11 THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF ELON MUSK

11 埃隆·马斯克的统一场理论：下一个10年

马斯克充满激情地讨论着汽车、太阳能板和电池，让人忘了它们其实是很冷门的项目。他相信技术，认为技术能够真正改善人类的生活。技术已经让他名利双收。尽管如此，马斯克的终极目标依然是把人类变成一种跨越行星的物种。这个想法在很多人看来很愚蠢，但这无疑是马斯克存在的理由。

THE RIVE BROTHERS USED TO BE LIKE A TECHNOLOGY GANG. In the late 1990s, they would jump on skateboards and zip around the streets of Santa Cruz, knocking on the doors of businesses and asking if they needed any help managing their computing systems. The young men, who had all grown up in South Africa with their cousin Elon Musk, soon decided there must be an easier way to hawk their technology smarts than going door-to-door. They wrote some software that allowed them to take control of their clients' systems from afar and to automate many of the standard tasks that companies required, such as installing updates for applications. The software became the basis of a new company called Everdream, and the brothers promoted their technology in some compelling ways. Billboards went up around Silicon Valley in which Lyndon Rive, a buff underwater hockey player,* stood naked with his pants around his ankles, while holding a computer in front of his crotch. Up above his photo, the tagline for the ad read, “Don't get caught with your systems down.”

赖夫兄弟以前曾是一帮技术控。20世纪90年代末期，他们踩着滑板，在圣克鲁兹一带挨家挨户询问是否需要电脑系统管理方面的服务。这几个年轻人从小在南非和表兄埃隆·马斯克一起长大，他们很快断定，一定有一种比挨家挨户敲门更简单的方法来兜售自己的技术结晶。他们编写了一套软件，让它们能够远程控制客户的系统，使得公司需要的很多标准工作变得自动化，比如安装应用更新。他们开了一家公司，取名为“永梦”^(Everdream)，这一软件便成了他们公司的基础产品，并且，兄弟几个还采用了一些非常有创意的方式推广他们的技术。他们在硅谷附近竖起了众多广告牌。在广告牌上，水下曲棍球运动员林登·赖夫^{[1](Lyndon Rive)}将裤子褪至脚踝，裸体站在那里，同时将一部电脑拿在胯部挡住重要部位。照片上方的广告词写道：“不要被你的客户发现你的系统靠不住。”

By 2004, Lyndon and his brothers, Peter and Russ, wanted a new challenge—something that not only made them money but, as Lyndon put it, “something that made us feel good every single day.” Near the end of the summer that year, Lyndon rented an RV and set out with Musk for the Black Rock desert and the madness of Burning Man. The men used to go on adventures all the time when they were kids and looked forward to the long drive as a way to catch up and brainstorm about their businesses. Musk knew that Lyndon and his brothers were angling for something big. While driving, Musk turned to Lyndon and suggested that he look into the solar energy market. Musk had studied it a bit and thought there were some opportunities that others had missed. “He said it was a good place to get into,” Lyndon recalled.

2004年，林登与他的兄弟彼得和罗斯希望尝试新的挑战——不仅能够赚钱，还能够如林登所说的那样，创造“让我们每一天都能感觉很棒”的东西。在那一年的夏天结束前，林登租了一辆房车，和马斯克一起出发前往黑岩沙漠庆祝美国的一个反传统狂欢节——火人节。他们小时候经常一起去参加冒险活动，希望通过这样的长途跋涉为自己的生意找到一点灵感。马斯克知道，林登和他的兄弟们一直在追求更大的成就。开车途中，马斯克和林登聊了聊，建议他投身到太阳能领域。马斯克已经做了不少研究，他认为这一领域有很多机会，但很多人却没能抓住。“他说这是一个很有前景的行业。”林登回忆道。

After arriving at Burning Man, Musk, a regular at the event, and his family went through their standard routines. They set up camp and prepped their art car for a drive. This year, they had cut the roof off a small car, elevated the steering wheel, shifted it to the right so that it was placed near the middle of the vehicle, and replaced the seats with a couch. Musk took a lot of pleasure in driving the funky creation.“Elon likes to see the rawness of people there,” said Bill Lee, his longtime friend. “It's his version of camping. He wants to go and drive the art cars and see installations and the great light shows. He dances a lot.” Musk put on a display of strength and determination at the event as well. There was a wooden pole perhaps thirty feet high with a dancing platform at the top. Dozens of people tried and failed to climb it, and then Musk gave it a go. “His technique was very awkward, and he should not have succeeded,” said Lyndon. “But he hugged it and just inched up and inched up until he reached the top.”

在到达火人节的举办地之后，马斯克作为这一活动的常客和他的家人一起开始了熟悉的准备工作。他们支起了帐篷，把艺术车准备就绪。今年，他们把一辆小汽车的车顶拆了下来，抬高了方向盘，然后把它往右移一点，这样方向盘就在汽车的中间位置了，他们还把座位换成了一张沙发。马斯克很享受驾驶这种奇特的汽车。“埃隆喜欢那里的人真实不造作，”他的多年好友比尔·李说道，“这是他喜爱的露营方式。他希望一边开着他的艺术车，一边欣赏拼装雕塑艺术和灯光秀。他经常跳舞。”他在活动中也展现了自己的力量和决心。在那里，有一根长约30英尺的木桩，木桩顶上是一个跳舞的平台。很多人都试着爬上去，但都失败了，于是马斯克也上去试了试。“他爬起来笨手笨脚的，我们觉得他应该爬不上去，”林登说道，“但他紧紧抱着木桩，一寸一寸地向上挪，最后挪到了顶部。”

Musk and the Rives left Burning Man enthused. The Rives decided to become experts on the solar industry and find the opportunity in the market. They spent two years studying solar technology and the dynamics of the business, reading research reports, interviewing people, and attending conferences along the way. It was during the Solar Power International conference that the Rive brothers really hit on what their business model might be. Only about two thousand* people showed up for the event, and they all fit into a couple of hotel conference rooms for presentations and panels. During one open discussion session, representatives from a handful of the world's largest solar installers were sitting onstage, and the moderator asked what they were doing to make solar panels more affordable for consumers. “They all gave the same answer,” Lyndon said. “They said, ‘We're waiting for the cost of the panels to drop.' None of them were taking ownership of the problem.”

马斯克和赖夫兄弟意犹未尽地离开了火人节活动。赖夫兄弟决定成为太阳能行业的专家，在市场中寻找机会。他们花了两年时间学习太阳能技术和行业动态、阅读研究报告、沿途拜访专家并参加会议。直到参加太阳能国际会议时，赖夫兄弟才真正确定了自己的业务模式。那场会议只有大约两千人出席^[2]。与会者都挤在酒店的几个的会议室中，聆听别人的报告和嘉宾讨论。在一次开放式的讨论中，一些世界最大太阳能供应商的代表坐在台上，主持人发问，他们将如何缩减成本，让消费者能够买得起太阳能板。“他们的答案如出一辙，”林登说，“他们说，‘我们在等太阳能板的成本下降。’没有人真正来解决这个问题。”

At the time, it was not easy for consumers to get solar panels on their houses. You had to be very proactive, acquiring the panels and finding someone else to install them. The consumer paid up front and had to make an educated guess as to whether or not his or her house even got enough sunshine to make the ordeal worthwhile. On top of all this, people were reluctant to buy panels, knowing that the next year's models would be more efficient.

当时，消费者要在家里装太阳能板很麻烦。他们必须非常积极，主动去购买太阳能板，还要找人来安装。消费者要预先付费，还要尽可能地做好判断，自家的房屋是否有足够的日照，否则这一切折腾都是白费。除此之外，人们也不太情愿购买太阳能板，因为知道明年的产品效能会更高。

The Rives decided to make buying into the solar proposition much simpler and formed a company called SolarCity in 2006. Unlike other companies, they would not manufacture their own solar panels. Instead they would buy them and then do just about everything else in-house. They built software for analyzing a customer's current energy bill and the position of their house and the amount of sunlight it typically received to determine if solar made sense for the property. They built up their own teams to install the solar panels. And they created a financing system in which the customer did not need to pay anything up front for the panels. The consumer leased the panels over a number of years at a fixed monthly rate. Consumers got a lower bill overall, they were no longer subject to the constantly rising rates of typical utilities, and, if they sold their house, they could pass the contract to the new owner. At the end of the lease, the homeowner could also upgrade to new, more efficient panels. Musk had helped his cousins come up with this structure and become the company's chairman and its largest shareholder, owning about a third of SolarCity.

赖夫兄弟决定让购买太阳能产品变得更简单，于是他们在2006年成立了一家名叫“太阳城”的公司。不像其他公司那样，他们自己不生产太阳能板，而是向别家公司采购太阳能板，然后负责解决余下的所有环节。他们设计了一套软件，用来分析客户当前的电费账单、房子的地理位置和房子能够接收到的太阳能总量，然后确定客户家里安装太阳能是否划算。他们成立了自己的团队，负责安装太阳能板，并创建了一个财务系统，客户无须预付任何费用就能安装太阳能板。客户只须通过支付月租费的形式租用太阳能板几年。这样一来，消费者既能节省一笔电费，而且不必再为不断上涨的电费而烦恼，如果客户中途出售了自己的房子，太阳能板的租赁合同也会同时转移到新的业主手中。租期届满之后，房子的业主还能升级到更新、更高效的太阳能板。马斯克帮他的表亲们构思了这一业务模式，并且成为该公司的董事长和最大股东，持有太阳城公司大约1/3的股权。

Six years later, SolarCity had become the largest installer of solar panels in the country. The company had lived up to its initial goals and made installing the panels painless. Rivals were rushing to mimic its business model. SolarCity had benefited along the way from a collapse in the price of solar panels, which occurred after Chinese panel manufacturers flooded the market with product. It had also expanded its business from consumers to businesses with companies like Intel, Walgreens, and Wal-Mart signing up for large installations. In 2012, SolarCity went public and its shares soared higher in the months that followed. By 2014, SolarCity was valued at close to $7 billion.

6年后，太阳城已经成为美国国内最大的太阳能板安装企业。公司完成了最初的目标，让安装太阳能板不再费时费力。不断有竞争者加入这一行业，模仿太阳城的业务模式。在中国的太阳能板制造商带着各自的产品大量涌入市场后，太阳能板的价格大幅跳水，太阳城也因此获益，其他业务也从个人客户扩展到了像英特尔、沃尔格林药房、沃尔玛这样的企业，签订了更大型的安装项目。2012年，太阳城挂牌上市，股价在几个月内大幅攀升。至2014年，太阳城的市值已经接近70亿美元。

During the entire period of SolarCity's growth, Silicon Valley had dumped huge amounts of money into green technology companies with mostly disastrous results. There were the automotive flubs like Fisker and Better Place, and Solyndra, the solar cell maker that conservatives loved to hold up as a cautionary tale of government spending and cronyism run amok. Some of the most famous venture capitalists in history, like John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, were ripped apart by the local and national press for their failed green investments. The story was almost always the same. People had thrown money at green technology because it seemed like the right thing to do, not because it made business sense. From new kinds of energy storage systems to electric cars and solar panels, the technology never quite lived up to its billing and required too much government funding and too many incentives to create a viable market. Much of this criticism was fair. It's just that there was this Elon Musk guy hanging around who seemed to have figured something out that everyone else had missed. “We had a blanket rule against investing in clean-tech companies for about a decade,” said Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist at Founders Fund. “On the macro level, we were right because clean tech as a sector was quite bad. But on the micro level, it looks like Elon has the two most successful clean-tech companies in the U.S. We would rather explain his success as being a fluke. There's the whole Iron Man thing in which he's presented as a cartoonish businessman—this very unusual animal at the zoo. But there is now a degree to which you have to ask whether his success is an indictment on the rest of us who have been working on much more incremental things. To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it's a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon.”

在太阳城发展壮大期间，硅谷在绿色科技公司投入了大笔资金，但大多数投资都打了水漂。菲斯克、乐土^{(Better Place)}等汽车公司，还有太阳能电池制造商索林德拉的业绩都差强人意，索林德拉还因此成为保守派眼中滥用政府支出和任人唯亲方面典型的反面教材。历史上最出名的几位风险投资家，比如约翰·杜尔和维诺德·科斯拉都因为在绿色产业投资失败而被当地和全国性媒体争相报道。很多投资人都有类似的经历。他们在绿色科技产业投入大笔资金，因为他们觉得这么做是正确的，而非出于商业意识。从新型的储能系统到电动汽车和太阳能板，这些技术都没有做到物有所值，它们需要非常多的政府资金和激励措施才能创造市场。很多批评都是公平的。而埃隆·马斯克和他的同伴们发现了其他人忽略的重点。“过去10年来我们一直反对向清洁技术公司进行投资，”PayPal创始人之一兼创业家基金的风险投资家彼得·蒂尔说，“从宏观层面上说，我们是正确的，因为清洁技术这一行业表现很糟糕。但是，从微观角度来看，埃隆似乎掌握着全美最成功的两家清洁技术公司。我们认为他的成功只是侥幸。他的表现简直像个商业版的‘钢铁侠’，他是个与众不同的人物。但我们必须扪心自问，他的成功对于我们这些比他做得更多的人来说算不算一种讽刺。尽管全世界仍然在质疑埃隆，但我认为有问题的其实是这个世界，而不是埃隆。”

SolarCity, like the rest of Musk's ventures, did not represent a business opportunity so much as it represented a worldview. Musk had decided long ago—in his very rational manner—that solar made sense. Enough solar energy hits the Earth's surface in about an hour to equal a year's worth of worldwide energy consumption from all sources put together.Improvements in the efficiency of solar panels have been happening at a steady clip. If solar is destined to be mankind's preferred energy source in the future, then this future ought to be brought about as quickly as possible.

和马斯克的其他风险投资一样，太阳城更多地表现了他的世界观，而非商业机会。马斯克很早以前就通过非常理性的思考认定太阳能是一个可以商业化的行业。太阳在一个小时内照射在地球表面上所发出的太阳能，相当于全世界一整年的能源消耗总量。太阳能板的效率正在稳步提升。如果太阳能注定是人类未来首选的能量来源，那么这一未来应该来得越快越好。

Starting in 2014, SolarCity began to make the full extent of its ambitions more obvious. First, the company began selling energy storage systems. These units were built through a partnership with Tesla Motors. Battery packs were manufactured at the Tesla factory and stacked inside refrigerator-sized metal cases. Businesses and consumers could purchase these storage systems to augment their solar panel arrays. Once they were charged up, the battery units could be used to help large customers get through the night or during unexpected outages. Customers could also pull from the batteries instead of the grid during peak energy use periods, when utilities tend to tack on extra charges. While SolarCity rolled the storage units out in a modest, experimental fashion, the company expects most of its customers to buy the systems in the years ahead to smooth out the solar experience and help people and businesses leave the electrical grid altogether.

太阳城在2014年开始充分显露出自己更大的野心。首先，公司开始销售储能系统。这些设备是由合作伙伴特斯拉汽车公司制造的。电池组是在特斯拉工厂制造的，然后放在冰箱大小的金属箱中。企业和消费者可以采购这些储能系统来增大自己的太阳能板阵列。充电之后，电池组能够用来帮助大客户提供夜间照明或者应对意外断电的时刻。客户还能在用电高峰时段使用电池中的电力，而非电网电力，这样就无须支付高峰时段的额外电费了。尽管太阳城还是以谨慎的试验性的方式在推广储能装置，但公司希望大多数客户能够在未来的几年里购买这些系统，帮助他们获得更好的使用太阳能电力的体验，最终帮助个人和公司客户彻底摆脱输电网络。

Then, in June 2014, SolarCity acquired a solar cell maker called Silevo for $200 million. This deal marked a huge shift in strategy. SolarCity would no longer buy its solar panels. It would make them at a factory in New York State. Silevo's cells were said to be 18.5 percent efficient at turning light into energy, compared to 14.5 percent for most cells, and the expectations were that the company could reach 24 percent efficiency with the right manufacturing techniques. Buying, rather than manufacturing, solar panels had been one of SolarCity's great advantages. It could capitalize on the glut in the solar cell market and avoid the large capital expenditures tied to building and running factories. With 110,000 customers, however, SolarCity had started to consume so many solar panels that it needed to ensure a consistent supply and price. “We are currently installing more solar than most of the companies are manufacturing,” said Peter Rive, the cofounder and chief technology officer at SolarCity. “If we do the manufacturing ourselves and take advantage of some different technology, our costs will be lower—and this business has always been about lowering the costs.”

2014年6月，太阳城以2亿美元的价格收购了一家名为赛昂电力^(Silevo)的太阳能电池制造商。这一交易标志着他们在战略方面的重大改变。太阳城将不再购买太阳能板，而是在纽约的工厂自己生产太阳能板。相比大多数转化效率为14.5%的普通电池，赛昂电力的电池将光转化为能源的效率据说可以达到18.5%，而他们的目标是采用正确的生产技术将转化效率提高到24%。购买而非制造太阳能板已经是太阳城的最大优势之一，不但能在市场供大于求时以较低的价格购入太阳能板，还能节省建造和运营工厂所需的巨额资金。然而，因为拥有11万客户，太阳城消耗的太阳能板的数量之大使得他们需要保证稳定的供应和价格。“我们目前安装的太阳能板比大多数公司生产的还要多，”太阳城的创始人之一兼首席技术官彼得·赖夫说，“如果我们自己制造太阳能板，并利用一些与众不同的技术，我们的成本将会降低，这一行的本质就是要不断降低成本。”

After adding the leases, the storage units, and the solar cell manufacturing together, it became clear to close observers of SolarCity that the company had morphed into something resembling a utility. It had built out a network of solar systems all under its control and managed by the company's software. By the end of 2015, SolarCity expects to have installed 2 gigawatts' worth of solar panels, producing 2.8 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. “This would put us on a path to fulfill our goal to become one of the largest suppliers of electricity in the United States,” the company said after announcing these figures in a quarterly earnings statement. The reality is that SolarCity accounts for a tiny fraction of the United States' annual energy consumption and has a long way to go to become a major supplier of electricity in the country. There can, however, be little doubt that Musk intends for the company to be a dominant force in the solar industry and in the energy industry overall.

在增加租约并生产储能器和太阳能电池后，密切关注太阳城的人已经发现，太阳城公司已经变得像一家公共事业^(水电煤)公司，并已经建立了一个网络，通过公司软件控制并管理太阳能系统。到2015年年底，太阳城的目标是每年安装2吉瓦的太阳能板并生产2.8太瓦的电力。公司在宣布季度财报中的这些数据时表示，“我们将致力于实现自己的目标，成为美国最大的电力供应商之一。”而现实情况是，太阳城在美国年度能源消耗中仅占很小一部分，要实现这一目标，公司还有很长的一段路要走。但毋庸置疑的是，马斯克希望让他的公司成为太阳能产业和能源产业的领军企业。

What's more, SolarCity is a key part of what can be thought of as the unified field theory of Musk. Each one of his businesses is interconnected in the short term and the long term. Tesla makes battery packs that SolarCity can then sell to end customers. SolarCity supplies Tesla's charging stations with solar panels, helping Tesla to provide free recharging to its drivers. Newly minted Model S owners regularly opt to begin living the Musk Lifestyle and outfit their homes with solar panels. Tesla and SpaceX help each other as well. They exchange knowledge around materials, manufacturing techniques, and the intricacies of operating factories that build so much stuff from the ground up.

此外，太阳城也是马斯克的统一场理论中的核心部分。他的所有业务在短期和长期来看都是相互关联的。特斯拉负责制造电池组，太阳城负责销售给终端客户。太阳城负责向特斯拉的充电站供应太阳能板，帮助特斯拉向司机提供免费充电服务。最新制造的特斯拉Model S车主也都选择了马斯克那样的生活方式，他们在家里安装了太阳能板。特斯拉和SpaceX也采取互帮互助的策略。他们会交流材料、生产技术和运营工厂方面的知识。

For most of their histories, SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX have been the clear underdogs in their respective markets and gone to war against deep-pocketed, entrenched competitors. The solar, automotive, and aerospace industries remain larded down by regulation and bureaucracy, which favors incumbents. To people in these industries Musk came off as a wide-eyed technologist who could be easily dismissed and ridiculed and who, as a competitor, fell somewhere on the spectrum between annoying and full of shit. The incumbents did their usual thing using their connections in Washington to make life as miserable as possible on all three of Musk's companies, and they were pretty good at it.

大多数时候，太阳城、特斯拉和SpaceX都是各自市场中的输家，他们有许多资金雄厚且根基稳固的竞争者。太阳能、汽车和太空产业一直充斥着对现有玩家有利的监管和官僚主义作风。对业内人士来说，马斯克是一个天真的技术专家，可以完全不予理睬，也常常被当成笑话来谈及，差不多就是一个介于捣蛋鬼和满嘴胡话之间的竞争对手。现在玩家利用自己在华盛顿的关系让马斯克的三家公司举步维艰，他们一向对这种事情很在行。

As of 2012, Musk Co. turned into a real threat, and it became harder to go at SolarCity, Tesla, or SpaceX as individual companies. Musk's star power had surged and washed over all three ventures at the same time. When Tesla's shares jumped, quite often SolarCity's did, too. Similar optimistic feelings accompanied successful SpaceX launches. They proved Musk knew how to accomplish the most difficult of things, and investors seemed to buy in more to the risks Musk took with his other enterprises. The executives and lobbyists of aerospace, energy, and automotive companies were suddenly going up against a rising star of big business—an industrialist celebrity. Some of Musk's opponents started to fear being on the wrong side of history or at least the wrong side of his glow. Others began playing really dirty.

自2012年起，马斯克的公司开始对竞争者形成了真正的威胁，想要逐一打败太阳城、特斯拉或SpaceX变得更加困难。马斯克的明星力量开始显现且同时席卷了三家公司。当特斯拉的股价暴涨时，太阳城的估价也会同时上涨。这种乐观的情况伴随着SpaceX的成功发射接踵而来。这些成功证明了马斯克知道怎么克服最大的困难，投资者们开始买入马斯克其他公司的股票。太空、能源和汽车公司的高管与说客们突然发现自己遇到了一位后起之秀——他是一个搞实业的名人。马斯克的一些对手开始害怕自己是不是站错了队。还有一些人开始使用卑劣的手段试图打败他。

Musk has spent years buttering up the Democrats. He's visited the White House several times and has the ear of President Obama. Musk, however, is not a blind loyalist. He first and foremost backs the beliefs behind Musk Co. and then uses any pragmatic means at his disposal to advance his cause. Musk plays the part of the ruthless industrialist with a fierce capitalist streak better than most Republicans and has the credentials to back it up and earn support. The politicians in states like Alabama looking to protect some factory jobs for Lockheed or in New Jersey trying to help out the automobile dealership lobby now have to contend with a guy who has an employment and manufacturing empire spread across the entire United States. As of this writing, SpaceX had a factory in Los Angeles, a rocket test facility in central Texas, and had just started construction on a spaceport in South Texas. (SpaceX does a lot of business at existing launch sites in California and Florida, as well.) Tesla had its car factory in Silicon Valley, the design center in Los Angeles, and had started construction on a battery factory in Nevada. (Politicians from Nevada, Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona threw themselves at Musk over the battery factory, with Nevada ultimately winning the business by offering Tesla $1.4 billion in incentives. This event confirmed not only Musk's soaring celebrity but also his unmatched ability to raise funds.) SolarCity has created thousands of white- and blue-collar clean-tech jobs, and it will create manufacturing jobs at the solar panel factory that's being built in Buffalo, New York. All together, Musk Co. employed about fifteen thousand people at the end of 2014. Far from stopping there, the plan for Musk Co. calls for tens of thousands of more jobs to be created on the back of ever more ambitious products.

马斯克多年来一直在巴结民主党。他多次出入白宫，受到奥巴马总统的接见。但马斯克不是一个盲目的保皇派。首先，他坚持马斯克旗下各公司的信仰根基，会务实地采用可以支配的任何方法来促进自己的事业。马斯克扮演着冷酷的实业家的角色，比大多数共和党更具资本家倾向，获得了大量的信任和支持。亚拉巴马州和其他州有一些希望保护洛克希德工厂的工人或帮助新泽西州的汽车代理商摆脱困境的政治家们，他们现在不得不对抗马斯克这样一个在全美拥有一个制造业帝国的商业巨头。此时，SpaceX在洛杉矶拥有一家工厂、在得克萨斯州中部拥有一个火箭测试地点，并且刚开始在得克萨斯州南部建造一家宇航中心。^{(SpaceX还在加州和佛罗里达州的发射场拥有大把业务。)}特斯拉在硅谷拥有自己的汽车工厂、在洛杉矶拥有一家设计中心，并开始在内华达州建造一家电池工厂。^{(来自内华达州、得克萨斯州、加州、新墨西哥州和亚利桑那州的政治家们纷纷支持马斯克在内华达州开设电池工厂，这一业务最终让特斯拉获得了14亿美元的激励。)}太阳城在清洁技术行业为白领和蓝领创造了几千个工作岗位，公司在纽约建造的太阳能板工厂还将带来很多制造业的岗位。同时，马斯克的公司在2014年年底雇用了大约1.5万人。不仅如此，马斯克的公司打算在之后制造更多产品，并由此创造数以万计的工作岗位。

Tesla's primary focus throughout 2015 will be bringing the Model X to market. Musk expects the SUV to sell at least as well as the Model S and wants Tesla's factories to be capable of making 100,000 cars per year by the end of 2015 to keep up with demand for both vehicles. The major downside accompanying the Model X is its price. The SUV will start at the same lofty prices as the Model S, which limits the potential customer base. The hope, though, is that the Model X turns into the luxury vehicle of choice for families and solidifies the Tesla brand's connection with women. Musk has pledged that the Supercharger network, service centers, and the battery-swap stations will be built out even more in 2015 to greet the arrival of the new vehicle. Beyond the Model X, Tesla has started work on the second version of the Roadster, talked about making a truck, and, in all seriousness, has begun modeling a type of submarine car that could transition from road to water. Musk paid $1 million for the Lotus Esprit that Roger Moore drove underwater in The Spy Who Loved Me and wants to prove that such a vehicle can be done. “Maybe we'll make two or three, but it wouldn't be more than that,” Musk told the Independent newspaper. “I think the market for submarine cars is quite small.”

特斯拉在2015年的工作重点是将Model X推向市场。马斯克希望这辆SUV能够和Model S一样畅销，并且特斯拉工厂能够在2015年年底达到每年10万辆汽车的年产量，可以满足市场对这两种车型的需求。困扰Model X的主要问题是它的价格。这辆SUV的起步价将和Model S一样，这限制了潜在客户群。不过，他们希望Model X能够成为家用豪车，并巩固特斯拉品牌在女性顾客心中的品牌形象。马斯克保证，他们将在2015年建造更多的超级充电站网络、服务中心和电池交换站来迎接新车型的上市。除了Model X之外，特斯拉也正在开发第二代Roadster跑车，讨论生产一种卡车和设计一种既能够在陆地行使又能潜入水中的潜水车。马斯克花了一百万美元买下了电影《007之海底城》中罗杰·摩尔驾驶的那辆莲花精灵，并希望向世人证明，这种车是可以真正被制造出来的。“我们可能会制造两至三种这样的车，但最多不会超过这一数字，”马斯克在接受《独立报》采访时说道，“我认为潜水车的市场其实很小。”

At the opposite end of the sales spectrum, or so Musk hopes, will be Tesla's third-generation car, or the Model 3. Due out in 2017, this four-door car would come in around $35,000 and be the real measure of Tesla's impact on the world. The company hopes to sell hundreds of thousands of the Model 3 and make electric cars truly mainstream. For comparison, BMW sells about 300,000 Minis and 500,000 of its BMW 3 Series vehicles per year. Tesla would look to match those figures. “I think Tesla is going to make a lot of cars,” Musk said. “If we continue on the current growth rate, I think Tesla will be one of the most valuable companies in the world.”

但马斯克希望能够投入更多精力开发特斯拉的第三代汽车——Model 3。这辆四门汽车将在2017年上市，售价大约为3.5万美元，它才是特斯拉准备用来撼动世界的真正法宝。公司打算售出成千上万辆Model 3，让电动汽车成为真正的主流产品。相比之下，宝马公司每年销售约30万辆Mini^(迷你)和50万辆宝马3系。特斯拉计划赶上这一销量。“我认为特斯拉将制造很多汽车，”马斯克说，“如果我们保持当前这一增速，我认为特斯拉将成为世界上最有价值的汽车公司之一。”

Tesla already consumes a huge portion of the world's lithium ion battery supply and will need far more batteries to produce the Model 3. This is why, in 2014, Musk announced plans to build what he dubbed the Gigafactory, or the world's largest lithium ion manufacturing facility. Each Gigafactory will employ about 6,500 people and help Tesla meet a variety of goals. It should first allow Tesla to keep up with the battery demand created by its cars and the storage units sold by SolarCity. Tesla also expects to be able to lower the costs of its batteries while improving their energy density. It will build the Gigafactory in conjunction with longtime battery partner Panasonic, but it will be Tesla that is running the factory and fine-tuning its operations. According to Straubel, the battery packs coming out of the Gigafactory should be dramatically cheaper and better than the ones built today, allowing Tesla not only to hit the $35,000 price target for the Model 3 but also to pave the way for electric vehicles with 500-plus miles of range.

特斯拉已经消耗了全世界很大一部分的锂离子电池，并且需要更多的电池来生产Model 3。这就是马斯克在2014年宣布建造一个他所谓的“超级工厂”，即世界最大锂离子电池制造工厂这一计划的原因。每个超级工厂将雇用大约6 500名员工，帮助特斯拉完成各种各样的目标。首先，它的产量要满足特斯拉汽车电池的生产需求和太阳城的储能器对电池的需求。特斯拉还希望能够降低电池的成本，同时提高电池的能量密度。他们将与长期合作伙伴松下一起建造超级工厂，但特斯拉会负责运营工厂和调整运维。根据斯特劳贝尔所说，出自超级工厂的电池组应该比如今生产的电池组便宜很多，质量也会提高很多，这样一来，特斯拉不仅能够达到Model 3售价3.5万美元的目标，还能为超过500英里续航的电动汽车的上市铺路。

If Tesla actually can deliver an affordable car with 500 miles of range, it will have built what many people in the auto industry insisted for years was impossible. To do that while also constructing a worldwide network of free charging stations, revamping the way cars are sold, and revolutionizing automotive technology would be an exceptional feat in the history of capitalism.

如果特斯拉真的能够制造出价格实惠的500英里续航的电动汽车，那么它将实现多年来汽车产业内很多人想做到却没能做到的事情。在达成这一目标的同时，特斯拉还将修建一个免费充电站全球网络，改进汽车的销售方式并且给汽车技术带来革命性的变化，这将成为资本主义历史上迈出的超前一步。

In early 2014, Tesla raised $2 billion by selling bonds. Tesla's ability to raise money from eager investors was a newfound luxury. Tesla had bordered on bankruptcy for much of its existence and been one major technical gaffe from obsolescence at all times. The money coupled with Tesla's still-rising share price and strong sales has put the company in a position to open lots of new stores and service centers while advancing its manufacturing capabilities. “We don't necessarily need all of the money for the Gigafactory right now, but I decided to raise it in advance because you never know when there will be some bloody meltdown,” Musk said. “There could be external factors or there could be some unexpected recall and then suddenly we need to raise money on top of dealing with that. I feel a bit like my grandmother. She lived through the Great Depression and some real hard times. Once you've been through that, it stays with you for a long time. I'm not sure it ever leaves really. So, I do feel joy now, but there's still that nagging feeling that it might all go away. Even later in life when my grandmother knew there was really no possibility of her going hungry, she always had this thing about food. With Tesla, I decided to raise a huge amount of money just in case something terrible happens.”

2014年年初，特斯拉以出售债券的方式募集了20亿美元的资金。这还是特斯拉第一次有能力从赚钱心切的投资人那里募集资金。特斯拉从创立开始已经有好几次濒临破产，总是由于重大技术失误而差点倒闭。这一大笔资金加上特斯拉一直在上涨的股价和稳固的销售额让公司能够开设许多新的门店和服务中心，同时提高自己的生产能力。“我们现在没有必要把所有的钱都投进超级工厂，但我决定提前募集这笔资金，因为我们谁也不知道什么时候会发生重大问题，”马斯克说道，“可能会有一些外部因素，或者意外需要召回的情况，然后我们突然会需要募集资金来解决这些问题。这一点我跟我的祖母一样。她经历过经济大萧条和一些特别艰难的时期。一旦你经历过这些，你会一直记得。我不能确定这一时期是否已经真正过去了。所以，虽然我现在觉得很开心，但我总担心这种快乐会突然溜走。尽管我祖母知道，以后的日子不会再饿肚子了，但她还是会囤一些食物以防万一。所以我决定先筹集一大笔资金，免得遇到困难时措手不及。”

Musk felt optimistic enough about Tesla's future to talk to me about some of his more whimsical plans. He hopes to redesign the Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto, a change employees would welcome. The building, with its tiny, 1980s-era lobby and a kitchen that can barely handle a few people making cereal at the same time, has none of the perks of a typical Silicon Valley darling. “I think our Tesla headquarters looks like crap,” Musk said. “We're going to spruce things up. Not to sort of the Google level. You have to be like making money hand over fist in order to be able to spend money the way that Google does. But we're going to make our headquarters much nicer and put in a restaurant.” Naturally, Musk had ideas for some mechanical enhancements as well. “Everybody around here has slides in their lobbies,” he said. “I'm actually wondering about putting in a roller coaster—like a functional roller coaster at the factory in Fremont. You'd get in, and it would take you around factory but also up and down. Who else has a roller coaster? I'm thinking about doing that with SpaceX, too. That one might be even bigger since SpaceX has like ten buildings now. It would probably be really expensive, but I like the idea of it.”

马斯克对特斯拉的未来十分乐观，他还对我透露了一些更异想天开的计划。他希望重新设计特斯拉在帕洛阿尔托的总部，这是员工们希望看到的变化。那幢大楼的大堂还是20世纪80年代的风格，厨房也很小，只能同时容纳几个人在里面冲麦片，这和硅谷的典型待遇大不相同。“我觉得我们的总部简直是一团糟，”马斯克说，“我们会把它重新装修。尽管不能达到谷歌那样的水平，但我们赚了大钱，也得像谷歌那样会花钱才对。我们会把总部装修得更漂亮，再增设一家餐厅。”当然，马斯克也有改善硬件的想法。“其他公司的大堂里都有滑梯，”他说，“事实上，我在想要不要在我们的大厅里装一个过山车，就是像弗里蒙特工厂里的那种功能性过山车。你可以坐进去，然后它会带你环绕工厂一圈，还能上升下降。除了咱们，哪家公司有过山车呀？我也打算在SpaceX装一部。那个应该更大一点，因为SpaceX现在大约有10幢大楼。这应该很贵，不过我觉得这真是个好主意。”

What's fascinating is that Musk remains willing to lose it all. He doesn't want to build just one Gigafactory but several. And he needs these facilities to be built quickly and flawlessly, so that they're cranking out massive quantities of batteries right as the Model 3 arrives. If need be, Musk will build a second Gigafactory to compete with the Nevada site and place his own employees in competition with each other in a race to make the batteries first. “We're not really trying to sort of yank anyone's chain here,” Musk said. “It's just like this thing needs to be completed on time. If we suddenly find that we're leveling the ground and laying the foundation and we're on a bloody Indian burial ground, then fuck. We can't say, ‘Oh shit. Let's go back to the other place that we were thinking about and get a six-month reset.' Six months for this factory is a huge deal. Do the basic math and it's more than a billion dollars a month in lost revenue,* assuming we use it to capacity. From a different standpoint, if we spend all the money to prepare the car factory in Fremont to triple the volume from 150,000 per year to 450,000 or 500,000 cars and hire and train all the people, and we're just sitting there waiting for the factory to come on line, we'd be burning money like it was going out of fashion. I think that could kill the company.

最有意思的是，马斯克仍然愿意为了实现理想而赌上一切。他不打算只建造一座超级工厂，他打算建好几座。他希望这些工厂能够马上造好，这样一来，这些工厂就能在Model 3上市的同时生产许多电池。如果有需要的话，马斯克会建造第二家超级工厂，和内华达州的那一座竞争，让员工们比赛看看哪一家能制造出更先进的电池。“我们不是急于求成，”马斯克说道，“我只是觉得应该按时完成这一任务。如果我们平整了场地、打好了基础，然后突然发现，这里以前是一个印第安人的坟地，那就悲剧了。我们总不能说，‘哦，天哪，我们去原来考虑过的其他地点吧，然后用6个月的时间从头再来。’6个月对一家工厂来说是很大的损失。只要算一算就知道，假设我们以最大能力进行生产的话，每个月我们将损失10亿多美元。^[3]从不同角度来看，如果我们把所有的钱都投到弗里蒙特的工厂，把产能从每年15万辆提高到45万辆或50万辆，再招聘培训一些员工的话，我们只需坐等工厂按部就班就行了，但那样做是在烧钱，好像钱不用就会变成废纸一样。我觉得那样做的话公司会倒闭。”

“A six-month offset would be like, like Gallipoli. You have to make sure you charge right after the bombardment. Don't fucking sit around for two hours so that the Turks can go back in the trenches. Timing is important. We have to do everything we can to minimize the timing risk.”

“浪费6个月的时间就和加里波利之战那样。你必须保证轰炸以后立刻冲锋。不要傻等两小时，白白错过机会，让土耳其人回到战壕里。时间很重要。我们必须尽一切所能将时间风险最小化。”

What Musk struggles to fathom is why other automakers with deeper pockets aren't making similar moves. At a minimum, Tesla seems to have influenced consumers and the auto industry enough for there to be an expected surge in demand for electric vehicles. “I think we have moved the needle for almost every car company,” Musk said. “Just the twenty-two thousand cars we sold in 2013 had a highly leveraged effect in pushing the industry toward sustainable technology.” It's true that the supply for lithium ion batteries is already constrained, and Tesla looks like the only company addressing the problem in a meaningful way.

马斯克很疑惑，为什么其他资金更充裕的汽车制造商没有采取类似的行动。至少，特斯拉似乎已经给消费者和汽车行业带来了足够的影响，未来电动汽车的需求将会越来越大。“我认为我们已经给几乎所有的汽车公司指引了方向，”马斯克说，“我们在2013年销售的2.2万辆汽车已经充分推动了市场向可持续技术方面发展。”确实，锂离子电池的供应已经受到限制，特斯拉似乎是唯一一家真正想解决问题的公司。

“The competitors are all sort of pooh-poohing the Gigafactory,” Musk said. “They think it's a stupid idea, that the battery supplier should just go build something like that. But I know all the suppliers, and I can tell you that they don't like the idea of spending several billion dollars on a battery factory. You've got a chicken-and-egg problem where the car companies are not going to commit to a giant volume because they're not sure you can sell enough electric cars. So, I know we can't get enough lithium ion batteries unless we build this bloody factory, and I know no one else is building this thing.”

“竞争者们似乎都鄙视我们的超级工厂，”马斯克说，“他们认为这是个愚蠢的主意，电池供应商自己会建造那样的工厂。但据我所知，所有供应商都不想花几十亿美元来建造一个电池工厂。这就像先有鸡还是先有蛋的问题一样，汽车公司不会投入这么一笔巨额资金，因为他们不确定自己是否能卖出这么多电动汽车。所以我知道我们是买不到足够的锂离子电池的，除非我们自己建工厂，我知道，除了我们，没有人会建这个工厂。”

There's the potential that Tesla is setting itself up to capitalize on a situation like the one Apple found itself in when it first introduced the iPhone. Apple's rivals spent the initial year after the iPhone's release dismissing the product. Once it became clear Apple had a hit, the competitors had to catch up. Even with the device right in their hands, it took companies like HTC and Samsung years to produce anything comparable. Other once-great companies like Nokia and BlackBerry didn't withstand the shock. If, and it's a big if, Tesla's Model 3 turned into a massive hit—the thing that everyone with enough money wanted because buying something else would just be paying for the past—then the rival automakers would be in a terrible bind. Most of the car companies dabbling in electric vehicles continue to buy bulky, off-the-shelf batteries rather than developing their own technology. No matter how much they wanted to respond to the Model 3, the automakers would need years to come up with a real challenger and even then they might not have a ready supply of batteries for their vehicles.

特斯拉有可能是在利用这一形势来抢占先机，就和苹果公司第一次向世人介绍iPhone时那样。iPhone推出的第一年里，苹果公司的对手一直在鄙视这一产品。但当他们发现苹果居然给自己造成了极大的威胁时，那些竞争者们不得不开始追赶苹果公司。即使他们手头有可用的设备，HTC^{(宏达电子)}、三星之类的公司还是要花几年才能生产出可以与iPhone媲美的产品。其他曾经辉煌过的公司，比如诺基亚和黑莓，则没能在这场竞争中存活下来。大胆假设如果Model 3对市场造成了巨大冲击——所有兜里有钱的人都想买这辆车，因为买其他车都只是在为过时的技术埋单，那么我们的竞争者们都将陷入困境。大多数涉猎电动汽车的汽车公司还在采购庞大的成品电池，而不是自己开发技术。不管他们打算怎么应对Model 3，这些汽车制造商将会需要几年的时间才能成为我们真正的对手，他们甚至可能买不到现成的汽车电池。

“I think it is going to be a bit like that,” Musk said. “When will the first non-Tesla Gigafactory get built? Probably no sooner than six years from now. The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward. They're probably more like seven years away. But I hope I'm wrong.”

“我觉得事情将会这样发展，”马斯克说，“第一家非特斯拉建造的超级工厂什么时候才会出现呢？很可能至少要在6年之后。那些大型汽车公司就是这么犹豫不决。他们想先看看别人的工厂是不是能存活下来，然后再批准这一项目，开始向前发展。搞不好可能会落后7年。但我希望我是错的。”

Musk speaks about the cars, solar panels, and batteries with such passion that it's easy to forget they are more or less sideline projects. He believes in the technologies to the extent that he thinks they're the right things to pursue for the betterment of mankind. They've also brought him fame and fortune. Musk's ultimate goal, though, remains turning humans into an interplanetary species. This may sound silly to some, but there can be no doubt that this is Musk's raison d'être. Musk has decided that man's survival depends on setting up another colony on another planet and that he should dedicate his life to making this happen.

马斯克充满激情地讨论着汽车、太阳能板和电池，让人忘了它们其实是很冷门的项目。他相信技术，认为技术能够真正改善人类的生活。技术已经让他名利双收。尽管如此，马斯克的终极目标依然是把人类变成一种跨越行星的物种。这个想法在很多人看来很愚蠢，但这无疑是马斯克存在的理由。马斯克已经确定，人类的生存取决于能否在另一个星球上建立殖民地，他将奉献自己的一生来实现这一愿望。

Musk is now quite rich on paper. He was worth about $10 billion at the time of this writing. When he started SpaceX more than a decade ago, however, he had far less capital at his disposal. He didn't have the fuck-you money of a Jeff Bezos, who handed his space company Blue Origin a kingly pile of cash and asked it to make Bezos's dreams come true. If Musk wanted to get to Mars, he would have to earn it by building SpaceX into a real business. This all seems to have worked in Musk's favor. SpaceX has learned to make cheap and effective rockets and to push the limits of aerospace technology.

如今，按账面金额来看，马斯克已经是个超级大富翁了。本文出版时他的身价已经达到122亿美元。十多年前刚刚成立SpaceX的时候，他手头可以支配的资金可远远没有那么多。他不像杰夫·贝佐斯那么有钱，后者向自己的太空公司蓝源公司投入了大笔现金，让它实现自己的梦想。如果马斯克想要到火星上去，他必须把SpaceX变成真正的航天事业才能赚到足够的资金。这对马斯克来说是有利的。SpaceX已经学会了制造便宜高效的火箭，并不断超越航天技术的极限。

In the near term, SpaceX will begin testing its ability to take people into space. It wants to perform a manned test flight by 2016 and to fly astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA the next year. The company will also likely make a major move into building and selling satellites, which would mark an expansion into one of the most lucrative parts of the aerospace business. Along with these efforts, SpaceX has been testing the Falcon Heavy—its giant rocket capable of flying the biggest payloads in the world—and its reusable-rocket technology. In early 2015, SpaceX almost managed to land the first stage of its rocket on a platform in the ocean. Once it succeeds, it will begin performing tests on land.

近期，SpaceX将开始试验自己是否有能力载人进入太空，计划在2016年之前进行载人实验，帮NASA把飞行员送到国际空间站。公司还将大力发展卫星制造和销售业务，这是航天产业里最赚钱的项目。此外，SpaceX还在试验猎鹰重型火箭——它的有效载荷是全世界最高的，以及可重复使用的火箭。2015年年初，SpaceX设法回收火箭的第一级，并让它在海上平台着陆，一旦获得成功，公司将在陆地上进行这些测试。

In 2014, SpaceX also began construction on its own spaceport in South Texas. It has acquired dozens of acres where it plans to construct a modern rocket launch facility unlike anything the world has seen. Musk wants to automate a great deal of the launch process, so that the rockets can be refueled, stood up, and fired on their own with computers handling the safety procedures. SpaceX wants to fly rockets several times a month for its business, and having its own spaceport should help speed up such capabilities. Getting to Mars will require an even more impressive set of skills and technology.

2014年，SpaceX也开始在得克萨斯州南部建造自己的宇航中心。它收购了几十英亩的土地，计划在那里建造一个与众不同的现代化火箭发射平台。马斯克希望把发射过程中的许多环节变得自动化，这样火箭就能通过电脑根据安全程序自动添加燃料、起竖并点火。SpaceX希望能够每个月发射几枚火箭来赚钱，建造一个自己的宇航中心能够加速实现这一目标。想要登陆火星还需要更多卓越的技术和科技。

“We need to figure out how to launch multiple times a day,” Musk said. “The thing that's important in the long run is establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars. In order for that to work—in order to have a self-sustaining city on Mars—there would need to be millions of tons of equipment and probably millions of people. So how many launches is that? Well, if you send up 100 people at a time, which is a lot to go on such a long journey, you'd need to do 10,000 flights to get to a million people. So 10,000 flights over what period of time? Given that you can only really depart for Mars once every two years, that means you would need like forty or fifty years.

“我们得想想怎么才能一天发射多次，”马斯克说，“从长远来看，重要的是在火星上建立一个能够自给自足的基地。为了能够在火星上建立这样一座能够自给自足的城市，我们需要在那里安置几百万吨的设备，并且可能需要几百万人口。所以你说我们得发射多少次呀？这样好了，如果我们每次送去一百人，那也得发射一万次才能凑满一百万人，就现在的技术而言，光是送一百个人都还是一桩艰巨的任务。所以，你算一算，我们得花多长时间才能发射一万次呢？假设你每两年能去一次火星，那也得四五十年才行。”

“And then I think for each flight that departs to Mars you want to sort of launch the spacecraft into orbit and then have it be in a parking orbit and refuel its tanks with propellant. Essentially, the spacecraft would use a bunch of its propellant to get to orbit, but then you send up a tanker spacecraft to fill up the propellant tanks of the spacecraft so that it can depart for Mars at high speed and can do so and get there in three months instead of six months and with a large payload. I don't have a detailed plan for Mars but I know of something at least that would work, which is sort of this all-methane system with a big booster, a spacecraft, and a tanker potentially. I think SpaceX will have developed a booster and spaceship in the 2025 time frame capable of taking large quantities of people and cargo to Mars.

“每次向火星发射时，你得把宇宙飞船发射进入轨道，然后飞船得进入暂泊轨道才能补充推进剂。基本上，宇宙飞船要用很多推进剂才能进入轨道，你得发射一艘专门运油的宇宙飞船来为这艘宇宙飞船补充燃料，这样它才能以高速开往火星，在3个月内携带着大量的有效载荷到达火星，而非6个月。我还没有详细的火星计划，但我至少已经知道该怎么做，我们可能需要一台巨大的助推器、一艘宇宙飞船和一艘运油飞船。我认为，SpaceX在2025年已经能够造好一台推进器和一艘宇宙飞船，能够把很多人和货物送上火星。

“The thing that's important is to reach an economic threshold around the cost per person for a trip to Mars. If it costs $1 billion per person, there will be no Mars colony. At around $1 million or $500,000 per person, I think it's highly likely that there will be a self-sustaining Martian colony. There will be enough people interested who will sell their stuff on Earth and move. It's not about tourism. It's like people coming to America back in the New World days. You move, get a job there, and make things work. If you solve the transport problem, it's not that hard to make a pressurized transparent greenhouse to live in. But if you can't get there in the first place, it doesn't matter.

“最重要的是控制好每次去往火星的人均费用。如果人均需要10亿美元，那我们无法在火星建立殖民地。如果人均为一百万美元或50万美元，那我们就有可能在火星建立一个自给自足的殖民地。有很多人对移民火星很感兴趣，他们会把自己在地球上的财产变卖后搬到火星上去。这可不是去旅游。这就好像人们在新世界时期移民到美国那样。你搬家过去，在那儿找到工作，然后一切步入正轨。一旦解决了交通运输问题，那么在那儿建造一个可以居住的密封透明温室也不再是难事。但如果你一开始就到不了那里，整个计划就完全没有价值。

“Eventually, you'd need to heat Mars up if you want it to be an Earthlike planet, and I don't have a plan for that. That would take a long time in the best of circumstances. It would probably take, I don't know, somewhere between a century and a millennium. There's zero chance of it being terraformed and Earthlike in my lifetime. Not zero, but 0.001 percent chance, and you would have to take real drastic measures with Mars.”*

“最终，我们得给火星升温，才能把它变成一个像地球一样的星球，但我没有那样的计划。那得花很长的时间才行，可能需要一百年到一千年的时间，我也不是很清楚。我的有生之年都没有机会把它变成一个像地球一样的星球，也不能说是零机会，可能还是有0.001%的机会，你得对火星采取非常极端的方法才行。”^[4]

Musk spent months pacing around his home in Los Angeles late at night thinking about these plans for Mars and bouncing them off Riley, whom he remarried near the end of 2012.* “I mean, there aren't that many people you can talk to about this sort of thing,” Musk said. These chats included Musk daydreaming aloud about becoming the first man to set foot on the Red Planet. “He definitely wants to be the first man on Mars,” Riley said. “I have begged him not to be.” Perhaps Musk enjoys teasing his wife or maybe he's playing coy, but he denied this ambition during one of our late-night chats. “I would only be on the first trip to Mars if I was confident that SpaceX would be fine if I die,” he said. “I'd like to go, but I don't have to go. The point is not about me visiting Mars but about enabling large numbers of people to go to the planet.” Musk may not even go into space. He does not plan to participate in SpaceX's upcoming human test flights. “I don't think that would be wise,” he said. “It would be like the head of Boeing being a test pilot for a new plane. It's not the right thing for SpaceX or the future of space exploration. I might be on there if it's been flying for three or four years. Honestly, if I never go to space, that will be okay. The point is to maximize the probable life span of humanity.”

好几个月里，马斯克总在夜深时在洛杉矶的家周围踱来踱去，思考这些关于火星的计划，然后跟莱莉聊这些问题，他们于2012年年底才复婚。^[5]马斯克说，“我的意思是，能够跟你讨论这种事的人其实不多。”这些谈话内容包括马斯克的白日梦，比如他想成为登上火星的第一人。“他是真的想第一个登上火星，”莱莉说，“我求他不要成为第一人。”也许马斯克喜欢和妻子开玩笑，或者他在假装腼腆，但他在我们的一次夜谈中否认了这一野心。“如果我死了，我自信SpaceX能够照常运转。这是我想第一个登上火星的唯一可能，”他说，“我想去，但我不必去，重点不是让我去火星，而是要让很多人能够去火星。”马斯克不打算参加SpaceX即将进行的载人飞行测试。“我觉得那是不明智的，”他说，“这就好像波音公司的老板来当新飞机的试飞员。这对SpaceX或太空开发的未来来说是不明智的。也许等它飞了三四年之后我才能上太空去看看。老实说，就算我永远不去太空，也没什么。重点是尽可能延长人类的寿命。”

It's difficult to gauge just how seriously the average person takes Musk when he talks like this. A few years ago, most people would have lumped him into the category of people who hype up jet packs and robots and whatever else Silicon Valley decided to fixate on for the moment. Then Musk filed away one accomplishment after another, transforming himself from big talker to one of Silicon Valley's most revered doers. Thiel has watched Musk go through this maturation—from the driven but insecure CEO of PayPal to a confident CEO who commands the respect of thousands. “I think there are ways he has dramatically improved over time,” said Thiel. Most impressive to Thiel has been Musk's ability to find bright, ambitious people and lure them to his companies. “He has the most talented people in the aerospace industry working for him, and the same case can be made for Tesla, where, if you're a talented mechanical engineer who likes building cars, then you're going to Tesla because it's probably the only company in the U.S. where you can do interesting new things. Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things.” Thiel thinks Musk's goal of getting humans to Mars should be taken seriously and believes it gives the public hope. Not everyone will identify with the mission but the fact that there's someone out there pushing exploration and our technical abilities to their limits is important. “The goal of sending a man to Mars is so much more inspiring than what other people are trying to do in space,” Thiel said. “It's this going-back-to-the-future idea. There's been this long wind-down of the space program, and people have abandoned the optimistic visions of the future that we had in the early 1970s. SpaceX shows there is a way toward bringing back that future. There's great value in what Elon is doing.”

我们很难知道，当马斯克在讨论这种事的时候，普通人是怎么看待他的。几年前，大多数人可能只把他归为吹嘘和兜售飞行背包、机器人或者其他硅谷流行的小物件的人。但随后马斯克获得了一次又一次的成功，摇身一变，从一个大话王变成了硅谷最出名的实干家。蒂尔见证了马斯克走向成熟的过程——从一个奋发图强但缺乏信心的PayPal CEO到一个自信且受万人敬仰的CEO。让蒂尔印象最深的是马斯克发现人才和招揽人才进公司的能力。“我觉得这段时间他在一些方面有了极大的提升。”蒂尔说，“他找到了航天产业最优秀的人才，让他们为自己的航天公司效力，在特斯拉也是，如果你是一个有天赋的机械工程师，喜欢汽车制造，那你一定会选择特斯拉，因为它可能是美国唯一一家能够让你尝试新鲜有趣的新事物的公司。两家公司在成立之初有抱有这样的愿景：让很多人才聚集在一起做着鼓舞人心的工作。”蒂尔认为，我们应该严肃看待马斯克把人类带往火星的目标，他相信这会给大众带来希望。不是所有人都会认同他的使命，但确实有个人在挑战自己的极限，推动宇宙开发和我们的技术能力发展，这点很重要。“把人类送上火星的这一目标比其他人在太空尝试的其他事都要振奋人心，”蒂尔说，“这个主意叫作‘去未来’。太空项目已经搁置了这么久，人们已经放弃了20世纪70年代有过的对未来乐观的展望。SpaceX展示了他们有办法实现那样的未来。埃隆正在做的事情非常有价值。”

The true believers came out in full force in August 2013 when Musk unveiled something called the Hyperloop. Billed as a new mode of transportation, this machine was a large-scale pneumatic tube like the ones used to send mail around offices. Musk proposed linking cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco via an elevated version of this kind of tube that would transport people and cars in pods. Similar ideas had been proposed before, but Musk's creation had some unique elements. He called for the tube to run under low pressure and for the pods to float on a bed of air produced by skis at their base. Each pod would be thrust forward by an electromagnetic pulse, and motors placed throughout the tube would give the pods added boosts as needed. These mechanisms could keep the pods going at 800 mph, allowing someone to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about thirty minutes. The whole thing would, of course, be solar-powered and aimed at linking cities less than a thousand miles apart. “It makes sense for things like L.A. to San Francisco, New York to D.C., New York to Boston,” Musk said at the time. “Over one thousand miles, the tube cost starts to become prohibitive, and you don't want tubes every which way. You don't want to live in Tube Land.”

2013年8月，马斯克公布了“超级高铁”计划，并吸引了大批忠实信徒。作为一种全新运输的方式，“超级高铁”采用的是一种大型气动管道，类似于办公室发送邮件所用的管道。马斯克计划利用这种管道来连接洛杉矶和旧金山这样的城市，乘客和车子将能通过舱体进行运输。以前也有人提出过类似的想法，但马斯克的创意包含了一些独一无二的元素。他提出，管道要在低压环境下运行，舱体将漂浮在基底滑动装置产生的气床上。每个舱体将由电磁脉冲推动前进，管道里面设置的发动机会按需向舱体提供额外的推力。这些机制能够让舱体以800英里每小时的速度前进，人们从洛杉矶到达旧金山只需大约30分钟。这个设施将由太阳能供电，能将相距一千英里以内的城市连接在一起。“洛杉矶到旧金山、纽约到华盛顿、纽约到波士顿，‘超级高铁’适用于这样的城市间交通运输，”马斯克在那时说道，“如果距离超过一千英里的话，不但成本不允许，而且你也不想随处都是管道，谁都不想住在一个管道的世界里。”

Musk had been thinking about the Hyperloop for a number of months, describing it to friends in private. The first time he talked about it to anyone outside of his inner circle was during one of our interviews. Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California's proposed high-speed rail system. “The sixty-billion-dollar bullet train they're proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Musk said. “They're going for records in all the wrong ways.” California's high-speed rail is meant to allow people to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about two and a half hours upon its completion in—wait for it—2029. It takes about an hour to fly between the cities today and five hours to drive, placing the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk. He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city.

马斯克花了好几个月构思超级高铁的想法，他私下里向朋友透露过这一构思。在一次采访中，他第一次在自己的圈子以外讨论了这一话题。马斯克告诉我，他的主意源于他对加州提出的高速铁路系统的厌恶。“他们计划在加州建造的价值600亿美元的高速子弹列车是全世界每英里造价最高但速度最慢的火车，”他说，“他们这是在以完全错误的方式创造纪录。”根据加州的高铁计划，人们从洛杉矶去往旧金山需要两个半小时左右，但这一铁路系统要在2029年才能建成。如今，在这两座城市穿梭的话，坐飞机只要一小时，开车只要5小时，高速子弹列车的速度毫无优势可言，这让马斯克十分苦恼。他坚称，他的超级高铁造价仅在60亿~100亿美元之间，速度比飞机还快，乘客还能够把汽车开进舱体，到站的时候，他们就可以开着车穿梭于另一座城市了。

At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn't actually intend to build the thing. It was more that he wanted to show people that more creative ideas were out there for things that might actually solve problems and push the state forward. With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement. “Down the road, I might fund or advise on a Hyperloop project, but right now I can't take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla,” he wrote.

在当时，马斯克公开他的超级高铁计划，似乎只是为了让公众和立法者重新审视高铁。他并不真的打算自己建造高铁。他主要是想告诉人们，可以找到一些更为创新的点子，能够真正解决问题，推动国家的发展。幸运的话，加州高铁项目将被取消。在宣布他的计划之前，马斯克在电子邮件和电话里跟我说了很多。他写道，“过一阵子，我可能要出资打造一个‘超级高铁’项目，或提出这方面的建议，但现在我还在忙SpaceX或特斯拉的业务，脱不开身。”

Musk's tune, however, started to change after he released the paper detailing the Hyperloop. Bloomberg Businessweek had the first story on it, and the magazine's Web server began melting down as people stormed the website to read about the invention. Twitter went nuts as well. About an hour after Musk released the information, he held a conference call to talk about the Hyperloop, and somewhere in between our numerous earlier chats and that moment, he'd decided to build the thing, telling reporters that he would consider making at least a prototype to prove that the technology could work. Some people had their fun with all of this. “Billionaire unveils imaginary space train,” teased Valleywag. “We love Elon Musk's nutso determination—there was certainly a time when electric cars and private space flight seemed silly, too. But what's sillier is treating this as anything other than a very rich man's wild imagination.” Unlike its early Tesla-bashing days, Valleywag was now the minority voice. People seemed mainly to believe Musk could do it. The depth to which people believed it, I think, surprised Musk and forced him to commit to the prototype. In a weird life-imitating-art moment, Musk really had become the closest thing the world had to Tony Stark, and he could not let his adoring public down.

在发表了一篇详述超级高铁的文章之后，马斯克的心情开始发生了变化。《彭博商业周刊》刊登了这篇文章的第一部分，很快，该杂志网站的网络服务器陷入瘫痪，因为大众纷纷登录网站来阅读这篇文章。Twitter^(推特)上的人也失去了理智。马斯克发布消息约一小时后，他召开了一个电话会议来讨论超级高铁，在我们的数次对话和发布消息那一刻之间的某个时刻，他已经决定了要自己建造高铁。他告诉记者，他考虑至少做出一个原型来证明这一技术是可行的。一些人嘲笑这一观点。“一位亿万富翁公布了幻想中的太空火车，”“硅谷八卦”嘲弄道，“我们喜欢埃隆·马斯克的疯狂决定——曾经，电动汽车和私人太空飞行似乎也是很愚蠢的想法。但更愚蠢的是我们当真了，其实它只是一个超级富翁狂热的想象。”不同于早期抨击特斯拉的时候，“硅谷八卦”现在只能代表少数派的声音。大多数人现在似乎相信马斯克能够做到这件事。我认为，人们相信他的程度让马斯克自己都很吃惊，这迫使他承诺造出这一原型。在这样一个不可思议的艺术模仿时刻，马斯克真的已经变成了全世界最像“钢铁侠”托尼·史塔克的人，他不能让崇拜他的大众失望。

Shortly after the release of the Hyperloop plans, Shervin Pishevar, an investor and friend of Musk's, brought the detailed specifications for the technology with him during a ninety-minute meeting with President Obama at the White House. “The president fell in love with the idea,” Pishevar said. The president's staff studied the documents and arranged a one-on-one with Musk and Obama in April 2014. Since then, Pishevar, Kevin Brogan, and others, have formed a company called Hyperloop Technologies Inc. with the hopes of building the first leg of the Hyperloop between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In theory, people would be able to hop between the two cities in about ten minutes. Nevada senator Harry Reid has been briefed on the idea as well, and efforts are under way to buy the land rights alongside Interstate 15 that would make the high-speed transport possible.

超级高铁计划发布之后没多久，投资人兼马斯克的好友谢尔文·皮谢瓦带着这项技术的详细说明在白宫与奥巴马总统进行了长达90分钟的会面。皮谢瓦说，“总统很喜欢这个点子。”总统的参谋研究了这些文件，并在2014年4月为马斯克和奥巴马安排了一次单独会面。从那以后，皮谢瓦、凯文·布罗根和PayPal前高管戴维·萨克斯成立了一家新公司，取名为超级高铁技术有限公司，致力于在洛杉矶和旧金山之间打造超级高铁的第一阶段工程。理论上，人们将能够在大约10分钟之内穿梭于两大城市。他们也向内华达州参议员哈里·瑞德简要介绍了这个想法，他们如今正准备买下15号州际公路旁边的土地使用权来建造高速铁路。

For employees like Gwynne Shotwell and J. B. Straubel, working with Musk means helping develop these sorts of wonderful technologies in relative obscurity. They're the steady hands that will forever be expected to stay in the shadows. Shotwell has been a consistent presence at SpaceX almost since day one, pushing the company forward and suppressing her ego to ensure that Musk gets all the attention he desires. If you're Shotwell and truly believe in the cause of sending people to Mars, then the mission takes precedence over personal desires. Straubel, likewise, has been the constant at Tesla—a go-between whom other employees could rely on to carry messages to Musk, and the guy who knows everything about the cars. Despite his stature at the company, Straubel was one of several longtime employees who confessed they were nervous to speak with me on the record. Musk likes to be the guy talking on his companies' behalf and comes down hard on even his most loyal executives if they say something deemed to be out of line with Musk's views or with what he wants the public to think. Straubel has dedicated himself to making electric cars and didn't want some dumb reporter wrecking his life's work. “I try really hard to back away and put my ego aside,” Straubel said. “Elon is incredibly difficult to work for, but it's mostly because he's so passionate. He can be impatient and say, ‘God damn it! This is what we have to do!' and some people will get shell-shocked and catatonic. It seems like people can get afraid of him and paralyzed in a weird way. I try to help everyone to understand what his goals and visions are, and then I have a bunch of my own goals, too, and make sure we're in synch. Then, I try and go back and make sure the company is aligned. Ultimately, Elon is the boss. He has driven this thing with his blood, sweat, and tears. He has risked more than anyone else. I respect the hell out of what he has done. It just could not work without Elon. In my view, he has earned the right to be the front person for this thing.”

对于格温·肖特维尔和斯特劳贝尔这样的员工来说，和马斯克一起工作意味着要默默无闻地帮助他开发这类奇妙的技术。他们是坚定的后盾，永远在幕后支持着他。肖特维尔从SpaceX成立第一天起就一直为公司服务，推动公司向前发展，她压抑自我，从而保证马斯克获得他希望的一切关注。如果你是肖特维尔，并且坚信要送人类上火星，那么这一使命将优先于个人欲望。斯特劳贝尔也同样一直在特斯拉工作，他是员工与马斯克之间沟通信息的可靠中间人，他对汽车的一切都了如指掌。尽管斯特劳贝尔在公司地位特殊，但他正式要求我谨慎处理我们的谈话记录。马斯克喜欢代表公司发表言论，如果他最忠实的管理人员说了和他自己的观点或者他想让大众知道的东西不一致的话，他会严厉惩罚他们。斯特劳贝尔一生都致力于制造电动汽车，他不希望愚蠢的记者毁了他一生的工作成果。“我费了好大劲儿才放下自我，”斯特劳贝尔说道，“埃隆这个人特别难伺候，很大程度上是因为他太富有激情了。他会失去耐心，然后说：‘该死的！我们一定要做这件事不可！’有些人会因为太过恐慌而变得神经紧张。人们似乎怕了他，没有勇气面对他。我设法帮助别人来理解他的目标和愿望，但我也有许多自己的目标，我得保证我们的目标是同步的。然后我就得保证公司里是上下一心的。但埃隆是我们的老板。他在用血、泪和汗水去推动这些事情。他冒的风险比谁都大。我很佩服他所做的一切。没有埃隆，一切就不是现在这样了。在我看来，他有资格站在台前代表我们。”

The rank-and-file employees tend to describe Musk in more mixed ways. They revere his drive and respect how demanding he can be. They also think he can be hard to the point of mean and come off as capricious. The employees want to be close to Musk, but they also fear that he'll suddenly change his mind about something and that every interaction with him is an opportunity to be fired. “Elon's worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyalty or human connection,” said one former employee. “Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workforce on their toes and scared; maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.”

普通员工对马斯克的描述更多面化。他们尊敬他，理解他的苛刻，也认为他已经达到了刻薄的地步，让人感觉反复无常。员工们想要接近马斯克，但他们也害怕他会突然变卦，每次和他见面感觉都可能被解雇。“在我看来，到目前为止，埃隆最糟糕的缺点是缺乏忠诚或者人情味，”一名离职的员工这样说道，“我们中的很多人多年来一直兢兢业业地替他工作，但他却能不假思索地就把我们像垃圾一样丢在路边。可能他的目的是杀鸡儆猴，可能他确实完全不顾及人情。很明显的是，为他工作的人就像一颗子弹：用完以后就会被丢掉。”

The communications departments of SpaceX and Tesla have witnessed the latter forms of behavior more than any other group of employees. Musk has burned through public relations staffers with comical efficiency. He tends to take on a lot of the communications work himself, writing news releases and contacting the press as he sees fit. Quite often, Musk does not let his communications staff in on his agenda. Ahead of the Hyperloop announcement, for example, his representatives were sending me e-mails to find out the time and date for the press conference. On other occasions, reporters have received an alert about a teleconference with Musk just minutes before it started. This was not a function of the PR people being incompetent in getting word of the event out. The truth was that Musk had only let them know about his plans a couple of minutes in advance, and they were scrambling to catch up to his whims. When Musk does delegate work to the communications staff, they're expected to jump in without missing a beat and to execute at the highest level. Some of this staff, operating under this mix of pressure and surprise, only lasted between a few weeks and a few months. A few others have hung on for a couple of years before burning out or being fired.

SpaceX和特斯拉的公关部门已经见证了多次这种状况，在公关部门，这种事发生的次数比任何部门都多。马斯克用极高的效率开除过很多公关人员。他常常自己承担大量媒体沟通工作、撰写新闻稿、联系他认为合适的媒体。很多时候，马斯克没有提前告知公关人员他在做的事情。比如，在宣布超级高铁计划之前，他的公关代表给我发了邮件，确认新闻发布会的时间和日期。有时候，记者们在电话会议开始前几分钟才会接到通知。这本不是公关人员的失职，他们无法得知这一消息。事实是，马斯克仅在活动前几分钟才告诉公关人员，他们只能匆忙地应对他心血来潮的计划。当公关人员接到马斯克下达的任务时，他们必须争分夺秒，以最高的水准去执行任务。一些公关人员在他的高压之下只工作了几个星期或者几个月就辞职了。另一些人坚持了下来，但最后都精力耗竭或被开除了。

The granddaddy example of Musk's seemingly callous interoffice style occurred in early 2014 when he fired Mary Beth Brown. To describe her as a loyal executive assistant would be grossly inadequate. Brown often felt like an extension of Musk—the one being who crossed over into all of his worlds. For more than a decade, she gave up her life for Musk, traipsing back and forth between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley every week, while working late into the night and on weekends. Brown went to Musk and asked that she be compensated on par with SpaceX's top executives, since she was handling so much of Musk's scheduling across two companies, doing public relations work and often making business decisions. Musk replied that Brown should take a couple of weeks off, and he would take on her duties and gauge how hard they were. When Brown returned, Musk let her know that he didn't need her anymore, and he asked Shotwell's assistant to begin scheduling his meetings. Brown, still loyal and hurt, didn't want to discuss any of this with me. Musk said that she had become too comfortable speaking on his behalf and that, frankly, she needed a life. Other people grumbled that Brown and Riley clashed and that this was the root cause of Brown's ouster.* (Brown declined to be interviewed for this book, despite several requests.)

马斯克看似无情的管理风格最典型的一个例子发生在2014年年初，他开除了玛丽·贝思·布朗。“一名忠诚的行政助理”这样的表述远远不足以形容她的工作。布朗更像是马斯克的左膀右臂——你必须通过她才能了解马斯克。十多年来，她把自己的人生贡献给了马斯克，每周在洛杉矶和硅谷之间穿梭，无论上班日的晚上还是周末都在辛苦加班。布朗找到马斯克，询问自己能否享受和SpaceX高管一样的工资待遇，因为她同时要安排马斯克在两家公司的日程、负责公关工作，很多时候还得做出商业决定。马斯克让布朗休几个星期的假，他会承担她的工作，看看能有多辛苦。布朗休假回来后，马斯克告诉她，他不再需要她了，改让肖特维尔的助理来负责安排他的会议日程。忠心耿耿的布朗觉得很受伤，她不愿意和我谈及这件事。马斯克说，她太轻率了，经常代表他发言，说真的，她需要过自己的人生。其他人偷偷议论说布朗和莱莉闹翻了，这才是布朗被开除的真正原因。^[6]

Whatever the case, the optics of the situation were terrible. Tony Stark doesn't fire Pepper Potts. He adores her and takes care of her for life. She's the only person he can really trust—the one who has been there through everything. That Musk was willing to let Brown go and in such an unceremonious fashion struck people inside SpaceX and Tesla as scandalous and as the ultimate confirmation of his cruel stoicism. The tale of Brown's departure became part of the lore around Musk's lack of empathy. It got bundled up into the stories of Musk dressing employees down in legendary fashion with vicious barb after vicious barb. People also linked this type of behavior to Musk's other quirky traits. He's been known to obsess over typos in e-mails to the point that he could not see past the errors and read the actual content of the messages. Even in social settings, Musk might get up from the dinner table without a word of explanation to head outside and look at the stars, simply because he's not willing to suffer fools or small talk. After adding up this behavior, dozens of people expressed to me their conclusion that Musk sits somewhere on the autism spectrum and that he has trouble considering other people's emotions and caring about their well-being.

不管发生了什么，整个情形变得很糟糕。托尼·史塔克可没有开除佩珀·波茨。他喜欢她，愿意照顾她一辈子。她是唯一一个他可以相信的人，和他一起经历过一切。马斯克愿意放布朗走，而且以这么草率的方式让她走，这让SpaceX和特斯拉的员工很吃惊，这简直是马斯克冷酷无情的最佳明证。布朗的离开成为马斯克缺乏同情心的证据之一。马斯克用伤人的话斥责员工的故事越传越多。人们还把这种行为归结为马斯克的另一个古怪的特点。一旦他发现邮件内容里有错别字，就会咬住不放，甚至达到了有错字就无法阅读邮件内容的地步。即使在社交场合中，马斯克也可能会突然从餐桌前站起来，不做任何解释，径直走到外面去看星星，仅仅因为他不愿意跟傻瓜待在一起闲聊。基于这所有的行为，很多人向我总结了马斯克给他们留下的印象，他们觉得马斯克是个在一定程度上自闭的人，他没办法考虑别人的情绪，也没办法顾及别人的福祉。

There's a tendency, especially in Silicon Valley, to label people who are a bit different or quirky as autistic or afflicted with Asperger's syndrome. It's armchair psychology for conditions that can be inherently funky to diagnose or even codify. To slap this label on Musk feels ill-informed and too easy.

在硅谷，人们喜欢给那些与众不同或者脾气古怪的人贴上自闭症或者艾斯伯格综合征的标签。这是一种很流行的空想心理学。如果给马斯克贴上这样的标签的话，那你就太不了解情况了。

Musk acts differently with his closest friends and family than he does with employees, even those who have worked alongside him for a long time. Among his inner circle, Musk is warm, funny, and deeply emotional.* He might not engage in the standard chitchat, asking a friend how his kids are doing, but he would do everything in his considerable power to help that friend if his child were sick or in trouble. He will protect those close to him at all costs and, when deemed necessary, seek to destroy those who have wronged him or his friends.

马斯克在他最好的朋友和家人面前又是另外一副模样，和对待员工时完全不同，即使那些员工已经跟随了他很久。在他的小圈子里，马斯克是个热心、风趣而且很容易动感情的人。^[7]他也许不会像普通人聊天那样关心一下朋友的孩子最近如何，但当他朋友的孩子生病了或者有麻烦的时候，他一定会想尽一切办法去帮助他们。必要时，他会不惜一切代价保护自己亲近的人，回击那些伤害他自己或者他朋友的人。

Musk's behavior matches up much more closely with someone who is described by neuropsychologists as profoundly gifted. These are people who in childhood exhibit exceptional intellectual depth and max out IQ tests. It's not uncommon for these children to look out into the world and find flaws—glitches in the system—and construct logical paths in their minds to fix them. For Musk, the call to ensure that mankind is a multiplanetary species partly stems from a life richly influenced by science fiction and technology. Equally it's a moral imperative that dates back to his childhood. In some form, this has forever been his mandate.

按照神经心理学家的描述，马斯克的行为显示他是个天才。这样的人在童年时往往会显示出不凡的智力，能够在智商测试中获得高分。这样的孩子往往会认真地观察这个世界，发现其中的缺陷，比如系统中的小故障，他们会在脑中构思逻辑路径来排除故障。对于马斯克来说，他之所以想要让人类成为多行星物种，很大程度上是因为受到科幻小说和技术的影响。这也可以追溯到他的童年时期。这已经变成他永远的使命。

Each facet of Musk's life might be an attempt to soothe a type of existential depression that seems to gnaw at his every fiber. He sees man as self-limiting and in peril and wants to fix the situation. The people who suggest bad ideas during meetings or make mistakes at work are getting in the way of all of this and slowing Musk down. He does not dislike them as people. It's more that he feels pained by their mistakes, which have consigned man to peril that much longer. The perceived lack of emotion is a symptom of Musk sometimes feeling like he's the only one who really grasps the urgency of his mission. He's less sensitive and less tolerant than other people because the stakes are so high. Employees need to help solve the problems to the absolute best of their ability or they need to get out of the way.

马斯克生活的每一方面都像在试图安抚那些正在侵蚀他每一寸皮肤的忧愁。他看人类皆是自我设限而且身处险境，并想要摆脱这样的处境。那些在开会时提出错误意见的人，或者在工作时犯错误的人，都阻碍了他的前进，让他不得不放慢脚步。他没有像别人一样讨厌这种人，只是为他们所犯的错误感到痛苦。他不是没有感情，只是觉得自己是唯一一个了解自己的使命时间紧迫的人。他比一般人更加不在乎他人的感受、更没有宽容心，因为他冒的风险实在太大。员工应该尽最大能力帮助他解决问题，否则就直接滚蛋。

Musk has been pretty up front about these tendencies. He's implored people to understand that he's not chasing momentary opportunities in the business world. He's trying to solve problems that have been consuming him for decades. During our conversations, Musk went back to this very point over and over again, making sure to emphasize just how long he'd thought about electric cars and space. The same patterns are visible in his actions as well. When Musk announced in 2014 that Tesla would open-source all of its patents, analysts tried to decide whether this was a publicity stunt or if it hid an ulterior motive or a catch. But the decision was a straightforward one for Musk. He wants people to make and buy electric cars. Man's future, as he sees it, depends on this. If open-sourcing Tesla's patents means other companies can build electric cars more easily, then that is good for mankind, and the ideas should be free. The cynic will scoff at this, and understandably so. Musk, however, has been programmed to behave this way and tends to be sincere when explaining his thinking—almost to a fault.

马斯克对于这种事一向很坦率。他希望别人能够理解，他不是在商业世界中追求短暂的机会，而是在试着解决那些几十年来一直困扰他的问题。在我们的对话中，马斯克一次又一次谈到了这一点，强调了他这么多年来对电动汽车和太空的思索。他的行为模式也是这样。当马斯克在2014年宣布特斯拉将公开其所有专利时，分析师们试图确定他是不是在作秀或者其中是否隐藏了不明动机或者圈套。但马斯克的决定就是这么坦率，他希望人们制造并购买电动汽车。马斯克认为，人类的未来取决于此。如果公开特斯拉的专利意味着其他公司能够更容易地制造出电动汽车，那么这对人类来说是有利的，这些理念应该是免费的。愤世嫉俗的人一定会嘲笑他的观点，但马斯克已经计划好这么做，他在解释自己的想法时是真诚的，而且极为真诚。

The people who get closest to Musk are the ones who learn to relate to this mode of thinking. They're the ones who can identify with his vision yet challenge him intellectually to complete it. When he asked me during one of our dinners if I thought he was insane, it was a test of sorts. We had talked enough that he knew I was interested in what he was doing. He had started to trust me and open up but wanted to make sure—one final time—that I truly grasped the importance of his quest. Many of his closest friends have passed much grander, more demanding tests. They've invested in his companies. They've defended him against critics. They helped him keep the wolves at bay during 2008. They've proven their loyalty and their commitment to his cause.

和马斯克最亲近的人都学会了这样的思考模式。他们能够认同他的观点，但他们会挑战它、完善它。马斯克在一次聚餐时询问我，是否觉得他是个疯子，这是他抛给我的一个测试。我们谈了很多，他知道我对他的工作十分感兴趣。他已经开始信任我，打算向我敞开心扉，但他想最后一次确定，我是否真的知道他追求的东西有多么重要。他的许多挚友已经通过了更多、更严格的测试。他们对他的公司寄予希望，在批评声中为他进行辩论，会在他2008年陷入绝境时帮助他。他们已经证明了自己的忠诚，致力于帮他完成他的事业。

People in the technology industry have tended to liken Musk's drive and the scope of his ambition to that of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. “Elon has that deep appreciation for technology, the no-holds-barred attitude of a visionary, and that determination to go after long-term things that they both had,” said Edward Jung, a child prodigy who worked for Jobs and Gates and ended up as Microsoft's chief software architect. “And he has that consumer sensibility of Steve along with the ability to hire good people outside of his own comfort areas that's more like Bill. You almost wish that Bill and Steve had a genetically engineered love child and, who knows, maybe we should genotype Elon to see if that's what happened.” Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalist who has invested in SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, worked for Jobs, and knows Gates well, also described Musk as an upgraded mix of the two. “Like Jobs, Elon does not tolerate C or D players,” said Jurvetson. “But I'd say he's nicer than Jobs and a bit more refined than Bill Gates.”*

技术行业人士喜欢把马斯克的自励和野心与比尔·盖茨及史蒂夫·乔布斯相提并论。“埃隆挚爱技术，他有对梦想无拘无束的态度和长期追求的决心，”曾经在乔布斯和盖茨的公司任职，最后成为微软首席软件架构师的神童爱德华·荣格^{(Edward Jung)}说道，“他有乔布斯那种消费者敏感度以及类似于比尔那样的聘用自己熟悉领域以外的人才的能力。我们有时候希望克隆出比尔和史蒂夫那样的人，或许我们也应该克隆一下埃隆，看看会发生什么。”风险投资家史蒂夫·尤尔韦松^{(Steve Jurvetson)}曾经投资过SpaceX、特斯拉和太阳城，他在乔布斯手下工作过，并且熟悉盖茨的为人，他也觉得马斯克是他们二人的升级结合体。“埃隆和乔布斯同样无法忍受表现差的员工，”尤尔韦松说，“不过我觉得他比乔布斯好相处一点，比盖茨更文雅一点。”^[8]

But the more you know about Musk, the harder it becomes to place him among his peers. Jobs is another CEO who ran two, large industry-changing companies—Apple and Pixar. But that's where the practical similarities between the two men end. Jobs dedicated far more of his energy to Apple than Pixar, unlike Musk, who has poured equal energy into both companies, while saving whatever was left over for SolarCity. Jobs was also legendary for his attention to detail. No one, however, would suggest that his reach extended down as far as Musk's into overseeing so much of the companies' day-to-day operations. Musk's approach has its limitations. He's less artful with marketing and media strategy. Musk does not rehearse his presentations or polish speeches. He wings most of the announcements from Tesla and SpaceX. He'll also fire off some major bit of news on a Friday afternoon when it's likely to get lost as reporters head home for the weekend, simply because that's when he finished writing the press release or wanted to move on to something else. Jobs, by contrast, treated every presentation and media moment as precious. Musk simply does not have the luxury to work that way. “I don't have days to practice,” he said. “I've got to give impromptu talks, and the results may vary.”

当你越来越了解马斯克之后，你会觉得很难把他跟同类人相比。乔布斯也是两家涉足不同产业的公司CEO——苹果公司和皮克斯公司。但他们除了这一点相似之外，其他都不一样。乔布斯在苹果公司投入的精力比皮克斯多，不像马斯克，他对两家公司投入的精力是相等的，然后把剩下的精力投入到太阳城。乔布斯注重细节也是出了名的，但他不像马斯克那样监督着公司如此繁多的日常运营。马斯克的方法有其局限性，他在营销和媒体策略上没有那么应对自如。马斯克不会事先彩排自己的陈述或者润色自己的演讲，他喜欢在特斯拉和SpaceX的大多数新闻宣传活动中进行即兴演讲，他总在周五下午记者们准备回家过周末时召开新闻发布会，因为他一般都是在那时写好了新闻稿，或准备采取下一步行动。乔布斯则相反，他很珍惜每一次做陈述和面对媒体的时刻。马斯克可没有时间这样做。“我没有时间去练习，”他说，“我一般都是即兴演讲，结果各异。”

As for whether Musk is leading the technology industry to new heights like Gates and Jobs, the professional pundits remain mixed. One camp holds that SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX offer little in the way of real hope for an industry that could use some blockbuster innovations. For the other camp, Musk is the real deal and the brightest shining star of what they see as a coming revolution in technology.

至于马斯克有没有像盖茨和乔布斯那样，带领着技术行业到达新的高度，权威人士的说法各不相同。一些人认为，太阳城、特斯拉和SpaceX并没有给产业带来多少真正的希望，它们并不能带来某种轰动性的创新。而另一些人则认为，马斯克有真本事，是未来技术革命中最闪亮的那颗星。

The economist Tyler Cowen—who has earned some measure of fame in recent years for his insightful writings about the state of the technology industry and his ideas on where it may go—falls into that first camp. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been depressed as a result. “In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies,” he wrote. “Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That's it. That is what has gone wrong.”

近年来凭借对科技领域有深刻见解的文章以及关于科技可能走向的观点而闻名的经济学家泰勒·考恩^{(Tyler Cowen)}属于前一类人。在《大停滞》^{(The Great Stagnation)}一书中，考恩对行业缺少显著的技术进步而感到惋惜，他辩称，美国经济已经放慢脚步，因此人们的工资水平也下降了。“这么比喻吧，美国经济从17世纪开始已经取得许多较易取得的成绩，比如自由的国度、大量移民劳动力或强大的新技术，”他写道，“然而，在过去的40年里，这些容易摘到的果子逐渐消失了，我们却假装它还在那儿。我们没有意识到，我们现在正处于技术的停滞期，而这里的果树比我们认为的少很多。就是这样，这就是出问题的地方。”

In his next book, Average Is Over, Cowen predicted an unromantic future in which a great divide had occurred between the Haves and the Have Nots. In Cowen's future, huge gains in artificial intelligence will lead to the elimination of many of today's high-employment lines of work. The people who thrive in this environment will be very bright and able to complement the machines and team effectively with them. As for the unemployed masses? Well, many of them will eventually find jobs going to work for the Haves, who will employ teams of nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners. If anything Musk is doing might alter the course of mankind toward a rosier future, Cowen can't find it. Coming up with true breakthrough ideas is much harder today than in the past, according to Cowen, because we've already mined the bulk of the big discoveries. During a lunch in Virginia, Cowen described Musk not as a genius inventor but as an attention seeker, and not a terribly good one at that. “I don't think a lot of people care about getting to Mars,” he said. “And it seems like a very expensive way to drive whatever breakthroughs you might get from it. Then, you hear about the Hyperloop. I don't think he has any intention of doing it. You have to wonder if it's not meant just to be publicity for his companies. As for Tesla, it might work. But you're still just pushing the problems back somewhere else. You still have to generate power. It could be that he is challenging convention less than people think.”

在他的另一本书《再见，平庸世代》^{(Average Is Over)}中，考恩预测未来将是平庸的，贫富差距的分水岭已经很明显。在考恩预测的未来中，人工智能的长足进步将终结如今众多高就业率的工种。在这种环境下还能生存下来的人是很聪明的，能够有效地补充机器和团队的不足之处。至于那些失业者，他们中的很多人将最终为富人打工，做他们的保姆、管家和园丁。考恩没有发现马斯克正在做的哪件事能够改变人类的发展轨迹，使之朝乐观的未来发展。根据考恩的观点，真正有突破性的理念比过去更难出现，因为我们已经挖掘出了大部分的发明。在弗吉尼亚州的一次午餐会面中，考恩说马斯克不是一个天才型的发明家，他只是一个媒体宠儿，而且他对此并不是特别在行。“我不觉得有很多人会关心去火星的事儿，”他说，“不管你可以从中获得什么突破，代价都是十分昂贵的。就拿他提出的超级高铁来说吧。我不认为他真的会去做这件事，这可能只是他在为自己的公司做宣传。至于特斯拉，它有可能取得成功，但你还是在把问题推到别的地方了，你还是必须产生电能。他在挑战传统方面可能没有人们想象的那么好。”

These sentiments are not far off from those of Vaclav Smil, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. Bill Gates has hailed Smil as an important writer for his tomes on energy, the environment, and manufacturing. One of Smil's latest works is Made in the USA, an exploration of America's past manufacturing glories and its subsequent, dismal loss of industry. Anyone who thinks the United States is making a natural, clever shift away from manufacturing and toward higher-paying information-worker jobs will want to read this book and have a gander at the long-term consequences of this change. Smil presents numerous examples of the ways in which the manufacturing industry generates major innovations and creates a massive ecosystem of jobs and technical smarts around them. “For example, when some three decades ago the United States stopped making virtually all ‘commodity' consumer electronic devices and displays, it also lost its capacity to develop and mass-produce advanced flat screens and batteries, two classes of products that are quintessential for portable computers and cell phones and whose large-scale imports keep adding to the US trade deficit,” Smil wrote. A bit later in the book, Smil emphasized that the aerospace industry, in particular, has been a huge boon to the U.S. economy and one of its major exporters. “Maintaining the sector's competitiveness must be a key component of efforts to boost US exports, and the exports will have to be a large part of the sector's sales because the world's largest aerospace market of the next two decades will be in Asia, above all in China and India, and American aircraft and aeroengine makers should benefit from this expansion.”

曼尼托巴大学退休教授瓦科拉夫·斯米尔^{(Vaclav Smil)}的看法与此相差无几。比尔·盖茨曾经称赞斯米尔是一个很棒的作家，因为他出版了一些关于能源、环境和制造业的重量级著作。斯米尔的最新作品是《美国制造》^{(Made in the USA)}，探索了美国制造业的光辉历史以及后来工业的没落。那些认为美国正在从制造业向更高薪的信息产业自然过渡的人都会想要看一看这本书，了解一下这一变化带来的长期结果。斯米尔列举了很多例子，说明了制造业如何产生重要的创新，以及如何依靠这些创新创造大规模就业生态体系并催生大量科技人员。在书的后一部分，斯米尔强调了航天工业已经给美国经济带来了巨大收益，航天工业企业是美国主要的出口商之一。“比如说，大约30年前，美国实际上已经停止制造所有的‘大宗商品类’消费电子设备与显示器，它也失去了开发和批量生产先进的平面屏幕和电池的能力，这两种产品是笔记本电脑和手机的精髓，大量进口这两种产品不断加大了美国的贸易逆差，”斯米尔写道，“我们必须更加努力地维持这一板块的竞争力，才能促进美国的出口业务，航天工业的出口将占据行业销售额的很大一部分，因为未来20年，世界最大的航天市场将出现在亚洲，尤其是中国和印度，美国的飞机和飞机引擎制造商将会从中获益。”

Smil is consumed by the United States' waning ability to compete with China and yet does not perceive Musk or his companies as any sort of counter to this slide. “As, among other things, a historian of technical advances I simply must see Tesla as nothing but an utterly derivative overhyped toy for showoffs,” Smil wrote to me. “The last thing a country with 50 million people on food stamps and 85 billion dollars deeper into debt every month needs is anything to do with space, especially space with more joyrides for the super rich. And the loop proposal was nothing but bamboozling people who do not know anything about kindergarten physics with a very old, long publicized Gedankenexperiment in kinetics. . . . There are many inventive Americans, but in that lineup Musk would be trailing far behind.”

斯米尔认为美国相对于中国的竞争能力正在减弱，他看不出马斯克或其公司有能力可以扭转这一趋势。“作为一名研究技术进步的历史学家，我只觉得特斯拉缺乏真正的创意，只是一个用于炫耀的被吹得天花乱坠的玩具而已，”斯米尔在写给我的邮件中说道，“对于一个拥有5 000万仰赖食品券的人口和每月新增850亿美元债务的国家而言，根本不需要去研究什么太空事业，尤其是超级富翁才能坐的宇宙飞船。马斯克的提议是在哄骗那些连幼儿园水平的物理原理都不懂的人，只不过是利用了众所周知的动力学理想实验……美国有很多善于发明的人，马斯克跟他们比还差一大截呢。”

The comments were blunt and surprising given some of the things Smil celebrated in his recent book. He spent a good deal of time showing the positive impact that Henry Ford's vertical integration had on advancing the car industry and the American economy. He also wrote at length about the rise of “mechatronic machines,” or machines that rely on a lot of electronics and software. “By 2010 the electronic controls for a typical sedan required more lines of software code than the instructions needed to operate the latest Boeing jetliner,” Smil wrote. “American manufacturing has turned modern cars into remarkable mechatronic machines. The first decade of the twenty-first century also brought innovations ranging from the deployment of new materials (carbon composites in aviation, nanostructures) to wireless electronics.”

鉴于他在最近一本书中颂扬的一些事物，这样的评论显得有点太过直接，令人颇感意外。他花很长的篇幅介绍了亨利·福特的垂直整合对推动汽车产业和美国经济的积极影响，也详细地介绍了“机电一体化设备”或依靠很多电子产品和软件工作的设备的崛起。“截至2010年，一辆普通四门轿车的电子控制系统所需要的代码数，比操控一架最新款的波音喷气式客机所需要的代码还多，”斯米尔写道，“美国制造业已经把现代汽车变成了机电一体化的设备。21世纪的第一个10年里还出现了其他创新，从新材料的使用^{(航天业的碳复合材料、纳米结构)}到无线电子工业。”

There's a tendency among critics to dismiss Musk as a frivolous dreamer that stems first and foremost from a misunderstanding of what Musk is actually doing. People like Smil seem to catch an article or television show that hits on Musk's quest to get to Mars and immediately lump him with the space tourism crowd. Musk, though, hardly ever talks about tourism and has, since day one, built up SpaceX to compete at the industrial end of the space business. If Smil thinks Boeing selling planes is crucial to the American economy, then he should be enthused about what SpaceX has managed to accomplish in the commercial launch market. SpaceX builds its products in the United States, has made dramatic advances in aerospace technology, and has made similar advances in materials and manufacturing techniques. It would not take much to argue that SpaceX is America's only hope of competing against China in the next couple of decades. As for mechatronic machines, SpaceX and Tesla have set the example of fusing together electronics, software, and metal that their rivals are now struggling to match. And all of Musk's companies, including SolarCity, have made dramatic use of vertical integration and turned in-house control of components into a real advantage.

许多评论家开始觉得他们误解了马斯克真正在做的事情，他不应该被看作一个无聊的梦想家。斯米尔这些人看到了描述马斯克想要登上火星的文章或者电视节目，然后马上将他归入太空旅游支持者的队伍当中。但马斯克几乎从未谈论过太空旅游的事，他从创立SpaceX的第一天起，只是想要在太空产业中闯出一片天地。如果斯米尔认为波音公司销售飞机对于美国经济来说很重要，那么他也应该对SpaceX在商业发射市场中取得的成就感到欣喜。SpaceX在美国制造产品，给航天技术带来了巨大的进步，也推动了材料和制造技术的发展。不消多说，SpaceX是未来几十年美国想要和中国一较高下的唯一希望。至于机电一体化设备，SpaceX和特斯拉已经率先将电子、软件和金属融合在一起，他们的竞争者们正在努力追赶。马斯克的所有公司，包括太阳城，已经充分利用了垂直整合方式，把部件的内部控制变成了一项真正的优势。

To get a sense of how powerful Musk's work may end up being for the American economy, have a think about the dominant mechatronic machine of the past several years: the smartphone. Pre-iPhone, the United States was the laggard in the telecommunications industry. All of the exciting cell phones and mobile services were in Europe and Asia, while American consumers bumbled along with dated equipment. When the iPhone arrived in 2007, it changed everything. Apple's device mimicked many of the functions of a computer and then added new abilities with its apps, sensors, and location awareness. Google charged to market with its Android software and related handsets, and the United States suddenly emerged as the driving force in the mobile industry. Smartphones were revolutionary because of the ways they allowed hardware, software, and services to work in unison. This was a mix that favored the skills of Silicon Valley. The rise of the smartphone led to a massive industrial boom in which Apple became the most valuable company in the country, and billions of its clever devices were spread all over the world.

为了了解马斯克的工作将为美国经济带来怎样的影响，我们应该想一想过去十几年来占据优势的机电一体化设备——智能手机。在iPhone出现之前，美国在电信行业一直处于落后水平。欧洲和亚洲的手机和移动服务才是最先进的，美国的消费者使用的都是过时的设备。当iPhone在2007年面世之后，一切都不同了。苹果设备模仿了电脑的很多功能，以应用程序、传感器和定位功能等形式为手机带来了新功能。谷歌带着安卓软件和相关手机进入了市场，美国突然成为移动产业的中坚力量。智能手机带来了革命性的变化，因为它们让硬件、软件和服务能够无缝衔接，这证实了硅谷的技术能力。智能手机的崛起带来了巨大的工业繁荣，而苹果公司也成为美国最具价值的公司，数十亿台智能设备被销售到世界各地。

Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive credited with bringing the iPod and iPhone to market, has characterized the smartphone as representative of a type of super-cycle in which hardware and software have reached a critical point of maturity. Electronics are good and cheap, while software is more reliable and sophisticated. Their interplay is now resulting in science fiction–worthy ideas we were promised long ago becoming a reality. Google has its self-driving cars and has acquired dozens of robotics companies as it looks to merge code and machine. Fadell's company Nest has its intelligent thermostats and smoke alarms. General Electric has jet engines packed full of sensors taught to proactively report possible anomalies to its human mechanics. And a host of start-ups have begun infusing medical devices with powerful software to help people monitor and analyze their bodies and diagnose conditions. Tiny satellites are being put into orbit twenty at a time, and instead of being given a fixed task for their entire lifetimes, like their predecessors, they're being reprogrammed on the fly for a wide variety of business and scientific tasks. Zee Aero, a start-up in Mountain View, has a couple of former SpaceX staffers on hand and is working on a secretive new type of transport. A flying car at last? Perhaps.

苹果公司前高管托尼·法德尔^{(Tony Fadell)}被认为是把iPod和iPhone推向市场的幕后功臣，他认为智能手机是一种超级循环下的代表性产物，在这个循环当中，硬件和软件已经到达了成熟的临界点。电子产品便宜又好用，软件也更可靠、更成熟。它们的相互作用让我们过去提出的那些科幻小说一般的创意变成了现实。谷歌发明了无人驾驶汽车，收购了多家机器人公司，以便更好地将软件和机器相结合。法德尔的耐斯特^(Nest)公司拥有智能恒温控制器和烟雾报警器。通用电气公司拥有装满传感器的喷气发动机，能够主动向机械师报告可能存在的异常现象。许多新兴的公司已经开始将医疗器械和软件融合起来，帮助人们监视并分析自己的身体情况，诊断病情。人们把小型卫星送入轨道，这些卫星不像之前那样，只能完成一项固定的任务，现在的卫星能够在飞行途中再次设定程序，去完成各种商业和科学任务。加州山景城一家名为Zee Aero的新兴公司聘用了SpaceX的许多前雇员，他们正在秘密进行一种新型交通工具的研发。是一种会飞的汽车吗？也有可能哦。

For Fadell, Musk's work sits at the highest end of this trend. “He could have just made an electric car,” Fadell said. “But he did things like use motors to actuate the door handles. He's bringing the consumer electronics and the software together, and the other car companies are trying to figure out a way to get there. Whether it's Tesla or SpaceX taking Ethernet cables and running them inside of rocket ships, you are talking about combining the old-world science of manufacturing with low-cost, consumer-grade technology. You put these things together, and they morph into something we have never seen before. All of a sudden there is a wholesale change,” he said. “It's a step function.”

法德尔认为，马斯克的工作处于这一趋势的最高点。“他本来只需要制造一辆电动汽车，”法德尔说，“但他用马达来启动门把手，把消费类电子产品和软件结合在一起，其他汽车公司也在想方设法做到这一点。无论特斯拉还是SpaceX，要把以太网电缆安装到火箭船中用于网络通信，都需要把旧世界的制造科学和低成本的消费级技术结合起来。当你把这两样东西结合在一起时，它们会变成我们从未见过的新事物。突然间，整个世界都变了，”他说：“这是一个巨大的飞跃。”

To the extent that Silicon Valley has searched for an inheritor to Steve Jobs's role as the dominant, guiding force of the technology industry, Musk has emerged as the most likely candidate. He's certainly the “it” guy of the moment. Start-up founders, proven executives, and legends hold him up as the person they most admire. The more mainstream Tesla can become, the more Musk's reputation will rise. A hot-selling Model 3 would certify Musk as that rare being able to rethink an industry, read consumers, and execute. From there, his more fanciful ideas start to seem inevitable. “Elon is one of the few people that I feel is more accomplished than I am,” said Craig Venter, the man who decoded the human genome and went on to create synthetic lifeforms. At some point he hopes to work with Musk on a type of DNA printer that could be sent to Mars. It would, in theory, allow humans to create medicines, food, and helpful microbes for early settlers of the planet. “I think biological teleportation is what is going to truly enable the colonization of space,” he said. “Elon and I have been talking about how this might play out.”

硅谷一直在寻找一个能够代替乔布斯成为技术行业领军角色的新人物，而马斯克就是最热门的候选人。他一定是此刻最受瞩目的人物。新兴公司的创办人、经验丰富的高管和各种传奇人物都一致赞赏马斯克。如果特斯拉能够变得更主流的话，那么马斯克的声誉就会更上一层楼。热销的Model 3将证明马斯克能够重新反思一个行业、读懂消费者的心思并执行他的计划。从那以后，他有了越来越多稀奇古怪的想法。“埃隆是为数不多的我认为比我更有成就的人之一。”破译了人类基因组并继续创造人工生命形态的克雷格·文特尔^{(Craig Venter)}这样说道。他希望能够和马斯克合作，制造一台能够带上火星的DNA打印机。理论上，它能够让首批登陆火星的人类自己生产药品、食物和有用的微生物。“我认为，只有生物远程传送机才能真正做到太空殖民，”他说，“埃隆已经和我讨论过怎么去做了。”

One of Musk's most ardent admirers is also one of his best friends: Larry Page, the cofounder and CEO of Google. Page has ended up on Musk's house-surfing schedule. “He's kind of homeless, which I think is sort of funny,” Page said. “He'll e-mail and say, ‘I don't know where to stay tonight. Can I come over?' I haven't given him a key or anything yet.”

谷歌创始人之一兼CEO拉里·佩奇是马斯克最好的朋友之一，也是他最忠实的仰慕者。佩奇早已被列入马斯克的借宿名单了。“他简直跟无家可归似的，我觉得有点古怪，”佩奇说，“他会发邮件来跟我说：‘今晚我没地方住。我能来你这儿过夜吗？’我还没给过他钥匙或别的什么东西。”

Google has invested more than just about any other technology company into Musk's sort of moon-shot projects: self-driving cars, robots, and even a cash prize to get a machine onto the moon cheaply. The company, however, operates under a set of constraints and expectations that come with employing tens of thousands of people and being analyzed constantly by investors. It's with this in mind that Page sometimes feels a bit envious of Musk, who has managed to make radical ideas the basis of his companies. “If you think about Silicon Valley or corporate leaders in general, they're not usually lacking in money,” Page said. “If you have all this money, which presumably you're going to give away and couldn't even spend it all if you wanted to, why then are you devoting your time to a company that's not really doing anything good? That's why I find Elon to be an inspiring example. He said, ‘Well, what should I really do in this world? Solve cars, global warming, and make humans multiplanetary.' I mean those are pretty compelling goals, and now he has businesses to do that.”

谷歌也向类似于马斯克火星计划的月球探测器计划投入了很多资金，比其他任何一家技术公司都多，包括无人驾驶汽车、机器人，以及给予能够发明低成本登月设备的人现金奖励。但谷歌作为一家拥有几万名员工的公司，它的运作总是受到一系列的限制，随时接受投资人的分析和审查，并被寄予很高的期望。因此，佩奇有时会很羡慕马斯克，因为他成功地让激进的变革理念成为公司立足的根基。“想想硅谷或一般的企业领导者，他们一般都不缺钱，”佩奇说，“如果你有那么多钱，但你在想用的时候却不能用，那你为什么还要投入那么多时间来经营一家什么事也做不成的公司呢？所以我觉得埃隆是我的榜样。他说，‘我在这个世界上应该做什么？我要制造汽车、解决全球变暖问题和让人类实现星际生存。’我觉得这些都是令人叹服的目标，而他现在正在做这些事。”

“This becomes a competitive advantage for him, too. Why would you want to work for a defense contractor when you can work for a guy who wants to go to Mars and he's going to move heaven and earth to make it happen? You can frame a problem in a way that's really good for the business.”

“这也成为他的一个竞争优势。如果你可以为一个目标是登陆火星，并且竭尽全力去实现这一目标的人工作，那你为什么还要傻傻地为一个国防承包商干活儿？你完全可以从对公司有价值的角度来阐述你要解决的这个商业问题。”

At one point, a quotation from Page made the rounds, saying that he wanted to leave all of his money to Musk. Page felt he was misquoted but stood by the sentiment. “I'm not leaving my money to him at the moment,” Page said. “But Elon makes a pretty compelling case for having a multiplanetary society just because, you know, otherwise we might all die, which seems like it would be sad for all sorts of different reasons. I think it's a very doable project, and it's a relatively modest resource that we need to set up a permanent human settlement on Mars. I was just trying to make the point that that's a really powerful idea.”

一度有传闻说佩奇打算把所有钱都留给马斯克。佩奇认为别人误解了他的意思，但他其实觉得这个想法也不错。“我目前不会把钱都给他，”佩奇说，“但埃隆提出了建设一个星际生存社会的想法，因为如果不这样，人类将会灭绝，这是件令人悲伤的事。我认为这是个十分可行的项目，我们需要适度的资源在火星上建立起一个永久的人类居住地。我只是在证明这一点：这真的是一个很给力的想法。”

As Page puts it, “Good ideas are always crazy until they're not.” It's a principle he's tried to apply at Google. When Page and Sergey Brin began wondering aloud about developing ways to search the text inside of books, all of the experts they consulted said it would be impossible to digitize every book. The Google cofounders decided to run the numbers and see if it was actually physically possible to scan the books in a reasonable amount of time. They concluded it was, and Google has since scanned millions of books. “I've learned that your intuition about things you don't know that much about isn't very good,” Page said. “The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There's this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what's possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues.”

佩奇说：“好的点子在被实现之前，人们总觉得那很疯狂。”他在谷歌也试着应用这一原则。当佩奇和谢尔盖·布林开始疑惑怎么找到一种方法来搜索书籍内部的内容时，他们咨询的所有专家都认为，不可能把每本书都数字化。于是这两名谷歌创始人决定进行测试，看看有没有可能在一段合理的时间内把书的内容扫描进电脑。结论是有可能的，迄今为止，谷歌扫描了几百万本书。“我知道，对于自己不了解的事情，直觉不是很可靠，”佩奇说，“埃隆对这种事是这么说的：你总是需要从一个问题的首要原则开始着手。它的物理本质是什么？需要花多少时间？需要花多少钱？我要做的话可以便宜多少？你需要一定程度的工程学和物理学知识来判断什么是可能、有趣的。埃隆的不同寻常之处就在于他知道这一点，并且他还了解商业、组织、领导力和政府问题。”

Some of the conversations between Musk and Page take place at a secret apartment Google owns in downtown Palo Alto. It's inside of one of the taller buildings in the area and offers views of the mountains surrounding the Stanford University campus. Page and Brin will take private meetings at the apartment and have their own chef on call to prepare food for guests. When Musk is present, the chats tend toward the absurd and fantastic. “I was there once, and Elon was talking about building an electric jet plane that can take off and land vertically,” said George Zachary, the venture capitalist and friend of Musk's. “Larry said the plane should be able to land on ski slopes, and Sergey said it needed to be able to dock at a port in Manhattan. Then they started talking about building a commuter plane that was always circling the Earth, and you'd hop up to it and get places incredibly fast. I thought everyone was kidding, but at the end I asked Elon, ‘Are you really going to do that?' And he said, ‘Yes.'”

马斯克和佩奇有几次在谷歌位于帕洛阿尔托的一处秘密公寓里进行交谈。这间公寓位于当地最高的一幢大楼里，从房间里能够看到环绕着斯坦福大学校园的山景。佩奇和布林会在这间公寓里举办私人会议，他们专属的大厨可以随叫随到，给客人准备食物。马斯克在场时，聊天的话题总会变得荒唐又不可思议。“有一次我在那儿，埃隆在谈论制造一架电动喷气式飞机，能够垂直起降，”风险投资人兼马斯克的朋友乔治·扎卡里说，“佩奇说，飞机应该能够在滑雪坡道上降落，而布林说，它应该能够在曼哈顿港停靠。然后他们开始讨论制造一架通勤飞机，一直围绕着地球飞行，当你加足马力时，它能够以惊人的速度飞到你想去的地方。我认为他们都在开玩笑，但结束时我问埃隆：‘你真的要制造这种飞机吗？’他回答说：‘对啊。’”

“It's kind of our recreation, I guess,” said Page.“It's fun for the three of us to talk about kind of crazy things, and we find stuff that eventually turns out to be real. We go through hundreds or thousands of possible things before arriving at the ones that are most promising.”

“我觉得这种讨论已经成为我们的一种娱乐方式，”佩奇说，“我们三个人讨论这种疯狂的事情，很好玩，我们也会发现最后真正能够变成现实的东西。在最后确定最有前景的那个项目之前，我们总要先考虑几百，甚至几千个可能的项目。”

Page talked about Musk at times as if he were a one-of-a-kind, a force of nature able to accomplish things in the business world that others would never even try. “We think of SpaceX and Tesla as being these tremendously risky things, but I think Elon was going to make them work no matter what. He's willing to suffer some personal cost, and I think that makes his odds actually pretty good. If you knew him personally, you would look back to when he started the companies and say his odds of success would be more than ninety percent. I mean we just have a single proof point now that you can be really passionate about something that other people think is crazy and you can really succeed. And you look at it with Elon and you say, ‘Well, maybe it's not luck. He's done it twice. It can't be luck totally.' I think that means it should be repeatable in some sense. At least it's repeatable by him. Maybe we should get him to do more things.”

佩奇跟别人谈起马斯克时，就好像他是自然赐予人类的独一无二的人，能够在商业世界中完成其他人连试都没试过的事情。“我们觉得SpaceX和特斯拉做的项目风险都很高，但我认为马斯克无论遇到什么困难都会尽力去完成它们。他愿意付出个人代价，这会让他的胜算变大。如果你私下认识他，当你回忆他刚刚创业的那个时候，你会觉得他成功的胜算在90%以上。我的意思是，我们现在有一点可以证明：对待某些别人觉得很疯狂而你自己觉得可以真正成功的事情，你会真的充满热情。当你从这个角度看埃隆时，你会说：‘好吧，可能这不是光凭运气。他已经成功了两次。这不可能只是因为运气好。’我认为这意味着成功在某种意义上是可以重复的，至少他可以重复这种成功。可能我们应该让他做得更多。”

Page holds Musk up as a model he wishes others would emulate—a figure that should be replicated during a time in which the businessmen and politicians have fixated on short-term, inconsequential goals. “I don't think we're doing a good job as a society deciding what things are really important to do,” Page said. “I think like we're just not educating people in this kind of general way. You should have a pretty broad engineering and scientific background. You should have some leadership training and a bit of MBA training or knowledge of how to run things, organize stuff, and raise money. I don't think most people are doing that, and it's a big problem. Engineers are usually trained in a very fixed area. When you're able to think about all of these disciplines together, you kind of think differently and can dream of much crazier things and how they might work. I think that's really an important thing for the world. That's how we make progress.”

佩奇把马斯克作为榜样，希望其他人也能向他学习，在这个商人和政治家都只注重短期的无关紧要的目标的时代，应该多一些像马斯克这样的人物。“我不认为我们现在做得很好，因为这个社会可以决定什么才是真正重要的事，”佩奇说，“我认为我们就是没有用这种观念教育人们。你应该具有相当广博的工程学和科学背景；你应该接受过一些领导技巧训练、MBA培训或者具有经营业务、组织活动和筹集资金的相关知识。但我认为大多数人都没有接受过这样的培训或教育，这是个重要问题。工程师们通常只在一个固定的领域内接受培训。当你能够综合考虑这些学科时，你将会产生不一样的想法，能够梦想实现一些更疯狂的事情，想象它们会怎么运作。我认为这对世界来说才是最重要的。这样我们才能进步。”

The pressure of feeling the need to fix the world takes its toll on Musk's body. There are times when you run into Musk and he looks utterly exhausted. He does not have bags under his eyes but rather deep, shadowy valleys. During the worst of times, following weeks of sleep deprivation, his eyes seem to have sunk back into his skull. Musk's weight moves up and down with the stress, and he's usually heavier when really overworked. It's funny in a way that Musk spends so much time talking about man's survival but isn't willing to address the consequences of what his lifestyle does to his body. “Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short,” Straubel said. “If you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can.”

改变这个世界的想法压垮了马斯克。有时，当你遇到马斯克的时候，他看起来筋疲力尽。他没有眼袋，但他的眼眶深陷。在最糟糕的时候，他连续几个星期睡眠不足，眼睛看起来都陷入头骨里面去了。马斯克的体重随着压力的大小上下浮动，当他劳累过度时波动往往会更明显一些。有趣的是，他总是喜欢谈论人类的生存，但他从不关注这种生活方式对自己身体健康的影响。“早在埃隆开始创业的时候，他就已经得出了结论，那就是‘生命是短暂的’，”斯特劳贝尔说，“如果你真的意识到这一点，你就会知道，活着的时候越努力工作越好。”

Suffering, though, has always been Musk's thing. The kids at school tortured him. His father played brutal mind games. Musk then abused himself by working inhumane hours and forever pushing his businesses to the edge. The idea of work-life balance seems meaningless in this context. For Musk, it's just life, and his wife and kids try to fit into the show where they can. “I'm a pretty good dad,” Musk said. “I have the kids for slightly more than half the week and spend a fair bit of time with them. I also take them with me when I go out of town. Recently, we went to the Monaco Grand Prix and were hanging out with the prince and princess of Monaco. It all seemed quite normal to the kids, and they were blasé about it. They are growing up having a set of experiences that are extremely unusual, but you don't realize experiences are unusual until you are much older. They're just your experiences. They have good manners at meals.”

忍受痛苦一直是马斯克的必修课。学校同学的凌辱折磨让他很头疼，他的父亲过去会和他玩一些严酷的心理游戏，长大后马斯克会用工作麻痹自己，他总是超时工作，而且总把工作日程安排到紧迫不堪，强迫自己不断迈上新台阶。工作和生活的平衡对于他来说毫无意义。对于马斯克来说，工作就是生活，他的妻子和孩子会配合他的人生大戏。“我是个好爸爸，”马斯克说，“我一个星期里有超过一半的时间和他们在一起，我出门的时候还会带上他们。最近，我们去了摩纳哥，观看一级方程式赛车锦标赛，和摩纳哥王子与王妃一起游玩。这对孩子们来说很普通，他们已经玩腻了。他们逐渐长大，有了很多不同寻常的经历，但在他们足够成熟之前，不会意识到这些经历有多么不同寻常。这些只是他们的经历而已。他们有很好的就餐礼仪。”

It bothers Musk a bit that his kids won't suffer like he did. He feels that the suffering helped to make him who he is and gave him extra reserves of strength and will. “They might have a little adversity at school, but these days schools are so protective,” he said. “If you call someone a name, you get sent home. When I was going to school, if they punched you and there was no blood, it was like, ‘Whatever. Shake it off.' Even if there was a little blood, but not a lot, it was fine. What do I do? Create artificial adversity? How do you do that? The biggest battle I have is restricting their video game time because they want to play all the time. The rule is they have to read more than they play video games. They also can't play completely stupid video games. There's one game they downloaded recently called Cookies or something. You literally tap a fucking cookie. It's like a Psych 101 experiment. I made them delete the cookie game. They had to play Flappy Golf instead, which is like Flappy Bird, but at least there is some physics involved.”

马斯克的孩子们没有吃过他那样的苦，这让他觉得很苦恼。他觉得吃苦帮助他成为现在的自己，给了他额外的力量和意志。“他们应该在学校吃点苦，但现在的学校太保护学生了，”他说，“如果你吼了谁一声，你就会被赶回家。在我读书那时，如果谁给了你一拳，没有出血的话，那都不算事儿。就算出了一点点血，不是很多，也没事。我能做什么呢？给他们吃点苦？该怎么做？我最多就是限制他们打电子游戏的时间，因为他们总想没日没夜地玩。我定的规矩是，他们看书的时间必须比打游戏的时间多。他们也不能玩特别愚蠢的电子游戏。他们最近下载了一个游戏，好像叫‘饼干’还是什么的，只要点击那块饼干就行，跟心理学101实验差不多。我命令他们把这个游戏删了。他们只好去玩‘疯狂高尔夫’，它类似于‘笨鸟先飞’，但至少里面还涉及一点物理学知识。”

Musk has talked about having more kids, and it's on this subject that he delivers some controversial philosophizing vis-à-vis the creator of Beavis and Butt-head. “There's this point that Mike Judge makes in Idiocracy, which is like smart people, you know, should at least sustain their numbers,” Musk said. “Like, if it's a negative Darwinian vector, then obviously that's not a good thing. It should be at least neutral. But if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's probably bad, too. I mean, Europe, Japan, Russia, China are all headed for demographic implosion. And the fact of the matter is that basically the wealthier—basically wealth, education, and being secular are all indicative of low birth rate. They all correlate with low birth rate. I'm not saying like only smart people should have kids. I'm just saying that smart people should have kids as well. They should at least maintain—at least be a replacement rate. And the fact of the matter is that I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You're like, ‘Wow, that's probably not good.'”

马斯克讨论过再生几个孩子，他和《瘪四与大头蛋》的制作人面对面地讨论了一些哲学问题。“迈克·詹郅出于这一点导演了《蠢蛋进化论》^(Idiocracy)：聪明人应该至少维持他们的人口基数，”马斯克说，“根据达尔文进化论，如果不能适者生存，那么很明显，这不是一件好事。至少聪明人和蠢人的数量应该达到平衡。但如果每一代聪明人生的孩子越来越少，那可能也不是好事。我的意思是，欧洲、日本、俄罗斯和中国都将面临人口问题。真实情况是，富裕人群、受教育水平较高的人群和无宗教信仰的人群普遍显示出较低的生育率。我并不是说只有聪明的人才应该生孩子，我的意思是说，聪明的人也应该生孩子，他们至少应该维持人口更新率。事实是，我注意到很多真正聪明的女性只生了一个孩子，甚至没有孩子，这让人觉得：‘哎呀，这可不太好。’”

The next decade of Musk Co. should be quite something. Musk has given himself a chance to become one of the greatest businessmen and innovators of all time. By 2025 Tesla could very well have a lineup of five or six cars and be the dominant force in a booming electric car market. Playing off its current growth rate, SolarCity will have had time to emerge as a massive utility company and the leader in a solar market that had finally lived up to its promise. SpaceX? Well, it's perhaps the most intriguing. According to Musk's calculations, SpaceX should be conducting weekly flights to space, carrying humans and cargo, and have put most of its competitors out of business. Its rockets should be capable of doing a couple of laps around the moon and then landing with pinpoint accuracy back at the spaceport in Texas. And the preparation for the first few dozen trips to Mars should be well under way.

马斯克的三家公司在接下来10年的发展应该是非同寻常的。他有机会成为有史以来最伟大的商人和创新者之一。到2025年，特斯拉将拥有5~6种车型，会成为正在蓬勃发展的电动汽车市场中的主导力量。根据目前的增长率来看，太阳城将实现它的承诺，成为一家大型公用事业公司以及太阳能市场的领军企业。而SpaceX呢？它可能是最有趣的。根据马斯克的计算，SpaceX每个星期都会进行发射，把人和货物送上太空，竞争者会因此出局。它的火箭能够绕月球几圈，然后以高精确度着陆在得克萨斯州的宇航中心。然后他们将着手首批前往火星的飞行准备工作。

If all of this were taking place, Musk, then in his mid-fifties, likely would be the richest man in the world and among its most powerful. He would be the majority shareholder in three public companies, and history would be preparing to smile broadly on what he had accomplished. During a time in which countries and other businesses were paralyzed by indecision and inaction, Musk would have mounted the most viable charge against global warming, while also providing people with an escape plan—just in case. He would have brought a substantial amount of crucial manufacturing back to the United States while also providing an example for other entrepreneurs hoping to harness a new age of wonderful machines. As Thiel said, Musk may well have gone so far as to give people hope and to have renewed their faith in what technology can do for mankind.

如果这些都能实现的话，到那时，年近55岁的马斯克将成为全世界最富有且最有权势的人之一。他将成为三家上市公司的大股东，其成就将载入史册。当其他国家和公司因为犹豫不决而碌碌无为时，马斯克应该已经采用最可行的方法来对抗全球变暖，还能提供人类去其他星球避难的计划，以防万一。他应该已经把大量的关键制造业带回美国，给想要再创机械新时代的其他企业家树立了榜样。正如蒂尔所说，马斯克将给人类带来希望，恢复他们对技术改变人类生活的信仰。

This future, of course, remains precarious. Huge technological issues confront all three of Musk's companies. He's bet on the inventiveness of man and the ability of solar, battery, and aerospace technology to follow predicted price and performance curves. Even if these bets hit as he hopes, Tesla could face a weird, unexpected recall. SpaceX could have a rocket carrying humans blow up—an incident that could very well end the company on the spot. Dramatic risks accompany just about everything Musk does.

当然，这样的未来依然是不确定的。马斯克的三家公司将面对巨大的技术难题。他在人类的创新精神以及太阳能、电池和航天航空技术能够按照预测的价格和性能曲线发展方面下了很大的赌注。即使他赌赢了，特斯拉也有面临意料之外召回的可能。SpaceX可能遭遇载人火箭的爆炸事故，一旦发生这种情况，公司将马上毁于一旦。戏剧性的风险将一直伴随着马斯克正在做的每一件事。

By the time our last dinner had come around, I had decided that this propensity for risk had little to do with Musk being insane, as he had wondered aloud several months earlier. No, Musk just seems to possess a level of conviction that is so intense and exceptional as to be off-putting to some. As we shared some chips and guacamole and cocktails, I asked Musk directly just how much he was willing to put on the line. His response? Everything that other people hold dear. “I would like to die on Mars,” he said. “Just not on impact. Ideally I'd like to go for a visit, come back for a while, and then go there when I'm like seventy or something and then just stay there. If things turn out well, that would be the case. If my wife and I have a bunch of kids, she would probably stay with them on Earth.”

如果马斯克纵情于此，他将一直伴随着这些风险，牺牲大多数人珍惜的一切。“我希望死在火星上，”他说，“我想去那里参观一下，然后回来一阵子，等到我大概70岁的时候再去，这样我就能一直住在那儿了。如果顺利的话，一切就会这样发展下去。如果莱莉和我生了很多孩子，那她可能会留在地球上，和孩子们在一起。”

^[1]实际上他不止是个运动员。林登和他的妻子都会打水下曲棍球，而且打得很好，他们因满足“特殊才能”的标准并获得了绿卡。他们曾代表美国国家队参加过水下曲棍球比赛。

^[2]2013年，1.3万人出席了会议。

^[3]假设每辆车售价4万美元，一年售出30万辆的话，那就是年收入120亿美元或平均月收入10亿美元。

^[4]马斯克还谈及很多宇宙飞船的物理和化学问题，太空爱好者们可以看到：“建造能够上火星的宇宙飞船的最后一个难题是甲烷发动机。你得在火星表面生成推进剂。现今火箭使用的大多数燃料都是煤油，生成煤油是一个特别复杂的过程，需要一系列的长链碳氢化合物。”制备甲烷或者氢则容易许多。氢最大的问题是，它是一种深度冷却剂，只有在接近绝对零度时才会变成液体。由于氢气是小分子，会渗透金属基体，使金属变脆或毁坏金属基体。氢的密度也很小，因此燃料罐必须很大，这使制备和储存氢的成本变得很昂贵。作为燃料的话，这不是一个很好的选择。

而甲烷则更容易处理。它变成液态的温度，和氧气液化的温度差不多，因此你只需在火箭里设置一个普通的隔板，也无须担心气体凝固的问题。甲烷同时也是地球上成本最低的矿物燃料。我们需要很多的能量才能去往火星。

因为火星上的大气是二氧化碳，土壤里有很多水或者冰，我们可以用二氧化碳和水制备甲烷和氧气，这样就能燃烧，一切问题就能迎刃而解了。

随后，最关键的问题之一是，你能否搭乘火箭到达火星表面并回到地球。答案是肯定的，如果你把回程时的有效载荷变为出发时的1/4就能做到，我认为这行得通，因为你要从地球带到火星上去的东西肯定比要从火星带回地球的东西多很多。而宇宙飞船的防热罩、生命保障系统和支架必须很轻很轻。

^[5]马斯克和莱莉离婚不到一年就复合了。“办理离婚手续期间，我拒绝和他说话，”莱莉说，“可是，当离婚手续真的办好以后，我们马上又重新在一起了。”至于离婚的原因，莱莉是这么解释的：“我就是觉得很不快乐。我觉得我可能做出了一个错误的决定。”至于再次复合的原因，她说：“一个原因是，我找不到人能够取代他。我兜兜转转了一圈，都没有发现让我心动的人。另一个原因是，埃隆这一辈子都不会听别人的话。谁的都不听。对于不符合他世界观的事他都不会去理睬。但他向我证明了他愿意为我做任何事。他说：‘我愿意倾听她的话，搞明白是怎么回事。’他向我证明了他重视我的意见，并且愿意倾听我的意见。我觉得这说明了一个问题，那就是他为此做出过努力。我爱着他，也想着他。”

^[6]根据马斯克的回忆：“我跟她说：‘我觉得你是很有价值的。可能你要求的工资待遇是合理的。你需要先休两个星期的假，我会评估这个要求合理与否。’在她放假前，我已经给了她很多天的带薪假期。我是真的希望她能好好休个假。等她回来的时候，我的结论是，我们的关系到此结束了。她已经做了12年，对于任何一份工作而言都已足够。她应该去找新的工作。”根据马斯克所说，他为布朗在公司安排了另一个职位，但她拒绝了这份工作，再也没有在公司里出现。马斯克给了她12个月的解约赔偿金，后来再也没有和她说过话。

^[7]根据莱莉所说：“埃隆是个厚脸皮又幽默的人。他很顾家，对孩子很好。他很幽默，真的特别幽默。他很善变，他是我见过最古怪的人。他有时会很自我，每当这时我会把他拉回来。他还会说些好笑的事，然后咧着嘴笑。他在各方面都很聪明。他很爱读书，有不凡的智慧。他爱看电影，我们会去看新上映的乐高大电影，然后他坚持要我叫他‘商业之王’。当我们有家庭聚餐时，他都会尽量早点回家陪我和孩子，有时还会陪儿子们打打电脑游戏。孩子们会向我们讲述一天的经历，之后跟我们说晚安。然后我们会聊会儿天，在笔记本上看看类似《科尔伯特报告》之类的电视节目。周末的时候，我们会去短途旅行。孩子们很爱旅行。以前我们有很多个保姆，甚至还有专门的保姆经理。现在一切都变得更正常了。我们尝试尽可能地以一家人的方式一起做一些事。我们一周有4天陪着孩子。我觉得我是个严格的人。我希望他们能够过正常的生活，但他们总是过着一种奇怪的生活。他们刚刚才和贾斯汀·比伯一起去旅游。他们到了火箭工厂，然后说：‘不，我不想再来了。’如果你的父亲是个造火箭的，你也不会觉得他很酷。他们已经习惯这样了。”

别人都没有发现埃隆是这样一个天真无邪的人。有时候，他除了纯粹的喜悦之外没有办法感受到其他情绪。而有时候他就是纯粹地生气。当他有某种情绪的时候，他的感受是完全的、纯粹的。没有别的事情能把情绪强加给他。很少有人能够和他一样。如果看到有趣的事情，他会放声大笑，忘记我们正在一个人头攒动的大剧院里，这会影响到其他人。他就像个孩子，很迷人且令人难以置信。他会莫名其妙地说：‘我是个复杂的人，但我的需求很简单、很明确。’或者‘没有人会是一座孤岛，除非他既强大又乐观’。我们会把想做的事罗列出来。他最近列出的计划是我们去沙滩漫步，欣赏日落，在对方耳边说着情话，还有骑马。他喜欢看书、打电子游戏和会友。”

^[8]尤尔韦松更详细地说道：“埃隆有盖茨那样的工程学天赋，但他更懂得人际相处。和盖茨在一起时，你没法进入他的圈子。埃隆更有人格魅力。他有一点和乔布斯很像，那就是他们都无法忍受傻瓜。但跟乔布斯在一起像在坐过山车似的，他喜欢你的时候，你就是天才；他不喜欢你了，你就是蠢材。我觉得埃隆也有点这样。”