22 hours a day like what how many hours working yeah so seven days a week sleeping in the factory uh i worked everywhere from i worked in the oaks in the paint shop general assembly body shop you ever worry about yourself imploding like just too much absolutely no one should put this many hours into work this is not good and people should not work this hard i'm not they should not do this this is very painful painful in what sense it's because my ears my brain and my heart turns this is not recommended for anyone
i just did it because if i didn't do it then tesla good chance has it died i don't think you'd necessarily want to be me it's very hard to turn it off all the time it doesn't stop when i was young i didn't really know what i was going to do when i got older i think when i was i don't know 506 or something i thought i was insane because it was clear that other people did not would their mind wasn't exploding with ideas it was just strange it was like [Music] i'm strange eventually
i thought that the idea of inventing things would be really cool the reason i thought that was because i read a quote from author c clock which said that efficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and and that's really true if you go back say 300 years the things that we take for granted today uh would be you'd be burned at the stake for you know being able to fly um that's crazy being able to see over long distances being able to communicate this is stuff that that really would be considered magic in times past
if i can do some of those things basically if i can advance technology that's like magic and that would be really cool were you a little naive when you thought i can easily build an electric car and a rocket i didn't think it would be easy um like i said i thought they would probably fail um but you know like creating a company is almost like having a child so it's sort of like how do you say your child should not have food so one once you have the company you have to feed it and
nurse it and take care of it even if it it ruins you yeah [Music] but uh supposing there was some tough times in uh end of 2008 how did you get through that period of crisis yeah two thousand and we just break for a second you wanna wait a little while yeah sure if it was worth it let me sure if it was worth it one of the most difficult choices i ever faced uh in life was in 2008. i think i had maybe 30 million dollars left or 30 or 40 million left in 2008
i had two choices i could put it all into one company and then the other company would definitely die or split it between the two companies and but if i split up between two companies then both might die and you know when you put your blood sweat and tears into creating something you're building something it's like a child and so it's like which one am i going to let one starve to death i couldn't bring myself to do it so i put i split the money between the two unfortunately thank goodness they both came through
you know with tesla we're like trying to make things that people love how many how many things can you buy that you really love that really give you joy so rare so rare i wish there were more things that's what we're trying to just make things that somebody loves yes doing something useful for other people that i like doing generally starting a business i'd say number one is have a high pain threshold that's um there's a friend of mine who's got a good saying which is that starting a company is like eating glass and stirring
into the abyss that's generally what happens because when you first start a company there's lots of optimism and things that things are great and then so happiness at first is high then you encounter all sorts of issues and happiness will steadily decline and then you'll go through a whole world of hurt and then eventually you'll if you succeed and in most cases you will not succeed and tesla almost didn't succeed you came very close to failure then if you succeed then after a long time you will finally get back to happiness and i want to
know what is the one thing that has surprised you about your life well i certainly i'm surprised by the whole thing honestly i certainly didn't expect to be to be uh for any of these things to happen honestly um in fact the only reason i started a company back in 95 an internet company was because i couldn't get it there were only a few internet companies and i couldn't get a job at any of them [Music] i tried to get a job at netscape and sent my resume and i tried hanging out in the lobby
but i was too shy to talk to anyone and then i was like okay well i guess i'll have to start a company because i can't get a job anywhere really really liking what you do whatever area that you get into um given that you know even if you're if you're the best the best there's always a chance of failure so i think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing if you don't like it life is too short if you like what you're doing you think about it even when you're not working it's
something that your mind is drawn to and and if you don't like it you just really can't make it work i think well you want to do and particularly if you're starting a company you need to work super hard so what what does super hard mean when my brother and i were starting our first company i didn't have any money in fact i had negative money um i had huge student debts or in fact i couldn't afford a place to stay and an office so instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office
and we slept on the couch and we showered at the the ymca and and there there wasn't there was an isp on the floor below us just like the little tiny isp and we drilled a hole through the floor and connected a null motor cable that that gave us our internet connectivity for like 100 bucks a month and we're so hot up we had just one computer so the website was up during the day and i was coding at night seven days a week all the time and i briefly had a girlfriend in that period
and in order to be with me she had to sleep in the office so work hard like i mean every waking hour that's the thing i would say particularly if you're starting a company it's very important to to actively seek out and listen very carefully to negative feedback and this is something that people tend to avoid because it's it's painful when um when friends get a product i say look don't tell me what you like tell me what you don't like otherwise your friend is not going to tell you what he doesn't like right this
is going to say oh i love this and that and and then and leave out the this is the stuff i don't like list and sometimes even your enemies give you good negative feedback so i actually went to i went to russia three times to look at buying a refurbished icbm i can tell you it was very weird going there in 2000 late 2001 2002 going to the russian rocket forces and saying i'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets they thought i was crazy but but i did have money so that was that
was okay one good friend of mine collected a whole series of videos of rockets blowing up and made me watch those she just didn't want me to lose all my money for spacex the first three launches failed we're just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the the fourth launch that fourth launch had failed we would have been dead i tried very hard to to get the right expertise in for for spacex i tried hard to to find a great chief engineer for the rocket but the good chief engineers wouldn't join
and the bad ones well there was no no point in hiring him so i ended up being chief engineer of the rocket so if i could have found somebody better than we would have maybe had less than three failures when you had that third failure in a row did you think i need to pack this in never why not i don't ever give up i mean i'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated you know there are american heroes who don't like this idea neil armstrong gene cernan have both testified against commercial space flight and
the way that you're developing it and i wonder what you think of that i was very sad to see that um because those guys are yeah you know those guys are heroes of mine so it's really tough you know i i wish they would come and visit and and see the hardware that we're doing here and i think that would change their mind they inspired you to do this didn't they yes and to see them casting stones in your direction [Music] [Applause] it's difficult did you expect them to cheer you on so they hoping they
would when critics say you can't do this your answer to them is we've done it
