Speaker 1: Latest interview of Elon Musk.
Speaker 2: That's better, thank you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're gonna make this interesting.
Speaker 1: How many how many quotes are you going to want
that are going to be after this session?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 1: Five, Okay, So good afternoon everyone. It's great to see
everybody here. It's been an amazing week.
Speaker 2: Here in Davos.
Speaker 1: Hopefully everybody saw that we are having conversations here. Hopefully
everybody agrees. There are some conversations that we made disagreed.
There's many conversations that we may have agreed, but through
those conversations and I think today's result with a peace
agreement earlier today, the World Economic Forum is here to
have those conversations that have understandings and also resolution. So
it's an important component of who we and.
Speaker 2: What we are. And olled to have Elon Musk here.
Speaker 1: He came all the way from California to be here
to see all of you.
Speaker 2: So thank you Elon.
Speaker 3: He was welcome. I mean I heard I heard about
about the formation of the Peace Summit, and I was like,
is that is that? P I e C you know,
a little piece of greenland, a little pieza, Thanks, we
got one. All we want is peace.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna as I said, I'm a pretty proud
CEO of black Rock since we went public, the compounding
return of Blackrock to our shoulders with twenty Since Elon
took Tesla public, his compounded return is forty three percent.
This is just another advertisement for everybody's for Europeans, this
is why more citizens should be investing with growth, investing
with your countries. Imagine if a lot of pension funds
invested with Elon when Tesla went public, and how much
return with all the pension funds that invested side by
side with Elon and the growth, so a spectacular return.
There's very few companies. Well, I don't think there's any
other company as large as Tesla today that has that
compoundent return.
Speaker 2: So congratulations, I think a good measurement.
Speaker 3: Well, we have an incredible team a Tesla. That's the reason.
Speaker 1: So I want to get into the dirt, the meaningful
component about technology, the possibilities. I want to talk about
AI and robotics, energy, space and the progress ultimately coming
down to engineering, engineering, discipline, scale, execution, and few people,
if not anyone, has the experience and the fortitude to
confront these issues head on not just the ideas, but
the execution across so many different technology zelon And that's
why I thought it was important for us to have
this dialogue here in Davos. So you're presently building on AI,
on robotics, on space, on energy all at the same time.
When you look across those efforts, what do they have
in common from an engineering standpoint, Well.
Speaker 3: They're all radical technology challenges. But the overall goal of
my companies is to maximize the future of civilization, like
basically maximize the probability that civilization has a great future,
and to expand consciousness beyond Earth. So for sake, SpaceX
for example, that's SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to
the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth,
to the Moon, to Mars eventually to other star systems.
And I think we should always view consciousness life as
we know it as precarious and delicate, because to the
best of our knowledge, we don't know if life anywhere else.
You know, I'm often asked other aliens among us, and
I'll say that I am one.
Speaker 2: But or you here from the future.
Speaker 3: They don't believe me, Okay, So I think if anyone
would know if there are aliens among us, who would
be me?
Speaker 2: And we have.
Speaker 3: Nine thousand satellites up there, and not once have we
had to maneuver around an alien spaceship. So I'm like,
I don't know. The bottom line is, I think we
need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare
and it might only be us, and if that's the case,
then we need to do everything possible to ensure that
the light of the light of consciousness is not extinguished
because we're effectively. The way I view it is the
measure in my mind is of a tiny candle in
a vast darkness, a tiny candle of consciousness that could
easily go out. And that's why it's important to make
life multiplanetary such that if there is a natural disaster
or a man made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues.
That's the purpose of SpaceX. Tesla is obviously about sustainable technology,
and also at this point we've sort of added to
our mission sustainable abundance. So with the robotics and aim
this this is really the path to abundance for all.
If you say, you know, people often talk about solving
global poverty or essentially, how do we make give everyone
a very high standard of living. I think the only
way to do this is AI and robotics, which which
doesn't mean that it is without its issues. I mean this,
We need to be very careful with AI. We need
to be very careful with robotics. We don't want to
find ourselves in a James Camera movie. You know, a Terminator.
He's a great, great movie. He love his movies. But
we don't want to be a Terminator. Obviously. But but
if you have ubiquitous AI that is essentially free or
close to it, and ubiquitous robotics, then you will have
an ex an explosion in the global economy, an expansion
in the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent.
Speaker 1: Can that expansion be broad or is it narrow? And
how can that be created?
Speaker 2: How can it broaden the global economy?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I mean, I mean the way to think
of it is that if you have a large number
of humanoid robots, the economic output is the average productivity
per robot times the number of robots. Right, And actually
my prediction is in the benign scenario of the future
that we will the robots will actually make so many
robots in AI that they will actually saturate all human needs,
I meaning you are to be able to even think
of something to ask the robot for at a certain point,
Like there will be such an abundance of goods and
services because the my prediction is there'll be there'll be
more robots than people.
Speaker 1: So but how do you then have human purpose in
that scenario?
Speaker 3: I mean, you know there was not nothing is perfect,
you know, but I mean, I mean, is it is
a necessary? Like you can't have both. You can't have
work that has to be done, uh and amazing abundance
for all because if it's if it's work that has
to be done, then then then you and and only
some people can do it, then then you you can't
have abundance narrow narrow exactly. So but if you if
you have billions of humanoid robots, and I think it
will be I think, I think everyone on earth is
going to have one and going to want one, because
you who wouldn't want a robot to you know, assuming
it's very safe, watch over your kids, take care of
your pets, if you have elderly parents. A lot of
friends might have said that for elderly parents it's it's
very difficult to take care of them. Yeah, it's expensive
and it's expensive, and they just aren't enough people to
take care of the enough young people to take care
of the old people. So if if they if you
had a robot that could take care of and protect
and elderly parents, I think that would be great. That
would be an amazing thing to have and and I
think we will have those things. So overall, I'm very
optimistic about the future. I think we're headed for a
future of amazing abundance, which is very cool. And and
definitely we are in the most interesting time in history.
I think there's more a more interesting time in history.
Speaker 1: Can we can you when I reverse aging in this
new history or or are we going to see it?
Speaker 3: You know, I haven't. I haven't put much time into
the aging stuff. I do think it is a very
solvable problem, like you can do. I think when we
figure out what causes aging, I think we'll find it's
incredibly obvious. It's not a subtle thing. The reason I
say it's not a subtle thing is because all the
cells in your body, you know, with some pretty much
age at the same rate. I've never seen someone with
an old left arm and a young right arm ever
in my life. So why is that? That means that
there must be a clock, a synchronizing clock that is
synchronizing across thirty five trillion cells in your body, and
you know there is some benefit to death. By the way,
it's like this, there's a reason why we don't actually
have a longer lifespan because if you if you have,
if people do live forever for a very long time,
I think there's some risk of an ossification of society,
of things just getting kind of locked in place, and
you know, it just may become stultifying just not uh,
lack vibrancy. But but that that's said, do I think
we'll figure out ways to extend life and and maybe
even reverse aging. I think that's highly likely.
Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, So.
Speaker 1: In the future that you talk about AI models, autonomous machines,
rockets depends on massive increases a compute, massive increases energy
expensive energy, manufacturing scale.
Speaker 2: What are the bottle next to get there?
Speaker 1: And once again, with all that expenditures, again, how can
we make sure that it's broad and not narrow.
Speaker 3: I just think the natural thing is it's going to
be very broad because AI companies will seek as many
customers as they possibly can, and the cost of AI
will get is already very low, and it's planeting every year,
I mean almost the cost of AI is almost changed,
meaningfully changing on a month's month basis.
Speaker 2: There's open there's open models now everywhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, very there's open models, and the open models
only lack there maybe a year behind right the private
the sort of closed models. So so I think the
AI companies will seek as many customers as possible, which
means they'll see they'll provide AI to the world, but the.
Speaker 1: Cost of getting to there that compute, the chips, the
fab the powering that to me, what are the what
are the you know, those are a huge limiting factory.
Speaker 3: I think the limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally
electrical power.
Speaker 2: It's just its energy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean we're seeing the rate of AI
chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being
vote online is uh.
Speaker 2: Year acts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's clear that we're very soon, maybe even later
this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can
turn on except for China. China. China is China's growth
electricity is tremendous.
Speaker 2: Hundred gigawatts of nuclear as we speak.
Speaker 3: Actually, solar is the sole biggest thing in China. So
China's I believe transproduction capacity on solar is fifteen hundred
gigawats a year, and they're deploying over a thousand gigawatts
a year of solar. Now, you know, for continuous solar load,
you divide that by roughly don't know, four or five cola.
That's around two hundred and fifty gigawats of steady state
power paired with batteries. And that's a very big number.
That's half of the average power usage in the US.
So US power usage on average is five hundred gigawatts.
China just in solar like just in solar like that
can provide steady state power and batteries can do half
of the elect US electricity output per year just with solar.
Solar is by far the biggest source of energy. And
actually when you look on or even even on Earth,
but certainly beyond Earth, that the Sun rounds up to
one hundred percent of all energy. This is an important
thing to consider. So the Sun is ninety nine point
eight percent of the mass of the Solar system, Jupiter
is about point one percent and everything else is miscellaneous. Now,
even if you were to burn Jupiter in a thermo
nuclear reactor, the amount of energy produced by the Sun
would still round up to one hundred percent, because Jupiter
is only point one percent. If you teleported teleported three
more Jupiters into our solar system and burnt three more
Jupiters and everything else in the solar system, the Sun's
energy would still round up to one hundred percent. So
it's really all about the Sun. And that's that's why
one of the things where we do with SpaceX within
a few years, it's launching solar powered AI satellites, right,
because the space is really the source of immense power,
And then you don't need to take up any room
on Earth. There's so much room in space, and you
can scale to enormous I mean, you can scale to
I think ultimately hundreds hundreds of terror wats the year.
Speaker 1: You and I have had these conversations before, but what
don't you tell the audience what would it take for
the United States and what type of geography would it
take to have that solar field to electrify.
Speaker 2: The United States? And then let me ask a question,
why aren't we doing it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So, I mean, I guess the rough way to
think about it is one hundred miles by one hundred
miles or quote one hundred and sixty kilometers by one
hundred and sixty kilometers of solar is enough to power
the entire United States. So miles one hundred mile areas
is I mean, you could take basically a small corner
of Utah, Nevada, Nevada, New Mexico. Obviously wouldn't want it
all in one place, but it's it's a very small
percentage of the area of the US to generate all
of the electricity that the US uses. And the same
is true actually, I mean for for Europe, you could
take a small you could take relatively unpopulated areas of
say Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity
power that your needs.
Speaker 1: Why don't you think that there's a movement towards that here.
Speaker 2: And in the United States?
Speaker 3: Well, there is, as it is in China. Well, Unfortunately
in the US, the tariff barriers for solar are extremely high,
and that makes the economic of deploying solo artificially high.
Because China makes almost all the solar and and attack that.
Speaker 1: What would it take for Europe or the US to
build it commercially if it's that scale.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think, well, I can tell you
what what we're going to do, Yes, SpaceX and TELA
is we're building up large scale solo So the SpaceX
and TELA teams both separately are working to build to
one hundred giggle what's a year of solar power in
the US of manufactured solar power, And that'll probably tech
Is Center in about three years or something. But that's
that's These are pretty big numbers, and you know, I
encourage others to do the same. We obviously don't control that,
you know, your US tariff policy, but for for for
other countries, Huck that this China makes solo cells that
are incredibly low costs, and I think it would be
worth doing a large scale solo.
Speaker 2: So I know you are.
Speaker 1: You're going to be having a couple of big announcements
on robotics and what it can do. I mean, when
I went to the factory, you showed me those robots.
Speaker 2: How quickly you talked about the billions of robots.
Speaker 1: But how quickly and how quickly can they be deployed
in a manufacturing setting. How quickly can they be utilized
and be functional and be create that that abundance that you.
Speaker 3: Talked about, Well, humanoid robotics will advance very quickly. I
think we do have the tails, the optimist robots doing
simple tasks in the factory, except probably later this year.
By the end of this year, I think they'll be
doing more complex tasks and still deployed in an industrial environment,
and and probably sometime next year. I'd say that by
the by the end of next year, I think would
be selling humanoid robots UH to the public. That's when
we are confident that it's very higher liability, very high safety,
and the range of functionality is UH is also very high.
You can basically ask it to do anything you'd like.
Speaker 1: You're already seeing that in Tesla car. Is this the
software changes that you're doing it?
Speaker 2: What is it? Every quarter now?
Speaker 1: A software change that upbrates the ability of a robot
within the car.
Speaker 3: Yes, the TAIL is a full self driving software. We
updated sometimes once a week and there recently some of
the insurance companies have said that it is actually so safe.
Tells a full self driving so safe that UH they're
they're offering customers half price insurance if they if they
use tess A full self driving in the car, and.
Speaker 1: That could be monitored by the insurance company, can they
Is that part of the agreement then yeah?
Speaker 3: But I think self driving cars is essentially a solved
problem at this point, right, And Telsa's roll rolled out
sort of robot taxi service in a few cities and
will be very very widespread by the end of this
year within the US. And then we hope to get
supervised full self driving approval in Europe hopefully next month
really quickly. Yeah, and then maybe a similar time timing
for China hopefully.
Speaker 1: I'm want to move the space because historically space is
very capital and intensive, historically been done by governments of
the least. SpaceX change the whole model. But we've seen
it slow to scale and now I'm starting to see
it rapping up in what you're doing and other things.
Talk to us about the reson, you know, the automation
and AI, how it's changing the economics and building and
preparing for us in operating in space.
Speaker 3: Sure, well, the key breakthrough that tells that that's the
major breakthrough that SpaceX is hoping to achieve this year
is full reusability. So no one has ever achieved full
reusability of a rocket, which is very important for the
cost of access to space. We've achieved partial reusability with
Falcon line by landing the boost stage. We've now landed
the boots stage over five hundred times, but we don't
we have to throw away the upper stage. The uper
stage burns up on re entry for Falcon nine, so
and that the cost of that is equivalent to a
small to medium sized jet. So, but with with Starship,
which is a giant rocket, it's the largest flying machine
ever made.
Speaker 1: Not the rocket that you're using for the idea of
going to Mars, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Mars and the Moon, as well as for high
volume satellite stuff. So Starship. Hopefully this year we should
prove full reusability for Starship, which will be a profound
invention because the cost of access to space will drop
by a factor of one hundred when you're chief full reusability.
It's the same sort of economic difference that you would
expect that between say, a reusable aircraft and a non
reusable aircraft, like if you have to throw aircraft away
after every flight, that would be a very expensive flight.
But if you only have to refuel, then it's the
cost of the fuel. And so that's really the the
fundamental breakthrough that gets the cost of access to space
we think below the cost of a freight on aircraft,
so you know, under one hundred dollars a pound type
of thing easily. So it makes putting large satellites into
into space very low, very very cheap. And then when
you have solar in space, you get five times more effectiveness,
maybe even more than that than solar on the ground
because it's always sunny cold, yeah, it's it's it's a
well toys sunny, so you don't have a day night
cycle or seasonality or weather, and you get about thirty
percent more power in space because you don't have atrospheric
attenuation of the power. The net effect is solar is
five times more. Any given solo panel will do five
times more energy in space than on the ground.
Speaker 1: There is there any capacity in doing that and then
taking that power and bringing it back to Earth? Is
there any way of doing that? Or you're just taking
that power and utilizing it for the needs like building
AI data centers in the space.
Speaker 3: I think the case it's a no brainer for building
AI solar powered AI data centers in space because as
you mentioned, it's also very cold in space. If you're
in the shadow, then it's it's very cold in space.
There's three degrees calve. So you just have your soul
Kandel spacing the Sun, and then a radiator that's like
point like pointed away from the Sun so it has
no sign incidents, and then it's and then it's just cooling.
It's a very efficient cooling system. So net effect is
that the lowest cost place to put AI will be space,
and that'll be true within two years, maybe three, three
of the latest.
Speaker 1: Well, so looking ten or twenty years out, how would
you describe success with AI or space technology?
Speaker 2: And where do you see it is that?
Speaker 1: Can you are you more certain what's going to happen
the next three years or five or ten.
Speaker 3: I don't know what's going to happen in ten years,
but the rate at which AI is progressing, I think
we were We might have AI that is smaller than
any human by the end of this year, and I'd
say no later the next year well, and then probably
by twenty thirty or twenty thirty one. Call it five
years from now, AI will be spotted. Then all of
humanity collectively.
Speaker 1: We only have a number of minutes left. But I
want to humanize you for a second, so there's no
speculation that you're a piece, right, I want to I mean,
I would frame this question by you are the most
successful entrepreneur industrialists in the twenty first century, maybe beyond.
Speaker 2: So I want to really get this.
Speaker 1: You know what inspired you, Who's inspired you? What was
a foundation of your curiosity, and importantly what was the
what was it?
Speaker 2: Was there an.
Speaker 1: Aha moment epiphany at any time in your life and career?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean as a kid, I read a lot
of science fiction, sci fi, fantasy books we talked about
and uh, comic books. H and I always like technology. Uh,
I didn't expect to be where I am today. Seems
incredibly implausible, but yeah I was. I was inspired by
reading about books about the future, about science fiction and uh,
and I guess I want to make science fiction not
fiction forever. At some point turned science fiction to science fact.
And uh, you know, we want to have like Starfleet
and star Trek really for for real, like where we
actually have giant space ships traveling through space going to
other planets traveling to other star systems.
Speaker 2: Beamed up to go back to New York.
Speaker 1: You know, I'd like to just be beamed back to
New York instead of.
Speaker 3: Flying Yeah, star trek. I guess my my essential what
I would call the philosophic philosophy of curiosity. I'd like
to understand the meaning of life. You know, the is
the standard model, is the standard model of physics correct
regarding the beginning of life, beginning of existence, and the
end of the year verse? What what questions do we
not know to ask that we should ask? And a
I will help us with these things. So I'm just
trying to say, how do we get here? What's going on?
What's real? Are there aliens? Maybe they are? And if
we've got if we've got spaceships that are traveling to
other star systems, we may find we may encounter aliens,
and or we may find many long dead alien civilizations.
But I'm just I just I just want to know
what's going on. I'm curious about the universe. And that's
my philosophy.
Speaker 1: Do you see yourself ever going to Mars in your lifetime?
Speaker 3: Uh? Yeah, I mean I would say, like, you know,
that's a long commitment. I've been asked, wasn't that three years?
Speaker 2: Each way? It's six months, six months, that's all it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, six months. But the planet's only aligne every every
two years. Okay, so uh yeah. I've been asked a
few times like do I want to, you know, die
On Moss, And I'm like, yes, but just not on impact.
Speaker 1: That's a good that's a good answer. Anyway, we're out
of time. I hopefully everybody enjoyed this. I mean, there's
so many myths around Elon Muss. I could tell you
he's a great friend, and I constantly learned so much
from him, and I'm totally inspired by what he's what
he has done. I've been been inspired who he is,
and I'm totally inspired by his vision of the future.
And I don't think it's such a bad future. And
I agree with his optimism. So Elon, thank you. Any
last words, Well.
Speaker 3: I think generally, I think my last words would be
I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about
the future. Good and generally, I think for quality of life,
it is actually better to err on the side of
being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and
right
Speaker 1: On that note, thanks for listening, see you in the
next episode.