You know, hey. Welcome back to TED. It's great to have you here.
Thanks for having me.
So in the next half hour or so, we're going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes the first question a little ironic. Why are you boring?
Yeah. I ask myself that frequently. The We're we're trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a three d network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. So I mean, now, I think one of the most soul destroying things is traffic. It affects people in every part of the world. It takes away so much of your life and your this this it's it's horrible. It's particularly horrible in LA. And so
I think you've you've brought with you the first visualization that's been shown of this. Can we can I show this?
Yeah. Absolutely. So this is the first time yeah. We're we're just to sort of show what we're talking about. So the the a couple of key things that are important in having a three d tunnel network. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. So by having a an an elevator, sort of a sort of a a car skate that's on on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. And then the car gets on a skate. There's no speed limit here, so we're designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometers an hour or about a hundred and two thirty hundred kilometers an hour or about a 130 miles per hour. So you should be able to get from say Westwood to LAX in six minutes, five, six minutes.
Possibly initially done, it's like on a on a sort of toll road type basis Yeah. Which I guess alleviates some traffic from the surface streets as well.
So I think I don't know if you will notice it in the video, but there's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall. So you can alleviate any arbitrary level of open congestion with the with the three d tunnel network. This is a very important point. So a key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels, then that will simply alleviate congestion, will get used up, and then you'll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels.
But people seem traditionally it's incredibly expensive to dig. That would block this idea.
Yeah. Well, they're they're right. To give you an example, the LA subway extension, which is I think it's a two and a half mile extension that was just completed for $2,000,000,000. So it's roughly a billion dollars a mile to do the the subway extension in in LA, and this is not the highest utility subway in the world. So, yeah, it's quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling. And how could you achieve that? I guess actually, if if you just do two things, you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and and I think you can go beyond that. So the the first thing to do is to cut the tunnel tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. So a single road lane tunnel would according to regulations, has to be 26 feet, maybe 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you if you shrink that diameter to what what we're attempting, is 12 feet, which is plenty to get an electric skate through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross sectional area by by a factor of four. So and the tunneling cost scales with the cross sectional area. So that's roughly a half order of magnitude improvement right there. Then tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, and then the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So if you have if you design the machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that'll give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and it's a factor of eight. Also, these machines are far from being at their their power or thermal limit, so you can jack up the power to the machine substantially. I think you can get at least a factor of two, maybe a factor of four or five improvement on top of that. So I think there's a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess and order of magnitude improvement in a cost per mile. And our target actually is we've got a pet snail called Gary. This is from Gary the snail from South Park. I mean, sorry, SpongeBob SquarePants. So so Gary is is capable of of currently, he's capable of going 14 times faster than than than a tunnel boring machine. Okay.
You want to beat Gary.
We want to beat Gary. Yeah. He's he's not a patient little fellow, and we want the will be victory. Victory is beating the snail.
But a lot of people imagining, dreaming about future cities, they imagine that actually the solution is is sort of flying cars, drones, etcetera. You you take you go above ground. Why isn't that a better solution? You save all that tunneling cost.
Right. I'm in favor of flying things. Obviously, I do rockets. So I like things that fly. This is not some inherent bias against flying things, but there is a challenge with flying cars in that they'll be quite noisy, the wind force generated will be very high. The there's let's just say that if something's flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety reducing situation. You don't think to myself, well, I feel better about today. You're thinking, like, did they service their hubcap, or is it gonna come off and guillotine me
as a flying pass? And so so you've so you've got this vision that future cities with these these rich three d networks of of tunnels underneath. Is there a time here with with Hyperloop? Could you apply these tunnels to use for this Hyperloop idea you had, you released a few years ago?
Yeah. So, you know, we've been sort of puttering around with the Hyperloop stuff for for a while. We built a Hyperloop test track adjacent to SpaceX just for a student competition to encourage innovative ideas in transport. It actually ends up being the biggest vacuum chamber in the world after the Large Hadron Collider by by volume. So so so it was it was sort of quite quite fun to do that, but it was kind of a hobby thing. And and then we we think we might so we developed a little pusher card to push these the the student pods, but we're gonna try seeing how fast we can make the the pusher go if it's not pushing something. So I mean, like, so cautiously optimistic we'll be able to be faster than a the world's fastest bullet train even in a point eight mile stretch.
Woah. Good brakes.
Yeah. I mean, it's yeah. It's either gonna smash into tiny pieces or
But you can you can picture you can picture then a Hyperloop in a tunnel Yes. Running quite quite long distances.
Exactly. So in looking at tunneling technology, it turns out that in order to make a tunnel, you have to in order to seal against the water table, you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be a good to about five or six atmospheres. So to go to vacuum is only one atmosphere, one near vacuum. So actually, it sort of turns out that automatically, if you build a tunnel that is good enough to resist the water table, it's automatically capable of holding vacuum. So yeah.
And so so you can actually picture this, like, what what kind of length tunnel do you is is in Elon's future to running Hyperloop?
Yeah. I I think there's no there's no real length limit. You could you could you could dig as much as you want. I I think the like, if you were to do something like a DC to New York Hyperloop, I think you'd probably want to go underground the entire way because it's a high density area. If there's You're under a lot of buildings and houses, and if you go deep enough, you cannot detect the tunnel. Sometimes people think, well, it's going to be pretty annoying to have a tunnel dug under my house. If that tunnel is dug more than about three or four tunnel diameters beneath your house, you will not be able to detect it being dug at all. In fact, if you're able to detect the tunnel being dug, whatever device you're using, you can get a lot of money for that device from the Israeli military who is trying to detect tunnels from Hamas and from the US Customs and Border Patrol that are trying to detect drug tunnels. So if you the reality is that earth is incredibly good at absorbing vibrations, and once the tunnel depth is below a certain level, it is undetectable. Maybe if you have a very sensitive seismic instrument, you might be able to detect it.
So you've started a new company to do this called The Boring Company. Very nice. Very, very funny. But how What's funny about that? How much of your time is this? It's
it's it's maybe two or 3%.
You've you've bought it a hobby. This is this is what an Elon Musk hobby looks like.
I mean, really is like, we actually you know, this is basically interns and people doing it part time. So this is like we bought, like we bought, you know, some secondhand machinery, and it's just it's kind of puttering along, but it's making good progress.
So an even bigger part of your time is being spent on on electrifying cars and transport through Tesla. Is is one of the motivations for the for the tunneling project, the realization that actually, in a world where cars are electric and where they're and where they're self driving, there may end up being more cars on the roads on any given hour than
there are now. Yeah. Exactly. Lot of people think that when you make cars autonomous, that they'll be able to go faster and that will alleviate congestion. And to some degree, will be true. But once you have shared autonomy where it's much cheaper to go by car and you can go point to point, the affordability of going in a car will be will be better than that of a bus, like it would cost less than a bus ticket. So the amount of driving that will occur will be much greater with shared autonomy, and actually traffic will get far worse.
I mean, you you started Tesla with the with the goal of of persuading the world to that electrification was the future of cars. Yes. And a few years ago, people were laughing at you. Now, not so much.
I mean Okay.
Well, mean, isn't it I don't know. I don't know. Maybe some But isn't it true that isn't it true that pretty much every auto manufacturer has announced serious electrification plans for the short to medium term future? Yeah.
Yeah. The I think almost every automaker has has some electric vehicle program. They vary in seriousness. Some some are very serious about transitioning entirely to electric, and some are just dabbling in it, And some amazingly are still pursuing fuel cells, but I think that won't last much longer.
But isn't isn't there isn't there a sense though, Elon, where you you you could now just declare victory and say, you know, we did it. Let let let the world electrify and you go on and focus on other stuff?
Yeah. I intend to stay with Tesla as as far into the future as I can imagine. And there are a lot of exciting things that we have coming. We've got obviously model three that's coming soon. We'll be unveiling the Tesla Semi truck.
Okay. We're gonna we're gonna come to this. So so Model three. So it's coming it's supposed to be coming in July ish?
Yeah. It's looking quite good for starting production in July.
Yeah. Wow. One of the things that people are so excited about is is the fact that it's it's got autopilot. And you you put out this video a while back showing what that what that technology look like or would look like.
Yeah.
There's obviously autopilot in model s right now. What are we seeing here?
Yeah. So this is using only cameras and a GPS. So there's no lidar or radar being used here. This is just using passive optical, which is essentially what a person uses. The whole road system is meant to be navigated with passive optical or cameras, and so once you solve cameras or vision, then autonomy is solved. If you don't solve vision, it's not solved. So that's why our focus is so heavily on having a vision neural net that's very effective for road conditions.
Right. Many other people are going the LIDAR route. You want cameras plus radar is most of it.
You can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras. Like, could probably do 10 times better than humans with just just cameras.
So so the new cars being sold right now have have eight eight cameras in them. That Yeah. They they can't yet do what that showed. When will they be able to?
I think the we're still on track for being able to go cross country from LA to New York by the end the year fully autonomous.
So so so a car by the end of the year, you're saying Yeah. Someone's gonna sit in a Tesla without touching the steering wheel, tap in New York Mhmm. Off it goes Yeah. Won't have to ever touch the wheel by the 2017.
Yeah. Essentially, November or December of this year, we should be able to go from yeah. All the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York. No controls touched at any point during the entire journey.
Amazing. Part of that is possible because you've already got a fleet of Teslas driving all these roads. You're you're accumulating a huge amount of data of that national road system.
Yes. But the thing that will be interesting is that I I I'm I'm actually fairly confident it will be able to do that route even if you change the route dynamically. So it gets it's fairly easy or if if you say I'm gonna be really good at one specific route, that's one thing, but I it should be able to go really be very good, certainly once you enter a highway, to go anywhere on the highway system in a in a given country. So it's not like it's not sort of limited to LA, New York. We could we could change it and make it Seattle, Florida
that that day
or, you know, in real time. So you were going from LA to New York, now go from LA to Toronto.
So so leaving aside regulation for a second, that in terms of the technology alone, the the time when someone will be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take their hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they've arrived, how far away is that to do that safely? That's about
that's about two years. The the real trick of it is not, you know, how do you make it work, say 99.9% of the time, because like like, if if a car crashes say one in a thousand times, then you're probably still not gonna be comfortable falling asleep. That's you know, you shouldn't be, certainly. But it's it's but it's not gonna be it's never gonna be perfect. No system is gonna be perfect. But if you say it's perhaps it's it the the car is unlikely to crash in a 100 lifetimes or a thousand lifetimes, then people are like, okay, wow. If I would live a thousand lives, I would still most likely never experience a crash, then that's probably okay.
I see. I guess a big concern of yours is that people may actually get seduced too early to think that this is safe Yeah. And that you'll have some horrible incident happen that puts things puts things back.
Well, I think that the autonomy system is likely to at least mitigate the crash, except in rare circumstances. The thing to appreciate about vehicle safety is this is this is probabilistic. So that there is I mean, there's some chance that any time a human driver gets in the car that they will have an accident. That is their fault. It's it's never zero. The the key threshold for autonomy is how much better does autonomy need to be than a person before you can rely on it.
But once you get that hand literally safe hands off driving, the the power to disrupt the whole industry seems massive because at that point, you've spoken of people being able to buy a car, drops you off Yeah. For work, and then you let it go and and provide a sort of Uber like service to other people, earn you money, maybe even cover the cost of your lease of that car. Exactly.
So you can
kind of get a car for free. Is that is that really likely?
Yeah. Absolutely, this is what will happen. So there will be a shared autonomy fleet where you buy your car and you can choose to use that car exclusively. You could choose to have it be used only by friends and family, only by five star other drivers who are rated five star. You can choose to share it sometimes, but not other times. That's that's that's 100% what will occur. It's just a question of when.
Wow. So you mentioned the semi, and I think you're planning to announce this in September, but I'm curious whether there's anything you could show us today.
I will show you a teaser shot of the Teaser shot. Of the truck. It's live.
Okay. No. I think
that's definitely a case where we want to be cautious about the autonomy features.
Because that that just we can't see that much of it, but doesn't look like just a little friendly neighborhood truck. It looks kind of badass. How how what sort of what sort of semi is this?
So this is a a heavy duty, long range semi truck. So it's like the highest weight capability and with long range. So so essentially it's meant to alleviate the the heavy duty trucking loads. And this is something which people do not today think is possible, to think the truck doesn't have enough power or it doesn't have enough range. And then with this with the Tesla Semi, we wanna show that no electric truck actually can out torque any diesel semi and, you know, put if if you had a tug of war competition, like, the Tesla Semi will will tug the the diesel semi uphill.
That's that's pretty cool. And short term, these aren't driverless. These are these are gonna be trucks that truck drivers want to drive.
Yes. So what will be really fun about this is you don't have you have a flat torque r p m curve with an electric motor, whereas with a diesel motor or any kind of internal combustion engine car, you've got torque r p m curve that looks like a hill. So this will be a very spry truck. You could drive this around like a sports car. There's no gears. It's like single speed.
There's a great movie to be made here somewhere. I don't know what it is, and I don't know that it ends well, but it's great.
It's quite bizarre test driving the the the you know, when when I was driving the test prototype for the first truck, it's really weird because you're driving around and you're just you're so nimble and you're in this giant truck.
Wait. Wait. You've you've already driven a prototype?
I drove it around the parking lot.
I was
like, this is crazy. Wow.
This is not vaporware. This is like
driving this giant truck and it's sort of making these mad maneuvers.
That's cool. Okay. From from a really badass picture to a kind of less badass picture, This is just a cute house from desperate housewives or something. What what the what what on earth is going on here?
Well, this illustrates the picture of the future that I think is how how things will evolve. You've got an electric car in the driveway. If you look in between the electric car and the house, there are actually three power walls stacked up against the side of the house, and then that that house roof is is a solar roof. So that's an actual solar glass roof. Okay. So those That's a picture of a real
that's a
well, admittedly, it's a it's a real fake house. That that's a real fake house.
So so these these roof tiles, some of them have in them Yeah. Basically solar power, the ability to?
Yeah. The solar the solar glass tiles where you can you can adjust the texture and the color at a very fine grained level, and then there's sort of micro louvers in the glass such that when you're looking at the roof from street level or close to street level, all the tiles look the tiles look the same whether there is a solar panel behind it or a solar cell behind it or not. So you you have an even even color from from the ground level. If you were to look at it from a helicopter, you you would be actually able to look through and see that some of the the glass tiles have a solar cell behind them and some do not. Right.
You put them in you put them in the ones that are likely to see a lot of sun. Yes. And that that makes these roofs super affordable. Right? They're not not that much more expensive than than just tiling the roof.
Yeah. The the the the We're very confident that the cost of the roof plus the cost of electricity that this that that a solar glass roof will be less than the cost of a normal roof plus the the cost of electricity. So this will be economically a no brainer. It will look we think it'll look great and it will last I mean, we thought about, like, having the the warranty be infinity. But then people thought, well, that might sound like we were just talking rubbish. But actually, this is toughened glass. Well after the house has collapsed and there's nothing there, the glass tiles will still be there.
So I think you're rolling So you're rolling this out in a couple weeks' time, I think,
with four different roofing types. Yeah. We're starting off with two, two initially, and then the second two will be introduced early next year.
What's the scale of ambition here? How how how many houses do you believe could end up having this this type of roofing?
I mean, think eventually I think eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof. Now now the thing is to consider the time scale here to be probably on the order of forty or fifty years. So on average, a roof is replaced every twenty to twenty five years. So but you don't you don't start replacing all roofs immediately, but eventually, if you say we were to fast forward to say fifteen years from now, it will be unusual to have a roof that does not have solar.
Is is there a mental model thing that people don't get here that that that there's there's been because of the shift in the cost of economics of solar power that, like most houses, actually have enough sunlight on their roof pretty much to power all of their needs. If you could capture the power, it could pretty much power all their needs. Right? You could you could go off grid, kinda.
Yeah. It depends on on on where you are and what the house size is relative to the roof area, but it's a fair statement to say that most houses in The US have enough roof area to power all the needs of the house.
Okay. So the key to the economics of the cars, the semi, of these houses is the falling price of lithium ion batteries, which you've made a huge bet on as as as Tesla. In many ways, that's almost the core competency, and and you you've decided that to really, like, own that competency, you you just have to build the world's largest manufacturing plant and kind of double the world's supply of lithium ion batteries Yeah. With with with this guy. What is this?
Yeah. So that's that's the Gigafactory, the progress so far in the Gigafactory. Eventually, you can sort of roughly see that there's it's a there's sort of a diamond shape overall. When it's fully done, it'll be it'll look like a giant diamond, or that's the idea behind it. And it's aligned on true north. There's a small detail there.
And capable of producing like a 100 eventually, a 100 gigawatt hours of of batteries a year?
100 gigawatt hours. We think probably more already.
And they're actually being produced right now already here. Right?
They're in
production already. As you guys put out this video. Yeah. I mean, does that speed it up or That's the
that's the slowed down version.
Is that? How fast does it actually go?
Well, when it's running at full speed, you can't actually see the cells without a strobe light. They just blur.
And help I mean, one of your one of your core ideas, Elon, about about what makes an exciting future is a future where we no longer feel guilty about energy. How help us picture this. I mean, how many gigafactories, if you like, does it take to to get us there?
It's about a 100, roughly. It's not 10, it's not a thousand, most likely a 100.
See, I I I kind of find this amazing. Like, you could actually picture, if if that's right, you can picture what it would take to move the world off this vast fossil fuel thing. It's like, you're building one, costs $5,000,000,000, maybe the next one or whatever, 5 to $10,000,000,000. Like, it's it's kind of cool that you can picture that that project. And you're planning to do a Tesla or at least another two announce another two this year?
I think we'll announce locations for somewhere between two and four Gigafactories later this year. Yeah. Probably four.
Woah. Okay. I can't I can't tease no more teasing from you for here. Like, where? Continent? You can say
no. We need to address a global market. Yeah.
Okay. I this is cool. I think we should talk for actually, double market. So I'm I have to ask you one I'm gonna ask you one question about politics. Only one. I'm kind of sick of politics, but I didn't ask you this. You're you're a body now giving advice to a guy who Who? Has said he doesn't really believe in climate change, and there's there's a lot of people out there who kind of think you shouldn't be doing that, that they'd like you to walk away from that. What would you say to them?
Well, think that that there's Eric, first of all, I'm just on two advisory councils where the format consists of going around the room and asking people's opinion on things. And so there's like a meeting every month or two. You know, that's the sum total of of of my contribution. But I think to the degree that there are people in the room who are arguing in favor of doing something about climate change or, you know, other, you know, certain social issues, You know, mean, I've used the meetings I've had thus far to argue in favor of immigration and in favor of climate change. And if I hadn't done that, that wasn't on the agenda before. So maybe nothing will happen, but at least the words were said. Okay. So
let's talk SpaceX and Mars. Last time you were here, you you spoke about this, what seemed like a kind of incredibly ambitious dream to develop rockets that are actually reusable, and you've only gone and done it.
Yeah. I mean, talk us Finally.
Talk us through this. What what are we looking at here?
Yeah. So this is one of our rocket boosters coming back from very very high very high and fast in space. So just delivered the the upper stage at at high velocity. I think this may have been sort of a mach seven or so delivery of the of the upper stage. So
that was that was that was the sped
up That's the slowed down version.
That was That was the sped up version. But I mean, that's that's that's amazing. And several of these failed before you finally figured out Yeah. How how to how to get get to do it. But now you've landed You've done this what, five or six times?
I think for eight eight or nine
or something. Yeah. Yeah. And for the first time, you've actually reflown one of the Yeah. Rockets that landed. So so So we
landed yeah. We landed the rocket booster and then prepped it for flight again and flew it flew it again. So it's the it's the first reflight of an orbital booster where where that reflight is relevant. So it's important to to appreciate that reusability is only relevant if it is rapid rapid and complete.
Right.
So like an aircraft or a car, the the reusability is rapid and complete. You do not send your aircraft into to to Boeing in between flights. Right.
So so this is allowing you to dream of this this really ambitious idea of of sending, like, many, many, many people to Mars Yeah. In what, in ten or twenty years twenty years time, I guess?
Yeah.
In the next twenty years. And you've designed this outrageous rocket to do it. So can you help us understand the scale of this thing?
Well, think visually, you can see that person. Yeah. That's the vehicle.
So if that if that was a skyscraper, that's like a 40 did I read that? 40 stories?
Yeah. It's more. Yeah. The yeah. The the the thrust level of this is really this configuration is about four times the thrust of this Saturn five moon rocket.
Four times the thrust of the biggest rocket humanity ever created before.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in As one does.
Yeah. I
mean, in in units of seven forty seven, a seven forty seven is only about a quarter a quarter million pounds of thrust, so that that's so there are for every 10,000,000 pounds of thrust, there's forty seven forty seven. So this this would be the thrust equivalent of a 100 a hundred and twenty seven forty sevens with all engines blazing.
And so even even with a machine designed to escape Earth's gravity, I think you told me last last this thing could actually take a fully loaded seven forty seven, people, cargo, everything into into into orbit.
Exactly. This this can take a fully loaded seven forty seven with with maximum fuel, maximum passengers, maximum cargo on the seven forty seven. This can take it as cargo.
So so so based on this, you you presented recently this interplanetary transport system, which is visualized this way, and this is a scene you picture, what, in in, I mean, thirtieth time, twentieth time? People walking into this this rocket.
I mean, I'm hopeful it's sort of in the eight eight to ten year time frame. Aspirationally, that's our target. Our internal targets are more aggressive, but I think
k. So this thing seems
quite large and is large by comparison with other rockets. I think the the the future spacecraft will be will make this look like a rowboat. I mean, this is the the the future spaceships will be truly enormous.
Why why, Elon? Because this because what like, why do we need to build a city on Mars with a million people on it in your lifetime, which I I think is kind of what you've said you'd love to do.
Yeah. I think it's important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. Mean, I I just think that there, like, there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you wanna live. Like, why do you wanna live? What what's the point? What what inspires you? What what do you love about the future? And if if we're not out there if the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi planet species, I find that it's incredibly depressing if that's not the future that we're going to have.
People want to position this as an either or, that there are so many desperate things happening on the planet now, from climate to poverty to you know, you pick your issue. This feels like a distraction. Shouldn't be thinking about this. You should be solving what's what's here and now. And to be fair, you've you've done a fair bit to actually do that with with your, you know, work work on sustainable energy, but why not just do that?
Well, I I think there's I think I look at the future from a standpoint of of the probabilities. It's like it's like a branching stream of probabilities, and there are actions that we can take that affect those probabilities, or that accelerate one thing or slow down another thing or make you know, introduce something new to the probability stream. Sustainable energy will happen no matter what. If there was no Tesla, if Tesla never never existed, it it would have to happen out of necessity. It's tautological. If if you until you if you don't have sustainable energy, means you have unsustainable energy. Eventually, you'll run out, and the laws of economics will drive will drive civilization towards sustainable energy, inevitably. But the the fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy, faster than it would otherwise occur. So when I think, like, what is the fundamental good of a company like Tesla, I would say, hopefully, it does if if it if it accelerated that by a decade, potentially more than a decade, that would be quite a good thing to occur. That's what I consider to be the the fundamental sort of aspirational goal of of Tesla. Then there's becoming a multi pan species in space prank civilization. This is not inevitable. It's very important to appreciate this is not inevitable. The sustainable energy future, I think, is largely inevitable, but being space prank civilization is definitely not inevitable. If you look at the the the progress in space, in 1969, we were able to send somebody to the moon. 1969. Then we had the the space shuttle. The the space shuttle could only take people to low Earth orbit. Then the space shuttle retired and The United States could take no one to orbit. So that's the trend. The trend is like down to nothing. This is not if you are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves, it does not automatically improve. It it only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And and the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts, but they forgot how to do it.
You know, it it always seems, you know, listening to you and looking at the different things you've done, that you've got this this unique double motivation on everything that I I find so interesting. We we, you know, which is one is this desire to work for humanity's long term good. The other is this desire to do something exciting, and it's it's often it feels like you you feel like you need the one to drive the other. With with Tesla, you want to have sustainable energy, so you make these super sexy, exciting cars to do it. You know, solar energy, we need to get there, so we need to make these beautiful roofs. We haven't even spoken about your newest thing, which we don't have time to do, but you want to save humanity from bad AI, and so you're going to create this really cool brain machine interface to give us all infinite memory and telepathy and so forth. And on Mars, it feels like what you're saying is, yeah, we need we need to save humanity and have a have a backup plan, but also we need to inspire humanity, and and and and this is this is a way to inspire. I think
I think value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated. No question. But I want to be clear. I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. That is not the I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.
Beautiful statement. I think everyone here would agree that it is not none of this is gonna happen inevitably. The fact that in your mind, you dream this stuff, you dream stuff that no one else would would dare dream, or or no one else would be capable of dreaming at the level of complexity that you do. The fact that you do that, Elon Musk, is a really remarkable thing. Thank you for helping us all to dream a bit bigger.
But you'll tell me if it ever starts getting genuinely insane. Right?
Thank you. That That was was really, really fantastic. That was really fantastic. Thank you, Thank you.
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