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- Elon Musk's friends held an intervention to stop him starting a rocket company, according to a new book.
- His college friend made him watch videos of rockets blowing up and warned him he'd lose his money.
- Musk ultimately created SpaceX, with the goal of colonizing Mars.
Elon Musk's friends staged an intervention when he told them he wanted to start his own rocket company in the early 2000s, according to a new biography of the billionaire.
"When Musk decided he wanted to start his own rocket company, his friends did what true friends do in such a situation: they staged an intervention," journalist Walter Isaacson wrote in the book, titled "Elon Musk."
Adeo Ressi, Musk's friend and former housemate at the University of Pennsylvania, made a highlight reel showing videos of rockets blowing up, "and he corralled friends to fly to Los Angeles, where they gathered with Musk to talk him out of it," Isaacson wrote.
"They made me watch a reel of rockets exploding, because they wanted to convince me that I would lose all my money," Musk told Isaacson. But Musk had already thought this through and had decided that someone would have to invest money if they wanted any progress in space exploration.
After he was ousted from PayPal in 2000, Musk shifted his focus to exploring Mars, with the lofty goal of colonizing the red planet. He attended meetings of the Mars Society and moved to Los Angeles, which was the home of aerospace companies including Lockheed and Boeing.
"Do we want to tell our children that going to the moon is the best we did, and then we gave up?" Musk asked Isaacson. He also thought that having a colony on Mars would ensure the survival of humanity if anything were to happen on Earth, and wanted to rekindle what he believes was a lost the spirit of adventure.
"To have a base on Mars would be incredibly difficult, and people will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States," he told Isaacson. "But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world … that's what can get us up in the morning."
He gathered rocket engineers for meetings and devised a plan to send a greenhouse to Mars, hoping this would inspire public interest in a mission to Mars.
So Musk headed to Russia twice with the aim of buying rockets. But after being taunted by the unnamed Russian businesspeople he met there, Musk decided the best way to get to Mars would be by privately producing his own rockets, allowing him to keep costs down and improve the technology. He started compiling figures on how much a rocket would cost to build on his flight back from Russia in early 2002.
"I wanted to hold out hope that humans could be a space-faring civilization and be out there among the stars," he told Isaacson. "And there was no chance of that unless a new company was started to create revolutionary rockets."
Musk ended up setting up Space Exploration Technologies, which later became SpaceX, later that year. More than two decades later, Musk is still aiming to colonize Mars, though he keeps pushing back the date that he expects the first humans to reach Mars. He's said that he wants a million people to live on the red planet by 2050.
SpaceX is a NASA contractor. It also operates Starlink, a satellite internet system. Musk currently serves as CEO and chair, though Gwynne Shotwell is its president and COO.