by Ashlee Vance
On the marketing front, Musk would run daily Google searches for news stories about Tesla. If he saw a bad story, he ordered someone to “fix it” even though the Tesla public relations people could do little to sway the reporters. One employee missed an event to witness the birth of his child. Musk fired off an e-mail saying, “That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.”*
Marketing people who made grammatical mistakes in e-mails were let go, as were other people who hadn’t done anything “awesome” in recent memory. “He can be incredibly intimidating at times but doesn’t have a real sense for just how imposing he can be,” said one former Tesla executive. “We’d have these meetings and take bets on who was going to get bloodied and bruised. If you told him that you made a particular choice because ‘it was the standard way things had always been done,’ he’d kick you out of a meeting fast. He’d say, ‘I never want to hear that phrase again. What we have to do is fucking hard and half-assing things won’t be tolerated.’ He just destroys you and, if you survive, he determines if he can trust you. He has to understand that you’re as crazy as he is.” This ethos filtered through the entire company, and everyone quickly understood that Musk meant business.
Straubel, while sometimes on the bad end of the critiques, welcomed Musk’s hard-charging presence. The five years to get to this point had been an enjoyable slog for him. Straubel had transformed from a quiet, capable engineer who shuffled around Tesla’s factory floor with his head down into the most crucial member of the technical team. He knew more about the batteries and the electric drivetrain than just about anyone else at the company. He also began developing a role as a go-between for employees and Musk. Straubel’s engineering smarts and work ethic had earned Musk’s respect, and Straubel found that he could deliver difficult messages to Musk on behalf of other employees. As he would do for years to come, Straubel also proved willing to check his ego at the door. All that mattered was getting the Roadster and the follow-on sedan to market to popularize electric cars, and Musk looked like the best person to make that happen.
Other employees had enjoyed the thrill of the engineering challenge over the past five years but were burnt-out beyond repair. Wright didn’t believe that an electric car for the masses would ever take off. He left and started his own company dedicated to making electric versions of delivery trucks. Berdichevsky had been a crucial, do-anything young engineer for much of Tesla’s existence. Now that the company employed about three hundred people, he felt less effective and didn’t relish the idea of suffering for another five years to bring the sedan to market. He would leave Tesla, get a couple of degrees from Stanford, and cofound a start-up looking to make a revolutionary new battery that could soon go into electric cars. With Eberhard gone, Tarpenning found Tesla less fun. He didn’t see eye to eye with Drori and also shied away from the idea of frying his soul to get the sedan out. Lyons stuck around longer, which is a minor miracle. At various points, he had led the development of most of the core technology behind the Roadster, including the battery packs, the motor, the power electronics, and, yes, the transmission. This meant that for about five years Lyons had been among Tesla’s most capable employees and the guy constantly in the doghouse for being behind on something and thus holding the rest of the company up. He suffered through some of Musk’s more colorful tirades—directed either at him or suppliers that had let Tesla down—that included talk of people’s balls being chopped off and other violent or sexual acts. Lyons also saw an exhausted, stressed-out Musk spit coffee across a conference room table because it was cold and then, without a pause, demand that the employees work harder, do more, and mess up less. Like so many people privy to these performances, Lyons came away with no illusions about Musk’s personality but with the utmost respect for his vision and drive to execute. “Working at Tesla back then was like being Kurtz in Apocalypse Now,” Lyons said. “Don’t worry about the methods or if they’re unsound. Just get the job done. It comes from Elon. He listens, asks good questions, is fast on his feet, and gets to the bottom of things.”
Tesla could survive the loss of some of these early hires. Its strong brand had allowed the company to keep recruiting top talent, including people from large automotive companies who knew how to get over the last set of challenges blocking the Roadster from reaching customers. But Tesla’s major issue no longer revolved around effort, engineering, or clever marketing. Heading into 2008, the company was running out of money. The Roadster had cost about $140 million to develop, way over the $25 million originally estimated in the 2004 business plan. Under normal circumstances, Tesla had probably done enough to raise more funds. These, however, were not normal times. The big automakers in the United States were charging toward bankruptcy in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In the midst of all this, Musk needed to convince Tesla’s investors to fork over tens of millions of additional dollars, and those investors had to go to their constituents to lay out why this made any sense. As Musk put it, “Try to imagine explaining that you’re investing in an electric car company, and everything you read about the car company sounds like it is shit and doomed and it’s a recession and no one is buying cars.” All Musk had to do to dig Tesla out of this conundrum was lose his entire fortune and verge on a nervous breakdown.
8
PAIN, SUFFERING, AND SURVIVAL
AS HE PREPARED TO BEGIN FILMING IRON MAN IN EARLY 2007, the director Jon Favreau rented out a complex in Los Angeles that once belonged to Hughes Aircraft, the aerospace and defense contractor started about eighty years earlier by Howard Hughes. The facility had a series of interlocking hangars and served as a production office for the movie. It also supplied Robert Downey Jr., who was to play Iron Man and his human creator Tony Stark, with a splash of inspiration. Downey felt nostalgic looking at one of the larger hangars, which had fallen into a state of disrepair. Not too long ago, that building had played host to the big ideas of a big man who shook up industries and did things his own way.
Downey heard some rumblings about a Hughes-like figure named Elon Musk who had constructed his own, modern-day industrial complex about ten miles away. Instead of visualizing how life might have been for Hughes, Downey could perhaps get a taste of the real thing. He set off in March 2007 for SpaceX’s headquarters in El Segundo and wound up receiving a personal tour from Musk. “My mind is not easily blown, but this place and this guy were amazing,” Downey said.
To Downey, the SpaceX facility looked like a giant, exotic hardware store. Enthusiastic employees were zipping about, fiddling with an assortment of machines. Young white-collar engineers interacted with blue-collar assembly line workers, and they all seemed to share a genuine excitement for what they were doing. “It felt like a radical start-up company,” Downey said. After the initial tour, Downey came away pleased that the sets being hammered out at the Hughes factory did have parallels to the SpaceX factory. “Things didn’t feel out of place,” he said.
Beyond the surroundings, Downey really wanted a peek inside Musk’s psyche. The men walked, sat in Musk’s office, and had lunch. Downey appreciated that Musk was not a foul-smelling, fidgety, coder whack job. What Downey picked up on instead were Musk’s “accessible eccentricities” and the feeling that he was an unpretentious sort who could work alongside the people in the factory. Both Musk and Stark were the type of men, according to Downey, who “had seized an idea to live by and something to dedicate themselves to” and were not going to waste a moment.
When he returned to the Iron Man production office, Downey asked that Favreau be sure to place a Tesla Roadster in Tony Stark’s workshop. On a superficial level, this would symbolize that Stark was so cool and connected that he could get a Roadster before it even went on sale. On a deeper level, the car was to be placed as the nearest object to Stark’s desk so that it formed something of a bond between the actor, the
character, and Musk. “After meeting Elon and making him real to me, I felt like having his presence in the workshop,” Downey said. “They became contemporaries. Elon was someone Tony probably hung out with and partied with or more likely they went on some weird jungle trek together to drink concoctions with the shamans.”
After Iron Man came out, Favreau began talking up Musk’s role as the inspiration for Downey’s interpretation of Tony Stark. It was a stretch on many levels. Musk is not exactly the type of guy who downs scotch in the back of a Humvee while part of a military convoy in Afghanistan. But the press lapped up the comparison, and Musk started to become more of a public figure. People who sort of knew him as “that PayPal guy” began to think of him as the rich, eccentric businessman behind SpaceX and Tesla.
Musk enjoyed his rising profile. It fed his ego and provided some fun. He and Justine bought a house in Bel Air. Their neighbor to one side was Quincy Jones, the music producer, and their other neighbor was Joe Francis, the infamous creator of the Girls Gone Wild videos. Musk and some former PayPal executives, having settled their differences, produced Thank You for Smoking and used Musk’s jet in the movie. While not a hard-drinking carouser, Musk took part in the Hollywood nightlife and its social scene. “There were just a lot of parties to go to,” said Bill Lee, Musk’s close friend. “Elon was neighbors with two quasi-celebrities. Our friends were making movies and through this confluence of our networks, there was something to go out and do every night.” In one interview, Musk calculated that his life had become 10 percent playboy and 90 percent engineer.10 “We had a domestic staff of five; during the day our home transformed into a workplace,” Justine wrote in magazine article. “We went to black-tie fundraisers and got the best tables at elite Hollywood nightclubs, with Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio partying next to us. When Google cofounder Larry Page got married on Richard Branson’s private Caribbean island, we were there, hanging out in a villa with John Cusack and watching Bono pose with swarms of adoring women outside the reception tent.”
Justine appeared to relish their status even more than Musk. A writer of fantasy fiction novels, she kept a blog detailing the couple’s family life and their adventures on the town. In one entry, Justine had Musk saying that he’d prefer to sleep with Veronica than Betty from the Archie comics and that he’d like to visit a Chuck E. Cheese sometime. In another entry, she wrote about meeting Leonardo DiCaprio at a club and having him beg for a free Tesla Roadster, only to be turned down. Justine handed out nicknames to oft-occurring characters in the blog, so Bill Lee became “Bill the Hotel Guy” because he owns a hotel in the Dominican Republic, and Joe Francis appeared as “Notorious Neighbor.” It’s hard to imagine Musk, who keeps to himself, hanging out with someone as ostentatious as Francis, but the men got along well. When Francis took over an amusement park for his birthday, Musk attended and then ended up partying at Francis’s house. Justine wrote, “E was there for a bit but admitted he also found it ‘kind of lame’—he’s been to a couple of parties at NN’s house now and ends up feeling self-conscious, ‘because it just seems like there are always these skeevy guys wandering around the house trolling for girls. I don’t want to be seen as one of those guys.’” When Francis got ready to buy a Roadster, he stopped by the Musks’ house and handed over a yellow envelope with $100,000 in cash.
For a while, the blog provided a rare, welcome glimpse into the life of an unconventional CEO. Musk seemed charming. The public learned that he bought Justine a nineteenth-century edition of Pride and Prejudice, that Musk’s best friends gave him the nickname “Elonius,” and that Musk likes to place one-dollar wagers on all manner of things—Can you catch herpes from the Great Barrier Reef? Is it possible to balance two forks with a toothpick?—that he knows he will win. Justine told one story about Musk traveling to Necker Island, in the British Virgin Islands, to hang out with Tony Blair and Richard Branson. A photo of the three men appeared later in the press that depicted Musk with a vacant stare. “This was E’s I’m-thinking-about-a-rocket-problem stance, which makes me pretty sure that he had just gotten some kind of bothersome work-related e-mail, and was clearly oblivious to the fact that a picture was being taken at all,” she wrote. “This is also the reason I get suck [sic] a kick out of it—the spouse the camera caught is the exact spouse I encountered, say, last night en route to the bathroom, standing in the hallway frowning with his arms folded.” Justine letting the world into the couple’s bathroom should have served as a warning of things to come. Her blog would soon turn into one of Musk’s worst nightmares.
The press had not run into a guy like Musk for a very long time. His shine as an Internet millionaire kept getting, well, shinier thanks to PayPal’s ongoing success. He also had an element of mystery. There was the weird name. And there was the willingness to spend vast sums of money on spaceships and electric cars, which came across as a combination of daring, flamboyant, and downright flabbergasting. “Elon Musk has been called ‘part playboy, part space cowboy,’ an image hardly dispelled by a car collection that has boasted a Porsche 911 Turbo, 1967 Series 1 Jaguar, a Hamann BMW M5 plus the aforementioned McLaren F1—which he has driven at up to 215mph on a private airstrip,” a British reporter gushed in 2007. “Then there was the L39 Soviet military jet, which he sold after becoming a father.” The press had picked up on the fact that Musk tended to talk a huge game and then struggle to deliver on his promises in time, but they didn’t much care. The game he talked was so much bigger than anyone else’s that reporters were comfortable giving Musk leeway. Tesla became the darling of Silicon Valley’s bloggers, who tracked its every move and were breathless in their coverage. Similarly, reporters covering SpaceX were overjoyed that a young, feisty company had arrived to needle Boeing, Lockheed, and, to a large extent, NASA. All Musk had to do was eventually bring some of these wondrous things he’d been funding to market.
While Musk put on a good show for the public and press, he’d started to get very worried about his businesses. SpaceX’s second launch attempt had failed, and the reports coming in from Tesla kept getting worse. Musk had started these two adventures with a fortune nearing $200 million and had chewed through more than half the money with little to show for it. As each Tesla delay turned into a PR fiasco, the Musk glow dimmed. People in Silicon Valley began to gossip about Musk’s money problems. Reporters who months earlier had been heaping adulation on Musk turned on him. The New York Times picked up on Tesla’s transmission problems. Automotive websites griped that the Roadster might never ship. By the end of 2007, things got downright nasty. Valleywag, Silicon Valley’s gossip blog, began to take a particular interest in Musk. Owen Thomas, the site’s lead writer, dug into the histories of Zip2 and PayPal and played up the times Musk was ousted as CEO to undermine some of his entrepreneurial street cred. Thomas then championed the premise that Musk was a master manipulator who played fast and loose with other people’s money. “It’s wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies,” Thomas wrote. “But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality.” Valleywag anointed the Tesla Roadster as its No. 1 fail of 2007 among technology companies.
As his businesses and public persona suffered, Musk’s home life degraded as well. His triplets—Kai, Damian, and Saxon—had arrived near the end of 2006 and joined their brothers Griffin and Xavier. According to Musk, Justine suffered from postpartum depression following the birth of the triplets. “In the spring of 2007, our marriage was having real issues,” Musk said. “It was on the rocks.” Justine’s blog posts back up his sentiments. She described a much less romantic Musk and felt people treated her as “an arm ornament who couldn’t possibly have anything interesting to say” rather than as an author and her husband’s equal. During one trip to St. Barts, the Musks ended up sharing dinner with some wealthy, influential couples. When Justine let out her political views, one of the men at the table made a crack about her being so opinionated. “E chuckled back, patted my hand the
way you pat a child’s,” Justine wrote on her blog. From that point on, Justine ordered Musk to introduce her as a published novelist and not just his wife and mother of his children. The results? “E’s way of doing this throughout the rest of the trip: ‘Justine wants me to tell you that she’s written novels,’ which made people look at me like oh, that’s just so cute and didn’t really help my case.”
