how did elon musk become elon musk? >> guest: well, you know, through a long series -- [laughter] of incredible events. he is, he's sort of lived the american dream in a lot of ways. he came to the united states with nothing, about $100 in his pocket, and essentially he

basically outworked, outhustled and outinvented just about everyone in his path. >> host: what were one of his first inventions or investments or successes? >> guest: his very first success was his company called zip for, it was call -- zip ii, it was kind of a google maps meets yelp. it was around 1994. and, essentially, the answer to the age-old problem of kind of how do i find a pizza place are near my dorm room and, you know, you would just type in i want a pizza, and it would show you where the place was and give you turn-by-turn directions, and nothing like that existed at the time. he ends up selling that company for about $300 million, and elon was the largest shareholder, and so that's what really set him on his way. it gave him about $20 million to do whatever his heart desired. >> host: and what did he do with that $20 million? >> guest: well, the next thing he did was he decided, he kind of sat back and thought for a little while of an industry that

needed a kick in the pants, i guess. he had worked at a bank as an intern, and he'd come away from that experience thinking bankers were sort of dumb -- [laughter] kind of a herd mentality. and so is, again, this was the early days of the internet, and he thought to do basically an online financial system for everything, credit cards, your savings, your banking, and this was called x.com, and it morphs into paypal which i think a lot of people have heard of. >> host: so exactly -- peter teal was often cited as the founder of paypal. what was elon musk's role? >> guest: well they were both cofounders in a way. there was x.com which was elon's company, and literally in the same building was peter teal's company he had started with another stanford be graduate. so you've got these two companies in the one building that were kind of spending each other to death to compete to get in this online payment space,

and they would or use their service by giving them $10 if you could get a friend to sign up, and there was a lot of fraud, so they decided to join forces, and confinity comes up with the service called paypal, and that becomes the big hit, and the company just changes its name to paypal. >> host: you say elon musk arrived in this country with $100 in his pocket. where's he from? what's his background? >> guest: he was born in south africa, and half of his family is canadian-american, and the other half is british-south african. he was a lot, like you might expect, he was a precocious kid. he read tons of science fiction, he was very bright, but he was a bit of a kind of know-it-all. he was well loved with his family, but he was bullied at school, and when he wasn't, he was kind of a loner. he was ignored by i his peers.

i interviewed tons of kids, and they all said pretty much the same thing which was, you know, he was just the last person they would expect to end up doing all this spectacular stuff. he just kept to himself, and he was really into computers and is sci-fi, and that pushed him. and then he'd always heard about silicon valley and dreamed of getting to america, and so from a very young age, that's what he pined to do. and at 17 he just ran away from home and did it. >> host: and ran away from home? >> guest: he did run away from home. yeah, his mom had canadian citizenship, and so he wanted to get to the united states, but he had to sort of make this pit stop in canada, and he sort of backpacks around canada for a year working a bunch of odd jobs, and then he, and then he gets into queens university and really starts to kind of excel academically, and then he ends up at u-penn in the united states to finish his degree. >> host: and what did he study

at u-penn? >> guest: he did a mix, physics and business at the same time. >> host: he did those in a combination? did he do that on purpose? >> guest: he did. i mean, he fancies himselfs a physicist. he was into things back then like batteries and ultra capacitors and all of this, and he wanted to get the business degree as well. and so he does them both at the same time. i think it took him about five years. and then he's also hosting these big house parties on the weekend to pay his way through school. they would have hundreds of people show up at these gatherings, and elon would charge $20-$50 a head for these parties. >> host: you write in your book that musk's behavior matches up more closely with someone who is described by neuropsychologists as profoundly gifted. >> guest: that's right. it's a clinical term that i ran across as i was doing the book. i mean, he is -- a lot of people think he's, they would say he's

somewhere on the asperger's spectrum. he doesn't show a lot of everyone thu towards his i coworkers, but i found there's a certain kind of person who at quite a young age has an empathy not for individual people, but for sort of mankind as a whole. it sounds, i don't know, sort of fantastic to some people, but he feels like he has to help the human species. there's a flaw with the human species, and he is out there to help people as a whole. >> host: after the selling of paypal, what happened next? >> guest: well, there's essentially a coup. he goes off on a honeymoon. he's been putting off his honeymoon for a long time with his first wife, justine musk. and there's a coup while he hops on the plane to go to sydney and gets thrown out. there's a big disagreement over the direction of the company, and then a few months pass, and ebay ends up acquiring paypal for about $1.5 billion, and elon

ends up with $200million. and then, you know, he decides he wants to do this grand gesture for man kind. he goes to the nasa web site, he sees there's nothing there about exploring mars, and this really depresses him. so he decides he is going to send at first mice to mars, and then he decides he wants to send a plant that's going kind of supply the first oxygen on mars. and be we would watch this in a video camera. >> host: and was that successful? [laughter] >> guest: he never quite gets there. he goes to russia. it's one of these amazing stories. he's got to buy the rockets, so he goes to russia to get these intercontinental ballistic missiles, refurbished ones, you know, russia's the only place he can buy these. the russians treat him sort of like just a dot.com millionaire that they can take advantage of. they try to overcharge him, they don't really take him seriously.

and then he comes back from that trip and he decides, look, what i have to do is build my own rockets, and that's the only way i'm going to do this, and this is kind of where his company, spacex, is born around 2001. it is this idea that they're going to be the southwest for space. he's going to assemble rockets much cheaper than other companies, and he's also going to assemble them faster and really sort of put the aerospace industry on its head. >> host: what has spacex accomplished or done since 2001? >> guest: it's been on a pretty remarkable run. i mean, it's a really unlikely story that it exists. it's competing against entire nations. it's had a rocky beginning. i mean, when elon first started in 2001, he thought it would take a couple years to get a rocket up. it ended up taking about six or seven years. and since then, you know, it's not a space tourism company, it's a commercial satellite company. they take satellites up for

countries and for other companies, communications companies. and the, they have become the low cost provider in the market. they charge about on the order to of $30-$60 million per flight versus hundreds of millions or dollars from their competitors. quite reasonably, they got on a really good run of about one launch per month very consistently and then, unfortunately, a couple weeks ago they had their first rocket blow up in a really long time. >> host: is it profitable, is spacex profitable? >> guest: elon says it is, but it's private, and so we don't know for sure. we do know they have a backlog that they publish on their web site, and it has about $8 billion in orders over the next five years. i mean, it's a success story. they build the rockets in the united states from scratch, they use american engenerals of their own -- engines of their own design. they're the only american company right now that has american engines, the other companies rely on russianen

engines. so they employ thousands of people. it's a fascinating story. it's kind of probably my favorite one in the book. >> host: ashlee vance, where is spacex based, where are the manufacturing facilities? >> guest: it's based in hawthorne, california, which is just a few miles from lax. they have an enormous factory there, about 500,000 square feet, and it's growing. and they, they make everything right there. they have another test facility where they test the rockets in texas, in mcgregor, texas, kind of central texas, and they're building a space port on the east coast of texas. >> host: so what is elon musk's relationship with silicon valley? >> guest: he's kind of a unique character. so is he lives a veryunusual lifestyle. he has a house in los angeles, in bel air, and that's kind of his home base. and that's where spacex is based. and tesla motors, his electric car company where he's also the

ceo, is based in silicon valley. they have an office in palo alto and also have a factory in fremont, california. so is he splits his time every week going back and forth between the two. and then he's kind of this, you know, most of the silicon valley ceos kind of keep to themselves, they, they're very much married to silicon valley and kind of the tech lifestyle. elon's a little more of like a hollywood kind of guy. he enjoys hanging out with celebrities. he's supposed to be sort of this tony stark type figure from the "iron man" shows, and he kind of revels in that a little bit. he's more of a celebrity ceo than we've seen in a long time. >> host: who is ta lula reilly? >> guest: well,, the -- this gets a little complicated. he's been married and divorced and remarried and divorced from her. she's a british actress, and then now i understand that elon

and talulah are back together again. his first wife he had five boys with, and then ta ta lula is his second wife. he met her around 2008 when his companies were kind of going under -- not going under, but going through really tough financial times, and she sort of stuck with him during that. >> host: and his relationship currently with justine? >> guest: i'd say it's, you know, they share custody of their kids, and i guess they -- it's, i would say, it's a little bit strained, although they share custody with the kids and sort of work that out. >> host: now, you describe your book, mr. vance, as before elon and after elon. what does that mean? >> guest: right. well, i had done a cover story on elon for "businessweek" in 2012, and i had sort of gone to him after that and asked him --

well, not asked him, but i told him i wanted to do a book, and he had -- [laughter] he told me, you know, he wasn't really going to participate. he was going to either do his own book, or he just wasn't going to cooperate. and i spent about 18 months interviewing a couple hundred people, and enough of them and just sort of pursuing the book anyway. and over time a bunch of those people go back to him and ask him if, you know, they should talk to me. and then one day i get a phone call from him at home. it comes up on my caller id, elon musk, and he said, look, i'm either going to participate now or really make life miserable for you, and we kind of hashed out terms over a dinner where he would participate, and he didn't get to read the book even though he'd sort of asked to. he wanted to put footnotes in it and have some influence, but, you know, ultimately i said i kind of couldn't live with that. and then he agreed to do interviews over about eight

months from there on out. >> host: and how many sessions did you have with him? >> guest: well, we met basically once a month over those eight months, and they would go anywhere from, like, an hour to three or four hours at a time, and then he also gave me access at that point to his executives at his companies, and then i would go with him to tesla and to spacex, and we would walk around the factory, walk around the tesla design studio. i'd sort of go to, like, a movie premiere with him and sort of got to see how he operates. >> host: what is his reputation, and what did you take away from the factory visits? what's his reputation as a ceo? >> guest: well, you know, it's complicated. he, i think in silicon valley he is completely seen as the next steve jobs. he's the guy that all the young kids want to be like. he is doing kind of bigger,

bolder things, certainly, than a lot of these app and web service companies. his reputation as a very hard-charging guy, he demands a ton of his employees, a six-day workweek is pretty standard at both spacex and tesla. he's very difficult to deal with for competitors and for suppliers, you know? he's always putting them under intense pricing pressure and time pressure. employees, it's the same sort of thing. i mean, he gets -- they're inspired, he gets a ton out of them, but he's very hard on them. he's been known to really go at people during meetings and to be pretty relentless to get them to solve problems. and on the whole, i mean, my takeaway was that he's kind of the most -- he's definitely the most intense human being i've ever met. >> host: as we're taping this in the middle of 2015, how old is he? >> guest: he's 44. he just turned 44 and, unfortunately, his birthday present was one of those rockets

blowing up. >> host: did you leave this project as a fan of elon musk? >> guest: that's another complicated question. [laughter] you know, i went in, i went -- when i first started, i mean, i thought he was a one-note sort of guy, like a techno utopian-type figure, and i came away discovering he is a much more complex character. i mean, you know, i think you could easily argue he's kind of lived one of the most interesting lives of anybody going, and he's a very complex man. i think i came away, i came away thinking that i'm a fan of the companies, absolutely. i mean, i think tesla is changing the automotive industry, i think spacex is changing the aerospace industry. his third or company, solar city, is doing very well. so i'm blown away by the technology. i think elon is a work in progress. i mean, i think he -- there's a

lot to love about him, and there's a lot of stuff that's very hard. so, you know, but i still -- to me, he's a guy who silicon valley talks a lot about disruption, and i'm kind of cynical about it. i don't see companies that are really pushing that hard on the status quo, but i think elon is, and to that degree i'm absolutely a fan of what he's doing. >> host: you mentioned tesla. how did the tesla factory end up in fremont, california? >> guest: that's an interesting story as well. there actually was a proper car manufacturing facility there from gm and toyota that had a partnership that dated back many, many years. it was supposed to be the best of both worlds. you had sort of japanese manufacturing expertise along with kind of american ingenuity and know how, and they were going to combine forces. and then during 2008 when the

recession hit, it was an asset that had to go for these car companies, and tesla was looking for a factory, so they really going to on the cheap. the factory probably would normal be worth billions of dollars, they got it for $50 million including, you know, it was basically an investment from toyota in the company. >> host: and? how many people does he employ? tell us about the factory today. >> guest: yeah, absolutely. i mean, the, you know, it's not -- it used to pump out hundreds of thousands of cars, so it's not filled to capacity right now. tesla pumps out about 50,000 to 60,000 cars a year. they have this model s sedan which is a luxury sedan that costs on the order of $100,000 for most people. they're about to come out with a second car called the model x which is kind of an suv. and they employ thousands of people there, probably on the order of around 10,000, i think, and then the numbers get even higher. they're opening this enormous battery factory in nevada which is also scheduled to employ

thousands of people in the coming years. >> host: ashlee vance, you write that for musk going public represented something of a faustian bargain. what does that mean? >> guest: you know, elon likes to -- as in the case of spacex, i mean, he's taken this very long-term view, and i think tesla's the same sort of thing. he had to convince people of electric cars, they have to build things like these networks of charging stations all across the world, he's got to build this battery factory. it asks a lot of investors in the company to continuously buy into the idea that he's going to gamble billions of dollars again and again and again. and so it was, you know, he needed to raise money at no point in time for the -- at that point in time for the company to build its factories, and so he had to go public. but that put him under this immense pressure and and scrutiny that elon really doesn't like. he prefers to operate with a little bit of secrecy around

him. essential hi, the company had no choice -- essentially, the company had no choice. that was around, it was coming out of 2008, and the company really needed money at that point. >> host: hyperloop, what is it? [laughter] >> guest: we don't know for sure yet. [laughter] the, you know, elon's announcement a couple years ago, i mean, it's a monorail type thing. it would be a raised platform with these pods that travel on a bed of air, and elon's version of this, the pods would go 800 miles an hour, so you could go from l.a. to cities -- to san francisco in 30 minutes. it's all hypothetical at this point and, essentially, a drawing on paper. elon was upset about the california high-speed rail project. he thinks it's kind of expensive and slow which, i guess, it is. and so he offered this up as an idea for an alternative. he really isn't looking to commercialize it himself, although three, two or three

companies have since appeared that are, essentially, hyperloop start-ups. they're taken the ideas that he put out there. they're looking to buy air rights. one is trying to go between los angeles and las vegas, and so the idea is you'd be able to do that in 15 minutes, so you could leave l.a., go to vegas for the night, come back and sleep in your bed. >> host: now, your book has been on the bestsell or list for a while. have you heard any feedback from mr. musk? >> guest: i did. you know, when -- so he didn't get to see the book before it came out, but i did let him see it once it was finished a couple weeks before -- i didn't want him to have to buy it on speed read it, and it seemed like the fair thing to do. he went through it and kind of as you might expect, he sort of pushed back on a few things or at least was a little bit, at least giving me his feedback on them. and then, you know, a day later he came back and he told me, well, he told me it was well

done, it was very accurate, he gave me a 95% accuracy rating -- [laughter] and then so we sort of left it at that and went on with business as usual. >> host: now, you compare and contrast him to steve jobs, bill gates and a couple other silicon valley or high-tech guys. give us a sense of what you, what you say in the book. >> guest: yeah. well, you know, he -- in silicon valley today he is seen as this next steve jobs kind of figure. i actually -- and there's bits of him like that, for sure. he's got this attention to detail, he pushes his workers really hard. i mean, i tend to lean more to sort of this edison kind of idea, although i think elon has a lot to prove. but what i've really taken away is that he's a guy who gets these thousands of engineers at both spacex and tesla, kind of the brightest of the bright, and these very hard working individuals and really is able to get products out of them that

can be commercialized and that have really changed industry. if you look at -- to me, he's the guy who has, he's combined software and hardware. this idea of atoms and bits in a way that nobody else has. he's kind of changed the car forever. it's a computer on wheels now, and all the other automakers are scrambling to match his software. in space he's taking consumer electronics in software and really changing the economics of space travel. i see him more on the order of sort of an edison. i think, certainly, he's got to get something like a mainstream electric car, a reasonable rocket to kind of be in that ultimate pantheon. >> host: something else that elon musk has proposed is the launching of the satellites in low altitude to increase internet speed. >> guest: yeah. it's his idea of like a space internet, i guess is what i call it. you would surround the earth with thousands of satellites in a low earth orbit. most of the communications

satellites are much higher up, and they have a pretty -- the latency of sending the data back and forth is not really good for internet service. so it's only recently we've gotten to the point where we can make these kinds of satellites, and people have come up with ideas how you would arrange them. so you would send up these thousands of satellites, it would sort of serve a couple different functions. one is there's about three billion people on the planet who probably will never be served by fibroper on the toic -- fiber optic cables, it's just too expensive or too hard to get it to them, so they would fiber optic-equivalent speeds, and then it would be, essentially, a backup internet. anything that went wrong with cables on the earth, you would have this space internet as a backup, and it could also be used to deal with huge amounts of traffic that get sent, say between north america and europe. spacex is looking to build the satellites and send them up through a partnership with google, and then there's another

company called one web that's basically their competitor and is ahead of space x so far in this race. >> host: so is that project in planning at this point? >> guest: one lab, the competitor, is -- they've got sort of designs for the satellite, they're very close to beginning manufacturing and to sending up the satellite. spacex is coming from behind here. i mean, the -- elon just announced a couple months ago the creation of a seattle office for spacex where they're going to build these satellites in its early days, for sure. and then the other huge question behind all of this is that like in a good year spacex or the european rocket launch company, in a good year they would do one launch a month, and to get thousands of these satellites up into orbit we're talking about at least kind of a launch a week

or several a month. so there's huge questions around kind of where this capacity is going to come, especially with spacex hitting a bump in the road lately. >> host: ash lee vance, i wonder if elon took exception to this paragraph: each facet of musk's life might be an attempt to soothe the kind of existential depression that seems to gnaw at his very fiber. >> guest: i don't think he would necessarily take exception to that. you know, he -- it goes back to the thing we were talking about a little bit earlier on the profoundly gifted thing. he has a, when we would talk about the survival of the human species, and you have to remember that the ultimate goal of spacex is not just to send up satellites, it's to create a colony on mars. this is elon's overarching life goal. i think for some people it probably sounds really weird, but he thinks the human species needs a backup plan, and he feels, you know, his existential

dread is that the human species will be wiped out and that a we're not doing anything about this. and, i mean, i don't think he would take exception with that at all. when we would talk, he would break down in tears at the thought of sort of man being wiped out by a virus or something we haven't even foreseen. >> host: mary beth brown, who is she? >> guest: you know, if he's compared to tony stark, our true or you want to just indulge them for a little bit, she would be the equivalent of pepper potts, his you y'all assistant. -- his loyal assistant. she worked with him for about 13 years, dating back to the paypal years. and elon's crazy life, live anything two cities, working seven days a week, she did all of that. she essentially gave up her life to him. she was his personal assistant, his work assistant, she would handle media things, she was the

person that people would come to if they wanted to go ask elon for a lot of money for a project, they would come look at her first and see, you know, if she gave them the nod or the go away was elon in a good mood or bad mood type thing. and over the course -- during the reporting of my book just about 18 months ago, she was basically let go from the company. >> host: why? >> guest: the story as i've heard it from other people and from elon himself was that mary beth basically asked for a raise, and she wanted to be compensated on the order of an executive vice president at spacex. and she has this very weird role. it wasn't, there was no, like, one job title that would really cover what she did, and elon told her, you know, to take a couple weeks off just to sort of clear her head. and then also he wanted to see what life was like without her. and when she came back, he said

he thought he could survive without her, and i don't think she took that very well. >> host: and that's a taste of "elon musk: tesla, spacex and the quest for a fantastic future," written by ashlee vance. thanks for being on c-span. yellow jersey? thank you so much for having me. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> live coverage later this morning of former fed chair ben bernanke. he'll join a discussion about military spending, national security and the economy. that's hosted by the brookings institution, gets under way at 10:30 a.m. eastern on c-span2. and our road to the white house coverage continues today on c-span. three more republican candidates hit the iowa state fair to speak at the soapbox. first is wisconsin governor scott walker, and a bit later carly fee' that and senator

lindsay graham of south carolina. all part of our continuing coverage of presidential candidates at the iowa state fair. we'll carry all those speeches live on c-span. here's a town hall discussion on race hosted by wusa-tv and the "the washington post." they talk about incidents in ferguson, missouri, baltimore and charleston, south carolina. and the state of race relations under the obama administration. it's an hour. ♪ ♪ >> we need to talk about this. >> i don't feel safe in america them. >> i do feel like we do spend an awful lot of money and time and resources on the folks that aren't trying to help themselves. >> when it comes to race relations, we just aren't there yet. anybody think race recommendations are pretty good right now, about where they should be? that's you. >> the man on the moon,