new York There are these moments when Elon Musk is completely with himself. On February 10, 2022, he is standing on his starbase in Texas like an enthusiastic boy. The sun has set, behind him the huge, super-heavy Starship from SpaceX shimmers silver. It’s supposed to bring people to Mars. And beyond. “Let’s make this happen!” Musk shouts to the audience, beaming.
There are many videos of the Tesla boss talking about electric cars, tunnel boring machines and flamethrowers. But he never seems so relaxed as when he talks about his first passion: space travel. “You want to wake up in the morning and believe that the future is going to be great,” says Musk. “And that’s what a spacefaring civilization is all about. I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out to the stars.”
The 50-year-old entrepreneur knows that belief in the future can move mountains. He was born in South Africa and programmed his first computer game at the age of twelve. At the age of 16 he emigrated to Canada with his brother and did a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics in Philadelphia.
In 1999 he founded the company that would become PayPal and revolutionized online payments. When Ebay bought the company for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk was a made man.
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In the same year he founded SpaceX. In 2004 he invested in Tesla. He has had three long-term partners over the years and today has seven children. But with Musk, it’s always clear where the focus is: business.
“Musk knows exactly what he wants. And he doesn’t like compromises,” says Steve Adler. He is the mayor of Austin, the 11th largest city in the United States, and has persuaded Musk to locate the new Tesla Gigafactory nearby.
“He can listen. if he wants”
To convince the entrepreneur, Adler resorted to an unusual means: in spring 2020, at the beginning of the corona pandemic, Adler invited Musk to his private home. “I was excited,” Adler recalled in an interview with the Handelsblatt. “Musk got straight to the point.” At the dinner table, the mayor promised to quickly complete the necessary planning and approval processes. There were also tax breaks. Musk was satisfied.
Adler was invited to the factory opening. The mayor was not allowed to speak.
Musk has revealed that he has Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. In fact, the entrepreneur often finds it difficult to deal with other people. He halts when he speaks, as if he were trying to find the right words. “Elon is a very good listener. If he wants to,” says an ex-Tesla manager who was part of the automaker’s founding team. “If he is interested in a topic, then he knows all the technical details.”
The episode of Musk sleeping on the floor of his office in the Tesla factory is famous. “Elon doesn’t take no. He sets an absurdly high goal. And then expects everyone to make it happen. It doesn’t matter how,” the manager recalls. When a new chief of logistics Tesla hired from the US Army told Musk that it could produce a maximum of 80,000 cars a year, not 100,000 as he had said, he fired her. Her successor managed the 100,000.
“Elon can be brutal. If he’s not satisfied with your answers and you contradict yourself too often, you end up on the hit list,” says the ex-manager. The list of companions Musk has fallen out with over the years is long. He argued with Tesla’s founder Martin Eberhard in court and followed up on Twitter years later. But he also throws parties for the workforce when his goals are met.
Companions say Musk has changed
Musk has achieved many goals over the years – against maximum odds. Single-handedly, Tesla has taken up the fight against the established car companies, some of which can look back on 100 years of experience. Initially ridiculed, Tesla has become her nemesis. And it is only thanks to SpaceX that Nasa can launch astronauts into orbit again on its own.
What do these hard-fought achievements do with their Spiritus Rector? Musk has changed over the years, say companions. Jürgen Schönstein teaches writing and rhetoric at MIT in Boston and has interviewed Musk several times.
The journalist remembers how easy it was in the early days. “Musk had an excellent assistant. She called me: Elon is now at the wheel for an hour and has time,” says Schönstein. “The assistant later fired Musk, as did his public relations office. Now the media can hardly reach him.”
You want to wake up in the morning and believe that the future will be great. Elon Musk, entrepreneur
In his book Powerplay, Musk biographer Tim Higgins describes how the circle of people Musk listens to has shrunk over the years. He no longer sees criticism as an enrichment, but increasingly as a nuisance, if one follows this presentation.
And that becomes a problem over time. You certainly don’t have to go as far as longtime Musk critic and head of investment house Stanphyl Capital, Mark Spiegel, who is betting on a stock crash and calling Musk a “pathological liar.” But it’s noticeable that Musk’s “believe moves mountains” mentality is becoming more and more of a nuisance. It’s often about vanities. Sometimes for human lives. And almost always a lot of money.
Example autopilot: Musk has been claiming for years that Tesla will master the so-called full self-driving “this year”, which the company is already selling for an additional charge of 12,000 dollars for its cars. But there are always accidents with Tesla cars whose drivers rely on the autopilot.
The US traffic regulator, long passive, has recently taken Tesla in the pliers. At the last quarterly conference, Musk himself said that he had “never seen so many undesirable developments” as with autopilot.
The “circus show” on Twitter
Take Twitter, for example: Musk has been lashing out at his critics there for a long time, often below the belt. At the beginning of the year, he had secretly built up a stake in the social network and reported it too late, which has enraged the US Securities and Exchange Commission against him.
Then, in the interest of “free speech,” he declared that he wanted to take over Twitter and tackle the problem of fake accounts. Only to announce now that the deal will be put on hold for the time being – because of the many fake accounts. On Wall Street, this was criticized as a “circus show”. Musk was undeterred.
There was a time when entrepreneurs were more open to criticism. When a US journalist asked him what it was about him that American idols, including moon traveler Neil Armstrong, criticized his commercial space flight plan, his voice broke for a brief moment. “It made me very sad because these are my heroes,” Musk said, fighting back tears.
“I wish they would come here and see our hard work. I want to make space travel accessible to everyone.” The excerpt is still touching today – there he is again, the enthusiastic boy who believes in the future. Alone: The times when Musk was so vulnerable were long ago. The interview is from 2012.
More: Musk is in trouble with Twitter lawyers.