Elon Musk

WATTENBERG: Elon Musk, welcome to THINK TANK. We normally begin these sessions by asking you a little bit about background, where you were born, where you went to school, what you do and then we’ll just pick it up from there.
MUSK: Well, I was born in South Africa, lived there until I was 17. Came to North America of my own accord, against my parent’s wishes. And was in Canada for a few years. I started school there which is where I met my wife.
Transferred down to the University of Pennsylvania and got a degree in physics, degree in business at Wharton. Came out to California with the intent of doing a PHD in the material science and physics [unintelligible] with an eye towards using that as an energy storage unit for electric vehicles.
I ended up deferring that graduate work to start a couple to start a couple of area companies, one of which people have heard about, such as Pay Pal.
WATTENBERG: What is that? I’m sort of a techie ignoramus. What does Pay Pal do?
MUSK: Pay Pal is the leading internet payment mechanism. It’s probably like an American Express of the Twenty First Century.
WATTENBERG: What does it do that my American Express card doesn’t do? I mean, I can order things on the internet with a credit card, can’t I?
MUSK: Yeah you can. It’s hard to explain Pay Pal by analogy since it’s really a new sort of entity.
So, what that allows you to do is to send money to a business or person just by entering an email address. And the money easily transfers from your Pay Pal account to their Pay Pal account.
If you have money in Pay Pal account, it will do an internal transfer, almost like a bank transfer. If you don’t have money in your account, it’ll draw from your credit card or draw from your real world bank --
WATTENBERG: This was your idea.
MUSK: There were two other people involved but I was responsible for many of the core idea.
MUSK: I had just sold my first internet company which -- internet software primarily for media companies, allowing it to publish and manage contents on the web. I had also some special functionality. We also had map and directions functionality, yellow pages functionality, white pages.
And it’s -- you know, when you went to a web site -- a web site like a Knight Ridder newspaper web site or New York Times you wouldn’t know you would actually be using our software, but not know -- you wouldn’t that you were using our software, but you would be.
So, any way, we sold that to Compaq for about 300 million dollars in cash in -- early in 99. And after I left the company and started what was originally called X.com which later became Pay Pal.
WATTENBERG: So, now we’re on this most remarkable factory floor of SpaceX. I felt I’ve been around. I’ve never quite seen anything like this. What are you doing here?
MUSK: SpaceX is developing markets for taking satellites and people to orbit and beyond. So, we’ve finished development of and done a few test launches in our small rocket, which is the Falcon One, which you see part of over here.
And we have in development a big rocket which is the Falcon 9. And that’s intended to service the space station, as well as deliver very large satellites to orbit.
WATTENBERG: Did you design these or are they your concept?
MUSK: Yes, I’m the chief designer in the company.
WATTENBERG: -- designer and the businessman.
MUSK: Yes.
WATTENBERG: A good combination.
MUSK: Yeah, I think it is a good combination.
WATTENBERG: And as I understand it -- so you make your money on these by taking up other people’s satellites to --
MUSK: Yes.