60 Minutes Australia (2015)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (3)
Transcript
0:0060 Minutes CorrespondentThe story of Elon Musk is almost too incredible to believe. He's an engineer and entrepreneur worth more than $15 billion. He backs himself on high risk ventures which invariably lead to huge profits.
0:1660 Minutes CorrespondentFirst there was PayPal, the way to buy and sell on the Internet. Then Tesla, the electric supercar he built. And SpaceX, the, the rocket company NASA uses. Now his sights are set even further afield, colonising Mars.
0:3460 Minutes CorrespondentAnd if he reminds you of Tony Stark, Iron man, you're right, because he's also the inspiration behind the Hollywood superhero.
1:0560 Minutes CorrespondentHow are you?
1:05Elon MuskCongratulations on the promotion.
1:0760 Minutes CorrespondentThank you very much. Exactly like Elon Musk. Yeah.
1:11Elon MuskGood idea for an electric jet. You do. Yeah.
1:1560 Minutes CorrespondentAnd if you spend any time with the real life Tony Stark.
1:19Elon MuskThank you all for coming tonight.
1:2260 Minutes CorrespondentBe prepared to move quickly.
1:24Elon MuskThis is where our mission control and launch control will be.
1:2860 Minutes CorrespondentOne moment. He's a rocket man. Lift off of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, proudly boasting his 2 billion dollar contract with NASA, ferrying supplies to the International Space Station.
1:42Elon MuskIt's just a giant kick in the balls for the people that said we couldn't do it.
1:5160 Minutes CorrespondentNext minute he's perfecting another rocket. His electric super fast supercar, the Tesla, it is a beast. It's a monster. 691 horsepower.
2:07Elon MuskYeah. And it'll go to zero to 100 kilometers in 3.1 seconds.
2:1360 Minutes CorrespondentWhatever he does and at whatever speed he's doing it, there's always a legion of adoring musketeers. Tears on hand.
2:2960 Minutes CorrespondentWhat really strikes me about your staff is everyone is almost messianic with their vision. They're true believers in Elon Musk's vision of the world.
2:39Elon MuskSure. Well, I mean generally I try to discourage cult like behavior.
2:4360 Minutes CorrespondentBy the way,
2:4860 Minutes CorrespondentElon Musk grew up in South Africa, studied in Canada, but then moved to California and became a Silicon Valley superstar by creating the online commerce business PayPal. A few years later, Musk sold PayPal for a packet.
3:0760 Minutes CorrespondentHe then bravely or stupidly poured his great fortune into Tesla, an electric car startup company that aimed to beat petrol powered vehicles.
3:18Elon MuskWell, so far this is a very expensive car. Call this the 50 million dollar car.
3:2360 Minutes CorrespondentIf ever there was a way to blow a billion bucks, this was it.
3:28Elon MuskYou know, this is really just the beginning of the beginning.
3:3060 Minutes CorrespondentAll right, so when people were telling you this is insane, what did you say?
3:36Elon MuskWell, I don't want to give the impression that I thought Tesla would be successful. From the beginning I actually thought we would fail.
3:4260 Minutes CorrespondentYou did, really?
3:43Elon MuskOh yeah. I thought would maybe have a, I don't know, 10, 20% chance of success. I mean, startups in general fail and auto startups especially fail. Sure.
3:5560 Minutes CorrespondentIn the early days, Tesla was a hugely expensive money pit and his prediction of failure and personal bankruptcy came perilously close to true.
4:06Elon MuskYou know, each month that passes is literally costs us tens of millions of dollars. I mean, we need to appreciate that
4:1460 Minutes Correspondentit didn't help that the traditional car industry treated Elon Musk as a joke.
4:20Elon MuskRight now we're facing an issue which is that it's sort of a crisis of confidence among our customers.
4:2760 Minutes CorrespondentThey were basically saying, well, this proves it. You know, here's this cheeky bloke from Silicon Valley who thinks he can make a car. He's going to fail.
4:35Elon MuskRight, sure.
4:3660 Minutes CorrespondentHow do you feel at that stage?
4:37Elon MuskWell, I felt pretty miserable, honestly. It did honestly look like we were going to fail. Almost ran out of money. In fact, at the end of 2008, I had to invest the last money that I had in the company.
4:4860 Minutes CorrespondentYou staked your fortune, didn't you?
4:50Elon MuskEverything. Yeah. I would have ended up owing money if Tesla had gone bankrupt. And we managed to close the financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible.
5:00Elon MuskSo it was Christmas Eve, 2008, 6pm
5:0360 Minutes CorrespondentShares of the electric car maker Tesla Motors are up at the 11th hour. Musk convinced investors to give him a second chance and set out to build a completely new type of electric car.
5:2360 Minutes CorrespondentYeah, this is a full size model. Can you show us which part? All of it. The whole thing.
5:31Elon MuskI don't think we can show you the whole thing.
5:3660 Minutes CorrespondentThe death of Australia's car manufacturing industry was Elon Musk's gains. So you've been here from the very beginning?
5:43Elon MuskFrom the very beginning.
5:4460 Minutes CorrespondentAustralian Ben Burnett, that's him on the right, used to work for Holden in Melbourne. He now manages clay modelling of new Tesla cars.
5:53Elon MuskWe should be doing it in our own country.
5:5660 Minutes CorrespondentFellow Aussie Ron Polonski used to work at Ford. I can imagine there's a huge attraction in designing an electric vehicle from the ground up and that that us to kind of rethink how the car's designed and manufactured.
6:12Elon MuskWe challenge everything and then we change.
6:1860 Minutes CorrespondentCan I be the Australian data for a moment? This country is a nation of petrol heads. They love their big trucks, their big cars, their throbbing V8s, they love their gasoline.
6:3060 Minutes CorrespondentI don't see them getting rid of oil anytime soon. Why would an electric car work in that market?
6:37Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think Australia's also appreciate advanced Technology and great engineering. And this car is regarded by the most difficult critics in the world as the best car.
6:5560 Minutes CorrespondentThree years ago, Tesla really took off with the launch of the Model S. It's a four door sedan that looks nothing like what most people would assume an electric vehicle to be.
7:14Elon MuskWe wanted to create an electric car that was beautiful, had incredible handling, great acceleration. In fact, the Model S has got the highest acceleration of any four door car ever.
7:2760 Minutes CorrespondentIt's a beautiful car to drive. As if playing up to his credentials as an automotive renegade, Musk Musk ensured there were plenty of idiosyncratic quirks in his new car.
7:4060 Minutes CorrespondentThe stereo does go up to 11. Thanks, Spinal Tap. And in the performance Tesla, there's a curious selector appropriately called the Insane button. It immediately unleashes an eye watering 691 horsepower to the car's four wheels.
8:0260 Minutes CorrespondentAnd if you push it and put your foot on the accelerator, it does amazing things. Wow. My God, that's amazing. It just pushes you back into the back of your seat.
8:24Elon MuskWhen I was trying the car out it, the acceleration felt insane. So it's like, well, we should probably have a button there so that people could decide if they want to have insane acceleration or not.
8:3560 Minutes CorrespondentSo it has the speed, the looks and the gadgetry. But the issues that have always held electric cars back have been price and range. Most owners talk about range anxiety, but this car can travel around 400 kilometres before it needs recharging.
9:0360 Minutes CorrespondentSo here we are en route from LA to San Francisco. And this being an electric car on that sort of journey, you've got to top it up probably a couple of times to be safe.
9:1260 Minutes CorrespondentThe nice thing about this though is they've got these supercharging stations all along the way. A couple of clicks on that, it
9:19Elon Muskopens it up,
9:2260 Minutes Correspondentplugs it in. In 15 minutes, the car's energy is all topped up. And better still, it's free, which helps ease the pain of the car's high cost. Although the boss and chief salesman says, like all evolving technology, it will get cheaper.
9:45Elon MuskOur third generation car, the Model 3, which is, it'll be a smaller car and at much higher volume. We're aiming to approximately halve the price of the car and be able to produce something for $35,000 instead of for $75,000.
9:5860 Minutes CorrespondentNow you're talking.
9:59Elon MuskYeah.
10:0360 Minutes CorrespondentHaving Tesla's fortunes improving gives Elon Musk the chance to pursue his other great vision, space. His company, SpaceX, builds unmanned rockets which resupply the International Space Station. And more economically and efficiently than NASA liftoff of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
10:2960 Minutes CorrespondentIt's a risky business, as Musk discovered last month,
10:35Elon Muskand we appear to have had a launch vehicle failure.
10:4060 Minutes CorrespondentBut even this is just a stepping stone to his most ambitious dream of all.
10:45Elon MuskStanding by for some information.
10:4860 Minutes CorrespondentSpaceX is an astonishing achievement, but you've also got your plans for Mars.
10:54Elon MuskThink about the future is just. If we're out there exploring stars, it's so much more exciting and inspiring than one where we are forever confined to
11:0160 Minutes CorrespondentEarth and a Mars mission.
11:03Elon MuskYeah. So in order to make Mars work, we need kind of the next generation of rockets and spacecraft. We think we've got something that will enable people to move to Mars for approximately half a million dollars.
11:1860 Minutes CorrespondentHalf a million dollars?
11:19Elon MuskYeah. And you can get a free return ticket with that.
11:2160 Minutes CorrespondentBy the way, the thing that most people say about you is the vision of the future that you have is quite breathtaking. And so many times along the way people have naysayed, haven't they?
11:31Elon MuskI guess there's certainly been a lot of attacks. One thing I've noticed in recent months and years is that it's become obvious to a lot of the entrenched interests that, that Tesla and SpaceX are not going to die.
11:47Elon MuskPreviously they thought, well, they just basically ignored us or laughed at us. Now we're actually starting to make real inroads and they're treating us as a real threat. And so it is quite daunting.
12:01Elon MuskIt's actually within the power of humanity to do, and I think it's something that we must do.
12:0860 Minutes CorrespondentElon Musk strives for what others might think impossible, thinking ahead of the curve. He wants technology to improve the way we live for generations to come. You get the feeling that there's a lot of dystopian writing about the world at the moment, the future.
12:2860 Minutes CorrespondentIt's very bleak the way the future's cast, isn't it?
12:30Elon MuskYeah, I guess bleak stories make for better drama.
12:3560 Minutes CorrespondentBut you're an optimist, aren't you? You're hopeful.
12:37Elon MuskI am hopeful. What I'm trying to do is maximize the probability that the future will be better. So it's sort of altruistic, but I think, why wouldn't you try to make the future better if you're going to be part of it?
12:5160 Minutes CorrespondentHello, I'm Tom Steinford. Thanks for watching 60 Minutes Australia. Subscribe to our channel now for brand new stories and exclusive clips every week. And don't miss out on our extra minute segment and full episodes of 60 Minutes on ninenow.com au as well as the nine now