Kimbal Musk
speaker
257 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Kimbal Musk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's just local search that is needed for everyone, and it became an add-on to search. But even remember in those days, you couldn't make money at search either. No one had figured out AdWords or anything. They didn't realize how big of a business this was. But we all knew this was a thing. And everyone was using it. But didn't quite know how to make money on it. Couldn't make money.
When we got acquired, it was a bittersweet moment because Compaq that owned AltaVista wanted to merge. So that's sort of regular search with the best search engine at the time, pre-Google, with Zip2, which would be the best local search, and it would be a Yahoo killer. And the Compaq just wanted to make money by taking the company public. but they wouldn't give us any stock.
They paid us cash return, which turned out actually very well for us, but because the whole internet bubble burst, we didn't know that at the time. And so it was bittersweet because they essentially wanted our company, and we were welcome to stay, but you don't have to. And that was a pretty rough feeling. But in retrospect, it opened the door to... It set us up for an incredible...
platform to go do beautiful things.
Yeah, I still sell on the board of Tesla. Tesla is 20 years now. Isn't that amazing? 20 years.
So I didn't join as a founder. I joined as a founding board member. And so I actually, I didn't write the business plan. I got to read it. And I still have that. I still have it as a part of history.
No. No, I certainly didn't. What I saw in it was- For me personally, I was really upset that General Motors had killed their EV car. There's even a movie called Who Killed the Electric Car? And I knew that the physics of electric is perfectly fine. I mean, there's no reason why you couldn't use an electric car to drive around.
What resonated with me with the business plan was take an electric motor, which is really a high-performance motor, and put it in a sports car and sell it at a high price as a way to enter into the market. Whereas what others had been doing, what General Motors had done is you put it into a really crummy car and you sell it as a commuter vehicle that doesn't really work that well.
And it looks ugly as well. They really did everything they could to make that thing as ugly as it's in. And then I was like, okay, I get it. We're going to take an appropriate technology and put it in an appropriate car so that when you have, because electric motors, they have constant torque, incredible power, put it in a car that looks like a sports car.
So the idea was to put it in the Lotus Elise, redesign it a bit. And even at that point, I was like, this is theoretically good, so I'm going to join and help build it. But I was not convinced that it would work because General Motors had done such a terrible job of making everyone think that these things are terrible.
But I was curious, and the time that I fell in love with the company and its mission was I was driving in what's called a mule, where we take a car and we take the engine out and we put in an electric drivetrain. And I drove it. You know, even the dashboards, there's no dashboards. It's just like you got a steering wheel and it's just like wires and everything around.
And I remember there's a street we were running in the Bay Area called Bing Street. And I was just like, no traffic. So I'm just going to drive this on the floor and see what happens. And it was a feeling I'd never experienced before. Gasoline cars have an inertia to them. So you go. Yeah. This is just, it was like being shot out of a cannon. Okay, this is going to be real.
It's a very spaceship-like feeling. Yeah. It's like, whoa. It's like the G-Force pulls you back. So I was like, okay, this is going to be great. This is going to be an interesting, we're going to create something interesting here. I think the real transformative thing for Tesla was the Model 3 when we were able to get the price down for the world.
And you were done. We were borderline bankrupt like two or three times that year. And everyone was hating on us about whether we'd get that done. The Model 3 today is an incredibly affordable car, like a $300 a month kind of lease and $3,000 down. That's where you get the scale. That's where you get people who... And by the way, it's a great car.
It's even a better Model 3 now than it was five years ago. We don't function the way... Car companies function, right? We function more like how an iPhone company, how Apple works. So our Model 3 today is, this year is better than last year. It's like way better. And we just keep getting better.
Exactly. And we can upload over the air.
Exactly. It's an iPhone with wheels. But actually, talking about autopilot, like right after this interview, I'm going to go test out the latest Model 3. You're going to get driven around by a robot. I'm going to get driven around by the car. I'm going to say, I want to go to this barbecue joint. Take me there and park me there. And I'm going to see how it is.
And this is the latest Model 3 that we have out into production. Anyone can buy it. And it's super affordable. And it's like, okay. Full stop driving is a journey. It's not like there's a destination. It's a journey forever. So let's see where we are on the journey today.
I think that's a really good insight. I actually live with this concept of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. And it's a philosophical term where fixed mindset is about the destination. And growth mindset is about learning on the journey.
And I think that I'm a happier person because I take that learning on the journey approach, which is really frustrating if you're always, it has to be about the destination every time.
Showing 221–240 of 257 · page 12 of 13
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