As he stewed about the absurd price the Russians wanted to charge, he employed some first-principles thinking, drilling down to the basic physics of the situation and building up from there. This led him to develop what he called an “idiot index,” which calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques.

“With a childhood like his in South Africa, I think you have to shut yourself down emotionally in some ways,” says his first wife Justine, the mother of five of his surviving ten children. “If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would’ve opened up an emotional dimension that he didn’t have tools to deal with.” This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

A few days after the board meeting, Eberhard was on his way to a conference in Los Angeles when his phone rang. It was Musk, who informed him that he was being ousted as CEO immediately. “It was like getting hit by a brick on the side of the head, something I never saw coming,” says Eberhard, who should have seen it coming. ... “They had had a meeting without me to vote me off the island.”

“We are on a deletion rampage!!” he wrote in one. “Nothing is sacred. Any remotely questionable tubes, sensors, manifolds, etc. will be deleted tonight.