You know, it's somewhat frankly predictable. Yes, yes, well that's not
what we're about. As you know, at ARC, we're all about the
future, trying to figure out the way the world's going to work. And
well, I'd love to give you an opportunity right now to you know,
address what you think mainstream media does not understand because there's such a big story
here. There are so many big stories that you know, offer all kinds
of hope and you know, really transformation in the future, and you're leaving
the charge. So what don't they get, do you think, and what
would you like to what would you like them to understand? Well, I
think that's quite a long list of things that don't understand or where they basically
don't wish to focus on because it doesn't quite lead to clicks and traffic.
So I guess, I guess I could I could you know, go over
at a high level what space Exit has are accomplishing or have accomplished this year.
You know, well you just said that like media is a dwindling pie,
and you own a big kind of like media platform franchise. How do
you think about the future of X within that context, and how it should
evolve. Well, I mean X is actually growing in traffic, so I
mean, again when doesn't know quite which to believe. But uh, the
you know, when you look at the traffic numbers, the traditional media is
down, but but X's is up, So you know, I think that's
you know, of course for optimism. But of course the traditional media would
never actually write a story about that. I'm not going to write a story
that says, hey, we're losing an X is winning is a very unlikely
headline. In fact, you see the opposite headlines which are quite misleading that
X FK Twitter is dying or dead or whatever. I mean, how many
times have we seen that headline. It's getting a little tedious. I mean
you can just press, you know, repost the same thing every month,
is what it seems like. So you know, that's you know, So
I think I feel quite optimistic about the sort of X platform and where it's
going. And we're adding a ton of functionality that I think people will find
useful. There's been immense progress in just the course of a year. We've
accomplished more advancements in a year than I think in the Twitter done in the
prior at least five years. So, yeah, one of the we've been
talking a lot about X. We know, we own it in our venture
fund, and we've been talking about, you know, the democratization that you
are enabling in many ways. We were just going back to Tesla. You'll
remember that, you know when when Tesla, when you were thinking about taking
a private I implored you, you know, no, you know the you
know we've been supporting We the retail investor and others have been supporting Tesla,
don't take it private. You'll you'll take it you know away, this incredible
growth opportunity. And so thank you for that. That was a democratization move.
But Twitter, yeah, should I should say that that, you know,
your little play was influential, you know, played as a significant role
in the decision ultimately not to take the company private. We could have taken
the company private. The downside was that it would have been quite a big
distraction. So and of course it would would have made it difficult for many
investors to remain invested. And I mean the combination of factors of complexity having
to leave behind so many investors. Really that was Those are the two factors
that you know why we decided not to take company private. We absolutely could
have. I want to be just absolutely super clear, No, no,
I know that, And we did have funding secured, so you know,
it was six more than enough funding. You know, it's it's it's worth
bear in mind that, you know, I was sued in a San Francisco
court which which was jury shopped by a class action plaintiff law firm. It's
always it's important bear in mind in these class action laws lawsuits, the media
will actually write as though it is actually an aggrieved shareholder, but in fact
it is not. The true plaintiff is the class action law firm, and
the plaintiff is simply a puppet. Yes, so, but the media never
never mentioned this. You took Twitter private, was, you know, to
to really enable free speech? And again the whole democratization, this democratization concept,
you know, we're we're all about that as well. We give our
research away. We want people to understand how how much the world's changing,
how technologically enabled innovation is going to transform could transform everyone's lives for the better
if they get on the right side of change. So so, yeah,
thank you, Well, absolutely so. The there's that kind of like maybe
an augment that sounds or kind of esoteric. But it's the way I actually
think about it that you can think of the X platform or social media in
general as kind of a collective consciousness or group mind, and you want to
have as much signal and as little noise as possible. And obviously we've got
a lot of work to do on that front. But you want your information
to becoming you from people who are experts in the field or who are in
the case of let's say a war zone, literally in the field, and
as opposed to filtered through journalists who are not experts in the field and who
most of the time from probably ninety nine percent of time are literally not in
the scene. At the scene, there's only a few reporter, sometimes only
one reporter at the scene. So now, in the past that it was
the only way to have things work. That's why, you know, so
the legacy structure in the past was you had to have information filtered to media
organizations and then too and then and then they would decide what to publish,
and they publish it, and then people would read really a small subset of
what was actually going on in the world, and obviously a subset that was
chosen by a handful of editors curated, Yeah, curated. So it's it's
sort of if the editors weren't that interested in the subject, you simply didn't
care about it. So now that's in the past, especially in a non
Internet world, that's kind of how things. There was really another way to
do it. You didn't really have a mechanism for connecting all of the humans.
But now with the Internet and a fast moving social media or what social
media is terrible word, but fast moving sort of platform, like like the
X platform, you can actually get have all of the you can get all
the people out there that are on the platform, reporting information, distilling it
down, have people who are who are world class experts in their field tell
you exactly what's going on. I mean, if you see, for example,
the AI discussions on X are by far the best relately, absolutely absolutely.
You know, Elon we I conceived of this open source research ecosystem that
we've evolved in twenty twelve. I never dreamed that Twitter at the time,
it was for tweens and teens and celebrities, and there's still some of those
on BED. I never dreamed that it would become our primary platform for giving
away our research and having dialogue with the people in the field out there who
are innovating. You know, we're getting information that no one else in the
financial world doing it the traditional way is getting just because we are engaging with
these you know, with the innovators. So it's it's a marvelous platform.
And I think it's the knowledge workers platform. Yeah, hi, Elen,
this is Jelly. Hey, how's it going it? It would be great
to learn more about how you're thinking actually about the roadmap to expand X from
where you see it today to where you see it becoming and risks, challenges
and also opportunities of that including AI and how you see that that transition well
along lines of what I was saying earlier, the it's it's really true kind
of create a group mind or collective consciousness where every person is essentially a part
of that group minor electical and is kind of reporting information to the system,
consuming information, giving their opinion on it. And you can just think about
like a giant brain basically, And you know, I posted I think a
few years ago that a neuron doesn't feel like it's it doesn't know it's a
neuron, So right, Uh, you know, individuals on the system.
Obviously you feel like an individual, but actually you are actually part of a
collective sort of group mind. And and then you know, see if they
say, well, what makes it a better or worse? You know,
collective consciousness, it's it's well ups these feed is very important. How fast
is information being transmitted? How is is that information is the most interesting information
being propagated to the the right other people as quickly as possible. You know,
how much noise is in the system. Noise would be information that is
either not interesting. Uh, obviously spam, scams, actual misinformation. But
you know that that that that term is overused, but just say, like
just say information that that that that is deviates from the truth meaningfully, because
there's always this question of what is the truth? You know, and it's
like there's an old sort of police saying, uh, you know, for
any given crime, there are at least three stories, the victim, the
perpetrator in the truth, right, you know, or you know, uh,
the well that coursa movie Rassamon where they the same event happens and you
see that perceived completely differently by four different people. So but nonetheless, one
can still aspire to the truth and have the least aspire to have the least
amount of error. So so that's that's really Uh, that's the main thing
is is like how do we get as many people as possible participating in providing
information that's accurate correcting information that is not accurate. And just if you think
of it, sort of like it from an information theory standpoint, this is
like, I think the right way to think about it. Think about it
from an information theory standpoint. You want to have what would make for the
most effective group mind or collective consciousness, and it's it's like all the neurons
all communicating as quickly as possible with the lowest signles noise, and yeah,
and there do you think you need to enable users to put like skin in
the game behind their messages in a more frictionless way, as in, if
I'm like within capital markets, I can bet I can put capital to work,
right, and I stand to lose it if I'm wrong. Uh,
And the information space and X is it's kind of like a survival of the
fittest, but kind of like the marginal energy needed to put in for an
individual tweet, I can't really change that or an individual post? Is that
like a direction to go. You mean, like when you put something assign
sort of a some amount of your credits effectively you're yeah, I mean within
prediction. Prediction markets work because people are able to bet on one thing versus
another. Like conceptually, if I'm right about something, if the truth,
if I if I get some kind of like you know, more than just
reputational cruel, but capital cruel for being correct about something on X. Is
that a way to kind of increase essentially effective signal to noise within the network.
Do you have a suggestion for how that might be implemented? I mean,
conceptually, you're the fact that I can advertise on X, like I
can promote a tweet, you know, is in some ways in instant atiation
of that. But there's no mechanism by which I effectively lose for being wrong,
or maybe within the distribution algorithm there is, but it just seems very
kind of like a loose kind of connection between whether or not I'm contributing positively
to the network and whether or not the network actually rewards me in some way,
either financially or otherwise for contributing positively. Well, I mean, we
are paying creators for you know, for people who are posting on the system
where that post is interesting and gets a lot of views. So that's that's
one way in which people are occurring value. If you if you post something
that's boring around uninteresting then just or wrong whatever you peraps will get less views
and thus earn less. You know, there's a there is this like very
challenging problem of of bots and trolls, which is I think, I mean
just tackling that and I think we've made great strides, but just a long
way to go. That is the biggest source of noise is because the fundamental
problem you have right now is that it's it's quite easy to pass the are
you a human test? You know, even if I mean basically open source
AI at this point can pass are you a human test? Spatter but I
think out than most humans m hmm, so uh, and that's only going
to become more widely available. So you know you have to I think biased
that the network too, ah have basically raised the cost of manipulation and raise
the cost of bots and trolls. You cannot completely get rid of them,
this is not possible, but you can make it much harder and much more
expensive, Like I mean having say a drug enforcement agency like the or any
kind of if making drugs legal does it doesn't make the drugs disappear, It
just makes them more expensive. So you know, sometimes there's a false dipot
of me of like, well, it's all or nothing. No, you
just you have to do things that that dramatically increase the cost of noise in
the system so that somebody can't spoil up one hundred thousand or a million bots
in a day and and then minigulate the system. So this is why the
you know, we've moved to sort of a subscription, there's at least a
small monthly payment, even even a small amount, like if like three dollars
a month is or so some some small amount, it's still several orders of
magnitude. If it raises the cost of bots by several orders of magnitude,
maybe by one thousand or ten thousand, so uh, and then it's not
just the cost, it's not just the dollar amount. But then you effectively
piggyback on the payment system, so payment authentication. So it's just it's just
hard to find more credit cards to misuse that like there's a natural cost in
the black market for credit cards that work. So so just just biasing things
to where the subscribers, effectively for premium users content is elevated above that of
bought amplified content is I think a very big deal. Sorry, And my
prediction actually is that any given social network that does not move in this direction
will be swarmed with bots and and will simply be overwhelmed. You know,
I have an experience with that. We all of a sudden, I guess
bots were taking over. And this was not on Twitter but on or on
X but on Instagram and Facebook. I mean, it was just all over
the place. So we've already experienced attacks like that. Can we stay on
the X platform as a topic, elon, but maybe take us a little
bit more into the future about this super app opportunity. Will you become a
financial platform? Identification is and we're already seeing you're still tipping I think on
X. But are you going to are you going to turn into a financial
platform, which is where you started your entrepreneurial journey many years ago? Is
this still is this still on the drawing board? Yeah? Absolutely, We're
just waiting for the final approvals to come through for the money transmitter licenses.
Has just taken longer than expected to get the money transmitter licenses. Yes,
so I did see you have fifteen or so now or is it more?
I think we actually have a majority of the states. Oh, I've been
for this, but it's it's irrelevant until California and New Yorker brewers. I
see, I see, And are there any showstoppers or it's just bureaucracy.
It's just I mean, really just I guess bureaucracy. You know the thing.
Things were obviously quite chaotic, especially for the first few months, so
you know, it's not entirely the fault. We were bit late in submitting
our you know, money transmitter licenses, and I essentially thought I thought we
had done it, but we had not done it until around the middle of
this year. So I think we'll probably get our approvals early next year,
and so I would expect payments to roll out. I would be surprised if
we aren't if it takes us longer than the middle of next year to roll
out payments. So I'm not aware of any any showstoppers. Is just kind
of working through the system. Yeah, that'll be exciting, if you don't
mind, Elan, I'd like to actually make an announcement on X since you
know, we learned in the market that once once you say something on exit,
it actually becomes public information from the SEC's point of view. We've seen
that tested comes and so I just wanted to announce that we're pretty excited that
for the first time, beginning in January, our venture fund will be available
on so far right now, if you want to buy our venture fund,
the Titan app is the way to go. That's an Andresen Horoitz funded company
and they've been great, but we are expanding and you know, we'd love
again in this movement towards democratization of VC if any other platforms want to participate
in this movement. You know, we're not exclusive, so and we're very
excited about the possibilities. So thank you for letting me do that. And
it's also a big part of bringing the broader base of a huge number of
non accredited investors whould love to enter companies like your Zealand of course, and
we are already with the Ark Venture Fund in SpaceX and X, and we'd
love to do others and really allowing you know, obviously your companies are extremely
well funded, but for many companies that don't have access to capital necessarily at
the scale you've built without going public. So we think that's a really exciting
potential for companies to stay private for longer. And really that sounds great.
Yeah, it's really really cool. I mean, the burden of being a
poly company really has increased over time such that it has it's somewhat persuaded a
lot of companies from being public, and I really frankly would recommend companies don't
go public unless they absolutely have to. So, yeah, do you think
do you think that going back to like the Model three ramp, when you
had customers and shareholders going out and facilitating delivery of vehicles, do you think
that could have happened without people having like skin in the game in the same
way. Yeah. Absolutely, Most most of the people who help we're not
shoulders. That's interesting. I mean that I don't know, you know,
Elon, so many people have come up to me and all of us over
the years because we were out there, you know, pounding the table,
uh for Tesla against you know, against the traditional financial world, and they
they read our research on Tesla and and bought into it. And so many
people have come up and said thank you for doing that research, alerting us
to the opportunities. What's happened to the public markets, Elon is I think
is I think they're kind of broken. I agree with you. I think
part of it is regulatory, but part of it is the way the traditional
financial world works. And I saw, I've seen this time and again,
is if a company is not in a broad based benchmark, then then financial
analysts and portfolio managers very often say, okay, not relevant, not relevant
to me. Not in an index. I'm not competing against it. That's
how broken it is. Instead of focusing on the future, and you know
which companies are going to be transformative and are going to scale brilliantly, they're
very nicely situated in the past, you know, in stocks that are where
they are in benchmarks because of past performance. That's the other thing that's happened
here. Sure, but it's important we changed that. Elon and Tesla,
it has been a change maker in that regard. Sure, you didn't get
into an index because of the way they construct them until Tesla was five hundred
billion dollars, So a lot of it was pretty crazy. You know,
how many more, how many companies are bigger than that. You know,
it's just crazy, but you did, you made it, and you opened
people's eyes. And we're trying to change this shift away from passive back to
active so that there is an efficient allocation of capital. Yeah, you're touching
on a very important point, which is that I think the percentage of the
market that is passive is simply is too great at this point. So at
the end of the day, somebody actually has to make an active decision that
the passive investors are riding on the decisions of the active investors. And so
the passive passive you know, investments like index funds whatnot, are they're like
a an They're just that they're an amplifier. It's like that, you know,
like an electric guitar app or something. So, but but you don't
want that amplifier gain to be too high or you get essentially massive movements of
the stock based on the decisions of maybe four or five active major stock pickers.
Well, you know, actually it's it's it's a little more complicated.
So if you if you well, yeah, if you if you look,
if you were in a risk off market, a bear market like we were
in twenty two, what actually happens is these managers are very fearful and they
just get closer and closer to their benchmarks, and they sell the stocks that
the kind of stocks that we're invested in because we're completely active, we don't
we're benchmark agnostic. We just we just don't even look at them. We're
all about the future. So that's in a risk of market, it punishes
stocks that are not in indexes more than otherwise would be the case. And
then to your point, it rewards stocks that you know, in a risk
one period that that that are growing very quickly like yours. And as you
say, yes, there's a pylon effect. If they get into a benchmark,
now everybody has to consider them. So it's really it's it's a really
distorted way of that. The public equity markets have evolved. Yeah, I
mean essentially getting into any kind of index will pass up fund well I think
increase the volatility significantly because you know, just now it's amplified that stock's not
amplified by by the passive. So you know, and I think Bogo was
was it was a good idea to create, you know, bank guard and
passives, but it's gone. It's just gone too far it has, so
you just don't want to have the amplify sort of the the amp is turned
up too high, there's a way to think of it. So there should
be more more active and less less passive. Totally agree and absolutely And the
other thing that's happening, I didn't know where we're going to go here,
elon. But the other thing that really is gripping the markets is you know,
seventy five percent plus UH of training every day is algorithmic, and we
see they're very simple algorithms. You know, in a bear market, okay,
do they have cash? Are they burning cash? And and those two
variables will will dominate the stock action. So yeah, we've watched this over
the last three years. It's a very simplistic way of managing money, and
I really do think it has led to the most massive miss allocation of capital
in history. A lot more private companies should be public, but we understand
why they don't go public because of the kind of behavior you're subjected to.
And now you know all about it, right, yeah, I mean the
regulatory burden of being public is way too high, and then the legal burden
of being public is also way too high. So if you're public, you're
just going to be sued NonStop by these class action law firms with their fake
plaintiffs, as is the case with Tesla. We're just you know, constantly
being sued by you know, I said what the media will portray as a
member of the class, but in fact we're just being sued by class action
law firms with with puppets like that drives me crazy. It happens, you
know, it's happening. But the problem that we're talking about here is non
accredited investors have not been invited to the venture capital party because they don't make
enough money or they are they're not wealthy enough, which we think is quite
a regressive tax. Yes, absolutely, I fully agree. That's why we're
democratizing venture capital by not taking a carry ourselves so that we can offer our
fund for as little as five hundred dollars to anyone anyone. That sounds great,
Well, I think more people should take you up on that. Yeah,
there is. I mean, most most of the the vast majority of
companies are obviously private, they're not public. Yes, And and you're right
that that it is somewhat of a regressive tax that makes it difficult for the
average citizen to participate in the outside of those companies, because once you go
i think above twenty five hundred shareholders, non employee shareholders, then you're forced
to go public. So the reason that SpaceX cannot simply offer stock to anyone
who wants to own it is because of that twenty five hundred direct shareholder limit.
Right, So do you think do you think that within SpaceX are just
thinking about Tesla versus SpaceX? Do you think you've been enabled to take more
appropriate risks within SpaceX than you have within Tesla because of the public versus private
Absolutely. I mean at SpaceX, we never think about what the quarter.
We never think about it, and we don't think, we don't think about
the stock price. So you know, there's there's a lot of pressure,
like an immense pressure on a public company to not have a bad quarter.
So this can act actually result in a less efficient operation where you're going to
great lengths at the end of a quarter to not disappoint people. And you
know that's just that's just how it goes. So uh and and then you
know you've also got a lot sort of a long term challenge with public markets
where a lot of the analysts following companies have a time horizon that is maybe
only a year or two. It's you know, rarely more than a few
years. So and so they literally don't care because then their incentive structure is
a short term. They do not care about what your long term outcome will
be because their careers dependent on how you do in the short term. Elon,
you have been great at I think standing up to short term oriented shareholders.
That's one of the scores in our scoring system as we're evaluating companies.
Is this a visionary management and will they stand up to short term shareholders who
want their profits now, their dividends, their share repurchases, Will they invest
aggressively enough in the future. And I think you've done a great job.
Well, thank you and credit to the test the team as well. So
but that that said, we at Tesla, we do go to great lengths
to ensure that our quarter is good as that that we don't disappoint because it's
not so much about the it's just that we feel like we have a sort
of you know, moral obligation too. You know, I don't know that
to not have a bad quarter and disappoint people. So we you know,
the number of New Year's Eves that I've spent in delivery centers is like,
I don't know of six. I don't know seven. I don't know I
blast camp how many times I was in I was delivering forest until like basically,
but not on Year's Eve personally. So, you know, has it
done any Let me just ask the question the other way, SpaceX. You
you feel like you have more degrees of freedom being public. Has it done
anything positive for you? For Tesla? I mean, well, it did
allow us to clean up our capital structure, which was overly complex as a
private company and have a single class of common so were really getting things were
getting quite unwieldy with the private company capital structure. There was obviously the capital
availability in the public markets, which is a lot more than the private markets.
And a car company is capital intensive, so I guess access to Ladge
has capital and cleaning up what had become an extremely complex your private company share
structure were two, you know, major things. Certainly, it was also
good to give access to the company stock to a small shareholders, you know,
so those are those are good things, but you know, I think
it's also been a tremendous distraction as well on the downside. So and you
know, there's just a lot of a lot of overhead just there's more time
that's required to manage a public company than a private company. So in the
past you've talked about potentially I guess listing Starlank or doing something on the space
X within the public capital markets. But do you think that that's actually not
something that you need to do or anticipate doing across all of your companies outside
of Tesla. At this point, I don't think it's worth going public and
ntil you have maybe an extremely stable and predictable revenue stream. So if your
cash flows are extremely stable and predictable at that point, going public is less
of an issue because you know, you're just not going to have these big
gyrations. So you know, isn't that ironic? Like the point of the
equity markets is to is to provide like perpetual capital for capital intensive businesses,
right, And what you're describing as a business that actually doesn't really need equity
capital necessarily, you could you could debt fund it to some degree if you
have very stable cash flows, right, I mean I can equity or debt
fund just about anything. At this point, you know, the You know,
it's worth noting that in all my old companies, across all the years,
I've never lost money for an investor even once, and this is now
over one hundred financing rounds. Now, of course I cannot stop people from
selling when they should not sell, but I have never driven them to a
bad outcome. So that's a pretty good betting average. And obviously, when
you've treated capital well, then capital if it treats you well in turn,
and so you know, it's it's basically very easy for me to raise almost
any amount of capital. Frankly, So now, of course I need to
make sure that traffic stays intact and not get complacent or entitled. But you
know, obviously I do not have a need to to raise capital, and
in fact a lot of in most cases I don't really need even for say
like Boring Company or Neural Link. I mean, I can funded myself entirely.
But I think it is good to have other investors. Why why why
even bother with with outside shareholders at all? It would be simpler to you
could take whatever risk you want without having to answer to anybody. Well,
I do take a lot of risks your way. I don't know, I
think it's I think it's good to have I don't know, I think it's
good. It's good to have other investors. I mean, I think that
you know, each investor you ad is an ally it's good to have more
allies. I think it also, you know, establishes that I'm not delusional
in the valuation of the companies. So if if others are prepared to invest
at a particular value, then then then you know, I'm not the sole
just decider of what the value of the company is. Others are deciding what
the value of the companies are. You know, it's it's sort of an
outside assessment of the value of the company. And and that you know,
there is also a need to uh, you know, provide liquidity so uh
to to to people at the company. So I believe in providing stock to
the people of the company, the employees and creators of the company. It's
important to provide them stock to have the incentive be aligned with the company outcome
and uh and then you know, you the various points want to gain liquidity
so that you you want to then establish an outside valuation. And you know,
so there's not it's not just me deciding it and enable liquidity for those
who've been awarded stock and options at the companies, and and and generally been
my approach to award everyone at the company stuff. You know, A tells
that we've awarded. We awarded everyone stock you no matter how junior they were.
So that actually obviously made a lot of people millionaires. I think I
think Teslam may have created more employee millionaires than any company in history. Yeah,
so I would say, like, if there's not a company that's done
has created more employee millionaires than Tela. You know, there's it's maybe there's
one, maybe it's there's one or two others. But but really the SURE
tests around one hundred and forty thousand people, and you know, I think
I think we might be number one. I think I think you are.
So I'm conscious of time here and thank you so much. Elon. We
Frank Downing, our director of research on Next Generation Internet, asked Grok,
what questions do people want? Kathy Wood to ask Elon Musk to Okay,
basis, and we would be remiss if we didn't, if we didn't summarize
this first and then let you take it where you'd like it. And it
basically said, it seems that this is Grock talking. Seems that people are
even here about the latest developments and AI's I mean, in Tesla's AI technologies
we definitely are, such as FSD twelve and the next generation platform for Robotaxi.
They're also interested in learning more about the company's plans for the Optimist project.
Additionally, there is a lot of curiosity surrounding Elon Musk's thought on the
AI space, as well as his take on the future of bitcoin. I
guess that was a little repetitive AI there, but these topics are sure to
spark some engaging discussions. That's that's Grock for you. Okay, well Crok,
that's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. So AI and and
I do. I do have more time than you know, if you would
like to go alonger longer than fifteen minutes, we can go alonger than fifteen
minutes, right, I mean trying to still my thoughts here on AI,
because I could really talk four hours on AI. You know, we both
Charlie and Brett are steeped in it, so is Frank and of course Tasha,
she's done our work on autonomous but one of the one of the things
we've been very curious about is open source versus closed AI? And I don't
know if you've seen I don't know if you've seen the chart that Frank and
Joseph did on our team, but they they drew a line. They basically
calculated performance improvements in both the closed closed or private AI companies and models large
language models, and then the open ones. And open is behind closed,
but the steep the performance is improving at a steeper rate than closed. Do
you have any thoughts about that and about open versus closed generally when it comes
to AI. Sure, well, I mean, I think a lot of
people know that. You know, I was instrumental in the creation of Opening
I and the impact. I came up with the name of the Opening open
I means open source, yes, and thought it as an open source nonprofit
And the reason I wanted to create it was to create establish a counterweight to
Google deep Mind, because it was a unipolar world at that point. It
was, you know, Google deep Mind had probably two thirsd of more of
the top AI talent and of course fast computing and financial resources. And at
the time I was close friends with Larry Page and it did not seem to
me that he was taking AI safety seriously. So I felt there needed to
be some, like I said, some counterweights, some competitor to sort of
the Google Deep Mind situation. So prankically instrumental in Crain, the company was
recruiting Iliosiskaer, which was a back and forth thing where actually Eli have changed
his mind a few times and ultimately decided to come to Opening Eye. And
uh so I won that recruiting battle, and that is actually what caused Larry
Page to stop being friends with me. Frankly so, but now ironically,
because fate loves irony, Opening Eye is a super closed source and and for
maximum profit it's it should be renamed closed for maximum profit AI, it won't
be more accurate. So because that's that's you know, it's literally the polar
opposite of what of how it started. I guess I'm I generally have a
bias in favor of open source, and you can see that certainly with the
X platform, where we've open sourced the algorithm U and for for example,
for community notes, we open source not just the algorithm, but all the
data as well, so you can see exactly how a note was created,
can be ordered by third parties. There's no there's no mystery, nothing hidden
at all, I think. So that's one of that seems to be one
of the confusing things about open source as pertains to large language models. It's
it's it's not as simple, and I think this has been lost in some
of the debate as just open sourcing the code. It's open sources the shades
of gray here of course, with parameter, weights, data, there's there's
all of that spectrum, and I think that's been maybe lost from some of
the debate. So it's great to hear, Yeah, there's there's actually a
very little code, very little actual traditional lines of software. Certainly at the
at the first level, there's there's very little. It's a remarkably tiny number
of lines of code. So it's it's just these giant, you know,
waste files and you know what your hyperparameter you know, numbers are and it's
basically a giant Comma separated value file. So I was find amusing to contemplate
that perhaps our digital guard will be a CSP file, you know, like
and and then you make a you see fee file that has maybe more weights
and the weights are better, and then you're pretty much delete the old one.
So just the AI is evolving and deleting its prior self constantly, So
we're going to worship a giant tel file essentially. That's pretty kind of I
mean, you need a very big Yeah, it's a lot of cells,
but it's really just a bunch of numbers. And then those numbers are they're
getting smaller in magnitude too, you know, going from f P sixteen to
fp F thirty two to P sixteen to in sixteen to into eight and now
it looks like things are training towards mostly into four, so they're not particularly
large numbers. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm answering, I'm
gonna asking a question, but I mean, I think it's true that closed
source is not that far, like from a time standpoint, not that far
ahead of of a of a source. But let's say, and if you
assume open sources, do you have six months because of the immense rate of
improvement of AI, that's six months is a is actually a massive amount of
time, I mean, or at least the delta in an exponentially improving situation,
six months, Well, I think feel like an eternity. So I
think closed will outperform open by a meaningful amount at any given point in time.
And given the Yeah, I'm just gonna say, given the questions we
were talking about before about truth and not truth, and do you think in
ten years' time a I will have been a net truth improver or detractor from
where we are today, I think it will be, well speaking for at
least for Groark, I think it will be a significant truth improver. That
that is the three. Our goal is to be maximum truth seeking, maximally
curious, minimizing the the error between between perceived reality and describe reality and actual
reality, and always acknowledging the error, not being too confident about it.
So I and I think there will be a competition for truth, and you
will go. People will tend towards the one that they think is most accurate.
So and if there's at least one AI that is aiming for maximum accuracy,
I think it pushes all of the AI is to aim for maximum accuracy,
just as with with the X platform FK twitters. As you know,
X pushes for maximum truth and accuracy. It's not forces the hand of others.
They the others now also have to do that. Right, The truth
the truth arms race among the cs fees and is Yeah, is one of
the one of our thesis I think with our is that Teesla is one of
the most undervalued AI companies there is because of the insane amount of data you've
got on all or you know, to feed into autonomous I don't know if
there's any commentary on that because I think, you know, obviously, with
the rise of these l M companies which are by and large working off essentially
available data that is not proprietary, the benefits coming to the companies like Teesla
that understand how to use the benefits but do have these enormous propriety data pools,
seems like that's going to be the next frontier. Yeah, I think
that's accurate, an accurate description. It is one of the leading A companies
in the world, and with respect to real world AI, it is obviously,
by fear and away the leader. So you know, the what large
language model with phrase long large language model l M is massively overused. But
what what I do see happening is somewhat of a convergence towards intelligence. You
know, it's just like, really to make full self driving work, you
kind of need baby a g I in the car because you need to understand
reality and is messy and complicated, and just as as a side effect,
the car AI has to be able to read, for example, has to
be able to read read read aubitrary science as a little just a little side
effect of understanding reality in every language. So you know, I think that
everything is coming down to, you know, different layers of transformers and diffusion,
and then how you put together the transformers and in diffusion. That's that's
what That's what I made. That that's somewhat niche AI joke on the X
platform. Who do you think will be present in twenty thirty two? Transformers
or diffusion? Do you think that? Do you think that switching to full
stack AI for for Tesla's full self driving reduces the kind of forecast error for
you in terms of when the problem will be solved as in you famously have
you know, said it's a your way for a few years now. Do
you think that like actually line of sight wherever it ends up, you'll have
a better line of sight on when you're going to cross a particular threshold of
performance where it can go without human intervention. Yeah, I mean the cars
are really incredibly good at driving itself. So now, especially if you say,
like okay, drive in California, which is you know, both generally
easy driving because you don't have heavy rain and snow and that kind of thing
in most parts of California, and tails the engineering is primarily in California,
so you're gonna get it's gonna overfit for solving California. But if you're just
driving to stay around Palo Alto, the probability that you'll need an intervention at
this point is incredibly low. In fact, even if you're driving through San
Francisco, the probably intervention at this point is very low. So we're really
just going through a march of nines, Like how many nines of reliability do
you need before somebody does not need to monitor the system? You know,
it's so interesting GM basically shutting down Cruise. Tasha has done the work on
safety and it seems that Tesla with FSDV has an accidents once every three point
two million miles. At Tesla without FSD six hundred thousand miles. The average
vehicle on the road I think this is surface streets one hundred and ninety thousand,
and Cruz was forty thousand, so there really was a safety issue there.
Do you worry that it has potentially set back regulators, you know,
from consider ring autonomous transportation or is this data, given that accidents on the
streets have gone up in the last ten years fairly dramatically actually because it texted,
do you think do you think that regulators are going to look at the
data which, I mean, we've done the research, Tasha's do other research
on this and is pretty compelling. Well, you know, our regulator in
the US is the End Enforcement Division of NITSA, for whom I actually have
a lot of respect. I think those guys are they really have I mean,
they're they're quite I think actually, in my experience thus far, have
been quite sensible. You know that that that doesn't mean that they're on't silly
things that happen from time to time, but they've really been quite sensible because
they see the actual truth of the accidents, and they see the fact that
they're on the order of forty thousand people killed every year in motivical accidents,
and so they actually do they do care about the safety statistics, and they
do recognize that there's always going to be some risk with cars. Uh,
they're well aware of the fact that that our cars are much safer than other
vehicles. So you know, we really I mean, there's been a few
things where, you know, maybe we have had some disagreements, but you
know, like like for example, coming to an absolute full stop at stop
streets even when the you know, it's very clear there are no cars anywhere
in sight that could possibly cause an impact. No, no, no cars,
no pedestrians, completely clear and actually almost no humans stop at stop streets
a stop signs. Almost no humans actually come to a full stop that typically
let me think they came to full stop, but typically they'll be going at
least a few miles an hour, so that you know, they said,
well, the Lord does say that you have to stop at a stop street.
Well even though no, almost no humans do. So that actually created
a bit of a challenge for us because we had to select the rare cases
were from the fleet where humans actually stopped at stop streets at stop scigns,
so and then actually get our QA team to stop at stop streets and then
overfit the stopping stopping at stop signs in order to get the car to stop
at stop science. Because it was quite a bit behave like a sort of
a good, normal human driver who does not stop at stuff signs. So,
you know, we had a disagreement there on it, but we ultimately,
you know, have made the car stop at stop signs, even though
it's a lit annoying. So but you know, overwhelmingly, you know,
that's one of the things in the media will try to create this that that
I'm some sort of lawbreaking maverick who just does what he wants and doesn't care
about legal matters. This is actually not true. Of the literally millions of
laws that I am subject to in my company's the subject to there are a
handful over the years that we've disagreed with almost but the vast majority ninety nine
point I don't know, nine percent of laws and regulations we do a buy
bine and we do agree with, well, maybe maybe we don't agree with.
We certainly a buy bye. You know, there's once in a while
the gout disagreement, but it's it's really minor. And but if you sum
up the disagreements across over the you know, twenty years, it can just
sound like a lot. But but in fact, my companies are incredibly low
abiding. So that's the that's the that's truth of it. Anyway, I
think I think it'll be I think it'll be fine from a regulatory standpoint.
When we can show that there's even completely without supervision, there is a massive
statistical case for self driving being actually safer than if someone had their hands on
the wheel, or was even potentially having their hands in wheel, then I
think the regulators will accept that. You know, it's been really interesting as
a we were watching the breakthroughs as everybody has in AI, and we had
agreed with you. Our original our original research had autonomous mobility in pretty much
full force. This was our original research by now. But if we didn't
have the breaks truths in a I that that we've seen, particularly transformer architecture,
it wouldn't have been possible, right, But we didn't know that.
Is that how you're viewing it now? Well, it's certainly true that transformers
are transformational. Yes, so, uh, you know, pretty much everyone's
using transformers, and it's really just how many transformers. What kind of transformers
are you using? Order aggressive transformers which are very memory bound with intensive you
know, there's but you I think you really I'm not sure you can really
do AI without transformers in a meaningful way. Diffusion is also very important.
So I mean it just really looks like a GI is some combination of transformers
and diffusion. That's interesting. Does diffusion help elon and the things that transformers
are necessarily not necessarily that good at yet, like planning and remembering rather than
sort of a current state. Uh, My, transformers are important for all
aspects of AI. Yeah, I mean, computers are very good at remembering
things. Your phone remembers the video that you took down to the last pixel,
whereas you know, most humans cannot remember who they met last week.
So memory is the easiest. I mean, we were already outsourced memory to
computers in that Like you say, how much of human knowledge is in digital
form versus in I contained in human neurons. It's overwhelmingly in silicon rather than
biological neurons, right, So I mean, and there's there's I mean,
I think it's always you know, it's good to think of. Like I
tried to consider one of the most fundamental ratios. This is like in physics,
you always thinking about trying to looking at fundamental ratios and some of the
you know, one of the fundamental ratios is the ratio of digital to biological
compute just you know, just just in rural compute and how much, and
the ratio of digital memory to biological memory. So you know, at what
point it's that's like I think at this point, I think we're probably over
ninety nine percent of all memory is digital as opposed to biological. So you've
got over I think over one hundred digital to biological ratio, and memory at
this point trending towards a thousand, you know, and many or is married
to beyond that. Then then you've got the digital biological compute ratio. And
since the number of humans is more or less constant, I'm worried about it.
You know, humans declining quite significantly in the years to come because the
birth rate is so low. But you know, so so human human computer
is more or less it looks like a flat line versus time, whereas the
digital compute is exponential, right, And you know, at some point it's
that that will also be above one hundred, meaning more than ninety nine percent
of all compute will be digital instead of biological. Right, And if we're
not there already, we will be within a year or two. Although it's
amazing how much data biology can store. I reckon, I believe it.
It's estimated that a gram of dry DNA can store between four and five hundred
exabytes. So maybe this bill things to learn from biology. But yes,
incredible the pace of change. Yeah, I mean, if you encode memories
in DNA like a ticker tape, then the DNA memory potential is amounts.
But I'm not sure that's actually what's happening, or if it is, it's
I don't know. I'm not sure why my memory is so terrible. But
actually, I mean your memory in terms of the raw details, like you
have an amazing search function, right, it's kind of like yeah, well
for for any I mean I would argue kind of in some ways like the
transformer architecture enables effective search of a very very broad amount of data, and
or that's or it's like data compression. It seems like the yes, we
have there's many more like data bytes and coded are gigabytes and coded and disk.
But but actually being able to effectively search that space is pretty still primitive
with compute, at least at large scale relative to humans ability to access information.
I mean, it's still some things that humans be better than computers.
I mean, if you say, like computers that have not yet discovered any
fundamental physics, but humans have discovered a lot of fundamental physics. The computers
have not yet invented a useful technology. Humans have invented many useful, useful
technologies. So you know, do you think that do you ascribe to the
notion that, like you, essentially training AI systems on language is not enough
and that you have to have some kind of embodied source of data, like
through an optimist robot to actually get kind of the raw learning in that AI
system would need to understand fundamental physics. Yeah, so that's what I think
is coming. I think I think what's coming is is a understanding fundamental physics
and and AI inventing new technologies. It definitely definitely feels like rather than even
though some things now apparently past the cheering test, most importantly pussing the money
penny test, as in kind of a I actually pay bills, do expense
reports to the extent James bonded those, and actually pay parking clients and things
like that. That would actually be a very good use of AI that I
think would have a lot of users immediately and maybe the the Billy Connolly test
of Cannon a I actually be consistently funny. Those feel like Grok is pretty
funny. That's fair. I think you know, one of our goals for
Grock is to be the funniest AI. So I mean, if you ask
Rock to provide a vulgar roast, it's really good. And speaking of Groc
to not to not let down our future AI overlords. The final question on
the GROC summary that that that Kathy touched on was the future of bitcoin.
Not sure if we want to touch on that or not, whether that's out.
Yeah, that that and and then just before I don't know if we're
wrapping up here, but I'd love to talk about bitcoin and your your view
of crypto assets, and then maybe back into kind of tying things up with
convergences among technologies. You mentioned that a little earlier Elon and the impact ultimately
of all of this on economic growth longer term, you know the surprises that
might come from there. But first, first bitcoin, okay, sure,
what's the question regarding well, you know, there's when we first when you
put it or Tesla put it on its balance sheet, there was I remember
afterwards, there was this backlash in terms of its economic impact, all of
the energy usage and so forth. And then and then as part of the
seminar that we did that you participated in elon, we basically we and block
had come up with this notion that wait, you put uh, bitcoin mining
into a utility ecosystem. Uh, so that you know, if if there's
a storage unit and you know, the the intermittent energy, you know,
the storage unit's full, the sun is still shining, the excess power goes
over to bitcoin, and uh, and you can mint bitcoin and overbuild solar
and wind and renewables and all of that. So so that that that argument
against bitcoin, and Larry Think himself used it quite vociferously for a long time
until until recently that that is going away. What do you think about bitcoin's
potential impact on the financial system, the monetary monetary systeminancial services generally. Well,
I have to say I don't spend a lot of time thinking about cryptocurrency,
hardly, any hardly any at all. I I have thought for a
long time about money and the you know the nature of money, what is
money? And you know it's really a database for resource allocation? Is the
way to think about money in my view, So now field currency is actually
fine as a data based for resource allocation. If you have a predictable money
supply and it doesn't, you know, just get inflator or deflated too much.
Rules based, it's rules based, and then and then, and provided
government does not too much abuse the privilege to create more money. You know,
some amount of abuse is almost is guaranteed to happen. But but you
know you can go too far. So uh, you know, the temptation
over the ages to debase money is I think it goes back to probably the
ancient Sumerians, you know. But if as at the point which money was
invented in any form, including in gold, there was there was the unavoidable
temptation to debase the money supply. So so then you think of any given
money system again I sort of applying information theory to a money problem. Just
think of it like it's a it's an information system. You want to minimize
noise, minimize latency, minimized packet loss, and and so any like like
inflation would be adding noise to the system. If if the if, the
transaction rate, if if the if what it takes to concluded transaction is a
long time that as latency to the system of fraud is kind of like packet
loss. Uh, you know, it's it's you know, so, so
I guess I kind of think of money like like I think of information moving
on a on a network, uh, bandwidth, latency, jutter, which
is the variants in latency, packet loss, those fundamental elements. Yeah,
it's been interesting to watch how human beings in this case that fed you know,
the words they say, whip around markets and there's just something not right
about that. I mean, that's that's my point of view. I think
our point of view certainly on on the crypto team. And you know Art
Laffer, who was my professor in school, he's supply side you know,
Austrian School of economics. You know, when he first he collaborated on our
first bitcoin paper in two thousand and fifteen, and after he got through reading
it, he said, you know, I've been waiting for this since they
closed the gold window in nineteen seventy one. I've been waiting for a rules
a new rules based global monetary system. And I think that's where our optimism
comes from. This is truly rules based and so he's gotten more and more
excited about it the more he's learned about it. So, you know,
anyway back to convergence though, and you're you're the maestro here. You know,
when I think of when we think of, you know, autonomous taxi
platforms, rubotaxi networks and so forth, you know that that's the convergence of
three of the major platforms around which we have centered our research, robotics,
energy storage, and artificial intelligence. Each one of those technologies, you know,
basically gearing up for or in the in the sweet spot of a of
the S curve. And I sort of think it of S curves feeding S
curves and creating the potential for explosive growth that no one is expecting. And
and Brett has just written a paper it should come out in the next few
weeks around this topic. I just want to get your thoughts about that,
and Brett, if you wanted to ask any questions specifically about that, but
that the bottom line from an economics point of view is we could see you
know, very surprising up uptick not just uptick, a step function up in
economic a real economic growth if these technologies are as big as we think they
are. Yeah, absolutely, Well, I mean the real economy is not
money, it's goods and services. So you know, I was saying earlier,
money is really just the database for resource allocation, and you know it's
but if they're no resources to allocate, or if the actual goods and services
output have is fixed, then you really I just try to allocate that that
same pie but more efficiently. But it's really not only as good as as
growing the pie, so growing the the the output of goods and services.
You know, productivity is really the thing that leads to prosperity. And obviously
with with robotics and AI, I think digital medicine through a synthetic RNA,
and you know, I think these things are what will just massively improve productivity.
You know, just if you've got if you take the car as an
example, and I think you understand this quite well, although not many people
do that. You know, if you've got to say a passenger car,
it will typically see ten to twelve hours of usage, like maybe one and
a half hours a day over the course of seven days, but there are
one hundred there are one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week, so
it's really used for a very small percentage of the week normally, and then
you've got to pocket somewhere as well. So you've got parking costs, storage
costs, maintenance costs, and you know all these these these costs associate with
the car, and you know you're at five to ten percent of asset utilization
for a car, whereas if you've got an autonomous vehicle, that same car
that costs basically about the same could now I think, be used as a
rough approximation for about a third of the hours of the week. If you
say like productive hours, and this is I think that's a I think that's
a conservative, but I think it's not far wrong. So if you say,
like it goes from say ten hours a week to fifty hours a week
out of one hundred and sixty eight of useful hours, that that I think
is not it's not going to be exactly right, but I don't think it's
far wrong. You now have the same asset being able to having five times
the utility m hm. So that is that is that is a such a
staggering leap of productivity, you know, And and if TESS is able to
do as as I think we will be able to, which is to upgrade
the fleet to make it autonomous will be the biggest step change in asset value
in history. I think overnight we we agree, we agree I'm converted here,
and that's why I prefaced it by I realize I'm preashing converted. But
you're also you're also underestimating the utility uplift because that ten hours that the car
is driving a week, somebody is not being paid to drive it, mostly
right, but but they're devoting their valuable brain to doing it. As then
kind of it's actually there's the human labor loss that that accompanies that as well,
and so freeing up those hours is actually I think on Tasha's work it's
as meaningful, you know as the capital utilization benefit. Absolutely, And I
think you've also predicted a massive increase in traffic. Uh, you know,
because once you take away the pain of driving, people will will go more
places. So so they'll actually be more caught on the road driving more places.
Because if you can sit in the car and you know, be watching
a movie or be texting legally, then then then what you know that that's
really much less pain than having to navigate Audio's traffic for an hour and a
half Yeah, many people miss that. I remember, I just frustrated me
that GM and its marketing material and presentation just would say zero congestion, because
I think that's larious. Yeah, I would suggest threefold the amount of traffic.
And that's what push pushed us into doing more with drones and you know,
delivery of food and parcels with drones and even air taxis because I cannot
imagine the commute from JFK into Manhattan being you know, four hours or five
five hours or six hours, you know. So, yes, well,
fortunately I have a proposed solution to that, which consists of tunnels. Yes,
yes, and we're now in Saint Petersburg. If you could build a
tunnel from here to Tampa, which is just sand, you're not going to
run into anything, that would be very cool. We can absolutely do that.
Yeah, the Born Company has actually made made it has I think at
this point, by far the most advanced tunneling machine. The thing that is
the biggest inhibitor of Boring Company by far is regulatory approval. It's you know,
we're we're in the United States, and particularly in some states like California,
the we are being strangled by regulation. Yeah, and this is an
important point to make, which is I think obvious when you think about it,
that if if we keep making more rules and regulations and laws every year,
and those laws and regulations are immortal, but humans are not immortal,
then over time, you know, you'll be like Gulliva where you're tied down
by millions of strings and you can't move. It's true, It's true.
That's why your first principles approach to your business is so interesting. I wish
we had first principles approach to policy making. And you know, because you're
right that the regulations are strangling. The only good news here in this and
we've seen it, is other countries want innovation. You know, US has
been you know, has been the source of a lot of innovation, but
some of our you look at the FAA and drones there there That business has
done much better elsewhere in the world. You know, it's been very frustrated
here and now the is starting to play ball because of it. Do you
think that that uh, you know, that competitive dynamic or regulatory arbitrage will
change things anytime soon, or do we just need someone to come in first
principles and kind of figure out a way to convince everyone we need to get
a white sheet of paper and and not start all over. But you know
what I mean, I think we need to have a process for garbage collection
of rules and regulations that if you don't have some means of deleting rules and
regulations and you only ever add them, then that we'll obviously just end up
in a situation where everything is illegal. Yes, yes, which is where
we where we are, and and uh kind of the bigger and more complex
the state is, like like California, New York. Uh, you just
have I guess, first approximation, the number of regulators you have is proportioned
to your population, and so other Texas in Florida do do do better in
that regard. But there's just so many rules and regulations in California, New
York. And if you say, you know La County, you know City
of La It's now you've got it's it can take you several months simply to
get a permit to change the tiles in your bathroom. Literally. Yeah,
So you know that's I think things are. We we've got to do something
here or we're just doomed for this reason. Elon, do you think China
is at a competitive advantage, it's command and control. I've heard you,
you know, say that they're very tech savvue down to the mayor of every
city. Do you think or do you think what has happened over there that
there's a dynamic changing. Maybe they've been they've over leveraged after twenty years of
you know, basically buying the dip was the right thing to do until it
wasn't. Do you think that it is now entered more of a Japanese style,
you know, you know, they have to readjust to a new reality.
Or do you think, you know, the regulatory or less regulation over
there is going to give them a competitive advantage and innovation is going to you
know, help bail them out. I don't think China is not immune to
the same forces that have driven excess regulation and laws in the United States or
Europe. They you know, absolutely seen just in the course of our operations
in China details in China, we've seen quite a substantial increase in the regulatory
button. So you know, the it's a harder to get things done now
than it was ten years ago. That's that's so what I'm saying is I
think this is just a natural part of the evolution of any any country is
the growth of rules and regulations. Now, in history, the forcing function
for cleaning up bad rules and regulations or or sort of archaic rules and things
that don't really matter anymore has been war. That has been what has driven
has been the clansing function for rules and regulations. So now we would like
to avoid war as ideally we can do this without war. That would be
nice. So you know, it would be nice. Has it ever happened?
Has it ever happened before? I know you're a student of war and
battles and that you really under stand that dynamic. Have we ever cleansed the
system without it? I am not aware of. I'm not aware of a
situation like that that. Yes. Now, the thing is, in history,
wars were very common, so you know that we're in this odd,
odd bit of history where war is quite rare. We're talking about, you
know, total population of the world divided by a number of by percentage of
the population at war. If you say, look what percentage of US population
is actively at war, it's very tiny today compared to any time in history.
The people confuse caring about war from being in war very different. Yeah,
I think exposing and I know you did in Ukraine with Starlink, Exposing
what's going on is half of the It is half the solution in a sense,
right, or or maybe the reason that you know that that we're not
going through the horrors of war because you can see it in living color and
and and how devastating it is. Yeah, I mean that that is certainly
something that is possible. It was not possible in the past, although it
clearly doesn't stop the Ukraine War, right, that's still going on. And
you know, I think a lot of a lot of things if they've been
social media, so clear they would have happened at all, Like the creation
of the United States. If if I was thinking, like if they've been
social media at the time of of Roanoke, I think people would have been
persuaded from future voyages. M h. It's like we're dying of salvation play
the locals. We've got rifles, disease. That's a good point, very
good, but that isn't that is another way to reset the regulatory landscape is
kind of exploration, right, I mean, like who knows what. I'm
sure there's some set of loss that apply on the moon and potentially Mars,
but you know, it's much more difficult to enforce laws from from that long
a distance. Yeah. I think ultimately, if there is a self sustaining
city on the Moon or Mars, that self sustaining city will achieve autonomy at
some point. So I think it's quite important that we have, extremely important
that we become a multi planet civilization and create a self sustaining city, ideally
on Mars, because that's quite far away from Earth, and I think if
something were to take down Earth civilization, then it would it's less likely to
take take out a mar civilization because Earthenware was early in the same quadrant of
the Solar system, you know, for six months every two years, so
for a lot of separation. And I think, you know, I think
a lot about the permi paradox of where are the aliens? I've seen no
evidence of aliens. People always ask me if I've seen any evidence of aliens,
and I would immediately shot from the rooftops and from the X platform of
any any evidence whatsoever about aliens, I would be you've Yeah, I would
be talking about it immediately, and I have. Thus I've seen none.
That's a concern because it means that we perhaps are alone. And you know,
and and maybe there were many other civilizations, but they failed to pass
the great culture of big of going from one planet to being a multiplanet civilization.
So I guess my concern is that we need to keep civilization going at
least long enough to be a multiplanet civilization. At that point, I think
we stabilize civilization and consciousness and greatly extend the probable life span of civilization and
consciousness as we know it. So, you know, I don't want to
have to say this is not some escape patch from Earth, because people are
misinterred with this as like some escape patch from Earth. The this and this
really doesn't apply to me personally, because you know, I will probably die
in I don't know, forty or fifty years, hopefully you know, living
that long. Maybe I don't live even that long. But the civilization can
last for tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions
of years. So I think it's very important that we make life multiplanetary while
the window is open. And this is the first time in the history of
Earth that in four and a half billion years of Earth's existence that it has
been possible to extend life and consciousness to another planet. So that window is
now open for the first time in four and a half billion years. Now.
It may stay open for a long time, but it may also close,
and I think so we should just take advantage of the time when the
window is open to make life multiplanetary and ensure that the tiny candle of consciousness
in a vast darkness continues to continues to burn, does not go out.
Do you think that Starlink you've said kind of the advance the idea that you
needed hypersonic travel to basically capitalize colonizing mar is starlink ornof or does that still
do you still need that second kind of like business model built on top of
space x to make it happen. I think Starlink is enough. I think
Starlak is enough. You know that there's there's there's a little diagram on the
Stomic router. It's where people will probably don't notice, but it's it's a
homo transfer from Earth to Mars. So if you look on your Starlink router,
you'll see that homo transfer diagram. That Starling is the means by which
life becomes multiplanetary. So well, you know you're you as you are.
You are pioneering us in an amazing way. A lot of a lot of
the hope for the future is so much as it of it, you know
has has has started with you know, with projects you've started and dreams you
have. And I think the world's a better place. And I'll end where
I started. I I know that media clicks, you know, maybe negative
is it works, but long run, long run, truth wins out.
And uh, you know you're doing amazing things and I think the world will
thank you for years and years and years. And maybe just a clue Charnie,
oh sorry and click back immune just as a closing thought to build off
that, maybe as well, how would you think about inspiring the next generation
of entrepreneurs to do the really big hard things. Does it make most sense
to try and do something more consumer internet or something earlier, build up capital
and then go and do something very hard or do you think that what would
you want to have heard as a as a starting out entrepreneur thinking about that
journey and also to inspire the next generation to do great things, including building
all the cottage industry no out of things that will need to survive on Mars.
Great question. Well, I actually think that you know, and anyone
that has a you know, a company that's providing goods and services is doing
great. I mean, it's not that or when you tackle so called you
know it quotes great challenges, I would recommend that they don't actually, because
the probably of failure is very high. I mean, I think I think
just just try to be useful, is my advice. It's very difficult to
be useful. You know. If you see like total area under the curve
of how useful you've been to other people, you know, that's cumulatively,
that's that's it's very hard to make that a big number, you know.
So it's really just trying to be useful and make you great pots and services
that people want and make their lives better. That's it. And you know,
as far as you know, encouraging entrepreneurs to start companies, my advice
would be that if if you need encouragement to start a company, don't do
it, right, right, yeah, because you'll probably I mean, the
probably failure is very high, so you really should not. If if you
need encouragment, yeah, yeah, don't do it. Thank you, yeah,
thank you so much, Elon. You know, as I think,
as it's clear, if you have if you have an idea that will fill
an unmet need that the world, you know some of the world really needs,
and you have a passion to go for it, then yes, but
agreed. The probability of failure is Brett, I think you know. Is
it ninety percent? For new businesses eighty ninety percent. Let's stay