An ampere is the basic unit of electric current intensity. A single amp will kill a person. My hand was about to come to rest on an exposed battery pack loaded with 1,450 amps. “Oh,” Elon Musk said with no emotion nor great concern, “you don’t want to touch that.”
Musk was showing me around the plant assembling his Tesla Model S all-electric four-door sedan. The battery was composed of seven thousand cells not unlike laptop batteries. The entire floor of the vehicle, from front axle to rear, was inhabited by this powerhouse that propelled a Model S from zero to sixty in 2.28 seconds.1 That’s beyond Lamborghini quick.2 With no engine or transmission, the car was mute in motion except for the sound of rubber on pavement. Inside, most functions were controlled by a seventeen-inch touch screen large enough to inspire wonder. In 2013, the Model S had the highest crash-test safety ratings in all categories.3 It appeared the car of the future had only one defect—it cost about $100,000. No one, not even the visionary Elon Musk, could build a successful car company with a product that none of its blue-collar employees could even dream of buying. But to worry about the viability of Tesla was to misunderstand Musk. He wasn’t trying to build a car company. To him, Tesla was a vehicle designed to speed human evolution. “Mankind is running this very, very dangerous chemical experiment,” he told me. “We’re putting trillions of tons of CO2 into the oceans and atmosphere to see what happens. That will be catastrophic. The only question is, when?”
Visionaries are risk takers and rule breakers. And like electricity itself, this trait can be enormously beneficial or nearly fatal. Elon Musk has seen both sides. In 2018, after a few wild and irresponsible tweets about taking the publicly traded Tesla private, the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for fraud. In September that year, Musk was forced to settle with the SEC by stepping down as Tesla’s chairman and agreeing to pay forty million dollars in fines.4 Musk’s sometimes erratic behavior is not unlike the life and career of his car company’s namesake. In the nineteenth century, the Serbian-American Nikola Tesla invented many of the devices that sparked our modern world, including the electric motor and the technology behind wireless communications. He also sank the fortunes of investors into dreams of transmitting electricity wirelessly; communicating with a civilization on Mars; and a “death ray” that would end all war. Often the flip side of genius is “wacky.” For the purposes of this chapter, I’ll concentrate on the side of Musk’s vision that may yet change civilization on Earth for the better.
Nikola Tesla would have been impressed with the auto plant bearing his name sprawled outside South Fremont, California, just across San Francisco Bay from Palo Alto, the capital of Silicon Valley. In 2014, as I watched Musk’s dreams parade down the assembly line, Musk was forty-two years old, a multibillionaire, whose vision defined the future long before the rest of us arrived. I said to Musk, “The last successful American car company was Chrysler, which started in 1929. How did you figure you were gonna start a car company and be successful at it?” I asked.
“Well, I didn’t really think Tesla would be successful,” Musk confessed. “I thought we would, most likely, fail.”
“Then why try?” My question tilted Musk’s head slightly to the right, his eyes narrowed with curiosity as though he was trying to figure out what was wrong with me. The query, which would be at home in most any boardroom, struck him as odd.
“If something’s important enough you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure,” he said.
Failure is not something with which Elon Musk had a great deal of experience though he does come perilously close. To me, he seemed unnaturally oblivious to risk and unjustifiably optimistic about the future—two reality-repudiating traits shared by most explorers. I have learned, in Musk’s case, this could be a genetic trait.
Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, was born in 1902. He arrived in a log cabin in Pequot, Minnesota. When he was just a boy, Joshua’s family moved to the wild west of Canada. In a picture from about 1926, Joshua, in his midtwenties, is smiling broadly, dressed in studded leather chaps, spinning a lariat so fast that both hand and rope have blurred into an arc. He was a handsome youth with rough-hewn features that would give him, later in life, a passing resemblance to Ernest Hemingway. Haldeman became a prominent chiropractor and national political activist. Like Hemingway, he didn’t care much for the status quo. I found evidence of this in a tiny article on page nine of the Ottawa Journal, dated October 14, 1940. Wedged in a column next to a vitamin cure for gray hair and a cupcake recipe, the article tells us Dr. Haldeman was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for being the head of Technocracy Incorporated for the town of Regina.5 Technocracy was a Depression-era social movement that advocated replacing politicians with scholars, engineers and scientists who might know more about running the economy. These people would be known as “Technocrats.” The group was outlawed in Canada during World War II but Haldeman refused to disband. It doesn’t appear the authorities pursued his case with vigor. After the war, he expanded his ambitions in national politics and medical societies. By this time, he and his wife, Winnifred, had four children. The youngest were twin girls. One of the twins, Maye, would become Elon Musk’s mother. Given the remoteness of Saskatchewan, Haldeman got a pilot’s license in 1948. Apparently, he understood the first rule of every boat owner; he named his plane after his wife. The letters Winnie were painted in white block letters across the red engine cowling. Newspapers dubbed the family “The flying Haldemans.” In 1950, still chafing under the Canadian political establishment, Haldeman loaded his Bellanca airplane and his family onto a freighter and sailed to South Africa. He had never been there—didn’t know a soul—but he hoped he was destined for the rugged independence of his youth.6
Africa turned out to be the kind of place where he could throw his lariat in any direction and lasso adventure. Joshua and Winnifred mounted several desert expeditions in search of the rumored Lost City of the Kalahari. They didn’t find it. But they did tie for first place in the Cape to Algiers road rally after enduring twelve thousand miles in a pale yellow station wagon with a V8 under the hood and water bags lashed to the grill.7 In 1954, with Winnifred as navigator, Joshua piloted Winnie thirty thousand miles from South Africa to Australia—a feat that summoned the Australian prime minister to the runway.8 Joshua was South Africa’s national champion in pistol shooting. Winnifred was the women’s pistol champion.
Their daughter, Maye, grew up to marry an electromechanical engineer and settle down in Pretoria to have three children: Elon; his younger brother, Kimbal; and a daughter, Tosca. The marriage short-circuited in less than ten years. Elon remembers an unhappy childhood, living for a time with his disagreeable father and suffering under the fists of bullies at school. Dissatisfied with the world as it was, he set about designing a new one to his own specifications. His mother told me Elon was brilliant in classes that he found interesting and poor in anything that bored him. His self-assigned homework included flying model planes, launching model rockets and divining the software inside his cherished 8-bit Commodore VIC-20 microcomputer brimming with 5KB of RAM. Musk told me the VIC-20 was “magic.” He taught himself code writing at about age twelve and proceeded to write video games which he sold to raise money for hardware upgrades. Like his grandfather, he longed for a land where dreams run wild.
“Why your interest in America?” I asked Musk. We were sitting for a 60 Minutes interview in his Bel Air, California, home in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.
“Well, I’m interested in things that change the world,” he told me. “I was interested in wondrous, new technology, where you’re like, ‘Wow, how does that even happen?’ It seemed like the vast majority of such things came from the United States. I do have some American background. A lot of people think my name must be from some exotic location, but I was named after my great-grandfather, who was from Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was a school superintendent and part-time sheriff in 1900.”
Musk got to America as quick as he could. He went to Canada for college, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania where he earned a degree in physics. He followed up with a degree in economics from the university’s prestigious Wharton School. After graduation, he and his brother, Kimbal, made for Silicon Valley. Elon was twenty-three, Kimbal, twenty-two.
“When we moved to Silicon Valley we had nothing,” Kimbal told me. “We literally had a small amount of money and a goal to start a company.” That company became known as Zip2. In 1995, it was among the first to harness the internet and big data to offer door-to-door driving directions. “We actually lived in the office,” Kimbal said. “And we would sleep on the floor in the evening and go shower at the YMCA the next morning. We would be ready to go before our employees arrived, so they wouldn’t think we were actually sleeping in the office, which, of course, we were.” In 1997, the brothers sold Zip2 to Compaq Computer Corporation for $307 million. That would be more than half a billion in 2018 dollars.
“So, you and your brother went from $7,000 between you to a $300-million deal, in what period of time?” I asked Elon.
“In four years,” he said.
“Only in America,” I observed.
Musk’s eyes ignited. “Right! Only in America, I agree. Absolutely only in America!” He said this not in greed, but in gratitude.
At the turn of the twenty-first century Musk saw the internet was a vast frontier of unfulfilled desires. He noticed that the financial services industry was slow to catch on, so he co-created PayPal, which he sold to eBay in 2002.
“And you sold PayPal to eBay for how much?” I asked.
“It was about $1.5 billion. So that was a good outcome.”
I had to chuckle. Good outcome? Well, yes. I suppose it was. This was the moment I noticed that Musk tends to talk about money in a dispassionate deadpan. To him spectacular wealth is a data point that fails to fire his imagination. But when you talk about ideas, he sparks to life. The more far-fetched, the better.
Musk’s share of the eBay deal was somewhere north of $200 million. In 2001, he imagined his next project would be an attempt to inspire the whole human race by landing a small greenhouse on Mars. “The furthest life has ever traveled,” he said at the time. What he needed was a spacecraft. He found American and French booster rockets much too expensive so Musk went to Russia to shop for a surplus intercontinental ballistic missile. But, again, the booster that could do the job came with an astronomical price. Musk, a fan of the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov, imagined that humankind would never colonize space without a cheaper way to get there. Unlike most of us, he decided this was his problem to solve.
“I think it’s important that humanity become a multi-planet species,” he told me. “I think most people would agree that a future where we are a space-faring civilization is inspiring and exciting compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. That’s really why I started SpaceX.”
In 2012, Musk and I walked the polished gray floors of his rocket plant in Hawthorne, California, near Los Angeles. Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, aka SpaceX, covered many acres under a ceiling that reached about five stories high. The plant was an example of what I thought of as Musk’s Hermit Crab Theory of industrial development. Years before, another aerospace company built the factory to produce fuselages for 747 jumbo jets. The plant eventually fell into disuse. Likewise, his Teslas were rolling out of a factory that had been abandoned by a defunct joint venture of General Motors and Toyota. Both buildings were perfect shells for his creatures. He didn’t have to build them or wait for them.
About seven thousand employees inhabit SpaceX. Some of those I met were newly minted engineers right out of college, others were rocket scientists with decades of experience at NASA. Hard hats swarmed over sections of booster rockets that looked like giant aluminum soda cans laid on their side. “That’s the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket,” Musk said. All of the major components—engines, fuselages, electronics—are designed and built here. Metal comes in one end of the factory, rocket ships come out the other. The screech of power saws chewing aluminum and bolts spinning under pneumatic wrenches forced the volume of Musk’s voice. “The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor,” he confided. Or, I thought, insane to try.
As we navigated the floor of the future he was building, Musk was just completing his own fortieth annual orbit around the sun. He’s about six foot two, slender but not athletic. He looked every bit of his youth, except, I noticed, bags under his eyes suggested more than a few sleepless nights. He was dressed in the spectrum of Silicon Valley, which is to say, black jeans, black T-shirt, black bomber jacket. Musk is given to self-deprecating humor. His eyes rarely break contact. He tends to emphasize words with sharp forward jabs of the head. Musk is analytical to the point of awkwardness. Even when engaged in conversation, you have the sense he is elsewhere—pursuing a vision the rest of us will see only in the fullness of time.
“When I was in college, I was thinking, what are the things that would most affect the future of humanity?” he told me. “There were essentially five things: the internet, sustainable energy, making life multiplanetary, reading and writing genetic code, and artificial intelligence. So, the last two are in a questionable category, where it’s a thorny issue of right and wrong. But the first three I thought for sure would have a positive impact on the future. So, I wanted to be involved in at least one of those three things. Space seemed like the one that would be least likely to attract other entrepreneurs.”
“Well, there’s a reason for that,” I pointed out. “You’d have to be crazy to start a rocket company.”
“Ha! That’s what my friends said. I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company.” Most of us write “Ha!” in text messages to indicate laughter. Musk is perhaps the only person I’ve met who actually says “Ha!” explosively, as a single syllable.
“What did your friends tell you?” I asked.
“One good friend of mine collected a whole series of videos of rockets blowing up and made me watch those,” he laughed.
Rocketry, as it turned out, is a humbling profession. In the beginning, SpaceX would only add to the video canon of catastrophe. In 2006, Musk’s first rocket, a single engine Falcon One, erupted from a launch pad in the Marshall Islands in the mid-Pacific. It flew thirty-three seconds before exploding. “Shook the coconuts off the trees,” Musk told me. Musk had anticipated a learning curve, so SpaceX was budgeted for two more launches. Both were failures. He had to beg and borrow money. It wasn’t easy to find investors who had watched three failures and were willing to pony up for a fourth attempt. Musk said, “When we’d call people and say, ‘Hey, would you like to invest?’ they’d be angry that we even called. Ha! It was not just ‘no’ it was ‘no’ with various expletives.”
In our interview in Musk’s Bel Air home, I took him back to those days of not so long ago. “In 2008, the rocket company is not going well, you’ve had three failures. The car company is hemorrhaging money and the American economy has tanked in the worst recession since the Great Depression.”
“And,” he interjected, “I’m getting divorced, by the way. Ha! Yeah, that was the worst year of my life. I remember waking up the Sunday before Christmas in 2008 and thinking to myself, ‘Man, I never thought I was someone who could ever be capable of a nervous breakdown.’”
At the end of 2008, both SpaceX and Tesla were two days away from bankruptcy. Kimbal Musk told me his brother was “worse than broke.” Elon told me he put his last dime in the two companies.
“Your personal money? Everything you had?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said. “I had to borrow money from friends just to pay the rent.”
“Anybody else would’ve said, ‘I’m gonna protect what I’ve got left. The car business didn’t work. I’m gonna let it go.’”
“If we had failed at that point,” Musk insisted, “we would’ve been used as a counterexample to say, ‘Oh, that silly company tried to make an electric car and they failed.’ We might’ve set back the cause of electric cars more than if we hadn’t started at all. For me, that was a no-brainer. The hard decision was that I had Tesla and SpaceX and they both needed money. I could either divide the money between SpaceX and Tesla and try to make them both survive, or I could pick one that’s gonna die for sure.”
“But you couldn’t choose between your children?”
“That’s right. It did feel like that.”
SpaceX had entered a competition with major aerospace companies for a launch contract with NASA. With its multiple failures it didn’t seem SpaceX was a likely choice. His funds were exhausted, investors were inventing new, colorful ways to say no. Musk went to bed, two days before Christmas, on the verge, as he said, of a nervous breakdown.
“The next morning,” Musk told me, “NASA called and told us that we’d won a $1.5 billion contract. I wasn’t expecting a call, especially just before Christmas. It came out of the blue. The head of NASA space flight operations said ‘Congratulations, you won.’ I just blurted out, ‘I love you guys!’”
“They saved you?” I asked.
“Yeah, they did.”
The next day, Christmas Eve, at 6:00 p.m., Musk arranged enough financing from weary investors to keep Tesla alive about nine months. The deal closed, as he put it to me, “at the last hour of the last day it was possible.”
“Merry Christmas,” I observed.
“Yeah. Ha! Merry Christmas indeed.”
Two years after the Christmas miracle, SpaceX became the fourth entity in history to orbit a spacecraft and return it safely to the Earth. The others were the United States, Russia and China.9 Two years later, in 2012, a SpaceX Dragon capsule was the first private spaceship to dock with the International Space Station.10 In 2015, SpaceX became the first to return its spent boosters to their launch sites, landing them vertically on a column of fire. SpaceX wasn’t carrying astronauts, but I couldn’t help but notice in our walk around the plant, the Dragon capsules under construction all had windows. Musk told me it would be a relatively simple matter to install seats instead of supplies. In 2018, SpaceX introduced the Falcon Heavy booster which is essentially three Falcon 9s lashed together. Falcon Heavy became the most powerful operational rocket in the world on February 6, 2018. It thundered into orbit carrying a Tesla roadster as experimental cargo. Cameras beamed back pictures of the car, top down, with a space-suited mannequin at the wheel. As Elon would say, Ha!
Musk’s second 2008 Christmas miracle allowed him to keep Tesla funded while he attracted more investors. One of them was Daimler AG, the maker of Mercedes-Benz vehicles, which wanted in on Tesla technology. Musk introduced his SUV, the Model X and then the car he needs to make the company viable for the long haul—the Model 3. At $35,000 the Model 3 is designed to be the mass production electric for everyman. Unless you drive a Tesla, you may not have noticed that Musk has built thousands of high-speed charging stations on major roads from coast-to-coast. He planned to convert many of the stations into giant batteries to store solar power. For Model S and Model X owners there’s no charge for the charging. He told me, “So, the basic premise is you can drive for free, forever, on pure sunlight.
“The solar panels will charge the stationary battery pack which will charge the car. So, these will be off-grid. Even if there’s a zombie apocalypse and the grid breaks down you’ll still be able to charge your car.”
“So,” I asked, “there’s a zombie apocalypse warranty?”
“Ha! Yes, you never know.”
The key to managing the cost of an electric vehicle is controlling your own battery production. Musk built a sprawling plant in Nevada he called Gigafactory 1 to make all of Tesla’s power packs. Then, he announced the development of a Tesla tractor for eighteen-wheelers and a new two-seat roadster. Critics said Musk had left reality in his rearview mirror. Production of the Model 3 was more troublesome than Musk had imagined. He overpromised and underperformed on the delivery date and production rate. Of course, Wall Street, nearsighted to the next quarter, punished the stock. Even worse, short sellers, who profit if the stock falls, organized media attacks on Musk and Tesla to undermine the company. (I understand investors should be allowed to make money on the upside or the downside in a free market, but for America’s sake, shouldn’t we be trying to create companies and jobs rather than destroy them?)
In late 2018, Tesla was still trying to outrun shortages of cash. For all the video he’d watched of exploding rocket ships it turned out the challenges of the car business were out of this world. Musk was showing signs of the nervous breakdown he had feared back in 2008. Still, no matter what the future holds for Tesla, Musk accomplished what he set out to do. He revolutionized transportation. By 2018 nearly all major automakers had announced development of electric models. For those interested in the mundane data points of wealth, 2018 was also the year that Tesla reached a market capitalization of $52 billion, which was greater than the Ford Motor Company.11 Somehow, spacefaring turned out to be a smoother ride. SpaceX became one of the world’s most valuable privately held companies at $21 billion.
Vision, ironically, is a word we use for that which cannot be seen by most of us—the future yet to come. A twentieth-century visionary, the original American car guy, Henry Ford, is often quoted as having said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” For the record, I cannot find any indication that Ford actually said that, but the quote does capture his belief. No one had imagined flying from South Africa to Australia until Winnie touched down, Down Under.
If you see SpaceX as a rocket company and Tesla as a car company, you’ve missed Elon Musk’s vision entirely. He created them to build vehicles to carry humankind to a future free of the hydrocarbons that cloud the thin wisp of blue we call an atmosphere—and to a future when Earth is known as “the home planet.” Musk once told National Geographic, “I want to die on Mars, just not on impact.”
In a now-revived manufacturing plant, where thousands of Americans could not build rockets fast enough to meet demand, Musk told me, “I think we’re at the dawn of a new era. And it’s going to be very exciting. What we’re hoping to do is provide more reasons to be inspired to be human. America is the very distillation of the spirit of exploration.”