Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes of repetitive flashing images

and some strong language.

My first impressions were that he was very sweet.

He seemed quite shy.

A minute and 30 seconds.

He said, "May I put my hand on your knee?"

And I said, "OK, go on, then."

Thought it was quite sweet that he asked.

T-17, 16, 15...

You know, he said, "I don't usually do this but,"

you know, he's like, "I'd love to see you tomorrow.

"Can we meet for breakfast?"

And we had breakfast and then, at the end of breakfast,

he said, "Will you come and have lunch with me?"

So then we went for lunch.

ROCKETS RUMBLE T-10, 9, 8...

And then he said, "Will you come to dinner?"

And then I remember, one evening, he said, um...

"Would...Would you like to come back to my hotel room

"so we can look at rocket videos?"

Five, four, three, two...

And I thought, "Mm."

I was like, "OK, yeah, I'll come back." And, um...

And we did get into his hotel and he did just show me rocket videos.

ROCKETS ROAR

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Elon Musk is the richest man who has ever lived.

But says he doesn't own a house.

He's a little different than a lot of other people.

He truly embodies big thinking and risk-taking.

With a few taps from his fingers, global markets can crash and soar.

CEO Elon Musk creating chaos with a single tweet.

It's bizarre. He shook confidence.

He's probably sleep-deprived.

This company is not run properly.

He is creating a chip that can be put into our brains.

Yeah, a chip and a bunch of tiny wires.

And it would do what?

Could you input?

Could you download Jim? Mm-hm, yes. But what...?

HE LAUGHS

And, right now, he's building rockets

that could take 100 people to Mars.

CHEERING

His power and wealth continue to grow.

No-one on Earth is doing more to change the world.

Come on over, man.

Why...why would you want to talk to me?

Because you are...you are the dude, my friend. You are the dude.

He's done things that no other country can do.

It's quite magnificent.

You're his mother... Yes. ..and his greatest champion. Yes.

He so dangerous. Completely, totally irresponsible.

It's not as much fun being me as you'd think.

I'm not sure I want to be me.

It seems a little strange to be handing it all over

to private enterprise, but I guess I'm kind of stuck in the past, huh?

"Unstable, reckless..."

I'm just being me.

OK. CLEARS THROAT

All right. OK. That all good? Yes. Lovely. Thank you.

I was this science nerd at high school.

I didn't really get many dates.

I don't know if men... boys, rather, were scared of me or whatever,

but I didn't have many dates.

I wouldn't date anyone who wasn't...

if he wasn't as good at math and science as I was,

and no-one was, so...

Although my ex-husband was.

He was better than me at math and science,

and I hate to admit that,

but that probably did help towards Elon being a genius.

One of my co-workers was a contract consultant

for Elon's first start-up, called Zip2.

Elon was upset that this engineer working on the deal, you know,

didn't know the technology well and he fired him.

So I went in there the next morning, he kind of grilled me on,

like, "Do you know the subject matter?"

And I was like, "Yeah, this is how it works."

And he was like, "Great, you're hired."

He works in mysterious ways, that guy.

RADIO TUNES AND DETUNES

RADIO: This is KRX.

You're waking up to another beautiful day in San Jose.

CAR HORNS HONK

Right when the Internet was being created...

..Zip2 was a cool company.

Elon and I sat across from each other.

It was like a lab environment -

they were still inventing

the product as they were running it.

REPORTER: Zip2, a California company that provides online access

to information about cities around the country,

from where to eat to how to get around.

You imagine the possibilities, but...

The company's founder is Elon Musk.

How old were you when you started this company? 23.

I remember meeting him for the first time.

He gave me a demo of what he had done,

which was online Yellow Pages with maps and directions,

and he turns to me and goes, "It's cool, huh?"

And I go, "Yeah, it's really cool."

I'm staring at him, he's staring at me

and I'm thinking, "Is this like a trick, you know, interview?

"Where they're trying to see, can I come up with something?"

He kind of assesses people,

and I've noticed he tends to stare at them

and it can be very intimidating.

And then I met Kimbal, his brother.

Zip2 focuses more on business listings, so, for example...

Kimbal was much more personable.

1995.

Brothers Elon and Kimbal are wannabe entrepreneurs...

..attempting to build just one of the thousands of start-ups

in the tech gold rush of Silicon Valley.

Living in the office and laden with over $100,000 of student debt,

they start searching for people who believe in them enough

to finance their venture.

How much money do you think you've invested in...?

..Elon's family of companies? Oh, I don't know.

It's probably in the order of $100 million, ballpark.

About on the order of $100 million, roughly.

Yeah.

The first time I met Elon, he was pitching Zip2. I remember it well.

He and Kimbal, they were relatively new to Silicon Valley,

been there only a few months.

I just remember thinking, "They're bright, properly self-confident.

That perfect entrepreneurial mix

of having enough self-confidence to be humble,

enough intelligence to respond to questions in a very nimble manner.

My first week...

..I come in and I see two people kind of passed out on a couch, OK?

One was Elon and one was a summer intern we had. OK?

They had both pulled... They had both pulled an all-nighter.

It turned out that was pretty common occurrence with Elon.

And we'd stay at the office until late hours,

and then eventually he'd fall asleep under his cube,

with his physics book as a pillow.

You know, Elon is an unusual fellow.

He knows just about everything about everything.

I would say, from the age of three, I thought he was a genius.

He would reason with me and his reasoning was sensible.

And how do you even do that when you don't really have much experience?

I wanted him to go to nursery school.

They said, "Well, he makes it by two days,

"but you really should keep him back a year

"because, otherwise, he'll be a little socially challenged."

And I said, "You don't understand, I have a genius son -

"he needs to talk to someone besides me."

And, of course, they rolled their eyes

because every mother thinks their child is a genius!

JIM AMBRAS: You know, we worked closely together.

When he was in a good mood, he was an incredible, fun guy to be with.

But I remember Elon...

You know, one time, it was about nine o'clock at night,

Elon was going around the office,

looking to see who was sitting in their cubes.

And there weren't many people sitting in their cubes. It was 9pm.

And his face turned red, and he was just really angry

that, you know, the entire company wasn't there

in the office at nine o'clock at night.

He worked seven days a week, crazy hours.

And, in that time,

he managed to still hold a relationship with his fiancee.

Elon met his fiancee, Justine, at university.

They were in the same abnormal psychology class.

Highly competitive with each other, Justine scored 97% in the exam.

Elon scored 98.

And they have now been dating for six years.

A roller-coaster ride in terms of watching Elon

go through the trials and tribulations of working,

and the toll that that, you know, takes on a relationship.

DOG BARKS

You know, and you accept that

when you're, you know, spending time with him,

you're getting a very small part of him

because 95% of his mental energy

is still being consumed by these problems.

He doesn't get any breaks from it.

You have to spend a tremendous amount of your time at work.

There's no such thing as the eight-hour day in Silicon Valley,

in any field.

TRUCK HORN HONKS

PHONE RINGS

Hi, Elon Musk speaking.

REPORTER: It's seven o'clock in the morning,

and Elon Musk anxiously waits for his prize

for paying his dues in the Valley.

He was a was talking about the McLaren F1.

It cost $1 million -

the fastest production car in the world, only 64 were made.

I said, "Why don't you just go out and buy a McLaren F1?"

And then, a week later, he did.

Wow, I can't believe it's actually here.

That's pretty wild, man.

Just three years ago, I was showering at the Y

and sleeping on the office floor.

And now, obviously, I've got a million-dollar car

and quite a few creature comforts.

There it is, gentlemen, the fastest car in the world.

I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas

and turn it into my personal fiefdom.

I'm much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.

When we were acquired, a number of us

were talking about where Elon would be in the future.

And we said, "Either he'll be the richest guy on the planet,

"or he will be totally dead broke."

But there would be nothing in between.

Elon invests almost all of his money into his next venture.

So this is an ATM.

What we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry.

He becomes CEO of a banking company

that will soon be worth billions of dollars.

But, whilst away on honeymoon, Elon is ousted as CEO.

He retains his shares,

but no longer has any significant role at the company.

You know, I think it's not a good idea to leave the office

when there are, like, a lot of major things under way

which are causing people a great deal of stress.

There was just a lot of worry that caused the management team to decide

that I wasn't the right guy to run the company.

Wow, what a formative event.

It leaves a mark. You feel betrayed.

As a teenager, Elon didn't have many friends,

but he read all the time.

Through the night - I couldn't get him up in the morning.

He read a lot of science fiction.

He would read through the night until he saw me getting up,

and then he would go to sleep, and then of course

I had to dress him when he was half asleep and get him to school.

What are some of the problems

that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?

The biggest terrestrial problem we've got

is sustainable energy.

The other one being the extension of life beyond Earth,

to make life multi-planetary.

Humans need an adventure.

Getting to new territory.

The best reason is so that we don't get wiped out.

Something like an asteroid strike, like plagues,

or nuclear war, of course.

If that was to happen,

human civilisation on multiple planets

is a great insurance policy.

Back in the early 2000s,

I was going to Mars Society meetings regularly.

The topic that would come up was this desire to have a fundraiser.

Film-maker James Cameron was a Mars nut himself

and had been contemplating a Mars movie.

Somebody had the idea of getting Jim Cameron as the feature draw.

I sent out all the invitations,

and I have to admit they didn't do real well.

One notable response from a guy named Elon Musk

that nobody had ever heard of.

He actually paid $5,000 for the plate

and to be seated with Jim Cameron.

He pulled me aside, and he said,

"Well, I have a project I need some help with -

"take a little miniature greenhouse down to the surface of Mars

"to watch the plants grow."

Honestly, I thought it was, like,

crazy ambitious but well thought out.

40 feet down, two and a half...

He was trying to do something to wake people up.

OK, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now.

His philosophy was, like, great things don't happen automatically.

That's one small step for man....

After winning the space race, Nasa's plans slowed.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

Engine ignition and liftoff of the Proton rocket carrying Zvezda,

the centrepiece of Russia's contribution

to the International Space Station...

Meanwhile, other nations developed their own rocket technology,

launching satellites and supplying the International Space Station.

In planning a trip to Mars, Musk believes he can also capitalise

on the business opportunities that are opening up in space,

putting America back in the game.

If you had a satellite and you want to put it in orbit,

you could fly on a Russian rocket...

..you can fly on a Chinese rocket,

a European rocket, you could fly on an Indian rocket.

Nobody flew in America.

None of the American companies flew in American rockets,

they were like, "We're going overseas,

"cos there's nothing in America that's cost competitive."

If Elon is going to get into space,

he's going to need to convince some ex-NASA engineers to help him.

When Elon, you know, first started talking to me

about, you know, the ultimate goal

of making humanity a multi-planetary species...

I...

You probably won't use this,

but, you know, this is what I thought

first of all, OK?!

So I'll give you something you can put on camera.

I didn't quite get his name,

"Ian Musk" is what I thought he said,

and I had no clue what PayPal was, he mentioned that.

It seemed like a funny name to me.

And that he was looking for a Russian rocket

to do an experiment to Mars,

and I was the guy, he was told, could help him do that.

Elon, Jim and another engineer, Mike Griffin,

fly to Russia to buy cheaper Russian rockets off the shelf.

The standard Delta rocket, it was about $80-100 million.

You could go to Russia and by a similar size rocket for two million.

We got into a classic military complex.

Razor wire on the top

and security and guns.

And finally we got down to where everybody was gathered,

including the chief designer.

In classic European style, you know, we didn't just jump into business -

we started to drink, and drink a little vodka,

and we'd have a toast, you know, a toast to the Russians,

a toast to the Americans,

and a toast to Elon, a toast to the internet.

Yeah, and so Elon starts to tell the chief designer,

you know, all about his idea of a multi-planetary species.

And here's Elon in his late 20s, you know,

and they don't know him,

he looks like he just walked in off the street,

and they took that as a sign of disrespect.

The chief designer was very angry.

He chopped Elon off mid-sentence and started in staccato Russian.

"This is a machine of war,

"this is not a toy for some young kid from Silicon Valley,

"this is not internet bullshit here, we're talking life and death."

And then he spit on Elon's shoes, and he spit on my shoes.

Elon turned to me, and he said, "I think he spit on our shoes!"

And I said yeah.

We got through all that, we got on the Delta flight back to New York.

Mike and I sat back, ordered some whisky,

and we were having a drink.

We were watching Elon, he's sitting two or three rows up from us.

And he's on his computer,

and he's working really, really diligently.

Mike elbows me, and he said, he said, uh...

"What the fuck do you think that idiot savant is up to up there?"

And...

And Elon turns around, and he looked at us,

and this is one of the few times he looks you directly in the eye,

and he says, "Fuck you both.

"I think we can build this rocket ourselves."

And he said, "I've got a spreadsheet."

We started looking at it.

It was remarkable.

He says, "We're going to build this when we get home."

And Mike and I just said, "OK!"

Ah... He'd probably try to drink it.

Me and another guy, John Garvey,

we wanted to build the biggest amateur rocket.

Holy...! Whoa!

We called it the Big Freaking Rocket, BFR.

John, at one point, said,

"There's this internet millionaire that wants to come by

"and see our BFR project.

"Is it OK if he comes by this Sunday?"

And I'm just, like, "Oh, yeah, sure, that's OK."

Two, one.

He was very interesting,

because he immediately started asking very pointed questions,

like, you know, "What do you have there?"

"A 13,000lb thrust engine."

He goes, "Is that a big engine?"

I go, "It's the biggest amateur engine."

And he goes, "Have you worked on anything bigger?"

I said, "Yeah, yeah, I worked on a 650,000lb thrust engine at TRW."

He said, "Could you build that engine?"

He said to me and a couple of other guys,

"Hey, if you guys are in, we'll start a company."

I said, "I'm in," so I was the first one to sign.

That's how I ended up becoming employee number one at SpaceX.

I remember emailing Elon again, saying,

"Hey, so what's next?" and...

"A rocket company? Yeah, sign me up."

Say your name, spell it for me, tell me what you do.

Elon Musk, E-L-O-N M-U-S-K,

chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies,

or SpaceX.

We couldn't hire anybody out of industry,

cos all my friends in the industry just thought,

"No way am I going to come there, you guys are going to fail."

I think there's only so much we can learn

by looking through a telescope,

and eventually we need to go out there if we're to find the answer.

The first time I met him was at a amateur rocket weekend,

and then later on, he came to my house.

And so I sent the whole family to the movies!

"Go watch a movie!"

We talked for a long time.

We talked more than two hours,

and when they came back, he was still there.

I think it's actually pretty smart to do this,

to go to somebody and check out their house, right?

And, you know, the overall impression

is so much more complete if you look at how they live.

NEWS REPORT: eBay is shelling out 1.5 billion bucks for PayPal,

a popular system used by web surfers to pay their bills...

A month after SpaceX is formed,

a buyout of PayPal nets Elon Musk $250 million.

Elon immediately tells his new group of engineers

they have just over a year

to become the first privately owned company

to build a rocket that makes orbit.

SpaceX relocates to Kwajalein, a small island in the Pacific Ocean.

There was no power, there was no water, plumbing.

We had to literally bring everything out there.

The logistics were terrible.

Just trying to get liquid oxygen there in the Tropics

was quite a feat.

It was humid. My body wasn't really made for that.

It was work and then work

and, uh...maybe work!

Everything is driven by schedule.

That was brutal.

Kwajalein was the only game for us at the time,

but it ended up being not the ultimate place to be.

The day that Falcon 1 launched,

Elon was...stressed at how much money he was spending.

MUSK: Yeah, it's pretty nerve-racking.

Sort of like seeing my baby go up there, you know?

It's pretty scary.

Step 170, LCR.

Initiate auto sequence start at T-minus 60 seconds.

Proceeding.

You were kind of moving towards that launch,

and then you realise one day you're actually in the control room

and you're doing this, right?

30 seconds.

Elon, he was nervous as hell, just like all of us!

20 seconds.

That final count in the seconds up to you,

you're just, like, so tense.

Just get it lit and please lift off!

Ten, nine, eight,

seven, six, five,

four, three...

Two, one, zero.

Plus one, plus two,

plus three, plus four,

plus five, plus six, plus seven,

plus eight, plus nine, plus ten.

This is the LC on the countdown net.

Falcon 1 is airborne at this time.

It only worked for 28 seconds or so,

and then the engine went out.

Stage one, OK, we just lost it.

Elon was pretty disappointed.

And just moments ago, the Falcon 1 rocketed toward space

off a small island in the Pacific.

But just moments after take-off, the rocket failed.

Angry at the failure,

Elon blames Jeremy Hollman, one of the young rocket engineers.

Elon, reporting to the press,

said the engineer and the technician screwed up.

Well, it ends up it wasn't really their fault.

If anybody, it was my fault for choosing aluminium bayonets.

A quick postmortem reveals that

salt sea spray caused corrosion on the aluminium components.

But Elon refuses to back down.

Elon wouldn't retract it in the press,

and that didn't sit well with Jeremy.

I went and talked with Elon about that,

and Elon said, "It's... you know, it's...

"There's no going back, you know, we're just moving forward."

So... So he ended up leaving the company.

So there was intense meetings where, "Let's not fail again."

He started working with us to optimise the rocket

to get as much out of it as possible.

He was technically very strong,

even though he was just learning about rockets.

And the one thing I noticed, if people were negative,

they were not in the next meeting.

He said a company is a bunch of vectors,

each person is a vector,

and they need to point in the direction that you want to go.

Bureaucracy and office politics and low morale,

it's almost random vectors.

He was always about making all the vectors,

which are all the employees,

pointing in the right direction, forward, moving forward.

Elon's ambition for SpaceX

can be found within his family history,

most notably his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman.

My dad was very adventurous.

He actually was driving along the road in Saskatchewan

and saw an aeroplane in the field, and it was for sale.

And he thought, "Oh, this looks good."

He swapped his car for the plane.

He became this pilot who flew all over Canada

and then flew all over America.

Elon's grandfather lost all his money in the Great Depression.

It resulted in a radical change in his thinking,

and he became a leading figure in a movement called the technocracy.

The whole planet Earth is in danger of total destruction.

Technocracy is a scientific approach to human affairs.

Technocrats believed in removing all politicians.

Instead, scientists and engineers would run the world.

They wore grey uniforms, held mass recruitment rallies,

and even changed their names to numbers,

such as 1X1809.

Above all, technocrats vowed to use science

to solve the greatest problems facing mankind.

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy.

And here we have a serious problem - America is addicted to oil.

By definition, we must move to renewable energy.

We will eventually run out of energy and die.

Civilisation will collapse.

In 2004, Elon Musk invests a $6 million stake

in a small electric-car company called Tesla,

becoming chairman of the board.

Really, what matters is, are we making a difference in the world?

To make a difference in the world, we have to build a lot of cars.

Until we see every car on the road being electric,

you know, we will not stop.

So, you know, this is really just the beginning of the beginning.

All right. APPLAUSE

We had nothing.

The day I started, we had a big empty floor.

They had one Craftsman tool box,

and we had to go to IKEA to buy the desks.

We had to go onto the Dell and buy our computers.

We crimped our own ethernet wires,

and we painted the space on the weekend.

They had a Lotus Elise,

and they had a pallet full of lithium-ion batteries

that'd just come in from Korea.

And they said, "We're going to take these lithium-ion batteries,

"put them into that Elise, and we're going to make a car company."

Every car start-up in America since Ford has gone bankrupt.

There was Rosen Motors, there was DeLorean,

there was Fisker - car company after car company.

And large amounts of money

and a large amount of time

would often be invested

before it was a complete wipe-out.

That's the sound of a crushed automobile!

Elon Musk now has two companies

with unproven and highly experimental products.

Look at this electric car called the Tesla.

And here we are with Elon Musk.

Oh, I'll also open the door for you.

There's actually a touchpad, which you can press and enter the...

Well, that's too complicated for me!

July 2006 and Tesla now has its first battery-powered vehicle,

the Roadster.

In fact, it's the only production electric car for sale

in the United States of any kind.

My original role was the office manager, so, I was responsible for,

basically, everything at the company that wasn't engineering.

We were a start-up, we were very scrappy, we hardly spent any money

on anything.

But we want to launch the Roadster in six weeks and go.

I went down to the Santa Monica unveiling event,

which they did in an aeroplane hangar.

A cocktail party with cars driving indoors...

# There's so many things I like about you...

..in a circle around all the participants, silent,

no emissions.

It was... Just a crackle of excitement in the air.

At one point, I got to be in a little small group conversation

with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That doesn't happen to me on a daily basis.

We'll do 0-60 in around 4 seconds.

Let's go. Here we go.

# Most of all...

Whoa!

# I like the way you move! #

A newcomer with no experience of building cars has entered the race.

A zero emission sports car that can go head-to-head with a Ferrari

and a Porsche and win.

Very nice.

Everybody was very, very bullish.

People were buying cars, I was surprised.

I mean, I didn't know that many people who would just up and buy

a car that wasn't ready for $109,000 at that point.

I was smitten, in fact, on the spot bought a Roadster.

I think I was customer number 17 of all their customers.

Behind-the-scenes, there wasn't enough ability to keep the batteries

thermally regulated and they'd get too hot.

And next thing you know, it's starting to smell and you can...

You know the smell.

So, we would cool the battery pack with ice packs.

But it felt like we had to build the enthusiasm with a promise

that was, you know, maybe a stretch.

But Elon had a way of...

Of dancing through that.

$109,000. It's a deal!

It's a deal! And our car's twice the efficiency of a Prius,

so a Prius is a gas-guzzling hog by comparison with our cars.

So, it's like plugging in a hairdryer, super simple.

Oh, yeah? Yeah.

To persuade folks like me that, eventually, all cars will be

electric, that this is the future, so much so that I'm believing it

in my gut is the inevitable future, is a rare skill.

Tesla has taken hundreds of orders for the Roadster.

I tested this one, it's hot.

And Elon has taken millions of dollars from customers.

But production issues mean that, several months on,

they're still not delivering the cars.

And now the company is haemorrhaging money.

If Roadster can't sustain the company by March, then

that's it and that scares me.

We need to get the company to cash flow positive in 6-9 months

or we're screwed.

I mean, you know, each month that passes is, literally...

Costs us tens of millions of dollars,

I mean, we need to appreciate that.

Just headed to the Menlo store

because I want to do a car-by-car walk-through.

Basically, a rundown of each car,

what's its status and what are the issues.

This was save the company, he was embedded.

Hey, Greg, the key fell apart.

He dug deep into every aspect of what was going on.

Holy mackerel!

Most of these Roadsters have major faults.

We have, like, an army of cars here.

Jesus! I'm looking like we're going to be able to deliver four cars

to the sales team. This is frightening.

Right now, we're facing an issue, which is that it's a sort of a

crisis of confidence amongst our customers, where you can only tell

them delay so many times and then they start to think,

"Man, is this company ever going to get me a car?"

He was talking to subcontractors, tier two, tier three suppliers.

Sometimes he called me at 2:30 in the morning.

I'm available 24-7, call me 3am on a Sunday morning, I don't care.

My family life was not the highlight of my years at Tesla.

These were long, long days.

It wasn't until Zach and Doreen found the faults

that we then realised that we had substandard parts on those cars,

which, quite frankly, pissed me off.

I want... I want names named.

At the time, there was incredible pressure on Elon.

You know, how are you going to tell the hardest-working man

in the world that, like, "No, I can't get that done."

If someone is always on the hot seat and is always the root cause

for problems, they will not be part of this organisation long term.

It's not OK to be unhappy and part of this company. Right.

And if somebody can't get happy, get divorced.

Right, exactly.

ELON CHUCKLES MEEKLY

Exactly, speak from personal experience!

In 2002, college sweethearts Elon and Justine

lost their first child, Nevada, aged just ten weeks.

Using IVF, the couple then had twins,

followed by triplets.

Suddenly, the CEO of SpaceX and the chairman of Tesla

is a father of five.

Now that you're a father, does it spur you on even more

in both of these companies?

Not really, er...

Obviously, I don't think there's any fundamental change

in my motivation for either company.

Actually, I have less time to work, because I... I have to and want to

spend time with my kids, so...

It actually...

Actually impairs my ability to execute here, really,

but that's fine, I don't mind.

OK, all right.

He compartmentalises his brain.

People are coming in and talking to him,

and every hour they tell him what's happening

and when you date or marry Elon,

you don't see him much.

So, it is hard to have a relationship in his case.

We were seeing a marital therapist

and I think he just got tired of the stress and the uncertainty

of it and the next day...

Sorry. I went into my therapist's office and he had left a message

for her to tell me that he was filing for divorce.

And so that was... That was how I found out.

One of the more

memorable moments of my life, yeah.

I mean, I was very young when I met Elon, I was 22,

so I hadn't really... Um...

Yeah, that was it - school and a bit of acting.

Weeks after filing for divorce,

Elon travels to London on a business trip

where he meets an up-and-coming actress, Talulah Riley,

in a West End nightclub.

I remember thinking, "Wow, what an incredible man,

"never met anyone like him".

And I was just thinking about him and so I emailed him and said,

"OK, well, I've got some time after this shoot, so I'm going to book

"a flight to LA and I've never been to LA, I'll book myself a holiday

"and it'll be lovely to see you".

And he wanted to sort of, you know, fly me over and sort it all out

and I was, like, "No, it's fine, I'll... I'll take care of it."

And then he said, "I don't want you to go home

"and I want to marry you."

And he apologised, he said, "I'm sorry I don't have a ring,"

he was like, "But this is, you know, this is what I'd like to do."

And so we shook hands on it and I said,

"Yes, I will do."

My father told my mother at the end of their first date

that he was going to marry her and so I think I was primed

to think that

after ten days...

You know, I thought, "Yep, that's... That's how it happens,

"that's what love is" and...

Do that thing, Dad.

You know, obviously, moved straight into the house with the children

and it became a very real thing, immediately.

What's this game? Did you just take... Did you just take that

from your brother? Yeah, but I want to see what game it is.

Dammit, this is what I was talking about!

Somebody took somebody's toy.

A CHILD CRIES

Statistically speaking, one out of the five has a good chance

of being unhappy at any given point.

I think because of my youth, I was relatively gung ho about it.

But, essentially, our home life was work, I mean, we were focused

on the companies and the children and that was...

That was it.

In 2010,

the space shuttle,

after nearly 30 years of duty,

will be retired from service.

A contract worth billions of dollars could be handed to SpaceX

if they can take on the duties of the retiring space shuttle.

SpaceX engineers have been on the remote Pacific island

for almost two years

with only one failed launch to show for it.

This is SpaceX Launch Control.

The vehicle has been recycled and turned around for another attempt.

Terminal count launch has started. 90 seconds.

Well, the first one was miserable for me,

cos it was... it was my engine on fire.

T minus 60 seconds. Vehicles to start-up.

So the second flight, I was kind of in the doghouse with Elon,

because, you know, the last one had failed and can't do that again.

T minus 30 seconds.

And if people get afraid of him,

that's certainly not the right answer.

But at the same time, he is intimidating, I can see that.

It helps if you have a little bit of a thicker skin.

Six, five, four... First-stage engine sequence initiated.

..three, two, one.

Falcon has cleared the tower.

The Merlin engine worked beautifully...

Thank fucking God!

..and I'm like, "Yes, it did it," and I remember Elon,

I always sat next to Elon, we stood up and hugged each other.

The pressure was off from that first failure, and it's like, "We got it."

Coming up on stage separation.

Separation. Stages are separated.

CHEERING

The first stage flew beautifully,

and then when the stage separated and the second stage came,

and then the second stage started doing the motion.

It starts wiggling around and the engine kicking back and forth.

It's like if you're carrying a glass of wine,

and every step you take, the wine sloshes around,

well, it actually ended up sloshing so high in the tanks

that we burned the tank down, it flamed the engine out.

The bottom line was we spun out of control.

It went a couple thousand miles

and then crashed in the ocean... again.

That failure wasn't on me, but it doesn't matter.

It was just, like, terrible for the company

to have another one fail when we were so close.

Elon had enough money to build three rockets.

We just told him, "Just calm down,

"we'll figure something out, we're going to fix it,

"we made a mistake, and we mop it up and do it again."

Nine, eight, seven...

So we came back a year later, again,

with a new engine.

A much better engine.

Everything else tightened down that we learned from the other launches.

Elon said that he's in for three times,

and everybody could count!

It was always three strikes and you're out.

You work so hard for so long...

It's agony, it really is, it's just, uh...

You know, everything was in it, and then it failed.

And to have it fail three times in a row was pretty disheartening.

So let's move it on now to brown-rice eco cars.

Tesla say it is pretty nippy.

Which is the fastest in a drag race?

# Excuse me, girl

# I know it's a bit embarrassing but I just noticed some tan lines... #

Almighty...!

# See, I reckon you're about an eight or a nine... #

Yes...! Come on!

Bye!

It does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.

# Like I said, you are really fit, but my gosh, don't you just know it?

# I'm not trying to pull you... #

Two years after its star-studded launch,

the Roadster has moved from dream prototype

to a saleable production car.

Tesla budgeted $25 million to develop the Roadster.

The bill now stands at 140 million.

This miscalculation means that the company can't afford

to make the cars for the price they promised.

400 expectant customers have already paid full deposits

and are now being asked to pay at least $6,000 more.

I cannot understate the degree of grief

that I've personally gone through to make this work.

Glass sandwich every bloody day.

I wish we didn't have to raise prices. It sucks.

And I can't carry Tesla entirely by myself.

I just don't have the resources to do it.

We took faith in you, and now you're just turning around

and changing the price on us, not telling us,

and then we find out about it backwards... Yeah.

..and now we're kind of hurt, because we weren't told.

We can't sell cars for, you know, less than they cost us to produce.

There seemed to be a little bit of anger from some people in the room.

Uh... It was very tough.

I think once you've snapped,

you probably don't realise it, because you've gone insane.

Your ability to look in the mirror psychologically

is substantially impaired.

Probably most insane people don't think they're insane.

ARCHIVE: Tough times have hit Tesla,

with some buyers cancelling orders of the battery-powered sports car.

2008, we had launched the car.

The team of people had done a spectacular job

of coming up to speed from... from nothing.

And then Elon, he made a public announcement

that we're going to bring in

the real guys from the auto industry now.

We're not going to be playing around anymore.

I was being seen more as the problem

than as the solution.

I took that as a personal affront.

I didn't really feel like I should be chopped liver.

And I took a move away.

Elon decided that I am his guy.

I told Elon when he was interviewing,

"Look at my name.

"It is spelled Ze'ev.

"Zero-emission electric vehicle.

"My friend, this is a destiny!"

The company was bleeding a lot of money.

If they don't get the car into the market,

there would be no company.

So I came essentially as an agent of change.

I got all the executives

that I decided that they should not be with us

and terminated them.

Faced with financial ruin,

like his grandfather before him,

Elon adopts the same clinical approach

to increasing workforce efficiency.

To work at Tesla, you have to be a little crazy.

You really need to be more dedicated to the mission

than you are to your own personal growth.

Between Elon and I, there was an understanding

that I was in it for the mission as he was in it for the mission.

All a company is is a group of people

that have gathered together to create a product or service.

Are these efforts that people are expending,

are they resulting in a better product or service?

And if they're not, stop those efforts.

Elon can be very overbearing.

I've seen Elon fire dozens and dozens and dozens of people.

He wouldn't ask anything of you

or ask you to work harder than he was working himself,

and so I just kept trying to nail it every single time.

I was drinking out of a fire hose every single day

for years and years and years,

so it just felt like... how we did things.

I feel bad that I lost those prime years with my daughter.

I didn't have as much contact with my family

as I otherwise would have.

I don't know how he does it.

He just keeps going and going and going.

He's amazing, the amount of energy that man has.

He can just take the pain of dealing with it constantly.

And most of us can't.

I had decided that I had no work-life balance

and I needed to take a break.

But I remember sitting in a room with him...

..and telling him that my three-year-old son

was calling me dad...

..and that I needed to take a break.

Work hard every waking hour.

If somebody else is working 50 hours when you're working 100,

you'll get twice as much done

in the course of a year as the other company.

He was trying to avoid bankruptcy.

Every day, Elon would come home and say, "Tomorrow, that's it."

Being ridiculed in the press, horrible things being said.

There was something called the Tesla Death Watch at the time,

which was an internet site kind of counting down the days

till when Tesla was going to disappear.

NEWS REPORT: Electric carmaker Tesla

laying off 20% of the workforce, 24%...

He'd have night terrors in the middle of the night.

I'd be fast asleep,

and then suddenly he would be screaming in his sleep

and sort of trying to climb up, like, in his sleep,

trying to escape something.

All available resource had to be ploughed into...

..the projects, into the companies.

You know, he gave me an out.

He said, "This is going to be the hard path,

"and you don't have to stay for it."

This simultaneous failure across all of his companies,

he's talking about chewing glass and staring into the abyss.

Rockets are blowing up.

And it just kept piling on.

The American people are concerned

about the situation in our financial markets

and our economy, and I share their concerns...

It was the financial crisis.

NEWS REPORT: Is your job safe?

Can our next president do anything to turn this economy around?

The recession is going to be deeper and longer than we thought...

Everything's falling apart in the economy.

Major auto companies in America are going bankrupt.

Not a great time to be trying to fund

a automotive company that's not yet profitable.

The important point to bear in mind is when you have new technology,

it takes time to optimise that technology...

Elon and I, we were in the mix for raising $100 million.

You feel that you just come up for air

and somebody come and bang you on the head.

And then it gets much worse.

This negativity, something bad is happening.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

You know, sometimes when a company is teetering

between economic certainty and "It's just a dream",

sentiment shifts can make a difference, right?

And the sentiment can turn against you.

The largest investor in the company has turned hostile.

Things like not signing legal paperwork.

And then it gets a little trickier still,

in that the company, by the way, is running out of money,

so it didn't have cash to even last to the end of 2008,

and the biggest investor says

"We're not going to put another penny in the company."

In that moment, Elon did something

that I've never seen any entrepreneur do,

going net into debt.

He borrowed money from friends,

literally spent every penny he had, plus more,

and he told all the folks at Tesla,

"I'll just do the whole thing, I'll invest $40 million."

He had no house to his name, he had nothing, he was all in.

And what happened was people's fear

switched to greed.

All of the other inside investors, ourselves included,

invested as much as we could.

That wasn't our bravery - it was Elon's bravery that we attached to.

Part of it, I think, comes from a self-affirming nature

that his brother Kimbal described as being somewhat immune to risk.

A more accurate description is that he...

..so truly sees the vision of what's unfolding,

that it doesn't seem fathomable that it would not happen.

Elon called a big meeting.

Then Elon said, "OK, get your shit together.

"We have one more rocket.

"Bring it down there, we launch again in six weeks."

After the flight three, we thought we were out.

But just by luck, you get that fourth chance at it.

SpaceX has just enough existing components

to attempt a fourth and final flight to orbit.

I was exhausted. 20 seconds.

But he rallied all of us for not giving up

and continuing this at this time

and putting everything on the last rocket, basically.

Two, one, zero.

Stage separation confirmed! Confirmed!

We didn't change a lot on the rocket this time.

We changed primarily a piece of software.

Nine minutes, 30 seconds. Second stage approaching SECO.

And that was all it took.

The rocket went to orbit.

And that means Falcon 1 is the first privately developed launch vehicle

to reach Earth orbit from the ground.

It's pretty amazing.

# I'm feeling rough, I'm raw

# I'm in the prime of my life... #

CHEERING

What we're hearing in the background

is Elon Musk addressing the employees at SpaceX.

Definitely one of the best days of my life,

and I think also for a lot of people here at SpaceX,

the culmination of a dream.

It's kind of mind-blowing, actually.

NASA called and told us that we'd won a $1.5 billion contract,

and I couldn't even hold the phone.

I just... I just blurted out, "I love you guys!"

They saved you.

Yeah, they did.

Financially and maybe even emotionally.

I'll tell you, that was... that was definitely helpful, yeah.

It was a wild party, and I don't remember the end of it.

# Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do?

# Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute? #

It was sort of the first thing that went right.

Elon was just...

..oh, the most joyous, incredible, wonderful thing.

It was lovely to watch him achieve.

Elon went from being ridiculed

to suddenly his word was gospel.

Fame is not something that agrees with him.

Tranquility Base here.

The Eagle has landed.

They inspired you to do this, didn't they? Yes.

And to see them casting stones in your direction.

It's difficult.

Neil, Jim Lovell and I have come to a unanimous conclusion,

that this is, in fact, a blueprint

for a mission to nowhere.

Can we just break for a second?