Transcript of Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024

Hey, everybody. Friedberg here. What you're about to hear is a discussion from our All-in summit, Recording LA on September ninth. We're going to publish some of the best conversations once a week. If you want to see all the talks, subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube. Com/@allin, and follow us on X at the All-in pod.

My greatest entrepreneur of this generation, Elon Musk. Hey, guys.

I'm going to grab my stuff. I'm going to sit there.

I'm going to take this. All right.

All right.

We're going to do you want to do this?Thanks for taking the time. How are you doing, brother? You keeping busy?

Yeah. I mean, It's rarely a slow week. I mean, in the world as well. Yeah. I mean, any given week, it just seems like the things getting out of here.

It's definitely a simulation. We've agreed on this at this point.

I mean, well, look, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high.

Yes. How are the Freedom of Speech Wars going? This is a... You You've been at war for two years now. Yes. The price of freedom of speech is not cheap, is it?

I think it's like 44 billion, something like that. Just round numbers.

Give or take a billion.

Yeah, round of Yeah. It's pretty nutty. There is this weird movement to quell free speech around the world. And that's something we should be very concerned about. You have to ask, why was the First Amendment a high priority? It was number one. It was number one. It was because people came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed. And they were like, Well, we would like to not have that here because that was terrible. Actually, there's a lot of places in the world right now, if you're critical of the government, you get in prison or killed.

Right.

Yeah, we'd like to not have that.

Are you concerned? Can I add to that?

I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message. I think we always thought that the West was the exception to that, that we knew there were authoritarian places around the world, but we thought that in the West, we'd have freedom of speech.

We've seen, like you said, it seems like a global movement. In Britain, you've got teenagers being put in prison for memes.

It's like you like to Facebook post, throw them in the prison. Yeah. It's so good. People have got an actual prison for obscure comments on social media.Not even shit posting yet.Not even. It's crazy. That's this one. Paul got thrown in prison. You've got Pavel. I'm like, That is pretty shook about it. I was like, What is the Massive crime. All right.

Pavel in France, and then, of course, we got Brazil with Judge Voldemort. That one seems like the one that impacts you the most. What's the latest on that?

Well, I guess we are trying to figure out, is there some reasonable solution in Brazil? The concern... I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly. And funny names aside, the nature of the concern was that, at least at XCorp, we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law. Obviously, we cannot, as an American company, impose American laws and values on other countries. We wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do think that if a country's laws are a particular way and we're being asked to what we think we're being asked to break them and be silenced about it, then obviously that is no good. I just want to be clear. Because this sometimes comes across as Elon's trying to just be a crazy, whatever, billionaire and demand outrageous things from other countries. Well, that is true, in addition, there are other things that I think are valid, which is we obviously can't... I think any given thing that we do at XCorp, we've got to be able to explain in the light of day and not feel that it was We're going to be dishonerable or we did the wrong thing.

That's the nature of the concern. We actually are in discussions with the judicial authorities in Brazil to try to run this to ground. What's actually going on? If we're being asked to break the law, the Brazilian law, then that obviously should not sit well with the resilient judiciary. If we're not and we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we're mistaken. I think that's a pretty reasonable position.

I'm a bit concerned as your friend that you're going to go to one of these countries and I'm going to wake up one day and you're going to get arrested and I'm going to have to go bail you out or something. This feels very acute. Yes. I mean, it's not a joke now. They're We're literally saying, it's not just Biden saying, we have to look into that guy. Now it's become quite literal. Who was the guy who just wrote the... Was it The Guardian piece about like... Oh, yeah.

There have been three articles, and I think in theIt was in the past three weeks. Robert Wright. But it wasn't just him. It was three different articles.

That's a trend.

Calling for me to be imprisoned in the Guardian. Guardian of What are they protecting, exactly? Guardian of, I don't know.

Authoritarianism?

Yeah. Guardian of...Censorship?Censorship..

But the premise here is that you bought this thing, this online forum, this communication platform, and you're allowing people to use it to express themselves, therefore you have to be gelled. I don't understand the logic here. What do you think they're actually afraid of at this point? What's the motivation here?

I think if somebody is trying to push a false premise on the world, then that premise can be undermined with public dialog, then they will be opposed to public dialog on that premise because they wish that false premise to prevail. Right. So that's, I think, the issue there is if they don't like the truth, then we want to suppress it. Now, what we're trying to do with the X Corp is, I distinguish that from my son, who's also called X. You have parental goals, and then you have goals for the company. Everything's just called X, basically. It's a very difficult disambiguation. The car, the sun. Yeah, it's X everything. What we're trying to do is simply adhere to the the laws in a country. If something is illegal in the United States or if it's illegal in Europe or Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down or we'll suspend the account because we're not there to make the laws. But if speech is not illegal, then what are we doing? Okay, now we're injecting ourselves as a sensor and where does it stop and who decides? Where does that path lead?

I think it leads to a bad place. If the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different. But otherwise, we're going to obey the law in each jurisdiction.Right. Some of these EuropeanThat's it. It's not more complicated. We're not trying to fill out the law. I'm going to be clear about that. We're trying to adhere to the law. If the laws change, we will change. And if the laws don't change, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law.

It's pretty straightforward.Yes, it's very straightforward.Yes.

It's very straightforward. If somebody doesn't think we're not adhering to law, well, they can file a lawsuit.

Bingo. Also very straightforward. Yes. I mean, there are European countries that don't want people to promote Nazi propaganda. Yes. They have some sensitivity to it.

It is illegal.

It is illegal in those countries. In those countries, if somebody puts that up, you take it down. Yes. But they typically file something and say, TYeah.

No, in some cases, it is just obviously illegal. You don't need to file a lawsuit for... If something is just unequivocally illegal, we can literally read the law. This highlights the law. Anyone can see that. If somebody is stealing, you don't need... Let me check the law on that. Okay. No, they're stealing stuff. That was in San Francisco. Let's talk about it.

We had JD Vance here this morning. He did a great job. And One of the things is there's this image on X of basically you, Bobby, Trump, and JD, or the Avengers, I guess. Then there's another meme where you're in front of a desk where it says DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency.

Yes, I posted that one. Tell us about it. I made it using the Groch image generator, and I posted it. Tell us about the... And printed it to my profile. Seed for Efficiency.

How do you even do it?

Well, I think with great difficulty. But it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations. The last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early '80s. We were 40 years away from a serious effort to remove regulations that don't serve the greater good and reduce the size of government. I think it's just if we don't do that, then what's happening is that we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal. That's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States. If you look at the absurdity of the California high-speed rail, I think they spent $7 billion and have a 1,600-foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it. I mean, your tax dollars at work. I mean, that's the expense of 1,600 feet of concrete. I mean, I think it's like, I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was not an optimist. But at the current trend, California Highspeed rail might finish sometime next century.

Maybe, but probably not.

We're justIt'll have teleportation by that time.

Yeah, exactly. Ai do everything at that point. I think you really think of the United States and many countries, it's arguably worse than the EU, as being like Gulliver tied down by a million little strings. Any one given regulation is not that bad, but you've got a million of them, or millions, actually. Then eventually, you just can't get anything done. This is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people. It's just they don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations. I'll give you a recent example that is just insane, is that, like SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for, they claimed, dumping potable water on the ground, drinking water. We're like, This is at Starbase. We're in a tropical thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. There was no actual harm done. It was just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff, and there's zero harm done. They agree, yes, there's zero harm done. We're like, Okay, so there's no harm done. But you want us to pay $140,000 fine? It's like, Yes, because you didn't have a permit. Okay. We didn't know there was a permit needed for zero harm, fresh water being on the ground in a place that where fresh water falls from the sky all the time.

Got it. Next to the ocean.

Next to the ocean.

Because there's a little bit of water there, too.

Yeah. It's hard because it rains so much, the roads are flooded. So we're like, How does this make any sense? And then they were like, Well, we're not going to process any more of your applications for launch, for Starship launch, unless you pay this $140,000. They just ran some dust. They were like, Okay, so we paid $140,000. But it's like, this is no good. At this rate, we're never going to get to Mars.

I mean, that's the confounding part here is We're acting against our own self-interest. When you look at, we do have to make, putting aside, fresh water. But hey, the rocket makes a lot of noise. So I'm certain there's some complaints about noise once in a while, But sometimes you want to have a party or you want to make progress, and there's a little bit of noise. Therefore, we trade off a little bit of noise for massive progress or even fun. So when did we stop being able to make those trade offs? But talk about the difference between California and Texas, where you and I now reside. Texas, you were able to build the Gigafactory. I remember when you got the plot of land. It seemed like it was less than two years when you had the party to open it. Yeah.

From start of construction to completion was 14 months.

Fourteen?

Fourteen months.

Is there anywhere on the planet that would go faster? Is China faster than that?

China was 11 months.

Got it. So Texas, China, 11 and 14 months.

California, how many months? And just give you a sense of size, the Tesla Gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon.

Which was the biggest building in America.

No, there are bigger buildings, but the Pentagon is a pretty big one. Yeah, where it was the biggest at the time. In units of Pentagon, it's like three.

Okay, three Pentagons and counting. Yeah.

Got it. In 14 months. Just the regulatory approvals in California would have taken two years. So that's the issue.

Where do you think the regulation helps? For the people that will say, We need some checks and balances. We can't have some... Because for every good actor like you, there'll be a bad actor. So where is that line then?

I have a... In doing sensible deregulation and reduction in the size of government is just be very public and say, Which of these rules do you... If the public is really excited about a rule and wants to keep it, we'll just keep it. Here, the thing about the rule is if the rule turns out to be a bad, we'll just put it right back. Okay, and then problem solved. It's easy to add rules, but we don't actually have a process for getting rid of them. That's the issue. There's no garbage collection for rules.

When we were watching you work, David and I, and Antonio in that first month at Twitter, which was all hands on deck, and you were doing zero-based budgeting, you really quickly got the cost under control. And then miraculously, everybody said, this site will go down, and you added 50 more features. So maybe explain, because this is the first time-Yeah, there were so many articles like that this Twitter is dead forever.

There's no way it could possibly even continue at all. It was almost like the press was rooting for you to fail. It was like, all right, let's write the obitury. Here's the obitury. They were all saying their goodbye's on Twitter.

Remember that? Yeah. They were all leaving and saying their goodbyes because the site was going to melt down.

Yes, they totally failed. All the journalists left.

If you ever want to hang out with a bunch of hall monitors. Oh, my God, Threads is amazing. Every time I go over there and post, they're really triggered.

If you like being condemned repeatedly, for reasons that make no sense, then Threads is the way to go.

Really, it's the most miserable place on Earth. If Disney is the happiest, this is the anti-Disney. But if we were to go into government, you went into the Department of Education, or pick the Department, you've worked with a lot of them, actually. You can't go in there in zero-based budget. Okay, we get it. But if you could just pair 2, 3, 4, 5% of those organizations, what impact would that have?

Yeah, I think we'd need to do more than that.

I think Ideally, compounding every year, 2, 3% a year. I mean, it would be better than what's happening now.

Yeah. Look, I think if Trump wins, and obviously, I expect there are people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen, but we do have an opportunity to do a once in a lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of Because the other thing, besides the regulations, America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly. And everyone seems to be whistling past the graveyard on this one.

They're all grabbing the silverware. Everyone stuff in their pockets in the silverware before the Titanic sinks.

Well, the Defense Department budget is a very big budget. It's a trillion dollars a year, DOD, Intel. It's a trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year, just in interest and rising. We're adding a trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay somehow every three months. And then soon it's going to be every two months, and then every month. And then the only thing we'll to pay is interest. It's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt. This does not have a good ending. How can it-So we have to reduce the spending.

Let me ask one question because I've brought this up a lot, and the counterargument I hear, which I disagree with, but the counterargument I hear from a lot of politicians is if we reduce spending, because right now, if you add up federal, state, and local government spending, it's between 40 and 50% of GDP. So nearly half of our economy is supported by government spending, and nearly half of people in the United States are dependent directly or indirectly on government checks, and either through contractors that the government pays or they're employed by a government entity. So if you go in and you take too hard an act too fast, you will have significant contraction job loss, and recession. What's the Balancing Act, Elon? Just thinking realistically, because I'm 100% on board with you. The next set of steps, however, assume Trump wins and you become the chief DOGE. Doge. Like Double G. I think the challenge is how quickly can we go in? How quickly can things change? Without Without...

I like that on my business card.

Without all the contraction and job loss. You're a mascot. Yeah. I guess, how do you really address it when so much of the economy and so many people's jobs and livelihoods are dependent on government spending?

Well, I do think it's a false dichotomy. It's not like no government spending is going to happen. You really have to say, is it the right level? And just remember that any given person, if they are doing things in a less efficient organization versus more efficient organization, their contribution to the economy, their net output of goods and services will reduce. I mean, you've got a couple of clear examples between East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea. North Korea, they're starving. South Korea, it's amazing. It's the future.

It's the compounding effect of productivity gains.

Yeah, it's night and day. And so in the North Korea, you've got 100 % government. In South Korea, you've got probably, I don't know, 40 % government. It's not zero. And yet you've got a standard of living that is probably 10 times higher in South Korea. At least. At least, exactly. And then East and West Germany. In West Germany, you had, just thinking in terms of cars, you had BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, and East Germany, which is a random line on a map. The only car you could get was a Trebant, which is basically a lawn with a shell on it. It was extremely unsafe. There was a 20-year wait. You put your kid on the But they're going to get there. As soon as they're conceived. Even then, only, I think, a quarter of people maybe got this lousy car. That's just an interesting example of basically the people, different operating system. It's not like West Germany was a capitalist heaven. It's quite socialist, actually. When you look, probably it was half government in West Germany and 100% government in East Germany. And again, call it at least a 5 to 10 X standard of living difference, and even qualitatively, vastly better.

And it's obviously, sometimes people have these amazingly in this modern era, this debate as to which system is better. Well, I'll tell you which system is better. The one that doesn't need to build the wall to keep people in. That's how you can tell. It's a dead giveaway.Spoiler alert.Dead giveaway. Are they climbing the wall to get out or come in? You have to build a barrier to keep people in. That is the bad system. It wasn't West Berlin that built the wall. They were like, Anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead. Speaking of walls. If you look at the flux of boats from Cuba, there's a large number of boats from Cuba, and there's a bunch of free boats that anyone can take to go back to Cuba. They're empty on the way back. Plenty of seats. There's like, Hey, wow, an abandoned boat. I could use this boat to go to Cuba, where they have communism. Awesome. Yes. And yet nobody picks up those boats and does it. Amazing.

He's given us a lot of thought.

Yeah. Wait, so your point is jobs will be created. If we cut government spending in half, jobs will be created fast enough to make up for...

Right, just to count it. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that people had immediately tossed out with no severance and now can't pay their mortgage. Then you see some reasonable off-ramp. Transition plan. Yeah. So reasonable off-ramp where they're still receiving money but have a year or two to find jobs in the private sector, which they will find. And then they will be in a different operating system. Again, you can see the difference. East Germany was incorporated into West Germany. Living standards in East Germany rose dramatically.

In four years, if you could shrink the size of the government with Trump, what would be a good target? Just in terms of like, ballpark.

Are Are you trying to get me assassinated before this even happens?

No, no.

Pick a low number. I mean, there's that old phrase go postal. I mean, it's like they might. Yeah. So we'll keep the post office. I'm going to need a half a security details, guys. Yes. The zero number of just grandhold workers for former government employees is quite a scary number.

I mean, I might not make it. I was saying low digits every year for four years would be palatable.

Yeah, and I like your idea of an offering. But the thing is that if it's not done, if you have a once in a lifetime or once in a generation opportunity, and you don't take serious action, and then you have four years to get it done, and then if it doesn't get done, then-How serious is Trump about this?

You've talked to him about it.

Yeah. Yeah, he is very serious about it. Got it. No, I think actually the reality is that if we get rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector, we will have immense prosperity, and I think we will have a golden age in this country, and it'll be fantastic.

Can we talk about the Bayesack?

You have a bunch of critical milestones coming up.

Yeah. In fact, there's a very exciting launch that is maybe happening tonight. So if the weather is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to Cape Canaveral for the Polaris Dawn mission, which is a private mission, so funded by Jared Isaacman, and he's a awesome guy. This will be the first time, the first commercial for spacewalk, and it'll be at the highest altitude since Apollo. So it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone.

What comes after that. Let's assume that's successful.

I sure hope so, man. No pressure. Yeah, we were... Astronaut prior Or astronaut safety is… Man, if I had all the wishes I could say about, that would be the one to put it on. So space is dangerous. So the Yeah, the next milestone after that would be the next flight of Starship, which… The next flight of Starship is ready to fly. We are waiting for regulatory approval. It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than the paper can move from one desk to another.

That stamp is really hard.Approved.Yeah..

Have you ever seen that movie Zutopia? You ever see that movie Zutopia? Approved. You ever see that movie Zutopia? There's like a sloth. Coming in for the approval.

Yeah, they accidentally tell a joke, and I was like, Oh, no, this is good.Oh, no, here we go. This is going to take a long time. Sorry. But yeah, Zutopia... The funny thing is, I went to the DMV about, I don't know, a year later after Zutopia, and to get my license renewal. And the guy, in an exercise of incredible self-awareness, had the sloth from Zutopia in his...In his cube? In his cube, and he was actually Swift. Yeah.

With the mandate, Beat the sloth.Beat.

Personal agency.Beat personal agency.

No, I mean, sometimes people think the government is more competent than it is. I'm not saying that there aren't competent people in the government. They're just in an operating system that is inefficient. Once you move them to a more efficient operating system, their output is dramatically greater, as we've seen when East Germany was reintegrated with West Germany, and the same people were vastly more prosperous with a basically half capitalist operating system. But I mean, for a lot of people, maybe most direct experience with the government is the DMV. And then the important thing to remember is the government is the DMV at scale.Right.That's the government.Got the mental picture.How much do you want to scale it? Yeah.

Sorry, can you go back to Chamov's question on Starship? You announced just the other day Starship going to Mars in two years. Yeah, by the way. Yeah. And then four years for a crude aspirational launch in the next window. And how much is the government involved?

I'm not saying like, say you're watched by these. But based on our current progress, where with Starship, we were able to successfully reach oval velocity twice, we were able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in in water. And that's despite the ship having half its flaps cooked off. You see the video on the X platform. It's quite exciting. We think we'll be able to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. The fundamental Holy Grail breakthrough for Rocketry, the fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multi-planetary is a rapidly reusable, reliable rocket. With a pirate somehow. Throw a pirate in there. Starship is the first rocket design where success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. For any given project, you have to say, this is the circle, so we've got a band diagram. Here's the circle, and it is success, the success dot in the circle, is success in the set of possible outcomes. That sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where that success is not in the set of possible outcomes. Starship not only is full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch.

And I'm confident it will succeed. It's simply a matter of time. And if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. So that would be very helpful. And in fact, if something isn't done about reducing regulation and speeding up approvals, and to be clear, I'm not talking about anything unsafe. It's simply the processing of the safe thing can be done as fast as the rocket is, but not slower, then we could become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species, and be out there among the stars in the future. It's incredibly important that we have things that we find inspiring, that you look to the future and say, The future is going to be better than the past. Things to look forward to. Kids are a good way to assess this. What are kids fired up about? If you could say, you could be an astronaut on Mars. You could maybe one day go beyond the Solar System. We could make Star Trek, Starfleet Academy, real. That is an exciting future. That is inspiring. You need things that move your heart. Fuck, yeah. Fuck, yeah. Let's do it.

Life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. There's got to be things that you look forward to as well. Yeah.

Do you think you might have to move it to a different jurisdiction and to move faster? I've always wondered if like...

Rocket technology is considered an advanced weapons technology, so we can't just go do it.In.

Another country?Yes. Yeah, interesting. And if we don't do it, other countries could do it. I mean, they are so far behind us, but theoretically, there's a national security justification here If somebody can put their thinking caps on, do we want to have this technology that you're building, the team's working so hard on, stolen by other countries, and then maybe they don't have as much red tape.

I wish people were trying to steal it. So No one's trying to steal it. It's just too crazy, basically.

And that's for you. Yeah, it's way too crazy.

Elon, what do you think is going on that led to Boeing building the Star Line the way that they did? They were able to get it up.

But not complete.

But can't complete. They can't finish. Can't finish.

I don't understand. And now you're going to have to go up and finish.

I think Boeing is a company that is… They actually do so much business with the government. They have an impedence match to the government. They're basically one notch away from the government. They're not far from the government from an efficiency standpoint because they derive so much of their revenue from the government. A lot of people think, Well, SpaceX is super dependent on the government, and I actually know most of our revenue is commercial. I think at least up until perhaps recently, because I have a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory. The CEO before that, I think, had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory and didn't know how airplanes flew. I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes planes fly and a spacecraft go to orbit, then it can't be a total mystery as to how they work. Yeah. You know, I'm like, Sure, if somebody is running Coke or Pepsi and they're great at marketing or whatever, that's fine because it's not a technology-dependent business. Or if they're running financial consulting in their degrees in accounting, that makes sense. But I think if you're the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse.Pretty.

Basic.yeah..

Yeah.

It's great to have you.

It's It's disconcerting if the cavalry captain just falls off the horse.He's scared of horses.I'm sorry, I'm scared of horses. It gets on backwards. I'm like, Ops.

Shifting gears to AI. Peter was here earlier, and he was talking about how so far, the only company to really make money off AI is NVIDIA with the chips. Do you have a sense yet of where you think the big applications will be from AI? Is it going to be an enabling self-driving? Is it going to be enabling robots? Is it transforming industries? It's still, I think, early in terms of where the big business impact is going to be. Do you have a sense yet?

I think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of… It does run ahead of the revenue right now. There's no question about that. But the rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen by far. It's I mean, for example, a Turing test used to be a thing. Now, your basic open-source random LLM, you're writing on a frigging rasberry pie, it probably could be the Turing test. I think actually the good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where There is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone can have whatever they want, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is a manufactured good or provided service will, I think, with the admin of AI plus robotics, that the cost of goods and services will to zero. I'm not saying it'll be actually zero, but everyone will be able to have anything they want. That's the good future, of course. In my view, that's probably 80% likely. Look on the bright side. 20% probably of anallysms. It's nothing.

Is the 20% like, what does that look like?

I don't know, man. Frankly, I do have to go I'm engaged in some degree of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI in order to sleep well, and even then. Because I think the actual issue, the most likely issue is like, well, how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do a bit better? That is perhaps the bigger challenge. Although at this point, I know more and more people who are retired, and they seem to enjoy that life. So But I think that maybe there'll be some crisis of meaning because the computer can do everything you can do, but better. So maybe that'll be a challenge. But really, you need the end effectors. You need the autonomous cars, and you need the humanoid robots or your general purpose robots. But once you have general purpose humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles, really, you can build anything. I think that there's no actual limit to the size of the economy. There's obviously the mass of Earth, like that there will be alone, one limit. But the economy is really just the average productivity per person times number of people.

That's the economy. If you've got humanoid robots that can do... Where there's no real limit on the number of humanoid robots, and they can operate very intelligently, then there's no actual limit to the economy. There's no meaningful limit to the It's what it would be.

You guys just turned on Colossus, which is the largest private compute cluster, I guess, of GPUs anywhere.

Is that right? It's the most powerful supercomputer of any kind.

Which speaks to what David said and what Peter said, which is a lot of the economic value so far of AI has entirely gone to NVIDIA. But there are people with alternatives, and you're actually one with an alternative. Now, you have a very specific case because Dojo is really about images and large images, huge video.

Yeah, the Tesla problem is different from the LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence is actually... And what matters in the AI is different to the point you just made, which is that in Tesla's case, the context length is very long. So we've got gigabytes of context. Gigabytes of context windows, yeah. Yeah, you've got I was just bringing it up? Billions of tokens of context, nutty amount of context because you've got seven cameras, and if you've got several, let's say, you've got a minute of several hi-def cameras, then that's gigabytes. So you need to compress. The Tesla problem is you got to compress a gigantic context into the pixels that actually matter and condense that over a time. So you've got to, in both the time dimension and the space dimension, you've got to compress the pixels in space and the pixels in time and then have We had that inference done on a tiny computer, relatively speaking, a small, a few hundred watts. It's a Tesla-designed AI inference computer, which is, by the way, still the best. There isn't a better thing we could buy from suppliers. Drives. So the Tesla-designed AI inference computer that's in the cars is better than anything we could buy from any supplier.

Just by the way, that's a... The Tesla AI chip team is extremely good.

You guys, in the design, there was a technical paper and there deck that somebody on your team from Tesla published, and it was stunning to me. You designed your own transport control layer over Ethernet. You were like, Ethernet's not good enough for us. You have this TT CoE or something, and you're like, Oh, we're just going to reinvent Ethernet and string these chips. It's pretty incredible stuff that's happening over there.

Yeah. No, the Tesla chip design team is extremely good.

But is there a world where, for example, other people over time that need some video use case or image use case? Because theoretically, you'd say, Oh, why not? I have some extra cycles over here. It should make you a competitor of Nvidia. It's not intentionally, per se.

Yeah, There's this training and inference, and we do have those two projects at Tesla. We've got Dojo, which is the training computer, and then our inference chip, which is in every car inference computer. At Dojo, we've only had Dojo one. Dojo two is... We should have Dojo two in volume towards the end of next year. That will be, we think, comparable to a B200-type system, a training system. I guess there's some potential for that to be used as a service. Dojo is just… I guess I have some improved confidence in Dojo. But I think we won't really know how good Dojo is until probably version 3. It usually takes three major iterations on a technology for it to be We'll only have the second major iteration next year. The third iteration, I don't know, maybe late '26 or something like that.

How's the Optimus project going? I remember when we talked last, and you said this publicly, that it's in doing some light testing inside the factory. It's actually being useful. What's the build of materials for something like that at scale? When you start making it like you're making the Model 3 and there's a million of them coming off the factory line, what would they cost? $20, $30, $40, $1,000, you think?

I've discovered that really that anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its materials. I should say, some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property and paying for patents and stuff. So a lot of what's in a The chip is paying royalties and depreciation of the chip fab. But the actual marginal cost of the chips is very low. Optimus, obviously, is a humanoid robot. It weighs much less and it's much smaller than a car. You could expect that in high volume. I'd say that you also probably need three production versions of Optimus. You need to refine the design three At least three major times, and then you need to scale production to the million-unit plus per year level. I think at that point, the labor and materials on Optimus is probably not much more than $10,000.

Yeah, and that's a decade-long journey, maybe.

Basically, think of it like, Optimus will cost less than a small car. Right. At scale volume with three major iterations of technology. If a small car costs $25,000, it's probably $20,000 for an Optimus for a Humanoid robot that can be your buddy, like a combination of R2D2 and C3PO, but better. Yeah. I mean... Honestly, I think people are going to get really attached to their Humanoid robot because you look at what Star Wars, it's like R2D2 and C3PO. I love those guys. They're awesome. And their personality. I mean, all R2 could do is just beef at you. Can't even speak English. You see three of you to translate the beep.

So you're in year two of that. If you did two or three years per iteration or something, it's a decade long journey for this to hit some scale.

I would say major iterations are less than two years. It's probably on the order of five years, maybe six to get to a million units a year.

And at that price point, everybody can afford one on planet Earth. I mean, it's going to be that one to one, two to one? What do you think ultimately, if we're sitting here in 30 years, the number of robots on the planet versus humans?

Yeah, I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans.Vastly, yeah.Vastly exceed. You have to say, who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. Totally. Especially if it can take your dog for a walk, it could mow the lawn, it could watch your kids, it could teach your kids, it could...

But we could also send it to Mars. Yeah, absolutely. We could send a lot of robots to Mars to do the work needed to make make it a colonized planet for humans.

And Masl is already the robot planet. There's a whole bunch of robots, like rovers and helicopter. It's only robots. Yes, it's only robots. I think the useful humanoid robot opportunity is the single biggest opportunity ever. Because if you assume like, I mean, the ratio of humanoid to humans is going to be at least two to one, maybe three to one, because everybody will want one. And then there'll be a bunch of robots that you don't see that are making goods and services.

And you think it's one generalized robot that then learns how to do different tasks? Yeah.

Hey,i mean, we are a generalized... Yeah, we're a generalized, non-robot. We're just made of meat.Yeah, exactly. We're a meat butt, a generalized meat butt. Yeah, I'm operating my meat puppy. So we are actually... We're going to have it to market. And by the way, it turns out, as we're designing Optimus, we learn more and more about why humans are shaped the way they're shaped, and why we have five fingers, and why your little finger is smaller than your index finger. Obviously, why you have opposable thumbs, but also why, for example, the muscles, the major muscles that operate your hand are actually in your forearm, and your fingers are Primarily operated. The muscles that actuate your fingers are located... The vast majority of your finger strength is actually coming from your forearm, and your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings. And so the current version of the Optimus hand has the actuators in the hand and has only 11 degrees of freedom. So it doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, roughly 25 degrees of freedom. And it's also not strong enough in certain ways because the actuators have to fit in the hand.

The next generation Optimus hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm just like a human, and they operate the fingers through cables, just like the human hand. The next generation hand has 22 degrees of freedom, which we think is enough to do almost anything that a human can do.

Presumably, I think it was written that X and Tesla may work together and provide services. But my immediate thought went to, Oh, if you just provide a groch to the robot, then the robot has a personality and can process voice and video and images and all of that stuff.

That's where we wrap here. I think everybody talks about all the projects you're working on, but people don't know you have a great sense of humor.

That's not true.

Oh, you do. People don't see it, but I would say I know for me, the funniest week of my life, or one of the funniest, was when you did SNL and I got to tag along. Maybe you saw it. Maybe behind the scenes, some of your funniest recollections of that chaotic, insane week when we laughed for 12 hours a day. It was a little terrorizing on the first couple of days.

Yeah, I was a bit worried in the beginning there because frankly, nothing was funny. Jay, The one was rough. Rough? Yeah.

It's like a rule, but can't you guys just say it? Just say the stuff that got on the cutting.

The funniest skits were the ones that didn't let you do.

That's what I'm saying. Can you just say it? There were a couple of funny ones, yeah, that they didn't like to do.

You can say it so that he doesn't get them.

How much time do we have here?

We should just give him one or two because it was... In your mind, which one do we regret most not getting on air?

You really want to hear that? I mean...

I mean, it was a little spicy. It was a little funny.

Okay.

Here we go.

All right, here we go, guys. All right. So one of the things that I think everyone's been wondering this whole time is, is Saturday Night Live actually live? Like Live. Live, live, live. Or do they have a delay or just in case there's a warbrobe, a malfunction or something like that. Is it like a five-second delay? What's really going on? But there's a way to test this.Right.We came up with a way.It was a way to test this, which is we don't tell them what's going on. I walk on and said, This is the script I'll throw on the ground. We're going to find out tonight, right now, if Saturday Night Live.If Saturday Night Live, is actually live. The way that we're going to do this is I'm going to take my cock out.

This is the greatest pitch ever.

If you see my cock, you know it's true. And if you don't, it's been a lie.

A lie. All these years.

All these years, Now, this is-We're going to bust them right now.

We're pitching this.

Yeah, so we're pitching this.On Zoom.Yeah, we're pitching this on Zoom on Monday. It's COVID. We're hung over from the weekend. We're pitching this at noon. We're in Miami. Jason is on. Mike and you.Yeah, and Mike. It's essentially got what my friends, I think, are quite funny. Jason is quite funny. I think Jason Jason is the closest thing to Cartman that exists in the real life.

We have this joke going that he's Butters and I'm Cartman.

Yeah. And then my friend Mike's pretty funny, too. So So we come in like just like...Guns blazing.Guns blazing with ideas. And we didn't realize, actually, that's not how it works. That's normally like actors, and they just get told what to do. I'm like, oh, you mean we can't just do funny things that we thought of? What?

They're watching this, and on the Zoom, they're agaced at Elon's pitch.

Yeah, it's silence. And I was like, Is this thing working? No, exactly. Are we muted? Is our mic on? And they're like, We hear you. And then after a long silence, Mike just says the word crickets. Crickets?

And they're not laughing.

They're not even going to chugle.I'm like, What's going on here?

Then Elon explains the punchline, which Which is?

Exactly. So there's more to it. Okay. That's just the beginning. So Elon says... So then I'm like, I said, I'm going I'm going to reach down.

Into my pants.

Into my pants. I stuck my hand on my pants, and I'm going to pull my car, and I tell this to the audience, and the audience is going to be like, What? Right. And then I pull out a baby rooster. It's like, okay, this is PG. It's not that bad. It's like, this is my tiny cock. It's like, What do you think? Do you think it's a nice cock?I like it.And I pitch.

I'm like, And then Kate McKennan walks out.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm like, Oh, no, but you haven't heard half of it until Kate McKinnon comes out.Yeah.And she says, Elon, I expected you would have a bigger cock.

Yeah. I don't mean to disappoint you, Kate, but yeah, But I hope you like it anyway. But Kate's got to come out with her cat. Okay. Right. Kate says... You can see where this is going. And I say, Nice. Wow, that's a nice pussy you've got there, Kate. Wow, that's amazing. It looks a little wet. Was it raining outside? And then, do you mind if I stroke your pussy? Is that cool? It's like, Oh, no, Elon, actually, can I hold your cock? Of course, Kate, you definitely hold my cock. And then we exchange. And I think just the audio version of this is pretty good. Right. And it's just like, Wow, I really like stroking your cock. And I was like...

And then Elon says, I'm really enjoying stroking your pussy.

Yes, of course. Yeah, so...

They're looking at us like, Oh, my God, what have we done inviting these lunatics on the program?

Yeah, they said, Well, it is Mother's Day.

It's Mother's Day. We might not want to go with this one.

A lot of moms in the audience. I'm like, Well, that's a good point. Fair, fair. It might be a bit uncomfortable for all the moms in the audience, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they'll dig it. Maybe they'll like it.

Yeah, that was... That's the cold open that didn't make it. We didn't get that on the air. But we did fight for Doge.

Yes.

And we got Doge on the air.

There's a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. They have these cue cards for what you're supposed to say, and I just didn't say it. I just went off the rails. Yeah. They didn't see that coming. Yeah, it's live.Well, it's live.

So Elon wanted to do Doge. This is the other one. He wanted to do Doge on late night, and he says, Hey, Jake, how can you make sure?

Oh, yeah. I wanted to do the Doge father. You redo that scene from the godfather. You need the music to queue things up. You'll bring me on my daughter's wedding. Listen, you ask for Doge. Yeah, you got Marlon Brando in the scene.I give you Bitcoin, but you want Doge. Exactly. You really got to set the mood. You got to have a tuxedo. This whole concept of the Doge father. You got to have like Marlon Brando. You come to me on this day of my Doge's wedding, and you ask me for your private keys. Are you even a friend? You call me the Doge father. That's potential.

That had great potential. So they come to me, and I'm talking to Colin and Joe, who's got a great sense of humor, and he's He's amazing. He loves Elon. And he's like, We can't do it because of the law and stuff like that. The law? The law and the liability. So I said, It's okay. Elon called Comcast, and he put in an offer, and they just accepted it. He just bought NBC, so it's fine. Colin Jones looks at me, I've sold this so good. And he's like, You're serious? I'm like, Yeah, we own NBC now.

He's like, Okay, well, that changes things, doesn't it?

I'm like, Absolutely. We're a go on Doge. Then he's like, You're fucking with me. I'm like, I'm fucking with you.

Or are we? Or are we?

It was the greatest we Week of... And that is like two of 10 stories. Yeah, we got to-We'll save the other eight. But it was just so happy for you to see you have a great week of just joy and fun and letting go because you were launching Rockets. You're dealing with so much bullshit in your life. To have those moments, to share them and just laugh. It was just so great. More of those moments. I think we got to get you back on SNL. Who wants to back on SNL one more time? All right, ladies and gentlemen, our bestie, Elon Musk. Thank you.