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