March 28, 2025 • 27 mins
In 2008 Tesla Motors launched its first car, the completely electric Roadster. Tesla was a great story — something genuinely new, an engineering marvel. Musk became a media darling, on the cover of countless magazines under headlines like ‘Elon Musk, AKA Tony Stark, Wants to Save the World’. Within the logic of Muskism, talking about saving the world was a business strategy, a way to sell cars without ads. Why did so many people buy what Musk was selling?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
All right, okay, so getting in it's really really low.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
That's what you want to do?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Is actually a friend of mine owns a Tesla roadster
black like the Batmobile, kind of slide in.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Welcome to X Man. The Elon Musk Origin Story, a
special report on the relationship between science fiction and the
worldview of Elon Musk. I'm Jill Lapour. Okay, so that
was the ignition.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, all right, you want to go, Yeah, I do.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Alright, let's go after Elon Musk made a fortune with
PayPal and launched SpaceX. But long before he bought Twitter,
when he was famous but not half as geopolitically influential
as he is now, he was known for Tesla. So
I decided to go for a ride.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well, oh my god, that's good.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
A century ago, in the early days of the automobile,
petrol powered cars won the battle against electric cars. In
nineteen ninety six, a few years before Tesla got started,
GM developed an electric car called the EV one. California
had just adopted a new zero emissions law. But then,
(01:38):
after California revised that law, GM seized its fleet of Eve's,
all of them. Grieving owners held funerals for their cars.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
Some might say that to be here gathered today to mourn.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
The loss of a car would be going too far.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
We are here to say goodbye to more.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Than a car.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
It is difficult to know what to say at a
time like this.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
I consulted my Rabbi's manual and there was absolutely nothing
in it for the burial of the car.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
So when Tesla came up with the roadster, these people
who'd held those funerals, these people went nuts. The roadster
was sleek and fast, It had a range of something
like two hundred miles. True, it cost about one hundred
thousand dollars, but that was supposedly part of the plan,
make electric cars sexy, sell a bunch to very rich people,
and use that money to build a more affordable car.
(02:36):
Hollywood A listers signed up. As Musk told NPR.
Speaker 6 (02:40):
George Clooney, that's the founders of Google, Laryn Surge, what's
the name of.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
Flee from Chollipevi's apoort.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
A car Tesla when it launched that first car, Tesla
was a great story, something genuinely new and not some
ethereal thing like Facebook, a physical thing, an engineering marvel,
but Musk was a better story. Young, handsome, dashing Thomas
Edison meets Henry Ford meets Elvis Presley. He'd already disrupted
(03:13):
banking and aerospace, now the automobile industry. He wasn't just
selling cars to celebrities. He had become one or No,
he was becoming something more. Here's how he talked about himself.
Speaker 6 (03:26):
Then, what I'm good at is, well, I think I'm
good at inventing solutions to problems. Things seemed fairly obvious
to me that are clearly not obvious to most people.
So and I'm not really trying to do it or anything.
I just seemed like, I don't know. I just I
(03:47):
can see the truth of things, and others seemed less
able to do.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So you can hear it just there in the messianic language.
When I started this series, I talked about Musk as Batman.
But long before that, in his Tesla Heyday, Musk had
begun to think of himself as Tony Stark. This episode,
(04:11):
Elon Musk as iron Man.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
He's the real life Tony Stark. This guy, please welcome.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur as superhero is an
interesting historical turn one more way in which Musk's brand
of capitalism is tied to science fiction. But this episode,
I want to begin by taking a look at iron
Man's origins with the US military during the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Who all, what is the most breathtaking, most sensational superhero
of all? Iron Man?
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Marvel Comics introduced iron Man in nineteen sixty three during
the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Rich handsome known as a glamorous playboy, constantly in the
company of beautiful a daring women.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
Look, there's Tony Stark.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
He's the dreamiest thing this side of rock.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Hudson, Yes, and many. Stock has both a sophesta cut
and a scientist, a millionaire bachelor as much at home
in a laboratory as in high society.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Stark travels to Vietnam to test some new tech in
the jungle, he trips and sets off an explosive and
wakes up in captivity to a communist. Hated by a
fellow captive, an elderly physicist, he sets to work building
a device to save his life.
Speaker 6 (05:37):
I've done extensive work with transistors. I can design them
in any size to perform any function.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
In the world of iron Man. You take technology on
faith it works.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
But this man who seems so fortunate, who's envied by millions,
is so destined to become the most tragic figure on Earth.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Stanley, who created the character, said later that comic book
readers hated the Vietnam War, so he created a superhero
who is a military contractor on a kind of a dare.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
So I said, I'm going to come up with a
character who represents everything everybody hates that. I'm going to
shove it down their throats.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
But earlier he told a different story. In nineteen sixty three,
Lee said, most Americans thought that what was going on
between North and South Vietnam was a pretty straightforward good
versus evil story, and would have thought of Tony Stark
as the good guy.
Speaker 5 (06:33):
Here.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Still, Tony Stark was a tragic figure, invincible but trapped
in a machine of his own making. In two thousand
and eight, Marvel reimagined that tragedy when it brought out
what would become some of the highest grossing Marvel superhero
movies of all time, the Iron Man franchise, produced by
Paramount and starring Robert Downey.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Junior, Tony Stark, visionary genius, American patriot even from an
early age. The son of legendary weapons developer Howard Stark,
quickly stole the spotlight with his brilliant and unique mind. Today,
Tony Stark has changed the face of the weapons industry
(07:15):
by ensuring freedom and protecting America and her interests around
the globe.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
The Ironman films were written by a guy named John Favreau.
While Favreau was developing the character of Tony Stark, he
met with Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
At age four, he built his first circuit board, At
age six, his first engine, and at seventeen he graduated
summa cum laude from MIT.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Musk received delivery of the very first Tesla roadster in
February two thousand and eight. John Favreau bought a Tesla too.
The first Iron Man movie hit theaters three months later,
Ironman in the Tesla rollout It was like a double feature.
Boy Wonder grows up to save the world by building
new machines and revels in his own celebrity.
Speaker 5 (08:07):
If I take a picture with you, yes, it's very cool.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
This too, seems to come from Musk's backstory. Back in
nineteen ninety nine, after Musk made his first millions from
x dot com and PayPal. He was already keen to
become a celebrity.
Speaker 6 (08:23):
I'd like to only cover of Rolling Stunt better be cool.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
After Ironman came out, Musk was on the cover of
Rolling Stone. The headline read Elon Musk aka Tony Stark
wants to save the world. Musk and Stark even look alike.
Black jeans, black T shirt, maybe a blazer, same haircut,
a little stubble. In the movie Reboot, Stark Industries is
manufacturing weapons to be used not fighting communists in Vietnam,
(08:50):
but fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. Tony Stark is super flashy.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Tell you what, throw a.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Little hot rod red in there.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
Yes, though, should help you keep love profile.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
If Elon Musk influenced Tony Stark, pretty soon, Tony Stark
seems to have begun to influence Elon Musk before iron Man.
Musk and Interviews was modest.
Speaker 6 (09:13):
The things that worry me are we going to make
a mistake? Our own foolishness, our own errors can hurt us.
There's a reason why there's an adiomatic expression about rocket
science being hard. It really is really hard.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
If you are not a Musketeer. If you've always scratched
your head at what people could possibly find appealing about
Elon Musk. Listen to some of these early interviews. He's
a smart, fascinating person with interesting, if grandiose ideas.
Speaker 6 (09:39):
Well. I think what I'd like to do is help
solve some important problems. So I think, in a small way,
helped build the Internet. And then with respect to the
global warning problem, that the transition away from oil and
other hydrocobins to something which is clean and sustainable, I
hope to have an impact there. And then with respect
to space, I hope to have an impact in helping
(10:01):
make humanity a multiplanet species.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
But after Iron Man, Elon Musk seemed to become more
like Tony Stark, flashier brasher. In twenty ten, in the
second Iron Man movie, he had a cameo as himself.
Speaker 5 (10:15):
Mister Musk, how are you?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Those Merlin ewes are fantastic?
Speaker 6 (10:20):
Thank you?
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yeah, good idea for electric jet?
Speaker 2 (10:22):
You do, then we'll make it work.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Elon Musk became a character in the Marvel universe and
on the celebrity circuit. It seems sometimes as if Musk
was resisting this role. For instance, in an appearance on
The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
People have called you the real Tony Stark.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
You're trying to do good things.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
And you're a billionaire. I mean, yeah, that seems a
little bit like either superhero or super villain, you have
to choose one.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
Are trying to do useful things.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
After a while, though, he settled into the role. Okay,
I am iron Man.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
But eventually you can transform Mars into an earth like planet.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
How would you do that?
Speaker 4 (11:04):
You'd warm it up, drop the nuclear weapons over the polls.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
You're a super villain.
Speaker 6 (11:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Still, I think there's another way to look at this transformation.
Maybe Elon Musk becoming Tony Stark had been Tesla's plan
all along. Science fiction as a business strategy, you have
to drive it. I'm not really a car person. I'm
more of a bicycle persons, foot on the brake and
(11:34):
push d Okay, But when I went for a ride
in my friend's roadster, I'll admit I was super excited
to take a turn at the wheel.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
So low. Yeah, literally feels like you're on it is.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah, Well, did you write go cards as a kid. Yes,
it's like a riding a go card.
Speaker 6 (11:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
I think I don't really really want God.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, driving the roadster was a blast. But I wanted
to learn more about Tesla's history, so I called up
Ed Niedermeier, a long time auto industry analyst and author
of Ludacrous, The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
I think a lot of the very earliest investment in
Tesla was not really an investment in Tesla. It was
an investment in Elon Musk.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Musk didn't start the company. The earliest news stories about
Tesla didn't even mention him or else. They talked about
him only as an early investor. Musk seems to have
said about making sure stories about Tesla were stories about him.
In two thousand and six, on the Tesla website, he
posted the Secret Tesla Motors master Plan, a clever manifesto
(12:39):
that explained the company's strategy build sports car, use that
money to build an affordable car, Use that money to
build an even more affordable car. While doing above, also
provide zero emissions electric power generation options. But it was
also a very canny bit of self puffery. Call it
the secret Elon Musk master Plan. He introduced himself this way.
(13:01):
My day job is running a space transportation company called SpaceX,
but on the side, I am the chairman of Tesla
Motors and and eight. When both Tesla and iron Man
made their debuts, Musk left the conventional mold of the
Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind. He moved to Los Angeles, which
is also where Tony Stark lives. In two thousand and nine,
(13:23):
one of the guys who started Tesla sued Musk for,
among other things, slander and libel. He said that Musk
set out to rewrite history by claiming he'd founded or
created the company. The suit was later settled out of
court in a resolution that acknowledged five co founders of Tesla,
including Musk. Meanwhile, though Musk's pr stunts generated just the
(13:45):
buzz the company needed.
Speaker 5 (13:48):
A big part of Silicon Valley is not just making money.
Another big part of it is the idea of changing
the world and making things cool. The reality is that
the reason Tesla is here today is because Elon Musk
is a remarkable storyteller.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
In some ways, what Musk was doing. A man becoming
a brand is an old game. Colonel Sanders is Kentucky
Fried Chicken, and then there's this guy Trump.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Steaks are the world's greatest steaks, and I mean that
in every sense of the word.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
But Musk did something different. Musk as Tesla was irreverent,
and he was witty, ironic, whip smart. The cheekiness of
Musk's online persona was new then, even if this voice
has since become ubiquitous online. Tesco's sassy Twitter personality, say,
Musk was sassy and messianic all at once. Not the
(14:39):
greatest steak in the world, but the steak that will
save the world. Niedermeyer has gotten a lot of harassment
for writing about Tesla.
Speaker 5 (14:47):
I've been labeled by the fans and the company itself
as a hater or you know, someone with potentially nefarious
motivations for writing about Tesla the way that I do.
The reality is is I wanted the book to capture
what I saw as the complexity underneath this very polarized
discourse about it online. And I think that, you know,
(15:08):
a a lot of that polarization has been a conscious strategy.
It's absolutely not a coincidence that this very polarized culture
has sprouted up around Tesla, and that the fan culture,
you know, people call it a cult. I think that
Musk knows that if you can force people to either
love him and trust everything he says implicitly, or hate
(15:29):
him and think he's a con man. More people will
break his way, and so polarization is a strategic advantage
to him.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Long before Musk bought Twitter, he seemed to be tweeting
all the time, getting into spats, cultivating a following, iron
manning his millions of followers. Began to gang up on
his critics, especially women. Why did he need fans? Why
did he need to be so online? Ed Niedermeyer has
(15:59):
a theory.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
Musk's fans need him to promise the impossible, and Musk
needs them to give him adulation even if he doesn't
actually deliver on the impossible. He needs them to tend
and nurture and grow again. What I think, ultimately is
the most important thing about Tesla, which is the narrative
(16:21):
in the image.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
For Niedermeier, this relationship is a consequence of the sort
of speculative capitalism that involves more speculation than capital.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
It's a natural outgrowth of the venture capital culture of
betting on the jockey and not the horse. You know,
for a venture capital investor, you don't always have to
build a really sustainably profitable business. What you have to
do is make sure that at some point down the road,
you can pass your investment off to someone who thinks
(16:51):
it's worth a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Tesla almost went bankrupt in two thousand and eight, the
year iron Man came out. In two thousand and nine,
it received a four hundred and sixty five million dollar
loan from the US government. It raised two hundred and
twenty six million at its IPO in twenty ten, and
in twenty thirteen paid back its government loan ten years early.
In twenty twenty, it had its first profitable year, and
(17:14):
those profits have continued. But despite the company's incredible success,
in twenty twenty four, profits seemed to have slumped. There
are no guarantees in the auto industry, and for Kniedermeyer,
the story of Tesla, which is one of engineering virtuosity
and against the odd success, is also a story of precarity.
(17:35):
For Tesla and for a musk.
Speaker 5 (17:37):
His position has always been incredibly precarious. And it's because fundamentally,
you know, a lot of why he's there is not
just the narrative, but also it's his risk tolerance is
an incredibly risk tolerant person. And you can look at
a lot of different decisions the companies made and see that,
and you know, with risk comes roared, but risk is
(17:57):
also risky.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
As far as risk goes. The striking thing about Tesla
to me was how for a long time Musk described
it as a company out to save the planet from
existential risk by a Tesla avert human extinction. In twenty
twenty one, on Earth Day, President Biden was at the
White House charing a sum out on how to avert
climate disaster. Well, Elon Musk was at the launch of
(18:24):
a SpaceX rocket carrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station.
The astronauts drove to the launch site in Tesla's that
each have their own suv with license plates that read Reduce, recycle,
and Reuse. A key story for Musk as a brand
for years was that he was saving the planet by
(18:44):
fighting climate change.
Speaker 7 (18:46):
But was he Elon Musk is a really difficult one
to parse. He's been very open and saying that colonizing
space is a sort of a survival strategy, which I
think is a thought that has a weird amount of
currency out there in the world. And when you think
about it, you know, in my view, just makes no sense.
Speaker 6 (19:08):
What's soever.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Elizabeth Colbert is a New york Er staff writer who
won Appel Surprize for her book The Sixth Extinction.
Speaker 7 (19:16):
There are a lot of these tech billionaires who are
interested in SPAZ obviously, as you know, and who also
see it as a big business, and it's hard to
pull that apart too. How much of this space exploration
hype I'm going to call it is on behalf of
potentially very profitable businesses, and how much of it is
(19:36):
really this kind of sci fi escape from Earth fantasy,
I really don't know.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
So then why do you call it hype?
Speaker 7 (19:46):
Well, I mean, Elon Musk is constantly telling us, you know,
when we're going to colonize Mars. But if you ask
any person seriously involved in space exploration, are we colonizing
Mars the way Elon Musk is constantly proclaiming that we will,
and within a very short time frame they will say
(20:07):
absolutely not. There's absolute no way that's happening.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
So then there's this other line of thought that I
confess myself totally perplexed by, which comes from the people
who talk about human extinction scenarios and their calculation is sure,
they're suffering here on Earth, but if we don't go
to other planets, then humans will become extinct when our
(20:33):
planet dies. And so against your global suffering of people
enduring poverty and disease, we count the untold numbers of
our human descendants whose human potential will be lost if
we don't go. Like it's almost a kind of extraterrestrial economics.
(20:54):
Have you encountered that existential risk argument?
Speaker 7 (20:58):
Every species that we have in the fossil record eventually
does go extinct. I'm not really predicting, you know, human
extinction here, but if you look at the record, it's
pretty much one hundred percent, you know, over time. So
the idea that humans Homo sapiens are going to be
around for the end of the planet Earth as a
habitable planet, that's so crazily at odds with As I say,
(21:23):
what we know about the history of life. So embedded
in that is this notion of humans as completely separate,
completely divorced from evolutionary history, and facing this shining future
on other planets. And that is a really interesting idea.
It's not one that I find very plausible.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
I'd called Colbert to ask her about Tesla, but we
ended up talking a lot about SpaceX, since it can
be difficult to pull these two visions of the future apart.
What struck me most talking with Colbert were her observations
about the internal contradictions of Muscism. In twenty twenty one,
Musk announced that Tesla would accept bitcoin from people to
pay for their Teslas, and the Tesla itself had purchased
(22:08):
one point five billion dollars worth of bitcoin. The price
of bitcoin jumped. Musk has been an incredibly avid proponent
of cryptocurrencies.
Speaker 7 (22:17):
Bigcoin is a terribly energy intensive cryptocurrency. Bitcoin mining nowadays
is using up roughly one hundred and thirty terarowat hours
of electricity per year, and that's roughly the energy consumption
of a country like Sweden. So the internal inconsistencies here,
(22:41):
I think prevent him from being a particularly good spokesman
for environmental causes.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
In twenty twenty one, Colbert published a piece in The
New Yorker about Tesla's bitcoin polluting. Days after it was published,
Musk announced that he'd changed his mind. You could no
longer buy a Tesla with bitcoin. Still, a lot of
commentators pointed out that there really was no excuse for
Musk's decision to accept bitcoin in the first place. How
(23:08):
could he not have known that bitcoin is mostly mined
in China and mostly on servers fueled by coal. A
writer for The Washington Post, pointing out how well known
it is that bitcoin is practically designed to waste power,
asked had Musk been on a multi year newsfast in
any case, the essential tenet of Muscism remains every problem
(23:33):
can be solved with technology. It's the reigning philosophy of
Iron Man, too, the motto of Stark Industries.
Speaker 6 (23:40):
Everything is achievable through technology, better living, robust health.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Everything can also be wrecked through technology. Elizabeth Culbert's book
Under a White Sky asks whether we have engineered ourselves
so deeply into so many problems, especially climate change, that
at this point the only way forward is to try
to engineer ourselves out of them. Stopping carbon emissions is essential,
but it's not going to be enough. Maybe we need
(24:06):
to invent machines that can eat carbon. Environmentalism used to
be largely anti tech, but it's not anymore because maybe
there's no longer a choice.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
I don't think there is really a sort of anti
tech environmentalism these days, but there are different strains, and
Elon Musk is the avatar of the strain that says, well,
humans can just do anything that we put our minds to.
We can cognize more as we can sucks here two
(24:36):
out of the atmosphere. There's no geophysical limits here that
we can't overcome. Unfortunately, I think that's just not true.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
We approached Tesla for a response to several points raised
in the series, but at the time of this recording,
we hadn't received a reply. I loved driving the Tesla Roadster,
but as I say, I'm more of a bicycle person.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
So is HG.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Wells, who once wrote cycle tracks will abound in utopia.
Alas utopia is never coming, I'll settle for sustainability. And
sustainability will require more than just switching out every petrol
powered car for an electric car. There on need to
be fewer cars and more bicycles, pedestrians and public transit,
(25:24):
and more renewable energy. But Tesla is pioneering that too.
Beyond producing electric cars and making them thrilling, Tesla has
done a whole lot for renewable energy, especially with its
battery technology. After all, the last part of the company's
secret master plan had always been provide zero emission electric
power generation options. In twenty seventeen, after a statewide power
(25:50):
outage in South Australia, Tesla won a bid to design
a battery system for the state and promise to install
it in one hundred days. As Musk explained at a
press conference.
Speaker 6 (26:00):
This is going to be the largest bat translation in
the world by a significant margin. We actually insisted in
during the contract that we beheld to the one hundred
where it's free. The system will be three times more
powerful than any system on Earth. This is not like
a minor Forura into the frontier. This is like going
three times further than anyone's gone before.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Tesla delivered in sixty three days. The system's still working
fantastically well for South Australians. Energy is cheaper and more reliable. Somehow,
this sort of thing never gets the Iron Man treatment.
It's not sexy, it didn't involve Hollywood or celebrities. It
didn't turn on Reddit, it didn't end in a Twitter feud.
(26:42):
It wasn't even a science fiction fantasy, and it did
not save the planet. It was a smart renewable energy
partnership that went well.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
There was really this opportunity to make a significant statement
about renewable energy to the world, to show that you
can really do a heavy duty, large scale, utility level
battery system, and that South Australia was up.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Of the challenge a public minded infrastructure project. It might
well be the most significant thing TESLA has ever done.
It is not, however, what Elon Musk will be remembered for,
because he pretty soon stopped talking about climate change as
humanity's greatest existential threat. Global warming risk is overblown, he
(27:26):
posted on Twitter in twenty twenty three. We don't need
to rush to solve climate change, he told Trump. At
the end of twenty twenty four, the less Musk talked
about renewable energy, the more he talked about politics and
especially about money. Next time on x men, bitcoin and
(27:51):
dogecoin and doge the Department of Government Efficiency Muskism under
the newly re elected Donald Trump,
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
All right, okay, so getting in it's really really low.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
That's what you want to do?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Is actually a friend of mine owns a Tesla roadster
black like the Batmobile, kind of slide in.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Welcome to X Man. The Elon Musk Origin Story, a
special report on the relationship between science fiction and the
worldview of Elon Musk. I'm Jill Lapour. Okay, so that
was the ignition.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, all right, you want to go, Yeah, I do.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Alright, let's go after Elon Musk made a fortune with
PayPal and launched SpaceX. But long before he bought Twitter,
when he was famous but not half as geopolitically influential
as he is now, he was known for Tesla. So
I decided to go for a ride.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well, oh my god, that's good.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
A century ago, in the early days of the automobile,
petrol powered cars won the battle against electric cars. In
nineteen ninety six, a few years before Tesla got started,
GM developed an electric car called the EV one. California
had just adopted a new zero emissions law. But then,
(01:38):
after California revised that law, GM seized its fleet of Eve's,
all of them. Grieving owners held funerals for their cars.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
Some might say that to be here gathered today to mourn.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
The loss of a car would be going too far.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
We are here to say goodbye to more.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Than a car.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
It is difficult to know what to say at a
time like this.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
I consulted my Rabbi's manual and there was absolutely nothing
in it for the burial of the car.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
So when Tesla came up with the roadster, these people
who'd held those funerals, these people went nuts. The roadster
was sleek and fast, It had a range of something
like two hundred miles. True, it cost about one hundred
thousand dollars, but that was supposedly part of the plan,
make electric cars sexy, sell a bunch to very rich people,
and use that money to build a more affordable car.
(02:36):
Hollywood A listers signed up. As Musk told NPR.
Speaker 6 (02:40):
George Clooney, that's the founders of Google, Laryn Surge, what's
the name of.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
Flee from Chollipevi's apoort.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
A car Tesla when it launched that first car, Tesla
was a great story, something genuinely new and not some
ethereal thing like Facebook, a physical thing, an engineering marvel,
but Musk was a better story. Young, handsome, dashing Thomas
Edison meets Henry Ford meets Elvis Presley. He'd already disrupted
(03:13):
banking and aerospace, now the automobile industry. He wasn't just
selling cars to celebrities. He had become one or No,
he was becoming something more. Here's how he talked about himself.
Speaker 6 (03:26):
Then, what I'm good at is, well, I think I'm
good at inventing solutions to problems. Things seemed fairly obvious
to me that are clearly not obvious to most people.
So and I'm not really trying to do it or anything.
I just seemed like, I don't know. I just I
(03:47):
can see the truth of things, and others seemed less
able to do.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So you can hear it just there in the messianic language.
When I started this series, I talked about Musk as Batman.
But long before that, in his Tesla Heyday, Musk had
begun to think of himself as Tony Stark. This episode,
(04:11):
Elon Musk as iron Man.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
He's the real life Tony Stark. This guy, please welcome.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur as superhero is an
interesting historical turn one more way in which Musk's brand
of capitalism is tied to science fiction. But this episode,
I want to begin by taking a look at iron
Man's origins with the US military during the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Who all, what is the most breathtaking, most sensational superhero
of all? Iron Man?
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Marvel Comics introduced iron Man in nineteen sixty three during
the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Rich handsome known as a glamorous playboy, constantly in the
company of beautiful a daring women.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
Look, there's Tony Stark.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
He's the dreamiest thing this side of rock.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Hudson, Yes, and many. Stock has both a sophesta cut
and a scientist, a millionaire bachelor as much at home
in a laboratory as in high society.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Stark travels to Vietnam to test some new tech in
the jungle, he trips and sets off an explosive and
wakes up in captivity to a communist. Hated by a
fellow captive, an elderly physicist, he sets to work building
a device to save his life.
Speaker 6 (05:37):
I've done extensive work with transistors. I can design them
in any size to perform any function.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
In the world of iron Man. You take technology on
faith it works.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
But this man who seems so fortunate, who's envied by millions,
is so destined to become the most tragic figure on Earth.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Stanley, who created the character, said later that comic book
readers hated the Vietnam War, so he created a superhero
who is a military contractor on a kind of a dare.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
So I said, I'm going to come up with a
character who represents everything everybody hates that. I'm going to
shove it down their throats.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
But earlier he told a different story. In nineteen sixty three,
Lee said, most Americans thought that what was going on
between North and South Vietnam was a pretty straightforward good
versus evil story, and would have thought of Tony Stark
as the good guy.
Speaker 5 (06:33):
Here.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Still, Tony Stark was a tragic figure, invincible but trapped
in a machine of his own making. In two thousand
and eight, Marvel reimagined that tragedy when it brought out
what would become some of the highest grossing Marvel superhero
movies of all time, the Iron Man franchise, produced by
Paramount and starring Robert Downey.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Junior, Tony Stark, visionary genius, American patriot even from an
early age. The son of legendary weapons developer Howard Stark,
quickly stole the spotlight with his brilliant and unique mind. Today,
Tony Stark has changed the face of the weapons industry
(07:15):
by ensuring freedom and protecting America and her interests around
the globe.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
The Ironman films were written by a guy named John Favreau.
While Favreau was developing the character of Tony Stark, he
met with Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
At age four, he built his first circuit board, At
age six, his first engine, and at seventeen he graduated
summa cum laude from MIT.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Musk received delivery of the very first Tesla roadster in
February two thousand and eight. John Favreau bought a Tesla too.
The first Iron Man movie hit theaters three months later,
Ironman in the Tesla rollout It was like a double feature.
Boy Wonder grows up to save the world by building
new machines and revels in his own celebrity.
Speaker 5 (08:07):
If I take a picture with you, yes, it's very cool.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
This too, seems to come from Musk's backstory. Back in
nineteen ninety nine, after Musk made his first millions from
x dot com and PayPal. He was already keen to
become a celebrity.
Speaker 6 (08:23):
I'd like to only cover of Rolling Stunt better be cool.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
After Ironman came out, Musk was on the cover of
Rolling Stone. The headline read Elon Musk aka Tony Stark
wants to save the world. Musk and Stark even look alike.
Black jeans, black T shirt, maybe a blazer, same haircut,
a little stubble. In the movie Reboot, Stark Industries is
manufacturing weapons to be used not fighting communists in Vietnam,
(08:50):
but fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. Tony Stark is super flashy.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Tell you what, throw a.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Little hot rod red in there.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
Yes, though, should help you keep love profile.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
If Elon Musk influenced Tony Stark, pretty soon, Tony Stark
seems to have begun to influence Elon Musk before iron Man.
Musk and Interviews was modest.
Speaker 6 (09:13):
The things that worry me are we going to make
a mistake? Our own foolishness, our own errors can hurt us.
There's a reason why there's an adiomatic expression about rocket
science being hard. It really is really hard.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
If you are not a Musketeer. If you've always scratched
your head at what people could possibly find appealing about
Elon Musk. Listen to some of these early interviews. He's
a smart, fascinating person with interesting, if grandiose ideas.
Speaker 6 (09:39):
Well. I think what I'd like to do is help
solve some important problems. So I think, in a small way,
helped build the Internet. And then with respect to the
global warning problem, that the transition away from oil and
other hydrocobins to something which is clean and sustainable, I
hope to have an impact there. And then with respect
to space, I hope to have an impact in helping
(10:01):
make humanity a multiplanet species.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
But after Iron Man, Elon Musk seemed to become more
like Tony Stark, flashier brasher. In twenty ten, in the
second Iron Man movie, he had a cameo as himself.
Speaker 5 (10:15):
Mister Musk, how are you?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Those Merlin ewes are fantastic?
Speaker 6 (10:20):
Thank you?
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yeah, good idea for electric jet?
Speaker 2 (10:22):
You do, then we'll make it work.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Elon Musk became a character in the Marvel universe and
on the celebrity circuit. It seems sometimes as if Musk
was resisting this role. For instance, in an appearance on
The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
People have called you the real Tony Stark.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
You're trying to do good things.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
And you're a billionaire. I mean, yeah, that seems a
little bit like either superhero or super villain, you have
to choose one.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
Are trying to do useful things.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
After a while, though, he settled into the role. Okay,
I am iron Man.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
But eventually you can transform Mars into an earth like planet.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
How would you do that?
Speaker 4 (11:04):
You'd warm it up, drop the nuclear weapons over the polls.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
You're a super villain.
Speaker 6 (11:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Still, I think there's another way to look at this transformation.
Maybe Elon Musk becoming Tony Stark had been Tesla's plan
all along. Science fiction as a business strategy, you have
to drive it. I'm not really a car person. I'm
more of a bicycle persons, foot on the brake and
(11:34):
push d Okay, But when I went for a ride
in my friend's roadster, I'll admit I was super excited
to take a turn at the wheel.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
So low. Yeah, literally feels like you're on it is.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah, Well, did you write go cards as a kid. Yes,
it's like a riding a go card.
Speaker 6 (11:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
I think I don't really really want God.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, driving the roadster was a blast. But I wanted
to learn more about Tesla's history, so I called up
Ed Niedermeier, a long time auto industry analyst and author
of Ludacrous, The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
I think a lot of the very earliest investment in
Tesla was not really an investment in Tesla. It was
an investment in Elon Musk.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Musk didn't start the company. The earliest news stories about
Tesla didn't even mention him or else. They talked about
him only as an early investor. Musk seems to have
said about making sure stories about Tesla were stories about him.
In two thousand and six, on the Tesla website, he
posted the Secret Tesla Motors master Plan, a clever manifesto
(12:39):
that explained the company's strategy build sports car, use that
money to build an affordable car, Use that money to
build an even more affordable car. While doing above, also
provide zero emissions electric power generation options. But it was
also a very canny bit of self puffery. Call it
the secret Elon Musk master Plan. He introduced himself this way.
(13:01):
My day job is running a space transportation company called SpaceX,
but on the side, I am the chairman of Tesla
Motors and and eight. When both Tesla and iron Man
made their debuts, Musk left the conventional mold of the
Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind. He moved to Los Angeles, which
is also where Tony Stark lives. In two thousand and nine,
(13:23):
one of the guys who started Tesla sued Musk for,
among other things, slander and libel. He said that Musk
set out to rewrite history by claiming he'd founded or
created the company. The suit was later settled out of
court in a resolution that acknowledged five co founders of Tesla,
including Musk. Meanwhile, though Musk's pr stunts generated just the
(13:45):
buzz the company needed.
Speaker 5 (13:48):
A big part of Silicon Valley is not just making money.
Another big part of it is the idea of changing
the world and making things cool. The reality is that
the reason Tesla is here today is because Elon Musk
is a remarkable storyteller.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
In some ways, what Musk was doing. A man becoming
a brand is an old game. Colonel Sanders is Kentucky
Fried Chicken, and then there's this guy Trump.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Steaks are the world's greatest steaks, and I mean that
in every sense of the word.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
But Musk did something different. Musk as Tesla was irreverent,
and he was witty, ironic, whip smart. The cheekiness of
Musk's online persona was new then, even if this voice
has since become ubiquitous online. Tesco's sassy Twitter personality, say,
Musk was sassy and messianic all at once. Not the
(14:39):
greatest steak in the world, but the steak that will
save the world. Niedermeyer has gotten a lot of harassment
for writing about Tesla.
Speaker 5 (14:47):
I've been labeled by the fans and the company itself
as a hater or you know, someone with potentially nefarious
motivations for writing about Tesla the way that I do.
The reality is is I wanted the book to capture
what I saw as the complexity underneath this very polarized
discourse about it online. And I think that, you know,
(15:08):
a a lot of that polarization has been a conscious strategy.
It's absolutely not a coincidence that this very polarized culture
has sprouted up around Tesla, and that the fan culture,
you know, people call it a cult. I think that
Musk knows that if you can force people to either
love him and trust everything he says implicitly, or hate
(15:29):
him and think he's a con man. More people will
break his way, and so polarization is a strategic advantage
to him.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Long before Musk bought Twitter, he seemed to be tweeting
all the time, getting into spats, cultivating a following, iron
manning his millions of followers. Began to gang up on
his critics, especially women. Why did he need fans? Why
did he need to be so online? Ed Niedermeyer has
(15:59):
a theory.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
Musk's fans need him to promise the impossible, and Musk
needs them to give him adulation even if he doesn't
actually deliver on the impossible. He needs them to tend
and nurture and grow again. What I think, ultimately is
the most important thing about Tesla, which is the narrative
(16:21):
in the image.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
For Niedermeier, this relationship is a consequence of the sort
of speculative capitalism that involves more speculation than capital.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
It's a natural outgrowth of the venture capital culture of
betting on the jockey and not the horse. You know,
for a venture capital investor, you don't always have to
build a really sustainably profitable business. What you have to
do is make sure that at some point down the road,
you can pass your investment off to someone who thinks
(16:51):
it's worth a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Tesla almost went bankrupt in two thousand and eight, the
year iron Man came out. In two thousand and nine,
it received a four hundred and sixty five million dollar
loan from the US government. It raised two hundred and
twenty six million at its IPO in twenty ten, and
in twenty thirteen paid back its government loan ten years early.
In twenty twenty, it had its first profitable year, and
(17:14):
those profits have continued. But despite the company's incredible success,
in twenty twenty four, profits seemed to have slumped. There
are no guarantees in the auto industry, and for Kniedermeyer,
the story of Tesla, which is one of engineering virtuosity
and against the odd success, is also a story of precarity.
(17:35):
For Tesla and for a musk.
Speaker 5 (17:37):
His position has always been incredibly precarious. And it's because fundamentally,
you know, a lot of why he's there is not
just the narrative, but also it's his risk tolerance is
an incredibly risk tolerant person. And you can look at
a lot of different decisions the companies made and see that,
and you know, with risk comes roared, but risk is
(17:57):
also risky.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
As far as risk goes. The striking thing about Tesla
to me was how for a long time Musk described
it as a company out to save the planet from
existential risk by a Tesla avert human extinction. In twenty
twenty one, on Earth Day, President Biden was at the
White House charing a sum out on how to avert
climate disaster. Well, Elon Musk was at the launch of
(18:24):
a SpaceX rocket carrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station.
The astronauts drove to the launch site in Tesla's that
each have their own suv with license plates that read Reduce, recycle,
and Reuse. A key story for Musk as a brand
for years was that he was saving the planet by
(18:44):
fighting climate change.
Speaker 7 (18:46):
But was he Elon Musk is a really difficult one
to parse. He's been very open and saying that colonizing
space is a sort of a survival strategy, which I
think is a thought that has a weird amount of
currency out there in the world. And when you think
about it, you know, in my view, just makes no sense.
Speaker 6 (19:08):
What's soever.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Elizabeth Colbert is a New york Er staff writer who
won Appel Surprize for her book The Sixth Extinction.
Speaker 7 (19:16):
There are a lot of these tech billionaires who are
interested in SPAZ obviously, as you know, and who also
see it as a big business, and it's hard to
pull that apart too. How much of this space exploration
hype I'm going to call it is on behalf of
potentially very profitable businesses, and how much of it is
(19:36):
really this kind of sci fi escape from Earth fantasy,
I really don't know.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
So then why do you call it hype?
Speaker 7 (19:46):
Well, I mean, Elon Musk is constantly telling us, you know,
when we're going to colonize Mars. But if you ask
any person seriously involved in space exploration, are we colonizing
Mars the way Elon Musk is constantly proclaiming that we will,
and within a very short time frame they will say
(20:07):
absolutely not. There's absolute no way that's happening.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
So then there's this other line of thought that I
confess myself totally perplexed by, which comes from the people
who talk about human extinction scenarios and their calculation is sure,
they're suffering here on Earth, but if we don't go
to other planets, then humans will become extinct when our
(20:33):
planet dies. And so against your global suffering of people
enduring poverty and disease, we count the untold numbers of
our human descendants whose human potential will be lost if
we don't go. Like it's almost a kind of extraterrestrial economics.
(20:54):
Have you encountered that existential risk argument?
Speaker 7 (20:58):
Every species that we have in the fossil record eventually
does go extinct. I'm not really predicting, you know, human
extinction here, but if you look at the record, it's
pretty much one hundred percent, you know, over time. So
the idea that humans Homo sapiens are going to be
around for the end of the planet Earth as a
habitable planet, that's so crazily at odds with As I say,
(21:23):
what we know about the history of life. So embedded
in that is this notion of humans as completely separate,
completely divorced from evolutionary history, and facing this shining future
on other planets. And that is a really interesting idea.
It's not one that I find very plausible.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
I'd called Colbert to ask her about Tesla, but we
ended up talking a lot about SpaceX, since it can
be difficult to pull these two visions of the future apart.
What struck me most talking with Colbert were her observations
about the internal contradictions of Muscism. In twenty twenty one,
Musk announced that Tesla would accept bitcoin from people to
pay for their Teslas, and the Tesla itself had purchased
(22:08):
one point five billion dollars worth of bitcoin. The price
of bitcoin jumped. Musk has been an incredibly avid proponent
of cryptocurrencies.
Speaker 7 (22:17):
Bigcoin is a terribly energy intensive cryptocurrency. Bitcoin mining nowadays
is using up roughly one hundred and thirty terarowat hours
of electricity per year, and that's roughly the energy consumption
of a country like Sweden. So the internal inconsistencies here,
(22:41):
I think prevent him from being a particularly good spokesman
for environmental causes.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
In twenty twenty one, Colbert published a piece in The
New Yorker about Tesla's bitcoin polluting. Days after it was published,
Musk announced that he'd changed his mind. You could no
longer buy a Tesla with bitcoin. Still, a lot of
commentators pointed out that there really was no excuse for
Musk's decision to accept bitcoin in the first place. How
(23:08):
could he not have known that bitcoin is mostly mined
in China and mostly on servers fueled by coal. A
writer for The Washington Post, pointing out how well known
it is that bitcoin is practically designed to waste power,
asked had Musk been on a multi year newsfast in
any case, the essential tenet of Muscism remains every problem
(23:33):
can be solved with technology. It's the reigning philosophy of
Iron Man, too, the motto of Stark Industries.
Speaker 6 (23:40):
Everything is achievable through technology, better living, robust health.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Everything can also be wrecked through technology. Elizabeth Culbert's book
Under a White Sky asks whether we have engineered ourselves
so deeply into so many problems, especially climate change, that
at this point the only way forward is to try
to engineer ourselves out of them. Stopping carbon emissions is essential,
but it's not going to be enough. Maybe we need
(24:06):
to invent machines that can eat carbon. Environmentalism used to
be largely anti tech, but it's not anymore because maybe
there's no longer a choice.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
I don't think there is really a sort of anti
tech environmentalism these days, but there are different strains, and
Elon Musk is the avatar of the strain that says, well,
humans can just do anything that we put our minds to.
We can cognize more as we can sucks here two
(24:36):
out of the atmosphere. There's no geophysical limits here that
we can't overcome. Unfortunately, I think that's just not true.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
We approached Tesla for a response to several points raised
in the series, but at the time of this recording,
we hadn't received a reply. I loved driving the Tesla Roadster,
but as I say, I'm more of a bicycle person.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
So is HG.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Wells, who once wrote cycle tracks will abound in utopia.
Alas utopia is never coming, I'll settle for sustainability. And
sustainability will require more than just switching out every petrol
powered car for an electric car. There on need to
be fewer cars and more bicycles, pedestrians and public transit,
(25:24):
and more renewable energy. But Tesla is pioneering that too.
Beyond producing electric cars and making them thrilling, Tesla has
done a whole lot for renewable energy, especially with its
battery technology. After all, the last part of the company's
secret master plan had always been provide zero emission electric
power generation options. In twenty seventeen, after a statewide power
(25:50):
outage in South Australia, Tesla won a bid to design
a battery system for the state and promise to install
it in one hundred days. As Musk explained at a
press conference.
Speaker 6 (26:00):
This is going to be the largest bat translation in
the world by a significant margin. We actually insisted in
during the contract that we beheld to the one hundred
where it's free. The system will be three times more
powerful than any system on Earth. This is not like
a minor Forura into the frontier. This is like going
three times further than anyone's gone before.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Tesla delivered in sixty three days. The system's still working
fantastically well for South Australians. Energy is cheaper and more reliable. Somehow,
this sort of thing never gets the Iron Man treatment.
It's not sexy, it didn't involve Hollywood or celebrities. It
didn't turn on Reddit, it didn't end in a Twitter feud.
(26:42):
It wasn't even a science fiction fantasy, and it did
not save the planet. It was a smart renewable energy
partnership that went well.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
There was really this opportunity to make a significant statement
about renewable energy to the world, to show that you
can really do a heavy duty, large scale, utility level
battery system, and that South Australia was up.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Of the challenge a public minded infrastructure project. It might
well be the most significant thing TESLA has ever done.
It is not, however, what Elon Musk will be remembered for,
because he pretty soon stopped talking about climate change as
humanity's greatest existential threat. Global warming risk is overblown, he
(27:26):
posted on Twitter in twenty twenty three. We don't need
to rush to solve climate change, he told Trump. At
the end of twenty twenty four, the less Musk talked
about renewable energy, the more he talked about politics and
especially about money. Next time on x men, bitcoin and
(27:51):
dogecoin and doge the Department of Government Efficiency Muskism under
the newly re elected Donald Trump,
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