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

Beavis and Butt-head.
“There’s this point that Mike Judge makes
in 
Idiocracy,
which is like smart people, you know, should at least sustain their numbers,” Musk said.
“Like, if it’s a negative Darwinian vector, then obviously that’s not a good thing. It should be at least
neutral. But if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad, too. I

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mean, Europe, Japan, Russia, China are all headed for demographic implosion. And the fact of the matter
is that basically the wealthier—basically wealth, education, and being secular are all indicative of low
birth rate. They all correlate with low birth rate. I’m not saying like only smart people should have kids.
I’m just saying that smart people should have kids as well. They should at least maintain—at least be a
replacement rate. And the fact of the matter is that I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or
one kid. You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.’”
The next decade of Musk Co. should be quite something. Musk has given himself a chance to become
one of the greatest businessmen and innovators of all time. By 2025 Tesla could very well have a lineup
of five or six cars and be the dominant force in a booming electric car market. Playing off its current
growth rate, SolarCity will have had time to emerge as a massive utility company and the leader in a solar
market that had finally lived up to its promise. SpaceX? Well, it’s perhaps the most intriguing. According
to Musk’s calculations, SpaceX should be conducting weekly flights to space, carrying humans and cargo,
and have put most of its competitors out of business. Its rockets should be capable of doing a couple of
laps around the moon and then landing with pinpoint accuracy back at the spaceport in Texas. And the
preparation for the first few dozen trips to Mars should be well under way.
If all of this were taking place, Musk, then in his mid-fifties, likely would be the richest man in the
world and among its most powerful. He would be the majority shareholder in three public companies, and
history would be preparing to smile broadly on what he had accomplished. During a time in which
countries and other businesses were paralyzed by indecision and inaction, Musk would have mounted the
most viable charge against global warming, while also providing people with an escape plan—just in
case. He would have brought a substantial amount of crucial manufacturing back to the United States
while also providing an example for other entrepreneurs hoping to harness a new age of wonderful
machines. As Thiel said, Musk may well have gone so far as to give people hope and to have renewed
their faith in what technology can do for mankind.
This future, of course, remains precarious. Huge technological issues confront all three of Musk’s
companies. He’s bet on the inventiveness of man and the ability of solar, battery, and aerospace
technology to follow predicted price and performance curves. Even if these bets hit as he hopes, Tesla
could face a weird, unexpected recall. SpaceX could have a rocket carrying humans blow up—an
incident that could very well end the company on the spot. Dramatic risks accompany just about
everything Musk does.
By the time our last dinner had come around, I had decided that this propensity for risk had little to do
with Musk being insane, as he had wondered aloud several months earlier. No, Musk just seems to
possess a level of conviction that is so intense and exceptional as to be off-putting to some. As we shared
some chips and guacamole and cocktails, I asked Musk directly just how much he was willing to put on
the line. His response? Everything that other people hold dear. “I would like to die on Mars,” he said.
“Just not on impact. Ideally I’d like to go for a visit, come back for a while, and then go there when I’m
like seventy or something and then just stay there. If things turn out well, that would be the case. If my
wife and I have a bunch of kids, she would probably stay with them on Earth.”

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EPILOGUE
E
LON MUSK IS A BODY THAT REMAINS VERY MUCH IN MOTION.
By the time this book reaches your hands, it’s quite possible that Musk and SpaceX will have
managed to land a rocket on a barge at sea or back on a launchpad in Florida. Tesla Motors may have
unveiled some of the special features of the Model X. Musk could have formally declared war on the
artificial intelligence machines coming to life inside of Google’s data centers. Who knows?
What’s clear is that Musk’s desire to take on more keeps growing. Just as I was putting the finishing
touches on this book, Musk unfurled a number of major initiatives. The most dramatic of which is a plan
to surround the Earth with thousands of small communications satellites. Musk wants, in effect, to build a
space-based Internet in which the satellites would be close enough to the planet to beam down bandwidth
at high speeds. Such a system would be useful for a couple of reasons: In areas too poor or too remote to
have fiber-optic connections, it would provide people with high-speed Internet for the first time. It could
also function as an efficient backhaul network for businesses and consumers.
Musk, of course, also sees this space Internet as key to his long-term ambitions around Mars. “It will
be important for Mars to have a global communications network,” he said. “I think this needs to be done,
and I don’t see anyone else doing it.” SpaceX will build these satellites at a new factory and will also
look to sell more satellites to commercial customers as it perfects the technology. To fund part of this
unbelievably ambitious project, SpaceX secured $1 billion from Google and Fidelity. In a rare moment of
restraint, Musk declined to provide an exact delivery date for his space Internet, which he forecasts will
cost more than $10 billion to build. “People should not expect this to be active sooner than five years,” he
said. “But we see it as a long-term revenue source for SpaceX to be able to fund a city on Mars.”
Meanwhile, SolarCity has purchased a new research and development facility near the Tesla factory
in Silicon Valley that’s intended to aid its manufacturing work. The building it acquired was the old
Solyndra manufacturing plant—another symbol of Musk’s ability to thrive in the green technology industry
that has destroyed so many other entrepreneurs. And Tesla continues to build its Gigafactory in Nevada at
pace, while its network of charging stations has saved upward of four million gallons of gas. During a
quarterly earnings announcement, J. B. Straubel promised that Tesla would start producing battery
systems for home use in 2015 that would let people hop off the grid for periods of time. Musk then one-
upped Straubel, bragging that he thinks Tesla could eventually be more valuable than Apple and could
challenge it in the race to be the first $1 trillion company. A handful of groups have also set to work
building prototype Hyperloop systems in and around California. Oh, and Musk starred in an episode of