Musk calls rockets, electric cars 'dumbest' ventures
Yet SpaceX, Tesla CEO is at forefront of both
Elon Musk seems to have never met a business idea he didn’t like. The wackier the better.
Send rockets to Mars? He’s in! Drill tunnels under major cities? Give him a shovel. Build a mass- market electric car? Duh!
In fact, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO called investing in rockets and massmarket electric vehicles “the dumbest things to do” when he spoke to crowds at SXSW Interactive in Austin.
If there’s a method fueling Musk’s madness, it’s identifying society’s long- term needs and hoping that being ahead of your time eventually yields a financial windfall.
Musk told festivalgoers he hunts for “things that don’t seem to be working that are important for our life and for the future to be good.”
He added: “If youwere to do a riskadjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put building rockets and cars pretty much at the bottom of the list.”
Take the decision to start rocket company SpaceX, pairing a childhood fascination with science fiction and a businessman’s intuition that private companies could pick up where government agencies had dropped out.
“I just kept wondering why we were not making progress towards sending people to Mars. Why we didn’t have a base on the moon. Where are the space hotels that were promised in the movie ( 2001: A Space
Odyssey)?” he said. “Year after year, it was getting me down. ... The genesis of SpaceX was not to create a company but really how do we get NASA’s budget to be bigger.”
After a series of initial rocket failures, SpaceX has successfully launched a variety of payload- carrying missiles into orbit, including Falcon Heavy.
By securing government contracts at rates that undercut traditional suppliers such as the United Space Alliance, a venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, SpaceX is able to fund Musk’s mission to Mars.