Elon Musk Interview

Meet The Man Who's Revolutionizing The Future Of Driving - And The Universe

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Quick Bio Elon Musk was a major newsmaker again in 2014, for events such as when he announced the upcoming $35,000 Model 3 would be arriving in 2017 -- a seriously exciting development in the future of electric cars. We got a chance to interview the billionaire philanthropic genius about one of his other ventures, SpaceX, earlier this year -- check it out:



Elon Musk is a billionaire many times over, but he is not much interested in discussing money. He has passion for what he does, and if that brings in cash, then so be it. “People definitely shouldn’t pursue money for its own sake,” says Musk.



Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk later moved to Canada. In 1997 he graduated with a B.A. in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, then got a physics degree. He became an American citizen in 2002, about the same time he launched the revolutionary



Musk is a big believer in reusing spacecraft hardware, a common-sense idea the workability of which has long eluded aerospace providers. “The way rockets work now is they’re expendable,” says Musk, 42. “You buy them once, then throw them away. Imagine if other means of transport were expendable. They wouldn’t be used very much -- planes, cars, bicycles, horses. A 747 costs about a quarter-billion dollars, and you would need two for a round trip. But nobody is paying a half-billion dollars to go to lunch in New York.”



Musk plans to recover his initial rocket booster stage with something called Grasshopper, a vehicle with legs that, if all goes well, will land back on Earth after it’s been jettisoned, rather than crashing into the ocean as space junk. He plans to test Grasshopper later this year, first over water, later over land.



Mars is also on Musk’s radar screen, though, like anything he does, he gradually builds up to it. “We need very big rockets,” he says. SpaceX’s first vehicle, Falcon 1, produced nearly 100,000 pounds of thrust; the current Falcon 9, which has thrice launched cargo to the International Space Station, delivers more than 10 times that. Falcon Heavy, at over 4 million pounds of thrust, will be two-thirds the size of the Apollo Saturn V and is expected to be tested next year.



The rockets will get even bigger. “We’re looking at our Mars transporter being around 15 million pounds of thrust,” says Musk. “And that one will switch to methane [fuel] for a high specific impulse system.”



Among Musk’s companies, past and present, are



The following are edited excerpts from a longer phone conversation with a fascinating entrepreneur. Elon Musk was a major newsmaker again in 2014, for events such as when he announced the upcoming $35,000 Model 3 would be arriving in 2017 -- a seriously exciting development in the future of electric cars. We got a chance to interview the billionaire philanthropic genius about one of his other ventures, SpaceX, earlier this year -- check it out:Elon Musk is a billionaire many times over, but he is not much interested in discussing money. He has passion for what he does, and if that brings in cash, then so be it. “People definitely shouldn’t pursue money for its own sake,” says Musk.Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk later moved to Canada. In 1997 he graduated with a B.A. in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, then got a physics degree. He became an American citizen in 2002, about the same time he launched the revolutionary Space Exploration Technologies Corporation , known as SpaceX.Musk is a big believer in reusing spacecraft hardware, a common-sense idea the workability of which has long eluded aerospace providers. “The way rockets work now is they’re expendable,” says Musk, 42. “You buy them once, then throw them away. Imagine if other means of transport were expendable. They wouldn’t be used very much -- planes, cars, bicycles, horses. A 747 costs about a quarter-billion dollars, and you would need two for a round trip. But nobody is paying a half-billion dollars to go to lunch in New York.”Musk plans to recover his initial rocket booster stage with something called Grasshopper, a vehicle with legs that, if all goes well, will land back on Earth after it’s been jettisoned, rather than crashing into the ocean as space junk. He plans to test Grasshopper later this year, first over water, later over land.Mars is also on Musk’s radar screen, though, like anything he does, he gradually builds up to it. “We need very big rockets,” he says. SpaceX’s first vehicle, Falcon 1, produced nearly 100,000 pounds of thrust; the current Falcon 9, which has thrice launched cargo to the International Space Station, delivers more than 10 times that. Falcon Heavy, at over 4 million pounds of thrust, will be two-thirds the size of the Apollo Saturn V and is expected to be tested next year.The rockets will get even bigger. “We’re looking at our Mars transporter being around 15 million pounds of thrust,” says Musk. “And that one will switch to methane [fuel] for a high specific impulse system.”Among Musk’s companies, past and present, are PayPal , which was acquired by eBay in 2002, Tesla Motors , the maverick electric car manufacturer, and SolarCity . But the one we focused on for this interview was SpaceX, based in Los Angeles, Calif., and the one in which NASA has invested $1.5 billion to help find a Shuttle replacement.The following are edited excerpts from a longer phone conversation with a fascinating entrepreneur.

Jim Clash: Contrast the early disappointment when your third SpaceX rocket test failed in 2008 with the joy of launch successes later on.

Elon Musk: It felt absolutely horrible to have the third failure of the rocket, and our odds of success were extremely low. We were zero for three. We had hardly any money left and it was the worst recession since the Great Depression. Fortunately we had enough for one extra flight, and that one succeeded. Things continued to improve from there. I didn’t actually feel joy or elation until several launches later. Probably the first time was when we did the initial flight of Dragon [2010], the one that didn’t dock with the Space Station, just went around the Earth and came back.

JC: How about two years later when you flew cargo to, and docked with, ISS? That must have been a joyful occasion.

EM: That was amazing, fantastic, hard to believe really.

JC: Do you want to travel in space yourself?

EM: I’d like to. It’s not the reason I’m doing this, but I do want to go into space at some point.

JC: With SpaceX?