Letter #69: Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson (2013)
Letter #69: Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson (2013)
Founder of Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla with Founder of Future Ventures | Encore Award Conversation
Today’s letter is the transcript of a conversation between Elon Musk (Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla) and Steve Jurvetson (DFJ, Future Ventures) from 2013. The pair first met in ~1996 when Elon pitched Steve on Zip2. While Steve didn’t invest, the two developed a mutual respect and friendship that has spanned four decades. Steve has since invested in nearly all of Elon’s endeavors, including Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Boring.
In this conversation, Elon and Steve discuss Elon’s ambition, AI, how the two met, parallels to Steve Jobs and being CEO of two companies, how Elon’s visions materialize, what Larry Page thinks about Elon and their relationship, mission driven companies, trying to buy the largest ICBM in the Russian nuclear fleet, and trademarking sexy. This is a fascinating opportunity to listen in on a conversation between one of the world’s most impactful entrepreneurs and one of the world’s most thoughtful investors.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
(Transcript and any errors are mine. For those interested in the intro and Q&A sessions, see the transcription done by Pangambam S linked in the “Relevant Links” below.)
Relevant Links
Transcript with Intro + Q&A - by Pangambam S
Steve Jurvetson
The Final Frontier with Steve Jurvetson - Steve Jurvetson Biography
Steve Jurvetson Compilation (427 pages)
Letter #4: Steve Jurvetson (2010) - St. Mark’s School of Texas Commencement
Elon Musk
Elon Musk Compilation (512 pages)
Transcript
Steve Jurvetson: So before we start, we’re going to try to keep this a little casual and interesting as well as trying to get into the mind of Musk a little tonight. It’s a marvelous place to delve. You all will have a chance to ask some questions later. So, you can start thinking about that now, I’ll start with a few. But, as a warm-up, and I think this might be something Elon might like to see, about a year and a half ago, before Model-S shipped, I remember him saying, with sort of a gleam in his eye that he relishes the day that he’ll be driving around somewhere around in Silicon Valley and see a Model-S on the road that’s not like an employee car that’s in testing, but like a real customer, like, that he doesn’t know. And so as a quick survey of hands, how many people here today saw a Tesla driving around Silicon Valley. And I don’t mean the one out there, that means you’ve seen multiple Teslas, right? I saw ten, I counted today, and I have a short commute. So that dream has become a reality. But what Tesla has done has been a marvel to watch. So I think a lot of folks here, business students, students, friends of the firm, are really curious on how this all works. And so if we could start with some design questions and then some organizational and people kinds of questions, but starting with design, as you think about the big problems in the world that you are addressing, do you start with a particular product in mind? Like there could be this Model S, there could be this Falcon 9, and then think how do I get there? Or do you start with saying there’s something broken in the world, and I’m going to fix it, and I’m going to commit to do it even if I don’t know how to get there.
Elon Musk: Sure. In the case of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity, and X.com – PayPal, Zip2 before that, it really stemmed from when I was in college, trying to think what would most effect the future in a very likely to be a positive way. So the three areas where I was quite sure would be positive were sustainable energy, internet, and making life multiplanetary. And then there were a couple other areas where there’s maybe a question mark, like the A.I. and writing genetics.
Steve Jurvetson: What was the last one?
Elon Musk: Rewriting genetics. You know, potentially negative consequences, hopefully positive. Something could go wrong.
Steve Jurvetson: So you have these orders – like was they top three and a couple contenders, or were they always kind of jumbling around?
Elon Musk: No, I just thought that, if you look ahead, and say what’s really going to have an important effect on future of humanity as a whole, those were the five areas that I could come up with standing in the shower, basically, you know.
Steve Jurvetson: So there’s this moment of epiphany that you held for a while because you didn’t pursue those right away, right, this was an early vision that you then got opportunities to execute on.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: So when you — maybe if we pick an example like Tesla going towards the Model S or SpaceX going towards the Falcon 9, do you commit the team yourself, your resources to that endeavor, now a little farther along, when you have the end point in mind? Or just let’s say the cost of goods analysis for the rocket or the cash EV should be better than internal combustion engines, just in general I’ll commit. I’ll believe that should be done.
Elon Musk: Yeah, I mean I didn’t really get into any of these with the expectation of success or at least… Yeah. I started out thinking okay, when I do something in the electrical vehicle space, and that’s why I originally came to Stanford was to work on advanced energy storage technologies and take ultra capacitors. So that was continuing on research that I’d done as an intern in Silicon Valley the summer prior. So that’s why I originally came out in ’95. And then during that summer I wrote some internet software and I thought okay, I can either work on electric vehicle technology, or, I could sort of work on internet stuff, try to do something with internet. And I thought the internet would be something that would dramatically affect the future of humanity be like acquiring a nervous system. And whereas previously, communication would have to occur almost by osmosis, from one person to another or slowly through telephone or mail or something like that. But now, if you have a nervous system, any part of the – so human collective can know about any other part instantly and previously you’d have to be at the sort of Library of Congress even to have the Library of Congress’ sort of information. But with everything digitized and accessed anywhere, you could be in a jungle in South America and if you had just internet link somehow, you’d have access to all of humanity’s information. So it would actually effectively create a super organism and fundamentally change the nature of humanity itself. So I was kind of – I just want to be kind of part of that…
Steve Jurvetson: Is that the path to AI that you might see?
Elon Musk: It’s actually not exactly AI, it’s some sort of human machine collective intelligence. So different from AI, although AI may not turn out to be exactly what —hopefully not — it’s not exactly what’s like described in Terminator or something, you know.
Steve Jurvetson: Quick pause for those who haven’t been to SpaceX. The data center has got to be the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. It’s SkyNet on the door, Cyberdyne systems branding and what have you. The most badass set of lights coming from all the little blinking servers. So these are the own it.
Elon Musk: Yeah. Our FEA and CFD cluster is called Cyberdyne Systems.
Steve Jurvetson: We’ll get back to influences later on, but I want to try to see if I understand what you were saying about this — you see the long arc of – and what’s important to humanity, not little problems, but huge problems that could be solved. A lot of us go around and we see something frustrating like traffic on the 405, and we just take it as well, crap, the governments screwed, right? You have this incredible, sort of scope of ambition, right, planetary scope, interplanetary scope, right? A little more than just changing the world — let’s change some other worlds too, right, and this is big stuff. Was that always in your mind or did that, that you become more emboldened over time that this is available. We can do these things.
Elon Musk: It definitely emboldened over time. When I started the first internet company, Zip2, with my brother and another person, Gregg Curry, it wasn’t really with the thought of being wealthy. I’ve got nothing against being wealthy, but —
Steve Jurvetson: We’ll get back to that later, too.
Elon Musk: But it’s just, it was just from the standpoint of being wanting to be a part of the internet. And I figured if we could make enough money to just get by, it will be — that’ll be okay. And when we started off, we’d literally only had, like, one computer, and so it’d be our web server during the day, and I code at night. And we just got a small office in Palo Alto back when rent was not insane. And it cost us like $450 a month. It was cheaper than an apartment, so we actually just slept in the office and then showered at the YMCA on Page Mill and El Camino. So we’d walk over there and shower and that was, actually, I think that was when I first met you, by the way. And so, I don’t know how many people – probably not many people know this, but we actually pitched Steve in like January ‘96 on the Zip2 business plan. And actually I thought, Steve was actually one of the most up to speed on what actually was in our business plan. Most people we met did not actually read our business plan. In fact, a lot of people we — a lot of venture capitalists we met at that time didn’t even know what the internet was. They’d never used it – they didn’t think it would amount to anything.
Steve Jurvetson: That’s true. I’m not sure if they still do.
Elon Musk: Yeah, something like, I’m sort of like, well-known people in Sand Hill. I was like, wow, okay. But at the time, nobody had made any money on the internet, so I guess that’s — there wasn’t any clear evidence that there was a business. And yeah —
Steve Jurvetson: Those were fun times, I remember Kimbal and you coming in. Very young looking guys. I think I was on my first four months on the job too.
Elon Musk: Yeah, yeah, exactly, so.
Steve Jurvetson: So, let’s switch gear for a second. I’ve also had the great honor to work with Steve Jobs briefly. But enough, and as a business school student, to study him with as much scrutiny as I could during that period. And there’s some obvious parallels. And so let’s start with the most obvious. But, just must be like elephant in the room. Is the secret to your success to be the CEO of two companies at the same time?
Elon Musk: No, I think it’s —
Steve Jurvetson: Because look at the correlation.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: Struggling companies, everything’s in the crap can in December 2008, so let’s take on a new CEO gig. And same for Steve coming back to Apple.
Elon Musk: No, definitely it was not my intention to be CEO of two companies. I mean, there are certain things that I kind of wanted to — that I thought were important to happen. And I thought it was important that there was — that an electric vehicle happened, that there was a success in the electric vehicle arena. Because the encumbered companies were convinced that it was not possible to create an electric car that looked good, had a good range of performance and so forth. And that even if you did make such a car, it would not sell. Because people had this love of gasoline. And so we had to show that it was possible to create a compelling electric car. Long range, good looking, all those things, that was the Tesla Roadster. And if you created –if you made such a thing, people would buy it. And so that’s what we tried to do with Tesla. By the way I should say, like one minor sort of correction on the introduction. I’m not a Co-founder of SolarCity, but I am a Co-founder of Tesla.
Steve Jurvetson: That’s a good point. And product architect of many of its key features.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: Very much like Jobs. Both the hand in some of the detail as well as the long arc of what’s important for the company. The quip though, about being Co-CEOs, is more than just a joke in that I wonder if, in ways that are hard to predict, and you wouldn’t set out for this amount of work, it seems insane. But inevitably, both companies cannot expect more than half your time, at most. It sort of naturally forces a delegation upon you, and an expectation that you have to rise up for partial awareness at best, right?
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: And I just wonder if that helps drive prioritization and really focusing on what’s important a bit more than you otherwise might have to.
Elon Musk: That probably does, yeah, I think I probably do — yeah, I mean, because I have to triage the things that I do at each company and constantly think about what is the most useful thing that I could do. But even with that, it still actually does take an enormous amount of time, and for a while there, I was just doing constant 100 hour weeks. And that’s definitely wearing. And now I’m kind of in the 80 to 90, which is more manageable. But you know, if you divide that by two, it’s only like 45 hours per company, which is not much if you’re where a lot of things are going on.
Steve Jurvetson: You’re like a slacker, I mean.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: So it is interesting also how you have a love for certain aspects of the product — so SpaceX, the whole concept and the vision of going to Mars, and back into features and stuff. It’s a wonderful thing to see. I think what obviously should strike folks in the room as remarkable is the diversity of industries that you’ve tackled, right, from commercial banking to the military industrial complex to the automotive industry, these are heavily regulated industries, that generally investors flee from, and start-ups routinely fail in, and they haven’t seen much change, with good reason, over decades. So there might not be an obvious pattern in which industry you tend to thrive in, but I wonder if there’s a pattern perhaps in process like do you approach each of these perhaps the way a software architect might, to think of a different way to bring innovation, a different way to reset from first principles perhaps, instead of iterating from the past, a breakthrough. And is there a reason you end up in these otherwise really tough industries? I mean, I don’t know if that’s ever occurred to you that you don’t — even with SolarCity going up against regulated utilities, none of these are places that you’d normally find entrepreneurs?
Elon Musk: Yeah, like I said, it was not from the standpoint of like what’s the best risk adjusted rate of return or what I think if things could be successful, just like I think these things need to happen, try to make them happen, and so then when we started SpaceX or Tesla, I thought the probability of success was less than 50%. They were probably a fair bit less than 50%. In the case of SolarCity, I thought the probability of success was probably greater than 50%, but it wasn’t clear what magnitude of success would be, you know, it could just be small. And I just thought these were things that needed to get done. And even if the money’s lost, okay, it’s a little worth trying.
Steve Jurvetson: So you had conviction, but it didn’t mean uncertainty. Right? You knew that all vehicles would be electric in your heart, ultimately, you will succeed.
Elon Musk: I think the fundamental good that Tesla can accomplish is acceleration of the inevitable, which is electric transportation. But I think there’s a lot of value to accelerating, even though I think it’s somewhat inevitable, there’s value to accelerating it to minimize the environmental and economic damage that would otherwise occur. So it’s better if we transition to sustainable transport 10 years or maybe 20 years sooner than might otherwise be the case. And I think Tesla’s effect has been much greater than the cars made — that’s been made internally, because when we announced that Tesla Roadster, then Bob Lutz — who was Vice Chairman of GM at the time — saw our press release and said, if a small company in California can do it, then so can GM. And he took it to his engineers, who told him that you couldn’t build an electric car. And told them that they needed to get going. And that’s what got the ball rolling. And that in turn got Nissan to do the Leaf, and so, it’s kind of got things going. And ultimately it’s what we induce other companies to do that will have a greater impact than the cars we make ourselves.
Steve Jurvetson: You know, it’s an interesting point I’m going to come back to later this idea that Tesla’s founding mission, as Elon has articulated from the very beginning through the most recent reports to the public is to catalyze an industry shift that Tesla will be some part of, but to help others in that shift as well, which is remarkable.
Elon Musk: Yeah, so we supply powertrains to Toyota and to Mercedes and that type of thing.
Steve Jurvetson: To help what could be viewed as your biggest competitors one day—
Elon Musk: Yeah. Absolutely.
Steve Jurvetson: To in fact accelerate that. Before we get to that sort of purpose driven mission, I do want to ask, or at least maybe make sure the audience realizes how cool this car is, and so Elon doesn’t have to do this. In case you haven’t been as much of a fan as the two of us, it’s a bit unprecedented the reviews it’s received. Consumer Reports saying it’s the best car they’ve ever tested. Road & Track saying it’s the most important car in America’s history. The safety testing showed it’s the most safe car ever manufactured by far, including vans and SUVs. And so it’s pretty remarkable to have packed performance, desirability, safety, and all these parameters… So, is it luck, or is there something particularly unique about the EV design space that let it be possible to build the best car?
Elon Musk: Well I think luck does play some role here. But I think electric vehicles have a fundamental architectural advantage. If one designs an electric vehicle from the ground up and takes advantage of what’s possible. Like if you were just to convert a gasoline car, you would not achieve these advantages. But if it’s properly done, you can actually package the battery pack in a full pan and achieve a low center of mass and have a very compact motor and a gearbox so that the actual useable space in the car is significantly greater than a gasoline car of the same external dimensions. And then if you do a few other things, which aren’t necessarily specifically related to an electric car, like using aluminum body and chassis, is helpful because you can absorb more energy per unit mass essentially in a crash.
Steve Jurvetson: Like a crumple zone.
Elon Musk: Yeah, exactly. Part of it is related to electric vehicle architecture and part of it is related to other technical decisions that we made in the design of the Model S. And so, yeah, that’s what leads to sort of having a high safety is — I mean I don’t want to go into too much details because it might take up too much time, but —
Steve Jurvetson: Did you know some of those things at the get-go, or did they unveil themselves as you went along? I’m just curious how the vision materializes — either along the product dimensions, like it will have all these great features, like at the get-go did they all gel? And the second thing, I am also curious when did you first know that all vehicles would be electric? Like, was that early, medium, like —
Elon Musk: That was probably 22 years ago, something like that.
Steve Jurvetson: Before you met Tesla?
Elon Musk: Way before there was Tesla. Well like I said, when I originally came out — I mean, when I was studying physics at Penn, that’s probably when I thought it was the case. Or maybe, no, sooner than that. Probably when I was in my sophomore year in college.
Steve Jurvetson: Did you have certainty in your heart?
Elon Musk: Yeah, absolutely. It’s super obvious.
Steve Jurvetson: Yes, yes, now, yes, now it is, and there are —
Elon Musk: I think it was super obvious then, but –
Steve Jurvetson: This is what blows my mind, because even like three years ago, most people probably didn’t agree with this point of view. And if I could be confident of any prediction I could make, it’s that within 10 years, all people will be of this point of view. But we won’t have made the transition yet, but we’ll realize that it’s a ridiculous debate to be having.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: You were a lone voice of sorts back then, probably amongst your cohort and friends, and you know, social connections —
Elon Musk: Yeah, actually, I used to talk to dates about electric cars.
Steve Jurvetson: How did that go?
Elon Musk: It wasn’t, wasn’t helpful.
Steve Jurvetson: It got better?
Elon Musk: Yeah, so actually I ran into a girl I dated briefly in Canada, Christie Nicholson, she’s now a writer for Scientific American. And she mentioned, yeah, when we went on date, I asked her, do you ever think about electric cars, and she said, no, I don’t. So yeah, that was a while back. I mean, it’s pretty, I mean almost everything’s electric that we have in our daily lives —
Steve Jurvetson: So it was from the physics of it, the heat loss of an internal combustion engine, just... pretty amazing, pretty amazing. So want to share a little story that leads to a question along a different angle. I don’t think you’ve heard this before, but I find it fascinating. I was at a lunch at a Google event, and out of the blue, with no expectation that this would be a topic, and Larry Page turned to me, knowing a little bit about our connection and said, you know… How much money do I have? And he mentioned a number — I thought that was cute that he was trying to recall that. He goes, you know, if I were to get hit by a bus today, I should leave all of it to Elon Musk.
Elon Musk: Really?
Steve Jurvetson: Yeah.
Elon Musk: He said that?
Steve Jurvetson: Yeah. And so I’m like paper, pen. Can we please get this down on... yes. So then… he likes zingers.
Elon Musk: I didn’t know that, actually. Like, he’s a good friend of mine.
Steve Jurvetson: So context is important…
Elon Musk: I met Larry before he got venture funding. So that’s like 97 or something back in the days.
Steve Jurvetson: Back in the garage days? Wow. Well he’s a remarkable guy. Obviously also an underachiever, and you know, has a company that wants to do good in the world. And I think he looks at you with a bit of envy because what he then proceeded to say was, you know, I could give my money to a non-profit and a lot less would get done than a corporation that’s pursuing things that are directly aligned with things I care about. Like, getting off of oil and colonizing other planets. He believes in those missions, and thinks that a corporation with endowed with the right to do that as its business purpose, is the best vehicle out there. And wishes he could do more of that in his own life. He compared, poignantly, I think, to some other software companies in the Pacific Northwest, who might have executives who do evil for their first part of their career then do good for the second half. And then the sad story of others who never got to the second half of their life, like Steve Jobs. I mean, not in a joking way, I mean, seriously, and it was a very deep moment. So it raises the question of a purpose-driven business. So you’ve heard already that Tesla’s not just trying to make money, that is the not the priority. In fact, if you read the most shareholder letter, it says profits are not —
Elon Musk: Yeah, in fact, I started off the shareholder letter saying the profits are not our primary goal. And then I got a little bit of — some of the board members who questioned that statement. And I was like, well it’s true, you know.
Steve Jurvetson: You mean like, for now, or like just like while we are growing — but no, it’s just not the priority, which I think, in a business school, is really a good point to dwell on for a moment.
Elon Musk: Yeah, it’s not that I think they’re unimportant or anything. It’s just not the primary goal.
Steve Jurvetson: Sure.
Elon Musk: And actually I told people that on IPO as well. And so it’s not like new information, or at least you know, for people who watched the IPO, it’s not new information. And yeah, actually, amazingly, the stock went up after that.
Steve Jurvetson: I think there’s a profound reason. I mean, you see the benefits of being focused on something that’s a higher calling as your primary motivation. Your employees love it, the customers love it, your partners love it, and you feel better about your job. The interesting thing, the irony perhaps, is that at least within our portfolio, the companies that have that kind of a founding principle actually make more profit and grow their revenue more quickly than the ones that don’t. And now there’s this little sample set, but the handful that had taken this bold of the step, to say no, no, no, we will not make that our number one priority, actually do a great job. And it occurred to me, and I don’t know if this was conscious in your head at some point, that if you weren’t wildly profitable, the auto industry wouldn’t follow you. In other words, this whole mission of catalyzing a shift to new electric vehicle isn’t going to work if the business model’s worse than the current business model. And so, it’s the obvious byproduct of what you’re focusing on, well, not obvious, but it occurs to me that it’s a byproduct. It wasn’t obvious at first at all. But, and I’m curious if that thought occurred to you, that oh yeah, the profits will come, or… yeah.
Elon Musk: Well, we have to generate enough cash flow to fund future developments, which requires having a good gross margin. And so I guess one could just say okay, well we’re going to stop developing new products, and then you’d be really profitable. So at any given point, you could sort of say well, we could be profitable at this point in a significant way, but we’ve got these great things that we want to develop for the future, and they’re a good investment. And that’s what we’re doing.
Steve Jurvetson: And similarly, at SpaceX, the founding vision was to colonize Mars —
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: Indirectly. Again, interestingly, catalyzing others to move —
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: And then you realize, hey, I’ve got to actually lead this charge.
Elon Musk: Yeah, well, I mean when SpaceX — originally I started off just thinking, well, how do I, increase NASA’s budget? Actually, that was my goal. So, it was like, 2001, I was just talking to a friend of mine, and he he asked me what I was going to do after PayPal, and I thought, well, you know, I was wondering, like, I’d like to get involved in space, but I just didn’t think there’s anything I could do as an individual. But I was curious as to when NASA would be sending a team to Mars, because that was always going to be the thing to do after the moon. I figured that there’d be some plan and I’d just go to the website and I could read the schedule, and…
Steve Jurvetson: Then Mars occurs.
Elon Musk: It’s oh yeah, it’s like okay, 2017, good, okay. But actually, there wasn’t anything on the website. And, or at least, I thought like, am I — can I not find it? Like what’s going on in here? Is it secret? I don’t know. But it turned out that that NASA had done a study on what it would cost to do a manned Mars mission, and this was under Bush the first, and in his first — he asked for a 90 day study shortly after taking office. And NASA came back with a $500 billion price tag. And he said, okay, maybe not.
Steve Jurvetson: Billion with a B.
Elon Musk: That’s when $500 billion was serious money, for the government. So then that got totally shelved, and it was like you were not allowed to talk about any kind of crewed mission to Mars at NASA. And anyway, so, but I thought, well, if I can do something that would galvanize public interest, and then that public interest would translate to additional appropriations for NASA and increase their budget, then maybe they could do it. So actually, what I sort of was thinking I would do is send out a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars with seeds and dehydrated gel and then upon landing, hydrate the gel and grow the plants. And the public test respond to precedence and superlatives. So this would be the furthest that life’s ever traveled, the first life on Mars, and you’d have this great shot of green plants on a red background, and I thought, okay maybe that would get —
Steve Jurvetson: The money shot. You’ve got to beam that —
Elon Musk: That would be the money shot, yeah. I’m never quite sure whether that’s a sort of a word you can use or not.
Steve Jurvetson: Now I’m realizing maybe I shouldn’t…
Elon Musk: Yeah, I didn’t know its origins until somebody pointed it out to me, but —
Steve Jurvetson: Okay, moving back to that greenhouse on Mars. Yes, so the photo is out there, and it inspires others.
Elon Musk: Yeah, so you have this great photo. And I thought, okay, if we make this happen, this would be cool, and NASA would get the money, and they could send a team to Mars, and it would be great. So I tried to figure out how to do this with the proceeds that I had from PayPal. And I was able to figure out how to get the cost of the spacecraft down and the communications and the little greenhouse and everything, but the one thing I couldn’t compress was the cost to launch. Because there were only a few options, and the US options are way too expensive. So I ended up going to Russia three times to try to buy the biggest ICBM in the Russian nuclear fleet.
Steve Jurvetson: That’s where I’d start, yeah.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: Go big or go home. Right?
Elon Musk: I mean, okay. It was — there were some strange trips, that’s for sure. But you know, there’s like virtually, like you can buy any — it’s a very capitalist society, in some ways. So I actually did negotiate a deal to buy two of the ICBMs minus the nukes. But I came to the conclusion after that third trip that it wouldn’t really matter. Like, I actually came to the conclusion that my initial premise was wrong. Because I actually think there’s a tremendous amount of will in the American population particularly, to explore. The United States, maybe more than any other country, is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. And it’s really fundamental to psyche so, if people think there’s a way, I think we’d actually get a lot of support. But it can’t be just banging your head against the wall. You’ve got to believe that this can be done without breaking the federal budget. So, that’s when I said okay, well, is there some way to affect the cost of space transport? And so I got together with a group of people over a series of Saturdays to just try to understand if there’s something super fundamentally super expensive about rockets, or can the cost be substantially improved? And we had a bunch of those brainstorming sessions and I couldn’t see any fundamental obstacles to improving the cost of rockets, so that’s when I started SpaceX.
Steve Jurvetson: It’s like, I’ll just build them myself.
Elon Musk: Yeah. But like I said, at that point, I would say the probability of success was definitely less than 50%. I thought it would most likely not succeed. But it was worth a try.
Steve Jurvetson: It’s fascinating. The parallels are so many between these companies. Again, probability is low. Certainty that it needs to be done. Certainty that it could be done, by physics and first principles, that success is an option, right? It’s one of the possibilities. And interestingly, starting with the Roadster and the Falcon 1 as a proof point to a larger design. You know, as I look at the Falcon 9, and, it looks like the product of a software engineer. Modular reuse, like let’s build one engine and step and repeat. And building all kinds of elegance into the system design to abstract away, almost from the hardware into the software, into the design, the beauty of the system. And I wonder if that’s why incumbents don’t see the sort of re-engineering of the car or the rocket or the what have you, the Hyperloop, is this. They don’t approach it in that kind of blank sheet of paper, how would you do this if you didn’t have to create jobs across districts or you didn’t have some other ulterior motive. Interesting, interesting. Looking at the time, I want to give a — I’m going to ask one last question, but I want to give a heads up that if there’s mics to start getting them ready for the audience. Because I don’t want to monopolize people’s time here. Actually there’s so many questions I want to ask, but what I’ll start with — maybe I’ll try to end here for at least, with somewhat of a quirky one, about influences. So we’ve heard about the Iron Man reference and your childhood interest in comic books and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Asimov, but, there’s all kinds of things woven into like, Cyberdyne systems at SpaceX that we heard, and then some Easter eggs. So, some of us, noticed that the stereo goes to 11 on the Tesla. This is a Spinal Tap reference for those who know — “This one goes to 11 and we just need one more.”
Elon Musk: “It’s louder than loud.”
Steve Jurvetson: That’s right.
Elon Musk: Exactly.
Steve Jurvetson: That’s right. But no one seems to have noticed the product line-ups. You got the Model S. You got the Model X. You’ve just trademarked the Model-E. No one’s been in that. And the Model Y.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Steve Jurvetson: Now, what’s behind this?
Elon Musk: I know, exactly. Well this, I guess there’s not a lot of humor in the trademark law, you know? Because, yeah, obviously, we just trademarked “sexy”. So, and then we’re having this discussion with Ford, because they, Ford’s counsel, they also didn’t get it. Like, because they’re sort of slightly opposing us using Model E. And then they saw that we registered Model Y. And they said, oh, you’re planning to use Model Y instead of Model E. Like no, it was just a joke.
Steve Jurvetson: They’re like, we don’t do that.
Elon Musk: They’re like, what is this about? Come on.
Steve Jurvetson: Fantastic. Well do we, I’ll keep going if we don’t, but do we have microphones for folks if they want to ask questions? Okay, let’s do a quick — see if anyone — oh my gosh, yes. We have some — why don’t we that? Let’s take a couple of questions from the audience.
Wrap-up
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