TechStuff Looks at Elon Musk

focus on another personality and technology. Uh you know, we did an episode not that long ago where we talked about the Internet Darling Tesla Tesla, and today we're going to talk about a guy who runs a company called Tesla. Mr. Elon Musk, Yeah, Elon Musk, and uh, he's sort of he's an interesting iconic figure. I would say he's he's

a wee bit like Tony Stark. Yeah, a little bit like Tony Stark, a little bit like Steve Jobs, a little bit like uh well, one Esquire article I read said that it was a bit Tony Stark and a bit Donald Trump. Okay, Yeah, and supposedly he's actually friends with the director of the current uh iron Man movies and that they sort of based that character a tiny bit on him. Interesting I have never met the man, so I am going to try my best to not

make any sort of assumptions. Um I say try, because there's certain things about this man's life that I find particularly interesting, and it might be difficult to avoid editorializing because I'm an opinionated idiot, But like like like many big famous billionaires who have started really fascinating companies that you know, go into space and create fancy electric vehicles, you know, like all of those people in the world, all those with those other guys, He's a very driven,

very very big personality. He's a sort of nerd rock star. Yeah, that's that's why we're doing this profile, and it's there's and there's some great articles that are out there, Lauren, you wanted me to one on Forbes. There's an Esquire profile that is phenomenal. There's some great information out there. If you really want to know about this guy's life,

we're gonna give you kind of an overview. And we also want to point out we're not going to dive too deeply into each of his ventures because frankly, they would each you know, Merrit their own podcast, so so maybe maybe later for all that, and I would I would really love too, because I didn't. I honestly had to keep tearing myself away from everything that SpaceX is doing. And I would love to revisit that right. And we should also point out we're recording this just a few

days after another SpaceX launch. There was a Falcon nine launch vehicle that launched the Dragon spacecraft out to rendezvous with the International Space Station, which it did. It's successfully docked. It's the first private vehicle, I believe to successfully Yeah, it's done this before. This is not the first time that the Dragon spacecraft has done it, but it is.

The Dragon spacecraft was the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space To This came with the headline happy Birthday birth b r H Well and and that was that was a big deal because while the launch went went fairly well, like there wasn't anything majorly wrong with the launch, it was discovered pretty soon after the launch then not all of the systems aboard the Dragon spacecraft were working properly, and there was some question for a while as to whether or not they would be

able to dock with the International Space Station. But we'll get into that or at least mention it again. Uh, let's start with his birth, the Elon Musk's birth, which was on June nineteen seventy one in pre Torria, South Africa. Yeah. I love the South African accent. Yeah. Yeah, I can't do it other than say South Africa. That's a be as close as I can get. So I apologize to all South Africans out there. But his father, Errol, was an engineer and his mother, May was a neutri still

is a nutritionist and model. Yeah she Yeah, she's a very popular model. Actually there. I looked at a couple of pictures of her and I was like, oh, you know that lady. Yeah, she's still modeling today in fact Um. And he has siblings. He's got a brother named Kimball and a sister named Tosca. And his childhood was a little rough. I mean, for one thing, he was growing up in South Africa, which, for those who don't know, it's an area that has a history with with some

big social problems and things like violence. Uh. He was apparently bullied at school quite a bit. His brother Kimball, has said that he was He got to a point where he really hated the idea of going to school. He loved learning. Elon Musk has always shown that he just he devours information right right. Well, And I think I read one thing from I think it was from his brother Kimball saying that that Elon tended to correct people factually even when he was a child, and that

that maybe is what led to some of that bullying. Yeah. Yeah, it was one of those things where from Elon's point of view, he wasn't trying to behave in a way that was superior to other people, but rather that, oh, you made a mistake, you probably don't want to do that. I will help you. But the problem is that when you help people by pointing out they make mistakes, they

can get a little they might not like you. And I've done the same thing, and I've had the same thing done to me because I'm human, I make lots of mistakes, and yeah, he can get pretty irritating. And yet I still do it when to other people, And I don't know what that says about me. But anyway, so he had a kind of rough childhood at eight when he was eight years old, his well, depending upon how you read the story, because he's also a fairly

private man about his own personal details. His either his father left or his mom took the kids and left, but in either case he no longer was having a day contact with his dad. Eight years old, uh and he very much wanted to get out of South Africa. When he was seventeen years old, he left South Africa for ontary O, Canada. His mother was a Canadian national by the way, so um and And the story goes that he mostly left because he was fleeing compulsory service

in the South African Defense Force. Yes, and that specifically he was doing it not because he really objects to military service, but he objected to the kind of military service that they were engaging in a k A. Pressing black people right. Yes, that was his His stance on the military has been that he's pro military when it is quote in the service of good um And, so he you know, you could draw the conclusion that he saw South Africa's military as being uh not aligned with

that and so he did not want to participate. Also, I have read that he had aspirations to become an American citizen early early on. He really wanted to be an American, but he also thought that it would be easier to become an American if he first went to Canada. Um, so, yeah, he leaves for Ontario. Yeah, I was. I was to say, I wonder if if part of part of that ambition to be an American was was he was a very enterprising child. He had written a code for a video

game called a blast Star. I believe that he sold to a computer mag for five hundred bucks, which isn't bad when you say twelve. Yeah, yeah, he he was, and that was one of those things. He was immediately interested in computers. He had begged his family to get a computer essentially as soon as personal computers became a thing, and uh and yeah, he just soaked it up. It was one of those things that he really had an

affinity for. He tried to open an arcade I read with with his brother when he was thirteen or fourteen, that they abandoned the plans when they realized that they would have to get an adult signature to obtain a permit to open this arcade, so they wound up just making homemade chocolate and selling it to their classmates instead. Yeah. Essentially, the story I read says that he and his brother, without any permission on the part of their parents, decided

to have this plan to make an arcade. Then they ran into the problem that they would require this adult signature and realized that this was not going to work out, and so essentially they you know, they hit a bureaucratic obstacle. And then their parents were furious when they found out that these two kids that just actually, I guess mom mainly was furious that these these kids had decided to just often started a business, started business, you know, on

their own, without any adult supervision. Now granted, of course it didn't go very far in that case, but um, yeah, it shows that Musk was not really uh interested in having to get permission to do things, which I thought was a running theme in his life. Absolutely. Uh. Yeah, he went to school. Uh, well, he had relatives in Canada because his mom was from Canada. So he goes over to Canada and he enrolls in school in Queen's University,

and uh he starts studying physics there. Uh. But then he ends up transferring as well to the University of Pennsylvania and uh gets degrees in uh, in physics and in business. He actually gets two different bachelor's degrees. Here's a quote from him. My areas of interest was cross disciplinary, focused on the physics of high energy density capacitors, which is a mixture of quantum physics and materials science plus business um. While he was in college, he met a

young lady. Actually this would be back in Queen's University. Uh, he would eventually marry her. That young lady's name was Justine J. Wilson. So we'll talk about her in a couple of years. I believe I believe she's a writer or novelist. I was going to yes, yes, and also a blogger as well, but yes, a novelist and uh, very interesting writer. I've I've read some of her work and she turns a good phrase. I will say I

enjoyed reading what she had to write. So he went to school, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with the degrees in physics and business, and he began to work on ultra capacitors at Pinnacle Research in Silicon Valley. And essentially from why I understand, he was doing this so that he could understand their potential as an energy storage mechanism for electric vehicles, because even at that time he was already interested in the idea of electric vehicles. So

he was going to go to Stanford. Yeah. Yeah, he was accepted to Stanford for a grad degree. He dropped out from what I read after two days on campus. Yeah yeah, he he was he had the opportunity to co found a company, and the problem was that he did not have the time to devote both to graduate studies and to launch this this company at the same time. And he asked to Stanford if he could get a

deferral for a quarter. They were on the quarter system, but he wanted to get one quarter deferral because he said, he realized that startup companies have a habit of not always succeeding. And he thought, Okay, if the company succeeds, I'm in great shape. But more likely than not, that company is not gonna work out. It's just, you know, it'll maybe it's a time, So maybe I'll just ask for a deferral, and that way I can really concentrate on this company for one quarter worth of time and

then go back to school. He did not get that deferral, so really it was an all or nothing. It was, you know, land the ships on the shores of America and burned them. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, that's I think that's the same year that that Netscape had just quintumpled in value the day that it went public, and that was launched by someone who was even younger than him at the time, and that's you know, yeah,

the Internet man, the Internet. So the company he founded or co founded back was called Zip two and it served as a platform for delivering ads and directories on the Internet. So he co founds this company, he starts building it up, and it's doing really well. It starts to increase in value year over year, and then and um, he ends up marrying his college sweetheart, Justine J. Wilson. Uh and uh. He marries her in two thousand and then he ends up while he's engaged to her, Actually,

he ends up selling zip too to Compact. They bought the company for three hundred and seven million dollars in cash, and that was the biggest sum paid for an Internet company ever at the time, and he got twenty two million of that. Yeah, so he was twenty years old when that happened, So he became a millionaire overnight. Justine was was in a relationship with him at this time. She actually has written about that in one of the

articles which I'll cite a little bit later. Um, and so that was a phenomenal time, I mean, like its transformative. He ended up they moved out of this little apartment into a nice house, and he got a really really fancy car, uh, a McLaren F one, which is the fastest production model car made. So it had the highest top speed of any production model car. So he so he literally bought the fastest that he could possibly going doors too. Just like my favorite car in the world,

the DeLorean, uh favorite for all the nostalgic reasons. Obviously it's of course performance. It's not that great of a car. I did a full episode about that. So we do have a delirian episode of tech stuff way back in the archives if you really want to listen to it. But he then also founded a company that would eventually be called PayPal. He co founded originally it was it was called the company that he founded was x dot com. It was an online financial services thing that enabled people

to make payments first first off by via email. Yeah, it was. It was again a very disruptive business because it was an idea of you know, there was this big notion of doing huge amounts of business online like the Internet, held limitless possibility when it came to uh conducting businesses. But one of the issue was how do

you process payments? How do you create a payment system, especially when you're talking about people connecting with other people and wanting to transfer payments over the Internet without having a big company in between, like right, and and Musk said he'd a quote from him is that banks are terrible at innovation, and financial services is a huge sector. So I thought, now there should be something there. Yeah,

so he did that. He the company acquired actually kind of merged with another company called Confinity, and together they became PayPal. Uh. And uh that was where you had the online point of sale functionality that was so important for those those early days. I mean it really it meant that people who were selling things uh personally could get paid for it without having to go through some other retailer to send their stuff to them and then get a cut of it. Uh, even if you're providing

a service. You know, for example, I I do some freelance editing, and so if I want to do that and I also want to get paid for it then which I do. Yeah. Well, and then uh that that company was bought by a little company called eBay, and at the time, Musk was the chief product officer and was also the largest shareholder in PayPal and eBay paid them at one point five billion dollars. Yeah, so at this point Musk goes from being rich to whoa is

that the official term? Scientific? Yeah, it was two thousand two when eBay bought the company for one point five billions, So he's been married for two years at that point. Uh. He experienced some tragedy in his life at this time as well. He and his wife. Uh He and Justine had their first son, and their first son, at ten weeks old, passed away from sudden infant death, and it

was it was obviously devastating for Justine. She says in an article that she wrote for Marie Claire that, uh Ellen really internalizes things like loss, and so there wasn't a lot of outward emotion. Now, I am sure Mr Musk suffered unimaginable loss at this but but there wasn't a lot of outward sign of that. Justina, on the other hand, was very expressive of her grief as as

is understandable. But they ended up pursuing some in vitro fertilization techniques so that they could have another child, and they they had five of them. They end up with one set of twins and one set of triplets, all boys, so all sons. Uh. And so it's a pretty amazing thing. And and we'll get more into his family in a

little bit. It was around this time as well, after he was seeing this amazing amount of success and had reaped in quite a bit of money from those early ventures, that he first started talking about the idea of privatized space exploration, and that in fact, he started chatting about this with a friend of his and they were they were just talking about why was it so expensive to go out in space? And how expensive could it be? And could a private company do this? I mean, is it?

These were these were new conversations. Like you know, before it was essentially governments that were sending up rockets. Right. But but but around this time was when you know, everyone was terribly losing funding. Yeah, they were having you know, Elon Musk had had this fascination with space exploration. Some might call it an obsession with space exploration and the idea of eventually colonizing other planets or maybe a moon or something, Mars being one of those destinations that he's

absolutely fixated upon. And so it began this this really passionate discussion about well, if no one else can do it, why couldn't private individuals do it? And Uh, the first company that he made to try and go after this goal was called Life to Mars. Life to Mars. Yeah, this was an idea that he had where the the goal would be to send a rocket with a payload that has some sort of life form on it, and

the the life form was a matter of debate. Uh, there was a point where it was going to be a mouse, and then there was a point where it was just going to be a plant. But the idea would be to send this thing to Mars as kind of an unmanned but life bearing mission as a step toward the eventual landing on and possible colonization of Mars by human beings. Yeah, he's he said that that this is a direct quote. I'd put the extension of life to another planet slightly above the transition from life in

the oceans to life on land. Yeah. He also said, I've always thought that space is important to the future of humanity. I think it's important that we one day become a spacefaring nation, and I just didn't see that happening by itself. I just didn't see that from Boeing or Lockheed or big aerospace companies. So that's why I started SpaceX. So if you heard about SpaceX, I that's

that's the company that, again Musk was behind. And uh, the early days of SpaceX we're kind of interesting because at first he was thinking, you know, I got a lot of money because because eBay bought my stuff, uh and not on an auction. It was like, you know, a company I made, So I'm gonna take this here money and I'm gonna buy myself some rockets. And that was originally his plan was that he was gonna buy rockets. He wasn't he wasn't making a company to build stuff.

He wanted to buy things. But then he realized that that really, you know, those other rockets were kind of crap. Well beyond that, it was the people that were crap. Okay, this is this is according to the Esquire article and uh so full disclosure. This is just based upon what Musk's experiences were. So Musk goes to Russia because Russia, as it turns out, had a pretty big supply of intercontinental listic missiles on its hands that no longer really

needed anything for any reason. And originally it looked like he would be able to purchase said missiles at seven million dollars a pop. So he thought, oh, that's reasonable by a BYBM, So I'll use that as my launch vehicle for for whatever you know, spacecraft I design. So um. The story in Esquire tells tales of corruption and bribery and lots and lots of vodka and uh and I'm not kidding it really does. I mean, when we read this,

it's both entertaining and kind of infuriating. But essentially, Musk felt like he was getting jerked around by the Russian officials that he was dealing with, that that they would quote him one price, and when he was finally ready to move on it, that price would suddenly triple. So saying oh no, no, no, not twenty one million for three of them, twenty one million for one. And so at that point that's it. I'm building my own and

he left. So it's like, so he decided at that point that's space X was going to manufacture its own rockets, and he started looking around for people who would help him do that. One of those was a guy named Thomas Mueller, who was an engineer, part of a group of people who were really kind of rocket enthusiasts. They called themselves the Reaction Research Society. Only Mueller was not

like an amateur rocket scientist. He was an engineer with Northrop Grumman, so he actually had a pedigree in rocket and rocket science. Like when you say it's not rocket science, he says, no, it totally is. Rocket science is what I do rocket scientists. Um. But he he was the one that must contacted to be the guy to design the engine that he wanted to propel spacecraft into the stars. Um, not literally into the stars, but because that would be

very that would be low, low cost efficiency for you. Yeah, you don't, you know, you don't get any reusability once you shoot it into the stars. And actually he thought that the reusability thing, and I think he still does really argue that reusability is key to making space travel economic because you know, to to use these things one time and then have to build a new one is not efficient at all. Yeah. Yeah, And and what he's really arguing with SpaceX of about performance versus reliability and

says that what he's looking for is really reliability. He he said that he aspires for SpaceX to be the Southwest Airlines of space. Interesting. So he Musk was personally involved in the design of two different launch vehicles that SpaceX developed. First was called the Falcon one and the second was the Falcon nine. And he was also instrumental in the design of the spacecraft, which they called Dragon,

whereas Mueller designed the engine which was called Merlin. Now, um, yeah, well, and we'll talk a little bit about SpaceX some more in a second, but before we get into that, let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsor Alright, getting back into space Tex. So, the early days of SpaceX did not go so well for for Mr Musk. Yeah,

they had they had a bunch of early failures. Yeah, and you've got to understand, like this, this whole process of him searching out the possible sources for rockets, deciding to go with building rockets on his own, having to work with various vendors for the various parts that he needed to build the rockets, and the stories that about him dealing with vendors are kind of like carbon copies of his experience with the Russians in the vodka, perhaps,

but eitherwise a little bit. In fact, Esquire says the exact same thing, like it's not as much vodka, but otherwise very similar in the sense that he would get quoted one price and then end up being told another when it was time to actually deliver, and that his decision was, well, heck, I will find a way to do that on my own. He eventually started running into some hard obstacles they couldn't easily get around, like where do you get your aluminum if they tell you that

the price has gone up? But anyway, he was having to sink a lot of his money into this, so the success of this venture could have very much determined whether or not he would have maintained his status as internet billionaire or gone bankrupt. Right because he was funding most of this himself. It wasn't you know. I mean, he did have some money from investors at that time. He had he had a there's like a hundred million dollars of investment money there was, And then later on

NASA would end up giving a huge contract. But in those early days, nothing was certain and and three well publicized failures launch failures did not help the Yeah, the first one failed twenty nine seconds after lift off, the main engine caught fire. Yeah. Yeah, and uh and apparently the the ride home with Musk and Mueller in the same car was intense. Yeah, like, why did your engine catch fire like that? That is that is a level of intensity that I've very rarely encountered in the workplace.

I have to say, I gotta say, I've never been in a car that I think would have had that much tension in it. I mean, there's there's one thing that comes to like, you should have turned back there that level of tension to your engine caught fire, and my billion dollar industry may crumble as a result. That

that's a whole different level. Yeah. But then the second launch also suffered a failure, and the third launch was particularly costly because the the UM payload included stuff from NASA and the Department of Defense, as well as the ashes of one James Dowon, better known to some as Scotty from Star Trek yes literally irreplaceable, Yeah, as someone that I had actually had the pleasure of meeting in person.

Um Yeah, full disclosure, had breakfast with the man very charming and entertaining guy that was at a science fiction convention because my dad's a science fiction author. So yeah, when I heard about that failure, I thought, oh, that's that's just so that's personally that's very sad. Yeah, I mean all of these, of course are sad for the whole industry of private space exploration. Right, of course, it

was putting all of that at risk. In fact, there were people who were already saying, oh, well, this is why there isn't private space exploration. It's too hard, it's too hard, it's impossible. Yeah, you just can't get the money and the right Yeah. So it was getting to the point where this the fourth attempt was was pivotal. It was sort of a make or break situation. If the if the launch vehicle did not performed successfully, it might have meant that Elon Musk would have gone bankrupt.

But it did successfully launch, so then, uh, that was pretty much the beginning of the real space X story. Two thousand eight, NASA awarded space x a one point six billion dollar contract for twelve cargo flights to and from the International Space Station. So essentially at that point, SpaceX becomes the replacement for the Space Shuttle program. So

that that ended up being discontinued. So it was the first private company to launch a private spacecraft that later docked with the International Space Station, and that that first uh successful docking was on May in a sense repeated that, so it's slowly getting to its way of those twelve cargo flights, but you know, it does take time between

launches for this to happen. And the most recent one, who was March one, I guess because we were originally going to record this episode on March first, and then we thought maybe we should wait and find out if that launch is successful and then we can talk about it and much yea, much better than sitting there and going like, well, it's going on right this very like at the moment we're recording this, but as by the time you listen to it, it has already either happened

or spectacularly not happened. As it turned out, the launch did go off pretty much without a hitch until it became apparent that a couple of the thrusters on the Dragon spacecraft we're not responding properly, and there was some concern that there wasn't enough control for it to dock successfully with the International Space Station. But fortunately for everyone involved. It worked. It worked well enough for them to be

able to dock. So um, it definitely again brought more scrutiny to space X and probably to those kind of statements about you know how safe versus reliable kind of stuff. You know, this idea that we really need this to be uh as as close to um too perfect as possible, especially once we get to the point where real live

human beings. But at a certain point, performance is in fact a measure of reliability and so yeah, so uh in SpaceX began to work on spacecraft to actually carry astronauts and that was part of an ANASA award, and

their first man flights are expected sometime in Yeah. So um, you know, obviously that performance reliability issue needs to be worked out for that, because when you're talking about human life, I mean, that's you know, the NASA has had its own share of tragedies as far as the space program is concerned, and no one wants to see a repeat

of that, certainly not so. So all of this started off when U the Dragon was actually also the first privately owned ship to return safely from Earth's orbit, which again is a big thing that must go Oh sure, yeah, and again very important because you want that reusability. You

want to be able to reuse as much as you can. UH. And you know, ideally he Musk wants to be able to reuse the rockets themselves, not just the spacecraft, and spacecraft is important, but to be able to reuse the rockets would mean a dramatic decrease in the cost of production.

Uh And Forbes had an interesting thing. They said that Musk is the space equivalent of a nineteenth century railroad tycoon poised to make a fortune in private space industry, because you know, when when you're the main game out there. And I've seen a lot of criticisms directed towards ace X, saying that it's not really a private space company because

it's funded by NASA. Yeah, because NASA is their chief client, right, So it's like, really from their perspective, their point is saying that SpaceX is really just a different contractor, so that instead of NASA paying one group of contractors like Lockheed and Boeing, it's now paying a different contractor, SpaceX, and so that really the companies have changed, but the game is the same now. Musk, for his part, denies that. He says that No, No, you're looking at this far

too narrow a field. Yes, right now, NASA is our main client, but that's not how this is going to be in the future. Right, That's only because NASA is the only the only company that really has a company, the only organization that has the amount of dollars to toss it kind of thing. Right, It's like, the reason this NASA is my customers because it's the only customer

to have right now. That's kind of the point that that Musk is making, But that in the future his customers will be anyone who has the you know, whatever the base prices for you to take a rye it up to Mars or whatever. Um. So Meanwhile, while all this SpaceX stuff is going on, other stuff is going on in his life. In two thousand and eight, he filed for divorce from Justine Musk, and she does keep

that surname. She's known as Justine Musk. And then six weeks six weeks later, six weeks after he falls for divorce, he sends a text message to her that says that he's engaged to British actress to Lula Riley. I think it was twenty three at the time. And he was maybe what was that like thirty seven something around there. Yeah, and then Justine ended up writing up her experiences with the divorce for Marie Claire I mentioned earlier, Um, it's a really it's a really oh snap kind of article.

If you guys enjoyed that sort of thing, it's it's it's heartbreaking to read too. I mean you you hear like apparently at their wedding, in the first dance he said to her like, I am the alpha in this relationship, and she just kind of shrugged it off at the time, not realizing that he meant it. He apparently meant it, uh, and that, um, you know, she has her own perspective obviously, and that's that's the perspective that article is written in, of course. And again, Musk is a very private person

about about his own life. And so even though even when he's enjoying enormous attention from the press, which he does frequently, he's he's pretty standoffish about these personal details. So we don't really have his perspective exactly. So we have one side of the story, but it's it's a pretty eye opening and grim story. I mean, here's one quote from her Marie Claire article. Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found

me lacking. I am your wife, I told him repeatedly, not your employee. If you were my employee, he said, just as often I would fire you. Oh yeah, so not the happy household that you would hope. And apparently, uh, you know, they share joint custody of their sons, and apparently she deals with his assistant when it comes to anything that deals with their children. Yeah, so apparently she hasn't. She has next to no contact with him. She has, though,

struck up a friendship with Telula Riley. Yeah, apparently the two women get along very well, and she she had

written to her. This is paraphrasing. I don't have the quote in front of me, but she wrote to her saying that I hope that we can be like a French film where the two women in a man's life can be perfect friends with each other and no one's the bad guy, so not like an American film where you have one person who's clearly the good guy and one person who's clearly the the the buttress, the home wrecker or whatever. And Tellula Robec said let's do as the French do, So it was kind of kind of

cute and sweet. We'll talk more about Telula in a little bit. Uh, but uh, yeah, there was a there's a lot in that that article, the Marie Claire article that that is very personally revealing, both for Justine and for Elon. And if you are interested more in that story and sort of the personal side of Elon Musk, I highly recommend it. It's a great read. You do see that just he's a very good writer, but it is heartbreaking. Well, we'll toss out a couple of links

on our social media. Yeah. Now back to Elon Muskin and his professional life. He he's involved in a couple of other companies besides SpaceX. One of them is called solar City. He's the chairman of solar City and that's a company obviously that's very concerned with solar power. He provides strategic direction for the company, and he conceived this company to help combat global warming and minimize air pollution. Right.

What he did was combined several solar power companies, I believe, starting in California, but they've spread out across the country um to offer solar panel installation on the cheap. Yeah, and I know that. At a recent TED talk, he said that within twenty years he would expect solar power to become a primary source of energy, which is kind of interesting. Uh, if you know anything about solar power, it's not the most efficient, efficient way of generating energy.

So in order for that to happen, not only will we need to create huge solar farms to harness this energy, but we'll have to improve efficiency on a pretty grand scale to make it useful. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, just to just to get people in the door. If if what you're spending on it costs more than yeah,

it's never going to catch on, right exactly. Yeah. And and there are other elements literally that are a concern, like uh, like like rare earth minerals that are Yeah, so there's there's a lot of issues that need to be worked out. But he's he's very much a well, at least he's an evangelist for solar power. Whether or not his vision becomes reality remains to be seen, but he's definitely passionate about it. And another one of those great quotes from from him is that he wants to

do for solar energy what Del did for computers. Yeah, that's pretty that's a pretty good quote. He's also he's known for generating quotes like that, No, I love it. Lots of lots of buzzwords and buzz phrases and very punchy, very twitter iff. Yeah, and he does. He does tweet quite a bit. So in July July, suppose I do

as my southern coming out. In July eleven, he donated two hundred fifty thousand dollars via his philanthropic Musk Foundation, which is a charitable organization, not some place where they keep a lot of musk, which is what it's what I first thought when I read it. But they offered

they offered grants for research and educational endeavors. Right, but yes, And through that foundation he donated two or fifty thousand dollars to fund a solar power project in the city of so Much, Japan, which was which is one of the locations that it's hit by the tsunami, yes, the earthquake and tsunami, and in fact was also in the pathway of the fallout from the nuclear power plant. So this was sort of a way that he saw of alleviating some of the distress in that area and to

help with the energy problems that that area was encountering. Um. And then of course we get to the other company he's known for, probably one of the you know, along with SpaceX. I would say that this is the most visible of all of his second perhaps too SpaceX, and and that you know, it's not launching things into space, which carries with it a necessary amount of journalism. But yes, Tesla Motors. Yeah, so, Tesla Motors known for creating electric vehicles,

and not just electric vehicles. The very the very first one, the Tesla Roadster, was known as like the super sexy sports car electric vehicles and and and Musk argues with the with the concept that they're an electric car company. He said that they're luxury car company that happens to make electric vehicles. And I think that first one was what a hundred thousand dollars, uh, baby, there was would have something. You know, I don't have the figure in

front of me. It seems to me like that might even be on the low end, but and it was

probably right around there, but yeah, it was. It was known as being the super sexy, sleek, fast, silent car that that was the thing that a lot of people, you know, really focused on was not only was this thing fast, but it was quiet, so it wasn't like other you know, supercharged cars that have these incredibly powerful engines in them, and had this very quite um and and you know, the whole Tesla story again, we'll probably do a full podcast on it someday, the Tesla Motors,

not Nicholas Tessel. You already did that one, um all. But another little thing to keep in mind about Elon muskis if he buys your company, that doesn't necessarily mean you're in good shape. Because he invested in Tesla in two thousand four, then he took control of the board of directors, and in two thousand seven he deposed the founder of the company, Martin Eberhard. So yeah, he said I like this, I want it, and now, yeah, that's

that's us paraphrasing editorializing. For a while there, he was looking for I think someone to take over as the CEO and uh and and couldn't couldn't find anyone. Well, there there was a time where he had a different CEO in place, Okay, but there were issues between what Tesla was promising Tesla Motors was promising and what they

could deliver. Essentially, they were getting they were getting orders for Tesla roadsters, and they were having trouble meeting the demand that they were and it was a limited demand. I'm not saying like thousands of people were by it, yeah, but but it was still difficult for the company to

meet that demand. And as a result, the company was starting to get into some financial trouble and so as a response to that, Musk began to do things like layoff employees and he even ended up firing the CEO he had hired to replace the former CEO, and then he assumed the role of CEO. And it was all in an effort, you know, from Musk's point of view, I assume, to keep the company alive. UM. And it

wasn't just the roadster that they developed. They developed some other vehicles as well, including an suv and the Models which was the pre first world's first premium electrics sedan, the Model X was the suv minivan and UM and he's guiding the development of that, yeah, so he he definitely is still very much in uh involved in that. Recently,

there's been a bit of a some controversy. The Tesla Roadster has been the victim of some poor press, as has the the the models, and there's some dispute about how accurate that was in fact outright indignation on the part of Musk. Well, it was. It was a It was a New York Times reporter. That was the most recent.

Before that, there was an episode of Top Gear where they drove a Tesla Roadster and then showed people pushing the roadster back to the studio and then uh Elon Musk said, I called shenanigans on this because, um, all the data from the car shows that there was plenty of energy for it to get back to where it was. They were just doing this for the purposes, for the purposes of showing, like what happens when your electric car and solve juice. I don't know what happens when your

car runs out of gas. Maybe you should watch your charge on it and make sure that you don't, yeah, because I mean that. That was one of the goals of Tesla Motors was to create an electric vehicle that could run on a full charge about as far as a comparable car would on a full tank of gasoline.

You know, to get that as close as possible, because I mean that's clearly a big concern that people have with electric cars is the idea that you would run out of juice halfway back from going out and then do you know, Yeah, and since you don't have a you don't have an electric car station every you know, two miles like you do a gas station, right, what do you do? And and so this was sort of playing on those fears, and Tesla was like Shenanigan. There

was plenty of juice in that. I mean, I understand what your your concerns are, but we are meeting those concerns by building up these charging stations, particularly in the United States. Well, the New York Times piece that Lauren referred to was an article that also went into detail about the Tesla. I think this the Models. That was

like a specific um. Yes, the Tesla Models test drive, and uh, it was John M. Broder who wrote the piece and wrote that it did not perform up to standards and that in fact, the car died on part of one of the legs of the journey and it had been too Yeah, there's a photo of it getting up onto a flat that. Yeah. And then Elon Musk again said Shenanigans park too, and then pulled all the data off the car and showed earlier. You know, he wrote a blog post that he produced this data and

showed it off to everybody. Whether or not the data is accurate, I can't say, but it was from his his blog post, he said, this guy did not charge the car as long as it needed to be charged. He was told how long by the car, like you need to charge this much in order to go that far, and then he stopped charging prematurely. That he still went

further than what was projected. So the car outperformed what it should have been able to do, but it still wasn't able to get through the full leg of the journey because it had not been charged all the way. And that he was doing things like driving around in circles in a parking lot right right, and and generally not um not adhering to the best practices. I mean, because electric cars will tell you everything about you know, you can really micromanage how you're using it synergy, and

he was not. He was not doing that thing. That's that's what Elon Musk says. Because again we don't have

the full story here. Mark Margaret Sullivan, who was the editor in charge of this story, says that she looked into this and that she felt that Broder was not being dishonest, but that he might have been less accurate then he needed to be like he wasn't taking careful enough notes and he wasn't paying enough attention to what he was doing, but that but that she was not she did not think that it was intentional, That's what

she says. Elon Musk, on the other hand, says that John Broder had just a grudge against electric vehicles in general, and that this was him carrying a bias over into a test drive and that that was what was guiding him and doing these things. Response was really quite strong, and he got a little bit of flak in the press for that. For yeah, well, there's and there's been a lot of back and forth in the blogosphere between Musk and Broder and as well as with Margaret Sullivan.

So it's it's kind of it's it's a lot of trash throwing. It's kind of interesting to read. I mean, it's entertaining. Uh And honestly, honestly, I don't know who's in the right in this. I mean, uh, I would like to think that the electric vehicles are really well made and can perform as advertised, because I think electric vehicles could be a wonderful, wonderful future, assuming that we find a way to produce that electricity cleanly, like if we do the solar stuff that Tesla must imagine. That's

what I'm calling your besties. Um. I guess that brings me around to the final bit about Elon Musk. He got divorced from Tallula Riley in he had married her back in a twenty Yes, supposedly he they were loaned with the Google judge for their honeymoon. Yeah, Elon Musk is friends with a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of celebrities as well. But anyway, Yeah, so they got divorced in twelve. She got four point two million dollars out of it. Keeping in mind that Musk

is worth a couple of billion. Yeah, yeah, so, um, in fact, there were there was at least some reports like she only got four point two million, And I'm thinking, you add up all the money I've ever made in my life, and I don't come close to that. But yeah, four point two million dollars. But there's a weird happy ending. They're reunited apparently back. Yeah, she's trying to make him, prevent him from going King crazy, which she says is a thing in England, like when you become king, you

go nuts. That seems like it's a common phrase back where I'm from. Like, really, I'm an anglophile, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, you know, I'm preventing him from going King crazy or King nad. I know the You've had your share of you know, e centric, eccentric royal. Yeah, eccentric is I think a mild term. But sure, I mean, but but I mean England has its own way of dealing with them, right, They just put a parking lot over them, all right. Well, that

that wraps up this this profile on Elon Musk. Like we said, we'll probably do profiles on some of the specific companies, I mean everything from you know, PayPal would be a good one. SpaceX and Tesla Motors are all great candidates for future episodes. But if you guys have your own suggestions for episodes we should tackle in the future, I highly suggest you get in touch with us and let us know. Our email address is tex Stuff at discovery dot com, or you can let us know on

Facebook or Twitter or handle at both those locations. Is text stuff H. S W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit has staff works dot com