Elon Musk's answers in 2015
Q1 How dangerous is AI and how do we make it go well?
He is not worried about narrow AI such as autonomous cars or a smart air conditioner; caution belongs with deep intelligence, and it is odd to be alive so close to the advent of AI. link
He wanted to stay on sustainable energy, but we should be cautious about the advent of AI. A lot of people developing AI are too convinced that the only outcome is good. We need to consider potentially less-good outcomes and make sure the public is aware. link
Q5 Why go to Mars / what is SpaceX's mission?
He said the goal is to enable large numbers of people and cargo to go to Mars, so humanity becomes a spacefaring, multiplanetary civilization. link
A future exploring the stars is more inspiring than being confined to Earth; the next generation of rockets should let people move to Mars for about $500,000 with a free return ticket. link
The overarching goal of SpaceX is to advance space-transport technology so space travel can become commonplace and large numbers of people and cargo can go to other planets. link
A future as a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species is exciting and inspiring. Getting there means dramatically improving the cost of spaceflight, which is why SpaceX exists. link
A Mars civilization is a life-insurance policy for life collectively: become a multiplanet species, not forever confined to one planet waiting for an extinction event. link
In college he asked which things would most affect the future of humanity at a macro level, including the internet, sustainable energy and becoming multi-planetary. link
The things that would affect the future: the internet, sustainable energy production and consumption, and making life multi-planetary, plus genetics and AI in the abstract. link
In college the five things that would most affect humanity were the internet, sustainable energy, extending life beyond Earth, AI, and rewriting human genetics. link
Understanding of the universe grows with the scope of civilization, and civilization's probable lifespan is much greater as a multiplanetary species. This is the first time in Earth's history the window is open to extend life to another planet. The wise move is to make life multiplanetary while we can. link
We should do both. His ideology is split between sustainable energy on Earth and advancing space technology to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars. The overarching goal is to minimize existential risk. link
He said a Falcon 9 costs about $60 million to build but propellant only about $200,000, so the long-term potential cost reduction is probably more than a factor of 100. link
Q6 When will AI surpass humans?
He said AI will be incredibly sophisticated in 20 years and appears to be accelerating, which makes exponential forecasts hard. link
Q8 Why are your timelines so often late?
He said weekly production rate had grown 100% year over year and Tesla would try to double it again from start to end of the year. link
Q11 What drives you / what is the meaning of life?
He is hopeful and trying to maximize the probability the future will be better — why wouldn't you if you're going to be part of it. link
As a kid he tried to find some meaning in life. He was sad about it as a teenager, then read that the universe is the answer and you need to figure out the questions. If he can help figure out the questions, he considers that meaningful. link
Q12 What's the biggest remaining Starship problem?
Reusability is key to that future. They had worked hard on it and had not succeeded yet; the last launch had been their best chance of landing on the drone ship. link
The next-generation deep-cryo methalox system, still many years away, could achieve full reusability — maybe a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of spaceflight. link
Reusability needs about 2% net payload to orbit. SpaceX had been at it 13 years and not yet achieved it; he thought within the next year they would land the rocket intact. link
Q15 How competitive is China?
They hire great engineers as fast as they can find them. It is not easy to find people with the right mindset; they hire at the maximum rate they can find people who would be an asset. link
Q16 How good is Tesla self-driving?
Autonomous driving much safer than a person is much easier than people think; cars will be like elevators, and in the distant future people may outlaw human driving as too dangerous. link
He said Autopilot v1 only eases the driver's workload. Before people could sleep while it drove, it would need to be about ten times safer than a human. link
Highway Autopilot was about a month from wide release; full autonomy technologically in about three years, with regulators maybe 1–3 years after that. link
He called electrification and autonomy the two most profound automotive innovations since the moving production line. link
He said the network of vehicles is going to be constantly learning. link
Q18 Are we in a simulation?
It is probabilistic: video games went from Pong to photorealistic 3D with millions of people, so advanced civilizations would make simulations like our existence. link
Q20 How hard should founders work?
He said he is constitutionally geared to just keep going. The work is important to the future, and if they fail people will use it as a reason not to try. link
Q22 When will Starship go to Mars?
Asked about a Mars colony, he hoped for a small base or small city on Mars in 20 years, then joked it could be a town, village or hamlet. link
He has said publicly they have a decent shot of sending a person to Mars in about 11 or 12 years. link
Q29 How do you think about doing good?
Tesla's mission is to transition the world to electric cars. Most of the good it will accomplish is by cutting a path through the jungle to show what can be done, so the rest of the industry follows. link
Tesla open-sourced its patents so any car company can use the technology free; the point is more electric cars, not fighting competitors. link
Q37 How should AI labs manage safety?
Argues we should at least try to postpone AI weaponry. link
Q45 Is there hidden alien or advanced propulsion technology?
Raises the Fermi Paradox and calls it really odd that we see no sign of aliens. link
They do not spend a ton of time on new physics. Current physics already has huge potential; rather than waiting on a breakthrough he cannot even envision, he is confident dramatic improvements in spaceflight are possible with what we know. link
The Fermi paradox: if there are so many planets and the universe is almost 14 billion years old, why aren't the aliens everywhere? You could blanket the galaxy even at bicycle speed. link
Q47 Has Tesla come close to failing?
From the beginning Tesla and SpaceX were in dire straits; nobody took them seriously. At the start he thought Tesla maybe had a 10% chance of success, and he was close to a nervous breakdown before Christmas 2008. link
He never thought Tesla would succeed from the beginning — maybe 10–20% odds; at the end of 2008 it looked like failure and he put in his last money, closing financing on Christmas Eve 2008 at 6 p.m. link
When he started SpaceX he thought the odds of success were very low and they would most likely fail, but they should give it a try anyway. link
The Mars-greenhouse idea would have been a 100% chance of losing the money. SpaceX, which he thought maybe had a 10% chance of success, was an improvement. link
The Tesla round closed 6 p.m. Christmas Eve 2008, last hour of the last possible day; they would have gone bankrupt about two days after Christmas otherwise. link
He thought success was maybe 10% likely; both companies nearly failed in 2008 after three SpaceX launch failures and a Tesla financing round that closed Christmas Eve. link
The real key was 2008, or mid-2007 to mid-2009: a super-bad two years, almost every early Tesla decision wrong, company almost completely recapitalized in 2007. link
When they first started Tesla and SolarCity they thought they would fail. Tesla in particular he thought maybe a 10% chance of success. Cars are one of the worst risk-adjusted returns. link
Probability of success was so low he provided all the money from PayPal into Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX. For Tesla they closed the financing round on Christmas Eve 2008, the last hour of the last day possible. Even as recently as early 2013 they were operating with maybe one to two weeks of money. link
Q52 How much solar would it take to power the United States?
He said most of the area needed for solar would be rooftops, so you would not need to disturb land. link
You can completely solve Earth's power need with a fairly small percentage of surface area. For the United States, a little corner of Utah/Nevada with solar could power the entire country. link
He is a proponent of using the big fusion power plant in the sky called the sun. If solar were the only source, a small section of Spain could power all of Europe; a little corner of Nevada or Utah the entire United States. link
Q53 What's your vision for energy abundance?
All transport except rockets will go fully electric; fracking may increase accessible oil and gas about tenfold, so scarcity cannot be counted on to force the switch. link
He said it is about a fundamental transformation of how energy is delivered across Earth. link
Sustainable generation (wind and solar) plus stationary storage plus electric transport is the complete solution for a good future. link
He said the most important thing to solve this century is sustainable energy. link
He said solar will be the single largest source of electricity generation by mid-century. link
Even aside from warming, oil runs out and the economy collapses; running the CO2 experiment is the dumbest in history, so we need sustainable production and consumption. link
It is a certainty that we will move to a sustainable energy economy, because the alternative is burn all the carbon then either go sustainable or the economy collapses. The only question is when, and how many billions of tons of CO2 end up in the atmosphere versus the ground. link
All transport goes fully electric over time, with the ironic exception of rockets, and all energy production goes sustainable. That takes many decades because the incentive structure is biased against it. A revenue-neutral carbon tax is by far the most effective accelerator. link
He said it is inevitable we will exit the fossil fuel era because we will run out of carbon to mine and burn. link
Q57 Will Starlink work as a phone?
They were at the early stages of a big LEO constellation and hoped to launch a test satellite next year. The system would talk to a pizza-box-sized user terminal, not compete with cellular handsets. link
Q117 What's the long-term vision for Starlink?
The long-term goal is a comprehensive global communications system with high bandwidth and low latency anywhere in the world, with satellite cross-links, because photons move 40–50% faster in vacuum than in fiber. link
Q118 What's your algorithm for designing products?
He is a big believer in a science or physics framework for new problems. Daily life runs on analogy; if something is fundamentally new or counterintuitive you have to do a first-principles analysis from simple fundamental truths. link
Q121 Should governments put a price on carbon?
Prices are information for labor allocation. When prices are wrong, the wrong thing happens in the economy. CO2 capacity of oceans and atmosphere is a tragedy of the commons, unpriced, so we are incenting bad behavior — like high taxes on fruit and low taxes on cigarettes. link
Best case of delay is just slowing the inevitable transition; worst case is more displacement and destruction than all the wars in history combined. About 97% of scientists believe the worst case. That is why he calls it the dumbest experiment in history ever. link
There is an untaxed negative externality — a hidden carbon subsidy. The solution is a carbon tax, and to make it neither left nor right, a revenue-neutral carbon tax: raise carbon taxes, cut other taxes, phased in so industry has time to react. link
The fundamental problem is the rules today incent people to create carbon, and this is madness. What you incent will happen. There needs to be a clear message from government. link
He said we need a carbon tax, probably revenue neutral so it is neither a left nor right issue. link
He called the untaxed negative externality a hidden carbon subsidy of $5.3 trillion a year, per the IMF. link
Q124 When will Dragon carry astronauts?
He said in about two years SpaceX would be transporting NASA astronauts to the space station. link
Q125 What is Tesla's mission?
He said the need for sustainable transport stays incredibly high and becomes more urgent even as oil prices fall. link
He said Tesla open-sourced its patents and offered its Supercharger network to other carmakers to accelerate sustainable cars. link
He said Tesla's goal is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, particularly sustainable transport. link
He said the world desperately needs sustainable transport. link
He said the goal with Tesla was to serve as a catalyst to accelerate the day of electric vehicles. link
Q129 Can the Boring Company solve traffic?
Lists why he likes tunnels: fast 3D travel, immune to weather, quiet. link
Q131 Why does rocket reusability matter?
He said reusable rockets are the key to making life multiplanetary. link
Q132 How fast is Tesla expanding Superchargers?
He said that two years after the first Superchargers opened in 2013, you could travel almost anywhere in the US on the network. link