The revenge of the electric car

LIFTOFF

THE FALCON 9 HAS BECOME SPACEX’S WORKHORSE. The rocket looks—let’s face it—like a giant white phallus. It stands 224.4 feet tall, is 12 feet across, and weighs 1.1 million pounds. The rocket is powered by nine engines arranged in an “octaweb” pattern at its base with one engine in the center and eight others encircling it. The engines connect to the first stage, or the main body of the rocket, which bears the blue SpaceX insignia and an American flag. The shorter second stage of the rocket sits on top of the first and is the one that actually ends up doing things in space. It can be outfitted with a rounded container for carrying satellites or a capsule capable of transporting humans. By design, there’s nothing particularly flashy about the Falcon 9’s outward appearance. It’s the spaceship equivalent of an Apple laptop or a Braun kettle—an elegant, purposeful machine stripped of frivolity and waste.

SpaceX sometimes uses Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California to send up these Falcon 9 rockets. Were it not owned by the military, the base would be a resort. The Pacific Ocean runs for miles along its border, and its grounds have wide-open shrubby fields dotted by green hills. Nestled into one hilly spot just at the ocean’s edge are a handful of launchpads. On launch days, the white Falcon 9 breaks up the blue and green landscape, pointing skyward and leaving no doubt about its intentions.

About four hours before a launch, the Falcon 9 starts getting filled with an immense amount of liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene. Some of the liquid oxygen vents out of the rocket as it awaits launch and is kept so cold that it boils off on contact with the metal and air, forming white plumes that stream down the rocket’s sides. This gives the impression of the Falcon 9 huffing and puffing as it limbers up before the journey. The engineers inside of SpaceX’s mission control monitor these fuel systems and all manner of other items. They chat back and forth through headsets and begin cycling through their launch checklist, consumed by what people in the business call “go fever” as they move from one approval to the next. Ten minutes before launch, the humans step out of the way and leave the remaining processes up to automated machines. Everything goes quiet, and the tension builds until right before the main event. That’s when, out of nowhere, the Falcon 9 breaks the silence by letting out a loud gasp.

A white latticed support structure pulls away from its body. The T-minus-ten-seconds countdown begins. Nothing much happens from ten down to four. At the count of three, however, the engines ignite, and the computers conduct a last, oh-so-rapid, health check. Four enormous metal clamps hold the rocket down, as computing systems evaluate all nine engines and measure if there’s sufficient downward force being produced. By the time zero arrives, the rocket has decided that all is well enough to go through with its mission, and the clamps release. The rocket goes to war with inertia, and then, with flames surrounding its base and snow-thick plumes of the liquid oxygen filling the air, it shoots up. Seeing something so large hold so straight and steady while suspended in midair is hard for the brain to register. It is foreign, inexplicable. About twenty seconds after liftoff, the spectators placed safely a few miles away catch the first faceful of the Falcon 9’s rumble. It’s a distinct sound—a sort of staccato crackling that arises from chemicals whipped into a violent frenzy. Pant legs vibrate from shock waves produced by a stream of sonic booms coming out of the Falcon 9’s exhaust. The white rocket climbs higher and higher with impressive stamina. After about a minute, it’s just a red spot in the sky, and then—poof—it’s gone. Only a cynical dullard could come away from witnessing this feeling anything other than wonder at what man can accomplish.

For Elon Musk, this spectacle has turned into a familiar experience. SpaceX has metamorphosed from the joke of the aeronautics industry into one of its most consistent operators. SpaceX sends a rocket up about once a month, carrying satellites for companies and nations and supplies to the International Space Station. Where the Falcon 1 blasting off from Kwajalein was the work of a start-up, the Falcon 9 taking off from Vandenberg is the work of an aerospace superpower. SpaceX can undercut its U.S. competitors—Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences—on price by a ridiculous margin. It also offers U.S. customers a peace of mind that its rivals can’t. Where these competitors rely on Russian and other foreign suppliers, SpaceX makes all of its machines from scratch in the United States. Because of its low costs, SpaceX has once again made the United States a player in the worldwide commercial launch market. Its $60 million per launch cost is much less than what Europe and Japan charge and trumps even the relative bargains offered by the Russians and Chinese, who have the added benefit of decades of sunk government investment into their space programs as well as cheap labor.

The United States continues to take great pride in having Boeing compete against Airbus and other foreign aircraft makers. For some reason, though, government leaders and the public have been willing to concede much of the commercial launch market. It’s a disheartening and shortsighted position. The total market for satellites, related services, and the rocket launches needed to carry them to space has exploded over the past decade from about $60 billion per year to more than $200 billion. [http://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/2013_SSIR_ Final.pdf] A number of countries pay to send up their own spy, communication, and weather satellites. Companies then turn to space for television, Internet, radio, weather, navigation, and imaging services. The machines in space supply the fabric of modern life, and they’re going to become more capable and interesting at a rapid pace. A whole new breed of satellite makers has just appeared on the scene with the ability to answer Google-like queries about our planet. These satellites can zoom in on Iowa and determine when cornfields are at peak yields and ready to harvest, and they can count cars in Wal-Mart parking lots throughout California to calculate shopping demand during the holiday season. The start-ups making these types of innovative machines must often turn to the Russians to get them into space, but SpaceX intends to change that.

The United States has remained competitive in the most lucrative parts of the space industry, building the actual satellites and complementary systems and services to run them. Each year, the United States makes about one-third of all satellites and takes about 60 percent of the global satellite revenue. The majority of this revenue comes from business done with the U.S. government. China, Europe, and Russia account for almost all of the remaining satellite sales and launches. It’s expected that China’s role in the space industry will increase, while Russia has vowed to spend $50 billion on revitalizing its space program. This leaves the United States dealing with two of its least-favored nations in space matters and doing so without much leverage. Case in point: the retirement of the space shuttle made the United States totally dependent on the Russians to get astronauts to the ISS. Russia gets to charge $70 million per person for the trip and to cut the United States off as it sees fit during political rifts. At present, SpaceX looks like the best hope of breaking this cycle and giving back to America its ability to take people into space.

SpaceX has become the free radical trying to upend everything about this industry. It doesn’t want to handle a few launches per year or to rely on government contracts for survival. Musk’s goal is to use manufacturing breakthroughs and launchpad advances to create a drastic drop in the cost of getting things to space. Most significant, he’s been testing rockets that can push their payload to space and then return to Earth and land with supreme accuracy on a pad floating at sea or even their original launchpad. Instead of having its rockets break apart after crashing into the sea, SpaceX will use reverse thrusters to lower them down softly and reuse them. Within the next few years, SpaceX expects to cut its price to at least one-tenth that of its rivals. Reusing its rockets will drive the bulk of this reduction and SpaceX’s competitive advantage. Imagine one airline that flies the same plane over and over again, competing against others that dispose of their planes after every flight. /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./ Through its cost advantages, SpaceX hopes to take over the majority of the world’s commercial launches, and there’s evidence that the company is on its way toward doing just that. To date, it has flown satellites for Canadian, European, and Asian customers and completed about two dozen launches. Its public launch manifest stretches out for a number of years, and SpaceX has more than fifty flights planned, which are all together worth more than $5 billion. The company remains privately owned with Musk as the largest shareholder alongside outside investors including venture capital firms like the Founders Fund and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, giving it a competitive ethos its rivals lack. Since getting past its near-death experience in 2008, SpaceX has been profitable and is estimated to be worth $12 billion.

Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity—they are all expressions of Musk. SpaceX is Musk. Its foibles emanate directly from him, as do its successes. Part of this comes from Musk’s maniacal attention to detail and involvement in every SpaceX endeavor. He’s hands-on to a degree that would make Hugh Hefner feel inadequate. Part of it stems from SpaceX being the apotheosis of the Cult of Musk. Employees fear Musk. They adore Musk. The give up their lives for Musk, and they usually do all of this simultaneously.

Musk’s demanding management style can only flourish because of the otherworldly—in a literal sense—aspirations of the company. While the rest of the aerospace industry has been content to keep sending what look like relics from the 1960s into space, SpaceX has made a point of doing just the opposite. Its reusable rockets and reusable spaceships look like true twenty-first-century machines. The modernization of the equipment is not just for show. It reflects SpaceX’s constant push to advance its technology and change the economics of the industry. Musk does not simply want to lower the cost of deploying satellites and resupplying the space station. He wants to lower the cost of launches to the point that it becomes economical and practical to fly thousands upon thousands of supply trips to Mars and start a colony. Musk wants to conquer the solar system, and, as it stands, there’s just one company where you can work if that sort of quest gets you out of bed in the morning.

It seems unfathomable, but the rest of the space industry has made space boring. The Russians, who dominate much of the business of sending things and people to space, do so with decades-old equipment. The cramped Soyuz capsule that takes people to the space station has mechanical knobs and computer screens that appear unchanged from its inaugural 1966 flight. Countries new to the space race have mimicked the antiquated Russian and American equipment with maddening accuracy. When young people get into the aerospace industry, they’re forced to either laugh or cry at the state of the machines. Nothing sucks the fun out of working on a spaceship like controlling it with mechanisms last seen in a 1960s laundromat. And the actual work environment is as outmoded as the machines. Hotshot college graduates have historically been forced to pick between a variety of slow-moving military contractors and interesting but ineffectual start-ups.

Musk has managed to take these negatives surrounding the aerospace business and turn them into gains for SpaceX. He’s presented the company as anything but another aerospace contractor. SpaceX is the hip, forward-thinking place that’s brought the perks of Silicon Valley—namely frozen yogurt, stock options, speedy decision making, and a flat corporate structure—to a staid industry. People who know Musk well tend to describe him more as a general than a CEO, and this is apt. He’s built an engineering army by having the pick of just about anyone in the business that SpaceX wants.

The SpaceX hiring model places some emphasis on getting top marks at top schools. But most of the attention goes toward spotting engineers who have exhibited type A personality traits over the course of their lives. The company’s recruiters look for people who might excel at robot-building competitions or who are car-racing hobbyists who have built unusual vehicles. The object is to find individuals who ooze passion, can work well as part of a team, and have real-world experience bending metal. “Even if you’re someone who writes code for your job, you need to understand how mechanical things work,” said Dolly Singh, who spent five years as the head of talent acquisition at SpaceX. “We were looking for people that had been building things since they were little.”

Sometimes these people walked through the front door. Other times, Singh relied on a handful of enterprising techniques to find them. She became famous for trawling through academic papers to find engineers with very specific skills, cold-calling researchers at labs and plucking possessed engineers out of college. At trade shows and conferences, SpaceX recruiters wooed interesting candidates they had spotted with a cloak-and-dagger shtick. They would hand out blank envelopes that contained invitations to meet at a specific time and place, usually a bar or restaurant near the event, for an initial interview. The candidates that showed up would discover they were among only a handful of people who been anointed out of all the conference attendees. They were immediately made to feel special and inspired.

Like many tech companies, SpaceX subjects potential hires to a gauntlet of interviews and tests. Some of the interviews are easygoing chats in which both parties get to feel each other out; others are filled with quizzes that can be quite hard. Engineers tend to face the most rigorous interrogations, although business types and salesmen are made to suffer, too. Coders who expect to pass through standard challenges have rude awakenings. Companies will typically challenge software developers on the spot by asking them to solve problems that require a couple of dozen lines of code. The standard SpaceX problem requires five hundred or more lines of code. All potential employees who make their way to the end of the interview process then handle one more task. They’re asked to write an essay for Musk about why they want to work at SpaceX.

The reward for solving the puzzles, acting clever in interviews, and penning up a good essay is a meeting with Musk. He interviewed almost every one of SpaceX’s first one thousand hires, including the janitors and technicians, and has continued to interview the engineers as the company’s workforce swelled. Each employee receives a warning before going to meet with Musk. The interview, he or she is told, could last anywhere from thirty seconds to fifteen minutes. Elon will likely keep on writing e-mails and working during the initial part of the interview and not speak much. Don’t panic. That’s normal. Eventually, he will turn around in his chair to face you. Even then, though, he might not make actual eye contact with you or fully acknowledge your presence. Don’t panic. That’s normal. In due course, he will speak to you. From that point, the tales of engineers who have interviewed with Musk run the gamut from torturous experiences to the sublime. He might ask one question or he might ask several. You can be sure, though, that he will roll out the Riddle: “You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?” One answer to that is the North Pole, and most of the engineers get it right away. That’s when Musk will follow with “Where else could you be?” The other answer is somewhere close to the South Pole where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile. Fewer engineers get this answer, and Musk will happily walk them through that riddle and others and cite any relevant equations during his explanations. He tends to care less about whether or not the person gets the answer than about how they describe the problem and their approach to solving it.

When speaking to potential recruits, Singh tried to energize them and be up front about the demands of SpaceX and of Musk at the same time. “The recruiting pitch was SpaceX is special forces,” she said. “If you want as hard as it gets, then great. If not, then you shouldn’t come here.” Once at SpaceX, the new employees found out very quickly if they were indeed up for the challenge. Many of them would quit within the first few months because of the ninety-plus-hour workweeks. Others quit because they could not handle just how direct Musk and the other executives were during meetings. “Elon doesn’t know about you and he hasn’t thought through whether or not something is going to hurt your feelings,” Singh said. “He just knows what the fuck he wants done. People who did not normalize to his communication style did not do well.”

There’s an impression that SpaceX suffers from incredibly high turnover, and the company has without question churned through a fair number of bodies. Many of the key executives who helped start the company, however, have hung on for a decade or more. Among the rank-and-file engineers, most people stay on for at least five years to have their stock options vest and to see their projects through. This is typical behavior for any technology company. SpaceX and Musk also seem to inspire an unusual level of loyalty. Musk has managed to conjure up that Steve Jobs–like zeal among his troops. “His vision is so clear,” Singh said. “He almost hypnotizes you. He gives you the crazy eye, and it’s like, yes, we can get to Mars.” Take that a bit further and you arrive at a pleasure-pain, sadomasochistic vibe that comes with working for Musk. Numerous people interviewed for this book decried the work hours, Musk’s blunt style, and his sometimes ludicrous expectations. Yet almost every person—even those who had been fired—still worshipped Musk and talked about him in terms usually reserved for superheroes or deities.

SpaceX’s original headquarters in El Segundo were not quite up to the company’s desired image as a place where the cool kids want to work. This is not a problem for SpaceX’s new facility in Hawthorne. The building’s address is 1 Rocket Road, and it has the Hawthorne Municipal Airport and several tooling and manufacturing companies as neighbors. While the SpaceX building resembles the others in size and shape, its all-white color makes it the obvious outlier. The structure looks like a gargantuan, rectangular glacier that’s been planted in the midst of a particularly soulless portion of Los Angeles County’s sprawl.

Visitors to SpaceX have to walk past a security guard and through a small executive parking lot where Musk parks his black Model S, which flanks the building’s entryway. The front doors are reflective and hide what’s on the inside, which is more white. There are white walls in the foyer, a funky white table in the waiting area, and a white check-in desk with a pair of orchids sitting in white pots. After going through the registration process, guests are given a name badge and led into the main SpaceX office space. Musk’s cubicle—a supersize unit—sits to the right where he has a couple of celebratory Aviation Week magazine covers up on the wall, pictures of his boys, next to a huge flat-screen monitor, and various knickknacks on his desk, including a boomerang, some books, a bottle of wine, and a giant samurai sword named Lady Vivamus, which Musk received when he won the Heinlein Prize, an award given for big achievements in commercial space. Hundreds of other people work in cubicles amid the big, wide-open area, most of them executives, engineers, software developers, and salespeople tapping away on their computers. The conference rooms that surround their desks all have space-themed names like Apollo or Wernher von Braun and little nameplates that explain the label’s significance. The largest conference rooms have ultramodern chairs—high-backed, sleek red jobs that surround large glass tables—while panoramic photos of a Falcon 1 taking off from Kwaj or the Dragon capsule docking with the ISS hang on the walls in the background.

Take away the rocket swag and the samurai sword and this central part of the SpaceX office looks just like what you might find at your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley headquarters. The same thing cannot be said for what visitors encounter as they pass through a pair of double doors into the heart of the SpaceX factory.

The 550,000-square-foot factory floor is difficult to process at first glance. It’s one continuous space with grayish epoxied floors, white walls, and white support columns. A small city’s worth of stuff—people, machines, noise—has been piled into this area. Just near the entryway, one of the Dragon capsules that has gone to the ISS and returned to Earth hangs from the ceiling with black burn marks running down its side. Just under the capsule on the ground are a pair of the twenty-five-foot-long landing legs built by SpaceX to let the Falcon rocket come to a gentle rest on the ground after a flight so it can be flown again. To the left side of this entryway area there’s a kitchen, and to the right side there’s the mission control room. It’s a closed-off area with expansive glass windows and fronted by wall-size screens for tracking a rocket’s progress. It has four rows of desks with about ten computers each for the mission control staff. Step a bit farther into the factory and there are a handful of industrial work areas separated from each other in the most informal of ways. In some spots there are blue lines on the floor to mark off an area and in other spots blue workbenches have been arranged in squares to cordon off the space. It’s a common sight to have one of the Merlin engines raised up in the middle of one of these work areas with a half dozen technicians wiring it up and tuning its bits and pieces.

Just behind these workspaces is a glass-enclosed square big enough to fit two of the Dragon capsules. This is a clean room where people must wear lab coats and hairnets to fiddle with the capsules without contaminating them. About forty feet to the left, there are several Falcon 9 rockets lying next to each other horizontally that have been painted and await transport. There are some areas tucked in between all of this that have blue walls and appear to have been covered by fabric. These are top-secret zones where SpaceX might be working on a fanciful astronaut’s outfit or rocket part that it has to hide from visitors and employees not tied to the projects. There’s a large area off to the side where SpaceX builds all of its electronics, another area for creating specialized composite materials, and another for making the bus-sized fairings that wrap around the satellites. Hundreds of people move about at the same time through the factory—a mix of gritty technicians with tattoos and bandanas, and young, white-collar engineers. The sweaty smell of kids who have just come off the playground permeates the building and hints at its nonstop activity.

Musk has left his personal touches throughout the factory. There are small things like the data center that has been bathed in blue lights to give it a sci-fi feel. The refrigerator-sized computers under the lights have been labeled with big block letters to make it look like they were made by Cyberdyne Systems, the fictional company from the Terminator movie franchise. Near the elevators, Musk has placed a glowing life-size Iron Man figure. Surely the factory’s most Muskian element is the office space that has been built smack-dab in its center. This is a three-story glass structure with meeting rooms and desks that rises up between various welding and construction areas. It looks and feels bizarre to have a see-through office inside this hive of industry. Musk, though, wanted his engineers to watch what was going on with the machines at all times and to make sure they had to walk through the factory and talk to the technicians on the way to their desks.

The factory is a temple devoted to what SpaceX sees as its major weapon in the rocket-building game, in-house manufacturing. SpaceX manufactures between 80 percent and 90 percent of its rockets, engines, electronics, and other parts. It’s a strategy that flat-out dumbfounds SpaceX’s competitors, like United Launch Alliance, or ULA, which openly brags about depending on more than 1,200 suppliers to make its end products. (ULA, a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, sees itself as an engine of job creation rather than a model of inefficiency.)

A typical aerospace company comes up with the list of parts that it needs for a launch system and then hands off their design and specifications to myriad third parties who then actually build the hardware. SpaceX tends to buy as little as possible to save money and because it sees depending on suppliers—especially foreign ones—as a weakness. This approach comes off as excessive at first blush. Companies have made things like radios and power distribution units for decades. Reinventing the wheel for every computer and machine on a rocket could introduce more chances for error and, in general, be a waste of time. But for SpaceX, the strategy works. In addition to building its own engines, rocket bodies, and capsules, SpaceX designs its own motherboards and circuits, sensors to detect vibrations, flight computers, and solar panels. Just by streamlining a radio, for instance, SpaceX’s engineers have found that they can reduce the weight of the device by about 20 percent. And the cost savings for a homemade radio are dramatic, dropping from between $50,000 to $100,000 for the industrial-grade equipment used by aerospace companies to $5,000 for SpaceX’s unit.

It’s hard to believe these kinds of price differentials at first, but there are dozens if not hundreds of places where SpaceX has secured such savings. The equipment at SpaceX tends to be built out of readily available consumer electronics as opposed to “space grade” equipment used by others in the industry. SpaceX has had to work for years to prove to NASA that standard electronics have gotten good enough to compete with the more expensive, specialized gear trusted in years past. “Traditional aerospace has been doing things the same way for a very, very long time,” said Drew Eldeen, a former SpaceX engineer. “The biggest challenge was convincing NASA to give something new a try and building a paper trail that showed the parts were high enough quality.” To prove that it’s making the right choice to NASA and itself, SpaceX will sometimes load a rocket with both the standard equipment and prototypes of its own design for testing during flight. Engineers then compare the performance characteristics of the devices. Once a SpaceX design equals or outperforms the commercial products, it becomes the de facto hardware.

There have also been numerous times when SpaceX has done pioneering work on advancing very complex hardware systems. A classic example of this is one of the factory’s weirder-looking contraptions, a two-story machine designed to perform what’s known as friction stir welding. The machine allows SpaceX to automate the welding process for massive sheets of metal like the ones that make up the bodies of the Falcon rockets. An arm takes one of the rocket’s body panels, lines it up against another body panel, and then joins them together with a weld that could run twenty feet or more. Aerospace companies typically try to avoid welds whenever possible because they create weaknesses in the metal, and that’s limited the size of metal sheets they can use and forced other design constraints. From the early days of SpaceX, Musk pushed the company to master friction stir welding, in which a spinning head is smashed at high speeds into the join between two pieces of metal in a bid to make their crystalline structures merge. It’s as if you heated two sheets of aluminum foil and then joined them by putting your thumb down on the seam and twisting the metal together. This type of welding tends to result in much stronger bonds than traditional welds. Companies had performed friction stir welding before but not on structures as large as a rocket’s body or to the degree to which SpaceX has used the technique. As a result of its trials and errors, SpaceX can now join large, thin sheets of metal and shave hundreds of pounds off the weight of the Falcon rockets, as it’s able to use lighter-weight alloys and avoid using rivets, fasteners, and other support structures. Musk’s competitors in the auto industry might soon need to do the same because SpaceX has transferred some of the equipment and techniques to Tesla. The hope is that Tesla will be able to make lighter, stronger cars.

The technology has proven so valuable that SpaceX’s competitors have started to copy it and have tried to poach some of the company’s experts in the field. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s secretive rocket company, has been particularly aggressive, hiring away Ray Miryekta, one of the world’s foremost friction stir welding experts and igniting a major rift with Musk. “Blue Origin does these surgical strikes on specialized talent /Blue Origin also hired away a large chunk of SpaceX’s propulsion team./ offering like double their salaries. I think it’s unnecessary and a bit rude,” Musk said. Within SpaceX, Blue Origin is mockingly referred to as BO and at one point the company created an e-mail filter to detect messages with “blue” and “origin” to block the poaching. The relationship between Musk and Bezos has soured, and they no longer chat about their shared ambition of getting to Mars. “I do think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos,” Musk said. “He has a relentless work ethic and wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he’s not the most fun guy, honestly.” /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.”/

In the early days of SpaceX, Musk knew little about the machines and amount of grunt work that goes into making rockets. He rebuffed requests to buy specialized tooling equipment, until the engineers could explain in clear terms why they needed certain things and until experience taught him better. Musk also had yet to master some of the management techniques for which he would become both famous and to some degree infamous.

Musk’s growth as a CEO and rocket expert occurred alongside SpaceX’s maturation as a company. At the start of the Falcon 1 journey, Musk was a forceful software executive trying to learn some basic things about a very different world. At Zip2 and PayPal, he felt comfortable standing up for his positions and directing teams of coders. At SpaceX, he had to pick things up on the job. Musk initially relied on textbooks to form the bulk of his rocketry knowledge. But as SpaceX hired one brilliant person after another, Musk realized he could tap into their stores of knowledge. He would trap an engineer in the SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material. “I thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.” People who have spent significant time with Musk will attest to his abilities to absorb incredible quantities of information with near-flawless recall. It’s one of his most impressive and intimidating skills and seems to work just as well in the present day as it did when he was a child vacuuming books into his brain. After a couple of years running SpaceX, Musk had turned into an aerospace expert on a level that few technology CEOs ever approach in their respective fields. “He was teaching us about the value of time, and we were teaching him about rocketry,” Brogan said.

In regards to time, Musk may well set more aggressive delivery targets for very difficult-to-make products than any executive in history. Both his employees and the public have found this to be one of the more jarring aspects of Musk’s character. “Elon has always been optimistic,” Brogan said. “That’s the nice word. He can be a downright liar about when things need to get done. He will pick the most aggressive time schedule imaginable assuming everything goes right, and then accelerate it by assuming that everyone can work harder.”

Musk has been pilloried by the press for setting and then missing product delivery dates. It’s one of the habits that got him in the most trouble as SpaceX and Tesla tried to bring their first products to market. Time and again, Musk found himself making a public appearance where he had to come up with a new batch of excuses for a delay. Reminded about the initial 2003 target date to fly the Falcon 1, Musk acted shocked. “Are you serious?” he said. “We said that? Okay, that’s ridiculous. I think I just didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. The only thing I had prior experience in was software, and, yeah, you can write a bunch of software and launch a website in a year. No problem. This isn’t like software. It doesn’t work that way with rockets.” Musk simply cannot help himself. He’s an optimist by nature, and it can feel like he makes calculations for how long it will take to do something based on the idea that things will progress without flaw at every step and that all the members of his team have Muskian abilities and work ethics. As Brogan joked, Musk might forecast how long a software project will take by timing the amount of seconds needed physically to write a line of code and then extrapolating that out to match however many lines of code he expects the final piece of software to be. It’s an imperfect analogy but one that does not seem that far off from Musk’s worldview. “Everything he does is fast,” Brogan said. “He pees fast. It’s like a fire hose—three seconds and out. He’s authentically in a hurry.”

Asked about his approach, Musk said,

I certainly don’t try to set impossible goals. I think impossible goals are demotivating. You don’t want to tell people to go through a wall by banging their head against it. I don’t ever set intentionally impossible goals. But I’ve certainly always been optimistic on time frames. I’m trying to recalibrate to be a little more realistic.

I don’t assume that it’s just like 100 of me or something like that. I mean, in the case of the early SpaceX days, it would have been just the lack of understanding of what it takes to develop a rocket. In that case I was off by, say, 200 percent. I think future programs might be off by anywhere from like 25 percent to 50 percent as opposed to 200 percent.

So, I think generally you do want to have a timeline where, based on everything you know about, the schedule should be X, and you execute towards that, but with the understanding that there will be all sorts of things that you don’t know about that you will encounter that will push the date beyond that. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have tried to aim for that date from the beginning because aiming for something else would have been an arbitrary time increase.

It’s different to say, “Well, what do you promise people?” Because you want to try to promise people something that includes schedule margin. But in order to achieve the external promised schedule, you’ve got to have an internal schedule that’s more aggressive than that. Sometimes you still miss the external schedule.

SpaceX, by the way, is not alone here. Being late is par for the course in the aerospace industry. It’s not a question of if it’s late, it’s how late will the program be. I don’t think an aerospace program has been completed on time since bloody World War II.

Dealing with the epically aggressive schedules and Musk’s expectations has required SpaceX’s engineers to develop a variety of survival techniques. Musk often asks for highly detailed proposals for how projects will be accomplished. The employees have learned never to break the time needed to accomplish something down into months or weeks. Musk wants day-by-day and hour-by-hour forecasts and sometimes even minute-by-minute countdowns, and the fallout from missed schedules is severe. “You had to put in when you would go to the bathroom,” Brogan said. “I’m like, ‘Elon, sometimes people need to take a long dump.’” SpaceX’s top managers work together to, in essence, create fake schedules that they know will please Musk but that are basically impossible to achieve. This would not be such a horrible situation if the targets were kept internal. Musk, however, tends to quote these fake schedules to customers, unintentionally giving them false hope. Typically, it falls to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, to clean up the resulting mess. She will either need to ring up a customer to give them a more realistic timeline or concoct a litany of excuses to explain away the inevitable delays. “Poor Gwynne,” Brogan said. “Just to hear her on the phone with the customers is agonizing.”

There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The ideal SpaceX employee is someone like Steve Davis, the director of advanced projects at SpaceX. “He’s been working sixteen hours a day every day for years,” Brogan said. “He gets more done than eleven people working together.”

To find Davis, Musk called a teaching assistant /Michael Colonno./ in Stanford’s aeronautics department and asked him if there were any hardworking, bright master’s and doctoral candidates who didn’t have families. The TA pointed Musk to Davis, who was pursuing a master’s degree in aerospace engineering to add to degrees in finance, mechanical engineering, and particle physics. Musk called Davis on a Wednesday and offered him a job the following Friday. Davis was the twenty-second SpaceX hire and has ended up the twelfth most senior person still at the company. He turned thirty-five in 2014.

Davis did his tour of duty on Kwaj and considered it the greatest time of his life. “Every night, you could either sleep by the rocket in this tent shelter where the geckos crawled all over you or take this one-hour boat ride that made you seasick back to the main island,” he said. “Every night, you had to pick the pain that you remembered least. You got so hot and exhausted. It was just amazing.” After working on the Falcon 1, Davis moved to the Falcon 9 and then Dragon.

The Dragon capsule took SpaceX four years to design. It’s likely the fastest project of its ilk done in the history of the aerospace industry. The project started with Musk and a handful of engineers, most of them under thirty years old, and peaked at one hundred people. /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.”/ They cribbed from past capsule work and read over every paper published by NASA and other aeronautics bodies around projects like Gemini and Apollo. “If you go search for something like Apollo’s reentry guidance algorithm, there are these great databases that will just spit out the answer,” Davis said. The engineers at SpaceX then had to figure out how to advance these past efforts and bring the capsule into the modern age. Some of the areas of improvement were obvious and easily accomplished, while others required more ingenuity. Saturn 5 and Apollo had colossal computing bays that produced only a fraction of the computer horsepower that can be achieved today on, say, an iPad. The SpaceX engineers knew they could save a lot of room by cutting out some of the computers while also adding capabilities with their more powerful equipment. The engineers decided that while Dragon would look a lot like Apollo, it would have steeper wall angles, to clear space for gear and for the astronauts that the company hoped to fly. SpaceX also got the recipe for its heat shield material, called PICA, through a deal with NASA. The SpaceX engineers found out how to make the PICA material less expensively and improved the underlying recipe so that Dragon—from day one—could withstand the heat of a reentry coming back from Mars. /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./ The total cost for Dragon came in at $300 million, which would be on the order of 10 to 30 times less than capsule projects built by other companies. “The metal comes in, we roll it out, weld it, and make things,” Davis said. “We build almost everything in-house. That is why the costs have come down.”

Davis, like Brogan and plenty of other SpaceX engineers, has had Musk ask for the seemingly impossible. His favorite request dates back to 2004. SpaceX needed an actuator that would trigger the gimbal action used to steer the upper stage of Falcon 1. Davis had never built a piece of hardware before in his life and naturally went out to find some suppliers who could make an electromechanical actuator for him. He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, ‘That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator. At the end of the process, he toiled for three hours writing an e-mail to Musk covering the pros and cons of the device. The e-mail went into gory detail about how Davis had designed the part, why he had made various choices, and what its cost would be. As he pressed send, Davis felt anxiety surge through his body knowing that he’d given his all for almost a year to do something an engineer at another aerospace company would not even attempt. Musk rewarded all of this toil and angst with one of his standard responses. He wrote back, “Ok.” The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space. “I put every ounce of intellectual capital I had into that e-mail and one minute later got that simple response,” Davis said. “Everyone in the company was having that same experience. One of my favorite things about Elon is his ability to make enormous decisions very quickly. That is still how it works today.”

Kevin Watson can attest to that. He arrived at SpaceX in 2008 after spending twenty-four years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Watson worked on a wide variety of projects at JPL, including building and testing computing systems that could withstand the harsh conditions of space. JPL would typically buy expensive, specially toughened computers, and this frustrated Watson. He daydreamed about ways to handcraft much cheaper, equally effective computers. While having his job interview with Musk, Watson learned that SpaceX needed just this type of thinking. Musk wanted the bulk of a rocket’s computing systems to cost no more than $10,000. It was an insane figure by aerospace industry standards, where the avionics systems for a rocket typically cost well over $10 million. “In traditional aerospace, it would cost you more than ten thousand dollars just for the food at a meeting to discuss the cost of the avionics,” Watson said.

During the job interview, Watson promised Musk that he could do the improbable and deliver the $10,000 avionics system. He began working on making the computers for Dragon right after being hired. The first system was called CUCU, pronounced “cuckoo.” This communications box would go inside the International Space Station and communicate back with Dragon. A number of people at NASA referred to the SpaceX engineers as “the guys in the garage” and were cynical about the start-up’s ability to do much of anything, including building this type of machine. But SpaceX produced the communication computer in record time, and it ended up as the first system of its kind to pass NASA’s protocol tests on the first try. NASA officials were forced to say “cuckoo” over and over again during meetings—a small act of defiance SpaceX had planned all along to torture NASA. As the months went on, Watson and other engineers built out the complete computing systems for Dragon and then adapted the technology for Falcon 9. The result was a fully redundant avionics platform that used a mix of off-the-shelf computing gear and products built in-house by SpaceX. It cost a bit more than $10,000 but came close to meeting Musk’s goal.

SpaceX reinvigorated Watson, who had become disenchanted with JPL’s acceptance of wasteful spending and bureaucracy. Musk had to sign off on every expenditure over $10,000. “It was his money that we were spending, and he was keeping an eye on it, as he damn well should,” Watson said. “He made sure nothing stupid was happening.” Decisions were made quickly during weekly meetings, and the entire company bought into them. “It was amazing how fast people would adapt to what came out of those meetings,” Watson said. “The entire ship could turn ninety degrees instantly. Lockheed Martin could never do anything like that.” Watson continued:

Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. I don’t want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.

One of Watson’s top discoveries at SpaceX was the test bed on the third floor of the Hawthorne factory. SpaceX has test versions of all the hardware and electronics that go into a rocket laid out on metal tables. It has in effect replicated the innards of a rocket end to end in order to run thousands of flight simulations. Someone “launches” the rocket from a computer and then every piece of mechanical and computing hardware is monitored with sensors. An engineer can tell a valve to open, then check to see if it opened, how quickly it opened, and the level of current running to it. This testing apparatus lets SpaceX engineers practice ahead of launches and figure out how they would deal with all manner of anomalies. During the actual flights, SpaceX has people in the test facility who can replicate errors seen on Falcon or Dragon and make adjustments accordingly. SpaceX has made numerous changes on the fly with this system. In one case someone spotted an error in a software file in the hours right before a launch. SpaceX’s engineers changed the file, checked how it affected the test hardware, and, when no problems were detected, sent the file to the Falcon 9, waiting on the launchpad, all in less than thirty minutes. “NASA wasn’t used to this,” Watson said. “If something went wrong with the shuttle, everyone was just resigned to waiting three weeks before they could try and launch again.” [Another moment like this occurred in late 2010 during a launch attempt in Florida. One of the SpaceX technicians had left a hatch open overnight at the launchpad, which allowed rain to flood a lower-level computing room. The water caused major issues with SpaceX’s computing equipment, and another technician had to fly out from California right away with Musk’s American Express card in hand to fix the emergency in the days leading up to the launch.

The SpaceX engineers bought new computing gear right away and set it up in the room. They needed to run the equipment through standard tests to make sure it could maintain a certain voltage level. It was late at night on a Sunday, and they couldn’t get access on short notice to a device that could simulate the high electrical load. One of the engineers improvised by going to a hardware store where he bought twenty-five headlamps for golf carts. The SpaceX crew strung them all together back at the launchpad and hung them from a wall. They then put on their sunglasses and lit everything up, knowing that if a power supply for the computing equipment could survive this test, it would be okay for the flight. The process was repeated for numerous power supplies, and the team worked from 9 P.M. that night until 7 A.M. and finished in time to keep the launch on track.]

From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that’s bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck:

There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.

That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action—I have given enough warnings over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past.

For example, there should be no “HTS” [horizontal test stand] or “VTS” [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A “stand” at our test site is obviously a *test* stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with “Tripod,” which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name!

The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, eg MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.

This was classic Musk. The e-mail is rough in its tone and yet not really unwarranted for a guy who just wants things done as efficiently as possible. It obsesses over something that other people might find trivial and yet he has a definite point. It’s comical in that Musk wants all acronym approvals to run directly through him, but that’s entirely in keeping with the hands-on management style that has, mainly, worked well at both SpaceX and Tesla. Employees have since dubbed the acronym policy the ASS Rule.

The guiding principle at SpaceX is to embrace your work and get stuff done. People who await guidance or detailed instructions languish. The same goes for workers who crave feedback. And the absolute worst thing that someone can do is inform Musk that what he’s asking is impossible. An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.”

It is jarring for both parties when the SpaceX culture rubs against more bureaucratic bodies like NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the Federal Aviation Administration. The first inklings of these difficulties appeared on Kwaj, where government officials sometimes questioned what they saw as SpaceX’s cavalier approach to the launch process. There were times when SpaceX would want to make a change to its launch procedures and any such change would require a pile of paperwork. SpaceX, for example, would have written down all the steps needed to replace a filter—put on gloves, wear safety goggles, remove a nut—and then want to alter this procedure or use a different type of filter. The FAA would need a week to review the new process before SpaceX could actually go about changing the filter on the rocket, a lag that both the engineers and Musk found ridiculous. On one occasion after this type of thing happened, Musk laid into an FAA official while on a conference call with members of the SpaceX team and NASA. “It got hot and heated, and he berated this guy on a personal level for like ten minutes,” Brogan said.

Musk did not recall this incident but did remember other confrontations with the FAA. One time he compiled a list of things an FAA subordinate had said during a meeting that Musk found silly and sent the list along to the guy’s boss. “And then his dingbat manager sent me this long e-mail about how he had been in the shuttle program and in charge of twenty launches or something like that and how dare I say that the other guy was wrong,” Musk said. “I told him, ‘Not only is he wrong, and let me rearticulate the reasons, but you’re wrong, and let me articulate the reasons.’ I don’t think he sent me another e-mail after that. We’re trying to have a really big impact on the space industry. If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.

“There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. It’s because there’s a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would any rational person behave in such a scenario?”

In the middle of 2009, SpaceX hired Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut, as its vice president of astronaut safety and mission assurance. Bowersox fit the mold of recruit prized by a classic big aerospace company. He had a degree in aerospace engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, had been a test pilot in the air force, and flew on the space shuttle a handful of times. Many people within SpaceX saw his arrival at the company as a good thing. He was considered a diligent, dignified sort who would provide a second set of eyes to many of SpaceX’s procedures, checking to make sure the company went about things in a safe, standardized manner. Bowersox ended up smack in the middle of the constant pull and push at SpaceX between doing things efficiently and agonizing over traditional procedures. He and Musk were increasingly at odds as the months passed, and Bowersox started to feel as if his opinions were being ignored. During one incident in particular, a part made it all the way to the test stand with a major flaw—described by one engineer as the equivalent of a coffee cup not having a bottom—instead of being caught at the factory. According to observers, Bowersox argued that SpaceX should go back and investigate the process that led to the mistake and fix its root cause. Musk had already decided that he knew the basis of the problem and dismissed Bowersox after a couple of years on the job. (Bowersox declined to speak on the record about his time at SpaceX.) A number of people inside SpaceX saw the Bowersox incident as an example of Musk’s hard-charging manner undermining some much-needed process. Musk had a totally different take on the situation, casting Bowersox as not being up to the engineering demands at SpaceX.

A handful of high-ranking government officials gave me their candid takes on Musk, albeit without being willing to put their names to the remarks. One found Musk’s treatment of air force generals and military men of similar rank appalling. Musk has been known to let even high-ranking officials have it when he thinks they’re off base and is not apologetic about this. Another could not believe it when Musk would call very intelligent people idiots. “Imagine the worst possible way that could come out, and it would come out,” this person said. “Life with Elon is like being in a very intimate married couple. He can be so gentle and loyal and then really hard on people when it isn’t necessary.” One former official felt that Musk would need to temper himself better in the years to come if SpaceX was to keep currying favor with the military and government agencies in its bid to defeat the incumbent contractors. “His biggest enemy will be himself and the way he treats people,” this person said.

When Musk rubs outsiders the wrong way, Shotwell is often there to try to smooth over the situation. Like Musk, she has a salty tongue and a fiery personality, but Shotwell is willing to play the role of the conciliator. These skills have allowed her to handle the day-to-day operations at SpaceX, leaving Musk to focus on the company’s overall strategy, the product designs, marketing, and motivating employees. Like all of Musk’s most trusted lieutenants, Shotwell has been willing to stay largely in the background, do her work, and focus on the company’s cause.

Shotwell grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, the daughter of an artist (mom) and a neurosurgeon (dad). She played the part of a bright, pretty girl, getting straight A’s at school and joining the cheerleading squad. Shotwell had not expressed a major inclination toward the sciences and knew only one version of an engineer—the guy who drives a train. But there were clues that she was wired a bit different. She was the daughter who mowed the lawn and helped put the family basketball hoop together. In third grade, Shotwell developed a brief interest in car engines, and her mom bought a book detailing how they work. Later, in high school, Shotwell’s mom forced her to attend a lecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology on a Saturday afternoon. As Shotwell listened to one of the panels, she grew enamored with a fifty-year-old mechanical engineer. “She had these beautiful clothes, this suit and shoes that I loved,” Shotwell said. “She was tall and carried off the heels really well.” Shotwell chatted with the engineer after the talk, learning about her job. “That was the day I decided to become a mechanical engineer,” she said.

Shotwell went on to receive an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Northwestern University. Then she took a job at Chrysler. It was a type of management training program meant for hotshot recent graduates who appeared to have leadership potential. Shotwell started out going to auto mechanics school—“I loved that”—and then from department to department. While working on engines research, Shotwell found that there were two very expensive Cray supercomputers sitting idle because none of the veterans knew how to use them. A short while later, she logged onto the computers and set them up to run computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, operations to simulate the performance of valves and other components. The work kept Shotwell interested, but the environment started to grate on her. There were rules for everything, including lots of union regulations around who could operate certain machines. “I picked up a tool once, and got written up,” she said. “Then I opened a bottle of liquid nitrogen and got written up. I started thinking that the job was not what I had anticipated it would be.”

Shotwell pulled out of the Chrysler training program, regrouped at home, and then briefly pursued her doctorate in applied mathematics. While back on the Northwestern campus, one of her professors mentioned an opportunity at the Aerospace Corporation. Anything but a household name, Aerospace Corporation has been headquartered in El Segundo since 1960, serving as a kind of neutral, nonprofit organization that advises the air force, NASA, and other federal bodies on space programs. The company has a bureaucratic feel but has proved very useful over the years with its research activities and ability to champion and nix costly endeavors. Shotwell started at Aerospace in October 1988 and worked on a wide range of projects. One job required her to develop a thermal model that depicted how temperature fluctuations in the space shuttle’s cargo bay affected the performance of equipment on various payloads. She spent ten years at Aerospace and honed her skills as a systems engineer. By the end, though, Shotwell had become irritated by the pace of the industry. “I didn’t understand why it had to take fifteen years to make a military satellite,” she said. “You could see my interest was waning.”

For the next four years, Shotwell worked at Microcosm, a space start-up just down the road from the Aerospace Corporation, and became the head of its space systems division and business development. Boasting a combination of smarts, confidence, direct talk, and good looks, Shotwell developed a reputation as a strong saleswoman. In 2002, one of her coworkers, Hans Koenigsmann, left for SpaceX. Shotwell took Koenigsmann out for a going-away lunch and dropped him off at SpaceX’s then rinky-dink headquarters. “Hans told me to go in and meet Elon,” Shotwell said. “I did, and that’s when I told him, ‘You need a good business development person.’” The next day Mary Beth Brown called Shotwell and told her that Musk wanted to interview her for the new vice president of business development position. Shotwell ended up as employee No. 7. “I gave three weeks’ notice at Microcosm and remodeled my bathroom because I knew I would not have a life after taking the job,” she said.

Through the early years of SpaceX, Shotwell pulled off the miraculous feat of selling something the company did not have. It took SpaceX so much longer than it had planned to have a successful flight. The failures along the way were embarrassing and bad for business. Nonetheless, Shotwell managed to sell about a dozen flights to a mix of government and commercial customers before SpaceX put its first Falcon 1 into orbit. Her deal-making skills extended to negotiating the big-ticket contracts with NASA that kept SpaceX alive during its leanest years, including a $278 million contract in August 2006 to begin work on vehicles that could ferry supplies to the ISS. Shotwell’s track record of success turned her into Musk’s ultimate confidante at SpaceX, and at the end of 2008, she became president and chief operating officer at the company.

Part of Shotwell’s duties include reinforcing the SpaceX culture as the company grows larger and larger and starts to resemble the traditional aerospace giants that it likes to mock. Shotwell can switch on an easygoing, affable air and address the entire company during a meeting or convince a collection of possible recruits why they should sign up to be worked to the bone. During one such meeting with a group of interns, Shotwell pulled about a hundred people into the corner of the cafeteria. She wore high-heel black boots, skintight jeans, a tan jacket, and a scarf and had big hoop earnings dangling beside her shoulder-length blond hair. Pacing back and forth in front of the group with a microphone in hand, she asked them to announce what school they came from and what project they were working on while at SpaceX. One student went to Cornell and worked on Dragon, another went to USC and did propulsion system design, and another went to the University of Illinois and worked with the aerodynamics group. It took about thirty minutes to make it all the way around the room, and the students were, at least by academic pedigree and bright-eyed enthusiasm, among the most impressive youngsters in the world. The students peppered Shotwell with questions—her best moment, her advice for being successful, SpaceX’s competitive threats—and she replied with a mix of earnest answers and rah-rah stuff. Shotwell made sure to emphasize the lean, innovative edge SpaceX has over the more traditional aerospace companies. “Our competitors are scared shitless of us,” Shotwell told the group. “The behemoths are going to have to figure out how to get it together and compete. And it is our job to have them die.”

One of SpaceX’s biggest goals, Shotwell said, was to fly as often as possible. The company has never sought to make a fortune off each flight. It would rather make a little on each launch and keep the flights flowing. A Falcon 9 flight costs $60 million, and the company would like to see that figure drop to about $20 million through economies of scale and improvements in launch technology. SpaceX spent $2.5 billion to get four Dragon capsules to the ISS, nine flights with the Falcon 9, and five flights with the Falcon 1. It’s a price-per-launch total that the rest of the players in the industry cannot comprehend let alone aspire to. “I don’t know what those guys do with their money,” Shotwell said. “They are smoking it. I just don’t know.” As Shotwell saw it, a number of new nations were showing interest in launches, eyeing communications technology as essential to growing their economies and leveling their status with developed nations. Cheaper flights would help SpaceX take the majority of the business from that new customer set. The company also expected to participate in an expanding market for human flights. SpaceX has never had any interest in doing the five-minute tourist flights to low Earth orbit like Virgin Galactic and XCOR. It does, however, have the ability to carry researchers to orbiting habitats being built by Bigelow Aerospace and to orbiting science labs being constructed by various countries. SpaceX will also start making its own satellites, turning the company into a one-stop space shop. All of these plans hinge on SpaceX being able to prove that it can fly on schedule every month and churn through the $5 billion backlog of launches. “Most of our customers signed up early and wanted to be supportive and got good deals on their missions,” she said. “We are in a phase now where we need to launch on time and make launching Dragons more efficient.”

For a short while, the conversation with the interns bogged down. It turned to some of the annoyances of SpaceX’s campus. The company leases its facility and has not been able to build things like a massive parking structure that would make life easier for its three-thousand-person workforce. Shotwell promised that more parking, more bathrooms, and more of the freebies that technology start-ups in Silicon Valley offer their employees would be on the way. “I want a day care,” she said.

But it was while discussing SpaceX’s grandest missions that Shotwell really came into her own and seemed to inspire the interns. Some of them clearly dreamed of becoming astronauts, and Shotwell said that working at SpaceX was almost certainly their best chance to get to space now that NASA’s astronaut corps had dwindled. Musk had made designing cool-looking, “non–Stay Puft” spacesuits a personal priority. “They can’t be clunky and nasty,” Shotwell said. “You have to do better than that.” As for where the astronauts would go: well, there were the space habitats, the moon, and, of course, Mars as options. SpaceX has already started testing a giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, that will take it much farther into space than the Falcon 9, and it has another, even larger spaceship on the way. “Our Falcon Heavy rocket will not take a busload of people to Mars,” she said. “So, there’s something after Heavy. We’re working on it.” To make something like that vehicle happen, she said, the SpaceX employees needed to be effective and pushy. “Make sure your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it. As Shotwell saw it, the commercial space race was coming down to SpaceX and China and that’s it. And in the bigger picture, the race was on to ensure man’s survival. “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.”

It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up. But on the whole, this approach stifles the pursuit of other endeavors. It leads to bloat and excess and a crippling of the commercial space industry.

Outside of SpaceX, the American launch providers are no longer competitive against their peers in other countries. They have limited launch abilities and questionable ambition. SpaceX’s main competitor for domestic military satellites and other large payloads is United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture formed in 2006 when Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined forces. The thinking at the time about the union was that the government did not have enough business for two companies and that combining the research and manufacturing work of Boeing and Lockheed would result in cheaper, safer launches. ULA has leaned on decades of work around the Delta (Boeing) and Atlas (Lockheed) launch vehicles and has flown many dozens of rockets successfully, making it a model of reliability. But neither the joint venture nor Boeing nor Lockheed, both of which can offer commercial services on their own, come close to competing on price against SpaceX, the Russians, or the Chinese. “For the most part, the global commercial market is dominated by Arianespace [Europe], Long March [China] or Russian vehicles,” said Dave Bearden, the general manager of civil and commercial programs at the Aerospace Corporation. “There are just different labor rates and differences in the way they are built.”

To put things more bluntly, ULA has turned into an embarrassment for the United States. In March 2014, ULA’s then CEO, Michael Gass, faced off against Musk during a congressional hearing that dealt, in part, with SpaceX’s request to take on more of the government’s annual launch load. A series of slides were rolled out that showed how the government payments for launches have skyrocketed since Boeing and Lockheed went from a duopoly to a monopoly. According to Musk’s math presented at the hearing, ULA charged $380 million per flight, while SpaceX would charge $90 million per flight. (The $90 million figure was higher than SpaceX’s standard $60 million because the government has certain additional requirements for particularly sensitive launches.) By simply picking SpaceX as its launch provider, Musk pointed out, the government would save enough money to pay for the satellite going on the rocket. Gass had no real retort. He claimed Musk’s figures for the ULA launch price were inaccurate but failed to provide a figure of his own. The hearing also came as tensions between the United States and Russia were running high due to Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine. Musk rightly noted that the United States could soon be placing sanctions on Russia that could carry over to aerospace equipment. ULA, as it happens, relies on Russian-made engines to send up sensitive U.S. military equipment in its Atlas V rockets. “Our Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles are truly American,” Musk said. “We design and manufacture our rockets in California and Texas.” Gass countered that ULA had bought a two-year supply of Russian engines and purchased the blueprints to the machines and had them translated from Russian to English, and he said this with a straight face. (A few months after the hearing, ULA replaced Gass as CEO and signed a deal with Blue Origin to develop American-made rockets.)

Some of the most disheartening moments of the hearing arrived when Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama took the microphone for questioning. ULA has manufacturing facilities in Alabama and close ties to the senator. Shelby felt compelled to play the role of hometown booster by repeatedly pointing out that ULA had enjoyed sixty-eight successful launches and then asking Musk what he made of that accomplishment. The aerospace industry stands as one of Shelby’s biggest donors and he’s ended up surprisingly pro-bureaucracy and anticompetition when it comes to getting things into space. “Typically competition results in better quality and lower-priced contracts—but the launch market is not typical,” Shelby said. “It is limited demand framed by government-industrial policies.” The March hearing in which Shelby made these statements would turn out to be something of a sham. The government had agreed to put fourteen of its sensitive launches up for bid instead of just awarding them directly to ULA. Musk had come to Congress to present his case for why SpaceX made sense as a viable candidate for those and other launches. The day after the hearing, the air force cut the number of launches up for bid from fourteen to between seven and one. One month later, SpaceX filed a lawsuit against the air force asking for a chance to earn its launch business. “SpaceX is not seeking to be awarded contracts for these launches,” the company said on its freedomtolaunch.com website. “We are simply seeking the right to compete.” /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.”/

SpaceX’s main competitor for ISS resupply missions and commercial satellites in the United States is Orbital Sciences Corporation. Founded in Virginia in 1982, the company started out not unlike SpaceX, as the new kid that raised outside funding and focused on putting smaller satellites into low-Earth orbit. Orbital is more experienced, although it has a limited roster of machine types. Orbital depends on suppliers, including Russian and Ukrainian companies, for its engines and rocket bodies, making it more of an assembler of spacecraft than a true builder like SpaceX. And, also unlike SpaceX, Orbital’s capsules cannot withstand the journey back from the ISS to Earth, so it’s unable to return experiments and other goods. In October 2014, one of Orbital’s rockets blew up on the launchpad. With its ability to launch on hold while it investigated the incident, Orbital reached out to SpaceX for help. It wanted to see if Musk had any extra capacity to take care of some of Orbital’s customers. The company also signaled that it would move away from using Russian engines as well.

As for getting humans to space, SpaceX and Boeing were the victors in a four-year NASA competition to fly astronauts to the ISS. SpaceX will get $2.6 billion, and Boeing will get $4.2 billion to develop their capsules and ferry people to the ISS by 2017. The companies would, in effect, be replacing the space shuttle and restoring the United States’ ability to conduct manned flights. “I actually don’t mind that Boeing gets twice as much money for meeting the same NASA requirements as SpaceX with worse technology,” Musk said. “Having two companies involved is better for the advancement of human spaceflight.”

SpaceX had once looked like it too would be a one-trick pony. The company’s original plans were to have the smallish Falcon 1 function as its primary workhorse. At $6 million to $12 million per flight, the Falcon 1 was by far the cheapest means of getting something into orbit, thrilling people in the space industry. When Google announced its Lunar X Prize in 2007—$30 million in awards to people who could land a robot on the moon—many of the proposals that followed selected the Falcon 1 as their preferred launch vehicle because it seemed like the only reasonably priced option for getting something to the moon. Scientists around the world were equally excited, thinking that for the first time they had a means of placing experiments into orbit in a cost-effective way. But for all the enthusiastic talk about the Falcon 1, the demand never arrived. “It became very clear that there was a huge need for the Falcon 1 but no money for it,” said Shotwell. “The market has to be able to sustain a certain amount of vehicles, and three Falcon 1s per year does not make a business.” The last Falcon 1 launch took place in July 2009 from Kwajalein, when SpaceX carried a satellite into orbit for the Malaysian government. People in the aerospace industry have been grumbling ever since. “We gave Falcon 1 a hell of a shot,” Shotwell said. “I was emotional about it and disappointed. I’d anticipated a flood of orders but, after eight years, they just did not come.”

SpaceX has since expanded its launch capabilities at a remarkable pace and looks like it might be on the verge of getting that $12 million per flight option back. In June 2010, the Falcon 9 flew for the first time and orbited Earth successfully. In December 2010, SpaceX proved that the Falcon 9 could carry the Dragon capsule into space and that the capsule could be recovered safely after an ocean landing. /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./ It became the first commercial company ever to pull off this feat. Then, in May 2012, SpaceX went through the most significant moment in the company’s history since that first successful launch on Kwajalein.

On May 22, at 3:44 A.M., a Falcon 9 rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket did its yeoman-like work boosting Dragon into space. Then the capsule’s solar panels fanned out and Dragon became dependent on its eighteen Draco thrusters, or small rocket engines, to guide its path to the International Space Station. The SpaceX engineers worked in shifts—some of them sleeping on cots at the factory—as it took the capsule three days for Dragon to make its journey. They spent most of the time observing Dragon’s flight and checking to see that its sensor systems were picking up the ISS. Originally, Dragon planned to dock with the ISS around 4 A.M. on the twenty-fifth, but as the capsule approached the space station, an unexpected glint kept throwing off the calculations of a laser used to measure the distance between Dragon and the ISS. “I remember it being two and a half hours of struggle,” Shotwell said. Her outfit of Uggs, a fishnet sweater, and leggings started to feel like pajamas as the night wore on, and the engineers battled this unplanned difficulty. Fearing all the time that the mission would be aborted, SpaceX decided to upload some new software to the Dragon that would cut the size of the visual frame used by the sensors to eliminate the effect of the sunlight on the machine. Then, just before 7 A.M., Dragon got close enough to the ISS for Don Pettit, an astronaut, to use a fifty-eight-foot robotic arm to reach out and grab the resupply capsule. “Houston, Station, it looks like we’ve got us a dragon by the tail,” Pettit said. [http://www.space.com/15874-private-dragon-capsule-space-station-arrival.xhtml]

“I’d been digesting my guts,” Shotwell said. “And then I am drinking champagne at six in the morning.” About thirty people were in the control room when the docking happened. Over the next couple of hours, workers streamed into the SpaceX factory to soak up the elation of the moment. SpaceX had set another first, as the only private company to dock with the ISS. A couple of months later SpaceX received $440 million from NASA to keep developing Dragon so that it could transport people. “Elon is changing the way aerospace business is done,” said NASA’s Stoker. “He’s managed to keep the safety factor up while cutting costs. He’s just taken the best things from the tech industry like the open-floor office plans and having everyone talking and all this human interaction. It’s a very different way to most of the aerospace industry, which is designed to produce requirements documents and project reviews.”

In May 2014, Musk invited the press to SpaceX’s headquarters to demonstrate what some of that NASA money had bought. He unveiled the Dragon V2, or version two, spacecraft. Unlike most executives, who like to show their products off at trade shows or daytime events, Musk prefers to hold true Hollywood-style galas in the evenings. People arrived in Hawthorne by the hundreds and snacked on hors d’oeuvres until the 7:30 P.M. showing. Musk appeared wearing a purplish velvet jacket and popping open the capsule’s door with a bump of his fist like the Fonz. What he revealed was spectacular. The cramped quarters of past capsules were gone. There were seven thin, sturdy, contoured seats arranged with four seats close to the main console and a row of three seats in the back. Musk walked around in the capsule to show how roomy it was and then plopped down in the central captain’s chair. He reached up and unlocked a four-paneled flat-screen console that gracefully slid down right in front of the first row of seats. /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.”/ In the middle of the console was a joystick for flying the aircraft and some physical buttons for essential functions that astronauts could press in case of an emergency or a malfunctioning touch-screen. The inside of the capsule had a bright, metallic finish. Someone had finally built a spaceship worthy of scientist and moviemaker dreams.

There was substance to go with the style. The Dragon 2 will be able to dock with the ISS and other space habitats automatically without needing the intervention of a robotic arm. It will run on a SuperDraco engine—a thruster made by SpaceX and the first engine ever built completely by a 3-D printer to go into space. This means that a machine guided by a computer formed the engine out of single piece of metal—in this case the high-strength alloy Inconel—so that its strength and performance should exceed anything built by humans by welding various parts together. And most mind-boggling of all, Musk revealed that the Dragon 2 will be able to land anywhere on Earth that SpaceX wants by using the SuperDraco engines and thrusters to come to a gentle stop on the ground. No more landings at sea. No more throwing spaceships away. “That is how a twenty-first-century spaceship should land,” Musk said. “You can just reload propellant and fly again. So long as we continue to throw away rockets and spacecraft, we will never have true access to space.”

The Dragon 2 is just one of the machines that SpaceX continues to develop in parallel. One of the company’s next milestones will be the first flight of the Falcon Heavy, which is designed to be the world’s most powerful rocket. /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.”/ SpaceX has found a way to combine three Falcon 9s into a single craft with 27 of the Merlin engines and the ability to carry more than 53 metric tons of stuff into orbit. Part of the genius of Musk and Mueller’s designs is that SpaceX can reuse the same engine in different configurations—from the Falcon 1 up to the Falcon Heavy—saving on cost and time. “We make our main combustion chambers, turbo pump, gas generators, injectors, and main valves,” Mueller said. “We have complete control. We have our own test site, while most of the other guys use government test sites. The labor hours are cut in half and so is the work around the materials. Four years ago, we could make two rockets a year and now we can make twenty a year.” SpaceX boasts that the Falcon Heavy can take up twice the payload of the nearest competitor—the Delta IV Heavy from Boeing/ULA—at one-third the cost. SpaceX is also busy building a spaceport from the ground up. The goal is to be able to launch many rockets an hour from this facility located in Brownsville, Texas, by automating the processes needed to stand a rocket up on the pad, fuel it, and send it off.

Just as it did in the early days, SpaceX continues to experiment with these new vehicles during actual launches in ways that other companies would dare not do. SpaceX will often announce that it’s trying out a new engine or its landing legs and place the emphasis on that one upgrade in the marketing material leading up to a launch. It’s common, though, for SpaceX to test out a dozen other objectives in secret during a mission. Musk essentially asks employees to do the impossible on top of the impossible. One former SpaceX executive described the working atmosphere as a perpetual-motion machine that runs on a weird mix of dissatisfaction and eternal hope. “It’s like he has everyone working on this car that is meant to get from Los Angeles to New York on one tank of gas,” this executive said. “They will work on the car for a year and test all of its parts. Then, when they set off for New York after that year, all of the vice presidents think privately that the car will be lucky to get to Las Vegas. What ends up happening is that the car gets to New Mexico—twice as far as they ever expected—and Elon is still mad. He gets twice as much as anyone else out of people.”

There’s a degree to which it’s just never enough for Musk, no matter what it is. Case in point: the December 2010 launch in which SpaceX got the Dragon capsule to orbit Earth and return successfully. This had been one of the company’s great achievements, and people had worked tirelessly for months, if not years. The launch had taken place on December 8, and SpaceX had a Christmas party on December 16. About ninety minutes before the party started, Musk had called his top executives to SpaceX for a meeting. Six of them, including Mueller, were decked out in party attire and ready to celebrate the holidays and SpaceX’s historic achievement around Dragon. Musk laid into them for about an hour because the truss structure for a future rocket was running behind schedule. “Their wives were sitting three cubes over waiting for the berating to end,” Brogan said. Other examples of similar behavior have cropped up from time to time. Musk, for example, rewarded a group of thirty employees who had pulled off a tough project for NASA with bonuses that consisted of additional stock option grants. Many of the employees, seeking instant, more tangible gratification, demanded cash. “He chided us for not valuing the stock,” Drew Eldeen, a former engineer, said. “He said, ‘In the long run, this is worth a lot more than a thousand dollars in cash.’ He wasn’t screaming or anything like that, but he seemed disappointed in us. It was hard to hear that.”

The lingering question for many SpaceX employees is when exactly they will see a big reward for all their work. SpaceX’s staff is paid well but by no means exorbitantly. Many of them expect to make their money when SpaceX files for an initial public offering. The thing is that Musk does not want to go public anytime soon, and understandably so. It’s a bit hard to explain the whole Mars thing to investors, when it’s unclear what the business model around starting a colony on another planet will be. When the employees heard Musk say that an IPO was years away and would not occur until the Mars mission looked more secure, they started to grumble, and when Musk found out, he addressed all of SpaceX in an e-mail that is a fantastic window into his thinking and how it differs from almost every other CEO’s. (The full e-mail appears in Appendix 3.)

June 7, 2013

Going Public

Per my recent comments, I am increasingly concerned about SpaceX going public before the Mars transport system is in place. Creating the technology needed to establish life on Mars is and always has been the fundamental goal of SpaceX. If being a public company diminishes that likelihood, then we should not do so until Mars is secure. This is something that I am open to reconsidering, but, given my experiences with Tesla and SolarCity, I am hesitant to foist being public on SpaceX, especially given the long term nature of our mission.

Some at SpaceX who have not been through a public company experience may think that being public is desirable. This is not so. Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products.

For those who are under the impression that they are so clever that they can outsmart public market investors and would sell SpaceX stock at the “right time,” let me relieve you of any such notion. If you really are better than most hedge fund managers, then there is no need to worry about the value of your SpaceX stock, as you can just invest in other public company stocks and make billions of dollars in the market.

Elon

 

THERE ARE SO MANY TELEVISION COMMERCIALS FOR CARS AND TRUCKS that it’s easy to become immune to them and ignore what’s taking place in the ads. That’s okay. Because there’s not really much of note happening. Carmakers looking to put a modicum of effort into their ads have been hawking the exact same things for decades: a car with a bit more room, a few extra miles per gallon, better handling, or an extra cup holder. Those that can’t find anything interesting at all to tout about their cars turn to scantily clad women, men with British accents, and, when necessary, dancing mice in tuxedos to try and convince people that their products are better than the rest. Next time a car ad appears on your television, pause for a moment and really listen to what’s being said. When you realize that the Volkswagen sign-and-drive “event” is code for “we’re making the experience of buying a car slightly less miserable than usual,” you’ll start to appreciate just how low the automotive industry has sunk.

In the middle of 2012, Tesla Motors stunned its complacent peers in the automotive industry. It began shipping the Model S sedan. This all-electric luxury vehicle could go more than 300 miles on a single charge. It could reach 60 miles per hour in 4.2 seconds. It could seat seven people, if you used a couple of optional rear-facing seats in the back for kids. It also had two trunks. There was the standard one and then what Tesla calls a “frunk” up front, where the bulky engine would usually be. The Model S ran on an electric battery pack that makes up the base of the car and a watermelon-sized electric motor located between the rear tires. Getting rid of the engine and its din of clanging machinery also meant that the Model S ran silently. The Model S outclassed most other luxury sedans in terms of raw speed, mileage, handling, and storage space.

And there was more—like a cutesy thing with the door handles, which were flush with the car’s body until the driver got close to the Model S. Then the silver handles would pop out, the driver would open the door and get in, and the handles would retract flush with the car’s body again. Once inside, the driver encountered a seventeen-inch touch-screen that controlled the vast majority of the car’s functions, be it raising the volume on the stereo /The volume level on the sound system naturally goes to 11—an homage to This Is Spinal Tap and a reflection of Musk’s sense of humor./ or opening the sunroof with a slide of the finger. Whereas most cars have a large dashboard to accommodate various displays and buttons and to protect people from the noise of the engine, the Model S offered up vast amounts of space. The Model S had an ever-present Internet connection, allowing the driver to stream music through the touch console and to display massive Google maps for navigation. The driver didn’t need to turn a key or even push an ignition button to start the car. His weight in the seat coupled with a sensor in the key fob, which is shaped like a tiny Model S, was enough to activate the vehicle. Made of lightweight aluminum, the car achieved the highest safety rating in history. And it could be recharged for free at Tesla’s stations lining highways across the United States and later around the world.

For both engineers and green-minded people, the Model S presented a model of efficiency. Traditional cars and hybrids have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of moving parts. The engine must perform constant, controlled explosions with pistons, crankshafts, oil filters, alternators, fans, distributors, valves, coils, and cylinders among the many pieces of machinery needed for the work. The oomph produced by the engine must then be passed through clutches, gears, and driveshafts to make the wheels turn, and then exhaust systems have to deal with the waste. Cars end up being about 10–20 percent efficient at turning the input of gasoline into the output of propulsion. Most of the energy (about 70 percent) is lost as heat in the engine, while the rest is lost through wind resistance, braking, and other mechanical functions. The Model S, by contrast, has about a dozen moving parts, with the battery pack sending energy instantly to a watermelon-sized motor that turns the wheels. The Model S ends up being about 60 percent efficient, losing most of the rest of its energy to heat. The sedan gets the equivalent of about 100 miles per gallon. /And it’s not just that the Model S and other electric cars are three to four times more efficient than internal combustion vehicles. They can also tap into power that is produced in centralized, efficient ways by power plants and solar arrays./

Yet another distinguishing characteristic of the Model S was the experience of buying and owning the car. You didn’t go to a dealership and haggle with a pushy salesman. Tesla sold the Model S directly through its own stores and website. Typically, the stores were placed in high-end malls or affluent suburbs, not far from the Apple stores on which they were modeled. Customers would walk in and find a complete Model S in the middle of the shop and often an exposed version of the car’s base near the back of the store to show off the battery pack and motor. There were massive touch-screens where people could calculate how much they might save on fuel costs by moving to an all-electric car, and where they could configure the look and add-ons for their future Model S. Once the configuration process was done, the customer could give the screen a big, forceful swipe and his Model S would theatrically appear on an even bigger screen in the center of the store. If you wanted to sit in the display model, a salesman would pull back a red velvet rope near the driver’s-side door and let you enter the car. The salespeople were not compensated on commission and didn’t have to try to talk you into buying a suite of extras. Whether you ultimately bought the car in the store or online, it was delivered in a concierge fashion. Tesla would bring it to your home, office, or anywhere else you wanted it. The company also offered customers the option of picking their cars up from the factory in Silicon Valley and treating their friends and family to a complimentary tour of the facility. In the months that followed the delivery, there were no oil changes or tune-ups to be dealt with because the Model S didn’t need them. It had done away with so much of the mechanical dreck standard in an internal combustion vehicle. However, if something did go wrong with the car, Tesla would come pick it up and give the customer a loaner while it repaired the Model S.

The Model S also offered a way to fix issues in a manner that people had never before encountered with a mass-produced car. Some of the early owners complained about glitches like the door handles not popping out quite right or their windshield wipers operating at funky speeds. These were inexcusable flaws for such a costly vehicle, but Tesla typically moved with clever efficiency to address them. While the owner slept, Tesla’s engineers tapped into the car via the Internet connection and downloaded software updates. When the customer took the car out for a spin in the morning and found it working right, he was left feeling as if magical elves had done the work. Tesla soon began showing off its software skills for jobs other than making up for mistakes. It put out a smartphone app that let people turn on their air-conditioning or heating from afar and to see where the car was parked on a map. Tesla also began installing software updates that imbued the Model S with new features. Overnight, the Model S sometimes got new traction controls for hilly and highway driving or could suddenly recharge much faster than before or possess a new range of voice controls. Tesla had transformed the car into a gadget—a device that actually got better after you bought it. As Craig Venter, one of the earliest Model S owners and the famed scientist who first decoded man’s DNA, put it, “It changes everything about transportation. It’s a computer on wheels.”

The first people to notice what Tesla had accomplished were the technophiles in Silicon Valley. The region is filled with early adopters willing to buy the latest gizmos and suffer through their bugs. Normally this habit applies to computing devices ranging from $100 to $2,000 in price. This time around, the early adopters proved willing not only to spend $100,000 on a product that might not work but also to trust their well-being to a start-up. Tesla needed this early boost of confidence and got it on a scale few expected. In the first couple of months after the Model S went on sale, you might see one or two per day on the streets of San Francisco and the surrounding cities. Then you started to see five to ten per day. Soon enough, the Model S seemed to feel like the most common car in Palo Alto and Mountain View, the two cities at the heart of Silicon Valley. The Model S emerged as the ultimate status symbol for wealthy technophiles, allowing them to show off, get a new gadget, and claim to be helping the environment at the same time. From Silicon Valley, the Model S phenomenon spread to Los Angeles, then all along the West Coast and then to Washington, D.C., and New York (although to a lesser degree).

At first the more traditional automakers viewed the Model S as a gimmick and its surging sales as part of a fad. These sentiments, however, soon gave way to something more akin to panic. In November 2012, just a few months after it started shipping, the Model S was named Motor Trend’s Car of the Year in the first unanimous vote that anyone at the magazine could remember. The Model S beat out eleven other vehicles from companies such as Porsche, BMW, Lexus, and Subaru and was heralded as “proof positive that America can still make great things.” Motor Trend celebrated the Model S as the first non–internal combustion engine car ever to win its top award and wrote that the vehicle handled like a sports car, drove as smoothly as a Rolls-Royce, held as much as a Chevy Equinox, and was more efficient than a Toyota Prius. Several months later, Consumer Reports gave the Model S its highest car rating in history—99 out of 100—while proclaiming that it was likely the best car ever built. It was at about this time that sales of the Model S started to soar alongside Tesla’s share price and that General Motors, among other automakers, pulled together a team to study the Model S, Tesla, and the methods of Elon Musk.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to meditate on what Tesla had accomplished. Musk had set out to make an electric car that did not suffer from any compromises. He did that. Then, using a form of entrepreneurial judo, he upended the decades of criticisms against electric cars. The Model S was not just the best electric car; it was best car, period, and the car people desired. America had not seen a successful car company since Chrysler emerged in 1925. Silicon Valley had done little of note in the automotive industry. Musk had never run a car factory before and was considered arrogant and amateurish by Detroit. Yet, one year after the Model S went on sale, Tesla had posted a profit, hit $562 million in quarterly revenue, raised its sales forecast, and become as valuable as Mazda Motor. Elon Musk had built the automotive equivalent of the iPhone. And car executives in Detroit, Japan, and Germany had only their crappy ads to watch as they pondered how such a thing had occurred.

You can forgive the automotive industry veterans for being caught unawares. For years Tesla had looked like an utter disaster incapable of doing much of anything right. It took until early 2009 for Tesla to really hit its stride with the Roadster and work out the manufacturing issues behind the sports car. Just as the company tried to build some momentum around the Roadster, Musk sent out an e-mail to customers declaring a price hike. Where the car originally started around $92,000, it would now start at $109,000. In the e-mail, Musk said that four hundred customers who had already placed their orders for a Roadster but not yet received them would bear the brunt of the price change and need to cough up the extra cash. He tried to assuage Tesla’s customer base by arguing that the company had no choice but to raise prices. The manufacturing costs for the Roadster had come in much higher than the company initially expected, and Tesla needed to prove that it could make the cars at a profit to bolster its chances of securing a large government loan that would be needed to build the Model S, which it vowed to deliver in 2011. “I firmly believe that the plan . . . strikes a reasonable compromise between being fair to early customers and ensuring the viability of Tesla, which is obviously in the best interests of all customers,” Musk wrote in the e-mail. “Mass market electric cars have been my goal from the beginning of Tesla. I don’t want and I don’t think the vast majority of Tesla customers want us to do anything to jeopardize that objective.” While some Tesla customers grumbled, Musk had largely read his customer base right. They would support just about anything he suggested.

Following the price increase, Tesla had a safety recall. It said that Lotus, the manufacturer of the Roadster’s chassis, had failed to tighten a bolt properly on its assembly line. On the plus side, Tesla had only delivered about 345 Roadsters, which meant that it could fix the problem in a manageable fashion. On the downside, a safety recall was the last thing a car start-up needs, even if it was, as Tesla claimed, more of a proactive measure than anything else. The next year, Tesla had another voluntary recall. It had received a report of a power cable grinding against the body of the Roadster to the point that it caused a short circuit and some smoke. That time, Tesla brought 439 Roadsters in for a fix. Tesla did its best to put a positive spin on these issues, saying that it would make “house calls” to fix the Roadsters or pick up the cars and take them back to the factory. Ever since, Musk has tried to turn any snafu with a Tesla into an excuse to show off the company’s attention to service and dedication to pleasing the customer. More often than not, the strategy has worked.

On top of the occasional issues with the Roadster, Tesla continued to suffer from public perception problems. In June 2009, Martin Eberhard sued Musk and went to town in the complaint detailing his ouster from the company. Eberhard accused Musk of libel, slander, and breach of contract. The charges painted Musk as a bully moneyman who had pushed the soulful inventor out of his own company. The lawsuit also accused Musk of trumping up his role in Tesla’s founding. Musk responded in kind, issuing a blog post that detailed his take on Eberhard’s foibles and taking umbrage at the suggestions that he was not a true founder of the company. A short while later, the two men settled and agreed to stop going at each other. “As co-founder of the company, Elon’s contributions to Tesla have been extraordinary,” Eberhard said in a statement at the time. It must have been excruciating for Eberhard to agree to put that in writing and the very existence of that statement points to Musk’s skills and tactics as a hard-line negotiator. The two men continue to despise each other today, although they must do so in private, as legally required. Eberhard, though, holds no long-standing grudge against Tesla. His shares in the company ended up becoming very valuable. He still drives his Roadster, and his wife got a Model S.

For so much of its early existence, Tesla appeared in the news for the wrong reasons. There were people in the media and the automotive industry who viewed it as a gimmick. They seemed to delight in the soap opera–worthy spats between Musk and Eberhard and other disgruntled former employees. Far from being seen universally as a successful entrepreneur, Musk was viewed in some Silicon Valley circles as an abrasive blowhard who would get what he deserved when Tesla inevitably collapsed. The Roadster would make its way to the electric-car graveyard. Detroit would prove that it had a better handle on this whole car innovation thing than Silicon Valley. The natural order of the world would remain intact.

A funny thing happened, however. Tesla did just enough to survive. From 2008 to 2012, Tesla sold about 2,500 Roadsters. /When the very first Roadster arrived, it came in a large plywood crate. Tesla’s engineers unpacked it furiously, installed the battery pack, and then let Musk take it for a spin. About twenty Tesla engineers jumped in prototype vehicles and formed a convoy that followed Musk around Palo Alto and Stanford./ The car had accomplished what Musk had intended from the outset. It proved that electric cars could be fun to drive and that they could be objects of desire. With the Roadster, Tesla kept electric cars in the public’s consciousness and did so under impossible circumstances, namely the collapse of the American automotive industry and the global financial markets. Whether Musk was a founder of Tesla in the purest sense of the word is irrelevant at this point. There would be no Tesla to talk about today were it not for Musk’s money, marketing savvy, chicanery, engineering smarts, and indomitable spirit. Tesla was, in effect, willed into existence by Musk and reflects his personality as much as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple reflect the personalities of their founders. Marc Tarpenning, the other Tesla cofounder, said as much when he reflected on what Musk has meant to the company. “Elon pushed Tesla so much farther than we ever imagined,” he said.

As difficult as birthing the Roadster had been, the adventure had whetted Musk’s appetite for what he could accomplish in the automotive industry with a clean slate. Tesla’s next car—code-named WhiteStar—would not be an adapted version of another company’s vehicle. It would be made from scratch and structured to take full advantage of what the electric-car technology offered. The battery pack in the Roadster, for example, had to be placed near the rear of the car because of constraints imposed by the Lotus Elise chassis. This was okay but not ideal due to the imposing weight of the batteries. With WhiteStar, which would become the Model S, Musk and Tesla’s engineers knew from the start that they would place the 1,300-pound battery pack on the base of the car. This would give the vehicle a low center of gravity and excellent handling. It would also give the Model S what’s known as a low polar moment of inertia, which relates to how a car resists turning. Ideally, you want heavy parts like the engine as close as possible to the car’s center of gravity, which is why the engines of race cars tend to be near the middle of the vehicle. Traditional cars are a mess on this metric, with the bulky engine up front, passengers in the middle, and gasoline sloshing around the rear. In the case of the Model S, the bulk of the car’s mass is very close to the center of gravity and this has positive follow-on effects to handling, performance, and safety.

The innards, though, were just one part of what would make the Model S shine. Musk wanted to make a statement with the car’s look as well. It would be a sedan, yes, but it would be a sexy sedan. It would also be comfortable and luxurious and have none of the compromises that Tesla had been forced to embrace with the Roadster. To bring such a beautiful, functional car to life, Musk hired Henrik Fisker, a Danish automobile designer renowned for his work at Aston Martin.

Tesla first revealed its plans for the Model S to Fisker in 2007. It asked him to design a sleek, four-door sedan that would cost between $50,000 and $70,000. Tesla could still barely make Roadsters and had no idea if its all-electric powertrain would hold up over time. Musk, though, refused to wait and find out. He wanted the Model S to ship in late 2009 or early 2010 and needed Fisker to work fast. By reputation, Fisker had a flair for the dramatic and had produced some of the most stunning car designs over the past decade, not just for Aston Martin but also for special versions of BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles.

Fisker had a studio in Orange County, California, and Musk and other Tesla executives would meet there to go over his evolving takes on the Model S. Each visit was less inspiring than the last. Fisker baffled the Tesla teams with his stodgy designs. “Some of the early styles were like a giant egg,” said Ron Lloyd, the former vice president of the WhiteStar project at Tesla. “They were terrible.” When Musk pushed back, Fisker blamed the physical constraints Tesla had put in place for the Model S as too restrictive. “He said they would not let him make the car sexy,” Lloyd said. Fisker tried a couple of different approaches and unveiled some foam models of the car for Musk and his crew to dissect. “We kept on telling him they were not right,” Lloyd said.

Not long after these meetings, Fisker started his own company—Fisker Automotive—and unveiled the Fisker Karma hybrid in 2008. This luxury sedan looked like a vehicle Batman might take out for a Sunday drive. With its elongated lines and sharp edges, the car was stunning and truly original. “It rapidly became clear that he was trying to compete with us,” Lloyd said. As Musk dug into the situation, he discovered that Fisker had been shopping his idea for a car company to investors around Silicon Valley for some time. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the more famous venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, once had a chance to invest in Tesla and then ended up putting money into Fisker instead. All of this was too much for Musk, and he launched a lawsuit against Fisker in 2008, accusing him of stealing Tesla’s ideas and using the $875,000 Tesla had paid for design work to help get his rival car company off the ground. (Fisker ultimately prevailed in the dispute with an arbitrator ordering Tesla to reimburse Fisker’s legal fees and deeming Tesla’s allegations baseless.)

Tesla had thought about doing a hybrid like Fisker where a gas engine would be present to recharge the car’s batteries after they had consumed an initial charge. The car would be able to travel fifty to eighty miles after being plugged into an outlet and then take advantage of ubiquitous gas stations as needed to top up the batteries, eliminating range anxiety. Tesla’s engineers prototyped the hybrid vehicle and ran all sorts of cost and performance metrics. In the end, they found the hybrid to be too much of a compromise. “It would be expensive, and the performance would not be as good as the all-electric car,” said J. B. Straubel. “And we would have needed to build a team to compete with the core competency of every car company in the world. We would have been betting against all the things we believe in, like the power electronics and batteries improving. We decided to put all the effort into going where we think the endpoint is and to never look back.” After coming to this conclusion, Straubel and others inside Tesla started to let go of their anger toward Fisker. They figured he would end up delivering a kluge of a car and get what was coming to him.

A large car company might spend $1 billion and need thousands of people to design a new vehicle and bring it to market. Tesla had nothing close to these resources as it gave birth to the Model S. According to Lloyd, Tesla initially aimed to make about ten thousand Model S sedans per year and had budgeted around $130 million to achieve this goal, including engineering the car and acquiring the manufacturing machines needed to stamp out the body parts. “One of the things Elon pushed hard with everyone was to do as much as possible in-house,” Lloyd said. Tesla would make up for its lack of R&D money by hiring smart people who could outwork and outthink the third parties relied on by the rest of the automakers. “The mantra was that one great engineer will replace three medium ones,” Lloyd said.

A small team of Tesla engineers began the process of trying to figure out the mechanical inner workings of the Model S. Their first step in this journey took place at a Mercedes dealership where they test drove a CLS 4-Door Coupe and an E-Class sedan. The cars had the same chassis, and the Tesla engineers took measurements of every inch of the vehicles, studying what they liked and didn’t like. In the end, they preferred the styling on the CLS and settled on it as their baseline for thinking about the Model S.

After purchasing a CLS, Tesla’s engineers tore it apart. One team had reshaped the boxy, rectangular battery pack from the Roadster and made it flat. The engineers cut the floor out of the CLS and plopped in the pack. Next they put the electronics that tied the whole system together in the trunk. After that, they replaced the interior of the car to restore its fit and finish. Following three months of work, Tesla had in effect built an all-electric Mercedes CLS. Tesla used the car to woo investors and future partners like Daimler that would eventually turn to Tesla for electric powertrains in their vehicles. Now and again, the Tesla team took the car out for drives on public roads. It weighed more than the Roadster but was still fast and had a range of about 120 miles per charge. To perform these joyrides-cum-tests in relative secrecy, the engineers had to weld the tips of the exhaust pipes back onto the car to make it look like any other CLS.

It was at this time, the summer of 2008, when an artsy car lover named Franz von Holzhausen joined Tesla. His job would be to breathe new life into the car’s early designs and, if possible, turn the Model S into an iconic product. /At some point from late 2007 to 2008, Musk also tried to hire Tony Fadell, an executive at Apple who is credited with bringing the iPod and iPhone to life. Fadell remembered being recruited for the CEO job at Tesla, while Musk remembered it more as a chief operating officer type of position. “Elon and I had multiple discussions about me joining as Tesla’s CEO, and he even went to the lengths of staging a surprise party for me when I was going to visit their offices,” Fadell said. Steve Jobs caught wind of these meetings and turned on the charm to keep Fadell. “He was sure nice to me for a while,” Fadell said. A couple of years later, Fadell left Apple to found Nest, a maker of smart-home devices, which Google then acquired in 2014./

Von Holzhausen grew up in a small Connecticut town. His father worked on the design and marketing of consumer products, and Franz treated the family basement full of markers, different kinds of paper, and other materials as a playground for his imagination. As he grew older, von Holzhausen drifted toward cars. He and a friend stripped down a dune-buggy motor one winter and then built it back up, and von Holzhausen always filled the margins of his school notebooks with drawings of cars and had pictures of cars on his bedroom walls. Applying to college, von Holzhausen decided to follow his father’s path and enrolled in the industrial design program at Syracuse University. Then, through a chance encounter with another designer during an internship, von Holzhausen heard about the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. “This guy had been teaching me about car design and this school in Los Angeles, and I got super-intrigued,” said von Holzhausen. “I went to Syracuse for two years and then decided to transfer out to California.”

The move to Los Angeles kicked off a long and storied design career in the automotive industry. Von Holzhausen would go on to intern in Michigan with Ford and in Europe with Volkswagen, where he began to pick up on a mix of design sensibilities. After graduating in 1992, he started work for Volkswagen on just about the most exciting project imaginable—a top-secret new version of the Beetle. “It really was a magical time,” von Holzhausen said. “Only fifty people in the world knew we were doing this project.” Von Holzhausen had a chance to work on the exterior and interior of the vehicle, including the signature flower vase built into the dashboard. In 1997, Volkswagen launched the “New Beetle,” and von Holzhausen saw firsthand how the look of the car captivated the public and changed the way people felt about Volkswagen, which had suffered from woeful sales in the United States. “It started a rebirth of the VW brand and brought design back into their mix,” he said.

Von Holzhausen spent eight years with VW, climbing the ranks of its design team and falling in love with the car culture of Southern California. Los Angeles has long adored its cars, with the climate lending itself to all manner of vehicles from convertibles to surfboard-toting vans. Almost all of the major carmakers set up design studios in the city. The presence of the studios allowed von Holzhausen to hop from VW to General Motors and Mazda, where he served as the company’s director of design.

GM taught von Holzhausen just how nasty a big car company could become. None of the cars in GM’s lineup really excited him, and it seemed near impossible to make a large impact on the company’s culture. He was one member of a thousand-person design team that divvyed up the makes of cars haphazardly without any consideration as to which person really wanted to work on which car. “They took all the spirit out of me,” said von Holzhausen. “I knew I didn’t want to die there.” Mazda, by contrast, needed and wanted help. It let von Holzhausen and his team in Los Angeles put their imprint on every car in the North American vehicle lineup and to produce a set of concept cars that reshaped how the company approached design. As von Holzhausen put it, “We brought the zoom-zoom back into the look and feel of the car.”

Von Holzhausen started a project to make Mazda’s cars more green by revaluating the types of materials used to fabricate the seats and the fuels going into the vehicles. He had, in fact, just made an ethanol-based concept car when, in early 2008, a friend told him that Tesla needed a chief designer. After playing phone tag for a month with Musk’s assistant, Mary Beth Brown, to inquire about the position, von Holzhausen finally got in touch and met Musk for an interview at the SpaceX headquarters.

Musk instantly saw von Holzhausen, with his bouffant, trendy clothes and laid-back attitude, as a free-spirited, creative complement and wooed him with vigor. They took a tour of the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne and Tesla’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Both facilities were chaotic and reeked of start-up. Musk ramped up the charm and sold von Holzhausen on the idea that he had a chance to shape the future of the automobile and that it made sense to leave his cushy job at a big, proven automaker for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “Elon and I went for a drive in the Roadster, and everyone was checking it out,” von Holzhausen said. “I knew I could stay at Mazda for ten years and get very comfortable or take a huge leap of faith. At Tesla, there was no history, no baggage. There was just a vision of products that could change the world. Who wouldn’t want to be involved with that?”

While von Holzhausen knew the risks of going to a startup, he could not have realized just how close Tesla was to bankruptcy when he joined the company in August 2008. Musk had coaxed von Holzhausen away from a secure job and into the jaws of death. But in many ways, this is what von Holzhausen sought at this point in his career. Tesla did not feel as much like a car company as a bunch of guys tinkering on a big idea. “To me, it was exciting,” he said. “It was like a garage experiment, and it made cars cool again.” The suits were gone, and so were the veteran automotive hands dulled by years working in the industry. In their stead, von Holzhausen found energetic geeks who didn’t realize that what they wanted to do was borderline impossible. Musk’s presence added to the energy and gave von Holzhausen confidence that Tesla actually could outflank much, much larger competitors. “Elon’s mind was always way beyond the present moment,” he said. “You could see that he was a step or three ahead of everyone else and one hundred percent committed to what we were doing.”

Von Holzhausen had examined the drawings of the Model S left by Fisker and a clay model of the car and had come away unimpressed. “It was a blob,” he said. “It was clear to me that the people that had been working on this were novices.” Musk realized the same thing and tried to articulate what he wanted. Even though the words were not precise, they were good enough to give von Holzhausen a feel for Musk’s vision and the confidence that he could deliver on it. “I said, ‘We’re going to start over. We’re going to work together and make this awesome.’”

To save money, the Tesla design center came to life inside the SpaceX factory. A handful of people on von Holzhausen’s team took over one corner and put up a tent to add some separation and secrecy to what they were doing. In the tradition of many a Musk employee, von Holzhausen had to build his own office. He made a pilgrimage to IKEA to buy some desks and then went to an art store to get some paper and pens.

As von Holzhausen began sketching the outside of the Model S, the Tesla engineers had started up a project to build another electric CLS. They ripped this one down to its very core, removing all of the body structure and then stretching the wheelbase by four inches to match up with some of the early Model S specifications. Things began moving fast for everyone involved in the Model S project. In the span of about three months, von Holzhausen had designed 95 percent of what people see today with the Model S, and the engineers had started building a prototype exterior around the skeleton.

Throughout this process, von Holzhausen and Musk talked every day. Their desks were close, and the men had a natural rapport. Musk said he wanted an aesthetic that borrowed from Aston Martin and Porsche and some specific functions. He insisted, for example, that the car seat seven people. “It was like ‘Holy shit, how do we pull this off in a sedan?’” von Holzhausen said. “But I understood. He had five kids and wanted something that could be thought of as a family vehicle, and he knew other people would have this issue.”

Musk wanted to make another statement with a huge touchscreen. This was years before the iPad would be released. The touch-screens that people ran into now and again at airports or shopping kiosks were for the most part terrible. But to Musk, the iPhone and all of its touch functions made it obvious that this type of technology would soon become commonplace. He would make a giant iPhone and have it handle most of the car’s functions. To find the right size for the screen, Musk and von Holzhausen would sit in the skeleton car and hold up laptops of different sizes, placing them horizontally and vertically to see what looked best. They settled on a seventeen-inch screen in a vertical position. Drivers would tap on this screen for every task except for opening the glove box and turning on the emergency lights—jobs required by law to be performed with physical buttons.

Since the battery pack at the base of the car would weigh so much, Musk, the designers, and the engineers were always looking for ways to reduce the Model S’s weight in other spots. Musk opted to solve a big chunk of this problem by making the body of the Model S out of lightweight aluminum instead of steel. “The non-battery-pack portion of the car has to be lighter than comparable gasoline cars, and making it all aluminum became the obvious decision,” Musk said. “The fundamental problem was that if we didn’t make it out of aluminum the car wasn’t going to be any good.”

Musk’s word choice there—“obvious decision”—goes a long way toward explaining how he operates. Yes, the car needed to be light, and, yes, aluminum would be an option for making that happen. But at the time, car manufacturers in North America had almost no experience producing aluminum body panels. Aluminum tends to tear when worked by large presses. It also develops lines that look like stretch marks on skin and make it difficult to lay down smooth coats of paint. “In Europe, you had some Jaguars and one Audi that were made of aluminum, but it was less than five percent of the market,” Musk said. “In North America, there was nothing. It’s only recently that the Ford F-150 has arrived as mostly aluminum. Before that, we were the only one.” Inside of Tesla, attempts were repeatedly made to talk Musk out of the aluminum body, but he would not budge, seeing it as the only rational choice. It would be up to the Tesla team to figure out how to make the aluminum manufacturing happen. “We knew it could be done,” Musk said. “It was a question of how hard it would be and how long it would take us to sort it out.”

Just about all of the major design choices with the Model S came with similar challenges. “When we first talked about the touch-screen, the guys came back and said, ‘There’s nothing like that in the automotive supply chain,’” Musk said. “I said, ‘I know. That’s because it’s never been put in a fucking car before.’” Musk figured that computer manufacturers had tons of experience making seventeen-inch laptop screens and expected them to knock out a screen for the Model S with relative ease. “The laptops are pretty robust,” Musk said. “You can drop them and leave them out in the sun, and they still have to work.” After contacting the laptop suppliers, Tesla’s engineers came back and said that the temperature and vibration loads for the computers did not appear to be up to automotive standards. Tesla’s supplier in Asia also kept pointing the carmaker to its automotive division instead of its computing division. As Musk dug into the situation more, he discovered that the laptop screens simply had not been tested before under the tougher automotive conditions, which included large temperature fluctuations. When Tesla performed the tests, the electronics ended up working just fine. Tesla also started working hand in hand with the Asian manufacturers to perfect their then-immature capacitive-touch technology and to find ways to hide the wiring behind the screen that made the touch technology possible. “I’m pretty sure that we ended up with the only seventeen-inch touch-screen in the world,” Musk said. “None of the computer makers or Apple had made it work yet.”

The Tesla engineers were radical by automotive industry standards but even they had problems fully committing to Musk’s vision. “They wanted to put in a bloody switch or a button for the lights,” Musk said. “Why would we need a switch? When it’s dark, turn the lights on.” Next, the engineers put up resistance to the door handles. Musk and von Holzhausen had been studying a bunch of preliminary designs in which the handles had yet to be drawn in and started to fall in love with how clean the car looked. They decided that the handles should only present themselves when a passenger needed to get in the car. Right away, the engineers realized this would be a technological pain, and they completely ignored the idea in one prototype version of the car, much to the dismay of Musk and von Holzhausen. “This prototype had the handles pivot instead of popping out,” von Holzhausen said. “I was upset about it, and Elon said, ‘Why the fuck is this different? We’re not doing this.’”

To crank up the pace of the Model S design, there were engineers working all day and then others who would show up at 9 P.M. and work through the night. Both groups huddled inside of the 3,000-square-foot tent placed on the SpaceX factory floor. Their workspace looked like a reception area at an outdoor wedding. “The SpaceX guys were amazingly respectful and didn’t peek or ask questions,” said Ali Javidan, one of the main engineers. As von Holzhausen delivered his specifications, the engineers built the prototype body of the car. Every Friday afternoon, they brought what they had made into a courtyard behind the factory where Musk would look it over and provide feedback. To run tests on the body, the car would be loaded up with ballast to represent five people and then do loops around the factory until it overheated or broke down.

The more von Holzhausen learned about Tesla’s financial struggles, the more he wanted the public to see the Model S. “Things were so precarious, and I didn’t want to miss our opportunity to get this thing finished and show it to the world,” he said. That moment came in March 2009, when, just six months after von Holzhausen had arrived, Tesla unveiled the Model S at a press event held at SpaceX.

Amid rocket engines and hunks of aluminum, Tesla showcased a gray Model S sedan. From a distance, the display model looked glamorous and refined. The media reports from the day described the car as the love child of an Aston Martin and a Maserati. In reality, the sedan barely held together. It still had the base structure of a Mercedes CLS, although no one in the press knew that, and some of the body panels and the hood were stuck to the frame with magnets. “They could just slide the hood right off,” said Bruce Leak, a Tesla owner invited to attend the event. “It wasn’t really attached. They would put it back on and try and align it to get the fit and finish right, but then someone would push on it, and it would move again. It was one of those Wizard of Oz, man behind the curtain moments.” A couple of the Tesla engineers practiced test-driving the car for a couple of days leading up to the event to make sure that they knew just how long the car would go before it overheated. While not perfect, the display accomplished exactly what Musk had intended. It reminded people that Tesla had a credible plan to make electric cars more mainstream and that its cars were far more ambitious than what big-time automakers like GM and Nissan seemed to have in mind both from a design and a range perspective.

The messy reality behind the display was that the odds of Tesla advancing the Model S from a prop to a sellable car were infinitesimal. The company had the technical know-how and the will for the job. It just didn’t have much money or a factory that could crank out cars by the thousands. Building an entire car would require blanking machines that take sheets of aluminum and chop them up into the appropriate size for doors, hoods, and body panels. Next up would be the massive stamping machines and metal dies used to take the aluminum and bend it into precise shapes. Then there would be dozens of robots that would aid in assembling the cars, computer-controlled milling machines for precise metalwork, painting equipment, and a bevy of other machines for running tests. It was an investment that would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Musk would also need to hire thousands of workers.

As with SpaceX, Musk preferred to build as much of Tesla’s vehicles in-house as possible, but the high costs were limiting just how much Tesla could take on. “The original plan was that we would do final assembly,” said Diarmuid O’Connell, the vice president of business development at Tesla. Partners would stamp out the body parts, do the welding and handle the painting, and ship everything to Tesla, where workers would turn the parts into a whole car. Tesla proposed to build a factory to handle this type of work first in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then later in San Jose, California, and then pulled back on these proposals, much to the dismay of city officials in both locales. The public hemming and hawing around picking the factory site did little to inspire confidence in Tesla’s ability to knock out a second car and generated the same type of negative headlines that had surrounded the Roadster’s protracted delivery.

O’Connell had joined Tesla in 2006 to help solve some of the factory and financing issues. He grew up near Boston in a middle-class Irish family and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College. After that, O’Connell attended the University of Virginia to get a master’s degree in foreign policy and then Northwestern, where he got an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. He had fancied himself a scholar of the Soviet Union and its foreign and economic policy and had studied these areas at UVa. “But then, in 1988 and 1989, they’re starting to close down the Soviet Union, and, at the very least, I had a brand problem,” O’Connell said. “It started looking to me like I was heading to a career in academia or intelligence.” It was then that O’Connell’s career took a detour into the business world, where he became a management consultant working for McCann Erickson Worldwide, Young & Rubicam, and Accenture, advising companies like Coca-Cola and AT&T.

O’Connell’s career path changed more drastically in 2001 when the planes hit the twin towers in New York. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, O’Connell, like many people, decided to serve the United States in any capacity that he could. In his late thirties, he had missed the window to be a soldier and instead focused his attention on trying to get into national security work. O’Connell went from office to office in Washington, D.C., looking for a job and had little luck until Lincoln Bloomfield, the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, heard him out. Bloomfield needed someone who could help prioritize missions in the Middle East and make sure the right people were working on the right things, and he figured that O’Connell’s management consulting experience made him a nice fit for the job. O’Connell became Bloomfield’s chief of staff and dealt with a wide range of charged situations, from trade negotiations to setting up an embassy in Baghdad. After gaining security clearance, O’Connell also had access to a daily report that collected information from intelligence and military personnel on the status of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Every morning at six A.M., the first thing to hit my desk was this overnight report that included information on who got killed and what killed them,” O’Connell said. “I kept thinking, This is insane. Why are we in this place? It was not just Iraq but the whole picture. Why were we so invested in that part of the world?” The unsurprising answer that O’Connell came up with was oil.

The more O’Connell dug into the United States’ dependence on foreign oil, the more frustrated and despondent he became. “My clients were basically the combat commanders—people in charge of Latin America and Central Command,” he said. “As I talked with them and studied and researched, I realized that even in peacetime, so many of our assets were employed to support the economic pipeline around oil.” O’Connell decided that the rational thing to do for his country and for his newborn son was to alter this equation. He looked at the wind industry and the solar industry and the traditional automakers but came away unconvinced that what they were doing could have a radical enough impact on the status quo. Then, while reading Businessweek, he stumbled on an article about a start-up called Tesla Motors and went to the company’s website, which described Tesla as a place “where we are doing things, not talking about things.” “I sent an e-mail telling them I had come from the national security area and was really passionate about reducing our dependence on oil and figured it was just a dead-letter type of thing,” O’Connell said. “I got an e-mail back the next day.”

Musk hired O’Connell and quickly dispatched him to Washington, D.C., to start poking around on what types of tax credits and rebates Tesla might be able to drum up around its electric vehicles. At the same time, O’Connell drafted an application for a Department of Energy stimulus package. /It took a couple of years, from about 2007 to 2009, for the Energy Department application to morph into the actual possibility of a loan from the government./ “All I knew is that we were going to need a shitload of money to build this company,” O’Connell said. “My view was that we needed to explore everything.” Tesla had been looking for between $100 million and $200 million, grossly underestimating what it would take to build the Model S. “We were naïve and learning our way in the business,” O’Connell said.

It January 2009, Tesla took over Porsche’s usual spot at the Detroit auto show, getting the space cheap because so many other car companies had bailed out on the event. Fisker had a luxurious booth across the hallway with wood flooring and pretty blond booth babes draped over its car. Tesla had the Roadster, its electric powertrain, and no frills.

The technology that Tesla’s engineers displayed proved good enough to attract the attention of the big boys. Not long after the show, Daimler voiced some interest in seeing what an electric Mercedes A Class car might look and feel like. Daimler executives said they would visit Tesla in about a month to discuss this proposition in detail, and the Tesla engineers decided to blow them away by producing two prototype vehicles before the visit. When the Daimler executives saw what Tesla had done, they ordered four thousand of Tesla’s battery packs for a fleet of test vehicles in Germany. The Tesla team pulled off the same kind of feats for Toyota and won its business, too.

In May 2009, things started to take off for Tesla. The Model S had been unveiled, and Daimler followed that by acquiring a 10 percent stake in Tesla for $50 million. The companies also formed a strategic partnership to have Tesla provide the battery packs for one thousand of Daimler’s Smart cars. “That money was important and went a long way back then,” said O’Connell. “It was also a validation. Here is the company that invented the internal combustion engine, and they are investing in us. It was a seminal moment, and I am sure it gave the guys over at the DOE the feeling that we were real. It’s not just our scientists saying this stuff is good. It’s Mercedes freaking Benz.”

Sure enough, in January 2010, the Department of Energy struck a $465 million loan agreement with Tesla. /The deal had two parts. Tesla would keep making battery packs and associated technology that other companies might use, and it would produce its own electric vehicles at a manufacturing facility in the United States./ The money was far more than Tesla had ever expected to get from the government. But it still represented just a fraction of the $1 billion plus that most carmakers needed to bring a new vehicle to market. So, while Musk and O’Connell were thrilled to get the money, they still wondered if Tesla would be able to live up to the bargain. Tesla would need one more windfall or, perhaps, to steal a car factory. And in May 2010, that’s more or less what it did.

General Motors and Toyota had teamed up in 1984 to build New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI, on the site of a former GM assembly plant in Fremont, California, a city on the outskirts of Silicon Valley. The companies hoped the joint facility would combine the best of American and Japanese automaking skills and result in higher-quality, cheaper cars. The factory went on to pump out millions of vehicles like the Chevy Nova and Toyota Corolla. Then the recession hit, and GM found itself trying to climb out of bankruptcy. It decided to abandon the plant in 2009, and Toyota followed right after, saying it would close down the whole facility, leaving five thousand people without jobs.

All of a sudden, Tesla had the chance to buy a 5.3-million-square-foot plant in its backyard. Just one month after the last Toyota Corolla went off the manufacturing line in April 2010, Tesla and Toyota announced a partnership and transfer of the factory. Tesla agreed to pay $42 million for a large portion of the factory (once worth $1 billion), while Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla for a 2.5 percent stake in the company. Tesla had basically secured a factory, including the massive metal-stamping machines and other equipment, for free. /Musk had received a lot of pushback internally for trying to locate a car factory in or near California. “All the guys in Detroit said it needs to be in a place where the labor can afford to live and be happy,” Lloyd said. “There’s a lot of learned skill on an assembly line, and you can’t afford turnover.” Musk responded that SpaceX had found a way to build rockets in Los Angeles, and that Tesla would find a way to build cars in Northern California. His stubbornness ended up being fortuitous for the company. “If it hadn’t been for that DOE loan, and the NUMMI plant, there’s no way Tesla would have ended up being so successful, so fast,” Lloyd said./

The string of fortunate turns for Tesla left Musk feeling good. Just after the factory deal closed in the summer of 2010, Tesla started the process of filing for an initial public offering. The company obviously needed as much capital as it could get to bring the Model S to market and push forward with its other technology projects. Tesla hoped to raise about $200 million.

For Musk, going public represented something of a Faustian bargain. Ever since the Zip2 and PayPal days, Musk has done everything in his power to maintain absolute control over his companies. Even if he remained the largest shareholder in Tesla, the company would be subjected to the capricious nature of the public markets. Musk, the ultimate long-term thinker, would face constant second-guessing from investors looking for short-term returns. Tesla would also be subject to public scrutiny, as it would be forced to open its books for public consumption. This was bad because Musk prefers to operate in secrecy and because Tesla’s financial situation looked awful. The company had one product (the Roadster), had huge development costs, and had bordered on bankruptcy months earlier. The car blog Jalopnik greeted the Tesla IPO as a Hail Mary rather than a sound fiscal move. “For lack of a better phrase, Tesla is a money pit,” the blog wrote. “Since the company’s founding in 2003, it’s managed to incur over $290 million in losses on just $147.6 million in revenue.” Told by a source that Tesla hoped to sell 20,000 units of the Model S per year at $58,000 a pop, Jalopnik scoffed. “Even considering the supposed pent-up demand among environmentalists for a car like the Model S, those are ambitious goals for a small company planning to launch a niche luxury product into a soft market. Frankly, we’re skeptical. We’ve seen how brutal and unforgiving the market can be, and other automakers aren’t simply going to roll over and surrender that volume to Tesla.” Other pundits concurred with this assessment.

Tesla went public on June 29, 2010, nonetheless. It raised $226 million, with the company’s shares shooting up 41 percent that day. Investors looked past Tesla’s $55.7 million loss in 2009 and the more than $300 million the company had spent in seven years. The IPO stood as the first for an American carmaker since Ford went public in 1956. Competitors continued to treat Tesla like an annoying, ankle-biting dachshund. Nissan’s CEO, Carlos Ghosn, used the event to remind people that Tesla was but a pipsqueak and that his company had plans to pump out up to 500,000 electric cars by 2012.

Flush with funds, Musk began expanding some of the engineering teams and formalizing the development work around the Model S. Tesla’s main offices moved from San Mateo to a larger building in Palo Alto, and von Holzhausen expanded the design team in Los Angeles. Javidan hopped between projects, helping develop technology for the electrified Mercedes-Benz, an electric Toyota Rav4, and prototypes of the Model S. The Tesla team worked fast inside of a tiny lab with about 45 people knocking out 35 Rav4 test vehicles at the rate of about two cars per week. The alpha version of the Model S, including newly stamped body parts from the Fremont factory, a revamped battery pack, and revamped power electronics, came to life in the basement of the Palo Alto office. “The first prototype was finished at about two A.M.,” Javidan said. “We were so excited that we drove it around without glass, any interior, or a hood.”

A day or two later, Musk came to check out the vehicle. He jumped into the car and drove it to the opposite end of the basement, where he could spend some time alone with it. He got out and walked around the vehicle, and then the engineers came over to hear his take on the machine. This process would be repeated many times in the months to come. “He would generally be positive but constructive,” Javidan said. “We would try and get him rides whenever we could, and he might ask for the steering to be tighter or something like that before running off to another meeting.”

About a dozen of the alpha cars were produced. A couple went to suppliers like Bosch to begin work on the braking systems, while others were used for various tests and design tweaks. Tesla’s executives kept the vehicles rotating on a strict schedule, giving one team two weeks for cold-weather testing and then shipping that alpha car to another team right away for powertrain tuning. “The guys from Toyota and Daimler were blown away,” Javidan said. “They might have two hundred alpha cars and several hundred to a thousand beta cars. We were doing everything from crash tests to the interior design with about fifteen cars. That was amazing to them.”

Tesla employees developed similar techniques to their counterparts at SpaceX for dealing with Musk’s high demands. The savvy engineers knew better than to go into a meeting and deliver bad news without some sort of alternative plan at the ready. “One of the scariest meetings was when we needed to ask Elon for an extra two weeks and more money to build out another version of the Model S,” Javidan said. “We put together a plan, stating how long things would take and what they would cost. We told him that if he wanted the car in thirty days it would require hiring some new people, and we presented him with a stack of resumes. You don’t tell Elon you can’t do something. That will get you kicked out of the room. You need everything lined up. After we presented the plan, he said, ‘Okay, thanks.’ Everyone was like, ‘Holy shit, he didn’t fire you.’”

There were times when Musk would overwhelm the Tesla engineers with his requests. He took a Model S prototype home for a weekend and came back on the Monday asking for around eighty changes. Since Musk never writes anything down, he held all the alterations in his head and would run down the checklist week by week to see what the engineers had fixed. The same engineering rules as those at SpaceX applied. You did what Musk asked or were prepared to burrow down into the properties of materials to explain why something could not be done. “He always said, ‘Take it down to the physics,’” Javidan said.

As the development of the Model S neared completion in 2012, Musk refined his requests and dissection style. He went over the Model S with von Holzhausen every Friday at Tesla’s design studio in Los Angeles. Von Holzhausen and his small team had moved out of the corner in the SpaceX factory and gotten their own hangar-shaped facility near the rear of the SpaceX complex. /Boeing used to make fuselages for the 747 in the SpaceX building and painted them in what became the Tesla design studio./ The building had a few offices and then one large, wide-open area where various mock-ups of vehicles and parts awaited inspection. During a visit I made in 2012, there was one complete Model S, a skeletal version of the Model X—an as yet to be released SUV—and a selection of tires and hubcaps lined up against the wall. Musk sank into the Model S driver seat and von Holzhausen climbed into the passenger seat. Musk’s eyes darted around for a few moments and then settled onto the sun visor. It was beige and a visible seam ran around the edge and pushed the fabric out. “It’s fish-lipped,” Musk said. The screws attaching the visor to the car were visible as well, and Musk insisted that every time he saw them it felt like tiny daggers were stabbing him in the eyes. The whole situation was unacceptable. “We have to decide what is the best sun visor in the world and then do better,” Musk said. A couple of assistants taking notes outside of the car jotted this down.

This process played out again with the Model X. This was to be Tesla’s merger of an SUV and a minivan built off the Model S foundation. Von Holzhausen had four different versions of the vehicle’s center console resting on the floor, so that they could be slotted in one by one and viewed by Musk. The pair spent most of their time, however, agonizing over the middle row of seats. Each one had an independent base so that each passenger could adjust his seat rather than moving the whole row collectively. Musk loved the freedom this gave the passenger but grew concerned after seeing all three seats in different positions. “The problem is that they will never be aligned and might look a mess,” Musk said. “We have to make sure they are not too hodgy podgy.”

The idea of Musk as a design expert has long struck me as bizarre. He’s a physicist at heart and an engineer by demeanor. So much of who Musk is says that he should fall into that Silicon Valley stereotype of the schlubby nerd who would only know good design if he read about it in a textbook. The truth is that there might be some of that going on with Musk, and he’s turned it into an advantage. He’s very visual and can store things that others have deemed to look good away in his brain for recall at any time. This process has helped Musk develop a good eye, which he’s combined with his own sensibilities, while also refining his ability to put what he wants into words. The result is a confident, assertive perspective that does resonate with the tastes of consumers. Like Steve Jobs before him, Musk is able to think up things that consumers did not even know they wanted—the door handles, the giant touch-screen—and to envision a shared point of view for all of Tesla’s products and services. “Elon holds Tesla up as a product company,” von Holzhausen said. “He’s passionate that you have to get the product right. I have to deliver for him and make sure it’s beautiful and attractive.”

With the Model X, Musk again turned to his role as a dad to shape some of the flashiest design elements of the vehicle. He and von Holzhausen were walking around the floor of an auto show in Los Angeles, and they both complained about the awkwardness of getting to the middle and back row seats in an SUV. Parents who have felt their backs wrench while trying to angle a child and car seat into a vehicle know this reality all too well, as does any decent-sized human who has tried to wedge into a third row seat. “Even on a minivan, which is supposed to have more room, almost one-third of the entry space is covered by the sliding door,” von Holzhausen said. “If you could open up the car in a way that is unique and special, that could be a real game changer. We took that kernel of an idea back and worked up forty or fifty design concepts to solve the problem, and I think we ended up with one of the most radical ones.” The Model X has what Musk coined as “falcon-wing doors.” They’re hinged versions of the gull-wing doors found on some high-end cars like the DeLorean. The doors go up and then flop over in a constrained enough way that the Model X won’t rub up against a car parked close to it or hit the ceiling in a garage. The end result is that a parent can plop a child in the second-row passenger seat without needing to bend over or twist at all.

When Tesla’s engineers first heard about the falcon-wing doors, they cringed. Here was Musk with another crazy ask. “Everyone tried to come up with an excuse as to why we couldn’t do it,” Javidan said. “You can’t put it in the garage. It won’t work with things like skis. Then, Elon took a demo model to his house and showed us that the doors opened. Everyone is mumbling, ‘Yeah, in a fifteen-million-dollar house, the doors will open just fine.’” Like the controversial door handles on the Model S, the Model X’s doors have become one of its most striking features and the thing consumers talk about the most. “I was one of the first people to test it out with a kid’s car seat,” Javidan said. “We have a minivan, and you have to be a contortionist to get the seat into the middle row. Compared to that, the Model X was so easy. If it’s a gimmick, it’s a gimmick that works.”

During my 2012 visit to the design studio, Tesla had a number of competitors’ vehicles in the parking lot nearby, and Musk made sure to demonstrate the limitations of their seating compared to the Model X. He tried with honest effort to sit in the third row of an Acura SUV, but, even though the car claimed to have room for seven, Musk’s knees were pressed up to his chin, and he never really fit into the seat. “That’s like a midget cave,” he said. “Anyone can make a car big on the outside. The trick is to make it big on the inside.” Musk went from one rival’s car to the next, illuminating the vehicles’ flaws for me and von Holzhausen. “It’s good to get a sense for just how bad the other cars are,” he said.

When these statements fly out of Musk’s mouth, it’s momentarily shocking. Here’s a guy who needed nine years to produce about three thousand cars ridiculing automakers that build millions of vehicles every year. In that context, his ribbing comes off as absurd.

Musk, though, approaches everything from a Platonic perspective. As he sees it, all of the design and technology choices should be directed toward the goal of making a car as close to perfect as possible. To the extent that rival automakers haven’t, that’s what Musk is judging. It’s almost a binary experience for him. Either you’re trying to make something spectacular with no compromises or you’re not. And if you’re not, Musk considers you a failure. This position can look unreasonable or foolish to outsiders, but the philosophy works for Musk and constantly pushes him and those around him to their limits.

On June 22, 2012, Tesla invited all of its employees, some select customers, and the press to its factory in Fremont to watch as the first Model S sedans were taken home. Depending on which of the many promised delivery dates you pick, the Model S was anywhere from eighteen months to two-plus years late. Some of the delays were a result of Musk’s requests for exotic technologies that needed to be invented. Other delays were simply a function of this still quite young automaker learning how to produce an immaculate luxury vehicle and needing to go through the trial and error tied to becoming a more mature, more refined company.

The outsiders were blown away by their first glimpse of the Tesla factory. Musk had T-E-S-L-A painted in enormous black letters on the side of the building so that people driving by on the freeway, or flying above for that matter, were made well aware of the company’s presence. The inside of the factory, once dressed in the dark, dingy tones of General Motors and Toyota, had taken on the Musk aesthetic. The floors received a white epoxy, the walls and beams were painted white, the thirty-foot tall stamping machines were white, and then much of the other machinery, like the teams of the robots, had been painted red, making the place look like an industrial version of Santa Claus’s workshop. Just as he did at SpaceX, Musk placed the desks of his engineers right on the factory floor, where they worked in an area cordoned off by rudimentary cubicle dividers. Musk had a desk in this area as well. /“He picks the most visible place on purpose,” said the investor and Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson. “He’s at Tesla just about every Saturday and Sunday and wants people to see him and know they can find him. Then, he can also call suppliers on the weekend, and let them know that he’s personally putting in the hours on the factory floor and expects the same from them.”/

The Model S launch event took place in a section of the factory where they finish off the cars. There’s a part of the floor with various grooves and bumps that the cars pass over, as technicians listen for any rattles. There’s also a chamber where water can be sprayed at high pressure onto the car to check for leaks. For the very last inspection, the Model S cruises onto a raised platform made out of bamboo, which, when coupled with lots of LED lighting, is meant to provide an abundant amount of contrast so that people can spot flaws on the body. For the few first months that the Model S came off the line, Musk went to this bamboo stage to inspect every vehicle. “He was down on all fours looking up under the wheel well,” said Steve Jurvetson, the investor and Tesla board member.

Hundreds of people had gathered around this stage to watch as the first dozen or so cars were presented to their owners. Many of the employees were factory workers who had once been part of the autoworkers’ union, lost their jobs when the NUMMI plant closed, and were now back at work again, making the car of the future. They waved American flags and wore red, white, and blue visors. A handful of the workers cried as the Model S sedans were lined up on the stage. Even Musk’s most cynical critics would have softened for a moment while watching the proceedings. Say what you will about Tesla receiving government money or hyping up the promise of the electric car, it was trying to do something big and different, and people were getting hired by the thousands as a result. With machines humming in the background, Musk gave a brief speech and then handed the owners their keys. They drove off the bamboo platform and out the factory doors, while the Tesla employees provided a standing ovation.

Just four weeks earlier, SpaceX had flown cargo to the International Space Station and had its capsule returned to Earth—firsts all around for a private company. That feat coupled with the launch of the Model S led to a rapid transformation in the way the world outside of Silicon Valley perceived Musk. The guy who was always promising, promising, promising was doing—and doing spectacular things. “I may have been optimistic with respect to the timing on some of these things, but I didn’t over-promise on the outcome,” Musk told me during an interview after the Model S launch. “I have done everything I said I was going to do.”

Musk did not have Riley around to celebrate with and share in this run of good fortune. They had divorced, and Musk had begun to think about dating again, if he could find the time. Even with this turmoil in his personal life, however, Musk had reached a point of calm that he had not felt in many years. “My main emotion is that there is a bit of weight off my shoulders,” he said at the time. Musk took his boys to Maui to meet up with Kimbal and other relatives, marking his first real vacation in a number of years.

It was right after this holiday that Musk let me have the first substantial glimpse into his life. Skin still peeling off his sunburnt arms, Musk met with me at the Tesla and SpaceX headquarters, at the Tesla design studio, and at a Beverley Hills screening of a documentary he had helped sponsor. The film, Baseball in the Time of Cholera, was good but grim and explored a cholera outbreak in Haiti. It turned out that Musk had visited Haiti the previous Christmas, filling his jet with toys and MacBook Airs for an orphanage. Bryn Mooser, the codirector of the film, told me that during a barbecue Musk had taught the kids how to fire off model rockets and then later went to visit a village deeper in the jungle by traveling in a dugout canoe. After the screening, Musk and I hung out on the street for a bit away from the crowd. I noted aloud that everyone wants to make him out as the Tony Stark character but that he didn’t really exude that “playboy drinking scotch while zooming through Afghanistan in an army convoy” vibe. He fired back, pointing to the Haitian canoe ride. “I got wasted, too, on some drink they call the Zombie,” Musk said. He smiled and then invited me to grab some drinks across the street at Mr. Chow to celebrate the movie. All seemed to be going well for Musk, and he savored the moment.

This restful period did not last long and soon enough Tesla’s battle for survival resumed. The company could only produce about ten sedans per week at the outset and had thousands of back orders that it needed to fulfill. Short sellers, those investors who bet a company’s share price will fall, had taken huge positions in Tesla, making it the most shorted stock out of one hundred of the largest companies listed on the NASDAQ exchange. The naysayers expected numerous Model S flaws to crop up and undermine the enthusiasm for the car, to the point that people started canceling their orders in bulk. There were also huge doubts that Tesla could ramp up production in a meaningful way and do so profitably. In October 2012, the presidential hopeful Mitt Romney dubbed Tesla “a loser,” while slagging off a couple of other government-backed green technology companies (the solar panel maker Solyndra and Fisker) during a debate with Barack Obama. [At the conclusion of the debate, Musk and I exchanged a couple of emails. He wrote, “Oil and gas is firmly in the Romney camp and they are feeding his campaign these talking points. Until recently, they didn’t care about Tesla, as they thought we would fail.

“Ironically, it is because they are starting to think Tesla might not fail that they are attacking us. The reason is that society has to function, so the less there seems to be a viable alternative to burning hydrocarbons, the less pressure there is to curb carbon emissions. If an electric car succeeds, it spoils that argument.

“Overall though, I think it is great that he mentioned us :) ‘Romney Tesla’ is one of the top Google searches!”

I reached out to Romney’s camp months later, as sales of Tesla’s soared, to see if he wanted to change his position but was rebuffed.]

While the doubters placed huge wagers on Tesla’s impending failure, Musk’s bluster mode engaged. He began talking about Tesla’s goals to become the most profitable major automobile maker in the world, with better margins than BMW. Then, in September 2012, he unveiled something that shocked both Tesla critics and proponents alike. Tesla had secretly been building the first leg of a network of charging stations. The company disclosed the location of six stations in California, Nevada, and Arizona and promised that hundreds more would be on the way. Tesla intended to build a global charging network that would let Model S owners making long drives pull off the highway and recharge very quickly. And they would be able to do so for free. In fact, Musk insisted that Tesla owners would soon be able to travel across the United States without spending a penny on fuel. Model S drivers would have no trouble finding these stations, not only because the cars’ onboard computers would guide them to the nearest one but because Musk and von Holzhausen had designed giant red and white monoliths to herald the appearance of the stations.

The Supercharging stations, as Tesla called them, represented a huge investment for the strapped company. An argument could easily be made that spending money on this sort of thing at such a precarious moment in the Model S and Tesla’s history was somewhere between daft and batshit crazy. Surely Musk did not have the gall to try to revamp the very idea of the automobile and build an energy network at the same time with a budget equivalent to what Ford and ExxonMobil spend on their annual holiday parties. But that was the exact plan. Musk, Straubel, and others inside Tesla had mapped out this all-or-nothing play long ago and built certain features into the Model S with the Superchargers in mind. /Tesla got its start using the same lithium ion batteries that go into consumer electronics like laptops. During the early days of the Roadster, this proved a risky but calculated choice. Tesla wanted to tap into Asia’s mature battery suppliers and get access to cheap products that would keep improving over time. The press played up Tesla’s use of these types of batteries, and consumers were fascinated by the idea that a car could be powered by the same energy source sitting inside of their gizmos.

There’s a major misconception that Tesla still depends on these types of batteries. Yes, the batteries inside the Model S look like those found in a laptop. Tesla, however, started developing its own battery chemistry in conjunction with partners like Panasonic dating back to late models of the Roadster. Tesla can still use the same manufacturing equipment as consumer electronics companies while ending up with a battery that’s safer and better tuned to the intense charging demands of its cars. Along with the secret formula for the battery cells themselves, Tesla has improved the performance of its batteries by developing its own techniques for linking the cells together and cooling them. The battery cells have been designed to vent heat in a very particular way, and there’s coolant running throughout the entire battery pack. The battery packs are assembled at the Tesla factory in an area hidden from visitors.

The chemistry, the batteries, the battery pack design—these are all elements of a large, continuous system that Tesla has built from the ground up to allow its cars to charge at record speed. To control the heat produced during the charging process, Tesla has designed an interlinked system of radiators and chillers to cool both the batteries and the chargers. “You’ve got all that hardware plus the software management system and other controllers,” said J. B. Straubel. “All of these things are running at maximum rate.” A Model S can recharge 150 miles of range in 20 minutes at one of Tesla’s charging stations with DC power pumping straight into the batteries. By comparison, a Nissan Leaf that maxes out at 80 miles of range can take 8 hours to recharge./

While the arrival of the Model S and the charging network garnered Tesla a ton of headlines, it remained unclear if the positive press and good vibes would last. Serious trade-offs had been made as Tesla rushed to get the Model S to market. The car had some spectacular, novel features. But everyone inside of the company knew that as far as luxury sedans went, the Model S did not match up feature to feature with cars from BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The first few thousand Model S cars, for example, would ship without the parking sensors and radar-assisted cruise control common on other high-end cars. “It was either hire a team of fifty people right away to make one of these things happen or implement things as best and as fast as you could,” Javidan said.

The subpar fit and finish also proved hard to explain. The early adopters could tolerate a windshield wiper going haywire for a couple of days, but they wanted to see seats and visors that met the $100,000 price tag. While Tesla did its best to source the highest-quality materials, it struggled at times to convince the top suppliers to take the company seriously. [As Tesla has grown in size, the company has commanded more respect from suppliers and been able to get better parts and better deals. But outsourcing components still bothers Musk, and for understandable reasons. When it tried to ramp up production in 2013, Tesla ran into periodic issues because of its suppliers. One of them made what should have been an inconsequential 12-volt lead acid battery that handled a few auxiliary functions in the car. Tesla bought the part from an American supplier, which in turn outsourced the part from a company in China, which in turn outsourced the part from a company in Vietnam. By the time the battery arrived at Tesla’s factories, it didn’t work, adding cost and delays during a crucial period in the Model S’s history. It’s situations like these that typically result in Tesla playing a much more active role with its suppliers when compared to other automakers. For something like an ABS braking controller, Tesla will work hand-in-hand with its supplier—in this case Bosch—to tune the hardware and software for the Model S’s specific characteristics. “Most companies just hand their cars over to Bosch, but Tesla goes in with a software engineer,” said Ali Javidan. “We had to change their mind-set and let them know we wanted to work on a very deep level.”] “People were very suspect that we would deliver one thousand Model Ss,” said von Holzhausen. “It was frustrating because we had the drive internally to make the car perfect but could not get the same commitment externally. With something like the visor, we ended up having to go to a third-rate supplier and then work on fixing the situation after the car had already started shipping.” The cosmetic issues, though, were minor compared to a tumultuous set of internal circumstances, revealed in detail here for the first time, that threatened to bankrupt the company once again.

Musk had hired George Blankenship, a former Apple executive, to run its stores and service-center operations. At Apple, Blankenship worked just a couple of doors down from Steve Jobs and received credit for building much of the Apple Store strategy. When Tesla first hired Blankenship, the press and public were atwitter, anticipating that’d he do something spectacular and at odds with the traditions of the automotive industry.

Blankenship did some of that. He expanded Tesla’s number of stores throughout the world and imbued them with that Apple Store vibe. Along with showcasing the Model S, the Tesla stores sold hoodies and hats and had areas in the back where kids would find crayons and Tesla coloring books. Blankenship gave me a tour of the Tesla store on Santana Row, the glitzy shopping center in San Jose. He came off as a warm, grandfatherly sort who saw Tesla as his chance to make a difference. “The typical dealer wants to sell you a car on the spot to clear inventory off his lot,” Blankenship said. “The goal here is to develop a relationship with Tesla and electric vehicles.” Tesla, he said, wanted to turn the Model S into more than a car. Ideally it would be an object of desire just like the iPod and iPhone. Blankenship noted that Tesla had more than ten thousand reservations for the Model S at the time, the vast majority of which had arrived without the customers test-driving the car. A lot of this early interest resulted from the aura surrounding Musk, who Blankenship said came off as similar to Jobs but with a toned-down control-freak vibe. “This is the first place I have worked that is going to change the world,” Blankenship said, taking a jab at the sometimes trivial nature of Apple’s gadgets.

While Musk and Blankenship got along at first, their relationship fell apart during the latter stages of 2012. Tesla did have a large number of reservations in which people put down $5,000 for the right to buy a Model S and get in the purchase queue. But the company had struggled to turn these reservations into actual sales. The reasons behind this problem remain unclear. It may have been that the complaints about the interior and the early kinks mentioned on the Tesla forums and message boards were causing concerns. Tesla also lacked financing options to soften the blow of buying a $100,000 car, while uncertainty surrounded the resale market for the Model S. You might end up with the car of the future or you might spend six figures on a dud with a battery pack that loses its capacity, and with no secondary buyer. Tesla’s service centers at the time were also terrible. The early cars were unreliable and customers were being sent in droves to centers unprepared to handle the volume. Many prospective Tesla owners likely wanted to hang out on the sidelines for a bit longer to make sure that the company would remain viable. As Musk put it, “The word of mouth on the car sucked.”

By the middle of February 2013, Tesla had fallen into a crisis state. If it could not convert its reservations to purchases quickly, its factory would sit idle, costing the company vast amounts of money. And if anyone caught wind of the factory slowdown, Tesla’s shares would likely plummet, prospective owners would become even more cautious, and the short sellers would win. The severity of this problem had been hidden from Musk, but once he learned about it, he acted in his signature all-or-nothing fashion. Musk pulled people from recruiting, the design studio, engineering, finance, and wherever else he could find them and ordered them to get on the phone, call people with reservations, and close deals. “If we don’t deliver these cars, we are fucked,” Musk told the employees. “So, I don’t care what job you were doing. Your new job is delivering cars.” He placed Jerome Guillen, a former Daimler executive, in charge of fixing the service issues. Musk fired senior leaders whom he deemed subpar performers and promoted a flood of junior people who had been doing above-average work. He also made an announcement personally guaranteeing the resale price of the Model S. Customers would be able to resell their cars for the average going rate of similar luxury sedans with Musk putting his billions behind this pledge. And then Musk tried to orchestrate the ultimate fail-safe for Tesla just in case his maneuvers did not work.

During the first week of April, Musk reached out to his friend Larry Page at Google. According to people familiar with their discussion, Musk voiced his concerns about Tesla’s ability to survive the next few weeks. Not only were customers failing to convert their reservations to orders at the rate Musk hoped, but existing customers had also started to defer their orders as they heard about upcoming features and new color choices. The situation got so bad that Tesla had to shut down its factory. Publicly, Tesla said it needed to conduct maintenance on the factory, which was technically true, although the company would have soldiered on had the orders been closing as expected. Musk explained all of this to Page and then struck a handshake deal for Google to acquire Tesla.

While Musk did not want to sell, the deal seemed like the only viable course for Tesla’s future. Musk’s biggest fear about an acquisition was that the new owner would not see Tesla’s goals through to their conclusion. He wanted to make sure that the company would end up producing a mass-market electric vehicle. Musk proposed terms under which he would remain in control of Tesla for eight years or until it started pumping out a mass-market car. Musk also asked for access to $5 billion in capital for factory expansions. Some of Google’s lawyers were put off by these demands, but Musk and Page continued to talk about the deal. Given Tesla’s value at the time, it was thought that Google would need to pay about $6 billion for the company.

As Musk, Page, and Google’s lawyers debated the parameters of an acquisition, a miracle happened. The five hundred or so people whom Musk had turned into car salesmen quickly sold a huge volume of cars. Tesla, which only had a couple weeks of cash left in the bank, moved enough cars in the span of about fourteen days to end up with a blowout first fiscal quarter. Tesla stunned Wall Street on May 8, 2013, by posting its first-ever profit as a public company—$11 million—on $562 million in sales. It delivered 4,900 Model S sedans during the period. This announcement sent Tesla’s shares soaring from about $30 a share to $130 per share in July. Just a couple of weeks after revealing the first-quarter results, Tesla paid off its $465 million loan from the government early and with interest. Tesla suddenly appeared to have vast cash reserves at its disposal, and the short sellers were forced to take massive losses. The solid performance of the stock increased consumers’ confidence, creating a virtuous circle for Tesla. With cars selling and Tesla’s value rising, the deal with Google was no longer necessary, and Tesla had become too expensive to buy. The talks with Google ended. /Google’s attorneys had asked to make a presentation to Tesla’s board. Before he would permit this, Musk asked for the right to call on Google for a loan in case Tesla encountered cash flow issues after acquisition talks became public, as there would otherwise be no way for Tesla to raise money. Google hesitated on this for a few weeks, by which time Tesla ended up in the clear./

What transpired next was the Summer of Musk. Musk put his public relations staff on high alert, telling them that he wanted to try to have one Tesla announcement per week. The company never quite lived up to that pace, but it did issue statement after statement. Musk held a series of press conferences that addressed financing for the Model S, the construction of more charging stations, and the opening of more retail stores. During one announcement, Musk noted that Tesla’s charging stations were solar-powered and had batteries on-site to store extra juice. “I was joking that even if there’s some zombie apocalypse, you’ll still be able to travel throughout the country using the Tesla Supercharger system,” Musk said, setting the bar very high for CEOs at other automakers. But the biggest event by far was held in Los Angeles, where Tesla unveiled another secret feature of the Model S.

In June 2013, Tesla cleared the prototype vehicles out of its Los Angeles design studio and invited Tesla owners and the media for a flashy evening soiree. Hundreds of people showed up, driving their pricey Model S sedans through the grungy streets of Hawthorne and parking in between the design studio and the SpaceX factory. The studio had been converted into a lounge. The lighting was dim, and the floor had been covered in AstroTurf and tiered to make plateaus where people could mingle or plop down on couches. Women in tight black dresses cruised through the crowd, serving drinks. Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” played on the sound system. A stage had been built at the front of the room, but before Musk ascended it he mingled with the masses. It was clear that he had become a rock star for Tesla owners—every bit the equivalent of Steve Jobs for the Apple faithful. People surrounded him and asked to take pictures. Meanwhile, Straubel stood off to the side, often totally alone.

After people had a couple of drinks, Musk fought through the crowd to the front of the room, where old TV commercials projected onto a screen above the stage showed families stopping by Esso and Chevron stations. The kids were so happy to see the Esso tiger mascot. “Gas is a weird thing to love,” Musk said. “Honestly.” That’s when he brought a Model S up onstage. A hole opened up in the floor beneath the car. It had been possible all along, Musk said, to replace the battery pack underneath the Model S in a matter of seconds—the company just hadn’t told anyone about this. Tesla would now start adding battery swapping at its charging stations as a quicker option to recharging. Someone could drive right over a pit where a robot would take off the car’s battery pack and install a new one in ninety seconds, at a cost equivalent to filling up with a tank of gas. “The only decision that you have to make when you come to one of our Tesla stations is do you prefer faster or free,” Musk said. /Following the demonstration, Tesla struggled to deliver on the battery swap technology. Musk had promised that the first few stations would arrive in late 2013. A year after the event, though, Tesla had yet to open a single station. According to Musk, the company ended up needing to deal with more pressing issues. “We’re going to do it because we said we’d do it,” Musk said. “It may not be on the schedule that we’d like but we always come through in the end.”/

In the months that followed, a couple of events threatened to derail the Summer of Musk. The New York Times penned a withering review of the car and its charging stations, and a couple of the Model S sedans caught fire after being involved in collisions. Disobeying conventional public relations wisdom, Musk went after the reporter, using data pulled from the car to undermine the reviewer’s claims. Musk penned the feisty rebuttal himself, while on vacation in Aspen with Kimbal, and friend and Tesla board member Antonio Gracias. “At some other company, it would be a public relations group putting something like this together,” Gracias said. “Elon felt like it was the most important problem facing Tesla at the time and that’s always what he deals with and how he prioritizes. It could kill the car and represented an existential threat against the business. Have there been moments where his unconventional style in these types of situations has made me cringe? Yes. But I trust that it will work out in the end.” Musk applied a similar approach to dealing with the fires by declaring the Model S the safest car in America in a press release and adding a titanium underbody shield and aluminum plates to the vehicle to deflect and destroy debris and keep the battery pack safe. [Tesla does seem to promote an obsession with safety that’s unmatched in the industry. J. B. Straubel explained the company’s thinking as follows: “With the safety stuff, it seems like car companies have evolved to a place where their design objectives are set by whatever is regulated or has been standardized. The rule says, ‘Do this and nothing more.’ That is amazingly boring engineering. It leaves you maybe fiddling with the car’s shape or trying to make it a bit faster. We have more crumple zones, better deceleration, a lower center of gravity. We went in wondering, ‘Can we make this car twice as safe as anything else on the road?’”]

The fires, the occasional bad review—none of this had any effect on Tesla’s sales or share price. Musk’s star shone brighter and brighter as Tesla’s market value ballooned to about half that of GM and Ford.

Tesla held another press event in October 2014 that cemented Musk’s place as the new titan of the auto industry. Musk unveiled a supercharged version of the Model S with two motors—one in the front and one in the back. It could go zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds. The company had turned a sedan into a supercar. “It’s like taking off from a carrier deck,” Musk said. “It’s just bananas.” Musk also unveiled a new suite of software for the Model S that gave it autopilot functions. The car had radar to detect objects and warn of possible collisions and could guide itself via GPS. “Later, you will be able to summon the car,” Musk said. “It will come to wherever you are. There’s also something else I would like to do. Many of our engineers will be hearing this in real time. I would like the charge connector to plug itself into the car, sort of like an articulating snake. I think we will probably do something like that.”

Thousands of people waited in line for hours to see Musk demonstrate this technology. Musk cracked jokes during the presentation and played off the crowd’s enthusiasm. The man who had been awkward in front of media during the PayPal years had developed a unique, slick stagecraft. A woman standing next to me in the crowd went weak in the knees when Musk first took the stage. A man to my other side said he wanted a Model X and had just offered $15,000 to a friend to move up on the reservation list, so that he could end up with model No. 700. The enthusiasm coupled with Musk’s ability to generate attention was emblematic of just how far the little automaker and its eccentric CEO had come. Rival car companies would kill to receive such interest and had basically been left dumbfounded as Tesla snuck up on them and delivered more than they had ever imagined possible.

As the Model S fever gripped Silicon Valley, I visited Ford’s small research and development lab in Palo Alto. The head of the lab at the time was a ponytailed, sandal-wearing engineer named T. J. Giuli, who felt very jealous of Tesla. Inside of every Ford were dozens of computing systems made by different companies that all had to speak to each other and work as one. It was a mess of complexity that had evolved over time, and simplifying the situation would prove near impossible at this point, especially for a company like Ford, which needed to pump out hundreds of thousands of cars per year and could not afford to stop and reboot. Tesla, by contrast, got to start from scratch and make its own software the focus of the Model S. Giuli would have loved the same opportunity. “Software is in many ways the heart of the new vehicle experience,” he said. “From the powertrain to the warning chimes in the car, you’re using software to create an expressive and pleasing environment. The level of integration that the software has into the rest of the Model S is really impressive. Tesla is a benchmark for what we do here.” Not long after this chat, Giuli left Ford to become an engineer at a stealth start-up.

There was little the mainstream auto industry could do to slow Tesla down. But that didn’t stop executives from trying to be difficult whenever possible. Tesla, for example, wanted to call its third-generation car the Model E, so that its lineup of vehicles would be the Model S, E, and X—another playful Musk gag. But Ford’s then CEO, Alan Mulally, blocked Tesla from using Model E, with the threat of a lawsuit. “So I call up Mulally and I was like, ‘Alan, are you just fucking with us or are you really going to do a Model E?’” Musk said. “And I’m not sure which is worse. You know? Like it would actually make more sense if they’re just fucking with us because if they actually come out with a Model E at this point, and we’ve got the Model S and the X and Ford comes out with the Model E, it’s going to look ridiculous. So even though Ford did the Model T a hundred years ago, nobody thinks of ‘Model’ as being a Ford thing anymore. So it would just feel like they stole it. Like why did you go steal Tesla’s E? Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber. And he was like, ‘No, no, we’re definitely going to use it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s such a good idea because people are going to be confused because it’s not going to make sense. People aren’t used to Ford having Model something these days. It’s usually called like the Ford Fusion.’ And he was like, no, his guys really want to use that. That’s terrible.” After that, Tesla registered the trademark for Model Y as another joke. “In fact, Ford called us up deadpan and said, ‘We see you’ve registered Model Y. Is that what you’re going to use instead of the Model E?’” Musk said. “I’m like, ‘No, it’s a joke. S-E-X-Y. What does that spell?’ But trademark law is a dry profession it turns out.” /As for the origins of the Model S name, Musk said, “Well, I like calling things what they are. We had the Roadster, but there was no good word for a sedan. You can’t call it the Tesla Sedan. That’s boring as hell. In the U.K., they say ‘saloon,’ but then it’s sort of like, ‘What are you? A cowboy or something?’ We went through a bunch of iterations, and the Model S sounded the best. And it was like a vague nod to Ford being the Model T in that electric cars preceded the Model T, and in a way we’re coming full circle and the thing that proceeded the Model T is now going into production in the twenty-first century, hence the Model S. But that’s sort of more like reversing the logic.”/

What Musk had done that the rival automakers missed or didn’t have the means to combat was turn Tesla into a lifestyle. It did not just sell someone a car. It sold them an image, a feeling they were tapping into the future, a relationship. Apple did the same thing decades ago with the Mac and then again with the iPod and iPhone. Even those who were not religious about their affiliation to Apple were sucked into its universe once they bought the hardware and downloaded software like iTunes.

This sort of relationship is hard to pull off if you don’t control as much of the lifestyle as possible. PC makers that farmed their software out to Microsoft, their chips to Intel, and their design to Asia could never make machines as beautiful and as complete as Apple’s. They also could not respond in time as Apple took this expertise to new areas and hooked people on its applications.

You can see Musk’s embrace of the car as lifestyle in Tesla’s abandonment of model years. Tesla does not designate cars as being 2014s or 2015s, and it also doesn’t have “all the 2014s in stock must go, go, go and make room for the new cars” sales. It produces the best Model S it can at the time, and that’s what the customer receives. This means that Tesla does not develop and hold on to a bunch of new features over the course of the year and then unleash them in a new model all at once. It adds features one by one to the manufacturing line when they’re ready. Some customers may be frustrated to miss out on a feature here and there. Tesla, however, manages to deliver most of the upgrades as software updates that everyone gets, providing current Model S owners with pleasant surprises.

For the Model S owner, the all-electric lifestyle translates into a less hassled existence. Instead of going to the gas station, you just plug the car in at night, a rhythm familiar to anyone with a smartphone. The car will start charging right away or the owner can tap into the Model S’s software and schedule charging to take place late at night, when the cheapest electricity rates are available. Tesla owners not only dodge gas stations; they mostly get to skip out on visits to mechanics. A traditional vehicle needs oil and transmission fluid changes to deal with all the friction and wear and tear produced by its thousands of moving parts. The simpler electric car design eliminates this type of maintenance. Both the Roadster and the Model S also take advantage of what’s known as regenerative braking, which extends the life of the brakes. During stop-and-go situations, the Tesla will brake by kicking the motor into reverse via software and slowing down the wheels instead of using brake pads and friction to clamp them down. The Tesla motor generates electricity during this process and funnels it back to the batteries, which is why electric cars get better mileage in city traffic. Tesla still recommends that owners bring in the Model S once a year for a checkup but that’s mostly to give the vehicle a once-over and make sure that none of the components seems to be wearing down prematurely.

Even Tesla’s approach to maintenance is philosophically different from that of the traditional automotive industry. Most car dealers make the majority of their profits from servicing cars. They treat vehicles like a subscription service, expecting people to visit their service centers multiple times a year for many years. This is the main reason dealerships have fought to block Tesla from selling its cars directly to consumers. /A handful of lawsuits have been filed against Tesla with auto dealers arguing that the company should not be able to sell its cars directly. But even in those states that have banned Tesla’s stores, prospective customers can usually request a test drive, and someone from Tesla will show up with a vehicle. “Sometimes you have to put something out there for people to attack,” Musk said. “In the long run, the stores won’t be important. The way things will really grow is by word of mouth. The stores are like a viral seed to get things going.”/ “The ultimate goal is to never have to bring your car back in after you buy it,” said Javidan. The dealers charge more than independent mechanics but give people the peace of mind that their car is being worked on by a specialist for a particular make of vehicle. Tesla makes its profits off the initial sale of the car and then from some optional software services. “I got the number ten Model S,” said Konstantin Othmer, the Silicon Valley software whiz and entrepreneur. [Othmer has lined up to be the lucky owner of the first Roadster II.

Musk has developed an unconventional policy to determine the order in which cars are sold. When a new car is announced and its price is set, a race begins in which the first person to hand Musk a check gets the first car. With the Model S, Steve Jurvetson, a Tesla board member, had a check at the ready in his wallet and slid it across the table to Musk after spying details on the Model S in a packet of board meeting notes.

Othmer caught a Wired story about a planned second version of the Roadster and emailed Musk right away. “He said, ‘Okay, I will sell it to you, but you have to pay two hundred thousand dollars right now.’” Othmer agreed, and Tesla had him come to the company’s headquarters on a Sunday to sign some paperwork, acknowledging the price of the car and the fact that the company didn’t quite know when it would arrive or what its specifications would be. “My guess is that it will be the fastest car on the road,” Othmer said. “It’ll be four-wheel drive. It’s going to be insane. And I don’t really think that will be the real price. I just don’t think Elon wanted me to buy it.”] “It was an awesome car, but it had just about every issue you might have read about in the forums. They would fix all these things and decided to trailer the car back to the shop so that they didn’t add any miles to it. Then I went in for a one-year service, and they spruced up everything so that the car was better than new. It was surrounded by velvet ropes in the service center. It was just beautiful.”

Tesla’s model isn’t just about being an affront to the way carmakers and dealers do business. It’s a more subtle play on how electric cars represent a new way to think of automobiles. All car companies will soon follow Tesla’s lead and offer some form of over-the-air updates to their vehicles. The practicality and scope of their updates will be limited, however. “You just can’t do an over-the-air sparkplug change or replacement of the timing belt,” said Javidan. “With a gas car, you have to get under the hood at some point and that forces you back to the dealership anyway. There’s no real incentive for Mercedes to say, ‘You don’t need to bring the car in,’ because it’s not true.” Tesla also has the edge of having designed so many of the key components for its cars in-house, including the software running throughout the vehicle. “If Daimler wants to change the way a gauge looks, it has to contact a supplier half a world away and then wait for a series of approvals,” Javidan said. “It would take them a year to change the way the ‘P’ on the instrument panel looks. At Tesla, if Elon decides he wants a picture of a bunny rabbit on every gauge for Easter, he can have that done in a couple of hours.” /Or as Straubel put it, “Watching people drive the Model S across the country is phenomenal. There is no way you can do that in anything else. It’s not about putting a charging station in the desert as a stunt. It’s about realizing where this is going to go. We will end up launching the third-generation car into a world where this charging network is free and ubiquitous. It bugs me when people compare us to a car company. The cars are absolutely our main product, but we are also an energy company and a technology company. We are going down to the dirt and having discussions with mining companies about the materials for our batteries and going up to commercialize all the pieces that make up an electronic vehicle and all the pieces that make an awesome product.”/

As Tesla turned into a star of modern American industry, its closest rivals were obliterated. Fisker Automotive filed for bankruptcy and was bought by a Chinese auto parts company in 2014. One of its main investors was Ray Lane, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Lane had cost Kleiner Perkins a chance to invest in Tesla and then backed Fisker—a disastrous move that tarnished the firm’s brand and Lane’s reputation. Better Place was another start-up that enjoyed more hype than Fisker and Tesla put together and raised close to $1 billion to build electric cars and battery-swapping stations. [Musk suspected Better Place came up with battery swapping as a plan after its CEO, Shai Agassi, heard about the technology during a tour of the Tesla factory.] The company never produced much of anything and declared bankruptcy in 2013.

The guys like Straubel who had been at Tesla since the beginning are quick to remind people that the chance to build an awesome electric car had been there all along. “It’s not really like there was a rush to this idea, and we got there first,” Straubel said. “It is frequently forgotten in hindsight that people thought this was the shittiest business opportunity on the planet. The venture capitalists were all running for the hills.” What separated Tesla from the competition was the willingness to charge after its vision without compromise, a complete commitment to execute to Musk’s standards.