Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

by Ashlee Vance

“I’m not sure why I’d want to talk about extremely sad events. It does no good for the future. If you’ve got other kids and obligations, then wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you.

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What Musk would not tolerate were excuses or the lack of a clear plan of attack.

“There was always this feeling that we were facing a sort of insurmountable challenge and that we had to band together to fight the good fight.”

The greatest mistake Tesla’s executives made in the early days were assumptions around the transmission system for the Roadster.

we would work on Saturdays and Sundays and sleep under desks until it got done.

“He would say that everything we did was a function of our burn rate and that we were burning through a hundred thousand dollars per day.

One post gave Musk a hard time for banning stuffed animals from the house when their twins turned seven. Asked about this, Justine said, “Elon is hard-core. He grew up in a tough culture and tough circumstances. He had to become very tough to not only thrive but to conquer the world. He doesn’t want to raise soft overprivileged kids with no direction.”

Musk a hard time for banning stuffed animals from the house when their twins turned seven. Asked about this, Justine said, “Elon is hard-core. He grew up in a tough culture and tough circumstances. He had to become very tough to not only thrive but to conquer the world. He doesn’t want to raise soft overprivileged kids with no direction.”

Musk feared that VantagePoint would oust him as CEO, recapitalize Tesla, and emerge as the major owner of the carmaker.

It could then sell Tesla to a Detroit automaker or focus on selling electric drivetrains and battery packs instead of making cars.

“When you have scarcity, it naturally reinforces greed and leads to more interest,”

For Gracias, the Tesla and SpaceX investor and Musk’s

friend, the 2008 period told him everything he would ever need to know about Musk’s character. He saw a man who arrived in the United States with nothing, who had lost a child, who was being pilloried in the press by reporters and his ex-wife and who verged on having his life’s work destroyed. “He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I’ve ever met,” Gracias said. “What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn’t just survive. He kept working and stayed focused.” That ability to stay focused in the midst of a crisis stands as one of Musk’s main advantages over other executives and competitors. “Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray,” Gracias said. “Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with more respect for the guy. I’ve just never seen anything like his ability to take pain.”

The object is to find individuals who ooze passion, can work well as part of a team, and have real-world experience bending metal.

I certainly don’t try to set impossible goals. I think impossible goals are demotivating. You don’t want to tell people to go through a wall by banging their head against it. I don’t ever set intentionally impossible goals. But I’ve certainly always been optimistic on time frames. I’m trying to recalibrate to be a little more realistic.

One former SpaceX executive described the working atmosphere as a perpetual-motion machine that runs on a weird mix of dissatisfaction and eternal hope.

“It changes everything about transportation. It’s a computer on wheels.”

Since the battery pack at the base of the car would weigh so much, Musk, the designers, and the engineers were always looking for ways to reduce the Model S’s weight in other spots. Musk opted to solve a big chunk of this problem by making the body of the Model S out of lightweight aluminum instead of steel. “The non-battery-pack portion of the car has to be lighter than comparable gasoline cars, and making it all aluminum became the obvious decision,” Musk said. “The fundamental problem was that if we didn’t make it out of aluminum the car wasn’t going to be any good.” Musk’s word choice there—“obvious decision”—goes a long way toward explaining how he operates. Yes, the car needed to be light, and, yes, aluminum would be an option for making that happen. But at the time, car manufacturers in North America had almost no experience producing aluminum body panels. Aluminum tends to tear when worked by large presses. It also develops lines that look like stretch marks on skin and make it difficult to lay down smooth coats of paint. “In Europe, you had some Jaguars and one Audi that were made of aluminum, but it was less than five percent of the market,” Musk said. “In North America, there was nothing. It’s only recently that the Ford F-150 has arrived as mostly aluminum. Before that, we were the only one.” Inside of Tesla, attempts were repeatedly made to talk Musk out of the aluminum body, but he would not budge, seeing it as the only rational choice. It would be up to the ...