Elon Musk On Putin, Nuclear Power, And Love

being at a net worth of 230 billion roughly being perceived as the richest person uh on earth well i think putin is significantly richer than me you really do yeah yes i mean there's been many times where i expected to lose everything who starts a car company and a rocket company expecting them to succeed certainly not me i thought they both had less than a 10 chance of success and frankly uh i wasn't wrong uh in that in 2008 we had the third failure of spacex and if the fourth launch had failed spacex would be dead in 2008. um we didn't have no money for a fifth launch and for tesla uh we were tesla's got been on the verge of bankruptcy many times and we we closed the last the financing round in 2008 because remember at the end of 2008 general motors and chrysler were going bankrupt and ford was almost bankrupt so imagine trying to raise money for electric car startup while general motors is going bankrupt and people were angry that i even asked um so but we were able to just barely raise enough money to squeak by and close the financing round for tesla on the last hour of the last day that it was possible in christmas eve 2008 and if we had not closed that financing round then it would go on bancroft two days after christmas with all your knowledge and products services you are almost a strategic weapon in modern warfare how do you see your role in that context i think i can be helpful in uh conflicts i try to take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the probability that the future will be good should we have even more nuclear energy in order to get faster independent from putin and to resolve the climate issues i want to be super clear in my opinion germany should not only not shut down the nuclear power plants it should reopen the ones that shut down and those are those are the fastest ones to restart it's crazy to shut down nuclear power plants especially like if you're in in a place where there's not natural disasters you know so like if you're maybe somewhere where there's severe earthquakes or tsunamis or something like that it's more you know of a question mark is i mean maybe you know but if there's not like massive natural disaster risk which germany does not have then there's really no danger with the nuclear power plants and you don't see any uh safer alternatives that could have a similar effect i think long term most of a civilization's energy is going to come from a solar and then you need to store it with a battery because obviously the sun only shines during the day and sometimes it's very cloudy so you need uh solar batteries is is will be the main long-term uh way that civilization is powered but between now and then we we need uh to maintain nuclear i can't emphasize enough please do not shut down the nuclear power plants and please reopen the ones that um have been chat this is total madness to shut them down i want to be clear total madness do you have recently presented optimism and robert and you shared great expectations what that could do for the world yeah could you explain a little bit your motivation i assume it's not only about the first visit to mars that could be done by optimus it is more than that a game changer in ai could you share a little bit your your vision with respect to ai and robotics i always approach these things with some trepidation because uh i certainly do not want to be play a hand in anything that could potentially be harmful to humanity humanoid robots they're clearly happening i mean you look at like boston dynamics they their demonstrations are better every year so there will be humanoid robots i mean the rate of advancement of ai is very rapid talking about speed you have the vision that one day a starship could be able to get from a to b in 30 minutes all around the globe is that correct and if so what would the time frame for this vision it's like a global super taxi you can just go from i mean san francisco to nairobi yeah um i mean the landing the landing will be loud so you'd want to probably be connecting uh you know um cities that are next to oceans or seas such that you can land maybe uh i don't know far enough offshore that the latin landing noise is not disturbing to people but i'm surprised that one topic seems not to be too fascinating for you and that is the project of longevity and increased lifespan uh significantly why are you not passionate about that well you're not personally interested in living longer i mean i don't i don't think we should try to have people live for a very long time for a very long time that it would cause ossification of society um because the truth is most people don't change their mind they just die and so if they don't die they will be will be stuck with old ideas and they won't society won't advance um i think we already have quite a serious issue with the germantocracy where the the leaders of so many countries are extremely old look i mean in the us it's you know very very ancient leadership and it's just impossible to stay in touch with the people if you are um you know at the you know if you're if you're like many generations older than them um and the founders in the us they put minimum ages for uh political office but they did not put maximum ages because they did not expect that people will be living so long but they should have because you really want in order for a democracy to function well the leaders must be reasonably in touch with the bulk of the population and if you're too young or too old it's you can't say that you would be in touch is there anything that you really would like to achieve which you think is going to be impossible impossible is a strong word you don't like that word well it's just a strong word i i mean i sort of approach things from a physics standpoint and the word impossible is you know more or less banned in physics i'm really worried about this birth rate thing that's been troubling me for many years because i just don't see it turning around you know i every year it's worse and i drive my friends crazy walter isaacson is planning a biography and he has written a biography on einstein on steve jobs on benjamin franklin and leonardo da vinci among the four with whom would you like to meet and have a glass of wine well i mean we've been honored to meet any of them even for a minute i think frank i think ben franklin would be the most fun at dinner and who is the one where you would say i'm closest to him would it be leonardo da vinci you know everyone there um it might actually be ben franklin frankly uh you know he did a lot of science and engineering stuff um i don't know but you know it's funny davinci uh thought of himself first and foremost as an engineer and you know i mean for the time he was pretty impressive what is your biggest hope my biggest hope is that humanity creates a self-sustaining city on mars you have once said if i'm not in love i cannot be happy are you happy at the moment i think there's degrees of love but certainly for one to be um we're fully happy i think you have to be happy and work and happy in love so i suppose i'm medium happy

Channel: Insider News

Views: 2,927,408

Keywords: Insider, News, Elon Musk, NUclear, Putin

Id: TIAqh2o1Jf4

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/edwinshap]

I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I don’t like seeing Elon shoving himself into everything…

[u/Fury_Burns]

What we have here is the typical Fury_Burns conundrum: Do I upvote because I agree with the point or downvote because its from a person I dislike

[u/Hel_Throwaway]

Celebrities aren't environmentalists. I'm game for license extensions for plants that aren't shitpits though.

[u/radome9]

Rich man says obvious thing. Film at 11.

[u/smegma_yogurt]

So, is Elon about to found nuclear energy in a few years?

[u/mutatron]

Who cares what that dingleberry says? Last year he said something about electric airplanes, and people fawned over that like he invented them. I don't disagree with what he's saying here, but he has no more expertise or credibility than anyone else.

[u/gordonmcdowell]

Wow there IS video of Musk sayin this! Oh this is good...