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

Pride and Prejudice
and thought of herself as quite the
hotshot. The older Musk, meanwhile, took on the role of the soft-spoken, sweet engineer. He whipped out
his phone and displayed photos of the Falcon 1 and Roadster, although Riley thought he had just done
some work on these projects and didn’t realize he ran the companies building the machines. “I remember
thinking that this guy probably didn’t get to talk to young actresses a lot and that he seemed quite nervous,”
Riley said. “I decided to be really nice to him and give him a nice evening. Little did I know that he’d
spoken to a lot of pretty girls in his life.”
*
 The more Musk and Riley talked, the more Lee egged them on.
It was the first time in weeks that his friend appeared happy. “His stomach didn’t hurt; he’s not bummed,
this is great,” Lee said. Despite being dressed for a fairy tale, Riley didn’t fall in love with Musk at first
sight. But she did become more impressed and intrigued as the night went on, particularly after the club
promoter introduced Musk to a stunning model, and he politely said “Hello” and then sat right back down
with Riley. “I figured he couldn’t be all bad after that,” said Riley, who then allowed Musk to place his
hand on her knee. Musk asked Riley out to dinner the next night, and she accepted.
With her curvy figure, sultry eyes, and playful good-girl demeanor, Riley was a budding film star but
didn’t really act the part. She grew up in the idyllic English countryside, went to a top school, and, until a
week before she met Musk, had been living at home with her parents. After the night at Whisky Mist,
Riley called her family to tell them about the interesting guy she had met who builds rockets and cars. Her
father used to head up the National Crime Squad and went straight to his computer to conduct a
background check that illuminated Musk’s resume as a married international playboy with five kids.
Riley’s father chided his daughter for being a fool, but she held out hope that Musk had an explanation and
went to dinner with him anyway.
Musk brought Lee to the dinner, and Riley brought her friend Tamsin Egerton, also a beautiful actress.
Things were cooler throughout the meal as the group dined in a depressingly empty restaurant. Riley
waited to see what Musk would bring up on his own. Eventually, he did announce his five sons and his
pending divorce. The confession proved enough to keep Riley interested and curious about where things
would lead. Following the meal, Musk and Riley broke off on their own. They went for a walk through
Soho and then stopped at Cafe Boheme, where Riley, a lifelong teetotaler, sipped an apple juice. Musk
kept Riley’s attention, and the romance began in earnest.
The couple had lunch the next day and then went to the White Cube, a modern art gallery, and then

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back to Musk’s hotel room. Musk told Riley, a virgin, that he wanted to show her his rockets. “I was
skeptical, but he did actually show me rocket videos,” she said. Once Musk went back to the United
States,
*
they kept in touch via e-mail for a couple of weeks, and then Riley booked a flight to Los
Angeles. “I wasn’t even thinking girlfriend or anything like that,” Riley said. “I was just having fun.”
Musk had other ideas. Riley had been in California for just five days when he made his move as they
lay in bed talking in a tiny room at the Peninsula hotel in Beverley Hills. “He said, ‘I don’t want you to
leave. I want you to marry me.’ I think I laughed. Then, he said, ‘No. I’m serious. I’m sorry I don’t have a
ring.’ I said, ‘We can shake on it if you like.’ And we did. I don’t remember what I was thinking at the
time, and all I can say is that I was twenty-two.”
Riley had been a model daughter up to that point, never giving her parents much of anything to worry
about. She did well at school, had scored some tremendous acting gigs, and had a soft, sweet personality
that her friends described as Snow White brought to life. But there she was on the hotel’s balcony,
informing her parents that she had agreed to marry a man fourteen years her senior, who had just filed for
divorce from his first wife, had five kids and two companies, and she didn’t even see how she could
possibly love him after knowing him for a matter of weeks. “I think my mother had a nervous breakdown,”
Riley said. “But I had always been highly romantic, and it actually didn’t strike me as that strange.” Riley
flew back to England to gather her things, and her parents flew back with her to the United States to meet
Musk, who belatedly asked Riley’s father for his blessing. Musk did not have his own house, which left
the couple moving into a home that belonged to Musk’s friend the billionaire Jeff Skoll. “I had been living
there a week when this random guy walked in,” Riley said. “I said, ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I am the
homeowner. Who are you?’ I told him, and then he just walked out.” Musk later proposed to Riley again
on the balcony of Skoll’s house, unveiling a massive ring. (He has since bought her three engagement
rings, including the giant first one, an everyday ring, and one designed by Musk that has a diamond
surrounded by ten sapphires.) “I remember him saying, ‘Being with me was choosing the hard path.’ I
didn’t quite understand at the time, but I do now. It’s quite hard, quite the crazy ride.”
Riley experienced a baptism by fire. The whirlwind romance had given her the impression that she
was engaged to a world conquering, jet-setting billionaire. That was true in theory but a murkier
proposition in practice. As late July rolled around, Musk could see that he had just enough cash on hand to
scrape through to the end of the year. Both SpaceX and Tesla would need cash infusions at some point just
to pay the employees, and it was unclear where that money would come from with the world’s financial
markets in disarray and investments being put on hold. If things had been going more smoothly at the
companies, Musk could have felt more confident about raising money, but they were not. “He would come
home every day, and there would be some calamity,” Riley said. “He was under immense pressure from
all quarters. It was horrendous.”
SpaceX’s third flight from Kwajalein jumped out as Musk’s most pressing concern. His team of
engineers had remained camped out on the island, preparing the Falcon 1 for another run. A typical
company would focus just on the task at hand. Not SpaceX. It had shipped the Falcon 1 to Kwaj in April
with one set of engineers and then put another group of engineers on a new project to develop the Falcon
9, a nine-engine rocket that would take the place of the Falcon 5 and serve as a possible replacement to
the retiring space shuttle. SpaceX had yet to prove it could get to space successfully, but Musk kept
positioning it to bid on big-ticket NASA contracts.
*
On July 30, 2008, the Falcon 9 had a successful test fire in Texas with all nine of its engines lighting
up and producing 850,000 pounds of thrust. Three days later, in Kwaj, SpaceX’s engineers fueled up the
Falcon 1 and crossed their fingers. The rocket had an air force satellite as its payload, along with a
couple of experiments from NASA. All told, the cargo weighed 375 pounds.

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SpaceX had been making significant changes to its rocket since the last, failed launch. A traditional
aerospace company would not have wanted the added risk, but Musk insisted that SpaceX push its
technology forward while at the same time trying to make it work right. Among the biggest changes for the
Falcon 1 was a new version of the Merlin 1 engine that relied on a tweaked cooling system.
The first launch attempt on August 2, 2008, aborted at T minus zero seconds. SpaceX regrouped and
tried to launch again the same day. This time everything seemed to be going well. The Falcon 1 soared
into the sky and flew spectacularly without any indication of a problem. SpaceX employees watching a
webcast of the proceedings back in California let out hoots and whistles. Then, right at the moment when
the first stage and second stage were to separate, there was a malfunction. An analysis after the fact would
show that the new engines had delivered an unexpected thrust during the separation process that caused
the first stage to bump up into the second stage, damaging the top part of the rocket and its engine.
*
The failed launch left many SpaceX employees shattered. “It was so profound seeing the energy shift
over the room in the course of thirty seconds,” said Dolly Singh, a recruiter at SpaceX. “It was like the
worst fucking day ever. You don’t usually see grown-ups weeping, but there they were. We were tired and
broken emotionally.” Musk addressed the workers right away and encouraged them to get back to work.
“He said, ‘Look. We are going to do this. It’s going to be okay. Don’t freak out,’” Singh recalled. “It was
like magic. Everyone chilled out immediately and started to focus on figuring out what just happened and
how to fix it. It went from despair to hope and focus.” Musk put up a positive front to the public as well.
In a statement, he said that SpaceX had another rocket waiting to attempt a fourth launch and a fifth launch
planned shortly after that. “I have also given the go-ahead to begin fabrication of flight six,” he said.
“Falcon 9 development will also continue unabated.”
In reality, the third launch was a disaster with cascading consequences. Since the second stage of the
rocket did not fire properly, SpaceX never got a chance to see if it had really fixed the fuel-sloshing
issues that had plagued the second flight. Many of the SpaceX engineers were confident that they had
solved this problem and were anxious to get to the fourth launch, believing that they had an easy answer
for the recent thrust problem. For Musk, the situation seemed graver. “I was super depressed,” Musk said.
“If we hadn’t solved the slush coupling problem on flight two, or there was just some random other thing
that occurred—say a mistake in the launch process or the manufacturing process unrelated to anything
previous—then game over.” SpaceX simply did not have enough money to try a fifth flight. He’d put $100
million into the company and had nothing to spare because of the issues at Tesla. “Flight four was it,”
Musk said. If, however, SpaceX could nail the fourth flight, it would instill confidence on the part of the
U.S. government and possible commercial customers, paving the way for the Falcon 9 and even more
ambitious projects.
Leading up to the third launch, Musk had been his usual ultra-involved self. Anyone at SpaceX who
held the launch back went onto Musk’s critical-path shit list. Musk would hound the person responsible
about the delays but, typically, he would also do everything in his power to help solve problems. “I was
personally holding up the launch once and had to give Elon twice-daily updates about what was going
on,” said Kevin Brogan. “But Elon would say, ‘There are five hundred people at this company. What do
you need?’” One of the calls must have taken place while Musk courted Riley because Brogan
remembered Musk phoning from the bathroom of a London club to find out how welding had gone on a
large part of the rocket. Musk fielded another call in the middle of the night while sleeping next to Riley
and had to whisper as he berated the engineers. “He’s giving us the pillow talk voice, so we all have to
huddle around the speakerphone, while he tells us, ‘You guys need to get your shit together,’” Brogan said.
With the fourth launch, the demands and anticipation had ratcheted to the point that people started
making silly mistakes. Typically, the body of the Falcon 1 rocket traveled to Kwaj via barge. This time

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Musk and the engineers were too excited and desperate to wait for the ocean journey. Musk rented a
military cargo plane to fly the rocket body from Los Angeles to Hawaii and then on to Kwaj. This would
have been a fine idea except the SpaceX engineers forgot to factor in what the pressurized plane would do
to the body of the rocket, which is less than an eighth of an inch thick. As the plane started its descent into
Hawaii, everyone inside of it could hear strange noises coming from the cargo hold. “I looked back and
could see the stage crumpling,” said Bulent Altan, the former head of avionics at SpaceX. “I told the pilot
to go up, and he did.” The rocket had behaved much like an empty water bottle will on a plane, with the
air pressure pushing against the sides of the bottle and making it buckle. Altan calculated that the SpaceX
team on the plane had about thirty minutes to do something about the problem before they would need to
land. They pulled out their pocketknives and cut away the shrink wrap that held the rocket’s body tight.
Then they found a maintenance kit on the plane and used wrenches to open up some nuts on the rocket that
would allow its internal pressure to match that of the plane’s. When the plane landed, the engineers
divvied up the duties of calling SpaceX’s top executives to tell them about the catastrophe. It was 3 
A.M
.
Los Angeles time, and one of the executives volunteered to deliver the horrific news to Musk. The
thinking at the time was that it would take three months to repair the damage. The body of the rocket had
caved in in several places, baffles placed inside the fuel tank to stop the sloshing problem had broken,
and an assortment of other issues had appeared. Musk ordered the team to continue on to Kwaj and sent in
a reinforcement team with repair parts. Two weeks later, the rocket had been fixed inside of the makeshift
hangar. “It was like being stuck in a foxhole together,” Altan said. “You weren’t going to quit and leave
the person next to you behind. When it was all done, everyone felt amazing.”
The fourth and possibly final launch for SpaceX took place on September 28, 2008. The SpaceX
employees had worked nonstop shifts under agonizing pressure for six weeks to reach this day. Their
pride as engineers and their hopes and dreams were on the line. “The people watching back at the factory
were trying their best not to throw up,” said James McLaury, a machinist at SpaceX. Despite their past
flubs, the engineers on Kwaj were confident that this launch would work. Some of these people had spent
years on the island going through one of the more surreal engineering exercises in human history. They had
been separated from their families, assaulted by the heat, and exiled on their tiny launchpad outpost—
sometimes without much food—for days on end as they waited for the launch windows to open and dealt
with the aborts that followed. So much of that pain and suffering and fear would be forgotten if this launch
went successfully.
In the late afternoon on the twenty-eighth, the SpaceX team raised the Falcon 1 into its launch position.
Once again, it stood tall, looking like a bizarre artifact of an island tribe as palm trees swayed beside it
and a smattering of clouds crossed through the spectacular blue sky. By this time, SpaceX had upped its
webcast game, turning each launch into a major production both for its employees and the public. Two
SpaceX marketing executives spent twenty minutes before the launch going through all the technical ins
and outs of the launch. The Falcon 1 was not carrying real cargo this time; neither the company nor the
military wanted to see something else blow up or get lost at sea, so the rocket held a 360-pound dummy
payload.
The fact that SpaceX had been reduced to launch theater did not faze the employees or dampen their
enthusiasm. As the rocket rumbled and then climbed higher, the employees back at SpaceX headquarters
let out raucous cheers. Each milestone that followed—clearing the island, engine checks coming back
good—was again met with whistles and shouts. As the first stage fell away, the second stage fired up
about ninety seconds into the flight and the employees turned downright rapturous, filling the webcast with
their ecstatic hollering. “Perfect,” said one of the talking heads. The Kestrel engine glowed red and
started its six-minute burn. “When the second stage cleared, I could finally start breathing again and my

---

knees stopped buckling,” said McLaury.
The fairing opened up around the three-minute mark and fell back toward Earth. And, finally, around
nine minutes into its journey, the Falcon 1 shut down just as planned and reached orbit, making it the first
privately built machine to accomplish such a feat. It took six years—about four and half more than Musk
had once planned—and five hundred people to make this miracle of modern science and business happen.
Earlier in the day, Musk had tried to distract himself from the mounting pressure by going to
Disneyland with his brother Kimbal and their children. Musk then had to race back to make the 4 
P.M
.
launch and walked into SpaceX’s trailer control room about two minutes before blastoff. “When the
launch was successful, everyone burst into tears,” Kimbal said. “It was one of the most emotional
experiences I’ve had.” Musk left the control room and walked out to the factory floor, where he received
a rock star’s welcome. “Well, that was freaking awesome,” he said. “There are a lot of people who
thought we couldn’t do it—a lot actually—but as the saying goes, ‘the fourth time is the charm,’ right?
There are only a handful of countries on Earth that have done this. It’s normally a country thing, not a
company thing. . . . My mind is kind of frazzled, so it’s hard for me to say anything, but, man, this is
definitely one of the greatest days in my life, and I think probably for most people here. We showed
people we can do it. This is just the first step of many. . . . I am going to have a really great party tonight. I
don’t know about you guys.” Mary Beth Brown then tapped Musk on the shoulder and pulled him away to
a meeting.
The afterglow of this mammoth victory faded soon after the party ended, and the severity of SpaceX’s
financial hell became top of mind again for Musk. SpaceX had the Falcon 9 efforts to support and had
also immediately green-lighted the construction of another machine—the Dragon capsule—that would be
used to take supplies, and one day humans, to the International Space Station. Historically, either project
would cost more than $1 billion to complete, but SpaceX would have to find a way to build both
machines simultaneously for a fraction of the cost. The company had dramatically increased the rate at
which it hired employees and moved into a much larger headquarters in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX
had a commercial flight booked to carry a satellite into orbit for the Malaysian government, but that
launch and the payment for it would not arrive until the middle of 2009. In the meantime, SpaceX simply
struggled to make its payroll.
The press did not know the extent of Musk’s financial woes, but they knew enough to turn detailing
Tesla’s precarious financial situation into a favored pastime. A website called the Truth About Cars
began a “Tesla Death Watch” in May 2008 and followed up with dozens of entries throughout the year.
The blog took special pleasure in rejecting the idea that Musk was a true founder of the company,
presenting him as the moneyman and chairman who had more or less stolen Tesla from the genius engineer
Eberhard. When Eberhard started a blog detailing the pros and cons of being a Tesla customer, the auto
site was all too happy to echo his gripes.