Musk and his private rocket company, SpaceX, are "urging the White House to come up with... financial support" for their Falcon 9 heavy rocket, the Wall Street Journal reports. SpaceX would then charge the government to send astronauts and space-station parts into orbit. Luckily for Musk, the president appears to have a soft spot for profligate futurists. In addition to funneling $465 million to help Tesla manufacture an electric sedan, the Obama administration is also considering hiring private companies — like SpaceX — to launch and supply a forthcoming space station, the Journal says.

The bailout could hardly come at a better time; despite private infusions totaling at least $120 million, and millions in fees from government customers for its first few launches, SpaceX has become famous for its failed launches. The company notoriously sent the ashes of Star Trek actor James "Scotty" Doohan into the South Pacific rather than toward the stars, giving the startup a perfect 0-for-3 record. In the intervening year, the company has successfully launched exactly one satellite, and been bailed out by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Thiel, a libertarian, no doubt relishes the thought of displacing NASA bureaucrats. But he'll have trouble explaining to his pro-oil-drilling, anti-immigrant political buddies why he's helping a Democratic administration grow the federal debt through a massive pork-barrel subsidy to an environmental entrepreneur, from South Africa.

Come to think of it, the administration in question might have trouble explaining that, too.

(Pic: Musk, lower left, observing a rocket launch, via SpaceX)

It's not that Musk's dreams — introducing a mass-market electric car, colonizing space — are ignoble. Far from it. It's just that he lacks the means and the mindset to realize them.

Every dreamer must turn huckster at some point, lest his fantasies remain just that. But Musk is taking the practice to an extreme.

He is touring the United States, showing off a barely driveable show-car version of his Model S electric sedan, hoping to drum up deposits — sorry, "reservation fees" — on which his cash-strapped company will live until, in theory, it lands $350 million in government loans to build the car — maybe in 2011 but more likely in 2012, years after Musk first predicted his company would sell a mass-market sedan. If it happens at all. Musk has been treating the loans as a sure thing for months, but the company's application has yet to be approved.

If he cannot stop human motorists from polluting the planet, he will try to help them escape it through his other company, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. But SpaceX, too, seems to be running aground. The latest launch of his Falcon 1 rocket was cancelled, and the vehicle is rotting in the moist salt air of Omelek Island in Kwajalein while his technicians scramble to fix a vibration problem.

Aside from Falcon 1, Musk has no tested vehicles. The Falcon 9, the rocketship which Musk hopes will replace the Space Shuttle in carrying crew to the International Space Station, has not yet had its maiden flgiht. According to an archived SpaceX launch schedule, that was supposed to happen last year. An updated schedule shows that SpaceX's paying clients from Malaysia to Sweden have had their launches delayed, in some cases by years.

Musk's personal life is another source of unmanaged distraction. He is in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Justine Musk; the couple has five children. He is engaged to a British actress, the recently blonde Talulah Riley, whom he is supposed to marry this year. (That launch's schedule, too, has seemed to shift.)

Musk's underlings report a fickle, reality-resistant boss, flitting from idea to idea but never quite landing. And yet we're supposed to believe that Musk will get us to Mars by 2020 on the dot?

There's the real danger: Not that Musk's dreams are wrong, but that his personal failings mean it's more than likely he'll never realize them. Then the danger is that Musk's frothingly dizzy fanboys and orgasmically giggling fangirls will turn not just against Musk but against the dreams of electric cars and spaceflight. That's why, if you hope to zip around this rock without polluting it, or escape its gravity altogether, Elon Musk should not be your hero. The dream is not the dreamer.

(Photo via SpaceX)

Tesla's lead investor, Elon Musk, installed himself as CEO last fall. That's just one of the many parallels between his story and that of Preston Tucker, the doomed automotive entrepreneur whose dream of an innovative new car died amid charges that he was taking people's money for cars he couldn't build. Musk's Tesla Roadster, a $109,000 sportscar which races from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 4 seconds, could be the next Tucker Torpedo.

In October, Valleywag reported that Tesla Motors was down to $9 million in the bank. Musk confirmed the company's cash position, and promised he would raise another $40 million in convertible debt from existing investors. But the fundraising is taking longer than planned. At a recent town hall meeting with customers, Musk reportedly told Tesla buyers that the company almost ran out of money in December, before it raised part of the round. Tesla is still seeking new funds.

And it has turned to existing customers as a source of those funds. The company is losing money on every Roadster sold, Musk says. Having already spent their deposits, Musk ordered a price hike on the $90,000-plus car's options, adding charges for everything from delivery to the car's electric charger to its sound system. (It is rather like Tucker's move to sell accessories to car buyers before he had even built one.)

Musk claimed he needed to raise prices to assure the company's viability. If the company does not look like it will make money soon, it will not be eligible for some $400 million in Department of Energy-guaranteed loans on which Musk has been counting to start production of a mainstream $50,000 sedan, the Model S, which has already been delayed until 2012.

But according to a Tesla tipster, Musk's decision to raise prices has caused severe damage to the company's operations. Production ceased while manufacturing waited to hear what options to install. And the company's salespeople were consumed by the task of calling back customers and asking for more money, rather than pursuing new sales. While cars stopped going out, money stopped going in. He also faces a real risk of customers asking for their deposits back; California's vehicle code provides strict consumer protections against such fiddling with prices. Tesla buyers, though, tend to be wealthy true believers, so they may well pony up more money — if they can still afford the car at all, that is.

Now Tesla has cancelled plans to build a factory in San Jose where it planned to build its Model S, a mass-market sedan. Musk is still planning to take deposits from Model S customers starting March 5.

This sounds exactly like the sort of trouble Tucker (left) found himself in, with an engineer accusing him of never bothering to buy production machinery for a factory he'd never bothered to build, while taking money from investors and customers.

Tesla and Musk may somehow pull through this. But he has already told customers they may lose any money they've given him. In November, he offered to personally guarantee the deposits of any Roadster buyer should the company fail. But at this week's town hall meeting, he told customers their deposit money would be at risk if they did not go along with his price hike and Tesla went bankrupt.

Musk, a successful Web entrepreneur whose PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5 billion, is also in the business of building rocket ships through his other company, SpaceX. He's talked about carrying out a privately funded mission to Mars. At this point, that looks more likely than Tesla getting off the ground.

Eberhard and Musk have long feuded, even before Musk ousted Eberhard as Tesla's CEO. But I'd note that for once, they're not outright contradicting each other here.

It's far more common for Musk to have a version of events that conflicts with everyone else's accounting. His history of events at PayPal, the electronic-payments startup he cofounded, seems to be shared only by him. And Musk has been telling everyone who will listen that SpaceX, his rocket startup, has a "Nasa contract to build the Space Shuttle replacement after 2010." If you ask Nasa administrators, they'll say that's more than a stretch of the truth. (In fact, SpaceX is competing for a contract, but it has only hit some of the milestones; Nasa is currently planning to rent out space on Russian rockets to supply the International Space Station, and a future supply contract for SpaceX is a possibility, not a certainty.)

So Musk has a tenuous relationship with reality. Is this a handicap in his business? Apple CEO Steve Jobs is famous for his "reality distortion field" — a charisma that leads others to believe the most exaggerated claims, because the vision behind them is so compelling.

Of course, Jobs actually has brought his outlandish vision to life four times: With the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Musk has realized the Roadster, and SpaceX has managed, after several crashes, to launch one lone rocket. He's also got SolarCity, a startup which installs solar panels on roofs.

If in 2011, we live in a shiny future where we drive Tesla cars powered with clean electricity from SolarCity panels, and SpaceX's Falcon1 rockets are supplying orbital space stations, then we will be living in a reality of Musk's making — much as Jobs envisioned the iPod in the dark days of October 2001, and then, three years later, saw them everywhere on the New York subway.

There's another possibility, however, which would also make Musk like Steve Jobs — the Jobs of two decades ago, who was forced out of Apple by the CEO he hired. Tesla could go under, SpaceX could fail to win the Nasa contract, and SolarCity could get beaten down by rival cleantech startups. And then Musk, driving his Roadster on the lonely roads of Silicon Valley, would find himself facing a reality not constructed in his mind. An unpleasant thought, that. Far easier just to succeed.

• Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
• Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
• Max Levchin, Slide
• Robin Li, Baidu
• Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
• Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
• Mika Salmi, MTV
• Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
• Quincy Smith, CBS
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
• Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
• Evan Williams, Twitter
• Andrew Zolli, PopTech

Ignominiously, the botched launch ended up splashing the ashes of James Doohan, the actor who play Scotty in Star Trek's ashes all over the Pacific. Perhaps more materially, three satellites — two from NASA and another form the department of defense — also saw their trips cut drastically short. Thiel's $20 million follows $100 million of Musk's own money already sunk into the project. As friendly as the two are now, Thiel's investment has to be humiliating — a reminder that Musk may have the occasional clever idea, but it takes a Thiel to make it pay off.