"Intense"

Note: re-post from July 2015

(cont'd)

Engineer Jeremy Hollman was already disappointed in his job at Boeing at the age of 23. When Elon Musk recruited him with his radical vision of change in the aerospace industry, he liked it: "I thought it was an opportunity I could not pass up."

Young and single, he was willing to "give up any semblance of having a life in favor of working at SpaceX non-stop." He worked with the top engineer to create a new rocket engine. Then he loaded it in onto a U-Haul trailer behind a Hummer and drove 4,000 lbs of gear from CA to Texas for intense trial and error testing.

A great job, but super consuming, with failure after failure. "I was really, really frustrated and just tired and mad." His glasses fell down a flame duct and he had no time to go to the optometrist. His safety glasses got scratched. He "vented about this in the factory one night." Musk was nearby and heard it all.

Two hours later, Musk's assistant appeared with a lasik eye surgery appointment. He paid for the surgery. Hollman says, "Elon can be very demanding, but he'll make sure the obstacles in your way are removed."

from Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future