From south Africa the author believes he is the second coming of Edison in fact married to ford and Rockefeller the superman America wanted in this century. Musk comes off as an eccentric munching into anything meat - bacon etc in the same speed as his high speed electric S accelerates .. Post the Jobs innovative void silicon valley has taken to musk genius like duck to water after Jobs who innovated very successfully in two different fields on same time (Pixar and apple ) Musk relentlessness led to 3 fields - solar city , SpaceX and Tesla of course and all hq in costliest of places SFo and LA .. author says how cool musk land a rocket factory I middle of LA is and shows what his ex girlfriend says ' musk gets what he wants and we all live in his world' ring true.. according to musk he is so successful because far too many geniuses and visionaries got tunneled into dotcom software Fintech sector.. he on other hand took the profits from first two success namely zipq (maps sold to Compaq in 95) and PayPal ( peter their was jus another collaborator musk was real brains ) 1.5B profit from ebay ... Put all this money on unluckiest places in the valley - hardware big giant machinery automobile namely SpaceX , solar city and Tesla and all of them boomed over time .. in that period late 2000s other innovations where not even close in changing mankind - Twitter and FB.
The giant super chargers in SFo middle are free for anyone to charge and that model may well save US .. musk in his techutopian way believes he is the .messiah to save humanity - putting civilization in Mars , running fast electric cars entirely charged and operated on solar cities and highway... Part of this is already true all 3 ventures are successful ND well in their way to realize dreams ... Musk due to energy leadership feels he is always a target of Russia and china as US is leading the innovation wave ...
His 3rd wife arling ensures musk eccentric self is occupied well .. she arranged fancy parties like hide and seek in UK castle , midnight cycling in Paris oriental express with entertainment private ride to Venice ... Japanese themed sci Fi party where musk dressed as samurai subjected to knife throwing .. he also wrestled actual sumo wrestler injuring himself.. his 5 sons and nannies constantly flew with him to weekend getaways like hiking in crater lake .. incredibly musk did not own place in SFo ND slept in friends places or hotels ... He worked too hard shuttling locations ND flying madly that he sent an email once accusing Tesla employees to ' getting fucking soft' as few ppl only turned up on Saturdays... he believed to change world ppl need to buck up!
Musk's ancestry : Musk's great grandfather was actually from Swiss-German origin Alderman and he went to US illinois / Minnesota area . The family were chiropractors and his son Joshua was the brilliant man with multiple talents dabbled in Aeroplanes , Chiro, mechanical engineering things and they moved and spent large part of life in Canada . Joshua even ran a dance studio and had a lassez faire approach to raising kids - they can become whatever they wanted , sky is the limit to quote from aviation. The family did incredible feat like flying several miles in canadian airspace and suddenly shifted base to South Africa for a change. Joshua took his aircraft and started a chiro clinic in Pretoria. Joshua's daughter May who was Elon's mother was a serious beauty who started modeling locally in her teens for South african magazines, shows and events and she married arial who had 200 yrs of SA heritage (British). Arial's mother cora was a very strict woman who had too much influence on the family- May and she did not get along that well . May & Arial had 4 kids and ELon was born in 1971 as one of the younger sons. Arial was a brilliant engineer who taught the kids everything in terms of how stuff worked however he was not a happy man and according to Musk and his siblings he made everything miserable . Only silver lining being he took the boys for travel and after their bitter divorce when Elon was 6 he moved in with Arial and Cora , since Cora (Grand ma) especially dotted on Elon playing scrabbles and making him tasty treats . Elon bought his first computer and devoted days running programs and playing games he was always a geek and could not get along with kids playing sports or games . Elon even in grade 3 could finish all the books in his neighbourhood librrary and asked the library to buy more books. When his reading list got over he took to mastering sections of 'Brittanica encyclopedia' and had a photographic memory. Most kids avoided Elon cause he turned out to be a 'Know it all' like Sheldon cooper rambling on about everything from Dinner conversation to playground conv. He famously asked a kid not to be afraid of darkness at 6 years stating 'Dark is nothing but absence of light'. May was worried Elon is turning out to be nerdy but she understood the boy's talents. Elon would often not show any signs of listening to what is happening around him and wander into his own world - Ppl took this for rudeness or weirdness when often he was thinking deeply. He studied not with a view to becoming best but barely grades so it gets him where he wants to go . Lot of his friends recounted strange conversation with Elon like 'Paperless banking' debating over Solar vs Fossil fuels etc. Elon got bullied a lot in SA esp grades 8,9,10 as the more athletic loving kids detested his quiet introverted self . He once got beaten so badly he had to spend 1 week in hospital and his nose only recovered fully in 2013 from that hit ! Elon excelled in physics, maths, sciences but did not entirely chase academic pursuits of excellence . He got his cousins win a 'Dungeouns and dragons' game through feats of imagination . Wrote computer games in Cobol , pascal that got popular and always had a inventive brain and business spirit. He and his brothers profited from Easter egg sales, tried in vain to establish Video Arcade and also tried hard at selling hardware and games . They even boarded the highly dangerous train from Johansberg to Pretoria in the heights of aparthied in 80s. According to Elon he viewed SA as a prison for his talents and wanted the cliche of 'Opportunities' that US offered. He simply enrolled in University of pretoria silently using his Canadian descendent for Canadaian passport which he got at age 17 and flew to Montreal with some help from family monetarily. In canada he chased after long lost relatives and got into several menial labor including boiler plate and lumbering and waited for his mom May and his brother to arrive. Kimbel Musk was elon's soul mate and he shared his visionary spirit they soon enrolled in Queens (coz the women were pretty there) and Musk found his calling again in Physics . He fell in love with 'Justin wilson' persisting her for dates and event finding out her favorite ice cream from her friend to impress her. Justin recalls Musk was like terminator once he sets sight on something he will get his way. Musk and Justin studied several classes together and emigrated for Post doc to NY. Musk went to Penn state and for once found academic happiness with like minded friends acoording to his mom. Musk impressed professors and peers with his papers on 'Solar energy', Ultra capacitor and space exploration and showed glimpses where his future lies. He and kimbel always had a practice of calling on big shots with ideas and that practice continued in US too.
Penn State led to good friendship with Adil Rashid who was creative happening part to Musk introverted geek .. Rashid and musk made money by hiring their apartment for parties . In US musk joined banking and pitched some solid ideas during dot com boom to bankers esp. PayPal like internet banking but he was shot down ...musk concluded bankers jus followed what everyone did in the field ..Musk first venture Zip2 combined Yelp like listings with map and finally cashed out for 250 Mill with Compaq. Musk at zip 2 was kicked out by vc from CEO to CTO . Musk immediately after cashing out came back internet banking idea and started X.com..paypal under confitti which Thiel and McDonaldf founded competed tooth and nail with X.com .. Mid 2000s both companies ended war of attrition and crazy spending by calling truce and merger - musk became combined CEO of X com but his no nonsense style coupled with favoring windows server opposed to engineers who wanted Linux ensured musk was replaced through an internal coup by 2000s with Theil chosen ... Musk however became advisor and largest shareholder helping PayPal make 1.5billion when eBay bought it . Musk suffered some horrific things in early 2000 - he got misdiagnosed when he was grappling with severe malaria almost died , lost their first child to SIDS and never spoke about it publicly. Miraculously Musk found purpose again after all this by going into space exploration - he picked good talents through 'life of mars ' foundation which soon morphed to spacex. Cottrell was his Russian emissary but musk failed to convince Russians to sell ICBM for 8million .. he handpicked good solid ppl in the valley like Miller and went to work to put a plant 'first life on Mars ' idea .. however in the course of the idea he took up commercial interests like putting payloads in space for low money like 7 million dollars ..Musk set up very ambitious deadline for his new company asking a rocket to ISS be readied in 15months or end 2003 launch .
SpaceX : Most of his employers were highly talented ex Boeing, NASA or TRW folks who got sick of the bureacracy, red tape and highly procedural work in these places. In musk words these places were dishing out Ferraris every time when an Accord would do. Miller from TRW was prime poach .. Holman was no.2 his Engineering division did most of dog work for Falcon 1 (first launch and 1 engine ) and Falcon 5 (5 engine).. musk's team did several unorthodox things to cut down cost and get engine working fast .. they also moved launch pads from LA to army islands near Hawaii .. Falcon 1 as with any other firsts crashed 25secs in blame was put on Holman who promptly resigned ..Most fiercest loyalists for Musk emerged in this period Mary Brown stayed with him like pepper Potts to iron man ... Musk also alienated several of his engineers through his ego and marketing stunts .. which though won outside public and government favors lost good internal folks ..
Electric car revolution : Stromble with his Stanford connection and Acrevolution start up believed electric car was the future and focused on improving lithium ion batteries .. His company was funded by musk post PayPal and even better musk stumbled on original Tesla team led by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. He got impressed with their innovation and can do spirit to challenge Detroit behemoth and he poured millions to realize his own visions through em. Engineering team if course toiled 90+ hrs a week and 2008 Roadster arrived after several advances on battery packs including multiple explosion tests ... Roadster got prebooked by multi millionaires and there was disagreement over musk vision of door sensors leather seats etc and manufacturing process of Eberhard who was let go .. Musk with his marketing muscle devised an ingineous way of reducing costs and improving margin by using Thailand China for parts and tapping into computing advances particularly cloud and testing simulator software ..Tesla used silicon valleys innovative thinking fail fast model to challenge Detroit and it started paying dividends ..noone in Detroit came even closer to anything like roadster in Electric.
Divorce and Aftermath: In this period musk and justin started getting closer to Hollywood celeb life moving with whos who in LA and attending late night parties. Naturally with Elon's prediliction to good looking younger models there was meant to be frictions and as Musk started an affair with 22 year old newbie rising star Toullala Riley .. Divorce became the obvious outcome , even before this musk's 7 day rigorous work life coupled with multiple nannies for his 5 kids and Justin's expectation to be treated equally all started to flare up . Riley surprisingly showed good taste and interest in electric cars and space exploration and for someone in showbiz she was in 'Musk's words' surprisingly virgin. Riley's english parents initially opposed but soon paved way for the inevitable . Musk profited a lot by putting a valuable Pre nup agreement with Justin and kept hold of most of his shares and assets , but lost his home to her. Riley moved in with Musk and they got married just as Obama was being sworn in 2008 amidst an economic recession. Tesla could not live up to the hype and they got more orders than what they could manufacture, money was deserting tesla. Multiple bets were on in blogging circles as to when Tesla was going down. Musk pleaded with his investors & Vcs for more patience and another fresh round to bail the company out , his close friends & ambel put everything they could on to the firm. Meanwhile Spacex was doing well amidst the financial doom they after 3 failures launched Falcon 1 for a fraction of the existing space cost and announced themselves as america's first real private rival to russian soyuz and chinese . Order started coming from countries like malaysia for launching satellites but they needed funds for getting the ambitious Falcon 9 off (9 engine rocket) and depended on Nasa's contract for Space station . Falcon 1 took 6 years 500 people and countless hours of sacrifices . In December 2008 Musk became lucky landing Nasa's 1.6B dollar contract and hence could pay off salaries to employees of spacex and Tesla. Tesla also got a fresh lease of life thanks to some Vcs and importantly 15million from a sale of one of musk's invested start ups. Musk recounts how 2008 was very tough year as Justin started blogging and spreading negativity about him and press latched on to Tesla & spacex troubles. Musk kept his persevarance to ride out this storm of negativity. Spacex hired more engineers most of them directly by Musk and famously they had solve a 500 line code problem and write essay on why they want to join SpaceX. Things were looking up and Musk promised more space probes particulary to mars and his pipe dream was to cut space travel even further by developing 'Reusable' rockets which astrophysisicts and engineers deemed impossible given the Thrust and pressure going into the equipment.
Musk disliked corporate practices like putting acronyms that don’t make sense, he notoriously not known to wait for process checks that led to astro safety manager from NASA being fired . Musk also exactly dint win friends by often berating very intelligent people publicly as Idiots. Musk hired Shotwell who wanted to be a women enterpreneur in tech as she was growing up and did exceedingly well at sales. In fact Shotwell later became president at Spacex and she was instrumental in selling things before Spacex actually built the equipment namely some ISS contracts to NASA. Shotwell was the perfect D&I counter balance to Musk in that she was more empathetic and brought in employee welfare like day care, better compensation etc. Musk though not a fan of space tourism understands that’s an interim ground to make money in this fledling market. In a nod for his capricious attitude NASA on one of the earlier payload malfunctions from SpaceX discovered that rather than wait for weeks to fix it (NASA way) … The spaceX engineering team got it all readied in less than an hour! Musk specifically looks for people who can sacrfice family needs for company and famously brought in chief architect John Davies straight from his masters, IVY league Univ after enquiring about bright very hard working person who had no family. This is the culture at SpaceX and Tesla i.e common to see people working 16 hrs for months even years together. Musk had this peculiar appeal in that despite all his monstrous work ethic and culture even those that got fired by him revered him ! The Dragon capsules successfully docked in Nasa ISS section , leading to more contracts for Shotwell and SpaceX. Musk's hiring pitch for hungry intelligent astrophysicits and engineers is this - We are colonizing mars bit by bit with people , provisions and equipment , are you going to be a part of it ?
Tesla took off from Roadster in 2009 and embraced radical changes when the Roadster morphed to Model S it had noticeably two 'trunks' one of which is due to lack of no regular engine space offset to be used for extra storage. Model S hardly made any sound could go from from 0 to 60mph in an impressive 4 sec period and could go on without charging for 300 miles . More impressive was that it introduced huge touch screen portals and could ignite engine just on sitting. The doors were also futuristic and straight out of a sci fi movie. The Technophiles in Silicon valley paid a big part in its success lapping up everything for 100K $ . Also Tesla had a policy of selling straight to consumers eliminating dealerships and building their own stores . Model S famously got concierged to customers and some folks could come into the HQ do a tour and pick up the car with friends and family . Importantly Tesla brought computing and software upgrade front and center with several updates put In every day eg: Traction control, Viper speed , Better touch sensitivity etc all coming through software builds and it was radical. Detroit companies missed the bus big time because noone saw this coming , they were all busy making fun of Tesla's financial and technical troubles all up till Roadster became a mini rage in 2008 and then Model S took Detroit like a storm.
SpaceX, Tesla and Solarcity being newcomers to well settled incumbents namely Boeing/Lockheed , Detroit biggies and Chinese & European heavy weights attracted heavy politics in the first two decades and had to contend with policy moves from washington , however with the brand of musk building up things started to ease up on the washington lane. In 2012 Musk got back with Riley one year into divorce finalization . Riley cited Musk had started listening to her suggestions and she was not sure if both of them can do better than each other. Riley contrary to employee perception of Musk recounts musk is very very funny and deeply emotional and empathetic to his close circle needs. That is not how his employees recall him , lot of veterans at spacex and Tesla got fired after their 'Use and throw period' … They believe Musk uses them as Ammunition firing at will and he expects 7 days a week no big vacation and complete machine like devotion on the job . Validation of employees claim became true when Musk fired his Pepper potts namely MBB (Mary beth brown) when she legitimately asked for better hikes and raises - Musk after letting her go on a 2 week vacation , tried her job and told her reportedly it is not so tough and I can live without you . Insiders cite 'Riley' behind the scenes pulling the lever for MBB departure , whatever the reason employees believe this is a part of Musk keeping things fresh and employees on leash and toes. Elon believes humans should be interplanetary species and reported his dreams of putting civilization on Mars happening in this century. Only thing Musk is sceptical is how to heat up Mars into a Terraform earth like planet - Musk said he wont be going into space anytime soon and will facilitate humanity's expansion into mars By 2025 he expects a booster and capsule ready to put first astronaut in space and mentions SpaceX has to be ready for up to 10000 trips in a decade or two to populate about 1 million people in Mars costing less than a million bucks. Peter Thiel is impressed musk has evolved from a shy introvert during Paypal days to a very confident , showbiz genius that has a capacity to attract best talents to all his companies. Solarcity is building Gigafactories to supply not just tesla but other car companies and energy conglomorate with Lithium ion and storage capacities and Musk says no one else will take this important plunge but himself. Strobble and Shotwell attest to how musk cannot be wronged in public and they don’t want to land in trouble by telling tidbits about the corporation or musk which he does not buy. Many Silicon valley magnets and writers liken Musk to be a combination of Gates nerdiness and Jobs innovative no nonsense approach.
Musk aims to make spacex launch 1 rocket a month and envisions the share value to cross 100 once it gets public (IPO). Nasa's missions drive the 800-900mill revenue roughly and post NASA's contracts Musk wants more private , businesses involved. Larry Page is a big advocate of Elon and once reportedly joked he views Musk in such great light that he is ready to give away all his wealth to Elon. In fact Musk Page and Brin regularly meet in a secret apartment near Paolo Alto and debate some exceptionally fantastical ideas including vertical private jets, Earth orbiting solar powered passenger taxis etc. Page is a major investor in Elon's firms including Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity and once came very close to purchasing off Tesla from Elon. Musk believes he may die in Mars after the age of 70 though he wants his wife and kids to be in Earth for the forseeable future. Many people who know Musk are worried about his self abusive lifestyle and want him to slow down to see even 70!
