Elon, welcome. You're in Palo Alto, I understand.
Yes, I'm at Global Engineering Headquarters in Palo Alto.
Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm actually going to start somewhere a little bit differently than I expected because I just saw
on a
little announcement and would love to get your thoughts on it. I see you're interviewing Rhonda Sanchez tomorrow morning. Is that right on Twitter Spaces? I see
Yes. It's I need to look at the exact time, but oh, tomorrow morning your time, think it would be probably correct.
Okay.
So yes. I we'll be interviewing Ron DeSantis and he has quite an announcement to make. And we'll be it'll be the first time that something like this is happening on social media and with real time questions and answers, not not scripted. So it's gonna be live and let let let her up. Let's see what happens.
And you've been tweeting some Tim Scott stuff in the last few days. What should we be thinking about who you're backing? Obviously, interview tells us something. Can you give us a sense of where your thinking is at the moment?
Yes. Mean, I'm not at this time planning to endorse any particular candidate. But I am interested in xTwitter being somewhat of a public town square and where more and more organizations host content and make announcements on Twitter. It's the it's the only place in the Internet to really get real time, like, down to the minute and second news. And it's yeah. So I I think it's it's quite groundbreaking that there'd be a major announcement of of this type on social media.
And should we expect sorry, don't want to go on too long about this, but in your new role as interviewer rather than interviewee, should we expect more of this? I mean if it's the town square, are you going to be interviewing other candidates, Democrats? What's your thought of this? Are people willing to come? Are you going to be there to execute the town square across the spectrum?
Yes, absolutely. So just as I promised when I do a series of media interviews, I did a range of interviews. And I guess this would be also a media interview. So ranging from sort of on on the, you know, left moderate to what's considered right. And I do think it's important that Twitter be have both the reality and the perception of level playing field of a place where all voices are heard and where there's the kind of dynamic interaction that is you don't really see anywhere else. I mean, today on Twitter, for example, AOC got into an Ted Cruz got into an argument on Twitter, which was independent of which side you agree with, it's still very entertaining.
So what and I'm sure tomorrow will be entertaining. We're all going to be tuned into that. But when you approach an interview like that and obviously a really important election like the one that is coming up, can you just talk a little bit about what are the key issues that really matter for you at this pivotal moment?
You mean matter for me as an individual or
Matter for you as an individual in terms of who leads the country, but also more broadly than that for the country and for your businesses. I mean can you give your sense of where the real issues lie here?
Well, I've said publicly that my preference, and I think it would be the preference of most Americans, is really to have someone fairly normal in office. I think we'd all be quite quite happy with that actually. You know, I think someone that is representative the moderate views that I think most of the country holds in reality. And but the way things are set up is that we do have a system that seems to push things towards the edges because of the primaries. So in order to win the primary you've got to win obviously majority of your party's vote. In both cases, that tends to cause a swing to the left and the right, although I think things are more complex than simply left and right during the primaries and then a shift towards the center for the general election. As for what I think is yeah, so I'd really just like someone fairly normal and sensible to be President. That would be great.
So if we go through the four names in the frame at the moment, can you just give us sort of yes, no and whether they're normal and sensible? So we've got Joe Biden?
I mean, I think I think be careful about these statements. So I we'd maybe have to have a few drinks before I would give you the answers to all of them.
I will look forward to that and I look forward to the conversation tomorrow and obviously a lot more of those to come over the coming months. That's great. Thank you very much. So what I wanted to start with, you've just flown in, I think, the last twenty minutes. You live a pretty But hectic you've said that the only true currency is time. Can you give a sense to the people in this room who are scheduled within an inch of their lives, sort of how you what is a day in the life of Elon Musk? What does that look like?
Well, my days are very long and complicated, as you might imagine. And and there's great there's great deal of context switching. So there's me and my like, well, like, relating to doom where it's like fear is not the mind killer, context switching is. So switching context is is quite painful. But I do generally try to divide companies. So it's predominantly one company on one day. So today is a Tesla day, for example. Although I might end up at Twitter late tonight. And then tomorrow would be partly a Tesla day as well, but sort of half Twitter. And then Thursday would be sort of a half SpaceX, half Tesla day. But these things somewhat intertwine. So time management is extremely difficult. And this is going to sound pretty strange, but I only have one part time assistant.
How many days a week is that? The part time? I
mean, I suppose was the hour she works, who would technically be full time, but it's not I do most of the scheduling myself. And the reason I do that is because it's impossible for someone else to know what the priorities are. So the and since the most valuable thing I have is time, I schedule it myself for the most part.
So if you come into Tesla today, do you have a series of meetings set up? Or do you come in with something on your mind and you go in and see people? I mean how structured is this? If you shop at Twitter, in terms of the people working for you, how do they handle that?
Yes. So today, have several hours of scheduled meetings at Twitter. So there are a number of things that operate on a weekly cadence. And so those meetings are already set up. And then I have supplemental meetings at the end of the day. But to be clear, I won't be going to sleep until probably two a. M. Or something like that. I'll be working almost the entire time.
And if you're shaking this yourself, is AI going to be helpful over the next few years to help you do this? Are you going to be using technology to help you manage that?
I guess we'll all be using technology. I don't use a lot of AI myself day to day. I mean Tesla AI is actually very advanced for real world AI. It's the most advanced for real world AI by far. And in fact, if I if positions were swapped and it would say up to Microsoft and OpenAI to create to create the best large language model, or or or or if basically, if if the tasks were swapped, Tesla was given the the task of making the most competitive large language model and Microsoft OpenAI were tasked with self driving, Tesla would win.
Okay.
I don't think people understand the degree of the the capability of Tesla's AI system. So while I don't use AI a lot personally, Tesla uses TransMed.
We'll get onto that in a second if that's okay. But one final thing in terms of just the management of what you do with your life. You're running three very big companies. You have very big stakes and ownership control of two of those at least. What is your succession plan if you suddenly can't execute what you're doing both in terms of who runs the companies, but as importantly, who votes those shares in terms of what happens longer term and strategically. What have you got a plan for all of those?
Yeah. Succession is one of the toughest age old problems. It's plagued countries, kings, prime ministers and presidents for and CEOs for since the dawn of history. There is no obvious solution. I I mean, there there are particular individuals identified as that that I've told the board, look, if something happens to me unexpectedly, this is who this is my recommendation for taking over. So in all cases, the Board is aware of who my recommendation is, which they may choose to it's up to them, of course, they may choose to go different direction. But I there is a in the worst case scenario, this is who should run the company. The control question is a much more is a much tougher question and something that I'm wrestling with. And I'm frankly open to ideas because it certainly is true that the companies that I have created and are creating collectively possess immense capability. And so the stewardship of them is incredibly important. I wanna make sure that the stewardship is ultimately accrues to the benefit of humanity. That's the idea, is the furtherance of civilization. But not that we're always successful in that, but that is aspirationally our goal. So I I have I have one one idea which is sort of partly in place, which is to create kind of a and and a sort of a educational institution that that would control, like, most of my vote. But this is not a case of automatically I'm definitely not at the school of automatically giving my kids some share of the companies even if they not even if they have no interest or inclination or ability to manage the company. I think that's a mistake. But it's a very hard problem to solve. Then who should be on the Board of Directors of the educational institution is also a very, very hard job to solve. So I think probably some disaggregation of control would make sense. I'm really just kind of thinking out loud creatively here.
But it sounds like it's something that you need to get planning of who those people are going to be because as you've said, when you look at SpaceX, you look at Tesla, you look at Twitter, these matter to society a lot. And having the right people to take those votes on the future of where they go and where money gets spent is very important.
Yes, absolutely. Now the goals of the companies, the achievement of those goals varies considerably in difficulty. The original goal of Tesla was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, which actually I think we've done that to a significant degree. And actually, it's kind of it's of an order industry CEO is too often acknowledge Tesla's role in accelerating electric vehicles. And so that I feel has a lot of momentum. They're still solving self driving, which we're aspirationally hoping to do this year. And Tesla got long way to go, the execution plan is relatively clear. And that ex that execution plan will generate a lot of positive cash flow for the company. So it's like a it's a fairly obvious thing to do. With SpaceX, it's a harder problem because the long term objective is to make life multi planetary with a self sustaining city on Mars, which is likely to be very cash flow negative at first. A long term let's just say the target market on Mars is small. You got to think long term here.
You're also going to have to get on very well with those you go with, I would imagine.
Yes, definitely. Insanity will be a prime requirement for stability traveling to Mars. You don't want someone going nuts and opening the airlock in the middle of the night.
Right.
So so so SpaceX is a harder problem because it's it's much a long term goal and with a lot more money lost along the way. So we're going make sure that that happens.
Is that the sort of thing, just to stay on SpaceX, and we'll go to Twitter and Tesla in a second, is that the sort of thing that you'd like to lock in to the goals of SpaceX that Mars remains the ultimate ambition of this come what may? Is that that important to you?
Yes. I mean, it's to make life multi planetary such that and and the the key threshold for multi planetary is that if the supply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, that Mars does not die out. That's the that's the that's the critical great filter if you talk about things in terms of the Fermi Paradox. The great filter is Mars being self sustaining without any resupply shifts from Earth. Until we reach that point, we are really just a one planet civilization with an extension. But at the point at which the planets are self sustaining, or Mars is self sustaining, then even in a worst case scenario of Earth's civilization either dying with a bang or a whimper, then Mars would have a much better chance of surviving. So the intent here overall is to ensure the light of consciousness, which appears to be just a tiny candle in a vast darkness. I frequently get asked, have I seen any evidence of aliens? And I have not. Apart from the fact that I didn't, at one point, have an alien registration card when I was getting my green card. It said alien registration.
Indeed. Possibly a slightly different type of alien. But so do you think you'll will you live to see Mars happen?
I hope to live to see the first humans on Mars. But I think it will take some period of time beyond that to make Mars self sustaining. So it's at least twenty years from the first visit to make Mars sustaining is my guess. And it may be forty or fifty. And that's assuming you really go for it. So that's a tough one. But like I said, I think it's important for improving the survivability of civilization.
And who's going to pay for that? I mean, your investors going to put the money up to do that? Are you going to expect government to fund that? Where does that money come from? Because as you say, you can make a return on Starlink, can make a return on launching satellites for other people and space tourism, but I mean that's a tougher return, isn't it?
Yes. Think long term, the value of it will be incredibly high. I would just it's just beyond the planning horizon of most people or most investors. So I mean, obviously, if if if there's a thriving city on Mars and there's a lot of interplanetary commerce and SpaceX is the primary provider of that, it would be immensely valuable. So but but, you know, the one thing is that there'd be this self sustaining, colony. And I think we generally operate with much of an assumption that civilization is robust and nothing could really take it down. A sentiment that has been common throughout history among empires shortly before they crumble. So, and you know, I have to say that there's a little bit of late stage empire vibes going on right now.
Yes, that is for sure. Are you yes. Is AI something that, in your view, accelerates the risk of that or increases the risk of that outcome?
I think it does, yeah. We could definitely make a city of Mars self sustaining without AI or without sort of AGI, which is generally artificial general intelligence or super intelligence. So I think that that is it's it's not necessary for anything we're doing. But it is happening and happening very quickly. So there is a risk that advanced AI either eliminates or constrains humanity's growth.
I was more thinking the opposite. Does it increase the chance that the planet self implodes and those things come true? Are you I mean, how concerned are you about these developments right now sort of accelerating your bad case scenario here?
Well, I mean, the development of artificial digital sort of super intelligence is very much a double edged sword. So it's if you have if you have a genie that can grant you anything, that can also do anything, that necessarily is presents a danger. And I expect the first uses of AI to be certainly first common uses of AI to be web weapons technology. So just having more advanced weapons on the battlefield that can that can react faster than any human could. That's that's really what AI will be capable of. I mean, future wars between other countries advanced countries or at least countries that have significant drone capability will be very much the drone wars.
So I want to get back to AI because this is big stuff and I'd like to talk about it in more detail. But I do want to come just come back to the present from a long way in the future. You just hired a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an ad veteran into Twitter. You usually focus on hiring engineers. Linda is a very different person. Can you just quickly tell us about your courtship? How did that go down?
Well, we had conversations over a number of months just relating to advertising. And then Linda felt that it would be very helpful for the advertisers to see me in person, so invited me down to a conference in Miami, which was very helpful. And met with a number of advertisers personally to assure their you know, assure them that that Twitter is a good place to advertise. And generally, that in fact, that that hate speech has declined, which it has, and that the quality of the system with especially with respect to scammers and spammers is dramatically better than it used to be. We've gotten rid of, at this point, well over 90% of the scams and scams on the scams and spam on Twitter. So it should be quite rare at this point that you see a scam. We've also rolled out sort of free
So just to be clear, when you say you got rid of 90% of the scams, is that the same thing as the bots? Or is this scams in general and bots is a different animal here?
They would typically use bots for scamming.
But you haven't taken the bots down 90%?
No, I think we have actually.
You think you have? Okay.
I think we have, yes. But maybe more than 90%, 90% at least. It is now much, much harder to operate a bot form on Twitter and have it yield any advantage. So dramatic improvement in bots, dramatic improvement in ability to detect sort of troll armies, which is a little different. That's where you've got, say, 100 people in a warehouse in a low wage country, each of which are sitting at a desk with 100 phones. So you've got 10,000 actual people. And they will then act together to brigade a particular subject or make something seem very popular when it is not. And we've been able to defeat almost all of them. We think very few of them are actually still able to operate. The quality of the system has gotten a lot better.
Okay. So if you said to Linda that you are going to keep speaking your mind whatever the commercial impact of that and has she agreed to that? Is she happy with that you aligned? Yes. Okay. And in her role as CEO, does she have any say over moderation? Or is that under you? Or you do that together?
Well, the general principle is that we will hew close to the law. So for any given country, we will try to adhere as closely to the law as possible. Our law is varied between countries and we can't simply flock the law in another country because they will simply cut us off. So but the general principle is do whatever we can to enable free and open communications with between people provided they're not like so breaking the
And she's aligned on that plan? Yes. That focus?
Yes. There is an important thing which is like that obviously doesn't mean that say advertisers should be forced to appear next to any content. So we've also developed adjacency controls that ensure that if what you're advertising is like Disney for example is a big advertiser. If Disney is advertising a children's movie, they want the content nearby to be sort of family friendly. That's totally understandable. It's not like advertisers have to appear next to content that they don't agree with.
And can so some people say you can be a little erratic with your tweeting or at least tweet a broad range of content. Does anybody say I don't want to be adjacent to Elon Musk? Is something that's happened on the platform?
I've never heard that yet. Nope, never heard that. But it correct.
And did that come up with Linda at all, sort of what you tweet and whether that was something that could affect advertisers. Did she ask you about that?
She did it, in fact, at the conference that we did Right, in Miami okay. And her speech is paramount.
Fine. Wanted to ask you a little bit about your vision for Twitter as a community and as a conversation. You've talked about your desire to maximize unregretted time. You explain what that means and how you measure that?
Yes. So previously, Twitter was mostly focused on this number called they called MDAU, monetizable daily active users. But the problem is that when you look closely at that, a bunch of those users never even went to Twitter. They would go to they would see a notification on their phone about a tweet, but they wouldn't actually click through the site. So what really matters is true user seconds of screen time. So that's the figure we track right now. And that's based on the screen time as reported to us by iOS, Android and the browser. So it would be it would have to be the amount of time the app is in the foreground.
Right.
Which is the most rigorous way to assess this.
When you say unregretted, sorry, please keep going.
Exactly. So in terms of unregretted, it's that's a little harder to measure. But we can certainly gather it anecdotally, which is to say that if you spent half an hour on Twitter yesterday, what percentage of that time do you regret? And journaling the feedback I've gotten has been very positive that they find it the information to be useful, entertaining, funny. So we seem to be heading in the right direction as far as I can tell. I'm certainly open to any critiques from the room.
Well, let me ask you one on that, which is you recently tweeted about George Soros. You said me get
that. Well,
let me just get the words because I'm kind of interested in what you think about this. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization, Soros Hates Humanity. That obviously generated a huge amount of response on Twitter on both sides, lots of different viewpoints. Is that unregrettable time, unregretted time? That debate that you created, does that fit into that category, do you think?
Well, I mean, said like Soros reminds me of Magneto.
Well, You then went a little further than that. But again, going into the Soros tweet itself, you're obviously a big figure on Twitter and you're setting a tone and an aim. So I'm just curious as to whether that sort of debate which gets triggered, is that does that fit into the definition that you're trying to create in that new town square?
Well, I mean, I think the important thing is that, like, look, what I say is not is what I say. It's sort of a town square. I'm not going to mitigate what I say because that would be inhibiting freedom of speech. That doesn't mean you have to agree with what I say. What does it mean if somebody says the total opposite that they won't be supported on Twitter? They are. The point is to have a divergent set of views. And free speech is only relevant if it's speech by someone you don't like, who says something you don't like, is that allowed? If so, you have free speech. Otherwise, you do not. And for those who would advocate censorship, I would say it is if you succeed in that, it's only a matter of time before the censorship gets turned on you.
I agree. I mean, can that's your free speech definition which you said, but I'm just curious as to on the unregrettable part, what type of conversation you're trying to achieve and whether that's something that is acceptable but maybe not where you want the broader conversation to go?
Well, I mean I did clarify that some of my concerns about Soros are that he has funded a very large number of small but influential races around the country, especially with district attorneys. And we funded, for example, the LA and San Francisco district attorney races with Ches Bourdine and the guy I always want to call him Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, but I think it's Gaston. And basically, he's caused a large number of DAs to be elected who are very easy on crime and will often refuse to prosecute.
So you're basically trying to make a deeper point with that short?
Yes. Okay.
Can I just move on quickly to because I don't want go too far down that rabbit hole because that debate has played out on Twitter a bit? Is are you back near profitability now?
Twitter is not quite there, but we're not like when I first acquisition closed, I'd say it's analogous to being teleported into a plane that's plunging to the ground with its engines on fire and the controls don't work. It's comforting, to say the least. Now we had to do some pretty heavy handed bus cutting if company healthy. But at this point, we're trending towards if we get lucky, we might be cash flow positive next month, but it remains to be seen.
And is the staffing the level you now want it? Or are you going to start taking it back up again from this? It's gone from, I think, thousand to about 1,500 or something like that. Is that correct?
That's roughly correct, yes. I think there's definitely we are going to start adding people to the company and we have started adding some number of people to the company. And but it's still there's still a lot of change to happen. So I think 1,500 is probably a reasonable number.
And does this show what you can do in a big tech company in terms of cost reduction? I mean, when you look around other big tech companies in Silicon Valley, would you say from your experience that there's room for much more significant change at those as well?
Yeah. Think Twitter may be somewhat of an outlier in that there were a lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have a lot of value. And that's I think that's true probably at most Silicon Valley companies. Maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter, but it's still yeah. There's a potential for significant cuts, think, out of the companies without affecting their productivity, in fact, increasing their productivity. So any given company, are people who help move things forward and people who've sort of tried to slam the brakes on. And Twitter was in a situation where you'd have a meeting of 10 people, you know, and one person with an accelerator and nine with a set of brakes. So you didn't go very far. Right. And so now we're gung ho about releasing functionality even at a little bit of risk to site stability so long as it's not too serious. And I think at this point, it's probably fair to say we've introduced more functionality in the last six months than Twitter has in the last six years.
And in terms of outages, there were some outages early on. Are you confident things are stable now?
Outages are not unusual. Instagram recently had an outage, for example, it was reported on Twitter ironically. So we've had outages but not massive ones and they've generally been brief and limited in scope.
Okay. Do you regret buying it? You tried to get out of it? Or are you now happy you bought it?
Well, all's well that ends well. Has
it ended well yet? Or we still got to wait and see?
I think we're on the hopefully on the comeback arc.
So I mean one of the things you have talked about, you bought it for $44,000,000,000 You've talked about it one day being worth $250,000,000 I think in internal meetings. Can you just talk about how you get there? What is the bigger vision? I mean, you want to bring back advertisers now. And are they coming back, by the way?
Yes.
Yes. Can you give any idea of the scale of the comeback in terms of who you lost and who's coming back?
Well, I think it will be very significant. So the advertising agencies at this point of all lifted their warnings on Twitter. So I appreciate the fact that GroupM, for example, removed the sort of concern label over Twitter, which is a very big deal. And so I think at this point, expect almost all advertisers to return.
Okay.
We've also done a lot more to make the advertising more relevant to users so that we show users things that are they're more likely to be interested in buying. Sounds obvious, but
Right. That's what tends to happen, yeah.
Sounds super obvious. I mean, just just basic stuff like, if you do a search on Twitter, previously, the the search banner ad did not did not take the search terms into account, which is pretty insane. So just show a random ad.
Okay.
Whereas obviously, an ad that is matches your search terms.
Sounds worth doing. So just quickly, what is you've talked about the sort of single app that does messaging and does finance and
other things.
Mean can you just enlarge a little bit on sort of how you get there and why America wants that?
Well, obviously, would be up to people to decide if they want it. It's like, do we make something that is useful enough that you want to use it more frequently? Great. That's our goal. So we're not going to do anything just to stop you leaving the app or try to track them in the app, but just provide enough compelling functionality that over time people's usage of the platform grows.
So in ten years' time, is advertising still going to be dominant on Twitter?
I think advertising will always play a role. At some point, say ten years from now, it may not play the largest role, but it will play the largest role for at least a few years to come.
So I want to do a quick fire round of questions. Just imagine that you're late at night, you're sitting there tweeting a few rapid fire responses to stuff. And I'm just going ask you a few questions and if you can just give me short answers and then I want to go into AI and talk a little bit about some of the deeper points that you started making earlier. So first one, will Twitter be public again in five years?
I don't know.
Okay. Do you think the HQ will still be in San Francisco?
That's right.
Okay. Not good so far. Let's try a couple more. Which decade are we going to crack artificial general intelligence?
I think this one.
This one. Okay. So it's that soon. You going to take a SpaceX trip yourself?
I will at some point. Yeah. Not sure when, but Which it will be
is the most exciting country to build a Tesla plant in right now?
Well, did make an announcement that Mexico would be our next location outside The U. S. And picked a site and everything. There's that. And then we'll probably pick another location towards the end of this year.
Is India interesting?
Absolutely. Okay.
Are you still a fan of crypto?
Well, I mean, I'm not advising anyone to buy crypto or bet the farm on Dogecoin or anything like that. Okay. Don't bet on Dogecoin. You might have been thinking too. Maybe you should. But let me advise you that would be perhaps otherwise. Okay. Dogecoin is sort of favorite cryptocurrency because it has the best humor and has dogs.
I did have a look at the price of it yesterday. It's lower than it was, I think.
Well, I don't know. Maybe, you know, it's like has a saying that the most ironic explanation is the most likely. And the most ironic outcome for currency would be that the thing that was made at as a as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies, most ironic outcome would become that it becomes the global currency.
Okay. We'll wait and see. Final one, can you rank The U. S. And China on their development of AI each out of 10?
I mean, The US has very much has the most advanced AI. So this is you see, like, I like, China's close behind, certainly, and has the resources to scale and to optimize. The biggest single advances in AI still come from The U. S. And Europe. But alright. So it's hard to give an exact number or score. It's more like
But there's a big gap, still.
There is a gap. That gap looks like it's on the order of twelve months. Right. Ish.
Right. And narrowing or expanding?
It's hard to tell. I suspect it will narrow to some degree.
Okay. Can you talk a little bit about you've created a new AI company yourself. Obviously, there's a huge amount of energy and activity in this space or at least it's been talked about. I mean, what do you want to do yourself in this space beyond Tesla and the stuff you talked about earlier? Is that new thing?
Well, think there should be a significant third horse in the race here. We've got OpenAI and Microsoft, Google DeepMind and probably there should be a third horse in the race. So we're learning more on that soon.
But is it something that will interact with the data of Twitter and the capability of Tesla? Is it something that tries to bring what you've talked about earlier in terms of capability together and become that third player? Is that what you're talking about?
To some degree, I don't want to jump the gun here on announcements, but OpenAI has a relationship with Microsoft that seems to work very well. It's possible that XAI and Twitter and Tesla would have something similar.
Possible. You've talked about the importance of regulation and you called for this moratorium. I mean the history of regulating tech has been checkered. It's been very hard for regulators to keep up with tech, let alone get ahead of it. What do you think actually needs to happen that practically could in this space to try to change that? Because obviously, the history of this is not encouraging.
Yes. I mean I think there should be I've been pushing hard for a long time. I met with a number of senior senators and congress people in congress and the White House to advocate for AI regulation, starting with an insight committee that is formed of independent parties as well as perhaps participants from the leaders in industry. And that oversight committee gains or should say, Insight Committee gains insight into what various companies are up to. And to the degree that there's competitive dynamics there, you can obviously you would sequester Board members who are perhaps have conflicts. But anyway, if you figure out some sort of regulatory Board they start off gaining insight and then have proposed rule making and then that will get comments that are on by industry And and then hopefully, we have some sort of oversight rules that improve safety just as we do with aircraft with the FAA and spacecraft and cars with and food and drugs with the Food and Drug Administration.
Right. And how would that work in such a global thing as we're talking about where AI and the relative advance between countries is going to be very, very important? Is that something that is globalizable? Is that
Well, really, the key question is will China cooperate with the West. That remains to be seen. But I would still advocate like some degree of oversight. I mean, have regulatory oversight of aircraft, for example, and yet The US is still very much doing great on the aircraft front. It makes more aircraft than the rest than any other place. So just because you have FAA regulation doesn't mean that it's necessarily slowed Okay. Down very
Does so your view would be that the AI changes, do they lock in the tech giants, the Microsofts and the Googles of this world? Does it also is there also a scenario where it actually helps to bring in new players and change that dynamic? Or is that a much more unlikely outcome?
Well, there are a lot of AI startups. The thing that's becoming tricky is that in order of you really need three things to compete. You need talent, talented people. You need a lot of compute, expensive compute, and you need access to data. So whoever's got whoever's succeeding on those three will win. So now that the cost of computers gotten astronomical, so it's now sort of minimum anti, I would say, minimum would be $250,000,000 of server hardware. That's like just to relevant in any way.
So the startups are more likely to piggyback off what the others are doing rather than compete directly themselves is what you're saying?
Yes. To train a big
Are you going to take a SpaceX trip yourself?
To train a model of probably GPT-five size, I wouldn't be surprised if they use at least thirty thirty thousand, maybe 50,000 h one hundreds, which are the latest.
GPU
is not quite the right word, but the latest technology from NVIDIA. So and then you need to run inference as well. So there's a lot of the the GPUs are at this point considerably harder to get than drugs. Actually, that's really not a high bar in San Francisco.
You can tell us more about that later, yes, it's okay.
Thank you. So
a couple of things I just wanted to go into on AI, which I love your perspective on. Is this going to what does it mean for society in terms of is this going to embed wealth and power in a very small subset and create a big widening of inequality? Is it going to democratize and create the opposite? What is your sense of where this heads?
In terms of access to goods and services, I think AI will be ushering an age of abundance. Assuming that we're in a benign AI scenario, I think the AI will be able to make goods and services very inexpensively. And so in anything that is a product or a service where there's not artificial scarcity created, such as, like, I wanna live exactly in this neighborhood of houses. It's like, okay, well, there's only 100 houses there. So that would still have scarcity. Or a unique artwork would have scarcity. But anything that does not have scarcity that we that we deliberately designed to be scarce will be plentiful for everyone in a benign scenario.
And in the unbeknownst scenario?
Well, there's a wide range of
But what's the thing that you're most worried about? When you look at when you've been talking for years about the need for regulation, what is the scenario that really keeps you up at night?
Well, I don't I don't think the AI is gonna try to destroy all humanity, but it might put us under strict controls. And there's no non zero chance of it going terminator. It's not 0%, but it's I think it's a small likelihood of not any humanity, but it's not zero. We wanted that probably to be as close to zero as possible. And and then, like I said, the of AI assuming control for the safety of all the humans and taking over all all computing systems and weapon systems of Earth and effectively being like some sort of uber and annie.
But isn't another scenario
If say that like, let's say you're a Miss World contestant, hypothetically.
It's unlikely. Let's face it. And
you say, what do you want? It's I want world peace. And it's like, okay, well, one way to achieve world peace is to take all the weapons away from the humans so they can no longer use them and to punish any humans that engage in extraterritorial activity.
But isn't more likely nasty outcome that rather than AI taking over and being the ultimate nanny that keeps us all doing stuff that is super safe and it wants us to, that actually somebody nefariously harnesses that power to achieve shuttle control, stroke, military superiority and that actually some country around the world decides to use it in a different way?
Yes. That's what I mean by AI uses as a weapon. And pen is mightier than the sword. So one of the first places we have to be careful of AI being used is in social media to manipulate public opinion. So the the reason that Twitter is going to a primarily subscriber based system is because it is dramatically harder to create it's it's like, call it, 10,000 times harder to create an account that has a verified phone number from a credible carrier that has a credit card and that pays a small amount of money per month And have those credit cards and phone numbers be highly distributed, not clustered, is incredibly difficult. So whereas in the past, someone could create a million fake accounts for a penny apiece And then manipulate or have something appear to be very much liked by the public when in fact it is not or promote it and retweet it when in fact it is not its popularity is not real. And essentially game the system. So bias towards a subscription based verification, I think, is very powerful and that really you won't be able to trust any social media company that does not do this because it will simply be overrun with bots to such an extreme degree.
So if we take it back to where we started, if you look at the election that's coming up, how big a role will this big shift in AI capability over the last few months, which will obviously continue through the next year. How big an impact is this going to play, do you think, in the messaging and the way that people get told the different pictures of the candidates?
I think that's something we need to be on the lookout for in big way is to make sure that this we're minimizing the impact of AI manipulation. We're certainly very much taking that that seriously at ex Twitter, ex Twitter. And I think we're putting in place all of the protections to minimize and certainly detect when we see large scale manipulation of the system.
Okay. But beyond Twitter, are you worried about this for the election in general?
Yeah. There probably will be attempts to use AI to manipulate the public and some of it will be successful. And if not this election, we're sure the next one.
Okay. I've got two more questions on AI, if you've got the time. Then just a little bit on China and Tesla, if that's okay. First thing is we talk a lot in terms of AI about the next five to ten years and what the impact is going to be on jobs and some of these things. If you look out on a much longer timeframe, given the speed and scale of the change and you look to your grandkids and great grandkids, can you just give us a sense of what it's going to be like to be human? How much is this going to change the fundamental nature of how we operate as a race at this point?
Mike's gonna change a lot. Especially if you go further out into the future. I mean, will be everything will be automatic. I mean, there'll there'll be household robots that you can fully talk to as though there are people that can help your own house or be a companion or whatever the case may be. There will be humanoid robots throughout, you know, factories. And ours will also be all automatic. And anything that that word intelligent intelligence can be applied, even modest intelligence, will be automated. So so let's say like ten, twenty years from now.
And will we be connected to that technology through a Neuralink type device? Is that where this in your view, obviously, is that where this heads?
Well, a high bandwidth interface from Cortex to the so your sort of computing or AI tertiary layer, which already exists, it's just that we don't have a high bandwidth connection. We've got our limbic system, which is our sort of foundational element. That's sort of our instincts and desires and whatnot. Then our cortex on top of that, which is our thinking part of our brain. And then we have a tertiary digital layer, which is currently in the form of our phones and computers and laptops and whatnot and all the applications. And the constraint on better a better merging or or the the constraint on on on having human interests and machine interests be aligned is the bandwidth, especially the output. So if you select, at what speed can you output to a computer using voice or your fingers, which move very slowly. So we're talking about maybe 10 bits per second or some some fairly small data rate. So with with the Neuralink, you can increase that by, you know, increase that by a million probably.
So everything just speeds up?
Speeds up, yeah. Okay. I mean this is obviously in a relatively benign scenario because there's a question of not just let's say it's a benign scenario. How how do we even appreciate or understand what what the computer is doing? Right. How do we even how do we go how do we go along for the ride? And if we have a better if we have a brain brain machine interface that's on a million times faster than or more like, we'll we'll go along for the ride a lot better. Right. That then interfacing with the phone using two slow moving meat sticks.
If you put it like that. And in terms of you have a lot of kids, many in this room have kids. What do they need to what skills do they need to have? What are the three skills that you think are most important for them that you're trying to give them to be prepared and well positioned for this new world?
Well, I think it's it's important to have a broad range of of understanding in in many different subjects. So I think a general knowledge is important. So you you at least have some clue of what you don't know in different areas. And then go deep in areas where your child is has a strong interest and ability. So find finding that that overlap of where is my child interested in this and has some ability to be successful, then, you know, finding if you could find that Venn diagram overlap, then obviously encouraging that is a good thing. And we are obviously headed to a high-tech world, so some basic understanding of computers and software and artificial intelligence is probably a good idea.
Okay. But the actual broad thrust of I mean, jobs will change, but it will be more AI enabling and making it better and easier rather than wholesale complete change of the skills you need.
Mean, depends on what time frame we're talking about here. So if you say like over twenty, thirty year time frame, I think things will be transformed beyond belief. Okay. You won't you probably won't recognize society in thirty years. Like, I do think we're we're fairly close. You asked me about artificial general intelligence. I think we're perhaps only three years, maybe six years away from it, this this this decade. So in fact, arguably, we are on the event horizon of the black hole that is artificial superintelligence.
Okay. So I'm going to ask one final question. I'm going to see if you've got two minutes to take a couple of questions from the floor. And it comes back to China, which you've talked about a little bit. You have a very big business in China in Tesla. And obviously, you're on that geopolitical fault line that's getting potentially interesting. To what extent is this affecting your decision making around sort of how you put assets and stuff on the ground? And how concerned are you about that as a business person and a lot of people in this room have business in China about that getting very, very difficult for us.
Well, there is fundamentally an issue that's coming to a head with Taiwan. And it's unclear when exactly push will come to shove, but it seems that there's a good chance push will come to shove. It's trending in that direction. I'd dread to think what would happen. The results would be for the global economy would be absolutely catastrophic. But China has been very clear about its goals on China and sort of including Taiwan as part of China. So one does not need to read between the lines. One can simply read the lines. They were very clear. And they're not getting.
And is the biggest concern despite the prospect of conflict itself, obviously, a lot of the world's high end chips come out of Taiwan. I mean how catastrophic would that be if that was cut off?
Well, there's even more that comes out of China. So China is a lot, so much of the world's heavy lifting on manufacturing, especially if the manufacturing is simply hard work and say not particularly glamorous. China just does an immense amount of hard work that people most people have no idea how much hard work they do. So being cut off from Taiwan is much less less of a concern than being cut off from time from China. Now China would reciprocally suffer, of course, because I I would say that the economy of the economies of of of China and Taiwan are are they're they're like conjoined twins with the the western economy, with with the rest of the world. So China and the rest the world being conjoined twins from an economic standpoint will mean that the separation is going to be dire indeed. Okay. That happens. I hope it does not happen. So and there's no easy solution here. But if there's any path to a diplomatic solution, we should really take that seriously.
Great. Do you have time to take a few questions from the floor, Elon? Sure. Does anybody have a question they'd like to pose? We'll go here and then here. Behind you.
Thanks, Elon. Thanks for joining us. I'm the founder of a real estate business in Newcastle in the Northeast Of England. We export manufacture and export more cars from the Northeast than the whole of Italy. Would you let me build you a Tesla factory in the Northeast Of England?
Thanks for the offer. So I will certainly consider England for a future location of a Gigafactory.
Thank you. I'll get you the
So you will consider it. Are you actively considering it?
We're not currently looking at new locations, but we will pull it towards the end of this year.
I'll send you some plans, okay?
Davide here, please.
Thank you for your time. Fusion, lots of scientists say could change the world. Planet is the sun. All life on this planet and on Mars depends on fusion, the sun itself. Can I ask you why a man of your brilliant brain, resources and talent is not actually focusing on fusion, which I think could be a game changer for society and rather than on Twitter where there are many media decent company that can do it? And I will say it almost in a trivial way. Well, think we already have a giant fusion reactor in the sky that called the sun that shows up every day. So which always felt like if you wanna know what standing in front of a fusion fusion reactor feels like, just go out go and stand in in front of the sun. You know, just walk outside. That's what a giant fusion reactor feels like because that's what the sun is. It converts about four and a half million tons of mass to energy every second and requires no maintenance. It's amazing. You don't have to you don't have to refuel it. You don't have to maintain it. It's just there. So my recommendation for fusion is solar power and batteries. And we can easily power all of Earth with just with photovoltaics and batteries. Not I mean, not easily, but there's just a very clear path to do so And no miracles required, just work. Interesting. I'm also an advocate of wind and of nuclear fission, geothermal, hydro and whatnot.
We'll take a couple more. One here and then the lady at the back.
Thank you. As you're considering exposure to China and particularly in the EV space and with the battery supply chain, what's your process for evaluating political risk in the near and midterm?
I guess I just talk to my team, you know, read the news. Assess the opinion on Twitter, I suppose. There's a very deep analysis you can get on Twitter people that are world experts on a particular subject. So I don't know. I think we just we try to prepare for the worst, hope for the best and, you know, make sure we have factories in geographically diversified regions of the world where the supply chain is as localized as possible. But this is important also for force majeure situations. So if there are earthquakes, wildfires, riots, revolutions, ice storms, heat waves, you name it. I think I've seen it all at this point. So you want to have a supply chain that does not inherit force majeure from all of Earth. Something of that is going to happen somewhere. It's planet. A So that's why I think it's important to have localized supply chains with factories in many geographies.
Last question from the lady at the back. Thank you. Yeah. You famously tweeted that you thought the population collapse was a much bigger risk to humanity than climate change. What do you think states, families, even companies can do to ensure that more of us want to have more children?
Well, yeah. I mean, think it's very telling if you look at the birth rates which are just publicly available. You can look at, say, the birth rate last year for every country available online. And you can look at the trend in both rates. And it's just very clear that the trend has been strongly downward and that we've recently hit all time lows. So you think of during COVID, what else you got to do? You might as well have a kid. It didn't happen actually. We had a big drop in birth rate during COVID. We've been increasing divorces too since spent a lot of time with their significant other. So I think generally, simply changing people's mind about the goodness of having kids. It's very important to have kids in order to continue civilization. And I think sometimes it's viewed as know, kids are viewed as an imposition on the world. I don't think that's the case at all or that people sometimes think there are too many people in the world. That's certainly not the case. You can fit all of the humans on Earth on one floor in the city of New York. It would be uncomfortable, but just to give you a sense of the cross sectional area of Earth that is human is very tiny. It just seems big if you're in a big city. But for the vast majority of Earth, if you're given a task of, from a plane of dropping a bowling ball and and you have to hit someone, you'd you'd miss. I almost never hit anyone. So point is that you very rarely go over a person in an aircraft. You fly from LA to New York. There are vast areas of land with no one at all. So anyway, I think we we wanna just generally have it be socially encouraged to have kids. I think certainly companies need to support employees that have kids. I think in terms of government incentives, there should be some, I think, tax breaks for having kids. Or make it financially not burdensome to have children. And it's always worth bearing in mind, like, autonomy aside, if someone doesn't have kids, what you're actually asking is that someone else's kids take care of you when you're old. And that doesn't seem quite right, you know? Because that's that's what we'll be for they'll be forced to do, absolute automation, is that someone else's kids will have to take care of you when you're old. One way or another, we need to solve this birth rate issue or civilization will go into nothing.
Isn't that where AI comes in? It will do all the jobs for us so we can handle a potentially lower population or what you're talking about?
I think there will be robot nannies that are very confident. So that will help.
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