Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet. Long
Speaker 2: before Donald Trump appointed him to run DOGE, a department
Speaker 2: of government efficiency, Musk had plans. Plans to save the
Speaker 2: world from climate catastrophe with electric cars and solar panels
Speaker 2: and underground tunnels, Plans to colonize Mars, Plans to build
Speaker 2: chips to put in people's brains. He is followed by
Speaker 2: more than two hundred million people on social media. He
Speaker 2: has two ex wives and eleven children, including a son
Speaker 2: named x The bare facts of Musk's life, the way
Speaker 2: they're usually told make him sound like a fictional character,
Speaker 2: a comic book superhero.
Speaker 1: But what's the real story, the actual history behind the
Speaker 1: comic book. Welcome to X Man, the Elon.
Speaker 2: Musk origin Story.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill Lapour.
Speaker 2: I'm a professor of history and law at Harvard. For
Speaker 2: a long time, I've been studying the relationship between technological
Speaker 2: and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of the future
Speaker 2: in political discourse, in literature, in science fiction, and even
Speaker 2: comic books. This series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism.
Speaker 2: I call Muskism extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism where stock
Speaker 2: prices are driven by earnings but also by fantasies. Fantasies
Speaker 2: that you can find in blockbuster superhero movies, but that
Speaker 2: come from science fiction, some of it.
Speaker 1: A century old.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk runs a rocket company. It's called space X,
Speaker 2: his artificial intelligence company x AI, the name he gave
Speaker 2: to Twitter after he bought it. X. Musk loves the
Speaker 2: letter X, one of his first big startups, X dot com.
Speaker 2: X is sexy as an X rated, but X is
Speaker 2: sexy because X means mysterious and X means mysterious because
Speaker 2: In sixteen thirty seven, when Renee Descartes sat down to
Speaker 2: write a treatise on geometry, he decided to use X, Y,
Speaker 2: and Z for variables, but his printer setting the type
Speaker 2: kept running out of ys and z's but not x's
Speaker 2: because you don't use X very often in French, so
Speaker 2: he used mostly x's X the unknown. In the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: X became science fiction writer's favorite letter of.
Speaker 1: The alphabet.
Speaker 2: X for extraterrestrial, as in the film The Strange World
Speaker 2: of Planet X.
Speaker 3: Be prepared for a fantastic adventure into.
Speaker 2: The future, a monstrous world of terror and chaos. By
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties x men, xbox, x files, and then
Speaker 2: Elon Muskin x, dot com, SpaceX. Something strange was happening
Speaker 2: to capitalism. As the gap between the rich and the
Speaker 2: poor got wider and wider, the claims of corporations got
Speaker 2: more and more grandiose. Google opened an R and D
Speaker 2: division called X, whose aim was to solve some of
Speaker 2: the world's hardest problems. Tech companies started talking about their mission,
Speaker 2: and their mission was always magnificently inflated, transforming the future
Speaker 2: of work, connecting all of humanity, making.
Speaker 1: The world a better place.
Speaker 2: Scholars kept groping for adjectives to describe these new brands
Speaker 2: of capitalism. Surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, identity capitalism, What about
Speaker 2: just capitalism X for extreme extravagant existential A capitalism in
Speaker 2: which companies worry very publicly and quite feverishly about planetary disaster,
Speaker 2: about the all too real catastrophe of climate change, but
Speaker 2: also about all sorts of so called existential risks to
Speaker 2: the future of the human race, so that they can
Speaker 2: save us all. A capitalism animated by catastrophe, A capitalism
Speaker 2: driven by science fiction and driven to by the disavowal
Speaker 2: of its.
Speaker 1: Own origins to recover that history.
Speaker 2: Each episode of X Men were blasting off to the past.
Speaker 2: This episode is called Dimension X. Our first destination and
Speaker 2: time and space is South Africa in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: His father, Errol, was an engineer who owned a construction business.
Speaker 2: His mother was a former model. They had three kids.
Speaker 2: Elon was the oldest. His parents got divorced when he
Speaker 2: was still a boy. Eryl Musk has lately become a
Speaker 2: prominent figure in his son's shadow. Outspoken and controversial, He's
Speaker 2: compared the jailed far right activist Tommy Robinson to Nelson
Speaker 2: Mandela and predicted Robinson would one day be Britain's Prime Minister.
Speaker 2: Eryl Musk's relationship with his oldest son is fraud, but
Speaker 2: he's always maintained that Elon is a genius, as he
Speaker 2: did about a decade ago during an interview with South
Speaker 2: Africa's Radio seven oh two.
Speaker 4: Is something about Elon that's an X factor?
Speaker 5: What is that? Yeah? I would say that he's always
Speaker 5: been a very deep thinker.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: When he was very small, for example, he would ask me,
Speaker 5: where is the whole world?
Speaker 2: The story of Elon Musk's childhood, as it's usually told,
Speaker 2: is right out of science fiction, from a genre known
Speaker 2: as the boy Wonder story. My favorites are the Tom
Speaker 2: Swift books series that started in nineteen ten.
Speaker 6: Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout, the speediest car on
Speaker 6: the road. Barton Swift, esteemed inventor, was drawing a complicated machine,
Speaker 6: pausing to make some intricate calculations when his young son
Speaker 6: interrupted him.
Speaker 7: I'm gonna build an electric runabout.
Speaker 4: Dad. Hmmm, I don't take much stock in electric autos. Tom.
Speaker 4: All the electric runabouts I ever saw didn't seem able
Speaker 4: to go so very fast, oh very far.
Speaker 7: That's true, but it's because they didn't have the right
Speaker 7: kind of battery. It seems to me that if you
Speaker 7: put the right kind of battery into an automobile, it
Speaker 7: could scoot along pretty lively.
Speaker 2: That Tom Swift story was published more than a century ago.
Speaker 2: But the way well Musk tells it, little Elon was
Speaker 2: that same boy wonder.
Speaker 5: When the computers came out right in the beginning, he
Speaker 5: came to me and said he would like to have
Speaker 5: one of these new computers.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty four, when Elon Musk was twelve, he
Speaker 2: sold a video game to PC magazine for five hundred dollars.
Speaker 2: It's called Blastar Black Screen, little squary blobs, Space Invader
Speaker 2: style our mission destroy alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs
Speaker 2: and status beam machines. So don't get me wrong, Elon
Speaker 2: Musk really was a whiz kid. And when Elon Musk
Speaker 2: tells his own origin story, like when he spoke at
Speaker 2: the Computer History Museum in California, that's how.
Speaker 1: He tells it.
Speaker 8: I was very prairie booker, so I was reading all
Speaker 8: the time. So I was either reading, working on my computer,
Speaker 8: or reading comics.
Speaker 2: He read a lot of books, but he says that
Speaker 2: one book above all became his guide for life, the
Speaker 2: Elon Musk Bible.
Speaker 8: When I was twelve or thirteen, a head company existential crisis,
Speaker 8: and I was reading various books trying to figure out
Speaker 8: the meaning of life. And we happened to have like
Speaker 8: some books by Nietzschen Schopenhauer in the house, which you
Speaker 8: should not read at age fourteen is bad, it's really negative.
Speaker 8: Then I read The Hitchhiker's Guide the galaxyat which was
Speaker 8: quite positive, I think.
Speaker 2: In Douglas Adams is Hitchhiker's Guide, the people of Megalithia
Speaker 2: built an enormous computer to ask it a question about life,
Speaker 2: the universe and everything, and after thinking for millions of years,
Speaker 2: it answers forty two.
Speaker 1: Musk says that taught him a.
Speaker 8: Lesson a lot of times, the question is hotter than
Speaker 8: the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question,
Speaker 8: then the answer is the easy part.
Speaker 2: The Hitchhiker's Guide didn't start out as a book. Adams
Speaker 2: wrote it for BBC Radio four, and starting in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy eight it was broadcast on the BBC World Service,
Speaker 2: including to Pretoria l What was.
Speaker 3: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams? Far
Speaker 3: back in the mists of ancient time, in the great
Speaker 3: and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich,
Speaker 3: and on the whole tax free. Many men, of course,
Speaker 3: became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing
Speaker 3: to be ashamed of, because no one was really poor,
Speaker 3: at least no one worth. Speaking of.
Speaker 2: The Hitchhiker's Guide, that is, begins with an indictment of
Speaker 2: economic inequality. What was it like to listen to this
Speaker 2: in South Africa under apartheid. Musk hardly ever talks about apartheid.
Speaker 1: At least not publicly. I'm going to.
Speaker 2: Talk about it for a while here because it's a
Speaker 2: crucial piece of this history. But first, let me be
Speaker 2: really clear. White people who happened to grow up in
Speaker 2: South Africa under apartheid in the nineteen seventies and nineteen
Speaker 2: eighties are not responsible for apartheid. Peter Teel, another Silicon
Speaker 2: entrepreneur and later a key business partner of Elon Musk's,
Speaker 2: also lived in South Africa for a while as a kid.
Speaker 1: They were children.
Speaker 2: Also, Musk left South Africa when he was seventeen to
Speaker 2: avoid being conscripted into the army, the army that imposed
Speaker 2: and enforced the regime. I'm not placing blame here. Still,
Speaker 2: I do think there's a weird way in which the
Speaker 2: culture of apartheid found expression in the nineteen nineties in
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley's Vision.
Speaker 1: Of the Future.
Speaker 2: You know, you've said that apartheid is a habit of mind.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me what you mean by that? I
Speaker 2: called up Jacob Glamini, a professor of African History at Princeton.
Speaker 2: He grew up in South Africa, and he's written beautifully
Speaker 2: and powerfully about apartheid.
Speaker 9: What I mean by that is that so the partid
Speaker 9: was not just a social and political and economic system,
Speaker 9: but that it was also a cultural system which inculcated
Speaker 9: in South Africans, both black and white, patterns of behavior,
Speaker 9: ways of thinking. It's side to transform how people saw themselves,
Speaker 9: but also how they saw the world.
Speaker 10: The color question is rapidly increasing in seriousness and urgency.
Speaker 10: I consider a Partheight to be South Africa's lost chance
Speaker 10: to remain a white man's country.
Speaker 2: Apartheid, which means aparthood, began in nineteen forty eight. That
Speaker 2: same year, nineteen forty eight, Elon Musk's mother was born
Speaker 2: in Canada. Her father, jay N. Haldeman, was an ardent
Speaker 2: conservative and anti communist. In nineteen fifty, Haldeman moved his
Speaker 2: family to South Africa. Was there a lot of immigration
Speaker 2: from say North America to South Africa after apartheid was declared?
Speaker 2: I just find that like an odd journey for a
Speaker 2: family to make in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, I think that is quite striking. There is
Speaker 9: this conscious airport and conscious attempt to recruit people to
Speaker 9: South Africa to beef up white numbers to a point
Speaker 9: where blacks would not be such a demographic threat. You know,
Speaker 9: here's a place, you know, with amazing sunshine, great weather,
Speaker 9: and you can actually live like a king or a queen.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk's mother published a memoir in twenty twenty. It's
Speaker 2: called A Woman Makes a Plan Advice for a lifetime
Speaker 2: of adventure, beauty and Success. A lot of the book
Speaker 2: is about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen
Speaker 2: fifties and nineteen sixties. She says her parents were persuaded
Speaker 2: to move there from Canada by missionaries who talked of
Speaker 2: its beauty. Not once does she mention apartheid. Domini says
Speaker 2: that's not unusual that the regime organized itself around acts
Speaker 2: of forgetting and erasure, including pretending the native population somehow
Speaker 2: didn't even exist.
Speaker 9: Unlike in the Americas, right, you know, where the indigenous
Speaker 9: populations were annihilated, the South Afcana Gas is different. The
Speaker 9: vast majority of the population is not annihilated, and whatever
Speaker 9: you have to build has to be built around this
Speaker 9: idea that the natives have not disappeared.
Speaker 2: A resistance movement rose up, led beginning in the nineteen
Speaker 2: sixties by a young lawyer, Nelson Mandela.
Speaker 9: The Africans require the franchise on the basis.
Speaker 2: Of one man, one vote.
Speaker 4: They won political independence.
Speaker 2: Mandela was sent to prison in nineteen sixty two. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: the resistance grew.
Speaker 5: Radioprio.
Speaker 2: The Boys of the African National Congress, the U and
Speaker 2: General Assembly denounced the apartheid regime in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2: Two years later, right about when Elon Musk was starting kindergarten,
Speaker 2: police opened fire on thousands of school children during a
Speaker 2: protest and Soweto were playing.
Speaker 5: In the yard in the school yard and the stituating
Speaker 5: Atrendo in the process.
Speaker 6: Hitting three kids.
Speaker 2: These were black children. White children went to white schools.
Speaker 9: Black people had to pay for their education, but whites didn't.
Speaker 9: Some people were jogging. It was actually socialism for whites
Speaker 9: and capitalism for blacks. Right, That's how a party it
Speaker 9: actually justified itself that you know, we are creating a
Speaker 9: class of successful white people.
Speaker 2: People who ran construction businesses like Eryl Musk. Elon's father
Speaker 2: made a lot of money in the apartheid era, building
Speaker 2: two of everything, one for blacks and one for whites.
Speaker 2: For whites, they built a fantasy.
Speaker 9: World ideologically, I think one of the successes of a
Speaker 9: part daid was in making white South often believe that
Speaker 9: everything they achieved was through individual initiative, and everything that
Speaker 9: they ever got in life was through their own hard work,
Speaker 9: you know, never mind the fact that the system was
Speaker 9: designed to in some ways give them all the benefit
Speaker 9: and to give them all the resources to gether in life.
Speaker 2: It's so interesting because the starkness of that divide, you know,
Speaker 2: the rigidity of the separation, has so many earlier representations
Speaker 2: in the world of science fiction, right, Like so much
Speaker 2: of H. G. Wells's science fiction is about what about
Speaker 2: a terrible, awful future in which we divide people into
Speaker 2: some who will live underground and do all of the
Speaker 2: work for us, and we will never see them, and
Speaker 2: we will pretend they don't even exist, and those of
Speaker 2: us who will live in the skies and in the clouds.
Speaker 2: And to me, sometimes when I think about what Silicon
Speaker 2: Valley is imagining, we will colonize Mars, and some people
Speaker 2: will go there who really need to be relieved of.
Speaker 1: Their experience on Earth.
Speaker 2: I mean, am I off base to say that some
Speaker 2: of that seems to revive these notions of very very
Speaker 2: strict hierarchies.
Speaker 9: I don't think you off based at all, Jill. I mean,
Speaker 9: I think you've put your finger on it. And of
Speaker 9: course we don't want to instrumentalize this and see you know,
Speaker 9: it has just cause an effect. But I think there's
Speaker 9: a strong case to be made for the connection between
Speaker 9: the Sabarti dystopia and this idealized version of a world
Speaker 9: where the elites don't have to share their oxygen with
Speaker 9: lesser beings.
Speaker 2: So I listened to The Hitchhiker's Guide, and I find
Speaker 2: it strange that the Elon Musk is such a fan,
Speaker 2: because a lot of it sounds to me like an
Speaker 2: indictment of people just like him, or like Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 2: The mega rich, with their privately owned rockets blasting off
Speaker 2: to other planets.
Speaker 3: And for these extremely rich merchants, life eventually became rather dull,
Speaker 3: and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled
Speaker 3: on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn't quite right
Speaker 3: in the later part of the afternoon, or the day
Speaker 3: was half an hour too long, or the sea was
Speaker 3: just the wrong shade of pink, and thus where it
Speaker 3: created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry,
Speaker 3: custom made luxury planet building.
Speaker 2: Also hear me out, I think the Hitchhiker's Guide, broadcast
Speaker 2: by the BBC in the nineteen seventies, just when the
Speaker 2: world was condemning apartheid, sounds quite specifically as though it's
Speaker 2: an indictment of apartheid like social and economic systems. And
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm over reading. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's
Speaker 2: Guide on a Hermes manual typewriter. One key is more
Speaker 2: worn down than the rest, the letter X. And you
Speaker 2: know what was on the side of that typewriter, a sticker.
Speaker 2: It says end apartheid. When Elon Musk started college at
Speaker 2: the University of Pretoria, apartheid was on the verge of collapse.
Speaker 10: Today the mighty off South Africa back and why a
Speaker 10: back up nine has.
Speaker 2: No huge hib By then, in nineteen ninety, when Mandela
Speaker 2: was released after twenty seven years in prison, Elon Musk
Speaker 2: had left South Africa behind to launch his new life
Speaker 2: in North America. After studying at the University of Pretoria,
Speaker 2: Elon Musk traveled to Canada, where his maternal grandfather was from.
Speaker 2: He wanted to get to the United States, but it
Speaker 2: was easier to get a Canadian passport. Having broken with
Speaker 2: his he flew to Montreal with nothing but a backpack,
Speaker 2: then hitchhiked to Saskatchewan, where his grandfather had lived before
Speaker 2: moving the family to South Africa. And it's this grandfather,
Speaker 2: jay N. Haldeman, who I want to look at next,
Speaker 2: because before he left Canada in the nineteen thirties, he'd
Speaker 2: been a leader of a strange sci fi inspired movement
Speaker 2: known as technocracy. It bears an uncanny resemblance to some
Speaker 2: things going on today in Silicon Valley, repackaged as existential
Speaker 2: risk futurism.
Speaker 4: What Technocracy Inc. Is chiefly engaged in now is the
Speaker 4: organization of an army of trained men and women who,
Speaker 4: when the present interference controls break down and the intricate
Speaker 4: machinery of production and distribution is in danger of stopping,
Speaker 4: will be able to prevent that catastrophe before it is
Speaker 4: too late.
Speaker 2: So this sounds like science fiction, but this really happened.
Speaker 2: People in the technocracy movement, they called themselves technocrats, wanted
Speaker 2: engineers and scientists to run governments. They took their inspiration
Speaker 2: from science fiction, where engineers and scientists.
Speaker 1: Were always solving problems.
Speaker 2: They were suspicious of democracy and also of capitalism.
Speaker 4: Biprice system is not meant merely the capitalistic system, which
Speaker 4: is only one variety of the species. It means the
Speaker 4: collapse and complete obsolescence of the entire method of distributing
Speaker 4: goods and services by means of a price. There will
Speaker 4: be no place for politics or politicians finance, so financiers
Speaker 4: rackets are racketeers.
Speaker 2: Grant Weitdoff teaches Digital Humanities and American Studies at Princeton.
Speaker 2: He says the technocracy movement started in New York in
Speaker 2: nineteen nineteen with a guy who ran a floor waxing business.
Speaker 11: His idea was that engineers had these unique qualities that
Speaker 11: would somehow make them good social leaders. They could assess
Speaker 11: a situation from a bou they would come up with
Speaker 11: much more rational or economic solutions than politicians or economic
Speaker 11: leaders would.
Speaker 2: Then, with the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine
Speaker 2: and the depression that followed, democracies were collapsing all over
Speaker 2: the world. Technocracy really had its moment.
Speaker 11: Local chapters at that point had sprung up everywhere across
Speaker 11: the US and Canada, and each of those chapters start
Speaker 11: putting forward their own competing ideas. There's an invented unit
Speaker 11: of measure called the ERG. This is one solution that
Speaker 11: we replace currency with units of energy, depended on how
Speaker 11: much energy a single worker is capable of producing in
Speaker 11: a given day and how much they should get in
Speaker 11: return for that work.
Speaker 2: As far as I can tell, it's at this point
Speaker 2: that Elon Musk's grandfather got involved with technocracy. He lost
Speaker 2: his farm during the depression and ever after didn't believe
Speaker 2: in banks or banking. A lot of people felt that way,
Speaker 2: and some of them were drawn into the set of
Speaker 2: ideas about a different way of thinking of about money.
Speaker 11: And some of the chapters start doing odd things to
Speaker 11: kind of get their message across. They start wearing these
Speaker 11: identical gray uniforms, driving these gray cars in these large parades,
Speaker 11: blasting speeches out of megaphones. They adopt this yin yang
Speaker 11: symbol on all of their uniforms and all of their signs.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of pulled in two different directions, you know.
Speaker 2: On the one hand, I just think they're nuts. On
Speaker 2: the other hand, it seems to reflect an enormous amount
Speaker 2: of anguish and uncertainty, but it has a kind of
Speaker 2: quasi fascistic feel to be how should we read that?
Speaker 11: Technocracy from the start was caught up in a lot
Speaker 11: of different science fictional imaginarys that it didn't always have
Speaker 11: full perspective on. They want to write themselves into these
Speaker 11: gleaming science fictional futures that they are obsessed with, but
Speaker 11: without actually thinking through what that would mean in practice,
Speaker 11: what it would mean to replace an entire system of government.
Speaker 1: Some of what.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs now endorse, including
Speaker 2: through DOGE the Department of Government Efficiency, bears more than
Speaker 2: a family likeness to the technocracy movement. Libertarianism, deregulation of
Speaker 2: the economy, faith that technological innovations can solve both political
Speaker 2: and social problems, a critique of paper currency and the
Speaker 2: price system. Also, for some reason, technocrats objected to personal names.
Speaker 2: Musk's grandfather renamed himself one zero four five zero dash
Speaker 2: zero one. Another technocrat called himself one x one eight
Speaker 2: zero nine x five six like one of Elon Musk's
Speaker 2: youngest children, a boy named x ash a twelve or
Speaker 2: X for short. Elon Musk after that year in Saskatchewan
Speaker 2: spent two years at Queen's University in Ontario. Then he
Speaker 2: transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in
Speaker 2: economics and physics.
Speaker 1: He spent a summer interning.
Speaker 2: At dot COM's in Silicon Valley, where things were getting wild.
Speaker 2: It was a gold rush. In nineteen ninety five, the
Speaker 2: Internet opened to commercial traffic for the first time. You
Speaker 2: could buy stuff online. But how Musk started a PhD
Speaker 2: program in material science engineering at Stanford but dropped out
Speaker 2: after two days. As he later told CNN, back in.
Speaker 8: Ninety five, there weren't very many people on the Internet,
Speaker 8: and certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most
Speaker 8: people thought the Internet was going to be a.
Speaker 2: Fat Elon Musk started his first company, ZIP two, with
Speaker 2: his brother and a friend. Everyone at the time was
Speaker 2: trying to engage in what was called disruptive innovation, which
Speaker 2: means destroy existing industries by doing things completely differently online.
Speaker 2: Zip too, was a newspaper industry disruptive innovation. It helped
Speaker 2: newspapers make the transition to online publishing, though it also
Speaker 2: contributed to a crisis in journalism, all sorts of people
Speaker 2: founded news aggregators and news feeds. Musk made his first
Speaker 2: fortune in nineteen ninety nine he sold zip to for
Speaker 2: three hundred million dollars.
Speaker 6: Cash.
Speaker 8: Receiving cash is cash. I mean those are just a
Speaker 8: large number of band Franklins.
Speaker 2: He then turned to thinking about online money technocrats. Like
Speaker 2: his grandfather had wanted to abolish the price system, Musk
Speaker 2: wanted to restructure the system of exchange itself.
Speaker 3: This planet has or had a problem, which was this,
Speaker 3: most of the people living on it were unhappy for
Speaker 3: pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for
Speaker 3: this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with
Speaker 3: the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is
Speaker 3: odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green
Speaker 3: pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety nine, Musk founded a new company, X
Speaker 2: dot com.
Speaker 8: So this is an ATM, and what we're going to
Speaker 8: do is transform the traditional banking industry.
Speaker 2: Musk put millions of dollars into x dot com. He said,
Speaker 2: selling one business and starting the next was like a
Speaker 2: high stakes poker game. You win a big pot, you
Speaker 2: risk it all all over again. This is called serial entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2: Start it, sell it, raise venture capital to start the
Speaker 2: next thing. Every time you do this, you've got to
Speaker 2: come up with a story, characters, and a plot. Because
Speaker 2: your investors don't have any real metrics, no earnings or profits,
Speaker 2: no prices. Investors are buying your story. A startup doesn't
Speaker 2: actually have to make anything, or do anything, or succeed
Speaker 2: in any measurable way for a venture capitalist to make money.
Speaker 2: That startup just has to sound good enough for someone
Speaker 2: else to invest in it. All it has to do
Speaker 2: is tell a really incredible story, and the more obviously,
Speaker 2: the story comes straight out of the pages of science fiction.
Speaker 8: The better.
Speaker 2: X dot com described itself as an online bank, but
Speaker 2: its founders soon discovered that people mostly wanted to use
Speaker 2: it as an online payment system. Meanwhile, Peter Teal had
Speaker 2: started a company called Confinity that could send payments between devices.
Speaker 2: Teal worked as a securities lawyer before helping to found Confinity.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety nine, the company launched.
Speaker 1: A service it called PayPal.
Speaker 2: If people were going to buy things online, they needed
Speaker 2: to be able to pay for things online. As Teal
Speaker 2: saw it, they were reinventing money. In two thousand confinityan
Speaker 2: X dot Com merged. One thing Musk regrets is that
Speaker 2: the company's product got called PayPal instead of X. The
Speaker 2: founders of these companies became known as the PayPal Mafia
Speaker 2: because they made staggering sums of money when PayPal went
Speaker 2: public in two thousand and two and was later bought
Speaker 2: by eBay, and then they went on to found their
Speaker 2: own venture capital companies, funding other startups, including YouTube and Facebook.
Speaker 2: X Capitalism was born.
Speaker 6: Later.
Speaker 2: Musk, nostalgic about this time in his life, reacquired the
Speaker 2: domain X dot com. For a long time, there was
Speaker 2: just a little X there on a blank page because
Speaker 2: the only thing in the source code was the letter X.
Speaker 2: Who was just waiting there when in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. But we're skipping
Speaker 2: ahead back in two thousand and two. Once Musk had
Speaker 2: his PayPal fortune, he mostly used that money not to
Speaker 2: fund other people's ventures, but to start a company of
Speaker 2: his own, a rocket company, and for that he.
Speaker 1: Needed a new origin story.
Speaker 2: Next time on X men blasting off to Mars with
Speaker 2: SpaceX