Elon Musk would get 'really angry' when employees at his first company Zip2 weren't still working at 9 o'clock at night, an ex-colleague told a BBC documentary

• Elon Musk would get very angry when staff at his first company, Zip2, weren't working after 9 p.m.
• A former Zip2 worker, Jim Ambras, told a new BBC documentary that Musk's face "would turn red."

Elon Musk would get very angry when employees at his first company were not still working after 9pm, a former colleague said in new BBC documentary.

The Elon Musk Story uses interviews with his family, friends, employees – and enemies – to explain his rise to become the world's richest man. The first episode was broadcast in the UK on Wednesday night.

Jim Ambras, who was a vice-president at Zip2, said Musk would go around the office well into the evening "looking to see who was sitting at their cubes, and there weren't many people sitting at their cubes – it was 9 p.m."

Complimentary Tech Event

Transform talent with learning that works

Capability development is critical for businesses who want to push the envelope of innovation.Discover how business leaders are strategizing around building talent capabilities and empowering employee transformation.Know More

"And his face turned red, he was really angry that the entire company wasn't there in the office at 9 o'clock at night," Ambras added.

Zip2, which provided online city guide software to newspapers, was founded in Palo Alto by Musk and his brother Kimbal in 1995 as Global Link Information Network in 1995. It was bought by Compaq four years later to boost its AltaVista search engine and netted Elon and Kimbal $22 million and $15 million respectively, according to Ashley Vance's 2015 book "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future."

Branden Spikes, a systems engineer at Zip2 also interviewed for the documentary, described Musk as an "unusual fellow" who would work late and then sleep under his desk. He also called the South African a "know-it-all" who thought he knew "just about everything about everything."

Elon Musk's mother, Maye, who also appears in the BBC documentary, said that when he was young she would struggle to wake him up in the morning because he would stay up all night reading books. She said she would dress him while he was still half-asleep.

Musk runs Tesla and SpaceX alongside two smaller start-ups, Neuralink and The Boring Company.

In 2019, he was ranked as the most inspiring leader in tech. However, he told a December 2021 episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast" not to try to "be a leader for the sake of being a leader. The people you want as leaders are the people who don't want to be leaders."