I Don’t Need These Russians 124
“While theoretically and technically television
may be feasible – commercially and finan-
cially it is an impossibility.”
“Sorry Steve [Jobs], here’s why Apple Stores
won’t work.”Also Elon can be negative to new business ideas. When
Twitter wasn’t as big as it is today, Elon didn’t believe in
the 140-character-messages. His wife was a Twitter addict.
When he wandered by and looked at the stream of tweets
on her screen, he said, “I don’t really get it.”^144 Elon would
later join Twitter and has now around 740 000 followers.
His first tweet to the world was “Please ignore prior tweets,
as that was someone pretending to be me :) This is actually
me.”
Despite the negative thoughts from everyone around
him, Elon knew the world needed a company like SpaceX.
Perhaps he remembered a quote by his role model Walt
Disney who said, “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
Disney knew what he talked about - when he decided to
build Disneyland, everyone thought it would end up as
closed and forgotten within the first year. “My rationale
there was that it was an important enough cause – at least
to me – that it was worth putting funds at risk and possibly
losing them,” Elon said. “Failure is an option here. If things
are not failing, you are not innovating enough. The reason
I’m doing SpaceX is not because I think this is the highest
return on investment. I think starting a rocket company
is an unusual thing to do and pretty risky. But I’m a big