Read the full transcript of Elon Musk’s interview with PBS Wired Science in 2007.
Editor’s Note: Recorded in 2007 for PBS’s WIRED Science, this rare full‑length interview captures a 35‑year‑old Elon Musk laying out his early vision for both Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Speaking with host Brian Unger, Musk explains why he left academia for startups, how electric cars and reusable rockets could reshape energy and space travel, and why making life multi‑planetary matters for the future of humanity.
Introduction: Elon Musk on Space, Tesla, and the Future of Humanity
BRIAN UNGER: Elon Musk is a dropout and a billionaire. After receiving an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, he dropped out of the Stanford PhD program in physics. He wound up CEO of PayPal, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002. With his fortune made in the virtual world, he’s created Tesla Motors and SpaceX in the real world.
Named for Nikola Tesla, the eccentric Serbian-born inventor of alternating current, Tesla Motors will roll their first 100 all-electric cars out factory doors this summer. SpaceX, one of many new ventures aimed at commercializing outer space, was recently awarded a $278 million NASA contract to build and operate launch vehicles and crew capsules to service the International Space Station and take America back to the moon. Elon, thank you so much for being with us here at Wired Science.
ELON MUSK: Well, thank you for having me.
From PayPal to Outer Space
BRIAN UNGER: I need to first lay a little bit of a foundation here. Two days into your physics program at Stanford University, you quit school to start a company called Zip2, a media company. Which you sold a few years later for a paltry $307 million. Then 4 years later, eBay buys PayPal. Is that correct?
ELON MUSK: Yes.
BRIAN UNGER: A company that you established or helped to establish as one of the creators.
ELON MUSK: I helped found it, a few others, yeah.
BRIAN UNGER: And now you’ve taken those two enormous successes and you’ve set your ambition on space. How did you go from online payment systems to building a spaceship, essentially?
ELON MUSK: Well, when I graduated from college, there were 3 areas that I thought would be most impactful to the future of humanity. The 3 were the internet, space exploration, and then changing the economy from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon-based economy to one which is solar electric, which I think is going to be the primary but not exclusive means of energy and transportation.
The Case for Mars
BRIAN UNGER: Have we screwed it up so badly here on this planet that our only hope is to build a new civilization out there?
ELON MUSK: No, not at all. Actually, I’m quite optimistic about the future of humanity on Earth.
BRIAN UNGER: You are?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, absolutely.
BRIAN UNGER: So what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit Mars, which is really what is an ambition of yours?
ELON MUSK: Well, I think if you consider two paths, one where we’re forever confined to Earth and the other where we are a space-faring civilization out exploring the stars, I think the latter is far more exciting and will result in a richer and more diverse human experience.
SpaceX and NASA: Partners, Not Competitors
BRIAN UNGER: How can you do that better than NASA?
ELON MUSK: Well, NASA is a customer of ours, so there’s a confusion in the public mind that perhaps a company like SpaceX is competing with NASA, but in fact NASA is a customer of ours. So we’re actually providing services to NASA, launch services. And when the shuttle retires in 2010, so starting in 2011, SpaceX’s rocket will replace the space shuttle in servicing the space station with astronauts and cargo transportation.
BRIAN UNGER: The name of your rocket ship is called the Falcon Explorer, is that it?
ELON MUSK: Well, the Falcon 9.
BRIAN UNGER: The Falcon 9 is the rocket. Yes, yes.
ELON MUSK: And then the spaceship is Dragon.
BRIAN UNGER: Dragon.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, so the Falcon 9 rocket lifts the Dragon spaceship, and this Dragon spaceship is what goes to the space station and then returns to Earth.
BRIAN UNGER: So it transports the Falcon as almost cargo then?
ELON MUSK: So yeah, the Falcon 9 is kind of like the semi or something like that. The Falcon 9 booster rocket takes the Dragon spaceship to space and drops it off. Then it goes to the space station, docks with the space station, transfers astronauts or resupply cargo, whatever the case may be, and then the Dragon spacecraft returns to Earth.
Where Did the Space Program Go Wrong?
BRIAN UNGER: Reading some of the speeches that you have given in your career and how old— you’re practically 23 years, you’re 23 years old, is that it?
ELON MUSK: I’m actually 12.
BRIAN UNGER: You’re 12. I was going to say, you look terrific. But you have said that we got lost along the way with our space program. What did you mean by that?
ELON MUSK: Right, I think that was in some of my congressional testimony. I gave a few speeches to Congress. Well, what I mean by that is in 1969 we were able to go to the moon, and here we are over 3 decades later and we can barely get to low Earth orbit. And I think by any measure that is a step backwards.
BRIAN UNGER: Is that for a lack of leadership or technology?
ELON MUSK: I think we made the wrong technological choices, and I think there was also a lack of will at the highest levels of government to take the next step and go— well, at least stay on the moon and perhaps build a base there, and then go beyond the moon to Mars.
And if you look at the news articles in the late ’60s, early ’70s, the expectation was that by now in the 21st century, we would have a moon base and probably even a Mars base.
And I think if you’d asked anyone at that point in time whether we would be unable to go to the moon and not have been to Mars, I think they would think you’re crazy.
The Need for Bold Leadership in Space
BRIAN UNGER: Do we need leadership in that realm? Do we need a John F. Kennedy who sets a goal for us when he said, “One day a man will walk on the moon”? Do we need that kind of leadership for this technology to move forward in that big step?
ELON MUSK: I do think it’s very important the president set the priority and determine the goal that we as a nation will aspire to. And George Bush has his pluses and minuses, but at least one plus is that he has helped to steer the space program in a direction that more or less makes sense. The only thing I would sort of argue with is that I don’t think we should be going back to the moon. I think we should be focused on Mars.
BRIAN UNGER: You think that’s a mistake, focusing on the moon?
ELON MUSK: I do think we should rather be focused on Mars. The moon is kind of like the Arctic. It’s just a very barren place, very little resources, it’s small. It’s not really a place that we could establish another human civilization.
BRIAN UNGER: There’s a feeling of been there, done that, too, with the moon.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, I think we saw that movie in the ’60s, and the remake’s never as good.
BRIAN UNGER: Did we really go to the moon?
ELON MUSK: Yes, we did.
BRIAN UNGER: Okay, I just wanted to check.
ELON MUSK: The government is incapable of suppressing a conspiracy of that nature.
The Competition in Commercial Space
BRIAN UNGER: Of that nature. Okay, good. This ambition to explore space. Absolutely. There’s quite a bit of competition out there. There’s Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin. There’s Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic. Right. And I’m not talking about NASA either. There’s Paul Allen. There’s the European Space Agency and Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the Chinese, the Russians. Let’s just throw all of them into this competitive field. How is SpaceX different? How do you think you’ll sort of surpass them?
ELON MUSK: Well, you’ve listed a wide range of entities there, and I think the differences are really different depending upon which one you’re referring to.
BRIAN UNGER: Well, let me ask you this question. Who is your competition?
ELON MUSK: We have no serious competition.
BRIAN UNGER: None? Not presently. Who’s chasing you?
ELON MUSK: Well, if you mean chasing and has a serious chance of catching, then I think none that I’m aware of.
BRIAN UNGER: And by the way, kind of a hack then.
ELON MUSK: Well, what Branson is doing— by the way, I’m a great admirer of Branson— is really a much smaller technological challenge. So their craft would be suborbital, so it would go to about Mach 3. Our craft is orbital, it goes to Mach 25, so 25 times the speed of sound.
But that doesn’t describe the whole scale of difficulty because the energy required to get to those velocities scales as the square of the velocity. So to do what Branson is doing, you need, say, about 9 units of energy. To do what we’re doing, you need 625 units of energy. The difference is monumental. And then when you re-enter, you have to burn off all that energy. So that doubles the problem, really.
So what Branson is doing from a technological standpoint is building something that can cross the English Channel. What we’re building is something that can circumnavigate the globe. It’s a very different scale of technological difficulty. I still think what he’s doing is great, and by the way, I bought a ticket on his effort.
BRIAN UNGER: You did?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, yeah. So I still think it’s great, but it’s not in the same league technologically.
BRIAN UNGER: So you’re not particularly worried?
ELON MUSK: Certainly not about that, no. The things that can really hurt SpaceX are our own foolishness, our own errors. But none of the competition that I’m aware of.
BRIAN UNGER: So generally, you’re worried about what’s in front of you, not the other guy. In fact, you probably don’t think about them in terms of how they criticize you or what they think about you.
ELON MUSK: I don’t think there’s much criticism. Boeing and Lockheed, of course, they were criticized. I don’t think any of the entrepreneurial guys would criticize what we’re doing. And it’s certainly possible, I think, what Jeff Bezos is working on could ultimately— I mean, he does have aspirations to get to orbit and beyond. It’s just that what they’re doing right now is suborbital and at the sort of lower technology level.
What I think about at SpaceX is really entirely what are we doing to ensure that our rocket is going to be successful and that we are truly optimizing the cost and ensuring high reliability. I mean, that’s just a very, very difficult problem. There’s a reason why there’s an idiomatic expression about rocket science being hard. It really is really hard.
BRIAN UNGER: So rocket science really is rocket science.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. It looks hard and it’s harder than it looks.
The Holy Grail: Making Life Multi-Planetary
BRIAN UNGER: What’s the big goal here? What’s the long-term plan?
ELON MUSK: Well, the long-term ultimate objective— the holy grail— is we would like to help make life multi-planetary. That’s really what we’d like to do.
BRIAN UNGER: So establish societies on as many planets as possible?
ELON MUSK: Well, yeah, I think there’s only one possibility, but yeah, I mean, even if we can just go from one planet to two, I think that’s a pretty big step.
BRIAN UNGER: And you’ll start with?
ELON MUSK: Mars. Mars is the only viable planet.
BRIAN UNGER: Viable planet. So multi-planetary life.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. It’s help make life multi-planetary. I think that’s an important thing.
BRIAN UNGER: I don’t think your goal’s big enough.
ELON MUSK: Ha! Yeah? It’s ambitious.
BRIAN UNGER: Well, like I said, we don’t expect to do it single-handedly, but we certainly would like to help make it happen.
Fortune, Motivation, and the Startup Mindset
BRIAN UNGER: It’s fair to say you’ve made a fortune.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, I think so. By any reasonable standard, yeah.
BRIAN UNGER: And those who work in science probably understand your trajectory, but there are those who are watching who would think, “If I made that money, I’d sit on a beach, I’d drink beer, and I would just watch the sunset.” Kind of like a Corona beer commercial. Have you ever thought about that as a career option?
ELON MUSK: I find that really pretty boring, so that would be torture if I had to do that every day.
BRIAN UNGER: That would really be pretty awful for me. Is there something about startup businesses that really fuels your desire to work?
ELON MUSK: Well, I guess I really need to be preoccupied with something, and if I’m just sort of sitting there relaxing, I can only do that for a very short period of time, and then it becomes unbearable. Although startups definitely have their highs and lows. There’s a friend of mine who has a good phrase— a startup business is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.
BRIAN UNGER: What is the criteria that you establish for yourself for a startup?
Tesla Motors and the Future of Electric Vehicles
ELON MUSK: I mean, why one business over another? Well, for me, it’s always about does this— does what I’m doing matter? If we are successful, does it matter to the world? And so there are easier ways to make money than starting a rocket company or, say, a car company. Or even when I started an internet company, because when I started the first internet company, nobody had made any money and it wasn’t clear that anyone would make any money. It was simply from the perspective of the Internet being a very important thing and something that needed to be built, and so I wanted to help build it.
BRIAN UNGER: Well, you touch upon something that’s interesting, is that there is a— that benefiting humanity is a very integral part of your criteria, no matter what you’re starting up. Yes, absolutely. Really? Not everybody has that as a prime interest.
ELON MUSK: No, I think that’s probably relatively unusual, although there are many people that I know in Silicon Valley for whom that is a significant motivation.
BRIAN UNGER: You said in your endeavor here to explore space that “we are committed to failing in a new way, if nothing else.” What did you mean by that? Just how it sounds?
ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, we’re committed to succeed, really. But if we do fail, I would hope that we at least add to the body of knowledge such that those who follow may make fewer mistakes.
BRIAN UNGER: Now, if Mars were not enough, you are busy here on Earth.
ELON MUSK: The world is not enough. That’s right.
BRIAN UNGER: Where, where, have you no limits, my friend? Here on Earth, you are establishing a presence, certainly, with Tesla Motors. Tell us a little bit about that. This is your electric car company, correct? Right. And this is no hybrid car you could buy on a car lot. This thing goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, is that right? Yes, absolutely.
ELON MUSK: 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds. It’s faster, better acceleration than any Porsche currently in production and any Ferrari except the Enzo. And it’s twice the energy efficiency of a Prius. So you really have the moral high ground, and you get to leave the Ferrari guy in your dust.
BRIAN UNGER: So it’s hard to beat. Well, let me ask the obvious. Well, and you don’t look like one of those guys who’s trying too hard in a Ferrari. Absolutely.
ELON MUSK: You don’t look like a jerk, you know?
BRIAN UNGER: In a bright banana yellow Lamborghini or Ferrari.
ELON MUSK: Absolutely. You know, there’s something I should point out about Tesla, which is we didn’t— Tesla’s first car is a sports car, not because we think the world lacks for a sports car, but because it is the right entry point for the market. If you have a new technology, the right place to enter is high unit cost, low unit volume. Just as, you know, when a new cell phone comes out or a new laptop or some new thing, tends to be expensive at first because they’re figuring out all the issues and it takes time to optimize. And then over time that technology will become cheaper and cheaper.
And so the Model 2 of Tesla— and maybe I’m leaping ahead here— but Model 2 of Tesla is a $49,000 4-door, 5-passenger sedan. And that’s going to be obviously a much broader market segment that can make use of that car. And then Model 3 is intended to be around a $30,000 price point. And so that’s really affordable by almost everyone who can buy a new car. So the idea is to drive to mass market as rapidly as possible, but only at the pace at which the technology matures.
Henry Ford, Environmental Vision, and the Case for Pure Electric
BRIAN UNGER: Is Henry Ford someone you admire?
ELON MUSK: Well, I think Henry Ford made some very important contributions to business and obviously, you know, moving manufacturing line and that sort of thing. So I think he is certainly worthy of admiration. He was a bit of an odd duck, but certainly noteworthy.
But the interest in Tesla is not from the perspective of, you know, the world needs another car company. It’s more from the perspective of we have a very important environmental problem that needs to be addressed, which is driven by the burning of fossil fuels and the increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and global climate change, which I think is going to be one of the most significant issues of the 21st century. And the only way to really get around that, in my view, is really with an electric vehicle. And then you need to pair that up with a zero-emission power generation method such as solar power. I think solar power is going to be a really big deal. Tesla is not a hybrid car. Tesla is pure electric.
BRIAN UNGER: Pure electric. So help connect the dots for me. Why aren’t we seeing Tesla cars on the car lots then? What’s keeping them back now?
ELON MUSK: Well, we haven’t made them yet.
BRIAN UNGER: So we’re just finishing up the development right now. And anybody can buy this? Yes. How will you—
ELON MUSK: Well, actually, we’ve almost sold out of 2007 production. So if somebody does want to buy next year’s model, they better act quickly.
BRIAN UNGER: One of the primary complaints about hybrid vehicles is they’re not fast enough. You seem to overcome this.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, you won’t have any trouble with this. In fact, really, there’s something uniquely better about electric vehicles, which is that the torque response is immediate. So if you want to pass someone, the response of the car is very immediate. It’s just— it’s more fun to drive an electric car than it is to drive a gasoline car.
The Name Behind Tesla: Nikola Tesla
BRIAN UNGER: You know, I was going to say that Tesla, the car, the name of the car company, is no coincidence, is it?
ELON MUSK: Explain a little bit about that. Right. The company’s named after Nikola Tesla, who is an inventor. He was originally from the area of Yugoslavia in Europe, but he moved to America when he was young and was inventor of the AC induction motor, invented a lot of the principles of magnetism. So he was a great man, a great, great inventor, and so the company’s named in honor of him.
BRIAN UNGER: So these cars, the Tesla Roadster, the first issue of the Tesla Roadster available in 2007. Yes. In the spring? The summer? How do you get on the waiting list?
ELON MUSK: Well, you buy the car. You basically put down a deposit. And we’ve actually— Can you do that through the web? Yeah, we’ll have, by the way, customer centers all around the country. So we’ll have one in LA, one in the Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, New York, and eventually nationwide customer centers where somebody does want to see the car in person, take a test drive, or see the car being worked on.
I mean, we have this idea for the way that the cars are serviced, that it should be a really pleasant experience. So we have, you know, somewhere between like a Starbucks and an Apple Store. So you’d go in and you’d see the cars being worked on behind a glass partition.
BRIAN UNGER: That would be your car you’re watching?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, or somebody else’s. But it’s really clean. It’s really clean, present, bright. You know, there’d be sort of a coffee bar available. We really want to have a very pleasant experience that you don’t typically get if you go into a dealership. Have you heard from Toyota?
BRIAN UNGER: Have you heard from General Motors and Ford saying, “Is the company for sale?”
ELON MUSK: Nobody’s actually made a formal offer, but the interest, you know, I think one of the biggest values that Tesla can provide is serving as an example to the rest of the auto industry, because right now the auto industry, you know, the big car companies believe that A, a viable electric vehicle is not possible, and B, even if it was, people wouldn’t buy it.
So we need to show that neither of those are true, that the technology works, that people want to buy it. And that will be the most effective way of really driving change in the auto industry is by serving as an example in that manner. And if we were to sell the company to one of the big car companies, I think it would really slow things down.
Balancing SpaceX and Tesla: A Day in the Life
BRIAN UNGER: You’re very busy enterprising the part of your company that will explore space. You’re very busy with this car company. Where do you find time to be CEO of two companies that size?
ELON MUSK: Well, I should correct you that I’m CEO of SpaceX. I’m chairman and CEO of SpaceX, and that is really my day job. So I spend 80% of my time on SpaceX. I am the chairman and the principal owner of Tesla Motors, but I do not run it on a daily basis.
BRIAN UNGER: You don’t run that on a daily basis? No. Well, that was really the question was how do you do— how do you run those two large enterprises on a daily basis? Is it a couple of phone calls to the Tesla folks? “How’s it going? I’m busy with outer space right now.”
ELON MUSK: “You guys got that covered?” I spend about 2 to 3 days a month on Tesla-related business, and almost all the rest of the time is on SpaceX. So SpaceX is very much my day-to-day job. And then I provide product guidance, strategic guidance, and obviously funding for Tesla. Like Steve Jobs, right? So he runs Apple on a daily basis, but he also has oversight over Pixar. It’s kind of like that.
BRIAN UNGER: And in your day-to-day, and this is one of those silly lifestyle questions, but how early do you get up in the morning and where do you go to work physically? Is it an office?
ELON MUSK: Yeah, I go to work at SpaceX. How early do you get up in the morning? You know, I’m not an early morning person, so—
BRIAN UNGER: So for young engineers and for inventors and creators, they can sleep in until 10 or 11?
ELON MUSK: We have no fixed hours at SpaceX. Personally, I tend to get up around 7:30 or 8:00. Be in the office around 9:00, 9:30, but then I tend to stay till about 8:00 PM.
BRIAN UNGER: Okay. College students across America are saying, “Oh, drats, I thought he was going to say like noon.” But then you go into an office and you sit with— in a separate office away from those who are working, or do you sit with them?
ELON MUSK: No, I just have a cubicle at SpaceX.
BRIAN UNGER: You have a cubicle? Yeah. And are you surrounded by your colleagues there? Yeah, absolutely. What is your hope in terms of the impact you will leave on culture, this civilization? This world, global civilization? What is it that you hope to leave here?
Legacy: The Internet, Clean Energy, and a Multi-Planet Species
ELON MUSK: Well, I think what I’d like to do is help solve some important problems. So I think in a small way, I helped build the internet. And then with respect to the global warming problem, the transition away from oil and other hydrocarbons to something which is clean and sustainable, I hope to have an impact there. And then with respect to space, I hope to have an impact in helping make humanity a multi-planet species.
BRIAN UNGER: Elon Musk, thank you so much for being with us at Wired Science. Let me get it straight: CEO of SpaceX and chairman of Tesla Motors.
ELON MUSK: Yeah, I got other titles, but that’s about right.
BRIAN UNGER: I think that you’re doing pretty good. You’ve done very well.
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