Elon Musk: CNBC Interview with David Faber
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:00David FaberAre you going to have full autonomous on the roads of Austin at the end, by the end of June?
0:03Elon MuskYes, you are.
0:05David FaberWhat gives you that confidence?
0:06Elon MuskWe have cars driving 247 with drivers in the cars and we see essentially no interventions. So we want to be very careful with the first introduction of unsupervised full self driving, meaning that there's the car driving around with no one in it.
0:20Elon MuskSo we're going to.
0:21David FaberNo one buying hot drivers.
0:23Elon MuskWell, yes, and sometimes no one in it at all. Just going to pick someone up. The car seems to be incredibly safe. So we have thousands of cars that are being tested, which is creating some strange situations where we just drive.
0:33Elon MuskThere's just a bizarre number of Teslas driving past people's houses. They're like, what's going on?
0:39David FaberComing from the airport, driving at night, alone, looked very lonely.
0:42Elon MuskYeah, it's looking good for the next one.
0:44David FaberYou know, some estimates have been that you're only going to have 10 to 12 of them on the road initially. I mean, it's going to be a very small amount.
0:49David FaberIs that correct?
0:50Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
0:50David FaberHow do you see it ramping up?
0:52Elon MuskWell, we'll have to see how well it does, but you know, I think it's prudent for us to start with a small number, confirm that things going well and then scale it up proportionate to how well we see it's doing.
1:01David FaberRight. And what's going to be a judge of how well it's doing?
1:04Elon MuskAre there any incidents, are there any interventions? But we want to deliberately take it slow and we start with a thousand or ten thousand on day one, but I don't think that would be prudent.
1:13Elon MuskSo we'll start with probably 10 for a week, then increase it to 20, 30, 40, and I think by say it would probably be at a thousand within a few months and then we'll expand to other cities.
1:26Elon MuskSo expand to San Francisco, California, Los Angeles.
1:31David FaberPossibility in the not too distant future. I mean, Texas very different than California when it comes to regulation. They don't really have much here in terms of dealing with autonomous.
1:39David FaberBut it's a different story in California.
1:41Elon MuskCalifornia's already approved. Waymo's been doing autonomous driving.
1:44David FaberI know they have.
1:45Elon MuskRight now the approval process is very haphazard and sort of state by state and sometimes city by city.
1:51David FaberWe were talking to Secretary of Transportation about that very fact a moment ago.
1:54Elon MuskIt's going to be important to have a unified set of natural regulations for self driving cars. Otherwise you're going to get into this weird Situation where if you're driving from Maine to New York, you're going to go through 10 different sets of regulations, cars going to behave differently.
2:07Elon MuskIt's not going to make any sense. So. So one set of regulations that just like there is for highway driving, that's what I think makes sense for the country as a whole.
2:17Elon MuskMy prediction is that probably by the end of next year, we'll have probably hundreds of thousands, if not over a million Teslas doing self driving in the
2:24David FaberUS what percentage of those are going to be? Well, not the cyber cab you're just talking about. On full self driving.
2:30Elon MuskLevel 4, unsupervised full self driving, you do not need to pay attention.
2:34David FaberRight. For me, if I own a Tesla and I have the software, the capability
2:38Elon Muskof doing it, yes.
2:39David FaberRight.
2:39Elon MuskWe'll have a model which is kind of like some combination of Uber and Airbnb. So if you're a Tesla owner, you'll be able to add or subtract your car to the fleet.
2:47Elon MuskJust like an Airbnb, you could rent out your spare bedroom or your house when you're not using it, and the same thing will be available for Tesla owners. So it's a way for Tesla owners to own revenue.
2:57Elon MuskInstead of having your car sit in the parking lot, your car could be earning money.
3:00David FaberWe talked, you and I talked about that a couple of years ago. Somewhat ambitious target. Why do you have the confidence now that in a year there'll be a million available?
3:08Elon MuskWell, in the end of 18 months, 1 86. Okay. Yeah. Once you have a proof point, once you have it working, then scaling up is just a matter of time.
3:15Elon MuskBut once it's working well in Austin, then we'll make sure it works well in other cities. I mean, there are obviously some unique cases like downtown New York, but that's a highly unusual situation.
3:25Elon MuskMost cities in America are like Austin.
3:27David FaberAlthough you can go on full self driving right now in New York, I mean, you can obviously have to sit there behind the wheel, but. And it'll do it.
3:34Elon MuskOh yeah.
3:35David FaberIt'll navigate the traffic. I've seen it.
3:37Elon MuskYes. Even a Tesla that you buy right now and the self driving just cost $9 a month, will give you autonomous driving anywhere in the country. Right now the question is, when is it unsupervised?
3:48David FaberWhere you're sitting in the back, so to speak?
3:50Elon MuskYes. Where you're like asleep. And the car, you wake up at your destination. In order for that to be the case, we want the autonomous car to be much safer than a car driven By a person.
3:57David FaberRight. But, you know, I'll come to Waymo because even though they only have about 700 cars, they obviously are on the market. They're in Beverly Hills, all over the
4:05Elon Muskplace of a concept.
4:07David FaberThey've got 28 cameras. They've got LIDAR and radar. You've had a different approach, the eight to nine cameras and the neural network. Why do you feel that that is going to be the equivalent in terms of safety profile?
4:17Elon MuskOh, I think it'll be better.
4:18David FaberWhy?
4:18Elon MuskBecause the way that the road system is designed is for intelligence, biological neural net and eyes. That's how the whole road system is designed. So what will actually work best for the road system is artificial intelligence, digital neural nets and cameras.
4:32Elon MuskAnd we'll also have the microphones near emergency vehicles, that kind of thing, right? Yeah.
4:36David FaberYou need to hear a fire engine or a police car. Yes, exactly right.
4:39Elon MuskBut that's how the whole road system is designed. It's not designed for shooting lasers out of your eyes. And what we found is that when you have multiple sensors, they tend to get confused.
4:47Elon MuskSo do you believe the camera or do you believe lidar? They get confused. That's what can lead to accidents. So we used to have, for example, radar in the car, but we found that the radar and the camera would sort of disagree and then you don't know which one to believe.
4:57David FaberSo it wasn't a bad expense. Are you seeing the data?
4:59Elon MuskRight. In fact, we turned off the radars in the cars.
5:01David FaberYou turned off the radar. If I were to say to you, all right, let's go. Do you think that you're there in terms of the safety profile you're seeing right now?
5:08Elon MuskYeah. We could take a ride today if you want. Sure.
5:10David FaberYeah. I'm happy to take a ride with you anytime you want, wherever you want. Logistics capability to operate sort of a ride hailing fleet at scale. Because you mentioned obviously, what's called the end of 26.
5:21David FaberAre you going to have an app? Are you there? Do you have that ability?
5:24Elon MuskI think we could figure out an
5:25David Faberapparently tells me you're not worried about it.
5:27Elon MuskWhich has already has an app.
5:28David FaberYeah, I know. X. I can probably do it for you in like an hour.
5:32Elon MuskApps just fine.
5:33David FaberDo you ever consider licensing the technology?
5:35Elon MuskYes, yes. I mean, there are a number of major automakers that have talked to us about licensing self driving and are very much open to that. I think the more we demonstrate the capability of self driving, the more that they will want to license it.
5:47Elon MuskAnd we're happy to help you know,
5:49David Faberback to the safety profile, because it's going to obviously be something key focus. I saw this over the weekend. They did a test between Waymo and Tesla.
5:57Elon MuskIt's not a real publication.
5:59David FaberRegardless of whether we want to have a debate about their journalistic integrity, the test itself, let me just share with you and get your reaction, which was the Waymo, ultimately they said proved better in part only because it avoided with its Geo fencing one very difficult intersection that the Tesla chose to go through.
6:16David FaberIt stopped at a red light, but then it went through the red light. What's your reaction?
6:20Elon MuskLook, I'm not going to comment on some Business Insider article, but is that
6:24David Fabera concern at all? Because in a way there's no geofencing. So it's like happy to go on up highways in a way that perhaps a Waymo is not. I guess my question is, is that a concern at all for you in terms of it encountering things that are still sort of a crucial test and perhaps it fails?
6:38Elon MuskNo. First of all, that actually should have been a test of supervised self driving and not unsupervised self driving. So the assumption there is that you have a person who is going to take over.
6:48David FaberRight.
6:48Elon MuskSo their test made no sense.
6:50David FaberOkay.
6:50Elon MuskBut when we deploy the cars in Austin, we are actually going to deploy not to the entire Austin region, but only the parts of Austin that we can see considered to be the safest.
6:59Elon MuskSo we will geofence it? Yeah, of course, yeah. It's not going to take intersections unless we are highly confident it'll just take a route around that intersection.
7:07David FaberBut there won't be a safety driver in the car, correct? Right, the car. It won't. There's not going to be somebody sitting there. But you did have ads for vehicle operator autopilots.
7:15David FaberWhat was that about then? Are there going to be people who are remotely sort of monitoring the performance of the fleet?
7:20Elon MuskYeah.
7:21David FaberAnd what will they do?
7:22Elon MuskThat out script? We're going to be extremely paranoid about the deployment, as we should be. Foolish not to be. We'll be watching what the cars are doing very carefully.
7:31Elon MuskAs confidence grows, you know, less that will be needed.
7:34David FaberYou know, again, you spoke about it and we spoke about it a couple of years ago and obviously your investor base, many of whom are watching right now, are interested in the revenue and profit ability of this ride.
7:46David FaberHailing autopilot and autonomous driving opportunity. Ewad, I believe at this point in China is now offering levels of autonomy for free. I mean, are you confident you're going to be in A position to continue to get a premium for that particular level?
8:03Elon MuskWell, interestingly, in China, we're not allowed to train on videos in China. So when we released full self driving was actually just trained on the rest of the world, but not in China.
8:12Elon MuskAnd the tests by local Chinese publications, I think concluded that even without training on local Chinese roads, the Tesla self driving was the best. It was the best, yes.
8:24David FaberBut again, I mean, is the technology
8:26Elon Musksome pretty wild videos where people like doing self driving, which we don't recommend, obviously, on like narrow mountain roads, including one where it's. There's a sharp precipice on either side and no barriers.
8:37David FaberAre you regulated Tap? Where are you in China right now in terms of your ability to offer that product, though, understood, unsupervised.
8:44Elon MuskWe have supervised full self driving where there's a person in the car has approval in China, but whenever we release a new version, we have to get an incremental approval.
8:54Elon MuskAnd at times we do have to battle other car companies in China who
8:58David Faberare trying to stop us from incredibly competitive market.
9:00Elon MuskChina is the most competitive market, extent
9:02David Faberbyd, which is neck and neck with you, I think, in the EV race, I think it's fair to say, worldwide. Correct?
9:08Elon MuskI don't really follow that.
9:09David FaberWell, they're willing, again, my question is they're willing to seemingly offer different levels of autonomy for. I don't want to call it free,
9:15Elon Muskbut I don't really think about competitors. I just think about making the product as perfect as possible.
9:20David FaberYou don't think about competitors at all?
9:22Elon MuskI just think about breaking. What we want to achieve is the platonic ideal of the perfect product. And as long as you focus on that, you will have a compelling product, obviously.
9:32David FaberAll right, well, there's a potentially compelling product right behind you, which is a Robotaxi. So when are we, you know, is in five years. Are they going to be all over the place?
9:39Elon MuskYes, they will.
9:40David FaberYou're confident?
9:41Elon MuskYeah.
9:42David FaberTalking about Tesla, obviously, you know, takes me to a certain extent to what some would say is the brand damage done by your government service. I don't know if you would agree with that.
9:51David FaberThere have been some pros and cons. You know, we sat here two years ago upstairs, and you famously said when I asked you about this very subject, I don't care.
10:00David FaberI'm going to say what I want to say and so be it. Do you regret that?
10:05Elon MuskNo.
10:05David FaberWhy not?
10:05Elon MuskI believe that we want to live in a free society where people are allowed to say what they want to say within reasonable Bounds like, you know, you can't advocate for the murder of somebody, but free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.
10:19Elon MuskThat's why it's the First Amendment.
10:20David FaberWithout a doubt. But I guess my question is more about your work at Doge, for example. Was that worth it? You know, to the extent you are now, Elon Musk, you are a somewhat divisive figure two years ago, but now you really are.
10:32David FaberI mean, there are people who love you, but there are a lot of people who dislike you, some of whom were your customers. And I wonder, was it worth the undertaking at Doge and everything else that you've done and how outspoken you've been in terms of the things you believe in to antagonize so many potential buyers and or users of things like a robot?
10:49Elon MuskUnfortunately, what I've learned is that legacy media propaganda is very effective at making people believe things that aren't true.
10:56David FaberAn example of that, that I'm a Nazi.
10:58Elon MuskAnd how many legacy media publications, talk shows, whatever, try to claim that I was a Nazi because of some random hand gesture at a rally where all I said was that my heart goes out to you, and I was talking about space travel, and yet the legacy media promoted that as though that was a deliberate Nazi gesture, when in fact, every politician, any public speaker who's spoken for any length of time has made the exact same gesture.
11:21Elon MuskAnd yet there's still people out there. And I've never had a single person.
11:24David FaberYou know what, Elon? I was.
11:25Elon MuskYou asked for an example, talk to
11:26David Faberyou about it, because, in fact, I number of people who are close to you, and I called them afterwards, and all of them, to a person, were like, no way.
11:33David FaberNo way.
11:33Elon MuskOf course not.
11:34David FaberBut that isn't necessarily the perception. The work you've done for Doge has also come obviously into the spotlight in a great deal. And, you know, people are upset about USAID being put into the wood chipper.
11:44David FaberPeople are upset about AmeriCorp disappeared hearing. People are upset about, and this isn't even on your side, the NIH and so many other areas that they feel rightly or wrongly are being cut as a result of your efforts.
11:55David FaberAnd I just, I guess, I wonder, as you start to transition now back to Tesla in a more significant way,
12:00Elon Muskany program in USAID that had any semblance of merit was retained and folded into the State Department. So. And if there's some exception to that, we're all ears and we'd love to look at it.
12:11Elon MuskWe just want to see the evidence that the program was actually doing good and not just funding draft in D.C. and warlords in some countries. Over and over again we saw sympathetic sounding programs.
12:24David FaberRight.
12:24Elon MuskBut when we actually said, well, please show us, show us pictures of the recipients of the aid, we just let us get into contact with them. No pictures were forthcoming.
12:35Elon MuskThey didn't give us any contact information. And we're like, look, we're not going to send money to VC grafters and warlords. That's not a good use of money. So that's all we're going to do.
12:44Elon MuskNow, invariably, when you stop waste and fraud, it's not like the fraudsters admit their guilt. They don't say like, oh, isn't it so great that the money we were getting, fortunately has been stopped?
12:55Elon MuskThey will obviously come up with a sympathetic sounding claim. That claim has no merits.
13:00David FaberI guess what I would come back to because I talk about economics all day long is, you know, we, to your point, you've been making, we have a deficit that's running at about 6.7% of GDP.
13:10Elon MuskRight.
13:10David FaberWe have interest costs that are going to be above a trillion. It's not going down next year. You entered this thinking you could cut as much as $1 trillion.
13:17David FaberYou're nowhere near that. It's not really making the dent I think you may have thought you might have been able to achieve in terms of a true problem. Would you agree?
13:25Elon MuskWell, first of all, it would obviously be ridiculous to assume that we'd achieve that on day one. So it's only been but, what, four months?
13:32David FaberYeah.
13:33Elon MuskAnd we've done, by our calculations, improved the deficit by $160 billion.
13:38David FaberRight. That's up, you know, that's your number that's out there. A lot of people take issue with it and say, well, you know, taxpayers expenses such as paid leave, that's 135 billion.
13:47David FaberThat's got to come back. IRS collection may go down as a result of cuts there we have some ask Rock it said between 5 and 32 billion is what you've actually said.
13:55Elon MuskYou need to ask the right question to ask is what is the best for the actions of the doge.
13:59David FaberRight.
14:00Elon MuskWhat would the incremental expenditures be in FY26?
14:03David FaberYep.
14:04Elon MuskBecause, for example, offered earlier, we offered severance and early retirement to a lot of government employees. Many of them took us up on that. That severance went all the way through to September.
14:15Elon MuskYeah. So there's not going to be any savings until October. Right. Because the severance goes through September. So the delta really is what is the spending difference, FY25 versus FY26 as a function of Doge's actions.
14:30Elon MuskThat's how we calculate the number, and we'll see if that turns out to be true or not.
14:33David FaberI mean, by changing the retirement age or really going after some other parts of the budget.
14:38Elon MuskWe've tried to go after every part of the budget. Some parts are boring than others about efficiency.
14:43David FaberI mean, that would take an act of Congress, obviously, to really make change, first of all.
14:47Elon MuskSo I think, in our opinion, we've created $160 billion Delta FY25 to FY26. Very significant. That's 16% of the way towards a trillion in five months. And in order to make progress, we need the consent, obviously, of not just the executive branch, but also the legislative branch and the judicial branch.
15:06Elon MuskSo if we, you know, and we are advisors, we are not kings here.
15:11David FaberI get it.
15:12Elon MuskSo why are you attacking this, given that we've made so much progress?
15:17David FaberMean the wheat. Not me. I'm not attacking. I'm just asking questions. In fact, I want to ask a lot more about Tesla. I do want to talk about Tesla.
15:23David FaberI mean, I was talking about brand damage and what you're seeing in the market. You did an interview earlier this morning where you seem to indicate you're starting to see a rebound.
15:30Elon MuskYes.
15:31David FaberNew automotive revenue was down 20% last quarter. I think 50,000 fewer units were sold in the Q1 versus Q1 a year ago. What is giving you confidence in the automotive business?
15:42David FaberOr is it all about robotaxis, as you've been saying? And people can't quite see them behind me, the robots as well, really, the
15:49Elon Muskonly things that matter in the long term are autonomy and optimus. Those overwhelmingly dominate the future of financial success of the company. As for Q1, we had a global factory changeover for the Model Y.
16:01Elon MuskSo there's a new version of the Model Y that came out which required a factory shutdown across the world. Model Y is the number one selling car of any kind of.
16:11David FaberI watched your presentation during your last. Right here.
16:14Elon MuskI think it's the one selling car in the world. So, you know, we can't. We can't make cars if the factories are retooling. So the right time to retool is the first quarter, since generally that's when the least demand occurs.
16:27Elon MuskBut we've seen a major rebound in demand at this point, I feel.
16:30David FaberMajor rebound. And I really believe you have seen.
16:33Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. I mean, look, for most people, right, when you buy a product how much do you care about the political views of the CEO or do you even know what they are?
16:40David FaberYour goal, you've also said, is to produce a million robots. I think by 2030, that's what I had you on the record as saying.
16:47Elon MuskI think that's a reasonable target.
16:48David FaberAnd then start towards sustainable abundance, which you can get into. But you know, I wonder, we've been talking about autonomous and how long it takes to train the automobile to be able to exceed human capabilities.
16:58David FaberBut what about these robots? To the extent that how much training are they going to need to actually deploy, be able to do various different types of tasks? Is that long time.
17:07David FaberIt's.
17:08Elon MuskIt's going to take a lot of compute resources and it'll take time. I think there's certain threshold breakthroughs that we think we can achieve where if, if optimus can.
17:19Elon MuskCan watch videos, you know, YouTube videos or how to videos or whatever. And based on that video, just like a human can learn how to do that thing, then you really have test accessibility.
17:32Elon MuskThat is dramatic because then it can learn anything very quickly. So I think we'll get there. We're not there yet.
17:39David FaberRelying on a significant uptick in terms of learning and training.
17:43Elon MuskYeah, no, that's why I'm calling it a very significant threshold would be understood the ability to learn from watching a video. Just so.
17:49David FaberRight. But at the point opposed to watching a human. Right. Which is. Or having wellness sort of trainer.
17:54Elon MuskRight now, I mean right now we're training optimists to do like primitive tasks where a human in a kind of a. What's called a mocap suit and sort of cameras on the head is moving in the way that the robot would move to say pick up an object or open a door.
18:10Elon MuskThe basic tasks, throwable dance. And I think that's needed to sort of bootstrap the intelligence so you can have the basic functions. Then where I think it gets very interesting and very much like humans is that you want the robot to self play.
18:25Elon MuskSo you say, how does a child learn? Well, a child has toys. A child plays with the toys, plays with the blocks. You know, at some point figures how to put the triangle in the triangle hole and the circle in the circle hole by doing it over and over again.
18:37Elon MuskAnd the self play. Once you have a lot of robots, you can do this self play which is that you just put the robot in a room with toys and have the robot play with toys.
18:47David FaberAnd it will learn.
18:48Elon MuskYeah. And you have a reward function. Say like, okay, the goal of the robot is to put, you know that plastic child, you put the circle in the circle, hole, the square, square, all train with hole and keep doing it until it works.
18:59Elon MuskAnd the reward function is succeeding.
19:01David FaberAnd there are no advances needed to accomplish that. No advances in AI or compute and things of that nature that can happen.
19:07Elon MuskThere are some advances needed, but I don't think these are insurmountable. I think we can solve these things in the next few years.
19:13David FaberOkay, so at that time, when millions of these things are coming off a line like we just saw with cars, they're going to be fully autonomous. They're going to come off and, I mean the way you've described it, come at my house and I'm going to be able to say, all right, do the dishes now.
19:26David FaberI need you to walk the dog.
19:27Elon MuskAbsolutely.
19:27David FaberHold the baby.
19:28Elon MuskIn fact, you really want him. Need to. It'll figure out what you probably want and do what you probably want without you having to ask.
19:35David FaberHow many GPUs are you going to need for that?
19:37Elon MuskWell, Quite a few GPUs. We do have our own program called Dojo for Training, which I think will be helpful.
19:43David FaberThat's contributing about 5% towards self driving, right?
19:46Elon MuskYeah.
19:46David FaberIs that the one in New York? In New York state, yeah.
19:48Elon MuskYeah. Yes, in Europe. So we expect to still buy a lot of GPUs from Nvidia, some from AMD and maybe from others. And as long as Nvidia is better than what we make, we'll keep buying from Nvidia.
20:01David FaberIs that the case right now? It is, yeah. I mean, you're obviously buying for xi, the Memphis big time, right?
20:07Elon MuskYeah. XI is building the most powerful. I think we have the most powerful training cluster in the world right now, which is over 200,000 GPUs. Training coherently.
20:17David FaberYou're at 200,000 already now there in Memphis. That facility. That.
20:21Elon MuskOkay. Yes.
20:22David FaberWhere are you going?
20:23Elon MuskAnd the will be at the million GPU level in the location just near Memphis.
20:30David FaberA million GPUs for a new location or 800,000 additional GPU.
20:35Elon MuskA million of the next generation GPUs. So the Blackwell well. Yeah.
20:39David FaberWait, are you building that now?
20:40Elon MuskYeah. How are you powering. It's a gigawatt class system. Yeah. You do naturally, but it is a hard problem.
20:46David FaberWhich is the hard problem?
20:48Elon MuskGetting a gigawatt online.
20:50David FaberYeah.
20:50Elon MuskAnd actually having the gigawatts of power be reliable because you get the power fluctuations in the grid and that whatnot. So we're using. Actually I just posted something online Today, which is a whole bunch of Tesla megapacks, batteries that are important for power conditioning the grid so that GPUs do not like power fluctuations.
21:10Elon MuskThey're like, they like a power steady. So and then if there are sometimes there's slight brownouts or if there's a blackout, you want to be able to carry through that like an uninterruptible power supply.
21:22Elon MuskSo we've got a lot of megapacks
21:23David Faberthere to support that.
21:24Elon MuskIt'll be the first gigawatt class training cluster in the world and the most powerful training.
21:28David FaberWhen that's going to be done?
21:30Elon MuskHopefully in about six months, maybe nine months.
21:33David FaberAnd that's largely powering Groq.
21:35Elon MuskYes. Yeah, it's just power and gr.
21:37David FaberRight. Which continues to advance. I mean I use it frequently. Yeah, I saw you using that on the joke was it with Rogan, when you're using that mode. What is that mode where I'm all sassy and curses all the.
21:48Elon MuskWell, I mean if you want to have fun at parties, Grok unhinged mode is pretty funny. Yeah, it's next level.
21:54David FaberIs power going to be the gating issue for our ability to continue to advance? And I. Yeah, I think we're.
21:59Elon MuskI mean a few years ago I made a very obvious prediction which is that the limitation on AI will be chips and it's full chips kind of chips today.
22:09Elon MuskThen it will be electrical equipment for the. Because you need to take power at that might be at 300,000 volts, all the way down to 400 volts for the, for the computer.
22:19Elon MuskSo these step down transformers and a lot of them and a lot of, you know, cabling and wiring and fuses and you know, it's a. It's a lot of transformers essentially.
22:30Elon MuskAnd the electrical transformer industry is not used to big changes in demand.
22:34David FaberNo, there's a shortage of transformers.
22:36Elon MuskLiterally a shortage of transformers. And then funnily enough, the AI algorithm is called a Transformer. And then our Optimus robot is named after Optimus Prime. That's a Transformer robot.
22:48Elon MuskSo we have transformers for Transformers.
22:50David FaberRight? Right. But it's the one Transformer is the one in shortage that the others need.
22:55Elon MuskAnd then as we solve the transport shortage, there will be the fundamental electricity generation shortage.
23:00David FaberAnd are we there yet or are we going to be there soon?
23:03Elon MuskGetting there soon. My guess is people start hitting challenges with power generation maybe by middle of next year, end of next year.
23:10David FaberEven with deregulation, an effort being made to perhaps movements a lot more quickly.
23:15Elon MuskLike how many Power plants are getting built. And how fast can you build a power plant?
23:18David FaberRight. China seems to be building them pretty quickly.
23:21Elon MuskChina has so many power plants that have been built and are being built. I don't think people quite realize this. I posted on my account just the graph of US power generation versus China power generation.
23:31Elon MuskThe China power generation is like a rocket going orbit and the US power generation is flat.
23:35David FaberRight.
23:36Elon MuskSo I think by the end of this year, China will have about two and a half times the power output of the United States and it's headed towards maybe three or four times the power of the United States.
23:46David FaberYou know, it's funny when you think about China. I mean, EVs, autonomous, we talked about batteries, solar power generation, by the way, even biotechnology recently. I don't know if you saw Pfizer's licensing cancer drugs.
23:57David FaberAre they ahead of us in certain areas that are important?
24:00Elon MuskThe United States still has an advantage in breakthrough innovation. But and I think it's somewhat of a cultural thing, which is that to have breakthrough innovation you have to question authority.
24:13Elon MuskThat fundamentally your breakthrough. You're questioning the conventional wisdom when you do a breakthrough innovation.
24:19David FaberRight.
24:20Elon MuskIn China that are generally like to question the authority or that's not as encouraged as it is in the us
24:26David Faberso you seem to be good at finding something and then making it better.
24:30Elon MuskYeah. I do want to emphasize that the sheer number of smart, talented people in China who work very hard is amazing. The amount of talents. I mean, I'm an admirer of China's capabilities.
24:41Elon MuskI think most people outside of China do not understand the power of China. It really is something special.
24:47David FaberYeah. You know, in the time we have left, I would like to sort of keep the focus on X. First of all, you know, you spoke earlier about wanting more control at Tesla.
24:57David FaberWould you ever consider merging Xi into Tesla would be a way. Obviously they could issue shares to you and conceivably would increase your overall economics. Is that a possibility?
25:06Elon MuskWell, I guess anything's possible, but it would be difficult to speculate about something, you know, tens of publicly traded stocks.
25:11David FaberI would think to get a majority of the minority vote or what, whatever you might need might be not easy.
25:16Elon MuskYeah, it's not out of the question, but that would have to be something that the Tesla shareholders would want to vote for.
25:22David FaberUnderstood. So. But it's not something you're thinking about doing.
25:25Elon MuskIt's not currently there are no plans to do so.
25:28David FaberRight.
25:28Elon MuskIt's not out of the question, but obviously it would require Tesla shareholder support for that.
25:33David FaberAnother way you could obviously increase your control would be to get that comp plan passed in Delaware or through the Delaware Supreme Court or a new one. You haven't been paid, I believe, since 2018.
25:44Elon MuskYeah.
25:44David FaberWhere are you? Seven years. Where are you on seven years of
25:46Elon Muskzero faith, you know, although, to be
25:48David Faberfair, if it goes through, you're going to have an enormous payday. Finally more money than anybody's ever made.
25:54Elon MuskYeah, I suppose so. But, I mean, let's just say that if any CEO of the Fortune 500 were to agree to a plan like the one that I agreed to, you should buy the stock that company immediately.
26:04David FaberNo, I remembered at the time fair. The targets were so far above where the stock was, and obviously they were met.
26:10Elon MuskYes.
26:10David FaberIs the board working, to your knowledge, on another potential plan, if in fact the one never gets out of Delaware? The Supreme Court rules against the Chancellor's ruling.
26:18Elon MuskI mean, I don't want to speak on behalf of the board, but, you know, I'm sure it's on their mind, but, you know, I can't comment on terms of board deliberations.
26:26David FaberYou said earlier, I mean, you want to stay as CEO. Why not? You know, I've wondered, Eli, given all the heat you've gotten in a lot of ways, why not sort of become like an Ellison Light figure at Tesla?
26:34David FaberObviously you're a lot younger, but still, he's very influential at Oracle, but, you know, he's not CEO and he doesn't get the attention, at least not in title.
26:42Elon MuskI think maybe a better term for. I'm a huge fan of Larry Ellson. It's good. Better line. Owner. Owner, I think would be.
26:49David FaberYeah.
26:49Elon MuskHe's the owner of Oracle.
26:50David FaberYes, he is, and he has a lot of it. Finally, I want to start the CEO,
26:54Elon Muskhe's just the owner.
26:55David FaberOwner. Yeah. It's a big percentage. A lot higher than yours, actually, at Tesla.
26:59Elon MuskYes, Impressive percentage at Oracle.
27:01David FaberFinally. I want to. I mean, so many things we haven't gotten to, but we're trying to keep to your time. Are we ready for the changes that AI is going to bring to this society?
27:10David FaberYou know, I try my job every day to sort of follow them. Obviously, they've been pushed aside to a certain extent by issues of the day. Yeah, it's coming fast.
27:18Elon MuskIt's going very fast. I mean, I feel like we're, you know, we're in the big bang of the intelligence explosion. Like we're in for watching. We have courtside seats to the big bang of intelligence explosion.
27:31Elon MuskOne thing's for sure. It won't be boring now.
27:33David FaberSo if you'd be saying there's a 20% chance of annihilation is often anymore,
27:37Elon MuskI think we should always consider that there's some chance of a bad outcome to try to protect against the bad outcomes. We don't want to be complacent and say that everything's just going to be fine.
27:45Elon MuskThere's no chance of a bad outcome. I sort of think of this maybe in movie terms as like are we in a Star Trek movie or are we in a Gene Roddenberry movie or a James Cameron movie?
27:55Elon MuskWhich movie are we in here? And if you could either have a Roddenberry or a Cameron outcome. I think in this case we want the Roddenberry outcome.
28:02David FaberYeah. And the abundance that may come with it. Going to miss the White House at all or not?
28:07Elon MuskMy rough plan on the White House is to be there for a couple of days every, every, every few weeks and to be helpful where I can be helpful.