SAL KHAN: So first of all, I just want
to thank Elon for coming-- hungry.
You didn't even have dinner.
And we didn't even feed you properly.
ELON MUSK: No, sorry to be a bit late.
I just came from the Tesla factory in Fremont.
SAL KHAN: Yes.
Was something wrong?
ELON MUSK: There's always something.
SAL KHAN: Did you have to like--
ELON MUSK: At any given point, there's always something wrong.
SAL KHAN: Yes.
ELON MUSK: Because there's just too many things going on.
So one of the trickiest things about a car
is that there's thousands of individual components--
there are thousands of unique components--
and even if one of those things is missing,
you can't make cars.
So today's fiasco was-- I kid you
not-- we were missing a $3 USB cable.
OK.
So we could not complete cars, because--
SAL KHAN: So the whole line was stopped?
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
So essentially, because it's part of the wiring harness.
So you can't put the interior in without this cable.
And so we could either make a whole bunch
of cars minus the interior, which
means that you've got to stack them up in the yard.
SAL KHAN: The resale value would be no good.
ELON MUSK: Well, it can be done, but if then things go out
of sequence, and it's way more inefficient--
you don't have a moving production line.
Then you have to send people out to hundreds
of cars that are sitting in the storage yard.
And so this happens to be a particularly pernicious cable.
It's kind of routed under the carpet, in a difficult place.
And it's literally $3.
And so we basically had to send people throughout the Bay Area
to go and buy USB cables.
SAL KHAN: Like, literally, Radio Shack?
ELON MUSK: Like Fry's.
SAL KHAN: Oh, Fry's.
That's better.
ELON MUSK: You're going to have a hard time getting a USB cable
right now at Fry's, because we bought every one of them.
SAL KHAN: That's good.
ELON MUSK: And so we're able to continue production.
And I don't want to belabor the anecdote,
but essentially the supplier is in China.
And we had plan A and plan B. And plan A
was like the normal supply chain process.
But what the supplier did was instead
of sending our parts in their own package,
they grouped it together with a bunch
of other stuff for other companies
and sent that all via some extremely slow boat from China
to LA.
And when it got to LA, the other stuff didn't pass customs.
And so they wouldn't let our stuff through, because--
SAL KHAN: They put it like a barrel fruit or something.
ELON MUSK: I don't what they put it,
but something that customs didn't like.
And the paperwork wasn't in order or whatever.
So it got stuck there for like a couple weeks.
And then we had plan B. So we called and said,
look you've got to air freight some of these cables--
cause they're just little cables-- to us.
And we talked to their US subsidiary
and ordered from the US subsidiary,
who then communicated to China.
But then because this was another batch of parts,
so it was kind of double the order,
it exceeded the credit limit that we had.
So it bounced off the credit limit, so they didn't ship it.
SAL KHAN: Fascinating.
So someone's losing their job now.
This is-- no, I'm kidding.
You shouldn't fire anyone.
ELON MUSK: I mean, it's pretty farcical.
And, anyway, so, it's coming like tonight
at 11:00 PM or something.
SAL KHAN: Wow.
And these things are happening like all the time?
This was an unusual circumstance?
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
That's like one example, but there's many things like that.
SAL KHAN: I guess, I mean, that's actually
a really good example, because that
leads into what I've always been fascinated
by a lot of what you're doing.
Well, I'll start with, how did you get into this?
ELON MUSK: Into cars?
SAL KHAN: Into cars.
Into taking over NASA.
Well, not taking over NASA-- being a contractor for NASA.
ELON MUSK: Just for the record, we are not taking over NASA.
SAL KHAN: You're not taking over NASA.
They are an independent organization.
But you are becoming a major provider of services for NASA.
Obviously, kind of internet payments and payments
generally.
I mean these are three completely different spaces.
I think a lot of people would not take someone seriously,
if they had a business plan in one of these.
ELON MUSK: Right.
Sorry to eat.
SAL KHAN: Oh, yeah, take your time.
What was your-- did you always think
you were going to be doing this or-- when did it
dawn on you that you would try to revolutionize
three industries?
ELON MUSK: Well, when I was in college--
I didn't actually expect to do it.
So it was not like this is some long-fulfilled expectation.
But when I was in college, I thought
about what were the areas that would most
effect the future of humanity, in my opinion.
And the three areas were the internet, sustainable energy,
and space exploration, particularly
if humanity becomes a multi-planet species.
You know, there's kind of like a pretty substantial bifurcation
in our future, if we're either out there among stars
on multiple planets, or if we're confined
to Earth until some obviously eventual extinction.
Not Not that I'm pessimistic about live on Earth.
I mean, things are likely to be good.
More likely to be good by far than bad.
SAL KHAN: Yellowstone's due for an explosion
every several hundred thousand-- Shandra knows about that.
It's been 700,000,
ELON MUSK: Right.
Right.
Yeah.
SAL KHAN: Super volcano for those of you who don't know.
It would envelop, but well--
ELON MUSK: Yeah. Exactly.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
So--
SAL KHAN: We read the same books.
I can tell.
ELON MUSK: Absolutely.
I mean something bad is bound to happen
if you give it enough time.
And civilization has been around for such a very short period
of time that these time scales seem like very long,
but on an evolutionary time scale, they're very short.
A million years on an evolutionary time scale
is really not very much.
And Earth's been around for four and a half
billion years, so that's a very tiny, tiny amount of time,
really.
But for us that would be-- can you
can imagine if human civilization continued
at anything remotely like the current pace of technology ad
advancement for a million years?
Where would we be?
I think we're either extinct or on a lot of planets.
SAL KHAN: Yes.
We should--
ELON MUSK: Those are the two options.
SAL KHAN: But given that-- I mean,
one, that's kind of as epic as one
can think about things, literally.
How did you make that concrete?
How does that turn into SpaceX, Tesla and Paypal?
ELON MUSK: Well, so I thought about these things
kind of in the abstract.
Not from the expectation that I would actually
have careers in those arenas.
But, I wanted to be involved in at least one of them.
And at first I thought the best bet
was going to be electric cars.
And so the area that I was studying
was advanced capacitors.
So essentially capacitors that have an engine density
exceeding that of batteries.
Because they have a very high power
density, but a low energy density.
Maybe you have lecture to that effect, I don't know.
SAL KHAN: Oh, yes, no.
We should do that.
We'll get to it later.
ELON MUSK: Exactly.
So obviously, if you could make a capacitor that
had anywhere near the energy density of a battery
with this incredibly high power density
and this quasi-infinite cycle and calendar life, then
you'd have an awesome solution for energy storage
and mobile applications.
So I was going to try to work on that
and try to leverage the equipment that was developed
for advanced chip making and photonics
to create ultra-precise capacitors
at the molecular level.
SAL KHAN: And this was when you were
going to go into grad school?
You had a brief stint at Stanford?
ELON MUSK: That's right.
SAL KHAN: At a PhD in applied physics?
ELON MUSK: Applied physics, material science.
SAL KHAN: Right.
So even then you were thinking of trying
to do something in the space?
ELON MUSK: Actually, this was d to work on energy storage
solutions for electric cars.
And I'd actually worked at a company
in Silicon Valley called Pinnacle Research, which
did advanced capacitors.
There were electrolytic capacitors.
And they actually were pretty good.
They had like the energy density of a lead-acid battery, which
for a capacitor, that's a big deal.
But they used ruthenium tantalum oxide.
And I think at the time, there was
maybe like one or two tons of ruthenium
mined per year in the world.
So it's not a scalable solution.
But I thought there could be some solid-state solution,
like just using chip-making equipment.
That was going to be the basic idea.
But it was one of those things where I wasn't sure
if success was one of possible outcomes.
It's difficult to bound that problem exactly and say, OK--
SAL KHAN: So you're saying, I felt
like this was a destined failure is another way
to parse that sentence.
But anyway, sorry.
ELON MUSK: No.
I didn't think it would fail, but I wasn't sure
that success was a possibility.
SAL KHAN: OK.
Yes.
ELON MUSK: And generally you want
to embark on something-- it's desirable to figure out
if success is at least one of the possibilities.
SAL KHAN: Right, exactly.
ELON MUSK: Because for sure failure
is one of the possibilities.
But, ideally, you want to try to bracket it
and say success is in the envelope of outcomes.
And I wasn't quite sure if that was the case.
I think success on an academic level would have been quite
likely, because you can publish some useless paper--
and most papers are pretty useless--
SAL KHAN: We have a few-- don't take offense.
ELON MUSK: I mean, how many PhD papers are actually
used by someone ever?
SAL KHAN: That's a good point.
ELON MUSK: Percentagewise it's not good.
And so it could have been one of those outcomes
where you add some leaves to the tree of knowledge.
And that leaf is, nope, it's not possible.
And there goes seven years of my life.
So that was one path.
And I was prepared to do that.
But then the internet came along.
And it was like, oh, OK, the Internet,
I'm pretty sure success is one of the outcomes,
and it seemed like I could either do a PhD
and watch the Internet happen, or I
could participate and help build in some fashion.
Like, I was just concerned with the idea of watching it happen.
So I decided to put things on hold
and start an Internet company.
And we worked on internet publishing software,
maps and directions, yellow pages, those kind of things.
And we had as investors and customers the media companies.
So like the New York Times Company, Knight Ridder.
SAL KHAN: And this is just at the early stages.
I mean this was like--
ELON MUSK: '95.
SAL KHAN: '95.
So it's really early stages, so it's really out the gate.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
Absolutely.
And so then we-- the reason we worked with the media companies
was because we needed to have money.
There was no advertising money in '95.
In fact, the idea of advertising on the internet
seemed like a ridiculous idea to people.
Obviously, not so ridiculous anymore.
But, at the time, it seemed like a very unlikely proposition.
And a lot of the media companies weren't even sure
that they should be online.
Like, what's the point of that?
SAL KHAN: And did you all think that PayPal was just
going to be a simple, little internet way to--
or did you think it was going to turn
into the major kind of transaction processing engine
that it is right now?
ELON MUSK: I didn't expect PayPal's growth rate
to be what it was.
And that actually created major problems.
So we started Paypal on University Avenue.
After the first month or so of the website being active,
we 100,000 customers.
SAL KHAN: Really?
That fast.
Wow, I didn't realize it was--
ELON MUSK: Yeah, it was nutty.
SAL KHAN: And how did it start?
How did people just even know to use it?
I mean, obviously, both buyer and seller have to be involved.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
Well, we started off first by offering people $20
if they opened an account.
And $20 if they referred anyone.
And then we dropped it to $10.
And we dropped it to $5.
As the network got bigger and bigger,
the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot
that we could offer.
SAL KHAN: So much money did you all
spend with that kind of $5, $10, $20 incentive
to get that critical mass going?
ELON MUSK: It was a fair amount.
I think it was probably $60 or $70 million.
SAL KHAN: Oh, wow, OK.
So it was substantial.
OK.
So we're not talking peanuts here.
ELON MUSK: It depends on your relative scale.
It's a peanut to Google.
SAL KHAN: Yeah, no, that's right.
That's right.
ELON MUSK: Here's a peanut.
I mean, Google's got $50 billion.
Apple's got $150 billion, some crazy amount of money.
That's just cash.
SAL KHAN: Yeah.
So it's not an outlandish-- I didn't
realize that was so core.
ELON MUSK: Like 1% of Google's cash would be $500 million.
So, you know, that's 0.1% percent of Google's cash.
SAL KHAN: That's true.
You're right, that's inexpensive.
It's nothing.
ELON MUSK: Relative to them, it's pretty inexpensive.
SAL KHAN: That's right.
ELON MUSK: And then we did a bunch of things
to decrease the friction.
It's just like bacteria in a Petri dish.
So what you want to do is try to have one customer generate
like two customers.
OK?
Or something like that.
Maybe three customers, ideally.
And then you want that to happen really fast.
And you could probably model it just
like bacteria growth in a Petri dish.
And then it'll just expand very quickly
until it hits the side of the Petri dish
and then it slows down.
SAL KHAN: And then after Paypal, then I
mean-- to some degree, especially us
in Silicon Valley, we kind of understand the Internet.
We know people.
PayPal's obviously of the scale that is noteworthy,
but then SpaceX just seems really, you know-- well,
one, how did you decide that I'm definitely going to do that?
And then like what's the first thing that you do?
How do you even go out-- I don't even
know how to start trying to make a rocket company.
ELON MUSK: Well, neither did I really.
And in fact, the first three launches failed.
So it's not as though it was like spot on.
It's like, did not hit the bull's eye.
But
SAL KHAN: But even getting to the point where
you're launching rockets.
I don't even how do you get there?
One, how did you decide?
And then what did you do on day one?
Like, who did you call?
Did you write a plan?
Did you start-- I don't even know.
ELON MUSK: Actually, the origin of SpaceX
is that I was trying to figure out
why we'd not sent any people to Mars.
Because the obvious next step after Apollo
was to send people to Mars.
But what in fact happened was that we sent a few people
to the moon and then we didn't send anyone
after that to the moon or Mars or anything.
But if you'd asked people in 1969, what would 2013
look like, they would have said, there
will be a base on the moon.
We would have least sent some people to Mars.
And maybe there'd even be a base on Mars.
There'd be like orbiting space hotels.
And there'd be all this awesome stuff in space.
And that's what people expected.
And if you said, well, actually, the United States in 2013
will not be able to send anyone to orbit.
But I'll tell you what will exist
is that there'll be this device in your pocket
that's like the size of-- smaller than a deck of cards
that has access to all the world's information,
and you can talk to any one on planet Earth.
And even if you're like in some remote village somewhere so
long as there's something called the Internet-- they wouldn't
know what that means, of course--
then you would you be able to communicate with anyone
instantly and have access to all of humanity's knowledge.
They would have said, like bullshit.
There's no way that that's going to be true.
SAL KHAN: Right.
Right.
ELON MUSK: And yet we all have that.
And space is not happening.
So I was trying to figure out like what was the deal here.
And this was 2001.
And it was just a friend of mine asked me,
what am I going to do after Paypal.
And I said, well, you know, I've always been interested
in space, but I don't think there's anything
that an individual could do in space,
because it's the province of government, and usually
a large government.
But, I am curious as to when we're
going to send some one to Mars.
So I went to the NASA website to try
to figure out where is the place that tells you that.
And I couldn't find that.
So I was like, either I'm bad at looking at the website,
or they have a terrible website, because surely there
must be a date.
SAL KHAN: That should be a big date.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
This should be on the front page.
And then I discovered actually that NASA
had no plans to send people to Mars, or even really back
to the moon.
So this was really was disappointing.
I thought well, maybe this is a question of national will.
Like do we to get people excited about space again?
And try to get NASA a bigger budget,
and then we would send people to Mars.
And so I started researching the area,
becoming more familiar with space, reading lots of books.
And I came up with this idea to do so-called Mars oasis,
which was to send a small greenhouse with seeds
in dehydrated gel that upon landing, you hydrate the gel.
You have green plants on a red background.
The public responses to precedents and superlatives.
So it would be the first life on Mars.
The furthest that life's ever traveled.
And you'd have this money shot of green plants
on a red background.
So that seemed like it would get people pretty excited.
So I started getting into this.
And trying to figure out, OK, well
can I afford to build a spacecraft?
Because I had some money as a result of PayPal,
but it had to fit within that budget.
And I figured we had to do two missions, because if we only
did one and it failed, then it might
have like the opposite effect.
SAL KHAN: But you were willing to bet the farm, so to speak,
on this?
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
Well, I figured I was willing to spend half the money that I got
from PayPal with no expectation of return.
Because I thought this was just something
that was pretty important and yeah,
it seemed like I could spend half the money
I made on PayPal on this, and if that got NASA a bigger budget
and resulted in us going to Mars, that
would be a pretty good outcome.
SAL KHAN: And when your friends or your family came up to you
and said, look there's nations that can't do this.
You're a guy, I mean you have some resources, what
did you say or do or think?
ELON MUSK: Well, so I had a lot of friends of mine
try to talk me out of starting a rocket company,
because they thought it was crazy.
And one friend of mine made me watch
a video of rockets blowing up.
And there were just lots of people
that thought it was a really crazy idea.
And there was some people that had
tried to start rocket companies, not succeeded.
And they tried to talk me out of it.
But the thing is that-- their premise for talking me out
of it was, well, we think you're going
to lose the money that you invest.
I was like, well, that was my expectation anyway,
so I don't really mind if I lose-- you I mean, I mind,
but I mean it's not like I was trying to figure out
the rank-ordered best way to invest money
and on that basis chose space.
It's not like that's-- I thought, wow--
SAL KHAN: You weren't looking at like money-market bonds,
AAA bonds, rocket company.
You weren't like--
ELON MUSK: I could do real estate.
I could invest in shoe making.
Anything.
And, whoa, space is the highest ROI.
That is not what-- it wasn't the premise.
I just thought that it was important
that humanity expand beyond Earth,
and we weren't doing that, so maybe there
was something I could do to spur that on.
And then I was able to compress the costs of the spacecraft
and everything down to a relatively manageable number.
And I got stuck on the rocket.
The US rockets were way too expensive.
I ended up going to Russia-- I flew to Russia three times
to negotiate a purchase of an ICBM.
I tried to buy two of the biggest
ICBMs in the Russian fleet in 2001 and 2002.
And I actually negotiated a price.
SAL KHAN: I'll just let that statement stand.
I'm not even going to-- Well, actually,
I have to-- like who did you call?
ELON MUSK: You open the yellow pages.
Go to ICBMs.
Oh!
SAL KHAN: How does this-- I don't
want to get too much in to it but I'm
curious about this one particular thing.
You decide at some point you need to buy an ICBM?
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
Well, actually at first I tried to buy just a normal launch
program that they use to launch satellites,
but those are too expensive.
SAL KHAN: I see.
I see.
ELON MUSK: The Boeing Delta II would have cost $65 million
each, so two would have been $130 million.
And then I was like, woah, OK, that breaks my budget
right there.
And I tried to negotiate with them.
And that was not-- I did not make progress.
SAL KHAN: How much does an ICBM go for?
I'm curious what's the market rate for one of those?
ELON MUSK: Well--
SAL KHAN: This is right after the fall,
it might have gone up.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, it's gone up a lot since then.
But in 2001, it would've been about $10 million each.
So two would have been $20 million.
And then I thought I could get the rest of the mission
down to also around $10 million per, so we'd
have a dual mission with like two identical launches,
two identical spacecraft for roughly $40 million.
And so I thought, OK, I can do that.
SAL KHAN: But you must have had some
like rocket scientists advising you at this point?
This sounds like you were serious.
I mean you were--
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
I engaged a bunch of consultants and started
to get familiar with the space industry.
But then after the third trip to Russia,
I came to realize that I was actually
wrong about my first premise, that there was a lack of will.
In fact, I think that there's a tremendous amount of will
in the United States for space exploration.
Because the United States is essentially
a nation of explorers.
I mean, it's a distillation of the human spirit
of exploration.
So of course it was quite silly of me
to think that people lacked motivation.
But what people don't want to think
is that, OK, sending people to Mars
is going to be so expensive that they'll
have to give up health care or something.
They're not going to do that.
So it's got to be that going to Mars
is not going to cause some meaningful drop
in their standard of living.
So if it's like maybe a quarter of a percent
or half a percent of GDP-- something
like that is palatable.
Anyways, so I thought, OK, it's not really
going to maybe matter that much if I
do this mission, because what really matters is having a way.
So I was wrong-- I thought there wasn't enough will,
but there actually was plenty of will,
if people thought there was a way.
So then I said, OK, well, I need to work on the way.
How hard is it really to make a rocket?
Historically, all rockets have been expensive, so therefore,
in the future, all rockets will be expensive.
But actually that's not true.
If you say, what is a rocket made of.
And say, OK, it's made of aluminum, titanium, copper,
carbon fiber, if you want to go that direction.
And you can break down and say, what is the raw material
cost of all these components.
And if you have them stacked on the floor
and could wave a magic wand so that the cost of rearranging
the atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket
be.
And I was like, wow, OK, it's really small.
It's like 2% of what a rocket costs.
So clearly it would be in how the atoms are arranged.
So you've got to figure out to OK, how
can we get the atoms in the right shape
much more efficiently.
And so I had a series of meetings on Saturdays
with people some of whom were still
working at the big aerospace companies,
just to try to figure out is the some catch here
that I'm not appreciating.
And I couldn't figure it out.
There doesn't seem to be any catch.
So I started SpaceX.
SAL KHAN: And you ended up-- you had
some failures, but obviously some huge successes.
What was the cost that you were able to build this rocket for
relative to what they were being built for before?
ELON MUSK: So let's see.
For the Falcon 1, which is the first rocket we built.
And the first three flights did not make it.
In fact, we got progressively further.
But like the first rocket came in and landed maybe
a couple hundred yards away from the launch
site, and tiny fragments.
So, yeah, anyway, that rocketed ended up
costing around $6 million compared
to other rockets in that class, which
were about to $25 million.
SAL KHAN: Wow.
So significant?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, like a quarter.
But there's an even better step beyond that
which is to make rockets reusable.
Right now that is around what our comparison price is--
excluding the refurbished ICBMs.
So, if you say building a rocket from new,
how does the SpaceX rocket compare
to a rocket from Boeing or Lockheed?
It's about a quarter of the price.
However, if we make it reusable, then it
can be two orders of magnitude cheaper.
SAL KHAN: Two orders of magnitude cheaper.
A 100th of the price?
ELON MUSK: That's right.
For you.
SAL KHAN: Only today.
Memorial day sale.
And I've seen some-- you all are doing these vertical landings,
like literally out of like the 1950s Sci-Fi movies.
And that's what you're talking about?
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
Essentially, the rocket needs to come back
and land at the launch site, and then reload propellant
and take off again.
Like an airplane in its reusability.
SAL KHAN: How far do you think we are from that?
When do you think-- your best guess,
when we'll actually see that happening?
ELON MUSK: Well, I'm hopeful we can do it next year.
SAL KHAN: Oh, OK.
Yeah.
That's-- we've got some ambitious stuff at Khan Academy
for the next year, too.
So we can compare.
We're redesigning the site.
ELON MUSK: Right.
We've been working on it for a long time.
I should say, SpaceX has been around for 11 years,
and thus far we have not recovered any rockets.
We recovered the spacecraft from orbit.
So that was great.
But none of our attempts to recover the rocket stages
have been successful.
The rocket stages have always blown up essentially
on reentry.
Now, we think we've figured out why that was the case.
And it's a tricky thing, because Earth's gravity is really
quite strong.
And with an advanced rocket, you can do maybe 2% to 3%
of your lift-off mass to orbit, typically.
And then reusability subtracts 2% to 3%
So then you've got like nothing to orbit or negative.
And that's obviously not helpful.
And so the trick is to try to shift that from
say 2%, 3% in an expendable configuration
to make the rocket mass efficiency, engine efficiency,
and so forth, so much better that it moves to maybe around
3.5% to 4% in expendable configuration.
And then try to get clever about the reusability elements
and try to drop that to around the 1.5% to 2% level.
So you have a net payload to orbit of about 2%.
SAL KHAN: But you're doing it at one, two orders of magnitude
cheaper.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
Absolutely, because our Falcon 9 rocket cost about $60 million.
But the propellant cost-- which is mostly
oxygen-- it's two-thirds oxygen, one-third fuel--
is only about $200,000.
SAL KHAN: Wow.
ELON MUSK: And it's much like a 747.
It costs about as much to refuel our rocket
as it does to refuel a 747 within-- well, pretty
close, essentially.
SAL KHAN: So assuming you all are successful,
and you all have proven yourself to be
successful on these audacious things in the past, I mean,
what happens?
I mean that seems like it's-- what happens in the next 5,
10 years in the space industry, if you all are successful
there?
I mean do we get to Mars?
Do we have kind of market forces, commercialization
of space starting to happen?
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
Let's see.
Well, the first step is that we need
to earn enough money to keep going as a company.
So we have to make sure that we're launching satellites.
Commercial satellites like broadcast communications,
mapping, government satellites that do scientific missions.
Earth-based or space-based missions.
GPS satellites.
That kind of thing.
And then also servicing the space station.
Transferring cargo to and from the space station,
which we've done a few times.
And then taking people to and from the space station.
So we've got to service the sort of Earth-based needs
to launch satellites and that pays the bills.
But in doing that keep improving the technology
to a point where we can make full reusability work.
And we have sufficient scale and sophistication
to be able to take people to Mars.
SAL KHAN: Wow.
So you think this is going to be a reality?
What's your best guess of when we're
going to have someone on Mars?
ELON MUSK: I think probably about 12 years.
SAL KHAN: That's nothing.
And you think it'll be a round trip?
It won't just be some type of permanent colony on Mars?
ELON MUSK: I think it's probably a round trip.
It's not for sure.
SAL KHAN: I could talk about this for-- people know, I'm--
ELON MUSK: Aspirational it'd be a round trip.
SAL KHAN: This is mind blowing.
And then on Tesla.
I mean Tesla's obviously, from my vantage,
it's a huge success.
What do you think in that industry-- well, one,
I'll ask kind of the same question.
What did you think-- this is something
that GM and Toyota and these massive multi-billion dollar
organizations have been trying.
What gave you the confidence to pursue it?
And now that it seems to be a huge success, where
do you think this industry's going
to be the next 5, 10 years?
ELON MUSK: Yes.
So with Tesla, the goal is try to accelerate
the advent of sustainable transport.
I think it would happen anyway, just out of necessity.
But because we have an un-priced externality
in the cost of gasoline.
We weren't pricing in the environmental effects of CO2
in the oceans and atmosphere.
That's causing the normal market forces to not function
properly.
And so the goal of Tesla is to try
to act as a catalyst to accelerate
those sort of normal forces.
The normal sort of market reaction that would occur.
We're trying to have a catalytic effect on that.
And try to make it happen, I don't know, maybe 10 years
sooner than it would otherwise occur.
That's the goal of Tesla.
So that's the reason we're making electric cars and not
any other kind of car.
And we also supply powertrains to Toyota and to Mercedes
and maybe to other car companies in the future
to accelerate their production of electric vehicles.
So that's the goal there.
And so far, it's working out pretty well.
SAL KHAN: I mean, I just saw a news report earlier today
that you all sold more Model S's than-- you all
are leading that segment of the industry.
The Mercedes S class, the BMW 7 Series, or the Lexus LS400,
or whatever it is.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, actually, that seems to be the case.
I didn't realize they sold so few cars in that segment.
Because we don't sell that many cars.
We sell 5,000 a quarter, or 12,000--
SAL KHAN: Well, out here they seem like you know every--
ELON MUSK: Well, this is our home team.
So it's-- we better sell a lot in the Bay Area.
Because otherwise we're like--
SAL KHAN: And, well, I mean, similar thing.
How did you start?
What gave you the confidence?
And do you see yourselves as kind
of a major automotive, mainstream brand in 5,10 years,
all the way down to competing with the Honda Accords
and Civics?
ELON MUSK: I mean, yeah.
Our goal-- it's not to become a brand big brand
or to compete with Honda Civics, rather
to advance the cause of electric vehicles.
And so we're just going to keep making
more and more electric cars and driving the price point down
until the industry is very firmly electric.
Like maybe half of all cars made are
electric or something like that.
Which is not to say that we expect
to make half of all cars.
We want to just have that catalytic effect until
at least that occurs.
And I think the point at which we're approaching half
of all new cars made are electric,
then I think I would consider that to be the victory
condition.
And so the faster we can bring that day, the better.
SAL KHAN: When would be your guess when that happens?
ELON MUSK: Well, I made a bet with someone
about three years ago that it would be sooner than 20 years.
So it's 17 years from now.
But that's conservative.
I think it's probably maybe 13 or 14 years.
SAL KHAN: Wow.
Right when we're going to Mars.
ELON MUSK: Right.
SAL KHAN: It'll be exciting times.
ELON MUSK: True.
Exactly.
I was just thinking about that.
It was like, oh, those time frames are kind of coincident.
The nature of new technology adoption
is it tends to follow an S-curve.
So what usually happens is people under-predict it
in in the beginning, because people
tend to extrapolate in a straight line.
And then they'll over-predict it at the midpoint,
because there's late adopters.
And then it'll actually take longer
than people think at the mid-point,
but much shorter than people think at the beginning.
But I'm pretty excited about how things are going.
And, in fact, I think that the pace of technology improvement
in electric energy storage is really
moving faster than anyone thinks.
SAL KHAN: Wow.
I got one more-- how are we doing on time?
Where's Ester?
Oh, 9 o'clock.
So how much time do you have?
I want to make sure we don't go over.
ELON MUSK: Well, I guess maybe another 15 minutes.
SAL KHAN: OK.
So I'll finish with one last question
and then we'll open it up.
What advice do you have for us at Khan Academy?
ELON MUSK: I don't know.
You guys seem to be doing really great.
So I was wondering if you had advice for me.
SAL KHAN: Oh, no, well.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
It seems like you're doing an amazing job of-- really
super leveraged.
I mean, obviously, a small team, and you're
having a dramatic effect--
SAL KHAN: Yeah, half these people don't even work here.
There just like-- so it's like it's even--
ELON MUSK: Right.
So it's, I think very impressive thing you're
doing to spread knowledge and understanding
throughout the world.
SAL KHAN: The universe soon, if you hold up
your end of the bargain.
ELON MUSK: It's actually kind of funny.
If you think, what is education?
Like you're basically downloading data and algorithms
into your brain.
And it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education.
Because like it shouldn't be like this huge chore.
So you're making it way, way better.
But I think a lot of things that I would say,
you've probably heard 100 times.
And, in fact, are if not doing.
The more you can game-ify the process
of learning, the better.
For my kids, I do not have to encourage
them to play video games.
I have to like pry them from their hands, like crack.
SAL KHAN: Yes.
ELON MUSK: It's like, drop that crack needle.
SAL KHAN: You have that problem at your house, too.
The crack is addictive.
ELON MUSK: So to the degree that you can make somehow learning
like a game, then it's better.
And I think, unfortunately, a lot of education
is very vaudevillian.
You've got someone standing up there kind
of lecturing at people.
And they've done the same lecture 20 years in a row,
and they're not very excited about it.
And that lack of enthusiasm is conveyed to the students.
They're not very excited about it.
They don't know why they're there.
Like why are we letting this stuff.
We don't even know why.
In fact, I think a lot of things that people
learn that probably there's no point in learning them.
Because they never use them in the future.
SAL KHAN: Because who's going to launch a rocket into space?
I mean, that's just like-- exactly, that never happens.
ELON MUSK: Well, you have to say--
people don't stand back and say, well,
why are we teaching people these things.
And we should tell them, probably,
why we're teaching these things.
Because a lot of kids are probably just in school,
probably puzzled as to why they're there.
I think if you can explain the why of things,
then that makes a huge difference
to people's motivation.
Then they understand purpose.
So I think that's pretty important.
And just make it entertaining.
But I think just in general conventional education
should be massively overhauled.
And I'm sure you pretty much agree with that.
I mean the analogy I sometimes use
is, have you seen like Batman, the Chris Nolan
movie, the recent one.
And it's pretty freaking awesome.
And you've got incredible special effects, great script,
multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound,
and it's very engaging.
But if you were to instead say, OK--
even if you had the same script, so at least it's same script.
And you said, OK, now that script,
instead of having movies, we're going
to have that script performed by the local town troop.
OK, and so in every small town in America,
if movies didn't exist, they'd have
to recreate The Dark Night.
With like home-sewn costumes and like jumping across the stage.
And not really getting their lines quite right.
And not really looking like the people in the movie.
And no special effects.
And I mean that would suck.
It would be terrible.
SAL KHAN: That's right.
Very--
ELON MUSK: That's education.
SAL KHAN: So with that-- and I apologize to all of you
guys for hogging up all of the time, because, obviously, I
could talk for hours about this stuff.
But we do have time, probably 5 or 10
minutes for a handful of questions.
If none of you all have any, I have about nine more.
But, yes.
SPEAKER 1: So I noticed-- I picked up two kind of themes
from what you were discussing.
One was somewhat audacious goals.
And the other was I don't think I heard you use the word
profit in anything that you spoke about.
You seem to be-- each thing is pointed at like re-invigorating
an industry or bringing back space missions.
How much of your success do you attribute
to having really audacious goals or versus
just not being focused on the short term, money coming
in, or I don't know, investors?
ELON MUSK: Unfortunately, one does
have to be focused on the short time and money coming
in when creating a company, because otherwise the company
will die.
So I think that a lot of times people
think like creating company is going to be fun.
I would say it's really not that fun.
I mean there are periods of fun.
And there are periods where it's just awful.
And, particularly, if you're the CEO of the company,
you actually have a distillation of all the worst
problems in the company.
There's no point in spending your time
on things that are going right.
So you're only spending your time
on things that are going wrong.
And there are things that are going wrong
that other people can't take care of.
So you have like the worst-- you have
a filter for the crappest problems in the company.
The most pernicious and painful problem.
So I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it.
And have a fairly high pain threshold.
There's a friend of mine who says,
starting a company is like starting into the abyss
and eating glass.
And there's some truth to that.
The staring into the abyss part is
that you're going to be constantly facing
the extermination of the company.
Because most start ups fail.
It's like 90% percent-- it could be 99% of start ups fail.
So that's the staring into the abyss part.
You're constantly saying, OK, if I don't get this right,
the company will die, which can be quite stressful.
And then the eating glass part is
you've got to work on the problems
that the company needs you to work
on and not the problems you want to work on.
And so you end up working on problems that you really
wish you weren't working on.
And so that's the eating glass part.
And that goes on for a long time.
SPEAKER 1: So how do you keep your focus on the big picture
when you're constantly faced with,
we could be out of business in a month?
ELON MUSK: Well, it's just a very small percentage
of mental energy is on the big picture.
Like you know where you're generally heading for
and the actual path is going to be
some sort of zigzaggy thing in that direction.
You're trying not to deviate too far from the path
that you want to be on, but you're
going to have to that to some degree.
But I don't want to diminish the-- I think the profit
motive is a good one, if the rules of an industry
are properly set up.
So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with profit.
In fact, profit just means that people
are paying you more for whatever you're
doing than you're spending to create it.
That's a good thing.
And if that's not the case, then you'll be out of business.
And rightfully so.
Because you're not adding enough value.
Now there are cases, of course, where people
will do bad things in order to achieve profit,
but that's actually quite unusual.
Because usually the rules are set up mostly correctly.
Like not completely, but mostly correctly.
SAL KHAN: I think we have time for one more question.
Joel.
JOEL: Yeah, I have an important one.
SAL KHAN: OK, very good.
Yes, please.
SPEAKER 3: No.
JOEL: OK, so few months ago, you teased Hyperloop,
and we haven't heard anything since.
So, first of all, a few of us engineers
were talking about it, and I think
we have a few ideas, if you need help.
But, if you feel comfortable, maybe you
could tell us a little bit more.
ELON MUSK: I was reading about the California high-speed rail,
and it was quite depressing.
Because California taxpayers are going
to be on the hook to build the most expensive high-speed rail
per mile in the world-- and the slowest.
Those are not the superlatives you want.
And, it's like, damn, we're in California,
we make super high-tech stuff.
Why are we going to be spending--
now the estimates are around $100 billion--
for something that will take two hours to go from LA to San
Francisco?
I'm like, OK, well, I can get on a plane
and do that it 45 minutes.
It doesn't make much sense.
And isn't there some better way to do it than that.
So if you just say, OK, well what would
you ideally want in a transportation system?
You'd say, OK, well you'd want something
that relative to existing modes of transportation
is faster-- let's say twice as fast-- costs half as much
per ticket, can't crash, is immune to weather, and is--
you can make the whole thing like self-powering
with like solar panels or something like that.
That would be pretty--
SAL KHAN: That would be great, yes.
ELON MUSK: --a good outcome.
And so what would do that?
And what's the fastest way short of inventing teleportation
that you could do something like that?
And some of the elements of that solution are fairly obvious,
and some of them are not so obvious.
And then the details-- the devil's
in the details of actually making something
like that work.
But I came to the conclusion that there
is something like that that could work.
And would be practical.
SAL KHAN: Is this around the evacuated tubes?
The vacuum tubes?
Like the old bank--
ELON MUSK: It's something like that.
SAL KHAN: But you haven't been more public with what this is?
ELON MUSK: No.
Although I did say that once Tesla was profitable
that I would talk more about it.
But, we haven't done our earnings call yet.
So I think I'll probably do it after the earnings call.
And the thing is I'm kind of strung out
on things that I'm already doing.
So adding another thing-- it's like doesn't-- it's a lot
SAL KHAN: Learning the guitar You
could pick up all sorts of things.
ELON MUSK: Right.
I tried learning the violin.
That's, by the way, a hard thing to learn.
SAL KHAN: Yeah.
Launching rockets, electric cars,
revolutionizing transportation.
Yeah, it's easy.
ELON MUSK: I cannot play the violin at all.
Very horrible.
If you think about the future, you
want a future that's better than the past,
and so if we had something like the Hyperloop,
I think that would be like cool.
You'd look forward to the day that was working.
And if something like that, even if it was only
in one place-- from LA to San Francisco, or New York to DC
or something like that-- then it would be cool enough
that it would be like a tourist attraction.
It would be like a ride or something.
So even if some of the initial assumptions didn't work out,
the economics didn't work out quite as one expected,
it would be cool enough that like,
I want to journey to that place just to ride on that thing.
That would be pretty cool.
And so that's I think how-- if you come with a new technology,
it should feel like that.
You should really-- if you told it to an objective person,
would they look forward to the day
that that thing became available.
And it would be pretty exciting to do something like that.
Or an aircraft.
Like I thought it was really disappointing when
the Concorde was taking out of commission,
and there was no supersonic transport available.
And of course the 787 has had some issues.
But the thing is, the 787 even in the best case scenario
is only a slightly better version of the 777.
And it's like, OK, not that exciting.
SAL KHAN: So this is something that you are working on?
ELON MUSK: I wouldn't say working on it.
SAL KHAN: And one day in the not-too-far future-- or there's
some plans or consultants involved or something?
SPEAKER 4: You called Russia.
SAL KHAN: You made some phone calls to Russia.
ELON MUSK: No, every now and then, it's percolating away.
I'm not actually thinking about it.
But then they'll be some new element of that I'll think of.
Oh, this would make it better.
SAL KHAN: Fascinating.
Well, I think I'm speaking for everyone.
This is like the most epic possible conversation
one could have over about the course of an hour.
And I think all of us would love to chat with you for hours
on end, but thank you so much.
I know you have a lot of free time,
so it probably wasn't that big of a deal for you to come here.
But, it was a huge honor.
And I think it's inspired all of us
to go out and change the world and the universe.
ELON MUSK: Cool.
All right.
SAL KHAN: Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]