X Takeover 2024 July 13, 2024 Elon Musk joins the 2024 X Takeover live over Starlink for nearly an hour with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley: Starship Flight 5 and the booster catch, Starlink Mini, Tesla's AI training clusters, batteries, FSD 12.5 on Cybertruck, Optimus, the Robotaxi and the next Roadster.
Elon Musk joins the 2024 X Takeover live over Starlink for nearly an hour with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley: Starship Flight 5 and the booster catch, Starlink Mini, Tesla's AI training clusters, batteries, FSD 12.5 on Cybertruck, Optimus, the Robotaxi and the next Roadster.
Transcript John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Special virtual guest appearance from freaking Elon Musk. This is just crazy. So let's, let's.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Okay. So Elon, I just. This is John from Tesla Owner, Silicon Valley. I just want to personally thank you for spending your precious time to be here at the X takeover with this audience. On behalf of Tesla Owner, Silicon Valley, thank you for coming.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So we just want to, I guess let's just dive right into it, but can you share just a little bit about any. Really just hold on.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Sorry.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So I think one, one thing obviously we know in the next week or 2 Starship 5 is going to be happening. What's top of mind? What does success look like for you?
Well it's probably not from a standpoint of when Starship would be ready. It's probably, probably is about two or three weeks but then, then depends on when we get the FAA license. So the, that is probably end of August is my guess earliest and it may go to early September. Just depends on how fast the FAA grants our license.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
And for you, what does success look like? I know there's the idea of literally using the chopsticks to capture this. Is that still the goal? Is that what success would look like? Or what is success for you and SpaceX in this next Starship 5 launch?
Well, we would like to catch the Mecha, the booster in the giant Mechazilla arms which sounds kind of insane and because this is the largest flying object ever made. So to catch it with, you know, giant robot arms is, you know, pluck it out of the sky is pretty insane. But I think it's got a decent chance of working. Might take a few kicks at the can before it's actually before it works well, but we're not breaking physics so success is one of the possible outcomes here. So we do want to try to recover the booster. On the last flight we were able to achieve a soft landing in the ocean or the, the golf in the water and the. Yeah, that's cool. So I think people may have seen the real time video all the way down to the, to splashdown. And then the other thing we're hoping to achieve is obviously a more robust heat shield. So you know, last time we, the ship actually did make it to, to the Pacific Ocean or kind of like the border of the Indian and the Pacific Ocean and it did light the engines and actually the ship did achieve a soft landing but the, we lost a lot of heat shield tiles and it's kind of amazing that the ship did, did make it to a Soft water landing and that it, it made it all the way also splashed down. Because of lost tiles. And I mean, we basically had like two, like. Control with like little skeleton hands, but it managed to make it, but it didn't get to the exact right location. So because Atlaska, the control authority, was about, I think, six miles or so off course from its landing location. So this time, obviously we want the heat shield to survive intact and the flaps to have full control authority and land at a, not just land softly in the ocean, but land at the exact right location. The ship landing is the tough part. Meaning like, that's because the ship has a heat shield and it's really designed to survive entry, not, not to sort of vaporize. It comes down very much intact. And so we need to make sure that for the ship that the reliability of the heat shield is extremely high and that the flaps and that it can steer to a very precise landing location because if it were to break up over, you know, populated area, that's some possibility of debris hitting, you know, damaging property or people. And so we want to be really confident that the ship heat shield is super robust and lands at the exact right location. So before we try to bring the ship back to the launch site, we'll probably, I think, want to have at least three successful landings of the ship, you know, and the, the ship heat shield this time is substantially upgraded. I say it's at least twice as good, well, some cases like infinitely better, and has a secondary heat shield behind the primary heat shield. So it's probably a longer explanation than maybe you're looking for, but that's what we're hoping to achieve is I think we get probably a 50% chance ish of catching the booster and then probably better than 50%, maybe 60, 70% chance of the ship heat shield remaining intact on this upcoming flight, assuming nothing else goes wrong.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So one thing I did want to comment is actually the X takeovers, actually you're coming through Starlink right now. So all the work SpaceX is doing, doing, it's all through Starlink.
Well, it's Starlink here too. It's a Starlink. Starlink.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Starlink. Connecting Starlink.
Yeah, I'm testing the Starlink mini as well. So I'm like alternating between the main Starlink dish and the Starlink mini dish. Now, to be clear, the Starlink mini dish is not as good as the regular dish because it's a smaller antenna. It's not as much antenna area as the regular dish. So just to be clear, like the Starlink Mini is not exactly the same as the other one, but just smaller.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Backpack size.
Yeah, it's like you give up a little bit of antenna area, but it's extremely portable. So it's like, I don't know, maybe a quarter of the weight of the regular one and you'll get about half the bandwidth. So it's, it's sort of, it's powered away. It's like ability to weight ratio is, is quite, is really good. It's. And then, yeah, you can just put in a backpack, take it anywhere you want. I think it'd be pretty, pretty good as a sort of a backup device for emergency services. So actually a lot of first responders and emergency services are, you know, looking at having that as just, just because it's so easy to just put on a vehicle. In fact, I know people have put it on Teslas, which is pretty cool.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
We have cybertrucks here with them literally stationed on them. Shout out to Teslatino and some of the other ones.
Yeah, but I think like the Sonic, Sonic money especially is because it's so portable and easy to put in places. It's just great for emergency services. Or if there's like, you know, forest fires, floods, natural disasters which take out, you know, where you lose the ground fiber and you lose the cell towers, then you still have access to the Internet with Starlink.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So, Elon, we're in the market for a StarLink mini, so two thumbs up. Good reviews. How do you like it so far?
It's good, you know, it's, it's a new product, so we're like ironing out little, little things here and there. But so far so good. It's looking good. I think it'll be a huge seller. And also it costs less to manufacture. So that means the terminal cost I think might ultimately get down around a couple hundred bucks, which makes it accessible to many parts of the world where the more expensive terminal is unaffordable. So this should be affordable for much of the world.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Well, I can't wait to get out to South Padre island for selfish reasons and have the Starlink Mini to cover this live. But what's incredible is just the access that Starlink is. You can go anywhere in the world and have access. The gap for knowledge is no longer going to be an issue in some of the most remote places. So even making it more accessible with Starlink Mini is just insane. Quickly, back to the Starship 5. So Starship 4 happened. I was there live on Isla Blanca park and then even going through the Star Factory tour. Just what you guys are doing at Starbase is incredible and how fast you iterate and make changes on the fly as it's, you know, each day that goes by it feels like a century maybe at other places because of how much you guys are changing. What, you know, outside of the heat shields, what were some of the other big findings from the Starship 4 launch that you guys are implementing for and preparing for for this upcoming launch?
Well, this, this, this really between each flight there are hundreds of changes on both the ship and the booster. Many of them are very sort of small, but they add up, you know, cumulatively to us to significant changes. So like if you add changes to the ship, the booster and to the launch site, you're really talking about thousands of changes between each flight. So you got really talented teams of SpaceX working on the stage zero, which is like the launch site. And stage zero is as important as stage one and two. So stage one being the booster, stage two being the ship. So man, there's so many. And a lot of them wouldn't. If I got into the details of it, people would be like, I don't know what you're talking about. You know. Well, it's going to be like a little valve here and a line change here and a routing, a wiring routing change there and a bunch of tweaks to the software. And so it's a whole bunch of things that, that are not like as easy to describe as upgrading the heat shield. And yeah, there's, yeah, now there's, there's a much more significant change coming in a couple flights from now. I think it's shift 7 where we move the forward flaps more towards the rear. So this always bugged me as a kind of design mistake we made with the ship initially, which is to have the forward flaps be symmetric with the rear flaps where the forward flaps are at 180 degrees. And you really actually want the forward flaps to be kind of in the lee of the wind. I'm cautious about getting into too much technical detail that, that maybe doesn't make sense. If you don't know about like rock but steers itself is. It's kind of like a skydiver where the flaps are like your, the forward, they're like arms and legs. So it's really different from a plane. It's, it's like. And then the, the forward flaps, you really don't want the forward flaps to be visible to the airflow because the, you're really trying desperately to, to not have the engine Side rotate forward and get into the hot plasma. So the, I think it's shift 7. The forward flaps get smaller and they rotate back. I mean their hinge position instead of being 180 degrees is like, I don't know, maybe 150 degrees or so. And so the forward flaps are really just used as trim flaps. So basically in a nutshell, the flaps get smaller and lighter, the payload improves and, and then, then there's continued improvements to the heat shields. The engines get, get better. So we're able to run the engines at higher thrust with more reliability. And then a really big step change will be maybe an of next year or something like that where we get rid of the base heat shield and the ship heat shield, the engine side heat shield. So the engines are, do not need to be encapsulated with the, the next big revision of the Raptor engine, which is quite tricky. But, but that, that eliminates a lot of mass at the base of the vehicle and at the base of the ship. But base, the ship and the booster both get a lot lighter and the engines are more robust. There's a lot of starship technical detail here. And then also the payload will be comfortably above 100 tons to a useful orbit. So 100 tons to useful orbit with full reusability. Where the booster and the ship come back to the launch site means that the cost per ton to orbit is maybe about 100 times less than it has been in the past. And this is what would enable life to extend beyond Earth and to build a self sustaining city on Mars, which would maximize the probable lifespan of consciousness by, I don't know, many millennia, if not millions of years.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
I'm going to pass it over to Kelvin after this. But one thing that's incredible about you, Elon, is how much in the weeds you are. I don't think I've ever seen any leader at any company be so involved in the weeds. And the fact that you can go as high and as low, literally, it's just truly amazing. So I'm going to pass it over to Kelvin. But that's just one thing that I've noticed about you, is that you're highly involved in everything you're doing and you're able to step out bird's eye, but also get into the weeds.
Yeah, well, I mean I drive the engineering and design at the company, so that's relatively unusual, you know, but that's, that's, I mean that's, I think a big part of why the companies succeed is because I, I understand the Engineering and I, I know when somebody, you know, like my judgment on whether somebody is great at engineering or design is, is quite good. So in terms of really having the most talented people giving them the most responsibility, if you don't actually understand the engineering then how do you know that somebody's a good engineer? So that's really important. So that's, I think we're a very talented team. But, but in order to know that somebody's talented you must also understand the engineering.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Elon, we're going to shift gears and talk about Tesla.
Sounds good. This is the Tesla takeover
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
now. The X takeover. But we do Tesla takeovers all over the world. World now.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Yeah.
That's cool than. By the way guys, I just want to say thanks a lot for your support. Super appreciated. Thank you.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
And I, I know Kelvin's going to follow up with a question, but I just wanted to say thank you from our organization for the support. I'm literally 2018 and got my Tesla started driving it and I can't believe the amount of fudge out there on it and fake news, especially even in the Bay Area.
And so it's always been that way, you know,
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
into getting into this community and creating now these epic events. So. But I'll pass it over to Kelvin.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Yeah. Elon, so obviously a lot of Tesla fans here as well as SpaceX. But regarding on the Tesla side, can you give us any updates on, on any future models? Obviously you know the robo taxi is coming out.
You know, I mean I can't quite, I can't do like product announcements at the X takeover.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Just joking.
I mean I think the, the you know, a lot of what I've said, I said on the earnings call or treats, I try to you know, say what I think on the earnings call the overwhelmingly important thing is, is achieving unsupervised full self driving. So this is really profound and hopefully a lot of you have gotten the chance to use 12.5 or at least 12. So the Tesla AI team and it's a couple hundred, it's not a huge team so just a few hundred super talented engineers. But I do want to emphasize that it's you know, it's, it's obviously way more than me but it's also, it's more than a show and it's like, it's like tough to recognize like 200 people. But I just do want to emphasize that there's, there's, well it's actually a little more than 200 people that are really responsible for the full self driving Software side. And then we've got a great chip design team because you need the chip to chip, you know, the chip, it's going to run on something. So the Tesla AI chip, hardware three and hardware four and then upcoming hardware five, which will probably be in volume production in 26. Yeah, 26.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
This.
There's really great chip team and, and then we've also got a great training cluster team. Like it's actually very hard to run a lot to, to build and run a large Nvidia training cluster is, is. Takes a lot of skill and a lot of work. So, you know, teams cranking 24 7, building the, the south extension to the Gigafactory in Austin. And I was just, I was actually just talking to the team last night, making good progress for installing the servers. But. But I do. It's like sometimes people think, oh, you just buy Nvidia, you know, GPUs and plug them in and they start the training run and off you go. This is not the case at all. It's super hard. Actually. The, in fact, one of the tricky things that is kind of interesting with. If you've got a. If you've got a large Nvidia training run or any kind of like large training run, the power fluctuations are unlike anything you ever see anywhere else because the, the GPU is all running with extreme precision. It's like, it's like a, a symphony. Like this massive symphony with, you know, in the case of the installation in at Giga, Texas will be 50,000. It's like imagine 50,000 instruments all moving in symphony and that what that actually causes, it's like actually extremely difficult, like a nightmare electrically because when the GPUs go up, the power goes up and the GPUs go down, power goes down. And this can happen at like 100 millisecond intervals. So it's, it's actually quite a difficult thing electrically.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Sounds like a light show almost.
It's quite kind of like a light show. It's just. You just get these dramatic changes in power draw. And so when you've got 50 megawatts that can go from 50 megawatts down to 20 megawatt watts in 100 milliseconds. That's just very unusual. And back up again. Anyway, so it's actually quite challenging. So shout out to the Tesla team for that is, you know, building and operating the training center. So it's really, it's like quite a few pieces of the puzzle that need to be done and then we've got to Record a lot of data and feed that into the training system. But the net result is that it's really starting to become quite compelling. I think with 12.5 and as I mentioned publicly, we've increased the number of parameters by a factor of five. Now this one can't simply increase parameters. One does not simply increase parameters. Unless those parameters are useful and done in the right way. It, it's just, it's, it doesn't matter. You actually have to have the parameters be the right. Each parameters like it's a number, but the numbers have to be correct. And you can think of what, like what, what the AI is trying to do is effectively compress reality. So it's trying to say like okay, we're taking all this video in, trying to understand reality, compress it down to, you know, a few gigabytes really. Although I think it's going to. That's steadily expanding and probably end up being 20 gigabytes soon. But we're trying to compress reality into, I don't know, a few gigabytes is pretty hard. And because the inference computer in the car is much weaker than say a GPU in a server center, it's only got like maybe 15 to 20% as much power. And so, so in order to make, if your inference computer is relatively weak, then you, you have to spend actually more effort on the training side in order to, to make up for the weak inference computer anyway, so. But it is working. I think it's doing really well and I think we'll see continued rapid improvements each passing week.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Speaking of late shows, Elon, I just want to say thank you for reposting sharing our late show from X Takeover.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So I want to talk about battery technologies. What advancements are you most excited about in terms of battery technology and how will they impact the range of inefficiencies of future Teslas?
Well, the. I think it's important to note that even if there were no battery breakthroughs at all, I think you could electrify all road transport and all road and transport and all ships could be electrified even if there was zero improvements in battery technology. This may be an important point to note. Now there will be improvements in battery technology, but even if they weren't, you could electrify all ground and water transport for airplanes. You do need some improvement in the energy density, the gravimetric and volumetric energy density. So you've got a, you ideally want to have about a 450 or 500 watt hours per kilogram energy density. Which you can get, I think in some, it's, it's getting there. Like, it's, it's that, you know, with some expensive cells, they're up in that region. But really most of the R and D effort is, is in improving the cost. Per what? Per kilowatt hour. So the cost of range, like how do you get, improve the cost of the battery pack in order to make the cars more affordable? And, and then yeah, the, from a range standpoint, I think people are coming to expect a range of roughly 300 miles, I think as being kind of normal, maybe a little above 300 miles. And that's if you're assuming that you're going, you're not, you know, climbing a mountain in cold weather because as you, as you add more load, the range will decrease. On the other hand, if you're going down a mountain, your range will increase. So, you know, so, you know, I think we're really gonna, I think starting to see like a nominal EPA range of above 300 miles as being kind of the normal, normal standard and, and then just figuring out how to build enough battery packs and scale it up. We're making good progress in the Tesla design cell, which is a design manufacturer cell, which is, this is a hard problem. I mean there are entire companies that, that's all they do. But the rate of progress is good. But like I said, no major breakthroughs. There's a lot of work just to say like how many gigawatt hours of cells need to be made every year to really transition the world to a sustainable energy economy. It's actually, you know, hundreds of gigawatt hours per year, ultimately perhaps thousands. And a lot of it will go to stationary storage. So for pairing wind power with stationary battery packs and solar power stationary battery packs and just overall improving the efficiency and stability of the grid with the stationary battery packs, that's actually quite a big deal. So. Yeah. But overall I feel like things are progressing at a good rate.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So I've been, again, I'm. When you think of a lot of the OGs that I've met over the years who've been following Tesla, I'm fairly late to the game. But it's crazy. Even since 2018, going from being weeks, if not days from bankruptcy to how the company has been going from ramping to 5,000 model threes into full self driving. And the one thing, I mean, I always knew that I was driving a robot at the end of the day, but never did, I think, I guess maybe my, the, you know, I was just Limited in thinking that we would ever create humanoids in Tesla specifically. And again how would you say, you know, as also too, you know, Tesla is an AI robotics company. You know, how is that. To being in the factories and you've made comments about how in the world. And so you know, how is robotics.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So how robotics humanoids just impacted the valuation view and really the vision for the company.
Right. Well, I mean you can think of the Tesla cars as essentially robots on four wheels. So the, it's really, really profound and I'd recommend, you know, get just giving demonstrations of the self driving capability to people, you know, to friends and family and stuff. Because if you take a Model 3 or Model Y, I mean it's a good looking car but it doesn't look like it has like super intelligence. You know, it looks, it looks like it's a good looking electric car, but it doesn't look like it's. I mean I use the analogy like let's say you had a cat and looks like a normal cat, but actually your cat can talk and jump up and do like a hat and cane dance and do like a musical.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Are you talking about Garfield?
Actually like let's say you had a sentient cat that could talk and sing and dance but people look at the cat on the couch and the cat what just looks like a normal cat until it jumps up and does a song and dance and it's like whoa, whoa.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Wow.
What was that? So that's the thing with the self driving is that. Yeah sure, the Model 3Y, they're good looking, normal looking cars except ours can basically sing and dance and it's intelligent and can drive from one place to another. So just demonstrating that to people kind of blows their mind. So I'd recommend doing that because that's really key. And then for the Optimus robot, that's really an extension of what we've learned with the car. So the car is a robot with four wheels, intelligent robot with four wheels and Optimus is an intelligent robot with arms and legs. So you know, in the case of, in the case of Optimus we have to design every part of the robot from scratch. The, you know, all the motors and gears and electronics and sensors all had to be designed from scratch. And also we had to learn how to, how to operate all of these motors and sensors. You really get to learn a lot about how the human body works and you realize there's a reason why we evolved this way. You know, the reason why the muscles that operate your hand are actually located in your forearm because you actually, and so you're, you know, if you look at your sort of hand, it's sort of like, it's like a puppet basically. And, and the puppet strings are in your forearm and, and the, So I mean there, there are a small number of muscles that are actually in the hand, but most of the muscles that, that operate your hand are in your forearm. So with, with the current version of Optimus, we, we actually have the actuators in the hand, but with the new version that we're moving to later this year, the, the actuators are in the forearm and really emulating how a human hand works. So, and there, there really are no motors and there's, there are no actuators. When I say actuator, an actuator would be like motor plus gearbox plus power electronics and, and sensors. There are no actuators for that actually that you can buy for really any, any amount of money that work well for a humanoid robot. So we actually go back to physics first principles and design all of the actuators from scratch. So it's a tremendous amount of work and I think it'd be very difficult for any company that does not have, that's not extremely good at designing actuators to make an effective humanoid robot. And then it'll have the same brain as the car. So initially hardware 4 and then hardware 5 in 26. And, and then just as the car is, the car is learning how to navigate reality. It's, it's the same basic process for the humanoid robot. And I think basically everyone's going to want one. So it's like, who wouldn't want, you know, sort of like there's way, just, there's different ways to think of robots, but like, like let's say R2D2 and C3PO were real and you could have them. Like, who would not want R2D2, C3PO. That would be awesome. Yeah, like a friendly buddy robot. Now we need to make sure they stay friendly. Of course, that's very important
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
for a Garfield.
Yeah. But you know, it's, I think it's kind of like people will get pretty attached to their humanoid robots. Just like people, you know, you get attached to C3PO and R2D2. And yeah, I think everyone's going to pretty much want one. And I think long term the cost of the humanoid robot should be less than the cost of a car because it weighs less, there's, you know, fewer parts in it. So ultimately I think, you know, humanoid robot that is super Useful, I think long term is probably like $20,000 or $25,000, but depends on what a dollar is worth in the future, you know, inflation and all. But, you know, current, current year dollars, I think, you know, I can see reaching a price of 20, $25,000 for a humanoid robot. That would be really useful, you know, that could like help you take care of kids, walk the dog, you know, you know, go go get groceries, like whatever, whatever works, you know. So, so I think everyone's going to want one. So there's 8 billion people on Earth and I think they're all going to want one. So that's why, that's why I think it's probably going to be the biggest thing ever.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Elon, what are you going to use your robot for?
Oh, I mean, initially we're, you know, so we're starting like production unit 1 of production design 1 of, of Optimus, which will, we'll do some basic stuff in the factory, in the Tesla factories next year because we want to iron out a lot of, you know, details. It's just to make sure it's useful. And for the first year or so it's going to require quite a lot of babysitting from engineering. And then hopefully when we get to 2026, that'll be one we could sort of sell it to sell it outside of the company because, and be confident that it'll work reasonably well and respond to voice commands and that kind of thing. And then you'll be able to sort of, I think, customize how the robot looks as well. Long term, you can kind of shell or scan the robot however you'd like. So I think there'll be a wide variation, wide variations in how the robots looks, you know, how the robot looks. And maybe like some third parties could do cool things. Just like there's like cool third party wraps of the Cyber truck. That's some really creative art, I think. So Cybertruck's like, even though it ships as kind of like bare stainless steel, ends up having some of the most interesting art in terms of how it's wrapped. And so it's really quite unique. And actually I was talking to Pharrell. He was obviously very creative and I think he has some ideas for doing a Pharrell version of an Optimus, for example, which would be pretty cool to have like different artists come up with different, you know, versions of Optimus.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So speaking of Cybertruck, I've had a Cybertruck since middle of February and I'm, you know, I'm So used to FSD
and you probably know you really, you really want the. I totally agree.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
I'm. I don't know if I could get special access, but either or more importantly for everybody, I'm just saying I've driven 10,000 miles and it kills my soul to be driving the most advanced technology and I feel like I'm driving. It's still the most amazing vehicle Tesla's ever made. But any updates on FSD with Cybertruck?
Well, I think that should be coming out in August. So 12.5 is wait two weeks. Yeah, at some point in the next 2 to 4 ish weeks it should work. I mean I'm sure, I'm not sure the exact timing because we just have to test it and make sure it works well. So. But 12.5 is where a lot of things come together where you've got the high. You know, we upgrade the highway stack to be the latest version. So you don't have the old highway stack and the new city stack. So having one sort of integrated state of the art stack for highway and city is a big deal. And little things like you can wear sunglasses and still do the hands off driving and then having it work on Cybertruck. Yeah, I mean a friend of mine drove Cybertruck all the way halfway across the country and he said it was driving him great, it was driving him crazy that he could not turn on FSD because it was.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
We literally have people I think who drove from Florida, Toronto in their cybertrucks. Well, not for, but just coming from all over the US And I think that's literally the one thing they were just like filling peasant status. Even though this is the best product that Tesla has made yet.
So yeah, it's great, it's a great product. So yeah, it should be very soon. So yeah, yeah.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Elon, what other future car projects are you most excited about? Is it the Roadster? Is it the Robotaxi? Can you speak about what you're most excited about?
Well, I think in terms of, of what will have the biggest impact in the world, it will be the kind of the Robotaxi dedicated robo taxi. Now of course all types of vehicles are, can operate. It will be able to operate as, as a Robotaxi, you know, pretty much all. So, you know. But yeah, I think the dedicated Robotaxi will have single biggest effect in the world. The semi truck I think will, will have a very, very big effect. The Roadster is one of those things that's not necessary from a utility standpoint, but is super cool. So I guess a friend of mine, Peter Thiel, is like, he always says, why don't we have flying cars? I'm like, wait for. It's coming. So I think it'll be super cool. Does it change the world? I don't know, but I think sometimes you just got to have things that are just cool because it's just great to have awesome things in the world. So it's kind of cherry on the cake. And I think the Roadster demo will be mind blowing. It might be the most mind blowing demo of anything ever.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Wow.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
When is that happening? I don't know if you could share that, but it's all good if, if you have to pass on that one,
I think next year, next year sometime. And that, that's, that's a, you know, joint sort of Tesla SpaceX effort. So it's kind of applying, you know, combining rocket engineering with Tesla EV engineering, alien technology to make something really special.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
I heard it can fly a little.
Yeah, right, Yeah, it'll be something special.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
And
yeah, we'll continue to make new products that we haven't talked about it all. So there's new things that'll come out. But the really ultra profound thing is full self driving is unsupervised. Full self driving, that's like the gigantic thing. And then Optimus having an autonomous useful humanoid robot is an even bigger thing than full self driving. Those are the two things that like, if you were to look back in history from fast forward, like 20, 30 years or 50 years even, like what are the things that really were profound? It'll be unsupervised. A general solution to unsupervised, full self driving and a humanoid robot that is truly useful even 100 years from now. They'll be like, whoa, those are big ones.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Elon, you have a date on the calendar for the announcement and launch of the Cyber, the Robo taxi. What can we expect from that?
Well, I can't give it away, you know, you gotta have some, you know, you know, you don't want to give the show away before the show, you know, so I think it'll be just a tease. I think it'll be, I think it'll be cool. I think people will be pretty excited. And yeah, it's, it's, it's like, like, it's like, I do wonder like in the actual event itself, will people, how many people will realize how profound it is, what we're going to show. I think as some people will understand how profound, not everyone Will, but it will be obvious in hindsight.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So I know we've been going 45 minutes. I just want to do a quick time check. Do you want to keep going a little bit more or.
Because we're so grateful, five or ten minutes more.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Okay. So yeah, everyone, thank you, Elon, for your time. One thing I wanted to ask you is. So, you know, we have, you know, obviously the latest vehicle, the Model 3 Performance, or really the Model 3 Highland has been out. The Cybertruck came out. When you think of just obviously even the future of transportation, and obviously that's obviously where Franz comes into play with the design. But how does. When you think of unsupervised fsd, how does that change the way you even approach tackling or building something like the future of transportation? And again, I know I don't have to throw the design aspect into it, but just when you think of what is next, how does the future of transportation impact that?
Well, you know, if you're not driving the. You're really effectively sitting in like a tiny lounge and then so, you know, having, say, you know, being entertained with, with being able to watch movies or, or play video games or work, you can. It's really. The car just becomes like a tiny mobile lounge. That's, that's. Or you could sleep, you know, whatever you want to do. I mean, you could drink too. I mean, you're not driving. So it's this thing where like, it's like a little mobile lounge. It's not something that you have to be. We have to be, you know, focus your attention, are driving all the time. So it's just, it's a completely different experience. One cool thing I should mention is that there would be, I think, interesting down the road is also for Optimus, you know, for people that have lost their limbs, the. That, that if you take neuralink basically being able to control which. Which the neuralink version one telepathy allows you to control electronic devices if somebody's lost their arms or legs or whatever the case, And attaching that and enabling, combining that with a neural link would give them essentially cybernetic limbs. Kind of like Luke, I don't know, like Luke Skywalker and Empire Strikes Back, you know, when you get like a robot, robot hand. So I think that could be pretty incredible for people that have lost limbs, being able to have like a cybernetic limb. Anyway, I think that'd be cool sort of combined effort between neuralink and Tesla.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Elon, there's. There was some recent news on X about some candy Announcements or something like that?
No, I just, I don't know what that is. I'm just joking about the candy stuff. So. Yeah, I have too much, too much late to add candy to it. I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, I mean it's wild how much is happening in the world. I mean there's stuff happening with SpaceX and Tesla and all the advancements in AI, a lot of advancements in pharma as well. You know, there's, there's a lot of interesting, like kind of miracle drugs coming
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
along
and we're, we're certainly headed for I think the most interesting future. I think we, you know, there's, we live in the most interesting of times and you know, sometimes it's like easy to sort of like, I don't know, get down about like some day to day event or political stuff or whatever. But in the grand scheme of things, we are living in the most interesting time in history and that's pretty cool.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Yeah, just on that. It's so easy to. I honestly don't know how you do it on a minute by hourly basis on things that are just lies and things that are being said. But it's so important to have a positive mindset, especially as those attention attacks are coming because if you're just depressed about everything that's just coming at you, it's just so hard to move forward. And so it takes people like you who are actually being a part of that change rather than just watching it from the sidelines. And so thank you for that. I mean just, it's one thing I'll ask and then I'll maybe pass it to, to Kelvin for one's question. So we have a lot of retail investors here as we know. It's actually, I just want to say how amazing X is and how some of the stuff has even worked in the backgrounds. I remember meeting Amy Steffens who was behind obviously you know who her team that she worked with to kind of like build a lawsuit obviously on the comp plan. I met her on an X spaces Twitter spaces and we got connected and she ended up on our podcast and next thing I know she connects with Alexandra Mertz, Tesla Boomer Mama and seeing all of the work that's happening behind the scenes with what Amy was doing and then what Alexandra was doing on the front facing. But the question I wanted to have is, you know, when you think of retail investors and what it's meant to Tesla, you know what comes to mind, especially again, all the work that, you know, the Community has done Alexandra. The Amy's of the world, the Tesla community. But what comes to mind when you think of retail investors for Tesla?
Well, I love retail investors, I have to say because you know, I think retail investors like, or like individual investors are like, they're, they're like making a decision to support the company and, and that's super appreciated. So you know, like we, I think we have the highest retail investor percentage of maybe any company or maybe certainly one of the highest. And I think that's really a good thing. So and, and I, you know, like there's going to be sort of ups and downs in the stock price for, you know, random reasons. But I do feel confident that the long term value of the company will be extremely high. The, you know, I think, you know, the best analysis I've seen is like Cathie Wood's company Ark Invest, they've been the most, the most accurate in the past. And, and it's just, it's the, you know, the value, the value of companies is going to be kind of nutty with unsupervised, full self driving and, and with Optimus it's, you know, I sort of wonder ultimately what money, what money will even mean in the future. Because if you've got robots that if the cost of goods and services are driven to almost nothing, I think we will, you know, assuming it's a positive future, which I think it probably will be, then we're headed for an age of abundance. So you know, I do feel like, like maybe that like Tesla is kind of in a phase right now like similar to what Nvidia was in before Nvidia stock went bananas. And I have to say like Nvidia deserves the valuation they've got. You know, they, Jensen and his team have done an amazing job and it really goes to show like the value of any kind of AI, A company that is strong in AI is it, it's just going to be crazy. And it will dwarf the value of companies that do not have advanced AI really will be profoundly different. I mean it's a simple sort of productivity kind of back of the envelope math for cars is that you know, typical passenger car is about 10 hours of use a week, call it like an hour and a half a day for seven days. So it's about 10 hours. But if it's autonomous it could be used 100 hours a week. Now I'm not sure what the average usage would be but average usage in autonomous mode might be 50 hours. But certainly it could be used 100 hours of 168 hours a week. So that would be a 10x increase increase in the productivity of the car. But it costs the same. So if you just do the basic math on that, it's like, okay, now you go from like I don't know, 20, 25% margins to 90% margins. It's insane. Yeah. And then you know, for cars that are owned by customers, they would obviously revenue share with the customers and so the owners of the cars I think, I think would earn quite a bit more than the lease cost or financing cost the car when it's autonomous mode. So yeah, but if you just think of asset utilization efficiency and you go from 10 hours a week of a car to 50 or 100 hours a week and it's the same car, that's just, it's the biggest explosion in value maybe ever.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So I had a quick follow up but again, let us know, we can do a time check. But you kind of were just talking about just content and like one question I actually had, it was a follow up kind of a little bit to what you were mentioning and some off topic. But do you see it? Do you foresee a rise in mechanisms to determine the authenticity of content and the validity of what is being said? Like I think that's in this future, right? I mean it's, I see half the time I feel like I turn up YouTube and you know, they're taking some, an interview from you and then you're randomly mentioning bitcoin and oh man. Or I've seen interviews of us. Like people are messaging us from our interview back in May of 2022 and they're live streaming it like it's happening live. I'm like, wow, I, you know, look different two years ago with longer hair. It's like. But it's you talking and you're randomly, you know, the bitcoin, you know, reel is going on the bottom. So what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean I'm really, I'm not going to be promoting crypto so if you know at most in a joking way. But if you see me pumping crypto, it's not me, you know, so I mean I do think there's some merit in bitcoin and maybe some of the other crypto and I sort of have a soft spot for dogecoin because I just like dogs and memes. But yeah, I don't know. On the X platform there's pretty quickly things get community noted or there's in the replies people say, hey, this is not real. So I think, you know, I think, I don't know, we can work to try to have community notes surface faster and also to if similar videos are popping up, that the community note gets appended to any kind of similar video. But I think it's definitely always one should be cautious about seeing any. If you see a sales pitch for crypto, I would double check whether that is real.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
All right, Elon, we want to wrap up with final question for you, which is what are you most excited excited about regarding Tesla and Space X?
Well, I think I've basically described it already, but the key for Space X is to achieve full and rapid reusability of the starship rocket. This is really the holy grail of, of space technology. No one has ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket. So Starship is the first design that is even capable of that. This is an absolutely profound thing because a fully reusable, rapidly reusable rocket is the difference between humanity being a single planet civilization and a multi planet civilization. So that's gigantic. And I think we might get there next year. So that's a big deal. And then for Tesla, yeah, I mean I want to count the chickens until they're hatched. These are tough chickens, but I think it's going to happen next year. And then a general solution to self driving, that is also an incredibly profound thing and that's unsupervised, full self driving. This is that, that looks like it's. If it doesn't happen later this year, it seems extremely likely to happen next year. If you just plot the points in the curve of miles between interventions, that number is improving dramatically. So those are really the two whopper things. And then as I mentioned for Tesla, also Optimus the optimist numbers, like they're really just, they're like so mind blowing that you're like, is this real? Because I actually think the market for humanoid robots is in excess of 10 billion units. Like more than the number of humans because people each want one and then there'll be others that are involved in industry and stuff. So you know, if, if they do sell at, even at volume for $20,000, that's 20 trillion. So it's like, I mean this is bananas numbers, you know? Yeah, I should say so. Yeah. Anyway, it's just insane numbers.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So we should hold on to their stock
anyway. It's just really, really nuts. I should say $200 trillion. This is just an insane, insane number. Yeah. 20, $20,000 times 10 billion. So 20 trillion, 200 trillion. It's like bananas. Numbers. So that's why I wonder, what does money even mean at that point, you know? So these things are, like I said, they're so profound that they will be recognized assuming we do them. We have to actually do them. They will be recognized 100 years from now, maybe a thousand years from now, as fundamental milestones in civilization. That's the level of significance we're talking about here. Should be held by a couple years. And thanks for your support, guys. Really super appreciated.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
If we can, we would love to just get a virtual slash in person. Oh, well, I think you literally have a standing ovation happening right now. Yeah, it's crazy. I feel like I can now say Elon actually danced when you're talking about the cat at the X Takeover.
Kelvin (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
But yeah, thank you again, Elon, Kelvin and I, on behalf of our organization. Thank you for being at the X Takeover, for giving us literally about an hour of your time and more. Thank you for the support of our community retail investors. And we appreciate all that you're doing for humanity and actually picking up the shovel and doing it.
All right, sounds good. Thanks, guys. Bye.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Thanks, Ivan. So background on this. This was supposed to be five minutes. Like, when he was DMing me back, he was like maybe five minutes, and then it went from 15 to 30, and then next thing you know, we're going an hour.
John (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
So thank you guys for just coming out and being a part of this event.