Elon Musk Answers All Your Questions at Tesla's 2022 Shareholder Meeting

uh we've got some uh questions from the internet that were voted to the top so i'll answer these questions and then we'll take just quite questions from the audience uh and uh so one of the questions is how does tesla intend to utilize cash in the in the coming years uh will we increase cap edge capex uh well i guess you can read the question share of ibex dividends or acquisitions um well it's interesting like tesla has actually done very few acquisitions apart from the solar city acquisition was the only really big acquisition we did and then the next largest would be tesla groman but it's tesla's actually used a remarkably small amount of its equity to do acquisitions compared to other companies the vast majority of our growth basically 90 of our growth has been organic which i think is actually a really good thing but if we do see interesting companies we you know we will acquire them but it's quite rare for us to acquire a company um but we are interested in companies that are very good at manufacturing automation uh software ai uh manufacturing technology in general that kind of thing um we certainly will increase uh capex uh i mean we are actually spending uh cap we're spending capex money and r d money um as fast as we can do so without wasting it so this is not a constraint um if we try to spend it any faster we'll just be wasting money so we're we're cranking hard on on capex and uh r d um depending on what our future cash flow looks like uh i think a sort of sheriff buyback is possible i wouldn't want to commit to that but uh well you know let's just make sure uh you know that there's not some force majira event somewhere um you know we think we want to make sure we we have plenty of capital that and that future cash flow is looking very solid and the world is relatively stable and then i think uh sure about buyback is is on the table yeah [Applause] so how many factories are necessary to achieve 20 million vehicles i think probably roughly a dozen so we're aiming for uh one and a half to two million units per factory um now our factory in california we're just running out of room so it's it's hard to get um more than maybe [Music] 700 or eight or seven or eight hundred thousand vehicles a year out of there um but uh most most places will be aiming for one and a half to two so a dozen sites although we are aiming for giant monolithic buildings cyber truck pricing uh it was unveiled in 2019 and the and and the reservation was 99 so you know things have a lot has changed since then uh so so the specs and the pricing will be different i you know hate to sort of give a little bit of bad news but i i think there's there's no way to sort of haven't anticipated quite the inflation that we've seen and the various issues um but what i can say is that the cyber truck will be one hell of a product and it's gonna be like a damn fine machine so yeah [Applause] and we are tracking to be in production um uh middle of next year from this factory so that we're installing we're going to be installing the production equipment tooling and all uh starting the next couple months we'll begin the uh the installation so aiming to be in volume production manager next year so [Applause] now what could possibly go wrong in answering this question oh man all right so uh um i should just pass uh well let me just say that uh uh you know i hope for peace and respect um fair enough yeah uh yeah good advice so we're trying we're deploying supercharges wherever we see the greatest need now sometimes the greatest need is in some place that is extremely difficult to get permits like the getting a permit in malibu was not like the next level that took years and so some places are hard to get permits uh and some places are easier um but we are aiming to just generally we we analyze the supercharger usage uh every day and and we prioritize uh supercharged locations according to where we see the greatest need um with respect sorry where well you know maybe we should do an online poll for where is it where should we put superchargers [Applause] um yeah that's good okay we'll do that um so i mean with respect to amenities uh with supercharges i think um we'll do a couple of just fun fun things like we're going to do a really fun supercharger location in la and the general vision is to have something that's like a futuristic uh kind of like diner sort of like i don't know uh blade runner meets grease meets jetsons yeah uh you know something cool different and but with some style and and uh where you can you know get you know uh so some great food and um the one in l.a we're planning to have like these big screens at the supercharged location and the screens will be aiming to show like the 100 greatest movie clips of all time and so you can like you know have a cheeseburger and uh charge your car and watch some cool stuff on the screen um and uh it'll be open to others who are not you know you can come to the restaurant even if you don't own a tesla but it'll be like a like a little gem i think there in in la and and then depending on how that goes we'll you know we might roll that out to a few other places we'll try do interesting fun things that are not necessarily economically sensible but they're cool so 4680 um the this is a this is not an easy one to answer um we are making a decent number every week and i think we'll be in high volume production by the end of this year it's always difficult to predict this is because a lot of new technology what's the slope of the s curve on ramp and except that i'm confident we will get to the you know the the high production rate uh but it's probably uh end of this year before we get confidently to a high production rate um but but this does not affect our vehicle output we actually have enough supply from enough battery cell supply from suppliers to make one and a half million cars this year so it's not a constraint on output uh it it but it is it will be important for next year and uh new mass plan is not not yet ready um i don't know maybe aim to get it done this month but like i said it's going to be just looking at the big picture what does it take to make earth fully self-sustaining from an energy standpoint and yeah just map it out and say this is this is what needs to be done tesla will try to be as useful as possible in this regard and hopefully uh lots of other companies can join in and and help accelerate the sustainable energy revolution so with peak inflation behind us so the inflation question is is interesting because we we do get a fair bit of insight into where prices of things are going over time because when you're making millions of cars you have to purchase commodities many months in advance of when they're needed like so you need to tell because it's a very long supply chain with a tremendous amount of inertia so we we sort of have some insight into where prices are headed over time and the interesting thing that we're seeing now is that most of our commodities most of the things that go into a tesla not all but i don't know more than half the prices are trending down in six months six months from now this could change obviously but but the trend is down which suggests that uh we are past peak inflation um now making macroeconomic prognostications is a recipe for disaster but my guess is that we're past peak inflation and that we will see we will have a recession i think it will be a relatively mild recession sort of uh but i'm just guessing here this is total speculation but i would guess it's a it's a you know mild recession for i don't know 18 months or something like that um it would be my best guess right now we don't have fundamental capital misallocations in the in the us as we have had in the past like in leading up to 2008 where we were building primary housing units at twice the rate of of household formation which obviously doesn't make sense um and there were a lot of companies that were over levered the the leverage or debt that companies have right now is relatively low so yeah i would say probably you know mild moderate recession maybe 18 months ish um and um and and i think we i think inflation is going to drop rapidly that's my guess i don't know what do you guys think it's like it's not sound about right okay great all right cool yeah the tesla robot essentially changing the economy like how can we base an economy on automation ai with the full self-driving that's being implemented you're going to have a full fleet of vehicles that can drive themselves you'll have these robots that can go and get into your vehicle and place things will you be moving to a rental model or how will you base a tesla model on selling cars whenever these cars are fully automated can drive wherever they would like and hopefully would be applicable to having multiple people use the vehicle instead of just one person yeah so it's interesting to think about an autonomous car because you know when you drive around look at you look at how many cars are parked like they're just parking lots full of cars everywhere because cars need a driver and so most of the time they're doing nothing you know typically a passenger car is going to be like 12 hours a week or something like that of usage now if it's autonomous maybe it can get to 50 or 60 hours of usage and that's sort of you know four or five time for a four or five fold improvement in the utility of a car but the interesting thing is that the car still costs the same so in that scenario at least for some period of time the effect of gross margin on an autonomous car is kind of boggles the mind um so and in terms of how the calls will be operated i mean i think it would be you know just um you'd have the option of of owning a car uh using a car just occasionally when you need it like an auto uber or something like that and there would be people and then an owner of a car could decide that they want to use their car or they want to add or subtract it to the fleet so i think it would end up being some kind of combination of like airbnb and uber or something like that you know so sometimes you you know you can go all the way from owning it to renting it sometimes to renting it a lot to completely renting it but the but the the utility of the car will just be mind-blowingly great and then like i said optimus will will really bring the future to now so yeah maybe maybe maybe you could rent optimus hourly um i mean assuming we get all these things we do all these things i think probably tesla will be the most valuable company in the world elon hi um we all know how the media treats you um so well yeah so i don't have a question for you today um i just want to say on behalf of my six-year-old at home kyler scott that's watching right now who thinks you're awesome as well thank you for making the world a better place thank you [Applause] well i love you guys i i i just like to say thank thank you for helping make it happen um yeah because with it without without the without you without the early adopters of electric vehicles and sort of full self-driving tesla would not be where it is today so thank you for your support [Applause] what a presentation thank you tesla team it's an honor to be a stockholder elon i brought you the final checkpoint for spacex and mini moon maybe little lex can play with it my name is david guajardo i'm a former bronzeville resident my first suggestion is to add a new string mode option where the driver can select lazy mode and have the software accommodate between comfort standard and sword modes depending on the speed the car is going this will increase handling and safety second when the when disengaging autopilot with the wheel the accelerator stays on please fix it last one weeks ago talking to mr sam patel at starbase i told him that the team should add a tab in the spacex website and disclose what type of skills and preparation are going to be needed from us to accomplish the greatest adventure ever ever in human history going to mars all right well thanks for the suggestions those those are good suggestions thank you all right uh sure hi so i do actually have a question but one thing that i want to okay to ask is like people ask you all the questions what do you think people miss and should be excited way more about and what do you think people are threatened way too much about and shouldn't be worried at all yeah that's actually that's a good point um you know i think actually the the questions uh and ideas posed by uh uh retail investors like small retail investors like i think many of you in the audience are actually the most insightful um and it's i find it remarkable that um you know essentially amateur like normal everyday people actually understand tesla better than the analysts i mean how much you must see this as like that's like and and i mean i think like you know to really say like well like what's what's the what's the point of a company is the point of a company is to create useful products and services you know company is not it should not exist in and of itself it exists it's it's a group of people gathered together to make products and services and if those products and services are great it's a valuable and useful company and if they're not it's there's not and so really to understand a company you just use its products and if you think the products are great then it's well the company is great that's it that that's how it is um and so i i think ironically a lot of the people people that episode professional analysts don't drive teslas so like well okay you know maybe you should yeah cool i mean i mean we aim to make tesla the most amount of fun you can have in a car you know so um yeah so let's see so so i think that there are a lot of really good and insightful ideas um that that i see on the internet on twitter and whatnot and um oh yeah twitter [Applause] um so uh yeah so let's see um i think sometimes people fret a bit too much about short-term things that which are clearly just um you know just bumps in the road type of thing uh where there might be a supplier shortage or a you know some shutdown in some part of the world but um but really those things are you know are clearly just kind of one-off items that don't really matter for the long-term um the the sort of the you know the the trend if you like looking at the sort of cumulative output and cumulative miles driven um and you can see that that cumulative output is a very clean exponential um and it's so you know so i guess sometimes people fret a little bit too much about this quarter or that quarter but um you know if you're a shareholder a company is really like the net present value of future cash flows and so what is a you know one quarter is not really a big deal i think if you see people panicking then instead of saying oh man my stock's gone down it's a buying opportunity hi elon thanks for the meeting i became a marine because i want to help protect your future base on mars my friends and i are trained and we're we support the mission would you be open to this idea yeah space marines absolutely [Applause] hi elon a lot of tesla's products today focus on electrical energy for sustainable future do you foresee tesla perhaps exploring thermal energy sustainable products other than hvac like say for example in this gigger factory taking the residual heat from the giga presses and applying them to say the drying ovens in your paint line yeah i think get getting um dual use of like if you use electricity to do something and then it generates heat and then you transporting that heat elsewhere within the factory it's it's probably a good idea to to do that actually um it is a an i sort of i would say a future optimization but but it is probably something worth doing in the factory and it is something we do in the car so in the car we carefully manage uh the the electrical and the thermal energy and so like one of the ways that we achieve a long range in cold weather is by both charging the pack and heating the pack and then the pack acts as a both an electrical and a thermal reservoir to achieve long range even in very cold climates and so we're constantly within the car shuttling uh heat back and forth between motor drive motor power electronics pack and the cabin volume so that same concept should be applied to to factory i agree elon what's up and my name is justin some know me as smd capital on twitter i've i had the number one voted question last earnings about scaling to extreme size i have another big question i think a lot of people would want to know in regards to when would tesla launch their first pilot city for the tesla network the robo-taxi business well you see i think it's actually going to be probably much more widespread than that because tesla is developing a general solution for self-driving and it's not really specific to one city or location now there's different regulatory requirements in in various cities and states so some locations will offer regulatory approval sooner than others but um but we are aiming for a general solution and um in fact if if you if you created a sort of a a randomly generated alternate earth our system would still work like literally you know like you had some sort of computer generated earth uh that you know obeyed roughly the same rules as current earth uh our system is sufficiently generalized that it would work in uh a computer generated alternate earth so yeah so anyway [Applause] so um i'm gary black managing partner of the future fund tesla's our largest position probably the thing we worry about most it's not not pr but it's uh it's succession so you know key man how how does the board think about your succession and especially when you have you know a judge who's going to decide in a couple months whether or not you have to take over twitter how would you split your time well i think tesla's definitely gathering a lot of momentum and we have a very exciting product roadmap that will last a long time so now obviously execution against that roadmap is difficult because these are not simple products they're not copies of what anyone else is doing they're new things so [Music] but i intend to stay with tesla as long as i can be useful and um you know i can be most useful i think on the product design and manufacturing of also basically factory design product design and sort of manufacturing optimization so um and we do have a very talented team here so i think uh i think tesla you know would continue to do very well even if i was kidnapped by aliens went back to my home planet maybe [Laughter] but so yeah um but no i think it's it's a good question and i to be frank i don't have us an easy answer uh open to ideas uh that uh you know i'm definitely working as hard as i can and um and i'm very excited about the future of the company and uh you know i think it's it's got a it's got a very very bright future uh even without me um so uh i'm not leaving so uh to be clear um so [Applause] you know i i also have to be a little careful about what i say with about twitter because uh you know this was like lawsuit and stuff um so sometimes people get bent out of shape um but i i i do use twitter a lot so it's not like i'm like randomly going around wanting to acquire companies or something i'm not like a hedge fund i'm not a hedge fund or a private equity firm or something so in fact the only two publicly traded securities i own are tesla and twitter that's it so and i think in the case of twitter since i use it a lot um shoot myself in the foot a lot you know uh take my grave et cetera um but you know i think it's i do understand the product quite well so i think i've got a good sense of of where where to point the engineering team uh with twitter to make it radically better um and um i i do it i i do sort of have a well as like a grander vision for what i thought x.com or fx corporation could have been back in the day it was a pretty pretty grand vision and and obviously that could be started from scratch or but i think twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years so it's kind of like something i've thought would be quite useful for a long time i know what to do i don't have to have twitter for that but it would it's like i said it's probably at least a three-year accelerant and i think it's something that will be very useful to the world how's it going elon my name is ronnie and with the projected release of the robot taxi coming in the years ahead uh would it be looked at as a the boring company would it be used to get regulation for full self-driving and would it be a good venue for the robot taxi also my little brother zane says hi owns all tesla hot wheels okay cool i said hi to him back so yeah boring company is um making good progress actually uh and um you know for the longest time people like i'd give a talk somewhere and people say what what are opportunities you know about i was like tunnels and they'd be like for five years i said if if somebody could just do a tunneling company we can solve traffic and we can have also very high speed transport between cities because while i'm a fan of trains and i like high-speed trains they do they do intersect the you know go through towns and neighborhoods and chop people's property in half and they're very loud so um but i want to be clear i'm pro-trained some of those are trained people you know um i take every opportunity to drive to go on interesting trains so but but if you have a sort of a much simplified version of the hyperloop it's really just tesla's in a tunnel that's depressurized you can go between cities super fast and without disrupting the stuff above ground so that's kind of the vision for the boring company is to make make roads 3d and have sort of an arbitrary an arbitrary number of layers of roads and i think you can solve essentially any traffic problem in any city if you go 3d with uh with with tunnels so multiple areas of tunnels going from you know connecting the the city and you can also turn a lot of the streets into parks because you won't need them any you won't need to have cars indoors you won't need parking so i think one company i think is capable of much more transformation than it may seem and we actually have an operational tunnel in vegas right now so yeah if you go to vegas uh go to resorts world and you can hop in the tunnel and and go to the convention center and like yeah and you can paint doge exactly i'm doing what i can to support those so um so but yeah i think i think one company is going to do some pretty interesting things in the years to come so let's see uh good afternoon elon um i think many people share my experience i gave you and or at least tesla my complete family's legacy because i believed in it and thank you for you and your company outperforming i think you saved a lot of us thank you [Applause] okay so my question is this uh commercial aircraft have something called acas where aircraft like telemetry of their position between one another to a permanent collision yeah sometimes too much telemetry so taking this to a higher level do you see tesla's communicating with one another with one another and dojo turning into some kind of ultimate air traffic control for tesla supply chains and robo taxi thank you actually that's an interesting idea i haven't thought about that um i mean right now a goal with dojo is just to be really good at video training so we actually already have i think the maybe the fourth and maybe approaching the third uh most powerful computing uh center in the world for for uh ai training um yeah they might be throw it at this point which obviously uses just an enormous number of gpus and stuff so um so our first goal with with dojo is to make it competitive and and be be more effective at neural net training than a whole bunch of gpus and we might you know might get there soonish and then of course can be used for many other neural net training tasks it's it's a fundamental it's a computer designed from the ground up to be optimized for neural net training which which really no computer has no that's never been done before um and yeah so and then maybe it'll do some traffic control i haven't really thought of that um the the tesla's probably there will be some merit to communicating for tells us to communicate to each other but but that won't be needed for full self-driving at all um and for long for a long time the the vast majority of cars on the road will be manually driven so the the value of tesla to tesla communication is is not that high except for perhaps communicating uh traffic issues uh or you know accidents potholes uh things that may be helpful to um the road closures that kind of thing so it's like you're getting real time a tesla ahead of you has got seen a road closure and you get that real time updated to your car so you don't get stuck in the road closure situation um that's that's the kind of stuff that i think we we definitely what we are we are working on right now so all right all right we have one last question um and it's yours thank you very much hello elon uh simply i would just like to say thank you for everything you've done for earth and the community and everything you've done i have one question and aside from working for tesla being a shareholder or purchasing a tesla how can the masses help push your vision all right well i think just generally um you know encouraging sustainable energy uh and being supportive of that i think is is really helpful um so uh but i i say you're doing great so far so uh you know like i said without your support we tells it wouldn't be where it is so it's people like yourself and everyone in this room and out there um and the three million people who have bought our cars uh and the millions who have gotten solar and uh you know that's all that all really helps uh you know make the world a better better place for the future um and and i'd say like it definitely i'd like to sort of convey a message of of optimism about the future um and like if we if we work you know really hard to accelerate sustainable energy sustainable transport uh the future will be good you know it's and and i think just just make sure people know that like and i i'm not suggesting complacency at all uh i'm literally saying if we work hard towards a sustainable future we will achieve it um and and the future was bright so all right thanks guys thank you thank you all right [Music]

Channel: CNET Highlights

Views: 344,496

Keywords: event, livestream, live, 2022, CNET Highlights

Id: dqOUCjHOtAQ

Length: 37min 30sec (2250 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2022