Elon Musk Motivational Video (video and formatted transcript)

So when everybody leaves, it's just Elon sitting at home brushing his teeth, just a bunch of ideas bouncing around in your head. When did you realize that that's not the case with most people?

I think when I was, I don't know, five or six or something, I thought I was insane. It was just strange because it was clear that other people did not... their mind wasn't exploding with ideas. I was like, "Hmm, I'm strange." I don't think you'd necessarily want to be me. People wouldn't like it that much. It's very hard to turn it off. It's like a never-ending explosion all the time.

Now is the time to overrule this administration's pledge to mediocrity. Listen, Tesla's to sell, sell, sell. You don't want to own this stock; you shouldn't even rent the darn thing. Why? Because beyond the hype, there's just not much going on here. Tesla still has yet to turn a profit. There'll be a 1.5 billion dollar company with no profit. His most recent quarter actually lost more money than it did the year before. 1.5 billion losing more money than the year before. This is a company with limited visibility. You put 90 billion dollars, like 50 years' worth of breaks, into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Enter One. I had a friend who said, "You don't just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers."

Private enterprise will not ever lead a space frontier, not because I don't want them to, but my read of history tells me they can't. It's not possible. You know, there are American heroes who don't like this idea. Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan have both testified against commercial space flight in the way that you're developing it, and I wonder what you think of that.

I was very sad to see that because those guys are... those guys are heroes of mine. So it's really tough. I wish they would come and visit and see the hardware we're doing here. I think that would change their mind.

And to see them casting stones in your direction... it's difficult. Did you expect them to cheer you on?

What I'm trying to do is make a significant difference in space flight and help make space flight accessible to almost anyone. One of the most difficult choices I ever faced in life was in 2008. I think I had maybe 30 million dollars left, 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, but if I split it between the two companies, then both might die. When you put your blood, sweat, and tears into creating something, you're building something, it's like a child. It's like, "Which one am I gonna let starve to death?" I couldn't bring myself to do it, so I split the money between the two. Fortunately, thank goodness, they both came through.

Well, there's a ton of failures along the way, that's for sure. As I support for SpaceX, the first three launches failed, and we were just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the fourth launch. If that fourth launch had failed, we would have been dead. So, multiple failures along the way. Tesla really faced the severe threat of death due to the Model 3 production ramp. Essentially, the company was bleeding money like crazy, and if we didn't solve these problems in a very short period of time, we would die. It was extremely difficult to solve them.

I went to Russia three times to look at buying a refurbished ICBM. I can tell you it was very weird going there in late 2001, 2002, going to the Russian rocket forces and saying, "I'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets, but you can keep the nuke." They thought I was crazy, but I did have money, so that was okay. After making several trips to Russia, I came to the conclusion that my thought was, "There's not enough will to explore and expand beyond Earth and have a Mars base," but I came to the conclusion that that was wrong. In fact, there's plenty of will, particularly in the United States, because the United States is a nation of explorers. The people who came here from other parts of the world, I think the United States is really just a distillation of the spirit of human exploration. After my third trip, I said, "Okay, what we really need to do here is try to solve the space transport problem," and I started SpaceX.

This was against the advice of pretty much everyone I talked to. It was tough going there in the beginning because I'd never built anything physical. I mean, I built little model rockets as a kid and that kind of thing, but I never had a company that built anything physical. So, I had to figure out how to do all these things and bring together the right team of people. It was tough going. The thing about a rocket is that the passing grade is 100%. You don't get to actually test the rocket in the real environment that it's going to be in. The best analogy for rocket engineering is if you want to create a really complicated bit of software, you can't run the software as an integrated whole and you can't run it on the computer it's intended to run on. But the first time you put it all together and run it on that computer, it must run with no bugs.

At the first launch, I was picking up bits of rocket near the launch site. It was a bit sad. But we learned with each successive flight and were able to, eventually with the fourth flight in 2008, reach orbit. I tried very hard to get the right expertise in for SpaceX. I tried hard 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 point in hiring them. So, I ended up being the chief engineer of the rocket. If I could have found somebody better, then we would have maybe had fewer than three failures.

How did you get the expertise to be the chief technology officer of a rocket ship company?

Well, I do have a physics background. That's helpful as a foundation. And then I read a lot of books and talked to a lot of smart people.

Well, like I said, I read a lot of books, talked to a lot of people, and have a great team.

When you had that third failure in a row, did you think, "I need to pack this in"?

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.

How did you figure you were going to start a car company and be successful at it?

Well, I didn't really think Tesla would be successful. I thought we would most likely fail, but I thought that we at least could address the false perception that people had that an electric car had to be ugly and slow and boring, like a golf cart.

If something's important enough, you should try even if the probable outcome is failure.

Were you a little naive when you thought, "I'll just easily build an electric car and a rocket"?

I didn't think it would be easy. Like I said, I thought they would probably fail. But, you know, creating a company is almost like having a child. It's sort of like, how do you say your child should not have food? So, once you have the company, you have to feed it and nurse it and take care of it, even if it ruins you.

But supposing there were tough times in 2008, end of 2008, how did you get through that period of crisis?

Where does that come from, or how do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea? Where do you get the internal strength to do that?

Well, first of all, I'd say I actually think I feel fear quite strongly. It's not as though I just have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. But there are just times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, that you do it in spite of the fear. People should think, "Well, I feel fear about this, and therefore I shouldn't do it." It's normal to feel fear. You'd have to definitely have something mentally wrong if you didn't feel fear. Particularly if you're starting a company, you need to work super hard.

Well, when my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment, we just rented a small office, and we slept on the couch. We showered at the YMCA. We were so hard up, we had just one computer. The website was up during the day, and I was coding at night, seven days a week, all the time. I sort of briefly had a girlfriend during that period, and in order to be with me, she had to sleep in the office. Work hard, like every waking hour. That's the thing I would say, particularly if you're starting a company. If you do simple math, say, "Okay, 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 as the other company."

I think certainly being focused on something that you're confident will have high value to someone else and just being really rigorous in making that assessment, because people tend to have a natural human tendency for wishful thinking. So, a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say, "What's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit?" That is a really difficult thing to tell. You need to be very rigorous in your self-analysis. And then just work like hell. You just have to put in 80 to 100-hour weeks every week. All those things improve the odds of success.

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. But even if you're the best, there's always a chance of failure, and if you don't like it, you really can't make it work. If you're creating a company or joining a company, the most important thing is to attract great people. Either you join a group that's amazing that you really respect, or if you're building a company, you've got to gather great people. A company is just a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service. Depending on how talented and hardworking that group is, and the degree to which they're focused cohesively in a good direction, that will determine the success of the company. So, do everything you can to gather great people.

If you're creating a company, then focus on signal over noise. A lot of companies get confused. They spend money on things that don't actually make the product better. For example, at Tesla, we've never spent any money on advertising. We put all the money into R&D and manufacturing and design to try to make the car as good as possible. I think that's the way to go. For any given company, just keep thinking about, are these efforts resulting in a better product or service? If not, stop those efforts. Don't just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it's good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles, which is rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and reason up from there. This is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense or if it's just what everybody else is doing. It's hard to think that way. You can't think that way about everything. It takes a lot of effort, but if you're trying to do something new, it's the best way to think. That framework was developed by physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics. It's a really powerful method.

The final thing I would encourage you to do is, now is the time to take risks. You don't have kids. As you get older, your obligations increase. Once you have a family, you start taking risks not just for yourself but for your family as well. It gets much harder to do things that might not work out. So now is the time to do that before you have those obligations. I would encourage you to take risks now, do something bold. You won't regret it.

When I was a kid, I was wondering, what's the meaning of life? Why are we here? What's it all about? I came to the conclusion that what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask. The more that we can increase the scope and scale of human consciousness, the better we are able to ask these questions. I think there are certain things necessary to ensure that the future is good. Some of those things are long-term sustainable transport and sustainable energy generation. To be a spacefaring civilization and for humanity to be out there among the stars and be a multi-planetary species, I think being a multi-planet species, being out there among the stars, is important for the long-term survival of humanity. That's one reason, kind of like life insurance for life collectively, life as we know it. But then the part that I find personally most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure, and it makes people excited about the future. If you consider two futures, one where we are forever confined to Earth until eventually something terrible happens, or another future where we are out there on many planets, maybe even going beyond the solar system... How many things can you buy that you really love, that really give you joy? It's so rare. I wish there were more things. That's what we're trying to do: make things that somebody loves. I think that second version is incredibly exciting and inspiring. There need to be reasons to get up in the morning. Life can't just be about solving problems. There's got to be things that people find inspiring and make life worth living.

The universe, as we know it, will dissipate into a fine mist of cold nothingness eventually. I don't want to sound like things are too dark because I think you have to be optimistic about the future. There's no point in being pessimistic. It's just too negative; it doesn't help. I think you want to be... my theory is, I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. What are the set of things that can be done to make the future better? I think that a future where we are a spacefaring civilization and out there among the stars is very exciting. This makes me look forward to the future. This makes me want that future. There need to be things that make you look forward to waking up in the morning, looking forward to the day, looking forward to the future. A future where we are a spacefaring civilization and out there among the stars is very exciting. That is the thing we want. If you knew we would not be a spacefaring civilization but forever confined to Earth, that would not be a good future. That would be very sad.

If there are two futures and one future is where we are out there among the stars and the things we read about and see in science fiction movies, the good ones, are true, we have these starships and we're going to see what other planets are like and we're a multi-planet species and the scope and scale of consciousness is expanded across many civilizations and many planets and many star systems, this is a great future. This is a wonderful thing to me, and that's what we should strive for.

People look like they have a much better life than they really do. People are posting pictures of when they're really happy, they're modifying those pictures to be better looking. Even if they're not modifying the pictures, they're at least selecting the pictures for the best lighting, the best angle. People basically seem way better looking than they really are, and they're way happier seeming than they really are. If you look at everyone on Instagram, you might think, "Man, they're all these happy beautiful people, and I'm not that good looking and I'm not happy, so I must suck," and that's going to make me feel sad. When in fact, those people you think are super happy are actually not that happy. Some of them are really depressed, they're very sad. Some of the happiest seeming people are actually some of the saddest people in reality. I think things like that can make people quite sad.

This may sound corny, but love is the answer. It wouldn't hurt to have more love in the world. I think people should be nicer.

“”So many people tried to talk me out of starting a rocket company. It was crazy.””

This reminds me so much of Rush Limbaugh. I was fortunate to have found Rush’s show his first week in Sacramento, 3-4 years before he went national.

Rush often talks about all the people who tried to warn him that a nationally syndicated radio show in the middle of the day would never fly, never be successful. Most of the people advising him this way were failures. Why on Earth would you listen to failures?

I don’t remember Rush ever bragging that he was the hardest-working man in show business. He just did it. (Besides, most of Rush’s faux bragging was to further tweak the liberal wackos). The way he established and grew his radio show was impressive. His Rush To Excellence tours throughout America solidified and expanded his audience, until, eventually, 650 radio stations carried his show.

I remember the four years of his television show. He had a map of the United States, and during every show he would place more pushpins as his TV audience grew and grew. It was just like his radio show expansion. Eventually, the entire fruited plain was covered with pushpins.

Rush and Robert Heinlein are smiling down on Musk, cheering him on to greater heights and accomplishments.

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