Elon Musk | Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit 2015
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:00InterviewerThank you all for sticking around this afternoon. We had some great conversations and we're hoping to have another great one. It is my pleasure, an honor, a privilege really, to have this conversation about the future with two gentlemen who know probably more about it than most.
0:16InterviewerThe fellow all the way to my right, to your left, does not need any introduction. Elon Musk, you all know from Tesla and SpaceX, of course, from SolarCity. Sam Altman, I would say you don't need too much introduction either, but I'm going to give it to you just in case you don't.
0:31InterviewerHe runs Y Combinator. Y Combinator has investments in over 1,000 companies. At this point they're investing in about 250 companies every single year. Those companies collectively are worth about $65 billion in total.
0:43InterviewerThat's with a B. And to give you just a sort of a sense of the kind of names we're talking about, we're talking about Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits, Instacart, et cetera.
0:53InterviewerSo both folks with an amazing pedigree and an amazing sense of what's going on.
1:00Co-panelistHere's.
1:00InterviewerI want to start the conversation with both of you and I think we're going to probably go to outer space very quickly, but we're going to try to keep it on Earth at least for the moment.
1:09InterviewerWhen you think about innovation and you think about where we are going to be 10, 15, 20 years and what to invest in and what to make. I'm going to make it hard for you, Elon.
1:19InterviewerIf you took Tesla out of it, took SolarCity out of it, took space, SpaceX out of it, and you said I could go start a new company tomorrow. It would be what it would be.
1:29InterviewerIn what area? Where would you start thinking about it?
1:37Elon MuskWell, I think there's some fairly like, there's a fairly obvious opportunity in electric aircraft because all transport will electrify over time with the exception of rockets, ironically. And you know, but, but
1:59Co-panelistthere's,
2:02Elon MuskI mean there's, I think there's, there's two areas which, I mean they're fraught with issues but you know, it's one of those things where if you, if you don't do something, maybe not doing something is worse like on the AI front or on genetics, you know.
2:21Elon MuskSo like the, those are the two things I think besides sustainable transport, the Internet and making life multi planetary, rewriting genetics and AI. The latter two are the ones that can most change destiny of humanity.
2:42Elon MuskBut, but they're, they're really dodgy So I mean, maybe I'd try to do something in one of those two areas, but they're, yeah. Fraught with difficulty.
2:51InterviewerElizabeth Holmes was here earlier, spoke during the lunch hour. Do you think about genetics and longevity and trying to sort of avoid your friend Larry Page is investing in a business hoping to end death?
3:06Elon MuskI don't, I mean the, I mean, I'm not actually a huge proponent of longevity. I mean, I do think that having a good life for longer is better. Like you'd want to address the, you know, things that, that happen to you when you're older, like dementia and so forth.
3:28Elon MuskThose are pretty.
3:34Elon MuskBut I'm not sure it's sort of actually want to do that, want to get into the genetics thing. But it is something that's going to fundamentally change humanity and along with AI so you don't want to live forever
3:49Interviewerso that you can get to Mars?
3:51Elon MuskI definitely don't want to live forever.
3:54InterviewerHow many years do you want to live?
3:58Elon MuskI don't know, 100 good ones.
4:01Interviewer100 good ones or 100 more good ones? You're 44.
4:05Elon MuskI mean, 100 good ones in total I think is probably fine and maybe a bit longer.
4:13InterviewerSam, where would you put your money? You're the investor here.
4:18Co-panelistWell, I mean, we try to invest in a very broad range of technology. So we funded an electric airplane or funded an electric airplane company. We've done AI companies.
4:27Co-panelistWe've done.
4:29InterviewerHow realistic is the electric airplane, by the way?
4:31Co-panelistI think it should work. I think it, like, it makes it, it makes sense.
4:35Elon MuskYeah, absolutely.
4:37Co-panelistThe math should work. I think I actually, I. No huge surprise, but I'll agree with Elon on those two areas. I think if you could pick two things, and I'm not already working really
4:48Bruce Gittlemanhard on
4:50Co-panelistAI having AI go in the positive direction, which I really think it can. And I think thinking about sort of genetic technology.
4:58Elon MuskGenetic technology.
5:00InterviewerI made it unfair for you because I said we had to take SolarCity out and had to take the cars out. So we didn't get to really talk about energy.
5:07InterviewerBut I imagine. How big, how big, how big a thing do you think energy all in. And when you think about both your investments in what you're doing is something that is one of the things that you need to tackle.
5:21Elon MuskWell, I think sustainable energy is the most important problem that we face this century. That's like a known difficult thing that we have to solve. Like if we continue to rely on burning hydrocarbons, the future is going to be quite bad.
5:38Elon MuskAnd the vast majority of the scientific establishment believes that. And the evidence I think is, well, I mean anyone with a scientific background is unequivocal. So we've got to solve sustainable energy.
5:57Elon MuskI'm a big fan of solar because we've got this big fusion ball in the sky called the sun and it shows up every day. So if we can use solar energy plus batteries, we can actually have a complete solution for sustainable energy generation and then we need to use it in a sustainable way, which is, you know, where you need the electric transport.
6:21Elon MuskYeah.
6:21Co-panelistSo the thing I would add, I think getting the cost of sustainable energy down super low is probably, you know, short of friendly AI, like the most important thing we can do for sort of quality of life of the poorest half of the world.
6:34Co-panelistI think that, you know, every time I look into this it's really amazing how much the cost of energy and the quality of life correlate.
6:42InterviewerWhat about nuclear energy? You have some investments in nuclear energy?
6:45Co-panelistYeah, I mean what I've always said is I think the end state of the world is a combination of nuclear and solar, probably 80, 21 way or the other sort of terrestrial based nuclear.
6:53Co-panelistI think fusion is likely to work at some point in the next couple of decades and that's a really big deal. I think that it's good to have a backup option, it's good to have two sources but you know, like it's all sort of fusion when you think about it.
7:06Elon MuskYeah, I mean I'm big, I mean I think fusion. I think it's definitely possible to make fusion work. But I think the, and I used to be a big fan of, of like having of that as the long term energy source.
7:20Elon MuskBut I'm inclined to think like indirect fusion from the sun essentially is going to be the primary source and then to some degree there will be fusion reactors for, you know, maybe whatever.
7:32Elon MuskYeah, if you're really far north or south or.
7:34InterviewerWhat about the risks of nuclear energy,
7:37Elon Muskof fusion, a fusion.
7:39InterviewerI assume there's some risk. There's no risk.
7:41Elon MuskNot really.
7:42InterviewerZero. I'm an idiot.
7:43Elon MuskI don't know.
7:45Audience MemberNo, no.
7:46Elon MuskWith fusion the difficulty is keeping it going. Not, you know, with, with fission you have some meltdown risk. Although there's, you know, there's new technology on the vision front that makes the meltdown risk extremely low.
8:02Elon MuskBut with fusion the great difficulty is keeping the reaction from, is keeping the fire from going out. It's quite hard to sustain a fusion reaction unless you have something very big like the sun.
8:16Elon MuskThe sun has gravitational confinement of the fusion Reaction. So since you can't do gravitational confinement on Earth, you have to do some sort of electromagnetic confinement, one form or another, or a kinetic confinement by slamming things into each other.
8:34Elon MuskSo it's quite tricky to prevent a fusion explosion from not immediately extinguishing. Got it. So fusion is like,
8:45Co-panelistI mean, probably what you do is just repeat it every second or whatever.
8:48Elon MuskSo I mean, just to sort of, you know, fusion is like when you take say two hydrogen atoms or two hydrogen isotopes technically, and slam them together and form helium.
9:03Elon MuskThat's fusion. And then fission is like when you've got like a heavy atom that is decaying at a relatively like a noticeable rate, like uranium or plutonium, and decays into smaller atoms, the then that's vision.
9:20InterviewerOk, I didn't do so well in science, so we're going to try to move along. But you recently said that you wanted to nuke Mars. I didn't realize I was using sort
9:33Elon Muskof colloquial terms there.
9:34InterviewerAnd you guys in the back were doing some science talk about how nuking Mars would work.
9:40Elon MuskYeah, yeah. So nuking Mars. I sort of was a little flippant about that.
9:47Co-panelistI think it's a really decent idea.
9:48Elon MuskThank you. Thank you. So, yeah, what I was really getting at, but it's hard to convey that in 30 seconds on the Late show with Culver was that the sun is a nuclear explosion, a fusion explosion.
10:07Elon MuskThat's what the sun is. It's an ongoing fusion explosion. So if you wanted to add energy to Mars, like warm up Mars, really, the source of almost all energy in the universe is fusion.
10:18Elon MuskEven fission is. Originally there was fusion, and then that then later resulted in fission. But what I was really talking about is creating two little suns, two pulsing suns above the north and south pole of Mars that would warm the poles up enough so that the frozen CO2 would, would gasify and densify the atmosphere.
10:42Elon MuskSome of the water would also heat up and you'd have sort of more water, water vapor and CO2 in the, in the Martian atmosphere, which in that case is good because the, the CO2 ends up warming, warming Mars up.
10:55Elon MuskAnd so you get a positive sort of reaction, like it's a positive cycle of warming on Mars. Like you want to warm Mars up, you don't want to warm Earth up, you know, so why would you ever
11:07Interviewerwant to live on Mars?
11:09Elon MuskIt looks like a great adventure to me.
11:13InterviewerBeyond the adventure, do you actually, both of you, you're investing in stuff that hopefully one day will go to Mars.
11:18Co-panelistNothing from Mars but excuse me, nothing from Mars, but I hope Elon goes, I think that would be cool.
11:23InterviewerBut is that just for one person what's going to happen? No, really, I want to.
11:26Bruce GittlemanYeah.
11:26Elon MuskWell, I mean the Mars thing is really like if you say what is going to be really important to the preservation of, of civilization or life as we know it more than just, you know, humanity because of course we bring life as we know it to Mars and there's no life that we can detect on the surface of Mars.
11:44Elon MuskThere may be some subterranean bacterial life, but there's, it's on the surface there, there isn't anything. So this would be the extension of life to another planet or life as we know it to another planet.
11:57Elon MuskAnd I think would be make a huge difference to the probable lifespan of human civilization and life as we know it. So it's sort of like an insurance policy, a life insurance policy for life collectively.
12:12Elon MuskAnd you know, so it's yeah, probable
12:16Interviewerbecause you, because you think global warming. What do you think is going to happen here that's going to.
12:20Elon MuskI do want to be clear. This is a, I mean I think it's important that we become a multi planet species, not a single planet species, but on another planet.
12:29Elon MuskSo this is if we, it's like really, it's like what kind of future do you want to have? Do you want to have a future where we are forever confined to one planet or one where we are out there exploring the stars and on many planets?
12:42Elon MuskAnd I think the latter one is far more exciting and inspiring because the former is basically waiting around until some extinction event. So eventually there will be one and it might be quite far in the future, but it also might not be far in the future.
12:59Elon MuskSo there's really two main reasons I think to make life multi planetary and to establish a self sustaining civilization on Mars. One is the defensive reason to ensure that the light of consciousness as we know it is not extinguished or lasts much longer.
13:14Elon MuskAnd the second is that it would be an amazing adventure that, that we could all enjoy vicariously, if not personally.
13:25Co-panelistI think it's really important to establish multi planetary life. I agree with that. I think my concern is that the, I think the AI question is likely to become pressing and important to deal with before we can establish a full colony on Mars.
13:39Elon MuskThat's true.
13:41Co-panelistAnd I think even if not, then the AI can like go to Mars on a laser beam. The AI goes easier, very hard.
13:47InterviewerWhat does that even mean?
13:48Elon MuskLike just gives itself there?
13:50Co-panelistYeah, I mean it's very hard to
13:50Elon Musksee them in through space.
13:52InterviewerBut the AI is going to go
13:54Co-panelistlike 20 minutes, you know, on a laser beam. It's easy.
13:57InterviewerDo you guys believe in life forms outside of Earth? Do you think there are.
14:02Elon MuskI mean, I think there's. There's quite a high chance of microbial life. There's a much that then as you get more advanced in life, that there's less and less likelihood of sophisticated life.
14:17InterviewerBut do you think there are aliens
14:19Elon Muskout there that we can talk to? You mean as opposed to, like, bacteria?
14:22InterviewerYeah, yeah.
14:23Elon MuskThere's a great Onion article recently about, like, you know, like, NASA should only hold a press conference if they find aliens that we can talk to. But I think so.
14:39Elon MuskI mean, it's an interesting confluence of events. Like, it's not just that there has to be life, intelligent life that evolves somewhere, but that life has to last for a long time for us to exist at the same time as that.
14:55Elon MuskSo what it suggests is this great question. It's called the Fermi Paradox. Like, where are the aliens? Like, if there are so many planets out there and the universe is almost 14 billion years old, why aren't the aliens everywhere?
15:15Elon MuskAnd this is one of the most perplexing questions because, you know, you could basically bicycle to Alpha Centauri in a few hundred thousand years, like, meaning at bicycle speed.
15:32Elon MuskSo it's sort of like, you know, in 100 billion years, even at a very slow speed, you could completely blanket the galaxy. So why not? Where are they? It's very hard for me to get around right now.
15:54InterviewerWe were talking in the back and we've had this conversation before. You please weigh in on this. And I think it's a thought experiment that you have suggested that we are all collectively right now living in a simulation.
16:08InterviewerWhat does that mean?
16:10Elon MuskYeah, it's a probabilistic thing. So really, if you look at, say, the advancement of video games from, say, 40 years ago when we started out with Pong, and you said, like, you know, rectangles, batting a rectangle to each other.
16:27Elon MuskAnd. And now we've got photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, or 3D games with millions of people playing simultaneously that are just getting better now we've got virtual reality headsets, so you can just put it on, and it feels like you're right there.
16:44Elon MuskYou'll have haptic feedback, meaning force feedback sticks, so you can actually pick up something and feel like you're picking up something, like have haptic gloves. And if you extrapolate that advancement, at any rate at all.
17:01Elon MuskLike, if you say, okay, let's say it slows down by a factor of 100 starting right now. Okay, so then, I mean, the video games will be indistinguishable from reality in, let's say, you know, 200 years instead of 20 years or something like that.
17:20InterviewerBut you don't think that we're in a game right now?
17:23Elon MuskOkay, well, this is the.
17:25InterviewerLike, that we are all. Somebody has a joystick somewhere else in some other. You know where I'm going with this.
17:31Elon MuskIt certainly doesn't feel like that. I mean, I don't.
17:34InterviewerI don't.
17:34Elon MuskI don't think I'm being played by somebody in a video game. But then people in video games don't generally think that.
17:43Co-panelistI certainly think if you talk to people who use the latest virtual reality equipment in sort of a big space where they sort of map, like, benches in the space to benches in the game and the environment, you know, they have this experience when they do that for the first time and they take it off, and then they just freeze for 10 seconds, and you can.
18:01Co-panelistAnd then you talk to them, and it's clear that, like, their belief that this is actual reality has been shaken because they were so convinced in virtual reality that that was real.
18:11Co-panelistAnd so if I can take this off, like, why aren't there other layers? I also think it ties interestingly back to the Fermi paradox.
18:18Elon MuskYeah, exactly.
18:19Co-panelistYou know, if it is a simulation, sort of, that would be a pretty good answer for why there are no aliens.
18:24InterviewerHow far are we away from sort of virtual reality being a thing that all of us sort of live in to some degree. We would go to this conference real close.
18:33InterviewerWe would go to this conference from our VR sets.
18:38Elon MuskI mean, I do think there's still something to actually really being there in person that we probably won't lose for a long time. Hopefully never. But, I mean, with what Oculus and Valve are coming out with, and I believe some of that, like, the first VR headsets are due out early next year.
18:59Elon MuskYeah. Like, in the next several months. And the demos that I've seen, and I think Sam's probably seen, too, are incredibly compelling. And there is that strange feeling because you put the headset on in, like, a very nondescript, bland room, and you put the headset on, and suddenly you're in anywhere.
19:18Elon MuskLike, you could be.
19:20Co-panelistYeah, you know, I got this demo where they would, like, blow air on you when you got near a cliff edge, and when you walk near a fire, they would turn on the heater.
19:26Co-panelistAnd you don't see any of this because you're just wearing it. And it's really. Quite. Quite compelling.
19:33InterviewerI want to talk about something else that's compelling, which is Tesla. It's really not about the.
19:38Elon MuskIt's an SUV.
19:39InterviewerIt's an SUV, but here's what I was going to say. $132,000. How many people really going to buy this thing?
19:45Elon MuskYeah. So the first cars that are produced are fully, sort of fully optioned version. So it's not like a base price of 132,000. It's. And we'll have a version that's still expensive on the expensive side, but before any incentives would be about 75k next year.
20:06Elon MuskAnd with incentives and whatnot, it's maybe 65. So it's still expensive, but it's not as crazy as 132. And then in a couple years, we should have the Model 3 and that'll be starting price of $35,000.
20:29Elon MuskSo it's a smaller car, but it's, you know, a lot more affordable.
20:34InterviewerOkay, so for the Tesla sort of real aficionados who follow you on Twitter, you need to. You need to answer one thing, which is last week somebody tweeted at you, I think, about the X, and then you put out a tweet that mentioned the Y and the three.
20:50InterviewerAnd then you deleted the tweet.
20:52Elon MuskYes, the same.
20:53InterviewerAnd everybody wants to know why you deleted the tweet and what the tweet actually said.
20:57Elon MuskNo, I think it just said something like, there'll be the Model 3 and the Model Y and that one of them will have, like, a Falcon Wing door, which is like, pretty obviously the Model Y.
21:11Elon MuskBut I deleted that and, like, I don't know, a dozen other tweets because I just thought I had, like, kind of a rambling Twitter history, but it had no significance.
21:18Elon MuskThe delete has no significance. Like, I don't think deleting a tweet, like, makes it go away from the Internet or something.
21:24InterviewerSo why. Why delete the tweet?
21:26Elon MuskI just didn't like the way my Twitter history looked. It was. It was like, too rambling.
21:34InterviewerYou've invested in Twitter? I'm in Twitter. In Tesla, yeah. You own a Tesla?
21:41Co-panelistYeah.
21:42InterviewerMake the case for those who are out there, make it harder because he has to do it now.
21:48Co-panelistWhy?
21:49InterviewerWhat is this going to become in your mind?
21:51Co-panelistYou sure you don't want him to answer?
21:52InterviewerYeah, we know what he's going to say.
21:55Co-panelistLook, I mean, I think as Most people who own one think it's the best car like out there. I had a roadster before, a Tesla Roadster which was not the best car but the Model S really is like it's just, it's the best car on the market.
22:07Co-panelistAnd I think that people think of this like, like existing car companies but actually this is like a software company with a car attached to it and it's, you know, you just like, you sort of point and click, you like point the wheel somewhere, you push the thing down and it just kind of gets there.
22:24Co-panelistIt doesn't make noise. It like it's very reliable. The software actually works. It's the only car with good software. So I think people really like it now. Yeah, it's like really expensive still.
22:32Co-panelistBut I think, well, I'm confident that a mass market Tesla will do very well and I also think the other electric cars I've driven feel like many years behind.
22:44Elon MuskRight.
22:45InterviewerYou talked about this being a software company. Do you think of yourself as a software company?
22:50Elon MuskI think we're software and a hardware company. But the software component does become increasingly important so you got to get both. Right. Because it's a holistic product experience. But it's software is increasingly the, you know, an increasing proportion of the problem, particularly as you get to autonomy and.
23:13InterviewerYeah, so there is a view, I don't know if it's a conspiracy theory that you are building autonomous functionality and other driverless like functionality into the car without advertising that it's in there and that one day you're going to flip a switch and the car is going to start just driving.
23:33Elon MuskWell no, not quite like that but we are going to upload new software soon. And this is not actually a secret or anything. We have version 7 of our software which turns on highway autopilot.
23:48Elon MuskSo the car will be able to steer by itself on highways or any kind of any kind of road that doesn't have really steep, sharp curves on it and also it'll steer quite well in traffic.
24:05Elon MuskSo those are the two scenarios where it's going to be quite good at steering and that's in public beta right now. So we have, I don't know, six or seven hundred Tesla drivers, owners that are testing the autosteer software.
24:25Elon MuskYeah, go ahead.
24:26Co-panelistI think full self driving cars, I'm not Tesla specifically just in general are likely to get here much more quickly than people realize. Yeah, I think you ask most people, they'd still say that's 10 to 20 years away.
24:39Co-panelistAnd I actually think we'll have Sort of like full point to point autonomous driving in a few years.
24:44InterviewerIt won't be a few years, like two or three years, three or four maybe.
24:49Elon MuskI agree. I think that's something on the, on the two to three year time frame is likely for it to be technologically. I mean, you'll be able to demonstrate it, but it won't, you won't be able to go to fully autonomous until you get regulatory.
25:02Elon MuskSo there's a time difference between when it is technologically possible in a general sense, you know, so that, you know, not, not just like in a very tightly mapped situation like say Mountain View or Palo Alto.
25:18InterviewerRight.
25:18Elon MuskBut in the general sense of like, you know, can it, can it do point to point virtually anywhere? Right. I think that's, that's only, you know, two to three years away.
25:28Elon MuskBut, but then approval of, from regulators of having it be autonomous is anywhere from, I don't know, one to five years after that, depending upon the location, because the regulators have, regulators have to be convinced that it is substantial.
25:43Elon MuskI think they'll, they'll want to see that it's significantly more, significantly safer than their cars that are driven by people.
25:53InterviewerI want to open it up in about five minutes. So I just have a couple more questions to get to you. And so if you guys have questions in the audience, get your shot on goal in just a second.
26:01InterviewerI want to talk about entrepreneurship because both of you are entrepreneurs. You invest in them. You are one and you think about this a lot. Your old pal Peter Thiel likes to say that he would not invest in somebody who's over the age of 30 years old.
26:18InterviewerThat that should be the cutoff. You're 44 now. He's invested in you.
26:24Elon MuskYeah, I guess make some exceptions, but
26:26Intervieweryou may be the exception to the rule. As somebody who invests in companies every day, do you think there's a cutoff? There's a lot of people out here who are over the age of 30.
26:35InterviewerAre we done?
26:38Co-panelistWe've said this before, but when we've looked at our data, the mean age of entrepreneurs we fund is just around 29 or 30. So there's obviously lots of over 30 entrepreneurs that we fund, some of which have gone on to create multibillion dollar companies.
26:52Co-panelistSo I think certainly you can't say it's impossible for people over 30 to create companies. That's ridiculous. And we plan to continue to invest in people of all ages.
27:01Co-panelistThe correlation that we've noticed is that if you look at the really successful companies we've had the multi billion dollar companies, the average age for those founders does skew significantly younger.
27:12Co-panelistBut the success rate of founders of, you know, this binary, is the company a success or not skews older than 30. So, you know, younger entrepreneurs, I think tend to take bigger risks.
27:23Co-panelistMaybe they're willing to work on these very long time horizon projects, but that's the only correlation we see. I think it would be a crazy strategy to say I'm never going to invest in anyone over 30.
27:34Elon MuskYeah, no, I mean, I think it's,
27:36Co-panelistI don't think Peter meant that either.
27:37Elon MuskYeah, I mean you can definitely start a company at any age and be successful. I mean, it's really just a question of like, do you, you know, do you have a good idea?
27:46Elon MuskAre you working really hard? Are you able to attract a great team and motivate the team and that, I mean, that's sort of really what matters.
27:55InterviewerBut you've had multiple ideas. And there's another view, by the way, which is that you can only really have one great idea, right? That everybody sort of has maybe, maybe one great idea.
28:04Elon MuskI start really the idea, you know, I mean, like there's that old saying, It's 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, I think is generally true. I mean, a lot of times companies start out with, with an idea that's actually wrong, but they adapt quickly enough to get it to something that's right.
28:24Elon MuskAnd I can say at the beginning of Tesla, we started the company with two false premises that turned out to be really dumb. One was that we'd be able to license the drivetrain technology from a company called AC Propulsion in Southern California and that it would just work.
28:45Elon MuskThat totally didn't work. And then we also thought we'd be able to adapt the Lotus Elise chassis at low cost and be able to essentially put the AC propulsion drivetrain technology in a Lotus Elise chassis and then just build that quickly and sell it and that would be okay.
29:05Elon MuskBut like I said, the AC propulsion technology did not lend itself to any kind of cost effective, reliable car. It was okay for like a small prototype, but not for a commercial product.
29:23Elon MuskAnd then the Lotus Elise, that ended up being worse than if we had designed a car from the beginning because we ended up changing like 96% of the components in the car and invalidating all of the crash results and all the safety stuff.
29:40Elon MuskThe car ended up being 30% heavier, had to be longer, and it ended up being like if you had a house in mind and instead of actually building a house from Scratch.
29:51Elon MuskYou got some existing house and ended up knocking everything except one wall in the basement out. And it would have been better to just build the house from the beginning, the house you wanted.
30:02Elon MuskSo, so basically Tesla was started on the basis of two dumb ideas. And we managed to, you know, it was a tough one to overcome those two issues, but we managed to get past them.
30:15Elon MuskSo that's, I think the more important thing is like, start somewhere and then, you know, really be prepared to question your assumptions, fix what you did wrong and adapt to reality.
30:26InterviewerHow did you run two companies at the same time? Jack Dorsey's about to take this on in a meaningful way. What does a day in the life of Elon Musk actually look like?
30:35Elon MuskYeah, I wouldn't recommend running two companies. It really decreases your freedom quite a lot.
30:50Elon MuskAnd I'll tell you what, so my day is probably a bit different than people think it is. Most of my time is actually spent on engineering and design. So it's probably, I don't know, like 70% of my time, like pressed stuff like this is maybe 2 or 3% of my time.
31:11Elon MuskIt's really, really tiny and I'm going to reduce it even further. It's probably like 1% of my time.
31:18InterviewerReal quick and then we'll go to the audience. Politics. I want to ask you two political questions. One is innovation in politics. Do you think will ever be a day where we actually vote on our phone?
31:29InterviewerWe stupidly seem to still go and vote, you know, in our local district, oftentimes at a local school. And I also wanted to get your sense of who out there you may or may not like right now in terms of what you guys do and who you think might do the best.
31:46Co-panelistOur. All right, I'll put the first question, Elon can answer the second.
31:49Elon MuskTrump's amazing.
31:52Co-panelistI think that yes, we will someday vote on our phones, I think, and it will have a significant impact because it'll really change the people who vote. So I think that may take a while because there are a lot of people who don't want to see the electorate change.
32:02Co-panelistBut over a 20 year timeframe, I always try to think about things over these sort of 10 or 20 year time frames. I think you can get so caught up in the what's happening this month or next year.
32:12Co-panelistAre we in a bubble? Are we buying at a low tick or a high ticket? But eventually it's going to happen and I take solace in that. Anyway, Elon, on Donald Trump.
32:20InterviewerYeah, he asked you.
32:27Elon MuskI mean, I don't really have strong feelings, except that I, you know, hopefully Trump doesn't forget the nomination of, you know, the Republican Party. That's because I think that's.
32:38Elon MuskYeah, that wouldn't be good. So.
32:42InterviewerBut I mean, Barry Diller said he would move out of the country. What about you?
32:46Elon MuskNo, I'm gonna move. I mean, I think like at most he would get the Republican nomination, but I think that would still be a bit embarrassing. So
32:55Co-panelistI think that could happen.
32:56Elon MuskYeah.
32:57InterviewerYou think it will happen?
32:58Co-panelistIt could. It won't surprise me if it does.
33:01Elon MuskYeah, I honestly don't have strong feelings about the.
33:05InterviewerDo you get involved in politics?
33:09Elon MuskI get involved in politics to the
33:11Co-panelistas little as possible.
33:13Elon MuskYeah. There's sometimes I have the sum amount that I have to get involved in mostly because SpaceX has to battle Boeing and Lockheed, you know, for national security and civil space launch contracts.
33:28Elon MuskSo if we don't, if we don't battle them, then we'll lose.
33:33Co-panelistHow corrupt is that whole thing?
33:36Elon MuskYeah, well, I mean, actually I would say that on balance, I guess it's not that corrupt because if it was corrupt then SpaceX would have no chance. Because SpaceX, I mean, it's gotten a bit bigger these days, but it was very tiny when we won our first government contract and if, if it had been like deeply corrupt, then we would not have won anything.
34:06Elon MuskSo, you know, I think, you know, I think actually at the greater the level of visibility politically, the less corruption occurs. So I think there's actually probably like the least corruption at the presidential level, then at the Senate level in the House, and then there can be a bit more corruption at the state level.
34:28Elon MuskIt's like basically how much attention are people paying that defines how much corruption occurs,
34:35Intervieweryou know, perhaps, and we'll open up. But it got me thinking. The only real big critique of some of your businesses is that they are subsidized to some degree by the government.
34:45InterviewerCould these businesses succeed without government help?
34:50Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. And I should, at some point I should probably write a rebuttal because there was like a nonsensical Louisiana Times article from which a lot of this stands.
35:02Elon MuskBecause what the Times article did was add up all incentives that Tesla has received and all intent incentives that Tesla will receive. So like over a 30 year period and made it, made it sound like a big number, but it's, you know, like if somebody's earning $50,000 a year, you don't say, you don't call them a millionaire because over the next 20 years they will cumulatively earn a million Dollars, but that's effectively what that article did.
35:32Elon MuskThe incentives, I think for Tesla and SolarCity, what they really do is balance out the actual and de facto incentives that carbon producing activities have. So, and I don't think they actually balance it out.
35:50Elon MuskSo the carbon producing activities still sort of overwhelm the incentives that electric cars and solar receives. I mean, for example, there's a 20% tax incentive for stripper oil.
36:02Co-panelistWell
36:04Elon Musklike, and the incentive for Solar is currently 30% but dropping to 10% in two years. So the, you know, two years the incentive for solar power will be half that of a stripper oil.
36:16Elon MuskWell. Right. So, you know, and SpaceX made it in spite of Boeing and Lockheed receiving a billion dollar plus subsidy for the launch activities. So I think in the case of SpaceX it was sort of success in spite of incentives.
36:34Elon MuskAnd in the case of SolarCity and Tesla it was. The incentives were moderately helpful, but not the deciding factor. They're a catalyst. They made things happen a little faster than they would otherwise happen.
36:47Elon MuskBut you look at something like there's a $7,500 tax credit for EVs, okay? So that ends up being a 10% discount that the consumer receives for buying the car.
37:02Elon MuskIt's not like patent data.
37:03Bruce GittlemanRight.
37:04InterviewerOkay, we got a lot of people who are standing and we want to get to all the questions. We're going to sort of try to do this rapid fire.
37:09InterviewerSo I'd ask you to keep your question short and these guys are going to keep their answers short as well. Or at least we're going to hope.
37:14Co-panelistGo ahead.
37:14Bruce GittlemanMy name is Bruce Gittleman. I'm a private investor in Toronto, Canada. And Elon, if you're not happy with the next election, you're more than welcome to come back to Canada.
37:24Bruce GittlemanQuestion is about artificial intelligence. Like any good new technology, people always fear the change and things that can go wrong. I was wondering if Sam and Elon could share with us their positive vision of AI's impact on our coming life.
37:39InterviewerWe didn't even get to AI in this whole conversation.
37:42Co-panelistYeah, I think, look, there is a really positive vision here, right? I think there are. The science fiction version is either that we enslave it or it enslaves us.
37:48Co-panelistBut there's this happy symbiotic vision which I don't think is the default case, but what we should work towards. I think already humans and AI are co evolving and no one's paid attention to this yet, but I don't think there's any human left that understands all of how Google search results are ranked on that first page.
38:05Co-panelistIt really is machine learning algorithms. So when we search on Google, it's an AI deciding what we should see. When a dating site matches two people together, there's a machine learning algorithm that no human understands how it works, that is getting people together that then have babies.
38:18Co-panelistAnd so, in effect, you know, you have this like machine learning algorithm breeding humans. And so really, I mean, you do. And so there's this. And then, you know, those people, like, work on the algorithms later.
38:29Co-panelistAnd so I think the happy vision of the future is sort of humans and AI in a symbiotic relationship, distributed AI, where it sort of empowers a lot of different individuals, not this single AI that kind of governs everything that we all do that's, you know, a million times smarter, a billion times smarter than any other entity.
38:48Co-panelistSo I think that's what we should work towards.
38:51Elon MuskI agree with what Sam said. I mean, we are effectively already a human machine collective symbiote. Like, there's like, we're like a, like a giant cyborg that that's actually what society is today, you know, but, but I mean, I sort of, obviously, I mean, I have an affinity for the human portion of that cyborg collective.
39:19Elon MuskAnd I think, I do think we need to be careful about the development of AI and make sure it is ultimately beneficial to humanity that it's. That. That the future is.
39:28Elon MuskGood question over here.
39:31Audience MemberOkay, so not too long ago. Oh my. Jessica Singh, by the way. But not too long ago, on the Nightly show with Larry Wilmore, they had Bill Nye the Science Guy on there discussing the new Mars discovery.
39:41Audience MemberAnd the other panelists basically said that our society doesn't care about the scientific discoveries of NASA. And how does innovation, what does that mean in a society that only values the results, like the final products, like a car or like finally going to space, not really valuing the process of getting there?
40:01Elon MuskWell, I mean, I do think that there is. I'm not sure I agree with that. I mean, I think we do value discovery and new things and learning about the universe.
40:13Elon MuskI mean, there was quite a bit of attention paid to the discovery of water flowing on Mars. I mean, I'd certainly say it should be more. But I think it's okay.
40:24Elon MuskI think it's not bad. I think we're like, we're better off than the show would suggest. Okay.
40:33InterviewerWe're going to try to get everybody up there if we can.
40:34Elon MuskSo go ahead. Question for Elon. I understand that the hyperloop was inspired by your opinions about California's high speed rail. And could you share those opinions as well as a bit about the hyperloop?
40:48Elon MuskYeah, just if we're to have some new form of transport in California which I think would be good to have, then we want to aspire to have something that is cutting edge technology.
41:05Elon MuskAnd when I was reading about the high speed rail plan, it's, it's a lot of money for something which isn't obviously compelling relative to a car or a plane in terms of the time it would take to complete the journey.
41:21Elon MuskAnd it will settle California taxpayers with a pretty significant amount of money that they've got to pay. So it's like if you pay a high price you should have a great outcome.
41:34Elon MuskLike that should be the sensible thing. And that doesn't seem to be what is happening from what I can tell. And so I was trying to think well, what would be the fastest way you could get from say LA to San Francisco or cities in between and ended up mentioning that I had an idea actually at a talk not unlike this and then, and then discovered my initial idea didn't work and then kept iterating with a bunch of other people and came up with Hyperloop.
42:10Elon MuskSo that's sort of where it actually, it finally did work from a technical standpoint and now there are some companies pursuing that which is awesome and I hope we see some, I hope we see it come to fruition.
42:23Elon MuskSpaceX is doing a hyperloop student competition that where teams will compete to see who can make the best pod. And so we're doing a sort of a mile long hyperloop section in LA, just right near SpaceX really Hawthorne technically, but LA county.
42:49Elon MuskAnd so I think that's going to be pretty exciting to see what the students can come up with and who can come up with the most advanced pod design.
42:56Elon MuskAnd I think we're going to set it so that the winner would be who can get their pod to go the fastest within a 1 mile section and then have a big crash area at the end if the pod doesn't slow down in time, can sort of get into the crash area.
43:12Elon MuskAnd I think that'll be quite an exciting competition.
43:15InterviewerWe had a couple more seconds, we'll grab it.
43:17Audience MemberThank you. Hello, my name is Baris, I'm a computer science student at Stanford and so far west, majority of startups we heard here today or the ones we hear on the news are brilliant innovations on business models that are supported by technology.
43:32Audience MemberOn the other hand, the ones that are based on true technical innovations are kind of limited, that we have a few examples year I want to ask Sam, why do you think that might be the case?
43:43Audience MemberAnd as a follow up to that to Elon, do you think you'll be able to successfully build Tesla or SpaceX if they were your first ventures and if you were looking funding for them out there?
43:56Co-panelistSo I think that a lot of people talk about how, you know, no one's working on anything interesting and we're all just doing software. The world is like really shitty, it's getting worse.
44:03Co-panelistIt's the end of progress. And I've never agreed with this. I think so. Two part answer. One, I actually think we're on an incredible pace of innovation. What's happening as what happens historically is that when there's a great opportunity, sort of talent sloshes around and finds that.
44:17Co-panelistAnd there's been incredible progress in software in the last couple of decades. There will be more. And so a lot of talented people are choosing to work on it.
44:25Co-panelistBut that doesn't mean we're not making progress. It just means this one area is like transforming the world incredibly quickly. People are doing other things as well. As you mentioned and you know, at Y Combinator we fund companies doing a lot of things.
44:37Co-panelistHere's the issue. The press loves to write about the software companies and they have very little interest in writing about the other stuff. And so as an outsider you would say, well, there's only software, but that just doesn't reflect reality.
44:47Co-panelistYou know, we fund companies doing all sorts of things and I think we love funding tech, we love funding technological innovation on a long time scale. The press does not love covering it.
44:59Co-panelistAnd also I think there's nothing wrong with working on software.
45:03Elon MuskYeah, I think SpaceX and Tesla are probably not the ideal companies to have as the first thing. I mean, generally, because if something is capital intensive, it's really hard to get going.
45:20Co-panelistIs it true that you totally ran out of money supporting those two companies?
45:22Elon MuskYeah. Wow.
45:24Co-panelistI guess that would not have been a good first.
45:26Elon MuskNo, I mean the, the thought I had in the beginning was I'm like, I'm not really an investor. I just like basically invest in the companies that I help create.
45:35Elon MuskAnd I thought, you know, coming out of PayPal, I sort of, I said I thought I'd invest like half the money in SpaceX and Tesla and Silver City and.
45:49Elon MuskAnd then I still have the other half left over, except that didn't really work out because then the recession of 2008 and 2009 came along and it was a choice of either invest everything or the companies would definitely die.
46:03Elon MuskSo it's like if I invest everything then they might live and if I don't invest everything, then they're definitely going to die. So ended up investing everything. And it was real tight, actually.
46:15Elon MuskIn fact, like the Tesla financing round at the end of 2008, I remember quite well because we closed that financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible was 6pm Christmas Eve 2008.
46:29Elon MuskAnd we would have gone bankrupt like two days after Christmas if we hadn't closed that round. Yeah, that was hard.
46:35InterviewerOkay, we got to wrap up. Final question for both of you, but I'm going to start with Elon with this. Your pal Larry Page once said that rather than give all of his money to charity, he would prefer to give all of his money to you.
46:48Elon MuskHe might have changed his mind.
46:51InterviewerSo my question for both of you is where do you want to, who would you give all of your money to? Or what would you give all of your money to?
47:04Elon MuskWell, I mean, my expectation is, I mean, I want to sort of continue the path of establishing a self sustaining city on Mars. I think that's an important thing that needs to happen.
47:19Elon MuskAnd then also sustainable energy, sustainable transport, and then education and pediatric healthcare. Those are like the areas that, I mean, that's essentially where all my money's going, sort of.
47:35Co-panelistThe good thing about Y Combinator is I get to pour all of my money back into the technologies that I believe in. So I would keep doing that.
47:42InterviewerAnd Larry Page will give your money to you. Elon Musk, Sam Altman. Thank you guys.