The book The PayPal Wars was released in 2004. “The only negativity in recent years was due to a book called The PayPal Wars, written by a sycophantic jackass called Eric Jackson,” Elon said. “Eric couldn’t find a real publisher, so Peter funded Eric to self-publish the book. Since Eric worships Peter, the outcome was obvious – Peter sounds like Mel Gibson in Braveheart and my role is somewhere between negligible and a bad seed. However, to his credit, Peter didn’t realize the book would be as bad as it was and apologized to me personally at a Room 9 board meeting at David Sacks’s home in LA.”259
Elon, Thiel, and Levchin invested in the company Room 9, which was founded by Sacks, who had earlier worked at PayPal. Room 9 released the movie Thank You for Smoking – a satirical comedy on the tobacco industry. The story is as follows: “Satirical comedy follows the machinations of Big Tobacco’s chief spokesman, Nick Naylor, who spins on behalf of cigarettes while trying to remain a role model for his twelve-year-old son.” Elon was the executive producer of the movie, and he had a small role in the movie as a pilot of a private jet.
After this rough ride, Elon realized he had inherited the flying genes from his grandfather and father. He thought his McLaren F1 wasn’t fast enough, and he didn’t want to buy a group of islands, so he decided to buy a black Aero L-39 Albatros. The Albatros was an aircraft that was used to train fighter pilots in eastern Europe during the Cold War. With an airframe from former Czechoslovakia, a jet engine from Ukraine, and avionics from Russia, it was a true product of the Soviet Union.113
Elon used the Albatros for fun to chase other planes in the Nevada desert. “Literally, it was just like in Top Gun,” he said. “You’re no more than a couple of hundred feet above the ground, following the contour of the mountains. We came up to a mountain, did a vertical climb up the side of it, inverted. Turned upside down. Yeah, that was fun. It’s like a roller coaster. Only you go much farther up and down. But your butt hurts if you fly in it for more than an hour. The seats are really hard.”114
I Don’t Need These Russians
Elon and his former housemate Adeo Ressi went on a trip to Long Island, just outside of New York. Ressi’s girlfriend and Elon’s wife were also with them.350 Ressi was now a wealthy man after he had sold his own Internet company Methodfive to Xceed for $88 million.46
On the way back from the trip, they were stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway. The rain poured down. Elon, who by now was tired of glorified features, began daydreaming together with Ressi. “What would the next-next thing be?” they wondered. The new idea had to be something big. “I pointed my hand out the window, and I was like, ‘space,’” Ressi said. “It was almost a joke at first. We debunked the idea no one can do anything in space. The more we debunked the idea as being impossible, the more it made us interested in how we could do it. Why does it take a billion dollars? Why is it so complex? It’s just metal and fuel.”278,301 They continued talking about space and in particular going to Mars. But Elon thought NASA already covered this area, and space also seemed too complicated and expensive.
When they came back from the trip, Elon visited NASA’s website. He searched for information on when an astronaut would set the first small step on Mars. But he couldn’t find anything on the website about the topic. “I thought there was some kind of mistake,” Elon said. “I expected to find that they were well on their way and that we’d have to figure out something else to do. But there was nothing at all.”278
“Hey, let’s do space,” Ressi shouted. They asked themselves why nothing had happened within the area since the last time we traveled to the Moon. “In the popular literature of the time, they expected that we would have a Moon base, a Mars base, that we would be exploring the solar system in a significant way by now,” Elon said.57
One problem was that we were no longer motivated by a military threat. US citizens used to be afraid of a communist base on the Moon and of nuclear weapons orbiting the Earth. A military threat motivated the earlier space programs. The early rockets were originally designed to deliver nuclear weapons and spy satellites. This threat motivated people to make sacrifices they wouldn’t have made in a time of peace. The last flight of the Apollo program occurred in July 1975, and the goal of the mission was to dock the Apollo capsule with the Russian Soyuz capsule. It marked the end of the space race between the rivaling countries. A military threat didn’t exist anymore.
Another problem was that we didn’t believe rockets were as exciting as we did in the 1960s. No one wanted to explore and expand beyond Earth anymore. “Spend billions of dollars to land an astronaut on Mars? What a waste of money!”
If there was no military threat and if rockets were not exciting anymore, why would we risk our lives in potentially lethal rockets and pay the money needed? “My theory was to apply the majority of my effort to the space arena, because there is not a natural economic forcing function that will lead to space exploration,” Elon said.52 As the world’s oil supply decreases, the price of oil will increase, and the market will automatically motivate engineers to design machines not dependent on oil. These market forces are currently not present in space because nothing will force us to go to space unless an asteroid or a new military power threaten us.
Of the three things that in the future will most affect the future of humanity, Elon had already tried Internet two times. Since the transition to a sustainable energy economy will take care of itself, space exploration, particularly extension of life to multiple planets, needed Elon more.
Elon and Ressi needed to find a way to make space interesting once again. “We were going to show the world that two guys with money and vision could reach Mars, and that it wasn’t that bad a place,” Ressi said.278 When NASA realized the public began losing interest in space, they had roughly the same idea as Elon and Ressi. To make us more interested in space, NASA decided to turn a teacher into an astronaut. The chosen teacher, Christa McAuliffe, boarded the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. 73 seconds after the launch, the Space Shuttle broke apart. All seven astronauts were killed together with our remaining interest in space.
The first idea Elon and Ressi had was to send green plants to Mars. The name of the project was Mars Oasis. With a $65 million price tag to complete the project, Elon found investors who also were critical to NASA’s abilities to bring humans to Mars.4
The idea behind Mars Oasis was to in 2005 launch a smaller spacecraft and land it on Mars in 2006.365 Among other equipment, the spacecraft contained a small greenhouse with an enclosed chamber filled with dehydrated nutrient gel.4 Different plants grew in the greenhouse, ranging from tomato plants to mustard weeds. The purpose was to test if humans could live off the land, and pictures from these plants would be transmitted back to Earth. “We’d have a great photo of green plants with a red background,” Elon said. “The public tends to respond to precedence and superlatives. This would be the first life on Mars and the furthest life had ever traveled. That would get people excited and increase NASA’s budget. If I could afford it, I figured it would be a worthy expenditure of money, with no expectation of financial return.”63,305
Another idea was the Life to Mars project where the green plants were replaced by mice-astronauts. “Do you think people would think I’m crazy if I sent mice to Mars?” Elon asked his friends.59 With the purpose to see if mice could breed in an environment similar to the environment on Mars, the mission would last for six weeks. But the rodents didn’t have to worry about landing on a planet. To simulated the gravity on Mars, they lived in a rotating craft up in space.287