“Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will”, 2012-11-14 (; backlinks):
For his entire life, Elon Musk has bent people to his insatiable will. But is he (1) the visionary who forces Americans to become explorers again, or (2) a man so distracted by vision that his life’s work is a series of brilliant disappointments?
…“It would take 6 months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost”, he says. “Then it would take 18 months for the planets to realign. Then it would take 6 months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to 3 months pretty quickly.” It is, in his words, entirely manageable—“if America has the will.”
And that is the key to Elon Musk. He has the will. “Elon is not afraid of breaking things—he will break himself if he has to”, says Justine Musk, his first wife and the mother of his 5 children.
[Family history: energy/risk-taking] …He grew up in South Africa without ever really considering himself South African. Like the rest of his family, he was just passing through. The Musks were a race nearly as much as they were a family, with a specialized awareness of themselves as wanderers and adventurers. Every Musk is able to tell the story of forebears whose accomplishments serve as an inspiration and whose energy endures as an inheritance—a grandfather who won a race from Cape Town to Algiers; a great-grandmother who was the first female chiropractor in Canada; grandparents who were the first to fly from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane. “Without sounding patronizing, it does seem that our family is different from other people”, says Elon’s sister, Tosca Musk. “We risk more.”
If the Musks had arisen from literature, they would come off as an unlikely combination of Salinger’s Glasses and Faulkner’s Snopeses—a combination of insular giftedness and rude commercial energy.
“I have two brilliant children, but Elon’s a genius”, says his mother, Maye Musk. “I can explain Tosca and [Elon’s brother] Kimbal pretty well. I can’t explain Elon.”
She was a dietitian and a fashion model; her husband, Errol, was an engineer and what a family member described as a “serial entrepreneur.” According to Maye, they knew their oldest child was “advanced from the very beginning.” He read continually, read not simply to amuse himself but to acquire knowledge, so they sent him to school early in Pretoria. “Elon was the youngest and smallest guy in his school”, Maye says, and soon he found himself in conflict not just with other children but with what seemed like South Africa itself. “It’s pretty rough in South Africa”, Kimbal Musk says. “It’s a rough culture. Imagine rough—well, it’s rougher than that. Kids gave Elon a very hard time, and it had a huge impact on his life.” Huge, Tosca says, “because there was no recourse. In South Africa, if you’re getting bullied, you still have to go to school. You just have to get up in the morning and go. He hated it so much.”
…When he was 16, he tried opening a video arcade near his high school with Kimbal, who was a year younger. “We had a lease, we had suppliers, but we were actually stopped”, Kimbal says. “We got stopped by the city. We couldn’t get a variance. Our parents had no idea. They flipped out when they found out, especially my father.”
[Physical energy] …That was the missing dimension. The extra dimension, for Justine, was “the body he was born into.” He could endure almost anything, impose his will on almost anyone. “He’s a big man, he’s strong-willed and powerful, he’s like a bear. He can be playful and funny and romp around with you, but in the end you’re still dealing with a bear.”
[Depressive phases] They were married in 2000. They had their first child, Nevada Alexander, two years later. At 10 weeks old, he stopped breathing in his crib; after being taken off life support, he died in Justine’s arms. Elon Musk could figure out how to build a rocket from reading books, but loss—the place he had to make in his life for its invisible enormity—baffled him. “He was very much in the mode of stiff-upper-lip, the-show-must-go-on, let’s-get-it-over-with”, Justine says. “He doesn’t do well in the dark places. He’s forward moving, and I think it’s a survival thing with him.”
6 weeks after the death of her son, Justine Musk went to the office of a fertility specialist and began the process of in vitro fertilization. They had twins in 2004 and triplets in 2006. The children were all boys, and two of them were diagnosed autistic. (One, according to Justine, is no longer on the spectrum.) She wrote and published 3 novels, but the bearlike presence of her husband had inevitably become what it had become to his partners at PayPal and Tesla Motors: an obliterating one. “Elon does what he wants”, she says. “If you want what he wants, life can be very exciting—that’s how he seduces people, I think: He taps into a shared dream. But he rules through strength of will. What he has comes at a price, sometimes to Elon, sometimes to people close to him. But someone always pays.”
…One year later, there was another failure. And when the third Falcon 1 fell into the sea in August 2008—along with a payload contracted by NASA and the Department of Defense, along with the ashes of the actor who played Scotty on Star Trek—Musk faced disaster.
At the same time, he was at a crisis point with his other business, Tesla. He had begun production of Tesla’s first car, the high-performance Roadster, but he couldn’t produce enough of them. He hadn’t yet begun receiving the proceeds of a half-billion-dollar loan from the federal government, and the financial system was commencing its collapse. He was searching for money and laying off people, and he wound up closing an R&D center and taking over for the CEO he’d hired to replace another CEO he’d fired earlier in the year.
“This wasn’t Elon facing adversity”, Kimbal says. “This was, ‘Holy s—t.’ Personal bankruptcy was a daily conversation. Tesla was on the limb to deliver cars that people already paid for. Bankruptcy would have been easier than what he did. He threw everything he had into keeping Tesla alive.” He threw more than that into the Falcon 1’s 4th launch on September 28, 2008. When Musk had decided to go into the rocket business, Adeo Ressi had counseled against it for two simple reasons: Outcomes are binary. “Rockets explode.”
“Everything hinged on that launch”, Ressi says. “Elon had lost all his money, but this was more than his fortune at stake—it was his credibility. He’d sold all these launches and would have to give the money back. And [if that had happened] right now we’d be having a conversation about his epic failure. If it works, epic success. If it fails—if one thing goes differently and it fails—epic failure. No in between. No partial credit. He’d had 3 failures already. It would have been over. We’re talking Harvard Business School case study—rich guy who goes into the rocket business and loses it all…”
The rocket didn’t explode. It rose into the sky and disappeared into orbit, Elon Musk’s burden lifted as if for all humankind.
…Talulah Riley acquired a presence in the gossip pages when she accepted a $5.78$4.22012 million divorce settlement from Musk in August. Now she tousles his hair and talks about making him eat and making him get enough sleep. And then she announces her real job: keeping him from going “king-crazy.” “You’ve never heard that term?” she asks. “I guess no one uses it outside of England. It means that people become king, and then they go crazy.”
View HTML: