Fast track

Elon Musk is poised to become Silicon Valley's Next Big Thing. What put him in the driver's seat?

By Mark Gimein

Aug. 17, 1999 | If Elon Musk had bothered to surround himself with the public relations handlers who monitor the average Silicon Valley gazillionaire, he would never, ever have been caught on camera climbing into his new MacLaren F1. The MacLaren F1, with its gull-wing doors, rear engine and center-mounted driver's seat, is essentially a road-ready version of a Formula 1 racer. Only 62 were ever made; the sticker price was 634,500 pounds sterling, and this is distinctly not a car that loses 30 percent of its value the moment you drive it off the dealer's lot. In fact, pretty much the only way of getting one is to buy it at a hefty premium from one of the current owners. (Ralph Lauren, the tweedy fashion designer, tried to buy this particular F1, but did not move fast enough, calling an hour after Musk had signed the deal.)

Musk was able to buy himself the coveted car because, at 28, he's already started and sold one Internet company -- namely, Zip2, a creator of online city guides that Compaq, the big computer maker, bought in April for a cool $307 million in cash. (Musk and his brother Kimbal held about 12 percent of the company, and made out with tens of millions.) Now he is starting another, X.com, which may be the hottest company in Silicon Valley that you've never heard of. This makes Musk, in today's Silicon Valley-speak, a "serial entrepreneur." A better way of thinking of him, however, is as today's Silicon Valley It Guy -- a young man with a one-page résumé, a good Rolodex, an aptitude for programming, money of his own and a lot more backing him.

By the conventional lights of Silicon Valley, what Musk has done -- taking me down to the garage of his Palo Alto, Calif., condominium and posing for snapshots with the world's fastest production car -- is a gross mistake. If you think of the photographs that you have seen of the Silicon Valley elite, you might notice that there is, in general, a striking absence of photographs of the newly mega-rich posed with their cars and yachts. The public relations machinery of the technology industry exists largely to maintain the fiction that the multimillionaires contemporary California produces in unseemly abundance are really just average, cubicle-dwelling Joes.

The immediate punishment for breaking these rules, generally, is a whacking by the very same press that you are indulging. Musk almost certainly knows this, because the last time that Musk was written about at any length, he took some heat for asking Upside magazine to take his photo in a black 1967 Jaguar. Musk's detractors still cite the article as evidence of his outsized ego.

The funny thing is that Musk really does not seem to care. I find this, on the whole, endearing. Here's why: Modern business journalism is devoted to glowing profiles of corporate honchos and scrappy entrepreneurs. And yet there is an unwritten rule that these moguls and mini-moguls (with, admittedly, the exception of a very few mega-moguls at the level of Bill Gates) should avoid displays of the extravagance that their wealth so obviously permits. They are schooled not to evidence any concern about their public personas.

The problem with all this is that, in fact, the showiness, the chutzpah, the streak of self-promotion and the urge to create a dramatic public persona are major elements of what makes up the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. If they were not, then people like Elon Musk, who already have tens of millions of dollars to their name, simply would not bother with starting a second company. Musk's ego has gotten him in trouble before, and it may get him in trouble again, yet it is also part and parcel of what it means to be a hotshot entrepreneur.

Next page: Why are big-name venture capitalists betting on Musk?