Elon Musk at the FT Future of the Car Summit
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (3)
Transcript
0:00Peter Campbell (FT)2022, we're very glad you can be with us, whether you're here in the room in central London or joining us on our global live stream. My name is Peter Campbell, I'm the global motor industry correspondent at the ft, and it is a great pleasure to introduce and chair this session for you.
0:15Peter Campbell (FT)Let me tell you how this is going to work. In a few minutes, we're going to have Jamie Straubel back on stage and Elon Musk joining us remotely. We're just going to spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of the session talking about the history of Tesla.
0:27Peter Campbell (FT)Now, these two guys were central to the company and its growth and everything it has achieved to date, and they have never before appeared on stage together to talk about the origins of the business.
0:37Peter Campbell (FT)So this is a unique chance to ask them about that and hear about that. And then for the rest of the session, we're going to have time just with Elon on his own, where we'll have questions about Tesla today and tomorrow and maybe one or two questions about some other projects he has going on.
0:53Peter Campbell (FT)Just a reminder to you, please do ask your questions on the chat box or if you're in the room using Slido, but with no further ado, because of all our guests, here's the one who needs least introduction.
1:04Peter Campbell (FT)I'd like you to welcome back to the stage JB Strabble. And joining us remotely, Elon Musk.
1:19Peter Campbell (FT)Good evening. Thank you so much for being with us, both of you. I want to go back to something that was alluded to earlier in the session and the lunch that changed the world, as Patrick called us when the two of you sat down and came up with a plan that led to Tesla.
1:35Peter Campbell (FT)Take us through that. Who started it? Whose idea was the lunch? Where did it go? Elon, we'd love you to start.
1:44Elon MuskSure. Well, actually. And JB completely. I think we could hear JB's perspective as well. But, yeah, I got a call, someone out of the blue from JV and Rosen, and I think, one, I'm not sure exactly what the subject matter was, but it's something involving space or maybe hydrogen airplanes or something.
2:14Elon MuskAnd so we got together for lunch and at some point the conversation turned to electric vehicles. And JB and Rosenut both worked on an electric vehicle company that I guess ultimately wasn't successful.
2:34Elon MuskAnd I mentioned that I'd actually had a strong interest in electric vehicles for a long time and thought electric vehicles were the future of transport. And in fact, I had worked at a company developing high energy Density capacitors, ultra capacitors for potential use in electric vehicles.
2:56Elon MuskAnd that was going to be my area of study, doing graduate studies at Stanford, which ultimately dropped out of. But anyway, that led to JB suggesting that I get a test drive in the T0 prototype from AC Propulsion, which is a small company in Southern California, because that sort of had a proof of concept electric sports car.
3:24Elon MuskAnd I said, that would be great. I'd love to get a test drive. And that was in 2003. And. And then I got a test drive in the T zero, and I tried to convince them to commercialize the T zero.
3:41Elon MuskI tried very hard, actually, to get AC Propulsion to commercialize the T zero electric sports car. And then after they said they really did not want to do that, I said, well, do you mind if.
3:59Elon MuskThen I do that? Do you mind if I create a commercial electric sports car? And they said, yeah, no problem. And so, you know that my intent was to basically create a company to commercialize the teaser with jb.
4:18Elon MuskAnd then the Tom Gage AC Propulsion said, well, you know, there's some other groups that also want to commercialize the T0 concept. And what do you think about teaming up with them?
4:35Elon MuskAnd one of the groups that was introduced to me was Mark Tarpenning, Ian Wright, and Martin Everhard. But it's very important to emphasize that there was no actual company that existed in any meaningful form at that point.
4:55Elon MuskSo it was really just three guys, and then JB and me, and then we decided to team up and create a. And commercialize. Create a commercial version of the T0 electric sports car.
5:11Elon MuskYeah. I mean, JB, what's your perspective?
5:16JB StraubelNo, that's a pretty close history of how I remember it as well. And I mean, my perspective on the thing was us trying to chat with you about this electric hydrogen airplane concept that we were, you know, I was at the time trying to work on.
5:31JB StraubelAnd I do recall that not going extremely well, actually, for the first part of the lunch, I think I can't remember the colorful adjectives you used, but you weren't very excited about the hydrogen airplane for good reason.
5:46JB StraubelSo, yeah, then I think our topics, our conversation completely turned to talking about lithium ion batteries. You know, state of the art of lithium ion batteries. Batteries. And what was possible, potentially possible, stringing together at the time large numbers of small lithium ion batteries, which were not very mature in those days, but could be potentially connected into really big battery packs to make an EV that could potentially have hundreds of miles of range, which today seems kind of commonplace.
6:15JB StraubelBut in 2003 was absolutely unheard of. It would literally set world records, you know, for range and. Yeah, I mean, you understood that concept, I think, and the potential of it better than anyone else that we'd ever talked to about it and were immediately enthused about it and excited.
6:32JB StraubelSo that was, I mean, shortly after, as you said, you know, we met up with AC propulsion and kind of were off to the races.
6:40Peter Campbell (FT)And there were a lot of early rejections. When you talked to some carmakers, obviously you settled on Lotus for the first roadster, but you went around some others. Was there ever a point between the lunch and getting the roadster off the ground where you almost gave up?
6:54Peter Campbell (FT)You thought that actually you couldn't make it work. Not from a chemistry point of view, but commercially,
7:01JB Straubelyeah, I could jump in maybe first on that. There were a lot of challenges in those early days. I mean, the technology was not, it was not a sure thing that all those pieces would work together.
7:13JB StraubelAnd some of the safety aspects around the battery were pretty thorny in the early days. And it was before, I think most people had figured out how to manage that.
7:23JB StraubelAnd I think at Tesla, I think we had an early chance to really figure that out in a very robust way and make them far safer than internal combustion, actually, as proved out to be through the statistics and through data.
7:37JB StraubelBut that was not the common perception. So that was, that was hard and that was risky. Obviously there were a lot of financial turns and tribulations. It wasn't exactly smooth sailing from idea of an electric roadster through into commercialization.
7:52Elon MuskIt was an insane nightmare, basically. And we screwed the pooch six ways to Sunday and made so many mistakes, it's embarrassing. Basically the. Almost everything about the first design of the Tesla Roadster was wrong and wouldn't work.
8:17Elon MuskAnd first of all, we had no idea how to build a car. And then no one really knew how to build a commercial lithium ion battery car. No one had ever done it.
8:32Elon MuskSo, like the original idea, sort of, which sounds appealing but was fundamentally flawed, was to use the Lotus Elise chassis and then combine that with AC propulsions, drivetrain technology and boom, you've got like theory, the two pieces necessary to create a car.
8:56Elon MuskIt should be straightforward and just do that and great. Unfortunately, those were two fundamentally flawed premises. The Lotus Elise chassis did not work, meaning that. So the car ended up being 40% heavier and we couldn't fit the battery pack in the Elise because it's a very tiny car.
9:21Elon MuskSo we had to change basically everything about the Elise. I think we kept maybe 6% of the parts were in common. All crash tests were invalidated. The structure was invalidated because of the greater mass and the mass distribution being fundamentally different from a gasoline car.
9:39Elon MuskAnd yeah, in retrospect, it would have actually been much smarter to start with a clean sheet design and not try to modify the Elise, because we ended up with a lot of the limitations of the Elise, but almost nothing to gain in terms of reuse of parts.
10:01Elon MuskSo that was a staggeringly dumb decision. And then on the drivetrain side, it turned out that I think almost none of the AC propulsion technologies were viable in a production car.
10:21Elon MuskI mean, jb, did we end up using any of the AC propulsion stuff?
10:27JB StraubelI think pretty much nothing by the time it went to the first customer.
10:31Elon MuskYes,
10:34JB Straubelit was a very helpful first proof of concept that maybe pointed the way what might be possible, but none of it was commercializing. All of it, as Elon said, was a lot of mistakes and trials and tribulations.
10:47JB StraubelAnd it was very hard to build more than two of those motor controllers in the first days with, with analog components. Those were still analog motor control. I mean, it would get hot and the motor would perform differently, the throttle would respond differently in a hot day versus a cold day.
11:01JB StraubelSo, yeah, everything pretty much had to be redone from scratch, but presumably.
11:06Peter Campbell (FT)Sorry, go on.
11:08Elon MuskSorry. So what we're saying is that we were huge idiots and we're totally wrong about the fundamental premises of creating the Tesla Roadster. And you ended up not being able to use any of the AC propulsion drivetrain technology using essentially almost none of the original Lotus Elise.
11:32Elon MuskBut we're still left with a lot of the limitations of the Elise being a car that was a bit too small, very difficult to get in and out of, and very bare bones.
11:44Elon MuskAnd then dependent on Lotus to make it. And then every time Lotus would have financial difficulties, they would increase the price on us and, and charge us more money.
11:55Elon MuskSo that made it very difficult to control the price of the car. So. And then the supply chain was also a complete mess. The initial idea was to basically outsource everything, and then almost none of the companies to which we outsourced the various parts of the cars were able to succeed in making those parts.
12:20Elon MuskSo we had to find a new supplier for the car body because the supply originally picked was flat out unable to do it. This is not a decision that I was quoting, but the.
12:34Elon MuskWe had outsourced making the battery to a barbecue company in Thailand. This is bit silly to say, okay, we're going to make the most sophisticated battery ever made and a barbecue company is going to make it.
12:52Elon MuskObviously they did not know how to make the world's most expensive battery. That was pretty silly. So we had to insource battery production to California. We made it, basically end up making the battery ourselves.
13:11Elon MuskYeah, it's one thing after another, basically just a flat out burning dumpster fire of stupidity, I would say was the beginning of the company. And then we had to recover from there and it was very difficult.
13:26Peter Campbell (FT)So there are lots of other EV startups out there, potentially in the hundreds today, all wanting to do what you did. You guys, you blazed the trail 10 years before the industry really caught up with you.
13:40Peter Campbell (FT)You had the advantage of having no one else playing in the same area. But the disadvantage that all the time you were trying to break through virgin snow. Was it more difficult to do it 10 years ago than you think it is today?
13:53Peter Campbell (FT)And if there's one piece of advice that you could offer to the various startups, what would it be?
14:00JB StraubelWell, I mean, I think most of them just completely forget about the first like eight to ten years of Tesla. That's the kind of amazing part to me. You know, they kind of see success and then they're like, oh, that looks good, let's do that, let's be one, let's do, you know, copy that.
14:13JB StraubelBut I mean it was brutal confusion and tons of mistakes and a lot of money invested for a lot of years. I personally think it's a lot actually harder today even still for a startup to compete because the first question is sort of what, what is the niche that even makes sense to have a new startup EV company relative to all the products from other OEMs or to Tesla, what are they going to do better than Tesla?
14:40JB StraubelTesla didn't exist. There was no Tesla in the world 17 years ago. So that was sort of the imperative and gave a Runway to make a lot of mistakes and still make it work.
14:53Elon MuskI think just very important to emphasize here the, you know, I think.
15:03Elon MuskI wouldn't Polynot JB would have wanted to go through the extreme pain of creating electric, an electric car company if the traditional automakers were going to make an electric car, make electric cars and you know, just an important thing for the world that needs to happen to move to a sustainable technology future.
15:21Elon MuskAnd but, but if at the time that we created Tesla, there were no startups doing electric cars and the big car companies had really no electric car programs going and the few tiny, tiny electric car programs they had going, they were shutting down.
15:41Elon MuskSo Therefore, unless we tried to create an electric car, there was not one going to be created. It's not from the standpoint of thinking, hey, here's a super lucrative idea, let's make start a car company.
15:56Elon MuskThe history of car company startups is horrific and they've almost all gone bankrupt. It's an incredibly big graveyard of car startups that all died. You've only heard a tiny number of them, you know, sort of the Tuckers and Delta Deloreans of the world, but there are hundreds of others that people didn't hear about.
16:19Elon MuskSo. And at this point in the United States, the only two American car companies that have not gone bankrupt are Ford and Tesla. And Tesla almost went bankrupt so many times I lost count.
16:33Elon MuskSo basically, it's a world of hurt. To start a car company is mega pain. It is not easy. Money is the furthest thing for easy money you could possibly imagine.
16:44Elon MuskSo, and what I see with some of these new car companies is that they are, they're jumping in at the deep end and trying to create a high volume vehicle that when they've never made a vehicle before, this is like, you know, not practicing your athletic sport and then going to the Olympics.
17:10Elon MuskYou're not going to win. This is crazy. You really need to start out small, make your mistakes at a small scale, make sure you've got a lot of reserve capital and then gradually build up from the dumb things that you do at the beginning and be less dumb over time.
17:30Elon MuskOtherwise what will happen is vast losses of money. The car industry is very competitive. It's, it's the opposite of a natural monopoly. You have sort of natural monopolies in things like social media or say Google search.
17:47Elon MuskCar companies are naturally not monopolies. They're hyper competitive and they're used to being hyper competitive throughout the world. They have entrenched customers, dealers, service, factories, existing expertise. These are veteran armies, like in fortresses.
18:17Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's extremely difficult.
18:20Peter Campbell (FT)Now you happen to mention in that answer the word social media, which brings us very neatly onto the question of Twitter. So, jb, I'm going to say thank you so much.
18:29Peter Campbell (FT)That was fascinating brief history there of Tesla and the early years and the mistakes that you made. So thank you very much for being with us on stage. Thank you.
18:43Elon MuskWell, on the Twitter front, there's not a lot that I can say because, you know, this is Twitter's publicly traded company and there are a lot of constraints in what I can say.
18:53Elon MuskSo not sure what you would like to ask, but most of the questions the answer is going to be no comments.
19:01Peter Campbell (FT)That's all right. I can have a go. Let me ask you to put your product development hat on. And if you pair Twitter all the way back, what is it and what do you think it can be in 10 years time?
19:21Elon MuskWell, what I said is that I think Twitter is currently the best, or looked at another way, the least bad. Public Square, a forum for the exchange of ideas nationally and internationally.
19:40Elon MuskBut I think it could be a lot better at that. In order to be better at that, it needs to really get rid of the bots and the scams and spammers and, you know, basically anyone tried to create sort of fake influence on the site by.
20:00Elon MuskWhereas one person or one entity operating 100,000 accounts or, you know, obviously scammers are not good. And Twitter really needs to do a much better job at that. It also needs to build trust, more trust with users.
20:18Elon MuskI think the way to do that is by open sourcing the algorithm so everyone can see how the algorithm works and can suggest improvements and changes. I would literally just put the Twitter algorithm on GitHub and say like, hey, anyone want to suggest changes to this?
20:36Elon MuskPlease go ahead and just. You really want transparency to build trust. And then any sort of adjustments to tweets or any human intervention with any account on Twitter should be highlighted as a Twitter person took the following action with your account or with this tweet so that you're not sort of sitting there in the dark wondering why did this tweet not get any attention?
21:02Elon MuskOr why did this one get a lot of attention? It's far too random. And you know, and then I think Twitter needs to be much more even handed. It currently has a strong left bias because it's based in San Francisco.
21:19Elon MuskI don't think the people that they're necessarily intend, or at least have some of them don't intend to have a left bias. They're just, from their perspective, it seems moderate, but they're just coming at it from an environment that is, that is very far left.
21:36Elon MuskSo. But then this fails to build trust in the rest of the United States and also perhaps in other parts of the world, because Twitter needs to be even handed and be, you know, I think, as I said publicly, victory would be that the Most far right 10% and the most far left 10% are equally upset.
22:03Elon MuskI don't think this is a situation where you're going to get necessarily a lot of praise. You're just gonna, you're just gonna balance the anger.
22:11Peter Campbell (FT)So how do you. Because People will, people will automatically associate you with Tesla and you with Twitter. Is there any risk in your mind that the actions that you're going to take at Twitter, which you've admitted freely will upset some people, potentially lead to a commercial impact on Tesla?
22:33Elon MuskI'm confident that we will be able to sell all the cars we can make.
22:41Elon MuskI mean, currently the lead time for ordering a Tesla is ridiculously long. So our issue is not demand, it is production.
22:51Peter Campbell (FT)But that's at the moment because of the global supply chains and the chip shortages. That's less around electric car demand, which we are expecting to go absolutely through the roof.
23:00Peter Campbell (FT)And you obviously have very ambitious targets for that at Tesla.
23:06Elon MuskYeah, I mean even before there was the supply chain issues, Tesla demand exceeded production. So now, now it's demand is exceeding production to a ridiculous degree. We're actually probably going to limit, just stop taking orders for anything beyond a certain period of time because you know, some of the timing is like a year away.
23:36Elon MuskSo anyway, the frustration that we're seeing from customers is under being unable to, to get them a car, not are they willing or interested in buying a car. So basically I think zero about demand generation and a lot about production and engineering and supply chain.
24:01Peter Campbell (FT)I have two more questions on Twitter, if I may, before we turn for the rest of the session to Tesla. How confident are you the deal will happen and is there a risk?
24:11Peter Campbell (FT)This is all one question and is there a risk because you're putting a lot of your personal stake up for this to fund it. Is there a risk that if it all goes south, you're imperiling your stake in Tesla, potentially hurting Tesla financially and maybe even SpaceX if it all goes to pot.
24:30Peter Campbell (FT)That's the technical term.
24:33Elon MuskYeah, sure. So I mean, I think there's still a lot of things that need to get done before this deal concludes. Obviously there's not yet even been a shareholder vote and Twitter has not yet filed the proxy for a shareholder vote.
24:51Elon MuskSo there are still, you know, some outstanding questions that need to be resolved. And so it is certainly not a done deal. Just objectively it is not a done deal.
25:10Elon MuskYou know, the best case scenario is that this would be, I think perhaps done in two or three months. Yeah.
25:21Peter Campbell (FT)And the final question, and this is, this is really the too paid elephant in the room. Are you planning to let Donald Trump back on?
25:32Elon MuskWell, I think there's a general question of should was it Twitter have permanent bans? And you know, I've talked with Jack Dorsey about this and he and I are of the same mind, which is that permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for.
25:55Elon MuskFor people where they're trying to. For accounts that are bots or spam scam accounts where there's just no legitimacy to the account at all. I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump.
26:17Elon MuskI think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice. He is now going to be on Truth Social, as will a large part of the sort of the right in the.
26:36Elon MuskIn the United States. And so I think this could end up being, frankly, worse than having a single, you know, single forum where everyone can debate. So I guess the answer is that I would reverse the perma ban.
26:52Elon MuskI would say I don't own Twitter yet, so this is not like a thing that will definitely happen, because what if I don't own Twitter? But my opinion, and Jack Dorsey, I want to be clear, shares this opinion, is that we should not have perma bans.
27:06Elon MuskNow, that doesn't mean that somebody gets to say whatever they want to say. If they say something that is illegal or, or otherwise just destructive to the world, then there should be perhaps a timeout, a temporary suspension, or that particular tweet should be made invisible or have very limited traction.
27:35Elon MuskBut I think permans just fundamentally undermine trust. And Twitter as a town square where everyone can voice their opinion. I think it was a morally bad decision to be clear and foolish in the extreme.
27:58Peter Campbell (FT)Even after he egged on the crowds who went to the US Capitol, some of them carrying nooses, you still think it was a mistake to remove him?
28:12Elon MuskI think the. If there are tweets that are wrong, they should and bad, those should be either deleted or made invisible. And a suspension, a temporary suspension is appropriate, but not a permanent ban.
28:34Peter Campbell (FT)So if the deal completes, he might potentially come back on, but with the understanding that if he does something similar again, he'll be back in the sin bin.
28:43Elon MuskHe has publicly stated that he will not be coming back to Twitter and that he will only be on Truth Social. And this is the point that I'm trying to make, which is perhaps not getting across, is, is that there is that banning Trump from Twitter didn't end Trump's voice.
29:02Elon MuskIt will amplify it among the right. And this is why it is morally wrong and flat out stupid.
29:13Peter Campbell (FT)Okay, thank you.
29:14JB StraubelWe will.
29:15Peter Campbell (FT)Let's turn to Tesla again. I'd like to ask you about your ambitions for the future. You've said you want the company to be able to make 20 million cars a year by 2030, which would make it the same size as Toyota and Volkswagen combined today.
29:32Peter Campbell (FT)Give us a sense, what does the business look like by 2030 to make 20 million cars, plants, footprints, models.
29:44Elon MuskYes, well, this is not a forum for announcing new products, new Tesla products. The 20 million by 2030 is an aspiration, not a promise. And the reason for aiming for something like that is There are approximately 2 billion cars and trucks in the world.
30:06Elon MuskAnd for us to really make a dent in sustainable energy and electrification, I think we need to replace at least 1% of the fleet per year to really be meaningful.
30:21Elon MuskAnd that's where the 20 million units comes from. Let's try to replace 1% of the global fleet of 2 billion cars and trucks per year. And that's our aspiration.
30:35Elon MuskIt's not a promise, it's an aspiration. I think we've got a good chance of getting there and people will see, based on the products that we unveil, will be able to judge for themselves whether that goal is realistic or not.
30:51Peter Campbell (FT)Now you've gone from zero plants to four plants. That would require you to get to possibly about 20 plants, depending how they're ramped up. Is that phase more difficult, what you've got ahead of you by 2030 than what's gone behind, given you've already done it?
31:06Peter Campbell (FT)Or do you still think it's more difficult to ramp to that level?
31:17Elon MuskI think it's close. It's roughly the sheer amount of stuff that Tesla's done is I think, quite mind boggling. We have an incredible team at Tesla and executing very well and our annual growth rates are faster than any large manufactured product in the history of Earth.
31:40Elon MuskThe I think the next fastest was the growth of the Model T and we're faster than the Model T. So you know, if that growth rate continues, then obviously we will reach 20 million vehicles a year.
31:53Elon MuskBut we may stumble and not reach that goal. So but I'd say on roughly, it's roughly equally difficult to have gotten to this point as will be to get to 20 million.
32:12Peter Campbell (FT)And what's the biggest uncertainty with getting to 2030? Is it manufacturing ramping? Is it the raw materials? Is it something else?
32:29Elon MuskThere are some raw material constraints that we see coming in lithium production probably in about three years and in cathode production, the cathode, the two main cathode choices are nickel and iron phosphate.
32:49Elon MuskObviously iron is extremely plentiful. The earth is 32% iron by composition. So a little bit of trivia if someone says, what is Earth made of? The single biggest element that earth is made of is iron.
33:07Elon MuskThe second biggest element that earth is made of is oxygen, which is about 30, 30% of Earth mass. So clearly iron's not in short supply. The phosphate is slightly more of a challenge, but still quite common.
33:25Elon MuskSo I do not see any fundamental scaling constraints. And lithium is also quite common. So lithium is practically everywhere. So this is not a question of a shortage of like as though it's some rare element.
33:37Elon MuskIt's really just that the, the lithium mining and especially the refining capacity and that of the, of taking iron and phosphorus and turning it into battery grade iron phosphate or nickel and turning it into battery grade nickel is, it's really the equipment, I think the single straight will be the equipment necessary to convert the ore into battery grade materials.
34:07Elon MuskAnd we're working on that with suppliers. So I'm not saying that this is an impossible thing to address. It is simply one of the problems along the way to getting 20 million vehicles.
34:18Peter Campbell (FT)LFP batteries are much less recyclable than the other batteries you use. How much of that is an issue in terms of overall environmental impact of what the company does if you end up using lots and lots of them?
34:31Elon MuskNo, what you said is not true. Iron phosphate batteries are fully recycled.
34:36Peter Campbell (FT)Good. Well, that's easy.
34:37Elon MuskAnd so nickel based. I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but iron phosphate is recyclable and so is sort of nickel based batteries.
34:47Peter Campbell (FT)Thank you. I stand corrected. Can I ask why you think Tesla needs to grow so much by 2030? Because what you set out when you in the early years was that you wanted Tesla to help tilt the world away from fossil fuels.
35:02Peter Campbell (FT)And to some extent it looks like it's already succeeded.
35:11Elon MuskYes, I think you're sort of putting too much emphasis on those 20 million vehicles by 2030, as though this is some grand promise, some hill upon which we will die.
35:20Elon MuskThat is, it is simply an aspiration and we may, we may achieve it or we may not. Our goal is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. And so that's why we want to make a lot of cars and also a lot of stationary battery packs.
35:39Elon MuskBecause the three pillars of a sustainable energy future are electric transport, stationary battery packs and solar and wind and geothermal and hydro, basically sustainable energy sources. But solar and wind particularly are intermittent.
35:55Elon MuskAnd so you need stationary battery packs to store the energy when the sun doesn't shine. So you know, you have your constant electro electricity provision or when the wind doesn't blow.
36:06Elon MuskSo. But you can have a. You can completely convert. I want to be very clear about this. All of Earth. All of Earth can. Can easily be powered by solar and wind, stationary battery packs and electric transport.
36:24Elon MuskWell, you could power perhaps several. If. Even if Earth's economy were to. You could do 10 times what Earth's economy is with solar, wind, batteries and electric transport. That's not a close thing.
36:40Elon MuskI think most people just have not done the basic math of just how much energy hits the Earth from the sun. It's a kilowatt per square meter, or said another way, a gigawatt per square kilometer.
36:50Elon MuskSo if you have a 20% efficient solar system, that's 200 megawatts per square kilometer, it's a lot. Basically, you could power all of Europe with a section of Spain, roughly unoccupied section of Spain.
37:06Elon MuskYou could power all of the United States with a corner of Utah or Texas. Now, obviously, it would make more sense to spread this out and not. I'm just using this as a figure of speech or to show that it is a small amount of area that is necessary to power the United States or Europe.
37:26Elon MuskIt is not some vast area. And I invite anyone to do the basic math. It's not hard. 200 megawatts per square kilometer. Okay, so how many. What's the power needed?
37:43Elon MuskThey'll tell you how many square kilometers, then you will need batteries to store that. The. I think our calculation of the area of the batteries needed to store all the energy to power the United States was roughly one square mile, literally.
38:04Peter Campbell (FT)So do you think. Do you think Tesla has succeeded in its goal, then? Or do you think there's still much more to do?
38:15Elon MuskNo, I think that we've not succeeded in the goal. If you consider the goal to be getting the automotive industry to move strongly towards electric vehicles, I think that part of the goal we have succeeded in, and that was explicitly part of our goal, is to get the industry moving towards electric vehicles, because they were doing nothing in that direction when we started.
38:41Elon MuskAnd for the longest time they were dismissing the concept of electric vehicles. And then Tesla started taking market share away from them and that changed their mind.
38:53Peter Campbell (FT)How long do you think you're likely to stay at Tesla?
38:58Elon MuskAs long as they can be useful.
39:02Peter Campbell (FT)And what are the. What else is there in terms of potential future projects that piques your interest? You're obviously going to be quite involved in Twitter if the deal goes through, but you've got Tesla, you've got SpaceX, you've got boring, you've Got neuralink, as you're looking around thinking you potentially have capacity, what else is there in terms of the kind of, I don't know, betterment of the human condition or improving Earth that you feel you might want to turn your attention to in the future?
39:32Elon MuskWell, I'm trying to take the set of actions that I think most likely make the future good and hopefully not pave the road to hell with good intentions. So I think Tesla is about accelerating sustainable energy because we're obviously a sustainable energy future on Earth.
39:50Elon MuskFor Earth to be good then SpaceX is about extending life beyond Earth so that we may become a multi planetary species. And with Starlink providing Internet coverage to the least served in the world, those are in rural communities or places that just don't have good Internet or it's very expensive.
40:16Elon MuskBut I think it's important that we become a multi planet species and a space dragged civilization because eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on Earth. So if one is a true environmentalist or cares about the future of life, it is obviously important that life become multi planetary and ultimately multi stellar.
40:37Elon MuskSo we must make that first step. What do you must make that first step?
40:45Peter Campbell (FT)What do you think the next goals are then for SpaceX and do you have a date in mind for when you think they will get to mar?
41:00Elon MuskI think I think we should be able to maybe get Starship to Mars uncrewed in three to five years. And then I think if that's successful, then we may be able to send a crewed mission to Mars before the end of the decade.
41:29Elon MuskThe windows for going to Mars occur every two years. So the planets align for orbital transfer every 26 months. So that's you get a kick at the can every 26 months.
41:45Elon MuskSo we're making a lot of progress with Starship. We will hopefully have our first launch attempt this summer or basically next two or three months. And we're building up, we've got a factory for Starship, so there's a whole bunch of starships coming behind the one that will attempt launch soon.
42:09Elon MuskSo if that one doesn't work, we have, we'll have many more behind that and we're continuously improving the design so each one is better than the last. Starship really is a game changer to an extraordinary degree with respect to access to space because it will be.
42:28Elon MuskIt's the first orbital rocket that is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. There's never been a fully reusable orbital rocket. Falcon 9 is the most reusable rocket since we're able to fairly rapidly reuse the boost stage and the fairing, and that's maybe 70% of the cost of per mission is saved, but we still lose the upper stage on every mission.
43:00Elon MuskSo with Starship, both the booster and the upper stage, both the ship and the booster will be recovered, and they'll be recovered very rapidly. And in theory, you could launch the booster 10 or 12 times a day.
43:20Elon MuskAnd the ship, because of orbital limitations, maybe you could launch it three times a day. And it's also a very big vehicle. So on the order of roughly 100 tons of useful load to orbit.
43:34Elon MuskSo it's Saturn V scale payload to orbit, but fully reusable. If it was expandable, it would probably do, I don't know, 250 tons to orbit. And I think with further improvements, even with full reusability, we can probably get it to 150 tons to orbit.
43:55Elon MuskBut to put this into perspective, if you have a fleet of starships launching, with the ability to launch every day or multiple times a day, Starship will do more than a thousand times the payload to orbit of all other rockets on Earth combined.
44:17Peter Campbell (FT)Can I. Thank you. That was fascinating. Can I bring us down to Earth gently and ask you about China in relation to Tesla. Where do you, how important is the market for you?
44:29Peter Campbell (FT)Do you think China contributes most of your growth in the future?
44:36Elon MuskNo, I think China is obviously a very significant market, but it is, you know, it's, it's probably 25 to 30% of our markets long term. The rest of world is probably three quarters of it.
44:53Peter Campbell (FT)Do you see? I promised I didn't have any more Twitter questions, but I have. This is two, sort of a Twitter question. Do you, do you see any risk at all that China uses your ownership of Twitter potentially to interfere or block Tesla's operations in the country?
45:08Peter Campbell (FT)Because obviously China has, has banned Twitter.
45:13Elon MuskI've seen no indication to that effect.
45:17Peter Campbell (FT)Okay, how, how close would you say you are personally to the Chinese government? Because when you set up the factory in Shanghai, the, the rules were rewritten around joint ventures to allow you to do that.
45:31Elon MuskWell, yeah, I was certainly asked many times by the government of China to, to do a factory in China. I said, well, we, we're not going to do one which is 51% locally owned.
45:44Elon MuskAnd so if they're willing to, to change the rules not just for us, but for everyone, then, then we would move forward. And so they did. And I think it's been very successful so far and the government's very happy about it.
45:59Elon MuskAnd so, I don't know, things are proceeding fairly well.
46:02Peter Campbell (FT)How many other plants are you expecting to open in China in the near future?
46:09Elon MuskWell, we're not expecting to open any additional plants in China in the near future. We will be expanding our Shanghai factory, but our focus on production is going to be on the two new factories that we've recently completed in Berlin and Austin, Texas.
46:32Elon MuskAnd getting those to high volume production is the, is the near term challenge.
46:38Peter Campbell (FT)We had Herbert Deese, Volkswagen chief executive, who you know well at the summit yesterday, and we asked him what his big question was for you, you, and it was, how do you scale production in China, Germany and Texas simultaneously?
46:51Peter Campbell (FT)Because for any experienced OEM, even the ones with 100 years of doing this, that's a challenge.
46:59Elon MuskYes, I think generally the difficulty of manufacturing and scaling, manufacturing is very much underappreciated. I've said many times that prototypes are easy. Production is hard. We can easily whip out a prototype of any kind of car you could possibly imagine with a small team in six months.
47:21Elon MuskNow, you know, we have a team of 100 people in six months now to bring that to fruition with high volume production is 10,000 people in two years, and that's three times faster than the rest of industry.
47:35Elon MuskSo overwhelmingly the problem with, with cars is production. Overwhelmingly it's, you know, 99% of the difficulty. So he's certainly correct that the difficulty is scaling. But if you look, if you look at our track record thus far in scaling production, we've scaled production at, like I said, a rate faster than any car company in the, on the history of Earth, or, or any company making a large sophisticated product of any kind.
48:10Elon MuskSo provided we continue to execute at that rate, we'll do fine. And even if that rate slows down a little, it'll still be faster than any other company on Earth.
48:22Peter Campbell (FT)Now, I want to ask you about two specific rumors that have swirled around future production plants for you. Are you going to build a plant in Indonesia?
48:34Elon MuskAs I said, this is not the forum for us to make major company announcements.
48:39Peter Campbell (FT)And finally, have you looked at building a plant in the uk? Do you think you might ever build a plant in the UK in the future?
48:46Elon MuskI refer back to my prior answer.
48:49Peter Campbell (FT)It was worth a try. Right? Can I, can I ask, can I ask about autonomy? Right, so you have this way that you think about autonomy using cameras on the vehicles, and you want to get to almost a kind of human level AI to get the cars to drive themselves fully in the real world.
49:12Peter Campbell (FT)But a lot of people who work in AI think human level AI is a long, long, long way off. How do you square that circle about the approach that you're taking and the speed at which you want to deploy full self driving technology?
49:28Elon MuskWell, I don't think you need full human level intelligence to drive a car. You need sufficient human level intelligence to drive a car, but not, you know, you don't, you don't need like deep conceptual understanding of, you know, esoteric concepts or anything like that.
49:47Elon MuskYou need sufficient intelligence to match what human neural nets do when driving a car. And I think anyone who's driven a car for any length of time, once you have some years of experience driving a car, the cognitive load on driving a car is not high.
50:06Elon MuskYou're able to think about other things, listen to music, have a conversation and still drive safely. So it's not like matching everything a human does, but it is still matching enough of the neural nets to what you know, the silicon neural nets need to at least be on par with the biological neural nets to enable safe driving.
50:32Elon MuskAnd I think we're quite close to achieving that. But I recommend that don't take my word for it, just sign up for our beta program and try it out or look at the videos that people are posting who are in our beta program.
50:48Elon MuskWe have like I think at this point about 100,000 people in our beta program. So it's not exactly top secret.
50:54Peter Campbell (FT)How, how hard is it as a problem to solve? Because you've made predictions in the past about autonomy and you know, some of those haven't come to fruition. At the same time, has your understanding of the problem of autonomy changed over the last few years?
51:09Elon MuskIs yes, the, I say that self driving is one of those things where there, there are a lot of false stones or you know, where you think you're getting there, but then you end up asymptoting.
51:28Elon MuskYour, your, your progress is initially linear and then, and then looks logarithmic and sort of tapers off because you're in a local maximum that you did not realize you were in.
51:40Elon MuskNow at this point, I think we are no longer trapped in local maximum. And obviously I could be wrong, but I think we are actually quite close to achieving self driving at a safety level that is better than human.
52:02Elon MuskAnd it appears my best guess is that we will get there this year, but we're really not far from it. And like I said, the best way to assess this is to be in our beta program or look at the videos of those who are in the beta program and look at the progress that has occurred.
52:22Elon MuskAnd the progress is dramatic. And I'm confident we will not merely get to the safety level of a human, will get far in excess of the safety level of a human.
52:34Elon MuskSo I think ultimately probably a factor of 10 is safer than a human as measured by the probability of injury.
52:42Peter Campbell (FT)Given where you're trying to get to with this, the factor above human driving, the potential lives that could be saved with that, I need to ask you about some of the accidents and fatalities that have happened that with vehicles previously, the people who died.
52:59Peter Campbell (FT)Do you consider that that was a price worth paying to get to the level where we want to be to save more human lives in the future?
53:10Elon MuskWell, it is important to note that we have never said ever that Tesla, the Tesla Autopilot does not report require attention. We have always made that extremely clear repeatedly.
53:25Elon MuskYou can't even turn it on without acknowledging that it requires a supervision. We remind you of that every time you turn it on to ad nauseam. So this was not a case of setting expectations that the car could simply drive itself in the past and then not meeting those expectations.
53:45Elon MuskThat is completely untrue now. It is also the case, however, and I knew this would be true from the beginning, that people don't, the people whose lives are saved with autopilot or autonomy don't know that their lives were saved.
54:08Elon MuskAnd so if you look at say deaths, annual automotive deaths every year, it's around a million people per year die from automotive accidents, maybe 10 million per year are severely injured.
54:24Elon MuskAnd so with autonomy, you, you know, the car's, you know, driving or it's assisted driving right now, but it will be fully autonomous in the future. Like I said, those who didn't realize they would have crashed or hit a pedestrian or cyclist, they don't know that.
54:43Elon MuskBut, but the. So basically even if you, if you, let's say save 90% of the people that would otherwise have died, the remaining 10% who did die will still sue you now.
55:01Elon MuskBut I think it's actually like in the grand scheme of things, what is the morally right decision. And I'm a strong believer in doing the reality of good over the perception of good.
55:15Elon MuskAnd I have utter contempt for those who simply who prefer the perception of good over the reality of it. And so we're just going to take the heat. But if we believe that the polity of injury is reduced and we have very confident of that, but we also know that we're going to be sued despite doing the right thing, we will do the right thing and get sued.
55:46Peter Campbell (FT)Thank you. We have. It will not necessarily surprise you to hear a lot of audience questions that have come in in the last few minutes. I'm going to try and rattle through as many as we can.
55:56Peter Campbell (FT)What is Tesla's approach to smaller and more affordable end of the market? You're going to go smaller than the Model 3, but could you get into a scooter, micro mobility, something else?
56:09Elon MuskScooters are very dangerous. I would not recommend anyone drive a scooter. If there's ever an argument between a scooter and a car, the scooter will always.
56:21Peter Campbell (FT)What about smaller than a Model 3? What are you, how far can you go down the entry level of the, the market?
56:30Elon MuskWell, like I said, this is not some forum for roundabout product announcements, no matter how, no matter how cleverly the question is asked. So you know, will we that there's some probability that Tesla will do a smaller car than the Model 3,
56:48Peter Campbell (FT)but
56:48Elon MuskI won't say more than that.
56:50Peter Campbell (FT)Okay, that's fine. That wasn't my question, that was an audience question. Does Tesla, would you ever consider licensing your platform to other OEMs? Presumably that would help switch the industry towards electric mobility, in your opinion?
57:07Elon MuskWell, we've already open sourced all our patents. Anyone can use our patents for free, so great. You know, we only patent things in order to prevent others from creating this minefield of patents that inhibit progress with electric vehicles.
57:24Elon MuskBut several years ago, you know, I came to the conclusion we're never going to really prosecute anyone for using our patents. So let's just say you can use any Tesla patents for free.
57:37Elon MuskSo I think hopefully that's helpful to others and, but I think the, you know, the regular car industry, the traditional car makers will solve electrification. It's not fundamentally difficult at this point to make electric cars.
57:53Elon MuskThe thing that I think they may be interested in licensing is Tesla Autopilot full self driving. And I think that would save a lot of lives. But, but I think we still have, we have to prove, prove ourselves for, I don't know, maybe another year or so and, and then perhaps there will be some other carmakers who may wish to license Tesla Autopilot and we'd be very open to that.
58:25Peter Campbell (FT)Thank you. Of all the other EV startups, which one has impressed you the most?
58:38Elon MuskWell, I think the company making the most progress besides Tesla is actually vw, which is not a startup, but could be viewed in some ways as a startup from an electric vehicle standpoint.
58:47Elon MuskSo VW is doing the most on the electric vehicle front, I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China. There's just a lot of super talented, hard working people in China that are strongly believe in manufacturing and they won't just be burning the midnight oil, they'll be burning the 3am oil.
59:18Elon MuskSo they won't even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.
59:29Peter Campbell (FT)We've got a question on the cybertruck. Is there a risk that you lose the pickup segment to Ford, GM and Rivian if you don't launch the cybertruck or get it to market soon?
59:43Elon MuskNo.
59:44Peter Campbell (FT)Good. We've had another question come in.
59:48Elon MuskMore orders to fill the cybertruck than we could possibly fulfill for three years after startup production.
59:54Peter Campbell (FT)Okay, thank you. We've had a question come in about China. You've been critical of lockdowns in the past, particularly when it happened in the U.S. shanghai is currently locked down.
1:00:06Peter Campbell (FT)Most of the western world is able to carry on functioning at the moment because of vaccines. But China is going towards a zero Covid approach. What do you make of the Chinese government's actions?
1:00:20Elon MuskWell, I've had some conversations with the Chinese government in recent days and it's clear that the lockdowns are being lifted rapidly. So I would not expect this to be a significant issue in the coming weeks.
1:00:39Elon MuskYou know, the, in the past where I was sort of upset with lockdowns is where those lockdowns differentially affected Tesla but not others. So in the case of California and the Bay Area counties specifically, every other car factory in North America was allowed to start, but not Tesla.
1:01:00Elon MuskEven though there was no basis for that. It was simply because we were located in Alameda county in California and, but they had no rational, it was arbitrary and unfair.
1:01:13Elon MuskAnd you know, that's the reason for why we're quite upset about Tesla being singled out as the only car company in America that was left to start. Even though I think our health care practices are probably better than anyone else.
1:01:30Peter Campbell (FT)Thank you. We've had a question on software. At what point did you realize that software was going to be key to Tesla's success? And particularly as others are coming into software, how do you maintain leadership in it?
1:01:43Elon MuskWell, Tesla is, I think, as much a software company as it is a hardware company. Now. I personally wrote software for 20 years, so I have great respect and admiration for software engineering.
1:01:59Elon MuskI think it's incredibly important and I think that's why Tesla's been able to recruit some of the world's best Software engineers is because we, we value software engineering so highly and do not regard it as an, as an afterthought.
1:02:18Elon MuskSo, you know, our autopilot full self driving AI team is incredibly talented and, and, and some of the smartest software engineers in the world. So, and I do not give compliments lightly.
1:02:36Elon MuskSo we have an incredible team. We have the best real world AI team in the world, the best real world AI team on earth, and, and we're seeing more and more incredibly talented people join our team.
1:02:52Elon MuskSo and we're really not seeing anyone else being close to solving real world AI. They may exist, but if so they're being very subtle about it. And I periodically call our team and say like, do we know anyone who is doing this?
1:03:10Elon MuskBecause, you know, we know who a lot of the top people are in AI and what they're doing and we just don't see anyone else that we're aware of making any significant progress in real world AI, apart from Tesla.
1:03:28Elon MuskSo yeah, I am quite confident that we'll not merely maintain our software lead, but increase it.
1:03:39Peter Campbell (FT)Thank you. We've had a question come in on the supercharger network. What are your thoughts about opening it to other motorists who don't drive Teslas? And doesn't that risk what is currently one of your great competitive advantages?
1:03:54Elon MuskWe've already opened Tesla superchargers to other electric cars in Europe and we intend to roll that out worldwide. It's a little trickier in the US because we have a different connector than the, the rest of industry, but we will be adding the rest of industry connectors as an option to superchargers in us.
1:04:19Elon MuskSo we will be fully, we're trying as best as possible to do the right thing for the advancement of electrification, even if that diminishes our competitive advantage.
1:04:30Peter Campbell (FT)Do you, do you think you'll ever wrap all your various operations, Tesla, SpaceX, etc. Under one umbrella group or do you want to keep them separate for the time being?
1:04:43Elon MuskI think they're sort of separate objectives with different shareholder bases and I think, you know, I don't see a ton of merit in combining them. At times there are people, you know, where we have some say very talented people who actually are willing to join, but they want to do things both at SpaceX and Tesla.
1:05:12Elon MuskSo for example, we've got one of the best advanced materials teams in the world. It might be the best, but it's certainly one of the best. And a lot of people on that team were willing to join, but only if they could work on both rockets and cars.
1:05:32Elon MuskAnd so it's like, great, let's do that. And so we can sort of share some of the ideas between rockets and cars, which are obviously not competitive. They're not different competitive segments.
1:05:45Elon MuskSo you know, if you're like, if somebody's a really incredible technologist, innovator, engineer, they want to work on interesting things. So the more interesting, you know, like, sure, money's, you know, they could get money from, you know, anyone would hire them for a lot of money.
1:06:04Elon MuskSo then it's, it's not a money thing. It's really just how interesting are the projects? And so there are just a few cases where we can recruit some of the smartest, you know, engineers, scientists, technologists in the world.
1:06:22Elon MuskBut they want to work on both rockets and cars. And there's a few cases like that.
1:06:27Peter Campbell (FT)Thank you. What do you. I know we've, I know we've run over time, but is one more. I'm going to try and get in and then if you need to go, go.
1:06:32Peter Campbell (FT)But if you're happy to keep talking, we'll keep you. What is the, what do you think is the next big innovation in personal transportation?
1:06:44Elon MuskWell, I think tunnels are underrated. Underappreciated tunnels will never let you down.
1:06:55Peter Campbell (FT)Here's the question on tunnels, right? So if you look at say for instance, Robert Moses in New York built loads of highways. They were supposed to solve congestion and all they did was led to more congestion.
1:07:05Peter Campbell (FT)How do you avoid tunnels doing exactly the same but just being very expensive in the process?
1:07:13Elon MuskI have to say the, this, this notion of induced demand is one of the single dumbest notions I've ever heard in my entire life. If, you know, if adding roads just increases traffic, why don't we delete them and decrease traffic?
1:07:30Elon MuskAnd I think you'd have an uproar if you did that. The real problem is that we have not. If you take say congested cities, which really almost all large cities are congested, you have a fundamental dimensional problem.
1:07:44Elon MuskYou have say these tall buildings or multi level buildings where you've got people living in 3D and then you want to take them in and out of those buildings on a 2D road network.
1:07:59Elon MuskHow would you possibly expect that to work? Especially if they want to all arrive and depart at roughly the same time. This is just a recipe for traffic, obviously.
1:08:11Elon MuskNow if you go 3D which you go 3D up or you go 3D down, now you have, you're matching the dimensionality of the buildings. The buildings are 3D and if the road network or you could potentially have flying cars is 3D, then you will completely alleviate the traffic problem.
1:08:30Elon MuskSo think of tunnels not as a single layer of tunnels, but as many layers as you want. And whatever layer count is necessary to drop traffic to that. People wouldn't think it would work.
1:08:44Elon MuskAnd we've already, we have a proof of concept list in Las Vegas with the tunnel going from the convention center to the strip and that will soon be connecting all of the hotels and the airport in Las Vegas.
1:08:59Elon MuskAnd people just try it out for themselves. It's working really well already in Vegas. And there was some skepticism among the county and the city as to whether it would be effective.
1:09:12Elon MuskAnd I think the test tunnel just barely succeeded in a vote with the, you know, with the local government in Clark county and Las Vegas. But once they saw the initial test tunnel and wrote in it themselves, we got a unanimous vote in favor of expanding it to the whole city.
1:09:34Elon MuskSo that should tell you something.
1:09:36Peter Campbell (FT)Could you ever potentially go in the other direction three dimensionally and look at VTOLs and potentially flying vehicles?
1:09:47Elon MuskWell, I like the idea of VTOLs but you know, we already have VTOLs in the form of a helicopter. So. But the problem with going 3D in the air is, is that you now have things that make a lot of noise.
1:10:08Elon MuskThat and the wind force that they generate when taking off or landing is very high. I mean if you just say like look at a little drone and say, now imagine if that thing was big, what a record it would make and how much wind force would it generate.
1:10:24Elon MuskAnd now they're going all over the place like a giant beehive of super noisy bees. I don't think people, this is what people want. And most cities, helicopters are actually banned except for emergency purposes because of this reason.
1:10:42Elon MuskSo then there's also the weather dependency. So if it's, if there's, if there are high winds or heavy snow, rain, sleet, now you can't fly. So that now you're shut down and can't go anywhere, then there's.
1:11:01Elon MuskThe probability of something falling on your head is much higher. If there are all these vetols flying all over the city. I mean, I think people's comfort level would be quite reduced should someone have perhaps not properly serviced their, you know, flying car and drops a wheel on your head.
1:11:23Elon MuskI know that, that I think would be discomforting to most people. And also having them fly over your backyard and having strangers stare at you all day is probably also discomforting.
1:11:35Elon MuskSo I think these are all reasons why? I think VTOLs will not succeed.
1:11:40Peter Campbell (FT)Perfect. I deliberately avoided calling them flying cars because most of them don't drive on the road. But. No, you're right. But apart from that, they're great. You told Kara Swisher in 2020 that if Tesla investors knew what you knew, they would panic about the state of the company.
1:11:56Peter Campbell (FT)That was two years ago. So what were you referring to at the time?
1:12:05Elon MuskI'm not sure what I was referring to at the time. 2020.
1:12:13Elon MuskI mean, I think it's not that Tesla investors should, should panic, it's just that the sheer number of problems being sold behind the scenes I think would blow their minds.
1:12:25Elon MuskAnd it's, it what? You know, it's like that analogy of you see that the duck serenely moving along the pond, but the meanwhile the legs are patterning like crazy underneath.
1:12:38Elon MuskThis is really what's happening pretty much all the time. So there are a non stop series of issues that need to be solved with Tesla or with SpaceX really with most companies I suspect, and now we do solve them.
1:12:58Elon MuskBut I think it would be very scary to most people to realize just how many things have to get solved on a real time basis for the company to function.
1:13:06Elon MuskWell, like just, just last night I basically got no sleep. I was up on Sunday night until. Well, I really just didn't get any sleep until, until last night, you know.
1:13:21Peter Campbell (FT)So what is it?
1:13:22Elon MuskJust, I was literally working all night just Sunday through Monday.
1:13:30Peter Campbell (FT)What is paddling under the water at the moment? Is there something going on that makes you worry about the future of Tesla or do you think the company is now completely secure?
1:13:42Elon MuskNo, it's. I think the future of Tesla is extremely strong. So Tesla is, has no debt, it has a lot of cash and you know, there's, there's a sort of a short term hiccup with the COVID restrictions in Shanghai.
1:14:05Elon MuskBut as the best of my knowledge, the future of Tesla is incredibly bright and I think we will throw off a tremendous amount of free cash flow.
1:14:18Peter Campbell (FT)Do you think with your cash and obviously your market cap at the moment, you would ever consider buying another carmaker, whether an established OEM or a new business?
1:14:30Elon MuskWell, I think it's highly unlikely now.
1:14:34Peter Campbell (FT)Great. Final. We've had a couple of questions come in on supercapacitors. Do you think they might be potential, have potential as an alternative energy storage solution to lithium ion batteries?
1:14:46Elon MuskWell, it's interesting. Supercapacitors or ultracapacitors are, oddly enough, I did research in that for a couple years while doing my physics degree at a company in Silicon Valley called Pinnacle Research which at the time at least made the highest energy, highest energy density capacitors in the world.
1:15:11Elon MuskNow they used a ruthenium tantalum alloy which is especially is very rare. So that would not scale to high volume. There simply is not enough ruthenium. But I thought about the problem quite a lot and in fact my primary goal, had I continued as a graduate student and done a PhD at Stanford, would have been to try to figure out how to build ultra high energy density capacitors.
1:15:50Elon MuskAnd the, the sort of theory I had at the time was to use advanced chip making equipment to build solid state capacitors that would be accurate at the molecular level.
1:16:05Elon MuskAnd that this, this a little bit of not new physics but explore, exploring some, some areas of quantum, quantum mechanics because you have to minimize the probability that electrons can sort of tunnel from one, you know, essentially a tunnel across the insulator from the conductor to the insulator.
1:16:30Elon MuskSo things get, get quite complicated and rather weird at the sort of single or when you get to a small number of atoms. But anyway, to cut a long story short, I think capacitors are not needed at all for electrification of the entire auto industry.
1:16:56Peter Campbell (FT)Thank you. We've had a question on money again.
1:16:59Elon MuskI know what I'm talking about.
1:17:03Peter Campbell (FT)I know that, don't worry. Could we've had a question on mining. You've obviously done a number of mining deals trying to secure raw materials. Do you think you could ever go a step further and actually buy a mining company in the future?
1:17:20Elon MuskIt's not out of the question. We will address whatever the limitations are on accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy. It's not that we wish to buy mining companies, but if that's the only way to accelerate the transition, then we will do that.
1:17:43Elon MuskThere are no arbitrary limitations on what's needed to accelerate sustainable energy. We'll just tackle whatever set of things are needed to accelerate sustainable energy. And doing mining and refining or buying mining company provided we think we can do, we can change that mining company's trajectory significantly are possibilities.
1:18:08Elon MuskYeah.
1:18:09Peter Campbell (FT)Do you, this is a slightly personal one. Do you ever think your children could end up working at Tesla? Obviously not the new one, she's only a few months old but the older ones.
1:18:21Elon MuskYeah. Well, my elder total have said that they wish to do their own thing, which I support that none of them have said that they wish to work at Tesla or at SpaceX.
1:18:35Elon MuskThey, they want to do their own thing. And I'm saying I support them doing that I think they want to do something for themselves and, you know, make their own way in the world and that's fine.
1:18:47Elon MuskAnd it's possible at some point in the future that they perhaps they do something of themselves and then, and then decide that they'd like to do something at Tesla, SpaceX and support that too, but.
1:19:00Elon MuskBut currently they want to do their own thing.
1:19:03Peter Campbell (FT)Perfect.
1:19:04Elon MuskIf I were to judge by little X. I know seeing a kid love rockets more than than he does, it's next level he likes. I mean, it's really next level.
1:19:14Elon MuskSo if his love of rockets continues from age to when he's older than he may be interested, he will be interested in working on rockets.
1:19:26JB StraubelPerfect.
1:19:26Peter Campbell (FT)Thank you. Do you have time for. Time for one more question?
1:19:31Elon MuskSure.
1:19:33Peter Campbell (FT)Excellent. Good. You talked earlier about things that are abundant in the world. Iron's abundant. Oxygen's abundant. Hydrogen is also very abundant in the universe.
1:19:46Elon MuskIn the universe, but not on Earth.
1:19:48Peter Campbell (FT)Not on Earth. Have you ever considered, do you think that it has a role to play if we really want to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels?
1:20:01Elon MuskNo.
1:20:02Peter Campbell (FT)There we go.
1:20:03Elon MuskI really can't emphasize this enough. The number of times I've been asked about hydrogen, it might be like well over 100 times, maybe 200 times. It's important to understand that if you want a means of energy storage, hydrogen is a bad choice.
1:20:20Elon MuskIt has extremely low energy density. It's extremely low density. Its volumetric energy density is poor.