Elon Musk - Tesla Motors ve SpaceX'in CEO'su

so first of all I just want to thank Alon for coming hungry you didn't even have dinner and we didn't even feed you properly to be a bit late oh no it came from the Tesla factory in Fremont yes is it was something wrong there's always something we have to like at any given point there's always something wrong yes because there's just too many things going on yeah we one of the trickiest things about a car is that there's there's thousands of individual components the thousands of unique components and even if one of those things is missing you can't make cars yeah I mean today's Fiasco was I kid you not we were missing $3.00 USB cable okay so we could not complete cars because the whole line was stopped yeah so essentially because you know it's part of the wiring harness no you can't put the interior in without this cable hmm and so we can either make a whole bunch of cars - an interior which means that you got to smell up in the yard the resale value would be good and it's way more it's it's way more in if it's what you can't you don't have a music movie production line they have to send people out to hundreds of cars that are sort of sitting in the storage yard and so we then this happens to be a particularly pernicious cable it's kind of like routed under the carpet and it's a difficult place and it's literally three dollars and so we basically had to send people through out the barrier to go and buy USB cable like little RadioShack you like I'm fries fries fries oh that's better hard time getting a USB cable right now fries oh really what every one of them that's good and and so we were able to continue production and a blade with anecdote but essentially the the suppliers in China and we had plan a and Plan B and plan a was like the normal supply chain process and but but what the supplier did was instead of sending our parts in their own package they grouped it together with a bunch of other stuff for other companies and sent that all via some extremely slow boat from China to LA and when it got to LA the other stuff didn't pass customs oh so they wouldn't they wouldn't let our stuff through because they put it in like a barrel of fruit or something I don't know this something that customs didn't like when the paperwork wasn't in order or whatever so it got stuck there for for like a couple weeks yeah and then we had planned be just like so so we called him said look you've got to air freight some of these cables there's little cables yeah I'm to us and we talked to their US subsidiary and ordered order from the US subsidiary who then communicated China but then because this was another batch of pots it was kind of double the order it exceeded the credit limit that we had oh yeah you got it bounced off with a credit limit so they didn't ship it fascinating so so so someone's losing their job now this is non point no no you should fire its I mean it's pretty farcical Oh anyway so it's coming like tonight at 11:00 p.m. or something Wow and these things are happening like all the time this was like an unusual circumstance yeah that's that's like one example but there's many things like that so I guess I mean that's actually a really good example because that kind of leads into what I've always been fascinated by a lot of what you're doing is well I guess it well I'll start with how did you get into this I mean you know it cars into cars into taking over NASA into well not taking over NASA being a contractor for for for NASA yes you're not taking over NASA they're an independent organization the but you are becoming a major provider of services for NASA obviously kind of internet payments and payments generally I mean these are very three completely different spaces I think a lot of people would not take someone seriously if they kinda had a business plan in one of these right well oh yeah you take pick your time what was your I mean where did you always think you were gonna be doing this or when did it dawn on you that that you would to revolutionize three industries well when I was in college I didn't actually expect to do it so it was not like this is some long fulfill of expectation but but when I was in college I thought about what were the areas that would most affect the future of humanity in my opinion and the three areas were the Internet sustainable energy and space exploration particularly humanity becomes a multi-planet species you know there's kind of like a pretty substantial bifurcation in our sort of future if we're either out there among stars on multiple planets or if we're confined to earth until some obviously a bench rule extinction event yeah not that I'm pessimistic about life on Earth I mean I think so because they're likely to be good but even more likely to be good yeah Yellowstone's due for an explosion every hundred right I think sideways about that yeah yeah Everest everything it's been seven hundred thousand since right right yes yeah supervolcano for those of you don't know it would envelop that well no exactly we read the same book like absolutely I mean something bad is bound to happen you should give it to give it enough time and civilization has been around for such a very short period of time that you know these these timescales seem like very long but on a evolutionary timescale a very short a million years on evolutionary timescale is it was really not much and the eros been around for four and a half billion years yeah so that's you know a very tiny tiny amount of time really but for us that would be and we ki imagine if if human civilization continued anything remotely like the current pace of technology advancement for a million years where would we be no I mean I mean I think we're either extinct or on a lot of planets yes but but given that I mean one that's that's kind of as epic as one can think about things I mean literally I mean how how did you make that concrete how does that turn into SpaceX Tesla and and PayPal well so I thought about those these things kind of in the abstract not for the expectation that I would actually have careers in those arenas but but I wanted to be involved in at least one of them and at first I thought the best bet was going to be electric cars and so the area that I was studying was advanced capacitors right so essentially capacitors that have an energy density exceeding that of batteries because they have a very high power density but but a low energy on season maybe lecture to that oh yeah so obviously if you could make capacitor that had anywhere near the intensity of battery and what's incredibly high power density it's quasi an infinite cycle and calendar life then you would have an awesome solution for energy storage and mobile applications so that I was going to sort of work on that and try to leverage the equipment that was developed for advanced chip-making photonics to create ultra precise capacitors at sort of this is where we're going to go into grad school yeah you had a brief stint at Stanford that's right and for the PhD in Applied Physics Applied Physics material science right this is what you were so even then you were thinking of kind of trying to do something in the space well this was yeah this was to work on energy storage solutions for electric cars yeah and and I'd actually worked at a company in Silicon Valley called clinical research which did advanced capacitors there they were electrolytic capacitors sort of and the problem and actually were pretty good they had like the energy density of a late Astor battery which for a capacitor is that's a big deal but they used ruthenium tantalum oxide and there's a I think at the time there was maybe like one or two tons of ruthenium mine per year and so there's not a scalable solution but there I thought there could be some solid state solution like just like you know say using chip making equipment that was going to be the basic idea but was one of those things where I wasn't sure if success was one of the possible outcomes you know and like you can't it's difficult to bound that problem exactly and say okay so you're saying I wasn't I felt like this was a destined failure is another way to parse that scent but anyway so I would fail but I wasn't sure that success was a possibility okay yes you know and generally you want to embark on something it's desirable to figure out if success is at least one of the possibilities right exactly sure failure is one of the possibilities yes but but ideally you want to try to bracket it and say success is in the envelope of outcomes yeah and or isn't quite sure if that was the case I mean I think success on an academic level would have been quite likely because you can publish some useless paper and the most papers are pretty useless you know we have a few don't take a how many PhD papers are actually used by someone ever I mean it's good point centage wise it's not it's not good no and so so it could've been one of those outcomes where you add some leaves to the tree of knowledge yeah yeah and then that leaf is nope it's not possible so that was weren't one path and I was prepared to do that but then the internet was the inter came along and it's like okay the Internet I'm pretty sure success is one of the possible outcomes and it seemed like I could either do do sort of do a PhD and watch the internet happen or I could participate in a helped bullet in some fashion you know sort of you know it like I just couldn't stand the idea of watching it happen yep yeah so that that's so I decided to put things on hold and start an Internet company and there that was kind of a would we worked on in order like publishing software maps and directions heel pages kind of things and and we had as investors and customers that the media companies like New Times Company the knight-ridder this was just at the early stages and this was like late 1995 so it's really early stages it's really optic 8 yeah absolutely and so then we you know we would the the reason we worked with media companies because we had money like there was no advertising money in 95 right right in fact the idea of advertising internet seemed like herodicus people obviously ridiculous anymore but at the time it was it seemed like a very unlikely proposition and a lot of the media companies weren't even sure that they should be online all right like what's the point of that and did you all think that PayPal was just going to be a you know simple little you know internet way or do you think it was going to turn into the major kind of transaction processing engine that it is right now I didn't expect PayPal's growth rate to be what it was yeah so and that actually created major problems so it's not a PayPal on University Avenue no after the first month or so of the website being active we had a hundred thousand customers really that that wow I didn't realize him yeah it was nutty oh wow and how did it start how did people just even know to use it and I mean obviously both buyer and seller have to be involved yeah well the we started off first by offering people $20 if they open an account hmm and $20 if they referred anyone oh and then we dropped it to $10 and then we doctored to $5 as the network got bigger and bigger the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer how much did you spend with that kind of five ten twenty dollar incentive to get that critical mass going it was a fair amount I think there's probably 60 or 70 million dollars oh okay so it was a substantial okay so we're not talking peanuts here yeah this is depends on your relatives game yeah it's a peanut to Google yes no that's right that's right yes being it yes yes I mean like Google's got 50 billion apples got I don't know 150 billion some crazy amount of money yeah yeah yeah so it's not about land well yeah I know that I didn't realize I didn't realize that was so cool would be 500 million dollars so you know that's point 1 percent of Google's that's true yeah you're right that's it expensive it's relative sensitive so it's probably pretty inexpensive well that's right on and and then we did it we just did a bunch of things to decrease the friction because and and it's just like bacteria in a petri dish yeah so the what you want to do is try to have one customer generate you know that like two customers yeah okay or something like that maybe three customers ideally and then you want that that to happen really fast and you could probably Madeline model it just like bacteria within in a petri dish and and it will just expand very quickly until it hits the side of the sides of the pantry - yeah it slows down and then after PayPal then I mean to some degree you know the especially us in Silicon Valley we can't understand the internet we know people I mean PayPal's obviously of a scale that you know is is noteworthy but then SpaceX just seems really you know like well what how did you decide that I'm definitely gonna do that and then like what's the first thing that you do like how do you even like go out like I don't even know how to start trying to make a rocket company well neither that I really the and in fact the first three launches failed so as though it was like you know spot-on but II but even getting the point that you're launching rockets I don't even know how to like how do you get there and like what did you do on like one how did you decide and then what did you do on day one like who did you call or did you write a plan do you start I don't know the origin of PayPal is or other SpaceX is is that I was trying to figure out why that we'd not sent any people to Mars because the obvious next step after after Apollo was to send people to Mars so but but what in fact happened was that we said a few people to the moon and then we didn't send anyone after that to the Moon or Mars or anything but if you'd asked people in 1969 what word 2013 look like they would they would have said there'll be a base on the moon there would be we would have at least had some people to Mars and maybe they'd even be a base on Mars would be like orbiting space hotels and they Bullis or some stuff in space yeah and and and that's where people expect it and if you'd said well actually the United States in 2013 will not be able to send anyone to of it but I'll tell you what will exist is that they'll be this device yoga and your part get that's like the size of it it's more than a deck of cards that has access to all the world's information and you can talk to anyone on planet earth you know and even if you're like and you know some remote village somewhere as long as there's something called the internet that would know what that means cause then you would you'd be able to communicate to anyone instantly and have access to all of humanity's knowledge said like [ __ ] there's no way that that's gonna be right right right and yeah we all have that and and space is not happening so I should I figure out like what was deal here and this was 2001 it was just a friend of mine asked me what I'm going to do after PayPal I said well you know were interested in space but I don't think is anything that an individual could do in space because it's the province of government is actually large government but I'm curious as to when we're going to seem someone tomorrow so I went to the NASA website try to figure out look where's this place that tells you that I couldn't find that so they're all like even I'm like bad looking at the website or they have a terrible website because it's surely there must be that should be a big date yeah yeah like yeah this is but this is real a front page and then I discovered actually that NASA had no plans to send people to Mars and or even really back to the moon yeah so so this was really disappointing I thought well maybe this is a question of national will like have have do it do we need to get people excited about space again and and try to get NASA a bigger budget and then that then then we would send people to Mars and and so I started researching the area becoming more familiar with space reading lots of books and cantle this idea to do something called Mars Oasis which was to send a small greenhouse it was seized in dehydrated gel that land upon landing you hydrate the gel you have green plants on a red background and the public is the public responds to precedents and supporters yeah so it's the first life on Mars the furthest that life's ever traveled and you'd have this money shot of green plants on a red background yeah so that that seemed like they were get people pretty excited yeah so that that I started getting into this and try to figure out okay well kind of afford to build the spacecraft because I add some money from Azrael to PayPal but it had to fit within that budget and I figured we had to do two missions because if we if we only do one and it failed then it might have like the opposite effect but you are willing to bet the farm so to speak on this yeah well yeah I figured like I was willing to spend half the money that I got from PayPal yeah with no expectation of return right because I thought this is just something that was pretty important and yeah I'm like it seemed like it could spend half the money on AFL on this and OB if that got NASA a bigger budget and results in us going to Mars that would be a good pretty good outcome and when your friends can or your family came up to you said look you know there's nations that can't do this you know your your guy but you have some resources what did you say or do or think well so I had a lot of friends mine tried to talk me out of starting a rocky company because they thought it was crazy and work friend of mine maybe watch a video of rock is blowing up and you know there were just lots of people thought it was a really crazy idea and there was some people that would try to start rocket companies not succeeded and that they try to talk me out of it and but the thing is that with their premise were talking me out of it was what we think you're gonna lose the money that you invest I was like well that was my expectation anyway so I don't really mind if I lose you know I mean god mine what I mean is so it's not like I was trying to figure out the rank-ordered best way to invest money right on that basis you know space right that's what like that's yeah I thought wow you're looking at like money money market bonds triple-a by rocket company you weren't like do real estate you know invest in shoemaking and and watch this is just highest ROI yeah excess that is not what I wasn't it's thought that it was important that humanity expand beyond earth and we weren't doing that so maybe there was something I could do to kind of spur I swear that on and then I I was able to compress the costs of the spacecraft everything down to a relatively manageable number and I got stuck on the rocket the the u.s. rockets were way too expensive I ended up going to Russia food Russia three times to negotiate purchase of a an ICBM that try to buy two of the biggest ICBMs the Russian fleet in 2001 or 2002 and actually the negotiator I'll just let that statement stand I might even get like who did you call like I mean how does this and I don't get too much in the wit but I am because this is one particular thing you are you decide at some point you need to buy an ICBM yeah well actually I first I try to buy just a normal Rock launch vehicle that they used to launch satellites rights are too expensive I see I see the Boeing Delta 2 would have cost 65 million dollars right each and so two would have been a hundred thirty and then like whoa okay that breaks my budget right there yeah and and try to negotiate with them and that was not how much does an ICBM go fo I'm curious what's the market rate for one of those um well this was right after fall we might have gone up yeah yeah it's gone up a lot right but in 2001 it would have been about 10 million dollars each for so two or the 20 and then and then I thought I could get the rest of the mission down to also around 10 per so it so would have a dual mission with like two identical launches to an eagle spacecraft and you know for flek roughly forty million dollars and so I thought that okay I can do that and but you must have had some like you know rocket scientists advising you at this point I mean this is how I was like you're serious I mean you were yeah yeah engaged a bunch of circuit consultants Ryan right and that kind of started to get familiar with the space industry and but then after the third trip to Russia III can trust that I was actually wrong about that my first premise that that there was a lack of will in fact I think that there's a tremendous amount of will in the United States for space exploration cozy nights is essentially a nation of explorers I mean it's a distillation of the human spirit of exploration so of course it was quite so Eve me to think that that that people like motivation but what people don't want to think is that okay going to saying people tomorrow is gonna be so expensive that it they'll have to give up like health care or something right yeah they're not gonna do that so it's gonna be think it's good it's gotta be that going to Mars is not going to cause some meaningful to drop in their standard of living right yeah so if it's like maybe a quarter of a percent or half percent of GDP so I'm like that is palatable anyway so it's up so I thought okay it's not really gonna maybe matter that much if I do this mission because what really matters is is having a away so so I was wrong I thought I thought I hope there was it wasn't enough will but there actually is worth plenty of world if people thought there was a way so so then I said okay well I need to work on the way how hard is it really to make a rocket in history historically all Rockets have been expensive so therefore in the future more rockets will be expensive but actually that's not true if you say what does a rocket made it and say okay it's made of aluminum titanium some copper it's common fiber if you want to go that direction and and you can break down and say what is what is the core material cost of all these components and if you have them stacked on the floor and could wave magic wand so that the cost of rearranging the atoms would zero then what would the cost of the rocket be yeah I was like wow okay it's really small it's like you know two percent of water so clearly be in how the atoms are arranged right the the other so you got to figure out sort of okay how can we get the atoms in the right shape much more efficiently yeah and so I have a series of meetings on Saturdays with people that were somewhat working at the big aerospace companies just to try to figure out is there some catch here that I'm not negotiating and I configure it doesn't suit for any catch so started SpaceX and and you and you ended up though I mean you had some failures but obviously some huge successes what was the cost that you were able to build this rocket for relative to what they were being built for before so excellent see the foot for the Falcon one which is the first rocket we both and the first three flights did not make it in fact yeah I mean we got it sort of progressively further but like the first rocket like came and cracked landed maybe couple of yards away from the launch site and had tiny fragments so yeah anyway that that that rocket ended up costing around six million dollars Wow compared to other rockets in that class which were about 225 million wow so significant yeah they're like a quarter Wow Wow and but that but there's an even better step beyond that which is to make rockets reusable so right now that that is around around what what our comparison price is excluding the refurbished ICBMs so if you say bullying rocket from new how does the SpaceX rocket compared to a rocket from Boeing a latke it's about a quarter of the price however if we make it reusable then it can be at tours magnitude cheaper two orders of magnitude cheaper or 100th the price that's right so so I mean into and that's you here for rolling on away today we know more they say oh oh what what what what and I've seen some you are doing like these vertical landings yeah like like literally out of like the 1950s like like sci-fi movies yeah and that's what you're talking about yeah yeah especially the rock needs to come back and land at the launch site and then reload propellant take off a game like an airplane and how far do you think we are from that like when do you think like you know your best guess is we'll actually see that happen I'm hopeful we can do it next year okay yeah let's we got we've got some ambitious stuff at Khan Academy for the next year Jason we can compare we're redesigning the site you know we're working on her for a long time I should say SpaceX has been around for 11 years and thus far we have not recovered any Rockets we've recovered the spacecraft from orbit so that that that was great but none of our attempts to recover the rocket stages have been successful the rocket stages have voice blown up basically on reentry yeah now we think we've we think we figured out why that was the case and it's a tricky thing because Earth's gravity is really quite strong and with advanced and advanced rocket you can do maybe two to three percent if you lift both master orbit typically and then reusability subtracts 2 to 3 percent mm-hmm yeah so then you feel like nothing to overt or negative right and and that's also helpful and so the trick is to try to shift that from say to 3 percent in an expendable configuration to make the rocket mass efficiency engines efficiency and so well so much better that it moves to around maybe three and a half to four percent in an expendable configuration and then try to get clever about the reusability elements and try to drop that to around the to one and a half to two percent level so you have a net payload to orbit of about two percent but you're doing it at one and two orders of magnitude cheaper yeah absolutely because so our Falcon 9 rocket costs about sixty million dollars but the propellant cost which it's mostly oxygen as two-thirds oxygen one to one-third fuel is only about $200,000 Wow and so much like a like a 747 cost yeah much to refuel our rocket as it is to refuel 747 you know within your port pretty close so what happened if assuming y'all are successful and y'all have proven yourself to be multiple successful on kind of these audacious things in the past I mean what happens I mean that seems like it's I mean what happens the next 5-10 years in the space industry if y'all are successful there I mean do we get to Mars do we do we have kind of market forces commercialization of space starting to happen yeah see well the first step is that we need to earn enough money to keep going as a company so we have to make sure that we're launching satellites commercial satellites like I broadcast communication is mapping and the government satellites that do scientific missions earth-based cycle or space-based missions GPS satellites I kind of think and and then also servicing the space station transfer cargo to infer on the space station which we've done a few times and and then taking people to and from the space station so we've got a we've got a service the sort of needs earth-based needs to launch satellites and that pays the bills but in doing that keep improving the technology to the point where we can make full reusability work and we have sufficient scale and sophistication to be able to take people to Mars Wow and so you think this is going to be a reality and what's your best guess when we're gonna have someone on Mars I think about twelve twelve that's describing and you think it'll be a round-trip it will be yeah it will just be able some type of permanent colony on on Mars yeah I think it's probably a round-trip Wow so it's not for sure I could I could talk about this but I mean people know I mean the aspiration will be around from ya know this yeah this is mind blowing and I'm and then on Tesla I mean Tesla is obviously from from our from my vantage success I mean it's I mean what do you think is in in that end well one I mean I'll ask kind of the same question what did you think you you know this is something that was GM and Toyota and these massive multi-billion dollar organizations have been trying you know what gave you the confidence to kind of pursue it and and now that it seems to be a huge success where do you think this industry is going to be in the next 5-10 years yes so with with Tesla the ghosts try to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport I think would happen anyway could just out of necessity but because we have a none priced externality in the cost of gasoline we were pricing in the environmental effects of co2 in the oceans and atmosphere that that's causing the norm of the normal market forces to not function properly and so the goal of Tesla is to try to act as a catalyst to accelerate that those sort of normal forces that the normal sort of market reaction that would occur we're trying to have a catalytic effect on that yeah and and try to make it happen I don't know maybe 10 years sooner than it would otherwise occur yeah that that's that's the goal of Tesla so that's the reason we're making electric cars and not any other kind of car and we also supply power trains to Toyota and to Mercedes and maybe to other car companies in the future to accelerate their production of electric vehicles so that's that's the sort of goal there and so far you know working every pretty well I mean I just saw a news report earlier today that y'all are sold more to Model S's than you are leading that segment of the industry that the Mercedes s-class the BMW 7 Series or the Lexus ls400 or whatever it is yeah actually that that seems to be the case and it's yeah I didn't realize they sold so a few cars in that segment that's that many quarter note well out here they seem like you know every yeah yeah yeah yeah team you know so it's we bet us all out of the barre yeah yeah yeah no but that's and and well I mean it seems some more thing I mean what what how did you start what gave you the confidence and I mean do you see yourselves I mean it's kind of a major our automotive mainstream brand in in 5-10 years all the way down to kind of the you know the competing with the Honda Accords and civics yeah I mean I mean I goal is not just it's not sort of to become a bright big brand or to compete with Honda Civics but rather to advance the course electric vehicles so we're just going to keep making more and more electric cars and driving the price point down until the industry is very firmly electric you know like maybe half of all cars made or electric or something like that which is not to say we expect to make all half of all cars we we want to just have that catalytic effect until at least that occurs I think the point which there's you know we're approaching half of all new cars made our electric then I think that's I would consider that to be kind of the victory condition Wow and and so the faster we can bring that day but the better one would be your guess when that happens well I made a bet with someone about three years ago that it would be sooner than twenty years so it's 17 years from now but right but that's I think that's conservative I think is probably you know it may move 13 or 14 years Wow right right about this happen right when we run to Mars it'll be exciting exciting time yeah absolutely true that's just good yeah exactly as this thing about that it was like this time K frames are kind of coincident yeah yeah I mean the nature of new technology adoption is a test to follow an s-curve so so what usually happens is people under predicted in the beginning that's people tend to extrapolate in a straight line and and then they'll over predict it kind of at the midpoint and because there's there's late adopters and then you know it'll actually take longer than people think at the midpoint but much shorter than people think at the beginning yeah yeah and yeah but I'm pretty excited about how things going it's in fact I think I thought that the pace of technology improvement is in energy storage like electri storages is really moving faster than anyone thinks Wow Wow I got it one more but are we doing on time where's Esther Oh 9 o clock so how much time do you have okay I can spare another 1500 okay okay so I'll finish with one last question then we'll open it up I mean what advice do you have for us at Khan Academy we're doing really great so yeah that's morning if you have advice for me oh no well yeah I mean it seems like you're doing they're doing an amazing job really really super leveraged you know I mean obviously a small team and you're having a dramatic effect on half these people don't even work here so like it's even yeah right it's right so it's I think very impressive thing you're doing to spread knowledge and and understanding you know throughout the world the universe assumes you if you follow up your end of the bargain yeah yeah I mean it's actually kind of funny you know if you think like what is education like you're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain and it's it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education cause like it shouldn't be like this huge chore so you're making it way way better but I mean I think I think a lot of things that I would say it you've probably heard a hundred times and in effect or if not doing like the more you can gamify the process of learning the better like for my kids I do not have to encourage them to play video games yeah okay yeah I've like pry them from their hands it's like like a crack yes yes like drop that crack needle yeah so it's yeah it's it's it's the degree that you can make somehow learning like a game it's better and I think unfortunately like a lot of education is very vaudvillian at you've got someone standing up there kinda of lecturing at people and they've done the same lecture twenty years in a row and they're excited about it and that lack of enthusiasm you know is conveyed to the students that they're not very excited about it I don't know why they're there like why are we learning this stuff we don't even know why in fact I think a lot of things people learn probably there's no point in learning them because it that they never use them in the future because who's gonna launch a rocket into space I mean that's just like yeah exactly that never happens well you have to say like people I think don't stand back and say well why are we teaching people these things and we should tell them probably why we're teaching those things because a lot of kids just in school kinda puzzled as to why they're there and I think and I think if you can explain the why of things then that makes a huge difference to people's motivation you know then they understand the understan purpose yeah so I think that's pretty important and just make make it entertaining but I think just in general like a conventional education should be massively overhauled I'm sure you very much agree with that but yeah so I mean the Belgian I've sometimes uses I we've seen but like that man like the Chris Nolan movie like the recent one and it's pretty freakin awesome right and you've got incredible special effects great script multiple takes amazing actors and great sound and it's very it's very engaging but if you would instead say okay that even if you had the same script so at least it's the same script and you said okay now that script instead of having movies we're gonna have those that that script performed by the local town troupe right okay and and so every in every small town in America if movies didn't exist they would have to then recreate the Dark Knight right you know with like home like home so in costumes yes in like the stage not giving their lines quite and not really looking like you know the kid the people in the movie and and no special effects are in it I mean I would suck that's right yeah very very that's so so with that and and I brought it to all of you guys for hogging up all of the time because obviously I could talk for hours about this stuff but and we do have time I think five or ten minutes for for a handful of questions if none of you all have any I have about nine more but yes yeah so I noticed I picked up two kind of themes from from what you were discussing one was somewhat audacious goals and the other was I don't think I heard use the word profit and anything that you spoke of but you seem to be each each thing has pointed out like reinvigorating in industry or bringing back space missions how much of your success do you attribute to having really audacious goals or versus just not being focused on the short term you know money coming in or other investors unfortunately I I when one does have to be focused on the short term and money coming in when creating company because otherwise the company will fall die so the the I think that a lot of times people think like creating company is gonna be fun I would say it's not it's really not that fun I mean their periods of fun and their their periods of where it's worse just awful and particularly if you a CEO of the company you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company there's no point in spending your time on things that are going right so you're 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 crappers problems in the company the most pernicious and painful problem so I wouldn't say it's it's 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 at the abyss and eating glass and there's some truth to that we're staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because what most startups fail like 90% probably 99% of Starks fail so I so you that that's the staring into the abyss part you can't so constantly saying okay if I don't get this right the company will die it should be quite stressful quite stressful and then the eating glass part is you've got you've got to do you've got to do the problems you're gonna start you're gonna work in the problems that the company needs you to work on not the problems you want to work on and so that the that's you and I've working on problems that that you'd really wish you weren't working on and so that's the eating glass part then that goes on for a long time 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 energies on the on the big picture like you know you know you know where you generally heading for and and the actual path is going to be some sort of zigzagging thing in that direction and try not to deviate too far from the path that that you want to be on but you're gonna have to do that some degree but I don't want to I don't to diminish the I mean I think the product the profit motive is it is a is a good one if the rules of an industry are properly set up so there's something fundamentally wrong with profit in fact profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you're doing then you're spending to create it that's a good thing and if you're not if that's not the case then you'll be out of business and rightfully so sure you're not adding enough value now there are cases of course where people will do bad things in order to achieve profit but but that's actually quite unusual I mean because because usually the rules are set up mostly correctly like not completely but mostly correctly well I think we have time for one one more question Joel the same important one okay very good yeah okay so a few months ago you teased Hyperloop and we haven't heard anything since so first of all a few of us engineers we're talking about it I think we have a few ideas if you need help but if you feel comfortable maybe you could tell us a little bit more I was reading about the California high-speed rail and it was quite depressing because California taxpayers are going to be on the hook to you know to build the most expensive high speed rail per mile in the world and the slowest which is those are not the superlatives you want yeah and and it's like damn like we're in California we make super high-tech stuff why are we gonna be spending 100 and not know the estimates are around a hundred billion dollars for something that that will take two hours to go from LA to San Francisco I'm like okay well I can get our plane to do that in 45 minutes it doesn't make much sense and isn't there some better way to do it than that so so if you just say okay well what would you ideally want in a transportation system you'd say okay well you'd want something that relative to existing modes of transportation is faster or let's say twice as fast costs half as much per ticket can't crash is immune to weather and is you know you can make the whole thing like self-powering with like solar panels or something like that that would create that would be that'd be great yeah good outcome yes and so what would do that and what's the fastest way short of inventing teleportation that you could do something like that it's some of the elements of that solution are fairly obvious and some of it some of them are not so obvious and then the details The Devil's in the details of actually making something like that work but I came to the conclusion that that there is something like that they could work and would be practical is this the around evacuated tubes the the vacuum tubes the old bank bet it's something like that yeah well you haven't been more public with what this is no although I did say that once Tesla was profitable that I would talk more about it but we haven't done our earning school yet okay I think yeah after the earnings cool and the things like I kind of strung out on the things that I'm doing so adding another yeah like doesn't you know it's learning the guitar right I tried learning the violin yes by the way a hard thing to learn yeah launching rockets electric cars yeah revolutionizing transportation yeah I calculate a violin at all very horrible if you think about the future you want a future that's better than the past and and so if we had something like the Hyperloop and that would be like cool like you'd look forward to the day that that was working yeah and and if something like that even if it was only only was in one place you know from LA San Francisco or New York to DC or something like that then it would be cool enough that you would be like a tourist attraction you have like a riot yeah yeah so even if some of the initial assumptions didn't work out the economics didn't didn't work out quite as one expected we like cool enough like I want to journey that place just to just to ride on it that'd be pretty cool and so that's I think how if you cope with the new technology it should feel like that you should really know like if you told it to an objective person would they look forward to the day that that thing became available yeah and be like you know be pretty exciting to do something like that or an aircraft like how thorough was really disappointing when that when the Concorde was taken out of commission and there was no supersonic transport available and of course the 787 has had some issues yeah so but it's but the thing is the 787 even the best-case scenario is only a slightly better version of the triple 7 yeah and it's like okay I'm not that exciting so they're there this is something that you are working on and and one day in the not too far future or there's some plans or consultants involved or something I made some phone calls to Russia it's like it's sort of percolating away and then I'm gonna actively think about it but then there were some new elements of that I think oh well you know this would make it better yeah yeah no well I mean I think I'm speaking for everyone this is like the most epic possible conversation one could have over about the course of an hour and I think all of us would love to chat with you for hours on end but thank you so much I mean I know you have a lot of free time so it probably wasn't that big of a deal for you to come here but yeah it was a huge honor and I think it inspired all of us to go out and change the world and the universe cool thank you thank you very much