Datasets:

SansarK

/

ElonData

like 0

https://youtu.be/XP5k3ZzPf_0

Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome to Starbase, Texas. Today, I'm gonna be taking you up SpaceX's launch tower, otherwise known as stage zero, with Elon Musk. We'll get the ultimate view of Starbase and learn more about just how exactly SpaceX plans to catch the world's largest flying object with giant robotic chopsticks. This is part two of our spring 2022 Starbase Tour with Elon. In the first part, we got up close and personal with the high bay and Starship prototypes. And in the next part, we'll get really in depth with Raptor 2 and Merlin rocket engines. So stay tuned. And if you happen to find this video valuable, consider dropping a "Super Thanks" as a tip below here on YouTube, or become a channel member or Patreon supporter for early access and to show your support. That being said, let's get up in there. I feel like you always talk about, you know, how you just wanna build an exciting future, a world where people get excited about stuff, wake up and wanna do cool things. And I gotta tell you standing right here, man. That's, that's pretty hard to not get excited about this. Yeah. I mean, this is pretty crazy. I mean, there's a custom built tower with arms that' are designed to catch the largest and heaviest flying object ever made and pluck it outta the air. I mean, that's the theory anyway, so. Yeah, I think it's funny people actually forget now that they're actually built to lift and stack the rocket, that cranes have such bad wind capability, but one time the booster legs were gonna weigh a lot, Elon just said, you know, delete the legs, delete. We're like, well, what is he? Like? You just, just use the arms and then say it again, and we were like, "Oh wow, he's serious?" Okay. We better get on this. And now it seems normal. Or we think at least seems plausible. Yeah. I mean, it's still super crazy but the more you talk about it... At SpaceX we specialize in converting things from impossible too late. . So, But it's pretty nutty because you're gonna have this gigantic, you know, booster coming back. I mean that's nine meters in diameter, not counting the chines, or roughly 30 feet in diameter. It'll weigh about 250 tons just a bit on the heavy side we'll make that lighter over time. Weighs about 250 now, is that what you said? This is way heavier than... I think we can get the... Well there's there's the weight at different points. So it's like say like weight when the landing tanks are full versus weight when the landing tanks are empty is also what, how much ullage mass do you have.. Dry, weight's kind of floating, you know, there's dry weight is yes. Kind of irrelative when it's actually in the air. Yeah. I mean there's several tons of air mass in the vehicle. If you just say like what's the mass of one atmosphere in that volume. It's several tons. Anyway, but I think we'll be able to get the mass well under 200 tons over time, but still pretty heavy. So you gotta like, you know, call it a couple hundred tons plummeting at you know, Let's see... well, I think our... the velocity at which we, we start up the engines is more than half the speed of sound. So this thing is still coming in really fast. Pretty much down in a downward direction. So then we light, the engines like I said, I think around Mach 0.5, give or take but it's only, you know, several hundred meters in the air, so it's gonna slow itself down very fast then, and correct any error. So like wherever the, whatever the X,Y error is when the engine's land it's gotta, take out the X,Y error and drop the last three of basically zero come in between the arms. The arms will be wide and as it's coming in, the arms will, will close go flush against the side of the vehicle and the vehicle will be descending through the arms. Those tiny little, you can barely see the little nubs, those kind of lifting lugs will touch the top of the arms and then it will hopefully not sheer off and crumple. Joe, is there anything you wanna add that, I dunno if you caught that, but I was just describing the landing sequence. Yep. That was accurate. . We really hope it doesn't hit the tower. Yeah, exactly. And especially not that launch ring, which is really difficult to make that launch ring is very complicated. We have not found a reason yet why it will not work. Yes. Success is one of the possible outcomes. The probability is uncertain, but the, it is above zero. So the part of the, you know, like the arms are off to the side. So in theory, the booster is gonna come back and then when the engines start up, it'll translate over, slow down and translate over and get in between the arms, arms need to close and when they close, they need to close in such a way that they don't crush the rocket as well. Or score it all the way up the whole thing, just , . Yeah. There's a lot of ways for this to fail. How quickly... Is it gonna close almost at the last second, like, or will it be mostly closed and there's a small tolerance there and it skirts the whole thing by, you know... It's intended to close on the methane tanks of the smooth, upper section about the top third of the rocket, and then you can keep translating down. And, and catch on those nubs that stick out the rocket. Yeah. I mean, if things are going right, it will actually look like the rocket is descending between the arms for quite a while. You know, cuz you gotta... The length of the thing is like basically around 70 meters. So you know, if you've got a descent rate of, I don't know, let's say two or three meters per second and you have, you know, 20 meters or something like that. It's okay. You're waiting for like 10 seconds. You know, So it'll actually be like actually this is taking a while . And now you gotta clear those chines too, you know, you can't have it be so close down on the... The chines will be clocked kind of away from the tower. So they won't be increasing... Oh, got it. The opposite way from the clamps. Got it. So as the, yeah, that makes sense. That's cool. But you still need to get the rocket has to still fit in between these arms. So, you know, it's still gotta come in and ... It has to center up and the arms will slew in... Yeah. ...To meet it wherever it is. So if it's off to one side, it's gonna hit one of the arms, which will be quite bad. Yeah. . yeah. . Or cook the arm or, you know, a bunch of bad things can happen. It's just insane though. I mean, it looks big from far away, but it looks even bigger when you're underneath it and you start to see almost the atmospheric distortion and the hazE make it fade into the distance there. Yeah. I'm told this is the tallest thing south of San Antonio. Yeah. Because I think the other tallest was on South Padre. They have the hotel was the other tallest thing in the whole area here, so. And that's quite a bit taller. Actually booster and rocket are almost identical. At least the 120 meter version was like exactly the size of the Sapphire over there. So people need to know what that feels like. Just go up in the Sapphire and know that's how big this rocket is. , which is insane to think about. Obviously you're not too worried about like the Human Landing System right now, compared to just getting things into orbit. But how is that has any of that stuff solidified yet? Like any of the Human Landing System? Uh, well, I mean, there's a lot of sort of design done on the computer level, but and there's some hardware, but, and our focus is getting to orbit, you know, if we can... Because human landing won't work without getting to orbit obviously. Yeah. We need Starship to get to orbit 'cause it's the only thing that can carry the Starlink 2.0 satellites. So, we've already produced the first, and we have on site, the first Starlink 2.0 satellite and it's seven meters long and Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0. So even if we shrunk the Starlink 2.0 satellite down, the total up mass of Falcon is not nearly enough to do Starlink 2.0. How heavy does one version 2.0 weigh? Well it's, it's about one and a quarter tons. There's so volumetrically huge that. Um, but if you just say like there's... A lot of people talk a lot about how many launches per year there are to orbit, but this is not really what matters. I think what really matters is what's the total useful payload to orbit per year. Cause otherwise you could say if this were ocean ships, you'd be like comparing a dinghy to a super tanker and it's like, they're not the same. For a satellite constellation, the thing that really matters is what is your total useful max mass flux to orbit. You know, so mass, you know, mass to orbit. So we need Starship to work and to fly frequently or Starlink 2.0 will be stuck on the ground. Wow. So that's your big motivator at this point is like get these things going. I assume because they're bigger will there have to be fewer of those to service the same amount of like area? Like is it gonna be, is version two gonna be in a higher orbit, servicing more people like with per satellite or is it just bigger so it has higher capacity, more bandwidth, more like all of that, I guess, compared to version one? Um, the Starlink 2.0 satellites are almost an order of magnitude more capable than Starlink 1.0. Bandwidth wise or total like throughput. I just think of it like how many useful bits of data can each satellite do Starlink 2.0 in terms of useful bits of data is almost an order of magnitude, better than a Starlink 1.0. Are those different user terminals too, compared to...? The user terminals are on a separate upgrade path. Although user terminals will work with Starlink 1.0. or Starlink 2.0 satellites, but the Starlink 2.0s are just much more capable. Um, is it possible to go up in the tower, and do some or...? Um, I don't know. Can we go up in the tower? Is the elevator working? As long as the generator gone? Yeah. I can fire it up. Okay. I mean just might not be a bad place to watch a sunset at this point. Yeah. Where are y'all going to? Men's department! I guess we could stop at the QD arm and then, you know, then continue up. That will be and then... Yeah. This views gonna be insane. I can already get little sneak peaks through the... Danggg. Wow, this is epic. This is so epic. We're not even at the top. . Better enough. It's worth. This is where the QD arm is. Oh, hey. The top has a better view. Look at how beefy all this stuff is though. Yeah. I mean, this is insane, custom designed gigantic hardware. I mean it's hard to believe this is real. It genuinely is. Oh man. Geez. That's... It's quite the view. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's beautiful. We're even above the booster even right now. And we are in the sky. We can't even see South Padre. Oh, wow. Yeah. Really hazy. Well, should we go up? Yeah. . Even better when there's a vehicle on the OLM. Oh, I know. I know. I can't imagine. Up close and personal. You gotta come back. Oh yeah. I missed the one... I came out here I think the day after you guys stacked. Well, I guess I came out for last event, but I think they stacked on like the 4th or not, don't know something. I don't what day it was. I was like next day. That's right. Emergency escape ladder thing? You can hand crank all the way down if you really lost power. I maybe want to do that once. It'd probably take like an hour. I feel like you... Holy crap. We're really getting up here though. The craziest thing to me is that none of this was here a year ago. You know, that's just hard to fathom is like, especially if you were out here three years ago and saw quite literally nothing but a field and a little R2D2 man. Wow, look at that. I mean it's far down there. If this isn't surreal. I don't know what is. Yeah, totally. It's insane. I mean, the Ship looks small from here. The ship looks tiny from here. Even people are like tiny. It's like, "Whoa". How tall is this again at this point? 143 Meters at the top. Or about 138 maybe? Oh my God. And look at how how hazy even the production site is right now. Yeah. This is not a good place if you have a fear of heights, that's for sure. You better go get over 'em real quick. Yeah. We should get like a hang glider and jump off or something. That'd be sweet. . You could sell rides as a zip line over to the High Bay. You could probably zip line pretty far. I can't believe how small the boosters look from here even. That just looks... It looks so fake right now. This is insane. And just, we how's that feel? Whoa. Vertigo. Oh my God. You see the ocean out there. We really lucked out on the on the night. The Gulf, I guess Insane. It is insane. . It is gorgeous. I think this is the time to be philosophical almost. It's just so inspiring out here, you know, it's... Do you, I mean, in your heart of hearts, like in the very depths of your soul, do you really believe this is like the start of making human Multi-planetary? I believe we have... I think for the first time it is possible. There's a possible outcome to make life multi-planetary. The key to making life multi planetary is a fully reusable rocket. That's the key. So full and rapid reusability, like an aircraft. So it's just very hard to achieve full reusability given the strength of Earth's gravity field and the density of the atmosphere. Full reusability would be, well, like relatively easy on Mars which has around 37-38% of Earth's gravity and about 1% atmospheric density. It's just barely possible to achieve reusability on Earth. Like it's not as though, you know, all the, the rocket engineers in the past.. It's not as though reusability never occurred to them. They, I mean, they're well aware of aircraft and other things. It's just that it's an incredibly difficult technical problem and they just thought it was impossible or the probability of success was so low that it was not worth doing. I feel like you almost had a bit of a Noah's Ark-esque you know, if you're gonna get Biblical, aspect at the last talk was saying how, you know, if you care about life and the true continuation of life on Earth and continuation of life as a consciousness, then you have to have a sustained planet, you know, another sustained planet off of Earth. Exactly. I mean, I think you know, if you think really long term, then you realize that eventually there will be some natural disaster even if it is not made by humans that destroys all life on Earth. So eventually the sun will expand and evaporate the oceans and and will be like Venus you know, just so hot that no life can really exist or maybe some chemotrophic bacteria, but eventually even they will, they will die. So the only way to prolong life, as we know it is for us to become multi-planetary and ultimately multi-stellar. And if we do not do that all life on Earth will die. So those who care about life on Earth should really care a lot about life becoming multi-planetary and ultimately multi-stellar. Well, I think there's a lot of people get attached to this idea that for some reason, you know, SpaceX or other aerospace companies are trying to escape Earth and escape Earth's problems. And I think you put it into a really good perspective that, you know, currently specifically like NASA's budgets, you know, 0.3% of the, you know, of the federal budget and then let alone, you know, the entire cost of how much we're investing so far in, you know, making, you know, getting humans off of Earth and protecting our planet even with asteroid defense and stuff is still relatively small. I think people don't understand that the... Oh yeah. So the Earth does not currently have any ability to stop asteroids now with Starship that we then have some ability to stop an asteroid. Actually, technically a comet would be the real danger because there are billions if not more than billions, maybe trillions of objects that are in the outer solar system some of them with that are very long period comments. An example that most people are probably aware of is Halley's Comet. So I forget the exact period is today but it's slightly under once per century that Halley's comment comes by. So there are probably many objects, many comments that have very long periods that we simply don't know exist and for example, the comet Shoemaker-Levy when that hit Jupiter, it made a hole in Jupiter, the size of Earth. So if that did hit Earth, that's "Game Over" everything's dead. So anyways, there's always some risk of such a thing occurring and the probable lifespan of life is just much greater if we're a multi-planet and ultimately multi-stellar civilization. Well, I think people also don't tend to realize that it's not a zero sum game, that if we're working on rockets and space flight and aerospace technology and all of these things, life support for these things, it's not just that you, you know, as company spend a hundred million dollars on a rocket and that a hundred million dollars went into space, it's that a hundred million went into the economy, you know, invested in our own technology, our terrestrial technology, you know. Look at all the spinoffs of NASA and what, you know, what NASA had done in the 60s and 70s to create the society that we live in today. You know, I mean, I think people are shortsighted sometimes on, you know, on the implications that you don't immediately see those things that you don't immediately grasp, because we they're just kind of unknowns at this point, you know? I mean, in general, the you know, the economy is very much a positive sum game, a kind of a growing the pie situation. When people examine their understanding or beliefs of the economy, if they have an implicit assumption that the economy is zero sum, then the only way for one person to get ahead is by taking things from another. But obviously the economy today is much, much greater than it was in the past. And we have the economic output per person is massively greater than the past. And so obviously what has happened is that the pie has grown and has grown much faster than the population has grown. You know, essentially if one creates wealth or creates great products and services that, that is something that should be applauded. That is, we've effectively increased the standard of living of, you know, of the country and perhaps of the world. The, you know, and sometimes people will conflate or you know, essentially they think of consumption and wealth as the same thing, but they're obviously not the same thing. You know, this is sort of a long argument of sort of capital allocation is a job consumption is fun, but capital allocation is a job. So anyway, I don't think a ton of people want say Warren Buffet's job, which is to read through very tedious annual reports of companies, including the minutia of the accounting and decide whether to invest in Coke or Pepsi. I don't want that job. . I think aerospace in general kind of still follows the same, like, you know, if back in the day at one point, no one had electricity, running water, air conditioning, all of modern life's conveniences. And of course at first it started off as something that only a few people could get. And now it's, you know, a pretty common standard of living across the world. And, you know, you gotta start somewhere, same with air travel, you know? Yeah. Exactly air travel used to be accessible to almost no-one, to very few people. It was insanely expensive and dangerous. And now it is commonplace to fly somewhere. TVs used to be rare and expensive. And then, you know, big flat screen, plasmas used to be extremely expensive. And now you can buy, you know, go to Walmart and buy an amazing flat screen plasma for 500 bucks. It's amazing. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Oh man. I don't wanna end the conversation on Walmart plasmas, but at the same time . Yeah. Wow. It's a hell of a lot of progress. I mean, again, not to bring up the past, but three years ago, I think the first time I ever came out here was March, 2019. So almost exactly three years ago. And all you had was little hoppy. He had just made it out here and was starting to do some of the initial static firing. That was that was three years ago. That's amazing that the, the hopper is still there. Yeah. Looking over us, all the grandfather, we all need. Yeah. But even, I mean, even the tank farm was like three tanks of those smaller, you know, for the first test, it was so tiny and there was literally just a dirt mound and three tanks. And now, you know, it's and there was a tent out there and that was about it. Yeah. The propellant storage for the whole vehicle was actually, that was a really, that was a quite difficult, just put a lot of effort into the propellant storage. How? So if you have to scrub, if you're trying to do like the first static fires and stuff, how long does it take to recycle because you're probably... What's that look like? Because you have to drain the propellants back into the tanks and say, you have to come out here and wrench on something and you know, you have 33 engines that all have to work harmoniously. What's a scrub and recycle look like with this system right now? Well, first is gonna take us long time to scrub and recycle, but over time it should be very fast and we really shouldn't be scrubbing. It should just take off for it's like a normal thing. Yeah. But I mean, obviously the first, the first booster static fires will be probably... Yeah, no, I mean, it is gonna be very bumpy at first. I mean, for Falcon 9 in the beginning we'd have like a dozen recycles, like we'd scrub the launch like a dozen times. I mean, for a while there I was living out at the Cape, basically just working on, getting the damn rocket to take to, you know, getting all nine engines to start and take off and, and 'cause we would just have one launch abort after another. And I brought the kids with me and I went to, went to DisneyWorld a lot and Harry Potter land. Thanks again to Elon for all of your generous time and thanks to Ryan Chylinski with Cosmic Perspective, for helping to capture and share this conversation. And I owe a huge thank you to my Patreon supporters for helping make this and everything we do at Everyday Astronaut possible. If you want to help support us, head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut and while you're online, be sure and check out our awesome merch store for shirts like this, the RD-171 shirt and lots of other cool nerdy rocket stuff at everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody. That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to Earth for everyday people.

https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc

2022 we're very glad you can be with us whether you're here in the room in central London or joining us on our Global live stream my name is Peter Campbell I'm the Global Motor industry correspondent at the ft and it is a great pleasure to introduce and share this session for you let me tell you how this is going to work in a few minutes we're going to have JB Straubel back on stage and Elon Musk joining us remotely but it's going to spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of the session talking about the history of Tesla now these two guys were Central to the company and its growth and everything it has achieved to date and they have never before appeared on stage together to talk about the origins of the business so this is a unique chance to ask them about that and hear about that and then for the rest of the session we're going to have time just with Elon on his own where we'll have questions about Tesla today and tomorrow and maybe one or two questions about some other projects He has going on just a reminder to you please do ask your questions on the chat box or if you're in the room using slido but with no further Ado because of all our guests here's the one who needs least introduction I'd like you to welcome back to the stage JB straable and joining us remotely Elon Musk thank you good evening thank you so much for being with us both of you I want to go back to something that was alluded to earlier in the session and the lunch that changed the world as Patrick called us when the two of you sat down and came up with a plan that led to Tesla take us through that who started it whose idea was the lunch where did it go Elon we'd love you to start I'm sure well actually and JB uh completely I think we could hear maybe his perspective as well um but uh uh yeah I got a call uh someone out of the blue uh from uh JV and um uh Rosen um uh and I I think once I'm not sure exactly what the subject matter was but it was it's something involving space or maybe hydrogen airplanes or something and um so we got together for lunch and at some point the conversation turned to electric vehicles and um uh had uh JB and and Rosner both worked on an electric vehicle company um that I guess ultimately wasn't successful and I mentioned that uh the I I'd actually had a strong interest in electric vehicles for a long time and I thought electric vehicles were the future of transport and um and in fact I had worked at a company developing high-ended density capacitors uh Ultra capacitors for potential use in electric vehicles and that was going to be my area of study during Graduate Studies at Stanford which ultimately uh dropped out of but um anyway that led to jba suggesting that I get a test drive in the the t0 Prototype from AC propulsion which is a small company in Southern California and um because that sort of had a proof of concept uh electric sports car and um I said that'd be great I'd love to get a test drive and that was in 2003 and um and and then I I did I get it got a test drive in the the t0 um and I tried to convince them to commercialize the t0 I tried very hard actually to to get AC propulsion to commercialize the the t0 electric sports car um and then after they um they they said they really did not want to do that um I I said well do you mind if uh then I do that if you mind if I I create a commercial uh electric sports car and they said yeah no problem and so uh my you know that my intent was to basically create and uh company to commercialize the the t0 with JB um and uh and then the uh to engage AC propulsion said well you know there's some other uh groups that also want to commercialize the t0 uh concept and uh what do you what do you think about teaming up with them and um and one of the groups that was introduced to me uh was uh uh Mark toppening at Ian Wright and what never had uh that but but it's very important to emphasize that there was no actual company of the that existed in any meaningful form at that point so it was really just three guys and then JB and me and and then we decided to team up and create a an exploration create a commercial version of the t0 electric sports car um yeah I mean JB at any uh what's what's your perspective no that that's a pretty uh pretty close history of how I remember it as well and and uh I mean my perspective on the thing was us trying to to chat with you about this electric hydrogen airplane concept that we were uh you know I was at the time trying to work on and and uh I do recall that not going extremely well actually for the first part of the lunch I think uh I can't remember the color colorful adjectives you used but they weren't they weren't very uh you weren't very excited about the hydrogen airplane for good reason um so yeah then I think our our topics our conversation completely turned to talking about Lithium-ion batteries you know state of the art of Lithium-ion batteries and what was possible potentially possible you know stringing together you know at the time large numbers of small Lithium-ion batteries which were you know not very mature in those days but but could be potentially connected into really big battery packs to make make an EV that could potentially have hundreds of miles of range which you know today seems kind of you know commonplace but in 2003 it was absolutely unheard of it would literally set World Records you know for range and uh yeah I mean you you uh you understood that concept I think in the potential of it better than anyone else that uh that we'd ever talk to about it and were immediately enthused about it and excited so that was I mean shortly after as you said you know we met up with AC propulsion and uh uh kind of We're Off to the Races and then what there were a lot of early rejections when you talked to some car makers obviously you settled on Lotus for the first Roadster um but you went around some others was there ever a point you know between the lunch and and getting the Roadster off the ground where you almost gave up you thought that actually you couldn't make it work not from a chemistry point of view but commercially I mean I can jump in maybe first on that you know there were a lot of challenges in those early days I mean the the technology was not um it was not a sure thing that all those pieces would work together and and uh you know some of the the safety aspects around the battery were pretty thorny in the early days and uh it was before I think most people had figured out how to you know manage that and um I think in at Tesla I think we had an early you know chance to really you know figure that out in a very robust way and you know make them far far safer than internal combustion actually has proved out to be through the statistics and through data um but that was not the common perception so so that was that was hard and that was risky uh obviously there were a lot of financial turns and tribulations it wasn't exactly smooth sailing from idea of an electric Roadster through into commercialization uh it was it was a insane nightmare basically um and uh we screwed the pooch six ways to Sunday um and made so many mistakes it's embarrassing um basically the almost everything about the first design of the Tesla Roadster was wrong um and wouldn't work um but uh and the we didn't first of all we had no idea how to build a car uh so uh and and then no one really knew how to build a you know a a commercial uh lithium-ion battery car uh no one had ever done it um so um so like the original idea sort of uh which sounds appealing but was fundamentally flawed was to um use the Lotus Elise chassis um and then combine that with AC propulsions drivetrain technology and and boom you've got like very the two pieces necessary to create a car it should be straightforward uh and um just do that and and and uh great uh unfortunately uh those were uh two fundamentally flawed uh premises the um the Lotus Elise chassis did not work uh meaning that so the car ended up being 40 heavier and we couldn't fit the battery pack in the Elise it was a very tiny car so we had to change basically everything about the Elise I think we kept maybe six percent of the parts were in common uh all crash tests were invalidated the structure was invalidated because of the the the greater mass and the mass distribution being fundamentally different from a gasoline car and um yeah uh if right it in retrospect it would have actually been much smarter to start from with a clean sheet design and not try to modify the Elise because we ended up with a lot of the limitations of the Elise but almost nothing to gain in terms of reuse of parts so that was a staggeringly dumb decision um and then uh on the on the drivetrain side it turned out that I think almost none of the AC propulsion Technologies were viable in a uh production car um I mean JB did we end up using any of the AC propulsion stuff pretty much nothing by the time it went to the first customer yes it was a very it was a very helpful first proof of concept that uh maybe pointed the way that was what might be possible but none of it was uh I mean the commercial commercializing all of it as Elon said was uh was a lot of mistakes and trials and tribulations and uh it was very hard to build more than two of those motor controllers in the first days with analog components those were still analog motor control I mean it would get hot and the motor would perform differently you know the throttle would respond differently in a hot day versus a cold day so yeah everything pretty much had to be redone from scratch So Gone so so what we're saying is that we're huge idiots and we're totally wrong about the the fundamental premises of creating the Tesla Roadster um uh uh and you ended up not being able to use any of the AC propulsion drivetrain technology uh using essentially almost none of the original Lotus lease um but we're still left with a lot of the limitations of the Elise being a car that was a bit too small very difficult to get in and out of um and very Bare Bones um and an independent on Lotus to make it and then every time Lotus would have financial difficulties they would increase the price on us and uh and charge us more money um so uh that made it very difficult to um control the price of the car uh so um and then the supply chain was also a complete mess the initial idea was to basically Outsource everything and uh then uh almost none of the companies to which we outsourced the various parts of the cars were able to succeed in making those parts so we had to find a new supplier for the car body um because or Cyrus Supply originally picked was flat out unable to do it um this was not a decision that I was building but the we had outsourced making the battery to a barbecue uh company in in Thailand um this is a bit silly uh to say okay we're going to make the most sophisticated battery ever made um and the Barbecue Company is going to make it um that obviously they did not know how to make uh um it was pretty silly um so we're at the end Source battery production to California we made it basically ended up making the battery ourselves um uh yeah it's one thing after another basically uh just a flat out uh running dumpster fire of stupidity I would say was the beginning of the company um and uh and then we had to recover from there and it was very difficult so there are lots of other EV startups out there potentially in the hundreds today all wanting to do what you did you guys uh you blazed the trail 10 years before the industry really caught up with you you had the advantage of having no one else playing in the same area but the disadvantage that all the time you were trying to break through Virgin Snow was it more difficult to do it 10 years ago than you think it is today and if if there's one piece of advice that you could offer to the various EV startups what would it be well I I mean I I think most of them just completely forget about the first like eight to ten years of Tesla that's the kind of amazing part to me you know they kind of see success and then they're like oh that looks good let's do that let's let's be one let's do you know copy that but um I mean it was it was brutal confusion and tons of mistakes and a lot of money invested for a lot of years um I personally think it's a lot actually harder today even still for a startup to compete because the first question is so what is the niche that even makes sense to have a new startup EV company relative to all the products from other oems or to Tesla you know what are they going to do better than Tesla Tesla didn't exist there was no Tesla in the world 17 years ago so that that was sort of the imperative and gave a Runway to to make a lot of mistakes and still make it work you know yeah I think just it's very important to uh emphasize here the you know I think um something I wouldn't uh JB would have wanted to go through the extreme pain of creating electric an electric car company if the traditional automakers were going to make an electric make electric cars um and you know just an important thing for the world that needs to happen to move to a sustainable technology future and but but if at the time that we created Tesla uh the there were no startups doing electric cars and the uh the big car companies had uh really no electric car programs going and the few tiny tiny electric car programs the head guard they were shutting down so therefore unless we try to create an electric car there was not one going to be created um it's not from the standpoint of thinking hey uh here's a super lucrative idea let's make start a car company the history of Cart Company startups is horrific um that and they've almost all gone bankrupt it's an incredibly big grave Rock great graveyard of car startups that all died um you've only heard a tiny number of them you know sort of the tacos and Deloreans of the world but there are hundreds of others that people didn't hear about um so and and at this point in the United States the only two American card companies that have not gone bankrupt are Ford and Tesla and Tesla went back almost went bankrupt so many times I lost count so basically it's a world of hurt to start a car company is Mega pain it is not easy money it's the furthest thing for easy money you could possibly imagine um so uh and what I see with some of these new car companies is that they are they're jumping in at the defend and trying to create a high volume vehicle that when they have never made a vehicle before this is um but you know not practicing your athletic Sport and then going to the Olympics you're not going to win this is crazy um you really need to start out small make your mistakes at a small scale um and make sure you've got a lot of reserved capital and then gradually build up from the dumb things that you do at the beginning and be less dumb over time otherwise what will happen is a vast uh losses of money um the car industry is very competitive it's it's it's the opposite of a natural monopoly you have sort of national monopolies in things like social media or say Google search um by card companies so naturally uh I'm not monopolies they're hyper competitive and they're used to being hyper competitive uh throughout the world they have entrenched customers dealers service actories uh existing expertise these are these are veteran veteran armies like in in fortresses so it's like it's yeah I mean it's extremely difficult now you happen to mention in that answer the word social media which brings us very neatly onto the question of uh Twitter so JB I'm going to say thank you so much that was fascinating a brief history there of Tesla and the early years and the mistakes that you made um so thank you very much for being with us on stage thank you well the Twitter friend is not a lot that I can say uh because you know this is that Twitter's publicly traded company and um you know there are a lot of constraints in what I can say so not sure what you would like to ask but most of the questions the answer is going to be no comment that's all right I can have a go let me ask you to put your product development hat on and if you pair Twitter all the way back what is it and what do you think it can be in 10 years time well what I said is that I think Twitter um is currently the the best or looked at another way the least bad uh Public Square um if a forum for the exchange of ideas uh nationally and internationally and and but I think it could be a lot better at that in order to be better at that it needs to really get rid of the the Bots and the the scams and spammers and you know basically and and anyone trying to uh create sort of fake influence on the side pipe whereas one person or one entity operating 100 000 accounts um or you know obviously scammers are not good um and and Twitter really uh at least do a much better job at that um the it also needs to build trust more trust with users I think the way to do that is by open sourcing the algorithm so everyone can see how the algorithm works and can uh suggest improvements and changes I would literally literally just put the uh the Twitter algorithm on on GitHub and say like hey anyone want to suggest changes to this please go ahead um and and just you really want transparency to build trust and then any any change any sort of adjustments to tweets or uh in any human intervention uh with any account on Twitter should be highlighted as a Twitter person took of the following action with your account or with this tweet so that you're not sort of sitting there in the dock wondering why did this tweet not get any attention or why did this one get a lot of attention um it's far too random um and um you know and then I think Twitter needs to be much more even-handed it currently has a strong left bias uh because it's based in San Francisco I don't think people that they're necessarily intent I or at least have some of them don't attend to to have a left bias they're just from their perspective uh it seems moderate but they're just coming at it from an environment that is that is very far left so uh but but then this this fails to build trust into in the rest of the United States and and also perhaps in other parts of the world uh because uh Twitter needs to be even-handed and and be um you know I think I said publicly uh Victory would be that the um the most far right 10 and the most part left 10 percent are equally upset um like I don't think this is a situation where you're going to get necessarily of Praise you're just gonna you're just gonna balance the anger so how how do you because people well people and will automatically associate you with Tesla and you with Twitter is there any risk in your mind that the actions that you're going to take at Twitter which you've admitted freely will upset some people um potentially lead to a commercial impact on Tesla um I'm confident that we will be able to sell all the cars we can make I mean currently the the lead time for ordering a Tesla is ridiculously so our issue is not demand it is production but that's at the moment because of the global Supply chains and the chip shortages that's less around electric car demand which we are expecting to go absolutely through the roof and you obviously have very ambitious targets for that at Tesla yeah I mean even before there was uh the supply chain issues Tesla uh demand exceeded production so um now now it's Advantage exceeding production to a ridiculous degree um uh we're actually probably going to limit uh just stop taking orders for for anything beyond uh a certain period of time because you know some of the timing is like a year away uh so um anyway uh the the frustration that we're seeing from customers is uh under being unable to to get them a car um not uh are they willing or interested in buying a car um so our basically I think zero about demand generation and a lot about production and engineering and supply chain I I have two more questions on Twitter if I may before we turn for the rest of the session um to Tesla how confident are you the deal will happen and is there a risk this is all one question and is there a risk um because you're putting a lot of your personal stake up for this to fund it is there a risk that if it all goes south you're imperiling your stake in Tesla potentially hurting Tesla financially and maybe even SpaceX um if it all goes to pod that's the technical term sure um so I mean I think there's still a lot of things that need to get done before the steal concludes obviously there's not yet even been a shareholder vote um and and Twitter has not yet filed the proxy for a shareholder vote um so there are still you know some outstanding questions that need to be resolved um and uh so it is certainly not a done deal that just objectively it is not a gonna deal um you know the best case scenario is that this would be yeah I think perhaps done in in uh two or three months um yeah and the final question and this is this is really the two paid elephant in the room are you planning to let Donald Trump back on well I I think there's there's a general question of should was it Twitter have women at bands um and you know I've talked with Jack Dorsey about this and uh he and I are of the same mind which is that uh permanent fans should be uh extremely rare and really reserved for uh people where they're trying to uh for for accounts that are uh Bots or spam scam accounts where there's just no legitimacy to the account at all um I I do think that uh it was not correct to ban Donald Trump I think that was that was a mistake um because it uh it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice he is not going to be on Truth social um as will a large part of the sort of the the right in the in the United States um and so I think this could end up being frankly worse than having a you know a single form where everyone can debate um so um I guess the answer is that I I I would reverse the Perma ban I would say I'm not I don't own Twitter yet so this is not like a thing that will definitely happen because what if I don't own Twitter uh but my opinion and Jack Dorsey I want to be clear shares this opinion uh is that we should not have permabads um now now that doesn't mean that somebody gets to say whatever they wanted to say if they say something that is uh illegal or um otherwise you know uh just you know just destructive to the world then then that there should be perhaps a timeout a temporary suspension or that particular tweet uh should be uh uh made invisible or or have very limited uh traction um but I think pro events just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter as a Town Square uh where everyone can voice their opinion it was a fun I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and and foolish in the extreme even even after he egged on the crowd who went to the U.S Capitol some of them carrying nooses you still think it was a mistake to remove him I think the if there are tweets that are wrong they should and bad those should be uh uh either deleted or made it visible and a suspension uh a temporary suspension is appropriate but not a permanent ban so if the deal completes he might potentially come back on but with the understanding that if he does something similar again he'll be back in the Simpson uh he has publicly stated that he will not be coming back to Twitter and that he will only be on true social and this is the point that I'm trying to make which is perhaps not getting across is that there is that banning Trump from Twitter didn't end Trump's voice it will amplify it among the rights and this is why it is morally wrong and flat out stupid okay thank you we will um let's turn uh to Tesla again I'd like to ask you about your Ambitions for the future you've said you want the company to be able to make 20 million cars a year by 2030 which would make it the same size as Toyota and Volkswagen combined today um give us a sense what does the business look like by 2030 to make 20 million cars plants for prints models yes well this is not a form for announcing new product is new Tesla products um the uh the 20 million by 2030 is an aspiration not a promise um and the the reason for uh aiming for something like that is there are approximately two billion uh cars and trucks in the world and for us to really make a dent in sustainable energy and electrification uh I think we need to to replace at least one percent of the fleet per year uh to really be meaningful um and and that's that's where the 20 million units comes from uh is is let's let's try to replace one percent of the global wage of two billion cars and trucks per year and um that's our aspiration it's not a promise it's an aspiration uh I think we've got a good chance of getting there and uh people will see based on the products that we unveil uh we'll be able to judge for themselves whether that goal is realistic or not now you've gone from zero plants to four plants that would require you to get to possibly about 20 plants depending how they're wrapped up is that phase more difficult what you've got ahead of you by 2030 than what's gone behind given you've already done it or do you still think it's more difficult to ramp to that level foreign I think it's close it's roughly [Music] um the sheer amount of stuff that tails is done is I think quite mind-boggling uh we have an incredible team at Tesla and um executing very well and our annual growth rates are faster than any large manufacturer product in the history of Earth but I think the next fastest was the growth of the Model T and we're faster than the Model T so you know if that growth rate continues then obviously we will reach 20 million Vehicles a year but we may stumble and and uh and uh not reach that goal so um but I'd say on roughly it's roughly equally difficult to have gotten to this point as will be to get to 20 million and what's the biggest uncertainty with getting to 2030 is it manufacturing ramping is it the raw materials is it something else um there are some raw material constraints that we see coming um in the theme production probably in about three years um and in cathode production the cathode the two main cathode choices are nickel and uh iron phosphate um obviously iron is extremely plentiful the Earth is uh 32 Iron by composition so uh if a little bit of trivia if someone says what is Earth made of the single biggest element that Earth is made of is iron the second biggest element that Earth is made of is oxygen which is about 30 30 of Earth Mass so clearly is not not in short supply um uh the the phosphate is slightly more of a challenge but still quite common um so I do not see any fundamental scaling constraints and lithium is also quite common so lithium is practically everywhere uh the so so this is not a question of a shortage of of like as though it's some Rare Element it's really just that the um the lithium Mining and especially the refining capacity and and that of the of taking iron or phosphorus and turning it into battery grade iron phosphate um or or nickel and turning it into battery grade nickel uh is it's really the the equipment I think this the single exist right would be the equipment necessary to convert the ore into battery grade materials we're working on that with suppliers so I'm not saying that this is an impossible thing to address it is simply uh one of the problems along the way to getting 20 million vehicles lfp batteries are much less recyclable than the other batteries you use how much of that is an issue in terms of overall environmental impact of what the company does if you end up using lots and lots of them uh no the word she said is not true uh iron phosphate batteries are fully recyclable I'm not sure we're getting your information but iron phosphate is equally recyclable and so is that store nickel base batteries um thank you I stand corrected um can I ask why you think Tesla needs to grow so much by 2030 because the what you set out when you in the early years was that you wanted Tesla to help um tilt the world away from fossil fuels and to some extent it looks like it's already succeeded um yes I I think you're sort of putting too much emphasis on this 20 million Vehicles by 20 30 as though this is some Grand promise uh some heal upon which we will die um that is it is simply an aspiration um and we may we may achieve it or we may not um uh we our goal is to accelerate the Advent of sustainable energy and and so that's why we want to make a lot of cars and also a lot of stationary battery packs because the three pillars of a sustainable energy future are electric transport uh stationary battery packs and solar and wind and geothermal and hydro basically sustainable energy sources but solar and wind particularly are intermittent and so you need stationary battery packs to store the energy when the sun doesn't shine as you you know you have your constant uh electricity provision or when the wind doesn't blow so um but you can have a you can completely convert I want to be very clear about this all of Earth all of Earth can can easily be powered by solar and wind stationary battery packs and electric transport well you could power several if even if Earth's economy were to you could you could do 10 times what Earth economy is with with solar wind batteries and early transport not it's not a close thing that that I think most people just have not done the basic math of just how much energy hits the earth from the sun it's a kilowatt per square meter or is it another way a gigawatt per square kilometer so if you have a 20 efficient solar system uh that's 200 megawatts per square kilometer um it's a lot basically uh you could power all of Europe with a section of Spain uh section of Spain um you could uh Power all of um the United States with a a corner of Utah or Texas now obviously it would make more sense to spread this out and not I'm just using this as a figure of speech or to show that it is a small amount of area that is necessary uh to power the United States or or Europe uh it is not some vast area um and I invite anyone to do the basic math it's it's not hard um 200 megawatts per square kilometer okay so how many what's the power needed um how many that'll tell you how many square kilometers uh then you will need uh batteries to store that um the um I think our calculation of the automatic area of the batteries needed to store all the energy to power the United States was roughly one square mile literally so do you think do you think Tesla has succeeded in its goal then or do you think there's still much more to do you know I think you know we we've not succeeded in the goal if you consider the goal to be uh getting the automotive industry to move strongly towards electric vehicles I think that part of the goal we have succeeded in that and that was explicitly part of our goal is to to get the industry moving towards electric vehicles because they they were doing nothing in that direction when we started um and for the longest time they were uh dismissing the concept of electric vehicles um and then uh Tesla started taking market share away from them and that changed their mind how long do you think you're likely to stay at Tesla as long as they can be useful and what are the what else is there in terms of potential future projects that piques your interest you're obviously going to be quite involved in Twitter if the deal goes through but you've got Tesla you've got SpaceX you've got boring you've got neuralink as you're looking around thinking you potentially have capacity um what else is there in terms of the kind of I don't know betterment of The Human Condition or improving Earth that you feel you might want to turn your attention to in future well I I'm trying to take the set of actions that I think most likely make the future good um and hopefully you know pave the road to hell with good intentions so um so I think Tesla's about accelerating sustainable energy because we're obviously a sustainable energy future on Earth for us to be good then SpaceX is about extending life beyond Earth to so that we may become a multi-planetary species and with starlink providing internet coverage to the the least served in the world um that those are that they're into rural communities or places that just don't have good internet or it's very expensive um and um but I think it's important that we become a multi-flatant species and a space-faring civilization um because eventually the sun will expand and destroy our life on Earth so if if one is an environment a true environmentalist or cares about the future of life it is obviously important that life become multi-planetary and ultimately a multi-stellar so we must make that first step um what do you think the next goals are then for SpaceX and do you have a date in mind for when you think they will get to Mars foreign I think I think we should be able to [Music] maybe get Starship to Mars uh on crude in um three to five years um and then I think if that successful then we may be able to send a crude Mission to Mars uh before the end of the decade um the the the windows for going tomorrow as a career every two years so the planets are align for a orbital transfer uh every every 26 months so that that's you get a a kick at the can every 20 seconds so we're making a lot of progress with Starship We will hopefully have our first uh launch attempt uh this summer um or it basically the next next two or three months um and we're building up the we've got a factory for selling ships so there's a whole bunch of Starships coming behind the one that will attempt launch uh soon so if that one doesn't work we have um we'll have many more behind that and we're continuously improving the design so each one is better than the last um and Starship really is a a game changer to an extraordinary degree with respect to access to space because it will be it's the first a little rocket that is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable um there's never been a fully reusable over the rocket um Falcon 9 is the most reusable rocket since we're able to fairly rapidly reuse the Boost stage and the fairing um and that's maybe 70 percent of the other cost a permission is saved um but we still lose the upper stage on every Mission so with with Starship both the booster and the upper stage both the ship and the booster will be recovered um and they'll be recovered very rapidly and uh in theory you could launch the booster I don't know 10 or 12 times a day and the ship because of over the limitations maybe you could launch it three times a day um and it's also a very big vehicle so on the order of roughly 100 tons 100 tons of useful Earth to orbits so it's Saturn V scale uh payload orbit but fully reusable um if it was Expendable it would probably do I don't know 250 tons to orbit um and I think with further improvements even with full reusability we can probably get it to 150 tons two of it um but to put this into perspective if you have a fleet of Starships uh launching with the ability to launch uh every day or multiple times a day um Starship will do more than a thousand times the payload to orbit of all other rockets on Earth combined can I thank you that was fascinating can I bring us down to earth gently um and ask you about China in relation to Tesla where do you how important is the market for you do you think China contributes most of your growth in the future um no I think China is obviously a very significant Market that it is um you know it says probably 25 to 30 of our Market uh long term um the rest of the world is probably three quarters of it do you see I promised I didn't have any more Twitter questions but I had this is sort of a Twitter question do you um do you see any risk at all that China uses your ownership of Twitter potentially to interfere or block Tesla's operations in the country because obviously China has has banned Twitter I've seen no indication to that effect okay how um how close would you say you are personally to the Chinese government because when you set up the factory in Shanghai the walls were Rewritten around joint ventures to allow you to do that well um yeah I was suddenly asked many times by the government attorney to to do a factory in China I said well we we're not going to do one which is 51 locally owned um and so if they're willing to to change rules not just for us but for everyone um then then we would move forward and so they did um and I think it's been very successful so far and the guy was very happy about it and so I don't know things are proceeding fairly well how many other plants are you expecting to open in China in the near future um well we're not expecting to open uh any any additional plants in China in the near future we will we will be expanding our Shanghai Factory um but we are our focused on production is going to be on the two new factories that we've recently completed uh in Berlin and in Austin Texas and US getting those to high volume production is the is the near-term challenge now we had Herbert Des Volkswagen chief executive who you know well at the summit yesterday and we asked him what his big question was for you and it was how do you scale production in China Germany and Texas simultaneously because for any experienced OEM even the ones with 100 Years of doing this that's a challenge yes I think generally the difficulty of manufacturing and scaling manufacturing is very much underappreciated uh I've said many times that prototypes are easy production is hard um and we can easily whip out a prototype of any kind of car you could possibly imagine with a small team in six months now you know we have a team of 100 people in six months now to bring that to fruition with high volume or direction is 10 000 people in two years and that's three times faster than the rest of Industry um so overwhelmingly the problem with with cars is production overwhelmingly it's you know 99 of the difficulty um so he's certainly correct that that the difficulty is scaling um but if you look if you look at our track record thus far in scaling production uh We've scaled production at like I said a rate faster than any car company in the on the history of Earth or any company making a large sophisticated product of any kind so provided we continue to execute at that rate um we'll do fine um and even if that rate slows down a little it'll still be faster than any other company on Earth now what I want to ask you about two specific rumors that have swirled around future production plants for you um are you going to build a plant in Indonesia um as I said this is not the forum for us to make a major company announcements and finally have you looked at building a plant in the UK do you think you might ever build a plant in the UK in the future I refer back to my prayer answer it was worth a try right mm-hmm can I can I ask um can I ask about autonomy right so you have this way that you think about autonomy using cameras on the vehicles and you want to get to almost a kind of human level AI to get the the cars to drive themselves fully in the real world um but a lot of people who work in AI I think human level AI is a long long way off how do you square that Circle about the approach that you're taking and the speed at which you want to deploy full self-driving technology well I don't think you need full human level intelligence to drive a car um you need sufficient human level intelligence to drive a car but not uh you know you're not you don't need like deep conceptual understanding of you know esoteric Concepts or anything like that uh you need sufficient intelligence to um match what human neural Nets do when driving a car and I think you know anyone who's driven a car for any length of time once you're you you know once you have some years of experience driving a car the cognitive load on driving a car is not high you're able to think about other things listen to music have a conversation and still drive safely so it's not like matching everything a human does um but it is still matching enough of the the neural Nets to what you know to look at the Silicon neural Nets need to at least be on par with the biological neural Nets uh to uh enable safe driving and I think we're quite close to achieving that um and but I recommend that uh don't take my word for it just sign up for our beta program and try it out uh we'll look at the videos that people are posting um who are in our beta program we have like I think at this point about hundred thousand people in our beta program so it's not exactly top secret how how hard is it as a problem to solve because you've made predictions in the past about autonomy um you know some of those haven't come to fruition at the same time as your understanding of the problem of autonomy changed over the last few years uh yes the I'd say that self-driving is one of those things where um there are a lot of false stones or you know where um you think you're getting there but then you end up asymptoting um your your progress is initially linear and then and it looks logarithmic and sort of tapers off um because you're in a like in a local maximum that you do not realize you were in now at this point I think we are no longer in trapped in a local maximum and uh obviously I could be wrong but I I think we are actually quite close to achieving self-driving at a safety level that is uh better than human and it appears my best guess is that we will get there this year um but we're really not far from it um and like I said the best way to assess this is to be in our beta program or look at the videos of those who are in the beta program and and look at the the progress that has had that has occurred and if the progress is dramatic um and I'm confident we will not really get to the safety level of a human we'll get far in excess of the safety level of a human um so I think ultimately probably a factor of 10 uh is safer than a human as measured by the probability of injury like given where you're trying to get to with this the you know the factor above human driving the potential lives that could be saved with that I need to ask you about some of the accidents and fatalities that have happened with vehicles previously um the people who died do you consider that that was a price worth paying to get to the level where we want to be to save more human lives in the future well it's important to note that uh and and we have never said ever that Tesla uh the Tesla autopilot does not require attention we have always made that extremely clear repeatedly you can't even turn it on without acknowledging that it requires a supervision um we remind you of that every time you turn it on to to ad nauseam so this was not a case of setting expectations that the card could simply drive itself in the past and then not meeting those expectations that is completely untrue um now I it is also the case however and and I knew this would be true from the beginning that um people don't the the people who are whose lives are saved with autopilot or autonomy don't know that the lives were saved um and and so you know if you look at say death's annual Automotive deaths every year it's about around a million people per year die from Automotive accidents of maybe 10 million uh per year are severely injured um and so with autonomy you um you know the cause you know driving or it's a sister driving right now but it will be fully autonomous in the future um like I said those who who didn't realize they would have crashed or hit a pedestrian or a cyclist they don't know that um but but the so see basically even if you if you um let's say save 90 of the people that uh would otherwise have died the remaining 10 percent who did die will still sue you now but I think it is I say like in the grand scheme of things what is the morally right decision is and I'm a strong believer in the in during the reality of good over the perception of good and utter contempt for those who simply who prefer the perception of good over the reality of it and so so we're just going to take the Heat but if we believe that uh that that quality of injury is reduced and we have very very confident with that uh and and but we also know that we're going to be sued despite doing the right thing we will do the right thing and get sued thank you we have it will not necessarily surprise you to hear a lot of audience questions that have come in um in the last few minutes I'm going to try and rattle through as many as we can what is Tesla's approach to smaller and more affordable end of the market you're going to go smaller than the model of three but could you get into a scooter micro Mobility something else uh scooters are very dangerous I would not recommend anyone drive a scooter if there's ever an argument between a scooter and a car the scooter will always what about smaller than a model three what do you how far can you go down the entry level of the market [Music] well I said this is not some forum for roundabout product announcements no matter how no matter how cleverly the question is asked um so uh you know well we that there's some probability that Tesla will do a smaller cloud in the middle three um I would say more than that okay that's fine that wasn't my question that was an audience question um does Tesla would you ever consider licensing your platform to other oems presumably that would help switch the industry towards uh Electric Mobility in your opinion well we've already open sourced all our patents anyone can use our pads for free so uh all right um you know we we only patent things in order to prevent others from creating this Minefield of patents that that inhibit progress with electric vehicles um but several years ago uh you know I came from conclusion we're never going to really prosecute anyone for using our patents so let's just say um you can use any Tesla patterns for free um so I think hopefully that's helpful to others um and uh but but I think the you know the regular car industry the traditional car makers um will solve electrification it's not fundamentally difficult at this point to make electric cars um the thing that I think they may be interested in licensing is Tesla uh autopilot full self-driving um and I think that would save a lot of lives um but but I think we still have we have to prove prove ourselves for I don't know maybe another year or so um and and then perhaps there will be some um other carmakers who uh may wish to license Tesla autopilot um and we'd be very open to that thank you um of all the other EV startups which one has impressed you the most well I think the company making the most progress besides Tesla is actually VW which is not a startup but could be viewed in some ways as a startup from an electric vehicle standpoint so VW is doing the most uh on on the electric vehicle front um I think there will be some very strong companies uh coming out of China um there's just like a lot of super talented hard-working people in China that are um strongly believe in in manufacturing and and they will they go they'll they won't just be voting the Midnight Oil they'll be burning the 3am oil so um they won't even leave the leave the factory type of thing whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all we've got a question on the Cyber truck um is it a is there a risk um that you you lose the pickup segment to Ford GM and rivien if you don't launch the Cyber truck or get it to Market soon no good um we've had another question coming what is the first cyber truck then we could possibly fulfill for three years after the start of production okay thank you we've had a question coming about China um you've been critical of lockdowns in the past uh uh particularly when it happened in the U.S Shanghai is currently locked down most of the western world is able to carry on functioning at the moment because of vaccines but China is is going towards a zero covert approach what do you make of the Chinese government's actions well um the you know had some conversations with the Chinese government um in in recent days and it's uh clear that the uh lockdowns are are being lifted rapidly so I would not expect this to be um a significant issue in in the coming weeks um you know the in the past where I was sort of upset with lockdowns is where those lockdowns differentially affected Tesla but not others um so in the case of California and the Bay Area County specifically um every other car factory in North America was allowed to start but not Tesla even though we there was no basis for that it was simply because we were located in Alameda County in California um and but they had no rational it was arbitrary and and uh unfair and and um you know that's that's the reason for why we're quite upset about uh kind of Tesla being singled out as the only car company in America that was allowed to start even though I think our health care practices are probably better than anyone else thank you we've had a question on software at what point did you realize that software was going to be key to Tesla's success and particularly as others are coming into software how do you maintain leadership in it well Tesla is I think as much a software company as it is a hardware company you know I personally wrote software for 20 years so um I have great respect and admiration for software engineering um I think it's incredibly important and um I think that's why Tesla's been able to recruit uh some of the world's best software Engineers is because we we value software engineering so highly and do not regard it as an afterthought um uh so you know our autopilot for self-driving AI team is uh incredibly talented and and some of the most the smartest software engineers in the world um so and I do not give compliments lightly so we have an incredible team we have the best real world AI team in the world the the best real world AI team that on Earth um and um and we're seeing more and more uh incredibly talented people join our team so um and we're really not seeing anyone else being close to solving real world AI um they may exist but if so they're being very subtle about it and that periodically pull our team and say like do we know anyone who is doing this because you know we know who a lot of the the top people are in Ai and what they're doing and and we just don't see anyone else that we're aware of making any significant progress in real world AI apart from Tesla um so yeah I I do I am quite confident that we'll not merely maintain our software lead but increase it thank you um we've had a question come in on the supercharger Network what are your thoughts about opening it to other motorists who don't drive Teslas and doesn't that risk what is currently one of your great competitive advantages uh we've already opened Tesla superchargers to um other uh electric cars in Europe and we intend to roll that out uh worldwide um it's a little trickier in the us because we have a different connector than the the rest of the industry but we will be adding the rest of Industry connectors as an option to superchargers in us so we'll be fully we're trying as best as possible to do the right thing for the advancement of electrification even if that diminishes our competitive advantage do you uh do you think you'll ever wrap all your various operations Tesla SpaceX Etc under one umbrella group or do you want to keep them separate for the time being I think they're they're sort of separate objectives with uh different shareable devices and I think you know I don't see a ton of merits in combining them um at times there are people um you know where we have some say very talented people who who actually are willing to join but they they want to do things both at SpaceX and Tesla uh so for example we've got um one of the best Advanced Materials teams in the world it might be the best but it's certainly one of the best um and uh a lot of people on that team were willing to join but only if they could work on both rockets and cars it was like great um let's do that and and so we can sort of share some of the ideas uh between rockets and cars which are obviously not competitive you know they're they're not different competitive segments um so you know if you say like if somebody's a really incredible uh technologist innovator engineer they want to work on interesting things so the more interesting you know like sure like money is you know they can get money from you know anyone would hire them for a lot of money so um then it's it's not a money thing it's really just how interesting are the projects and so there are just a few cases where um we can recruit some of the smartest you know Engineers scientists technologists in the world but they they want to work on both rockets and cars and there's a few cases like that thank you what do you I know we've I know we've run over time but it's one more I'm going to try and get in and then if you need to go go but if you're happy to keep talking we'll we'll keep you um what is the uh what do you think's the next big innovation in personal transportation well I think tunnels are underrated underappreciated tunnels Will Never Let You Down here's the question here's the question on tunnels right so if you look at say for instance Robert Moses in New York built loads of Highways they were supposed to solve congestion and all they did was led to more congestion how do you avoid tunnels doing exactly the same but just being very expensive in the process foreign I have to say the this this notion of induced demand is one of the single dumbest Notions I have ever heard my entire life um if if you know if adding roads just increases traffic why don't we delete them and decrease traffic and I think you'd have an uproar if you did that the the real problem is that we have not if you take say congested cities which really almost all large cities are congested you have a fundamental dimensional problem you have say these tall buildings or multi-level buildings where you've got uh you know people people you know living in 3D and then you want to take them in and out of those buildings on a 2d Road Network like how would you possibly expect that to work um so uh especially if they want to all to you know arrive and depart at roughly the same time this is just a recipe for traffic obviously so now if you go 3D which you go 3D up or you go 3D down now you have you're matching the dimensionality of the buildings um the buildings are 3D that the the and if the road Network or you could potentially have flying cars uh is 3D then you will completely alleviate the traffic problem um so think of titles not as a single layer of tunnels but as as many layers as you want um as whatever layer count isn't is necessary to drop traffic to landline that people wouldn't think it would work um and we've already we have a proof of concept list in Las Vegas with the tunnel uh going from the convention center to the strip and that will soon be connecting all of the hotels and the airport uh in in Las Vegas um and Phil will just try it out for themselves it's working really well uh already in Vegas and there was some skepticism um among the county in the city as weather would be effective um and I think the the test tunnel just barely succeeded in in a vote with the the you know the with the local government in Clark County and and Las Vegas but uh once they saw the initial test tunnel and wrote in it themselves uh we got a unanimous vote in favor of expanding it to the whole city so that should tell you something could you ever potentially go in the other direction three-dimensionally and look at vetoles and potentially flying vehicles well I like the idea of details but um you know we already have vetoes in the form of a helicopter so but the problem with with going 3D in the air um is is that um you you now have things that make a lot of noise uh that uh and the wind force that they generate when taking over Landing is very high um I mean if you just say like look at a little drone and say and I imagine that that thing was big what a record it would make and how much wind force would it generate and now they're going all over the place like a giant beehive of super noisy bees um I don't think people is what people want and most cities uh helicopters are actually banned except for emergency purposes because of this reason so um then there's also the weather dependency so if if it's if there's if there are high winds or or heavy snow rain sleet uh now the you can't fly um so but now you're shut down and and can't go anywhere um then there's the the probability of something falling on your head is much higher if there are all these uh you know vetoes flying all over the city right I mean I think people's Comfort level would be quite reduced uh you know should someone have perhaps not properly serviced their you know flying car and drops a wheel on your head um I know that that I think would be discomforting to most people um and and also having them fly over your backyard and and having a strangers stare at you all day is probably also discomforting so I think these are all uh reasons why I have I think vitals will not succeed perfect I deliberately avoided calling them flying cars because they don't most of them don't drive on the road but no you're right but apart from that they're great um uh you told Kara Swisher in 2020 um that if Tesla investors knew what you you knew they would Panic about the state of the company that was two years ago so what were you referring to at the time I'm not sure what I was referring to at the time uh 2020 um I mean I think it's it's not that uh tells the investors should should Panic it's just that the sheer number of problems being sold behind the scenes I think would would blow their minds and uh it's it what you know it's like that analogy of of you see that the duck serenely moving along the pond but the meanwhile the legs are patterning like crazy underneath this is really what's happening pretty much all the time um so the there there are a Non-Stop series of issues that need to be solved uh with um Tesla or with SpaceX really with most companies I suspect um and uh now we do solve them um but I think it would be very scary to most people to realize just how many things have to get solved on a real-time basis for the company to function well just last night I I basically got no sleep uh I was up on Sunday night until well I really just didn't get any sleep until until last night you know so what is I was literally working all night uh just a Sunday through Monday what is paddling under the water at the moment is there something going on that makes you worry about the future of Tesla or do you think the company is now completely secure no it it's it's I think the future of Tesla is extremely strong um so Tesla is uh has no debt it has a lot of cash and uh you know there's there's a sort of a short-term um hiccup with the covert restrictions in in Shanghai uh but I I as for the rest of my knowledge the future of Tesla is incredibly bright um and I think we will uh throw off uh a tremendous amount of free cash flow do you think with your cash and obviously your market cap at the moment you would ever consider buying another car maker whether an established OEM or a new business um uh well I think it's highly unlikely now great finally we've had a couple of questions coming on super capacitors do you think they might be potential have potential as an alternative energy storage solution to lithium-ion batteries what's interesting uh specific capacitors or Ultra capacitors are um oddly enough uh and I did research in that for a couple years uh while doing my Physics degree um I had a company in uh Silicon Valley called political research which at the time at least made the highest energy highest energy density capacitors in the world um now they used a ruthenium tantalum uh alloy which is um very rare with him especially is very rare so um the that that would not scale to to high volume um because it simply isn't not enough enough ruthenium um so that and but I thought about the problem quite a lot and in fact my primary goal um had I continued as a graduate student and done a PhD at Stanford um would have been to try to figure out uh how to build ultra high energy density capacitors um and the the sort of theory I had at the time was to use Advanced chip making equipment uh to build a solid state capacitors uh that would be accurate at the molecular level um and um that this this uh a little bit of we're not new physics but explore exploring some some areas of of quantum quantum mechanics because you have to minimize the probability that electrons can sort of tunnel from uh one you know essentially a tunnel across the insulator from the conductor to the insulator so um I guess make things get get quite complicated and rather weird at the sort of single or or when you when you get to get to a small number of atoms um but anyway it belongs to kind of long story short I think the capacitors are not needed at all for electrification of the entire Auto industry thank you we've got a question on money and again I know what I'm talking about so I know that don't worry um could um we've had a question on mining you've obviously done a number of mining deals trying to secure raw materials do you think you could ever go a step further and actually buy a mining company in the future it's not out of the question we will address whatever the limitations are on accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy it's not that we wish to buy mining companies but if that's the only way to accelerate uh transition then we will that that will do that there are no arbitrary limitations on uh what's needed to accelerate sustainable energy we'll just tackle whatever set of things are needed to accelerate sustainable energy and doing Mining and refining or buying a mining company provided we think we can do we can change that mining company's trajectory significantly our possibilities yeah do you this is a slightly personal one do you ever think your children could end up working at Tesla obviously not the new one she's only a few months old but the older ones yeah um well my Elder uh children have said that they were to do their own thing which I support um that none of them have said that they wish to work at Tesla or SpaceX uh they they want to do their own thing and um obviously I support them doing that um uh I think they want to do something for themselves and uh you know you know make their own way in the world and that's fine and it's possible at some point in the future that they um perhaps they do something of themselves and then and then decide that they'd like to do something a Tesla SpaceX and I'd support that too but but currently they they want to do their own thing perfect if I were to judge by it by a little x uh I know seeing a kid level Rockets more than than he does it's next level he likes it I mean it's really Next Level so if if his level of rockets continues from H2 and to when he's older then then he may be interested he will be interested in working on Rockets perfect thank you um do you have time for time for one more question sure um excellent good um you talked uh earlier about things that are abundant in the world irons abundant Oxygen's abundant and hydrogen is also very abundant in the universe in the universe but not on Earth not on earth have you ever considered do you think that it has a role to play if we really want to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels no there we go I I really can't emphasize this enough the number of times I've been asked about hydrogen it might be like well over 100 times maybe 200 times um it's important to understand that uh if if you want a means of energy storage hydrogen is a bad choice it is has extremely low energy density sorry it's extreme extremely low density and so it's actually it's volumetric energy density is poor

https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM

hello so in just a few minutes um elon musk will be joining us here live on stage for a conversation uh rumor has it there are a few things to talk about with him um we we we will see but um before that i just want to show you something special i want you to come with me to tesla's huge gigafactory in austin texas so the day before it opened last week the evening before i was allowed to walk around it no one else there and what i saw there was honestly pretty mind-blowing this is elon musk's famous machine that builds the machine and his view the secret to a sustainable future is not just making an electric car it's making a system that churns out huge numbers of electric cars with a margin so that they can fund further growth when i was there um none of us knew whether elon would actually be able to make it here today so i took the chance to sit down with him and record an epic interview and i just want to show you a nine an eight minute excerpt of that interview so here from austin texas elon musk i want us to switch now to think a bit about artificial intelligence i i'm curious about your timelines and how you predict and how come some things are so amazingly on the money and some aren't so when it comes to predicting sales of tesla vehicles for example i mean you've kind of been amazing i think in 2014 when tesla had sold that year 60 000 cars you said 2020 i think we will do half a million a year yeah we did almost exactly half a million five years ago last time you came today we um i asked you about for self-driving and um you said yep this very year where i am confident that we will have a car going from la to new york uh without any intervention yeah i i don't want to blow your mind but i'm not always right um so talk what's the difference between those two why why why has full self-driving in particular been so hard to predict i mean the thing that really got me and i think it's going to get a lot of other people is that there are just so many false stones with with self-driving um where you think you think you've got the problem have a handle on the problem and then it nope uh it turns out uh you just hit a ceiling um and and uh uh because what happened if you if you were to plot the progress the progress looks like a log curve so it's like yeah a series of log curves so uh most people don't like cookies i suppose but it shows the show it goes it goes up sort of a you know sort of a fairly straight way and then it starts tailing off right and and and you start there's a kind of ocean getting diminishing returns you know in retrospect they seem obvious but uh in in order to solve uh full self-driving uh properly you actually just you have to solve real-world ai um you you you know because you said what are the road networks designed to to work with they're designed to work with a biological neural net our brains and with uh vision our eyes and so in order to make it work with computers you basically need to solve real world ai and vision because because we we need we need cameras and silicon neural nets uh in order to have to have self-driving work for a system that was designed for eyes and biological neural nets it you know when you i guess when you put it that way it's like quite obvious that the only way to solve full self-driving is to solve real-world ai and sophisticated vision what do you feel about the current architecture do you think you have an architecture now where where there is a chance for the logarithmic curve not to tail off any anytime soon well i mean admittedly these these uh may be an infamous uh last words but i i actually am confident that we will solve it this year uh that we will exceed uh you're like what the probability of an accident at what point should you exceed that of the average person right um i think we will exceed that this year we could be here talking again in a year it's like well yeah another year went by and it didn't happen but i think this i think this is the year is there an element that you actually deliberately make aggressive prediction timelines to drive people to be ambitious and without that nothing gets done so it's it feels like at some point in the last year seeing the progress on understanding you that you're that the ai the tesla ai understanding the world around it led to a kind of an aha moment in tesla because you really surprised people recently when you said probably the most important product development going on at tesla this year is this robot optimus yes is it something that happened in the development of fourself driving that gave you the confidence to say you know what we could do something special here yeah exactly so you know it took me a while to sort of realize that that in order to solve self-driving you really needed to solve real-world ai um at the point of which you solve real-world ai for a car which is really a robot on four wheels uh you can then generalize that to a robot on legs as well the thing that the things that are currently missing are uh enough intelligence enough to tell intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world and do useful things without being explicitly instructed it is so so the missing things are basically real world uh intelligence and uh scaling up manufacturing um those are two things that tesla is very good at and uh so then we basically just need to design the the uh specialized actuators and sensors that are needed for a humanoid robot people have no idea this is going to be bigger than the car um but so talk about i mean i think the first applications you you've mentioned are probably going to be manufacturing but eventually the vision is to to have these available for people at home correct if you had a robot that really understood the 3d architecture of your house and knew where every object in that house was or was supposed to be and could recognize all those objects i mean that that's kind of amazing isn't that like like that the kind of thing that you could ask a robot to do would be what like tidy up yeah um absolutely or make make dinner i guess mow the lawn take take a cup of tea to grandma and show her family pictures and exactly take care of my grandmother and make sure yeah exactly and it could recognize obviously recognize everyone in the home yeah could play catch with your kids yes i mean obviously we need to be careful this doesn't uh become a dystopian situation um like i think one of the things that's going to be important is to have a localized rom chip on the robot that cannot be updated over the air uh where if you for example were to say stop stop stop that would if anyone said that then the robot would stop you know type of thing and that's not updatable remotely um i think it's going to be important to have safety features like that yeah that that sounds wise and i do think there should be a regular free agency for ai i've said this for many years i don't love being regulated but i you know i think this is an important thing for public safety do you think there will be basically like in say 2050 or whatever that like a a robot in most homes is what they will be and people will probably count you'll have your own butler basically yeah you'll have your sort of buddy robot probably yeah i mean how much of a buddy do like do you do how many applications you thought is there you know can you have a romantic partner lot of a sex inevitable i mean i did promise the internet that i would make cat girls we'll have we could make a robot cackle how are you because yeah you know so yeah i i guess uh it'll be what whatever people want really you know so what sort of timeline should we be thinking about of the first the first models that are actually made and sold you know the the first units that that we tend to make are um for jobs that are dangerous boring repetitive and things that people don't want to do and you know i think we'll have like an interesting prototype uh sometime this year we might have something useful next year but i think quite likely within at least two years and then we'll see rapid growth year over year of the usefulness of the humanoid robots um and decrease in cost and scaling out production help me on the economics of this so what what do you picture the cost of one of these being well i think the cost is actually not going to be uh crazy high um like less than a car yeah but but think about the economics of this if you can replace a thirty thousand dollar forty thousand dollar a year worker which you have to pay every year with a one-time payment of twenty five thousand dollars for a robot that can work longer hours doesn't go on vacation i mean that could it could be a pretty rapid replacement of certain types of jobs how worried should the world be about that i wouldn't worry about the the sort of putting people out of a job thing um i think we're actually going to have and already do have a massive shortage of labor so i i i think we'll we will have um uh not not people out of work but actually still a shortage labor even in the future uh but this really will be a world of abundance any goods and services uh will be available to anyone who wants them that it'll be so cheap to have goods and services it'll be ridiculous so that is part of an epic 80 minute interview which we are releasing to people members of ted 2022 right after this conference um you should be able to look at it on the ted live website um there's public interest in it we're putting that out to the world on sunday afternoon i think sunday evening but uh but if you're into this kind of stuff um definitely a good thing to do over the weekend um now then hearing from elon live there's there's huge public interest in that we have opened up this segment to live stream and so we're joined right now by i think quite a few people around the world um welcome to vancouver welcome to ted 22 you're joining us on the last day of our conference here in a packed theater and we've been hearing all week from people with dreams about what the next era of humanity is going to be and now arguably the biggest visionary of them all elon musk [Music] hey elon welcome so elon um a few hours ago you made an offer to buy twitter why [Laughter] how'd you know little bird tweeted in my ear or something i don't know by the way have you seen the movie ted about the bear i i i have i have a movie so um yeah yeah so was there a question why why make that offer oh so um well i think it's very important for uh there to be an inclusive arena for free speech where all yeah so uh yeah um twitter has become kind of the de facto town square um so uh it's just really important that people have the both the uh the reality and the perception uh that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law um and you know so one of the things that i believe twitter should do is open source the algorithm um and make any changes uh to people's tweets you know if they're emphasized or de-emphasized uh that action should be made apparent so you anyone can see that action has been taken so there's there's no sort of behind the scenes manipulation either algorithmically or manually um but last week when we spoke elon um i asked you whether you were thinking of taking over you said no way said i i do not want to own twitter it is a recipe for misery everyone will blame me for everything what on earth changed no i think i think everyone will still blame me for everything yeah if something if if i acquire twitter and something goes wrong it's my fault 100 i i think there will be quite a few arrows uh yes um it will it will be miserable but you still want to do it why i mean i hope it's not too miserable uh but um i i just think it's important to the fun like uh it's important to the function of democracy it's important to the function of uh the united states uh as a free country and many other countries and to help actually to help freedom in the world more broadly than the u.s and so i think it's uh it's a you know i think this there's the risk civilizational risk uh is decreased if twitter the more we can increase the trust of twitter as a public platform and so i do think this will be somewhat painful and i'm not sure that i will actually be able to to acquire it and i should also say the intent is is to retain as many shareholders as is allowed by the law in a private company which i think is around 2000 or so so we'll it's not like it it's definitely not not from the standpoint of letting me figure out how to monopolize or maximize my ownership of twitter but we'll try to bring along as many shoulders as we right as we're allowed to you don't necessarily want to pay out 40 or whatever it is billion dollars in cash you you'd like them to come come with you in in i mean i mean i could technically afford it um what i'm saying is this this is this is uh this is not a way to sort of make money you know i think this is it's just that i think this is um this could my strong intuitive sense is that uh having a public platform that is maximally trusted um and and and and broadly inclusive um is extremely important to the future of civilization but you've described yourself i don't care about the economics at all okay that's that's core to hear you this is not about the economics it's for the the moral good that you think will achieve you you've described yourself elon as a free speech absolutist but does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay well i i i think uh obviously uh twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in um so obviously there are some limitations on free speech uh in in the us and and of course uh twitter would have to abide by those uh right rules so so so you can't incite people to violence like that that the like a direct incitement to violence you know you can't do the equivalent of crying fire in a in a movie theater for example no that would be a crime yeah right it should be a crime but here's here's the challenge is is that it's it's such a nuanced difference between different things so there's there's excitement to violence yeah that's a no if it's illegal um there's hate speech which some forms of hate speech are fine you know i hate spinach um i mean if it's a sauteed in a you know cream sauce that would be quite nice but so so but the problem is so so so let's say someone says okay here's one tweet i hate politician x yeah next tweet is i wish polite politician x wasn't alive as we some of us have said about putin right now for example so that's legitimate speech another tweet is i wish politician x wasn't alive with a picture of their head with a gun sight over it or that plus their address i mean at some point someone has to make a decision as to which of those is not okay can an algorithm do that well surely you need human judgment at some point no i think the like i said in my view uh twitter should um match the laws of the of the country of and and and really you know that there's an obligation to to do that um but going beyond going beyond that um and having it be unclear who's making what changes to who to where uh having tweets sort of mysteriously be promoted and demoted with no insight into what's going on uh having a black box algorithm uh promote some things and other not not other things i think this can be quite dangerous so so so the idea of opening the algorithm is a huge deal and i think many people would would welcome that of understanding exactly how it's making the decision and critique it and critique like i want to improve what wondering is like like i think like the code should be on github you know so then uh and so people can look through it and say like i see a problem here i don't i don't agree with this um they can highlight issues right um suggest changes in the same way that you sort of update linux or or signal or something like that you know but as i understand it like at some point right now what the algorithm would do is it would look at for example how many people have flagged a tweet as obnoxious and then at some point a human has to look at it and make make a decision as to does this cross the line or not that the algorithm itself can't i don't think yet um tell the difference between legal and okay and and definitely obnoxious and so the question is which humans you know make make that core i mean do you have do you have a picture of that right now twitter and facebook and others you know they've hired thousands of people to try to help make wise decisions and the trouble is that no one can agree on on what is wise how do you solve that well i i i think we would want to er on this if if in doubt uh let let the speech that let it exist uh it would have you know if it's a you know a a gray area i would say let let the tweet exist um but obviously you know in a case where there's perhaps a lot of controversy uh that you would not want to necessarily promote that tweet if uh you know so the i'm not i'm not saying this is that i have all the answers here um but i i do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things and and have um just just be very cautious with with with permanent bands uh you know timeouts i think are better or uh than sort of permanent bands and um but just just in general like i said uh how how it won't be perfect but i think we wanted to really uh have like so the possession and reality that speech is as free as reasonably possible and a good sign as to whether there's free speech is is is someone you don't like allowed to say something you don't like and if that is the case then we have free speech and it's it's damn annoying when someone you don't like says something you don't like that is a sign of a healthy functioning uh free speech situation so i think many people would agree with that and look at the reaction online many people are excited by you coming in and the changes you're proposing some others are absolutely horrified here's how they would see it they would say wait a sec we agree that that twitter is an incredibly important town square it is a it is you know where the world exchanges opinion about life and death matters how on earth could it be owned by the world's richest person that can't be right so how how do you i mean what's the response there is there any way that you can distance yourself from the actual decision-making that matters on content at in some very clear way that is convincing to people well like i said i think the it's it's very important that like the the algorithm be open sourced and that any manual uh adjustments be uh identified like so if this tweet if somebody did something to a tweet it's there's information attached to it that this that action was taken and i i i i won't personally be uh you know in their editing tweets um but you'll know if something was done to promote demote or otherwise affect uh a tweet um you know as for media sort of ownership i mean you've got you know um mark zuckerberg owning facebook and instagram and whatsapp um and with a share ownership structure that will have mark zuckerberg the 14th still controlling those uh entities so literally um what's that need we won't have that on twitter if if you commit to opening up the algorithm that that definitely gives some level of confidence um talk about talk about some of the other changes that you've proposed so you at the edit button that's that's definitely coming if you if you have your way yeah yeah and how do you i mean i i think i mean one frankly um the top priority i have i would have is is eliminating the the spammings and scam bots and the bot armies that are on twitter um you know i think i think these these fun influence that they're not they're they're they they make the product much worse um if i see if you know if i had a dogecoin for every crypto scam i saw [Laughter] more you know 100 billion dollars do you regret sparking the sort of storm of excitement overdose and you know where it's gone or i mean i think deutsche is fun and you know i've always said don't bet the form of dogecoin uh fyi yeah but i i think i think it's it's i like dogs and i like memes and uh it's got both of those and but just on the on the edit button how how do you get around the problem of so someone tweets elon rocks and it's tweeted by two million people um and um and then then after that they edit it so i'm elon sucks and um and then all those retweets they're all embarrassed and how how do you avoid that type of changing of meaning so that retweeters are exploited well i think uh you know you'd only have the edit capability for a short period of time and probably the thing to do at upon the edit would be to zero out all retweets and favorites okay i'm open to ideas though you know so in one way the um algorithm works kind of well for you right now i just i wanted to show you this this is so this is a typical tweet of of mine kind of lame and wordy and whatever and look at and the amazing response it gets is this oh my god 97 likes um and then i tried another one um and uh 29 000 likes so the algorithm at least seems to be at the moment you know if elon musk expanded the world immediately um not bad right yeah i guess so i mean that was cool i mean you but but you've so help us understand how it is you've built this incredible um following on twitter yourself when i mean some of the people who love you the most look at some of what you tweet and they they they think it's somewhere between um embarrassing and crazy some of it's amazing i mean [Laughter] is that actually why it's worked or why why has it worked i mean i don't know i mean i i'm you know tweeting more or less stream of consciousness you know it's not like let me think about some grand plan about my twitter or whatever you know i'm like literally on the toilet or something i'm like oh this is funny and then tweet that out you know that's that's like most of them [Laughter] you know over sharing but um but you are obsessed with getting the most out of every minute of your day and so why not you know um so i don't know i just like try to tweet out like things that are interesting or funny or you know and then people seem to like it so if if you are unsuccessful actually before i ask that let me ask this if i don't yeah so how can i say is uh funding secured [Music] i i have sufficient uh assets to complete the uh it's not a forward-looking statement blah blah but i have to i mean i can do it if possible right um so um and um i mean i should say actually even in the in originally the uh with with tesla back in the day funding was actually secured i want to be clear about that um in fact this may be a good opportunity to to to clarify that um if funding was indeed secured um and uh i should say like why why do i do not have respect for the sec in that situation and i don't mean to blame everyone at the sec but certainly the san francisco office um it's because the sec knew that funding was secured but they pursued the an active public investigation nonetheless at the time tesla was in a precarious financial situation and i was told by the banks that if i did not agree to settle with the sec that they would the banks would cease providing working capital and tesla would go bankrupt immediately so that's like having a gun to your child's head so i was forced to concede to the sec unlawfully those bastards and and and now that they they say it makes it look like i lied when i did not in fact lie i was i was forced to admit that i lied for to save tesla's life and that's the only reason given what's actually happened given what's actually happened to tesla since then though aren't you glad that you didn't take it private yeah i mean it's difficult to put yourself in the position at the time tesla was under the most relentless short seller attack in the history of the stock market uh there's something called short and distort um where the barrage of negativity that tesla was experiencing from short sales wall street was beyond or belief tesla was the most shorted stock in the history of stock markets this is saying something so you know this was affecting our ability to hire people it was affecting our ability to sell cars it was uh they were yeah it was terrible um yeah they wanted tesla to die so bad they could taste it well most of them have paid the price yes where are they now um so so that was a really strong statement i mean obviously a lot of people who who support you i thought would say you have so much to offer the world on the upside on the vision side don't don't waste your time getting getting distracted by these these battles that bring out negativity and and and make people feel that you're being defensive or like people don't like fights especially with with powerful government authorities they'd rather they'd rather buy into your to a dream do do you like aren't you encouraged by people just just to edit that in that you know temptation out and uh go with the bigger story um well i mean i i would say like you know i'm sort of a mixed bag you know i mean well you're a fighter and you you don't you don't you don't you don't you don't like to lose and and you you you are determined that you don't basically i i mean you are sure i don't like to lose i'm not sure many people do um but the truth matters to me a lot really like sort of pathologically it matters to me okay so so you don't like to lose if in this case you are not successful in you know the board does not accept your offer you've said you won't go higher is there a plan b there is i i think we i think we would like to hear a little bit about plan b for it for another time i think another time yeah all right [Applause] i that that's a nice tease all right so um i i would love to try to understand this brain of yours more ilan i i if with your permission i'd like to just play this this is the oh actually before we do that um here was one of the of the thousands of questions that people asked i thought this was actually quite a good one um if you could go back in time and change one decision you made along the way do your own edit button which one would it be and why do you mean like a career decision or something just any decision over the last few years like your decision to invest in twitter in the first place or your anything um i mean the the worst business decision i ever made was um not starting tesla with just jb straval by far the worst decision i've ever made is not just starting tesla with jb that that that's the number one by far all right so jb strabo was was the visionary co-founder who who who was obsessed with and knew so much about batteries and your your decision to go with tesla the company as it was meant that you got locked into what you concluded it was a weird architecture now this this there's a lot of confusion tesla tesla did not exist in any tesla was a shell company with no employees uh no intellectual property when i invested but the a false narrative has been created by um one of the other co-founders uh martin everhard and i don't want to get into the nastiness here but uh i didn't invest in an existing company we created a company yeah and ultimately the creation that company uh was was done by uh jv and me um and unfortunately there's a someone else and another co-founder who has made it his life's mission uh to make it sound like he he created the company which is false wasn't there another issue right at the heart of the development of the tesla model 3 where tesla almost went bankrupt and i i think you have said that part of the reason for that was that you overestimated the extent to which it was possible at that time to automate a a factory a huge amount was spent kind of over automating and it didn't work and it nearly took the company down is that fair uh i mean first of all it's important to understand like what what has tesla actually accomplished that is that is most noteworthy um it is not the creation of an electric vehicle or creating electrical vehicle prototype or low volume production of a of a car that they've been uh hundreds of cars startups over the years hundreds and uh in fact at one point um bloomberg counted up the number of electric vehicle startups and they i think they got to almost 500. yeah so the hard part is not creating a prototype or going into limited production the the the absolutely difficult thing which has not been accomplished by an american car company in 100 years is reaching volume production without going bankrupt is the actual hard thing um the last company american company to reach volume production without going bankrupt was chrysler in the 20s right and and and it nearly happened to tesla yes it but it's not like oh geez i guess if we just done more manual stuff things would have been fine of course not uh that is definitely not the case uh so we basically messed up almost every aspect of the model 3 production line from from cells to packs to driving voters motors body line the paint shop uh final assembly um everything everything was messed up um and i lived in that fa i lived in the fremont and and nevada factories for three years fixing the that production line running around like a maniac through every part of that factory living with the team i slept on the floor so that the the team who was going through a hard time could see me on the floor uh that they knew that i was not in some ivory tower whatever pain they experienced i was i had it more and some people who knew you well actually thought you were making a terrible mistake that you were driving yourself you were you were driving yourself to the edge of sanity almost and yeah and and that you were in danger of making bad choices and in fact i heard you say last week elon that that you because of tesla's huge value now and and you know the the significance of every minute that you spend that you are in danger of sort of obsessing over spending all this time to the point of to the edge of sanity um that doesn't that doesn't sound super wise isn't that like your your your time your your completely sane centered rested time and decision making is more powerful and compelling than that sort of i can barely hold my eyes open so surely it should be an absolute strategic priority to look after yourself i mean there wasn't any other way to make it work there were three years of hell 17 8 2017 18 and 19 with three years this longest period of excruciating pain in my life uh there wasn't any other way and we barely made it and we're on the ragged edge of bankruptcy the entire time so so when you felt like i want pain i don't like it um those were three or three so so much pain but it had to be done or tesla would be dead when you looked around the gigafactory that we saw images of earlier um last week and just see where the companies come i mean do you feel that that this this challenge of figuring out the the new way of manufacturing um that you that you actually have an edge now that it's different that you've figured out how to do this and and um from those three years what won't be repeated you've actually figured out a new way of manufacturing at this point i think i know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth between that yeah i'll tell you i can tell you how every damn part part in that car is made which basically if you just live on the factory live in the factory for three years and that was nice that was a poignant note or something someone wants to compose a symphony to that uh expression of confidence uh something like that i have no idea what that is anyway yeah every aspect of a car six weeks to sunday i know i mean you you you talk about scale right now you're in the middle of writing your new master plan and you've said that scale is at the heart of it why does scale matter why are you obsessed with that what are you thinking yeah well see in order in order to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy uh there must be scale because we've got a transition um a vast economy that is currently uh overly dependent on fossil fuels to a sustainable energy economy one where the energy is uh yeah i mean we got to do it so so the energy's got to be sustainably generated with wind solar uh hydro geothermal i i'm a believer in nuclear as uh as well i think ever talk about and uh and then you you since solar and wind is intermittent you have to have stationary storage batteries and and then we're going to transition all transport um to to electric uh if we do those things we have a sustainable energy future the faster we do those things the less risk we the less risk we put to the environment uh so sooner is better uh and and so scale is very important um you know it's not about it's not about press releases it's about tonnage what was the tonnage of of batteries produced and obviously done in a sustainable way and and our estimate is that approximately 300 terawatt hours of battery storage is needed to transition uh transport uh electricity and and heating and cooling uh to a fully electric situation others may there's there may be some different estimates out out there but uh our estimate is 300 terawatt hours yeah so we dug into this a lot in the interview that we recorded last week and so people can go in and hear that more but i mean the context is that is i think about a thousand times the current install battery capacity i mean the scale up needed is breathtaking basically yeah and and and um yeah so so your vision is to commit tesla to try to deliver on a meaningful percentage of what is needed yeah and what and call on others to do the rest that this is what this is a task for humanity to massively scale up our response to change change the energy grade yes it it's it's like basically how fast can we can we scale um and encourage others to scale to get to that 300 terawatt hour installed uh base of batteries right and then of course uh there'll be a tremendous need to recycle those batteries which is i and it makes sense to recycle them because the raw materials are like high grade ore um so people shouldn't think well they'd be this big pile of batteries now they're going to get recycled because the even a dead battery pack is worth about a thousand dollars so um but but this is what's needed for a sustainable energy future so we're going to try to take the set of actions that accelerate the day of and bring the day of a sustainable energy future sooner okay there's going to be a huge interest in your master plan when you when you publish that um meanwhile i just i would love to understand more what goes on in this brain of yours because it is it is a pretty unique one i want to play with your permission this very funny opening from snl saturday night live can we have the volume there actually please sorry it's an honor to be hosting saturday night live i mean that sometimes after i say something i have to say i mean that [Music] so people really know that i mean that's because i don't always have a lot of international variation in how i speak which i'm told makes for great comedy i'm actually making history tonight as the first person with asperger's to host snl [Applause] and i think you followed that up with at least the first person to admit it the first person to admit it but i mean so this was a great thing to say but i i would love to understand whether you know how you think of of asperger's like whether you can give us any sense of even you as a boy how what what the experience was or as you now understand with the benefit of hindsight can you talk about that a bit well i think i think everyone's experience is going to be somewhat different but i guess for me the social cues were not uh intuitive so i was just very bookish and i didn't understand this i guess others could sort of intuitively understand uh what watches meant by something i would just tend to take things very literally as just like the words as spoken word exactly what they meant but but then that didn't turn out to be wrong you can't they do not they're not simply saying exactly what they mean there's all sorts of other things that are meant it took me a while to figure that out um so i was you know bullied quite a lot um so i didn't i did not have a sort of happy childhood to be frank was quite quite rough um and um but i read a lot of books i read lots and lots of books and so that you know sort of gradually i sort of understood more from the books that i was reading and watched a lot of movies and you know just but it took it took me it took me a while to understand things that most people intuitively understand so i've wondered whether it's possible that that was in a strange way an incredible gift to you and and indirectly to many other people in as much as brains you know are plastic and they they they go where the action is and if in for some reason the external world and social cues which so many people spend so much time and energy and mental energy obsessing over if that is partly cut off isn't it possible that that is partly what gave you the ability to understand inwardly the world at a much deeper level than than most people do i suppose that's certainly possible um i think this may be some value also from a technology standpoint because i found it uh rewarding to spend all night programming computers um just by myself and i think most people most people don't enjoy typing strange symbols into a computer by themselves all night they think that's not fun but i thought it was i really liked it um so so i just programmed all night by myself and um i found that to be quite enjoyable um but but i think that is not uh normal [Music] so i mean it does you know i've thought a lot about it's a riddle to a lot of people of of how you've done this how you've repeatedly innovated in these different industries and it it does you know every entrepreneur sees possibility in the future and then acts to make that real it it feels to me like you see possibility just more broadly than almost anyone and can connect with so you see scientific possibility based on a deep understanding of physics and knowing what the fundamental equations are what the technologies are that are based on that science and where they could go you see technological possibility and then really unusually you combine that with economic possibility of like what it actually would cost is there a system you can imagine where you could affordably make that thing and that that sometimes you then get conviction that there is an opportunity here put those pieces together and you could do something amazing yeah i think one aspect of whatever condition i had um was i was just absolutely obsessed with truth just obsessed with truth and and so the obsession with truth is why i studied physics because physics attempts to understand the the truth the truth of the universe physics just it's just what are the provable truths of the universe um and and true and truths that have predictive power um so for me physics was sort of a very natural thing to study nobody made me study it it was intrinsically interesting to understand the nature of the universe and then computer science or information theory also to just i understand uh logic and and uh you know there's an also there's an argument that you know that you the that information theory is actually operating at a more fundamental level more fundamental level than than even physics um so uh just yeah um the physics and information theory uh were really interesting to me so when you say truth i mean it's it's not like some people so it's what you're talking about is the truth of the universe like the fundamental truths that drive the universe it's like a deep curiosity about what this universe is why we're here simulation why not you know we don't have time to go into that but i mean it's you're just deeply curious about what this is for what this is this whole thing yes i mean i think the why the why of things is very important um i i actually uh when i was a i don't know so young teens uh i i got quite depressed about the meaning of life um and i was trying to sort of understand the meaning of life looking at reading religious texts and and reading books on philosophy and i got into the german philosophers which is definitely not wise if you're a young teenager i have to say can be ripped out but dark so [Music] much better at as an adult i um and and then actually i ended up reading um the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which is actually a book on philosophy just sort of disguised as a silly humor book but but actually the book it's actually a philosophy book and uh adams uh makes the point that it's actually the the question that is harder than the answer um you know this sort of makes a joke that the answer was 42. um that number does pop up a lot um and 420 is just 10 14 10 10 times 10 times more significant than 42. okay you know there's um you can make a triangle with 42 or 42 degrees and two 69s um so there's no such thing as a perfect triangle or is there but even more important than the answer is the questions that was the whole theme of that book i mean is that yeah basically how you see meaning then it's the pursuit of questions yeah so i have a sort of you know a proposal for a world view or a motivate a motivating philosophy which is to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe and the to agree that we expand the scope and scale of consciousness uh biological and digital uh we will be better able to to uh ask these these questions to frame these questions and to understand why we're here how we got here what what the heck is going on and so that that is my driving philosophy is to expand the scope and scale of consciousness that we may better understand the nature of the universe elon one of the things that was most touching last week was uh was seeing you hang out with your kids um here's if i may um it looks vaguely like a ventriloquist dummy there [Laughter] i mean how do you know that's real um so that's x and and you know you're it was just a delight seeing seeing you hang out with him and what what what what's his future going to be i mean i don't mean him personally but the world he's going to grow up in what future do you believe he will grow up in well i mean a very digital future um a very a different world than i grew up in that's for sure um but i think we want to obviously do our absolute best to ensure that the future is good uh for everyone's children um and and that you know that the future is something that that you can look forward to and not feel sad about um you know you want to get up in the morning and be be excited about the future and we should fight for the things that make us excited about the future you know the future cannot it cannot just be that one miserable thing after another solving one sad problem after another there got to be things that get you excited like you're like you want to live these things are very important you should have more of it and it's not as if it's a done deal like it's all it's all to play for like the future may be horrible still there are scenarios where it is horrible but you you see a pathway to an exciting future both on earth and on mars and in our minds through artificial intelligence and so forth i mean in your in your heart of hearts do you really believe that you are helping deliver that exciting future for ex and for others i'm trying my hardest to do so i you know i love humanity and i think that we should fight for a good future for humanity and i think we should be optimistic about the future and fight to make that optimistic optimistic future happen [Music] i think that's that's the perfect place to close this thank you so much for spending time coming here and for the work that you're doing and good luck with finding a wise course through on twitter and everything else all right thank you hey guys [Music]

https://youtu.be/YRvf00NooN8

Chris Anderson: Elon Musk, great to see you. How are you? Elon Musk: Good. How are you? CA: We're here at the Texas Gigafactory the day before this thing opens. It's been pretty crazy out there. Thank you so much for making time on a busy day. I would love you to help us, kind of, cast our minds, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 years into the future. And help us try to picture what it would take to build a future that's worth getting excited about. The last time you spoke at TED, you said that that was really just a big driver. You know, you can talk about lots of other reasons to do the work you're doing, but fundamentally, you want to think about the future and not think that it sucks. EM: Yeah, absolutely. I think in general, you know, there's a lot of discussion of like, this problem or that problem. And a lot of people are sad about the future and they're ... Pessimistic. And I think ... this is ... This is not great. I mean, we really want to wake up in the morning and look forward to the future. We want to be excited about what's going to happen. And life cannot simply be about sort of, solving one miserable problem after another. CA: So if you look forward 30 years, you know, the year 2050 has been labeled by scientists as this, kind of, almost like this doomsday deadline on climate. There's a consensus of scientists, a large consensus of scientists, who believe that if we haven't completely eliminated greenhouse gases or offset them completely by 2050, effectively we're inviting climate catastrophe. Do you believe there is a pathway to avoid that catastrophe? And what would it look like? EM: Yeah, so I am not one of the doomsday people, which may surprise you. I actually think we're on a good path. But at the same time, I want to caution against complacency. So, so long as we are not complacent, as long as we have a high sense of urgency about moving towards a sustainable energy economy, then I think things will be fine. So I can't emphasize that enough, as long as we push hard and are not complacent, the future is going to be great. Don't worry about it. I mean, worry about it, but if you worry about it, ironically, it will be a self-unfulfilling prophecy. So, like, there are three elements to a sustainable energy future. One is of sustainable energy generation, which is primarily wind and solar. There's also hydro, geothermal, I'm actually pro-nuclear. I think nuclear is fine. But it's going to be primarily solar and wind, as the primary generators of energy. The second part is you need batteries to store the solar and wind energy because the sun doesn't shine all the time, the wind doesn't blow all the time. So it's a lot of stationary battery packs. And then you need electric transport. So electric cars, electric planes, boats. And then ultimately, it’s not really possible to make electric rockets, but you can make the propellant used in rockets using sustainable energy. So ultimately, we can have a fully sustainable energy economy. And it's those three things: solar/wind, stationary battery pack, electric vehicles. So then what are the limiting factors on progress? The limiting factor really will be battery cell production. So that's going to really be the fundamental rate driver. And then whatever the slowest element of the whole lithium-ion battery cells supply chain, from mining and the many steps of refining to ultimately creating a battery cell and putting it into a pack, that will be the limiting factor on progress towards sustainability. CA: All right, so we need to talk more about batteries, because the key thing that I want to understand, like, there seems to be a scaling issue here that is kind of amazing and alarming. You have said that you have calculated that the amount of battery production that the world needs for sustainability is 300 terawatt hours of batteries. That's the end goal? EM: Very rough numbers, and I certainly would invite others to check our calculations because they may arrive at different conclusions. But in order to transition, not just current electricity production, but also heating and transport, which roughly triples the amount of electricity that you need, it amounts to approximately 300 terawatt hours of installed capacity. CA: So we need to give people a sense of how big a task that is. I mean, here we are at the Gigafactory. You know, this is one of the biggest buildings in the world. What I've read, and tell me if this is still right, is that the goal here is to eventually produce 100 gigawatt hours of batteries here a year eventually. EM: We will probably do more than that, but yes, hopefully we get there within a couple of years. CA: Right. But I mean, that is one -- EM: 0.1 terrawat hours. CA: But that's still 1/100 of what's needed. How much of the rest of that 100 is Tesla planning to take on let's say, between now and 2030, 2040, when we really need to see the scale up happen? EM: I mean, these are just guesses. So please, people shouldn't hold me to these things. It's not like this is like some -- What tends to happen is I'll make some like, you know, best guess and then people, in five years, there’ll be some jerk that writes an article: "Elon said this would happen, and it didn't happen. He's a liar and a fool." It's very annoying when that happens. So these are just guesses, this is a conversation. CA: Right. EM: I think Tesla probably ends up doing 10 percent of that. Roughly. CA: Let's say 2050 we have this amazing, you know, 100 percent sustainable electric grid made up of, you know, some mixture of the sustainable energy sources you talked about. That same grid probably is offering the world really low-cost energy, isn't it, compared with now. And I'm curious about like, are people entitled to get a little bit excited about the possibilities of that world? EM: People should be optimistic about the future. Humanity will solve sustainable energy. It will happen if we, you know, continue to push hard, the future is bright and good from an energy standpoint. And then it will be possible to also use that energy to do carbon sequestration. It takes a lot of energy to pull carbon out of the atmosphere because in putting it in the atmosphere it releases energy. So now, you know, obviously in order to pull it out, you need to use a lot of energy. But if you've got a lot of sustainable energy from wind and solar, you can actually sequester carbon. So you can reverse the CO2 parts per million of the atmosphere and oceans. And also you can really have as much fresh water as you want. Earth is mostly water. We should call Earth “Water.” It's 70 percent water by surface area. Now most of that’s seawater, but it's like we just happen to be on the bit that's land. CA: And with energy, you can turn seawater into -- EM: Yes. CA: Irrigating water or whatever water you need. EM: At very low cost. Things will be good. CA: Things will be good. And also, there's other benefits to this non-fossil fuel world where the air is cleaner -- EM: Yes, exactly. Because, like, when you burn fossil fuels, there's all these side reactions and toxic gases of various kinds. And sort of little particulates that are bad for your lungs. Like, there's all sorts of bad things that are happening that will go away. And the sky will be cleaner and quieter. The future's going to be good. CA: I want us to switch now to think a bit about artificial intelligence. But the segue there, you mentioned how annoying it is when people call you up for bad predictions in the past. So I'm possibly going to be annoying now, but I’m curious about your timelines and how you predict and how come some things are so amazingly on the money and some aren't. So when it comes to predicting sales of Tesla vehicles, for example, you've kind of been amazing, I think in 2014 when Tesla had sold that year 60,000 cars, you said, "2020, I think we will do half a million a year." EM: Yeah, we did almost exactly a half million. CA: You did almost exactly half a million. You were scoffed in 2014 because no one since Henry Ford, with the Model T, had come close to that kind of growth rate for cars. You were scoffed, and you actually hit 500,000 cars and then 510,000 or whatever produced. But five years ago, last time you came to TED, I asked you about full self-driving, and you said, “Yeah, this very year, I'm confident that we will have a car going from LA to New York without any intervention." EM: Yeah, I don't want to blow your mind, but I'm not always right. CA: (Laughs) What's the difference between those two? Why has full self-driving in particular been so hard to predict? EM: I mean, the thing that really got me, and I think it's going to get a lot of other people, is that there are just so many false dawns with self-driving, where you think you've got the problem, have a handle on the problem, and then it, no, turns out you just hit a ceiling. Because if you were to plot the progress, the progress looks like a log curve. So it's like a series of log curves. So most people don't know what a log curve is, I suppose. CA: Show the shape with your hands. EM: It goes up you know, sort of a fairly straight way, and then it starts tailing off and you start getting diminishing returns. And you're like, uh oh, it was trending up and now it's sort of, curving over and you start getting to these, what I call local maxima, where you don't realize basically how dumb you were. And then it happens again. And ultimately... These things, you know, in retrospect, they seem obvious, but in order to solve full self-driving properly, you actually have to solve real-world AI. Because what are the road networks designed to work with? They're designed to work with a biological neural net, our brains, and with vision, our eyes. And so in order to make it work with computers, you basically need to solve real-world AI and vision. Because we need cameras and silicon neural nets in order to have self-driving work for a system that was designed for eyes and biological neural nets. You know, I guess when you put it that way, it's sort of, like, quite obvious that the only way to solve full self-driving is to solve real world AI and sophisticated vision. CA: What do you feel about the current architecture? Do you think you have an architecture now where there is a chance for the logarithmic curve not to tail off any anytime soon? EM: Well I mean, admittedly these may be infamous last words, but I actually am confident that we will solve it this year. That we will exceed -- The probability of an accident, at what point do you exceed that of the average person? I think we will exceed that this year. CA: What are you seeing behind the scenes that gives you that confidence? EM: We’re almost at the point where we have a high-quality unified vector space. In the beginning, we were trying to do this with image recognition on individual images. But if you get one image out of a video, it's actually quite hard to see what's going on without ambiguity. But if you look at a video segment of a few seconds of video, that ambiguity resolves. So the first thing we had to do is tie all eight cameras together so they're synchronized, so that all the frames are looked at simultaneously and labeled simultaneously by one person, because we still need human labeling. So at least they’re not labeled at different times by different people in different ways. So it's sort of a surround picture. Then a very important part is to add the time dimension. So that you’re looking at surround video, and you're labeling surround video. And this is actually quite difficult to do from a software standpoint. We had to write our own labeling tools and then create auto labeling, create auto labeling software to amplify the efficiency of human labelers because it’s quite hard to label. In the beginning, it was taking several hours to label a 10-second video clip. This is not scalable. So basically what you have to have is you have to have surround video, and that surround video has to be primarily automatically labeled with humans just being editors and making slight corrections to the labeling of the video and then feeding back those corrections into the future auto labeler, so you get this flywheel eventually where the auto labeler is able to take in vast amounts of video and with high accuracy, automatically label the video for cars, lane lines, drive space. CA: What you’re saying is ... the result of this is that you're effectively giving the car a 3D model of the actual objects that are all around it. It knows what they are, and it knows how fast they are moving. And the remaining task is to predict what the quirky behaviors are that, you know, that when a pedestrian is walking down the road with a smaller pedestrian, that maybe that smaller pedestrian might do something unpredictable or things like that. You have to build into it before you can really call it safe. EM: You basically need to have memory across time and space. So what I mean by that is ... Memory can’t be infinite, because it's using up a lot of the computer's RAM basically. So you have to say how much are you going to try to remember? It's very common for things to be occluded. So if you talk about say, a pedestrian walking past a truck where you saw the pedestrian start on one side of the truck, then they're occluded by the truck. You would know intuitively, OK, that pedestrian is going to pop out the other side, most likely. CA: A computer doesn't know it. EM: You need to slow down. CA: A skeptic is going to say that every year for the last five years, you've kind of said, well, no this is the year, we're confident that it will be there in a year or two or, you know, like it's always been about that far away. But we've got a new architecture now, you're seeing enough improvement behind the scenes to make you not certain, but pretty confident, that, by the end of this year, what in most, not in every city, and every circumstance but in many cities and circumstances, basically the car will be able to drive without interventions safer than a human. EM: Yes. I mean, the car currently drives me around Austin most of the time with no interventions. So it's not like ... And we have over 100,000 people in our full self-driving beta program. So you can look at the videos that they post online. CA: I do. And some of them are great, and some of them are a little terrifying. I mean, occasionally the car seems to veer off and scare the hell out of people. EM: It’s still a beta. CA: But you’re behind the scenes, looking at the data, you're seeing enough improvement to believe that a this-year timeline is real. EM: Yes, that's what it seems like. I mean, we could be here talking again in a year, like, well, another year went by, and it didn’t happen. But I think this is the year. CA: And so in general, when people talk about Elon time, I mean it sounds like you can't just have a general rule that if you predict that something will be done in six months, actually what we should imagine is it’s going to be a year or it’s like two-x or three-x, it depends on the type of prediction. Some things, I guess, things involving software, AI, whatever, are fundamentally harder to predict than others. Is there an element that you actually deliberately make aggressive prediction timelines to drive people to be ambitious? Without that, nothing gets done? EM: Well, I generally believe, in terms of internal timelines, that we want to set the most aggressive timeline that we can. Because there’s sort of like a law of gaseous expansion where, for schedules, where whatever time you set, it's not going to be less than that. It's very rare that it'll be less than that. But as far as our predictions are concerned, what tends to happen in the media is that they will report all the wrong ones and ignore all the right ones. Or, you know, when writing an article about me -- I've had a long career in multiple industries. If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth. But if you put those against the things I've done right, it makes much more sense, you know? So essentially like, the longer you do anything, the more mistakes that you will make cumulatively. Which, if you sum up those mistakes, will sound like I'm the worst predictor ever. But for example, for Tesla vehicle growth, I said I think we’d do 50 percent, and we’ve done 80 percent. CA: Yes. EM: But they don't mention that one. So, I mean, I'm not sure what my exact track record is on predictions. They're more optimistic than pessimistic, but they're not all optimistic. Some of them are exceeded probably more or later, but they do come true. It's very rare that they do not come true. It's sort of like, you know, if there's some radical technology prediction, the point is not that it was a few years late, but that it happened at all. That's the more important part. CA: So it feels like at some point in the last year, seeing the progress on understanding, the Tesla AI understanding the world around it, led to a kind of, an aha moment at Tesla. Because you really surprised people recently when you said probably the most important product development going on at Tesla this year is this robot, Optimus. EM: Yes. CA: Many companies out there have tried to put out these robots, they've been working on them for years. And so far no one has really cracked it. There's no mass adoption robot in people's homes. There are some in manufacturing, but I would say, no one's kind of, really cracked it. Is it something that happened in the development of full self-driving that gave you the confidence to say, "You know what, we could do something special here." EM: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, it took me a while to sort of realize that in order to solve self-driving, you really needed to solve real-world AI. And at the point of which you solve real-world AI for a car, which is really a robot on four wheels, you can then generalize that to a robot on legs as well. The two hard parts I think -- like obviously companies like Boston Dynamics have shown that it's possible to make quite compelling, sometimes alarming robots. CA: Right. EM: You know, so from a sensors and actuators standpoint, it's certainly been demonstrated by many that it's possible to make a humanoid robot. The things that are currently missing are enough intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world and do useful things without being explicitly instructed. So the missing things are basically real-world intelligence and scaling up manufacturing. Those are two things that Tesla is very good at. And so then we basically just need to design the specialized actuators and sensors that are needed for humanoid robot. People have no idea, this is going to be bigger than the car. CA: So let's dig into exactly that. I mean, in one way, it's actually an easier problem than full self-driving because instead of an object going along at 60 miles an hour, which if it gets it wrong, someone will die. This is an object that's engineered to only go at what, three or four or five miles an hour. And so a mistake, there aren't lives at stake. There might be embarrassment at stake. EM: So long as the AI doesn't take it over and murder us in our sleep or something. CA: Right. (Laughter) So talk about -- I think the first applications you've mentioned are probably going to be manufacturing, but eventually the vision is to have these available for people at home. If you had a robot that really understood the 3D architecture of your house and knew where every object in that house was or was supposed to be, and could recognize all those objects, I mean, that’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? Like the kind of thing that you could ask a robot to do would be what? Like, tidy up? EM: Yeah, absolutely. Make dinner, I guess, mow the lawn. CA: Take a cup of tea to grandma and show her family pictures. EM: Exactly. Take care of my grandmother and make sure -- CA: It could obviously recognize everyone in the home. It could play catch with your kids. EM: Yes. I mean, obviously, we need to be careful this doesn't become a dystopian situation. I think one of the things that's going to be important is to have a localized ROM chip on the robot that cannot be updated over the air. Where if you, for example, were to say, “Stop, stop, stop,” if anyone said that, then the robot would stop, you know, type of thing. And that's not updatable remotely. I think it's going to be important to have safety features like that. CA: Yeah, that sounds wise. EM: And I do think there should be a regulatory agency for AI. I've said that for many years. I don't love being regulated, but I think this is an important thing for public safety. CA: Let's come back to that. But I don't think many people have really sort of taken seriously the notion of, you know, a robot at home. I mean, at the start of the computing revolution, Bill Gates said there's going to be a computer in every home. And people at the time said, yeah, whatever, who would even want that. Do you think there will be basically like in, say, 2050 or whatever, like a robot in most homes, is what there will be, and people will love them and count on them? You’ll have your own butler basically. EM: Yeah, you'll have your sort of buddy robot probably, yeah. CA: I mean, how much of a buddy? How many applications have you thought, you know, can you have a romantic partner, a sex partner? EM: It's probably inevitable. I mean, I did promise the internet that I’d make catgirls. We could make a robot catgirl. CA: Be careful what you promise the internet. (Laughter) EM: So, yeah, I guess it'll be whatever people want really, you know. CA: What sort of timeline should we be thinking about of the first models that are actually made and sold? EM: Well, you know, the first units that we intend to make are for jobs that are dangerous, boring, repetitive, and things that people don't want to do. And, you know, I think we’ll have like an interesting prototype sometime this year. We might have something useful next year, but I think quite likely within at least two years. And then we'll see rapid growth year over year of the usefulness of the humanoid robots and decrease in cost and scaling up production. CA: Initially just selling to businesses, or when do you picture you'll start selling them where you can buy your parents one for Christmas or something? EM: I'd say in less than ten years. CA: Help me on the economics of this. So what do you picture the cost of one of these being? EM: Well, I think the cost is actually not going to be crazy high. Like less than a car. Initially, things will be expensive because it'll be a new technology at low production volume. The complexity and cost of a car is greater than that of a humanoid robot. So I would expect that it's going to be less than a car, or at least equivalent to a cheap car. CA: So even if it starts at 50k, within a few years, it’s down to 20k or lower or whatever. And maybe for home they'll get much cheaper still. But think about the economics of this. If you can replace a $30,000, $40,000-a-year worker, which you have to pay every year, with a one-time payment of $25,000 for a robot that can work longer hours, a pretty rapid replacement of certain types of jobs. How worried should the world be about that? EM: I wouldn't worry about the sort of, putting people out of a job thing. I think we're actually going to have, and already do have, a massive shortage of labor. So I think we will have ... Not people out of work, but actually still a shortage labor even in the future. But this really will be a world of abundance. Any goods and services will be available to anyone who wants them. It'll be so cheap to have goods and services, it will be ridiculous. CA: I'm presuming it should be possible to imagine a bunch of goods and services that can't profitably be made now but could be made in that world, courtesy of legions of robots. EM: Yeah. It will be a world of abundance. The only scarcity that will exist in the future is that which we decide to create ourselves as humans. CA: OK. So AI is allowing us to imagine a differently powered economy that will create this abundance. What are you most worried about going wrong? EM: Well, like I said, AI and robotics will bring out what might be termed the age of abundance. Other people have used this word, and that this is my prediction: it will be an age of abundance for everyone. But I guess there’s ... The dangers would be the artificial general intelligence or digital superintelligence decouples from a collective human will and goes in the direction that for some reason we don't like. Whatever direction it might go. You know, that’s sort of the idea behind Neuralink, is to try to more tightly couple collective human world to digital superintelligence. And also along the way solve a lot of brain injuries and spinal injuries and that kind of thing. So even if it doesn't succeed in the greater goal, I think it will succeed in the goal of alleviating brain and spine damage. CA: So the spirit there is that if we're going to make these AIs that are so vastly intelligent, we ought to be wired directly to them so that we ourselves can have those superpowers more directly. But that doesn't seem to avoid the risk that those superpowers might ... turn ugly in unintended ways. EM: I think it's a risk, I agree. I'm not saying that I have some certain answer to that risk. I’m just saying like maybe one of the things that would be good for ensuring that the future is one that we want is to more tightly couple the collective human world to digital intelligence. The issue that we face here is that we are already a cyborg, if you think about it. The computers are an extension of ourselves. And when we die, we have, like, a digital ghost. You know, all of our text messages and social media, emails. And it's quite eerie actually, when someone dies but everything online is still there. But you say like, what's the limitation? What is it that inhibits a human-machine symbiosis? It's the data rate. When you communicate, especially with a phone, you're moving your thumbs very slowly. So you're like moving your two little meat sticks at a rate that’s maybe 10 bits per second, optimistically, 100 bits per second. And computers are communicating at the gigabyte level and beyond. CA: Have you seen evidence that the technology is actually working, that you've got a richer, sort of, higher bandwidth connection, if you like, between like external electronics and a brain than has been possible before? EM: Yeah. I mean, the fundamental principles of reading neurons, sort of doing read-write on neurons with tiny electrodes, have been demonstrated for decades. So it's not like the concept is new. The problem is that there is no product that works well that you can go and buy. So it's all sort of, in research labs. And it's like some cords sticking out of your head. And it's quite gruesome, and it's really ... There's no good product that actually does a good job and is high-bandwidth and safe and something actually that you could buy and would want to buy. But the way to think of the Neuralink device is kind of like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch. That's where we take out sort of a small section of skull about the size of a quarter, replace that with what, in many ways really is very much like a Fitbit, Apple Watch or some kind of smart watch thing. But with tiny, tiny wires, very, very tiny wires. Wires so tiny, it’s hard to even see them. And it's very important to have very tiny wires so that when they’re implanted, they don’t damage the brain. CA: How far are you from putting these into humans? EM: Well, we have put in our FDA application to aspirationally do the first human implant this year. CA: The first uses will be for neurological injuries of different kinds. But rolling the clock forward and imagining when people are actually using these for their own enhancement, let's say, and for the enhancement of the world, how clear are you in your mind as to what it will feel like to have one of these inside your head? EM: Well, I do want to emphasize we're at an early stage. And so it really will be many years before we have anything approximating a high-bandwidth neural interface that allows for AI-human symbiosis. For many years, we will just be solving brain injuries and spinal injuries. For probably a decade. This is not something that will suddenly one day it will have this incredible sort of whole brain interface. It's going to be, like I said, at least a decade of really just solving brain injuries and spinal injuries. And really, I think you can solve a very wide range of brain injuries, including severe depression, morbid obesity, sleep, potentially schizophrenia, like, a lot of things that cause great stress to people. Restoring memory in older people. CA: If you can pull that off, that's the app I will sign up for. EM: Absolutely. CA: Please hurry. (Laughs) EM: I mean, the emails that we get at Neuralink are heartbreaking. I mean, they'll send us just tragic, you know, where someone was sort of, in the prime of life and they had an accident on a motorcycle and someone who's 25, you know, can't even feed themselves. And this is something we could fix. CA: But you have said that AI is one of the things you're most worried about and that Neuralink may be one of the ways where we can keep abreast of it. EM: Yeah, there's the short-term thing, which I think is helpful on an individual human level with injuries. And then the long-term thing is an attempt to address the civilizational risk of AI by bringing digital intelligence and biological intelligence closer together. I mean, if you think of how the brain works today, there are really two layers to the brain. There's the limbic system and the cortex. You've got the kind of, animal brain where -- it’s kind of like the fun part, really. CA: It's where most of Twitter operates, by the way. EM: I think Tim Urban said, we’re like somebody, you know, stuck a computer on a monkey. You know, so we're like, if you gave a monkey a computer, that's our cortex. But we still have a lot of monkey instincts. Which we then try to rationalize as, no, it's not a monkey instinct. It’s something more important than that. But it's often just really a monkey instinct. We're just monkeys with a computer stuck in our brain. But even though the cortex is sort of the smart, or the intelligent part of the brain, the thinking part of the brain, I've not yet met anyone who wants to delete their limbic system or their cortex. They're quite happy having both. Everyone wants both parts of their brain. And people really want their phones and their computers, which are really the tertiary, the third part of your intelligence. It's just that it's ... Like the bandwidth, the rate of communication with that tertiary layer is slow. And it's just a very tiny straw to this tertiary layer. And we want to make that tiny straw a big highway. And I’m definitely not saying that this is going to solve everything. Or this is you know, it’s the only thing -- it’s something that might be helpful. And worst-case scenario, I think we solve some important brain injury, spinal injury issues, and that's still a great outcome. CA: Best-case scenario, we may discover new human possibility, telepathy, you've spoken of, in a way, a connection with a loved one, you know, full memory and much faster thought processing maybe. All these things. It's very cool. If AI were to take down Earth, we need a plan B. Let's shift our attention to space. We spoke last time at TED about reusability, and you had just demonstrated that spectacularly for the first time. Since then, you've gone on to build this monster rocket, Starship, which kind of changes the rules of the game in spectacular ways. Tell us about Starship. EM: Starship is extremely fundamental. So the holy grail of rocketry or space transport is full and rapid reusability. This has never been achieved. The closest that anything has come is our Falcon 9 rocket, where we are able to recover the first stage, the boost stage, which is probably about 60 percent of the cost of the vehicle of the whole launch, maybe 70 percent. And we've now done that over a hundred times. So with Starship, we will be recovering the entire thing. Or at least that's the goal. CA: Right. EM: And moreover, recovering it in such a way that it can be immediately re-flown. Whereas with Falcon 9, we still need to do some amount of refurbishment to the booster and to the fairing nose cone. But with Starship, the design goal is immediate re-flight. So you just refill propellants and go again. And this is gigantic. Just as it would be in any other mode of transport. CA: And the main design is to basically take 100 plus people at a time, plus a bunch of things that they need, to Mars. So, first of all, talk about that piece. What is your latest timeline? One, for the first time, a Starship goes to Mars, presumably without people, but just equipment. Two, with people. Three, there’s sort of, OK, 100 people at a time, let's go. EM: Sure. And just to put the cost thing into perspective, the expected cost of Starship, putting 100 tons into orbit, is significantly less than what it would have cost or what it did cost to put our tiny Falcon 1 rocket into orbit. Just as the cost of flying a 747 around the world is less than the cost of a small airplane. You know, a small airplane that was thrown away. So it's really pretty mind-boggling that the giant thing costs less, way less than the small thing. So it doesn't use exotic propellants or things that are difficult to obtain on Mars. It uses methane as fuel, and it's primarily oxygen, roughly 77-78 percent oxygen by weight. And Mars has a CO2 atmosphere and has water ice, which is CO2 plus H2O, so you can make CH4, methane, and O2, oxygen, on Mars. CA: Presumably, one of the first tasks on Mars will be to create a fuel plant that can create the fuel for the return trips of many Starships. EM: Yes. And actually, it's mostly going to be oxygen plants, because it's 78 percent oxygen, 22 percent fuel. But the fuel is a simple fuel that is easy to create on Mars. And in many other parts of the solar system. So basically ... And it's all propulsive landing, no parachutes, nothing thrown away. It has a heat shield that’s capable of entering on Earth or Mars. We can even potentially go to Venus. but you don't want to go there. (Laughs) Venus is hell, almost literally. But you could ... It's a generalized method of transport to anywhere in the solar system, because the point at which you have propellant depo on Mars, you can then travel to the asteroid belt and to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and ultimately anywhere in the solar system. CA: But your main focus and SpaceX's main focus is still Mars. That is the mission. That is where most of the effort will go? Or are you actually imagining a much broader array of uses even in the coming, you know, the first decade or so of uses of this. Where we could go, for example, to other places in the solar system to explore, perhaps NASA wants to use the rocket for that reason. EM: Yeah, NASA is planning to use a Starship to return to the moon, to return people to the moon. And so we're very honored that NASA has chosen us to do this. But I'm saying it is a generalized -- it’s a general solution to getting anywhere in the greater solar system. It's not suitable for going to another star system, but it is a general solution for transport anywhere in the solar system. CA: Before it can do any of that, it's got to demonstrate it can get into orbit, you know, around Earth. What’s your latest advice on the timeline for that? EM: It's looking promising for us to have an orbital launch attempt in a few months. So we're actually integrating -- will be integrating the engines into the booster for the first orbital flight starting in about a week or two. And the launch complex itself is ready to go. So assuming we get regulatory approval, I think we could have an orbital launch attempt within a few months. CA: And a radical new technology like this presumably there is real risk on those early attempts. EM: Oh, 100 percent, yeah. The joke I make all the time is that excitement is guaranteed. Success is not guaranteed, but excitement certainly is. CA: But the last I saw on your timeline, you've slightly put back the expected date to put the first human on Mars till 2029, I want to say? EM: Yeah, I mean, so let's see. I mean, we have built a production system for Starship, so we're making a lot of ships and boosters. CA: How many are you planning to make actually? EM: Well, we're currently expecting to make a booster and a ship roughly every, well, initially, roughly every couple of months, and then hopefully by the end of this year, one every month. So it's giant rockets, and a lot of them. Just talking in terms of rough orders of magnitude, in order to create a self-sustaining city on Mars, I think you will need something on the order of a thousand ships. And we just need a Helen of Sparta, I guess, on Mars. CA: This is not in most people's heads, Elon. EM: The planet that launched 1,000 ships. CA: That's nice. But this is not in most people's heads, this picture that you have in your mind. There's basically a two-year window, you can only really fly to Mars conveniently every two years. You were picturing that during the 2030s, every couple of years, something like 1,000 Starships take off, each containing 100 or more people. That picture is just completely mind-blowing to me. That sense of this armada of humans going to -- EM: It'll be like "Battlestar Galactica," the fleet departs. CA: And you think that it can basically be funded by people spending maybe a couple hundred grand on a ticket to Mars? Is that price about where it has been? EM: Well, I think if you say like, what's required in order to get enough people and enough cargo to Mars to build a self-sustaining city. And it's where you have an intersection of sets of people who want to go, because I think only a small percentage of humanity will want to go, and can afford to go or get sponsorship in some manner. That intersection of sets, I think, needs to be a million people or something like that. And so it’s what can a million people afford, or get sponsorship for, because I think governments will also pay for it, and people can take out loans. But I think at the point at which you say, OK, like, if moving to Mars costs are, for argument’s sake, $100,000, then I think you know, almost anyone can work and save up and eventually have $100,000 and be able to go to Mars if they want. We want to make it available to anyone who wants to go. It's very important to emphasize that Mars, especially in the beginning, will not be luxurious. It will be dangerous, cramped, difficult, hard work. It's kind of like that Shackleton ad for going to the Antarctic, which I think is actually not real, but it sounds real and it's cool. It's sort of like, the sales pitch for going to Mars is, "It's dangerous, it's cramped. You might not make it back. It's difficult, it's hard work." That's the sales pitch. CA: Right. But you will make history. EM: But it'll be glorious. CA: So on that kind of launch rate you're talking about over two decades, you could get your million people to Mars, essentially. Whose city is it? Is it NASA's city, is it SpaceX's city? EM: It’s the people of Mars’ city. The reason for this, I mean, I feel like why do this thing? I think this is important for maximizing the probable lifespan of humanity or consciousness. Human civilization could come to an end for external reasons, like a giant meteor or super volcanoes or extreme climate change. Or World War III, or you know, any one of a number of reasons. But the probable life span of civilizational consciousness as we know it, which we should really view as this very delicate thing, like a small candle in a vast darkness. That is what appears to be the case. We're in this vast darkness of space, and there's this little candle of consciousness that’s only really come about after 4.5 billion years, and it could just go out. CA: I think that's powerful, and I think a lot of people will be inspired by that vision. And the reason you need the million people is because there has to be enough people there to do everything that you need to survive. EM: Really, like the critical threshold is if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does the Mars City die out or not? And so we have to -- You know, people talk about like, the sort of, the great filters, the things that perhaps, you know, we talk about the Fermi paradox, and where are the aliens? Well maybe there are these various great filters that the aliens didn’t pass, and so they eventually just ceased to exist. And one of the great filters is becoming a multi-planet species. So we want to pass that filter. And I'll be long-dead before this is, you know, a real thing, before it happens. But I’d like to at least see us make great progress in this direction. CA: Given how tortured the Earth is right now, how much we're beating each other up, shouldn't there be discussions going on with everyone who is dreaming about Mars to try to say, we've got a once in a civilization's chance to make some new rules here? Should someone be trying to lead those discussions to figure out what it means for this to be the people of Mars' City? EM: Well, I think ultimately this will be up to the people of Mars to decide how they want to rethink society. Yeah there’s certainly risk there. And hopefully the people of Mars will be more enlightened and will not fight amongst each other too much. I mean, I have some recommendations, which people of Mars may choose to listen to or not. I would advocate for more of a direct democracy, not a representative democracy, and laws that are short enough for people to understand. Where it is harder to create laws than to get rid of them. CA: Coming back a bit nearer term, I'd love you to just talk a bit about some of the other possibility space that Starship seems to have created. So given -- Suddenly we've got this ability to move 100 tons-plus into orbit. So we've just launched the James Webb telescope, which is an incredible thing. It's unbelievable. EM: Exquisite piece of technology. CA: Exquisite piece of technology. But people spent two years trying to figure out how to fold up this thing. It's a three-ton telescope. EM: We can make it a lot easier if you’ve got more volume and mass. CA: But let's ask a different question. Which is, how much more powerful a telescope could someone design based on using Starship, for example? EM: I mean, roughly, I'd say it's probably an order of magnitude more resolution. If you've got 100 tons and a thousand cubic meters volume, which is roughly what we have. CA: And what about other exploration through the solar system? I mean, I'm you know -- EM: Europa is a big question mark. CA: Right, so there's an ocean there. And what you really want to do is to drop a submarine into that ocean. EM: Maybe there's like, some squid civilization, cephalopod civilization under the ice of Europa. That would be pretty interesting. CA: I mean, Elon, if you could take a submarine to Europa and we see pictures of this thing being devoured by a squid, that would honestly be the happiest moment of my life. EM: Pretty wild, yeah. CA: What other possibilities are out there? Like, it feels like if you're going to create a thousand of these things, they can only fly to Mars every two years. What are they doing the rest of the time? It feels like there's this explosion of possibility that I don't think people are really thinking about. EM: I don't know, we've certainly got a long way to go. As you alluded to earlier, we still have to get to orbit. And then after we get to orbit, we have to really prove out and refine full and rapid reusability. That'll take a moment. But I do think we will solve this. I'm highly confident we will solve this at this point. CA: Do you ever wake up with the fear that there's going to be this Hindenburg moment for SpaceX where ... EM: We've had many Hindenburg. Well, we've never had Hindenburg moments with people, which is very important. Big difference. We've blown up quite a few rockets. So there's a whole compilation online that we put together and others put together, it's showing rockets are hard. I mean, the sheer amount of energy going through a rocket boggles the mind. So, you know, getting out of Earth's gravity well is difficult. We have a strong gravity and a thick atmosphere. And Mars, which is less than 40 percent, it's like, 37 percent of Earth's gravity and has a thin atmosphere. The ship alone can go all the way from the surface of Mars to the surface of Earth. Whereas getting to Mars requires a giant booster and orbital refilling. CA: So, Elon, as I think more about this incredible array of things that you're involved with, I keep seeing these synergies, to use a horrible word, between them. You know, for example, the robots you're building from Tesla could possibly be pretty handy on Mars, doing some of the dangerous work and so forth. I mean, maybe there's a scenario where your city on Mars doesn't need a million people, it needs half a million people and half a million robots. And that's a possibility. Maybe The Boring Company could play a role helping create some of the subterranean dwelling spaces that you might need. EM: Yeah. CA: Back on planet Earth, it seems like a partnership between Boring Company and Tesla could offer an unbelievable deal to a city to say, we will create for you a 3D network of tunnels populated by robo-taxis that will offer fast, low-cost transport to anyone. You know, full self-driving may or may not be done this year. And in some cities, like, somewhere like Mumbai, I suspect won't be done for a decade. EM: Some places are more challenging than others. CA: But today, today, with what you've got, you could put a 3D network of tunnels under there. EM: Oh, if it’s just in a tunnel, that’s a solved problem. CA: Exactly, full self-driving is a solved problem. To me, there’s amazing synergy there. With Starship, you know, Gwynne Shotwell talked about by 2028 having from city to city, you know, transport on planet Earth. EM: This is a real possibility. The fastest way to get from one place to another, if it's a long distance, is a rocket. It's basically an ICBM. CA: But it has to land -- Because it's an ICBM, it has to land probably offshore, because it's loud. So why not have a tunnel that then connects to the city with Tesla? And Neuralink. I mean, if you going to go to Mars having a telepathic connection with loved ones back home, even if there's a time delay... EM: These are not intended to be connected, by the way. But there certainly could be some synergies, yeah. CA: Surely there is a growing argument that you should actually put all these things together into one company and just have a company devoted to creating a future that’s exciting, and let a thousand flowers bloom. Have you been thinking about that? EM: I mean, it is tricky because Tesla is a publicly-traded company, and the investor base of Tesla and SpaceX and certainly Boring Company and Neuralink are quite different. Boring Company and Neuralink are tiny companies. CA: By comparison. EM: Yeah, Tesla's got 110,000 people. SpaceX I think is around 12,000 people. Boring Company and Neuralink are both under 200 people. So they're little, tiny companies, but they will probably get bigger in the future. They will get bigger in the future. It's not that easy to sort of combine these things. CA: Traditionally, you have said that for SpaceX especially, you wouldn't want it public, because public investors wouldn't support the craziness of the idea of going to Mars or whatever. EM: Yeah, making life multi-planetary is outside of the normal time horizon of Wall Street analysts. (Laughs) To say the least. CA: I think something's changed, though. What's changed is that Tesla is now so powerful and so big and throws off so much cash that you actually could connect the dots here. Just tell the public that x-billion dollars a year, whatever your number is, will be diverted to the Mars mission. I suspect you'd have massive interest in that company. And it might unlock a lot more possibility for you, no? EM: I would like to give the public access to ownership of SpaceX, but I mean the thing that like, the overhead associated with a public company is high. I mean, as a public company, you're just constantly sued. It does occupy like, a fair bit of ... You know, time and effort to deal with these things. CA: But you would still only have one public company, it would be bigger, and have more things going on. But instead of being on four boards, you'd be on one. EM: I'm actually not even on the Neuralink or Boring Company boards. And I don't really attend the SpaceX board meetings. We only have two a year, and I just stop by and chat for an hour. The board overhead for a public company is much higher. CA: I think some investors probably worry about how your time is being split, and they might be excited by you know, that. Anyway, I just woke up the other day thinking, just, there are so many ways in which these things connect. And you know, just the simplicity of that mission, of building a future that is worth getting excited about, might appeal to an awful lot of people. Elon, you are reported by Forbes and everyone else as now, you know, the world's richest person. EM: That’s not a sovereign. CA: (Laughs) EM: You know, I think it’s fair to say that if somebody is like, the king or de facto king of a country, they're wealthier than I am. CA: But it’s just harder to measure -- So $300 billion. I mean, your net worth on any given day is rising or falling by several billion dollars. How insane is that? EM: It's bonkers, yeah. CA: I mean, how do you handle that psychologically? There aren't many people in the world who have to even think about that. EM: I actually don't think about that too much. But the thing that is actually more difficult and that does make sleeping difficult is that, you know, every good hour or even minute of thinking about Tesla and SpaceX has such a big effect on the company that I really try to work as much as possible, you know, to the edge of sanity, basically. Because you know, Tesla’s getting to the point where probably will get to the point later this year, where every high-quality minute of thinking is a million dollars impact on Tesla. Which is insane. I mean, the basic, you know, if Tesla is doing, you know, sort of $2 billion a week, let’s say, in revenue, it’s sort of $300 million a day, seven days a week. You know, it's ... CA: If you can change that by five percent in an hour’s brainstorm, that's a pretty valuable hour. EM: I mean, there are many instances where a half-hour meeting, I was able to improve the financial outcome of the company by $100 million in a half-hour meeting. CA: There are many other people out there who can't stand this world of billionaires. Like, they are hugely offended by the notion that an individual can have the same wealth as, say, a billion or more of the world's poorest people. EM: If they examine sort of -- I think there's some axiomatic flaws that are leading them to that conclusion. For sure, it would be very problematic if I was consuming, you know, billions of dollars a year in personal consumption. But that is not the case. In fact, I don't even own a home right now. I'm literally staying at friends' places. If I travel to the Bay Area, which is where most of Tesla engineering is, I basically rotate through friends' spare bedrooms. I don't have a yacht, I really don't take vacations. It’s not as though my personal consumption is high. I mean, the one exception is a plane. But if I don't use the plane, then I have less hours to work. CA: I mean, I personally think you have shown that you are mostly driven by really quite a deep sense of moral purpose. Like, your attempts to solve the climate problem have been as powerful as anyone else on the planet that I'm aware of. And I actually can't understand, personally, I can't understand the fact that you get all this criticism from the Left about, "Oh, my God, he's so rich, that's disgusting." When climate is their issue. Philanthropy is a topic that some people go to. Philanthropy is a hard topic. How do you think about that? EM: I think if you care about the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult. SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and The Boring Company are philanthropy. If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy. Tesla is accelerating sustainable energy. This is a love -- philanthropy. SpaceX is trying to ensure the long-term survival of humanity with a multiple-planet species. That is love of humanity. You know, Neuralink is trying to help solve brain injuries and existential risk with AI. Love of humanity. Boring Company is trying to solve traffic, which is hell for most people, and that also is love of humanity. CA: How upsetting is it to you to hear this constant drumbeat of, "Billionaires, my God, Elon Musk, oh, my God?" Like, do you just shrug that off or does it does it actually hurt? EM: I mean, at this point, it's water off a duck's back. CA: Elon, I’d like to, as we wrap up now, just pull the camera back and just think ... You’re a father now of seven surviving kids. EM: Well, I mean, I'm trying to set a good example because the birthrate on Earth is so low that we're facing civilizational collapse unless the birth rate returns to a sustainable level. CA: Yeah, you've talked about this a lot, that depopulation is a big problem, and people don't understand how big a problem it is. EM: Population collapse is one of the biggest threats to the future of human civilization. And that is what is going on right now. CA: What drives you on a day-to-day basis to do what you do? EM: I guess, like, I really want to make sure that there is a good future for humanity and that we're on a path to understanding the nature of the universe, the meaning of life. Why are we here, how did we get here? And in order to understand the nature of the universe and all these fundamental questions, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness. Certainly it must not diminish or go out. Or we certainly won’t understand this. I would say I’ve been motivated by curiosity more than anything, and just desire to think about the future and not be sad, you know? CA: And are you? Are you not sad? EM: I'm sometimes sad, but mostly I'm feeling I guess relatively optimistic about the future these days. There are certainly some big risks that humanity faces. I think the population collapse is a really big deal, that I wish more people would think about because the birth rate is far below what's needed to sustain civilization at its current level. And there's obviously ... We need to take action on climate sustainability, which is being done. And we need to secure the future of consciousness by being a multi-planet species. We need to address -- Essentially, it's important to take whatever actions we can think of to address the existential risks that affect the future of consciousness. CA: There's a whole generation coming through who seem really sad about the future. What would you say to them? EM: Well, I think if you want the future to be good, you must make it so. Take action to make it good. And it will be. CA: Elon, thank you for all this time. That is a beautiful place to end. Thanks for all you're doing. EM: You're welcome.