Elon Musk Speaks About Tesla and SpaceX at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit

[Music] a man who needs no introduction but welcome thanks for being here number one on the vanity fair' new establishment West is that the highest honor you've ever had of course that's right the no bells are now you're doing an announcement tomorrow and the next day is a Nobel Prize so if you get all three that's a great trifecta let's talk about your announcement tomorrow yeah what is it you're going to announce I'm glad you asked well I think I can give maybe one clue which is that one of the things is already there and people don't realize it so we just need to turn it on yeah well cool and it'll be part of a new car I used to be a drummer so you're gonna be good at this yeah it's um will be will be a different are we different from the current one that would be some part of I announce will be different from things in the past obviously its announcement but I can't say it's it's we're not gonna talk about the model 3 or the Model X the model 3 would be the $35,000 electric vehicle you're going to talk about something that labeled D yeah D and then there's another thing which is it actually would have said the other thing except it would have been too obvious and that's the reason I didn't like the weather because I can't say what the letter is okay and what is the D stand for yeah I think the Internet is very good at guessing these things so there they understand directionally it's it's directionally correct but the magnitude is not well appreciated yet and the magnitude of the something yeah that's a really big it on this I can tell I kind of got myself in trouble by because I you know we had the Model S and the X and then just for fun we try to trademark the model E and and then then Ford sued us said they were going to see us so we have to change the model 3 so it's s3x you know totally different and so I kind of I guess when I say that that we're about to unveil the D and something else then it's I kind of dug my own grave on that front yeah we look forward to why in the world are you doing this i we went to impelling you to make an electric special car I think it's important that we accelerate the advent of a sustainable transport future so it it it's better if we move towards electric cars sooner rather than later and then we can get away from burning oil and obviously that needs to be paired with sustainable generation of power that's where Solar City comes in and but in order for us in order for Humanity have a good future the century we have to figure out a way to sustainably produce and consume energy and that's what Tesla and SolarCity are trying to be helpful in that regard so that's that's really the purpose but it's not as I think that there's a need for another car company plenty of you know good car companies very competitive industry but but there is need to show that electric cars can be better than gasoline cars otherwise people will continue by guessing cars when you say better I'm gonna push you back to where you didn't want to go which is what you're announcing they're better means that it would be faster and stronger than a gas car which we think electric car cannot be yeah it will be bigger and faster yeah can I have a way for that court to be out there yeah unveil the D it's bigger and faster yeah and now there's a lot of jokes that car Swisher started today that yeah I know we have to steal a conference call All Things D yeah zip it why did you give away or open up the intellectual property Oh was satins yeah to two weeks a robust response in order to accelerate the advent of electric vehicles that's the main reason I think people think that maybe there was some competitive reason or that that this would somehow be helpful to test of you know because more people would enter electric cars and somehow there would be you know rising tide lifts all boats but actually I think I think the open sourcing our patents does slightly impair our competitive position on balance but I'm hopeful that it generates enough good will to overcome that competitive impairment but medicham conclusion at least on a personal level that patents were kind of like buying a lottery ticket to a lawsuit you know and so why would you want to do that what drove you into the electric car business was a really sustainability for the planet or was it just the intellectual curiosity of it all actually Sophie if you go back to like when I first thing about electric cars in college and it was really more from the standpoint of the need to transition to it to some transport means that was sustainable in independent whether there was an environmental impact or not because if if we're burning oil you know to move and that's not a renewable resource then the independent of any environmental impact we must find some alternative or there'll be economic collapse so and civilization would prefer crumble because we have to or revert you know degree so that so that that was actually originally why I was very interested in it is just because it's it is I mean I think and from a physics standpoint it's really obviously the way to go is electric motors I mean kind of crazy to do something else or actually and and then the environmental thing grew over time it became it became evident that the environmental impact was quite significant because we're putting so much carbon into the atmosphere that were fundamentally changing the chemical makeup of Earth's atmosphere and then and the oceans too because of the co2 that gets absorbed into the into the water in creates carbonic acid so if we don't take corrective action we that that the probability of a catastrophe will increase over time eventually there's like certainty of of a catastrophic outcome and the longer takes us try to make that transition the greater the probability of something bad happening and sooner so that but I think what's the fundamental good that Tesla can achieve it would be to accelerate the advent of electric vehicles perhaps by you know if we're fortunate at a decade or something like that because it it'll happen anyway independent it could even tells was not not around so that's the say that that's a really fundamental good and since we're making cars I mean it seems like we should try to make really good cars and and you know maybe make the buying buying experience level pleasant there's a peter thiel line as you know about you know promised flying cars but we got 140 characters do you think that other innovators people not like yourself aren't really shooting as high as they should be when you're doing things from you know space shots to electric cars do you think that should be flying cars yeah okay yeah am I missing something gosh I think that would be fun don't you I'm not sure I mean I think I think there should be vertical takeoff and landing a supersonic air transport yeah that that's obviously should be the case we had that 30 years ago and then we don't meet him sonic sure yeah no it's kind of innovation for big things has actually slowed down it seems is that true I think whenever you have a large industry that is monopoly or duopoly the forcing function for innovation is weak because innovation tends to come from new entrants to an industry and if the barriers like Tesla into the auto box yeah yeah when there are huge capital barriers to entry then it's very difficult for new entrants to enter that dentistry is like being in a forest of giant redwoods and in that in that situation the innovation is weak because if you sort of it sank it's fairly easy to understand this because if you would say the senior executive in that company or CEO let's say if you do something incremental you are very unlikely to be fired if you do something bold and it doesn't work out you're very likely to be fired so that's than they do incremental things you mentioned a moment ago the environmental sustainability thing that's really big that you worry about your other big thing that you worry about is sort of machines getting out of control explain that or the artificial intelligence singularity yeah I don't think most people understand just how quickly machine intelligence is advancing it's much faster than almost anyone realizes even within Silicon Valley and certainly outside Silicon Valley people really have no idea so why is that dangerous I mean if there's if there's a super intelligent particularly if it's engaged in recursive self-improvement if there's some digital super super intelligence and it's optimization or utility function is something that's detrimental to humanity then it will have a very bad effect you know it could be just something like getting rid of spam email or something and it's like concludes well the best way to get over spam is to get rid of humans you know but why would we lose source of all spam I know we've all watched how in 2001 but why would we lose control of our machines there are no data points showing that that that our connection to machine has ever been loosened actually I think the thing to do would be to plot the progress of digital intelligence versus time and and then to maybe curve fit or extrapolate that progress and see where that leads but you're talking about machines that are not just intelligent but have intentionality is that right they have the intention of their utility function which is really programmed in right yes okay but it can have an attention understand consequences is that propelling no pun intended your Mars mission ideas no I think it's quite it's more likely than not that if if there's some digital super intelligence apocalypse scenario it would probably follow people to Mars not necessarily because because of that utility function if it simply has utility function that is already convened to earth it would be totally fine doing that but I mean it's this is it's just it's a computer what what is let's get to the Mars mission why do you feel that is something we should be aiming at I think the reason for this two main reasons for Mars or becoming a multiplanetary I think what one is the defensive reason it's life insurance for life as a whole and this there's some value to having that you know it would in terms of a small percentage of our economic output like let's say half a percent or maybe even less of our economic output to insure that that the light of consciousness as we know it propagates into the future - for a much longer period of time and so there's a defensive reason and and this is the first time in four and a half billion years in the sense of Earth you know first formed that it's been possible for life to move to another planet to become multiplanetary and that window may be open for a long time or may be open for a short time I'm actually quite an optimistic person so I'm hopeful that we'll be open for a long time but maybe it'll be open for a short time in which case we should take action now and not delay you've been a fan of science fiction books have they actually influenced you sure I'll just say the other reason which I actually find personally more motivating with respect to Mars which is that it would just be the greatest adventure ever and very exciting and I think we need things in life that are exciting and inspiring you can't just be about solving some awful problem they have to be reasons to get up in the morning and I was talking about the books you've read in the science fiction I noticed you're a science fiction for that do you think maybe you've read too much science fiction right maybe have that's certainly certainly possible so that the yeah I mean we're we all right now is we've I think at on the SpaceX front we've made evolutionary but not revolutionary progress we're hoping to make revolutionary progress in the coming years but the key breakthrough that we're in for is what they're aiming for is to be able to have the rocket booster come back and land and be able to reap light it why is that important it is that's not the way we've been doing it well yeah it's been expendable rockets up to now really to accept that the space shuttle was partly reusable but but it was extremely difficult to refurbish for flight you need 10,000 people needed to work nine months to refurbish the space shuttle so what we really need is rapid and complete reusability like an aircraft or a car or really any mode of transport is that besides rockets is reusable a horse bicycle we can think of almost anything but imagine if that mode of transport was not reusable so very unfortunate in the case of the horse and but but I even like in cars like if you could use a car once and you have to buy a new car every time you took a journey odds are you would not buy many cars because they'll be very expensive so it reusability essentially it opens the door for reducing the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100 or more and if you do this how much of it will be government funded in a way aren't you under a lot of contracts with government yeah in the beginning there was no government I funded SpaceX entirely with the proceeds from PayPal and but we got off so first government contract about five or six years after starting the company from NASA and but I should say about NASA's maybe a quarter of our flights three quarters are commercial but the way we have been doing innovation in this country especially starting with World War two has always been a combination of government private enterprise universities and that is now dissipated the government is not doing as much basic research do you think that's going to be a problem for the United States well I think we'd ever come it is quite a lot and that I'm not exactly sure whether we're at the right number of basic research I mean I'm a fan of research side we I'd be in favor of spending more money on that Alec or allocating more resources to to basic research but I think the governs doing doing quite a bit I mean NASA is doing doing a lot of things because they've got the the Rovers on Mars I've got the Hubble things like the Hubble telescope the upcoming James Webb telescope there are planetary probes and earth science missions launching all the time so NASA's doing quite a lot actually what are the big things like electric cars space shots whatever do you dream of I think it's face and cars a lot obviously we've eliminated flying cars yeah well I'm not I mean I I'm I'm not sure about the flying cars I mean let's not say I don't think there should be flying cars I mean but if the sky was full of cars flying all over the place and it was you know it would affect how this how things look would affect the skyline and and I would be noisier and there would be a greater probability of something falling in your head yes right disappointment you know those are those are not good things on the other hand that you could be able to go from one place to another faster but I think actually if at least push if you eliminate the choke points in cities then there's really not that much traffic outside of the choke point so you look at sort of in suburban streets you don't see a lot of I mean you know the traffic doesn't doesn't choke things it's really on the highways and major arteries since because the the cities grew way bigger than the major are how would we fix that tunnels tunnels what about autonomously driving cars with that help that would help something yeah I'm going to open it up but I'll have one frivolous question while they bring the lights up everybody so far today has been touting how much they love Silicon Valley the HBO show and you said some bad things about it why don't you like it well first of all I should say that the I mean the article was not very accurate that was written it was just one article which was it was simply not an accurate cool so I the I I thought it was okay the but I think like Mike judge did an amazing job with office base like that's one of my favorite movies ever and he may be here so be nice great man to get a problem anyway so so maybe like office space just really nailed it I don't think Silicon Valley the show quite nails it it's not it's not quite it's not quite right so that's you know that's my objection to it it doesn't it doesn't quite get it right in my opinion Bay but I've heard that the later episodes are better I saw the first two sir yes UC Berkeley hi um I used to work in large-scale renewable energy mostly solar and I was wondering that given all their the release of the patents of the batteries and knowledge on small scale renewables like solar city if if is there something coming about like large renewable energy storage from there from the all the batteries patents in Tesla what the test is going to do a stationary storage of you know in a very large-scale way because it's it's very important to para battery packs with solar power and for wind it's even more important so with with the gigafactory that we're creating in nevada we're going to create many of probably tens of gigawatt hours per year of stationary storage on the battery friends so that yeah there's a lot coming for sure hi name is Tina emerging Phil in China so my questions is relevant to China market how would you in your perspectives how are you forecast about the electric vehicles the demand in China and how's the task strategies in the coming year uh yeah yeah sure I think things seem to go you know fairly well in China we've had a very enthusiastic response and yeah I think I think long term it seems likely that China would be the biggest market for Tesla so yeah I'm really really optimistic about things over there is it going to be bigger than the North America it seems likely that it you know it would likely be bigger than North America yeah in long term how about the government regulations and the local compilers there the government's been pretty good I mean there's there is certainly in terms of the incentive structure it is favored local production but overall it's had you know I think it's not been too much of an issue the government's been been great so far yeah thank you hi I'm manu I'm a sophomore at Stanford and all of your work has been bringing people from place a to be in the in the fastest and the most environmentally friendly manner there's also another kind of research happening in the valley where people are trying to avoid transportation at all we call it virtual reality right so I can be in my dorm and I can see you speaking with the same level of contact on my oculus rift as I am here right now taking the Cal train or the Tesla or even a SpaceX rocket in the future how do you think will virtual reality tie in the future of Transportation which you are working on thank you well maybe we're in a simulation right now yeah yeah seriously some of this feels like that yeah I think it is going to from what I've heard of oculus rift and and some other immersive technologies that it's quite transformative you really feel like you're there and and then when you come out of it it feels like reality is real so I think we'll see probably less physical movement in the future as a result of the virtual reality stuff yeah and when we come out of what we're here now into this virtual reality we'll think it's real I mean it's like work well I mean I mean there's some interesting things here on the virtual reality front I mean just on the whole notion of a simulation which is that if you just if you extrapolate into the future and say well how good let's say well video games be in a hundred or two hundred or thousand years from now if if there's continued improvement and you're going to full-body haptic suit with a sort of surround vision and you it becomes beyond a certain resolution indistinguishable from reality if and there were likely to be there like three millions maybe maybe billions of such simulations so then what are the odds that we're actually in base reality isn't it one in billions is it I mean give I can give the calamari I'd rather you give the counter-argument I it obviously this feels real but but it mean I mean it seems unlikely to be real my name is Danielle I'm an architect from Palo Alto I just completed a NetZero Passivhaus and I'm now a fellow at the Stanford Business School and I'm working with a group of students on a project to come up with the most innovative ways to solve big problems in cities we've identified Detroit as our prime target to questions what do you see as citywide innovation and and since women don't ask as we're taught I'm going to ask would you come down to Stanford and brainstorm on this with us mm-hmm this may sound trite but I think I honestly think tunnels should be given a lot more consideration so that I mean if you look at a city you have a look at I cannot we have all these upon buildings and office buildings and there are many levels like they're gonna feel like an average of in Manhattan I don't know what is an average of like 30 stories or something like that but then you've got a street which is one story this is an obvious issue like you have a thirty to one ratio of you know so we should have multi-layered highways yeah underground stacked up yeah you can have tunnels to the tunnels don't have to follow the buildings they can they can be they can go diagonally through the basement yeah yeah and you can have as many levels as you want so it it's really just the cost of building the tunnels and but really it's all tunnels a hole in the ground like how hard can it really be I mean just so it seems like if some mantra has put their effort into building tunnels you know what other effectively would be transformative to cities around the world also they consider coming giving a talk I mean I'm in Palo Alto every week so it shouldn't be open to it sure what other things besides you know tunnels hyper loops you've talked about other things that are great visions I could transform a daily what we call reality with Russian is reality at the moment yeah I mean it's really it with within cities it's sort of tunnels tunnels and tunnels and tubes and the I mean for long distance travel I really think that the vertical type of landing electric supersonic aircraft is the way to go and I think it's very doable so that they'll be the way to go for long distance trapped in like if you're going more than like 500 miles because then you have any - any you solve the any - any problem of a long distance for shorter distances because you have time to climb at a time to descent penalty below 500 miles aircraft are not as good so that's why I think sort of it needs some sort of evacuated tube is a better way to travel what is an evacuated tube well you know just something where you've reduced the air density the drag is dramatically reduced and it's like it's as though you've got got teleported to altitude right and you can go much faster and not have to have the climate descent issues hi I'm Lawrence I'm a sophomore at Stanford and I run a music syrup we all know that you have all those really crazy ideas in the best way possible but how do you come up with those ideas could you tell me more about your eating process and also once you have those great ideas how do you go about capitalizing those really ambitious ideas if you have very few limited financial resources what if the great thing about software or anything which just involves intellectual capital you a couple of you and you friends you and a few friends is that you can just do it so that's why they're doing some sort of internet thing or software thing is great as an initial company to create that's why it's up to and paypal they gave me the capital to attempt to do more capital intense activities I mean in as far as idea generation I think I tend to think of things from sort of physics standpoint like from first principle standpoint what would be the best way to accomplish something and then pursue that so and that's also a good way to determine if there's a if something's far from its optimum and like on rockets for example one could say oh you know that you could reason by analogy and say the rocket is going to cost a certain amount because that's what prior Rockets have cost or you can say well what is a rocket made of what are the material constituents what are those missed what are they weigh what's the cost per unit mass and that that sets the limit asymptotically for what a rocket can be so if you can figure out some creative way to rearrange those elements into a rocket shape then you can achieve a much better outcome that's the first principles approach and I think also just combining ideas from different industries is really helpful for innovation so what do people discovered in one industry and can that be applied to other industries that's I think also a great source of ideas but usually just struggle on a solution and you try try a bunch of things some of them don't work and some of them and most of that work and occasionally one does you mentioned this startup of PayPal which is a great innovation that happened in sort of how we pay for things that seems to me an area in which it hasn't been as much subsequent innovation other than Bitcoin as a be in other words quickly transferring money especially to people you don't know whatever is to me maybe I'm wrong far more difficult than it seemed like it should be are you somewhat disappointed with the way PayPal then proceeded or you disappointed with the lack of innovation in the digital currency in environment yeah if people has definitely I mean it hasn't moved much since from when when it was sort of bought by eBay the the long-term vision that I had for PayPal sort of in sort of finance was to - well it sounds but strange like do to convert the financial system from a series of heterogeneous insecure databases to one database or well not one database and maybe there'd be like a few more but the money is just a number in a database that's what it is and it's primarily an information mechanism for labor allocation and the current databases are not very efficient like they're you know there are these old legacy mainframes that don't talk to each other very well have poor security and only do their and do batch processing once a day are you glad PayPal is being spun off it's probably the right move and what would you do with it well I think I think I converted into more of a full-service financial institution so you just you want to do all the things that a consumer you want to have like all the financial services that somebody needs in one place seamlessly integrated together and easy to use and I really really care about the consumer I think a lot of banks don't seem to care that much about the customer so I think there's not ready to be like a really good bank effectively but but but much more than what people think of it you think Bitcoin will be disruptive in that way and we now it's a speculative currency will it be something that will be what normal consumers would use and will disrupt the banking industry my opinion bitcoin is that I think what coin is probably a good thing but it's it's essentially its main thing thing will be even this probably get quoted in there but the it it's it it's Ike is primarily going to be a means of doing illegal transactions but that's not necessarily entirely bad because on the inner side if something should be maybe shouldn't be illegal so but a combination of Silk Road and Bitcoin will save us well it will be useful for legal and illegal transactions otherwise it would have no value as a use of for for legal transaction because you have to have a legal to illegal bridge yeah I don't own any Bitcoin all right okay well I'll let you get the last word sir I promise it'll be fast Ilan Bob short guy from Thomson Reuters India just launched a mission to Mars 75 million dollars to get that thing was it as Astro teller said a miracle or is there something fundamental about the Indian space industry that allowed them to do a mission like that for so cheap and if so is there something that we can pick up and learn from that I think it's a very impressive mission given that it was executed by a government entity that's like really really impressive I mean impressive no matter who's doing it but from a cost standpoint impressive because it's being done by a government entity ultimately we have to be able to do missions to Mars for much less than that otherwise it will be impossible to establish a self-sustaining civilization on Mars because we'll have to transport millions of tons of cargo planes people and the cost of moving to Mars has to be affordable otherwise people won't be able to so it has to ultimately come down by couple resumed attitude from from that level circularly $7,000,000 a couple orders of magnitude I say blow well below million here Elon Musk great innovator thank you very much and good luck tomorrow what will will be looking to see what was right under our nose when you announce it tomorrow starts good thank you [Music]

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 154,939

Keywords: walter isaacson, elon musk, vanity fair summit, vfsummit, new establishment summit, vanity fair new establishment, new establishment, new, news, style, culture, celebrity, hollywood, vanity fair, vf

Id: fPsHN1KyRQ8

Length: 36min 27sec (2187 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 17 2014