I had a hard time keeping a straight face while the self-taught rocket scientist got worked up about bathroom furnishings. But later that week, when I used the SpaceX men's room, I noticed a design touch that seemed positively Muskian. When I asked him about it, Musk informed me that he had indeed personally selected the toilets at SpaceX. His favorites: a urinal that incorporates a psychedelic strobe light and another that employs, instead of a porcelain receptacle, a large steel bucket. "I was looking for creative urinals," he explains. "It's a nice pot."
The allusion to having a pot to piss in is apt. Two years ago, Musk and his companies were perilously close to bankruptcy, and Musk was perilously close to falling apart. "Those were dark days," he says of the summer of 2008. "I think I still have some emotional scar tissue. Just thinking about that time stresses me out."
The trouble began in 2007, just as production for the Tesla Roadster was set to begin. That was when Musk discovered that the Roadster, which was supposed to sell for $92,000, was actually costing the company $140,000 in raw materials alone. Musk blamed the failure on lax accounting practices -- and on intentional obfuscation by co-founder and CEO Martin Eberhard. He fired Eberhard and installed a new CEO, who began renegotiating supplier contracts, slashing costs, and raising prices. Over the next year, Tesla would fire roughly 30 percent of its staff and close the Detroit office that had been developing the Model S sedan. Eberhard did not leave quietly. On his blog, Teslafounders.com, he portrayed Musk and his cohorts as coldhearted, shortsighted, and mean, calling the layoffs a "stealth bloodbath." (The pair eventually resolved their dispute in mediation.)
In addition to the public spat with Eberhard, Musk found himself embroiled in a lawsuit with Henrik Fisker, a former Tesla designer who had started a competing company. Meanwhile, Musk's marriage was falling apart, and his wife, Justine, being a professional writer, was, naturally, blogging about the divorce. "No one who knows my ex-husband would accuse him of being weak-willed," she wrote that October. "The same qualities that helped bring about his extraordinary success dictate that the life you lead with him is his life...and that there is no middle ground (not least because he has no time to find it)."
The result of all this was a barrage of terrible press. A long article in Fortune questioned whether Tesla would ever deliver production cars. A series of posts on the blog Valleywag suggested that Musk was intentionally steering Tesla into bankruptcy, that he had engaged in an extramarital affair, and that he was a habitual liar. Musk did his best to strike back with denials and rejoinders, but the battling took its toll. "I'd never seen him so sad," says Maye Musk, Elon's mother. "Everything was collapsing around him."
It got worse. In August 2008, SpaceX suffered its third consecutive launch failure, losing a rocket and two satellites -- and the remains of James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty in the original Star Trek TV series. Doohan had paid to have his ashes shot into orbit. Instead, they ended up in the South Pacific, with what was left of the rocket and the satellites.
Musk was devastated. SpaceX's goal had been to make rockets cheaper to launch and more reliable. Instead, the company had lost every rocket it had launched and had spent nearly all of the $100 million that Musk had used to found the company.
Then, just as Musk was trying to raise additional funds so Tesla could begin building the Model S, the credit markets collapsed, and the auto industry seized up. Tesla had just four months of operating capital left in the bank at a time when no investor wanted to sink money into an unprofitable car company. Even SolarCity was foundering. Morgan Stanley, which had been financing no-money-down solar panel leases, pulled out of the program, temporarily cutting the company's sales in half. "It looked like all three might go under," says Musk.
I had never seen Musk show any kind of emotional vulnerability before he told this story. He looked down and then confessed that he would often wake up and discover that he had been sobbing in his sleep. To Musk, a man who had steered his own destiny since his early teens, the loss of self-control was terrifying. "I'd wake up and just be like, What the fuck," Musk says. "I think that it's like" -- he pauses, suddenly seeming far younger than his 39 years, and then tries to explain -- "When you're asleep, there's just much less emotional control."
After SpaceX's third launch failure, Musk announced that the company was raising outside capital for the first time -- $20 million from the Founders Fund, a venture capital fund run by his former PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The investment did two things: It showed that somebody other than Elon Musk believed he might succeed, and it gave him enough money for at least two more launches.
Rocket companies normally spend months after a launch failure carefully reviewing what happened before they make their findings public. But just four days after the crash, Musk took to the SpaceX blog and wrote that he was "certain as to the origin of this problem." He planned to have a new rocket on the launching pad within a month. To industry veterans, the swiftness of the response was impressive -- and also a little frightening. "A lot of people were seriously questioning whether SpaceX could put everything together and have a successful launch," says Jeff Foust, an aerospace analyst with the Bethesda, Maryland, consulting firm Futron and the editor of The Space Review, an online journal that covers the industry. "If Elon had failed again, he would have been roundly criticized for not taking a more methodical approach. It was a bit of a bet on his part."
