Elon Musk

Musk started dating the singer Grimes in 2018. Isaacson claims that Grimes was “not a calming influence” (307), but “[d]espite such dramas, Grimes was a good partner for Musk” (309). According to Isaacson, Grimes realized that Musk’s Asperger’s made him difficult and made other people perceive him as an “asshole,” but she was able to navigate all his different personalities, including his “demon mode” (310).

Musk wanted to expand Tesla to sell cars in China as part of his vision to make Tesla a global company. He hired his friend from college, Robin Ren, to take charge of manufacturing in China. Manufacturing began in 2019, and within two years, Tesla’s China factories were producing more than half of Tesla’s vehicles.

In 2017, Musk and his head Tesla designer, Franz von Holzhausen, began brainstorming ideas for a Tesla pickup trick. Musk wanted it to look futuristic and wanted the body to be made of stainless steel. The designers tried to guide Musk toward more conventional designs, but he pushed back on their ideas and insisted that they carry out his vision. By 2019, they had created a truck that they deemed the Cybertruck due to its severe and futuristic appearance.

The company presented the truck in November of 2019. Von Holzhausen tried to demonstrate the truck’s strength by throwing a metal ball at one of its windows, but the window shattered. Tesla stock dropped after the presentation.

In 2015, Musk announced the creation of a new division of SpaceX called Starlink. This division would send satellites into low-earth orbit, providing internet service to paying customers.

In 2018, Musk fired the leaders of the Starlink team and appointed an enthusiastic SpaceX engineer named Mark Juncosa as the new leader of the team. When Juncosa took over, he stripped down the design of the Starlink satellite and made it simpler, which dramatically saved on costs.

In 2017, SpaceX started developing a bigger reusable rocket called Starship. Musk convinced the team to use stainless steel to build it. He pushed the steel workers to make the tank walls as thin as possible, even though they did not feel it was safe.

Musk decided that SpaceX should build a rocket manufacturing area near Boca Chica, Texas, home to one of the company’s backup launchpads. SpaceX bought most of the homes near the launch site, and Musk moved into one of them.

Musk gave the Tesla team a stressful deadline, demanding that in four weeks’ time, on April 22, 2019, the company would demonstrate a partially self-driving car, on a day they deemed “Autonomy Day.” This instigated a frenzy of around-the-clock activity to try to meet the deadline. In Musk’s presentation on Autonomy Day, he mixed hype with reality, and he was met with a somewhat skeptical reception from analysts.

In 2020, Tesla started building a giant factory called Giga Texas in Austin, Texas. The factory would be 10 million square feet.

Isaacson recounts how, in late 2018, Musk was playing with a small toy version of the Model S. He noticed that the underbody of the car had been cast as one piece. He challenged his engineers to use this technique to produce full-scale Teslas. They worked with a company in Italy to manufacture a gigantic press and they began casting the chassis of the cars as one piece. This made the process quick and cheap and also reduced gaps and rattles in the car.

In May 2020, Grimes gave birth to a boy. Musk and Grimes named him X. Musk and X became closely bonded and Musk took the boy everywhere with him, including to the office, factories, and installation sites.

Musk became estranged from one of his teenage children who denounced Musk’s wealth and capitalist ambitions. This child, Jenna, came out as transgender and transitioned around the time that X was born. Isaacson notes that “Musk would end up wrestling, often publicly, with transgender issues” (344). He started tweeting messages that criticized the use of pronouns and would later become more and more explicit in his conservative, anti-trans beliefs. Isaacson notes that Musk’s sister-in-law believed that Elon was not prejudiced and that his rift with Jenna was caused by Jenna’s political beliefs rather than her gender identity.

In May 2020, SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon capsule with two NASA astronauts. This was the first launch of humans into orbit by a private company.

Bezos and Musk continued their rivalry. It flared again in April 2021, when SpaceX beat Blue Origin for a NASA contract. The two had another dispute in the summer of 2021 when Musk got approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to lower to orbital altitude for future Starlinks, which would end up putting them close to the planned orbits of the Kuiper constellation, Bezos’s competing satellites. Bezos filed an objection and Musk mocked him on Twitter.

In the summer of 2020, Bezos announced that he and his brother would go into space. After it was too late for Bezos to change his launch date, Sir Richard Branson announced that he would go into space nine days earlier than Bezos. Both flights succeeded.

Musk and his team were rethinking the landing legs for the Falcon 9. Musk suggested that they use the tower to catch the rocket upon reentry, like a pair of chopsticks. His employees were skeptical but agreed to study ways to do it. In July 2021, “Mechazilla,” as the device was called, was finished at Boca Chica.

That same month, Musk was focused on getting approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for Starship to fly. He decided that the best way to get approval was to get his team to stack the ship on the booster even though the rocket was not ready to fly yet (it would not end up being ready until April 2023) so that they could create a “maniacal sense of urgency” within his team and the regulators (361). He ordered a surge, pushing a team to carry out his wishes. They did so within the 10-day deadline he set for them. It did not force the FAA to rush its approval.