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

Wall Street Journal
for having a high-end camp. “Elon Musk, chief executive of electric-car maker Tesla
Motors and co-founder of eBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, is among those eschewing the tent life,” the paper wrote. “He is paying for an
elaborate compound consisting of eight recreational vehicles and trailers stocked with food, linens, groceries and other essentials for
himself and his friends and family, say employees of the outfitter, Classic Adventures RV. . . . Classic is one of the festival’s few
approved vendors. It charges $5,500 to $10,000 per RV for its Camp Classic Concierge packages like Mr. Musk’s. At Mr. Musk’s RV
enclave, the help empties septic tanks, brings water and makes sure the vehicles’ electricity, refrigeration, air conditioning, televisions,
DVD players and other systems are ship shape. The staff also stocked the campers with Diet Coke, Gatorade and Cruzan rum.” Once
the story hit, Musk’s group felt like Classic Adventures had leaked the information to drum up business, and they tried to move to a new,
undisclosed location.
20.
http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf.
21.
Tesla employees have been known to sneak across the street to the campus of the software maker SAP and to take advantage of its
sumptuous, subsidized cafes.
22.
Shotwell talks about going to Mars as much as Musk and has dedicated her life to space exploration. Straubel has demonstrated the same
type of commitment with electric vehicles and can sound a lot like Musk at times. “We are not trying to corner the market on EVs,”
Straubel said. “There are 100 million cars built per year and 2 billion already out there. Even if we got to 5 or 10 percent of the market,
that does not solve the world’s problems. I am bullish we will keep up with demand and drive the whole industry forward. Elon is
committed to this.”
23.
Page presented one of his far-out ideas to me as follows: “I was thinking it would be pretty cool to have a prize to fund a project where
someone would have to send something lightweight to the moon that could sort of replicate itself. I went over to the NASA operation
center here at AMES in Mountain View when they were doing a mission and literally flying a satellite into the south pole of the moon.
And they like hurled this thing into the moon at a high velocity and then it exploded and it sent matter out into space. And then they looked
at that with telescopes, and they discovered water on the south pole of the moon, which sounds really exciting. I started thinking that if
there’s a lot of water on the south pole of the moon, you can make rocket fuel from the hydrogen and oxygen. The other cool thing about
the south pole is like it almost always gets sun. There’s like places high up that get sun and there’s places that are kind of in the craters
that are very cold. So you have like a lot of energy then where you could run solar cells. You could almost run like a steam turbine there.
You have rocket fuel ingredients, and you have solar cells that can be powered by sun, and you could probably run a power plant turbine.
Power plant turbines aren’t that heavy. You could send that to the moon. You have like a gigawatt of power on the moon and make a lot
of rocket fuel. It would make a good prize project. You send something to the moon that weights five pounds and have it make rocket fuel
so that you could launch stuff off the moon or have it make a copy of itself, so that you can make more of them.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photograph © by Melinda Vance