In a recent CBS 60 minutes interview, Elon said that when something is important enough, you do it, even if the odds are not in your favor. In his inimitable style, Elon followed this guiding principle when creating SpaceX. This past month, SpaceX successfully launched the Dragon Space Capital on top of its Falcon Rocket. And Dragon successfully docked at the International Space Station, simultaneously launching a new era of commercial space flight. As an inventor, entrepreneur, visionary and relentless dreamer, Elon has proven over and over that his dedication to advancing science and engineering is boundless.
Known for the success of his many companies, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Solar City and PayPal, Elon is a renaissance man with a passion for learning and unleashing the human potential. Today, we welcome Elon to Caltech as a friend, a fellow engineer and a mentor to our students. Please join me in welcoming mister Elon Musk.
Elon Musk:
Alright. Alright. I’d like to thank you for leaving crazy person out of the description. So I thought I try to think what what is the most useful thing that I could what could I say that that could actually be helpful or useful to you in the future? And, I thought perhaps tell the story of, how I how I sort of came to be here. How did some of these things happen? And and maybe there’s some lessons there, because I often find myself wondering how did this happen. So when I was young, I didn’t really know what I was gonna do, when I got older. People kept asking me and but then eventually I thought that the idea of inventing things would be would be really cool. And the reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clarke, which said that a sufficiently
Advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And that’s really true. If you go back, say, 300 years, the things that we take for granted today would be you’d be burned at the stake for, you know, being able to fly. That’s crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having effectively with with the Internet a group mind of sorts, and having access to all the world’s information instantly from almost anywhere in the earth. This is this is stuff that that really would be magic, that would be considered magic, in times past. In fact, I think it actually goes beyond that because there are
Many things that we take for granted today that weren’t even imagined in times past. They weren’t even in the realm of magic.
So it actually goes beyond that. So I thought, well, you know, if I can do some of those things, basically if I can advance technology, then that’s like magic and that would be really cool. And the I also had sort of a slight existential crisis because I was trying to figure out what does it all mean? Like, what’s the purpose of things? And, I came to the conclusion that
If we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can do things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we’re better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened,
and that’s really the only way forward. So, I studied physics and business because I figured in order to do a lot of these things, you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how the economy works. And you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to work with you to create something, because it’s very difficult to do something as an individual if it’s a significant technology. So I originally came out to California to try to figure out how to improve the energy density of electric vehicles, basically to try to figure out if there was an advanced capacitor that could serve as an alternative to batteries. And that was in ‘ninety five. And, that’s also when the Internet started to happen.
And I thought, well, I can either pursue this technology where success may not be one of the possible outcomes, which is always tricky, or participate in the Internet and be part of it. So I decided to drop out. Obviously, you unfortunately, we’re past graduation, so I can’t be accused of recommending that to you. And so so did some Internet stuff, you know, did a few things here and there, one of which was PayPal.
And I think maybe it’s helpful to say one of the things that was important then in the creation of PayPal was kind of how it started because initially the initial thought was with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services. So if you have one place where all of your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. And then we had, like, a little feature, which was to do email payments. And whenever we’d show the system off to someone, we’d show the hard part, which was the the agglomeration of financial services, which was quite difficult to put together.
Nobody was interested. Then we’d show people email payments, which was actually quite easy, and everybody was interested. So this is I think
It’s important to take feedback from your environment.
You know, it’s you you wanna be as closed loop as possible. And so we focus on email payments and really try to make that work, and that’s what really got things to take off. But if we hadn’t responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So it’s it’s important to look for things like that and focus on them when you when you see them and correct your your prior assumptions. And then go going from PayPal, I thought, well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity? It really wasn’t from the perspective of what’s the rank ordered best way to to make money, which which is which is okay.
But it was really what I think is gonna most affect the future of humanity.
So I think the biggest terrestrial problem we’ve got is sustainable energy, but the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner. If we don’t solve that this century, we’re in deep trouble.
And then the other one being the extension of life beyond Earth to make life multi planetary. So that’s the basis for the latter is the basis for SpaceX and the former is the basis for Tesla and and SolarCity. And when I started SpaceX, it actually initially, I thought that, well, there’s there’s no way one could possibly start a rocket company. I wasn’t that crazy. But but then, I thought, well, what is a way to, increase NASA’s budget? That was actually my initial goal.
So I thought, well, if we can do a low cost mission to Mars, something called Mars OASIS, which would land seeds with, with dehydrate with with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel, and you hydrate them upon landing, and then you’d have this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background. And the public tends to respond to, precedents and superlatives, and this would be the first life on Mars, the furthest that life’s ever traveled, as far as we know.
And I thought, well, that would get people really excited and therefore increase NASA’s budget. So so obviously, the financial outcome from such a mission would probably be 0. So anything better than that was on the upside. So I actually went to I went to Russia three times to to look at buying a refurbished ICBM because that that was the best deal. And, I can tell you it was very weird going there in in 2000 late 2001, 2002, going to the Russian rocket forces and saying, I’d like to buy 2 of your biggest rockets, but you can keep the nuke. That’s a lot more.
And that was 10 years ago, I guess. So they thought I was crazy. But I did have money, so that was okay. And after making several trips to Russia, I came to the conclusion that actually my initial impression was wrong about because my initial thought was, well, that there’s not enough will to explore and expand beyond Earth and have a Mars base and that kind of thing. But I can’t get the conclusion that was wrong. In fact, there’s plenty of will, particularly in the United States, because the United States is a nation of explorers, of people who came here from other parts of the world. I think the United States is really a distillation of the spirit of human exploration. So, but but if people think it’s impossible, then or it’s gonna completely break the federal budget, then they’re not gonna do it.
So after my 3rd trip, I said, okay, what we really need to do here is try to solve the space transport problem and started SpaceX. And, this this was against the advice of pretty much everyone I talked to. One friend made me sit down and watch a bunch of videos of rockets blowing up. Let me tell you, he wasn’t far wrong. I think it was it was tough going there in the beginning because I’d never built anything physical. I mean, I built, like, little model rockets as a kid and that kind of thing, but, I never had a company that built anything physical. So I had to figure out how to how to do all these things and and bring together the right team of people. And so we did all that and then failed three times.
It was tough tough going. Because the thing about a rocket is that the passing grade is a 100%. And you don’t get to actually test the rocket in the real environment that it’s going to be in. So I think so the best analogy for for rocket engineering is is, like, if you wanna create a really comp complicated bit of software, you you can’t run the software as an integrated whole, and you can’t run it on the computer it’s intended to run on. But the first time you put it all together and run it on that computer, it must run with no bugs. That’s that’s basically the essence of it. So so we missed the mark there. The first launch, I was picking up bits of rocket near the the launch site.
It was a bit sad. And, but we we learned with with each successive flight and and were able to, with eventually with the 4th flight in 2008, reach orbit. And that was also with the last bit of money that we had. So thank thank goodness that that happened. I think the saying is 4th time’s the charm. So that so we got the Falcon 1 to orbit and then, began to scale that up to to the Falcon 9, which is about an order of magnitude more thrust. It’s around a £1,000,000 of thrust. And we managed to get that to orbit and then developed a Dragon spacecraft, which recently was able to dock and return to Earth from the space station.
That was thanks. That was a white knuckled event. So, yeah, it’s a huge relief. Still can’t quite believe it actually happened.
But there’s a lot more, that must happen beyond this in order for humanity to become a space faring civilization, ultimately, a multi planet species.
And that’s something I think it’s it’s vitally important, and I hope that some of you will participate in that either at SpaceX or or at other companies because it’s just really one of the the most important things for the preservation and extension of consciousness. I mean, it’s worth noting, as I’m sure people are aware, that the Earth has been around for 4 billion years and civilization, at least in terms of having writing, has been around for 10 thousand years, and that’s being generous. So it’s really somewhat of a tenuous existence that that civilization and consciousness as we know it has been on Earth.
And I think I’m actually I’m actually fairly optimistic about the future of Earth. So I don’t wanna I don’t want to sort of people to have the wrong impression that I think we’re all about to die. I think we’ll I think things will most likely be okay for a for a long time on Earth, but not not for sure, but most likely. But even if it’s if it’s sort of 99% likely, 1 a 1% chance is still it’s still worth spending a fair bit of effort to ensure that we have we’ve backed up the biosphere, you know, planetary redundancy, if you will. And, so I think I think it’s really really quite important.
And in order to do that, there’s a breakthrough that needs to occur, which is to create a rapidly and completely reusable transport system to Mars, which is one of those things that’s right on the borderline of impossible. But that’s sort of the thing that we’re going to try to achieve there with SpaceX. And then on the Tesla front, the goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression.
We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly and had low range, kind of like a golf cart. And so that’s why we created the Tesla Road set to show that you can be fast, attractive and long range. And it’s amazing how even though you can show that something works on paper and the calculations are very clear, until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.
And so that that I think is is something worth noting. If if you’re gonna create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. You know, everything everything looks great on PowerPoint. You can make anything work on PowerPoint. But if you have a if you have an actual demonstration article, even if it’s in primitive form, that’s much, much more effective for convincing people.
So, so we made the Tesla Roadster, and now we’re coming out soon with the Model S, which is a a 4 door sedan. Because after we made the Tesla Roadster, people said, oh, sure. Sure. We always knew you could make a car like that. It’s an expensive car, and it’s low volume and it’s small and all that, but you can make a real car. Like, okay, fine, I’ve got to make that too. So that’s coming out soon. And, yeah, so that’s the I think the where things are and hopefully there are some lessons to be to be drawn there.
But I think the overarching point I want to make is that you guys are the magicians of the 21st century. You know, don’t let anything hold you back. Imagination is the limit. And, go out there and create some magic.
Thank you.
