Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

To help mankind become multi-planetary, the first step is to colonize Mars, but Elon has larger plans. “Having a base on Mars, where there is a lot of travel to and from Earth, will create a powerful incentive for developing technology that will enable us to travel to other star systems,” Elon said. “With a nuclear thermal rocket you could definitely reach a tenth of the speed of light. There are some interesting things I’ve seen lately about warp drives. You can’t exceed the speed of light but you can warp space and effectively travel many times the speed of light. That’s kind of exciting.” 314

Now this is not the end. It is only the end of the beginning. “I think that it is possible to solve any of the problems that are before us. I don’t think we are doomed on Earth,” Elon said. Therefore, he will continue to come up with new ideas as long as he can. “The goal is to retire right before senility,” he said. 328

But what does Elon do to find a problem to solve? There are a number of methods you can use to find new ideas. Walt Disney used to go through trashcans to find out what people threw away, and he tried to find new ideas from the garbage. 30Thomas Edison found several ideas when he was almost asleep. To wake up just after falling asleep, he held steel balls in his hand. When he fell asleep, his hand relaxed and released the steel balls. They hit the floor, and he woke up again from the noise. He immediately wrote down his thoughts. 31

A British survey with 500 entrepreneurs showed that 49 percent found new ideas while in their bed, 72 percent found new ideas while at work, 57 percent found new ideas while talking to friends, and 41 percent found new ideas while at the toilet. “I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought,” an entrepreneur said. “I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.” 32

Elon has found some ideas when he took a shower, some ideas late at night when he couldn’t sleep, and some ideas when he attended Burning Man. “It’s something of a cliche, but a lot of my ideas nowadays come to me when I’m in the shower,” Elon said. “It’s because I’ve been thinking about them, the mind processing them subconsciously while I’m sleeping, and what’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning? You take a shower.” 128

Almost all the larger ideas originates from when Elon read articles about a topic he thought was sad. “I thought it was quite sad that the Apollo program represented the high water mark of space exploration,” Elon said. “It was not something I was able to witness in real time, because I was -2 when they landed.” 339So he founded SpaceX to not be sad anymore. “You want to have a future where are you expecting things to be better, not one where you are expecting things to be worse,” Elon said. It would have been sad to have a future where we didn’t have any cars because we have used up all our oil wells. That’s why Tesla designed Model S. 124“What we were really aiming to achieve with the Model S is to create a car – an electric car – that was the best car. Not the best car among the electric genre, but the best car overall,” Elon said. 193

When Elon read an article about the decommissioning of the Concorde, he felt sad because we traveled slower. To solve the problem, he came up with an electric aircraft. It had to be electric because of peak oil. “Boeing just took $20 billion and ten years to improve the efficiency of their planes by ten percent,” Elon said. “That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.” 51

After some engineering calculations, he realized the new aircraft should fly at an extreme altitude because the density of the air drops as higher you fly. The performance of the electric aircraft will thus improve. While an electric aircraft should fly at an altitude of 80 000 feet [24 km], the optimal altitude for a combustion aircraft is 40 000 feet. “In order to go fast, you need to be at high altitude where the air drops exponentially, as air at sea level becomes as thick as molasses as you approach sonic velocity,” Elon said. 401Like a helicopter, this new aircraft will takeoff and land vertically. 328

While commuting in Los Angeles, Elon found another sad problem. Some highways in Los Angeles have ten traffic lanes, but the traffic situation is still horrible. Elon explained that it’s easier to launch rockets into orbit than to commute between his home in Bel Air and SpaceX in Hawthorne – a distance of 15 miles [24 km] as the crow flies. “The 405 varies from bad to horrendous,” Elon said. “It just seems people in Los Angeles are being tortured by this. I don’t know why they aren’t marching in the streets.”

A double-decker-highway is Elon’s solution to his commuting problem. The second deck will consist of a cheap metal construction dropped on the top of the original highway. It will increase the capacity with 100 percent. To speed up the idea, Elon contributed with $50 000 to a group seeking to hasten the development and repair of infrastructure in the US. “If it can actually make a difference, I would gladly contribute funds and ideas. I’ve super had it,” Elon said. 184

While SpaceX is in Los Angeles, Tesla is in San Francisco. Because Elon only owns a house in Los Angeles, and it takes too long time to fly home when he has worked at Tesla, he often sleeps over at one of his friends. “We play video games together and eat some food,” Bill Lee said, who was an early investor in both SpaceX and Tesla. 51

To travel between SpaceX and Tesla, Elon uses his private jet because it takes too long time to drive. Flying a jet is not to save the world from its dependency on oil, so there’s clearly a need for a new type of transportation between the cities that’s more environmental friendly than an aircraft and faster than a car. The state of California had the same idea and decided to build a bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the train wouldn’t be a bullet. “Because the $60 billion bullet train they’re proposing in California would be [one of] the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Elon said. “They’re going for records in all the wrong ways. Why are we, in the center of high tech, doing such a bad job [with transportation]? It’s embarrassing. It says all sorts of wrong things about our state.” 51

Elon thought the story about the bullet train was sad, so he came up with the Hyperloop. “I was thinking about what could be better, state of the art?” Elon said. “That’s where I came up with the idea for a fifth mode of Earth transport, apart from planes, trains, automobiles, and boats. The Hyperloop could go from city center to city center [San Francisco to Los Angeles] in not much more than a half-hour.” 316While the California bullet train will cost $70 billion, Elon thought the Hyperloop would cost only $7 billion. 401

The Hyperloop was a secret project and Elon didn’t want to reveal any major details when asked to do so by reporters. But the Hyperloop was finally revealed in August 12, 2013. The released document is not the final document as Elon’s idea is to give away the basic idea to anyone who wants to build it. “I just want to put it out there in a way that doesn’t require me to do day-to-day execution,” Elon said. “I would like to do less, actually. I tried my hardest to avoid being CEO of Tesla. Running two companies is not the most fun thing in the world.” 400

If no one shows any interest in the idea, Elon will probably build a smaller prototype of the Hyperloop to get things moving. If he wasn’t the CEO of two companies, it would have taken one to two years to build this prototype. Then it would take another five years before we could travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 35 minutes. 400