A26 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022
Mars. Like Te sla, which would
seek to end dependence on gas-
powered vehicles, SpaceX was
meant to save the species. Mars,
Musk said, would be mankind’s
backup plan, a h aven in case of
nuclear war, climate disaster or
some other “extinction event.”
He had been warned it was a
fool’s errand; there was an indus-
try saying that “the quickest way
to become a millionaire in space is
to start out as a billionaire.” But
after moving slowly at first, Musk
unleashed a characteristic bar-
rage of bombast and bare-knuck-
led street fighting.
Before starting SpaceX, Musk
had checked NASA’s website for
information about its first human
Mars mission. He couldn’t find it.
“I thought the problem was
me,” he said during a speech in- “ Because it must be some-
where on this website.”
If NASA wasn’t going to Mars,
Musk determined that SpaceX
would. Getting there would be
expensive — and inconceivable
without mega-contracts from the
government.
SpaceX barely survived its first
few years, its spacecraft failing
three times to reach orbit. By
2008, Musk had burned through
virtually all of the $100 million he
had bet on the company and bare-
ly had enough to attempt one
more launch.
It was a success — the first
privately developed rocket to
reach orbit — leading NASA to
come to the company’s rescue,
hiring it in late 2008 to fly cargo
and supplies to the space station.
That contract, worth $1.6 bil-
lion, gave SpaceX a toehold in the
space industry. But Musk had his
eye on another prize: the l ucrative
contracts to launch national secu-
rity satellites for the Pentagon and
intelligence agencies.
For years, those launches had
been entrusted to the United
Launch Alliance, a joint venture
of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Musk had attempted to block
their merger, filing an unsuccess-
ful lawsuit in 2005 that alleged
the companies had “destroyed
any pretense of competition.”
Over the next few years, as
SpaceX launched several rockets
successfully and sent its autono-
mous Dragon spacecraft to the In-
ternational Space Station, Musk
made his big move. He beefed up
his Washington lobbying efforts
and filed another suit, this time
against the Air Force, which was
moving toward awarding more
contracts to the United Launch
Alliance.
“We sued the Air Force and Boe-
ing and Lockheed — these are
formidable opponents,” Musk
once told The Post. “Suing the
military industrial complex is
something that you do not take
lightly.”
The suit angered top Pentagon
officials, but Musk charged ahead,
taking his battle public, insulting
his competitors and casting
SpaceX as the moral choice over
the United Launch Alliance,
whose rocket depended on an en-
gine made in Russia.
Musk prevailed: Congress
capped the number of Russian-
made engines the United Launch
Alliance could buy, forcing it to
seek a U.S.-built alternative. The
Air Force settled Musk’s lawsuit,
allowing SpaceX to bid for Penta-
gon contracts. SpaceX now
launches Pentagon satellites, flies
cargo and crew to the space station
for NASA and won the contract to
build the spacecraft that would
land NASA astronauts on the
moon.
Musk remains focused on de-
veloping Starship, SpaceX’s next-
generation rocket. But he’s also
looking farther ahead, saying he
might want to retire on Mars —
but only “if I’m certain that
SpaceX will be fine without me”
and progress toward space coloni-
zation continues.
Rise of the ‘Technoking’
In 1999, flush with Zip2 money,
Musk bought himself a toy, a
McLaren F1 sports car. He invited
a CNN camera to film the delivery.
“Now I’ve got a million-dollar
car and quite a few creature com-
forts,” Musk boasted. (Looking
mildly astonished, his then-fian-
cee Justine pronounced the pur-
chase “decadent.”)
Four years later, with many
millions more from the sale of
PayPal, Musk’s car interests had
shifted: He longed for an electric
vehicle b ut found few options. His
search led him to Martin Eber-
hard, founder of Te sla Motors,
which aimed to build an electric
car for everyday consumers.
The path to success at Tesla was
typically stormy: Musk pumped
in millions and eventually fired
Eberhard, who sued him, after
which Musk called his erstwhile
partner “the worst person I’ve
ever worked with.” (Eberhard’s
libel suit against Musk was settled
out of court.)
Musk became more hands-on,
seeing Tesla’s first vehicle, the
Roadster, through to production.
As i n other industries he’d e ntered,
Musk struck people in the auto
business as impulsive and at times
tyrannical, given to sudden termi-
nations known as “rage firings,”JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
NASA astronauts and international partners launch to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy
Space Center in 2021. A NASA contract to fly cargo and supplies to the space station gave SpaceX a toehold in the space industry.Newspaper executives who met
with Musk liked his technology
but didn’t know what to make of
the frantic, awkward, tempera-
mental guy who was selling it.
“There were a lot of graduate
students coming to us then, many
of them out of Stanford, with
ideas about how to make the tran-
sition” to digital, said Ralph
Te rkowitz, chief technology offi-
cer at The Washington Post at the
time. “They were all brash, eager.
They saw the world differently.”
Musk “had an almost fanatical
intensity that all successful entre-
preneurs have,” said Martin
Nisenholtz, the CEO of New York
Times Digital who negotiated a
deal to use Zip2 technology to
build the Times’s first online city
guide and later joined the compa-
ny’s board.
“But I’ve also known unsuc-
cessful entrepreneurs with that
same fanatical intensity,” Nisen-
holtz said. Musk “was super dra-
matic,” he added, “but I didn’t see
greatness there.”
Several former news executives
who spoke on the condition of
anonymity for fear of public at-
tack by Musk recalled him as
difficult to work with. “He would
lose it over very small things,” one
said. “Every little thing was exis-
tential.” Two executives described
Musk storming out of a board
meeting in a huff because he
wasn’t getting his way on a minor
issue. Two recalled Musk upbraid-
ing employees at Zip2’s offices in
front of visiting investors.
“He’d tell them that compared
to what he’d studied in college,
this stuff was so stupid that he
couldn’t believe they couldn’t do
it perfectly,” one executive re-
called.
In 1999, Compaq, a personal-
computer maker, bought Zip2 for
$307 million. Musk got $22 mil-
lion: He was rich.
Soon, he’d be much richer.
He used a large chunk of his
Zip2 profits to start X.com, which
eventually merged with a compet-
itor founded by Peter Thiel to
become PayPal, which was sold to
eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Finally, Musk could follow his
dream.Suing the Pentagon
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002
with the goal of getting people tohas consistently denied any abuse.
At school, Musk was bullied,
shoved down a flight of stairs,
beaten so badly he needed a nose
job. At 17, he resolved to immigrate
to the United States. He arrived
first in Canada, taking jobs logging
and farming before enrolling at
Queen’s College in Kingston, On-
tario.
He transferred to the University
of Pennsylvania and did some
graduate work at S tanford but was
eager to dive into his life’s w ork. H e
knew how to achieve (“I work a
lot,” he said on Joe Rogan’s p odcast
in 2020. “I mean, a lot ”) and he
knew what made him different.
He could, he said, “boil things
down to their fundamental truths
and reason up from there, as op-
posed to ... copying what other
people do with slight variations.”
Some of his critics see Musk’s
attitude toward his intelligence
and ability to generate wealth as
evidence of ultimate arrogance.
Musk sees it as simple fact.
“How does this wealth arise?”
he told Rogan. “You organize peo-
ple in a better way. That gives you
a right to organize capital.”
His first step down that road
was Zip2.A ‘fanatical intensity’
In 1995, when the World Wide
Web was still a mystery to most
Americans, Musk was 24, a self-
taught programmer fresh off an
internship at a video game maker
in Palo Alto, Calif. Three years
before two other Stanford gradu-
ate students launched Google,
Musk created Zip2, which built
online directories of local busi-
nesses. These were essentially
digital Yellow Pages with some-
thing extra — digital maps.
With a $28, 000 gift from his
father, Musk and his brother rent-
ed a small office in Palo Alto,
recruited sales p eople to hawk the
idea to local retailers and worked
round-the-clock to perfect Zip2’s
software. Less than a year later, a
venture capital firm pumped
$3 million into Zip2, allowing
Musk to hire talented engineers
and shift the company’s focus to
news organizations.
Eager to translate their offer-
ings from paper to screen, news-
papers wanted to offer readers a
way to search for restaurants,
events and local businesses.Lonely but ambitious
Musk, who did not respond to
multiple emails requesting an in-
terview, displayed cosmic ambi-
tion even in childhood. At 14,
having already created and sold a
video game called “Blastar” (it
won $500 from a computer maga-
zine), Musk decided his life need-
ed a serious mission.
He w ould, he later told his biog-
rapher, “strive for greater collec-
tive enlightenment.”
Musk’s first wife learned about
her husband’s supreme confi-
dence early on. When Musk asked
Justine Musk how many children
she wanted, she said “one or two,
although i f I could afford nannies,
I’d like to have four.”
Musk laughed, Justine later
wrote, and said, “That’s the differ-
ence between you and me. I just
assume that there will be nannies.”
There were. The couple ulti-
mately had six sons (one died in
infancy) and a domestic staff of
five. Married in 2000, they di-
vorced in 2008, when Musk got
engaged to actress Ta lulah Riley,
whom he married and divorced
twice. Musk later had two chil-
dren with the singer Grimes.
Adventure came naturally to
Musk, who was born to a family of
explorers. His mother, Maye, a
model born in Canada, flew
around the world in her father’s
prop plane as a child. His father,
Errol, was a South African engi-
neer who lectured Elon and his
brother, Kimbal, for hours, teach-
ing them electrical wiring and
bricklaying. (He also has a sister,
To sca.)
But Musk’s childhood in Preto-
ria, South Africa, was volatile. His
parents split when he was 9, and he
has described his upbringing as
lonely and harsh. He read con-
stantly, often 10 hours a day —
science fiction, history, encyclope-
dias.
After the divorce, Musk spent
two years with his mother, then
took it upon himself to move in
with his father, who “seemed sort
of sad and lonely,” as Musk told
Ashlee Vance, author of “Elon
Musk: Te sla, SpaceX, and the
Quest for a Fantastic Future.” But
Errol treated young Elon poorly:
Kimbal said the father engaged in
“psychological torture” against his
older son. Both brothers have de-
clined to offer details, and Errolshowing “my fellow liberal” turn-
ing into a “woke progressive.”
He appears to delight in keep-
ing the world guessing about how
he might use his fortune and
prominence, diving into random
interests with gusto — sumo w res-
tling, electronic music, Barack
Obama’s presidential campaign
(he once waited six hours in a line
to shake Obama’s hand).
He rails against government
regulation, yet his most promi-
nent ventures have relied heavily
on taxpayers’ dollars, in the form
of federal loans for Te sla, tax cred-
its for electric vehicles and gov-
ernment contracts for SpaceX.
He has revolutionized two com-
plex industries — car manufactur-
ing and rocketry — but often
tweets like a 12-year-old. Asked by
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey which
of his 17,000 tweets ranks as quint-
essential Musk, he chose one from
2020: “I put the art in fart.”
He has absolute confidence in
his ability to innovate (“I can see
the truth of things and others
seem less able to do so,” he told
NPR in 2007 ) yet has described
himself as fearful and anxious.
“When I was a child, there’s one
thing I said: ‘I never want to be
alone,’ ” Musk told Rolling Stone
in 2017. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Some view Musk as one more
“thrillionaire,” an ultrawealthy
Internet entrepreneur who — like
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen,
Virgin magnate Richard Branson
and Amazon founder (and Wash-
ington Post owner) Jeff Bezos —
directs his money toward fulfill-
ing childhood dreams of space
exploration, life extension or oth-
er fascinations born of adolescent
hours spent soaking in science
and science fiction.
Musk’s serial endeavors show
other continuities. Whether figur-
ing out how to trim a car’s weight
so it can accelerate shockingly
quickly while carrying heavy bat-
teries or how to blast rockets into
space and retrieve them for eco-
nomical reuse, Musk bristles with
confidence that he can solve hu-
manity’s central problems, pri-
marily climate change, a threat so
serious, he told blogger Tim Ur-
ban, “we better get to the multi-
planet situation fast .”
But to boost humanity’s
chances, Musk decided early on,
he first needed to become rich.His interest in facilitating online
payments also turned out to be
passing. What Musk really want-
ed was the big payday that would
let him focus on his lifelong ambi-
tion: to save humanity through
space exploration, electric vehi-
cles and solar energy.
His next ventures — SpaceX,
Te sla, SolarCity, Neuralink — final-
ly propelled Musk toward the goal
he’d s et w hen he was 14 t o be at t he
cutting edge of making human life
“exciting and inspiring.”
Now Musk is pivoting once
more, taking on one of the most
prominent and problematic sym-
bols of the Internet age, Twitter.
As was true at the start of each of
his primary ventures over the past
quarter-century, he has been at
once bold, brash and somewhat
blurry about his purpose.
He h as cast Twitter as a “de facto
public town square,” essential to a
functioning democracy. But it car-
ries a legacy of intangible prob-
lems — misinformation, censor-
ship, harassment, some starring
Musk himself — far from the con-
crete realm of rockets and engines.
Early Friday, amid doubts that
he could muster the cash, he tweet-
ed that the $44 billion deal was
“temporarily on hold.” The tweet
said he was seeking “details” to
support Twitter’s claims that fake
accounts known as bots make up
less than 5 percent of users. (Musk
has made getting rid of fake ac-
counts a centerpiece of his take-
over bid.)
Two hours later, Musk tweeted
four words: “Still committed to
acquisition.”
Did his predawn tweet indicate
he w as looking for a way out of the
deal? Or was he simply seeking to
drive down the purchase price?
Twitter stock futures fell sharply
after his doubtful tweet; prices
jumped after his reassuring one,
but closed down Friday almost
10 percent. (Meanwhile, Tesla, the
cornerstone of Musk’s vast for-
tune, rose slightly Friday. But the
share price has lost 30 percent of
its value since April 4, when Musk
revealed his first moves toward
acquiring Twitter and began sell-
ing off Te sla shares to help fund
the purchase.)
Musk has done this sort of thing
before. In 2018, the Securities and
Exchange Commission fined him
$20 million to settle the govern-
ment’s claim that he misled inves-
tors by tweeting that he had the
funding to turn Te sla into a private
company. (The SEC also reported-
ly is investigating Musk’s tardy
disclosure of taking a big stake in
Twitter.) Musk did not admit
wrongdoing, and has grumbled
about the SEC ever since.
Those who know Musk, 50, say
he is both fickle and crafty. At every
stage of his supremely public ca-
reer, he has positioned himself as
an entertaining, if off-putting, ce-
lebrity. He is at once an open book
— an omnipresent star inventor,
pontificating about free speech in
tweets and podcasts, hosting “Sat-
urday Night Live” — and an elusive
enigma, given to riddles, insults
and slogans about how he might
remake society — or, in this case, a
social media platform with
229 million daily users.
Beneath the puckish public per-
sona, Musk has displayed a fierce
temper and what some associates
and employees call a dark tendency
to dismiss or harass people unlike
himself. He has tossed off casually
insulting tweets about women and
other comments that have un-
leashed torrents of abuse from his
nearly 9 3 million Twitter followers.
According to some Te sla work-
ers and California regulators who
sued the company, h e has overseen
a factory rife with racial slurs and a
“pervasive culture of sexual ha-
rassment ... a daily barrage of sex-
ist language and behavior ... [and]
frequent groping on the factory
floor.” Te sla has denied some of the
allegations and seeks to handle
others in private arbitration rather
than in court. The company said it
takes any violations seriously.
Last fall, a jury awarded a Black
Te sla worker $137 million in dam-
ages after finding in favor of his
allegation that Te sla tolerated rac-
ist harassment, including “daily
racist epithets” at t he factory. A fter
the verdict, a Te sla executive said
the company was “still not perfect,
but we have come a long way.” The
award was later reduced. Musk
himself has rarely addressed such
allegations, but sometimes he
notes that he fled his native South
Africa in part because of its repres-
sive apartheid regime.
He is an engine of contradic-
tions. His worries over the future
of civilization appear to have
deepened through the years: He
quit President Donald Trump’s
councils on manufacturing and
job creation to protest Trump’s
decision to pull the United States
out of the Paris climate accords.
He has contributed to Democrats
and Republicans alike, yet often
has aligned himself with the right
online, recently tweeting a meme
MUSK FROM A1
For Musk, a quest to save ‘all life on Earth’
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is surrounded by the media as he exits federal court in New York on April 4, 2019, after oral
arguments in a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.