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

San Jose Mercury News.
“Internet Sales Apply
Here!” it read, and Heilman got the gig. A handful of other salespeople joined him and worked for
commissions.
Musk never seemed to leave the office. He slept, not unlike a dog, on a beanbag next to his desk.
“Almost every day, I’d come in at seven thirty or eight 
A.M
., and he’d be asleep right there on that bag,”
Heilman said. “Maybe he showered on the weekends. I don’t know.” Musk asked those first employees of

---

Zip2 to give him a kick when they arrived, and he’d wake up and get back to work. While Musk did his
possessed coder thing, Kimbal became the rah-rah sales leader. “Kimbal was the eternal optimist, and he
was very, very uplifting,” Heilman said. “I had never met anyone quite like him.” Kimbal sent Heilman to
the high-end Stanford shopping mall and to University Avenue, the main drag in Palo Alto, to coax
retailers into signing up with Zip2, explaining that a sponsored listing would send a company to the top of
search results. The big problem, of course, was that no one was buying. Week after week, Heilman
knocked on doors and returned to the office with very little to report in the way of good news. The nicest
responses came from the people who told Heilman that advertising on the Internet sounded like the
dumbest thing they had ever heard of. Most often, the shop owners just told Heilman to leave and stop
bothering them. When lunchtime came around, the Musks would reach into a cigar box where they kept
some cash, take Heilman out, and get the depressing status reports on the sales.
Craig Mohr, another early employee, gave up his job selling real estate to hawk Zip2’s service. He
decided to court auto dealerships because they usually spent lots of money on advertising. He told them
about Zip2’s main website—www.totalinfo.com—and tried to convince them that demand was high to get
a listing like www.totalinfo.com/toyotaofsiliconvalley. The service did not always work when Mohr
demonstrated it or it would load very slowly, as was common back then. This forced him to talk the
customers into imagining Zip2’s potential. “One day I came back with about nine hundred dollars in
checks,” Mohr said. “I walked into the office and asked the guys what they wanted me to do with the
money. Elon stopped pounding his keyboard, leaned out from behind his monitor, and said, ‘No way,
you’ve got money.’”
What kept the employees’ spirits up were the continuous improvements Musk made with the Zip2
software. The service had morphed from a proof-of-concept to an actual product that could be used and
demoed. Ever marketing savvy, the Musk brothers tried to make their Web service seem more important
by giving it an imposing physical body. Musk built a huge case around a standard PC and lugged the unit
onto a base with wheels. When prospective investors would come by, Musk would put on a show and roll
this massive machine out so that it appeared like Zip2 ran inside of a mini-supercomputer. “The investors
thought that was impressive,” Kimbal said. Heilman also noticed that the investors bought into Musk’s
slavish devotion to the company. “Even then, as essentially a college kid with zits, Elon had this drive that
this thing—whatever it was—had to get done and that if he didn’t do it, he’d miss his shot,” Heilman said.
“I think that’s what the VCs saw—that he was willing to stake his existence on building out this platform.”
Musk actually said as much to one venture capitalist, informing him, “My mentality is that of a samurai. I
would rather commit seppuku than fail.”
Early on in the Zip2 venture, Musk acquired an important confidant, who tempered some of these
more dramatic impulses. Greg Kouri, a Canadian businessman in his mid-thirties, had met the Musks in
Toronto and bought into the early Zip2 brainstorming. The boys had showed up at his door one morning to
inform Kouri that they intended to head to California to give the business a shot. Still in his red bathrobe,
Kouri went back into the house, dug around for a couple of minutes, and came back with a wad of $6,000.
In early 1996, he moved to California and joined Zip2 as a cofounder.
Kouri, who had done a number of real estate deals in the past and had actual business experience and
skills at reading people, served as the adult supervision at Zip2. The Canadian had a knack for calming
Musk and ended up becoming something of a mentor. “Really smart people sometimes don’t understand
that not everyone can keep up with them or go as fast,” said Derek Proudian, a venture capitalist who
would become Zip2’s chief executive officer. “Greg is one of the few people that Elon would listen to
and had a way of putting things in context for him.” Kouri also used to referee fistfights between Elon and
Kimbal, in the middle of the office.

---

“I don’t get in fights with anyone else, but Elon and I don’t have the ability to reconcile a vision other
than our own,” Kimbal said. During a particularly nasty scrap over a business decision, Elon ripped some
skin off his fist and had to go get a tetanus shot. Kouri put an end to the fights after that. (Kouri died of a
heart attack in 2012 at the age of fifty-one, having made a fortune investing in Musk’s companies. Musk
attended his funeral. “We owe him a lot,” said Kimbal.)
In early 1996, Zip2 underwent a massive change. The venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures
had caught wind of a couple of South African boys trying to make a Yellow Pages for the Internet and met
with the brothers. Musk, while raw in his presentation skills, pitched the company well enough, and the
investors came away impressed with his energy. Mohr Davidow invested $3 million into the company.
*
With these funds in hand, the company officially changed its name from Global Link to Zip2—the idea
being zip to here, zip to there—moved to a larger office at 390 Cambridge Avenue in Palo Alto, and
began hiring talented engineers. Zip2 also shifted its business strategy. At the time, the company had built
one of the best direction systems on the Web. Zip2 would advance this technology and take it from
focusing just on the Bay Area to having a national scope. The company’s main focus, however, would be
an altogether new play. Instead of selling its service door-to-door, Zip2 would create a software package
that could be sold to newspapers, which would in turn build their own directories for real estate, auto
dealers, and classifieds. The newspapers were late understanding how the Internet would impact their
businesses, and Zip2’s software would give them a quick way of getting online without needing to
develop all their own technology from scratch. For its part, Zip2 could chase bigger prey and get a cut of
a nationwide network of listings.
This transition of the business model and the company’s makeup would be a seminal moment in
Musk’s life. The venture capitalists pushed Musk into the role of chief technology officer and hired Rich
Sorkin as the company’s CEO. Sorkin had worked at Creative Labs, a maker of audio equipment, and run
the business development group at the company, where he steered a number of investments in Internet
start-ups. Zip2’s investors saw him as experienced and clued in to the Web. While Musk agreed to the
arrangement, he came to resent giving up control of Zip2. “Probably the biggest regret the whole time I
worked with him was that he had made a deal with the devil with Mohr Davidow,” said Jim Ambras, the
vice president of engineering at Zip2. “Elon didn’t have any operational responsibilities, and he wanted
to be CEO.”
Ambras had worked at Hewlett-Packard Labs and Silicon Graphics Inc. and exemplified the high-
caliber talent Zip2 brought on after the first wave of money arrived. Silicon Graphics, a maker of high-
end computers beloved by Hollywood, was the flashiest company of its day and had hoarded the elite
geeks of Silicon Valley. And yet Ambras used the promise of Internet riches to poach a team of SGI’s
smartest engineers over to Zip2. “Our attorneys got a letter from SGI saying that we were cherry-picking
the very best guys,” Ambras said. “Elon thought that was fantastic.”
While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the
new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk
bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that
Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could
be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what
developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.
The engineers also brought a more refined working structure and realistic deadlines to the engineering
group. This was a welcome change from Musk’s approach, which had been to set overly optimistic
deadlines and then try to get engineers to work nonstop for days on end to meet the goals. “If you asked
Elon how long it would take to do something, there was never anything in his mind that would take more

---

than an hour,” Ambras said. “We came to interpret an hour as really taking a day or two and if Elon ever
did say something would take a day, we allowed for a week or two weeks.”
Starting Zip2 and watching it grow imbued Musk with self-confidence. Terence Beney, one of Musk’s
high school friends, came to California for a visit and noticed the change in Musk’s character right away.
He watched Musk confront a nasty landlord who had been giving his mother, who was renting an
apartment in town, a hard time. “He said, ‘If you’re going to bully someone, bully me.’ It was startling to
see him take over the situation. The last time I had seen him he was this geeky, awkward kid who would
sometimes lose his temper. He was the kid you would pick on to get a response. Now he was confident
and in control.” Musk also began consciously trying to manage his criticism of others. “Elon is not
someone who would say, ‘I feel you. I see your point of view,’” said Justine. “Because he doesn’t have
that ‘I feel you’ dimension there were things that seemed obvious to other people that weren’t that obvious
to him. He had to learn that a twenty-something-year-old shouldn’t really shoot down the plans of older,
senior people and point out everything wrong with them. He learned to modify his behavior in certain
ways. I just think he comes at the world through strategy and intellect.” The personality tweaks worked
with varying degrees of success. Musk still tended to drive the young engineers mad with his work
demands and blunt criticism. “I remember being in a meeting once brainstorming about a new product—a
new-car site,” said Doris Downes, the creative director at Zip2. “Someone complained about a technical
change that we wanted being impossible. Elon turned and said, ‘I don’t really give a damn what you
think,’ and walked out of the meeting. For Elon, the word 
no
does not exist, and he expects that attitude
from everyone around him.” Periodically, Musk let loose on the more senior executives as well. “You
would see people come out of the meetings with this disgusted look on their face,” Mohr, the salesman,
said. “You don’t get to where Elon is now by always being a nice guy, and he was just so driven and sure
of himself.”
As Musk tried to come to terms with the changes the investors had inflicted on Zip2, he did enjoy
some of the perks of having big-money backing. The financiers helped the Musk brothers with their visas.
They also gave them $30,000 each to buy cars. Musk and Kimbal had traded in their dilapidated BMW
for a dilapidated sedan that they spray-painted with polka dots. Kimbal upgraded from that to a BMW 3
Series, and Musk bought a Jaguar E-Type. “It kept breaking down, and would arrive at the office on a
flatbed,” Kimbal said. “But Elon always thought big.”
*
As a bonding exercise one weekend, Musk, Ambras, a few other employees and friends took off for a
bike ride through the Saratoga Gap trail in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Most of the riders had been training
and were accustomed to strenuous sessions and the summer’s heat. They set up the mountains at a furious
pace. After an hour, Russ Rive, Musk’s cousin, reached the top and proceeded to vomit. Right behind him
were the rest of the cyclists. Then, fifteen minutes later, Musk became visible to the group. His face had
turned purple, and sweat poured out of him, and he made it to the top. “I always think back to that ride. He
wasn’t close to being in the condition needed for it,” Ambras said. “Anyone else would have quit or
walked up their bike. As I watched him climb that final hundred feet with suffering all over his face, I
thought, That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.”
Musk continued to be a ball of energy around the office as well. Ahead of visits by venture capitalists
and other investors, Musk would rally the troops and instruct them all to get on the phone to create a buzzy
atmosphere. He also formed a video-game team to participate in competitions around Quake, a first-
person-shooter game. “We competed in one of the first nationwide tournaments,” Musk said. “We came in
second, and we would have come in first, but one of our top players’ machine crashed because he had
pushed his graphics card too hard. We won a few thousand dollars.”
Zip2 had remarkable success courting newspapers. The