Elon Musk, Founder, CEO & Product Architect, Tesla Motors, Space X, 4/12/12

now tonight we are pleased to welcome a brilliant inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk mr. musk is CEO and CTO of SpaceX a private space rocket company that's aiming to send the first privately funded flight to space within the next three years he also serves as a CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors at which he was he has overseen the development and design of all the electric Telsa the all-electric Tesla Roadster the Model X SUV and the Model S sedan which we have here tonight on display at the front of the ballroom I understand they're taking orders and he would be glad to fulfill that order for you prior to SpaceX mr. musk co-founded PayPal the world's leading internet payment system but rather than me telling you about him let's take a look at this video which is part of the Bloomberg risk-takers series Elon Musk he's a lot like the kid in the comic book whose fantasies turn into reality but not as a magician he did it as an engineer an engineer is the closest thing to magician that exists in the real world Musk's fantasies and the companies they've inspired are transforming the way we live like this guy is changing the world he founded his first company at age 23 and sold it a few years later for 300 million dollars he helped pave the way for online commerce with PayPal his goal was to transform the financial industry he made solar energy affordable and jump-started the electric car industry we show that you can make compelling electric cars that people really want to buy and he's beating NASA to outer space Elon Musk goes a step further with SpaceX he literally wants to go to Mars and he's still only 40 I looked to him with awe at the way in which he can see the future and make it manifest his greatest asset is his ability to take this big big dream and make other people believe that it's true there have been setbacks we had maybe about a week's worth of cash in the bank hole and despite his critics musk has never been bashful about his own achievement you know Prince is a gas guzzling hog by comparison with this car yes he's a media darling a scale of 1 to 10 how sexy am I gonna be if I buy this price I mean 11 here he is in the movie Iron Man he was even the model for the movies here oh yeah from electric jet you do then we'll make it work [Music] ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Elon Musk [Applause] well thank you for having me it's an honor to be here before you so I guess what I've been asked to do is is kind of talk about the various things that I've done and what led me from one thing to the next because it isn't completely intuitive how somebody would get from internet payments to rockets and and so I sell I'll tell you that story and then I think there's some questions that I'll be answering that have been that have been submitted so I was I was born in South Africa and and left there when I was 17 - I always actually always wanted to come to the United States I visited here as a kid when I was I guess about 10 or something and I read a lot of comic books and I always seem to be set in the United States so it seemed like we're cool things happen and and I felt in South Africa actually that if you wanted to be at the cutting edge and if you wanted to be at a place where great things were possible that there was no better country in the world and I think that's still true today and I don't mean to suggest complacency you know because one can lose that but but I do think it is true even-steven still so I had to go through a somewhat secure this route because although my grandfather was American a lot of people don't know that from Minnesota and it's not far from Europe thank you close and my great-grandfather was also from Minnesota and in fact I was named after my great-grandfather so I'm kind of the opposite of Barack Obama I'm from Africa named after an American so so I but my mom was born in Canada so I didn't have US citizenship so initially I was in Canada for a few years and and then came down to the US I went to the University of Pennsylvania did it that studied physics and and then business at Wharton and decided that I actually wanted to try to invent technologies related to electric cars they were actually three things that I thought were really yeah that I thought would most affect the future of humanity when I was in college and those three were the Internet sustainable energy and making life multiplanetary so but I thought about those things in the abstract it wasn't as though I thought that I would actually be involved in all three of those things but so it goes and at the time I actually thought the play that the best opportunity might be in electric cars and so I actually went out to California originally to do with the intent of doing a PhD at Stanford on high-intensity storage devices for electric cars particularly ultracapacitors and and I got out there and then during that summer I wrote some Internet software answers in 95 and and I thought well you know I can either I can either spend several years doing doing a PhD on on ultracapacitors and maybe find out that success with what was not one of the possible outcomes because that's you know unfortunately how it can sometimes go or I can try to start an Internet company and and see how that goes and and I did a hedge my bets I actually I asked for deferment at Stanford so I figured in fact I talked to my professor and said I'd like to defer for for about maybe three to six months and I'm pretty sure I'll be back because companies usually fail and that's how it goes and and he said well it's probably the last conversation that we'll have that's that was the last conversation we had and although I should point out a lot of people think like I must be huge on on being entrepreneurial I actually tried to get a job at Netscape if people can remember it like probably remember that company I sent in my my resume didn't get a reply and I tried hanging out in the lobby and and I was too shy to talk to anyone so so I figured well either either oh I'll start an Internet company or or I won't do anything in the Internet so it's uh that's that's why I wrote some software and thought of my first Internet company called zip - and yeah and it turned out well actually so we ended up building software that that helped bring the media companies online particularly the newspapers and there weren't always online and we want a consumer brand but we helped with the New York Times and knight-ridder and Hearst and the number of others who were investors and customers so sold that to Compaq at the time and and then with the funds from that started a company called XCOM which merged with a company called con Finiti to create PayPal so and initially with XCOM the in the early days the idea I was just trying to figure out well where there's there an opportunity that they had in an industry that perhaps hasn't had a lot of innovation applied to it where the internet could make a lot of sense and it seemed to me that well you know money is essentially just an entry in a database and the there wasn't really it was quite difficult to pay for things online if you were to credit a credit card processor you know like on eBay people would mail checks to one another so we created this system which actually had an integrated set of financial services and had this feature which enabled you to transfer funds just by entering an email address and when we demonstrated the system nobody cared about the financial services but people loved the email payments thing which was the easiest to implement so we focused on that and now this is approximately December of 99 things were kind of crazy in December of 99 like the Nasdaq was four thousand or something like that and we debuted the slide kind of liked it around that time and then by the end of January we have about a hundred thousand customers and we had five people and customer service that's that's a lot of anger and I actually did a little short anecdote about how we solve that problem because never done customer service before so we sat around basically thinking we're really screwed what are gonna do so we tried two things we we hired an outsource call center company which did work for AT&T and American Express and we thought well those guys are real experts that they're really going to know how to do this and and but but they were taking a bit of time to get going so then I my director of communication he said well she's got this sister in Omaha who she's a housewife she doesn't she's never needed to do and she's got some friends and and maybe maybe they could take the easy questions and well you know what I got to lose sure they were awesome they kicked the ass of the professional the professional call center company so I sent my director of communications out to Omaha and said you're not the head of the Kohl Center you need to hire 100 people in 30 days and actually that's that's where the PayPal call center is to this day so yeah worked out really well [Applause] so then they think things are quite turbulent in in 2000 at particularly the Internet but I'd like to thank Madison Dearborn for investing in March of 2000 and I understand it was ended up being a pretty good return and and we made it through that really tough period and and then in February of 2002 we we I took the company public and and then we received an offer in about mid 2002 from eBay to purchase the company and and we sold the company for the decent amount of money so in fact it allowed me to do some of the other things that that are relatively high capital endeavours rockets and cars they take a lot of cash so I I started SpaceX first and and and I'll go a little bit back backtrack a little because initially I was not gonna start a rocket company the thought I had was that we needed to reinvigorate interest in space and in exploration and I you know I thought well if we could just do something that would get people excited about space exploration then then NASA would get more money and then we could continue on and send people to Mars and have a base on the moon and just you know we can keep keep going in space and it's so the thought I had was this thing called Mars Oasis which was to send a small greenhouse with seeds and dehydrated nutrient jail you'd land the green greenhouse and you hydrate the gel in the plants and the public tends to be that what people in general tend to respond to presidents and superlatives so this would be the furthest but life's ever traveled the first life on another planet and so I thought well that I worked at people really excited and so I started learning more and more about space and all of the elements and I died although I have a physics degree which is helpful I didn't know anything about rockets or or spacecraft or anything so but I learned more and more and I was able to get the cost of the spacecraft and communications and so both down to a reasonable number sort of in this sort of several million dollar range which which is very low for something like that and but I was I travel with the Rockets and that the lowest cost us rocket was a Boeing Delta - and that was 65 million dollars and I figured that would probably make some mistakes so we needed to do two of these in case one went wrong and because that would be really you know anticlimactic and and you know maybe don't have the desired effect so and I didn't have enough money for that because I wasn't expecting this would make any return so III thought well where can you get lower-cost rockets and you know Russia as it turns out has a lot of rockets and you know with with with the disarmament in the various salt treated you know salt talks and said what they were actually it had to destroy a bunch of rockets under the treaties and well you know instead of destroying them you could sell a few to us so I went to Russia three times that was a to to buy an ICBM felt normal at the time so yeah this was in late 2001 and 2002 I it was definitely you know I was just about 30 and the Russians were like with some crazy American here that wants to buy the biggest ICBM and the Russian fleet but the night I said well I got money I said well you may be crazy but he is money and they're happy to talk to me after the the third trip to Russia I was like wow I got really tired of going to Russia and and as I started to learn more and more about it and I thought well maybe you know how hard is it to make a rocket I you know it's like what does it really take and so I got a gather together a group of engineers and we had a series of sessions of a trip during weekends because they're mostly more working and I just want to understand what you know what made rockets expensive or what goes into a rocket and you know you learn a lot I think often more by talking to people and then by reading books but I mean both are good sources and and I it just seemed to me like there wasn't really anything fundamentally preventing us from having you know much more advanced rockets that that lowered the cost of access to space and I also decided that I was I was wrong about my initial assumption about about there being insufficient will I I think there's actually a great deal of will to explore in the United States but particularly the United States which is a nation of explorers it's it's really fundamental to the American psyche that there's no storage shortage of will but people need to believe that there was a way and and so I thought okay well we need to work on the way and so I started SpaceX in in 2002 with the proceeds from PayPal a large part of the proceeds from PayPal and the the initial idea was well let's make the smallest useful orbital rocket which would be able to deliver about a thousand pounds to orbit which is there are some satellites that fit into that category and that was the the Falcon one and we needed to develop the whole rocket including the engines the stages the guidance control system electronics and the launch site because to the degree that we used legacy components then we inherit inherited the legacy cost structure and limitations so we essentially had to do the whole thing from scratch and and that this is this compounded the problem and so and of course then I'm there and I actually tried to hire someone to be the chief designer but the ones who were really good wouldn't join and the ones who weren't really good well that wouldn't have done any that would have been helpful so I ended up being the chief designer and well we got to open on the fourth time that's the cut to the yeah the happy part and we did technically get to space on the second and third flights just not all the way to overall velocity and a lot of people don't don't quite appreciate the difference between getting to space and getting to orbit but to get to the edge of space you only need about a Mach 3 terminal velocity to get to orbit you need at Mach 25 and the energy required scales with the square so you need nine units of energy to do a suborbital flight you need 625 units of energy to get to orbit and we did almost get too overdone on flight too and that I won't drill into the technical details but but yeah that was unfortunate the video is quite sad as you see it spiraling out of technically was spiraling in control and then it's so anyway the the this the third launch failure was was in roughly in mid-2008 and and then going into the end of 2008 well I was not a good environment for raising capital and and and I'd run out of money so fortunately the fourth flight worked and in late 2008 and and then I think it was December 23rd approximately NASA announced that they were giving us a 1.6 billion dollar contract to resupply the space station so that was like Merry Christmas but if the fourth flight had not worked that would have been it for SpaceX Thank You faith and in parallel with that story there is the the story of Tesla and I don't have enough time to tell tell all the stories of these things but initially with with Tesla III didn't think it would be necessary just to do something like Tesla but I was disappointed that General Motors had recalled the ev1 and I don't if people have seen who killed electric car but it was sort of a sad story and at the time people thought electric cars would be you know if there would be ugly and slow and and low range kind of like a golf cart and so we we needed to show that that that was not true and I so which so we created the created Tesla developed the Tesla Roadster and and that that helped get the ball rolling and we unveiled it in in 2007 and in fact that that was what got General Motors to do the eveyone and Nissan to do the leaf and a number of other programs and initially I tried to not be CEO of Tesla as well a lot of people think I am CEO of two countries because I want to be there's not the case but going into two thousand two thousand eight again I essentially commit all of my capital between SpaceX and Tesla had Oh zero zero cash in fact I ultimately had to borrow money for friends to pay the rent so I had to run run both companies or would not have well I success odds would have been much lower and I'd like to thank Antonio for crisis for being a key investor and and not just invest of a strategic partner through that period I don't think we would have made it with that his help so thank you so that yeah if we had to raise around for Tesla at the same time and at the end of 2008 let me tell you if you tell people you're a start-up car company and you need money and General Motors and Chrysler are about to go bankrupt that has a tough story but we managed to raise the money really really all from an internal investors and I'm grateful to them all for for for doing that and then with Tesla we were able to convince Daimler to become a to be a partner of ours and we provided the battery pack and charger for the electric smart and after that was successful for about a year then they they became an investor and they were they were also key to to saving Tesla and and then we went public in it gets two years ago yeah so went public two years ago and it's gone pretty well and in a few a few months I will be coming out with the Model S so we'll go into production that car over there and and with the model s our goal is to to show that a car that is of a comparable price to other premium sedans is actually arguably a better product it's got a range of 300 miles it good to do 0 to 60 and 4.4 seconds it's I think it's not bad looking and yeah and it can charge fastest an awesome car I got I got a do better could car sales and anyway so and and I'll switch back to basics for a minute and then and then and then take questions or address the questions so jumping to where SpaceX is now we were able to get the Falcon one to orbit and we got our Falcon 9 big rocket to orbit unfortunately that worked in the first time and then we were able to launch our dragon spacecraft and brought that to orbit and and returned it to Earth and we have an upcoming flight which is to the space station this will be the first time we attempt to dock with the space station there's a lot that could go wrong hopefully it doesn't so it certainly be a nerve-wracking time but that that launches is in the next three or four weeks and and then it about maybe three years or so we should be launching astronauts and and then the long-term goal of SpaceX is to develop the technology necessary to extend life to Mars and make life multiplanetary and I think I can see a path towards making that happen and yeah that's that's basic so yeah so thank you Elan so there's so many places I could start we get solar power internet space rockets electric cars serial entrepreneur so I start with tells Tesla in the development of electric car by the way these questions are submitted by our members so if they seem particularly stupid I did not do these so in the development of the electric car why did you skip over the hybrid model and other alternative fuels sure Indian we actually initially did look at doing a plug-in hybrid for the the sedan and I after really thinking about it fro for a live i I I felt that we could be if we if we split the baby effectively we could even we would not make a good product I felt if you focus on an electric car or you focus on a gasoline car you can make a great gasoline car or a great electric car but if you if you split it you end up having a really compromised vehicle so I felt that mener was also somewhat of a transitional phase and the plug-in hybrid felt to me more like sort of an amphibian and you want to sort of transitional all the way to being either land or ocean that that was I mean that couldn't turn out to be wrong but that's that's how I felt and I forgot to mention that there is actually a video a SpaceX video which I think might be interesting people to see I don't know if we can play that that we can or can't we I don't know if it's handy but all right there it's a simulation model so with what the simulation is showing is what we aim to get to with the next generation of rocket technology the ultimate goal of rocket I mean that the really the long sought after goal with with buckets is to make one that is fully reusable like other modes of transport you imagine that even had a jet that was not reusable very few people would fly it or if you had a car that was not reusable very few people would drive we have to have rocket technology that is rapid rapidly and completely reusable and that's that's what we hoped it about next at SpaceX the the cost of the fuel or propellant is only about 0.3% of the cost of the flight a much much as it is for an airplane so you know obviously there's a to order of magnitude potential for improvement if you can make a fully and rapidly reusable rocket I'm gonna get this SpaceX in a minute but I understand that the Model S will debut in July but it it's sold out through March 2013 so what do you project for the the electric car space and will we all be driving electric cars yeah what I think will occur is that all modes of transport will be will be fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets although I think it's possible for our kids to be renewable because you can with the with water co2 and electricity and something like a ruthenium catalysts you can create methane and oxygen which is actually a pretty good rocket fuel so yesterday GM reported that a battery blew up in a test and just tell us two things have you had problems with with batteries with Tesla and where's battery technology going a tremendous amount of money has been invested in companies that are developing battery technology sure we've never had a battery fire or explosion in any car at Tesla and we've now had we've got I don't know quite a few cause the road to cut cars on the road now in 33 countries and particularly since our first car was a roadster a sports car it hasn't they've driven it lip you know some pretty crazy ways and if you you can actually Google Tesla accident if you're curious and that there Wilson some real doozies out there there was one where a guy got it was was parked in front of a Volkswagen Touareg which is kind of a big SUV at a light and got rear-ended by I think a Prius at about 50 miles an hour I was quite quite a hard impact and got shoved under the Touareg like a wedge flip the Touareg into the air it landed on the on the on the Tesla and and so there's this picture of this Volkswagen SUV sitting on top of a Tesla with a Prius in the butt and both the driver and passenger walked away without injuries so no battery fire so it's it's been I mean I you know I say that now on of course I'm testing my life by saying that but so far it's been really good that's a heartwarming story but Dad how about where where where battery technology is taking us absolutely so I got a million of those yeah so a battery technology has been improving approximately I know 8% a year or maybe 10% a year depending upon how you count it in terms of costs and energy density so if you look at say the battery pack in the roads two versus the Model S there's about a 50% increase in energy density and the cost is about half so the cost per kilowatt hours about half so that's a pretty you know decent improvement over the course of let's call it four or five years and I think we'll see continued improvement in the future we've got a pretty good road map you know I can certainly see 30 40 percent improvement without any miracles so it's kind of wearing okay thanks so a SpaceX represents an interesting intersection of public and private funding and it could be viewed as contrarian to your libertarian views my libertine views why is why is funding fill the public funding philosophically correct in this instance and do you view the government as your customer or your partner well government is in the case of Tesla Tesla does have a loan from the Department of Energy now it is the in terms of capital total capital raised we'll let you know I guess it's sort of roughly around a third of the capital is is coming from the d-r-e loan I think we could have gotten a gotten things done without the deer alone but but that was certainly a helpful catalyst in fact a lot of people think Tesla was were saved by the deer we learned but this is not the case died Daimler saved at the time that people thought we were saved by the deer we were actually saved by dime line so we certainly have someone to think but it's and it starts with Adi but it's Daimler and and then about a year after that we start leaving some some very funding and and but I think we kind of had to do that because if you know if GM and Chrysler and many others are receiving government funding and and we don't seek a low-cost source of capital then well that would be pretty pretty dumb so we kind of we kind of had to do it and I think on balance it's a good program that that particular program so which is a separate program from Solyndra in case in weeks wondering honestly if I had a dollar for every time somebody mentioned Solyndra I wouldn't need an IPO but but then in general it's important to mare in mind that the government is going to be a third of almost anyone's customer base like if you make pens or ham or whatever anything since the government is about a third of the economy you there will be about a third of your customers on average so along those same lines what do you think of the US government's retrenchment and research refreshment and research and development particularly in regards to the space program well in NASA's budget has been relatively flat in in space so it's not so much I mean it's a small reduction but it's not a significant in in government expenditures on the NASA front however it seems as though things have gotten more and more expensive to do things in space and I think that's partly because NASA has not had great options as far as who to work with the the the the main national contractors have tended to increase their costs over time and they've tended to merge and consolidate so there were fewer of them so if you're in NASA's position and you you don't have a lot of horses and you're stable to choose from then you know things things are gonna get more expensive over time and so what what I think SpaceX has been able to do is to be quite helpful to NASA in in giving them options that are lower cost and enable them to achieve more for a given dollar a lot of people think SpaceX is somehow competitive with NASA but actually it NASA's our biggest customer that there are about a third of our launches are with NASA do you think the the Russians have announced some pretty aggressive plans for intergalactic exploration and whatnot do you think that'll act as a spur put pressure on the US to to re-energize its its space program earlier than they pleasantly present a plan well I don't think that I don't think the Russians are likely to be a serious competitor in space unfortunately that the Russians have have not invested in new very invested very little in new space technology since the fall of the Soviet Union that the Rockets that existed 20 years ago are very similar to the Rockets that that exist now so I I don't think much is going to occur there I think China on the other hand could could be a significant competitor they are investing a great deal in their space program and they are very much set on exceeding the United States in space exploration so I think there's really it's really just gonna come down to the United States and China now you you're a businessman and you're trying to change the world and many of the things you do do you stop to consider what is more important creating profit or having a positive effect on society well I don't think being profitable and creating a positive effect on are necessarily mutually exclusive in fact I think that they're usually coincident but I mean there there are times when they are not aligned but but those times are are more unusual than usual and there are cases such as the you know where you have the classic tragedy of the Commons issue you know which anyone who's taken economics 101 is aware of where you have a public good that is consumed and it's not priced correctly I think this is the case with the co2 capacity of the oceans in atmosphere there's there is some co2 percentage which is going to result in calamitous events on earth it's not completely clear what that percentage is but you can certainly I think you get wide agreement that at a certain percentage it's going to be quite bad unfortunately there's no price placed on this and so you have classic tragedy a common tragedy the Commons occurring you see this also in fishing stocks and international waters where you know since no one owns the fishing stock in international waters they will fish a certain area to extinction and you know that's all well and good that's the that's the fish but in this case it's us so I think I think I think we really need to pay attention to that particular issue Thanks you're right it was I called my person that made the decision it was a 35 percent return rate so I thank you for that you're welcome PayPal was a pioneer in e-commerce but it's other importance was launching the careers of several entrepreneurs who went on to start it or play key roles and companies such as YouTube LinkedIn Yelp can you describe the culture that existed at PayPal that helped inspire these entrepreneurs and and what other companies do you see is similar in encouraging young people to go out and innovate and startup companies so I think it part of what's caused there to be so many companies to have started from from PayPal was that you had to pretty strong count basis from X comment infinity that that merged see it kind of a double talent base and then it was sold for pretty significant amount of money and and that is so suddenly you had a lot of talent and a lot of liquidity and and that's what really gave rise to a lot of these companies and and there was also a good mixture of people because there was some some people like roll-off Berta who went to Sequoia there was a venture capitalist and Peter Thiel who sort of acquired quite a smart investor and then you also have people that were sort of more entrepreneurial and technical you know as strong with technology so it's sort of a good mix of talents and expertise and and and they're all been kind of we had the the Silicon Valley operating system loaded into their heads during that the PayPal era and and it ended seen both the sort of the high times as well as the very low times so that kind of that they were kind of there were veterans of a sort in an entrepreneurial experience I think those are probably the key ingredients that resulted at those companies do you mean you're you're young and you say many times you didn't intend to be CEO but you became CEO do you consciously try to create a culture of innovation is it more collaborative or competitive would you say I think it's more collaborative than competitive yeah I certainly try in fact I'm certainly pushing for innovation all the time so I'm trying as far as I can to push people to try new and different things and you know whenever you tried something new there's a probability that it will succeed it's never certain in fact it's arguably quite uncertain so there has to be a culture of the culture where failure is it is fine provided that people thought it through and kind of had some good assessment of the risks ahead of time you you know when you try to be innovative most things you try will not will not succeed yeah but but then occasionally they do and then so you really have to foster a risk what I would call a risk rational environment yeah let me go back to space extra minute for those are you're cheating on your hand device you probably saw that the North Koreans had a little accident with their rocket today and apparently make it into orbit and you you did that three times and four times yeah so you had one more and you were gonna be out of money Yeah right that's correct so that had to be like watching your eight-year-old on the foul line with the game tied I mean what was it like watching that fourth that was that the fifth launcher the fourth sorry the fourth Lorne's the one that got to over it yeah so what was that like what was that day like what was that time when they blasted off it was it like the longest time of your life I did it it takes nine minutes to get to orbit and I was a long nine minutes I felt terrible and and at the end of it I mean I literally white-knuckled you know just the whole time and at the end of it I I didn't even feel elation I just felt relief yeah so Chicago is striving to be a hub of innovation and we've had some successes we have a great universities and research labs progressive companies and a talented workforce how can Chicago be more successful in creating the innovate and hosting innovative companies do we do would you have any advice for us oh I think it is a great city and lots of Boston companies are here yeah so it's only 12 so I well I guess it depends on on what type of company you mean sort of high tech companies then I think you need to have you need to have venture capital particularly in these sort of seed round and the the a round area because that that's very sparse in most parts of the country outside of Silicon Valley and to unless degree the Boston area you need to have a bit of an ecosystem where the fundamentals of the business like you know in terms of being able to lease space and get legal advice and accounting help and all that where there were there are some people that are willing to support a company that is that's just an idea you have that in Silicon Valley so that's sort of us that's what I mean by this sort of ecosystem and then you for these for technology you need to have you need to have a critical mass of technical talent so to do whatever you can to attract the key engineers and you have some great universities here so I think those are a good nexus for creating technology companies we have a lot of young members and we have a lot of young guests here tonight that are in their early stages in their business careers some of them are entrepreneurs and want to be what do you have some advice maybe you've you've started five companies yourself all successfully you have some advice well I'd say certainly make sure you have a good pain tolerance there's a friend of mine who has a phrase for starting a company is that it's like eating glass and staring into the abyss if that sounds appealing you know and and those who have started companies know what I mean it's pretty it's pretty hard and you have to be prepared to live on next to nothing you know when I started my first company I had a few thousand dollars I couldn't I started with actually with my brother he's here and they were in somewhere and he came down from Canada and we started this company and we literally had a tiny amount of money so we could either we could either get an apartment or we could get an office and the office was cheaper so good we got the office and and and then we had a sort of these few tones that would be couches by day and then we'd have meetings and then there turn into beds at night and would shout the YMCA down the road I was that slow burn rate basically so if you're starting company really focused on having a low burn rate and I think try to get a useful product demonstration as soon as possible even if it's just completely jury-rigged so people can get an idea of what your products like or service sort of the case may be that they need to really feel it everything looks great on PowerPoint everything works on PowerPoint but if you can you can actually get a sample or a demo or something that that really makes a difference in fact that was key to us getting the initial daimler contract was the Daimler was really you know the idea of them buying technology for an American car company was the furthest thing from their minds it had a negative experience with Chrysler and that was not not what they wanted to do but we we created a complete working electric smart and them demonstrated for them and that's really what got them interested is there any is there any leader or innovate our entrepreneur that a you truly admire and had an influence on you or any mentor well there's really a long list I love reading biographies so I think that we'll had had some measure of an influence I recently read obviously the Steve Jobs biography is great and I read the number of books about both the autobiography and number of books on Ben Franklin I think he's pretty awesome I like Edison obviously I like Tesla and you know I like I like a lot of the scientists as well you know Newton and Einstein and a number of others and but I've read you know many many different things to say that there's only one particular one but I I do I do strongly recommend reading biographies and autobiographies that I think those are really fascinating what's your leadership style what would people if you weren't in the room say about your leadership and what do you look for in people that you surround yourself with well I'd try to find people that are really smart and driven and and and that are that have a strong feedback loop you know that it's really important to seek out feedback particularly negative feedback if you in fact I think one of the best things that someone can give you as constructive negative feedback but it it kind of sucks to hear it so you have like you know you can't have to make yourself you're I agree with that statement that's why I don't ask for it good working so what's what's the next big thing for you you've you've done five companies what what what do you see is a problem you're you're ready to solve well I'm definitely gonna be working on SpaceX and Tesla for for a long time and then this Solar City which the solar power and although I'm look they're on a day to day basis just provide some strategic guidance and the main credit for that goes to Linda and Peter arrived but but I think I'm gonna be for I think I'm kind of strung out right now honestly did you move out of that office so you gotta get partment yeah we did ya hear that yeah it turned out it leaked that office fortunately doesn't rain that much in California so yeah so I'm one of the most amazing things you've done you've started five companies your investors has never lost money but I don't know anybody else that has twin boys and triplet boys right how the hell'd you do that it's science and and then and then a follow-up question there there two of them are eight two of them three of them were five right that's correct and so you're running two companies and you're involved with another that I know of so how do you get balance in your life what what do you do to to balance all those stuff I have a Labrador Retriever I handle yeah well my week kind of goes like this I have SpaceX on Monday Tesla on Tuesday and Wednesday then Thursday I'm back at SpaceX a half a Friday at SpaceX half of Friday at Tesla because the Tesla design studio is adjacent to the rocket Factory and and then we can sort of spent with my kid so that's kind of how it works that's pretty good so I know you were very philanthropic why don't you take a few minutes to tell us some of the things that that you are involved in and I think they're important and a chance to make a pitch and there's a lot of rich guys right well I I tend to support you know a bunch of things in in the environment and I think education is extremely important you know that's that's probably the best investment for the long term and support a lot of educational initiatives particularly in in science and for underprivileged kids here and in other countries I just we're just building a high school in Haiti in a place that's never had a high school so yeah I think supporting the you know education and you know an environmental causes health care there's so many good causes really but I think probably but the toughest problem for this century is going to be sustainable energy because that that is just such a you know the energy production the production of energy and consumption of energy is such a gigantic industry and there's so much inertia and we do have such a strong dependency on hydrocarbons that that's that's going to be a tough one and so yeah and water people say well access to clean water if you look at that as a place that you'd be interested in water is I view water is primarily an energy problem in that if you have affordable energy you can run a desalination plant or water purifier that kind of thing and so and then and that sort of takes us back to sustainable energy and but I do there are localized order problems in in many parts the world certainly Haiti is a good example where they've had the biggest cholera epidemic in the world I think four or five hundred thousand people have been affected which is by five percent of population because they don't have clean water so one final list yeah and I don't know if this is true but have you said that you plan to retire and Mars and and if that's true when when will that be and how well will you get there yeah absolutely well I could build some big Rockets yeah I I think I think I think the the next generation of rockets after the Falcon Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy after that basically after the Falcon line will be capable of sending people to Mars that's you know so clear how long it'll take us to develop that but I think best-case ten years worst case 20 years so sometime in the 12 probably 12 to 15 year period is when I think it would we're likely to go to Mars but but people have accused me of optimism Elon thank you very much for coming tonight [Applause] I think it's it's pretty obvious why he successfully founded and and and exit' didn't manage five companies and we really appreciate it's been very important to us and thank you this meeting is now adjourned

Channel: The Economic Club of Chicago

Views: 1,131

Rating: 4.75 out of 5

Keywords: The Economic Club of Chicago, EconClubChi, Chicago, Elon Musk, Economic Club of Chicagi, Space X, Tesla Motors, Space Exploration Technologies, Tesla, SpaceX, Mars, Living on Mars, boring company, chicago loop, elon musk chicago, high-speed transit, ohare airport

Id: Yv6oYUeYnX4

Length: 58min 38sec (3518 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019