Elon Musk's Video From 2008 Explaining Why Tesla Cars are So Expensive Goes Viral

Elon Musk today is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX boss, and occasionally alternates between the top spot for "richest man in the world." The last estimate of his wealth stood at $199.9 billion.

But the South-African born and one of today's leading moguls in electric cars didn't always have a great start.

An old video of Musk from 2008 has surfaced on the Internet, posted on Twitter by Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley, where Musk is heard discussing electric vehicles in 2008, as Tesla was nearly out of cash - and explaining why they are the future.

"There's an important point about Tesla," explains Musk in the video, "that whenever somebody buys a Tesla Roadster, (which then cost 100,000$) sports car, every penny that Tesla makes, goes into the development of a smaller lower-cost vehicle." He adds how there's no dividend ever, and "My salary is minimum wage." He even jokes about how, "I'm a volunteer, basically."

But the real highlight of the video is his vision, back almost 13 years ago about EVS, "What's the point of expensive cars for rich people? The point is, when you have new technology, it takes time to optimize that technology." He then uses a more common example to explain it, "If you think back to the early days of laptops or cell phones or anything new, it's expensive in the early days. The first job you have with new technology is that you have to make it work. The critical point is you can't get to the low-cost cars unless you start with the expensive ones."

The video is actually part of a much longer video, from Elon Musk's 2008 SpaceX presentation to The Hollywood Hill.

The full video posted on YouTube describes it as, "On December 6, 2008, for The Hollywood Hill's holiday party (www.hhill.org) at the home of Victoria & Dennis Hopper, we hosted Elon Musk's first large SpaceX presentation to Hollywood with an assembled audience of 300 members from the film, television, and music industry. It was the early days for SpaceX (and Tesla). The second guest presenter of the afternoon was Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Mars Rover Exploration Mission. We're now publishing this informal video from of our archives for a fun look back into history."

The tweet posted has garnered the attention of many fans, and has over 2.2 million views at the time of writing this. Elon Musk himself has liked the video.

Currently, Musk has reached a point where the cheapest car Tesla produces is a Model 3, which in India is expected to cost about Rs 60 lakh.

Another quirky thing about the video from the past is Musk mentions his car, a Tesla is parked outside (and partly visible) in the frame. That car is now currently parked in space. Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster is an electric sports car that served as the dummy payload for the February 2018 Falcon Heavy test flight and became an artificial satellite of the Sun. "Starman", a mannequin dressed in a spacesuit, occupies the driver's seat. In 2020, it just zoomed past Mars.