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"FacebookPinterest\n\nonce in a while, this planet gives birth to a child with freakish talent\u2014freakish not only because it is vast, but because it is ready upon arrival, with batteries included and no assembly required. One need only open the box and step back.\n\nIn this case, the talent belongs to a 6-year-old boy with a rather odd name. The year is 1977, and Elon Musk lives in the most odious country in the world: South Africa. It's summertime, and Elon, his kid brother and sister, and their cousins have been playing outside their grandmother's suburban Pretoria home for hours. Now it's getting dark. The other children head for the house. Come on, Elon. Let's go.\n\nBut Elon doesn't want to go inside and doesn't understand why the others do. It's beautiful out here in the dark.\n\nElon and his siblings and cousins start to argue. Come on, Elon. No! Come, Elon! I won't! Please, Elon.\n\nTosca, the 3-year-old, starts to yell, then cry. Then she blurts out what the other children are thinking.\n\n\"Elon, I'm scared!\"\n\nTosca's mummy has come outside to see what the tears are about. Huddled there on the porch are Tosca and Kimbal\u2014the middle sibling, fifteen months Elon's junior\u2014and the cousins. And there at the tree line is Elon. The light has mostly waned, but Elon, he's so white, skin as pale as a fish's belly, and Maye Musk can see his face so clearly. Beaming. Euphoric. Because he knows.\n\nElon hasn't been bickering with his sister and brother; he has been evangelizing. And now he raises both arms to make sure they can see, as well as hear, the good news.\n\n\"Do not be scared of the darkness!\" Elon Musk calls out to them from the wilderness. \"There is nothing to fear\u2014it is merely the absence of light!\"\n\nThough Elon has been issuing such pronouncements for several years, it seems to Maye Musk that the distinct way her son has of inspecting the world around him\u2014so precise, so sober\u2014was fully formed even before he could speak. A carefulness was evident, a stillness. Now, at 6, he is creative and imaginative, but not in a fanciful way. Other than a fondness for comic books and Tolkien, he doesn't engage in make-believe, doesn't make things up. There are no imaginary friends\u2014a surprise, since he doesn't have many real ones\u2014or monsters in the closet. Elon simply isn't interested in things that are not there. Only in things that are, or plausibly could be. Facts. Elon needs facts the way he needs air.\n\nAnd so he reads. Four, five hours a day, even as a first grader. He forgets nothing he reads. Tosca will say, \"I wonder how high up in the sky the moon is!\" and Kimbal will respond, \"A billion kilometers!\" And Elon, smiling, sharing, will say, \"Actually, it is 384,400 kilometers away.\" His siblings will stop and look at him then, and Elon, interpreting the silence as an invitation, will add, \"On average.\"\n\nJust the facts. They're all Elon needs. What he doesn't seem to need is a mentor, or even encouragement. Sometimes he fires questions at his father, an electrical and mechanical engineer. Problem is, many of his questions involve computers, which Errol Musk dismisses as \"toys that will amount to nothing.\" His son calls this opinion \"very silly\" and, at the age of 10, buys his first computer and begins teaching himself how to program it. Two years later, he sells his first piece of software\u2014a video game called Blastar\u2014for $500.\n\nIntelligence like Elon's\u2014self-originating, self-sustaining, seemingly parentless\u2014provokes a reflexive question from everyone who encounters it. Where does such a child come from It's also a rhetorical question. The better thing to ask is: Where does such a child go\n\nThis is the more relevant question not only because it is answerable but because it can and must be asked and answered now. Now\u2014when we are more uncertain about one another, and about ourselves, and about our direction, than we have been in decades\u2014it is important for us to hear a story like Elon Musk's. As a reminder. And as a bracing slap to the face.\n\nBecause when children like Elon Musk attain the kind of self-awareness that leads to questions about environment\u2014Where in the world can I go for the license and the room to do what I must do Where in the world are my peers\u2014they always, and still, come to the same conclusion.\n\nElon Musk knew when he was a child. A remarkable conviction for a child to have, and all the more so because there was no specific dream attached to it. There was no \"to build rocket ships\" or \"to make millions\" or \"to design computer software.\" Instead, Elon (pronounced ee-lon) had this thought, consciously, literally, and at the age of 10: America is where people like me need to go. That is where people like me have always gone. A place that was the photographic negative of apartheid South Africa, a place less encumbered than any in the world, ever, by fear.\n\n\"It is as true now as it has always been,\" says Elon Musk, the man who is endeavoring\u2014as preposterously as he is credibly\u2014to give the human race its biggest upgrade since the advent of consciousness. \"Funny how people seem to have forgotten that. But almost all innovation in the world takes place in the United States.\"\n\nby the time he's 10, he's reading eight to ten hours a day. Elon reads and Elon retains, and his retention armors him. When the negative injunctions, You can't and You won't, come at Elon the way they come at all children, tens of thousands of times and in every conceivable form, sometimes overt and hard, sometimes insidious and soft, he simply doesn't hear them. Another couple of decades will pass before his biography fills in the specifics, but Elon Musk\u2014the metamorphic intellect, the stuntman brazenness, the aura of immanence\u2014is already there. The 24-year-old physics Ph.D. candidate at Stanford who drops the program after forty-eight hours to become a software programmer who sells his first venture, a media-software company called Zip2, for $307 million There. The propulsive personality that, within weeks of that sale, starts X.com, an online-banking company that morphs into PayPal before being sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion There. The 30-year-old autodidact who then dispenses with digital ephemera in order to become a man, a rocket man, a rocket scientist, and creates Space Exploration Technologies, a company whose short-term purpose is to commercialize an endeavor\u2014orbital rocketry\u2014that has previously been the province of a handful of nations and huge aerospace concerns (Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.) and whose long-term aim is, yup, a mission to Mars There. The 32-year-old entrepreneur who decides it's time to gin up some ambition already and wean America off the teat of foreign oil while combating global warming, and in 2004 makes himself the controlling shareholder and, eventually, CEO of Tesla Motors, manufacturer of the world's first all-electric sports car There. The 34-year-old penitent who realizes he's just not doing his part, greenhouse-gas-wise, and becomes the chairman and controlling shareholder of SolarCity, turning the company into one of the nation's biggest installers of solar panels There.\n\nThe above reads as a chronology, which it is, but much of it is also a simultaneity: Elon Musk is currently helming three companies, all of them start-ups, each of them created to address an intractable global problem, two of them on the cutting edge of entirely different engineering technologies, and none of them in even remotely related industries. He is doing so as a businessman (he devised the business plan for SolarCity, which is run by his two cousins, and is the chief ecutive of the other two) and as a financier (having put more than $100 million of his own money into SpaceX and\n\n $55 million into Tesla), and that's something.\n\nBut really, it's nothing, because he's not just the vision guy or the money guy or the marketing guy, although he's all of those, too. He's also designing the stuff. At each of his companies, he knows what the engineers\u2014chemical, mechanical, electrical, structural\u2014know and what the software programmers know, and he does what they do. When the brushed-aluminum pedal of the Tesla Roadster is floored, unleashing 650 amps and 14,000 rpm from the car's 6,831 lithium-ion cells and launching it from zero to sixty miles per hour in 3.9 seconds, the engine roars like\u2026a cell phone on vibrate mode\u2014a phenomenon made possible not only by Elon Musk's money but by his mind. Likewise, the \"CTO\" in his official SpaceX title is descriptive, not ceremonial: Elon Musk taught himself how to design and build rockets. \"I'd never seen anything like it,\" says Chris Thompson, explaining what persuaded him to leave a senior position at Boeing to oversee \"structures\" at SpaceX. \"He was the quickest learner I've ever come across. You had this guy who knew everything from a business point of view, but who was also clearly capable of knowing everything from a technical point of view\u2014and the place he was creating was a blank sheet of paper.\" Musk says (as do the rocket scientists he works with) that after founding SpaceX, it took him \"about two years to get up to speed.\" How is such a thing possible\n\nBooks. They did for Elon what they'd always done. They gave him what he needed\u2014facts. And, less obvious but just as crucial, they took away what he didn't: fear, or even any kind of hesitation.\n\nDid you see what Elon did this fall It was big. It almost, but not quite, made up for what he did in August, when one of his Falcon 1 rockets failed to make orbit and ended up dumping James Doohan's ashes\u2014Scotty's ashes\u2014in the Pacific Ocean. The achievement might have slipped under your radar, though, because it came at the very end of September, just before the bottom truly fell out. Most of us had already assumed the fetal position by then, thrust our eyes into the softs of our elbows, anything to avoid looking at our latest 401(k) statements. So know this: On September 28, Elon Musk did something that had never been done before, and which experts had repeatedly said could never be done: launched a privately funded rocket built from scratch into Earth orbit. Previously, only nine nations (and the European Space Agency) had independently done such a thing\u2014each after decades of trial and error, dozens of failed launches, and billions (of dollars, rubles, francs\u2026) invested. Musk's Falcon 1 rocket, built for $100 million by a company with fewer than 150 employees, succeeded on only its fourth attempt.\n\nwalk into the giant hangar housing the offices of SpaceX and you will immediately find your eye drawn to a large glass-walled space named after Wernher von Braun, the Teutonic creator-god of rocketry and, like Elon Musk, a naturalized American citizen. Spend an hour or two at the company and you'll realize that von Braun refers less to a room than a state of mind. \"We'll take it to the von Braun\"\u2014that's the argot, the invocation, in the face of any conflict that requires immediate resolution. Engineers at SpaceX talk about takin' it to the von Braun the way toughs in dive bars talk about takin' it outside.\n\nIt's early November, late in the afternoon on election eve, as the dozen men who make up SpaceX's senior design team file into the von Braun Room. (Yes, they're all men, ranging from their early twenties to early fifties. Two wear wedding rings; all but Elon sport metal watches chunky enough to deflect gunfire.) There is every reason to believe that this will be a truly terrible meeting for Elon Musk. Actually, meetings are terrible almost by definition in Musk's view. Meetings, he's fond of saying, are what happens when people aren't working.\n\nBut this Monday afternoon is special, thanks to Tesla. October has just proven to be the single worst month for the auto industry in twenty-five years. Despite being a new kind of company making a new kind of car, Tesla isn't immune from what is ailing Detroit. People aren't buying cars, period, much less $109,000 electric sports cars with a 244-mile range\u2014a fact not lost on the venture capitalists Tesla relies on for financing. In recent weeks, Musk has had to close Tesla's engineering office in Michigan, lay off 20 percent of the company's staff (mostly from the Michigan office but also from the Silicon Valley headquarters), and announce a significant production delay in Tesla's Model S\u2014the $57,000 sedan that Musk (and those venture capitalists) have been hoping will broaden the company's client base.\n\nYet more: That announcement about the S has nearly coincided with another, on the blog of Elon's wife, the fantasy novelist Justine Musk, that he has left her and their five boys (4-year-old twins and 2-year-old triplets) for a 23-year-old English actress named Talulah Riley. \"By all accounts she is bright and sweet and of course beautiful, and about as personally responsible for the death of my marriage as she is for the dynamic that played out inside it. In other words, not very,\" Justine wrote. \"Also, she is not blonde, and I do find this refreshing.\" (After initial publication of this story, Elon contacted GQ to clarify that he and Riley met only after he had filed divorce papers, and that he has his boys several days a week at his home; in an e-mail, Justine confirms the custodial arrangement, and that Elon \"has always insisted that he met Talulah on the July 4 weekend following his June 16 filing for divorce.\") And about a week after that, a Tesla employee leaked information to a popular Silicon Valley blog about how low morale at Tesla had sunk, and revealing the proprietary fact that the company\u2014which has taken more than a thousand deposits from buyers who haven't yet received their Roadsters\u2014was down to its last $9 million in liquid reserves. The same day the blog item appeared, Musk issued a statement confirming the $9 million figure while announcing his intention to bolster Tesla's cash with at least $20 million in additional financing. Then, in search of the leaker, he sent a computer-forensics team to seize and search the computers of various employees. The only redeeming pieces of news about Tesla Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and George Clooney are all having their Roadsters delivered this week.\n\nToday, Elon and his SpaceX engineers are takin' it to the von Braun to discuss a fine point of reentry physics, per an exchange in one of the day's earlier meetings.\n\nengineer #1: Would you VPPA\n\n engineer #2: [lustily] Naaaaaah, I'd probably go to soft plasma.\n\n elon: You always get misplaced diameters with that.\n\n engineer #2: What if the heat shield attached to the Dragon's base\u2026\n\n [A prolonged exchange of glances; a clear consensus that there are sometimes feelings for which there can be no words.] \n\n elon: We'll take it to the von Braun.\n\n [Satisfied nods from all. Eunt, pursued by a bear.] \n\nNow Musk sits, his engineers loosely grouped around him, waiting for one of them to begin a PowerPoint presentation. He just misses being extremely handsome, and somehow, by just missing the extreme of handsomeness, he also just misses being merely handsome. Yet Elon Musk draws eyes the way an extremely handsome man does, for two reasons. The first is that he is unusual looking, in a boyish and pleasant way. The second is that physically, Elon Musk is a very, very still human being, and there is something arresting about that. Or as one Silicon Valley blog recently put it, \"The liquored-up consensus at San Francisco watering hole Joey &amp;amp; Eddie's last night: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is actually kind of hot.\"\n\n\"The economy is shit,\" he says, apropos of nothing and everything. Though Elon Musk almost never raises his voice and doesn't now, his tone is unmistakably\u2026chipper. \"Do you realize what that's going to do to the value of secondhand machines They'll be in the toilet! We can get an EB welder on-site!\"\n\nIt's the damnedest thing. The world is shit. Elon's world is shit. Yet when Elon asks, \"Should we buy a welder\" he seems to be doing so in the same way a 10-year-old asks, \"Should we ride the roller coaster now\" Here in the von Braun, everything that comes out of his mouth, whether in the form of a question or comment, is about building, hiring, investing. If and when the present woes of the world are acknowledged\u2014the economy is shit!\u2014the point is to exult in how easy that's going to make things.\n\nBut then the fun time is over and the meeting begins in earnest. The issue at hand involves the physics of reentry on the Falcon 9\u2014the larger and more ambitious successor to the Falcon 1 that SpaceX put into orbit in September. SpaceX is all about making orbital rockets that are both cheap and reusable\u2014in other words, rockets that can survive the hellfires of atmospheric reentry. The adherence to one-time-use technology is the reason space exploration has always been the province of governments and their contractors. (Even the space shuttle is only partly reusable\u2014and still costs $450 million per launch.) The commercial viability of SpaceX is therefore less about getting rockets into Earth orbit than reliably getting them back. Without reusability, there can be no economy of scale, and if there can be no economy of scale, there can be no SpaceX.\n\nThough SpaceX already has several Falcon 1 contracts lined up with government and private satellite makers, it is the Falcon 9\u2014scheduled to be test-launched from Cape Canaveral this summer\u2014that could transform the aerospace industry. With its single engine, the seventy-foot Falcon 1 can send payloads of 1,400 pounds or less into low Earth orbit (up to about 1,200 miles above the planet's surface). The 180-foot F9, with its nine engines and its Dragon capsule, is designed to catapult eleven tons of cargo\u2014or up to seven people\u201422,000 miles into the sky. What that will cost, at least initially: about $40 million per launch\u2014somewhere between a third and a half of what NASA is accustomed to paying. An important breakthrough came in late December, when NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract which calls for the F9 to take cargo (and only cargo) to and from the International Space Station between 2010 and 2016.\n\nThe PowerPoint presenter mentions reentry temperatures and the need for \"restoring the pitch moment.\" All par for the course. But then he says it.\n\n\"So we want to make sure there's room enough for the avionics.\u2026\"\n\n\"There is shitloads of fucking room there,\" Elon says quietly. Then, for clarity, he adds, \"There is shitloads of fucking room there.\" He's not angry. This is just what Elon does; as nature hates a vacuum, Elon hates an inaccuracy. Without a trace of defensiveness, the engineer whom Elon has corrected explains the calculations underlying his previous statement. There's some back-and-forth on that. On paper, the language can look a bit violent (\"If people do anything that contributes to this [rocket] stage not being recoverable,\" Elon says at one point, \"they will find their work undone\"). Spoken, it's a purely informational exchange.\n\nWill the molten slag cause any problems\n\nNah, it'll all be blowin' off so hard\u2026\n\nIf we think of this as an upside-down Dragon\u2026\n\nIf we need three inches of cork, how the fuck will the inflatable survive\n\nAnd so it goes. It's quite something to see a group of human beings offering themselves up in the service of facts the way these men are. Here in the von Braun, it is possible to comprehend the facts\u2014all those mind-blowing technological facts\u2014as molds into which these men have poured their lives, and not the other way around.\n\nThen it is over. There is no announcement of this fact. Elon doesn't say \"Good work, people\" or \"Okay, that's it for now\" or even \"We're done.\" He just rises to his feet, saying \"Yup\" as he does, wheels around a walks off. Yup. From anyone else, it would read as a scornful dismissal.\n\nHe returns to the cubicle that serves as his office, I follow at a distance. He's already at his desk, eyes fid to the monitor of his desktop computer, when I arrive. I stand there for a bit, waiting for, I don't know, some kind of permission. Then I sit. Elon Musk is working at his desk and I am seated five feet from him, facing him, watching. Minutes pass. I cannot determine whether he is unaware of my presence or just indifferent to it\u2014only that whichever the case, it is entirely so.\n\n Finally, just for kicks, I ask, \"Was that fun\" Meaning the von Braun.\n\n Elon doesn't hear the question. Just keeps looking at his screen, his fingers chattering away at the keyboard. Ten seconds pass. His mother has warned me about this. \"We'll all be out to dinner with him, and someone will say, 'Let's see a movie after dinner. Elon what movie do you want to see Elon We're talking about a movie.' But Elon's not eating. He's just sitting there. Thinking. 'Okay, Elon's not with us for a while, we've got to let him be wherever he is. Let's, the rest of us, talk about the movie.'\"\n\n Eventually the fingers slow, then stop. Elon turns in his chair. His mouth does not move, yet somehow there is a smile.\n\n \"Yeah,\" he says. \"I liked that. Actually, I liked that a lot.\"\n\nsomething remains to be said about the nature of Elon Musk's ambition, something that makes the man either a sublime or comic figure. Or perhaps both. Because according to Musk, the point of SpaceX is not to make money. The point is that mission to Mars. And that mission, as well as the Martian colonization to which it leads, still isn't the end-all Elon has in mind. There is a larger imperative.\n\nAccording to Elon Musk, there are such things as \"epochal moments.\" As he defines them, epochal moments are not moments \"in\" human history. They're larger. Rarer. Musk says the first epochal moment in the grand human ascent was \"the advent of the single-celled organism. The next was the emergence of multicelled life. Then the differentiation into plants and animals. Then the move onto land. Then mammals. Then consciousness.\" To Musk, epochal moments are make-or-break moments; either there is a great leap forward or there is extinction. One does not fuck with epochal moments. And now, Elon says, for the first time since we humans began peering at our own reflections and wondering Who, another epochal moment is upon us: We've got to get off this rock\u2014soon\u2014or face oblivion.\n\n\"I founded SpaceX and put much of my fortune in it because I really believe it is a matter of when and not if, and that when is probably a lot sooner than most of us are comfortable thinking about,\" Musk says of the end of life\u2014all life, not just human\u2014on Earth. There is a constant motion in his eyes as he says this. Actually, the motion is present even when he's not prophesying the end-time. While his gaze remains fid, the irises and pupils of his eyes\u2014small, gray, wide-set\u2014never stop moving. Very rapidly, almost imperceptibly, horizontally. Vibrate and even shiver overplay it, make it seem like a leer or tic when it is neither, and unappealing, which it isn't. When Elon Musk speaks, the colored parts of his eyes shimmer with attentiveness. He seems less like a person who is speaking than one who is listening. \"I'm not saying we'll do it, to be sure. The odds are we won't succeed. But if something is important enough, then you should do it anyway.\n\n\"Things have happened quickly,\" he continues. \"It took us millions of years to evolve into what we are, but in the last sixty years, with atomic weaponry, we've created the potential to extinguish ourselves. And if it's not us, it will inevitably be something else. If not a meteorite in the relative short term, then the expansion of the sun's corona. It will happen.\"\n\nYeah, man, the corona. Guy needs to lay off the comic books or go into movies, right (Oh, wait\u2014he already did that when he and two of his PayPal co-founders were producers on Thank You for Smoking.)\n\nBut he's not done.\n\n\"It's important enough to be on the scale of life itself, and therefore goes beyond the parochial concerns of humanity,\" Musk says of our interplanetary destiny. \"We're all focused on our little things that are of concern to humanity itself. People think of curing AIDS or cancer as being very important, and they are\u2014within the context of humanity. But curing all forms of cancer would improve the average life span by only two to three years. That's it.\"\n\nIn other words, while eradicating disease is a worthy pursuit, and would extend the lives of individual human beings, my life's work is extending the life span of life itself.\n\nhow does a person say the kinds of things Elon Musk is fond of saying and not conjure a man stroking an albino show cat while reclining in the control room of his volcanic lair Yet he doesn't. This neutral, disarming tone of his has always been part of his gift, his ability to make grandiose pronouncements without coming across as arrogant or show-offy (as an adult) or obnoxious or precious (when he was a child). Part of this may be physical. In addition to being soft-voiced, Musk has an unusually small mouth that barely moves, if it moves at all, when he speaks. There's a vaguely ventriloquistic effect. To listen to Elon Musk speak is to encounter words that somehow feel displaced from motive; he never seems to be attempting to prove anything about himself. There is a drawing power in that.\n\nPeople follow Elon Musk. Many things about the man amaze, but none so much as the way he gets people to follow him. The pattern is constant: Elon declares his intentions and asks people to join him. Without exception, those intentions are ludicrous; without exception, the people he's wooing are bright, older and more experienced than he is, and safely ensconced in lives they find fulfilling. Yet these people forsake the secure and the known to follow Elon Musk. It has been this way since he was a teenager.\n\nOnly a few months after Musk left South Africa at the age of 17, his sister, Tosca, announced to their mother that she intended to join him in Canada. (Elon was unable to immigrate straight to the United States\u2014only to Canada, where his mother had been born and still had citizenship.)\n\n\"Elon is 18, you're 15,\" said Maye Musk, pointing out the obvious.\n\n\"Elon will look after me,\" Tosca told her mother.\n\nTosca, it turned out, had absorbed more than a little of what her older brother had told her years before about the absence of light; Maye Musk returned from a trip to find that her 15-year-old daughter had not only managed to put their house on the market, but to sell it. \"I think we must leave now,\" Tosca explained. Elon was expecting them.\n\nNearly a decade earlier, Maye Musk had taken her three children and, as she now puts it, \"run away\" from her husband. (Elon says he and his father have been in \"limited touch\" ever since. \"Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar.\") In the years following her divorce, Maye had built dual careers as a model and a dietitian. If she chose to emigrate, the South African government would freeze all her assets\u2014even the money from the house sale. The choice filled her with panic. Don't worry, Tosca assured her mother, \"Elon knows everything.\" How could Maye argue with that Elon really did know everything, which meant there was nothing to fear. Which was why Maye Musk packed a bag and, with her two younger children, followed her eldest child across an ocean.\n\nIt was the same twelve years later when Musk started SpaceX and began recruiting. Some of those who came gave up senior, secure, lucrative positions at places like TRW and Boeing to come work at SpaceX with Elon Musk\u2014an Internet entrepreneur with no background in rocket science. \"It was a can-do attitude combined with the fact that he knew what he was talking about and was happy to be corrected if he didn't,\" says Tom Mueller, the man who now oversees all \"propulsion\" at SpaceX. \"You couldn't say no to it.\" Others left places like Google and Microsoft to come work at SpaceX, and later at Tesla, because Musk liked the way their minds worked and convinced them that they, like he, didn't need physics Ph.D.'s to build rockets and cars.\n\nPerhaps the most remarkable thing about Elon Musk's drawing power is that, as strange as it may seem, he is not a particularly charming or charismatic person. Charm and charisma require, first, the desire to be charming and charismatic and, second, the ability to ecute; both of these require energy. And Elon, a man deeply attuned to the physics of his energy\u2014its caloric and intellectual and financial and historical value\u2014simply isn't interested in using it to light up a room. And yet there is some\u2026thing whereby Elon Musk enters a room and both the space and the other people in it suddenly seem distilled. What is that\u2014and how does it obviate the questions about charm and charisma and even likability\n\nHere's how: Elon Musk's leadership, his ability to inspire and motivate the people who work for him, derives completely, and only, from his knowledge. The knowledge\u2014the millions upon millions of facts that he has not forgotten\u2014is itself a form of charisma, that infectious \"thing you just can't put your finger on\" that we normally expect to see in the form of \"star power.\" Ironic, that the man with the intelligence and the will to take the human species to Mars and beyond would lack star power. And strangely assuring that he doesn't need it. What he needs is to persuade the smartest engineers in the world to come work for him. Star power can't do that. Facts can.\n\nIn the end\u2014although it is patently ridiculous to speak of any kind of \"end,\" seeing as how Elon Musk is still three years shy of 40\u2014all those facts add up to a kind of dazzling mosaic. Of\u2026 Well, that depends on who you are. If you are Elon or one of the people working with him to build his cars and his rockets, it is an image that convinces\u2014an image without metaphysical content: He doesn't have faith that he can do it; he knows. Because Elon knows everything.\n\nBut if you are just\u2026a citizen, and especially if you are an American citizen weary of soul after eight years of a national leadership not only incurious about but hostile toward science, even if this man fails to midwife the next epochal moment in the great human ascension, or even to deliver an affordable all-electric car that helps kill this country's oil addiction, the mosaic image of Elon Musk's life is one that galvanizes: This guy had to come here to attempt that.\n\nBrothers, sisters, fellow earthbound humans, if that doesn't wake you up, you're already extinct.\n\nandrew corsello is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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