Tesla's high valuation is not due to the number of cars they make, and it is certainly not due to profits. So what is it all about?

A lot of it has to do with the company’s visionary co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk.

“You can kind of play armchair psychologist and see that is a guy who wants to prove himself to the world and show everyone that he was the special guy,” says Musk biographer Ashlee Vance. “He [was] kind of this outcast at school... but his family was very kind to him, except for his father who he had a very difficult relationship with as well.”

Musk emerged from a childhood he himself described to Vance as “misery” with ambition and determination that left him little patience for human relationships. “He just has the strangest form of empathy I think of anyone that I’ve met,” Vance observes. “He’s not really interested in individual people but when we’re talking about Mars, when we’re talking about the climate, he really would just break down in tears when we were talking about these things.”

Vance explains how Musk’s experiences with the so-called PayPal mafia and his other early ventures in Silicon Valley influenced the all-encompassing role he plays in his current companies. “I think this has had a really lasting effect on him where you see with Tesla and SpaceX that he will never relinquish control of the companies and sort of allow this to happen again.”
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