Moon shot billionaire hits turbulence
Elon Musk’s space mission has lift-off, but back on Earth his business is under investigation. Is Tesla’s turmoil getting to the maverick entrepreneur, asks Philip Delves Broughton
The countdown is on. This week, Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, announced that it’s all systems go for his plan to send a person to the moon by 2022. He’s found a willing passenger — Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa (42), who is paying for the ride. All Musk needs to do now is build his Big Falcon Rocket.
This announcement came at the end of a turbulent few months for Musk. The 47-yearold, who is worth $20.4bn, faces investigation because he backtracked on plans to take Tesla private at $420 a share, which he tweeted about in August, saying “funding secured”.
In Musk’s world, which involves running Tesla and the rocket company Space X, and being an all-round technology god, that one-line tweet about the ownership structure of one of his companies might not seem like very much. But as Tesla’s shares shot up then fell back when it emerged that the funding to take Tesla private was anything but secured, the market and the media promptly turned on the billionaire.
With his rockets, cars and tunnelling machines, Musk makes Silicon Valley’s other titans, with their social networks and search engines, look like wimps. Since Apple’s Steve Jobs died in 2011, Musk has come closer than anyone to filling his boots.
But suddenly he looked vulnerable. Had “funding secured” been just a ploy to pump up Tesla’s share price? Out poured allegations about Musk’s private life, the health of his businesses, his sanity, and inquiries from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission about Tesla’s financial practices.
It was suggested he chose $420 to buy back Tesla’s shares because the number is slang for cannabis. In a podcast interview, he tweaked his critics by appearing to smoke weed.
He is being sued for defamation by Vernon Unsworth (below), the British diver who led the rescue of boys trapped in a cave in Thailand in July. Unsworth had criticised Musk’s offer of a miniature submarine and suggested he “stick his submarine where it hurts”. Musk responded by calling Unsworth a “pedo”. He then apologised, but the noise added to concerns among investors and employees that Musk was losing it.
Earlier in the year, he snapped during a call with analysts, saying: “Boring questions are not cool.” His management style was reported to have driven away dozens of high-level employees, forcing him to take on more himself.
Musk grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. His mother, Maye, is a model with 216,000 followers on Instagram. She was in Beyoncé’s music video for Haunted. His father, Errol, is an engineer. When Musk was nine, his parents divorced, and he went to live with his father, a decision he has said he regrets. In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Musk called his father “a terrible human being” who has done “almost every evil thing you could think of ”. Errol’s relationship history is complicated. The 72-year-old is married to his step-daughter from his second marriage. Jana Bezuidenhout is 31 and has a oneyear-old son with Errol. He has said it was “God’s plan” for him to have a baby with his own stepdaughter.
When Musk was a boy, he was a compulsive reader and Monty Python devotee. He was bullied until he learned martial arts in his teens and fought back. For university, Musk moved to Canada, then the US before heading to Silicon Valley in the mid-Nineties. He made $22m selling his first software company, Zip2; $180m selling his second, the payments company PayPal; and then invested almost all of it in what would become Tesla and SpaceX.
He regards himself less a businessperson than a hardcore engineer, consumed by every form of structural, mechanical, electrical, software, design and aerospace engineering. His mind, he has said, is “like a never-ending explosion” of ideas, committed to making the future better. But all those explosions have come at a personal cost.
In an interview with The New York Times a week after his fateful tweet, Musk seemed near-hysterical as he spoke of working 120-hour weeks trying to fix Tesla’s production problems. “There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three days,” he said. “Days when I didn’t go outside. This has come at the expense of seeing my kids. And friends.” He spent his 47th birthday, June 28, working all day and all night, and said he takes Ambien to turn his brain off and go to sleep. “This past year,” he said, “has been the most difficult and painful year of my career.”
However gruelling, though, Musk’s efforts have yielded remarkable results. His Teslas are fast, beautiful cars often rated the best in the world, and they have forced every major car company to accelerate production of electric cars. Teslas have flashes of Musk’s quirky humour, like the stereo whose volume goes up to 11, in tribute to Spinal Tap.
His ambition to put us all in electric cars and reignite America’s space programme are just his most evolved ventures. He also wants to build Hyperloops, tubes through which trains can travel at 700mph on a cushion of air; tunnels under cities to relieve congestion; and to liberate us from the consequences of treating Earth so poorly by colonising Mars.
Musk’s private life is just as unconventional. As a child, he has said, he was determined not to end up alone. He has five children by his first wife, Justine, a writer who eviscerated him in a magazine essay after their divorce. She said when they danced at their wedding reception, he told her: “I am the alpha in this relationship.”
They continue to raise their children together.
He then married, divorced, remarried and divorced English actress Talulah Riley, before dating actress Amber Heard. Since spring this year he has been with the Canadian musician Grimes. That has come with its own issues.
❝ The ‘pedo’ incident added to concerns among investors that Musk was losing it
In August, Grimes invited rapper Azealia Banks to one of Musk’s homes shortly after the “funding secured” tweet, with the intention of recording music. Banks said she was left waiting and told Business Insider that she saw Musk “in the kitchen tucking his tail in between his legs scrounging for investors to cover his ass after that tweet”. Later, she apologised to Musk.
Few business titans have their personal relationships so scrutinised, but as Musk unfollowed Grimes on Twitter after Banks’s comments, then refollowed her later in the month, their fans groaned then cheered.
For now at least, Musk has the focus where he wants it.