Elon Musk at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (3)
Transcript
0:27ModeratorThank you for doing this. I know today was a busy day at the office. Yeah, I guess every day is a busy day at the office when you run into the companies.
0:33Elon MuskSome are more intense than others. This is on the more intense side.
0:38ModeratorLet's talk about Tesla. And if one were to believe everything one reads in the press, which I don't as a former journalist, the recent fires in the Tesla cars sound like the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.
0:54Elon MuskRight.
0:54ModeratorThe humanity reality is somewhat different. Tell us what really happened there.
0:59Elon MuskYeah. So I think, first of all that it's fair for a new technology to receive more scrutiny than older technologies because it should be held to a higher standard.
1:10Elon MuskBut there's some reasonable limit to what that increased standard should be. And I mean, since the Model S went into production about a year and a half ago, there have been about a quarter million gasoline car fires in the US about 400 deaths, 1200 serious injuries.
1:30Elon MuskOur three fires, which caused no injury, received more headline news than the other quarter million combined. That seems like an unreasonable ratio.
1:44ModeratorAnd I believe all three owners of those cars who crashed wanted to get another one.
1:49Elon MuskYes, right, exactly. It's like, don't take my word for it. That was like I said, well, how soon can they get a loaner car? Until the insurance thing gets figured out.
2:02Elon MuskAnd so I gave them one right away. But, yeah, I mean, that's the acid test. Does the guy that was that experienced the fire, does he want to have that same car again?
2:14ModeratorHe feels safe. And stock price down again today, 10%. Do you care about that?
2:20Elon MuskI mean, it kind of sucks running a public company. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the stock goes through these huge gyrations and. Yeah. For like, seemingly arbitrary reasons. And then I'm asked to explain why it changed.
2:44Elon MuskI'm like, I have no idea.
2:47ModeratorIt should be pointed out it's up 300% on the year.
2:50Elon MuskYeah, right. I mean, on balance, that's still good. But I mean, when the stock price was way higher and people asked me what I think of the valuation, I said, well, I think it's probably more than we have a right to deserve.
3:03Elon MuskWe'll try to get there in the long term, and I think we will and probably exceed it, but I would not try to justify that. A company with a little over $2 billion revenue should be worth $22 billion in market cap.
3:17Elon MuskThat does seem pretty high to me. You know, it's like. Yeah.
3:21ModeratorAnd it's fair to say you wouldn't be there without government subsidy.
3:25Elon MuskWell, I think it would have taken longer. So the. There's a slight misperception about the history of Tesla, which is that the government funding was pivotal. It was an accelerant, but it was not pivotal.
3:38Elon MuskThe really pivotal point was an investment from Daimler in 2009, early 2009, when there was. I basically spent all the money I had and we had one company that was willing to invest or one entity that was wanting to invest, period.
3:54Elon MuskAnd that was Daimeland. And. And if they hadn't come in with that investment, we would definitely be dead.
4:00ModeratorFortunately bankrupt. Finished.
4:03Elon MuskYeah, gone. And fortunately they did. And we've done a number of vehicle programs with amlo. There's the Mercedes B Class which is not currently produced in the us but it's very popular in Europe and other parts of the world will be coming to the US and that'll have a Tesla battery pack and powertrain.
4:22Elon MuskIt'll be the largest electric vehicle program in Daimler history. So that got a great relationship. They've been a great supporter.
4:34ModeratorHow about self drive version of Tesla?
4:39Elon MuskI do think that's an important technology, although.
4:48Elon MuskThe difficulty increases exponentially to get to fully self driving to cover all the corner cases. So I think we can get to maybe 90% of miles driven being autopilot as we call it, because we're using that sort of aircraft analogy.
5:05Elon MuskI think we'll get there pretty soon, maybe in a few years. But then covering that last 10% is really difficult. And so getting from 90% to 99 then to 99.9% and then ultimately to be truly self driving, like you can fall asleep and the car arrives at your destination, which would be really great.
5:24ModeratorSome people do already by the way.
5:25Elon MuskYeah, exactly.
5:28ModeratorThey die.
5:29Elon MuskYeah.
5:34Elon MuskI think you probably need like six nines of reliability. Like the standard would be actually way higher than the safety of a person, probably by a factor of 10 or 100 in order for people to be comfortable or otherwise.
5:51Elon MuskLike this fire thing, you know, just like a car is basically the safest car you could possibly drive if you care about fires. And that's not the impression one would have reading the headlines.
6:04Elon MuskYou have sort of the opposite impression. And so for self driving autopilot, hopefully the media doesn't do the same thing. Same like mega disproportionate response. But I do think that it should be held to a standard that's maybe like 10 times better than a person.
6:25ModeratorAnd I know Google's working on this too. Ten years, more or less.
6:29Elon MuskYeah,
6:34Elon MuskI mean I think that the right path is Probably a little different from what Google is pursuing. And Larry Page is an old friend of mine, I've known him since before he got venture funding for Google and I think he's a really brilliant guy.
6:47Elon MuskBut it's not. Google isn't focusing on autonomous cars, whereas it's going to be a pretty significant focus for Tesla. And from our standpoint, it only matters if the autopilot capability does not result in a substantial cost increase to the car.
7:10Elon MuskThe way the Google sensor suite is set up, it's like 60 grand. That's like a lot.
7:17ModeratorI want to ask you about risk taking because there's a theory that entrepreneurs who hit it out of the park one time, make that billion dollar plus company work, they are reluctant to do it again, not because they're afraid of losing their money, but because they feel if they were to fail a second time round, then in their own minds maybe they would think, well, the first time it was just luck.
7:41ModeratorIt wasn't really my own skill or my own sense of how to run a business. But not only did you, well, you rose PayPal came up to 1.5 billion.
7:50ModeratorYou got out of that. Not only did you invest again, but you invest again twice. Not only that, but you chose probably two of the most risky capital intensive industries to go with rocket technology, which is basically a bomb directed up and then cars which are, you know, we know what's happening in Detroit.
8:08Elon MuskYeah.
8:09ModeratorSo what is it that motivates there to do that? To go through the crucible again two times again?
8:16Elon MuskYeah, I'm not sure it was the right decision, but
8:22Moderatorso far so good.
8:24Elon MuskYeah,
8:29Elon MuskIt's much less fun than it may appear, but. I mean, in the case of what I thought of I would do was start and run SpaceX and then create an electric car company with a few other people.
8:51Elon MuskWork, but just like apply 20% of my time and work on the product design because my main thing is engineering and design. So yeah, that was an illusion. So yeah.
9:10Elon MuskAnd then I don't really have any choice but to apply a ton of time to Tesla or the company would be definitely dead.
9:23ModeratorBut the other way to do it, you could have stayed in Silicon Valley, started another few Internet companies, made a zillion dollars and then you could have bought Chrysler and probably bought NASA too, and you wouldn't have to start from scratch.
9:38Elon MuskThat seems too easy. Yeah.
9:43ModeratorAll right.
9:44Elon MuskI don't really want to. The point is not to sort of own a car company, but rather to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. And it seemed like it would be difficult.
10:02ModeratorLet's talk about SpaceX. SpaceX, you have said you started with the specific intention of getting to Mars.
10:11Elon MuskYeah, well, the origin of SpaceX was actually not. My initial thought in space was that it wasn't possible to create a company. And I mistakenly thought that the reason that we're not sending people to Mars was because we'd lost the world to explore or something.
10:34Elon MuskAnd I thought, well, maybe that needs to be reignited. And so came up with this idea to do basically a philanthropic mission to Mars with 100% probability of losing all the money in order to reignite interest in that goal.
10:51Elon MuskBut after a while I realized that was actually a mistake. Particularly the United States is a nation of explorers, came here from other parts of the world. I think more than any other country is the distillation of the human spirit of exploration.
11:09Elon MuskThere's no lack of will, but people need to believe that there's a way in, a way that's feasible and that it's not going to bankrupt the country and their living standard won't be materially affected.
11:23Elon MuskAnd then I think they're super keen on that goal.
11:28ModeratorNow, as you look out, whatever we're talking 10, 15, 20 years to get to Mars. It's not just rocket technology, and you've talked about reusable rocket technology. It's also how you shield people from radiation.
11:39ModeratorIt's a 10, 12 month trip. What you do when they arrive, how are they going to live there? Is that something that you want to work on too? Or will you partner with other companies?
11:48ModeratorHow do you see that playing out over the next decade?
11:50Elon MuskWell, I actually think the technology required to live on Mars is not particularly difficult, but getting there is really difficult. I mean, it's like hundreds of millions of miles.
12:08ModeratorTo get to Death Valley.
12:10Elon MuskYeah, exactly. To get to a place that kind of looks like Arizona,
12:17Elon MuskLike a cold version of Arizona with not quite as much water. So, I mean, at least that's my best. My guess is, I think if we can get there, the technology required to live there is not a really big challenge.
12:38Elon MuskMars has some advantages. It's quite sort of Earth. Like in some ways. It's got a rotational period of 24 and a half hours, by far the closest of any other planet.
12:51Elon MuskThe atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Now, it's at a low pressure, but if you were to have a transparent dome, all you'd need is a pump and some fertilizer and you could grow plants on Mars.
13:06Elon MuskThe plants would convert the CO2 to oxygen.
13:10ModeratorThe other thing that's been big in the news recently. Is the hyperloop, which you have seen sketched out, you estimate, from LA to San Francisco in 35 minutes?
13:21Elon MuskYeah, you could push that a little bit, but.
13:23ModeratorWell, I'd be happy if I could get from Santa Monica the downtown.
13:31Elon MuskI know, I know you have your
13:32Moderatorpersonal issues with the four or five.
13:34Elon MuskThe four or five is like, this is like the most brutal construction project I've ever personally witnessed. I mean it's like mind boggling.
13:43ModeratorBut I also know that so, so you sketched this out, but I know that your plans for the hyperloop have been put into pretty sophisticated simulation technology and it looks like it actually might work, am I right?
13:54Elon MuskYeah. And we did run simulations at SpaceX and Tesla, so we thought it would work. But I actually don't think it's particularly. I think it's like the engineering of it that it would work is actually pretty obvious, honestly.
14:16Elon MuskBut I mean it's so I think the larger issues are political. You know, getting the political sport to do something like that and then making sure the economics pan out.
14:31ModeratorAnd
14:33Elon Muskyeah, I hope someone does that because I think it would be cool. I mean it would be great to have something like that. It's just like it doesn't seem like our mass transportation is getting better.
14:45Elon MuskIt seems to be kind of getting worse. So that's, that's not a good future.
14:51ModeratorYou said something or you hope somebody else would do it. I'm curious, what makes you really so unique is not only your ability to dream big, but to execute.
14:59ModeratorThere are lots of utopian thinkers out there, but they cannot execute. But there are some other people who can do good things. And I'm wondering what seems to motivate you.
15:08ModeratorYou see things that frustrate you or you think are not as good as you like and then you try and fix them. You've worked on solar power, you've worked on electric cars and planetary space travel.
15:20ModeratorI'm wondering what other things about America and about the world for that matter would you like to see fixed either by a company you might do yourself or by someone a smart entrepreneur.
15:29ModeratorWhat else out there is feasible? You know, we all want to get rid of world poverty and get rid of childhood diseases, but what problems out there can feasibly be fixed, say in our lifetimes?
15:40Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think first of all, the world's actually pretty great right now. I mean, arguably better than at any point in history. And this is sometimes lost.
15:52Elon MuskIf you read the newspapers, they're, they're like a magnification of all the world's promises. Like, newspapers seem to be attempting to answer the question, what was the worst thing that happened on Earth today?
16:10Elon MuskYeah, and it's
16:13Moderatorif it bleeds, it leads.
16:14Elon MuskYeah. And it's like, okay. I mean, and I think there's, there is kind of an evolutionary reason for that because it makes more sense. Like you want to prioritize danger over
16:25Moderatorreward
16:28Elon Muskbecause if you get eaten by the lion, it's game over. But if you forget where you left some snack, that's okay. I mean, you would be.
16:38ModeratorSo
16:41Elon Muskit's not quite the same in terms of the risk reward balance, but we didn't evolve with newspapers and global media. So like our brains sort of having a fear response to a lot a bunch of dangers that are extremely unlikely to ever affect us.
16:59Elon MuskBut yeah, just, yeah,
17:02Moderatoryou have, I believe, about 3000 people at Tesla.
17:05Elon MuskWe have 6000.
17:07ModeratorYeah, 6000. I'm malinformed and SpaceX is 3500. So that's a massive agglomeration of engineering talent. Huge. If I could take the metaphor of a ship. How much time do you have to go down into the engine room, roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty and fix stuff as an engineer?
17:29ModeratorAnd how much time do you spend on the bridge, steering and looking at the distant horizon?
17:35Elon MuskWell, not a lot on that last point. I mean, there's a constant flurry of executional challenges. And so I try to triage my time according to what would be best for the companies and still have some time to see my kids because I don't want to miss them growing up.
17:58ModeratorSo
18:01Elon Muskit can vary from big issues to things that seem small but actually could have a really big impact. So I mean, it's all the way from design aesthetics to the details of, say, the vehicle functionality, or in the case of the rocket, the avionics, propulsion system and airframe.
18:30Elon MuskI mean, the rocket is kind of a, has more of a concentrated pucker factor because you've got these launches and at least for the car, you can do a recall or do a software update.
18:46Elon MuskThat's not going to happen with the rocket. So it's like passing grade is 100%, which induces anxiety.
19:01ModeratorHow do you handle launch anxiety when you're actually waiting with the countdown? We saw one here.
19:07Elon MuskWell, these ones actually. I mean, I have quite a lot of anxiety, so I think, oh, there must be something that we did wrong. And is there anything I could have done to prevent this pipe cycle thing from bad thing from occurring?
19:27Elon MuskI Mean, the last roughly 10 launches have worked, but the three launches we started off with did not.
19:41ModeratorSo
19:43Elon Muskby far the worst emotional stress was the fourth launch of Falcon 1 because the first three launches did not make it to orbit. They got to sort of space on launches two and three, but they didn't get to full orbital velocity.
19:56Elon MuskAnd when I started out, I figured I would have enough money for three launches. Yeah. So we squeaked by on the fourth one.
20:11ModeratorWe sent out a link today. I don't know how many of you saw it, but it's of you using your hands as 3D, molding sort of tools for stuff you're doing on a computer screen.
20:23ModeratorAnd it's a rocket engine that you're able to manipulate with your hands. And I know that you have told Jon Favreau, who produced or directed Iron man, that that was the inspiration because we see Tony Stark doing this in the movie.
20:34Elon MuskAbsolutely.
20:35ModeratorAnd I know also, you know, I've read a bit Isaac Asimov's foundation series. You've also said he's been inspiration. So I'm wondering, when you're on the cutting edge of technology today in the fields that you're in, do you feel you've almost got one foot in science fiction?
20:53ModeratorDo you have to be that far ahead?
20:56Elon MuskWell, you have to imagine an outcome in order to head in that direction. And science fiction explores a lot of different ideas, so it can be helpful as a source of inspiration.
21:10Elon MuskAnd like books, TV shows, movies, I mean, they're all, I think, sources of inspiration. Most of the movies and TV shows about space are totally wrong, but they still have interesting ideas.
21:29Elon MuskLike the Star Trek communicator was an inspiration for the cell phone with the flipper, Right? Yeah, exactly. In fact, the weird thing is the phones we have in our pocket vastly exceed what was on Star Trek.
21:47ModeratorWe're going to go to ask some of our students some questions. But first, one more I saw. I'm a big James Bond fan. You just bought the Lotus Esprit that they used in Spy who Love Me, which goes underwater, and you're going to make that work.
22:04Elon MuskSo it's definitely a backbone of project.
22:06ModeratorOkay. But my question is, when do we get to see a functioning version of the Millennium Falcon?
22:14Elon MuskThat's a tricky one because it's not actually the right shape.
22:20ModeratorNo, to George Lucas. Yeah.
22:23Elon MuskI mean, the Falcon 9, our Falcon Rocket, was named after the Millennium Falcon, even though it looks nothing like it. And. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's not the shape you'd want for the spaceship, really.
22:41ModeratorOkay, so if we can swing the camera to our student tables, can we get a couple of questions from there and then I'll go to the written questions from the rest of the audience.
22:51ModeratorSo here we go.
22:53Audience MemberGood evening, sir. My name's Ariel Jaime. I'm from Vaughan Excellent century, referring to Merlin 9. Does SpaceX have a working prototype and when will it be ready to launch?
23:08Elon MuskWell, Merlin is the name of our engine and Falcon 9 is the name of the rocket. We've done several launches of Falcon 9 and an important milestone happened a few months ago which was the launch of the next generation Falcon 9, which is designed to be able to return and land at the launch pad.
23:37Elon MuskAnd we came close on the initial mission but didn't quite get there. We need to make a few corrections, but I think we've got a good chance of getting there next year.
23:49ModeratorOkay, let's go for another one there.
23:53Audience MemberHi, I'm Kennedy Green from Harvard Westlake. So I've seen you speak at a TED talk and I remember you spoke pretty emphatically about the success of your innovations and how you kind of take a physics approach where you take the idea and boil it down to its basics and from there start to build up.
24:13Audience MemberSo can you talk about an example where you use that process?
24:21Elon MuskWell, I think, you know an important thing in innovation or trying to create new things is to try really hard to do that. Which may sound incredibly obvious, but that's what I find is most often what people don't do.
24:41Elon MuskThey actually didn't, didn't try super hard to come up with something new. And it is helpful to have cross pollination of industries. I mean it's been quite difficult to run SpaceX and Tesla, but there has been good ideas, you know, since I got both in my mind space this, this good ideas going back and forth.
25:05Elon MuskThe for example on the car, with respect to the car, the Model S is the only all aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. Very few cars are all aluminum.
25:16Elon MuskIn the aerospace industry that's the default. So it seemed like obviously the right move in order to minimize the non battery pack mass of the car. So in order to offset fairly heavy battery pack, we had to make the rest of the car light but still achieve a five star safety rating.
25:38Elon MuskI don't think it would have been possible to do that if we had used steel, which is the traditional method. And what's helped SpaceX has been that the car industry is really good at making complicated objects at a low cost.
25:55Elon MuskI mean it's actually Quite incredible that one can buy a decent car for $20,000. All the stuff that's in that car is. I mean, it's nutty. How much stuff is in a car?
26:09ModeratorSo
26:11Elon Muskat SpaceX I hired a bunch of people from the auto industry to run manufacturing, which has worked out reasonably well.
26:21ModeratorLet's take two more student questions, please, and then we'll come to the other written ones.
26:28Audience MemberHello, I'm Natalie Watson from Marlboro School and we have a sort of two part question that builds. So why do you think Tesla succeeded whereas other companies, car companies, have failed in their methods of electric cars?
26:49Audience MemberAnd is the location in Silicon Valley an important part of this?
26:56Elon MuskYeah, I think being in Silicon Valley is pretty important because what's really critical with electric cars is electrical engineering software and electronics and Silicon Valley has the best concentration of talent in those areas in the world.
27:17Elon MuskAnd yeah, sorry, what was the first part of the question?
27:22ModeratorWhy did you succeed?
27:23Elon MuskOh, why do we succeed? Oh yeah, right.
27:25Audience MemberI'm sorry, what was your question? Oh, the first part. Okay. Why do you think Tesla succeeded whereas other car companies failed in their methods of electric, of electric cars?
27:37Audience MemberLike why do you think Tesla is the leader in this idea?
27:45Elon MuskWell, there haven't been that many car company startups. I mean there was sort of Fisker and Coda and then a few smaller ones and then the rest has sort of been some fairly small scale efforts by the big companies.
28:10Elon MuskI think if we say what was the difference between say Fisker and Tesla, that's maybe the most direct comparison. Tesla is a hardcore engineering company and Fisker is kind of a, it's based on, kind of on styling.
28:26Elon MuskYou know, like styling is good, important, but it's, that's not the reason we don't have electric cars. So. But for styling we would have electric cars. That's not the reason.
28:37Elon MuskSo in the case of Visco, they made a car that a lot of people think looked really good but didn't work properly.
28:45ModeratorSo
28:47Elon Muskthen people don't want to buy the car. That's like a pretty reasonable thing, I think. Yeah,
29:02Elon MuskIf you think what's the point of a company existing? The point is that it's a group of people that have gathered together to create a product. If the product is good, the company should exist and if it is not good, the company should not exist.
29:22Elon MuskThat seems like fundamental to major companies. So I mean clearly then one should focus on making the absolute best product you can, otherwise you reduce the probability of success.
29:36Elon MuskBut a lot of companies focus on things that aren't really to do with the product. As though a company has any basis for existing apart from doing useful things.
29:46Elon MuskThat's kind of strange.
29:49ModeratorOne more question, student question for.
29:53Elon MuskGood evening sir.
29:54ModeratorMy name is Eric Palayo from von Next Century. And regarding the Mars.
30:01Elon MuskThe proposed Mars expedition, how exactly do you plan on making it cost efficient?
30:09ModeratorSure.
30:11Elon MuskWell, now that is. That is indeed a tricky problem.
30:19Elon MuskI mean, I feel reasonably possible that success is at least one of the possible outcomes.
30:35Elon MuskI mean, this is pretty important when you're trying to do something. It's like, well, can that be one of the outcomes? I wasn't actually confident about that until a few years ago.
30:46Elon MuskNow I'm not saying we will get there, but I'm confident that it is at least possible. And the key to that is having a fully reusable Mars transportation system so that all you are placing between flights, maybe apart from minor maintenance, is the propellant.
31:07Elon MuskI mean, this is like reusability is so fundamental to having a major change in space flight. It would be difficult to overstate its importance. But I mean, with analogy to other modes of transport, you can imagine that if airplanes could only be used once, very few people would fly because it would be super crazy expensive.
31:39Elon MuskI guess like a 747 costs a quarter billion dollars. You'd need two of them just for a round trip. People are not paying half a billion dollars to fly it back and forth to London.
31:48Elon MuskAnd that's because you can use the 747 like 20,000 times. And for a rocket, a Falcon 9 rocket costs about $60 million to build. And so if it can be used once, obviously that's a $60 million capital cost.
32:03Elon MuskBut if it can be used a thousand times, then it's only a $60,000 capital cost. I mean, that is, it is the fundamental difference. So you have to have fully useful, then you have to make sure that the propellant used is as low cost as possible.
32:22Elon MuskSo our next generation rockets will be using methane as a fuel, which methane is the lowest cost source fuel on the planet by a good margin. I think if your propellant costs are low and the system is fully reusable, then I think it should be possible to move to Mars for less than half a million dollars, which I think is an important threshold.
32:53Elon MuskBecause if people can sell all this stuff on Earth and move to Mars, well, and there's enough people who can do that, combined with those who actually want to do that,
33:11Elon MuskThen that's the fundamental thing needed to have a growing colony on Mars kind of like the way that the US was the early English colonies in America. When it became affordable for people to sell all this stuff in England and move to America, it grew really fast.
33:37Elon MuskIn the absence of that, it would just require humongous amounts of government support and I think probably wouldn't be, wouldn't result in a self sustaining civilization. So the economics of it are extremely fundamental.
33:51Elon MuskThanks.
33:52ModeratorOkay, I'm going to go to some questions that we got from the floor and the first one I want to ask is what do you think is the next battery technology after lithium ion?
34:03ModeratorI guess lithium ion has sort of reached its ceiling, more or less or no.
34:08Elon MuskI think there are substantial improvements that will occur with lithium ion batteries without any required. The thing with lithium ion technology in terms of the cost and energy density is that the sort of average improvement per year is about 8%, which isn't that noticeable on a one year basis.
34:32Elon MuskBut compound interest is a very powerful force. And so after say four or five years, the cost is cut in half, assuming there's a forcing function for a strong forcing function for improvement, which I think electric cars provide.
34:49Elon MuskSo I feel pretty good about achieving a substantial reduction in the cost of battery pack, say in kind of the three or four year time horizon.
35:00ModeratorStill way behind Moore's Law for Microsoft.
35:02Elon MuskOh yeah, sure. I mean the only thing that operates at Moore's Law speed is Moore's Law. You know, semiconductors just have this incredible advantage that as you made them tinier, they got way more efficient.
35:20Elon MuskFor something with like that's a lot large, like a macro structure like a battery pack, you just don't have or really almost anything essentially in fact anything except microprocessors and memory that does not improve at that pace.
35:38ModeratorAnother question here, it's about medical technology. Is there a medical application or technology that you would like to change or see somebody else change work on?
35:51Elon MuskWell, medical technology?
35:56Elon MuskWell, I think the thing that would most profoundly affect people would be
36:06Moderatorto
36:07Elon Muskbe able to recode genetics, which is obviously a dodgy situation. But that's the thing. We're close to saturation on, on lifespan. I mean it's sort of pretty much leveled out.
36:24Elon MuskAnd so even if you solve say any one particular disease, you maybe slightly improve life expectancy, but not a lot, you know, slight. You kind of have a genetic programming any given species for a certain lifespan.
36:39Elon MuskLike you cannot make a fruit fly live for 10 years no matter what you do. I mean no amount of healthy living vitamins or anything.
36:52ModeratorFruit flies live for 20 years.
36:54Elon MuskThat would be A truly astounding achievement. But yeah, so I mean it's a really tricky subject. It's fraught with all sorts of moral issues, but that's the thing that would most affect people's lives.
37:12Elon MuskBut it's, I mean it certainly is double edged sword.
37:18ModeratorHere's another question from a Tesla owner. Why is there no coat hook in the back? He says, he or she says, you can design a rocket but you forgot the coat hooks.
37:33Elon MuskWell, I didn't actually forget it. I just, I intentionally didn't like it. So I didn't put it there. Like the aesthetics of it really bothered me. But I know obviously some people disagree with that decision, but I think we might have a retroactive fix for that.
37:52Elon MuskIf somebody has the panoramic roof, which is to basically have a hook on the bow section in the middle of the roof and then the. Your coat could hang down in the second row, passenger footwell, which is actually slightly better than having a coat hook that's stuck on the side of the car.
38:15Elon MuskSo I think we'll probably do that. Yeah.
38:20ModeratorWherever that question came from. Hold on.
38:23Elon MuskIt's not the first time I've heard that question.
38:25ModeratorI'm sure, I'm sure. Is there a future in hydrogen fueled engines?
38:31Elon MuskYeah, actually I'll mention one little anecdote
38:33Moderatorwhich is
38:35Elon Muskin the beginning of more or less production, I also didn't have reading lights in the second row because like, well, people, I thought people were really going towards ebooks, Kindle and iPad and that kind of thing.
38:49Elon MuskIt's like, so they have their own light. They don't need like an actual light in the back. And I was driving with one of my kids and he was trying to read his book Daddy.
39:03Elon MuskYeah. He said this is the stupidest car in the world.
39:12Elon MuskAll right, we'll put the light back in.
39:18ModeratorHydrogen fueled engines.
39:19Elon MuskThey have a future, you know, I don't think so. Hydrogen is a very difficult energy storage mechanism. Essentially it's a means of storing energy chemically. But there are way better, if you want to do that, there are way better materials than hydrogen.
39:40Elon MuskI could go with methane or propane way before hydrogen. In fact, the way that they make the hydrogen is by taking methane and chopping the carbon atom off. So like, well, that seems like a waste.
39:54Elon MuskOr they'll do electrolysis, which is even worse. So it's a really energy intensive. It's either like either still mining hydrocarbons on a large scale or you're applying massive amounts of electricity to separate H2O and then sometimes they'll say over.
40:14Elon MuskHydrogen is the most common elements in the universe. Yes, but not on Earth, which is important consideration. You know, it's, it's. Yeah, it's one of those things that sort of always sounds like it's like it's one of those things, like it's the future and it always will be like.
40:38Elon MuskAnd then there's the Hindenburg issue. Yeah. I mean, in the case of the Hindenburg, my understanding is that the main issue is the paint on the outer surface as opposed to the hydrogen itself.
40:49Elon MuskBut hydrogen does combust extremely well. Hydrogen has a. Has a. There's a good argument for hydrogen as a fuel in the upper stage of a rocket, say Saturn V in the second and third stages had hydrogen.
41:05Elon MuskAnd particularly for the upstage of a rocket where you're not volumetrically constrained,
41:12Moderatoror
41:12Elon Muskrather you're mass constrained rather than volumetrically constrained, hydrogen is good if you care about mass and terrible if you care about volume. And it's also horrible from a handling standpoint.
41:23Elon MuskThis is a really tiny molecule and it goes all over the place.
41:28ModeratorYou look at Apple after Steve Jobs and Microsoft after Bill Gates struggle to keep up the momentum. I wonder, have you thought about the future of your companies, Tesla and SpaceX?
41:39ModeratorI know you've talked about giving away a lot of your money, but then I know you've had some other thoughts about that and you've looked at Ford and wondered if you want to give.
41:48ModeratorI mean, where are you at on that succession issue now?
41:51Elon MuskWell, I don't know if, like, I'm not sure about the whole sort of family dynasty from a wealth standpoint thing. I mean, that seems to often work out worse than if the kid wasn't given a huge sum of money.
42:10Elon MuskI mean, unless they've actually demonstrated a high ability to be a good steward of capital, then it's not going to work out, I think, to give them a huge sum of money.
42:27Elon MuskNow, that said, I mean, I'm wavering a little bit on that because if you look at the example of Ford and gm, like GM went bankrupt, Ford did not.
42:37Elon MuskFord had the Ford family as a stabilizing influence. So there could be some merit to having a family stabilizing influence, but maybe not necessarily complete control.
42:53ModeratorWe're going to end with two questions on the hyperloop, which has clearly aroused a lot of emotion in Los Angeles. One is from ucla Anderson. I know that Gene Block is here who runs ucla, but they want to know, how do you envision the hyperloop as an open source Project to be run in traditional enterprise fashion, which would make profits.
43:15ModeratorDoes that make sense?
43:17Elon MuskYeah, I guess. I mean, I think it's quite difficult for someone to execute the hyperloop and the thing that will really matter is how good is that company at executing as opposed to the basic sort of ideas of the system.
43:37Elon MuskSo I don't think a company has to worry too much about Nick creating value if they're really good at execution. And probably the best example of open source is Linux.
43:53Elon MuskAnd there's lots of companies that are quite valuable even though Linux is open source.
44:03ModeratorAnd the follow up to that is from somebody else who wants to know, when will the Hyperloop potentially be ready and can we get to Australia?
44:13Elon MuskThat would be. I would not recommend it for going to Australia because Australia is really far. So where something like Hyperloop would work best is for distances that are maybe about 500 miles, but probably not more than a thousand.
44:33Elon MuskAnd that's because if you compare it to say an alternative being supersonic air transport, in order to go really fast with a plane, you have to climb pretty high because the atmosphere just looks like molasses when you're going fast.
44:49Elon MuskSo for distances certainly under 500 miles, you spend all your time just ascending and descending and you don't really get an opportunity to spend time at Cruise. So something like a hyperloop can complete really well in that arena because you instantly or almost instantly enter a low pressure environment.
45:11Elon MuskSo the tube contains a low pressure environment that's like the cruising altitude of. Well, it's like very high altitude atmosphere basically. And so you don't have to spend any time ascending or descending.
45:29Elon MuskSo there's no way for. It would be extremely difficult for a plane to be faster than a hyper loop for distances under 500 miles because of that ascent decent thing.
45:43Elon MuskHowever, once you get to long distances, then the cost of the tube starts to become a big factor. And so then I'd say it's probably the right move is to go to Superstar Castle because then you're spending a large percentage of your time at Cruise and you could probably get there faster with a supersonic aircraft.
46:02ModeratorInteresting. So no Kangaroos in the hyperloop. I know you have an insane schedule. I know that you have to go from here back to your office tonight.
46:09Elon MuskYeah. I apologize for not being at my best. This has been working most of last night.
46:16ModeratorWe are deeply grateful you came. You gave us some time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.