Bloomberg Risk Takers 10 juin 2014 Un portrait documentaire de Bloomberg dans lequel Musk raconte la construction de PayPal, SpaceX et Tesla ainsi que ses premiers risques entrepreneuriaux.
Un portrait documentaire de Bloomberg dans lequel Musk raconte la construction de PayPal, SpaceX et Tesla ainsi que ses premiers risques entrepreneuriaux.
Transcription Narrator
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk puts his money where his mouth is.
Elon Musk
I am personally guaranteeing that value and standing behind that guarantee with all of my assets.
Journalist
His greatest asset is his ability to take this big, big dream and make other people believe that it's true.
Narrator
The determined engineer's big dreams transformed three industries.
Elon Musk
I'm just wishing to any entities that are listening, please bless this launch.
Commentator
Here's an immigrant from South Africa coming to America to say, you know, NASA, that whole rocket thing you do with the space shuttle, I've got a better way.
Narrator
His better way meant risking everything.
Elon Musk
We had maybe about a week's worth of cash in the bank or less. I had to make a choice then that either took all of the capital that I had left from the sale of PayPal to eBay and invest that in Tesla, or. Or Tesla would die.
Narrator
Others weren't so willing to take a chance on him or his companies.
Commentator
You put $90 billion, like 50 years
Narrator
worth of brakes into, into solar and
Commentator
wind to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and enter one.
Narrator
I mean, I had a friend who said, you don't just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers.
Journalist
It's very unlikely that the Tesla investment is ever repaid to the taxpayers. Electric vehicles are really not possible in ways that would be effective for most consumers still.
Narrator
But his bets have paid off.
Elon Musk
We didn't just repay the principal, we actually repaid it with interest and a bonus payment. So ultimately, the US taxpayer actually made a profit of over $20 million on this loan.
Narrator
Elon Musk has even bigger dreams that might just take him farther than anyone else.
Commentator
Elon Musk goes a step further. Earth's not big enough with SpaceX. He literally wants to go to Mars.
Elon Musk
I'd really love to go to Mars. And that's the overarching goal of SpaceX. When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dog. But then I sort of came to understand, okay, well, dark just means really the absence of photons in the visible wavelength, 400 to 700 nanometers.
Narrator
It's hard to believe that entrepreneur Elon Musk was ever afraid of anything.
Maye Musk
And Elon said, darkness is merely the absence of light.
Elon Musk
Then I thought, well, it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn't afraid of the clock anymore after that.
Maye Musk
Once one of the kids said to him, look at the moon. It's a billion miles away. And he said, well, no, it's actually under 250,000 miles away. And they said, oh, Elon.
Narrator
Entrepreneur Elon Musk has spent his life proving people wrong. Growing up in South Africa, Musk was the oldest of three children and started school a year early. His father was an engineer. His mother, May, was a model and nutritionist.
Maye Musk
He was the youngest. He made about two days and the shortest and. And then he was this brilliant boy, and so people didn't really like him.
Elon Musk
So I was this little bookwormy kid and probably a bit of a smart aleck. So this is a recipe for disaster.
Maye Musk
Not that he told me much about it, but he was picked on quite a bit.
Elon Musk
So I just like, read a lot of books and try to stay out of people's way during school.
Maye Musk
And so his social life was much less than my other two kids. And that's a typical nerd.
Elon Musk
I read all the comics I could buy or that they'd let me read at the bookstore before chasing me away. I read every. Everything I could get my hands on from when I woke up to when I went to sleep. At one point, I really ran out of books and started reading the encyclopedia.
Maye Musk
And he has a photographic memory, so he could remember everything. Anytime I had a question, my daughter Tosca would say, call genius boy.
Narrator
His brother, Kimball Musk.
Kimbal Musk
When Elon was 10 years old, he got tested by IBM and he was found to have one of the highest aptitudes they'd ever seen for computer programming.
Elon Musk
I tried taking some computer classes, but I was way ahead of the teacher, so it didn't really help. So I started programming the space game called Blastar.
Narrator
Musk, already thinking like an entrepreneur, figured out how to sell his game.
Elon Musk
I don't think they realized I was 12.
Kimbal Musk
We decided we were going to open an arcade out near our high school. We were big into video games. We figured that it was going to be a huge hit. We got a lease on a building, we got the arcade provider to deliver the equipment, and the only thing we needed to do by the end of it was get the city to approve what we were doing.
Narrator
But an adult had to apply for a city permit and they hadn't told their parents what they were up to.
Kimbal Musk
And of course, they told us we were not going to be opening up an arcade.
Narrator
Max Chavkin is a technology and business journalist who has profiled Elon Musk several times.
Journalist
Really, the most amazing thing about his childhood is his escape from South Africa.
Elon Musk
I remember thinking and saying that America is where great things are possible more than any other country in the world. It's all cliche, but it's True, America is the land of opportunity.
Narrator
By moving, Musk would also avoid mandatory service in South Africa's army.
Kimbal Musk
Growing up in apartheid South Africa was pretty surreal. I mean, we didn't support that government. We didn't believe in it. And so the idea of actually going to the military service was really out of the question.
Elon Musk
I told my parents I was going to Canada, and they tried to convince me not to leave.
Maye Musk
And off he flew. And I thought, wow, he's so independent. I, of course, as soon as he lands, he calls me and says, what do I do now?
Elon Musk
So I boarded a bus from Montreal to Vancouver, and that allowed me to kind of see Canada, at least from the highway.
Narrator
He worked at odd jobs across the country before settling at Queens College in Toronto.
Elon Musk
In fact, when I went to college, I rarely went to class. I'd just read the textbook and then show up for exams. The big appeal at university was being able to date girls my own age. I actually met my first wife there.
Narrator
Musk got an engineering and business degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a scholarship to go to Stanford. Silicon Valley was the promised land.
Elon Musk
I really wanted to kind of go where the really exciting breakthroughs were occurring.
Kimbal Musk
Elon had this ability to look at the world and go, this is a real problem that's going to happen in 20 years.
Journalist
He looked around and he saw that the world changing stuff was not happening at Stanford.
Elon Musk
I didn't even go to class. I called the chair of the department and said, I'd like to try starting this Internet company. It probably won't succeed. And so when it fails, I want to make sure that I can still come back.
Maye Musk
My kids do funny things, and I'm never too concerned about them because, you know, if Elon wanted to drop out of college, he could always go back.
Elon Musk
My brother was in Canada at the time, and I said, look, I think we should try to create an Internet company. So he came down and joined me.
Journalist
He had $2,000, no friends, barely enough money for an apartment. I think he told me he was showering at the gym because they didn't have a shower where he was living.
Elon Musk
We just got some futons that there were couches during the day and then turned into beds at night.
Narrator
Steve Jurvetson is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.
Commentator
I first met Elon N. Kimble Musk, his brother, back in the mid-90s when they first set foot in California. I think they'd been here for about a week, and they were pitching a new company called Zip2 Silicon Valley in the mid-90s and late-90s was a gold rush. People were flocking to the region to find riches to make it in the Internet business.
Narrator
Musk came up with an idea to bring newspapers into the digital age. He took a CD rom, yellow pages, some mapping software, wrote a little code, and put it all together to create the first online city listings.
Kimbal Musk
Elon was more the business mastermind. I was more the sales guy.
Elon Musk
I still had my core programming skills, so I was able to write the software needed for the first company.
Journalist
Now, when Elon was starting zip two, keep in mind, the Internet was just
Commentator
a couple of years old.
Journalist
Most local businesses were not on the Internet. And the way you found a local business was you opened up the yellow pages.
Elon Musk
The thought was that media companies, the newspapers, are going to need help coming online and building lots of functionality into their websites.
Kimbal Musk
We had someone literally throw a yellow pages book at us and tell us, do you think you'll ever replace this? And we thought the guy was crazy because not only were we going to replace this, but that's not where it ended. It would keep going from there.
Narrator
It wasn't long before media companies across the country were signing up.
Elon Musk
And so we were able to get as investors and customers the New York Times Company, Hearst, Knightrider, and a number of other companies.
Narrator
In 1999, the Alta Vista division of Compaq bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and 34 million in stock options. Musk was just 28 years old.
Elon Musk
I thought, that's crazy. Why would somebody pay such a huge amount of money for this little company that we have? It actually turned out very well for them financially, so they knew a lot more about it than I did.
Maye Musk
When the kids sold them, too, it was the most exciting day. We couldn't believe it, because you don't know in the Internet world if you're going to, you know, make a million or die tomorrow.
Narrator
In February 1999, Elon Musk sold his first company. At 28, he joined the ranks of Silicon Valley millionaires.
Elon Musk
Software was acquired by Compaq for a little over $300 million. And I made about 21 or $22 million as a result of that, which was a phenomenal amount of money for me.
Kimbal Musk
It was obviously a financial windfall. It was super fun to go out and buy some cool toys.
Elon Musk
There is John in the fastest car in the world.
Commentator
One of his first things to do is go out and get a big sports car. He comes from a family that really enjoys racing and vehicles, and he got one of the highest performance cars money could buy at the time, the McLaren F1, and proceeded to enjoy that around the bay area. Let's say there's a number of adventures and risk taking moves with his driving.
Journalist
While I'm sure it felt, you know, wonderful to have all this money and to have people recognizing success, I think he was also frustrated that this company hadn't become as great as he wanted it to be. It hadn't changed the world. It had just slightly altered the course of newspaper history, which I think from his point of view is, you know, kind of a piddling accomplishment.
Elon Musk
I certainly had the choice at that point of retiring and buying an island somewhere and sipping mai tais, but that was not of interest to me at all.
Kimbal Musk
There really wasn't a choice of we weren't going to do anything. It was just really what we were going to do next. In Elon's case in particular, it was really just a stepping stone.
Elon Musk
The goal in doing my second Internet company was to create something that would have a profound effect. And it seems to me that the financial sector had not seen a lot of innovation on the Internet. And money is really just an entry in a database. And so it's low bandwidth. It seems like something that should lend itself to innovation.
Journalist
He was very rich. I mean, just more money than most people could dream. And he took almost no time in between that sale and starting the company that became paypal.
Narrator
Musk's new company created something we take for granted today. It changed the way the world buys things, the way money is transferred from one person to another.
Elon Musk
At the time, transactions were very slow. People would have to mail checks to each other, so it could take weeks just to complete a single transaction.
Narrator
With his windfall from the sale of Zip2, Musk quickly turned around and founded X.com to make electronic cash transfers possible. But his new company collided with a rival mobile payment company called confinity.
Kimbal Musk
And they were really competing against each other. And the real enemy at the end of the day was ebay.
Elon Musk
We combined our efforts in order to compete effectively against ebay's built in system.
Narrator
They called the new company paypal.
Kimbal Musk
When he looked at PayPal, his goal was not to create a place you could do person to person payments. His goal was to transform the financial industry.
Elon Musk
We're able to become the leading payment system in the world. And then ebay finally threw in the towel and acquired PayPal. In early 2002, Musk and his partners
Narrator
sold PayPal for $1.5 billion. Musk was the largest shareholder and walked away with 180 million. He was 30 years old.
Elon Musk
I could have bought probably a chain of islands, but again, that was obviously just not of interest to me.
Narrator
Islands weren't of interest, but outer space was.
Elon Musk
It's just a much more exciting, inspiring future if we're out there exploring the stars as opposed to a future where we are forever confined to Earth. I was thinking, well, I wonder when we're going to Mars, when is NASA going to go to Mars? And I went to the NASA website and there was no plan to go to Mars and no plan to really even take the next step in space exploration.
Kimbal Musk
This is Elon saying he wants to go and enable human civilization to leave the planet Earth. It's about as big a vision as you could possibly imagine. And that's going to require funds. And he has enough funds to go do it, so he's going to go do it.
Narrator
Musk had the outrageous idea that private enterprise could actually re energize space Travel. And in June 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.
Commentator
Elon was the only funder of the company for its early years. Another incredibly risky move to say nobody on the planet thinks this idea is financible. I'm going to fund all of it myself to the tune of almost $100 million, which was the majority of his net worth at the time, into a dream to take on the military industrial complex. Here's an immigrant from South Africa coming to America to say, you know NASA, that whole rocket thing you do with the space shuttle, I've got a better.
Elon Musk
I actually traveled to Russia three times to look at buying a refurbished ICBM without the nuke. And I came to the conclusion that the thing that was really holding us back from making much more progress in space was really that rockets had not evolved since the 60s.
Journalist
So the trick isn't figuring out how to get to orbit, it's figuring out how to get to orbit cheaply.
Elon Musk
So I had to come up with lower cost ways to produce engines, the primary structure, the electronics to the launch operation, as well as run the company at with very little overhead. And the sum of inventions in all those areas is what has led us to roughly three to four fold improvements over the cost of other rockets in the United States.
Journalist
What SpaceX has been very successful at is taking basically off the shelf technology stuff that was developed by NASA 50 years ago and streamlining it. So in that way, he's kind of the Henry Ford of space, because Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile. He Just figured out how to make the army automobile, you know, commercially viable.
Narrator
Musk was more than just an entrepreneur.
Journalist
If you ask Elon how he managed to teach himself rocket science, he'll just look at you very seriously and just say very quietly, I read a lot of books.
Narrator
32 year old Elon Musk had his next big idea at his family's annual visit to Burning man, the counterculture desert happening. Although still fascinated by rockets and fast cars, he wanted to find a way to end Earth's addiction to fossil fuels.
Elon Musk
I was one that suggested the idea of going into the solar power arena to Lyndon and Peter Ryan, my cousins.
Journalist
He basically hands this idea to his cousins and says, if you want to start this, I will fund you and it'll be your company, but I'll be the chairman. And they said, okay. And it works almost perfectly.
Commentator
What they figured out is that if you sort of do a hundred things 10% better in the area of solar cell installation for homeowners, you can dramatically consolidate an industry that's currently a bunch of mom and pop shops. So what SolarCity did was they said, how about no money down? You want solar shelves, we'll just put them in.
Elon Musk
You don't pay a center.
Commentator
It's like leasing a car, but even better.
Narrator
SolarCity started in five Western states and soon grew into the largest solar service provider in the US the solar cells keep going.
Commentator
SolarCity then owns those at the end of lease. So it's a fascinating business model where in the long term they may become the largest energy generator in America off
Elon Musk
all of these rooftops.
Narrator
But renewable energy was just one part of a much bigger goal. Musk had a more ambitious plan for a sustainable future.
Journalist
He had this idea that he wanted to make electric cars help humanity get off fossil fuels.
Elon Musk
And so SolarCity is about sustainable energy creation, whereas Tesla is about sustainable energy consumption.
Narrator
In April 2004, Musk helped launch Tesla with $6.3 million of his own money. It was the first auto industry startup in decades and the only one born in Silicon Valley.
Elon Musk
And it's really pretty simple. Make a high priced car at low volume, because that's essentially the only thing we could afford to do. And then step two is a medium priced car at medium volumes, and step three is a low priced car at high volumes.
Narrator
Tesla's plan was to introduce a high end, high performance product to first attract outliers, then make an affordable car for the masses. Tesla's co founder and first CEO, Martin Eberhard.
Journalist
We expect to change the way people think about electric cars with this car and that we hope to open the market for us to sell other electric cars. But we also know that if you start off by saying, let's first change human nature and make everybody drive crummy little cars, that doesn't work. So instead, let's build a car that people want to drive. Let's build a car that's hot and desirable and beautiful and convince people that driving an electric car is not a compromise.
Kimbal Musk
This idea of actually going in and putting it in a high end car and breaking the mold of what an electric car was, was exciting. This is no longer going to be a golf cart. This is going to be a Ferrari.
Journalist
Any cops watching?
Commentator
When we first saw Tesla, it had a good explanation for how they get to market without having to spend exorbitant amount of money. How they would create a brand and an object of desire in consumers. And each part of the story clicked together.
Elon Musk
He talked about Silicon Valley smarts, being able to show Detroit how to do something that Detroit didn't think was possible. It's batteries, it's drive electronics, it's electric motors. Those are skills that are present in Silicon Valley and not present in Detroit.
Narrator
Tesla's revolutionary technology for the Roadster started with a computer battery as the power source for the automobile. J.B. straubel, Tesla's chief technology officer, was the main designer of the electric powertrain.
Tesla Engineer
For the first time, it was possible to drive over 200 miles and have performance that was directly comparable, competitive with what a gasoline car could do. And Tesla was the first company to take those principles and put that into practice and try it.
Narrator
California Governor Schwarzenegger showed up for the roadster's 2006 coming out party.
Elon Musk
A test drop. This one, it's hard.
Narrator
He bought one. So did Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney. But could Musk sell regular customers on his idea?
Elon Musk
At that time, there was very little activity in the auto industry in electric vehicles. We were in the age of the large suv. So it was a little unusual to hear about this company in California that was planning to come to market with a high end, all electric sports car.
Tesla Engineer
We were very passionate about trying to make sure that this car was going to just throw down the gauntlet on what the technology could do and really prove to the world that electric vehicles could be incredibly fast and could have incredibly long range. There was kind of a sense of adventure, you know, doing these things for the first time and doing it in a really scrappy way. We did some of the very first battery packs in my garage in Menlo park before we actually were able to rent a real office.
Narrator
The big issue for Tesla, as with all electric cars, has been the batteries, their cost, and how long they last. Eric Noble is president of Car Lab, an automotive consulting firm that evaluates new cars and trucks.
Journalist
American consumers are very ready for battery electric vehicles. Unfortunately, battery electric vehicles aren't ready for American consumers.
Narrator
The first results at Tesla seem to support this gloomy forecast. Tesla.
Elon Musk
When we first started out, the thought was simple and really, obviously in retrospect, quite naive, which was to make use of some technology that we develop ourselves, but also some technology that we'd license from AC Propulsion, put that together, and create an electric sports car that would be compelling. So let's see, where did that fall apart?
Narrator
It fell apart when the team told Musk that the projected cost had skyrocketed from $65,000 to $140,000. As the problems mounted, Musk faced a do or die decision at Tesla. He would have to choose between investing his PayPal payoff or let his new company collapse.
Commentator
And Elon was looking at this and saying, the dream is still there. But oh my gosh, what have I got? I gotta get this under control.
Narrator
By 2007, Tesla was running out of money fast. No one wanted to step up to save the unproven automobile startup Elon Musk had to take the leap alone.
Elon Musk
We have to make some pretty dramatic changes, essentially recapitalize the business and invest about twice what we'd originally expected. What we really expected is the outer limit.
Journalist
Basically, Tesla got to this point where they only had enough money in the bank for a couple of months and there's nobody around who are willing to put more money in.
Elon Musk
I take all of my reserve capital and invest it into Tesla, which was very scary because, you know, it would obviously be quite sad to have the fruits of my labor with Zip2 and PayPal not amount to anything. But there was no question that I would do that in my mind because Tesla was too important to let die. I'm available 24 7. Help solve issues. Call me 3am on a Sunday morning. I don't care.
Kimbal Musk
We had to go in and make some really hard decisions on personnel changes. And Elon really had to dedicate his time to the company.
Elon Musk
I want names named. So if someone's always on the hot seat and is always the root cause for problems, they will not be part of this organization long term. It's not okay to be unhappy and part of this company. And if somebody can't get happy, get the boots.
Narrator
Musk and his board replaced Martin Eberhard, one of the co founders who had been running Tesla.
Elon Musk
And I think we kind of really exceeded the level that Everhard could handle. And that became apparent in 2007.
Kimbal Musk
We either were going to have to shut the company down or Elon was going to have to take over as CEO.
Tesla Engineer
It was actually a process of building a company as well as building a car. A lot of people that, that fit in very well with the company when it was extremely small, didn't end up fitting in as well when it was larger.
Narrator
Everhard didn't go quietly. He sued Musk for libel, slander and breach of contract.
Journalist
I believe that I was scapegoated to take the blame for the programs that
Narrator
were not run well. Musk resolved the dispute through mediation, but his company was in serious financial trouble. In September 2007, Musk flew to Germany with a scheme to raise extra cash by force forging an alliance with Daimler Mercedes.
Elon Musk
Daimler is the company that invented the internal combustion engine car, the maker of Mercedes Smart. And their endorsement carries a great deal of weight. So that was just a very important moment.
Narrator
He had to convince the company that Tesla could supply battery packs for its cars. They were skeptical.
Elon Musk
Really. The key thing with Daimler was to demonstrate hardware that worked.
Tesla Engineer
You know, if they can't touch it, they can't drive it. It's not particularly real.
Narrator
He pushed his team to retrofit a Daimler Smart Car with Tesla's electric motor. But first they had to find one.
Tesla Engineer
The challenge of converting a Smart Car to electric was doubly difficult because we couldn't find a Smart Car.
Elon Musk
The Smart Car is not for sale in the United States. So we had to send somebody down to Mexico to buy a Smart Car, bring one to the US and then the Smart Car is really tiny, so we had to fit a motor and power electronics charger and everything in the Smart Car.
Narrator
The challenge was daunting. To replace the Smart Car's gas engine with a Tesla drivetrain and battery, fit it in the tiny space under the hood, and do it all in less than four weeks.
Tesla Engineer
We didn't have much time at all. We knew that from the beginning. And we kind of prepared for almost battle and, you know, set up a war room in the shop.
Narrator
They worked around the clock, stealing naps on the factory floor right up to the deadline.
Elon Musk
The Daimler executives arrived and not at all convinced that it made any sense to work with an American car company, let alone a little tiny American car company in Silicon Valley.
Narrator
While waiting for Daimler's decision, Musk brought in one of the world's leading automobile designers to help create his next project, a modern and sexy family sedan, which he called the Model S. Originally with
Elon Musk
Model S, I thought, well, let's have Henry Fisker, who, who had a design studio do the styling. We paid him a pretty good sum of money to do that. Curiously enough, the designs that he worked on that he came up with for us were terrible. And what he didn't tell us was that he was actually working on a competing car company. Tesla officials claimed that perhaps Henrik had come in to learn what Tesla was doing, while all along he was planning to form his own company, do his own vehicle. We were pretty upset with him for basically taking what were at the time the original specifications for the Model S and then going and shopping a business plan to create that same car.
Journalist
Tesla sued him. He sued Tesla and there was all kinds of infighting.
Narrator
Henrik Fisker wouldn't grant Bloomberg an interview, but he told us that I believe there is enough space in the market for several new car companies that pursue a new type of electrified powertrain with different philosophies. In November 2008, the court ruled in Fisker's favor. It was a setback for Musk, who was also going through a tough time personally. After eight years of marriage and five children, Elon and Justine Musk divorced.
Elon Musk
I got divorced. Personal life in somewhat of a shambles and in addition getting, you know, attacked by some in the media, you know, my ex wife, every bad thing you could imagine.
Narrator
There was more bad news when his bold space transport company, SpaceX again failed to get a rocket into orbit.
Elon Musk
The first launch didn't get very far, got about a minute up and then was there was an engine fire and that was it. The second flight actually did make it to space, but not to orbit. And then also flight three, we didn't get all the way to orbit.
Journalist
He started saying, I've got enough money for three cracks at it. He put $100 million of his own money and he sort of hinted at the idea that after three, if he didn't make would be over, SpaceX would die.
Narrator
Musk burned through the 100 million he had sunk into SpaceX. Now he was on his way back to the drawing board.
Journalist
Three days after the failure, he announced like first that he knew what was wrong. He announced that they'd raised money to finance a fourth launch. And the fourth launch was going to happen in a matter of months, which in the rocket industry was a crazy announcement.
Elon Musk
We were able to solve the problems and then just as we solved those problems, we ran smack into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
Maye Musk
It's been one of the darkest days on Wall street in recent memory. Stock market falling the most since 9 11.
Elon Musk
The Dow off more than 500 points.
Maye Musk
This is what financial Armageddon looks like. Red screens that scream sell, sell, sell.
Narrator
It was a week that shook Wall street and indeed the world.
Journalist
And a realization that the economy may still head into a deeper downturn.
Narrator
As 2008 drew to a close, Elon Musk faced the worst crisis of his career. All three of his companies appear to be in free fall.
Elon Musk
The worst point was probably just the weekend before Christmas in 2008 we had the economic tsunami take place and made things even worse. If it wasn't needed, we had to shut it down and, and just figure out what's. How do we get through this dark period and not go bankrupt?
Maye Musk
General Motors shares falling to more than a 20 year low after Goldman cut the automakers rating to sell on a worsening sales outlook.
Elon Musk
That was tough. It was, it was obviously an economic period that saw the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler. And there we were a young company selling a very, very optional car. I mean it was really a. You people don't need a hundred thousand dollar sports car and they certainly wouldn't
Narrator
want one getting poor reviews. The popular BBC program Top Gear took the Tesla roadster on a test drive in December 2008.
Elon Musk
This car van really was shaping up to be slightly something wonderful.
Elon Musk
although Tesla say it'll do 200 miles, we worked out that on our track it would run out after just 55 miles. And if it does run out, it's not a quick job to charge it up again.
Narrator
The combative CEO charged the incident was faked and said he had proof that the roadster had not run out of power. He sued the BBC to block reruns of the show. The case was later dismissed. But things would get even tougher. His energy company SolarCity foundered. The bank that had backed their leases pulled out of the deal.
Elon Musk
I certainly did not anticipate that we would have the worst economic climate since the Great Depression and one which was disproportionately bad for cars. I mean General Motors went bankrupt. I mean General, General F and Motors,
Narrator
you know, Musk was in the fight of his life.
Elon Musk
We had maybe about a week's worth of cash in the bank or less. And there was just very little time left in the year to resolve these things. I mean, there were like two or three business days left in the air. I never thought it was possible for me to have a nurse breakdown, but it was possible for me to have a nurse breakdown there. That was about as close as I was going to come.
Maye Musk
When Elon was going through his sad period, I was so sad. I felt like I had a hole in my heart and there's nothing you can do. You just hurt so much. And I just didn't see him getting out of it. He was just so sad. And then the next thing I get this call saying, ma, you can't believe it. I've met a wonderful woman.
Narrator
The one bright spot was meeting Tallulah Riley, a British actress who had never heard of Tesla, SpaceX, or Elon Musk. They married in 2010.
Elon Musk
I thought it was some sort of hapless engineer that had wandered into a London club.
Maye Musk
And he just looked so forlorn. He was sort of just sat in
Elon Musk
the corner on his BlackBerry and he
Maye Musk
just looked really out of place and sad.
Elon Musk
I was, you know, trying to be very sweet to him and sort of humoring him, going, oh, yes. When he was going, this is my rocket and. And then this is my car.
Narrator
Musk's personal life was looking up, and the future of SpaceX was finally taking off. We have liftoff. The fourth attempt to launch the Falcon 1 was a huge success. And three months later, NASA rewarded SpaceX with a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. But Musk had no time to celebrate. Tesla was on the verge of financial disaster.
Elon Musk
I had to make a choice then that either took all of the capital that I had left from the sale of PayPal to eBay and invest that in Tesla, or Tesla would die.
Journalist
The company is really teetering on the brink of failure. And there's this board meeting late in 2008 where they're discussing what's going to happen and Elon just says, well, I'm going to raise a 40 million dollar round to keep the company going. And the board members are kind of wondering, well, how's he going to do that? And he says, I'm going to put it all in myself.
Commentator
And that incredible braggadocio confidence catalyzed a change in people's opinion. And we and everyone else around the table, oh my gosh, we want to be part of this. We want to get as much of this investment as we can. He saved the company in its darkest hour with an act of heroism that is hard to describe there's nothing quite like spending your last remaining dollar on a project you believe in.
Elon Musk
It was thankfully a good week, but definitely took its toll from mental strain standpoint. I think I mentally just burned out a few circuits.
Narrator
Just after his emergency cash infusion came the news they desperately needed a 40 million dollar deal with Daimler for smart car batteries. Daimler later added 50 million for 10% of the company. Determined not to repeat past mistakes, Musk focused on bringing his family car to life.
Elon Musk
So I decided, look, we really need to have our own design studio. And that's when I hired Franz von Holzhausen to design the Model S. His
Narrator
green agenda was irresistible to von Holzhausen, a legendary figure in car design who had already revolutionized the looks of vw, GM and Mazda.
Elon Musk
He's completely passionate to really rid the world of this addiction to fossil fuel. And that was something that he talked about from the very first sentence, first conversation that we had.
Narrator
With a new team in place, Musk completely revamped the look of the Model
Elon Musk
S. A sedan doesn't have to be a brick, it doesn't have to be a big blocky car.
Tesla Engineer
We wanted to bring this kind of passion and feeling back to this marketplace. The architecture of Model S is really
Elon Musk
similar to a skateboard. The floor of the vehicle is the battery pack and the motors between the rear wheels and everything above that is the opportunity space.
Narrator
In March 2009, Musk unveiled the prototype for the Model S. It could hold seven passengers and as much luggage as a station wagon. But to build it, he knew he needed a piece of the US government's new 7.5 billion dollar loan program to support alternative energy vehicles in order for
Elon Musk
Model S to truly be successful. You know, it was important that the loan come through.
Narrator
The government funding was controversial. The New York Times writer Randy Strauss called the program the bailout of very, very high net worth individuals who invested in Tesla Motors act. Musk struck back.
Elon Musk
Randy's cross is a huge douchebag
Narrator
Okay, it wasn't a bailout, but a loan. The Obama administration agreed to lend Tesla $465 million to mass produce the Model S, a move that astounded many in the industry.
Journalist
It's very unlikely that the Tesla investment is ever repaid to the taxpayers. Electric vehicles are really not possible in ways that would be effective for most consumers. Still, this is just the religion of electric vehicles. And like Jonestown, that religion will come to an end. There are most certain people who want to see Tesla fail because they it is an attack on the mainstream car industry,
Elon Musk
of course, the biggest impact that Tesla will have is not the cars that we make ourselves, but the fact that we show that you can make compelling electric cars that people really want to buy.
Narrator
The government loan came with a challenging condition. To get the money, he had to first find a place to build his electric car. Tesla burned through $300 million since 2003. Elon Musk needed to get his Model S into production fast. Ever the risk taker, he took another giant gamble, purchasing a plant in Fremont, California, abandoned by Toyota.
Elon Musk
The dream factory location for Tesla was always the new ME factory, which was a 50% Toyota, 50% General Motors factory. It's one of the biggest car plants in the world. It's a great location close to Tesla headquarters.
Journalist
The reality is, for very little money, Toyota got an albatross off its books. From an industry perspective, it looked incredibly savvy on Toyota's part and incredibly naive on Tesla's part. Car factories are big pieces of sunk capital. To retool a factory takes a tremendous incremental investment.
Narrator
The acquisition released the government funds to begin production. Despite the fact that Tesla had posted a profit just once since its founding. Musk took his company public in June 2010.
Elon Musk
The smartest money in the world is betting on Tesla.
Narrator
Not everyone was as upbeat about the company's future.
Tesla Engineer
Tesla stock voted by Wall street as
Narrator
the least likely to succeed. You don't want to own this stock,
Elon Musk
you don't want to lease it. Heck, you shouldn't even rent the darn thing.
Commentator
There hasn't been an IPO of a car company in America since Henry Ford and that caught people's attention.
Narrator
Investors ignored the skeptics. Tesla raised $226 million in its IPO. Musk now had the capital to get rolling on the Model S. You just
Journalist
saw on his face this sort of just elation and this feeling like all of this suffering is worth it. And it's, and we're, and it's real now.
Narrator
lift off. Falcon 9 has cleared the powers. In 2010, after winning the $1.6 billion contract from NASA, SpaceX became the first private company to successfully launch and return a spacecraft from orbit.
Elon Musk
So SpaceX was, was the first purely commercial ground up development to reach orbit.
Kimbal Musk
The first successful launch at SpaceX was incredibly emotional.
Commentator
Falcon 9 stage 2 and the Dragon
Elon Musk
capsule are now in orbit around the Earth. I'm just wishing to any entities that are listening, please bless this launch.
Narrator
Three, two, one and two years later, in May 2012, it made history as the first privately held company to send a cargo payload to the International Space
Narrator
back on Earth, the long awaited launch of Tesla's new sedan was also taking off. It's time, it's time to start delivering
Narrator
The Model S started rolling off the production line, although questions about range and service remained.
Narrator
Not everyone was cheering. In a 2012 presidential debate, Republican candidate Mitt Romney blasted President Obama for the government loan to Tesla, lumping Tesla in with other financially troubled green companies.
Commentator
You put $90 billion, like 50 years
Narrator
worth of brakes into solar and wind
Commentator
to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and enter one.
Narrator
I mean, I had a friend who said, you don't just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers. But Tesla was no loser. In the eyes of the automotive industry, the Model S was the first electric sedan to win Motor Trend's Car of the Year. Musk didn't have much time to celebrate. A few months later, the New York Times delivered a devastating review of the Model S. It reported the battery died on its test drive from Washington to Boston and published an image no CEO would want.
Elon Musk
There was this sad shot of our car on a flatbed as though that was the only outcome possible for such a drive. And that's just not true.
Narrator
Musk went on the offensive and lots
Elon Musk
of people said, oh, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. You don't battle the New York Times. And it's like, the hell with that.
Narrator
The battle between the reporter and the renegade CEO ended when the New York Times public editor concluded, concluded the reporting was imprecise, but not done in bad faith. But the story didn't affect his bottom line. Remember that loser comment from a presidential candidate about the 465 million dollar government loan?
Elon Musk
It really feels good to have repaid the US taxpayer. That's really what's important here. And we didn't just repay the principal, we actually repaid it with interest and a bonus payment. So ultimately, the US taxpayer actually made a profit of over $20 million on this loan.
Narrator
Tesla repaid the loan nine years ahead of schedule. Never short on optimism or confidence, Musk made a stunning promise for the nearly $70,000 car.
Elon Musk
We're guaranteeing that the value of the Model S will be no less than that of a Mercedes S class after three years. I am personally guaranteeing that value and standing behind that guarantee with all of my assets, not just with Tesla.
Narrator
He has guaranteed free charging for the life of the car and has expanded the charging system across the country.
Elon Musk
You'll be able to travel all the way from LA to New York just using the Tesla Supercharger network. And Supercharger system is free. So it's not just free now, it's free forever. That's the Tesla commitment.
Narrator
His commitment to customers has paid off. Since its IPO, Tesla shares were up more than five fold. SpaceX and SolarCity were also turning profits.
Elon Musk
NASA's our biggest and most important customer, but almost three quarters of our customers are commercial.
Narrator
SpaceX says it has more than $4 billion in revenue under contract. But of all his companies, perhaps the greatest success was the one addressing the world's energy need. SolarCity is now the largest solar solar service provider in the US and has more than quadrupled in value. Since its initial public offering in December
Journalist
2012, SolarCity has been very, very impressive. I mean there are, you know, thousands of people with panels on their roofs and lots of big offices. I believe eBay has SolarCity panels. So it's having a very big, very visible impact on the world.
Commentator
He really wants to change the world. And in Elon Musk's vision of the future, you'll have clean and renewable sources of energy feeding the grid and all of our vehicles will run off that.
Narrator
This is really the future.
Commentator
It's something you want to tell stories about.
Journalist
Elon has a self confidence that is just, it's breathtaking and it's especially breathtaking when you think about the things he's confident about. The idea that humanity is going to get to Mars, that not just humanity is going to get to Mars, but that he, in his lifetime, Elon Musk will get to Mars.
Narrator
Crusader or canny businessman Named one of Time magazine's most influential people in the world. The risk taking, multitasking CEOs estimated net worth was $6 billion. In June 2013, divorced for the second time, Musk splits his time between his five sons, his companies and thinking about
Elon Musk
the future, just is it significant? It, it really the question is, are things I'm working on, are they really going to matter or do they have the potential for really mattering?