Iron Man from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
In 2008 Tesla Motors launched its first car, the completely electric Roadster. Tesla was a great story — something genuinely new, an engineering marvel. Musk became a media darling, on the cover of countless magazines under headlines like ‘Elon Musk, AKA Tony Stark, Wants to Save the World’. Within the logic of Muskism, talking about saving the world was a business strategy, a way to sell cars without ads. Why did so many people buy what Musk was selling?
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:07.0 | All right. |
| 0:10.0 | Okay, so getting in, it's really, really low. |
| 0:14.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:15.0 | A friend of mine owns a Tesla Roadster, black, like the Batmobile. |
| 0:20.0 | You can then kind of slide in. |
| 0:21.6 | Okay. |
| 0:22.5 | Whoa. |
| 0:23.4 | Slide in. |
| 0:26.4 | Welcome to X-Man, the Elon Musk origin story, a special report on the relationship |
| 0:32.5 | between science fiction and the worldview of Elon Musk. |
| 0:37.1 | I'm Jill Lepore. |
| 0:38.8 | Okay, so that was the ignition. Yeah. All right. You want to go? |
| 0:42.9 | Yeah, I do. All right. Let's go. Let's go. |
| 0:45.9 | After Elon Musk made a fortune with PayPal and launched SpaceX, but long before he bought |
| 0:52.4 | Twitter, when he was famous, but not half as geopolitically influential |
| 0:57.0 | as he is now. He was known for Tesla, so I decided to go for a ride. |
| 1:02.0 | Wow! Oh my God! That's cool. |
| 1:06.0 | A century ago in the early days of the automobile, petrol-powered cars won the battle against electric cars. |
| 1:18.1 | In 1996, a few years before Tesla got started, GM developed an electric car called the EV-1. |
| 1:25.6 | California had just adopted a new zero-emissions law. But then, after |
| 1:30.1 | California revised that law, GM seized its fleet of EVs, all of them. Grieving owners held |
... |
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