Tim Urban - The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

When you scroll through Twitter and see a Tweet from Elon Musk, you definitely dont expect it to be a link to your blog. And yet, one day in January of 2015, there it was:

Elon Musk had just shared a link to my post about Artificial Intelligence. I didnt know it at the time, but this was the beginning of something that would dramatically change the next year of my life.

One Tweet turned into two, and then three. And then one day, I got a call.

Ill save the details of that call for the pages to come, but by the time it was over, I had scheduled my first conversation with Elon Musk. Over the course of the next few months, I found myself with an amazing amount of access to Musk, his staff, and his factories, giving me an extraordinary opportunity to dig deep into what this man was doing and why he was able to make such an impact on the world.

I supplemented this first-hand experience with over 500 hours of research, immersing myself in the stories of energy and transportation and electricity and space travel and government corruption and existential risk and multi-planetary expansionif youre going to write about Elon Musk, theres a lot you need to learn.

Finally, I got writing, and by the time I finished, I had written the most thorough four-part blog series in blog history. Writing the series significantly deepened my understanding of the world, of humanity, and of my own life and the way I think. And judging from the response to the four posts, readers seemed to have a similar experience.

The series was originally published on Wait But Why, but we know that reading something the length of a book on your computer screen isnt for everyone, and thanks to a large number of reader requests, weve made the series into an e-book.

So with thatget settled in, pull up a blank slate in your head, and lets dive into the many worlds of Elon Musk.

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1. Readers have asked me whether I was paid to write the Musk series. The answer is that no, I was not. I took on the series because it was something I really wanted to write about anyway, and by not involving money, I was able to keep fully independent and do things however made best sense for Wait But Why.

Last month, I got a surprising phone call.

Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the worlds raddest man.

Ill use this post to explore how he became a self-made billionaire and the real-life inspiration for Iron Mans Tony Stark, but for the moment, Ill let Richard Branson explain things briefly:

Whatever skeptics have said cant be done, Elon has gone out and made real. Remember in the 1990s, when we would call strangers and give them our credit-card numbers? Elon dreamed up a little thing called PayPal. His Tesla Motors and SolarCity companies are making a clean, renewable-energy future a realityhis SpaceX [is] reopening space for explorationits a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time hes building spacecraft to help us leave it.

So no, that was not a phone call I had been expecting.

A few days later, I found myself in pajama pants, pacing frantically around my apartment, on the phone with Elon Musk. We had a discussion about Tesla, SpaceX, the automotive and aerospace and solar power industries, and he told me what he thought confused people about each of these things. He suggested that if these were topics Id be interested in writing about, and it might be helpful, I could come out to California and sit down with him in person for a longer discussion.

For me, this project was one of the biggest no-brainers in history. Not just because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, but because here are two separate items that have been sitting for a while in my Future Post Topics document, verbatim:

electric vs hybrid vs gas cars, deal with tesla, sustainable energy

spacex, musk, mars?? how learn to do rockets??

I already wanted to write about these topics, for the same reason I wrote about Artificial IntelligenceI knew they would be hugely important in the future but that I also didnt understand them well enough. And Musk is leading a revolution in both of these worlds.

It would be like if you had plans to write about the process of throwing lightning bolts and then one day out of the blue Zeus called and asked if you wanted to question him about a lot of stuff.

So it was on. The plan was that Id come out to California, see the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet with some of the engineers at each company, and have an extended sit down with Musk. Exciting.

The first order of business was to have a full panic. I needed to not sit down with these peoplethese world-class engineers and rocket scientistsand know almost nothing about anything. I had a lot of quick learning to do.

The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:

• Automotive
• Aerospace
• Solar Energy
• Energy Storage
• Satellite
• High-Speed Ground Transportation
• And, um, Multi-Planetary Expansion

Zeus would have been less stressful.

So I spent the two weeks leading up to the West Coast visit reading and reading and reading, and it became quickly clear that this was gonna need to be a multi-post series. Theres a