“我只做四件事：特斯拉、SpaceX、孩子和睡觉”，马斯克2009年接受Kevin Pollak采访

• A fresh perspective on the journey of Elon Musk.
• Insights into the beginnings of electric cars.
• The evolution of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
• Overcoming challenges in the automotive industry.
• The impact of electric cars on the environment and economy.

My next guest, I'm going to give you a little bit of a heads up in terms of who this next gentleman is and also admit that I am coming to this interview, I think, with the freshest eyes that he's probably faced in a while. That is to say, I was an instant fan when I found out about what this man has done, but I wanted to have him on so that I could ask the real straightforward, simple questions, which is one of the reasons I wanted to do this show, which is to not only meet people that I admired as well as have people on that I've worked with, but when I meet people and they know me from movies or what have you, they all want to know, really the hardships and how you got from there to here, and then they want to hear about your project.

So I think that's where we're going to start today. And I'm going to now welcome the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors as well as SpaceX. I hope I pronounced those correctly. Yes, absolutely. And Elon Musk is also. Yeah, okay, good. So thank you very much. First of all, you're welcome for joining us here. And I also have to thank you profusely for not bolting out the door after watching the last four minutes of my show. It was difficult. It must have been. Yeah, yeah. Because it's a very different world. And I'm sure that there was a moment, at least a moment, one in your mind, that said, oh, my God, what am I doing here? What have I gotten myself into?

Well, here's the thing. These interviews. Have you been on Charlie Rose yet? No, but I will be, I think later this month or early next. Yeah, yeah. Well, I certainly watch the show. Yeah, yeah. As a viewer, you understand that one of the wonderful things about his show that I'm trying so desperately to emulate blatantly is actual conversations. Throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to do almost every talk show that's existed for the last 20 years, starting with Johnny Carson and Larry King and all of them. And they're all about little sound bites and they're all about little quick anecdotes, in my case, with punchlines and characters. Rarely is there an opportunity to have an actual conversation and to find out more details about what it is that drives you to do what you do and got you to the place that you're at today.

So thank you very much for everything you're about to share. We've got twitter.com asking questions live. We've got folks actually very excited to ask questions. I'm going to start pretty much with, you know, reading a lot about you in preparation. All that stuff is, you know, Wikipedia and various sites to find out one's history. How old were you? It's all hit or miss. I know it's all hit or miss. I find it to be that way. How old were you, if I may? Let's just start here. When the first vision popped into your head about working and bringing an electric car to the consumer?

Well, I've been interested in electric cars for a long time. Actually, I used to think about it quite a bit in college. So it's been probably 17, 18 years that I've been thinking about the area. In fact, I used to talk to my dates in college about the importance of electric cars. And how did that work out for you? Not well. It's not a great date conversation. No, no. In fact, I ran into someone who I briefly dated in college and she brought this up. She's a writer for Scientific American these days and come to do an interview with me and actually mentioned that it was a memorable date, not necessarily in a good way. One she would never forget. Yeah, absolutely.

But I'm kind of a science and engineering guy. So for me it's been obvious for a while that the future we have to figure out a way to get off and that the solution is electric cars. The advantage of an electric car is that you can generate that electricity by renewable means. And so if you consume the electricity, if you're running electric cars and then you're generating your power with solar, wind, geothermal, which is increasing dramatically, by the way. It sure is. And if you're doing that, then you have a sustainable solution for the future. And obviously if you're burning oil, that's something that's going to end sooner or later. And so it's better to do it sooner and avoid the environmental damage than later and have the environmental damage plus a massive wealth transfer from the United States to other countries.

Yeah, well, that's a big part of it too, is how do we take back control of our destiny, quite frankly. And so when this idea came to you 17, 18 years ago, I think it was around that time that for the most part, those who were starting to hear rumblings of an electric car, myself included, were thinking whoever puts out a gorgeous as well as functional electric car wins in terms of exciting. First a few and then the masses eventually with as the prices become more affordable to all consumers. Initially, what people are praising and also damning, you know, there's both sides of it.

Initially, you started with the Roadster, right? The Tesla Roadster, which is a huge success. It has been very successful. Yeah. How. Just walk us through, if you wouldn't mind, the chronological pieces of business here, because this really is fascinating to a great many of us. From conception to rolling out that first model. Just in terms of a brief history of the. I can't imagine the hardships that took place in trying to get this thing to come to fruition. Yeah. It's certainly been technically quite difficult from a business standpoint. Quite difficult. And then it's been overlaid with a bit of a sort of soap opera from a personnel standpoint.

So please feel free to share all of that, whatever you're comfortable sharing. We'd love to hear whatever you can legally share. Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I'll focus on the non personnel elements. Fair enough. Because I think that's more pertinent for the future in terms of where do we come from, where are we headed? And that kind of thing. So in starting a car company, it's obviously a high capital endeavor, and particularly when you're talking about something which is a brand new technology and no one had really gotten all the pieces to work together quite right. To create a compelling product as far as electric cars are concerned.

There's a couple of people who tried. Yeah, a couple of companies that came and went well. And some of those companies are sort of still here today. Like General Motors had the EV1, and actually if they'd continued and produced the EV2, EV3 and continued that development, there probably wouldn't have been a need for Tesla. But they didn't, unfortunately. They took those cars away from people forcibly and crushed them. Literally crushed them. And if people have seen Chris Payne's movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" which I recommend, you can see some of that. It's amazing that the people who Jim gave those EV1s to held a candlelit vigil for their cars getting crushed. I mean, can you imagine anyone holding a candlelit vigil for a GM car? No, I really can't. Or any product. Or any product is the point. Why would you discontinue a product line with that level of customer interest? That's pretty amazing. Yeah, pretty well documented in that film.

But I'll give you the chronology and the reasoning. Why did we start with the car that we started with? Because I do get asked the question, why are you making this expensive sports car? Implying that we somehow think there's a shortage of sports cars in the world or rich people really need a break or something like that. I mean, it's absurd if you think of it, but nonetheless, people are confused. Like, why can't you make an affordable car? I wanted to give you the opportunity to explain.

Yeah, absolutely. And there are two reasons. One is that when you have a brand new technology, it tends to be expensive. It's almost always expensive, in fact, because the first thing you're trying to do is to make it work. And if you're just trying to make it work, you don't have an opportunity to optimize the cost. And if you think about anything new, when cell phones first came out, they were very expensive. Personal computers were very expensive. Oh, boy. Even gasoline engine cars in the beginning were very, very expensive.

Could only be afforded by a few people. Absolutely. So who doesn't remember the $1,400 VCR? Right. Absolutely. It's part of our. In fact, you can point at almost anything new innovation. It starts off expensive because the first thing you're trying to do is make it work. Cell phones the size of a shoebox, $1,800. I remember Wall Street with the guy walking around with that shoebox phone, basically. So any new technology is expensive.

And then the other factor is economies of scale. So in order to make something inexpensive, you have to make a lot of it. But to put together a factory that can make hundreds of thousands of cars costs a billion dollars or more. And who's going to take a chance? Right. And the thing is, it would still be silly to try to do that economies of scale thing on the first iteration of the technology because it's still going to be expensive. And this is a problem that GM is starting to see with the Volt because they're having trouble bringing the cost of that car below $40,000. And that's problematic when you're talking about a car that is essentially intended to compete against gasoline cars that are in the $25,000 to $30,000 range.

It's very important that an electric car be of comparable price to other cars of its type. So the Tesla Roadster is actually about the same price as a Porsche. In many cases less. Yeah. In fact, less than a Porsche Turbo. Anyway, that's basically the reason it was the first generation of technology and we were necessarily at low volume because we didn't have the capital to go to high volume manufacturing.

Yeah. And you weren't making an inexpensive sports car. You were making a brand new state-of-the-art sports car. That was some of the negativity that I didn't understand. Because it didn't seem to come from naive people. It seemed to come from people who seemed very scholarly in their particular areas of expertise, who completely missed the obvious justification in terms of what kind of vehicle you are actually making from the ground up. And it being the first of its kind, I'm astounded by.

Well, a common misperception is that because for the Roadster, we worked with Lotus and we did initially intend to use a modified Lotus Elise chassis for our car, people think, oh, it's just a modified Lotus. But actually we had to redesign almost every part of the car. And our initial thought of, well, we can just use a Lotus Elise chassis turned out not to be true because the weight distribution is all different, the load points are all different.

Our car ended up being 30% heavier. We had to redesign almost everything. In fact, there's only 7% parts commonality between our car and Elise. 7%. In fact, those are the letters. First of all, there's five letters in Lotus, so that's a bit of the 7% right there. Well, there's no Lotus actually. There's not any Lotus logos on the car. Of course not. But nonetheless it is. So 7% parts commonality is actually that means when somebody like J.M. Ford announces an all-new car, that all-new car has more than 7% commonality with prior cars.

Excellent point. So in other words, this is a newer new car than most new cars, almost all new cars. So it was tricky to bring it in for the price that we did bring it in. In fact, there were some pretty big mistakes made initially on the estimates of cost, and that forced us to raise the price later in order not to be shipping product at a loss.

What's the time frame from the first sort of breaking ground on the space where you're going to manufacture this car? Obviously a prototype to be the sedan or the sedan. The Roadster is in production. Right. How long did it take? Yeah, but I mean, they're on the road now. Yes, yes. In fact, we've delivered over 300 cars, approaching 400 cars. And when was the first one delivered, the Roadster? Well, the first production car was delivered in February of last year, and that was my car. But it was. I mean, the initial production rate was about one every three to four weeks. Wow.

And then it's got up to two every three to four weeks, then four. And now we're at the point where we're about 20 to 25 per week. Okay, wow. And now at what point during the Roadster building process does the S model begin its drawing boards almost immediately? Well, we've been working on the Model S for about two years if you take this sort of early conceptual stuff into account. So you really obviously have to focus everything on the Roadster first, get it up and running. But in the back of your mind, the master plan is the Model S.

Yeah, the basic plan of action, the master plan, is, was and is to produce an expensive car in low volume, then a lower cost car in kind of medium cost car in medium volume and then a low cost car in high volume. And that's the plan. That was my plan from the beginning and that remains the plan today. And we've been able to accelerate the low-cost car a little bit by working with Daimler, the maker of Mercedes and Smart, to create an electric smart car.

Oh really? Yeah. That's the third phase after the Model S. Well, I think we'll probably still do a third-generation platform of our own, but as a means of accelerating low-cost vehicle access, we’re working with companies like Daimler to get there sooner. So my understanding is Daimler is planning to have the beginning of that 1,000 car test fleet on the roads towards the end of this year.

So you're already focusing on working with an existing manufacturer in terms of bringing the electric car to a larger consumer base. Yeah, really. The overarching point of Tesla is to accelerate the electric car revolution. And that's going to be a combination of cars we produce and cars that we help other companies produce. In fact, we've been trying to sell our technology to Detroit and to other car companies in other parts of the world for a couple years now. And it's ironic that really the first company to do that is not an American company, but it's a German company, Daimler.

In fact, Daimler was the one that invented the internal combustion engine car. So you know, they're the oldest car company in the world, and they're actually being here they are jumping in with the electric car full force. As we move into your describing the Model S and its conception, we have some photos that we can throw up and let people look at while you're talking about it. Because I got to be honest, when I saw the Roadster, I was wildly impressed, but I was waiting. I was waiting for a non-sports car, more of a sedan, which is what. And most people were.

Yeah. And I do feel like the larger audience is already chomping at the bit. And when I saw this car, I flipped out. I just could not believe something like this had been achieved when I wasn't looking. Because you did an awfully good job keeping it under wraps all these months, if not how the first prototype was completed.

Yeah, well, the first prototype was just completed last month when we. And that's when we did the unveiling of the Model S, the first drivable prototype. We've been working on the Model S in earnest for about a little over a year. A little over a year. So you're saying only a week or so before you unveiled it on March 26th, was it March 26th?

Yeah. March 26th. Yeah. Only a week before, was it actually fully functioning and ready to be driven? Yes. That's fantastic. Yes. Because that sort of thing happens. Yeah. Not fantastic for you. I can't imagine. I don't understand how you have any hair left after that.

Sort of a nail biter. In my business, that sort of thing happens all the time. People rushing to get their film ready for the Sundance Film Festival. I've seen big studio films that are still polishing and doing last-minute special effects adjustments way after they've announced the release date and rushing it into theaters. And oh, my goodness, I can't even imagine the sort of pressure involved.

So we've been looking at some pictures. Yeah. Wonderful. We're still looking at them. Great. Because this car is so gorgeous. Okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna get a little selfish here. Sure. And also lean this towards people like myself who want to. Who have the next series of questions, which are, when will this car be available to me and what is the process for me to sign up and get one now?

Well, the car will be available in two years, which is. That's when we'll be finished with all the crash testing and all the regulatory stuff and have built out the factory. Because this is a true mass production car. In fact, the Model S will be the first mass production electric vehicle or true car. That highway capable car.

What numbers of? Not a golf cart type of thing. What numbers of mass production are we talking about? We're talking about 20,000 a year. So when you unveil, you want to have 20,000 ready? Well, we'll still be over a year's time to roll them out. It'll take a little bit of time to spool up the production line. But these will be mass manufactured cars where robots are doing things as opposed to hand-built cars.

Because the Roadster is really a hand-built car. Right. You got robots building the model. A lot of it, yeah. Now, I've heard everything from the third quarter of 2010 to the beginning of 2012. What's realistic for the Model S? Well, our aspiration is to have the first production cars available in the third quarter of 2011. So just over two years from now. Right. And I think it's achievable. And I think we've. There's much less technology risk and uncertainty than there was with the Roadster.

So I do feel reasonably confident that we can meet that date. Of course, it is dependent on when the Department of Energy disperses funds for the loan program that they have. There's something called the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which was actually put into effect by Congress last year. And then the DOE is just on the verge of awarding those loan programs. It's intended to provide a lower cost of capital to companies that are developing energy-efficient cars.

Well, it couldn't make more sense to those of us who have been waiting for this to happen. So we're glad that they're going to pitch in. There's also going to be a $7,500 rebate. There is. There is already a $7,500 rebate. That's as of January 1st. So it's a tax rebate. Applies to anyone, regardless of your tax situation. And the first base price is $49,900 and it goes up from there depending on the size of the battery.

Yes. The base price of the Model S is 49,900, and that's for the basic version, which has 160 mile range. But you can get a battery pack that goes up to 300 miles in range. Right. And in fact, one of the things we think we'll probably do is, is have the 300 mile packs available for rent. So if you're just using your car. Please do that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Please do that. Because this car is unbelievably exciting.

And I think the instinct is much like other forms of technology, there's going to be the I want the everything package and then there's going to be a lot of people who can't really afford the everything package. They can barely get into the car as it is, but they're dying to get into this car. So that sure would be fantastic if they could rent that larger battery if and when they ever needed it. Because for a lot of people, 160 miles around town as their everyday car is fantastic.

Right. The average person drives 30 miles a day. So 160 miles is five times what the average person drives in a day. Are all three batteries this quick charge of 45 minute capability? Yeah. The car will have a standard 45-minute charge. All cars will come with the ability to charge in 45 minutes.

Now I should point out that the 45 minutes does require an off-board charger. So you won't be able to use the onboard charger to do the 45-minute charge. The onboard charger you have to pull over and take the battery out. No, you just need to just go to a charging station that's kind of an industrial strength charging station because that's a lot of power. More than most houses are capable of delivering.

But the onboard charger that's built into the car will be capable of recharging the car in about three to four hours. So overnight you plug the car in. Yeah, no problem. And is it going to be like my computer where I can overcharge it and then it's bad for the computer? I don't want to leave it plugged in overnight.

There's a lot of intelligence in the battery pack. It won't allow itself to be charged incorrectly. Excellent. Will I get better service than AT&T than I do with my iPhone? Is a real question here. The computer onboard. Yeah, but before I get to that, there's one thing that Wired magazine wrote a very, I thought, supportive article about the Model S. And then there's all sorts of debates going on in the comment section of that article and a lot of naysayers, as always, they line up like idiots. We seem to. Tesla seems to generate a bipolar response.

Well, you know what, that's fantastic though. I mean, if anything it challenges you to rise above all questions and inquiries and be able to answer them all and be able to attribute the genius and expertise of your design people and yourself. Because I do understand also that you've, as an engineer yourself, have really been at the forefront of the design.

Yeah, I was trying to think of the right title, but probably a good description would be Product Architect. So at Tesla, we do have a Chief Technology Officer, J.B. Straubel, who's been with the company from the beginning and really is the person most responsible for leading the technology of Tesla. He's a great guy. And also would like to credit Franz von Holzhausen in terms of the design of the Model S. And the way I look at it is I sort of work with them and the other members of the Tesla team to create a great product because I think great companies are both in great products.

Yeah, well, yes. Hell yes. Forgive me for reading this, but I don't want to miss this and I was hoping I could put this to you to address the why is the Model S still so expensive? Question. A wonderful article in Wired magazine written by Chuck Squatriglia, which I'm sure I'm destroying his name. I'm sorry. Very supportive of design. Not only the car but the master plan in general of Tesla Motors to roll out the so-called more expensive models first with the $109,000 Roadster and then now the $49,000 up to $54,000 I think it is Model S.

Tons of comments posted. One reader, obviously an EV driver hit on some wonderful points that I wanted your feedback on that really sort of drove a point home that I don't think a lot of people are considering and that is wildly ignored. I think these people are considering the sticker price only as opposed to the fuel and maintenance.

And when you own a car, you pay for more than just the initial purchase price. You also pay for fuel and maintenance. And these two very important unavoidable truths that EV costs a miniscule of what the ICE or internal combustion engine costs. The EV motor has only one moving part on the Roadster and presumably the Model S. The only regular this is true.

Well, technically there are some gears, right? Regular maintenance items really are brakes and tires. Not even the brakes actually, because regenerative braking means that your brake pads see very little wear. I love this. The EVs actual fuel cost, they've narrowed it down to 2 to 3 cents per mile. That sounds familiar. That's about right. So if you keep your Model S for the average of 10-year 100,000-mile lifespan, you replace your tires brakes with your not the case for say $1,000 each time.

Again, these numbers can vary. And pay up $3,000 for the fuel. Over this 100,000 miles, your $49,900 purchase price only increases to around $54,900. The IRS says driving an ICE internal combustion engine car costs 50.5 cents per mile inclusive of fuel maintenance. At that rate, over the lifespan, the same lifespan, Ford Taurus with a sticker price of $25,000 increases over that lifespan to $75,000. $75,500, theoretically.

Therefore, the ICE car with a sticker price of zero would still cost more than the Model S after those 100,000 miles. I don't think people have done that math in terms of the initial investment. Oh my God, it's so much more than a Taurus. Yeah, well, actually, I think perhaps the best way to address that question is not even to have people do the math because we will have our car for lease.

And so if you take our lease cost and the lease cost of a gasoline car and you add in the cost of ridiculous, the cost of fuel and maintenance on the gasoline car and the cost of electricity and maintenance on the electric car, then you have the savings from the beginning. There's no need to add this up over five, seven years or whatever. You can simply say, how much is transportation costing me every month?

And you will have the savings from day one. But I will shove people out of the way who want a lease so that I can get one so I can buy one. If you do that, in fact, we're going to put a calculator on our website, hopefully in the next week or two so you can plug in and you can say, okay, what do you think the price of gasoline is going to be?

And you can put in the price of gasoline and, and what's your electricity cost and the cost of electricity and then we'll say what's the probable operating cost per month? And then how does that compare and compare that to cars of different types? It becomes pretty clear, doesn't it? Yeah. And then it's pretty obvious that if you assume that gasoline is going to get back up above $4 a gallon, which I think that's a certainty, in fact, I think it's going to go way beyond that.

And then you put in the cost of electricity, particularly if you have time of use meters like in places like California where you can get 7 cents a kilowatt hour, then our car is comparable to a Ford Taurus. Well, let's talk about what you need in your home to keep this car charged on a regular basis. What sort of setup do you need electrically? You really don't need much of anything. You can, if you are only driving say 30 miles a day or something like that, you can actually plug it, charge it out of a regular 110 volt socket, typically plug it in like it's a hairdryer for overnight.

In terms of your range, your range is going to lower though? Well, 110 volt supply will generate, will recharge about five or six miles an hour. So, so if you're say driving 30 miles a day and you charge it for just six hours, you've topped it off essentially. So that's certainly possible. You want to unplug the toaster and plug in the car. So it is workable. And we actually have many Roadster customers that operate the car on that basis.

That's fantastic. Yeah. And that comes along with the base price. And then if you want to do a faster charge, the next step up would be a 240 volt 40amp circuit, which is comparable to a dryer. So it's like a dryer plug. Wow. So it doesn't cost very. It costs a couple hundred bucks to install a dryer outlet in your garage. And again, that just operates off the onboard charger in the car. So you just plug it in like it's a dryer or a range or something like that. And that'll charge a lot faster. That'll charge the car in seven or eight hours.

Full charge. Full charge, yeah. And the quick charge will be only available at these charging stations. Yeah, the quick charge is we're talking about something which is. It's a lot of power. I mean, 45 minutes, you're talking about something which is on the order of a 60 kilowatt power source. There's very few houses that you'd break the master circuit on.

Most it's a bad idea. Yeah. And it's overkill and unnecessary for a house. But I do think a lot of businesses may choose to install that for their employees and that where this will really come in handy is when you're going between cities.

So there's three ways that we've addressed the range issue on the Model S. One is by offering a range of up to 300 miles. And like I said, we're also hoping to be able to say, allow people to buy the 160 mile range car, rent and then rent the 300-mile range pack as needed. You'll give them a map of where these charging stations are along the route. So if they want to drive across the country, you'll let them know where.

Yeah. In fact, you mentioned that the touchscreen. The car will be 3G connected to 3G wireless connected all the time. So you won't need a map. You can just ask the car, take me to the next charge, next charging station and I'll give you a selection of locations.

If you could, if there's any way you could put in a phrasing that just at some point the car says, stop busting my balls. I just want to put that out there. Let's go to. Actually, we are going to offer, you know what, ask, can you show or receive? Okay. We are going to offer themes so you can actually theme your. Because it's all just a big screen. You have a 17-inch center console screen and you've got a smaller sort of display screen on the front, you can theme your car.

So if you just like you sort of theme your desktop or your cell phone, give it a little cynicism, give it a little. Yeah, you can. Yeah, absolutely. Playful. And there'll be people that probably want to write applications that do various things. And your center console is a full-fledged computer running Linux. So it's something where it'll have a browser if you want to browse and search the web, do your email while not driving.

While not driving, while charging. If you want to go sit on your phone, it could do things like read out your email for you. Yeah, no. Did you show any pictures of this monitor when we ran through? Okay. If you want to throw them back up, now that we're talking about it, if you have that one isolated. Because it is pretty astounding, that whole part of it. And people go to the website, Tesla Motors, they can do a little more research in terms of what you're offering in that monitor because it is wildly extensive.

If there's anything else in it that you do want to address. Well, we are taking advantage of economies of scale from the computer business, which is a lot bigger than the car business in unit volume. You've got hundreds of millions of computers shipping every year, whereas you've got a much smaller number of cars shipping every year now less than ever. Right? Absolutely.

By putting in 17-inch monitors in the computer business these days are dirt cheap. And so it's really not that expensive for us to do this. Right. Well, what it is is cutting edge and that's one of the things that makes the car so unbelievably desirable. What about, they're asking here, twitter.com for the next generation of road vehicles, what will they be when the electric car have become obsolete?

Wow. People are going on to the next generation beyond the electric car. I'm not sure that's for this discussion. Electric car is a long-term solution. Yeah. You know there's, as you were pointing out in terms of how to power the electricity, that's where we can diversify. Be it water, be it solar power, be it wind.

Yeah, I'm not sure wind is the correct word. There may be. I mean, the only thing I could see as potentially being a change is, and this is speculative, is a switch from batteries to high energy density capacitors. In fact, I originally came out to California to do a PhD at Stanford in the material science and physics of high energy density capacitors for use in electric cars. That's what initially brought me to Silicon Valley. And then ended up putting that on hold to start a couple of Internet companies. But it was.

So I think that's a possibility. I'm not sure whether success is one of the possible outcomes, but. But it's a possibility. Any chance for a flux capacitor? Maori. Maori. Where's the flux capacitor? Sorry, I did that on a dare. I suppose you could call it a flux capacitor. Flux just means sort of flow, right. Of anything. You know, you could flux, energy, flux anything.

Ask Elon how we can help Tesla Motors get the federal loan. And also where the factory. The factory would be here in Los Angeles. I don't know if you want to get specifics about where in Los Angeles is it that the SpaceX, where you have the.

Yeah, the Tesla design studio is inside the SpaceX rocket factory and the design center is in Southern California. Because the world's best automotive design talent is actually right here in Southern California. You're welcome. It's true. And von Holzhausen, our designer, head of design, was based here when he worked at Mazda before joining us. And there's just a really big talent pool. And rather than go rent a whole separate space, it was just easier to allocate some space in the SpaceX rocket factory for the tails of design.

Also made it also very convenient for me to work with Franz, who's a great guy to work with. We're very much on the same wavelength. It's great, actually. So as far as helping on the DOE front, I actually think we're okay. Definitely. Any voice of support is great. You know, mentioning it to your congressman or senator, that does help, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. If they feel a groundswell, if they feel that the public. There's a public demand. Yeah, I think it's helpful to let your congressman and senator know that you think companies like Tesla should get a portion of the ATVM program. And I should mention what we're asking for is really a tiny. We're only asking for about 1.5% of the ATVM program. The vast majority of it will go to GM, Ford, Chrysler. They'll get 98%. 1.5%. You're asking.

Yeah, we're asking for 1.5%. I think it's not a big ask. Can we get Barack on the phone, people? Tyler. Crude. What are you laughing about? Yeah, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all to be asking for the 1.5%. I think we can probably put it to better use than GM.

Yes. Well, you know what? I would love to have them in this room and watch that debate. Quite frankly, SpaceX came first and it is a thriving industry that only recently actually stepped up its game, or so it seems, from what I'm reading. You want to share some of the latest news?

Well, SpaceX, we got to orbit last year, which is a fairly big deal. Our rocket is arguably the first completely privately developed rocket to reach orbit, although there's some dispute on that front. But it's unequivocally the first liquid-fueled privately developed rocket to reach orbit. And that's a tough thing and most countries can't do that. So it's a, and how many years did that take? That was six years.

Yeah. From start to reaching. Yeah. And so when the money is just evaporating as you're pouring all the time and energy in your life into this vision, how often people want to hear about the struggle? How often does the thought enter your mind? You know, it's just, it's too much. There are other things I want to do with my life because I have to assume this is all-consuming for you.

Well, there's, I mean, I spend a lot of time with my kids. I mean, there's really just three, there's I guess four things that I do. There’s SpaceX and Tesla, which take about roughly half of my business time each. Then there's my kids. And then I sleep. I mean, that's like the four things I do and often sleep. I don't get a lot of sleep. That becomes the commodity, doesn't it?

Yeah, it was definitely difficult. The fourth quarter of last year was very difficult and yeah, it was. Well, it was a very difficult time for everyone, I think. Yeah, for everyone. Until we found out, of course, that Britney Spears is back. And then it all sort of lightened our load a little bit.

Absolutely. There was a glimmer of hope, right? Well put. That's what I would have called it as well, a glimmer. So six years from the design and from the vision and then last year your first complete orbit. Yeah, absolutely. We came close on our second and third flights. We did reach space, but we did not reach orbital velocity in our second or third flights. And then our fourth flight, we reached orbital velocity and then we've got another flight coming up towards the end of this month and that's going to deliver a satellite for Malaysia.

You have to take on some commercial cargo. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We have a wide variety of customers. Actually. NASA is our biggest customer by far, but we have many other customers as well. Sweden is a customer. Malaysia as I mentioned, Canada and then we also have some purely commercial customers. We'll be launching a satellite for Avanti, which is a European broadcast satellite company.

And. Yeah, so expound a little bit if you can about your relationship with NASA, because I think this is pretty fascinating, quite frankly. Yeah, well, I love NASA. I want to say that NASA is awesome. Well, they believe in you. So I tend to agree with people who agree with me. So I understand where you're coming from.

Yeah, NASA's actually been really supportive and SpaceX would not have gotten as far as it did without NASA's help. So I want to acknowledge that. And in December of last year, NASA actually gave us the contract to be the replacement for the Space Shuttle as far as cargo is concerned.

So the Space Shuttle retires at the end of next year. And then NASA does have a long-term plan for developing a launch vehicle and a spacecraft called the Ares Orion Project, but that's intended to go back to the moon and that's only going to see flight probably around the 2016 time frame. So there's kind of a gap of five or six years. But we still have a space station up there that we've got to service.

So what do we do during that gap? And that's why NASA took the unprecedented step of saying, okay, well let's see what the private sector can do and let's. You stepped up. Yeah, yeah, we did. And so NASA felt confident enough to award. They actually did a competition and there were 20 missions and we got 12 of them.

28 of them were awarded to another company, Orbital Sciences. And then there was a third competitor which was a joint venture of Boeing, Lockheed and Alignment Tech Systems, which actually did not get any of the missions. So that was a big upset. A huge upset. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't blame any of your engineers when that moment happened if they sort of rallied together and said suck it to those people.

Right. So it was. I think we said suck it. I knew I could break it. Boring. Lucky to find companies, of course. Please, they're doing just fine without my little cynicism. Yeah, no, it's. So you're well established now with your relationship with NASA. They're clearly depending on you. You've won this competition. They really are depending on us.

And so it's actually quite a big responsibility which we take very seriously. And so we're working very hard to make sure we don't let them down. Yeah. And you were just in Washington just before the Model S announcement, right? About. Well, tell us what you were actually I'm in Washington quite a lot because there's a lot of interest there, both for SpaceX and Tesla. There was a bit of an announcement right before the March 26th. You were there. I was reading something where you had to address a group.

Maybe it was the satellite conference. There's a big satellite conference in D.C. every year. So, yeah, I gave a keynote there. Right, yeah. And that was just basically giving people an update on where SpaceX is and what progress we're making. That's what I was reading about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, just basically telling people where we are. And we're expecting to launch our big rocket, the Falcon 9, with the Dragon spacecraft later this year. Right. I think you were discussing the Falcon 9. Right. The vehicles we've launched to date are the Falcon 1, which is a much smaller vehicle.

So Falcon 9 is a very big vehicle. In fact, it's going to be the most powerful single-core vehicle in the U.S. fleet. By single core, I mean without using side boosters. And then the Falcon 9 heavy, which is the Falcon 9 with side boosters, will actually be the highest payload capable vehicle in the world.

When did you share that piece of? Was that something that was actually? It's been on our website for a while, though. I'm not sure people believed we'd actually do it. Yeah, I'm sure there were people waiting for that announcement and also now waiting for the failure. You must have a lot of the surrounding people, I mean, people who are competitive with you, I speak of who part of them want you to succeed because it opens up opportunities for them.

But at the same time, if it's anything at all, like the business of show, there's such competition that even those who succeed feel the sense of there isn't enough to go around. And if you succeed, it means I won't. Is there more of a camaraderie from your standpoint?

Well, it depends on who you're talking about. So there's some companies where we are a great enabler because fundamentally SpaceX is in the transportation business. And if transportation improves, then those who use transportation will find that their business has improved, just as when they finished the transcontinental railway in the early days of early history of the United States, it was a huge boon to businesses in the East Coast.

Businesses, people could travel back and forth, goods could transfer a lot easier. So it was really helpful to everyone, except probably the stagecoach companies. Their didn’t like it that much. No, they didn't. So I think there's more of the space business that wants us to succeed than doesn't want us to succeed.

So are you feeling more scrutiny about the Model S in terms of competitiveness? Because here's just based on the documentary, the Killing of the Electric Cars. This has happened before. The name itself, Tesla, comes from someone who is obviously squashed by the bigger electric companies.

You know, Nikola Tesla did pretty well for most of his life, although he went kind of bonkers at the end. Hopefully that doesn't happen to me. Yes, we're all pulling for that, but I mean, in terms of who got credit for what, that seemed to be the struggle.

In terms of the memory. If you ask your average American on the street what they know about Nikolai, it says you're not going to get a lot of. Yeah, Edison. I think in the popular mindset, Tesla gets less notice than Edison.

In the sort of scientific world, Tesla gets more attention and more credit than Edison. And they both. I think they're both really great men and did amazing things and a little bit of rivalry is probably a good thing. It's a great thing.

So I think they're both great. We thought we'd recognize Tesla in naming the car company better than naming it the Elon Car Company or something like that. I'm proud of you for letting that go. Sure crossed your mind at some point.

All right. How many people have signed up, already officially signed up, and are waiting delivery on the Model S? I don't know the exact number today, but we're well over 500. Over 500. How do I become the next one? Oh, just go to the website. You can just click the button, but I've got you right here.

Aren't there forms that we could fill out right now? Literally, you can. How easy is it? So you go to the website and you follow the simple instructions, clicking, yes, me. I want one. As someone who did PayPal, you can imagine that I have a big focus on making things really easy.

Nice job online. Thanks. So we spend a lot of time at PayPal trying to make things super easy. And actually, if somebody goes to the Tesla Motors, just go to teslamotors.com click on the buy tab. You should be able to put down a reservation for a Model S in under five minutes. I like that a lot.

Yeah. And it's a $5,000 reservation, which is refundable, and I'm personally standing behind the reservation payments. So if anyone is concerned about us going out of business, the only thing you should worry about is if I get hit by a bus and I'm trying to cover that one as well by getting some key man insurance in place.

So if I do get hit by a bus, really, there's the bus factor. That's still an opportunity. Because I was just thinking, not a lot of buses in LA. Fortunately, I'm safe. 500 people times $5,000, you should be able to cover that fairly easy.

Yeah, it's not going to. I don't think it's going to be. I don't think people's deposit.

Well, we can't call it a deposit for legal reasons, but people's reservation payment is, I think, is safe. But I'm glad we were able to uncover the bus factor. This is very important, I think, to a lot of customers. They need to know.

Well, I mean, there's still. I mean, there's a tiny bit of risk. Your kryptonite, apparently, is the bus. Right. Well, so there's always a tiny bit of risk. And tiny bit of risk would be if Tesla goes out of business and I lose all of my assets.

And don't die. And don't die. And don't die. There's the rub. And for the rest of my life, I'm never able to repay. To build up my assets to the point where people can be repaid. That would be the circumstance under which people would lose their money. You know what? I'm glad you did the math on that, because I'm sure a lot of people have also.

And, well. So if the bus does hit me, it needs to kill me, not partially paralyze me or something. For those of you who currently call bus driving your professional, do us all a favor and stay the hell away from this man.

If at all possible, hit the dog. If I may, Mr. Musk, I cannot thank you enough for sharing as much as you have. I would love to have you on again in terms of watching the progress of SpaceX as well as Tesla, because I am wildly curious and I know an awful lot of people are as well that are just starting to discover what's been going on now in your life for the last six years, in the case of SpaceX, in the last Roadster, rather, and now the last couple years with the Model S and waiting with bated breath to see where this company is going and praying with you and for you, that it succeeds beyond your dreams.

Thanks. Actually, you know what? You haven't touched on any personal stuff, which is fine. I didn't want to, but I'm happy to go there. What would you like to talk about?

Well, there is a common misperception which does sort of drive me crazy a little bit. Okay. You know, I sort of, my wife and I are getting. My ex-wife and I are getting divorced and we've been there. Yeah, yeah, sorry. The divorce filing took place in sort of June of last year and so it takes a while for these things to get done. Boy, does it. Yeah.

And although my ex-wife, to her credit, made it clear in her blog that that the marriage was over for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone else. In fact, she wanted to get divorced at least as much as I did, if not more. That takes a little stress and guilt away. Sure. Right.

There have been a few articles which have said that I left my wife and five kids for someone else. I'm glad you brought this up. I wasn't about to go there, but for God's sakes, let's clear a little air here. I think.

Yeah. You know, that would be very frustrating to me as well if that was the, if that was in press releases and articles written about me when I was trying to change the face of the automobile business.

But yeah, let's talk about it. Well, it's whatever you'd like to share. If I read that about someone, I would think, what a dick. Alright. And that would be true if it were true. But actually it's not because I would never leave my kids. In fact, I see them five days a week.

They keep you from sleeping. We talked about that before. Yes. Yeah. What are the age range of these five children of yours?

Well, the twins are turning five and the triplets are two and a half. Wow. Twins and triplets. Yeah. That makes the five.

Wow. Wow. So anyway, it's just a point of clarification. There was an article, I think there have been a few articles where. Where that's sort of been mentioned as an offhand comment. In fact, they weren't even. There were positive articles. They just mentioned it sort of off the cuff and they were corrected in the online version. But, you know, it's difficult to sometimes correct these perceptions.

On the surface of it may seem that I left my wife or someone else, but I didn't. Well, this is the problem that comes with the limelight. You see, you've gone beyond your profession and your expertise. Expertise and your business life and you're now being scrutinized for your personal life.

And I do know a great deal about that from, of course, the business that I chose many years ago. And it's never fair, it's never balanced and it's always about selling an article or a paper or a magazine. And whatever it takes to throw you under that bus, if we may go back to that unfortunate spot, they will do it.

And I am more than happy to offer you this form to clear any error in regards to this at any time. Because a lot of times, quite frankly, people in show business, they're sort of taught to stay away from it. You know what? Don't just leave it. They're going to write whatever they want to write.

And I think that it's pretty damn courageous to sit here and say, you know what? This is what's being said about me, and I don't appreciate it. So I commend you for that.

Well, I think it's not. I'm certainly not someone who is. I'm no saint. I'll say. Well, I didn't say. But I generally try to do the right thing. And so, like I said, if people actually were to say, go look at my ex-wife's blog or something, they'd know, okay, the marriage came to an end because we grew apart and just wasn't working and were making each other unhappy.

But there are people who don't always know to do that. And so, anyway, well, thank you. Thank you very much for sharing all of that. I really genuinely appreciate it, and I think the people watching appreciate it as much. The whole idea of the show was to not just be an infomercial about a film or a project or the design of an electric. It was really about getting to know the people behind their work and their lives and what it takes in some cases to make history.

And so on that level, I thank you very much. Alright, well, thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you.