How would I describe myself? I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something, which is fine. I kind of think of myself more as an engineer and a designer, maybe inventor, rather than entrepreneur. If something has to be designed and invented, and you have to figure out how to ensure that the value of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs, then that is probably my core skill. I spend most of the week with my engineering and design team. So, I guess the way that I usually describe myself is more as sort of an engineer than an entrepreneur, because most of what I do is engineering. Trying to create new technology that's important, but fun and cool at the same time.
The things that I’m interested in are advanced technology and the things that are pushing the forefront and I think are perhaps likely to change the future of humanity in a positive way. And I found out that I needed to run the company in order to design and engineer the things that are important, or that I think of as important, otherwise somebody else makes me do a different thing. So, if I wanted to engineer the things that I liked as opposed to being told what to engineer, it seemed I had to start a company and run the company.
It’s difficult of course for someone to come up with praise for oneself, and there’s bad and good here. I am no saint but I generally try to do the right thing. I always look to figure out how I can better understand things, and I actually really take the position that I am always to some degree wrong and the aspiration is to be less wrong. We are always to some degree wrong. It doesn't matter who you are. I think trying to minimize the wrong headedness overtime, I believe in that philosophy.
I care a lot about the truth of things and trying to understand the truth of things. I think that’s important, if you’re trying to come up with some solution than the truth is really really important.
I am a very literal person, pretty much take what I say at face value that's what I mean. I am not a naturally extroverted person. I mean I used to be really horrendous in public, I’m not that great as it is, but I used to be really horrendous. I mean I would sort of shake and be unable to speak, but I kind of learned not to do that. I much rather just be doing engineering stuff and design. But you know if you're in the car business, you got to sell cars and go out there and do promotional stuff.
I seem the have a high innate drive, and that’s been true even since I was a little kid I should say, I really had a very strong intrinsic drive. Sort of do all sort of risky things, like why did I do those things? that’s crazy. I think I'm kind of constitutionally geared to just keep going, and I can get really sort of get set on something and be able to keep going in that direction.
When I was a kid I didn't have any grand design. I probably wasn't that ordinary but my lack of ordinariness did not manifest itself till later in life, or it wasn't all that obvious. But I think people can choose to be not ordinary, they can choose to not necessarily conform to the conventions that were taught them by their parents. I think it's possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary. I just think sometimes the things that seem quite clear and obvious to me I don’t understand they aren’t that obvious to everyone. I don't know. Certainly there are times when things don't go well, then that's quite disparaging for sure, and then it's difficult to proceed with the same level of enthusiasm. But I do think that the things we are doing are pretty important to the future and if we don't succeed, then it's not clear what other things would succeed. And if we don't succeed then we'll be certainly pointed to as a reason why people shouldn't even try for these things. So I think it's important that we do whatever is necessary to keep going.
My drive to get things done is sort of disconnected from hope or enthusiasm. I actually don't care about hope, enthusiasm, or motivation, I just give it everything I got. You just keep going and get it done. I don’t ever give up, I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated. I certainly have lost many battles, so far I have not lost the war, but I've certainly lost many battles. More than I can count probably.
I wouldn’t say I’m fearless. Well, first of all I'd say I actually think I feel fear quite strongly. There's fear of failure, I certainly have fear of failure. But if I think that what I’m doing is important enough then I just override the fear. If the stakes are high, if the stakes are really important then I will overcome the fear and just do it anyway. Essentially drive overrides fear. It's like, people shouldn't think "I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn't do it" it's normal to feel fear. People should ignore fear if it's irrational, and even if it's rational and the stake is worth it it's still worth proceeding. You’d have to have something mentally wrong with you if you don't feel fear. But I feel fear more strongly than I would like, it’s kinda annoying, I wish I felt it less. There are just times when something is important enough that you believe in it enough that you do it in spite of fear. But it does cost me a lot of stress and anger.
You know, actually something that can be helpful is fatalism to some degree. If you just accept the probabilities then that diminishes fear. When starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10% and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose everything, but that maybe we would make some progress. If we could just move the ball forward, even if we died maybe some other company could pick up the baton and keep moving it forward, so that’d still do some good. Yeah, same with Tesla, I thought the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low.
I did have for a while there just sort of horrible nightmares of rockets failing before launch. In the very beginning our rockets did not succeed so I think that sort of traumatic event sticks with you. As we get closer to a rocket launch my sleep gets worse I mean it's more stress.
I do have some dark dreams I don't know why, I've always had those from when I was a kid. Just like really vivid dreams which are often scary, and I don't remember them very well. Oddly enough I also sleep fairly well most of the time. I do think it correlates to stress in the real world. I am sure I have good dreams sometimes, but I don't remember the good dreams. The ones that I remember are the nightmares.
These introspective questions are interesting. It’s hard to evaluate yourself on these things. Yeah, it’s not as much fun being me as you think, I don’t know. I think it sounds better than it is. It definitely could be worse for sure, but I’m not sure I want to be me.
In terms of what your definition of balance is, my life would probably be pretty unbalanced by the definition of most people. I work quite a lot, I probably put in sort of between 80 and 100 hours of work. It has really varied quite a bit over time. These days it's probably 80, 85 hours per week. For a while there it was over 100 hours per week and that's just a very high amount of pain. The difficulty and pain of work hours really increased exponentially, it’s not linear. When the financial crisis hit in 2008/2009 it was just every day, seven days a week, morning till night and dream about work. It was terrible.
My day is probably a bit different than people think it is, most of my time is actually spent on engineering and design. That's probably like 70% of my time.
I've got more ideas than time to implement. There are sometimes, like, late at night, if I've been thinking about something and I can't sleep, and there's something bothering me, then it'll occur then. I'll be up for several hours pacing around the house thinking about things, occasionally I'll sketch something or send myself an email or something like that. This sounds really cliche, but it happens a lot in the shower. The shower is probably like the most.. wake up, go shower in the morning. I don't know what it is about showers. I think what is really happened is things have percolated in the subconscious and it's not really occurring in the shower, but you're kinda getting the results from last night's you know, computation, basically. I just sort of stand there in the shower and - sounds wrong but yeah, I do.
Not to mention the Burning Man epiphanies. Those are huge. One key idea for a supersonic vertical takeoff and landing electric plane occurred to me at Burning Man. It's a very creative place. So yeah.. Shower and Burning Man that’s it.
Getting up for me usually is about 7, but I go to bed late. Usually I go to bed around 1 am or so. Sleep is really great because I find if I don't get enough sleep then I'm quite grumpy. I mean, obviously, I think most people are that way. I try to figure out what's the right amount of sleep, because I found I could drop below a certain threshold of sleep and although I could be awake more hours, and I could sustain it, I would get less done because my mental acuity would be affected. I found generally the right number for me is around six to six and half hours on average per night. That is an average though.
I think it's probably true that having a good breakfast is a good idea, but usually I don't have time for that. Sometimes it's made for me, but probably half the time I don't have any breakfast. I'll have a coffee or something like that. I'm trying to cut down on sweet stuff. I think I probably should have an omelet and a coffee or something like that. That seems like the right thing and sometimes I do have that.
I used to have so much coffee and Diet Coke that I'd get really wired and then I'd get over-caffeinated and it wouldn't be good. Diet coke is good, there's something that they put in that stuff that is - you know, you never get sick of it for some reason. It's some infernal ingredient. I'm trying to cut down these days. There was probably times when I had like eight a day or something ridiculous. I think these days it's probably one or two. I'm cutting down to, I think, more reasonable portions these days.
Lunch is usually served to me during a meeting, and I finish it in five minutes. It's a bad habit. Dinner is where the calories really come into play. If I have dinner meetings - they're the worst, you eat enough for two people at those things. You have the appetizer, and the main course, and all that sort of stuff. Business dinners are like the thing where I probably eat way too much. I certainly could be slimmer I think. I work out once or twice a week. I mean, yeah, once or twice. I should do it more often, for sure. I usually just do a little bit on the treadmill or lifting some weights, I suppose.
Having a smartphone is incredibly helpful because that means you can do email during inter-social periods. You can do email practically whenever you're awake - you're in a car, in the bathroom, walking, everywhere. Whenever possible I try to communicate asynchronously, so that’s really helpful to have email for SpaceX and Tesla integrated on my phone. I'm really good at email, I got skillz, I got mad skillz on the email front. I'm constantly on email.
Then I have to apply a lot of hours to actual working. The way I generally do it is I'll be working at SpaceX on Monday and then Monday night fly to the bay area. Then Tuesday and Wednesday at the bay area at Tesla, and then fly back on Wednesday night and then Thursday and Friday at SpaceX. I wouldn't recommend running two companies, it really decreases your freedom. I work a lot, I mean a lot, I'm sort of in work triage mode a lot of the time.
Most of my remaining waking hours I try to reserve time for my kids because I love to spend time with them. Kids are really great, I mean 99% of the time they make you happier. Of anything in my life I would say kids by far make me the happiest. Most of the time kids are kind of in their own world so most of the times they don't need to talk to their dad hours at a time. The great thing about something like an iPhone or BlackBerry or whatever it is, is that you can intermix activities. So I can be with my kids and on email at the same time since they don't require constant attention. I can be in the same room with them and get some emails done, get some work done, and whenever they want to talk to me they can.
We play video games together. I like playing video games, and they are all boys so they like playing video games too. And we try to do things like travel places. I do drag them along on a lot of things, actually. You know they're a little blasé about the cars, they're remarkably unimpressed - I wish they were sort of more interested. Maybe they'll get more interested later. Well, I think if they're inclined to.. I mean, if they're really interested in working at Tesla or SpaceX then I'd help them do that. I'm not sure I'd want to, necessarily, try to insert them into the CEO role at some point, you know. It's sort of like, if the rest of the team and the board felt that they were the right person then that would be fine, but I wouldn't want people to feel like I'd installed my kid there. I don't think that'd be good for either the companies or the kid, really.
I do encourage them to ask questions.. kids go through this asking why stage. You have this sort of chained whys. Like why is this this way? And why is that?.. And why is that?.. And why..and why.. And answering those questions gladly and encouraging them to ask questions is definitely a good idea, you just want to encourage curiosity, you want to encourage tenacity. One of my kids in particular is a master of the chained why.
Heritability of traits is much greater than I thought. I had assumed that in the nature versus nurture, it was much more in the nurture. But having five kids I think it's much more nature. I mean what are you? you are hardware and software right? so the difference between one person and the next must be either a hardware or a software difference. Why are kids that may have the exact same background, or same school and same everything, yet there is widely different capabilities? they had the same input experiences, so then it must be the hardware differences.
When a crisis flares up in either one of the businesses or the kids it can be quite a bit overwhelming. When things are going well with family and things are going well with work then I’m happy.
I do have an issue with punctuality I must admit. One thing I should say is when I sort of cite a schedule, it’s actually the schedule I think is true. It’s not some fake schedule that I don’t think is true. I may be delusional, that’s possible and it maybe happened from time to time. But it’s never some knowingly fake deadline, ever.
I try to get feedback from as many people as possible. I have, like, friends and I ask them what they think about this, that, or the other thing. Larry Page is a good friend of mine. I value his advice a lot, and I have many other good friends.
I think it's good to solicit feedback and particularly negative feedback, actually. Obviously, people don't love the idea of giving you negative feedback, unless it's on blogs they’ll do that. I don't have a problem with negative feedback. I'm actually always interested in negative feedback. The biggest challenge I think is making sure you have a corrective feedback loop, and then maintaining that corrective feedback loop over time even when people want to tell you exactly what you want to hear. Nor do I have a problem with critical reviews, If I had a problem with critical reviews I would spend my time battling critical reviews. There have been hundreds of negative articles. I don't have a problem with critical reviews, I have a problem with false reviews. I don't like it when people think wrong things. I mean I'm far from flawless, but I don't like when people think wrong things about me.
I don't like the sort of celebrity element, like when people sort of write trivialities. Like why write about that? Obviously some people think that’s interesting, hopefully not many. Sometimes people write things that make me concerned if my kids will read that. That’s probably the most concerning thing. But I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone that would be cool. It's a double edged sword for sure. It's gotten a lot harder for me to just have a drink at a bar. If I go to just hang someplace with my friends then people come up to me quite a lot. They're always really nice and everything.
As far as role models, I wouldn't say there was any one particular role model. I don't really compare myself to anyone. There’s some people in history that I admire and think are great, certainly the scientists and engineers, and literary figures and, the great technologists. Steve Jobs at Apple, Bill Gates, and I actually thought Disney was a great innovator, Larry Page and Sergey Brin for sure, they’re friends of mine they have done an amazing job. I’m in general a fan of the whole Google team. Obviously Jeff Bezos is doing some impressive stuff with Amazon. Warren Buffett on the investment side. I think Bill Gates has done a number of very impressive things obviously with Microsoft and the Gates foundation.
Steve Jobs was a very unique individual, I think everyone and their mom looks up to Steve Jobs in that respect. I'm not sure if there's anyone that's going to be like him for a very long time. He's certainly someone I've admired. Although I did try to talk to him once at a party and he was super rude to me, but I don't think it was me. I think it was, sort of, you know I'm not the first. Larry Page was the guy that introduced me to Steve Jobs. So it's not as like I'm going tugging on his coat like, you know, please talk to me. Being introduced by Larry is not bad. Obviously he was an incredible guy and made fantastic products. The iPhone was a really great invention. Something that Steve Jobs was, that was quite admirable, was that he was ultra product focused down to the little details. And he and other people at Apple would really try hard to have these, on a high-level and a small level, delightful things happen. The product just made you happy, and that's what we tried to do with the Model S. There was a certain - the guy had a certain magic about him that was really inspiring. I think that's really great. I think Steve Jobs is way cooler than I am.
There's a lot of great people out there and I think also historically guys like Edison and Tesla. Edison was certainly a role model, probably one of the biggest role models. It is an interesting contrast Edison versus Tesla. I think they are both great men and did amazing things. A little bit of rivalry is probably a good thing.
It's interesting because the car company is called Tesla. The reason it's called Tesla is because we use an AC induction motor, which is an architecture that Tesla developed. And the guy probably deserves a little more play then he gets in current society. But on balance I am a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla. Because Edison brought his stuff to market and made those inventions accessible to the world, whereas Tesla didn't really do that. In the scientific world Tesla gets more attention and more credit than Edison. He's well-known in the scientific community, units of magnetism are in units of Tesla, but he's not very well known in the popular mindset so that's why Tesla is named after him. We thought we would recognize Tesla in naming the car company. Better than naming it the Elon car company or something like that. Tesla did pretty well for most of his life although he went kinda bonkers at the end, I hope that doesn't happen to me. I've actually contributed some funding to save the land for the Tesla museum. I like the way The Oatmeal put it: “let's have a god damn Tesla museum.” Awesome.
There's a lot to learn from the lessons in history, and I think just in general to read about interesting people, about the difficulties they faced and how they overcame them. I think reading in general is just great. I also admire people like Winston Churchill, and sort of the great interesting people like Oscar Wilde. There’s really a lot of interesting people in history, amazing people like Shakespeare. I'm a big fan of Brunel, I have five boys and I really wanted to name one of them Brunel.. or Isambard. No luck. Hopefully, one in the future.
I don't read actually many general business books. I like biographies or autobiographies. I think those are pretty helpful, and a lot are not really business. For example, I like Franklin's autobiography and the biography by Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin was really good. I am a big fan of Ben Franklin. You can see how he was an entrepreneur, he sort of started from nothing, like a runaway kid basically. Created his printing business, how he went about doing that, and then over time he also did science and politics. Franklin is certainly one of my heros, he was a great guy. He was in different fields, and he sort of thought about okay what is the important thing that needs to be accomplished right now and than worked on that. I would certainly say that he's one of the people I most admire. Franklin was pretty awesome.
I like biographies in general, I think it's also worth reading books on scientists and engineers. There's a lot of great books and science fiction with a lot of interesting ideas. I love technology and particular when I was a kid I would just consume all the science fiction and fantasy, movies, books, anything at all. Even if it was just really shlonky.
In terms of books, Lord of the Rings is probably my favorite book, but it's not really sci-fi, in fact oddly enough J.R. Tolkien was kinda almost anti-technology. It's funny, Lord of the Rings was as a book kind of anti-technology, but it's still great.
The thing about science fiction is that it's free from the normal constraints, and science fiction explores a lot of different ideas. It can be helpful as a source of inspiration. You have to imagine an outcome in order to head in that direction. I read a lot of sci-fi when I was a kid, and I really liked the Asimov books, and Heinlein books, and Arthur C. Clark obviously. I'm a big fan of Asimov and Heinlich and Arthur C. Clarke. I think the Foundation series from Asimov is like really one of the best ever. I like 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,' that's a good one, I think that's Heinlein's best book, honestly. Those are like probably the three best sci-fi authors.
I certainly got inspired by a lot of science fiction books, and all the other obvious stuff, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica. There's many forms and sources of inspiration, like books, TV shows and movies they're all sources of inspiration. Most of the movies and TV shows about space are totally wrong, but they still have interesting ideas. Like the Star Trek communicator was an inspiration for the cell phone. In fact the weird thing is the phones we have in our pocket vastly exceed what was on Star Trek.
In terms of key influences, I certainly liked Star Trek because that actually shows more of a Utopian future. It's not like things are horrible in the future - there's so many bloody post-apocalyptic futures, okay, can we have one that's nice? Just a few. So I like that about Star Trek.
Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw, so it was going to be fairly influential. I'd never seen a movie in a theater before, it was like super great. Our Falcon rocket was actually named after the Millennium Falcon, even though it looks nothing like it. It's not the shape you want for a spaceship really. My favorite fictional spacecraft? I'd have to say that would be the one in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy that's powered by the Improbability Drive. I mean, that thing's awesome, it does the most unexpected things. From an inspiration standpoint... having read all those books and seen the movies, and many other books and movies, just the idea of having a future where that didn't come true, just seemed terrible. So we want to make sure that those books are not always fiction. So that's my inspiration.
I suppose I'd like to play a musical instrument, that'd be cool. I tried learning the violin. That's by the way a hard thing to learn. I cannot play the violin at all. Very horrible. I can whistle, I'm not bad whistling. I kinda have like a whole bunch of songs that I just whistle randomly. I can whistle but it's maybe not the coolest instrument to play. I can whistle Pachelbel's Canon, which is a tricky one, but I'm not going to whistle it for you now because that'd be too embarrassing.. I can whistle ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ It’s played in ‘Life of Brian’ and obviously it’s a pretty funny song because they are being crucified at the time. I saw it first when I was pretty young, probably about 8 or 9 or something and I didn’t quite get it. But I think it is a good reminder to not get focused on the negative things in life. My personal philosophy is I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.
I think ‘Con Te Partiro’ is an incredibly beautiful song. It’s really calming, and it’s just a really beautiful song. And obviously Andrea Bocelli is just an incredible singer. I think that song is kind of a reminder that the world is a beautiful place. It’s an incredibly beautiful song, sung really beautifully so I think that’s why it makes me feel that way about the world.
I personally don’t understand it, but the song that I whistle the most is ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ I don’t even realize I’m whistling it, I just go into auto-whistle and this one comes up more than any other so I must like it at a subconscious level, but I’m not entirely sure why. I could guess. It’s sort of a positive song, I mean who doesn’t like Santa Claus? I guess it’s good to have him come to town.
A song that just kind of gets you fired up is ‘America, Blank, Yeah’ I think it’s funny and inspiring in a weird way – It’s just cool, I like it. That is from the movie ‘Team America’ I’m a big fan of ‘South Park.’ The shows that I watch are ‘South Park,’ ‘Daily Show,’ and ‘Colbert Report’, those are sort of my main three ones, they just capture a little bit of essence of America in both a good and a bad way.
I get involved in politics as little as possible. There is some amount that I have to get involved in mostly because SpaceX has to battle Boeing and Lockheed for national security and civil space launch contracts. I am sort of moderate, I'm sort of half Republican half Democrat. I'm sort of in the middle, I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Which I think lot of the country is actually.
My personal ideology is split right now between trying to be helpful on Earth-related stuff, which is sustainable energy, and trying to advance space technology so we can establish a self-sustaining city on Mars. My interest is really from an environmental standpoint, and to some degree from a national security standpoint, and longer-term overall from an economic situation standpoint.
I'm like a volunteer at this point, I don't need the money. I get paid minimum-wage actually, and I don't even get paid overtime. There's nothing like I'm sitting here saying I wish I could buy such and such a thing, I can just buy it. There's nothing that I want to buy personally that I can't buy. I don't really like yachts or anything like that.
There’s two gasoline cars that I own, not many people know about these, but one is a series 1 ’67 E-Type Jaguar roadster, that was the first car I bought when I had any money. The other car that I got is a Model T that a friend of mine bought and gave me.
The first car that I really bought and liked was an old 1978 BMW 320i that I bought for $1400 and fixed up myself in “94. I had it for 2 years and then literally one of the wheels fell off. It was during the start of my first company, and I had lend the car to an intern to get something, and he gives me a call and says: “The wheel fell of the car” You could see like a big scratch in the road from the axle, because it occurred while he was turning. I just scrapped the car at that point.
The first car that I bought when I had more than a few thousand dollars was the 1967 series 1 E-Type jag. When I was 17 I was given for my birthday a book of classic convertibles, I looked trough them all, and I thought well if I could ever afford a car, there were two that I liked the most.. One was the Gull-winged Mercedes that was like millions of dollars.. and the other the E-Type Jaguar. I said well, if I could ever afford it, that’s the car I want to get, so that’s what I bought. In fact when the Venture Capitalists invested in my first company they gave me and my brother $40.000, just like an initial bonus or something, and I spend $35.000 of it on the car. That was like a bad girlfriend, it kept breaking down on me and caused me all sorts of trouble. In fact it broke down on the way back from the dealer. It broke down on the way back it was very sad, I thought damn it I didn’t even bring it home.
I used to do lots of things that were personally risky, but now with kids and responsibilities I do a lot less of that. I used to have, like a fighter jet and doing all sorts of crazy stunts, and I was like I want to see my kids grow up and all that. I have responsibilities.
I want to be able to look back and say that I had a good effect on the world. I just want to be useful. Sometimes that usefulness turns out entrepreneurial, and sometimes from an engineering standpoint, it’s just you know usefulness. It seems to be so far so good.
Do I think that there is some sort of master intelligence architecting all of this stuff? I think probably not, because then you have to say where did the master intelligence come from. I think really you can explain this with fundamental laws of physics. Complex phenomenon from simple elements.
I'm not superstitious but you never know, there could be some divine entity, and if there is I hope that entity is favorable.