Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

After founding SpaceX, the first thing Elon did was to spread the word how he would build rockets with the ultimate goal to colonize Mars. He talked to magazine writers, movie stars, and wealthy entrepreneurs. The reason why he did it is simple. He thought no one would sell him any rocket parts if they didn’t believe he was serious about the idea to build rockets. 278

SpaceX opened an office in El Segundo, Los Angeles, because southern California has the highest density of aerospace engineers in the world. Elon assumed experienced space engineers didn’t want to move to San Francisco. “They [his friends] view southern California as being a little vacuous and northern California as being more intellectual,” Elon said. “But people in the Bay Area have forgotten that there’s been a huge concentration of aerospace engineering talent here, for more than a century. In Silicon Valley, startups are such a norm, and there are many success stories. In southern California that’s not so much the case. In the early days of aviation, southern California was startup city. This was the huge entrepreneurial center.” 316SpaceX was Elon’s only company, so he decided to move from his current home in Palo Alto to Los Angeles.

Elon became the CEO of SpaceX, and because he didn’t find any CTO to hire, he also became the CTO. Initially, Elon wanted to hire someone as the chief designer of the rocket, but he couldn’t find anyone who was willing to join and was competent. Those who were willing to join couldn’t do the job and those who could do the job weren’t willing to join. “A lot of aerospace senior managers seem to be really disassociated from and unable to do hard core engineering,” Elon said. “I think that is a mistake and results in cloudy judgment on important technical issues – they can’t tell if something is really good or not, so they just do what everyone else does, assuming it to be the safe bet.” 285

It would be has hard to find a good CEO if Elon needed to replace himself. “Jeff Bezos could do this [be CEO of SpaceX]. Larry Page could do this. Bill Gates could do this. But there’s just a really small list of people with the sufficient technical and business ability to do this job,” Elon said. 71

The original SpaceX team consisted of about 20 SpaceXers, as they call themselves. It was a small, but efficient team. “I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done,” Elon said. “Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer [Two people who don’t know something are no better than one], will tend to slow down progress and will make the task incredibly expensive.” 285

To find a great team, Elon didn’t cold-call different experts. Because almost all other private rocket companies had failed, the experts didn’t want to join yet another company that eventually would fail. 365“It would have been quite difficult if I’d just started off by cold-calling them and saying that I wanted to start a rocket company,” Elon said. “What I said was ‘Would you mind helping me with a feasibility study to find out if it’s possible to make significant advancements in rocket technology? It will involve a few weekends and evenings of your time, I said I’d pay a decent amount for their help, and so they were enthusiastic.” 128

A graveyard with failed rocket companies include VolksRocket, AMROC, and Beal Areospace. The reasons why these companies failed were: they didn’t have the technical knowledge needed, they had insufficient capital, or they relied on technologies that didn’t yet exist. SpaceX, however, recruited experienced engineers, had enough capital to afford the loss of several rockets, and was founded in the 21st century. “The design tools, such as solid modeling and finite element analysis software are substantially more powerful than ten years ago, so that’s a clear advantage,” Elon said. “Obviously, most electronics have improved a lot too, except gyroscopes and flight termination systems.” 285

After the meetings ended, they concluded it would indeed be possible to build better rockets than those built before. The experts were now convinced that SpaceX was different and wouldn’t end up as yet another failed rocket company. “I essentially led them to a conclusion that they created,” Elon said. “It was sort of a Socratic dialogue on a technical level. The essence of a Socratic dialogue is that people wind up convincing themselves. People are much more willing to change their opinion if you’re not forcing it.” 128

Convinced experts from companies like Boeing, TRW, Google, and Microsoft joined SpaceX. “It was a can-do attitude combined with the fact that he knew what he was talking about and was happy to be corrected if he didn’t. You couldn’t say no to it,” an expert said. 49

But Cantrell, the expert who had helped Elon from the very beginning, wasn’t convinced. “What separated us, I believe, was his lack of even being able to conceive failure,” he said. “I know this because this is where we parted ways at SpaceX. We got to a point where I could not see it succeeding and walked away. I have 25 years experience building space hardware and he had none at the time. So much for experience.” 457

Employee number seven was Gwynne Shotwell, who joined SpaceX in 2002 and is now working as the company’s President and COO. Since the day she asked her mother how an engine worked, she has been interested in technology. “So my mom bought me a book on engines,” she said. “I read it and became really interested in car engines, and gears and differentials.” 309As one of the few women in a primarily male industry, she hasn’t experienced any disadvantages of being a woman. “I did have a little problem during an interview process – but I didn’t get that job because I was a girl – but they were clearly losers, so it is best that I didn’t work for them,” she said. “What counts is how effective you are, not what body parts you happen to possess.” 310

SpaceX needed not only experts with years of experience – they also needed young people who didn’t have any limits. If you have years of experience from a company, you may have learned it’s impossible to build cheaper rockets. But if you have no experience, you do not yet know what’s impossible, then it’s much easier to do what everyone else think is impossible. To find these new engineers, SpaceX contacted Stanford University´s aeronautics and astronautics department to get the names of the best students. “We start with that layer – young engineers, young talent, young technicians – who don’t really know what’s impossible,” a SpaceXer said. 425

As when Elon founded X.com and Zip2, he didn’t have any practical experience from the industry. Launching rockets as a kid in South Africa wasn’t enough. But the degree in physics included some basic theories he could use, and he was eager to learn what he didn’t know by reading books and through learn by doing. “It is not like I ever worked for Boeing or Lockheed,” Elon said. “But I do have an understanding of how things work in physics and engineering.” 60

Elon set out to learn everything he could about rocket technology by asking his employees who were experts in their respective area. “I’d never seen anything like it,” a SpaceXer said. “He was the quickest learner I’ve ever come across. You had this guy who knew everything from a business point of view, but who was also clearly capable of knowing everything from a technical point of view – and the place he was creating was a blank sheet of paper.” 49

It took Elon two years to learn what he needed to know about rockets. “I know my rocket inside out and backward,” he said. “I can tell you the heat treating temper of the skin material, where it changes, why we chose that material, the welding technique… down to the gnat’s ass.” 288