“It was the shittiest period of my life, given what was happening with my marriage, SpaceX and Tesla. I didn’t even have a house. Justine had it.”

In August 2008, a third SpaceX rocket crashed into the Pacific Ocean. This time, the rocket was carrying paying cargo. Elon Musk’s dreams of creating a viable space company making humanity “an interplanetary species” were in tatters.

SpaceX had run out of money. Tesla had run out of money. Musk personally was running out of money.

And yet after the third crash, Elon says to his team: “SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit. I will never give up. And I mean never.”

This time, the famously voluble Musk didn’t point the finger of blame. He chose to stay positive. The team knew exactly what had caused each launch failure, so it was a matter of eliminating all the faults and risks.

The third launch had taken 18 months to prepare. He now instructs the engineers to build a fourth rocket and launch it in six weeks. The audacity “blew me away” says Hans Koenigsman, SpaceX chief rocket engineer.

“I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell within suntan oil after that” - Dolly Singh, head of human resources at SpaceX

A writer for Wired, Carl Hoffman, asked Musk how he could remain so optimistic after the third launch failure. Musk replied: “Optimism, pessimism, fuck that. We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work”.

Now to Tesla: In 2008 the Tesla Roadster was going to be launched, but Tesla was facing bankruptcy. In his private life, Musk was meanwhile paying $170,000 a month to divorce lawyers.