DONALD ABRAM ’16 grew up on the South Side of Chicago with a single mother and a grandmother who took him to church every Sunday, no excuses—and he tried using them all, down to not having clean socks.

Every week he would see church members joyfully worship. He never really understood what that was about even though he was an active member of the congregation. Then, on a cold December day when he was 14 years old, Abram says he heard a distinct call from God.

After coming home from school and warming himself by his space heater, Abram dozed off. In a dream, he saw himself walking down the center aisle at church, but as a celestial being, not a physical one. He looked up to the pulpit expecting to see his pastor standing there, but instead he saw himself preaching. Abram says he woke up shocked and shaken.

His father was a minister, and though Abram never lived with him, he knew the Sunday morning routine and what a preacher’s life entailed—and he wasn’t having any of it. Throughout his childhood, people had told him, “I see the call in your life,” but he says he ran from it.

Abram wanted to be a force for good—but in the form of an FBI agent, not a minister. Still, he talked to family, seeking advice and interpretation about the dream, which was now recurring. Ultimately, he had to come to grips with the vision on his own: He decided that God was in fact telling him to preach. So he went to his pastor, who decided to test him with a trial sermon. Abram preached his first sermon, and the pastor and elders confirmed that this call was a real one.

He vividly remembers one moment in the sermon when he thought: “This is what I saw in the dream. This is what I’m supposed to be doing, and I know that.”

You’ve heard of the preacher’s kid. But this was a preacher kid. All throughout high school, Abram delivered sermons at Greater New Mount Eagle Missionary Baptist Church, a black congregation. At first he mimicked his pastor, but soon he found his own rhythm and style, earning the nicknames “Fireball” and “Firecracker” for his blazing energy. Abram says he feels communion with both God and the audience when he’s in the pulpit.

“There are things that I will say and things that I will do that are not on my manuscript, and the Holy Spirit drops that down in my spirit and it comes out,” says Abram. “I am just so in tune with that moment that I know this is what I’m supposed to do—this is what I’ve been called to do.”

While growing up, Abram’s interactions were mostly with black people. His original plan was to attend the historically black Morehouse College, which Martin Luther King Jr. and Spike Lee attended—that’s where successful African American men went to school where he was from, Abram says. But when he received a Posse Foundation scholarship to Pomona, he began to rethink those plans. After researching the College, he decided to go west. Another big change was on the way.

THE DECISION TO come to Pomona was another turning point for Abram and the beginning of a four-year transformation. In the classroom, he was challenged to think of his faith more critically through courses like Professor Erin Runions’ Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Runions’ goal is for students to approach the Scriptures as literature, from a scholarly perspective rather than a particular religious tradition. Looking at the Bible through this new lens created an inner struggle, he says.

“It was incredibly difficult for me to take on a class that removed the sanctity of spirituality from the text.” says Abram. “Initially it felt really disrespectful to me. I didn’t feel like we were giving the due deference and respect.”

But the no-holds-barred questioning of the Bible gave him permission to reexamine his belief system. “There were a lot of questions that came up that I didn’t have the space to bring up on the South Side, with my pastor or my father,” Abram says.

The perspectives and points that Abram thought were great in the classroom ran counter to what he was taught in the church. He grappled hard with his faith, controversial texts and the ways he saw the Bible used to perpetuate injustice. In conversations, family members and his pastor noticed his worldview shifting.

As Abram’s advisor and teacher, Pomona College Politics Professor Lorn Foster witnessed that shift as well. Over time, Foster says, he saw an evolution in Abram and “a willingness to be more open about things than when he entered Pomona College. … His faith was more dogma when he entered the door.”

Abram would agree. Whereas before, he says, his spiritual practice revolved around a God that had a strict code of rules and regulations, at Pomona his perspective has widened and deepened into a recognition that the core of his belief is about relationship with Christ, not religion, he says. This ongoing faith journey is one of both reclamation and tension.

It is also a journey of relationships. On campus, he says, he encountered types of people he never had before—students from marginalized backgrounds that were markedly different from his black Chicago experience. He met undocumented students, gay students, students with mental illnesses—identities and stories that were new to him and that he felt the church he was raised in either ignored or was blind to. Over time, Abram became concerned not just about God but also about God’s politics, as he understood them. Another call began to stir in his heart.

Through his analysis of biblical texts, readings on black liberation theology, and his relationships with other students, Abram says he began to see Jesus not only as a spiritual savior but also as a revolutionary figure—an advocate for the poor and those on the fringes, who upended traditional religious institutions and whose central message was one of unconditional love. Religious leaders in that day were also government figures, and Jesus pushed back, Abram says. He points to the story of Jesus turning over tables in the temple in anger as a profoundly political act. “You could call it a protest. You could call it a sit-in. You can really call it an act of rebellion in many ways to a system that keeps [down] those in society who are viewed as less than or who are viewed as different or not as valued. And he is saying, ‘This system has to come down. This system has to stop. Because what you’re doing now on a very micro level is taking advantage of people.’”

NOW RELIGION AND POLITICS have become one and the same for Abram. Yes, his call was a personal transformation, but he was also called to transform institutions and systems of injustice, the politics major says.

Whenever he returns to his home church sanctuary, he preaches a message on how life in the pew and life in the public square are inextricably intertwined. In his sermons he is subtle, but intentional and strategic in weaving in his politicization, Abram says, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive as he offers critiques of materialism and urges congregants to fight for the most vulnerable in society. “I think the church is not able to see those connections because we focus on abortion, gay marriage or passing out Thanksgiving dinners,” says Abram. “We’re not focused on structural change.”

Abram points to inequities in the criminal justice system, massive wealth disparities and the behavior of Wall Street investors—and he believes the most effective ways to combat those inequities are through policy and government as well as a mobilized church. “Christ has called you to condemn that which is wrong,” and Abram believes the church writ large has missed some of what he sees now as obvious sins.

Along the way, Abram has become a fierce advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement, which he believes is “an indictment of the black church.” Of course, he says, the black church has held a key role in the civil rights struggles of the past. But on other issues the church has been silent at best.

“Black Lives Matter is actually doing what Jesus did. Not only are they saying, ‘We’re combating white supremacy.’ They are combating misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, discrimination against those who are differently abled,” says Abram. “I think Black Lives Matter has hit at the root of what it is Christ has called us to fight against but also the root of what the church has failed to address.”

Abram has held two internships in Washington, D.C.—one at the Center for American Progress and another with Joshua DuBois, formerly the head of the Obama administration’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He remains hopeful that change will happen both in the church and in public policy.

In the fall, he will attend Harvard Divinity School for a master’s of divinity degree. He may also pursue a master’s in public policy. Inspired by DuBois’s work, Abram wants to start a faith-based consulting firm, advising government, businesses and political campaigns. He says he may even run for public office someday.

“Jesus came as a liberator. Therefore in all that we do, we should do it in the name of liberation. And we should do that with conviction, with power and with strategy. … I want to be in a position where my faith is central to policies or advice that I give so that it can be impactful and beneficial for those that are most marginalized in our society.”

And preaching?

“I will continue to preach. I will always be a preacher.”

From Abram’s view, his call hasn’t changed—it has only grown.

—Photos by Drew Reynolds

MOST DOCTORS HAVE war stories from their days as medical students: their first encounter with a cadaver; their first rotation in the emergency room. Few, however, compare with Karen Benker’s.

As a student at the University of Southern California’s School of Medicine from 1967 to 1971, Benker did rotations at what was then the L.A. County Hospital (now LAC+USC Medical Center), a large public teaching hospital in the predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Boyle Heights. She became especially familiar with the obstetrics ward in the Women’s Hospital unit, where she worked as an obstetric technician, delivering babies on the night shift.

It was an eye-opening experience.

On her very first day on the ward, Benker heard a senior physician declare how “wonderful” it was that the obstetrics department had just received “a big federal grant to cut the birthrate of the black and Mexican population.” Soon after, she would discover that many African- and Mexican-American patients were in fact bullied into being surgically sterilized.

“You want this?” she recalls hearing one resident ask a laboring woman as he held a syringe full of painkilling medicine in front of her, a sterilization consent form at the ready. “Sign!”

“It was barbaric,” says Benker, who is now an associate professor of health policy and management and associate dean for community public health affairs at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine in Brooklyn, New York.

In 1975, a small team of lawyers filed a class action civil rights lawsuit in federal district court against the hospital and state and federal officials on behalf of 10 Mexican-American women who claimed that they were coerced into undergoing a sterilization procedure known as tubal ligation. The lawyers argued that sterilizing their clients without their informed consent violated their right to bear children—a right guaranteed under the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.

Once largely forgotten, the story of Madrigal v. Quilligan came to national prominence again in 2015 thanks to the release of No Más Bebés (“No More Babies”), a documentary film by Academy Award–nominated director Renee Tajima-Peña that explores the events surrounding the case. And the details of what transpired remain as disquieting today as they were when Karen Benker first witnessed them nearly 50 years ago.

Some of the women of Madrigal were sterilized without their knowledge while under general anesthetic, only to discover months or years later that they could no longer bear children. Others were falsely assured that the procedure was medically necessary or easily reversible; most were pressured into giving consent while they were in active labor, their minds fogged by painkillers. Several were accused by nurses of “burdening the taxpayers” with their offspring, or harassed by doctors who insisted that their poverty and immigration status would make it difficult for them to raise any more children.

Although a resident at the hospital leaked evidence crucial to the case, Benker was the only hospital employee who testified in court on behalf of the plaintiffs; the rest either agreed with what had gone on or feared retribution. “She’s a great heroine in my eyes,” says Virginia Espinosa, the historian who produced No Más Bebés. “She would not be silent.”

Although the judge found in favor of the defendants, the publicity generated by Madrigal helped draw attention to a pattern of coerced sterilization among minority and low-income women throughout the United States. (Other affected groups included African-Americans in the South, Native Americans under the care of the Indian Health Service, and working-class women in Puerto Rico.) The case ultimately helped drive changes to sterilization laws and consent protocols across the country, and expanded the conversation around reproductive rights to include not only abortion and birth control, but also the right to procreate.

As a result, says Benker, the women of Madrigal lost their case, but they won the battle.

Seated at a long oval conference table in the SUNY Downstate building, the surrounding neighborhood of East Flatbush visible through the window behind her, Benker—thoughtful, easygoing, and quick to smile—does not look like a firebrand.

Appearances can be deceiving.

Growing up in the hamlet of Quaker Hill, Connecticut, Benker always dreamt of becoming a doctor. As an undergraduate, she was already riding the bus to USC to serve as a guinea pig in the School of Medicine’s earliest experiments with case-based learning—a model of medical training that has students meet immediately with patients, rather than spending their first two years memorizing material from textbooks. She was, she says, fairly naïve, her politics moderately conservative.

But the sixties were tumultuous times, and Benker, who speaks of the high school friends she lost in Vietnam and describes the Watts riots that raged across South Central Los Angeles in 1965 as “earth-shattering,” remembers them as an era when many in her generation became increasingly aware of the injustices perpetrated within and by American society.

The experiences that she and her fellow students shared at L.A. County Hospital could only have hastened the process. For most, she says, their encounters with patients represented their first exposure to an impoverished black and Hispanic population, and “a first understanding of what it’s like to be a 40-year-old mother with seven kids who has to work 12 hours a day.”

If time and place contributed to the awakening of Benker’s social conscience, they also conspired to provide her with a singular opportunity to act on it.

In 1909, California became one of the first states to pass a law sanctioning the nonconsensual sterilization of the feebleminded and the unfit, thereby propelling it to the forefront of the American eugenics movement. According to historian Alexandra Minna Stern, by the time California repealed its sterilization law in 1979 in response to Madrigal, the state was responsible for one-third of the more than 60,000 nonconsensual sterilizations carried out nationwide in state-run hospitals and homes.

Even after eugenics lost its luster after WWII, many in California and elsewhere continued to embrace sterilization as a tool for combating overpopulation by limiting reproduction among welfare mothers, immigrants, and others regarded as representing a burden on society. In 1968, when Benker was in her second year of medical school, the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted that out-of-control population growth would lead to mass starvation. By that same year, approximately one-third of all women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico had been coercively sterilized under a population-control program funded by the American government.

There were other factors at play, as well. The very notion of informed consent was still in its infancy: The National Research Act, which requires that doctors obtain informed consent from human research subjects, was passed only in 1974, following the revelation that hundreds of black men had been intentionally deprived of medical treatment as part of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. What’s more, the late 1960s saw a massive influx of federal funding for birth control and family-planning services, much of it pumped into public teaching hospitals like L.A. County, where residents often felt pressured by their superiors to perform a certain number of surgeries every day. And while not all hospital employees harbored racial and ethnic prejudices, some clearly did: In her deposition for Madrigal, Benker described how physicians in the Women’s Hospital referred to Chicana patients as “beans.”

Add it all up, and you have what the sociologist Elana Gutierrez has called a “perfect storm” of circumstances leading to coercive sterilization. With its high proportion of African-American and Mexican-American patients and its factory-like atmosphere—Benker recalls the labor room as a small space crammed with women crying out in pain as nurses and doctors rushed about to free up beds—the obstetrics ward at L.A. County may have been especially conducive to such abuse.

“It was a good environment for people to do the wrong thing,” she says.

It was also, for Benker, a crucible of sorts; she would devote the rest of her career to public health, advocating on behalf of immigrants, children, and other vulnerable groups.

After graduating from USC, Benker did an internship at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, an area whose large Puerto Rican population still bore the scars of the territory’s mass sterilization program. While there, she helped establish the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, or CESA (“stop” in Spanish), which convinced the New York City Council to pass a law requiring that a woman give consent no less than 30 days before being sterilized. Then she heard about Madrigal.

Antonia Hernández, the young Latina lawyer who served as co-counsel for the plaintiffs, came to New York to discuss the case and slept on the floor of Benker’s studio apartment. Benker, in turn, flew to Los Angeles to help raise funds for the suit. In 1978 she gave her testimony in federal court, a lone doctor speaking out against what she had witnessed seven years earlier.

Back in New York, Benker served as director of programs for homeless families at the New York City Department of Health; conducted research for the Legal Aid Society on the health outcomes of homeless pregnant women, which led to reforms in the services provided to such women; and investigated the conditions of children living in foster care. After coming to SUNY Downstate in the early 1990s to work with HIV patients, she became director of the school’s first Community Health Center and developed its Master of Public Health Program.

When Espinosa began researching Madrigal in 1994, Benker readily agreed to participate—just as she did when Espinosa and Tajima-Peña decided to make No Más Bebés. “Bringing the facts to a wider popular audience was thrilling to me,” she says. “It meant a new generation of people could learn about this very disturbing aspect of medical and social injustice.”

These days, Benker focuses on policy issues surrounding mental illness and spends most of her time teaching—or as she puts it, trying to develop a healthcare workforce that won’t make the mistakes of the past. Mistakes that she has seen firsthand and has spent a lifetime trying to make right.

“It’s a great way to get up in the morning,” she says.

And with that, the heroine of Madrigal pushes back her chair, rises to her feet, and prepares to set an exam for her students—young men and women, many hailing from working-class immigrant families, whom she is training to take up a battle that she has waged for nearly half a century, and of which she has clearly yet to tire.

—Photos by Casey Kelbaugh

In his New York Times bestseller Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance ’00, veteran tech journalist and TV host of Bloomberg’s Hello World, reports on the daring business titan’s life and the rise of his innovative companies in finance, the auto industry, aerospace and energy. With exclusive, unprecedented access to Musk, his family and friends, Vance interviewed nearly 300 people for a book hailed as “masterful,” a “riveting portrait,” and “the definitive account of a man whom so far we’ve seen mostly through caricature.” Vance talked to PCM’s Sneha Abraham about the journey of the book and about Musk—a man both lauded and lambasted.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

PCM: Why write about Elon Musk?

Vance: When I started out and I was at The New York Times and places like that, Elon was just never really on my radar. I sort of felt like he was this guy who used to run around Silicon Valley promising all these wonderful things and never really delivering on them. I kind of pegged him as your run-of-the-mill techno-utopian guy. In 2012 everything started to change for me because SpaceX got to the International Space Station and Tesla came out with the Model S, which not just people in Silicon Valley but people in Detroit and around the world hailed as one of the best cars ever made. And SolarCity, his third company, filed to go public. That all happened in the span of just a couple of months.

I just thought, “Wow. This guy who’s been promising all of this stuff for all these years has just delivered in this huge way.” So I set out to do a cover story on him for Businessweek, and that’s when it really became obvious to me that this is the book that I wanted to do.

I visited the Tesla factory, which is spectacular, and then the SpaceX factory, which is really what hooked me in. It was right in the middle of Los Angeles, and I thought they’d kind of be cobbling together this one rocket, but they were mass producing rockets in this gleaming white factory, with thousands of people running around, and there was just this unreal energy to the place.

And then I interviewed Elon for the story, and he struck me as so much more interesting than I had ever really given him credit for. He has this amazing life story, this kind of self-made man from South Africa, who had a very difficult upbringing and all these trials and tribulations along the way. And then he was just way more authentic and down-to-earth when I interviewed him than I expected, and I thought, “Man, this guy has lived an incredible life and would make a great story.”

PCM: How did this book take off?

Vance: So after the interview for Businessweek, I sent him an email and asked, “Hey, have you ever thought about cooperating with a book about you?” And he said, “Look, a lot of people have asked me, and I’ve had to turn them down, and I just don’t think it’s the right time.” And I said OK, and then I went and I sold the book anyway in New York. I thought if I sold the book, it would sort of force his hand, and he would end up cooperating. So then, after I sold the book, we had a big hour-long meeting at Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto. And Elon came in and I gave him the whole spiel on why I w wanted to do the book and why it was a good idea for him to do interviews and all that.

And two days after that meeting he sent me an email, and he said, “Look, I can’t do this.” And I think he thought I would give up on the project—and I did think about it.

I went out for this eight-mile run after that and was really distraught. I had already sold the book. I kind of rolled the dice and lost. And I just was out there running and I thought, “Well, what would Elon do in the same situation? He would just keep going.” So I decided to keep going, and then I spent the next 18 months interviewing. I interviewed about 200 people and it was all his friends, his family, his ex-girlfriends, his ex-employees.

PCM: So he didn’t send out a “Don’t talk to Ashlee” memo?

Vance: Yeah, that was a weird thing. I didn’t know how things would play out after he said no. I kind of thought he would tell people not to talk to me, but no, the opposite happened. A lot of people that I reached out to would, of course, write to him or call him and say, “Hey, this guy wants to talk to me,” and he gave approval to everyone. Nobody turned me down. And so that encouraged me because I thought, “He’s not making life as miserable for me as he could, and so I’ll keep pushing forward.” And then after those 18 months that’s when he called me at home one day, and then we had dinner shortly after that.

In the phone call he said, “Look, I might cooperate, but I want control of the book and everything.” So I was thinking, “Oh man, I’ve come this far and now there’s this thing that I just cannot agree to.” And so I was still sort of dreading that, and so then I got to the dinner and I had this huge speech. I had spent time rehearsing all these reasons that it made sense for him to cooperate and why I had to do it like a proper journalist and not give him control. And I got about five minutes into the speech, and then he just said, “OK, fine. Let’s do it.” My reaction then—I had to hold it all inside—but I was screaming on the inside. So much work had gone into it, this huge gamble and just this intense amount of pressure. It just felt like, “My God, this is all going to be worth it.” And I knew the book would be so much better with him participating in it.

PCM: How did your perception of him change as these interviews over the next year were happening? Because you write that you came in thinking he was just another big shot sort of megalomaniac.

Vance: My impressions had already started to change a bit after I did the cover story. I was always really impressed with how open he was. He never came in with any handlers or anything; it was always just me and him. So initially, for the first three interviews, it was frustrating because he was basically repeating a lot of things that he always talks about, and I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. And then it was around the fourth interview where he really started to open up, and I felt like I was seeing a side of Elon that no journalist had ever seen before. We could talk about anything, and he never dodged questions or tried to deflect me. I felt like he gave me these really rich answers about his philosophies of life, and about all these moments in the history of the company, and I got this much deeper insight. We would sort of trade off-the-record information back and forth.

Even when I was first starting the book, he had accomplished these amazing things, but it was unclear how sustainable these companies were. If you really could make them enduring and still pull off all this lofty stuff. Half the people still thought that he was crazy.

And over time, as I learned more and more about the companies and Elon, I just came away, not in a fanboy sense, but to sort of witness this guy firsthand and his resolve and how relentless he is, whether it’s him telling a story or it’s meeting the thousands of engineers around him. I just came away thinking, “Man, this guy. It may take him longer than he says—things might be more expensive sometimes than what he says—but this guy is absolutely going to accomplish what he sets his mind to.” In that sense, he’s unlike any exec I’ve ever interviewed. There are obviously very driven, intelligent people. But to me, what became obvious is—this is not a job for him; it’s a life’s calling. He is sort of playing on a different field, and a lot of people around him are as well. My big takeaway is that he was just more capable than I had even imagined.

I’d say the other thing I’ve learned over time is just that Elon really is a hard dude. You would hear more and more stories about what he expects from employees or the demands he puts on people, and then I started to feel that personally. It was a very rocky, back-and-forth thing that we had. Where he really didn’t want to be participating in this but was doing it and wanted to exert control, and I wouldn’t let him. So, yes, actually I felt all this stuff personally, and I feel like that gave me a taste for the full Elon.

PCM: How did he react to the book?

Vance: Well, it kind of went in stages. He got the book and then he was going through it and he was emailing me all of the time, like every couple of pages. So that was kind of an interesting experience, but most of that was sort of harmless. He plucked out a couple of things that he disagreed with, and then at the very end of a couple of days of him reading it, he came back and said it was 95 percent accurate, which for Elon was hilarious, not only that he gave me a score, but also that it was that high. He said it was well done. A couple of weeks passed, and then the media finally got their copies of the book, and a couple of the early stories focused on what a tough boss he is, and he got really upset that that’s sort of the direction that the press was taking at the beginning. So then there was big blowback. He was really unhappy that he was kind of getting portrayed that way, and so our relationship has not been the same since.

PCM: How does he come across, and how would you describe his personality?

Vance: The most basic thing is just he’s the most intense, driven individual I’ve ever met and one of the most capable human beings in the sense that he’s in all of these different industries. He’s doing technical stuff, marketing, design, day-to-day operations of the companies. It’s this incredible thing. As a person, there are different flavors of Elon. There’s the guy that you sit down with at dinner, and he’s not immediately charming and charismatic. He’s more like an engineer. He’s very serious and takes a little while to warm up. But then, even that guy, you warm him up and then he’s obviously very bright, he’s funny. He has an amazing sense of humor that I think most people miss. And he’s amazing to talk to. It was the thing I would look forward to most every month. So there’s that side to him—this surprisingly down-to-earth, intense, intelligent, funny guy. And then there’s the other side to him, too. For the employees, he’s super-demanding. He sets these incredibly lofty goals. He expects everybody to meet them. He can be really hard on people in meetings and in that sense comes off as unempathetic to his people and can come off as kind of callous and cold. And then, I think, for his friends there’s a very different side. I think he’s got a small circle of really close friends. And I think for them, he’s a much more fun-loving guy who is a lot of fun to be around.

PCM: Where do you think his faith in himself comes from? Because you write about how he had this awful childhood, and reading about that, one would guess he wouldn’t turn out to be the way that he is. Where does that sense of self-confidence that he can accomplish anything come from?

Vance: I think that his difficult childhood in a lot of ways hardened him and taught him to be willing to take risks. It’s a similar story you see with lots of these guys. If you leave the country where you’re born—say you go to Canada with zero in your pocket, and you’re off on your own at this young age—there are few things later on that are going to be harder than that. In a sense, running a business and taking a risk and all of that pales in comparison to what you’ve already been through. He talks about it a lot. He learned to just sort of suffer. So things like long hours or a business collapsing or all this pressure, he deals with that really well. I think that self-confidence thing definitely seems like it was learned over time, because at Zip2 and PayPal you see this guy who is not a very sure-handed manager. He’s really upsetting his employees. He’s having fights with other board members. And I think it was during that process where he sort of learns to become who he is today, and his self-confidence grows almost out of necessity.

He’s very logical, I think, and so part of it is just if he sees something he wants to do, and he thinks it’s the right thing to do, he’s decided that he’s going to do it. It’s this very binary thing. He’s just like, “This makes sense to me. I’m going to pursue it with all my energy.” I think he’s just wired a little bit different than most people.

PCM: So, he wants to turn humans into space colonizers. What do you think it reveals about his personality that his goals are so high?

Vance: I think it’s oddly that logical side of him. I don’t know. I guess you could think back to Columbus or Magellan or somebody, these really adventurous, flamboyant explorers. I think his original impetus for this is much more clinical and logical. “There should be a backup plan for the human species, and there isn’t a very good one, and I’m going to go build it.” And he does have this weird form of empathy, where he genuinely cares deeply, not about individual people as much but more about the human species. He would break down in tears when he was talking about the colony. It comes from this very logical, software-programmer place that you should back up your files and your work.

PCM: Do you think he has an equal today?

Vance: No. People always want to compare him to Steve Jobs or Edison or whatever. It’s sort of hard. It’s difficult because he’s a work in progress, and we don’t know where some of his stuff is going to end. But even just the face value of what he’s accomplished so far, you cannot find another human being that’s changed industries as diverse as finance, aerospace, automotive and energy. I think on that level he has no equal today or really ever.

I think clearly he has to get an affordable electric car out that is good and that people want and that they sell a lot of, in order for him to be considered a success with Tesla. I think SpaceX has to really get this reusable rocket technology done. He’s got to get to Mars in order for that to be considered a huge, forever-world-altering success. For SolarCity, it has to be proven that that’s a really sustainable business. There are a lot of people that argue that they’re not going to be profitable going forward. And so yeah, there are all of these question marks about exactly where he ends up in the pantheon of inventors and businesspeople.

As far as equals today, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos come to mind. I feel like those three guys are all in this camp of people who are willing to spend money on big, long-term things that are far afield from apps and things like that. They’re all working on these big computer services but also these crazy machines, and really bringing science fiction to life. So, in that sense, I think they’re sort of in similar camps. But I think Elon’s probably taken bigger risks so far and arguably been more successful with these other businesses.

ELON MUSK: TESLA, SPACEX, AND THE QUEST FOR A FANTASTIC FUTURE

BY ASHLEE VANCE ’00

ECCO, 2015

400 PAGES | $28.99