Grabbing the Brass Bone & delivering the TechCrunch Crunchie to Elon Musk today

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The SpaceX Falcon 9 wins the Tech Achievement Crunchie, and Tesla Autopilot was the runner up!

I accepted on behalf of Elon. Here is the video from last night and here is something I wrote about the value of being able to recover the Falcon 9 booster for reuse. And here is the backstage interview afterward that covered the future of space, Planet Labs, and the Mars Colonial Transporter.

2 responses to “Grabbing the Brass Bone & delivering the TechCrunch Crunchie to Elon Musk today”

jurvetson

Feb 10, 2016 at 4:23 am

The bucolic view from Elon’s office at Tesla HQ On stage at the War Memorial Opera House last night, moreContendersBackstage before the show

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jurvetson

Feb 10, 2016 at 4:36 pm

BuzzFeed had the funniest take on the evening…. "One of the high-profile founders who didn’t show up was Elon Musk. “I’m not Elon Musk, but I wish I was,” said the man who came up to accept the award for Best Technology Achievement, which went to the reusable booster of the Falcon 9 spacecraft. It was Steve Jurvetson, a managing partner with the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who looks sort of like Steve Buscemi as imagined by Norman Rockwell. He was an early believer in Musk and is a board member on Tesla and SpaceX. The reach of Musk’s ambitions and accomplishments extend so far that Jurvetson kept referencing science fiction; as he said, the booster lands “the way we expected like in comic books — you know, with rocket engines on other worlds.”

While the investor was lost in a reverie about Musk, Bastian Lehmann, the CEO of Postmates, who’d presented the award, started taking selfies next to the statue of a giant monkey, a larger-than-life version of the trophy itself. Jurvetson pressed forward with a shrug. “Anyways, I think it’s more important to think about the big things. And Elon wants to change other worlds, right? He thinks Mars is a fixer-upper planet.”

Peretti came back on the stage after that, but Jurvetson couldn’t seem to leave the podium. A TechCrunch employee had to march out, grab his arm, and escort the investor backstage. Peretti was characteristically chill. “I would luxuriate in the moment if I could build a spaceship with my bare hands…which is what I’m assuming that young man did,” she said. “Guys, take your time, you own this world.”

From BuzzfeedP.S. The reason I was stuck at the podium: as I was returning to my seat, they called me back on stage "for some photos" but failed to mention that I was meant to keep on walking backstage for a video interview.

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