Elon Musk | SXSW Live 2013 | SXSW ON

thank you and good afternoon so we have a lot to cover lend us a lot of things that are there right now one of your spaceships docked at the space station the dragon spaceship this is the third time it has docked the second commercial was released last week, Many of you may have followed the launch, but there was drama, you know, there were solar panels and all this kind of stuff. We could follow him on his Twitter account. Yeah, what can you tell us what it's like to be Elon Musk? the control room during a launch when something happens when there's a problem well, it's extremely stressful, I mean, but the thing about a rocket launch is that all your work comes down to these few minutes, particularly the first few seconds around of takeoff because The worst thing that can happen with a rocket in a touch word is if you have an engine failure or some huge failure right above the launch pad and the whole thing can go down with about a million pounds of TNT equivalent and destroy. the entire launch pad, that would be what's going through my mind in case you're wondering, yeah that's actually what I'm thinking about, yeah, so when it passes by the lightning towers and zooms out it enough to not destroy the launch pad, they don't, so it's kind of going down a level, you know, fear and anxiety and then after the first stage separation, that's another one and when the second stage ignites, it is as if the intensity decreases as the rocket advances. and the thing is that the first three rocket launches we had failed well and if the first one failed quite close to the launch pad it almost destroyed the launch pad, in fact I spent that day collecting rocket pieces from the reef, which is what It sucks, so I think there's a pretty powerfully ingrained fear response as a result of that, because three in a row, you know, but images of the rocket failure flash through my mind as I watch the rocket launch, so that's what that "It's happening and then in this case you got through the stage separation, but then there was a problem with the solar cells, um, tell me a little bit about how you detected the problem, you diagnosed it, what's the equipment, I mean you ?I finally got there, but how does it work?

Yes, the solar panels were really good, but the rocket launch went very well, so the kind of winter it was after the separation of the spacecraft was not a problem. We try to initialize all four thrusters. capsules, so there are four booster capsules with a combined total of 18 engines and the system is designed with a lot of redundancy so that it can withstand all types of failures and still complete its mission, that's how it was done, so made. Can it work even if you only have two of the four booster pods working? Yes, you can still complete a quest, so it works with three words and that would be a big puzzle like why three doesn't work because these things are squashed. prepared for you to think that maybe one wouldn't work or a couple of crushed erasers wouldn't work, but not three, it was actually very strange, so we have the spaceship just going through sort of free drifting in space like we were. just hanging around and which makes it difficult to communicate with them as well because the antennas point, you know, in every direction you can imagine, so what we had was a very slight link to occasionally kill a little to kill a little. . was going in and out and that was an omnidirectional signal transmitted from NASA's tigress satellite system, so to really improve the foot, we first had to improve the bandwidth, so we asked the Air Force if we could have some of Their range telemetry scanners can handle what they give us access to and we have this communication system that they would call mega proxy, so we had to recode the mega proxy to go through the air force long range dishes to fire the spacecraft with enough intensity to be able to upload new code to try to fix the problem, so we wrote new software for Lamb, essentially precious, on the two of the three oxidizer tanks that refused to pressurize and it turned out that I think we discovered the foam, there was one.

A slight change was made to a check valve that was missing on three of the tanks, and on the other, they were able to replicate their problem in the ground later and were basically able to have the system build up pressure upstream and then release that pressure. and slam the valve shut, so we're trying to give it the kind of spacecraft equivalent to the Heimlich maneuver, basically, and then we got one of the capsules, which looked like it was progressing and we didn't want to deploy the solar power. panels until we had at least two active capsules so we could go from sort of drifting to active hold, but then the temperatures of the solar panels that were in these protective covers were shoring up and can drop to almost absolute zero. if it's pointing inwards it's a dog space so it was falling, falling, falling and we're like the vocation we better release the solar panels otherwise they could literally freeze in place so we run a simulation to see what would happen and it's actually a little beneficial and it's like when a skater, you know, where the skater extends his arms, he slows down, he pushes them in, he speeds up, so when actually, when the arms are They extended, when the solar panels are not there, they slowed down. of rotation actually helped us a little bit to maintain communication with the spacecraft and then we can with that burst of pressure make it separate and then it activates then a third and then a fourth, they have all four working and we can continue the conversation of the mission with the space station, in fact, Dragon is currently crouching with the space station right now and if all goes well we will return to Earth and about to chase him, that sounds scary.

Don't know. I don't want to go through that again, okay, not only are you here in Austin, first South by Southwest, but also to meet with the Texas Legislature to talk about a possible launch base here in Texas, tell us more about that. Yes, right now we put two. The main launch sites, one is Cape Canaveral in Florida and the other is Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, so Cape Canaveral is good for eastbound launches, Vandenberg for southbound launches and we think we need a third launch site that is some kind of commercial. launch site, you know it's not good because Cape Canaveral at Vandenberg Air Force bases, which is great and obviously there is a major need for Air Force space launch bases, as well as Air Force airports , but there is also a need for commercial airports and just like you wouldn't expect commercial airplanes to land at an Air Force Base in the normal course of events, it makes sense to have a commercial spaceport and we need to be able to launch to the east and we want to be close to the equator, which basically means the potential states or Virginia through Texas south to Hawaii and Puerto Rico because the other things when you stay with us.

The territory is rocket technology like what we are doing, it is considered an advanced witness technology, so it is very difficult to export it if you want to other countries and anyway, those are our options at the moment. Texas is possibly the frontrunner, but we need to get some legislation passed. that supports space launch and I think it's particularly controversial there. One of the things we need, for example, is that we need to be able to close the beach when we launch and Texas has an open beach law. I was like, okay, you know? We can't launch it if there's someone right next to the rocket, you know, on the beach, so I don't like what they said.

I don't think it's something that's particularly controversial, it's pretty simple and then and then we need to. provide protection for the one in 10,000 person who complains about things like we had with this guy who filed a lawsuit against us over our rocket development site in central Texas near Waco, and he's not even in the same county as a neighbor. The county and he also thinks that the CIA is listening to his brain waves, so we need some protection for people like that, so we don't like to spend a lot of time in court because that's basically what we're asking for.

A little bit, nothing major and I think it's likely to move forward, so I think if things go as expected, we'll probably have a launch site in Texas, which I think would be great when that happens, it depends. about how the environmental approvals are going to go, but I think that well, if things go well, I mean in a notable node, it's in our hands, so assuming things go as expected, you would know that there would be a decision this year and construction would begin next year. and then, probably, the first launches would take place and, from there, in two or three years, fantastic, yes, Falcon 9 with a rocket that launched a dragon is a traditional rocket, that is, they are disposable parts, but essentially you're ultimately focused on reusable robo, the name of that, can you talk a little bit about why it's reusable, what's different from reusable and I think you probably have some things to show as well, yeah, absolutely , so reuse is extremely important if you think it is important for humanity to spread further?

Earth and becoming multiplanetary species and all that, yeah, I mean, it's very important, I thought, so I think it's also incredibly obvious common sense, like you can imagine watching Star Trek and then they have a new spaceship after every trip. , that would be nice. fool and all the means of transportation that we are used to, like cars, planes, trains, automobiles, horses, bicycles, they are all reusable, but not rockets, and if we can't make rockets reusable , the cost is simply prohibitive, just as the cost of fuel and oxygen in a Falcon 9 is 0.3 percent of the rocket's cost.

Wow, basically it's a very small number and it's very similar to that of an airplane. So how much does it cost to fuel a plane and how much does it cost? The cost of buying a plane are very different things, so if we want humanity to ever expand beyond Earth and establish a self-sustaining basin for the planet, it's critical that we solve this problem, whether it's SpaceX or someone else. . solar problem and we can reduce the cost of space flight a hundredfold, so that's what SpaceX has been trying to do and really that's been the goal since the beginning of the company, so far I haven't had much success in that.

I consider it that way, but I think we handle it. I think we have a design that in simulations in any CAD and so on closes like it should work if we can build that. Which should work and in fact it may be worth it to just post the reuse videos. People have an idea what I'm talking about. I know where that place would find us. People in the audience see that. Alright. So what you're seeing. Here is the first stage after stage separation, the first stage rotates, returns to the launch pad, and then lands propulsively with the landing gear.

It is the frequency with which you should land. That is the highest stage. This is the quick version of the video. obviously, and they sing the dragon version, so version 2 of the dragon will land on thrusters with landing gear with an epic act with as much precision as a helicopter circling anywhere on Earth as with the precision of a helicopter. One last question about space before we move on to the two cars. I've talked before about how you decide to get into this. It was you who founded. You know, you co-founded PayPal. Actually, it is not like that.

I mean, you have a degree in physics. You know something about the underlying mechanics. But you didn't have any. space experience, right, you decided, I think, to take a train to go to Mars and you decided that you could beat NASA or that you could get to Mars. You could get to space faster, cheaper and better than one of the world's largest space agencies. world, how did you get that trust? Well, I guess first I should say maybe preface what happened before I started SpaceX, in fact, how I got to space was introduced. I was very disappointed that we didn't feel anyone on Mars. that wouldn't progress beyond Apollo and I kept waiting until we did it and it just didn't happen year after year and with a lot of fear mine asked me what I wanted to do after PayPal and I said well, you know, I was curious about space. but I don't think there was anything I could do in space and I went to the NASA website to see when we were going to Mars and I couldn't find out.

I thought maybe it was there, but well hidden or something, but then I thought well, maybe this is a matter of will, is thereenough will to do this? And the first idea that came to me was actually to do a philanthropic mission to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars with seeds and dehydrated gel that would hydrate upon landing and you would have this cool greenhouse, these green plants on a red background will be the injection of money and then you know people like presidents and superlatives, so be the first plant first life on another planet further than life has ever traveled and that would excite people and they will learn a lot about what to sustain the terrestrial plants in a greenhouse on Mars.

The whole purpose of that was to get people excited. send people to Mars and increase NASA's budget, so that was my goal. Basically I was going to burn it down, yes it had nothing to do with competing with NASA, in fact my goal was to increase their budget and I must say that today NASA is our biggest customer, we have almost 50 launches and about a quarter of those of NASA, but 3/4 3/4 commercial, but a quarter of NASA and NASA have been incredibly supportive and helpful and we wouldn't be where we are today with that without the help of Asus, we really spent the night competing with NASA, it's really just about what do we need to do to have an exciting and inspiring future in space, that's what I What really matters, at the end of the day, you didn't end up raising the fund, the money to pay NASA for the mission, you end up building your own company and, ideally, doing it cheaper than the government good, yes, to be able to calculate.

I figured out how to get the cost of the spaceship and the greenhouse in the communication system to be much lower than what such a thing would normally cost. I got stuck on the rocket and went to Russia three times to try to buy a couple of their bigger ones. ICBM this is what it's about this is in 2001 late 2001 in 2002 it was definitely an interesting experience and I had the feeling that I could avoid the nuclear bomb, but I don't want to go there and then when I return from On the third trip to Russia, it was then when I thought, "Okay, look, even if we do, even if we buy these ICBMs from Russia." I thought my initial assumption was wrong and what I really thought was that we had lost. the world to explore that we had lost the world by crossing the border and Anna and in retrospect that was actually a very foolish mistake because America is a nation of explorers America is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration it's ridiculous actually, in In retrospect, I made such an assumption, but people need to believe that it is possible and that it won't be like that, it won't ruin them, they won't have to give up something important like healthcare. it will be a cost that will not significantly affect your standard of living and I think the United States would be absolutely very enthusiastic about sending people to Mars and I think a lot of people would really like that to happen anyway, so it did.

That's what I came to the conclusion and I thought well, if we don't make a difference in the cost of the rocket of the transportation system, that's all, it doesn't matter, it's not a question of good, it's a question of manner, and that's when I came back and started SpaceX, but when I started SpaceX there was no perspective that we were just going to take over the world and have incredible rockets, I don't know what it was. I had no idea. I thought the most likely outcome was that we failed and the first three rockets failed and you put all your money into it between Tesla SpaceX and SolarCity - yeah, by the way, that wasn't the plan at the beginning.

Okay, and Peter Tail says we don't think big anymore, you need to have conversations with him about that, well, you know, Peters has been a big supporter, so he invested in SpaceX at a very important time in 2008 before we we approached, so after a third. failure, but before our first success, so you know, big credit to Peter and Luc, no stick and the other guys they found responded basically, my PayPal friends, but PayPal friends saved my ass. You know, it's really very good, so let's talk about cars, many, many. The audience may remember the notorious New York Times review of the Model S, yes, exactly the Model S earlier this year, yes, and their reaction to that review and the Times' reaction to their reaction and the effect on the price of their actions and requests and all that grit without repeating the review or the facts I would like you to just do a post mortem on the whole experience wait, I know?

Can I do an autopsy without any facts? post mortem your reaction is fine with the review and what you know put you are on the couch and what would you do differently today after having seen the way everything turned out well. I think there's one thing I didn't do and maybe still do is post the rebuttal of the rebuttal because I held it back. and waited for the public editor. I sent that information to the public editor. I waited for her to do her thing and she sided with Tesla regarding the fact that the article was a mistake, but she didn't agree with why. the ethics, yes, and because you challenge both the facts and the ethics, I did, yes, and, and I think it was, I think it was a low-grade ethical violation, not a big one, I don't think I thought I was doing something. particularly terrible mm-hmm and I would call it a lower grade, it seems like a huge violation and not part of Jayson Blair's crazy fabrication variety, but I would call it a lower grade, it wasn't in good faith, if that's that, that It is an important point. and I probably should have posted that rebuttal to make it clear, but I didn't, that's what I regret, so the only change you would make is that the last part of the rebuttal that you wrote but wasn't posted, you would get maybe I should go out there, yes, you would see, you would continue to use the same language in the same way.

I just think the language was inaccurate. You don't really fall. You've often said that one of your management techniques is one of The secret to your success is that you listen, you need negative feedback. Yes, the times the review did not fall into the negative comments category. I have no problem with negative comments. I have no problem with critical reviews. It's a matter of fun with critical reviews. I would spend all my time fighting critical reviews. There have been hundreds of negative articles, hundreds, and yet I have only spoken out a few times. I have no problem with critical reviews.

I have a problem with fake reviews. check carefully, one of the technologies that I had to know basically developed almost perfectly or at least or at least worked harder was lithium batteries for electric cars or battery operation. Safety has always been an issue, accidents etc, recently Boeing had shoots what they are looking at batteries and bees and the Dreamliner is now in service because of that you volunteered to help Boeing executives I guess diagnose and redesign yeah can you talk a little bit about what they did wrong and what you would have done? differently and what do you think if the future of batteries for Boeing and other airlines is going to be secure, first of all on the front, I mean, obviously, although SpaceX and Boeing compete on the space side, we have no competition on the commercial aircraft side and some of the comments I made about Boeing can be interpreted in some ways as an attack on Boeing when it's actually not an attack on Boeing, the only reason I'm actually referring to the main reason why The one I should say I offered to help was that there is a friend of mine, Richard Branson, whose airline is suffering as a result of this, both he and I are on fire and he mentioned that he is losing hundreds of millions.

His airline is as a result of this problem. I said fine. I think we could probably help and then he said, "That's great, let me connect you to the chief engineer of the 787." I said, "Okay, we'll be happy to help you," so I gave you some tips and I hope they're helpful. I said we're also happy to find the solution if you want and you haven't accepted that offer, but we're happy to help, either in an advisory capacity or to make the solution, whatever it is that results in getting the 787 back into the air. before, we're trying to be productive and useful, so I think in the case of the battery, Boeing doesn't have a lot of internal battery experience, so they outsource the battery and then you have a bunch of sort of nested outsourcing where the answer was the battery system and then that got outsourced to another company, then another company and there's a bunch of other companies and you're like four layers deep before you get to any hardware and So that turned out and I think it was kind of a disruption of communication, I mean, from an architectural point of view, the fundamental problem is that AI is what I think is that the cells are too big, the battery cells are too big and the spaces between the batteries. the cells are not big enough hmm the problem with a large battery cell is that the thermal path is at worst very long so you say well if there is a hot spot on the battery can it take out the heat? and if you're deep in a cell, you can't, you can't do that and it's also difficult to thermally condition the cells, but the life of the pack will depend on the temperature, it would be the average temperature and not the average temperature, but the worst . temperature at any point in any cell, so you really want to match that temperature, that's why Tesla is a fan of having lots of small cells and then actively cooling each cell to keep the temperature uniform and make sure that if hot spots develop, that's a very short way to the cooling system and again, and you might know to take care of it and you also want to make sure that it's.

Again I'm pretty technical here, sorry, it's passive propagation proof, so if it's active the cooling system fails and you get them or escape in a cell which we then run, the event can't cascade to a neighboring cell , then you get the right double thermal domino effect. I mean, it's not very complicated, so just if you have big cells, what big gaps and your ideal, what don't you want, big cells, if you want, you want big gaps, small cells, small gaps, I mean, I mean, this It's really important because because I'm the everything about this new generation. of the planes that are light use composites, they use electronic systems instead of mechanical so electricity drives everything so basically I understand that lithium batteries are needed in the sky it just doesn't work any other way and your point is se can do Oh Tony it can be done, yeah, like themes got a bit of a bad rap here, theme is obviously the way to go, maybe people have lithium ion batteries in their cell phones and laptops I mean, I don't think so.

Someone's panicking here about the fact that they're going to look at the mind battery, you know, next to a probably sensitive region of their body, you know, you got it once by staying on for one last set of questions. before we return. To you, your life seems crazy, it's the same. You are also president of Solar City, which I believe is the largest solar installer in the United States. You know, space transportation energy eliminates the big guys. Now you know that solar energy has a bad reputation in the world. last few years because of the Solyndra merger, etc., but yes, in my opinion, different people do not differentiate between the manufacture of solar cells and the use of a solar cell, and the Chinese competition and gluttony of the market on the side of supply is what Solyndra What gets Linda into trouble is that they couldn't compete with falling prices, but you're a consumer of solar cells, right?

So how do you see? Learn about Chinese competition and the excess of solar cells on the market. What's that? I mean, I think what China is doing in the field of solar panels is amazing because they are reducing the cost of their solar energy to the world and they have these huge Giga factories that they created in the Chinese desert and with a lot of funds from the Chinese government, so it's like a giant donation from the small Chinese government, thank you, that's amazing, you know, and you know, people complain about Solyndra a little bit, but I mean, obviously, anyone who's been involved in the venture world knows that you don't bet a grand, there are some companies that die, the only reason we know about cylinders is because it became a political football right and I mean, there are other panel manufacturers solar that are still doing reasonably well, but it's difficult when you compete, I mean, I think it's good.

The general rule was not to compete with China and with a basic product. You know you're really asking for trouble if you can, in that scenario and it's really very easy to achieve fifteen percent efficiency or standard efficiency. solar panels, it's super easy, it's like these are the ones making the weird drywall right now, so does anyone think we should compete with China in drywall manufacturing? Well, probably not, so that's the question, and the difficult part of Seoul's power is not the panel, inIt's actually the entire system, basically it's about designing something that fits a particular roof, because all the roofs you have are heterogeneous, you have to set up the system, you have to wire it to achieve it. connected, the inverter is connected to the grid, I will do all the permissions.

I mean, they're a bunch of stupid, unglamorous, thorny problems, but if someone doesn't optimize them, they'll still cost a ton of money and a ton of problems. They're not really fun problems nowadays, they don't hold exciting promise to optimize. , but they're the issues that really matter in the cost of solar, so it's more like you know it as a roofing contractor. I mean, what you're doing is putting a second roof on a building, yeah, okay, so you have to do it at scale and then you have to manage all these systems because there are still some, I mean, although the after-sales service is small when you have hundreds of thousands of systems that are better at managing in low light, so what Solar City really is is a giant distributed utility that works in partnership with the house in business and in competition. with the big monopolistic utility type, I mean, I think it's like literally, power to the people, okay, it's like, literally, I think it's really amazing because the utilities never had competition before, yeah, and now they're like deaf to think about the cost of energy and they have better ways of doing it and That kind of stuff I think is really cool and the credit really goes to Lyn and Peter.

I have co-founders. I mean, I've pitched some ideas from time to time, but mostly it's just about showing up at the board meeting. To hear the good news, those guys are just doing a session or some work, so you are the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, so you're not just running the company. He is also Bergersen's chief technology officer. Yes, you are the CEO and chief product designer of Tesla, so you don't just run the company. but designing the cars, yes, and you are president of Solar City, what is your life like? She's very busy, and in fact, I'd like to tell Scrooge, honestly, because they're all they ever are, I mean these things. that the last few years have been really great, but then there were a series of years that sucked terribly and I wish it wasn't so extreme and last year was a year of great achievements, but I honestly didn't.

Have a lot of fun, it sucks, I didn't have a lot of fun, um, when the year's resolution was to have a little more fun this year, so hey, I'm free with you and you have five kids, dude, they're awesome kids. amazing by the way everyone should have kids kids are great how much do you see them? I didn't actually see them enough, but what I find is that I can be with them and still be on email because they don't need constant interaction except when we talk directly, so I can be with them and still work at the same time. time, but I think you can send emails while you are with your kids, yes, absolutely.

Sure, Wow, we have all the time, but most of the time that's why I tend to have a phone that you can send emails to at interstitial times. Without it, I couldn't do my job well, that's impressive. we have five kids, I can't send emails while I'm with my kids, they're not the kids and it's really not good for email, I have to have a babysitter there otherwise they'll kill each other, so yeah, um, we. At this point we'll move on to audience questions, just a reminder that if you tweet your questions with the Ask Musk hashtag, there's a team behind it that will curate the others that we've already covered and I thought were interesting and I'm including them.

Up front, maybe you can see them too, so we, David Solace's first, yeah, when it comes to researching, analyzing business opportunities, how do you qualify or legitimize, presumably, the idea? Well, I'm not sure I'm the best guide here because the things I've chosen haven't been up to par. I haven't been trying to optimize on a risk-adjusted return basis, so there are things like I wouldn't say I went into the rocket business, the car business, or the solo business thinking that it's a great opportunity. I just thought there was a need to do something in these industries to make a difference and that's why I did it, but in general I think it's worth thinking about what you do, whether it's what you do.

What we are doing will result in disruptive change or not, if it is simply incremental it is unlikely to be anything major, it has to be something that is substantially better than what happened before that question. The next question is a very good one, this is from a look at Craig Legree. space automobile finance energy you've disrupted major industries what would you do if you had free rein over education? Well, I think the way we currently do education is wrong and that's how it is when you see something like Khan Academy and so on. I think it's probably going in the right direction.

I mean, in general, you want education to be as video game-like as possible, like a good video game, like you don't need to tell your kid to play video games, they'll play video games. autopilot all day, so if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education much more compelling and much easier to do. I think that's how it should be and it shouldn't be that you have these degrees where people move. step by step and so everyone goes through, you know, normally you'll go through English, math, science, etc., from fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade, like it's an assembly line, but people are not objects on a line of assembly, that is a ridiculous notion.

People learn and are interested in different things at different rates, so you really want to disconnect all grade level three subjects. Allow people to progress at the fastest pace they can or are interested in in each subject. It seems like a really obvious thing, I mean, I think most teaching today is a lot like vaudeville and as a result, it's not as compelling, it's like someone is standing there and lecturing you and has given the same lecture. several years in a row. You're not necessarily as invested or in doing it and you compare it to saying Batman The Dark Knight, okay, but they like the best special effects in the world.

You have the best director, screenwriter in the world. Multiple incredible cuts. You know, editing and and and. and that's awesome, but I imagine if instead, as the local aspiring actor, you did the one-man stage version, that wouldn't be convincing. Yes, do you agree with Peter Thiel about the unnecessary nests of university higher education? I actively agree with Peters on the point that college education is often unnecessary, that's not to say it's unnecessary for all people, but I think you've probably learned a lot, but the vast majority of what you'll learn there on the first . two years and most of it comes from your classmates because you can always buy the textbooks and just read them like no one is stopping you from doing so or get on the Internet, oh, get on the Internet, so now a lot of companies want to see the completion of the degree because they are looking for someone who will persevere and see it through to the end and that is really what is important to them so it really depends on what someone's goal is, if the goal is to start a company I would say no.

It makes sense to finish. In my case, I had to go to university, otherwise they would kick me out of the country, yes, that was important, but you went on and got a master's degree, right? I came to Silicon Valley to pursue a PhD at Stanford in Applied Physics. and materials science to work on ultracapacitors for electric cars and that's what I was going to do and then I started putting that on hold to start a company, but since I already had my bachelor's degree, I could get an h-1b visa. And I can, I think the h-1b visa requires a degree, but other than that, I would have done it if that wasn't the case.

I probably would have dropped out sooner if you hadn't gone to Wharton for, yeah, yeah, the physics and business double major. At Wharton I say yes, but it was a bachelor's degree but not a master's degree. I understood another question from the audience to Dan Griffiths. He fills in the blank. You will be disappointed if white space does not happen in your life. Well, probably what has disappointed us the most is humanity. don't land on Mars in my life, I would be really disappointed, you know, that would probably be my biggest disappointment and yeah, I think that's what worries me the most because we're in this or obviously that's it. what SpaceX is working on, so I'm not trying to be selfish here, but I'm worried that we've come to this if I don't know if our level of technology will continue or decline and for the first time in four and a half billion years, the level technology is at the point where we can extend life to another planet, make life multiplanetary and I think it's too easy to assume that it will stay above that level and if it doesn't, it falls below that will come back who knows you know the Sun is gradually expanding and in about 500 million years maybe a billion years outside the oceans will boil and then we won't know there will be significant life on Earth I mean it could there are like some that you know, with chemotherapy or ultra high temperature bacteria or something like that, but nothing that a spaceship can do and that's it, if you think that maybe it's the five million time frame that's just an increase of ten percent in the Earth's lifespan, so if humanity had taken ten percent longer to get here, it wouldn't have gotten here at all, yeah, and so far we haven't seen any signs of life from other worlds that we have, we haven't seen I detected something, I hope so, I hope we do and I hope it's not a warship coming towards us, but I think that's what really worries me, we have to do this and then that is the best we can do to ensure continued existence. of humanity, so I would say that that is the most important thing.

Do you personally want to set foot on Mars? I personally want to set foot on Mars, but honestly, I would do this even if there wasn't one, even if I knew. There was no chance of me going to Mars because I think Blech said so. I think it's important that we are on the path to get there, so I would like to go at some point. I'll go if I'm sure SpaceX will do it. You will be fine without me and that path will continue. Some people may have heard me. Some people may have heard the joke I made earlier, which is like you know that.

It shouldn't have to be. I would like to die on Mars, but not on impact, not on the question from the audience that we just lost that one that there was like I don't remember who would ask this question, but the question was which one, when I mean, which one do you think it's going to have? more impact on the world, SpaceX or Tesla. Well, I think if we look back or with historians, if you were to look back at Tesla's impact many years from now, I think it would be that Tesla, hopefully, advanced the advent of sustainable transportation in something like a decade, maybe two decades. but I think electric cars are inevitable, in fact I think all modes of transportation will be fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets and that's what I think and then for Solar City maybe something similar on the energy production, sustainable energy production.

For SpaceX, hopefully SpaceX will develop the technology necessary to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars and I mean, I think that's a bigger impact, but or another, what the city and the tears are solving are about what I think is the most pressing Earth concern, which is this sustainable energy production and consumption, to help solve it. I mean, they have a lot of people solving it and then what SpaceX is about is helping solve the biggest non-Earth problem, which is the extension of life beyond Earth so that's how I see it, we have two questions related, one that is no longer on the screen but and one that is, the first was what was the best advice you received and the second, and maybe you can join them in your answer.

Did you mention working with your friends Peter Thiel and Richard Branson, who influence and inspire you? Well, I'm inspired by a lot of historical figures, like one of my favorite guys is Ben Franklin, you know, I think he's, you know, he's really good. boy, I mean he was a scientist and I also mean he worked obviously in the editorial and political sphere, but it's like he just thought about what are the problems that need to be solved and he worked on those names. Justice seemed like a good one guys sorry I like it and I like only historical figures like science and literature and I'll be a big fan of Churchill and obviously like Tesla we named him Tesla after Nikola Tesla better than most murders, you know, and I've actually done them.I didn't name any product or company after myself, but that maybe gives a sense of yes.

I think Tesla is someone who deserves a lot of recognition and I'm sorry, what was his? Well, they're all dead. I don't know, yeah. I mean, I think there's a friend of mine, Larry Page. I think what Larry and Sergey are doing at Google. I really admire what they have done. I think most of them died recently, but Steve Jobs, Peters or in Maya Steve Jobs, I think Jeff's business is. doing great things among others competing with you, yes, but that's a good thing, in fact every time I see Jeff on the list I say why aren't you doing more in space, yes, yes, yes.

The other half of the question was the best advice you've ever given. I ever received the best advice I ever received. I think that, you know, physics training is a very good training in that it's a good framework for reasoning. We're trained to think about first principles and reason from there, and that means boiling things down to the most fundamental truths and then connecting those truths in a way to try to understand what reality is like because you know physics has this problem. where they are trying to discover things that are totally counterintuitive and so they had to have a framework to forget them.

Something like quantum mechanics is incredibly counterintuitive, but it's true, so physics developed a framework for figuring out things that aren't obvious and that's why I think it's a lot of advice, but it's the right framework and then just, in general, the Critical thinking is good, you know, examining whether you have the right axioms, are they the most applicable axioms, the logic necessarily connects and then what is the range of probable results, the results usually are not deterministic, they are a range , so you need to figure out what those odds are and, ideally, make sure that you're the house that you know it's okay to take, it's okay to bet on, as long as you're the house and you know, and that's listening to critical comments that we alluded to earlier.

The oolitic voice asks for critical comments, particularly from friends because they will usually think about it but they won't tell you the question here from a Giles of songs, any news or developments about your Hyperloop idea and you could explain what your Hyperloop idea is haha ​​well, what What I've said is that I'm going to put the Hyperloop stuff on hold until I get Tesla to profitability because I think if I was an investor in Tesla and they heard me talk about Hyperloop before the company was profitable and they said, hey, You know, go, do it, do your job, so that's what I'm doing, I think once Tesla, right?

You know, it's been profitable for maybe at least a quarter, maybe two quarters, then I'll talk about Hyperloop. I think it could be an interesting way to travel very quickly from one city to another. the next one quickly explains only in one sense what a Hyperloop is eh, well it would be something that would be, say, twice as fast as an airplane, at least in terms of total transit time, maybe a little faster, it would be immune to the climate incapable of crashing. practically unless there is a terrorist attack and the price of the ticket would be, I would say, half that of a plane, so it would be better in every way, some type of train, although it is not exactly a train, it would be a different, it would be a new mode of transportation that doesn't currently exist, terrestrial, terrestrial, yes, okay, underground, on the surface, it could be a kind of subway, maybe I think it is, I think the capital cost will be lower if it's mostly about land but you can go underground okay maybe last question what's the biggest mistake you've made and this is from Alexi Hill was the biggest mistake you've made and how did you move forward looking back?

It was really that big the biggest mistake I've made a lot of mistakes, some of them were pretty big. I mean, it's hard to say because things turned out pretty well in the end, so how big of a mistake could that have been? The question really is: do you know? I did a lot of dumb things at my first company and at PayPal and you know, I guess sometimes I think, yeah, I don't know, there's so many, I like God, it's hard for me to say this is the biggest one, you know this one. or two, okay, first, okay, sure, so they're the biggest mistake I've made overall and I'm trying to correct it.

It's giving too much importance to someone's talent and not enough to their personality. that mistake several times, in fact, then I'd say, gee, I mean, I'm not going to make that mistake, so I'd make a game out of it and I think it really matters if someone has a good heart, they really do and I've done that. i made them i made the mistake of thinking that sometimes it's just about the brain on that sincere note we're done thank you please join me in thanking you