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

right
). 
©Steve Jurvetson
With a Dragon capsule hanging overhead, SpaceX employees peer into the company’s mission control center at the Hawthorne factory.
Photograph courtesy of SpaceX

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Gwynne Shotwell is Musk’s right-hand woman at SpaceX and oversees the day-to-day operations of the company, including monitoring a
launch from mission control. 
Photograph courtesy of SpaceX
Tesla took over the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (or NUMMI) car factory in Fremont, California, which is where workers produce
the Model S sedan. 
Photograph courtesy of Tesla Motors

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Tesla began shipping the Model S sedan in 2012. The car ended up winning most of the automotive industry’s major awards. 
Photograph
courtesy of Tesla Motors
The Tesla Model S sedan with its electric motor (
near the rear
) and battery pack (
bottom
) exposed. 
Photograph courtesy of Tesla Motors

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Tesla’s next car will be the Model X SUV with its signature “falcon-wing doors.” 
Photograph courtesy of Tesla Motors
In 2013, Musk visited Cuba with Sean Penn (
driving
) and the investor Shervin Pishevar (
back seat next to Musk
). They met with students
and members of the Castro family, and tried to free an American prisoner. 
©Shervin Pishevar

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Musk unveiled the Hyperloop in 2013. He proposed it as a new mode of transportation, and multiple groups have now set to work on building
it. 
Photograph courtesy of SpaceX
In 2014, Musk unveiled a radical new take on the space capsule—the Dragon V2. It comes with a drop-down touch-screen display and slick
interior. 
Photograph courtesy of SpaceX

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The Dragon V2 will be able to return to Earth and land with pinpoint accuracy. 
Photograph courtesy of SpaceX

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Musk is a nonstop traveler. Here’s a look at one year in his life via records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Musk married, divorced, remarried, and then divorced the actress Talulah Riley. 
Photograph courtesy of Talulah Riley

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Musk and Riley relax at home in Los Angeles. Musk shares the home with his five young boys. 
Photograph courtesy of Talulah Riley

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7

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ALL ELECTRIC
J
. B. STRAUBEL HAS A TWO-INCH-LONG SCAR that cuts across the middle of his left cheek. He
earned it in high school, during a chemistry class experiment. Straubel whipped up the wrong concoction
of chemicals, and the beaker he was holding exploded, throwing off shards of glass, one of which sliced
through his face.
The wound lingers as a tinkerer’s badge of honor. It arrived near the end of a childhood full of
experimentation with chemicals and machines. Born in Wisconsin, Straubel constructed a large chemistry
lab in the basement of his family’s home that included fume hoods and chemicals ordered, borrowed, or
pilfered. At thirteen, Straubel found an old golf cart at the dump. He brought it back home and restored it
to working condition, which required him to rebuild the electric motor. It seemed that Straubel was
always taking something apart, sprucing it up, and putting it back together. All of this fit into the Straubel
family’s do-it-yourself traditions. In the late 1890s Straubel’s great-grandfather started the Straubel
Machine Company, which built one of the first internal combustion engines in the United States and used it
to power boats.
Straubel’s inquisitive spirit carried him west to Stanford University, where he enrolled in 1994
intending to become a physicist. After flying through the hardest courses he could take, Straubel
concluded that majoring in physics would not be for him. The advanced courses were too theoretical, and
Straubel liked to get his hands dirty. He developed his own major called energy systems and engineering.
“I wanted to take software and electricity and use it to control energy,” Straubel said. “It was computing
combined with power electronics. I collected all the things I love doing in one place.”
There was no clean-technology movement at this time, but there were companies dabbling with new
uses for solar power and electric vehicles. Straubel ended up hunting down these startups, hanging out in
their garages and pestering the engineers. He began tinkering once again on his own as well in the garage
of a house he shared with a half dozen friends. Straubel bought a “piece of shit Porsche” for $1,600 and
turned it into an electric car. This meant that Straubel had to create a controller to manage the electric
motor, build a charger from scratch, and write the software that made the entire machine work. The car set
the world record for electric vehicle (EV) acceleration, traveling a quarter mile in 17.28 seconds. “The
thing I took away was that the electronics were great, and you could get acceleration on a shoestring
budget, but the batteries sucked,” Straubel said. “It had a thirty-mile range, so I learned firsthand about
some of the limitations of electric vehicles.” Straubel gave his car a hybrid boost, building a gasoline-
powered contraption that could be towed behind the Porsche and used to recharge the batteries. It was
good enough for Straubel to drive the four hundred miles down to Los Angeles and back.
By 2002, Straubel was living in Los Angeles. He’d gotten a master’s degree from Stanford and
bounced around a couple of companies looking for something that called out to him. He decided on Rosen
Motors, which had built one of the world’s first hybrid vehicles—a car that ran off a flywheel and a gas
turbine and had electric motors to drive the wheel. After it folded, Straubel followed Harold Rosen, an
engineer famed for inventing the geostationary satellite, to create an electric plane. “I’m a pilot and love
to fly, so this was perfect for me,” Straubel said. “The idea was that it would stay aloft for two weeks at a
time and hover over a specific spot. This was way before drones and all that.” To help make ends meet,

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Straubel also worked nights and on the weekend doing electronics consulting for a start-up.
It was in the midst of toiling away on all these projects that Straubel’s old buddies from the Stanford
solar car team came to pay him a visit. A group of rogue engineers at Stanford had been working on solar
cars for years, building them in a World War II–era Quonset hut full of toxic chemicals and black widows.
Unlike today, when the university would jump at the chance to support such a project, Stanford tried to
shut down this group of fringe freaks and geeks. The students proved very capable of doing the work on
their own and competed in cross-country solar-powered car races. Straubel helped build the vehicles
during his time at university and even after, forming relationships with the incoming crop of engineers.
The team had just raced 2,300 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles, and Straubel offered the strapped,
exhausted kids a place to stay. About a half dozen students showed up at Straubel’s place, took their first
showers in many days, and then spread across his floor. As they chatted late into the night, Straubel and
the solar team kept fixating on one topic. They realized that lithium ion batteries—such as the ones in their
car being fed by the sun—had gotten much better than most people realized. Many consumer electronics
devices like laptops were running on so-called 18650 lithium ion batteries, which looked a lot like AA
batteries and could be strung together. “We wondered what would happen if you put ten thousand of the
battery cells together,” Straubel said. “We did the math and figured you could go almost one thousand
miles. It was totally nerdy shit, and eventually everyone fell asleep, but the idea really stuck with me.”
Soon enough, Straubel was stalking the solar car crew, trying to talk them into building an electric car
based on the lithium ion batteries. He would fly up to Palo Alto, spend the night sleeping in his plane, and
then ride a bicycle to the Stanford campus to make his sales pitch while helping with their current
projects. The design Straubel had come up with was a super-aerodynamic vehicle with 80 percent of its
mass made up of the batteries. It looked quite a bit like a torpedo on wheels. No one knew the exact
details of Straubel’s long-term vision for this thing, including Straubel. The plan seemed to be less about
forming a car company than about building a proof-of-concept vehicle just to get people thinking about the
power of the lithium ion batteries. With any luck, they would find a race to compete in.
The Stanford students agreed to join Straubel, if he could raise some money. He began going to trade
shows handing out brochures about his idea and e-mailing just about anyone he could think of. “I was
shameless,” he said. The only problem was that no one had any interest in what Straubel was selling.
Investors dealt him one rejection after another for months on end. Then, in the fall of 2003, Straubel met
Elon Musk.
Harold Rosen had set up a lunch with Musk at a seafood restaurant near the SpaceX headquarters in
Los Angeles and brought Straubel along to help talk up the electric plane idea. When Musk didn’t bite on
that, Straubel announced his electric car side project. The crazy idea struck an immediate chord with
Musk, who had been thinking about electric vehicles for years. While Musk had mostly focused on using
ultracapacitors for the vehicles, he was thrilled and surprised to hear how far the lithium ion battery
technology had progressed. “Everyone else had told me I was nuts, but Elon loved the idea,” Straubel
said. “He said, ‘Sure, I will give you some money.’” Musk promised Straubel $10,000 of the $100,000 he
was seeking. On the spot, Musk and Straubel formed a kinship that would survive more than a decade of
extreme highs and lows as they set out to do nothing less than change the world.
After the meeting with Musk, Straubel reached out to his friends at AC Propulsion. The Los Angeles–
based company started in 1992 and was the bleeding edge of electric vehicles, building everything from
zippy midsize passenger jobs right on up to sports cars. Straubel really wanted to show Musk the tzero
(from “t-zero”)—the highest-end vehicle in AC Propulsion’s stable. It was a type of kit car that had a
fiberglass body sitting on top of a steel frame and went from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.9 seconds
when first unveiled in 1997. Straubel had spent years hanging out with the AC Propulsion crew and asked

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Tom Gage, the company’s president, to bring a tzero over for Musk to drive. Musk fell for the car. He saw
its potential as a screaming-fast machine that could shift the perception of electric cars from boring and
plodding to something aspirational. For months Musk offered to fund an effort to transform the kit car into
a commercial vehicle but got rebuffed time and again. “It was a proof of concept and needed to be made
real,” Straubel said. “I love the hell out of the AC Propulsion guys, but they were sort of hopeless at
business and refused to do it. They kept trying to sell Elon on this car called the eBox that looked like
shit, didn’t have good performance, and was just uninspiring.” While the meetings with AC Propulsion
didn’t result in a deal, they had solidified Musk’s interest in backing something well beyond Straubel’s
science project. In a late February 2004 e-mail to Gage, Musk wrote, “What I’m going to do is figure out
the best choice of a high performance base car and electric powertrain and go in that direction.”
Unbeknownst to Straubel, at about the same time, a couple of business partners in Northern California
had also fallen in love with the idea of making a lithium ion battery powered car. Martin Eberhard and
Marc Tarpenning had founded NuvoMedia in 1997 to create one of the earliest electronic book readers,
called the Rocket eBook. The work at NuvoMedia had given the men insight into cutting-edge consumer
electronics and the hugely improved lithium ion batteries used to power laptops and other portable
devices. While the Rocket eBook was too far ahead of its time and not a major commercial success, it
was innovative enough to attract the attention of Gemstar International Group, which owned