Fortune favours the brave

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. By Ashlee Vance. Ecco Press; 400 pages; $28.99. Virgin Books; £20.

IN MOST parts of the world, chief executives strive to be steady, straightforward and as uncontroversial as possible. Not in Silicon Valley. The titans of the technology business tend to be outspoken optimists whose quests to challenge entrenched industries and change the world make them seem like megalomaniac characters out of an Ayn Rand novel—albeit flecked with an engineer’s social awkwardness.

Steve Jobs, the late head of Apple, took on music labels, redefined computing with the iPod and iPhone, and helped change the look of animated films through Pixar. Peter Thiel, a libertarian venture capitalist and a founder of PayPal, wants to set up a floating island that can incubate new social policies. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is spending millions to commercialise human space travel and build a clock that can last for 10,000 years.

Whatever their pet projects, Silicon Valley’s giants are disconcertingly focused. This is especially true of Elon Musk, the subject of a new biography by Ashlee Vance, a journalist with Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. More than perhaps anyone since Mr Jobs, Mr Musk has assumed legendary status in the Valley. He is only 44, but has already played a role in disrupting internet, finance, car, space and energy businesses. He is best known for making a fortune at PayPal, an online-payments company, and using the proceeds to fund two of this era’s most interesting technology companies: Tesla, which makes electric cars and batteries, and SpaceX, a rocket company.

Mr Musk seems to be a unique melding of the brash and the brainy. He wants to wean the motor industry off fossil fuels, and help human beings become a “multiplanetary species” by eventually settling on Mars. He has a flair for self-promotion, although appears less motivated by profits than by purpose. Indeed his determination to change the world can, at times, make him appear slightly unhinged. “Do you think I’m insane?” he asks Mr Vance during a dinner.

South African-born, Mr Musk was brought up mostly by his curmudgeonly father after his parents divorced, and he was badly bullied at school. (He ended up needing a nose job to repair one injury.) Aged 17 he moved to Canada and lived with relatives before enrolling in university in Kingston, Ontario. He eventually headed to Stanford, but dropped out to start his first software company, Zip2, which made online maps. It was sold to Compaq for $307m in 1999. That same year he started X.com, an online-finance firm, which merged with PayPal.

Mr Musk is a compelling character in part because he embodies the booms and busts of his own industry. Before becoming a billionaire he risked nearly all his money to put some $100m into SpaceX and $70m into Tesla, and watched both flirt with bankruptcy. Even today their success is not guaranteed: on June 28th an unmanned SpaceX rocket bound for the International Space Station exploded.

Mr Vance’s highly readable book offers some clues to those trying to understand Mr Musk’s involvement in some of Silicon Valley’s biggest fights. A grand vision must be combined with a relentless focus on detail. The only other renowned boss of recent times to obsess so much about the specifics of products was, again, Mr Jobs. Like him, Mr Musk has created a working environment characterised by brutally high expectations, where he sets unrealistic deadlines for rocket launches and car debuts and then dresses down employees who do not meet them.

Success in the technology world also requires both a stomach for failure and an enthusiasm for reinvention. Mr Musk was fired by the boards of Zip2 and PayPal, yet stayed involved in the firms. Such setbacks are reminiscent of Mr Jobs’s experience. Fired from Apple, he later came back and turned the company around.

Another, more controversial quality that has helped Mr Musk and some of his peers to succeed is a certain lack of empathy. Mr Vance tries to play down Mr Musk’s brittleness, but it is hard to obscure. While dancing with his first wife on their wedding day, he told her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” When Mary Beth Brown, his longtime assistant, asked for a pay rise, he said he wanted to see if he could do her job, and then fired her instead. Mr Vance concludes that Mr Musk is not on the Asperger’s spectrum, as some have suggested, but is “profoundly gifted”. Bent on saving humanity, he sometimes lacks the patience to deal with individual humans.

The most fascinating and at times frustrating relationship revealed by the book is in fact the one between biographer and subject. Several times Mr Vance compares Mr Musk to Tony Stark, the businessman who becomes “Iron Man” (of Marvel Comics fame). Mr Vance comes across as a “Musketeer”, someone who believes in Mr Musk’s power to reshape the world. Having waited 18 months for an interview he may have felt indebted for the access that was eventually granted. The reverential tone grates, but it also reflects this moment in the technology business, when celebrity entrepreneurs are riding high, and their big personalities and ambitions are seen as virtues. They will inevitably stumble, and some of their companies will suffer declines, but many will make a comeback, as heroes often do.