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developers are making apps for Dropbox.
    Houston needed to delegate more. His spiky chestnut hair boasted patches of premature gray. The Phi Delta MBA remained the company’s CFO until April 2014. Relinquishing that post was a big step on the road from startup code geek to tech tycoon.
    A glimpse at his future came one evening in the fall of 2011. Houston dined with Mark Zuckerberg, and over generous portions of buffalo meat (the Facebook founder was then in his much-mocked phase of eating only what he killed), they plotted ways to collaborate. As he walked out of Zuckerberg’s pre-IPO starter home, a relatively modest Palo Alto colonial, clearly en route to becoming the big company CEO he had told Steve Jobs he would be, Houston noticed the security guard parked outside, presumably all day, every day, and pondered the corollaries of the path: “I’m not sure I want to live that life.”

  CHAPTER 3  
    Elon Musk, Tesla Motors and SpaceX: Inside the Mind of Iron Man
    Elon Musk may be the greatest entrepreneur of the twenty-first century. By thirty-two, he had cofounded and sold two wildly successful companies, including PayPal, the bank of the Internet, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002. For a second act, he again went double-barreled, this time aiming for two of the world’s largest, most hidebound industries: automobiles and space travel. With Tesla Motors, he sought to make a viable electric car (and create the first successful American auto startup in more than a half-century). SpaceX was designed to privatize the path to the heavens. Today, both seem likely winners, swelling Musk’s net worth well past $10 billion.
    But when Hannah Elliott spent extensive time with Musk in 2011 and 2012, those successes were far from certain, and his second marriage was crumbling. For months, on both coasts, Musk, now forty-three, gave Elliott full access to his work and home life, sharing his uninhibited thoughts in real time—less Tony Stark (Musk was the inspiration for Iron Man) than Tony Soprano. Not even genius, it turns out, is free from doubt.
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    O n a Thursday morning in Bel Air, California, Elon Musk, his cheeks still wet with aftershave, retreated to the basement theater of his 20,000-square-foot French Nouveau mansion, which he’s converted into a man cave suitable for business or play.
    The leather couch and coffee table inscribed with the periodic table served as a de facto workstation, a retreat for the e-mails he shoots out past midnight and his research on such things as the Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, the “best heat shield known to man.” But rather than trudge to the office when the rest of the world is awake, the young billionaire founder of electric car maker Tesla and SpaceX, the first private company to put a vehicle into orbit, taught me how to play BioShock, an Ayn Rand–esque first-person shooter epic.
    â€œIt talks about Hegelian dialectics being the things that determine the course of history,” Musk explained, his eyes fixed on the screen. “They’re sort of competing philosophies or competing meme sets, and you can look at modern history where it’s not so much genetics going into battle as a battle of meme structures.”
    Yes, he talks like that. While he’s playing video games.
    The games went on for ninety minutes. While work for both of his companies beckoned—Tesla was readying the debut of an SUV aimed at eco-conscious soccer moms and planned to launch a new sedan; SpaceX, meanwhile, was testing its Dragon spacecraft for a docking with the International Space Station—Musk clearly relished the distraction, carving out still more time for a tour of the house.
    Situated atop a hidden hill that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, the 1.6-acre grounds boast a tennis court (Musk’s brother, Kimbal, joked that their infrequent matches get so competitive that he needs to run away after making a