Elon Musk's answers in 2016
Q1 How dangerous is AI and how do we make it go well?
The car is narrow AI, essentially a solved steering problem needing many nines of reliability; worry is deep AI that develops a will or is controlled by a few. link
Says control of super powerful AI by a small number of humans is the most proximate concern. link
The most important near-term item for humanity is AI going well; then genetics, then a high-bandwidth brain interface. link
Q5 Why go to Mars / what is SpaceX's mission?
Defensive reason: protect humanity so the light of consciousness is not extinguished if calamity befalls Earth. Personally he is more excited that it would be the greatest adventure ever. link
Another step towards the stars. To open up access to space we have to achieve full and rapid reusability of the primary booster. It will take a few years to make it smooth, but it is proven it can work. Full rapid reusability is fundamental. link
Reusability is as fundamental in rocketry as in cars or planes. Propellant is about $200–300k; the rocket is $60 million. A fully and rapidly reused rocket is on the order of a 100-fold reduction in marginal cost. link
Some aspects of the stage would have no meaningful life limit — you could probably do them a thousand missions. Almost everything on the stage would be good for 10 or 20, and with minor refurbishment you could get to 100. link
First NASA astronaut test flights hopefully toward the end of next year. Unmanned Dragon 2 first, then crew. It could be as soon as next year that they do the first crewed spaceflight. link
He and Bezos both think it is important for the future to be a spacefaring civilization, ultimately among the stars, a multi-planet species. link
The question is how to take people to Mars and create a self-sustaining city that can become a planet in its own right. link
Q8 Why are your timelines so often late?
He set a goal of a full-autonomy drive from LA to Times Square by the end of next year without a single touch. link
Q14 What do you think of OpenAI?
No one company should control advanced AI; that is why they created OpenAI, combined with a high-bandwidth cortical interface so humans merge with AI. link
Q15 How competitive is China?
Chinese social products Weibo and WeChat are pretty impressive, better than what is in the US; he also called Alibaba impressive. link
Q16 How good is Tesla self-driving?
Of new cars produced, he would be surprised if a majority were not self-driving in 10 to 15 years; long term most cars may have no steering wheel. link
In the long term nobody will buy a non-autonomous car — like a manual elevator or owning a horse for sentimental reasons. You will only drive if you want to. link
He said Autopilot was named after an aircraft autopilot: not a way for the driver to abdicate responsibility, but a workload reduction. link
He said all Tesla vehicles leaving the factory have the hardware for level five autonomy. link
He said discouraging people from autonomous vehicles with negative articles is effectively killing people. link
Q18 Are we in a simulation?
After the Pong-to-photorealistic-games argument, he said the odds this is base reality are one in billions. link
Q20 How hard should founders work?
About 80% of his time is engineering and design of next-generation product, not media or business. link
Q22 When will Starship go to Mars?
Crew Dragon to ISS was scheduled for the end of the next year. First flight to Mars hoped around 2025; he might go to the space station in four or five years. link
Not the time for a full update. He planned to describe an approach for establishing a city on Mars at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico that September. He thought it would sound pretty crazy. link
They were going to send one to Mars in 2018. He would not be on that flight; dying on Mars, not on landing, was a joke. link
He is now certain a self-sustaining, growing Mars colony is a possible outcome, potentially in about 10 years, maybe nine. link
Said sending a meaningful number of people to Mars could potentially be accomplished in about 10 years. link
Said if things went super well it might be in the ten-year time frame, while not committing to a date. link
Said SpaceX planned to send Dragon 2 (Red Dragon) to Mars in a couple of years and another Dragon in 2020. That mission was later cancelled. link
Q23 Will humans stay in control of AI?
Without a brain interface, ultra-intelligent AI would leave humans so far below that even in a benign case we would be like a house cat. link
Q47 Has Tesla come close to failing?
He is minimizing existential threats; at the start he thought Tesla and SpaceX maybe had a 10% chance and is surprised they are alive. link
Getting to orbit the first time was the best one. Through 2008 three launches failed and he only had money for three; they scrambled parts for one final launch and it worked. Falcon 1 flight 4 was the most profound. link
Q53 What's your vision for energy abundance?
It makes the transition to sustainable energy more difficult and will dampen interest in EVs. Tesla's answer is to make the car so compelling that even with cheap gasoline it is the car you want. link
Tesla's point is to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport as a catalyst; he thinks all transport except rockets will go fully electric. link
Take the actions likely to accelerate sustainable energy: scale production, Model 3 pulled forward two years, half a million cars around 2018, maybe a million a year by 2020. link
He said the tide of history strongly supports a sustainable energy future, primarily solar and virtually entirely electric vehicles. link
He said solar combined with stationary storage and electric vehicles gives a complete solution to a sustainable energy future. link
He said ultimately all forms of terrestrial transport will go electric. link
He said all battery packs will be recycled. link
He said solar panels need to become as appealing as electric cars have become. link
He said with solar on your house you can power it indefinitely. link
He said solar with batteries can avoid building electricity plants at all. link
Q94 Will SpaceX offer travel to Mars to anyone who wants to go? (asked on X)
If the cost of moving to Mars is around a US median house price (~$200,000), he thought a self-sustaining civilization would almost certainly occur. link
Q107 When will a city on Mars be self-sustaining?
From the first ship to Mars, 20 to 50 Mars rendezvous, probably 40 to 100 years to a fully self-sustaining civilization. link
Q121 Should governments put a price on carbon?
He said the only way to do that is basically with a carbon tax. link
Q125 What is Tesla's mission?
He said the goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport, which is also why Tesla open-sourced its patents. link
He said Tesla expected to have the Model 3, a lower-price, higher-volume car, in about two years. link
He said it is very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport. link
Q126 What did Elon promise for the Model 3?
He said Model 3 would be five-star in every safety category, not just on average. link
He said the Model 3 price would be $35,000. link
Q129 Can the Boring Company solve traffic?
Says traffic is driving him nuts and he will build a tunnel boring machine and start digging. link