Twitter All-Hands June 16, 2022 Full audio of Musk's first all-hands Q&A with Twitter employees, fielding questions on free speech, bots, layoffs and remote work amid the acquisition.
Full audio of Musk's first all-hands Q&A with Twitter employees, fielding questions on free speech, bots, layoffs and remote work amid the acquisition.
Transcript All right. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining this special Q and A session with Elon. Elon, thank you so much for joining us. The company has been so eager to hear from you live and direct, and we all appreciate you joining us today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Glad to be able to speak to everyone. And since we started late, I'm going to go right ahead, hand it over to Leslie so that she can moderate this Q and A session for us. Okay, Sounds good.
Moderator
Amazing. Thanks, Parag. Hi, Elon. We have a lot to cover, a ton to cover. So I am going to ask you a question that usually gets asked at the end, which is, will you come back for a part two at some point if there are things that we don't cover?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. What happened?
Moderator
Okay, great. Okay. So you have some breathing room. So I really do see this at the beginning of a conversation, obviously with the company at large and then also with teams and leaders over the next coming weeks and months and beyond. So we're just getting started. Okay. So I'm going to zoom all the way out to the reason that we're actually here together today, and that is because you love Twitter.
I love Twitter, yes. I want to be clear about that. I love Twitter. In fact, I literally have tweeted, I love Twitter.
Moderator
You have. So tell us, say more. Why do you love Twitter? And also, why did you. And do you want to buy Twitter?
Well, let's see. I find, like, I learn a lot from what I read on Twitter and what I see and the pictures, videos, text, and memes that people create. I also find it's a great way to get a message out. If I want to say something or make an announcement, I think Twitter is the best way to do that. It just goes out immediately to everyone. And, you know, I sort of made this joke already, but, you know, some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter.
you know, I find it's, yeah, the best form for communicating with a lot of people simultaneously and getting that message directly to people. You know, in the past, you'd have to. In order. In order for somebody to reap. Read about something, you have to issue a press release or. And then you hope that the regular media would write about the press release and then they wouldn't write about it in quite the way you'd like to write about it. I always find those, like, the old style press release is kind of oddly, like really quite strange because you're like writing a press release about yourself, which is sort of something that the media. It's like, it's some overly flattering, it's like vaguely sort of, you know, propagandist, in fact, quite propagandist, and then hope that the media writes something favorable, which they usually do not. And, you know, I think that that actually is maybe one of the biggest reasons for me using Twitter is so I can talk, I can communicate directly with people and not through the lens of the media. And you know, I think there's obviously an important role for the media to play, but as anyone knows who reads the newspaper, it's coming through quite a negative lens. So, you know, they have to say, how many newspaper articles do you read that are positive? And how many news articles do you read that are negative? What percentage are positive? What percentage are negative? And then when you read about, you know, it's obviously overwhelmingly negative. And then when you, when you read about something in newspaper data term in the news that you where you actually personally understand the situation, how many times have the media gotten it right? I would say almost never. Not never, but almost never. So, you know, this is a way for people to communicate directly with each other and not through a negative lens. And I think that's extremely important for the world. So I'm sort of going waxing on about this, but I think it's pretty important. And you know, some of my comments about Twitter being sort of like a digital town square, but really much more than that because you can't put that many people in town square, but you can have communicate with millions of people on Twitter. That's just an incredibly important thing. And I think it's essential for a functioning democracy to function well. I think it's essential to have free speech and for. And to be able to communicate. Yeah, just communicate freely. Now the, you know, the free speech stuff, this needs to be, you know, it's free speech within the context of the law. So I'm not definitely not suggesting that we, you know, just flout the law because we'll get shut down in that case. And, and I think there's also, there's freedom of speech and freedom of reach. And you know, freedom of speech is one thing because, you know, like, anyone could just go into the middle of Times Square right now and say anything they want. They can just walk into the middle of Times Square and deny the Holocaust. Okay, yes, stop them. They will just do that. But that doesn't mean you have to. That needs to be promoted to millions of people. So. So I think people should be allowed to say, you know, pretty outrageous things that are within the bounds of the law. But then they don't, you know, doesn't get amplified. It doesn't get, you know, a ton of reach. And I think an important goal for Twitter would be to try to include as much of the country, as much of the world as possible. So currently, you know, it's a. It's a relatively small percentage of the world that is. It is a small percentage of what that is on Twitter. If you say, like daily active users, assume that that's say 200 million. You've got 8 billion people on earth, that's 7.8 billion who are not on Twitter. So that's a pretty big number. And really, I think you want as many, as much of the world as possible on Twitter. You want to be as inclusive as possible, the broadest demographic. And for that to happen, people must like being on Twitter. So if they're being, like, harassed or if they're uncomfortable, they're just not going to use Twitter. And they're, you know, so, you know, we have to sort of strike this balance of, you know, allowing people to say what they want to say, but also making people comfortable on Twitter when they simply won't use it. It will be, you know, I know it'll be sort of quite niche,
I think there's also a lot of. A lot that should be done in terms of enhancing the core technology and offerings of Twitter. Like right now, if somebody does say a video, like let's say a content creator does a video, then they're going to put that video on YouTube and just put a link to it from Twitter, because they're able to monetize their content on YouTube, but not on. On Twitter. And I think it's going to be really important for if you want people to put the content on Twitter, which we do, then there has to be a mechanism for content creators to monetize that content. And so they could do a poster, they could post it to YouTube and to Twitter. But I think it's crazy right now that content creators will use Twitter to drive traffic to their YouTube video, because that's how they make a living. And that really should be on Twitter. We want to basically address the reasons that people, like, why aren't more people using Twitter? And why do people click away from Twitter? And if we can address those reasons, then they'll use Twitter more and they'll get greater value from service. And. And, you know, if I, you know, think of like, like WeChat in China, which is actually a great, great app, but there's no WeChat equivalent in. Outside of China. And I think that there's a real opportunity to create that sort of, you know, you basically live on WeChat in China, so. Because it's so useful and, you know, so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we achieve that or even get close to that with Twitter, be an immense success, hopefully. That is just, you know, really went on there. But. And I'm happy to elaborate on any of those points.
Moderator
Yeah, no, it's great. And we're going to get a little bit deeper on free speech and policy a little bit later. So I do want to come back to this, actually. But in terms of you clearly have a lot of thoughts around sort of the problems that with Twitter, the things that aren't working well or sort of the barriers to what's possible. How do you see your buying the company? Does that sort of feed your desire to buy the companies? Or how do you see these things sort of coming together and what's your thought process around that? Well,
there's definitely an ongoing challenge with Twitter with, with bot. Bot accounts and spam accounts. You know, there's still quite a lot of crypto scams on Twitter. It's gotten a lot, it's gotten better, but there's still a fair bit of that. There are also people where they're not necessarily bots, but they might be operating, you know, one person's operating hundreds of accounts and trying to make, trying to make them look like individuals, but they're not. So, you know, I think it's. And I'm kind of reiterating stuff that I said publicly, but in fact on Twitter, in order for people to have trust in Twitter, I think it's extremely important that there be transparency. So that's why I'm an advocate of having the algorithm be open source so that people can critique it, that improvers identify bugs potentially, or bias. But when it's transparent, transparency obviously increases trust. So I think it's just very important like that anything that's happening on an automated basis be open source and be clear. And that if there is any action taken by someone within Twitter to deep boost or deboost or something with a tweet, that it's just very clearly identified on the tweet. So people aren't ascribing to malice that which is not where there's no malice.
But when it's inscrutable, then people don't know what to think and they will sometimes think the worst when that's actually not True. So I think that trust is extremely important and that just for the usefulness of the system, getting rid of sort of troll farms and bots and spam is incredibly important. I mean I have a quote in this regard which I think might work which is to, you know, there's currently this Twitter Blue, but if you're in Twitter Blue, it doesn't, your identification in the system does not change at all. Like you still look like a normal user id. But I think if there was like a little, you know, Twitter Blue authenticated, not like authenticated like a celebrity, but authenticated at least by Twitter Blue payments, just using the piggybacking on the payment system to do authentication, then I think a lot of people were like, okay, that's pretty helpful to have some designation that respects my name. That in the case I'm probably not a bot or spam or one of one person who's operating 100 accounts and you know, that's like three bucks a month I believe. I think that would be pretty helpful. And then, and then also prioritizing comments and you know, mentions and whatnot by who is verified in this broader sense the word of verification in the sense of, you know, the put a blue verified and just prioritize like that about someone who's not, not verified. So there will still be full read access to the system, still be full write access to the system. But, but, but you essentially any, any tweets or actions will be prioritized according to who's, who's verified and then, and then a very large number of people can be verified.
Moderator
I'm going to have a couple of follow up questions on this specifically but given you mentioned trust, I wanted to ask one of the employee questions around trust. They said Twitter has a lot of incredible, smart, talented people. What can we do to earn your trust and what are you going to do to earn ours?
You know, I think, I don't know trust is as trust does. So you know, the I tend to be extremely literal in what I say. So, you know, aspiration one does not need to read between the lines. One can simply read the lines. And so the things that I've said about Twitter I think need to happen in order for it to be, you know, to really go to the next level. I mean, I think like the potential is there for Twitter to have and you know, be accessible to an order of magnitude more people and for a lot more people to find it useful. Not you know, currently, I guess it would be 4 or 4% of the world or something. Like that. Otherwise, 4 or 5% of the world optimistically, is finding Twitter useful. And, like, maybe 50% of the world could find Twitter useful. So I want to take whatever actions would lead to that. And, you know, the, you know, I'm very much like, it's. I wouldn't say it's necessarily a trust thing. It's like, if somebody's getting useful things done, then that's great, but if they're not getting useful things done, then, like, okay, why at the company? So it's, it's really just like, we need to improve the core technology, improve the design and,
Moderator
you know, so trust emerges from that.
Yeah, I mean, trust, yes. It's not, like I say, trust is not the. It's not exactly the. It's. It's like, you know, if somebody's getting stuff done, great, I love them. And if they're not, I don't like them. I do not love them. It's pretty straightforward.
Moderator
I would love to stay on this topic of employees and how we work. So distributed work is something that has been core to our strategy. Most of our people work in a hybrid model. About 1500 people work remote full time. We know that you recently made sense of communication to Tesla executives about remote work. Can you share what your point of view is on remote work and specifically for Twitter?
Yeah. So now Tesla makes cars and you cannot make cars remotely, obviously. You have to make cars in a big factory and the supply chain and, you know, and you have to bring in the parts and, you know, assemble them and then transport the car to the owner. All of these things must be done in person because they're just physically impossible to do them remotely. Now, there are some roles at Tesla where work can be done remotely, like, say, software or design. And so that, you know, I think that's still a case where you want to aspire to do things in person, but if somebody is exceptional at their job, then it's possible for them to be effective even working remotely. So with. With Tesla, I simply have asked for a list, you know, that the manager has to confirm that. That they're. They're an excellent contributor. And if they do, they're allowed to work remotely. So it's pretty basic. I think there is a hit one takes remotely because the. It does reduce esprit de corps. And, you know, it's like, it's hard to, you know, like if you just. There's. There's really. It really. It kind of matters to be in person at least some of the time. So, like, one of the things I said, even if somebody's working remotely, they got to show up at the office occasionally so that they recognize their colleagues. And don't, you know, you don't walk down the street and pass your colleague and you don't even recognize them. That would not be good.
Moderator
No. I think this is super clarifying and resonates with us and it entirely in terms of how we work. So thank you for clarifying that topic. It's really important to us. I'd like to keep on the topic of employees and some of the questions that have come through. This one's on compensation and benefits. Most people, especially obviously here, are used to working for a public company. Can you talk a little bit about how you compensate folks at SpaceX as a private company? How does it work and what approach you plan to take at Twitter as a private company?
Yeah. So SpaceX, I think, operates in the best of both worlds where stock and options are issued to everyone, but we don't have all the challenges. Being publicly traded company where the stock could be up and down from one day to the next would be quite a distraction. And where one is at the most, you have short sellers and class action lawsuits and just generally it's like being in the stockade, public stockade, and they just throw tomatoes at you all day.
SpaceX still allows liquidity. And so every six months there's a liquidity event at SpaceX and people have the opportunity to sell their shares. And that's worked very well for the whole life of the company. So I think something like that would make sense at Twitter. So it'd still be stock and options, everything, and it'd just be liquidity events twice a year.
Moderator
Great. And thanks. We are getting some real time feedback on the remote work question. So I just want to make sure I follow up your approach to remote work and distributed work at Twitter. You are that what I'm hearing from you is that you are supportive of remote and distributed work as it is productive and meaningful and people show up when it's important and depending on their job. Is that an accurate reflection?
Yeah. I think the bias definitely needs to be strongly towards working in person. But if somebody is exceptional, then remote work can be okay. But basically if their work output is exceptional, then remote work is fine. There is some communication impact that one takes when working remotely, because if you're with people and they're just a few desks away, it's very easy to communicate in real time, but it's much harder to do that if you're in different physical locations. So I do want to emphasize that the bias is very much towards in person work. It's just that it would obviously be insane if someone is excellent at what they do, but can only work remotely to then fire them even though they're doing excellent work would be insane. So I'm definitely not in favor of like things that are like mad. I'm in favor of things that build the business and make it better.
Moderator
Thank you. Question about layoffs. We received several questions from employees on this point. Obviously they write about the recent layoff at Tesla. Can you speak to how you're thinking about layoff layoffs at Twitter?
Well, I think it depends on, you know, the company does need to be to get healthy. So right now the costs exceed the revenue. So that's not a great situation to be in. And so there would have to be some rationalization of headcount and expenses to have revenue be greater than cost. Otherwise Twitter is simply not, not viable or, you know, can't grow. So yeah, I think it would just be dependent on, you know, but like I said, anyone who's like, obviously like a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about. Like, I'm not, you know, I do not take actions which are destructive to the health of the company. So, you know.
Moderator
Yeah, Elon, a question connected to that. As you're obviously learning and gaining information as we get closer to this deal being closed, what do you feel that you have sort of a deep understanding and grasp of and what are the areas that you feel you want to dive much more deeper on to understand and learn?
Well, I certainly, I mean I have a strong understanding of the product because I use Twitter every day practically. And you know, I think I've got a really good understanding of, you know, how Twitter works from a product standpoint. What I have less of an understanding of is, you know, you know, like this sort of bot spam or multi user account. Basically anything that affects the, the monetizable daily user number is. That's probably my biggest concern because that's really what drives advertising revenue as well as subscription revenue. And really Twitter's revenue is going to be subscription advertising. I think payments would be an interesting thing to do as well. But all of those things are only relevant for as a function of how many unique humans are on the system. So that's the most, that's my biggest concern. And that's what, you know, what I said publicly as well. Like I said, I try to be as literal as possible. So. And you know. Yeah,
Moderator
and as we think about, obviously, the product and the service and serving customers all around the world. Clearly, it's critical in essential for us to serve diverse communities and all people, as you said, as you said earlier. So inclusion, diversity is obviously core essential to our work at Twitter, both our employees and the customers that we serve. You've been vocal on a variety of different topics and issues that relate to inclusion and diversity. Can you talk about your. Both your views and also your commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace and also a service where everyone can feel included at Faith.
Yeah. I mean, well, to be clear, you know, everyone talks about the. I said about Twitter as a whole, like, there's 8 billion people in the world. There's sort of, I'm told there's 200 billion, you know, daily users of Twitter. That's a 7.8 billion person gap. So I think we really want to have, you know, I don't know, at least a billion people on Twitter, maybe more. As many people as we can possibly get on Twitter. So that, I think, is the most inclusive definition of inclusiveness. It's like all humans. So, you know, that's important, you know, from a company standpoint. You know, I believe in something, in a sort of strict meritocracy. So whatever, you know, whoever's doing great work, great, you know, they get more responsibility and authority and that's that.
Moderator
And I know we. You mentioned in some of our conversations about your IND team at Tesla. We have an amazing IND team here at Twitter as well. So continue on the journey. On the journey together. I wanted to talk about content moderation. Go back to a number of the things that you said earlier. So this is one I'll take. I'll take verbatim. So you've spoken a lot about the importance of free speech. Let's start with the US where we have a strong tradition around this. And you talk. You touched on this earlier. A lot of what's called lawful but awful speech is allowed here in the United States, right? Animal abuse footage, doxing videos of sexual violence, et cetera. So allowing this type of content obviously could cause harm and make Twitter unusable for the broad audience that you're trying to reach. What is your approach to this type of content that's legal but problematic as it relates to people actually using the service. How do you think about this tension?
As I said earlier, really, it's. I think people. We should allow people to say what they want, post what they want within the bounds of the law, but that's different from them being able to reach people who don't want to be reached with that content. So if that content is offensive, then to people, those who will not, will simply stop using Twitter. So it's important to make Twitter as attractive as possible. And really that that means not showing people content that they would find hateful or offensive or even frankly, content they would find boring is not good. So we don't want them to see boring content. Unless we were talking about TikTok last night. And TikTok obviously just like, like a great job of making sure you are not bored. I mean, it does. It does like feel like ADD, but like next level. But TikTok just does a great job of making our board. I mean, I do find some of the videos offensive, I think, but they're not boring. So the folks we are like, how do we ensure people have content that is that they find entertaining and engaging and interesting, such that they want to keep using Twitter and use it more. So that's, you know, that's essential to the growth of the service.
Moderator
One of our employees asked about sort of people who use Twitter having the right and the ability to filter out content that they don't want to see. I think this guest today is exactly what you're pointing to.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, to be clear, it's like, like the standard is much more than not offending people. The standard is, should be that they're. They're very entertained and informed. Like, because like, so like you could not offend someone, but you'll support them and show them a bunch of content that they don't find interesting and then they will not use the service or they will use it less. So that's why I use the example of TikTok where they just hone the algorithm to. To be as engaging as possible. And I think we want to also hone it to be as engaging as possible in a different way. I think in a way that's. That's like TikTok is interesting, but like, you want to be informed about like, serious issues as well. And I think Twitter in terms of like serious issues can be a lot better in informing. Informing people about serious issues. I do think it's important that, that there be, you know, if there are two sides to an issue, it's important to represent, you know, if there are multiple opinions, but, you know, and just make sure that we're not sort of driving a narrative, but that we give people an opportunity to understand the various types of issues. Most issues in the world are complex. They're not. They don't boil down to a simple, this is 100% good and this is 100% bad. So I think it would be. It would have a more informal public if people were presented with multiple sides to an issue.
Moderator
One point I just want to go back to on sort of the law and how that impacts content and moderation as we think globally around the world. There are some countries, right, that limit. That have laws that limit speech and sometimes actually use these laws to silence disagreement with the government, et cetera. You're talking about different points of view. So Twitter is historically focused on doing what we can do to enable people everywhere to have their voices. How do you think about that as it relates to, again, like, the local laws and what that means?
Well, I mean, I'm in favor of doing, you know, of going as far as the law will allow us. If the law allows, you know, if, say, Twitter employees would get arrested in the country if we. If we didn't adhere to the law, then we obviously must adhere to the law or exit the country or something. So. But I mean, as much as we can enable people to have a voice and to speak their mind, I think we want to. We want to do that. Yeah.
Moderator
And I know we talked about this as well last night about the teams doing this work and your desire to connect with those teams and sort of understand sort of where we've been, where we are and where we're going. And I think that would be hugely productive across the board, both ways. Can we talk briefly about your political views? How, if at all, do your political views play into the leadership of the companies that you currently run? How would it affect Twitter, if at all?
Well, my political views, I think, are moderate, at least as would be, you know, as if you said, like, what is the center of the normal distribution of political views in the country? I think I'd be pretty close to the center. You know, I voted Democrat every election until this recent one this week, and. And then I voted for Mayor Flores, who was Republican. She was Mexican American, and I thought a good candidate and worth voting for. So. But I'm in favor of moderate politics, but allowing people who have relatively extreme views to. To express those views within the bounds of the law. So that's, you know. You know, as I said publicly, like, I think if the. Let's say the far left, 10% and far right 10% were equally upset on Twitter, then that would probably be a good outcome.
Moderator
I want to just talk about our business for a minute. You've spoken about incentives that the Ad business created, creates for services like Twitter. What role does advertising play in the future of your business plan for the company?
I think advertising is very important for Twitter. So in the case of, say, Tesla's SpaceX, there's no need for advertising because the demand exceeds our production. So, I mean, advertising is fundamentally a demand generator and occasionally you want to get some other message out there, but it's fundamentally a demand generator. So given that Tesla demand is far in excess of production, there's no need for Tesla to advertise. But, you know, I'm not against advertising. I would probably, I don't know, want to talk to the advertisers and say, like, hey, let's make sure the ads are as entertaining as possible. I think they're more effective if they're entertaining. Like you want, sort of, you don't want to be strident or spammy in the ad. And then of course, I don't think it's good to allow advertising of any products which are, you know, bad products. You know, like, I was literally scammed on it. I bought this thing off of a YouTube ad and it doesn't work. And then I Googled it and it's like, oh, yeah, once you click on the second page of Google search results, it's like, yeah, this product totally just worked in scratch. And I'm like, well, what the hell is YouTube allowing advertising of scammy products? That's totally not cool. So, you know, like, I think if the advertising is entertaining, interesting as something you might actually want, and the product would be fulfilling to the Twitter user, then I think that's great advertising. So, yeah.
Moderator
So, Elon, we're going to go over, is that okay?
Moderator
Awesome, thank you. Can you talk a little bit about Twitter and payments? You mentioned this a few times in different settings. We'd love to understand your thinking. There's.
Yeah, I think money is essentially a form of information. So, you know, it's information that allows us to exchange products and services without having to barter and allows people to shift obligations in time. But money is fundamentally digital at this point and has been for a while. And PayPal, I think, has done a great job on the payments front. I think it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter. So that's easy to send money back and forth and fiat currency as well as crypto, whenever somebody would find useful. So like I said, the goal, my goal would be to, to maximize the usefulness of the, of the service. The more useful it is, the better. And if one can use it to make convenient payments. That's an increase in usefulness. You know, sort of sort of news, entertainment and payments I think are like three critical areas. But really it's just about sort of thinking about how to make this, how to make using Twitter so compelling that you can't live without it and that everyone wants to use it.
Moderator
I wanted to stay on the product. I know again you touch upon this earlier, but it's a recurring question around the authentication piece, you know, in terms of you're saying you want to authenticate all humans. So just to sort of double click into that, you know, balancing this with those who benefit from anonymity, right from safety perspective, especially for example human rights activists and marginalized communities. So it's sort of. Can you just clarify again, speak to that sort of, that tension and how you think about those groups specifically. Is sort of core to how.
Yeah, I don't think it's necessary for someone to use their real name. So if one say, does a payments based authentication, I think it should be okay to not use your real name on Twitter. So Twitter would know who you are, at least from a payment standpoint. But you would not have to state your real name or anything that's obviously important. Where if someone has different political views from their manager, let's say then they don't really want to get crosswise there and so that it'd be better for them to have a pseudonym on Twitter. But it's still back end authenticated. And like I said, at no point would I suggest that you have to be authenticated in order to use Twitter. It's just that it would just be a prioritizing authenticated comments and actions on Twitter over unauthenticated in order to combat the sort of bots and trolls, essentially it needs to be much more expensive to have a troll army. Whereas right now it's basically very inexpensive to have 100,000 fake Twitter accounts.
Moderator
And you have, you have certainly been very vocal on Twitter. You are very vocal on Twitter and often your tweets and even emojis create news cycles. You know, you have been also critical of the company on Twitter, which obviously impacts lots of discussions, conversations and perceptions from whether it be partners or even our employees. How do you think about these tweets? Do you look at the reaction or think about the reaction of these tweets? I'm just curious, sort of the thinking behind the tweet, if you will.
Well, I think it would be helpful. You know, one thing about words is that it's hard to convey tone and so it's possible for. Essentially, people will sometimes like, take. Take the words and then assume they were said in maybe an angry way or, you know, a vindictive way or something like that. But, I mean, hopefully you can tell, like, my normal tone is not. I'm not an angry person. I almost never raised my voice. So, like, in a year I might not have raised my voice literally. So this is not a. You know, so sometimes people may think, oh, wow, he's sort of yelling and screaming or something, but I'm really not. So maybe some way to indicate tone. I mean, emojis sort of do that. But I don't know, maybe there could be like a. Where you have like a, I don't know, irony flag or something. This is like. This is an ironic. You know, this is an ironic tweet or something like that.
Moderator
Listen, I think Spaces is a great product for you as well. We also have voice tweets, which I don't think I've seen you use before, but I think that would add sort of your literal voiceover and color to some of the things that you tweet. So maybe you can sort of.
Oh, sure, I should. Yeah. Maybe I could just say it.
Moderator
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Or you could read it. But then you can also see how I would have said it. Like, then you, you know, like, I wonder if you said that in every way and then you can see how I actually said it.
Moderator
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. That'd be amazing on your. I know we have. I'm going to only push you about 10 more minutes up at the hour, so I'm holding you until then. Your. Your role at the company. You know, there's been some discussion about, will you be a CEO? Will you not be CEO? What can you speak to this and how do you anticipate your role, sort of influencing strategy day to day division?
Well, I guess I'm not that hung up on titles, but I do want to drive the product in a particular direction. So, you know, it could be like, I don't really care what you know about being CEO. In fact, I renamed myself Technoking at Tesla with an official SEC filing.
Moderator
Yes, we thought.
Yeah. And then our CFO was renamed Master of Coin, which I think is a cooler thing than cfo. So, I mean, what I really just want to do is drive the product, improve the product, and it's like basically software and product design, you know, so, you know, I don't mind doing other things, you know, related to operating a company, but there are kind of chores, there's A lot of chores if you're a CEO. And I really just want to make sure that the product evolves rapidly and in a good way. And I don't really care what title is, but obviously people do need to listen to me if I say like, hey, we need to make, improve the product in the following way, make the following changes, add these features, then you know, I do expect that people listen to me in this regard. And I mean that's what I do at SpaceX and Tesla. So you know, I'm really just working with really engineering and production and like it sometimes may seem like, wow, Yoland's really out there a lot, but actually I'm not. If you see how many actual interviews do I do, it's quite a small number, but if I do a tweet, they'll like make an entire like two page article about it, you know, so I'm like, basically if you're, I'm like actually quite internally focused at SpaceX and Tesla, even though it may not seem that way. And it's really just, you know, evolving the rocket technology with SpaceX and providing global Internet with Starlink and then Tesla, it's about accelerating sustainable energy and you know, with electric cars and stationary battery packs and solar power. And you know, the fundamental good of Tesla, I would say is measured by how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. And then the fundamental good of SpaceX is, you know, are we able to make life multi planetary and thus improve the probable lifespan of consciousness? Like, if I were to say, like what is a unifying philosophy? For me it is we should take a set of actions most likely to extend the scope, scale and lifespan of consciousness as we know it. And you know, so that's like, like what, what set of actions improve things at a civilizational level and improve the probable lifespan of civilization? Like civilization will come to an end at some point, but let's try to make it last as long as possible. And it would be great to understand more about the nature of the universe, why we're here, the meaning of life, where are things going, where do we come from? Can we travel to other star systems and see if there are alien civilizations? There might be a whole bunch of long dead one planet civilizations out there that existed, you know, 500 million years ago. If you think about the span of human civilization from the advent of the first writing, it's only about 5,000 years, which is nothing. Earth is roughly four and a half billion years old.
all of civilization as measured from the adventure writing is a flash in the pan. And I think we want to take whatever actions we can to extend that flash in the pan to hopefully be. Be a plane that lasts a long time.
Moderator
I can't believe that's the transition from alien away from this conversation back to Twitter. What do you.
I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's alien.
Moderator
What does Twitter look like to you?
I gotta stop trolling people about the alien stuff. People really think. To be clear, I've seen no evidence. What? I've seen no actual evidence for aliens. I get asked that a lot, and I think I know, and I've not seen anything yet.
Moderator
Okay, you've heard it here, everybody. Question about Twitter. When you look five to ten years from now, what do you consider successful for yourself in acquiring the company and for all of us in the work that we do? What does success look like?
Yeah. So I think success would be a substantial increase in daily active users. You know, I don't know. Like I said, if can we get daily active users over a billion, that would be. You know, it's still only one eighth of Earth, but that would be a huge improvement from where things are today. And, you know, and I guess broadly speaking, like, is Twitter helping further civilization and consciousness? You know, like, are we. It's Twitter. I'm not saying transactions aren't complete, so I shouldn't say we. But, like, is Twitter contributing to a stronger, longer lasting civilization where we're better able to understand the nature of reality? I would say my philosophy is one of curiosity of trying to understand the nature of the universe in as much as is possible to understand. So in order to understand the nature of the universe, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness that extend the life of consciousness. So I guess broadly speaking, it would be. Has Twitter meaningfully improved the strength and longevity of civilization?
Moderator
I know that we have gone meaningfully over. So first of all, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for coming back for a part two. Thank you for continuing the conversation with all of us.
Moderator
Was pleasant. Thank you so much. We'll talk very soon.
Moderator
Thanks, Elon. Bye, everybody.