姜小白对《Elon Musk》的笔记(4)

Musk was laser-focused on keeping down costs. It was not simply because his own money was on the line, though that was a factor. It was also because cost-effectiveness was critical for his ultimate goal, which was to colonize Mars. He challenged the prices that aerospace suppliers charged for components, which were usually ten times higher than similar parts in the auto industry.

His focus on cost, as well as his natural controlling instincts, led him to want to manufacture as many components as possible in-house, rather than buy them from suppliers, which was then the standard practice in the rocket and car industries. At one point SpaceX needed a valve, Mueller recalls, and the supplier said it “would cost $250,000. Musk declared that insane and told Mueller they should make it themselves. They were able to do so in months at a fraction of the cost. Another supplier quoted a price of $120,000 for an actuator that would swivel the nozzle of the upper-stage engines. Musk declared it was not more complicated than a garage door opener, and he told one of his engineers to make it for $5,000. Jeremy Hollman, one of the young engineers working for Mueller, discovered that a valve that was used to mix liquids in a car wash system could be modified to work with rocket fuel.

No detail was too small to escape Musk’s meddling. The Roadster originally had ordinary door handles, the kind that click open a latch. Musk insisted on electric handles that would operate with a simple touch. “Somebody who’s buying a Tesla Roadster will buy it whether it has ordinary door latches or electric ones,” Eberhard argued. “It’s not going to add a single unit to our sales.” It was an argument he had made about most of Musk’s design changes. Musk prevailed, and electric door handles became a cool feature that helped define the magic of Tesla. But as Eberhard warned, it added yet another cost.

Musk had budgeted for three launch attempts of the Falcon 1, and all had exploded before they could get to orbit. Facing personal bankruptcy and with Tesla in a financial crisis, it was hard to see how he was going to raise money for a fourth attempt. Then a surprising group came to the rescue: his fellow cofounders of PayPal, who had ejected him from the role of CEO eight years earlier.

Musk had taken his ouster with unusual calm, and he stayed friendly with the coup leaders, including Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. The old PayPal mafia, as they called themselves, were a tight-knit crowd. They helped finance their former colleague David Sacks—the friend who took notes for Antonio Gracias in law “school—when he produced the satirical movie Thank You for Smoking. Thiel teamed up with two other PayPal alums, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, to form the Founders Fund, which invested mainly in internet startups.

Thiel was, he says, “categorically skeptical about clean tech,” so the fund had not invested in Tesla. Nosek, who had become close to Musk, suggested that they invest in SpaceX. Thiel agreed to a conference call with Musk to discuss the idea. “At one point I asked Elon whether we could speak to the company’s chief rocket engineer,” Thiel says, “and Elon replied, ‘You’re speaking to him right now.’” That did not reassure Thiel, but Nosek pushed hard to make the investment. “I argued that what Elon was trying to do was amazing, and we should be a part of it,” he says.

Eventually Thiel relented and agreed that the fund could put in $20 million. “Part of my thinking was that it would be a way to patch things up from the PayPal saga,” he says. The investment was announced on August 3, 2008, just after the third launch attempt failed. It served as a lifeline that allowed Musk to declare that he was going to fund a fourth launch.

“It was an interesting exercise in karma,” Musk says. “After I got assassinated by the PayPal coup leaders, like Caesar being stabbed in the Senate, I could have said ‘You guys, you suck.’ But I didn’t. If I’d done that, Founders Fund wouldn’t have come through in 2008 and SpaceX would be dead. I’m not into astrology or shit like that. But karma may be real.”

“That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If “Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit.

At a conference in Utah, he went to a party thrown by SpaceX and, after a couple of drinks, worked up the nerve to corner Gwynne Shotwell. He pulled a crumpled résumé out of his pocket and showed her a picture of the satellite hardware he had worked on. “I can make things happen,” he told her.

Shotwell was amused. “Anyone who is brave enough to come up to me with a crumpled-up résumé might be a good candidate,” she said. She invited him to SpaceX for interviews. He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing.

When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.”