Thank you so much for being with us. You're at Wired Science, Well, thank you for having me. 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, which you sold a few years later for a paltry three hundred and seven million dollars. Then four years later eBay buys PayPal. Is that correct? A company
that you established or helped you establish as work. And now you've taken those two enormous successes and you set your ambition on space. How did you go from online payment systems to building a spaceship? Essentially?
Well, when I.
Graduated from college, there were three areas that I thought will 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 hydrocobony based economy to one which is cellar electric, which I think is going to be the primary, but not exclusive means of energy and transportation.
Have we screwed it up so badly here on this planet that our only hope is to build a new civilization out there.
No, not at all.
Actually, I'm quite optimistic about the future of humanity on Earth.
You are, yeah, absolutely, So what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit Mars, which is really what is an ambition of yours? Well, I think if you consider two paths, one where we're forever confined to Earth and the other where we are 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. How can you do that better than NASA?
Well, well, you know, NATA is a customer of ours, So there's 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 twenty ten, so starting in twenty eleven, SpaceX's a rocket will replace the Space Shuttle in so the space station with astronauts and Cogo transportation.
The name of your rocket ship is called the Falcon Explorer.
Is that it, Well, the Falcon nine, the Falcon nine, yeah, is the rocket, and then the spaceship is Dragon Dragon. Yeah, So the Falcon nine rocket lifts the Dragon spaceship. And this Dragon spaceship is what goes to the space station and then returns to Earth.
So it transports the falcon as almost cargo.
Then, so yeah, the Falcon nine is kind of like the Semi okay or something like that, and transit the falcon Ie booster rocket takes the Dragon spaceship to space and drops it off. Then it goes to the space station, but it ducks with the space station, transfers astronauts or resupply you know, cargo, whatever whatever the case may be, and then the Dragon spacecraft returns to Earth.
Reading some of the speeches that you have given in your your career, and you mean like that, you're particularly twenty three years You're twenty three years old.
I'm actually twelve, you're twelve.
I was going to say, you look terrific, But you have said that we got law along the way with our space program. What do you mean by that? Right?
I think I think that was in some of my congressional testament I gave a few speeches to Congress. Well, what I mean by that is in nineteen sixty nine we were able to go to the Moon, and here we are over three decades later and we can barely get to lower orbit. And I think by any measure, that is a step backwards.
Is that for a lack of leadership or technology.
I think we made the wrong technological choices. And I think there was also a lack of will at the highest levels of government to take the next step and well, at least go at least stay on the Moon and peraps build a base there and then go beyond the Moon to Mars. And if you look at the news articles in the late sixties early seventies, the expectation was that by now in the twenty first century, we would have a Moon base and probably even a Mars bace.
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 and not have been to Mars, think they would I think you're crazy.
Do we need a leadership in that realm? Do we need a John F. Kennedy who sets a goal for us when he said one one day man will walk on the moon.
Do we need that.
Kind of leadership for this technology to move forward in that big step.
I do think it's it's very important the president set the priority and and determine that the goal.
Uh you know that that reals nation will all aspire to.
And you know, George Bush has his pluses and minuses, but at least one plus is that he has helped 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 think we saw the Do.
You think that's a mistake focusing on the Moon?
I do think I do think we should rather go I think we should rather be focused on on Mars. You know, the Moon is kind of like it's kind of like the Arctic, and it's just it's just a very barren place and very very little resources.
It's small, it's not it's not really a place.
That we could establish of the human civilization.
There's a there's a there's a feeling of been there, done that too with the Moon.
Yes, we saw that movie of the Sexies, you know, and the room makes never as good.
Did we really go to the Moon?
Ah?
Yes, we definitely just wanted to the government is incapable of suppressing a conspiracy of that.
Mantor of that newture.
Okay, good, This ambition to explore space absolutely entrepreneur. There's 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 in Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the Chinese, the Russians. Let's just throw all of them into this a competitive field. How is SpaceX different? How do you think you'll sort of surpass them?
Well, you know you've 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 Well, let me ask you this question. Who is your competition?
We have no serious competition, No, not presently.
Who's chasing you?
Well, if you mean chasing and have and has a serious chance of catching, then I think none that I'm aware of. And by the say you guys kind of a hack, then well, what Branson is doing, by the way, I'm great admirer at Branson is really a much smaller technological challenge.
So their craft.
Would be suborbital, so it would go to about mark three. Our craft is orbital, it goes to mark twenty five, so twenty five times to speed of sound. But that doesn't describe the whole scale of difficulty because the energy required to get those philosophies scales as the square of the velocit. So to do what Branson is doing, you need to say about nine units of energy. To do what we're doing, you need six hundred and twenty five
units of energy. The difference is monumental, and then when you Rehanner you have to you have to burn off all that energy, so that double's the problem.
Really.
So what Branson is known for a technological standpoint is building something that can cross the English Channel. What we're building is something that can circ navigate the globe. It's a 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. Yeah, yeah, I still think it's great, but it's not in the same league technologically.
So you're not particularly worried.
Certainly, not about no sileinly not about that. Now, the things that worry me are are we going to make a mistake? The things that can really hurts face x are I mean, our own foolishness, our own errors can hurt us, but not none of the competition that I'm aware of.
So generally you're worried about what's in front of you, not the other guy, And in fact, you probably don't think about them in terms of how they criticize you or what they think about you.
I don't think, actually, I don't think there's much criticism. I mean Boeing and Lockied of course that they would criticize, but I don't think any of the entrepreneurial guys would criticize what we're doing. And it certainly possibly I think, you know, what Jeff Bezos is working on could ultimately, I mean, he does have aspirations to get to over and beyond. It's just that what they're doing right now is sub orbittal and at the sort of lower technology level.
What I think about at basics 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 a higher liability. I mean, that's just a very very difficult problem. There's a reason why there's an atomatic expression about rocket science being hard.
It really is really hard.
So rocket science really is rocket science.
Yeah, it looks hard, and it's harder than it looks.
What's the big goal here, what's the long term plan?
Well, that 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, so establish societies on as many any planets as possible.
Uh.
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.
And you'll start with well Mars. Mars is the only Bible.
Viable planet, so multiplanetary life.
Yeah, helped make life multiplanetary. I think that's an important thing.
I don't think your goal is big enough. Hah, Yeah, it's ambitious.
Well, like I said, we don't expect to do it single handedly, but we certainly would like to help make it happen.
It's fair to say you've made a fortune.
Yeah, I think so if you have any reasonable standard.
Yeah, 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?
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.
Is there something about startup businesses that really fuels your desire to work?
Well, I guess I really need to be preoccupied to something and 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.
And as a friend of mine, who is a good phrase, you know, a startup business is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.
What is the criteria that you established for yourself or a startup?
I mean, why one business over another?
Yeah?
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.
Well, you touch upon something that's interesting is that there is a benefiting humanity is a very integral part of your criteria no matter what you're starting up. Yes, absolutely, really not everybody has that as a prime interest, but.
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.
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 just how it sounds.
Well, I mean we're I mean we're committed to succeed.
Really, but if we do fail, I would hope that greatly stads to the body of knowledge such that those who follow may make few mistakes.
Now, if Mars were not enough you you are busy here on earth, the world is not enough.
That's for you?
Where what 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 is your electric car company wreck right, and this is no this is no hybrid car you could buy on a car lot. This thing goes from zero to sixty and four seconds?
Is that? Yes? Absolutely is zero sixteen under four seconds.
It's faster, a better acceleration than any port currently in production and any Ferrari except the end Zoe.
And it's twice the energy efficiency of a Prius.
So it's you really have the moral high ground and you get to, you know, leave the Ferrari guy in your dest So.
Well, let me start to be let me ask the obvious. Well, and you don't look like one of those guys who's trying too hard in Ferrari.
Absolutely, yeah, you don't look like a jerk, you know you.
Up right banana yellow Lamborghini or or absolutely.
I mean this something I just point out about Tesla, which is we didn't you know Tesla is the first car is a sports car, not because we think the world lacks 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 or some 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 two of Tesla, UH, maybe I'm leaping ahead here, but Model two of Tesla is a forty nine thousand dollars four door, five passenger sedan, and that's that's going to be obviously a much broader market segment that that that can make use of that car. And then model three is intended to be around a thirty thousand dollars price point, and so that's that's really affordable by by almost everyone who's who's 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.
So is Henry Ford and someone you admire.
Well, I think Henry Ford made some very important contributions to UH to business and obviously, you know, moving moving manufacturing line and that sort of thing. So I think you certainly worthy of admiration. Here's a bit of an out duct, but you know, certainly noteworthy. But the interest in Tesla's 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 K two concentration in the atmosphere and global climate change, which I think is going to be one of the most significant issues of
the twenty first 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 mission power generation method such as solar power.
I think is solar power is going to be a really big deal.
Tesla is not a hybrid car.
Tesla's pure electric, pure electric.
So help connect the dots from me, why aren't we seeing Tesla cars on the car lots?
Then, well, what's keeping the day them yet? So we're just finishing up the development right now.
And anybody can buy this, Yes, how will you?
Actually we've almost sold out of two thousand and seven productions. So if somebody doesn't want to buy next year's model, they better act quickly.
One of the primary complaints about hybrid vehicles is they're not fast enough. You seem to overcome.
You won't have any trouble with this. In fact, really there's something uniquely better about electric vehicles, which is that the talk response is immediate. So if you want to pass someone, I mean you just the response to 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.
You know, I was going to say that Tesla the car, the name of the car company is no coincidence, is it. We'll explain a little bit about that, right.
The company is named after Nicola Tesla, who was 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 was an inventor of the ac induction motor. Invented a lot of the principles of magnetism. So he was a great man, a great, great inventor, and so the company is named in honor of him.
So these cars, the Tesla Roadster the first the first issue of the Tesla Roster available in two thousand and seven. Yes, in the spring the summer. How do you get on the waiting list?
Well, you buy the car.
You basically put down a deposit, and we've actually can you do that through the web. Yeah, we'll have by the way customer centers all around the country. So we'll have one in La, one of the various Cargo Miami, New York, and eventually nationwide customer centers where somebody does want to see the current person take a test drive or see the car being worked on. I mean, we have this idea for the way that the car is a service, that it should be a really really pleasant experience.
So we have you know, some some some somewhere between like a Starbucks and Apple store. So you go in and you see the car being car's being worked on behind a glass partition that would be your car you're watching or somebody else's can. But it's really clean, it's really clean, present bright. It'll be sort of a you know, coffee bar available, you know, just to we really want to have a very pleasant experience that that you don't typically get if you go into a dealership.
Have you heard from Toyota, Have you heard from General Motors and Ford saying use the company for sale?
Nobody's actually made a formal offer. But the interesting you know, I think one of the one of the biggest values that Tesla can Can can provide is serving as an example to the rest of the auto industry because right now, the order interest, you know, the big car companies believe that a bible electric vehicle is not possible and be
if even if it was, people would buy it. So we need to show that that need 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 in the order industries by serving as an example in that matter. And if we were to sell the company to one of one of the big car compans, I think it would really slow things down.
Mm hmm, you think so. Absolutely.
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 well.
I should correct you that I'm CEO of SpaceX and I'm chairmingan c of SpaceX and that is really my day job.
So I spend eighty percent of my time on SpaceX.
Okay, I am the chairman and the principal owner of Tesla Motors, but I do not run it on a daily basis.
You don't run that on a daily basis. 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 or the Tesla f So how's it going? I'm busy without her space right now, you guys got that covered.
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 for Tesla. Like Steve jobs, right, so he runs Apple on a daily basis, but he also, you know, has overside over Pixar's.
It's kind of like that.
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?
Yeah, I go to work at SpaceX.
How hourly do you get up in the morning?
You know, I'm not an early morning person, so so a young like for young engineers and for inventors and creators, they can sleep in until ten or eleven.
We have no fixed hours at SpaceX.
And I mean my personally, I would I tend to get up around seven thirty or eight and be a the office around you know, nine, nine thirty.
But then I tend to state about it till about eight pm. Okay.
College students across America are saying, oh rats, I thought he was going to say, like noon. But then you go into an office and you sit with in a separate office away from those who are working, or.
Do you sit with No, I just have a cubicle at SpaceX.
You have a cubicle yeah, And are you surrounded by your colleagues there?
Absolutely?
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?
Well, I think what I'd like to do is help solve some important problems. So I think, in a small way, help build the Internet, and then with respect to the global warring problem that the transition from away from oil and other hydrocobons 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 multiplanet species.
Elon Musk, thank you so much for being with us at wire Science. Let me get a straight CEO of SpaceX and chairman of Test the Motors.
Yeah, I got other titles, but that's about. That's about right now.
I think that you're doing You've done very well. Thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.