Elon Musk's Guide to the Galaxy

There are many things of which Elon Musk is certain. Musk knows, for instance, how to get a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit and how to run a sports car with 7,000 tiny batteries. He knows how to manage 1,700 employees spread between two wildly ambitious companies in two different cities: the Los Angeles aerospace company SpaceX and the Bay Area electric-car company Tesla Motors. He knows how to get rich.

And then there are things Elon Musk doesn't know but simply believes. He believes that Northrop Grumman couldn't build an inexpensive rocket even if someone literally handed it plans to do so. He believes that the Chevy Volt will be a disappointment when it goes on sale later this year. And he believes that in roughly 20 years, he will step out of a space capsule and become one of the first humans -- part of a new generation of explorers, without precedent since the days of Columbus and Magellan -- to establish a human colony on Mars.

The last, of course, will require hard work. Musk will have to create and then launch a rocket capable of safely transporting humans beyond Earth's orbit -- all while avoiding the machinations of his competitors, the lingering effects of the global recession, and the ill will of members of Congress and the public who are annoyingly hostile to the idea of having private companies set up colonies on other planets.

Yes, getting to Mars will be a challenge, even for someone who knows as much as Elon Musk. So he isn't worrying much about getting back. His will most likely be a one-way mission: a glorious and romantic and -- let's be honest -- insane attempt to take civilization beyond this planet.

Whatever one thinks of Musk's ideas about multi-planetary life, he is a singular character in American business. Musk has already helped inspire a Hollywood action hero -- Tony Stark, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the Iron Man movies -- and has hundreds of pages' worth of press clippings. He tends to remind people of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The comparison has merit: both men are committed micromanagers, and both have an instinct for the theater of business. But whereas Jobs is very good at working within constraints -- designing the perfect cell phone or the best computer operating system -- Musk likes to aim his energies far beyond the normal limits of common sense. "Lots of successful entrepreneurs want to change the world," says Steve Jurvetson, a longtime venture capitalist who has invested in Tesla and SpaceX. "For Elon, that's too narrow." The solar system is the thing.

These grand ambitions date at least to college, when Musk had an epiphany about what to do with the rest of his life. "I decided that there were three areas that were most going to affect the future of humanity: the Internet, sustainable energy, and extending life beyond Earth," Musk tells me. "I'm sure you've heard this story before."

I had heard this story before. In fact, in some small way, I helped create it. Three years ago, I wrote an article for Inc. about Musk, who had already started and sold two successful Internet companies. When he was just 23, Musk co-founded Zip2, an early Web software company that Compaq bought for $300 million, and at 27, he helped start PayPal, the Internet payments company for which eBay paid $1.5 billion. These accomplishments made him absurdly wealthy, but when I met him in 2007, he hardly seemed qualified to colonize another planet or cure humanity's addiction to oil. And yet for some reason I -- along with many others who heard his story -- believed he could do it.

Why that was, I'm not sure. Maybe it was his background, which reads like a heroic myth of entrepreneurship. As a boy growing up with divorced parents in apartheid South Africa, Musk dreamed of escaping to America. When he was 17, he left home and enrolled in college in Canada. He eventually graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1995, he was accepted into a Ph.D. program in materials science and applied physics at Stanford, only to decide, two days after he had arrived on campus, to drop out and start a company.

Or maybe it was the oversize scale on which Musk seemed to live his life: not a family, but five boys, all under the age of 5. Not just one company, but three: SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, a solar panel company that Musk dreamed up, funded, and then turned over to two of his cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive.

Or maybe it was his physical presence: the imposing frame -- Musk stands over 6 feet tall, is thick through the middle, and carries himself like a rugby player -- the haughty South African accent, and the striking, if not exactly handsome, face. Or maybe it was the fact that nearly everybody who had ever worked with him, even people who clearly despised him, seemed to think he was a genius.

By late 2007, thanks to Musk's guidance and cash, Tesla Motors had built a prototype for an electric car that, it was said, could beat a Ferrari off the line. His spaceship had yet to reach orbit -- its ultimate goal -- but there had been two launches and a dozen signed contracts, including a $278 million deal with NASA. SpaceX's was the first privately funded rocket that seemed to have a legitimate chance at competing with those developed by the government and operated by the big aerospace companies, and it promised to reduce the cost of a launch dramatically. (SpaceX charges $50 million to launch a satellite, less than half the going rate.) Finally, SolarCity had quickly become the dominant solar panel installation company in California, with $23 million in revenue and nearly 200 employees.