Walter Isaacson: Instead of Buying an Island, Elon Musk Decides to Send a Rocket to Mars

Walter Isaacson on the moment Elon Musk's trajectory diverged: “Instead of buying an island, he decides he wants to send a rocket to Mars.”

Michael Lewis:

“At what point in his career or life do people start saying, Elon Musk is a really unusual person who's going to do really unusual things?”

Walter Isaacson:

“His first two companies, which are Zip2 and then what we'll call PayPal, both are successful and they both make him a hundred million or so, which is a lot of money.

Instead of buying an island or buying a yacht, he wants to keep putting his chips on the table. He decides he wants to send a rocket to Mars.

He says, if we don't become a space-faring civilization, human consciousness may die out. They say, hey, bro, you're going nuts.

Everybody, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, that whole PayPal Mafia, they say suddenly, once he had a couple of hundred millions, he decided to put it all into trying to get a rocket to Mars.”

Michael Lewis in conversation with Walter Isaacson, The 92nd Street Y, October 13, 2023