The Model S won the 2013 Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award, which is a competition that began in 1949. “I did a double-overhead high-five with George Blankenship, who told me the news,” Elon said. “Hopefully, what it will mean to the public is something very powerful. It should symbolize the transition to electric. Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award is the top award, obviously, in the car industry and the most respected, so for Motor Trend to say that the Model S is, in fact, the best car is a huge vindication and, I think, what will be hopefully seen historically as a turning point in the transition from gasoline to electric.”193 The Toyota Prius won the competition in 2004 and Chevrolet Volt won it in 2011.
While the Chevrolet Volt is not a true electric car, it has a small combustion engine in reserve, it’s a first step. General Motors admitted they started the Volt program as a direct response to the Tesla Roadster.355 “All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is ten years away, and Toyota agrees with us – and, boom, along comes Tesla,” Bob Lutz of General Motors said. “So I said, ‘How come some teeny little California start-up run by guys who know nothing about the car business can do this, and we can’t?’ That was the crowbar that helped break up the logjam.”59
Elon is not a fan of the Volt. The Volt’s battery pack is half as large as the Roadster’s, but has only one sixth of the electric range. “You’ll have a tiny engine pulling around a big car with a dead battery – you’ll be the worst car on the road,” Elon said of what will happen if the Volt’s battery runs out of juice.59 And Lutz is not yet a fan of Tesla. “This is a little bit like saying that a new, exclusive, high-end restaurant in New York, with a three week reservation list, is ‘doing a better job’ in the food business than McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Pizza Hut combined,” he said.376
One of the executives who was blamed for killing the EV1 was Lutz. He received e-mails like, “You sold out to the oil companies,” “You killed my grandchildren,” and “I hope you rot in hell.” He has now changed his mind, and he calls himself an environmentalist within reason.331 Elon is also an environmentalist within reason. “I’m not too hardcore about being green,” Elon said. “I think it leads to a very constrained life. Waste is not good, but we can’t conserve our way to a solution. If everyone were a super-green conservationist, it would just delay the inevitable. We have to find sustainable means of producing and consuming energy.”373
The third co-founder who decided to leave Tesla was Ian Wright; the other were Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard. Wright felt his vision was different from Tesla’s and wanted to build an electric vehicle based on a different technology, so he decided to leave the company after only a year.384 With the vision to build the fastest electric vehicle, he founded the company Wrightspeed. “I want to build an extreme performance electric sports car, faster than any production car you can buy for less than one million dollar,” Wright said. “This would be zero to 60 [100 km/h] in three seconds.”207
Unfortunately, Wright couldn’t convince anyone to invest in his sports car. Instead, he decided to target the truck industry. He realized that when you operate a delivery truck, you replace the truck’s engine several times throughout its lifetime. When you replace the old gasoline engine, why can’t you replace it with a clean electric engine? This is what Wrightspeed set out to do when they developed a plug and play repower kit for trucks.26
The designer who first designed the Model S, Henrik Fisker, has left Fisker Automotive and the company struggles for its survival. 75 percent of the workforce had to leave the company in April 2013, and they continue to negotiate with prospective investors. “Fisker thinks the most important thing in the world is design, so he outsourced the engineering and manufacturing,” Elon said. “But the fact is that’s the crux of the problem. And he’s outsourcing to people who don’t know how to solve the problem. So he came up with a product – it’s a mediocre product at a high price.”190
Elon’s second ex-wife, Talulah Riley, has moved back to his house. She promised Elon to retire with him on Mars – but only if Elon has colonized the planet. After she came back, Elon designed an engagement ring. It has a diamond in the middle that symbolizes Elon and Riley, and the sapphires around it are the ten children, out of which five are not yet born.129 You can apparently save the world in more ways than with technology. “People have to make sure they have at least as many babies as people who die,” Elon said. “The death rate has to equal the birth rate. Otherwise you get a population inversion, which is what happened in Japan and is happening in Europe, where there are birth rates of 1.2, 1.3 children per woman. You need 2.2 to retain parity.”301
Riley explained that her current job is to prevent Elon from going king-crazy. This is a British expression and it means that a person becomes the king, which Elon has become in a way, and then the king goes crazy.278 “I think I’m probably am a bit crazy, but maybe that’s sort of a healthy sign, because at the point which you conclude that you are not crazy at all, then you probably are,” Elon said.328
Some say Elon has already gone king-crazy, and some say he’s using government money to enrich himself by creating companies that are hidden Ponzi schemes.
“Soon that company besmirching the name of one of the 20th century’s most important inventors, will be as dead as he is. The difference will be that the man [Nikola Tesla] accomplished much, and left us with mysteries researchers are still exploring. The company will just leave a bunch of empty pockets and a few cobbled-up cars.”203
“He’s going to send somebody to Mars for $500 000? That’s just baloney. It’s just bullshit. Why do people allow him to say things like that?”120
But Elon couldn’t care less about what others are saying about him, and insanity is after all more logical than sanity when you attack a problem. As Apple’s Think Different commercial said.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify and vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
So someone like Elon has to endure more criticism because his ideas are changing the world. But if you care enough about your ideas then it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. “For me it was never about money, but solving problems for the future of humanity,” Elon said. “If I was purely trying to optimize my net worth, I wouldn’t have picked these as ventures. I’d be in real estate or finance or, frankly, in the oil business. There’s nothing wrong with making money, provided it’s done in an ethical and legal manner, which it mostly is. The things we read about in the newspapers are the exception, not the norm. But we need to consider what it’s all about. What is the meaning of life? Are we doing things that extend the scope of collective human knowledge and understanding? We should do the things that lead us there. I’m not trying to paint myself as some sort of saint. I’m just making the point that the success of the company doesn’t change my life. These are the problems that I think are important and need to be solved, and I’m trying to help solve them.”22,50,69