Elon Musk Tesla, SpaceX, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future

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* Two years after the birth of his son, John Elon began to show signs of diabetes. The condition amounted to a death sentence at the time and, despite being only thirty-two, John Elon learned that he would likely have six months or so to live. With a bit of nursing experience behind her, Almeda took it upon herself to discover an elixir or treatment that would extend John Elon’s life. According to family lore, she hit on chiropractic procedures as an effective remedy, and John Elon lived for five years following the original diabetes diagnosis. The life-giving procedures established what would become an oddly rich chiropractic tradition in the Haldeman family. Almeda studied at a chiropractic school in Minneapolis and earned her doctor of chiropractic, or, D.C., degree in 1905. Musk’s great-grandmother went on to set up her own clinic and, as far as anyone can tell, became the first chiropractor to practice in Canada.

* Haldeman also entered politics, trying to start his own political party in Saskatchewan, publishing a newsletter, and espousing conservative, antisocialist ideas. He would later make an unsuccessful run for Parliament and chair the Social Credit Party.

* The journey took them up the African coast, across the Arabian Peninsula, all the way through Iran, India, and Malaysia and then down the Timor Sea to Australia. It required one year of preparation just to secure all of the necessary visas and paperwork, and they suffered from constant stomach bugs and an erratic schedule along the way. “Dad passed out crossing the Timor Sea, and mum had to take over until they hit Australia. He woke up right before they landed,” said Scott Haldeman. “It was fatigue.”

* Both Joshua and Wyn were accomplished marksmen and won national shooting competitions. In the mid-1950s, they also tied for first place in the eight-thousand-mile Cape Town to Algiers Motor Rally, beating pros in their Ford station wagon.

* Musk couldn’t remember this particular conversation. “I think they might be having creative recollection,” he said. “It’s possible. I had lots of esoteric conversations the last couple years of high school, but I was more concerned about general technology than banking.”

* When Maye went to Canada to check out places to live, a fourteen-year-old Tosca seized the moment and put the family house in South Africa up for sale. “She had sold my car as well and was in the midst of putting our furniture up for sale, too,” Maye said. “When I got back, I asked her why. She said, ‘There is no need to delay. We are getting out of here.’”

* The Musk brothers were not the most aggressive businessmen at this point. “I remember from their business plan that they were originally asking for a ten-thousand-dollar investment for twenty-five percent of their company,” said Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalist. “That is a cheap deal! When I heard about the three-million-dollar investment, I wondered if Mohr Davidow had actually read the business plan. Somehow, the brothers ended up raising a normal venture round.”

* Musk also got to show off the new office to his mother, Maye, and Justine. Maye sometimes sat in on meetings and came up with the idea of adding a “reverse directions” button on the Zip2 maps, which let people flip around their journeys and ended up becoming a popular feature on all mapping services.

* At one point, the founders thought the easiest way to solve their problems would just be to buy a bank and revamp it. While that didn’t happen, they did snag a high-profile controller from Bank of America, who in turn explained, in painful detail, the complexities of sourcing loans, transferring money, and protecting accounts.

* Fricker disputed that he yearned to be CEO, saying instead that the other employees had encouraged him to take over because of Musk’s struggles getting the business off the ground. Fricker and Musk, once close friends, remain unimpressed with each other. “Elon has his own code of ethics and honor and plays the game extraordinarily hard,” Fricker said. “When it comes down to it, for him, business is war.” According to Musk, “Harris is very smart, but I don’t think he has a good heart. He had a really intense desire to be running the show, and he wanted to take the company in ridiculous directions.” Fricker went on to have a very successful career as CEO of GMP Capital, a Canadian financial services company. Payne founded a private equity firm in Toronto.

* Musk had been pushed out as CEO of X.com by the company’s investors, who wanted a more seasoned executive to lead the company toward an IPO. In December 1999, X.com hired Bill Harris, the former CEO of the financial software maker Intuit, as its new chief. After the merger, many in the company turned on Harris, he resigned, and Musk returned as the CEO.

* After feeling ill for a few days, Musk went to Stanford Hospital and informed them that he’d been in a malaria zone, although the doctors could not find the parasite during tests. The doctors performed a spinal tap and diagnosed him with viral meningitis. “I may very well have also had that, and they treated me for it, and it did get better,” Musk said. The doctors discharged Musk from the hospital and warned him that some symptoms would recur. “I started feeling bad a few days later, and it got progressively worse,” Musk said. “Eventually, I couldn’t walk. It was like, ‘Okay, this is even worse than the first time.’” Justine took Musk to a general practitioner in a cab, and he lay on the floor of the doctor’s office. “I was so dehydrated that she couldn’t take my vitals,” Musk said. The doctor called an ambulance, which transported Musk to Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City with IVs in both arms. Musk faced another misdiagnosis—this time of the type of malaria. The doctors declined to give Musk a more aggressive treatment that came with nasty side effects including heart palpitations and organ failure.

* When Zubrin and some of the other Mars buffs heard of Musk’s plant project, they were upset. “It didn’t make any sense,” Zubrin said. “It was a purely symbolic thing to do, and the second they opened that door, millions of microbes would escape and plague all of NASA’s contamination protocols.”

* Most of the stories written about Musk that touch on this period say he went to Moscow three times. According to Cantrell’s detailed records, this is not the case. Musk met with the Russians twice in Moscow, and once in Pasadena, California. He also met with Arianespace in Paris, and in London with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., which Musk considered buying.

* Buzza knew Hollman’s work at Boeing and coaxed him to SpaceX about six months after the company started.

* Including a 1,300-pound hunk of copper.

* Before returning to El Segundo, Hollman used a drill press to remove the glasses’ safety shield. “I didn’t want to look like a nerd on the flight home,” he said.

* Hollman left the company after this incident in November 2007 and then returned for a spell to train new personnel. A number of people I interviewed for the book said that Hollman was so key to SpaceX’s early days that they feared the company might flame out without him.

* In a press release announcing the funding round, Musk was not listed as a founder of the company. In the “About Tesla Motors” section, the company stated, “Tesla Motors was founded in June 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to create efficient electric cars for people who love to drive.” Musk and Eberhard would later spar over Musk’s founder status.

* This was how the employee remembered the text. I did not see the actual e-mail. Musk later told the same employee, “I want you to think ahead and think so hard every day that your head hurts. I want your head to hurt every night when you go to bed.”

* Musk fought to set the record straight, as he saw it, on the Huffington Post and wrote a 1,500-word essay. Musk maintained that two months of negotiations with independent parties had gone into the postnuptial agreement, which kept the couple’s assets separate so that Musk could get the spoils from his companies and Justine could get the spoils from her books. “In mid 1999, Justine told me that if I proposed to her, she would say yes,” Musk wrote. “Since this was not long after the sale of my first company, Zip2, to Compaq, and the subsequent cofounding of PayPal, friends and family advised me to separate whether the marriage was for love or money.” After the settlement, Musk asked Arianna Huffington to remove his essay about the divorce from her website. “I don’t want to dwell on past negativity,” Musk said. “You can always find things on the Internet. So it’s not like it’s gone. It’s just not easily found.”

* The pair have continued to have their difficulties. For a long time, Musk ran all of the child-sharing scheduling through his assistant Mary Beth Brown rather than dealing directly with Justine. “I was really pissed-off about that,” Justine said. And the time Justine cried the most during our conversation came as she weighed the pros and cons of the children growing up on a grand stage where they’re whisked away to the Super Bowl or Spain in a private jet on a moment’s notice or asked to play at the Tesla factory. “I know the kids really look up to him,” she said. “He takes them everywhere and provides a lot of experiences for them. My role as the mother is to create this reality where I provide a sense of normalcy. They are not growing up in a normal family with a normal dad. Their life with me is a lot more low-key. We value different things. I am a lot more about empathy.”

* Musk recalled their meeting as follows: “She did look great, but what was going through my mind was ‘Oh, I guess they are a couple of models.’ You know, you can’t actually talk to most models. You just can’t have a conversation. But, you know, Talulah was really interested in talking about rockets and electric cars. That was the interesting thing.”

* He asked Riley to go with him, but she turned Musk down.

* By this time, Musk had built up a reputation as the hardest-charging man in the space business. Before settling on the Falcon 9, Musk planned to build something called the BFR, a.k.a. the Big Falcon Rocket or Big Fucking Rocket. Musk wanted it to have the biggest rocket engine in history. Musk’s bigger, faster mentality amused, horrified and impressed some of the suppliers that SpaceX occasionally turned to for help, like Barber-Nichols Inc., a Colorado-based maker of rocket engine turbo pumps and other aerospace machinery. A few executives at Barber-Nichols—Robert Linden, Gary Frey, and Mike Forsha —were kind enough to recount their first meeting with Musk in the middle of 2002 and their subsequent dealings with him. Here’s a snippet: “Elon showed up with Tom Mueller and started telling us it was his destiny to launch things into space at lower costs and to help us become space faring people. We thought the world of Tom but weren’t quite sure whether to take Elon too seriously. They began asking us for the impossible. They wanted a turbo pump to be built in less than a year for under one million dollars. Boeing might do a project like that over five years for one hundred million. Tom told us to give it our best shot, and we built it in thirteen months. Build quick and learn quickly was Elon’s philosophy. He was relentless in wanting the costs to come down. Regardless of what we showed him on paper with regard to the cost of materials, he wanted the cost lower because that was part of his business model. It could be very frustrating to work with Elon. He has a singular view and doesn’t deviate from that. We don’t know too many people that have worked for him that are happy. That said, he has driven the cost of space down and been true to his original business plan. Boeing, Lockheed, and the rest of them have become overly cautious and spend a lot of money. SpaceX has balls.”

* To provide a glimpse of how well Musk knows the rockets, here he is explaining what happened from memory six years after the fact: “It was because we had upgraded the Merlin engine to a regeneratively cooled engine and the thrust transient of that engine was a few seconds longer. It was only like one percent thrust for about another 1.5 seconds. And the chamber pressure was only ten PSI, which is one percent of the total. But that’s below sea level pressure. On the test stand, we didn’t notice anything. We thought it was fine. We thought it was just the same as before, but actually it just had this slight difference. The ambient sea level pressure was higher at roughly fifteen PSI, which disguised some effects during the test. The extra thrust caused the first stage to continue moving after stage separation and recontact the other stage. And the upper stage then started the engine inside the interstage, which caused the plasma blowback which destroyed that upper stage.”

* Musk would later discover the identity of this employee in an ingenious way. He copied the text of the letter into a Word document, checked the size of the file, sent it to a printer, and looked over the logs of printer activity to find one of the same size. He could then trace that back to the person who had printed the original file. The employee wrote a letter of apology and resigned.

* Griffin had pined to build a massive new spacecraft that would solidify his mark on the industry. But, with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Bush appointee knew that his time as NASA chief was coming to an end and that SpaceX appeared poised to build the most interesting machines moving forward.

* It should be noted that there are many people in the space industry who doubt reusable rockets will work, in large part because of the stress the machines and metal go through during launch. It’s not clear that the most prized customers will even consider the reused spacecraft for launches due to their inherent risks. This is a big reason that other countries and companies have not pursued the technology. There’s a camp of space experts who think Musk is flat-out wasting his time, and that engineering calculations already prove the reusable rockets to be a fool’s errand.

* Blue Origin also hired away a large chunk of SpaceX’s propulsion team.

* Musk has taken exception to Blue Origin and Bezos filing for patents around reusable rocket technology as well. “His patent is completely ridiculous,” Musk said. “People have proposed landing on a floating platform in the ocean for a half century. There’s no chance whatsoever of the patent being upheld because there’s five decades of prior art of people who proposed that six ways to Sunday in fiction and nonfiction. It’s like Dr. Seuss, green eggs and fucking ham. That’s how many ways it’s been proposed. The issue is doing it and like actually creating a rocket that can make that happen.”

* Michael Colonno.

* According to Musk, “The early Dragon Version 1 work was just me and maybe three or four engineers, as we were living hand to mouth and had no idea if NASA would award us a contract. Technically, there was Magic Dragon before that, which was much simpler, as it had no NASA requirements. Magic Dragon was just me and some high altitude balloon guys in the U.K.”

* NASA researchers studying the Dragon design have noticed several features of the capsule that appear to have been purpose built from the get-go to accommodate a landing on Mars. They’ve published a couple of papers explaining how it could be feasible for NASA to fund a mission to Mars in which a Dragon capsule picks up samples and returns them to Earth.

* The politicking in the space business can get quite nasty. Lori Garver, the former deputy administrator of NASA, spent years fighting to open up NASA contracts so that private companies could bid on things like resupplying the ISS. Her position of fostering a strong relationship between NASA and the private sector won out in the end but at a cost. “I had death threats and fake anthrax sent to me,” she said. Garver also ran across SpaceX competitors that tried to spread unfounded gossip about the company and Musk. “They claimed he was in violation of tax laws in South Africa and had another, secret family there. I said, ‘You’re making this stuff up.’ We’re lucky that people with such long-term visions as Elon, Jeff Bezos, and Robert Bigelow [founder of the aerospace company that bears his name] got rich. It’s nuts that people would want to vilify Elon. He might say some things that rub people the wrong way, but, at some point, the being nice to everyone thing doesn’t work.”

* On this flight, SpaceX secretly placed a wheel of cheese inside the Dragon capsule. It was the same one Jeff Skoll had given Musk back in the mice-to-Mars days.

* Musk explained the look to me in a way that only he can. “I went for a similar style to the Model S (it uses the same screens as Model S upgraded for space ops), but kept the aluminum isogrid uncovered for a more exotic feel.”

* Rather insanely, NASA is building a next-generation, giant spaceship that could one day get to Mars even though SpaceX is building the same type of craft—the Falcon Heavy—on its own. NASA’s program is budgeted to cost $18 billion, although government studies say that figure is very conservative. “NASA has no fucking business doing this,” said Andrew Beal, the billionaire investor and onetime commercial space entrepreneur. “The whole space shuttle system was a disaster. They’re fucking clueless. Who in their right mind would use huge solid boosters, especially ones built in segments requiring dynamic seals? They are so lucky they only had one disastrous failure of the boosters.” Beal’s firm criticisms come from years of watching the government compete against private space companies by subsidizing the construction of spacecraft and launches. His company Beal Aerospace quit the business because the government kept funding competing rockets. “Governments around the world have spent billions trying to do what Elon is doing, and they have failed,” he said. “We have to have governments, but the idea that the government goes out and competes with companies is fucking nuts.”

* The volume level on the sound system naturally goes to 11—an homage to This Is Spinal Tap and a reflection of Musk’s sense of humor.

* And it’s not just that the Model S and other electric cars are three to four times more efficient than internal combustion vehicles. They can also tap into power that is produced in centralized, efficient ways by power plants and solar arrays.

* When the very first Roadster arrived, it came in a large plywood crate. Tesla’s engineers unpacked it furiously, installed the battery pack, and then let Musk take it for a spin. About twenty Tesla engineers jumped in prototype vehicles and formed a convoy that followed Musk around Palo Alto and Stanford.

* At some point from late 2007 to 2008, Musk also tried to hire Tony Fadell, an executive at Apple who is credited with bringing the iPod and iPhone to life. Fadell remembered being recruited for the CEO job at Tesla, while Musk remembered it more as a chief operating officer type of position. “Elon and I had multiple discussions about me joining as Tesla’s CEO, and he even went to the lengths of staging a surprise party for me when I was going to visit their offices,” Fadell said. Steve Jobs caught wind of these meetings and turned on the charm to keep Fadell. “He was sure nice to me for a while,” Fadell said. A couple of years later, Fadell left Apple to found Nest, a maker of smart-home devices, which Google then acquired in 2014.

* It took a couple of years, from about 2007 to 2009, for the Energy Department application to morph into the actual possibility of a loan from the government.

* The deal had two parts. Tesla would keep making battery packs and associated technology that other companies might use, and it would produce its own electric vehicles at a manufacturing facility in the United States.

* Musk had received a lot of pushback internally for trying to locate a car factory in or near California. “All the guys in Detroit said it needs to be in a place where the labor can afford to live and be happy,” Lloyd said. “There’s a lot of learned skill on an assembly line, and you can’t afford turnover.” Musk responded that SpaceX had found a way to build rockets in Los Angeles, and that Tesla would find a way to build cars in Northern California. His stubbornness ended up being fortuitous for the company. “If it hadn’t been for that DOE loan, and the NUMMI plant, there’s no way Tesla would have ended up being so successful, so fast,” Lloyd said.

* Boeing used to make fuselages for the 747 in the SpaceX building and painted them in what became the Tesla design studio.

* “He picks the most visible place on purpose,” said the investor and Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson. “He’s at Tesla just about every Saturday and Sunday and wants people to see him and know they can find him. Then, he can also call suppliers on the weekend, and let them know that he’s personally putting in the hours on the factory floor and expects the same from them.”