Description
September 28, 2008. A rocket climbs over the Pacific on its fourth and final attempt. If it fails, SpaceX dies. Its founder has invested every dollar from his PayPal fortune into two companies that are both weeks from bankruptcy. In a control room in Hawthorne, California, the man who will one day become the richest person on Earth is borrowing money from friends to pay rent. The rocket reaches orbit. And the most complicated entrepreneur of our time lives to build another day. This episode traces the full arc of Elon Musk — from a bullied boy reading encyclopedias in Pretoria to the man who put humans in orbit, revolutionized the auto industry, and then bought Twitter and set it on fire. We begin in apartheid South Africa, where a strange, brilliant child escapes into Asimov novels and dreams of Mars while surviving a father whose damage would shape everything that followed. We follow the teenage escape to Canada, the early ventures — Zip2, X.com, the merger that became PayPal — and the $180 million sale that gave a twenty-something the capital to bet on the impossible. We watch him found SpaceX in a warehouse with twelve employees and a dream that Boeing laughed at. We see three rockets explode before the fourth saves the company with days of cash remaining. We follow the parallel crisis at Tesla — a startup trying to build an electric car that every expert said couldn't be built — through the ouster of its original founder, the Roadster's catastrophic cost overruns, and the Christmas Eve funding round that closed on the last day before bankruptcy. Then the triumphs: reusable rockets landing on drone ships. The Model S earning the highest Consumer Reports rating in history. Model 3 production hell — Musk sleeping on the factory floor, building an assembly line in a parking lot tent. Crew Dragon carrying astronauts to orbit from American soil for the first time in nine years. Then the unraveling: the funding-secured tweet, the SEC sanctions, and the $44 billion Twitter acquisition that took every trait that built rockets and cars — the risk tolerance, the refusal to listen to experts, the conviction that he knew better — and applied them where they proved catastrophic. The manchild who moved mountains. The question is where they'll land.