SimplyAbuDhabi XXXVII

070 | SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL A lot of my motivation comes from looking at things that don’t work well.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s his relationships that fail. When the journalist Neil Strauss interviewed Musk in 2017, the first question he asked was how it felt to launch the Tesla Model 3 — how did he feel standing on stage telling the world he had just bootstrapped a mass-market electric car? Musk struggled to answer, before confessing. “I just broke up with my girlfriend. I was really in love and it hurt bad,” he said, talking about the actress Amber Heard. “Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think. I’ve been in severe emotional pain for the past few weeks. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up: drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people and then, like, tell myself, ‘I have all these people depending on me. All right, do it!’ ” He asked Strauss to suggest or even introduce him to possible girlfriends because, he said, “It’s so hard for me to even meet people. I’m looking for a long-term relationship. I’m looking for a serious companion or soulmate. It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there. When I was a child there’s one thing I said . . . ‘I never want to be alone.’ ” There’s an echo of this in his business philosophy. “A lot of my motivation comes from looking at things that don’t work well and feeling a bit sad about how it would manifest in the future,” he has said. “If that would result in an unhappy future, then it makes me unhappy, so I want to fix it.” Certainly he is as much a hard-headed businessman as a dreamer. He admits that he expected SpaceX and Tesla to fail, but was canny enough to walk out of negotiations with the Russian rocket builder Kosmotras when he realised that he could build a rocket for less than 5 per cent of the market price. SpaceX rose, well, like a rocket. His Falcon 1, launched in 2008, was the first privately funded rocket to reach orbit and was followed by the launch and recovery of Dragon, the future replacement for the Space Shuttle. “ SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL | 071 “Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience,” says Dolly Singh, the former head of talent acquisition at SpaceX. “He is never satisfied with himself, so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him. He pushes himself harder and harder and he pushes others around him the exact same way. So if you work for Elon you have to accept the discomfort. But in that discomfort is the kind of growth you can’t get anywhere else, and worth every ounce of blood and sweat.” And Musk dreams of growth in a way that few CEOs have. All of his achievements, he insists, are steps on the road to his goal of a full colonisation of Mars, requiring AI-guided space travel, electric vehicles and solar power. Why? Because he fears we’re on the brink of destruction, citing global war, a technology collapse and climate change as existential threats. “There’s a window where we have an opportunity to establish a self-sustaining base on Mars,” he reasons, “before something happens to drive the technology level on Earth below where it’s possible.”