so what what advice do i have for college graduates interested in getting involved
in the spheres you've tapped into well certainly i'd invite you to apply for a
job at solar city or tesla or spacex if that doesn't work for whatever reason then i guess
apply to jobs at other companies in that arena or try starting a company the space business is quite
it's quite hard to start a company in the space business because it's such a capital intensive
business so it may be better to do something in solar power or if you're going to do it in cars
do it in as kind of a component supplier for cars or something like that if you study engineering
and you figure out how to design new things then it's relatively easy to start a company
you just need to get a few like-minded people with you how did you get the expertise to be the chief
technology officer of a rocket ship company um well i do have a physics background that's
helpful as a foundation and then i read a lot of books and talked to a lot of a lot of smart people
you know i think my sort of drive to get it done is somewhat disconnected from
hope enthusiasm or anything else i just actually just don't care about hope or
enthusiasm motivation just give it everything i've got irrespective of what the circumstances may be
you just keep going and get it done what is the one thing that has surprised you about your life
oh one thing wow well i certainly i'm surprised by the whole thing honestly
i certainly didn't expect to be to be uh for any of these things to happen
honestly i know i wanted to be involved in technology um and in fact the only reason i
started a company back in 95 an internet company was because i couldn't get it there were only a
few internet companies and i couldn't get a job at any of them i tried to get a job at netscape and
sent my resume and i tried hanging out in the lobby but i was too shy to talk to anyone and
and then i was like okay well i guess i'll have to start a company because i can't get a job anywhere
i wouldn't say i'm fearless in fact i i think i fear i feel fear quite strongly but i if the
if what we're doing isn't for what you know what i'm doing is i think is important enough then i
just uh override the fear i think also people tend to overweight risk on a personal level it's one
thing if you've got you know a mortgage to pay and kids support and that if you were to deviate from
your job that well how you're going to feed your family and pay the rent okay that's understandable
but let's say you're young and you're just coming out of college or coming out of high school or
whatever the what what are you what do you risk you know you're not going to stop i mean it's it's
really certainly not in any kind of modern economy it's so easy to earn enough money just to live
somewhere and eat food so if you don't know what are they only afraid of they're mostly afraid of
failure i think but people should be less risk averse when there's not much at risk
i always had sort of a slight existential crisis because i was trying to figure out
what does it all mean like what's the purpose of things and um i came to the
conclusion that if if we can advance the the the knowledge of the world if we can do things that
expand the scope and and scale of consciousness then we're better able to ask the right questions
and become more enlightened and and that's really the only way forward what drives you what what is
it that when you wake up in the morning do you see a problem and you want to solve it
i think the the thing that drives me is that uh i want to be able to think about the future
and we feel good about that that you know we're doing what we can to have the future be be as good
as possible to be inspired by what is likely to happen and to look forward to the next day
that's that's what really really drives me is is trying to figure out
uh how do we how to make sure that things are great and i'm gonna be so and that's
the underlying principle behind tesla and spacex i think you know particularly for
americans you know like think about america is a nation of explorers people came here
from other parts of the world chose to give up the known in favor of the unknown so i think
uh exploration like i think united states is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration
i mean i thought both tesla and spacex would fail at the beginning you saw it yeah sure really of
course but nevertheless you put all your money in there i expected to lose it well technically what
i thought was well i'll take half the money from paypal and if i lose half of it that's okay um
but then of course the companies encounter difficulties and then have a choice of the
either like let the company die um or put you know all the money into the companies and so
i really didn't want the companies to die so i put all the money in the companies
and then had to borrow money for friends to pay living expenses
you know just looking just for evidence of exceptional ability and if there's a track
record of exceptional achievement then it's likely that that will continue into the future well it
really depends on the stakes if the stakes are high if it's really important then one
should then i you know will overcome the fear and just do it anyway but essentially i mean i just
drive over right fear but i feel the fear it's kind of annoying i shouldn't i wish i felt it less
toward the end of 2008 spacex prepared its fourth attempt we were running on fumes at that point
we had virtually no money so a fourth failure the fourth valley would have been absolutely game over
play so far as a support for spacex the first three launches failed
just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the fourth launch that
fourth launch had failed we would have been dead so multiple failures along the way i
tried very hard to get the right expertise in for for spacex i tried hard to to find a great
chief engineer for the rocket but the good chief engineers wouldn't join and the bad
ones well there was no no in hiring them so i ended up being chief engineer of the rocket
but flight 4 was flawless in musk's world it lit the darkness when critics say you can't do this
your answer to them is we've done it and then just work like hell i mean you just have to put in
you know 80 hour 80 to 100 hour weeks every week if other people are putting in 40 hour
work weeks and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks then even if uh you're doing the same
thing you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes then a year to achieve
work hard like i mean every waking hour that's that's the the thing i would i would say
and i mean if you do simple math say like okay if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're
working 100 you'll get twice as done as much done in the course of years i think it's important that
humanity become a multi-planet species i think most people would agree that a future where we're
a space faring civilization is inspiring and exciting compared with one where we are forever
confined to earth until some eventual extinction event that's really why i started spacex
you