CHM Revolutionaries 22 janvier 2013 Conversation sur scène à propos du parcours de Musk, de l'Afrique du Sud à la Silicon Valley, et de la fondation de PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX et SolarCity.
Conversation sur scène à propos du parcours de Musk, de l'Afrique du Sud à la Silicon Valley, et de la fondation de PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX et SolarCity.
Transcription John Hollar
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Computer History Museum. I'm John Holler, the CEO, and it's my pleasure to welcome you tonight on behalf of our trustees, our staff, our members, our amazing volunteers, all the people involved in making the museum a great place. Thank you. Thank you for being here tonight for the kickoff of our Revolutionaries speaker series for 2013. We have major funding for the revolutionary speaker series from Intel. We're delighted to have Intel's support for the fourth year running now. And it's just fantastic because it enables everything that we do to make these revolutionary programs possible. We also get additional funding from the William K. Bose Foundation. I want to say a special thank you to Tesla for arranging to have a Model S here this evening. I hope you had a chance to see the Model S downstairs. We've been looking forward for years to an event when we could have the Motor Trend Car of the Year at the museum. And we have it here tonight. So thank you to Tesla. We asked SpaceX for a rocket
John Hollar
proved to be a little more challenging, but maybe someday. And now for tonight's program, here's a thought exercise. If you compiled a list of the 75 most influential people of the 20th century, who would be on your list? Or if you compiled perhaps a list of the hundred people who most affected the world in the 20th century, who would be on that list now think of the same list that you might start compiling for the 21st century so far. And if all of that proves to be a little too much, I can offer some help. Elon Musk has been on every single one of those lists that has been compiled for the 20th century to date. No matter who seems to be drawing the lists up, few scientists, entrepreneurs or industrialists of the last century could stake a claim to a career as boldly ambitious as the one Elon Musk is fashioning now. Transforming a large measure of the world's commerce and payment systems. As co founder and chairman of PayPal in 1999 might be enough for anyone for one lifetime. But Elon Musk has gone on from there to pursue his passion for solving business, environmental and scientific problems on a global scale. He may be best known for his work at Tesla, where he serves as CEO and head of product design. The path breaking Tesla Roadster and now the Model S have changed almost all of the assumptions that the automotive world has made about what the styling, performance and future of a new generation of electric cars might be. Simultaneously, he serves as chairman and principal shareholder of SolarCity, the nation's leading provider of solar Power systems. But perhaps his most ambitious and intriguing work is taking place at SpaceX, where he is CEO and chief designer. SpaceX is erasing the boundaries between spaceflight and private enterprise. It has a multi billion dollar, multi year agreement with NASA to be a workhorse for cargo flights to and from the International Space station. And in 2015, that is the company's stated goal, it will begin manned spaceflight. What is the source of Elon Musk's revolutionary thinking? How has he been able to do what he's done with the investors he's attracted to and the teams that he's built? Exploring these questions and more tonight with Elon is Alison Van Diggelen, who is a very notable and noteworthy journalist here in Silicon Valley, a contributor to KQED and the Huffington Post, and one of the best interviewers in the field through her series Fresh Dialogues. We're delighted to have Alison here tonight. This is her first time on stage. She's going to be terrific, as will Elon. Please join me in welcoming Elon Musk and Alison Van Diggelen.
Interviewer
So I'd like to start. You grew up in South Africa, and I heard a wonderful story of when you were six years old and you started breaking the rules even then. So you were six years old and you were invited by your cousin to a birthday party. But there were two problems with that. One, you were grounded. And two, it was on the other side of town. So can you explain, tell the audience, how you got there?
Elon Musk
All right. Well, I mean, this was when I was six, so the memory's a little fuzzy at this point. But as I recall, yeah, I was grounded for some reason. I don't know why, but I think I felt it was unjust. And I really wanted to go to this party, my cousin's party, who was five. So this is a kid's party. So. At first I was going to take my bike, but then, and I told my mom this, which was a mistake, and she told me some story about how you needed a license for a bike and the police would stop me. So I wasn't 100% sure if that was true or not, but I thought I'd better walk just in case. So, yeah, I sort of thought I knew the way, but it was clear across town, so I don't know, it was 10 or 12 miles away. It's really quite far, further than I realized, actually. And so I just started walking to my cousin's house. I think it took me about four hours. And just as my mom was leaving that party with My brother and sister, she saw me walking down the road and freaked out. And then I saw. She saw me. So I then sprinted to my cousin's house and it was just about two blocks away and then climbed a tree and refused to come down.
Interviewer
So the first of many rule breaking adventures for Elon Musk. So by the time you were 12, you're already an entrepreneur and making a profit. I understand you, you earned $500 equivalent in rent for creating a video game. Can you tell us about that and what the inspiration was?
Elon Musk
Yeah, sure. So when I was about 10, I walked into a computer store in South Africa and saw an actual computer. I previously had some early sort of precursors to the Atari system, and then I got the Atari system, which I'm sure a lot of people here have played and. But then I saw you could actually have a computer where you could make your own games. And it was a Commodore VIC 20. So that was the first computer I bought. And then I got some books on how to teach yourself programming. And this was like the coolest thing I'd ever seen. So I was just like, this is super awesome. And so I started programming games and then selling games in order to actually buy more games. Sort of a circular thing. More games and better computers and that kind of thing.
Interviewer
Right. So the money wasn't the end goal for you, it was more a means to an end.
Elon Musk
Yeah, basically I'd spend money on, yeah, better computers and Dungeons and Dragons modules and things like that. Nerdmaster 3000, basically.
Interviewer
So I understand at that time you were heavily into comics. I'm curious to know, did you love Iron man? The comic Iron Man?
Elon Musk
Kind of like Iron Man. Yeah, you did.
Interviewer
Did you ever imagine that you would be the inspiration for the movie version?
Elon Musk
I did not. That was pretty much, I would say zero percent. I would have said zero percent chance.
Interviewer
What kind of kid were you? I mean, can you. Can you look back and see yourself? Were you a bit of a loner kid, bookish kid?
Elon Musk
I wasn't all that much of a loner, at least not willingly, But I certainly was quite. I was very bookish. I was reading all the time. So I was either reading, working on my computer, reading comics, playing dungeon dragons, that kind of thing.
Interviewer
I understand Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that wonderful book by Douglas Adams. That was a key book for you. What was it about that book that fired your imagination?
Elon Musk
Yeah. So I guess when I was in around 12 or 13, I had a company called Existential Crisis and I was reading Various books on trying to figure out the meaning of life and what does it all mean? Because it starts seeming quite meaningless. And then we happened to have some books by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in the house which you should not read at age 14. It's bad, it's really negative. But then I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it was quite positive, I think, and, and it sort of highlighted an important point, which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. And so to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we better know what questions to ask. And then whatever the question is that most approximates what's the meaning of life? You know, that's the question we could ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought, well, to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, human knowledge, then that would be a good thing.
Interviewer
Wow. So you're having these deep thoughts at what age? 10, 14?
Elon Musk
Yeah, sort of in the puberty, I guess, 13 through 15, probably the most traumatic years.
Interviewer
And so by the time you were 17, you were actually left. Right. I assume you hatched the plan earlier when you were around 14, 15.
Elon Musk
I did hatch the plan earlier, actually. I tried to hatch several plans which they did not hatch.
Interviewer
But by 17, you were on a plane from South Africa. You had enough of South Africa, you were ready to seek new pastures. Now, why was it the United States was your destination? Why not Europe or somewhere else in the world?
Elon Musk
Well, just whenever I'd read about cool technology, it would tend to be in the United States, you know, or more broadly, North America, including Canada. So I kind of wanted to be where the cutting edge of technology was. And of course, within the United States, Silicon Valley is where the heart of things is. So although at the time I didn't know where Silicon Valley wise it sounded like some mythical place really. So yes, I wanted to come to the us. I tried to convince my mother or father, who were divorced, if either one of them would move to the United States, then I could get there. At one point I convinced my father, but then he reneged, unfortunately, you had him convinced.
Interviewer
And then he changed his mind.
Elon Musk
He did say yes, and then he changed his mind.
Elon Musk
I don't know. I guess he was fairly established, he's an engineer, he's sort of established in South Africa and didn't want to have to go through that again in another country.
Interviewer
Right. So you got on that plane all by yourself at 17?
Elon Musk
Yeah. So I actually got. My mother was born in Canada, and actually her father was American, but unfortunately she didn't get her American citizenship. So then that broke the link and I couldn't get my American citizenship, but she was born in Canada, so I could get. I actually filled out the forms for her and got her Canadian passport and me too. And then as soon as. Within three weeks of getting my Canadian passport, I was in Canada.
Interviewer
And then you ended up at University of Pennsylvania University in physics and business.
Elon Musk
Yeah, So I was in Canada for a few years at Queens University. Got a scholarship to go down to University of Pennsylvania, because one of the downsides of coming to university in North America was that my parents said they would not pay for college if it was. Or my father said he would not pay for college unless it was in South Africa. So it was either. So I could have free college in South Africa or find some way to pay it here. And fortunately I got a scholarship at UPenn, and so did dual undergraduate business and physics at UPenn Wharton.
Interviewer
And it was there that you came up with this idea of three main areas that you felt were most important to humanity. Can you describe how you came upon them? Was it just one day you had a flash of inspiration? These are the three areas that are important and I want to concentrate on. Or how did that inspiration come to you?
Elon Musk
I think I was thinking about it for a couple years during sort of freshman and sophomore year at Queen's and then also at UPenn, and I was trying to think what would most influence the future? What are the problems that we have to solve? And. And I actually talked a lot to friends and my housemates and that kind of thing, and dates, which was maybe not the best thing. Actually met a woman I dated briefly in college who now works at Scientific American as a writer, and she related the anecdote that we went on a date. All I was talking about was electric cars. That was not a winning conversation.
Interviewer
So it was a bit of a monologue, was it?
Elon Musk
Yeah. She said the first question I asked her was, do you ever think about electric cars? She never does.
Interviewer
So you learn from that. That wasn't the best standout line.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it wasn't great. Recently, it's been more effective.
Interviewer
That's wonderful. Well, we'll get onto Tesla soon, but I want to go from University of Pennsylvania. You ended up in Silicon Valley. You've described Silicon Valley as Darwinian. Can you talk about what it was?
Elon Musk
The most positive sense, really
Interviewer
can you elaborate on what that means and why it had to be Silicon Valley? What drew you to Silicon Valley?
Elon Musk
Well, I was at Penn and there was a professor who was chairman of a company in Silicon Valley that was working on advanced capacitors for use in electric cars, or potentially for use in electric cars, as it turns out. They're way too expensive. But I thought, well, this is really awesome because I asked if I could get a summer job because it was in Silicon Valley and working on technology for electric cars. I thought, well, that's pretty much as good as it gets. So I got a summer job here. I was in Los Gatos, actually, at Pinnacle Research doing electrolytic ultracapacitors, which were. But they had a. The problem was that they used ruthenium tantalum oxide and there was, I think, only a few tons of ruthenium mined in the world, so not very scalable. And they'd sell it to you by the sort of milligram. So that's, you know, there's a problem. But they had a pretty high energy density. It's sort of roughly equivalent to a lead acid battery, which for a capacitor is huge.
Interviewer
But you ended up then after that at Stanford.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So then I thought, well, Stanford is in Silicon Valley, sort of epicenter. And so that's where I wanted to come. Here's Stanford or Berkeley. And Stanford's sort of sunnier. So I liked it sunnier.
Interviewer
That's great. And I understand you were at Stanford University for a whole two days before you decided, no, it's time. I'm going to do my first startup.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I figured. Well, so this was the summer of 95, and. And I've been working on some Internet software because the three things I thought would depict the world were Internet sustainable energy and space exploration, making life multi planetary. But on the Internet thing, I just couldn't figure out how to make enough money to feed myself. If I didn't make money, then I would run out of food and die. So that was not good.
Elon Musk
Yeah, literally. So whereas, you know, if I was a student, then I could be a teaching assistant and do various things and do research on electric vehicle technologies. That was my default plan. But then I also thought that if I did a PhD at Stanford, then I would spend several years watching the Internet go through this incredibly rapid growth phase and that would be really difficult to handle. Like it really wanted to be doing something.
Interviewer
So you saw the wave growing.
Elon Musk
It really seemed like things were going to take off, although nobody had made any money. On the Internet. At the time, in 95, there was really. Nobody was making any money on the Internet. And in fact, even on Sand Hill Road, people were like, what's the Internet? They were. Amazingly, when we tried to get funding for a company in, I think it was November or something of 95, there about October, November, more than half of the bench capitalists we met with did not know what the Internet was and had not used it.
Interviewer
That's amazing.
Elon Musk
Yeah, literally. I mean, like, isn't that. They're literally asking, isn't that something that the government and universities use? I'm like, for now, Yeah. But then Netscape went public in late 95, I think it was. And then after that, even though a lot of venture capitalists still didn't understand it and still hadn't used it, somebody had made money on it. So now that it was on their radar. Yeah. So when we went to get funding the second time we tried to get funding, everyone was interested.
Interviewer
Right. So this company was Zip2.
Elon Musk
That's right. Terrible name.
Interviewer
Yeah. What was the reason for that name?
Elon Musk
Well, we were just incredibly stupid at the time. I think that's the main reason for that name. And because we got some ad agency because we thought, well, we don't know anything about names, so we'll get some ad agencies to suggest a bunch of options. And then Zip2 seemed kind of speedy. I don't know what the hell. Why the hell we chose that stupid name. And it has a digit in it. It's like, why would you pick it? Because it could be zip T o, could be zip T wo it could be zip T O O. So people literally spelled the name, every variation, which is bad if you got a URL and you don't have the other ones. Zip2 started off as basically, like I said, we're trying to figure out how to make enough money to exist as a company. So since there wasn't really any advertising money being made, we thought we could help existing companies get online, bring their stuff online. So we developed software that helped bring a lot of newspapers and media companies online because a lot of them just didn't. They also didn't know what the Internet
Interviewer
was, or they used to be customers, didn't you?
Elon Musk
Yeah. And even the ones that were aware of the Internet didn't have a software team, so they weren't very good at developing functionality. And so we had as investors and customers, New York Times company, Knight, Ridder, Hearst. And so we were able to get them to pay us to develop software for them to bring Them online, so online publishing stuff. And we did maps and directions and yellow pages and white pages and various other things. And we developed quite sophisticated technology, actually, but it wasn't actually being employed super well by the media companies. We would suggest ways to use it, and then it would not be used as effectively as it could be. It was very frustrating.
Interviewer
Right, but you did sell that company successfully to Compaq. Yeah, right. And that allowed you to go on and create X.com?
Elon Musk
that's right. Yeah, exactly. So the Compaq had AltaVista. So their thought was combine AltaVista and a bunch of other technology companies and see if that would work, which it did not. But nonetheless, they were pretty nice guys and bought the company. And that gave me the capital to do another company. And I wanted to do another company in the Internet because I thought we hadn't really reached the potential that we could have with Zip2, because we had really sophisticated software. Our software was sort of at least comparable to what Yahoo or Excite or others had. In fact, I thought in some ways it was better. So. But it wasn't because it was all filtered through these partners. It wasn't getting properly used. So I thought, well, I want to do something that could be more. A more significant contribution to the Internet. And so the initial thought was financial services, because money is digital, it's low bandwidth. At the time there was, you know, most people were on modems, still on modems. And because this was late 98, early 99.
Interviewer
So this was. X.com was a precursor to PayPal, basically.
Elon Musk
That's right, yeah.
Interviewer
You merged with Confinity and it became PayPal. Major success.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So it worked out better than we expected. Yeah. So. Yeah. So initially, Confinity and Exocom started out from slightly different directions and then converged to the same point with X. The thought was to create integrated set of financial services so that you could go to one place and do all of your financial anything. And then as a feature, we had the ability to transfer money or securities or anything simply by entering unique. Unique identifier. So like email address or phone number or something like that. And when we demo the system, the hard stuff, which was the integration of all the financial services people would not be interested in, but they'd be really interested in being able to transfer money using an email address. That was actually quite easy. And so we focused our energy on that. And although it's easy in principle, what gets really hard is adding security while still keeping it easy to use. So because, you know, it's like the Willy Loman quote. Like, why do people. Why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is. So why do people rob PayPal? Same reason. And so you can dial up the security to a really high level, but then you're going to make it very hard to use. And so that was one of the toughest things we wrestled with. And then Confinity originally started as kind of software for PalmPilots, and then they had a demonstration application which was the ability to beam money from one Palm Pilot to another using the infrared port. People remember that one. That was big at one point. And then they had a website sort of parallel to that, because once you'd beamed the infrared tokens, you had to still then synchronize your Palm Pilot and do the transfer via the website. But then people weren't that interested in the Palm Pilot stuff, but they were interested in the website. So we kind of converged to the same point, and we're quite close together, so we decided to merge the companies. And in January or so, 2000, it's a very turbulent period, and the growth in the company was pretty crazy. At the end of the first sort of four or five weeks, we had 100,000 customers.
Interviewer
That's incredible.
Elon Musk
Incredible growth.
Interviewer
Did you anticipate that when you started out?
Elon Musk
Definitely did not. And it wasn't all good because we had some bugs in the software. And even if the bug only occurs one in a thousand times still, and you have 100,000 customers, 100 very angry customers, like, where's my money? That would be a reasonable concern that people would have. And then we had customer service on University Avenue in Palo Alto. There were five people. So when something went wrong, customer service, Bones would basically explode.
Elon Musk
And so we had many challenges. And then the various financial regulatory agencies were trying to shut us down. Visa and Mascot were trying to shut us down. Ebay was trying to shut us down. FTC was trying to shut us down. There were a lot of battles there.
Interviewer
Wow. It's quite incredible. With all that adversity you conquered, you came out with 100 million, right?
Elon Musk
Yeah, it was a close call. We definitely, I mean, came very close to dying there in 2000 and 2001.
Interviewer
And what was the reason for that success? What would you put it down to in that case? How did you overcome?
Elon Musk
Well, you know, I think we had a really talented group of people at PayPal, and a lot of those people have actually gone on to start many other companies. YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Yammer. It's like quite a long list actually.
Interviewer
So for you personally, there you were with several hundred million. Were you not tempted just to go and buy an island? Not really. What was it that drove you? What I'm getting at, because I know you didn't.
Interviewer
What I'm getting at is why were you so driven to, to jump into the next thing?
Interviewer
Did you take any time off?
Elon Musk
I did take a bit of time off because after PayPal, I did reasonably well for PayPal. I was the largest shareholder in the company, so. And we were acquired for about a billion and a half in stock and then the stock doubled. So it did reasonably well. But the idea of like lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. That sounds horrible to me.
Interviewer
The boredom factor.
Elon Musk
I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs, I mean,
Interviewer
or serious pina coladas.
Elon Musk
Right, Exactly. I mean, it's just I'd be super duper bored. So, I mean, I like high intensity. I mean, I like going to the beach for a short period of time, but not much longer than like, you know, a few days or something like that.
Interviewer
Right. So let's talk about the seeds of SpaceX. I understand it started not as the idea of let's start a rocket ship company. You had a philanthropic idea. You were really surprised when you found out that NASA didn't have any plan plans to go to Mars and you came up with this idea of let's put a greenhouse on Mars. So can you explain how that whole idea came into being for SpaceX?
Elon Musk
Sure. Well, so when I was thinking of like what I thought would affect the world as a student, it wasn't really from the standpoint of those are the things I'll get involved in. It was kind of more in the abstract. The. These are the things I think will happen that will affect the world, but not that I will be involved in them, as it turns out I have. But I always thought that we would make much more progress in space and it just didn't happen. It was really disappointing. So, yeah, I was really quite bothered by it. So when we went to the moon, we were supposed to have a base on the moon, we were supposed to send people to Mars and that stuff just, it just didn't happen. We went backwards, we got the space shuttle, but the space shuttle could only go to low Earth orbit where Saturn V could go to the moon. Now the space shuttle's gone. And so that just seemed like a really bad thing. So I thought, well, maybe it was a question of there not being enough attention or will to do this. But this was a wrong assumption. But that's the reason for the greenhouse idea. The thought was if there could be a small philanthropic mission to Mars. I was expected to lose all the money that I invested in that. But if we could send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars with seeds in dehydrated nutrient gel and you hydrated upon landing, and you'd have this great shot of a little greenhouse with little green plants on a red background, I thought that would get people excited.
Interviewer
So you literally imagined a photograph. Inspired firing and new generation.
Elon Musk
You've got to sort of imagine the money shot, if you will. So, yeah, I think green plants in red background would be that. And people tend to get interested and excited about precedents and superlatives. So this would be the furthest that life's ever traveled. The first life on Mars, as far as we know. And I thought, well, maybe that would result in. In a bigger budget for NASA and then we could sort of resume the journey. That was the basic idea. I spent several months on this, actually, and went to Russia three times because I was able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft low and the communications and the greenhouse and all that to a reasonable number. Reasonable meaning several million dollars.
Interviewer
Did you actually physically draw out a greenhouse of how you imagine?
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. Actually, I hope we've got that somewhere.
Interviewer
That'd be amazing to see.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it looks pretty goofy in retrospect, but that's the idea that we had. And I spent several hundred thousand dollars just kind of getting the design worked out and, and engaging some companies to come up with design specifications for the subsystems. But then it came to buying the rocket. And the problem was that the cost of rockets was really high. And the lowest cost rocket in the US at the time was the Delta 2. Boeing's Delta 2. And. And that would have been about $50 million. Yeah. And then you still need to have like an upper stage for Mars, so probably 60 million all in. And that was. And I wanted to do two of these missions because I thought if it just did just one and it didn't work, then that could have like the opposite effect. Like, look how dumb it is to do things to drive a sample.
Interviewer
Look at all this money down the drain. Right.
Elon Musk
What an idiot. So I wanted to do two, and I just didn't have enough money to do two complete missions.
Interviewer
So you had a budget of about 100 million, something like that.
Elon Musk
Well, I was hoping it would be less than that, but not more than that. But then, yeah, I guess roughly on that order is about most I'd be. I mean, I couldn't spend much more than that,
Interviewer
so. So the Russians didn't help you out?
Elon Musk
Yeah, Three. Three quite interesting trips to Russia to try to negotiate purchase of two Russian ICBMs. Yeah.
Interviewer
And did they think you had evil intent?
Elon Musk
No, they just thought I was crazy. But, I mean, that's not good either if you're buying ICBMs, but minus the nuke. I mean, I think that would have been a lot more.
Interviewer
So you didn't talk nuke, so.
Elon Musk
No, I mean, I didn't. I mean, I slightly got the feeling that that was on the table, if I. Which is very alarming. But, yeah, that was. Those were very weird meetings with the. The Russian military and whatnot. I mean, I think they thought I was pretty crazy, but then they read about PayPal and said, okay, he was crazy, but he's got money.
Interviewer
He did something. Right.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, and more importantly, I could pay him.
Elon Musk
So that's really. I mean, yeah, it was remarkably capitalist, was my impression of the Russians.
Interviewer
Yeah, right. I have heard that before. So tell me, what was the turning point from talking with the Russians and then deciding, okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to set up a company, what was that turning point for you?
Elon Musk
Well, I guess I came to the conclusion that my initial premise was wrong. That, in fact, there's a great deal of will. There's not such a shortage, but people don't think there's a way. And that if people thought there was a way, or at least something that wouldn't break the federal budget, then people would support it. Which in retrospect, I think is actually kind of obvious, because the United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. People came here from other places. I mean, it's. You know, there's no nation. There's no. I mean, there's no nation that's more a nation of explorers than the United States. United States. But people need to believe that it's possible and that it's not. You know, they don't have to give up, like health care or something important. It's got to be. That's important. So I thought, okay, well, then it's not a question of will, it's a question of showing that there's a way. And I started reading quite a bit about rockets to try to understand why they're so Freaking expensive. You know, is there something, you know, where does the $60 million go for the Delta 2? And that subsequently. Now, Delta 2, I think is $100 million or something, even some crazy number. And Delta 2 is, I mean, that's a relatively small rocket. So if you go to like a really, you know, one of the bigger rockets, it's anywhere from 200 to $400 million. Anyway, so I came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a good reason for rockets to be so expensive and that there could be a lot less. Even in expendable format, there could be less. And that if one could make them reusable like airplanes, then the cost of rocketry would drop dramatically. Cost of space travel would drop dramatically because the cost of the fuel was maybe anywhere from 0.2 to 0.5% of the cost of the rocket. It's kind of like a plane. How much is the cost of the fuel in the plane versus the plane itself? It's at least a two order of magnitude difference. But nobody had really been able to make a reasonable rocket work. So I thought, okay, if we can do that, then that would, that would really be the key breakthrough for space travel.
Interviewer
Right. But you also said that so far
Elon Musk
we have not succeeded.
Interviewer
I should point out you also said that failure was the most likely outcome. Can you talk about failure in that sense and in a broader sense of being an entrepreneur and an innovator? Why is failure so important?
Elon Musk
Well, I think failure is bad. I don't think it's good. But if something is important enough, then you do it even though the risk of failure is high. And so I think my advice if somebody wants to start a company is they should bear in mind that the most likely outcome is that it's not going to work. And they should reconcile themselves to that strong possibility. And they should only do it if they feel that they are really compelled to do it, you know, because it's, it's going to. The way starting a company works is like usually in the beginning, it's the very beginning. It's kind of fun, and then it's really hellish for a number of years.
Interviewer
You talked about chewing glass.
Elon Musk
Yeah. There's a friend of mine who's successful entrepreneur and started actually his career around the same time as I did. And he has a good phrase, his name's bully. He said, yeah, starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.
Interviewer
And you agree with that?
Elon Musk
Generally true, yeah. And if you don't eat the glass, you're not going to be successful.
Interviewer
Tough medicine. So let's move along. We're going to get down into innovation and motivation shortly. But I want to just go through your whole business career first. So Shortly after finding SpaceX, you then got interested in electric vehicles. And I understand you watched the vigils for the death of the EV1 when they were all smashed. Talk about that and why you felt Even after founding SpaceX I have to get involved with Tesla.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, as I said, like my interest in electric vehicles goes back a long time to, you know, goes back 20 plus years. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, the original reason I came to Silicon Valley was to work on electric vehicle energy storage technology.
Elon Musk
And I thought that the big car companies would develop electric cars because obviously the right move. And I thought that was vindicated when General Motors and Toyota announced their. General Motors was doing the EV1, the electric vehicle one. Toyota did the electric RAV4, the original one, and they made those announcements and they brought those to market. And I thought, okay, well this is great. We're going to have electric cars. GM is going to obviously do the EV2 and 3 and then just keep getting better and everything would be cool. And then when California relaxed its regulations on electric cars, GM recalled all of the EV1s and crushed them into little cubes, you know, which is seems kind of nutty. So, in fact, the people didn't want their EV1s recalled. And in fact, they tried court orders to stop the cars from being recalled. They held a candlelit vigil, okay. At the yard where the cars were crushed.
Interviewer
Did you attend that vigil?
Elon Musk
No, I didn't. I did not.
Interviewer
You looked at your roof fire?
Elon Musk
Well, certainly. I mean, it's crazy. When is the last time you heard about any company customers holding a candlelit vigil for the demise of that product, particularly AGM product? I mean, what bigger wake up call do you need? It's like, hello? The customers are really upset about this. They were really preferred if it didn't get recalled. So that kind of blew my mind. So I was like, wow, okay. And then we had the advent of lithium ion batteries, which really helps the. It makes, you know, that's one of the key things for making electric cars work. There's still nothing. And so in 2003, actually had lunch with one of the other co founders of the company, JB Straubel, who was actually working, I think, on like a hydrogen airplane or something. And he mentioned to me the T0 car that was done by AC propulsion. AC propulsion, I think consists of Guys, some of whom had actually been on the EV1 program, and they took a gasoline sports car, kind of a kit car, and outfitted it with lithium ion batteries, sort of consumer grade cells, and they created a car which is essentially the precursor of the Roadster. And in fact it had very similar specifications. So sub zero, a sub four second zero to 60 miles an hour, 250 mile range and also a two seater sort of sports car. But it was quite primitive. It didn't have a roof, one thing at all. And in fact I don't know if it had doors, but it didn't have any safety systems, no airbags, it wasn't homologated, so you couldn't sell it. So in order to sell that car, in order to create a commercial version of the car, something that a manufacturer could produce and sell to people, there was a fair bit of work that was required. But anyway, I kept trying to get AC propulsion to commercialize the T0 and I said, look, I'm going to outfund the whole effort, you really need to do this. And they just sort of refused to do it. They didn't want to do it. They wanted to make. What's that? They want to make like an electric Scion, which in principle sounds good, except that it would have cost $75,000 and nobody wants to buy $75,000 Scion. And the technology just was not ready. There was just no way to make a good value for money proposition.
Interviewer
What was it that compelled you to say, I have to be CEO here and lead this company. Why not say, you know, I'll help you, jb, get this, get this rolling?
Elon Musk
Well, I really didn't want to be CEO of two companies. I tried really hard not to be actually. And yeah, so anyway, so AC Repulsion finally said, okay. I actually told AC Repulsion, look, if you're not going to do this, I'm going to create a company to do this. And they said, well, there's some other guys who are also interested in doing that and you guys should combine efforts and create a company. And that's basically how Tesla came together. And then we had like a lot of drama
Elon Musk
But I mean I had, since I was the, you know, I provided like 95% of the money, so I could have been the CEO from day one. But I really, you know, the idea of being CEO of two startups at the same time was not appealing and shouldn't be appealing, by the way, if anyone's thinking that's a good idea, really terrible idea.
Interviewer
But then Again, you know, going back to your trajectory here, not only did you take on two, you took on three, you had an epiphany at Burning Man, I understand, and decided you have
Elon Musk
to watch those epiphanies. Burning man, not necessarily what you should pursue.
Interviewer
And you came up with the idea.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's. Well, solar is kind of part of the whole sustainable energy thing. So sustainable energy, you have to have sustainable means of producing and consuming energy. And so even if you have electric cars, you have to have the other side of the equation, say how do you produce energy in a sustainable way? And I think solar is the obvious primary means of sustainable energy generation. In fact, the Earth is almost entirely solar powered today. The, the only reason we're not a frozen ice ball at 3 degrees Kelvin is because of the sun. And the sun is responsible for all precipitation. It's responsible for the vast majority of the ecosystem, apart from sort of chemotrophs, the bond of the ocean. So there's just a tiny amount of energy that people, that people consume to power civilization. It's actually a very tiny amount of energy relative to the amount of energy that the sun sends in our general direction. And so in order to deal with that, we couldn't in fact power the entire world with solar power quite easily. This is maybe not super obvious to people.
Interviewer
So was that the epiphany you had at Burning Man?
Elon Musk
Was it a. Oh, no, I knew that long. I knew that in college.
Interviewer
But what was the key vision that came to you at Burning Man? We all want to imagine you're there.
Elon Musk
No, it was more. I wouldn't say it was a particular epiphany. It was more that I was at Burning man with my cousins or two of my cousins, Lyndon and Peter. Lyndon, Peter Rife, who are awesome guys. And they were sort of trying to think what should they do after their first startup. So they did a company called Everdream which did large scale management of computers. So if you've got like 60,000 computers, it's kind of hard to manage them. So they created software that enables companies to do that and that company actually got sold to Dell.
Interviewer
So they were looking for a new venture and looking for your ideas?
Elon Musk
Well, I wouldn't say they were initially looking for my ideas, but I actually was trying to convince them that they should do solar. Because I just thought it was an area that needed people like them who are really good entrepreneurs. And since I was somewhat over committed, I thought, to say the least, yeah, I thought well and I said like, look, if you guys Will do a solar company, I'll find you provide all the funding and whatever guidance I can or help I can provide. I'd do that. And I thought it was really important that there be good entrepreneurs like them in solar because just just wasn't doing very well as an industry. So. And I thought people were kind of focusing on, not the, they weren't focusing on the right problem. Everybody sort of thought that the panel was the problem, but actually it's a problem, but it's not the most important problem. And the panel is somewhat commoditized at this point. So it's, you know, making standard efficiency solar panels is about as hard as making drywall. It's really easy. In fact, I'd say drywall is probably harder. And. But what is a thorny problem is trying to figure out how to get solar on tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands of rooftops.
Interviewer
The logistics part, yeah, it's kind of
Elon Musk
like you got to re roof millions of buildings and then figure out how the grid interconnects work and then manage all those systems. So if you've got hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of systems, eventually you've got to manage all these distributed systems. You have this really complex distributed utility effectively, which I think actually plays to their strengths in creating their price strength in creating really scalable software for managing, you know, hundreds of thousands of computers in a distributed fashion. And that's kind of what they did and did an awesome job. It was just like I basically would show up at the board meetings to hear what's the good news this time. You know, it's like really, you know, we had like maybe a couple of bad news board meetings. Well, late 2008 there were some bad news board meetings. But for the most part, apart from a few times when the macroeconomic conditions were really terrible, they just did an amazing job with almost no help from me.
Interviewer
So you've been able to leave it in their good hands.
Elon Musk
Yeah, they deserve the vast majority of the credit for the success of that company.
Interviewer
Awesome. So I'd like to move on to innovation and motivation. There's been a lot of talk lately about the fact that innovation is leveling off. We're not making the dramatic increases or improvements in innovation like we did when the plane was invented. Do you agree with that?
Elon Musk
No, I don't agree with that. I don't think that's true. I think we've seen, and I'm not sure what time period that is exactly, but we've seen huge improvements in the Internet and new Things, I mean, in recent years, Twitter and Facebook being pretty huge, when people kind of thought the Internet was done. And I think there are some things that we're doing, like electric cars are a new thing. And I do think there's some pretty significant breakthroughs. I mean, in genomics. We're getting better and better at decoding genomics, genomes and being able to write genetics. I think that's going to be a huge, huge area. I think there's likely to be some breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and I suspect we will even see the flying car.
Interviewer
All right. Is that going to be an Elon Musk production?
Interviewer
You're going to let someone else do that?
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I think someone else. I think someone else is doing that.
Interviewer
Okay, that's another conversation. Do you feel the government is standing in the way of innovation at all?
Elon Musk
Well, sometimes the government. I don't think the government intends to stand in the way of innovation, but sometimes it can over regulate industries to the point where innovation becomes very difficult. The auto industry used to be a great hotbed of innovation at the beginning of the 20th century, but now there's so many regulations that are intended to protect consumers. I mean, the body regulation for cars could like full, you know, this room. It's just crazy how much regulation there is down to like what the headlamps are supposed to be like. And they even specify some of the elements of the user interface on the dashboard. And some of these are completely anachronistic because they're relating back to the days when you had like a little light that would illuminate an image. So like we have to reserve space on the instrument panel, the model S, for where all of the indicators that a car would have, you know, you've got like these little lights, like check engine or whatever. Yeah, like all these little things. There's like a whole bunch of them. And we can't have anything else in that space. Like, well, how about if we have one space and render a different graphic? Like, oh, no, because people are expecting to see it in that space. Like, nobody is expecting to see it in that space.
Interviewer
Yeah. So you feel you can argue with these regulations? You just have to.
Elon Musk
Well, you can argue with them, but not with great success. And you can actually get these things changed, but it takes ages. One of the things we're trying to get is why should you have side mirrors if you can have say little video cameras, tiny video cameras, and have them display an image inside the car. But there are all these regulations saying you have to have Side mirrors. And I went and met with the Secretary of Transport, like, can you change this regulation? Still nothing has happened. That was like two years ago.
Interviewer
So you're banging your head against a wall here a little bit.
Elon Musk
It's not easy to get these regulations changed.
Interviewer
So talking of government, President Obama is obviously trying to do what he can. If you had five minutes with President Obama, what would you advise him for one, stimulating the economy and entrepreneurship and creating jobs. Is there one thing that if he could successfully get through, that would be a big stimulus, do you think?
Elon Musk
Well, I think actually, I think the reality of being president is that you're actually like the captain of a very huge ship and have a small rudder. Because obviously if there was a button that a president could push that said economic prosperity, you'd be like, they're hitting that button real fast, full steam ahead. You can measure the speed of light by how fast they measure. They press that button because that's called like the re election button. So I'm not sure how much the president can really do, but I think, you know, I'm generally a fan of like minimal government interference in the economy. Like, the government should be kind of like the referee, but not the player. And there shouldn't be too many referees. But there is an exception, which is when there's an unpriced externality, such as the CO2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere. So when you have an unpriced externality, then the normal market mechanisms do not work. And then it's government's role to intervene in a way that's sensible. And the best way to intervene is to, is to put. Is to assign a proper price to whatever the common good is that's being consumed. And then.
Interviewer
So you're saying there should be a
Elon Musk
tax on gas, there should be a tax on carbon. You know, if the bad thing is carbon accumulation in the atmosphere, then there needs to be a tax on that. And then we can, that will. And then you can get rid of all subsidies and all everything else. And it seems like logical that you should tax things that are most likely to be bad rather than. That's why we tax cigarettes and alcohol, because those are probably bad for you. Certainly cigarettes are. So you want to err on the side of taxing things that are probably bad and not tax things that are good. And so I think given that there is a need to gather tax for the, you know, to pay for the federal government, we should shift the tax burden to bad things and then adjust that tax of that bad thing. According to whatever is going to result in the behavior that we think is beneficial for the future. I mean, I think currently that what we're doing right now, which is mining and burning trillions of tons of hydrocarbons that used to be buried very deep underground, and now we're sinking them in the atmosphere and running this crazy chemical experiment on the atmosphere. And then you've got the oil and gas companies, which have ungodly amounts of money, and you can't expect them to just roll over and die. Like, they don't do that. So actually what they to do is spend enormous amounts of money lobbying and running bogus ad campaigns and that kind of thing to preserve their situation. You know, it's a lot like tobacco companies in the old days. I mean, they used to run these ads with doctors, like a guy with a doctor, you know, pretending he's a doctor, you know, essentially implying that smoking is good for you and like having pregnant mothers on ads, smoking.
Interviewer
Do you have a message for the climate change skeptics and the big oil people?
Elon Musk
Well, as far as climate change skeptic, I mean, like, I'm, you know, I like to. I believe in the scientific method, and one should be. One should have a healthy skepticism of things in general and, you know, as if you first things from a scientific standpoint, you always look at things probabilistically, not definitively. And so I think a lot of times if somebody's a skeptic in the science community, what they're really saying is that they're not sure that it's 100% certain that this is the case. But that's not the point. The point is that it's looking from the other side. What do you think the percentage chance is of this being catastrophic for some meaningful percentage of the Earth's population? Is it greater than 1%? Is it even 1%? If it is even 1%, why are we running this experiment?
Interviewer
We called it a Russian roulette. We're playing Russian roulette with the atmosphere.
Elon Musk
We're playing Russian roulette. And then as each year goes by, we're loading more rounds in the chamber. It's not wise. So that's. And what makes it super insane is that we're going to run out of oil anyway. It's not like there's some infinite oil supply. We're going to run out of it. So we know we have to get to a sustainable means of transportation no matter what. So why even run the experiment? It's the world's dumbest experiment.
Interviewer
So let's move on to focus on Silicon Valley. Valley. Steve Jobs was and is a wonderful Silicon Valley icon. Is he someone that you've admired, and what have you learned from Steve's life and work?
Elon Musk
Well, he's certainly someone I've admired, although I did try to talk to him once at a party, and he was super rude to me, but I don't think it was me. I think it was sort of.
Interviewer
I think you weren't the first.
Elon Musk
Yeah, not the first, no. But yeah. And I was actually there with, like, Larry Page is an old friend of mine. I've known Larry since before he got venture funding for Google. And Larry was the guy that introduced me to Steve Jobs. So it's not as like, I'm going, like, on his coat, like, you know, please talk to me. But. So it was introduced by Larry Page. It's not bad. So. But I mean, he obviously was an incredible guy and made fantastic products that. And, I don't know, there was like, a certain. The guy had a certain magic about him. You know, just sort of. That was kind of. That was really inspiring. So, I mean, I think that's really great.
Interviewer
Is there that magic that you try and emulate?
Elon Musk
No, I think Steve Jobs is way cooler than I am, so.
Interviewer
Okay, so I'd like to get inside your head a little bit about, you know, when you come up with an idea, do you doodle it on a pad of paper, or do you get your iPad out and take notes? When you come up with something new, a new rocket design or whatever it is, how does that manifest itself? Could we see you being creative?
Elon Musk
I mean, it's somewhat cliched, but it happens a lot in the shower. I don't know what it is about showers. Get the camera. Like, yay. No, I do. I just kind of stand there in the shower.
Interviewer
So you have long showers?
Elon Musk
I do actually create lots of long showers. Sounds wrong, but, yeah, I do.
Interviewer
So there's no iPad in the shower.
Elon Musk
You mentioned the Burning man epiphanies.
Elon Musk
Those are huge. So, yeah, I think that's. Yeah. And then there are some times, like, late at night, if I've been thinking about something, then I can't sleep. And I'll be up for, you know, for several hours thinking about sort of pacing around the house and thinking about things. And occasionally I'll sketch something or. Or send myself an email or something like that.
Interviewer
Right. So we have a question from the audience. Who inspires you, or do you have a mentor?
Elon Musk
Well, I don't have a mentor, per Se, although I try to get feedback from as many people as possible. So I have like friends and I ask them what they think of this, that and the other thing. And you know, as mentioned, Larry's a good. Larry Page is a good friend of mine. Value his advice a lot and I have many other good friends. And so I think it's good to solicit feedback and particularly negative feedback, actually, because, you know, obviously people don't love the idea of giving you negative feedback unless it's like some, you know, on blogs they do that.
Interviewer
How do you deal with negative feedback? Because you got some tough criticism. Especially with SpaceX, you had incumbents like Neil Armstrong even speaking out and saying, this is wrong. We don't want commercial companies in space. It's not a place for commerce. So how did you deal with that and how do you deal with naysayers in general? Because you've had a lot.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that was kind of troubling because, you know, growing up, Neil Armstrong was kind of a hero. So it's like kind of sucks to
Interviewer
knife in the back.
Elon Musk
That's a bit of a blow. So. Yeah, but I think in his case he was somewhat manipulated, you know, by other interests. I don't think he quite knew what he was saying in those congressional hearings. So.
Interviewer
Yeah, okay. And talk about, you know, it's one thing to have these wonderful ideas in the shower at Burning man, but it's another thing to build, motivate and retain a team of excellent people. Can you talk about some tips and some things you've learned that obviously work for you?
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I mean, if you think about a company, a company is a group of people that are organized to create a product or service. That's what a company is. So in order to, to create such a thing, you have to convince others to join you in your effort. And so they have to be convinced that it's a sensible thing, that there's at least some reasonable chance of success. And if there is success, that the reward will be commensurate with the effort involved. And so I think that's getting people to believe in what you're doing and you is important. So in the beginning, there will be few people who believe in you or in what you're doing. But then over time, as you make progress, the evidence will build and more and more people will believe in what you're doing. So I think it's a good idea when creating a company to have a demonstration or if it's a product, to have a good mockup or Even if it's software to have good demo wear or to be able to sketch something so people can really envision what it's about, try to get to that point as soon as possible and then iterate to make it as real as possible as fast as possible. Yeah, if that makes sense.
Interviewer
Okay, so you're running, you're CEO of two companies, you're chairman of SolarCity. Talk about time management. How on earth do you do this? Do you get any sleep?
Elon Musk
Sometimes not enough sleep is really great because I find if I don't get enough sleep, then I'm quite grumpy. I mean, obviously I think most people are that way. And also I try to sort of figure out what's the right amount of sleep because I found I could have, I could drop below a certain threshold of sleep and although I'd be awake more hours and I could sustain it, I would get less done because mental acuity would be affected. So I found generally the right number for me is around six to six and a half hours on average per night.
Interviewer
That's not too bad.
Interviewer
And any other tips on that is an average though. Any other tips on just managing to run two companies simultaneously? I mean, do you find. I mean, I know you're up here Monday, Tuesday, is it all Tesla when you're up in Silicon Valley and all
Elon Musk
SpaceX, Wednesday, Thursday, having a sort of having a smartphone is incredibly helpful because that means you can do email during interstitial periods, like you're in a car, you're walking in the bathroom everywhere. You can do email practically when you're awake. And so that's really helpful to have email for SpaceX and Tesla integrated on my phone and then just. You have to apply a lot of hours to actual working, actually working. So the way I generally do it is I'll be working at SpaceX on Monday and then Monday night, fly to the Bay Area, then Tuesday and Wednesday at the Bay Area, then at Tesla, and then fly back on Wednesday night, spend Thursday and Friday at SpaceX in the last several months. Then I would fly back here on a Saturday and either spend Saturday and Sunday at Tesla or spend Saturday at Tesla and Sunday at SpaceX.
Interviewer
And where do the boys fit in? You have five sons.
Interviewer
Do they tag along with dad on some of these?
Elon Musk
I do drag them along in a lot of things actually. They're remarkably unimpressed by. I wish they were sort of more interested, but I mean, the twins are eight and the triplets are six, so maybe they'll get more interested later.
Interviewer
But do you see one day grooming one of them or several of them to take over your companies?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, I think if they're inclined to. I mean, if they're really interested in working at Tesla or SpaceX, then I'd help them do that. I'm not sure I'd want to necessarily try to insert them into the CEO role at some point. It's kind of like if the rest of the team and the board kind of felt that they were the right person, then that would be fine. But I wouldn't want to people to feel like I kind of installed my kid there. I don't think that would be good for either the companies or the kid really. But I have, I was actually at one point I was cool thought that it's best to give away kind of like 99% or more of one's assets, kind of like the Buffett school of thought. And I'm still mostly of that incline in that direction. But after seeing what happened with Ford and GM and Chrysler, where GM and Chrysler went bankrupt but Ford did not and Ford seemed to make better long term choices than the other two companies. And that's in part because of the influence of the Ford family. And I thought, well, okay, there may be some merit in having some longer term family ownership, at least a portion of it. So it acts as a positive influence. This is still something I'm thinking about, but acting as a positive influence in the long term. So the company kind of does proper long term things. Look at what happened also in Silicon Valley with hpm. I think it's quite sad.
Elon Musk
that to some degree is because there was much diminished influence by the Hewlett and Packard families. I think they should have prevailed in their, you know, they were opposed to the merger that took place at one point and I think they were right actually.
Interviewer
And looking to the future for SpaceX, is there an IPO plan for this year?
Elon Musk
No, there's no IPO plan.
Elon Musk
I say running a public company does have its drawbacks.
Interviewer
So you're not in a hurry?
Elon Musk
No, I mean in the case of Tesla and SpaceX, we had to raise capital and we had kind of a complex equity structure that needed to be resolved by going public. And so I thought we kind of needed to do that in those two cases. We don't have to do that in SpaceX. I think there's a good chance we will at some point in the future. But SpaceX's objectives are super long term and the market is not. So I'm a Bit worried that if we did go public, certainly if we went public too soon, that market pressure would force us to do short term things and abandon kind of long term projects.
Interviewer
Like going to Mars.
Elon Musk
Right? Going to Mars. Very long term, yes.
Interviewer
That's an important one. So you do have other projects on the back burner. You've talked about the hyperloop, a way of getting people from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under half an hour and the electric supersonic airplane.
Interviewer
Which of those two are bubbling up that we might hear more about in the near future?
Elon Musk
Well, I did promise that I'd do some paper on the hyperloop idea and things got a little hectic towards the end of last year because I'd committed to make these milestones at Tesla to the public markets and I had to stay true to that obligation, which required just an insane level of work and attention. And then we also had the SolarCity IPO, which was a very difficult IPO to get done. And that IPO occurred just by the skin of its teeth. I mean, it was such a tough one.
Interviewer
We just determined it had to be in design.
Elon Musk
Well, if it wasn't in December, it would mean pushing it out, you know, quite a bit. And the problem is that we'd already pushed it out quite a bit. So if we didn't go public we'd have to do a private round and then. And it just, the whole thing wouldn't feel right. You know, it's like you're sitting at the, it's like your spirit, you know, at the, at the altar and you don't do the wedding. It's like, must be awkward
Interviewer
to say the least.
Elon Musk
Yeah. So we really needed to do it and I think if we hadn't done it, people would have looked at it as a failure and it wouldn't have been good because there's just been too many failures in the solar or too many, not enough success, let's say, in the solar arena. They needed to be sort of. We need to chalk up the success.
Interviewer
Yeah. It was a rare piece of sunshine
Elon Musk
for the solar industry last year, that's for sure. Ironically for a solar industry does not have a lot of that.
Interviewer
Yes. So it's time, unfortunately for the last question. You've come a long way since you were that six year old little boy breaking the rules. You turned 42 this year.
Interviewer
What is on the cards? Where do you see yourself in 10 years time, 20 years time, 40 years time? Because you famously said you want to die on Mars, just not on impact Right,
Interviewer
Tell us about that dream.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Well, actually, I was asked by a journalist, do you want to die on Mars? And I said yes. I was like, but wait. Not impact, just to be clear. That's one of the possibilities. Yeah. So I guess, I mean, I'd like to be able to go to Mars while I'm still able to manage the journey reasonably well. So I think, like, I don't want to be, like, 75 and go to Mars.
Interviewer
You don't want to take your Zimmer frame with it.
Elon Musk
Right. You know, it could be. At least in the beginning, it could be, you know, mildly arduous. So wanted to. I'd like to get there. I don't know. I mean, ideally in my 50s. That would be kind of cool.
Interviewer
So you see that happening in the next.
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, I aspire to make that happen, and I can see the potential for that happening. And I'm not saying it will happen, but I think it can happen. I'll try to make it happen.
Interviewer
Great. Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk. Thank you very much.