TIME Person of the Year: Elon Musk

so which living person do you most admire i admire anyone who is uh making a positive contribution to humanity um whether that is in entertainment or in technology or you know i think anyone who's sort of doing things that are really useful to the rest of humanity is i admire them greatly [Music] [Applause] [Music] you know it's really hard to escape elon musk's dominance over so many things in american life right now he's got this rocket company that is completely dominating the space launch business he's got a car company that is completely dominating the electric vehicle market uh he's got 65 million twitter followers and he likes to make weird jokes and set people off and sometimes with a single tweet he can control the stock market or the value of various different cryptocurrencies so this is a man who's just sort of become uh ever present across a lot of different sectors and this was really the year that he came into his own his goal is to make humanity a multi-planet species and at a time in which nasa has abdicated its operations to put people in low earth orbit and for the time being at least put people on other worlds spacex has stepped in like no other private company before it around the world so elon musk's wealth is largely tied up in tesla stock he is the not only the ceo he is its largest shareholder and tesla is one of the most valuable companies in the country its market value is more than one trillion dollars and his wealth is sort of tied up in that company tesla has dragged the legacy automators into the electric vehicle market yeah do companies like ford gm rivie and lucid pose a threat to tesla's dominance or do you think you guys have so grasped the market at this point that you are going to own it well if somebody makes better cars than we do then um and they then sell more cars than we do i think that's totally fine our intent with tesla was always that we would serve as an example to the car industry and that and hope that they also make electric cars that we can accelerate the transition to sustainable energy i you know i'm confident in the future in tesla that it will do well and i hope some of these other companies do well too earlier this year this tesla crashed into a highway divider in california killing the driver another slammed into a park fire truck in utah both had the autopilot feature on there is a federal investigation underway into the autopilot software that tesla has which despite the name is not autopilot software it does not drive the car for you and people inside tesla have expressed a lot of skepticism about whether the company's technology is eventually going to be able to get there are the cars safe i mean should i feel comfortable getting behind the wheel of a tesla and saying drive me where i need to go well the statistics that uh i think are at this point unequivocal that you know far more accidents off autopilot than on autopilot so this is not to say that autopilot is perfect now to get to full self driving where you don't need to pay attention um we still obviously have a lot of work to do so as we get to the point where individual interventions are extremely rare even in complex traffic situations and get to the point where the probability of injury uh with full self-driving is much lower than with a human driving right then obviously at that point it would make sense to allow the car to drive itself and not have to pay attention so this year elon musk became the world's richest man ever so we asked him about another pressing global problem and that is income and wealth inequality when it's time to pay taxes new reporting from propublica says the nation's top 25 richest people pay little to nothing at all including warren buffett jeff bezos and elon musk one of the main criticisms of him is just that he's so rich should any human being be worth 300 billion dollars you know a lot of the push for higher government involvement and expropriation of assets by the government is really pushed by a bunch of politicians who are actually saying um that resources shouldn't be in control of people of of private individuals they should be in control of the government they're basically saying they want control of the assets i mean i think in terms of things that people should perhaps get upset about is like i think getting upset about excess consumption is a thing to get upset about but uh you know somebody's just wasting money on personal luxuries in a crazy way you know i'm like i'm not i'm not wearing barefoot's biggest fan frankly but you know he he sits there and he reads all these annual reports which are super boring does anybody want that job i think most people do not i don't want that job um but like he's not he's not like uh engaged in like insane conspicuous consumption i think so you have to say like okay sure he's got a high net worth but doesn't he's doing a useful job for the economy you know and he's very skilled at it and should probably keep doing it elon musk definitely uses twitter in a way that no other business leader does and it's gotten him into a lot of trouble in recent years his twitter feed is juvenile to say the least he has insulted some important people in really immature ways but when a person with 65 million followers and 300 billion dollars is just having fun that tends to create ripples in the larger pond you are not to put too fine a point on it the richest man in the history of the world and arguably the most influential um and yet you tweet freely and playfully and somewhat mischievously yes that's that's accurate so our fuse with jeff policymakers is that good for the overall brand yeah i don't really think about brand optimization to be frank as obvious from my tweets which are often self-inflicted wounds uh or humor that i find funny but not necessarily that other many other people find funny right you know when you say take the red pill do you worry about sending none too bad take both pulls take but all right yeah but do you worry at all about activating motivating the you know a political fringe yeah actually when i said take the red pill i didn't realize that was some like uh politically charged phrase right um i was just referring to the matrix yeah you know like uh you know make sure you accept reality for what it is right that turns out it's like also like some like acceptance right-wing dogma thing or something i don't i don't realize that at the time um you do have the ability to move markets with a tweet should any one man have that power well um you know the markets move themselves all the time and so you know especially tesla stock has seen some very big changes in value from one day to the next based on nothing as far as i can tell so do statements that i make are they materially different from random movements uh of the stock that might happen anyway uh i don't think so it's not like you know stock drops in half or something like that right you know elon musk is someone who pursues his goals relentlessly and i think that does sometimes make him blind to the potential human toll the potential human cost that that can create for some of the people who get sort of ground up in the gears of the things he's trying to do you've made statements um downplaying covet 19 you kept your factories open running at the height of the pandemic and well actually technically i think there's a mister standing there on the on the factory's front tell me that um so uh other car factories in the united states had start had restarted right um and we were blocked only because our car factories in the bay area in california so california had actually said uh manufacturing can restart right and then alameda county cited off their own accord that tesla could not restart reopening the factory in alameda was arguably a poor management choice i think he was aware of the risks that his employees were taking i don't think it was necessarily a fair choice to pressure or invite or ask or instruct employees to come back to work are you vaccinated yes yeah yeah i mean i'm very pro vaccination i believe uh it's the science is unequivocal yeah i treat it to that effect but by the same token i am against forcing people to be vaccinated you know i think this is just not something we should do in america i think we should encourage people to be vaccinated strongly try to convince them to be vaccinated but not force them to be vaccinated or for example force them to get vaccinated or get fired elon musk is incredibly influential in the in the cryptocurrency world he's constantly tweeting about his opinions about certain cryptocurrencies versus others he is um known as a as a big proponent of dogecoin um and and someone who has in the past taken tesla's assets and invested those into into bitcoin and then sold that bitcoin at a profit well i mean i could really sort of wax on about the nature of money for hours because i played a significant role in creating uh paypal um and so my understanding of the the money system at a fundamental level of how it actually works the detailed mechanics of it is i think there's there are very few people that understand it doesn't mean bitcoin uh is an interesting example obviously the the prime mover on this um but the transaction volume of bitcoin is low yeah uh and the cost per transaction is high it is uh at least at its base level uh suitable for maybe an exchange a store of value but fundamentally um bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency right um and um even though it was created as a silly joke dogecoin is uh better suited for transactions why is that the total transaction flow uh that you could do with with um dogecoin is substantially more than like transactions per day is much higher than has much higher potential than than bitcoin uh it is uh slightly inflationary um but that inflationary number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage right so that means over time its percentage inflation actually decreases and that's actually good because it encourages people to spend and rather than sort of hoard it as a store of value i'm going to switch to a personal question a little bit if you're okay with yeah sure um so what happened with grimes and do you have a new girlfriend oh man someone knew i know here we are with our uh um you know grimes are like serving separated you know like uh it's just that her work um has her just being in different places a lot versus my work um so um we you know weren't seeing each other that much yeah we're still we're still good friends uh and um i do not have a new girlfriend or anything okay yeah i mean this place is basically like a technology monastery you know um technology mine is there yeah um there's hardly any i mean there's someone here but not many and it's remote yeah and we do do technology yes so this was the techno monastery [Music] you

Channel: TIME

Views: 424,646

Keywords: Elon Musk, Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, Mars, Space, Electric Cars, Grimes, Person of the Year, POY

Id: PbVSZvC7UxY

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mezzo710]

I think they misspelled manipulative