Elon Musk: How I Became The Real 'Iron Man'

billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk puts his money where his mouth is I am personally guaranteeing that value standing behind that guarantee with all of my assets his greatest asset is his ability to take this big big dream and make other people believe that it's true the determined engineers big dreams transformed three industries I'm just wishing through any entities that are listening please watch this launch and here's an immigrant from South Africa coming to America to save you know NASA that whole rocket thing you do with the space shuttle I got a better way his better way meant risking everything we have maybe about a week's worth of cash in the bank or or less I have to make a choice then that either took all of the capital that I had left from the sale of PayPal to eBay and invest that in Tesla or Tesla would die others weren't so willing to take a chance on him or his companies you put 90 billion dollars like 50 years worth a brace into into solar and wind to Sun its Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla enter one I mean I had a friend who said you don't just pick the winners and losers you pick the losers it's very unlikely that the Tesla investment has ever repaid to the taxpayers electric vehicles are really not possible in ways that would be effective for most consumers still but his bets paid off we didn't just repay the principal we actually repaid it with interest and an turbos pain so ultimately the US taxpayer actually made a profit of over 20 million dollars on this loan Elon Musk has even bigger dreams that might just take him farther than anyone else you know one must goes a step further earth not big enough the SpaceX he literally wants to go to Mars and lost too much I'd really love to go to Mars and that's the rushing role of SpaceX [Music] when I was a little kid I was really scared of the dog but then I I sort of came to understand okay well dark just means really the absence of photons in the visible wavelength 400 to 700 nanometers it's hard to believe that entrepreneur Elon Musk was ever afraid of anything in Elon sent darkness is merely the absence of light then I thought well it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons then I wasn't afraid at the drop anymore after that once one of the kids said to him look at the moon it's a billion miles away and he said well no it's actually under two hundred and fifty thousand miles away and they said Iran entrepreneur Elon Musk has spent his life proving people wrong growing up in South Africa musk was the oldest of three children and started school a year early his father was an engineer his mother Mae was a model and nutritionist he was the youngest made about two days and the shortest and then he was this brilliant boy and so people didn't really like him so I was this little bookworm a kid and probably a bit of a smart aleck so this is a recipe for disaster not that he told me much about it he was picked on quite a bit so just like read a read a lot of books and and tries to out of people's way during school and so his social life was much less than my other two kids and that's a typical nerd I read all the comics I could buy or that they let me read the bookstore before chasing me away I read everything I could get my hands on from when I woke up to when I went to sleep at one point I got I really ran out of books instead really encyclopedia and he has a photographic memory so he could remember everything anytime I had a question my daughter Tosca would say hole genius boy his brother Kimball musk when he Louis was ten years old he got tested by IBM and he was found to have one of the highest aptitudes they'd ever seen a full computer programming I tried to take some computer classes but I was way ahead of the teacher so it didn't really help so I saw her doing space game called blastaar musk already thinking like an entrepreneur figured out how to sell his game I realized I was 12 we decided we were gonna open an arcade outcome here near our high school we were in big into video games we figured that it was gonna be a huge hit we got a lease on a building we got the arcade provider to deliver the equipment and the only thing we needed to do by the end of it was get the city to approve what we were doing but an adult had to apply for a city permit and they hadn't told their parents what they were up to but of course they told us we were not gonna be opening up an arcade max chaff Caen is a technology and business journalist who has profiled Elon Musk several times really the most amazing thing about his childhood is his escape from from South Africa I remember thinking and saying that America is where we're great things are possible more than any other country in the world it's a little cliche but it's true america is the land of opportunity by moving musk would also avoid mandatory service in South Africa's army growing up in apartheid South Africa was pretty surreal I mean we didn't support that government we didn't believe in it and so the idea of actually going to the military service was really part of the question I told my parents I was going to to Canada and they tried convince me not to leave and off he flew and I thought wow he's so independent of course as soon as he lands he calls me he says what do I do now except water bus safe from Montreal to Vancouver and that allowed me kind of see Canada at least from the highway he worked at odd jobs across the country before settling at Queens College in Toronto back when I went to college I rarely went to class I just read the textbook and then show up for exams the bigger pills the University was being able to date girls my own age actually met my first wife their mas got an engineering and business degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a scholarship to go to Stanford Silicon Valley was the promised land I really wanted to just kind of go where where the really exciting breakthroughs were occurring Elon had this ability to to look at the world go this is a real problem that's going to in 20 years he looked around and he saw that the world changing stuff was not happening at Stanford I didn't even go to class I called the chair of the department and said I'd like to try selling this Internet company if probably won't succeed and so when it fails I want to make sure that technics still come back my kids do funny things and I'm never too concerned about them because you know if you no one wanted to drop out of college he could always go back my brother was in Canada at the time and I said look I think we should try to create an Internet company so he came down and joined me he had you know $2,000 no friends barely enough money for an apartment I think he told me he was showering at the gym because they didn't have a shower he was living we just got some few times that there were couches during the day and then turned into beds at night Steve Jurvetson is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley I first met Elan and Kimball musk his brother back in the mid 90s when they first set foot in California I think they'd been here for about a week and they were pitching a new company called zip to Silicon Valley in the mid 90s in late 90s was a gold rush people were flocking to the region to find riches to make it in the internet business must came up with an idea to bring newspapers into the digital age he took a cd-rom yellow pages some mapping software wrote a little code and put it all together to create the first online city listings you know was more the business mastermind I was more than sales guy I still had my my core programming skills I was able to write the was the software needed for for the first company now when yuan was starting to keep in mind you know the internet was just a couple of years old most local businesses were not on the internet the way you found a local business was you open up the Yellow Pages they thought it was the media campaigns the newspapers are gonna need help coming online and building lots of functionality into their websites we had someone literally throw a Yellow Pages book at us and tell us do you think she will ever replace this and we put the guy who's crazy because not only were we gonna replace this but that's not where it ended keep going from there it wasn't long before media companies across the country were signing up and so we were able to get as investors with customers the new york times company Hearst knight-ridder and a number of other companies in 1999 the AltaVista division of Compaq bought zip2 for 307 million dollars in cash and 34 million in stock options musk was just 28 years old I hope that's crazy well I would somebody pay such a huge amount of money for this little company that we have it actually also turned out very well for them to actually so stuff there were a lot more about it than I did when the kid solves it - it was the most exciting day we couldn't believe it because you don't know in the internet world if you're going to you know make a million or die tomorrow [Music] in February 1999 Elon Musk sold his first company at 28 he joined the ranks of Silicon Valley millionaires since it was acquired by Compaq for a little over two million dollars and I made a play about 21 or 22 million dollars as a result of that which was a phenomenal amount of money for me it was obviously a financial windfall it was super fun to go out buy some toys one of his first things to do is go out and get a big sports car he's comes from a family that really enjoys racing in vehicles and he got one of the highest performance cars money could buy at the time it was a McLaren f1 and proceeded to enjoy that around the Bay Area let's say there's a number of adventures and respecting news with with his driving well I'm sure it felt you know wonderful to have all this money and and have people recognizing success I think he was also frustrated that this company hadn't become as great as he wanted to be it hadn't it hadn't changed the world it had just slightly altered the course of newspaper history which I think from his point of view is you know kind of piddling accomplishment so I certainly have a choice at that point of retiring and you know buying an island somewhere and sipping mai-tais but there was not of interest to me at all there really wasn't a choice of we weren't gonna do anything it was just really what we were gonna do next any landscapes in particular it was really just stepping stones the goal with in doing my second area company was to create something that would have a profound effect and it seems to me that the financial sector had not seen a lot of innovation on the Internet and money is really just an entry in a database and and it's so it's low bandwidth it seems like something I should lend itself to innovation he was very rich I mean just more money than most people could dream and he took almost no time in-between that sale and starting the company that became PayPal Musk's new company created something we take for granted today it changed the way the world buys things the way money is transferred from one person to another at the time transactions were very slow people would have to mail checks to each other so it could take weeks just to complete a single transaction with his windfall from the sale of zip to must quickly turned around and founded XCOM to make electronic cash transfer as possible but his new company collided with a rival mobile payment company called con Finity and they were really competing against each other and the real enemy at the end of the day was eBay we combined our efforts in order to compete effectively against eBay's built-in system they called the new company PayPal when he looked at PayPal that his goal was not to create a place you could do person-to-person payments his goal was good to transform the financial industry were able to become the the leading payment system in the world and then they finally threw in the towel and acquired PayPal in early 2002 musk and his partners sold PayPal for 1.5 billion dollars musk was the largest shareholder and walked away with 180 million he was 30 years old I could abort probably a chain of islands but but that big a no it's not it's just not a lot of interest to me Islands weren't of interest but outer space was it's just a much more exciting inspiring future for out that are exploring the Stars as opposed to the future where we are forever confined to earth I was thinking well I wonder when when we're going to Mars you know when is when is naphthenic go to Mars and I went to the NASA website and there was no plan to go to Mars and no plan to really even take the next step in space exploration this is he was saying he wants to go and enable the human civilization to leave the planet Earth I said it's about a big as big a vision as you could possibly imagine and that's gonna require funds and he has enough funds to go do it so he's gonna go do it musk had the outrageous idea that private enterprise could actually reenergize space travel and in June 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX Elon was the only funder of the company for this early years another incredibly risky move to say nobody on the planet thinks this idea is financeable I'm gonna fund all of it myself to the tune of almost a hundred million dollars which was the majority of his net worth at the time into a dream to take on the military-industrial complex now here's an immigrant from South Africa coming to America to say you know NASA that whole rocket thing you do with the space shuttle I got a better way actually travelled to Russia three times look at buying a refurbished ICBM without the nuke and I Kim's conclusion that the real thing that was really holding us back from making much more progress in space it was really that Rockets had not evolved since the 60s so the trick isn't figuring out how to get to orbit it's figuring out how to get to orbit cheaply so I had to come up with low-cost ways to produce engines the primary structure the electronics to the launch operation as well as run the company with very little overhead and to some of inventions in all those areas is what has led us to a roughly three to fourfold improvement over the cost of of other rockets in the United States what SpaceX has been very successful at is taking basically off-the-shelf technology stuff that was developed by NASA 50 years ago and streamlining it so in that way he's kind of the Henry Ford of of space because Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile he just figured out how to make the automobile you know commercially viable musk was more than just an entrepreneur if you ask yuan how he managed to teach himself rocket science he'll just look at you very seriously and just say very quietly read a lot of books thirty two-year-old Elon Musk had his next big idea at his family's annual visit to Burning Man the counterculture desert happening although still fascinated by rockets and fast cars he wanted to find a way to end Earth's addiction to fossil fuels I was one that the idea of going into the solar power arena to Lyndon and Peter I of my cousins he's basically hands this idea to his cousins and says if you want to start this I will I will fund you and it'll be your company but I'll be the Chairman and they say okay and it works almost perfectly what they've figured out is that if you sort of do a hundred things ten percent better in the area of solar cell installation for homeowners you can dramatically consolidate an industry that's currently a bunch of mom-and-pop shops so it Solar City instead was they say how about no money done you want solar cells we'll just put it in you don't pay a cent right it's like leasing a car but even better Solar City started in five western states and soon grew into the largest solar service provider in the US the solar cells keep going solar city that only goes up at the end at least so the fascinating business model were in the long run they may become the largest energy generator in America all of these but renewable energy was just one part of a much bigger goal musk had a more ambitious plan for a sustainable future he had this idea that he wanted to make electric cars help humanity get off fossil fuels and so cities about sustainable energy creation whereas Tesla's but sustainable energy consumption in April 2004 musk helped launch Tesla with six point three million dollars of his own money it was the first auto industry start-up in decades and the only one born in Silicon Valley and it's really pretty simple it's you know make a high-priced car at low volume because that's essentially the only thing we could afford to do and then step 2 is a medium priced car at medium volume since f3 is a low priced car at high volumes Tesla's plan to introduce a high-end high-performance product to first attract outliers then make an affordable car for the masses teslascope founder and first CEO Martin Eberhard we expect to to change the way people think about electric cars with this car and that we hope to open the market for us to sell other electric cars but we also know that if you start off by saying let's first change human nature and make everybody Drive crummy little cars that doesn't work so instead let's build a car that people want to drive let's build a car this is hot and desirable and beautiful and convince people that driving you know electric car is not a compromise its idea of actually going in and putting it in a high-end car and breaking the mold of what an electric car wars was exciting this is no longer gonna be a golf cart this is gonna be a Ferrari any cops watching when we first saw Tesla it had a good explanation for how they get to market without having to spend exorbitant amount of money how they would create a brand and the object of desire and consumers and it's part of the story clicked together he talked about Silicon Valley smarts being able to show Detroit how to do something that Detroit didn't think was possible its batteries its Drive electronics it's electric motors those are skills that are present in Silicon Valley and our president Detroit Tesla's revolutionary technology for the Roadster started with a computer battery as the power source for the automobile JB Straubel Tesla's chief technology officer was the main designer of the electric powertrain for the first time it was possible to drive over 200 miles and have performance that was directly comparable competitive with what a gasoline car could do and Tesla was the first company to to take those principles and put that into practice and try it California Governor Schwarzenegger showed up for the roadsters 2006 coming-out party a test of this one it's hot he bought one so did Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney but could must sell regular customers on his idea at that time there was very little activity in the auto industry in electric vehicles we were in the age of the large SUV so it was a little unusual to hear about this company in California that was planning to come to market with a high-end all-electric sports car we were very passionate about trying to make sure that this car was going to just throw down the gauntlet on what the technology could do and really prove to the world that electric vehicles you know could be incredibly fast and could have incredibly long range there was kind of a sense of adventure you know doing these things for the first time and doing it in a really scrappy way you know we did some of the very first battery packs in my garage in Menlo Park before we actually were able to rent a real office the big issue for Tesla as with all electric cars has been the batteries their cost and how long they last Eric Noble is president of car lab an automotive consulting firm that evaluates new cars and trucks American consumers are very ready for battery electric vehicles unfortunately battery electric vehicles aren't ready for American consumers the first results at Tesla seemed to support this gloomy forecast when we first started out the thought was simple and really obviously in retrospect quite naive which was to make use of some technology that we developed ourselves but also some technology that would license from AC propulsion put that together and create an electric sports car that would be compelling so let's see where did that fall apart it fell apart when the teen told musk that the projected cost had skyrocketed from $65,000 to 140,000 as the problems mounted musk faced a do-or-die decision at Tesla he would have to choose between investing his paypal pay off or let his new company collapse and Elon was looking at this and saying the dream is still there but oh my gosh what do I got I got to get this under control by 2007 Tesla was running out of money fast no one wanted to step up to save the unproven automobile startup Elon Musk had to take the leap alone with make some pretty dramatic changes essentially recapitalized the business and invest about twice what we originally expected what we really expected as the outer limit basically Tesla got to this point where they only had enough money in the bank for a couple of months and there's nobody around who are willing to put more money in I take all of my reserve capital and invested in Tesla which was very scary because you know it would actually be quite sad to have the fruits of my labor with subduer and PayPal not amount to anything but there was no question that I would do that in my mind because tells it was too important to till I die I'm available 24/7 just to help solve issues right I call me 3:00 a.m. in of Sunday morning I don't care we had to go in and make some really hard decisions on on personnel changes and even really had to dedicate his time to the company I want I want I want names named so if someone's always on the hot seat and it's always the root cause for problems they will not be positive organization long term it's not okay to be unhappy and part of this company and if somebody can't get happy right musk and his board replaced Martin Eberhard one of the co-founders who had been running Tesla and I think we kind of really really exceeded the level that Everhart could handle and they're freaking apparent in 2007 we either were gonna have to shut the company down or you know wasn't have to take over as CEO it was actually a process of building a company as well as building a car you know a lot of people that fit in very well with a company when it was extremely small you didn't end up you know fitting in as well when it was larger Everhard didn't go quietly he sued musk for libel slander and breach of contract I believe that I was scapegoated to take the blame for the programs that were not run well must resolve the disputes through mediation but his company was in serious financial trouble in September 2007 musk flew to Germany with a scheme to raise extra cash by forging an alliance with Daimler Mercedes it down is the company that invented the internal combustion engine car the maker of Mercedes smart and their endorsement carries great deal of weight so that was a just a very important moment he had to convince the company that Tesla could supply battery packs for its cars they were skeptical really the key thing was to demonstrate a hardware that worked you know if they can't touch it they can't drive it it's not particularly real he pushed his team to retrofit a Daimler smart car with Tesla's electric motor but first they had to find one the Challenger converting a smart card to electric was doubly difficult because we couldn't find a smart card the small cone for sale in the United States we had to send somebody down to Mexico to buy a smart car bring-bring 1/2 to the US and then the smoke is really tiny so we had to fit up a motor how electronics of charger and everything in the squad car the challenge was daunting to replace the smart cars gas engine with a Tesla drivetrain and battery fitted in the tiny space under the hood and do it all in less than 4 weeks we didn't have much time at all we knew that from the beginning and we kind of prepared for almost battle and you know setup war room in the shop they worked around the clock stealing maps on the factory floor right up to the deadline the Daimler executives arrived and nut it all convinced that it made any sense to work with an American car company let alone a little tiny American car company in Silicon Valley while waiting for Daimler's decision must brought in one of the world's leading automobile designers to help create his next project a modern and sexy family sedan what she called the Model S originally with Model S I thought well let's let's have Kerry Kiska who was had a design studio do the styling we paid him up pretty good sum of money to do that curiously enough the designs that he worked on that he came up with for us were terrible and what he didn't tell us was that he was actually working on a competing car company Tesla officials claimed that perhaps Henrik had come in to learn what Tesla was doing well all along he was planning to form his own company do his own vehicle we were pretty upset with him for basically taking what we're at the time the original specifications for the Model S and then going and shopping a business plan to create that same car Tesla sued him he sued Tesla and there was all kinds of you know infighting Henrik Fisker wouldn't grant Bloomberg an interview but he told us that I believe there is enough space in the market for several new car companies that pursue a new type of electrified powertrain with different philosophies in November 2008 the court ruled in Fiskars favor it was a setback for musk who was also going through a tough time personally after eight years of marriage and five children Elon and Justine musk divorced I got divorced personal life in somewhat of a shambles and in addition getting you know attacked by some in the media my ex-wife every bad thing you could imagine there was more bad news when his bold space transport company SpaceX again failed to get a rocket in support the First Lord didn't get very far got about a minute up and then it was that there was an engine fire and that was it the second flight actually did make it to space but not too overt and then also flight 3 we didn't get all the way to orbit he started saying I've got enough money for three cracks at it he put a hundred million dollars of his own money and he sort of hinted that the idea that after three he didn't make it it would be over SpaceX would would die must burn through the 100 million he had sunk into SpaceX now he was on his way back to the drawing board three days after the failure he announced like first that he knew what was wrong he announced that they raised money to finance a fourth and the fourth launch was gonna happen in a matter of months which in the rocket industry was a crazy announcement we were able to sell the palms and then just as we'd solve those problems where you ran smack into the the worst economic recession since the Great Depression it's been one of the darkest days on Wall Street and recent memory stock markets falling the most since 9/11 the Dow off more than 500 points this is what financial Armageddon looks like red screams that scream sell sell sell it was a week that shook Wall Street and indeed the world and a realization that the economy may still head into a deeper downturn as 2008 drew to a close Elon Musk faced the worst crisis of his career all three of his companies appear to be in freefall the worst point was probably just the weekend before Christmas in 2008 we had the economic tsunami take place and made things even worse if it wasn't needed we had to shut it down and and just figure out what's how do we get through this the stock period and not go bankrupt General Motors shares falling to more than a 20-year low after Goldman cut the automakers rating to sell on a worsening sales outlook that was tough it was obviously an economic period that swore the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler and there we were a young company selling a very very optional car I mean it was really you'd people don't need $100,000 sports car and they certainly wouldn't want one getting poor reviews the popular BBC programme Top Gear took the Tesla Roadster on a test drive in December 2008 this car then really was shaping up to be something wonderful [Music] although Tesla say it'll do 200 miles we worked out that on our track it would run out after just 55 miles and if it does run out it's not a quick job to charge it up again the combative CEO charged the incident was faked and said he had proof that the Roadster had not run out of power he sued the BBC to block reruns of the show the case was later dismissed but things would get even tougher his energy company Solar City founder the bank that had backed their leases pulled out of the deal I certainly did not anticipate that we would have the worst economic climate since the Great Depression and and one which was disproportionately bad for cars I mean General Motors went bankrupt I mean general general effing motors you know musk was in the fight of his life we had maybe about a week's worth of cash in the bank all or less and there was just very little time left in the year to resolve these these things I mean they were like two or three business days left in the year I never thought I was hot it was possible for me to have a nervous breakdown but if it was possible for me to have a nice break down there that was about as good as that's going to come when Eden was going through his sad period I was so sad I felt like I had a hole in my heart and there's nothing you can do you just hurt so much and I just didn't see him getting out of it he was just so sad and then the next thing I get this call saying wow you have made a wonderful woman the one bright spot was meeting Talulah Riley a British actress who had never heard of Tesla SpaceX or Elon Musk they married in 2010 I could be some sort of hapless engineer that had wandered into a London club and he just looked so forlorn he was just sat in the corner on his Blackberry cific he was really out of place and sad I was you know trying to be very sweet to him and instead of humoring him going oh yes when he was gay this is my rocket and this is my Musk's personal life was looking up and the future of SpaceX was finally taking off the fourth attempt to launch the Falcon 1 was a huge success and three months later NASA rewarded SpaceX with a 1.6 billion dollar contract to resupply the International Space Station but musk had no time to celebrate Tesla was on the verge of financial disaster I had to make a choice then that either took all of the capital that I had left from the sale of PayPal to eBay and invest that in Tesla or Tesla would die the company is really teetering on the brink of failure and there's this board meeting late in 2008 where they're discussing what's gonna happen and Elon just says well I'm gonna raise a 40 million dollar round to keep the company going and the board members are kind of wondering well how is he gonna do that and he says I'm gonna put it all in myself and that incredible braggadocio confidence catalyzed a change in people's opinion and we and everyone else around the table is like oh my gosh we want to be part of this want to get as much of this investment as we can he saved the company in its darkest hour with an act of heroism that is hard to describe there's nothing quite like spending your last remaining dollar on a project you believe in it was thankfully they could a good week but it definitely took its toll from the mental strain standpoint handicapped man play just burned out a few circuits just after his emergency cash infusion came the news they desperately needed a 40 million dollar deal with Daimler for smart car batteries Daimler later added 50 million for 10% of the company determined not to repeat past mistakes musk focused on bringing his family car to life so I said look we really we need to have our own design studio and that's when I hired fronts from the host housing to design the Model S his green agenda was irresistible to van Holt thousand a legendary figure in car design who had already revolutionized the looks of the wgm and Mazda he's completely passionate to really rid the world of this addiction to fossil fuel and that that was something that he talked about from the very first sentence first conversation that we had with a new team in place must completely revamp the look of the Model S a sedan doesn't have to be a brick doesn't have to be a big blocky car we wanted to bring this kind of passion and feeling back to this marketplace the architecture of monoliths is really similar to escape word the floor of the vehicle is the battery pack and the motors between the rear wheels and everything above that is the opportunity's base in March 2009 musk unveiled the prototype for the Model S it could hold seven passengers and as much luggage as a station wagon but to build it he knew he needed a piece of the US government's new 7.5 billion dollar loan program to support alternative energy vehicles in order for Model S to truly be successful you know it was important that the the loan come through the government funding was controversial the New York Times writer Randy Stross called the program the bailout of very very high net worth individuals who invested in Tesla Motors act musk struck back Randy's cross is a huge douche bag and an idiot okay it wasn't a bailout but alone the Obama administration agreed to lend Tesla four hundred and sixty five million dollars to mass-produced the Model S a move that astounded many in the industry it's very unlikely that the Tesla investment has ever repaid to the taxpayers electric vehicles are really not possible in ways that would be effective for most consumers still this is just the religion of electric vehicles and like Jonestown that religion will come to an end there are most certain people who want to see Tesla fail because it is an attack on the mainstream car industry of course the biggest impact that test will have is not the cause that we make ourselves but the fact that we show that you can make compelling electric cars that people really want to buy the government loan came with a challenging condition to get the money he had to first find a place to build his electric car Tesla burned through 300 million dollars since 2003 Elon Musk needed to get his model s into production fast ever the risk-taker he took another giant gamble purchasing a plant in Fremont California abandoned by Toyota The Dream Factory location where Tesla was always the new me factory which was a 50-percent Toyota factory sent General Motors factory it's one of the biggest car plants in the world it's a great location close to Tesla headquarters the reality is for very little money Toyota got an albatraoz off its books from an industry perspective it looked incredibly savvy on Toyotas part and incredibly naive on Tesla's part car factories are big pieces of sunk capital to retool a factory it takes a tremendous incremental investment the acquisition released the government funds to begin production despite the fact that Tesla had posted a profit just once since its founding musk took his company public in June 2010 the smartest money in the world is is betting on Tesla not everyone was as upbeat about the company's future Tesla stock voted by Wall Street as the least likely to succeed you don't want on this stock you don't want you shouldn't even write the darn thing there hasn't been an IPO of a car company in America since Henry Ford and that caught people's attention investors ignored the skeptics Tesla raised 226 million dollars in its IPO must now had the capital to get rolling on the Model S you just saw on his face this sort of just relation and this feeling like all of this suffering is worth it and it's anger and it's real now in 2010 after winning the 1.6 billion dollar contract from NASA SpaceX became the first private company to successfully launch and return a spacecraft from orbit so SpaceX was the first purely commercial ground-up development to reach orbit the first successful launch at SpaceX was I'm just wishing through any entities that are listening please bless this launch and two years later in May 2012 it made history as the first privately held company to send a cargo payload to the International Space Station back on earth the long-awaited launch of Tesla's new sedan was also taking off its time delivery model s the Model S started rolling off the production line although questions about range and service remained not everyone was cheering in a 2012 presidential debate Republican candidate Mitt Romney blasted President Obama for the government loan to Tesla lumping Tesla in with other financially troubled green companies you put 90 billion dollars like 50 years worth of breaks into into solar and wind to suck it Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and enter one I mean I add a friend who said you don't just pick the winners and losers he picked the losers but Tesla was no loser in the eyes of the automotive industry the Model S was the first electric sedan to win motor trends Car of the Year musk didn't have much time to celebrate a few months later the New York Times delivered a devastating review of the Model S it reported the battery died on its test drive from Washington to Boston and published an image no CEO would want there was a sad shot of about car owner on a flatbed as though that was the only outcome possible for for such a drive and that's just that's just not true musk went on the offensive unless people said oh you know should it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong you don't battle the New York Times and it's like the hell with that the battle between the reporter and the renegade CEO ended when the New York Times public editor concluded the reporting was imprecise but not done in bad faith but the story didn't affect his bottom line remember that loser comment from a presidential candidate about the 465 million dollar government loan it really feels good to have have repaid the US taxpayer that's that's really what's important here and and we're not we didn't just repay the principal we actually repaid it with interest and and a bonus pay and so ultimately the the US taxpayer actually made a profit of over 20 million dollars on this Tesla repaid the loan nine years ahead of schedule never short on optimism or confidence musk made a stunning promise for the nearly $70,000 car we're guaranteeing that the value of the Model S will be no less than that of a Mercedes s-class after three years I am personally guaranteeing that value and standing behind that guarantee with all of my assets not just with with Tesla he has guaranteed free charging for the life of the car and has expanded the charging system across the country you'll be able to travel all the way from LA to New York just using the Tesla supercharger network and supercharger system is free so it's not just free now it's get free forever that's the Tesla commitment his commitment to customers has paid off since its IPO Tesla shares were up more than fivefold SpaceX and Solar City were also turning profits and this is a biggest and most important customer but almost three quarters of our customers are commercial SpaceX says it has more than four billion dollars in revenue under contract but of all his companies perhaps the greatest success was the one addressing the world's energy need Solar City is now the largest solar service provider in the US and has more than quadrupled in value since its initial public offering in December 2012 Solar City has been very very impressive I mean there are you know thousands of people with panels on their roofs and and lots of big offices I believe eBay has solar city panels so it's it's having a very big very visible impact on the world he really wants to change the world and in my vision of the future that you'll have clean and renewable sources of energy feeding the grid and our all of our vehicles will run off that this is really the future it's something wonderful stories about Iran has a self-confidence that is just it's breathtaking and it's especially breathtaking when you think about the things he's confident about the idea that Humanity is gonna get to Mars that not just humanity is gonna get to Mars that but that he in his lifetime Elon Musk will get to Mars Crusader or canny businessman named one of Time Magazine's most influential people in the world the risk-taking multitasking CEOs estimated net worth was six billion dollars in June 2013 divorced for the second time musk splits his time between his five sons his companies and thinking about the future just is it significant it really is question is all things I'm working on are they really gonna matter or do they have the potential for really matter [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 12,057,342

Rating: 4.7604294 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, elon musk, tesla, Tesla Motors (Organization), SpaceX, electric cars, nasa, space, Spacecraft (Industry), Rocket (Product Category), iron man, technology, Tesla Model S (Automobile Model), tesla model d

Id: mh45igK4Esw

Length: 45min 0sec (2700 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 10 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Not-So_Random]

Bigger the risk, bigger the profit. But it's not even about profit when it comes to Musk, it's about making a change - a positive change for humanity. Breaking all the barriers and going against all the market trends. Proud of you Musk :') you are a role model to many.

[u/Obscure31]

I loved this, Elon Musk's determination and self confidence is that of what everyone can learn from. We all can truly learn from his journey in entrepeneurship.

[u/krinklekut]

2 weeks ago Dan Bilzarian was the "real iron man".

[u/pwaclo]

True inspiration. This one man's level of innovation will change the world

[u/young_mula]

Found this very inspiring. Thanks for sharing

[u/kimonos]

Very inspiring! I really need this now! Thank you!