At Caltech's 118th commencement, Musk delivers his "Magicians of the 21st Century" address — urging graduates to work hard, take risks while young, question assumptions and reason from first principles, and go create technology so advanced it looks like magic.
Elon Musk
I'd like to thank you for leaving crazy person out of the description. So I thought. I was trying to think, what is the most useful thing that I could. What could I say that could actually be helpful or useful to you in the future? And I thought perhaps tell the story of how I sort of came to be here. How did some of these things happen? And maybe there's some lessons there, because I often find myself wondering, how did this happen? So when I was young, I didn't really know what I was going to do. When I got older, people kept asking me. But then eventually I thought that the idea of inventing things would be. Would be really cool. And the reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clark which said that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And that's really true. If you go back, say, 300 years, the things that we take for granted today would be. You'd be burned at the stake for, you know, being able to fly. That's crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having effectively with the Internet, a group mind of sorts, and having access to all the world's information instantly from almost anywhere on the Earth. This is stuff that really would be magic. It would be considered magic in times past. In fact, I think it actually goes beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren't even imagined in times past. They weren't even in the realm of magic. So it actually goes beyond that. So I thought, well, if I can do some of those things, basically, if I can advance technology, then that's like magic, and that would be really cool. And I was at sort of a slight existential crisis because I was trying to figure out, what does it all mean? Like, what's the purpose of things? And I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can do things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened. And that's really the only way forward. So I studied physics and business because I figured in order to do a lot of these things, you need to know how the universe works, and you need to know how the economy works. And you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to work with you to create something, because it's very difficult to do something as an individual if it's significant technology. So I originally came out to California to try to figure out how to Improve the energy density of electric vehicles, basically to try to figure out if there was an advanced capacitor that could serve as an alternative to batteries. And that was in 95. And that's also when the Internet started to happen. And I thought, well, I can either pursue this technology where success may not be one of the possible outcomes, which is always tricky, or participate in the Internet and be part of it. So I decided to drop out. Fortunately we're past graduation, so I can't be accused of recommending that to you. And did some Internet stuff, you know, did a few things here and there, one of which was PayPal. And I think maybe it's helpful to say one of the things that was important then in the creation of PayPal was kind of how it started. Because initially the initial thought was with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services. So you have one place where all your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. And then we had like a little feature which was to do email payments. And whenever we show the system off to someone, we'd show the hard part, which was the agglomeration of financial services, which was quite difficult to put together. Nobody was interested. Then we'd show people email payments, which was actually quite easy and everybody was interested. So, so this is, I think it's important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed loop as possible. And so we focused on email payments and really try to make that work. And that's what really got things to take off. But if we hadn't responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So it's important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them and correct your prior assumptions. And then going from PayPal, I thought, well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity? It really wasn't from the perspective of what's the rank ordered best way to make money, which is okay, but it was really what I think is going to most affect the future of humanity. So I think the biggest terrestrial problem we've got is sustainable energy, but the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner. If we don't solve that the century we're in deep trouble. And then the other one being the extension of life beyond Earth to make life multi planetary. So that's the basis for the latter is the basis for SpaceX and the former is the basis for Tesla and SolarCity. And when I started SpaceX, it actually initially I thought that, well, there's no way one could possibly start a rocket company. I wasn't that crazy. But then I thought, well, what is a way to increase NASA's budget? That was actually my initial goal. So I thought, well, if we can do a low cost mission to Mars, something called Mars Oasis, which would land seeds with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel and you hydrate them upon landing and then you'd have this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background. And the public tends to respond to precedents and superlatives. And this would be the first life on Mars, the furthest that life's ever traveled as far as we know. And I thought, well, that would get people really excited and therefore increase NASA's budget. So obviously the financial outcome from such a mission would probably be zero. So anything better than that was on the upside. So I actually went to, I went to Russia three times to look at buying a refurbished ICBM because that was the best deal. And I can tell you it was very weird going there in 2000, late 2001, 2002, going to the Russian rocket forces and saying, I'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets but you can keep the nuke, that's a lot more. And that was 10 years ago, I guess. So they thought I was crazy, but I did have money, so that was okay. And after making several trips to Russia, I came to the conclusion that actually my initial impression was wrong about because my initial thought was, well, that there's not enough will to explore and expand beyond Earth and have a Mars base and that kind of thing. But I came to the conclusion that that was wrong. In fact, there's plenty of will, particularly in the United States, because the United States is a nation of explorers, of people who came here from other parts of the world. I think the United States is really a distillation of the spirit of human exploration. But if people think it's impossible then, or it's going to completely break the federal budget, then they're not going to do it. So after my third trip I said, okay, what we really need to do here is try to solve the problem, the space transport problem, and started SpaceX. And this was against the advice of pretty much everyone I talked to. One friend made me sit down and watch a bunch of videos of rockets blowing up. Let me tell you, he wasn't far wrong. It was tough going there in the beginning because I'd never built anything physical. I mean, I built like little model rockets as a kid. And that kind of thing. But I never had a company that built anything physical. So I'd figure out how to do all these things and bring together the right team of people. And so we did all that and then failed three times. It was tough going because the thing about a rocket is that the passing grade is 100% and you don't get to actually test the rocket in the real environment that it's going to be in. So I think. So the best analogy for rocket engineering is like if you want to create a really complicated bit of software, you can't run the software as an integrated whole and you can't run it on the computer it's intended to run on for the first time. You put it all together and run it on that computer. It must run with no bugs. That's basically the essence of it. So we missed the mark there. The first launch I was picking up bits of rocket near the launch site. It was a bit sad, but we learned with each successive flight and were able to eventually, with the fourth flight in 2008, reach orbit. And that was also with the last bit of money that we had. So thank goodness that that happened. I think the saying is fourth times the charm. So we got the Falcon 1 to orbit and then began to scale that up to the Falcon 9, which is about an order of magnitude more thrust. It's around a million pounds of thrust. And we managed to get that to orbit and then developed a Dragon spacecraft which recently was able to dock and return to Earth from the space station. That was. Thanks. That was a white knuckled event. So yeah, it's a huge relief. Still can't quite believe it actually happened. But there's a lot more that must happen beyond this in order for humanity to become a space faring civilization, ultimately a multi planet species. And that's something I think it's vitally important and I hope that some of you will participate in that either at SpaceX or at other companies, because it's just really one of the, the most important things for the preservation and extension of consciousness. It's worth noting, as I'm sure people are aware, that the Earth has been around for 4 billion years and civilization, at least in terms of having writing, has been around for 10,000 years. And that's being generous. So it's really somewhat of a tenuous existence that civilization and consciousness as we know it has been on Earth. And I think I'm actually fairly optimistic about the future of Earth. So I don't want people to have the wrong impression that I think we're all about to die. I think things will most likely be okay for a long time on Earth, but not for sure, but most likely. But even if it's sort of 99% likely, a 1% chance, it's still worth spending a fair bit of effort to ensure that we have, we've backed up the biosphere, planetary redundancy, if you will. And so I think it's really, really quite important. And in order to do that, there's a breakthrough that needs to occur, which is to create a rapidly and completely reusable transport system to Mars, which is one of those things that's right on the borderline of if impossible. But that's sort of the thing that we're going to try to achieve there with SpaceX. And then on the Tesla front, the goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people's perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly and had low range, kind of like a golf cart. So that's why we created the Tesla Roadster. Show that you can be fast, attractive and long range. And it's amazing how even though you can show that something works on paper, you know, and the calculations are very clear until you actually have the paper physical object and they can drive it, it doesn't really sink in for people. And so that I think is something worth noting. If you're going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint. You can make anything work on PowerPoint, but if you have an actual demonstration article, even if it's in primitive form, that's much, much more effective for convincing people. So we made the Tesla Roadster and now we're coming out soon with the Model S, which is a four door sedan. Because after we made the Tesla Roadster, people said, oh sure, sure, we always knew you could make a car like that. It's an expensive car and it's low volume and it's small and all that, but you couldn't make a real car like, okay, fine, I got to make that too. So that's coming out soon. And yeah, so that's the, I think the where things are and hopefully there's some lessons to be drawn there. But I think the overarching point I want to make is that you guys are the magicians of the 21st century. Don't let anything hold you back. Imagination is the limit and go out there and create some magic. Thank you.