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

Huffington Post
and wrote a 1,500-word essay. Musk maintained that two
months of negotiations with independent parties had gone into the postnuptial agreement, which kept the couple’s assets separate so that
Musk could get the spoils from his companies and Justine could get the spoils from her books. “In mid 1999, Justine told me that if I
proposed to her, she would say yes,” Musk wrote. “Since this was not long after the sale of my first company, Zip2, to Compaq, and the
subsequent cofounding of PayPal, friends and family advised me to separate whether the marriage was for love or money.” After the
settlement, Musk asked Arianna Huffington to remove his essay about the divorce from her website. “I don’t want to dwell on past
negativity,” Musk said. “You can always find things on the Internet. So it’s not like it’s gone. It’s just not easily found.”

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The pair have continued to have their difficulties. For a long time, Musk ran all of the child-sharing scheduling through his assistant Mary
Beth Brown rather than dealing directly with Justine. “I was really pissed-off about that,” Justine said. And the time Justine cried the most
during our conversation came as she weighed the pros and cons of the children growing up on a grand stage where they’re whisked away
to the Super Bowl or Spain in a private jet on a moment’s notice or asked to play at the Tesla factory. “I know the kids really look up to
him,” she said. “He takes them everywhere and provides a lot of experiences for them. My role as the mother is to create this reality
where I provide a sense of normalcy. They are not growing up in a normal family with a normal dad. Their life with me is a lot more low-
key. We value different things. I am a lot more about empathy.”

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Musk recalled their meeting as follows: “She did look great, but what was going through my mind was ‘Oh, I guess they are a couple of
models.’ You know, you can’t actually talk to most models. You just can’t have a conversation. But, you know, Talulah was really
interested in talking about rockets and electric cars. That was the interesting thing.”

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He asked Riley to go with him, but she turned Musk down.

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By this time, Musk had built up a reputation as the hardest-charging man in the space business. Before settling on the Falcon 9, Musk
planned to build something called the BFR, a.k.a. the Big Falcon Rocket or Big Fucking Rocket. Musk wanted it to have the biggest rocket
engine in history. Musk’s bigger, faster mentality amused, horrified and impressed some of the suppliers that SpaceX occasionally turned to
for help, like Barber-Nichols Inc., a Colorado-based maker of rocket engine turbo pumps and other aerospace machinery. A few
executives at Barber-Nichols—Robert Linden, Gary Frey, and Mike Forsha—were kind enough to recount their first meeting with Musk in
the middle of 2002 and their subsequent dealings with him. Here’s a snippet:
“Elon showed up with Tom Mueller and started telling us it was his destiny to launch things into space at lower costs and to help us
become space faring people. We thought the world of Tom but weren’t quite sure whether to take Elon too seriously. They began asking
us for the impossible. They wanted a turbo pump to be built in less than a year for under one million dollars. Boeing might do a project like
that over five years for one hundred million. Tom told us to give it our best shot, and we built it in thirteen months. Build quick and learn
quickly was Elon’s philosophy. He was relentless in wanting the costs to come down. Regardless of what we showed him on paper with
regard to the cost of materials, he wanted the cost lower because that was part of his business model. It could be very frustrating to work
with Elon. He has a singular view and doesn’t deviate from that. We don’t know too many people that have worked for him that are
happy. That said, he has driven the cost of space down and been true to his original business plan. Boeing, Lockheed, and the rest of them
have become overly cautious and spend a lot of money. SpaceX has balls.”

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To provide a glimpse of how well Musk knows the rockets, here he is explaining what happened from memory six years after the fact: “It
was because we had upgraded the Merlin engine to a regeneratively cooled engine and the thrust transient of that engine was a few
seconds longer. It was only like one percent thrust for about another 1.5 seconds. And the chamber pressure was only ten PSI, which is
one percent of the total. But that’s below sea level pressure. On the test stand, we didn’t notice anything. We thought it was fine. We
thought it was just the same as before, but actually it just had this slight difference. The ambient sea level pressure was higher at roughly
fifteen PSI, which disguised some effects during the test. The extra thrust caused the first stage to continue moving after stage separation
and recontact the other stage. And the upper stage then started the engine inside the interstage, which caused the plasma blowback which
destroyed that upper stage.”

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Musk would later discover the identity of this employee in an ingenious way. He copied the text of the letter into a Word document,
checked the size of the file, sent it to a printer, and looked over the logs of printer activity to find one of the same size. He could then trace
that back to the person who had printed the original file. The employee wrote a letter of apology and resigned.

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Griffin had pined to build a massive new spacecraft that would solidify his mark on the industry. But, with the election of Barack Obama in
2008, the Bush appointee knew that his time as NASA chief was coming to an end and that SpaceX appeared poised to build the most
interesting machines moving forward.

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It should be noted that there are many people in the space industry who doubt reusable rockets will work, in large part because of the
stress the machines and metal go through during launch. It’s not clear that the most prized customers will even consider the reused
spacecraft for launches due to their inherent risks. This is a big reason that other countries and companies have not pursued the
technology. There’s a camp of space experts who think Musk is flat-out wasting his time, and that engineering calculations already prove
the reusable rockets to be a fool’s errand.

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Blue Origin also hired away a large chunk of SpaceX’s propulsion team.

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Musk has taken exception to Blue Origin and Bezos filing for patents around reusable rocket technology as well. “His patent is completely
ridiculous,” Musk said. “People have proposed landing on a floating platform in the ocean for a half century. There’s no chance
whatsoever of the patent being upheld because there’s five decades of prior art of people who proposed that six ways to Sunday in fiction
and nonfiction. It’s like Dr. Seuss, green eggs and fucking ham. That’s how many ways it’s been proposed. The issue is doing it and like
actually creating a rocket that can make that happen.”

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Michael Colonno.

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According to Musk, “The early Dragon Version 1 work was just me and maybe three or four engineers, as we were living hand to mouth
and had no idea if NASA would award us a contract. Technically, there was Magic Dragon before that, which was much simpler, as it had
no NASA requirements. Magic Dragon was just me and some high altitude balloon guys in the U.K.”

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NASA researchers studying the Dragon design have noticed several features of the capsule that appear to have been purpose built from
the get-go to accommodate a landing on Mars. They’ve published a couple of papers explaining how it could be feasible for NASA to fund
a mission to Mars in which a Dragon capsule picks up samples and returns them to Earth.

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The politicking in the space business can get quite nasty. Lori Garver, the former deputy administrator of NASA, spent years fighting to
open up NASA contracts so that private companies could bid on things like resupplying the ISS. Her position of fostering a strong
relationship between NASA and the private sector won out in the end but at a cost. “I had death threats and fake anthrax sent to me,” she
said. Garver also ran across SpaceX competitors that tried to spread unfounded gossip about the company and Musk. “They claimed he
was in violation of tax laws in South Africa and had another, secret family there. I said, ‘You’re making this stuff up.’ We’re lucky that
people with such long-term visions as Elon, Jeff Bezos, and Robert Bigelow [founder of the aerospace company that bears his name] got
rich. It’s nuts that people would want to vilify Elon. He might say some things that rub people the wrong way, but, at some point, the being
nice to everyone thing doesn’t work.”

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On this flight, SpaceX secretly placed a wheel of cheese inside the Dragon capsule. It was the same one Jeff Skoll had given Musk back
in the mice-to-Mars days.

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Musk explained the look to me in a way that only he can. “I went for a similar style to the Model S (it uses the same screens as Model S
upgraded for space ops), but kept the aluminum isogrid uncovered for a more exotic feel.”

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Rather insanely, NASA is building a next-generation, giant spaceship that could one day get to Mars even though SpaceX is building the
same type of craft—the Falcon Heavy—on its own. NASA’s program is budgeted to cost $18 billion, although government studies say that
figure is very conservative. “NASA has no fucking business doing this,” said Andrew Beal, the billionaire investor and onetime commercial
space entrepreneur. “The whole space shuttle system was a disaster. They’re fucking clueless. Who in their right mind would use huge
solid boosters, especially ones built in segments requiring dynamic seals? They are so lucky they only had one disastrous failure of the
boosters.” Beal’s firm criticisms come from years of watching the government compete against private space companies by subsidizing the
construction of spacecraft and launches. His company Beal Aerospace quit the business because the government kept funding competing
rockets. “Governments around the world have spent billions trying to do what Elon is doing, and they have failed,” he said. “We have to
have governments, but the idea that the government goes out and competes with companies is fucking nuts.”

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The volume level on the sound system naturally goes to 11—an homage to