[projector chattering] [suspenseful music] [Elon] This is a difficult thing that we're doing. It's a hard thing, it's a new thing, and you know, I'd hope that you would cheer us on. [dramatic music] [Mission Control] Three, two, one, and lift off! [rocket roaring] [Elon] I think this is a really good milestone for the future of space flight.
You know, I think it's another step towards the stars. [Narrator] Elon Musk is not your average tech billionaire. He's one of the most intriguing entrepreneurs in business today. The man behind PayPal is taking on the giants of the aerospace and motor industries, along with the oil corporations, the energy utility companies, and winning.
[Ashley] Elon Musk is a visionary, someone who comes along perhaps once a century, who is actually changing the way we function and the way we look at the world. Back then, people were still afraid to buy books online, so putting together a financial services suite on the internet was a rather revolutionary idea, and that company turned out to be PayPal, the online payment service. It's one thing to run a company that's worth a billion dollars. Elon Musk has four.
My personal ideology is kind of split right now between trying to be helpful on Earth related stuff, which is sustainable energy, and then trying to advance space technology, so we can establish a self-sustaining city on Mars. From AI, to disrupting the car industry, to SolarCity. I mean how many other people can say, I have my own rocket company? Not many.
- In terms of space, Elon has completely changed how we think about everything. When you look at what SpaceX has done with their reusable rockets, we are seeing science fiction of the 1950s coming to life. Rockets land as they always were meant to do. It's really trying to land on a postage stamp there. [Doug] Astonishingly difficult.
So, Mars does beckon. I am very convinced that this is gonna happen in my lifetime. - If you look at Tesla alone, has changed the way that automobiles will be forever in the future. He has truly broken down the wall that was impossible to break, and now we're in a situation where all of the big car companies are switching massively to electric cars, and that is a revolution done by one man. [Sarah] He's almost like a real life Iron Man in what he's doing.
There's a lot more that will happen before his story is over. So, I think we just get to watch, and be excited, and see what comes next. A lot of people think that successful entrepreneurs are just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right product or right service. That's untrue. Why are they not content with $25 million when they sell their first company, then go on to a second company for another $50 million, or a third company when they fail and go into another one.
Serial entrepreneurs are driven. They're psychologically driven, and it's usually to do with something in their childhood. [Narrator] Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971, the son of a Canadian mother and South African father.
Elon grew up in South Africa, and he had a very unfettered upbringing. He has said that he was raised basically by books and occasionally nannies. His mother and father have two other kids. They're, he has a younger brother and sister, Kimball and Tuska, but it seemed like Elon didn't have a lot of adult supervision. He said that he was basically out there building explosives, and learning about conduction with very little supervision. He had a passion for engineering, and obviously physics and the sciences as well.
[Narrator] Musk attended Waterkloof Primary School, and after his parents divorced, nine year old Elon went to live with his father. Elon at one stage in his childhood, after his parents divorced, says that he felt sorry for his dad living by himself, so he opted to go and live with his dad. That, he later called a huge mistake. He's been on record saying, he didn't have a great relationship with his father. He's notably said some really, really hard things about his dad. It sounds like it was a really awful situation.
His father was an engineer, and Elon says that a lot of his engineering nous came from his father, and his father had some issues according to Elon, but what he did have was a very incisive engineering background. As disturbing as Elon's relationship with his dad seemed to be, Elon's relationship with his mother appears to be very good and went from strength to strength. I think his mother is probably the ultimate optimist. She's lovely.
She's really something. [people chattering] Open the New York Times, there's Maye, it's great. I've been modeling for 50 years, ha! So, you just have to just keep on going, and be nice, and available, and be surprised when you suddenly become mother of the bride, and then grandmother. Elon's Mom has been very supportive of him over the years. She's constantly outspoken on Twitter telling us the wonders of Elon, and she's clearly very proud of him. Maye Musk is an incredible woman.
At something like 69, she's called an "It Girl" by Vanity Fair. She's an in-demand model who's doing campaigns for big major brands all over the world. She's one of the most glamorous older women you will ever see.
Despite the fact that Elon says he tried repeatedly, again and again and again to try and repair his relationship with his father, at this stage he's just given up, because he doesn't believe his dad is capable of change. He's talked openly about how as a child he spent a lot of time alone. He says he can still remember the sound of an empty house, footsteps far off in the distance, and he never ever wanted that again.
[suspenseful music] My own view is the really stellar entrepreneurs, their life experiences particularly in childhood are the determinant of their success later on. If you look at their early childhood experiences, you will find a number of adverse events. Substantial adverse events like school bullying, or being rejected.
These events drive you, you now need to prove something. You wanna gain control of a world again, you didn't have control of when you were younger, and moving toward a top job, being an entrepreneur, being a CEO, gives you power, gives you strength, gives you control, the thing they never had when they were younger, so I think that's a driving force in many entrepreneurs. [melancholy music] [Narrator] Elon Musk attended Bryanston High School in Pretoria, where he thrived academically. He had quite a tough upbringing. There are some reports of bullying as well. You know, any child that shows that sort of intellect, and interest might come under the glare of the bullies.
He was even hospitalized after one particular fight. He was a nerd. He was bullied at school. There was one point he was even knocked unconscious.
You know, it wasn't obvious that he was a marketing genius at that point. [ref whistle blows] Elon took on wrestling classes, and a bit of judo in an attempt to compensate with a bit of added physicality, and then he grew up a little bit, got a growth spurt, got a bit taller, and really took the bullies head on. [suspenseful music] [Narrator] After spending three years at Bryanston High, Elon attended Pretoria High School for boys. Elon attended Boys High from 1986 until 1988, which is the year he matriculated. He excelled in science, and he also excelled in computer studies. He, in fact, got a distinction for both science and computer studies in 1988.
As I do recall his grades, 'cause I have them in my mark book, and he was definitely top of the science class. I've taught many boys over the years, and Elon did stick in my mind. You know, I can't tell you where every boy sat, but I can remember Elon sitting at the back of the classroom getting on with his work.
He wasn't one of the boys that wanted attention all the time. We always take a lot of pride in all of the boys, but from a personal point of view having taught Elon science, I'd like to think that I made a small input in his formative years. I've read would like to go to Mars. I'm hoping he'll do that a lot sooner, but Star Trek style so he can invite me there. [upbeat music] [Narrator] Elon Musk was always different.
His entrepreneurial ventures started early. In 1984, a science fiction inspired tech success gave a hint of his future when he sold his first commercial software. [Jeff] He started working on computers at the age of 10, working very hard, and being very clever in developing programs. He develops a video game called Blastar. He famously sold this to a PC magazine for $500. Elon was asked about what sets him apart from other people, and he himself said, there were things that were very obvious to him growing up that other people didn't understand, how conduction works, how light and wires make a light switch go on, things that to him were immediately clear and obvious, whereas other people didn't automatically, especially when they're like 14, understand what was going on.
He played a lot of chess, and as a result of that was always sort of thinking ahead. In chess you play to think moves ahead. So, even when he was younger, he was looking at ideas for what might make a good business in the short term, and then what could be part of a grand plan further on. [dramatic music] [Narrator] After graduating from high school, Musk briefly attended the University of Pretoria before deciding to leave South Africa.
The story of Elon Musk's wealth and his rise is tied up in part with the American dream. It was always ingrained to him that South Africa wasn't where he was going to achieve the ambitions he had. He wanted to be in America. He wanted to be a part of that scene.
Initially he couldn't go directly to America. He actually had to go through Canada. [dramatic music] [Narrator] Elon spent two years studying at Queen's University in Ontario.
He funded his own degrees in Canada and the US by getting scholarships and working part time, so he didn't have a huge amount of money behind him. He has a famous university paper where he talks about wanting to conquer different areas of the world, and those included the internet, space exploration, solar energy, artificial intelligence, and brain learning interfaces as well. [ethereal music] Elon Musk married his childhood sweetheart.
They met at university. Her name was Justine and she was absolutely beautiful, and on their first date they were supposed to go out for ice cream. She actually said yes, and then basically ditched him, and went off to do some studying instead.
He didn't take no for an answer. He pursued her. He continued to pursue her, and even after Elon left the university he attended with Justine and moved to Horton Business School, he still sent her roses regularly. When Elon Musk is interested in you, I think he comes on like a steam train or an electric steam train perhaps, but Elon Musk is unstoppable.
He sees what he wants, and he does everything he needs to do to get it. He's like that in business and he's like that in love. [Narrator] Having completed degrees in business and physics, in 1995 Musk abandoned the PhD at Stanford and headed for Silicon Valley.
He famously dropped out of his third degree at Stanford University in California after just two days. And, he had launched a company with his brother Kimball called Zip2, and it was effectively a form of online Yellow Pages that he sold to newspapers at the time. And, he struck lucky when the company was bought. They actually ended up selling it to Compaq, for about $307 million, when he was only 27 years old. He made about $22 million back then, which is wonderful, an awful lot of money, but in typical Elon style, he recycled half of that into his next venture, and which eventually ended up becoming PayPal. [suspenseful music] [Narrator] Having disrupted the traditional paper advertising industry with Zip2, Musk's next venture took on the global financial market.
So, he worked to setup a company called X.com, which is the precursor to what is now PayPal. X.com was supposed to be a full services financial services business.
So, it sounds sort of archaic now, but back at the time putting together a financial services suite on the internet was a rather revolutionary idea. He had one internet win under his belt. So, it was not especially challenging to bring on new engineers, or new business people who wanted to work on something that seemed very exciting with someone who had already won already once. So, that was a big feather in his cap.
It was, I think, more challenging to persuade outside investors that it was a good idea, 'cause they were not swayed by one win. It was not enough to buy public opinion in Silicon Valley. The jury was still sort of out on whether he was genius or crazy or just a big ego, or how it was all gonna play out, but he invested $10 or $12 million of his own money into X.com,
so we didn't need a whole lot of money right off the bat. He sort of took care of all of that. [Narrator] Musk was revolutionary in his strategy at X.com,
gifting new customers cash rewards, and creating peer-to-peer payment systems. My initial impressions were just that he was very focused and very passionate on what he was about to do. It seemed very clear early on that Elon was not playing by the standard book of life, or business, or anything else. So, I was just gonna be along for the ride. At the beginning Elon wasn't easy to read at all, mostly because you just had no idea how he was going to react to anything. I had no experience with someone who thought the way that he did, or talked the way that he did, or had as much confidence about what he was doing, and in himself as he did.
It was so foreign to me as someone who grew up in Iowa, or maybe it's foreign to everyone. I don't know. [dramatic music] [Narrator] PayPal was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas in 1999. Elon Musk was instrumental in the company's focus on a global payment system, which would change the course of the internet.
People probably know him mostly from PayPal. That's when he really first came to public consciousness. PayPal was how are we going to turn finances into an online transaction? How are we gonna make it easy? How are we gonna make it more efficient? It sounds sort of obvious now, but back then people were still afraid to buy books online, so asking them to put all their financial data in one place was not a solid proposition.
The goal of the company that we were building was always trying to do something very positive for humanity, and he was thinking about space, and solar panels, and all of that way back then. So, we knew that this was sort of a stepping-stone on the way to grander dreams. [Narrator] PayPal soon became the online payment system of choice, from a few thousand users, multiplying to more than a million within months.
The person to person payment side of things took off so quickly, we were gaining traction like crazy, and then the online auction market took hold of it, and it blew up into this huge thing. We were adding tens of thousands of new accounts every day, which at the time was fairly unprecedented. Elon was very hands-on in all aspects of the company.
It was his money after all that we were all playing with. So, I think when it's your money on the table, you have, it's in your best interests to be very involved in all the details. [car honks] Everyday was a new sort of fire, right? Everyday something was burning down that needed to be addressed. We had a customer service nightmare where soon after launching the service, we had thousands and thousands of emails in the queue, because people didn't understand, again, the early days of the internet, they didn't understand how to get their money out. And so, they would freak out, and call in, or email like 12 different times. So, we have two million emails in the cue and we only had 10 customer service people dedicated to dealing with that.
And so, we really had no idea what we were going to do. Customer service was enormously expensive in California. And so, I said you know this is gonna sound crazy, but I have a huge extended family in the Midwest.
I could train them all to do customer service at home. Elon laughed at first, and then a couple of hours later came back and said all right, get on a plane. So, I went out and taught 10 of my family members how to do customer service from home, and then my sister ended up hiring 12 stay at home parents in a small town in Nebraska who started all working from home. And they were so good that we ended up building a customer service center in Omaha, Nebraska, which now employs 1800 people, and that turned out fantastic. We went from zero to a hundred people in six weeks out in Omaha, and that was probably the most challenging thing, but we were a little short of options, so. [laughs] [dramatic music] [Narrator] Led by his passion for perfectionism, determination, and a heroic work ethic, Musk has succeeded in markets that were previously considered impossible to conquer.
[Julie] He's always had higher expectations for himself than he did for other people, so he pushed himself very, very hard. There's a lot of pressure on him because he has a lot of expectations, a lot of responsibility to his shareholders, to the capital that has sourced, to his staff, his colleagues, so there's a lot of demands. So, you can't just say you know what? This is all good and great. I'm just gonna take six months off. Why, because I've got 20 billion, so it's okay. No, it doesn't work like that.
As the stakes get higher, and the more people that get involved there's more pressure on that front, but I think he looks at it, and turns away. What drives Elon, what pushes him, I don't get it, but he's making changes in the world, because he doesn't ever stop and rest. He just keeps going. Elon Musk is famous for his work ethic, which is nonstop.
I think he has two modes, and there's stop and go. He works around the clock and he expects everyone else to do the same. Elon was up all hours of the night working. He would send emails at midnight or 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. and just be very focused on some problem that we were trying to solve. If you hear stories from SpaceX in the early days, people were really struggling to keep pace with him, but that's how he works, and if you can't keep pace, you're out the door.
I thought he was a good boss. It's sort of infamous now that he runs through PR people very quickly, but at that time, I thought I was just gonna be like, a normal PR person. [laughs] And so, Elon wasn't really gonna have any of that.
He expected a lot of his people, but we all expected a lot of each other, and that's how you get it done. In the culture of startups the expectation is that everybody is working all the time. You get there at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning and not leave until 9:00 or 10:00 or maybe after that at night.
And Elon was definitely working until midnight every night. That was just what we did, and it was exciting. Rarely did anyone complain about that kind of thing, 'cause you really felt like you were changing the world.
[dramatic music] [Narrator] By the year 2000, Musk had married Justine Wilson. He was always pining for Justine, and he was still in Canada at that point. And so, it was lovely when she came down. The couple did suffer a tragedy very early on.
Their baby boy was 10 weeks old, Nevada, when he died suddenly of SIDS. It was beyond difficult for both of them to cope with. Justine immediately sought IVF, and fertility help, and went on to have five boys, one set of triplets and one set of twin boys. So, very quickly they went from having no children to having five. Justine has written extensively about how it caused a strain in the marriage, as it might do, as it would do, but this tragic event of losing their infant son unfortunately didn't draw the couple closer, but rather was the beginning, perhaps, of what ultimately would pull them apart. [Narrator] As PayPal flourished, boardroom troubles dogged Musk.
An internal disagreement with the Board resulted in Elon being ousted from his own company. There was a time when Peter Theil and Elon were co-CEOs at PayPal, but there were certain differences in opinion about the technology and the branding of the company that led to the vote of no confidence to oust Elon. And Elon unfortunately, was in South Africa. I had just spoken with him on the phone that day, and he's like how bad is it? I'm like oh, it's not that bad. And then that night I went home, and I was laying in bed, and I started realizing and started putting together all the pieces of who I had seen in the office, and what was happening, and at about 10:30 at night I sat straight up in bed, and I'm sure I said some swear word at the ceiling. I got up, and I went back in the office, and sure enough everybody was there, and that was when they were doing it.
They were talking to the Board on the phone, and ousting him, and I tried to call to Elon, and he was on a plane, and I couldn't get him. I couldn't get him until the morning, and by then it was too late, it was already done. I'm sure there was quite a bit of unhappiness early on, but he really handled it marvelously. [suspenseful music] [Narrator] Musk left PayPal, but as the largest shareholder, remained in an advisory role.
His next windfall arrived next 2002, when eBay bought PayPal, leaving him wealthy beyond belief. That was where Elon started to make some serious money. He cashed in about $165 million wonderful.
What was amazing is he plowed almost all of it into these new business ventures. He didn't put any aside for himself, didn't think of sort of personal gain, in short term at least. A lot of us would've just retired. He made the money in PayPal, he could've just stopped, and you know, bought a place in the south of France, and said I'm retiring, I'm 28, and be done, but he ended up starting three other billion dollar companies. [dramatic music] - He took $100 million and put it into SpaceX, $70 million ended up going to Tesla, and about $10 million going to SolarCity.
Most people would say $165 million, I'm set for life. That's it, where's the beach? Let's go. Not Elon, and I have a lot of respect for that. [Emcee] Ladies and gentleman, -please welcome Elon Musk. -[audience applauding] [Narrator] In 2001, Elon established the Musk Foundation, delivering solar energy systems to areas of the world struck by natural disasters. He also pledged to give away at least half of his wealth to philanthropy.
A lot of people think that entrepreneurs are driven by money, and that's why they're serial entrepreneurs. They wanna make more and more. Really after you make $50 million, you need to make more money? Not really, that's not a good driver. They are not driven by money at all. He's aware of it no doubt. If you've got $20 billion floating around, I'm sure you would've noticed, but I don't think that's the main driver for him.
I really don't. I think he's got a bigger vision, beyond this little thing called money, but money helps him execute the dream, so it is a necessary thing. It's certainly not the pursuit of money at this point. I think he realized we're here, and it's more interesting to spend time doing something that you find meaningful in your heart, and that's what he's doing. It's almost like a drug.
When you've done one successful thing, you wanna the other one, you wanna come up with a new vision and keep learning. It's just a way of being. He would be bored on the beach. [Julie] It has to be a very big world changing goal for him to get up in the morning. That's just the way he's wired.
So, I don't expect that to stop. I think it actually is gonna make a difference to the world if we transition to sustainable transport sooner rather than later. We're not doing this because we thought it was like a way to get rich or anything. Like I said, I thought maybe a 10 percent chance of success at the beginning.
I thought I would just lose all my money, and I almost did. So, it's not like it was, I came very close to losing everything. [suspenseful music] [Operations] Falcon 9 has cleared the tower.
[Narrator] Having conquered cyber space, Musk's next mission would focus on outer space. In 2002, he launched one of the most revolutionary businesses of our time, focused on shaking up the space industry. The pivotal breakthrough that's necessary to make life multi-planetary is a fully and rapidly reusable orbit-class rocket. This is a very difficult thing to do, because we live in a planet, where that is just barely possible.
In the last 12 months or so, I've come to the conclusion that it can be solved, and I think SpaceX is going to try to do it. We could fail. I'm not saying we are certain of success here, but we are going to try to do it. He had already been talking about energy and transportation and space.
I was like why space? He's like space is cool. Alright. [laughs] No one thought he could do what he's done when he first set out to achieve his goals. I mean this random South African coming along in the 2000s and saying he wants to build a rocket that can land itself back on the ground, can take things to orbit for 10 times cheaper than anyone else. He was laughed out the room in most places. They kind of ignored him at first and then he kind of put his money where his mouth was literally.
He famously went to Russia once to try and buy some rocket engines off them, and he got laughed out of the country basically by their engineers, so he came back to the US and he built his own rocket. We were still used to NASA, space equals NASA, but when Elon Musk started to experiment with these new rockets, we realized that Elon Musk and SpaceX is a serious space player. [Astronaut] Everything looking good for the beginning of today's space walking tasks. [Narrator] The first three SpaceX launches failed, which sparked skepticism in many investors.
[Mission Control] The vehicle on course on track. And, we appear to have had a launch vehicle failure. Space flight is a tricky business. I mean, it is definitely difficult, and I think we forget that sometimes.
We see launches and landings as routine. It's a huge amount of energy and dangerous substances, and that work is very hard. Look where we are today. The critics have been silenced. [dramatic music] [Narrator] Just one year after founding SpaceX, Musk invested in Tesla Motors, an electric car manufacturer aiming to produce a power-packed zero polluting car. Over the next several years, Tesla would take the lead in a niche market.
Our goal was to really to try to create the best car in the world in order to show that an electric car can be the best car in the world. Because a lot of people have this perception that electric cars are compromised, that there are issues with electric cars, and then if you buy electric, it's because you have some sort of electric fetish. What I think is incredibly important is to break that perception and show that indeed the electric car can be better than any gasoline car. Cars were always a big deal. He had the F1 McLaren show up very early on in the X.com days, and there was a Jaguar very soon after that, and he liked them all very much, anything that was rare, expensive, and cool.
If you look at the revolution that's almost upon us in electric cars, Tesla was there first. -There's been various attempts to bring in electric cars, which have failed, because big car giants didn't want them to succeed. Elon knew nothing about electric cars when he started out, but recognized that there was a problem there that needed to be solved, and he just bulldozed his way through it.
I'm really excited by the fact that we've got a zero emission sports car that can go head-to-head with a Ferrari and a Porsche and win. This is what's truly disruptive, a tech guy coming into the car space. Elon doesn't look at it as a car. It's a piece of software with a little bit of hardware attached to it. The driving experience in a Tesla, everybody is raving about it. [Test Driver] It was awesome, it was unbelievable, the acceleration was out of this world.
It was like a roller coaster. I felt like I was gonna fly or something. It's quick, it's silent, but also with Teslas it's the technology, the fact that they update themselves. I had a Tesla for a while and I'll come out in the morning.
Software update as your phone does and you get stuff on your car that you didn't have the previous night. You can actually move your Tesla out of a parking spot with your smartphone. So, it's just incredible. For somebody who's a car fan and a tech fan, then Tesla do really tick a lot of boxes. The future is electric. In the future we won't be filling up for petrol.
Elon has understood that for a decade. Already you're seeing countries across Europe, France, the UK, who are saying they're gonna ban the sale of petrol cars in the next 10, 20 years, and that's pretty much thanks to Tesla. [Elon] In the face of massively declining oil prices I think it actually becomes more urgent that the auto manufactures transition to electric and put a huge amount of effort behind their electric vehicle programs.
What's amazing is how the rest of the auto industry is sort of following. They had this lithium-ion cell technology that other companies really couldn't match. -There isn't a car company in the world who isn't looking at an electric vehicle.
There's probably not a car company in the world who hasn't taken a Tesla apart to see what's going on underneath. At Tesla we've open sourced our patents, so we're trying to be as helpful as possible for the advent of electric vehicles and we've also said that our super charge network, we're happy to have other car makers use that network. We're really doing doing everything we can to accelerate the advent of sustainable cars. I mean, now we know that GM and Land Rover have said they're gonna start doing electric cars in the near future, just electric cars. There's so many things that Tesla has done first, which has got every other car maker around the planet looking, thinking yeah, we've got to do like that haven't we? The fundamental problem is the rules today incent people to create carbon, and this is madness, and whatever you incent will happen. We need to send a clear message to the negotiating teams and to the politicians that this time there needs to be significant change.
[Narrator] An essential part of Elon Musk's tale of triumph is how close he came to complete disaster. By his own admission, 2008 was the worst year of his life. His companies were battered by the economic meltdown. Three failed launches left SpaceX hanging in the balance, and Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Elon was widely assumed to be finished. He certainly has his ups and downs, and believe me it has been lots and lots of ups and downs. He seems to have the media on his back almost permanently, but that seems to be the price of his success. In the early years, it really came down to a knife edge, as to whether or not SpaceX was going to make it whether or not it was going to go bankrupt.
He was having to allocate resources and money between Tesla and SpaceX in order to keep them going, and it came down to having to borrow money from friends and family, and bear in mind this is a man who made millions off a software sale earlier. Elon Musk he has had plenty of failures, failed rocket launches, and you have to go through this learning curve. [Julie] With the early rockets and all of that he didn't seem to understand that the chances were they were going to blow up, but sometimes through your greatest failure, you make your greatest steps forward. He just keeps going, he keeps pushing the boat out. It is just an insatiable appetite to just keep going whatever happens.
Yes is yes, maybe is yes, and a no is just a delayed yes. There were a million places along the way where he could have stopped or been derailed or decided to go buy that island and just sit on it, but he didn't. They're risk takers, they love it. They live to be on the knife edge. Failure is expected.
Entrepreneurs don't expect necessarily to succeed all the time, which is a characteristic that makes them successful, because when they do fail, and all entrepreneurs do because they take risks, they just brush it off. They have this phenomenal bounce back factor. Unlike other people who get absorbed by the failure, and get stymied, and they can't do anything else for a while, he can cope with failure.
And to be able to bounce back, and then go into another venture without blinking an eye is what it's all about. [dramatic music] [Narrator] With his companies on the brink of collapse, doom was averted at the last minute. Tesla was saved by investors and SpaceX was awarded a $1.6 billion NASA contract.
The SpaceX team is incredible. They are really pushing the boundaries in terms of where we're going forward with exploration. I think humans are naturally driven to do this, and this is really the beginning I think of human beings leaving low Earth orbit. I certainly plan on being around to see that.
In 2010, Elon launched his Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. SpaceX became the first company to dock a private spacecraft with the ISS, which was at the time amazing. [Josh] This is Mission Control, Houston, official hatch opening time for the SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft. Every bit of adrenaline in my body released at that point. It's such an extremely intense moment. Anything could have gone wrong, and everything went right fortunately, so I felt, I feel very lucky.
[Josh] Don Pettit giving the thumbs up there, as well as the rest of the crew. Elon Musk is developing a track record of delivering on what he says he will. So, he already has developed reusable rockets.
He is supplying the space station. The next stage will be to have versions of his Dragon Spacecraft that are human rated. So, he's actually delivering on his promise. [dramatic music] [Narrator] After his marriage to Justine had unraveled into divorce, Musk began dating British actress Talulah Riley. According to Justine, her divorce was finalized and six weeks later she found out Elon was married to someone else.
It was an extremely quick courting. He met her, courted her, and then asked her to marry. They went on to have a very wonderful, but also very tempestuous relationship.
They married, they divorced, they remarried, they announced a divorce and they called off their divorce, and then put the divorce back on. It's very difficult to keep track of Elon and Talulah's ups and downs. They ended in a very amicable fashion and even now Talulah says never, never say never. They could still end up back together again. [upbeat music] [Narrator] Over the next several years, Tesla would take the lead in the electric car market. Under Elon's leadership, the company is heralded as the great American auto industry success story of the century.
This is kind of crazy but I just learned, I was just told that, the total number of orders for the Model 3 in the past 24 hours has now passed 150,000. [cheering] His concerns about climate change and sustainability is what's behind all of this push towards an electric car, not just a fancy Tesla, but also a mid-range car that for $35,000 or less that everybody can drive. When the Model 3 was launched, there were something like 400,000 people who put money down. That's unheard of in the car industry. You might have some waiting list, but to wait that long for a relatively affordable car is something we haven't seen before.
You can see the line has been building up ever since we got here, so, it's like a never ending line and some tourists actually came up to me and asked what this was. And then I said it was Tesla and they knew about it. Tesla famously doesn't advertise. I don't think it needs to. There's such a buzz about the brand. Things were on track to be able to meet the Model 3 production timing in the middle of next year, and really excited about what's happening.
Tesla's value is something that has a lot of people scratching their heads, the fact that it's a company that's not making money, but yet it has a, a huge value. If you look at the revenues to market cap of the car maker Honda and the value to revenue on Tesla, Honda would be trading at about 0.5 times. Tesla would be trading about 7.4 times today.
So, Tesla is obviously valued a lot more given the little revenue that it produces. Why? Because there's a lot of goodwill in the stock, and that's because Elon has a fan club in the investment community. And that access to capital, that good will, that brand if you like is wonderful for Elon, because that does allow him to get on with other things, such as The Boring Company or his AI ambitions or whatever else crazy frontier driven ideas he comes up with next. The reputation Tesla has as much to do with the product as the guy that's running the company. Frankly, if the cars weren't any good people wouldn't buy them, but they are good, they are technology leaders, and that's what really gets the following. The fact that there's a guy like Elon running the company as well is the icing on the cake.
The general public really appreciate that sort of candid approach to how he's running his companies. What keeps me intrigued about Musk is that if you look closely, you can see his signature in the products that he makes. So, for example, the Tesla sound system goes up to 11. It's a reference to Spinal Tap.
The Ludicrous Mode, the warp speed that you get on the screen when you unlock an Easter egg for extra performance. It's those little details that car companies don't normally do but Tesla just has a bit of fun with them. It's not yet like Knight Rider, because the car doesn't talk back at you.
You can't have a conversation with it, but when it comes to autonomous technology, Tesla is certainly one of the leaders out there. If people want electric cars, fine, but you see through electric cars comes what? Driverless cars. Now, when you see some of the things that have happened with driverless cars and you see how computers can go wrong, well you know, I'm not sure I would want to be in driverless car. People are quite keyed off over the whole autonomous vehicle thing. I think maybe people have this like image of like, robot cars run amok. It's really not anything like that.
All of that would apply to, the software goes through extreme levels of validation before a customer ever sees it. So, there's all sorts of nonsense about people being used as human guinea pigs. You know, it's basically advanced driver's assistance at this point, and in fact we use the name Autopilot, because that's what that's what's used in an aircraft, but the presumption in aircraft is that the pilot must, you know, pay attention and be alert and be ready to take over at any time, not that the pilot can then go, go to sleep, or you know walk away from the cockpit. [car engine revving] [Narrator] Musk is confronting some of the world's biggest challenges head on. Through Tesla, he intends to reduce our use of fossil fuels, while simultaneously attempting to revolutionize the energy industry. A key part of his aim is to change not just energy consumption, but energy production.
Elon is the Chairman of SolarCity, one of the largest producers of solar power systems in the United States. People in a remote village or an island somewhere can take solar panels, combine it with the Tesla Powerwall and never have to worry about having electricity lines. Electricity lines are not the most pretty thing in the world. So, being able to have this solution just works wherever you are. The fact that it's wall mounted is vital, because it means you don't need to have a battery room.
It means that a normal household can mount this on their garage or on the outside wall of their house and it doesn't take up any room. You could actually go if you want completely off grid. You can take your solar panels, charge the battery packs, and that's all you use and the cost of this is $3500. [audience cheering] Oh wow, the grid, it's actually zero. [Elon laughs] This entire night has been powered by batteries. [audience cheering] With The SolarCity Company as now part of Tesla.
Elon is trying to make solar panels more attractive to the mass market. They launched their new solar roof technology, whereas in the old days solar panels would be big, black, bulky squares that you'd put out on your roof or your garden. Now people going to have solar panels embedded into their roof. [Narrator] Tesla's lithium-ion battery installed in South Australia, led to a massive drop in the cost of backing up the region's power supply.
The system powered by wind turbines reduced the price of power outages by 90 percent. They are taking the surplus electricity that's being produced in Australia, and storing it and putting it back to the grid. I think their latest estimate suggests they're making up to a million dollars a day in the electricity they're storing, which is pretty impressive.
That came from a bet that he made over Twitter. So, it was an Australian businessman, and they were discussing about the feasibility of making a city run on solar power. And a bet was issued to Musk about can you do that in this much time, and he went, I'll take that bet. [keyboard keys chattering] He put the batteries in place, had it up and running within the time scale, all for a billionaire's bet and that's what came of it. We have reached an agreement with Tesla Motor Company subject to legislative review and approval, that will enable Tesla to build the world's largest and most advanced battery factory, right here in the Silver State.
[audience cheering] Why do we even call it the Gigafactory? It's because, it's actually gonna be, it's not just gonna be the biggest lithium-ion battery factory in the world, but it will actually be bigger than the sum of all lithium-ion factories in the world. So, it's difficult to quite describe in words, but it's a heck of a big factory. [audience cheering] [dramatic music] [Narrator] Since the Dragon launch, Elon Musk has continued to make history with SpaceX. When the Falcon Heavy rocket launched in February 2018, it heralded the start of a new space race. [rocket engines rumbling] [Phil] This is a big deal. This is kind of the Super Bowl of rocket launches.
Elon Musk and his team just proved that the Falcon Heavy works, which puts us now in a completely different realm, what we can put into deep space, what we can send to Mars. [Narrator] Lifting off from the same launch pad that sent the crew of Apollo 11 to the moon, the mission represented a new era in the progress of space flight. [majestic music] The launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, it was significant for so many reasons scientifically. I mean it's the most powerful rocket we've seen launched since the Saturn V, which took humans to the moon. [Neil] It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. We are entering a new era of space exploration, which is extremely exciting.
Sort of the continuance of the dream of Apollo. I was on the Space Coast for the launch. I haven't seen it that busy there since 2011 when the space shuttle launched and landed for the final time. It really has started to capture people's imaginations about space exploration. It was a great achievement by a private company to create and successfully launch one of the biggest lifting rockets ever in history.
It's the third largest rocket ever to be launched. We had the Apollo Saturn V, and of course we had the shuttle. The Falcon Heavy is that order of magnitude. It is a seriously big rocket. The Falcon Heavy can carry 64 tons. That's a lot, I mean it's a truck.
It's the equivalent of a 737 jetliner, filled with passengers, filled with baggage, filled with fuel, lifting that up and sending it into space, and not just sending it into space, sending it beyond low Earth orbit, sending it beyond the moon, sending it beyond Mars. This launch will also have political implications in my view, because the American government is preparing and budgeting for NASA's rockets, but the fact that Elon and SpaceX have now proven they can successfully launch the Falcon Heavy, which will probably have a cost at about a $100 million, that's about 10% of the NASA rockets, so they are budgeting about a billion dollars per launch. That's a significant cost saving, and that is what a private enterprise can do when you put the right person at the helm and you give him a chance to execute his vision.
In order for us to really open up access to space we've got to achieve full and rapid reusability, and being able to do that for the primary rocket booster is gonna be a huge impact on the cost. Now this will still take us a few years to make that smooth, and make it efficient, but it's, I think it's proven that it can work. [suspenseful music] [rocket engine roaring] [Narrator] Of all Musk's innovations developing reusable rockets could be the most radical. We thought it was more likely than not that this mission would work, but still probably, you know one third chance of failure.
The Holy Grail for space is to have a totally reusable launch system. So, to actually see the SpaceX Falcon rockets launching its spacecraft into orbit and then coming back down and performing a pinpoint accurate landing on a floating platform at sea, that is pretty astonishing. It's quite a tiny target. It's really trying to land on a postage stamp there.
Just to put it this way, you get on an airplane and you fly somewhere, you wouldn't dream of throwing that airplane away, so why do we do the same with space rockets? That's what SpaceX is trying to do and they're succeeding. They're leading the way at the moment. Elon is getting people to question why NASA is still building any rockets at all. They think if SpaceX can do it, why do we need to buy a comparable rocket? We can just buy that one off them.
Inside the Falcon Heavy rocket was a plaque with 6,000 names of all the SpaceX employees that worked on the project, and that just shows that he's willing to really value the people that work for him. Elon Musk's aspiration is to eventually put all of his efforts into developing far larger rockets, which can still launch payloads into Earth orbit, but also be capable of taking human rated spacecraft into deep space, i.e. Mars. You have like a 10 to 20 year horizon here when you want to go to Mars. -I wanna enable-- -SpaceX.
I wanna enable large numbers of people and cargo to go to Mars. So, it's not sort of about me personally want to make a journey back to Mars, I mean that would be nice on a personal level, but I do think it is important that we as a species of this civilization are on a path to become a true space ranked civilization and a multi planet species. [Narrator] Musk aims to launch a mission to Mars by 2022. Elon Musk's ultimate goal is to have humans permanently living and working on Mars, a Martian colony you could say.
Mars is very special. It has a sky and it has landscape and large amounts of frozen water and it has seasons, so there are a lot of similarities to Earth. The atmosphere is much thinner than the Earth's atmosphere, but you've got carbon and then you've got oxygen, so you could potentially use what's on Mars's atmosphere as resources.
It's a very terrestrial environment. It appears to be a home from home but is it? It is possible in our lifetime to send a rocket to Mars, manned, I do think that's possible. Do we wanna do it? Do we wanna pay for it? That's a different question. There's a lot of questions, there's a lot of hurdles, but as long as Elon doesn't break the fundamental laws of physics we can do it.
Mars is reachable and I'm sure we will devise the means by which we can live there, but there are many questions and challenges before that can be achieved. So, let Musk say he's gonna do it, because he probably will. If he maintains this momentum, I see no reason why he shouldn't be landing spacecrafts on Mars. [dramatic music] [Narrator] Elon Musk's evolvement with design, engineering and critical technical decisions is unique amongst his peers. Believe me, Elon is just as smart on engineering as he is on the money side.
Even in the earlier days of Tesla and SpaceX he could easily have said, let me put in some of my cash in there, and we'll put some clever technical people, and I'll just run it, I'll be the manager, I'll be the CEO or whatever, uhn-uhn. To actually be able to get so involved in the engineering side, that's amazing, but that's what he did, because deep down he is an engineer. I would say he approaches engineering and business in much the same fashion, it's a puzzle to be dissected, and then the pieces put back together in some way. At his heart, the man is an engineer.
I think that's where his first love is. He'll be walking around SpaceX, and will talk to the employees, and then will quiz them on things like thrust vectors or aero dynamical design, not typical of CEO behavior. I think the engineering came more naturally because the engineering part is a more rational approach.
He sort of struggled early on in the CEO role of his two early companies, but certainly we've seen that he just learned and grew from that, and so I think you know, he's sort of the whole package at this point. I don't think too many people would argue with that. Some entrepreneurs are more socially skilled than others, but they're not necessarily socially skilled, because they're too focused.
You see, if you're a socially skilled human being, then you're sensitive to everybody around you, but that may prevent you from actually getting on to achieve your objective, and they have objectives in mind, and they are ruthless in the sense of trying to achieve that objective. Not ruthless in the way they treat other people necessarily, just in making sure that they're on their own timeline to achieve that objective. [upbeat music] I had made an enormous PR mistake, and it had landed on the front page of the New York post, and it was bad, like it was mortifyingly bad, and when I went into tell Elon about it, you know, he was very, very angry with me, and the things that he said, the thing that he said that stuck with me was, Julie, perception becomes reality. It was the only time that he was really, really angry with me that I can remember. And the fact that he didn't fire me, I think just points to him being a nice guy. One of the things I find so fascinating about Elon is that in the midst of all his acumen and business sense he does interviews where he tears up and even cries talking about how he wants to find the one.
It's not easy being Elon. It sounds amazing, it sounds glamorous, and it no doubt is also a lot of fun. He's having a ball executing his engineering dreams.
The flip side of that comes with the personal side, it ain't easy. Elon started dating a very famous celebrity actress who was at the time at war with her ex-husband Johnny Depp. Like, I don't know what it is about Amber, but men who fall in love with Amber, they fall hard for Amber.
So, everyone was very curious, in the showbiz world, to see who Amber would end up with next, and when we saw she was with a billionaire, who had this kind of baby face, there was a lot of interest in finding out more. The breakup between Elon and Amber was very painful for Elon, and he very characteristically I suppose is very open with people and journalists about how much he was hurting. At one stage, in a very high profile interview he did with Rolling Stone, he actually asked the journalist who was doing the story, do you know anybody you could set me up with? Is there anybody you know I should date? For a billionaire guy, who is like, let's be honest, decently good looking, to be out there talking about how he wants to find a nice girlfriend, it's just something you don't see come along very often.
He's fairly an open book. So, if they had been spending some time together and the journalist had earned his trust in some capacity, it wouldn't surprise me at all. I mean, he definitely wears his heart on his sleeve.
I would say he's a big softie underneath. I mean Elon is so honest and vulnerable, and I think that's why people find him so incredibly endearing. There are a lot of technological dreams that Elon Musk would have for himself over the next two decades, but I think as much as he wants all of that, I think Elon Musk would like to be happily in love.
[electronic dance music] [Narrator] Musk continues to invest in the future. In 2013, he outlined a potential world changing plan for a transportation system that could reshape the way humanity travels. Elon Musk came up with an idea.
He published a white paper on this vacuum transport, but let it go. He said I'm not gonna do this myself. What I'm gonna do is open up to third party companies that want to develop it themselves.
The Hyperloop project is of huge interest in terms of the world of transportation, the idea of going from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the time it would take to drive from San Francisco to the edge of San Francisco is fantastic. It's a vacuum tube, where all the air is sucked out of the tube, and you send a pod containing passengers through the tube. There's no friction, there's no air resistance, because the pods are levitating on magnets. -The technology is sound.
We can travel faster in a vacuum, there's no friction. They want to get up to speeds about 500 to 700 miles an hour. Elon's idea is that tubes could connect major cities, and you could travel in one of these passenger pods and travel from, say, L.A. to New York in a matter of half an hour. When he was talking about it the first time, we all thought oh well this time he might have, he might have lost it a little bit, or it's a little bit too ambitious or too crazy, but, as with many other of Elon's ideas, watch that space, because before you know it, and actually ahead of schedule, this thing is actually becoming reality.
The speed we can put these tunnels out is dramatic, how fast it can all happen. So, I think a lot of the world will be connected. We'll be moving cargo in 2019. We think we can have passengers safely being transported in Hyperloop by 2021. [Narrator] Elon Musk is a leading voice on the potential of an AI apocalypse.
He has declared that digital super intelligence is the most serious threat to the survival of the human race. To offset this, he launched Neuralink, aimed to developing safe and beneficial artificial intelligence. [Per] The dangers of AI, are the end of the human mind as we know it.
You're dealing with something that is fundamentally going to be smarter than you. It's gonna learn on its own, so how do you stay ahead of it? That's something that Musk is paying close attention to. His main concern is that, if AI becomes too smart and too important, then why do you need humans? We kind of become obsolete. The very worst nightmare that a Hollywood horror movie could come up with is as nothing compared to where we're heading and heading so fast. [dramatic music] When AI has the ability to think, to come to conclusions, and to make judgments, et cetera, just like the human mind, does anyone think they might just be the slightest chance that through that alone, AI could take the planet over? If they do become self-aware, how are we gonna control them? Who's gonna control the controllers? It's a scary prospect. What is its potential to take over everything? You know what its potential to take over everything is? 100 percent, it's the end of humanity.
When software rises up and becomes all powerful, where are we gonna look to? We're gonna look to the titans of industry to provide a counterweight. Elon is ideally placed to be the sort of counterpoint to this software early vision. I mean it's interesting that he's also looking into AI himself with open AI and Neuralink.
When I hear Elon Musk talking about the fact that AI revolution is humanity summoning the demon, absolutely it is, but then founding and opening company called Neuralink to connect AI to the human brain. I mean that contradiction is so extraordinary, I don't know the thought processes that must be going on there. Neuralink is a direct response of Elon's concerns to AI in the first place.
The fact that he thinks AI might surpass humans in terms of its mental capabilities, it makes sense that he would try and develop technology using computers in tandem with our biology. I think that Elon Musk wants to use AI as a tool for augmenting our self, and not a tool for replacing our self. I think he's saying if you can't beat them, become superhuman and then beat them. Brain computer interfaces could help people in two different ways. So, one way would be to restore capabilities for people with disabilities, and another application would be to go beyond our limitation. And so, for example we could think about controlling a computer just with our thoughts without moving any muscle, and that's the core function of a BCI, a brain-computer interface.
There are a lot of different scenarios in which you could apply this technology. We are talking about critical decision making in the military, in a warfare scenario, or in the health sector. So, whenever we talk about hybrid humans, or human and machine, or cyborgs, we are all talking about the same thing I think, which is using technology to augment our capabilities and that's it.
[Narrator] Musk's skepticism about the potential risks of AI technology has led to a public
2024-10-17