TIME Person of the Year

what's more important rockets or cars actually that's a good first question well i guess uh i guess they're both important um i guess my career is mars and cars cars and cars um so you know i think we need to transition to sustainable energy and become a space spring civilization starting with space um why haven't you uh gone you know bezos went up branson went up do you want to go off is that on your to-do list in 22 or how do you think about that yourself i i'm i might i will go up at some point um but the i mean there is an unlike philosophy uh that uh by which i aspire to guide my actions and uh that is to take the set of actions that maximize the probability that the future is good um and hopefully not pave the whole the road to hell with good intentions

so uh the you know spacex is the point of space spacex is to help make humanity a space spring civilization and ultimately a multi-planet species so as to expand the scope and scale of consciousness and ultimately better understand what questions to ask about the answer which is the universe switching to risk in the context of tesla and autopilot auto driving i mean um and one of our competitors had a big piece on that this weekend that it's not all the way thought through and it's you know back to risk how do you think about obviously that's not zero risk either you're you're paving the way in that area autonomy is just it's incredibly important in innovation because people spend um hours of many hours a week ultimately you know uh you know many months

of their lives probably in in cars and stuck in traffic and um and then there's a lot of people that die in order accidents so worldwide there's um about a million automotive gas per year uh so uh the vast majority of which are due to driver error so um and uh so if we can have autonomy that that would potentially solve you know save on the order of a million lives per year and there's about 10 million serious accidents where there's a permanent injury per year so it's one of those things where um you know you're not going to get uh rewarded for necessarily for the for the lives that you save but you will definitely be blamed for lives that you don't save um so and i mean there's a there was a you know something sorry something somebody said to me beginning

of when we're pursuing autonomy uh said that he said that you know even if you um save ninety percent of their lives but temperature you don't say we're gonna sue you a lot of people are worried about uh democracy the future of democracy the state of democracy part of that's tied to silicon valley we have democracy well i don't know yeah are you my question is are you worried about democracy here okay start here these things are going okay in the grand scheme of things you know um it's easy to complain but i mean the fact of the matter is uh this is the most prosperous time in human history so um but people's expectations always adjust to the you know like however good things get people's expectations will always um kind of recalibrate to how things are

but you know if we stand back and say like okay is there really some point in history would you where you'd rather be um and and by the way have you actually read history it wasn't great so so i think you know we should be i think probably um happier with the way things are than maybe sometimes people are