Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance Page B

also bounced his ideas off some contacts he’d made at the bank in Canada. In January 1999, with Zip2’s board seeking a buyer, Musk began to formalize his banking plan. The deal with Compaq was announced the next month. And in March, Musk incorporated X.com, a finance start-up with a pornographic-sounding name.
    It had taken Musk less than a decade to go from being a Canadian backpacker to becoming a multimillionaire at the age of twenty-seven. With his $22 million, he moved from sharing an apartment with three roommates to buying an 1,800-square-foot condo and renovating it. He also bought a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car and a small prop plane and learned to fly. Musk embraced the newfound celebrity that he’d earned as part of the dot-com millionaire set. He let CNN show up at his apartment at 7 A.M . to film the delivery of the car. A black eighteen-wheeler pulled up in front of Musk’s place and then lowered the sleek, sliver vehicle onto the street, while Musk stood slack-jawed with his arms folded. “There are sixty-two McLarens in the world, and I will own one of them,” he told CNN. “Wow, I can’t believe it’s actually here. That’s pretty wild, man.”
    CNN interspersed video of the car delivery with interviews with Musk. The whole time he looked like a caricature of an engineer who had made it big. Musk’s hair had started thinning,and he had a closely cropped cut that accentuated his boyish face. He wore an all-too-big brown sport coat and checked his cell phone from his lavish car, sitting next to his gorgeous girlfriend, Justine, and he seemed spellbound by his life. Musk rolled out one laughable rich-guy line after another, talking first about the Zip2 deal—“Receiving cash is cash. I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklins”—next about the awesomeness of his life—“There it is, gentlemen, the fastest car in the world”—and then about his prodigious ambition—“I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.” The camera crew followed Musk to the X.com offices, where his cocksure delivery led to another round of cringe-worthy statements: “I do not fit the picture of a banker,” “Raising fifty million dollars is a matter of making a series of phone calls, and the money is there,” “I think X.com could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza.”
    Musk purchased the McLaren from a seller in Florida, snatching the car away from Ralph Lauren, who had also inquired about buying it. Even very wealthy people like Lauren would tend to reserve something like a McLaren for special events or the occasional Sunday drive. Not Musk. He drove it all around Silicon Valley and parked it on the street by the X.com offices. His friends were horrified to see such a work of art covered with bird droppings or in the parking lot of a Safeway. One day, Musk e-mailed fellow McLaren owner Larry Ellison, the billionaire cofounder of the software maker Oracle, out of the blue to see if he wanted to go race cars around a track for fun. Jim Clark, another billionaire who liked fast things, caught wind of the proposal and told a friend that he needed to rush over to the local Ferrari dealership to buy something that could compete. Musk had joined the big boys’ club. “Elon wassuper-excited about all of this,” said George Zachary, a venture capitalist and close friend of Musk’s. “He showed me the correspondence with Larry.” The next year, while driving down Sand Hill Road to meet with an investor, Musk turned to a friend in the car and said, “Watch this.” He floored the car, did a lane change, spun out, and hit an embankment, which started the car spinning in midair like a Frisbee. The windows and wheels were blown to smithereens, and the body of the