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

Bloomberg Businessweek
had the first story on it, and the magazine’s Web server began melting down as
people stormed the website to read about the invention. Twitter went nuts as well. About an hour after
Musk released the information, he held a conference call to talk about the Hyperloop, and somewhere in
between our numerous earlier chats and that moment, he’d decided to build the thing, telling reporters that
he would consider making at least a prototype to prove that the technology could work. Some people had
their fun with all of this. “Billionaire unveils imaginary space train,” teased Valleywag. “We love Elon
Musk’s nutso determination—there was certainly a time when electric cars and private space flight
seemed silly, too. But what’s sillier is treating this as anything other than a very rich man’s wild
imagination.” Unlike its early Tesla-bashing days, Valleywag was now the minority voice. People seemed
mainly to believe Musk could do it. The depth to which people believed it, I think, surprised Musk and
forced him to commit to the prototype. In a weird life-imitating-art moment, Musk really had become the
closest thing the world had to Tony Stark, and he could not let his adoring public down.
Shortly after the release of the Hyperloop plans, Shervin Pishevar, an investor and friend of Musk’s,
brought the detailed specifications for the technology with him during a ninety-minute meeting with
President Obama at the White House. “The president fell in love with the idea,” Pishevar said. The
president’s staff studied the documents and arranged a one-on-one with Musk and Obama in April 2014.
Since then, Pishevar, Kevin Brogan, and others, have formed a company called Hyperloop Technologies

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Inc. with the hopes of building the first leg of the Hyperloop between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In
theory, people would be able to hop between the two cities in about ten minutes. Nevada senator Harry
Reid has been briefed on the idea as well, and efforts are under way to buy the land rights alongside
Interstate 15 that would make the high-speed transport possible.
For employees like Gwynne Shotwell and J. B. Straubel, working with Musk means helping develop
these sorts of wonderful technologies in relative obscurity. They’re the steady hands that will forever be
expected to stay in the shadows. Shotwell has been a consistent presence at SpaceX almost since day one,
pushing the company forward and suppressing her ego to ensure that Musk gets all the attention he desires.
If you’re Shotwell and truly believe in the cause of sending people to Mars, then the mission takes
precedence over personal desires. Straubel, likewise, has been the constant at Tesla—a go-between
whom other employees could rely on to carry messages to Musk, and the guy who knows everything about
the cars. Despite his stature at the company, Straubel was one of several longtime employees who
confessed they were nervous to speak with me on the record. Musk likes to be the guy talking on his
companies’ behalf and comes down hard on even his most loyal executives if they say something deemed
to be out of line with Musk’s views or with what he wants the public to think. Straubel has dedicated
himself to making electric cars and didn’t want some dumb reporter wrecking his life’s work. “I try really
hard to back away and put my ego aside,” Straubel said. “Elon is incredibly difficult to work for, but it’s
mostly because he’s so passionate. He can be impatient and say, ‘God damn it! This is what we have to
do!’ and some people will get shell-shocked and catatonic. It seems like people can get afraid of him and
paralyzed in a weird way. I try to help everyone to understand what his goals and visions are, and then I
have a bunch of my own goals, too, and make sure we’re in synch. Then, I try and go back and make sure
the company is aligned. Ultimately, Elon is the boss. He has driven this thing with his blood, sweat, and
tears. He has risked more than anyone else. I respect the hell out of what he has done. It just could not
work without Elon. In my view, he has earned the right to be the front person for this thing.”
The rank-and-file employees tend to describe Musk in more mixed ways. They revere his drive and
respect how demanding he can be. They also think he can be hard to the point of mean and come off as
capricious. The employees want to be close to Musk, but they also fear that he’ll suddenly change his
mind about something and that every interaction with him is an opportunity to be fired. “Elon’s worst trait
by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyalty or human connection,” said one former employee.
“Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a
second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workforce on their toes and scared; maybe
he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people
who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.”
The communications departments of SpaceX and Tesla have witnessed the latter forms of behavior
more than any other group of employees. Musk has burned through public relations staffers with comical
efficiency. He tends to take on a lot of the communications work himself, writing news releases and
contacting the press as he sees fit. Quite often, Musk does not let his communications staff in on his
agenda. Ahead of the Hyperloop announcement, for example, his representatives were sending me e-mails
to find out the time and date for the press conference. On other occasions, reporters have received an alert
about a teleconference with Musk just minutes before it started. This was not a function of the PR people
being incompetent in getting word of the event out. The truth was that Musk had only let them know about
his plans a couple of minutes in advance, and they were scrambling to catch up to his whims. When Musk
does delegate work to the communications staff, they’re expected to jump in without missing a beat and to
execute at the highest level. Some of this staff, operating under this mix of pressure and surprise, only
lasted between a few weeks and a few months. A few others have hung on for a couple of years before

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burning out or being fired.
The granddaddy example of Musk’s seemingly callous interoffice style occurred in early 2014 when
he fired Mary Beth Brown. To describe her as a loyal executive assistant would be grossly inadequate.
Brown often felt like an extension of Musk—the one being who crossed over into all of his worlds. For
more than a decade, she gave up her life for Musk, traipsing back and forth between Los Angeles and
Silicon Valley every week, while working late into the night and on weekends. Brown went to Musk and
asked that she be compensated on par with SpaceX’s top executives, since she was handling so much of
Musk’s scheduling across two companies, doing public relations work and often making business
decisions. Musk replied that Brown should take a couple of weeks off, and he would take on her duties
and gauge how hard they were. When Brown returned, Musk let her know that he didn’t need her anymore,
and he asked Shotwell’s assistant to begin scheduling his meetings. Brown, still loyal and hurt, didn’t
want to discuss any of this with me. Musk said that she had become too comfortable speaking on his
behalf and that, frankly, she needed a life. Other people grumbled that Brown and Riley clashed and that
this was the root cause of Brown’s ouster.
*
(Brown declined to be interviewed for this book, despite
several requests.)
Whatever the case, the optics of the situation were terrible. Tony Stark doesn’t fire Pepper Potts. He
adores her and takes care of her for life. She’s the only person he can really trust—the one who has been
there through everything. That Musk was willing to let Brown go and in such an unceremonious fashion
struck people inside SpaceX and Tesla as scandalous and as the ultimate confirmation of his cruel
stoicism. The tale of Brown’s departure became part of the lore around Musk’s lack of empathy. It got
bundled up into the stories of Musk dressing employees down in legendary fashion with vicious barb after
vicious barb. People also linked this type of behavior to Musk’s other quirky traits. He’s been known to
obsess over typos in e-mails to the point that he could not see past the errors and read the actual content of
the messages. Even in social settings, Musk might get up from the dinner table without a word of
explanation to head outside and look at the stars, simply because he’s not willing to suffer fools or small
talk. After adding up this behavior, dozens of people expressed to me their conclusion that Musk sits
somewhere on the autism spectrum and that he has trouble considering other people’s emotions and caring
about their well-being.
There’s a tendency, especially in Silicon Valley, to label people who are a bit different or quirky as
autistic or afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s armchair psychology for conditions that can be
inherently funky to diagnose or even codify. To slap this label on Musk feels ill-informed and too easy.
Musk acts differently with his closest friends and family than he does with employees, even those who
have worked alongside him for a long time. Among his inner circle, Musk is warm, funny, and deeply
emotional.
*
 He might not engage in the standard chitchat, asking a friend how his kids are doing, but he
would do everything in his considerable power to help that friend if his child were sick or in trouble. He
will protect those close to him at all costs and, when deemed necessary, seek to destroy those who have
wronged him or his friends.
Musk’s behavior matches up much more closely with someone who is described by
neuropsychologists as profoundly gifted. These are people who in childhood exhibit exceptional
intellectual depth and max out IQ tests. It’s not uncommon for these children to look out into the world and
find flaws—glitches in the system—and construct logical paths in their minds to fix them. For Musk, the
call to ensure that mankind is a multiplanetary species partly stems from a life richly influenced by
science fiction and technology. Equally it’s a moral imperative that dates back to his childhood. In some
form, this has forever been his mandate.
Each facet of Musk’s life might be an attempt to soothe a type of existential depression that seems to

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gnaw at his every fiber. He sees man as self-limiting and in peril and wants to fix the situation. The
people who suggest bad ideas during meetings or make mistakes at work are getting in the way of all of
this and slowing Musk down. He does not dislike them as people. It’s more that he feels pained by their
mistakes, which have consigned man to peril that much longer. The perceived lack of emotion is a
symptom of Musk sometimes feeling like he’s the only one who really grasps the urgency of his mission.
He’s less sensitive and less tolerant than other people because the stakes are so high. Employees need to
help solve the problems to the absolute best of their ability or they need to get out of the way.
Musk has been pretty up front about these tendencies. He’s implored people to understand that he’s not
chasing momentary opportunities in the business world. He’s trying to solve problems that have been
consuming him for decades. During our conversations, Musk went back to this very point over and over
again, making sure to emphasize just how long he’d thought about electric cars and space. The same
patterns are visible in his actions as well. When Musk announced in 2014 that Tesla would open-source
all of its patents, analysts tried to decide whether this was a publicity stunt or if it hid an ulterior motive
or a catch. But the decision was a straightforward one for Musk. He wants people to make and buy
electric cars. Man’s future, as he sees it, depends on this. If open-sourcing Tesla’s patents means other
companies can build electric cars more easily, then that is good for mankind, and the ideas should be free.
The cynic will scoff at this, and understandably so. Musk, however, has been programmed to behave this
way and tends to be sincere when explaining his thinking—almost to a fault.
The people who get closest to Musk are the ones who learn to relate to this mode of thinking.
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They’re the ones who can identify with his vision yet challenge him intellectually to complete it. When he
asked me during one of our dinners if I thought he was insane, it was a test of sorts. We had talked enough
that he knew I was interested in what he was doing. He had started to trust me and open up but wanted to
make sure—one final time—that I truly grasped the importance of his quest. Many of his closest friends
have passed much grander, more demanding tests. They’ve invested in his companies. They’ve defended
him against critics. They helped him keep the wolves at bay during 2008. They’ve proven their loyalty
and their commitment to his cause.
People in the technology industry have tended to liken Musk’s drive and the scope of his ambition to
that of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. “Elon has that deep appreciation for technology, the no-holds-barred
attitude of a visionary, and that determination to go after long-term things that they both had,” said Edward
Jung, a child prodigy who worked for Jobs and Gates and ended up as Microsoft’s chief software
architect. “And he has that consumer sensibility of Steve along with the ability to hire good people
outside of his own comfort areas that’s more like Bill. You almost wish that Bill and Steve had a
genetically engineered love child and, who knows, maybe we should genotype Elon to see if that’s what
happened.” Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalist who has invested in SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity,
worked for Jobs, and knows Gates well, also described Musk as an upgraded mix of the two. “Like Jobs,
Elon does not tolerate C or D players,” said Jurvetson. “But I’d say he’s nicer than Jobs and a bit more
refined than Bill Gates.”
*
But the more you know about Musk, the harder it becomes to place him among his peers. Jobs is
another CEO who ran two, large industry-changing companies—Apple and Pixar. But that’s where the
practical similarities between the two men end. Jobs dedicated far more of his energy to Apple than
Pixar, unlike Musk, who has poured equal energy into both companies, while saving whatever was left
over for SolarCity. Jobs was also legendary for his attention to detail. No one, however, would suggest
that his reach extended down as far as Musk’s into overseeing so much of the companies’ day-to-day
operations. Musk’s approach has its limitations. He’s less artful with marketing and media strategy. Musk
does not rehearse his presentations or polish speeches. He wings most of the announcements from Tesla

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and SpaceX. He’ll also fire off some major bit of news on a Friday afternoon when it’s likely to get lost
as reporters head home for the weekend, simply because that’s when he finished writing the press release
or wanted to move on to something else. Jobs, by contrast, treated every presentation and media moment
as precious. Musk simply does not have the luxury to work that way. “I don’t have days to practice,” he
said. “I’ve got to give impromptu talks, and the results may vary.”
As for whether Musk is leading the technology industry to new heights like Gates and Jobs, the
professional pundits remain mixed. One camp holds that SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX offer little in the
way of real hope for an industry that could use some blockbuster innovations. For the other camp, Musk is
the real deal and the brightest shining star of what they see as a coming revolution in technology.
The economist Tyler Cowen—who has earned some measure of fame in recent years for his insightful
writings about the state of the technology industry and his ideas on where it may go—falls into that first
camp. In