In Good Company April 8, 2024 Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norway's $1.6tn sovereign wealth fund, interviews Musk on AI, space, X and Mars, on leadership, speed and his "hardcore" work culture.
Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norway's $1.6tn sovereign wealth fund, interviews Musk on AI, space, X and Mars, on leadership, speed and his "hardcore" work culture.
Transcript Nicolai Tangen
Hi everyone and big thanks for taking the time. Elon, you know, we've been trying to get you on the podcast since we started it two years ago. So we are super pleased that we, that we have you on and indeed on your X platform. How cool.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean you have like lots of people from all around the world simultaneously do effectively a real time podcast and it works pretty well.
Nicolai Tangen
Very good. Well, we have so much to talk about. Love to kick off with with AI. Now, what's your take on where we are in the AI race just now?
Elon Musk
Wow, that's a long answer. There's so much happening and AI is the fastest advancing technology that I've ever seen of any kind. And I've seen a lot of technology. You know, barely a week goes by without some new announcement. So. And if you look at the amount of AI hardware, the computers coming online that are dedicated to AI, that is increasing, what looks like at least by a factor of 10 every year, if not every six to nine months. So when you combine the hardware coming online really order of magnitude increase every, you know, call at least every nine months. And many, many software breakthroughs. If you look at that, that curve, it looks insane. So I think we'll, my guess is that we'll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year. And then AI, the total amount of sort of sentient compute of AI, I think will probably exceed all humans in five years.
Nicolai Tangen
What is the race about just now? Is it algorithms? Is it people? Is it computing power? What is it about just now? Is it the supply of chips? Just what is it?
Elon Musk
Yeah, last year it was chip constrained and the hardware deployment to break it down into the three areas of people, data and hardware. Starting with hardware. Last year it was about a shift supply. People could not get enough Nvidia chips. Particularly this year it's starting to transition to a voltage transformer supply that actually getting enough voltage transformers put in place. So my sort of very niche joke is transformers for transformers because a lot of the AI that's run is called a transformer. So you need transformers to run transformers. And then next in the, if you look out a year or two or certainly three years, it's just electricity availability. So those were constraints on the hardware side. So many of the world's smartest people are doing AI. People that would have done physics before in fact, or have done physics, for example, have moved into AI because it's just the fastest moving field. So we're seeing a Lot of the best talent, a lot of the smartest humans going into AI and then we see along with that algorithmic breakthroughs and then, then you start hitting the, the wall with the data problem. So the, you know, you can fit all books ever written, just the text, the text in compressed form on one hard drive or they'll call it one computer. So when you're looking at like so called tokens to train on, because you still think of like all the books ever written in all languages by all humans, sounds like a lot. Certainly it's far more than any one human could ever read. It actually is a small number. It's a small number of training tokens. It's just not enough. So then you start having to look at all the videos that I've created, all the podcasts, all the everything,
Elon Musk
you start even running out of data there.
Nicolai Tangen
Well, hopefully they will include this podcast.
Elon Musk
Definitely will include this podcast.
Nicolai Tangen
What's the biggest challenge you have with xai?
Elon Musk
Well, XAI is still relatively new, so it's not, you know, like the limiting factor right now is just training our GROQ version 2 model, which should be, we think better than GPT4. And that's, we're hoping to complete that in May. So that's training right now. So it's just really, we're just trying to get enough GPUs online to train it fast enough to get that done in May, which I think probably will happen. And then, and that's with roughly 20,000 H1 hundreds and doing I think very efficient training. Then the next step would be for Grok 3, which would be, I guess G55 or beyond would, you know, requires 100,000 Nvidia H100s training coherently. So that's you know, a half order of magnitude basically more training. And then you really start to have running into this data problem where you, you have to either create synthetic data or use real world video. Those the two sources of kind of like unlimited data are synthetic data and real world video, which I should say Tesla has a pretty big advantage in real world video because it has by far the most real world video of anyone.
Nicolai Tangen
Yeah, you've got a huge library that. So when do you think. So when do you think we'll see proper AGI?
Elon Musk
Well, it depends on how you define AGI. If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it's probably end of next year, like, like within two years. But that's that there's still, there's still a pretty big leap beyond that, to say, smarter than the machine, augmented human collective. So is it smarter than all humans working together who are also using computers to augment their output? And that, I think, is probably five years away. One way to look at it is to try to assess, like, roughly what is the ratio of digital to biological computer.
Nicolai Tangen
Last question on AI. Any new thoughts on regulation and how it should be structured?
Elon Musk
Well, I think we probably do need some sort of regulatory authority to look at the safety of AI, just as we have regulatory authorities in other arenas to oversee aircraft and the safety of aircraft and cars and other things, medication.
Elon Musk
now the rate at which AI is progressing is faster than probably any regulatory agency can keep up with. But I do have a comment on what I think is very important for achieving safe AI, which is that it's very important to train the AI to be as truthful as possible and not to. Yeah, just to be as truthful as possible. I think you can get some very dangerous things when you program an AI to be politically correct. Things that may seem relatively innocuous now, but will not be so in the future. If AI has immense power, you can take the Google Gemini example, where it refused to publish to produce a picture of George Washington as a white man. And any, in fact, any historical figure would automatically be made diverse because it's been programmed to insist on diversity, which sounds perhaps okay at first, but not if the AI has so much power that it can actually enforce diversity and decide there's too many of one kind of people or too many of one sex and kill off, just, just kill off enough until the diversity number is. Is what is programmed to believe is correct.
Nicolai Tangen
But don't you think this will be sorted out in the next version?
Elon Musk
No, no, they'll make it more subtle.
Elon Musk
And less obvious, but it will still be there.
Nicolai Tangen
Okay, well, we'll see. But where is China? Where do you. Where is China now relative to the US
Elon Musk
I don't know exactly where China is, except that there are a lot of very smart people in China and they won't be far behind the rest of the world or far behind the U.S. i mean, AI right now is very concentrated in San Francisco and London. And then, you know, there's, you know, a lot happening in China, but I don't have insight into what they're doing except that I'm confident they will not be far behind what is developed in the west. So. But mark my words, if we do not program an AI to be as truthful as possible, that that is where it will go. Awry. That is where the danger lies.
Nicolai Tangen
Moving tack here, moving to Tesla. Is the EV conversion now going slower than you had expected? Just where is the speed of conversion now relative to your expectations?
Elon Musk
I think it's going quite fast actually. Especially in Norway.
Nicolai Tangen
Absolutely. Well, it's pretty much all there is is your Teslas.
Elon Musk
Yeah, there's a lot of Teslas in Norway. It's crazy. I once again like to thank Norway for the support of electric vehicles. So much appreciated. So, and I think it's we will the that electric that all vehicles will go fully electric. It's only a matter of time. That includes aircraft ultimately and boats obviously, trains. The only thing that is ironically difficult to where you can't really make it electric is rockets because you need, you can't get away from having to expel mass. Sort of Newton's third law. But all cars will be electric. It's only a matter of time. And we'll look back on combustion cars in the same way that we look at back on steam engines, that it was inevitable that there would be internal combustion cars and that and it's just as inevitable that all cars will go electric and there will be some ebb and you know, so like going to be a completely straight up line. There will be some ebb and flow in how, like how far electric cars go. But that, but the ultimate victory of electric cars is inevitable. And I think the sooner we get there the better.
Nicolai Tangen
How do you see the Chinese competition here now?
Elon Musk
We generally find that the companies in China are the most competitive in the world and certainly in electric vehicles or cars in general. The Chinese car companies are by far the most competitive. Yeah, that's where we find the most toughest, toughest competitive challenges. They make great cars and they work very hard.
Nicolai Tangen
So when you ride in one of the Chinese cars, what do you think? I mean you're an engineer, you know, what about it? What do you, what do you think?
Elon Musk
I haven't written, I have not ridden in one lately. But because they're not all available here, you know, in the U.S. very few are available in the U.S. some are available in Europe but from what my team tells me they are very good.
Nicolai Tangen
Moving, moving out in space. What would it take to be self sufficient at Mars?
Elon Musk
To be self sufficient on Mars? It's really about the total tonnage that is delivered to the surface of Mars. So you can say like, well,
Elon Musk
think it's probably on the order of a million tons, maybe more. But somewhere between probably a million tons and 10 million tons are needed to make Mars itself sufficient.
Nicolai Tangen
And how many rockets is that?
Elon Musk
Well, I gave a presentation on this recently, if you've looked at my recent SpaceX talk. But if you, if you have 100, really, if you have 100 tons per flight, you need 10,000 flights to get to a million million tons and that's 100 tons landed to the surface of Mars. So in order to get 100 times land to the surface of Mars, you need 505 times that number in Earth orbit. So we do a lot of orbital refilling, so launching sort of rockets, tanker ships over and over again. That, that would replenish the propellant of the ships that would go to Mars and then you'd need roughly on order of 10,000 of them to get to a million tons. And but we, we plan to do that, that we're, that's, that's what we think we can get that done within 20 years, really.
Nicolai Tangen
So, and when do you think, so when do you think we'll be there for the first time?
Elon Musk
First, first. Well, the first starship that will land on Mars, which obviously would not have people at first, I think it's probably within about five years. And then it would probably launch several ships and just confirm that they can land okay on Mars. We'll also be doing the moon simultaneously with that. So taking, I think, I think we'll get people back to the moon, I should say within five years and we'll get uncrewed ships landed on Mars within five years. And then we'll be building up the production rate and improving the design of the booster and the ship. So in the first people on Mars, I think within seven years or so, seven to nine years. And from, from there we need to rapidly increase. We need massive numbers of ships going and Earth and Mars only are in the same quadrant of the solar system roughly for six months every two years or at least it's only possible to really transfer efficiently from Earth to Mars. I say every six months, but really there's about a couple months where, where it's ideal every 26 months. So every two years that you would see a, basically a fleet depart Mars. I think it'd be quite a spectacular thing to see a thousand ships depart from Mars all at once like Battlestar Galactica.
Nicolai Tangen
What kind of new technology do we need before we'll be self sufficient there?
Elon Musk
Actually I think we have all the tech we already know all the technology that's necessary for that. It just needs, we just need to build. No new physics is needed for this.
Nicolai Tangen
Why is it so important for you,
Elon Musk
I think it's important for consciousness in general. So if we wish to maximize the lifespan of consciousness, then being a multi planet species will result in a much longer existence of consciousness than if we are on one planet. If you're on one planet, we're simply biding our time until there's eventually a calamity. It could be soon, it could be a long time, but eventually something will happen. It could be global thermonuclear war. It could be simply that civilization merely subsides. Our civilization may not die with a bag, it may die with a whimper, just gradually falling into obsolescence. But if we're a multi planet species, then we've got two planets and they can support each other. And we can go beyond two planets, ultimately to the moons of Jupiter, to the, to the beyond, to the outer parts of the solar system, and ultimately to other star systems. So this tiny candle of consciousness that we have in this vast darkness can be extended and amplified and we're just far more likely to survive. As for consciousness to survive, if we are multi planet species, you don't think
Nicolai Tangen
it'd be better to use all these resources and try to sort out Earth?
Elon Musk
Well, just to put this into perspective, the amount of resources I'm talking about for making life multi planetary will be less than 1% of all resources on Earth. So really you can think of it as resource allocation. Do you think it's worth spending half a percent of Earth resources to ensure that we have redundancy in consciousness and that we extend consciousness beyond Mars to other planets? To Mars and other planets and ultimately other star systems? And then also take into account the fact that there are certain inevitable, there's certain things we simply cannot avoid on Earth. Like is it within your power of mine to stop World War iii? I don't think so, no. If it happens and if we have global thermonuclear warfare, our technology level will drop to the stone age and we may never survive. And then there are, we maybe get, we may get hit by a comet like the dinosaurs. And if the dinosaurs had spaceships, they'd probably still be around. And then if you wait long enough, the Earth, the sun will continue to expand and eventually in engulf Earth and destroy it and destroy all life. So just given a certain amount of time, no matter what you do on Earth, no matter how careful you are, all life on Earth will die. That it will happen is a certainty.
Nicolai Tangen
On a slightly less gloomy note, X Twitter.
Nicolai Tangen
What is your vision now? How do you see the vision of
Elon Musk
X, our goal of X is to be the best source of truth on the Internet. And I think we're making a good progress there. I mean, I call it Everything App. Like anything you want to do, you can do on the X platform, whether it's text, audio, video, payments, financial stuff, communications of all kinds. And then, but then also where there's publicly disseminated information just to be the best source of truth. And I think, I think it already is that. Now people may say, oh, there's some piece of misinformation. Disinformation. I say, yes, but look, look at the replies, the replies correct that misinformation and look at community notes and how good the batting average of community notes is. It's extremely good. It's by far the best fact checking system on the Internet. So. And a lot of people still labor under the illusion that the legacy newspapers that they read are actually true. There's so much nonsense in them. I mean, Nico, how many times when do you read an article in newspaper where you know the circumstances of what that article is and how often is it spot on?
Nicolai Tangen
No, of course it's normally. No, no, of course we all know it's normally wrong. But, but how do you look at. Not sure, but how do you look at the situation now, for instance, with, with Russia? You know, the work Russia does in Germany with fake accounts on, it's pretty, pretty huge activity. Right?
Elon Musk
I mean, we don't see a lot of Russian activity, to be frank, on the system. So we, we see very little. We do, we do see a lot of, lot of temps to influence things, but they seem to be coming from, from the west, not from Russia.
Nicolai Tangen
Right. What about, what about things like the latest developments in, in Brazil and so on?
Elon Musk
Sure, yeah. So the, the, we kept getting these demands from this judge, Alexander, that's his name, on Twitter, Lexander. And there would be to suspend accounts immediately. We were given typically two hours to suspend an account or face massive fines. And the final straw is we were being given demands to suspend sitting, sitting members of the parliament and major journalists. And moreover, we could not tell them that this was at the behest of Alexander Morales. We had to pretend that it was due to our rules of service and that was the final straw. And we said no.
Nicolai Tangen
Now, when you, when you bought Twitter, now renamed X, did you expect that you would end up in these type of situations or is this all unexpected?
Elon Musk
Well, I knew it wouldn't be just a total bed of roses, you know, and it's okay, I wouldn't. No. I mean, I thought it would be since we're just like rigorously trying to pursue the goal of being the most accurate and truthful place on the Internet and that that doesn't mean that what is said is always true or accurate, but it is perhaps another way to frame it is as the least inaccurate place on the Internet.
Nicolai Tangen
Do you secretly, do you secretly think this is a bit fun?
Elon Musk
It's fun, yeah. Yeah, it's fun at times, it's stressful at times, and it's fun at times. But overall, we're trying to serve the people of Earth. And this is sort of an esoteric, sort of, maybe an esoteric way of viewing it, but to try to be kind of like the group consciousness of Earth. So you can think of like, if each person is like a neuron contributing to like the collective brain of Earth and you want to try to minimize the noise and maximize the signal of every neuron that's connected to the X network, that's basically what is the collective will of humanity and how to. Yeah, just serve the collective will of humanity and serve the greater good. That's our goal. Now there's definitely going to be people who want to manipulate that information. And so we have to fight that and try to have it be the most accurate place to the best of our ability and have it be kind of a marketplace of ideas where people can propose ideas and, you know, debate them. And I think so far it's working reasonably well in that regard. Now people that don't like the truth will not like X. Or if they want to manipulate things, they will not like it.
Nicolai Tangen
So, but only, but only a few years ago you were, you were a guy producing electric vehicles. Now you are, you know, through Starlink, you've had some, you know, I mean, some big impact in, in Ukraine with Twitter. You are kind of into some issues in, you know, Brazil, India, Turkey. You know, you're becoming like a real geopolitical force and a really important one. How do you, how do you look at that?
Elon Musk
Well, like I said, I'm really take the set of actions that maximize the probability that the future is good. I mean, we have to keep civilization going onward and upward as much as possible and try to minimize the civilizational threats that occur. Like, you know, we can't get to Mars if civilization collapses. It's not going to happen. So, you know, we've got to keep civilization going. And I think we should view our civilization as being much more fragile than we think we kind of take for granted. Oh, it's always going to be there. But actually, if you study history, you realize that there arise, you know, there's rise and fall to civilizations. I mean, I was reading in depth about the ancient Sumerians, who were arguably the first civilization, if you call civilization like writing and stuff. You know, they were the first to develop writing, but eventually they died out and they were gone, and then nobody could read the writing at all, and they just faded out as a civilization. But they're pretty impressive in their time. And the ancient Egyptians, the same thing and sort of one after another. Ancient Greek had a, Greece had a stay, China and India had. Will have incredibly impressive populations. But there's been ebbs and flows in the China and Indian civilizations over the aeons, the millennia as well. So, you know, I guess I'm just trying to take this set of the steps that increase the scope and scale of consciousness. That's what I'm trying to do. It's not that I'm trying to have a. Put a political thumb on the scale or anything like that, but I think I'm trying to have the political will go where the people want it to go.
Nicolai Tangen
You mentioned some, some really smart people here and kind of just moving tack a bit here to corpor culture. Now you manage a lot of geniuses in your, in your companies. What is the key to manage really smart people? You think?
Elon Musk
I don't. I don't think I manage smart people. They manage themselves,
Elon Musk
Well, I guess with really smart people, you know, I don't really think of it like managing them. I think that if somebody is very smart and talented, they can go anywhere and do anything anytime. Like, if they think they don't have to work with me, they could go anywhere. So I really just say, like, look, this is the goal we're after, and this is what we're trying to achieve. And do you agree with this goal? And if you do, then let's try to get it done and, you know, provide my opinion along the way. And once in a while I say, look, guys, just got to trust me on, on this one. We got to do this thing. And if it turns out to be a bad decision, you can all hold that against me in the future.
Nicolai Tangen
But you have an incredible eye for detail, right? I mean, when we read the Isaacs book, it's pretty clear that you, I mean, you really are deep into detail and know what you talk about. So how do you. How do you balance this kind of micromanagement of some areas and then delegate other areas?
Elon Musk
I Wouldn't call it micromanagement. It's just insisting on attention to detail that if you're trying to make a perfect product, you must have attention to details. Essential. And I haven't actually read the Isaacson book.
Nicolai Tangen
You should. It's very good actually. I love it.
Elon Musk
Well, I, I asked Walter Isaacson if I should read it and he said I shouldn't. So so then.
Nicolai Tangen
Well, okay, so then he said I shouldn't read it. So. Okay, well I'll, I'll ask you some questions from the book then. They. You, he talks about, you know, you the kind of a hardcore and ultra hardcore culture. What is an ultra hardcore culture? I guess it's work. I mean it's working culture, right? I mean how, I mean ultra hard work. How hard is that?
Elon Musk
Well, when things get really intense, you're basically just working every waking hour.
Nicolai Tangen
And how long can you do that for?
Elon Musk
I've done that for continuously for sometimes like a few years.
Nicolai Tangen
What does it, what does it do to you?
Elon Musk
It really, it's pain. And every waking hour maybe is an exaggeration because there are a few hours obviously with friends and family and critical other things. But 100 hour weeks would be, I've done many, many stretches of 100 hour weeks like true 100 hour weeks where roughly 6 hours per day is sleeping. I would not recommend that. This is not, that's for emergencies. You know, it's not all the time. You know, during very difficult times at Tesla I've had to do that. And sometimes at the beginning of my earlier startups I did that where I just wouldn't leave the office. I would just sleep under my desk and just work seven days a week. Sometimes it's necessary for success or to avoid failure.
Nicolai Tangen
But do you enjoy being in this crisis mode?
Elon Musk
No, I don't. It sucks.
Elon Musk
No, I don't want to be there. That's pain. But sometimes it's the difference between success and failure.
Nicolai Tangen
When you make decisions, how important is speed?
Elon Musk
He just gave me an idea which is I'm going to invite the judge, Alexander Raleigh to do a spaces and then he can explain why what I'm doing is bad. And maybe he's right. I challenge, I challenge him to a spaces.
Nicolai Tangen
Sounds good. Yeah, but what about you? When you make, when you make decisions, how important is speed? And how do you, how do you balance analysis with your gut feeling?
Elon Musk
I think the, the best offense and defense is speed. If you think of something like the SR71 Blackbird, it really had almost no defenses except accelerate and it was never shot down even once. Like I think over 3,000 missiles were shot at the SR71 Blackbird and none hit. And, and really what it did was just go faster. So the, the power of speed is underappreciated as a competitive dimension.
Nicolai Tangen
Is that why, you know, SpaceX for instance, has been so successful? Because you've been mean and lean as an organization and fast?
Elon Musk
I think speed is definitely a factor. Now I should say you want to go, in the case of a company you'd, you need to be a vector, not a scalar. So it can't be. You need to go at high speed in the right direction.
Elon Musk
So can't just so. And no company is going to be going in the right direction all the time. So you have to do course corrections like a guided missile recorded course corrections. And, but in the case of SpaceX, it's like, okay, our goal is to extend humanity beyond Earth and we didn't even know how to even frame the question correctly. Like what? We just knew that that was the general goal. We didn't know what propellant would use or what the raw materials would be, or how would the rocket be built, how would it be designed, what's actually important. And you know, so for example, going from our Falcon architecture, which is, uses refined jet fuel and liquid oxygen in
Elon Musk
open cycle gas generator architecture engine, to Starship, which is a liquid methane, liquid liquid oxygen propellant in a staged combustion, very high pressure engine. That's a big architectural change. But we didn't know that we needed to make that architectural change until we were pretty far down the road, like about halfway. It took us about 10 years to figure out that was even the right architecture. Now we're confident it is just we
Nicolai Tangen
were on risk taking and so on. I think SpaceX is one of the best example I know about what we call failing. Well, right. Learning from mistakes and moving on. What generally, how do you, how do you look at mistakes? Well, I mean, which ones do you tolerate and which ones don't you tolerate?
Elon Musk
Well, I think, I don't really think of that way. You know, the first three flights of SpaceX failed, the fourth one succeeded and if the fourth one had not succeeded, we would have gone bankrupt, we would have had no money left. So it was very close call. But since then SpaceX has done very well. It's now the Falcon 9, you know, knock on wood, is the most reliable rocket in the world and launches about every two to three days.
Nicolai Tangen
Now, last question on risk, what are the types of risk you would not want to take.
Elon Musk
Well, I think in terms of risks, you don't want to take risks that you only want to take bet the company risks if they're absolutely necessary. So there have been a few times where, say, with Tesla, we just had no choice but to vet the company because if we're doing a new vehicle program that is an order of magnitude larger than the past one, then we're just unequivocally betting the company because the new vehicle would be 90% of production. So going from the original roadster to the Model S original roadster was only about606,700 per year. Then Model S was 20,000 per year. And then Model 3 is sort of half, sort of half a million per year. Model Y, over a million per year. So these are all bet the company vehicles. But the reason we could do, for example, the Cybertruck, which was kind of a radical new design, was because it wasn't about the company decision. So I was like, okay, look, let's try something. I want to try something totally crazy. It's like what truck would Blade Runner
Nicolai Tangen
drive except the one you're going to drive on Mars?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think it would be perfect for Mars. But like, we could try something that, where there's some chance that people might not like it, but it's radical and new and it's aesthetically, it's not derivative. It doesn't look like anything else on the road. Whereas all the other sort of pickup trucks look like vague copies of one another there. We could afford to take a chance on failure and say like, and chalk it up to, you know, well, we tried, you know, we tried to do something interesting but, but actually, by the way, Cybertruck's doing great. So. But one of the things that I think is important for innovation is that you do accept failure like, like necessarily. You have to always look at the incentive structure of an organization and say, you know, is it is that is an organization properly incenting and innovation and in. Within, if you do innovation, you're necessarily going to uncharted territory. So there are going to be some mistakes, there are going to be some failures and you have, you have to like, like actually like for, for SpaceX rocket engine development, like I keep telling the team, look, if we're not occasionally blowing up an engine on the test stand, we're not trying hard enough. You know.
Nicolai Tangen
Absolutely. How important are the, how important is research and PhDs and that kind of stuff? I think I've said seen somewhere you think most PhDs are useless.
Elon Musk
Well, I think most PhD theses are useless, which I think is actually objectively true. If you look at how many PhD you look at all, how many PhDs are created every year and how many of those papers are actually used in anything.
Elon Musk
Then objectively most PHDCs are, have very low utility or maybe zero because nobody uses them or so once in a while you get something that is spectacular, but it's pretty rare.
Nicolai Tangen
Perhaps something more useful. Isaacson, in the book that you haven't read talks about your love for gaming in particular like strategic ability gaming. And I've been thinking quite a lot about it. What have you learned from those games? And have that learning and wisdom been helpful when you have been planning your companies?
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's hard to say exactly what I've learned from video games, except that I do like playing video games. As if I want to take my mind off work. I will typically play a very hard video game.
Nicolai Tangen
Such as which one?
Elon Musk
Well, over the years there's been many, many different video games. So you know, when I was a little kid it was like, you know, Pong and the little tank games and things and. But if you take a game like for example, Civilization, it's actually quite a good. It tells you how civilizations are formed. Like I remember playing the original civilization, playing the technology tree and, and how you invent different things. You'd like, invent literacy and you know, invent democracy and invent gun, gunpowder, all these things like, and you start to realize, oh wow, there are stages to technology. Like you can't, you know, you can't actually get to democracy without literacy. And you know, so there's these stages of technology development or stages of ideas that, you know, that's a helpful framework for a company. And I guess like I say in recent years there's a game I played that was actually developed in Sweden called Polytopia, which is actually quite a good game. A lot of people like playing chess, but I think chess is not a great. There's not a lot of transfer learning from chess to the real world because in chess you've got only 64 squares. It's a set piece battle, same pieces every time. There are no terrain differences, there's no technology tree, there's no fog of war. But say a game like Polytopia has all of those things. Random terrain generation, differences in attack and defense bonuses depending on what type of terrain. You've got 16 tribes, I think, each with different abilities. You've got a technology tree that you can choose to develop in different ways and you've got of course Fog of War. So that I think is much more, much closer to reality. So I think Polytopia. I mean I was playing Diablo for a while. Pretty fun. Diablo as high levels gets very complicated. You could call it like a spreadsheet with a game attached. And I briefly got for about a day the world record in this abattoir of zier on a four person team of clearing the hardest level, which was not bad for someone who's like 53. Basically will be 53 soon. There is still some twitch element to it and it's hard to beat kids at games with a twitch element. But yeah, I like, I find these games interesting if you can be fully immersed in a game.
Nicolai Tangen
Some last questions here. As you know we are big shareholders and made a model a lot of money on our investment. Okay, I can hear you here.
Elon Musk
Okay, good, sounds good. Good to go. Sorry, I can, I think everyone can hear me. Let's see. Thumbs up if you can hear me.
Nicolai Tangen
Let's try again.
Elon Musk
Okay. Okay, sounds good, Sounds good.
Nicolai Tangen
Now what is the score now on in terms of the union in Sweden and the collective bargaining?
Elon Musk
Actually, I think the storm has passed on that front. I think things are in reasonably good shape in Sweden. So yeah, I think things are good. Overall. Yeah, I feel pretty good about the future. I mean, you know, there's going to be bumpy quarters from, you know, here and there, but I think the long term future of Tesla is extremely strong. For example.
Nicolai Tangen
Yeah, I'm back on just. So, yeah, we met with, we met with your chair last month. So we, we have some update, but any, any view on it. Why are you, why, why are you skeptical to collect?
Elon Musk
Just playing with the soundboard here. Hello.
Nicolai Tangen
Yeah, last question for me. Sorry, I didn't have the answer here because I was out. But we have covered this with, with your chair. But just last question here. What do you want your legacy to be?
Elon Musk
I don't, I don't mind if my legacy is accurate or inaccurate, provided that I die feeling that I've done the right thing for the future of consciousness. So just trying to have this light of consciousness last as long as possible and maybe understand more about the nature of the universe or simulation or whatever this is. So I have a philosophy of curiosity which is to understand the. Understand the universe, understand the nature of the universe or even what questions to ask. Kind of like the artist. I would subscribe to the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guides of the Galaxy school of philosophy that we're trying to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.
Nicolai Tangen
Okay. I think that's a good place to end. For sure. The life on this planet would have been a lot more boring without you.
Elon Musk
I'm glad to spice it up a little.
Elon Musk
All right, well, it's good talking.
Nicolai Tangen
Fine. Take care now.