My first impressions were that he was very sweet. He seemed quite shy.
A minute, 30 seconds.
He said "may I put my hand on your knee?"
I said "OK, go on then" so it was quite sweet that he asked.
T minus 17, 16, 15...
He said "I don't usually do this, but I'd love to see you tomorrow.
Can we meet for breakfast?"
We had breakfast and then at the end of breakfast
he said, "will you come and have lunch with me?"
So, we went for lunch.
T minus, 10, 9, 8...
And then he said, "will you come to dinner?"
and then I remember one evening he said,
"would you like to come back to my hotel room
so we can look at rocket videos?"
I thought hmm, "okay, I'll come back",
We did get into his hotel room, and he did just show me rocket videos.
Elon Musk is the richest man who has ever lived
but says he doesn't own a house.
He's a little different than a lot of people.
He truly embodies big thinking and risk taking.
With a few taps from his fingers, global markets can crash and soar.
CEO Elon Musk creating chaos with a single tweet.
Bizarre, shook confidence.
He is creating a chip that can be put into our brains.
Right now, he's building rockets that could take a 100 people to Mars.
His power and wealth continue to grow.
No one on Earth is doing more to change the world.
-Come on over man. -Why would you want to talk to me?
Because you are the dude, my friend. You are the dude.
This is Elon Musk's story
He's done things that no other country can do.
-It's quite magnificent. -You're his mum
-and his greatest champion? -Yes.
Ex-wives, family, friends, enemies
He's so dangerous. Completely, totally irresponsible.
It's not as much fun being me as you think. I'm not sure I want to be me.
Should we celebrate his achievements?
It seems a bit strange to be handing it all over to private enterprise,
but I guess I'm kind of stuck in the past.
Or be frightened by his power?
-Unstable, reckless. -I'm just being me.
-All good? -Yes, thank you.
I was the science nerd at high school. I didn't get many dates.
I don't know if men, boys, rather, were scared of me or whatever,
but I didn't have many dates so I wouldn't date anybody who wasn't.
If he wasn't as good at math and science as I was,
and no one was. Although my ex-husband was,
he was better than me at math and science, and I hate to admit that,
but that probably did help towards Elon being a genius.
One of my co-workers was a contract consultant
for Elon's first Start-Up called Zip 2.
Elon was upset that this engineer working on the deal,
didn't know the technology well, and he fired him.
I went in there the next morning,
he kind of grilled me on like, do you know the subject matter?
And I was like, Yeah, this is how it works. And he was like, you're hired.
He works in mysterious ways, that guy.
This is KRX you're waking up to another beautiful day in San Jose.
When the Internet was being created.
Zip2 was a cool company. Elon and I sat across from each other.
They were still inventing the product as they were running it.
Zip 2. A California company that provides online access
to information about cities around the country,
from where to eat to how to get around.
The company's founder is Elon Musk.
How old were you when you started this company?
23.
I remember meeting him the first time.
He gave me a demo of what he had done,
which was online Yellow Pages with maps and directions.
And he turns to me, It's cool, huh? I go, Yeah, really cool.
I'm staring at him. He's staring at me.
And I'm thinking, is this a trick interview
if I can come up with something?
He assesses people and I've noticed he tends to stare at them,
and it can be very intimidating.
And then I met Kimbal, his brother.
Kimbal was much more personable.
1995, brothers Elon and Kimbal are want-to-be entrepreneurs
attempting to build just one of the thousands
of start-ups in the tech gold rush of Silicon Valley.
Living in the office and ladened with over $100,000 of student debt,
they start searching for people
who believe in them enough to finance their venture.
How much money have you invested in...
The Elon family of companies? I don't know.
It's probably in the order of $100 million ballpark.
In the order of $100 million, roughly. Yeah.
The first time I met Elon, he was pitching Zip2.
I remember, he and Kimbal were relatively new to Silicon Valley.
Been there only a few months.
I just remember thinking they're bright, properly self-confident,
that perfect entrepreneurial mix of having enough self-confidence
to be humble, enough intelligence to respond to questions
in a very nimble manner.
My first week I come in,
and I see two people passed out on a couch.
One was Elon and one was the summer intern we had.
They both pulled an all nighter.
It turned out that was a pretty common occurrence with Elon.
And we'd stay at the office until late hours
and then eventually he'd fall asleep under his Cube
and physics book as a pillow.
Elon is an unusual fellow.
He knows just about everything. About everything.
I would say from the age of three, I thought he was a genius.
He would reason with me, and his reasoning was sensible.
How do you even do that when you don't really have much experience?
I wanted him to go to nursery school.
They said, well, he makes it by two days,
but you should keep him back a year
because otherwise he'll be a little socially challenged.
And I said, you don't understand. I have a genius son.
He needs to talk to someone besides me.
And they roll their eyes because every mother thinks
that a child is a genius.
We worked closely together.
When he was in a good mood, he was an incredible fun guy to be with.
I remember Elon one time it was at about 9:00 at night.
Elon was going around the office
looking to see who was sitting in their cubes.
There weren't many people in their cubes.
It was 9 p.m. and his face turned red, and he was really angry
that the entire company wasn't there in the office at 9:00 at night.
You worked seven days a week, crazy hours.
And in that time, he managed to still hold a relationship with his fiancé.
Elon met his fiancée Justine at university.
They were in the same abnormal psychology class.
Highly competitive with each other,
Justine scored 97% in the exam. Elon scored 98,
and they have now been dating for six years.
A roller coaster ride in terms of watching Elon
go through the trials and tribulations of working
and the toll that it takes on a relationship.
And you accept that when you're spending time with him,
you're getting a very small part of him
because 95% of his mental energy
is still being consumed by these problems.
He doesn't get any breaks from it.
You have to spend a tremendous amount of your time at work.
There's no such thing as the eight-hour day
in Silicon Valley in any field.
Hi, Elon Musk speaking.
It's 7 o'clock in the morning
and Elon Musk anxiously waits for his prize
for paying his dues to the valley.
He was always talking about the McLaren F1
cost $1,000,000 fastest production car in the world.
Only 64 were made.
I said, "why don't you just go out and buy a McLaren F1
and then a week later he did.
I can't believe it's actually here. It's pretty wild, man.
But just three years ago I was showering and at the YMCA
and sleeping on the office floor.
And now obviously I've got a million dollar car
and quite a few creature comforts.
The fastest car in the world.
I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas
and turn it into my personal fiefdom.
I'm much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.
When we were acquired,
a number of us were talking about where we want to be in the future,
and we said either he'll be the richest guy,
or he'll be totally dead broke. But there would be nothing in between.
Elon invests almost all of his money into his next venture.
This is an ATM.
What we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry.
He becomes a CEO of a banking company
that will soon be worth billions of dollars.
But whilst away on honeymoon Elon is ousted as CEO.
He retains his shares
but no longer has any significant role at the company.
It leaves a mark. You feel betrayed.
As a teenager Elon didn't have many friends
but he read all the time through the night.
I couldn't get him up in the morning.
He read a lot of science fiction. He would read through the night
until he saw me getting up and then he would go to sleep.
Then I had to dress him while he was half asleep and get him to school.
What are some of the problems
that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?
The biggest terrestrial problem we've got is sustainable energy.
The other one being the extension of life beyond Earth.
To make life multiplanetary.
Humans need an adventure. Getting to new territory.
The best reason is so that we get wiped out.
Something like an asteroid strike, like plagues or nuclear war.
If that was to happen,
human civilization on multiple planets is a great insurance policy.
Back in the early 2000s, I was going to Mars Society meetings regularly.
Their topic that would come up was this desire to have a fundraiser.
Filmmaker Jim Cameron was a Mars nut himself
and had been contemplating a Mars movie.
Somebody had the idea of getting Jim Cameron as the featured draw.
Sent out all the invitations. And I have to admit, they didn't do well.
One notable response from a guy named Elon Musk.
Nobody had ever heard of.
He actually paid $5,000 for the plate and be seated with Jim Cameron.
He pulled me aside and he said, I have a project I need some help with.
Take a little miniature greenhouse down to the surface of Mars
to watch the plants grow.
Honestly, I thought it was like crazy ambitious but well thought out.
He was trying to do something to wake people up.
His philosophy was just like great things don't happen automatically.
After winning the space race, NASA's plans slowed.
Meanwhile, other nations developed their own rocket technology,
launched satellites and supplied the international space station.
In planning a trip to Mars, Musk believes
he can also capitalize on the business opportunities
that are opening up in space, putting America back in the game.
If you want to put a satellite in orbit,
you can fly on a Russian rocket, you can fly on a Chinese rocket,
a European rocket, you could fly on an Indian rocket.
None of the American companies flew on an American rocket.
So we're going to go overseas
because there's nothing in America that's cost competitive.
If Elon is going to get into space,
he'll need to convince some ex NASA engineers to help him.
When Elon first started talking to me about the ultimate goal
of making humanity of multi-planetary species...
You probably won't use this but...
This is what I thought. First of all. Okay.
So, I'll give you something you can put on camera.
I didn't quite get his name Ian Musk, is what I thought he said,
and I had no clue what PayPal was.
He mentioned that, it seemed like a funny name to me,
and that he was looking for a Russian rocket to do an experiment to Mars.
And I was the guy he was told could help him do that.
Elon, Jim and another engineer, Mike Griffin,
fly to Russia to buy cheaper Russian rockets off the shelf.
The Standard Delta rocket. It was about 80 to $100 million.
You could go to Russia and buy a similar sized rocket for 2 million.
We got into a classic military complex.
Razor wire on the top and security and guns.
And finally, we got down to where everybody was gathered,
including the chief designer.
In classic European style, we didn't just jump into business.
We started to drink and drink a little vodka,
and then we'd have a toast, toast to the Russians, toast to the Americans,
toast you Elon, toast to the Internet.
And Elon starts to tell the chief designer,
all about this idea of multi-planetary species.
And there's Elon in his late twenties. And they don't know him.
He looks he looks like he just walked in off the street,
and they took that as a sign of disrespect.
Chief designer was very angry, he chopped Elon off mid-sentence,
started staccato Russian. This is machine of war.
This is not a toy for some young kid from Silicon Valley.
This is not Internet bullshit. We're talking life or death.
Then he spit on Elon's shoes and he spit on my shoes.
Elon turned to me and he said, I think he spit on our shoes
and I said yeah.
We got through all that we got on the Delta flight back to New York.
Mike and I sat back, ordered some whisky, and we're having a drink.
We were watching Elon sitting two or three rows up from us.
He's on his computer and he's working really, really diligently.
Mike elbows me and he said
"so what the fuck do you think that idiot savant is up to up there?"
And Elon turns around and he looked at us
and this is one of the few times he looked you directly in the eye
and he says, "Fuck you both".
He says, "I think we can build this rocket ourselves."
And he said, "I've got a spreadsheet."
We started looking at it. It was remarkable.
He says "we're going to build this when we get home."
Mike and I just said, "okay".
He probably tried to drink it.
Me and another guy, John Garvey,
We wanted to build the biggest amateur rocket.
We called it the big freaking rocket or BFR.
John said, "There's this Internet millionaire
that wants to come by and see our BFR project.
Is it okay if he comes by this Sunday?"
and I'm like, "Sure, it's okay".
He was very interesting,
he immediately started asking very pointed questions,
like what "what do you have there?" 13,000 pound thrust engine.
He goes 'Is that a big engine?" I go "the biggest amateur engine"
He goes, "Have you worked on anything bigger?"
I said, "Yeah, I worked on a 650,000 pound thrust engine at TRW".
He said, "Could you build that engine?"
He said to me and a couple other guys,
"If you guys are in, we'll start a company".
I said, I'm in. So that's the first one to sign.
That's how I end up becoming employee, number one at SpaceX.
I remember emailing Elon again and saying, Hey, so what's next?
And a rocket company? Yeah, sign me up.
Say your name. Spell it. Tell me what you do.
Elon Musk. E-L-O-N M-U-S-K,
chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies or Space X.
Couldn't hire anybody out of industry because all my friends there thought,
no way will I come here. You are going to fail.
There's only so much we can learn by looking through a telescope,
and eventually we need to go out there for it to find the answer.
The first time I met him was at a amateur rocket weekend,
and then later on he came to my house.
And so I sent the whole family to the movies to go watch a movie.
We talked for a long time. We talk more than 2 hours
and when they came back, he was still there.
I think it's pretty smart to do this, to go to somebody
and check out the house.
And the overall impression is so much more complete
if you look at how they live.
eBay is shelling out one and a half billion bucks for PayPal
popular system used by Web surfers to pay their bills.
A month after Space X is formed,
a buyout of Paypal nets Elon Musk 250 million dollars.
Elon immediately tells his new group of engineers
they have just over a year to become the first privately owned company
to build a rocket that makes orbit.
Space X relocates to Kwajalein, a small island in the Pacific Ocean.
There was no power. There was no water, plumbing.
We had to literally bring everything out there.
The logistics were terrible.
Trying to get liquid oxygen there in the tropics was quite a feat.
It was humid. My body wasn't really made for that.
You must work and then work and maybe work.
Everything was driven by a schedule.
It was brutal.
Kwajalein was the only game for us at the time,
but it ended up being not the ultimate place to be.
The day that Falcon was launched,
Elon was stressed at how much money he was spending.
You are kind of moving towards that launch,
and then you realize one day you're in the control room
and you are doing this.
Elon, he was nervous as hell. Just like all of us.
That final count in the seconds is up to you.
Just like so tense. Just get it lit and please lift off.
It only worked for 28 seconds or so. And then the engine went out.
Elon was pretty disappointed.
Moments ago, the Falcon one rocketed towards space
off a small island in the Pacific. But just moments after take-off,
the rocket failed.
Angry at the failure, Elon blames Jeremy Holman,
one of the young rocket engineers.
Elon, reporting to the press, said
the engineer and the technician screwed up.
Well, ends up it wasn't really their fault.
It was if anybody is my fault for choosing aluminum B nuts.
A quick post-mortem reveals
that salt sea spray caused corrosion on the aluminum components.
But Elon refuses to back down.
Elon wouldn't retract it in the press.
And that didn't sit well with Jeremy.
I went and talked with Elon about that.
And Elon said, there's no going back, we're just moving forward.
So, he ended up leaving the company.
So there was intense meetings where let's not fail again.
He started working with us to optimize the rocket
to get as much out of it as possible.
He was technically very strong,
even though he was just learning about rockets.
And the one thing I notice, if people were negative,
they were not in the next meeting.
He said "a company is a bunch of vectors.
Each person is a vector and they need to point in the direction
that you want to go bureaucracy and office politics and low morale.
It's almost random vectors." He was always about making all the vectors,
which all the employees pointing in the right direction forward.
Elon's ambition for Space X can be found within his family history.
Most notably his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman.
My dad was very adventurous.
He actually was driving along the road in Saskatchewan
and saw a plane in the field for sale.
And he thought, this looks good.
He swapped his car for the plane.
He became this pilot.
He flew all over Canada and then flew all over America.
Elon's grandfather lost all his money in the great depression.
It resulted in a radical change in his thinking,
and he became a leading figure in a movement called the technocracy.
The whole planet Earth is in danger of total destruction.
Technocracy is a scientific approach to human affairs.
Technocrats believed in removing all politicians.
Instead, scientists and engineers would run the world.
They wore grey uniforms, held mass recruitment rallies,
and even changed their names to numbers, such as 1X1809.
Above all, technocrats vowed to use science
to solve the greatest problems facing mankind.
Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy.
And here we have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil.
By definition, we must move to renewable energy.
We will eventually run out of energy and die. Civilization will collapse.
In 2004, Elon Musk invests a $6 million dollar stake
in a small electric car company called Tesla,
becoming chairman of the board.
What matters is are we making a difference in the world?
And to make that, we have to build a lot of cause
for what we see every car on the road being electric.
We will not stop.
So, this is really just the beginning of the beginning. All right.
The day I started, we had a big empty floor.
They had a one craftsman toolbox
and we had to go to IKEA to buy the desks.
We had to go out to the Dell and buy our computers.
We crimped our own Ethernet wires
and we painted the space on the weekend.
They had a Lotus Elise and a pallet full of lithium ion batteries
just come in from Korea. They said,
"we'll take these lithium-ion batteries
and we'll put them into that, Elise. We'll make a car company."
Every car Start-Up in America since Ford has gone bankrupt.
There was Rosen Motors, there was DeLorean, there was Fisker.
Car Company after Car Company and large amounts of money and time
would often be invested. Before, it was a complete wipe out.
That's the sound of a crushed automobile.
Elon Musk now has two companies
with unproven and highly experimental products.
Look at this car called The Tesla. And here we are with Elon Musk.
I'll get the door. There is a touch pad which you can touch and enter.
Too complicated for me.
July 2006 and Tesla now has its first battery powered vehicle,
the Roadster.
It's the only production electric car for sale in the U.S.
My original role was the office manager,
so I was responsible for basically everything
at the company that wasn't engineering.
We were a start-up we were very scrappy,
we hardly spent any money on anything.
But we want to launch the Roadster in 6 weeks and go.
I went down to the Santa Monica unveiling event,
which they did in an aero plane hangar.
A cocktail party with cars driving indoors.
In a circle around all the participants.
Silent, no emissions.
It's the crackle of excitement in the air.
At one point, I was in a small group conversation
with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It doesn't happen on a daily basis.
A newcomer with no experience and building cars has entered the race.
As a zero-emission sports car that can go head-to-head
with a Ferrari and a Porsche and win.
Very nice.
Everybody was very, very bullish. People were buying cars.
I was surprised. I didn't know that many people
who just buy a car that wasn't ready for $109,000. That point.
I was smitten. In fact, on the spot bought a Roadster.
I think I was customer number 17 of all their customers.
Behind the scene.
There wasn't enough ability to keep batteries thermally regulated
and they'd get too hot.
And the next thing it's starting to smell, and you know the smell.
So, we would cool the battery pack with ice packs
but felt like we had to build the enthusiasm with a promise
that was maybe a stretch.
But Elon had a way of dancing through that.
-$109,000? -It's a deal.
And our cars twice the efficiency of a Prius.
Prius is a gas guzzling hog by comparison with our cars.
It's like plugging in a hairdryer. Super simple.
To persuade folks like me that eventually all cars will be electric.
That this is the future. So much so that I'm believing in my gut
as the inevitable future is a rare skill.
Tesla has taken hundreds of orders for the Roadster.
I had a taster of this one. It's hot.
And Elon has taken millions of dollars from customers.
But production issues mean that several months on,
they're not delivering the cars.
And now the company is hemorrhaging money.
If the Roadster can sustain the company by March,
then that's it. And that scares me.
We need to get the company to cash flow positive in 6 to 9 months,
or we're screwed.
Each month that passes it literally costs us tens of millions of dollars.
We need to appreciate that.
Just headed to the Menlow store.
So, I want to do a car by car,
walk through basically a rundown of each car.
What's its status and what are the issues?
This was save the company. He was embedded.
He dug deep into every aspect of what was going on.
Holy mackerel.
Most of these Roadsters have major faults.
We have like an army of cars here. Jesus.
I'm looking like we'll be able to deliver four cars to the sales team.
This is frightening.
Now we're facing an issue, a crisis of confidence among our customers,
where you can only tell them delay so many times
and then they start to think, is this company ever going to get me a car?
He was talking to subcontractors, tier two, tier three suppliers.
Sometimes he called me at 2 in the morning.
I'm available 24/7. Call me at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
My family life was not the highlight of my years of Tesla.
These were long, long days.
it wasn't until Zach and Doreen found the faults that we then realized
we had sub-standard parts on those cars, which frankly pissed me off.
I want names named.
At the time there was incredible pressure on Elon
how are you going to tell the hardest working man that I can't get it done.
If someone is always on the hot seat
and is always the root cause for problems,
They will not be pause, organization long term.
It's not okay to be unhappy and part of this company
and so if somebody can't get happy, get divorced.
Exactly, speaking from personal experience.
In 2002, college sweethearts Elon and Justine
lost their first child, Nevada, aged just 10 weeks.
Using IVF, the couple then had twins, followed by triplets.
Suddenly, the CEO of SpaceX and the chairman of Tesla
is a father of five.
Now that you're a father,
does it spur you on even more in both of these companies?
Not really. At least I don't think there's any fundamental change
in my motivation for either company. Actually, I have less time to work
because I think I have to and want to spend time with my kids.
So, it actually I'm actually impairs my ability to execute there really.
But that's fine. I don't mind.
He compartmentalizes his brain.
People are coming in and talking to him
and every hour they tell him what's happening.
And when you date or marry Elon, you don't see him much.
So, it is hard to have a relationship in his case.
We were seeing a marital therapist,
and I think he just got tired of the stress and the uncertainty of it.
And the next day I went into my therapist's office.
And he had left a message for her to tell me
that he was filing for divorce.
So that was that was how I found out.
One of the more memorable moments of my life. Yeah.
I was very young when I met Elon, I was 22,
so I hadn't really... yeah, that was it, school and a bit of acting.
Weeks after filing for divorce, Elon travels to London on a business trip
where he meets an up-and-coming actress, in a west end nightclub.
I remember thinking, Wow, what an incredible man.
I never met anyone like him.
And I was just thinking about him and so I emailed him and said
okay, I've got some time after this shoot
so I'm going to book a flight to LA and I've never been to LA,
and it would be lovely to see you.
And he wanted to sort of fly me over and sort it all out
and I was like, No it's fine I'll take care of it.
And then he said, I don't want you to go home, and I want to marry you.
And he apologized he said, 'I'm sorry I don't have the ring,
but this is what I'd like to do.'
And so we shook hands on it and I said yes, I will do.
My father told my mother at the end of their first date
that he was going to marry her.
And so, I think I was primed to think that after ten days,
I thought, yep, that's that's how it happens. That's what love is.
Do that thing Dad...
You know, obviously move straight into the house with the children.
And it became a very real thing immediately.
-What's this game? -Did you take that from your brother?
Damn it, see this is what I was talking about.
Somebody took somebody's toy,
statistically speaking one out of the 5
has a good chance of being unhappy at any point.
I think because of my youth, I was relatively gun ho about it.
But essentially, our home life was work.
We were focused on the companies and the children and that was it.
In 2010, the space shuttle, after nearly 30 years of duty,
will be retired from service.
A contract worth billions of dollars could be handed to SpaceX,
if they can take on the duties of the retiring space shuttle.
SpaceX engineers have been on the remote pacific island
for almost two years with only one failed launch to show for it.
SpaceX launch control.
The vehicles have been recycled and turned around for another attempt.
Count launch has started. 90 seconds.
The first one was miserable for me because it was my engine on fire.
T-minus 60 seconds vehicles and Start-Up.
So the second flight, I was kind of in the doghouse with Elon
because the last one had failed. I can't do that again.
T minus 30 seconds.
When people get afraid of him. That's certainly not the right answer.
But at the same time, he is intimidating.
I can see that. It helps if you have a little bit of a thicker skin.
-6, 5 4, 3, 2, 1. -1st team sequencing is.
Falcon has cleared the tower.
The Merlin even worked beautifully.
Thank fucking God.
And I'm like, Yes, it did it. And I remember Elon,
I always sat next to Elon and we stood up and hugged.
The pressure was off from that first failure and like, we got it.
Coming up on stage separation.
Separation stages are separated.
The first stage flew beautifully and then the stage separated
and the second stage came and then the second stage started this motion.
It starts wiggling around and the engine kicking back and forth.
It's like you're carrying a glass of wine and every step you take,
the wine sloshes around well.
They ended up sloshing so high in the tanks
that we burned the tank down that it flamed the engine out.
The bottom line was we spun out of control.
It went a couple thousand miles and then crashed in the ocean again.
That failure wasn't on me, but it didn't matter.
It was terrible for the company to have another fail
when we were so close.
Elon had enough money to build three rockets.
You just told him. Just calm down.
You figure something out, we're going to fix it.
We made a mistake, and we mop it up and do it again.
So, we came back a year later. Again, with the new engine.
A much better engine.
Everything else tightened down that we learnt from the launches.
Elon said that he's it for three times and everybody could count.
It was always three strikes and you're out.
You work so hard for so long.
It's agony. It really is. It's just everything was in it
and then it failed. And to have it fail three times in a row.
It was pretty disheartening.
So, let's move on now to brown rice, eco cars.
Tesla say it is pretty nippy, which is the fastest in a drag race.
Christ almighty!
Yes, come on!
Bye!
It does 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds.
Two years after its star-studded launch,
the Roadster has moved from dream prototype
to a saleable production car.
Tesla budgeted 25 million dollars to develop the Roadster,
the bill now stands at 140 million.
This miscalculation means
that the company can't afford to make the cars for the price they promised.
400 expectant customers have already paid full deposits
are now being asked to pay at least $6,000 more.
I cannot understate the degree of grief
that I've personally gone through to make this work.
Glass sandwich every day. I wish we didn't have to raise prices.
It sucks, but I can't carry Tesla entirely by myself.
I don't have the resources to do it.
We took faith in you, and now you're just turning around
and changing the price at us, not telling us. And then we find out.
And now we're kind of hurt because we weren't told.
We can't sell cars for less than they cost us to produce.
There seemed to be a little bit of anger from some people in the room.
It was very tough.
Once you've snapped, you don't realize it
because you've gone insane. Your ability to look in the mirror
psychologically is substantially impaired.
Probably most insane people don't think they're insane.
Tough times have hit Tesla
with some buyers canceling orders of the battery powered sports car.
In 2008 we had launched the car.
The team of people had done a spectacular job
of coming up to speed from nothing.
And then Elon, he made a public announcement
that we're going to bring in the real guys from the auto industry now.
We're not going to be playing around anymore.
I was being seen more as the problem than as the solution.
I took that as a personal affront.
Didn't really feel like I should be chopped liver.
And I took a move away.
Elon decided that I am his guy.
I told him in Elon when he was interviewing. Look at my name.
It is spelled Z, e, e, v.
Zero, emission, electric, vehicle. I felt this is our destiny.
The company was bleeding a lot of money.
If they don't get the car into the market, there would be no company.
So, I came essentially as an agent of change.
I got all the executives
that I decided that should not be with us and terminated them.
Faced with financial ruin. Like his grandfather before him,
Elon adopts same clinical approach to increasing workforce efficiency.
To work at Tesla, you have to be a little crazy.
You really need to be more dedicated to the mission
than you are to your own personal growth.
Between Elon and I, there was an understanding
that I was in it for the mission as he was in it for the mission.
All a company is, is a group of people
gathered together to create a product or service.
Are these efforts that people are expanding
resulting in a better product or service?
And if they're not, stop those efforts.
Elon can be very overbearing.
I've seen Elon fire dozens and dozens and dozens of people.
He wouldn't ask anything of you or ask you to work harder than him.
And so I just kept trying to nail it every single time.
I was drinking out of a fire hose every single day for years and years.
So, it just felt like how we did things.
I feel bad that I lost those prime years with my daughter.
I didn't have as much contact from my family as I otherwise would have.
I don't know how he does it. He just keeps going and going and going.
He's amazing. The amount of energy that that man has,
I think he can just take the pain of dealing with it constantly.
And most of us can't.
I had decided that I had no work life balance and I needed to take a break.
But I remember sitting in a room with him.
And telling him that my three-year-old son was calling me dad
and that I needed to take a break.
Work hard every waking hour.
If somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100,
you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year.
He was trying to avoid bankruptcy.
Every day Elon would come home and say, tomorrow, that's it.
Being ridiculed in the press, horrible things being said.
There was something called the Tesla Death watch,
an Internet site counting down the days
till when Tesla was going to disappear.
Electric carmaker Tesla laying off 20% of the workforce, 24%.
He'd have night terrors in the middle of the night. I'd be fast asleep.
And then suddenly he would be screaming in his sleep
and trying to climb up, like in his sleep, trying to escape something.
All available resource had to be ploughed into the projects,
into the companies. He gave me an out.
He said, this will be the hard path and you don't have to stay for it.
This simultaneous failure across all of the companies he's talking about,
chewing glass and staring into the abyss. Rockets are blowing up.
And it just kept piling on.
The American people are concerned about the situation
in our financial markets and our economy, and I share their concerns.
Is the financial crisis?
Is your job safe? Can our next president do anything...
The recession is going to be deeper and longer than we thought.
Everything falling apart in the economy.
Major auto companies in America are going bankrupt.
Not a great time to fund automotive company that's not yet profitable.
When you have new technology,
it takes time to optimise that technology, everything.
Elon and I, we were in the midst for raising $100 million dollars.
You feel that you just come from where
some of these come and bang you on the head.
And then it gets much worse. This negativity.
Something bad is happening. Fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Sometimes when a company
is teetering between economic certainty and it's just a dream.
Sentiment shifts can make a difference, can turn against you.
The largest investor in the company has turned hostile.
Things like not signing legal paperwork.
And then it gets a little trickier still.
The company is running out of money.
It didn't have cash to even last to the end of 2008.
The biggest investor says we won't put another penny in the company.
Then Elon did something that I've never seen any entrepreneur do.
Going net into debt. He borrowed money from friends,
spent every penny he had, plus more.
He told all the folks at Tesla, I'll do the whole thing.
I'll invest $40 million dollars.
He had no house to his name. He had nothing. He was all in.
And what happened was people's fear switched to greed.
All of the other inside investors, ourselves included,
invested as much as we could. That wasn't our bravery.
It was Elon's bravery that we attached to.
Part of it, I think, comes from a self-affirming nature
that his brother Kimbal described as being somewhat immune to risk.
A more accurate description is that he so truly sees
the vision of what's unfolding,
that it doesn't seem fathomable that it would not happen.
Elon called a big meeting. And then Elon said,
okay, get your shit together. We have one more rocket.
Bring it down there and we launch again in six weeks.
After the Flight three, we thought we were out.
But just by luck you get a forth chance at it.
Space X has just enough existing components
to attempt a fourth and final flight to orbit.
-I was exhausted. -20 seconds.
But he rallied all of us
for not giving up and continuing this at this time
and putting everything on the last rocket.
We didn't change a lot on the rocket.
This time we changed primarily a piece of software.
And that was all it took. The rocket went to orbit.
And that means Falcon1, the first privately developed launch vehicle,
to reach Earth orbit from the ground.
It's pretty amazing.
What we're hearing in the background
is Elon Musk addressing the employees of Space X.
One of the best days of my life and a lot of people here at Space X.
It's the a culmination of a dream. Kind of mind blowing, actually.
NASA told us that we'd won a one and a half billion-dollar contract
and I couldn't hold the phone.
I just blurted out, I love you guys.
-They saved you. -Yeah, they did.
Financially and maybe even emotionally.
I tell you what, that was definitely helpful. Yeah.
There was a wrap party. And. And I don't remember the end of it.
It was the first thing that went right.
Elon was just the most joyous, incredible, wonderful thing.
It was lovely to watch him achieve.
Elon went from being ridiculed to suddenly his word was gospel.
Fame is not something that agrees with him.
The eagle has landed.
-They inspired you to do this? -Yes.
And to see them casting stones in your direction?
It's difficult.
Neil, Jim Lovell and I have come to a unanimous conclusion
that this is in fact a blueprint for a mission to nowhere.
Can we just break for a sec?