The Evening Rocket: Iron Man

about the Tesla. I decided to go for a ride. So what I like it? Off? The car? Is it? I really do? I feel like I'm driving a piece of art? Yeah? Who. 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 evs, 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, To be honest with you, I consulted my Rabbi's manual and there was absolutely meling 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, there's the founders of Google, LARRYN. Sergay, what's the name of Lee Flee fla chollieps about 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 Thomason meets Henry Ford meets Elvis Presley with a little Dick cavit tossed in debonair. 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 where. 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 seem barely 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 just seemed like, I don't know, It's just like to see the truth of things, and others seemed less

able to do so. Elon Musk was becoming a superhero. Time on the Evening Rocket How Elon Musk became Iron Man CEO of Tessa Motors. 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 be gained by taking a look at iron Man's origins with the US military

during the Cold War. Oh oh, 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 side of work cuts. Yes, Anthony Stock has both a sophesticut and as scientist, a millionaire bachelor as much at home in a laboratory as an 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. Heated by a fellow captive and 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 Earth. Stanley, who created the character, said later that comic book readers hated the Vietnam War, so he created a superhero who was a military contractor on a kind of a dare. So he said, I'm going to come up with a character who represents everything everybody hates it. 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, who would have 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 Jr. Tony Stark's fusionary us. 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 Sola cum laude from MIT. Musk received delivery of the very first Tesla roadster. In February two thousand and eight, John Favreau bought a Tesla two. The first Iron Man movie hit theaters three months later iron Man in the Tesla roll out, it

was like a double feature. Boy Wonder grows up to save the world by building new machines and revels in his own celebrity sick if I take a picture with you? Yes, that'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 like to only cover Rolling Start better. After Iron Man came out, Musk was

on the cover of Rolling Stone. The headline read Elon Musk Ak a 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, I should helping

keep a low 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 adeomatic 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 waring problem that the transition from away from oil and other hydrocommence to

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, flash you brashure. In twenty ten, in the second Iron Man movie, he had a cameo as himself, how are you Those Merlin engines 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. You're

trying to do useful things. After a while, though, he settled into the role. Okay, I am Iron Man, But eventually you can transforms into an earthlike planet. How would you do that? You'd warm it up, dropped the nuclear weapons over the poles. Was a super villain. 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 person. Ye, put 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. Yeah it is. Yeah, Well, did you ride go carts as a kid. Yes, it's like a riding a go cart high end. I think I don't really really want Yeah, driving the roadster was a blast.

But I wanted to learn more about Tesla's history, so I called up Ed Niedermeyer, a longtime auto industry analyst an author of Ludicrous, 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 Teslomotors 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 Teslomotors. And in two thousand and eight, when both Tesla and iron Man made the 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, Lloyd Grossman is his line of sauces, 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 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 lot of that polarization

has been a conscious strategy. It's absolutely not a coincidence that this very polarized culture has 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 the strategic advantage to him. Musks fifty five

million followers on Twitter. He has sued his critics he has damned the media. His Twitter followers tend to gang up on his critics, especially when those critics are women. Musk is always getting into Twitter spats. It's strange. Why is this billionaire online all the time, tweeting belligerently about mostly nothing? What does he need it? 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 and the image. For Niedermeyer, 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 dollars

loan from the US government. It raised two hundred and twenty six million it's 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. But for Niedermeyer, the story of Tesla, which is one of engineering virtuosity and against the odd success, is also a story of procarity for Tesla and for Musk. Even as the richest man in the world, when he you know in those days that he is, his position has always

been incredibly precarious. And it's because fundamentally, you know a lot of why he's there. It's not just the narrative, but but also it's his risk tolerance. Is an incredibly risk tolerant person. And you can look at a lot of different decisions the company's 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 is how Musk describes it as a company out to save the planet from existential risk by

it avert human extinction. This year, on Earth Day, President Biden was at the White House sharing a smut 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 Teslas. They each o their own SUV with license plates that read Reduce, recycle, and reuse. A key story for Musk as a brand is that he's saving the planet and saving humans from extinction. But is he

Elon Musk is a really difficult one to parse. He's been very open and saying that, you know, colonizing space is in 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 just makes no sense whatsoever. Elizabeth Colbert is a New Yorker staff writer who want appealed Surprise for her book The Sixth Extinction.

There are a lot of these tech billionaires who are interested in space obviously, as you know, and who obviously also see it as a big business, and it's hard to pull that apart too. How much of this, you know, sort of space exploration hype I'm going to call it, is on behalf of very potentially very profitable businesses. And how much of it is really this kind of sci fi um, you know, 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 mu is constantly proclaiming that we will, and within a very short time frame, they will say

absolutely not. There's absolutely 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 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 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 so embedded in that is this notion of humans as completely separate, completely divorced from evolutionary history and facing the shining future on other planets. And you know, that is a really interesting idea. It's

not one that I find very plausible. I 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. Earlier this year, Musk announced that Tesla would accept bitcoin from people to pay for their Tesla's, 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. Bitcoins a terribly energy intensive cryptocurrency. Bitcoin mining nowadays is using a roughly one hundred and thirty terror watt hours of electricity per year, and that's roughly the energy consumption of a country like Sweden. So you know, the internal inconsistencies here, I think prevent him from being a particularly good spokesman

for environmental causes. Just doesn't suggest that his ultimate goal is really driving carbon emissions down. The day I talked to Colbert, she'd just published a piece in The New Yorker about Tesla's bitcoin polluting. Days later, must announced that he 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 decisions 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 ask had must been on a multi year news fast. In any case, the essential tenant of Muskism remained, every problem can be solved with technology. It's a 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 Colbert's new 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 colonize mores, we can succeed or two out of the atmosphere. There's there are 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 haven't received a reply. I loved driving the Tesla Roadster, but as I say, I'm not much of a car person. I'm more of a bicycle person. So is HG. Wells, who once wrote cycle tracks will abound in utopia. Alas utopias never coming,

I'll settle for sustainability. And sustainability will require more than just switching out every petrol powered car for an electric car. They only 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 this date and promise to install it in a hundred days. As Musk explain at a press conference, this is going to be the largest matter translation in the world by a significant margin.

We actually insisted in doing the contract that we'd be held to the one hundred days or it's free. This system will be three times more powerful than any system on Earth. This is not like a minorphoora 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 with a challenge a public minded infrastructure project. It might just be the most significant thing Tesla has ever done. Next time on the Evening Rocket will blast off to a different past to the science fiction vision

of the future that Silicon Valley left behind. The Evening Rocket was written and read by New Gillipour for the BBC. The Evening Rocket was produced by viv Jones. Oliver Riskin Cuts was the researcher. The editor was Hugh Levenson. The commissioning editor was Dan clark I. Oonah Hammond was production coordinator. Mixing by Graham put a foot In, original music by Corntith for Pushkin. It was produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon and Jake Gorski, who also did the mix and sound design.

Production support from Ben Nattapafrick. Our executive producer is Neil o'bell. Our operations team includes Danielle Lakhan, Maya Kanig and Carly Mgliori. Thanks also to John Schnar's, Jacob Weisberg, Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Nicole Moreno and Eric Sandler.