WSJ CEO Council Summit
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:00WSJ InterviewerElon, hello. Welcome.
0:02Elon MuskHi.
0:03WSJ InterviewerYou're in Palo Alto, I understand.
0:05Elon MuskYeah, I'm at Global Engineering headquarters in Palo Alto.
0:11WSJ InterviewerGreat. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm actually going to start somewhere a little bit differently than I expected because I just saw on Twitter a little announcement and would love to get your thoughts on it.
0:28WSJ InterviewerI see you're interviewing Ron DeSantis tomorrow morning, is that right? On Twitter spaces. I see.
0:35Elon MuskYes. I need to look at the exact time, but tomorrow morning your time I think would be probably correct. So yes, we'll be interviewing Ron DeSantis and he has quite an announcement to
0:51WSJ Interviewermake
0:53Elon Muskand will be the first time that something like this is happening on social media and with real time questions and answers not scripted. So it's going to be live and let her up.
1:06Elon MuskLet's see what happens.
1:10WSJ InterviewerAnd you've been tweeting some Tim Scott stuff in the last few days. What should we be thinking about who you're backing? Obviously this interview tells us something. Can you give us a sense of where your thinking is at the moment?
1:23Elon MuskYes. I mean, I'm not at this time planning to endorse any particular candidate, but I am interested in X Twitter being somewhat of a public town square and where more and more organizations host content and make announcements on Twitter.
1:45Elon MuskIt's the only place on the Internet to really get real time, like down to the minute and second news. And it's. Yeah. So I think it's quite groundbreaking that there'd be a major announcement of this type on social media.
2:06WSJ InterviewerAnd should we expect. Sorry, I don't want to go on too long about this, but in your new role as interviewer rather than interviewee, should we expect more of this?
2:17WSJ InterviewerI mean, if it's the town square, are you going to be interviewing other candidates, Democrats? What's your thought of this? Are people willing to come? Are you going to be there to execute the town square across the spectrum?
2:28Elon MuskYes, absolutely. So just as I, as I promised, when I do a series of media interviews, I did a range of interviews and I guess this would be also a media interview, so ranging from sort of on the left, moderate to what's considered right.
2:47Elon MuskAnd I do think it's important that Twitter have both the reality and the perception of level playing field of a place where all voices are heard and where there's the kind of dynamic interaction that is you don't really see anywhere else.
3:06Elon MuskI mean, today on Twitter, for example, AOC got into and Ted Cruz got into an argument on Twitter which was independent of which side you agree with, it's still very entertaining.
3:24WSJ InterviewerSo what? And I'm sure tomorrow will be entertaining. We're all going to be tuned into that. But when you approach an interview like that, and obviously a really important election like the one that is coming up, can you just talk a little bit about what are the key issues that really matter for you at this pivotal moment?
3:46Elon MuskDo you matter for me as an
3:47WSJ Interviewerindividual or matter for you as an individual in terms of who leads the country, but also more broadly than that for the country and for your businesses? Can you give your sense of.
4:00WSJ InterviewerOf where the real issues lie here?
4:03Elon MuskWell, I've said publicly that my preference, and I think would be the preference of most Americans is really to have someone fairly normal in office.
4:16Elon MuskI think we'd all be quite happy with that, actually. You know, I think someone that is representative of the moderate views that I think most of the country holds in reality.
4:30Elon MuskBut the way things are set up is that we do have a system that seems to push things towards the edges because of the primaries. So in order to win the primary, you've got to win, obviously, majority of your party's vote.
4:42Elon MuskIn both cases, that tends to cause a swing to the left and the right, although I think things are more complex than simply left and right during the primaries.
4:53Elon MuskAnd then, and then let's shift towards the center for the general election as far, I think is. Yeah. So I would really just like someone, you know, fairly normal and sensible to be the president.
5:08Elon MuskThat would be great.
5:09WSJ InterviewerSo if we go through the, if we go through the four names in the frame at the moment, can you just give a sort of yes, no, and whether they're normal and sensible?
5:17WSJ InterviewerSo we've got Joe Biden.
5:19Elon MuskI mean, I think I, you know, be careful about these statements. So I would maybe have to have a few drinks before I would give you the answers to all of them.
5:36WSJ InterviewerI will look forward to that and I look forward to the conversation tomorrow and obviously a lot more of those to come over the coming months. So that's great.
5:45WSJ InterviewerThank you very much. So what I wanted to start with, you've just flown in, I think, in the last 20 minutes. You live a pretty hectic lifestyle, but you've said that the only true currency is time.
6:01WSJ InterviewerCan you give a sense to the people in this room who are scheduled within an inch of their lives, sort of how you. What is a day in the life of Elon Musk?
6:10WSJ InterviewerWhat does that look like?
6:12Elon MuskWell, my days are very long and complicated, as you might imagine.
6:15WSJ InterviewerYeah.
6:17Elon MuskAnd There's a great deal of context switching, so there's a meme called like relating to doom where it's like, fear is not the mind killer, context switching is. So switching context is quite painful.
6:33Elon MuskBut I do generally try to divide companies that's predominantly one company on one day. So today is a Tesla day, for example, although I might end up at Twitter late tonight.
6:47Elon MuskAnd then tomorrow would be partly a Tesla day as well, but sort of half Twitter. And then Thursday would be sort of a half SpaceX, half Tesla Day. But these things somewhat intertwined.
7:02Elon MuskSo the time management is extremely difficult. And this is going to sound pretty strange, but I, I only have one part time assistant.
7:12WSJ InterviewerHow many days a week is that? The part time, I mean, I suppose
7:17Elon Muskin terms of hours she works, it would technically be full time, but it's not. I do most of the scheduling myself and the reason I do that is because it's impossible for someone else to know what the priorities are.
7:34Elon MuskSo. And since the most valuable thing I have is time, I schedule it myself for the most part.
7:41WSJ InterviewerSo if you come into Tesla today, do you have a series of meetings set up or do you come in with something on your mind and you go in and see people.
7:53WSJ InterviewerHow structured is this? If you show up at Twitter in terms of the people working for you, how do they handle that?
8:02Elon MuskYeah, so today I have several hours of scheduled meetings at Twitter. So there are a number of things that operate on a weekly cadence and so those meetings are already set up and then I have supplemental meetings at the end of the day.
8:16Elon MuskBut to be clear, I won't be going to sleep until probably 2am or something like that. I'll be working almost the entire time.
8:24WSJ InterviewerAnd if you're scheduling this yourself, is AI going to be helpful over the next few years to help you do this? Are you going to be using technology to help you manage that?
8:37Elon MuskI guess we'll all be using technology. I don't use a lot of AI myself day to day. I mean Tesla AI is actually very advanced for real world AI.
8:47Elon MuskIt's the most advanced real world AI by far. And in fact, if positions were swapped and it was a up to Microsoft and OpenAI to create who could create the best large language model.
9:03Elon MuskAnd if basically if the tasks were swapped, Tesla was given the task of making the most competitive large language Model and Microsoft OpenAI were tasked with self driving, Tesla would win.
9:15Elon MuskOkay, I don't think people understand the degree of the capability of Tesla's AI system. So while I don't use AI a lot personally, Tesla uses transmit.
9:28WSJ InterviewerWe'll get onto that in a second if that's okay. But one final thing. In terms of just the management of what you do with your life, you're running three very big companies.
9:36WSJ InterviewerYou have very big stakes and ownership control of two of those at least. What is your succession plan if you suddenly can't execute what you're doing? Both in terms of who runs the companies, but as importantly, who votes those shares in terms of, you know, what happens longer term and strategically?
9:57WSJ InterviewerHave you got a plan for all of those?
10:01Elon MuskYeah, succession is one of the toughest age old problems. You know, it's, it's plagued, you know, countries, kings, prime ministers and Presidents for, and CEOs for, you know, since the dawn of history.
10:20Elon MuskThere is no obvious solution. I mean there are particular individuals identified as that. I've told the board, look, if something happens to me unexpectedly, this is who my, this is my recommendation for taking over.
10:33Elon MuskSo in all cases the board is aware of who my recommendation is, which they may choose to, it's up to them. Of course they, they may choose to go a different direction.
10:42Elon MuskBut I think there is, in worst case scenario, this is who should run the company. The control question is a much more, is a much tougher question and something that I'm wrestling with and I'm frankly open to ideas because it certainly is true that the companies that I have created and are creating collectively possess immense capability.
11:05Elon MuskAnd so the stewardship of them is incredibly important. I want to make sure that the stewardship is ultimately accrues the benefit of humanity. That's the idea is the furtherance of civilization.
11:20Elon MuskNot that we're always successful in that, but that is aspirationally our goal. So I have one idea which is sort of partly in place, which is to create kind of a, sort of an educational institution that would control most of my vote.
11:48Elon MuskBut this is not a case of automatically. I'm definitely not at the school of automatically giving my kids some share of the companies, even if they are not, even if they have no interest or inclination or ability to manage the company.
12:08Elon MuskThat's a mistake, but it's a very hard problem to solve. And then who should be on the board of directors of the educational institution is also a very, very hard job to solve.
12:21Elon MuskSo I think probably some disaggregation of control would make sense. I'm really just kind of thinking out loud creatively here, but it sounds like
12:31WSJ Interviewerit's something that you, I mean you need to get planning of who those people are going to be because as you've said, when you look at SpaceX, you look at Tesla, you look at Twitter, these, these matter to society a lot.
12:44WSJ InterviewerAnd having the right people to take those votes on the future of where they go and where money gets spent is. It's very important.
12:53Elon MuskYes, absolutely. Now the goals, the companies, the achievement of those goals varies considerably in difficulty. You know, the original goal of Tesla was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, which actually I think we've done, done that to a significant degree and have actually it's kind of, it's kind of auto industry CEOs too often acknowledge Tesla's role in accelerating electric vehicles and you know, so that I feel has a lot of momentum.
13:27Elon MuskThey're still solving self driving, which we're, you know, aspirationally hoping to do this year. And so Tesla's got a long way to go but, but the execution plan is relatively clear and that that execution plan will generate a lot of positive cash flow for the company.
13:49Elon MuskSo it's like a, it's a fairly obvious thing to do with SpaceX. You, it's a harder problem because the long term objective is to make life multi planetary with a self sustaining city on Mars, which is likely to be very cash flow negative at first, very much a long term, let's just say the target market on Mars is small.
14:11Elon MuskYou got to think long term here.
14:13WSJ InterviewerYou're also going to have to get on very well with those you go with, I would imagine.
14:16Elon MuskYes, definitely. You know, sanity will be a prime requirement for traveling to Mars. You don't want someone going nuts and opening the airlock in the middle of the night.
14:30Elon MuskRight. So anyway, so SpaceX is a harder problem because it's much a long term goal and with a lot more money lost along the way. So got to make sure that that happens.
14:45WSJ InterviewerAnd is that the sort of thing just to stay on SpaceX and we'll go to Twitter and Tesla in a second. But is that the sort of thing that you'd like to lock in to the goals of SpaceX?
14:54WSJ InterviewerThat Mars remains the ultimate ambition of this come what may. Is that that important to you?
15:02Elon MuskYeah, I mean it's to make life multi planetary such that. And the key threshold for multi planetary is that if the supply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason that Mars does not die out.
15:17Elon MuskThat's the critical Great filter. If you talk about things in terms of the Fermi paradox, the great filter is Mars being self sustaining without any resupply shifts from Earth.
15:29Elon MuskUntil we reach that point, we are really just a one planet civilization with an extension. But the point in which the planets are self sustaining or Mars self sustaining, then even in a worst case scenario of Earth civilization either dying with a bang or a whimper, then Mars would have a much better chance of surviving.
15:55Elon MuskSo the intent here overall is to ensure light of consciousness, which appears to be just a tiny candle in a vast darkness. I frequently get asked, have I seen any evidence of aliens?
16:09Elon MuskAnd I have not, you know, apart from the fact that I did at one point have an alien registration card when I was getting my green card to alien registration.
16:21WSJ InterviewerIndeed, possibly a slightly different type of alien, but. So do you think you'll, will you live to see Mars happen?
16:32Elon MuskI hope to live to see the first humans on Mars, but I think it will take some period of time beyond that to make Mars self sustaining. So it's at least 20 years from the first visit to make Mars sustaining is my guess.
16:48Elon MuskAnd it may be 40 or 50. And that's assuming you really go for it. That's a tough one. But like I said, I think important for improving the survivability of civilization.
17:04WSJ InterviewerAnd who's going to pay for that? I mean, are your investors going to put the money up to do that? Are you going to expect government to fund that?
17:14WSJ InterviewerWhere does that money come from? Because as you say, you can make a return on Starlink, you can make a return on launching satellites for other people and space tourism.
17:22WSJ InterviewerBut that's a tougher return, isn't it?
17:26Elon MuskYeah, I think long term the value of it will be incredibly high. It's just beyond the planning horizon of most people or most investors. So I mean obviously if there's a thriving city on Mars and there's a lot of interplanetary commerce and SpaceX is the primary provider of that, it would be immensely valuable.
17:53Elon MuskSo. But you know, the important thing is that there be this self sustaining colony. And I think we generally operate with too much of an assumption that civilization is robust and nothing could really take it down.
18:17Elon MuskA sentiment that has been common throughout history among empires shortly before they crumble. So and you know, I have to say, you know, there's a little bit of late stage empire vibes going on right now.
18:31WSJ InterviewerYeah, for sure. Are you? Yeah. Is AI something that in your view accelerates the risk of that or increases the risk of that outcome?
18:47Elon MuskI think it does, yeah. We could definitely make a city of Mars self sustaining without AI or without sort of AGI, which is generally artificial general intelligence or super intelligence.
19:01Elon MuskSo I think that is it's not necessary for anything we're doing, but it is happening and happening very quickly. So there is a risk that advanced AI either eliminates or constrains humanity's growth.
19:22WSJ InterviewerI was more thinking the opposite. Does it increase the chance that plant the planet self implodes and those things come true? I mean, how concerned are you about the these developments right now, sort of accelerating your bad case scenario here?
19:38Elon MuskWell, I mean the development of artificial digital sort of superintelligence is very much a double edged sword. So it's if you have a genie that can grant you anything, that can also do anything that necessarily is presents a danger.
19:59Elon MuskAnd I expect the first uses of AI to be certain. The first government uses of AI to be weapons technology. So just having more advanced weapons on the battlefield that can react faster than any human could, that's, that's really what AI will capable of.
20:24Elon MuskI mean, future wars between advanced countries or at least countries that have significant drone capability will be very much the drone wars.
20:37WSJ InterviewerSo I want to get back to AI because this is big stuff and I'd like to talk about it in more detail. But I do want to just come back to the present from a long way in the future.
20:47WSJ InterviewerYou just hired a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an ad veteran, into Twitter. You usually focus on hiring engineers. You know, Linda is a very different person. Can you just quickly tell us about your courtship?
21:01WSJ InterviewerHow did that go down?
21:04Elon MuskWell, we had conversations over a number of months just relating to advertising. And then Linda felt that it would be very helpful for the advertisers to see me in person.
21:22Elon MuskSo invited me down to a conference in Miami, which was very helpful, and met with a number of advertisers personally to assure them that Twitter is a good place to advertise.
21:37Elon MuskIn fact, that hate speech has declined, which it has, and that the quality of the system, especially with respect to scammers and spammers, is dramatically better than it used to be.
21:49Elon MuskWe've gotten rid of at this point well over 90% of the scams and scams, the scams and spam on Twitter. So it should be quite rare at this point that you see a scam.
22:01Elon MuskSo we've also rolled out sort of.
22:05WSJ InterviewerJust to be clear, when you say you got rid of 90% of the scams, is that the same thing as the bots or is this scams in general? And bots is a different animal here.
22:14Elon MuskThey would typically use bots for scamming.
22:17WSJ InterviewerBut you haven't taken the bots down 90%?
22:21Elon MuskNo, I think we have, actually.
22:23WSJ InterviewerI think you have.
22:23Elon MuskOkay, Yeah, I think we have. Yeah. Maybe more than 90% at least. It's now much, much harder to operate a block bomb on Twitter and have it yield any advantage.
22:38Elon MuskSo dramatic improvement in bots, dramatic improvement in ability to detect sort of troll omnis, which is a little different. That's where you've got, say, you know, 100 people in a warehouse in a low wage country, each of which are sitting at a desk with 100 phones.
22:56Elon MuskSo you've got 10,000 actual people. And they will then act together to brigade a particular subject or make something seem very popular when it is not. And we've been able to defeat almost all of them.
23:12Elon MuskWe think very few of them are actually still able to operate. The quality of the system has gotten a lot better.
23:20WSJ InterviewerOkay, so.
23:26WSJ InterviewerHave you said to Linda that you are going to keep speaking your mind, whatever the commercial impact of that? And has she agreed to that? Is she happy with that you aligned?
23:37Elon MuskYeah.
23:38WSJ InterviewerOkay. And in her role as CEO, does she have any say over moderation or is that under you, or do you do that together?
23:48Elon MuskWell, the general principle is that we will hew close to the law. So for any given country, we will try to adhere as closely to the law as possible.
24:01Elon MuskNow, law is varied between countries and we can't simply flat law in another country because they will simply cut us off. So. But the general principle is do whatever we can to enable free and open communications between people, provided they're not, like I said, breaking.
24:23WSJ InterviewerAnd she's aligned on that plan, that focus.
24:28Elon MuskYeah. There is an important thing which is like, that obviously doesn't mean that, say, advertisers should be forced to appear next to any content. So we've also developed adjacency controls that ensure that if what you're advertising is, like Disney, for example, is a big advertiser, if Disney is advertising a children's movie, they, you know, want the content nearby to be sort of family friendly.
24:57Elon MuskThat's totally understandable. So it's not like advertisers have to appear next to content that they don't agree with.
25:06WSJ InterviewerAnd can you. So some people say you can be a little erratic with your tweeting, or at least tweet a broad range of content. Does anybody say, I don't want to be adjacent to Elon Musk?
25:18WSJ InterviewerIs that something that's happened on the platform?
25:24Elon MuskI've never heard that yet.
25:31Elon MuskNope, never heard that.
25:35WSJ InterviewerAnd did that come up with Lynda at all? Sort of what you tweet and whether that was something that could affect advertisers. Did she ask you about that?
25:45Elon MuskShe did. In fact, at the conference that we did in Miami. Free speech is paramount.
25:50WSJ InterviewerFine. I wanted to ask you a little bit about your vision for Twitter as a community and as a conversation. You've talked about your desire to maximize unregretted time.
26:04WSJ InterviewerCan you explain what that means and how you measure that?
26:08Elon MuskYeah. So previously, Twitter was mostly focused on this number called. They called mdao, Monetizable Daily Active Users. But the problem is that when you look closely at that, a bunch of those users never even went to Twitter.
26:24Elon MuskThey would go to. They would see a notification on their phone about a tweet, but they wouldn't actually click through the site. So what really matters is true user seconds of screen time.
26:38Elon MuskSo that's the figure we track right now, and that's based on the screen time as reported to us by iOS, Android and the browser. So it would have to be the amount of time the app is in the foreground.
26:57WSJ InterviewerRight.
26:58Elon MuskWhich I think is the most rigorous way to assess this.
27:01WSJ InterviewerSo when you say unregretted. Sorry, please keep going.
27:05Elon MuskExactly. So in terms of undergraduate, that's a little harder to measure, but we can certainly gather it anecdotally, which is to say that if you spent half an hour on Twitter yesterday, what percentage of that time do you regret?
27:22Elon MuskAnd Journaling's feedback I've gotten has been very positive that they find the information to be useful, entertaining, funny. So we seem to be heading in the right direction, as far as I can tell.
27:34Elon MuskI'm certainly open to any critiques from the room.
27:37WSJ InterviewerWell, let me ask you one on that, which is. You recently tweeted about George Soros. You said, let me get that. Well, let me just get the words, because I'm kind of interested what you think about this.
27:49WSJ InterviewerHe wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity. That obviously generated a huge amount of response on Twitter on both sides. Lots of different viewpoints. Is that unregrettable time, unregretted time?
28:02WSJ InterviewerThat debate you created, does that fit into that category, do you think?
28:06Elon MuskWell, I mean, I said, like, Soros reminds me of Magneto, you know?
28:12WSJ InterviewerWell, you then went a little further than that. But again, without going into the Soros tweet itself, you know, you're obviously a big figure on Twitter and you're setting a tone that and an aim.
28:23WSJ InterviewerSo I'm just curious as to whether that sort of debate which. Which gets triggered is that does that fit into the definition that you're trying to create in that new town square?
28:34Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think the important thing is that like, look, what I say is not. Is what I'd say, you know, it's sort of a town square. I'm not going to mitigate what I say because that would be inhibiting freedom of speech.
28:48Elon MuskThat doesn't mean you have to agree with what I say. Nor does it mean if somebody says the total opposite, that they won't be supported on Twitter. They are.
28:56Elon MuskThe point is to have a divergent set of views and free speech is only relevant if it's a speech by speech by someone you don't like. Who says something you don't like.
29:06Elon MuskIs that allowed? If so, you have free speech, otherwise you do not. And for those who would advocate censorship, I would say it is. If you succeed in that, it's only a matter of time before the censorship gets turned on you.
29:19WSJ InterviewerI agree. I mean that's your free speech definition, which you said. But I'm just curious as to on the unregrettable part, what type of conversation you're trying to achieve and whether that's something that is acceptable, but maybe not where you want the broader conversation to go.
29:37Elon MuskWell, I mean I did clarify that some of my concerns about Soros are that he's funded a very large number of small but influential races around the country, especially with district attorneys.
29:51Elon MuskAnd we funded the, for example, the LA and San Francisco district attorney races with Ches Bodine and the guy always wanted to call him Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, but I think it's Gaston.
30:13Elon MuskAnd the basically he's caused a large number of VAs to be elected who are very easy on crime and will often refuse to prosecute.
30:29WSJ InterviewerSo you were basically trying to make a deeper point with that short. Can I just move on quickly to. Because I don't want to go too far down that, that rabbit hole because that debate has played out on Twitter a bit.
30:41WSJ InterviewerIs, you know, are you back near profitability now?
30:46Elon MuskTwitter is not quite there, but we're not like, you know, when I first acquisition closed, I'd say it's analogous to being teleported into a plane that's plunging to the ground with its engines on fire.
31:02Elon MuskThe controls don't work. So discomforting to say the least. We had to do some pretty heavy handed cost cutting company healthy. But at this point we're trending towards, if we get lucky we might be cash flow positive next month.
31:21Elon MuskBut it remains to be seen and
31:23WSJ InterviewerIs the staffing the level you now want it, or are you going to start taking it back up again from this is gone From I think 8000 to about 1500 or something like that?
31:32WSJ InterviewerIs that correct?
31:33Elon MuskThat's roughly correct, yeah. I think there's, you know, there's, there's definitely. We are going to start adding people to the company and we have started adding some number of people to the company and.
31:47Elon MuskBut it's still, there's still a lot of change to happen, so. But I think 1500 is probably a reasonable number.
31:56WSJ InterviewerAnd does this show what you can do in a big tech company in terms of cost reduction? I mean, when you look around other big tech companies in Silicon Valley, would you say from your experience that there's room for much more significant change at those as well?
32:15Elon MuskYeah, I think Twitter may be somewhat of an outlier in that there were a lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have a lot of value. And I think that's true probably at most Silicon Valley companies.
32:33Elon MuskMaybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter, but it's still, yeah, there's potential for significant cuts, I think, at other companies without affecting their productivity, in fact, increasing their productivity.
32:49Elon MuskSo, you know, in any given company there are people who help move things forward and people who sort of try to slam the brakes on. And Twitter was in a situation where you'd have a meeting of 10 people, you know, and one person with an accelerator and nine, nine with a set of brakes.
33:09Elon MuskSo you didn't go very far. Right. And so now we're gung ho about releasing functionality even at a little bit of risk to site stability, so long as it's not too serious.
33:22Elon MuskAnd I think at this point it's probably fair to say we've introduced more functionality in the last six months than Twitter has in the last six years.
33:30WSJ InterviewerAnd in terms of outages, there were some outages early on. Are you confident things are stable now?
33:36Elon MuskWell, outages are not unusual. Instagram recently had an outage, for example. It was reported on Twitter, ironically. So we've had outages, but not massive ones. And they've generally been brief and limited in scope.
33:52WSJ InterviewerOkay. Do you regret buying it, you tried to get out of it, or are you now happy you bought it?
34:00Elon MuskWell, all's well that ends well.
34:03WSJ InterviewerHas it ended well yet or we still got to wait and see?
34:07Elon MuskI think we're on the, hopefully on the comeback arc.
34:11WSJ InterviewerOkay, so I mean, one of the things you have talked about, you bought it for 44 billion you've talked about it one day being worth 250, I think in internal meetings.
34:21WSJ InterviewerCan you just talk about how you get there? What is the, what is the bigger vision? I mean, you want to bring back advertisers now and are they coming back, by the way?
34:29Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
34:32WSJ InterviewerCan you give any idea of the scale of the comeback in terms of who you lost and who's coming back?
34:38Elon MuskWell, I think it'll be very significant. So the advertising agencies at this point of all lifted their warnings on Twitter. So appreciate the fact that Group M, for example, removed the sort of their concern label over Twitter, which is a very big deal.
34:59Elon MuskAnd so I think at this point I expect almost all advertisers to return. We've also done a lot more to make the advertising more relevant to users so that we show users things that are more likely to be interested in buying.
35:17WSJ InterviewerSounds obvious, but that's what tends to happen.
35:21Elon MuskYeah, sounds super obvious. I mean, just basic stuff like if you do a search on Twitter previously, the search banner app that did not take the search terms into account, which is pretty insane.
35:36Elon MuskSo just show random ad, whereas obviously show an ad that matches your search
35:41WSJ Interviewerterms sounds worth doing. So just quickly you've talked about the sort of single app that does messaging and does finance and other things. I mean, can you just enlarge a little bit on sort of how you get there and why America wants that?
35:57Elon MuskWell, obviously it'd be up to people to decide if they want it. It's like, do we make something that is useful enough that you want to use it more frequently?
36:07Elon MuskGreat, that's our goal. So we're not going to do anything to stop people leaving the app or try to trap them in the app, but just provide enough compelling functionality that over time people's usage of the platform grows.
36:21WSJ InterviewerSo in 10 years time, is advertising still going to be dominant on Twitter?
36:27Elon MuskI think advertising will always play a role at some point, say 10 years from now. It may not play the largest role, but it will play the largest role for at least a few years to come.
36:38WSJ InterviewerSo I want to do a quick fire round of questions. Just imagine that you're late at night, you're sitting there tweeting a few rapid fire responses to stuff. And I'm just going to ask you a few questions and if you can just give me short answers and then I want to go on to AI and talk a little bit about some of the deeper points that you, you started making earlier.
36:59WSJ InterviewerSo first one, will Twitter be public again in five years?
37:04Elon MuskI Don't know.
37:05WSJ InterviewerOkay. Do you think the HQ will still be in San Francisco? Okay, not good so far. Let's try a couple more. Which decade are we going to crack artificial general intelligence?
37:22Elon MuskI think this one.
37:23WSJ InterviewerThis one. Okay. So it's out soon.
37:25Elon MuskOkay.
37:27WSJ InterviewerAre you going to take a SpaceX trip yourself?
37:32Elon MuskI will at some point. Yeah. Not sure when, but it'll be nice.
37:39WSJ InterviewerWhich is the most exciting country to build a Tesla plant in right now?
37:42Elon MuskNow? Well, we, we did make an announcement that Mexico would be our next location outside the US and picked a site and everything, so there's that. And then we'll probably pick another location towards the end of this year.
37:59WSJ InterviewerIs India interesting?
38:01Elon MuskAbsolutely.
38:02WSJ InterviewerOkay. Are you still a fan of crypto?
38:10Elon MuskWell, I mean, I'm not advising anyone to buy crypto or bet the farm on dogecoin or anything like that. Don't bet the farm on dogecoin. You might have been thinking.
38:20Elon MuskSo maybe you should. But let me advise you that would be perhaps on ways. Dogecoin is my sort of favorite cryptocurrency because it has the best humor and has dogs.
38:35WSJ InterviewerI did, however, look at the price of it yesterday. It's lower than it was, I think.
38:42Elon MuskWell, I don't know, maybe it's like a friend of mine has saying that the most ironic explanation is the most likely and the most ironic outcome for currency would be that the thing that was made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies most ironic outcome would become that it becomes the global currency.
39:05WSJ InterviewerOkay, we'll wait and see. Final one. Can you rank the US and China on their development of AI each out of 10?
39:16Elon MuskI mean, the US very much has the most advanced AI. So this is, you say like China's close behind, certainly, and has the resources to scale and to optimize.
39:34Elon MuskThe biggest single advances in AI still come from the US and Europe, but. All right, so it's hard to give an exact number score. It's more like.
39:47WSJ InterviewerBut there's a big gap still.
39:51Elon MuskThere's a gap. That gap looks like it's on the order of 12 months. Ish.
40:02WSJ InterviewerAnd narrowing or expanding.
40:06Elon MuskIt's hard to tell. I suspect it will narrow to some degree.
40:13WSJ InterviewerOkay, can you talk a little bit about you've created a new AI company yourself. Obviously there's a huge amount of energy and activity in this space, or at least it's been talked about.
40:26WSJ InterviewerI mean, what do you want to do yourself in this space beyond Tesla and the stuff you talked about earlier? What is that new Thing.
40:38Elon MuskWell, I think there should be a significant third horse in the race here, but OpenAI and Microsoft, Google, DeepMind and probably there should be a third horse in the race.
40:52Elon MuskSo more on that soon.
40:55WSJ InterviewerBut is it something that will interact with the data of Twitter and the capability of Tesla? Is it something that tries to bring what you've talked about earlier in terms of capability together and become that third player?
41:06WSJ InterviewerIs that what you're talking about to some degree?
41:10Elon MuskI don't want to jump the gun here on announcements, but OpenAI has relationship with Microsoft that seems to work fairly well. So it's possible that XAI and Twitter and Tesla would have something similar.
41:27WSJ InterviewerPossible.
41:32WSJ InterviewerYou talked about the importance of regulation and you called for this moratorium. I mean, the history of regulating tech has been checkered. It's been very hard for regulators to keep up with tech, let alone get ahead of it.
41:46WSJ InterviewerWhat do you think actually needs to happen that practically could in this space to try to change that? Because obviously the history of this is not encouraging.
41:56Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I think there should be. You know, I've been pushing hard for a long time. I met with a number of senior senators in Congress, people in Congress and the White House to advocate for AI regulation, starting with an insight committee that is formed of independent parties as well as perhaps participants from the leaders in industry.
42:19Elon MuskAnd that oversight committee gains, or should say that insight committee gains insight into what various companies are up to. And to the degree that there's competitive dynamics there. You can, obviously you would sequester board members who are perhaps have conflicts.
42:44Elon MuskBut anyway, you figure out some sort of regulatory board and, and they start off gaining insight and then have proposed rulemaking and then that, you know, will get comments that are on by industry and, and then hopefully we have some sort of oversight rules that improve safety, just as we do with aircraft with the FAA and spacecraft and cars with NHTSA and food and drugs with the Food and Drug Administration.
43:15Elon MuskRight.
43:15WSJ InterviewerAnd how would that work in such a global thing as we're talking about where AI and the relative advance between countries is going to be very, very important. Is that something that is globalizable?
43:27WSJ InterviewerIs that.
43:30Elon MuskWell, really the key question is will China cooperate with the West? That remains to be seen, but I would still advocate some degree of oversight. I mean, we have a regulatory oversight of aircraft, for example, and yet the US is still very much doing great on their car front.
43:56Elon MuskIt makes more aircraft than the rest than any other place. So just because you have FAA regulation doesn't mean that it's necessarily Slowed down very much.
44:07WSJ InterviewerOkay, so your view would be that the AI changes today lock in the tech giants, the Microsofts and the Googles of this world. Is there also a scenario where it actually helps to bring in new players and change that dynamic or is that a much more unlikely outcome?
44:31Elon MuskWell, there are a lot of AI startups. The thing that's becoming tricky is that in order, you really need three things to compete. You need talent, talented people, you need a lot of compute, expensive compute, and you need access to data.
44:56Elon MuskSo whoever's got, whoever's succeeding on those three will win. So now that the cost of computer has gotten astronomical, so it's now sort of minimum. Anti I would say minimum would be $250 million of server hardware.
45:20Elon MuskMinimum. That's like just to relevant anyway.
45:23WSJ InterviewerSo the startups are more likely to piggyback off what the others are doing rather than compete directly themselves, is what you're saying.
45:32Elon MuskYeah. To train a big.
45:34WSJ InterviewerAre you going to take a SpaceX
45:36Elon Musktrip yourself to train a model of probably GPT5 size? I wouldn't be surprised if they use at least 30,000, maybe 50,000 H1 hundreds which are the latest GPUs is not quite the right word, but the latest technology from Nvidia, so.
46:00Elon MuskAnd then you need to run inference as well. So there's a lot of the GPUser. This point considerably harder to get than drugs actually. That's really not a high bar in San Francisco.
46:18WSJ InterviewerYou can tell us more about that later. But yeah. Okay, thank you. So, couple of things I just wanted to go into on AI, which I'd love your perspective on.
46:30WSJ InterviewerIs this going to. What does it mean for society in terms of. Is this going to embed wealth and power in a very small subset and create a big widening of inequality?
46:40WSJ InterviewerIs it going to democratize and create the opposite? What is your sense of where this
46:45Elon Muskheads in terms of access to goods and services? I think I will be ushering an age of abundance. Assuming that we're in a benign AI scenario, I think the AI will be able to make goods and services very inexpensively.
47:07Elon MuskAnd so in anything that is a product or a service where there's not artificial scarcity created, such as like I want to live exactly in, in this, you know, neighborhood of houses, it's like, okay, well there's only 100 houses there, so you know, that would still have scarcity or a unique artwork would have scarcity.
47:31Elon MuskBut anything that does not have scarcity that we deliberately design to be scarce will be plentiful for everyone. In a benign scenario and in the
47:42WSJ Interviewerunbenign scenario,
47:45Elon Muskwell, there's a wide range of.
47:48WSJ InterviewerBut what's the thing that you're most worried about when you look at, you know, when you've been talking for years about the need for regulation, what is the scenario that really keeps you up at night?
48:06Elon MuskWell, I don't think the AI is going to try to destroy all humanity, but it might put us under strict controls.
48:18Elon MuskAnd there's a non zero chance of it going Terminator. It's not zero percent, but it's. I think it's a small likelihood of annihilating humanity, but it's not zero. We wanted that problem to be close to zero as possible.
48:33Elon MuskAnd then like I said of AI assuming control for the safety of all the humans and taking over all the computing systems and weapon systems of Earth and effectively being like some sort of Uber and Annie.
48:50WSJ InterviewerBut isn't another scenario if you say
48:54Elon Muskthat like, you know, like let's say you're, you know, a Miss World contestant, hypothetically?
49:04WSJ InterviewerIt's unlikely, let's face it.
49:08Elon MuskAnd you know, you say, what do you want? I want world peace. And it's like, okay, well, you know, one way to achieve world peace is to take all the weapons away from the humans so they can no longer use them and to punish any humans that engage in extraterritorial activity.
49:31WSJ InterviewerBut isn't the more likely nasty outcome that rather than AI taking over and being the ultimate nanny, that keeps us all doing stuff that is super safe and it wants us to.
49:41WSJ InterviewerThat actually somebody nefariously harnesses that power to achieve societal control stroke, military superiority, and that actually some country around the world decides to use it in a different way.
49:57Elon MuskYes, that's what I mean by like AI uses as a weapon and the pen is mightier than the sword. So one of the first places we have to be careful of AI being used is in social media to manipulate public opinion.
50:11Elon MuskSo the reason that Twitter is going to a primarily subscriber based system is because it is dramatically harder to create. It's like 10,000 times harder to create an account that has a verified phone number from a credible carrier, that has a credit card and that pays a small amount of money per month and have those credit cards and phone numbers be highly distributed, not clustered, is incredibly difficult.
50:44Elon MuskSo whereas in the past someone could create a million fake accounts for a penny a piece and then manipulate, have something appear to be very much liked by the public when in fact it is not, or promoted and retweeted when in Fact, it is not.
51:03Elon MuskThis popularity is not real and essentially gain the system. So the bias towards a subscription based verification I think is very powerful. And that really you won't be able to trust any social media company that does not do this because it will simply be overrun with bots to such an extreme degree.
51:26WSJ InterviewerSo if we take it back to where we started, if you look at the election that's coming up, how big a role will this big shift in AI capability over the last few months, which will obviously continue through the next year, how big an impact is this going to play, do you think, in the messaging and the way that people get told the different pictures of the candidates?
51:51Elon MuskI think that's something we need to be on the lookout for in a big way is to make sure that we're minimizing the impact of AI manipulation. We're certainly very much taking it, taking that seriously at X Twitter, you know, X Twitter.
52:07Elon MuskAnd I think we're putting in place all of the protections to minimize and certainly detect when we see large scale medical issue of the system.
52:17WSJ InterviewerOkay, but beyond Twitter, are you worried about this for the election in general?
52:24Elon MuskYeah.
52:30Elon MuskThere probably will be attempts to use AI to manipulate the public and some of it will be successful. And if not, this election will show the next one.
52:45WSJ InterviewerOkay, I've got two more questions on AI if you've got the time, and then just a little bit on China and Tesla, if that's okay. The first thing is we talk a lot in terms of AI about the next five to 10 years and what the impact is going to be on jobs and some of these things.
53:02WSJ InterviewerIf you look out on a much longer time frame, given the speed and scale of the change, and you look to your grandkids and great grandkids, can you just give us a sense of what it's going to be like to be human?
53:16WSJ InterviewerHow much is this going to change the fundamental nature of how we operate as a race at this point?
53:27Elon MuskI think it's going to change a lot, especially if you go further out into the future. I mean there will be, everything will be automatic. There'll be household robots that you can fully talk to as though they're people that can help you around the house or be a companion or whatever the case may be.
53:49Elon MuskThere will be humanoid robots throughout factories and ours will also be all automatic. And anything that, where intelligence can be applied, even modest intelligence, will be automated. Say like so if you say like 10, 20 years from now, and will
54:13WSJ Interviewerwe be connected to that technology through a neuralink type device. Is that where this, in your view obviously, is that where this heads?
54:24Elon MuskWell, a high bandwidth interface from cortex to the your sort of computing or AI tertiary layer which already exists. It's just that we don't have a high bandwidth connection.
54:41Elon MuskWe've got our limbic system, which is our sort of foundational element, that's sort of our instincts and desires and whatnot, then our cortex on top of that, which is a thinking part of our brain, and a tertiary digital layer which is currently in the form of our phones and computers and laptops and whatnot, and all the applications.
55:04Elon MuskAnd the constraint on better.
55:14Elon MuskMerging or.
55:19Elon MuskThe constraint on having human interests and machine interests be aligned is the bandwidth, especially the output. So if you select at what speed can you output to a computer using voice or your fingers, which move very slowly, so you're Talking about maybe 10 bits per second or some fairly small data rate.
55:48Elon MuskSo with the neural link you can increase that by, you know, increase that by a million probably.
55:56WSJ InterviewerSo everything just speeds up.
55:58Elon MuskSpeeds up. Yeah. I mean this is obviously in a relatively benign scenario because there's a question of not just, let's say it's a benign scenario. How do we even appreciate or understand what the computer's doing?
56:19Elon MuskHow do we go along for the ride? And if we have a better, if we have a brain machine interface that's a million times faster, then we're more like we'll go along for the ride a lot better than if we're interfacing with a phone using two slow moving meat sticks,
56:40WSJ Interviewerif you put it like that. And in terms of you have a lot of kids, many in this room have kids, you know, what do they need to, what skills do they need to have?
56:51WSJ InterviewerWhat are the three skills that you think are most important for them, that you're trying to give them to be prepared and well positioned for this new world?
57:03Elon MuskWell, I think it's important to have a broad range of understanding in many different subjects. So I think a general knowledge is important so you at least have some clue of what you don't know in different areas and then go deep in areas where your child has a strong interest and ability.
57:25Elon MuskSo finding that overlap of where is my child interested in this and has some ability to be successful, then if you can find that Venn diagram overlap, then obviously encouraging that is a good thing.
57:41Elon MuskAnd we are obviously headed to a high tech world. So some basic understanding of computers and software and artificial intelligence is probably a good idea.
57:51WSJ InterviewerOkay. But the actual broad thrust of, I mean, jobs will change but it'll be more AI enabling and making it better and easier rather than wholesale complete change of the skills you need.
58:09Elon MuskI mean, it depends on what time frame we're talking about here. So if you say like over 20, 30 year time frame, I think things will be transformed beyond belief.
58:27Elon MuskYou probably won't recognize society in 30 years. Like I do think we're fairly close. You asked me about artificial general intelligence. I think we're perhaps only three years, maybe six years away from it this decade.
58:47Elon MuskSo in fact, arguably we are on the event horizon of the black hole that is superintelligence.
59:02WSJ InterviewerOkay,
59:05Elon Musksweet facts.
59:06WSJ InterviewerSo I'm going to ask one final question. I'm going to see if you've got two minutes to take a couple of questions from the floor. And it comes back to China, which you've talked about a little bit.
59:15WSJ InterviewerYou have a very big business in China, in Tesla and obviously you're on that geopolitical fault line that's getting potentially interesting. To what extent is this affecting your decision making around sort of how you put assets and stuff on the ground?
59:33WSJ InterviewerAnd how concerned are you about that as a business person? And a lot of people in this room have business in China about that getting very, very difficult for.
59:46Elon MuskWell, there is fundamentally an issue that's coming to a head with Taiwan and it's unclear when exactly Bush will come to shove, but it seems that there's a good chance Bush will come to shove.
1:00:04Elon MuskIt's trending in that direction. I dread to think what would happen. The results would be for the global economy would be absolutely catastrophic. But China has been very clear about its goals on China and sort of including Taiwan as part of China.
1:00:29Elon MuskSo one does not need to read between the lines. One can simply read the lines. They were very clear and they're not
1:00:40WSJ Interviewergetting and is the biggest concern despite the prospect of conflict itself. Obviously a lot of the world's high end chips come out of Taiwan. I mean how catastrophic would that be if that was cut off?
1:01:00Elon MuskWell, there's even more that comes out of China. So China is a lot, so much of the world's heavy lifting on manufacturing, especially if the manufacturing is, you know, simply hard work and say not, not particularly glamorous.
1:01:17Elon MuskChina just does an immense amount of hard work that people, most people have no idea how much hard work they do. So being cut off from Taiwan, it's much less, less of a concern than being cut off from Taiwan.
1:01:35Elon MuskNow China would reciprocally suffer, of course, because I would say that the economy of the economies of China And Taiwan are. They're like conjoined twins with the Western economy, with the rest of the world.
1:01:54Elon MuskSo China and the rest of the world being conjoint twins from an economic standpoint will mean that the separation is going to be dire. Indeed that happens. I hope it does not happen.
1:02:11Elon MuskAnd there's no easy solution here. But if there's any path to a diplomatic solution, we should really take that seriously. Great.
1:02:20WSJ InterviewerDo you have time to take a few questions from the floor, Elon? Sure. Does anybody have a question they'd like to pose? We'll go here and then here behind you.
1:02:34WSJ InterviewerThanks, Elon. Thanks for joining us. I'm the founder of a real estate business in Newcastle in the northeast of England. We export manufacture and export more cars from the northeast than the whole of Italy.
1:02:47WSJ InterviewerWould you let me build you a Tesla factory in the northeast of England?
1:02:54Elon MuskThanks for the after. So I would certainly consider England for a future location of a gigafactory.
1:03:03WSJ InterviewerThank you. I'll get you. So you will consider it. Are you actively considering it?
1:03:11Elon MuskWe're not currently looking at new locations, but we will pull it towards the end of this year.
1:03:18WSJ InterviewerI'll send you some plans. Okay. Davide here, please.
1:03:31Elon MuskThank you for your time. Fusion, lots of scientists say it could change the world. Planet is the sun. All life on this planet and on Mars depends on fusion, the sun itself.
1:03:46Elon MuskCan I ask you why a man of your brilliant brain, resources and talent is not actually focusing on fusion, which I think could be a game changer for society and rather than on Twitter where there are many media decent company that can do it and I would say it almost in a trivial way.
1:04:05Elon MuskWell, I think we already have a giant fusion reactor in the sky that called the sun that shows up every day. So which I always say, if you want to know what standing in front of a fusion reactor feels like, just go out, go and stand in front of the sun.
1:04:21Elon MuskYou know, just walk outside. That's what, that's what a giant fusion reactor feels like because that's what the sun is. It converts about four and a half million towns, four and a half million tons of mass to energy every second and requires no maintenance.
1:04:38Elon MuskIt's amazing. You don't have to, you don't have to refuel it, you don't have to maintain it just there. So my recommendation for fusion is solar power and batteries and we can easily power all of Earth with just with photovoltaics and batteries.
1:04:59Elon MuskNot, I mean, not easily, but there's just a very clear path to do so. And no miracles required, just work. I'm also an advocate of wind and of course of nuclear fission, geothermal, hydro and whatnot.
1:05:16WSJ InterviewerWe'll take a couple more. One here and then the lady at the back.
1:05:21Elon MuskThank you.
1:05:22WSJ InterviewerAs you're considering exposure to China and particularly in the EV space and with the battery supply chain, what's your process for evaluating political risk in the near and midterm?
1:05:42Elon MuskI guess I just talk to my team, you know, read the news,
1:05:51Elon MuskI don't know, assess the opinion on Twitter, I suppose.
1:06:00Elon MuskThere's a very deep analysis you can get on Twitter from people that are world experts on a particular subject. So
1:06:08WSJ InterviewerI don't know.
1:06:09Elon MuskI think we just, we try to prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and you know, make sure we have factories in geographically diversified regions of the world where the supply chain is as localized as possible.
1:06:30Elon MuskThis is important also for post majeure situations. So if there are earthquakes, wildfires, riots, revolutions, ice storms, heat waves, you name it, I think I've seen it all at this point.
1:06:49Elon MuskSo you want to have a supply chain that does not inherit force majeure from all of Earth because something that's going to happen somewhere, it's a big planet. So that's why I think it's important to have localized supply chains with factories in many geographies.
1:07:08WSJ InterviewerLast question from the lady at the back. Thank you. Yeah. You famously tweeted that you thought the population collapse was a much bigger risk to humanity than climate change.
1:07:18WSJ InterviewerWhat do you think states, families, even companies can do to ensure that more of us want to have more children?
1:07:29Elon MuskWell, yeah, I mean, I think it's very telling. If you look at the birth rates, which are just publicly available, you can look at say the birth rate last year for every country available online, and you can look at the trend in birth rates and it's just very clear that the trend has been strongly downward and that we've recently hit all time lows.
1:07:52Elon MuskSo you think if you know, during COVID you know what else you got to do, you might as well have a kid. It didn't happen, actually. We had a big drop in birth rate during COVID An increase in divorces too, since spent a lot of time with their significant other.
1:08:13Elon MuskSo I think generally simply changing people's mind about the goodness of having kids, it's like very important to have kids in order to continue civilization. And I think sometimes it's viewed as kids are viewed as an imposition on the world.
1:08:32Elon MuskI don't think that's the case at all or that people sometimes think there are too many people in the world. That's certainly not the case. You can fit all of the humans on Earth on one floor in the city of New York.
1:08:43Elon MuskHere we be uncomfortable. But just to give you a sense of the cross sectional area of Earth that is human is very tiny. It just seems big if you're in a big city.
1:08:54Elon MuskBut for the vast majority of the Earth, if you're given a task from a plane of dropping a bowling ball and you have to hit someone, you, you'd miss almost never hit anyone.
1:09:08Elon MuskSo the point is that you very rarely go over a person in an aircraft. You fly from LA to New York. There are vast areas of land with no one at all.
1:09:22Elon MuskSo anyway, the. I think we want to just generally have it be socially encouraged to have kids. I think certainly companies need to support employees that have kids. I think in terms of government incentives, there should be some, I think tax breaks for having kids, you know, or make it financially not burdensome to have children.
1:09:54Elon MuskAnd it's always worth bearing in mind like autonomy aside, if someone doesn't have kids, what you're actually asking is that someone else's kids take care of you when you're old.
1:10:06Elon MuskAnd that, that doesn't seem like quite right, you know, because. Because that's, that's what they'll be forced to do absent automation is is that someone else's kids will have to take care of you when you're old.
1:10:23Elon MuskSo I think anyway, one way or another we need to solve this birth rate issue or civilization will dwindle to nothing.
1:10:32WSJ InterviewerIsn't that where AI comes in? It'll do all the jobs for us so we can handle a potentially lower population. On what you're talking about,
1:10:43Elon MuskI think there will be robot nannies that are very confident, so that will help.