I Don’t Need These Russians 125
believer in us becoming a space exploring civilization.” He
never asked what his wife thought of the idea to start a
rocket company.128,278,354,410
After founding SpaceX, the first thing Elon did was to
spread the word how he would build rockets with the ulti-
mate goal to colonize Mars. He talked to magazine writers,
movie stars, and wealthy entrepreneurs. The reason why
he did it is simple. He thought no one would sell him any
rocket parts if they didn’t believe he was serious about the
idea to build rockets.^278
SpaceX opened an office in El Segundo, Los Ange-
les, because southern California has the highest density
of aerospace engineers in the world. Elon assumed ex-
perienced space engineers didn’t want to move to San
Francisco. “They [his friends] view southern California as
being a little vacuous and northern California as being
more intellectual,” Elon said. “But people in the Bay Area
have forgotten that there’s been a huge concentration of
aerospace engineering talent here, for more than a century.
In Silicon Valley, startups are such a norm, and there are
many success stories. In southern California that’s not so
much the case. In the early days of aviation, southern Cal-
ifornia was startup city. This was the huge entrepreneurial
center.”^316 SpaceX was Elon’s only company, so he decided
to move from his current home in Palo Alto to Los Angeles.
Elon became the CEO of SpaceX, and because he didn’t
find any CTO to hire, he also became the CTO. Initially,
Elon wanted to hire someone as the chief designer of the
rocket, but he couldn’t find anyone who was willing to