DEDICATION FOR BOWIE AND TUCKER CONTENTS Dedication 1. Dinner with Elon 2. Elon’s World 3. Adventures in Africa 4. An Awakening in Canada 5. Elon’s First Start-Up 6. The PayPal Years 7. Mice in Space 8. SpaceX Takes Flight . . . Sort of 9. All Electric 10. Silicon Valley Learns to Drive 11. Roadster Roadblocks 12. Pain, Suffering, and Survival 13. Lift-off 14. SpaceX Rising 15. The Revenge of the Electric Car 16. Tesla’s iPhone Moment 17. The Grand Vision of Elon Musk Epilogue Timeline Acknowledgments About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher 1 DINNER WITH ELON “DO YOU THINK I’M INSANE?” This question came from Elon Musk near the end of a dinner we shared at a fancy seafood restaurant in Palo Alto, California. I’d gotten to the restaurant first and settled down, knowing Musk would—as always—be late. After about fifteen minutes, Musk showed up wearing designer jeans, a plaid dress shirt, and leather shoes. Musk stands six foot one, but ask anyone who knows him and they’ll tell you he seems much bigger than that. He’s extremely broad-shouldered, sturdy, and thick. You might guess that he would strut when entering a room. Instead, he tends to be almost sheepish. This time, he walked with his head tilted down, gave me a quick handshake hello, and then sat at the table. From there, Musk needed a few minutes before he warmed up and looked at ease. Musk asked me to dinner to negotiate. Eighteen months earlier, I’d informed him of my plans to write a book about him. He’d informed me of his plans not to cooperate and do interviews for the book. His rejection stung at the time but made me work harder as a reporter. I’d spent the last year and a half digging for sources of information and poring over Musk’s life. Plenty of people had left Musk’s companies—PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX— and agreed to talk to me. Plus, I already knew a lot of his friends, and they too had plenty of stories to share. It was after interviewing about two hundred of these people that I heard from Musk again. He called me at home one evening and said that things could go one of two ways: he could start blocking people from talking to me or he could help with the project after all. I, of course, said I preferred the second option. Musk said he’d be willing to cooperate if he could read the book before it went to publication and could add footnotes throughout it. He would not change my text, but he wanted the chance to set the record straight in spots that he judged inaccurate. I understood where this was coming from. Musk wanted control over his life story. He’s also a physicist by training and hates factual errors. Any mistake in the book would gnaw away at him for months or even years. While I could understand his perspective, I could not let him read the book. A journalist must have the freedom to research a subject and then present the findings to the world without the fear of someone looking over his shoulder and possibly trying to tilt the work in his favor. Besides that, Musk has his version of the truth, and it often differs from the view held by others. Lastly, Musk tends to give very long answers to even basic questions, and the thought of footnotes that were longer than the actual book seemed all too real. The fancy dinner was our chance to chat all of this out, have a bit of a debate, and see where it left us. When the dinner first started, we talked for a while about people we both knew, famous businessmen like Howard Hughes, and the Tesla car factory. About twenty minutes in, the waiter stopped by to take our order, and Musk asked for suggestions that would work with his diet. At the time, he did the whole low-carb thing and tried to avoid foods like pasta, bread, and sugary treats. He settled on chunks of fried lobster coated with black squid ink. Even before our negotiation had really begun, Musk started talking and opening up in his uniquely serious fashion. He confessed to being terrified that Google’s cofounder Larry Page might be building a fleet of artificial- intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind. “I’m really worried about this,” Musk said. It didn’t make Musk feel any better that he and Page were very close friends and that he felt Page was a good person. In fact, that was sort of the problem. Page’s nice-guy nature left him assuming that the machines would forever do what we wanted. “I’m not as optimistic,” Musk said. “He could produce something evil by accident.” When the food arrived, Musk consumed it. That is, he didn’t eat it as much as he made it disappear rapidly with a few huge bites. Wanting to keep Musk happy and chatting, I handed him a big chunk of steak from my plate. The plan worked . . . for all of ninety seconds. Meat. Hunk. Gone. It took a while to redirect Musk’s thoughts on robots taking over humanity, and get him to talk about the book. Once he did, Musk