Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2022
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (7)
Transcript
0:00Jason CalacanisSo live from an undisclosed location with the sultry filter on. Very sultry filter on.
0:11Elon MuskYeah.
0:13Jason CalacanisHaving a great hair day.
0:14Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah, that is a good hair day for you.
0:16Jason CalacanisGreat hair day. My pal and your favorite CEO and Twitterer, Mr. Elon Musk. How you doing pal?
0:28David SacksLet your winners ride,
0:32Jason Calacanisman. David Sachs.
0:35Elon MuskAnd instead we open sourced it to
0:37David Sacksthe fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
0:39Jason CalacanisLove you. Appreciate you coming to the event and or zooming in. Yeah. What's new in your world?
0:54Elon MuskWell, let's see. I guess right now I'm sort of debating the number of bots on Twitter with Para on Twitter and currently I'd like. What I'm being told is that there's just no way to know the number of bots.
1:15Elon MuskIt's like as unknowable as the human soul, basically. So you have no idea what level of witchcraft and alchemy is needed to determine these bottom spot percentage.
1:29Jason CalacanisHow do you determine?
1:30Elon MuskI say like, why not try calling people but I haven't got a response. Have you tried calling people or something? It's not a bot. Oh no, I don't know.
1:40Elon MuskBut I think that would be one of the things to do, to say have you tried calling them as opposed to trying to read the tea leaves here. That's impossible.
1:49Elon MuskObviously you can have an account that looks exactly like a human account or is being operated where one person is operating 1,000 accounts or something, but that person can only buy one toaster.
1:59Elon MuskThey're not going to buy 1,000 toasters. You care about number of unique, real people that are on the system. It's extremely fundamental and anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are full of spam scam and just a lot of fake accounts.
2:17Elon MuskSo it seems beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of. Essentially the number of. Said another way, the number of real, unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95%.
2:39Elon MuskThat is what they're claiming. Does anyone have that experience?
2:46Elon MuskI mean,
2:51Elon MuskI mean really, there's a bridge I'd like to sell you, you
3:01David Friedbergknow,
3:03Elon Muskand also you can buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
3:08David FriedbergWhat do you think it is?
3:09Jason CalacanisYeah, what's the.
3:10David FriedbergI mean, if it's not 5%, what is it?
3:14Elon MuskI think it's some number that is probably at least four or five times that number. I'd say at. If you did sort of the lowest estimate would be probably 20%.
3:29Elon MuskAnd this is a bunch of quite smart outside firms have done analysis of Twitter and looked at the Daily users. And their conclusion is also about 20%. But that's a lower bound, it's not an upper bound.
3:47Elon MuskIf you look at, say, the most liked tweets on Twitter. So I have the honor of having the most liked tweet of any living human. This is, thank you everyone for liking my tweet, including some of the bots out there.
4:13Elon MuskBut that tweet is less than 5 million likes. It's like 4.7 or something like that. And that was the. Where I tweeted about that. Next time buying Coca Cola to put the cocaine back in.
4:31Elon MuskDefinitely. It's clearly something that the public really wants.
4:35Jason CalacanisAnd
4:38Elon MuskCoca Cola Corporation should really think about going back to their roots. Coca Cola. I mean, this, I guess, is the reason why our grandparents could sort of walk 20 miles in the snow because they had Coca Cola with cocaine.
4:55Elon MuskThis real reason.
5:00Elon MuskAnyway, that is literally the most popular tweet of any living human. But Twitter says that the sort of monetizable daily active users is 217 million. So why would it be that the most popular tweet ever basically is only 2, 2.5% of the entire user base?
5:28Elon MuskThis seems a very, very low number. And the most popular tweets generally are clustered around that sort of 4 million like level. So it's basically 2% or less than 2% of the daily active users.
5:46Elon MuskAnd technically monetizable daily active users is how Twitter refers to it. So it just seems. How is this possible? Surely there's something that maybe, you know, 10% of people would like, not merely 2%.
6:00Jason CalacanisWell, actually, you know, if you think about it, Elon, there's a corollary on YouTube. What do. What's the total user base of YouTube and what have the most popular videos gotten there?
6:10Jason CalacanisYes, and I think there's a billion or two, maybe a billion people using YouTube and those the most popular videos have tens of billions of views. Yes, that might be instructive.
6:21Elon MuskExactly. That ratio makes a lot more sense. So something doesn't add up here. And my concern is not that is it like, you know, is it 5 or 7 or 8%, but is it potentially 80% or 90% bots?
6:42Elon MuskI mean, I certainly know there's some real people on Twitter, but is it an order of magnitude, is it 50% instead of 5? And that's obviously an incredibly material number, especially since Twitter relies primarily on brand advertising as opposed to specific click through advertising where you make a purchase, if you make a purchase, it doesn't really matter that much.
7:06Elon MuskBut for brand Advertising, which is really just awareness advertising. It matters if real humans are seeing that or not.
7:12Jason CalacanisYeah. And so I guess stepping back for a second, people are curious why you want to buy Twitter. Why is this so important to you? And then I guess, what are the chances you think the deal gets done at this point?
7:26Jason CalacanisSo a two parter, why is it so important to me?
7:31Elon MuskSome of this I've articulated before, but I think there's a need for a public town square, digital town square, that, where people can debate issues of all kinds, including the most substantive issues.
7:46Elon MuskAnd in order for that to be the case, you have to have something that is as broadly inclusive as possible, that has as much of the people on the platform as possible, where it feels balanced from a political standpoint, it's not biased one way or the other, and where the system is transparent.
8:07Elon MuskThis is why I think it's important to put the algorithm on GitHub and actually allow the public to see it and critique it and improve it. And if there are any manual changes, sort of shadow banning as it's called, or increasing or decreasing the prominence of a tweet that's done manually, that, that should be noted.
8:27Elon MuskSo you know what has happened and it's not just, you know, you're just where it is right now. We don't know what the heck is going on. Why is one tweet doing well?
8:37Elon MuskWhy is another tweet not. Is it the algorithm? Did someone manually intervene? Why are some accounts banned with no recourse, apparently? And you know, the reality is that Twitter at this point has a very far left bias and I would classify myself as a moderate, neither Republican nor Democrat.
9:02Elon MuskAnd in fact I have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, historically, overwhelmingly. Like, I'm not sure, I might never have voted for a Republican. Just to be clear right now, this election I would.
9:19Jason CalacanisWell, David, you okay? Keep going, keep going.
9:24Chamath PalihapitiyaHe's fine, he's fine. We're going to resuscitate him.
9:25Jason CalacanisWe're going to resuscitate David Sachs. I mean, let me ask you a
9:29Elon Muskfirst point I'm trying to make is that this is not some sort of attempt to, you know, it's not some right wing takeover as people in life may fear, but rather a moderate wing takeover and an attempt to ensure that people of all political beliefs feel welcome on a digital town square and they can express their beliefs without fear of being banned or shadow banned.
9:56Elon MuskAnd that we obviously need to get rid of the bots and scams and trolls and people that are operating huge bot armies in an attempt to unduly influence the public opinion.
10:08Elon MuskSo this is what I think it's very important that we have that, like the, the, some of the smartest people in history have said, have, have thought about it and said, like, free speech is important for a, for a healthy democracy.
10:22Elon MuskIt is important. And free speech only,
10:32Elon MuskLike, say, when does free speech, speech matter most? It's when it's someone you don't like saying something you don't like. That's when it actually matters. So, you know, obviously, and it's pretty annoying when someone you don't like says something you don't like that's bad, but it's actually a good sign of that you have free speech.
10:57Elon MuskSo, I mean, I get trashed by the media all the time. It's fine, I don't care. Do it twice as much. I couldn't care less. But it's indicative of the fact that even though I have like a lot of resources, I do not actually have the ability to stop the media from trashing me.
11:13Elon MuskAnd that's actually a good thing.
11:16Jason CalacanisYeah. I have to ask, with regard to this current administration, I know how hard you work on the car company and then Biden, you know, you've been a lifelong Democrat.
11:28Jason CalacanisYou've donated to Obama and to everybody, probably never voted Republican. And yet. And the same is true for Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is, you know, a Bernie Sanders supporter.
11:40Jason CalacanisAnd that the Democratic Party has been openly hostile to Joe Rogan and Biden can't even say the word Tesla or invite you to the White House when they do an EV summit.
11:50Jason CalacanisI'm curious, just on a very personal basis, what does it feel like to have that experience where the party you supported won't even say the name of your company or invite you there's.
12:00Jason CalacanisThey should be celebrating the work you're doing.
12:03Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it definitely feels like this is not right. Like, this is the issue here is that there's just. The Democrat Party is overly, overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers, particularly the class action lawyers.
12:19Elon MuskAnd generally, if you'll see something that is not in the interest of the people on the Democrat side, it's going to come because of the unions, which is just another form of monopoly.
12:30Elon MuskAnd the trial lawyers, that's where actions will be happening from the Democrat side. They're not in the interests of the people. And then to be fair, on the Republican side, if you say, like, where is something like not ideal happening?
12:48Elon MuskIt's because of corporate evil and religious zealotry that's generally where the bad things will be coming from on the Republican side that are not representative of the people. So in the case of Biden, he is simply too much captured by the unions, which was not the case with Obama.
13:09Elon MuskSo in the case of Obama, you could have. He was sort of quite reasonable and I think he took more of a view that obviously you take the concerns of the unions into account, but there are bigger issues at stake and unfortunately, Biden does not do that.
13:25Chamath PalihapitiyaElon, I have a. I have a Tesla question I read today. It's incredible. There was a Bloomberg article that said the following. So the setup is this. It said, since you went public, Tesla's up 22,000%, 11/4 of profit, sequential profitability.
13:39Chamath PalihapitiyaSo hitting on all cylinders. But the public analyst, we had to look at it.
13:47Elon MuskThat's a car joke.
13:48Chamath PalihapitiyaThat's a combustion
13:51Elon Muskfiring. They're stepping on the gas pedal firing.
13:58Chamath PalihapitiyaBut analysts, when they put up their projections, okay, it's, it's one of the most enormous bans for any company in America. The. The price targets for Tesla, despite all of this success.
14:09Chamath PalihapitiyaSome have it at 200, some have it at 1600. It's all over the place. You tweeted a couple of months ago, tesla's not a company. It's like six companies inside of a company.
14:20Jason CalacanisLike you've had to build.
14:22Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah, maybe more. Can you just explain to people all these companies inside this super company just so folks have a sense of what had to be done to get here?
14:29Elon MuskOkay. I mean, this question requires thought and I'll probably be leaving out quite a few things, but if you look at, say, what does a typical car company do?
14:40Elon MuskWhat they do is they assemble vehicles and they send them to dealers and they manage the supply chain. They might make the engine, or typically will make the engine, but most of the parts are made by suppliers, and a lot of the actual technology development is done by suppliers, and most of the vehicle software is done by suppliers.
15:05Elon MuskSo the actual amount of real work done by car companies, what you think of sort of like a GM or Ford, is not actually that much. So they don't do sales, they don't do service.
15:20Elon MuskSo in the case of Tesla, for example, we do our own sales and service. We don't have dealerships. Then Tesla also has by far the biggest network of superchargers, sort of the electric equivalent of gas stations.
15:35Elon MuskSo we built an entire global supercharger network, which is still the most advanced and by far the best way to charge your car when traveling long distance. Or if you live in a city and, and don't have the ability to charge your car because of street parking or an apartment.
15:50Elon MuskSo the whole Supercharger network, we developed the Supercharger network, we deployed it, I think we have 15,000 superchargers globally. You can travel anywhere in America right now with the Tesla supercharged network.
16:06Elon MuskThen in terms of vertical integration, we make the battery pack, the power electronics, the drive unit, we actually make, we're more integrated in the parts. We actually make so much of the car internally we're vertically integrated.
16:26Elon MuskNot necessarily because we think that there's some religious reason to be vertically integrated, but because the pace at which we needed to move was just much faster than the supply chain could move.
16:36Elon MuskAnd to the degree that you inherit the legacy supply chain, you inherit the legacy constraints, including their speed, cost and technology. And then Tesla is as much a software company as it is a hardware company.
16:49Elon MuskSo the software that runs in Tesla operates the car, operates the screen, does the charging, all of that stuff is developed by Tesla. And so we have sort of a car, a Tesla OS in the car.
17:04Elon MuskI could go on for a long time. And then very importantly, Tesla has built an autopilot AI team from scratch that is the best real world AI team on earth.
17:18Elon MuskAnd if anyone else has got a better one, I'd like to see it demonstrated in a car. The full self driving beta at this point can very often take you with zero interventions across the Bay Area from San Jose to Marin.
17:33Elon MuskSo through complex traffic. It's really quite sophisticated. And I invite anyone to join the beta or look at the videos of those who are in the beta. We've got like 100,000 people in the beta, so it's not tiny.
17:45Elon MuskAnd we'll be expanding that to probably a million people or a million, I don't know on that order by the end of the year. So it's, you have this slide.
17:58Elon MuskWe also built a chip team because there wasn't hardware that we could run the friggin AI on. We couldn't just fill the trunk with a whole bunch of GPUs and they would have taken a trunk full of GPUs that would have been very expensive and take massive amount of power and cooling just to be able to do what the Tesla designed full self driving computer can do.
18:24Elon MuskAnd we started a chip team from scratch, designed it, it was the best in the world and still is the best in the world several years later. And we also then developed, we're designing a dojo supercomputer to be able to process all the video that's coming in from billions of miles of data.
18:41Elon MuskBecause just sort of like the way that it's very difficult to compete with Google because they have so much data and they have all the people doing searches all the time and humanity is training it.
18:49Elon MuskBut the same is true of Tesla. You really need billions of miles and ultimately tens of billions of miles of training data combined with sort of a vast training computer and then optimize inference hardware in the car and state of the art AI and training and specialized software across the board to be able to achieve a full self driving solution.
19:13Chamath PalihapitiyaWhen he opened Tesla Gigafactory, remember this six years ago. I'll just tell the audience a story quickly. He puts a slide up there and he says, guys, we're not actually building a factory, we're building a machine that makes machines.
19:26Chamath PalihapitiyaAnd he puts the layout of the factory and it looks like a chip. And it was basically like how you would actually lay out a microchip if you were or you know, you were like a layout engineer.
19:35Chamath PalihapitiyaIt was the craziest thing I'd ever seen. I was like, that was when I first got it.
19:38David SacksYeah.
19:39Chamath PalihapitiyaYou know, you walk intended and you see what's happening.
19:40Jason CalacanisAnd you have an insurance company now you're doing insurance for Tesla owners and an Uber competitor.
19:45Chamath PalihapitiyaRight.
19:45Jason CalacanisAnd eventually a Robo taxi Uber competitor. RIP
19:50Elon MuskYeah, I mean insurance is like quite significant now.
19:53Jason CalacanisAre you okay? I'm okay.
19:54Chamath PalihapitiyaOkay.
19:57Elon MuskThe car insurance thing is a bigger deal than it may seem. A lot of people are paying, you know, 30, 40% as much as their lease payment for the car in car insurance.
20:07Elon MuskSo the car insurance industry is incredibly inefficient because they're just. First of all, you got like so many sort of middle entities. You've got from the insurance agent all the way to the final sort of reinsurer.
20:19Elon MuskThere's like a half dozen companies each taking a cut. And then it's all very statistical so that there's. Even if you're a very good driver, like you could be like, you know, 20 years old and a great driver.
20:32Elon MuskBut it's all statistical. So you can't get, you either can't get insurance or it's extremely expensive. But Tesla allows for real time insurance based on how you actually drive the car.
20:44Elon MuskYou can actually, if you drive the car in a safer way, you actually have lower insurance. So ours is. Insurance is based on how you actually drive, not how historically people that fit your whatever demographic have drive.
21:02Elon MuskAnd then you can close the Loop around your insurance rate by simply driving better and looking at your score and lowering your assurance in real time. And people do.
21:11Elon MuskIt actually promotes safer driving.
21:13Jason CalacanisI actually have had this experience because in my household, two people drive my car and one of them has a 93 score and the other one does not. They have like a 60 score.
21:24Jason CalacanisAnd you may have met this other person, but I've been trying to work with her on the aggressive turns and stops in advance of our insurance bill, which we're hoping will go down at some point.
21:40Jason CalacanisThe one question, is this Twitter deal going to get closed?
21:43David FriedbergDo you think?
21:44Jason CalacanisWhat are the chances here?
21:45Elon MuskWell, I mean, it really depends on a lot of factors here. I'm still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number of sort of fake or spam accounts on Twitter.
21:59Elon MuskAnd Twitter is refusing to tell us. So, you know, this just seems like a strange thing.
22:08Chamath PalihapitiyaWait, sorry, are they refusing to tell you or you don't think they really know? I mean, there's a good chance they may just have no idea.
22:16Elon MuskThey claim that they do know.
22:18Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah.
22:18Elon MuskAnd they claim that they've got this complex methodology that only they can understand.
22:28Jason CalacanisBut the guy who landed two rockets
22:30Elon Musksimultaneously stir this cauldron and then you throw the knuckle boom. And.
22:41Elon MuskThen suddenly it comes to you in a dream. I don't know. But there should be some objective way to assert the thing, because this is a material public statement threshold issue.
22:55Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah.
22:56Elon MuskYou know, it's a material adverse misstatement. You know, if they, in fact have been vociferously claiming less than 5% of fake or spam accounts, but in fact, it is four or five times that number or perhaps ten times that number.
23:13Elon MuskThis is a big deal. It's not this. It's sort of like if you said, okay, I'm going to, I agree to buy your house. You say the house has less than 5% termites.
23:24Elon MuskThat's an acceptable number. But if it turns out it is 90% termites, that's not okay. It's not the same house. This house is made mostly of termites. Termites leave.
23:38Elon MuskLiterally, your house will disappear because it's mostly made of termites. So that would obviously just not be appropriate. So in making the Twitter offer, I was obviously reliant upon the truth and accuracy of their public filings.
23:51Elon MuskAnd if those. Those filings are not accurate, it's simply not that it's not. You can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed.
24:03Jason CalacanisAnd, you know, they say, Elon Life's in negotiations. So at a different price, it might be a totally viable deal.
24:10Chamath PalihapitiyaCorrect?
24:11Elon MuskI mean that, I mean, it's not out of the question, but I really would, you know, this is, you know, the more questions I ask, the more I. The more my concerns grow.
24:27David FriedbergSo,
24:30Elon Muskyou know, at the end of the day, acquiring has to be fixable and fixable, you know, with reasonable time frame and without revenues collapsing along the way and all that sort of stuff.
24:41Elon MuskAnd so, you know, I really need to see how these things are being calculated. And it can't be some deep mystery that is like more complex than the human soul or something like that.
24:55Elon MuskIt's got to be, you know, I think we can apply the scientific method to this and try to figure out what's really going on. And Twitter's revenue is primarily dependent, I think 70% or some of that order on brand advertising as opposed to specific purchase advertising.
25:13Elon MuskThis is a big deal because brand advertising is not. There's not a purchase that results from that. So it's basically how much Mindshare, or basically, if you're a big company, how often do they hear your name as opposed to something where you can directly measure the outcome?
25:31Elon MuskSo that means that they're somewhat going on faith. And if that faith is undermined or reduced because of the reality of the situation coming to the fore, then Tesla's revenue or Twitter's revenue will be significantly impaired.
25:51Elon MuskAnd that's a major problem.
25:53David FriedbergElon, did you have a chance to ask these questions during your negotiation?
25:59Elon MuskLike I said, I was reliant upon their public filings. So to the degree that their private public, and this is normal for a public company, if you, you know, if you make a formal filing, that that is what investors are relying on, whether they are making an acquisition offer or simply buying some shares.
26:20Elon MuskSo the accuracy of these filings is important, whether you're buying one share or the whole company. And so if these filings are inaccurate or if they're sort of potentially blatant, it's a big deal.
26:36David SacksElon, do you have a sense of why this has been such a persistent problem for Twitter? Do they not have the technical capabilities to solve the bot problem? Or is it more of like just a they've under prioritized the issue or been unwilling to because potentially there are implications for ad revenue?
26:55Elon MuskI don't know. It's sort of speculative at this point. So the, you know, the, the worst interpretation would be that they don't want to look too closely at the thing because they might not like the answer.
27:06Elon MuskThat would be the worst interpretation. I'm not sure what the best interpretation is, but the least bad interpretation would be maybe they thought it was this way, but the way they were doing it was wrong and they didn't realize they were mistaken and simply weren't paying enough attention.
27:20Elon MuskIt does seem as though it should be a lot easier to get rid of the bots and spam and trolls than like, this is not some. We're not trying to put the atom here, you know, not trying to get to the moon, okay?
27:33Elon MuskJust trying to limit the amount of obviously scammy accounts. If it's like bitcoin giveaway, probably it's a spammer, maybe.
27:51Jason CalacanisWait, you're not giving away 100 bitcoins I just sent you, Kenny.
27:58Elon MuskIf you send me two bitcoin, I'll send you one back. Right? That's my.
28:02Jason CalacanisWhat if I send you 20? Actually, I thought one of the interesting things that came up in your product roadmap, or I guess this was released and people covered it, was the possibility of Twitter becoming kind of a super app with payments included, perhaps even Doge or something.
28:23Jason CalacanisThis seems to me based on your work with David at PayPal, like a pretty brilliant idea. What's the vision there in terms of if you were able to buy it, you know, perhaps at the right price, what would it look like?
28:36Jason CalacanisIf, you know, I could add Jason to lonmusk, you know, 10 bucks or something, if we were splitting a check or something.
28:43Elon MuskSure. Well, for those that have used WeChat, I think that's. WeChat's actually a good model. If you're in China, it's basically you kind of live on WeChat. It does everything.
28:55Elon MuskIt's sort of like Twitter plus PayPal plus a whole bunch of other things and all roll into one with actually a great interface. And it's really an excellent app and we don't have anything like that outside of China.
29:07Elon MuskSo I think such an app would be really useful and just like the utility of it of sort of a spam free thing where you can make comments, you can post videos, you can, you know, I think it's important for content creators to have a revenue share.
29:30Elon MuskNow, this does not need to be done on Twitter. It could be done from something that's created from scratch. So it could be something new. So really. But I think this thing needs to exist, whether it is converting Twitter to be the sort of like, kind of all encompassing app that, like I said, everything from Digital Town Square, where important ideas are debated, maximally trusted and inclusive.
29:55Elon MuskAnd at a point where you sort of have a high trust situation, then payments, whether it's crypto or fiat, can make a lot of sense. You just want something that's incredibly useful and that people love using.
30:12Elon MuskBut it's either convert Twitter to that or start something new. Those are the two. But it does need to happen somehow.
30:20Jason CalacanisWell, it's interesting you bring that up because the price of Twitter is pretty high and you've built a couple of companies and some engineers like to come work for you, and you've now gone through the intellectual exercise of studying all this.
30:33Jason CalacanisIf you're looking at the two choices now, fixing Twitter, given all these problems, and maybe just starting your own version, which one are you leaning towards? Because I have watched you build a couple of companies and the products have turned out pretty good.
30:46Jason CalacanisSo is it easier for someone like you to just start from scratch?
30:49Elon MuskI mean, I mean, it's certainly the. My, my default inclination is to start things from scratch. I mean, I'm not really. I don't buy things like there's this sort of, you know, like SpaceX was startup from scratch.
31:09Elon MuskIn the case of Tesla, it was like five people still this guy, Mark Everhard, who's the worst guy I've ever worked with, who tries to claim sole credit essentially for creating Tesla.
31:21Elon MuskAnd if he's so damn great, why don't he just go create another car company when he was fired? But anyway,
31:29Jason CalacanisI mean, that's a pretty good story. I mean, I remember, I mean, no, but I remember having this conversation with you. We were having a conversation about the roadster.
31:39Jason CalacanisI think I can tell the story. I said, how's it going, pal? And you said, well, I got one problem. It turns out the roadster parts and putting it together cost 190,000.
31:49Elon MuskYeah.
31:50Jason CalacanisAnd I said, I gave you 150 for number 16, so if you make 2,000 of these, you're gonna lose $80 million. And you were like, yeah, or double that.
31:58Jason CalacanisI mean, they basically, the parts of the car cost more than they were selling it for. When you were starting to get involved, it was the same.
32:06Elon MuskNo, no, no, I got involved well before that.
32:09Jason CalacanisWell before that. Yes,
32:12Elon Muskwhen Tesla was nothing but a piece of paper. Let me be crystal clear. Crystal fucking clear. No, they didn't bring me in either. I was going to start an ED company with JV Straubel based on the AC propulsion T0.
32:32Elon MuskAnd when I asked AC Propulsion if it was okay to do that, they said, well, there's also some others who want to create an EV company but have not created one yet.
32:42Elon MuskWould you like to join forces with them? And I said okay, well we'll do that. That was a huge mistake. JV and I should have just started the car company ourselves.
32:50Elon MuskInstead we teamed up with Everhard, Topening and Wright. Big mistake. The actual moral error here was me trying to have my cake and eat it too. Which is like I just want to work on the technology and the product and have someone else be the CEO and sort of run the business operations.
33:09Elon MuskBecause I just like working on technology and product design. And also I was like doing SpaceX at the time in our rockets were blowing up. So it seemed like, okay, this is like I always wanted to an electric car company.
33:22Elon MuskThis is how I can have my cake and eat it too. That was a huge mistake and fundamentally a moral error. And so in the end I had to friggin be CEO and I didn't want to be basically, but it's either that or the company's going to die.
33:40Elon MuskSo we started with really just nothing. And the T0 prototype from AC Propulsion, that's the precursor to Tesla,
33:51David Sacksto be
33:52Elon Musk100% clear once again. When we created Tesla, when I joined, there were no employees, there was no intellectual property, there was no prototype, there was no nothing to be crystal fucking clear.
34:13Jason CalacanisAnd it almost bankrupted. I mean that sent you to the cliff of insurance. I mean that was.
34:22Elon MuskYes, we were on the ragged edge of bankruptcy so many times it was ridiculous. 2008 was one of the worst years where basically the GM and Ford, GM and Chris Ford almost went bankrupt.
34:38Elon MuskAnd trying to raise money for a startup electric car company in 2008 while GM is going bankrupt was difficult to say the least. People were angry that I even asked them for money.
34:53Elon MuskThey're like fuck you and hang up.
34:59Elon MuskSo the only way that Tesla actually made it through 2008 was a subset of the existing investors which includes people like Antonio Gracias and Steve Jobson and a few other key people.
35:14Elon MuskIra Aaron Price, who I hold a debt of gratitude to say. And I put in all the money I had left and they said everything, literally everything. I didn't even have a house, so my ex wife had the house.
35:32Elon MuskSo I was like staying actually in Jeff Skoll's bedroom, spare bedroom and but the subset of the best is would say okay, I put in as much as I put in.
35:47Elon MuskSo I put in everything. And then we closed that round. 6pm, Christmas Eve 2008. It was last hour of the Last day that was possible because after that people were kept breaking for the holidays and we would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas.
36:00Jason CalacanisIt was pretty that's doorstep. I mean, it was an incredible moment in time. And people also forget at the time that the first two rockets SpaceX sent up didn't exactly make it to orbit.
36:12Elon MuskLike one of the first three.
36:13Jason CalacanisYeah, the first three. And I remember having dinner with you at that time and I asked you, hey, how's it going? I heard Gawker says you got four weeks of payroll left.
36:22Jason CalacanisAnd you said, that's not true. And I said, thank God. And you said, we have two.
36:28Elon MuskAnd I said, I said, both SpaceX and Tesla in 2008, if we'd simply paid our suppliers on time, we would have gone bankrupt immediately.
36:40Jason CalacanisTell us. Actually, it was a pretty crazy moment in time because I also remember asking you. We were having dinner at boa and I said, well, certainly it's got to be some good news.
36:51Jason CalacanisAnd you took out your BlackBerry to date the conversation. I don't remember it.
36:55Elon MuskOh yeah.
36:56Jason CalacanisAnd you said, don't tell anybody. Jkow. I said, no problem. And you showed me the clay version of the Model S. Yeah. The most beautiful car I'd ever seen.
37:04Jason CalacanisAnd I said, oh my God, it's stunning. How much is it going to cost? He said, I think I can make it for 50,000. I remember it was yesterday, I said, if you make that car for 50,000, you'll change the world.
37:14Elon MuskAnd you did it.
37:15David FriedbergAnd I.
37:16Elon MuskIt was a little more than 50,000, but.
37:22Jason CalacanisHi Shore.
37:24David FriedbergLet's ask about SpaceX.
37:25Jason CalacanisOkay, well, that's what space it. But I want to ask one more personal question. Has life gotten easier for you as these companies have hit scale, or has the complexity made life even more challenging?
37:37Jason CalacanisBecause those early days, it was just fighting to survive. Nobody knew who you were, you were anonymous. And it was really just about the work. And now, let's face it, you're the world's most famous guy and everybody's watching everything you do.
37:50Jason CalacanisBut these companies are also very big. So what's life like for you today? Are you enjoying what you you're doing every day?
37:57Elon MuskWell, I mean, it's somewhat of a roller coaster. So there are like good days and bad days and there's, there are some crisis issues and you know, like sort of, you know, knock on wood.
38:08Elon MuskLike we're not like facing, you know, death in the face. Like, it's definitely like quite stressful when like, you know, death is like trying to eat your Face off and like the foam is like you know, just getting.
38:23Elon MuskAnd like right there you. No, it's pretty stressful in that situation. Both SpaceX and Tesla have significant cash reserves, so it's not worth staring death in the face. We can see it over in the horizon.
38:44Elon MuskSo I don't want to get complacent or entitled, but if it's not like just foaming at the mouth, gnashing, trying to eat your face off on a daily basis, that's certainly.
38:55Elon MuskWe've moved on from that point and hopefully never return. But there are a lot of issues that need to be. It's just like if you're a CEO of a company, the chore level is high and if you don't do your chores then the company goes to hell.
39:11Elon MuskAnd I hate doing chores, frankly. So who does? So that's the real. There's a whole bunch of sort of, you know, personnel issues and legal issues and things that I don't find enjoyable to work on, but if I don't work on them, the company suffers.
39:30Elon MuskSo it's more like just the sheer volume of work is insane. That's the. And then, you know, go do something. Go add to it with you know, Twitter or something like that.
39:41Elon MuskYeah, I mean, honestly, Processor. Yeah, I mean I have a habit of biting off more than I can chew and then just sitting there with like chipmunk cheeks.
39:54Chamath PalihapitiyaTell us a little bit about where we are at SpaceX. Like how you fund the ability to go to Mars but then also commercially still build a conventional space business domestically.
40:07Chamath PalihapitiyaI think this Russia thing was probably really good for SpaceX. If you want to just tell us a little bit about that.
40:14Elon MuskSure will the, the, I mean the goal of SpaceX is to develop the technology that enables life to become multi planetary and make humanity a space faring civilization. Which I think is very exciting, inspiring thing.
40:30Elon MuskAnd it's like one of those things where you can. That I think just makes kids be excited about the future. And we need things that are inspiring and exciting and make the future seem like it's going to be better than the past.
40:43Elon MuskLife can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. It's got to be like what's inspiring and exciting. And I think that a future where we are space Frank civilization is one that we can all get excited about and we can go out there and find out what's out there in the universe and what's the meaning of life and where are the aliens and hopefully they're friendly and that kind of thing.
41:06Elon MuskSo, you know, it's interesting. I do get asked about the aliens question a lot and I've not seen any evidence of aliens. And I'll be the first to, you know, tweet about it or whatever.
41:20Elon MuskIf I found, if I see some
41:21Jason Calacanisaliens, I mean, you'll tell us if you find them?
41:22Elon MuskI will tell you. I will definitely tell you if there's aliens.
41:27David SacksAnd
41:29Elon Muskyou know, I think it would be quite helpful for, you know, like, if we found aliens, probably SpaceX will get a ton more revenue because people are like, oh man, aliens.
41:39Elon MuskWe would upgrade our space technology pronto because what if we're unfriendly?
41:48Chamath PalihapitiyaIt's the idea that you build basically the ability to do orbital cargo, take all those profits, launch Starlink, take all those profits and move it all into building something that can get to Mars.
42:03Chamath PalihapitiyaIs that the kind of rough plan?
42:07Elon MuskPretty much. If it was like a three step, a three slide PowerPoint, it would be pretty much as you described, which is develop rockets that are, that are capable of taking satellites to orbit and crew to the space station, you know, basically servicing government commercial space launch needs.
42:28Elon MuskAnd then build a global communication system in space that obviously it does a lot of good for Earth by providing Internet connectivity to the least served. Because a satellite system is really great for remote locations and you know, countryside or remote islands or places where someone's trying to cut off their Internet
42:55Jason Calacanisas a prelude to a war. We take them to the system like in Star Wars.
43:00Elon MuskYeah, yeah. So it's like, you know, so it can be pretty, pretty helpful. Like I think like a Starlink basically, I think is a sort of forceful grid in its own right by providing connectivity to the least served or where they've got either no connection or a very expensive or poor connection.
43:19Elon MuskYou know, the like. We're connecting a lot of schools, remote schools in Brazil right now. I'm actually going to be headed there to sort of kick things off. But they've got a lot of schools that have no connectivity at all.
43:32Elon MuskAnd in a modern age, how do you learn with no connectivity? I mean, you get, I guess old textbooks and stuff, but it's really, you're at a huge disadvantage if you have no digital connectivity.
43:46Elon MuskSo I think there's just a lot of good that Starlink can do just by itself. But then the revenue generated from Starlink is what can enable the creation of a permanently crewed base on the moon, which would be the next, you know, next step from Apollo, which is like, let's just not go there for A few hours and then head back.
44:06Elon MuskLet's have a permanently occupied science station on the moon. And we could also build some pretty epic telescopes on the moon that would enable us to learn more about the nature of the universe and figure out what's going on and maybe detect those aliens.
44:25Chamath PalihapitiyaDo you think that there's enough profit in those businesses to fund all this? Or do you need Wall street and other investors to come share the load with you?
44:35David FriedbergGo to Mars. A partnership with the government, does it need to partner with governments to get there?
44:42Elon MuskWell, I think technically it does not need to partner with governments, but of course government support would be helpful. So it's going to be very expensive to build a self sustaining city on Mars.
44:57Elon MuskLike in order for us to become multi planetary in a way that's meaningful. The key threshold is at which point does the city become self sustaining, such that if the ships from Earth stopped coming for any reason, and it could be any reason, it could be World War three, or it could be just, you know, civilization subsided and just gradually got decrepit or something.
45:21Elon MuskBut if the ships stop coming, if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming to Mars for any reason, does the city still survive? And that's like really a large base of resources that are needed on Mars.
45:35Elon MuskYou can't be missing any one critical ingredient. And think of this like there are these various great filters, you know, that perhaps stop civilizations. And one of the great filters is will we become a multi planet species or not?
45:51Elon MuskWill humanity be one of those species that passes the great vulture of going beyond one planet and being a multi planet species. And this is certainly something we will have to do at some point because the sun is expanding and will eventually boil the oceans and destroy all life on Earth.
46:07Elon MuskSo if you care about life on Earth, you should really care about life becoming multi planetary and ultimately multi stellar. Because otherwise you're basically saying you're signing the sort of death warrant for all life as we know it.
46:19Elon MuskIt's inevitable. And then there's also the various things that killed the dinosaurs. And I mean if you look at the fossil record, there have been five major extinctions that are sort of on the order of 80 to 90% of all creatures on Earth dying for a wide range of reasons.
46:38Elon MuskAnd then humans can also the World War three danger that, that other creatures didn't have, where we could do ourselves in by sort of misusing advanced technology and sort of just, you know, having some radioactive hellhole, that's all that's left after World War three.
46:56Elon MuskSo you know, you could even characterize it potentially as which will come first, World War three or life becoming multi planetary on Mars?
47:09David FriedbergYeah, sorry, I was going to shift, but you know, when you think about the importance of going to Mars versus solving critical energy and climate change problems here on Earth, obviously the effort with Tesla is related to sustainable energy.
47:23David FriedbergAnd I think going back to like probably the 1950s, there were engineering designs around plasma fusion or fusion based systems that have evolved to these plasma systems, to these tokamak systems.
47:33David FriedbergAnd every year, every decade it's like, hey, next decade we're going to have it. What's your point of view on where plasma fusion systems are? Are we going to have fusion energy this century?
47:45David FriedbergThis decade? And does it create limitless energy where the electricity production goes up by 10,000 fold and the price of electricity drops by 10,000 fold? And then what does that world on Earth look like if that happens?
47:59David FriedbergSo I guess the question is like, is that technology real? When does it happen and what happens to the world, world here when. And if that happens?
48:06Elon MuskI'll answer that question. But then let me sort of point out what the, what the actual issue is. If the question is like, is it possible to solve fusion energy 100%?
48:17Elon MuskYes, definitely. Definitely, definitely, definitely. For sure. So, and really just using a tokamak style, which is like basically a donut ring with electromagnets that control the, the plasma, the way to solve that is simply scale up the tokamak.
48:36Elon MuskFusion is very much a scale based thing. You want to minimize your surface volume ratio. So as you scale up a tokamak, you reduce your surface volume ratio, which means like the volume you have relative to the surface, you now have much more.
48:55Elon MuskLike you can basically have a hot zone in the center that's relatively far away from the walls and more of a hot zone. So it's not in my mind a question as to whether fusion can work, but there is a question as to whether it is economically viable and whether it is competitive with alternatives.
49:17Elon MuskI think the economic viability of fusion is a much bigger question. And I think the answer probably is that fusion, earth fusion is not competitive economically. I think that is, I would say it's probably not competitive economically by an order of magnitude.
49:36David FriedbergWhere does it break? Is it a materials breakdown or where does it break down economically?
49:41Elon MuskWell, so you can't just use normal hydrogen. You need to use deuterium and tritium, like unusual forms of hydrogen, helium 3. You know, there are some other types of fusion that could be used, but these are just not, they're not like, there's not a lot of this raw material.
50:09Elon MuskIt's very difficult to get the raw material. So first you have to get the raw material. That's expensive raw material. And then it's not just about generating the energy.
50:20Elon MuskYou've got to turn that energy into usable electricity. You can't just have a hot thing, okay? So the hot thing has to translate to usable electricity. So I think you've got a cost of fuel issue, which is very significant.
50:37Elon MuskYou have a whole bunch of knockdowns from when you generate the heat to when you actually convert that into electricity. You've got some very difficult maintenance issues with a fusion reactor.
50:53David SacksSo.
50:55Elon MuskAnd that should be then compared to alternatives. The sustainable energy alternatives that I think are overwhelmingly more competitive are solar energy, wind, geothermal, hydro, some tidal energy, but it's really primarily solar and wind.
51:16Elon MuskNow you can really say, like, why bother creating fusion on Earth when we have a gigantic, gigantic fusion reactor in the sky that just works with zero maintenance and it shows up every day?
51:30Jason CalacanisPretty consistent.
51:31David FriedbergYeah, but Elon, can We scale to 1000x or 100x our electricity production here using solar and other renewable sources?
51:39Elon MuskYes. So the amount of subsary you need to power the United States is remarkably tiny. So you need like basically roughly 100 miles by 100 miles of territory. And it obviously doesn't need to be in one place in the United States to power the United States.
51:57Elon MuskIt's like a little corner of Texas or Utah, the entire country. And you could basically power you probably 10x just with solar alone, without displacing anyone's home, power an economy 10 times the size of the United States.
52:17Elon MuskIn the United States, on land, when energy prices, if you extend that to water, because Earth is 70% water, I mean, you could say, okay, now we could probably have a civilization that is 100 times as energy intensive as we currently have it.
52:34David FriedbergSo what does that look like? Was the last part of my question, which is a world where energy costs are, say, 100 times cheaper than they are today, and we have 100 times more energy production capacity.
52:43David FriedbergWhat changes about civilization? What do we do differently and what do we see change most kind of dramatically?
52:50Elon MuskWell, currently we're not. Because of just generally low birth rates, almost worldwide civilization is not headed to have a population that is an order of magnitude greater than where we're currently headed towards a population decline.
53:09Elon MuskAnd this is almost everywhere in the world. So it basically seems as though as soon as you have urbanization and education beyond a certain level and income beyond a certain level, birth rates plummet.
53:26Elon MuskAnd so as countries get wealthier, their birth rates plummet. It's somewhat counterintuitive because people will say like, well, it's too expensive to have a baby. Nope, the wealthier the are, the fewer kids you have.
53:37Elon MuskThe more educated you are, the fewer kids you have.
53:40David SacksSo
53:43Elon Muskit's the inverse. So I'm not sure who would use all that energy unless there's a significant change in the birth rate or we have a very robot oriented economy.
53:55Elon MuskSo that's also possible. So if we've got a lot of four wheeled robots in cars and androids, humanoid robots, then you can certainly see that there'd be perhaps the need for an order of magnitude more energy.
54:13Elon MuskBut it's not coming from the humans unless something major changes on the, on the human birth rate level. This, by the way, is I think the biggest single threat to civilization right now is the why.
54:26Chamath PalihapitiyaWhy do you think societally people just make those decisions when they become more affluent? Is it that they just become more selfish or there's more things for them to do and they have more money to they spend on themselves and they say, you know what, I don't want to have a large family, I want to go to Coachella.
54:44Elon MuskYeah, well, there is this weird mind virusy thing where some people think having fewer kids is better for the environment. Yeah, that's crazy, Just total nonsense. The environment is going to be fine.
54:57Elon MuskThey're going to be fine even if we doubled the size of the humans. And I know a lot about environmental stuff. So you know, we can't have civilization just dwindle into nothing.
55:13Elon MuskAnd you know, Japan's leading indicator here, like Japan's population declined by 600,000 people last year. They had the lowest birth rate in history. It's, you know, it's pretty bad.
55:25Elon MuskSo I don't know. I think so this one element of this is a lot of people just think that having kids is somehow bad for the environment. I want to be clear, it's not.
55:37Elon MuskIt's essential for maintaining civilization that we at least maintain our numbers. We don't necessarily need to grow dramatically, but at least let's not, you know, gradually dwindle away until civilization ends with us all in adult diapers in a whimper.
55:54Elon MuskLike we don't want civilization to end in a adult diapers with a whimper. That would suck.
55:59Jason CalacanisKind of suck.
56:01Elon MuskBleak and sad.
56:03Jason CalacanisWell, I mean, and you and I have had this conversation. I mean in Japan, I had two people tell me when I was There, Like, I think it's immoral to bring humans into the world.
56:11Jason CalacanisI mean, people have gotten very sad about the future. It's kind of crazy. The world's great, life's awesome.
56:19Elon MuskYes. No, there's literally, I've heard many times, like, how can I bring a child into this terrible world? I'm like, have you read history? Because let me tell you, it was way worse back then.
56:29Jason CalacanisOkay, yeah, now's a good time to be bored. Hey, listen, I know you're super busy, but I want to ask you about the move to Texas, because I've been thinking about it.
56:41Jason CalacanisAustin, California. I don't know, some senator told you to go fuck yourself. And like, you know, like, we don't
56:47Elon Muskneed a couple senators.
56:49Jason CalacanisThat actually, it seems to be turning into a bit of a trend. But how has building the Tesla Gigafactory, which I got to see in Austin a couple of weeks ago, and it was one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen.
57:04Jason CalacanisI mean, I don't know how many months it took to build there, but how long did it take to build that dreadnought? And then what would have taken to build that in California?
57:16Jason CalacanisCalifornia, under Gavin Newsom.
57:18Elon MuskSo we built the Giga Texas, which is the biggest factory in North America, I think possibly the biggest factory in the world. And it's three times the size of the Pentagon.
57:29Elon MuskTo give you a sense of scale. Okay, this is frigging big. It's like, it's weird. It's like so big. It's weird.
57:34Jason CalacanisLike you, I was trying to find you in it and I was trying to drive around and it took me about 45 minutes to find you.
57:42Elon MuskYeah, like, no, you have to like call. You can't like find someone in the building. You have to call them on their cell phone and say, where are you?
57:48Elon MuskYou know, so I mean, the building is like just under a mile long and we're actually going to extend it. It will be like literally a mile long and about a quarter mile wide and it's 80ft tall.
58:02Elon MuskSo it's just ridiculously big. And when you think about it, like for a manufacturing situation, like what the two things that really define manufacturing competitiveness are economies of scale and technology.
58:17Elon MuskAnd so if you've got an ace on economy, like if you sort of maximize your ACE level on technology and you maximize your ACE level on scale, this is obviously going to be the most competitive situation.
58:27Elon MuskAnd that's why they're so friggin giant. And Giga Texas will go all the way from cell raw materials. Like basically rail cars of cell raw materials coming in and then forming the battery cell, then the battery pack, building the motor.
58:45Elon MuskCasting. We also have introduced a major innovation, which is to cast the entire front third and rear third of the car as a single piece. I got this idea from toys, actually, because I was like, how do they make toys?
58:57Elon MuskThose are cheap. They just cast them. I was like, well, can you build a casting machine that big? And they're like, well, no one ever has. I'm like, are we breaking physics?
59:05Elon MuskLike, no. Well, let's just ask them. And there were six major casting machine suppliers in the world, and five of them said no. And the six said, maybe. I'm like, I'll take that as a yes.
59:15Jason CalacanisWell, I mean, you wanted to do this for the Model 3, but it was just too soon, huh? And now it's almost there.
59:22Elon MuskActually, this partly comes from the Model 3, which is actually a fantastic car in many ways. But we were rightly criticized for an inefficient design for the front and rear body.
59:35Elon MuskLike Sandy Munro, who I think is really excellent from an engineering standpoint and really a very fair critic. He pistol whupped us for the design of the battery.
59:47Jason CalacanisHe ripped it apart, and piece by piece, told you why you suck. And then he did the why and told you why. You were awesome.
59:54Elon MuskHe took it apart and told us exactly why we sucked. And he was correct. And then I was like, well, that's pretty embarrassing. So, no, he was complimentary of other parts of the carpet, of the body design.
1:00:06Elon MuskAnd so it's like, okay, we're gonna go from, like, you know, it's just an incredibly difficult body to make. It's made out of, like, 120 different pieces with dissimilar metals that are joined.
1:00:18Elon MuskAnd you've got galvanic corrosion challenges. It's very difficult to make to a single piece casting. That's one piece. So, like, 120 pieces went down to, like, one.
1:00:27Chamath PalihapitiyaSo
1:00:30Elon Muskit's a huge. And like, the Model Y body shop, especially the new one where we cast both the front and rear, is 60% smaller than the Model 3 body shop.
1:00:39Elon MuskSo it's, you know, gigantic. There's a lot of innovations of Tesla besides the stuff that is obvious. So anyway, so, yeah, and really, you know, to be fair to Gavin Newsom, like, you know, if you had a gun to Gavin's head, okay, and said, we need to start building this factory in California right now, he couldn't do it because there are so many regulatory agencies and so many litigators in California that want to stop you from doing anything that even if you're the governor of the state, you cannot get it done.
1:01:21Elon MuskSo something's got to be done to, you know, because California used to be the land of opportunity and it's a beautiful state and I loved living there. I still spend a lot of time in California, even though every time I go there I get, literally every day I go there, I get the bejesus
1:01:38Jason Calacanistax bill by day.
1:01:40Elon MuskThe sheer cost per day of me going and working in California days boggles the mind. And I still do it. But California's gone from the land of opportunity to the land of sort of taxes over regulation and litigation.
1:01:57Elon MuskAnd this is not a good situation. And really there's got to be like a serious cleaning out of the pipes in California.
1:02:04Jason CalacanisHow many months was it to get the Giga Austin done? Took a year and a half. Two years?
1:02:10Elon MuskYeah. 18 months to build something three times the size of the Pentagon.
1:02:13David FriedbergIncredible.
1:02:14Jason CalacanisAnd you just. Basically the answer to how many months it would take in California?
1:02:18David FriedbergInfinity.
1:02:19Elon MuskWe would still be working on the permits.
1:02:21David FriedbergYeah. Elon, this begs a good question, which
1:02:28Elon MuskI'm not exaggerating.
1:02:29Jason CalacanisAnd you just keep signing paperwork. We'll have one more form for you.
1:02:33David FriedbergWhat's a better model? Yes, what's a better model for government? So all governments tend to increase in complexity. Dictatorship capacity. Is the dictatorship the right model? And you know, like how do we solve this?
1:02:48David FriedbergLet's say you go to Mars or let's say you have to fix California. Is California permanently broken? Is there a way to fix it? Or like how do you set up a better model so that you don't end up having this kind of special interest complexity situation that eventually kills the population?
1:03:03Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think ultimately with California, the people of California just have to get fed up and demand change. That's the thing that really has to happen. And there's got to be an above 0% chance of the Republicans winning in California if it's just the Democrats every time.
1:03:22Elon MuskIt's gotta be. And this is like occasionally the thing is that right now, plus the level of gerrymandering, which is basically just treating the people like sheep, it's terrible
1:03:39David Friedbergthat's
1:03:40Elon Muskgone on in California is outrageous. So California, the Dems have a super majority in the House and Senate in California and the governor and everything. And so how responsive is any political party going to be to the people if they are guaranteed to win?
1:03:55Elon MuskIt's a one party state. And so I'm not saying that sort of elect the Republicans every time, but if it's never, you're just making California a one party state.
1:04:07Elon MuskThey will no longer be responsive, responsive to the people and will only be responsive to those that funded their political campaigns.
1:04:13David FriedbergClip elon saying that 30 seconds on TV over and over.
1:04:16Jason CalacanisGo ahead. Sex.
1:04:17David SacksYeah. So Elon, shifting gears to the economy. You know, we saw this surprise report of negative 1.4% GDP growth in Q1. Interest rates been rising that increased the cost of the consumer of getting loans, things like that.
1:04:32David SacksWe've had a stock market correction, really a crash in a lot of growth stocks, software stocks from where you sit and the data that you see. Where do you think the economy is headed right now?
1:04:44David SacksDo you think we're in a recession or is it just a risk? How do you assess our current economic situation?
1:04:50Elon MuskWell, predicting economic macroeconomics is always difficult and once you assign probabilities to these things. But ironically I did last year. People asked me what I think about the economy.
1:04:59Elon MuskI said, well, I think we might enter a recession in Approximately spring of 2022.
1:05:08Jason CalacanisCalled it. Nailed it.
1:05:11Elon MuskYeah. Now the thing is that recessions are not necessarily a bad thing.
1:05:22Elon MuskI've now been through a few of them. And what has to happen is if you have a boom that goes on for too long, you get misallocation of capital.
1:05:31Elon MuskIt starts raining money on fools, basically. It's like any dumb thing gets money and I'm sure you've seen a few of those. So at some point it gets just out of control and you just have a misallocation of human capital where people are doing things that are silly and not useful to their fellow human beings.
1:05:50Elon MuskAnd then those companies. There needs to be sort of an economic enema, if you will, to have everyone sort of shift uncomfortably in their seats.
1:06:03Elon MuskSorry. It's just I'm visualizing it, the economic enemy. I mean, listen, it's got alliteration.
1:06:14Jason CalacanisThis too shall pass.
1:06:18Elon MuskEventually. The economic anima does its job. It clears out the pipes, if you will.
1:06:22Chamath PalihapitiyaYes,
1:06:25Elon Muskand sort of the bullshit companies go bankrupt and the ones that are doing useful products are prosperous. But there's certainly a lesson here that if one is making useful product and has a company that makes sense, make sure you're not running things too close to the edge.
1:06:43Elon MuskFrom a capital standpoint, they've got some capital reserves to last through irrational times. Because in the past when there's been a recession, it has gone. It's amazing. It's flipped like a light switch.
1:06:55Elon MuskI mean, David do you remember this from the PayPal ex PayPal days when we raised $100 million in March of 2000 and we literally, the demand was so high we had people like VCs just literally without even a term sheet wiring money into our account.
1:07:16Jason CalacanisWe'll send the term sheet later.
1:07:18Elon MuskThey literally would like sleuth out our bank account number and wire money in. And we're like, where'd this come from? And it's like, oh. So it was like there was literally fire hosing money in March of 2000 and then in April 2000 the market went into free fall and it went from raising money was trivial to even good companies could not raise money in a month.
1:07:44Elon MuskSo it's just important to bear in mind that PayPal almost went bankrupt in 2000. We came close, but thankfully we'd raised that $100 million in March 2000, without which we would have been game over, basically.
1:08:00Elon MuskAnd we kind of saw it coming. So it's like we got the ex confinity merger done in like three weeks. AD raised $100 million because we were all like, oh, this is, we see this coming to an end pretty soon.
1:08:13Elon MuskAnd then a month later it was like a nightmare, basically. So it's just important make sure if you're a healthy company, you got some capital, get through things, and then what's your costs?
1:08:27Elon MuskAnd if it is a recession, which more likely than not it is a recession. I'm not saying it is, but it probably is, then just watch your cash flow and get positive cash flow as soon as you can.
1:08:43Elon MuskSo, yeah, but I think we probably are in a recession and that that recession will get worse, but these things pass and then there will be boom times again.
1:09:00Elon MuskSo there'll probably be some tough going for, I don't know, a year, maybe, maybe 12 to 18 months is usually the amount of time that takes for a correction to happen.
1:09:17Elon MuskWhat do you guys think?
1:09:18Jason CalacanisYeah, David, how do you feel about it?
1:09:21David SacksYeah, I mean, it feels like it started, you know, what started as a slowdown earlier this year. Now seems like, I mean, technically, I guess we need 2/4 of negative growth to be in a recession, but it feels like we're in one.
1:09:32David SacksFeels like it started, you know, the growth stock, the software businesses that we invest in are sort of the canaries in the coal mine. And there's a lot of, a lot of dead canaries.
1:09:42David SacksDead.
1:09:42Jason CalacanisBut they're having a hard time breathing.
1:09:45Elon MuskYeah, I'm not dead yet. It's not dead. It's just, it's Just napping. It's napping.
1:09:53Jason CalacanisWake up, little birdie.
1:09:55Elon MuskWake up. It's just stunned. It got stunned for a brief moment, and it'll be fine. It sort of reminds me of the parrot. You know, the pet shop sketch with the parrot with Monty Price.
1:10:16Elon MuskThis parrot is pining for the fjords.
1:10:19Jason CalacanisHey, Elon, a lot has been talked about as we wrap here, and you've been incredibly gracious, giving us so much time. Thank you for that. A lot of talk about American exceptionalism over the last couple years waning, and maybe this country had seen its best days.
1:10:36Jason CalacanisAnd we see the work you're doing and other people in this great country are doing and the debates we're having about the future. And, yeah, China's doing pretty fantastic.
1:10:46Jason CalacanisRussia's on the ropes. But it does seem like America is still producing some of the greatest companies the world has ever seen, some of the greatest innovations. What are your thoughts on America and our future and what we need to keep this country and this beacon of hope that, you know, four of the five of us were not born here.
1:11:08Jason CalacanisYou know, two of you came from South Africa and.
1:11:10Chamath PalihapitiyaNo, three of you.
1:11:11Jason CalacanisThree of you came from South Africa, one of you from Canada. I don't know what they're putting.
1:11:14Chamath PalihapitiyaOh, from Sri Lanka.
1:11:14Jason CalacanisAnd from Sri Lanka with three cattle via Canada.
1:11:18Elon MuskHe came through Canada, too.
1:11:19Jason CalacanisYeah, I know. It seems like that's the.
1:11:22David FriedbergThat's the way.
1:11:22Chamath PalihapitiyaCanada is a gateway.
1:11:23Jason CalacanisIt is a gateway. And how do we. Well, I'm hinting at the answer here, but, you know, it does seem like our immigration policy is absolutely insane, and maybe we need to keep collecting some of the great individuals that I get to share the stage with here and yourself.
1:11:41Jason CalacanisWe need to keep bringing great people to this country. Why can't we get that in our heads that it's talent recruitment?
1:11:50Elon MuskNo, absolutely. I think it's incredibly important that the United States be, like, the destination for the world's best talent. I mean, you can think of this like a pro sports team if you want to win the league and you want the best players on your team.
1:12:06Elon MuskNow, there are obviously a lot of very talented people born in the United States, but if you could add a few aces from outside the country to the team, you're going to win the league.
1:12:19Elon MuskAnd here's the thing. Those aces actually want to work for your team. They don't want to compete against you. They want to win. Be on Team America. And so it's like we have to fight them off to not be on Team America.
1:12:33Elon MuskThat's the crazy thing. And so it's like if you had some aces that are the difference between winning and losing, we should be really recruiting them. Like you'd recruit like a star basketball player or football player.
1:12:46Elon MuskThat's what we should be doing, active recruiting. Just like if you're a company that wants to succeed, you actively recruit the best talent and that's the way to win.
1:12:58Elon MuskAnd if that stops happening, America will stop winning.
1:13:02Jason CalacanisAnd we have two administrations in a row, Biden and Trump, who don't want to let the greatest minds, the most talented people into this country is absolutely insane. I deal with this every day.
1:13:15Elon MuskReality is like actually anyone who's gonna, who wants to work hard and be and do useful things and we want in the United States. And it's not just people who are sort of intellectually strong, but it's just anyone with a strong work ethic, you know, if they're coming from Mexico or if they're coming from, you know, Europe or China, wherever.
1:13:40Elon MuskIt's just if they're like going to come here and crank hard and contribute more than they take, hell yeah. I mean, that's just, it's a no brainer.
1:13:49Chamath PalihapitiyaHave you been, have you been disappointed in the similarities between Biden and Trump on this? Like maybe you could have expected it from Trump because that was a rhetoric he needed to use to get elected.
1:14:00Chamath PalihapitiyaBut it's not as if Biden has flipped the script and said, okay, we're going to go 180 degrees in the other direction. He's kind of kept it the same, which has been really surprising actually.
1:14:09Elon MuskIt's hard to tell what Biden's doing if you're totally frank.
1:14:18Elon MuskI feel like this Weekend at Bernie's, the real president is whoever controls the teleprompter. You know, it's like the path to power is the path to the teleprompter, you know, like what?
1:14:31Elon MuskBecause that's reads the teleprompter. So, you know, I do feel like if somebody would accidentally lean on the teleprompter, it's going to be like Anchorman, it's going to be like QQQ, ASDF123 type of thing.
1:14:45Jason CalacanisI mean, in fairness to Biden, he hasn't been napping as much as he needs to, but
1:14:52David Friedbergit's hard.
1:14:54Elon MuskThese are things that are getting done, you know, I mean, this administration just, it doesn't seem to get a lot done and you know, whatever. Like the Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done.
1:15:11Elon MuskSo this administration seems just to not have like the drive to just get shit done. That's my impression. So, you know, we definitely need to fix immigration policy. Like we had Covid, which was an issue.
1:15:32Elon MuskAnd so that was like one reason, like not, you know, I guess, clamp down on. But now, now we moved on. And so let's just make sure we're getting tough talent in the United States.
1:15:43Elon MuskAnd really, I'd say broadly it's anyone who wants to work their auss off and contribute more than they take to the economy, like, that's just necessarily going to make for a stronger, better society in America.
1:15:58Chamath PalihapitiyaElon, did you see Jeff's Bezos tweet back and forth with Biden, where Biden, I think, was talking about inflation. Inflation. But then he correlated that to taxing corporations. And Bezos said, this is misinformation and disinformation, et cetera, et cetera.
1:16:13Chamath PalihapitiyaWhat do you, what do you think about that whole exchange then? Back and forth?
1:16:16Elon MuskI mean, the obvious reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion amount of more money than it had, obviously. So it's like the government can't just issue checks far in excess of revenue without there being inflation.
1:16:35Elon MuskVelocity of money held constant. So unless something were to change with velocity of money, but if the federal government writes checks, they never balance, so that is effectively creation of more dollars.
1:16:47Elon MuskAnd if there are more dollars created then the increase in the goods and services output of the economy, then you have inflation again, velocity of money held constant.
1:16:59Elon MuskThis is very basic. This is not super complicated. And if the government could just issue massive amounts of money and deficits didn't matter, then why don't we just make the deficit 100 times bigger?
1:17:17Elon MuskOkay, the answer is you can't because it will basically turn the dollar into something that is worthless. And various countries have tried this experiment multiple times. It's not like, oh, I wonder what happens if this is done.
1:17:32Elon MuskHave you seen Venezuela? Like, the poor people of Venezuela have been just run roughshod by their government. And so obviously you can't simply create money. The true economy is very important.
1:17:47Elon MuskThe true economy is the output of goods and services. It's not money. It's literally what is the output of goods and services. Money is simply a way for us, or anything that you call money is a way for us to conveniently exchange goods and services without having to engage in barter and also to shift obligations in time.
1:18:09Elon MuskThose are the two reasons that you have money. This thing called money, it's really, it's a database. Money is an information system for labor allocation and for exchange of goods and services and for translating in time.
1:18:23Elon MuskAnd the quality of that information is a function of. It's like, basically you can apply information theory to money. And I think it helps explain why one money system is why one action is better than another.
1:18:37Elon MuskAnd so just like an Internet connection, you'd want something that's high bandwidth, low latency and jitter, and is not dropping packets. It's not having a lot of errors in the system.
1:18:51Elon MuskAnd the same is true of money. And really, like you said, what did PayPal really do that helped improve the bandwidth, the speed at which money could move? Instead of mailing checks back and forth, which amazingly that was what people did in 2000, you could now do real time exchange of money.
1:19:16Elon MuskAnd now you could ship your goods immediately instead of mailing a check and waiting for the bank to clear the check. And the ultimate thing that with PayPal or if it was in the ex.com sort of less sort of niche payments, more so broad financial would be to simply just intermediate all the heterogeneous cobalt databases out there running on mainframes doing batch processing and have a single real time system that was secure and not batch processing.
1:19:48Elon MuskAnd so it would just be, from an information standpoint, more efficient. And eventually all the batch processing cobalt mainframes operated by the banks would cease to exist.
1:20:01Jason CalacanisYou've spent more time and built more in China than almost anybody. I mean, Apple would be the only company I could think of that's probably got a bigger footprint, but I'm not certain of that.
1:20:13Jason CalacanisWhat have you learned about China that you didn't know before you opened the factories there and started delivering cars there? What should we know about China as Americans? How should we think about China and our relationship with it?
1:20:26Jason CalacanisBecause we haven't spent time there.
1:20:28Elon MuskSure. Well, China, first of all is not monolithic. It's not like everything is not some plot by the Chinese government. There are many factions within China that compete vigorously within China.
1:20:49Elon MuskAnd perhaps most important is that there's just a. Just a tremendous number of hardworking, smart people in China who want to get ahead and get things done. And they're not complacent and they're not entitled and they want to get things done and they want to make a better life for themselves.
1:21:07Elon MuskAnd what we're going to see with China for the first time that anyone can remember who is alive, is an economy that is twice the Size of the US Possibly three times the size of the US and it's going to be very weird living in that world.
1:21:22Elon MuskSo we better stop the infighting in the US and stop punching ourselves in the face because like there's a whole, there's way too much of America punching itself in the damn face, which is just dumb.
1:21:36Elon MuskAnd think about like, hey, we got to be competitive here and there's a new kid on the block that's going to be two to three times our size. We better step up our game and you know, and stop infighting.
1:21:51Chamath PalihapitiyaYou think it's easier to stop infighting once we're beaten? Or do you think that there's a way folks here can actually just, you know, get their political and commercial act together?
1:22:01Chamath PalihapitiyaOr does it not happen until we realize we've lost?
1:22:04David FriedbergOr do we need a war?
1:22:06Elon MuskI mean, I sort of hope we don't need a war, but there will
1:22:12David Friedbergbe certainly
1:22:15Elon Muskan economic competition that I think will blow people away when they realize just how competitive they have to be to be competitive with companies in China. It's very difficult.
1:22:27Elon MuskTesla is competitive. Tesla is competitive because we have an awesome team in China.
1:22:36Chamath PalihapitiyaDo your Tesla China employees work some meaningful percentage more or harder than your Tesla non China employees? Do you find like it's two different companies basically?
1:22:46Elon MuskWell, I mean I think Tesla is somewhat, Tesla is sort of pretty far out there in terms of work ethic anywhere in the world. So the Tesla work ethic in the US I think is substantially greater than any other car company or any large manufacturing company that I'm aware of.
1:23:06Elon MuskSo Tesla, Tesla does have a strong work ethic in the US but to be totally frank, the work, that work ethic is exceeded on balance by the Tesla China team.
1:23:27Elon MuskThat is, I think objectively true. So let's not say there aren't lots of hard working people at Tesla us there certainly are. But if you say on average the work ethic in China is higher, it's just tell us like it is, you know, so what about if you're an
1:23:43Chamath PalihapitiyaAmerican CEO, how do you deal with, do you think just the need for managing all these political factions inside of a company? You probably saw, you know, all the sturm and drong related to Disney and what happened to them and what's continuing to happen to them on both sides between their employees and as well as the governments, et cetera.
1:24:03Chamath PalihapitiyaDo you have any advice or what do you tell like young CEOs that you hang out with about how to deal with that, how to make those decisions where you land in the spectrum of dealing with all of this stuff.
1:24:14Chamath PalihapitiyaThe non work issues that are related to now, you know, going to work every day.
1:24:20Elon MuskI'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean.
1:24:21Chamath PalihapitiyaLike, you know, whether it's the need for political correctness or the need for having political points of view and having to bring that and balance that in the work workplace.
1:24:32Chamath PalihapitiyaHow do you deal with that? How do you give advice to other folks about having to deal with it?
1:24:36Elon MuskLook, I think the point of a company is to produce useful products and services for your fellow human beings. It is not some political gathering place or a thing where that's the point of a company.
1:24:50Elon MuskI'd say politics and other stuff should.
1:24:57David SacksBe.
1:24:58Elon MuskLet's not lose sight of why companies should exist. So I gotta, I'm actually late for. Yeah, I gotta work on the rocket, guys.
1:25:10Jason CalacanisYeah, we're gonna go ahead and let you get to Mars and I'll see you soon.
1:25:16Elon MuskLadies and gentlemen, Elon Musk.
1:25:20Jason CalacanisNicely done, brother. We'll let your winner ride Rain Man David Sack.
1:25:29David SacksAnd instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
1:25:33Jason CalacanisLove you, Queen of K.
1:25:42Jason CalacanisBesties are gone.
1:25:45Elon MuskThat is my dog taking a noise in your driveway. Oh man, my appet will meet me at. We should all just get a room
1:25:54Jason Calacanisand just have one big huge orgy
1:25:55Elon Muskbecause they're all just useless.
1:25:56Jason CalacanisIt's like this like sexual tension, but
1:25:58Chamath Palihapitiyathey just need to release my mouth.
1:26:00Elon MuskWet your feet, feet. Wet your feet.
1:26:06Jason CalacanisWe need to get