#12 Elon Musk & How Tesla Will Change The World

**David Senra** (0:00)
So, I want to continue what we were talking about last week. And this podcast will be part two of, I think, what's going to wind up being a three-part series, covering the Wait But Why Elon Musk blog post series. So, normally, if you've heard Founders before, you know that every week I read a biography of a different entrepreneur or founder, and then share with you some key insights or parts from the book that I found interesting and I learned something from. So, this podcast and the last podcast, the first time we've ever done a blog, covering a blog post. And to call it a blog post really doesn't do it justice. He, the writer of Wait But Why, his name is Tim Urban, he wrote something like 90,000 words of this series. So, it's actually available in Kindle format. So, I originally stumbled upon it and I read it online, which was like a Herculean effort, because like the post we're talking about today, it takes about an hour and a half to read. So obviously, we're not going to cover all of it, but the entire series, according to the Kindle version, takes about seven to seven and a half hours to read. So, without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into the post. I'm going to start, the beginning of the post is really interesting, because if you're familiar with Wait But Why, he starts at a foundational level and then builds up from there. So, he talks about how energy is produced and consumed on the planet. He goes into the early production of gasoline engines and how that came about. For the purpose of our podcast, I'm going to just focus on the parts, specifically about Tesla, their strategy, and then Elon Musk's ideas on how to organize and run a business, because I think that's what's most interesting to you. All right, so let's go ahead and jump in.
Christy Nicholson remembers meeting Elon Musk for the first time at a party back in 1989 I believe the second sentence out of his mouth was, I think a lot about electric cars. And then he turned to me and said, do you think about electric cars? And just so you know, if you want to follow along, I'm in the part three, the story of Tesla. And again, that's available at waitbutwhy.com. When he decided in 2003 to stop thinking about electric cars and start making them, the odds weren't in Musk's favor. There were the high barriers to entry that had prevented any startup car company from succeeding in almost a century. There was the unaccounted for cost of carbon emissions, which made starting an EV company like trying to stand out on a basketball court as a rookie when all the players except you can foul with no penalty. And then there was the gargantuan oil industry, which would do everything in its power to stomp on every effort to make it obsolete. On top of that, the EV was a new kind of car whose development had essentially been on pause ever since EV makers threw in the towel a century earlier. And a daunting and costly catch up process would lay ahead. The three concerns listed above would all need to somehow be addressed for this to have a chance. The overarching question was, had electric cars never had their day because of irreconcilable issues, or had the right person, the Henry Ford of EVs, just not come along yet? So there's gonna be a lot of references to the Henry Ford in this post and on this podcast. Somebody that Elon Musk very much admired. If you want to learn more about him, I did two podcasts on Henry Ford, one about his autobiography, and one about a biography written by somebody else called I Invented the Modern Age. You can find them both at founderspodcast.com.
Let's go back to the post. Car companies aren't supposed to start in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, startups aren't supposed to make cars. But the electric car industry is not your grandfather's car industry. And in 2003, it wasn't anyone's car industry. After the brief bubble of new electric cars in California in the 1990s, between the year that the state passed the zero emissions vehicle mandate and the year they were bullied into repealing it, the electric car industry had withered into the oblivion of the scattered California garages and tech labs of car geeks. And just as a side note, if you want to learn more about that time period, there's a great documentary. I watched it on Netflix. It might still be there. It's called Who Killed the Electric Car?
It's definitely worth checking out. It ends with the cars being forcibly repossessed and crushed, and then the owners of the cars actually had a candlelight vigil for their cars. Big things have emerged out of small groups of cutting edge geek labs. Apple, Microsoft, Google. So why not the modern electric car industry? One of these little car technology companies was AC Propulsion. And while car makers in Detroit, Tokyo, and Munich continued to not realize that electric cars were clearly the future, the guys at AC Propulsion were experimenting away, quietly making one giant EV breakthrough after another.