Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

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

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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-

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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