All right. I would like to thank you for leaving a 'crazy person without explanation. So, I thought - I was trying to figure out what was the most useful thing for me - what I could say that would help you and be useful to you in the future. And I thought, maybe tell me a story about how it happened to be here.
How did these things happen? And maybe there are lessons there. I often find myself wondering, how did this happen. As a kid, I didn't know what to do when I got older.
People kept asking me. But in the end, I thought the idea of innovation would cool down. And the reason I think that is because I read an excerpt from Arthur C. Clark that said ‘Advanced technology is inseparable from magic.’ And that’s true.
If you go back and say, for 300 years, the things that we take for granted today, you will be burned at the stake. Being able to fly. That's crazy. Being able to see long distances be able to communicate, work effectively with the Internet as a team mentality, and access all the world's information instantly from almost anywhere in the world. These things would be magic - that would be considered magic in the past.
I think that goes beyond that because there are so many things we take for granted today that were unthinkable even in the past, which were not even in the magical realm. So, it goes beyond that.
So I thought, if I could do some of those things - actually if I could advance technology, that would be like magic and that would always be a problem because I was trying to figure out what 'all this means?'
Like what is the purpose of things? And I concluded that if we could advance the knowledge of the world, if we could do things that increase the breadth and scale of understanding, then we could better ask the right questions and be enlightened.
And that's the only way forward. So, I studied physics and business, because I thought to do a lot of these things you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how the economy works. And you need to be able to bring more people together to work with you to create something.
Because it is very difficult to do certain things for each person when it is an important technology. So, first I went out to California and tried to figure out how to improve the power of electric cars - basically trying to find out if there was a high-capacity capacitor that could work as an alternative to the battery. And that was in 1995. That was also the case with the Internet.
And I thought I could pursue this technology, where success may not be one of the possible consequences, which is always deceptive, or participating in the Internet and being part of it. So, I decided to give up.
Fortunately, we are past graduation, so, I can't blame you for recommending that to you. And I've done some Internet stuff, you know. I’ve done a few things here and there.
One of them is PayPal. Perhaps helpful to say, one of the most important things in building PayPal was how it got started.
Because in the beginning - the first idea with PayPal was to integrate financial services integration, so if you have one place where all your financial services needs can be seamlessly integrated and work well.
And we had a small feature, which was paid by the post. Whenever we showed another program, we were showing the hard part, which was a combination of financial services, which is very difficult to integrate.
No one was interested. After that, we showed people email payments, which was easy, and everyone was interested. So, I think it’s important to take a respond to your environment.
You want to be as close to the loop as possible. So, we focused on email payments and tried to make that work. And that's what made things go away. However, if we did not respond to what people said, then we probably would not be successful.
Therefore, it is important to look at things like that and focus on them when you see them, and adjust your previous thinking.
From PayPal, I thought to myself, what are some of the issues that could significantly affect the future of humanity? It did not come from the idea, 'what better way to make money,' but, rather, 'what I think will have a profound effect on the future of mankind.'
Therefore, the world's biggest problem we have is sustainable energy. But the production and use of energy in a sustainable manner.
If we do not resolve this issue in this century, we are in big trouble. And another extinction of life beyond the earth to make life on many planets. So that's the foundation of - the latest is the foundation of SpaceX and the former is the foundation of Tesla and SolarCity.
When I started SpaceX, at first, I thought that well, there is no way one can start a rocket company. I wasn't that crazy. However, I thought, well, what is the best way to increase NASA's budget? That was my first goal.
I thought to myself if we could do a low-cost job on Mars, something called Mars Oasis, I could get in the seeds with a water-free nutrient gel, and water it when it arrives. And you can have this hot cash shortage of green plants in the background.
The public is often more responsive and more responsive. And this would be the first life on Mars and the most important life ever to go as far as we know. And I was pretty sure that would make people happy and increase NASA's budget.
It is therefore clear that the financial outcome from such machines may be zero. So, anything better than that was aside. So, I went three times to Russia to look for a replacement ICBM… because that was a very good deal.
And let me tell you - it was very strange to go there in late 2001-2002 to go to Russian rocket forces and say, 'I'd like to buy your biggest rockets, but you can keep the nuke.'. That was 10 years ago, me
