Negotiating for ICBMs and SpaceX

I went to Russia in like 2001 and 2002

to buy ICBMs, which is like, that's an adventure.

You know, you go and meet with Russian high command and say,

I'd like to buy some ICBMs.

This was to get to space as a rocket.

Yeah, not to nuke anyone,

but as a result of arms reduction talks,

they had to actually destroy a bunch of their big nuclear missiles.

So I was like, well, how about if we take two of those,

you know, minus the nuke, add an additional upper stage for Mars.

But it was kind of trippy,

you know, being in Moscow in 2001,

negotiating with like the Russian military to buy ICBMs,

like that's crazy.

And, but they kept also raising the price on me.

So that so like, literally, it's kind of like the opposite

of what a negotiation should do.

So I was like, man, these things are getting really expensive.

And then I came to realize that actually,

the problem was not that there was insufficient will to go to Mars,

but there was no way to do so without breaking the budget,

you know, even breaking the NASA budget.

So that's where I decided to start SpaceX

to advance rocket technology to the point where we could send people to Mars.

And that was in 2002.