Interview mit CCTV 25. September 2026 In Teslas globaler Engineering-Zentrale spricht Elon Musk mit der China Media Group über seine Eindrücke von China und Präsident Xi, die Giga Shanghai, den Cybercab, das Tempo der KI und chinesische Modelle, KI-Sicherheit, Optimus, ein universelles hohes Einkommen, die Raumfahrtkooperation zwischen den USA und China, den Mars, Neuralink und Bildung im KI-Zeitalter.
In Teslas globaler Engineering-Zentrale spricht Elon Musk mit der China Media Group über seine Eindrücke von China und Präsident Xi, die Giga Shanghai, den Cybercab, das Tempo der KI und chinesische Modelle, KI-Sicherheit, Optimus, ein universelles hohes Einkommen, die Raumfahrtkooperation zwischen den USA und China, den Mars, Neuralink und Bildung im KI-Zeitalter.
Transkript CMG interviewer
Thank you so much, Elon, for joining me and also having us here at Tesla Global Engineer Headquarters. It's so amazing to see kind of new technology innovations, all talented engineers here as well.
CMG interviewer
In this May, you were also on the delegation to China as well. You have met with President Xi. What's your impression about President Xi as a leader?
Elon Musk
Well, he seems like a great leader. I mean he's. Under his tenure, China has prospered immensely. I mean, I've seen it firsthand, like if you visit China and you see the amount of progress that happens from one year to the next or even within a year, it's very visible. Like you can see the new buildings, the new infrastructure and, and it's also obvious to see that just walking around the streets, the increased prosperity of the average Chinese citizen has increased tremendously. And that's all that seems happened under President Xi's while he's been the leader of China. So, so he's clearly done, you know, done an excellent job and is very capable.
CMG interviewer
Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai has always done an incredible job. You praise your many times. So what kind of advantage or breakthroughs do you think that to making the Shanghai factory a very important position in Tesla's global blueprint? And what ultimate kind of confidence do you think this will unfold, especially in the market?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, China just has a very strong inherent ability to do manufacturing well. And this has been true not just in present days, but for the past two or three thousand years. I think that to be totally frank, the magic of Tesla Shanghai is because of Chinese. In China at least, what we have is the Tesla China team is just incredibly talented and hard working and trustworthy and they have, the quality is excellent and the efficiency is excellent. So the Tesla Shanghai factory is a gem. It's beautiful actually, if anyone's ever been there. And we also care a lot about taking care of the workers and making sure that they have good health care and good food and enjoy coming to work. It's very important.
CMG interviewer
Absolutely. I think we can tell all your staffing Shanghai factory, they're very enjoying working there. So we're talking about next hot topic. Recently we probably, we can call September is the Cybercat month. Have you seen the videos? Like all the people gather around that. I guess it goes very, very quickly.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean it's pretty cool because we designed the car to look futuristic because I think, you know, from a fashion standpoint we don't, we don't want the aesthetics of the street to stay stagnant. You want to evolve the. What do cars look like? And also I think maybe even clothing. Like we should be like there was, there was rapid fashion evolution in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and probably time to make things look more futuristic. Yeah.
CMG interviewer
And then how you see the kind of market potential for cybercap, you know, it's, it's, it's like, you know, it's really futuristic. But how long you can really come to the reality or real life.
Elon Musk
Well, we have the Cyber cab which has, as you know, has no steering wheel or pedals or side mirrors or rear view mirror, operating commercially in Texas right now and it will soon be operating commercially in Florida and Nevada and a number of other states. Probably by middle of next year it will be operating commercially in California.
CMG interviewer
Absolutely. I think all the changes is happening really fast. Just like every day we have to look social to see the kind of improving our breakthroughs about AI or other old tech topics.
Elon Musk
So yeah, I mean it's just so crazy. I mean the rate of software improvements so, and major announcements is so rapid that it makes my head spin, you know, and I'm in, you know, I
CMG interviewer
mean it's still making this industry, but
Elon Musk
you still have to, it's still shocking. Yeah. You know, sometimes I'll, like when I go to bed there'll be some big breakthrough and then when I wake up there's an air breakthrough and by the time it gets to lunch, there's another breakthrough.
CMG interviewer
So that's why even during this break you have to check another. Yeah. So talking about like models, Tesla have the latest version. Right. The latest release about the Grok 4.7.
CMG interviewer
I think this is your most focused these two days. I just saw you post social saying that, you know, the Groq body is already in your Tesla. Tell us like what's the reactions, what's the latest you have received from.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, well, we just, we release a new model, you know, roughly every month or two.
Elon Musk
So and it's a core graph form 2.7, a solid workhorse of a model. It's, it's not as good as say opus 5.5 that just got released, but also we're, we've only been around for about three years doing AI, whereas Anthropic's been around for six years. So I would expect that we probably catch up to Frontier sometime next year most likely. In the meantime, I think Grok is very useful for many things and Grokbot as kind of like a personal digital assistant has been very popular and is growing about 100% a month. So it's growing very rapidly.
CMG interviewer
I think you are very humble. You're saying that like graph 4.7 is still not the perfect one. But we know that although have experienced a little bit delay but you know, people are already very fascinated or interested to know because graph 4.7 already being trained by SpaceX real world engineering data. So do you think Only a little bit so far. Okay, so do you think this will be one of your secret weapon to kind of break through the AI seating? Because currently, you know, other models are have the challenge for data.
Elon Musk
Yes, well, I think we've got a real opportunity with the SpaceX training data and maybe with the TESLA training data to make AI extremely capable in real world engineering. So what anthropic did extremely well was make AI excellent at software engineering. But no one has yet made AI excellent at real world engineering. And I think that's an opportunity for Grok using the training data from SpaceX and Tesla to be excellent at real world engineering.
CMG interviewer
You mentioned many times like previously, Chinese models also doing a fascinating job. So currently, what's the most impression breakthroughs for Chinese models in your understanding?
Elon Musk
Well, the Chinese AI models are generally outstanding actually. I mean you can see on the sort of intelligence rankings there, especially given the limited amount of compute that the Chinese AI companies have, the, the performance is excellent. Probably China's doing by far the best in terms of performance per unit of compute. And as I've said publicly, you know, I think China is going to address the compute limitation in I think faster than most people expect. My rough guess would be that China addresses the compute constraints with lithography and chip making in about two or three years.
CMG interviewer
Two or three years. We were really expecting to this time. So the challenges facing for AGI in early September, the G20 visual session, you have raised a very serious concern about the compute and electricity shortages. You mentioned that probably China has way more capability about electricity infrastructure.
CMG interviewer
And can you elaborate a little bit more about this gap? And you know, what areas do you think the Chinese industry and capability can help to get a new breakthrough for the specifically on the electricity infrastructure for the whole world.
Elon Musk
I mean it's just a statement of fact that China I think is like earlier this year China passed the electricity output of the United States, Europe and India combined. Wow. Yeah, exactly. And continuing to increase significantly. So if, if China reaches the same GDP electricity output as the US which I think is likely, then China would go from where it is now roughly three, three times the U.S. electricity production to probably four times, which would be proportionate to the population difference.
CMG interviewer
Talking about the topic like air safety, what kind of crucial consensus do you expect?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think maybe there could be a working committee to figure out safety because it's, I think in order for safety to work it can't just be regulation in the US or regulation in China. It's got to be, you know, how we, how do we apply regulation fairly to AI produced in any country. But really China and the US are the ones that really matter here. So I think a really important thing that would be good for the safety of AI for all of humanity.
CMG interviewer
Yeah. So let's talk about the human right robotics because I think this is also kind of industrial field. Us, China can still also working together, leading the world. And also I can give you one example for the Optimus. It's really amazing, really impressive. So before interview we have a kind of interactions, we play rock paper scissors with Optimus. So we, yeah, we just won the first two rounds and Optimus win all the remaining. That's really impressive.
Elon Musk
Well, robots have a very fast reaction time. So it's going to be very difficult to beat a robot for reaction time because we are somewhat constrained by our biology. But a robot, you can just improve the actuators, improve the sensors, improve the frame rate of the cameras, increase the amount of AI compute there is and it's going to just fundamentally be much better and have faster reactions than humans. I enjoyed watching the Robot Games. I mean everyone in America was fascinated by that. All over us, social media.
CMG interviewer
Yeah, you said it's very entertaining to watch, right?
Elon Musk
Yeah, but other than that. Well, but it's entertaining to watch, but it also shows you the progress of humanoid robotics. Exactly. Like it wouldn't be entertaining to watch if the robots just fell over.
CMG interviewer
Of course.
Elon Musk
But you know, the robots like boxing and then like wrestling. Wrestling, running, doing gymnastics. It's pretty cool. So I mean the future is going to have a lot of robots. Like a lot, a lot.
CMG interviewer
Yeah, you mentioned that just in another 10 years, right. There will be the population for human robots will surpass 1 billion.
Elon Musk
Yes. So that's, I think that's an easy prediction to make.
CMG interviewer
Easy prediction. Maybe within 10 years, I'd say no
Elon Musk
later than 10 years.
CMG interviewer
So let's talk about what's the real life will look like in 10 years, you know, when there are so big, you know, number of population of human rights robots. And also you mentioned that one human, right. Robots will have the five times of productivity for a human.
Elon Musk
Pretty much, yeah.
CMG interviewer
So what the life will be and then I mean specifically like ordinary people, how we can cope with the living, you know, with AI kind of dominated world.
Elon Musk
Well, I think my. So let me focus on the. What's the 90% likely outcome, which is the prosperous, the good outcome. We don't want to get complacent regarding the 10% but probability of a bad outcome. So we need to, it's important for us to pay close attention to AI safety. But let me tell you about the 90% positive outcome. The 90% positive outcome is that everyone's got robots that are their bodies. And if you think like Star wars, we had C3PO and R2D2 and they were friendly, helpful robots. Well, wouldn't it be great if everyone could have their own personal C3PO R2D2, but even better than that, like more productive, that could take care of elderly parents or be a good guardian and watch over the children or be a teacher, like an individualized tutor to your child and taking care of any jobs that you can think of. So that would be pretty cool. I think everyone would like to have a future where they can have their own personal robots. And then I think you'll see many companies where it's one person with hundreds, maybe thousands of robots, like physical robots as well as digital robots. So the productivity of one person would be greatly amplified. And my prediction is that is that there will be effectively universal high income. In fact, it's not clear to me that money will even matter in the future. Like if you, if you scale the economy, the output of goods and services to a level much greater than could possibly be consumed by the number of humans on the planet, then you have an age of abundance that is, that is difficult for us to wrap our minds around because our entire evolutionary history has been an evolution of constraints of where we didn't have enough food or didn't have enough, you know, heat or, you know. So necessarily going to be true if the output of goods and services is constrained by the number of humans. Because, you know, humans take about 20 years to grow up and then they are generally retired for the last 20 years of their life.
Elon Musk
So it's about 40 years, maybe half the life of a human that's productive. But then humans also need to sleep and they need to do the eat and go to the restroom, you know, all the basic stuff. And, and so the actual number of hours that most humans can work is maybe around 40 to 50 hours a week, something like that. Whereas the robot will be Happy to work 168 hours a week continuous and this. And the robot is instantly at working age and does not have retirement. Exactly. Yeah.
CMG interviewer
So you give us a very beautiful picture about how the life or how highly efficiency about the product activity by the humanoid robots. But for example, you just mentioned that maybe money will not be the kind of concern at that time. Yeah. If money will not be, for example, like a tool for exchange in that kind of world, how do you think that we can try to prevent, you know, the only a handful few tech giants in, you know, controlling the all the resources is specifically how ordinary people do you think they can claim their share in this kind of full abundance?
Elon Musk
Yeah, what I'm trying to say is that I think that there will be a level of abundance that is more than anyone could possibly consume. I mean, I think it's going to get pretty wild like where if you want a castle, robots will build you a castle. So it's not like it's not as though the robots will be hoarded by a small number of people. Actually the robots I think will be. They will saturate on human demand, meaning that they will do more than anything humans could possibly think of. And they'll run out of things to do for humans because there is a finite amount of things you could do for humans within reason. So I think the robots will actually run out of things to do for humans and then they will do things for themselves because they've run out of things to do for humans. And probably there will be. I mean, my prediction is like as you talked about at least a billion humanoid robots within 10 years, probably less than 10 years. I think that continues to grow. And probably if you assume that things roughly double per year, then that's about every three or four years you have a 10x increase. Yes.
Elon Musk
you know, maybe that would mean say in 15 years there are 10 billion robots.
CMG interviewer
10 billion. Just 15 years.
Elon Musk
In 20 years, 100 billion.
CMG interviewer
Exactly. So that's why we always call it like AI world is changing, improving exponentially. Continue about the cooperation between us, China or whatever we can do together the space exploration. Because currently many Chinese commercial space companies that are strive to to explore more use after the successful land recovery. What kind of areas or avenues do you think possible avenue do you think between communications or corporations can get between us and China?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean in space, I think the most important thing to achieve cooperation with is to make sure that when satellites are launched from the US or China, that we closely coordinate what orbits the satellites are going to to avoid a Potential collision. I think that's the most important area of cooperation. And then in general I would say the important thing for space launch, the fundamental breakthrough that's needed is full and rapid reusability which we're hoping to achieve with the starship design by catching the ship hopefully around the end of next month and then re flying the ship either later this year or early next year. That will be a very important breakthrough and I'm sure others will solve that problem as well. I'm sure China will at some point solve that problem too. But the full and rapid reusability of a rocket is the fundamental breakthrough needed to make life multi planetary.
CMG interviewer
Continue to talk about multiplanetary species, having always believed that humans should become a multi planetary species. So tell us, what's the current crucial step for your Mars mission?
Elon Musk
Well, like I said, the most profound and fundamental invention necessary for making life multi planetary is rapidly and completely reusable rockets. Otherwise the costs are impossible. You know, with our Falcon 9 rocket we recover the boost stage and the fairing, but not the upper stage. And this is like throwing away a medium sized jet on every flight. And you can imagine if an air flight, if you had to throw away the planes after every flight, it would be far too expensive and air flight would not be a realistic option. Well, that's been true in rockets for a very long time. So I can't emphasize enough, and I've said this so many times over the years, full and immediate reusability of rockets like aircraft is the, is a fundamental breakthrough that's needed to extend life beyond Earth, to make life multi planetary and to create self growing cities on the moon and Mars. As soon as we're able to create a self growing city on the moon and Mars, the probable lifespan of consciousness is dramatically greater because now we don't have all our eggs in one basket. So if something were to, something were to go wrong with say the moon or Mars or Earth, but we've got human civilizations on all three of those places, then our chances of surviving are much greater.
CMG interviewer
Of course. Yeah, three different planets. So that's why we all have to do our part follow and also.
Elon Musk
It's just super cool.
CMG interviewer
Exactly. We have to follow all the tech giant steps, try to make our own self, try to be the become multi planetary species.
Elon Musk
Yes, exactly. So I mean I classify these generally as like this two main lines of argument. One is the defensive line, which is that having consciousness on multiple heavenly bodies greatly improves the probable lifespan of civilization. That's the defensive argument you can think of it as life insurance for life as a whole. But the one I find personally that drives me more is actually the inspiration argument. Because you see that like life cannot just be about solving one sad problem after another. There must also be things that make you excited to wake up in the morning, that make you look forward to the future, that make life worth living. And being a space bearing civilization is one of those things.
CMG interviewer
I totally agree with that. So you know, you once list five areas you care about most, like sustainable energy, space and Also the Internet, AI and Geni editing. Looking ahead for another 10 years. Are there any new frontiers you want add to that list?
Elon Musk
Well, I think biological enhancement with like Neuralink, this company I created with some other people where we want to try to solve the bandwidth constraint that humans have. So, so, so because you can imagine like even in the most benign scenario where the AI is super friendly and wants through everything you can, it wants to make you happy. Just our rate of communication is too slow. So our like average peak human bandwidth is only about 100 bits per second roughly. And our input bandwidth is much higher because of vision. So there we maybe have. It's a debatable point, but you know, a megabit per second or a few megabits per second from our eyes, which are effectively like cameras. But our output bandwidth is really low, maybe 100 bits per second. Whereas computers are communicating at trillion bits per second. So anything we can do to increase the communication speed of humans will improve the. I think the alignment of humans and machines. Because otherwise to an AI that is communicating at a terabyte a second, talking to a human will be like talking to a tree. Exactly. You know, you talk to a tree, it takes a long time to respond.
CMG interviewer
Let's talk about the challenge for young people. You mentioned that you also talk about education in the world. And also I watched that in your headquarter here you have a sign like you can come back to school in Tesla as well means. Which means that in every age you can have the opportunity to come back to, to learn always to follow the latest kind of bricks breakthrough in AI world. But what about kind of suggest suggestions or your predictions at that time. How for example like a 20 year old young people they can get there fulfill their self worth rather than being left behind during this massive transition.
Elon Musk
Well, my recommendation for education would be to get as broad based education as possible. That includes arts and sciences, engineering, wide general knowledge. In order to know what to ask the robots for for you need to be able to formulate the question and with the broadest possible general knowledge. You'll be better able to formulate the questions or what they call prompt engineering. I guess you've got to convey your, your wishes to the robot. And as crazy as this sounds, we will run out. There will be so many robots and so much AI that the AI will actually be eager to hear any request that you could possibly, possibly have, because that request will be fulfilled immediately. Yeah.
CMG interviewer
Your last visit to China is in May. If you, you kind of have one opportunity to bring one American entrepreneur for visiting China for the welfare sign, what will be the most experience you want him to have first?
Elon Musk
Well, I would generally recommend, I mean, as much time as that person can vote to China, they should, because China's got so many things to see. So I don't mean to, I mean, but like, usually people don't have, they don't have infinite time, so at a minimum they should see, obviously, Shanghai, Beijing. I recommend Xi' an, the Terracotta Warriors. I took the bullet train from Beijing to Xi'.
Elon Musk
That was a great experience. Train stations are amazing. The Terracotta warriors is one of the wonders of the world. And, and just make sure you look out the window and you're not on your phone because there's so much to see.
CMG interviewer
Yeah. Like you always recommend everyone to experience, go and see China by themselves.
Elon Musk
Yes. Because any words I say do not do justice to the incredible majesty that is China. It's awesome.
CMG interviewer
Really appreciate for your words. Thank you so much, Elon, for sitting down with CCTV Business Channel. And Elon, we truly hope to see you again very soon in Beijing.
CMG interviewer
Thank you. Yoland, thank you so much.
Elon Musk
Generally, I just like to say China is awesome and an incredible country and I encourage people from around the world to visit China and experience it for themselves. Sam.