He is under attack. For tweeting the wrong thing, for not making enough cars, for appearing unstable. Some of the criticisms have merit. Much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline observers gleefully salivating at the opportunity to take him down a peg. But what have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity?

Elon Musk is an engineer at heart, a tinkerer, a problem-solver—the kind of person Popular Mechanics has always championed—and the problems he’s trying to solve are hard. Really hard. He could find better ways to spend his money, that’s for sure. And yet there he is, trying to build gasless cars and build reusable rockets and build tunnels that make traffic go away. For all his faults and unpredictability, we need him out there doing that. We need people who have ideas. We need people who take risks.

We need people who try.

Because I Want to Go to Mars

by Tom Chiarella

It must have been fun to have been alive when Mark Twain walked the earth. You might have lived in Columbus, and made your own fine living selling barrel hoops. But among your everyday pleasures was included the possibility that when you picked up the newspaper, you might read a serialized report from the sometimes distant travels of Mark Twain, a highly recognizable guy with a contrived-sounding name, who wandered around the country thinking big ideas.

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Not everybody liked Twain. They still don’t. He could be scandalous and self-indulgent. He smoked too much. Judgmental. And Twain, a one-time river­boat pilot, made nothing substantial, produced no commodities or goods, except his tales and observations. He took you somewhere. Mark Twain didn’t think for you, you barrel-hoop baron you. But he was out there. Thinking. He spoke past his newspaper editor, directly to the people, to his readers, whether they agreed with him or not. And while he certainly produced outsize, often painful, observations about what we had become as a people, he also offered glaring, satiric propositions concerning what we might want to try to be henceforth. And why. In person, he could be wily, cold, and unpleasant, but Twain stood out as a man who reliably saw the truth of human purpose beneath the weighty mess of human foibles. He had ambitions for humanity. At the very least, he believed that humanity ought to have ambitions for itself.

Rockets. Plug-in cars that drive themselves. The “hyperloop.” Friggin’ flamethrowers.

And now, Elon Musk walks the earth. The pleasure of his presence on this mantle is similar to Twain’s. You might live in Tacoma and make a living working in a consulting firm that helps affordable hotel chains rebrand themselves using urban graphic-design strategies and overlapping pricing platforms. But admit it, among your everyday pleasures is the possibility that you might pick up an item in the news feed on your smartphone concerning Elon Musk’s next great idea. Electric cars. The colonization of Mars. Tunnels beneath Los Angeles. Brains linked to computers.

If the last ten years have convinced you of nothing else, you have to admit: Elon Musk is somewhere out there, thinking. Right now. I’m glad for it. He has ambitions, sure. That’s easy to assert. But his ambitions relate to something more than monetizing a good idea. They relate to the obligations of possibility, to our larger sense of self. Musk speaks these ideas to us, the people—straight past the analysts, the corporate boards, the stockholders narcoticized by profit statements—because he knows we will respond. Ambition is an element of our humanity.

My favorite Elon Musk idea is the one about going underground. The tunnels. The hyperloop. The creation of low-pressure tubes carrying trainloads of commuters at speeds approaching 760 mph. Tunnels running the length of the West Coast, from New York to Washington, beneath the 405 in central Los Angeles.

To be honest, I don’t much care about the economic effect, or even the environmental impact. I just want to try. I love a tunnel. The weight, the shape, the darkness, the mystery of its engineering. I have never entered a single traffic tunnel when I wasn’t aware that once upon a time human beings set out to do what must have seemed impossible to the hundreds of generations that preceded. They moved heaven and earth to make a way forward. Downward. Into the land. And Musk proposes that we do it now, but on a scale never before attempted, using a transportation technology previously featured primarily in steampunk fiction.

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We should do this, he said of the hyperloop and its tunnels. And then, in a real Mark Twain moment, Elon Musk, in the fashion of Tom Sawyer when whitewashing the fence, open-sourced the hyperloop project, and challenged the works, essentially tricking his friends into picking up the paintbrush. It is trundling forward, too. Meanwhile, said Elon Musk, let’s go to Mars!

And we will.

Yes, he’s annoying, and sometimes a bit ever-present. He seems brusque and impatient at times. He’s clumsy in his tweeting at times. But I’m glad Elon Musk is out there, wandering the earth. Like every other greedy schmuck who stumbles out of Silicon Valley, he seems to be a tissue of want at times. Truth is, I could care less who he lives with or what he drinks.

But some of that comes with the territory. Musk is a riverboat pilot in his own right, like Twain before him. And he wants what I want. Something larger than simple profit. Something Large. Profit is fine. Just take me someplace.

Because He Understands

by Margaret Lazarus Dean, author, Leaving Orbit

Americans seem to have trouble grasping collective achievements. I knew Neil Armstrong’s name by the time I was five, but it was decades before I learned about the 400,000 men and women who worked together to make Project Apollo possible. Everyone seems to know the name Elon Musk, but few can explain how the SpaceX Falcon is different from other rockets—not even the people standing near me at a predawn Falcon launch I witnessed at the Kennedy Space Center.

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A cult of celebrity can be a powerful thing, and Musk’s companies have certainly benefited from his. But the viewing public doesn’t only want to see celebrities defeat the odds through their talent and charisma; once a celebrity has entered into the Kardashian cycle, we also, eventually, demand to see them fail—toppled by their own hubris, preferably. Neither of these plot points particularly has much to do with the undeniable successes of SpaceX, and I fear that when we talk about Elon Musk we tend to miss the point. A cult of personality doesn’t create a rocket that can land on a barge; SpaceX engineers did that. If our celebrity obsession keeps us from understanding and encouraging achievements like these, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Because He Keeps Going

by Ashlee Vance, author, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

It was 2008. People were pulling their money out of banks, titans of finance and industry were going bankrupt, and we all felt sad and lost. Somehow, in the midst of all this, Elon Musk managed to keep his electric car and rocket companies alive. (Think how ridiculous this sounds now.)

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Since then, automakers everywhere have devoted themselves to making electric cars mainstream. Dozens of new rocket and satellite companies have appeared. Humanity’s access to space appears to have been changed forever, filling people with hope and revitalizing our sense of exploration that had been so dulled. You have to credit the man—this South African man—with being a true patriot and a symbol of what is possible when America is at its best.

Because He Hired Franz von Holzhausen

by Alexander George

In 2008, Franz von Holzhausen left the security of Mazda to join a nearly bankrupt electric automotive startup with only one car. The designs he’s created since make competitors look dated. Here’s an abridged list of our favorite of his team’s ideas.

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Wraparound Windsheld, Model X: The glass sweeps back past the crown of the driver’s head. It gave some drivers double vision—but in the era of high belt lines and thick pillars, the visibility is comparatively panoramic. It’s magic in any city with tall buildings.

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Grille-less Face, Model X: Although the 2015 Model X’s general design recalled a four-door car, it had radical details—and its mouth was missing. After a few years of distance, the decision is akin to the MacBook Pro losing the DVD drive. Lose the unnecessary allusions to the combustion past. It’s how von Holzhausen and crew earned those ­Falcon Wing doors.

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Pop-Out Door Handles, Model S: In most modern luxury cars, you can approach the vehicle, key in pocket, and tug on the door handle to open it. Approach a new Model S, and its flush-to-the-door handles extend out in invitation. The idea is functional, too. Sunken door handles benefit aerodynamic efficiency.

Because It's a Fun Ride

by Anna Peele

Dear Elon,

Maybe it’s because I write about pop culture and not space, tech, or cybermoney—could someone please explain blockchain to me again? I swear I’ll get it this time!—but it’s been hard to follow what’s going on with you. First, you were the eccentric tech billionaire I’d been waiting for. Rather than doing something boring and responsible with your money—say, purchasing a newspaper or politician—you used it to start making dangerous toys for adults. Rockets. Plug-in cars that drive themselves. The “hyperloop.” Friggin’ flamethrowers. Then, instead of being Batman, you turned into a supervillain. Insulting on Twitter the man who rescued the Thai soccer players from a cave? Crying during a New York Times interview because you had to work on your birthday once? Seriously, dude, what the hell? Why aren’t you out torching things with your fire gun?

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But the saving grace was your girlfriend. Especially because she was the weirdo alt-pop musician Grimes. I was like, My Grimes? Dating Elon Musk? (Surely this was her experimental art project on the evils of capitalism, ironically patronized by you as a promotion for some new 4D camera that will wind up with a five-figure price tag and six-year waitlist!)

You showed up together at the 2018 Met Gala in New York dressed like rich vampires and it was . . . endearing. Adorable, even. It was sweet to watch you spooky kids awkwardly dance in front of statues on Vogue’s Instagram feed. I smiled when I read the text messages leaked by Grimes’s rapper friend Azealia Banks about how she thought you manipulated the stock price of Tesla to $420 to reflect your new Grimes-induced affinity for marijuana.

And now you’ve unfollowed each other on social media. I can only assume it’s your fault, so you need to fix this, Elon. Because damned if, reflected in Grimes’s creepy eyes, you haven’t seemed like the guy who wanted to shoot me across the country at 760 mph again.

The reckless, swaggering glee that let you waltz with a goth pop star is the same high-flying mania that gave us Tesla and SpaceX and dreams of the hyperloop. And right now, we need some impossible things to believe in. So, Elon, shut down your social media accounts, turn up the Grimes, and be a hero.

Because He Redefines Ambition

by Ezra Dyer, PM Automotive Edtior

Revolutionary technology doesn’t jibe with the car industry’s business model, which is based on incremental improvements, slowly honing a proven product. Right now, I’m sure Porsche knows how many horsepower you’ll get in a 2026 911. There aren’t a lot of surprises, simply because the industry doesn’t need them. Slap on a new grille and add 15 horsepower and you’ve got something to sell, something that’s different enough for the neighbors to notice. Why get mired in moon-shot R&D when America’s buying 17 million cars either way? That’s how the car business works. At least, that’s the way it worked before Tesla.

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By now the Elon Musk origin story is well known, but a short recap: He sold his first software company, Zip2, for enough money to retire in style. He plowed $12 million of that into what became PayPal, which was bought by eBay and put him in the nine-figure-net-worth club. Most of us would’ve taken that windfall and set off on a lifetime journey of maximum chillin’, with perhaps an occasional detour into public entrepreneurial dabbling. What nobody would do—and we know this for a fact, because nobody else has—is put their money and reputation and all waking hours into tackling the biggest problems facing humanity. Self-made wealthy people all have ambitions, but Musk’s are on a different level from everyone else’s. His PayPal chum, Peter Thiel, dreams of building a floating city where nobody cares if you jaywalk. Musk wants to colonize Mars and completely change the world transportation infrastructure. And he knows there will be colossal setbacks and nonstop smug punditry and platoons of People Who Know telling him that he shouldn’t bother. Why not just go hot-air ballooning with Richard Branson and call it a day? Because he’s pulling it off, that’s why. Here we are, six years after the Tesla Model S debuted, and that car still has no competition. In about a year, the Porsche Taycan will become the first EV to directly challenge the Model S, and even Porsche isn’t promising it will get near the P100D’s 2.5-second zero-to-60 time and 315-mile range. This is crazy, really. Porsche can’t just blow this tiny American company off the map?

I get the impression that the Germans still don’t take Tesla seriously. A few years ago I was discussing the Model S with an executive from a German company, who dismissed it as a novelty. “The interior is horrible,” he said. Last year, the Model S outsold the Mercedes-Benz S-Class in the U.S. And the Porsche Panamera. And the Audi A8. Combined. Are we taking Elon Musk seriously yet?

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He invites you not to. He wanted his four-car model lineup to spell sexy. He pushes an over-the-air holiday update that enabled his cars’ doors and lights to execute a choreographed performance to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “Wizards in Winter.” He names his performance software “Ludicrous Mode.” He launches a damn car into space, with a mannequin jauntily hanging an arm out the window. And then there are the flamethrowers and mini-submarines and tunnels and Twitter-as-internal-monologue trolling, all of it fueling daily speculation about whether Elon Musk is good or bad, sane or crazy, genius or fool. Zoom out, people. We’re talking about a guy who thinks on a cosmic scale, who wants to push civilization as far as he can while we still have one. But go ahead and scoff at what he said on the quarterly conference call.

No matter what happens from here on out, Tesla has changed the automotive industry’s timeline for progress. Incrementalism is out. From now on, it’s all Ludicrous Mode.

Because He’s a Superhero

by Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR

Bruce Wayne. Elon Musk. Tony Stark. Three men worth billions of dollars who care more about solving important problems than living comfortably, but only one of them is real.

Because of the Cars Alone

by Robert Bollinger, Bollinger Motors electric trucks

Musk reversed what everyone thought of electric cars. Tesla started when there were basically no vendors in the field. There still aren’t many options but it’s growing. All thanks to Tesla. For Elon to find a way to keep the company going through so many obstacles is incredibly more difficult than anyone can imagine.

Because They All Made Mistakes

by Roy Berendsohn, PM Senior Home Editor

George Westinghouse has as spotless a reputation as any luminary in American history. He invented the air brake that dramatically increased the safety and efficiency of train traffic, successfully championed alternating current, and built the first safe, high-voltage distribution system. The Westinghouse geared turbine engine improved marine shipping, and he was granted patents that safely advanced natural-gas-well drilling, metering, and distribution.

But even Westinghouse didn’t always get it right. Natural gas was so plentiful in the point breeze section of Pittsburgh where he made his home that he put down a natural gas well in his yard. There was just one problem: very few people (one might argue no one) really understood how to do this safely. The gas pressure was so great that in the middle of the night it blew the head off the well and blasted the primitive drill rig to smithereens. For the next several days, a hurricane of natural gas escaped through the hole until it was brought under control by a valve that Westinghouse himself invented. That near disaster didn’t prevent Westinghouse from running his own experiment on gas illumination by erecting a 60-foot-tall pipe on his property and lighting off the gas plume. Contemporary accounts describe a king-size gas torch with a 100-foot-tall flame. Think of the kind of notoriety that would bring today.

Now I don’t mean to too closely associate the erratic and flamboyant Musk with Westinghouse. Westinghouse’s many biographers portray him as quiet and essentially selfless. His longest employees were pallbearers at his funeral. Yet if a church mouse like Westinghouse can sometimes get it wrong, Musk—with all his ideas and technology and passion and appetite for risk—deserves more than a few mulligans.

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Because He's More Entrepreneur Than CEO

by Mark Cuban

Alan Kay, an early originator of the personal computer, once said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” While others talk about what someone else might create, Musk goes out and does it. As a true entrepreneur he puts his own money on the line. He is always all-in.

When you invest in a company run by an entrepreneur like Elon, you are investing in the mindset and approach that an entrepreneur brings to the table as much as you are valuing the net present value of future cash flows. That is not typical for public companies that are overwhelmingly run by hired CEOs.

My advice for Elon is simple: Be yourself. Be true to your mission. Respect your investors. Ignore your critics.

Because of the One Way Tesla Made the Production Line Faster

by Alexander George

Like most car manufacturers, the Tesla factory uses a piece of equipment called a servo press, a line of machines that molds metal into parts for the car. Tesla bought the best one it could find, from a company called Schuler. There are 35 like it in use around Europe, but Tesla has the first one in the United States. The machine started out exactly the same as the other 35—it was capable of moving 12 sheets per minute. Pretty quick. But not quick enough for Musk. First, his engineers at the Tesla factory in Fremont made the machine fit in a smaller space by shortening the conveyor belts at the end of the press and added two additional belts. Then they increased the speed at which the machine transfers the metal sheets to be stamped. Now, instead of moving 12 sheets per minute, it moves 14. That’s an astonishing 17 percent improvement in the servo’s efficiency, which means more cars coming off the line faster. This translates to a rate of production that’s twice that of the Model X line and four times that of the Model S. It’s mesmerizing to watch. This is a microcosm of what’s happening at the factory right now. When naysayers talk about bottlenecks and things going wrong, what’s really happening is simple troubleshooting. It’s tinkering on a huge scale.

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Because of the Attempt

by PM Editor-in-Chief Ryan D’Agostino

Four days after Elon Musk recorded an episode of a comedian’s podcast during which he was filmed taking a puff on a joint, two men stood on the floor of the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, examining a piece of aluminum. It was unpainted and trapezoidal and would soon become the hood of a Tesla Model 3, the car company’s most recent release and the source (like most of Tesla’s previous releases) of great excitement, derision, hype, and misunderstanding. The men wore gloves and safety goggles, and they took turns running their hands around the edges of the aluminum, again and again, slowly, like a lock-picker feeling for a click. You couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other over the factory din, but one was trying to show something to the other, and eventually they both nodded. They finished their brief conference, pointed to a stack of identical stamped hoods next to them, and hurried back to their stations on the line.

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In the weeks before, Musk had tweeted that he was thinking of maybe taking Tesla private, prompting an SEC investigation, rumors that he was on drugs, and a 31 percent drop in the stock price. He gave a tearful interview to the New York Times about being overworked, and weathered a social media storm instigated by a friend of his girlfriend, who suggested that he was unhinged. And yet here was his five-million-square-foot car factory, in which massive dies stamped hood after hood after hood. Robot arms welded doors onto bodies in seconds—some of the robots were as tall as the palm trees outside but they moved so swiftly and busily that they looked like squirrels scampering around building a nest. Guys powered through foil-wrapped tacos from the on-site taco truck, finishing their breaks, before jumping back on the forklifts. Hydraulic Schuler lifts raised half-built Model S sedans way up high, so close to the rafters you winced, on their way to the next station on the line. A woman pressed floor panels into Model X’s neat and tight, faster than your eyes could follow her hands. It was, in other words, a mundane Tuesday morning at 11:15 there on Fremont boulevard, in the factory that used to churn out cars for GM and Toyota until that stopped and Tesla bought it, rehired many of its previous workers, applied tankards of crisp white and red paint everywhere, and began making electric cars. I asked an employee about all the Musk stuff going on. She smiled and shrugged. It was an off-topic question, a media question. It was not a question about the business of this place. Have there been production issues? Yes, there have. That’s one thing Elon Musk didn’t invent. It happens, especially when you’re inventing something. So what are they doing about it? They are troubleshooting. A robot hits a snag, a bottleneck happens—they ­troubleshoot, until the trouble stops.

Be yourself. Be true to your mission. Respect your investors. Ignore your critics.

There is a sales office at the factory where you can buy a car. Out front is a small lot stocked with cars. I had driven the Model 3, but not the new performance model, with the dual electric motors. I took one out, up and down the boulevard, on a stretch of the 880 freeway, to the drive-thru at In-N-Out. I accelerated so quickly I made my stomach fly, like when a roller coaster drops straight down. It was fantastic.

The car was built inside the factory. That may seem an unremarkable statement. Obvious. It might do nothing to satiate Tesla’s investors, who aren’t wrong to be concerned about the tweeting and the joint-puffing. Or that he seems particularly erratic lately. Musk himself probably prompted the latest round of Tesla nay-saying by promising specific production goals. But that’s what the guy does, and it’s not about pumping up the stock price for this quarter. Musk, desirous of everything at the same time, says: we’re gonna do this impossible thing. And then sometimes he does it—he and the thousands of people working for him, using the engineering accomplishments and the inventions of generations of thinkers who came before them. And when they do it, when Musk’s promises come true, like Dean Moriarty he burns like a fabulous yellow roman candle exploding across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes awww, while the rest of us just shamble on after him.

And when he doesn’t do it—when the employees of Tesla or SpaceX set out to do some task he said they could do, but they make only 4,000 cars a week instead of 5,000, or the massive rocket doesn’t quite land on the tiny barge in the middle of the sea—Elon Musk can say the one thing no one else can:

I tried.


This appears in the November 2018 issue.