Mindset of Elon Musk, 2013 Interview!!!

Thank you and good afternoon. So we have lots of cover. Elon does a lot of things.

There is at the moment one of his spaceships docked to the space station, the Dragon spaceship. This is the third time that's been docked. Second commercial one was launched last week. Many of you may have followed the launch, but there was drama. You know, there were solar panels and all this kind of stuff we could follow on your Twitter feed.

Yet drama, what's it?

Can you just tell us what it's like to be Elon Musk in the control room during a launch when something happens, when there's an issue.

Well, it's I mean, it's extremely nerve wracking.

I mean it's the thing about rocket launch is that all of your work is distilled into these few minutes, particularly the first several seconds around the lift off. Because the worst thing that can happen with the rocket in a touch word is if if you have an engine failure or some huge failure right above the launch pad and the whole thing can come down with about a million pounds of T and T equivalent and destroyed the

I'm thinking about here.

So when it clears the lightning towers and it's gotten further enough away from not actually destroying the launch pad, then then it's that's one sort of go down a notch on, you know, the fear and anxiety. And then after first stage separation.

That's another one. And when the.

Second stage lights up, so it's sort of going down in intensity as the rocket is going up. And the thing is that the first three rocket launches that we had failed okay, and then the first one failed quite close to the launch pad, almost destroyed the launch pad.

In fact, I spent that.

They're picking up rocket pieces off the reef, which sucks. So I think like there's a pretty powerfully ingrained fear response as a result of that, because three in a row, just you know, and the image of those rocket failures kind of going through my mind as I seeing the rocket launch. So that's what's going on.

And then in this case, you made it through the state separation, but then there was an issue with the solar cells. Tell me a little bit how you sort of spotted the problem, diagnosed it, What does the team do?

I mean, you got there in the end, but how does it work?

Yeah, so the solar panels are actually okay. But and the rocket launch went went really well, so that that was not a problem. Where things kind of went awry was after spacecraft separation, we try to initialize the fourth rustler pods. So there's fourth thrustal pots with a combined total of eighteen engines, and the system is designed with a huge amount of dundancy, so it can take all sorts of failures and it's complete its mission. That's that's

So three weren't working. Wow, and.

That which was a huge puzzle, like what why are three not working? Because these things are crash strapped, so you'd kind of think that either maybe one wouldn't work or a crash strap pair wouldn't work, but not three.

It was really really strange.

So so we had the spacecraft just going through kind of free drift in space, like we're just tumbling, and which makes all it's also difficult to communicate with because the antennas are like pointing, you know, every which way you can imagine. So we had. All we had was was a very flight two killer, it occasional two kill a bit link that would go in and out and that was an omnidirectional signal beaming off of the NASA

So we actually asked the Air Force.

If we could have some of their long range clameatory scanners with would they give us access and we have this communication system they would call the megaproxy, So we had to recode the megaproxy to go through the Air Force long range dishes to blast the spacecraft with enough intensity to be able to upload new code to try.

To fix the problem.

And so we wrote some new software to essentially pressure slam the two of the three oxidizer tanks that were refusing to pressurize. And it turned out we've I think we've figured out problem, which is that there's a there was a slight chain which made to a check valve that was in three of the tanks and not on the other.

And we're able to replicate that problem the ground later.

And we're able to to basically have the have the system build up pressure upstream, then release that pressure and slam the valve. So we're trying to give it the sort of the spacecraft equivalent to the heimlich maneuver basically, And.

And then we got one.

Of the pods too that looked like it was making progress, and we didn't want to unfil the solar panels until we had at least two pods.

Active so we could we could go from sort.

Of drifting to an active hold. But then the temperatures of the solar panels, which are any protective covers, was dropping and it can drop to like almost absolute zero if it's pointing at a dog space. So so it was dropping, dropping, dropping, and we're like, okay, we better release the solar panels otherwise they could literally freeze in place. And so we ran a simulation to see what would what would happen, and it's actually slightly beneficial, and it's kind of.

Like when a skater.

You know, when a skater puts her arms out, it slows down, pull him in, it speeds up. So when actually when the the arms went out, when the solar panel raise went out, it slowed down. The rate of rotation actually slightly helped us with maintaining communication with the spacecraft. And so then we're able to uh with with the precious lamp thing, get get it, get apart active. Then then then a third one and then a fourth one. Then we've got all four working and we're able to

That sounds terrifying.

Why that was?

That was hardcore. I don't want to go through that again.

Okay, you are not just here in in in Austin for south by Southwest, but also to meet with the Texas legislature to talk about it possibly a launch base here in Texas.

Tell us more about that.

Yeah, So right now we've got two main launch locations. One is Cape Canaval in Florida and the other is a Vanderberg Air Force Base in California. And so the Cape Narral is good for kind of eastward launches, Vanderberg for southerly launches, and we figured we need a third launch site.

That's kind of a commercial launch site.

You know, it's not good because Cape Narval and Vanderberg or air Force Bass, which which is cool, and it's obviously there's an important need for air Force space launch bases, as there is for air Force airports, but then there's also a need for commercial airports.

And just like you wouldn't.

Expect commercial airliners to land at an air force base in a normal course of events, it makes sense to have a commercial spaceport. And we need to be able to launch eastward and we want to be close to the equator.

So that basically means.

The potential states are Virginia through Texas going south, Hawaii and Puerto Rico because the other things when need to stay.

On US territory because.

Rocket technology like we're doing is considered an advanced weapons technology, so it's very difficult to export that if you will, to other countries and anyways, So those are our options right right now. Texas is arguably the leading candidate, but we need certain legislation pass that's supportive of space launch. I don't think it's particularly controversial, but one of the things we need, for example, is we need to be able to close the beach when we're doing a launch and Texas has.

The Open Beaches Act.

It's like, Okay, you know, we we can't launch if there's someone right next to the rocket, you know, on the beach. So that's I don't like I said, I don't think it's a particularly controversial thing.

It's pretty straightforward.

And then and then we kind of need liberal protection for kind of the one in ten thousand person case who complains about the thing. Like we had this dude who filed a lawsuit against us for our rocket development site in Central Texas near Waco. He's like not even in the same county, He's in a neighboring county, and he like also thinks like the CIA is listening to his brain waves. So we need like just a little bit of protection for people like that. So we're not

Terrific.

Yeah, So Falcon nine or the rocket that launched a dragon is traditional rocket, which is to say, it's disposable bits. But you're essentially you're ultimately focused on reusable rock. Yes, Grasshopper is the name of that. Can you talk a little bit about what's why reusable, what's different about reusable?

And I think you probably have some things to show as well.

Yeah, absolutely so reasonability is extremely important if you think it's important that humanity extend beyond Earth and become multipenant species and all that, and I.

Mean it's super important. I thought.

I think it's also incredibly obvious common sense, Like you can imagine watching like star Trek and then they got a new starship after every every trip that would be pretty sarly, and and and every motor transport that we're used to, like cars, plane strains, ormobiles, horses.

Bikes, they're all reusable.

But not rockets, and if we can't make rockets reusable, the cost is just prohibitive. That the like the cost of the fuel and oxygen on a Falcon nine is zero point three percent of the cost of the rocket. So it's basically it's a very tiny number. It's it's very similar to an airplane. So it's how much does it cost to fuel up an airplane and how much does it cost to buying air plane.

They're very different things.

So if we're if humanity is ever to expand beyond Earth and establish a self sustaining base and another planet, is critical that.

We solve this problem.

Whether it's SpaceX or someone else, someone has to solve the problem and we can have one hundred fold reduction in the cost of space plight. So so that's what SpaceX has been trying to do, and really that's been the goal since the beginning of the company. So so far, I'm not being very successful in that in that regard, so but I think we kind of have a.

Handle on it. I think I think we've got to. We've got a.

Design that in the simulations in and in CAD and so forth, it it closes like it should work.

If we can build that thing. It should work, and.

In fact it may be worth just rolling the reusability videos so people have a sense of what I'm talking about. I don't know where that plays, but behind us a farm us and people in the audience of that there. Ye alright, So what you're saying here is that the the first age after stage separation, the first aage turns around, boosts back to the launch pad, and then lands propulsively with landing gear. That's kind of how rocket should land.

One last question about space before we turn to two cars. You've talked before about how you decided.

To get into this.

You were you founded you know, you go founded PayPal. You don't really, I mean, you have a physics degree, you know something about about you know the underlying mechanics, but you didn't have any space experience. You decided I think on a train to go to Mars, and decided that you could out compete in NASA, that you could get to Mars, you could get to space faster, cheaper, better than one of the largest, the largest space agency.

In the world.

How did you get that confidence?

Uh? So, well, I think first of all, I should say maybe give some of a preface to what happened before starting SpaceX. In fact, the way I sort of got into space was to do I was really disappointed that we had not send anyone to Mars, that we had not progressed beyond Apollo, and I kept waiting for when we would.

And it just didn't happen.

A year after year, and and so a friend of mine asked me about what I wanted to do after PayPal, and I thought, well, you know, I was always curious about space, but I didn't think about that there was anything I could do do in space. And I went to the NASA website to just see when are we going to Mars?

And I can find that out.

I thought maybe it was there, but I well hid them or something. But so so then I thought, well, perhaps this is a question of will. Is there sufficient will to do this? And the first idea I came up with was actually to do a philanthropic mission to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars with seats and dehydrated jail that would hydrate upon landing, and you'd have this cool greenhouse with these green plants on

Plants and a greenhouse on Mars.

The whole purpose of that was to get people excited about sending people to Mars and increase NASA's budget. So that was my whole goal. I was going to basically torch. Yeah, it had nothing to do with competing with NASA. In fact, my goal was to increase their budget. And I should say that today NASA is our biggest customer. I mean, we've got almost fifty launchers and about a quarter of those of FANASA, but three quarters three quarters commercial, but.

One quarter NASA.

And NASA's been incredibly sort of been helpful, and we wouldn't be where we are today without without the help and NASSA. So it's gonna really got nice too. With competing with NASA. It's really just about what do we need to do to have an exciting and inspiring future in space.

That's that's what I think really matters.

At the end of the day.

You didn't end up raising the fund the money to pay NASA to the mission. You end up doing building your own company, and ideally to do it cheaper than government scout.

Yeah. So I was able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft and the greenhouse and the communications system way less than it normally would cost for such a thing.

I got stuck on the rocket and I.

Went to Russia three times to try to buy a couple of their biggest ICBMs.

This is about.

This is in two thousand and one, late two thousand and one and two thousand and two. It was definitely an interesting experience, and I sort of got the feeling I could have bought the Nook too, but.

I don't.

I don't want to go there.

And then when I when I got back from the third trip to.

Russia, that that's when I thought, Okay, look, even if we do even if we buy these these ICBMs from Russia.

I.

Thought, I thought my initial supposition was wrong. And so what I thought really was that we'd lost the world to explore, that we'd lost the world to push the boundary, and and and in retrospect, that was actually a very foolish error. Because the United States is a nation of explorers. United States is a distillation of the humans.

Bird of exploration.

It's ludicrous to actually, in retrospect, to have made such an assumption. But people to believe that it's possible, and that it's not gonna it's not going to bankrupt them. It's not They're not gonna have to give up something important like healthcare. You know, it's going to be a cost that isn't going to meaningfully affect their their standard

Or some rockets. I don't know what the book I was doing. It was like clueless.

I thought the most likely outcome was that we would fail, and the first three rockets did fail.

So and you put all your money into it.

Between Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City all in. Yeah, that wasn't the plan at the beginning.

By the way, and Peter Tail says, we don't think big anymore.

You must have some conversations with him about that.

Well, you know, Peter's spent a big supporter actually, so he's he invested in SpaceX at a very important time in two thousand and eight before we reached orbit, so after our.

Third failure of it, before our first success.

So you know, big credit to Peter and Luke Nosik and the other guys that I found. Respond Basically, my my buddy's great well, my buddies from Papal saved my butt.

You know, it was really really good.

So so let's talk about cars. Many and the audience may recollect the notorious New York Times review of the Model S, Yes, exactly of the Model S earlier this year, and your reaction to that review, and the Times reaction to your reaction, and the effect on your share price and on orders and all that, and without rehashing the review or the facts, I'd like it you just to post.

Mortem the entire experience.

How do I do a post mortem without any facts or anything?

Post mortem? Post mortem?

Your reaction to the review and what you know put you on the couch, and what would you do differently today?

Having seen the weight all played out?

Well, I think I think this one thing I didn't do.

And maybe still should, which is to post the rebuttal to the rebuttal, because I withheld that and waited for the public editor. I sent that information to the public editor, waited for her to do her sort of thing, and she came down kind of on the side of Tesla with respect to the fact that the article was in error, but but disagreed on the motive.

On the ethics, Yes, and because you impugned both facts and.

Ethics, I did, yes, and and and I think it was. I think it was.

I would call it a low grade ethics violation, not like a big one. I don't think he thought he was doing anything particularly terrible.

But I would call it a low grade, low grade violation.

And not not not of the Jason Blair, you know, crazy fabrication variety.

But I would call it a low grade. It was not in good faith.

If that that's that's that's an important point. And I probably should have posted that rebuttal to make that clear, but I didn't do it.

That's what I regret.

So the only change you would make is that the very last bit the rebuttal that you wrote but that has not been published, you would get.

Maybe I should, you would get out there.

Yeah, So you would continue to use the same language in the same way.

And I don't think the language was inaccurate.

I really don't.

You've often.

You've often said that one of your management techniques, one of the secrets of your successes, that you listen to negative feedback. Yes was a Times review not didn't fall into the category of negative feedback.

I have no problem with negative feedback. I have a problem with nor do I have a problem with critical reviews. If I had a problem with critical reviews, I would spend all my time battling critical reviews. There have been hundreds of negative articles, hundreds, and yet I've only spoken out a few times. I don't have a problem with critical reviews. I have a problem with false reviews.

All right.

One of the technologies that you had to you know, basically developed to near perfection or at least or at least work on hardest with lithium batteries for the electric cars or run on lithuan batteries. Safety has always been an issue, accidents, et cetera. Recently, Boeing had fires with their lithium batteries, and these and the dreaminers now to service because of that, you volunteered to help the Boeing executives, I guess, diagnose and redesign.

Can you talk a little bit.

About what they did wrong, what you would have done differently, and what do you think that the future of you know, Boeing in others, airline batteries are going to.

Be sure well, first of all, on the bowing front, I mean, obviously, even though SpaceX and Going compete on the space side, we have no competition on the commercial airline a side, and some of the comments that I made about Boeing, somehow I've been interverted as an attack on Boeing, when it is in fact not an attack on Boeing.

The only reason I actually, I mean, the main.

Reason I should say I offered to help, was that there's a friend of mine, Richard Branson, who's whose airline is suffering as a result of this with him iron Fire, and here he was mentioning that, you know, he's losing hundreds of millions he always airline is as a result of this this problem. I said, well, I think we could probably help, and then so he said, oh great, well, let me connect you with the chief engineer of the seven eight seven. I said, cool, we're happy to help.

And you're like four layers deep before you actually got to any hardware.

And so that resulted and I think in a kind of a breakdown of communication. I mean from an architectural standpoint, The fundamental issue is that the is that I think is that the cells are too big. The battery cells are too big, and the gaps between the battery cells are are not big enough. And the problem with a big battery cell is that the thermal pathway is in a most case scenario is very long. So you say, well, if there's a hot spot in the battery, can it

So so.

It just if if you have big cells, you want big gaps, and ideally you want you don't want big cells. If you do, you want big gaps, small cells, small gaps.

Yeah, I mean, so.

I mean this is this is really important because because the whole thing about this new generation of aeroplanes that they're light, they use composites, they use electronics rather than mechanical systems, and so electricity drives the whole thing.

So basically my understanding is that.

You need lithium batteries in the sky. It just doesn't work any other way. And your point is it can be done.

Oh, totally can be done.

YEA, Like lithium is getting a bit of a bad name here, Lithium is obviously the way to go. I mean, people have lithium my own batteries and their cell phones and their laptops. I mean, I don't think anyone's panicking here with the fact that they go to lithium ion battery.

You know, next to a sensitive region of probably their body. You know, got it.

Well, just staying on on on power for one last set of questions before well, before I returned.

To your life, which seems insane.

Is the same.

You're also a chairman of Solar City, which I believe is America's largest solar installer. You know, so space transportation energy ticking.

Off the big ones there.

Now, you know, solar got a bad name over the last few years because of the cylinder meltdown, et cetera. But in my sense that people different are not differentiating between the making of solar cells and the using of solar cells and the Chinese competition and the glutting of the market on the supply side is what solender what got Cylinder in trouble.

They couldn't compete with the falling prices. But you're a consumer of solar cells, So how do you see you know, the Chinese, Chinese competition and sort of the glut of solar solar cells on the market. What did I do with you?

I mean, I think what China is doing in the solar panel arena is awesome because they're lowering the cost of solar power for the world, and they have these huge gigafactories that they created out in the Chinese desert and with a ton of funding from the Chinese government. So it's like a giant donation from the tiny Chinese government.

There's some companies that die.

The only reason we know about Cylinder is because became a political football, right, And I mean there are other sort of panel manufacturers are still doing reasonably well, but it is tough when you're competing. I mean, I think a good rule of thumb was don't is, don't compete with China with a commodity product. You know, you're really asking for travel in that scenario. And it's really super easy to make fifteen percent inefficient or standard efficiency solar panels.

So it's really more like you know, like a like a roofing contractor than it is at a company.

I mean, what you're doing is you're putting a second roof on a building. Yeah, okay, so.

And you've got to do it at scale, and then you've got to manage all these systems because there's still some I mean, even though the after sales service is small, when you've got like hundreds of thousands of systems, that's still a lot to manage. And and so what solar City really is is a giant distributed utility and it's working in partnership with the house and business and in competition with the big sort of monopoly utility.

I mean, I think it's like literally power to the people.

Okay, It's like it's literally So I think it's really awesome because utility has just never had.

Any competition before.

Yeah, and now they're like they have to actually think about the cost of power and figure out better ways to do it. And the thing I think it's really great, and the credit there is really due to Lennon and Peter Rye co founders. I mean, I've hearn a few ideas every now and then, but mostly it's just about showing up at the board meeting to hear the good news.

It's those guys are just think sessional some job.

So you are CEO and CTO of SpaceX, so not just running company progression chief technology officers as well. You are CEO and chief product designer for Tesla, so not just running the company, but designing the cars. And you're chairman of Solar City.

Right, what is your life like.

It's it's very busy, and I'd actually like to take it down just as Scooch, honestly, because there they're always I mean these things that the last few years have been really really great, but then there were a number of years that saw horribly and I'd like to just not have it be so extreme. And like last year was a year of great achievement, but honestly, I didn't have that much fun.

It sucked.

I didn't have that much fun. My US resolution was to have a little bit more fun this year. So hey, I'm at south By Southwest.

You know, and you have five children?

Do They're awesome? Kids are awesome. By the way, you guys should all have kids. Kids are great.

How much do you see them?

I don't see them enough, actually, But.

I what I find is that I'm able to be with them and still be on email because I don't need like constant interaction except when we're talking directly. So I find I can be with them and still be you know, working at the same time.

But wait, are you saying you can do email while you're with your children?

Yeah? Absolutely sure.

Wow.

I mean not all it's time, but a lot of the time. That's why I tended to have a phone, and you can sort of you do email in interstitial moments. In the absence of that, I would not be able to get my job done.

Well, that's impressive.

We are.

I have five children. I can't do email wine with my children. It's not good for the children and it's really not good for the email.

Well, I do have to have a nanny there otherwise they'll kill each other.

So yeah, we.

Are going to turn to audience questions at this point. Just a reminder that if you tweet your questions hashtag ask musk there's a team in the back that will be selecting the are the ones that we haven't already covered, and it seem interesting, and I get them in front, maybe you can see them as well. So as the first one from David Solis. Yes, when it comes to researching analyzing entrepreneurial opportunity, how do you go about qualifying or legitimizing presumably the idea?

Sure, well, I'm not sure I'm the best guide here because the things that I've chosen have not been I've not been trying to optimize on a risk adjusted return basis. So there are like I would not say that I went to the rocker business, of the car business or the solar business thinking that it's a great opportunity. I just thought that that something needed to be done in these industries in order to make a difference, and that's

That cubes up our next question really Well, this is from a Craig Lagrese space, automotive, finance, energy disrupted major industries.

What would you do if you had a free reign over education?

Well, I think that the way that we current lead to education is wrong.

And when you see something like the Kon Academy and so for I think that's probably going in the right direction.

I mean, generally, you want.

Education to be like as close to a video game as possible, like a good video game, Like you do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can.

Make education far more compelling and a far easier to do.

So I think that's how it should be, and it shouldn't be that you've got like these grades where people move in lockstep and so everyone goes through, you know, goes like normally we'll go through English, math, science and so forth, from like fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade, like it's an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line. That's a ridiculous notion. People learn and are interested in different things at different paces.

Lecture several years in a row.

They're not necessarily all that engaged or in doing it. And you compare that to say, Batman the Dark Knight, Okay, and then you've got like the world's best special effects, you've got the world's best director, screenwriter, multiple cuts, amazing, you know, editing and and and and and and that's amazing. But but like imagine if instead you had like the local town aspiring actor to the one person play version of that, that would not be compelling.

Do you agree with Peter Tiel about the unnecessaryness of university higher education?

I don't don't. I definitely I do agree with Peter's point that a university education is often unnecessary. That's not to say it's unnecessary for all people, But I think you've probably learned about as much. For the vast majority of what you're gonna learn there in the first two years, and most of it is from your classmates.

Because you can always buy the textbooks and just read them like nobody's stopping you from doing that, or go online or go online.

So now now, for a lot of companies, they do want to see the completion of the degree because they're looking for someone who's going to persevere and see it through to the end, and that's actually what's important to them.

So it really depends on what somebody's goal is.

If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college. In my case, I had to otherwise I get kicked out of the country, So.

That was important.

But although you went on and got a master's degree as well.

Right, I came out to look at value to do a PhD at Stanford and applied physics and material science to work on ultra capacitors who use in electric cars, and that's what I was going to do, and then I started to put that on hold to start a company. But since I already had my undergrad I couldn't get an H one BBSA and that kind of thing. So if the h one BB's requires a degree, but other than that, I would have if that wasn't the case, I probably would have stopped education sooner.

Did you not go to Wharton for Yeah?

They did dual undergrade in physics and business at Wharton. Yeah, but it was undergrad not not master's understood.

Another question for the audience from Dan Griffiths.

Fill in the blank, you will be disappointed if blank does not happen in your lifetime.

Well, probably the most thing I've disappointed is if if humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I'd be really disappointed. That would be you know that that would probably be my biggest disappointment. And yeah, I think I think that's the thing I'm most concerned about because because we're.

At this and obviously that's what SpaceX is working on.

So I'm not trying to be self serving here, but it's just I kind of worry that we've hit this if I don't know whether technology level will keep going or subside. And for the first time in four and a half billion years, the technology level is at the point where we can extend life to another planet, make life multiplanetary, and I think it's too easy to take for granted that it's going to stay above that level. And if it doesn't and it falls blow that will it return?

Who knows?

You know, the sign is gradually expanding, and in about you know, roughly five hundred million years, maybe a billion years of the outside the oceans will boil and there will be no meaningful life on Earth. I mean it might be like some you know, chemotrophs or or ultra high temperature bacteria or something, but nothing that can make a spaceship. And that's like, if you think it's like, maybe it's a five hundred million your type, for that's only a ten percent increase in the.

Life of lifespan of Earth. So if.

If humanity had taken an extra ten percent longer to get here, it wouldn't have gotten here at all. Yeah, And so far, we haven't seen any signs of life from.

Other worlds that we have. We haven't detected anything.

I hope, you know, hopefully we do, and hopefully it's not a warship coming towards us. But I just think that's the thing that really concerns me. We need to get this done and then that is the best thing we can do to ensure the continued existence of humanity. So that's why I would say that's the most important thing.

Do you personally do you personally want to step foot on Mars?

I do personally want to have put on Mars.

But honestly, I would be doing this even if there was no even if I knew there was no chance of me going to Mars, because I think, like I said, I think it's just important that we are on a path to getting there, So I would like to go at some point. I'll go if I'm certain that SpaceX will be fine without me and that that path will continue.

So another question from the audience, and we just we just lost lost that one. There was a I don't remember who would ask this question, but the question was which, when, when Which do you think is.

Going to have more impact on the world, SpaceX or Tesla.

Well, I think if we look back, or with historians, if I would look back on the impact of Tesla in many.

Years from now, I think it would be that Tesla.

Hopefully that Tesla advanced the advent of sustainable transport by something like a decade, maybe maybe two decades. But I do think electric cars are inevitable. In fact, I think all modes of transport will go fully electric, with the ironic exception of rockets. So that's uh, that's what I think. And then for Solo City, perhaps something similar on the

And I mean I think that's you know, a big or impact.

But we're all the the what Solo City and Tesla are about are solving what I think is the most pressing terrestrial concern, which is the sustainable production and consumption of energy. Well helping solve it. I mean, there's many people solving it. And then what SpaceX is about is helping solve the biggest non terrestrial problem, which is the extension of life beyond Earth.

So those are how I see it.

We have two related questions, the one that's no longer on the screen, but and another one that is that The first was what was the best advice you ever got and the second and you maybe can join them in your answer, is you mentioned working with your friends Peter Teal and RIDRW Branson who influences and inspires you?

Sure, well, I'm inspired by a lot of historical figures. Like one of my favorite guys is Ben Franklin. You know, I just think he's you know, he's a really good guy. I mean, he was a scientist and he also i mean worked in obviously publishing and the political sphere, but he kind of like he's just thought about like what are the what are the problems that need to get solved and worked on those. I mean, it's just seems

We named Tesla after Nikola.

Tesla better than most motors, you know, and I actually haven't named any product or company.

After myself, but.

Then maybe gives a sense of like I think, like Tesla is someone who deserves a lot of recognition, and.

They're all dead.

Yeah, I mean I think there's a friend of mine, like Larry Page. I think what Larry's doing and and Serge at Google. I'm really admire what they've done. I think, obviously he's recently dead, but Steve Jobs here doesn't admire Steve Jobs.

I think Bezlis is doing some great.

Things and among others competing with.

You, yes, but that's a good thing. In fact, every time I see Jeff Beslis, I say, why aren't you doing more in space?

The other half the question was the best advice you ever got?

Best advice I ever got? Well, I think the.

You know, the physics training is a very good training where it's a good framework for reasoning where you're trained to think about first principles and reason from there. And that means boiling things down to the most fundamental truths and then connecting those truths in a way to try

Out things that aren't obvious.

And that's why I think it's it's not it's it's a lot of advice, but it's it's it's the right framework.

And then you know, just in general, critical.

Thinking is is good, you know, examining whether you have the correct axioms, are the most applicable axioms, does the logic necessarily connect? And then what are the what are the range of probable outcomes? Outcomes are usually not deterministic, they're they're they're a range, and so you want to figure out what those probabilities are and make sure ideally.

That you're the house.

You know, it's it's fine to take, it's fine to it's fine to gamble, as long as you're the house, and you know and say that is is to listen to critical feedback, which you alluded to earlier. Voice solicit critical feedback, particularly from friends, because generally they will be thinking it, but they won't tell you.

Yeah, the question here from a Gels chance and you use the development on your hyper loop idea, and you might be explain what your hyper loop idea is.

Ha, Well, what I have said is that I'm putting the hyper loop stuff on hold until I get Tesla to profitability, because I think if I was an investor in Tesla, and they heard me sort of spouting off about the hyperloop before I got the company profitable. They were like, hey, you know, go do go do your job.

So that's what I'm doing.

I think once Tesla isn't it in a has been profitable, maybe for at least for a quarter, maybe two quarters, then i'll I'll.

Talk about the hyper loop. But I think it could be an interesting way to.

I mean, it would be an interesting way to travel really quickly from one city to the next.

And quickly explain, just in one sense, what a hyper loop is.

Well, it would be something that would be i'd say twice as fast as a plane, at least in terms of total transit time, maybe a little faster. It would be immune to whether incapable of crashing pretty much unless there's like a terrorist attack, and the ticket price would be like, let's say, half that of a plane, So it.

Would be better in every way the train of some sort, though it's kind of it's.

Not exactly a train.

It would be a different It would be a new mode of transportation that doesn't currently exist.

Terrestrial terrestrial, yeah.

Okay, underground, above ground could go either a kind of subway.

Perhaps I think it's I think it's.

The capital costs will be less if it's mostly above ground, but you can go underground too.

All right.

Maybe last question, what's the biggest mistake you've ever made? And this is from Lexi Hill. Was the biggest mistake you've ever made? And how did you move forward looking back? Was it really that big a deal?

Biggest mistake?

I've made lots of mistakes, some of them some are pretty big.

I mean, it's hard to say because things have worked out pretty well in the end.

So how how big of a mistake could it have been? As the question is really really asking, you know, I did lots of dumb things at my first company and at PayPal, and you know, I think, I think sometimes.

Yeah, I don't know.

There's so many I like got I'm hard pressed to say this is this is the biggest. Thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.