Elon Musk: The Unedited, Uncensored Version of My Rolling Stone Cover Story

Going to begin a new chapter in my Steemit adventures. And also give some of you something to help you forget about this week's crypto drop and keep your eye on the big picture...

Last year was all about starting the Steemit Book Club (thanks @the-alien). This year, I’m going to start posting the raw versions of my Rolling Stone stories. Many times, there are parts of a story that have to be cut because there’s not enough space in the print magazine (yes, that’s still a thing). Sometimes they make the story better, and other times you lose great quotes and scenes.

In the case of the Elon Musk story, the most extensive interview he’s agreed to in years (or possibly ever), there were whole wide swathes of the story that were cut for these reasons. So here, on Steemit only, is the full unexpurgated article. If you haven’t read the original, I think you’ll understand Elon, what he’s doing it, and why he’s doing it in a whole new way after reading this opus.

Enjoy…

ELON MUSK: The Architect of Tomorrow

PART I
The Vision of Elon Musk

Q: Do you believe in God?

Musk: I try to let the weight of evidence determine my opinion.

It's mid-afternoon on a Friday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and three of Elon Musk's children are gathered around him – one of his triplets, both of his twins.
Musk is wearing a gray T-shirt and sitting in a swivel chair at his desk, which is not in a private office behind a closed door, but in an accessible corner cubicle festooned with outer-space novelty items, photos of his rockets, and mementos from Tesla and his other companies.

Most tellingly, there's a framed poster of a shooting star with a caption underneath it that reads, "When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless it's really a meteor hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then you're pretty much hosed, no matter what you wish for. Unless it's death by meteorite."

To most people, this would be mere dark humor, but in this setting, it's also a reminder of Musk's master plan: to create habitats for humanity on other planets and moons. If we don't send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dream's inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the first Earthling to show humanity that it’s possible to live on other planets, the man who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonialization.

And that's just one of Musk's ambitions. Others include converting automobiles, households and as much industry as possible from fossil fuels to sustainable energy; implementing a new form of high-speed city-to-city transportation via vacuum tube; relieving traffic congestion with a honeycomb of underground tunnels fitted with electric skates for cars and commuters; creating a mind-computer interface to enhance human health and brainpower; and saving humanity from the future threat of an artificial intelligence that may one day run amok and decide, quite rationally, to eliminate the irrational human species.

So far, Musk, 46, has accomplished none of these goals.

But what he has done is something that very few living people can claim: Painstakingly bulldozed, with no experience whatsoever, into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry – car manufacturing (Tesla) and rocketry (SpaceX) – and created the best products in those industries, as measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. In the process, he's managed to sell the world on his capability to achieve objectives so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else, they'd be called fantasies.

At least, most of the world. "I'm looking at the short losses," Musk says, transfixed by CNBC on his iPhone. He speaks to his kids without looking up. "Guys, check this out: Tesla has the highest short position in the entire stock market. A $9 billion short position."

His children lean over the phone, looking at a table full of numbers that I don't understand. So his 13-year-old, Griffin, explains it to me: "They're betting that the stock goes down, and they're getting money off that. But it went up high, so they lost an insane amount of money."

"They're jerks who want us to die," Musk elaborates. "They're constantly trying to make up false rumors and amplify any negative rumors. It's a really big incentive to lie and attack my integrity. It's really awful. It's..."

He trails off, as he often does when preoccupied by a thought. I try to help: "Unethical?"

"It's..." He shakes his head and struggles for the right word, then says softly, "Hurtful."

It is easy to confuse who someone is with what they do, and thus turn them into a caricature who fits neatly into a storybook view of the world. Our culture always needs its villains and heroes, fools and geniuses, scapegoats and role models. Our brains can’t hold all the data about a person, so instead we tend to label and file someone into a single narrow category.

And so, despite opinions to the contrary, Elon Musk is not a robot sent from the future to save humanity. Nor is he a Silicon Valley savant whose emotional affect has been replaced with supercomputer-like intelligence. Over the course of nine months of reporting, watching Musk do everything from strategize Mars landings with his rocket-engineering team to find out how his artificial-intelligence experts programmed the first AI to ever win a competitive eSports tournament, I learned he is someone far, far different from what his myth and reputation suggest.

The New York Times has called him "arguably the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world." It's an easy case to make: He's probably the only person who has started four billion-dollar companies – PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City. But at his core, Musk is not a businessman or entrepreneur. He's an engineer, inventor and, as he puts it, "technologist." And as a naturally gifted engineer, he's able to find the design inefficiencies, flaws and complete oversights in the tools that power our civilization.

"He's able to see things more clearly in a way that no one else I know of can understand," says his brother, Kimbal. He discusses his brother's love of chess in their earlier years, and adds, "There's a thing in chess where you can see 12 moves ahead if you're a grandmaster. And in any particular situation, Elon can see things 12 moves ahead."

PART II
The Solitude of Elon Musk

Q: What do you think happens when you die?

Musk: I think you cease to exist. I hope I’m wrong in a positive way. But most likely, you’re just gone.

His children soon leave for the home of their mother, Musk's ex-wife Justine. "I wish we could be private with Tesla," Musk murmurs as they exit. "It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company."

What follows is ... silence.

Musk sits at his desk, looking at his phone, but not typing or reading anything. He then lowers himself to the floor, and stretches his back on a foam roller. When he finishes, I attempt to start the interview by asking about the Tesla Model 3 launch a week earlier, and what it felt like to stand onstage and tell the world he'd just pulled off a plan 14 years in the making: to bootstrap, with luxury electric cars, a mass-market electric car.

The accomplishment, for Musk, is not just in making a $35,000 electric car; it's in making a $35,000 electric car that's so good, and so in-demand, that it forces other car manufacturers to phase out gas cars to compete. And sure enough, within two months of the launch, both GM and Jaguar Land Rover announced they were planning to eliminate gas cars and go all-electric.

Musk thinks for a while, begins to answer, then pauses. "Uh, actually, let me go to the restroom. Then I'll ask you to repeat that question." A longer pause. "I also have to unload other things from my mind."

Five minutes later, Musk still hasn't returned. Sam Teller, his chief of staff, says, "I'll be right back."

Several minutes after that, they both reappear and huddle nearby, whispering to each other. Then Musk returns to his desk.

"We can reschedule for another day if this is a bad time," I offer.

Musk clasps his hands on the surface of the desk, composes himself, and declines.

"It might take me a little while to get into the rhythm of things."

Then he heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. "I just broke up with my girlfriend," he says hesitantly. "I was really in love, and it hurt bad."

He pauses and corrects himself: "Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think."

Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier: It felt unexpectedly, disappointingly, uncontrollably horrible to launch the Model 3.

"I've been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks," Musk elaborates. "Severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up: drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people and then, like, tell myself: 'I have all these people depending on me. All right, do it!'"

Minutes before the event, after meditating for pretty much the first time in his life to get centered, Musk chose a very telling song to drive onstage to: "R U Mine?" by the Arctic Monkeys.

Musk discusses the breakup for a few more minutes, then asks, earnestly, deadpan, "Is there anybody you think I should date? It's so hard for me to even meet people." He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly, "I'm looking for a long-term relationship. I'm not looking for a one-night stand. I'm looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing."

I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven't worked in the long run: his marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Talulah Riley, and this new breakup with actress Amber Heard.

Musk shakes his head and grimaces: "If I'm not in love, if I'm not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy."

I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.

Musk disagrees. Strongly. "It's not true," he replies petulantly. "I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me." He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. "It's not like I don't know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there – and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?"

There's truth to what Musk is saying. It is lonely at the top. But not for everyone. It's lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom.

"When I was a child, there's one thing I said," Musk continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. "'I never want to be alone.' That's what I would say." His voice drops to a whisper. "I don't want to be alone."

A ring of red forms around his eyes as he stares forward and sits frozen in silence. Musk is a titan, a visionary, a human-size lever pushing forward massive historical inevitabilities – the kind of person who comes around only a few times in a century – but in this moment, he seems like a child who is afraid of abandonment. And that may be the origin story of Musk's superambitions, but more on that later. In the meantime, Musk has something he'd like to show me.

"If you say anything about what you're about to see, it would cost us billions," he says, rising from his desk. "And you would be put in jail."