You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane Read Free Book Online

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”).
    â€œDo you ever wish you had lived during a different time in history?” I asked.
    â€œNo, I’m glad I live now,” he responded, displaying the remnants of his South African lilt.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œIf 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.
    â€œIf 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