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

New
York Times
penned a withering review of the car and its charging stations, and a couple of the Model S
sedans caught fire after being involved in collisions. Disobeying conventional public relations wisdom,
Musk went after the reporter, using data pulled from the car to undermine the reviewer’s claims. Musk
penned the feisty rebuttal himself, while on vacation in Aspen with Kimbal, and friend and Tesla board
member Antonio Gracias. “At some other company, it would be a public relations group putting something
like this together,” Gracias said. “Elon felt like it was the most important problem facing Tesla at the time
and that’s always what he deals with and how he prioritizes. It could kill the car and represented an
existential threat against the business. Have there been moments where his unconventional style in these
types of situations has made me cringe? Yes. But I trust that it will work out in the end.” Musk applied a
similar approach to dealing with the fires by declaring the Model S the safest car in America in a press
release and adding a titanium underbody shield and aluminum plates to the vehicle to deflect and destroy
debris and keep the battery pack safe.
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The fires, the occasional bad review—none of this had any effect on Tesla’s sales or share price.
Musk’s star shone brighter and brighter as Tesla’s market value ballooned to about half that of GM and
Ford.
Tesla held another press event in October 2014 that cemented Musk’s place as the new titan of the
auto industry. Musk unveiled a supercharged version of the Model S with two motors—one in the front
and one in the back. It could go zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds. The company had turned a sedan into a
supercar. “It’s like taking off from a carrier deck,” Musk said. “It’s just bananas.” Musk also unveiled a
new suite of software for the Model S that gave it autopilot functions. The car had radar to detect objects
and warn of possible collisions and could guide itself via GPS. “Later, you will be able to summon the
car,” Musk said. “It will come to wherever you are. There’s also something else I would like to do. Many
of our engineers will be hearing this in real time. I would like the charge connector to plug itself into the
car, sort of like an articulating snake. I think we will probably do something like that.”
Thousands of people waited in line for hours to see Musk demonstrate this technology. Musk cracked
jokes during the presentation and played off the crowd’s enthusiasm. The man who had been awkward in
front of media during the PayPal years had developed a unique, slick stagecraft. A woman standing next to
me in the crowd went weak in the knees when Musk first took the stage. A man to my other side said he

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wanted a Model X and had just offered $15,000 to a friend to move up on the reservation list, so that he
could end up with model No. 700. The enthusiasm coupled with Musk’s ability to generate attention was
emblematic of just how far the little automaker and its eccentric CEO had come. Rival car companies
would kill to receive such interest and had basically been left dumbfounded as Tesla snuck up on them
and delivered more than they had ever imagined possible.
As the Model S fever gripped Silicon Valley, I visited Ford’s small research and development lab in
Palo Alto. The head of the lab at the time was a ponytailed, sandal-wearing engineer named T. J. Giuli,
who felt very jealous of Tesla. Inside of every Ford were dozens of computing systems made by different
companies that all had to speak to each other and work as one. It was a mess of complexity that had
evolved over time, and simplifying the situation would prove near impossible at this point, especially for
a company like Ford, which needed to pump out hundreds of thousands of cars per year and could not
afford to stop and reboot. Tesla, by contrast, got to start from scratch and make its own software the focus
of the Model S. Giuli would have loved the same opportunity. “Software is in many ways the heart of the
new vehicle experience,” he said. “From the powertrain to the warning chimes in the car, you’re using
software to create an expressive and pleasing environment. The level of integration that the software has
into the rest of the Model S is really impressive. Tesla is a benchmark for what we do here.” Not long
after this chat, Giuli left Ford to become an engineer at a stealth start-up.
There was little the mainstream auto industry could do to slow Tesla down. But that didn’t stop
executives from trying to be difficult whenever possible. Tesla, for example, wanted to call its third-
generation car the Model E, so that its lineup of vehicles would be the Model S, E, and X—another
playful Musk gag. But Ford’s then CEO, Alan Mulally, blocked Tesla from using Model E, with the threat
of a lawsuit. “So I call up Mulally and I was like, ‘Alan, are you just fucking with us or are you really
going to do a Model E?’” Musk said. “And I’m not sure which is worse. You know? Like it would
actually make more sense if they’re just fucking with us because if they actually come out with a Model E
at this point, and we’ve got the Model S and the X and Ford comes out with the Model E, it’s going to
look ridiculous. So even though Ford did the Model T a hundred years ago, nobody thinks of ‘Model’ as
being a Ford thing anymore. So it would just feel like they stole it. Like why did you go steal Tesla’s E?
Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of