All-In Summit September 8, 2024 Live at the 2024 All-In Summit, Musk talks AI and robotics, the economy, free speech, the election and his growing political engagement with the All-In hosts.
Live at the 2024 All-In Summit, Musk talks AI and robotics, the economy, free speech, the election and his growing political engagement with the All-In hosts.
Transcript All-In Host
The greatest entrepreneur, Elon Musk.
All-In Host
I'm gonna. Yep.
I'm gonna take this. All right. Thanks for taking the time.
How you doing, brother? You keeping busy?
Yeah. I mean, it's rarely a slow week. I mean, in the world as well.
I mean, any given week, I mean, it just seems like the things get nuttier.
It's definitely a simulation. We've agreed on this at this point.
I mean, well, look, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high.
Yeah. How are the freedom of speech wars going? This is a. You've been. You've been at war for two years now.
The price of freedom of speech is not cheap, is it?
I think it's like 44 billion, something like that.
All-In Host
Give or take a billion.
Yeah. Wrong numbers. It's pretty nutty. There is, like, this weird movement to quell free speech kind of around the world, and that's something we should be very concerned about. You know, you have to ask, like, why was the First Amendment, like, a high priority? It was like, number one. Number one is because people came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed. And they were like, well, we would like to not have that here, because that was terrible. And actually, you know, there's a lot of places in the world right now if you're critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed. Right, yeah, we'd like to not have that.
I mean, I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message.
All-In Host
You know, I think we always thought that the west was the exception to that, that we knew there were authoritarian places around the world, but we thought that in the west we'd have freedom of speech. And we've seen, like you said, it seems like a global movement. In Britain, you've got teenagers being put in prison for memes opposing.
It's like you like to. You like to Facebook post, throw them into prison.
People have got an actual, you know, prison for. For like. Like, obscure comments on social media.
All-In Host
Not even shit posting.
Like, not even. Yeah, it's crazy.
All-In Host
In prison, you've got.
I'm like, that. I was like, what is the massive crime that.
All-In Host
Pavel in France. And then, of course, we got Brazil with Judge Voldemort. That. That one seems like the one that impacts you the most. Can you. What's the latest on that?
Well, I guess we are trying to figure out, is there some reasonable solution in Brazil? The concern. I mean, I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly. And funny memes aside, the nature of the concern was that at least at export, we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law. So obviously we cannot, as an American company, impose American laws and values on other countries that, you know, we wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do, you know, think that if a country's laws are a particular way and we're being asked to what we.
We think we're being asked to break them, then. And be silent about it, then obviously that is no good. So. So I just want to be clear because the sometimes. Sometimes comes across as Elon's trying to just be a crazy, whatever, billionaire and demand outrageous things from other countries. And, you know, while that is true, There are other things that I think are valid, which is like, we obviously can't. I think any given thing that we do at X Corp, we've got to be able to explain in light of day and not feel that it was dishonorable or we did the wrong thing. So we don't. That. That. That. That was the. That's the nature of the concern. So we actually are in sort of discussions with the, you know, judicial authorities in Brazil to try to, you know, run this to ground. Like, what. What's actually going on? Like, if. If we're being asked to break the law, Brazilian law, then that's.
That obviously should not be. Should not sit well with the Brazilian judiciary. And if we're not and we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we are mistaken. I think that's a pretty reasonable position.
I'm a bit concerned, as your friend, that you're going to go to one of these countries and I'm gonna wake up one day and you're gonna get arrested and like, I'm gonna have to go bail you out or something. Like this is. Feels very acute. Like.
I mean, it's not a joke now. Like they're literally saying like, you know, it's not just Biden saying like, we have to look into that guy. Now it's become quite literal like this. Who is the guy who just wrote the. Was it the Guardian piece about, like.
Oh, yeah, yeah. There have been three articles and I think in the past three weeks, Robert Reich. But it wasn't just him. It was like three different articles.
That's a trend calling for me to be imprisoned in the Guardian, you know, Guardian of what. What are they protecting exactly?
Guardian of. I don't know.
The premise here is that you bought this thing, this online forum, this communication platform, and you're allowing people to use it to express themselves, therefore you have to be jailed. I don't understand the logic here.
There's. What do you think they're actually afraid of at this point? What's the motivation here?
All-In Host
I mean, I think
if somebody's sort of trying to push a false premise on the world, then. And then that premise can be undermined with public dialogue, then they will be opposed to public dialogue on that premise because they wish that false premise to prevail.
So that's, I think, you know, the issue there is if they don't like the truth, you know, then we want to suppress it. So now the sort of, what we're trying to do with X Corp is I distinguish that from my son who's also called X. Yes.
Everything's just called X, basically. It's very difficult disambiguation.
what we're trying to do is simply adhere to the, you know, the, the laws in a country. So, so if something is illegal in the United States or if it's illegal in, you know, Europe or Brazil or wherever it might be, then, then we will take it down or we'll suspend the account because we, we're not, you know, there to make the laws. We. But, but, but if speech is not illegal, then, then what are we doing? Okay, now we're injecting ourselves in as a sensor, and where does it stop and who decides? So, and where does that path lead? I think it leads to a bad place. So if the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different, but otherwise we're going to obey the law in each jurisdiction.
And some of these Europeans, that's it.
It's not more complicated than we're not trying to fly out the law. I'm going to be clear about that. But we're trying to adhere to the law. And if the laws change, we will change. And if the laws don't change, we, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law.
It's pretty straightforward.
It's very straightforward. If somebody thinks we're not adhering to law, well, they can file a lawsuit. Bingo.
Also very straightforward.
I mean, there are European countries that don't want people to promote Nazi propaganda.
They have some sensitivity to it.
Well, it is illegal and it is
illegal in those countries. If somebody puts that up, you take it down. Yes, but they typically file something and say yes.
In some cases it is just obviously illegal. Like you don't need to file a lawsuit for, you know, if something is just, you know, unequivocally illegal, we can literally read the law. This violates the law. You know, anyone, anyone can see that. Like, you know, you don't need, like if somebody is stealing, you don't need. Let me check the law on that.
Oh no, there's. They're stealing.
All-In Host
So we had, we had J.D. vance here this morning. He did a great job. And you know, one of the things is there's this image on X of like basically like you, Bobby Trump and JD are like the Avengers, I guess. And then there's another meme where you're in front of a desk where it says D O G E. Yeah, the Department of Governmental Efficiency.
Yes, yes, I posted that one. Tell us about it. I made it using Grok, the Grok image generator and I posted it. Tell us about it to my profile.
All-In Host
How do you do it?
Well, I mean, I think with great difficulty, but you know, look, it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations.
And you know, last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early 80s. So we're 40 years away from a serious effort to remove, you know, not regulations that don't serve the greater good and, and reduce the size of government. And I think it's just if we don't do that, then what's, what, what's happening is that we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal. And that's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States. Like if you look at the absurdity of the California high speed rail, I think they, they spent $7 billion and have a 1600 foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it. I mean, your tax dollars at work, I mean.
That's an expensive 1600ft of concrete, you know, And I mean, I think it's like if, you know, I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but, you know, I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was, you know, not an optimist, so. But at the current trend, you know, California high speed rail might finish sometime next century maybe. Probably not.
We're just, we'll have Teleportation by that time.
Yeah, exactly. AI do everything that point. So, so, so you, I think you really think of, you know, the United States and many countries, it's, it's arguably worse than the EU as being like Gulliver, tied down by a million little strings. And like any one given regulation is not, is not that bad, but you've got a million of them and, or millions actually, and then eventually just can't get anything done. And this is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people. It's just, they don't, they don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations. And I'll give you a recent example that you know is just insane is that like SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for they claimed dumping potable water on the ground, drinking water. So, and we're like, this is at Starbase. And we're like, it's. We're in a tropical thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. And there was no actual harm done. It was just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff. And there's zero harm done. And they're like, they agree. Yes, there's zero harm done. We're like, okay, so there's no harm done, but you want us to pay $140,000 fine? It's like, yes, because you don't have a permit. Okay. We didn't know there was a permit needed for zero harm. Fresh water being on the ground in a place that, where fresh water falls from the sky all the time.
Because there's a little bit of water there too.
Yeah. I mean, sometimes it rains so much, the, the roads are flooded. So we're like, you know, how does this make any sense?
And, and then like, then they were like, well, we're not going to process any more of your, any more of your applications for launch, for starship launch unless you pay this $140,000 there's ransomed us. And we're like, okay, so we paid $140,000. But it was a, it's like, this is no good. I mean, at this rate we're never going to get to Mars.
I mean, that's the, that's the confounding part here. Yeah. Is we're acting against our own self interest. You know, when you look at, we do have to make, putting aside fresh water. But hey, you know, they're, the rocket makes a lot of noise. So I'M I'm certain there's some complaints about noise once in a while, but sometimes you want to have a party, but, well, you want to make progress and there's a little bit of noise. Therefore, you know, we, we trade off a little bit of noise for massive progress or even fun. Yes. So like, when did we stop being able to make those trade offs? But talk about the difference between California and Texas, where you and I now reside. Texas, you were able to build the Gigafactory. I remember when you got the plot of land and then it seemed like it was less than two years when you had the party to open it.
From starter construction to completion was 14 months.
Is there anywhere on the planet that would go faster? Is like China faster than that?
Got it. So Texas, China, 11 and 14 months. California, how many months?
And just give you a sense of size, the Tesla Gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon,
which was the biggest building in America.
No, there are bigger buildings, but the Pentagon's pretty big one.
Or it was the biggest building in units of pentagon. It's like three.
Okay, three pentagons and counting.
Yeah, got it. In 14 months. The just, the, just the regulatory approvals in California would have taken two years. So that's the issue.
All-In Host
Where do you think the regulation helps? Like for the people that will say, we need some checks and balances. We can't have some because for every good actor like you, there'll be a bad actor. So where is that line?
Yeah, I mean, I haven't sort of, you know, in sort of doing sensible deregulation and reduction in the size of government is just like be very public about it and say like, which of these rules do you. If the public is really excited about a rule and wants to keep it, we'll just keep it. And here's the thing about the rules. If like, if the rule is, you know, turns out to be a bad, we'll just put it right back. Okay. And then, you know, problem solved. It's like, it's easy to add rules, but we don't actually have a process for getting rid of them. That's the issue. There's no garbage collection for rules.
When we were watching you work, David and I and Antonio, in that first month at Twitter, which was all hands on deck and you were doing zero based budgeting, you really quickly got the cost under control. And then miraculously, everybody said this site will go down and you added 50 more features. So maybe because this is the first
time there were like so many articles like the. That this is Twitter is dead forever. There's no way it could possibly even continue at all.
It was almost like the press was rooting for you to found.
Let's write the obituary. Here's the obituary.
All-In Host
They're all saying their goodbyes on Twitter. Remember that?
All-In Host
They were all leaving and saying their goodbyes because the site was going to melt down and.
Yeah, totally failing. And all the journalists left.
Which if you ever want to, like, hang out with a bunch of hall monitors. Oh, my God, Threads is amazing.
All-In Host
Every time I go over there and
post, they're like, they're really triggered.
But yeah, I mean, if you like being condemned repeatedly, then, you know, for reasons that make no sense, then Threads is the way to go.
It's really. It's the most miserable place on earth. If Disney's the happiest, this is the end anti Disney. But if we were to go into government, you went into the Department of Education or pick the department you've worked with, a lot of them actually. You can't go in there and Zero based budget. Okay, we get it. But if you could just pair 2, 3, 4, 5% of those organizations, what kind of impact would that have?
Yeah, I mean, I think we'd need to do more than that.
I think ideally, yeah, compounding every year, 2 or 3% a year. I mean, it would be better than what's happening now.
Yeah, Look, I think, you know, if Trump wins, and obviously I suspect there are people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen, but we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once in a lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing besides the regulations, America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly. And nobody seems to. Everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.
All-In Host
But they're all grabbing the silverware. Everyone's stuff in their pockets, in the silverware, before the Titanic sinks.
Well, you know, the Defense Department budget is a very big budget. Okay. It's a trillion dollars a year. DoD intel, it's a trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year just in interest and rising. We're adding a trillion dollars to the net, to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay somehow every three months. And then soon it's going to be every two months and then every month. And then the only thing we'll be able to Pay is interest. And if this. It's just, you know, it's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt. And this. This is not. This does not have a good ending. And so we have to reduce the spending.
All-In Host
Let me ask one question, because I've brought this up a lot, and the counterargument I hear, which I disagree with, but the counterargument I hear from a lot of politicians is if we reduce spending. Because right now, if you add up federal, state, and local government spending, it's between 40 and 50% of GDP. So nearly half of our economy is supported by government spending, and nearly half of people in the United States are dependent, directly or indirectly, on government checks and either through contractors that the government pays or they're employed by government entity. So if you go in and you take too hard an axe too fast, you will have significant contraction, job loss and recession. What's the balancing act? Elon? Just thinking realistically, because I'm 100% on board with you. The steps, the next set of steps, however, assume Trump wins and you become the chief Doge.
All-In Host
Like. Yeah. And I think the challenge is how quickly can we. Yeah. How quickly can we go in? How quickly can things change? And without. Without.
I want that on my business card.
All-In Host
Without all the contraction and. Yeah. So I guess how do you really address it when so much of the economy and so many people's jobs and livelihoods are dependent on government spending?
Well, I mean, I do think it's sort of, you know, it's a false dichotomy. It's not like no government spending is going to happen. You really have to say, like, is it the right level? And just remember that, you know, any given person, if they are doing things in a less efficient organization versus more efficient organization, their contribution to the economy, their net output of goods and services will reduce. I mean, you've got a couple of clear examples between East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea. I mean, North Korea, they're starving. South Korea, it's, like, amazing.
All-In Host
The compounding effect of productivity gains. Yeah, yeah.
It's night and day. And so in the North, North Korea, you've got 100% government, and in South Korea, you've got probably, I don't know, 40% government. It's not zero. And yet you've got a standard of living that is probably 10 times higher in South Korea. At least. At least. Exactly. And then east and West Germany. In West Germany, you Had, just thinking in terms of cars. I mean, you had BMW, Porsche, Audi,
and East Germany, which is a random line on a map. The only car you could get was a Trabant, which is basically a lawnmower with a shell on it. And it was extremely unsafe. There was a 20 year wait. So you like, you know, put your kid on the list as soon as they're conceived. And even then, only I think, you know, a quarter of people maybe got, got this lousy car. And so, so that's just an interesting example of like basically the same people, different operating system. And, and it's not like West Germany was some, you know, you know, a capitalist heaven. It was, it's quite socialist actually. So, so when you look, you know, probably it was half, half government in West Germany and 100 governed in East Germany. And again, sort of a 5 to, I'd like to call it a call at least a 5-10x standard of living difference and even qualitatively vastly better. And, and it's obviously, you know, sometimes you'll have these. Amazingly in this modern era, this debate as to which system is better. Well, I'll tell you which system is better. The one that doesn't need to build the wall to keep people in. Okay. That's, that's how you can tell. Okay. Yeah, it's a dead giveaway.
All-In Host
Spoiler alert.
Are they climbing the wall to get out or come in?
You have to build a barrier to keep people in. That is the bad system. It wasn't West West Berlin that built the wall. Okay. They were like, you know, anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead.
So, you know, and if you look at sort of the flux of boats from Cuba, there's a large number of boats from Cuba and there's a bunch of free boats that anyone can take to, to go back to Cuba.
There's like, hey, wow, an abandoned boat. I could use this boat to go to Cuba where they have communism. Awesome.
And yet nobody, nobody picks up those boats and does it. Amazing.
All-In Host
Yeah. Wait, so your point is jobs will be created if we cut government spending in half? Yes, jobs will be created fast enough to make up for. Right, Just the cash.
Yes, obviously. You know, I'm not suggesting that people, you know, had like immediately, you know, tossed out with no severance and you know, can't now can't pay their mortgage. Then you see some reasonable off ramp where. Yeah, yeah, so reasonable off ramp where, you know, they're still, you know, earning, they're still receiving money, but have like, I don't know, a year or two to find jobs in the private sector, which they will find and then they will be in a different operating system again. You can see the difference. East Germany was incorporated into West Germany. Living standards in East Germany rose dramatically.
Well, so in four years, if you could shrink the side, the size of the government with Trump, what would be a good target? Just in terms of like ballpark?
Are you trying to get me assassinated before this even happens?
No, no. Pick a low number.
I mean, you know, there's that old phrase go postal. I mean it's like they might, yeah, me.
All-In Host
So we'll keep the post office.
I mean, I'm going to need a lot of security details, guys.
I mean the serum number of disgruntled workers, former government employees is, you know, quite a scary number. I mean, I might not make it.
You know, I was saying low, low digits every year for four years would be palatable.
And I like your idea of an
opportunity, but the thing is that if it's not done, like if you have a once, once in a lifetime or once in a generation opportunity and you don't take serious action and, and then you have four years to get it done and then, and if it doesn't get done, then how serious is Trump about this?
Like you, you've talked to him about it?
Yeah, yeah, I think he is very serious about it.
And no, I think actually the reality is that if we get rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector, we will have immense prosperity and I think we will have a golden age in this country and it'll be fantastic. Can we talk about SpaceX?
All-In Host
You have a bunch of critical milestones coming up.
Yeah. In fact, there's an important, a very exciting launch that may be happening tonight. So if that the weather is, is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to Cape Canaveral for the, the Polaris dawn mission, which is a private mission so funded by Jared, guys, Jared Isaacman and he's awesome guy. And, and there. This will be the first time, the first private, first, first commercial for spacewalk. And it'll be at the highest altitude since Apollo. So it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone.
All-In Host
And what comes after that? Let's assume that's successful.
Yeah, we're, you know, absolutely, you know, astronaut prior, astronaut safety is man, if I Had like all the wishes I could say about. That'll be the one to put on. So you know, space is dangerous. So the. The.
I mean the next milestone after that would be the next flight of Starship which. You know. Starship is next flight. Starship is ready to fly. We are waiting for regulatory approval. You know, it really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than the paper can move from one desk to another.
That stamp is really hard. Approved.
All-In Host
You ever see that movie Zootopia? There's like a sloth.
Yeah. Accidentally tell a joke. And I was like oh no, this is.
All-In Host
No, here we go.
It's gonna take a long time. But yeah. Zootopia. You know. You know the funny thing is like. So I went to the dmv but I don't know. Year later after Zootopia and to get my license renewal and the guy in an exercise of incredible self awareness had the sloth from Zootopia in his cube. In his cube. And he was actually swift.
Yeah. With a mandate. Beat the sloth.
All-In Host
No. Personal agency. Personal agency.
No. I mean sometimes people like think the, you know, the government is more competent than it is. I'm not saying that there aren't competent people in the government. They're just in an operating system that is inefficient. Once you move them to a more efficient operating system their output is dramatically greater. As we've seen. You know when East Germany was reintegrated to with West Germany and the same people were vastly more prosperous with a basically half capitalist operating system. So. But I mean for a lot of people they're like the maybe most direct experience with the government is the dmv. And then the important thing to remember is that the government is the DMV at scale.
That's the government got the mental how much do you want to scale it?
All-In Host
Sorry, can you go back to Chamath's question on starship? So you announced just the other day starship going to Mars in two years.
And by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All-In Host
And then four years for crude aspirational launch window. And how much is the government involved?
I'm not saying like say you watch by these. Not you know, but these. But it based on our current progress where with starship we were able to successfully reach oval velocity twice. We were able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in water. And that's despite the ship having you know, half its flaps cooked off. You can see the video on the X platform. It's quite exciting. So you know, we think we'll be able to have to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. And the fundamental holy grail breakthrough for rocketry for what? The fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multi planetary is a rapidly reusable, reliable rocket.
with a pirate. Somehow throw a pirate in there. The so with Starship is the first rocket design where success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. So for any given project you have to say this is the circle. Talk about Venn diagrams. Here's a circle and it is success. The success.in the circle is success in the set of possible outcomes. That you know, sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where that, that is success is not in the set of possible outcomes. And so Starship not only is fully full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch. And I'm confident it will succeed. It's simply a matter of time. And you know, if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. So that would be very helpful. And in fact if something isn't done about reducing regulation and sort of speeding up approvals and to be clear, I'm not talking about anything unsafe, it's simply the processing of the safe thing can be done at a, as fast as the rocket is built, not slower. Then we could become a spacefaring civilization and a multi planet species and be out there among the stars in the future. And there's, It's just very like, it's incredibly important that we have things that, that we find inspiring. That you look to the future and say the future is going to be better than the past. Things to look forward to. And like, like kids are a good, a good way to assess this. Like what are kids fired up about? And if you could say, you know, you could, you know, you could be an astronaut on Mars. You could maybe one day go beyond the solar system. We could make Star Trek Starfleet Academy real. That is an exciting future. That is inspiring. You know, I mean you need things that move your heart, right?
Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. Let's do it.
I mean life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. There's got to be things that you look forward to as well.
Yeah. And do you think you might have to move it to a different jurisdiction to move faster?
I've always wondered if like rocket technology is considered an advanced weapons technology. So we can't just go do it,
you know, in Another country. Yes, in it, yeah. Interesting. And if we don't do it, other countries could do it. I mean, they're so far behind us. But theoretically there is a national security, you know, justification here. If somebody can put their thinking caps on, like do we want to have this technology that you're building the team's working so hard on stolen by other countries and then, you know, maybe they don't have as much red tape.
I wish people were trying to steal
so that no one's trying to steal it. It's just too, this is too crazy, basically.
And that's for you. Yeah, it's way too easy.
All-In Host
Elon, what do you think is going on that led to Boeing building the Star Line the way that they did? They were able to get it up,
All-In Host
But can't complete.
And now understand you're going to have
All-In Host
to go up and finish.
Well, I mean, I think Boeing is a company that is, they actually do so much business with the government. They have sort of impedance match to the government. So they're like basically one notch away from the government. Maybe they're not far from the government from an efficiency standpoint because they derive so much of the revenue from the government. Now a lot of people think, well, SpaceX is super dependent on the government and actually no, most of our revenue is commercial.
And there's been, I think at least up until perhaps recently because they have a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory. And the CEO before that I think had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory and didn't know how airplanes flew. So I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and spacecraft go to orbit, then it can't be a total mystery as to how they work. So you know, I'm like, sure, if somebody's like running Coke or Pepsi and they're like great at marketing or whatever, that's, that's fine because you know, it's not a sort of technology dependent business, you know, or if they're running a, you know, financial consulting and their degrees in accounting, that makes sense. But I think, you know, if you're, if you're the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse.
Pretty basic. Yeah, yeah,
it's like, it's disconcerting if the cavalry captain just falls off the horse, you know, he's not going to inspire the team.
I'm sorry, I'm scared of horses.
Gets on backwards. I'm like, oops
All-In Host
shifting gears to AI. Peter was here earlier and he was talking about how so far the only company to really make money off AI is Nvidia with the chips. Do you have a sense yet of where you think the big applications will be from AI? Is it going to be an enabling self driving, Is it going to be enabling robots? Is it transforming industries? I mean it's still, I think early in terms of where the big business impact is going to be. Do you have a sense yet?
I mean, I think, I think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of, I mean it does run ahead of the revenue right now, there's no question about that. But the rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen by far. And it's, I mean like for example, a Turing test used to be a thing. Now your basic open source random LLM you're writing on a frigging Raspberry PI probably could, you know, beat the Turing test. So there's, I think actually the good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone can have whatever they want unless, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is a manufactured good or provided service will, I think with the advent of AI plus robotics that the cost of goods and services will be, will trend to zero. I'm not saying it'd be actually zero, but it'll be, everyone will be able to have anything they want. That's, that's the good future. Of course, you know, in my view that's probably 80 likely. So look on the bright side. Only 20 probability of annihilation. Nothing
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is the 20%. Like what does that look like?
I don't know, man. I mean, frankly, I do have to go engage in some degree of, of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI in order to sleep well and even then, because I, I, I, I think the actual issue, the, the most likely issue is like, well, how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do but better? That, that is, that is perhaps the bigger challenge. Although you know, at this point I know more and more people who are retired and they seem to enjoy that life. So, but I think that that may be, maybe there'll be some crisis of meaning, like because the computer can do everything you can do but better. So maybe that'll be a challenge. But, but really, you know, you need, you need the sort of end effectors, you need the autonomous cars and you need the sort of humanoid robots or general purpose robots. But once you have general purpose humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles, you really, you can build anything. And I think that there's no actual limit to the size of the economy. I mean there's obviously, you know, the mass of Earth, you know, like that will be alone one limit. But you know, the economy is really just the average productivity per person times number of people. That's the economy. And if you've, if you've got humanoid robots that can do, you know, where there's no real limit on the number of humanoid robots and, and they, they can operate very intelligently, then then there's no actual limit to the economy. And there's no meaningful limit to the economy.
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You guys just turned on Colossus, which is like the largest private compute cluster I guess, of GPUs anywhere.
It's the, it's the most powerful supercomputer of any kind.
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Which sort of speaks to what David said and kind of what Peter said, which is a lot of the kind of economic value. So far, baby AI has entirely gone to Nvidia. But there are people with alternatives and you're actually one with an alternative. Now you have a very specific case because Dojo is really about images and large images, huge video.
So yeah, I mean the potential problem is different from the, you know, the sort of LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence actually is actually. And then what matters in the AI is different to the point you just made, which is that in the, in Tesla's case the context length is very long. So we've got gigabytes of context context windows. Yeah, yeah, you've got, you know, sort of, I was just bringing it up kind of billions of tokens of context, not the amount of context. Because you've got seven, seven cameras. And if you've got several, you know, let's say you've got a minute of several high, high def cameras, then that's gigabytes. So you need to compress. So the Tesla problem is you've got to compress a gigantic context into the, the pixels that are, that actually matter and you know, and condense that over a time. So you've got, in both the time dimension, the space dimension, you've got to compress the pixels in space and the pixels in time and then have that inference done on a tiny computer, relatively speaking, a small, you know, a few hundred watts, a Tesla designed AI inference computer, which is by the way, still the best. There isn't a better thing we could buy from suppliers so the Tesla designed AI inference computer that's in the cars is better than anything we could buy from any supplier. Just by the way. That's kind of by the way. The Tesla AI Trip team is extremely
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good, you guys in the design. There was a technical paper and there was a deck that somebody on your team from Tesla published and it was stunning to me. You designed your own transport control, like layer over Ethernet. You're like, ah, Ethernet's not good enough for us. You have this TT COE or something and you're like, oh, we're just going to reinvent Ethernet and like string these chips. It's pretty incredible stuff that's happening over there.
Yeah, no, the team, the Tesla chip design team is extremely, extremely good. So.
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But is there a world where for example, other people over time that need you know, some sort of like video use case or image use case? Theoretically, you know, you'd say oh, why not? You know, I have some extra cycles over here, so we should kind of make you a competitor of Nvidia. It's not intentionally per se, but
I mean the, you know, there's this training and inference and we do have the, you know, those two projects at Tesla. We've got Dojo, which is the training computer and then you know, our inference chip which is in every, every car. Inference computer. So. And Dojo, we've only had Dojo 1. Dojo 2 is, you know, should be, we should have Dojo 2 in volume towards the end of next year. And, and that, that, that will be, we think sort of comparable to
of a B200 type system, a training system. And you know, so there's, I guess there's some potential for, for that to be used as a service. But like Dojo is just kind of like, I mean, I guess I have like some improved confidence in Dojo, but I think we won't really know how good Dojo is until probably version three. Like usually takes three major iterations on a technology for it to be, to be excellent. And we'll only have the second major iteration next year, the third iteration. I don't know, maybe late 26 or something like that.
How's the Optimus project going? I remember we talked last and you said this publicly that it's in doing some light testing inside the factory. Yeah, it's actually being useful. What's the build of materials and when, you know, for something like that at scale. So when you start making it like you're making the Model 3 now and there's a million of them coming off the factory line. What would that they cost? 20, 30, $40,000, you think?
Yeah, I mean what, I mean I've discovered really that you know, anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its, of its materials. So now there's, there's, I should say there's some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property and like paying for patents and stuff. So a lot of you know what, what's in a chip is like paying, paying royalties and depreciation of the chip. Fab. So, but the actual marginal cost of the chips is very low. So. So, so Optimus, it obviously is humanoid robot. It, it is, it weighs much less and it's much smaller than a car. So the, you could expect that in high volume. And I'd say that you also probably need three, three production versions of Optimus. So you need to refine the design three at least three major times. And, and then you need to scale production to sort of the million unit plus per year level. And I think at that point the cost, the, you know, the, the labor materials on Optimus is probably not much more than $10,000.
Yeah. And that's a decade long journey maybe.
Basically. Think of it like Optimus will cost less than a, a small car.
So at scale volume, with three major iterations of technology. And so if a small car, you know, costs $25,000, you know, it's probably like $20,000 for an optimist. For a humanoid robot that can be your, your body like a combination of R2, D2 and C3PO, but better. I mean, you know, that's, that's Honestly, I think people are going to get really attached to, to their humanoid robot because I mean like you look at sort of, you watch Star wars and it's like R2, D2 and C3. I love those guys, you know, they're awesome and their personality and I mean all R2 could do is just beep at you. Right. Guys couldn't speak English in C3PO to translate the beeps, you know.
So you're in year two of that. If you did two or three years per iteration or something, it's a decade long journey for this to hit some sort of scale.
And I, I would say mid major iterations are less than two years. So it's probably on the order of five years.
maybe six to get to a million units a year.
And at that price point everybody can afford one on planet Earth. I mean it's going to be that 1 to 1, 2 to 1. What do you think? Ultimately, if we're sitting here, in 30 years, the number of robots on the planet versus humans.
Yeah, I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans. I mean, you have to say, like, who. Who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. You know, this is like, especially if it can, you know. You know, it can take care of your. Take your dog for a walk. It could, you know, mow the lawn, it could watch your kids. It could, you know, like, it could teach your kids. It could.
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We could also send it to Mars.
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So we could send a lot of robots to Mars to do the work needed to make it a colonized planet for humans.
And Mars is already the robot planet. There's like a whole bunch of, you know, robots, like rovers and.
Helicopter. Yes, only robots. So, yeah, no, I think the sort of useful humanoid robot opportunity is the single biggest opportunity ever. Because if you assume like that, I mean, the ratio of humanoid robots to humans is going to be at least 2 to 1, maybe 3 to 1, because everybody, everybody will want one. And then there'll be a bunch of robots that you don't see that are making goods and services.
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And you think it's a general. One generalized robot that then learns how to do different tasks or.
Yeah, hey, I mean, we are a generalized. Yeah, we're a generalized. We're just made of meat, you know, we're a meatball. Yeah, I mean, I'm operating my meat puppet, you know, so. Yeah, we are actually. And by the way, it turns out, like, as we're designing Optimus, we sort of learn more and more about why humans are shaped the way they're shaped and, you know, and why we have five fingers and why your little finger is smaller than, you know, your index finger, you know, you know, obviously why you have opposable thumbs, but also why, for example, your. The muscles, the major muscles that operate your hand are actually in your forearm. And your fingers are primarily operated like the muscles that actuate your fingers are located. The vast majority of your finger strength is actually coming from your forearm. And your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings that. That's. And so the current version of the Optimus hand has the actuators in the hand and has only 11 degrees of freedom. So it can't. It's not. As. Doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, roughly 25 degrees of freedom. And it's also, like, not strong enough in certain ways, because the actuators have to fit in the hand. So the next generation Optimus hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm just like a human, and they operate the fingers through cables just like the human hand. And the next Generation hand has 22 degrees of freedom, which we think is enough to do almost anything that a human can do.
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And presumably, I think it was written that X and Tesla may work together and, you know, provide services, but my immediate thought went to, oh, if you just provide a grok to the robot, then the robot has a personality and can process voice and video and images and all of that stuff as we wrap here.
Yeah, I think, you know, everybody talks about all the projects you're working on, but people don't know. You have a great sense of humor.
Oh, you do, you do. People don't see it, but I would say. I know for me, the funniest week of my life, or one of the funniest was when you did SNL and we got.
I got to tag along. Maybe you saw it maybe behind the scenes, like some of your funniest recollections of that chaotic, insane week. When we laugh for 12 hours a day. It was a little terrorizing of the first couple days, but, yeah, I was
a bit worried in the beginning there because frankly, nothing was funny.
Rough. Yeah. So, I mean, it's like a rule.
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But can't you guys just say it? Just say the stuff that got on the cutting. The funniest skits were the ones that didn't let you do. That's what I'm saying.
Can you just. There were a couple of funny ones.
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Yeah. That they didn't let you do. You can say it so that he doesn't get.
I mean, how much time do we have here?
Well, we should just give one or two because it was in your mind. Which one do we regret most? Not getting on air?
You really want to hear that? I mean,
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I mean, it was a little spicy. It was a little funny.
All right, here we go, guys.
So one of the things that I think everyone's been sort of wondering this whole time, is Saturday Night Live actually live? Like live live live? Or do they have like a delay or, like, just in case, you know, there's a wardrobe malfunction or something like that? Is it like a, you know, truly live, 5 second delay? What's really going on? But there's a. There's A way to test this, right?
There's a way to test it, which is we don't tell them what's going on. I walk on and says, this is the script. I'll throw it on the ground. We're going to find out tonight right
now if Saturday Night Live.
Saturday Night Live is actually live. And the way that we're going to do this is I'm going to take my cock out.
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This is the greatest thing ever.
And if you see my cock, you know it's true. And if you don't, it's been a lie.
We're going to bust them right now.
Yeah, yeah. So we're pitching this on Zoom. Yeah, we're pitching this on Zoom. On, like, the Monday after, like. Yeah, we're like, kind of hungover for the weekend, and we're, like, pitching us. And it's. It's, you know, Jason's on, and Mike and. Yeah, and Mike, you know, so essentially got like. You know, my friends, I think, are sort of, you know, quite funny. You know, Jason's quite funny. I think, like. Like, Jason's the closest thing to Cartman that exists in the real. In real life,
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we have a joke going that he's Butters and I'm Cartman. Yeah.
So. And then my friend Mike's pretty funny too. So. So we. We come in like. Like, just like, guns blazing. Guns blazing with. With, like, ideas. And we didn't realize, like, actually, you know, that's not how it works.
that's normally, like, actors and they just get told what to do and, like, oh, right. You mean we can't just, like, do funny things that we thought of?
They're watching this. And on the zoom, they're a guest at pitch.
They're silent, like. So I'm like. And I'm like. And I was like, is this thing working?
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Is this. Are we muted?
And they're like, we hear you.
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Yeah. And then.
And then after a long silence, like Mike's. Mike just says the word crickets.
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And they're not laughing.
They're not gonna. Not even a chuckle. I'm like, what's going on?
Elon explains the punchline.
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Yes. Which is. Exactly.
So there's more to it. Okay. That's just the beginning.
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So then I'm. So.
Now I'm like, so. So. So I said, look, I'm. I'm gonna I'm going to reach down
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into my pants.
Into my pants. And I stick my hand in my pants, and I'm going to. And I'm. And I'm going to pull my cock. And I tell this to the audience. And the audience is going to be like, what? And then.
And then I pull out a baby rooster, you know?
And it's like, okay, this is kind of pg, you know, it's like that. Not that bad. It's like, this is my tiny cock. And. It's like, what do you think? And do you think it's a nice cock? I mean, I like it.
And then Kate McKinnon walks out.
And I'm like, oh, no. But you haven't heard happen. So Kate McKenna comes out.
And she says, elon expected you would have a bigger cock.
Yeah. I don't mean to disappoint you, Kate, but. Yeah. But I hope you like it. Anyway, Kate's got to come out with her cat. Okay.
So Kate says, you can see where this is going. And I say, nice. Wow, that's a nice pussy you've got there, Kate. Wow, that's amazing. It looks a little wet. Was it raining outside?
do you mind if I stroke your pussy? Is that cool? It's like, oh, no, Elon, actually, can I hold your cock? Of course, Kate. You definitely hold my cock. And then, you know, we exchanged, and I think just the audio version of this is pretty good.
And, you know, it's just like, wow, I really like stroking your cock. And I was like.
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And then Eli says, I'm really enjoying shrugging your.
Yes, of course. And, yeah. So, you know, they're looking at us
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like, oh, my God, what have we done, inviting these lunatics on the program.
They said like, well, it is Mother's Day.
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It's Mother's Day. We might not want to go with this.
A lot of moms in the audience, I'm like, well, that's a good point.
It might be a bit uncomfortable for all the moms in the audience. Maybe. I don't know.
I don't know. Maybe they'll dig it.
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That's the. That's the. That's the.
That's the cold open that didn't make it. We didn't get that on the air. But we did fight for Doge.
I mean, there's a bunch of things that I said that were Just not on the script. Like, they have these, like, cue cards for what you're supposed to say, and I just didn't say it. I just went off. Off the rails.
Yeah. They didn't see that coming.
Well, it's live. And so the Elon wanted to do Doge. This is the other one. He wanted to do Doge on late night. And he says, hey, Jake, Al, can you make sure.
Oh, yeah, I want to. Yeah, I want to do the Doge father. Like, you sort of redo the. You know, that scene from the. The Godfather. I mean, you kind of need the music to queue things up.
You bring me on my daughter's wedding this, and you ask for Doge.
Exactly. You really got to set the mood. You have to have a tuxedo and this whole sort of office. You got to, like, talk like Marlon Brown. Do. You come to me on this day of my do wedding and you ask
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me for your private keys?
Are you even a friend? You call me the Deutsche father.
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So. Buenos serra.
They had great potential. So they come to me, and I'm. I'm talking to Colin and Joe, who's got a great sense of humor, and he's amazing. He loves Elon. And he's like, we can't do it because of the law and stuff like that.
The law and liability. So I said, it's okay. Elon called Comcast and he put in an offer, and they just accepted it. So it's fine.
And Colin Jones looks at me so good, and he's like, you're serious? I'm like, yep, we own NBC now.
And he's like, okay, well, that kind of changes things, doesn't it? I'm like, absolutely. Where I go on Doge.
And then he's like, you're fucking with me. And I'm like, fucking with you.
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Or are we? It was the greatest week of.
And that, like, is, like, two of 10 stories.
We'll save the other eight.
But it was. And I was just so happy for you to see you have a great week of just joy and fun and letting go because you were launching rockets. You're dealing with so much bullshit in your life to have those moments, to share them and just laugh. It was just so great. More of those moments. I think we gotta.
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We gotta get you back on snl. Who wants to back on SNL One more time. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, our bestie, Elon Musk.