Elon Musk: AxelSpringer Award Talk with Questions from other CEOs - 1.12.2020

yes pioneers talk it's a great pleasure to have you for everybody to be joining into our discussion theme of the day is mission to mars and we have a very special guest today which is elon musk elon welcome thank you perfectly you're the founder of so many companies of tesla of spacex we're going to speak to that in a minute but we have more than you in the round we have entrepreneurs talk today and let me shortly introduce uh the other guests in the round dr hannes ahmeda he is the ceo of vodafone the telecommunications company we have olivier report he is ceo of share now the car sharing company with marcus essing the ceo of philip morris undergoing a very strict uh renovation of its business model moving away from tobacco we have andreas krois ceo of einhell which is a company specialized in trading for do-it-yourself uh construction and building we have for batteries i'm sorry i said for batteries and for batteries our main business is our platform battery battery so we have something in common okay great doctor osaka verman he's ceo of dws the big b2c um investment company and oscar the book he is ceo of dhl supply chain and my name is christophe keiser i'm your moderator i'm with axel springer so elon let we just came from visiting your construction site in green hyde and i think it's fair to say that everybody was deeply impressed 12 months ago this was a forest there was no such cardboard factory technically in my sense that the trees were just grown for use in cardboard so okay to be clear not an old growth forest it was literally a cardboard bomb that so sometimes people wonder are we knocking down old trees but it's just uh it's actually literally a cardboard uh farm and today we knocked down the cardboard phone okay but there wasn't any sewage no fresh water uh at least not in pipes underneath the ground this rain rained a decent amount but yeah and no electricity yeah and now it's a huge factory almost uh yeah i mean we have a lot of the core shell that's been built and uh there's still a transparent work that goes on because the building is is like you know like if you get a computer this is the the building is the box that the computer goes in but the computer is the hard part yes so please tell us germans are not really famous for building buildings very quickly look at we're in berlin right now look at the airport berlin airport right how did how do you manage to build so quickly well it is it is actually quite difficult to get all the permits and it requires a lot of effort and a lot of uh cooperation with the authorities so it may i would definitely not say that it is easy to get the permits it's not not easy um one of the approaches that we did take was to proceed at risk with temporary permits so there is a way to accelerate things in the system to go with temporary permits but the risk is that your long-term permit could be denied in which case that you have to stop everything and and tear it down yes so most companies are not willing to take the risk of the temporary permit and then the risk of having to stop and tear down you're a ceo of a publicly traded company very valuable okay of many public debates how do you explain taking this risk to shareholders i don't know i mean frankly i think there's probably a lot of risk associated with tesla and if a low-risk situation is what an investor wants i would recommend not investing in tesla but many still invest in tesla because they believe in speed yeah why is speed of such an essence well i think the speed is um a fundamental determinant of the competitiveness of any company so especially with when there's technology involved so the rate of innovation fundamentally determines which companies succeed uh you know which companies are the number one in a in a particular arena uh like unless if like if one company has twice the speed of innovation of another uh provided that company does not die of a self-inflicted wound or die sort of um have infant mortality the company with the the high rate of innovation will unequivocally win long term you're building um a factory that is geared for half a million cars yes yes particularly like i very much think that and i've said this many times the making of a prototype is easy but production is hard especially if you have advanced production techniques that people have not used before um the the vast majority of of our engineering effort isn't is in manufacturing basically designing the machine that makes the machine so i can't emphasize this enough uh the the the factory especially in advanced factories the hard part the vehicle design is comparatively easy so we will aim for a half million vehicles a year that is our goal to get there as quickly as possible the only uh limitation on growth is how quickly can make can we make cars that are high quality higher reliability that's the only governing element on the rate of uh progress um but nonetheless even with extreme effort i think it probably takes us until this is just a guess that until roughly the end of 22 to reach that level of production what about demand uh not many europeans drive electric cars yet yet you're building a gigafactory as as it's called yeah is demand or creation of demand an issue in your mind or do you do you think if the car is good if the car is workable if it's affordable it will be sold absolutely definitely yeah no question no doubt in your mind zero how come because creating demand is always a huge question on entrepreneur's mind but you seem totally confident that it will work absolutely if you have a compelling product and the price is affordable um so the value for money is good the affordability you know people can have enough money to buy it um and the product itself is compelling then demand is never going to be an issue um so that is not something i worry about i do worry about making sure that we can achieve affordability thresholds um because even if you make the value for money infinite if people do not have enough money to buy it they can't still can't it's and then it's just frustrating for people they see this great product too expensive can't buy it so making the car affordable is um and while continuing to improve the the capabilities and quality of the product is is the that is the hardest problem so many people ask how does elon musk manage his life and i know you have been asked that question a lot of times and i heard a lot of interviews with you but still even i wonder all the time how do you do this because tesla in itself is a huge complex operation with factories on all continents almost by now almost almost yeah but it's not your only company you have spacex which seems to be huge success you have your own space program you're talking about mission to mars you have neural link connecting computers to the brain like a small company it's a small company it's very small you have the boring company building very small very small company yeah you envisioned hyperloop it's not a company but uh well a boring company can do the hyperloop boring company can do the hybrid yeah i mean hyperloop is essentially just a fast-moving electric car in a vacuum tube okay yeah you have starlink uh bringing fast speed internet to every almost every like square meter on earth starting it's gonna be great it's gonna be great but but how's part of spacex and and as part of spacex yes how do you manage to dive so deeply into so many different engineering challenges well i studied physics and i certainly strongly recommend physics as a good grounding uh to understand the nature of reality i mean physics is at fundamentally just understanding how does the universe actually work um and then that's a good foundation for then a variety of uh engineering disciplines and i think uh also the the analytical principles the the sort of analytical constructs used in physics uh apply to basically anything um it's you know philips physics developed all these ways of of thinking like like first principles thinking uh thinking about things in the limit of high and low you know testing your hypothesis you know it's um the scientific principle essentially uh these things are incredibly helpful in all arenas it's just most people tend to think by analogy uh or by comparison with something that already exists and and this this is a sort of a mental shortcut that requires less uh brain strain uh but it it does not it's hard to get fundamental insights unless you think about things from a first principle standpoint and the first principle standpoint is is kind of deductive thinking that almost has like yeah the force of a natural law of a physical law of making things happen because they need to happen uh no i mean first principles thinking is just saying okay what are the most fundamental truths that we know about any given situation like the things that at a very granular level the most the sort of simplest building blocks um that that we're most convinced are true and then um and then you reason up from those fundamental uh axioms uh and then you it's just sort of cogent thinking would be another way to to refer to it as uh say like are these axioms uh believed to be the most believed to be true are they the most relevant do they necessarily lead to a conclusion uh what is the probability associated with that conclusion uh the things that because reality is really probability it's not it's not deterministic it's not one or the other when did you have the personal epiphany understanding that this rule that comes from physics applies to the business world i think it applies to everything but um i don't know i think probably 95 or 94 something like that while swimming while jogging under the shower when did it hit you was it a process or a moment i was i was thinking about the internet and um those are the early days and like what is the internet fundamentally you know it's not it's not like a place you get email or post pictures or something really the internet uh is um like the nervous system for humanity whereas previously uh communication was more like osmosis in order for information to travel somebody would have to call someone with a phone or write them a letter and then that letter would be carried by another person to you know my series of people to your destination um now uh communication can ha can happen instantly from any place in the world to any anyone else and does not need a human to carry it uh this is this is sort of like yeah at a cellular level you see uh say a small primitive um multicellular creature will just communicate via from by osmosis from one cell to the next or diffusion essentially so um but once you have a more sophisticated organism you have a nervous system um the the speed at which information can travel is much faster and the accessibility of information is fundamentally different you know if you want now with the internet you could be you know in the middle of the amazon jungle with the internet with a satellite connection and you have access to all the world's information whereas previously even if you lived in the library of congress in the us where the most books are you still would only have access to a fraction of the world's information this is this is basically humanity becoming a super organism uh to agree that's not possible um unless you have uh sort of essentially instant light speed communication from anywhere anywhere as opposed to osmosis diffusion thus humanity transforming into something like a bio organism or at least behaving more same rules like the the speed of information flow and just in fact even not just speed but qualitatively the access to information was so limited before i mean now technically you you could teach yourself anything previously say universities had somewhat of a monopoly on uh higher education but now mit has all of their lectures online you can buy all of the textbooks you can you can do the tests online uh you can learn anything you want almost i i'm not sure what you couldn't learn on online but you can learn right now online for free more than someone who did a doctorate could do before very impressive this is just yeah so um i mean what is the purpose of universities at this point i think it's mostly just to hang out with uh peers okay have some fun and uh talk to your friends and hanging out with peers this is not confirmation good point hanging out with peers this is exactly what we're doing here and so open let's open up the round and please shoot questions uh this is supposed to be an open dialogue who wants to begin yeah i'm sure for sure so um again what christoph said already we were deeply impressed by what we saw with the gear factory it's fantastic to see that uh one question uh which i find very interesting since we are in the business of connectivity um and i once heard you saying that uh connected cars autonomous driving uh what infrastructure do you need and your answer i think it was like we take what we get which is a bit disappointing for us because we have such great 4g 5g and want to hear that it needs to be connected what is your perspective on connectivity bandwidth you need for the car for the future and then another question to it how do you stay ahead because i think you were the first one to understand that electric mobility could be big and will be big and it's the right way it's good efficiency how do you stay ahead of the others because now everybody's coming i think the biggest stimulus of electric mobility is coming from competition because they all move in that means you're the original you are ahead how do you stay ahead with battery and with concepts software platform sure well our cars have been connected uh almost from the beginning uh from the early roadsters we we put you know cell modem uh even in the the early roadsters of our very first part the first one in austria okay great thanks um so we started off i think it was 2g at the time or something and now uh our cars are you know about to transition to 5g and everything so it's important to have a connected car so you can update the software and you can do uh remote analysis so a lot of the problems can be solved uh with the software update um i mean our car is extremely adaptable it's basically like a computer on wheels um and so so that this means like less time that people have to go to a service center and also the car can diagnose its problems uh tell the service center ahead of time we can stock the parts and then we can be much more efficient about service and and you can also watch um any uh tv on the car so it has uh you know high speed data connectivity you can watch um really any show you want on the car is it a specific entertainment platform or you just take anything out of the internet yeah we just worked with you know netflix and disney and everyone else and just made it made it available there's also a web browser so you can technically you can watch anything that's on the internet as well and it also has video games i think entertainment is going to become extremely important especially as you move to fully autonomous cars yeah if the car is driving itself then what are you going to do while you're driving probably want entertainment some maybe some productivity uh stuff um and the autonomous driving you just do with some sensors leader rather et cetera or do you need more uh we we believe just uh just cameras aren't the way to go um we don't use lidar at all uh the entire road network is designed for passive optical essentially vision so um if you in order to make a car drive properly you have to solve vision and at the point which you sold vision you really don't need any other instruments like a careful driver human driver can can drive with an extremely good track record and and unlike a computer unlike a human the computer does not get tired yeah um it has a 360 degree surround cameras it's got three cameras pointing forward uh so it's like being able to see with eyes on the back of your head basically um so it's really um vision is the way to go uh there's some value to um active optical uh for a wavelength that's occlusion penetrating so it can see through fog or rain or dust but it has to be high resolution such that you can rely on like for example for radar at uh roughly uh four millimeter wavelength uh this is good for occlusion penetration um and uh but it needs to have enough resolution to know that you're braking for a real object and not just a bridge or a manhole cover or something like that um yeah um how do you stay ahead yeah sure no let's go ahead last question and then we move on to other vehicles no okay maybe just finished the last question that they asked how do you stay ahead how do you keep like i don't know if we'll say that maybe we won't stay ahead i i don't i just think about how we can improve the experience for the owner of the car how can we make it the most fun the most functional what can we do to have them love the product as much as possible and if somebody else makes a better product then more power to them you know then i guess we should lose yeah okay good good yes we are we really believe that uh we can improve the the quality of life in the cities and uh we love cars really we really love cars but we also believe car sharing is uh is something who makes the usage of car much more much more efficient for sure and also uh it makes really affordable even a very expensive car if you only have to pay it for a minute or minute base or hourly basis it's really i would say something you can you can do whatever money you have what would be very interesting for us because we always try to look into the future also in our business very important and to innovate what we do in the mobility area is how do you see mobility in 20 years especially in urban areas and maybe you have the one or other ideas who would also help us to to further develop our product well i think in 20 years almost every car made will be fully autonomous and almost every car made will be electric this does not mean that the whole fleet will be electric or the whole fleet will be autonomous because the annual production rate of new cars new cars and trucks at full full speed is around 100 million units a year uh but there's this two billion uh cars and trucks in active use and that number is rising so that that's basically it takes 20 years from the point at which uh 100 of all vehicle production is electric it's still 20 years from that point before the fleet is fully electric um so i think people sometimes you know it of course but uh sometimes people don't realize like you can't just it's not like phones you can't just replace all the cars and trucks overnight uh only fly only but new vehicle production is only five percent the size of the fleet um and as it is right now only a few a couple of percent of new car production is electric and uh at least right now none no new car production is fully autonomous um but 20 years from now probably essentially 100 electric essentially 100 fully autonomous and even in the urban area where i would say the challenge is the everything yes concerning autonomous no problem no no problem in 20 years 20 years my god you've not i hope civilization is around in 20 years you know i thought that was a win yeah okay great yeah great thank you marcus essing yeah philip morris elena we have been formulating a quite i think ambitious not very humble vision to lead the way into a smoke-free future which is i think pretty bold your vision i think what i learned is goes also beyond electric cars it considers the transition to renewable energy which i find super inspiring and the most important thing to me also to my kids yeah um what do you think is needed on the one and do we look at the let's say green energy options that we know today like sun and wind and is it decentralized or would you build such an inspiring plant as we have seen today in a place where there's a lot of sun or wind or do you even look at totally new energy sources that go beyond that i mean i feel quite comfortable in predicting that the vast majority of earth's uh electricity generation will be solar and electric solar and wind i should say so wind has actually been i've been surprised just how good wind has gotten wind power is extremely low cost in fact a lot of the the best wind turbines are made in germany so the numbers are extremely good yeah that needs to be paired with a large battery packs in order to buffer the wind power because the wind speed changes um and sometimes it doesn't blow wind so but people want steady electricity they don't want to have just have electricity when the winds blowing so you have to have pair uh wind turbines with large battery packs um and the same is with solar you've got to buffer the that's the soil park because obviously it's no sun at night and sometimes it's very cloudy um do you see the growing electronic cafe there's a buffer for that to be connected to the network or is that unrealistic i i mean i i just i certainly could be wrong about this point the early roadsters we made had vehicle-to-grid capability but nobody used it so we you know it cost some money nobody was using it so we turned it off we can easily turn it on back on on right now and uh actually easy especially in europe because of the way the connectors work a little more we need like a maybe 100 accessory to be able to do this in the u.s um but i i really think people want to have a home-based battery like like i think the future that i see most most likely is solar on the roof so either where the roof itself this roof tiles itself are solar generating or solar panels retrofit on an existing roof combined with a local battery we have a product called the powerwall that's very popular and then you need to combine that with grid level uh solar and wind so and and then have a long distance high-voltage dc connections uh high voltage dc is extremely uh efficient at uh transferring uh electric power no need for superconductors in my view um so uh like the the the the energy penalty for for long-distance electricity transmission is i squared r so it's the current square times resistance so if you just increase the voltage you can have the current be low and then your i squared r heating is low uh so you have a high so high voltage low current you can transfer a tremendous amount of electricity with almost no very tiny losses so um now you still need to compare it to pair that i think there's other sources like uh hydro uh geothermal um i'm actually not against nuclear i know that some people don't like nuclear but i think actually nuclear in a situation where there's not uh natural disasters is actually fine um i don't think you want to have nuclear in a place where it has lots of earthquakes or tsunamis or something like that or big hurricanes with a name but in places where national disasters are not a concern i think nuclear is very safe thank you very much mr kais thank you we are working in our company also on the battery platform completely different my vision is that i i rep with we revolutionize the do-it-yourself market i want to have a battery in every house with a garden that all the tools and all the garden equipment can be run on one platform so one battery for all tools around the garden and in the house okay the the key is for sure the battery same as in the car we're working every day on endurance and performance because this is what the customer requires in the car and also in tools and in garden yeah the difference i think is uh we have our charger always with us yeah and uh when we go all in electricity mobility uh what do you think how fast we can charge the cars and how long it will take us when everybody drives with the e-car to charge the battery that we're having not the completely mess in front of the fueling stations well i think most people are going to charge their cars at home generally people will charge their cars where their charge their cell phones and that's at home at night this actually works fairly well with the grid usage uh because the electricity usage on the grid is mostly during the day so um you don't actually need a lot of new power plants given that people primarily charge their car at night at their house now not everyone can do that some people park on the street or something and that's where you need supercharger stations or charging at work so total electricity power consumption obviously will increase i mean when everything when all transport goes electric or road transfer transport going electric will approximately double the electricity usage um total electricity usage like i said because most of us at night that doesn't mean a doubling of the power plants but we will need to increase uh the amount of solar and wind geothermal hydro nuclear i think this is fine like i said in order to solve the needs of uh electric vehicles um you know my guess is that the majority of the electricity production long term will be photovoltaics solar and uh paired with uh batteries obviously that's my guess yeah okay thank you very much dws yeah no thank you i think dws is an investing company in big companies around the world but i want to say i want to concatenate that you have choose germany for this gigaff you know sure fabric i i think might be you have for might be look into the engineer space it's a big culture in germany i have to say that i'm not native german but i've grown up here and this is a really big culture for automobile industry and i think that you came to germany it's impressive for me by the but one thing what i learned is yeah i love germany it's great yeah it's it's um i you know might be we have more time to talk in a later stage but one thing what i would like to also learn today from you is not to be engineer but to think in like a physician you know this is important i think this is i have a four young children so i have to advise them now a little bit differently i think people should have more kids yeah seriously yeah yeah no no i mean people don't have humans where are the humans coming from yeah yeah they're not you're right how to make them somehow yeah you're right take a long time to boot up yeah i have i have four but uh you know i have to um be carefully the cars are too small but again but i want to i want to say you have revolutionized and i think dedicated and dedication for electric cars what is your next big thing you know in your mind you know you called many companies you are owning what is your real you say this is a disruption you have in mind might be you don't want to talk today but this might be interesting i mean first of all my goal is not disruption for the sake of disruption um i i really think there's okay there's some important things we have to solve in order for the future to be good yeah i would say like my you know my sort of algorithm or optimization is like okay what set of things do we need to do uh to ensure that the increase the probability of the future is going to be good yeah and so if we if we have to solve sustainable energy yeah this is total logical if we do not solve sustainable energy then we have unsustainable energy then it's just a matter of time before things go before civilization collapses we must but even beside even if there was not an environmental issue uh since the availability of oil is limited yeah this is not something we can sustain long term yeah my original interest in electric vehicles was actually not environmental it was out of concern just you know studying physics and i'm like wait a second yeah we need to transition to uh solar electric yeah or we're going to have a problem and and we run out of oil civilization collapses that's a problem now of course the environmental concerns uh have added to the urgency um because the the more co2 we put in the oceans and atmosphere the more we increase the probability that uh something will go wrong like i said like things are much more probability as opposed to certainty but i think it's an unwise experiment to dramatically increase the co2 yeah in the atmosphere and oceans yeah given that we know we need to transition anyway because we ran out of oil yeah so why run that experiment it's not it doesn't make any sense um we know we have to transition to a sustainable energy economy um then let's just get on with it yeah you know let's just get on with it and not run the crazy experiment and see if the what happens if the atmosphere has 2000 ppm co2 this is crazy okay great and thank you question thank you very much and um yeah that's it's nicely related to the point you were just mentioning so um so i run dhl and dhl supply chain in there and we have quite some ambitions plans towards zero emission and and optimizing the supply chains of our customers to get to that but one of the things we obviously always face is that um we also run an airline and and that's actually the biggest the biggest ambition on how do we get that carbon neutral so i'm curious to pick your brain on that one um well actually i'm just curious how many aircraft do you have many a lot okay so um yeah so aircraft uh will certainly go electric um the uh energy density requirement to have uh aircraft with the reasonable range is much greater than for cars or ships so um my back of the envelope calculations suggest that you need about 400 watt hours per kilogram to have aircraft with a decent range this is where with a range where it's comfortably over a thousand kilometers including some reserves and you know uh emergency power and that kind of thing um and then as you go above 400 per kilogram it gets really better in a non-linear way because you spend so much of your energy getting to altitude once you get to altitude uh the air is then and your cruise cruise cruise power is is quite low um so once you get if you go to like 450 watt hours kilogram even though it's let's say 460 or 480 what else per gram you will you will double the range um so even like a 20 increase let's say in energy density will double the range to at least 2 000 kilometers if not more so and we're getting there progressively with improvements in the energy density um almost every year uh so this is just white house per kilogram and uh a lot of the improvements in energy density actually also improve the cost because you need less material because you're able to put more energy uh in the same amount of material which means less material per unit of energy you know where we are right now is um you know a little over 300 watt hours per kilogram and some of the very expensive cells can do over 400 watt hours per kilogram but the the high volume cells i think will start to approach 400 watt hours a kilogram as well so i would expect to see a significant transition to [Music] electric aircraft starting initially with propeller planes because they're more generally more efficient per kilometer than jets uh and then and then turboprops and then um commercial uh airliners and that kind of thing um that transition probably happens i think reasonably soon within the next five years we should start to see electric jets okay that's fascinating wow thank you our time is almost over let me just finish off with uh just a couple of very short questions and very short answers do you still plan to go to mars personally um i would like to go to mars the the reason for spacex is not you know if i go to mars uh that's that's nice to have but but what is important is that we establish a self-sustaining uh city on mars uh this is important for the long-term future of humanity or consciousness as we know it um and uh so it's less about a few people tomorrow has been more about creating a self-sustaining city on mars uh and and humanity becoming a space faring civilization which i think is incredibly inspiring for the future thank you and very last question you said you like germany for what reasons do you like germany i don't know um i've always had a good time when i when i come here um you started in munich a semester no no i studied german for it as semester actually in canada so um i don't know i i do like the sort of the engineering culture and um there's uh it's hard to say exactly why do you like something but i always have a good time um and people i think they really want to get things done um and i know a lot of the coolest people i know are german so i don't know that's that's why i love dreaming we leave it at that thank you very much for being here all right thank you very much and this has been thank you very much this has been our pioneer talk thanks for joining us thanks for everybody being here thanks elon musk for joining us thank you and have a good day bye-bye thank you thank you thank you thank you great thank you thank you

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Length: 36min 55sec (2215 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020