- Jim Cantrell worked at SpaceX during its early days in 2001 and 2002.
- He was impressed by Elon Musk’s vision, but he yelled and once called Cantrell to work at 3 in the morning.
- Cantrell gives Twitter employees his advice for their new boss.
This essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Jim Cantrell about his time working with Elon Musk as one of the founding employees at SpaceX. It has been edited for length and clarity.
When Elon first called me in 2001, I didn’t know who he was—I’d never heard of PayPal. At the time, I was working as part of the aerospace engineering team at Utah State University.
He explained over the phone that he was an Internet billionaire and wanted to prove that humans could be an interplanetary species.
Elon wanted to buy Russian missiles because they were cheaper than American missiles and I had been told that I was the one to ask because I had worked with the Russians.
We, with incoming NASA administrator Mike Griffin, traveled to Moscow and laughed our way out of there
Elon was in his late 20s, poorly dressed and rather awkward. He was very smart and very determined, but even people in the US thought he was just a rich kid who wanted to go into space.
We were on the return plane and Elon turned to us and said, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.”
We were incredulous, but he showed us a chart he had been working on with Tom Mueller and Chris Thompson—engineers who were also part of the SpaceX co-founding team. Those were the initial plans for the Falcon 1, the first vehicle built by SpaceX, and I was impressed.
I was tired of dealing with government inefficiency. The plans that Elon showed me were exciting.
I planned to see where it took me for a year or so. I was SpaceX’s vice president of business development from December 2001 until I left in September 2002. Elon and I clashed a lot. He yelled at me several times and I would have to change who I was to continue working there.
Working with Elon was like working with two different people: the good Elon and the bad Elon, and you never knew which one you were going to get.
Good Elon is very funny and charming. He brought you his big ideas and you should be a part of it.
Evil Elon would yell at you and he would be frustrated. No one was good enough for him; nothing was good enough for him.
One time, he called me at 3 in the morning demanding to know where I was because he was in the office. I said, “I went to bed three hours ago—I need more sleep than that.” He wanted me to go down there because he had work to do.
Elon wouldn’t expect you to do anything he wouldn’t do, but the lengths he’s willing to go to are unusual for most people. I suspect the same will happen on Twitter – by sheer force of will I think he will increase productivity there.
Another thing about working with Elon was that he always had a vision. With SpaceX there had to be people on Mars. He expected you to be 100% aligned with this objective. It was always clear in his mind, but he didn’t always make it clear to his employees. There was a lot of guesswork.
I remember when we were building tanks for the missile and we had a fight. I had given him an estimate for the tanks, with the understanding that we would build them ourselves, and he thought it was too expensive. He shouted at me and was very upset.
He had me go to Salt Lake City and look at truck tanks on the highway and at a local steel mill to research these tanks and see if we could contract them. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust my judgment; he just knew there was another way to approach the problem.
I learned a lot, but I felt disrespected. I didn’t need to be paid to be yelled at, so I left.
There are people on Twitter who will have to decide if they are 100% on board with Musk’s mission for it.
If there are employees who don’t match that vision, he will chew them out and do it viciously, which is his right as an owner. If you are in tune with his vision and immune to a very strong boss who demands a lot of your time and thoughts, then it will be a very fun ride.
It depends on what people want in life – not everyone sees their career as the most important thing.
It’s exciting to be a part of Elon Musk’s vision. He gave speeches all the time during meetings about how important our work at SpaceX was, and I see him doing that in Twitter in his photos about the coffee bar.
These speeches are useful to keep you going. This is good Elon. Evil Elon sacked all the leaders. He can be wild – he’s very good at it.
