Meet The Secret Genius Behind Elon Musk

hi i'm carl medlock welcome back to the iced coffee hour and i don't know what else i'm supposed to say so far the podcast is made and just guess i guess you guys made six hundred and eighty two thousand three hundred fifty one dollars on podcasts not bad uh two hundred and three thousand three hundred and eighteen dollars is how much money for someone outside of the youtube thing that was a pretty good guess i'm gonna expect more out of you this year well that's goal it's gonna be 650. 650. let's do it by the end of this year let's do it all we need is for you guys to subscribe hit the like button comment down below for the algorithm and uh anyway we got a really exciting episode today because this car behind me i uh may have done a thing and uh this is the newest addition to the uh family got the uh 2010 tesla roadster one of 26 in yellow and how this all came to be is because i found you on both cnbc and the what's inside channel as the original tesla whisperer you're the one who's keeping these cars alive and you're also an integral part to the development of these cars and a lot of the early history with tesla so today we're going to be sharing some secrets about elon musk tesla tesla and everything else you didn't know that you need to know is that a good intro oh i'm scared that's fun what number of uh what number employee are you of tesla i would say i'm probably in the 300s 300th employee of tesla probably somewhere in the 300 range so walk us through your story and how exactly you found yourself to that place the quick version of the story is i was a car dealer here in seattle but when tesla was looking for somebody to be their first employee outside the california area what they did was they were looking for a technician with a master technician experience they were looking for somebody who owned a business previously and they were looking for somebody who had managed a dealership and they're looking for somebody who had worked on high on cars apparently i was the only person at seattle that checked all those boxes on linkedin and they contacted me and asked me if i wanted a job i didn't know who they were kind of laughed tesla hold on while i google you and i typed i literally was googling the guy as i was talking as i was talking anyway long story short was i turned the job down i wasn't interested dealership was doing great i didn't have any reason to go anywhere else and uh the economy in 2008 kind of took a dive and i ran out of inventory for my car dealership and the phone rings and it's uh matt giambruno from tesla motors uh called back and see if i was interested in that job and i thought well you know what absolutely been reading up on you guys which i hadn't been reading up in you guys i really look like i'd be entertaining that the the idea of coming to work for you and i'll take that free trip to san carlos so that's what i did what were those early days like for you like what was your first day what do they have you do if you uh if you're at a stop light and you just mash your foot to the floor and you spin the tires and eventually you get the car straightened down that's kind of like the first day's a tesla you literally were running as fast as you could run you're on an airplane you know somebody call you hey where are you today that's kind of one of the famous things was where are you we actually my team would use we used facebook messenger for private messages between my entire team whoever was working with me because if we did email then somebody could read the email or whatever but if we had something going on that we wanted to get done um behind the scenes we would just use facebook messenger chat that way with everyone oh and so at the time it was just the roadster that was being sold correct this is before the model s came out just the roadster and like there was the one prototype which people don't really know this but the original tesla model s prototype was actually an s 500 mercedes that had been lengthened and a roadster drive train was stuck in that model uh that uh s500 it was the first model s it was white and it was maroon and i don't know what colors all the cars was that carpet came what was your first impression of the roadster when you first started working with so i was actually driving a ferrari 360 at the time and i was just uh i went to work for tesla and i went to san carlos to drive um for the interview and they gave me a ride one of these cars i instantly realized that you have power right out of the hole as soon as you mash the throttle you can take off and you can you know the cars just the difference between that and a ferrari or a gas engine car was you have to wait for the rpms to come up so you get the torque pattern and you get up into the torque curve and then you actually had power so ferrari 360 you were doing 70 miles an hour in first gear before the car actually had any real real power a tesla roadster has power right off the bottom it's the same as turnaround blender it's instantly on and they're just fast they're quick did you take the job for tesla before having driven the car i did actually really i never sat unseen really i had never seen a roadster when i took the job how good was their offer that you were willing to because i know your car business was somewhat going wasn't wasn't going as well as you would have liked but how good was their offer as a company who at the time wasn't doing that well either they were just getting themselves out there very competitive you know they kind of felt me out you know i now i look back on that and i and i think about what matt the questions about jim bruno asked me and you know they were feeling out what your price point was what and you know what they made me a very fair offer and at the time you know i came from the car dealership industry and the health insurance you have at car dealerships it's worse than not having insurance and you'll spend two thousand dollars a month per person and then have a six thousand dollar deductible before you can even start using the insurance it was just awful and so i go to work at tesla and my my even my our medications were five dollars it's the best insurance i've ever heard so there was a lot of perks that came with tesla and they gave us a lot of stock options to start with i mean they gave us 40 000 options um some of us wow to start higher on it was funny they uh talked about um right after i was hired people i was like yeah i just want to work for tesla i'm so excited and then people said like they just went through a layoff i'm thinking oh wow that sucks but that's when they ousted martin eberhard and a bunch of other people right in october of 08 right when they were calling me to hire me right can you say what exactly the offer was and the decision and like why you decided to do that instead of however much you were making i basically took a 40 pay cut to go to work at tesla the offer was 120 000 or maybe 125 i think and then it was 40 000 or 20 it was 40 000 options and then they did a reverse split right before the ipo which made him 20 000 options but still that's a lot of money it wasn't at the time because my strike price was 90 cents the strike price was 90 cents price oh yeah i was like at 90 cents it was going to take him seriously i mean because i surely wasn't i mean like i was i love the job but i didn't take at 90 cents who cares 40 thousand options well i got 40 000 oop d you know that's all it was back then but that's 50 million dollars today oh my gosh so yeah what did you do with those options well um i kept them and then i went through a divorce and the divorce lawyer uh convinced the judge that the tesla was going to go out of business in 2013 and they sold them all no at 38 dollars a share exactly what somebody else did somebody else mentioned thirty eight dollars this year yeah oh my god that's the most expensive attorney i think i've ever seen oh yeah it was you know like water was 60 grand or something at the time but now that's 50 million dollars i actually did some research to see if i had a case against the lawyer but i don't even though he made a he convinced the judge that they're gonna go out of business and we're gonna have to sell the stock to pay his lawyer fees yeah i'm how often does that keep you up at night i mean at this point you can't do anything other than just like the absurdity of it well the good news is oh my gosh i met you and i met a lot of great people through these cars the bad news i've been i've been retired i bought myself a helicopter i've been on some island that i owned and you know nobody ever seen me again but now here's the thing too is we're also assuming you would have held through all the boom and bust cycles and because a lot of people say that with like oh i bought bitcoin when it was ten dollars and now it would have been worth all this money realistically a lot of those people would have sold it a hundred or a thousand and you know and it let's say if that hit 10 million dollars i mean at that point it's like well i may as well 10 million dollars but it goes to show just how far tesla's come i don't really sell anything like i have a bunch of lucid stock a bunch of rivien stock as well i don't really sell anything i just like to buy it and then if i can afford it and if i can afford to lose the money i'll buy it yeah but then i just then i forget about it don't think about it so your initial offer was 120 and then you obviously i'm sure continued on this tesla journey what was it like over the next couple of years working at tesla and how did your position in the company scale it was the most fun job i've ever had and i'll tell you why um first off you have a new you have a new topic you have electric cars and it's a support car it's fun it's fast and you get past all the mocking you know where do you put the gas you know all that stuff and that was the early on and that but it became fun because you're working with the best people if you know for example the way i was hired i had like six or seven interviews and every one of those programs could have kicked me out said i wasn't capable or or the right person right fit but then i went through all those and then i had to interview with elon as well and i interviewed with elon and he asked me customer service stories you know what was what was your best customer service experience what was you know this what was that and then uh so i got the job based on what they had learned right then and then the other aspect of the job was i actually had worked with a guy in 1998 here in seattle and he was one of my final interviews there and i didn't recognize him and he looked at me this guy's six five ish black belt in jiu jitsu you know the type of guy i'm looking at you know it's like a dark cloud in the doorway and uh he's standing in the door when he goes i'm not gonna review this guy i thought well had a good trip see you later and uh it ended up being that um he was the guy that i had helped out at a dealership we both got dropped in a dealership basically got lost our jobs at other dealerships and both ended up this dumpy water i mean it rained inside it's hard it rained outside it was a really bad deal it's called university ford it's gone now but we were both getting cheated by our group leaders because each side of the shop had a different group and you know we kind of teamed up with friends and you know i never saw him again he needed a ride the last time i saw that guy jameson's coming is actually the last time i saw him he needed a ride to go pick up his motorcycle motorcycle shop well that dealership sold and they closed it almost for all right after we started there so he went a separate way he went back to california and i went did something else and then here i run into the guy at the interview at the at the tesla motors it's a little bit weirder that interview went because the guy that was the director of service at the time greg zangie was also the past i don't know if he's a world guy for ducati and i in 19 2001 i had a ducati 99 916 that the bolts on the bike were all corroding and ducati says oh you know that that was one of six bikes that was shipped from italy without the silica packs in the in the bag so they said well you know we're gonna get we're gonna take your bike so this guy flies from new jersey which i think is completely crazy he comes to my house which i think is even crazier he takes my bike don't meet the guy i don't see the guy i'm at work he calls me up two days later said i'm not getting my bike back and i'm thinking what's up with this so he goes oh you know we're going to buy you a new bike we're going to give you a new bike so i went down to seattle ducati and there my new bike was sitting brand new bike no charge to me and they did that so greg zangie asked me to tell the best customer service story he i had ever had so i tell the story about how ducati and i still don't have an understanding why not he did all this greg zangie was adam fawcett's boss greg zangie's the person who made the decision to give me that new ducati and i didn't even know the guy wow so years later i run into jamison cummings and greg zangie which i never met greg before i run into these two they're they're interviewing me at tesla so it's just like the stars aligned yeah stars online and here we are and you got interviewed by six people you said uh at least six and one of those was elon yeah the last person what was that like it was fun he's a really nice he's actually a really good guy i mean he's incredibly smart so he's intimidating in that in that regard but if you look at him based on his kids the guy loves his kids he loves his family he's a good dad and he's just easy to talk to we have to say we just had a conversation and i got the job and that's after the whole paypal thing so he was i mean you already knew who he was and everything he knew who he was but he was still um if you look at the pictures he uh he uh was young a lot younger yeah and uh you know what he had some very for a guy not from the car industry and never worked at a car dealership he had some very good questions and uh i answered all of his questions and somehow some of the questions uh just basically like a customer service you know what are the what are the some of the pitfalls you've experienced in the service industry you know what did you do to overcome those kinds of things and he asked me questions of basically what was the problem and how did you solve the problem i think he was trying to figure out what my problem uh solving processes were like and then i um you know i told him about because i had the highest customer satisfaction in the world at the lincoln america dealerships i worked at i beat out four or we did i don't want to take credit for everything without a nice team we uh i managed a team that we beat out four thousand seven hundred other dealerships worldwide for customer service from ford they gave me a trip to cause they're trying to co-op and they gave me a crypt of cozumel and a trip to maui and a bunch of other stuff how do you get so good at customer service like graham has to practice this with his courses like let's say someone requests a refund graham's really good he's like hey i'll give you a refund it's always a 21 day window he's very good at that but how do you get to that next level of customer service i know you gave the example of the ducati guys who just came picked it up and gave you a new one but what do you do that's so special yeah how do you prevent getting taken advantage of because sometimes there there are those circumstances where you know it's you know false and you don't want to be taken let's just say i probably do that a little bit different than you would imagine yeah okay so the reality is i already know people who are getting take nice guys i've been a nice guy my whole life i've helped a lot of people i'm not bragging about that i'm just saying i do so you kind of get the signs you get the you know i already knew they were going to take advantage of me but i let them do it anyway sometimes and then i'll just tell them about it you know i already knew that your ac condenser wasn't damaged and i already knew from the paint on your front bumper that we didn't do this and the car was wrecked after it was here but we're going to go and take care of that anyway and then they just feel like completely dirt because they've gotten a lie and half them most time when i call them out they'll pay for it wow but i do it in a nice way i do it i don't try to humiliate him oh maybe it was an honest mistake you know what i know so you let people get away with lies and deception you just do your job chug away and then of course you know you mention it to him but it tends to work in your favor it always works in my favor usually we need to straight with people people we're just seeing everybody's adults right if you just have you know there's i read a book a long time ago called difficult conversations so you just got to have him he's got to be respectful no name calling you know don't make any accusations hey this is what happened this is what i found oh yeah i i forgot i ran into the back of that semi truck and you know wiped my car off with the windshield it was an honest mistake you know just made all that up but the truth is you catch it you catch him and what are you supposed to do you can't you don't want to ruin your future business right i also wrote another book called customer for life it was an old dealership book back in the 90s but you know what every customer was for life you treated them like you know you may lose this time but you're going to gain next time and that's one of the things we do here we just sometimes we lose now the community i've noticed is very tight and you've been describing these cars as like oh that's number 245 and that's this one you know every car by number with their owner yep and you were explaining something that i found really interesting uh linking up two customers together two owners of the roadster together who have never met each other or trading their cars basically temporarily to drive one back to the other who have never met so a really strange coincidence here today which doesn't happen ever before is we have vins 905 which is the car you just purchased and we have been 906 here we also have vin 687 here which is the vin number directly after the car that's in space which is vin 686. a guy called me one of the cars was from a really small town in canada so a guy called me this morning while we were chatting it up and i went outside to take the phone call the guy called me up he goes look i've got this car in the city and i don't know i'm going to get it to you because i'm going to leave for a couple months and i don't know how to get it back either and i said well that's funny because we've got a car here from that same town you got to keep in mind it's a very small town and in canada so we've got a car here from that same town let me get a hold of that guy and see if he can drive your car down and take his back so i got a three-way phone call made it happen and nobody nobody ever met each other before and you know what that guy the other guy is handing his keys to this guy because he's gonna bring his car down swap it for his own this is a really tight community i i would imagine that any roadster owner could go to any country in the world and get whatever they needed they need a ride no problem i guarantee somebody will come get them how many roadsters were made 2500 2450 is about the reason i can't say definitely was there were some production gaps and changes like some validation prototypes were built during production time um and then the six six there was a little bit so i don't know exactly the number and i'm not gonna lie about it because i don't i think right there are people out there who claim that they have the number but i was i haven't actually seen the hard numbers i want to see it in writing now is this card developed when elon musk took over tesla during during okay before and during okay so could you describe that some of the history behind so one of the yeah one of the things if you look at these cars some of them early cars have a shifter and the later cars have push buttons drive okay well they needed to make one of the reasons that martin eberhard and elon musk didn't see eye to eye was build cost now if you look at the connections on a 215 101.5 version of this car all the electronic connections are all miligra military grade twist locks they're even green actually and they're watertight i mean they're really the top of the top right of the best you could buy so we needed a elon and this is before my time elon needed to let make the cars less expensive to manufacture so they took out the shifter which was an 1800 savings they took out the little tray coin tray which you don't have and they took out they added a glove box plastic glove box plastic tray got rid of a big piece of aluminum that went across there so anyway they brought the prices down on these cars too they were a where they could break even on them and not lose it was costing like 110 000 just to build them and they were selling them for 90 to 125 the most highly optioned cars were 160. but so the early development of the tesla could you describe when elon musk took over tesla what was the company the company was not selling the company was doing events showing the car but they hadn't sold a bunch of them yet they were on weak knees we're having trouble making payroll you know tesla was you know in june of 2010 they shipped a bunch of us and probably 25 of us to to the uk to go help put these cars together so part of the problem with the lotus factory was they had a break room that was about a 20-minute walk from the production floor and they had to start their breaks when they got to the is how we were explained is they didn't get to start their break the clock didn't start ticking on their break until they actually got to the breaking which is a 20-minute walk 20 minutes there 30 minute break 20 minute back what are you at 30 50 70 minutes now right yeah for for three breaks so there's 240 minutes 210 minutes that aren't being produced in the lotus factory because these guys are always on break so they sent us there and we're all much flat rate technicians if you guys know what that mean you get paid by what you do and the faster you go the more money you make so all of us are old flat rate technicians so we go into the lotus factory we start making waves and they basically said take off your peso jackets we don't want you here so the base they want to kick us out of the factory but you know the powers that be i'm assuming elon at the time you know we're kicking them back in the line saying no no they're going to work on those cars and there was a guy i don't want to mention his name uh glenn uh one of us went around so these cars were all painted with uh in pieces and there were there was masking tape on the back side of every one of these panels or permanent marker written on the back of every one of these panels and they would put the cars together and whatever they were but the guys that lotus were actually hiding parts because they were pissed off at us because we were getting the cars out they were hiding the parts so a guy named glenn he goes around the factory and he finds a hood that we needed for a car to put it together it's got the vent number written on the hood so we put on the car they came back the next morning had an explosion they were so mad at us for you're stealing parts you're doing this you're doing that it's like there are parts not stealing anything we're just doing what we're here to be paid to do so i i think the only reason tesla survived was all those guys who went to the uk there was i would say there's probably 10 different events that made tesla barely survive and we you know that was the a team you worked at tesla early on you're the best there was period how long did you stay with tesla for i stayed there until 2013. what happened then decided to leave on your own uh no i got fired i uh basically i um my boss was going out of his way to make sure that we were not getting the cars out the door he um backing up to march of 2012 i had sent out i had to send out an email to all everybody in service but in parts i need to know what your last service ranger services mobile service visit how long it took the time you picked up the phone until the time you you know parked the vehicle and you were done with that deal and it became it came it was nine hours per car for a ranger to come take the phone call get the parts load the van go to the car come back it was nine hours so what happened was we didn't get to staff so we're down at the factory setting up for the 2012 model s's a lot of us and the cars were coming off the line is a disaster like i just described to you and we didn't have anybody to because there was no staff there was no extra staff anywhere that we needed staff i ended up pulling 32 people from all over the world i was spending basically a hundred thousand dollars a month at the fremont marriott hotel to house these people and defeat them and i got trouble for feeding these guys and he goes they need to take a break and i said they don't want to take a break because well legally they have to take a break and i said i know and legally they're taking a break he goes well you need to make sure that every one of those guys goes out and eats and be gone an hour well keep in mind we need to have four thousand cars out and we were working hundred hour weeks so for us to stop and eat three meals a day was just gonna kill three or four hundred of those cars getting out the door and we we barely made it we were there until midnight on the 2012 to get that 4000 car out the door we didn't have any extra time so i was buying food on my company credit card to feed everyone i would spend like 300 bucks on lunch to feed everybody we were buying like banquet buffet type stuff it wasn't horrible it wasn't too expensive i got trouble for that because he told me that they could they had to go down and eat and it was basically a way to to nail me on my company credit card but first we got to thank our sponsors storyblocks guys we've been using storyblocks for about two years now and i mean it when i say it has helped the workflow of this business tremendously storyblocks is a subscription service that gives you instant access to millions of high quality royalty-free hd and 4k footage templates images sound effects you name it i cannot tell you the countless hours i've literally just wasted looking for the perfect stock footage or sound effects for my edit well with storyblocks that is no longer an 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and back to the podcast and then the second thing happened was there was a car in hawaii that was all scratched up it was delivered hawaii all scratched up but the car was sold in seattle so i actually ended up knowing the lady and then when i got promoted i found out that that lady had never driven the car because he'd been sitting at kona hawaii all scratched up so my oldest son had just gotten married i went to my boss and said hey you're only giving me 500 total to detail this car nobody in kona hawaii is going to detail this car 500 bucks they won't do it and you know she lives in las vegas part time and she lives in kona so she can't get the car there what should we do i'll figure it out that's your problem so an email came to me from somebody way high up at tesla and says fix the problem because this lady had contacted elon and so somebody downhill had gotten the message i was told to go to hawaii so i went back to my boss and my boss said i don't care what he says you're not going to hawaii for more than 500 i said we need to take care of this lady she's in her third year of owning this car and she still has not been able to drive because it's so scratched up so we got approval on an email exchange for five hundred dollars today with tesla would pay one way of that flight of the trip to kona because he was going there for honeymoon if he would detail the car for free so we shipped all the chemicals the buffer the polisher everything we needed to take care of a car what sandpaper no matter how bad it was my son goes there before he goes on his honeymoon he fixes this lady's car she's raving about us she loves i was just so happy my boss looks at me and goes you're not gonna live through this like what you authorize this because no i didn't so i got fired he told hr that that trip was not authorized we got fired both of us within about two minutes of each other we got fired for an unauthorized trip to hawaii and the truth was so i told tesla's legal i said look i won't sue you if you'll go and read my email and that that guy's thread because i had a folder just for this guy who was so bad in my outlook and i said if you'll read that folder for an hour a day for a week at the end of the week you tell me what you found or whatever you whatever you say to me but in a week we'll talk again and if you feel like that everything is as it should have been no problem i'm not going to sue anybody but i just want to i want you to read it so you know where i was coming from and to know that that was a legitimate trip so they did that and the guy got demoted three times but he still kept his job so that's how i got fired to tesla was being lied about wow it was cutthroat back there because tesla had gotten this feet on the ground they had already created this massively good service team these guys are the best of the best nationwide worldwide i mean still these guys are a players everywhere i mean a lot of these guys have gone are lucid they're the top dogs that lucid and riviera now in other places because they were so good so tesla legal two lawyers read that folder and i never got my job back i probably could have um at that time i was too pissed off why weren't they fixing your car why would they do that to you like what's the what's the motive so the first thing was i was sent to santa monica before this promotion that i got to fire the santa monica service manager because this guy my boss didn't like him so i he used me as his hatchet man they fired him and bob had told me the guy's name was bob that guy had told me that he'd been trying for two years to get somebody to wipe it they wouldn't let him take anybody they wouldn't give him a budget to do it so my boss had been for two years to mess with my the guy that i had to terminate just to mess with him he was making that lady pay that's the kind of guy he was he's doing that everywhere oh why he just that guy how did you fall into doing this was this right after you got fired you decided you wanted to get into roadsters no actually strangely enough the guy called while we were having lunch yeah um david vascovich a close friend actually uh he called me said he want to get his roster working he goes nobody's working on my car at you and then he talked to another guy and then another guy and you know eventually we have all of them not all of them but there's 37 of them here i think today is that legal for you to work on a tesla car after working for them like on the side they sued me they tried to sue me and yeah basically wrote go after yourself on the envelope send it back i never heard another word about that really yeah well they originally tried to say it wasn't qualified yes and then what they didn't know was i was one of the one of the people that were certifying body shops at the time i mean there were there was a main guy that did it but occasionally you know there'll be an outlier right so here's my signature on the bottom of this form right so i have the body shop certification form and it's like so if i'm incompetent to work on the cars how was i competent enough to train the people to work on the cars how did that work and then they're like white as ghosts and that was it that was the end of my conversation with tesla legal what do you think the issue was that they didn't want someone who wasn't within their organization working on the car or they were just trying to stamp this car out and get rid of it it was it was all based on how i was terminated right i was terminated for stealing right so they don't want somebody with that credibility problem working on their cars so that's why they went after me the truth was i never stole anything that was proven later but i think the legal team just figured that i was every i think they assumed that what hr did and what this guy did was legal because hr did it right you know and they didn't even she didn't that lady didn't check anything nobody verified i even asked her in front my laptop was a foot from where she was sitting to fire me i asked her to look at that email no no no no that's already because it's already been made she wouldn't do it jeez so you started off with one customer one car where were you doing the work from i have another business about 1.3 miles from here right now we're building street rods out of there yeah about electric street rods gosh okay we started with that word of mouth how long did it take you to get something like this we were it's kind of funny how this happened so the owner of this building is also the owner of my other building he owns a token he stands towing so stan retired eventually this was a warehouse where they stored this this building did not have water sewer or power in it there was one two outlets in the ceiling with two light bulbs i was always in here it was used for storing direct cars and impounds that's all this was for and uh so the owner of this this uh property said you know you've always been good to me how about you know you want to use that warehouse like i looked at this place and you know we used 30 gallons of degreaser because this had never had water would never be clean it was an oil before it was hit a tow yard it was an oil storage depot for uh home oil for like furnaces and stuff it was oil all over in here it was disgusting so you couldn't walk in without getting dirty but he gave it to me because it was so bad for 1300 a month on a really long lease and i thought for thirteen hundred dollars a month i'm gonna rip this place apart and put everything new that's what i did it cost me sixty thousand dollars i had an estimate from a contractor for four hundred thousand to do what you see here yeah and it was sixty 000 in parts and labor because i hired all the homeless to you know i found out i kind of chatted up with the homeless to find out which ones used to work for in construction and stuff i hired them paid them cash every day they loved it wow and now we're uh they've gotten back on their lives they're back on their back on their feet they're off doing other things now and so when tesla sells a car like this do they agree that they'll always be available to service the car or how does that work there used to be a federal law that people had to manufacture at the supply parts for 10 years that law i don't think is in existence anymore in the magnuson act where right to repair doesn't really really qualify either i mean if you have one of these cars in your name tesla legally has to sell you parts but if they don't have it they don't have it and they don't have an inventory parts for these cars i mean every time i call them zero so what happens if i take this the tesla service center and i say it would really most most the time we've had um i can't i want to say the states yeah we've had a little get these guys in trouble we've had several you know a smart manager a smart technician knows when they're over their head instead of getting buried in the car and wasting time with the other cars they need to get out like a model threes or model x them otherwise or plaids or whatever getting out the front door they automatically just call and we ship the cars to us so there's a couple guys that are pretty sharp about that they realize that it's going to cost them money and time to fix the car they don't know anything about so they don't do it no i've heard stories about tesla making offers to buy customer cars to then part out they do so if i took this car into a service center would they make me an offer or would they just call you and then if nothing could be done they'll just make how does that work it's like a multi-layered conversation so they would you'll take it in for service and if you acted like you wanted to sell it or trade it in they would give you a trade-in value for this but they're not paying very much they've been paying like like the yellow car that they put out they pay like 35 000 for that car jeez why are they parting out cars like why do they want to decrease the amount of decreasing the cars decreases the amount of parts that they'll need in the future right and so they parted out 53 cars basically because they owed people batteries 3 0 battery upgrades and they didn't have any they didn't have any battery cases or anything and the people who made this battery case originally like the black case right there the people that made that case that was a that was a barbecue manufacturer that made that case for tesla so they're not going to do it again and so there wasn't any so they had to to fulfill their requirements their legal requirements for the 3-0 battery packs they had to part out at least a few of the cars to get exchange battery packs to get started so they can put new sheets in the batteries and new stuff but that's why they bought i don't that and they don't have any parts so early early on they threw away 13 million worth of parts or that's what i was told and now they need an inventory of something i mean if they're going to work on the cars they have to have parts too so how many teslas do you have we own 12 and probably eight parts cars what's the total worth of all of your tesla's currently and what was it like three years ago three years ago twelve teslas would have been worth five hundred thousand dollars tops now they're probably worth two million i would think and what's your prediction for the the future value of these cars i feel like if you know obviously it's such a tough question to answer but if anyone's going to have a good estimation if you look at history you look at shelby mustangs or gts ac cobras z28 camaros you look at the anything that's rare in low production and a gear head can get their arms wrapped around their mind wrapped around it they're going to buy it they want to buy it but as far as the values of these cars you know as long as they're still drivable you know these are going to be i would say in five years going to be about a bunch of these in museums you know i had a pretty famous person bring me their car about a year ago and say look i don't want this thing i don't want to sell it you know this guy's worth billions and he just said i don't want any more what's the cheapest you ever bought a roadster for and i said the cheapest ever bought one for was ten thousand dollars he goes that's what you're going to pay for mine and i said ah okay that's not fair to you and he drove it here right so billionaire drove their tesla yesterday and i said uh what do you what are you thinking he goes 10 grand write me a check for 10 grand what's your pay for it because getting rid of this car is worse than having a yard sale to me you know it's just i got to driving around and finding a home for it and he goes and i thought of you and you know what this is the home was there anything wrong with it no just had a new battery put on it what goes on through your mind just like acquiring like the 10th one the 11th one the 12th one like is there any desire to continue buying these cars or is it just the idea of buying them you just want more i want all of them and is there any part in your mind that's like okay you know if i buy this car i can hold on to it it'll be a good investment and i can sell it in the future for a better price or is it just like you know opportunity comes up sure why not i'll just get my we often we often run ourselves down to zero dollars around here um we have we have all this because everything is we don't have any debt the only debt we have is whatever's on the credit card from this month right now that's the only debt this company has so what we do is we take our profits and we buy parts cars or other cars and right now there are two cars coming up which is part of the reason i sold this car there are two cars coming up for me to buy for screaming deals i can triple my money on them so i buy them one thing that's interesting to me is that you would expect electric cars especially like since this was one of the first ones uh to have so many issues what are some of the most common issues that you find in in the original tesla roadster the most common issue is people not playing in the letting go dead so every other tesla has the ability to restart charging if the car if you have a power outage power goes off if you stop the charging on one of these cars it will not restart you have to go back and restart it and if you don't do that three months later the battery's dead that's the biggest problem but it's self-inflicted as far as uh the cars breaking the pems the power electronic module is that's what controls the ac to dc voltage and all that stuff that that component wears and some of the electronic components age out we repair those that's the biggest thing so how do the batteries die like that like if you don't plug it in what's how quickly do you have to get it back and when is the point of no return uh when you hear if you ever walk by this car and it goes it's a very distinct that car's killing itself that's the final warning before it actually shuts the whole car down and says this battery is smoked graham posted on his instagram story asking for short quick questions that we can ask our very special guest today so we're gonna get on to instagram rapid fire question and answer okay uh are you gonna buy the new roadster when it comes out no why it's too expensive i'll build one all right let's see what do you dislike about the roadster that i don't have more of them if you could say something though that like something that could be improved uh all the things that could be improved on those cars we have improved like the suspension was awful it handled awful in a corner you throw one of these things doing a corner you better pray but now we've changed we've changed all the shucks since the valving in the springs and we have that all dialed in i think it was one thing that uh i would too weak on these cars as a suspension what was the lowest vin you've ever worked on i worked on alien's car event too really why did you work on elon's car well he left it at the uh i don't know how this happened but he left at the fremont marriott hotel and he wanted it brought back or brought someplace and i i ended up moving the car that car had its own group of people what was that like working for elon it was fun yeah you know he's he's an off if if he wants micromanager you you're probably on your way out really you know because he hires good people let him do their thing he's smart but he also knows how to hire smart people was he social in the workspace or does he kind of keep to himself he wasn't social at all i mean he would talk to you if he needed to talk to you but he didn't just go to bs with people at all i'm even in meetings he was would you ever joke around or anything i never saw it so he was very like stoic and strict he was very very i think he was very disciplined when i was how i would put it i you know i i stayed in the freedom merit at hotel for almost six months straight while they were setting up the factory and stuff and elon's kids stayed there too and uh you know one of the respectful things that everybody at tesla did which i thought was just without even saying it he had this old if you go to the front hotel you go in the front door and hard to the right there's a bunch of little cubby you can sit back in the corner back there that's where him and his kids went and you know what nobody disrespected him nobody went over there and talked to him when he was with his kids nobody said a word the place was quiet everybody catered to him to his kids and him and uh it was just i i i admired the guy for the way he took care of his kids it was uh you know that's the side that's the side of elon and everybody not everyone gets to see yeah how is that because it seems like in a lot of the the media that we see he's he's absent from his kid's life and he's always working and it seems like he's sleeping on the floors uh did you see a different side i actually saw him sleep on a desk once um um i deleted the photo i should have kept the photo but i deleted a photo out of respect i took the picture and i thought oh my god you're getting fired for this so i deleted the photo but uh he's a human being right i mean he's got uh hopes and dreams and you know the way he'd say is the worst thing you could ever do in the in the world to start a car company i wouldn't recommend it and you know it's tough i mean he went from having an easy life i wouldn't say it was easy but you know being a car manufacturer and all those bottlenecks and stuff he had to work through it's astonishing that he has gone this far but he hires good people he really does hire good people you think that's one of the biggest keys to running such a successful business is the ability to hire well i think it's the ability where i hire well but there's more to it than that so like everybody that i hired at tesla's never got fired unless they got railroaded the reality is to hire the right people for a position like it would be easy for you to hire a videographer or somebody else because you have a lot of experience in that space for me it was easy because i'd done every job at that you could possibly do in the auto repair industry so the guy you know every time he was trying to bs me i was like come on yes give me the truth you know but the truth is i could hire people because i knew what i was looking for i would hire somebody like i would hire a guy that was a ex-service advisor ex-service manager ex-service advisor x this and i'd put him in a position of leadership so if his team got into trouble he could go out and help him and that's so i hired one guy that could do four jobs that was the key to hiring for me and that's what i did and we called we they called our team to get get [ __ ] done to him the gsd team because all the people that were around me i surrounded myself with were all those same people you just all you have to do is point the red one over there and you never thought about it again you never had to check on any of their work nothing ever not once so really good people is the best it's the only way that he survived have you ever refused to serve as a roadster yeah actually i have oh is that story we've had some problems with uh people feel entitled you know sometimes they'll come here and they think that uh you know because they're worth 100 million dollars and they've got that way by cheating everyone that they think the best way to handle that situation is to cheat me too and i just cut them off okay who are you i'll fire you you're talking down to me or one of my kids or you're being disrespectful or you don't want to pay your bill you're not a customer you're definitely not a good customer so i keep you is the new one ever going to get made that's a good question i'm going to say yes to that because i've never seen elon not do what he said he was going to do i don't know what the holdups are probably i would assume that sales would be hold up even though people like uh a sports car two-door cars are the the lowest sales of any manufacturer's cars sports cars everybody likes sports cars everybody likes to ride in sports cars and drive them but very few people can afford to buy them for a second for a first vehicle yeah will it get built i think it's going to get built probably 20 23 i'm skeptical because he also promised to give so many of them away for people who did through the you know the referral program i think he owes like 100 roadsters at this point that might be an issue yeah so i think that's going to be an issue the other issue i see is that when he got rid of that program he said that there is going to be a raffle every 30 days depending on how many uh referrals you bring in you're going to have a chance to win a brand new model why we're going to give away you know these cars as far as i'm aware he never did that i never once saw anything that indicated he ever gave away a car it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction in my opinion because back when these cars and about then 600 each range whatever time period and in time that was they weren't selling okay so tesla came up with the bank america lease program for these cars so they a lot of some were leased and that sounds like the same kind of gimmick to get sales up i don't know to be true but yeah that's what i would from what i've seen before so i'm skeptical about the the roadster ever coming into production because i think by the time maybe it does it's going to be outdated and they have to do it again and maybe bring out something different yeah i mean how much not everybody needs a track car i mean a 10 second car like the plan is i mean it took 150 200 000 to build one of those if you want your own street car there was a 10-second car yeah but now you just go down and turn the key but not everybody has those driving skills i think if you're going to own applaud you better go to school because people are taking those things off-road with you know they're fast yeah what's the maintenance on this car every year it has a 600 annual service and the funny story behind the annual maintenance on that car is about 2009 i would say may june niche people were asking what was the service going to be what was annual maintenance going to be in tesla never even thought about a manager yet so they created this service which is really much a fluff 600 service includes a wiper blade a bunch of testing and the washer reservoir cleaned and you know it's just ridiculous stuff you can get in a quick loop right that's what the service and a bunch of measuring we did a bunch of high pod testing you know but that was those tests were needed for the first couple years but these cars approved themselves they don't need to do those testing anymore so what's the annual maintenance basically nothing resetting the light putting a wiper blade on checking the tires and you know basic overview do you ever have plans to make a battery yourself where you could replace individual cells we actually duplicated this battery already can't get it out of the china tariffs but eventually you'd be able to that's our goal flopping a new battery i was gonna uh i was gonna send an email elon an email and ask him about that because if he's gonna build the batteries for him i don't want to but if they're not going to build them i'm going to that blows my mind so you just you just send elon an email yeah just him yeah just casually i'll send him an email no no no no no no not right now hold on okay you tell him to subscribe to the iced coffee hour podcast say hey uh you might know graham steph and he just bought the yellow roadster elon tesla that's it musk at tesla.com i wouldn't be surprised if it's something yeah mr musk i wouldn't be surprised if it's something like really easy like that yeah that's crazy that you could just casually say hey man are you going to create the batteries it gets better could you share your last text with elon musk i still have all this contact no way is that a cell phone number is that like a really yeah no way he just answers that though i i he i this is the same he interviewed me on this phone he interviewed me so i had his number and everybody elon was elon used to even in public would tell people his email address because he wanted to hear the he want to hear the straight scoop from people he doesn't like things being filtered or any kind of bs coming his way he likes the truth why do you save his name as elon musk are you ever worried that like if your phone gets stolen or something happens is someone like because people i think it's i mean alex's contact in your phone is elon musk oh that is true that is true i literally have alex saved in in my phone as elon musk that is funny people aren't going to think oh the this race actually has jack and elon musk like no one's gonna think that i'd say he's fine doing that yeah yeah i don't know i mean he's just a regular guy you know when you work with him there's no celebrity status going on it's it's like i need that done in five minutes and in four minutes you hand it back to him go he likes people to get it done he doesn't he doesn't need to know me i've contacted him once since i left tesla and what was that one time for i was asking i needed some parts and uh you know what that i did was right before the first cnbc video in 2019 and the next week they were selling me parts it's that fast mentioned on the video i sent it to him in a message the next thing i know is carl alex buying parchment tesla i'd went three years with no parts at all nothing it's so cool is there anything else you could tell us uh from your experience working with elon um we don't argue with them when elon makes when elon stands up at the end of a meeting and said this is the direction we're gonna go you better get out of your chair and you better have that direction whatever the direction that is you better go because he's not one for people back talking he'll just let you go you're just gone and i actually saw that happen actually would you ever see him just straight up fire people i saw him fire somebody we were we were in a meeting and it was early on at tesla and they were trying to convince people this person was trying to convince people that um they needed service centers in these locations these location league locations and elon said we're going to do this that person kept talking i never saw the person again that also happened during my interview one of the people who interviewed me i never saw again he's friends with me on facebook i didn't know he didn't work at tesla until a year later because i didn't know anybody that worked at tesla in the first place right so they're all new faces to me and so so i go going through my interview list i'm like i took notes right oh man what happened to this guy he got fired as soon as he walked out of the door for interviewing me and they canned him that's the way you know what he said the mask it's just [Laughter] i think the elon musk stuff is is so fancy it's so different to hear about it it's so detached from what we're doing yeah yeah like you constantly are hearing about elon musk obviously we idolize him because he runs the biggest company you know he's seems like a great guy doing so much what happened by the way to the uh tesla shop in arizona that burned down i don't know you know i don't know the actual details all i know is that shot burned in 2017 then in october you know i don't know what happened but i'm going to assume that they the first fire was you know lithium ion doesn't burn up by like sparks that doesn't do anything to a lithium ion but if you heat a lithium ion battery with a like a air dryer or a heat gun you know it's thermal runaway that's what you're talking about so when that once that thermal run away have you ever watched the video and throw it right away you probably should it's scary it'll scare you they'll go from zero uh you know whatever the ambient temperature is in the room to 2300 degrees within a few seconds and uh that so what happens when one thermal runaway happens there's 6831 cells on this car right when one of them thermal runaways then it just keeps the rest of them run away and then you then it tags every other car so my my thought was and i don't know but my thought was that they were charging a battery and it had a resistive selling it recharging a sheet and it shorted and it created the heat you know resistance creates heat and then heat it combustion i think that's what burns the shop down but i don't know how do you prevent that from happening here well we do a couple things uh number one we don't even go across the streets of seven level with anything charging we don't go anywhere with anything charging in this building we don't charge at night we don't we have some safety protocols and what we do is there's two people like that car right there we'll get turned off before it leaves we leave we just don't charge anything we're not around it's you know it's just about being diligent about being focused on what you're doing yeah but what about for a home owner who charges this in their garage and they they're out of town for a few weeks so if the car will charge at all they don't have any resistive sales okay they'll um it'll it'll avoid that brick or it will um actually the car will only charge up to a level that's safe i don't think any one of these has ever burned up on its own not that i've ever heard of i think it's important to recognize that anybody that drives one of these cars is somebody because look at what they had to pay you you guys have seen some of the names right so what the other thing is interesting is the community the facebook group for these cars is so tight there's such a nice group of people i bet you i could say you know i already know this to be true i could fly to france right now a place to stay i could go to spain and have a place to stay i go to the uk and play a voice anywhere in the world there's one of these cars i could find a place to stay they're just the doors are open they're just really nice people it's kind of funny it reminds me of the board eight yacht club you know except except it's the tesla something like real value it's something with real value guys but it's like you that's the community i think behind the car yeah and um there's so few of them made yeah you know but also i think what i thought was so cool is just just knowing what sort of people have owned these cars reminds me of like the hollywood boulevard walk of fame where you get the stars you look down i was like that person has a tesla why this crazy free of stuff definitely this one again now i got my star on the hollywood walk of fame except with tesla what's your plan with it where are you gonna put it so this would go next to the lotus but that means i can't use that as a filming set so either the lotus or this have to swap around and uh get a garage space so i asked alex i said hey alex you got an extra garage space alex lives close by what if we made an agreement so it's free but we can drive the lotus a set amount of miles per month oh i'd get too paranoid i i would get two people you've seen me draw a stick before man it's plus insurance i know but it's like maybe what i'll do is i'll come over and i'll pull it out what yeah i'll tell you what if you wanna if you wanna consider letting your son jack take out the lotus on occasion you know have a little bit of fun then i would consider you know letting that park in my garage i'd be open to it okay and and damages uh 50 50 there you go damn damages damages oh [ __ ] we got [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] you have liability insurance on this place jack your neck hurts right i might have a little bit of whiplash thank you thank you [Music] ptsd now for sitting in chairs because the thing is realistically i'll have both cars in the garage um but just for filming it would make sense to have something open and with a car in the background and it would also make a lot of sense you have someone you trust and you care about and you want them to have that 23 year old experience but but you got to compete now with alex were you when you had your lotus were you 23. were you 20. yeah but you can't drive stick but alex doesn't want to drive the car that's the thing mine's free yeah but alex doesn't want to drive a negotiator i'd watch out you tell me what you would do in this situation if you were okay free 150 care great care of the vehicle i drive stick very comfortably who knows who knows but but he's not gonna drive it but he's not gonna drive it but free over here what i would probably do is i'd offer to buy it from him and let him use it when he needs to oh no no i don't want to sell it i can't sell the car he's like i just traded cheated him you see him sell it i actually i wouldn't be opposed but i can't have three cars like what that's so ridiculous guess when you put the hammer down that's what you guys know huh graham doesn't put the hammer it's usually on price related things yeah it's usually if like they want me to buy something like no we don't need it yeah uh or like some business expenses it's usually business depends i'm like no we don't need that and jack wants me to hire more people and i'm just like i don't like i don't like to have an overhead i don't like making payroll sure i want more people to help us out here but the reality is you know the kids want me to hire more people but the truth is these are going to run out eventually right i mean why don't we just work on our pace that we're working on we'll stay as a family business and if we get too big then we'll hire somebody but right now we're not too big yeah people are just waiting and they're not bitching so they start bitching and then i'll have to do something cool that's good yeah thank you so much for doing this i really appreciate it i think it's gonna be fun yeah i i can't wait to see what you're spending on this on this yeah because dan i already know what dan's gonna do right and i know what msnbc is going to do they're going to try to trick me which they did in the first video when it was when i told elon to go [ __ ] himself so you were watching the first video it's all the time i'm sure i've seen it yeah yeah i told elon said yeah go [ __ ] yourself why'd you say that on camera well because well i didn't know they were filming you know because you don't know when they're there for three days you don't know what you know you're like we're just talking right in the video i didn't know they were filming wow yeah because they sent me that letter the cease and desist and all that stuff and everyone go [ __ ] yourself and send it back and i said that right on the video so when people say look that's that's a great scene it defines you perfectly it's like that's the definition of me carl thank you so much for coming on i'll link to all of your information down below in the description for anyone who wants to reach out along with your instagram because you're good at getting back to uh getting back to people on instagram also make sure to add us on instagram along with a free stock that you can get when you sign up for public using the code gram worth all the way up to a thousand dollars thank you carl for having us i really appreciate this this is in seattle so i don't know i don't know if we mentioned this yet but we are in oh that's right we came all the way yeah i'm all the way we traveled so for you guys off of a chair for you guys thank you so much for watching and until next time you