Ashlee Vance - Elon Musk

Thirteen thousand people showed up in 2013.

http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf.

Tesla employees have been known to sneak across the street to the campus of the software maker SAP and to take advantage of its sumptuous, subsidized cafes.

If you assume an average selling price of $40,000 per car for 300,000 cars sold in a year, that’s $12 billion in annual revenue, or $1 billion per month.

For the space buffs, here’s Musk talking more about the physics and chemistry of the spaceship: “The final piece of the puzzle for figuring out the Mars architecture is a methane engine. You need to be able to generate the propellant on the surface. Most of the fuel used in rockets today is a form of kerosene, and creating kerosene is quite complex. It’s a series of long-chain hydrocarbons. It’s much easier to create either methane or hydrogen. The problem with hydrogen is it’s a deep cryogen. It’s only a liquid very close to absolute zero. And because it’s a small molecule you have these issues where hydrogen will seep its way through a metal matrix and embrittle or destroy metal in weird ways. Hydrogen’s density is also very porous, so the tanks are enormous and it’s expensive to create and store hydrogen. It’s not a good choice as a fuel.

“Methane, on the other hand, is much easier to handle. It’s liquid at around the same temperature as liquid oxygen so you can do a rocket stage with a common bulkhead and not worry about freezing one or the other solid. Methane is also the lowest-cost fossil fuel on Earth. And there needs to be a lot of energy to go to Mars.

“And then on Mars, because the atmosphere is carbon dioxide and there’s a lot of water or ice in the soil, the carbon dioxide gets you CO 2, the water gives you H 2O. With that you create CH 4and O 2, which gives you combustion. So it’s all sort of nicely worked out.

“And then one of the key questions is can you get to the surface of Mars and back to Earth on a single stage. The answer is yes, if you reduce the return payload to approximately one-quarter of the outbound payload, which I thought made sense because you are going to want to transport a lot more to Mars than you’d want to transfer from Mars to Earth. For the spacecraft, the heat shield, the life support system, and the legs will have to be very, very light.”

Musk and Riley were divorced for less than year. “I refused to speak with him for as long it took for the divorce to be finalized,” Riley said. “And then, once it was finalized, we immediately got back together.” As for what caused the breakup, Riley said, “I just wasn’t happy. I thought maybe I had made the wrong decision for my life.” And, about what brought her back to Musk, Riley said, “One reason was the lack of viable alternatives. I looked around, and there was no one else nice to be with. Number two is that Elon doesn’t have to listen to anyone in life. No one. He doesn’t have to listen to anything that doesn’t fit into his worldview. But he proved he would take shit from me. He said, ‘Let me listen to her and figure these things out.’ He proved that he valued my opinion on things in life and was willing to listen. I thought it was quite a telling thing for the man—that he made the effort. And then, I loved him and missed him.”

As Musk recalled, “I told her, ‘Look, I think you’re very valuable. Maybe that compensation is right. You need to take two weeks’ vacation, and I’m going to assess whether that’s true our not.’ Before this came up, I had offered her multiple all-expenses-paid vacations. I really wanted her to take a vacation. When she got back, my conclusion was just that the relationship was not going to work anymore. Twelve years is a good run for any job. She’ll do a great job for someone.” According to Musk, he offered Brown another position at the company. She declined the offer by never showing up at the office again. Musk gave her twelve months’ severance and has not spoken to her since.

According to Riley, “Elon is kind of cheeky and funny. He is very loving. He is devoted to his children. He is funny—really, really, really funny. He’s quite mercurial. He’s genuinely the oddest person I have ever met. He has moments of self-awareness and lucidity, which for me always bring him back around. He’ll say something cheeky or funny and have this grin. He’s smart in all sorts of areas. He’s very well read and has this incredible wit. He loves movies. We went to see the new Lego Movie and afterwards he insisted on being referred to as Lord Business. He tries to come home early for family dinners with me and the kids and maybe play some computer games with the boys. They will tell us about their day, and we’ll put them to bed. Then we’ll chat and watch something together on the laptop like The Colbert Report. On the weekends, we’re traveling. The kids are good travelers. There were bajillions of nannies before. There was even a nanny manager. Things are a bit more normal now. We try and do stuff just as a family when we can. We have the kids four days a week. I like to say that I am the disciplinarian. I want them to have the sense of an ordinary life, but they live a very odd life. They were just on a trip with Justin Bieber. They go to the rocket factory and are like, ‘Oh no, not again.’ It’s not cool if your dad does it. They’re used to it.

“People don’t realize that Elon has this incredible naiveté. There are certain times when he is incapable of anything other than pure joy. And then other times pure anger. When he feels something, he feels it so completely and purely. Nothing else can impose on it. There are so few people who can do that. If he sees something funny, he will laugh so loudly. He won’t realize we are in a crowded theater and that other people are there. He is like a child. It’s sweet and amazing. He says this random stuff like, ‘I am a complicated man with very simple but specific needs’ or ‘No man is an island unless he is large and buoyant.’ We make these lists of things we want to do. His latest contributions were to walk on a beach at sunset and whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ear and to take more horseback rides. He likes reading, playing video games, and being with friends.”

Shotwell talks about going to Mars as much as Musk and has dedicated her life to space exploration. Straubel has demonstrated the same type of commitment with electric vehicles and can sound a lot like Musk at times. “We are not trying to corner the market on EVs,” Straubel said. “There are 100 million cars built per year and 2 billion already out there. Even if we got to 5 or 10 percent of the market, that does not solve the world’s problems. I am bullish we will keep up with demand and drive the whole industry forward. Elon is committed to this.”

Jurvetson elaborated by saying, “Elon has that engineering prowess of Gates, but he’s more interpersonal. You have to be out there on the spectrum with Gates. Elon has more interpersonal charms. He’s like Jobs in that neither of them suffer fools. But with Jobs there was more of a hero-shit roller coaster where employees went from in favor to out of favor. I also think Elon has accomplished more.”

Page presented one of his far-out ideas to me as follows: “I was thinking it would be pretty cool to have a prize to fund a project where someone would have to send something lightweight to the moon that could sort of replicate itself. I went over to the NASA operation center here at AMES in Mountain View when they were doing a mission and literally flying a satellite into the south pole of the moon. And they like hurled this thing into the moon at a high velocity and then it exploded and it sent matter out into space. And then they looked at that with telescopes, and they discovered water on the south pole of the moon, which sounds really exciting. I started thinking that if there’s a lot of water on the south pole of the moon, you can make rocket fuel from the hydrogen and oxygen. The other cool thing about the south pole is like it almost always gets sun. There’s like places high up that get sun and there’s places that are kind of in the craters that are very cold. So you have like a lot of energy then where you could run solar cells. You could almost run like a steam turbine there. You have rocket fuel ingredients, and you have solar cells that can be powered by sun, and you could probably run a power plant turbine. Power plant turbines aren’t that heavy. You could send that to the moon. You have like a gigawatt of power on the moon and make a lot of rocket fuel. It would make a good prize project. You send something to the moon that weights five pounds and have it make rocket fuel so that you could launch stuff off the moon or have it make a copy of itself, so that you can make more of them.”