Original subtitles

This programme contains some racist and offensive language

My sort of personal ideology is kind of split right now

between trying to be helpful on Earth-related stuff,

which is sustainable energy, and then trying to

advance space technology

so we can establish a self-sustaining city on Mars.

But I do think it's important to be multi-planet.

Not just one planet, but another planet.

Verify range, go.

This is a guy who's coming up with things that we don't even

know what he's going to come up with yet.

The thing that really drove Tesla to the moon, so to speak,

is the promotional capabilities of Elon Musk.

He never imagines that he can fail.

He just doesn't.

I mean, we've got to be excited about the future.

We've got to do things that make us want to live, you know?

It cannot always be about problems every day.

Do you want to wake up every morning and everything is just a problem?

What inspires you, and what makes you excited about the future?

Falcon 9 is looking good.

2 million pounds of thrust as it goes into space.

Elon Musk is so polarising.

I've never seen a CEO elicit such opposite responses.

Elon! Elon! Look this way! Look this way!

He makes people feel that we can save the Earth

without making sacrifices.

Instead, you can just buy a sexy red car.

Elon Musk has always been totally unafraid from the very beginning

to just go after anyone who criticises him

with the gloves all the way off.

Everybody walks on pins and needles out there.

You hear the word Elon and these guys are shaking.

They were scared.

I mean, scared.

I think living next door to the rocket has been the most

advantageous thing in my whole entire life

besides having my children.

I'm Maria Pointer, and I'm a SpaceX influencer

and I'm the first neighbour,

and I love doing what I do.

CAR HORN BEEPS

Maria Pointer works as a videographer chronicling

the development of Starbase, the remote spot

on the US-Mexican border from which

Elon Musk and his company SpaceX

intend to launch humanity to Mars.

It is THE most extraordinary thing.

This is going interstellar.

This is going deep space.

This is going beyond my wildest dreams.

It's just a wonderful, quiet place.

I lived right there. That's the front door to our old villa.

This tree was in my front yard right here.

But Elon, he told me, he says,

"You're not going to want to live there."

Paved paradise and put in a parking lot.

SHE CHUCKLES

What am I going to do?

He's a billionaire, and I can either get on board or cry.

And I'm not going to do that.

Elon lives in a simple, normal, everyday house right here behind me.

It's quiet back here, and there's no lights glaring.

You can actually get a full night's sleep here.

But Elon doesn't sleep at night.

He sleeps in the day.

So, you know, you can always tell when he's here

because the workers are gone.

It's quieter.

He comes and goes. He loves it here.

Musk hopes his rockets will turn humans into what he calls

"a multiplanetary species".

CHEERING

She's up. She's up.

It's always been about Mars for Elon. It always will be.

And it's always about the multiplanetary species.

If you interpret everything that SpaceX does and Elon does

in that optic of going to Mars, it starts to make sense.

But who is the real Elon Musk?

People have been trying to figure him out for years,

like this revealing interview on one of America's

most popular talk shows.

OK. You've got your finger

in so many different advanced technologies.

As I said, SpaceX, Tesla,

now you've got SolarCity

and the solar pack that people put in their houses.

AUDIENCE CHEERS AND APPLAUDS

Are you sincerely trying to save the world?

Well, I'm trying to do good things, yeah.

I mean, saving the world is not... I mean...

But you're trying to do good things AND you're a billionaire.

I mean... Yeah. ..that seems a little bit like either superhero

or super villain. You have to choose one.

Elon Musk was born into a wealthy family in South Africa in 1971.

These pictures depicting a seemingly happy childhood

do not tell the full story.

Musk has talked quite a lot about being bullied as a child.

He went to a very traditional British private boys' school

in South Africa that I think was very hard on him.

I mean, here he is, this kind of sensitive, incredibly smart,

dreamy kid reading science-fiction books

and physically getting beaten up at school.

I mean, I think that that must have had a profound impact on him.

He remains very sensitive to criticism and also very motivated

to prove doubters wrong.

Musk grew up during apartheid, an era marked by violence

and civil unrest.

He was also a witness when a gang of armed intruders

broke into the family home.

One night, they were sitting in the living room and his dad said,

"Everybody down, get down,"

and grabbed some weapons, as you could see on the cameras,

there was some intruders that were coming over the walls

and they were also armed.

And there was a shooting in the living room.

And I guess his father shot them dead.

So Elon was a witness to this, and the bullets flying around,

and so it was very formative on him,

you could tell by the way he told the story, and he had this sense

that it was definitely not a safe place to be,

right, and he had to get the hell out.

This is Silicon Valley.

We're south of San Francisco Bay here,

the heartland of the American high-technology sector.

Google is here. Apple is here.

If you can think of a high-technology company,

there's a good chance that they started here

and that their headquarters are here.

This is very possibly the largest concentration of wealth, power

and influence anywhere in the United States

and likely anywhere in the world.

Elon Musk arrived here in Silicon Valley in the early to mid-1990s

to go to Stanford University, and almost immediately he quit

because he recognised this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Months after coming to Silicon Valley,

Musk started an internet company, Zip2.

This is where Elon Musk created his first start-up, Zip2.

The idea behind Zip2 was simple.

It was taking business directories,

which at the time were in a phone book

that would be delivered to everyone's house, and instead,

putting those directories on the internet.

Selling it made Musk $22 million.

He was starting to make his mark and a lot of money.

It's 7 o'clock in the morning and Elon Musk

anxiously waits for his golden payoff,

his prize for paying his dues in the Valley.

I expect to receive a car that I've just bought,

which is called the McLaren F1.

It's $1 million for a car.

It's...

It's decadent.

There are 62 McLarens in the world, and I will own one of them.

Musk sold his first computer program at the age of 12...

There was a CNN camera crew on site to record the moment,

and it's a remarkable artifact - really, clearly, a guy

who is enjoying his new wealth.

My values may have changed,

but I'm not consciously aware of my values having changed.

My fear is that we become spoiled brats.

That period of time is really interesting for those of us

who follow the Elon Musk career, because, you know,

he had not achieved this notoriety.

He had money,

he had accomplishments, but he didn't have fame.

And it seems like that fame, the desire for fame

is really what has animated a lot of his activities

sort of since then.

Musk ploughed the rest of the money from Zip2 into a new start-up

that became PayPal,

earning him more than $100 million when it was sold.

He married his college sweetheart, Justine.

Then, while the fresh-faced couple were on honeymoon

in South Africa, Musk had a life-changing experience.

While he's on that trip, he contracts malaria,

which nearly kills him.

And when he's on that near deathbed is when he starts to think about,

what is he doing with his life? What's next?

What's going to be his life ambitions?

And you start to see him start thinking about space travel.

About taking humanity beyond just planet Earth.

To fulfil his extraterrestrial dreams,

Musk needed rockets.

Elon cold-called me in a warm afternoon, July 2001.

I could hardly understand his accent. It was a strange accent.

I couldn't quite place it. And he went on about

humanity being a multiplanetary species,

and that he wanted to prove that that humans could go to Mars

and that he couldn't afford US rockets, and that he had heard

that I was somebody who could connect him

with buying Russian rockets,

something that happens every day, I suppose!

The Russians had been converting intercontinental ballistic missiles

to satellite launchers.

They were fairly inexpensive.

The Russians could sell them for $3, $4, $5 million.

I had spent a number of years in Russia.

What I did was to take him over there.

It seems like it always snows in Moscow.

And Elon started to explain to them that we wanted to buy

one of their rockets because we want to launch this mission to Mars.

And the chief designer was getting very agitated as Elon spoke.

Elon, at the time, was late 20s and he didn't dress well.

And the Russians always wore ties. They were very formal.

This not dressing well is a sign of disrespect in their mind.

And so this whole thing came together in such a way

that this guy got tired, this chief designer got tired of it,

listening to him, and he spit on our shoes

and, you know, Elon stopped

and he looked at me and he says, "I think he spit on our shoes."

And I said, "Yeah, he did."

And as I look back on that, the Russians had just sealed

their entire fate of their future commercial launch industry,

because this is the moment at which Elon had decided

to start SpaceX.

Musk began devising a plan to build his own rockets,

initially to take small satellites into space,

but with a long-term goal of reaching Mars.

We can bring life as we know it and breathe life into Mars,

where it doesn't exist today,

and ensure that if there is some kind of cataclysmic event on Earth,

that's life as we know it continues to exist.

At some point, humanity will become extinct

if we don't leave this planet.

He's creating the pathway to humanity becoming space exploring.

He wants to be the equivalent of Christopher Columbus

in the history of mankind.

Musk did not just want to provide an escape route for humanity.

He also wanted to save planet Earth.

And his ambition extended to revolutionising

not just the space industry, but the car industry as well.

Our goal was to show that an electric car can be the best car

in the world.

Soon after launching SpaceX,

Musk bought into a small electric vehicle company called Tesla.

So I'm really excited by the fact that we've got

a zero-emission sports car that can go head to head with a Ferrari

and a Porsche and win.

Tesla's first car was the Roadster.

The world thought of electric cars like golf carts.

They were utilitarian, they were full of compromises,

they were not something that was going to get you laid

if you bought it,

whereas Tesla was all about sex appeal and performance

and, oh, yes, it happened to be an electric car.

Arnold Schwarzenegger,

he takes one of their early rides.

He's crammed in this two-seat little Roadster,

you know, his knees are up against the dashboard.

They start to kind of go out on this airport runway and the car

just takes off like a rocket.

And it's just off.

Off to the future.

Tesla attracted a real quirky community,

some of them hippie environmentalists,

some technophiles and early adopters of tech,

venture capitalists who wanted to see Silicon Valley surpass Detroit.

If all the cars in the world were hybrids,

would we solve our oil addiction?

No, we wouldn't.

We might delay the day of reckoning a little bit,

but we would not fundamentally change the equation.

To fundamentally change the equation,

you've got to have an all-electric vehicle.

But a few years later, in 2008,

Tesla was on the brink of bankruptcy.

The video, Revenge Of The Electric Car,

it was the first look at a start-up car company.

I got a message last week that if the Roadster can't sustain

the company by March, then that's it. And that scares me.

We need to get the company to cashflow positive in 6 to 9 months,

or we're screwed.

Elon Musk was this guy in California clearly labouring over the company.

I want...I want names named.

So if someone's always on the hot seat and is always the root cause

for problems, they will not be part of the organisation long term.

It's not OK to be unhappy and part of this company.

Here is this kind of window into a man who was in the trenches

trying to bring to the world something that a lot of people

thought wasn't possible.

One. Zero. Plus one. Plus two. Plus three.

Plus four. Plus five.

Plus six. Plus seven.

Plus eight. Plus nine...

SpaceX was also in trouble.

Good signal strength.

How badly the company was doing could be gauged

through the grainy rocket eye view footage

showing the launch of its first rocket, Falcon 1.

The feed cut out just as it developed a fault

and plunged back to Earth.

Everything looked good

and it basically just came straight back down

100-ish yards into the ocean from the launch pad.

And that was where it kind of landed,

back almost where it started from.

Jeremy Hollman was the senior engineer

on the Falcon 1 launch team.

Hollman believed Musk blamed him personally for the failure,

claiming he had failed to tighten a crucial nut.

That was a pretty big blow.

It felt, at the very least, unfair,

and it almost felt vindictive.

When Hollman confronted Musk,

he found his reaction bizarre.

Elon - it's kind of almost a blank stare.

He just kind of looked at me,

bewildered that I was in front of him

in the state that I was in.

He seemed shocked that I was having that response

to what I had read.

An investigation into the launch failure revealed that Hollman

was not to blame.

Two further rockets were lost after launch and didn't reach orbit.

SpaceX was considered a joke

in its early days.

I was considered a fool for working with him.

But one thing that Elon is very, very, very, very good at

is not even thinking about failing.

He never imagines that he can fail.

He just doesn't.

In 2008, SpaceX launched again.

We're at stage one. Liftoff indication.

We have liftoff.

This time, the grainy multi-camera, point-of-view footage captured

a more euphoric moment.

No cut-out and a successful trip into orbit.

SpaceX and Elon Musk's other high tech-company, Tesla,

had both come perilously close to collapse.

In 2008, there's no doubt Tesla came very, very close to bankruptcy.

SpaceX was within one launch...

One more failure, essentially, and SpaceX would have shut.

Right here, please.

Tesla had only been saved when Musk managed to secure emergency funding

at the last minute.

Elon Musk's story, at many different points, is one of confidence

overcoming all obstacles,

and that if you can create the perception of success,

everyone else and everything else kind of reorients themselves

around that vision of success.

There's sort of a strain of this in Silicon Valley culture,

which is "fake it till you make it".

Musk was now a minor celebrity.

He'd been living in Bel Air in Los Angeles since 2002

with his wife Justine.

After their first baby died in infancy,

the couple went on to have five children.

But in 2008, they divorced.

And six weeks later, Musk texted Justine

to tell her he was engaged to British actress Talulah Riley.

How he handles the stress...

A documentary following Musk at the time captured an intriguing

snapshot of their home life.

..own worst enemy.

Elon proposed really quickly.

My parents are traumatised by this whole experience.

Although there's been so many times like, "Right, I'm getting on a plane

"to England and I'm never going to see you again."

Really? No.

Erm...no. No, not really.

Musk also began making cameo appearances in TV and film.

You got to be kidding me.

Sorry?

Y-You're Elon Musk.

I am.

Musk appeared in The Big Bang Theory, the cult US sitcom

that showcased nerd culture.

I'm washing dishes.

His acting was wooden.

Well, I was on the turkey line, but I got demoted

for being too generous with the gravy.

That wasn't the point.

The nerds were just taking over the American economy.

By portraying himself as someone who could, even though he was

this world-famous billionaire already, that he could hang out

with a bunch of fellow nerds and just relate to them

and engage with them on their level,

that's a really important part of his appeal.

Elon! Elon!

But not everyone was convinced by the Musk magic.

My name is Mark Spiegel.

I run a small value-oriented hedge fund,

and I've had a short position

in Tesla - in meaningful size, actually, unfortunately -

since 2014.

So the reason I shorted Tesla stock is that electric cars

are easy to make.

They're not profitable.

When they become profitable, all of the large auto manufacturers

will step in and and build them

and basically wind up burying Tesla's

electric car market share.

You know, the only advantage they had was just doing it first

when other companies didn't want to do it.

But in this market, it doesn't seem to matter.

This is Tesla since it went public through 2016. All of a sudden,

between March of 2013 and, up here,

this is September of '13, the stock

absolutely took off.

The thing that really drove Tesla to the moon, so to speak,

is the promotional capabilities of Elon Musk.

He appeals to a certain sort of almost cultish audience,

which is a large audience,

that, in my opinion, have very few critical

thinking skills and have just fallen in love with the guy, essentially.

The synthetic graphite...

This sympathetically filmed Tesla shareholder meeting reveals

the adoration Musk commands.

Hi, my name is Jason Chang.

I own one share of Tesla. LAUGHTER

And...Great! MUSK CHUCKLES

So first I want to say, I love you.

LAUGHTER

Love you too.

Tesla's share price has in large part been driven

by amateur investors.

Hasn't run anybody over yet.

But a small core of professional

investors have backed them throughout.

Let's do it, Mr Tesla.

Ross Gerber runs a green investment fund in Los Angeles.

The money he's made from Tesla has enabled him to buy a $140,000

Tesla Model S Plaid, a car so advanced it's meant to be able

to come to its owner when summoned.

You got halfway out the door, Mr Car, and then you didn't

get any further.

It may not always work, but Gerber is convinced Tesla is the investment

of the future.

Tesla has enormous upside potential.

Climate change is the kind of issue

that, no matter how bad you try to deny it, you can't.

So when you think about investing in a theme like climate change

and a company like Tesla, it's a necessity.

And it's for our human survival, to some degree.

Elon Musk is the innovator of our time, and people

who don't recognise his gift that he's brought us

are missing the point.

Elon Musk's appeal isn't only about his talent for innovation.

For many, Musk's private life is just as interesting.

In 2016, he divorced Talulah Riley and began a relationship

with American actress Amber Heard.

Heard's husband, Johnny Depp, has claimed the relationship began

while they were still married.

Musk denies the allegation.

Musk's celebrity can't only be measured

by his Hollywood love life.

In less than ten years, the number of people following him on Twitter

has risen to over 90 million.

I don't think Elon Musk would exist without social media.

I think that he has been able to take charge of his own narrative

in a way that was not possible before social media.

But he wanted more.

Elon Musk reached a deal to buy Twitter.

Elon Musk, space and automotive pioneer.

Is this really worth it, Mr Musk?

And social media icon.

He has so much power today on the internet.

You know, the power that he has now on social media from building

this persona means that Tesla doesn't have to spend $1

in advertising. Not a dollar.

They don't even have a PR department. And why?

Because he's built this ability to tweet information, make it news

and everybody follows him.

But Musk went from being a fan and prolific user of Twitter

to striking a deal to become its owner.

The billionaire who's put himself in charge of global free speech.

Elon Musk says he's spending a cool $44 billion on Twitter to unlock

the digital town square.

But will he also unleash the hounds of hell?

Mr Musk has pledged a series of reforms, saying he wants

the platform to be a genuine forum for free speech.

When he was asked why he wanted to buy Twitter

in a typically cerebral TED Talk interview, Musk's answer

was much deeper.

My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform

that is maximally trusted and...broadly inclusive...

..is extremely important to the future of civilization.

But you've described yourself...

I don't care about the economics at all.

Musk went further, and in a considered exchange

with the Financial Times, he promised to allow Donald Trump

back onto the social media platform.

I do think that...

..it was not correct to ban Donald Trump.

I think that was that was a mistake because it alienated a large part

of the country.

But amid plunging share prices, Musk put the purchase of Twitter on hold.

For someone who makes a point of saying how much they believe

in free speech,

Elon Musk's most famous company doesn't always like it when people

talk in a way it doesn't want to hear.

Tesla's giant Gigafactory near Reno employs close to 10,000 people

and produces lithium batteries for the company's electric cars.

Everybody walks on pins and needles out there.

You hear the word Elon and these guys start shaking.

They were scared.

I mean scared - to where if you even heard whisper he was coming,

it was like the second coming.

I think people ARE afraid of Elon Musk.

Elon Musk was directly involved in so much of what was going on here

at that time.

I was told my first time I met Mr Musk,

"Don't look him in the eyes. Don't look him in the eyes."

People walked around this place on eggshells.

Lynn Thompson and Karl Hansen both worked at the Gigafactory

in the summer of 2018,

as Tesla struggled to ramp up production

of its new Model 3.

It was about, work as much as you had to.

Bottom line, the schedule is going to be met.

Even to the fact where electrical equipment

that was supposed to be commissioned,

after it had been turned over by the electrical contractors -

and I viewed it - well,

hardly anything ever passed.

Nothing passed on the first time.

Stuff that hasn't been inspected...

..it's dangerous.

At the same time, another employee,

a man called Martin Tripp, contacted

a journalist in New York with his own allegations

about Tesla's safety and environmental record.

Martin Tripp reached out to me.

He was an hourly employee, line worker, but he was dealing

with quality control and he was seeing issues at the factory

that he thought was not safe or good for the environment.

He thought he was joining Tesla to protect the earth

and he was seeing at the company that that's not what was going on.

I became aware of Marty Tripp probably around mid-May

to end of May.

I also learned around that same time that Tesla had hired a team to help

identify insider threats.

This insider threat team was actually on Marty Tripp.

Elon was convinced that Martin was working with big oil or

short sellers or something.

They thought they were going to find some cabal,

some crazy puppet master behind all of it.

How are you doing, sir?

On June 20th, 2018, a security officer contracted by Tesla informed

the police that Martin Tripp

was on his way to the Gigafactory with a gun.

The police released bodycam footage of their response.

There was a report that he was going to be coming with a firearm

and that he was going to be shooting the place up.

When when we were able to locate him, he did not have a firearm.

ON FOOTAGE: Gotcha.

At the end of the day, there was never

a credible threat substantiated.

He was fearful for his own well-being and basically in hiding,

thinking that Tesla was after him.

I don't believe there was ever a threat.

I believe that he was set up, to make an example out of him.

That's just my personal opinion.

Tripp eventually decided to release a large number of legal documents

relating to his case against Tesla on Twitter, breaching

a confidentiality agreement.

As a result, he was made to pay the company damages of around

$500,000.

I think the way Tessa went after Martin Tripp was...

..to make an example for every 40,000 of Tesla's workers.

For them to understand that they should never speak

to the press.

A few weeks later, Lynn Thompson's contract with Tesla

was allowed to expire.

He believes this was because he reported his belief

there was theft of copper from the plant.

We kept turning in pictures of individuals that were involved

in these actions, but I was told by Tesla's upper management

that, if I did not catch it with them in their hands, I better

not say nothing.

And I was also instructed by my superior of Tesla

that it was OK if they stole $2 million worth of copper as long

as they met the schedule.

Local police had also complained that Tesla were being uncooperative

in their investigations into the alleged theft of copper.

Shortly after he began to follow up Thompson's report of thefts,

Karl Hansen's employment was terminated by the security

company as part of what Tesla says was a company-wide restructuring.

I was told, "Sit down, don't talk to anybody."

The company's intent at the time was to repress any information

about the theft and focus solely on production.

You know, the impact on me has been tremendous - myself,

Lynn Thompson, Marty Tripp.

And it bothers me tremendously because we were trying to do

the right thing. We were trying to do the right thing.

Both Thompson and Hansen's whistle-blower cases

are yet to be decided.

In 2018, Elon Musk went on the Joe Rogan Podcast, drank whiskey...

So is that a joint?

..and he ended up smoking a joint.

It's a blunt. Or is it a cigar? No. OK.

It's marijuana inside of tobacco. Oh, OK.

Some people thought it was the coolest thing that he'd ever done.

Some people thought it was the stupidest thing he'd ever done.

And I think, ultimately, you know, it was successful in that it got

people talking about him.

It's tobacco and marijuana in there.

That's all it is.

I call it like a Rolling Stones moment.

You know, in the late-'60s, the Stones got arrested for drugs

and it made them huge.

They're the bad-boy band.

And that's exactly what Elon did.

He went out, he smoked pot with Joe Rogan and he became

the bad-boy entrepreneur.

As Musk developed his counterculture image,

other problems were developing inside Tesla's giant Fremont

car plant in San Francisco.

Allegations of racism.

It's a company that touts itself as a technology... As a leader

of the future, launching rockets and electric cars.

And yet they're operating in the past in the way

that they treat their workers.

You would think you were reading about something in Alabama

in the 1930s.

It's astonishing.

We were being put in the worst areas

of the department in Tesla to work in.

Cold, wet climates, the most nastiest areas that you can

possibly be at.

I was called the B-word,

whore, monkey.

The black women are the bottom of the barrel

at the Fremont Tesla factory.

We are nothing.

Shortly after like my first day, I started hearing the N-word,

the word "monkey", things like that, on the line.

And I was like, this is a very unprofessional place to work at.

My supervisor, he called me the N-word.

And riding around, you just hear the N-word being called out.

Whether it's me downstairs delivering a part and I hear

it out and I'm the only person that's in that area -

got to be directed towards me, if I'm the only person

that's around here.

You can be using the restroom. Look to your left, look to your right,

you'll see racial graffiti, you'll see swastikas.

You'll see all that.

I complained to HR. I was met with resistance,

I was met with hostility.

I was met with, "This didn't happen. I can't believe you."

That's what I was met with.

African-American workers at the plant, including

Monica Chatman and Marcus Vaughn, have now banded together to bring

an extraordinary class action against Tesla, alleging racial

harassment and discrimination.

In May 2017, Musk sent an email round to workers calling on them not

to ever intentionally allow someone to feel excluded, uncomfortable

or unfairly treated.

But he added an extraordinary caveat.

He says, "In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you but sincerely

"apologises, it is important to be thick-skinned

"and accept that apology.

"If you are a part of a less-represented group,

"you don't get a free pass on being a jerk yourself."

It's astonishing that his response would be anything other than,

"I take this very seriously. I would never tolerate this."

That instead his response is to blame the victim and say,

"This is your responsibility to deal with it."

For the head person to say that, it's kind of like everybody else

falls in line.

And from then on, it was just...

..go to work, come back home. And get mistreated at work -

you know, get called the N-word, get called a monkey.

And we had to just deal with it.

We couldn't speak up any more.

We are still compiling the class list, but we believe that,

ultimately, there'll be thousands of workers,

at least 2,000 class members.

People who are buying these cars because it makes them feel

good that they're doing something good by buying an electric car,

if they knew the kind of racism that was happening,

that at its core the core of this company is rotten,

they might think twice.

Melvin Berry has been awarded $1 million after he won

his case against Tesla.

In a separate case, Tesla was ordered to pay another

African-American worker $137 million for failing

to stop racial harassment.

In April, the figure was reduced to $15 million.

But the judge rejected Tesla's appeal, commenting on testimony

that the Tesla factory was saturated with racism.

The class action is ongoing.

This lawsuit is not about financial gain.

This is about me standing up for who I am as an

African-American woman and saying, enough is enough.

Tesla and Musk did not respond to this programme's

request for comment.

They have previously stated that some of Mr Hansen's claims

are outright false and that others could not be corroborated.

In general, of the Reno allegations, they have said they are...

On racism, Tesla recently said...

They say that they have a training programme, reinforcing that...

They seek...

On Musk's email to employees, they said...

One of the great goals of the electric car

is to make it self-driving.

Critics claim Musk's determination to push the limits

of this technology, combined with his talent for hype,

is dangerous and might actually be putting Tesla customers at risk.

If you fail with self-driving, autonomous vehicles,

people's lives are in danger.

Elon Musk's most recent partner is the Canadian pop star Grimes.

The couple had two children, called X and Y, before separating.

Not surprisingly, press attention focused on Musk's private life

has dwarfed that looking at his flagship new product, Autopilot.

All Tesla cars are capable of driving themselves

but critics claim the Autopilot feature is dangerously overhyped.

Everything about Elon Musk is cutting edge.

So, when he hypes up a product, it typically is for good reason.

When it comes to Autopilot and full self-driving, when Elon overhypes

this particular product, people's lives are theoretically

now in jeopardy.

Tesla says that you need to keep your hands on the wheel

at all times, even when the car is in Autopilot.

Elon strays from that.

You can see him driving with his hands nowhere

near the steering wheel.

I'm not touching anything. No hands, no feet, nothing.

The internet is full of hair-raising images of people driving like Musk,

without their hands on the wheel.

Good Lord.

An early advert by Tesla itself demonstrating Autopilot

also proved highly controversial.

It claimed...

Or was it?

MUSIC: Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones

The video was very misleading because it really suggested

that that entire drive was in one shot,

when in reality, it was actually chopped up.

Tesla essentially edited out where the driver had to take over,

and by editing, it led people to believe that a driver

is not needed.

He seems to be overhyping full self-driving

because of the valuation of the stock.

There are cases where, unfortunately, Teslas on Autopilot

are crashing and, unfortunately, it results in the drivers dying.

Tesla and Musk did not respond

to this programme's request for comment.

Its website states that...

Musk has tweeted that...

In January 2020, Elon Musk celebrated the production

of the first cars made in Tesla's new factory in Shanghai

in typically bizarre fashion.

He would soon be celebrating a new extraordinary surge

in the Tesla share price.

How much money have I made on Tesla?

It's kind of hard to quantify because I've taken profits

at various points in time in the journey

And I still own a lot of Tesla personally that I haven't sold,

but it's millions.

This is a guy who's coming up with things that

we don't even know what he's going to come up with yet.

And that's the beauty of investing with one of

the few true entrepreneurial geniuses of our time.

Elon has the ability to

make you feel like you should never bet against him.

He makes people feel that we can save the Earth

without making sacrifices.

Instead, you can just buy a sexy, red car.

Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk!

Tesla's share price means Musk now alternates

between being the richest and second-richest man in the world.

In May 2021, he made a glitzy, showbiz appearance

as host of Saturday Night Live.

I'm actually making history tonight

as the first person with Asperger's to host SNL.

APPLAUSE

Or at least, the first to admit it.

Down in Boca Chica, Musk continues to work tirelessly

on his ultimate goal, Mars.

I think Elon will succeed in in sending people to Mars.

I don't believe he'll actually go himself, but I believe

he will send a crew there.

Hero or villain, Musk continues to set out his own fantastic vision

of reality in almost visionary, inspirational speeches

at every opportunity.

Earth is the cradle of humanity

but you cannot stay in the cradle forever.

It is time to go forth, become a starfaring civilisation,

be out there among the stars,

expand the scope and scale of human consciousness.

I find that incredibly exciting.

That makes me glad to be alive.

I hope you feel the same way.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media