Well, what I mean by that is in nineteen sixty nine we were able
to go to the Moon, and here we are over three decades later,
and we can barely get to lowerth orbit. And I think by any measure,
that is a step backwards. Is that for a lack of leadership or
technology, I think we made the wrong technological choices. And I think there
was also a lack of will at the highest levels of government to take the
next step and well, at least go at least stay on the Moon and
perhaps build a base there, and then go beyond the Moon to Mars.
And if you look at the news articles in the late sixties early seventies,
the expectation was that by now in the twenty first century, we would have
a Moon base and probably even a Mars base. And I think if you'd
asked anyone at that point in time whether we would be unable to go to
the Moon and have no not have been to Mars, I think they would
think you're crazy. Do we need a leadership in that realm? Do we
need a John F. Kennedy who sets a goal for us when he said,
one one day man will walk on the moon. Do we need that
kind of leadership for this technology to move forward in that big step. I
do think it's it's very important the president set the priority and and and determine
the goal. Uh. You know that that reals nation will aspire to.
And you know, George Bush has his pluses and minuses, but at least
one plus is that he has helped to steer the space program in a direction
that that more or less makes sense. You know. The only thing I
would I would sort of argue with is that I don't think we should be
going back to the Moon. I think we should be focused on Mars.
I think we saw the Do you think that's a mistake focusing on the Moon.
I do think I do think we should rather go I think we should
rather be focused on on Mars. You know, the Moon is kind of
like it's kind of like the Arctic. It's just it's just a very barren
place and very very little resources. It's small, it's not it's not really
a place that we could establish another human civilization. There's a there's a there's
a feeling of been there, done that too with the Moon. Yes,
we saw that movie of the sixties, you know, and the room makes
never as good did we really go to the moon? Ah, yes,
we definitely just wanted to try. The government is incapable of suppressing a conspiracy
of that nature, of that newture. It's okay, good this ambition to
explore space. Absolutely, that's entrepreneur There's there's quite a bit of competition out
there. There's Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, There's Richard Branson with his Virgin
Galactic and I'm not talking about NASA either. There's Paul Allen, there's the
European Space Agency in Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the Chinese, the Russians,
let's just throw all of them into this. Everyone doing a competitive field.
How is SpaceX different? How do you think you'll sort of surpass them?
Well, you know you've You've listed a wide range of entities there, and
I think the differences are really different depending upon which one you're referring to.
The Well, let me ask you this question. Who is your competition?
We have no serious competition, No, not presently. Who's chasing you?
Well, if you mean chasing and have and has a serious chance of catching,
then I think none that I'm aware of. And Biden saying you guys
kind of a hack. Then, well, what Brandson is saying, by
the way, I'm a great admirer of Branson, is really a much smaller
technological challenge. So their craft would be suborbital, so it would go to
about mark three. Our craft is orbital. It goes to mark twenty five,
so twenty five times to speed a sound. But that doesn't describe the
whole scale of difficulty because the energy required to get to those philosophies scales is
the square of the placity. So to do what Branson is doing, you
need to say about nine units of energy. To do what we're doing,
you need six hundred and twenty five units of energy. The difference is monumental.
And then when you re enter you have to you have to burn off
all that energy, so that doubles the problem. Really, So, I
mean, what Branson is doing, for a technological standpoint, is building something
that can cross the English Channel. What we're building is something that can circum
navigate the globe. It's a very different scale of technological difficulty. I still
think what he's doing is great, and by the way, I bought a
ticket on his effort. Yeah, yeah, so I still think it's great,
but it's not in the same league technologically, so you're not particularly worried,
certainly not about no certinly not about that. Now the things that worry
me are are we going to make a mistake? The things that can really
hurts face x are I mean, our own foolishness, our own errors can
hurt us. But not none of the competition that I'm aware of. So
generally you're worried about what's in front of you, not the other guy.
And in fact, you probably don't think about them in terms of how they
criticize you or what they think about you. I don't think actually, I
don't think there's much criticism. I mean Boeing and Luckied of course that they
would criticize, but I don't think any of the entrepreneurial guys would criticize what
we're doing. And it certainly possibly I think, you know, what Jeff
Bezos is working on could ultimately, I mean, he does have aspirations to
get to over and beyond. It's just that what they're doing right now is
sub orbital and at the sort of lower technology level. What I think about
at spaces is really entirely what are we doing to ensure that our rocket is
going to be successful and that we are truly optimizing the cost and ensuring a
higher liability. I mean, that's just a very very difficult problem. There's
a reason why there's an an atomatic expression about rocket science being hard. It
really is really hard. Science really is rocket science. Yeah, it looks
hard, and it's harder than it looks. What's the big goal here,
what's the long term plan? Well, that the long term ultimate objective that
the holy grail is. We would like to help make life multiplanetary. That's
really what we'd like to do, so establish societies on as many planets as
possible. Uh. Well, yeah, I think there's only one possibility.
But yeah, I mean even if we can just go from one planet to
two, I think that's a pretty big step. And you'll start with well
Mars. Mars is the only viable, viable planet, so multiplanetary life.
Yeah, it's helped make life multiplanetary. I think that's an important thing.
I don't think your goal is big enough. Hah, Yeah, it's ambitious.
Well, like I said, we don't expect to do it single handedly,
but we certainly would like to help make it happen. It's fair to
say you've made a fortune. Yeah, I think so, if you have
any reasonable standard. Yeah, And you know, those who work in aliens
probably understand your trajectory. But there are those who are watching who would think
if I made that money, I'd sit on a beach, I'd drink beer,
and I would just watch the sunset, kind of like a Corona beer
commercial. Have you ever thought about that as a career option? You know,
I find that really pretty boring, So that would be torture if I
had to do that every day, that would really be pretty awful for me.
Is there something about startup businesses that really fuels your desire to work?
Well, I guess I really need to be preoccupied with something and if I'm
just sort of sitting there relaxing, I can only do that for a very
short period of time and then it becomes unbearable. Although startups definitely have their
highs and lows. And as a friend of mine who has a good phrase,
you know, a startup business is like eating glass and staring into the
abyss. What is the criteria that you established for yourself or a startup?
Meanwhy want business over? Yeah? Well, for me, it's always about
does what I'm doing matter if we are successful, does it matter to the
world, And so there are easier ways to make money than starting a rocket
company, or say a car company, or even when I started an Internet
company, because when I started the first Internet company, nobody had made any
money, and it wasn't clear that anyone would make any money. It was
simply from the perspective of the Internet being a very important thing and something that
needed to be built, and so I wanted to help at Well, you
touch upon something that's interesting is that there is a that benefiting humanity is a
very integral part of your criteria no matter what you're starting up. Yes,
absolutely, really not everybody has that as a prime interest. I think that's
probably relatively unusual, although there are many people that I know in Silicon Valley
for whom that is a significant motivation. You said in your endeavor here to
explore space that we are committed to failing in a new way if nothing else.
What did you mean by that? Just how it sounds? Well,
I mean we're I mean we're committed to succeed, really, but if we
do fail, I would hope that we at least add to the body of
knowledge such that those who follow may make few mistakes. Now, if Mars
were not enough, you are busy here on earth, the world is not
enough. That's right for you? Where? What have you? No limits?
My friend? Here on earth you are establishing a presence, certainly with
Tesla Motors. Tell us a little bit about that. This is your electric
car company, correct, right? And this is no this is no hybrid
car you could buy on a car lot. This thing goes from zero to
sixteen four seconds? Is that y? Absolutely? Is there a sixteen under
four seconds? It's faster, a better acceleration than any Porsch currently in production,
and any Frari except the Enzo. And it's twice the energy efficiency of
a Prius. So it's you. We have the moral high ground, and
you get to, you know, leave the Ferrari guy in your dust.
So well, let me start to be let me ask the obvious. Well,
and you don't look like one of those guys who's trying too hard in
a Ferrari. Absolutely, yeah, you don't look like a jerk, you
know, you know, up right banana yellow Lamborghini or or I mean there's
something I shoul point out about Tesla, which is, uh, we didn't
you know Tesla is the first car is a sports car, not because we
think the world lacks for a sports car, but because it is the right
entry point for the market. If you have a new technology, the right
place to enter is high unit cost, low unit volume. Just as you
know when when when a new cell phone come out comes out, or a
new a new laptop or some some new thing, it tends to be expensive
at first because they're figuring out all the issues and it takes time to optimize,
and then over time that that technology will become cheaper and cheaper. And
so the model two of Tesla, uh, and maybe I'm leaping ahead here,
but Model two of Tesla is a forty nine thousand dollars four door,
five passenger sedan, and that's that's going to be obviously a much broader market
segment that that that can make use of that car. And then Model three
is intended to be around a thirty thousand dollars price point, and so that's
that's really affordable by by almost everyone who's who's who can buy a new car.
So the idea is to drive to mass market as rapidly as possible,
but only at the pace at which the technology matures. So is Henry Ford,
and of someone you admire, well, I think Henry Ford made some
very important contributions to UH, to business and obviously you know, moving moving,
manufacturing line and that sort of thing. So I think he's certainly worthy
of admiration. Uh here's a bit of an od duct but you know,
certainly noteworthy. But the interest in Tesla's is not from the perspective of,
you know, the world needs another car company. It's more from the perspective
of we have a very important environmental problem that needs to be addressed, which
is and buy the burning of fossil fuels and the increasing CO two concentration in
the atmosphere and global climate change, which I think is going to be one
of the most significant issues of the twenty first century. And the only way
to really get around that, in my view, is really with an electric
vehicle, and then you need to pair that up with a zero mission power
generation method such as solar power. I think is solar power is going to
be a really big deal. Tesla's not a hybrid car. Tesla's pure electric,
pure electric. So help connect the dots from me, why aren't we
seeing Tesla cars on the car lots, then well, what's keeping them made
them yet? So we're just finishing up the development right now, and anybody
can buy this, yes, how will you? Actually we've almost sold out
of two thousand and seven productions, so if somebody does want to buy an
next year's model, that they better act quickly. One of the primary complaints
about hybrid vehicles is there not fast enough. You seem to overcome it.
You won't have any trouble with this. In fact, really there's something uniquely
better about electric vehicles, which is that the talk response is immediate. So
if you want to pass someone, I mean you just the response to the
car is very immediate. It's just it's more fun to drive an electric car
than it is to drive a gasoline car. You know, I was going
to say that Tesla the car, the name of the car company is no
coincidence, is It'll explain a little bit about that, right. The company
is named after Nikola Tesla, who is an inventor. He was originally from
the sort of the area of Yugoslavia and Europe, but he moved to America
when he was young and was an inventor of the ac induction motor. Invented
a lot of the principles of magnetism. So he was a great man,
a great, great inventor, and so the company is named in honor of
him. So these cars, the Tesla Roaster first, the first issue of
the Tesla Roaster available in two thousand and seven. Yes, in the spring
the summer. How do you get on the waiting list? Well, you
buy the car. You basically put down at a positive and we've actually can
you do that through the web. Yeah, we'll have, by the way,
customer centers all around the country. So we'll have one in La,
one of the various Cargo Miami, New York, and eventually nationwide customer centers
where somebody does want to see the current person take a test drive or see
the car being worked on. I mean, we have this idea for the
way that the car is a serviced that it should be a really really pleasant
experience. So we have you know, some some some somewhere between, like
a Starbucks and Apple store. So you'd go in and you'd see the car
being the cars being worked on behind a glass partition. That would be your
car you're watching or somebody else's again, but it's really clean it's really clean,
present bright, It'll be sort of a you know, coffee bar available,
you know, just a we really want to have a very pleasant experience
that that you don't typically get if you go into a dealership. Have you
heard from Toyota, Have you heard from General Motors and Ford saying use the
company for sale? Nobody's actually made a formal offer. But the interesting you
know, I think one of the one of the big values that Tesla can
can provide is serving as an example to the rest of the auto industry because
right now, the order interest, you know, the big car companies believe
that a biable electorcy vehicle is not possible and be if even if it wise
people would buy it. So we need to show that neither of those are
true, that the technology works, that people want to buy it, and
that will be the most effective way of really driving change in the in the
order industries by serving as an example in that matter. And if we were
to sell the company to one of one of the big car compans, I
think it would really slow things down. Mm hmm, you think so.
Absolutely. You're very busy enterprising the part of your company that will explore space.
You're very busy with this car company? Where do you find time to
be CEO of two companies that size? Well, I should correct you that
I'm CEO of SpaceX and I'm chairman of SpaceX, and that is really my
day job. So I spent eighty percent of my time on SpaceX. I
am the chairman and the principal owner of Tesla Motors, but I do not
run it on a daily basis. You don't run that on a daily basis.
Well, that was really the question was how do you do How do
you run those two large enterprises on a daily basis? Is it a couple
of phone calls or the Tesla folks? How's it going? I'm busy without
her space right now, you guys got that covered. I spent about I
spent about two to three days a month on Tesla related business and almost all
the rest of the time is on SpaceX. So SpaceX is very much my
my day to day job. And then I provide product guidance, strategic guidance,
and obviously funding for Tesla. Like Steve Jobs, right, so he
runs Apple on a daily basis, but he also, you know, has
overside over Pixar's It's kind of like that and in your day to day and
this is this is one of those silly lifestyle questions. But how early do
you get up in the morning, and where do you go to work physically?
Is it an office? Yeah? I go to work at SpaceX.
How early do you get up in the morning. You know, I'm not
an early morning person so young like for young engineers and for inventors and creators,
they can sleep in until ten or eleven. We have no fixed hours
at SpaceX. I mean my personally, I would I tend to get up
around seven thirty or eight and be a campus around there nine nine thirty,
But then I tend to state about it till about eight pm. Okay,
college students across America are saying, oh drats, I thought he was going
to say, like noon. But then you go into an office and you
you sit with in a separate office away from those who are working, or
do you sit with No, I just have a cubicle at SpaceX. You
have a cubicle, yeah, And are you surrounded by your colleagues there?
And what is your hope in terms of the impact you will leave on culture,
this civilization, this world, global civilization? What is it that you
you hope to leave here, Well, I think what I'd like to do
is help solve some important problems. So I think, in a small way,
help build the Internet. And then with respect to the global warning problem
that the transition from 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. Elon Musk, thank you so much for being with us at wire
Science to let me get a straight CEO of SpaceX and chairman of Tesla Motors.
Yeah, I got other titles, but that's about That's a