72. I have only one thing I want from Musk.
“Mr. Kang?”
“Mr. Musk?”
“hahahahaha! Good to see you! Good to see you! Hey! Alex! Just call me Elon!”
“Uh, yeah. Elon!”
The man who insists on calling you by your first name the moment you meet him.
This is Elon Musk.
How do I even begin to define this man?
A genius entrepreneur, a dreamer, a fortune hunter, an architect of the future?
Or an asshole? A nutcase? A ruthless executive who sees people as mere ammunition?
A workaholic who puts in 100 to 120 hours a week?
And a multiples dad with a frightening number of children, having achieved the feat of having twins back-to-back?
This tall man who is all of these things.
I don’t know.
Anyway, he’s almost 15 years older than me, and I’m glad I’m comfortable with that, because he gets straight to the point.
“Alex, you’re pretty big for an Asian, because I’ve seen a lot of Japanese people, and most of them are much smaller than me. But you’re in great shape, and it looks like you’ve been training for quite some time.”
“Well, I’m not much bigger than you, and I’ve always loved sports since I was a kid, and I think I pretty much perfected it when I was in the army.”
“The army? You were in the army?”
“What country am I from?”
“You’re Korean, aren’t you? Oh, and Korea is still under a truce, right?”
“Yes. Your home country, South Africa, also participated in the Korean War.”
“hahahaha! Is that so? I didn’t know. Are you saying I was drafted?”
“Korean men are drafted unless they pass a physical and fail, but I applied for a reason, so I was in the army for over four years.”
“hahahahaha! I almost got drafted into the army too!”
“Elon, you were in the army?”
I ask.
“Uh, yeah. South Africa had conscription for white people back then. If my mom didn’t have Canadian citizenship, I would have gone to the army too, but I probably would have killed myself if I did. I couldn’t live in that environment.”
“Hmph, the military is a place where people live.”
“I’m a libertarian, I couldn’t live a day in that oppressive environment, and besides, you hate exercise?”
“I see.”
“Come on, why don’t we have a drink? What do you say when you drink in Korea? I know the Japanese call it gappa, right?”
It’s no secret that this guy is a Japanese manga nerd.
“We say cheers.”
“Oh! It’s similar?”
“It’s kanji, so it’s similar in all three countries.”
“hahahahaha! Here we go! Cheers then!”
“Cheers!”
This guy really likes to drink.
After a little over half an hour of drinking whiskey together over a meal, they emptied the bottle and opened a new one.
“Alex.”
“Why?”
“What the hell are you buying our Tesla stock for?”
Finally sobered up, he seemed to get to the point.
Oops, I drank too fast and I’m a little tipsy.
Let me sober up.
“Why are you buying them?”
“Literally, what’s the point of buying our Tesla stock?”
“What do you mean, you’re an investor, right?”
“Really?”
“Elon, you’re probably worried about control, but don’t worry about that. I’m purely interested in profiting from stock price appreciation over the long term.”
“Really?”
“What do you think I have to gain by lying to you?”
“Hmph! I get it.”
“Then why are you being so sensitive, I thought you had a large stake in Tesla, institutional investors are all over the place, and they’re friendly to you?”
Besides, just as AMD is Lisa Su and Lisa Su is AMD, Tesla is Elon Musk.
There’s no way Tesla’s leadership is going to be shaken.
Is that it?
This guy is supposed to get tens of millions of stock options, right?
So why am I being ridiculously greedy?
“Because I don’t want to take any risks with my control.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and then there’s the fact that I got screwed over by those damned Saudis last year.”
“Ah! Pooh-hah! You got screwed last year, didn’t you, trusting the Saudi sovereign wealth fund?”
“Don’t laugh, I still get pissed off thinking about it!”
Elon Musk shocked the world last year by announcing his intention to take Tesla private.
He pointed to the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), as a possible source of funding for the delisting.
This caused a stir, and guess what?
The Saudi sovereign wealth fund denied Elon’s story.
There were reports that they were not making any promises of funding.
The Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which had been buying a lot of Tesla stock and was perceived as a strong Tesla supporter, inadvertently invested $1 billion in Lucid Motors, one of Elon Musk’s biggest pet peeves, and started selling off its Tesla stake.
In fact, a lot of the reason we got so much equity in a short period of time was because the Saudis were selling.
In any case, Musk was embarrassed, humiliated, and even accused of securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
It’s no wonder Musk is so pissed off.
“Bam! Ah! I’m sorry, Elon. Let me ask you something: Is it true that you were in talks with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund to delist?”
“It’s true. The head of that f*cking sovereign wealth fund, Lu Maiyan, clearly promised to fund me, and then he breaks his word and gives money to Lucid Motors, the same people who would still be herding sheep if oil wasn’t coming out of the ground?”
“Whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”
“Hey! Alex, how could you not be pissed off, no matter how much you stab me in the back? You’re telling me to f*ck off for investing in Lucid, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, it is. Cackle!”
“I told you not to laugh!”
“Thorie, thorie, thorie!”
“…”
There was good reason for Mr. Musk to be upset that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund had put money into the Rushd Group.
The founders of Rushd Group are former Tesla founding members who either got kicked out by Musk or left Tesla after fighting with Musk.
As we all know, it was Martin Eberhard who founded Tesla, not Musk.
Musk was just one of the key early investors, using the money he made from selling PayPal.
However, Musk didn’t like the idea of Martin Eberhard running the company, so he held a board meeting while Eberhard was traveling, demoted Eberhard to President of Technology, and took over as CEO himself.
To put it bluntly, he stole the company.
That’s why Musk seems to be so sensitive to control.
In any case, it seems that Musk, who was upset by the production delays and funding pressures at the time, was really mean to the existing members.
When he got bored, he would lash out at his employees.
So a bunch of early core engineers left the company, led by Bernard Tse, who co-founded Lucid with Sam Weng.
At the time, it was called Atieva, and it specialized in batteries and powertrains, and Bernard Tse was known as one of the top battery engineers in the U.S., so they got some investment from China and Japan, and they were doing pretty well.
The problem is that in 2013, Lucid decided to start building his own electric cars.
He even scouted Peter Rollinson, Tesla’s vice president and chief engineer, so it’s easy to imagine Musk’s ire.
The final nail in the coffin, however, was the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
The Saudi sovereign wealth fund had the money to mass produce electric cars.
You’d think they’d be your best friend, but they stabbed you in the back when you asked for money to delist Tesla.
This is why Musk’s kids still have seizures when he talks about it.
“I was really serious back then,” he says, “because I really didn’t like having anyone around to tell me what to do.”
“Really?”
“So I was hanging out with Larry Page at Google, with my ego crushed.”
“Huh—.”
He must have been really, really hurt.
“Well, rest assured. I have complete faith in your management abilities.”
“Really? Thank you. But let me ask you something else. What do you believe in that makes you so invested in Tesla? I know we’re not where we were last year, but there’s still skepticism.”
Last year, Tesla was in real jeopardy with production delays on the Model 3, its turnaround car.
It forced Musk to work 120-hour weeks for much of last year.
“It was really hard last year, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t say it. It was worse than my worst year, 2008.”
“Was it that hard in 2008 too?”
“Hmph! If you ask me to go back to that time, I’d rather kill myself than launch a rocket with all my dreams and hopes on it, and I’d have to bend over backwards to pay my employees because I had no money, and on top of that, personally—.”
I had heard the personal story.
A kid probably died that year, and he got divorced by his first wife.
“Well, after all that hell, I thought I’d hit rock bottom, but who knew there was a basement underneath?”
“Phew!”
“Last year, it was so hard I wanted to die, and now I’m feeling a little better.”
“I see. You’ve had a hard time. But I believed in you last year, or maybe I always have.”
“Believed in what?”
“Your insight into the future, and your tenacity and execution to make it happen. I believed in that.”
I mean it.
Insight into the future is a privilege few have.
It’s even more of a privilege to see the future.
I believe in this guy, Musk.
Even though he doesn’t seem to have much of a personality.
“Oooh! Thank you! Alex!”
“So, stop worrying so much and get to work building the car, okay?”
“Yeah, well, can you do me one more favor?”
“What else?”
What is this bastard doing shamelessly asking me for a favor at the beginning?
Western kids don’t usually do this.
What a strange guy.
“Can you entrust me with the voting rights of your company?”
“What? Voting rights? Hey, Elon, what kind of friends are we? We just met today?”
“I thought you said you trusted me completely anyway?”
“That’s one thing, this is another! To be honest, I enjoyed meeting you today, and I think we’ve become friends, but this isn’t it, if I give you full voting rights, what will you give me?”
“Hmmm, well, that would be—.”
“It’s not that, it is, and the least you could do is show me some sincerity and say something like that.”
“So, you, how much more equity do you plan to acquire?”
“There’s a limit to how much of Tesla we can buy, even if we wanted to. I’m sure you can guess, but we’re looking at about 25%.”
“Hmm, we see it that way too, so—.”
Musk thought for a moment, then spoke again.
“Alex.”
“Why?”
“Is there something you want from me?”
“Want?”
“Yeah, I’ll show you good faith, and you’ll give me voting rights to the shares you get, right?”
“You want me to do that?”
“Yeah.”
Well, that’s a different story.
I only want one thing from Mr. Musk.
A stake in SpaceX.