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| “Ravi Speaks:-“ |
PERSON OF THE YEAR-2021 ELON MUSK.
Musk’s mother was a model, and his father was a monster. Born in Pretoria in 1971, Elon was prone to long silences and speed-reading the encyclopedia. When he was 12, he wrote the code for a video game called Blastaar, which he sold to a computer magazine for $500. “He was always different. He was my little genius boy,” his mother, Maye Musk, tells TIME. “From the time he was 3, we used to call him that—Genius Boy.”
His parents divorced when Musk was 8. After the divorce, Elon and brother Kimbal went to live with their father. Errol Musk was a brilliant engineer and entrepreneur; he was also, in Elon’s telling, an “evil” man who tormented the boy psychologically in ways Musk still finds painful to discuss. Errol Musk told Rolling Stone he once shot and killed three armed robbers who broke into his home. In 2017, Errol later acknowledged that he fathered a child with his ex-stepdaughter, 42 years his junior. Musk has said he no longer has contact with his father.
Musk, age 24, at his computer in 1995; that year, he co-founded his first company, Zip2, an online city guide that was a precursor to MapQuest and Yelp Courtesy Maye Musk
From left: Musk tweeted this picture in 2017, saying, “On my cousin’s farm in Canada at 17, wearing a hat on a hat”; Musk fled to Canada, in part to avoid military service; Peter Thiel, left, and Musk at PayPal’s Palo Alto headquarters in 2000; two years later, eBay gained the company for $1.5 billion, netting Musk $180 million from left: Elon musk—Twitter; Paul Sakuma—AP
The school was nearly as bad as a home for the precocious child. Vicious gangs of bullies targeted Musk relentlessly. At one point, beaten him so badly that he was hospitalized, until he hit a growth spurt in high school and started punching back. Musk’s maternal grandfather had moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950, arriving during the early years of apartheid. When Musk was 17, he made the opposite journey, in part to avoid the regime’s military draft. He took off for Canada, enrolling at Queen’s University in Ontario.
Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a double major in physics and economics. Accepted to Stanford University’s Ph.D. program, he moved to California but dropped out after two days. Instead, Elon and Kimbal got in on the nascent Internet boom. They rented a tiny office in Palo Alto, slept on the floor, showered at the YMCA, pirated an Internet line from a neighbor, and lived on Jack-in-the-box. While Kimbal tried to drum up business, Elon wrote code nonstop.
Their first company, Zip2, was the first Internet mapping service, using GPS data to help consumers find businesses in their neighborhood—a precursor to MapQuest. In 1999, Compaq bought the company and Musk netted $22 million for his share. For his next act, Musk reimagined the global banking system. His company, X.. com, eventually became part of PayPal, which was purchased by eBay in 2002. Musk came away with about $180 million. But instead of gloating over his payday, Musk still seems irked that these former companies never fulfilled their potential as he saw it. If PayPal had “just executed the product plan I wrote in July 2000,” he told a podcast last year, it could have put the entire banking industry out of business.
At 30, Musk was fabulously rich, but whiling away his days on a yacht didn’t appeal to him. After a severe bout of malaria nearly killed him in 2001, those close to him say, he seemed to feel an urgency to make more of his time on Earth. Around then, he was shocked to discover that NASA had no plans to go to Mars. Zubrin, of the Mars Society, introduced Musk to the community of serious space people, even though he was skeptical of the latest in a parade of rich man-boys with Astro fetishes. A globetrotting engineer named Jim Cantrell lent Musk his college rocketry textbooks, which Musk devoured, and agreed to take him to Russia, where Musk hoped to buy an old Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile and turn it into a rocket launcher. “He did not come across as credible,” Cantrell recalls. “It was, ‘Who is this charlatan? This guy’s crazy; he will not make a rocket.’”
After a couple of trips, Musk concluded that the Russians were trying to rip him off—and that their rockets weren’t even very good. He packed up and flew home from Moscow with Cantrell and Mike Griffin, who would serve as NASA administrator under President George W. Bush and undersecretary of defense under President Donald Trump. “Griffin and I are back in coach drinking whiskey, and Mike says, ‘What do you think the idiot savant’s doing up there?’ loud enough for everyone to hear,” Cantrell recalls. “Elon’s sitting in the row ahead of us. And he turns around and says, ‘Hey guys, I think we can build this rocket ourselves. I’ve got a spreadsheet.’ We start looking at the spreadsheet, like, ‘Elon, where did you get this?’ I still use something similar to model a rocket today. He’d just gone and figured it out.”
Around the same time, Musk met a Stanford-trained engineer named JB Straubel, who was trying to turn old Porsches into electric cars. Energy storage had always been the biggest stumbling block—a conventional battery would have to be so big and heavy that the car would expend most of its power hauling its own weight around. Straubel believed recent advances in lithium-ion batteries would enable much denser, lighter power cells, if only someone would give him the money to prove it. Most investors he met dismissed him as a crazy gadfly. Musk did the math and concluded on the spot that Straubel was right. A few months later, Musk pledged $6.5 million to a lithium-ion car startup called Tesla, becoming its largest investor and eventually taking it over. “I saw plenty of examples of people that had enormous wealth, and were entirely cautious,” Straubel says. “In Elon, there was this complete opposite mindset.”
Musk had made the incredibly risky decision to plow his fortune into simultaneous startups in industries with high costs, long development timelines, and massive barriers to entry. The last successful startup in the American automotive industry, Chrysler, was founded in 1925. “I said, ‘Just choose one: solar or cars or rockets,’” Maye Musk recalls. “Obviously, he didn’t listen.”
By 2008, the scale of the challenge became clear. Tesla had taken deposits of up to $60,000 from over 1,000 EV enthusiasts but had yet to deliver more than a few sample vehicles. An automotive blog was running a regular “Tesla Death Watch” feature. SpaceX had attempted to launch three single-engine Falcon rockets from a remote atoll in the Pacific, and all had exploded. Then the financial crisis hit.
“The world imploded. GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. We did not want Tesla to go bankrupt,” Kimbal Musk recalls. “I remember him calling me in October and asking me if I had any money. I had no money—everything was gone, except about $1 million I was saving to survive the recession. I wired it to him to put into Tesla. We will be in hell together if everything goes to hell. Musk scraped together $8 million of his own money to cover payroll for one week.
Then, finally, the fourth rocket made a successful launch. And two days before Christmas, NASA made the shocking decision to award SpaceX $1.6 billion for 12 flights to the ISS. “I do sometimes wonder if other people have easier times building businesses, because all our businesses have been really freaking hard,” Kimbal Musk says. “Something about our upbringing makes us constantly want to be on the edge.”