Tesla Technoking and SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon Musk | Full Interview | Code 2021

[Music] your [Music] [Applause] is opening today it's my favorite movie so i felt like i had to do something like that anyway how you doing good how are you good what's the mood of elon today the the mood it could be anything i feel good are you yeah all right we have a lot to talk about right where do you want to start uh anywhere you'd like to talk all right china um cryptocurrency what they're doing uh that's my safe word by the way okay um what they're doing cryptocurrency yeah yeah it'll kill anytime um cryptocurrency in china yes what they're doing around bitcoin etc and i'd like to pivot to what the us is going to do around regulation uh well it it would appear that they don't love cryptocurrency appear it appears yeah yeah it's subtle but uh you know [Laughter] very hinting in that direction yeah so um i can't speak to exactly why they don't like it that much but people can speculate for various reasons um china by the way it has is having some significant uh electricity generation issues yeah so actually i think part of it may actually be due to uh electricity shortages in many parts of china so a lot of south south china right now is having random um power outages uh because the power demand is higher than expected um so you know crypto mining might be playing a role in that i'm not sure um this is further than that it is more than that um well i suppose uh cryptocurrency is fundamentally aimed at um reducing the power of a centralized government yes it is and that they they don't like that okay that's my guess okay so what do you think's gonna happen i mean maybe the audience has obviously years went up it didn't matter after they announced this they went down and they went up you can change the shares of cryptocurrency more than china cat yeah is that a good thing um if it goes up i suppose it is but i mean i think there's an always long-term role for for crypto um and um you know really people should think of any kind of uh money system whether it's historic value or currency as as really a form of information um if you apply information theory to money whether it's cryptocurrency or some other form and view it in terms of you know how good is it at um you know sort of bandwidth latency uh jitter uh dropping packets uh which is you'd say like fraud is like losing packets or something on the network um and um you know it's overall security uh then i think a lot of these things just seem to just make make a lot of sense in that regard like any form of money has no power in and of itself except as an exchange of uh value between people for goods or services or to translate uh things in time like alone so is this the right thing for governments to do to take control of it is it possible i it is not possible to i think destroy crypto but it is possible for governments to uh slow down its advancement so what should the u.s government do we had gary gansler on earlier sec chairman he was calling it the wild west of finance what should they do that if anything i would say do nothing okay they're not saying that yeah i mean i wouldn't sleep just let it fly because um what what do you think governments can do i think they can like you said they can ruin it i don't think they can just slow it down i think they can stop it i don't think they can control it and therefore they may want to stop it yeah i mean i i i'm i wouldn't say i'm some you know massive cryptocurrency expert um you know i think the there's there's some value to cryptocurrency i don't think it's like the sec the second coming of the messiah which some people seem to think um you know it's uh it it will hopefully reduce the uh error and latency in the money system the legacy money systems and reduce the yeah i mean just you know governments have a habit of um editing the money database um which is like probably some ancient mainframe somewhere in virginia ryan coble if i it's kind of bleak to think about that um but so you know when governments can't keep the hand out of the cookie jar and edit the money database there's probably some value to that okay so what are you you're saying you're not an expert but you spend a lot of time tweeting about it now you tweet about a lot of things we'll get to that in a minute um but why is that why that's true why is that of interest to you crypto because you become i wouldn't say the crypto messiah but yeah that's going to be oh no um well i mean i mostly don't tweet about crypto this is a minority of small number of tweets okay so um i do know a lot about the money system and payments and how it actually works as opposed to say how economists think it works on a practical basis just how money money is just basically the monetary system is a series of heterogeneous databases that are not real time with the exception of paypal and a few others um and engage and to reconcile on a batch basis uh you know that that may take anywhere from 24 hours to several days um and um so it's just it's slow that's just a lot of latency in jitter and uh the ach system is has basically no security um so and this has just been in the it was that way when paypal started in 99 and it's uh still that way 22 years later it needs reform yeah yeah exactly um so i want to move on to um when china i want to stick with china for a second you're operating there selling there what do you make of what they're doing to the tech entrepreneurs there or the tech moguls um well hmm where is jack ma where is china i know do you know no i was curious we have some means to find out i'm guessing i well maybe i don't know i think there's there's there there are there are some uh changes afoot in china um i think part of this may be actually covered related in the sense that it's been quite difficult to have in-person meetings in china and china really runs a whole system is set up to run on the basis of in-person meetings and the absence of of these meetings for the past 18 months i think has um probably led to things being worse than they would be if there were more in-person meetings so i think as covert lifts and the in-person meetings return i think the uh i think probably there will be an increase in the in the sort of trust level and i think things will probably start heading in a more positive direction the trust level between tech and the government yeah both internally within china and with respect to people from the us and other countries going and visiting and meeting with officials in the chinese government now it's just it china is very much set up to work with the in-person meetings and so kobot i think has impeded that um so i think i think things will improve most likely as the in-person meetings should resume they did these anti-trust actions because they couldn't say hello um i think not all of it can be ascribed to that but it's uh some of it can be um yeah um well we'll see i i i suspect things will improve next year because of just better more interaction are you nervous about what you're doing there it's a big market for you it's a you operate there yeah um we've got a big factory in shanghai which is doing very well at tesla time until the tesla china team is uh doing great work and um we we do well with selling in the chinese market as well as producing cars for china and for export to europe um so overall things are going pretty well frankly you're not worried about u.s china relations i don't it's not no not not especially right now especially all right so let's talk about space you had a recent um space you instead of a bunch of civilians into space you do not send yourself up uh no i've not set myself up i suppose i will at some point but my goal is not to set myself up my goal is to open up space for humanity and ultimately set us on a path to becoming a space spring civilization and a multi-planet species yes so you don't want to go up yourself it's neither here nor there i will go at some point what do you think of the other efforts to go to suborbital soboball suborbital is a step in the direction of orbit but [Laughter] so um but just to put things in perspective you need about a hundred times more energy to get to orbit versus sub orbit um and then to get back from morbid you need to burn off that energy so you need a like heavy-duty heat shield because you're coming in like a meteor so so like orbit is roughly towards the magnitude more difficult than than subwoofers but it's still you know good to do something in space what do you think watching those uh both uh richard branson and jeff bezos doing that um i thought it was cool that they're spending money on the advancement of space i think we ultimately want to be humanity wants to be should want to be a space-bearing civilization and out there among the stars and we want i think we really want you know i mean all these things that we see in science fiction movies and books like you know we want those to be like real one day not always fiction right so i think it's good that people are spending their money advancing space technology so last time we talked we didn't talk a lot about space we talked about a whole bunch we talked about meat flaps which was elon's word for speaking yeah we're flapping arm yeah slow tonal wheezing yes that's right when i sound like it right now that's what we sound like to a computer like whale sound slow down yeah so we can talk about space so let's talk a little bit about where you think you've advanced with what you're doing because i think you're probably the most fast forward of all these efforts yeah so with respect to spacex um let's see um i mean there's two besides orbital human space flight and providing transport for uh nasa of astronauts and cargo to and from the space station which we've been doing for a while now over a decade um we are we have something called starlink which is a global internet system and this is i think going to have some profound positive effects on the world because this star link is really designed to serve the the least served um you have 1300 satellites up right now is that correct what 50 um yeah we'll get to space pollution in a minute but explain the reasons for it yeah so in order to provide high bandwidth low latency connectivity to a large number of people you need a lot of satellites and they need to be at low earth orbit so that latency is is low the problem with satellites that are at geostationary orbit is that they are you know around 36 000 kilometers whereas we are at 550 kilometers so gigantic difference in latency maybe for the starling system you could play like a competitive video game um that's best latency dependent and and still be able to play it with starlink um it's it's like browsing a terrestrial system essentially um and uh but but starlink has really um just be clear not a threat to uh 5g or terrestrial fiber or anything like that it's um but it's very well suited to low to medium density regions of the earth uh places that where it is too expensive to trench fiber or put uh cells you know 5g cellular base stations and so it's really a good it kind of takes care of the the people that that just didn't get internet or either it's too too slow or too expensive or they just don't have it at all it's very well suited a space-based system for serving like the least served maybe five percent or something like that how big a part of your space business is it from your perspective i mean i think it's quite significant in that the launch side of things just just launching other people's satellites and serving the space station uh probably tops out around you know three or four billion dollars a year of revenue whereas if we can get to say three percent of global internet traffic then that that's and that's roughly a trillion dollar a year business then we can increase our revenue by order of magnitude to more like the 30 billion or something like that and and then we can use the proceeds from that to develop the rocket technology necessary to get humanity to mars and to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system so that's that's so then the you know so so i think sonic is is good in and of itself uh for providing uh like i said providing internet access to the the least served in the world it's a fundamentally good thing in that respect um and also offering a little bit of competition in the cities although the you know stanley can really maybe uh serve less than five percent of people in a city it's just because of the way the the the spot beams from space are very big so um anyway it's a very nice complement and a necessary complement to [Music] 5g and fiber so and like it'll provide a revenue stream for us to develop our next generation rocket which is a starship um with starship that we're trying to achieve the a fundamental breakthrough that is the holy grail of rock tree uh that is to have a fully reusable mobile rocket this is extremely fundamental with falcon 9 we have a mostly reusable rocket she recently approved it landed correct we've been landing for quite a while now but um so we in fact a number of our boosters are on their 10th uh reflight so uh we've shown that reusing the the boost stage is can be done and that it is economically uh sensible to do so the difference in price between our falcon 9 and competitors um in using a reusable rocket oh yeah sure um so uh it's it's really gigantic um uh with felt with falcon 9 we still have to uh lose the upper stage and you can think of each stage being like the equivalent of a jet airplane so the boost age is like the big jet airplane upper stage is the small jet airplane we still throw away the small jet airplane every time so falcon 9 is able to be the most competitive rocket in the world because we recover the blue stage in the fairing but that but but still our best case marginal cost of launch not taking into account uh overhead allocation is about 15 million dollars per launch yeah for 15 tons to orbit that's which is quite big like spacex over the last year or so has delivered about i think roughly two-thirds of all payloads to orbit of earth and most of the remaining third is china and then everyone else is kind of they're in the miscellaneous um so um so anyway so but we still have a it's still 15 million dollars because of the mostly because what's the cost differential between that and what you're aiming for yeah so um basically falcon 9 is effectively about half to a third the cost of alternatives because of the reuse of the boost age with uh starship we should be able to get to the point where uh it's maybe one percent the the cost of an expendable system so that would just be a million bucks right or yeah the marginal cost of launch we think can be um it could be potentially under a million dollars so is there anybody for over a hundred tons to orbit 100 more though than 15 you said 50. yes 100 tons likely and with refinement of the design probably 150 tons so essentially it's it would be um you know uh 10 times the payload of falcon 9 uh for um 15 times lower cost so what's that happening 100 fold better you know it's really um profound um essentially with starship it is possible uh to make the economics close for creating a self-sustaining city on mars um and a base on the moon for those who want to go there and so it's really very very profound development um and that's what i'm spending most of my time on is driving the development of starship starships so you can go to mars or or you want civilization on mars uh civilization on mars so what's first the moon base or moonbase first correct i mean the moon is closed so we might as well okay yeah you might as well it's practically right there you know excuse me so you um you got a contract with the defense department to do a lunar lander from nasa from nasa um which is being disputed by jeff bezos yes how do you feel about that well i think i've uh expressed my thoughts on that front um [Music] you know uh if i i think he should put more uh of his energy into getting to orbit uh than lawsuits um you can't you cannot see your way to the moon okay you know how good your lawyers are yeah so why isn't he doing that i don't know i also like to make fun of his rock head you all make fun of each other's rockets i mean i think it does have uh i mean it could be a different shape potentially [Laughter] you know could you explain from a technological point of view why it's that shape well um if you are only going to doing sub-orbital then your rocket can be sort of shorter yes [Laughter] so have you called him and said cut this get bigger or what i mean i haven't i've encouraged um him to emphasize uh getting to orbit yes do you talk to him um not verbally what is it mine no just uh you know tweet at him yeah yeah yeah exactly sub tweet if you will so what is up to what you do so what so what are you gonna do with the lunar lander and how do you get the moon base there yeah so a starship is designed essentially as a general purpose transport system to anywhere in the solar system because it is a propulsive lander and with a propulsive lander you can land anywhere that's got a solid surface so and it's also designed for orbital refilling so you can get the starship to orbit and then send tanker flights to refill it so that it has a tremendous delta velocity basically it can go very far from earth orbit because you can refill propellant the moon base is important because um [Music] well i think that the moon base i mean certainly there's like a lot we could learn scientifically if we had a proper laboratory on the moon um about the nature of the universe and you know where we all came from in the early history of earth and that kind of thing yeah we have a science station in antarctica and we're still learning a lot from uh you know our activities in antarctica and i think we could learn uh even more on the moon um so there's a lot of a lot of value i think to having uh i think it'd be just freaking cool i mean come on it's like we gotta you know humanity let's you got to represent here for humanity you know just have a base on the moon but i think everyone would be like yeah hell yeah we got to base in the moon that's cool yeah you know um for tourism what do you think was the science science uh science i think like the a lot of a lot can be learned if you've got a sort of a science station on the moon like we've got a science station in antarctica and many other places um and uh i think uh there's i think there is value um that shouldn't be denigrated for people who want to experience uh going to orbit or going to the moon um and um you know when they do so and i think some degree vicariously we we all go with them you know when and when in the polar program when they landed on the moon um yeah it was just a handful of individuals on the moon but we all went with them vicariously humanity went with them like if you if you asked peter to paul of people on earth and said sorry what do you think is uh humanity's greatest achievement of the maybe ever it's like landing on the moon you know and that's inspiring i think to kids everywhere so you just brought sent up for civilians is that space tourism you're doing and by the way you have to be kind of rich to do it like from what i understand i cannot afford to go to the moon for example yeah i i mean i think billionaires i think it's got a bit more gravitas than um you know metaphorically figuratively and literally um more gravitas than uh you know simply tourism um it's not like going to disneyland you know it's like uh it's more profound than that um so sometimes people use tourism in there sort of a negative way but um i think you know especially with the inspiration flight i think they they really i mean they you know they filmed the whole thing in real time um you know they shared their experiences with the world there's a really cool group of people i recommend watching the netflix show countdown mark pantioff talked about it it's awesome um i i didn't have anything to do with it and and the production value on the netflix countdown documentary is amazing um and you learn about the backstory of the people and um it's uh it's it's actually super awesome you know like this is for science and for saving humanity presumably yeah i think uh what tourism um i think that there's an element of tourism to it but i think you know it there's also uh you know the technology is expensive at first um you you can't just when you try to develop brand new technology it doesn't instantly become uh cheap and affordable and think of like cell phones and the only cell phones were were really expensive and sucked you know yeah frankly like you know usually like wall street one where you know he's walking down the beach with the shoebox size cell phone on it you know talking to this and and so just like really expensive and the tech wasn't that great but but if if some number of people didn't pay for the expensive cell phones they would not be the inexpensive cell phones that everyone can afford so thank billionaires for going into space um i mean you know it doesn't have to be top of your thank you list but i mean it's not um i'm just saying that there's a nest when there's new technology uh it is necessarily expensive until uh you can refine the design and you can scale things up and then you can make it more affordable there is a common misconception that there's some with some new technology especially if it's a physical object that you can just suddenly make it cheap and available um and and um but you have to have many design iterations and you've got to scale up the production and get economies of scale like we had this argument um against tesla for for a long time because people would say like well why are you building this tesla roadster back in the day it's it's basically a you know it's an expensive toy sports car for its people we're like yes it is but there's no way we could build an affordable electric car as our first car any you know we just didn't have the capital we didn't have the experience and we needed to go through several technology iterations in order to get to something like the model 3. right and i actually wrote a blog about this because i knew people would be like why are you making sports cars rich for rich people as though we thought there was somehow a shortage of sports cars for rich people we're obviously not um but better you just got to you got to figure out the technology uh you got to go through multiple design like how do you make something mass market and affordable many many design iterations many many different versions of the technology a lot of hard work and then you've got to scale up the production rate so you get economies of scale and those two things are what make any given technology available to the public and basically every uh technology that we take for granted today has gone through that uh uh so the idea of getting to mars will be affordable someday yes absolutely it has to be in order for it um in order for moz to be a self-sustaining civilization it has to be affordable you say that enough people need to go you know why do you want people to go when you just keep saying that because you're worried about this planet are you just betting the odds are we'll either blow it up or no it'll be the day after tomorrow moving you know i i think it's really um you know if you sort of look you know uh just sort of stand back um just if you just if we just step away from our sort of antony squabbles and say let's look at the big picture here what what set of actions can we take that maximize the probability that the future is going to be good for civilization and for consciousness and i think we should regard consciousness on earth as delicate not uh you know just fragile um and you know what sort of actions can we do to ensure that it continues and that the scope and scale of consciousness expands and um and i'm i'm in favor of of expansion because like you know if we want to understand what the universe is about and and what's the meaning of life and we need to get out there and find out um and the more we expand the scope and scale of consciousness the better we will be able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe so when you get a lot of criticism say about starlink space pollution you see a lot of stories about space pollution why is elon putting so many astronomers get mad at you or with um the rockets so that you have these big expense contracts that you're doing correct first time someone's broken into the area how do you meet those criticisms this is just small potatoes well first of all with respect to the astronomers um we are in uh constant dialogue with the leading astronomers of the world and taking great pains to ensure that our satellites do not interfere with their telescopes and we've um i believe at this point they are satisfied that they will not um so uh we've like said we're taking great pains to ensure that uh the satellites do not reflect or you know uh otherwise interfere with the the telescopes including the most sensitive telescopes so um you know there may be a few sort of amateur astronomers who are unhappy but the professional ones are are satisfied that we're taking reasonable steps to ensure that we are not standing in the way of science nor would we ever want to and we're also looking at uh launching some uh new telescopes using starship because starship is a much bigger vehicle we can launch satellites that have uh 10 times the resolution of the hubble which would be great for science um and in fact there's an exciting program uh working with seoul pearl motor at berkeley on a big new space satellite um a space telescope i should say um and i think we'll do we'll do more of those so i think at the end of the day uh starship and spacex are gonna do a lot to advance uh our understanding of uh astrophysics and strongholds you still wanna you said to me last a couple times ago we talked you wanna die on mars you still wanna die on mars um well just not on landing right yes yeah it's not an impact right well that would be spectacular yes but you wouldn't get to enjoy it much of you know just a second or so about a narrative for the recipe yeah no i was just asked uh do you want to die in was and i was like well i suppose if you're going to pick earth or mars i'm like it'd be cool to like be born on earth and down moss i'm not i'm not like trying to make a beeline to mars and just you know dive or something um it's just that uh yeah i gotta pick one you're gonna die somewhere short mars i've interviewed a lot of astro uh i guess they're biologists they're worried about um essentially they said you have to be under the earth a couple hundred feet no no no you get short definitely not a couple months too much a couple hundred yeah you know you just need um first of all half the time you're shielded by this of by mars itself um that's half the radiation is just the planet shielding you and then um you want to make maybe have like i don't know three feet of dirt ish on the roof or just kind of a thick roof um they'll be fine um so so you're not worried about becoming shorter and stupider by moving to mars uh no i think we might uh become taller actually on mars a little bit a little bit taller yeah because the gravity is roughly 40 percent out of both okay that would be good for me when you think about um but i think i do think there's like an important thing before if you think of the various great filters um if you feel familiar with the sort of great grateful sort of thought um you know one of the filters is do we become a space for a multi-planet species or not um so that is at least one of the one of the great filters and we would i think it would be great to uh pass that and have um be a multi-planet species where the the critical threshold is uh it on for a mars city if if the resupply ships from earth stop coming for for any reason whether that is civilization on earth it could be a mundane reason or could be world war iii but does mars prosper or die out and if mars is missing anything at all like the civilizational equivalent of vitamin c then it will eventually die out so you need to get to the point where a mars city is self-sustaining even if the earth the ships from earth stopped coming then you have passed the great filter or at least that particular great culture i think we should uh endeavor to pass that great filter as soon as possible you said pretty soon last time we talked yeah i mean i think we should really try hard to make it happen in the century um before the end of the century you'll be pretty old i'll probably be dead yeah not on mars well i mean i'll you know pop over there when i'm old or something okay so um one of the things you're doing is a lot of government deals you're doing this lunar lander he did the rocket one um you're getting billions from 2.9 billion dollars there right well right now we're not getting anything because we're being sued right that's right i'm sorry okay yeah but you're getting a lot of money and hopefully we'll get it right right when it's over yeah um and he fixes right i mean most of our launches are commercial to be clear yes i understand that but you're doing a lot of government work what is that like working with the government i mean is that important to your business yeah i mean it's it's an important part of it's an important part of the business i mean just just very i mean bear in mind if like if you're in any industry like let's say you're a pencil manufacturer okay about 40 of your pencils are going to go to the government the government's about 40 of the economy you know if you're a shoe manufacturer about 40 of your business is going to be with the government so you know it's to be expected that any any company is going to have uh most companies are going to have a percentage of business with the government state federal and local that is proportionate to the gdp of the government so one of the criticisms of you is you don't pay enough taxes if any um can you address that because here you are getting money from the government you obviously want to function in government uh to be able to build all kinds of things and services how do you look at that trade-off uh well i mean there was a bunch of very misleading stuff that was published uh by pro-publica um and really that was some sort of trickery and really that they did themselves no good service by by by doing that first of all with respect to the government contracts that uh spacex wins uh our aspiration is to do the most for the least and if you look at all the contracts we've won we've won them because we're the best price we have a better service at a lower price they weren't just handed to us i don't think they were and that's what i'm saying in fact you called me and said we finally got in after years of sort of this back slappy i think it's a great thing that isn't great absolutely i mean in the for the lunarland just taking that as one example um our bed was half the price of the blue origin lockheed bed hat so for a vehicle that does basically 10 times more or eight times more bats our price was half and nasa has a mandate to get back to the moon so we save taxpayers like three billion dollars relative to that contract um so i think that's that's a good thing with respect to my personal taxes um the um i don't actually draw a salary or anything my cash compensation is basically zero um which is a good thing because income is a problem for most people because they pay taxes on income that was the whole point of the story i think yeah yeah um so um i do have sock options um that best and so in the years that the but but i don't i basically with um tesla and spacex i just um have not really bothered to sort of take money off the table which is a common most people do they sell some of their stock and they take money off the table um and for me i just like said i you know my mind will be that sort of it was it was the first in and it'll be the last out and um the success of spacex and tesla was far from assured and there are many times when it looked like the companies would and they did they skirted bankruptcy many times but i never tried to take money off the table and now this has been trying to be turned around and made into a bad thing and i this is that's messed up um so um but with when my stock options uh um just before my stock options expire then i am forced to exercise and my top marginal tax rate is 53 percent so i don't think that's particularly low and it's going to go up next year it's like probably 57 or something and you sell yes and and i i have a bunch of options that are expiring uh early next year so i'm uh that a huge block of options will sell in q4 because i have to or they'll expire and my top marginal tax rate is 53 so you'll eventually won't pay a lot of taxes but massive yeah i mean basically majority of what i said would be tax i don't think it was alleging illegality it's that uh wealthy people got to borrow against their stock uh yes they were they were saying that like somehow borrowing is a trick to get away from paying taxes but um it's more important to bear in mind that we've had a very long expansion uh in the economy maybe the longest ever and borrowing against stock is all is all sort of fun and games until you have a recession and you get the margin calls and then you go to zero which is which happens basically every time there's a recession stocks don't always go up they go down yours seems to most stocks have gone up including some questionable stocks frankly are you talking about yourself i'm sorry um i think are you surprised by how much it's gone up and uh i mean i have literally gone on record and said i think our stock price is too high in my opinion and this did nothing to stop the rise of the stock price so i don't know what am i supposed to do you know i'm not the one making a go up um so um but i think it's important to bear in mind like my actual tax rate is 53 they try to make it sound like basically it was a big increase in the value of the tesla stock and then they added up they just very selectively poked the numbers to make it sound like i was paying very low taxes but in fact my taxes are very high they're like over half um and you pay them when you open yes and a huge amount will be paid in next three months because of expiring uh options and there was like one year where i think my taxes were basically zero and the reason for that was because i had overpaid taxes the year before they forgot to mention that you didn't call them back i'm gonna call them back they have no interest in the truth oh okay all right um let me ask you a question um uh twitter let's finish twitter and then let's get to questions from the audience what's going on with you in twitter i am a twitter addict i say the wrong things all the time what is someone explained it to me was very close to you saying it's your release valve this is where you feel better yeah i think i said some people some people use their hair to express themselves i use twitter you regret any of it or not you are kind of prominent yeah i mean sure walk us through when you decide to do a tweet you go no no no well i think about it for hours and i consult with my strategy team you could just literally go yeah yeah yeah or maybe i'm wasted or not approved it's gone [Laughter] let me shoot myself on the put fam now let me shoot myself a little bam yeah that describes some of my tweets yeah are you um worried about any sec involvement in your tweets going forward um what does that stand for again i mean i know the middle word is elon's but i can't remember the other two words [Laughter] you need to answer you need to answer me are you worried they're gonna say elon stop tweeting you talk about the short seller enrichment commission yeah yeah that's the new name is it yeah yeah about the particular recent tweet you did about he did one great wait about time saying time is the currency which i thought was beautiful time is the ultimate currency yes um no matter what resources you have you can't wind back the clock it's true yeah how rich you are yeah but then you did the biden tweet can you explain that one oh when um well yeah i mean so you know like biden held this uh ev summit um didn't invite tesla um invited um gm ford chrysler and uaw navy summit on the white house um didn't mention tesla once and praised german ford for leading the ev revolution so you were pissed this sound does sound uh maybe a little biased uh or something um so um and then you know just uh it's not the friendliest administration you know [Music] it seems to be controlled by the unions before i like now so are you waiting to get trump back uh no would you like to be president besides yourself i would not want to be present at all sounds like no fun being president um what do you think is going to bring our country together if at all moving to mars what well i think if there was some uh moderate you know sort of sort of centrist president and i think uh that would help um you know that i think everyone just wants uh i think most people most people want a president who is just a very competent you know executive you know not too far left not too far right [Music] and and everyone would be like i think most people would prefer that uh you know some when it comes out the election you've got two choices you're like oh you know maybe you don't love either choice but you gotta pick do you think that'll one do i think that would be what's interesting i hope so i hope so about democracy um i'm not super worried about democracy um are you worried about democracy oh smidge what concerns you uh a lot of the dialogue is getting a little i study propaganda oh yeah it's worrisome the fact that it can't happen here it certainly can i'm a phillip roth kind of person so yeah um but we're both having a lot of children so we must believe in the future yes children we have 10 children between us correct at least yes you're slightly ahead but you've got a rocket um anyway i i i i do think we there is um you know i think a lot of people think that there's too many people on the planet but i think there's in fact too few and the the possibly the single greatest risk to human civilization is the uh rapidly diminishing birth rate and the facts are out there for anyone to look at but a lot of people are still stuck with you know pearl uh paul ellick's book population bomb and it's like uh that was a long time ago that is not the case today um and the there's a there was a massive notch uh in demographics last year because uh the birth rate plummeted and also this year so i mean if you know no no babies no humanity you got to come from somewhere oh okay we're going to end on that we need questions from audiences because there's a lot of great questions hey lana i'm ronan levy from field trip uh we spent a lot of time talking about outer space we want to ask you about inner space and the question specifically is do you spend time thinking about humanity's somewhat destructive tendencies before sending people to mars and specifically you've talked about the subject of dmt and curious to know what role you think psychedelics may have in addressing some of the more destructive tendencies of humanity we're going to talk about this tomorrow okay um um i think generally uh people should be open to psych psychedelics yeah yeah so yeah clearly i mean you know yeah a lot of people making laws are kind of from a different era um so i think as um you know as as the new generation gets into political power i think we'll see a greater receptivity to the benefits of psychedelics right now concern you like about before we go to mars i mean humanities tendencies i mean we are at a very peaceful moment in history um so you got to separate the sort of news headlines from the reality um i think like stephen pinker hobbit has really pointed this out like we're actually at the lowest violence per capita in his in human history um it may not seem like that but objectively those are the statistics um let's not say there's no violence or there aren't things to be improved but it's you know it's actually quite good and so um but you know just like i said big picture-wise we i think we want to take a set of actions that maximize the probability of the future is good um and that and that civilization continues and that the sort of this small candle of consciousness in the void that is humanity continues and there's not it's not the candle does not go out okay next up here hello my name is lena i'm a student at the university of chicago and i also have a podcast called kind of sort of brown so my question centers a little bit what you talked about concerning that you know you're building this world for not enough people yet but the people that now are here but concerning young people how do you actually build infrastructure to make sure that you're not just building resources for people to be in mars but actually putting them in positions of power politically or educating people who don't have access to learn about space technology etc how do you actually teach young people and bring them and do you feel like that's your role or does it your role to just build the spaceship to mars well our primary goal is is to create the technology necessary to get people to mars in the absence of which not you know it's somewhat academic um so we wouldn't want to get too directed from our primary mission of we we got to make it at least possible to get it to go to mars um and we want to uh do so as soon as possible and make uh access to mars as widely available as as possible as affordable as possible so that if somebody wants to go they can um so that's that's our primary mission um i mean there are many good causes in the world but we got to be careful that we do not try to um take on too many uh i mean there are many noble missions but we we have to pick our battles and say okay let's just make sure we get this done and because nobody else is doing it and i mean if if spacex doesn't do it i'm not sure how it will happen i think this this is the at least right now spacex is the only hope so we we're going to get this done and it's far from done i mean it's a lot long way to go um yeah i i starting in terms of providing internet connectivity to people that really don't have it or it's very expensive i think will be helpful in um empowering a lot of people who are disempowered today so i think that's a good thing too right next hi techno king um how do you respond to allegations you call him techno king yeah okay that is my formal title i've found that with you gotta be respectful cara yeah how do you respond to allegations that uh you're a living cyber genetic organism sent from the future to save us and secondly let's say i can either confirm nor deny that he's good he's good and secondly what do you think uh the probability is that general purpose blockchains that have greater utility will eclipse the value of like a fish finished product in bitcoin i actually i'm not sure how to answer that last one um i think just generally uh public ledger stuff is good um because uh i'm a fan of open source and just and just you know uh sunlight being a great disinfectant and the the more the less things occur in the dark the better um and uh you know sort of a cryptic basically i mean blockchains are just a it's a cryptographic ledger um an open you know so i think that uh there's probably a lot of things good things i could have done with that so the first question i said i could neither confirm no denying okay right here hey elon alex heath with the verge um the questions on the self-driving beta you guys are rolling out curious why you're encouraging people to not share videos making them sign ndas just be careful uh no i mean there's a lot of videos being shared uh but the ndis for me the ndas for for the full self-driving beta i don't know um people don't seem to listen to the md i mean i'm not sure there's uh yeah i don't know why this is in the nda we probably don't need it and people just are ignoring it anyway so i'm sure it matters all right so i'm gonna ignore this i'm gonna keep getting questions let's do two hi hi alanzia yusuf from bcg could you talk a little bit about ai and robotics and you've expressed concerns in the past but you know building some as well what do you see as the issues that we do have to solve on that front well i've said for a long time i think ai safety is a really big deal and we should have some regulatory agency that is overseeing ai safety um but there's not yet currently any such thing and and just generally any kind of regulatory agency done by the government will usually takes years to put in place so um you know after uh the population collapse issue i think ai safety is probably the second biggest um threat to the future of civilization um and um yeah like i said i'm not quite sure what to do with it um i mean tesla is arguably the world's biggest robot maker because like we have basically semi-semi-autonomous cars that will ultimately be fully autonomous um and we are building a humanoid robot that will be basically like um like like the car but with legs so um and i kind of uh held off on doing that for a while because you know i i certainly don't want to hasten the ai apocalypse but clearly with a look at boston dynamics and like those humanoid robots are going to happen so um they're really going to happen with or without tesla so it's like tesla i've got a little bit more i mean a lot more ability to ensure uh robotics safety and ai um and i'll try my best to to do that what what would you do no we can't do more sorry we got it quick first uh thanks for making the first car i ever loved um i love the car my wife insisted i asked this question if i got here uh we also have way too many children um that's probably great if there's any chance that you could put a roof rack on the x that's what she's looking for uh uh we need a roof rack on the x if y if you could figure that out that's almost more important than going to mars um we have not figured that out i mean it's tricky because we have the fancy doors they're awesome yeah the doors are awesome but you know if you have a roof rack like how do you stop the doors from smashing them you were smart yeah thank you and the model y has a roof rack though it's not big enough for all the kids really it's seat seven not not normal kids okay okay what do you have separate cars for your children elon musk it does have a tow hitch you can tow your stuff two questions elon thanks for the plaid it's a great car um as we're all uh you know waiting for full self that's awesome really it's awesome we like we might have to argue a bit about the yolk but we're getting accustomed to it it's great you know it's like something different and it it's different and people sometimes don't like the different thing but how much did you know it's pushing you was it your kids my kids love the yolk so that works for them anyway really really quick look we're living in this in between time between we drive our cars ourselves and the cars drive themselves they're semi-autonomous for those of us in the industry those of us who understand something about technology about machine learning i actually like it it's pretty easy it fixes my mistakes i fix its mistakes a lot in the press though about and google's position certainly is this is like the worst place to be right because people are going to get checked out and the cars are going to drive themselves into what do you think about the ml human hybrids that we're kind of you know embracing right now how long are we going to have these crossover periods i know you believe s fst is around the corner do you think this is really a problem are we going to teach people to deal with ml well i mean the transition period to new technology is always a little bumpy um and um but i think we published the the safety stats like basically miles driven uh on autopilot and miles driven manually and this i mean it's an order of magnitude different so like people say oh well you're playing with the statistics i'm like listen we're just saying miles driven autopilot miles not driving rotten mud and there's a 10 up back to 10 difference so i mean even if we were like we're not fiddling with statistics that's just it this is not subtle it's what i'm saying it's not subtle um the truth is that people are actually not great at driving these two-ton death machines you know and people get tired and they um get drunk and they get distracted and they text and they do all sorts of things they shouldn't do and then the cars that you know crash basically um and um now that now when we were embarking on the autonomy front uh someone told me i think that's quite true which is even if you for argument's sake uh reduce fatalities by 90 with autonomy um the 10 that do die uh with autonomy are still going to sue you the 90 that are living don't even know that that's the reason they're alive um nonetheless um i've had many conversations with the tesla autopilot full self driving team who are just an outstanding group of people um and saying like listen guys it is better to um pursue like the reality of doing the right thing matters more than the perception of doing the right thing and as long as we are confident that we're doing the right thing even if we are criticized and sued and all that we should not only do the right thing and not care about simply the perception of the right thing okay last question sorry rick cutter the cloud for utilities uh thank you so much for the hard work you've done with with tesla driving the ev market as we move towards more green energy utilities are getting rid of their fossil plants coal plants investing in renewables there's a difference in the economic output they can deliver are you concerned at all as the growth of evs continue do you think we could have a supply chain problem with energy down the road yeah i think that's a that's a very good question um the full answer is is lengthy um i'll try to give this the short version um the electricity demand roughly if if we go if we shift or transport to electric then electricity demand approximately doubles maybe a little more than doubles and this is going to create a lot of challenges with the grid especially for distribution to neighborhoods and this is why tesla has the product the solar roof and solar retrofit is because even if you increase uh sustainable power generation at the utility level you're still going to have a distribution problem where you need new high power lines new medium power lines you need to dramatically increase the size of the substations which means you're gonna have to start knocking down houses to increase the substation size this is really unworkable unless you have a significant local power generation at houses and this is why i think it's actually very important that um that a a necessary part of the solution is local power generation uh on on rooms on the houses of homes very important and then of course we need large sustainable power generation developments primarily wind and solar but it needs to be paired with battery packs for steady state to provide continuous power and a lot of good things are happening in this regard the growth of solar in the last several years has been incredible i think it's like a 40 compound annual growth rate in in solar and uh also a big growth in wind i'm also kind of a pro-nuclear nuclear nuclear pro-nuclear and um you know i'm sort of surprised by a lot of the public sentiment against nuclear and i'm not saying we should go build a whole bunch of new nuclear plants but i don't think we should shut down ones that are operating safely um and um but they did that they did this in germany for example i think that was and and then and had to create a whole bunch of coal power plants and i i don't think that was uh the right decision frankly so um um yeah anyway so we're one or another though we're going to have to have a lot more electricity generation um and this is this is primarily going to come down to solar and wind uh paired with batteries it will be our next conversation okay tesla boring solar sounds good okay can i ask you one more question one time we talked a couple years ago code you said we were in a simulation this past couple of years has seemed truly up yeah it feels like a bunch of teenagers from the future are just really smoking a lot of dope and with us are we are we in a simulation i mean my heart says no and my brain says yes elon musk [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Recode

Views: 850

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Id: HZP67-DECVw

Length: 65min 17sec (3917 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021

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Ronan's Question to Musk about psychedelics starts at 47:55 to 50:20