1Here we are in the SpaceX machine shop.
2When Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002,
3he only had two things going for him.
4SpaceX basically consisted of carpet and a mariachi band.
5That's all of SpaceX.
6Well, he did have one more thing: an ambition that knew no bounds.
7The sky is not the limit for Elon, whose mission is to send people to Mars.
8On April 20, 2023 - humanity took one step closer to that dream.
9When the world's largest rocket, the fully reusable Starship, attempted to go into orbit for the first time.
10Obviously, this is uh... does not appear to be a nominal situation.
11Although Starship failed to reach orbit,
12learning from failures is Elon's approach to his career building SpaceX.
13And to think he built a rocket company with just a bachelor's degree in economics and another in physics.
14Elon, who has Canadian citizenship thanks to his mother Maye,
15began his undergrad studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, three hours east of Toronto.
16He chose Queen's over Canada's University of Waterloo, which is renowned for its engineering program,
17because, as he told Queen's magazine, "there didn't seem to be any girls at Waterloo!"
18"I didn't want to spend my undergraduate time with a bunch of dudes."
19After two years at Queen's, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania
20as he thought attending an Ivy League school might help him land a job in America.
21The land of opportunity when it comes to tech.
22Still, degrees in economics and physics weren't enough to make him a rocket scientist.
23So, Elon taught himself by devouring these books.
24A habit he built as a boy,
25reading the entire Encyclopedia when he was only eight or nine years old.
26He also absorbed knowledge from the industry's best.
27He cold-called aerospace consultant Jim Cantrell
28who answered while driving in his convertible with the roof down.
29He thought he heard Elon introduce himself as an "Internet billionaire",
30as he recalled in an interview with Esquire.
31Elon wasn't quite a billionaire then, but he did score $180 million
32when his financial services company X.com merged with PayPal,
33which was bought by eBay.
34He then sunk everything into three projects:
35$100 million into SpaceX,
36$70 million into Tesla,
37and $10 million into solar energy company SolarCity, which later merged with Tesla.
38In 2001, he planned on buying a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile from the Russians to use as a launch vehicle.
39He figured his space ambitions could start with sending some mice to Mars.
40The Russians wanted $8 million per ICBM,
41twice what Elon was prepared to pay.
42When he countered with $8 million for two,
43Jim Cantrell recalled in Ashlee Vance's biography on Elon,
44that the Russians reportedly said something like, "Young boy. No"
45Elon apparently "stormed out of the meeting."
46On the flight home, he broke down the cost of building and launching a rocket on a spreadsheet.
47He realized a modest-sized rocket that could carry smaller satellites and research payloads into space
48could be much less than $8 million.
49So, SpaceX was born with the goal of building its own rockets.
50It is an understatement to say starting a rocket company is hard.
51But Elon found an ally in the godfather of rocket science, Tom Mueller.
52Tom worked for the large aerospace company TRW at the time,
53which Northrop Grumman later acquired.
54He spent weekends building and firing rockets in the Mojave Desert in California as part of an amateur rocket club.
55The amateur rocket scene was tight, and Tom got introduced to Elon.
56Tom designed the Merlin engine that powers SpaceX's rockets.
57Merlin revolutionized spaceflight as it's designed to be re-used.
58Elon understood that the only way to open up space to everyone
59was to drastically cut costs by building reusable rockets.
60The Falcon 9 is partially re-usable as the booster lands back on earth.
61Before the Falcon 9, there was the Falcon 1.
62The Falcon 1 attempted to launch for the first time on March 24, 2006.
63It lasted only 41 seconds in the air before crashing due to a fuel leak.
64The second attempt the following year went slightly better,
65but the rocket failed to reach orbit due to a chain of issues caused by an unexpected bump
66when the first and second stages separated.
67Third time wasn't a charm either,
68as a timing error caused the two stages to collide.
69Elon had run through all the money he had set aside for SpaceX.
70When you had that third failure in a row,
71did you think, "I need to pack this in"?
72Never.
73Why not?
74I don't ever give up.
75I mean, I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.
76He told his employees to keep going.
77The then head of talent acquisition at SpaceX, Dolly Singh,
78recalled on the question-and-answer site Quora, Elon said:
79"we need to pick ourselves up, and dust ourselves off,"
80"because we have a lot of work to do."
81Then he said, with as much fortitude and ferocity as he could muster...
82"For my part, I will never give up and I mean never,"
83"and that if we stick with him, we will win."
84"I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that."
85"It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed."
86While Elon tried to save SpaceX, Tesla was hanging by a thread.
87He joined Tesla in its infancy after sinking millions from his PayPal earnings
88and stepped into the role as the company's board chair.
89After numerous management shakeups, he was left in charge as CEO in late 2008
90at a time when Tesla was in serious trouble.
91The production of the first vehicle, the sporty Roadster, went way over budget.
92By October 2008, Tesla had just $9 million left to fund the company.
93It was hard to convince investors to fork over millions more
94during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
95His personal life fared no better;
96he was going through a divorce from his first wife, Justine,
97with whom he shares triplets and twins.
98Elon has said 2008 was the worst year of his life.
99With SpaceX unable to get its rocket into orbit
100and Tesla nearly running out of cash,
101it looks like one or both of his companies would die,
102as he painfully recalled to Ashlee Vance:
103"I could either pick SpaceX or Tesla or split the money I had left between them."
104If I split the money, maybe both of them would die.
105If I gave the money to just one company,
106the probability of it surviving was greater,
107but then it would mean certain death for the other company.
108I debated that over and over.
109It felt like having to choose between two children.
110Perhaps his difficult childhood shaped his never-give-up mentality.
111He was bullied for years when he was growing up in Pretoria, South Africa.
112One day in eighth or ninth grade,
113he and his brother Kimbal were sitting on the top of a flight of stairs eating
114when a boy snuck up behind him, kicked him in the head, and shoved him down the stairs.
115Then a bunch of boys beat him up until he blacked out.
116The beating damaged his nose so severely that it restricted airflow,
117he later got surgery to correct his deviated septum.
118His life at home was no less painful.
119After his parents divorced, Elon opted to live with his father for a time.
120But he told Rolling Stone that his dad Errol "was such a terrible human being."
121"You have no idea."
122"My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil."
123"He will plan evil."
124Elon found comfort in coding, sometimes programming throughout the night.
125At age twelve, he coded a space-themed video game called Blastar.
126A South African magazine published the source code and gave him 500 bucks.
127The game was no marvel of computer programming,
128but it did hint at his underlying brilliance.
129He turned his science fiction fantasies into reality
130when he founded SpaceX at the age of 30.
131Despite three failed flight attempts,
132an investment from a venture capital firm made it possible for SpaceX to attempt a fourth flight.
133The future of SpaceX rested on that fourth launch.
134On September 28, 2008, the Falcon 1 lifted off.
1359 minutes 31 seconds after launch, the rocket reached orbit.
136The success saved SpaceX
137because it helped secure a 1.6 billion dollar contract from NASA
138to resupply cargo to the International Space Station.
139SpaceX was out of death's reach.
140But Tesla was still within its grasp.
141As Tesla was running out of money, Elon devised a plan to keep his company afloat:
142he cut 25% of the workforce and leaned on friends to cover the weekly payroll.
143He managed to scrape together $20 million,
144including money he made investing in his cousin's data center startup,
145which Dell bought the year before.
146Investors agreed to match whatever he was able to get on his own.
147This new round of $40 million in funding saved Tesla on Christmas Eve.
148"It was the last hour of the last day that it was possible"
149Tesla would endure many more years of pain after going public in 2010 at $17 a share.
150Although the Model S wowed the world,
151people hesitated to buy the luxury vehicle after it came out in 2012.
152Elon turned his employees into salespeople
153whose job was to convince anyone who put down a $5,000 deposit
154to go through with their purchase.
155When orders weren't coming in fast enough,
156Tesla said it was temporarily shutting down its factory for "maintenance"
157and kept the real reason secret
158to avoid spooking investors and sending the stock plummeting.
159Elon's maneuvering worked.
160In 2013, Tesla stunned Wall Street by posting its first-ever profit.
161Elon's goal has always been to build a more affordable electric car.
162But Tesla simply couldn't keep up with demand for the Model 3.
163Frankly, we're gonna be in production hell.
164And as the saying goes, if you're going through hell, keep going.
165Elon promised to produce 5,000 Model-3s a week initially,
166yet only managed a mere 800 cars a week in the first few weeks of 2018.
167Tesla was burning cash as it tried to increase the production of its most affordable car.
168Elon says Tesla was about a month from bankruptcy.
169The situation was so critical that he slept in his factories to save time,
170and he also said it was to suffer more than his staff.
171He told Bloomberg: "Whenever they felt pain, I wanted mine to be worse."
172The pain eased as Tesla found a way to claw its way out of danger once again.
173Tesla managed to increase production and turned the corner as it entered 2020.
174It has expanded from one factory in Fremont, California, to factories worldwide.
175Tesla delivered 1.3 million vehicles in 2022.
176And one of them was my own.
177As I drove across Canada last summer,
178I couldn't help but think that one day, electric cars will be so run-of-the-mill
179that they'll just be called...cars.
180I did notice that supercharging stations across the country were pretty empty.
181There was basically no one charging beside me.
182Yet charging stations will soon be getting busier.
183Many countries, including Canada,
184have mandated that all new cars and light-duty trucks sold be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
185Not to mention other auto companies will now be relying on Tesla's charging network, like Ford.
186Elon has stressed that Tesla must make its cars fully autonomous
187in which there is no human intervention at all.
188"That's really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero."
189As Tesla engineers work to improve its full self-driving technology,
190it wants to place that technology in a robot.
191Optimus perhaps felt like a sideshow when Tesla first unveiled it in 2021.
192However: Those who are insightful or who listen carefully will understand that Optimus ultimately will be worth more than the car business.
193Worth more than FSD.
194There's been arguably even more skepticism over Elon's plan to ease traffic
195by putting Teslas into his own tunnels.
196We're still years away from seeing whether the Boring Company's tunnels will be a visionary mode of transportation
197or if there are too many holes in Elon's plan.
198It's also too early to determine the potential of Neuralink,
199which received regulatory approval in May 2023 to test its brain implant on people.
200Neuralink's chip is meant to stimulate the brain
201and help those with spinal cord injuries control their computers and smartphones with their thoughts.
202I think we have a chance, I emphasize "a chance",
203of being able to allow someone who
204cannot walk or use their arms to be able to walk again.
205The long-term goal of Neuralink is to merge humans with AI.
206A common theme runs through all his companies.
207The dream of freedom from Earth by going to Mars
208Freedom from fossil fuels.
209Freedom from traffic.
210Freedom from the limitations of human biology.
211And now Twitter is fighting for freedom of speech
212which he felt was suppressed under previous leadership.
213Twitter has changed its incorporated name to X Corp,
214to move toward Elon's plan of transforming Twitter into X, the "everything app".
215Although Elon has been building many of his companies for over a decade,
216their potential is only just starting to emerge.
217Regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, he won't give up.
218He once said, "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."