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

Author: Ashlee Vance

• One thing that Musk holds in the highest regard is resolve, and he respects people who continue on after being told no.

• If some of the things that Musk says and does sound absurd, that’s because on one level they very much are.

• This is not the guy who slinks into the restaurant. It’s the guy who owns the joint and strides about with authority.

• “I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”

• “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me.

• Huebner told me in an interview. “Innovation is a finite resource.”

• Around 2010, Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and early Facebook investor, began promoting the idea that the technology industry had let people down. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” became the tagline of his venture capital firm Founders Fund.

• What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview.

• Musk sampled a handful of ideologies and then ended up more or less back where he had started, embracing the sci-fi lessons found in one of the most influential books in his life: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

• “He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.

• “We are the kinds of people that can be by ourselves at a party and not feel awkward,”

• “When Elon gets into something, he develops just this different level of interest in it than other people. That is what differentiates Elon from the rest of humanity.”

• Musk’s insistence on explaining the early origins of his passion for electric cars, solar energy, and rockets can come off as insecure. It feels as if Musk is trying to shape his life story in a forced way. But for Musk, the distinction between stumbling into something and having intent is important.

• “Really smart people sometimes don’t understand that not everyone can keep up with them or go as fast,”

• They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.

• He had to learn that a twenty-something-year-old shouldn’t really shoot down the plans of older, senior people and point out everything wrong with them.

• As I watched him climb that final hundred feet with suffering all over his face, I thought, That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.”

• There was one guy who wrote a quantum mechanics equation, a quantum probability on the board, and he got it wrong. I’m like, ‘How can you write that?’ Then I corrected it for him. He hated me after that. Eventually, I realized, Okay, I might have fixed that thing but now I’ve made the person unproductive. It just wasn’t a good way to go about things.”

• All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them.

• Fricker would not be the last person to accuse Musk of overhyping products and playing the public, although whether this is a flaw or one of Musk’s great talents as a businessman is up for debate.

• The book painted Musk as an egomaniacal, stubborn jerk, making wrong decisions at every turn, and portrayed Thiel and Levchin as heroic geniuses. Valleywag, the technology industry gossip site, piled on as well and turned bashing Musk into one of its pet projects.

• “He comes from the school of thought in the public relations world that you let no inaccuracy go uncorrected,”

• At both Zip2 and PayPal, the companies’ boards came to the conclusion that Musk was not yet CEO material. It can also be argued that Musk had become a hyperbolic huckster, who overreached and oversold his companies’ technology.

• Musk was already playing the entrepreneur game at the highest level and working the press and investors like few others could. Did he hype things up and rub people the wrong way? Absolutely—and with spectacular results.

• “He was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. ‘I am your wife,’ I told him repeatedly, ‘not your employee.’ ‘If you were my employee,’ he said just as often, ‘I would fire you.’”

• “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you.”

• The start-up life, which Musk described as akin to “eating glass and staring into the abyss,”4 had gotten old and so had Silicon Valley.

• Howard Hughes, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, Boeing, and myriad other people and organizations have performed much of their manufacturing and cutting-edge experimentation in and around Los Angeles. Today the city remains a major hub for the military’s aeronautics work and commercial activity.

• As the first dozen or so employees came to the offices, they were told that SpaceX’s mission would be to emerge as the “Southwest Airlines of Space.”

• have occurred over the decades. From 1957 to 1966, the United States alone tried to blast more than 400 rockets into orbit and about 100 of them crashed and burned.

• “It’s like anything else where you find out that the last ten percent is where all the integration happens and things don’t play together,”

• Tesla’s strategy of starting with a high-priced, low-volume product and moving down to more affordable products over time, as underlying technology and manufacturing capabilities advanced.

• “Cellphones, refrigerators, color TV’s, they didn’t start off by making a low-end product for masses,”

• Quite often, the Tesla engineers brought their Silicon Valley attitude to the automakers’ traditional stomping grounds. There’s a break and traction testing track in northern Sweden near the Arctic Circle where cars get tuned on large plains of ice. It would be standard to run the car for three days or so, get the data, and return to company headquarters for many weeks of meetings about how to adjust the car. The whole process of tuning a car can take the entire winter. Tesla, by contrast, sent its engineers along with the Roadsters being tested and had them analyze the data on the spot.

• “People had been making transmissions since Robert Fulton built the steam engine,”

• “The idea was to get to Asia, get things done fast and cheap, and make money on the car,” said Forrest North, one of the engineers sent to Thailand. “What we found out was that for really complicated things, you can do the work cheaper here and have less delays and less problems.”

• in Apocalypse Now,” Lyons said. “Don’t worry about the methods or if they’re unsound. Just get the job done. It comes from Elon. He listens, asks good questions, is fast on his feet, and gets to the bottom of things.”

• Justine ordered Musk to introduce her as a published novelist and not just his wife and mother of his children. The results? “E’s way of doing this throughout the rest of the trip: ‘Justine wants me to tell you that she’s written novels,’ which made people look at me like oh, that’s just so cute and didn’t really help my case.”

• “There’s no such thing as a well-adjusted public figure. If they were well adjusted they wouldn’t try to be a public figure.”

• Musk would hound the person responsible about the delays but, typically, he would also do everything in his power to help solve problems.

• The rocket had behaved much like an empty water bottle will on a plane, with the air pressure pushing against the sides of the bottle and making it buckle.

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

• Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets.

• Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity—they are all expressions of Musk. SpaceX is Musk.

• Musk does not simply want to lower the cost of deploying satellites and resupplying the space station. He wants to lower the cost of launches to the point that it becomes economical and practical to fly thousands upon thousands of supply trips to Mars and start a colony.

• Musk has managed to take these negatives surrounding the aerospace business and turn them into gains for SpaceX.

• SpaceX is the hip, forward-thinking place that’s brought the perks of Silicon Valley—namely frozen yogurt, stock options, speedy decision making, and a flat corporate structure—to a staid industry.

• The SpaceX hiring model places some emphasis on getting top marks at top schools. But most of the attention goes toward spotting engineers who have exhibited type A personality traits over the course of their lives.

• From the early days of SpaceX, Musk pushed the company to master friction stir welding, in which a spinning head is smashed at high speeds into the join between two pieces of metal in a bid to make their crystalline structures merge. It’s as if you heated two sheets of aluminum foil and then joined them by putting your thumb down on the seam and twisting the metal together.

• thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.”

• “I thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.”

• Musk simply cannot help himself. He’s an optimist by nature, and it can feel like he makes calculations for how long it will take to do something based on the idea that things will progress without flaw at every step and that all the members of his team have Muskian abilities and work ethics.

• So, I think generally you do want to have a timeline where, based on everything you know about, the schedule should be X, and you execute towards that, but with the understanding that there will be all sorts of things that you don’t know about that you will encounter that will push the date beyond that. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have tried to aim for that date from the beginning because aiming for something else would have been an arbitrary time increase.

• Musk often asks for highly detailed proposals for how projects will be accomplished. The employees have learned never to break the time needed to accomplish something down into months or weeks. Musk wants day-by-day and hour-by-hour forecasts and sometimes even minute-by-minute countdowns, and the fallout from missed schedules is severe.

• SpaceX’s top managers work together to, in essence, create fake schedules that they know will please Musk but that are basically impossible to achieve. This would not be such a horrible situation if the targets were kept internal. Musk, however, tends to quote these fake schedules to customers, unintentionally giving them false hope. Typically, it falls to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, to clean up the resulting mess. She will either need to ring up a customer to give them a more realistic timeline or concoct a litany of excuses to explain away the inevitable delays. “Poor Gwynne,” Brogan said. “Just to hear her on the phone with the customers is agonizing.”

• Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates.

• “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel.

• Davis was the twenty-second SpaceX hire and has ended up the twelfth most senior person still at the company. He turned thirty-five in 2014.

• “I put every ounce of intellectual capital I had into that e-mail and one minute later got that simple response,” Davis said. “Everyone in the company was having that same experience. One of my favorite things about Elon is his ability to make enormous decisions very quickly. That is still how it works today.”

• I don’t want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.

• An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.”

• “There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules.

• your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it.

• Someone had finally built a spaceship worthy of scientist and moviemaker dreams.

• It would also give the Model S what’s known as a low polar moment of inertia, which relates to how a car resists turning. Ideally, you want heavy parts like the engine as close as possible to the car’s center of gravity, which is why the engines of race cars tend to be near the middle of the vehicle.

• “The mantra was that one great engineer will replace three medium ones,”

• The Tesla motor generates electricity during this process and funnels it back to the batteries, which is why electric cars get better mileage in city traffic.

• Musk’s ultimate goal, though, remains turning humans into an interplanetary species. This may sound silly to some, but there can be no doubt that this is Musk’s raison d’être.

• As Page puts it, “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.” It’s a principle he’s tried to apply at Google.

• “I’ve learned that your intuition about things you don’t know that much about isn’t very good,” Page said. “The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There’s this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what’s possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues.”

• “I think like we’re just not educating people in this kind of general way. You should have a pretty broad engineering and scientific background. You should have some leadership training and a bit of MBA training or knowledge of how to run things, organize stuff, and raise money. I don’t think most people are doing that, and it’s a big problem. Engineers are usually trained in a very fixed area. When you’re able to think about all of these disciplines together, you kind of think differently and can dream of much crazier things and how they might work. I think that’s really an important thing for the world. That’s how we make progress.”

• The biggest battle I have is restricting their video game time because they want to play all the time. The rule is they have to read more than they play video games.

• They also can’t play completely stupid video games. There’s one game they downloaded recently called Cookies or something. You literally tap a fucking cookie. It’s like a Psych 101 experiment. I made them delete the cookie game. They had to play Flappy Golf instead, which is like Flappy Bird, but at least there is some physics involved.”

• I’m not saying like only smart people should have kids. I’m just saying that smart people should have kids as well. They should at least maintain—at least be a replacement rate. And the fact of the matter is that I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.’”

• “Square is doing the wrong version of PayPal. The critical thing is to achieve internal transactions. This is vital because they are instant, fraud-free, and fee-free.

• The banks who provide that debt wanted SolarCity to have the additional and painful scrutiny that comes with being public. Those rules, referred to as Sarbanes-Oxley, essentially result in a tax being levied on company execution by requiring detailed reporting right down to how your meal is expensed during travel and you can be penalized even for minor mistakes.