Elon Musk

by Ashlee Vance

  *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.”<
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  *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.”

  *Tesla got its start using the same lithium ion batteries that go into consumer electronics like laptops. During the early days of the Roadster, this proved a risky but calculated choice. Tesla wanted to tap into Asia’s mature battery suppliers and get access to cheap products that would keep improving over time. The press played up Tesla’s use of these types of batteries, and consumers were fascinated by the idea that a car could be powered by the same energy source sitting inside of their gizmos.

  There’s a major misconception that Tesla still depends on these types of batteries. Yes, the batteries inside the Model S look like those found in a laptop. Tesla, however, started developing its own battery chemistry in conjunction with partners like Panasonic dating back to late models of the Roadster. Tesla can still use the same manufacturing equipment as consumer electronics companies while ending up with a battery that’s safer and better tuned to the intense charging demands of its cars. Along with the secret formula for the battery cells themselves, Tesla has improved the performance of its batteries by developing its own techniques for linking the cells together and cooling them. The battery cells have been designed to vent heat in a very particular way, and there’s coolant running throughout the entire battery pack. The battery packs are assembled at the Tesla factory in an area hidden from visitors.

  The chemistry, the batteries, the battery pack design—these are all elements of a large, continuous system that Tesla has built from the ground up to allow its cars to charge at record speed. To control the heat produced during the charging process, Tesla has designed an interlinked system of radiators and chillers to cool both the batteries and the chargers. “You’ve got all that hardware plus the software management system and other controllers,” said J. B. Straubel. “All of these things are running at maximum rate.” A Model S can recharge 150 miles of range in 20 minutes at one of Tesla’s charging stations with DC power pumping straight into the batteries. By comparison, a Nissan Leaf that maxes out at 80 miles of range can take 8 hours to recharge.

  *Google’s attorneys had asked to make a presentation to Tesla’s board. Before he would permit this, Musk asked for the right to call on Google for a loan in case Tesla encountered cash flow issues after acquisition talks became public, as there would otherwise be no way for Tesla to raise money. Google hesitated on this for a few weeks, by which time Tesla ended up in the clear.

  *Following the demonstration, Tesla struggled to deliver on the battery swap technology. Musk had promised that the first few stations would arrive in late 2013. A year after the event, though, Tesla had yet to open a single station. According to Musk, the company ended up needing to deal with more pressing issues. “We’re going to do it because we said we’d do it,” Musk said. “It may not be on the schedule that we’d like but we always come through in the end.”

  *As for the origins of the Model S name, Musk said, “Well, I like calling things what they are. We had the Roadster, but there was no good word for a sedan. You can’t call it the Tesla Sedan. That’s boring as hell. In the U.K., they say ‘saloon,’ but then it’s sort of like, ‘What are you? A cowboy or something?’ We went through a bunch of iterations, and the Model S sounded the best. And it was like a vague nod to Ford being the Model T in that electric cars preceded the Model T, and in a way we’re coming full circle and the thing that proceeded the Model T is now going into production in the twenty-first century, hence the Model S. But that’s sort of more like reversing the logic.”

  *A handful of lawsuits have been filed against Tesla with auto dealers arguing that the company should not be able to sell its cars directly. But even in those states that have banned Tesla’s stores, prospective customers can usually request a test drive, and someone from Tesla will show up with a vehicle. “Sometimes you have to put something out there for people to attack,” Musk said. “In the long run, the stores won’t be important. The way things will really grow is by word of mouth. The stores are like a viral seed to get things going.”

  *Or as Straubel put it, “Watching people drive the Model S across the country is phenomenal. There is no way you can do that in anything else. It’s not about putting a charging station in the desert as a stunt. It’s about realizing where this is going to go. We will end up launching the third-generation car into a world where this charging network is free and ubiquitous. It bugs me when people compare us to a car company. The cars are absolutely our main product, but we are also an energy company and a technology company. We are going down to the dirt and having discussions with mining companies about the materials for our batteries and going up to commercialize all the pieces that make up an electronic vehicle and all the pieces that make an awesome product.”

  *No, really. Both Lyndon and his wife play underwater hockey and used these skills to secure green cards, meeting the criteria for the “exceptional abilities” the United States desires. They ultimately played for the U.S. national teams.

  *Thirteen thousand people showed up in 2013.

  *If you assume an average selling price of $40,000 per car for 300,000 cars sold in a year, that’s $12 billion in annual revenue, or $1 billion per month.

  *For the space
buffs, here’s Musk talking more about the physics and chemistry of the spaceship: “The final piece of the puzzle for figuring out the Mars architecture is a methane engine. You need to be able to generate the propellant on the surface. Most of the fuel used in rockets today is a form of kerosene, and creating kerosene is quite complex. It’s a series of long-chain hydrocarbons. It’s much easier to create either methane or hydrogen. The problem with hydrogen is it’s a deep cryogen. It’s only a liquid very close to absolute zero. And because it’s a small molecule you have these issues where hydrogen will seep its way through a metal matrix and embrittle or destroy metal in weird ways. Hydrogen’s density is also very porous, so the tanks are enormous and it’s expensive to create and store hydrogen. It’s not a good choice as a fuel.