Elon Musk: The Single Biggest Challenge to Starting Tesla | Rare 2012 Interview

Well, I think that probably the toughest thing with starting a car company is that the regulations around cars are enormous. So in order to be able to make any car that's not, say, just a kit car or something like that, there's a capital cost that's enormous. And that's why there have been no new successful car company startups of any significance since Chrysler 90 years ago. So the oldest— rather, the youngest car company in America is 90. And there's a similar problem in the space business. And whenever you've got industries that have— need a huge amount of capital, it's a barrier to startups. And that also tends to mean that there's less innovation, because new companies tend to drive innovation in an industry. So the biggest single challenge was getting all of it done at a— with an amount of capital that we could afford to raise. So, that's probably the single biggest challenge. And there's certainly technology challenges and things, but, you know, given enough money, you could probably solve those. But it's— if you have a really— an amount of money that's way less than anyone thinks is necessary, can you solve it within that, you know? Yeah, that was the hardest thing. So, you're a big fan of the book,