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Elon Musk Interview By Charlie Rose in 2009!!! · Elon Musk Thinking

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Elon Musk is here.
• 0:01
  Speaker 2: He is chief executive of two startup companies with bowl missions.
• 0:05
  Speaker 2: He leads Tesla Motors, the electric car company that has
• 0:07
  Speaker 2: attracted attention from both car enthusiasts and environmentalist as well.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: The company's powerful rochister, which can travel from zero to
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: sixty in less than four seconds, is entirely powered by batteries.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: The company plans to break into the mainstream modo market
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: with an electric sedan as early as twenty eleven. Mosk
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: is also a found to see of Space Exploration Technologies,
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: a company trying to slash the cost of space travel.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Last year, the company signed an agreement with NASA to
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: send cargo to the International Space Station and if that
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: is not enough. He's also chairman of a growing company
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: called Solar City that installs solar panels on homes and businesses.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: He has thrived in Silicon Valley one of the co
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: founders of PayPal, the online payments company that eBay bought
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: for one point five billion dollars in two thousand and two.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: I am pleased to have him here at this table
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: for the first time.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: Welcome, Thank you, thanks for having me. I've been a
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: big find of the show for a long time.
• 1:01
  Speaker 4: Let's just talk about you first, so that if the
• 1:03
  Speaker 4: audience does not know growing up in South Africa. Yeah yeah,
• 1:07
  Speaker 4: and why how how did you end up in Canada?
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: Well, I guess growing up in South Africa, I was
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: actually it was very technology oriented and I taught myself
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: how to program computers, mostly because I wanted to program games.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: And I when when I was about twelve, program sold
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: my first game, and whenever I'd read about technology and
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: great innovation, it's it was coming from from the United States, and.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: So it was, you know, that's where I wanted to be.
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: And I tried to convince my parents to move move there,
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: and uh, neither of them would They would have wahed.
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: I tried my mother trying to find neither would would
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: do it. My mother later moved back to initially Canada
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: and then and then the US. And so when I
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: was seventeen, as soon as I got my Canadian passport,
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: three weeks later, I was in Canada.
• 1:54
  Speaker 4: So here you are, and you come to Canada and
• 1:56
  Speaker 4: make it to the United States, and then you and
• 1:58
  Speaker 4: and several other guys come together and create PayPal right
• 2:01
  Speaker 4: and you sell it to eBay for one point whatever.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: It was five billion dollars.
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so after PayPal, Uh that that gave me, you know,
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: a fair bit of capital. And uh, there were there
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: were there were three areas when as in college, there
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: were three areas that I though would most affect the
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: future of humanity and and those were the Internet, the
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: transition to a sustainable energy and transportation sector. And the
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: third was space exploration and particularly the extension of life
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: to multiple planets. And I didn't ever expect to be
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: involved in the third one, but but it just that
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: seems to.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Me that's something that would be very important for the future.
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: And with the capital I got from the sale of PayPal,
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: I was able to go into both those those areas.
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: And uh and so hint hents uh SpaceX and and
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: in the space and then in in the sustainable energy
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: and transportation you've got Solar City and and Tesla.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: We to talk about space exploration just for a moment.
• 2:54
  Speaker 4: How is it going in terms of creating the systems
• 2:58
  Speaker 4: that will engage in space exploration, not just for governments
• 3:03
  Speaker 4: and not just for NASA, but for private citizens as well.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: Well.
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  Speaker 3: You have to divide the efforts that are going on
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: into what isn't an orbit class effort versus a sub
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: orbital class effort, and there's really a very big difference.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: But the general public doesn't understand the difference between getting
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: to space and getting to getting to orbit, and so
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: it's important to make that distinction. To do a suborbital flight,
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: you need a terminal velosity of around mark three. To
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: get to orbit you need a terminal polosophy of mark
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: twenty five. It's a huge, huge difference. And because the
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: energy required to do that scales with the square of
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: the velocity, So suborbital maybe nine units of energy, orbit
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: is six hundred and twenty five units of energy, So
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: it's only about one and a half percent of the
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: energy of orbit is required to get to SubOrbit. So
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: that there's there are a number of efforts in the
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: suboverval category that certainly could grow one day to to orbital.
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: Jeff Bezos has an effort, and uh, I know that
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: that's something that that's Ranson involved in this. Branson absolutely,
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: not so much directly from the technology standpoint, but from
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: he's he's funding that development at Scales Composits in California.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: What are you doing? So we're in the we're in
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: the in the in the orbit class.
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: And that's it's it's a lot more capital and and
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: uh and and and that's really where you're sort of
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: pushing the ragged edge of of what's what's physically possible.
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  Speaker 1: And uh, last year we got to orbit uh with
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: for the first.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: Time with with our rocket and UH that was certainly
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: a huge relief and a milestone.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: And so what's the next step, You're gonna rocket into orbit?
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so next month we were putting a satellite for
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: Malaysia into orbit uh and then from Malaysia form Formulasia
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: Malasian satellite. And but in the rocket business, the rocket
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: company does launch. It's not like the airline business. So
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: you don't sell the rocket, you sell the launch. And
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: and then later this year we'll be launching out big
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: rocket from Cape Canaveral. That's the Falcon Mine and that's
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: the one that's going to be servicing the space station
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: among other things.
• 5:07
  Speaker 4: Is there a philosophy here that somehow the private sector
• 5:10
  Speaker 4: can do a lot more than than it has done
• 5:12
  Speaker 4: in in areas that seem because of them because of
• 5:16
  Speaker 4: the size related reserved for government.
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, the private sector is very good at at
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: optimization and an innovation. I mean, private sector is generally
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: better doing things than the government. Uh.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: I think that's that's that's fair to say.
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: But you know, there are certain things that that that
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: the government that that asks through to the government, like
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: basic research and that sort of thing. But yeah, so
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: as far as uh, space, the reason that there hasn't
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: been a huge number of a big improvement in the
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: space industry, I think it's because of it's very difficult
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: for it is create a destruction process to to to
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: coming to effect because it is such a significant amount
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: of capital that's needed to start a rocket company, and
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: it's a very difficult technical challenge. And the number of
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: people that that really understand rocketry in the world is
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: a very small number. So it's it's just it's really
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: a huge barrier to entry and and that's why we
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: haven't seen the forcing function of improvement that that there
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: should have been over the years.
• 6:27
  Speaker 4: And your understanding came from sort of from this was
• 6:30
  Speaker 4: not what you studied in college. Well, I studied physics,
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: but I was studying physics and studying rocket science thing.
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it gives you the basics, It gives you
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: the basics. Good framework, analytical framework. So, uh, but no,
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: I picked it up along the way. But what is
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: your core competent you think you? I think it's uh technology, technology, Yeah, yeah, technology.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: If if, if something has to be designed and invented
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: and then and you have to figure out how to
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: ensure that the value of the thing you create is
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: greater than the cost of the inputs, then that's that's
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: probably my course skill.
• 7:10
  Speaker 4: Now bring me to the car. And I drove a
• 7:13
  Speaker 4: car this afternoon. So far, so good, which was terrific.
• 7:18
  Speaker 4: It's the Roadster. Yeah. Where does that stand you? Obviously
• 7:23
  Speaker 4: I've been I've been in the Google parking lot. Yeah,
• 7:26
  Speaker 4: you're seen a few that I've seen a few there. Yeah,
• 7:28
  Speaker 4: I'm sure that's true another place in Silicon Valley. I
• 7:31
  Speaker 4: don't know whether it's particularly a car that appeals to
• 7:34
  Speaker 4: people in Silicon Valley because of interest in technology and
• 7:38
  Speaker 4: high performance and lots of other things, or or what
• 7:41
  Speaker 4: whether there are a lot of rich people and who
• 7:43
  Speaker 4: willing to spend that kind of money for something they
• 7:45
  Speaker 4: think is on the cutting edge of causes A believe
• 7:48
  Speaker 4: in sustainable energy. Right, tell me about how where you
• 7:52
  Speaker 4: are in this development of this electric car which has
• 7:57
  Speaker 4: most of all this extraordinary sort of power.
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, Yeah, zero to takes sixty times a
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: three point nine Seguis and.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: The roast is extraordinary.
• 8:06
  Speaker 4: When you think about the sports car, isn't there anything
• 8:09
  Speaker 4: else that's out on the road today.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: In fact, on the top gear test track, our standard
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: roads to beats the Porsche GT three exactly, which is
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: one that reference, and the roads total to even better.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: But you've also said, in terms of where you want
• 8:24
  Speaker 4: to go that that developing a high performer sports car
• 8:28
  Speaker 4: is not what this is about.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, it is about something else. And you want to
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: develop a sedan. Yeah.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: The whole purpose behind Tesla, the reason I've put so
• 8:38
  Speaker 3: much of my time and money it's helping create the
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: business is is we want to serve as a catalyst
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: for accelerating the electric car revolution.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: The price of gas.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: At the pump does not reflect the true cost of
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: gasoline because you have a consumption of.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: A public good.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: It's one of the most It's really a common problem economos.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: You have the same thing in fishing, where because there's
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: no cost to fishing stocks, people just over fish and
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: you have disaster that ensues. And here we're not paying
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: for the cost of this year two concentration in the
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: oceans and the atmospheres. We're not paying for all these
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: the ancillary effects of the wars and all the other
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: things at the gas prompt So you effectively have a
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: subsidy taking place at the gas comp because of that.
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: So the only way to bridge that is with innovation
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: is to try to try to make electric cars better
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: sooner than they would.
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  Speaker 4: Otherwise be this Suppose this, this is a hypothetical which
• 9:31
  Speaker 4: it may or may not speak to the point.
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  Speaker 1: But suppose fifteen.
• 9:35
  Speaker 4: Years ago, let's say Bill Clinton as president, who talked
• 9:40
  Speaker 4: about the road to the twenty first cent fion and
• 9:42
  Speaker 4: all of that.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Suppose he had said, I.
• 9:45
  Speaker 4: Believe so much unsustainable energy that I want to make
• 9:47
  Speaker 4: a commitment and the federal government, using all of its resources,
• 9:51
  Speaker 4: will develop an electric car with appropriate battery power that
• 9:55
  Speaker 4: will change the face of automobile, the automobile industry in
• 9:59
  Speaker 4: the world. Was that very doable? Bill Clinton was elected
• 10:03
  Speaker 4: in nineteen ninety two, seventeen years ago.
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you could have made a reasonably good electric car
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: around that time for a lot of investment.
• 10:14
  Speaker 4: And should that have been done, should the US government
• 10:17
  Speaker 4: have made that kind of otherwise you will not be
• 10:19
  Speaker 4: able to change the driving habits of Americans.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: Was it a worthwhile expenditu or add that time, probably
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: would have been a worthwhile expenditure.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: But the thing that really helps electric cars is lithium
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: my own right?
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: And when did that come around?
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: I mean, explain why our batteries has always been the
• 10:40
  Speaker 4: great dilemma for developing an electric car.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: Sure well, the energy contained with their battery is so
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: much less than it's contained in gasoline that I mean,
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: it's really almost it's hard to quite describe. Another way
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: to put it is the Tesla battery pack in the roadstuff,
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: which is the most advanced batory pack in the world.
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: The common reference is to call what is actually a
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: cell a battery, right, So a cell is the little
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: single kin of chemicals. And then if you have multiple cells,
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: that's that's what actually a battery. Right, That's that's virtually
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: what a battery means, multiple cells, multiple cells. And then
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: and usually as the batteries get bigger and bigger, they
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: get harder and harder to deal with. So the cell
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: that we use as a commodity cell, it's bid anywhere
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: pretty much and it's and it's the same sort of
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: thing that's in any one of a number of laptops.
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: That the challenge is combining those cells into and having
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: thousands of them, making sure they're safe, making sure that
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: they'll last for two hundred thousand miles or one hundred
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: thousand over bumps and potholes and extremes of temperature, and
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: safe in a crash, and that that compounds the problem massively,
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: and you've got to make sure the charges and temperatures
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: balanced across the whole thing. So the difficulty is really
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: at the pack level much more than it is at
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: the cell level, and that's really where where the single
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: biggest area of Tesla's expertise, although I should point out
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: the Tesla also has we designed to build the motor
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: and the power electronics, and then the software that manages
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: the whole thing, so that those are important too, But
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: the battery is the single most important thing. And the
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: Tesla battery pack to reference to gasoline, it weighs about
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: one thousand pounds and it has the energy content of
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: two and a half gallons of gasoline. So so that
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: means you've got to have a lot of charges. Well,
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: what that means is that but there's there's an advantage
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: that that. That's because the the consumption of that energy
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: is much more efficient in an electric car. And this
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: and this is I'll get to. You know why why
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: is the Tesla roads twice as efficient as as a Prius.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Which is obviously not as sports car? Right?
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: And the reason is because an electric motor is fundamentally
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: super efficient at turning energy into motion.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: So a good electric motor.
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: Such as the one that we have in the Tesla Roadster,
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: is about ninety percent efficient at turning the Christie into motion,
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: whereas a gasoline internal combustion engine is somewhere typically in
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: the range of around seventeen or eighteen percent. Most of
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: what it does is generate heat. So even though it's
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: only two and a half gallons gasoline, that two and
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: a half gallons of energy content goes really far compared
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: with you know, if you had.
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: If that was okay, compared to the Priest, but also
• 13:21
  Speaker 4: compared to the new GM volt, Right, how does it
• 13:25
  Speaker 4: do in comparison with the volt?
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: The vault is a different architecture it uses.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: It's a plug in hybrid architecture, so it's a I
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: think about a forty miles or so battery back what
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: they say, and then there's an engine with a generator
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: that allows you to go beyond the forty miles, right,
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: and whereas ours pure electric and the strategy that we've
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: decided to hew to is a pure electric strategy. And
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: I mean, I've been criticized sometimes for responding to questions
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: like yours to explain why we've gone to electric, and
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: then people have taken that to be an attack on
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: on on the Vault, which is is not the case.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: I I hope the Bolt succeeds, and I think it
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: can be a pretty good car kind of I don't
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: take this as an attack U totally. It's it's it's
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: not but that. But I just wanted to to put that.
• 14:18
  Speaker 4: And what I hope to do in this conversation with
• 14:20
  Speaker 4: you is figure out what it is you've done, because
• 14:21
  Speaker 4: you've got a fair amount of attention, so figure out
• 14:23
  Speaker 4: why you're not further along than you are, or figure
• 14:26
  Speaker 4: out why you are and what your expectations are to
• 14:30
  Speaker 4: do when and where is the game for you.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: I think it's taken a while for the industry to
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: come around to this point, but I think it's it's
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: largely at this point, it's it's it's almost become conventional
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: wisdom that the future is electric cars. The only question
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: is this interim period, of this transitional period. But if
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: you look at the pace of battery improvement, it's clear
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: that that's what I mean, it's inevitable the future will
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: be entirely electric.
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: And the iron of all this conversation is that in
• 14:57
  Speaker 4: the last year, a year before it's bankruptcy, General Motors
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: had announced that the bold you know, it was.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: The key to their future, right as an holm Bill company, right, yeah, exactly.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: I mean one area of Christism I think that it
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: is valid regarding Jim is have.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: Them come to that conclusion.
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: By the way, well, they should have probably done a
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: prius or something like that. But I think if you know,
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: they had the e.
• 15:21
  Speaker 4: V one right right exactly, which didn't work, didn't work,
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: but didn't make it for reasons I'm not clear, right,
• 15:27
  Speaker 4: and you know as a marketing success.
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Chris Pain did a movie Who Killed the Electric
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: Car about it, and it was sort of trying to.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Viiscia that issue.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: But I think it's it's notable that in that movie
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: it shows that the customers who had the EV one,
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: the cause had to be taken away from them and crushed,
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: and they held a candlelight vigil.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: If you have people that really love a product to
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: the degree that they're willing to hold a candle lit
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: vigil for it, that that says, hey.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: Maybe you should make an EV too. It certainly does
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: say that. You know.
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: So the car that I drove today coached to two,
• 16:00
  Speaker 4: I think, I mean, I think it was a roaster
• 16:01
  Speaker 4: before this, this is right, second iteration of it.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, came came through production.
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: What year the first roaster number one, the first first
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: production roster which was fully deplotment of transport.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Legal and all that sort of stuff at all the standards. Yeah, Yeah,
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: it was Februar of last year, and that was my car.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: That was the car, your car meaning what the one?
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and so then you decided immediately to make improvements
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: on that.
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely it was. It was a little little
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: rough going in the beginning, and we had some issues
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: with some of the powertrain components. In fact, not that
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: not the hard stuff, but the stuff that's sort of
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: theoretically easier, and you know, we're able to fix those
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: and get get production wrapped up, and now we're at
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: the point where we're delivering about twenty to twenty five
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: cars a week.
• 16:50
  Speaker 4: You know that Tata Motors obviously, you know, and I
• 16:53
  Speaker 4: know take for a moment what he's doing in India. Yeah,
• 16:58
  Speaker 4: developing a little sedan for twenty three hundred dollars none, right, right, right?
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: Where do you put that in the whole equation of
• 17:06
  Speaker 4: where the future of cars are?
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: Well, I think it's a good idea to have affordable cause.
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: You know, I think I think we're with the problem
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: with with something something like like the Nana, which I think,
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: by the way, I'll say a problem. I think it's
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: a great idea. And Jack Russian is a gentleman. The
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: skull and all of those are. Yeah, it's hard not
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: to yeah, exactly. I think where it's going to come
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: challenging the futures. As the price of gasoline rises, the
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: cost of acquiring the car is much less of an
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: issue than the cost of operating in that car, right,
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: And uh, And I think oil.
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: Is inevitable, it's already moving back up. And you, yeah,
• 17:45
  Speaker 4: do you have some assumptions in your own calculations as
• 17:48
  Speaker 4: to where oil will level off.
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: I think it will exceed that the numbers we've seen
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: last year one hundred and forty four. Oh yeah, sure, absolutely,
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: I think we'll see it sort of approach two hundred
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: dollars and beyond.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: By twenty ten, eleven, twelve somewhere.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: Now, I'd say, whenever the next boom is so as
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: they say the next boom is four years from now,
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: it'll be around that around that point.
• 18:11
  Speaker 4: Of all your businesses, which one do you care the
• 18:13
  Speaker 4: most about?
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: Well, right now my time is split roughly evenly between
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: Tesla and SpaceX, so it's I guess it would be
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: pretty pretty even between the two. And that Solar City
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: is doing great on its own, and the two co
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: founders that are living to Peter Rve have done a
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: phenomenal job and thankfully it requires very little my attention
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: right now.
• 18:35
  Speaker 4: The reason to create a sports car a roaster as
• 18:39
  Speaker 4: the first stage of this is because it attracts attention
• 18:42
  Speaker 4: or what oh.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: So good, great, great question.
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: So because I feel often misinterpret why we have created
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: a sports car because they will say.
• 18:53
  Speaker 4: You know, the implication will be cars for rich guys,
• 18:56
  Speaker 4: is that I saw the energy from.
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: Right exactly, And they would sort of like that that
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: I feel that there was somehow a shortage of sports cars.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: For rich guys or something like that.
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: And that was the part and not only if you're
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: if any new technology is expensive when it starts out,
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: and you can point pretty much anything. And and because
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: the first thing that that you, the engineers are trying
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: to do is make it work. And then when you
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: made it work, make it work, then you optimize and
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: new optimize and new optimized. And you look at the
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: early days of computers or cell phones or almost anything,
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: even the early days of gasoline cars. There used to
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: be toys for rich people until they were made affordable
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: and mass products. Yeah, and and and and then you
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: combine them with and and then you combine that with
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: the fact that we were just a little startup and
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: you know, there's there's just no way that we could
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: afford a billion dollars to make a giant car plant
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: that that would uh make you know, hundreds of thousands
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: of cars a year, because that's the kind of volume
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: you have to get to to make to make cheap cars,
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: and uh and then and it's also the first iteration
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: of technology.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: So we had both a.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: Volume problem and a new technology problem, and so that
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: naturally that you have to reach scale. You have to
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: reach scale, and you have to work the bugs out
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: of the system, and so you've got to make it
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: and you want to make mistakes at a small scale.
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: Okay, So how's that going. Reaching scale and being able
• 20:17
  Speaker 4: to create a marketing, a business plan, they'll enable you
• 20:24
  Speaker 4: to reach a large audience, you know, and create and
• 20:28
  Speaker 4: continue the development of the technology.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: They'll make it even more attractive. It's going really well. Actually,
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: so it was. We had a few bumpy, bumpy years
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: in the beginning, but at this point we're producing at
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: a steady state of about an annualized production rate of
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: about a thousand roads to sports cause a year. We
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: unveiled at saidan a few months ago, which is a
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: much more functional car, and it's a fifty thousand dollars car,
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: so it's basically it's about half the price of the
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: roads and.
• 20:54
  Speaker 4: The production run, say for the year twenty ten, for
• 20:57
  Speaker 4: the roads, that will be about one thousand, and for
• 21:00
  Speaker 4: the sedan.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: The sedan is only coming out in two years.
• 21:05
  Speaker 4: Twenty eleven will be the first year, right, and what's
• 21:07
  Speaker 4: the projection for that.
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: We're expecting to do twenty thousand units a year for
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: the Sedan. It's always difficult to predict these things exactly,
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: but our target is we'll produce a total of about
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: one hundred thousand of them in about twenty thousand a year,
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: and they're going to be many variations on that. We'll
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: do an suv and we'll do you know, other things,
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: and then we'll do our third generation platform beyond the.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Sedan.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: The model of Sedan will be a sub thirty thousand
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: dollar car. So we're trying to get to mass production
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: as soon as we possibly can. And but that's both
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: from the cars that we make ourselves as well as
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: the cause we do in partnership with others, like the
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: Dialer deal you may have read about.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: And so how do you measure the odds of success personally?
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: I would say success for me for Tesla is that
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: we've accelerated the advent of electric cars by at least
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: five years.
• 22:00
  Speaker 4: That's at the goal to accelerate the advent of electric
• 22:05
  Speaker 4: cars or to create a great electric car company.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: I think the two are anonymous. I mean or I
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: mean that you do one, you do the other.
• 22:12
  Speaker 4: Okay, Yeah, And why is it that it's happening by
• 22:17
  Speaker 4: a guy who created a startup in two thousand and three,
• 22:20
  Speaker 4: rather than a whole range of sort of industrial autombile
• 22:26
  Speaker 4: companies around.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: The world, not just here.
• 22:28
  Speaker 4: Theod is a successful car company and their own Chrysler right.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: Well, disruptive technology like where you really have a big
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: technology discontinuity, it tends to come from new companies. You know,
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: you could ask the same question of why does Google
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: come from Google?
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: Larry and Lari.
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: By the way, I've known Larry since before he got
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: venture funding for for Google.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: Man is he But is he an investor in Tesla?
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: He is, Larry?
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: Answergar investors in Tesla and they drive them or don't drive? Yeah,
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: they drive them?
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: Absolutely?
• 22:59
  Speaker 4: Uh it because some of the criticism that comes at
• 23:03
  Speaker 4: you and the company now is that that you went
• 23:05
  Speaker 4: out to seek a lot of external financing and did
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: not reach your goals.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: Well, we we're taken as longer to reach our goals.
• 23:13
  Speaker 4: But what was it raise one hundred million to raise
• 23:16
  Speaker 4: forty or what was it?
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: What was the goal? Well?
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: I think it's you know, some of some of the
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: stumbles were were silly mistakes we made ourselves.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: Some of them were market externalities, and.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: We were getting ready to raise or we're in the
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: facets of raising about one hundred million dollars round. That
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: began in sort of the summer of last year and
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: then ran into uh, you know four or five hurricane.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: An economic circumstance that took everything.
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and so so that that forced us to scale
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: back our plans a little bit. We had to do
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: a layoff, and we had to raise the money internally
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: from existing investors. I had to put up a lot
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: of the money personally, and uh think there was just
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: no money and so that that was it was sort
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: of a hair raising time for the company. But at
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: this point we're actually in good shape. We expect to
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: be profitable in the third quarter.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: And that comes from the success of the roaster, yeah,
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: and the roads.
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: Then we also have a power train supply business to
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: Diamoner as well for the electric smart that we're doing
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: with them.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: Make the smart car an electric car.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, the smart car was always intended to
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: be an electric car, but they can never get they
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: can never get the battery right. So a year and
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: a half ago we met with Daimler and that I
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: was trying to convince them to work with us. We actually,
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: I mean we've really tried hard to work with a
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: lot of different car companies and what happened, Well, I
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: guess they think, well, this took the attitude of what,
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: you know, what if some little startup in Silicon Valley
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: know that that that.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: We don't know or couldn't do, and what would.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: You say to them, Well, we'd say, drive our car
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: and look at our technology. And I don't know, it
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: just never seemed to sort of sink in. But the
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: diamer uh that put diamelet did. Actually, so I I went,
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: I went through Stuttgart, went out on the way to
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: India actually uh and met with the doctor Waver, the
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: head of Global R and D and and and we
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: had conversations.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: Said, well, what does it take for us to to
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: work together. We'd love to do something.
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: We'd love to do something with, you know, an affordable
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: mass market car that you know we ourselves couldn't do
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: right now because we don't have the cast of it. Yeah,
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: and and and so I said, what about you know
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: what what about electric smart?
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: And because the Smart was always intended.
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: To be an an electric car, and and and what
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: would take for us to work together? And he said, well,
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: if you could do a prototype that would that would
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: really go a long way. So we did. We worked
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: really hard. The power trying team led by JB. Stravel
• 25:38
  Speaker 3: don awesome job. And forty days later when when when
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: they came out to visit, we said here's the car,
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: take a drive, and they really liked what they saw,
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: and so what did they do?
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: Then?
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: Then they said, okay, well let's let's take it sort
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: of another step further, and that they gave us a
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: little little R and D contract and eventually got to
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: the point where where we got a contract for to
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: supply it thousand cars for them and then if we
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: do well and that we'll we'll potentially go into you know,
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: tens of thousands of cars.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: So so that but this is a car.
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: That everyone could afford and and could hopefully come quite soon.
• 26:11
  Speaker 4: Do you have a profile of the people who you
• 26:13
  Speaker 4: think will want to buy these roasters?
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's it's the kind of person who who likes
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: the performance car.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: Maybe they want a Porsche or you know.
• 26:23
  Speaker 4: You know Lamborghini or you know this car is actually
• 26:27
  Speaker 4: faster than Lamborghini zero sixty.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's I think faster than almost almost
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: anything anything I know of.
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's like things that the really sort
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: of million dollars supercars. Obviously those will those will be
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: like Frienzo exactly. But but it's it's pretty much faster
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: than any normal, normal sports car, and.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: And it's really easy to drive.
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: If you want a hyperformance car with a clean conscience,
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: this is the only option. And the sedan is going
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: to be for someone that wants a great sedan and
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: also you know, clean conscience, and it's it's going to
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: be cheap and operate.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: Then.
• 27:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so you are, as you well know, a controversial
• 27:05
  Speaker 4: guy as well.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: I try to I try not to be controversial. Controversy
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: it finds you.
• 27:13
  Speaker 4: It finds you because you think big. You're a software
• 27:17
  Speaker 4: guy who has been successful in the private sector. Yeah,
• 27:23
  Speaker 4: you know, and see no reason you can't do things
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: that other people have not been able to do. No,
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: a lot of how large the corporate enterpise create the
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: best electric car or be put privately astronauts in space,
• 27:38
  Speaker 4: which you say you will do in two years.
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah, it sort of depends on when NASA asked
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: us to do that. If so, if NASA tunes on
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: the access to do that this year, which we're hopeful
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: that they will. The White House has a convened a
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: panel on the future of human spaceflight that that panel
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: is going to make their recommendations in a few months.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: I hope though some of those recommendations will be favorable to.
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: SpaceX, because the alternative is, if SpaceX doesn't do it,
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: we will be entirely dependent on the Russians to carry
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: our astronauts to the space station after twenty ten, and
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: billions of dollars will be spent on essentially a soul
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: source situation to the Russians, which I think is outrageous.
• 28:17
  Speaker 4: And you haven't taken advantage of the opportunity to do
• 28:19
  Speaker 4: in space yourself, have you?
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: No? I have not. Have you wanted to?
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: If it was if it was purely a matter of
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: personal interest, I would I would have done it already.
• 28:28
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I do want it, I want interested
• 28:30
  Speaker 4: in that or no is expressed some interesting, some interesting.
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: Yes, Yeah, I would like to go at some point,
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: but it's I'm also in the point where it's difficult
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: for me to take personal risks.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: I used to take a lot of personal risks of children.
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: I've got my kids and responsibilities for the companies as well,
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: and so if I, if I do things for they
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: have personal risk. At this point, I risked more than
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: my own moment.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: You've had.
• 29:01
  Speaker 4: How many trips do you have? One set of trips
• 29:03
  Speaker 4: on one set of twins?
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they have the twins Smithy in New York.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: Actually, so they like they like the car.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they can't drive and they can't go on
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: the road, so because it doesn't you know, it's not
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: very kit friendly, but.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: But you know, it's not very good friendly. You're right.
• 29:21
  Speaker 4: The Sedan will be ideal for them. So much success
• 29:24
  Speaker 4: to you. Thank you for coming, thank you for joining us.
• 29:27
  Speaker 4: See you next time.