When I arrived, Musk was at his computer, powering through a stream of single-line email replies. I took a seat and glanced around at his workspace. There was a black leather couch and a large desk, empty but for a few wine bottles and awards. The windows looked out to a sunbaked parking lot. The vibe was ordinary, utilitarian, even boring. After a few minutes passed, I began to worry that Musk had forgotten about me, but then suddenly, and somewhat theatrically, he wheeled around, scooted his chair over, and extended his hand. ‘I’m Elon,’ he said.
It was a nice gesture, but in the year 2014 Elon Musk doesn’t need much of an introduction. Not since Steve Jobs has an American technologist captured the cultural imagination like Musk. There are tumblrs and subreddits devoted to him. He is the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man. His life story has already become a legend. There is the alienated childhood in South Africa, the video game he invented at 12, his migration to the US in the mid-1990s. Then the quick rise, beginning when Musk sold his software company Zip2 for $300 million at the age of 28, and continuing three years later, when he dealt PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. And finally, the double down, when Musk decided idle hedonism wasn’t for him, and instead sank his fortune into a pair of unusually ambitious startups. With Tesla he would replace the world’s cars with electric vehicles, and with SpaceX he would colonise Mars. Automobile manufacturing and aerospace are mature industries, dominated by corporate behemoths with plush lobbying budgets and factories in all the right congressional districts. No matter. Musk would transform both, simultaneously, and he would do it within the space of a single generation.
Musk announced these plans shortly after the bursting of the first internet bubble, when many tech millionaires were regarded as mere lottery winners. People snickered. They called him a dilettante. But in 2010, he took Tesla public and became a billionaire many times over. SpaceX is still privately held, but it too is now worth billions, and Musk owns two-thirds of it outright. SpaceX makes its rockets from scratch at its Los Angeles factory, and it sells rides on them cheap, which is why its launch manifest is booked out for years. The company specialises in small satellite launches, and cargo runs to the space station, but it is now moving into the more mythic business of human spaceflight. In September, NASA selected SpaceX, along with Boeing, to become the first private company to launch astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Musk is on an epic run. But he keeps pushing his luck. In every interview, there is an outlandish new claim, a seeming impossibility, to which he attaches a tangible date. He is always giving you new reasons to doubt him.
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