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

I certainly don’t try to set impossible goals. I think impossible goals are demotivating. You

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don’t want to tell people to go through a wall by banging their head against it. I don’t ever set
intentionally impossible goals. But I’ve certainly always been optimistic on time frames. I’m
trying to recalibrate to be a little more realistic.
I don’t assume that it’s just like 100 of me or something like that. I mean, in the case of the
early SpaceX days, it would have been just the lack of understanding of what it takes to develop
a rocket. In that case I was off by, say, 200 percent. I think future programs might be off by
anywhere from like 25 percent to 50 percent as opposed to 200 percent.
So, I think generally you do want to have a timeline where, based on everything you know
about, the schedule should be X, and you execute towards that, but with the understanding that
there will be all sorts of things that you don’t know about that you will encounter that will push
the date beyond that. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have tried to aim for that date from the
beginning because aiming for something else would have been an arbitrary time increase.
It’s different to say, “Well, what do you promise people?” Because you want to try to
promise people something that includes schedule margin. But in order to achieve the external
promised schedule, you’ve got to have an internal schedule that’s more aggressive than that.
Sometimes you still miss the external schedule.
SpaceX, by the way, is not alone here. Being late is par for the course in the aerospace
industry. It’s not a question of if it’s late, it’s how late will the program be. I don’t think an
aerospace program has been completed on time since bloody World War II.
Dealing with the epically aggressive schedules and Musk’s expectations has required SpaceX’s
engineers to develop a variety of survival techniques. Musk often asks for highly detailed proposals for
how projects will be accomplished. The employees have learned never to break the time needed to
accomplish something down into months or weeks. Musk wants day-by-day and hour-by-hour forecasts
and sometimes even minute-by-minute countdowns, and the fallout from missed schedules is severe. “You
had to put in when you would go to the bathroom,” Brogan said. “I’m like, ‘Elon, sometimes people need
to take a long dump.’” SpaceX’s top managers work together to, in essence, create fake schedules that
they know will please Musk but that are basically impossible to achieve. This would not be such a
horrible situation if the targets were kept internal. Musk, however, tends to quote these fake schedules to
customers, unintentionally giving them false hope. Typically, it falls to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s
president, to clean up the resulting mess. She will either need to ring up a customer to give them a more
realistic timeline or concoct a litany of excuses to explain away the inevitable delays. “Poor Gwynne,”
Brogan said. “Just to hear her on the phone with the customers is agonizing.”
There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees.
Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial
nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a
typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership
of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two 
P.M
.,’” Brogan said.
“He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two 
P.M
. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you
are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can
feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated
people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends
up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t
have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps
working and working and working. The ideal SpaceX employee is someone like Steve Davis, the director

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of advanced projects at SpaceX. “He’s been working sixteen hours a day every day for years,” Brogan
said. “He gets more done than eleven people working together.”
To find Davis, Musk called a teaching assistant
*
in Stanford’s aeronautics department and asked him
if there were any hardworking, bright master’s and doctoral candidates who didn’t have families. The TA
pointed Musk to Davis, who was pursuing a master’s degree in aerospace engineering to add to degrees
in finance, mechanical engineering, and particle physics. Musk called Davis on a Wednesday and offered
him a job the following Friday. Davis was the twenty-second SpaceX hire and has ended up the twelfth
most senior person still at the company. He turned thirty-five in 2014.
Davis did his tour of duty on Kwaj and considered it the greatest time of his life. “Every night, you
could either sleep by the rocket in this tent shelter where the geckos crawled all over you or take this one-
hour boat ride that made you seasick back to the main island,” he said. “Every night, you had to pick the
pain that you remembered least. You got so hot and exhausted. It was just amazing.” After working on the
Falcon 1, Davis moved to the Falcon 9 and then Dragon.
The Dragon capsule took SpaceX four years to design. It’s likely the fastest project of its ilk done in
the history of the aerospace industry. The project started with Musk and a handful of engineers, most of
them under thirty years old, and peaked at one hundred people.
*
They cribbed from past capsule work and
read over every paper published by NASA and other aeronautics bodies around projects like Gemini and
Apollo. “If you go search for something like Apollo’s reentry guidance algorithm, there are these great
databases that will just spit out the answer,” Davis said. The engineers at SpaceX then had to figure out
how to advance these past efforts and bring the capsule into the modern age. Some of the areas of
improvement were obvious and easily accomplished, while others required more ingenuity. Saturn 5 and
Apollo had colossal computing bays that produced only a fraction of the computer horsepower that can be
achieved today on, say, an iPad. The SpaceX engineers knew they could save a lot of room by cutting out
some of the computers while also adding capabilities with their more powerful equipment. The engineers
decided that while Dragon would look a lot like Apollo, it would have steeper wall angles, to clear space
for gear and for the astronauts that the company hoped to fly. SpaceX also got the recipe for its heat shield
material, called PICA, through a deal with NASA. The SpaceX engineers found out how to make the
PICA material less expensively and improved the underlying recipe so that Dragon—from day one—
could withstand the heat of a reentry coming back from Mars.
*
 The total cost for Dragon came in at $300
million, which would be on the order of 10 to 30 times less than capsule projects built by other
companies. “The metal comes in, we roll it out, weld it, and make things,” Davis said. “We build almost
everything in-house. That is why the costs have come down.”
Davis, like Brogan and plenty of other SpaceX engineers, has had Musk ask for the seemingly
impossible. His favorite request dates back to 2004. SpaceX needed an actuator that would trigger the
gimbal action used to steer the upper stage of Falcon 1. Davis had never built a piece of hardware before
in his life and naturally went out to find some suppliers who could make an electromechanical actuator for
him. He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, ‘That part is no more
complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis
spent nine months building the actuator. At the end of the process, he toiled for three hours writing an e-
mail to Musk covering the pros and cons of the device. The e-mail went into gory detail about how Davis
had designed the part, why he had made various choices, and what its cost would be. As he pressed send,
Davis felt anxiety surge through his body knowing that he’d given his all for almost a year to do something
an engineer at another aerospace company would not even attempt. Musk rewarded all of this toil and
angst with one of his standard responses. He wrote back, “Ok.” The actuator Davis designed ended up
costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space. “I put every ounce of intellectual capital I had into that

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e-mail and one minute later got that simple response,” Davis said. “Everyone in the company was having
that same experience. One of my favorite things about Elon is his ability to make enormous decisions very
quickly. That is still how it works today.”
Kevin Watson can attest to that. He arrived at SpaceX in 2008 after spending twenty-four years at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Watson worked on a wide variety of projects at JPL, including
building and testing computing systems that could withstand the harsh conditions of space. JPL would
typically buy expensive, specially toughened computers, and this frustrated Watson. He daydreamed about
ways to handcraft much cheaper, equally effective computers. While having his job interview with Musk,
Watson learned that SpaceX needed just this type of thinking. Musk wanted the bulk of a rocket’s
computing systems to cost no more than $10,000. It was an insane figure by aerospace industry standards,
where the avionics systems for a rocket typically cost well over $10 million. “In traditional aerospace, it
would cost you more than ten thousand dollars just for the food at a meeting to discuss the cost of the
avionics,” Watson said.
During the job interview, Watson promised Musk that he could do the improbable and deliver the
$10,000 avionics system. He began working on making the computers for Dragon right after being hired.
The first system was called CUCU, pronounced “cuckoo.” This communications box would go inside the
International Space Station and communicate back with Dragon. A number of people at NASA referred to
the SpaceX engineers as “the guys in the garage” and were cynical about the start-up’s ability to do much
of anything, including building this type of machine. But SpaceX produced the communication computer in
record time, and it ended up as the first system of its kind to pass NASA’s protocol tests on the first try.
NASA officials were forced to say “cuckoo” over and over again during meetings—a small act of
defiance SpaceX had planned all along to torture NASA. As the months went on, Watson and other
engineers built out the complete computing systems for Dragon and then adapted the technology for Falcon
9. The result was a fully redundant avionics platform that used a mix of off-the-shelf computing gear and
products built in-house by SpaceX. It cost a bit more than $10,000 but came close to meeting Musk’s goal.
SpaceX reinvigorated Watson, who had become disenchanted with JPL’s acceptance of wasteful
spending and bureaucracy. Musk had to sign off on every expenditure over $10,000. “It was his money
that we were spending, and he was keeping an eye on it, as he damn well should,” Watson said. “He made
sure nothing stupid was happening.” Decisions were made quickly during weekly meetings, and the entire
company bought into them. “It was amazing how fast people would adapt to what came out of those
meetings,” Watson said. “The entire ship could turn ninety degrees instantly. Lockheed Martin could never
do anything like that.” Watson continued: