Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Young Readers' Edition

knew that just by being in Los Angeles he would be surrounded by the world’s top space thinkers.

What followed was one of the nastiest overthrows in Silicon Valley’s long history of nasty overthrows. A small group of X.com employees gathered one night and brainstormed about

The family went on numerous shopping excursions in which they realized midtrip that Elon had gone missing. Maye or Kimbal would pop into the nearest bookstore and find Elon.

The rank-and-file engineers at SpaceX tended to be young male overachievers. Musk would personally reach out to the aerospace departments of top colleges and inquire about the students who had finished with the best marks on their exams. It was not unusual for him to call the students in their dorm rooms and recruit them over the phone.

These early days marked the arrival of Mary Beth Brown as well. Brown—or MB, as everyone called her—became Musk’s loyal assistant, establishing a real-life version of the relationship between Iron Man’s Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. If Musk worked a twenty-hour day, so did Brown. Over the years, she brought Musk meals, set up his business appointments, arranged time with his children, picked out his clothes, dealt with press requests, and, when necessary, yanked Musk out of meetings to keep him on schedule. She became the only bridge between Musk and all of his companies.

SpaceX was to be America’s attempt at a redo in the rocket business. Musk felt that the space industry had not really improved in about fifty years. The aerospace companies had little competition and tended to make very expensive products that achieved maximum performance, even when something less expensive and less powerful would do just as well.

Founded in June 2002, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) came to life in humble settings.

Musk had reverted to his childhood state as a devourer of information and had realized that rockets could and should be made much cheaper than what the Russians were offering. Forget the mice. Forget the plant with its own video feed growing—or possibly dying—on Mars. Musk would inspire people to think about exploring space again by making it cheaper to explore space.

The somber mood lingered all the way to the plane. “You always feel particularly good when the wheels lift off in Moscow,” Cantrell said. “It’s like, ‘My God. I made it.’”

The Russians were the only ones with rockets that could possibly fit within Musk’s budget.