Entretien PBS Wired Science 3 janvier 2007 Un entretien rare de 2007 tourné pour l'émission Wired Science de PBS. À 35 ans, Musk expose sa vision naissante pour Tesla Motors et SpaceX, et pourquoi il a quitté la recherche pour parier sur la voiture électrique et les fusées réutilisables.
Un entretien rare de 2007 tourné pour l'émission Wired Science de PBS. À 35 ans, Musk expose sa vision naissante pour Tesla Motors et SpaceX, et pourquoi il a quitté la recherche pour parier sur la voiture électrique et les fusées réutilisables.
Transcription Narrator
Elon Musk is a dropout and a billionaire. After receiving an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, he dropped out of the Stanford PhD program in physics. He wound up CEO of PayPal, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002. With his fortune made in the virtual world, he's created Tesla Motors and SpaceX in the real world. Named for Nikola Tesla, the eccentric Serbian born inventor of alternating current, Tesla Motors will roll their first 100 all electric cars out factory doors this summer. SpaceX, one of many new ventures aimed at commercializing outer space, was recently awarded a $278 million NASA contract to build and operate launch vehicles and crew capsules to service the International Space Station and
Interviewer
take America back to the moon. Elon, thank you so much for being with us here at Wired Science.
Elon Musk
Well, thank you for having me.
Interviewer
I need to first lay a little bit of a foundation here. Two days into your physics program at Stanford University, you quit school to start a company called Zip to a media company, right. Which is sold a few years later for a paltry $307 million. Then four years later, eBay buys PayPal. Is that correct? A company that you established or helped to establish as one of your others?
Interviewer
And now you've taken those two enormous successes and you've set your ambition on space. How did you go from online payment systems to building a spaceship essentially?
Elon Musk
Well, when I graduated from college, there were three areas that I thought would be most impactful to the future of humanity. The three were the Internet, space exploration, and then changing the economy from a mine and burn hydrocarbon based economy to one which is solar electric, which I think is going to be the primary but not exclusive means of energy and transportation.
Interviewer
Have we screwed it up so badly here on this planet that our only hope is to build a new civilization out there?
Elon Musk
No, not at all. Actually, I'm quite optimistic about the future of humanity on Earth.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely.
Interviewer
So what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit Mars, which is really what is an ambition of yours?
Elon Musk
Well, I think if you consider two paths, one where we are forever confined to Earth and the other, where we are a space frank civilization out exploring the stars. I think the latter is far more exciting and will result in a richer and more diverse human experience.
Interviewer
How can you do that better than NASA?
Elon Musk
Well, you know, NASA is a customer of ours, so there's I think, a confusion in the public mind that perhaps a company like SpaceX is competing with NASA, but in fact NASA is a customer of ours, so we're actually providing services to NASA launch services. And when the shuttle retires in 2010. So starting in 2011, SpaceX's rocket will replace the space shuttle in servicing the space station with astronauts and cargo transportation.
Interviewer
The name of your rocket ship is called the Falcon Explorer, is that it?
Elon Musk
Well, the Falcon 9.
Interviewer
The Falcon 9, yes. It's a rocket.
Elon Musk
And then the space. The spaceship is Dragon. Dragon, yeah. So the Falcon 9 rocket lifts the Dragon spaceship and this Dragon spaceship is what goes to the space station and then returns to Earth.
Interviewer
So it transports the Falcon as almost cargo then.
Elon Musk
So yeah, the Falcon 9 is kind of like the, the semi.
Elon Musk
Or something like that. And it trans. The false Falcon 9 booster rocket takes the Dragon spaceship to space and drops it off. Then it goes to the space station, docks with the space station, transfers astronauts or resupply cargo, whatever the case may be, and then the Dragon spacecraft returns to Earth.
Interviewer
Reading some of the speeches that you have given in your career and how old you mean like you're practically 23 years? You're 23 years old?
Elon Musk
I'm actually 12.
Interviewer
You're 12? I was going to say you look terrific. But you have said that we got lost along the way with our space program. What did you mean by that? Right.
Elon Musk
I think, I think that was in some of my congressional testimony. I gave a few speeches to Congress. Well, what I mean by that is in 1969 we were able to go to the moon and here we are over three decades later and we can barely get to low Earth orbit. And I think by any measure that is a step backwards.
Interviewer
Is that for a lack of leadership or technology?
Elon Musk
I think we made the wrong technological choices. And I think there was also a lack of will at the, at the highest levels of government to take the next step and go, well, at least, at least stay on the moon and passport a base there and then go beyond the moon to Mars. And if you look at the, the news articles in the late 60s, early 70s, the expectation was that, that by now in the 21st century, we would have a moon base and probably even a Mars base. And I think if you'd asked anyone at that point in time whether we would be unable to go to the moon and have. No, not have been to Mars, I think they would, they would think you're crazy.
Interviewer
Do we need leadership in that realm? Do we need a John F. Kennedy who sets a goal for us when he said one, one day a man will walk on the moon? Do we need that kind of leadership for this technology to move forward in that big step.
Elon Musk
I do think it's very important. The President set the priority and determined the goal that we as a nation will aspire to. And, you know, George Bush has his pluses and minuses, but at least one plus is that he has helped us to steer the space program in a direction that. That more or less makes sense. You know, the only thing I would. I would sort of argue with is that I don't think we should be going back to the moon. I think we should be focused on Mars. I. We saw the.
Interviewer
Do you think that's a mistake, focusing on the moon?
Elon Musk
I do think. I do think we should rather go. I think we should rather be focused on Mars. You know, the moon is kind of like. It's kind of like the Arctic. It's just. It's just a very barren place. Very, very little resources. It's small. It's not. It's not really a place that we could establish another human civilization.
Interviewer
There's a. There's a. There's a feeling of Ben there done that too. With the moon.
Elon Musk
Yeah, we saw that movie in the 60s. You know, the remake's never as good.
Interviewer
Did we really go to the moon?
Interviewer
We definitely just wanted to check.
Elon Musk
The government is incapable of suppressing a conspiracy of that nature.
Interviewer
Of that nature. Okay, good. This ambition to explore space.
Interviewer
There's quite a bit of competition out there. There's Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin. There's Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic, and I'm not talking about NASA either. There's Paul Allen. There's the European Space Agency and Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Chinese, the Russians, let's just throw all of them into this.
Elon Musk
Everyone's doing it.
Interviewer
Competitive field. How is SpaceX different? How do you think you'll sort of surpass them?
Elon Musk
Well, you know, you've listed a wide range of entities there, and I think the differences are really different depending upon which one you're referring to. The.
Interviewer
Well, let me ask you this question. Who is your competition?
Elon Musk
We have no serious competition.
Interviewer
Who's chasing you?
Elon Musk
Well, if you mean chasing and have. And has a serious chance of catching, then I think none that I'm aware of.
Interviewer
Kind of a hack, then.
Elon Musk
Well, what Branson's doing, by the way, I'm a great admirer of Branson, is really a much smaller technological challenge. So their craft would be suborbital. So it would go to about Mach 3. Our craft is orbital. It goes to Mach 25. So 25 times the speed of Sound. But that doesn't describe the whole scale of difficulty because the energy required to get to those velocities scales as the square of the velocity. So to do what Branson is doing, you need say about nine units of energy. To do what we're doing, you need 625 units of energy. The difference is monumental. And then when you re enter, you have to burn off all that energy. So that doubles the problem really. So what Branson is doing from a technological standpoint is building something that can cross the English Channel. What we're building is something that can circumnavigate the globe. Very different scale of technological difficulty. I still think what he's doing is great. And by the way, I bought a ticket on his effort.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. So I still think it's great, but it's not in the same league technologically.
Interviewer
So you're not particularly worried?
Elon Musk
Certainly not about. No, certainly not about that, no. The things that worry me are, are we going to make a mistake? The things that can really hurt SpaceX are, I mean, our own foolishness, our own errors can hurt us, but none of the competition that I'm aware of.
Interviewer
So generally you're worried about what's in front of you, not the other guy. In fact, you probably don't think about them in terms of how they criticize you or what they think about you.
Elon Musk
I don't think, actually, I don't think there's much criticism. I mean, Boeing and Lockheed, of course they were criticized, but I don't think any of the entrepreneurial guys would criticize what we're doing. And it's certainly possible. I think what Jeff Bezos is working on could ultimately, I mean, he does have aspirations to get to orbit and beyond. It's just that what they're doing right now is suborbital and at the sort of lower technology level. What I think about at SpaceX is really entirely what are we doing to ensure that our rocket is going to be successful and that we are truly optimizing the cost and ensuring higher liability? I mean, that's just a very, very difficult problem. There's a reason why there's an idiomatic expression about rocket science being hard. It really is really hard.
Interviewer
So rocket science really is rocket science?
Elon Musk
Yeah, it looks hard and it's harder than it looks.
Interviewer
What's the big goal here? What's the long term plan?
Elon Musk
Well, the long term ultimate objective, the Holy Grail, is we would like to help make life multiplanetary. That's really what we'd like to do
Interviewer
so establish societies on as many planets as possible?
Elon Musk
Well, yeah, I think there's only one possibility, but yeah, I mean, even if we can just go from one planet to two, I think that's a pretty big step.
Interviewer
And you'll start with, well, Mars. Mars is the only viable planet, so multi planetary life.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Help make life multi planetary. I think that's an important thing.
Interviewer
I don't think your goal is big enough. Ha. Yeah, it's ambitious.
Elon Musk
Well, like I said, we don't, don't expect to do it single handedly, but we certainly would like to help make it happen.
Interviewer
It's fair to say you've made a fortune.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think so. By any reasonable standard. Yeah.
Interviewer
And you know, those who work in science probably understand your trajectory, but there are those who are watching who would think if I made that money, I'd sit on a beach, I'd drink beer and I would just watch the sunset. Kind of like a Corona beer commercial. Have you ever thought about that as a career option?
Elon Musk
You know, I find that really pretty boring. So that would be torture if I had to do that every day. That would really be pretty awful for me.
Interviewer
Is there something about startup businesses that, that, that really fuels your desire to work?
Elon Musk
Well, I guess I really need to be preoccupied with something and if, if I'm just sort of sitting there relaxing, I can only do that for a very short period of time and then it becomes unbearable. Although startups definitely have their highs and lows. There's a friend of mine who has a good phrase. You know, a startup business is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.
Interviewer
What is the criteria that you establish for yourself for a startup mean?
Elon Musk
Why one business over another?
Elon Musk
Well, for me it's always about does what I'm doing matter? If we are successful, does it matter to the world? And so there are easier ways to make money than starting a rocket company or say a car company or even when I started an Internet company. Because when I started the first Internet company, nobody had made any money and it wasn't clear that anyone would make any money. It was simply from the perspective of the Internet being a very important thing and something that needed to be built and so I wanted to help. Hold it.
Interviewer
Well, you touch upon something that's interesting is that there is a, that benefiting humanity is a very integral part of your criteria, no matter what you're starting up.
Elon Musk
Yes, absolutely.
Interviewer
Really? Not everybody has that as a prime interest.
Elon Musk
No, I think that's, that's probably relatively unusual. Although there are many people that I know in Silicon Valley for whom that is a significant motivation.
Interviewer
You said in your endeavor here to explore space that we are committed to failing in a new way, if nothing else. What did you mean by that? Just how it sounds.
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, we're committed to succeed, really. But if we do fail, I would hope that we at least add to the body of knowledge such that those who follow may make few mistakes.
Interviewer
Now, if Mars were not enough, you
Elon Musk
are busy here on Earth, the world is not enough. That's right.
Interviewer
Have you no limits, my friend? Here on Earth you are establishing a presence certainly with Tesla Motors. Tell us a little bit about that. This electric car company, correct?
Interviewer
This is no, this is no hybrid car you could buy on a car lot. This thing goes from zero to 60 in four seconds.
Elon Musk
Yes, absolutely. Zero to 60 in under four seconds. It's faster, better acceleration than any Porsche currently in production and any Ferrari except the Enzo. And it's twice the energy efficiency of a Prius. So you really have the model high ground and you get to leave the Ferrari guy in your dust.
Interviewer
Well, let me ask, it's hard to beat, let me ask the obvious. Well, and you don't look like one of those guys who's trying too hard in a Ferrari.
Elon Musk
Absolutely, yeah. You don't look like a jerk, you know,
Interviewer
in a bright banana yellow Lamborghini or something.
Elon Musk
There's something I should point out about Tesla which is we didn't, you know, Tesla is first car, is a sports car. Not because we think the world likes for a sports car, but because it is the right entry point for the market. If you have a new technology, the right place to enter is high unit cost, low unit volume. Just as you know, when a new cell phone come out, comes out, or a new, a new laptop or some new thing, it tends to be expensive at first because they're figuring out all the issues and it takes time to optimize and then over time that that technology will become cheaper and cheaper. And so the Model 2 of Tesla, and maybe I'm leaping ahead here, but Model 2 of Tesla is a $49,000 four door, five passenger sedan. And that's, that's going to be obviously a much broader market segment that can make use of that car. And then Model 3 is intended to be around a $30,000 price point. And so that's, that's really affordable by, by almost everyone who can buy a new car. So the idea is to drive to mass market as rapidly as possible, but only at the pace at which the technology matures.
Interviewer
So is Henry Ford someone you admire?
Elon Musk
Well, I think Henry Ford made some very important contributions to business and obviously, you know, moving, moving manufacturing line and that sort of thing. So I think he's certainly worthy of admiration. He was a bit of an odd duck, but, you know, certainly noteworthy. But the interest in Tesla is not from the perspective of, you know, the world needs another car company. It's more from the perspective of we have a very important environmental problem that needs to be addressed, which is driven by the burning of fossil fuels and the increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and global climate change, which I think is going to be one of the most significant issues of the 21st century. And the only way to really get around that in my view is really with an electric vehicle. And then you need to pair that up with a zero emission power generation method such as solar power. I think solar power is going to be a really big deal.
Interviewer
Tesla is not a hybrid car.
Elon Musk
Tesla is pure electric.
Interviewer
Pure electric. So help connect the dots for me. Why aren't we seeing Tesla cars on the car lots then? What's. Well, we keep them.
Elon Musk
We haven't made them yet. So the car, it's. We're just finishing up the development right now.
Interviewer
And anybody can buy this. Yes.
Elon Musk
How will you actually almost sold out of 2007 production. So if somebody does want to buy next year's model, they better act quickly.
Interviewer
One of the primary complaints about hybrid vehicles is they're not fast enough. You seem to overcome.
Elon Musk
You won't have any trouble with this. In fact, really it's, there's something uniquely better about electric vehicles which is that the torque response is immediate. So if you want to pass someone, I mean you just. The response of the car is very immediate. It's just, it's more fun to drive an electric car than it is to drive a gasoline car.
Interviewer
You know, I was going to say that Tesla, the car, the name of the car company is no coincidence, is it? Explain a little bit about that.
Elon Musk
Right. The company's named after Nikola Tesla, who is an inventor. He was originally from the sort of the area of Yugoslavia and Europe, but he moved to America when he was young and, and was an inventor of the, the AC induction motor. Invented a lot of the principles of magnetism. So he was a great man, great, great inventor. And so the company's named in honor of him.
Interviewer
So these cars, the Tesla Roadster. The first, the first issue of the Tesla Roadster available in 2007. Yes, in the spring, the summer how do you get on the waiting list?
Elon Musk
Well, you buy the car. You basically put down a deposit, and we've actually.
Interviewer
Can you do that through the Web?
Elon Musk
Yeah, we'll have, by the way, customer centers all around the country. So we'll have one in la, one in Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, New York, and eventually nationwide customer centers where somebody does want to see the car in person, take a test drive, or see the car being worked on. I mean, we have this idea for the way that the cars are serviced, that it should be a really pleasant experience. So we have, you know, somewhere between, like, a Starbucks and an Apple Store. So you go in and you'd see the car being. Cars being worked on behind a glass partition.
Interviewer
That would be your car you're watching.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Or somebody else's. And. But it's really clean. It's really clean. Present brightly. Sort of a, you know, coffee bar available. You know, just a. Really want to have a very pleasant experience that. That you don't typically get if you go into a dealership.
Interviewer
Have you heard from Toyota, have you heard from General Motors and Ford saying, is the company for sale?
Elon Musk
Nobody's actually made a formal offer, but the interest. You know, I think one of the biggest values that Tesla can provide is serving as an example to the rest of the auto industry, because right now, the auto industry, you know, the big car companies believe that a, viable electric vehicle is not possible, and B, if, even if it was, people wouldn't buy it. So we need to show that neither of those are true, that the technology works, that people want to buy it, and that will be the most effective way of really driving change in the auto industry, is by serving as an example in that matter. And if we were to sell the company to one of. One of the big car companies, I think it would really slow things down. Mm, you think so? Absolutely. Mm.
Interviewer
You're very busy, enterprising the part of your company that will explore space. You're very busy with this car company. Where do you find time to be CEO of two companies that size?
Elon Musk
Well, I should correct you that I'm CEO of Space X. And I'm chairman CEO of Space X. And that is really my day job, so I spend 80% of my time on Space X.
Elon Musk
I'm the chairman and the principal owner of Tesla Motors, but I do not run it on a daily basis.
Interviewer
You don't run that on a daily basis?
Interviewer
Well, that was really. The question was, how do you do. How do you run those two large enterprises on a daily basis? I Is it a couple of phone calls to the Tesla folks? How's it going? I'm busy with outer space right now. You guys got that covered?
Elon Musk
I spent about, I spent about two, two to three days a month on Tesla related business and almost all the rest of the time is on SpaceX. So SpaceX is very much my, my day to day job and then I provide product guidance, strategic guidance and obviously funding for Tesla. Like Steve Jobs.
Elon Musk
So he runs Apple on a daily basis but he also, you know, has oversight over Pixar. It's kind of like that.
Interviewer
And in your day to day, and this is, this is one of those silly lifestyle questions, but how early do you get up in the morning and where do you go to work physically? Is it an office?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I go to work at SpaceX.
Interviewer
How early do you get up in the morning?
Elon Musk
You know, I'm not an early morning person.
Interviewer
So, so young. For young engineers and for inventors and creators, they can sleep until 10 or 11.
Elon Musk
We have no fixed hours at SpaceX. And I mean my, personally I would, I tend to get up around 7:30 or 8 and be in the office around, you know, 9, 9:30. But then I tend to stay until about 8:00pm okay.
Interviewer
College students across America are saying oh drats. I thought he was going to say like noon. But then you go into an office and you, you sit with in a separate office away from those who are working.
Elon Musk
Or do you sit with? No, I just have a cubicle at SpaceX.
Interviewer
You have a cubicle?
Interviewer
And are you surrounded by your colleagues there?
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely.
Interviewer
What is your hope in terms of the impact you will leave on culture, this civilization, this world, global civilization? What is it that you hope to leave here?
Elon Musk
Well, I think what I'd like to do is help solve some important problems. So I think in a small way helped build the Internet. And then with respect to the global warming problem, the transition from away from oil and other hydrocarbons to something which is clean and sustainable. I hope to have an impact there and then with respect to space, I hope to have an impact in helping make humanity a multi planet species.
Interviewer
Elon Musk, thank you so much for being with us at Wire Science. Let me get it straight. CEO of SpaceX and chairman of Tesla Motors.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I got other titles, but that's about, that's about right.
Interviewer
I think that you're doing pretty good. You've done very well.