CHAPTER 9
OF COURSE I STILL LOVE YOU
In the summer of 2013, Elon dressed up in a medieval costume to get ready for his third wedding. Soon he was gazing at his bride-to-be, clad in a medieval-inspired silk gown with bejeweled accents and matching headdress. Talulah and Elon were making a second trip to the altar.
In their time apart, Talulah had been busy acting in various movies and writing a screenplay for another. She and Elon had kept up a friendship after their divorce. A friendship that once again turned romantic. Now back in Los Angeles as Mrs. Musk, she would attempt to juggle writing, acting, and helping to raise her five stepsons.
Elon was still working long hours, managing two companies, serving on the board of SolarCity, and sorting through the constant explosion of ideas in his head. Often, he would spend hours awake in the middle of the night, pacing, working through ideas, sketching them out or e-mailing himself.
Describing his schedule at the time, he said, “I’ll be working at SpaceX on Monday. And then Monday night flight to the Bay Area. Tuesday and Wednesday at Tesla. Fly back Wednesday night. Spend Thursday and Friday at SpaceX.”130 And on the weekends? He was at the airport again first thing Saturday morning to spend the day at Tesla … and then back to Los Angeles to spend Sunday at SpaceX. It was a lot, but in Elon’s world, there was no time to rest.
In fact, that August, just a month after the wedding, Elon was announcing a new idea for getting around the planet, as he put it, a fifth mode of transportation: the hyperloop.
Think bullet train, but crash proof, weatherproof, and much, much faster. He felt sure you could take a hyperloop from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in thirty minutes.
As he started talking about the idea in interviews, people would sometimes ask if he was serious. It seemed outlandish.
Elon was serious. Only, he couldn’t possibly fit that in. And yet the idea had the potential to help him reach his ultimate goal of getting humans off of gasoline, an effort that couldn’t wait.
So instead of starting another company to chase that down, he published a public paper on the idea, spelling out what he thought was possible—with the hope that others in the tech community would pick up the idea and run with it. And they did. A start-up called Hyperloop One quickly set to work developing high-speed vacuum tunnel travel, eventually building a test site in Nevada. Another group of entrepreneurs and engineers started a company called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.
And it wasn’t like Elon did not have enough to work on. SpaceX had already figured out how to launch rockets into orbit. Since 2012 it had made six deliveries to the International Space Station for NASA, using the larger Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon cargo capsule. The company was also regularly putting satellites into orbit with Falcon 9.
But in the desert, there was something else Elon wanted to master— landing a rocket. Nothing could reduce the cost of going to space more than figuring out how to reuse those rockets. And that meant the boosters would need to return to Earth and gently settle onto terra firma. Regular testing was underway. How could you bring a rocket back to Earth, slow it down, and land it upright?
SpaceX would also need a way to land over water. Elon’s answer to that was a drone ship, a remote-controlled landing pad. SpaceX needed two. The Atlantic would be covered by a drone ship named Just Read the Instructions and the Pacific by Of Course I Still Love You.
Just Read the Instructions drone ship. (© SpaceX.)
But to even set down a rocket safely on land, well, one SpaceX commentator described the problem like this: “Launching a pencil over the Empire State Building, having it reverse, come back down and land on a shoebox on the ground during a windstorm.”131 Oh, just that.
STICK THE LANDING
MONDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2015
8:29 p.m. (EST)
Cape Canaveral, Florida.
SpaceX Cape Canaveral Launch Control. (© SpaceX.)
T minus twenty seconds.
Under a clear night sky at Launch Complex 40, the control room’s countdown commands blared from loudspeakers. Elon stood behind his team of rocket scientists, engineers, and experts as they hunched over their computers. On the screens in front of them was a live video feed of the Falcon 9 rocket sitting on its launchpad.
T minus ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.
Everything had to be perfect for launch. Everything was on the line. Just six months earlier, the last rocket launch ended in spectacular failure: an explosion.
Now, here they were again.
Six. Five. “Go for launch.”
SpaceX was seconds away from trying to make rocket history. The goal? Launch a rocket into orbit, deploy satellites, and then land the rocket booster back on Earth so it could be reused—a feat that had never been done before.
Most rockets—rockets that take millions of dollars to design, build, and successfully launch—are actually nothing but … future trash. Each rocket can only be used once. It goes like this. The rocket blasts off. The rocket boosters separate from the payload in stages as it soars through the sky. Some fall back to Earth and land in the ocean. Others remain in orbit, contributing to millions of pieces of useless and potentially dangerous debris orbiting the Earth. Not really a great plan, but there was no other choice.
The technology for a reusable orbital rocket did not exist. Until now … hopefully.
Across the country at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a crowd gathered. They suddenly fell silent, watching every move in Cape Canaveral on a giant screen.
Four. Three. Two. One.
Falcon 9’s engines roared. In a cloud of dust and smoke, the blazing rocket blasted off the launchpad.
“We have liftoff.”
Falcon 9 thundered skyward.
Elon made his way toward the exit. Breathless and running, he raced outside to watch it fly.
Looking up, he saw Falcon 9’s fiery glow become smaller and smaller as it flew out of sight.
The sky was black. Now he had to wait. Would the booster separate and return to Earth?
Elon listened to mission control through outdoor speakers as he waited. He searched the sky for a glimmer of the returning rocket.
He wasn’t the only one feeling nervous. The crowd back in California stood quiet with clasped hands. Some covered their mouths. Tortured looks spread across many of their faces.
Employees watch launch from SpaceX headquarters. (© SpaceX.)
Then, above Cape Canaveral, a sonic boom filled the sky. The rocket was on its way back to Earth.
Suddenly a bright light appeared in the distance and grew bigger, closer to Earth.
Would history be made this time? Could they land the rocket? The rocket’s booster blazed, slowing it down as it zoomed toward the launchpad. Suddenly out of a stream of fire, the landing legs deployed.
“The Falcon has landed.”
Falcon 9 First Stage landing. (© SpaceX.)
Mission control erupted. Gwynne shot out of her seat. Employees hugged each other, jumped up and down, and screamed for a long time, finally chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” And fresh on their minds was the fact that the leading space experts of the world, just a few years ago, did not think SpaceX could do what it set out to do.
The space industry had changed. History had been made. By a company started by an Internet Guy who was reading about rocketry just thirteen years earlier.
“It’s a revolutionary moment. No one has ever brought a booster, an orbital-class booster, back intact,”132 Elon told reporters. They had done it. Revolutionized space travel. Accomplished the impossible, and opened up the heavens in a way that had never been done before.
ALL PART OF THE MASTER PLAN
So imagine driving your Tesla home after a busy day. You park it in the garage, plug it into the wall to keep it nice and charged. Only, the charge isn’t coming from the electric company. Instead it’s coming from the solar tiles on your roof and stored right there at your house. And what if Tesla provided all of that, the wall charger, the battery storage, and the solar cells on your roof. That full-circle vision was very much on Elon’s mind and had been for quite some time.
In 2016 Tesla moved toward this vision by acquiring SolarCity. SolarCity had become the solar industry’s largest installer. By now SolarCity had installed panels on more than forty-five thousand buildings. Its customer base was exploding.
It had all been a part of Elon’s master plan—for at least ten years, published on Tesla’s website. The last paragraph of the plan got right down to the bottom line:
Build sports car.
Use that money to build an affordable car.
Use that money to build an even more affordable car.
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options.
Don’t tell anyone.
Tesla Powerwall. (Photo by Tesla Motors Inc.)
Not everyone was as thrilled about the deal as Elon and his cousins. Critics were quick to point out that SolarCity went into debt to fuel its growth. Others pointed out that founders Lyndon and Peter had laid off staff and cut their own salaries to just a dollar a year each. To some, it looked like a bailout.
But the deal proceeded and was approved by Tesla’s shareholders. Lyndon and Peter stayed on until the deal closed and then both left the company. Lyndon said he was in search of his next start-up. Peter, too, began to explore what was next for him.
These weren’t the only good-byes. In the fall of 2016, Elon and Talulah’s second marriage to each other ended in divorce, but with the couple vowing they would always love each other and would stay close friends.
As Elon made his way through divorce proceedings, enduring enormous public interest in his private life, he began spending time with someone who was also going through a very public divorce: actress and humanitarian Amber Heard. She was in the midst of finalizing her divorce from actor Johnny Depp.
The next spring, Amber announced to the world that she and Elon were dating by planting a red kiss on his cheek, snapping a picture, and posting it on Instagram.
Amber Heard’s Instagram post (screenshot taken October 29, 2018).
Elon had fallen deeply in love.
Paparazzi captured every shot they could—Amber with Elon’s jacket draped across her shoulders with him all smiles beside her, a street-side kiss, Amber and Elon on the red carpet. Even the couple themselves shared fun-loving shots taken with Elon’s boys on a vacation in Australia. As their relationship passed the one-year mark, Elon was ramping up to launch Tesla’s Model 3.
Standing offstage on July 29, 2017, Elon was about to head out in front of the crowd and the white-hot light of the international media to launch the car for the masses. It was an achievement Tesla had been working toward since its inception.
And yet Elon was having a hard time pulling it together. He needed to knock his presentation out of the park. His showmanship was an essential ingredient in big Tesla moments. But, the fact was, Elon was heartbroken. Amber had broken it off just three days before.
“It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around,”133 he later told Rolling Stone’s Neil Strauss.
But then, he thought about the people depending on him. He tried to meditate, drank a couple of Red Bulls, cranked the music and rallied.
Talking to Rolling Stone, he didn’t hold back in describing the depth of his misery and loneliness. “When I was a child, there’s one thing I said, ‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.”134
It was the loneliness that got to him. “I will never be happy without having someone,” he said. “Going to sleep alone kills me. It’s like I don’t know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there—and no one on the pillow next to you.”135
Puerto Rico, September 20, 2017—Swirling in the Atlantic, Hurricane Maria grew into a monster. Sustained winds hit 155 mph as the Category 4 storm barreled across Puerto Rico. Entire trees were ripped out of the ground. A wall of water rushed inland, with a force capable of unthinkable destruction. The screaming storm peeled away roofs.
And then everything went black. Power lines flew away with the wind. Power poles snapped, and giant waves carried them out to sea. The power infrastructure was devastated, and the island plunged into darkness.
Debris filled the streets. A few days after the storm left a stricken island in its wake, the enormity of the situation began to sink in. Puerto Rico had sustained the kind of damage that could not be easily fixed. No one had a quick solution for getting the power back on. And that affected people’s houses, their ability to use their cell phones, hospitals’ power supplies, and schools’ power supplies.
The images coming out of Puerto Rico were shocking. It looked like a war-torn country.
A couple of weeks later, most of Puerto Rico still had no power. The island’s governor reached out to Elon directly over Twitter, asking for help.
Twitter conversation between Ricardo Rosselló and Elon Musk (screenshot taken October 2018).
Elon’s teams at Tesla and SolarCity sprang into action. Just two weeks later, a month after the storm struck, Tesla restored power to the island’s children’s hospital. They installed solar panels, batteries, and infrastructure, creating a self-sufficient microgrid.
Then Tesla began restoring power to a senior housing center, followed by a sewer treatment plant.
Homeowners in Puerto Rico who already had solar panels were offered the chance to buy Tesla’s Powerwall batteries while Tesla was on hand to install them. Solar energy could be stored overnight, which would mean independence from Puerto Rico’s downed power grid and freedom from generators.
As the 2018 hurricane season approached with many on the island still without power, Elon announced that Tesla had eleven thousand energy storage projects underway in Puerto Rico.