NOTES
1. Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association, 1995.
2. http://queensu.ca/news/alumnireview/rocket-man.
3. http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/millionaire-starter-wife.
4. The investor Bill Lee, one of Musk’s close friends, originated this phrase.
5. http://archive.wired.com/science/space/magazine/15-06/ff_ space_musk?currentPage=all.
6. http://news.cnet.com/Electric-sports-car-packs-a-punch%2C-but-will-it-sell/2100-11389_3-6096377.xhtml.
7. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/business/19electric.xhtml.
8. A southern gentleman, Currie could never get used to Musk’s swearing—“he curses like a sailor and does it in mixed company”—or the way he would churn through prized talent. “He’d search through the woods, turn over every rock and dig through brambles to find the one person with the specific expertise and skill he wanted,” Currie said. “Then, that guy would be gone three months to a year later if he didn’t agree with Elon.” Currie, though, remembers Musk as inspirational. Even as Tesla’s funds dwindled, Musk urged the employees to do their jobs well and vowed to give them what they needed to be successful. Currie, like many people, also found Musk’s work ethic astonishing. “I would be in Europe or China and send him an email at two thirty in the morning his time,” Currie said. “Five minutes later, I’d get an answer back. It’s just unbelievable to have support on that level.”
9. http://www.mercurynews.com/greenenergy/ci_7641424.
10. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3666994/One-more-giant-leap.xhtml.
11. http://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/2013_SSIR_ Final.pdf.
12. Another moment like this occurred in late 2010 during a launch attempt in Florida. One of the SpaceX technicians had left a hatch open overnight at the launchpad, which allowed rain to flood a lower-level computing room. The water caused major issues with SpaceX’s computing equipment, and another technician had to fly out from California right away with Musk’s American Express card in hand to fix the emergency in the days leading up to the launch.
The SpaceX engineers bought new computing gear right away and set it up in the room. They needed to run the equipment through standard tests to make sure it could maintain a certain voltage level. It was late at night on a Sunday, and they couldn’t get access on short notice to a device that could simulate the high electrical load. One of the engineers improvised by going to a hardware store where he bought twenty-five headlamps for golf carts. The SpaceX crew strung them all together back at the launchpad and hung them from a wall. They then put on their sunglasses and lit everything up, knowing that if a power supply for the computing equipment could survive this test, it would be okay for the flight. The process was repeated for numerous power supplies, and the team worked from 9 P.M. that night until 7 A.M. and finished in time to keep the launch on track.
13. http://www.space.com/15874-private-dragon-capsule-space-station-arrival.xhtml.
14. At the conclusion of the debate, Musk and I exchanged a couple of emails. He wrote, “Oil and gas is firmly in the Romney camp and they are feeding his campaign these talking points. Until recently, they didn’t care about Tesla, as they thought we would fail.
“Ironically, it is because they are starting to think Tesla might not fail that they are attacking us. The reason is that society has to function, so the less there seems to be a viable alternative to burning hydrocarbons, the less pressure there is to curb carbon emissions. If an electric car succeeds, it spoils that argument.
“Overall though, I think it is great that he mentioned us :) ‘Romney Tesla’ is one of the top Google searches!”
I reached out to Romney’s camp months later, as sales of Tesla’s soared, to see if he wanted to change his position but was rebuffed.
15. As Tesla has grown in size, the company has commanded more respect from suppliers and been able to get better parts and better deals. But outsourcing components still bothers Musk, and for understandable reasons. When it tried to ramp up production in 2013, Tesla ran into periodic issues because of its suppliers. One of them made what should have been an inconsequential 12-volt lead acid battery that handled a few auxiliary functions in the car. Tesla bought the part from an American supplier, which in turn outsourced the part from a company in China, which in turn outsourced the part from a company in Vietnam. By the time the battery arrived at Tesla’s factories, it didn’t work, adding cost and delays during a crucial period in the Model S’s history. It’s situations like these that typically result in Tesla playing a much more active role with its suppliers when compared to other automakers. For something like an ABS braking controller, Tesla will work hand-in-hand with its supplier—in this case Bosch—to tune the hardware and software for the Model S’s specific characteristics. “Most companies just hand their cars over to Bosch, but Tesla goes in with a software engineer,” said Ali Javidan. “We had to change their mind-set and let them know we wanted to work on a very deep level.”
16. Tesla does seem to promote an obsession with safety that’s unmatched in the industry. J. B. Straubel explained the company’s thinking as follows: “With the safety stuff, it seems like car companies have evolved to a place where their design objectives are set by whatever is regulated or has been standardized. The rule says, ‘Do this and nothing more.’ That is amazingly boring engineering. It leaves you maybe fiddling with the car’s shape or trying to make it a bit faster. We have more crumple zones, better deceleration, a lower center of gravity. We went in wondering, ‘Can we make this car twice as safe as anything else on the road?’”
17. Othmer has lined up to be the lucky owner of the first Roadster II.
Musk has developed an unconventional policy to determine the order in which cars are sold. When a new car is announced and its price is set, a race begins in which the first person to hand Musk a check gets the first car. With the Model S, Steve Jurvetson, a Tesla board member, had a check at the ready in his wallet and slid it across the table to Musk after spying details on the Model S in a packet of board meeting notes.
Othmer caught a Wired story about a planned second version of the Roadster and emailed Musk right away. “He said, ‘Okay, I will sell it to you, but you have to pay two hundred thousand dollars right now.’” Othmer agreed, and Tesla had him come to the company’s headquarters on a Sunday to sign some paperwork, acknowledging the price of the car and the fact that the company didn’t quite know when it would arrive or what its specifications would be. “My guess is that it will be the fastest car on the road,” Othmer said. “It’ll be four-wheel drive. It’s going to be insane. And I don’t really think that will be the real price. I just don’t think Elon wanted me to buy it.”
18. Musk suspected Better Place came up with battery swapping as a plan after its CEO, Shai Agassi, heard about the technology during a tour of the Tesla factory
19. Musk had made a number of art cars over the years at Burning Man, including an electric one shaped like a rocket. In 2011, he also received a lot of grief from the Wall Street Journal for having a high-end camp. “Elon Musk, chief executive of electric-car maker Tesla Motors and co-founder of eBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, is among those eschewing the tent life,” the paper wrote. “He is paying for an elaborate compound consisting of eight recreational vehicles and trailers stocked with food, linens, groceries and other essentials for himself and his friends and family, say employees of the outfitter, Classic Adventures RV. . . . Classic is one of the festival’s few approved vendors. It charges $5,500 to $10,000 per RV for its Camp Classic Concierge packages like Mr. Musk’s. At Mr. Musk’s RV enclave, the help empties septic tanks, brings water and makes sure the vehicles’ electricity, refrigeration, air conditioning, televisions, DVD players and other systems are ship shape. The staff also stocked the campers with Diet Coke, Gatorade and Cruzan rum.” Once the story hit, Musk’s group felt like Classic Adventures had leaked the information to drum up business, and they tried to move to a new, undisclosed location.
20. http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf.
21. Tesla employees have been known to sneak across the street to the campus of the software maker SAP and to take advantage of its sumptuous, subsidized cafes.
22. Shotwell talks about going to Mars as much as Musk and has dedicated her life to space exploration. Straubel has demonstrated the same type of commitment with electric vehicles and can sound a lot like Musk at times. “We are not trying to corner the market on EVs,” Straubel said. “There are 100 million cars built per year and 2 billion already out there. Even if we got to 5 or 10 percent of the market, that does not solve the world’s problems. I am bullish we will keep up with demand and drive the whole industry forward. Elon is committed to this.”
23. Page presented one of his far-out ideas to me as follows: “I was thinking it would be pretty cool to have a prize to fund a project where someone would have to send something lightweight to the moon that could sort of replicate itself. I went over to the NASA operation center here at AMES in Mountain View when they were doing a mission and literally flying a satellite into the south pole of the moon. And they like hurled this thing into the moon at a high velocity and then it exploded and it sent matter out into space. And then they looked at that with telescopes, and they discovered water on the south pole of the moon, which sounds really exciting. I started thinking that if there’s a lot of water on the south pole of the moon, you can make rocket fuel from the hydrogen and oxygen. The other cool thing about the south pole is like it almost always gets sun. There’s like places high up that get sun and there’s places that are kind of in the craters that are very cold. So you have like a lot of energy then where you could run solar cells. You could almost run like a steam turbine there. You have rocket fuel ingredients, and you have solar cells that can be powered by sun, and you could probably run a power plant turbine. Power plant turbines aren’t that heavy. You could send that to the moon. You have like a gigawatt of power on the moon and make a lot of rocket fuel. It would make a good prize project. You send something to the moon that weights five pounds and have it make rocket fuel so that you could launch stuff off the moon or have it make a copy of itself, so that you can make more of them.”