Elon Musk attended the VivaTech fair in Paris this Friday, June 16, as part of an exclusive interview. The businessman, interviewed by Maurice Lévy, returned above all to the beginnings of SpaceX and his ambitions for the future of space travel, with some anecdotes from a history that he described as “very long”.
To support his budding passion for Mars, astronauts and space travel, the billionaire indicated in particular that he had tried to negotiate with Russia to buy old nuclear missiles.
“When I started to understand rockets better, I went to Russia to try to buy old models from them. I also tried to trade in two old nuclear missiles (without the warheads, of course).”
An initiative that was clearly inconclusive, since it was after this event that Elon Musk realized that “new rockets had to be invented.”
“Radically improve methods”
“If we didn’t have a new model, there was going to be problems. It was not to discourage space travel, far from it. But to carry it out, you had to find new means, drastically improve the methods to bring down costs.”
It is on this reflection that SpaceX was born. Or almost, because the businessman has not stopped having his feet on the ground -at least for the moment- by specifying that “the best way to make a fortune in the aerospace industry is when you even start with the necessary fortune”.
Among other topics that Elon Musk raised were the management of Twitter, the future of artificial intelligence, his company Tesla or OpenAI, of which he is a co-founder.
Source: BFM TV
