Code Conference

elon let me start by saying we're very glad you're here safe and sound yeah uh thanks uh unfortunately i had to circumvent late i was uh flying i flew here with the landing gear down because it was like some kind of landing gear issue landing gear was stuck there's some kind of warning light and my pilot said that if they were attracted to the landing gear it may not go back down again so that's all so this is probably best this even happens to you yeah yeah okay outlining your problems of various kinds um so um anyway we're happy to wait for you and we're glad you got here safe thanks for having me it's great to see you guys thank you for coming i really appreciate it you kept your promise which was nice i think you were drunk when you promised me but

that's okay i'll take it so you know in a couple of years since you've come you've done some astonishing things in in terms of substantive stuff with your with both your companies um let's start talking about space and what you've been doing there um obviously you've had some success uh landing the landing the rocket you've had you know you've done a bunch of other things where people thought you weren't going to be successful talk a little bit about sort of the progress you think you've made with spacex sure well i mean there's a lot of things where i think i didn't think we'd be successful so the the um and the most significant thing is being able to land in an orbit class rocket uh brew stage um and uh and bring it both back to cape canaveral land

on land and be able to land on a drone ship out in the ocean the there is a bit of an education process that's needed to understand orbital dynamics um because a lot of people are confused of like why the heck are you landing a ship landing a rocket in a on a ship in the ocean that seems pretty inconvenient and the reason is because that going up and staying up is actually about velocity horizontal to the earth's surface so um there's a huge difference between space and or space and or and orbit like space you could think of as like say being the international waters boundary for the pacific ocean like if you go you know uh 100 miles offshore you're technically out of coastal waters now you're in the pacific so it's like technically you're in the pacific

but but it's but orbit is like circumnavigating the globe it's a really giant difference and the the reason that things go up and stay up is because you're zooming around the earth so fast that your outward radial acceleration is equal to the inward acceleration of gravity and so those balance out and you have a net zero gravity so when you see the space station the thing this little little sort of um counterintuitive is that the space station is actually zooming around the earth at 17 000 miles an hour even though it seems like it seems really still you know but it's moving really really fast um i mean to put that into perspective um a bullet from a 45 gun in a handgun is is is just below the speed of sound so the space station is going more than 25

times faster than that and that's what's needed actually to go up and stay up and that's why that's why there's the term escape velocity not escape altitude there's no such thing as an escape altitude there's only an escape velocity you need to be a certain speed to escape the gravity of the earth yeah you can think of gravity as kind of a funnel in space-time um so think of it like a coin funnel like it really it's very much like that in in you know but it's obviously a sort of a four-dimensional coin funnel but uh if you if you spin a spin a marble or a coin on a coin funnel the when it's when it's far out it sort of spins slowly and then as it gets closer it spins faster and faster and if you want if you want if you were to start at the bottom of the

coin funnel and you wanted to to to to to exit you'd spin it horizontally and it would it would spin out and and and that's really how you how you get to orbit um yeah so how does the gravity well there's like a funnel why you want to land on the on a ship in the ocean because in order to get to orbit you all that matters is your horizontal velocity your altitude is just doesn't really matter um in fact the the um the force of gravity at i say the nominal um boundary of space 100 kilometers is almost exactly the same as it is on the surface of the earth um is it like if it's a few percent lower than the surface of the earth um uh so in order to go up and stay up the only thing that matters is how fast are you going horizontal to the earth's surface so

you have that outward radial acceleration or think of it like maybe like tetherball or something like that it's really that outward acceleration is the thing that matters and so when the rocket is going to orbit um the only reason it's going up is to get out of the thick part of the atmosphere because that at high velocity the atmosphere is thick as molasses and so it goes up very briefly but if you look at a long exposure of the the rocket's trajectory you'll see it it goes up but immediately curves over and starts going horizontal and so the um at the at the point at which the uh the uh at the point which the stages separate those two stages um the primary boost stage which is the most expensive part of the rocket the point which that that staging occurs

uh can be um as high as uh mach 10 but it's so it's going away from the launch site at 10 times the speed of sound so in order to get back to the launch site you would have to have enough uh fuel and oxygen to reverse out that velocity and and and boost back all the way to the launch site and you just don't have the physics of it don't really allow you to have that much it's not about saving money on fuel or anything it's just physically impossible so because another sort of thing about uh if you're if you're in space is that there's nothing to react against so like whereas an aircraft can can circle very easily because it's reacting against air in vacuum there's nothing to react against so the only way to go back the other direction is to apply just

as much energy as it took you to go if you want to go backwards you have to apply just as much energy as it took you to go forwards in fact or twice as much really because you've got to zero it out and then you've got to you've got to land elsewhere yeah so bottom line is this thing is zinging out just zinging out yeah it's super at ten times faster than the foot it may well be over the ocean because the ocean covers most of the oh it's it's actually at the point of separation it's not that far away it's maybe 100 kilometers away from the launch site but it is going like hell in the opposite you know away from the launch site so the the only way to really land it is to have it continue on that arc that ballistic arc and then land far out to sea on a ship

that's that's pre-positioned to a particulate uh latitude and longitude very very precise to within about a meter um and then the rocket will um then go from vacuum through rarefied air at hypersonic velocity uh um and what so what is it when it's in vacuum it has to obviously you can't use aerosurfaces you have to use nitrogen jets to control the the attitude and position and then as it starts to encounter the air we use grid fins because grid fins look like sort of like a waffle they work quite well across a wide regime from both very high velocity hypersonics through supersonic transonic and subsonic so it's hard it's hard to have arrow surfaces that work well across that entire regime and then uh so once the error forces become high it uses the um

the four grid fins to to sort of control its attitude to land itself yeah it's controlling its it's controlling picture and roll with with the grid fins um and uh and then once and those griffins will then position it to where it's fairly close to the ship and then it will light in this case three of the nine engines to arrest the velocity and then drop to one engine for precision right before landing right okay so that's super [ __ ] hard there's a video so why why is that important why has that this moment been important for you um well so in order to reuse the the boost stage which is about 70 percent of the cost of rockets so that what cost is that how much is that um well i mean it's sort of on the order of 30 to 35 million right so you want to save

that yeah i mean it's like i try to i tell my team it's like imagine there was a pallet of cash that was vomiting through the atmosphere and it was going to burn up and smash into tiny pieces would you try to save it right right right probably yes yes okay yeah that sounds like a good idea right okay um so so yeah so we we want to get it back and that way um we don't have to make another one right um and i think it's quite tragic if rockets like get smashed into tiny pieces and land can i ask you a question we've been in we've been going to space for uh what 50 years or something like that nobody until you started doing this and jeff bezos company has done it uh the government never sort of saved the rockets they never saved the pallet of cash why not

and the russians didn't either i mean what was the deal there yeah i mean there was some attempt uh made to do that with the space shuttle but there was no um return it's the first time that that a rocket boost has returned to launch site right um from an orbital mission and and certainly the first time that there's been a landing on a ship but the regular rockets that went up that weren't designed like planes never tried to do this right um the plane thing is not not a good idea in my view so the the plane um and the reason i think it's like intuitively it seems like a plane should work but but actually if you consider that really every mode of transport has a design that is appropriate to its medium and if you're in space wings are not very useful because

there's no air and and and then if you want to go somewhere other than earth there's also no runways so this is these are important considerations so that's why when they went to the moon they used propulsive landing right but what i'm saying was when they built the space shuttle it sort of was like a looked like a kind of bulb i think that appealed to congress yeah yeah it went cool that's cool yeah looks like an airplane can you explain that you know jeff jeff good one jeff bezos was here last night and i asked him what's the difference between what you're doing and what elon musk is doing and he said well i think we have uh i think use the word like-minded in the general sense of it and then he went on to explain some differences do you and then he

but he talked about and correct me if i'm misquoting him but i think he was saying where this is all about laying the foundations of being able to do greater things by getting the basic infrastructure of being able to reuse these rockets down right do you is that correct do you have a similar starting point from him and you're thinking i mean i think there's certainly some similarities of opinion um i think both jeff and i believe that it's important for the future to be a space faring civilization um and not to ultimately be out there among the stars and i think that's the that's the exciting inspiring future that i think i think certainly people in this room want and anyway particularly after seeing that the asteroids are going to destroy the planet

i mean um i mean i don't view it as um you know we want we i mean i think i think what when i say you know multi-planets species like that's really where we want to be it's not like you know solving a single planet species but moving planets it's it's really being a multi-planet species um and having civilization and life as we know it extend beyond earth to the rest of the solar system and ultimately to other star systems um i think that's the thing that that's that's the future that's exciting and inspiring and i think that's what you know i think you know any kind of you need things like that to make to to to be glad to wake up in the morning you know like life like life can't be just about solving problems like they have to be things that are inspiring

and exciting that make you glad to be alive so what in the immediate time frame what is what is your goal for spacex now that you've done this which is a huge accomplishment what is the plan for you in the immediate time and then the longer range sure so the um so we plan to refly uh one of the landed rocket boosters hopefully in about two or three months something like that and and then that that so that'll be an important milestone um so far the the stages are looking like quite quite good um even though they come through through quite there's a really difficult entry reentry situation um but they're looking like they're in good shape um we now have four of them so we want to start re-flying them you know towards the end of summer and then hopefully

by the end of this year we'll be launching falcon heavy uh which will be the um the most powerful rocket uh in the world by more than a factor of two so falcon heavy is will be on the order of five million pounds of thrust on liftoff which is about two-thirds the size of a saturn v oh really yeah so that's the rocket that took the astronauts to the moon right exactly so in fact we're launching from the same from the same pad from very same pattern the apollo 11 pad wow yeah that's amazing so i'm hoping to launch that falcon heavy by the end of this year yeah that's that's our aspiration is that now that's somewhat of a delay from when you first hoped to launch it right um yeah um but uh the i mean it's not like we had a lot of pressing customers who wanted

us to launch it okay so the in fact the first launch will will not have any operational satellites it'll be a demonstration launch and the the first operational flights where customers actually want us to launch it or next year you know whereas there's there's a lot of customers who want us to launch uh falcon 9 so about about a quarter of our launch of our flights are for uh for nasa but three quarters or commercial satellites like broadcasting communications satellites um or science missions for other countries um and um and this is there's quite a quite a backlog and we had we had an issue with the rocket last year so that put about a six month hole in our schedule so we're sort of backlogged on on our launches and we're trying to get them out as as

quickly as we as we can um and you know you know service our customers the the uh so the launches will take place you know every two to four weeks there's quite quite a high launch cable that's a much faster cadence than nasa had right um yeah it's i mean it's it'll be more launches than any anything else in the world um so more than russia more than europe more than well more than china by next year certainly and largely to deliver customers exactly yeah it's um there's a lot of broadcasting communication satellites that are going to geosynchronous orbit um and um and then there's we're we'll also be launching the new uh iridium constellation so that iridium's got a next generation uh constellation of uh satellites i think 60 or 70 satellites quite you

know decent-sized satellites that that'll be like many orders of magnitude improvement over the current iridium system so you'll be able to have global broadband um so that'll be a whole bunch of launches and um yeah and then and then next year we'll be flying um dragon version two which is the one that's capable of taking up to seven astronauts to the space station in fact dragon 2 really is it's a propulsive lander as well um and it'll be the uh it's it's intended to carry astronauts to the space station but it's also capable of being a general science delivery platform to anywhere in the solar system so um so where are you going with it we're going to we're going to send one to mars in 2018.

now let's 2018 that's for sure a couple years a couple years now will you be on that flight no you have talked about this you said you don't want to you want to die on mars just not on landing right is that correct well i mean i think if you're going to choose a place to die then mars is probably you know not a bad choice all right um but you're not right it's not some sort of martian death wish or something but but uh yeah i mean you're gonna be born on earth on mars so sending this up to mars 2018 right setting this up to mars 2018 when will someone like you get there from your plans sure so so the 2018 mission would be a drag dragon version 2 right and that um i wouldn't recommend traveling to mars in in that because i mean it has the interior volume

of a large suv okay uh the trip the trip for dragon would be on the order of six months it's a long time to spend in an suv i think it's it can be done can be done but not not probably not ideal um and it also doesn't have the capability of getting back to us right that's that seems more important than the space system yeah we can put that in the fine print you know yeah sorry yeah it's it's like the side effects and a drug ad by the way we cannot get back to earth yeah we saw the movie we didn't know what happened he got back yeah yeah um so it was good i actually enjoyed the movie um so do you think he could have gotten back like that was that plausible i thought there was some you know connection though it was it was mostly it was like 80 percent scientifically

correct um but that did connect a series of improbable events such as well i mean i don't think you can sort of just uh take off from oz um on an unguided rocket really and and then hook your finger on the space suit and navigate to us to a spaceship right yeah not not impossible just extremely unlikely so the sandwich but if you're matt damon maybe maybe you have some mad skills yeah for sure so so so when will people like yourself get there and i assume you'll be first in line for that yeah so uh later this year in september at the um iac which is the big uh sort of world space conference industry space conference i'm going to be presenting the uh the architecture for mars colonization so i think what really matters is being able to transport uh large

numbers of people and um ultimately millions and tons of cargo to mars um and that's what's necessary in order to create a self-sustaining and and not really self-sustaining but a growing uh city on mars i'm curious have you been to space yet no why i mean you could just go up right for a little bit or not oh i could i suppose yeah why haven't you like walked through well at some point or something or yeah yeah probably will will you do a moon test before you go to mars um yeah i mean probably probably i don't know go to orbit in four or five years or something like that but again space and orbit are very different things but on the mars thing would you send up two or three whether it's you or not i kind of would prefer if you tried it frankly but um

because it would be exciting but um would you send up some people some people before you do this whole architecture for colonizing mars just a handful of people to kind of see what i mean the basic game plan is like we're gonna uh send um a mission to mars with every mars opportunity from 2018 onwards so and they occur approximately every 26 months so um you know we we're establishing cargo flights to mars that people can count on uh for cargo and it's like said the the earth moths opel rendezvous is only every 26 months so there's one in 2018 there'll be another one 2020 and i think if things go according to plan we should be able to uh we should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025.

is that is that a more certain schedule than united airlines well um i don't know there's certainly some uncertainties associated with that so um let's um i'm going to show you anyway that's the game plan like approximately 2024 to do the first uh to to launch the first um of the mars and on your transport system i want to get back to what you said earlier about a multiple this will be a very big rocket okay very big bigger than 75 yes 20 twice as big or what september i'll tell you you're not going to say anything till september come on very big come on has to be very big like how big is very big so big [Laughter] do you think we should abandon the earth at some point no that way no i think that's great but you have said things why would we have bound

on earth it's really nice here you've said things about we may have to abandon the earth so it's good to have a plan b you've seen what happened before no that was amazing that's like that's amazing i don't know but it wasn't me all right okay it wasn't me like shaggy so let's move to things on this earth let's move to uh hyperloop tesla uh other things let's talk about tesla first um where do you feel like the company is at at this point and there's been lots of activity in self-driving cars in autonomous autonomous how do you look at how everybody's jumped in google apple others um and all the car manufacturers um yeah i mean there have been so many announcements of like autonomous ev start-ups i'm waiting for my mom to announce one okay it's like mom

you too um i mean there's a lot so um yeah i mean in in yeah in the us alone there there are four i think maybe five china funded eb startups at the billion dollar plus level like cirrus funding and there's a bunch of startups and then of course the you know the car industry as a whole seems to be moving that direction volkswagen just i think announced a huge battery factory that they're going to build and i think these are all good you know it's good it's good for the industry to moving towards sustainable transport as as quickly as possible um we open sourced our patents to try to be helpful in that regard and um yeah so it's it's encouraging to see all this activity um from a tesla's standpoint you know we're just trying we want to take a set of actions

that are uh likely to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy um so um scale up production as fast as we can so we accelerated plans for the model 3 by two years and so we want to try to get to half a million cars in total in kind of the 2018 time frame which is an aggressive schedule but i think achievable and then maybe a million cars a year by 2020 and um you know i can see it like i think a pretty clear path to get there [Music] autonomy is obviously extremely important people are going to want watch autonomy it's going to be odd to have a car without autonomy in the future but um yeah so i think that's so what we're scaling up how do you look at the all these efforts not your mother but yeah my mom's she's not gonna do it she may do a rocket

situation but um how do you look at each of them let's go through them what google is doing how do you assess what they're doing when you're looking at it because they'll be competitors at some point these are all um eventual competitors well you know i think what what google's i mean google's done a great job of showing the potential of autonomous transport um but they're they're not a they're not a car company so they would potentially you know license their technology to other car companies i think they announced something with the fiat and so i i wouldn't say you know google's a competitor um because they're not a car company that we would compete with somebody perhaps what they licensed technology to but not to them directly right um apple um yeah

that'll be more direct that'll be more direct yeah you can tell that by the hiring pattern and yeah that kind of stuff so what are you okay so they're going to be more direct how do you assess it um i mean i i say like you know i i i think it's great that they're doing this and um i um you know i hope they hope it works out what's what's the time frame for them do you think um i don't know i mean um i think they should have embarked upon this project sooner actually um uh that that uh um but i don't know i don't know when they i mean you know they don't share with me the details of their production plans but um i i i don't think it's going to be i don't think they'll be in volume production sooner than maybe 2020 that'll be like the soonest and that's

is that too late we say they should have embarked sooner is that because 2020 will be too late to stop you or beat you or compete with you or whatever it's just like it's a missed opportunity it's just a that they it's it's um it'll be over by 2020.

i wouldn't just say it's just like it's it's a couple of years i think they'll they'll probably make a good car and probably be successful the car industry is very big so it's not as though there's um you know one company to the exclusion of others i mean it's like a dozen car companies in the world of significance so and the the most that any company has is approximately 10 market share so it's not like um you know somebody comes up with a car and they're suddenly like they kill everyone else it's not not that way um and and the sheer scale of automotive manufacturing is is is just it's hard to appreciate until you see the plants i mean they're gigantic like the industries yeah i mean the the the sheer size of the industrial infrastructure is is staggering

not just the assembly plant but everything else that goes yeah the supply chain exactly the symptoms just a little engine tip of the iceberg really yeah the service plan is literally took the iceberg phenomenal the the supply chain is um you know once you go to tier two tier three two or four suppliers um that's uh probably an order magnitude more uh than that okay so so you think google will not be a competitor probably will be a direct competitor yeah yeah sure what about the car companies the exactly i think they'll all be competitors yeah sure who do you see out there that has done a nice job so far mercedes of what a competitive car of the incumbents potentially competitive car i guess i mean i don't think anyone's any of the car companies thus far

have made um a really great electric car i mean you tell me if i'm if you disagree um but uh i don't think yet that any of them have made a great electric car okay they you know presumably will continue to improve on what they've done so far and and then at some point they may make a car that's that that's uh you know that's a great car but no they haven't done that yet can i ask you about batteries for a second oh yeah sure so you're building this gigafactory right you've got it's built it's well it's not completely both okay but it's part of it's running yeah part of it's a really gigantic thing it's like when the gigafactory is done it'll be the largest footprint building of any kind in the world of any kind not just factories it literally event what

is this the largest rocket the largest building i mean well i mean i think this it's not scale for scale sake it's just like if you say well we want to accomplish these goals then um then you kind of have to be make a big thing okay you've got this big thing it's this big giant building yeah it's going to make batteries the batteries it's going to we're make have an opening we'll start taking the opening party since it's been operating for a little while but we're gonna have a party soon you guys maybe want to come okay numb all right we'll come to the beginning but they can't i love we're seeing this thing come right just this is crazy no this is like an alien dreadnought it's really nutty because i love a battery party but yeah um right but but talk

about where it's going are these lithium-ion batteries yeah sure so they're the same batteries that's in our phone no explain please explain yeah so have you made a battery breakthrough is something i'm interested in um yeah i mean generally the i mean there's there's so much nonsense out there about batteries like about you can believe about one percent of what you read you know maybe lithium ion covers a very broad range of technologies and you can have an enormous difference in the power density and the energy density and the cycle life between one chemistry and another they can be really enormously different so what you really actually want to ask is what is the cathode and what is the anode right um so in our case that's right okay um let's put it

in the but the lithium is actually two percent of the cell mass so it's like the salt in the salad it's it's a very small amount of the cell mass and a fairly small amount of the cost but it sounds like it's big because it's called lithium ion but it it really like i've actually should be called nickel graphite because it's mostly nickel and graphite okay and um it's nickel cobalt aluminum but battery little things and graphite with a silicon oxide layer battery efficiency or power that you know the power that you can store in a certain mass seems to be moved very slowly at least compared to you know we're used to moore's law pushing uh integrated circuits faster batteries kind of are always in our consumer devices always lagging behind in your you've

built this giant thing the biggest building in the world it's ever seen it's not fully built but yes it's you're building a pretty big chunk yeah uh to make batteries your whole business depends on batteries in these cars have you figured out a way to do some significant uh increase in the yield of energy from a given amount of of space in the battery well yeah i mean the the the energy density is increasing sort of maybe on the order of like five-ish percent per year um and it doesn't sound like much but you add that up over a number of years with compound interest it ends up being quite quite a significant number um and a lot of people sort of think that oh well we just sort of cobbled together some laptop batteries and somehow made a great car but

if it was that easy then i think we would have quite a few competitors who did the same thing but but it's it's it's really quite quite a lot harder than that um the it's a cylindrical form form factor but the internals of the battery are quite different from what you would find in uh in a laptop and uh and and will be increasingly different with the what's built at the gigafactory which is highly optimized for automotive um and um and with has improved energy density but but mostly it's not the energy i see that's the issue because we you know you can buy if you buy a model s today um the range is um around 300 miles um and and that's quite a lot um so it's pretty rare that people really need to go more than 300 miles at a time without stopping right

you know um so i don't think we really have a range issue and we could make a 400 mile range car today like that wouldn't be too big of a deal um what really matters is decreasing the cost uh per unit of energy of the battery packs okay so you can make the car affordable that's actually the important thing so there's and there's really two main main dimensions along which uh cost optimization and making something available to the national market can be achieved one is design iteration going through multiple versions of something and then the other is economies of scale you kind of need both of those those things in order to make a compelling mass-market uh product and you look at like cell phones and how many design iterations have we gone through with

cell phones um and and then and and look at the scale at which that they're made which is enormous uh and that's what enables everyone to have a super computer in their pocket um so speaking of that the sales when you're talking about the sales you have booked how many orders for it's on the order of four hundred thousand four hundred thousand four hundred yeah consumer interest and a promise a lot of it around you around the idea of you and tesla and the excitement they're not booking it was quite surprising actually i mean the um because we didn't do any advertising or there was no guerrilla marketing or anything it was just basically like yeah we're gonna have this webcast there was only there were only about a thousand people in the audience um and

um i really caught us by surprise but i think you know when you have a product that really resonates with with customers the word of mouth uh grows like wildfire and that seems to be what yeah but it's a little bit i mean honestly in some groups of especially men in silicon valley if you show up and read like a label of a peanut jar they'd be thrilled with the situation so i mean you a lot of this does base around you like the idea of you and the excitement around this exciting entrepreneur is that is that enough to get it to to this massive company you've been hoping to the idea of this is the elon promise or it's the well i think actually it's not so much i mean sort of um um i i'm not sure i i think i just deserve less credit than that actually the

the uh i mean what what tesla's done with a phenomenal team is like 15 000 people at the company um worked super hard to create compelling products to create great cars um and we start off with the roadster and then the model s and the model s was rated you know by consumer reports as the best car ever got the model x which you know had some has had some teething issues but um i think it's now at the point where it's it's really starting to i think it's really i think quite sublime at this point um and uh and and so people look at that and say okay well if tesla's made these cars then probably the next car they make is going to be you know the less expensive one also a great car and um yeah but you know so it'll be a great car but it'll be affordable

it's like great okay that sounds like something i want so this car this next car the price is it's starting at 35 000 okay affordable okay when do you get to the really affordable then way down much lower than that yeah i mean it's important to point out that the 35 000 particularly when factoring in the lower cost of electricity versus gasoline and that the maintenance cost is much less you don't have to have oil changes you never need to replace your brakes because the car uses regenerative braking so the brakes last as long as the car do that the car does it's basically you just need to replace the tires like that's about about all um so the operational cost of the car is much lower fundamentally than than a gasoline car and and so um and the i think

the the uh average price for cars for gasoline cars is around 30 32 something like that yeah i mean there are starting prices that are lower but but when people pick pick options i believe it's in the around 32 or so in the us so we're pretty close to the that that but that's your base price right i mean though yeah but it's absolutely great may not be the asp for the car no but it's gonna be a great car even at 35.

so it's like even if you order nothing no options at all it'll be great but you're at but you're likely to have a mix where the average car that you actually sell sells for a little more than that yes probably it's probably going to be yeah it's probably going to be some higher number um but it's really important size like the 35 if somebody orders the 35 000 car they'll be very happy like it's not like you need to order a bunch of options in order without which the car is is you know not good that car will have autonomous for 35.

um i have a uh i'm going to do another tesla event maybe at the end of the year um talk more about that and so you could start here um it will be real big news if i start here um we don't mind that let me just say that we're gonna do the obvious thing okay okay got it it's really obvious it's so cool so so cupholders good okay um so really those things are nuanced all right absolutely let's talk about two more things i want to talk about ai because we've been talking about it a lot here um which i want to get it clear what your thoughts are because it's mostly elon scared of robots i mean that kind of thing or what how do you i'm scared of robots um artificial intelligence can you like clarify exactly what the issue you have now and you deserve the background

we've been talking to uh jeff bezos sundar chai uh we talked to mark fields from ford about it um uh yeah the facebook folks um there certainly seems to be uh in the i in the tech companies a big tremendous new drive or interest to believing that we'll be all good for intelligent assistance and it's good it'll make your life better make your life better siri is going to suddenly get smart microsoft one is going to get smart and google is going to cream them all largely a happy version of this is going to sometimes technology hurts you but not as much as it helps you that's really yeah so that's there's been a lot of conversation here about that sure and yet and you've staked out a slightly different position so can you talk about that well i mean i think

my sort of full position would require quite a long explanation um i mean i i am concerned about um certain directions that ai could take that would be uh not good for the future that the i mean it i i think it'd be fair to say that like not all ai futures are benign not not all okay um and and so if you have something if if this if we create some digital super intelligence that exceeds us in every way by a lot um it's very important that that be benign um and um and so actually with with uh with a few others um i created uh openai uh which is uh an ai uh it's a non-profit actually it's so there's no i think the governor's structure here is important um so you want to make sure that there was not some fiduciary duty to uh generate um you know profit off

of the ai technology that's developed um so uh so we created this uh 51c3 um but but i think it's quite different from i mean a lot of sort of five one c3s are you know they've they don't have a high sense of urgency um like they're not like um you know they're not really sort of developing technology at a fast pace but openai is so openi has a very high sense of urgency and the talent i think that the people that have joined are are really really amazing and and the intent with openai is to democratize ai power um there's a quote that i love from lord acton he was the guy that came up with power corrupts and absolute power crafts absolutely um which is that uh freedom consists of the distribution of power and despotism in its concentration and so i think

it's important if we have this incredible power of ai that it not be concentrated in the hands of a few and potentially lead to a world that we don't want and what world is that what is what do you see for see that when you sit it's difficult i mean it's called the singularity because it's it's difficult to predict um what exactly what future that might be except i don't know a lot of people who love the idea of living under a despot um you know i don't think people generally choose to live in a democracy over a dictatorship and the despot would be the computer or the people controlling the and do you worry specifically about any of these companies i mentioned who've all seemed to now kind of be pivoting toward this is the battleground in the next 10

years i wouldn't name a name but there is only one there's only one you're worried about and they're not preoccupied with making a car that will compete with you i assume there's only one competing for you know mutual destruction it's like there's no it's not about competing it's really just about trying to increase the probability that the future will be good that's all so the the goal of open ai is really just to take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the positive futures like if you can think of like the future as a set of of probability streams that branch out and then converge collapse down to a particular event and then branch out again and uh there's a certain set of probabilities associated with the future being positive and different

type flavors of that and uh at open ai we want to try to do do whatever we can to guide to increase the probability of the good futures happening i think that's that's really what we're trying to do you worry that by making this open some bad actors may use some of what has been developed to do bad stuff uh with the power yeah i mean that is certainly the the i mean a good remodel to that however i think if ai power is widely distributed then and there's not say one entity that has some super ai that is a million times smarter than anything else you know if instead the ai power is broadly distributed and to the degree that we can link ai power to each individual's will it's like you know you would have your ai agent you knew it like everyone would have

their sort of ai agent and then if somebody did try to do something really terrible well then the collective will of others could overcome that bad actor um which you can't do if if there's one ai that's you know a million times better than ever and it's proprietary and it's yeah it's either has its own world or more likely at least in the beginning is controlled by you know some small set of people so um i think that's that's really the the risk i mean um you know there's always these arguments like what's what's the best form of government um i'm a big fan of i think it's churchill like you know democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others right um so speaking of that yeah this election you are no no no yes yes yes how does that

strike you what's happening now you're you you've come to this country you're naturalized you know i think uh i'm glad that the frame is the constitution saw fit to ensure that the president uh was someone who um was captain of a lodge ship with a small writer okay and there's a limit to how much harm any given president are you sure about that oh yeah yeah yeah so you're not worried about are you backing in either of the candidates at this point try to stay out of this situation because i don't think that's the finest moment in our democracy well given that it's not the finest moment in our democracy do you think the best thing is to stay out or we'll see i'm not sure what what i can do to head off the worst i'm sure how much influence i could have as

as one person on the outcome so i mean if i think i could make a difference i would probably do something um but um like i said i think i'm just glad that the pres you know being the us president is like being captain of a large ship with a small rudder and so there's just a limit to how much good or bad a president can can actually do i mean obviously if a president could make the economy great that and there was like a button he could press they'd be pressing that button at the speed of light so you know that they just but they could they can't like can't they can't just magically make the economy good um no president wants the economy bad ever um but they you know like there's just a limit to how much they can do um and um yeah i guess there is the

nuclear thing which is yeah the new thing i guess there is the nuclear thing yeah but i i don't know i think i think i think i don't think we would like just arbitrarily launch nuclear missiles yeah one would have president can do that uh i don't think so i mean i think that he's no he's the commander-in-chief i still don't think that means you can just launch nuclear missiles whenever you want right yeah um i think congress would be like quite upset about that and they might not be consulted yeah but i think i think like the military would be like yeah we really think congress should be consulted on before we launch uh yeah that that might happen preemptively are you willing you're basing your faith in that though i'm quite confident that the military

would not just you know randomly agree to launching nuclear missiles at somebody well that's calming this is right so um uh we're going to put up just very quickly we'll and on hyperloop you've been involved with it your level involvement is what at this point just yeah i know it's a bit confusing because um i um you talked about it when you were here last time yeah i actually came up with the idea um i came up with an initial idea which was turned out to be wrong it wouldn't work several years ago and and then um but i sort of shot my mouth off and and said i look like i have an idea that would work and turned out that didn't work but with a lot of iteration i was able to come up with something that where the physics hangs together and then published

the paper and just said like look anyone who wants to do this is great go you know be my guest because i'm i sort of have a plate full running tesla and spacex yeah yeah and so i think it'd be great i mean it'd be great to have any interesting new transport solutions um anything that gets people to their destination um in a way that's safer costs less it's more convenient um that'd be great i mean and so i think probably the most valuable thing that the hyperloop paper that i published has done is to spur thinking in terms of new transportation system so it's not just oh let's you know have a fast train um okay that's not even as fast as what japan did in the 80s like okay i don't see what the point of that is you know like we should really be trying

to think of some something that's um i think particularly in california like we should be like saying hey what is the best let's invent something new that's way better than anything else do you want to shoot your mouth off about that um well um you know i so so i i'm not an investor in any of the companies uh that that are working on and i've tried to be neutral because i'm like i'm trying not to favor one company over another but just to encourage anyone that is interested to say that you know try to give them moral support you know um and i hope they succeed um the only thing that um i am doing a half blue front is like we're holding a student competition and the student competition is really just aimed towards encouraging uh students to think about

exciting new transport methods and it's totally cool if they want to like do some architecture that's different from what i propose in hyperloop and in fact the the winning team at the student competition that we held earlier this year used a different um suspension mechanism than what i proposed which is i you know i propose using essentially taking taking the uh air that eventually that builds up on the nose from the compressor and and flowing that through air skis so that you simultaneously remove the drag from the nose and provide a a means of suspending the the pod um and that's also something that that works well um even at uh super supersonic velocities you can go it's been demonstrated up to mach 1.

1 in terms of using air bearings as but they use something different i like uh yeah basically electromagnetic suspension um and like the the reason i didn't suggest um sort of any kind of magnetic system suspension is that it's very important that the cost of the of the tube be minimized so if you really want because the the part is cheap the tube is expensive so if you if you want to go say 400 miles and you've and two in two directions you've got 800 miles of tube the the critical uh economic optimization parameter is the cost of the tube so you want that tube to be as low cost as possible and so if you if you do anything that that requires action on the tube side it's going to make that tube much more expensive so if you use air bearings it doesn't

change like that's real cheap and yeah so you think this is going to happen yeah i think something like that i think something will happen in the future um you know it's i think i think if if the companies that are that are trying that are trying to make it happen now if if for whatever reason that that doesn't work out um then you know i think i i'll you know i'll i might i might do something myself in the future i don't want to do something i don't know if i don't want to sort of front run them you know it's like say here's this free idea and then meanwhile i go and do it myself you know that wouldn't be nice so um so but if they if a bunch of people if companies don't try and it doesn't work out then i think i think um i think i'll try to just at least

do a demonstration system you know okay last question do you think tech has gotten more serious do you how do you look at the tech landscape as someone who's you know well-known you probably qualify as a visionary um the concept what do you imagine we are right now in the tech space and then we'll get to questions from the audience i think there's a lot of innovation happening in in many different areas um the advancements in ai i think are quite quite astonishing the advancements in genetics are amazing so i think that there is a lot of innovation going on i think there's probably a few too many talented entrepreneurs in kind of the internet space and and i think their talent actually would be better served in some other industries um but i do think

i mean i don't think we're like facing some sort of low innovation period or anything like that i think there's a lot of innovation going on they need to move to other i just think that like if you had some ideal distribution would probably be fewer like there's just a lot of talent focused on the internet and probably some of that talent would be better to have some of that talent in other industries that's about all but there's tremendous amount of innovation that that's happening um it's something that i think is is going to be quite important um and and it's there's not i don't know of a company that's working on it seriously is um is a neural lace um so you know going back to the ai situation um this is quite an important uh quite important debate

like that if you assume any rate of advancement in ai um we will be left behind by a lot um and so then we could be in you know benign but even the benign situation if you have some you know if you have ultra intelligent ai um we would be you know so so far below them in intelligence that it would be would be like you know a pet that's what it was like a pet a cat a cat like a house yeah we like the house cat right um and um yeah so that's it's not the end of the world you know it's just not sort of you've seen the movie it could be it could be it could be um the you know so that but that honestly that would be the benign scenario um and so house cat is okay i mean i don't love the idea of being a house guy okay but what's the solution yeah so i think

the um i think i think it i think it's to essentially i think one of the solutions the solution that seems maybe the best one is to have an ai layer um if you think of like you've got your limbic system your cortex and then a digital layer a sort of a third layer above the cortex that could work work well and symbiotically with with you i mean just as your cortex works somewhat spiritically with the olympic system your did sort of a third digital layer could work symbolically with the rest this is something that's surgically inserted or bred into the species or what the fundamental limitation is input output so we already have uh we're already a cyborg um it's just that i mean you have a digital version of yourself or a partial version of yourself online

in the form of your emails and your social media and all the things that you do and and you have basically superpowers in that with your computer and your phone and and the applications that are there you have more power than the president united states had 20 years ago that you can answer any question you can video conference with anyone anywhere you can send a message to millions of people instantly you know you just do incredible things and um but the constraint is is input output so we're i o bound um particularly output bound i mean like the your output level is so low it's like particularly on a phone like your two thumbs are sort of tapping away um this is ridiculously slow our input is much better because we have a high bandwidth visual interface

into the brain like our eyes taking a lot of a lot of data so there's many orders magnitude difference between input and output so mostly effectively merging in a symbiotic way with uh digital intelligence revolves around eliminating the i o constraint so it's be some sort of direct cortical interface and you called it a neural neural lace yeah um it's totally not google glass right no i i'm talking about something would you wear it or no i mean it would be uh i mean i mean there are a few ways to approach this but some sort of interface directly with your cortical neurons particularly but doesn't that apply surgical insertion not necessarily you could go through the veins and arteries because that provides a complete roadway to all of your neurons your

neurons are very heavy users of energy so they need high blood flow so you automatically with your veins and arteries have a road network to your neurons still some kind of surgery right um yes but you could insert something you know basically you know into the jugular and and have it gets macabre but it sounds really easy and it doesn't involve it it doesn't it doesn't involve you know like chopping your just your skull up or anything like that yeah and plus you're not a house cat anymore right a house cat so um i mean essentially if if we can figure out how to establish a high bandwidth neural interface with ourselves with with your digital self effectively um then uh then you're no longer a house cat you know all right on that note no on that yeah

well i do just one closing thing i mean i think it's probably are you in are you into that part of the best outcome i think are you interested in exploring this possibility that you have just laid somebody's got to do it i'm not saying that i will but i'm somebody's got to do it i mean i i i mean somebody should do it and i mean if somebody doesn't do it then i then i think i should probably do it but uh and and the goal of this is to prevent there being an external uh ai particularly one controlled by a small group of people that could yeah be so much more powerful and intelligent than we are that the house will be god-like in situations yeah well this has been really cheerful thank you yeah but if but if we can establish i was worried about asteroids

at the beginning of this i mean asteroids are a low probability existential threat um on the time scale that's relevant to us okay okay this is different this requires urgency so what do you do for fun yes this is much elon what do you do for fun fun what do you do anything i play video games with my kids all right that sounds good let's get some questions come on elon the house cat i watch movies yeah i kind of think normal things okay why don't we start over here yeah hi i think this last question by uh carl just just did that i want to know how do you live through the stress that kind of conversations we just heard that you went through and kind of ambitions that you carry and then how do you adjust to the everyday work life balance etc things that

in your life it's a little bit of your personal side actually so you're very busy how does that work yeah i mean i am sort of in kind of work triage mode um a lot of the time so i know it seems to be uh as long as there's not like a crisis simultaneously at spacex and tesla it's okay um but you know companies are i mean the situation in any given company particularly one you know if it's sort of growing fast and sort of quasi startup it's it's somewhat sinusoidal so that i mean it's okay if if you don't if the if the waves don't crest together you know um when that does happen it then that's a huge strain right now things are like you know motoring along okay um and i have like the contacts loaded for both companies and i can look sort of see a path to

a good outcome so i feel pretty good right now but they've been super stressful times in the past and and then you know and then i always try to reserve time for my kids because i love hanging out with them like i mean kids are really great i mean like the um of the time they're they're they make you happier their kids are awesome you know yeah um then there's that one percent one percent you know like yeah one percent but but like it's it's like of anything in my life i would say kids by far make me the happiest i mean i don't know you know i agree yeah that's great i agree yeah um so hang out with them like so like no like things like a lot of times kids are kind of in their own world so you don't need to like they don't want to like talk to their dad

for hours on end generally i've noticed that yeah um so like um so i can be in the same room with them they can talk to me from time time but like you know i can get you know some emails done just get some work done and then whenever they want to talk to me they can um and then we try to do things like um you know travel places and uh like i said we play video games together or actually on monday we went to the new harry potter land um at universal it was quite fun yeah so i think that somebody from universal just clapped yeah whoever was in charge of harry potter land did a great job it's really good yeah that's good i highly recommend it yeah the butter beer is amazing yeah i was just saying the butter beer is amazing yeah okay over here hi my name

is evan burns and the founder of odyssey and i hope into the future to be in something in the space industry and my curiosity is you've talked about spacex getting into many different businesses for example global wi-fi through launching many satellites do you hope spacex becomes a platform for others to launch businesses or you see spacex being a business that launches many business lines um well i mean the general strategy of spacex is to like we clearly need a lot of money in order to develop the transport system to establish a city on mars so you know we're like kind of gathering revenue like earth-based revenue that's we're trying to maximize there's some other earth revenue well right now is only earth so we've got to maximize earth revenue as it

relates to space you know as it relates to rockets and spacecraft so um but i think like what assuming spacex is able to transport large numbers of people and and goods to mars it will be an enormous enabler for entrepreneurial activity on mars um because there's gonna be so much to do um you know everything from creating like the first iron ore refinery to the first pizza joint to um you know it was something that doesn't even exist on earth um it was kind of like when the union pacific uh crossed crushed you know and like everyone thought you know it's like what a stupid idea you know like there's nobody living in california well okay now there's quite a lot of people living in california so so just uh having it you need the transport link and so what

spacex is trying to do is establish transport link um and then try to create a fertile environment for entrepreneurs on mars uh to flourish um and and i think that will be an amazing um expansion of entrepreneurial how long would it take to deliver a pizza from mars well it's going to be a little cold i think but i mean we we could certainly see a way to get to mars in under three months and i think ultimately you'll be able to get to mars in under a month it does get exponentially difficult as you reduce the time um but um but you know three months is a way to think of it um and i think that's probably you know that's that's really where spacex will i think create a a great environment for entrepreneurial potential thanks neelac i hope dominos does not

get to mars please don't let it have a special special mars uh so you're obviously very ambitious um that's led to some really ambitious deadlines that have been missed so falcon heavy was originally 2012.

um the model x was a little bit delayed the model 3 the model x was delayed the model 3 seems to be stretching but the model 3 in particular is a consumer product you're taking money from people against a really aggressive production schedule and a huge amount of orders what are you going to do to hit your deadlines on that because it's real consumers this time in a big class of people sure the i think the biggest thing is just designing the car for um for for manufacturing so in the case of model s like models was the first time we'd really built a car uh a whole car like with the roadster lotus did the body and chassis we did the powertrain then we did the sort of final installation of the powertrain to the chassis but the model s was the first time

we made a car so we were just trying to make a great car and but we had no idea like what it meant to design something to be manufacturable so the model s is super hard to make and then the model x is built off of the model s platform except it's got a bunch of other whiz-bang technologies that make it even harder to build so um and uh you know so like i mean definitely we want to do the opposite of what we do with the with the x um which is make something that is is going to be a lot simpler um but still a car that people will love and where every design decision is factoring in the manufacturability uh in fact and making sure that when we designed something um that you can manufacture at volume at an affordable price uh in the schedule that would that

were on the schedule that we're targeting um one of the things that makes a car very difficult particularly if it's a new car uh is is that it's an integrated product with several thousand unique components so we are somewhat at the mercy of whatever the slowest component is whatever basically i mean if you say go to tier 2 and 3 suppliers they end up being several thousand suppliers so so things move as fast as the least lucky and least competent supplier um you know but but just and you can think of like like any natural disaster you care to name all of those things have happened to our suppliers their factory has burnt down there's been an earthquake there's been a you know tsunami there's been uh massive hail uh there's been a tornado uh the ship

sank there was a shootout at the mexican border um no kidding um that delayed trunk carpet at one point well like and we couldn't get and like then like the border patrol wouldn't give us the truck because it had like bullet holes in it um we just wanted our trunk carpet um like it's pretty safe there's like no cocaine or anything so good um but you know that shut down the production line as an example for several days um so so there's that's the biggest issue is like the supply chain stuff is really tricky um we're trying to anticipate as much that as possible increase our optionality so that there's more internal capability at tesla not that we want to do things internally but if if a supplier is unable or unwilling to uh deliver the part we can quickly

make that internally so i think the whole company is geared geared for that um and um i mean right now it looks like you know we should be able to do that we expect to i mean almost all of the model 3 design is done um and we're aiming for pencils down basically [Music] in about six weeks complete pencils down and um and we're tabling all you know like if they're ideas for future cool things we'll we'll have it in version two version three in future years type of thing so um overall i feel pretty good about it um and our supply particularly our major supplier partners have been um very supportive and are are on board um but um you know uh i mean one thing i i should say like the like when i when i sort of cite a schedule it is actually the schedule i

think is true it's it's not some fake schedule that i don't think is true um so i mean uh you know it's never you know i it's um i may be delusional that is entirely you know possible maybe it's happened from time to time but it's it's it's never um you know some knowingly fake deadline ever so is there an event in six weeks we're going to announce autonomous driving is included in the pencil down plan for the model 3.

we're not expecting any event in six weeks uh josh hi um i have a this is kind of a weird question i feel like you'd would be the guy with the right answer for it there's a um sort of a philosophic concept that a sufficiently advanced civilization will be able to create uh sort of a simulation yeah maybe you've answered this before a simulation i've had so many simulation discussions it's crazy okay so because in fact it got to the point where basically every conversation was was the ai ai slash simulation conversation um and my brother and i finally agreed that um we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub that was like here because that really kills them so so so the idea is right any sufficiently advanced civilization would create

could create a simulation that's like our existence and so the theory follows that maybe we're in the simulation have you thought about this and a lot are we are we even in hot tubs so much so it had to be banned from a hot tub [Laughter] okay it's not the sexiest conversation are we in are we in um the the i mean i think here's remember like the the strongest argument for the for us being in a simulation probably being assimilation i think is the following um that that 40 40 40 years ago we had pong like two rectangles and a dot that was what games were now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3d simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year and soon we'll have you know virtual reality of augmented reality

if you assume any rate of improvement at all then the games will become indistinguishable from reality just instinctual um even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now um then you just say okay well let's mention it's a ten thousand years in the future which is nothing in the evolutionary scale so um so so given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a pc or whatever and there would probably be you know billions of such uh you know computers or set-top boxes it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in based reality is one in billions so tell me what's wrong with that argument is the answer yes the argument

is probably like is there is there a flow in that argument i mean but someone i'm not sure what the error no no the argument makes sense so the assumption then is that somebody beat us to it and this is a game no no there's a one in billions chance that this is based reality oh okay what do you think well i think it's one in billions okay i mean this that seems to be like clearly what the you know what what what it suggests right and actually i mean arguably we should hope that that's true because otherwise if if civilization stops advancing then that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization so maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation because otherwise so they could reboot it well otherwise either we're going to create

simulations that are industrial indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist those are the two options yeah i like those odds okay okay we're going to it's unlikely to go into some like you know multi-millionaire stasis so it's either going to increase or decrease hi i'm g2 patel from box uh two-part question for you one is um if you think about fully autonomous vehicles um which have passed through regulatory approvals have passed through in-city driving and traffic conditions how far do you think from a time frame perspective we are for that that becoming reality and number two would be the second part of that question is how far before how long before you think it's either illegal or extremely prohibitively expensive for humans

to drive on the road well i i mean i think i mean i really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem um even in cities like beijing and yeah yeah actually it is the there's really only one um area where it's like a little dodgy and that's basically if you're at roughly the 30 30 to 40 miles an hour in in urban environments which is that's difficult to achieve in beijing um it's like heavy traffic in in in dense traffic situations autonomy is really easy um because you can just maintain a set distance from various cars it's actually quite quite easy um you're very unlikely to drop to run anyone over because you're not moving fast enough and you can break in time on highways particularly highways that are um that have barriers so

that you you don't have pedestrians that's also relatively easy and like a model s and model x at this point uh can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person right now my point is when does it get to be where you don't need to be sitting behind a vehicle and it actually the way that society starts expecting this is i can have my 75 year old mother who doesn't speak any english or doesn't drive be able to be transported from point a to point b by just sitting in a car by ourself and being taken i know it's technically possible but how far do you think the regulatory approvals are for that happening i think we're basically um less than two years away from complete autonomy wow well complete safer than a human um however regulators will take um

i think at least another year at least another year and to pick it's going to depend on which what part of the world you're in because they'll want to see billions of miles of data to show that it is statistically true that there is a substantial improvement in safety if something's autonomous versus not autonomous i don't think that regulators will accept something that's close to that's that's that's sort of approximately as good as a person i think they'll have to be at least twice as good as a person maybe five or ten times um you know better in terms of uh safety um and and that will have to be have to be a statistically relevant data set so like billions of miles over widely differing roads and situations so yeah you know that's i think it's like

probably three years before it's right through from a regulatory standpoint but less than two before it is uh technically possible and do you think there's a day when it's illegal to drive for humans or um you know well i mean we live in a democracy so presumably that would be a function of the population deciding um i mean i i mean i'm not in favor of banning people from driving cars um like i'm in favor of freedom um and and not restricting what people do um yeah but maybe the requirements for a license will get more stringent i think that seems like maybe a good move you know so you have to demonstrate a higher level of skill to drive in order to be allowed to manually drive okay very last question this is the last make it a good one sorry because

elon has to go gotta make it a great question uh thinking about life on mars again how do you how do you think about cultural unification systems of government uh rules of law establishing those uh very early on well i think i've just declared king of moss a moment ago i like that yeah take it yeah thank you thank you thank you um so the the uh i think most likely the form of government on mars would be a direct direct democracy um not representative so would be people voting directly on on issues um and i think that's probably better because like the potential for corruption is substantially diminished in a direct versus a representative democracy so i think that's probably what will occur um the i i think there's some i think so i would recommend like

some adjustment for the inertia of laws is would be wise in that it should probably be easier to remove a law than create one um i think you know that this is i would just be like let's just i mean i think i think that's probably probably good because just laws have infinite life unless they're taken away um so i think my recommendation would be like like something like let's say 60 of people need to uh vote in a law but at any point greater than 40 percent of people can remove it um and any law should come with a sunset with a built-in sunset provision if it's not good enough to be voted back in maybe it shouldn't be there so that's that's the framework for the government on mars i mean that'll be my those would be my recommendations direct democracy

where where it's slightly harder to put laws in place than to take them away and where laws don't just automatically live forever you'll be a good king thank you elon musk thank you