Ashlee Vance: Elon Musk

Musk rarely finds time to decompress, but when he does, the festivities are just as dramatic as the rest of his life. On his thirtieth birthday, Musk rented out a castle in England for about twenty people. From 2 A.M. until 6 A.M., they played a variation of hide-and-seek called sardines in which one person runs off and hides and everyone else looks for him. Another party occurred in Paris. Musk, his brother, and cousins found themselves awake at midnight and decided to bicycle through the city until 6 A.M. They slept all day and then boarded the Orient Express in the evening. Once again, they stayed up all night. The Lucent Dossier Experience—an avant-garde group of performers—were on the luxurious train, performing palm readings and acrobatics. When the train arrived in Venice the next day, Musk’s family had dinner and then hung out on the patio of their hotel overlooking the Grand Canal until 9 A.M. Musk loves costume parties as well, and turned up at one dressed like a knight and using a parasol to duel a midget wearing a Darth Vader costume.

For one of his most recent birthdays, Musk invited fifty people to a castle—or at least the United States’ best approximation of a castle—in Tarrytown, New York. This party had a Japanese steampunk theme, which is sort of like a sci-fi lover’s wet dream—a mix of corsets, leather, and machine worship. Musk dressed as a samurai.

The festivities included a performance of The Mikado, a Victorian comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan set in Japan, at a small theater in the heart of town. “I am not sure the Americans got it,” said Riley, whom Musk remarried after his ten-hour-a-week dating plan failed. The Americans and everyone else did enjoy what followed. Back at the castle, Musk donned a blindfold, got pushed up against a wall, and held balloons in each hand and another between his legs. The knife thrower then went to work. “I’d seen him before, but did worry that maybe he could have an off day,” Musk said. “Still, I thought, he would maybe hit one gonad but not both.” The onlookers were stunned and frightened for Musk’s safety. “That was bizarre,” said Bill Lee, a technology investor and one of Musk’s good friends. “But Elon believes in the science of things.” One of the world’s top sumo wrestlers showed up at the party along with some of his compatriots. A ring had been set up at the castle, and Musk faced off against the champion. “He was three hundred and fifty pounds, and they were not jiggly pounds,” Musk said. “I went full adrenaline rush and managed to lift the guy off the ground. He let me win that first round and then beat me. I think my back is still screwed up.”

Riley turned planning these types of parties for Musk into an art. She met Musk back in 2008, when his companies were collapsing. She watched him lose his entire fortune and get ridiculed by the press. She knows that the sting of these years remains and has combined with the other traumas in Musk’s life—the tragic loss of an infant son and a brutal upbringing in South Africa—to create a tortured soul. Riley has gone to great lengths to make sure Musk’s escapes from work and this past leave him feeling refreshed if not healed. “I try to think of fun things he has not done before where he can relax,” Riley said. “We’re trying to make up for his miserable childhood now.”

Genuine as Riley’s efforts might have been, they were not entirely effective. Not long after the Sumo party, I found Musk back at work at the Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto. It was a Saturday, and the parking lot was full of cars. Inside of the Tesla offices, hundreds of young men were at work—some of them designing car parts on computers and others conducting experiments with electronics equipment on their desks. Musk’s uproarious laugh would erupt every few minutes and carry through the entire floor. When Musk came into the meeting room where I’d been waiting, I noted how impressive it was for so many people to turn up on a Saturday. Musk saw the situation in a different light, complaining that fewer and fewer people had been working weekends of late. “We’ve grown fucking soft,” Musk replied. “I was just going to send out an e-mail. We’re fucking soft.” (A word of warning: There’s going to be a lot of “fuck” in this book. Musk adores the word, and so do most of the people in his inner circle.)

This kind of declaration seems to fit with our impressions of other visionaries. It’s not hard to imagine Howard Hughes or Steve Jobs chastising their workforce in a similar way. Building things—especially big things—is a messy business. In the two decades Musk has spent creating companies, he’s left behind a trail of people who either adore or despise him. During the course of my reporting, these people lined up to give me their take on Musk and the gory details of how he and his businesses operate.

My dinners with Musk and periodic trips to Musk Land revealed a different set of possible truths about the man. He’s set about building something that has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic. At the heart of this transformation are Musk’s skills as a software maker and his ability to apply them to machines. He’s merged atoms and bits in ways that few people thought possible, and the results have been spectacular. It’s true enough that Musk has yet to have a consumer hit on the order of the iPhone or to touch more than one billion people like Facebook. For the moment, he’s still making rich people’s toys, and his budding empire could be an exploded rocket or massive Tesla recall away from collapse. On the other hand, Musk’s companies have already accomplished far more than his loudest detractors thought possible, and the promise of what’s to come has to leave hardened types feeling optimistic during their weaker moments. “To me, Elon is the shining example of how Silicon Valley might be able to reinvent itself and be more relevant than chasing these quick IPOs and focusing on getting incremental products out,” said Edward Jung, a famed software engineer and inventor. “Those things are important, but they are not enough. We need to look at different models of how to do things that are longer term in nature and where the technology is more integrated.” The integration mentioned by Jung—the harmonious melding of software, electronics, advanced materials, and computing horsepower—appears to be Musk’s gift. Squint ever so slightly, and it looks like Musk could be using his skills to pave the way toward an age of astonishing machines and science fiction dreams made manifest.

In that sense, Musk comes off much more like Thomas Edison than Howard Hughes. He’s an inventor, celebrity businessman, and industrialist able to take big ideas and turn them into big products. He’s employing thousands of people to forge metal in American factories at a time when this was thought to be impossible. Born in South Africa, Musk now looks like America’s most innovative industrialist and outlandish thinker and the person most likely to set Silicon Valley on a more ambitious course. Because of Musk, Americans could wake up in ten years with the most modern highway in the world: a transit system run by thousands of solar-powered charging stations and traversed by electric cars. By that time, SpaceX may well be sending up rockets every day, taking people and things to dozens of habitats and making preparations for longer treks to Mars. These advances are simultaneously difficult to fathom and seemingly inevitable if Musk can simply buy enough time to make them work. As his ex-wife, Justine, put it, “He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It’s Elon’s world, and the rest of us live in it.”