Following the current fashion for visionary technological geniuses to be portrayed through three critical moments in their lives,*_ here are three from Elon Musk's. Except, in this case, they all come from one single day—October 12, 2015, a Monday—a day that feels like it could've been pretty much any day in Musk's life right now._
Musk starts most workweeks here at his rocket company, SpaceX, in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles, and each Monday, he explains to me, there is a brainstorm about "Mars colonial transport architecture." He says these words as though most people could look through their Monday schedule and find something similar.
There are many remarkable aspects to SpaceX: for instance, the way it has challenged accepted rocket manufacture by making rockets for a fraction of the cost; the way it has become the first private entity—rather than a country—to successfully launch spacecraft into orbit and then return; the way it went from an idea in Musk's head to a company that resupplies the International Space Station and that hopes to soon ferry astronauts back and forth. But the most remarkable fact about SpaceX is that—right from the start, before the first rocket had lifted an inch off the ground—it was explicitly intended as the means to another, far more grandiose and idealistic end: colonizing Mars. Musk has said that he feels this is imperative for two reasons. One is that it would be an inspiring adventure and we need such goals. The other is the long-term survival of humankind. If a calamity, self-made or otherwise, destroyed life on Earth, as long as a human colony was established elsewhere, the species could endure. In Musk's mind, becoming multi-planetary is just good common sense, a prudent move that he has likened to backing up a computer: "You back up your hard drive.... Maybe we should back up life, too?"
SpaceX exists to further this quest on several fronts: to develop the reusable rocket technology that would be needed to ferry large numbers of people, and large amounts of cargo, to Mars; to earn money to finance this goal; and to work out exactly what it would take to get to and from Mars in the way that Musk envisions. If you didn't know what "Mars colonial transport architecture" was—that's what it is.
Musk and his colleagues aren't vaguely hypothesizing about what people might like to do in some distant future generation—he believes the first manned Mars mission will be possible by the time he's in his fifties. He is now 44. The rocket that they are working on is referred to internally by the code name BFR. And it doesn't stand for some arcane, smarty-pants science term. It stands for Big Fucking Rocket.
I ask Musk whether he really calls it that; his answer is both delightfully nerdy, and not.
"Well, there's two parts of it—there's a booster rocket and there's a spaceship. So the booster rocket's just to get it out of Earth's gravity because Earth has quite a deep gravity well and thick atmosphere, but the spaceship can go from Mars to Earth without any booster, because Mars's gravity is weaker and the atmosphere's thinner, so it's got enough capability to get all the way back here by itself. It needs a helping hand out of Earth's gravity well. So, technically, it would be the BFR and the BFS." As in "Big Fucking Spaceship."
Musk coined these names himself. "This is a very obtuse video-game reference," he tells me. "In the original Doom, the gun that was like the crazy gun was the BFG 9000 or something like that. So it was sort of named after the gun in Doom. But that's not its official name, of course." (For all the authority Musk projects in person, there is also something endearingly boyish and geeky about him, even when he isn't saying things like this.)
Musk has previously said that he would publicly present some specifics of his Mars-colonization plans later this year, though he tells me that it may now be early next year. "Before we announce it, I want to make sure that we're not gonna make really big changes to it," he says. "Um, yeah. I think it's gonna seem pretty crazy, no matter what."
Just because it's so far beyond what people would imagine?
He laughs. "It's really big." And laughs again. "It's really big. There's not been any architecture like this described that I'm aware of."
The more practical present-day focus at SpaceX is on the crew vehicle that will take astronauts to the International Space Station. Musk gave a small insight into the minutiae involved in negotiating design details for manned spacecraft with NASA earlier this year: "There were small disagreements here and there…like, it seems like the amount of mass and volume reserved for poop is too high… We're like, well, are they really going to do that much poop?"
I ask Musk how often he actually thinks about colonizing Mars. Every day? Every week? "I do think about it a fair bit," he answers, explaining that part of his urgency is that we might not always have the technology to get there. Most of us instinctively assume that technology relentlessly marches forward, but there have been times before now in human history—after the Egyptians built the Pyramids, for instance, or after the multiple advances of the Roman Empire—when the civilizations that followed could no longer do what had been done before, and perhaps there's a complacency and arrogance in assuming that this won't happen again.
"There's a window that could be opened for a long time or a short time where we have an opportunity to establish a self-sustaining base on Mars," he reasons, "before something happens to drive the technology level on Earth below where it's possible. So does the base become self-sustaining before spaceships from Earth stop going?...I mean, I don't think we can discount the possibility of a third World War. You know, in 1912 they were proclaiming a new age of peace and prosperity, saying that it was a golden age, war was over. And then you had World War I followed by World War II followed by the Cold War. So I think we need to acknowledge that there's certainly a possibility of a third World War, and if that does occur it could be far worse than anything that's happened before. Let's say nuclear weapons are used. I mean, there could be a very powerful social movement that's anti-technology. There's also growth in religious extremism. Like, I mean, does ISIS grow…?"
Ironically, Musk himself recently advocated the use of nuclear weapons, during an appearance this fall on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. One possible strategy for making Mars habitable over the long term is to "terraform" it—manipulate its environment so, in the simplest terms, the planet warms up, ice turns into water, and plants can be introduced, which will convert the atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen, with the goal of creating a stable and breathable atmosphere. (Musk's favored line on this subject: "It's a fixer-upper of a planet.") He told Colbert that there are slower and faster ways to do this, and then he proposed a fast way: "Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles."
Musk has since somewhat clarified this, explaining that his idea (currently impossible, as if that's ever bothered him) is to have a small repeatedly detonating fusion bomb at each pole. "Not really nuclear weapons," he says. "I think a lot of people don't realize that the sun is a giant fusion explosion. And we're only talking about duplicating that in small form on Mars, essentially having tiny pulsing suns. There would be no radiation or mushroom clouds or fallout or anything like that."
Even so, it seems a little invasive to contemplate, given that unmanned NASA Mars missions are currently forbidden to even land near potential areas of liquid water, in case small bio-organisms from Earth contaminate Mars. Musk is a little dismissive of these concerns. "As far as we can see now, there's no evidence of life on the surface of Mars at all—the best case is really that there's subterranean microbial life. That's what we're talking about as, like, the most amount of life that would exist."
But whether life exists on the planet or not, there seems to be a moral issue worth raising: Is Mars ours to mess with?
To Musk, this is missing the point. "There's certainly no moral issue if there's no life," he insists. "I mean, in fact, it would be, I think, sort of immoral not to do it, if it meant preservation of life on Earth as we know it."
Either way, when it comes to these big decisions about terraforming, he's also clear about how they should be made, and by whom: "This would be up to the Martians."
The Martians. By which he means—and Musk can talk in a way that makes a thought like this sound not only sane, but sensible—those of us who choose to become interplanetary pioneers.
Musk runs another multi-billion-dollar company with ambitions to revolutionize our life: Tesla, which hopes to achieve this by accelerating the adoption of the electric car. Typically, Musk begins and ends his week in Southern California; Tuesdays and Wednesdays, he's in Northern California at Tesla. But although on this day Musk is at SpaceX, taking whatever time he can to imagine Mars-bound rocketry, this particular week is being dominated by Tesla.
Three days from now, the latest Tesla car update will be released. Teslas are electric cars, but they are different from most other cars in a number of other ways—one is that improvements can be uploaded remotely, in the same way as phones and laptops. Tesla owners are notified about an update, then advised to schedule and automatically download it overnight. Some updates are small, some are big. This new update (the tenth major one since the cars were launched) is as big as they come; it's what Tesla calls "Autopilot." In Tesla's sedan—the Model S, which I had test-driven a week earlier—you could already set the cruise control and the car would accelerate and decelerate according to the traffic it sensed all around it. But this update is more fundamental—a huge step toward a self-driving car. Beginning on Thursday, updated Tesla cars should be able to follow the lanes on a highway without driver steering. The car will also change lanes automatically—all you have to do is tap the indicator and it will move over when it is safe.
Oddly, Musk talks about these advances as though they're not even that big a deal. It might feel like the future to us, but to him it's as though this is an almost banal iteration of what people in his field know can be done quite easily already. (He quotes William Gibson's dictum: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.")
But that's if the update works, of course. It is Monday evening, and from what Musk tells me, there's lots to be done before Thursday. "The thing that's tricky," he explains, "is that there are a lot of corner cases with steering." (A "corner case" is a technical engineering term denoting an extreme event that occurs outside normal operating bounds—not specifically anything to do with cars turning corners. Dialogue with Elon Musk, even when he is talking to regular people, is littered with such terms: "corner cases," "forcing functions"... There's only so much dumber that he's prepared to be. You either keep up or you don't.)
A corner case, when it comes to a car steering itself, is clearly a problem. "It's easy to get the steering to work 99 percent of the time," he explains. "But 99 percent is not good enough. One percent of steering into a wall is not…not good. And so you really need to get it to, you know, 99.99 percent of the time. And even then, when the system is losing confidence, it needs to inform the driver so the driver can take over with enough time before anything terrible happens."
And that's still being worked on for Thursday? I ask.
"Well, there's some tweaks that are gonna occur before Thursday. There aren't any major issues, but there's some minor issues that would be good to take care of by Thursday."
Two days later, when he holds a press conference to formally announce what is coming, he will err on the side of caution, in a very Elon Musk way: "It should not hit pedestrians, hopefully."
Still, the fact is that we will soon be in a world that many people have no idea is so close at hand: where vehicles can essentially drive themselves. When I bring up something he'd mentioned recently, that cars would soon be able to park themselves in a garage at the end of the journey, he almost dismissively notes that this capability will be in Tesla's next update after this one. (Tesla cars will also be able to be remotely summoned at the beginning of a journey, as long as you're on private land.) "It's pretty straightforward," he says.
I point out that while that may be the case, technologically speaking, most people have no idea what's coming.
"True," he says. "I think it will be quite an amazing thing for people to see. And I mean the reality is that autonomous systems will drive orders of magnitude better than people. In terms of accidents per mile, it'll be far lower. Technologically, I think it's about three years away for full autonomy."
Musk also acknowledges that we could reach a point where "society may choose to make it illegal to drive your own car"—a possibility that he recently floated in public, inciting a certain amount of kickback from the keenest car fanatics. (The kind of people, of course, who are likely to own Teslas. They may want to own the first cars that can drive themselves, but that doesn't mean they take kindly to being told they're not allowed to steer if they want.) Consequently, Musk is now careful to point out that this was an observation, not a development he supports. "I want to be clear," he says, "I'm not advocating taking the steering wheel away from anyone."
To Musk, the bigger picture is about a different paradigm shift—the shift to electric cars, which is simply a given in Musk's mind, because it is by far the most energy-efficient option available, even when electricity is generated from fossil fuels. (If the electricity can be generated sustainably, he notes, then the advantages only increase.) And so once the historic disadvantages of electric cars (low range, slow and inconvenient charging, high cost) have been overcome, they become the obvious choice. His stated mission with Tesla is to accelerate the changeover so that it happens years earlier than it otherwise might; he has built the company up by introducing the high-end Roadster sports car, then the Model S sedan, and most recently the new SUV Model X, but the core of this plan is the next-generation Tesla, the Model 3, intended as a mass-market car whose basic model will start at $35,000. "It's difficult," he says, "but I think we'll achieve it." After that? Most likely a new roadster, a smaller SUV, and a truck. "I mean, these are very obvious moves," he says.
The week after we meet, Tesla suffers a rare blip when Consumer Reports downgrades its previous ecstatic recommendation of the Model S after troubling reliability reports. (Musk pushed back on Twitter, claiming that these were mainly already-solved problems with early production vehicles, and he accurately noted "CR says 97% of owners expect their next car to be a Tesla.") But it is with the Model 3 that Musk will either succeed or fail at his central Tesla mission.
This has been the plan all along, incidentally. In August 2006, before the first Tesla car was finished, Musk published a blog post on Tesla's website, the end of which reads: So, in short, the master plan is: Build sports car. Use that money to build an affordable car. Use that money to build an even more affordable car.... Don't tell anyone.
Still, I say to him—because sometimes within the realm of hi-tech new cars and the debates that surround it, this point often seems to be forgotten—even now it is far from obvious that people in the wider world know or accept that a shift to electric vehicles is inevitable, whether coming slowly or quickly. Musk compares this quietly inevitable shift toward electric cars to the economy he encountered when he first came to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s and started the Internet company Zip2.
"I remember in ’95 trying to get venture funding for my first company, and most of the venture capitalists we met with in Silicon Valley had never used the Internet. Never, for anything." He laughs at the memory. "Didn't know what it was. They'd heard of it, but they didn't know. Literally, if you said, ‘Tell me something about the Internet,’ they were like...nothing. They're like, 'Is it like AOL or CompuServe?' 'No.' I was pretty amazed that they did not know about it." Another laugh. But then the culture shifted. "There was quite a big change that occurred right at the end of ’95 when Netscape went public. Venture capitalists then took note of that and said, 'Well, if this browser company can have a high market cap, then probably other things can. too.' So the second time my brother and I tried to find venture funding, in early ’96, it was a complete change. Everyone we met with was interested."
Zip2, which pioneered basic online city guides for newspapers, brought Musk his first fortune. Elon Musk has told his origin story many times. He grew up in South Africa, a bookish child nastily bullied at school, and he left for Canada at 17 (his mother is Canadian), his eye set on the U.S.A., the country of possibility he had read about in comics growing up. In college, he identified three areas that he thought would most affect the future of humanity: the Internet, sustainable energy, and the extension of human life beyond Earth. His first two companies involved the Internet: Zip2 made him rich, and PayPal made him much richer. Then he started a rocket company, SpaceX, from scratch and became involved in an electric-car company, Tesla. In both of these companies, he is not just CEO but leads product development himself. He makes a point of saying to me, as he has to many others, "People don't realize that most of my time is spent in engineering," and he has often talked as though this is his fundamental skill, the thing he can do better than anyone else.
Nevertheless, the mystery of Elon Musk and his incredible successes can't be explained quite so simply. For while it is very true that he has led these two companies, SpaceX and Tesla, from nowhere to multi-billion-dollar industries by making things, it's also important to remember that he made those first two fortunes in companies that never made anything physical at all. So whatever his secret sauce, it's a little more complicated than that.
The visionary technological genius occupies a strange place in the modern cultural psyche, as shown by the current battles in Steve Jobs's afterlife over who he was and what he did, and how those two things are related. Right now, I can only think of two living people who seem close to occupying a similar role in the public imagination: Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. When I first introduce this subject by mentioning the new Danny Boyle movie about Jobs, Musk throws me off, not by the fact that he hasn't seen it—it's only been out for three days when we speak, though he says that he does intend to see it—but by the unconventional opinion that follows: "I actually saw the one with Ashton Kutcher, and I thought that was pretty good—I thought Ashton did a good job."
I ask Musk whether the way Jobs's legacy is being fought over makes him reflect at all on how he is thought of, or how he will be.
"I think what matters is the actions," he says, "not what people think of me in the future. I'll be long dead. But the actions that I take, will they have been useful?"
But, I suggest, you can't be completely indifferent to how people think of you.
"Well, I don't like it if people hate me. But who does, you know?"
I point out that there seems to be a kind of popular stereotypical narrative where figures like Jobs—and, more recently, Musk—are seen on one hand as visionary geniuses, but on the other as deeply flawed in their personalities.
"Sure," he says. "I don't know—I mean, the one time I met Steve Jobs, he was kind of a jerk. And everyone I know who met him…" He stops himself here, mid-sentence, and says he'd like to withdraw this answer. "Sorry. Hang on. The last thing I need is, like, more…"
There's doubtless a very particular reason for this sudden hesitancy, relating to a media storm over the previous week that involved Musk and Apple—but before I ask him about that, I press a bit more about his uncomfortable encounter with Jobs. Musk explains that he was introduced to Jobs by Google's Larry Page at a party, and he tells me that Jobs didn't know who he was, so it wasn't some personal thing. "I mean, I can't say beyond my personal experience. That is the only experience that I had." To be clear, Musk has also expressed many times over the years his appreciation and admiration for what Jobs achieved, and he reiterates his wish not to be talking about this right now. "The last thing I need is to generate animosity, you know," he says. "It just is not helpful."
The awkward context hanging over our conversation is this: A couple of weeks earlier, on a Tesla-related trip to Germany, Musk gave an interview to a German newspaper, Handelsblatt. The resulting article was published a few days before we speak, and toward its end came the following exchange, which related to Apple's rumored move into car design and manufacturing:
Apple just hired some of Tesla's most important engineers. Do you have to worry about a new competitor?
Important engineers? They have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the "Tesla Graveyard." If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding.
Do you take Apple's ambitions seriously?
Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? (laughs) No, seriously: It's good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the
next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.
Musk's remarks flew around the world's media, and they were generally portrayed in the least attractive way: as though Musk had declared war on Apple. In response, he attempted to explain and contextualize his statements on Twitter: "Yo, I don't hate Apple. It's a great company with a lot of talented people. I love their products and I'm glad they're doing an EV...Regarding the watch, Jony & his team created a beautiful design, but the functionality isn't compelling yet. By version 3, it will be." This didn't seem to help much. (One subsequent newspaper headline: Elon Musk tries to take back Apple insults, ends up insulting Apple again.) He complains to me now that the quotes in his German interview were taken and used "as though I issued a press release or something… I have no interest in sort of attacking Apple."
But, I say to him, while it was clearly something you might wish you hadn't said, presumably it was a true reflection of your thoughts?
"You know, it's better if I don't say anything on this front," he says. "My point is, there's no upside in generating animosity. It's not that I care about currying favor with Apple or anything like that, but I don't care to generate animosity."
One final observation about Tesla's view of Apple: Tesla has established a tradition—well, for the last two years, anyway—of announcing a fake product update on its blog on April 1. In 2014, they apprised their customers on the subject of "Pet Driving Cars," a post illustrated by a montage of two sweet giant-sized kittens clawing out of the roof of a Model S on an oceanside highway; the text reported Tesla's conclusion that cats "had an inexplicable propensity to drive off a cliff," with dogs faring not much better, but that "a goldfish-driving car" offered "the best path forward."
This year's joke was simpler:
"Tesla today announced a whole new product line called the Model W. As many in the media predicted, it's a watch. That's what the 'W' stands for. This incredible new device from Tesla doesn't just tell the time, it also tells the date…This will change your life. Reality as you know it will never be the same."
At the end of September, I watched Musk launch the latest real Tesla product, the SUV known as the Model X, in a giant hangar space close to the main Tesla production plant in Fremont, California. Many hundreds of hyped-up Tesla owners, and owners-to-be, were crowded on the floor. At the very front, behind a thin rope, were a few VIPs on fold-out seats, including Sergey Brin from Google, who would be one of the first five owners to receive their Model X tonight. In the row next to the stage were two of Musk's boys (he has twin 11-year-olds and triplet 9-year-olds)—the other three would have roles in the presentation, demonstrating how much luggage could fit in the car and how a bike rack could easily be fitted at the back. One of the two sons sitting in front of me whiled away the time reading a book as we all waited for Musk's delayed presentation: a book written in childish hand-lettering but that, in an almost impossibly appropriate way, appeared to be demonstrating quite sophisticated scientific principles—the chapter he was looking at, improbably, was titled "Other Orbits."
At the end of the same row was Musk's mother, Maye, enjoying her own late-life career as an over-sixties model, and next to the boys was Musk's second wife, the British actress Talulah Riley. Perhaps it would be impossible to imagine that someone as driven and singular as Musk could be anything other than a strange person to live with. This perception was certainly fed by the extensive and fairly unguarded blog his novelist first wife, Justine, wrote during and after their marriage, but Musk himself hasn't always excelled at giving a different impression. During a 2012 Bloomberg Businessweek interview, at a time when he was single, he mused to journalist Ashlee Vance, in a quote that may have been a clear-headed reflection on the practicalities of his life but that is also perhaps one of the least romantic dating pitches of all time: "I think the time allocated to the businesses and the kids is going fine. I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe ten hours?" And Musk's history with Riley certainly hasn't been straightforward. They married in 2010, then announced a divorce settlement in 2012, then remarried in 2013, then at the end of 2014 announced a second divorce settlement. No further public updates have been made, but the fact that the two of them have started appearing together again—at the Cannes Film Festival in May; taking turns wing walking on a biplane in the U.K. in August; her presence here, one of his sons resting his head on her lap—suggests that the second divorce has been no more successful than the first.
The particular way Musk does product launches makes these events unlike any others you've ever seen. Though he has an idiosyncratic charisma, he's not a natural showman, and there are few signs that he has carefully rehearsed and honed a script. He's clearly confident, despite the hesitations and the endless "um"s and the strange cough-laugh he uses as a kind of diffident pause, but there's also something breathlessly unsophisticated about the way he speaks—in some ways he's more like a teenager who's been asked to stand up and speak at a family dinner than like a titan of industry. There's also the occasional sense that he's pausing so much not because he's trying to work out what to say, but what not to, as if he's working out how to translate what's in his head so that the normal people of Earth might understand it.
He's also got a delightfully weird sense of humor and sense of timing. On this day, I see him present the car twice—first to a small group of automotive and tech journalists, second at this big event. He hits different notes at each presentation. For the journalists, when talking about the car's distinctive Falcon Wing doors, he explains how he was so determined that these doors opened and rose up balletically that he actually had the engineers watch ballet. Then he explains, almost apologetically, that they probably got a bit carried away with some features. "I'm not sure anybody really should make this car…there is a lot more there than is necessary to sell the car," he says. "This is definitely the most complex sun visor in history—we probably shouldn't have done that…There's never been a car like it. I'm not sure there should be. It's a car from the future." For the bigger crowd, he is a little more theatrical, bringing the house down when he shows how the driver's door automatically opens when you walk toward it and then closes behind you when you get in. "Like an invisible chauffeur," he explains.
But one part of the presentation plays out the same way with both audiences.
He describes the car's filters in great detail, his basic point being that these filters are way beyond anything that anyone else has used before, and that the air within the car is filtered to medical standards. Consequently, as he then explains, "if there ever is sort of an apocalyptic scenario of some kind hypothetically, you just press the Bioweapon Defense Mode button…"
When he first mentions this, among the press and among the later audience, there's the kind of warm and gentle laughter you get when someone has said something a bit weird and funny as a joke. But then he explains—and each audience realizes, with a different kind of laughter, louder but also more baffled—that he means it. Not that one needs a defense against bioweapons, but that there really is a button on the car's control screen, complete with a sinister twirly symbol, that when pressed will prompt the car to filter incoming air to this standard, and it really is called the Bioweapon Defense Mode.
Tesla and Musk have plenty of history like this. When the Supercharger network (the charging stations across the country where Tesla owners can speed-charge their cars for free) was first announced, Musk pointed out that once the Supercharger stations are set up to get their own power from solar panels, as eventually intended, then "even if there's a zombie apocalypse, you'll still be able to travel the country on the Tesla Supercharger network." And likewise, when Tesla worked out how to increase the Model S's already impressive acceleration, they decided to call this new option "insane mode"—not just internally, but on the car's instrumental panel. And then, when they found a way to improve on even that degree of acceleration, they offered a new upgrade: "ludicrous mode."
Later, I ask him about all this.
"Well," he says, "I like sort of silly absurdist humor, and I like technology, so those two sort of combine."
But, I press, there aren't many billionaire CEOs—Musk laughs halfway through my question when he hears himself described this way—who carefully explain the advantages of their latest launch in the event of a zombie apocalypse.
"Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I did say we're trying to be a leader in apocalypse defense scenarios. I really like the Bioweapon Defense thing. I mean, I was just going through it with the lead engineers on the air-filtration system, and I asked them, 'So how good is this? Like, could any virus or bacteria get through?' And they're like, 'No, no, it's definitely gonna stop anything. So you basically wouldn't even be able to measure it—it's such a tiny number that it wouldn't cause an infection, just as it would be for a hospital operating room.' So I was like, 'Wow, so if there was like a genetically engineered super-virus, you could get in your car and be safe?' And they said, 'Yes, we believe so.' So, like, 'Cool—we should call it, like, Bioweapon Defense Mode then.’ ”
But, I say, that's the funny bit: actually doing it rather than just thinking it. Likewise, using the words "insane" and "ludicrous."
"True. Yeah, I don't know. It seemed ludicrously fast. And I like Spaceballs as a movie. So we named it 'ludicrous mode' for that reason. I mean, I thought it was funny—maybe not everyone thinks it's funny, but I thought it was funny. I mean, it's memorable. I think people are gonna remember 'ludicrous speed' more than they're gonna remember that it's, like, 2.8 seconds zero to sixty. And our competitors, they usually don't have a sense of humor, so I think that's a differentiator."
Elon Musk has plenty of other ideas. If anyone asks and he has a moment to explain, he'll talk distractedly of as-yet-unrealized concepts—a vertical takeoff-and-landing supersonic electric jet for long-distance travel; an entirely new form of transport that he's named the Hyperloop, which would propel passengers at high speed through tubes on cushions of air. (He also has a third multi-billion-dollar company, SolarCity, which makes and installs solar panels—it's run by two of his cousins but was his idea.) He is a man with the rare problem of having more ideas for how to radically change our world than the time to realize them.
Still, you do what you can. And so this Monday evening, his mind is on space suits. Right now, specifically, he needs to go see the latest secret prototype of a new kind of space suit—the first to be made by a private rocket company for astronauts to wear into orbit and beyond, which he hopes will go into use in 2017.
"We're trying to have a good balance between aesthetics and functionality," he explains, sitting in his office at SpaceX. "It's tricky to have something that works in reality and looks good."
As with much of what Musk does, there is a plan, but then, behind that, there's often a bigger plan. To Musk, it's obvious that this new space suit not only needs to work well but also needs to look cool, because he needs people—regular people like you and me—to imagine themselves wearing it.
"If we're to inspire the next generation to want to go beyond Earth," he says, "they have to think they want to wear that suit one day. The easiest way to make a pressure suit work is to make it very bulky, and have lots of sort of things poking out." He laughs, and then offers another illustration that the way Elon Musk's mind works is both quite brilliant and quite entertainingly unusual. "Actually," he says, "one of the more embarrassing things about space suits is that the backside kind of pooches out pretty bad. I don't know if you've seen any of the Soyuz space suits?"
I concede that I can't bring to mind a rear view.
"That's because they never show you that angle!" he says, as though vindicated. "It's really bad." Then he swivels round to the computer behind him and actually does a Google image search to show me. "You can barely stand upright," he says, scrolling. All the views that come up are head-on, but this, he proclaims with satisfaction, only proves his point. "They always kind of avoid the side image."
He also explains the underlying physics dilemma: "Imagine that you've got to be able to bend over, but it's rigid material—then, when you stand up, it's gonna pooch out really significantly in the back. So we wanted to have something which would not do that."
So, I ask, you can mitigate big-butt space syndrome?
"Yeah," he replies, though a little uncertainly, as if he's not quite convinced I've accurately outlined the technical parameters of the problem. "We just wanted it to look good. Feel good."
Do your suits look anything like space suits have looked before?
"They look a bit more like space suits in the movies," he says. "If you've seen an advanced space suit in the movies, it looks a bit more like that. Unfortunately those things don't work. They just work in Hollywood."
As we sit here, Elon Musk explains to me how he thought up the Hyperloop.
People get stuck in traffic every day, but few of them react to the situation as Musk once did. It was July 2012. He was trapped on Santa Monica Boulevard for 45 minutes, edging toward the coast to appear at an event where he was to be interviewed in front of an audience by a tech journalist called Sarah Lacy, and he was late. "I didn't realize they'd actually paid to attend, so I was keeping all these people waiting that had paid to attend without me even realizing it," he says. “I thought, ‘Man, there's gotta be, you know, a better way.’ ”
What happened next is two kinds of absurd. First, he tells me, it was actually right as he sat there in his car, inching down Santa Monica Boulevard, that he not only thought, We need a new mode of transport, but imagined it, and in his head (Musk famously never writes things down) came up with a quite specific idea he thought would work. Second, when he arrived at his destination, he couldn't keep it to himself. "I sort of shot my mouth off in the interview," he recalls. He would explain at the event that his idea was also inspired by his frustration at California's continually-delayed high-speed train link between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which he saw as disappointingly slow and crazily expensive. "I said," he remembers, “ ‘I think I've come up with a better way to get from one place to another.’ ” This, in part, is what he explained.
Musk: It would be for a fifth mode of transport. So right now we've got planes, trains, automobiles, and boats for getting around Earth. But what if there was a fifth mode? I've a name for it, which is the Hyperloop.
Lacy: The Hyperloop? Is it like a Jetsons tunnel?
Musk: It's something like that, yeah.
Lacy: You just get in and it whisks you?
Musk: Yeah…it goes about, let's say, an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. So you go from downtown L.A. to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes…
Lacy: You think this is possible?
Musk: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
Over the next few months, when Musk was asked about it, he said that when he had time he might publish an open-source version of this Hyperloop plan for others to work on, and meanwhile he offered more opaque clues as to what his idea was ("a cross between a Concorde and a rail gun and an air-hockey table…if they had a three-way and had a baby somehow"), which inspired lots of online speculation, much of it deeply skeptical. Despite prodding, though, he said little more for quite some time, and he published nothing. For one thing, as we know, he was a little busy. But he tells me now that there was also another reason for his reticence.
"In actual fact," he says, "what I thought of wouldn't work, but I didn't realize that at the time. It was like a wrong precursor, sort of along the lines of a pneumatic mail chute. But the problem is, pneumatically things won't work because the friction of the air column is far too great. And then it heats up the air, the air expands, and it creates this enormous back pressure. That's why mail slots don't work at scale. You can have them over short distances, but not long distances."
Pretty much anyone else might have left it there, but Musk didn't. He carried on thinking about it: "I was like, 'Is there any other way to make this work?' Because I'd sort of put myself out there saying I could think of this thing—it's gonna be pretty embarrassing to say that it didn't work. So maybe there's some other thing that would work."
The following year, he announced the imminent publication of his new and improved concept, though he confesses to me that, even then, a key detail only came to him at the very last moment: "A final piece of the puzzle—to use a compressor on the nose of the pod to compress the air and eject it backwards using air skis—I came up with literally the night before. I was up at 3 A.M.—I was like, 'I think it might actually work.' "
It's fair to say that there was a large audience ready to debunk and savage whatever he published—which turned out to be a surprisingly detailed, 58-page document packed with calculations, reasonings, schematics, and costings—but though there were inevitably doubters, it soon became clear that there were plenty of people who could not see any reason why it wouldn't work, and a few who were ready to start building it and testing it out. There are now competing companies investing millions in Hyperloop prototypes. Musk hasn't endorsed any particular endeavor, but for his own part he's building a mile-long Hyperloop test track here in Los Angeles so that students can try out designs and compete to see whose prototype will go faster. And while there is a long way to go before the Hyperloop proves itself, no one has yet come up with a fundamental flaw that undermines his designs or his reasoning.
You must be aware that other people don't think up new modes of transport in their spare time?
"Um, well, in this case it was just sort of sheer desperation," he replies. "Of, like, I'd better think of something, otherwise I'm gonna have to tell people it doesn't work."
Well, yes, but lots of other people have been desperate before now, and they still don't do things like this.
He pauses, as though looking for a way to sidestep this. If so, he fails to find one.
"True," he concedes.
Elon Musk has been asked many times to explain his success, and occasionally he has tried. He points to things he does that other people don't do—actively seeking out negative feedback, for instance, and working really, really, really hard. But I think he knows that he's different. This is what he said once to NPR, back in 2007, before the first Tesla car hit the road, before the first SpaceX rocket took off: "What I'm good at is, well, I think I'm good at inventing solutions to problems. Things seem fairly obvious to me that are clearly not obvious to most people. So…and I'm not really trying to do it or anything. I just, I don't know, I can see the truth of things, and others seem less able to do so."
Eight years later, he tries to boil down some more practical lessons for me.
The things you've been working on the last ten years or so, would they be where they are now yet without you?
"Which things?"
Everything you've been doing at SpaceX and everything you've been doing at Tesla.
"Would they happen without me? Um, certainly some things wouldn't have. You know, I think probably not."
So what is that that you're doing to make that happen?
"Well, you've got to convince great people to join the companies and then get them to work together in concert toward a clear goal with a strategy that's sensible."
But surely there are thousands of people who are doing that. Why are you more successful than pretty much anyone else right now?
"Well, it's really because people, they either have a strategy where success is not one of the possible outcomes—occasionally it's that. And then they don't change that strategy once that becomes clear, amazingly. Or they cannot attract a critical mass of technical talent, if it's in a technology-related thing. Or they run out of money before reaching a cash-flow-positive situation. That tends to be what occurs."
Sure, but even so, there's other people who get over all those bars…
He laughs. "No, they don't. There's very few."
You really think those hurdles are enough to stop nearly everything?
"Oh yeah, absolutely. Probably very often when a company starts out, it's headed in the wrong direction. But it really depends on how quickly it can recognize that and take corrective action. But people tend to think that they're right even when they aren't right."
An essential part of the Elon Musk tale of triumph is how close he came himself to complete disaster in the second half of 2008. "Yeah, we had some really, really hard times," he says when I refer to this, "and very narrowly escaped death as a company, both for SpaceX and Tesla." He has told the full story over and over—how SpaceX had failed with its first three rocket launches and Tesla was struggling to make vehicles quickly or economically enough, and how, when the wider market crash then came, both companies were only kept going by Musk committing the remainder of his $180 million fortune from PayPal, to the point where he was reduced to borrowing money off friends for living expenses. And how, at the last minute, doom was averted: The fourth SpaceX launch reached orbit, and the company was awarded a $1.6 billion NASA contract; other Tesla investors agreed to match Musk's final $20 million investment and saw them through the most vulnerable moments.
Even now, Musk gets uncharacteristically emotional talking about it. There's a very recent interview shot at the Tesla factory for Norwegian TV where Musk has to ask to halt the filming when they are discussing this period because he is tearing up. He seems surprised when I mention this. "Well, I mean, I certainly have feelings!"
SpaceX received its biggest setback since those days earlier this year when, after eighteen consecutive successful launches, a Falcon 9 rocket on a resupply mission for the International Space Station exploded just over two minutes into its flight (a mishap they now believe was caused by the failure of a small metal strut supplied by a contractor). "It was the first time that we'd had a failure in seven years, so most of the people at SpaceX were not around when we had the failures in the early days. Because we only were about 500 people or so, and now we're five thousand, so 90 percent of the people had only ever seen success."
I ask him if there's something he's had to do to get people in a mindset where they're more scared of failure, but his answer is basically that a rocket blowing up—or, to use the actual jargon, undergoing a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," or RUD—should be enough to do the trick.
"I think it's now clear to them," he says. "It's pretty obvious this is what happens if you don't do things right."
Toward the end of our conversation, Musk starts getting periodic reminders, ever more insistently, that he is late to this meeting to review the latest space-suit prototype. No one outside of a few select insiders has seen the suit, I am told, but eventually he invites me to come take a look, as long as I don't describe the suit itself.
Earlier in the day, I'd been taken on a tour of the SpaceX factory, within which there is an area that approved guests are allowed to tour, where the rockets, capsules, and engines are fabricated. (First, though, you walk past the Iron Man suit, which is here presumably because another key part of Musk lore is that Jon Favreau and Robert Downey, Jr., used aspects of Musk as the basis for the movie version of Tony Stark; Musk also has a cameo in the second film, trying to buttonhole Stark about his real-life electric-plane idea at a party.) There's nothing boring about the inside of a rocket factory—this is where SpaceX puts together every part of the rocket and capsule, fabricating nearly everything themselves—but I also knew there were areas that no one is allowed to see. We head into one of these areas now, until we reach a glass-walled room identified as space-suit development.
Inside, a man is waiting, a little awkwardly, in a next-generation SpaceX astronaut suit, visor open. He stands there for the next 20 minutes as Musk and his team discuss it. Other versions, presumably earlier or alternative prototypes, hang on a rack in the back of the room. Musk is not at all overbearing, but he asks a lot of very specific questions—about fabrics, about colors, about placements—and he makes comments about what is and is not flattering. They discuss some of the practical constraints imposed by the fact that this suit has to work in space. There's also quite a lot of laughter. Musk seems both pleased and dissatisfied with what he is seeing; he has plenty of suggestions for improvements. Still, I think it would be fair to say that his description—more like space suits in the movies—is a pretty good one. And I trust he won't mind my observing that there is no sign whatsoever of pooching.
*See Aaron Sorkin's mythic reimagining of Steve Jobs in Steve Jobs.
Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent.
