Speaker 1: Pushkin. My name is jo Lapour. I'm a professor of
Speaker 1: history at Harvard, a New York or staff writer and
Speaker 1: host of the podcast The Last Archive. Last spring, I
Speaker 1: made a program with the BBC's Radio four. It's called
Speaker 1: The Evening Rocket, and now Pushkin Industries is releasing that
Speaker 1: show stateside for the first time. It's all about Elon
Speaker 1: Musk and his strange new kind of capitalism. Call it Muskism,
Speaker 1: extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism where stock prices are driven
Speaker 1: by earnings but also by fantasies. I'm fascinated by civilcon
Speaker 1: Valley's futurism and by how in Musk's life those visions
Speaker 1: of the future will come from the same place the
Speaker 1: science fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk
Speaker 1: wants to take the rest of us with his electric cars,
Speaker 1: rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath
Speaker 1: the Earth, I decided to look at those science fiction
Speaker 1: stories and understand what he's missed about them. So blast
Speaker 1: off with me on The Evening Rocket on a journey
Speaker 1: into the history of our future. Elon Musk is one
Speaker 1: of the richest people on the planet He intends to
Speaker 1: save the world from climate catastrophe with electric cars and
Speaker 1: solar panels and underground tunnels. He plans to colonize Mars.
Speaker 1: He's building chips to put in people's brains. He is
Speaker 1: adored by fifty million followers on Twitter. He has two
Speaker 1: x wives and six sons, including a baby named X.
Speaker 1: The bare facts of Musk's life, the way they're usually
Speaker 1: told make them sound like a fictional character, a comic
Speaker 1: book superhero. But what's the story, the actual history behind
Speaker 1: the comic book. Welcome to The Evening Rocket. I'm Jill Lapour.
Speaker 1: I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US political historian,
Speaker 1: and for a long time I've been studying the relationship
Speaker 1: between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of
Speaker 1: the future in political discourse, in literature and science fiction,
Speaker 1: and even comic books. This series, I'll be exploring a
Speaker 1: new kind of capitalism, call it Muscism, extravagant extreme capitalism,
Speaker 1: extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven by earnings
Speaker 1: and also by fantasies. Fantasies that you can find in
Speaker 1: blockbusters superhero movies, but that come from science fiction. Some
Speaker 1: of it a century old. The title of this series
Speaker 1: comes from old science fiction two in a pulp story
Speaker 1: from nineteen thirty eight, The Evening Rocket was the name
Speaker 1: of a newspaper of the future, also in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: The rocket is the go to metaphor for explosive growth.
Speaker 1: This is a rocket ship, Get on it. The CEO
Speaker 1: of Google like to tell people about his company. Cheryl
Speaker 1: Sandberg of Facebook said the same thing. It's all about
Speaker 1: fast growth. Blast off the people at Google and Facebook.
Speaker 1: They're not doing rocket science. Elon Musk, though he really
Speaker 1: does run a rocket science company. It's called SpaceX. Musk
Speaker 1: loves the letter X. One of his first big startups,
Speaker 1: X dot com. X is sexy as an X rated,
Speaker 1: but X is sexy because X means mysterious and X
Speaker 1: means mysterious because in sixteen thirty seven, when Renee Descartes
Speaker 1: sat down to write a treatise on geometry, he decided
Speaker 1: to use X and Z for variables, but his printer
Speaker 1: setting the type kept running out of ys and z's,
Speaker 1: but not xes because you don't use X very often
Speaker 1: in French, so he used mostly xes X. The unknown
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century, X became science fiction writer's favorite
Speaker 1: letter of the alphabet X for extraterrestrial, as in the
Speaker 1: film The Strange World of Planet X. Be prepared for
Speaker 1: a fantastic adventure and to the future a monstrous world
Speaker 1: of terriinal chaos. By the nineteen nineties, X Men, xbox,
Speaker 1: X Files and then Elon Muskin X dot Com, SpaceX,
Speaker 1: something strange was happening to capitalism. As the gap between
Speaker 1: the rich and the poor got wider and eider, the
Speaker 1: claims of corporations got more and more grandiose. Google opened
Speaker 1: an R and D division called X, whose aim was
Speaker 1: to solve some of the world's hardest problems. Tech companies
Speaker 1: started talking about their mission, and their mission was always
Speaker 1: magnificently inflated, transforming the future of work, connecting all of humanity,
Speaker 1: making the world a better place. Scholars kept groping for
Speaker 1: adjectives to describe these new brands of capitalism. Surveillance capitalism,
Speaker 1: platform capitalism, identity capitalism, What about just x capitalism? Expert extreme,
Speaker 1: extravagant existential a capitalism in which companies worry very publicly
Speaker 1: and quite feverishly about planetary disaster, about the all two
Speaker 1: real catastrophe of climate change, but also about all sorts
Speaker 1: of so called existential risks to the future of the
Speaker 1: human race, so that they can save us all. A
Speaker 1: capitalism animated by catastrophe, a capitalism driven by science fiction
Speaker 1: and driven too by the disavowal of its own origins.
Speaker 1: To recover that history, each episode of The Evening Rocket
Speaker 1: will blast off to the past. This episode is called
Speaker 1: Dimension X. Our first destination in time and space is
Speaker 1: South Africa in the nineteen seventies. Elon Musk was born
Speaker 1: in Pretoria in nineteen seventy one. His father, Errol, was
Speaker 1: an engineer who owned a construction business. His mother was
Speaker 1: a former model. They had three kids. Elon was the oldest,
Speaker 1: and then they got divorced when he was still a boy.
Speaker 1: Errol Musk once gave an interview to South Africa's Radio
Speaker 1: seven o two about his oldest son. But there's something
Speaker 1: about Elon that's an X factor. What is that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say that it's always been a very deep sea.
Speaker 1: When he was very small, for example, he would ask
Speaker 1: me where is the whole world? The story of Velan
Speaker 1: Musk's childhood, as it's usually told, is right out of
Speaker 1: science fiction from a genre noon as the Boy Wonder story.
Speaker 1: My favorites are the Tom Swift books series that started
Speaker 1: in nineteen ten. Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout, the
Speaker 1: speediest car on the road. Barton Swift, esteemed inventor, was
Speaker 1: drawing a complicated machine, pausing to make some intricate calculations
Speaker 1: when his young son interrupted him, I'm gonna build an
Speaker 1: electric runabout, Dad, m I don't take much stock in
Speaker 1: electric autos. Tom, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. All the
Speaker 1: electric runabouts I ever saw, while they were very nice cars,
Speaker 1: didn't seem able to go so very fast. Ah, very far,
Speaker 1: that's true, but it's because they didn't have the right
Speaker 1: kind of battery. It seems to me that if you
Speaker 1: put the right kind of battery into an automobile, it
Speaker 1: could scoot a lung pretty lively. That Tom Swift story
Speaker 1: was published more than a century ago, But the way
Speaker 1: Errol Musk tells it, Little Elon was that same boy Wonder.
Speaker 1: When the computers came out right in the beginning, he
Speaker 1: came to me and said, the would like to have
Speaker 1: one of these new computers. In nineteen eighty four, when
Speaker 1: Elon Musk was twelve, he sold a video game to
Speaker 1: PC Magazine for five hundred dollars. It's called blast Star
Speaker 1: Black Screen, little squary blobs, Space Invader style our mission
Speaker 1: destroy alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.
Speaker 1: So don't get me wrong. Elon Musk really was a
Speaker 1: whiz kid. And when Musk tells his own origin story,
Speaker 1: like when he spoke at the Computer History Museum in California,
Speaker 1: that's how he tells it. I was very party bookers.
Speaker 1: I was reading all the time, so I was either
Speaker 1: reading or working on my computer or reading comics. He
Speaker 1: read a lot of books, but he says that one
Speaker 1: book above all became his guide for life, the Elon
Speaker 1: Musk Bible. I guess when I was twelve with the
Speaker 1: Tina had Company existential crisis, and I was reading various books.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out the meaning of life. And
Speaker 1: we happen to have like some books by Nietzche and
Speaker 1: Schopenhauer in the house, which you should not read at
Speaker 1: age fourteen. It's really negative. Yeah, And I read The
Speaker 1: Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy. It was quite positive. I think
Speaker 1: in Douglas Adams is Hitchhiker's Guide. The people of megal
Speaker 1: Athia build an enormous computer to ask it a question
Speaker 1: about life, the universe and everything, and after thinking for
Speaker 1: millions of years, it answers forty two. Musk says that
Speaker 1: taught him a lesson a lot of times. The question
Speaker 1: is harder than the answer, and if you can properly
Speaker 1: phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.
Speaker 1: The Hitchhiker's Guide didn't start out as a book. Adams
Speaker 1: wrote it for BBC Radio four, and starting in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight it was broadcast on the BBC World Service,
Speaker 1: including Tupratoria. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Speaker 1: Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the
Speaker 1: great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life
Speaker 1: was wild, rich, and on the whole tax free. Many men,
Speaker 1: of course, became extremely rich. But this was perfectly natural
Speaker 1: and nothing to be ashamed of, because no one was
Speaker 1: really poor, at least no one. We're speaking of. The
Speaker 1: Hitchhiker's Guide, that is, begins with an indictment of economic inequality.
Speaker 1: What was it like to listen to this in South
Speaker 1: Africa under apartheid. Musk hardly ever talks about apartheid, at
Speaker 1: least not publicly. I'm going to talk about it for
Speaker 1: a while here because it's a crucial piece of this history.
Speaker 1: But first, let me be really clear. White people who
Speaker 1: happened to grow up in South Africa under apartheid in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties are not responsible for apartheid.
Speaker 1: Peter Thiel, another Silicon Valley entrepreneur and later a key
Speaker 1: business partner of Elon Musk's, also lived in South Africa
Speaker 1: for a while as a kid they were children. Also,
Speaker 1: Musk left South Africa when he was seventeen to avoid
Speaker 1: being conscripted into the army, the army that imposed and
Speaker 1: enforced the regime. I'm not placing blame here. Still, I
Speaker 1: do think there's a weird way in which the culture
Speaker 1: of apartheid found expression in the nineteen nineties and Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley's vision of the future. You've said that apartheid is
Speaker 1: a habit of mind. Can you tell me what you
Speaker 1: mean by that? I called up Jacob Glamini, a professor
Speaker 1: of African history at Princeton. He grew up in South Africa,
Speaker 1: and he's written beautifully and powerfully about apartheid. What I
Speaker 1: mean by that is that the party it was not
Speaker 1: just a social and political and economic system, but that
Speaker 1: it was also a cultural system which incarcated in South Africans,
Speaker 1: both black and white, patterns of behavior, ways of thinking.
Speaker 1: It's side to transform how people saw themselves, but also
Speaker 1: how they saw the world. The color question is rapidly
Speaker 1: increasing in seriousness and urgency. I consider apartheid to be
Speaker 1: South Africa's lost chance to remain a white man's country. Apartheid,
Speaker 1: which means a parthood, began in nineteen forty eight. That
Speaker 1: same year, in nineteen forty eight, Elon Musk's mother was
Speaker 1: born in Canada. Her father, J. N. Haldeman was an
Speaker 1: ardent conservative and anti communist. In nineteen fifty, Haldiman moved
Speaker 1: his family to South Africa. Was there a lot of
Speaker 1: immigration from saying North America to South Africa after apartheid
Speaker 1: was declared? I just find that like an odd journey
Speaker 1: for a family to make in nineteen fifty. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that is quite striking. There is this conscious
Speaker 1: effort and conscious attempt to recruit people to South Africa
Speaker 1: to beef up white numbers to a point where blacks
Speaker 1: would not be such a demographic threat. You know, here's
Speaker 1: a place with amazing sunshine, great weather, and you can
Speaker 1: actually live like a king or a queen. Elon Musk's
Speaker 1: mother published a memoir in twenty twenty. It's called A
Speaker 1: Woman Makes a Plan Advice for a lifetime of adventure,
Speaker 1: beauty and Success. A lot of the book is about
Speaker 1: growing up in South Africa in the nineteen fifties and
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties. She says her parents were persuaded to move
Speaker 1: there from Canada by missionaries who talked of its beauty.
Speaker 1: Not once does she mention apartheid. Domini says that's not
Speaker 1: unusual that the regime organized itself around acts of forgetting
Speaker 1: and a razure, including pretending the native population somehow didn't
Speaker 1: even exist. Unlike in the America's Right, you know, where
Speaker 1: the indigenous populations were annihilated, the South African gates is different.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of the population is not annihilated, and
Speaker 1: whatever you have to build has to be built around
Speaker 1: this idea that the natives have not disappeared. A resistance
Speaker 1: movement rose up led beginning in the nineteen sixties by
Speaker 1: a young lawyer, Nelson Mandela. The Africans require the franchise
Speaker 1: on the basis of one man, one vote. They're one
Speaker 1: political independence. Mandela was sent to prison in nineteen sixty three. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the resistance grew is Radio Freio, the voice of the
Speaker 1: African National Congress. The UN General Assembly denounced the apartheid
Speaker 1: regime in nineteen seventy three. Two years later, right about
Speaker 1: when Elon Musk was starting kindergarten, police open fire on
Speaker 1: thousands of school ldren during a protest, and so wadow
Speaker 1: we play in the yard, the school yard, in the
Speaker 1: pools of hitting creatures. These were black children. White children
Speaker 1: went to white schools. Black people had to pay for
Speaker 1: their education, but whites didn't. Some people were joking it
Speaker 1: was actually socialism for whites and capitalism for blacks, right,
Speaker 1: And that's how a party it actually justified itself that,
Speaker 1: you know, we create in a class of successful white people,
Speaker 1: people who ran construction businesses like Errol Musk. Elon's father
Speaker 1: made a lot of money in the apartheid era, building
Speaker 1: two of everything, one for blacks and one for whites.
Speaker 1: For whites, they built a fantasy world. Ideologically, I think
Speaker 1: one of the successes of a part aid was in
Speaker 1: making whites out off can't believe that everything they achieved
Speaker 1: was through individual initiative, and everything that they ever have
Speaker 1: got in life was through their own hard work, you know,
Speaker 1: never mind the fact that the system was designed to
Speaker 1: some ways gave them all the benefit and to give
Speaker 1: them all the resources to get on in life. It's
Speaker 1: so interesting because the darkness of that divide, you know,
Speaker 1: the rigidity of the separation, has so many earlier representations
Speaker 1: in the world of science fiction, right, like so much
Speaker 1: of H. G. Wells as science fiction is about what
Speaker 1: about a terrible, awful future in which we divide people
Speaker 1: into some who will live underground and do all of
Speaker 1: the work for us, and we will never see them,
Speaker 1: and we will pretend they don't even exist, and those
Speaker 1: of us who will live in the skies and in
Speaker 1: the clouds. And to me, sometimes when I think about
Speaker 1: what Silicon Valley is imagining, we will colonize Mars, and
Speaker 1: some people will go there who really need to be
Speaker 1: relieved of their experience on Earth. I mean, am I
Speaker 1: off base to say that some of that seems to
Speaker 1: revive these notions of very very strict hierarchies. I don't
Speaker 1: think you're off base at all, Joe. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think you've put your finger in it. And of course
Speaker 1: we don't want to instrumentalize this and see, you know,
Speaker 1: it does just caused an effect. But I think there's
Speaker 1: a strong case to be made for the connection between
Speaker 1: this a part of dystopia and this idealized version of
Speaker 1: a world where the elites don't have to share their
Speaker 1: oxygen with lesser beings. So I listened to The Hitchhiker's Guide,
Speaker 1: and I find it strange that Elon Musk is such
Speaker 1: a fan, because a lot of it sounds to me
Speaker 1: like an indictment of people just like him, or like
Speaker 1: Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The mega rich, with their privately owned
Speaker 1: rockets blasting off to other planets, and for these extremely
Speaker 1: rich merchants, life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed
Speaker 1: that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory.
Speaker 1: Either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part
Speaker 1: of the afternoon, nor the day was half an hour
Speaker 1: too long, or the sea was just the wrong shade
Speaker 1: of pink. And thus where created the conditions for a
Speaker 1: staggering new form of industry, custom made luxury planet building.
Speaker 1: Also hear me out. I think the Hitchhiker's Guide, broadcast
Speaker 1: by the BBC in the nineteen seventies, just when the
Speaker 1: world was condemning apartheid, sounds quite specifically as though it's
Speaker 1: an indictment of apartheid like social and economic systems. And
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm overreading. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide
Speaker 1: on herme's manual typewriter. One key is more worn down
Speaker 1: than the rest, the letter X. And you know what
Speaker 1: was on the side of that typewriter, a sticker. It
Speaker 1: says end apartheid. When Elon Musk started college at the
Speaker 1: University of Pretoria, apartheid was on the verge of collapse
Speaker 1: today if black and wide the lack of nine bapati.
Speaker 1: By then, in nineteen ninety, when Mandela was released after
Speaker 1: twenty seven years in prison, Elon Musk had left South
Speaker 1: Africa behind to launch his new life in North America.
Speaker 1: We have to get back in the rocket again to
Speaker 1: go still further back in time, two generations in fact,
Speaker 1: because after graduating, Musk traveled to Canada, where his maternal
Speaker 1: grandfather was from He wanted to get to the United States,
Speaker 1: but it was easier to get a Canadian passport. Having
Speaker 1: broken with his father, he flew to Montreal with nothing
Speaker 1: but a backpack, then hitchhiked to Saskatchewan, where his grandfather
Speaker 1: had lived before moving the family to South Africa. And
Speaker 1: it's this grandfather, j Nn Haldeman, who I want to
Speaker 1: look at next, because before he left Canada in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, he'd been a leader of a strange sci
Speaker 1: fi inspired movement known as technocracy. It bears an uncanny
Speaker 1: resemblance to some things going on today in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: repackaged as existential risk futurism. What technocracy ink is chiefly
Speaker 1: engaged in now is the organization of an army of
Speaker 1: trained men and women who, when the present interference controls
Speaker 1: break down and the intricate machinery of production and distribution
Speaker 1: is in danger of stopping, will be able to prevent
Speaker 1: that catastrophe before it is too late. So this sounds
Speaker 1: like science fiction, but this really happened. People in the
Speaker 1: technocracy movement, they call themselves technocrats, wanted engineers and scientists
Speaker 1: to run governments. They took their inspiration from science fiction,
Speaker 1: where engineers and scientists were always solving problems. They were
Speaker 1: suspicious of democracy and also of capitalism. By price system
Speaker 1: is not meant merely the capitalistic system, which is only
Speaker 1: one variety of the species. It means the collapse and
Speaker 1: complete obsolescence of the entire method of distributing goods and
Speaker 1: services by means of a price. There will be no
Speaker 1: place for politics or politicians, finance or financiers. Rackets are racketeers.
Speaker 1: Grant Whiteoff teaches Digital Humanities and American Studies at Princeton.
Speaker 1: He says that technocracy movement started in New York in
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen with a guy who ran a floor waxing business.
Speaker 1: His idea was that engineers had these unique qualities that
Speaker 1: would somehow make them good social leaders. They could assess
Speaker 1: a situation from above, they would come up with much
Speaker 1: more rational or economic solutions than politicians or economic leaders would. Then,
Speaker 1: with the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and
Speaker 1: the depression that followed, democracies were collapsing all over the world.
Speaker 1: Technocracy really had its moment. Local chapters at that point
Speaker 1: had sprung up everywhere across the US and Canada, and
Speaker 1: each of those chapters art putting forward their own competing ideas.
Speaker 1: There's an invented unit of measure called the ERG. This
Speaker 1: is one solution that we replace currency with units of energy,
Speaker 1: depended on how much energy a single worker is capable
Speaker 1: of producing in a given day and how much they
Speaker 1: should get in return for that work. As far as
Speaker 1: I can tell, it's at this point that Elon Musk's
Speaker 1: grandfather got involved with technocracy. He lost his farm during
Speaker 1: the depression and ever after didn't believe in banks or banking.
Speaker 1: A lot of people felt that way, and some of
Speaker 1: them were drawn into the set of ideas about a
Speaker 1: different way of thinking about money. And some of the
Speaker 1: chapters start doing odd things to kind of get their
Speaker 1: message across. They start wearing these identical gray uniforms, driving
Speaker 1: these gray cars in these large parades, blasting speeches out
Speaker 1: of megaphones. They adopt this Yin Yang symbol on all
Speaker 1: of their uniforms and all of their signs. I'm kind
Speaker 1: of pulled into a different directions, you know. On the
Speaker 1: one hand, I just I just think they're nuts, And
Speaker 1: on the other hand, it seems to reflect an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of anguish and uncertainty. But it has a kind
Speaker 1: of quasi fascistic feel to me. How should we read that?
Speaker 1: Technocracy from the start was caught up in a lot
Speaker 1: of different science fictional imaginaries that it didn't always have
Speaker 1: full perspective on. They want to write themselves into these
Speaker 1: gleaming science fictional futures that they are obsessed with, but
Speaker 1: without actually thinking through what that would mean in practice,
Speaker 1: what it would mean to replace an entire system of
Speaker 1: government some of what Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs now indoors. There's something of a family likeness to
Speaker 1: the technocracy movement, a fixation on futurism, a kind of
Speaker 1: radical rationalism, the idea that technological innovation can solve political
Speaker 1: and social problems, a critique of paper currency and the
Speaker 1: price system. Also, for some reason, technocrats objected to personal names.
Speaker 1: For instance, one technocrat renamed himself one X one eight
Speaker 1: zero nine x five six, like Elon Musk's youngest son,
Speaker 1: a baby named x Ash twelve or X for short.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, after that year in Saskatchewan, spent two years
Speaker 1: at Queen's University in Ontario. Then he transferred to the
Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in economics and physics.
Speaker 1: He spent a summer interning at dot COM's in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: where things were getting wild. It was a gold rush.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety five, the Internet opened to commercial traffic
Speaker 1: for the first time. You could buy stuff online. But
Speaker 1: how Musk started a PhD program in material science engineering
Speaker 1: at Stanford but dropped out after two days. As he
Speaker 1: later told CNN back in ninety five, they weren't for
Speaker 1: many people on the Internet, and certainly nobody was making
Speaker 1: any money at all. Most people thought the Internet was
Speaker 1: going to be a fat elon. Musk started his first company,
Speaker 1: zip two, with his brother and a friend. Everyone at
Speaker 1: the time was trying to engage in what was called
Speaker 1: disruptive innovation, which means destroy existing industries by doing things
Speaker 1: completely differently online. Zip two was a newspaper industry disruptive innovation.
Speaker 1: It helped newspapers make the transition to online publishing, though
Speaker 1: it also contributed to a crisis in journalism. All sorts
Speaker 1: of people founded news aggregators and news feeds. Musk made
Speaker 1: his first fortune in nineteen ninety nine. He sold Zip
Speaker 1: two for three hundred million dollars cash receiving cash is cash.
Speaker 1: I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklin's.
Speaker 1: He then turned to thinking about online money technocrats. Like
Speaker 1: his grandfather had wanted to abolish the price system, Musk
Speaker 1: wanted to restructure the system of exchange itself. This planet
Speaker 1: has or had a problem, which was this, most of
Speaker 1: the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much
Speaker 1: of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem,
Speaker 1: but most of these were largely concerned with the movements
Speaker 1: of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because
Speaker 1: on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of
Speaker 1: paper that were unhappy. In nineteen ninety nine, Musk founded
Speaker 1: a new company, X dot com. So this is an ATM.
Speaker 1: All we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry.
Speaker 1: Musk put millions of dollars into x dot com. He said,
Speaker 1: selling one business and starting the next was like a
Speaker 1: high stakes poker game. You win a big pot, you
Speaker 1: risk it all all over again. This is called serial entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1: Start it, sell it, raise venture capital to start the
Speaker 1: next thing. Every time you do this, you've got to
Speaker 1: come up with a story, characters, and a plot. Because
Speaker 1: your investors don't have any real metrics, no earnings or profits,
Speaker 1: no prices invests. You are buying your story. A startup
Speaker 1: doesn't actually have to make anything, or do anything, or
Speaker 1: succeed in any measurable way. For a venture capitalist to
Speaker 1: make money. That startup just has to sound good enough
Speaker 1: for someone else to invest in it. All it has
Speaker 1: to do is tell a really incredible story. And the
Speaker 1: more obviously the story comes straight out of the pages
Speaker 1: of science fiction the better. X dot Com described itself
Speaker 1: as an online bank, but its founders soon discovered that
Speaker 1: people mostly wanted to use it as an online payment system. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Peter Teal had started a company called Confinity that could
Speaker 1: send payments between devices. Teal worked as a securities lawyer
Speaker 1: before helping to found Confinity. In nineteen ninety nine, the
Speaker 1: company launched a service it called PayPal. If people were
Speaker 1: going to buy things online, they needed to be able
Speaker 1: to pay for things online. As Teal saw it, they
Speaker 1: were reinventing money. In two thousand, Confinity and X dot
Speaker 1: Com merge. One thing Musk regrets is that the company's
Speaker 1: product got called PayPal instead of X. The founders of
Speaker 1: these companies became known as the PayPal Mafia because they
Speaker 1: made staggering sums of money when PayPal went public in
Speaker 1: two thousand and two and was later bought by eBay,
Speaker 1: and then they went on to found their own venture
Speaker 1: capital companies, funding other startups, including YouTube and Facebook. X
Speaker 1: Capitalism was born a few years back. Elon Musk, nostalgic
Speaker 1: about this time of his life, bought the domain X
Speaker 1: dot com. There's just a little X there now on
Speaker 1: a blank page because the only thing in the source
Speaker 1: code is the letter X. Mostly though, Musk used his
Speaker 1: money not to fund other people's ventures, but to start
Speaker 1: a company of his own, a rocket company, SpaceX Next
Speaker 1: Time on the Evening Rocket, blasting off to Mars. The
Speaker 1: Evening Rocket was written and read by me Jillapoor for
Speaker 1: the BBC. The Evening Rocket was produced by Viv Jones.
Speaker 1: Oliver Riskin Cuts was the researcher. The editor was Hugh Levinson.
Speaker 1: The commissioning editor was Dan Clark. Ionah Hammond was production coordinator.
Speaker 1: Mixing by Graham put a Foot and original music by
Speaker 1: Corn Tooth. For Pushkin, it was produced by Sophie Crane,
Speaker 1: mckibbon and Jake Gorski, who also did the mix and
Speaker 1: sound design. Production support from Ben Nattapafrick. Our executive producer
Speaker 1: is Mielobell. Our operations team includes Daniella Lakhan, Maya Kanig,
Speaker 1: and Carl Mgliori. Thanks also to John Schnar's Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Nicole Moreno, and Eric Sandler.