Flashback: What Elon Musk Told Me in Butte in 2013

I was going through some of my old archives as I shared a story about a 100 year old WWII POW veteran here in Montana yesterday. That reminded me of this...

For those of us who are big fans of Elon Musk now speaking out on behalf of free speech, taking over Twitter etc...remember when he was the golden boy of the environmental Left?

I do. In fact, I remember when I got to attend a press conference and chat with him in Butte, Montana back in 2013. This was the line that stood out to me after he was asked about rare earth elements and developing those resources here in America instead of China.

Elon Musk in 2013: "Well, the United States actually has an enormous amount of resources. Basically, almost everything you possibly want is, can be mined somewhere in the United States. But it is expensive to mine things here relative to other parts of the world. And sometimes I think, from an environmental standpoint, we can be a bit a little overzealous. And honestly, I'm an environmentalist. So I'm speaking from that standpoint, but I do think we can be a little overzealous in the amount of environmental regulations that prevent mining from taking place. They just need to be used- you have to walk a delicate line there. So sometimes, even if we've got the resource in the United States, getting the regulatory approvals to extract it is extremely difficult."

Here's what I shared back on September 17th, 2013

During Senator Max Baucus’ (D-MT) Economic Development Summit in Butte, I had the chance to throw a couple questions toward Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is the founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.  I asked him how Montana, known as the Big Sky state for a reason, could better capitalize off of the commercial aviation and private sector space flight industry.  He started his answer by mentioning one of his major suppliers-SeaCast- a Butte, Montana manufacturer.

When I asked him what more could be done in Montana, he reinforced what is already being done with SeaCast:

“I think Montana is .3% of the US population, something like that. I’m pretty sure that we source more than .3% of the rocket from Montana. So Montana is disproportionately a source of components for our rocket.”

According to the Montana Jobs Summit website, Musk’s credentials include an impressive list of accomplishments including founding PayPal and serving as founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. He has been referred to by Forbes Magazine as one of the most powerful people in the world. Musk is one of the most powerful people in the world, and has been compared to a real life Tony Stark- the character in the film Ironman.

On Monday morning his kids travelled with him to SeaCast, and got to press the button to cast a titanium part used by his company.

Do his kids think of him like Ironman?  “I don’t think so. No. They don’t behave that way certainly. They’re quite blase. I think it’s alwways like, anything Dad does is not that cool. Or maybe they do think it’s cool they just don’t tell me, I don’t know.”

Here's a tweet I had from back in 2013 (wish I had a better cell phone for the photo back then!)