← BackAugust 29, 2018SEC Deposition — "Funding Secured"WithElon MuskPart 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 50:00 / 0:00CC1×YouTubeSEC Deposition — "Funding Secured"August 29, 2018Musk's videotaped testimony to the SEC about his August 2018 tweet on taking Tesla private at $420 with "funding secured". Five parts.Musk's videotaped testimony to the SEC about his August 2018 tweet on taking Tesla private at $420 with "funding secured". Five parts.TranscriptPart 1 / 5Elon MuskI do.Elon reef musk e l o n r e e v e m u s.Sa.May I take an opportunity to review it again?Referring to this. Yeah.General.Yes, I do not.And sorry, I forget that even though it's videotaped, there's also a written thing which hence the clarification has sort of puzzled as to why it's been repeated, but yeah, sure.Yes, I am.Sa.Yes.Yes, I believe so.Transfer.I mean, not before government agency, but I've done depositions in civil cases. Yes, Yes, I do.Yeah.Should I be answering these or just acknowledging.Okay, wait for a pause.My apologies.Make things difficult. If I'm making things difficult for a stenography standpoint, please let me know.Yes.No, I reviewed documents last night with counsel and that's. That's pretty much it.No.Did anyone tell me to testify? Sorry. Oh, no, No.Well, concerning is broad.I know, I know. Yeah. I was just working on the definition of concerning being quite broad.Sorry. Defining the word or to mean and. Or.And the word and also means and. Or.Sorry.The masculine gender includes the female gender.Some of these definitions, given that they are contrary to the sort of standard English meaning of the words, I think maybe I should just spend a moment just understanding them because it is interesting that it defines words differently than one would use in common vernacular.Yeah, absolutely. When something says the word or has been redefined to mean and. Or, and and has been defined to mean and or as well is unusual. I've not seen that.Sa.All right, thank you.Yes, I am. Not offhand. No.Yes, I did not. Yeah. No.So. Not that I can recall. I do not think so.I'm not sure of the exact date. But shortly thereafter, the end.I think it was within a few days.Some may have been immediate. I'm not sure.I provided my phone and several computers.Yes.Yeah, it is.Don't think that happen.Yeah, I mean, of course, being.Sure.All right.No, I believe so.No.There.Pretoria, south africa.I was going to Queen's University in Canada.Was there for two years, transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, completed a dual undergraduate degree in. In physics and economics at the Wharton School, and then came out to California to do a PhD in flight physics and material science at Stanford, but ended up putting that on hold to start an Internet company.I met a lot of future investment bankers to convince me not to have a career in that direction. It.I am the CEO of the company, although I'm considering changing my title.Nothing quite literally.No. I just think there's like there's too much focus on titles. And I think that you have all these titles like Chairman and CEO and sort of all these titles, and people get too focused on titles and then everyone wants a title. So I think the best title is no title.Yes, Yes. Well, I'm considering just not having a title there either.The title of Chairman is somewhat of an honorific and has little in the way of de facto value.So.No, I just think people are too concerned about titles.I hope not.I don't think so.Oh, well, yeah, but that's not really the title.I think I somewhat embarrassingly called myself Chief Product Officer or something like that. That was in the vestiges of the past. That's a tragic title.Yeah, I think it might be, unfortunately.Well, so the origins are interesting.The.At some point there should be some accurate recounting of this, but in 2003 I had lunch with JB Strauvel and.Another fellow who was his name, I'll remember in a moment, but he's quite famous in space and he's the one who requested the meeting. And in the course of the meeting in 2003, we got to the subject of electric vehicles. And I mentioned that my PhD at Stanford would have been in high energy density.Electric energy storage for electric vehicles, essentially trying to develop advanced ultracapacitors for use in electric vehicles in order to commercialize electric vehicles and make them work and have long range and fast charging. Is this too fast? Is this okay?And so JV suggested that I have a test drive of the T0 vehicle that was made by AC Propulsion, which is a small, sort of a small engineering shop in Southern California.So I had a test drive of the T zero, which was a sports car that had essentially the properties of what we later did in Tesla with the Roadster, where it had about a 250 mile range 0 to 60 time of under 4 seconds.And yeah, so it was sort of a proof of concept prototype.And I talked to Tom Gage and al Capone at AC Propulsion and tried to convince them to commercialize the T0 and saying that the world really needed to see what electric cars were capable of.And despite my best efforts, I could not convince them to commercialize the T0. So they were just not interested in going beyond a sort of small engineering shop.So after a few months of trying to convince them to do that, I said, well, if you. If you guys are not going to create a productized commercial version of the t 0, then would you mind if I did that?And they Said sure.And it's important to Note that the T0, while it was a two seater electric sports car, it also didn't have any doors or airbags or any safety features and was extremely expensive to make on a one off basis. It was like half a million dollars. So there's quite a big gap between a proof of concept prototype and creating a car that meets all of the regulatory requirements and is safe and reliable and doesn't cost half a million dollars.So when I suggested that to Tom Gage, he said, well, there are two other teams that are interested in doing this as well.I never met the other team, but the one team he did introduce me to was Martin Everhart, Rock Toppling and Ian Wright.Wright W or Ian I A N.So no, they didn't have anything except a business plan which involved commercializing the AC repulsion T0 and I thought running SpaceX at the time, this is maybe a way for me to advance the course of electric vehicles without having to run two companies that didn't work out obviously.I think some degree, it's sort of like a case of you can't have your cake in either two.So whenever you try to do something and avoid hard work, good things do not come from that or at least too much work. So I thought I would combine forces with Mark, Martin and Ian and then bring in JB rather than just create a separate company with JB and me.Maybe more detailed, I don't know. But I mean like, you know, it's interesting.I mean how much detail do you want?Sure, Yes, I know that date well because it was June 28, 2010.Yes, Yes.I do.Is it legally the president or actually a CEO? I'm not sure if that's. I think technically it's the president or something like that, but yeah, head of the company.Approximately.Similar. So I am the CEO and chief engineer, chief designer of the rockets. So it's really pretty similar to both companies. I drive the technical direction of the product. So I'm the overall head of engineering or design and also run the company.Yes. But the time allocation is minor. So I have some little companies.Yeah, well I have the boring company which digs tunnels, sports towns and that's a real fun company I have to say. The enjoyment to grief ratio is very good there so far.The enjoyment to grief ratio is quite good for now at least. Various last words.So that's digging tunnels and selling bizarre merchandise.And then there's neuralink, which is where the goal is to help solve brain injuries and you know Strokes, dementia, Parkinson's. Just there's a whole range of epilepsy and using computer chips to be able to do that.And this is a bit esoteric but with a longer term view to potentially achieving symbiosis with artificial intelligence, which I think achieving symbiosis with artificial intelligence, which could be important for. On an existential level for civilization.No.Yes, yes.Just neuralink. So just those three for companies. Yeah. Haven't bothered with a boring address.Yes. There may be occasional mistakes, but it is almost always. I try to be quite careful about specificity of each company.Actually the phone's pretty good. Essentially, if somebody emails me from Tesla it's automatically going to be initiate an email. The reply will automatically come from my Tesla address.Likewise, if I send an email to somebody and they're at Tesla, it will default to sending for my Tesla address.To the public. You mean.I mean there's only one.I know I'm not supposed to do this, but there's only one communication that I recall relating at all to the take private which was Todd Moran sending me a note saying.Yes, yes, Yes. It was just one. One note. Yeah.It may, it may be privileged, I don't know. But it's not.I mean I can just say it's not like it was.I'm not sure exactly. But early August.It was prior to that. Yes.It informed the tweet. So that's why I think it may be relevant.How's that?Sam Seller is my chief of staff and is.He is on the.Yeah. I do want to emphasize very little was discussed at all.Yeah, I don't. I don't think so.It's very brief, Maybe a few weeks. But this was very, very little and. Yeah. And was sort of unrelated to this matter.Probably june.Yeah, I think so.Yeah.Yes. Yes.No, I'm. I don't recall. Don't know.I think Sam may have just set the setting, but I'm not sure.Sam's hilarious.I mean to be clear, there was very little on. Not like there was a ton of communication. It was very little on this.I don't recall. I need any communications.Yes.I didn't. I was actually quite surprised to see a note from him. Sa.Unwise.I did have installed but I actually not used it in years and I don't use. Because I.No.I have twitter.Correct.Yeah. It's embarrassing.Is it funny?Well, there's just, you know, I think it sort of gives this false impression that people are having these amazing lives when in fact they can Be quite miserable. And it then creates unhappiness because people compare their life to the apparent life of others and then they feel bad. And I think it may actually contribute to an increase in the suicide rate, which is terrible. And so I didn't like it and deleted it.About a week ago.Yeah, right. In the beginning when it was a filter for Twitter, it used to be like a, you know, you'd have an image on Twitter as like a plugin and you'd like use it as a filter. I was one of the first people able to use it actually.So I took snapshots of like the few photos that I care about and then deleted it.You're kind of close to it. An early version, not sure it was made up for, but it was like very early. You can't even get those filters anymore.I use it infrequently. I mean, I had it, I think for six or six and a half years and in that entire time probably did an average of 1 post a month or something like that.I actually only realized about a year ago that there was one, but it's just entirely for personal reasons and generally involved sending some Instagram picture to somebody else with a, you know, LOL or something.Yes, sorry, this is entirely frivolous.No, not at all.Well, technically I first signed up for Twitter when it was very tiny. I think it only had a few thousand users. And a friend of mine was the. Was one of the lead series A investors in Twitter and I signed up and then people just kept talking about like what kind of latte they had at Starbucks. And so then I was like, this is ridiculous and deleted my Twitter because it just seemed like nonsense.And then somebody else took over my Twitter handle and started posting things in my name.But I kind of ignored Twitter until about probably when was it 2011 or 2010 or something.And a friend of mine suggested that Twitter would be a good way to talk directly to the public and bypass the media.Obviously a double edged sword. But I thought, well, this could be a good way to not always have what I want to say filtered through the lens of a journalist.Close. It was unrelated to. Well, it was really from a press standpoint as a means of counteracting the press. But yeah, around that time, Elon musk.No, close.I don't think so.No, No, sa.In the beginning, I'm not sure what I. I don't think. I think I was just tweeting nonsense.I was torturing people with my terrible sense of humor.Yeah. Yes.Well, I'm not sure it has entirely. It's still, you know, whimsical bad humor interspersed with talk of SpaceX and Tesla and Boring Company and Neuralink and OpenAI and other things. Oh, I forgot to mention OpenAI, sort of. It's a non profit. I'm not on the board or anything.I think it would have been two or three years ago, Not more than four years ago.Yeah, Yes.Yeah.There was a blatantly false review in the New York Times about this terrible test drive that a Times journalist had had in our car, where he fundamentally misrepresented the test drive and flat out lied, which we were able to determine from the car log, since it was our car he was driving. We had full access to logs, including everything the car did. And his entire story was a piece of fiction.And so we pointed that out.It was, I think, 20, 2013 or 14, something like that.Yes.Yeah. Essentially about it trying to combat what I saw as misrepresentation of Tazeh in the media.I think it varies quite a lot.So it could be anywhere, maybe once a week or something like that on average. But then there are times when there's a lot more tweets than that.Yeah, I think there can be. A week can go by with no mention of Tesla, and then a day, there could be a day where there's a great deal of it.Do you mean as. Was I speaking as a CEO of tesla or something? Or.I felt I was sort of speaking as leader of the company?Yeah, I guess.You okay? Yeah, yeah, no problem.No, I mean, occasionally I've asked Sam, do you think. What do you think of this tweet?Yes.Yeah, sure.Well, if he happens to be there, and I'm not too certain about this tweet, I'll ask Sam. What do you think? Most of the time I do not ask anyone.Yes, there's. Well, yes, there's, I believe, a disclosure in our corporate documents that I use Twitter.Yes.At. No, I'm not aware of a formal policy.Not really.Yes, In some cases, very few. But I've actually gone back and unblocked a bunch of them. It's better to just mute them because then they use the block feature as they get all excited about that.Mute's way better. They can still see my tweets, but I can't see theirs.Yes.No, I cannot recall any instances. Right. Where did that.Distinct.Yes, Yes.