I LOST MANY BATTLES - Elon Musk's Speech That Broke The Internet

well i certainly have lost many battles uh so far i've not lost a war but i've certainly lost many battles oh yeah more than i can count probably i mean we had many uh tesla came many times close to bankruptcy um in fact in at the end of 2008 we were only a few days from bankruptcy literally two days three days maybe i gave basically both spacex and tesla from the beginning um a probability of less than ten percent of likely likely to succeed uh in the beginning i wouldn't actually wouldn't let my friends invest because i don't want to lose their money i thought it was like you know i'd rather lose my own money we almost did diet spacex actually so we i budgeted for or three flights um i mean technically i did have a plan where i had the money from paypal i had like 180 million from paypal i thought you know [Music] i'll allocate half of that to spacex and tesla and silver city and um that should be fine i'll have 90 million likes just lots you know but but then what happened is um things cost more and took longer than and i thought so i had a choice of either put the rest of the money in or the companies are gonna die um and it's like so i ended up putting all the money in and borrowing money for rent from france if you want to try to come up with an innovative breakthrough that's kind of that's going to be how it is anything which is significantly innovative is going to come with a significant risk of failure you've got to take big chances in order for the potential for a big positive outcome if the outcome is exciting enough then taking a big risk is worthwhile it's really i approach it but but then once executing down a path i actually do my absolute best to reduce uh risk you know because or to improve the another way of saying to improve the probability of success because uh when you're trying to do something that is very um very risky uh that you ha you you have to spend a lot of effort trying to reduce that risk as you embark down that path i mean i i think i'm kind of constitutionally just geared to to just keep going i don't know it's uh yeah i mean it just i don't know i mean it it certainly there are times when you know things don't go well and then uh that's quite dispersing for sure um and so then it's difficult to proceed with the same level of enthusiasm um but um but i do think like i do think the things that we're doing are you know pretty important to the future um and if we don't succeed then you know there's well there's not it's not clear what other things would succeed um and if if we don't succeed then we'll be certainly pointed to as a reason why people shouldn't even try for these things so i think it's important that we do whatever is necessary to keep going so how do you keep your focus on the big picture when you're constantly faced with we could be out of business in a month well it's just a very small percentage of mental energy is on the on the big picture like you know you know where you're generally heading for and and the actual path is going to be some sort of zigzaggy thing in that direction um you're trying not to deviate too far from the path that that you want to be on but you're going to have to do that some degree i think successful entrepreneurs probably come in all sizes shapes and flavors and obsessive uh nature with respect to the quality of the product it is very important even if you're if you're the best the best there's always a chance of failure so i think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing if you don't like it life is too short if you like what you're doing you think about it even when you're not working i mean it'll just it's something that your mind is drawn to um and and if you don't like it you just really can't make it work i think a lot of times people think like creating companies going to be fun i would say it's not it's really not that fun i mean there are periods of fun and there are periods of where it's just awful um and particularly if you're a ceo of the company you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company um there's no point in spending your time on things that are going right so you only spend on things on your time on things that are going wrong and and there are things that are going wrong that other people can't can't take care of so you're like the worst you have a filter for the crappiest problem in the company the most pernicious and painful problem i think you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold and there's a friend of mine who says like starting companies like staring into the abyss and and eating glass um and there's some truth to that the staring into the best part is that you're going to be constantly facing the um extermination of the company because most startups fail it's like 90 percent ugly 99 of startups fail so i so you that that's the staring into the abyss part you're constantly saying okay if if i don't get this right the company will die um it should be quite rightful quite stressful and and then um the eating glass part is you've got you've got to do you've got to do the problems you're going to you're going to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on not the problems you want to work on and so that that's you end up working on problems that that you'd really wish you weren't working on and so that's the eating glass part um and that goes on for a long time you may have heard me say that it's good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles which is rather than reasoning by analogy you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there and this is a good way to figure out if if something really makes sense or if it's just what everybody else is doing [Music] it's hard to think that way you can't think think that way about everything takes a lot of effort but if you're trying to do something new it's the best way to think and that framework was developed by by physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics so it's really a powerful powerful method the reason i came out to stanford was actually to work on energy storage technologies for electric cars at that summer 95 i was looking at the internet and it seems to me like the internet was going to have a big effect on humanity so i i thought well i can either work on electric vehicle technology and do my phd at stanford um and watch the internet get built or i could put my studies on hold and try to be part of the internet and at first i tried to get a job at netscape because that was the only internet company and they didn't respond to me so then i was like okay if i can't get a job at the only internet company then i better try starting something um but i talked to my professor and i said look i'm going to try starting a company it's probably not going to succeed and if it doesn't succeed can i come back he said sure no problem um and so i put my studies on hold and started the company if things just gone a little bit the other way both companies would be dead and i had like one of the most difficult choices i ever faced in life was was in 2008 um and um i think i had uh like maybe 30 million dollars left or 30 or 41 left in 2008 i had two choices i could put it all into one company and then the other company would definitely die or split it between the two companies and but if i split it between two companies then both might die and and when you put your blood sweat and tears into creating something you're building something it's like a child it's like which one am i gonna let one starve to death i can bring myself to do it so i put i split the money between the two fortunately thank goodness they both came through

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Id: x3WdEOh6ezg

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021