Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

To save money, Model X has the same platform as Model S. “The Model X is a continuation of the Model S story,” Franz von Holzhausen said. “We looked at the segment because it is really demanding and we wanted to break into it with a game changer. Minivans are incredible, they have such a versatile interior but you have to sell your soul to drive one. And SUVs are horrible inefficient in their utilization of interior space. We wanted to merge attractive and usable.” 239

The next model after Model X will probably be the affordable car that Tesla want to build hundreds of thousands of in a few years. You can no longer buy a Roadster, so Tesla would also like to manufacture another electric sports car. “We will do an electric supercar at some point,” Elon said. “It was going to happen right after the Model X, but it is more important to the world that we do a more affordable electric car.” 434

But Tesla is also working with several other projects, including an innovative electric truck. “I’m really excited about bringing out a whole series of cars that address a wide range of consumer interests and needs,” Elon said. “I do think it will be interesting to do self-driving cars, perhaps working in conjunction with Google, who’s quite close to us in Silicon Valley. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are longtime friends of mine, so it would be great to work with them, maybe to do self-driving cars.” 193

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein was one of the two first books in the International Space Station’s library. The other book was Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 171Heinlein, who was one of the young Elon’s favorite authors, said that once you reach orbit you are halfway to anywhere. 301SpaceX was still far away from anywhere, but their customers believed in them. “The important thing is that none of our customers left SpaceX,” Elon said. “They all sort of held the faith. We actually worked closely with our customers, gave them full disclosure. They knew everything we knew as far as the nature of the problem. They knew we weren’t trying to give them a snow job or hide anything. I think that was really important.” 22

To survive, SpaceX raised outside capital for the first time. “As a precautionary measure to guard against the possibility of flight three not reaching orbit, SpaceX recently accepted a significant investment,” Elon said. “Combined with our existing cash reserves, that ensures we will have more than sufficient funding on hand to continue launching Falcon 1.”

One of the investors was Elon’s former co-worker Peter Thiel with his Founders Fund, and the other was Steve Jurvetson with the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “Musk called me around the darkest times,” Jurvetson said. “I was a believer all along, and just wanted my partners to let me invest in something this cool. I really like rockets.” 300Jurvetson, who launches small rockets as a hobby, has an office full of space memorabilia. “You can’t finesse your way around this stuff,” he said. “There’s not a lot of room for artistry because the physics will bite you in the ass.” 51

Jurvetson had previously invested in Tesla and became the first owner of the Model S. “I whip out my wallet, where I always keep one check, fill it out for the full price of the car, and then toss it across the table,” Jurvetson said of what happened at a board meeting. It stunned everyone. “Well, I guess you get the first car,” a surprised Elon said, who got the second car. 228

Because of SpaceX’s unconventional business model, not everyone would be allowed to invest in the company. “When I’ve recruited investors, I’ve made sure they’re like-minded,” Elon said. “SpaceX will create a great deal of value over the long term, but there will be times when that horizon is beyond what some investors would be comfortable with. I’m going to make sure I have sufficient control of the company to optimize for the very long term.” 316

This is the reason why it will take a long time before SpaceX becomes a public company. “Mars requires developing complex technology over a decade, but market cares about next three months,” Elon said. 250He added that going to Mars will not yield any immediate revenues, so the stock market would say no to make us an interplanetary species.

In September 2008, it was time for the fourth stressful attempt to launch the Falcon 1 rocket. The launch became a success. “It’s just a giant kick on the balls of the people who said that we couldn’t do it,” Elon said. “A friend of mine wrote to remind me that only 5 of the first 9 Pegasus launches succeeded, 3 of 5 for Ariane, 9 of 20 for Atlas, 9 of 21 for Soyuz, and 9 of 18 for Proton. Having experienced firsthand how hard it is to reach orbit, I have a lot of respect for those that persevered to produce the vehicles that are mainstays of space launch today.” 282

Athletes tend to be superstitious. It’s common to hear how a soccer player always wears the same underwear because it brings luck. What Elon did before the first successful launch of a rocket from SpaceX was to bring his kids to Disney World where they took a ride in the roller coaster Space Mountain. Like the soccer player, Elon now believes there’s a connection between Space Mountain and a successful rocket launch, so it has become a tradition to visit Disney World before each launch. 420

After the successful launch of Falcon 1, SpaceX had now done something only nine nations and the European Space Agency done before. “Unlike North Korea, whose rockets actually get worse each flight, the Falcon 1 flights got successively better,” Elon said. 56This was a quote from a time before North Korea claimed they had successfully launched a satellite into space. Elon has made many mistakes, especially in his first companies, but he always tried to learn something from each mistake. 67“My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart,” he said. 410

Elon was once asked how he is able to do the things that the government has found itself less able to accomplish as quickly? “Well, one way to think of government is to think of it as essentially a large corporation,” Elon replied. “Generally, large corporations have a harder time with radical innovations than smaller companies. There are some exceptions to that rule, like Apple, but it is generally true that the larger a company is the harder it is to execute innovation.” 451

When discussing the benefits of a small company, and a small government, Elon compares West Germany with East Germany and South Korea with North Korea. In these countries, the same people live but different system of government control them, and as a result, they have different standards of living. In West Germany, the economic output per capita was about five times higher than in East Germany. “And it’s not like West Germany was particularly capitalist, they were a lot more socialist than we [US] are,” Elon said. 359

Because Elon believes in a small government, he questioned how much a president could affect the economy. “The reality of being a president is that you are like the captain of a very huge ship and have a small rudder,” Elon said. “If there was a button that the president could push that said ‘economic prosperity,’ he would hit that button really fast. You could measure the speed of light by measure how fast they press that button.” 363

But he’s still positive to some politicians. 98“I believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause,” Elon said. “This statement may surprise some people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians and their staffs want to do the right thing and eventually do.” 386