Its mid-afternoon on a Friday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and three of Elon Musks children are gathered around him one of his triplets, both of his twins.

Musk is wearing a gray T-shirt and sitting in a swivel chair at his desk, which is not in a private office behind a closed door, but in an accessible corner cubicle festooned with outer-space novelty items, photos of his rockets, and mementos from Tesla and his other companies.

Most tellingly, theres a framed poster of a shooting star with a caption underneath it that reads, When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless its really a meteor hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then youre pretty much hosed, no matter what you wish for. Unless its death by meteorite. To most people, this would be mere dark humor, but in this setting, its also a reminder of Musks master plan: to create habitats for humanity on other planets and moons. If we dont send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dreams inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.

And thats just one of Musks ambitions. Others include converting automobiles, households and as much industry as possible from fossil fuels to sustainable energy; implementing a new form of high-speed city-to-city transportation via vacuum tube; relieving traffic congestion with a honeycomb of underground tunnels fitted with electric skates for cars and commuters; creating a mind-computer interface to enhance human health and brainpower; and saving humanity from the future threat of an artificial intelligence that may one day run amok and decide, quite rationally, to eliminate the irrational human species.

So far, Musk, 46, has accomplished none of these goals.

But what he has done is something that very few living people can claim: Painstakingly bulldozed, with no experience whatsoever, into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry car manufacturing (Tesla) and rocketry (SpaceX) and created the best products in those industries, as measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. In the process, hes managed to sell the world on his capability to achieve objectives so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else, theyd be called fantasies.

At least, most of the world. Im looking at the short losses, Musk says, transfixed by CNBC on his iPhone. He speaks to his kids without looking up. Guys, check this out: Tesla has the highest short position in the entire stock market. A $9 billion short position.

His children lean over the phone, looking at a table full of numbers that I dont understand. So his 13-year-old, Griffin, explains it to me: Theyre betting that the stock goes down, and theyre getting money off that. But it went up high, so they lost an insane amount of money.

Theyre jerks who want us to die, Musk elaborates. Theyre constantly trying to make up false rumors and amplify any negative rumors. Its a really big incentive to lie and attack my integrity. Its really awful. Its

He trails off, as he often does when preoccupied by a thought. I try to help: Unethical?

Its He shakes his head and struggles for the right word, then says softly, Hurtful.

It is easy to confuse who someone is with what they do, and thus turn them into a caricature who fits neatly into a storybook view of the world. Our culture always needs villains and heroes, fools and geniuses, scapegoats and role models. However, despite opinions to the contrary, Elon Musk is not a robot sent from the future to save humanity. Nor is he a Silicon Valley savant whose emotional affect has been replaced with supercomputer-like intelligence. Over the course of nine months of reporting, watching Musk do everything from strategize Mars landings with his rocket-engineering team to plan the next breakthroughs with his artificial-intelligence experts, I learned he is someone far, far different from what his myth and reputation suggest.

The New York Times has called him arguably the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world. Its an easy case to make: Hes probably the only person who has started four billion-dollar companies PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City. But at his core, Musk is not a businessman or entrepreneur. Hes an engineer, inventor and, as he puts it, technologist. And as a naturally gifted engineer, hes able to find the design inefficiencies, flaws and complete oversights in the tools that power our civilization.

Hes able to see things more clearly in a way that no one else I know of can understand, says his brother, Kimbal. He discusses his brothers love of chess in their earlier years, and adds, Theres a thing in chess where you can see 12 moves ahead if youre a grandmaster. And in any particular situation, Elon can see things 12 moves ahead.

His children soon leave for the home of their mother, Musks ex-wife Justine. I wish we could be private with Tesla, Musk murmurs as they exit. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company.

What follows is silence. Musk sits at his desk, looking at his phone, but not typing or reading anything. He then lowers himself to the floor, and stretches his back on a foam roller. When he finishes, I attempt to start the interview by asking about the Tesla Model 3 launch a week earlier, and what it felt like to stand onstage and tell the world hed just pulled off a plan 14 years in the making: to bootstrap, with luxury electric cars, a mass-market electric car.

The accomplishment, for Musk, is not just in making a $35,000 electric car; its in making a $35,000 electric car thats so good, and so in-demand, that it forces other car manufacturers to phase out gas cars to compete. And sure enough, within two months of the launch, both GM and Jaguar Land Rover announced they were planning to eliminate gas cars and go all-electric.

Musk thinks for a while, begins to answer, then pauses. Uh, actually, let me go to the restroom. Then Ill ask you to repeat that question. A longer pause. I also have to unload other things from my mind.

Five minutes later, Musk still hasnt returned. Sam Teller, his chief of staff, says, Ill be right back.

Several minutes after that, they both reappear and huddle nearby, whispering to each other. Then Musk returns to his desk.

We can reschedule for another day if this is a bad time, I offer.

Musk clasps his hands on the surface of the desk, composes himself, and declines.

It might take me a little while to get into the rhythm of things.

Then he heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. I just broke up with my girlfriend, he says hesitantly. I was really in love, and it hurt bad.

He pauses and corrects himself: Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.

Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier: It felt unexpectedly, disappointingly, uncontrollably horrible to launch the Model 3. Ive been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks, Musk elaborates. Severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up: drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people and then, like, tell myself: I have all these people depending on me. All right, do it!'

Minutes before the event, after meditating for pretty much the first time in his life to get centered, Musk chose a very telling song to drive onstage to: R U Mine? by the Arctic Monkeys.

Musk discusses the breakup for a few more minutes, then asks, earnestly, deadpan, Is there anybody you think I should date? Its so hard for me to even meet people. He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly, Im looking for a long-term relationship. Im not looking for a one-night stand. Im looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing.

I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships havent worked in the long run: his marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Talulah Riley, and this new breakup with actress Amber Heard.

Musk shakes his head and grimaces: If Im not in love, if Im not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.

I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.

Musk disagrees. Strongly. Its not true, he replies petulantly. I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me. He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. Its not like I dont know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?

Theres truth to what Musk is saying. It is lonely at the top. But not for everyone. Its lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom.

When I was a child, theres one thing I said, Musk continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. I never want to be alone. Thats what I would say. His voice drops to a whisper. I dont want to be alone.

A ring of red forms around his eyes as he stares forward and sits frozen in silence. Musk is a titan, a visionary, a human-size lever pushing forward massive historical inevitabilities the kind of person who comes around only a few times in a century but in this moment, he seems like a child who is afraid of abandonment. And that may be the origin story of Musks superambitions, but more on that later. In the meantime, Musk has something hed like to show me.

If you say anything about what youre about to see, it would cost us billions, he says, rising from his desk. And you would be put in jail.

The most interesting tourist attraction in Los Angeles County is one thats not in many guidebooks: Its in the otherwise-untouristed southwestern city of Hawthorne, around SpaceX. If you walk along Crenshaw Boulevard from Jack Northrop Boulevard to 120th Street, what you will see is a city of the future thats under construction. This is Musk city, an alternate reality, a triumph of futuristic imagination more thrilling than anything at a Disney park. On the west side of the street, a 156-foot-tall rocket towers above SpaceX headquarters, symbolizing Musks dream of relatively low-cost interplanetary travel. This particular rocket booster was the first in human history to be launched into space, then recovered intact on Earth after separating, and then fired back into space. On the east side of the street, an employee parking lot has been dug up and turned into the first-ever tunnel for the Boring Company, Musks underground-honeycomb solution to traffic jams and the future home of all his terrestrial transportation projects. Then, running for a mile beside Jack Northrop Boulevard, theres a white vacuum tube along the shoulder of the road. This is the test track for the Hyperloop, Musks high-speed form of city-to-city travel. Taken together, the dreams of Musk city promise to connect the planet and the solar system in ways that will fundamentally change humanitys relationship to two of the most important facets of its reality: distance and time.

But there is a particular building in Musk city that few have visited, and this is where Musk takes me. It is the Tesla Design Studio, where hes slated to do a walkthrough of the Tesla Truck and other future vehicle prototypes with his team of designers and engineers.

Outside the door, a guard takes my phone and audio recorder, and Im given an old-fashioned pen and paper to take notes on. Musk then continues into the building and reveals the Tesla Truck, which aims to help the trucking industry go green. (Musk has even been toying with creating a supersonic electric jet, with vertical takeoff and landing, in the future.) Four key members of the Tesla team are there Doug Field, JB Straubel, Franz von Holzhausen, Jerome Guillen and watch with anticipation as Musk explores a new configuration of the cab for the first time.

Guillen explains the idea behind the truck: We just thought, What do people want? They want reliability. They want the lowest cost. And they want driver comfort. So we reimagined the truck.

This is a perfect example of the idea that Musk-inspired wannabe visionaries around the world worship like a religion: first principles thinking. In other words, if you want to create or innovate, start from a clean slate. Dont accept any ideas, practices or standards just because everyone else is doing them. For instance, if you want to make a truck, then it must be able to reliably move cargo from one location to another, and you must follow existing laws of physics. Everything else is negotiable, including government regulations. As long as you remember that the goal isnt to reinvent the truck, but to create the best one, whether or not its similar to past trucks.

As a result of this type of thinking, Musk is able to see an industry much more objectively than others whove been in the field their whole lives.

I was literally told this is impossible and Im a huge liar, Musk says of the early days of Tesla. But I have a car and you can drive it. This is not like a frigging unicorn. Its real. Go for a drive. Its amazing. How can you be in denial?

An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it even when confronted with facts to the contrary. Its very unscientific, Musk says. Theres this thing called physics, which is this scientific method thats really quite effective for figuring out the truth.

The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Heres how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:

1. Ask a question.

2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.

3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.

4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then youre probably right, but youre not certainly right.

Thats the scientific method, Musk concludes. Its really helpful for figuring out the tricky things.

But most people dont use it, he says. They engage in wishful thinking. They ignore counterarguments. They form conclusions based on what others are doing and arent doing. The reasoning that results is Its true because I said its true, but not because its objectively true.

The fundamental intention of Tesla, at least my motivation, Musk explains in his halting, stuttering voice, was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. Thats why I open-sourced the patents. Its the only way to transition to sustainable energy better.

Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI, he continues. I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but its all fun and games until somebody loses a fucking eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone whos not crazy in the scientific community.

For the next 20 minutes, Musk examines the Tesla Truck. He comments first on the technical details, even ones as granular as the drawbacks and advantages of different types of welding. He then moves on to the design, specifically a driver-comfort feature that cannot be specified here, due to said threatened jail time.

Probably no one will buy it because of this, he tells his team. But if youre going to make a product, make it beautiful. Even if it doesnt affect sales, I want it to be beautiful.

According to Musks best guess, our personalities might be 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture. Whatever that ratio actually is, if you want to understand the future that Musk is building, its essential to understand the past that built him, including his fears of human extinction and being alone.

For the first eight or so years of his life, Musk lived with his mother, Maye, a dietitian and model, and his father, Errol, an engineer, in Pretoria, South Africa. He rarely saw either of them.

I didnt really have a primary nanny or anything, Musk recalls. I just had a housekeeper who was there to make sure I didnt break anything. She wasnt, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed. Im shocked that I have all my fingers. He raises his hands and examines them, then lowers his digits. I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.

Some of those books help explain the world Musk is building, particularly Isaac Asimovs Foundation series. The books are centered around the work of a visionary named Hari Seldon, who has invented a scientific method of predicting the future based on crowd behavior. He sees a 30,000-year Dark Ages waiting ahead for humankind, and creates a plan that involves sending scientific colonies to distant planets to help civilization mitigate this unavoidable cataclysm.

Asimov certainly was influential because he was seriously paralleling Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but he applied that to a sort of modern galactic empire, Musk explains. The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.

Musk was around 10 at this time, and plunged in his own personal dark age. Hed recently made a move that would change his life. It was a wrong decision that came from the right place.

When his parents split up two years before, he and his younger siblings Kimbal and Tosca stayed with their mom. But, Musk recounts, I felt sorry for my father, because my mother had all three kids. He seemed very sad and lonely by himself. So I thought, I can be company.' He pauses while a movies worth of images seem to flicker through his mind.

Yeah, I was sad for my father. But I didnt really understand at the time what kind of person he was.

He lets out a long, sad sigh, then says flatly about moving in with Dad, It was not a good idea.

According to Elon, Errol has an extremely high IQ brilliant at engineering, brilliant and was supposedly the youngest person to get a professional engineers qualification in South Africa. When Elon came to live with him in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg, Errol was, by his own account, making money in the often dangerous worlds of construction and emerald mining at times so much that he claims he couldnt close his safe.

Im naturally good at engineering thats because I inherited it from my father, Musk says. Whats very difficult for others is easy for me. For a while, I thought things were so obvious that everyone must know this.

Like what kinds of things?

Well, like how the wiring in a house works. And a circuit breaker, and alternating current and direct current, what amps and volts were, how to mix a fuel and oxidizers to create an explosive. I thought everyone knew this.

But there was another side to Musks father that was just as important to making Elon who he is. He was such a terrible human being, Musk shares. You have no idea. His voice trembles, and he discusses a few of those things, but doesnt go into specifics. My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil, he says. He will plan evil.

Besides emotional abuse, did that include physical abuse?

My dad was not physically violent with me. He was only physically violent when I was very young. (Errol countered via email that he only smacked Elon once, on the bottom.)

Elons eyes turn red as he continues discussing his dad. You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. Um

There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he cant bring himself to utter the words, at least not on the record. Its so terrible, you cant believe it.

The tears run silently down his face. I cant remember the last time I cried. He turns to Teller to confirm this. Youve never seen me cry.

No, Teller says. Ive never seen you cry.

The flow of tears stops as quickly as it began. And once more, Musk has the cold, impassive, but gentle stone face that is more familiar to the outside world.

Yet its now clear that this is not the face of someone without emotions, but the face of someone with a lot of emotions who had been forced to suppress them in order to survive a painful childhood.

When asked about committing crimes, Musks father said that he has never intentionally threatened or hurt anyone, or been charged with anything, except in this one case, he says he shot and killed three out of five or six armed people who broke into his home, and was later cleared of all charges on self-defense.

In his e-mail, Errol wrote: Ive been accused of being a Gay, a Misogynist, a Paedophile, a Traitor, a Rat, a Shit (quite often), a Bastard (by many women whose attentions I did not return) and much more. My own (wonderful) mother told me I am ruthless and should learn to be more humane.' But, he concluded, I love my children and would readily do whatever for them.

As an adult, Musk, with the same optimism with which he moved in with his father as a child, moved his dad, his fathers then-wife and their children to Malibu. He bought them a house, cars and a boat. But his father, Elon says, hadnt changed, and Elon severed the relationship.

In my experience, there is nothing you can do, he says about finally learning the lesson that his dad will never change. Nothing, nothing. I wish. Ive tried everything. I tried threats, rewards, intellectual arguments, emotional arguments, everything to try to change my father for the better, and he no way, it just got worse.

Somewhere in this trauma bond is the key to Musks worldview creation against destruction, of being useful versus harmful, of defending the world against evil.

Things at school werent much better than life at home. There, Musk was brutally bullied until he was 15 years old.

For the longest time, I was the youngest and the smallest kid in the class because my birthday just happens to fall on almost the last day that they will accept you into school, June 28th. And I was a late bloomer. So I was the youngest and the smallest kid in class for years and years. The gangs at school would hunt me down literally hunt me down!

Musk put down the books and started learning to fight back karate, judo, wrestling. That physical education, combined with a growth spurt that brought him to six feet by age 16, gave him some confidence and, as he puts it, I started dishing it out as hard as theyd give it to me.

When he got into a fight with the biggest bully at school and knocked him out with one punch, Musk noticed that the bully never picked on him again. It taught me a lesson: If youre fighting a bully, you cannot appease a bully. Musk speaks the next words forcefully. You punch the bully in the nose. Bullies are looking for targets that wont fight back. If you make yourself a hard target and punch the bully in the nose, hes going to beat the shit out of you, but hes actually not going to hit you again.

When he was 17, Musk left college and moved to his mothers home country, Canada, later obtaining passports for his mother, brother and sister to join him there. His father did not wish him well, Musk recalls. He said rather contentiously that Id be back in three months, that Im never going to make it, that Im never going to make anything of myself. He called me an idiot all the time. Thats the tip of the iceberg, by the way.

After Musk became successful, his father even took credit for helping him to such a degree that its listed as fact in Elons Wikipedia entry. One thing he claims is he gave us a whole bunch of money to start, my brother and I, to start up our first company [Zip2, which provided online city guides to newspapers]. This is not true, Musk says. He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.

Musks career history decorates his desk. Theres an item from nearly all of his companies, even a mug for X.com, the early online bank he started, which became PayPal. The sale of Zip2 resulted in a $22 million check made out directly to Musk, which he used in part to start X.com. With the roughly $180 million post-tax amount he made from the sale of PayPal, he started SpaceX with $100 million, put $70 million into Tesla, invested $10 million into Solar City, and saved little for himself.

One of the misunderstandings that rankles Musk most is being pigeonholed and narrowcast, whether as the real-life Tony Stark or the second coming of Steve Jobs. When, at a photo shoot, he was asked to wear a black turtleneck, the trademark garb of Jobs, he bristled. If I was dying and I had a turtleneck on, he tells me, with my last dying breath, I would take the turtleneck off and try to throw it as far away from my body as possible.

So what is Musk about?

I try to do useful things, he explains. Thats a nice aspiration. And useful means it is of value to the rest of society. Are they useful things that work and make peoples lives better, make the future seem better, and actually are better, too? I think we should try to make the future better.

When asked to define better, Musk elaborates, It would be better if we mitigated the effects of global warming and had cleaner air in our cities and werent drilling for vast amounts of coal, oil and gas in parts of the world that are problematic and will run out anyway.

And if we were a multiplanetary species, that would reduce the possibility of some single event, man-made or natural, taking out civilization as we know it, as it did the dinosaurs. There have been five mass-extinction events in the fossil record. People have no comprehension of these things. Unless youre a cockroach or a mushroom or a sponge youre fucked. He laughs sharply. Its insurance of life as we know it, and it makes the future far more inspiring if we are out there among the stars and you could move to another planet if you wanted to.

This, then, is the ideology of Musk. And though basic, its actually very rare. Think of the other names that one associates with innovation this century: Theyre people who built operating systems, devices, websites or social-media platforms. Even when it didnt start out that way, the ideology in most cases soon became: How can I make my company the center of my users world? Consequently, social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter use a number of tricks to activate the addictive reward centers of a users brain.

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