WILLIAM SHATNER: What do you think of
when you think of the future?
Is it space travel? Robots?
Trucks with the word "cyber" in front of them?
Whatever your vision,
there's one man working to make it a reality.
He's part Thomas Edison, part Iron Man,
part annoying dude in the group chat.
And he's anything but your standard CEO.
I changed my title to-to "Technoking."
Um, and, by the way, this is a formal SEC filing.
It's... I'm legally, or whatever, "Technoking."
Um, I just did that as kind of, like, a joke.
SHATNER: Yes, he's the Technoking, but as a joke.
And soon, we'll all be his serfs, but in a funny way.
Because while he may be an eccentric,
satellite-launching, terminally-online billionaire
who wants to plug people into computers
and build a vast network of underground tunnels,
it's not like he's some kind of super villain.
Eventually, you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet.
Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.
SHATNER: Well, maybe a little.
So strap in,
turn on the autopilot, but keep your hands on the steering wheel
in case of pedestrians,
because this is The Dailyshowography of Elon Musk,
Visionary FutureMan.
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa,
in Earth year 1971.
His father made a fortune in construction
and emerald-mining because Africa's resources
are like free money for white people.
Badly bullied in school, Elon overcame many hardships.
Although, unlike other South African celebrities,
he didn't make his childhood into a whole thing.
By age ten, he was learning to program computers.
At 12, he built a video game he called "Blastar,"
which started his lifelong love
-of inventing things that already exist. -(beeping)
Soon after, he left South Africa and made his way
to a booming Silicon valley,
where he launched his first company,
Zip2, which he eventually sold to Compaq Computer
for $305 million.
Like so many tech entrepreneurs,
he earned his unimaginable wealth
by doing something invaluable for society--
selling a start-up you've never heard of
to a company that doesn't exist anymore.
Musk celebrated by buying himself
a million-dollar supercar.
There are 62 McLarens in the world,
and I will own one of them.
SHATNER: Yes. Musk was so rich,
he could afford to have a midlife crisis
while he was still in his 20s.
Sadly, his new toy wouldn't last long.
MUSK: I didn't really know how to drive the McLaren
because it's, like, a difficult car to drive,
and I floored it and did a lane change
and the back wheels broke loose and the car spun around
and, uh, and then we hit the embankment and knocked the car
into the air, which continued spinning like a discus,
like, three feet in the air.
SHATNER: That's right, Musk's McLaren crashed
worse than Dogecoin after Saturday Night Live.
For his next act, Musk created X.com,
which would later become PayPal, the app your uncle had to use
because Venmo And Cash App won't work on his Nokia.
Musk took the money he made from that business
and built an empire of cool-ass shit--
rocket ships, electric cars, solar farms,
artificial intelligence, neurotechnology
and underground highways-- all while dating celebrities
and starting a record label to release his own EDM track.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: A banger all the more impressive considering
Musk had clearly never heard music before.
Yes, Elon Musk refuses to stay in his lane,
much like a Tesla on autopilot.
-It's downlo-- It's changing lanes by itself. -(gasps)
SHATNER: Tesla's groundbreaking cars...
Ludicrous speed-- go!
SHATNER: ...brought unprecedented power, range
and sexiness to electric vehicles,
a market previously reserved
for nerds who cared about the environment.
And Musk even promised the dream
of full self-driving technology.
No hands, no feet, nothing.
SHATNER: Like, promised repeatedly.
MUSK: I'm confident that
in less than a year, uh,
you'll be able to go from highway on-ramp
to highway exit without touching any control.
MAN: Holy shit, it just ran that red light.
I'm quite confident that within three years, uh,
the-the car will be able to take you from point to point,
and you could be asleep the whole time.
MAN: Oh, (bleep)! Jesus!
MUSK: I think we're basically
less than two years away from complete autonomy.
MAN: Oh-- Oh! (bleep) Oh, shit. Shit.
Shit, we-- we hit that.
Cross-country from L.A. to New York
by the end of the year, fully autonomous.
Extremely confident, uh,
of achieving full autonomy, uh,
and-and releasing it
to the Tesla customer base, uh, next year.
SHATNER: But Musk can't stop dreaming big,
-even when he probably should. -Oh, my (bleep) God.
SHATNER: Like when SpaceX made history
with the world's first reusable rocket technology,
and then used it to launch the first car into space.
Technically second, if you count Elon Musk's McLaren.
Musk's special brand of achievement is one
of totally normal and healthy families around the world.
But success didn't come easy.
He had to overcome a lot of doubters, starting with himself.
MUSK: I don't want to give the impression that I thought
Tesla would be successful from the beginning.
I actually thought we would fail.
We were only a few days from bankruptcy.
Lit-Literally, two days.
SHATNER: It pushed him to the brink.
Musk could have gone from being a multibillionaire
all the way down to the very lowest rung of society:
millionaire.
But through the years, Musk kept his many ventures going
with little more than his can-do attitude.
Oh, oh! Jesus. Sorry.
SHATNER: And billions of dollars in government subsidies.
Today, Musk isn't merely the richest man in the world.
His net worth is higher than the GDP of most countries.
Should Musk be a country?
Ah, he does have a national anthem.
♪ ♪
But don't worry. It's not like he's got an army or anything.
MUSK: I went to, uh, Russia to look at buying,
um, uh, a refurbished ICBM,
which is a very trippy experience.
SHATNER: Okay, maybe worry a little.
And he's not just great at making money--
he's also an expert at saving it,
by paying almost nothing in taxes for three years
and then actually nothing in 2018.
Of course, there's always haters
who like to nitpick Musk's business methods.
STAHL: There are charges of unreported injuries,
excessive hours,
abusive conditions.
Injuries on the job.
Breathing toxic fumes.
Over 100 ambulance calls.
Uh, I don't think that's correct.
-Because... -No, I-I...
I-I mean, I was literally living in the factory.
Um, if these-- if-if there was, like, toxic fumes,
I'm breathing them, okay?
SHATNER: Exactly.
Does Musk seem like a man who is inhaling toxic fumes?
But Elon Musk also understands that all work and no play
make X AE A-12 a dull boy.
And like any well-adjusted person,
his favorite pastime is spending 12 to 14 hours a day on Twitter.
So it made sense when Musk announced that he would buy
the social media platform
and even more sense when the deal spun out of control
and crashed into an embankment.
But Musk doesn't only use Twitter for fun.
He uses it to make the world a better place.
Or at least promise to.
It's where he promised to solve world hunger,
end traffic,
fight COVID,
and fix Flint's water.
And when a Thai soccer team was stuck in a cave,
Elon even promised to rescue those kids
from the guy who rescued them.
That's why Musk is such a champion of free speech.
If you can't randomly accuse someone
who's saving people's lives
of being a "pedo guy,"
does civil discourse even exist?
Elon Musk is dedicated
to building a brighter future for all humanity.
It's why he backed the most futuristic
presidential candidate of 2020.
It's why he's so dedicated to turning every aspect
of our lives into a platform for his dumb jokes.
From robots to cybernetic implants
to A.I.
to space travel
to unfettered social media,
Elon Musk is building a future that humanity
only imagined in the movies.
And who wouldn't want to live there?
And that's why Elon Musk truly is
a visionary future man.