Elon Musk: To the Limit (2024) FULL TECH DOCUMENTARY w/ SUBS | HD
- [Elon] Becoming a space faring civilization is one of those things that makes you excited about the future. - [News Reporter 1] After revolutionizing the space race and electric cars, the world's richest man is now promising a Twitter makeover, renaming his own account, "Chief Twit", and proclaiming "The bird is freed". - [Elon] Space is one of those things that I think almost everyone is inspired by.
And if you asked people what was the most inspiring event in history, was probably landing on the moon. - Elon Musk has been dethroned as the world's richest man. As Costa Haritos explains, the person that's taken over may just surprise you. - Going viral today is the new lineup of the world's richest people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Elon Musk once worth as much as $340 billion was dethroned as the world's richest person. Today, Bernard Anault, the founder of LVMH, took the title instead, for now.
- [Narrator] A man with a dream that opened a door to many others. Or a man that opened too many doors at once? Elon Musk set himself a task turning the impossible into possible. And through the years, he has stopped at nothing to do so. A multi-talented, dedicated, and driven entrepreneur who created groundbreaking inventions that shook the entire world.
With a highly respectable reputation in the space and technology industry, Elon Musk is Ironman incarnate. And now putting his stamp on the social media world, he has become one of the most influential entrepreneurs of the 21st century. With an estimated net worth of 146.5 billion US dollars, making him the second wealthiest person in the world. Is there really any stopping a man who sees the sky as nothing more than a stepping stone, as opposed to an actual limit? Committed to building the future, devoted to the pursuit of success, an ongoing pursuit of wanting it all that could very well lead to losing it all in a financial decline. Will Elon Musk, reaching beyond the clouds, cause a neglect in his already existing attainments? Or can Elon Musk really conquer it all? And at what expense? - [News Reporter 2] Elon Musk carried a kitchen sink into Twitter HQ this week.
Tweeting "Let that sink in.", then fired senior execs once closing the 44 billion deal. - [News Reporter 3] Twitter insists it remains committed to content moderation and is taking a more aggressive approach than ever, but with top advertisers deserting the platform. The question is whether this is a new beginning or the beginning of the end. - [Elon] Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.
I think just generally that the, I'm looking for something that's like, like I said, broadly as broadly inclusive as possible, that's as trusted as possible as a system, and I hope we are successful in that regard. [Interviewer] Thank you. - Thank you. - [Narrator] Elon Reeve Musk was born on 28th June, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa.
His father was a wealthy South African engineer, and his mother, Maye Musk was a Canadian model. Elon was the oldest of three children with his brother Kimbal and his sister Tosca. They appeared to be society's picture perfect nuclear family, but what lay on the surface was far from the reality. Elon grew up in a tumultuous household where his father was abusive towards his mother. As a result, Elon had difficulties growing up, often isolated. The relationship between him and his father was strained as he denied Elon any help to begin a career in business.
He wasn't interested in his children's happiness or success, therefore, his parents divorced when Elon was only 10 years old. Elon was different. His mother was able to distinguish his specialty at an incredibly young age as he showed signs of being a little genius. In her autobiography, published in 2019, "A Woman Makes A Plan", she shared some humbled photographs of his childhood and wrote, "When Elon was young, I noticed that he read everything." After finally getting his first computer, he learned to code at only 10 years old.
He taught himself programming after realizing that classes weren't helping because he was already ahead of his teachers. He quickly figured out that he could write a better software and sell it. Then he could buy better computers, and that's what he did. He created his first piece of space gaming software called Blast Star. He sold it to a magazine for $500. At 12 years old, he had sold his first commercial program.
It seems that Elon Musk was born with a creative superpower. He was already thinking like an entrepreneur born to innovate and create. Despite his tough childhood, it might have been an asset for his incredible success later in life, giving him the ability to adapt and overcome the most difficult challenges and circumstances.
In June, 1989, he decided to leave South Africa, only 17 years old. He had in mind the American dream. Elon believed that America is where great things are possible more than in any other country in the world, the land of opportunity. He didn't have a concrete plan, but he knew that staying in his country would prohibit his potential. Against his father's wishes, he moved from his hometown to Canada.
He settled at Queens University in Ontario where he met his first wife, Justine Wilson. They got married in 2000. He then moved to the United States to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with BA degrees in Economics and Physics. in 1997. He earned a scholarship to go to Stanford where he got a PhD in Energy Physics, but that was only step one for Elon. He wanted to work on new technology, so he decided to move to Silicon Valley in California where he believed he'd thrive the most, the promised land of any entrepreneur in the tech world.
It was soon revealed that Musk had the capacity of foreseeing future problems the world will be dealing with. He could anticipate things and create a solution. By the time he moved, his intention was to affect the future of humanity. Since it was the dawn of the internet, Elon believed this was his opportunity to make an impact.
Most local businesses familiarized themselves with Yellow Pages as opposed to the internet. Musk thought that he would invent something that would help to transform newspapers and print media into a digital platform. People didn't believe him, what could possibly replace the Yellow Pages? Little did they know that he had already had the experience and knowledge required to write internet software. He knew he wanted to make useful things happen on the internet, even though he had no idea of what exactly to create in the beginning. This soon changed.
He created his first internet software, allowing the media to convert their paper print content into digital content. This was the basis of his first company, Zip2 that he created with his brother Kimbal in 1995. He had no idea of the difficulty the first years would bring. Eventually, his company took off and grew. He struck deals with larger and larger clients, such as the New York Times. After four years, they finally reached the success they had wanted from the beginning.
In February, 1999, tech company Compact acquired Zip2 for 307 million in cash and 34 million in stock options. Musk was just 28 years old when he joined the ranks of the Silicon Valley millionaires. Musk had just gone from a broke man living on a couch in his office to a multi-millionaire overnight. And what was he going to do with his new money? Buy a new toy. He went and bought one of the highest performance cars money could buy at the time, the McLaren F1 costing $1 million. But for Musk it was deeper than materialistic items.
He wanted to change the world, not just make a small change in the newspaper's history. Zip2 didn't have the profound effect he was looking for. He soon got more interested in building a new company.
He was always thinking, what could they do next? How about transforming the banking industry? After selling Zip2, his confidence had grown even more and he was ready for a new challenge. His ambition was endless. In 1999, only a month after selling Zip2, Elon and Kimbal used the money for their sale to found x.com, known as the now incredibly popular PayPal.
Money transactions used to be very slow. In fact, people mailing checks to each other could take weeks just to complete a single transaction. Musk notice that there was a problem here to be fixed and an opportunity to make a real profound change in the financial world. He invented PayPal to make money transfer and payments easier without having to deal with cash.
Ahead of his time Musk second business grew fast, and by the end of the second year, it exploded with a million customers. In October, 2000, a year and a half after the launch, he was fired as CEO of his own company. The reason was that he decided to go away in the middle of a very tough period for PayPal, where it had many issues.
Upon his return, his CEO position had been replaced. His team had decided that he was probably not the right guy to run this company, but things would get better again. In 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for 1.5 billion being the largest shareholder, and after receiving more than 150 million, this situation led him to improve his business relationships.
And just as things started to look up again for the successful entrepreneur, matters in his personal life were anything but. That year a tragedy hit him and his wife. By the time eBay bought PayPal, Elon and Justine had moved to Los Angeles and had their first child, a boy named Nevada Alexander.
That same week, which catapulted Elon's net worth to well over 100 million. His son, their baby boy, suddenly stop breathing. He died from SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He was just 10 weeks old. Elon had just earned his first billion, but he had lost a child. Following on, he refused to talk about Nevada's death as he and his wife decided that they wanted to have children again as soon as possible.
Within the next five years and with the help of IVF, Justine gave birth to twins, then triplets, five sons in total named Griffin, Xavier, Damien, Saxon and Kai. He and his family were living a dream or so it seemed. Justine declared feeling that she had turned into a trophy wife and that their relationship had become unhealthy and unsustainable. The tragic death of their first child. Elon's priorities and obsessions with work led to them growing apart. Some would say at this point he had it all, the family, the everlasting supply of money, a name that wouldn't be forgotten, with a reputation that claimed respect and admiration.
And yet, that still wasn't enough to satisfy Elon Musk. Ultimately, the couple divorced in 2008, a year that would be full of challenges. Not long after in 2010, he met his second wife, the British actor, Talulah Riley. He proposed after dating for only 10 days. They divorced, then remarried in 2013, but in 2016, their marriage ended for good. Despite the troubles and the obstacles.
Musk had finally reached the impact he dreamed about and worked for. PayPal created something that we all now take for granted. It paved the way from money transfers and how the world buys things. There is no denying the fact that Musk had come a long way in a short three years.
In 2002 at 31, he became a US citizen and a billionaire. Without hesitation or delay he could have easily retired, bought private tropical islands, and sipped on Mai Tai's for the rest of his life. But that did not intrigue him. Musk interest lay in a more inspiring future, like exploring outer space.
A future where humans are not forever confined to earth. After PayPal's success, his new goal was to enable the human civilization to leave the planet Earth. The little child with no big or clear vision in the beginning evolved into a genius entrepreneur who now held a vision bigger than what most could possibly imagine. Was he punching above his weight or was he devoted to monopolizing anything deemed profitable? Anything that kept him on top? True or false, it didn't matter to Elon Musk because now he had his eyes on Mars. In 2002, he founded his third company, SpaceX, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel.
- [Elon] We can bring life as we know it's, and breathe life into Mars where it doesn't exist today. The future where we are, a space faring civilization and out there among the stars is infinitely more exciting and inspiring than one where we are not. You basically have to have to hate humanity if you don't like that future. - [Narrator] SpaceX was established by 2008 and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station. - [News Reporter 4] What the National Space Agency would like to do, of course, is to slowly hand over operation of the entire International Space Station to commercial companies. - This human space flight is the reason that SpaceX was created and we're incredibly honored to partner with NASA and lets just make this happen.
- We as an agency, we want to go to Mars and even beyond. And of course we're very excited about the excitement that Elon is bringing to this, that SpaceX is bringing to this idea of humans expanding throughout the solar system. - [Elon] You know, having some permanent presence on another heavenly body, to be the, the kind of the moon base and then the, yeah, and then getting, getting people to, to Mars and beyond.
And you know, that's sort of the that's the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for. - [Narrator] In 2015, SpaceX began development of the Starlink to provide satellite internet access. On May 24th, 2019, the first 60 operational satellites were launched. - [NASA Employee] This is a huge step for us. It's a huge step for the commercial ventures, and I think it's important for the world to realize that we're going into space to stay and we're gonna continue on to then the moon and then onto Mars.
- [Narrator] The project cost about $10 billion. - And we do have significant danger with fracking technology, which is, I think really still at a, at early stage. Cause I think fracking probably increases the accessible oil and gas in the world by perhaps a factor of 10. I mean, we didn't really know what the full extent of it is, but it's probably something like an order of magnitude, which means the potential harm to the climate is really much, much greater than it was before.
And we can't rely on scarcity to drive the price of oil and gas high and have that be an adequate forcing function to move electric. So we have to figure out how to make electric cars themselves compelling without that economic forcing function of high gas prices. - [Narrator] Having always been fascinated by rockets and fast cars, Musk wanted to find a way to end the destructive use of fossil fuels. So his next move in 2004 would need every chance on his side.
He got involved with the company he believed would change the course of humanity, and build a more sustainable future. A company with revolutionary technology, dedicated to the environment, to the best customer experience, to success. The incredibly popular Tesla Motors. In more recent times, when you hear the word Tesla, you immediately attach Elon Musk face to the brand. However, it was actually founded by two less known engineers who simply had a vision for transport using energy that was better for the environment.
In April of that year, he helped them launch Tesla with 6.5 million of his own money and was appointed as chairman of the company. - [Elon] Our goal is to is to get to cars that everyone can afford as soon as possible, but any technology has to go through a learning curve and has to go through economies of scale, and that kind of thing. So for us, being a little startup, we had to start off with a car that was in low production and necessarily expensive. And of course, it has only the first version of technology. - [News Reporter 5] Tesla have only sold 1300 Roadsters.
So critics have argued that as such a small company, they'll never have the scale to revolutionize the automobile industry. But they have sold their battery technology to Daimler, who will build it into an electric smart car. And they hope that the Roadster is a convincing enough replica of a regular car that the public might just believe that the future really is electric.
- [Elon] No, I think all transport with the exception of rockets, will go fully electric. So that's why, I mean, I see the value of, of Tesla as an accelerant, as a catalyst in that transition. - [Narrator] The first Tesla Roadster car was released to the market in 2008.
A sports car capable of accelerating from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds. But Musk had underestimated the production cost of such high end cars. They weren't able to predict how difficult the following years would really be.
Between now and then Musk had faced his fair share of a financial deficit. Particularly in 2008 with the global financial crisis, leaving both Tesla and SpaceX with 10% survival. But by 2013, the business side of things began to boom for him again. And through the decade he made this evident. He released a concept for a new form of transportation called the Hyperloop in 2013. He founded Open AI, a not-for-profit, artificial intelligence research company in 2015.
With his hands full, the multi billionaire co-founded Neurolink, a neuro technology startup company in 2016. Nothing was ever enough for the entrepreneur because he also founded the Boring company to construct tunnels with plans for specialized underground high occupancy vehicles in 2017. Elon was unstoppable, an influential force that couldn't be tamed. A recognizable and respected name on the Forbes billionaires list. It was no longer a question of what could he accomplish next. - [Elon] My guess is in probably 10 years, it will be very unusual for cars to be built that are not fully autonomous.
Owning a car that is not self-driving in the long term will be like owning a horse you would own it for and you would use it for sentimental reasons, but not for, you know, not for daily use really. - [Narrator] It was the question of when. How soon or better yet, when would he finally rest with his billions? Two years after his second divorce with Talulah Riley and after his short-lived relationship with Amber Heard, evoking headlines when her ex-husband Johnny Depp accused the two of engaging in an affair since 2012, an accusation they both denied. Musk appeared at the Met Gala in 2018 with a new girlfriend on his arm. Canadian singer, producer Claire Boucher, professionally known as Grimes. - [Photographer] Keep doing it, keep doing it, come on.
- [Narrator] They met online a few weeks before, after Musk discovered a joke on Twitter about artificial intelligence on Grimes account. He reached out to her and they started dating quietly since then. Musk told the Wall Street Journal that he loves her for her wild artistic creativity and intense work ethic. To two years later in May, 2020, Elon announced the birth of their first son on Twitter, a son with the most unusual name, which was shortened to X.
The couple initially announced that they had named their new baby X AE A-12 Musk. - [Elon] I mean it's just X, letter X and then the AE is like pronounced ash. Yeah, and then A-12. A-12 is my contribution. - Oh, why A-12? - Archangel 12, the precursor to the SR-71 coolest plane ever.
- [News Reporter 6] I love how Rogan was laughing 'cause we were all like, Ash heck, how did you get that out of it? But look at this baby. How adorable is he? The name though apparently could run into some administrative issues and this is why. - [Narrator] Due to the controversy and the Californian law stating that a baby's name must only contain letters from the English alphabet. Elon and Grimes changed the numbers in the name into letters, X AE-Aii.
The baby's surname is simply Musk. But the name of Grimes and Musk's son isn't the only thing controversial about him. And when Elon Musk isn't bouncing between his multimillion dollar businesses, he tweets and those tweets come at an expense. Musk has been known to be infamously controversial on Twitter.
In 2017 in response to a tweet suggesting that he buy Twitter must jokingly replied, "How much is it?". Little did we know that confident joke in the form of a tweet would materialize five years later. In May, 2020, he wiped off 14 billion of Tesla's value with just one tweet by writing, "Tesla stock price is too high." 3 billion was taken off of his own stake as investors bailed following this. By January, 2021, Musk had a beaming net worth of 185 billion surpassing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It was now September later that year, and Forbes announced that Musk had a net worth of over 200 billion.
Life in the business world seemed to rapidly elevate Elon above the clouds. However, his relationship seemed to be sinking just as fast. Just one year after the birth of his son, Elon told page six that the pair was semi-separated but remained on good terms.
In December, 2021, Grimes and Musk had a second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Siderael Musk nickname Y, born via surrogacy. In March, 2022 Grimes said of her relationship with Musk, "I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we're very fluid.". That same month, Grimes tweeted confirming their official breakup. Speculation about this occurred when the insider published court document stating Musk had had twins with Shevon Zilis, Director of Operations and Special Projects at Neurolink in November, 2021.
But that wasn't all that occurred that November, he also became the first person worth over 300 billion. He had done it. Elon Musk was the richest person in the world. It was almost as if he owned it and Twitter was next for the taking. Musk begin buying Twitter shares in January, 2022.
Eventually becoming the company's largest shareholder by April with a 9.1% ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors. An offer Musk initially accepted before declining. On April 14th, he made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company. Twitter's board initially responded with a poison pill strategy to resist a hostile takeover, but unanimously accepted Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25th. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open source, combat spam bot accounts, and promote free speech.
- [Student] My thoughts are that things will probably get worse on Twitter if he's trying to open up freedom of speech just because that allows room for fake news to spread hate speech, stuff like that to happen. Maybe harassment, more harassment. So I don't think it could, I guess good things could come out of it, but I see the result of being more negative than positive. - The worry is now with the midterms just around the corner, Musk has said he will lift the ban on people like Trump.
- If you're Jewish, that the first content you'll see is antisemitism because it makes you react and get angry and respond to it and spend time arguing with people. What it does is tries to find a way to hook you in. These platforms aren't free speech platforms.
They're about monetizing misery. They're about rewarding rage. - [Narrator] In July, Musk announce his intention to terminate the agreement, asserting that Twitter had breached their agreement by refusing to crack down on Spambot accounts. The company filed a lawsuit against Musk shortly thereafter with a trial scheduled for the week of October 17th. - There were questions about whether or not he actually wanted to go through with the transaction. We then went into a legal battle between Twitter and Elon Musk.
Perhaps there was something in there that saw that ultimately he was going to lose and he realized it was actually easier to go through with the transaction. It's very difficult to say exactly what's happening behind the scenes. But what we do know is that now he is in charge of Twitter and he could reportedly in fact become the CEO as well. - [Narrator] Weeks before the trial was set to begin, Musk reverse course announcing that he would move forward with the acquisition.
The deal was closed on October 27th with Musk immediately becoming Twitter's new owner and CEO and Twitter was taken private. - [News Reporter 7] Musk calls himself a free speech absolutist, arguing for fewer restrictions and lifting the ban on former President Trump accused of encouraging violent acts. - I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and foolish in the extreme. - [News Reporter 7] But today more anonymous, Neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic and racist tweets.
Musk trying to reassure the advertisers posted, "Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences." - So I think it's good that we have such platforms in which you can speak freely, but in democratic societies, freedom has bounds, has boundaries. And I'm not sure if Elon Musk is the one who should, the one who should define these boundaries for such a huge platform like Twitter. - So the center for countering digital hate has shared new research with us, showing that in the week before Musk's claim, the number of tweets containing hateful slurs was actually substantially higher in comparison to the month before he bought Twitter.
- [Narrator] Upon acquiring Twitter, Musk promptly fired several top executives, including previous CEO, Parag Agrawal. Musk has since proposed several reforms to Twitter and laid off half of the company's workforce. Hundreds of employees then resigned from the company. After Musk issued an ultimatum demanding they commit to extremely hardcore work. - [News Reporter 8] Now, if you are on Twitter, you'll have already seen a number of people saying their goodbyes and linking to other accounts and platforms.
It comes after the social media company was forced to temporarily close its offices to staff as after many walked out, the new owner, Elon Musk, has called on employees to sign up for long hours at high intensity or leave. - Yeah, I think Elon Musk is still trying to treat this as humor like he has with many things. Just hours ago he posted the image of a tombstone. His Twitter account is full of memes and jokes.
People want a degree of seriousness. They consider this a a really important product in the world. The thousands of people who work there who've lost their jobs. It's about the millions of people who've actually come to rely on it as a service. It doesn't seem to be treating anybody with any respect at all.
- [Narrator] The first weeks of Musk's tenure at Twitter have been widely described as chaotic and tumultuous by the media. Harvard professor Sandra Sucher called Musk mass layoffs, poorly handled. Jason Wilson of the Southern Poverty Law Center, criticized Musk, perceived disinterest in policing hate speech, observing an increase in verified white nationalists and other far right extremists.
- [Interviewee] I don't know if anybody left in that company has any morale left working for him as a leader, and we're just gonna have to see what unfolds say for the next few days and weeks or maybe even hours. - [Narrator] Elon Musk did not last long as the world's richest person. A little more than a year after reaching the top, he has been eclipsed by 73 year old French billionaire, Bernard Arnault, according to analyst at Forbes. Musk's 176.8 billion realtime net worth is based largely
on his 25% ownership of Tesla, but stocks closed down 6.87% in one day alone. The stocks of the automotive company have more than halved in value this year, partially due to the selloff that accelerated in the wake of his 44 billion Twitter acquisition where he sold off approximately 4 billion of Tesla stock. - [News Reporter 8] And Musk of course is he's lost more than a hundred billion dollars just this year and is now worth well, Oh, only 167 billion.
His drop as the world's richest came as Tesla's market value fell below 500 billion for the first time since November, 2020. And of course, this is amid concerns about the slowing demand for electronic vehicles and Elon Musk's focus running Twitter. - [Narrator] Elon may be known even more now for his infamous Twitter takedown. But at what expense? Was the acquisition of Twitter in making a statement or losing a title he had dedicated years to a claim? Musk's revolutionary concepts and the ideology that the only imitation is believing there truly is one, have enabled him to reach unimaginable heights. There is no doubt that he will not continue to succeed beyond measures.
But to see the sky is anything but the limit, puts in question. Whether Musk will continue to achieve the unthinkable and stay above the clouds, or whether his need to claim it all will result in the cause of his own downfall. Only time will tell.
2024-09-17 21:03
