Elon Musk's answers in 2022
Q1 How dangerous is AI and how do we make it go well?
One reason for world war III would be if one country gets advanced AI and others attack before it can be used in weapons. link
AI and robotics will bring an age of abundance. The danger is AGI or digital superintelligence decoupling from collective human will. link
We should be concerned about AI and ought to have an AI regulatory agency for the public good, like the FDA or FAA. link
Q3 Where do you stand politically?
He said his views are moderate, near the center of the country's political distribution. He voted Democrat until recently. If the far left 10% and far right 10% were equally upset on Twitter, that would probably be a good outcome. link
Q5 Why go to Mars / what is SpaceX's mission?
Starship aspires to be the first fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, the holy grail of rocketry and the critical breakthrough for multiplanetary life. link
Tesla is about accelerating sustainable energy; SpaceX is about making life multi-planetary. Those goods exceed anything he does from a charitable standpoint. link
It is the people of Mars' city. The reason is maximizing the probable lifespan of humanity or consciousness against meteors, volcanoes, climate, or war. link
The goal of SpaceX is to develop the technology that enables life to become multi-planetary and make humanity a space-faring civilization. link
To make life multi-planetary and have a self-sustaining city, cost per useful landed ton had to improve to probably under $100,000 — about 10,000 times better than then-current art. link
The fundamental good of SpaceX is whether we can make life multi-planetary and improve the probable lifespan of consciousness. Tesla's is how many years it accelerated sustainable energy. link
A fully reusable rocket is the Holy Grail needed to make life multi-planetary. He also gave a defensive reason: keep the light of consciousness from being extinguished if something happens to Earth. link
Q6 When will AI surpass humans?
Even if Tesla stopped doing AI, he thinks we are still on a track to artificial general intelligence, meaning intelligence smarter than the smartest human. link
Q7 Will people still need to work?
He would not worry about putting people out of a job; there is already a massive labor shortage, and it will be a world of abundance. link
He said Optimus will obviate what an economy even means and do anything humans don't want to do. link
Q8 Why are your timelines so often late?
Internally they set the most aggressive timeline they can, because schedules expand to fill the time; it is rare to finish early. link
He said self-driving has a lot of false stones: you think you are getting there and then you asymptote. link
Q9 How does X handle different countries' laws and free speech?
Any forum is bound by the laws of the country it operates in; you cannot incite people to violence or cry fire in a movie theater. link
He said go as far as the law allows. If employees would be arrested for not complying, Twitter must adhere to the law or exit the country. link
He says his general philosophy is to stay close to the law in each country. link
Q10 Was buying Twitter worth it?
He said it is important to have an inclusive arena for free speech. Twitter has become the de facto town square. link
He said he loves Twitter — he has tweeted that — and uses it to communicate directly with people instead of through the media. link
He says the most essential task after the takeover was to cut the burn rate so Twitter would not go bankrupt the next year. link
After cutting the burn rate and building subscriptions, he said he now thought Twitter would be okay the next year. link
He says Twitter faced about $3 billion a year of negative cash flow with $1 billion in cash, so he spent five weeks cutting costs. link
He says his sometimes odd actions are because Twitter was in an emergency. link
He admits Twitter may have gone too far cutting costs on lunch. link
He says without changes Twitter faced net cash outflow of about $6–6.5 billion the next year. link
He says the $12.5 billion acquisition debt and rising rates mean about $1.5 billion a year in debt servicing. link
In late 2022 he said he expected Twitter to be roughly cash-flow break-even the following year. link
He says Twitter went from close to 8,000 people to a little over 2,000 and the site is still running. link
Q11 What drives you / what is the meaning of life?
In his young teens he got depressed about the meaning of life, then read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which he treats as a book on philosophy. link
He wants a good future for humanity and a path to understanding the universe and the meaning of life, which requires expanding the scope and scale of consciousness. link
His unifying philosophy is to take the set of actions most likely to extend the scope, scale and lifespan of consciousness. link
Q12 What's the biggest remaining Starship problem?
In February 2022 he was highly confident they would get Starship to orbit that year. link
By the end of 2022 he expected to produce a ship and a booster per month. link
Full reusability would be relatively easy on Mars (weaker gravity, thin air); it is just barely possible on Earth. link
The critical breakthrough for a space-bearing civilization is a fully and rapidly reusable orbital rocket. Falcon 9 is about 70 to 80 percent reusable; Starship is going for 100 percent reusable. link
Q13 Why shouldn't AI be made to lie?
Says training AI to be woke, i.e. to lie, is deadly. link
Warns of great danger in training an AI to lie. link
Q15 How competitive is China?
He is very impressed with Chinese car companies as extremely competitive, hard-working and smart, and expects a massive wave of Chinese products globally. Tesla's constraint is supply chain, not competitors. link
Q16 How good is Tesla self-driving?
He said these may be infamous last words, but he is confident Tesla will solve full self-driving this year, exceeding average-person accident probability. link
He said Tesla has the best real-world AI team on Earth, with FSD beta often able to take you across the Bay Area with zero interventions. link
Tesla has always said Autopilot requires attention; you cannot even turn it on without acknowledging supervision. link
He hoped for an interesting humanoid prototype by the end of September and said Tesla AI Day is to emphasize Tesla is the leading real-world AI company, more than a car company. link
He said self-driving electric cars will be all that matters; a gas car without autonomy will be like riding a horse. link
He said FSD Beta would be available to anyone who requests it by the end of that year. link
He said eventually all cars will be self-driving. link
Autonomy: cars are driven about 10 or 12 hours a week; autonomous cars could run 50 or 60 hours, a five-fold increase in utility, and far fewer cars and parking lots would be needed. link
Q17 When will Optimus be produced at scale?
Optimus is a general-purpose worker droid; initial roles would be tasks people do not want to do. link
Cost will not be crazy high, like less than a car. First prototype sometime this year, something useful next year, quite likely within two years; home units in less than ten years. link
He said Tesla had a shot at being in production for version one of Optimus, hopefully the next year. link
He said the goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible. link
He said it was the first time the robot operated without a tether, on stage that night. link
The Optimus humanoid robot will use Tesla manufacturing and self-driving intelligence. If labor is no longer a constraint, it is not clear there is any limit to the size of the economy. link
Q19 Is population decline a problem?
Says we should be much more worried about population collapse. link
Most people wrongly think there are too many people. Earth could maintain many times the current population, and the birth rate has been dropping like crazy. link
Mostly optimistic, but population collapse is one of the biggest threats: birth rate is far below what is needed to sustain civilization. link
Low birth rates almost worldwide mean civilization is headed toward population decline; he called that the biggest single threat to civilization. link
Says many wrongly think Earth is overpopulated while birth rate trends point to population collapse. link
Q21 What is the purpose of X?
Twitter has become the de facto town square, so people need both the reality and the perception that they can speak freely within the bounds of the law. link
There is a need for a public digital town square where people can debate issues, as broadly inclusive as possible. link
His aspiration for Twitter as a digital town square is to be as inclusive as possible, let people say what they want within the law, and limit who sees it based on user preferences. link
He said Twitter is a digital town square, and more than that, because you can communicate with millions of people at once. Direct communication, not through a negative media lens, is essential for a functioning democracy. link
Success would be a substantial increase in daily active users. Getting over a billion DAU — still only one eighth of Earth — would be a huge improvement, and whether Twitter meaningfully improved the strength and longevity of civilization. link
He wants a digital town square where people feel comfortable talking and exchanging ideas, including most of the public rather than only the extremes. link
Says social media, especially Twitter, was eroding civilization, which matters for reaching a self-sustaining Mars. link
He defends charging for verification because somebody has to pay for the servers. link
He says a 2 GB upload limit plus a better codec would let Twitter host long videos. link
He describes the Twitter tech stack as combining the difficulties of three different worlds. link
He says subscription revenue becoming a meaningful part of revenue is essential for Twitter's survival. link
He says a rewrite of the Twitter stack is needed, comparing it to Apple moving to OS X. link
He says Twitter certainly needs to enable longer videos. link
He says Twitter needs a way to like a tweet without advertising that to the world. link
He says adding view counts to tweets will make the site pop by showing how many people actually see them. link
He says the first priority for video is being able to post a sufficiently long one. link
He says people should not need a Twitter account unless they want to write something. link
Q22 When will Starship go to Mars?
You can only go to Mars every two years; he thought you need about a million tons on Mars for a self-sustaining city. link
Useful landed tons to the Martian surface then cost in excess of a billion dollars each; a self-sustaining city needed that to fall under about $100,000 a ton. link
In May 2022 he called 2029 a pivotal year for AGI and said he hoped people would be on Mars too. link
Q28 Should you have Starlink's geopolitical power?
Says Starlink was told by some governments to block Russian news and will not unless at gunpoint. link
Says in war areas other comms are destroyed and Starlink is all that’s left. link
Q29 How do you think about doing good?
If you care about the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult. SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and The Boring Company are philanthropy. link
Q30 How do you hire and manage people?
He said the most inclusive definition is all humans — get as many people as possible on Twitter. From a company standpoint he believes in a strict meritocracy: whoever does great work gets more responsibility. link
He said a company's output is the vector sum of its people; a strong individual who drags down those around them can be a net negative. link
Q31 What about the advertiser boycott?
He said advertising is very important for Twitter. Tesla and SpaceX do not need ads because demand exceeds production. Ads should be entertaining, not spammy, and not for scam products. link
Activist groups pressured major advertisers to stop spending even though moderation rules had not changed, causing a massive drop in advertising revenue. link
Says Twitter revenue dropped massively due to activist groups pressuring advertisers. link
He says companies cut brand advertising first in a recession, so Twitter needs a subscriber base. link
He says major advertisers he spoke with were looking for return on investment. link
He says Twitter's ads were maximizing irrelevance. link
He says having ads of only one type makes relevance hard to achieve. link
He says when times are tough advertisers ask hard ROI questions, and pulling back is sane. link
He says Twitter must move its revenue base away from being almost entirely dependent on advertisers. link
He says old Twitter ads were tuned to maximize impressions rather than clicks and purchases. link
He says advertisers in tough times hold back when there is no clear return on investment, which is sane. link
He says subscriber and business revenue matter as brand advertising declines rapidly. link
Q32 Did X throttle The New York Times?
Says the NYT just posts short summaries that hit a paywall, and would get far more views if it engaged with readers on Twitter. link
Q33 Is free speech under threat globally?
Polls whether Twitter rigorously adheres to free speech, calling it essential to democracy. link
Says Twitter is the de facto public town square, so failing free speech principles undermines democracy. link
Says he disagrees with him but disagrees with deleting his content even more; that is free speech. link
People should be able to speak freely within the bounds of the law. Twitter is bound by the laws of the country it operates in. link
Defines free speech as that which matches the law, and opposes censorship beyond the law. link
Free speech is important for a healthy democracy; it matters most when it is someone you do not like saying something you do not like. link
He said free speech is within the context of the law: you can say outrageous things, but that does not mean they must be promoted to millions of people. Freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach. link
He called advertiser pressure to suppress free speech an attack on the First Amendment, because Twitter is dependent on those advertisers. link
Calls it a battle for civilization: if free speech is lost in America, tyranny lies ahead. link
Q37 How should AI labs manage safety?
Says there is no regulatory oversight of AI, which is a major problem. link
Q38 What is the limiting factor for AI scaling?
He said two to three years out, total gigawatt hours of battery production will be the limiting factor. link
Q44 What is Neuralink's near-term goal?
Neuralink has put in an FDA application to aspirationally do the first human implant this year. link
He said Neuralink expected a first human implant in about six months. link
He said they believe they can restore vision even for someone born blind. link
Q45 Is there hidden alien or advanced propulsion technology?
He gets asked about aliens a lot and has not seen any evidence; he would tweet if he did. link
He said he has to stop trolling people about aliens. He has seen no actual evidence for aliens. link
Q47 Has Tesla come close to failing?
Says SpaceX and Tesla both narrowly escaped bankruptcy in 2008. link
Q53 What's your vision for energy abundance?
He called 20 million cars a year by 2030 an aspiration, not a promise, needed to dent a world of about two billion cars and trucks. link
He said with the three pillars of production, storage and electric transport you have a fully sustainable future. link
Q54 How should X recommend content?
Says Twitter's algorithm should be open source. link
One of the things he believes Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and make changes to people's tweets visible. link
He said he wants the algorithm open source so people can critique it, find bugs or bias. Anything automated should be transparent, and any human deboost should be clearly identified on the tweet. link
He says good recommendations from accounts you don't follow also mean Twitter can show you relevant ads. link
He says a highly relevant ad is content and an irrelevant one is spam, so Twitter wants ads relevant to users' needs. link
He says Twitter's advertising was mostly optimizing for irrelevance. link
He says the thing to optimize is time people don't regret, citing people who regret hours spent on TikTok. link
He says what matters is true user minutes, not fake user minutes. link
He says since the acquisition he has pushed Twitter to maximize relevance rather than impressions. link
He says Twitter should optimize for unregretted true human user minutes. link
Q57 Will Starlink work as a phone?
Says Starlink V2 will transmit direct to mobile phones, eliminating dead zones. link
Says SpaceX has had promising conversations with Apple about Starlink connectivity to phones. link
Says direct-to-cell bandwidth is shared within a cell; good for texts, voice and low-res pictures, with video possible where few phones are active. link
Q63 Did Twitter exaggerate its user numbers?
Says fake/spam accounts could be much higher than 20%, four times Twitter's claim, and that the deal can't move forward until Twitter shows proof of <5%. link
He said Twitter still has a bot and spam problem, including crypto scams and people running hundreds of accounts. Anything that affects the monetizable daily user number is his biggest concern. link
He says Twitter cut off telcos with heavy 2FA SMS fraud, which had been inflating fake users and costs. link
Q69 Will X become a payments app?
WeChat is a model: Twitter plus PayPal plus other functions in one app, which does not exist outside China. link
He said money is a form of information, and it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter — fiat and crypto — so sending money is easy. News, entertainment and payments are three critical areas. link
Q106 When will Starship demonstrate orbital refilling?
Getting to Mars requires orbital refilling, like aerial refueling for aircraft. link
From February 2022 he was optimistic toward the end of next year (2023) and would be surprised if refilling took longer than two years (~2024). link
Q107 When will a city on Mars be self-sustaining?
The critical threshold for Mars is a city that is self-sustaining; if any ingredient is missing and ships from Earth stop, the city dies out. link
Starship is necessary for creating a self-sustaining city on Mars, with orders of magnitude more mass to orbit than Falcon. link
In August 2022 he hoped there would be a self-sustaining city on Mars in 20 years (~2042). link
Q109 How important is physical-world AI compared with language models?
Calls a general self-driving solution essentially real-world AI and one of the hardest technology problems. link
Says the only path to self-driving is hardcore real-world AI software, dedicated inference chips, a huge training cluster and 10B+ miles of data. link
Q114 How does Community Notes work?
Says the community notes feature is awesome and the goal is making Twitter the most accurate source of information regardless of politics. link
Says Community Notes correcting him shows it can correct anyone, and that the label on his post was right. link
Q115 When will you step down as CEO of X?
He said he is not hung up on titles — he renamed himself Technoking at Tesla — but he does want to drive the product, and people need to listen when he says to change it. link
Q116 Should people work remotely?
He said the bias needs to be strongly toward working in person. Remote work can be okay if someone's output is exceptional; firing an excellent remote worker would be insane. link
Replying about Twitter's office policy, he said anyone who can be in the office should be; staying home is fine if logistics or personal matters require it, remote work is OK if a manager vouches for excellence, and it's the same policy as Tesla and SpaceX. link
Q125 What is Tesla's mission?
He said accelerating sustainable energy is Tesla's primary mission. link
He said Tesla open-sourced its charge connector and is letting other EVs use Superchargers. link
Q128 Why did Tesla build the Cybertruck?
He said Tesla wanted to complete Cybertruck development and be ready for production the next year. link
He said Tesla would start manufacturing Cybertruck at Giga Texas the next year. link
Q130 What is the Tesla Semi?
Says the 500-mile Tesla Semi starts shipping this year, Cybertruck next year. link
Announces start of Semi production with first deliveries to Pepsi on Dec 1 (2022). link
Reports a 500-mile drive by a fully loaded Semi. link
Q131 Why does rocket reusability matter?
Says getting Starship reliably to orbit, then full and immediate reusability of both stages, is top priority. link
Q133 Can the world solve its water problems?
Says Earth has more water than we could use and desalination is cheap. link
Q134 Why does Tesla use cameras instead of lidar?
Calls lidar a seductive local maximum; roads are designed for biological eyes, so self-driving needs cameras and neural nets. link
Q136 When will the Tesla Semi reach volume production?
He said Roadster and Semi would be in production the next year (2023). link