You Only Have to Be Right Once (4 page)

So rather than advertise, they turned their small but loyal customer base into salespeople, giving away 250 megabytes of free storage in exchange for a referral. One-quarter of all new customers come to Dropbox this way. Within two and a half years the snowball had rolled into a $4 billion valuation.

The opportunity in front of Drew Houston revealed itself again in the summer of 2011 during a booze-fueled lunch at VC Ron Conway's Belvedere, California bayside villa. As Houston carefully explained what Dropbox did, he was cut off exactly as he had been by Steve Jobs so many years ago: “I know, I use it all the time.” Rather than a tech CEO, his drinking buddy was rapper Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, who told Houston he used Dropbox to collaborate with producer David Guetta on the hit “I Gotta Feeling.”

Such tipping-point anecdotes now pour in. After his laptop crashed during final exams, one law student wrote in: “Without Dropbox I would have failed out of law school and be living under a bridge.” A watch design firm just outside of Venice, Italian Soul, used Dropbox to create new pieces with a designer in Mendoza, Argentina, the hulking 3-D files living painlessly in the cloud. Haitian relief workers kept up-to-date records of the deceased and shared those names with Miami and other cities. Professional sports teams inventory videos of opponents' plays, accessible wherever the team is playing. On Thanksgiving 2010, the shadowy Ferdowsi, donning a Dropbox hoodie, was mobbed by starstruck teens in an arcade in Kansas City, his hometown. “That's when I knew we'd hit it,” said Ferdowsi.

• • •

HOUSTON BELIEVES DROPBOX IS
ushering in a new wave of computing, where people are untethered from their files. “Your data follows you.”

To pull this off Dropbox must manage incredible volume and stunning complexity—while making that all simply disappear to anyone using the service. As we talked with him in late 2011, 325 million files were saved daily to Dropbox (old files and newly created ones), which had to slide seamlessly onto any device. By early 2013, that number passed one billion. Houston and his geeks built tendrils into eighteen different operating systems, four browsers, and three mobile software systems. When even the smallest software update comes out, they have to make sure Dropbox still works. In June 2011 a password breach exposed up to sixty-eight accounts, underscoring the risk Houston faces as the company holding the keys to 50 million people's digital attic. “I cannot express how deeply sorry I am,” he e-mailed the exposed users, appending his personal cell phone number. “Dropbox is my life.”

There's also the issue of competition. Houston rattled off the list: “Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon in a way, then there's IDrive, YouSendIt, Box.net, dozens of startups, even e-mail . . . people sending themselves everything.” While he believes Dropbox will torpedo the backup industry within five years, he especially fears iCloud, which has pushed itself upon the hundreds of millions of people who've bought iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Google's Drive product. But Apple has proved less monolithic since the passing of Houston's hero, Steve Jobs; Dropbox remains the leader.

Houston combatted an implosion by spending a lot of his war chest on ubiquity. He protected his flank against Google via a deal with phone maker HTC, which makes Dropbox the default cloud storage option on every one of its Android phones. Deals with other phone firms, plus PC and television makers came next. Houston hired a team to tailor Dropbox to businesses. Hundreds of outside developers are making apps for Dropbox.

Houston needed to delegate more. His spiky chestnut hair boasted patches of premature gray. The Phi Delta MBA remained the company's CFO until April 2014. Relinquishing that post was a big step on the road from startup code geek to tech tycoon.

A glimpse at his future came one evening in the fall of 2011. Houston dined with Mark Zuckerberg, and over generous portions of buffalo meat (the Facebook founder was then in his much-mocked phase of eating only what he killed), they plotted ways to collaborate. As he walked out of Zuckerberg's pre-IPO starter home, a relatively modest Palo Alto colonial, clearly en route to becoming the big company CEO he had told Steve Jobs he would be, Houston noticed the security guard parked outside, presumably all day, every day, and pondered the corollaries of the path: “I'm not sure I want to live that life.”

Elon Musk, Tesla Motors and SpaceX: Inside the Mind of Iron Man

Elon Musk may be the greatest entrepreneur of the twenty-first century. By thirty-two, he had cofounded and sold two wildly successful companies, including PayPal, the bank of the Internet, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002. For a second act, he again went double-barreled, this time aiming for two of the world's largest, most hidebound industries: automobiles and space travel. With Tesla Motors, he sought to make a viable electric car (and create the first successful American auto startup in more than a half-century). SpaceX was designed to privatize the path to the heavens. Today, both seem likely winners, swelling Musk's net worth well past $10 billion.

But when
Hannah Elliott
spent extensive time with Musk in 2011 and 2012, those successes were far from certain, and his second marriage was crumbling. For months, on both coasts, Musk, now forty-three, gave Elliott full access to his work and home life, sharing his uninhibited thoughts in real time—less Tony Stark (Musk was the inspiration for Iron Man) than Tony Soprano. Not even genius, it turns out, is free from doubt.

 

O
n a Thursday morning in Bel Air, California, Elon Musk, his cheeks still wet with aftershave, retreated to the basement theater of his 20,000-square-foot French Nouveau mansion, which he's converted into a man cave suitable for business or play.

The leather couch and coffee table inscribed with the periodic table served as a de facto workstation, a retreat for the e-mails he shoots out past midnight and his research on such things as the Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, the “best heat shield known to man.” But rather than trudge to the office when the rest of the world is awake, the young billionaire founder of electric car maker Tesla and SpaceX, the first private company to put a vehicle into orbit, taught me how to play BioShock, an Ayn Rand–esque first-person shooter epic.

“It talks about Hegelian dialectics being the things that determine the course of history,” Musk explained, his eyes fixed on the screen. “They're sort of competing philosophies or competing meme sets, and you can look at modern history where it's not so much genetics going into battle as a battle of meme structures.”

Yes, he talks like that. While he's playing video games.

The games went on for ninety minutes. While work for both of his companies beckoned—Tesla was readying the debut of an SUV aimed at eco-conscious soccer moms and planned to launch a new sedan; SpaceX, meanwhile, was testing its Dragon spacecraft for a docking with the International Space Station—Musk clearly relished the distraction, carving out still more time for a tour of the house.

Situated atop a hidden hill that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, the 1.6-acre grounds boast a tennis court (Musk's brother, Kimbal, joked that their infrequent matches get so competitive that he needs to run away after making a winning shot), an outdoor pool, and a footpath leading to a giant tree upon which Musk, the father of then-seven-year-old twins and five-year-old triplets, all boys, planned to build a tree fort. The inside was just as grand, with all the expected billionaire trappings, down to the cavernous wine cellar and the master bathroom so big Musk put a treadmill in it.

What was missing from all of this, though, was any sign of actual people. The white shelves in a towering library stood embarrassingly bare. (Musk devours books exclusively on his iPhone, including
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
and Walter Isaacson's
Steve Jobs
.)

The pool was covered, the manicured backyard devoid of toys, lawn chairs, or a grill. The boys were at school—Musk, having been through a much-publicized divorce, shared custody of his sons with his college sweetheart, Justine. His second wife, Talulah Riley, a twenty-eight-year-old British actress, was, I was told, back in her home country filming a movie. There was no evidence—clothes, shoes, makeup—of a female inhabitant. There weren't even any personal photographs to speak of, save a three-foot-wide panoramic shot of Musk and Riley watching an eclipse in front of a private yacht on some remote tropical beach, his arms wrapped around her as they both gaze skyward, laughing. On another wall, a photo of a chair seemed to be the placeholder that came with the frame.

I asked Musk if he had a dog. Yes, he said, two. But no dish, leashes, or chew toys were in sight. The house, he told me, is leased. So was the furniture. Although Musk lived here, in other words, it would be an exaggeration to call it his home. It was a way station, the perfect place to play dystopian video games.

• • •

AT SIX FOOT ONE,
with broad shoulders and legs that match his first name (Elon is Hebrew for “oak tree,” although Musk's family comes from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, not Jewish), he filled out the burgundy Tesla Roadster—which he chose over his Audi Q7 and Porsche 911—for the twenty-mile drive to the Hawthorne-based headquarters of SpaceX. Pulling onto the 405, he attentively configured the optimum temperature and wind levels for the convertible; programmed a mix of Robbie Williams, Adele, and Beethoven's Fifth; and drove fast and clinically. It was all done in a manner that reflects his public perception as a robotic genius—the real-life inspiration for the Tony Stark character in Jon Favreau's
Iron Man
. Much of that reputation is deserved.

“If I was walking with the three kids and Elon disappeared, he was in a bookstore,” recalled his mother, Maye, who, at 63, remains an in-demand fashion model. (While in her sixties, she posed in the buff with a fake baby bump, Demi Moore–style, for the cover of
New York
magazine.) “He'd be sitting on the ground in a world of his own. He read the entire
Encyclopedia Britannica
when he was only eight or nine—and he remembered it!”

Growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, Elon alienated schoolmates by correcting their minor factual errors. He thought he was doing them a favor; they thought he was arrogant and responded by bullying him.

“He can be brutally honest, where you're like, Oh my God, that stuff hurts,” said his sister, Tosca. “He's not trying to be mean or make you feel bad. And he appreciates honesty in return.”

By college—Musk studied physics and business at the University of Pennsylvania, then more physics and science at Stanford—he had matured physically but retained his blunt intensity, channeling it into his studies to the point where Maye felt the need to check on him to make sure he was at least getting something to eat and wore a fresh pair of socks every day. He has “become a better man” since college, said his Penn roommate Adeo Ressi, another tech entrepreneur. “Now he will make jokes.”

As he drove to work—his Montblanc aviators, retrieved from the floor of the Lotus-bodied coupe, perched on his nose—we talked about his favorite drives (he favors Highway 1, unsurprisingly), his favorite music (when not rocking to Robbie Williams, he's more a Beatles and Pink Floyd, classic rock man), and his favorite cars (the 1967 Jag E-Type is “like a bad girlfriend—very dysfunctional”).

“Do you ever wish you had lived during a different time in history?” I asked.

“No, I'm glad I live now,” he responded, displaying the remnants of his South African lilt.

“Why?”

“If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.”

Good point.

“If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic—being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago. So engineering is, for all intents and purposes, magic, and who wouldn't want to be a magician?”

Musk has been one of his generation's foremost magicians almost since leaving Stanford. In 1995, he cofounded Zip2 Corporation, a software and services provider to the media industry, which he sold to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million in cash.

Then, in 1998, he cofounded PayPal, which went public in early 2002; Musk was the largest shareholder of the company until eBay acquired it for $1.5 billion later that year. His fame grew with his success—when he and Riley married in 2010, Larry Page and Sergey Brin reportedly loaned them the Google jet for their honeymoon; Musk and Riley became frequent guests at Hollywood A-list parties and chic weekend retreats.

Over the past decade, he has doubled his magic, at once trying to establish the electric car and private space industries as viable business propositions. Tesla is based in Palo Alto, so Musk commutes between the two companies twice a week via his Dassault Falcon. (Tesla's design warehouse is nearby, behind the SpaceX campus.)

Investors don't seem to mind the juggling act: Tesla went public with an IPO valued at $226.1 million. In 2011, the company posted total revenues of $204 million, with losses at $254 million. (By 2013, the revenue had surged to $2 billion, the loss whittled to $74 million.) Musk owns about 29 percent of Tesla, which has never turned a profit but, as of mid-2014, is valued at $26 billion.

Privately held SpaceX, founded in 2002 with money from the PayPal sale, has won more than $5 billion in contracts to launch satellites. In 2012, its Dragon became the first private spacecraft to shuttle to the International Space Station. In 2013, it launched a satellite into geosynchronous orbit, a feat previously pulled off only by governments. By 2014, it was successfully testing reusable rocket boosters, which could greatly shrink the cost of space flight. Pairing Dragon with its Falcon launch vehicle, Musk thinks he could have his first crewed mission by 2015.

Thirty minutes into the drive, we arrived at SpaceX, which, if you didn't know better, would seem like a movie set, right down to the life-size statue of Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit and an ice cream stand, where middle-aged engineers line up to pile toppings on their free soft-serve sundaes. The walls here are more impressively adorned than in Musk's rental house: He pointed out a portrait of Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi who advocated for NASA's Apollo program, and drew me over to a huge photo of Mars, a place he dreams of colonizing, and navigates me to the Valles Marineris trench. The real show, though, took place on the manufacturing floor, where the conical Dragon spacecraft awaited its date with the space station.

Surrounded by the best toys in the history of the planet, Musk returned to his office—a jumbo corner cube, actually, since SpaceX and Tesla embrace the open-seating philosophy—and grabbed a sword, its handle swathed in stingray leather, an award for accomplishments in commercial space, whisking it around his shoulders. “You could really stab somebody with this thing,” he said. “I'm trying to make it swoosh without killing anyone.”

I held up a sheet of paper for target practice, and Musk, true to his promise, avoided killing me, though he failed to slice the paper, instead pushing it out of my hands. He took revenge on a nearby potted plant, slicing a few leaves off with the precision of a master engineer.

• • •

AS MUCH AS ELON
Musk is known for rational brilliance, he also carries a playboy reputation—nights spent dancing in Afro wigs and leisure suits, closing down Russian clubs in New York, and grokking Burning Man in full. Young, handsome, self-made, he has all the game he needs at any club, including the one in London where he met Talulah Riley, twenty-three at the time, in 2008. So it wasn't too surprising that, at midnight on a Friday in Hollywood, I was still waiting for Musk to text me.

The idea was that he would show me, with a group of his friends,
his
Los Angeles—how the City of Angels plays out when money and access are unlimited. We exchanged messages all day about it. But per his last update, he was eating a quiet dinner at Soho House with his close friend,
Iron Man
director Jon Favreau. “We can meet for a drink at the Beverly Hills Hotel (or somewhere else) afterwards,” he texted.

By 12:30 a.m., though, he wasn't feeling it: “Just left Soho House. Am on way home and pretty tired. Was up early with the kids, so not much sleep.” Then another message: “The reality is that I very rarely go out to clubs these days. Only did that twice in the past twelve months, because friends dragged me there.” I'd been waiting with friends a few miles away at the Spare Room. Someone in my group suggested I had gotten “hot-chicked”—current L.A. lingo for being replaced by a better offer—but that didn't ring true. Later, by chance, I heard from someone who had seen Musk with Favreau at Soho House, as he had said. And over the previous three months, he had faithfully returned every phone call, e-mail, and text I sent.

He did go dark on me once. For three weeks, through Christmas and New Year's, there had been complete silence, except to cancel a photo shoot. It was as if he had retreated into the rented man cave for extended hibernation.

A late-night tweet posted on January 17, 2013 explained everything: “@rileytalulah It was an amazing four years. I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy one day.”

I e-mailed him as soon as I saw the breakup announcement—Musk, back from the breach, called me ten minutes later, at 7:00 a.m. his time. “It just became emotionally difficult,” he said quietly. He sounded different: sad, yes, but also raw and alive. “Essentially, I fell out of love, and it's kind of hard to get back.” It was a relief to have made the news public, he said, as it had become increasingly evident over the past few months that he and Riley weren't going to make it.

It turns out that Riley hadn't been with Musk in Los Angeles for months. According to court documents, she was the one who filed for divorce.