Elon Musk

by Ashlee Vance

  Musk will have the occasional vodka and Diet Coke, but he’s not a big drinker and does not really care for the taste of alcohol. “Somebody had to stay sober during these parties,” Musk said. “I was paying my own way through college and could make an entire month’s rent in one night. Adeo was in charge of doing cool shit around the house, and I would run the party.” As Ressi put it, “Elon was the most straight-laced dude you have ever met. He never drank. He never did anything. Zero. Literally nothing.” The only time Ressi had to step in and moderate Musk’s behavior came during video game binges that could go on for days.

  Musk’s longtime interest in solar power and in finding other new ways to harness energy expanded at Penn. In December 1994, he had to come up with a business plan for one of his classes and ended up writing a paper titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” The document started with a bit of Musk’s wry sense of humor. At the top of the page, he wrote: “The sun will come out tomorrow. . . .”—Little Orphan Annie on the subject of renewable energy. The paper went on to predict a rise in solar power technology based on materials improvements and the construction of large-scale solar plants. Musk delved deeply into how solar cells work and the various compounds that can make them more efficient. He concluded the paper with a drawing of the “power station of the future.” It depicted a pair of giant solar arrays in space—each four kilometers in width—sending their juice down to Earth via microwave beams to a receiving antenna with a seven-kilometer diameter. Musk received a 98 on what his professor deemed a “very interesting and well written paper.”

  A second paper talked about taking research documents and books and electronically scanning them, performing optical character recognition, and putting all of the information in a single database—much like a mix between today’s Google Books and Google Scholar. And a third paper dwelled on another of Musk’s favorite topics—ultracapacitors. In the forty-four-page document, Musk is plainly jubilant over the idea of a new form of energy storage that would suit his future pursuits with cars, planes, and rockets. Pointing to the latest research coming out of a lab in Silicon Valley, he wrote: “The end result represents the first new means of storing significant amounts of electrical energy since the development of the battery and fuel cell. Furthermore, because the Ultracapacitor retains the basic properties of a capacitor, it can deliver its energy over one hundred times faster than a battery of equivalent weight, and be recharged just as quickly.” Musk received a 97 for this effort and praise for “a very thorough analysis” with “excellent financials!”

  The remarks from the professor were spot-on. Musk’s clear, concise writing is the work of a logician, moving from one point to the next with precision. What truly stood out, though, was Musk’s ability to master difficult physics concepts in the midst of actual business plans. Even then, he showed an unusual knack for being able to perceive a path from a scientific advance to a for-profit enterprise.

  As Musk began to think more seriously about what he would do after college, he briefly considered getting into the videogame business. He’d been obsessed with video games since his childhood and had held a gaming internship. But he came to see them as not quite grand enough a pursuit. “I really like computer games, but then if I made really great computer games, how much effect would that have on the world,” he said. “It wouldn’t have a big effect. Even though I have an intrinsic love of video games, I couldn’t bring myself to do that as a career.”

  In interviews, Musk often makes sure that people know he had some truly big ideas on his mind during this period of his life. As he tells it, he would daydream at Queen’s and Penn and usually end up with the same conclusion: he viewed the Internet, renewable energy, and space as the three areas that would undergo significant change in the years to come and as the markets where he could make a big impact. He vowed to pursue projects in all three. “I told all my ex-girlfriends and my ex-wife about these ideas,” he said. “It probably sounded like super-crazy talk.”

  Musk’s insistence on explaining the early origins of his passion for electric cars, solar energy, and rockets can come off as insecure. It feels as if Musk is trying to shape his life story in a forced way. But for Musk, the distinction between stumbling into something and having intent is important. Musk has long wanted the world to know that he’s different from the run-of-the-mill entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He wasn’t just sniffing out trends, and he wasn’t consumed by the idea of getting rich. He’s been in pursuit of a master plan all along. “I really was thinking about this stuff in college,” he said. “It is not some invented story after the fact. I don’t want to seem like a Johnny-come-lately or that I’m chasing a fad or just being opportunistic. I’m not an investor. I like to make technologies real that I think are important for the future and useful in some sort of way.”

  4

  ELON’S FIRST START-UP

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, took their first steps toward becoming honest-to-God Americans. They set off on a road trip across the country.

  Kimbal had been working as a franchisee for College Pro Painters and done well for himself, running what amounted to a small business. He sold off his part of the franchise and pooled the money with what Musk had on hand to buy a beat-up 1970s BMW 320i. The brothers began their trip near San Francisco in August, as temperatures in California soared. The first part of the drive took them down to Needles, a city in the Mojave Desert. There they experienced the sweaty thrill of 120-degree weather in a car with no air-conditioning and learned to love pit stops at Carl’s Jr. burger joints, where they spent hours recuperating in the cold.

  The trip provided plenty of time for your typical twenty-something hijinks and raging capitalist daydreaming. The Web had just started to become accessible to the public thanks to the rise of directory sites like Yahoo! and tools like Netscape’s browser. The brothers were tuned in to the Internet and thought they might like to start a company together doing something on the Web. From California to Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Illinois, they took turns driving, brainstorming, and talking shit before heading back east to get Musk to school that fall. The best idea to arise from the journey was an online network for doctors. This wasn’t meant to be something as ambitious as electronic health records but more of a system for physicians to exchange information and collaborate. “It seemed like the medical industry was one that could be disrupted,” Kimbal said. “I went to work on a business plan and the sales and marketing side of it later, but it didn’t fly. We didn’t love it.”

  Musk had spent the earlier part of that summer in Silicon Valley, holding down a pair of internships. By day, he worked at Pinnacle Research Institute. Based in Los Gatos, Pinnacle was a much-ballyhooed start-up with a team of scientists exploring ways in which ultracapacitors could be used as a revolutionary fuel source in electric and hybrid vehicles. The work also veered—at least conceptually—into more bizarre territory. Musk could talk at length about how ultracapacitors might be used to build laser-based sidearms in the tradition of Star Wars and just about any other futuristic film. The laser guns would release rounds of enormous energy, and then the shooter would replace an ultracapacitor at the base of the gun, much like swapping out a clip of bullets, and start blasting away again. Ultracapacitors also looked promising as the power supplies for missiles. They were more resilient than batteries under the mechanical stresses of a launch and would hold a more consistent charge over long periods of time. Musk fell in love with the work at Pinnacle and began using it as the basis for some of his business plan experiments at Penn and for his industrialist fantasies.

  In the evenings, Musk headed to Rocket Science Games, a start-up based in Palo Alto that wanted to create the most advanced video games ever made by moving them off cartridges and onto CDs that could hold more information. The CDs would in theory allow them to bring Hollywood-style storytelling and production quality to the games. A team of budding all-stars who were a mix of engineers and film people was
assembled to pull off the work. Tony Fadell, who would later drive much of the development of both the iPod and iPhone at Apple, worked at Rocket Science, as did the guys who developed the QuickTime multimedia software for Apple. They also had people who worked on the original Star Wars effects at Industrial Light & Magic and some who did games at LucasArts Entertainment. Rocket Science gave Musk a flavor for what Silicon Valley had to offer both from a talent and culture perspective. There were people working at the office twenty-four hours a day, and they didn’t think it at all odd that Musk would turn up around 5 P.M. every evening to start his second job. “We brought him in to write some very menial low-level code,” said Peter Barrett, an Australian engineer who helped start the company. “He was completely unflappable. After a short while, I don’t think anyone was giving him any direction, and he ended up making what he wanted to make.”

  Specifically, Musk had been asked to write the drivers that would let joysticks and mice communicate with various computers and games. Drivers are the same types of annoying files that you have to install to get a printer or camera working with a home computer—true grunt work. A self-taught programmer, Musk fancied himself quite good at coding and assigned himself to more ambitious jobs. “I was basically trying to figure out how you could multitask stuff, so you could read video from a CD, while running a game at the same time,” Musk said. “At the time, you could do one or the other. It was this complicated bit of assembly programming.” Complicated indeed. Musk had to issue commands that spoke directly to a computer’s main microprocessor and fiddled with the most basic functions that made the machine work. Bruce Leak, the former lead engineer behind Apple’s QuickTime, had overseen the hiring of Musk and marveled at his ability to pull all-nighters. “He had boundless energy,” Leak said. “Kids these days have no idea about hardware or how stuff works, but he had a PC hacker background and was not afraid to just go figure things out.”

  Musk found in Silicon Valley a wealth of the opportunity he’d been seeking and a place equal to his ambitions. He would return two summers in a row and then bolt west permanently after graduating with dual degrees from Penn. He initially intended to pursue a doctorate in materials science and physics at Stanford and to advance the work he’d done at Pinnacle on ultracapacitors. As the story goes, Musk dropped out of Stanford after two days, finding the Internet’s call irresistible. He talked Kimbal into moving to Silicon Valley as well, so they could conquer the Web together.

  The first inklings of a viable Internet business had come to Musk during his internships. A salesperson from the Yellow Pages had come into one of the start-up offices. He tried to sell the idea of an online listing to complement the regular listing a company would have in the big, fat Yellow Pages book. The salesman struggled with his pitch and clearly had little grasp of what the Internet actually was or how someone would find a business on it. The flimsy pitch got Musk thinking, and he reached out to Kimbal, talking up the idea of helping businesses get online for the first time.

  “Elon said, ‘These guys don’t know what they are talking about. Maybe this is something we can do,’” Kimbal said. This was 1995, and the brothers were about to form Global Link Information Network, a start-up that would eventually be renamed Zip2. (For details on the controversy surrounding Zip2’s founding and Musk’s academic record, see Appendix 1.)

  The Zip2 idea was ingenious. Few small businesses in 1995 understood the ramifications of the Internet. They had little idea how to get on it and didn’t really see the value in creating a website for their business or even in having a Yellow Pages–like listing online. Musk and his brother hoped to convince restaurants, clothing shops, hairdressers, and the like that the time had come for them to make their presence known to the Web-surfing public. Zip2 would create a searchable directory of businesses and tie this into maps. Musk often explained the concept through pizza, saying that everyone deserved the right to know the location of their closest pizza parlor and the turn-by-turn directions to get there. This may seem obvious today—think Yelp meets Google Maps—but back then, not even stoners had dreamed up such a service.

  The Musk brothers brought Zip2 to life at 430 Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto. They rented a studio-apartment-sized office—twenty feet by thirty feet—and acquired some basic furniture. The three-story building had its quirks. There were no elevators, and the toilets often backed up. “It was literally a shitty place to work,” said an early employee. To get a fast Internet connection, Musk struck a deal with Ray Girouard, an entrepreneur who ran an Internet service provider operation from the floor below the Zip2 offices. According to Girouard, Musk drilled a hole in the drywall near the Zip2 door and then strung an Ethernet cable down the stairwell to the ISP. “They were slow to pay a couple of times but never stiffed me on the bill,” Girouard said.

  Musk did all of the original coding behind the service himself, while the more amiable Kimbal looked to ramp up the door-to-door sales operation. Musk had acquired a cheap license to a database of business listings in the Bay Area that would give a business’s name and its address. He then contacted Navteq, a company that had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create digital maps and directions that could be used in early GPS navigation-style devices, and struck a masterful bargain. “We called them up, and they gave us the technology for free,” said Kimbal. Musk merged the two databases together to get a rudimentary system up and running. Over time, Zip2’s engineers had to augment this initial data haul with more maps to cover areas outside of major metropolitan areas and to build custom turn-by-turn directions that would look good and work well on a home computer.

  Errol Musk gave his sons $28,000 to help them through this period, but they were more or less broke after getting the office space, licensing software, and buying some equipment. For the first three months of Zip2’s life, Musk and his brother lived at the office. They had a small closet where they kept their clothes and would shower at the YMCA. “Sometimes we ate four meals a day at Jack in the Box,” Kimbal said. “It was open twenty-four hours, which suited our work schedule. I got a smoothie one time, and there was something in it. I just pulled it out and kept drinking. I haven’t been able to eat there since, but I can still recite their menu.”

  Next, the brothers rented a two-bedroom apartment. They didn’t have the money or the inclination to get furniture. So there were just a couple of mattresses on the floor. Musk somehow managed to convince a young South Korean engineer to come work at Zip2 as an intern in exchange for room and board. “This poor kid thought he was coming over for a job at a big company,” Kimbal said. “He ended up living with us and had no idea what he was getting into.” One day, the intern drove the Musks’ battered BMW 320i to work, and a wheel came off en route. The axle dug into the street at the intersection of Page Mill Road and El Camino Real, and the groove it carved out remained visible for years.

  Zip2 may have been a go-go Internet enterprise aimed at the Information Age, but getting it off the ground required old-fashioned door-to-door salesmanship. Businesses needed to be persuaded of the Web’s benefits and charmed into paying for the unknown. In late 1995, the Musk brothers began making their first hires and assembling a motley sales team. Jeff Heilman, a free-spirited twenty-year-old trying to figure out what to do with his life, arrived as one of Zip2’s first recruits. He’d been watching TV late one night with his dad and seen a Web address printed at the bottom of the screen during a commercial. “It was for something dot-com,” Heilman said. “I remember sitting there and asking my dad what we were looking at. He said he didn’t know, either. That’s when I realized I had to go find me some Internet.” Heilman spent a couple of weeks trying to chat up people who could explain the Internet to him and then stumbled on a two-by-two-inch Zip2 job listing in the San Jose Mercury News. “Internet Sales Apply Here!” it read, and Heilman got the gig. A handful of other salespeople joined him and worked for commissions.

  Musk never seemed to leave the office. He slept, not unlike a dog, on a b
eanbag next to his desk. “Almost every day, I’d come in at seven thirty or eight A.M., and he’d be asleep right there on that bag,” Heilman said. “Maybe he showered on the weekends. I don’t know.” Musk asked those first employees of Zip2 to give him a kick when they arrived, and he’d wake up and get back to work. While Musk did his possessed coder thing, Kimbal became the rah-rah sales leader. “Kimbal was the eternal optimist, and he was very, very uplifting,” Heilman said. “I had never met anyone quite like him.” Kimbal sent Heilman to the high-end Stanford shopping mall and to University Avenue, the main drag in Palo Alto, to coax retailers into signing up with Zip2, explaining that a sponsored listing would send a company to the top of search results. The big problem, of course, was that no one was buying. Week after week, Heilman knocked on doors and returned to the office with very little to report in the way of good news. The nicest responses came from the people who told Heilman that advertising on the Internet sounded like the dumbest thing they had ever heard of. Most often, the shop owners just told Heilman to leave and stop bothering them. When lunchtime came around, the Musks would reach into a cigar box where they kept some cash, take Heilman out, and get the depressing status reports on the sales.

  Craig Mohr, another early employee, gave up his job selling real estate to hawk Zip2’s service. He decided to court auto dealerships because they usually spent lots of money on advertising. He told them about Zip2’s main website—www.totalinfo.com—and tried to convince them that demand was high to get a listing like www.totalinfo.com/toyotaofsiliconvalley. The service did not always work when Mohr demonstrated it or it would load very slowly, as was common back then. This forced him to talk the customers into imagining Zip2’s potential. “One day I came back with about nine hundred dollars in checks,” Mohr said. “I walked into the office and asked the guys what they wanted me to do with the money. Elon stopped pounding his keyboard, leaned out from behind his monitor, and said, ‘No way, you’ve got money.’”