WHEN MUSK set out to establish a new electric-car company three years ago, he had no experience in the auto industry. But he wasn't about to take advice from the boys in Detroit. "Look at the EV1 debacle," he says, of General Motors' electric vehicle, available from 1997 to 2001 (and subject of this year's hit indie exposé Who Killed the Electric Car?). "It wasn't attractive, it had terrible range, and the speed was mediocre. It was, frankly, a punishment car. Driving it was like wearing a hair shirt."

Musk interviewed existing electric-car manufacturers but decided to put his money behind Martin Eberhard, a 48-year-old Silicon Valley electrical engineer best known for inventing the Rocket eBook, a handheld electronic book-reading device, in 1998. Eberhard had found a battery to radically extend the eBook's life, and that was just the sort of knowledge Musk needed to reinvent the plug-in. "Electric skills are not Detroit skills," Musk points out. "They're Silicon Valley skills."

Musk may have inherited his maverick streak from his grandfather, an adventurous Canadian who emigrated to Africa in the 1950s to search for the Lost City of the Kalahari. Elon was born in apartheid South Africa in 1971 and raised in a liberal family. He left Pretoria in 1989, refusing mandatory enlistment in what he called his country's "fascist army," and eventually accepted a scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He planned to pursue a doctorate in physics when he moved to California in 1995. But after less than a week at Stanford University, he traded school for the software industry, founding several companies—PayPal among them—in the late nineties.

His latest venture captures the essence of clean-tech philosophy: Environmental problems demand technological solutions. People may want to live greener lives—they'll give lip service to driving less and carpooling more—but unless transportation solutions are easy and attractive, change is hard to embrace. "Sometimes there is an antihuman element to environmental thinking, as if the earth would be better off without us," Musk says. "But to be an effective environmentalist, you also have to be a good businessman. You have to be pro-human and give people a car they'll actually want to drive."

This past June, Musk and Eberhard unveiled the Tesla Roadster, a sexy two-seater sports car powered by lithium-ion batteries, the same kind that run your laptop. Rather than shelling out big bucks to develop their own batteries, Musk and Eberhard cleverly harnessed the computer industry's existing technology. The result is a car with a 250-mile range (compared with the EV1's 90 miles), a top speed of 130, and a zero-to-60 acceleration of roughly four seconds. "What we've done is combine the moral high ground of the Prius with the performance of a Ferrari," Musk says. "You no longer have to compromise to be an environmentalist."

But, at least for now, you have to have a lot of cash. The first production run of 100 limited-edition Tesla Roadsters went for $100,000 apiece to buyers like George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio and sold out within a month. The same model will be offered to the public at $89,000 through Tesla dealerships, the first of which will open in Los Angeles in early 2007. And Musk says they're only laying the groundwork for more mass-market models: A four-door electric sedan for less than $50,000 is in the works for 2008; by 2010, he hopes to have prices below $35,000.