Read the full transcript of Elon Musk’s interview by Senator Ted Cruz and Ben Ferguson for a discussion about the future of space travel and his plans to colonize Mars.
TRANSCRIPT:
INTERVIEWER: Welcome. It is verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you. And today is part two of our exclusive conversation with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and innovator who is transforming industries and is dismantling government waste, fraud and abuse with DOGE. Musk’s relentless pursuit of technology and space exploration continues to capture the world’s imagination. In this episode we unravel the thoughts and aspirations of a man who defies conventional boundaries, pushing humanity towards new horizons. So join us in the White House as we continue to explore the riveting journey of Elon Musk, a modern day pioneer whose revolutionary ideas are set to redefine tomorrow.
Let me start with a question. You know a lot about… what year does man first step, set foot on Mars?
ELON MUSK: I think the soonest would be 29.
INTERVIEWER: 29?
ELON MUSK: Yes. And I don’t think it’s more than two to four years beyond that.
INTERVIEWER: And that’s not an unmanned, that’s a human being putting his foot on the surface.
ELON MUSK: Yes. Best case would be 29.
The Search for Life on Mars
INTERVIEWER: And what do you put the odds of finding either alien life or evidence of alien life?
ELON MUSK: I don’t think we’re going to find aliens.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, but do we find ruins? Do we find remnants?
ELON MUSK: We may. We may find the ruins of a long dead alien civilization. That’s possible. And we may find subterranean microbial life. That’s possible.
INTERVIEWER: All right. If man lands on Mars in 29, how soon after that do you land on Mars?
ELON MUSK: Remains to be seen. I’m not sure. The important thing is that we build a self-sustaining city on Mars as quickly as possible.
Civilization could die with a bang or a whimper. It may be that civilization dies with a whimper rather than a bang and simply loses the ability to send ships to Mars. So you obviously need Mars to become self-sustaining and be able to grow by itself before the resupply ships from Earth stop coming. That is the critical civilizational threshold beyond which the probable lifespan of civilization is much greater.
INTERVIEWER: And how close are we technologically to be able to do that? To have a self-sustaining settlement on the surface of Mars?
ELON MUSK: I think it can be done in 20 years.
INTERVIEWER: But it would take 20 years. So we’re not in 29, we’re not there. What are we missing? What are the big technologies we don’t have?
Building a Self-Sustaining Mars Colony
ELON MUSK: A few people running around the surface in a hostile environment is not going to make it self-sustaining. So you’re going to need on the order of a million people, maybe a million tons of cargo.
INTERVIEWER: So you think we could have a million people on Mars in 20 years? And what’s the technology we’re missing right now? When you think about a million people on Mars, do we have the ability to get water, to get food, to keep them safe? I mean, what do we need to make that happen?
ELON MUSK: Well, you need to recreate the entire base of industry of Earth. So we’re here at the top of a massive pyramid of industry that starts with mining a vast array of materials. Those materials going through hundreds of steps of refinement. We grow food, obviously we grow trees, we make things out of the trees. You’ve got to build all that on Mars. And Mars is a hostile environment. It sometimes gets above zero on a warm summer day near the equator on Mars, but it’s quite cold.
INTERVIEWER: How do you prep for that?
ELON MUSK: Well, in the beginning on Mars you have to have a life support habitation module. Like you can’t just live outdoors, you can’t breathe the air.
INTERVIEWER: Like a dome you think is likely?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, glass domes type of thing.
INTERVIEWER: Have you identified a location on Mars that is likely to be ideal for habitat?
ELON MUSK: Well, it might be Arcadia Planitia is one of the good options. That’s one of my daughters is named Arcadia after that.
INTERVIEWER: And what makes that attractive?
ELON MUSK: My other son’s middle name is Aries. Mars.
INTERVIEWER: You’ve been thinking about this for a long time if you’re naming your kids around it.
ELON MUSK: My eldest kid, his middle name is essentially Mars.
The Mars Dream
INTERVIEWER: When did you get the dream?
ELON MUSK: I mean he’s 20 now, turning 21 soon.
INTERVIEWER: This is a decades old dream. So like when you were 10, did you look up and say I’m going to Mars?
ELON MUSK: No, no. I read a lot of science fiction books and programmed computers. But the first, funnily enough, the first video game that I sold was a space video game called Blastar. Maybe I was born this way.
INTERVIEWER: How do you become Elon Musk? Look, you’re obviously smart as hell, but there are a lot of smart people that don’t do squat. And you’ve managed everything you’ve touched has been an extraordinary success.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Look, I mean that’s just objectively right. So what has led to that? Because there are other smart people that’s not true. And they gaze at their navel, and they don’t do anything. So what do you do differently that makes you so effective?
ELON MUSK: Well, I suppose I have a philosophy of curiosity. I want to find out the nature of the universe, understand the universe. And in order to do that, we have to travel to other planets, see other star systems, maybe other galaxies, find perhaps other alien civilizations, or at least the remnants of alien civilizations, gain a better understanding of where is this universe going? Where did it come from? And what questions do we not yet know to ask about the answer that is the universe?
From PayPal to Space Exploration
INTERVIEWER: So let’s go back 25 years. Late 90s, you’re at PayPal. How do you turn PayPal into the success it was, which then helped launch you to the next one? And the next one.
ELON MUSK: I studied physics and economics in college. A good foundation for understanding how the economy works and how reality works. And then was going to do a PhD at Stanford in advanced ultracapacitors, actually, as a potential means of energy storage for electric transport. Put that on hold to start an Internet company.
I essentially came to the conclusion that the Internet was one of those rare things, and I could either watch it happen while a grad student or participate. I figured I’d always go back to grad school. Grad school is going to be kind of the same. But I couldn’t bear the thought of just watching the Internet happen, so I wanted to be a part of building it.
So I created an Internet company. We did the first maps, directions, yellow pages, white pages on the Internet. I actually wrote the first version of software just by myself in ’95. And we ended up selling that to Compaq, a Texas company, I guess, for about $300 million in cash about four years after I graduated.
INTERVIEWER: Wow.
ELON MUSK: So I should say, just to preface that, I graduated with about $100,000 in student debt.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, you and me both.
ELON MUSK: And when I first arrived in North America, I arrived with $2,500, a bag of books, and a bag of clothes.
INTERVIEWER: All right, so you sell the company for 300 million. How much does that change your life?
ELON MUSK: Well, I got $21 million. But I wanted to do more on the Internet, so started a company called X.com, which merged with a company called Confinity, which is Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. And the combined company was actually, at first still called X.com, but we later changed the name of the company to PayPal because of all the name changes. It’s kind of confusing, but the company that people know as PayPal today was actually… I filed those incorporation documents for that company.
INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Yeah, well, and as you know, Peter Thiel and I were buddies back in the mid-90s before he went and did any of this. But I became friends with him when he was a corporate lawyer in New York and just sort of a young libertarian with a lot of dreams. So it’s been a heck of a journey.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, and now obviously Peter was involved in a coup. We had a little sort of knifing in the Senate situation where they ousted me at PayPal.
INTERVIEWER: Now, did you all make peace after that?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was doing a lot of sort of risky moves that I think ultimately would have been successful. But I then went on a two-week trip which was a dual money raising trip and honeymoon. Hadn’t done my honeymoon earlier in the year. So I was raising money while doing a honeymoon.
INTERVIEWER: How’d that go over, by the way?
ELON MUSK: It worked. It worked.
INTERVIEWER: There you go.
ELON MUSK: Kind of. It worked. I raised money.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
ELON MUSK: And we had a honeymoon.
INTERVIEWER: There you go.
ELON MUSK: So yeah, but you don’t want to be away from the battle when things are scary. So I was not there to assuage the concerns of the troops. And anyway, we patched things up and have been friends nonetheless. And these days I like to stay at his house and stuff. So we’re friends. And he’s also invested in most of my companies.
The Birth of SpaceX
INTERVIEWER: All right, so 2002, you start SpaceX. Like how do you start a rocket company? Like, what’s the first day where you’re like, I want to make rockets and I want to go to Mars. Like, what do you do on day one?
ELON MUSK: So I think you have to start with some sort of philosophical premise in order to be highly motivated. You have to have some philosophical foundation. In my case it was that we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of the universe. And in order to expand consciousness, we need to go beyond one planet.
If we’re on one planet, there’s too much risk. Hopefully Earth civilization prospers very far into the future, but it may not. There’s always some risk that we self-annihilate through nuclear war or that there’s a big meteor that takes us out like the dinosaurs. There’s always some risk if all your eggs are in one basket. So it’s going to be better if we’re a multi-planet species. And then once we’re a multi-planet species, the next step would be to be multi-stellar and have civilization among many different star systems.
So in 2001 I didn’t think that I could start a rocket company. So I thought I’d take some of the money from PayPal. In that case, I think it was about $180 million after tax, something like that. And I thought, you know, I don’t need $180 million so I’ll spend a bunch of it on a philanthropic Mars mission to get the public excited about going back to Mars or going to Mars I should say.
Mars was always going to be the destination after the moon, right. In fact, if you told people in 1969 that it would be 2025 and we’ve not even gone back to the moon…
INTERVIEWER: Let alone, it’s hard to believe.
ELON MUSK: Let alone Mars, they’d be like, what happened? Did civilization collapse? It would be incomprehensible that we’ve not been to Mars by now if you told people this at the landing on the moon in ’69.
INTERVIEWER: Why do you think in 50 years America never went back to the moon?
ELON MUSK: Well, we destroyed the Saturn 5 rocket that could take people to the moon and had the space shuttle which could only go to low Earth orbit. And then there really hasn’t been anything to replace it. No vehicle has been made since then that can go to the moon or to Mars. Until the SpaceX Starship rocket. So can’t go to Mars if you don’t have the ride.
Meeting with Senator Ted Cruz
INTERVIEWER: So I remember you and I first met in 2013 when I was a brand new baby senator and I was still down in the basement office. They stick freshman senators in a basement office. Kind of like hazing.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: There are 100 separate offices, but for six months you stay in the basement, put you in a place, it’s like wearing beans. They want you know where you’re supposed to be. You know, I gotta say now 13 years into it, I think there’s a lot of wisdom to doing that. But you were down in the basement office and I remember you were coming and sitting down with SpaceX and at the time the Air Force was not letting you all bid to launch satellites and so you were coming and saying look, we got a company. I think we can do a really good job of this. And yet we’re locked out of this. It’s a little amazing to think the journey SpaceX has gone from then to now.
The Original Mars Mission Plan
ELON MUSK: Yes, it’s hard to believe that this is all real because originally consistent with my belief that we need to become a multi-planet species, I thought the only way to do that would be through NASA. I thought, well, if I can just get the public excited about Mars, then they’ll do a mission to Mars.
So initially my thought was to have to send a small greenhouse with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel, then land the greenhouse, hydrate the seeds, and you see these. The sort of money shot would be green plants on a red background. And then hopefully that would get the public excited about Mars, that would increase NASA’s budget and then we could send people to Mars.
INTERVIEWER: So your original dream was NASA to do this?
ELON MUSK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Not you?
ELON MUSK: No. The original plan was literally to take a bunch of the money from PayPal and I guess by some people’s definition waste it with no profit on a non-profit thing. I wanted to spend a whole bunch of my money for free to get NASA’s budget to be bigger so we could go to friggin Mars.
INTERVIEWER: Right?
ELON MUSK: Wow. That’s what I wanted.
INTERVIEWER: So that was the holy grail.
ELON MUSK: That’s what I want.
INTERVIEWER: I was like, so when did you change?
ELON MUSK: Why am I going to Mars? That’s what I wanted to know.
INTERVIEWER: When did it strike you? Okay, you’re going to have to do this if you want.
The Russian ICBM Story
ELON MUSK: It gets crazier. All right, it gets crazier. So then I couldn’t afford any of the US rockets because as you know, the US rockets are way too expensive. The Boeing Lucky rockets are crazy money. Even with 180 million, there’s no way I could have afforded.
INTERVIEWER: How much were they back then?
ELON MUSK: Well, with the additional stage to get to Mars, it would have been about like 80 million. So technically I could have afforded one of them, but I wanted to do two in case one of them didn’t work and then I didn’t have enough money for that. I was sort of prepared to waste half the money. And I figured if I had 90 million left, that’d be fine, you know, but ideally, not all of it. So I went to Russia twice to try to buy ICBMs.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, interesting. How’d that go?
ELON MUSK: And who do you call? The Russian rocket forces?
INTERVIEWER: Do they sell ICBMs, does that work? Yeah, you got to tell us a story that I want to know who I.
ELON MUSK: Turns out you can buy anything in Russia.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, like, please walk me down that. I want to know how you made that phone call and when you get there, how did that work and what.
ELON MUSK: Do you tell your friends? Yeah, listen, I’m going to Russia to buy ICBMs. I might not return, you know, depends on the situation.
INTERVIEWER: Literally.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, so it gets slightly less insane when you understand that the Russians had to demolish a bunch of their ICBMs because of the SALT talks. Because of basically an agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce the total number of ICBMs, Russia was actually obligated to scrap a bunch of their ICBMs. So you took the very biggest ICBMs, you could convert those into a rocket, add an additional stage and send something to Mars.
INTERVIEWER: So those are big enough with one more stage to get to Mars, to.
ELON MUSK: Send a small payload to Mars. Yeah. So the SS18.
INTERVIEWER: So you try to buy ICBMs, do you succeed or no? Or do you figure out you got to build your own instead?
ELON MUSK: They kept raising the price on me. Because I figured, like, look, they got to throw these things in scrap yard anyway. You should get a really good deal. So the price started out at 4 million. Then the next conversation they were at 8 million. Then the next conversation they were at like 19 million. And I’m like, this is before we signed a contract, by the way.
INTERVIEWER: Was there another bidder? Was there another bidder or were you the only one trying to buy them?
ELON MUSK: I don’t know if there were other bids, but they didn’t mention any other bids. But I was like, man, if the price is increasing this much before the contract sign, I’m really going to get fleeced after the contract sign. So I got pretty frustrated there, actually. In some cases. We got into shouting matches in Moscow. Some guy’s shouting at me in Russian. I’m shouting back at him.
INTERVIEWER: Put it away really badly, you know.
ELON MUSK: I’m like, so you are all, I.
INTERVIEWER: I mean, you’re all in rubbing me off.
ELON MUSK: In Moscow. Yeah. So, man, I should have recorded that. That would have been one for them.
INTERVIEWER: How many days were you there negotiating that? First time? I mean, was this like ongoing?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, this took place. These conversations took place over probably six months or so. And then the final trip there was with Mike Griffin, who later became NASA administrator. I actually realized in the course of this that my original premise was wrong, that America actually has plenty of will to go to Mars, but it just needs a way to Mars that is affordable and that doesn’t break the budget.
INTERVIEWER: As you know, we couldn’t even get to the space station. We needed the Russians to get us to our own space station.
ELON MUSK: That was embarrassing.
INTERVIEWER: It really was pitiful.
ELON MUSK: I’m not sure most Americans know just how much we were being fleeced. Like, I think they got up to like $90 million per seat. Wow. Yeah. For a seat that cost them like 10.
INTERVIEWER: It was pre-Doge, obviously, but it.
ELON MUSK: Was before SpaceX. But $90 million a seat for a seat that cost him 10 million is high. Yeah, it’s a lot of money.
SpaceX’s Growth and Innovation
INTERVIEWER: So a few months ago, you and I were down in Boca Chica with the President for a starship launch. And it is incredible what you’ve built in Boca Chica. You know, five years ago it was an empty beach at the southern tip of Texas sandbar.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: And it’s now a city and a factory where you’re building a rocket ship a month with incredible precision.
ELON MUSK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: But one of the things you said to me when we were down there that really stood out to me is your philosophy on intellectual property. I talk to lots of CEOs, they’re like, we fight to guard our IP. And you had a very different approach. What’s your view of IP patents?
ELON MUSK: Patents for those who innovate slowly.
INTERVIEWER: I literally do not know anyone else in business who would say something like that. It was startling. And what Elon said down there is, he said, look, this stuff, I assume everyone will steal everything, but by the time they steal, it will be five generations beyond and it won’t matter.
Elon’s Philosophy on Patents and Innovation
ELON MUSK: Yes. At Tesla, we actually open source a lot of patents. So we said our patents are – anyone can use them for free.
We only give patents to Tesla to avoid patent trolls causing trouble. So we’ll try to look ahead, say, okay, patent trolls are going to file patents to block certain things. We’ll file patents and then open source patent, make it free.
There are a few cases in, say with pharmaceuticals where it might cost you a billion dollars to do a phase three human trial, but then subsequently the drug is very cheap to manufacture. In my opinion, we should massively reduce what can be patented. Because the whole point of patenting is to maximize innovation, not inhibit it. And in my opinion, maybe a controversial opinion, most patents inhibit innovation, they do not help it.
But there are cases such as a phase 3 clinical trial, it might cost a billion dollars, but then the drugs thereafter cost a few dollars to manufacture. And if you can then immediately copy those drugs for a few dollars, no one will pay for the billion dollars.
INTERVIEWER: A free rider problem.
ELON MUSK: Free rider problem. Yeah, exactly. So you have to address the free rider problem. But other than that there should be no patents. Ideas are easy.
INTERVIEWER: You want ideas to flow maximum to people to get there faster and do things bigger.
ELON MUSK: The idea is the easy part. The hard execution is the hard part. As the old saying goes, it’s 1% inspiration, if not less than 1% and 99% perspiration.
Manufacturing Excellence
INTERVIEWER: But I’ll say the perspiration part you’re really damn good at also because you’re making, you know, the companies you’re building are actually building stuff. They’re building cars, they’re building spaceships, they’re building things that if they don’t work, it’s a real problem. And the precision you manufacture things with, how do you get that level of precision? How do you build a culture? You’re amazing at thinking outside the box. But what’s interesting is you may even be better at execution, which is how do you execute so effectively?
ELON MUSK: Well, I take a physics first principles approach to everything. It’s not as though I wanted to in-source manufacturing, it’s just that I was unable to outsource it effectively. So the idea in the beginning of Tesla was that we would outsource almost all the manufacturing. But then it turned out there were no good companies to outsource manufacturing to, really wasn’t feasible.
Outsourced manufacturing actually is the exception of the rule. And just over time we had to in-source almost everything for Tesla and same for SpaceX. I became very good at manufacturing because I had to. There’s no choice at this point I might know more about manufacturing than any human ever has because I’ve done so many different things in so many different arenas. I think probably more than anyone ever has.
Work Ethic
INTERVIEWER: Look, that sounds like an astonishing statement, but it’s not a crazy statement. And you’re somehow running Tesla and running SpaceX and running X and running the Boring Company and running Neuralink and doing Doge. How much do you sleep in a given night?
ELON MUSK: About six hours on average.
INTERVIEWER: So about six. It wouldn’t have shocked me if you said three or four. So the next question is, how many hours do you work a day?
ELON MUSK: I work almost every waking hour.
INTERVIEWER: And Ben, he’s not kidding. Like, when Elon and I were first getting to know each other, I suggested, I said, hey, let’s grab dinner sometime. And I don’t know if you remember what you said. You said, I don’t eat dinner.
ELON MUSK: I don’t have social dinners. Really.
INTERVIEWER: Right. I mean, you obviously eat food, but yeah, you’re not going to restaurant for two hours. But the idea of like, I don’t. But it was just kind of matter of fact, why would I go to dinner? Like, you work.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, I literally just have lunch and then abroad during meetings and continue being.
Sleeping at the Office
INTERVIEWER: How many nights have you slept at your offices, you think your career percentage wise, where you say, I just got to take this nap basically because my body forces me to and I got to get back to work fast and efficiently without going somewhere else.
ELON MUSK: Well, I guess it started out even with the first company, Zip2, which is a terrible name, but the first company, we were able to rent an office which was like in a leaky attic, essentially for $500 a month. And the cheapest apartment we could find was $800 a month. And we only had about $5,000 between my brother and I. So we thought, we’ll just stay in the office.
So we got some couches that converted into beds and we’d kind of sleep at night. And then we just have to like turn the beds back into couches before anyone came. And then we would shower at the YMCA down the road. That literally was what we did for several months. I was in great shape, you know, working out at the Y. I still remember that YMCA at Page Mill and El Camino in Palo Alto.
INTERVIEWER: So that was a long time ago.
ELON MUSK: So it’s been… I don’t know, I’ve never thought to count it, but several hundred days maybe. I don’t know.
INTERVIEWER: So you’re now the richest man on earth. Do you still sleep in the office? Well, that’s true. Maybe on Mars we’ll find someone else.
ELON MUSK: But I think if someone is a sovereign head of a country they’re de facto richer by a lot.
INTERVIEWER: Do you still sleep at the office now?
ELON MUSK: I’ve sometimes slept at the office, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Don’t forget, we do this show Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Hit that subscribe or auto download button from the White House. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for being with us on Verdict. We’ll see you guys back here in a couple days.
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