Elon Musk at Code Conference 2016
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (5)
Transcript
0:00Walt MossbergElon, let me start by saying we're very glad you're here, safe and sound.
0:04Elon MuskThanks. Unfortunately, I had to start a bit late. I was flying. I flew here with the landing gear down because it was like some kind of landing gear issue.
0:11Walt MossbergLanding gear was stuck.
0:13Elon MuskThere's some kind of warning light. My pilot said that if they were attracted to the landing gear, it may not go back down again. So I thought.
0:21Walt MossbergSo this happens. This even happens to you?
0:24Elon MuskYeah.
0:25Walt MossbergOkay.
0:26Elon MuskLanding gear problems of various kinds.
0:29Kara SwisherSo, anyway, we're happy to wait for you and we're glad you got here safe.
0:33Elon MuskThanks for having me. It's great to see you guys.
0:34Kara SwisherThank you for coming. I really appreciate it. You kept your promise, which was nice. I think you were drunk when you promised me, but that's okay. I'll take it.
0:42Kara SwisherSo, you know, in the couple of years since you've come, you've done some astonishing things in terms of substantive stuff with both your companies. Let's start talking about space and what you've been doing there.
0:55Kara SwisherObviously you've had some success landing the rocket. You've had, you know, you've done a bunch of other things where people thought you weren't going to be successful. Talk a little bit about sort of the progress you think you've made with SpaceX.
1:07Audience MemberSure.
1:08Elon MuskWell, I mean, there's a lot of things where I think I didn't think would be successful. So the, and the most significant thing is being able to land an Orbit class rocket brew stage and bring it both back to Cape Canaveral, land on land, and be able to land on a drone ship out in the ocean.
1:34Elon MuskThere is a bit of an education process that's needed to understand orbital dynamics because a lot of people are confused of like, why the heck are you landing a ship, landing a rocket on a ship in the ocean, that seems pretty inconvenient.
1:49Elon MuskAnd the reason is because that going up and staying up is actually about velocity horizontal to the Earth's surface. So there's a huge difference between space and, or space and orbit.
2:04Elon MuskLike space you could think of as like, say, being the international waters boundary for the Pacific Ocean. Like, if you go, you know, 100 miles offshore, you're technically out of coastal waters.
2:15Elon MuskNow you're in the Pacific, so it's like, technically you're in the Pacific, but, but it's, but orbit is like circumnavigating the globe. It's a really giant difference. And the reason that things go up and stay up is because you're zooming around The Earth so fast that your outward radial acceleration is equal to the inward acceleration of gravity.
2:37Elon MuskAnd so those balance out and you have a net zero, zero gravity. So when you see the space station, the thing that's a little sort of counterintuitive is that the space station is actually zooming around the earth at 17,000 miles an hour.
2:52Walt MossbergEven though it seems like it, it
2:53Elon Muskseems really still, you know, but it's moving really, really fast. To put that into perspective, A bullet from a.45 gun handgun is just below the speed of sound. So the space station is going more than 25 times faster than that.
3:16Elon MuskAnd that's what's needed actually to go up and stay up. And that's why there's the term escape velocity, not escape altitude. There's no such thing as an escape altitude, there's only an escape velocity.
3:26Walt MossbergYou need to be a certain speed to escape the gravity of the Earth.
3:29Elon MuskYeah, you can think of gravity as kind of a funnel in space time. So think of like a coin funnel. Like it really, it's very much like that, but it's obviously sort of a four dimensional coin funnel.
3:42Audience MemberBut
3:45Elon Muskif you spin a marble or a coin on a coin funnel, when it's far out, it sort of spins slowly and then as it gets closer, it spins faster and faster.
3:56Elon MuskAnd if you want, if you were to start at the bottom of the coin funnel and you wanted to, to exit, you'd spin it horizontally and it would spin out.
4:06Elon MuskAnd that's really how you get to orbit. Yeah. So the gravity well is like a
4:13Walt Mossbergfunnel, why you want to land on a ship in the ocean.
4:17Elon MuskBecause in order to get to orbit, all that matters is your horizontal velocity. Your altitude doesn't really matter. In fact, the force of gravity at say the nominal boundary of space, 100 km is almost exactly the same as it is on the surface of the Earth.
4:40Elon MuskIt's a few percent lower than the surface of the Earth. So in order to go up and stay up, the only thing that matters is how fast are you going horizontal to the Earth's surface.
4:52Elon MuskSo you have that outward radial acceleration, or think of it like maybe like tetherball or something like that. It's really that outward acceleration is the thing that matters. And so when the rocket is going to orbit, the only reason it's going up is to get out of the thick part of the atmosphere.
5:06Elon MuskBecause at high velocity the atmosphere is thick as molasses. And so it goes up very briefly. But if you look at a long exposure of the rockets trajectory, you'll See, it goes up, but immediately curves over and starts going horizontal.
5:24Elon MuskAnd so at the point at which the, at the point at which the stages separate those two stages, the primary boost stage, which is the most expensive part of the rocket, the point at which that staging occurs, can be as high as Mach 10.
5:46Elon MuskBut it's so it's going away from the launch site at 10 times the speed of sound. So in order to get back to the launch site, you would have to have enough fuel and oxygen to reverse out that velocity and boost back all the way to the launch site.
6:05Elon MuskAnd you just don't have the physics of it, don't really allow you to have that much. It's not about saving money on fuel or anything, it's just physically impossible.
6:16Elon MuskSo because another sort of thing about if you're in space is that there's nothing to react against. So like, whereas an aircraft can circle very easily because it's reacting against air, in vacuum, there's nothing to react against.
6:34Elon MuskSo the only way to go back the other direction is to apply just as much energy as it took you to go. If you want to go backwards, you have to fly just as much energy as it took you to go forwards.
6:43Elon MuskIn fact, well, twice as much really, because you got to zero it out and then you've got to, you've got to land elsewhere. Yeah. So bottom line is this thing is zinging out to zinging out to be at super at 10 times faster than the bullet.
6:55Walt MossbergIt may well be over the ocean because the ocean covers most of the.
6:58Elon MuskOh, it's actually at the point of separation. It's not that far away. It's maybe 100km away from the launch site, but it is going like hell in the opposite away from the launch site.
7:10Elon MuskSo the only way to really land it is to have it continue on that arc, that ballistic arc, and then land far out to sea on a ship that's pre positioned to a particular latitude and longitude, very precise to within about a meter.
7:30Elon MuskAnd then the rocket will then go from vacuum through rarefied air at hypersonic velocity. So when it's in vacuum it has to, obviously you can't use aerosols. You have to use nitrogen jets to control the attitude and position.
7:50Elon MuskAnd then as it starts to encounter the air, we use grid fins, because grid fins looked sort of like a waffle. They work quite well across a wide regime from both very high velocity hypersonics through supersonic transonic and subsonic.
8:11Elon MuskSo it's hard to have aero surfaces that work well across that entire Regime. And then so once aero forces become high, it uses the. The four grid fins to sort of control its attitude to land itself.
8:27Elon MuskYeah, it's controlling its. It's controlling pitch, yaw and roll with the grid fins and then once. And those grid fins will then position it to where it's fairly close to the ship, and then it will light, in this case, three of the nine engines to arrest the velocity and then drop to one engine for precision right before landing.
8:51Kara SwisherRight, okay, so that was maybe a
8:53Elon Muskbit of a late explanation.
8:55Kara SwisherOkay, what we're going to get to is. That's super fucking hard.
8:59Elon MuskThere's a video.
9:00Kara SwisherSo why, why is that important? Why has that this moment been important for you?
9:08Elon MuskWell, so in order to reuse the boost stage, which is about 70% of the cost of the rocket. So that.
9:15Kara SwisherWhat cost is that? How much is that?
9:19Elon MuskWell, I mean, it's sort of on the order of 30 to 35 million dollars.
9:22Kara SwisherRight, so you want to save that?
9:24Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's like I try to tell my team, it's like, imagine there was a pallet of cash that was plummeting through the atmosphere and it was going to burn up and smash into tiny pieces.
9:36Elon MuskWould you try to save it?
9:37Kara SwisherRight, right, right.
9:38Elon MuskProbably. Yes.
9:39Kara SwisherYes. Okay.
9:40Elon MuskYeah, that sounds like a good idea.
9:41Kara SwisherRight, okay.
9:44Elon MuskSo, yeah, so we want to get it back, and that way we don't have to make another one. And I think it's quite tragic if rockets get smashed into tiny pieces and land.
9:57Walt MossbergSo I can ask you a question. We've been going to space for what, 50 years or something like that. Nobody, until you started doing this, and Jeff Bezos company has done it.
10:10Walt MossbergThe government never sort of saved the rockets. They never saved the pallet of cash. Why not? And the Russians didn't either. I mean, what was the deal there?
10:20Elon MuskYeah, I mean, there was some attempt made to do that with the space shuttle, but there was no return. It's the first time that a rocket boost has returned to launch site from an orbital mission, and certainly the first time that there's been a landing on a ship outside.
10:34Walt MossbergBut the regular rockets that went up that weren't designed like planes never tried to do this.
10:41Elon MuskRight. The plane thing is not a good idea in my view. So the plane. And the reason, I think, is like, intuitively it seems like a plane should work.
10:54Elon MuskBut actually, if you consider that really every mode of transport has a design that is appropriate to its medium. And if you're in space, wings are not very useful because there's no air.
11:11Elon MuskAnd then if you want to go somewhere other than Earth, there's also no runways. So these are important considerations. So that's why when they went to the moon, they used propulsive landing.
11:26Walt MossbergRight. But what I'm saying was when they built the space shuttle, it sort of was like a, looked like a kind
11:31Elon Muskof bull, I think that appealed to Congress. Yeah, yeah.
11:36Kara SwisherCool. Cool.
11:37Elon MuskYeah, like an airplane.
11:39Walt MossbergCan you explain the, you know, Jeff. Jeff Bezos.
11:42Elon MuskGood one.
11:43Walt MossbergJeff Bezos was here last night and I asked him what's the difference in what you're doing and what Elon Musk is doing? And he said, well, I think we have, I think he used the word like minded in the general sense of it.
11:55Walt MossbergAnd then he went on to explain some differences. Do you. And then he, but he talked about, and correct me if I'm misquoting him, but I think he was saying this is all about laying the foundations of being able to do greater things by getting the basic infrastructure of being able to reuse these rockets down.
12:18Walt MossbergRight. Do you, is that correct? Do you have a similar starting point from him in your thinking process?
12:25Elon MuskI think there's certainly some similarities of opinion. I think both Jeff and I believe that it's important for the future to be a space faring civilization and out there ultimately be out there among the stars.
12:35Elon MuskAnd I think that's the exciting, inspiring future that I think certainly people in this room want.
12:43Walt MossbergParticularly after seeing that the asteroids are going to destroy this planet.
12:48Elon MuskI mean, I don't view it as, you know, we want, we. I mean, I think what, when I say, you know, multi planet species, like that's really what we want to be.
12:57Elon MuskIt's not like, you know, still being a single planet species, but moving planets. It's, it's really being a multi planet species and having civilization and life as we know it extend beyond Earth to the rest of the solar system and ultimately to other star systems.
13:13Elon MuskI think that's the thing, that's the future that's exciting and inspiring and I think that's what, you know, I think you need things like that to be glad to wake up in the morning.
13:25Elon MuskLife can't be just about solving problems. There have to be things that are inspiring and exciting that make you glad to be alive.
13:31Kara SwisherSo in the immediate time frame, what is your goal for SpaceX now that you've done this, which is a huge accomplishment, what is the plan for you in the immediate time and then the longer range?
13:44Elon MuskSure. So we plan to refly one of the landed Rocket boosters, hopefully in about two or three months, something like that and then. So that'll be an important milestone.
14:04Elon MuskSo far the stages are looking quite, quite good. Even though they come through quite. It's a really difficult entry reentry situation. But they're looking like they're in good shape and we now have four of them.
14:19Elon MuskSo we want to start re flying them towards the end of summer and then hopefully by the end of this year we'll be launching Falcon Heavy, which will be the most powerful rocket in the world by more than a factor of two.
14:36Elon MuskSo Falcon Heavy is, will be on the order of 5 million pounds of thrust on liftoff, which is about 2/3 the size of a Saturn V. Oh really? Yeah.
14:45Walt MossbergSo that's the rocket that took the astronauts to the moon, right?
14:49Elon MuskExactly. So in fact launching from the same, from the same pad, from very same pad, from the Apollo 11 pad.
14:54Walt MossbergWow, that's amazing. So you're hoping to launch that Falcon Heavy by the end of this year?
15:00Elon MuskYeah, that's, that's our aspiration is that
15:02Walt Mossbergnow that's somewhat of a delay from when you first hoped to launch it. Right?
15:07Elon MuskYeah, but I mean it's not like we had a lot of pressing customers who wanted us to launch it.
15:17Elon MuskIn fact, the first launch will not have any operational satellites. It'll be a demonstration launch and the first operational flights where customers actually want us to launch it are next year.
15:28Elon MuskWhereas there's a lot of customers who want us to launch Falcon 9. So about a quarter of our launch of our flights are for NASA, but three quarters are for commercial satellites, the broadcast and communication satellites or science missions for other countries.
15:47Elon MuskAnd there's quite a backlog and we had an issue with the rocket last year so that put about a six month hold in our schedule. So we're sort of backlogged on our launches and we're trying to get them out as, as quickly as we can and service our customers.
16:06Elon MuskSo the launches will take place every two to four weeks. There's quite a high launch cadence.
16:11Walt MossbergThat's a much faster cadence than NASA had, right?
16:14Elon MuskYeah, I mean it'll be more launches than anything else in the world. So more than Russia, more than Europe, more than, well, more than China by next year certainly.
16:25Kara SwisherAnd largely to deliver customers satellites.
16:29Elon MuskYeah, it's. There's a lot of broadcast and communication satellites that are going to geosynchronous orbit and then there's. We'll also be launching the new Iridium constellation. So that Iridium's got a next Generation constellation of satellites, I think 60 or 70 satellites, quite, you know, decent sized satellites that, that'll be like many orders of magnitude improvement over the current Iridium system.
16:57Elon MuskSo you'll be able to have global broadband. So that'll be a whole bunch of launches and. Yeah. And then, and then next year we'll be flying Dragon version two, which is the one that's capable of taking up to seven astronauts to the space station.
17:16Elon MuskIn fact, Dragon 2 really is. It's a propulsive lander as well. And it'll be the. It's intended to carry astronauts to the space station, but it's also capable of being a general science delivery platform to anywhere in the solar system.
17:34Elon MuskSo.
17:35Walt MossbergSo where are you going with it?
17:37Elon MuskWell, we're going to send one to Mars in 2018.
17:40Kara SwisherNow let's.
17:41Walt Mossberg2018, that's for sure.
17:43Elon MuskYeah, a couple years.
17:44Walt MossbergCouple years.
17:45Kara SwisherNow will you be on that flight?
17:47Elon MuskNo.
17:48Kara SwisherYou have talked about this. You said you don't want it. You want to die on Mars, just not on landing. Right. Is that correct?
17:54Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think if you're going to choose a place to die, then Mars is probably, you know, not a bad choice.
18:01Kara SwisherAll right.
18:03Walt MossbergBut you're not ready.
18:04Elon MuskIt's not some sort of Martian death wish or something, but yeah, I mean, you're going to be born on Earth, die on Mars.
18:11Kara SwisherSo sending this up to Mars 2018. Sending this up to Mars 2018. When will someone like you get there from your plans?
18:20Elon MuskSure. So the 2018 mission would be our dragon version two. And that I wouldn't recommend traveling to Mars in that because, I mean, it has the interior volume of a large suv.
18:35Kara SwisherOkay.
18:37Elon MuskThe trip for Dragon would be on the order of six months. It's a long time to spend in an suv, I think. Can be done. Can be done, but probably not ideal.
18:51Elon MuskAnd it also doesn't have the capability of getting back to Earth.
18:54Kara SwisherRight.
18:57Walt MossbergThat seems more important than the space.
18:59Elon MuskYeah, we can put that in the fine print.
19:03Walt MossbergIt's like the side effects in a
19:05Elon Muskdrug ad, by the way.
19:06Walt MossbergWe cannot get back to Earth.
19:08Kara SwisherYeah, we saw the movie.
19:09Elon MuskWe saw what happened.
19:10Kara SwisherHe got back.
19:11Elon MuskYeah, yeah. So it was good. I actually enjoyed the movie.
19:17Kara SwisherDo you think he could have gotten back like that? Was that plausible?
19:19Elon MuskWell, I thought there was some connection. It was like 80% scientifically correct that did connect a series of improbable events.
19:29Kara SwisherSuch as?
19:31Elon MuskWell, I mean, I don't think you can sort of just take off from Mars on an unguided rocket. Really. And, and then prick your finger on the spacesuit and navigate to a spaceship.
19:47Elon MuskNot impossible, just extremely unlikely.
19:50Walt MossbergSo the standard movie, but if you're Matt Damon maybe, maybe you have some
19:54Elon Muskmad skills for sure.
19:57Kara SwisherSo when will people like yourself get there? And I assume you'll be first in line for that.
20:02Elon MuskYeah. So later this year in September at the iac, which is the big World Space Conference, Industry Space Conference, I'm going to be presenting the architecture for Mars colonization.
20:19Elon MuskSo I think what really matters is being able to transport large numbers of people and ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars. And that's what's necessary in order to create a self sustaining and not really self sustaining, but a growing city on Mars.
20:40Kara SwisherI'm curious, have you been to space yet? No, why? You could just go up, right for
20:45Elon Muska little bit or not I could, I suppose.
20:48Kara SwisherWhy haven't you like walk through something or.
20:50Elon MuskYeah, probably will.
20:52Kara SwisherWill you do a moon test before you go to Mars?
20:57Elon MuskYeah, I mean probably, I don't know, go to orbit in four or five years or something like that. But again, space and orbit are very different things.
21:03Walt MossbergBut on the Mars thing, would you send up two or three, whether it's you or not? I kind of would prefer it if you tried it frankly, but because it would be exciting.
21:17Walt MossbergBut would you send up some people before you do this whole architecture for colonizing Mars? Just a handful of people to kind
21:25Elon Muskof see what I mean. The basic game plan is like we're going to send a mission to Mars with every Mars opportunity from 2018 onwards. So and they occur approximately every 26 months.
21:39Elon MuskSo you know, we're establishing cargo flights to Mars that people can count on for cargo. And it's like I said, the Earth Mars orbital rendezvous is only every 26 months.
21:53Elon MuskSo there's one in 2018, there'll be another one in 2020. And I think if things go according to plan, we should be able to, should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025
22:13Kara Swishersoon.
22:14Walt MossbergIs that a more certain schedule than United Airlines?
22:20Elon MuskWell, I don't know. There's certainly some uncertainties associated with that.
22:27Kara SwisherSo let's, I'm going to show anyway
22:30Elon Muskthat's the game plan. Like approximately 2024 to do the first to launch the first of the Mars on your transport system.
22:39Walt MossbergI want to get back to what you said earlier about a multi.
22:41Elon MuskThis will be a very big rocket, okay?
22:44Walt MossbergVery big. Bigger than the Saturn fire?
22:46Elon MuskYes.
22:47Walt MossbergTwice as big or what?
22:49Elon MuskSeptember.
22:50Walt MossbergI'll tell you not going to say anything till September. Come on.
22:53Elon MuskVery big.
22:54Walt MossbergCome on.
22:55Elon MuskHas to be very big.
22:57Walt MossbergHow big is very big?
22:59Elon MuskSo big.
23:05Walt MossbergDo you think we should abandon the Earth at some.
23:07Elon MuskNo, no, no, I think that's great.
23:09Walt MossbergBut you have said things.
23:12Elon MuskWhy would we abandon earth? It's really nice here.
23:14Walt MossbergYou've said things about we may have to abandon the earth, so it's good to have a plan B. You've said before.
23:20Kara SwisherNo, that was Bezos.
23:21Elon MuskI think that's Bezos. I don't know, but it wasn't me.
23:25Walt MossbergAll right, okay.
23:26Elon MuskWasn't me. Like Shaggy.
23:29Kara SwisherSo let's move to things on this earth. Let's move to hyperloop, Tesla, other things, but let's talk about Tesla first. Where do you feel like the company is at at this point?
23:40Kara SwisherAnd there's been lots of activity in self driving cars. Autonomous. Autonomous. How do you look at how everybody's jumped in? Google, Apple, others and all the car manufacturers.
23:53Elon MuskYeah, I mean there have been so many announcements of like autonomous EV start offs. I'm waiting for my mom to announce one. Okay, it's like, mom, you too?
24:06Elon MuskI mean there's a lot. So yeah, I mean in the US alone there are four, I think maybe five China funded EV startups at the billion dollar plus level, like serious funding and there's a bunch of startups.
24:27Elon MuskAnd then of course the, you know, the cost car industry as a whole seems to be moving in that direction. Volkswagen just I think announced a huge battery factory that they're going to build and I think these are all good.
24:41Elon MuskYou know, it's good for the industry to be moving towards sustainable transport as quickly as possible. We open sourced our patents to try to be helpful in that regard.
24:52Elon MuskAnd yeah, so it's encouraging to see all this activity from a Tesla standpoint. You know, we're just, we want to take the set of actions that are likely to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.
25:08Elon MuskSo scale up production as fast as we can. So we accelerated plans for the Model 3 by two years. So we want to try to get to half a million cars in total in kind of the 2018 time frame, which is an aggressive schedule but I think achievable and then maybe a million cars a year by 2020.
25:34Elon MuskAnd you know, I can see, I think a pretty clear path to get there. Autonomy is obviously extremely important. People are going to want autonomy. It's to going, going to be odd to have a car without autonomy in the future.
25:52Elon MuskBut yeah, so I think that's scaling up.
25:57Kara SwisherHow do you look at all these efforts, not your mother, but.
26:00Elon MuskYeah, my mom's.
26:02Kara SwisherShe's not going to do it. She may do a rocket situation, but how do you look at each of them? Let's go through them. What Google is doing. How do you assess what they're doing when you're looking at it?
26:12Kara SwisherBecause there'll be competitors at some point. These are all eventual competitors.
26:16Elon MuskWell, you know, I think what Google's. I mean, Google's done a great job of showing the potential of autonomous transport, but they're not a car company. So they would potentially license their technology to other car companies.
26:32Elon MuskAnd I think they announced something with Fiat. And so I wouldn't say, you know, Google's a competitor because they're not a car company. We would compete with somebody perhaps that they license technology to, but not to them directly.
26:46Elon MuskRight, Apple, Yeah, that'll be more direct.
26:52Walt MossbergThat'll be more direct, yeah. You can tell that by the hiring pattern and that kind of stuff. So what do you. Okay, so they're going to be more direct.
27:01Walt MossbergHow do you assess it?
27:06Elon MuskI mean, I say, like, you know, I think it's great that they're doing this and, you know, I hope they hope it works out.
27:19Kara SwisherWhat's the time frame for them, do you think?
27:22Elon MuskI don't know. I mean, I think they should have embarked upon this project sooner, actually. That.
27:38Elon MuskBut I don't know. I don't know when. I mean, they don't share with me the details of their production plans, but I don't think it's going to be. I don't think they'll be in volume production sooner than maybe 2020.
27:53Elon MuskThat would be like the soonest.
27:55Walt MossbergAnd is that too late? We say they should have embarked sooner. Is, is that because 2020 would be too late to stop you or beat you or compete with you or what?
28:03Elon MuskIt's just like it's a missed opportunity. It's just that they, it's, it's, it'll
28:10Walt Mossbergbe over by 2020.
28:12Elon MuskIt's just like it's a couple of years. I think they'll, they'll probably make a good car and probably be successful. The car industry is very big, so it's not as though there's, you know, one company to the exclusion of others.
28:27Elon MuskI mean, there's like a dozen car companies in the world of significance, and the most that any company has is approximately 10% market share. So it's not like somebody comes up with a car and they're suddenly like, they kill everyone else.
28:44Elon MuskIt's not that way. And the sheer scale of automotive manufacturing is just. It's hard to appreciate until you see the plants. I mean, they're gigantic. Like the industrial.
28:57Walt MossbergI have seen the plants.
28:58Kara SwisherYeah.
28:58Elon MuskI mean, the sheer size of the industrial infrastructure is staggering.
29:03Walt MossbergNot just the assembly plant, but everything else that goes.
29:05Elon MuskYeah, the supply chain. Exactly. The assembly plant is just a little tip of the iceberg, really. The assembly plant is literally the tip of the iceberg.
29:11Walt MossbergPhenomenal.
29:12Elon MuskThe supply chain is, you know, once you go to tier two, tier three, tier four suppliers, that's probably an order of magnitude more than the final assembly.
29:25Walt MossbergSo you think Google will not be a competitor? Apple probably will be a direct competitor. What about the car companies?
29:33Elon MuskI think they'll all be competitors. Yeah, sure.
29:36Kara SwisherWho do you see out there that has done a nice job so far?
29:39Walt MossbergMercedes or gm?
29:41Elon MuskOf what?
29:43Kara SwisherA competitive car?
29:44Walt MossbergOf the incumbents.
29:46Kara SwisherPotentially competitive car, I guess.
29:50Elon MuskI mean, I don't think anyone's. Any of the car companies thus far have made a really great electric car. I mean, you can tell me if I'm. If you disagree, but I don't think yet that any of them have made a great electric car, presumably will continue to improve on what they've done so far and then at some point they may make a car that's a great car, but they haven't done that yet.
30:18Walt MossbergCan I ask you about batteries for a second?
30:21Elon MuskYeah, sure.
30:22Walt MossbergSo you're building this gigafactory, right? It's built.
30:25Elon MuskWell, it's not completely built.
30:27Walt MossbergOk. But part of it's up and running.
30:29Elon MuskA chunk of it's built.
30:30Walt MossbergYeah, part of it's up and running.
30:31Elon MuskIt's a really gigantic thing. When the gigafactory's done, it'll be the largest footprint building of any kind in the world. Of any kind. Not just factories, it literally of any kind.
30:40Walt MossbergWhat is this? The largest rocket? The largest building? I mean.
30:43Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think it's not scale for scale's sake. It's just like if you say, well, we want to accomplish these goals, then you kind of have to be make a big thing.
30:54Walt MossbergOkay, You've got this big thing. It's this big giant building. It's going to make batteries. The batteries is going to make our lithium.
31:03Elon MuskWe're going to have an opening. Well, let's start taking the opening party since it's been operating for a little while, but we're gonna have a party soon. You guys maybe want to come?
31:10Walt MossbergAll right, we'll come to the back party. But they can't it's worth seeing this. They can't come, right?
31:15Elon MuskThis is crazy. No, this is like an alien dreadnought. It's really nutty.
31:20Kara SwisherBecause I love a battery party. But talk about where it's going.
31:25Walt MossbergAre these lithium ion batteries?
31:26Elon MuskYeah, sure.
31:27Walt MossbergSo they're the same batteries that's in our phone? No, explain, please explain.
31:32Kara SwisherYes.
31:33Elon MuskSo lithograph.
31:34Walt MossbergHave you made a battery breakthrough? Is something I'm interested in.
31:39Elon MuskYeah. I mean, generally the. I mean, there's. There's so much nonsense out there about batteries. Like, about. You can believe about 1% of what you read. You know, maybe lithium ion covers a very broad range of technologies, and you can have an enormous difference in the power density and the energy density and the cycle life between one chemistry and another.
32:05Elon MuskThey can be really enormously different. So what you really actually want to ask is what is the cathode and what is the anode?
32:14Walt MossbergRight.
32:16Elon MuskSo in our case, that's right.
32:17Kara SwisherOkay. Put it in the.
32:21Elon MuskLithium is actually 2% of the cell mass. So it's like the salt and the salad. It's a very small amount of the cell mass and a fairly small amount of the cost.
32:33Elon MuskBut it sounds like it's big because it's called lithium ion. But it really like our battery should be called nickel graphite because it's mostly nickel and graphite.
32:43Walt MossbergOkay.
32:43Elon MuskAnd it's nickel, cobalt, aluminum. But battery other little things. And graphite with a silicon oxide layer.
32:49Walt MossbergBattery efficiency or power that, you know, the power that you can store in a certain mass seems to be move very slowly, at least compared to, you know, we're used to Moore's Law, pushing integrated circuits faster.
33:04Walt MossbergBatteries kind of are always in our consumer devices, always lagging behind in your. You've built this giant thing, the biggest building in the world has ever seen.
33:13Elon MuskIt's not fully built, but yes, it's.
33:15Walt MossbergYou're building a pretty big chunk of
33:16Elon Muskbolts
33:18Walt Mossbergto make batteries. Your whole business depends on batteries in these cars. Have you figured out a way to do some significant increase in the yield of energy from a given amount of space in the battery?
33:35Elon MuskWell, yeah, I mean, the energy density is increasing sort of maybe on the order of like 5ish percent per year. And it doesn't sound like much, but you add that up over a number of years with compound interest, it ends up being quite, quite a significant number.
33:55Elon MuskAnd a lot of people sort of think that, oh, well, we just sort of cobbled together some laptop batteries and somehow made a great car. If it was that easy, then I think we would have quite a few competitors who did the same thing, but it's really quite, quite a lot harder than that.
34:11Elon MuskIt's a cylindrical form factor, but the internals of the battery are quite different from what you'd find in a laptop and will be increasingly different with what's built at the Gigafactory, which is highly optimized for automotive and has improved energy density.
34:31Elon MuskBut mostly it's not the energy density that's the issue, because you can buy, if you buy a Model S today, the range is around 300 miles and that's quite a lot.
34:45Elon MuskSo it's pretty rare that people really need to go more than 300 miles at a time without stopping.
34:51Walt MossbergRight.
34:54Elon MuskSo I don't think we really have a range issue and we could make a 400 mile range car today. That wouldn't be too big of a deal. What really matters is decreasing the cost per unit of energy of the battery pack so you can make the car affordable.
35:11Elon MuskThat's actually the important thing. And there's really two main dimensions along which cost optimization and making something available to the national market can be achieved. One is design iteration, going through multiple versions of something, and then the other is economies of scale.
35:29Elon MuskYou kind of need both of those things in order to make a compelling mass market product. And you look at like cell phones and how many design iterations have we gone through with cell phones?
35:39Elon MuskAnd then look at the scale at which they're made, which is enormous. And that's what enables everyone to have a supercomputer in their pocket.
35:50Kara SwisherSo speaking of that, the sales, when you're talking about the sales you have booked how many orders for.
35:56Elon MuskIt's on the order of 400,000.
35:58Kara Swisher400,000, obviously consumer interest and a promise, a lot of it around you, around the idea of you and Tesla and the excitement. They're not looking.
36:07Elon MuskIt was quite surprising, actually. I mean, because we didn't do any advertising or there was no guerrilla marketing or anything. It was just basically like, yeah, we're going to have this webcast.
36:20Elon MuskThere were only about 1,000 people in the audience and I really caught us by surprise. But I think when you have a product that really resonates with customers, the word of mouth grows like wildfire.
36:34Elon MuskAnd that seems to be one of the.
36:35Kara SwisherYeah, but it's a little bit. I mean, honestly, in some groups, especially men in Silicon Valley, if you show up and read like a label of a peanut jar, they'd be thrilled with the situation.
36:44Kara SwisherSo, I mean, a lot of this does Base around you. Like the idea of you and the excitement around. Exciting entrepreneur. Is that. Is that enough to get it to this massive company you've been hoping to.
36:57Kara SwisherThe idea of this is the Elon Promise or it's the.
37:01Elon MuskWell, I think actually it's not so much. I mean, I sort of. I mean, I'm not sure. I think I deserve less credit than that, actually. The. I mean, what Tesla's done, we have a phenomenal team.
37:17Elon MuskIt's like 15,000 people at the company worked super hard to create compelling products, to create great cars. And we started off with the Roadster and then the Model S.
37:26Elon MuskAnd the Model S was rated by Consumer Reports as the best car ever got. The Model X, which had some teething issues. But I think it's now at the point where it's really starting to.
37:39Elon MuskI think it's really, I think, quite sublime at this point. And so people look at that and say, okay, well, if Tesla's made these cars, then probably the next car they make is going to be the less expensive one.
37:55Elon MuskAlso a great car. Yeah. So it'll be a great car, but it'll be affordable. And it's like, great. Ok, that sounds like something I want.
38:03Kara SwisherSo this car, this next car, the price is.
38:06Elon MuskIt's starting at 35,000.
38:07Kara SwisherOkay. Affordable. Okay. Relatively speaking, when do you get to the really affordable? The way down. Much lower than that.
38:15Elon MuskYeah. I mean, it's important to point out that 35,000, particularly when factoring in the lower cost of electricity versus gasoline, and that the maintenance cost is much less. You don't have to have oil changes.
38:24Elon MuskYou never need to replace your brakes because the car uses regenerative braking. So the brakes last as long as the car does. It's basically you just need to replace the tires, like, that's about all.
38:37Elon MuskSo the operational cost of the car is much lower fundamentally than a gasoline car. And so. And I think the average price for cars, for gasoline cars is around 30, 32, something like that.
38:51Elon MuskYeah. I mean, there are starting prices that are lower, but when people pick options, I believe it's in the. Around 32 or so in the U.S. so we're pretty close to the.
39:01Walt MossbergBut that's your base price, right? I mean, yeah, that is a great price. It may not be the ASP for the car.
39:06Elon MuskNo, but it's going to be a great car, even at 35. So it's like, even if you order nothing, no options at all. It'll be great.
39:12Walt MossbergBut you're at. But you're likely to Have a mix where the average car that you actually sell sells for a little more than that.
39:19Elon MuskYes, probably. It's probably going to be. Yeah, it's probably going to be some higher number. But it's really important to emphasize like 35. If somebody orders the $35,000 car, they'll be very happy.
39:30Elon MuskLike, it's not like you need to order a bunch of options without which the car is, you know, not. Not good.
39:35Walt MossbergThat car will have autonomous for 35.
39:40Elon MuskI have a. I'm going to do another Tesla event maybe at the end of the year, talk more about that.
39:50Walt MossbergWell, so you could start here.
39:55Elon MuskIt will be real big news if I start here.
39:58Walt MossbergWe don't mind that.
40:01Elon MuskLet me just say that we're going to do the obvious thing.
40:05Walt MossbergOkay.
40:06Kara SwisherOkay, got it.
40:08Elon MuskIt's really obvious.
40:12Kara SwisherSo cup holders. Good. Okay.
40:17Audience MemberBrilliant.
40:18Elon MuskThose things are nuanced.
40:20Kara SwisherAbsolutely. Let's talk about two more things. I want to talk about AI because we've been talking about it a lot here, which I want to get it clear what your thoughts are because it's mostly Elon.
40:31Kara SwisherScared of robots. I mean that kind of thing. Or how do you.
40:34Elon MuskI'm scared of robots or artificial intelligence.
40:38Kara SwisherCan you like clarify exactly what the
40:40Walt Mossbergissue you have now and you deserve the background. We've been talking to Jeff Bezos, Sundar Chai. We talked to Mark Fields from Ford about it. Yeah. The Facebook folks.
40:57Walt MossbergThere certainly seems to be in the tech companies a big tremendous new drive or interest to believing they will be all competing for intelligent assistance.
41:11Kara SwisherAnd it's good.
41:11Walt MossbergIt'll make life better, make your life better. Siri is going to suddenly get smart. Microsoft, Swan is going to get smart. Google is going to cream them all.
41:21Kara SwisherLargely a happy version of this is sometimes technology hurts you, but not as much as it helps you. That's really.
41:27Walt MossbergYeah, so that's. There's been a lot of conversation here about that and you've staked out a slightly different position. So can you talk about that?
41:35Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think my sort of full position would require quite a long explanation. I mean, I am concerned about certain directions that AI could take that would be not good for the future.
41:56Elon MuskI think it'd be fair to say that like not all AI futures are benign. Not all.
42:00Walt MossbergOkay.
42:02Elon MuskAnd so if you have something, if we create some digital superintelligence that exceeds us in every way by a lot, it's very important that that be benign. And so actually with.
42:18Elon MuskWith the few others I created OpenAI, which is an AI it's a non profit actually. So there's no, I think the governance structure here is important. So we want to make sure that there was not some fiduciary duty to generate, you know, profit off of the AI technology that's developed.
42:43Elon MuskSo, so we created this 501C3. But, but I think it's quite different from, I mean a lot of sort of 501C3s are, you know, they've, they don't have a high sense of urgency and like, they're not like, you know, they're not really sort of developing technology at a fast pace.
43:11Elon MuskBut OpenAI is. So OpenAI has a very high sense of urgency and the talent. I think that the people that have joined are really, really amazing. And the intent with OpenAI is to democratize AI power.
43:30Elon MuskThere's a quote that I love from Boat Acton. He was the guy that came up with power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is that freedom consists of the distribution of power and despotism in its concentration.
43:44Elon MuskAnd so I think it's important if we have this incredible power of AI that if not be concentrated in the hands of a few and potentially lead to a world that we don't want.
43:53Kara SwisherAnd what world is that? What do you see, foresee that when you sit.
43:57Elon MuskIt's difficult. I mean, it's called the singularity because it's difficult to predict exactly what future that might be. Except I don't know a lot of people who love the idea of living under a despot.
44:11Elon MuskI don't think people generally choose to live in a democracy over a dictatorship.
44:16Kara SwisherAnd the despot would be the computer
44:18Elon Muskor the people controlling the computer.
44:21Walt MossbergAnd do you worry specifically about any of these companies I mentioned who've all seemed to now kind of be pivoting toward this as the battleground in the next 10 years?
44:34Elon MuskI wouldn't name a name, but there is only one.
44:37Walt MossbergThere's only one you're worried about. And they're not preoccupied with making a car that will compete with you. I assume
44:46Elon Muskthere's only one.
44:51Kara SwisherAnd what this is an interesting.
44:53Elon MuskIt's not about competing. This is sort of like what would be the point of competing for mutual destruction? It's like there's no, it's not about competing. It's really just about trying to increase the probability that the future will be good.
45:09Elon MuskThat's all. So the, the goal of OpenAI is really just to take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the positive futures. Like if you can think of the future As a set of probability streams that branch out and then converge, collapse down to a particular event and then branch out again.
45:30Elon MuskAnd there's a certain set of probabilities associated with the future being positive and different type flavors of that. And at OpenAI, we want to try to do whatever we can to guide to increase the probability of the good futures happening.
45:44Elon MuskI think that's, that's really what we're trying to do.
45:46Walt MossbergYou worry that by making this open, some bad actors may use some of what has been developed to do bad stuff with the power.
45:56Elon MuskYeah, I mean, that is certainly the. I mean, a good rebuttal to that. However, I think if AI power is widely distributed, then and there is not, say, one entity that has some super AI that is a million times smarter than anything else, you know, if instead the AI power is broadly distributed and to the degree that we can link AI power to each individual's will.
46:27Elon MuskSo, you know, you would have your AI agent. You knew it. Like everyone would have their sort of AI agent. And then if somebody did try to do something really terrible, well, then at the collective will of others could overcome that bad actor, which you can't do.
46:42Elon MuskIf there's one AI that's a million times better than it's proprietary. Yeah. It either has its own will or more likely, at least in the beginning, is controlled by some small set of people.
46:58Elon MuskSo I think that's really the risk. I mean, there's always been these arguments like, what's the best form of government? Big fan of, I think it was Churchill. Like, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
47:13Walt MossbergRight.
47:15Kara SwisherSo speaking of that, this election, you are. Oh, no, no, no, no. Yes, yes. How does that strike you? What's happening now? You come to this country, you're naturalized.
47:28Elon MuskI think I'm glad that the framers of the Constitution saw fit to ensure that the President was someone who was captain of a large ship with a small rudder.
47:38Kara SwisherOkay.
47:40Elon MuskAnd there's a limit to how much harm any given president.
47:44Kara SwisherAre you sure about that?
47:45Elon MuskOh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
47:47Kara SwisherSo you're not worried about. Are you backing either of the candidates at this point?
47:52Elon MuskTrying to stay out of this situation? Because I don't think that's the finest moment in our democracy.
47:59Walt MossbergWell, given that it's not the finest moment in our democracy, do you think the best thing is to stay out or to get in?
48:06Elon MuskI'm not sure what I do to try to head off the worst. I'm not sure how much influence I could have as one person on the outcome. So,
48:18Elon MuskI mean, if I think I could make a difference, I would probably do something. But like I said, I think I'm just glad that the. Being the US President is like being captain of a large ship with a small rudder.
48:31Elon MuskAnd so there's just a limit to how much good or bad a president can actually do. Obviously if a president could make the economy great and there was like a button they could press, they'd be pressing that button at the speed of light.
48:47Elon MuskSo you know that they. But they can't, they can't just magically make the economy good. No president wants the economy bad ever. But they, you know, like there's just a limit to how much they can do.
49:03Elon MuskAnd there, I guess there is the nuclear thing, which is.
49:09Walt MossbergYeah, the nuclear thing. I guess there is the nuclear thing.
49:13Elon MuskYeah. But I, I don't know, I think you, I think, I think, I don't think we would like just arbitrarily launch nuclear missiles.
49:19Walt MossbergYeah, one would hope President can do that.
49:22Elon MuskI don't think so. I mean, I think that he's.
49:25Walt MossbergNo, he's the commander in chief.
49:26Elon MuskYeah. But I still don't think that means you can just launch nuclear missiles or whatever you want. Yeah, I think Congress would be like quite upset about that.
49:35Walt MossbergThey might not be consulted.
49:37Elon MuskYeah. But I think, I think the military would be like, yeah, we really think Congress should be consulted on it before we launch.
49:43Walt MossbergThat might happen.
49:44Elon MuskPreemptive strike.
49:45Walt MossbergAre you willing. You're basing your faith in that though?
49:48Elon MuskI'm quite confident that the military would not just, you know, randomly agree to launching nuclear missiles at somebody.
49:56Kara SwisherWell, that's calming.
49:58Elon MuskThis is.
50:00Kara SwisherWe're going to put up just very quickly. We'll end on hyperloop. You've been involved with it. Your level of involvement is what at this point? Point just.
50:06Elon MuskYeah, I know it's a bit confusing because I.
50:12Walt MossbergYou talked about it when you were here last time.
50:14Elon MuskYeah, I actually came up with the idea. I came up with an initial idea which turned out to be wrong. It wouldn't work several years ago. But I sort of shot my mouth off and said, I, I have an idea that would work.
50:32Elon MuskAnd it turned out that didn't work. But with a lot of iteration I was able to come up with something that. Where the physics hangs together and then published the paper and just said like, look, anyone who wants to do this is great, be my guest.
50:45Elon MuskBecause I sort of have a plate full running Tesla and SpaceX and so I think it'd be great. I Mean, it'd be great to have any interesting new transport solutions.
50:58Elon MuskAnything that gets people to their destination in a way that's safer, costs less, is more convenient. That'd be great. I mean, and so I think probably the most valuable thing that the Hyperloop paper that I published has done is to spur thinking in terms of new transportation systems.
51:21Elon MuskSo it's not just, oh, let's, you know, have a fast train, okay, that's not even as fast as what Japan did in the 80s. Like, okay, why. I don't see what the point of that is.
51:33Elon MuskYou know, like, we should really be trying to think of some, something that's particularly in California. Like we should be like, saying, hey, what is the best. Let's invent something new that's way better than anything else.
51:47Kara SwisherDo you want to shoot your mouth off about that?
51:51Elon MuskWell, you know, I mean, I'm not an investor in any of the companies that are working on it. And I've tried to be neutral because I'm trying not to favor one company over another, but just to encourage anyone that is interested to say, you know, try to give them moral support, you know, and I hope they succeed.
52:13Elon MuskThe only thing that I am doing on Hyper Bluefront is like, we're holding a student competition. And the student competition is really just aimed towards encouraging students to think about exciting new transport methods.
52:28Elon MuskAnd it's totally cool if they want to do some architecture that's different from what I propose in Hyperloop. And in fact, the winning team at the student competition that we held earlier this year used a different suspension mechanism than what I proposed, which is I propose using essentially taking the air that builds up on the nose from the compressor and flowing that through air skis so that you simultaneously remove the drag from the nose and provide a means of suspending the pod.
53:04Elon MuskAnd that's also something that works well even at super, supersonic velocities. You can go. It's been demonstrated up to Mach 1.1 in terms of, of using air bearings as.
53:14Walt MossbergBut they use something different.
53:16Elon MuskYeah, basically electromagnetic suspension. The reason I didn't suggest sort of any kind of magnetic suspension is that it's very important that the cost of the tube be minimized. So you really want.
53:37Elon MuskBecause the part is cheap, the tube is expensive. So if you want to go say 400 miles and tune two directions, they've got 800 miles of tube. The critical economic optimization parameter is the cost of the tube.
53:52Elon MuskSo you want that tube to be as low cost as possible. And so if you do Anything that requires action on the tube side, it's going to make that tube much more expensive.
54:07Elon MuskSo if you use air bearings, it doesn't change. Like that's real cheap and. Yeah.
54:14Walt MossbergSo you think this is going to happen?
54:19Elon MuskYeah, I think something like that. I think something will happen in the future. You know, I think if the companies that are, that are trying, that are trying to make it happen now, if for whatever reason that doesn't work out, then, you know, I think I'll, you know, I might do something myself in the future.
54:38Elon MuskI don't want to do something, I don't want to sort of front run them. You know, it's like, say, here's this free idea and then meanwhile go and do it myself.
54:46Elon MuskYou know, that wouldn't be nice. So. But if they, if they, if companies don't try it and it doesn't work out, then I think, I think, I think I'll try to just at least do a demonstration system.
55:02Kara SwisherLast question. Do you think tech has gotten more serious? How do you look at the tech landscape? As someone who's well known, you probably qualify as a visionary. What do you imagine we are right now in the tech space?
55:15Kara SwisherAnd then we'll get to questions from the audience.
55:20Elon MuskI think there's a lot of innovation happening in many different areas. The advancements in AI, I think are quite, quite astonishing. The advancements in genetics are amazing.
55:39Elon MuskSo I think that there is a lot of innovation going on. I think that there's probably a few too many talented entrepreneurs in kind of the Internet space and I think their talent actually would be better served in some other industries.
55:57Elon MuskBut I do think, I mean, I don't think we're like facing some sort of low innovation period or anything like that. I think there's a lot of innovation going on.
56:04Kara SwisherThey need to move to other.
56:06Elon MuskI just think that like, if you had some ideal distribution, there probably be fewer. Like there's just a lot of talent focused on the Internet and probably some of that talent.
56:17Audience MemberWould
56:20Elon Muskit be better to have some of that talent in other industries? That's about all. But there's tremendous amount of innovation that's happening. It's something that I think is going to be quite important and I don't know if a company that's working on it seriously is,
56:45Elon MuskIs a neural lace. So going back to the AI situation, this is quite important, quite an important debate. Like the, if you assume any rate of advancement in AI, we will be left behind by a lot and so then we could be in, you know, Benign.
57:12Elon MuskBut even the benign situation, if you have some, you know, if you have ultra intelligent AI, we would be, you know, so, so far below them in intelligence that it would be, would be like, you know, a pet.
57:26Elon MuskLike a pet, Like a cat, Like a cat, Like a house cat. Yeah, it would be like the house cat.
57:29Kara SwisherRight?
57:32Elon MuskAnd yeah, it's not the end of the world sort of pets.
57:37Kara SwisherYou've seen the movie.
57:38Elon MuskIt could be, it could be, could be. But honestly that would be the benign scenario.
57:46Kara SwisherSo house cat is ok.
57:49Elon MuskI mean, I don't love the idea of being a house cat,
57:53Walt Mossbergbut what's the solution?
57:55Elon MuskYeah, so I think the,
58:02Elon MuskI think it's to essentially, I think one of the solutions, the solution that seems maybe the best one is to have an AI layer. If you think of like you've got your limbic system, your cortex and then a digital layer, sort of a third layer above the cortex that could work, work well and symbiotically with, with you.
58:28Elon MuskI mean, just as your cortex works symbiotically with your limbic system, your sort of a third digital layer could work symbolically with the rest.
58:36Walt MossbergThis is something that's surgically inserted or bred into the species or what.
58:44Elon MuskThe fundamental limitation is input output. So we already have, we're already a cyborg. It's just that, I mean, you have a digital version of yourself or partial version of yourself online in the form of your emails and your social media and all the things that you do.
59:05Elon MuskAnd you have basically superpowers with your computer and your phone and the applications that are there. You have more power than the President of the United States had 20 years ago.
59:15Elon MuskYou can answer any question. You can video conference with anyone, anywhere. You can send a message to millions of people instantly just do incredible things. But the constraint is input out output.
59:36Elon MuskSo we're I O bound, particularly output bound. I mean like the, your output level is so low, it's like, particularly on a phone, like your two thumbs are so sort of tapping away.
59:47Elon MuskThis is ridiculously slow. Our input is much better because we have a high bandwidth visual interface to the brain. Like our eyes take in a lot of, lot of data.
1:00:00Elon MuskSo there's many orders of magnitude difference between input and output. So mostly effectively merging in a symbiotic way with digital intelligence revolves around eliminating the IO constraint. So it's some sort of direct cortical interface.
1:00:27Walt MossbergAnd you called it a neural lace.
1:00:29Elon MuskNeural lace, yeah.
1:00:34Kara SwisherIt's totally not Google Glass, right?
1:00:37Elon MuskNo, I'm talking about something which.
1:00:38Kara SwisherWould you wear it?
1:00:39Elon MuskNo. I mean, it would be.
1:00:45Elon MuskI mean. I mean, there are a few ways to approach this, but some sort of interface directly with your cortical neurons, particularly.
1:00:52Walt MossbergBut doesn't that imply surgical insertion?
1:00:54Elon MuskNot necessarily. You could go through the veins and arteries because that provides a complete roadway to all of your neurons. Your neurons are very heavy users of energy, so they need high blood flow.
1:01:06Elon MuskSo you automatically, with your veins and arteries, have a road network to your neurons.
1:01:11Walt MossbergStill some kind of surgery, right?
1:01:14Elon MuskYes, but you could insert something basically into the jugular and have. It gets macabre.
1:01:23Walt MossbergBut it sounds really easy and
1:01:27Elon Muskit doesn't involve chopping your skull off or anything like that.
1:01:32Kara SwisherAnd plus, you're not a house cat anymore.
1:01:34Elon MuskNot a house cat. So I mean, essentially, if we can figure out how to establish a high bandwidth neural interface with ourselves, with your digital self effectively, then. Then you're no longer a house cat.
1:01:54Kara SwisherAll right, on that note.
1:01:55Walt MossbergNo, on that note, just one closing thing.
1:01:59Elon MuskI mean, I think it's probably the best outcome, I think.
1:02:03Walt MossbergAre you interested in exploring this possibility that you have just laid.
1:02:09Elon MuskSomebody's got to do it. I'm not saying that I will, but I'm. Somebody's got to do it. I mean, somebody should do it. And I mean, if somebody doesn't do it, then I think I should probably do it.
1:02:23Walt MossbergAnd the goal of this is to prevent there being an external AI, particularly one controlled by a small group of people that could. Could be so much more powerful and intelligent than we are, that the house.
1:02:36Elon MuskIt would be godlike in the shape.
1:02:39Walt MossbergWell, this has been really cheerful. Thank you.
1:02:41Elon MuskYeah. But if we can establish.
1:02:44Walt MossbergI was worried about Asteroids at the beginning of this.
1:02:46Elon MuskI mean, Asteroids are a low probability existential threat on the timescale that's relevant to us.
1:02:52Kara SwisherOkay.
1:02:54Walt MossbergOkay. This is different. This requires urgency.
1:02:57Kara SwisherSo what do you do for fun?
1:02:58Elon MuskYes, this is much more.
1:02:59Kara SwisherElon, what do you do for fun? Fun. What do you do? Anything.
1:03:03Elon MuskI play video games with my kids.
1:03:04Kara SwisherAll right, that sounds good. Let's get some questions to Elon. Elon, the house cat.
1:03:09Elon MuskWatch movies, you know, kind of thing, normal thing.
1:03:11Walt MossbergWhy don't we start over here?
1:03:12Elon MuskYeah, hi. I think this last question just did that. I want to know how do you live through the stress, that kind of conversations we just heard that you went through and kind of ambitions that you carry.
1:03:27Elon MuskAnd then how do you adjust to the everyday work life, balance, etc, things that in your life? So a little bit of your personal
1:03:34Kara Swisherside, actually, you're very busy. How does that Work.
1:03:37Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I am sort of in kind of work triage mode a lot of the time. So I know it seems to be, as long as there's not like a Crisis simultaneously at SpaceX and Tesla, it's okay.
1:03:52Elon MuskBut you know, companies are, I mean the situation in any given company, particularly one, you know, if it's sort of growing fast and sort of quasi startup, it's somewhat sinusoidal.
1:04:01Elon MuskSo that, I mean, it's okay if you don't, if the waves don't crest together. You know, when that does happen, then that's a huge strain. But right now things are like, you know, motoring along.
1:04:14Elon MuskOkay. And I have like the context loaded for both companies and I can look sort of see a path to a good outcome. So I feel pretty good right now.
1:04:26Elon MuskBut they've been super stressful times in the past and then, you know, and then I always try to reserve time for my kids because I love hanging out with them.
1:04:37Elon MuskLike, I mean, kids are really great. I mean they're like the 99% of the time they make you happier. Kids are awesome.
1:04:47Kara SwisherYeah, then there's that 1%.
1:04:50Elon Musk1%, you know, like. Yeah, 1%. But like, of anything in my life, I would say kids by far make me the happiest. I don't know, you know.
1:04:59Kara SwisherI agree.
1:05:00Elon MuskYeah, it's great.
1:05:01Walt MossbergI agree. Yeah.
1:05:03Elon MuskSo hang out with them like, so like things like a lot of times kids are kind of in their own world so you don't need to like, they don't want to like talk to their dad for hours on end generally.
1:05:12Walt MossbergI've noticed that.
1:05:13Elon MuskYeah. So like, so I can be in the same room with them, they can talk to me from time to time, but I can get some emails done, just get some work done and then whenever they want to talk to me, they can.
1:05:25Elon MuskAnd then we try to do things like travel places and like I said, we play video games together or actually on Monday we went to the new Harry Potter Land at Universal.
1:05:42Elon MuskIt was quite fun.
1:05:46Walt MossbergSomebody from Universal just clapped me.
1:05:49Elon MuskWhoever was in charge of Harry Potterland did a great job. It's really good.
1:05:52Kara SwisherYeah, it is good.
1:05:53Elon MuskI highly recommend it. The Butterbeer is amazing.
1:05:56Kara SwisherYeah, I was just saying the butter beer is amazing.
1:05:57Elon MuskThe butter beer is amazing.
1:05:58Kara SwisherYeah.
1:05:59Walt MossbergOk, over here.
1:06:01Elon MuskHi, my name is Evan Burns, I'm
1:06:02Audience Memberthe founder of Odyssey and I hope into the future to be in something in the space industry. And, and my curiosity is, you've talked about SpaceX getting into many different businesses, for example global Wi Fi.
1:06:13Audience MemberThrough launching many satellites. Do you hope SpaceX becomes a platform for others to launch businesses?
1:06:18Elon MuskOr do you see SpaceX being a business that launches many business lines? Well, I mean the general strategy of SpaceX is to like, we clearly need a lot of money in order to develop the transport system to establish a city on Mars.
1:06:35Elon MuskSo you know, we're like kind of gathering revenue, like Earth based revenue that's we're trying to maximize.
1:06:48Walt MossbergIs there some other Earth revenue?
1:06:50Elon MuskWell, right now it's only Earth, so we've got to maximize Earth revenue as it relates to space, you know, as it relates to rockets and spacecraft. So, but I think what assuming SpaceX is able to transport large numbers of people and goods to Mars, it will be an enormous enabler for entrepreneurial activity on Mars because there's going to be so much to do, you know, everything from creating like the first iron ore refinery to the first pizza joint to, you know, something that doesn't even exist on Earth.
1:07:20Elon MuskIt's kind of like when the Union Pacific crossed crossed, you know, and like everybody thought, you know, like what a stupid idea, you know, like there's nobody living in California, you know, well, okay, now there's quite a lot of people living in California.
1:07:35Elon MuskSo just having, you need the transport link. And so what SpaceX is trying to do is establish a transport link and then try to create a fertile environment for entrepreneurs on Mars to flourish.
1:07:50Elon MuskAnd I think that will be an amazing expansion of entrepreneurial.
1:07:54Walt MossbergHow long would it take to deliver a pizza from Mars?
1:07:58Elon MuskWell, it's going to be a little cold, I think, but I mean, we can certainly see a way to get to Mars in under three months. And I think ultimately you'll be able to get to Mars in under a month.
1:08:10Elon MuskIt does get exponentially difficult as you reduce the time. But three months is a way to think of it. And I think that's probably, you know, that's really where SpaceX will, I think, create a great environment for entrepreneurial potential.
1:08:27Elon MuskThanks, Neeli.
1:08:30Kara SwisherI hope Domino's does not get to Mars. Please don't let it.
1:08:34Elon MuskI have a special Mars.
1:08:36Kara SwisherI'm assuming you're going to be king of Mars.
1:08:41Audience MemberSo you're obviously very ambitious. That's led to some really ambitious deadlines that have been missed. So Falcon heavy was originally 2012. The Model X was a little bit delayed.
1:08:53Audience MemberThe Model X was delayed. The Model 3 seems to be stretching. But the Model 3 in particular is a consumer product. You're taking money from people against a really aggressive production schedule.
1:09:05Audience MemberAnd A huge amount of orders. What are you going to do to hit your deadlines on that? Because it's real consumers this time in a big class of people.
1:09:14Audience MemberSure.
1:09:17Elon MuskI think the biggest thing is just designing the car for manufacturing. So in the case of Model S, like the Model S was the first time we'd really built a car, a whole car.
1:09:30Elon MuskLike with the roadster, Lotus did the body and chassis, we did the powertrain, then we did the sort of final installation of the powertrain to the. To the chassis.
1:09:36Elon MuskBut the Model S was the first time we made a car. So we were just trying to make a great car and. But we had no idea, like, what it meant to design something to be manufacturable.
1:09:46Elon MuskSo the Model S is super hard to make. And then the Model X is built off of the Model S platform, except it's got a bunch of other whiz bang technologies that make it even harder to build.
1:09:55Elon MuskSo. And, you know, so, like, I mean, definitely we want to do the opposite of what we did with the X, which is make something that is going to be a lot simpler, but still a car that people will love and where every design decision is factoring in the manufacturability and making sure that when we design something that you can manufacture it at volume at an affordable price.
1:10:27Elon MuskIn the schedule that we're on, the schedule that we're targeting, one of the things that makes a car very difficult, particularly if it's a new car, is that it's an integrated product with several thousand unique components.
1:10:42Elon MuskSo we are somewhat at the mercy of whatever the slowest component is, Whatever. Basically, if you say go to tier two and three suppliers, they end up being several thousand suppliers.
1:10:53Elon MuskSo things move as fast as the least lucky and least competent supplier. And you can think of any natural disaster you care to name, all of those things have happened to our suppliers.
1:11:06Elon MuskThe factory has burnt down. There's been an earthquake, there's been a tsunami, there's been massive hail. There's been a tornado. The ship sank. There was a shootout at the Mexican border.
1:11:21Elon MuskNo kidding. That delayed trunk carpet at one point. And we couldn't get. And the border patrol wouldn't give us the truck because it had bullet holes in it. We just wanted our trunk carpet.
1:11:38Elon MuskIt's pretty safe. It's no cocaine or anything. This is good. But you know, that shut down the production line as an example for several days. So that's the biggest issue is like the supply chain stuff is really tricky.
1:11:53Elon MuskWe're trying to anticipate as Much of that as possible. Increase our optionality so that there's more internal capability at Tesla. Not that we want to do things internally, but if a supplier is unable and unwilling to deliver the part, we can quickly make that internally.
1:12:14Elon MuskSo I think the whole company is geared for that. And I mean, right now it looks like, you know, we should be able to do that. We expect to.
1:12:27Elon MuskI mean, almost all of the Model 3 design is done and we're aiming for pencils down basically in about six weeks. Complete pencils down, and we're tabling all, you know, like, if there are ideas for future cool things, we'll have it in version two, version three, you know, future years type of thing.
1:12:50Elon MuskSo overall I feel pretty good about it. And our supplier, particularly our major supplier partners have been very supportive and are on board.
1:13:04Walt MossbergBut,
1:13:06Elon Muskyou know, I mean, one thing I should say is like the, like when I sort of cite a schedule, it is actually the schedule I think is true. It's not some fake schedule that I don't think is true.
1:13:21Elon MuskSo I mean, you know, it's never, you know, it's maybe delusional. That is entirely possible. Maybe it's happened from time to time, but it's never some knowingly fake deadline ever.
1:13:43Audience MemberSo is there an event in six weeks where you're going to announce autonomous driving is included in the pencil down plan for the Model 3?
1:13:54Elon MuskWe're not expecting any event in six weeks.
1:13:59Walt MossbergJosh.
1:14:00Elon MuskHi.
1:14:02Audience MemberSo I have a. This is kind of a weird question. I feel like you would be the guy with the right answer for it. There's a sort of a philosophic concept that a sufficiently advanced civilization will be able to create.
1:14:16Audience MemberSimulation. Yeah, maybe you've answered this before. A simulation.
1:14:20Elon MuskI've had so many simulation discussions, it's crazy. Okay, so. Because in fact, it got to the point where basically every conversation was, was the AI simulation conversation. And my brother and I finally agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub that was like.
1:14:38Elon MuskBecause that really kills the magic.
1:14:41Audience MemberSo the idea is, right, any sufficiently advanced civilization could create a simulation that's like our existence. And so the theory follows that maybe we're in the simulation. Have you thought about this?
1:14:55Elon MuskAnd a lot.
1:14:56Audience MemberAre we,
1:14:59Elon Muskare we even in hot tub? So much so it had to be banned from a hot tub.
1:15:06Audience MemberOkay.
1:15:07Elon MuskIt's not the sexiest conversation.
1:15:08Audience MemberAre we in? Are we in?
1:15:12Elon MuskI think here's, in my mind, like the strongest argument for us being in a simulation. Probably being in a simulation, I think is the following.
1:15:24Elon Musk40 years ago we had pong like two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously.
1:15:37Elon MuskAnd it's getting better every year. And soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.
1:15:53Elon MuskJust indistinguishable. Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now, then you just say, okay, well let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale.
1:16:09Elon MuskSo. So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality and those games could be played on any set top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such
1:16:28Audience Membercomputers
1:16:29Elon Muskor set top boxes. It would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what's wrong with that argument, is the answer?
1:16:42Elon MuskYes, the argument is probably, it's like, is there a flaw in that argument? I mean, I'm not sure what the error.
1:16:50Audience MemberNo, no, the argument makes sense. So the assumption then is that somebody beat us to it and this is a game.
1:16:58Elon MuskNo, no. There's a 1 in billions chance that this is base reality. Oh, okay. What do you think? Well, I think it's one in billions. Okay, that seems to be clearly what it suggests.
1:17:15Elon MuskAnd actually arguably we should hope that that's true because otherwise if civilization stops advancing, then that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization. So maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation because otherwise, because
1:17:33Walt Mossbergthey could reboot it.
1:17:35Elon MuskWell, otherwise either we're going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options. I like those odds.
1:17:47Walt MossbergOkay.
1:17:49Elon MuskIt's unlikely to go into some like multimillion year stasis. So it's either going to increase or decrease.
1:17:56Audience MemberHi, I'm Jeetu Patel from box two. Part question for you. One is if you think about fully autonomous vehicles which have passed through regulatory approvals, have passed through in city driving and traffic conditions, how far do you think from a time frame perspective we are for that becoming reality?
1:18:16Audience MemberAnd number two would be the second part of that question is how far before, how long before you think it's either illegal or extremely prohibitively expensive for humans to drive on the road?
1:18:31Elon MuskWell, I Mean, I think, I mean I really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem
1:18:41Audience Membereven in cities like Beijing and.
1:18:43Elon MuskYeah, yeah, actually this, the, there's really only one area where it's like a little dodgy and that's basically if you're at roughly the 30, 30 to 40 miles an hour in, in urban environments, which is, that's difficult to achieve in Beijing it's like heavy traffic.
1:19:03Elon MuskIn, in, in dense traffic situations, autonomy is really easy because you can just maintain a set distance from various cars. It's actually quite, quite easy. You're very unlikely to, to run anyone over because it's not moving fast enough.
1:19:16Elon MuskAnd you can break in time on highways, particularly highways that are, that are barriers so that you don't have pedestrians. That's also relatively easy. And like a Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person.
1:19:33Audience MemberRight now my point is when does it get to be where you don't need to be sitting behind a vehicle? And it actually, the way that society starts expecting this is I can have my 75 year old mother who doesn't speak any English or doesn't drive, be able to be transported from point A to point B by just sitting in a car by herself and being taken.
1:19:53Audience MemberI know it's technically possible, but how far do you think the regulatory approvals are for that happening?
1:19:59Elon MuskI think we're basically less than two years away from complete autonomy. Wow, complete. Safer than a human. However, regulators will take I think at least another year. At least another year and it depend on which what part of the world you're in.
1:20:22Elon MuskBecause they all want to see billions of miles of data to show that it is statistically true that there is a substantial improvement in safety if something's autonomous versus not autonomous.
1:20:33Elon MuskI don't think that regulators will accept something that's close to, that's sort of approximately as good as a person. I think they'll have to be at least twice as good as a person, maybe five or 10 times better in terms of safety and that will have to be a statistically relevant data set.
1:20:55Elon MuskSo like billions of miles over widely differing roads and situations. So yeah, you know, so I think it's like probably three years before it's from a regulatory standpoint, but less than 2 before it is technically possible.
1:21:16Audience MemberAnd do you think there's a day when it's illegal to drive for humans or, you know.
1:21:20Elon MuskWell, I mean, we live in a democracy, so presumably that would be a function of the population deciding. I mean, I Mean, I'm not in favor of banning people from driving cars.
1:21:34Elon MuskLike, I'm in favor of freedom and not restricting what people do.
1:21:43Elon MuskYeah, but maybe the requirements for a license will get more stringent. I think that seems like maybe a good move, you know, so you have to demonstrate a higher level of skill to drive in order to be allowed to manually drive.
1:21:56Kara SwisherOkay, very last question.
1:21:57Walt MossbergThis is the last question Elon has to.
1:22:00Kara SwisherGonna make it a great question. Thinking about life on Mars again, how do you think about cultural unification, systems of government, rules of law, establishing those very early on?
1:22:16Elon MuskWell, I think I was just declared king of Mars a moment ago.
1:22:20Kara SwisherI like that. Yeah, take it.
1:22:22Elon MuskYeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I think most likely the form of government on Mars would be a direct democracy, not representative. So it would be people voting directly on issues.
1:22:40Elon MuskAnd I think that's probably better because the potential for corruption is substantially diminished in a direct versus a representative democracy. So I think that's probably what will occur. I think there's some, I think I would recommend like some adjustment for the inertia of laws is what would be wise.
1:23:05Elon MuskIn that it should probably be easier to remove a law than create one. I think, you know, this is. I would just be like, let's just. I mean, I think that's probably, probably good because laws have infinite life unless they're taken away.
1:23:22Elon MuskSo I think my recommendation would be something like, let's say 60% of people need to vote in a law, but at any point Greater than 40% of people can remove it.
1:23:34Elon MuskAnd any law should come with a sunset, with a built in sunset provision. If it's not good enough to be voted back in, maybe it shouldn't be there.
1:23:42Walt MossbergSo that's, that's the framework for the government on Mars.
1:23:46Elon MuskI mean, those would be my recommendations. Direct democracy, where it's slightly harder to put laws in place than to take them away. And where laws don't just automatically live forever.
1:24:00Kara SwisherYou'll be a good king. Thank you, Elon Musk. Thank you.