Elon Musk is a science-fiction character. That’s how one friend puts it. In some ways, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is the archetypical cartoon billionaire – Tony Stark meets The Simpsons’ Hank Scorpio – with the rockets, the rollercoaster personal life and the fast cars – one of which is currently speeding away from us at 13,000kph.
Those who know Musk talk about the inevitability of his own ascension to the stratosphere. After setting up online mapping and directory service Zip2 in 1995 with his brother Kimbal, and netting $22 million (£16.5m) from its sale four years later, Musk ploughed much of that money into X.com, an online bank. That eventually became PayPal, which scored him a further $165 million.
Musk then found another interest, and has dedicated the last 17 years of his life to it. Saving humanity from itself, as he sees it, is what wants to achieve through electric-vehicle company Tesla, rocket firm SpaceX, plus interests in energy startup Solar City, brain-hacking company Neuralink, tunnel-construction firm The Boring Company, and, of course the hyped Hyperloop.
Musk’s entrepreneurial journey has been characteristically unpredictable. By 2008, Tesla and SpaceX were both on the verge of collapse, and Musk was left borrowing money from friends to fund his living costs. Even having weathered that storm, he still flits between triumph and disaster. The successful test of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018 was followed by months of turmoil at Tesla, from production problems on the mass-market Model 3, to safety concerns both on the roads and in factories.
Over two months of reporting, friends, family members and former colleagues told WIRED about the personality traits that have contributed to the billionaire’s successes and his setbacks, and what they might mean for the future of SpaceX, Tesla and life on Mars.
Crack some books
Scott Haldeman, uncle: “He never went anywhere without a book in his hand. He was always reading, and it was often advanced books. That was one of the earliest things you started seeing. It was this intense reading, and they were books about the future and about success.”
Peter Nicholson, boss during an internship at Scotiabank: “He was fascinated with ideas, big thoughts. He tended to always go back to first principles whenever we were dealing with an issue. We spent a lot of time talking about puzzles, talking about physics and the meaning of life and the essence of the Universe.”
Christie Nicholson, friend: “Every single conversation I’ve ever had with Elon, it always starts with a problem. He always says, ‘What do you think about x?’, and x is an issue that we’ve got to solve.”
Haldeman: “Even at an early age he would always migrate to the most successful person in the room, and he would just stand there and listen and then ask very pointed questions. They were always highly intelligent and highly directed. He’d leave his cousins and his brother and sister in order to come and spend time with somebody he perceived as being a success in whatever field they happened to be in.”
Peter Barrett, co-founder of Playground Global; managed Musk during his internship at Rocket Science Games: “He always exhibited this curiosity, which is a property I look for in entrepreneurs in the venture world: Why is it that way? And how does it work? And why does it need to work that way? And why can't it work some other way?”
Christie Nicholson: “[The first time we met] I went to their apartment, north of the city of Toronto. It was small, there were about 12 people there maybe. I remember it vividly, possibly because I was walking into a room where I knew nobody. It was family and close friends. Literally, we said ‘Hi,’ and then two sentences in, he asks me ‘[What] do you think about electric cars?’”
Rich Sorkin, founder and CEO of Jupiter Intelligence; former CEO of Zip2: “I think Elon is always thinking about everything – both immediate, short-term tactical things that need to get done in the next ten minutes as well as a decade out.”
Christie Nicholson: “What struck me then is how quickly it gets into an extremely intellectual conversation. You have to be really on your game when you're talking to him because he goes so fast into a philosophical or scientific conversation. He doesn't mess around, and I wouldn't think he had any time at all for anyone who doesn't want to go there with him.”
Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society: “When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people. You have to crack some books.”
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Be relentless
Haldeman: “He has this unbelievable drive to work 70, 80, 90 hours a week, non-stop. The first time I really noticed was when he and his brother visited us for Christmas while they were forming Zip2. Everybody was opening presents, and Elon worked from the minute he got up to the minute he went to sleep on Christmas Day, and every day he was there.”
Jeff Heilman, sales representative at Zip2, Musk’s first employee: “I went to his apartment one time. There was a mattress on the floor in one bedroom, and about 30 Chinese food-to-go containers. That was it. Almost as if having an apartment was something you thought you should do because other people do it, but functionally it had no purpose. It had no purpose because they lived at the office.”
Jim Ambras, VP product development at Zip2: “Elon would sleep under his desk probably one in every three nights, sometimes one in two. It was industrial carpet on concrete. He had no pillow, he had no sleeping bag. I don’t know how he did it.”
Heilman: “He would code and tell us to kick him in the morning to wake him up, because he’d be asleep on this bean-bag chair, but he didn’t want to be asleep. Sleep wasn’t his reward for hard work, sleep was the thing getting in the way.”
Ambras: “I usually came in earlier than everyone else, so I was the person who would typically have to wake Elon up. Once in a while if we had a customer meeting in the morning I’d have to tell him to go home and take a shower or something because he wasn’t ready for a meeting.”
Sorkin: “There were a bunch of people at Zip2 that were serious mountain bikers. There’s a very tough, fairly popular ride up the hill that separates the bay from the ocean, and they did it on a regular basis.”
Ambras: “We invited Elon to a Saturday-morning bike ride, and he agreed. It was the only thing I ever did with Elon outside of work, socially. It’s a long climb, it’s pretty steep, and it was a very hot day. All of us found it very challenging. One of them was his cousin, Russ Rive – he worked for us at Zip2. Russ was really athletic. He beat me up there, but as I was riding up to the very top, Russ just lost his lunch. He just vomited all over the place. That was a sign of how hard it was.”
Sorkin: “Elon was not in anywhere near as good shape as the rest of them, and not really nearly as experienced a mountain biker. But there was no way that he was going to stop.”
Ambras: “We’re all at the top waiting for him, we just assumed he turned around and went home. Then we see him coming up around the turn, and he was just completely red. Beet-red. He was riding his bike, he wasn’t walking his bike, and it was just clear that he was killing himself. He just looked like he was torturing himself. When people ask me what’s different about Elon – every other person I know in the world would have just turned around because they were not physically conditioned to do that ride.”
Sorkin: “Elon is the most relentless person I have ever met in my entire life. If you have the right people and you've built the culture right it’s extraordinarily compelling. It’s very similar to what I saw when I worked with Steve Jobs.”
Ambras: “He was always talking about guys like Sumner Redstone from Viacom in terms of how hard they worked, and how they pushed themselves, and how they would torture themselves. He looked up to that level people just killing themselves for the sake of being successful.”
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Use special forces methods
Dave Lyons, co-founder, Peloton Technology, former director of engineering at Tesla: “In December 2007, four of us flew across the country to Detroit to triage where we were on the transmission. This was a period of time when he was absolutely stretched to his limit, and he saw all of his stuff in massive jeopardy. I've got to paraphrase this, but he goes: ‘I've spent all my money and all of my friendships on this. It has to succeed. You need to do whatever is possible to make this happen – you need to use special forces methods to make this transmission happen.’ I watched in his eyes that night how incredibly invested this guy was. I have never seen anybody in my life who was willing to put everything on the table the way I saw him that night.”
Ambras: “He was always extremely aggressive regarding the schedule. Every item was either one hour or one day. There was nothing that was going to take more than one day. A couple of weeks in, I realised that whenever he said one hour that was like one or several days’ work. If he said one day that was at least a week of work, maybe two. His estimates were off by an order of magnitude.”
Jeremy Hollman, former SpaceX test engineer: “He never gave us demands on cost, it was always time. Time was money. In the end, a lot of it just ended up with us working harder and longer.”
Ambras: “I remember at one point he was walking around the office at nine o'clock at night, and he was pissed off that there weren't enough engineers in their cubicles. At nine o'clock at night. I would try and occasionally take weekends off, and Elon would be in the office and he'd call me up and have some reason as to why I needed to come in to help him on something. I think he just wanted me in the office on the weekend.”
Hollman: “I got married during the lead up to the first ever Falcon 1 launch. Elon did not take that well – he did not think that was a good reason for me to be missing. He called me into his cubicle and asked me how much it would cost to change the wedding date. My response was it would cost more money than he had. He didn't quite get what I was going at because he had quite a bit of money, but I said it would cost me a wife, and you can't afford that.”
Ambras: “He definitely had a lot of clashes with people. Part of it was there was a few people who had different opinions, and Elon would just double down on wanting to prove that he was right sometimes and that would cause some problems. He had a low tolerance for any degree of incompetence.”
Sorkin: “At the time, Elon was very quick to want to fire people, and I probably could have had a more mature and balanced approach to what we ended up doing. We had a really intense, demanding culture and it was pretty unforgiving, and in a way that – with 20 years’ additional experience under my belt – was not necessary to achieve the outcomes we achieved.”
Lyons: “You were basically as good as 'What have you done for me lately?' and ‘lately’ means this week, today, as opposed to what you may have solved last week.”
Jim Cantrell, CEO of Vector Launch; SpaceX co-founder: “When he got mad, he got really mad. One of the first things he and I got into a conflict over was the Falcon 1 fuel tanks. When he read my email about how much these tanks would cost... He's famous for his ear-burning phone calls, and I got one of those. I was on my way somewhere - I was trying to find a parking space in the parking structure in Salt Lake City International Airport, and I was driving around and he's yelling at me. He was just yelling about how it was bullshit about the tanks costing so much. I remember him saying, ‘If these tanks cost a million dollars for a set, I’ll have you and I go out there and weld them our fucking selves.’”
Lyons: “He has a way of slashing through the red tape with a machete. He was continuously challenging the status quo, and he has no tolerance for anything that is perceived to be a runaround at all. He is absolutely burning the ships to shore. There is no way back. The only way to go is forward and through and he sends his teams to do whatever it takes to do that. I have been unbelievably impressed by Elon's ability to make his own luck through these tactics. I will never bet against him, but I personally don't know if I could spend any more time that close to the Sun.”
Zubrin: “He can put forward these audacious ideas and then is open to modifying them in the direction of practicality, and that's a great strength. If he was pure audacity he'd be a science-fiction author, he wouldn't be what he is, which is difficult to describe. But, while Elon is not a science-fiction author, he is a science-fiction character. If science fiction anticipated the submarine and the rocket ship, it also anticipated Elon Musk.”
Lyons: “It's a completely results-oriented culture from the top down. Fundamentally when he was describing special forces methods, implicit in that at least when I heard those words was, ‘I don't really care how you get the results, just get the results.’ This culture of implicit results can drive a lot of people to start cutting corners. [Tesla] is stumbling now for the first time since my days and you're going to find people who are incentivised to do things that are fundamentally dangerous. Because that's how you rise - that's the incentive for rising. The people who rose were not necessarily the people who actually did all the great work. It's the people who could present themselves in a manner that was well suited for Elon's praise.”
Lars Moravy, director, Chassis Dynamics Engineering, Tesla: “Day to day, he’s not about wasting time. He gets in, he makes his point, he gets out and moves on to the next challenge. Elon doesn’t spend a lot of time on things that are working, but rather gets involved in things that are not. He likes to solve problems.”
Take the credit
Zubrin: “People sometimes ask me what I think motivates Elon Musk. I will tell you it is not money. Elon certainly likes money and he finds it useful, but that’s not what he’s about.”
Peter Nicholson: “He had just sold out his position in Zip2 and he came back to Canada at Christmas to be with his girlfriend. The two of them took an overnight bus and arrived in Montreal on the day after Christmas. He called me up, and said. ‘I’m down here at the bus station I’d like to come up and visit you’. It was a bitterly cold day and I drive down to the bus station in the middle of Montreal and there he and his girlfriend are standing on the sidewalk, all alone, the most forlorn couple you could imagine. He had a great big hockey duffle bag with all their worldly possessions it seemed and they were just shivering. It was so strange - here was a guy who had just sold his company for north of 20 million dollars and you wouldn’t have thought he had two nickels to rub together. Which I think is an important clue to the nature of the man. I always thought that money had been a means to a larger end."
Barrett: “Curiosity and ability to get to the bottom of things is quite independent of how much money you've made. His success means that he can [take on] harder and larger challenges. I think the only interest he has in money is being able to do things at a scale that nobody else can do.”
Christie Nicholson: “He is driven by a tremendous human good, as far as I'm concerned, completely and fully driven by wanting to do good in the world and for our species. He wants to take some of the biggest challenges and overcome them. This is a trait of a lot of great inventors, but for him what sets him apart is that he'll take the craziest ideas but he'll actually execute them and make them happen.”
Haldeman: “You don't get the feel that he wants to be a billionaire, you don't get the feel that he wants to be famous. What he wants to do is achieve things. He basically wants to save humanity – it sounds very grandiose, but he perceives that he will contribute to saving humanity with the green movement, the energy-efficient car, energy efficient solar heating and space travel. He believes that mankind needs to have an escape from Earth.”
Zubrin: “He's not Mother Theresa. He is not without selfishness, but his selfishness is of the form of Henry V in Shakespeare's play. He is selfish for glory.”
Ambras: “My team had worked night and day to create this incredible content demo of what we could do for The New York Times. Elon and I were debating who would give the demo – he wanted to do it, but he had no understanding of how the demo worked, and back then he wasn’t very smooth at giving customer presentations. But Elon wanted to be the frontman – back at Zip2, and even more so after Zip2.”
Tim Fernholz, author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race: “He's passionate about what he's doing – he loves to talk about it. Like every other powerful person, he likes to control his own image, so he's happy when the press is sort-of agreeing with him, and he expresses his disagreement when they don't.”
Christie Nicholson: “There's always been a fascination with storytelling and Hollywood, and maybe it's because he's been in LA, but I think there is a part of him that likes that kind of limelight.”
Josh Boehm, co-founder of Cyph; former SpaceX software quality analyst: “There were lots of celebrities that would come through the factory, and he liked to give personal tours for many of those people. I remember going to the bathroom and bumping into [actor and entrepreneur] Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Another time I was sitting on the mezzanine facing out and I realised that directly across from me, Elon is sitting at one of these tables and he's eating lunch with Jennifer Aniston.”
Zubrin: “People sometimes say, “Well, he’s a showman, he’s a huckster, he wants to be in the limelight.” Well, he wants to be in the limelight for doing great things. This is both his strength and his weakness, this is the most attractive and the most disturbing thing about him at the same time. This is why you almost never hear about anybody else at SpaceX, because he doesn't share credit with anyone. It's all Elon. He wants to do great deeds for humanity, but he wants to get the glory for it.”
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Enjoy yourself
Barrett: “In the job descriptions we sent out, one of the requirements was that you had to be able to play Doom, and the other was that you had a sense of destiny. Arguably he was accomplished at both. Doom consumed most of the network bandwidth at Rocket Science. People weren’t playing with the sound all the way up because they didn’t want to make it obvious, so you would hear this subtle background of keyboards clacking, and then shrieks of obscenities when somebody would hide in the corner and snipe with a rocket launcher. That was Elon’s move of choice.”
Fernholz: “When you meet him he's a very serious person, he's very serious about the science behind his businesses, but he also has a very sort of wry, kind of sly sense of humour that sneaks up on you sometimes.”
Boehm: “He does have a sense of humour. I remember my orientation video. Elon really hates acronyms, and in this video it explains that we have a ‘no acronym policy’, or NAP.”
Hollman: “As the years went on at SpaceX, the holiday parties became kind-of infamous. The first holiday party was just at Elon's house – 12 or 15 people with their spouses or significant others, and then they grew and grew and became more and more notorious and those were a lot of fun. It went from different fancy restaurants to a full-blown party in the factory, having it set up with stuff like a carnival. Elon was really good at working people hard but then making sure they really had fun when opportunities came up.”
Boehm: “A lot of the whimsical, silly side of Elon shines through there. The holiday party is the biggest one. They spare no expense for that. It’s one of the craziest events I’ve ever seen. We had a giant adult-sized ball pit like you'd see at a Chuck E. Cheese’s or one of those kids’ places, with the big coloured balls, and people would jump into them. There were those big stunt mats and you could jump from the third storey. It was huge – they needed a map for the party just to get around. I never really saw Elon dance much or get too crazy, but he clearly enjoyed it, and I think he was heavily involved in the planning.”
Ambras: “Elon was always into cars. He was always talking about the McLaren F1 – only 64 built, fastest production car in the world [at the time]. After Zip2 was acquired by AltaVista I said, ‘Elon, now you should go out and buy a McLaren F1.’ He looks at me and he goes, 'Really?' 'Yeah dude, you just made like 25 million dollars, just pretend you made 25 million!' It's a million-dollar car – go out and buy it.’ So a week later he did. He found some guy in Florida who had two of them, and he wound up spending a million dollars of his payoff from Zip2 to buy a McLaren F1.”
Julie Anderson (nee Ankenbrandt), vice president of operations and communications at X.com/PayPal: “The day we had our first industry reporter in to our new offices for an interview, I’m sure I expected something normal – we’d gone over the talking points and had a plan — but instead we ended up in a parking garage with Elon showing off the McLaren F1 that had arrived that week. ‘Showing off’ is not even the right term because Elon was giddy like a kid in a candy store about that car but loved it in more of an academic sense – they were rare, expensive and cool. But given that the jury was still out on whether Elon was for real or full of hot air, my PR sense of propriety was completely mortified.”
Ambras: “The funny thing is, when I talked to him about it he seemed more excited about the fact that two hours later Elton John had tried buying that McLaren F1 from that guy in Florida, but Elon had beat him to it. I think he was probably more proud of that then having bought the car.”
Cantrell: “He'd drive this million-dollar McLaren and just park it on the street in El Segundo. I was like, ‘Elon, somebody is going to relieve you of your property here,’ but I think they probably figured he was a drug lord or something and nobody would touch it.”
Chase the big dream
Zubrin: “In 2001, the Mars Society held a fundraiser in the Silicon Valley area. It was a 500-dollar-a-plate dinner and we get a cheque from somebody for 5,000 dollars. Somebody named Elon Musk.”
Barrett: “James Cameron, the film director, was there, and him, Elon, Bob Zubrin and a bunch of Nasa folks were all sitting around talking about the opportunity and the future.”
Zubrin: “He had read my book The Case for Mars and was really taken by the idea of expanding the human reach to Mars, and thereby making humanity a space-faring civilisation.”
Haldeman: “He has repeatedly said that space travel was something that was always in his mind. His favourite book is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – he read that as a teenager.”
Barrett: “I remember him saying that he had no alternative but to pursue this because once he thought of it he could never let it go.”
Cantrell: “His idea originally was to send mice to Mars. I call it a pornographic journey – he wanted to show that they could breed and come back to Earth.”
Zubrin: “He was very taken with that. At that time the cheapest launch vehicles available were in Russia. I directed him to a friend of mine, Jim Cantrell.”
Cantrell: “It was almost staccato how quickly he spoke. Not, ‘Hello, how are you?’ – sales pitch, boom. Like listening to some televangelist or someone who called me on the phone. I could almost recite the speech I’ve heard it so many times. He says, ‘I’m Elon Musk, I'm an internet billionaire, I founded PayPal and X.com. I sold X.com to Compaq for 165 million dollars in cash and I could spend the rest of my life on a beach drinking Mai Tais, but I decided that humanity needs to become a multi-planetary species to survive and I want to do something with my money to show that humanity can do that and I need Russian rockets and that's why I'm calling you.’”
Zubrin: “They [Cantrell, Musk and Mike Griffin, future administrator of Nasa] went to Russia and they experienced the kleptocratic culture there. Everybody was trying to rip them off.”
Cantrell: “There was one guy [at Russian rocket firm NPO Mashinostroyeniya] who was thin and scrawny and missing some teeth. He was introduced to us as the chief designer. Elon launches into the same speech he gave me over the phone. You could just see this guy getting visibly upset. He wasn't saying anything, but he was starting to fidget. He asked us a few questions, and then he starts hitting a staccato response about how this was a weapon of war, and how it was never meant for the capitalists to use it for going to Mars on some bullshit mission, and then he spat on our shoes! Elon turns to me, and he goes, 'Did he spit on us?' And I say, ‘Yeah I think he did. I think it's a sign of disrespect.’”
Zubrin: “He realised from that if there were going to be cheap launch vehicles someone would have to create them here.”
Cantrell: “He walked away deciding not to have anything built in Russia because, as he put it, it all resembled an insane asylum to him and he'd rather not have his money disappear in some Russian warehouse. He'd rather do it in the US.”
Cantrell: “We got out, we got on our Delta flight back to New York. [Mike and I] are sitting in the back. Elon's up in front of us, and he's madly typing on his computer as he does. Mike elbows me and he goes, 'What the fuck do you think that idiot-savant is doing up there?' And Elon turns around and he goes, 'Hey guys, I think we can build this rocket ourselves.'”
Zubrin: “There’s been a history of billionaires who decided that they’d be the one to open up the space frontier. In every case what happened was they’d throw in 50 million dollars of play money to some visionary engineer to play with and it would get to a certain point, and the difficulties would mount and then they would quit. When Elon started SpaceX, that's what a lot of us thought would happen there too. That had been the pattern: you get a rich kid, gets the Mars bug, plays it for a while and then walks away.”
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Cantrell: “[Rocketeer] John Garvey had taken him for a tour of all his friends’ homes in the fall of 2001. They even took him out for a rocket engine test and they blew the rocket up, right there on the test stand. Elon was not deterred by all of this. He suddenly realised that, hey, if you guys with pocket change can build rockets in your garage, then what can we do with real money and Silicon Valley-style leadership? That's where Elon really got his inspiration. He had like a religious conversion at this rocket test.”
Zubrin: “What Elon did was very different. He didn't just throw some play money in. He put in his heart, his soul and his mind. He put his talent into it – not just his technical talent, which while I would say is first class, there are other people that are comparable. What is incomparable is his business talent, in terms of recruiting the right people and creating the right company culture and defeating people out to destroy him in the political realm.”
Cantrell: “Elon really doesn't care about the money – he wants to go to Mars. It was always focused on Mars, none of this was focused on the market. I was the guy who had the market focus, and I was like, ‘Hey, look Elon, we've got to have a return on investment.’ His response to me was, 'I don't really give a damn about return on investment.’”
Hollman: “He's very focused on what his singular ambition for a company is. Whether that be Tesla or SpaceX or whatever he's doing, there's always a high overarching goal. From the very beginning of SpaceX we knew that the Falcon 1 was a test vehicle, Falcon 9 would be bigger and then eventually we would be launching things even bigger to go to Mars. The whole plan was to reduce costs and speed to make humanity a multi-planetary species.
Cantrell: His inability to even imagine failure is incredible. There we were [in SpaceX’s first factory], with insulation falling from the ceiling, the floors were dingy, I couldn't get internet service and he was yelling at me for something else. I walked out to the kitchen and I looked out onto the shopfloor and I saw a rat run under his McLaren. I thought, 'Yeah, we're going to build rockets here?'
“You've got to have faith and passion in what you're doing in what you're doing to make it work, and he did. Many of us, myself included, couldn't see how he could possibly succeed. He couldn't see how he could possibly fail.”
Christie Nicholson: “I consider SpaceX to be his heart and soul. I know people think about Tesla first, but SpaceX is where I think his heart his. His soul is in SpaceX. I think he'd let everything else go.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
