Elon Musk

Members of the Tesla board reached out to Musk and suggested that they find a replacement for Eberhard. Initially, they made a cordial agreement to gradually transition Eberhard out of the company. However, after Watkins came to Musk and told him that Eberhard had not put together a bill of materials, Musk’s tone changed and he conjectured that Eberhard had deceived him. He told Eberhard that he was fired immediately. Musk ranted about Eberhard online, eventually spurring Eberhard to sue Musk for libel. Even after the two men reached a settlement, Musk continued to unleash sporadic attacks on Eberhard via Twitter.

Musk appointed a man named Michael Marks to be the interim CEO, but Marks quit because he felt that Musk infantilized him and talked down to him. Marks speculated to Isaacson that Musk’s Asperger’s might have caused his tactless behavior, saying, “[h]e’s somewhere on the spectrum, so I think he honestly doesn’t have any connection with people at all” (166).

Musk recruited a new CEO, Ze’ev Drori, who later quit as well. Finally, Musk became the CEO of Tesla in October 2008.

Justine got pregnant via in vitro fertilization and gave birth to twins in 2004 and then triplets in 2006.

Justine and Elon’s relationship was marked by fighting. After Justine got into a car accident in 2008, she told Elon that she wanted their relationship to change, and Elon agreed to see a therapist together. However, after three sessions, their marriage split up.

In 2008, Musk met the 22-year-old actress Talulah Riley. After a whirlwind courtship, they got engaged. They had only known each other for two weeks. They agreed to wait a couple of years before getting married.

SpaceX launched a third rocket, which exploded. Even though Musk had run out of money, he was determined to keep going and rallied his team around his cause. In characteristic fashion, he gave the team a highly unrealistic goal, telling them that they needed to build and launch a fourth rocket within six weeks. Even though the deadline seemed almost impossible, the employees were energized by his mission.

As Tesla ran out of funds, the company dipped into the deposits that customers had put down, using these deposits to keep the company going. This move was legally questionable. Musk pleaded with family and friends to pitch in funds to keep the company afloat. Musk was going through expensive divorce proceedings with Justine. Talulah watched as Musk grew so stressed that he would talk to himself at night, “sometimes flailing his arms and screaming” (180). Some people tried to persuade Musk to choose between Tesla and SpaceX, telling him that he couldn’t keep both alive, but Musk refused to choose between them, claiming that they were each like a child to him.

Musk received unexpected funding for SpaceX from Peter Thiel and Thiel’s venture capital group. SpaceX launched their fourth rocket, and this time, the launch succeeded.

Musk managed to secure private funding for Tesla at the end of 2008. Isaacson mentions that, contrary to popular belief, Tesla did not receive a bailout from the Department of the Treasury. Rather, they got $465 million in interest-bearing loans from the Department of Energy. They also received a boost from Daimler, a German company that contracted with Tesla for battery packs.

Musk hired Franz von Holzhausen as the head designer for Tesla as Tesla worked on the new car model, the Model S. Musk was heavily involved in design and production, ordering his team to implement the changes he decreed and pushing them to use fewer parts.

Musk often took issue with small aesthetic choices. He decided that the safety stickers on the passenger-side visor were ugly and unnecessary, and he ordered the team to remove them. This started a year-long back-and-forth with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which repeatedly recalled Tesla cars without the safety stickers.

SpaceX’s contract with NASA called for a more powerful rocket that could lift a cargo into space. The team started to develop the Falcon 9, “a rocket that would become the workhorse of SpaceX for more than a decade” (205). Musk relentlessly pushed the team to save money. As such, employees scavenged for parts and improvised in order to cut costs.

In 2010, SpaceX successful launched the Falcon 9. Later in the year, they scheduled a test to show that the company could return a rocket to earth safely, something no private company had ever done.

Before this launch, employees noticed small cracks in the skirt of the rocket. Musk ordered them to trim the skirt with shears so as not to delay the launch. The rocket launched on time and successfully returned to earth.

According to Isaacson, Talulah believed that Musk was “thrilling and mesmerizing, but also brooding and encrusted with layers of complexity” (215). Talulah observed that Musk could be very childlike. He also sometimes lapsed into states during which he recounted abusive things that his father had said to him. Talulah noted that Musk used some of these same phrases when he was angry himself.

Talulah and Elon married in September 2010. Isaacson characterizes their marriage as one of relative stability and posits that they would have been happy together had Elon not had a penchant for drama.