Ampere Man

Pretend it's the height of the dot.com boom in California, you've just cashed out of your second flourishing online startup, and about 200 million greenbacks are suddenly doing the cha-cha across your bank statement. Oh, and you're 32 years old. What's next, big man?

By the customary interpretations of the American Dream, you should be out shopping for an island and a helicopter. Here's what Elon Musk did: he went out and ploughed tens of millions into a San Francisco-based electric-car company called Tesla Motors. And he started a residential solar panel installation business called SolarCity. And, as though the task of engineering, building, certifying, and marketing a US$110,950 electric sports car while simultaneously trying to convert oil-drunk America to solar power was just something to exercise the mind between crossword puzzles, Musk also got involved in making interstellar rockets.

Then, in April of this year, he pulled the sheet off a running prototype of the Tesla Model S, an aluminium-bodied electric luxury sedan to go into production by 2011 with up to a 300-mile (483km) range and a base price of US$57,400. He might as well have just gone the Max Mosley route...

But don't get the wrong idea. Musk lives in rarified Bel Air with the LA movie stars, and he once cruised around in a McLaren F1. But when you set up an interview with Musk today, you'll most likely find him in the corner cubicle adjacent to the front door of a converted aircraft factory, just down the street from the car wreckers, taco stands and welding shops of the gritty south-Los Angeles borough of Hawthorne.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), Musk's rocket operation, is headquartered in one of the largest industrial buildings in California. Here, where fuselage sub-assemblies for the Boeing 747 were once built, the huge cylinders of the Falcon 9 rocket lie prone while workers tend to its battery of kerosene-liquid oxygen engines. It's very cool stuff.

This is also where Musk's desk sits cluttered with papers, binders, and models of aeroplanes and the Saturn V moon rocket. In the CEO parking spot lurks his black Tesla Roadster.

It's 6:30pm and the cubicle farm of designers, aerospace engineers and so forth that Musk lords over at SpaceX is still buzzing. Just outside his windows, the Los Angeles police are funnelling traffic through a road checkpoint, screening for illegal immigrants. Musk, now 38, looks frail and tired.

"If you do anything for 100 hours a week, it's hard for it to be fun," he says. "Eighty hours a week I can manage on an ongoing basis, but 100 hours, it starts to encroach on sleep time and family time, and that makes it tough."

Musk's McLaren F1 is long gone, the garage holding just a Tesla, a late-model Porsche, and an infirm '67 Jaguar E-Type. These days, says Musk, all he does is work, sleep, and play with his five children, not necessarily in that order.

It's been tough indeed. Since taking over as Tesla's board chairman in 2005, Musk has been through a bitter divorce and doubly bitter management shake-up at Tesla which forced out company co-founder Martin Eberhard, among others. Eberhard didn't go quietly, and Tesla is currently embroiled in a messy and very public lawsuit.

Meanwhile, the world economy crumbled and Tesla, still based near San Francisco, struggled with funding and was forced to raise the price of the Roadster, eventually from US$92,000 to US$109,000, and charge extra for some items that had originally been standard. Customers who had already placed deposits were irked, but Musk says he had no choice. 

"At the time, the car's cost was way higher," says Musk. "A year ago it was US$140,000, and that's just direct labour and materials. We'd been selling these things for US$92,000. The prior management team had been representing to myself and to the board that the car cost US$65,000. Pretty bad."
 
Born in South Africa, Musk came to the USA via Canada in the early 1990s to attend school. Eventually he landed at California's Stanford University, a prestigious Bay-area feeder school to a Silicon Valley then on the verge of explosion. He soon dropped out and with his brother Kimbal started Zip2, an online publishing-software company that was acquired by Compaq in 1999 for US$300 million.
 
In those heady days, Silicon Valley venture capitalists were practically handing out million-dollar checks at the bus station. Heavier then, and more nerdy looking with hedgerows of fuzz down his cheeks, Musk looked the part of a pasty-faced keyboard prodigy. But, in fact, he also had business savvy and was well positioned to exploit the dot.com fever. After Zip2, he co-founded X.com, which became the online bill-paying service PayPal and Musk's biggest payout. Musk, the largest shareholder, owned about one-tenth of the company when it traded to eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock. Do the maths.

Had Musk gone island-shopping with his loot, you'd never have heard about him. Instead, he decided to try to change the world, starting with its cars.

"I didn't put so much time and effort and money into helping create Tesla because I thought it was going to yield the highest risk-adjusted return and be the most fun thing I could do," says Musk. "I think it's very important that we accelerate our transition to a sustainable energy economy and I think electric cars are the transportation part of that solution, and if left up to the traditional car business it's not going to happen fast enough."

Again, Musk was in the right place at the right time. In 2006-07, such green-tech rhetoric from a Silicon Valley titan reverberated at a time when fuel prices were rising and Al Gore was harping on inconvenient truths. Plus, the Tesla prototype looked fabulous -- a two-seat sportster that defied the notion that eco-cars must be bio-ugly.

Assembled mostly by Lotus Cars on an aluminium chassis with carbonfibre panels all heavily modified from the Elise, the Roadster's sleek, pavement-sucking lines and claimed circa-4.0sec-to-100km/h time made it a breakout media sensation.

Every newspaper, news channel, and online news outlet weighed in with glowing coverage. Time magazine put the car on its cover and called it the second-most important invention of 2008. More than 500 orders flooded in.

But it would be almost two years before the first customer received a car and about three years before the final-assembly line in San Carlos, California, would reach anything like its planned run rate of 15 cars per week.

Meanwhile, Tesla's cash kitty ran dangerously low; no shocker in an industry where you can't design a hubcap for less than $10 million. In late 2008, Tesla laid off about a third of its workforce and chairman Musk fired his chief executive, vowing to do the CEO job himself and insure every customer's deposit with his own money.

Musk speaks quickly in his sing-song Praetorian lilt which tills through dense tech and business jargon with a fluid familiarity. In one breath he's explaining the impending redesign of the Roadster's information touch-screen, in another, the difficulty of raising private investment capital for a start-up car company when the news is full of Detroit's bankruptcy woes.  

Since unveiling the Model S this year, Musk has taken the Jaguar XF-esque prototype on a publicity tour, courting the same mass media which catapulted the Tesla name out of the encyclopedia and into national stardom. His goals are two-fold: raise prospective buyer enthusiasm and raise government bailout enthusiasm.

Because private funding is particularly fickle in the wake of the financial meltdown, Musk has been angling for a relatively small, US$450 million slice of the multi-billion-dollar government loan package that has lately propped up General Motors and Chrysler. He figures the 2200kg Model S, with its aluminium spaceframe, seven-seat cabin, 8000-cell lithium-ion battery pack, will be a US$400 million development job. 

However, the media has more recently turned skeptical on Musk as technical delays and financial shortfalls dim the Tesla halo. The media isn't buying wholesale the Model S's ambitious claims as they did the Roadster. Dan Neil, Pulitzer-winning auto columnist for the Los Angeles Times, dismissed the Model S prototype as "a gimpy, far-from-real fibreglass prototype"; "a glorified golf cart". 

Repeated back, those words get the f-bombs flying from the normally placid Musk. "A total hit piece," he rails. "Neil should be ashamed of himself. What kind of fool stamps finished body panels for a prototype!? Of course they're fibreglass!"
 
Musk is a bit touchy about the press since striking it big and becoming a permanent target for gossip bloggers. Sites such as Valleywag.org have painted him as a controlling paranoid obsessed with secrecy.
"It sucks that I'm trying to do a good thing with Tesla and there are these lamentable people in the press who have a serious case of schadenfreude and delight in the misery of others," he snaps.

This May, Tesla was tossed a lifeline. Daimler, with which Tesla had been collaborating on an electric version of the Smart city car, paid out an estimated $50 million for a 10 percent stake in Musk's company. And in late June, the US government delivered with a low-interest $465m loan package. Whether or not it's enough to get the Model S into showrooms, it's a major confidence demonstration to venture capitalists and prospective Model S customers.

Alas, the history of the car industry is spotted with the burn marks of fast-moving neutrinos like Tesla that came and disappeared at the speed of light. Tesla's fate is still uncertain -- perhaps Musk is just repeating his lucrative pattern by setting up the company for a quick sale to a manufacturer such as Daimler.

Second-guessing Elon Musk may be a cottage industry in the US, but few observers doubt what they themselves would have done with a couple hundred million and lots of free time. For anybody who thinks like Musk does, he offers this free advice: "Have a high pain tolerance."

Comparisons with the Lotus Elise are inevitable. The Tesla is more softly sprung, leaning more heavily in corners and serving up a less frenetic ride. The brakes have it easy: the regenerative braking (when the motor becomes a drag-inducing generator) is so sharp and effective that you can drive a mountain twisty without touching the left pedal.

With careful driving, it'll go up to 390km on a charge of its 6831-cell lithium-ion battery pack, but our lower backs gave out after only 260km. The rest of the Tesla is well made, and a redesigned cockpit should up the luxury factor.  

But if you're now wondering which used Porsche you can buy for US$109K, the Telsa Roadster probably isn't for you.

Model S
Need To Know:
- Built from a unique aluminium spaceframe with aluminium panels. Weighs 2200kg; targets 0-100km/h in 5.6sec.
- Powered by 8000-cell lithium-ion battery pack under the floor, designed to be swapped out in minutes at a roadside facility.
- First one to be delivered 24-30 months after Tesla obtains the US$400 million needed for development.
- Base price US$57K; Oz distribution possible.