Latest interview of Elon Muss.
Yeah, be called X, but it would be the most valuable company in the world. On the other hand, now that's not all good though. On the other hand, then a lot of super talented people would have stayed and because because people got acquired by eBay not long after, like you know, so there was like the PayPal coup at the end of two thousand, eighteen months later it
was acquired by eBay. So and and then but you know, it feels to think of the companies that came out of PayPal, so called PayPal in Mafia, the YouTube you know, those that Stephen Chad created YouTube, Jerry Saltman created yelp, Interpeter created Volunteer, and a bunch of other things. There's David Sachs created this company, and Reed Hoffmann created LinkedIn.
It's almost like all that market cap still exists, but now it's allocated on all these other tech companies instead of X dot com.
Yeah.
So in retest, like I sometimes like it's maybe a good thing that uh X wasn't vall wasn't achieve those things because all these other companies would have at least been delayed or may not have existed.
There's definitely been kind of a resurgence and interest as we get into kind of cryptographic you know, money and bitcoin and all that, like interest in this idea, you know. And it's interesting, like software hasn't even the banking industry yet. Software has eaten a lot of industries or some that it just hasn't, and bankings still.
There, you know, stripes, stripes eating them slowly, but pretty good job. The mags are in trouble if if it's not stripe as be somebody else.
And you love code, but you don't seem to be as bullish on bitcoin. Do you have any could you break down like why, because you're talking about this big database that's more secure for faster transactions. It seems like bitcoin's hitting at least some of those.
I'm neither here there on bitcoin.
Yeah, yeah, what do you think when you read like Satoshi's white paper for the first time, we're like it's pretty.
Interesting or.
Those pretty clever. It's it's it's just like the things this always gets like the crypto people angry.
But I think.
There are there are there are transactions that are not within the balance of the low and those and they're obviously many of those in different countries, and normally cash is used for these transactions. But but but in order for illegal transactions to occur those the cash.
Must also be used for legal transactions.
You need an illegal to legal bridge.
That's where crypto comes in.
So is it kind of the darknet stuff?
It can't be entirely dark because otherwise how do you buy normal stuff? And cash these days is used just much rarer. It's hard, it's like increasingly difficult use cash. Some places you can't use cash at all. So there's a there's a forcing function for transactions that are illegal, quasi illegal and in some cases legal, but the've got to have some it's got to be both legal and illegal.
It doesn't count otherwise otherwise you simply it can't just be transactions within an legal economy, because how do you buy like, you know, food and a house or something, you know, So you must have a legal to illegal bridge. So where I see crypto as as effectively as a replacement for cash, but not as a replacement for as a primary not not as I do not see crypto
being the primary database. So now this is this is something that's taken to me like I'm being judgmental about crypto, and it's actually I think there's a lot of things that are illegal that shouldn't be illegal. But you know, so it's not as the I think that sometimes governments just have too many laws about that they should I should have so many things.
That are illegal.
Didn't you say that on Mars there'd be less loss hopefully?
Yeah, you also propose of direct democracy on Mars.
I think probably that's the best, I mean, probably the best thing.
Mars technocracy, the most technocracy.
And you want to make laws super short and simple, right.
Well, yeah, I mean like if people can't understand laws, then how do you then what's usually going to happen is some special interests in a bamboos of public with long laws. Yep, and then the lord is like reading this law is like the size of the Lord of the Rings, but a very boring version of it.
Like the dealership thing is just crazy to me, you know, like America is supposed to be competitive, free market.
It's weird, right, yeah, absolutely, so anyway, it's just sick.
You want to keep the lawder short and give them some kind of sunset period so they don't just stay there forever. I'd like it's just accumulate over time and just eventually it'll be unwieldy. So the laws should have some time prime associated with them. They automatically go away. So I mean, it's just keep a little short to avoid trickery and and sort of special interests that ultimately
does not matter for the public. And and then I think direct directmocracy is less susceptible to corruption than representative democracy. So you know, corruption just being like to what degree is this actually being taken that do not serve, that generate the interests of the population, you know, do not need a results in a net increase in population happiness as a whole. So that's that's that's why I think probably the direct is better.
And then you.
Have things in real time, so you know, if you want to vote on something, you just you can vote on.
It real fast.
Probably make it, I would say, make it easier to get rid of laws then to put them in because these things tend to have a lot of inertia and to have a bias towards having laws go away and not be there, you know, so like maybe it takes sixty percent to put alaw in place for forty percent to remove it.
To theming like that. Yeah, let's try it. You know, see what happens.
The bills are extremely long that they pass. No one reads them.
Yeah, hardly anyone in Congress has read the bill. And if you even if they've read the bill, if you quized them on the details.
They would not.
They'll find their page.
Yeah, there's like, tell me what's Yeah this there was no idea.
It seems kind of alarming that that's like the status quo and everyone just accepts it.
But yeah, these laws tend to be written by industry groups as well, so that that they'll write the law and then and then interact with the Congressional staff and but most of the work would be done by the industry groups, and so they're going to write laws that entrench their position.
It's like the people are the players buying the ref like you were saying earlier, Is that exactly so.
You get the regultary capture of the exactly. Yeah, the players shouldn't be paying the ref salary type of thing. Well, the REF should be thinking I'm going to retire and get paid by the players. So it's kind of amazing that it works as well as it is, given all these issues so yeah, so then hey, hell I end up getting valaria and anyway in two thousand and one, yeah, two thousand.
And one, Yeah, us about this the malaria thing that was you went on vacation, right, yeah, we're South Africa with Kimball.
Actually yeah, it's crazy, and then came back and had like a near death case of hilaria.
Yeah, we live grew up in So Africa.
We'd go to the bushfelt all the time, to what you guys call Safari, and you just we just had a house in the bush, used to go there every every few weeks or so. I don't think we ever took malaria tablets.
Yeah, I think.
And then suddenly yeah, right, like and so we were we were told to and we did take malaria tablets them as well. And and when you got back, they was in Stanford and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. Our uncle who's a doctor in South Africa, he has malaria. And they's like, no, no, he doesn't have malaria. We checked check again. Malaria kind of hides in the body.
And then.
So this was after PayPal got started.
Oh this is two thousand and one, so sort of after the pay PayPal coups. I was, I was on the PayPal board and I was providing, you know, providing sort of product advice and whatnot. But in December, late December two thousand, went on a trip to South Africa. Came back January, early January two thousand and one. I had a spare case malaria almost I had next to.
Five days and yellow. And he just said early morning til later night, just waiting to see. And then they seem to be get some some jamas for him. And the closest store was based for lease or something, so I just got into some pajamas and then then the next thing, after five days rod and he said, so these buddies onamas.
And you were sleepy, I mean, like you're it affected your brain? That that harsh?
Yeah, no, it was bad. It's really bad.
Does that a change your perspective?
How did the like influence you after that? I don't know. I don't think it changed me that much. Would you say, no, I don't think it did.
Yeah, but how many times have you been on I lost like fifty pounds though it was great now.
No more vacation, so well, yeah it was. It was.
It took me like almost six months to get back to normal sou And then in two thousand and one, I was thinking about, you know what you next, and.
And I thought the.
You know, this is like okay, sustainable energy, like a basical electric cars, solar space. And then a friend of mine asked me, you know, so what are you gonna do next? I said, well, you know, that's so I would love to do something in space, but I didn't think anything of there's anything that a private individual could do in space. But at least I'm gonna go on the NASA website and find out when people are going
to Mars. And I go on the net web NAST website and it's nowhere to be found, and so I'm like, well, this is pretty weird, and then ask that it was actually a NASA policy not to talk about it.
Really, yeah, that's time. Why why was that?
Do you think what I sold is that when George Bush the first was when he was elected, he said he has not NASA to put together a plan to send people to Mars. In ninety days, they came back of the plan and it was five hundred billion dollars, and it says all that this is like political suicide. So then after that talk of man missions to Mars were banned.
That's what I sold.
So anyway, so it's like, well, you know, maybe there's something that can be done here to get the public excited about going to Mars.
And if I get the public excited, then they will vote mass that I have more funding. And so the.
Original idea for SpaceX was just to have a philanthropic mission to Mars.
Yeah, just started as a graphic of a of a pot plant. You just need to get the pot plan to Mars, you know. It was like an inspiration sure, just as a as a as a way to prove to the world that it could be done.
Yeah.
So the mission was called Mars Oasis. There was seas and dehydrated nutrient l that would hydrate upon landing. You get this great picture of green plants right background and be like the first sort of life as we know.
It on Mars.
And the you can also learn, you know, a lot about what does it take to keep plants alive and have a little miniature greenhouse on on sof to Mars. So that's that's why I initially pursued as as like a way to basically increase NASA's budget.
That was.
It wasn't let's create a space company. It was how do we get Nasta's budget increased so we can go sim people tomorrows. And I've trying to figure out how to get this thing launched. And the rockets, the European and US rockets are too expensive and I can afford them.
So I went to Russia to try to buy some ICBMs in two thousand and one, literally, and the keptu raising the price on me, and it was quite being quite difficult, and I said, I, you know, I could afford to pay like nine million dollars for ICBM, but not twenty because we need to do two of these missions because odds are good that one would fail and then it could have a negative impact potentially. So that was pretty weird. Being muscular for buy ICBMs in two thousand and one.
That's amazing.
Negotiate to buy an ICPN.
Yeah.
I caught up the military and say, well, you know they're gonna go They're gonna get rid of these things anyway because of the introduction treaties. So it's like, if you listen, if you're gonna throw it away, I'll buy take it off your hands. You know, they have to. It was like s S eighteen to never. It was the biggest nuclear mussile in the Russian fleet. And but anyway, they're know decommissioned these things, so why why not just
tell me them it's dead? And then there's very time I talked to them, the price you go off, and I'm like, this is is not good because you know, even if once we do a deal, we're probably gonna get shrafted afterwards too, and this is the pre deal shafting. Well, it's like it's what's going to be after or its you know, when after I've given them money and it's good, so so that I yeah, so, And then I started looking into it as like why rockets cost so much?
And there's nothing fundamental about why did you cost so much? If you add up the materials let's say, if you you know, it's not like the word materials cost that much. Really just need to figure out a smart way to get the materials in that shape, and and then you need we need to make rockets re usable. So like in any form of transport, if it's not reusable, it's
extremely expensive. You know, if cars were single use, you know, and you need a round trip, you know, for a car for twenty thousand dollars, then you around trip because forty thousand dollars.
That's crazy. So it's the same thing is true for aircraft and boats and rockets and everything.
So so there were the rockets were expensive even as expendable things, but then they were also not reusable. So there's no way we're going to have a city on Mars unless we can have reasonable, low cost, reliable rockets. That's fundamentally the issue. So so I came to conclusion that even if this Males Away susmission was successful, it
would still knock results in. It would not materially further the goal of being a multiplant species because the rocket technology was not good enough and it was not getting better.
In fact, it was arguably getting worse.
So so the real thing that needed to be solved here is reusable rocketry and lowering the cost of access to space, and that that's like, okay, well I'm gonna try to do that. So I've got SpaceX started in early two thousand and two. Basically I was living in pala Alta at the time, but most of the engineering expertise was in southern California, so that's why I moved to LA.
Did you ever have any like even inkling of imagination that you could be doing, you know, a dozen launches a year and being contracted with NASA? Is that even like it?
I thought that was fair, I know, I thought we had you know, terms of success or something like that.
You ended up being chief engineer, right, because no one wanted to give up their secure jobs of.
U I and something exactly I actually tried to hire. Basically, there's been a number of tents at doing a a private rocket company or commercial rocket company, and it all or really they all failed effectively. And then that's to the degree that it was like a joke in the aerospace industry, like how do you make a large portion large portion in the rock you know, start with the how do you make how do you make a small portion in the rocky industry? Start with a large one.
Going to be smaller business?
Yeah, that's how many jokes. So many times just jumped to the punchline, you know. So the Yeah, it was very hard to recruit people because I had not built any physical hardware before, and I kept being called Internet guy for the longest time for ages. As the finally start I made for the first ten years, they're calling me Internet guy, but we basically at Internet entrepreneur slash fool. He's trying to start a Rockey company. That's what if
an idiot. That was generally how it went. So it was quite hard to recruit people, and you know, especially if something's got like a secure job at you know, buying a lockeed or something like that, then trying to recruit them to be you know, chief engineer of us started Rocket company.
I was so hopeless.
So basically no nobody, nobody who was who was good was willing to join, and there was no point in hiring somebody wasn't good. So I ended up being chief engineer, you know, which is yeah.
So the.
First three launch has failed and probably if I had been better than we would have gotten to at BIT sooner. So it took me a while to learn all these things.
So from books or books and talking to people.
Did you go to Utah and talk to anybody like it? At he Orbital?
Oh? Yeah?
Visited atk Orbital was Dallas, Virginia, So yeah, I visited a t K.
I visited Orbital and the Orbital.
Had had a success with the solid rocket based Pegasus, but they'd also gotten like an eight launch deal from Darper. So you're like, okay, if you've got if you're starting off with basically an eight launch s deal from Darper, that's a good situation. And we did not have a large seal from anyone.
And Pegasus is a.
I mean, there's some claar engineering with Pegasus, but fundamentally I think launching rockets from planes is not tensible.
It sounds like it would be a good idea, but it's not.
And then even Oval went away from doing that with their as soon as you get past certain size that went to ground launch.
I was reading somewhere that at if I call Morton that they were doing snowcats, they were doing ski lifts, and they sold that to the man who made the DeLorean heat Really yeah, I just read that in their Wikipedia. I'm like, oh, that's fascinating. When to come around.
So yeah, So yeah, so I got SpaceX going, and that was very difficult.
We got the Falcon one rocket built. It was very simple.
It's the simplest overall rocket that's a liquid fuel, so it had the potential for reusability, for useful reasbility, and then yeah, we had three failures. Finally got to orbit at the end of two thousand and eight, so.
That was incredible going down to Quadalon and watching you.
Wrote it like a blog for a while.
Yeah.
I actually still have it up there.
It's a little and it's an old, old blogging platform that Google still keeps alive. It's called quas Rockets dot blogspot dot com.
I think it's gonna get a lot of traffic soon.
Yeah, totally say it.
Check it out.
It's all there.
It's a photos and photos of There was one photo of Elaine picking up a satellite.
We launched the rocket and the rocket.
Exploded, which was very, very very sad.
Everyone's excading.
People are pouring their heart and sold into the rocket and the satellite was i think in the US Navy Air Force Academy and it was thrown out of the rocket and fell through the roof of the hangar.
Well, this is like we really thinking exactly, it's like a like a like a stand up small tool shed.
Yeah, it wasn't supposed to do that.
Maybe the size of this room. The rocket it had.
This is the first Lord failure, so the it had a there's a cracked limited beanut on that that cracked during during leftoff and created so the engine there was an engine fire the this this wouldn't have been the end of the world, but there was a one of the the helium lines was steel mesh overapped with the kevlost sleeve and it melted the sleeve the.
And so we.
Lost pressure, pneumatic pressure which caused the engine ballast to close. So about thirty seconds after lift off, the engine shot itself off due to the engine fire, and then it went. It went ballistic and it basically smashed in the rocks just on a calple hundred Feueralk shore and when it when it's it was quite a big explosion. Actually in
an explosion. The satellite, which was in a faring, went through the faring on a ballistic arc back onto the island, smashed through the tool shared roof and onto the floor in a pretty reasonable condition, like it wasn't totally gnarled.
We use it.
So we gave them back their satellite, so like we didn't lose your satellites may need summer affair, but it was so improbable that the satellite would come back. We had a couple more failures after that. Yeah, two thousand and eight was particularly diffult year because we had the third failure in two thousand and eight, the tales around financing round collapsed such a nightmare and I got divorced, and it was.
I think two thousand and eight was bad year, really really bad.
Yeah, that year. Yeah, I don't think anyone could. I think twenty eighteen.
I think twenty eighteen was worse.
What's well with the Model three ramp?
Right? Oh, there were so many things that happened so strong, it's insane.
Yeah. So yeah, sorry, so we're in two thousand and two. Sorry, space X moved down to l A and it was just it was pretty fun in the beginning, Like generally start ups are pretty fun in the beginning, and then you go through the you know, chasm of doom, Yeah, chasm of doom, Yeah.
Exactly, it's rough despair.
Yeah, it's usually always like everyone's like super optimistic and excited for first year or so, and then the then things started to go awry and there's usually many years of grief before there's finally day dawns. So yeah, so it's like two thousand and two, and then about in two thousand and three is when h Rosen and JB. Strabo called me up and said, hey, we want to have lunch. I want to say, hold Rosen. I think
that's his name, but he he rarely had. He was a pioneer in space technology and electric vehicles, which crossover uh, and he'd done some Rosen Motors, which is like a sort of an electric vehicle company, and but he'd also been pioneer in ge stationary satellites. So he called me up and said, hey, let's have lunch, like lunch at like Smith and Lansky or something in in Alsigondo where SpaceX started.
And so.
Stravel and Rosen talking about space stuff, and then so I was talking about electric cars, and I said, oh, yeah, you know, so I was gonna be working on electric car technology at Stanford and and JB said, you know, we should take a drive in the Tea zero from AC propulsion, and I was I was like, yeah, you know, because the timing is like lettin my own factories was really like the critical breakthrough needed for compelling electric cars. And so I was like, okay, I'll go try out there.
T zero, which had spec similar to what we eventually bought to markets tells the road store. So then I so, yeah, so I got I got a ride in the T zero, and then I tried to convince Ala Caconi and Tom Gage to commercialize the T zero. Now that the teaser, and there's like lots of stuff online about it. You know, it didn't have doors or a roof, so clearly you need to add those things or any safety systems. And it was very unreliable because it was just like a sort of a proof of concept.
Basically it was basically like canned assembled.
You guys really had trouble scaling it.
It's I mean it literally didn't have doors or a roof, or any airbags or an effective cooling system for the battery, and it was not safe, and it was very unreliable breakdown like you it need to be baby buy an engineer or would not you can use it.
So but nonetheless, it did get like zero.
To sixty I think, you know, under four seconds two and fifty mile range.
It was enough to convince you that.
It was possible.
I mean it was possible because if you go from the interests you have lead Acid to to Letimon, you've got about a four x energy dwncity improvement. So you've got if you've got to say, a sixty mile range with lead acid, you're gonna have about a turn of fifty mile range with with litiumon for the same weight. So but it was it was cool to see it in action with with ac propulsion. So I tried hard to convince those guys. I could really pester them a lot to going to to commercialize the T zero, and
they just did not want to do it. Weirdly, the thing they wanted to make was an electric sion. And I'm like, you guys, nobody's gonna pay seventy thousand dollars for an electric sion. Okay, that was their idea, seventy thousand dollars for an electric sion. I'm like, there's not gonna work. Okay, you will sell like fourteen of these things, you know, And I'm like, you know, I have like the email trails in these Yeah, I mean I think
they're still still around. So in fact, but I even say, listen, even though I think this is the dumbest idea ever, I will I will pay. I will fund one tenth of it if you can find bine other people. And I think the only other person I could find he
would was gay Brin. So it's like, okay, so Gay and I are the only ones willing to do this, I think, And so they didn't actually get her off the ground, but I said it's going to fail, okay, but at least it's something and and so then eventually I said, I'm like, listen, if you guys are not going to commercialize the teaser, do you mind if I do it? And they're like no, yeah, that'd be totally fine, Like okay.
So then I was gonna it's like, okay, so I.
Go do this with with JB and we'll go commercialized to create a commercial version of the T zero and then engage. And Coconi said, well, you know there's some other people who also want to do it. Do you want to maybe team up with them? He said there were two other groups that wanted to do it, And I was like, okay, sure, you know, maybe this is the way that I can have my cake and eat it too. You know, last work never works up. God damn, Try to have your cake and eat it too, doesn't it?
This one's going to be easy?
No?
I mean, well.
I didn't think it would be easy, but it was like I thought, maybe I can allocate like twenty to thirty hours a week and just work on product and engineering and then other people can do those stuff. But I don't even like doing those souff anyway, So that it didn't work out. So so that then tom Gage said, he said, he said there were two teams, but I only ever met one, and that was ever hard toppening and right, but like, the thing that is really bugs
about them is they everhard. Particular the worst guy I've ever worked with. And I want to make a note of this. He is literally the worst person I've ever worked with. And I've worked with some real ditchbacks.
Okay, to be number one takes a lot. It's not easy.
His version of the story is like, is that out of the blue he pitched me on on funding on funding his electric car company, and and and he convinced me to do it. Totally false, Okay, I was like, I'm creating an electric car company. It's like the Gage said, well maybe you could team up. It's like, okay, well that that might be worth worth doing. And and so the company ended up being basically five people.
This is right Toppening.
Uh, you know, everhard struggle myself and so there's the five of us, and like topping always tries to write right right out of the history books because they had a huge battle, and they made me choose which one was going to be CEO. It's Right or Everhard, And I told JV, and is like, which one because I really didn't know want to be CEO. So they're like, okay, well both have issues, but maybe right has bigger issues than Toppening. That's what JV said, so maybe you know
lesser evals. I was like, okay, fine, I gotta make a choice here because the two of them would not they would not they refuse to be the same ble.
So I was like.
A lot of drama that has so much trauma. And I was like, okay, you know, it's not like I said, like, you know, you know less or evils. So it's like I said, you're right, sorry, you know, not that I didn't think he had good points, but I gotta if
I got to pick one, and I don't. I was trying not to be I've gotta make this rocking company work, so okay, so then made uh you know, it's like right, you know, it's like I had to leave then anyway, So we've got the Basically, we we we jammed a superpulsion powertrain and backpack into a Lotus lease with the first productyping like really just jammed it in, you know.
And in retrospect this was not a good idea because the the car ended up weighing like like sixty percent more than in the lease or on that order, and we didn't have enough follow you to put the battery pack, and we had to meet all we invalidated all of the crash tests because the weight distribution was different. It was heavier, so none of the crash tests were valid anymore.
To redo the airbags, the air conditioning air conditioner ran off a belt fan, so we didn't have a belt van, so we had to have a new air conditioning system, so to change the HVAC system. And so basically in the end, only about like I think six or seven percent of the parts ended up being in common with
the lease. So and I went through a lot of trouble trying to shoot one everything in there, and I mean, it's a cute car, but it's ten percent too small, it's like, and then the costs ended up being crazy, and yeah, and then then yeah, there was there was an ordit of for the costs of the production costs of the roads to buy one of the investors that
joined in two thousand and seven. And and then they caught me up and said, hey, the the numbers that Martin is telling you, Theybore's telling you about the roads are totally false.
Oh boy.
And I was like, what do you mean? Like he said, no, we just didn't order it there. It's more than twice of what do you say, the Yeah, it's like we would have to sell this car for a quarter million dollars in order to make to not lose money, Like this is insane. So anyway, then we obviously had to fire everhard. There was no choice about that.
Yeah.
And then it turned out not only had he misled me directly, if he'd instructed others to also lie. Yes, when I say, like somebody, that's like the worst person who worked with it was pretty bad. So the SpaceX also hadn't gotten over at that time. So I was like, man, So like, okay, I asked, what's his name, Harris, I'm really guy.
When banking on the name Interim.
Uh yeah, he he ran like a manufacturing company. I mean, he seemed pretty smart. The problem The problem that I found with Testa was we were start up in Silicon Valley building a car that was really manufacturing and materials engineering, and it's really like all the talent was for You think there was probably talent, you know, in Detroit to Japan, but if you took any of those guys in to run Tesla, they would run out like a car company and then.
It would be destroyed.
Well, no idea, you can take somebody who's running.
I could not take someone from a massive company culture and having to do a startup. And yet you couldn't find anyone in the Silicon Valley who knew who knew enough about making cars. And so we kind of found a middle, middle of the road who he was. He was an expert in manufacturing.
X CEO of Flextronics, was an investor, and he agreed to just be joined us the interim CEO.
And this is two thousand and seven.
Yeah, but I mean Tesla was a company you tried so hard not to be CEO of.
Yeah. But the thing is this is misinterpreted. If I say that, it's misinterpreteds like I somehow don't love Teesla, which I do. It's just like I tried not to go insane with work on.
Yeah, you can.
Being to see of a real startup is eighty hours a week. Being CEE of two is one hundred and sixty hours a week, and there's only one hundred and sixty nine hours or something of sleep of one hundred and sixty eight hours a week, so like you just can't physically do it.
Yeah, I mean the pain level is extreme, so that's yeah. Anyway, let's try quite hard not to be to you, but had to be no choice that or tells him die, so so that yeah.
Everhard Gut was fired in July two thousand and seven, and he was at the time we didn't know he'd instructed other people to lie, so we thought he was just you know, it wasn't as bad. But once he left the building then it turned out no, he'd actually orchestrated a massive deception, which is quite bad.
So yeah. Yeah.
He also says he came up with the name of Tells the Motors Motors, which is false. I was created by a guy in ninety five and more of a he knows this because we went to great length we had.
To buy the trademark. Yeah, exactly, So you can come about the name. It was a trademark ninety five, So it's like there's a whole bullshit backstory of it. But the guy, we almost almost had to change the name of the company because the guy who owned tells the motors wouldn't communicate with us, and so eventually we sent the nicest kind of company. Now, who's weirdly Martin's best friend, which I don't understand, but Mark Toppening super nice guy. Actually,
you can't not like Mark, It's impossible. He's super nice guy.
So this said Mark to go sit on the guy's door step and not leave until he until he agreed to at least negotiate with us or something. You talked to us, And then we ended up buying the trademark for seventy five thousand dollars.
Yeah, was he the one who owned the domain too?
No, that was a whole different nightmare.
Now that domain guy that took us ten years to buy that tis dot com domain. Man, it was it is I think still like a networking engineer at Junifler. So yeah, there was, and that costs us like ten million dollars. Yeah, that was crazy, Like just the guy just held out.
Was he just sitting on the domain or was he using it for something?
It was impossible to No, he wasn't using it for anything.
The name it's like Twitter handle Falcon heavy. We're fighting for that one.
Yeah.
So man, that was to us ages to buy the Tails economy, but we're gonna have to change the name to be something else.
And actually the lead candidate.
Was was Faraday as the name because Faraday invented the electric motor and then Tails look perfected the electric motor with the AC induction motor.
So it was.
So if we couldn't do Tales, that would do Faraday. And then ironically a competitor was later created.
Cool, let's start up yeah China, right, yeah, yeah yeah.
So did you guys have a Faraday a logo or anything? Were you that far down there?
No, we didn't really even have a tail logo until later because there's nothing to sell or anything. So but in the end, the tel the logo and the Tailor font was done by me working with basically a little firm. That's why the Tailor and SpaceX there's some similarities between the the fonts, and that's because I just don't buy the same people. Yeah, I spent a lot of time on the tails and space x fonse the get a little.
That's cool, Yeah, sure, sure, excellent, all right, awesome.
It would be much easier if if the world was flat or if you're not if you're in a flat situations, those things are not flatten. You've got the world has undulations and curves, and and then your the car can be at any kind of at any kind of angle, and then if you if you accelerate or break, it's actually gonna tip a little bit. Yeah, we've got sort of pitch and mule compensations.
That's where it gets really tricky.
Yeah, I mean they're doing just amazing work. It literally just blows my mind every time, like there's an update, like you think it's like wow, I can't believe. It's just good, and then it just gets better.
Like the big one was the faster lane changes, like you push the turn second was like like immediately, it's really.
Awesome, satisfying.
Yeah, well I was kind of just like before, I was like, Okay, it's not that good, but it feels good because like I can't believe a computer is doing this, and we got the faster ones and I was like, oh my god, it was so bad before.
You know, Yeah, I mean it'll be able to just do crazy maneuvers like like a high speed chase technically because it's it's you don't always want to buy into the thing to be conservative in any and actions that it takes. But there's there's quite a significant foundational rewrite in the TEES autopod system that's almost completely Yeah, and what what part of.
The system like perception, like planning or.
Just like.
It's it's instead of having planning, perception, image recognition all be separate, they're they're they're being combined.
So yeah, I don't even understand what effectually like the the sort of neural net is absorbing more and more of the problem beyond simply the is this is if you see an image, is this a car or not?
Or what?
You know?
It's it's kind of what do you what do you do from that? Three D labeling is the next big thing, where the car can go through a scene with eight cameras and and and and kind of paint a paint a path and then you can label the path in three D. This is probably two or three order of magnitude improvement in labeling efficiency and labeling accuracy, you know two through orders improvement in labeling efficiency and significant improvement in labeling accuracy as opposed to having to label individual
frames from eight cameras at thirty six frames a second. Just drive through the scene, rebuild that scene as a three D thing with it, so it's like there might be a thousand frames that we used to create that scene and then you can label all at once.
Is that related to the dojo thing?
You mentioned that the autonomy day.
Now dojo's for learning, for training the neural net. That's like when you're trying to build the neural net that you ship into the car, Dojo speeds it up by hardware accelerating it.
Yeah, exactly.
Are you guys has that up and running yet or no?
It might be we might have first one at the end of this year, but next year. I think it's very likely next year, maybe this year. But it's essentially meant to as a massive amounts of video input and then and then train against vast amounts of data so that it can be used in the inference engine in the car. It's just like a human really, It's like how long does it take you to learn a subject versus do a subject. You know, it's like hard to learn, say calculus, but once you learned it, then you can
you know, integrate something fast or something. It's like it's a it's really the same same basic thing.
Yeah, I mean, that'll just really tighten the feedback loop. Like at some point it just gets impossible to catch you guys, and like the rest of the people haven't even really like started the rest of the auto industry, and like the feedback loop is just getting so tight with autopilot now, it's just like makes it a lot easier.
I think it will.
They will catch up eventually, at least they will catch a t where TESA is now. I don't know things like like for example, we're talking about maps and directions and how today like computer based and navigation is a trouble considered trivial. But you know, back in ninety five it was not true. Yeah, it was considered very hard and the computer power you had was tiny, so like
the code had to be super tight. I couldn't have fluffy code if you're you know, trying to execute something on like a three eighty six, you know, like very very puny amount of memory and compute. So so now it's but but now maps, directions are are easy. I think it's at some point in the future, it might be a decade or something, then autonomy will will seem easy.
Yeah, I mean it will obviously be commoditized in the long term.
Yes, it will.
It will seem easy in ten years, but there will be a long stretch there where there will be vast differences between cars. Well, I have I have the order industry. It is used to slow rates of improvements, so you know, it's this will not really a car yet that matches the original model s.
Maybe you canug.
If you look at like the E p A ratings, it literally is just all below Yeah.
So that was twenty twelve and it's twenty twenty, so it's it's still like pretty hard to get a car. Let's say that's there's not a car available at the price of the models that has the capabilities of the models of twenty twelve.
It's kind of exactly what you were talking about with the Elise, where you're like, oh, we'll just put a battery in the Eleise, and that kind of showed you like, Okay, we really need to ground up electric.
Disney hasn't done that, like the sort of founding principles of Teesla. We're basically completely wrong. So the premise going in is like, it's not going to be that hard. You know, we'll just take the Lotus Lease, you know, a nice light, lightweight car, and we'll take AC propulsions drive unit technology and we'll.
Put them together and we'll have electric car. It'd be great.
This sounds pretty easy, except the AC propulsion technology it could not be industrialized. Like it was like basically hand crafted electronics with an analog motor controller. Yeah, and so depending if there was hot or cold, you would respond differently or not at all, and the motors were hand round. It was just like it was like impossible. It cannot scale this technology. You can have like Finickey individually made super expensive prototypes, but you could. We ended up using
none of the AC propulsion technology. So yeah, it's something that looks cool and works well at an individual prototype level, does not necessarily scale. And then the like I said, it was like maybe seven percent of the parts of the original roads that were in common with the Lotus Lease. It would have been way easier if we started from
blank slate. It would have been a better car. So but I think like the real test of any given startup is how does it respond to adversity and adapt and and and and just figure it out?
You know.
So like most things are just when they start out, they're just they don't make a lot of sense. But then as long as you adapt quickly, then you can make the company work. And you know, if you say like some sort of confinity, you know, doing doing pomp out tokens with the infrared port made no sense, but they adapted quickly to online payments, you know, That's that
was that was key. And yeah, at at x dot com was originally going to buy it off way more than a could chew by trying to all the banking services and then also focused on payments. It's like, if we do all these banking things, we're gonna need a banking license, and banking license going to slow us down. We're just focused on payments, so we can just get a payment you know, license from the state and it's
just like fifty bucks or something. You can be a money transmitter literally, and so you just go to it daft quickly.
You kind of need to be naive, though if you had known as much about manufacturing, you might not have done it.
Yeah, yeah, this would have been.
It would have been difficult to I guess if you know the outcome is going to be good in the end. Sure, it sort of depends on how much foretnoledge do you have about it.
It.
Manufacturings is insanely difficult. It's underappreciated. It's difficulty.
Yeah, I know, that's totally true.
Yeah, even making the roads store, which we only peak made abound six hundred roadsters in a year, but you know, call it like ten a week or something like that, you know, ten or twelve a week. So you know, if two got made in a day, that was a big day and tells us making over a thousand cars day.
Now what I find amazing is from start to finish, your car is made in forty eight hours.
Yeah it's been would count start to finishing?
Yeah, it depends. But you can see the role of aluminum in.
One section of the factory and you can see the cars coming out the other end, and then it is astounding. And cars have been built for a long time, but but this is just astounding. It's still when you you don't appreciate when you're driving a car, how much goes into the level of detail of ten thousand parts that come together, the shaping of everything that.
Doesn't unique unique cards. Wow, the back alone is several thousand cells and it all.
Comes together with people that are skilled. But you know, skills are changing. Is as things become a little bit there's more, there's more autonomy, but it's not it's not autonomy is not perfect. So you do need to have a lot of people there and and these cars have to be perfect.
I mean, it's just.
Just if we've given how much complexity there is no car it's rockable. They cost as of those they do this. There's so much that's in a car.
So so what sort of processes did you remove, like you know, first principles type thing approach from the elise to like the model ass Like, was it a massive jump there?
Yeah, I mean it's gigantic. Yeah, tells that never made a car, made.
A full car before.
The uh lotis made the non power trained portion of the roadster, and then it tells about the battery pack, motor, par electronics, charger, and then put put a roll together at the end. And that final assembly was actually at an old Ford dealership in Menlo Park. You can see some of the stuff in Revenge of the Electric Car.
Yeah. See, yeah, it's.
Great, just gives you crazy perspective to look back on it.
Crazy.
We need a third one, yeah, I mean the idea of having a car like a car assembly tiny plant in Menlo parkable places. And that was just because we managed to sub lease the four dealership closed down and we managed to get it like this deal from Stamford because the SAM is going to redevelop it and they so and they they're We figured they'll probably take it way longer than they expected to redevelop it. So we said, well,
you're not bringing it to anyone. Can we pay you like fifty cents of square foot and you can kick us out, kick us out whenever you want. And and it was actually huge dealership and it had enough room to do final assembly of the cars, so we just did final assembly the cars there.
Amazing.
Yeah, and one of the most absurd places to build cars on Earth is Menal.
No test track or anything, just the road outside or some.
Yeah, well we would actually the early roasters were very unreliable, so we generally put about fifty miles of just normal driving around the Bay area with somebody following you and.
Looks from people it's like what is that?
Yeah, but we put fifty miles in each one of those cars because they just have a lot of things that are break down in the first fifty miles. So and then yeah, battery production was in Sant Colas. Yeah, so man, that was there is a lot of detail and all that. But going from the road so to MODELES was massive leap because the the models is quite a sophisticated sedan where we test about the whole thing as opposed to buildey power.
Train and.
Yeah, so you know, competing against Sycamacy's BMW AUDI type thing. So that that was that was a massive leap of difficulty. We did get the new me planted, but really that just meant we got eight box. Yeah, because they stroked the planet of all the great equipment. The only equipment that turn On GM left behind was the stuff that that they could not use anywhere else, So they only
left the most tracky, broken pieces of equipment behind. We managed to use some of it, but but yeah, in the paint drop, I mean some of the things were literally not even worth the scrap value. So it was like not worth it to call the scrap metal dealer.
What did you do with it? We made it.
We made a lot of those things work. Oh you did plastic injection molding machines and we made work and the paint robots, we mostly made those work. That the assembly that the body production line had to be made new because they constructed there was just nothing. So we made the body production line for month Less was created from scratch.
Yeah, and.
Worked out, but it was very difficult. It's also in the beginning, the the top suppliers would not work with us or we would get like their D team because like who wants you know, if if they like they got all the customers, like they've got you know, the big car companies they got like Toyota, or they got you know, I. E. And W forward as customers and and a startup. Who Now you're you're in the pliers position. Which team are you going to sign to us to
start up that everyone says going bankrupt? You're gonna sign assign the interns and rejects. Okay, it's not going to be your top team. The same thing with the top team is going to go to like Toyota, you know, your big customers, the top teams. So we would get the worst team usually at the supplier company. If the supply would even work with.
Us, You think that influenced you to vertically integrate more. It was vertically integrate or die makes sense. Yeah, we tried outsourcing the battery production originally was going to be made at this place that made I think barbecue grills in Thailand. Yeah, and I was like, man, they have no idea how to make a battery.
And I was like, this is crazy. We're moving it to.
Back to headquarters in Strlis and we're gonna make it here because they're basically once there's a massive amount of work going from a prototype to production, and so you need a fast feedback loop with engineering, and if that feedback loop is all the way out in Thailand is just no way. It's it's like, it's not like it's if you have an existing production line that you already know how to make it a volume that you can move, but you cannot create a production line never existed that's
super far away from where the engineers are. It's gonna it's red beef disaster. And also the cells were coming from Japan, so they go from Japan, they go to Thailand, they go through customs, they'll be waiting and that then
they'd be going to a battery packed. Then that battery pack were sent to England, then Lotus if this is this is these all things that got changed, but the supply chain, like let's say they've been a problem with the cells, you would only find if this plan years change was so long that you would only find out that it didn't work five months later.
Yikes.
Yeah, and then you have five months of scrap inventory. So this is a recipe for a disaster. So that that got moved to Saint Carlos sales ship directly to Saint Carlos. Put it in a module, figure out why the module's not working, fix it, maybe put into a pack, like there is no reason why the roast of battery pack had like it was like sixteen sort of blades was if was modules, if one of them didn't work, you could pull it out and put another one in.
Because that happened, then we can then Yeah, so you don't really need modules in my view, should just go from cells pack at this point. But yeah, it was a very difficult thing going from roads to to modelized.
The fact that like the Model three still has modules is kind of vestigial.
It's fastigial.
Yeah, because if the modules the model three are not actually interchangeable, so there's no point in modules.
Really, you just have a should just have a pack.
Was that done? Is just save costs then or or some other reason.
It start off because it's not it's not a sensible reason.
The reason that there were seals modules and pack goes back to the early roads to days, where we'd make a module, that module would have problems and so then you could flop out a module. It's like like a server act. The idea was like, you know, if you have a bunch of servers in a server room and one of the servers flakes out, you can pull it out, put another round. So without avagur replace, so you could place a small fraction of pack instead of the whole pack.
Then that then that concept just carried forward into Model s X and three, but without the the original logic no longer exists because the modules are not interchangeable. You can't just swap out a module. So but these things just have a lot of innotia. So we really want to move to no such thing as a module as just sells and pack.
Yeah, yeah, because I mean, initially they had the battery swap facility right at Harris Ring, I mean, and then the Model three. I don't think I have that capability that you could actually swap the whole pack out quickly, right.
Don't It does not right, SNX still have the ability to do a fast pack swap. But things essentially evolved in the same direction that phones evolved. You know, for a long time phones had swappable battery packs, and now basically nobody, almost nobody makes a phone with a swapt full of battery pack. As soon as the range gets past a certain point. Then I agree, yeah, it doesn't
make sense. But but this was far from clear at the time of designing the modeless, So we weren't in a lot of trouble to make the SNX pack capable of of a fast swap with quick disconnects and bolts coming only from the bottom and that kind of thing. And then we did that demo. We're just swapped out two packs faster than full of gas.
It's amazing.
It's kind of ridiculous to me, like taking the battery out of your cars some you know, Harris Ranch, and put a new battery in and you come back it was kind of like, it's good that super charging got a lot better.
Yeah, it was just way better to to increase the range of the pack and have better faster charging. So but but this debate, which seems obvious in retrospect, was
not obvious at the time. And yeah, back then, I think at least a lot of phones had swappable packs because this was would have been designed in you know, we had the first prototype out in twenty ten for the modeless, So back twenty ten, let's say, the thought process going into this in two thousand and nine would have been, you know, at a time when I don't know, maybe most phones had softable packs or something like that. You know, the iPhone was like two thousand and seven
or something, iPhone one. And yeah, so then it doesn't didn't make sense. But you know, copanies have a lot of momentum. So the the sn X pack is still a soppable pack because they say it was like two hour trials to change the design. And Model three still has modules even though twodn't have modules, and somebody we like what you'll see in any given product is that the errors in the structure of an organization will manifest
them selves in the product. So you know that's where Well, we have a module team, so we have modules like ways, I just combine the module team with the pack team and then the WIL modules. So generally the Yeah, the errors in the organization manifest themselves in the product.
You can see where the organizational boundaries are. Uh.
And then then you off and get like a box in a box. It's like, wait, why is this thing have two boxes? Well, because this team wanted to have an enclosure and this team wanted to have an enclosure, and so they have an enclosure on an enclosure. This is still the case with the sound It's like, what a silly thing, But that's actually the case with the Model three. Well three battery pack has a top enclosure and the car also has an underbody. Yep, what's the
point of that. That doesn't make any sense because the pack the pack team wanted to have an enclosed battery pack and the body team wanted to happen in closed body. Yeah it makes sense, but you don't.
Need to.
So yeah, awesome, this is all this and and putting the top cover on the battery pack is a big pain in the neck. So as mass and class and stuff, so that should definitely go away in the future.
Lots of brackets on brackets, that kind of thing.
So you survived the production hell of the Model three, which was pretty intense.
I mean that was like, it's stupidously difficult, and I mean, I think it's.
It has a.
I don't know if it's accur up, but I think might be accurate. Is the first company co company to reach volume production I think on an eighty eighty or ninety years.
Or something like that in the US.
Yeah, And it's a harder time to do it for sure.
Yeah.
The complexity of of like what people the regulatory requirements and the minimum expectations for a car at this point are dramatically more than they were eighty or ninety years ago.
And the place you chose to do it too.
Yeah, so that was it was a super difficult one. I mean there's like there's lots of car company startups, but that's doing the prototype is the easy part. Building the production system is one hundred times hotter. So I mean that's where you see the things fail, like they've been over the course of the last century, probably thousands of car company startups, most of which people have never heard about, you know, occasionally hear about something like a
Dorian or Attucker. Most of them there's there's there's not even a footnote, and it's it's because of the difficulty of production. And then and here's a real important point that is not well appreciated. This is a point that should be advanced by short sellers. But I'm not seen,
I'm not seen it articulated, which it should be. The incumbent car companies make most of their money from selling spare parts to the existing fleet at high margins, and they'll sell the new cars either it de factos zero margin or even at a loss. It's kind of like printers and cartridges or razors and blades. You sell the razor at a loss, celebrates of profits, sell printer at the last sequartris and a profit. Or video game consoles.
You know, the actual cost of say an Xbox is six hundred dollars, we can buy it for three or four hundred dollars because they make it up in the games that are boord So.
This is this now.
So if you're a new company, you do not have a fleet, so you have no fleet with which to subsidize the sale of your new cars. This is the this is the primary reason there has not been a successful car company start up in the United States. This is the primary reason. So because the incoming car companies have eighty percent of their fleet outside of a warranty
or something like that. Maybe it's seventy percent, but approximately, Like, if a car lasts for say twenty years or something like that, and the warranty is for four years, then it's eighty percent out of warranty. So even if they stopped selling new cars, they would still the profit would increase.
So, according to Edmunds, dealerships make twenty percent of their revenue but fifty percent of their profits on service.
Yeah, exactly so, and the the car companies themselves will often make more than one hundred percent of their profit on selling spare parts.
Wow. Yeah.
So if like, if at the point in which they're making stay one hundred and ten percent of the profit from selling spare parts, it means that they're actually selling the new class Atalyzes. So this this is a this is the very difficult thing to overcome. In order to overcome it, the a car has to be significantly more compelling then other than other vehicles, such that people are willing to pay a premium, and that you can.
Actually be prizitive cash flow.
Aspirationally profitable selling new cars, not simply selling spare parts of the fleet. So I mean, for Tesla's fleet, is probably ten percent of Tesla's fleet or selling in less than twenty percent is out of warranty, whereas eighty percent of the other car makers is out of warranty. So this makes it very difficult. Also, electric cars need much less servicing, so that that's another difficult thing. So so this is this is the main this should be the
main argument advanced. I think for why a car a new cock company cannot be successful the main one. And so yeah, then, like I said, the in order for that car to have cock company to have any chance, there must be it must be compelling enough that people
will pay for you. Otherwise there's no chance. And I think there's actually in order for a cock company to be successful, it has to succeed on two on two fundamental technology discontinuities, one being electrification, the other one being autonomy. I think not even even pure electrification by itself is
not enough. So you can, like it says the movie production line, there there have been two major technology step changes being electrification and aton me and the combination of those two is the only thing that's the only opening for a new cock company to make it.
Yeah, makes sense. I mean, without autonomy, you'd probably have to wait for EVS to reach price parody. With autonomy, you can drive many more miles and bridge that gap easier.
And it's like, well, Tesla's mote in some ways or not mote, I guess, but like Tesla's advantage in many ways is bigger because like, these are two such different technologies that are happening at once that you've been working on while nobody else has. So it's like that much harder to replicate now that it's been accomplished.
Almost, it's very hard for it's very hard for any any new C company to end of the market. That they have to make it a very compelling product, I meaning they have to have some significant technology advancements in the electric drive train and the battery pack and just generally with the car itself, and then the autonomy has to be very compelling. Autonomy in and of itself is enormous, so that both of those things company must be successful in doing or they will end up in the cemetery.
So that's that's the real challenge of it.
Yeah, well even with like the I mean the software updates. I mean that's something that no other manufacturer can really even get right. They can't do it over the air. You have to take your car into you know, because it doesn't work right. So that's a core component of providing updates. Instead of getting your revenue now from the dealership and spare parts stuff, you can actually send software as a service.
You know.
We actually did a whole podcasts on this.
Well, I've all this is to minimize service costs, whereas the other companies this is I wouldn't say that goes to maximize service costs, but it's certainly not to minimize it.
The car companies also have two different businesses as the dealerships, where their business is actually just service. And I don't think it's anyone's surprised that that people don't like going to their dealer. I mean it's like it's it's because their incentives are actually not aligned with the with the customers incentives. Their goal is bring you back as often as possible.
Yeah, there were the dealerships, and saves also misligned with the the car companies in the during the warranty period because the warrant, the car company has to pay for the warranty that the service during warranty.
Uh So it's so it's that they have a conflict of you can contrivate contradict of interests.
Yeah, the car companies to cover the warranty costs, but the dealership makes profit on the servicing, so they want to maximize servicing even during the warranty period.
Yeah.
It's almost like the economic factors you just mentioned have created like a complacency where there is no innovation because you know, nobody can just start a car company.
Yeah right, I mean it's like Schumpetter's creative destruction. You know, there's like innovation tends to come from new entrants to an industry. So if there's if an industry has formed an oligopolg or something like that, then the forcing function is weak for innovation because innovation tends to come from new entrants. Yeah, this is a problem with rockets. There's no allowed new entrants, so innovation forcing function is weak.
But it's encouraging to see rocket booster land and everyone is all like, wow, we can't innovate.
Maybe Yeah, it's actually been surprising how little innovation that's been on. And despite SpaceX showing reusable rockets, landing and reflying these rockets, many times they're like, come on, you know this Covey itt something the same.
Yeah, tech works just.
Do the same thing.
Didn't like Chinese space companies started putting grid fins on their rockets.
I think there's some Chinese rocks that have launched with grid fins. Well, you can really use any kind of fin.
Grid fin is just more predictable across a wide range of speeds, So from hypersonics through you know, supersonic, transonic, subsonic, they're they're just it's quite easy to predict the behavior of a gridfin and the center of pressure where a grid fin doesn't change that much, whereas if you have a you know, fin fin, like a wing looking thing, that you'll see quite a big change in where the center of pressure is across a.
Wide moss regime. Either one or to work the shuttle didn't have griffins.
What do you think about rock and lapse approach of trying to use a helicopter to recover the first stage.
Yeah, I think that's gonna be harder than it seems so, but there are boosters quite small, so that the issue with the helicopters you run into a max lower problem, like the lifting capability of helicopter is not that great, and that lifting capability drops with altitude, and then the range of helicopters also not that great. So so then
you end up having to helicopter on a show. And then if in that in heavy weather conditions, you can't take off, so that you're gonna you have to be your weather constraints at the launch point and the catch point are end up limiting your launch availability mm hmm. And then then you've gotta it's it's it's dangerous. You know, you've got somebody in a helicopter with with a you know, pilot trying to catch this thing coming out of the skuy.
It doesn't sound insane, there's a there's certainly the potential for somebody, you know, somebody to go wrong. Whereas if you have a growing chip's you know, if it's smashes into drown ship, it's not a big deal.
But smashing into helicopter that's a big deal. Yeah, So.
You know, overall I've been you know that that's what I've been pretty impressed with rocket Lab and they're mad, they're making they're making a go of it, and they're they're gonna.
Do reasonability, which is important. It's fundamental.
Do you guys still see yourself doing that city to city travel in thirty minutes one day?
Yeah, there's more.
Yeah, I think they can. For sure it can be done. Yeah, for sure can be done. It is it is loud.
That's that it's really annoys Is that the biggest concern there, both taking off and landing. When it comes in for landing, that sonic boom is loud. It's like, yeah, there's actually two sonic booms. So it sounds like somebody just discharged the double barl shotgun in your backyard. So it's not like it's breaking windows or anything, but it's like, it's be pretty annoying if it's happening on a regular basis.
That's basically water amounts you.
So that you have to off. Sure, So I think we'll do. But it can be done, definitely. It's the fastest way to get anywhere based on non physics, so and I think the economics can be made to work as well, so that it would be competitive with international air travel.
Wow, I can't wait for that. I travel a lot like today, asier like minium, like twelve hour to fourteen.
Will you try to keep most of the launches around the equator just or would it matter?
Like it doesn't matter a ton.
It matters if you're going east to know, if you if you launch east, you have the advantage of the oath rotation, the closer are of the equator and more, you can take advantage of Earth rotation if you if you fly west, you're actually counteracting US rotation, so you're the LTI blast that you need is higher, but you go in either direction. I think one of our one of our upcoming launches is actually a retrogate retrograde flight, so it's going to go against the lit'll.
Be fun to watch.
Yeah, But if Starship is going to launch so many times a day, how are you going to produce all these raptors? Because we've been we've been touring the SpaceX factory in author On and you're doing you're making them by hand, right? Are you going to automate any of this? Yeah?
I wouldn't say it's being made by hand, being assembled by hand maybe, but yeah, we have a lot of metal printers with a whole Yeah, three D, three D metal printing.
Wow, Yeah, I love it. I mean I think.
SpaceX is pushing the envelope with metal printing more than anyone else. At least that's what's the splash tell us. So we also have a foundry. Uh, that's we do are casting of exotic parts for a Raptor with a lot of CNC machines. It's a very complicated engine to build. Merlin looks like a toy relative to Raptor. It's very simple.
But we're going to make a lot of rafts and starships.
Are they going to be made in the States? Then yes, Okay, they'd have to be.
Yeah, we can get simple ingredients from outside the US, but other than that, we're not We're not allowed to transmit any sort of anything that is a sophisticated element of a rocket engine. Weren't allowed to transfer out the US or rockety stuff is the weapons technology.
So just a starship when it's assembled to fly there and come back.
Technically, there's a lot of rockets at the bottom of the ocean shout.
And they have.
So if you're city to city rocket travel works, does that mean Tesla doesn't need to build an electric airplane.
Man building electric airplane has a lot of difficulty associated with that.
Or what about the V tall jet, It's a lot of difficulty asia share with that.
I gotta make sure, well, it takes a messi amount of effort to do any one of these things, so you can't do them all. It's not possible, say, oh, how you I like it? The resources? What's the best thing to do? Making a vtall jet can definitely be done doing electric aircraft for sure. I mean all transport will go electric, accept for rockets, yeah, everything.
I guess why it seems exciting is because if Tesla's leading and energy density and battery technology, then the logical next step is like if somebody's build an electric airplane, it's the company with the best lightest, most efficient batteries.
Right.
Yeah, It's just it's hard. It's an entirely different regulatory regime. Like there's there are there aren't any car companies that are also aircraft companies, So why don't they just make aircraft?
Actually, you know, it's kind of funny. There was like some conspiracy theories on Twitter because on Instagram, Tesla's category it's aid, automotive, and then somehow aircraft has gone.
Like at the cyber truck event, cyber truck, this is like your Wikipedia.
I think it's incredibly hard to bring an aircraft to production and meet all of the regulatory requirements worldwide.
It's a very difficult thing. So it's not like we're something that could be just be done.
We would have to not do a bunch of other things. It's not like there's like a ton of unallocated resources. Tells I'm like, oh, what should we do now? It's like a constant resource starvation, so there's like why do you do this other thing? Okay, but we're starving for resources?
Then what do we you not do well?
It seems like that's what's so exciting is now that the business is kind of taken this next step. The resource like starve is kind of changing, or hopefully slowly changing.
I mean in the airplane like another car or something.
It's not yeah, not.
It'sarily an airplaneses, but just in general, it seems like the financial help means you can spend more on R and D, you can invest more, Like.
That's not how it works.
It's not like if you're just haending more money, you could spend it effectively in R and D. But if there was a if there was a factory producing excellent engineers, that would be true. Where is this factory.
It doesn't exist.
So it's incredibly difficult to find the right talent to integrate them into an organization and have it be work effectively. It's not a money thing. It's just hard to find that. This is a short number a small number.
Of people, you know, more engineers.
Especially, there's just a fundamental limitation on exceptional engineers.
There's just not that many.
So, given like these constraints and all the things you have to do, could you tell us like a little bit about your thinking on how you prioritize.
And the prioritize. Prioritizing has usually been out of desperation, not choice. It's not like, oh, let's sit back and how should we spend these resources. Thing isn't going to work, and we're gonna if we don't make it work, we're going to go bacraft, you know, and then so we're better make it work.
I mean the Mall free program.
There were so many mistakes that were made with mal three program that the entire company had to be devoted to fixing the model reproduction system. So you know, we took everyone off solar, almost everyone off battery pack, power power pack and that kind of thing. Anyone who is working on you know, roadsters, am I everyone stopped doing that working Model three or there won't be any Tesla.
Yeah, it's kind of amazing. You really bet the whole company to get to this next level. But you know, I mean I have a Model three. I couldn't afford a Model less. So like, I'm very thankful that you guys decided to at the whole company.
There's no choice. It's like either you got to you got to get to volume. So there's checking an next situation. You can't make the car at an affordable price unless you have high volume. Unless you have high volume, you can't get an affordable price.
So now what do you do? How do you bootstrap this thing?
You've basically just got to take a giant flying leap at high volume and hope you get to the you know ground, have a cliff at ledge with your fingertips. It's like Indiana Jones were like running down the thing. And here's what it actually feels like. It's like that temple are doing whatever where it's like there's a damn boulder chasing you down, okay, and it's a big hole in the ground.
Can make that game and you need to jump across the hole in the ground and if you slow down, the boulder is going to crush you. This is what it feels like. It's they're like, I.
Wonder what you we shall do, like boulder hol on the ground and then jump across or you're gonna die. So that's basically or you know, get the situation. You know, like at this point, maybe we could say like, okay, what shall we do at this point? You know, the biggest problem we have to solve right now is just having production on each onto it because it's insane to be making cars in California shipping them to Europe and Asia. This is I mean, as it is, making cars in
the area is pretty absurd. And then you also got to ship those cars half around the world, and so you got all this finished goes inventory on the water that's very high capital carrying costs, and you can finance part of it, but not all of it.
So you know, then you've got the.
Transport costs, you've got tariffs, you've got you know, every time a car gets loaded and unloaded, there's some potential for damage.
It's not zero, you know, So.
It just creates a lot of cost and then it's hard to manage. And the factory complexity in California is is amplified because you've got several different regulatory regimes. So you're building it seems like you're building Model three, which you're actually building several versions of a Model three, depending upon whether it's going.
To China, Japan, Australia, Europe.
Then you got got down right hand drive. Okay, it's like every now everything's gonna go. There's some random bureaucratic decision one hundred years ago. Right hand driver, left hand drive. This is a megapain in the ass.
In the middle.
Yeah. Absolutely. And then all these different languages.
You know, you can't have like warning labels in English, and if they don't speak English, it's like prove I don't know what it means.
So this stickers all over the place for you know, or whatever it is. And that's all in one factory.
So so so the complexity amplifies the difficulty of manufacturing.
And then.
You kind of get into the cycle where in the first month in the core or well, I say, first six weeks in the quarter you build cars for Europe and Asia and you get them on the boats, and then for the next say three weeks, you voilt cars for the east coast of the US or North America, and then the final three weeks you built the coast cars for.
The west coast.
So the deliveries early in the quarter look look very very low, and they spank exponentially at the end because basically all the cars arrive at the customers.
At the end of the quarter.
And then we're like, then we'll have these conversations we've got to get out of this wave like and they're like, well, they'll punish us very badly if we get out of the way because the financials.
Will look horrible. Yeah, So then we're okay, we'll do the wave again.
And so that so that now we've got a factory in Shanghai that should that that'll go a long way towards alleviating the complexity and the cost. You know, we'll have far a few goods that we need to finance that are on boats. Wants to get the factory going in Berlin. Branderberg technically close Ble in then then then that this massively reduces the complexity of production and uh and and reduces the fundamental cost of the vehicle. So this will really de stress the company a lot.
So local production will break the wave.
Local production will break the wave. I mean, just like we've had number of times the headlights have come up as an issue.
Is crazy.
We've had to ship cars to Europe many times where the the supplier of the headlights for the EU headlights can match rate uh and and or made them wrong or something. And then so we may have to make cars with US headlights, ship them to Europe, then ship a bunch of EU headlights to Europe, change them in the port because they're not all id to exit the port until they have the EU headlights.
Oh my god.
So that was the port problems we would see.
That's one of the many poor problems. Like like first year quarter last year was a tragedy of errors, not a comedy, but a tragedy. Belgium went on strike, right and like, what do you mean Belgium's on strike? Yeah, a lot of cars were coming into Subruge and like okay, now what do we do?
Nothing?
Just cars are stuck because okay, but then they're scheduled to go off strike in this other day and like okay, so then we can move things great, And.
It was just so many, so many things. Cars got stuck in the port of Shanghai because they had wrong sticker.
Oh my god. Yeah, I know, I know. It's been off like just many in China.
Absolutely like totally agree.
You don't have to spend like two weeks, three weeks on the ocean, go there and.
Roll sticker and you have to wait so replace.
People don't appreciate Giggashanghai yet completely.
Until recently, definitely not yet.
I think people have realized it.
It's extremely important.
Yeah, yeah, and these like shipping times or that, like like like technically as possible, if everything goes right, you can get the cars are in two weeks, but the ships don't don't leave every single day, and then you also have to cure you can't just instantly load the cars. So the cars you have like send like two thousand cars to a lot and like you know, port Oakland to Port of San Francisco, accumulate, the cars move, then
they get to another place. Then they get loaded onto the ship one at a time, and then finally the ship leaves, and then like sometimes the ship has problems and like the storms or somethingstom like it's how to go through everything? There's so much drama then yeah, and then like the ship's engine brought down. It's like stuck somewhere.
Yeah, but it's great, Like right now, like everything roll off the production line, go directly to the Yeah, sands great, it's wonderful. So I have another question. It's like, from your perspective, how to Chinese public perceive EV.
Well, China is very pro EV and it's biggest EV marking in the world. I think it's like half of old EV's or made and bought in China something like that, right now.
Yeah, yeah, So the China sort of.
Subsides for evs dropped conservatively, so that did cause a reductional lot. But the EV incentives were very high in China and now they're much less. They're like a third of what they used to be or less, so the so that's caused some decline in demand as one would expect, but it's still China is still the biggest market for EV's in the world, so I think they're very positively received.
That's great.
Yea so talking about the incentives, because you I know, the price, there was a small price reduction right in the Chinese Model three and then but then the subsidies were the balance. So it's actually not it's not any impact on Tassla in no profit, right.
No, I don't think so. Well, yeah, I think the.
Obviously, depending on what percentage of the car is made in China, that the parts that are made in China are not subject to a tariff, so that's certainly helpful. We also save on logistics, and generally we found that locally sourced parts in China costs less than in the you know, in the US or Europe, so this is
all pretty helpful. Also, the Tesla got added to the purchase tax exemption, which will all the other This is I'm not sure if you like realized just how much of an outfield battle Tesla has had to sell cars
in China. It's been a you know, really basically no access to any subsidies, and we paid a tariff and we had to ship the cars over and every single thing was set against Tesla, and still we made progress decently well, So I think there will be much better, a much better situation with local production, not having to do shipping and tariffs, and being able to have lower cost local sourcing of components. So make a big difference, I think.
Is that your victory dance when you broke in.
Yeah, that's great, that's a big deal. Huge.
Yeah, just uh, just fundamental economics. It kind of makes sense that making cars on the continent where there are bought will be a lot more efficient than making them in California and shipping them around the world.
Yeah, and you can get paid for the cars before paying your suppliers, which seems to not be the case if you're shipping around the world, and that could be a huge like friction on the whole kind of cash flow situation, or it.
Has been for sure, it will sure make a big difference on cash flow because yeah, it's there's just no way to get the cars, especially in Europe, but but even China to get them to customers, you know, before
we have to pay spliers. So if you're a rapidly growing company, it's it's night and day if if you get paid by your customers before you have to pay your suppliers, like night and day, because then the faster you grow, the video cash cash position is but if it's the other way around, where you have to pay your suppliers before you get paid for customers get paid by customers, then the faster you grow, the.
Faster your cash position drops.
Because you're going to spend more money to make it.
Growth actually causes you to orger into the ground in a situation like that. Now it tells us we had a mixture of both things where we had a lot of customers in say in California, and that's that's fast. For sure, we would get paid by customers faster than we would have to pay suppliers. But then for cars going to Europe and Asia, it's the other way around, you know, So we would have to pay suppliers before
we got paid by by customers. And now we could we could off sat some of that with the asset back line, which was pretty helpful, but only some of it, not all of it.
So the.
Just the fundamental financial health for sure improves dramatically by just having just been having a factory on the continent. Okay, we're not talking next door, but it's just how many oceans, you know. It's like, especially Europe was logistically super hard because we're on the west coast. If we're on the
east coast, then then China would be much harder. But if if you're on the west coast, you're much harder because you've got to go through the Panama Canal or even worse around you know, Tierra del Fuego, because sometimes the Panama Canal get backed up like the spring, and ship is going to the Antarctic. It's like you can skip up to the end and the stormy as hell.
It's so you send a ship around Chile, you shiitting, you know, in the middle crazy storms, and then back up all the way and then like you know, it is so funny, oh my god, so logistic nightmare. So yeah, it'd be great to just have have it, not get on a boat and crust the Pacific and Atlantic and that kind of thing.
So maybe similar to Vincent's question, what's the biggest advantage in choosing Berlin other European countries, Berlin.
Has the best nightclubs. I went to Bogm once.
Years ago.
Well, I don't know. I mean he looked a lot of different different locations and.
I sort of, I don't know. We're could have put it in a lot of locations. We needed to move move quickly. And actually this this place, you know, it's like wherever thirty minutes to the outskirts of Berlin, technically in brand Rondeberg. It actually was a place location that BMW was going to put a plants there, so a ton of the environmental work and all of the permits and stuff had already been done and then for some reason BMW chose a different location.
But there's like I guess something on the order of a year's.
Work worth of environmental you know, paperwork and stuff that's been done on that location for an auto plant. So that's it made it one of the quickest places to get going, and the like the government local and state government was very supportive.
So you know, I went there and it's like, okay, this seems like some pretty good vibe this place.
So there's a lovely part of this lovely place, and there's an opportunity for like it's it's close enough to Villain, that's a young people could still you know, live in an apartment in Berlain and commute to the factory. It's right, there's a train state station. The actually gonna move the train station. It's a small train station, but they're gonna move the train station to where you can literally get off the train and be.
Right at the Gaga Vilain.
Wow, that's great, that's great, that's perfect.
You could literally just pop right off and you don't if you walk, you don't need a bicycle. So then it's like, okay, this is pretty cool. And ya, so so young people could be in a Berlain department and it's you know, work at Gay Villain. But if you want to have more a family situation, but by backyard, there's you know, affordable housing available with you know houses with yards and stuff that aren't too expensive. Yeah, so it seems like a good, good combination of factors. Yeah,
a lot of talent in the area. So it sounds cool to giggle in. It just sounds it just sounds like some some cool nightclub.
I think.
You can definitely have a cool nightclub that was cooled back people like, yeah, that sounds good. Shanghai too, it sounds pretty cool. Yeah, should have like a rave cave.
And the.
The factory, but you should have like your own nightclub.
I think that would be who who doesn't know, doesn't we should do that. I feel like i'd go for sure work at a company with guys Hut the nightclub. That sounds way more fun.
Didn't you want to put a roller coaster into the Freemont factory.
Yeah, you're still going to do that. I mean I think that would be pretty fun to do. Yeah, I think we can just like do yeah, just basically have like we just needed a rail that can support like a modified modified Teslas and.
Then yeah, can you imagine a plaid Yeah, just like sip around and around the factory in like five seconds.
It would be booked for months. Yeah, we should get in right now. Awesome.
Yeah, we're kind of actually versed parts of the factory.
We have vehicle conveand systems. They just don't move that fast, but they're kind of like roller coasters.
That move so big exactly.
So yeah, but yeah, we're freeling pretty you know temp fade or anything, but feeling pretty good about where things are added. And I think this is like a lot of good things. You know, the model Wine coming out this year, and some exciting announcements about batteries, a lot of progress and autopilot. Yeah, so bullying Giga ballin and and then make your progress on some of the new vehicle developments. I went and solo, the solar roof, solar glass roof. Getting that rolled out.
The cyber truck got received really well.
I think, yeah, did you expect that many orders?
Not? No, not really.
When I first saw the cyber truck and in the France's design studio, I mean, you know, you know, and had told me that this was a this was a daring design. Although I think you're the most excited about this design than any dia.
I think it's the best product ever.
Yeah, and I saw it.
I was just taken aback, and not not by the design so much by the pure aggression that the truck. You stand in front of it and you're like, okay, I'm afraid you know, it really is like a badass truck.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like like the other reasons why people buy a pickup trucks, you know in the US, is like because it's like the most bad ass truck, you know, like like which one is the toughest truck, And it's like, what's tough with a truck tank?
Like a tank from the future. So it's like.
And really fine, cyber truck just in case the first four are busy.
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, It's literally like how you out top of a truck, US make a futuristic adored personnel carrier, and that's the tougher than a truck.
And I feel like a Tommy will probably be very like mature by the time it ships too, for sure.
So how many cyber truck orders do we have right here?
I got one. I ordered three. I mean it's gonna be pretty special and I look like other things, so you know, yeah, it looks so cool.
Like the first time I show it to my son is like, Daddy, this is something from Alien.
This is the first impression. Yes it is.
That's that's how I just designed it.
Was.
It's like, what's the you know, let's let's make a future futuristic award personal carrier, you know. And so the inspiration board was like literally like you know, Blade Runner, you know, like sort of Mad Max back to the Future, you know, Aliens, you know, they're like, yeah, so.
That's why it looks like that, Like the pre older number is amazing. It's gonna be over like four hundred thousand now right.
I think it was just so risky, and it just like at first people were like even people who like were hardcore fans will rolled out and then people are like wait a minute, like, yeah, it's kind of amazing.
I want you could see it like there was like in person, you could see it happening really fast, like the reaction and then they're processing and then you're seeing all the features and then the range and the price.
Those are the compelling things that really like just hit everybody.
Forty thousand was the biggest genres, like, oh, people are gonna be buying.
And that range too, like it's just actually.
Sixty nine five hundred miles with two point nine second like come.
On you.
Yeah, loved it too, right?
Did Actually? Yeah?
One of the last things he said, actually did he have a drive in it? And no, he saw pictures of it, but I think he was not. Obviously he died recently, so he didn't. He saw pictures and he said, yeah, that's great, and he says send us a note like he loves it, you know.
Yeah.
So, but you know, you want you want to have these things that inspire people. It feels different, not like everything else is like the same. It's like variations on the same theme. You want to have something different, but you feel like how many I wasn't sure if nobody would buy it?
Or a lot of people would buy it. It just wasn't.
I don't know, but you know, I just told him, like listening, if nobody wants to buy this, we can always make one that looks like the other trucks. That's not like yeah, you don't just try it and there's yeah, okay, it was you know, I could just say, okay, it was weird failure, but now you know, make one light looks just like the.
Others and they you go.
So it seems to capture the whole world though, like elevated Tesla and the cultural zeitgeist in a way that like is so exciting, Like the Travis Scott music video already happened, like that was so I was waiting for the first music video and I was like, yeah.
Really cool.
Yeah, it's gonna be hard to make that, by the way, So it's not. It's because because it's a different architecture. It's an exoskeleton architecture. So there isn't any cars out there that have an exo skeleton architecture. So you've got to rethink how the all the internals of the car done so that you can use the external shell as as as a load bearing structure instead of just basically thin cheap metal that is effectively just therefore aerodynamic reasons.
So you could take you could take the external what's called a class office of most cars and still drive around. It loses almost no structural value. It's that they usually go very very thin sheet metal. So it's a total endoskeleton. So there'll be some some challenges building that.
It's the Starships three.
It's a starships. You can use the same steel as the show.
I'd love one of those limited quantity ones.
I don't like Timid shout out it out.
Yeah, Timid asked about that everyday astronaut.
Yeah, that's cool guy. He's a cool guy. He really knows what he's talking about. It does.
So.
Yeah, so there's there's there's a lot of a lot of good things and undoubtedly be some you know, sit backs along the way, but it's it's looking looking pretty good.
Should do some.
Closing thoughts, you know. I just remember when I got my Model three. It was like a difficult time in my life, and it made it easier and you know, you don't have to buy gas, car drives you around. It just makes your life better. All of our lives in these little ways like all this struggle you do it. You know it really makes things better and just makes you hopeful and inspired. And you know, I just can't thank you and the whole Tesla team and uh enough for for all the love you put into the car.
You know every day.
It's just happy because I have a Model three.
That's cool. I'm glad you like it.
As let's go, I go to you know, maximize the we make peel like really touch people's heart for the product. And it's like I think, like too many of the companies out there, the design these things because it is sort of a spreadsheet and sort of marketing surveys and that kind of thing without saying do you love it?
You actually like the product that you're making. Touch my heart very much.
I like, thank you for this chance like doing interview with all of us, and as a shareholder and Model three owner, I remember like one time you tweak about your money is first in and will be lost out. I was really touched to see that tweak. I think it's like years ago, like right after one of the shareholder meeting, I was like like we see, oh will do this, you know, And like after I bought my Moto three. I'm more believed to the company, like I order a motor y and then two side was shrup.
I was like, I'm a Porsche fans before.
And then right now like he was gonna get a take on until he saw the range.
Yeah, I was thinking you get a take on, like why not, like give it a try, But when you look at a spec the the range turned.
Me off, like yeah, it's absolute already.
Two oh one, Like who's gonna buy it for one hundred and fifty k? Just not talk about money, just talk about range itself. The spect it's like it's not there yet. So with like one hundred and fifty cake plus like nobody gonna buy it. Yeah, so thank you and absolutely thank you very much. Well yeah, well I thank thanks you guys for your sport. Just really makes difference. Yeah.
I mean I don't know Tesla, so I hope hopefully I will.
Yeah yeah true in your shareholders call it.
Yeah, so yeah, I got to save up, but I will buy one, and I've got to cyber truck like you said. But I've made so many great memories just like through these cars, Like I've met all you guys through Tesla and this is amazing. Just like what kind of community just is created through products that you love And I think that really means a lot, Like I don't I think I've never seen people being so excited about a product before, like having this whole family feeling. That's really cool.
Thank you so much, welcome, thank you.
Yeah, I just want to say congrats first of all, because I feel like this has been it's kind of like a feel good moment for Tesla all that's happening. Yeah, obviously, thank you, because like you've inspired all of us, and I think there's not many things in the world that like people get pumped about that are positive about the future. Like I really feel like we need that now, and so Tesla, like bringing us all together has been really awesome and really much needed.
I think, great, this is this is really cool.
I think i'd have to agree with what Gally said, just whear Tesla's going. You have a car that's actually making a difference with the clean energy, changing the earth, cleaning things up. I mean it made me excited to see and you're so efficient and you can you actually get things the way you do it, you just I don't know, you get it done. And I trust you and I trust the company, and it's it's I don't know, such a passion. It's amazing. I don't know. I just don't get cut the words out.
Sometimes a little later we think we get it done in the end.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, always deliver.
Yes, thank you, you're welcome, Thanks please for it.
Well, I just want to say, like how I described this, this podcast, like we kind of it kind of just grew out grassroots, right.
And thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.