Pushkin.
All right, okay, so getting in it's really really low.
That's what you want to do?
Is actually a friend of mine owns a Tesla roadster black like the Batmobile, kind of slide in.
Okay.
Welcome to X Man. The Elon Musk Origin Story, a special report on the relationship between science fiction and the worldview of Elon Musk. I'm Jill Lapour. Okay, so that was the ignition.
Yeah, all right, you want to go, Yeah, I do.
Alright, let's go after Elon Musk made a fortune with PayPal and launched SpaceX. But long before he bought Twitter, when he was famous but not half as geopolitically influential as he is now, he was known for Tesla. So I decided to go for a ride.
Well, oh my god, that's good.
A century ago, in the early days of the automobile, petrol powered cars won the battle against electric cars. In nineteen ninety six, a few years before Tesla got started, GM developed an electric car called the EV one. California had just adopted a new zero emissions law. But then, after California revised that law, GM seized its fleet of Eve's, all of them. Grieving owners held funerals for their cars.
Some might say that to be here gathered today to mourn.
The loss of a car would be going too far.
We are here to say goodbye to more.
Than a car.
It is difficult to know what to say at a time like this.
I consulted my Rabbi's manual and there was absolutely nothing in it for the burial of the car.
So when Tesla came up with the roadster, these people who'd held those funerals, these people went nuts. The roadster was sleek and fast, It had a range of something like two hundred miles. True, it cost about one hundred thousand dollars, but that was supposedly part of the plan, make electric cars sexy, sell a bunch to very rich people, and use that money to build a more affordable car. Hollywood A listers signed up. As Musk told NPR.
George Clooney, that's the founders of Google, Laryn Surge, what's the name of.
Flee from Chollipevi's apoort.
A car Tesla when it launched that first car, Tesla was a great story, something genuinely new and not some ethereal thing like Facebook, a physical thing, an engineering marvel, but Musk was a better story. Young, handsome, dashing Thomas Edison meets Henry Ford meets Elvis Presley. He'd already disrupted banking and aerospace, now the automobile industry. He wasn't just selling cars to celebrities. He had become one or No, he was becoming something more. Here's how he talked about himself.
Then, what I'm good at is, well, I think I'm good at inventing solutions to problems. Things seemed fairly obvious to me that are clearly not obvious to most people. So and I'm not really trying to do it or anything. I just seemed like, I don't know. I just I can see the truth of things, and others seemed less able to do.
So you can hear it just there in the messianic language. When I started this series, I talked about Musk as Batman. But long before that, in his Tesla Heyday, Musk had begun to think of himself as Tony Stark. This episode, Elon Musk as iron Man.
He's the real life Tony Stark. This guy, please welcome.
Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur as superhero is an interesting historical turn one more way in which Musk's brand of capitalism is tied to science fiction. But this episode, I want to begin by taking a look at iron Man's origins with the US military during the Cold War.
Who all, what is the most breathtaking, most sensational superhero of all? Iron Man?
Marvel Comics introduced iron Man in nineteen sixty three during the Vietnam War.
Rich handsome known as a glamorous playboy, constantly in the company of beautiful a daring women.
Look, there's Tony Stark.
He's the dreamiest thing this side of rock.
Hudson, Yes, and many. Stock has both a sophesta cut and a scientist, a millionaire bachelor as much at home in a laboratory as in high society.
Stark travels to Vietnam to test some new tech in the jungle, he trips and sets off an explosive and wakes up in captivity to a communist. Hated by a fellow captive, an elderly physicist, he sets to work building a device to save his life.
I've done extensive work with transistors. I can design them in any size to perform any function.
In the world of iron Man. You take technology on faith it works.
But this man who seems so fortunate, who's envied by millions, is so destined to become the most tragic figure on Earth.
Stanley, who created the character, said later that comic book readers hated the Vietnam War, so he created a superhero who is a military contractor on a kind of a dare.
So I said, I'm going to come up with a character who represents everything everybody hates that. I'm going to shove it down their throats.
But earlier he told a different story. In nineteen sixty three, Lee said, most Americans thought that what was going on between North and South Vietnam was a pretty straightforward good versus evil story, and would have thought of Tony Stark as the good guy.
Here.
Still, Tony Stark was a tragic figure, invincible but trapped in a machine of his own making. In two thousand and eight, Marvel reimagined that tragedy when it brought out what would become some of the highest grossing Marvel superhero movies of all time, the Iron Man franchise, produced by Paramount and starring Robert Downey.
Junior, Tony Stark, visionary genius, American patriot even from an early age. The son of legendary weapons developer Howard Stark, quickly stole the spotlight with his brilliant and unique mind. Today, Tony Stark has changed the face of the weapons industry by ensuring freedom and protecting America and her interests around the globe.
The Ironman films were written by a guy named John Favreau. While Favreau was developing the character of Tony Stark, he met with Elon Musk.
At age four, he built his first circuit board, At age six, his first engine, and at seventeen he graduated summa cum laude from MIT.
Musk received delivery of the very first Tesla roadster in February two thousand and eight. John Favreau bought a Tesla too. The first Iron Man movie hit theaters three months later, Ironman in the Tesla rollout It was like a double feature. Boy Wonder grows up to save the world by building new machines and revels in his own celebrity.
If I take a picture with you, yes, it's very cool.
This too, seems to come from Musk's backstory. Back in nineteen ninety nine, after Musk made his first millions from x dot com and PayPal. He was already keen to become a celebrity.
I'd like to only cover of Rolling Stunt better be cool.
After Ironman came out, Musk was on the cover of Rolling Stone. The headline read Elon Musk aka Tony Stark wants to save the world. Musk and Stark even look alike. Black jeans, black T shirt, maybe a blazer, same haircut, a little stubble. In the movie Reboot, Stark Industries is manufacturing weapons to be used not fighting communists in Vietnam, but fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. Tony Stark is super flashy.
Tell you what, throw a.
Little hot rod red in there.
Yes, though, should help you keep love profile.
If Elon Musk influenced Tony Stark, pretty soon, Tony Stark seems to have begun to influence Elon Musk before iron Man. Musk and Interviews was modest.
The things that worry me are we going to make a mistake? Our own foolishness, our own errors can hurt us. There's a reason why there's an adiomatic expression about rocket science being hard. It really is really hard.
If you are not a Musketeer. If you've always scratched your head at what people could possibly find appealing about Elon Musk. Listen to some of these early interviews. He's a smart, fascinating person with interesting, if grandiose ideas.
Well. I think what I'd like to do is help solve some important problems. So I think, in a small way, helped build the Internet. And then with respect to the global warning problem, that the transition away from oil and other hydrocobins to something which is clean and sustainable, I hope to have an impact there. And then with respect to space, I hope to have an impact in helping make humanity a multiplanet species.
But after Iron Man, Elon Musk seemed to become more like Tony Stark, flashier brasher. In twenty ten, in the second Iron Man movie, he had a cameo as himself.
Mister Musk, how are you?
Those Merlin ewes are fantastic?
Thank you?
Yeah, good idea for electric jet?
You do, then we'll make it work.
Elon Musk became a character in the Marvel universe and on the celebrity circuit. It seems sometimes as if Musk was resisting this role. For instance, in an appearance on The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central.
People have called you the real Tony Stark.
You're trying to do good things.
And you're a billionaire. I mean, yeah, that seems a little bit like either superhero or super villain, you have to choose one.
Are trying to do useful things.
After a while, though, he settled into the role. Okay, I am iron Man.
But eventually you can transform Mars into an earth like planet.
How would you do that?
You'd warm it up, drop the nuclear weapons over the polls.
You're a super villain.
Yeah.
Still, I think there's another way to look at this transformation. Maybe Elon Musk becoming Tony Stark had been Tesla's plan all along. Science fiction as a business strategy, you have to drive it. I'm not really a car person. I'm more of a bicycle persons, foot on the brake and push d Okay, But when I went for a ride in my friend's roadster, I'll admit I was super excited to take a turn at the wheel.
So low. Yeah, literally feels like you're on it is.
Yeah, Well, did you write go cards as a kid. Yes, it's like a riding a go card.
Yeah.
I think I don't really really want God.
Yeah, driving the roadster was a blast. But I wanted to learn more about Tesla's history, so I called up Ed Niedermeier, a long time auto industry analyst and author of Ludacrous, The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.
I think a lot of the very earliest investment in Tesla was not really an investment in Tesla. It was an investment in Elon Musk.
Musk didn't start the company. The earliest news stories about Tesla didn't even mention him or else. They talked about him only as an early investor. Musk seems to have said about making sure stories about Tesla were stories about him. In two thousand and six, on the Tesla website, he posted the Secret Tesla Motors master Plan, a clever manifesto that explained the company's strategy build sports car, use that money to build an affordable car, Use that money to
build an even more affordable car. While doing above, also provide zero emissions electric power generation options. But it was also a very canny bit of self puffery. Call it the secret Elon Musk master Plan. He introduced himself this way. My day job is running a space transportation company called SpaceX, but on the side, I am the chairman of Tesla Motors and and eight. When both Tesla and iron Man made their debuts, Musk left the conventional mold of the
Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind. He moved to Los Angeles, which is also where Tony Stark lives. In two thousand and nine, one of the guys who started Tesla sued Musk for, among other things, slander and libel. He said that Musk set out to rewrite history by claiming he'd founded or created the company. The suit was later settled out of court in a resolution that acknowledged five co founders of Tesla,
including Musk. Meanwhile, though Musk's pr stunts generated just the buzz the company needed.
A big part of Silicon Valley is not just making money. Another big part of it is the idea of changing the world and making things cool. The reality is that the reason Tesla is here today is because Elon Musk is a remarkable storyteller.
In some ways, what Musk was doing. A man becoming a brand is an old game. Colonel Sanders is Kentucky Fried Chicken, and then there's this guy Trump.
Steaks are the world's greatest steaks, and I mean that in every sense of the word.
But Musk did something different. Musk as Tesla was irreverent, and he was witty, ironic, whip smart. The cheekiness of Musk's online persona was new then, even if this voice has since become ubiquitous online. Tesco's sassy Twitter personality, say, Musk was sassy and messianic all at once. Not the greatest steak in the world, but the steak that will save the world. Niedermeyer has gotten a lot of harassment for writing about Tesla.
I've been labeled by the fans and the company itself as a hater or you know, someone with potentially nefarious motivations for writing about Tesla the way that I do. The reality is is I wanted the book to capture what I saw as the complexity underneath this very polarized discourse about it online. And I think that, you know, a a lot of that polarization has been a conscious strategy.
It's absolutely not a coincidence that this very polarized culture has sprouted up around Tesla, and that the fan culture, you know, people call it a cult. I think that Musk knows that if you can force people to either love him and trust everything he says implicitly, or hate him and think he's a con man. More people will break his way, and so polarization is a strategic advantage to him.
Long before Musk bought Twitter, he seemed to be tweeting all the time, getting into spats, cultivating a following, iron manning his millions of followers. Began to gang up on his critics, especially women. Why did he need fans? Why did he need to be so online? Ed Niedermeyer has a theory.
Musk's fans need him to promise the impossible, and Musk needs them to give him adulation even if he doesn't actually deliver on the impossible. He needs them to tend and nurture and grow again. What I think, ultimately is the most important thing about Tesla, which is the narrative in the image.
For Niedermeier, this relationship is a consequence of the sort of speculative capitalism that involves more speculation than capital.
It's a natural outgrowth of the venture capital culture of betting on the jockey and not the horse. You know, for a venture capital investor, you don't always have to build a really sustainably profitable business. What you have to do is make sure that at some point down the road, you can pass your investment off to someone who thinks it's worth a lot of money.
Tesla almost went bankrupt in two thousand and eight, the year iron Man came out. In two thousand and nine, it received a four hundred and sixty five million dollar loan from the US government. It raised two hundred and twenty six million at its IPO in twenty ten, and in twenty thirteen paid back its government loan ten years early. In twenty twenty, it had its first profitable year, and those profits have continued. But despite the company's incredible success,
in twenty twenty four, profits seemed to have slumped. There are no guarantees in the auto industry, and for Kniedermeyer, the story of Tesla, which is one of engineering virtuosity and against the odd success, is also a story of precarity. For Tesla and for a musk.
His position has always been incredibly precarious. And it's because fundamentally, you know, a lot of why he's there is not just the narrative, but also it's his risk tolerance is an incredibly risk tolerant person. And you can look at a lot of different decisions the companies made and see that, and you know, with risk comes roared, but risk is also risky.
As far as risk goes. The striking thing about Tesla to me was how for a long time Musk described it as a company out to save the planet from existential risk by a Tesla avert human extinction. In twenty twenty one, on Earth Day, President Biden was at the White House charing a sum out on how to avert climate disaster. Well, Elon Musk was at the launch of a SpaceX rocket carrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station.
The astronauts drove to the launch site in Tesla's that each have their own suv with license plates that read Reduce, recycle, and Reuse. A key story for Musk as a brand for years was that he was saving the planet by fighting climate change.
But was he Elon Musk is a really difficult one to parse. He's been very open and saying that colonizing space is a sort of a survival strategy, which I think is a thought that has a weird amount of currency out there in the world. And when you think about it, you know, in my view, just makes no sense.
What's soever.
Elizabeth Colbert is a New york Er staff writer who won Appel Surprize for her book The Sixth Extinction.
There are a lot of these tech billionaires who are interested in SPAZ obviously, as you know, and who also see it as a big business, and it's hard to pull that apart too. How much of this space exploration hype I'm going to call it is on behalf of potentially very profitable businesses, and how much of it is really this kind of sci fi escape from Earth fantasy, I really don't know.
So then why do you call it hype?
Well, I mean, Elon Musk is constantly telling us, you know, when we're going to colonize Mars. But if you ask any person seriously involved in space exploration, are we colonizing Mars the way Elon Musk is constantly proclaiming that we will, and within a very short time frame they will say absolutely not. There's absolute no way that's happening.
So then there's this other line of thought that I confess myself totally perplexed by, which comes from the people who talk about human extinction scenarios and their calculation is sure, they're suffering here on Earth, but if we don't go to other planets, then humans will become extinct when our planet dies. And so against your global suffering of people enduring poverty and disease, we count the untold numbers of our human descendants whose human potential will be lost if
we don't go. Like it's almost a kind of extraterrestrial economics. Have you encountered that existential risk argument?
Every species that we have in the fossil record eventually does go extinct. I'm not really predicting, you know, human extinction here, but if you look at the record, it's pretty much one hundred percent, you know, over time. So the idea that humans Homo sapiens are going to be around for the end of the planet Earth as a habitable planet, that's so crazily at odds with As I say,
what we know about the history of life. So embedded in that is this notion of humans as completely separate, completely divorced from evolutionary history, and facing this shining future on other planets. And that is a really interesting idea. It's not one that I find very plausible.
I'd called Colbert to ask her about Tesla, but we ended up talking a lot about SpaceX, since it can be difficult to pull these two visions of the future apart. What struck me most talking with Colbert were her observations about the internal contradictions of Muscism. In twenty twenty one, Musk announced that Tesla would accept bitcoin from people to pay for their Teslas, and the Tesla itself had purchased one point five billion dollars worth of bitcoin. The price
of bitcoin jumped. Musk has been an incredibly avid proponent of cryptocurrencies.
Bigcoin is a terribly energy intensive cryptocurrency. Bitcoin mining nowadays is using up roughly one hundred and thirty terarowat hours of electricity per year, and that's roughly the energy consumption of a country like Sweden. So the internal inconsistencies here, I think prevent him from being a particularly good spokesman for environmental causes.
In twenty twenty one, Colbert published a piece in The New Yorker about Tesla's bitcoin polluting. Days after it was published, Musk announced that he'd changed his mind. You could no longer buy a Tesla with bitcoin. Still, a lot of commentators pointed out that there really was no excuse for Musk's decision to accept bitcoin in the first place. How could he not have known that bitcoin is mostly mined
in China and mostly on servers fueled by coal. A writer for The Washington Post, pointing out how well known it is that bitcoin is practically designed to waste power, asked had Musk been on a multi year newsfast in any case, the essential tenet of Muscism remains every problem can be solved with technology. It's the reigning philosophy of Iron Man, too, the motto of Stark Industries.
Everything is achievable through technology, better living, robust health.
Everything can also be wrecked through technology. Elizabeth Culbert's book Under a White Sky asks whether we have engineered ourselves so deeply into so many problems, especially climate change, that at this point the only way forward is to try to engineer ourselves out of them. Stopping carbon emissions is essential, but it's not going to be enough. Maybe we need
to invent machines that can eat carbon. Environmentalism used to be largely anti tech, but it's not anymore because maybe there's no longer a choice.
I don't think there is really a sort of anti tech environmentalism these days, but there are different strains, and Elon Musk is the avatar of the strain that says, well, humans can just do anything that we put our minds to. We can cognize more as we can sucks here two out of the atmosphere. There's no geophysical limits here that we can't overcome. Unfortunately, I think that's just not true.
We approached Tesla for a response to several points raised in the series, but at the time of this recording, we hadn't received a reply. I loved driving the Tesla Roadster, but as I say, I'm more of a bicycle person.
So is HG.
Wells, who once wrote cycle tracks will abound in utopia. Alas utopia is never coming, I'll settle for sustainability. And sustainability will require more than just switching out every petrol powered car for an electric car. There on need to be fewer cars and more bicycles, pedestrians and public transit, and more renewable energy. But Tesla is pioneering that too. Beyond producing electric cars and making them thrilling, Tesla has done a whole lot for renewable energy, especially with its
battery technology. After all, the last part of the company's secret master plan had always been provide zero emission electric power generation options. In twenty seventeen, after a statewide power outage in South Australia, Tesla won a bid to design a battery system for the state and promise to install it in one hundred days. As Musk explained at a press conference.
This is going to be the largest bat translation in the world by a significant margin. We actually insisted in during the contract that we beheld to the one hundred where it's free. The system will be three times more powerful than any system on Earth. This is not like a minor Forura into the frontier. This is like going three times further than anyone's gone before.
Tesla delivered in sixty three days. The system's still working fantastically well for South Australians. Energy is cheaper and more reliable. Somehow, this sort of thing never gets the Iron Man treatment. It's not sexy, it didn't involve Hollywood or celebrities. It didn't turn on Reddit, it didn't end in a Twitter feud. It wasn't even a science fiction fantasy, and it did not save the planet. It was a smart renewable energy partnership that went well.
There was really this opportunity to make a significant statement about renewable energy to the world, to show that you can really do a heavy duty, large scale, utility level battery system, and that South Australia was up.
Of the challenge a public minded infrastructure project. It might well be the most significant thing TESLA has ever done. It is not, however, what Elon Musk will be remembered for, because he pretty soon stopped talking about climate change as humanity's greatest existential threat. Global warming risk is overblown, he posted on Twitter in twenty twenty three. We don't need
to rush to solve climate change, he told Trump. At the end of twenty twenty four, the less Musk talked about renewable energy, the more he talked about politics and especially about money. Next time on x men, bitcoin and dogecoin and doge the Department of Government Efficiency Muskism under the newly re elected Donald Trump,