March 19, 2025 • 11 mins
-
Mars Exploration:
- Elon Musk predicts humans will set foot on Mars by 2029.
- Possibility of finding ruins of an alien civilization or subterranean microbial life on Mars.
- Emphasis on building a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure survival even if Earth faces catastrophic events.
-
Technological Advancements:
- Musk believes a self-sustaining settlement on Mars can be achieved in 20 years.
- Importance of expanding human consciousness by becoming a multiplanetary species.
-
Career Journey:
- Musk's background in physics and economics.
- His decision to start an Internet company instead of pursuing a PhD.
- Founding of SpaceX in 2002 and the philosophical premise behind it.
-
Intellectual Property Philosophy:
- Musk's unique approach to patents, viewing them as inhibitors of innovation.
- Tesla's open-source patent policy to avoid patent trolls.
-
Personal Anecdotes:
- Musk's early days, including living in his office to save money.
- His journey from arriving in North America with $2,500 to becoming a successful entrepreneur.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Do they sell ICBMs? Does that work?
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
You gotta tell us a story that I want to
know who.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Anything in Russia?
Speaker 4 (00:10):
And what do you tell your friends? Yeah, listen, I'm
going to rush a device and mice.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Yes, you are listening to a forty seven Morning Update
exclusive with Ben Ferguson. Good Wednesday morning, Ben Ferguson, with you.
It's so nice to have you on the forty seven
Morning Update. And this morning is part two of the
sit down interview that I was a part of with
Elon Musk. This part of the interview you're gonna love
because we talk about the astronauts that were caught as
(00:36):
political prisoners in outer space. As you know, the astronauts
stuck in space for nine months after what was supposed
to be a simple eight day mission. Well they're finally home.
Why because of Elon Musk in space x. So here
is part two of that interview with Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
What does man first set foot on Mars?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
I think the soonest would be twenty nine, twenty nine, yes,
and I don't think it's more than two to four
years beyond that.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
And that's not an unman, that's that's a human being.
Putting his foot on the surface.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yes, best case would be twenty nine.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
And what do you what do you put the odds
of finding either alien life or evidence of alien life.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I don't think we're going to find aliens, okay, but do.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
We find ruins? Do we find remnants?
Speaker 4 (01:37):
We may We may find the ruins of a long
dead alien civilization, that's possible. And we may find subterranean
microbial life.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
That's possible.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
All right. If man lands on Mars in twenty nine,
how soon after that do you land on Mars?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
It remains to be seen. I'm not sure.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
The important thing is that are we uh both a
self sustaining city on Mars as quickly as possible. The
key threshold is when that city can't continue to grow,
continue to prosper, even when the supply ships from Earth
(02:16):
stop coming. At that point, even if something would happen
on Earth, it might, it might. It might not be
World War three, but it might be that.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
A bad virus.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, it might not be anything. For those things.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
It's like like like say, civilization, you could die with
a bang or a whimper. It may be that civilization
dies with a whimper rather than a bang or and
simply loses the ability to send ships to Mars. But
so you obviously need Mars to become self sustaining and
be able to grow by itself before the resupply ships
from Earth stopped coming. That that is the critical a
(02:53):
civilizational threshold beyond which the probable life span of civilization
is much greater.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
And how close are we technologically to be able to
do that, to have a self sustaining settlement on the
surface of Mars.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
I think it can be done in twenty years.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
How do you turn PayPal into the success it was,
which then helped launch you to the next one and
the next one.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
So I studied physics and economics and college. She's a
good foundation for understanding how the economy works and how
reality works. And then I was going to do a
PhD at Stanford in advanced ultra capacitors actually as a
(03:39):
potential means of energy storage for electric transport. Put that
on hold to start an Internet company. Essentially came to
the conclusion that the Internet was one of those rare
things and I could either watch it happen while a
grad student or participate. And I figured I've always go
(03:59):
to act to grad school you know, grad school is
going to be kind of the same. But I couldn't
rather thought of just watching the Internet happen, so I
wanted to be a part of building it. So I
created an Internet Internet company. We did the first maps, directions,
yellow pages, white pages on the Internet. I actually wrote
the first version of software just by myself in ninety five,
(04:22):
and we ended up selling that to Compact Texas company
I guess YEP for about three hundred million dollars in
cash about four years after I graduated. Wow, So I
should say just to preface that I graduated with about
one hundred thousand dollars a student debt.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
So it wasn't yeah you and me both yeah, yeah,
where right? I know?
Speaker 4 (04:48):
And when I first arrived in North America, I arrived
with twenty five hundred dollars, a bag of books and
a bag of clothes.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
All right.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
So two thousand and two you start SpaceX, Like, how
do you start a rocket compan Like what's the first
day where you're like, I want to make rockets and
I want to go to Mars? Like what do you
do on day one?
Speaker 4 (05:06):
So I think you have to start with a some
sort of philosophical premise in order to have in order
for the in order to be in order to be
highly motivated, you have to have some.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Philosophical foundation. In my case, it was.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
That that we want to expand the scale, the scope
and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of
the universe. And in order to expand scale, expand consciousness,
we need to go beyond one planet. If for one
planet there's there's too much risk. You know, hopefully Earth
(05:47):
civilization prospers very far into the future, but it may not.
There's always some risk that we are we self annihilate
through nuclear war, or that there's a big meter that
takes us out like the dinosaurs. Ye, there's always some
risk if all your eggit are in one basket. So
it's going to be better if we're a multiplanet species.
And then once we're a multiplanet species, that the next
(06:07):
step would be to be a multi stellar and have
a civilization on many different star systems. So in two
thousand and one, I didn't think that I could I
didn't think I could sell a rock company, so I
thought I'd take some of the money from PayPal. In
that case, I think was about one hundred and eighty
(06:29):
million dollars after tax something like that, and I thought,
you know, I don't need one hundred and eighty million dollars,
so I'll spend a bunch of it on a philanthropic
Mars mission to get the public excited about going back
to Mars. We're going to Mars, I should say. Yeah,
(06:49):
Mars was always going to be the destination after the Moon. Right.
In fact, if you told people in nineteen sixty nine
that it would be twenty twenty five and we've not
even gone back to the Moon, let alone, it's hard
to believe, let alone Mars, they'd be like what happened
in the civilization collapse top, Yeah, like they would be
incomprehensible that we've not been to Mars. By now, if
(07:10):
you told people listen, after landing on the Moon in
sixty nine.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
What do you think in fifty years America never went
back to the Moon.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Well, we destroyed the Saturn five rocket that was that
could take people to the Moon, and had the Space Shuttle,
which could only go to lowth orbit, and then there
really hasn't been anything to replace any No vehicle has
been made since then that can go to the Moon
or to Mars until the SpaceX Starship rocket. Yeah, so
(07:39):
you can't go to Mars if you don't have the ride.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
So a few months ago you and I were down
in Boca Chica with a president for a starship launch.
And it is incredible what you built in Boca Chica.
You know, five years ago it was an empty beach
at the southern tip of this sandbar. Yeah, and it's
now a city and a factory where you're building a
rocket ship a month within incredible precision. But one of
(08:02):
the things you said to me when we were down
there that really stood out to me is is you said,
your philosophy on intellectual property talked to lots of CEOs
or we fight to guard our i P. And and
you had a very different approach. What's what's your view.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
Of i P, patents of the week, patterents of for
those innovation slowly.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
I literally do not know anyone else in business who
would say something like that, like like it was a
startling and and and what Elon said down there is
he said, look this stuff, I assume everyone will steal everything,
but by the time they steal it will be five
generations beyond and it won't matter.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Yes, at Tesla, we actually opened sourcialte patents, so we
said our patents are anyone can use them for free.
Really yeah, uh, the only really your patents of Tesla
to to avoid patent trolls causing causing trouble. So we'll
try to look ahead and say, okay, patent trolls are
going to trial file patents to blocks and things, will
(08:58):
file patents and then open source to patent make it free.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
I mean I when I say patents for the week.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Now, there are a few cases, in say with pharmaceuticals,
where it might cost you billion dollars to do a
Phase three human file, but then subsequently the drug is
very cheap to manufacture. So cases there are some, in
my opinion, which its massively reduced what can be patented.
And and say, because the whole point of patenting is
(09:24):
to maximize innovation, not inhibit it. And in my opinion,
maybe a controversial opinion, most patents inhibit innovation, they do
not help it.
Speaker 5 (09:33):
How many nights have you slept at your offices? You
think your career percentage wise where you say I just
got to take this nap basically because my body forces
me to and I got to get back to work
fast and efficiently without going somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Well, I guess it started out.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Even with the first company, so two, which is a
terrible name, but the first internet company. We're able to
rent an office, which was like in a leaky attack
essentially for five hundred dollars a month, and the cheapest
apartment we could find was eight hundred dollars a month.
(10:10):
So like, and we only had about five thousand dollars
between our brother and I, so like, we're not we'll.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
We'll, we'll just stay in the office. Yep. So we
got some.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
Couches that converted into beds and we'd can't sleep at night,
and then we just have like turn the beds back
into couches before anyone came, and then we would shout
the YMCA down the road and so that went that
that that that literally was for several months what we did.
(10:43):
I was in great shape, you know, work out the
y I still remember that that YMCA at Page Mill
al Camino in Palo Alto.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
So that was a long time.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Again, so it's been I don't know, I've never thought
to count it, but several hundred days maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Now, if you'd like to hear the rest of the conversation.
Make sure you download Verdict with Ted Cruz right now
wherever you're listening to this podcast, and you can hear
Part two in its entirety. And I'll see you back
here tomorrow
Do they sell ICBMs? Does that work?
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
You gotta tell us a story that I want to
know who.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Anything in Russia?
Speaker 4 (00:10):
And what do you tell your friends? Yeah, listen, I'm
going to rush a device and mice.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Yes, you are listening to a forty seven Morning Update
exclusive with Ben Ferguson. Good Wednesday morning, Ben Ferguson, with you.
It's so nice to have you on the forty seven
Morning Update. And this morning is part two of the
sit down interview that I was a part of with
Elon Musk. This part of the interview you're gonna love
because we talk about the astronauts that were caught as
(00:36):
political prisoners in outer space. As you know, the astronauts
stuck in space for nine months after what was supposed
to be a simple eight day mission. Well they're finally home.
Why because of Elon Musk in space x. So here
is part two of that interview with Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
What does man first set foot on Mars?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
I think the soonest would be twenty nine, twenty nine, yes,
and I don't think it's more than two to four
years beyond that.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
And that's not an unman, that's that's a human being.
Putting his foot on the surface.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yes, best case would be twenty nine.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
And what do you what do you put the odds
of finding either alien life or evidence of alien life.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I don't think we're going to find aliens, okay, but do.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
We find ruins? Do we find remnants?
Speaker 4 (01:37):
We may We may find the ruins of a long
dead alien civilization, that's possible. And we may find subterranean
microbial life.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
That's possible.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
All right. If man lands on Mars in twenty nine,
how soon after that do you land on Mars?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
It remains to be seen. I'm not sure.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
The important thing is that are we uh both a
self sustaining city on Mars as quickly as possible. The
key threshold is when that city can't continue to grow,
continue to prosper, even when the supply ships from Earth
(02:16):
stop coming. At that point, even if something would happen
on Earth, it might, it might. It might not be
World War three, but it might be that.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
A bad virus.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, it might not be anything. For those things.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
It's like like like say, civilization, you could die with
a bang or a whimper. It may be that civilization
dies with a whimper rather than a bang or and
simply loses the ability to send ships to Mars. But
so you obviously need Mars to become self sustaining and
be able to grow by itself before the resupply ships
from Earth stopped coming. That that is the critical a
(02:53):
civilizational threshold beyond which the probable life span of civilization
is much greater.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
And how close are we technologically to be able to
do that, to have a self sustaining settlement on the
surface of Mars.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
I think it can be done in twenty years.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
How do you turn PayPal into the success it was,
which then helped launch you to the next one and
the next one.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
So I studied physics and economics and college. She's a
good foundation for understanding how the economy works and how
reality works. And then I was going to do a
PhD at Stanford in advanced ultra capacitors actually as a
(03:39):
potential means of energy storage for electric transport. Put that
on hold to start an Internet company. Essentially came to
the conclusion that the Internet was one of those rare
things and I could either watch it happen while a
grad student or participate. And I figured I've always go
(03:59):
to act to grad school you know, grad school is
going to be kind of the same. But I couldn't
rather thought of just watching the Internet happen, so I
wanted to be a part of building it. So I
created an Internet Internet company. We did the first maps, directions,
yellow pages, white pages on the Internet. I actually wrote
the first version of software just by myself in ninety five,
(04:22):
and we ended up selling that to Compact Texas company
I guess YEP for about three hundred million dollars in
cash about four years after I graduated. Wow, So I
should say just to preface that I graduated with about
one hundred thousand dollars a student debt.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
So it wasn't yeah you and me both yeah, yeah,
where right? I know?
Speaker 4 (04:48):
And when I first arrived in North America, I arrived
with twenty five hundred dollars, a bag of books and
a bag of clothes.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
All right.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
So two thousand and two you start SpaceX, Like, how
do you start a rocket compan Like what's the first
day where you're like, I want to make rockets and
I want to go to Mars? Like what do you
do on day one?
Speaker 4 (05:06):
So I think you have to start with a some
sort of philosophical premise in order to have in order
for the in order to be in order to be
highly motivated, you have to have some.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Philosophical foundation. In my case, it was.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
That that we want to expand the scale, the scope
and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of
the universe. And in order to expand scale, expand consciousness,
we need to go beyond one planet. If for one
planet there's there's too much risk. You know, hopefully Earth
(05:47):
civilization prospers very far into the future, but it may not.
There's always some risk that we are we self annihilate
through nuclear war, or that there's a big meter that
takes us out like the dinosaurs. Ye, there's always some
risk if all your eggit are in one basket. So
it's going to be better if we're a multiplanet species.
And then once we're a multiplanet species, that the next
(06:07):
step would be to be a multi stellar and have
a civilization on many different star systems. So in two
thousand and one, I didn't think that I could I
didn't think I could sell a rock company, so I
thought I'd take some of the money from PayPal. In
that case, I think was about one hundred and eighty
(06:29):
million dollars after tax something like that, and I thought,
you know, I don't need one hundred and eighty million dollars,
so I'll spend a bunch of it on a philanthropic
Mars mission to get the public excited about going back
to Mars. We're going to Mars, I should say. Yeah,
(06:49):
Mars was always going to be the destination after the Moon. Right.
In fact, if you told people in nineteen sixty nine
that it would be twenty twenty five and we've not
even gone back to the Moon, let alone, it's hard
to believe, let alone Mars, they'd be like what happened
in the civilization collapse top, Yeah, like they would be
incomprehensible that we've not been to Mars. By now, if
(07:10):
you told people listen, after landing on the Moon in
sixty nine.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
What do you think in fifty years America never went
back to the Moon.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Well, we destroyed the Saturn five rocket that was that
could take people to the Moon, and had the Space Shuttle,
which could only go to lowth orbit, and then there
really hasn't been anything to replace any No vehicle has
been made since then that can go to the Moon
or to Mars until the SpaceX Starship rocket. Yeah, so
(07:39):
you can't go to Mars if you don't have the ride.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
So a few months ago you and I were down
in Boca Chica with a president for a starship launch.
And it is incredible what you built in Boca Chica.
You know, five years ago it was an empty beach
at the southern tip of this sandbar. Yeah, and it's
now a city and a factory where you're building a
rocket ship a month within incredible precision. But one of
(08:02):
the things you said to me when we were down
there that really stood out to me is is you said,
your philosophy on intellectual property talked to lots of CEOs
or we fight to guard our i P. And and
you had a very different approach. What's what's your view.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
Of i P, patents of the week, patterents of for
those innovation slowly.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
I literally do not know anyone else in business who
would say something like that, like like it was a
startling and and and what Elon said down there is
he said, look this stuff, I assume everyone will steal everything,
but by the time they steal it will be five
generations beyond and it won't matter.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Yes, at Tesla, we actually opened sourcialte patents, so we
said our patents are anyone can use them for free.
Really yeah, uh, the only really your patents of Tesla
to to avoid patent trolls causing causing trouble. So we'll
try to look ahead and say, okay, patent trolls are
going to trial file patents to blocks and things, will
(08:58):
file patents and then open source to patent make it free.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
I mean I when I say patents for the week.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Now, there are a few cases, in say with pharmaceuticals,
where it might cost you billion dollars to do a
Phase three human file, but then subsequently the drug is
very cheap to manufacture. So cases there are some, in
my opinion, which its massively reduced what can be patented.
And and say, because the whole point of patenting is
(09:24):
to maximize innovation, not inhibit it. And in my opinion,
maybe a controversial opinion, most patents inhibit innovation, they do
not help it.
Speaker 5 (09:33):
How many nights have you slept at your offices? You
think your career percentage wise where you say I just
got to take this nap basically because my body forces
me to and I got to get back to work
fast and efficiently without going somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Well, I guess it started out.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Even with the first company, so two, which is a
terrible name, but the first internet company. We're able to
rent an office, which was like in a leaky attack
essentially for five hundred dollars a month, and the cheapest
apartment we could find was eight hundred dollars a month.
(10:10):
So like, and we only had about five thousand dollars
between our brother and I, so like, we're not we'll.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
We'll, we'll just stay in the office. Yep. So we
got some.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
Couches that converted into beds and we'd can't sleep at night,
and then we just have like turn the beds back
into couches before anyone came, and then we would shout
the YMCA down the road and so that went that
that that that literally was for several months what we did.
(10:43):
I was in great shape, you know, work out the
y I still remember that that YMCA at Page Mill
al Camino in Palo Alto.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
So that was a long time.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Again, so it's been I don't know, I've never thought
to count it, but several hundred days maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Now, if you'd like to hear the rest of the conversation.
Make sure you download Verdict with Ted Cruz right now
wherever you're listening to this podcast, and you can hear
Part two in its entirety. And I'll see you back
here tomorrow
Host
Ben Ferguson
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