Elon Musk

by Ashlee Vance

  A handful of high-ranking government officials gave me their candid takes on Musk, albeit without being willing to put their names to the remarks. One found Musk’s treatment of air force generals and military men of similar rank appalling. Musk has been known to let even high-ranking officials have it when he thinks they’re off base and is not apologetic about this. Another could not believe it when Musk would call very intelligent people idiots. “Imagine the worst possible way that could come out, and it would come out,” this person said. “Life with Elon is like being in a very intimate married couple. He can be so gentle and loyal and then really hard on people when it isn’t necessary.” One former official felt that Musk would need to temper himself better in the years to come if SpaceX was to keep currying favor with the military and government agencies in its bid to defeat the incumbent contractors. “His biggest enemy will be himself and the way he treats people,” this person said.

  When Musk rubs outsiders the wrong way, Shotwell is often there to try to smooth over the situation. Like Musk, she has a salty tongue and a fiery personality, but Shotwell is willing to play the role of the conciliator. These skills have allowed her to handle the day-to-day operations at SpaceX, leaving Musk to focus on the company’s overall strategy, the product designs, marketing, and motivating employees. Like all of Musk’s most trusted lieutenants, Shotwell has been willing to stay largely in the background, do her work, and focus on the company’s cause.

  Shotwell grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, the daughter of an artist (mom) and a neurosurgeon (dad). She played the part of a bright, pretty girl, getting straight A’s at school and joining the cheerleading squad. Shotwell had not expressed a major inclination toward the sciences and knew only one version of an engineer—the guy who drives a train. But there were clues that she was wired a bit different. She was the daughter who mowed the lawn and helped put the family basketball hoop together. In third grade, Shotwell developed a brief interest in car engines, and her mom bought a book detailing how they work. Later, in high school, Shotwell’s mom forced her to attend a lecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology on a Saturday afternoon. As Shotwell listened to one of the panels, she grew enamored with a fifty-year-old mechanical engineer. “She had these beautiful clothes, this suit and shoes that I loved,” Shotwell said. “She was tall and carried off the heels really well.” Shotwell chatted with the engineer after the talk, learning about her job. “That was the day I decided to become a mechanical engineer,” she said.

  Shotwell went on to receive an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Northwestern University. Then she took a job at Chrysler. It was a type of management training program meant for hotshot recent graduates who appeared to have leadership potential. Shotwell started out going to auto mechanics school—“I loved that”—and then from department to department. While working on engines research, Shotwell found that there were two very expensive Cray supercomputers sitting idle because none of the veterans knew how to use them. A short while later, she logged onto the computers and set them up to run computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, operations to simulate the performance of valves and other components. The work kept Shotwell interested, but the environment started to grate on her. There were rules for everything, including lots of union regulations around who could operate certain machines. “I picked up a tool once, and got written up,” she said. “Then I opened a bottle of liquid nitrogen and got written up. I started thinking that the job was not what I had anticipated it would be.”

  Shotwell pulled out of the Chrysler training program, regrouped at home, and then briefly pursued her doctorate in applied mathematics. While back on the Northwestern campus, one of her professors mentioned an opportunity at the Aerospace Corporation. Anything but a household name, Aerospace Corporation has been headquartered in El Segundo since 1960, serving as a kind of neutral, nonprofit organization that advises the air force, NASA, and other federal bodies on space programs. The company has a bureaucratic feel but has proved very useful over the years with its research activities and ability to champion and nix costly endeavors. Shotwell started at Aerospace in October 1988 and worked on a wide range of projects. One job required her to develop a thermal model that depicted how temperature fluctuations in the space shuttle’s cargo bay affected the performance of equipment on various payloads. She spent ten years at Aerospace and honed her skills as a systems engineer. By the end, though, Shotwell had become irritated by the pace of the industry. “I didn’t understand why it had to take fifteen years to make a military satellite,” she said. “You could see my interest was waning.”

  For the next four years, Shotwell worked at Microcosm, a space start-up just down the road from the Aerospace Corporation, and became the head of its space systems division and business development. Boasting a combination of smarts, confidence, direct talk, and good looks, Shotwell developed a reputation as a strong saleswoman. In 2002, one of her coworkers, Hans Koenigsmann, left for SpaceX. Shotwell took Koenigsmann out for a going-away lunch and dropped him off at SpaceX’s then rinky-dink headquarters. “Hans told me to go in and meet Elon,” Shotwell said. “I did, and that’s when I told him, ‘You need a good business development person.’” The next day Mary Beth Brown called Shotwell and told her that Musk wanted to interview her for the new vice president of business development position. Shotwell ended up as employee No. 7. “I gave three weeks’ notice at Microcosm and remodeled my bathroom because I knew I would not have a life after taking the job,” she said.

  Through the early years of SpaceX, Shotwell pulled off the miraculous feat of selling something the company did not have. It took SpaceX so much longer than it had planned to have a successful flight. The failures along the way were embarrassing and bad for business. Nonetheless, Shotwell managed to sell about a dozen flights to a mix of government and commercial customers before SpaceX put its first Falcon 1 into orbit. Her deal-making skills extended to negotiating the big-ticket contracts with NASA that kept SpaceX alive during its leanest years, including a $278 million contract in August 2006 to begin work on vehicles that could ferry supplies to the ISS. Shotwell’s track record of success turned her into Musk’s ultimate confidante at SpaceX, and at the end of 2008, she became president and chief operating officer at the company.

  Part of Shotwell’s duties include reinforcing the SpaceX culture as the company grows larger and larger and starts to resemble the traditional aerospace giants that it likes to mock. Shotwell can switch on an easygoing, affable air and address the entire company during a meeting or convince a collection of possible recruits why they should sign up to be worked to the bone. During one such meeting with a group of interns, Shotwell pulled about a hundred people into the corner of the cafeteria. She wore high-heel black boots, skintight jeans, a tan jacket, and a scarf and had big hoop earnings dangling beside her shoulder-length blond hair. Pacing back and forth in front of the group with a microphone in hand, she asked them to announce what school they came from and what project they were working on while at SpaceX. One student went to Cornell and worked on Dragon, another went to USC and did propulsion system design, and another went to the University of Illinois and worked with the aerodynamics group. It took about thirty minutes to make it all the way around the room, and the students were, at least by academic pedigree and bright-eyed enthusiasm, among the most impressive youngsters in the world. The students peppered Shotwell with questions—her best moment, her advice for being successful, SpaceX’s competitive threats—and she replied with a mix of earnest answers and rah-rah stuff. Shotwell made sure to emphasize the lean, innovative edge SpaceX has over the more traditional aerospace companies. “Our competitors are scared shitless of us,” Shotwell told the group. “The behemoths are going to have to figure out how to get it together and compete. And it is our job to have them die.”

  One of SpaceX’s biggest goals, Shotwell said, was to fly as often as possible. The company has never sou
ght to make a fortune off each flight. It would rather make a little on each launch and keep the flights flowing. A Falcon 9 flight costs $60 million, and the company would like to see that figure drop to about $20 million through economies of scale and improvements in launch technology. SpaceX spent $2.5 billion to get four Dragon capsules to the ISS, nine flights with the Falcon 9, and five flights with the Falcon 1. It’s a price-per-launch total that the rest of the players in the industry cannot comprehend let alone aspire to. “I don’t know what those guys do with their money,” Shotwell said. “They are smoking it. I just don’t know.” As Shotwell saw it, a number of new nations were showing interest in launches, eyeing communications technology as essential to growing their economies and leveling their status with developed nations. Cheaper flights would help SpaceX take the majority of the business from that new customer set. The company also expected to participate in an expanding market for human flights. SpaceX has never had any interest in doing the five-minute tourist flights to low Earth orbit like Virgin Galactic and XCOR. It does, however, have the ability to carry researchers to orbiting habitats being built by Bigelow Aerospace and to orbiting science labs being constructed by various countries. SpaceX will also start making its own satellites, turning the company into a one-stop space shop. All of these plans hinge on SpaceX being able to prove that it can fly on schedule every month and churn through the $5 billion backlog of launches. “Most of our customers signed up early and wanted to be supportive and got good deals on their missions,” she said. “We are in a phase now where we need to launch on time and make launching Dragons more efficient.”

  For a short while, the conversation with the interns bogged down. It turned to some of the annoyances of SpaceX’s campus. The company leases its facility and has not been able to build things like a massive parking structure that would make life easier for its three-thousand-person workforce. Shotwell promised that more parking, more bathrooms, and more of the freebies that technology start-ups in Silicon Valley offer their employees would be on the way. “I want a day care,” she said.

  But it was while discussing SpaceX’s grandest missions that Shotwell really came into her own and seemed to inspire the interns. Some of them clearly dreamed of becoming astronauts, and Shotwell said that working at SpaceX was almost certainly their best chance to get to space now that NASA’s astronaut corps had dwindled. Musk had made designing cool-looking, “non–Stay Puft” spacesuits a personal priority. “They can’t be clunky and nasty,” Shotwell said. “You have to do better than that.” As for where the astronauts would go: well, there were the space habitats, the moon, and, of course, Mars as options. SpaceX has already started testing a giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, that will take it much farther into space than the Falcon 9, and it has another, even larger spaceship on the way. “Our Falcon Heavy rocket will not take a busload of people to Mars,” she said. “So, there’s something after Heavy. We’re working on it.” To make something like that vehicle happen, she said, the SpaceX employees needed to be effective and pushy. “Make sure your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it. As Shotwell saw it, the commercial space race was coming down to SpaceX and China and that’s it. And in the bigger picture, the race was on to ensure man’s survival. “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.”

  It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up. But on the whole, this approach stifles the pursuit of other endeavors. It leads to bloat and excess and a crippling of the commercial space industry.

  Outside of SpaceX, the American launch providers are no longer competitive against their peers in other countries. They have limited launch abilities and questionable ambition. SpaceX’s main competitor for domestic military satellites and other large payloads is United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture formed in 2006 when Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined forces. The thinking at the time about the union was that the government did not have enough business for two companies and that combining the research and manufacturing work of Boeing and Lockheed would result in cheaper, safer launches. ULA has leaned on decades of work around the Delta (Boeing) and Atlas (Lockheed) launch vehicles and has flown many dozens of rockets successfully, making it a model of reliability. But neither the joint venture nor Boeing nor Lockheed, both of which can offer commercial services on their own, come close to competing on price against SpaceX, the Russians, or the Chinese. “For the most part, the global commercial market is dominated by Arianespace [Europe], Long March [China] or Russian vehicles,” said Dave Bearden, the general manager of civil and commercial programs at the Aerospace Corporation. “There are just different labor rates and differences in the way they are built.”

  To put things more bluntly, ULA has turned into an embarrassment for the United States. In March 2014, ULA’s then CEO, Michael Gass, faced off against Musk during a congressional hearing that dealt, in part, with SpaceX’s request to take on more of the government’s annual launch load. A series of slides were rolled out that showed how the government payments for launches have skyrocketed since Boeing and Lockheed went from a duopoly to a monopoly. According to Musk’s math presented at the hearing, ULA charged $380 million per flight, while SpaceX would charge $90 million per flight. (The $90 million figure was higher than SpaceX’s standard $60 million because the government has certain additional requirements for particularly sensitive launches.) By simply picking SpaceX as its launch provider, Musk pointed out, the government would save enough money to pay for the satellite going on the rocket. Gass had no real retort. He claimed Musk’s figures for the ULA launch price were inaccurate but failed to provide a figure of his own. The hearing also came as tensions between the United States and Russia were running high due to Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine. Musk rightly noted that the United States could soon be placing sanctions on Russia that could carry over to aerospace equipment. ULA, as it happens, relies on Russian-made engines to send up sensitive U.S. military equipment in its Atlas V rockets. “Our Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles are truly American,” Musk said. “We design and manufacture our rockets in California and Texas.” Gass countered that ULA had bought a two-year supply of Russian engines and purchased the blueprints to the machines and had them translated from Russian to English, and he said this with a straight face. (A few months after the hearing, ULA replaced Gass as CEO and signed a deal with Blue Origin to develop American-made r
ockets.)

  Some of the most disheartening moments of the hearing arrived when Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama took the microphone for questioning. ULA has manufacturing facilities in Alabama and close ties to the senator. Shelby felt compelled to play the role of hometown booster by repeatedly pointing out that ULA had enjoyed sixty-eight successful launches and then asking Musk what he made of that accomplishment. The aerospace industry stands as one of Shelby’s biggest donors and he’s ended up surprisingly pro-bureaucracy and anticompetition when it comes to getting things into space. “Typically competition results in better quality and lower-priced contracts—but the launch market is not typical,” Shelby said. “It is limited demand framed by government-industrial policies.” The March hearing in which Shelby made these statements would turn out to be something of a sham. The government had agreed to put fourteen of its sensitive launches up for bid instead of just awarding them directly to ULA. Musk had come to Congress to present his case for why SpaceX made sense as a viable candidate for those and other launches. The day after the hearing, the air force cut the number of launches up for bid from fourteen to between seven and one. One month later, SpaceX filed a lawsuit against the air force asking for a chance to earn its launch business. “SpaceX is not seeking to be awarded contracts for these launches,” the company said on its freedomtolaunch.com website. “We are simply seeking the right to compete.”*