Elon Musk built PayPal and now aims to revolutionise travel on Earth and in space, he tells Ben Oliver
Elon Musk's rockets resupply the international space station
Elon Musk describes building four billion-dollar businesses with conspicuous understatement. “I decided to do a couple of internet companies,” he says, “and that actually worked out reasonably well.”
The first of those he sold, at the age of 31, to Compaq for $307m (£205m); then, with his partners, he offloaded payment firm PayPal to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002. Today, his focus is on investing his considerable resources in what he thinks are nothing short of the most important issues facing humanity.
So to help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, he has founded Solar City, which builds and installs solar panels, and electric car maker Tesla.
And to further his belief that humanity should become a “space-faring civilisation”, he founded SpaceX, “to develop the technology to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars. That has to be solved at some point by some company, or it’s not going to happen.”
He opens with an unprompted reference to his recent, unsuccessful legal action against the BBC’s Top Gear. The show implied that one of Tesla’s cars had run out of charge early and had to be pushed, and it plainly still rankles. “Jeremy Clarkson is a huge ----,” he says, “and you can quote me on that.”
Recent months, indeed, have been eventful. Despite another, very public, row with the New York Times over Tesla’s charging abilities, in October his Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, the first mission in his $1.6bn resupply contract with NASA.
Solar City went public in December at a value of nearly $500m, and its share price has since more than doubled. Tesla made its IPO in 2010 and is also now trading at around twice its initial offer price, with a value of more than $4bn.
The Tesla factory in San Francisco – a facility closed by Toyota in the financial crisis – is now producing its target of 400 cars each week and will make 20,000 in a full year.
The Model S won “Car of the Year” awards from both Automobile and Motor Trend magazines in the US.
Tesla cars go on sale in the UK early next year and indeed Musk expects “to do more sales in Europe than the US in the long term, as the cost of petrol is so much higher, the distances travelled are shorter and the environmental consciousness is higher”.
Success, however, has not come easily: SpaceX endured two abortive test launches; Tesla suffered cost overruns and design reboots that delayed production; and then SpaceX flamed out on its third, penultimate launch.
“It was like being in the stockade while people hurl ---- at you,” Musk says.
“We struggled very badly for many years just to keep the company alive. I had nothing left. I had to borrow money for rent. I sold everything I could, and I would have sold the plane, too, except that in 2008 you literally could not sell a plane.”
The plane in question is a Dassault Falcon 900 intercontinental jet; there’s also a vast new Bel Air mansion. But he denies that he is materialistic: he points out that he is “a volunteer in all this”, and that if he had wanted bigger and safer returns on his capital, he would have invested in property, or oil. “Profit is important in that if you don’t make more money than you spend, eventually people will stop giving you money and you will die. But it’s not something that’s of personal interest to me. I just want to have the resources to get the things done that I think matter.”
Difficult times will come again, and soon. There remains a noisy antipathy towards electric cars from those who question their price, practicality and true environmental benefit, and Musk will also have to put people on his rockets. “That will be a very nervous day,” he admits. Two new models for Tesla will increase its volumes tenfold, to the current size of Mini. He also needs to crack the design of the fully reusable rockets he believes are needed to make a Mars trip financially viable.
Despite all this, Musk says that he plans to “take it down a tiny bit” this year, spending more time with his five sons – twins and triplets. Even so, he has plans for a supersonic, vertical take-off and landing electric jet, and for a supersonic underground transport system called the Hyperloop, which he says could link LA and San Francisco – 500 miles apart –in 30 minutes and would cost £4bn to build. He won’t talk details, yet.
But if the Hyperloop sounds far-fetched, so did the idea of a private individual building, from scratch and to his own design, a rocket and spacecraft that would succeed in docking with the International Space Station.
Elon Musk describes building four billion-dollar businesses with conspicuous understatement. “I decided to do a couple of internet companies,” he says, “and that actually worked out reasonably well.”
The first of those he sold, at the age of 31, to Compaq for $307m (£205m); then, with his partners, he offloaded payment firm PayPal to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002. Today, his focus is on investing his considerable resources in what he thinks are nothing short of the most important issues facing humanity.
So to help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, he has founded Solar City, which builds and installs solar panels, and electric car maker Tesla.
And to further his belief that humanity should become a “space-faring civilisation”, he founded SpaceX, “to develop the technology to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars. That has to be solved at some point by some company, or it’s not going to happen.”
He opens with an unprompted reference to his recent, unsuccessful legal action against the BBC’s Top Gear. The show implied that one of Tesla’s cars had run out of charge early and had to be pushed, and it plainly still rankles. “Jeremy Clarkson is a huge ----,” he says, “and you can quote me on that.”
Recent months, indeed, have been eventful. Despite another, very public, row with the New York Times over Tesla’s charging abilities, in October his Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, the first mission in his $1.6bn resupply contract with NASA.
Solar City went public in December at a value of nearly $500m, and its share price has since more than doubled. Tesla made its IPO in 2010 and is also now trading at around twice its initial offer price, with a value of more than $4bn.
The Tesla factory in San Francisco – a facility closed by Toyota in the financial crisis – is now producing its target of 400 cars each week and will make 20,000 in a full year.
The Model S won “Car of the Year” awards from both Automobile and Motor Trend magazines in the US.
Tesla cars go on sale in the UK early next year and indeed Musk expects “to do more sales in Europe than the US in the long term, as the cost of petrol is so much higher, the distances travelled are shorter and the environmental consciousness is higher”.
Success, however, has not come easily: SpaceX endured two abortive test launches; Tesla suffered cost overruns and design reboots that delayed production; and then SpaceX flamed out on its third, penultimate launch.
“It was like being in the stockade while people hurl ---- at you,” Musk says.
“We struggled very badly for many years just to keep the company alive. I had nothing left. I had to borrow money for rent. I sold everything I could, and I would have sold the plane, too, except that in 2008 you literally could not sell a plane.”
The plane in question is a Dassault Falcon 900 intercontinental jet; there’s also a vast new Bel Air mansion. But he denies that he is materialistic: he points out that he is “a volunteer in all this”, and that if he had wanted bigger and safer returns on his capital, he would have invested in property, or oil. “Profit is important in that if you don’t make more money than you spend, eventually people will stop giving you money and you will die. But it’s not something that’s of personal interest to me. I just want to have the resources to get the things done that I think matter.”
Difficult times will come again, and soon. There remains a noisy antipathy towards electric cars from those who question their price, practicality and true environmental benefit, and Musk will also have to put people on his rockets. “That will be a very nervous day,” he admits. Two new models for Tesla will increase its volumes tenfold, to the current size of Mini. He also needs to crack the design of the fully reusable rockets he believes are needed to make a Mars trip financially viable.
Despite all this, Musk says that he plans to “take it down a tiny bit” this year, spending more time with his five sons – twins and triplets. Even so, he has plans for a supersonic, vertical take-off and landing electric jet, and for a supersonic underground transport system called the Hyperloop, which he says could link LA and San Francisco – 500 miles apart –in 30 minutes and would cost £4bn to build. He won’t talk details, yet.
But if the Hyperloop sounds far-fetched, so did the idea of a private individual building, from scratch and to his own design, a rocket and spacecraft that would succeed in docking with the International Space Station.
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