by Randall Lane
Houston needed to delegate more. His spiky chestnut hair boasted patches of premature gray. The Phi Delta MBA remained the company’s CFO until April 2014. Relinquishing that post was a big step on the road from startup code geek to tech tycoon.
A glimpse at his future came one evening in the fall of 2011. Houston dined with Mark Zuckerberg, and over generous portions of buffalo meat (the Facebook founder was then in his much-mocked phase of eating only what he killed), they plotted ways to collaborate. As he walked out of Zuckerberg’s pre-IPO starter home, a relatively modest Palo Alto colonial, clearly en route to becoming the big company CEO he had told Steve Jobs he would be, Houston noticed the security guard parked outside, presumably all day, every day, and pondered the corollaries of the path: “I’m not sure I want to live that life.”
CHAPTER 3
Elon Musk, Tesla Motors and SpaceX: Inside the Mind of Iron Man
Elon Musk may be the greatest entrepreneur of the twenty-first century. By thirty-two, he had cofounded and sold two wildly successful companies, including PayPal, the bank of the Internet, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002. For a second act, he again went double-barreled, this time aiming for two of the world’s largest, most hidebound industries: automobiles and space travel. With Tesla Motors, he sought to make a viable electric car (and create the first successful American auto startup in more than a half-century). SpaceX was designed to privatize the path to the heavens. Today, both seem likely winners, swelling Musk’s net worth well past $10 billion.
But when Hannah Elliott spent extensive time with Musk in 2011 and 2012, those successes were far from certain, and his second marriage was crumbling. For months, on both coasts, Musk, now forty-three, gave Elliott full access to his work and home life, sharing his uninhibited thoughts in real time—less Tony Stark (Musk was the inspiration for Iron Man) than Tony Soprano. Not even genius, it turns out, is free from doubt.
On a Thursday morning in Bel Air, California, Elon Musk, his cheeks still wet with aftershave, retreated to the basement theater of his 20,000-square-foot French Nouveau mansion, which he’s converted into a man cave suitable for business or play.
The leather couch and coffee table inscribed with the periodic table served as a de facto workstation, a retreat for the e-mails he shoots out past midnight and his research on such things as the Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, the “best heat shield known to man.” But rather than trudge to the office when the rest of the world is awake, the young billionaire founder of electric car maker Tesla and SpaceX, the first private company to put a vehicle into orbit, taught me how to play BioShock, an Ayn Rand–esque first-person shooter epic.
“It talks about Hegelian dialectics being the things that determine the course of history,” Musk explained, his eyes fixed on the screen. “They’re sort of competing philosophies or competing meme sets, and you can look at modern history where it’s not so much genetics going into battle as a battle of meme structures.”
Yes, he talks like that. While he’s playing video games.
The games went on for ninety minutes. While work for both of his companies beckoned—Tesla was readying the debut of an SUV aimed at eco-conscious soccer moms and planned to launch a new sedan; SpaceX, meanwhile, was testing its Dragon spacecraft for a docking with the International Space Station—Musk clearly relished the distraction, carving out still more time for a tour of the house.
Situated atop a hidden hill that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, the 1.6-acre grounds boast a tennis court (Musk’s brother, Kimbal, joked that their infrequent matches get so competitive that he needs to run away after making a winning shot), an outdoor pool, and a footpath leading to a giant tree upon which Musk, the father of then-seven-year-old twins and five-year-old triplets, all boys, planned to build a tree fort. The inside was just as grand, with all the expected billionaire trappings, down to the cavernous wine cellar and the master bathroom so big Musk put a treadmill in it.
What was missing from all of this, though, was any sign of actual people. The white shelves in a towering library stood embarrassingly bare. (Musk devours books exclusively on his iPhone, including The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.)
The pool was covered, the manicured backyard devoid of toys, lawn chairs, or a grill. The boys were at school—Musk, having been through a much-publicized divorce, shared custody of his sons with his college sweetheart, Justine. His second wife, Talulah Riley, a twenty-eight-year-old British actress, was, I was told, back in her home country filming a movie. There was no evidence—clothes, shoes, makeup—of a female inhabitant. There weren’t even any personal photographs to speak of, save a three-foot-wide panoramic shot of Musk and Riley watching an eclipse in front of a private yacht on some remote tropical beach, his arms wrapped around her as they both gaze skyward, laughing. On another wall, a photo of a chair seemed to be the placeholder that came with the frame.
I asked Musk if he had a dog. Yes, he said, two. But no dish, leashes, or chew toys were in sight. The house, he told me, is leased. So was the furniture. Although Musk lived here, in other words, it would be an exaggeration to call it his home. It was a way station, the perfect place to play dystopian video games.
• • •
AT SIX FOOT ONE, with broad shoulders and legs that match his first name (Elon is Hebrew for “oak tree,” although Musk’s family comes from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, not Jewish), he filled out the burgundy Tesla Roadster—which he chose over his Audi Q7 and Porsche 911—for the twenty-mile drive to the Hawthorne-based headquarters of SpaceX. Pulling onto the 405, he attentively configured the optimum temperature and wind levels for the convertible; programmed a mix of Robbie Williams, Adele, and Beethoven’s Fifth; and drove fast and clinically. It was all done in a manner that reflects his public perception as a robotic genius—the real-life inspiration for the Tony Stark character in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. Much of that reputation is deserved.
“If I was walking with the three kids and Elon disappeared, he was in a bookstore,” recalled his mother, Maye, who, at 63, remains an in-demand fashion model. (While in her sixties, she posed in the buff with a fake baby bump, Demi Moore–style, for the cover of New York magazine.) “He’d be sitting on the ground in a world of his own. He read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica when he was only eight or nine—and he remembered it!”
Growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, Elon alienated schoolmates by correcting their minor factual errors. He thought he was doing them a favor; they thought he was arrogant and responded by bullying him.
“He can be brutally honest, where you’re like, Oh my God, that stuff hurts,” said his sister, Tosca. “He’s not trying to be mean or make you feel bad. And he appreciates honesty in return.”
By college—Musk studied physics and business at the University of Pennsylvania, then more physics and science at Stanford—he had matured physically but retained his blunt intensity, channeling it into his studies to the point where Maye felt the need to check on him to make sure he was at least getting something to eat and wore a fresh pair of socks every day. He has “become a better man” since college, said his Penn roommate Adeo Ressi, another tech entrepreneur. “Now he will make jokes.”
As he drove to work—his Montblanc aviators, retrieved from the floor of the Lotus-bodied coupe, perched on his nose—we talked about his favorite drives (he favors Highway 1, unsurprisingly), his favorite music (when not rocking to Robbie Williams, he’s more a Beatles and Pink Floyd, classic rock man), and his favorite cars (the 1967 Jag E-Type is “like a bad girlfriend—very dysfunctional”).
“Do you ever wish you had lived during a different time in history?” I asked.
“No, I’m glad I live now,” he responded, displaying the remnants of his South African lilt.
“Why?”
“If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very g
ood student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.”
Good point.
“If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic—being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago. So engineering is, for all intents and purposes, magic, and who wouldn’t want to be a magician?”
Musk has been one of his generation’s foremost magicians almost since leaving Stanford. In 1995, he cofounded Zip2 Corporation, a software and services provider to the media industry, which he sold to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million in cash.
Then, in 1998, he cofounded PayPal, which went public in early 2002; Musk was the largest shareholder of the company until eBay acquired it for $1.5 billion later that year. His fame grew with his success—when he and Riley married in 2010, Larry Page and Sergey Brin reportedly loaned them the Google jet for their honeymoon; Musk and Riley became frequent guests at Hollywood A-list parties and chic weekend retreats.
Over the past decade, he has doubled his magic, at once trying to establish the electric car and private space industries as viable business propositions. Tesla is based in Palo Alto, so Musk commutes between the two companies twice a week via his Dassault Falcon. (Tesla’s design warehouse is nearby, behind the SpaceX campus.)
Investors don’t seem to mind the juggling act: Tesla went public with an IPO valued at $226.1 million. In 2011, the company posted total revenues of $204 million, with losses at $254 million. (By 2013, the revenue had surged to $2 billion, the loss whittled to $74 million.) Musk owns about 29 percent of Tesla, which has never turned a profit but, as of mid-2014, is valued at $26 billion.
Privately held SpaceX, founded in 2002 with money from the PayPal sale, has won more than $5 billion in contracts to launch satellites. In 2012, its Dragon became the first private spacecraft to shuttle to the International Space Station. In 2013, it launched a satellite into geosynchronous orbit, a feat previously pulled off only by governments. By 2014, it was successfully testing reusable rocket boosters, which could greatly shrink the cost of space flight. Pairing Dragon with its Falcon launch vehicle, Musk thinks he could have his first crewed mission by 2015.
Thirty minutes into the drive, we arrived at SpaceX, which, if you didn’t know better, would seem like a movie set, right down to the life-size statue of Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit and an ice cream stand, where middle-aged engineers line up to pile toppings on their free soft-serve sundaes. The walls here are more impressively adorned than in Musk’s rental house: He pointed out a portrait of Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi who advocated for NASA’s Apollo program, and drew me over to a huge photo of Mars, a place he dreams of colonizing, and navigates me to the Valles Marineris trench. The real show, though, took place on the manufacturing floor, where the conical Dragon spacecraft awaited its date with the space station.
Surrounded by the best toys in the history of the planet, Musk returned to his office—a jumbo corner cube, actually, since SpaceX and Tesla embrace the open-seating philosophy—and grabbed a sword, its handle swathed in stingray leather, an award for accomplishments in commercial space, whisking it around his shoulders. “You could really stab somebody with this thing,” he said. “I’m trying to make it swoosh without killing anyone.”
I held up a sheet of paper for target practice, and Musk, true to his promise, avoided killing me, though he failed to slice the paper, instead pushing it out of my hands. He took revenge on a nearby potted plant, slicing a few leaves off with the precision of a master engineer.
• • •
AS MUCH AS ELON Musk is known for rational brilliance, he also carries a playboy reputation—nights spent dancing in Afro wigs and leisure suits, closing down Russian clubs in New York, and grokking Burning Man in full. Young, handsome, self-made, he has all the game he needs at any club, including the one in London where he met Talulah Riley, twenty-three at the time, in 2008. So it wasn’t too surprising that, at midnight on a Friday in Hollywood, I was still waiting for Musk to text me.
The idea was that he would show me, with a group of his friends, his Los Angeles—how the City of Angels plays out when money and access are unlimited. We exchanged messages all day about it. But per his last update, he was eating a quiet dinner at Soho House with his close friend, Iron Man director Jon Favreau. “We can meet for a drink at the Beverly Hills Hotel (or somewhere else) afterwards,” he texted.
By 12:30 a.m., though, he wasn’t feeling it: “Just left Soho House. Am on way home and pretty tired. Was up early with the kids, so not much sleep.” Then another message: “The reality is that I very rarely go out to clubs these days. Only did that twice in the past twelve months, because friends dragged me there.” I’d been waiting with friends a few miles away at the Spare Room. Someone in my group suggested I had gotten “hot-chicked”—current L.A. lingo for being replaced by a better offer—but that didn’t ring true. Later, by chance, I heard from someone who had seen Musk with Favreau at Soho House, as he had said. And over the previous three months, he had faithfully returned every phone call, e-mail, and text I sent.
He did go dark on me once. For three weeks, through Christmas and New Year’s, there had been complete silence, except to cancel a photo shoot. It was as if he had retreated into the rented man cave for extended hibernation.
A late-night tweet posted on January 17, 2013 explained everything: “@rileytalulah It was an amazing four years. I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy one day.”
I e-mailed him as soon as I saw the breakup announcement—Musk, back from the breach, called me ten minutes later, at 7:00 a.m. his time. “It just became emotionally difficult,” he said quietly. He sounded different: sad, yes, but also raw and alive. “Essentially, I fell out of love, and it’s kind of hard to get back.” It was a relief to have made the news public, he said, as it had become increasingly evident over the past few months that he and Riley weren’t going to make it.
It turns out that Riley hadn’t been with Musk in Los Angeles for months. According to court documents, she was the one who filed for divorce.
The second split (settled for a reported $4 million, followed almost two years later by comments that seemed to imply they have reconciled their relationship, if not their marriage) went easier than the first—a public, very acrimonious breakup in 2008 that capped what Musk has called the most difficult year of his life. Justine Musk, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, chronicled their troubles in Marie Claire: “The same qualities that helped bring about his extraordinary success dictate that the life you lead with him is his life . . . and that there is no middle ground (not least because he has no time to find it).” Elon Musk largely stayed mum.
Did he still believe in love? “Yeah, absolutely.” Although he wasn’t sure at the moment how, or where, to find it. His wish list—selfless, hardworking, realistic—didn’t seem to jibe well with his old Hollywood-club ways.
• • •
MUSK’S TWO WORLDS—HOLLYWOOD AND Silicon Valley—converged when he hosted the launch party for his new Tesla SUV at the company’s Hawthorne design warehouse. Musk recruited Foster the People as entertainment (three nights later, they would play the Grammys), as nearly 2,000 people, from fashionistas to venture capitalists, Captain America star Chris Evans to California governor Jerry Brown, washed down lobster with Veuve Clicquot and clamored for a piece of Musk.
Taking the stage in a midnight-blue velour blazer and dark jeans, Musk actually told a joke, albeit a lame one about fracking (“The world desperately needs sustainable transport. If we don’t solve this problem this century, we are fracked!”) and stood calmly watching as d
esigners frantically tried to open the overstuffed front trunk of the SUV. (“We’re maybe a bit stuck on the safety latch there,” he said.) He stayed late, appeared to drink only water, and posed gamely with the many women around him asking for photos—without seeming to focus on anyone in particular. Half the time he sat on a couch in a corner surrounded by well-groomed men wearing sports jackets and loafers.
The night was crucial for Musk, who touted the “falcon wing” SUV as the ideal combination of a minivan (practicality), Audi Q7 (style), and Porsche 911 (performance)—and the logical follow-up to his $50,000 Model S electric sedan, which debuted in 2012. He needed a hit: In 2012, Tesla boasted a $3.6 billion market cap but sold only 2,000 or so of the discontinued Roadsters.
Yet he seemed as relaxed as I’ve seen him. There was a waiting list for both the SUV and the upcoming sedan, and he was wearing the clarity of his personal life with ease. Two days later, I came back for another morning at his mansion, and this time, the house was jumping. It was Saturday, so the kids were off from school—Dad and the boys loudly played a variant of dodgeball they called “dogball.” (He and his old roommate Ressi started taking their kids on Daddy camping trips in Yosemite.)
Meanwhile, I was with a large photography crew, including three photo assistants, a makeup artist, and a fashion director, plus a blonde Frenchwoman sent to mind the $35,090 Parmigiani wristwatch Musk would wear for the photos. Musk, unexpectedly, rolled with it. At a previous shoot earlier that week, he had vetoed immediately the tailored offerings from Tom Ford, Giorgio Armani, and Ralph Lauren set out for him. “You’ll have to find something else,” he had announced to the stylist. “I will not look like some preppy boy. That’s not me.”
