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[
{
"content": "Yeah, you compare that to like a Galaxy Note 9.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Sure.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Like, how the fuck did that become that, right? And I wonder when I see this HTC Vive, I’m like, „What is that thing going to be ten years from now when we’re making fun of what it is now?“ I mean, how ingrained, and how connected and interconnected is this technology going to be in our life?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It will be, at some point, indistinguishable from reality.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,700 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah. And I want to stress, this is not just a concept or a rendering. We’re starting to ramp up manufacturing of these cells at our pilot 10 GWh production facility, just around the corner.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. So. Yeah. It’s a video of some of what’s going on in the plant. Now. I mean, to be clear, it will take about a year to reach the 10 GWh capacity. This is important to appreciate. When you build a factory, there’s a certain capacity that you design to, and then it takes some period of time to actually achieve that capacity. I would say it’s probably about a year before we get to the 10 GWh annualized rate with the pilot plant. And this is just a pilot plant. The actual production plants will be more on the order of maybe 200 GWh, maybe more over time.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "But let’s stack up everything we just saw at the cell level. So just the cell form factor change enables a 14% $/kWh reduction, just that cell form factor change. And now that you’ve been teased on this factory, we’re going to go on and walk step-by-step through that factory and discuss a series of innovations there.\nWhen thinking about the ideal cell factory, we have inspirations behind us in the paper and bottling industry, wherefrom humble beginnings, over a century of innovation has enabled mass scale, continuous motion, unbelievably low manufacturing costs. And when we think about the lithium-ion industry, which is really only in its third decade of high-volume production, it has so far to go to achieve similar scale and simplicity. And that was the inspiration that we set out to the team as we thought about how to marry cell design and manufacturing in the best possible factory.\nAnd let’s talk a little bit about what’s in a cell factory. First, there’s an electrode process where the active materials are coated into films onto foils. Then those coated foils are wound in the winding process we just talked about where if you do have tabs, you have to start and stop a lot. Then the jelly roll is assembled into the can, sealed, filled with electrolyte, and then sent to formation where the cell is charged for the first time and where the sort of the electrochemistry is set and the quality of the cell is verified.\nAnd we set out at every step of this process to try to take that inspiration we just showed and think about how we make those processes fundamentally better and more scalable. And one of the most important processes is where it all begins, the wet process of the electrode coding. And just to give you all a sense of scale, I’m going to walk through what’s in that wet process.\nYou’ve got mixing where the powders are mixed with either a water or a solvent, solvents for the cathode. That mix then goes into a large coat and dry oven where the slurry is coated onto the foil, huge ovens, tens of meters long, dried, and that solvent then has to be recovered. You can see the solvent recovery system. And then, finally, the coated foil is compressed to the final density. And when you’re looking at this, you’re like, wow, that’s a lot of equipment for one step, especially when you consider that little spec next to the coating oven is a person. This is serious iron involved in making batteries.\nWouldn’t it be great if we could skip that solvent step, which is one of those dig a ditch, and then fill it kind of things where you put the solvent in and then take it out and recycle it, and just go straight to a dry mix to coat? And that’s what the dry process really is about. And in the most basic form, you can see it here on a benchtop, literally powder into film, as simple as that.",
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},
{
"content": "I mean, it’s hard actually, just to be clear. If this was easy, everyone would do it. It’s not like dry coating electrode is actually easy. It’s actually very hard to do what appears to be a simple thing. And it’s worth noting, we did acquire Maxwell a little over a year ago, I guess, and certainly a good company and everything. But the dry coating they had was like, it’s like a sort of, I would call proof of concept.\nSince the acquisition, we’ve actually ramped the machine that does dry coating four times, so a revision full post acquisition of the machine. And there’s still a lot of work to do. So I would not say this is completely in the bag. It’s still a lot of work to do. And as you grow, as you scale, go from benchtop to lab to pilot to volume production, there are actually major issues that you encounter at every level. It’s not like you make something work on your bench and bingo, now you can make a bazillion of it.",
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]
| 1,701 |
[
{
"content": "Didn’t you come up with some crazy tiles for your roof that are solar paneled?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, I have it on my roof right now, actually. I’m just trying it out. The thing is, it takes a while to test roof stuff because roofs have to last a long time. So, like, you want your roof to last like 30 years.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Could you put it over a regular roof?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No. So, there are two versions. It’s like the solar panels you put on a roof. So, like, it depends on whether your roof’s new or old. So, if your roof’s new, you don’t want to replace the roof. You want to put solar panels on the roof.So, that’s like retrofit, you know. And they were trying to make the retrofit panels look real nice.\nBut then, the new product was coming out with it is if you have a roof that’s either you’re building a house, or you’re going to replace your roof anyway, then you make the tiles have solar cells embedded in the tiles.And then, it’s quite a tricky thing because you want to not see the solar cell behind the glass tile. So, you have to really work with the glass, and the various coatings, and the layers, so that you don’t see the solar cells behind the glass. Otherwise, it doesn’t look right.So, it’s really tricky.",
"role": "assistant"
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]
| 1,702 |
[
{
"content": "It’s just constant ideas just bouncing around.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Damn.So, when everybody leaves, it’s just Elon sitting at home brushing his teeth, just a bunch of ideas bouncing around your head.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, all the time.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,703 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Outside Twitter?",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.\nYou’re brave.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "What are you doing, pointing camera at the sign or something?",
"role": "assistant"
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]
| 1,704 |
[
{
"content": "It’s doable.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s doable. Yes.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Well, that’s the human spirit right there to believe.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. I mean, it did prompt me to think about just hate in general, which is you want to be careful of one of those things where you wish for something that sounds good, but if you get it’s actually a dystopian situation. So if you wish for world peace sounds good, but how’d it enforced and at what cost eternal peace? It might actually be worse to have eternal peace because of what that would entail. The suppression of everyone, it might be the suppression of progress. It might be an ossified society that never changes. What I’m saying is that there is an argument that if you wish for no war, you should be careful what you wish for because what’s required in order for there to be no war might be worse than a little war.",
"role": "assistant"
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]
| 1,705 |
[
{
"content": "Like, literally, Radio Shack?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Like Fry’s.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Oh, Fry’s. That’s better.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "You’re going to have a hard time getting a USB cable right now at Fry’s because we bought every one of them.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,706 |
[
{
"content": "How much can you talk about that right now?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I don’t want to jump the gun on that.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "But what’s like the ultimate… – What’s the idea behind it, like, what are you trying to accomplish with it? Like, what would you like best case scenario?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I think, best case scenario, we effectively emerge with A.I. where A.I. serves as a tertiary cognition layer. We’ve got the limbic system – kind of the primitive brain essentially. You’ve got the cortex. So, you’re currently in a symbiotic relationship. Your cortex and limbic system are in a symbiotic relationship. And generally, people like their cortex, and they like their limbic system. I haven’t met anyone who wants to delete their limbic system or delete their cortex. Everybody seems to like both.\nAnd the cortex is mostly in service to the limbic system. People may think that their thinking part of themselves is in charge, but it’s mostly their limbic system that’s in charge. And the cortex is trying to make the limbic system happy. That’s what most of that computing power is oriented towards. How can I make the limbic system happy? That’s what it’s trying to do.\nNow, if we do have a third layer, which is the A.I. extension of yourself, that is also symbiotic. And there’s enough bandwidth between the cortex and the A.I. extension of yourself, such that the A.I. doesn’t de facto separate. Then that could be a good outcome. That could be quite a positive outcome for the future.",
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]
| 1,707 |
[
{
"content": "„I just don’t have the time.“",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I have a design for a plane.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "You do?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,708 |
[
{
"content": "Right.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "So, it really is all about the journey.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Or transcendence from whatever we are now into something that doesn’t worry about death.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "The universe, as we know it, will dissipate into a fine mist of cold nothingness eventually.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,709 |
[
{
"content": "How do we make sure it works? We try it on prisoners? What do you do? Take rapists? Cut holes in their head?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, like I said if somebody has got a serious brain injury and people that have very severe brain injuries and then you can fix those brain injuries. Then you prove out that it works and envelope expands and make more and more brain injuries, solve more and more. At a certain age, we all are going to get Alzheimer’s, or we’re all going to get senile. Then moms forget the names of their kids and that kind of thing.\nIt’s like you said, okay, well this would allow you to remember your names of your kids and have a normal, a much more normal life where you were able to function much later in life. So I think essentially almost everyone would find a need at some point if you get old enough to use a neural link. Then it’s like, okay, so we can improve the functionality and improve the communication speed. So then you will not have to use your thumbs to communicate with the computer.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Do you ever sit down and extrapolate? Do you ever sit down and think about all the different iterations of this and what this eventually leads to?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, sure. I think about it a lot. Like I said, this is not something that’s going to sneak up on you. Getting FDA approval for this stuff is not overnight. I don’t know; we probably have to be on version 10 or something before it would realistically be a human AI symbiote situation. You’ll see it coming.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,710 |
[
{
"content": "That’s not bad.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It was rear-biased.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Right, but not bad. Considering like a 911, which is like one of the most popular sports cars of all time. Heavy rear-end bias.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I mean, yeah. The 911, I’m not going to joke, is like the master despite Newton not being on their side. If you’re fighting Newton, it’s very difficult. The moments of inertia on a 911 don’t make any sense.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,711 |
[
{
"content": "7%?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Everything? Including tires, and wheels, bolts, brakes?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, even every-",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,712 |
[
{
"content": "But my question is, I know how much time you must be spending on your Tesla factory, I know how much time you must be spending on SpaceX, and yet you still have time to dig holes under the ground in L.A. and come up with these ideas and then implement them.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I got a million ideas.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "I’m sure you do.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "There is no shortage of that.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,713 |
[
{
"content": "How much longer, and maybe the answer is forever, how much longer are we going to have to call it the formerly known as Twitter? I mean even Prince went back to Prince instead of… Is it always going to be X?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s definitely always going to be X.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So X is going through some changes, as I said, a lot of media companies are going through some changes. You’re in charge of an incredible platform, Elon, how do you feel that’s going?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I think it’s going pretty well so far. We’re seeing record usage. We’ve added a tremendous amount of functionality. I mentioned that it used to be that you can only do a short text and maybe a picture or something like that, a short video, but now you can do long form text, long form video. We’ve added audio video calling, so you can not just do text, DMs, you can do video calling. We’ve improved the algorithm, I think significantly and made the system faster and better and that’s reflected in the increased usage.",
"role": "assistant"
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]
| 1,714 |
[
{
"content": "Have you given any consideration whatsoever to the Flat Earth movement?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I think that’s a troll situation.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Oh, it’s not. No, it’s not. You would like to think that…",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Okay.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,715 |
[
{
"content": "This fucking podcast, dude, we’re talking about chimps every episode.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s chimp city? Okay.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "People are laughing right now. Yeah, constantly, I’m obsessed. I saw that David Attenborough documentary on chimps where they were eating those colobus monkeys and ripping them apart.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes, that’s rough. Gruesome.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,716 |
[
{
"content": "It seems that you believe in the fact that we’re all going to drive electric cars, and maybe someday only by computers, not by human beings. Do you still believe in that?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I think it’s fairly clear that, to me, at least, that all transport will go fully electric. It’s better for the world from an environmental standpoint and from an economic standpoint if we transition to electric transport sooner. It will help with pollution and global warming and all that stuff. And I do think we’re headed towards an age of autonomous transport where you know, you just summon the car with your phone or something and then get in, and you just tell the computer where you want to go, and it takes you there. It’s gonna happen very quickly, I think maybe in four or five years.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, but how do you react to some, you know, the public opinions, skepticism? Because it seems a lot of people are watching you and say, well, let’s see how far this can go.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I suppose there’s skepticism about anything new, that’s normal. And I mean, I’m not expecting that people will just believe me. But I think if you look at generally my predictions, they’re more often correct than they’re not. I mean, I’m really just talking about five years. You know, we’ll have affordable electric cars that go long ranges, and they will be autonomous.\n(03:50 – 05:23)\nA documentary sequence about Elon Musk in Chinese, translation not available",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,717 |
[
{
"content": "997?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Great car, man.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. I mean, particularly, the Porsche wouldn’t have the variable vanes on the turbo, and it didn’t have the turbo lag. That was great.That was really great. The turbo lag is, like, you know, you floor it, like phone home, call your mom.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,718 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah. And then on the grid side, we have a similar mountain to climb, 1600 times growth from today’s grid batteries to go a hundred percent renewable on the grid and to take all of the existing heating fossil fuel uses in homes and businesses, a hundred percent electric.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. And this number, I think, might grow even more. As the world economy matures, and as countries with high populations industrialize, we could see this number be even more. But let’s say it’s like roughly 20 to 25 TWh per year sustained for 15 to 25 years to transition the world to renewable. This is a lot.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Today’s batteries cannot scale fast enough. They’re just too small. For Giga Nevada, 150 GWh per year is what we probably expect to make out of there. But this is really pretty small in the grand scheme of things. That’s only 0.15 TWh. And it costs too much.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,719 |
[
{
"content": "But you’re having fun. Like this thing, you know, you program a car to do a ballet dance, you’re having fun.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s great.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "But how do you have the time to do that? I don’t understand. While you’re digging holes under the earth, and sending rockets into space, and powering people in Australia, like, how the fuck do you have time to make the car dance ballet?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I mean, in that case, there were some engineers at Tesla that said, „You know, what if we make this car dance and play music?“ I was like, „That sounds great. Please do it. Let’s try to get it done in time for Christmas.“ We did.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,720 |
[
{
"content": "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.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes, population collapse is one of the biggest threats of the future of human civilization. And that is what’s going on right now.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "What drives you on a day-to-day basis to do what you do?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "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 wouldn’t understand this. I would say I’ve been motivated by curiosity more than anything, and just a desire to think about the future and not be sad, you know.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,721 |
[
{
"content": "Yes.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "You know, have a negative — You know, you can have a negative view of the world because, you know, you’re just interacting with a lot of criminals. But, actually, most of society does not consist of criminals.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Right.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "And I, actually, had this conversation at dinner several years ago with a district attorney. I was like, „Man, it must, sometimes, seem pretty, pretty dark because, you know, man, there’s some terrible human beings out there. And he was like, „Yup.“ And he was like dealing with some case, which consisted of a couple of old ladies that would run people over somehow for insurance money. It was rough. Like, „Wow, that’s pretty rough.“ It’s hard to maintain faith in humanity if you’re a district attorney, but, you know, it’s only a few percent of society that are actually bad.\nAnd then if you go to the worst, say 0.1% of the society of the worst, one in a thousand, one in a million, you know. Like how bad is the millionth worst person in the United States? Pretty damn bad. Like damn evil. One in a million of evil is so evil; people cannot even conceive of it. But there are 330 million people in the United States. So, that’s 330 people out there somewhere. But by the same token, there are also 330 people who are incredible angels and unbelievably good human beings on the other side.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,722 |
[
{
"content": "Oh listen, man, I think about this all the time. Yeah, I mean, it’s unquestionable that one day that will be the case, as long as we keep going, as long as nothing interrupts us, and if we start from scratch, and, you know, we’re single-celled organisms all over again. And then, millions and millions of years later, we become the next thing that is us with creativity and the ability to change its environment.\nIt’s going to keep monkeying with things until it figures out a way to change reality. To change — I mean, almost like punch a hole through what is this thing into what it wants it to be and create new things. And then, those new things will intersect with other people’s new things, and there will be this ultimate pathway of infinite ideas and expression all through technology.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "And then, we’re going to wonder like, „Why are we here? What are we doing?“",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Let’s find out.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,723 |
[
{
"content": "We would need 135 fully built out in Nevada Giga factories to achieve 20 TWh a year. It’s not scalable enough of a solution. We need a dramatic rethink of the cell manufacturing system to scale as fast as we can and should.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, and I think we should view this as more than just a question of money. Money is sort of an material thing, but it’s really the amount of effort. You have a certain amount of effort in terms of people and machines, and depending on how efficient that effort is, for a given amount of effort, you want the most amount of batteries. It’s not just the question of, well, if we have $2 trillion, tomorrow you could make this. It’s not that easy. You actually need to organize a massive number of people, build a lot of machines, build the machines that make the machines. And so it’s incredibly important to have that effort yield the most number of batteries.\nAnd then goal two: obviously we need to make more affordable cars. I think one of the things that troubles me the most is that we don’t yet have a truly affordable car, and that is something that we will make in the future. But in order to do that, we’ve got to get the cost of batteries down, and we’ve got to be better at manufacturing. And we need to do something about this curve. The curve of the cost per kilowatt-hour of batteries is not improving fast enough. We’ve given this a lot of thought over many years to say, okay, how can we radically improve the cost per kilowatt-hour curve? It’s been somewhat flattening out actually in recent years.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. I mean, early growth was promising, but you can see we’re kind of plateauing. So that’s what’s motivating us to rethink how cells are produced and designed.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, exactly. EV market share is growing, but EVs still aren’t accessible to all. And you can see, as Drew were saying, it’s like starting to flatten out a little bit because the rate of improvement of the affordability of cars is just not fast enough. That’s why we’ve got Battery Day.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,724 |
[
{
"content": "I bought the first one in Austria.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Okay, great, thanks. So, we started off, I think, it was 2G at the time or something. And now, our cars are about to transition to 5G and everything. It’s important to have a connected car, so you can update the software and you can do remote analysis. A lot of the problems can be solved with a software update. I mean, our car is extremely adaptable. It’s basically like a computer on wheels. This means less time that people have to go to a service center.\nAnd also, the car can diagnose its problems, tell the service center ahead of time, we can stock the parts, and then we can be much more efficient about service. And you can also watch any TV in the car. It has high-speed data car activity; you can watch, really any show you want on the car.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Is it a specific entertainment platform, or you just take anything out of the internet?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, we just worked with Netflix and Disney and everyone else and just made it available. There’s also a web browser, so you can technically watch anything that’s on the internet, as well. And it also has video games. I think entertainment is going to become extremely important, especially as we move to fully autonomous cars. If the car is driving itself, then what are you going to do while you’re driving? Probably you want entertainment, maybe some productivity stuff.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,725 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah, there’s a French song like that.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "[foreign language 01:38:39]",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I regret nothing.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,726 |
[
{
"content": "That’s probably bad for me.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I’m scrolling as fast as I can to sort of see, I guess there’s some complaints about Twitter Spaces needing some improvement. Let’s fix Twitter Spaces is one of the comments. People like the fact that my dog Floki is the CEO. I’m really just scrolling as fast as I can here.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "I guess my reflection on this interview-",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I just want to say I like BBC.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,727 |
[
{
"content": "Might as well…",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Might as well.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "…be human. So on a darker topic, you’ve expressed serious concern about existential threats of A.I. It’s perhaps one of the greatest challenges that our civilization faces, but since, I would say, we’re kind of an optimistic descendant of apes, perhaps we can find several paths of escaping the harm of A.I., so if I can give you three options, maybe you can comment which do you think is the most promising?\nSo one is scaling up efforts in A.I. safety and beneficial A.I. research, in the hope of finding an algorithmic or maybe a policy solution. Two is becoming a multi-planetary species as quickly as possible, and three is merging with A.I. and riding the wave of that increasing intelligence, as it continuously improves. What do you think is most promising, most interesting, as a civilization that we should invest in?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I think there’s a tremendous amount of investment going on in A.I. Where there is a lack of investment is in A.I. safety, and there should be, in my view, a government agency that oversees anything related to A.I. to confirm that it does not represent a public safety risk, just as there is a regulatory authority for the Food and Drug Administration, NHTSA for automotive safety, there’s the FAA for aircraft safety. We’ve generally come to the conclusion that it is important to have a government referee or a referee that is serving the public interest in ensuring that things are safe when there’s a potential danger to the public.\nI would argue that A.I. is unequivocally something that has potential to be dangerous to the public and therefore should have a regulatory agency, just as other things that are dangerous to the public have a regulatory agency. But let me tell you, the problem with this is that government moves very slowly. Usually, the way a regulatory agency comes into being is that something terrible happens, there’s a huge public outcry, and years after that, there’s a regulatory agency or a rule put in place.\nTake something like seatbelts. It was known for, I don’t know, a decade or more, that seatbelts would have a massive impact on safety and save so many lives and serious injuries. And the car industry fought the requirements to put seatbelts in tooth and nail. That’s crazy. And, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of people probably died because of that. And they said people wouldn’t buy cars if they had seatbelts, which is obviously absurd.\nOr look at the tobacco industry and how long they fought anything about smoking. That’s part of why I helped make that movie „Thank You for Smoking“ because you’ll see just how pernicious it can be when you have these companies effectively achieve regulatory capture of government, they’re bad. People in the A.I. community refer to the advent of digital superintelligence as the singularity. That is not to say that it is good or bad, but that it is very difficult to predict what will happen after that point. And that there’s some probability it will be bad, some probability it will be good. We obviously want to affect that probability and have it be more good than bad.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,728 |
[
{
"content": "Do you think that perhaps productivity is maybe more attractive to you than enlightenment or even the concept of whatever enlightenment means. Like, what are you trying to achieve when you’re meditating all the time? With you, it seems almost like there’s a franticness to your creativity that comes out of this burning furnace. And in order for you to calm that thing down, you might have to throw too much water on it.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s like a never-ending explosion.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "What is it like? Try to explain it to a dumb person like me. What’s going on?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Never-ending explosion.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,729 |
[
{
"content": "But you accept there has to be a line in terms of hate speech. I mean, you are not looking at total 100% unrestricted speech.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I generally… I’m often seen in that view, if the people in a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it. So for example, you cannot advocate murdering someone. That’s illegal in the United States, everywhere really, I suspect. So there are limits to speech.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "I mean, I guess taking your argument to a logical conclusion, then, do you accept that there’s more misinformation on the platform if it’s not being policed in the same way?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I actually think there’s less these days because we’ve eliminated so many of the bots which were pushing scams and spam. And previously, previous management turned a blind eye to the bot because their bonuses were tied to user growth. And if your compensation’s tied to user growth, well, you’re not going to look too closely at some of the users. That’s part of the problem. So I think we’ve got less misinformation because we don’t have one problem that we used to do. And we also have given a lot of attention to community notes, which corrects, with community itself, corrects misinformation. It’s been very effective.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,730 |
[
{
"content": "I’ve interviewed a lot of …. uh, I guess they’re biologists, they’re worried about essentially… they said you have to be under the earth, a couple 100 feet?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, no, no. Definitely not a couple hundred. You know, first of all, half the time, you’re shielded by Mars itself. Half the radiation is just the planet shielding you. And then you want maybe have like, I don’t know, three feet of dirt ish on the roof or just a kind of a thick roof. They’ll be fine.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So you’re not worried about becoming shorter and stupider by moving to Mars?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, I think we might become taller, actually, on Mars. A little bit taller because the gravity is roughly 40% of ours.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,731 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah. What’s the hardest part?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It might sound great if it’s turned on, but what if it doesn’t turn off?",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Now, I showed you the\nisolation tank\n, and you’ve never experienced that before. I think that could help you turn it off a little bit just for the night.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Okay.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,732 |
[
{
"content": "To set the stage today, our energy economy, let’s be honest, it’s dirty and it’s wasteful. Over 80% of global energy, primary energy, comes from fossil fuels, and only 1/3 of that global energy actually ends up delivering useful work or heat. This is the problem statement, but we’re here to talk about the solution.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Some of this I’m going to elaborate because there’s a very wide range of technical expertise out there from people who are like, you know, whatever, level 9 wizards in the subject to people who do not do engineering at all. If you have a gasoline car, less than a third, and maybe only 25%, of the energy in the gasoline is converted into motion, and the rest is turned into waste heat that doesn’t do any good at all. And there’s a lot of energy required even to get the oil out of the ground, to refine the oil, and to transport the gasoline to the gas station.\nWhen you look at all that for a typical gasoline car, less than 20%, fully considered, of the energy from the oil actually goes into motion. So when we see people doing calculations for what does it take to create a sustainable energy Earth, they assume that the same energy amount is required for an electrified civilization versus a combustion civilization. This is not true. Because most of the energy of combustion is waste heat.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "And even to get the fuel to combustion in the first place and get it to the end use, there’s a lot lost along the way. I mean, this is the primary energy consumption, 165 petawatt hours a year. Petawatt hour is a trillion kilowatt hours, so it’s a large amount of energy. But the nice thing about an electrified economy – there’s a better way, we’re going to talk about it – is that through end-use efficiency and through efficiency along every step of the way, actually, the total energy use halves. So, one of the most enabling aspects of electrifying everything is that the sustainable energy economy is that much easier to accomplish. It’s actually half the problem statement of the fossil fuel economy.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "And we’re being conservative here. It could be better than a half. But we’re trying to have assumptions that are reasonable and not overly optimistic, in fact, slightly pessimistic. It’s really better than half, but just say for… it’s easy to make the argument that we need half as much energy with an electric economy versus a combustion economy.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,733 |
[
{
"content": "The area around Twitter’s headquarters especially is like zombie apocalypse is the perfect way to describe it.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, literally. It’s like people think maybe you’re exaggerating. I’m like, no, you can just definitely come here any day of the week, including 10 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon. We’re not talking midnight stuff. Literally mid-morning driving into Twitter, it looks insane. So people can just come here and see it with their own eyes, it’s next level.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Or watch the videos on Twitter because it’s safer.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,734 |
[
{
"content": "So you can change your past?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "You could change what you think was your past. Yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Well, so if you had a dramatic experience?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "This whole thing right now could be a replayed memory.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,735 |
[
{
"content": "I’m too stupid for this conversation.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It makes sense, though.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "No, I’m sure it does.\nNow, when you think about this new idea of design, when you have this idea about improving planes, are you going to bring this to somebody and check this one out?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I have a lot on my plate.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,736 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah. Pretty great. Does it feel strange to have a child while this craziness is going? Does it feel like you’ve had children before? Is this any weirder?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Actually, I think it’s better being older and having a kid. I appreciate it more. Yeah, babies are awesome.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "They are pretty awesome.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "They’re awesome. Yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,737 |
[
{
"content": "Okay. You have Starlink bringing fast-speed internet to almost every, like, square meter on Earth.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Starlink is going to be great.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "It’s going to be great. But how…",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s part of SpaceX.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,738 |
[
{
"content": "For retribution.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Their memory is very good.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "I bet it is. And it is getting better every day.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s really good.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,739 |
[
{
"content": "That’s my hope right now with the way we’re able to communicate with each other today, and how radically different it is than generations past is that we all just, the dust settles. We all realize, like what you’re saying, that most people are good.\nMost people are good.\nThe vast majority.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes. I think if you give people the benefit of doubt, for sure.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "I think you’re right. Do you know who could help with that? Mushrooms.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Mushrooms.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,740 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah. I wonder, is there a possible somehow emergent thing there that could challenge Wikipedia? Wikipedia is a different kind of thing, which is more permanent articles about things.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Wikipedia is very hierarchical. Whereas, Community Notes is inherently not. There is no hierarchy. The asset test is I can’t change a community note if somebody put a gun to my head. And Community Notes, all the code is open source, 100%. All the data is open source, 100%. So, you can completely recreate any note in the system independently. So, if there was any interference, you’d notice immediately.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "By The way, on the topic of Grok, it’s actually pretty good at criticizing you, which is great.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Okay.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,741 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah.\nWell, it’s amazing that like Rolex is that it’s all done mechanically.There are no batteries in there. There is no nothing.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. You could do the same thing. You create a little charger that’s based on wrist movement. It really depends on how much energy your watch uses.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "You know what’s fucked up about that, though? We accept a certain amount of like fuckery with those watches. Like I brought my watch. I have a Rolex that my friend, Lorenzo, gave me, and I brought it to the watch store, and I said, „This thing’s always fast.“ I said, „It’s always like after a couple of months, it’s like five minutes fast.“ And they go, „Yup.“ They go, „Yeah.“",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Really?",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,742 |
[
{
"content": "They can’t. They tried. They say, every few months, whether it’s four months, or five months, or six months, it’s going to be a couple of minutes fast.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Okay. It seems like they should really recalibrate that because if it’s always fast, you can just, you know, delete those minutes.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "You should figure that shit out. You need to fucking kick down the door at Rolex and go, „You bitches are lazy.“",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s kind of amazing that you can keep time mechanically on a wristwatch with these tiny little gears.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,743 |
[
{
"content": "Less than 7%. So, that’s basically-",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Every body panel is different. The entire structure was different. We couldn’t use the HVAC system, the air conditioner. It was a belt-driven air conditioner. So, now, we needed something that was electrically driven. We need a new AC compressor.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "And all that takes away from the battery life as well, right?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. We need a small, highly efficient air conditioning system that fits in a tiny car and was electrically powered, not belt-driven. It was very difficult.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,744 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah. Can you be a little more weird?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "And funny?",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "And funny? We’re really being mean to the system. Absolutely. If I were a hostage, I would probably be tied up with a bunch of computer cords and forced to tell knock, knock jokes to my captain. Seriously. But seriously being a hostage is no laughing matter. I mean, it’s trying to be a responsible adult in the room.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Literally, you might make the best of a bad situation by juggling chainsaws or something.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,745 |
[
{
"content": "So that’s a really important statement there because if the hardware is capable enough, that’s the hard thing to upgrade usually.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes, exactly.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Then the rest is a software problem.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes, software has no marginal cost, really.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,746 |
[
{
"content": "Oh, wow, okay. So it was substantial. Okay, we’re not talking peanuts here.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It depends on your relative scale. It’s a peanut to Google.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, no, that’s right. That’s right.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "This is a peanut. I mean, Google’s got $50 billion. Apple’s got $150 billion, some crazy amount of money. That’s just cash.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,747 |
[
{
"content": "Why don’t we concentrate on saving the planet instead of, you know, having the back door open?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I do think that 99% of our efforts should be focused on Earth. And really, 99.9% of our effort is focused on Earth. But I do think it’s worth saying: ‘Okay, let’s take 1% and try to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars and make life multi-planetary.’ And I think there’s a couple of good reasons for that. First of all, there’s always the possibility that there could be some terrible thing that happens on Earth that we maybe don’t anticipate. If you look at the fossil record and the fact that there’ve been five major extinction events in the last 500 million years, and what happened to the dinosaurs. They used to be here; they’re not around anymore. So that’s kind of the defensive argument. And then there’s what I call maybe the inspiration argument, the excitement. Building a city on Mars would just be this incredible adventure, that there be things in life that are exciting and inspiring that when you wake up in the morning, you’re like, yes, I’m glad to be alive. And I think having this great adventure would be like that.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "You know, there’s a proverb in Chinese called (… 06:53). Two thousand years ago, there was a man who spent the whole day worrying about what if the heaven falls down? Everyone laughed at him and said, you know, why can’t you be concerned about something more pragmatic, basically. So you are the guy who is worrying about maybe another, you know, Millennials away that we need to move to another planet?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, it’s not moving to another planet. It’s being multi-planet. We’re still going to be on Earth, but we’ll have Mars too. And we want to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species and ultimately be out there exploring the stars. I think that’s a much more exciting future than a future where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.\n(07:33 – 08:00)\nA documentary sequence about Elon Musk in Chinese, translation not available",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,748 |
[
{
"content": "Decoupled from humans. So this is the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So you feel like it’s inevitable, like an AI, a sentient AI, is essentially inevitable?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Super sentient AI. Like beyond a level that’s difficult to understand and impossible to understand probably.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,749 |
[
{
"content": "How much of those weigh, those cars, the Roadster?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I think it was 2,700 pounds.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "That’s still very light.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "2,700. Depending on which version, 2,650 to 2,750 pounds, something like that.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,750 |
[
{
"content": "How often do you smoke it?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Almost never. I mean, it’s-",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "How does it feel?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I don’t actually notice any effect.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,751 |
[
{
"content": "No, it’s going to be stuck in my head now. Yeah, there’s no me and whatever in quantum mechanics, wait. I mean is that part of the process of discovering, understanding the universe is understanding intelligence?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. I think we need to understand intelligence, understand consciousness. I mean there are some fundamental questions of what is thought, what is emotion? Is it really just one atom bumping into another atom? It feels like something more than that. So I think we’re probably missing some really big things.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Something that’ll be obvious in retrospect. You put the whole consciousness and motion.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, some people would quote like a soul religion, be a soul. You feel like you’re you, I mean you don’t feel like you’re just a collection of atoms, but on what dimension does thought exist? What dimension does do emotions exist? Because we feel them very strongly. I suspect there’s more to it than atoms bumping into atoms.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,752 |
[
{
"content": "Oh, he’s a legend. He’d want his soul, he’d want his essence in the building.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "And it’s there.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Is it?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s a real quirky house, yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,753 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah, the Jaguar E type with a giant long hood, that could be a giant solar panel.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, at the beginning of Tesla, I did want to have this like unfolding solar panel thing. They’d press a button, and it would just like unfold these solar panels, and like charge/recharge your car in the parking lot. Yeah, we could do that, but I think it’s probably better to just put that on your roof.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Right, yeah.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "And then, it’s be facing the sun all the time. Otherwise, your car could be in the shade. You know, it could be in the shade, it could be in a garage, or something like that.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,754 |
[
{
"content": "If AI were to take down Earth, we need a plan B. Let’s shift our attention to space. We spoke last time we talked 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.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes. Starship is extremely fundamental. 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% of the cost of the vehicle or of the whole launch. Maybe 70%. And we’ve now done that over 100 times.\nSo with Starship, we will be recovering the entire thing. At least that’s the goal. 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. You just refill propellants and go again. This is gigantic. Just as it would be in any other mode of transport.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,755 |
[
{
"content": "You can tell me. What you got? What’s going on?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I mean, the exciting thing to do would be some sort of electric vertical takeoff and landing, supersonic jet of some kind.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Vertical takeoff and landing meaning no need for a runway. Just shoot up straight in the air.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,756 |
[
{
"content": "He’s in jail right now, I think, for the rest of his life. And he put away — He would take like a young boy who would do something like steal something from a store, and he would put them in detention for, you know, five years. Something ridiculous egregious. And they investigated his history. And they found out that he was literally being paid off.\n(\nto Jamie\n) Was it by private prisons? Is that what the deal was? There was some sort of — But, anyway, this judge is-\nActually, two judges.\nTwo judges?\nTwo judges. Kids for cash scandals, let’s call them.2008, yeah. Common pleas judges. So, I think they are elected.\nAnd who was paying them? Someone — It was proven to the point where they’re in jail now that someone was paying them to put more asses in the seats in these private prisons.\nIt’s like a million-dollar payment to put them in a youth centers builder.\nA million-dollar payment?\nYeah.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I do think it’s this private prisons thing that is creating a bad incentive.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "It’s dark.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Right, yes. But, I mean, that judge is in prison.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,757 |
[
{
"content": ".",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "This is Roadster 20 Questions.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Does it have a steering wheel?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Not exactly.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,758 |
[
{
"content": "Did you cry or scream?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, I didn’t.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Smashing the apartment?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No. But sleep was difficult.\n(18:45 – 18:53)\nA documentary sequence about Elon Musk in Chinese, translation not available\n(refers to the sequence shown before)\nI wasn’t expecting that they\n(NASA)\ncall. Actually, I thought they were on vacation because it was so close to Christmas. You know, I thought – it was only a few days before Christmas. So I thought, well, there’s no way they’re going to call. They must have gone home for the year.\n(19:06 – 19:11)\nA documentary sequence about Elon Musk in Chinese, translation not available\nBut they called, and they said that SpaceX had this $1.4 billion contract.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,759 |
[
{
"content": "And awareness of potential.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes. I think this has shaken up the system. The system is somewhat moribund with lot of layers of bureaucracy, and I think that we’ve cut through some of that bureaucracy. And at some point, there probably will be a pandemic with a high mortality rate. Debate about like what’s high, but I mean something that’s killing a lot of 20-year-olds, let’s say. Like if you had Ebola type of mortality.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Spanish flu, something that attacks the immune systems of healthy people.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. Like killing large numbers of young, healthy people, define that as a high mortality. This is at least practice for something like that. And I think there’s – this given – it’s just a matter of time, that there will be eventually some such pandemic.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,760 |
[
{
"content": "Well, whereas-",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "You’re in the computer.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "You know, what defines where you are?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Exactly.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,761 |
[
{
"content": "I go with whatever\nMatt Taibbi\nsays. I trust him more than anybody. Matt Taibbi is onto something. As far as investigative reporters in particular, the way he reported the savings and loan crisis, the way he reports everything. I just listened to him above most. He’s my go-to guy.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "All right. I’ll check it out.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Oh, his Rolling Stone articles are amazing. His stuff on the savings and loan crisis, it’s just like, “What in the fuck?” And he’s not an economist by any stretch of the imagination. So he had to really deeply embed himself in that world to try to understand it and to be able to report on it. And also with a humorous flair.\nThere’s not that many of them. It’s hard. And not a location where like, we are no bullshit, Wearenobullshit.com, like the one place where you can say, “This is what we know, this is what we don’t know. This is what we think.” Not, “This person’s wrong, and here’s why.” Like, ah, God damn it. I can’t. You don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff that is open to interpretation.\nThis particular coronavirus issue that we’re dealing with right now seems to be a great illuminator of that very fact. Is that there’s so much data. And there’s so much that’s open to interpret. There’s so many things… because it’s all happening in real-time. Right? And particularly right now in California, we’re in stage two tomorrow, or Friday, two days from now. Stage two. Retail stores opening up. Things are changing. Like, no one knows the correct process that needs to take place to save the most amount of lives, but yet ensure that our culture and that our economy survives. It’s a lot of speculation and guessing. But if you go to certain places, they’ll tell you, “We know why, and we know this, and we know…” Oh, it’s hard.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. I mean, in general, I think we should be concerned about anything that’s a massive infringement on our civil liberties. So, you got to put a lot of weight on that. A lot of people died to win independence for the country and fight for the democracy that we have. And we should treasure that and not give up our liberties too easily. And I think we probably did that, actually.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,762 |
[
{
"content": "When was that?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "That was around late December, early January.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So that was the biggest sort of, I’m worried here?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Biggest crisis, yeah.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,763 |
[
{
"content": "But the NDAs for the full self-driving data.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I don’t know. People don’t seem to listen to me. Not sure there’s… I don’t know why there’s an NDA, we probably don’t need it. People just are ignoring it anyway so I’m not sure it matters.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Alright, so I’m gonna ignore this. I’m gonna keep getting questions. Let’s do two.\nHi Elon, Zia Yusuf from BCG. Could you talk a little bit about AI and robotics? You’ve expressed concerns in the past but now building some as well. What do you see as the issues that we do have to solve on that front?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I’ve said for a long time, I think AI safety is a really big deal. And we should have some regulatory agency that is overseeing AI safety. But there is not yet currently any such thing, and just generally, any kind of regulatory agency run by the government usually takes years to put in place. So, you know, after the population collapse issue, I think AI safety is probably the second biggest threat to the future of civilization. And yeah, like I said, I’m not quite sure what to do with it.\nTesla is arguably the world’s biggest robot maker because like we have basically semi-autonomous cars that will ultimately be fully autonomous. And we are building a humanoid robot that will be basically like the car but with legs. I kind of held off on doing that for a while because, you know, I certainly don’t want to hasten the AI apocalypse. But clearly, if you look at Boston Dynamics, these humanoid robots are gonna happen. So they’re gonna happen with or without Tesla. So it’s like, Tesla’s got a little bit more, I mean, a lot more ability to ensure robotics safety and AI. And I will try my best to do that.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,764 |
[
{
"content": "Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson was in here last week. I’m marveled at his ability to get through life without a case.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "That’s right.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "You know, he takes his phone, and he flips it in between his fingers like a soldier would do it with his rifle. He just rolls that shit in between his fingers. It’s marvelous. He says that’s the reason why they do it. He said, „Would you look at someone who has a rifle? Why would they do that? Why would they flip it around like that?“ It’s like, when it goes to drop, they have it in their hand. They catch it quickly.So, that’s what he does with his phone. He’s just flipping his phone around all the time.\n(\nJoe realizes that Elon examines something\n) I got that in Mexico. I was hoping it holds joints.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Does it do anything? It tips to open.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,765 |
[
{
"content": "You need to do both.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes, you need to do both, exactly.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So, what are some of the ideas that excite you today? Because there are so many brilliant ideas around the world. How could you keep focused on the things you’re doing instead of being distracted by so many other good ideas?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "There’s a lot of opportunity in electrification of cars, of aircraft, and of boats, and I think there’s a particular opportunity for a supersonic vertical takeoff and landing electric jet. That’s something I’d love to do at some point in the future if time allows.\n(23:41 – 24:44)\nA documentary sequence about Elon Musk in Chinese, translation not available",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,766 |
[
{
"content": "Let me ask you a question about XAI and what you’re doing because there’s an interesting thing that’s different, I think, about what you have relative to some of the others, which is you have data, you have information, you have all of the stuff that everybody in here has put on the platform to sort through, and I don’t know if everybody realized that initially. What is the value of that?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. Data is very important. You could say data is probably more valuable than gold.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "But then maybe you have the gold in X in a different way, in a way, again, that I don’t know if the public appreciates what that means.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes, X might be the single best source of data. People click on more links to X than anything else on earth. Sometimes people think Facebook or Instagram is a bigger thing, but actually, there are more links to X than anything. This is public information. You can Google it.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,767 |
[
{
"content": "Right? One sec.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Oh, hey Walter. Let’s invite Walter to speak. He may not wish to speak, but we can at least invite him.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Okay.\nHave I been invited?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "We’re clearly a well-oiled machine here.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,768 |
[
{
"content": "Mind viral immunity, meaning that once something like Neuralink gets established, the real concern is something that..- I mean, you said it’s Bluetooth, right? Or some future version of that? The idea is that something could possibly get into it, fuck it up.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, I’m talking about, like somebody, some cockeyed concept that happens right now.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Well, I know this virus is in embedded chips, right? They’ve embedded chips and then acquired viruses.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, when I’m talking about a mind virus, I’m talking about a concept that infects people’s minds.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,769 |
[
{
"content": "I mean, that’s something that’s been done for decades and decades. This is not rocket technology. And lastly, a small part of the pie, but a necessary part of the pie, is sustainably fueling planes and boats. Shipping accounts for 3% of global CO2. It’s ripe for electrification. Even with lithium iron phosphate long-haul ships can be fully battery-powered. So that’s a great opportunity to electrify.\nEnergy density is a little bit harder for planes. But short haul is doable today. With some improvements, we’ll get long-haul underway. But even in the meantime, we can leverage sustainable aviation fuels produced and stored using excess renewable electricity. There’s a lot of work going on in this space.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I mean, to really get long-range aircraft and long-range shipping to use lithium-ion, you need to redesign the ship and the plane to take advantage of the fact that it is a new source of energy. It’s a different architecture. Like with an electric car, you wouldn’t just take a gasoline car and stick a battery in it. That’s very suboptimal.\nIt’s much more efficient to have the battery be the structure of the car and make it mass efficient and optimized for batteries. If that’s done with aircraft, you can get long-range aircraft with cells at around 450 watt-hours per kilogram, which you can buy right now, actually. It’s expensive, but I think the price will come down.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So, when we stack up all of these efforts, we end up with the numbers we shared at the beginning of the presentation: 30 terawatts, 240 terawatt hours, $10 trillion.\nAnd you may be saying like: “I need some context. Is this feasible?” Spoiler alert, it’s entirely feasible. Just looking at it from a growth rate perspective, how much do we need to grow the deployment of these technologies? We’re talking about only a 3x growth rate in solar and wind deployment. Solar is already growing at a breakneck pace, as is wind. This gap is going to be closed really quickly. When we look at the electric vehicles, they have to grow 11x. Well, they grew 60% year on year last year. That growth rate is also going to close pretty darn. That gap is going to close pretty quickly as well.\nAnd lastly, storage. You know, Tesla’s energy storage business has grown at 65% CAGR\n(compound annual growth rate)\nsince 2016. The global energy storage businesses is accelerating pace as well. I mean, all these gaps are going to close, especially as this momentum of the transition to sustainable energy accelerates. And, of course, our goal on this page is 20 million EVs per year and one terawatt hour of stationary storage per year, basically, as soon as we can.\nAnd then, what about this investment? How do I have a reference point on this investment? Elon mentioned it’s 10% of one year’s world GDP. Another way of thinking about it is, how does it compare to what we invested last year in the fossil fuel infrastructure. And it’s 60% of that investment. So actually, building this sustainable energy economy is less than extending the fossil fuel economy from a year-over-year investment basis. So, very doable.\nWhen we look towards, does this fit on the planet? Absolutely. Less than 0.2% of land. As a reference point: the total land area intensively farmed today is 12.5% of all land. So I mean, you drive around, you see some farms, but you don’t see them everywhere. This is an order of magnitude, more than order of magnitude difference between farming and what we’re talking about for sustainable energy land.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It doesn’t need to displace farmland, or forests, or jungle, or any kind of ecological preserve. It can be used in very sparsely populated desert regions.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,770 |
[
{
"content": "But that’s the thing, right? This is the argument they will bring up. You are endangering others. You should stay home for the people that, even if you’re fine, even if you know you’re going to be okay, there’s certain people that will not be okay because of your actions. They might get exposed to this thing that we don’t have a vaccine for, we don’t have a universally accepted treatment for, and then we need to… There’s two arguments, right?\nOne argument is we need to keep going, protect the weak, protect the sick, but let’s open up the economy. The other argument is stop placing money over human lives and let’s shelter in place until we come up with some sort of a decision and let’s figure out some way to develop some sort of a universal income, universal basic income plan, or something like that, to feed people during this time while we make this transition.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. I think there’s a, as I said, my opinion is if somebody wants to stay home, they should stay home. If somebody doesn’t want to stay home, they should not be compelled to stay home. That’s my opinion. If somebody doesn’t like that, well that’s my opinion. This notion, though, that you can just sort of send checks out to everybody and things will be fine is not true, obviously. There’s some people have this absurd view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty. Like it just makes stuff. There’s just a magic horn of plenty, and the goods and services, they just come from this magic horn of plenty. And then if somebody has more stuff than somebody else, it’s because they took more from this magic horn of plenty. Now let me just break it to the fools out there.\nIf you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff. Yeah. So, if you don’t make the food, if you don’t process the food, you don’t transport the food, medical treatment, getting your teeth fixed, there’s no stuff. They’ve become detached from reality. You can’t just legislate money and solve these things. If you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff, obviously. We’ll run out of the stores, run out of the… the machine just grinds to a halt.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "But the initial thought on this virus, the real fear was that this was going to kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, instantaneously in this country. It was going to do it very quickly if we didn’t hunker down if we didn’t shelter in place, if we didn’t quarantine ourselves, or lock down. Do you think that the initial thought was a good idea based on the perception that this was going to be far more deadly than it turned out to be?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Maybe. Briefly, but I think if any kind of sensible examination of what happened in China would lead you to the conclusion that that is obviously not going to occur. This virus originated in Wuhan. There’s like, I don’t know, hundred thousand people a day leaving Wuhan. So, it went everywhere very fast throughout China, throughout the rest of the world, and the fatality rate was low.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,771 |
[
{
"content": "What is it, (…)?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, just a…you know…",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "…tweet at him.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Sub tweeted.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,772 |
[
{
"content": "Why don’t we do it then? You have a lot of free time.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It is done. There is a lot of desalination done. There’s plenty of water. It’s not an issue. I want to be clear.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "All right. But let’s talk about AI. Because you were on this tip ten years ago when nobody else was there. And I always thought he’s right. Why? Because I’ve seen too many movies. Everything that happens in movies that happens in real life. And, you know, if you make things that are way smarter than you, why wouldn’t they become your overlords? So what did you say to Chuck Schumer? And what are we doing about this? I know you want to pause in AI because just in the last six months with chat GPT, which came from a company you started,…",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes. I mean, a friend of mine has a sort of modification of Occam’s razor, you know, instead of ‘the simplest thing being the most likely’, ‘the most ironic outcome is most likely’.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,773 |
[
{
"content": "I wanted to ask you about this before I forgot. There’s a company that’s called Apex; it’s taking your Teslas, and they’re giving it a wider base and wider tires and a little bit more advanced suspension. How do you feel about that?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Sounds good to me, sure.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Do you work with them? Are you cool with those people?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, I mean, go ahead.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,774 |
[
{
"content": "Well, I think there’s a movement to that. I mean, in terms of like a social movement. I think some of it’s misguided, and some of it’s exaggerated, and there’s a lot of people that are fighting for their side out there. But it seems like the general trend of, like, social awareness seems to be much more heightened now than has ever been in any other time in history because of our ability to express ourselves instantaneously to each other through Facebook, or Twitter, or what have you. And that the trend is to abandon preconceived notions, abandon prejudice, abandon discrimination, and promote kindness and happiness as much as possible. Looking at this knife? Somebody gave it to me. Sorry.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. What is it?",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "My friend Donnie, he brought this with him, and it just stayed here. I have a real samurai sword if you want to play with that. I know you’re into weapons. That’s from the 1500s. The samurai sword at the end of the table.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Really?",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,775 |
[
{
"content": "What evidence do you have though that they’re lowering the standards? There’s no evidence of that.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I believe there is.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "There’s no evidence of that. Elon, what is the evidence?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I believe they have literally lowered the standards at Duke University and that is what the article was referring",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,776 |
[
{
"content": "Boring?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "How so?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, when we create a simulation like a game or a movie, it’s the distillation of what’s interesting about life. You know, it takes a year to shoot an action movie. And then, that’s all to slow down into two or three hours. So, let me tell you, if you see an action movie being filmed, it’s boring. It’s super boring.\nThere’s like lots of takes. Everything’s on a green screen. It looks pretty goofy. It doesn’t look cool. But once you had the CGI and have great editing, it’s amazing. So, I think, most likely, if we’re in a simulation, it’s really boring outside the simulation. Because why would you make a simulation that’s boring? You’d make simulation way more interesting than base reality.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,777 |
[
{
"content": "Do you think they know what’s going on? Do you think it’s as hard?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah.I mean, it’s got to be pretty weird.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "No, I would imagine.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Like, in my mind, dragging this dead, you know, horse around, and I’m a horse.They might not like it.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,778 |
[
{
"content": "...inaudible...",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Everyone. Well, I mean, this is definitely a new approach. We’ve got the Tesla drive-in movie theater, basically. It’s good to see everyone. It’s a little hard to read the room with everyone being in cars, but it’s the only way we can do it. So hopefully, it’s cool. And hopefully, you can hear me. Can you guys hear me?\n(hooting)\nOkay. All right. Great.\nWell, thanks for coming. I think it’s been an incredible year, and I’d like to just thank you for your support through tough times, good times. It’s been great. Really appreciate everyone who’s put their heart and money into Tesla, and I think it’s worked out pretty well. This has been a good year. And I think there’s many good years to come. So I’ll go through the shareholder presentation fairly quickly because the real main event here is Battery Day. And really, I’m just going through a recap of what’s happened over the past year or so.\nIn terms of our ability to create a factory, huge kudos to the Tesla Shanghai team for being able to go from literally a dirt pile to volume production in 15 months. It’s like, damn. Yeah. And I think something that’s really quite noteworthy here is, Tesla’s the only foreign manufacturer to have a hundred percent owned factory in China. So this is often not well understood or not appreciated, but to have the only hundred percent owned foreign factory in China is a really big deal, and it’s paying huge dividends here.\nSo we really wouldn’t have the results that we have had this year without the great efforts of the Tesla China team, so I’m super appreciative of that. And we’ll see the Shanghai factory continue to scale quite a bit from where it is right now. I think we really could expect that to be, over time, a factory that produces over a million vehicles a year.\n(hooting)\nYeah, it’s cool. So let’s see. So we also reached in the past year of volume production of the Model Y, and this was the smoothest launch that we’ve ever had, so I think we’re definitely getting better at new vehicle launches and building factories, and scaling production. As you’ve heard me say before, the hardest thing is scaling production, especially of a new technology. It’s insanely difficult.\nMaking a prototype is relatively easy. And if I think, like, what is the real achievement of Tesla in sort of car company terms, it’s like it wasn’t making sort of exciting prototypes. It was that Tesla was really the first company in about a century in the U.S., the first U.S. company in the U.S. to reach volume production and be sustainably profitable. The crazy thing is this has really not happened in a hundred years. That’s the actual super hard part, and we now have four vehicles in volume production: S, 3, X, Y\n(SEXY)\n. Also, the toughest joke, I think, maybe ever. It was a very difficult joke to make.\nWe also introduced the lowest cost solar in the U.S. – it’s only $1.49/Watt. We really just simplified the whole value chain, so reduced sales and advertising, got rid of a bunch of unnecessary costs, and really are just relying upon the fact that it’s just the lowest cost, most efficient solar in the U.S., providing both a retrofit and the solar glass roof, which I think is a really great product – a hard product to make work – that will be a major product line in the future.\nAnd we also got four consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability, which was very difficult. Yeah. And certainly, a testament to the hard work of people at Tesla. I mean, to do this in extremely difficult times against a wide range of adverse circumstances was insanely hard , but we got it done. And I think the future is looking, I think, very promising from a sort of an annual profitability standpoint.\nSo in order to sort of do well financially, you really need economies of scale, and you need ideally the best technology, and I think we’ve had the best technology for a while, but now we are also achieving economies of scale. And we’re also rapidly improving autonomy, which is a massive value add to each car. So, I think the value of Tesla is going to be like total, just on the vehicle side, total vehicles produced times the value of autonomy. That’s a way to think about the future value of Tesla.\nWe also have consistent free cashflow generation. This is really important for growth. A key element here is tightening up the time from when a car is ordered to when it is built and delivered. So for a company that is growing rapidly, it’s extremely important to tighten the supply chain and to have, from when parts arrive, put it into a car very quickly and deliver the car very quickly to the customer. And if you can do that inside sort of ahead of your payables timeline, then the faster you grow, the more cash you have.\nOr conversely, if you’re unable to do it within your payables timeline, the faster you grow, the less money you will have, which is obviously bad for capital intensive situation. So just tightening up and having the parts move very quickly to the factory, put it in a car, get it to a customer makes a massive difference to cashflow generation.\nThat’s why it’s extremely important to have a factory on each continent because if you don’t at least have a factory in the continent, it isn’t impossible to achieve this. So having a factory in China that’s able to serve China, and then soon many other countries in the region will be key to us tightening that total sort of chain of cashflow, and getting… essentially the faster we grow, the more cash. This is really important. That’s also why it’s important to have Giga Berlin complete because then we’ll have a factory in China, a factory in the U.S., and soon a second factory in the U.S. in Austin, and a factory in Europe.\nI mean, even if for Giga Texas in Austin – even if we had exactly the same cost as in California, it would still be advantageous to do it there because it’s roughly two-thirds of the way across the U.S., so in terms of delivering cars to the central U.S. and to the East Coast, it’s just faster, it costs less, and it fundamentally improves our economics. So I think this is also maybe something that’s not fully appreciated of just how important it is to have a factory at least on the continent or reasonably close to where the end customers are, so you can tighten that whole chain.\nIndustry performance. While the rest of industry has gone down, Tesla has gone up. And so I’d like to thank all the customers for taking a chance on Tesla and buying our product and really hope you’re enjoying it. This is really – our sales, as I was saying, it really grew by word of mouth. So this is really, I think, very pure in the sense that it’s growing on the basis of existing owners recommending it to others, to new customers. This is, really, I think, a good way to grow.\nSo, and then in 2019, we had 50% growth, and I think we’ll do really pretty well in 2020. Probably somewhere between 30-40% growth, despite a lot of very difficult circumstances. I mean, there’s so many… pandemic, wildfires – it’s a whole bunch of difficult production issues, but thanks to the hard work of the Tesla team and a lot of innovative approaches to overcoming issues, we’re able to still see significant growth in one of the most difficult… in fact, I’d say probably the most difficult year of Tesla’s existence.\nWe also published our extended Impact Report. At Tesla, we try very hard to do the right thing. If the right thing does not happen, it’s just because we maybe made a mistake or weren’t aware of it. But we always try to do the right thing to the best of our ability. And then we published the extended impact report to show, you know, just a sort of self-examination of, okay, what are we doing right, what are we doing wrong, what can we do better in the future? We’re definitely trying to accomplish the most good, and so if we occasionally make a mistake, we work quickly to fix it and do the right thing.\nSo it’s worth looking at the average life cycle of emissions in the U.S. and just how much better a Tesla is or electric car than any kind of gasoline car, and what we’ll talk about in the Battery Day is also just how much the grids around the world, and actually especially in the U.S., are greening. It’s actually much faster than I think people realize, the U.S. is moving towards sustainable energy.\nAnd so as we move more and more to sustainable energy, then effectively you end up building the solar factories and the car factories themselves with solar or with sustainable energy. Over time, you will even mine with sustainable energy, and eventually, it will get to an effective emissions of zero, so that’s where things will end up. Yeah.\nSo, we also have safety at the core of our design. The Tesla cars are the safest cars ever designed. We have the lowest probability of injury of any cars ever tested by the U.S. government. And that’s just passive safety. When you add active safety into that, it’s even better, so it’s really … If safety is important to you, which obviously it is, the safest car you could drive is a Tesla. So, I think some people aren’t aware of this, but it’s really safety is paramount. It is actually the number one design objective when we build a Tesla is safety.\nOur factories are also becoming safer, and if you look at the sort of accidents per vehicle, total vehicle made, it’s dramatically better than in the past, and it’s already better than industry average, and we’re confident we can get it to the best in the auto industry.\nAutopilot functionality continues to improve, and you can see it in the safety report that we publish every quarter. It’s just getting better and better. The U.S. average for collisions is at roughly 2.1 per million miles, and with autopilot engaged, it’s 0.3. I mean, this is a profound difference, really massive, and this will get even better. So we’re confident that over time we can get the probability of an accident, especially the probability of injury, to 10 times better than the industry average, like an order of magnitude better. So that’s a lot of lives saved and a lot of injuries avoided, so that’s a huge priority for us.\nOn the autopilot front – I think it’s kind of hard for people to judge the progress of autopilot. I’m driving… As a matter – of course, I’ve always done this – I drive the bleeding edge alpha build of autopilot, and so I sort of have insight into what is going on. Previously, about a couple of years ago, we were kind of stuck in a local maximum, so we’re improving, but the improvements kind of started tailing off and just not getting where they needed to be. I call this sort of getting trapped in a local maximum. So we had to do a fundamental rewrite of the entire autopilot software stack and all of the labeling software as well.\nSo we are now labeling in 3D video. So this is hugely different from the previously where we were labeling essentially a bunch of single images from eight cameras, and they would be labeled at different times by different people, and some of the labels – you literally can’t tell what it is you’re labeling. So it basically made it in some cases impossible to label, and the labels had a lot of errors.\nNow with our new labeling tools, we label it in video. We actually label entire video segments. And the system… so you get basically a surround video thing to label with the surround video and with time. It’s now taking all cameras simultaneously and looking at how the image change over time and labeling that . And then the sophistication of the neural nets in the car and the overall logic in the car has improved dramatically.\nI think we’ll hopefully release a private beta of autopilot, of the full self-driving version of autopilot in, I think, a month or so, and then people will really understand just the magnitude of the change. It’s profound. Anyway, so you’ll see it. It’s just like a hell of a step change. But because we had to rewrite everything, labeling software, just the entire code base, it took us quite a while. The sort of new … I call it like 4D in the sense that it’s three dimensions plus time. It’s just taken us a while to rewrite everything, and so you’ll see what it’s like. It’s amazing. Yeah. It’s just clearly going to work.\nAt Tesla, the core competencies – we’ve got engineering, obviously, but also manufacturing. I think manufacturing is underappreciated in general. The difficulty of designing the machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself. So the designing, like making a Model 3 or Model Y or Cybertruck prototype, is really quite trivial compared to designing the factory that makes it. Especially if it’s new technology, and you want to use new manufacturing methods, it’s just at least 10 to 100 times harder to do the factory than the prototype.\nAnd that’s why you see a lot of companies out there or startups; they’ll bring out a prototype, but they just can’t get it over the hump for manufacturing because manufacturing – of new technology especially – is the hardest thing by far. Basically, the prototype is at best 10% of the difficulty and probably closer to 1%.\nAnd then software. Tesla is both a hardware and a software company. So a huge percentage of our engineers are actually software engineers. You can think of our car as kind of like a laptop on wheels. So software is incredibly important, actually, not just in the car, but also in the factory. So the factory software is extremely important – just software in general. I mean, these are fundamental. These are the three critical areas that are needed to make for an awesome company.\nWe’ll soon have three new factories incremental on – well, we have one already – on three different continents. Shanghai – we’re expanding the Shanghai with the second phase. Berlin is making rapid progress, and Texas is making even faster progress. With each factory, what we’re trying to do is also improve the manufacturing technology, so in some cases, like the Model Y made in Berlin might look the same, but it actually is made in a much more efficient way. We’ll talk about that later in the battery presentation.\nWe launched Megapack. It’s three megawatt hours all-in-one energy storage solution, so it’s been great overall.\nAnd I think that’s basically it, right? Well, thanks, everyone, for coming, and we’ll be back in a little bit to go through the battery stuff. And there’s a little bit more in addition to the battery stuff, we’ve got a few extras as well. So I think you’ll really like what we have to say on batteries. The battery stuff we’re going to talk about is truly revolutionary and essential to Tesla’s goal.\nThe fundamental good of Tesla, it’s like, if you look back in history and say, “What good did Tesla do?” The good will be by how many years did we accelerate sustainable energy? That’s the true metric of success. It matters if sustainable energy happens faster or slower, and so that’s really how I think about Tesla and how we should assess our progress. By how many years did we accelerate sustainable energy? And what we’re going to talk about with batteries and a few other things will really explain how we’re going to make a step-change improvement in the acceleration of sustainable energy. Thank you.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,779 |
[
{
"content": "Right. And as I’ve already said, I don’t use that feed. But let’s-",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Then how did you know? You literally said-",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "I don’t think this is getting anywhere.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "You literally said you experienced more hateful content and then couldn’t name a single example.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,780 |
[
{
"content": "First of all, I just want to thank Elon for coming – hungry. You didn’t even have dinner. And we didn’t even feed you properly.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, sorry to be a bit late. I just came from the Tesla factory in Fremont.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,781 |
[
{
"content": "So, how the master plan works? You want to talk…?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "The thing that is needed in a very large scale that is not currently present is a vast amount of battery energy storage. Our rough calculations are that this is about 240 terawatt hours, or 240,000 gigawatt hours. This is a lot of batteries, but it is actually a very achievable amount. We’ll go into details on that. So that’s a combination of electric vehicles and stationary storage. If you’ve got solar or wind, you’ve got to store the energy when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. We’re assuming sort of an eight-to-one ratio of stored energy to power, so 30 terawatts of power. Our actual capital expenditure calculation for manufacturing investment is more like 6 trillion, but we made it higher to make it 10 trillion.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "And this is across mining, refining, battery factories, recycling, vehicle factories, all the things that we’re going to talk about needing to invest in to build this sustainable energy economy.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Now, if you look at the total world economy, it’s just under 100 trillion. If this was spread out, say over ten years, it would be 1% of the global economy. Over 20 years, it would be half a percent of global economy. This is not a big number relative to the global economy. As Drew mentioned, you need about half as much energy with an electric economy versus a combustion economy.\nAnd in terms of wind and solar, how much land would be used? It’s less than 0.2% of the land area of Earth. Generally, people don’t realize quite how much energy is reaching us from the sun. It’s roughly a gigawatt per square kilometer. And, you know, the sun doesn’t shine all the time. But if you multiply that by, say, four to get the continuous power, four or five, then that gives you the land area of solar. And you can put wind and solar often in the same place. So in places that currently have wind, you can have solar there, and you double your energy.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,782 |
[
{
"content": "Well, what’s the worst part about you?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I never thought people would like it that much.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Well, most people wouldn’t, but they can’t be you. So, that’s like some superhero type shit. You know, we wouldn’t want to be Spiderman. I’d rather just sleep tight in Gotham City and hope he’s out there doing his job.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s very hard to turn it off.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,783 |
[
{
"content": "We definitely covered that top one.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, a lot of the things we’ve already asked, really.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Covered that. That one.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "We literally just answered that.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,784 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah. Okay, so listen, let’s talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. All right? That’s been a target of yours lately on… There was a repost of Ben Shapiro that you claim that DEI is killing people. Specifically, you point to medicine, you claim that DEI programs are putting people at risk. Do you really believe this to be true and what evidence do you have to support it?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "What I was referring to there was that if we lower the standards for doctors so that… If the test for a doctor is lowered, then the probability of them making a mistake and killing someone is obviously going to be higher.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Wait, say that again? I’m not sure I understand what you said. I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying, I should say.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes. If the standards for passing medical exams and becoming a doctor or especially something like a surgeon, if the standards are lowered, then probability that the surgeon will make mistake is higher. They’re making mistakes in their exam. They may make mistakes with people and that may result in people dying.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,785 |
[
{
"content": "Elon Musk,\nthis has been a pleasure.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, likewise.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "It really has been.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "It’s been an honor. Thank you for having me.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,786 |
[
{
"content": "They’re jazzing stuff up with carbon fiber and doing a bunch of interior choices. You’re cool with… You can’t fuck with that. You don’t have time. So is it good that someone comes along and has that sort of specialty operation?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. I’ve got no problem.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "That’s what it’s called, right? It’s like… Jamie, is it called Apex?\nYeah. I got an\nUnplugged Performance S-APEX\n.\nThat’s right. Unplugged Performance. Yeah.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah. You could, for sure, lighten the car up and improve tire traction and…",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,787 |
[
{
"content": "Teriyaki Bowl wasn’t bad. There was a sort of sourdough grilled cheese thing that wasn’t bad.\nThose are the good old days, right?\nI mean, it was (…1:10:40) the good days. I mean, we were just hoping that people would let us stay in the country. We weren’t really that worried about what we were eating. We were just doing everything we could to get someone to support the company. I didn’t understand the venture capital world that much. We were doing a seed round, an angel round, and doing our best to talk to everyone and anyone we could find.\nWe had a very good friend with us, Greg Curry, who’s now passed away, who was older than us by about ten years, I think. He was a wonderful mentor who helped us out and put a little money in as well. And then I did a lot of the work to just network with people. I think our first salesman who was selling Yellow Pages ads for us, he was a real estate agent who knew another person who knew this other person who helped us raise… put together – we ended up not doing the round – but put together around $200,000 or something. And then…",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "We did like part of it or something.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "But I think once we had the Java map, which was really quite impressive – I mean if you’ve never seen… if you’ve never seen Google Maps or Yahoo Maps before, it really is a remarkable thing to see. We started to go… we got some audiences with some venture capitalists. And it just went from, we were starving, we had no car or the car we had had broken…",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "The wheel fell off.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,788 |
[
{
"content": "No?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Nope, definitely not.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So, we’re fucked?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, we’re not fucked. I mean, this is quite a complex question. The more carbon we take out of the ground and add to the atmosphere, and a lot of it gets permeated into the oceans, the more dangerous it is. Like I don’t think right — I think we’re okay right now. We can probably even add some more, but the momentum towards sustainable energy is too slow.\nLike there’s a vast base of industry, vast transportation system. Like there’s two and a half billion cars and trucks in the world. And the new car and truck production, if it was a 100% electric, that’s only about 100 million per year. So, it would take — If you could snap your fingers and instantly turn all cars and trucks electric, it would still take 25 years to change the transport base to electric. It makes sense because how long does a car and truck last before it goes into the junkyard and gets crushed? About 20 to 25 years.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,789 |
[
{
"content": "Do you have any desire to understand what many people of color and even trans people, how they feel about this country and how they’re treated in this country? If they say and they believe that they are treated a certain way in this country, why don’t you believe them?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "You cannot have a situation where someone is a self-described victim and they just get to be that because that’s how they feel.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "I think that that does happen in some cases, but not all cases. And I think that not understanding the history of the country, I think is a real shame. Look, I’ve had-",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "We should understand the history of the country and other countries.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,790 |
[
{
"content": "So you haven’t really explored or hit the limit of the system.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "No, not yet, the limit, no.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So the magic of deep learning is that it gets better with data. You said there’s a huge inflow of data, but the thing about driving, the really valuable data to learn from, is the edge cases. I’ve heard you talk somewhere about Autopilot disengagements being an important moment of time to use. Are there other edge cases, or perhaps can you speak to those edge cases, what aspects of them might be valuable, or if you have other ideas, how to discover more and more edge cases in driving?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, there’s a lot of things that are learned. There are certainly edge cases where say, somebody’s on Autopilot, and they take over, and then that’s a trigger that goes out to our system and says, okay, did they take over for convenience, or did they take over because the Autopilot wasn’t working properly? There’s also, let’s say we’re trying to figure out, what is the optimal spline for traversing an intersection. Then the ones where there are no interventions are the right ones. Then you say, okay when it looks like this, do the following. And then you get the optimal spline for navigating a complex intersection.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,791 |
[
{
"content": "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?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, 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. I can’t emphasize that enough, as long as we push hard and are not complacent, the future is gonna 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.\nThere are three elements to a sustainable energy future. One is obviously sustainable energy generation, which is primarily wind and solar. There’s also hydro, geothermal. I’m actually pro-nuclear. I think nuclear is fine. And 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, this needs a lot of stationary battery packs. And then you need electric transport, 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.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Right.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "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. 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.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,792 |
[
{
"content": "Or we’re on our way to one, right? Well, not just because we exist. We could most certainly be on the road. We could be on the road to that, right. It doesn’t mean that it has to have already happened.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "We could be in ‘Base Reality’.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "We could be here now on our way to the road or on our way to the destination where this can never happen again; where we are completely ingrained in some sort of an artificial technology or some sort of a symbiotic relationship with the internet or the next level of sharing information. But, right now, we’re not there yet. That’s possible too, right? It’s possible that a simulation is, one day, going to be inevitable, that we’re going to have something that’s indistinguishable from regular reality, but maybe we’re not there yet. That’s also possible.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes, it is.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,793 |
[
{
"content": "That’s right.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "And then we did a bunch of things to decrease the friction. It’s just like bacteria in a Petri dish. What you want to do is try to have one customer generate like two customers. Okay? Or something like that. Maybe three customers, ideally. And then you want that to happen really fast. You could probably model it just like bacteria growth in a Petri dish. Then it’ll just expand very quickly until it hits the side of the Petri dish, and then it slows down.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "And then after Paypal, then I mean… to some degree, especially us in Silicon Valley, we kind of understand the internet. We know people. PayPal’s obviously of the scale that is noteworthy, but then SpaceX just seems really, you know… well, how did you decide that I’m definitely going to do that? And then like, what’s the first thing that you do? How do you even go out… I don’t even know how to start trying to make a rocket company.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, neither did I really. In fact, the first three launches failed. So it’s not as though it was spot on. It’s like, did not hit the bull’s eye.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,794 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah, a little sip here and there, and your inhibitions are relaxed, and it shows your true self. And, hopefully, you’re more joyous, and friendly, and happy, and everything’s good. The real worry is the people that can’t handle it. Like the real worry about people who can’t handle cars and go 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds or anything. Have you ever considered something that — Like, imagine if one day, everyone has a car that’s on the same, at least, technological standard as one of your cars, and everyone agrees that the smart thing to do is not just to have bumpers but to perhaps have some sort of a magnetic repellent device, something, some electromagnetic field around the cars that as cars come close to each other, they automatically radically decelerate because of magnets or something.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Well, I mean, our cars brake automatically.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Brake? When they see things?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,795 |
[
{
"content": "You’re slightly ahead, but you’ve got a rocket. Anyway…",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I think a lot of people think that there’s too many people on the planet, but I think there’s, in fact, too few. And that possibly the single greatest risk to human civilization is the rapidly diminishing birth rate. And the facts are out there for anyone to look at. But a lot of people are still stuck with, you know, Paul Ehrlich’s book ‘Population Bomb’, and it’s like, that was a long time ago. That is not the case today. And there was a massive notch in demographics last year because the birth rate plummeted, and also this year.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "So more children?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "So I mean, you know, no babies, no humanity. They got to come from somewhere.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,796 |
[
{
"content": "That is for sure. Probably the weirdest that I can remember.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, and he was born on May the fourth.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "That’s hilarious, too. May the fourth be with him.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yes, exactly.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,797 |
[
{
"content": "Yeah.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "So, I think it’s really just about, how can we make it last longer.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Are you a proponent of the multi-universe theory? Do you believe that there are many, many universes, and that even if this one fades out that there are other ones that are starting fresh right now, and there’s an infinite number of them, and they’re just constantly in a never-ending cycle of birth and death?",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "I think most likely. This is just about probability. There are many, many simulations. These simulations, we might as well call them reality, or we could call them the multiverse.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,798 |
[
{
"content": "And what did he say? So, what about Hillary? Worry about her, first. Shh, everybody be quiet.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "He listened. He certainly listened. I met with Congress. I was at a meeting with all 50 governors and talked about just the A.I. danger, and I talked to everyone I could. No one seemed to realize where this was going.",
"role": "assistant"
},
{
"content": "Is it that, or do they just assume that someone smarter than them has already taken care of it? Because when people hear about something like A.I., it’s almost abstract. It’s almost like it’s so hard to wrap your head around it, and by the time it already happens, it’ll be too late.",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Yeah, I think they didn’t quite understand it or didn’t think it was near term or not sure what to do about it. I said like, you know, an obvious thing to do is to just establish a committee, government committee, to gain insight before you oversight, before you do make regulations, they should try to understand what’s going on. And then, if you have an insight committee, once they learn what’s going on, you get up to speed. Then, they can make some rules or propose some rules. That would be probably a safer way to go about things.",
"role": "assistant"
}
]
| 1,799 |
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