Elon Musk: How I Became The Real 'Iron Man' - Zweisprachige Untertitel
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk puts his money where his mouth is.
I am personally guaranteeing that value and standing behind that guarantee with all of my assets.
His greatest asset is his ability to take this big big dream and make other people believe that it's true.
The determined engineers big dreams transformed three industries.
I'm just wishing to any entities that are listening please bless this launch.
And here's an immigrant from South Africa coming to America to say,
you know, NASA, that whole rocket thing you're doing at this space shuttle, I've got a better way.
His better way meant risking everything.
We have maybe about a week's worth of cash in the bank, or less.
I had to make a choice then that either took all of the capital that I had left from the sale of PayPal to eBay
and invest that in Tesla or Tesla would die.
Others weren't so willing to take a chance on him or his companies.
You put $90 billion, like 50 years worth of breaks into solar and wind, to Cylindra and Fiska and Tesla and N-R-1.
I I had a friend who said you don't just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers.
It's very unlikely that the Tesla investment is ever repaid to the taxpayers.
Electric vehicles are really not possible in ways that would be effective for most consumers still.
But his bets have paid off.
We didn't just repay the principal.
We repaid it with interest and a bonus pay.
So ultimately the US taxpayer actually made a profit of over $20 million on this loan.
Elon Musk has even bigger dreams that might just take him farther than anyone else.
Elon Musk goes a step further.
Earth not big enough.
The he literally wants to go to Mars.
A long time I'd really love to go to Mars and that's the overarching goal of SpaceX.
You When I was a kid, I was really scared of the dock.
But then I sort of came to understand,
okay, well, dock just means really the absence of photons in the visible wavelength 400 to 700 nanometers.
It's hard to believe that entrepreneur Elon Musk was ever afraid of anything.
And Elon said, darkness is merely the absence of light.
Then I thought, well, it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons.
Then I wasn't afraid of the balcony, well, after that.
Once one of the kids said to him, look at the moon, it's a billion miles away.
And said, well, no, it's actually under 250,000 miles away.
And they said, oh, Elon!
Entrepreneur Elon Musk has spent his life proving people wrong.
Growing in South America, It the oldest of three children and started school a year early.
His father was an engineer.
His mother May was a model and nutritionist.
He was the youngest, made about two days, and the shortest, and then he was this brilliant boy and so people didn't really like him.
So I was this little bookwormy kid and probably a of it.
So this is a recipe for disaster.
Not that he told me much about it, but he was picked on quite a bit.
So I just like read a lot of books and try to stay out of people's way.
And so his social life was much less than my other two kids, and that's a typical nerd.
I read all the comics I could buy or that they'd let me read the book store before chasing me away.
I read everything I could get my hands on from when I woke up to when I went to sleep.
At one point I got, I really ran out of books and started reading the encyclopedia.
And he has a photographic memory so he could remember everything.
Any time I had a question, my daughter, Tosca, would say, hold on.
His brother, Kimbal Musk.
When he was 10 years old, he got tested by IBM.
And he was found to have one of the highest attitudes they had ever seen for computer programming.
I tried to take some computer classes, but I was way ahead of the teacher.
So it didn't really help.
So started programming the space game called Blastar.
Musk, already thinking like an entrepreneur, figured out how to sell his game.
And I didn't realize that I was 12.
We decided we were going to open an arcade out near our high school.
We were in big into video games.
We figured that it was going to be a huge hit.
We got a lease on a building.
We got the arcade provider to deliver the equipment.
And the only thing we needed to do by the end of it was get the city to approve what we were doing.
But an adult had to apply for a city permit, and they hadn't told their parents what they were up to.
And of course, they told us we were not going to be opening up an arcade.
Max Chafkin is a technology and business journalist who has profiled Elon Musk several times.
Really, the most amazing thing about his childhood is his escape from...
I remember thinking and saying that America is where great things are possible, more than any other country in the world.
It's a little cliche, but it's true.
America is the land of opportunity.
By moving, Musk would also avoid mandatory service in South Africa's army.
Growing up in a part of South Africa was pretty surreal.
I we didn't support that government, we didn't believe in it.
And so the idea of actually going to the military service was really out of the question.
I told my parents I was going to Canada and they tried to convince me not to leave.
And off he flew and I thought, wow, he's so independent.
Of course, as soon as he lands, he calls me and he says, what I do now?
So I bought a bus ticket from Montreal to Vancouver and that allowed me to kind of see Canada, at from the highway.
He worked at odd jobs across the country before settling at Queens College in Toronto.
In fact, when I went to college, I rarely went to class.
I've just and then show up for exams.
The bigger pills university was being able to date girls my own age.
I actually met my first wife there.
Moss got an engineering and business degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a scholarship to go to Stanford.
Silicon Valley was the promised land.
I really wanted to kind of go where the really exciting breakthroughs were occurring.
Elon had this ability to look at the world, this is a real problem that's going to happen in 20 years.
He looked around and he saw that the world changing stuff was not happening at Stanford.
I didn't even go to class.
I called the chairman of the department and said I'd like to try starting this internet company.
It probably won't succeed and so when it fails I want to make sure that I can still come back.
My kids do funny things and I'm never too concerned about them because you know they But if Elon wanted to drop out of college,
he could always go back.
My brother was in Canada at the time and I said,
look, I think we should try to create an internet company so he came down and joined me.
He had, you know, $2,000, no barely enough money for an apartment.
I he told me he was showering at the gym because they didn't have a shower where he was living.
We just got some futons that were couches during the day and then returned into beds at night.
Steve Gerberton is a venture capitalist.
I first met Elon and Kimball Musk his brother back in the mid 90s when they first set foot in California.
I think they'd been here for about a week and they were pitching a new company called Zip2.
Silicon Valley in the mid 90s and late 90s was a gold rush.
People were flocking to the region to find riches to make it in the internet business.
Musk came up with an idea to bring newspapers into the digital age.
He took a CD-ROM yellow pages,
some mapping software, wrote a little code and put it all together to create the first online city listings.
Elon was more the business mastermind.
I still had my core programming skills, so I was able to write the software needed for the first company.
Now, when Elon was starting to keep in mind, you know, the internet was just a couple of years old.
Most local businesses were not on the internet.
The way you found a local business was you opened up the yellow pages.
You thought it was the media?
The media the newspapers are going to need help coming online and building lots of functionality to their websites.
We had someone literally throw a yellow pages book at us and tell us, do you think you will ever replace this?
And we thought the guy was crazy.
Because not only were we going to replace this, but that's not where it ended, it could keep going from there.
It wasn't long before media companies across the country were signing up.
And so we were able to get as investors and customers, the York Times company, Hearst, Knight Ritter, and a number of other companies.
In 1999, the Altu Vista Division of Compact bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in Musk was just 28 years old.
I thought that's crazy.
Well, I would somebody pay such a huge amount of money for this little company that we have.
It actually turned out very well for them, actually.
So it's that they're a lot more fatter than I do.
When the kids sold the tooth, it was the most exciting day.
We couldn't believe it because you don't know, in the internet, Well, if you're going to make a million or die tomorrow.
In February 1999, Elon Musk sold his first company.
At 28, he joined the ranks of Silicon Valley millionaires.
It was acquired by a compact for a low of $200 million,
and I made about $21 or $22 million as a of that, which was a phenomenal amount of money for me.
It was obviously a financial winful.
It was super fun to go out and buy some through toys.
There is, y'all, in the fastest part of the world.
One of his first things to do is go out and get a big sports car.
family that really enjoys racing in vehicles.
And got one of the highest performance cars money could buy at the time.
It a McLaren F1.
And proceeded to enjoy that around the Bay Area, let's say, the number of adventures and risk taking moves with with his driving.
Well, I'm sure it felt, you know, wonderful to all this money and to have people recognizing success.
I he was also frustrated that this company hadn't become as great as he wanted it to be.
It hadn't changed the world.
It had just slightly altered the course of newspaper history, which I think from his point of view.
is kind of a piddling accomplishment.
So I certainly had the choice at that point of retiring and buying an island somewhere and serving my ties,
but that was not of interest to me at all.
There really wasn't a choice of we weren't going to do anything, it was just really what we were going to do next.
In Elon's case in particular, it was really just a stepping stone.
The in doing my second area company was to create something that would have a profound effect.
And it seems to me that the financial sector had not seen a lot of innovation on the internet.
And money is really just an entry in a database.
And it's low bound with, it seems like something that should lend itself to innovation.
He was very rich.
I just more money than most people could dream.
And he took almost no time in between that sale and starting the company that became PayPal.
Musk's new company created something we take for granted today.
It the way the world buys things, the way money is transferred from one person to another.
So it could take weeks just to complete a single transaction.
With his windfall from the sale of Zip2, Musk quickly turned around and founded X.com to make electronic cash transfers possible.
But his new company collided with a rival mobile payment company called Confinity.
And they were really competing against each other.
And real enemy at the end of the day was eBay.
We combined our efforts in order to compete effectively against eBay's built-in system.
They called the new company PayPal.
When he looked at PayPal, his goal was not to create a place you could do person-to-person payments.
His goal was to transform the financial impact.
We're able to become the leading payment system in the world and then eBay finally threw in the towel and acquired PayPal in early 2002.
Musk and his partners sold PayPal for $1.5 billion.
Musk was the largest shareholder and walked away with $100 billion.
He was 30 years old.
I could afford probably a chain of islands, but that again, that was just not of interest to me.
Islands weren't of interest, but outer space was.
It's just a much more exciting and inspiring future throughout their exploring.
stars, as opposed to the future where we are forever confined to Earth.
I was thinking, well, I wonder when we're going to Mars, you when is NASA going to go to Mars?
And I went to the NASA website and there was no plan to go to Mars.
And no plan to really even take the next step in space exploration.
This is Elon saying he wants to go and enable the human civilization It's about as big a vision as you could possibly imagine,
and that's going to require funds and he has enough funds to go do it, so he's going to do it.
Musk had the outrageous idea that private enterprise could actually re-energize space change.
travel.
And in June 2002, he founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.
Elon was the only funder of the company for this early year.
There's another incredibly risky move to say nobody on the planet thinks this idea is financeable.
I'm to fund all of it myself to the tune of almost $100 million,
which was the majority of it, isn't that at the time, into a dream to take on the military industrial complex.
Here's an immigrant from South Africa coming to America to say,
you know, NASA, that whole rocket thing, you're doing like a space shuttle, I've got a better way.
Actually travel to Russia three times,
look at buying our privileged ICVM for the MOOC,
and I came to the conclusion that the thing that was really holding us back from making much more progress in space was really that rockets have not evolved since the 60s.
So the trick isn't figuring out how to get to orbit, it's figuring out how to get to orbit cheaply.
So I had to come up with lower cost ways to produce engines,
the structure of the electronics to launch operation, as well as run the company with very little overhead.
dimensions in all those areas is what has led us to roughly three to fourfold improvement
over the cost of other rockets in the United States.
What SpaceX has been very successful at is taking basically off the shelf technology,
stuff that was developed by NASA 50 years ago, and streamlining it.
So in that way, he's kind of the Henry Ford of space because Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile.
He figured out how to make the automobile commercially viable.
Musk was more than just an entrepreneur.
If you ask Elon how he managed to teach himself rocket science, he'll just look at you very seriously and just say very quickly.
I've got 32-year-old Elon Musk had his next big idea at his family's annual visit to Burning Man, the counterculture desert happening.
Although still fascinated by rockets and fast cars, he wanted to find a way to end Earth's addiction to fossil fuels.
I was one that suggested the idea of going into the solar power arena to Lyndon and Peter Riot, my cousins.
He's basically hands this idea to his cousins and says,
if you want to start this,
I will fund you and it will be your company, but I'll be And they said, OK, and it works almost perfectly.
What they've figured out is that if you sort of do 100 things 10%
better in the area of solar cell installation for homeowners, you can dramatically consolidate an that's currently a bunch of mom and pop shops.
So what SolarCity did was they said, how about no money done?
If you want solar shelves, we'll just put them in.
You don't pay a cent.
It's like leasing a car, but even better.
SolarCity started in five western states and soon grew into the largest solar service provider in the US.
The SolarCity then owns at the end of the lease.
So the fascinating business model in the long-term,
they may become energy generator in America on all of these rooftops, but renewable energy was just one part of a much bigger goal.
Musk had a more ambitious plan for a sustainable future.
He had this idea that he wanted to make electric cars help humanity get off.
fossil fuels, and so those cities about sustainable energy creation, whereas Tesla is about sustainable energy consumption.
In April 2004, Musk helped launch Tesla with $6.3 million of his own money.
It was the first auto industry startup in decades, and the only one born in Silicon Valley.
And it's really pretty simple.
It's, you know, make a high-priced car at low volume, because that's essentially the only thing we could afford to do.
And then step two is a medium-priced car at medium volumes, and step three is a low-priced car at high volumes.
Tesla's plan was to introduce a high-end, high-performance product to first attract outliers, then make an affordable car for the masses.
Tesla's co-founder and first CEO, Martin Eberhard.
We expect to change the way people think about electric cars with this car,
and that we hope to open a market for us to sell other electric cars.
But we also know that if you start off by saying let's first change human nature and make everybody drive coming over cars.
So instead, let's build a car that people want to drive.
Let's build a car that's hot and desirable and beautiful and convince people that driving electric cars is not a compromise.
This idea of actually going in and putting it in a high-end car and breaking the mold
of what an electric car was was exciting.
This is no longer going to be a golf cart.
When we first saw Tesla,
it had a good explanation for how they get to market without having to spend an exorbitant amount of money,
how they would create a brand and the object of desire and consumers.
And each part of the story clicked together.
He talked about Silicon Valley smarts being able to show Detroit.
how to do something that Detroit didn't think was possible.
It's batteries, it's drive electronics, it's electric motors, those are skills that are present at Silicon Valley and not present in Detroit.
Tesla's revolutionary technology for the Roadster started with a computer battery as the power source for the automobile.
J.B.
Strawbell, Tesla's chief technology.
technology officer was the main designer of the electric power train.
For the first time,
it was possible to drive over 200 miles and have performance that was directly comparable competitive with what a gasoline car could do.
And was the first company to to take those principles and put that into practice and try it.
California Schwarzenegger showed up for the Roadsters 2006 coming out party.
A test roof, this one, it's hot.
so did Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney, but could Musk sell regular customers on his idea?
At that time, there was very little activity in the auto industry in electric vehicles.
We were in the age of the large SUV.
So it was a little unusual to hear about this company in
California that was planning to come to market with a high-end all-electric sports car.
We were very passionate about trying to make sure
that this car was going to just throw down the gauntlet on what the technology could do, and really prove to the world that...
electric vehicles, you know, could be incredibly fast and could have incredibly long range.
There was kind of a sense of adventure, you know, doing these things for the first time and doing it in a really scrappy way.
You know, we did some of the very first battery packs in my garage in Menlo Park.
before we actually were to rent a real office.
The big issue for Tesla, as with all electric cars, has been the batteries, their cost, and how long they last.
Eric Noble is President of Car Lab, an automotive consulting firm that evaluates new cars and trucks.
American consumers are very ready for battery electric vehicles.
Unfortunately, battery electric vehicles aren't ready for America.
The first results at Tesla seemed to support this gloomy forecast.
Tesla, when we first started out, the was simple and really obviously in retrospect
quite naive,
which was to make use of some technology that we developed ourselves,
but some technology that would license from AC propulsion, put that together and create an electric sports car that would be compelling.
It fell when the team told Musk that the projected cost had skyrocketed from $65,000 to $140,000.
As the problems mounted, Musk faced a do-or-die decision at Tesla.
He would have to choose between investing his or let his new company collapse.
And Elon was looking at this and saying, the dream is still there, but oh my gosh, what have I got?
I've got to get this under control.
By 2007, Tesla was running out of money fast.
No one wanted to step up to save the unproven automobile startup.
Elon Musk had to take the leap alone.
We have to make some pretty dramatic changes, essentially recapitize the business, and invest about twice what we'd originally expected.
What we'd really expected is the outer limit.
Basically, Tesla got to this point where they only had enough money in the for a couple
of months, and there's nobody around who are willing to put more money in.
I'd take all of my reserve capital and invest it into Tesla,
which was very scary because it would actually be quite sad to have the fruits of my labor with zip-tune.
not amount to anything but there was no question that I would do that in my
own mind because Tesla was too important to to let die.
I'm available 24-7 to help solve issues.
I call me 3 a.m.
of Sunday morning.
I care.
We had to go in and make some really hard decisions on personnel changes and Elon really had to dedicate his time to the company.
I want names named,
so if someone's always on the high seat and is always the root cause for problems,
they will not be part of this organization long term.
It's not okay to be unhappy.
And so if somebody can't get happy, it's good to move.
Musk and his board replaced Martin Eberhard, one of the co-founders who had been running Tesla.
And I think we kind of really...
level that Eberhard could handle and that became apparent in 2007.
We either were gonna have to shut the company down or you know it doesn't have to take over CEO.
It was actually a process of building a company as well as building a car.
You a lot of people that fit in very well with the company when it was extremely small you didn't end up you know fitting in as well when it was larger.
Eberhard didn't go quietly.
He sued Musk for libel, slander and breach of contract.
I believe that I was scapegoated to take the blame for the program.
Musk resolved the dispute through mediation but his company was in serious financial trouble.
In September 2007 Musk flew to Germany with a scheme to raise extra cash by forging an alliance with Daimler Mercedes.
Daimler is company that invented the internal combustion engine car, the maker of Mercedes smart and their endorsement carries great tailors.
of weight.
So that was just a very important moment.
He had to convince the company that Tesla could supply battery packs for its cars.
They were skeptical.
Really the key thing was to demonstrate hardware that worked.
If they can't touch it, they can't drive it, it's not particularly real.
He pushed his team to retrofit a battery.
with Tesla's electric motor.
But first, they had to find one.
The challenge of converting a smart car to electric was doubly difficult because we couldn't find a smart car.
The smart car was not for sale in the United States,
so we had to send somebody down to Mexico to buy a smart car, bring one to the U.S.
The smoke was really tiny, so we had to fit a motor and power electronics and charger and everything in the smoke car.
The challenge was daunting.
To replace the Smart Cars gas engine with a Tesla drive train and battery,
fit it in the tiny space under the hood and do it all in less than four weeks.
We didn't have much time at all,
we knew that from the beginning, and kind of prepared for almost battle and set up a war room in the shop.
They worked around the clock, stealing apps on the factory floor, right up to the deadline.
The time limit executives arrived and not at all convinced that it made any sense to
work with an American car company that alone is a little tiny American car company that's what they're about.
While waiting for Daimler's decision must brought in one of the world's leading automobile designers to help create his next project.
A modern and sexy family sedan, which he called the Model S.
Originally Model S, I thought well let's have Henry Fiska who had a design studio, do the styling.
We him a pretty good sum of money to do that.
that he worked on, that he came up with for us, were terrible.
And what he didn't tell us was that he was actually working on competing car company.
Tesla officials claimed that perhaps Henrik had come in to learn what Tesla was doing while all along he was planning to form his
own company, do his own vehicle.
We were pretty upset with him for basically taking what were at the time the original specifications for the Model S and then
and shopping a business plan to create that same car.
Tesla sued him, he sued Tesla, and there was all kinds of, you know, infighting.
Henrik Fisker wouldn't grant Bloomberg an interview,
but he told us that I believe there's enough space
in the market for several new car companies that pursue a new type of electrified power train with different philosophy.
In November 2008, the court ruled in Fisker's favor.
It was a setback for Musk, who was also going through a tough time personally.
After eight years of marriage and five children, Elon and Justine Musk divorced.
I got divorced personal life in somewhat of a and in addition,
getting attacked, Some in the media, my ex-wife, every bad thing you could imagine.
There was more bad news when his bold space transport company SpaceX again failed to get a rocket into orbit.
The first launch didn't get very far, got about a minute up, and then there was an engine fire and that was it.
The second flight actually did make it to space, but not to orbit.
And then also flight three, we didn't get all the way to orbit.
He started saying, I've got enough money for three cracks at it.
He put $100 million of his own money,
and he sort of hinted at the idea that after three, if he didn't make it, it would be over.
SpaceX would.
Musk burns through the 100 million he had sunk into SpaceX.
Now he was on his way back to the drawing board.
Three days after the failure,
he announced first that he knew what was wrong,
he announced that they'd raise money to finance a fourth launch, and the fourth launch was going to happen in a matter of time.
The rocket was a crazy announcement.
We were able to solve the problems and then just as we'd solve those problems,
we ran smacking to the worst economic processions since the Great Depression.
It's been one of the darkest days on Wall Street in recent memory stock markets,
falling the most since 9-11, the Dow off more than $500.
point, this is what financial Armageddon looks like.
Red screams that scream sell sell sell.
It was a week that shook Wall Street and indeed the world and a realization that the economy may still head into a deeper downturn.
As 2008 drew to a close, Elon must face the worst crisis of his career.
All three of his companies appear to be in free fall.
The worst point was probably just the weekend before Christmas We had the economic tsunami take place and made things even worse.
If it wasn't needed,
we had to shut it down and just figure out how do we get through the stock period and not go bankrupt.
General Motors shares falling to more than a 20-year-low after Goldman cut the automaker's rating to sell on a worsening sales outlook.
That was tough.
It was obviously an economic period that saw the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler.
a young company selling a very, a very optional car.
I it was really, you'd feel that it needed a $100,000 sports car.
And they certainly wouldn't want one getting poor reviews.
The popular BBC program Top Gear took the Tesla Roadster on a test drive in December, 2008.
This car then really was shaping up to be something wonderful.
But then...
Ugh, over do 200 miles, we worked out that on our track it would run out after just 55 miles.
And if it does run out,
it's not a quick job to charge it up again."
The combative CEO charged the incident was faked and said he had proof that the Roadster had not run out of power.
He sued the BBC to block reruns of the show.
show, the case was later dismissed, but things would get even tougher.
His energy company, SolarCity, founded the bank that had backed their leases pulled out of the deal.
I certainly did not anticipate that we would have the worst economic climate since the Great Depression,
and one which was Just proportionately bad for cars.
I General Motors went bankrupt.
I mean, General FN Motors, you know.
Musk was in the fight of his life.
We had maybe about a week's worth of cash in the bank, or less.
There was just very little time left in the year to resolve these things.
I there were like two or three business days left in the year.
I never thought it was possible for me to have a nose breakdown,
but if it was possible for me to have a nose breakdown there, that was about as close as I was going to come.
When Elon was going through his sad period, I was so sad.
I felt like I had a hole in my heart, and there's nothing you can do.
You just hurt so much.
And just didn't see him getting out of it.
He was just so sad.
And then the next thing I did I Ma, you can't believe it.
I've made a wonderful woman."
The one bright spot was meeting Toulula Riley, a British actress who had never heard of Tesla, SpaceX, or Elon Musk.
They married in 2010.
I thought he was some sort of hapless engineer that had wandered into a London club and he just looked so full on.
He was sort of just sat in the corner on his black ring and he just looked really out of place.
you know,
trying to be very sweet to him and sort of humoring him going,
oh yes when he was getting this is my rocket and this is my car.
Musk's personal life was looking up and the future of SpaceX was finally taking off.
We have liftoff.
The fourth attempt to launch the Falcon 1 was a huge success.
And three months later,
NASA rewarded SpaceX with a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station, but Musk had no time to sell it.
I had a choice then that either took all of the capital that I had left from the
sale of PayPal to eBay and invest that in Tesla or Tesla would die.
The company is really teetering on the brink of failure and there's this board meeting late
in 2008 where they're discussing what's going to happen and Elon just says,
well I'm going to raise
40 million dollar round to keep the company going and the board members are kind of wondering well how's he going to do that?
And he says I'm going to put it all in myself.
And that incredible Braggadocio confidence.
catalyzed a change in people's opinion and we and everyone else around the table
was like my gosh we want to get as much of this investment as we can.
He saved the company in his darkest hour with an act of heroism that is hard to describe.
There's nothing quite like spending your last remaining dollar on a project you believe in.
But I definitely took it's toll from a mental strength standpoint and got mentally just burned out a few circuits.
Just after his emergency cash infusion came the news they desperately needed, a $40 million deal with Daimler for smart car batteries.
Daimler later added $50 million for 10% of the company.
Determined not to repeat past mistakes, Musk focused on bringing his family car to life.
So I said look we really need to have our own design studio and that's when I hired
friends from the whole thousand to design the Model S.
His green agenda was irresistible to Von Holtzhausen, a legendary figure in car design, who had already revolutionized the looks of VW, GM and Mazda.
He's completely passionate to really rid the world of this addiction to fossil fuel.
That was something that he talked about from the very first sentence, first conversation that we had.
With a new team in place, Musk completely revamped the look of the Model S.
A sedan doesn't have to be a brick, doesn't have to be a big brick.
we wanted to bring this kind of passion and feeling back to this marketplace.
The architecture of Model S is really similar to a skateboard.
The floor of the vehicle is the battery pack and the motors between the rear wheels and everything above that is the opportunity space.
In March 2009, Musk unveiled the prototype for the Model S.
It could hold seven passengers and as much luggage as a station wagon,
but to build it, he knew he needed a piece of the U.S.
government's new $7.5 billion loan program.
of energy vehicles.
In order for Model S to truly be successful, you know, it was important that the loan come through it.
The government funding was controversial.
The York Times writer Randy Strauss called the program the bailout of very, very high net worth individuals who invested in Tesla Motors Act.
Musk struck back, it a bailout but alone.
The Obama administration agreed to lend Tesla $465 million to mass-produce the Model S,
a move that astounded It's very unlikely that the Tesla investment has ever repaid to the taxpayers.
Electric are really not possible in ways that would be effective for most consumers still.
This is just the religion of electric vehicles, and like Jon's town, that religion will come to an end.
There are most certain people who want to see Tesla fail because it is an attack on the mainstream car industry.
Of course,
the biggest impact that Tesla will have is not the cars that we make ourselves,
but the fact that we show that we can make it compelling electric cars that people really want to buy.
The government loan came with a challenging condition.
To get the money, he had to first find a place to build his electric car.
Tesla burns through 300 million dollars since 2003.
Elon Musk needed to get his Model S into production fast.
Ever the risk taker, he took another giant ganney, purchasing a plant in Fremont, California, abandoned by Toyota.
The dream factory location with Tesla was always the the new me factory which was a 50%
Toyota 50% It's of the biggest car plants in the world.
It's a great location close to the headquarters.
The reality is, for very little money, Toyota got an Albatross off its books.
From an industry perspective, it looked incredibly savvy on Toyota's part and incredibly naive on Tesla's part.
Car factories are big pieces of sunk capital.
To retool a factory takes a tremendous incremental investment.
The acquisition released the government funds to begin production.
Despite the fact that Tesla had posted a profit just once since its founding, Musk took his company public in June 2010.
The smartest money in the world is betting on Tesla.
Not everyone was as upbeat about the company's future.
Tesla stock voted by Wall Street as the least likely to succeed.
You don't want to own this stock.
You don't want to waste it.
You shouldn't even rent the darn thing.
There hasn't been an IPO of a car company in America since Henry Ford, and that caught people's attention.
Investors ignored the skeptics.
Tesla raised $226 million in its IPO.
Musk now had the capital to get rolling on the Model S.
You just saw on his face this sort of just elation,
and this feeling like all of the suffering is worth it, and it's real now.
Three, two, one.
They aren't flipped out.
Falcon has cleared the power.
In 2010, after winning the $1.6 billion contract from NASA, SpaceX the first private company to successfully launch and return a spin.
So SpaceX was the first purely commercial ground up development.
to reach over it.
The first successful launch at SpaceX was an incredibly emotional time.
I'm just wishing who any entities that are listening, please bless this launch.
And two years later,
in May 2012, it made history as the first privately-held company to send a cargo payload to the International Space Station.
Back on Earth, the long-awaited launch of Tesla's new sedan was also taking off.
It's time.
It's to start delivering Model S.
The Model S started rolling off the production line, although questions about range and service remained.
Let them go!
Not everyone was cheering.
In a 2012 presidential debate,
Republican candidate Mitt Romney blasted President Obama for the government loan to Tesla, lumping Tesla in with other financially troubled countries.
You put $90 billion, like 50 years worth of breaks into solar and wind, to Cylindra and Fiska and Tesla and N-R-1.
I I had a friend who said, you just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers.
But Tesla was no loser in the eyes of the automotive industry.
The Model S was the first electric sedan to win Motor Trans Car of the Year.
Moss didn't have much time to celebrate.
A few months later, the New York Times delivered a devastating review of the Model S.
It reported the battery died on its test drive from Washington to Boston, and published an image no CEO would want.
There was a sad shot of our car on a flatbed as though that was the only outcome possible for such a drive.
And that's just not true.
Musk went on the offensive.
And most people said, oh, you know, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, you don't battle the New York Times.
And it's like, the hell with that?
The battle between the reporter and the renegade CEO ended.
When New York Times public editor concluded the reporting was impossible.
not done in bad faith, but the story didn't affect his bottom line.
Remember that lose your comment from a presidential candidate about the $465 million government loan.
It really feels good to have repaid the U.S.
taxpayer.
That's really what's important here.
And didn't just repay the principal.
We repaid it with interest and a bonus paid.
So ultimately the U.S.
taxpayer actually made a profit of over $20 million on this loan.
Tesla repaid the loan nine years ahead of schedule.
Never short on optimism or confidence, Musk made a stunning promise for the nearly $70,000 car.
We're guaranteeing that the value of the Model S will be no less than that of a Mercedes S class after three years.
I am personally guaranteeing that value and standing behind that guarantee with all of my assets, not just with Tesla.
He has guaranteed free charging for the life of the car and has expanded the charging system.
You'll be able to travel all the way from L.A.
to New York, just using the Tesla Supercharger network.
And the Supercharger system is free.
So it's not just free now.
It's free forever.
That's the Tesla commitment.
His commitment to customers has paid off.
Since its IPO, Tesla shares were up more than five fold.
SpaceX and SolarCity We're also turning profits.
And that's our biggest and most important customer, but almost three quarters of our customers are commercial.
SpaceX says it has more than $4 billion in revenue under contract.
But of all his companies, perhaps the greatest success was the one addressing the world's energy needs.
Solar City is now the largest solar service provider in the U.S.
and has more than quadrupled in value since its initial public offering in December 2012.
Solar City has been very, very impressive.
There are thousands of people with panels on their roofs and lots of big offices.
I eBay has solar city panels.
a very big, very visible impact on the world.
He really wants to change the world.
And in Elon Musk's vision of the future,
you'll have clean and renewable sources of energy feeding the grid, and are all of our vehicles who run off that.
This is really the future.
It's something you want to tell stories about.
Elon has a self-confidence that is just it's breathtaking and it's
especially breathtaking when you think about the things he's confident about the idea
that humanity is going to get to Mars that not just humanity is going to get
to Mars that but that he in his lifetime Elon Musk will get to Mars crusader or
candy businessman magazine's most influential people in the world, the risk-taking, multitasking CEO's estimated net worth was $6 billion in June 2013.
Divorced for the second time, Musk splits his time between his five sons, his companies, and thinking about the future.
Just, is it significant?
Really, question is, are things I'm working on?
Are really going to matter, or do they have the potential for really mattering?
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