Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. His troubled father made his childhood “a kind of misery”, but he was also free to experiment with building home-made rockets in the company of his cousins. At the age of 12 he published in a magazine the code for a video game he had written. He moved to Canada at 17 and worked odd manual jobs before winding up at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took degrees in both physics and economics. Soon afterwards Musk co‑founded an early internet-mapping company called Zip2, and when Compaq bought it in 1999 he made $22m (£15m). He ploughed most of it into his next venture, an internet-banking startup that would become PayPal. In Ashlee Vance’s fascinating and superbly researched biography, one Musk admirer describes this decision as representing “an insane amount of personal risk. When you do a deal like that, it either pays off or you end up in a bus shelter somewhere.” In a bus shelter, that is, with the $4m Musk had reserved for his personal use. Some Valley people do rather lack perspective. When PayPal in turn was eventually bought by eBay in 2002, Musk found himself with more than $100m at his disposal.
Time to retire? Not a bit of it. Musk pumped nearly all of this money into the two ventures for which he is known today: the electric-car company Tesla Motors (Musk was an early investor and board chairman before becoming CEO), and the rocket company SpaceX. (He also has a solar-panel company, SolarCity.) These business decisions were thrillingly contrary to the prevailing wisdom of bits over atoms. Tesla was based in Silicon Valley, and SpaceX opened its factory in the middle of Los Angeles, where tattooed engineers worked on rocket engines to a deafening soundtrack of Van Halen. As Vance describes it, Musk “doubled down on making super-complex physical goods in two of the most expensive places in the world”.
For years, however, both companies were near-jokes, and people were waiting to see Musk fail. Tesla was late delivering its first electric supercars to celebrity customers, while SpaceX’s test rockets kept blowing up. But Musk persevered. Tesla now sells nearly 50,000 cars a year. And SpaceX became the first private company in history to launch a rocket into orbit; in 2013 it successfully delivered its first commercial satellite. It now has a long and profitable roster of launch missions planned for government agencies, for Nasa (to resupply the International Space Station), and satellite companies. No one is laughing any more. As Musk’s former eBay comrade Peter Theil tells Vance: “To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it’s a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon.”
Musk is, everyone says, a genius, able to solve complex orbital equations in his head and successfully perform the job of any given engineer in his companies. (Friends affectionately report his habit of falling silent and thinking about rocket problems.) Like many modern geek entrepreneurs – most notoriously the late Steve Jobs – he also has an abrasive management style, sometimes insulting brilliant colleagues and firing people without warning. Vance makes a valiant attempt to explain: “He sees man as self-limiting and in peril and wants to fix the situation. The people who suggest bad ideas during meetings or make mistakes at work are getting in the way of all this [...] he feels pained by their mistakes, which have consigned man to peril that much longer.”
Yet Musk also seems much more like a regular human being than many other tech CEOs. One investor calls him “nicer than Jobs and a bit more refined than Bill Gates”. He is interested in more than just tech: he follows the New York Review of Books on Twitter, where his profile gives his location, in an accurate joke, as “1 AU”. (An astronomical unit is defined as the average distance between the sun and Earth.) He shares custody of his five sons with his former wife, Justine Musk. (He subsequently married, divorced and remarried the British actor, Talulah Riley.) Though evidently immensely driven, Musk can be self-mocking and surprisingly funny. “No man is an island,” he likes to say, “unless he is large and buoyant.” And he tells the story of contracting a dangerous bout of malaria while on holiday: “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you.”
Meanwhile he is engagingly rude about some of his peers, particularly the founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. “I do think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos,” Musk tells Vance. “He has a relentless work ethic and wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he’s not the most fun guy, honestly.” Bezos has funnelled some of his own vast fortune into a rival space company, Blue Origin. Forget yachts: spaceships are the new trophy craft of the super-rich. But as Vance points out, Musk had to build SpaceX from the ground up as a real commercial outfit.
Musk didn’t invent the rocket, nor the electric car. But he did, with his fellow engineers, reinvent them. Most crucially, he made them good enough, cheaply enough. Teslas are the first electric cars to solve “range anxiety”: the company’s battery-pack tech gives its cars 200 to 300 miles between charges. (Electric cars, of course, don’t solve the climate problem by themselves: the electricity you charge them with still has to be generated somehow. Ideally, for a Musk lifestyle addict, it will be generated by your home installation of SolarCity panels. In any case, getting machines that burn fossil fuels off the streets is an important step.) The most crucial innovation SpaceX made in rocket design, meanwhile, was the audacious decision to build nearly everything itself. Insourcing became the new outsourcing. By designing and constructing almost all the parts from engines to electronics, SpaceX could shave chunks off the prices demanded by external suppliers, while being able to iterate and change things in the designs very quickly when needed.
Today the word “philanthropy”, which means love of mankind, is reserved to describe the actions of rich people who receive tax breaks for donating money to art galleries or carefully chosen charities. The term implies that only those who have acquired lots of wealth and then disgorge it to carefully selected institutions can truly love their fellow humans. Among giants of the tech industry it is more accurately applied, at least, to someone like Gates, whose foundation is attacking problems of the global poor such as malaria. But philanthropy can take more forms still. A medical researcher, or even a novelist, might be philanthropic in her motivations. And so too, by all accounts, is Musk.
Musk’s philanthropy, though, does not consist in giving his billions away, but in trying to make his businesses succeed in order to save humanity from civilisational collapse or planetary extinction. As Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and CEO, describes the company’s mission: “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it. 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.”
Perhaps it will all crash and burn. But Musk certainly can’t be accused of lowering his sights, or shirking what he conceives of as his responsibility. As he says to Vance about another side‑project: “I think this needs to be done, and I don’t see anyone else doing it.” Future generations might be glad he did.
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