Baron Investment Conference

tonight [Music] I'm invincible [Music] you know there are American Heroes who don't like this idea Neil Armstrong Gene cernan have both testified against commercial space flight in the way that you're developing it and I wonder what you think of that I was very sad to see that because those guys are yeah you know those guys are heroes of mine so it's really tough when you had that third failure in a row did you think I need to pack this in never why not I don't ever give up [Music] hello you know I tell you something every time I see that clip it chills me every single time and I look at a lot so thank you very much for coming here I know it's not convenient it's not around the corner I'm really appreciative absolutely I think thank you for having me

um I was on a red-eye flight so I I'm a little slower than normal to say I didn't get much sleep so you know that's uh that's sort of my first question is that so you're 51 yeah no spring I think I'm safely not a spring chicken anymore I hope a late summer chicken I'm 79.

yes but just to do I mean you look great so you're 51 and uh and you do 16-hour days and you work seven hours a week and you fly all over the place and you go to these meetings constantly and and people constantly criticize you for everything it's amazing to me I mean you're changing the world and you're giving yourself why do you do this so my wife says to me why are you still working why are you still working what are you doing here well I think the um what I'm working on has important uh as an important effect on the future um you know in the case of Tesla I think it's fair to say that Tesla has significantly a significantly accelerated the Advent of sustainable energy you know before Tesla no one was doing electric cars and now as a result of Tesla

I think almost every major car company in the world has is um going is building electric cars and and uh that's I think that's that's a pretty big deal um but there's still a long way to go uh to transition the world to a sustainable energy economy and so so so we still have a lot of work ahead of us at Tesla but that's that's our goal there and then for SpaceX I think it's important for the for the future for the future to be exciting and for humanities um existence to be insured over the long term I think we must become a multi-planet species and a space-bearing civilization um you know I think the um we're here like four and a half billion years after Earth Earth got started uh 13.

8 billion years into the age of the universe and it's only now recently in the last 5 000 years that we even we invented writing I would say date the first Civilization by when we there was the first writing which was um in ancient Samaria around five five or six thousand years ago so we've basically just been here for a very brief instant a blink all of human civilization is a blink of an eye if there was an eye in in on an evolutionary time scale so so I think it's important we take the actions to ensure that the light of Consciousness continues and because you should we should really view Consciousness as as a small candle and a vast Darkness so it could easily go out so you so we have these missions uh and somehow whenever you have a mission and you

have this vision and you are a Visionary it's somehow whatever you do you develop other businesses so when you started SpaceX you didn't think about satellites when you started Tesla you didn't think about robots when you don't have enough people you didn't think about robots uh and uh so so you didn't think about autonomous driving and without Elon there would not be electric cars nobody who makes cars wants to make electric cars they're being forced to make them in fact every time they sell electric car they sell one fewer car that they make money on and say and they have all that money invested in plans to make those other cars so nobody wants to have these cars except for him and everybody thought it was going to fail so uh so and one of the things

she said is that patents are for the week and you share your patents and and with other companies of course on the other hand when they get your patents you're two or three years ahead of them well I mean joking about patents for the week I think there is a role for patents um you know let's say if somebody's spent if some company has spent a lot of money developing a particular medicine and had to go through the expense of uh you know stage three medical trials and then they then they finally get something that is approved but but where the drug itself is cheap to manufacture then I think a patent in that case makes sense otherwise no one would go to the trouble of doing stage three medical trials um so there are definitely roles for patents um in the

case of Tesla the you know our goal is to advance sustainable energy and so and we can't just do it by ourselves when we need the whole industry to go that way so we gave them our patents for free in order to help them accelerate electric vehicles so it must be terrifying to other companies to realize that women we make cars it's 39 000 in cost the car and we're making fifteen thousand dollars sixteen thousand dollars in profit a car and so we invest seven billion dollars and we make 15 billion dollars a year uh I'm sorry yeah at 15 rate 15 a million cars fifteen thousand fifteen a million a year and a seven million dollar investment shopping so no one else does that and when we're and and here you're telling us how you want to make cars for twenty thousand

dollars a piece how do you do that well we're not formally announced um our next car program so I can't talk too much about our upcoming vehicle program or programs that have not been announced but we do expect to make cars that are more affordable than the current the model 3 or model y so and a big factor in this is yeah [Applause] but I think by far the biggest factor is autonomy and the in terms of value of a car because right now cars get driven for about 10 or 12 hours a week like maybe one and a half hours a day and um so but there's 168 hours in a week and so if they were autonomous you could probably drive the cars could drive for 50 or 60 hours so you would see a five-fold increase in the utility of a car you know that can do autonomy this is

a really really gigantic thing it would also mean that there was we wouldn't need anywhere nearest any parking lots and this would also be helpful for the environment because you would need far fewer cars so uh I misspoke it was a seven billion dollar investment for a plant that makes a million cars a year that makes 15 billion dollars a year in profits they invest 7 billion and you make 15 billion dollars a year who does that and for a plan that makes you know things uh manufacturing and so the way this is accomplished is so you're doing it with casting right now and casting half of the car and you're going to soon cast the other half of the car and other companies why don't they try why don't they try to do the do what we're doing in fact one of the

executives of another automobile company uh wanted me to introduce her to you and you did that once in a meeting and now she wants to come visit with her director of engineering it's our plant in Austin and I presume when I ask you you're going to say yeah bring her on because you innovate so fast by the time anyone copies what we're doing let's go on to something else what else is there how when you're casting what else is there that enables us to make a cheaper we're eliminating a lot of other parts are we eliminating functions what are we doing to do that to be how would we sell a car that's so cheap I I mean I think the full explanation or at least an accurate explanation would take a long time um because the first approximation a car is made of 10

000 unique parts and process steps um and we've I mean Tesla's really I think at this point um probably the best at Manufacturing in the Auto industry which I think would nobody was expecting probably in history of the world probably um yeah so um well I've got this like first principles algorithm that I find to be very helpful in and any in the design and manufacturing of anything um and people here may find it helpful the the first thing you should do is make the requirements that you've been given a less dumb um whatever constraints and requirements were given there were some degree down and you want to make them less dumb if you don't do that start with this then you can you answer the right you get the right answer to the wrong question um and the

the requirements must be given from a person who can explain the requirement not from a department because then you don't know who to talk to um then step two is delete the part or delete the process step this sounds extremely obvious and yet over and over again we have found that uh parts were not needed they were just put in there just in case or by mistake or there was a step that people someone thought was needed but was not actually needed the The Sounds insanely obvious but we've deleted so many parts from the car that were did nothing um they were just there well yeah I mean so many examples um uh in one example was there were three uh fiberglass mats on top of the battery pack uh but they partially covered the battery pack and that it was it was

I was on the battery pack production line and it was the number one thing choking battery pack production with these with gluing on these three fiberglass mats to the top of the battery pack and so so so this is the reason I repeat this algorithm myself is that I first did things backwards first I try to automate it um then I try to accelerate it just have the the let's go faster then I try to simplify it and only then did I delete it um because it turned out that the um the the team at Tesla that does noise and vibration minimization uh so making making a car quiet uh thought that the fiberglass mats were there because of the battery safety team which for battery fire prevention and then I asked the battery fire prevention team what were they needed

for and they said oh noise and vibration I'm like okay so so then we had two cars drive one with a microphone in the car in each car and you could not tell the difference so we went to all that trouble for a plot that should not exist um and then another another example was there was a a again this was like these were choke points in the entire production system that's why they you know I'm running around the production line trying to fix the production line uh just like a maniac uh sort of Tasmanian Devil just running around the factory like a lunatic um and uh let's see we have the the body production line and model 3 was at one point stuck because um that we had a laser welding cell to to um weld a small cross car beam in the passenger footwell of

the of the front seats and I'm looking at this this sort of this beam and I'm like what the heck does that do um because the entire Factory is stopped uh trying to put trying to get the the laser weld itself to work um and I'm like I I can't imagine what a useful thing it could do and then the team said the production team said oh that's for for crash safety so then I I called the crash safety team and said is this for crash safety and said oh no that was that didn't do anything we should delete it it turned out to be totally useless they forgot to tell the production team so honestly a bunch of these things just feel like you're living in a Dilbert cartoon oh no what's that I mean any any given company he says like what's your Dilbert ratio okay it's

not zero so is this is this you or is this your corporate question try to keep it low so so is this you or is this so you do all these different things here well it's literally me someone else who did this I was in the I was living in the in the in the factory in Fremont um and and the one in in Nevada for three years straight that was my primary residence no kidding literally did you keep the couch I I actually stepped in a couch at one point on a tent on the roof um and then but for a while there I was just sleeping under my desk which is out in the open in the factory um and for an important reason and it was damn uncomfortable sleeping on that floor and always when I woke up I'd smell like metal dust we went to visit and they bought him a new couch

yeah but actually I stopped using the couch in the in because this little conference room and a couch there I stopped using the couch I just slept on the floor under my desk so that they so during shift change the entire team could see me and that's important because like you know the on the the team like if if if they think the the sort of their leader is is off somewhere having a good time you know drinking my Ties on a tropical island which I could definitely have have been doing and would much have preferred to do let me I'm not a I'm not actually a masochist I think um but but the thing is that since the team could see me sleeping on the floor um during shift change was I just met with nothing um they knew I was there and that made a huge difference

and then they gave it their all right so so the focus is on always lowering cost and providing leadership and and this company we're doing a million and a half Cars a year but you expect to do 20.

uh and and so what happens uh in 10 years if you're not there what happens in five years if you're not there how's that work I mean are there all these people so in all the engineering schools the top engineering schools the top choice of where everybody wants to work is test their SpaceX those two places so do we have all these people coming up and fighting each other for the job or they're working together how do you get people to say gee I could buy that real expensive house but I'm not going to do that boy I could buy I could go on vacation I'm not we do have that problem a little bit um so you know as a company um has Prosperity um and then people become wealthy then for a lot of people you know that once they become past they're sort of independently

wealthy they they just can't bring themselves to work or they're just they don't want to work and that's totally you know understandable and no judgment um and and so I mean I have a lot of friends who um who are extremely talented uh and they they you know had some success uh earlier in life and they just decided you know that was enough trauma um I mean you know I remember one of my my good friend of mine saying like we're start starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss so so when people say tell me like what can you do to encourage entrepreneurs to start companies I'm like if you need encouragement don't start a company [Laughter] um in uh in SpaceX and so we have uh you know competitors sort of I guess so SLS and you know

I read about that's not yeah just just going Northrop in Lockheed um and with those guys when they build the launching pad it took them like like 10 years and billions of dollars and we had a build a laundry pad and it cost a few hundred million dollars and did it in six months and and then I was interested in how that was done and the woman I'm talking to says that uh Ron did you see the plumbing when you went there I said why should it cost 100 million dollars it looks like it's a landing fields and I said would you see what's underneath did you see the plumbing I said no they didn't show that to me and she said well you should be aware that there's all these pipes that take away the Heat and then they all deliver fuel to the rocket and it has to be

there at an exact right amount at the exact right time and if it's not that doesn't happen it blows up and so I said well how does Elon know this and because you hire these great people and then you ask them all these questions and then somehow you remember everything I tell you is that true well my memory for technical matters is is very good um and I but but I I think probably a lot of people don't realize like what I do apes of the time is is engineering so um you know it's actually quite rare for me to give a talk um and my day-to-day work at SpaceX and Tesla is almost entirely engineering and design so um and and also production production is key but although I consider that to be part of engineering um yeah so um but Starship is something special

um the thing that is like the the Holy Grail like the critical breakthrough needed to make life multi-planetary and for Humanity to be a space-bearing civilization is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket open Rocket and so we've gone most of the way there with Falcon 9.

you may have seen the rocket booster come back and land and we also recover the nose cone or fairing but we do not recover the upper stage so so we've gone to the point where we're about you know 70 to 80 reusable with with falcon 9.

um with Starship we're going for 100 reusable um I cannot it's able to say how profound a change this will be but a fully and rapidly reusable um orbital rocket has the potential to drop the cost of access to space by a factor of a thousand factor of a thousand a thousand [Applause] and I should say also Sasha is it's a very very big rocket it's more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V and uh about twice the mass and it's also the entire ship is the is designed to land propulsively so it can land before you do what I didn't hear to land on its engines to land propulsively so it can land on any solid surface in the solar system so if we can make Starship work then it it enables us to over time get anywhere in the solar system so why is it so hard why don't

other people do the same thing so everyone says it's impossible and how much harder is it to do what we're trying to do than we're doing with falcon well so let's see Earth's gravity is actually quite strong and we have a we have a thick atmosphere so with known physics it is only barely possible to make a fully reusable orbital rocket only barely possible um this was a video game the setting is a extreme difficulty not impossible but Extreme difficulty um because it's not like those who have developed Rockets before weren't aware of reusability they were they were you know fully away sell more Rockets they're fully aware of reusability that aircraft and cars are reasonable um it's just that in order for a rocket to be reusable everything has to be perfect

so you have to have exceptionally efficient engines you have to have an exceptionally efficient structure you need Advanced avionics and software you need you need a a very lightweight heat shield or orbital reentry um and then another key factor for traveling to Mars is you need orbital refilling so that you get the ship to orbit and then you you send up tankers to refill the the shipping orbit just like um is done by the Air Force with aerial refueling those are the things that are necessary and um it's it's never been achieved before there have been many attempts to achieve it and they've all um been basically they all failed and they usually they would cancel the program part way through once they they thought it was no longer possible so so it's

just a very difficult engineering challenge so SLS is supposed to get uh to the Moon they got a contract in 2010 and it was supposed to be for 10 billion dollars but it was cost plus it's now up to 40 billion dollars and they say it's going to be 100 billion dollars and 90 billion dollars yeah and and we haven't gotten anything and or we have our rocket is 10 meters taller than theirs and uh and and we can reuse ours how can anyone possibly compete if they're not doing what we're doing how can that how can they compete I don't understand and how can they get contracts and then I just saw something from uh from NASA and they said that we're spending 20 billion a year and oh by the way that's the 360 000 jobs in all these congressional districts well I

I think this I have to be careful of what I say here uh I I you know I have enough enemies I would I would like to have you know I think I I think yes I would like to have smaller a lot a smaller number of companies that want me to die that would be great okay so but like I said you know what a big part of this is like what's the goal you know in the case of Starship the goal is um to lower the cost of access to orbit and ultimately to to Mars and the moon and elsewhere to the point where Humanity can actually afford to become a multi-planet species to the point where we can afford to have a permanent base on the moon and ultimately far exceed the high water mark of Apollo which was incredible and I think aspiring to all of humanity everyone if you were

to ask people I think what was in any country not Americans anyone what was the what was the greatest what was Humanity's greatest achievement in the 20th century maybe Evelyn go to the Moon and that's why they say moonshot as a metaphor um because that was incredible um you know still amazing that that was achieved in fact a lot of people asked me was it real I'm like yeah it was real well it's probably on Twitter that's where they asked that [Applause] um I mean that was just an incredible achievement and I think it's it's one of those things that you know going to the Moon makes you proud to be a member of humanity you know it's like full and For All Mankind you know that's that it was For All Mankind so so it's amazing achievements uh and and now

we have this web telescope they can you know I guess the Big Bang was 14 billion years ago and and first light is 13 and a half billion years ago and our plan is four and a half being so so what do we get out of this what is the you know so I I so obviously struggling a really big deal a trillion dollar opportunity maybe maybe more and maybe right and uh so so what do we get uh out of seeing back 13 and a half billion years what does that do for us what technology do we develop we don't we know we don't know until we do it yeah I think uh I think like there's two there's two main motivations I think for becoming a multi-planet species and a space-bearing civilization and then ultimately going beyond that to go to other star systems and explore the Galaxy

and I think we may find that there's there's many one planet civilizations that died out millions of years ago I never made it to the second planet do you think in your lifetime that happens that I well it depends how long I live um maybe forever you know I keep if I keep increasing that enemies listed might not be much longer are we deeply ironic if if if if it's someone angry on Twitter that takes me out well now you can keep them off Twitter yeah exactly um so anyway I think there's but there's two reasons for life to become multi-planetary like as we know it to become multi-planetary I think one is the defensive reason where we just I think we want the the light of Consciousness to not be extinguished if something would happen to Earth whether and

and you know in the case of the dinosaurs they only had to worry about like you know meteors and two volcanoes and other things um but for us humans we actually have the power to destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons uh or or some sort of you know crazy bio terrorism thing so um you know so so there's some there's some danger that is not zero that could cause the end of life on Earth as we know it um so that's kind of the defensive reason to ensure that life is not just an unconsciousness it's just it's not only on Earth that um that's the defensive reason to protect the future of consciousness um then the other big reason I think is that it's exciting and it's it's it's adventurous and it's it's it's inspiring uh it makes it like it makes you think

positively about the future you know and and life life can't just be about solving one problem or another that there needs to be reasons to be inspired you know reasons that move your heart and say yes the future is going to be great and when you get out when you wake up in the morning I can't wait to see what happens next and and I think that's you know Humanity going to Mars even if you don't yourself want to go to Mars and most people don't just just watch it it's a tough gig frankly um this was this would not be a luxury Expedition um and uh but but you'd be able to watch it happen and I think it would just be incredibly inspiring to the world in the same way that the Apollo program was inspiring to the world um and like I said there's got to be life

can't just be about solving one problem or another we need things that are that make us excited and inspired about the future and that would be one of them foreign ER just for a minute and we'll go back to this stuff which is more interesting to me um I I try to get out of the deal will you follow me back here reminded that scene from The Godfather basically but you told me you wanted to ask tough questions [Laughter] so uh so on Twitter uh what could possibly go wrong so I saw this article says you bought something called Twitter um and it says uh musk puts off lifting Twitter Bans and so obviously the big deal in to me anyway in uh in Twitter is that so we have this incredible it was incredibly poorly managed this business and uh but those guys somehow

did great for their shareholders by selling it to us and right but we didn't buy what they're selling we bought something of what it's going to become um yes uh I mean I think it's uh most people would say like you know given how the market has evolved this year the prices on the high side right um right but that's uninvasive what it is yes but in terms of what it what I think there is a tremendous amount of potential um that it will be very difficult to achieve but I think possible and I think ultimately it could be one of the most valuable companies in the world so so when we think about this in order for that to happen in order for that so so I met you and it took me a few years and then I Believe In You and Your Heart Right your heart and so I think

you're a skeptical at our first meeting you were a bit skeptical and uh so so the way I think about it is that so I'm trusting you with the future of our country of the world actually when you're in charge of a media like that and so what I think about is so how do you prevent to being Jewish uh how do you prevent this anti-Semitism or if I were black how do you prevent all of these so so how do you prevent the use of the n-word and when I think about Tick Tock and they're able we're just looking at pictures to tell what you're going to do you know you remove your left arm you move your right arm what you other pictures you like that's what they do with their software and they've great their algorithm how can we not have an amazing algorithm because we

know more about them to do with Tick Tock and we ought to know what interests people have and uh and and because of that in words we should be able to figure out words that people are using what that means and considering what they content they're interested in we should be able to figure out the software how to moderate this and prevent that from happening is that true or not yeah yes absolutely um totally agree um the I want to be clear but uh you know content moderation policies have not changed uh at Twitter and and it is um not not okay to engage in hateful conduct uh on on Twitter um so um we have had like actually oddly like targeted attacks where temporarily people have been able to put some hate speech on on Twitter but um but then it's been

taken down immediately um so now now I don't want to try to achieve with this sort of enabling everyone to be payment verified with with Twitter blue is to try to get as many people payment verified as possible it's only eight bucks a month um although for some people that were complaining about that and these are people who pay more with the net for their latte I'm going to be one of your Twitter review okay thank you thank you um but but like as part of its Revenue part of it is payment authentication and so if somebody uh because there is a huge problem with Spam and and Bots and trolls on on Twitter and organizations trying to manipulate a public opinion and just just generally making the system worse um and I think but I think that there is an answer

to that which is to to get as many uh regular users of Twitter to be a subscriber for eight dollars a month and you'll get a lot more than just the blue check mark for eight dollars a month because now we can afford long-form video a long long audio podcasts and we can also start sharing Revenue with with content creators which is essential give them a chance to make money yeah absolutely just so I mean right now if you're on Twitter you'll you'll see a lot of links posted to YouTube and and Tick Tock um and that's because at least until now Twitter is not a lot even given them enough video length to post their video um and then they give the content creators no means of monetizing the video so we're going to change that rapidly at Twitter it's going

to be transformative but but if we can get enough verified users and we're going to prioritize um Twitter search replies mentions by verified users first um and and yeah that's okay that's what calls Amplified yes so the so the if you're payment verified with blue check mark then you'll be prioritized um and so this this is the point of this is to make crime not pay um because um because right now to create a bot on Twitter costs less than a penny um so the cost of crime is so cheap and that's part of why crime um and hateful conduct pays but if somebody risks losing even eight bucks that they or you it's too expensive to now have a a hundred thousand fake accounts because they have to spend 800 000 a month um as opposed to you know 800 a month so um

and then we also since we're using payment authentication uh we're piggybacking on the authentication system of the payment system and we're also piggybacking off of uh Apple's authentication system which is another layer of security so the the net effect will be over time that the the verified users will be will pretty much always be at the top of of comments and search and you won't really see you'll have to scroll far to see the unverified users which will be the Bots and controls and whatnot and this is sort of analogous to um Google search like um if you go to page eight of Google search there will be a ton of scams and and stuff you know call it page eight page nine something like that um and but the thing is that Google search results are so good

for page one that you never go to page eight um so or it's rare and like the old joke is like something we don't want to see it gets pushed way down yeah just basically the the bad stuff gets pushed way down um and and and then crime stops paying and then they stop trying to do all these things and we can recruit them as Engineers to a program for us Crime Guys yeah um so I mean the joke is like what's the best place to hide a dead body would be the second page of Google search results nobody ever goes there so so today we fired uh half of of uh Twitter and uh that should save us what four billion a year no it's not going to say 4 billion a year I wish but um uh so uh I mean to be frank uh Twitter was having pretty serious Revenue challenges and cost

challenges um before the acquisition talks started and any company that is dependent on Advertising um has had a hard time so uh if you look at say snap or you know Google Facebook whatnot they've all had a difficult time with advertising Revenue dropping and Twitter is more you know currently more vulnerable than they are to advertising because most of Twitter's advertising is large brand advertising as opposed to direct response so it's kind of like a much more of a discretionary ad spend than it is for uh like if you if you're if you can do direct response for a specific product um so and then we also recently had a lot of difficulty with activist groups pressuring major advertisers to stop spending money on Twitter um this is despite us doing everything

possible to appease them and to make it clear that moderation rules and hateful contact rules have not changed uh and we're continuing to enforce them um the a number of major advertisers have stopped spending on Twitter um so those but this is this doesn't seem right because um we've made no change in our operations at all and um but nonetheless the activist groups have been successful in in causing a massive drop in Twitter advertising revenue and we've done our absolute best to appease them and nothing is working so this is a major concern and I think this is frankly an attack on the First Amendment um like if if activist groups can pressure uh advertisers upon which Twitter is fundamentally dependent um to you know suppress Free Speech then that doesn't

seem right I mean by the way 400 million instead of 4 billion I meant actually 400 million instead of 4 billion oh yeah okay so so we're now there you're living at this place you go there for the next couple three weeks you're going to devote and then we have a team lined up you think you have a team lined up you're uh to manage it and then you would just do it the same way we do with SpaceX and Tesla where you just attend the meetings regularly say this is what we need to do do it well this is what we need yeah my my workload went up from about I don't know 70 to 80 hours a week to probably 120 .

um so yeah I go to sleep I wake up I work go to sleep wake up work do that seven days a week I'll have to do that for a while no choice um but I think once Twitter is set on the right path I think it is a much easier thing to manage than SpaceX or Tesla so um and I I mean I really understand the internet and how to make a so I wrote software wrote software but I wrote software personally for 20 years um you know it's one of the key people behind uh Hey x.

com which became PayPal um and so I also like I'm aware of like a and I know how to make a way better PayPal um because you build PayPal yeah yeah pretty much um I mean with a lot of other people but there's there's a product plan I wrote which I wish I'd kept a copy of in July of 2000 where I thought it would be possible to make the most valuable financial institution in the world and we're going to execute that plan from 22 years ago which amazingly no one has done and and so I I think that's what part of why I think Twitter will be ultimately extremely valuable because I'm going to execute the x.

com game plan from 22 years ago with some improvements um and um and then we're also going to obviously make Twitter just a way better system um I mean it's a sad to reason that um you know if if the social media company is um is not taking uh steps to and make it positive to be on that social platform then people won't come or they'll leave you know so you speak of sort of anti-Semitism or racism or anything like that well I mean if who's going to stay on a platform if if that's prevalent like that's that's obviously yeah I mean come on and ultimate's inherent wrongness if who's going to stay on the platform um so like you you want to be it needs to be something where um like our goal with Twitter is like how do we get 80 of America maybe not like the

sort of far left and the far right but but and maybe we don't want to necessarily but uh how do we get 80 of the public to join a digital Town Square and voice their opinion and exchange ideas and maybe once in a while change their minds um on occasion yeah I mean you know once in a while um so I read also that you said and then we'll move off to Twitter but you said that your goal is you want to make the 20 of people who are on the far right I hate you just like you want to make the 20 of people on the far left hate you so well I I don't want them to hate me um but but I think the extremist like you know it's just very difficult to satisfy extremists um so unless you fully buy into whatever their Dogma is so um but I I'm confident we can satisfy like

I don't know 80 of America 80 of the world um and but maybe not the most the 10 most extreme of of of either side and I would count that as a great outcome and I think it I think it is important to have a sort of a a digital Town Square where people feel comfortable talking um where and I also think it's it's like one of the things that's important is to be able to sort of decide what kind of experience you want to have on Twitter um because you know some people always might say okay like I want the like if this was a radio station I want this the easy listening smooth jazz station okay cool but that's good that's so you fail to have that setting for have that setting for Twitter and and uh and then some people might say say like no I want heavy metal

thrash and and and like okay so now this is going to be sort of then then you don't mind someone saying mean things to you you know within the context of the law and you don't mind engaging in in vigorous arguments on Twitter and that kind of thing but you should be able to kind of like pick your preference and and decide if if you want sort of full contact battle or or do you want like no I just want to look at puppies and flowers and nice landscapes and stuff so so let's go off Twitter um two other topics uh where you have some questions uh that number one is logistics when we're starting to uh to make so many cars by the end of this year forty thousand forty thousand cars a week I mean I have to be careful of mnpi uh but uh I believe I have said in

the past publicly that our aspiration is to reach 40 000 a week by the end of this year so if we're doing that then that means that uh producing a core every 15 seconds yeah and uh so but that's still only uh two million cars a year there's 100 million cars uh that are made a year and so the question so this presumably capacity to be able to Logistics to ship all these cars all over the place to have people pick them up where they want them but but not if they all do them in the same week yes totally so um I mean we're a bit of criticism a bit of criticism from our Q3 results because we um had a lot of cars in transit um and the reason was that we we got too big for our cars to actually be transported in the final few weeks um there weren't enough car

carriers and weren't enough ships so but it's actually good it's actually good in the long run um right to to smooth out deliveries and actually have cars and Transit at the end of the quarter uh because then you're not rushing to get everything delivered by the end of the quarter and paying all these expedite fees um so so my question always if we have autonomous driving and we have autonomous trucks is that one of the ideas that we're going to be able to move things around with our own if there's not enough drivers that we're going to have autonomous transport yes that's question one we can also yeah I mean have if you're in the if you're in the area have the car just drive to you right that's one and then the other one is about materials and when all

of a sudden so we have somehow navigated supply chain problems from other people and you might have thought that it was the absolute Brilliance that we had to be able to do that but probably the reason is that when you start off and you don't make any cars a year and you go to someone and say we're going to make 20 million cars a year from zero who's going to believe you and make all the equipment that we need so as a result of that we were forced initially to be able to say okay we're going to get you know we're vertically integrate we can't rely on you both do vertically integration and yeah cut it materials I can talk longer if you'd like a message talk a little bit longer materials how so we have geology we anyone wants to show us a mine we got people

in Minds to figure who are knowledgeable and they come to us say we can produce this much lithium this much copper this much we are able to assess that and give contracts to be able to say contractual agreements okay and they'll and they'll rely on our agreement other people they won't is that fair and glencore the uh well the scaling constraints change as time goes by and in the beginning we we were just very vertically integrated because suppliers didn't take us seriously um like we could get hardly any of the the a of the best suppliers wouldn't talk to us because the car startup has not been successful in the United States since Chrysler in the third in the 20s I believe they started so it's been a century since a car company was successful in the

US that was not not a foreign car company coming in with that was already successful in their home market so but for an American car startup it was the first Tesla's first success in 100 years so you can imagine if you're an auto supplier that doesn't sound like a smart financial decision exactly um so if then we we had to do it just build a lot of the stuff ourselves be vertically integrated or we couldn't couldn't create the car um and and then that ended up being um an asset because now we understood so much about the entire supply chain or what it took to build a car so we were able to design a more integrated uh vehicle uh that that actually um needed far fewer parts and cost less and weighs less and has higher performance but it is looking increasingly

light for some of the critical elements of batteries that tells the we'll we'll need to get into the mining business at Mining and refining you know that's why glencore was announced that's where we're talking to glencore we were no and we're we've never contemplated investing in glencore um I'm talking about Tesla doing it ourselves yes uh congratulations more time for some questions from the audience just give me a couple turn in the lights too quick the powers that be I'll do it anyway I mean is it for me or you I don't know questions so by the way if you leave before we give away the uh the door prizes which are two Teslas you're not eligible to get the Teslas but go ahead I gave an extra one once I guess last time but uh we're not going to do that

again you got to be in your seat in order to get the Teslas I'm paying for it not to not Elon questions uh Elon Seneca once said every genius has a touch of Madness I thought you'd like that quote but I agree with the madness part um so even with Tesla as a publicly traded company uh I think it's down 40 percent or something from its high is selling at 70 times earnings meanwhile Mercedes-Benz which now produces EVS is selling for six times earnings and yielding five percent why should I invest in Tesla rather than Mercedes-Benz well I actually um rarely try to convince anyone to invest in Tesla and many times I've recommended people don't invest in Tesla and I've said our stock is too high but when people just ignore me and keep buying the stock some

reason um so um but if I think at at a very high level I'd say that autonomy is an insanely fundamental breakthrough and and no one is even close to Tesla for solving generalized autonomy or generalized self-driving Vehicles no one's even close um and and with self-driving as I was talking about earlier the car becomes call it roughly five times more useful but it costs the same to build now can you imagine what would happen if a company was doing they were doing like 25 to 30 percent of gross margins but suddenly that same thing was five times more valuable that what would that do to the value of Tesla and the value of that car it boggles the Mind actually um so you know if you think of net present value of future cash flows if you actually do the math

on that it's insane um then there's also The Optimist program which is our humanoid robot um which we will leverage our manufacturing expertise and and the intelligence we've developed for self-driving to have a useful humanoid robot um now the the economy is fundamentally GDP per capita times capital if you no longer have a constraint on capita because of a useful humanoid robot it is not clear that there is any limit to the size of the economy [Applause] and these things will actually happen so okay that's probably a good reason that that one more question [Applause] okay this is the last question [Laughter] go ahead given all the cars given all the cars that you're gonna make and uh I hope Ron's right whether it's 10 million or 20 million you're going

to need a lot of charging stations around the world yes have you thought about doing it more efficiently and more economically and better for our um ecosystem from an ESG perspective because you may or may not know there are 400 million existing street lights in the world and every street light has pervasive persistent electricity you could take some amount of those street lights which are half owned by utilities and half owned by a cities and repurpose that and that would probably be the most cost efficient way to roll out millions of charging stations all over the world well well thanks I I think they actually are using that idea in London and some other cities but if if I mean I think the the long-term goal for our supercharger stations is that they

all have solo like Tesla solo and batteries at them so that they are as many as possible are self-sustaining that the that the supercharger stations generate the energy during the day and then also have a localized battery pack um to so that people can charge at night so that that the Tesla Super supercharging stations would continue to function even in a zombie apocalypse so just never know that's coming one day we know it yes it's just a matter of time thank you very much can I get a selfie with you all right a selfie I posted on Twitter your your arms are longer than mine also uh please use Twitter I'm I and and you're doing this right now and please please subscribe to Twitter verified eight bucks uh and uh actually it's technically at 7.

99 so uh slightly less um but I would really encourage everyone here to use Twitter uh and uh and and uh you know uh yeah please do that here we go [Applause]