Elon Musk

Levchin started to find Musk difficult and dispiriting to work with. He told a few colleagues that he was ready to quit, but instead they encouraged him to fight back. Thiel agreed. Theil, Levchin, and others decided that it was “time to dethrone Musk” (83).

While Musk was gone on his honeymoon (a trip that had been postponed for eight months), Levchin asked Thiel—who had since drifted away from active involvement in the company—to come back on as CEO. Thiel said yes, and together, along with other disgruntled employees, they presented their argument to Michael Moritz. Moritz agreed to bring Thiel on as temporary CEO, but he said that they needed to find someone more experienced to fill the role long-term.

At age 30, after he was ousted from PayPal, Musk decided to found a startup to build rockets to go to Mars. He did so because he was frightened by the fact that technological progress was not inevitable—as evidenced by the fact that the United States had divested funding from space travel—and because he fervently believed in his mission to make humans multiplanetary.

Musk had meetings with Russians who were selling rockets—used missiles. These meetings went badly. Every time he tried to negotiate to buy the missiles, the price went up, and the Russians taunted him. This caused Musk to form what he came to call his “idiot index,” which determined the discrepancy between the price of a finished product and the price of its component parts; the higher the discrepancy, the greater the idiot index. Musk realized that the costs of the space industry were bloated and that, instead of buying rockets at a too-high price, he should build them himself.

Around the time that Musk was launching SpaceX, Justine gave birth to a baby boy named Nevada. A few weeks later, Nevada died of sudden infant death syndrome. Musk was deeply affected by Nevada’s death, but he refused to express his emotions or process them. He blamed Justine for being overly emotional and emotionally manipulating him.

Errol visited with his new wife and step-children. Elon supported them by buying them a house and car. He became disturbed about Errol’s uncomfortably close relationship with one of his step-children. Eventually, he asked Errol to leave, and Errol left with his family.

Musk asked Tom Mueller, an aerospace engineer, to discuss building a rocket. Along with a few other engineers, they spent Superbowl Sunday sketching out plans for what later became SpaceX’s first rocket. Mueller became SpaceX’s first employee. Isaacson notes that as Musk continued to hire more employees to his team, he encouraged risk-taking and ambitious—sometimes “reality-bending”—thinking.

Musk demanded that his SpaceX employees challenge the cost of everything, insisting that whatever they were building should not cost much more than the components used to build it. They started to make more components in-house, eventually making 70% of them within a few years. One reason why many components were expensive was because they had to meet strict requirements set by NASA and the military.

Musk believed that these requirements were outdated. He believed that all requirements should be questioned and that they “should be treated as recommendations […] [because] [t]he only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics” (114).

Musk also declared that all employees should have a “maniacal sense of urgency” and that they should move fast, improvise, and learn from failure (114).

Isaacson highlights Gwynne Shotwell, one of the only people to work long-term with Musk without their relationship rupturing. She joined SpaceX in 2002 and later became its president. Isaacson claims that Shotwell understood Elon better than most because Shotwell had a husband with Asperger’s.

In 2003, Shotwell and Musk traveled to Washington, DC, to try to secure a contract from the Department of Defense. They managed to win a $3.5 million contract. However, the relationship between SpaceX and NASA grew tense when NASA awarded a contract to another private rocket company without competition, later claiming to Musk that they did so to prevent the company from going under. Musk decided to sue NASA and ended up winning the dispute. NASA was forced to open the bidding for the contract, and SpaceX won a portion of it. This, Isaacson notes, was a victory against “cost-plus” contract that the government usually awarded—contracts which gave specific requirements and which, according to Musk, stalled innovation and led to bloated costs.

Isaacson introduces Jeffrey Brian “JB” Straubel, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, and Ian Wright, the men who eventually collaborated with Musk to found Tesla. Eberhard had licensed an electric motor built by two other engineers; the idea was to build a brand named after Nikola Tesla which would make electric vehicles sporty and appealing. Musk agreed to fund the company, and Eberhard became CEO, Tarpenning became president, Straubel became the CTO, and Wright became the chief operating officer (COO).

Isaacson notes that while Tesla later became a vertically integrated company, one that controlled its own supply chain, it started out as a company with a convoluted supply chain that sourced parts from all over the world.

Tension grew between Eberhard and Musk because both men considered themselves to be the main founder of the company. Musk grew angry when he didn’t receive credit in the press as a founder of the company. He also exerted a high degree of control over the designs of Tesla’s upcoming car.

SpaceX originally planned to launch their first rockets from an air force base in California, but after the company was told the launch pad would not be available, they were forced to move to a different location that Shotwell had already scouted: a site in the Marshall Islands, on an island colloquially known as Kwaj.

The team ran into difficulties as they dealt with the remote nature of the island. However, the hardship also served as a bonding experience.

The first launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket was scheduled for March 24, 2006. After take-off, the rocket exploded due to a fuel leak. Musk publicly blamed an engineer named Jeremy Hollman for the leak, but Hollman denied that it was his fault. Hollman left the company a year later.

It later turned out that the leak was not Hollman’s fault but was rather due to corrosion caused by the salty ocean air.

Before a second rocket launch in March 2007, Musk’s team determined that there was a small risk of fuel sloshing and causing an issue. Musk decided to accept the risk and launch anyway. The rocket exploded due to sloshing fuel.