Interview: "Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars" (TSLA)
From Wired Science:
When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a
vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that
same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable
of reaching Mars—sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island
in the Pacific—you need to find another diagnosis. That’s the thing
about extreme entrepreneurialism: There’s a fine line between madness
and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the
world.
All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than
that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological
investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren’t more risk-tolerant
than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to
believe in their own visions, so much so that they think what they’re
embarking on isn’t really that risky. They’re wrong, of course, but
without the ability to be so wrong—to willfully ignore all those
naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary—no one would possess the
necessary audacity to start something radically new.
I have never met an entrepreneur who fits this model more than Elon
Musk. All of the entrepreneurs I admire most—Musk, Jeff Bezos, Reed
Hastings, Jack Dorsey, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Bill Gates, Steve
Jobs, and a few others—have sought not just to build great companies but
to take on problems that really matter. Yet even in this class of
universe-denters, Musk stands out. After cofounding a series of Internet
companies, including PayPal, the South African transplant could simply
have retired to enjoy his riches. Instead he decided to disrupt the most
difficult-to-master industries in the world. At 41 he is reinventing
the car with Tesla, which is building all-electric vehicles in a
Detroit-scale factory. (Wired profiled this venture in issue
18.10.) He is transforming energy with SolarCity, a startup that leases
solar-power systems to homeowners.
And he is leading the private space race with SpaceX, which is poised
to replace the space shuttle and usher us into an interplanetary age.
Since Musk founded the company in 2002, it has developed a series of
next-generation rockets that can deliver payloads to space for a
fraction of the price of legacy rockets. In 2010 SpaceX became the first
private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and bring it back; in
2012 it sent a craft to berth successfully with the International Space
Station.
It’s no wonder the character of Tony Stark in Iron Man,
played by Robert Downey Jr., was modeled on Musk: This is
superhero-grade stuff. I sat down with him at Tesla’s Fremont,
California, factory to discuss how cheaper and (eventually) reusable
rockets might someday put humans on Mars.
Chris Anderson: You’re not a rocket scientist by training. You’re not a space engineer.
Elon Musk: That’s true. My background educationally
is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering
environment—my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there
were lots of engineery things around me. When I asked for an
explanation, I got the true explanation of how things work. I
also did things like make model rockets, and in South Africa there were
no premade rockets: I had to go to the chemist and get the ingredients
for rocket fuel, mix it, put it in a pipe.
Anderson: But then you became an Internet entrepreneur.
Musk: I never had a job where I made anything
physical. I cofounded two Internet software companies, Zip2 and PayPal.
So it took me a few years to kind of learn rocket science, if you will.
Anderson: How were you drawn to space as your next venture?
Musk: In 2002, once it became clear that PayPal was
going to get sold, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine,
the entrepreneur Adeo Ressi, who was actually my college housemate. I’d
been staying at his home for the weekend, and we were coming back on a
rainy day, stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway. He was asking
me what I would do after PayPal. And I said, well, I’d always been
really interested in space, but I didn’t think there was anything I
could do as an individual. But, I went on, it seemed clear that we would
send people to Mars. Suddenly I began to wonder why it hadn’t happened
already. Later I went to the NASA website so I could see the schedule of
when we’re supposed to go. [Laughs.]...MORE
