[0:00:01] We met a number of years ago. I was going in to pitch a movie called Interstellar. At the time, Steven Spielberg was the director, and he wanted to do a grounded movie about the future of space travel. So I came in, and my pitch was very short. I said, the movie's going to be 10 minutes long, because it's not happening. It was about 10 years ago. We're not going. There's no money left.
[0:00:30] This is not a priority for us anymore. And then in the course of, and somehow I got the job, in the course of writing the movie, working with Kip Thorne, a physicist, invited me to a physics conference one night, and I got seated next to Elon. We've been friends ever since. The irony of that being I wound up becoming friends with a guy who I think personally is moving the needle back in the other direction, kind of by himself at this point.
[0:00:59] More than anyone I can think of. So the net result is, I think we are going back to the moon. I think we are going to Mars. And I think a lot of it is because of you. So one of the questions we got here today, one of the questions that you guys have submitted that I love is, it's simple. Mars, how can we help? Well, let's see. So in the short term, Mars is really about getting the spaceship built.
[0:01:43] Making good progress on the ship and the booster, code name VFR. What does that stand for again? Well, it's like sort of a Rorschach test in acronym form. But it is very big. And I gave a presentation on this at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia last year.
[0:02:18] Design is evolving rapidly. We're actually building that ship right now. I think right now the biggest thing that would be helpful is just general support and encouragement and goodwill. I think once we build it, we'll have a point of proof, something that other
[0:02:51] Companies and countries can then go and do. They currently don't think it's possible, so if we show them that it is, then I think they will up their game and they will build interplanetary transport vehicles as well. Now, once that has been built and there is a means of getting cargo and people to and from Mars as well as to and from the moon and other places in the solar system,
[0:03:21] And I think that's really where there's a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial resources that are needed. Because you've got to build out the entire base of industry, everything that allows human civilization to exist. And it's going to be harder, a lot harder, in a place like Mars or the moon. We need some volunteers to be colonists. Do we have any colonist volunteers here from Mars? Actually, not many hands raised, by the way.
[0:03:55] I mean, the moon of Mars is often thought of as like, is this some escape hatch for rich people? But it won't be that at all. For the early people that go to Mars, it'll be far more dangerous. I mean, really, it kind of reads like Shackleton's ad for Antarctic explorers. It's like, difficult, dangerous, good chance you'll die. Excitement.
[0:04:27] For those who survive, that kind of thing. And I think there's not many people who actually want to go in the beginning, because all those things I said are true. But there'll be some who will, for whom the excitement of the frontier and exploration exceeds the concern of danger. And we'll start off building the most elementary infrastructure, just a base to create propellant, a power station,
[0:04:58] Glass domes in which to grow crops. All the sort of fundamentals without which you cannot survive. And then really there's going to be an explosion of entrepreneurial opportunity because Mars will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to nightclubs. Definitely pizza joints.
[0:05:28] I think Mars should really have great bars. The Mars bar. Sorry. I love dad jokes. I'm a dad. What do you think the timeline for this is? I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the timeline, although sometimes my timelines are a little, you know.
[0:06:01] People have told me that my timelines historically have been optimistic. And so I'm trying to recalibrate to some degree here. But I can tell you what I know currently is the case is that we are building the first ship, the first Mars or interplanetary ship right now. And I think we'll be able to do short flights, short sort of up and down flights.
[0:06:32] Probably sometime in the first half of next year. This is a very big booster and chip. The lift-off thrust of this would be about twice that of a Saturn V. So it's capable of doing 150 metric tons to orbit and be fully reusable. So the expendable payload is around double that number. So what's amazing about...
[0:07:04] Thank you very much. My question is, assuming we can make full and rapid reusability work, is that we can reduce the marginal cost per flight dramatically by orders of magnitude compared to where it is today. This question of reusability is so fundamental to rocketry. It is the fundamental breakthrough that's needed. If you consider aircraft, for example, you can lease a 747 and do a return flight
[0:07:34] Bullet cargo from California to Australia for half a million dollars. That's what it cost to lease a 747 fully round trip to Australia, which is far. To buy a single-engine turboprop plane, a good one, would be about $1.5 million. And that can't even reach Australia, and it's tiny compared to a 747. So what that means is like a...
[0:08:05] It costs less to use a giant plane with huge cargo for a long trip. That costs way less than buying a small plane for a short trip in the aircraft world. And the same actually is true of Rocket Green. A BFR flight will actually cost less than our Falcon 1 flight did back in the day. So that was about a $5 or $6 million.
[0:08:35] Marginal cost per flight. We're confident that BFR will be less than that. So that's profound. And that is what will enable the creation of a permanent base on the moon and a city on Mars. And that's equivalent of like the Union Pacific Railroad or having ships that can cross oceans. Until you can get there, there's no way for all of the entrepreneurial energy to...
[0:09:04] You can't do anything. There's no way for all the flowers to bloom. Once you can get there, the opportunity is immense. And so we're going to do our best to get you there and then make sure that there's an environment in which entrepreneurs can flourish. And then I think it'll be amazing. A big part of that, and we've talked about this, is inspiring people to look again.
[0:09:37] We were talking about this yesterday. It was our grandparents who went to the moon. We have not gone back since. In my lifetime, no one's gone to the moon. You and I were having a conversation last year about what to put in Falcon Heavy. What's the cargo? The idea was to use that as an opportunity to inspire people. Again, Carl Sagan had a beautiful thought many, many years ago that if you just get enough people to look at the Earth from a distance,
[0:10:07] That it would get them to focus on the problems here and on the possibilities of space exploration. I was fortunate enough to be with you at Launch Control when Falcon Heavy launched a few weeks back. And we made a little movie. We've called it a trailer that sums up that experience. We have it here. We thought we'd play it for you guys again. This is two minutes that does a pretty good job of giving you the feeling of what it was like to be there when Falcon Heavy launched.
[0:10:36] We wanted you to get excited about the possibility of something new happening in space, of the space frontier getting pushed forward. The goal of this was to inspire you and make you believe again, just as people believed in the Apollo era, that anything's possible. Thank you. That picture at the end is a picture of one of the circuit boards inside the roadster, right? We tried to confuse the aliens as much as possible.
[0:11:20] If you look carefully, there's also a little Hot Wheels version of the Roadster with a tiny little astronaut in the Hot Wheels Roadster on the dashboard. That was suggested by a friend of ours called Nora. Nora suggested that. So if you guys have any suggestions, let us know. I think for me, watching those two boosters come down side by side felt like a transformative moment.
[0:11:50] It felt like a, oh, we can do anything. And that's the culmination. I was really struck there by the culmination of a singular vision and hundreds or thousands of very talented people working together to make sure. I was sitting in launch control and looking at the sheer amount of variables that you guys are clocking in those moments before the launch. Wind speed at different altitudes and the status of all the different 27 engines in that. I mean, how do you manage?
[0:12:19] You're very hands-on with the details, but you're also looking at the bigger picture. How do you manage your time? How do you zoom in and zoom out and make sure that all these things are coming together? Well, at SpaceX, almost all my time is spent on engineering and design. It's probably 80% and 90%. And then Gwynne Shotwell, who's president and chief operating officer, takes care of the business operations of the company, which is what allows me to do that.
[0:12:51] And I think in order to make the right decisions, you have to understand something. If you don't understand something at a detailed level, you cannot make a decision. But I'd like to just point out what you saw there as a result of an incredible team at SpaceX, super talented people who really work like crazy to make that happen. I think my role is to...
[0:13:23] Make sure that they have an environment where the talents can really come to the fore. But I can't tell you how honored and grateful I am to work with such a great team. Everyone in this room is inspired by you. Who are you inspired by? Well, Kanye West, obviously. Me too. Fred Astaire. You should see my dance moves.
[0:14:02] We may see some dance moves. I do love Fred Astaire. He's amazing. If you haven't watched his movies, they're amazing. I think for me, when I look at all of the things you've undertaken to do, the commonality is with Tesla, with SpaceX, SolarCity, now with the Boring Company, it feels like you're seeing a firmly established and mature industry.
[0:14:40] That is ripe for sort of a quantum shift. There's an opportunity there for, you know, in the case of cars, it's electrification, which drastically changes, you know, the complexity of an automobile and potentially down the line the expense of it. With rockets, it's the usability of it. With solar, it's about a firmly established energy system that's about to be massively disrupted. This is happening.
[0:15:09] And with the Boring Company, it's about looking at infrastructure projects which typically take decades and billions of dollars and looking to reduce the complexity of that. Is that how you see the world? Do you see the things that don't work and can be made better? No. I don't look at things and say, okay, what's the rank ordered?
[0:15:39] Business opportunity from a financial standpoint or anything like that. It's really just like there's some things that don't seem to be working that are important for our life and for the future to be good. And I'd say that if one were to do a risk-adjusted rate of return,
[0:16:10] Estimate on various industry opportunities. I would put basically building rockets and cars pretty close to the bottom of the list. They would have to be the dumbest things to do. Just because, you know, look at the auto industry. And in the U.S. auto industry, the only two companies that haven't gone bankrupt, at least at some point, are Tesla and Ford. Every other company.
[0:16:40] So why do it? Well, in the case of SpaceX, I just kept wondering why we were not making progress
[0:17:12] Sending people to Mars. Why we didn't have a base on the moon. Where are the space hotels that were promised in 2001, the movie? It just wasn't happening year after year. It was getting me down. I look at the NASA website. I was like, where does it say when we're going to Mars? It doesn't. Initially for SpaceX, for example, I thought,
[0:17:43] The genesis of SpaceX was not to create a company, but really, how do we get NASA's budget to be bigger? That was initially the goal. So I came up with this little, small philanthropic mission, which would be to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars. It's called Mars Oasis. And upon landing, the seeds would be a dehydrated nutrient gel, hydrated upon landing, and you'd have this little greenhouse.
[0:18:11] And then the money shot would be green plants against a red background. I recently learned that money shot has a meaning that I wasn't aware of. I think that would get people excited. It rekindles the spirit of Apollo, essentially. And as I got more and more into what it would take to do that, I learned that the fundamental issue is actually the cost of access to space.
[0:18:41] Rockets were super expensive and the cost per pound or kilogram to orbit had actually gone up over the years, not down. And I was like, okay, well, it won't matter if we are able to do this philanthropic mission and it generates a lot of will to go to Mars. That's not going to matter if there's no way. So after my second or third trip back from Russia, I was like, whoa, there's got to be a way to build.
[0:19:11] There's got to be a way to solve this rocket problem. I started reading a lot of books on rockets and sort of a first principles analysis of a rocket. Just broke down the materials that are in a rocket, what would it cost to buy those materials, versus the price of the rocket. And there's a gigantic difference between the raw material cost of the rocket and the finished cost of the rocket. So there must be something wrong happening in going from the constituent atoms to the final shape.
[0:19:42] And I found that certainly to be true. And then why weren't people trying to make reusability work? It was very difficult to make rocket reusability work. And then unfortunately the space shuttle ended up being a counterexample of don't try to make reusability work because the space shuttle ended up costing more per flight than an expendable vehicle of equivalent capability. So for a long time people were using the space shuttle as an example of why reusability is dumb.
[0:20:11] You can't take a single case example and make an entire theory out of it. So there's no question in my mind that if you could reuse the rockets, it has to be true reuse, which means rapid and complete reuse. The problem with the space shuttles, only a portion of the system came back. The big orange tank, which was also the primary airframe, was discarded every time, and the parts that were reused were incredibly difficult to refurbish.
[0:20:41] So the only kind of reuse that matters is if it's rapid and complete. So the only thing you're changing between flights apart from scheduled maintenance is the propellant. So we embarked upon that journey to create SpaceX in 2002. And in the beginning, I actually wouldn't even let my friends invest because I don't want to lose their money. I thought it was like, you know, I'd rather lose my own money.
[0:21:15] And then we almost did die at SpaceX, actually. So I budgeted for three flights. I mean, technically, I did have a plan where I had the money from PayPal. I had like about $180 million from PayPal. And I thought, you know, I'll allocate half of that to SpaceX and Tesla and SolarCity. And that should be fine. I'll have $90 million, like just lots, you know. But then what happened is,
[0:21:47] Things cost more and took longer than I thought, so I had a choice of either put the rest of the money in or the companies are going to die. I ended up putting all the money in and borrowing money for rent from friends. 2008 was brutal. 2008, we had the third consecutive failure of the Falcon rocket for SpaceX.
[0:22:18] Almost went bankrupt. We closed our financing round 6 p.m. Christmas Eve 2008. It was the last hour of the last day that it was possible. We would have gone bankrupt two days after Christmas otherwise. And I got divorced. That was like rough. Man. It poses a question, or maybe you just answered the question of why is no one else doing these things? What's your pain threshold? It's real high.
[0:22:55] Yeah, SpaceX is alive by the skin of its teeth, so is Tesla. If things had just gone a little bit the other way, both companies would be dead. And one of the most difficult choices I've ever faced in life was in 2008. And I think I had maybe $30 million left, $30 or $40 million left in 2008, and I had two choices.
[0:23:26] Put it all into one company, and then the other company would definitely die. Or split it between the two companies. But if I split it between the two companies, then both might die. And when you put your blood, sweat, and tears into creating something, or building something, it's like a child. So it's like, which one am I going to let one starve to death? I couldn't bring myself to do it, so I split the money between the two.
[0:23:59] Fortunately, thank goodness, they both came through. We've got a question for the audience that builds on that. What was your biggest failure and how did it change you? What was your biggest failure and how did it change you? I have to really think hard about that. Failure. I've never heard of it. There's your answer. Well, there's a ton of failures along the way, that's for sure. As I said, for SpaceX, the first three launches failed.
[0:24:34] And we were just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the fourth launch. If that fourth launch had failed, we would have been dead. So multiple failures along the way. I tried very hard to get the right expertise in for SpaceX. I tried hard to find a great chief engineer for the rocket. But the good chief engineers wouldn't join. And the bad ones, well, there was no...
[0:25:01] No point in hiring them. So I ended up being chief engineer of the Rocket. So if I could have found somebody better, then we would have maybe had less than three failures. How do you plan a business where you know, the Rocket business, you know some of these things are going to blow up? How does the business plan work? I don't really have a business plan. I had a business plan way back in the Zip2 days.
[0:25:38] But these things are just always wrong, so I just didn't bother with business plans after that. I think wishful thinking for sure is a source of many problems in many walks of life. Business or personal wishful thinking causes a lot of trouble. You really have to ask whether something,
[0:26:17] Is it true or not? Does it make sense? If it ever feels like too easy, it probably is. But for all the drama of SpaceX, I think Tesla's actually been probably two-thirds of my total drama dose over time. Tesla's a drama magnet. It's crazy. How do you... I mean, a lot of people want to know. You're managing three...
[0:26:54] We're four companies now, each of them trying to do something revolutionary, each of them challenging a business that has historically been regarded as impossible to challenge or disrupt. How do you prioritize? How do you prioritize between the different companies? How do you prioritize? How do you spend your time? Yeah, absolutely. Actually, can I tell you for a while? I've got a bit of a cold, so my voice is a bit hoarse.
[0:27:26] In terms of time priority, for business time, almost all of it is really dedicated to SpaceX and Tesla. It may sound like I've got a lot of different endeavors, but it's overwhelmingly SpaceX and Tesla in terms of time allocation. And then for non-business stuff, it's almost entirely kid stuff. My kids are here today, actually. I brought them along to South by Southwest. I hope they're having a good time.
[0:28:04] They went and saw the Westworld exhibit. It's really amazing. If you haven't seen the Westworld, what do you call it, exhibit? I don't know what you call it. I think you just call it Westworld at this point. It's a theme park. It's really incredibly well done. I took the kids there yesterday. They had a great time. I think probably one of the biggest misunderstanding is that I'm actually not an investor.
[0:28:33] Sometimes people think I'm an investor or I invest in things. I actually don't invest in anything. In fact, the only public security that I own of any kind is Tesla. And then the next biggest is SpaceX. And then the Boring Company kind of started more as a joke because that would be a funny name for a company. You know, we put the zero in bring. I mean, it's sort of like...
[0:29:04] That doesn't make any sense. I remember when you first told me that you were thinking about tunnels. When did I first tell you about that? Years ago. Okay, it's like a long time ago. I thought you were joking. Yeah, it was. I was joking. It's not because of some epiphany that I had one day driving down the 405. That's how it gets translated somehow. I was talking about tunnels for years and years.
[0:29:36] For probably five years or four years at least, whenever I'd give a talk and people would ask me about what opportunities do you see in the world, I'd say tunnels. Can someone please build tunnels? So after four or five years of begging people to build tunnels, and still no tunnels, I was like, okay, I want to build a tunnel. Like maybe I'm missing something here. So, yeah, so I was like basically talking.
[0:30:08] It feels years of tunnels for several years. And then said, well, let's find out what it takes to build a tunnel. And so I started digging a tunnel. I wanted to start the tunnel from where I could see it, from my office at SpaceX. So I said, well, let's just carve off a part of the parking lot across the road so I can see if anything's happening or not. And then we named our first boring machine Godot. Because I kept waiting for it. It never came.
[0:30:38] Finally it did. And we got it going. And now we're making good progress. And we're finding the company for merchandise sales. So thank you for anyone who's bought our flamethrower. You will not be sorry, or maybe you will. It won't be boring.
[0:31:08] We have a video, I think, here of the latest vision for the Boring Company in terms of how it plans. I didn't even know this. Great. We've added seats. I think, you know, when we were first talking about the concept, you know, tunnels feel like a resolutely old school solution to a problem. I invented tunnels.
[0:32:13] And I was still holding out hope for the flying car, and then you asked me one simple question that answered the question for me about flying cars kind of forever, which was, would you want your neighbor to have a flying car? Yes, exactly. This is exactly the question. Oh, you want a flying car? How about everyone around you has a flying car too? Oh. That doesn't sound so good. Yeah. And I think one of the interesting things about tunneling is it's one of these things that, you know, there's not a lot of market competition there. It's not a, you know, it's...
[0:32:42] It's something that's ripe for change. So how do you... I remember you talked about the philosophy with Godot was to just keep running it basically until you figured out why it can't run any faster. Yeah, so... I mean, the boring company, to be clear, it's like literally 2% of my time. It's probably 20% of my tweets. But tweets do not correlate to actual time spent.
[0:33:14] I mean, I sort of just have fun with the boring company, but my time allocation is literally about 2%. Talk about your time allocation. I think one of the things you spend an awful lot of time thinking about, I know, is artificial intelligence. It's something that you and I have as a shared interest, and it's something that our audience is interested in as well. The question here is a lot of experts in AI don't share the same level of concern.
[0:33:43] What specifically do you believe that they don't? Well, the biggest issue I see with so-called AI experts is that they think they know more than they do. And they think they're smarter than they actually are. In general, we are all much smarter than we think we are, but much less smart, dumber than we think we are, by a lot.
[0:34:21] This tends to plague smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence, and they don't like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea, which is fundamentally flawed. That's the wishful thinking situation. I'm very close to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me. It's capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows.
[0:34:53] And the rate of improvement is exponential. You can see this in things like AlphaGo, which went from, in the span of maybe six to nine months, it went from being unable to beat even a reasonably good Go player, to then beating the European World Champion, who was ranked 600, then beating Lisa Doll, 4-5, who had been World Champion for many years, then beating the current World Champion, then beating everyone while playing simultaneously.
[0:35:22] Then there was AlphaZero, which crushed AlphaGo 100 to 0. And AlphaZero just learned by playing itself, and it can play basically any game that you put the rules in for. Whatever rules you give it, literally read the rules, play the game, and be superhuman for any game. Nobody expected that rate of improvement. If you ask those same experts who think AI is not progressing at the rate...
[0:35:52] I think you'll find that their predictions for things like Go and other AI advancements, their batting average is quite weak. It's not good. We'll see this also with self-driving. I think probably by the end of next year, self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least
[0:36:24] 100 to 200% safer than a person by the end of next year. We're talking maybe 18 months from now. NHTSA did a study on Tesla's autopilot version 1, which is relatively primitive, and found that it was a 45% reduction in highway accidents. And that's despite autopilot 1 being just version 1. Version 2, I think, will be at least two or three times better. That's the current version that's running right now.
[0:36:56] So the rate of improvement is really dramatic. We have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital superintelligence is one which is symbiotic with humanity. I think that's the single biggest existential crisis that we face, and the most pressing one. And how do we do that? If we take it that it's inevitable at this point, that some version of AI is coming down the line, how do we steer through that? Well...
[0:37:26] I'm not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight. I mean, I think once you generally are on the side of minimizing those things. But this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public. And therefore, there needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important.
[0:37:56] I think the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot. And nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to just build nuclear warheads if they want. That would be insane. And mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. Far. So why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane. What's a question you've been asking for a long time? I think it's a question that's come to the forefront over the last year.
[0:38:26] Where you begin to realize that it doesn't necessarily, I think we've all been focused in on the idea of artificial superintelligence, right? Which is clearly a danger, but maybe a little further out. What's happened over the last year is you've seen artificial, what I've been calling artificial stupidity. You've been talking about algorithmic manipulation of social media. We're in it now. It's starting to happen. How do we, is it, what's the intervention at this point?
[0:39:00] I'm not really all that worried about the short-term stuff. Narrow AI is not a species-level risk. It will result in dislocation in lost jobs and better weaponry and that kind of thing, but it is not a fundamental species-level risk, whereas digital superintelligence is. It's really all about...
[0:39:29] Laying the groundwork to make sure that if humanity collectively decides that creating digital superintelligence is the right move, then we should do so very, very carefully. Very, very carefully. This is the most important thing that we could possibly do. Building on that, other than AI and the other issues that you're tackling, transportation, energy production, aerospace.
[0:40:07] What issues should our next generation of leaders be focused on solving? What else is coming down the line? Well, I mean, there are other things that are on a longer time scale. And obviously the things that I believe in, like extending life beyond Earth, making life multi-planetary. I'm a big believer in sort of Asimov's Foundation Series or the principle that you really want to... I recommend reading the Foundation Series, but it's like...
[0:40:47] If you know that there's likely to be, we don't know, but there's likely to be another Dark Ages, which it seems, my guess is there probably will be at some point. I'm not predicting that we're about to enter a Dark Ages, but that there's some probability that we will, particularly if there's a Third World War. Then we want to make sure that there's enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back.
[0:41:17] And perhaps shorten the length of the dark ages. I think that's why it's important to get a self-sustaining base, ideally on Mars, because Mars is far enough away from Earth that a war on Earth, the Mars base might survive. It's more likely to survive than a moon base. But I think a moon base and a Mars base that could perhaps...
[0:41:46] Help regenerate life back here on Earth would be really important, and to get that done before a possible World War III. Last century, we had two massive world wars, three if you count the Cold War. I think it's unlikely that we'll never have another World War again. There probably will be at some point. Or if we have another one, it'll be the last. Yeah, it just could be a radioactive problem. So, again, I'm not predicting.
[0:42:18] It just seems like, well, if you say given enough time, will it be most likely? Given enough time. This has been our pattern in the past. So I really believe in the zeroth law, Asimov's zeroth law. You take the set of actions most likely to support humanity in the future. But I think sustainable energy is also obviously really important. That's tautological. If it's not sustainable, it's unsustainable.
[0:42:50] Yeah, how close are we to solving that problem? Well, I think that the core technologies are there with the wind, solar, with batteries. The fundamental problem is that there's an unpriced externality in the cost of CO2. The market economics works very well if things are priced correctly. But when things are not priced correctly,
[0:43:20] And something that has a real cost has zero cost, then that's where you get distortions in the market that inhibit the progress of other technologies. So essentially anything that produces carbon, it puts carbon into the atmosphere, which includes rockets, by the way. So I'm not excluding rockets from this. It has to be a price. And you can start off with a low price.
[0:43:49] And then depending upon whether that price has any effect on the possibility of CO2 in the atmosphere, you can adjust that price up or down. But in the absence of a price, we sort of pretend that digging trillions of tons of fossil fuels from deep under the earth and putting it into the atmosphere, we're pretending that that has no probability of a bad outcome. And the entire scientific community is saying,
[0:44:18] Obviously, it's going to have a bad outcome. Obviously. You're changing the chemical constituents in the atmosphere. So it's really up to people and governments to put a price on carbon, and then automatically the right thing happens. It's really straightforward. What do we do with the carbon that's already up there? I actually think we can manage with the current carbon level, or even a little bit higher.
[0:44:53] And this is going to sound like I'm backtracking, but there's actually an argument that more carbon in the atmosphere is actually good, but up to a point. So we might actually arguably have been a little carbon-starved. If you go back 200 years ago and say, okay, a few years ago, we had like...
[0:45:23] 280, 290 parts per million of carbon. We're probably a little carbon starved. Now we're about 400, just past the 400 mark. I think somewhere in the 400s, probably okay. We don't have to worry about sequestering carbon or anything like that. But now, if this momentum keeps going, and we start going up to 600, 800, 1,000, 1,500, that's where things get really squirrely.
[0:45:54] The sheer momentum of the world's energy infrastructure is leading us in that direction. So it's just very important that the public and the governments push to ensure that the correct price of carbon is paid. So that will be the thing that matters. Our audience is very interested in knowing how many hours of sleep you got last night. I don't know, about six, five or six, I think.
[0:46:31] I feel like we know part of the answer to this because you were trapped in Westworld for a while. But on a regular day for you, you're not sleeping a lot, right? Well, geez, do I look that bad? No. You look great. But we just imagine with the amount of responsibilities, with the amount of what you've got going on, do these problems still keep you up at night or do you think we're on our way to solving them?
[0:46:59] Well, right now the only things that are really stressing me out in a big way are AI, obviously. That's like always there. And working really hard on Tesla Model 3 production. And we're making good progress, but it's hugely hard work. But those are the two most stressful things in my life right now. Yeah. Our audience really wants to know, what do you hope the world will look like for children born today when they're your age? Winter?
[0:47:31] What do you hope for the world to look like? What's the best case scenario? Say we solve these problems. What's that world look like? Let's see. I think a good picture would look like we've really substantially transferred to sustainable generation and consumption of electricity so that the CO2 risk and the ocean rising risk is mitigated. We're not looking at having Florida and...
[0:48:05] And sort of large portions of the world underwater. That'd be great. Not to have to address that risk. That'd be enormous. For us to have a base on the moon, base on Mars, be out there exploring the solar system, start building industry on essentially having human civilization go out there and have it be such that anyone can go to the moon or Mars or out.
[0:48:34] It's the sole system, if they want, to make it really affordable. I do think it's important that there's competition, that there are multiple companies doing this, not just SpaceX. And that AI risk is, I guess, is sort of a benign AI, and that we're able to achieve a symbiosis with that AI. Ideally, the AI, there's somebody who, I can't remember his name, but had a good suggestion for what the,
[0:49:05] Optimization of the AI should be, what's its utility function? You have to be careful about this, because you say maximize happiness, and the AI concludes that happiness is a function of dopamine and serotonin, so it captures all humans and jacks your brain with logical amounts of dopamine and serotonin. Like, okay, that's not what we meant. It sounds pretty good, though. Oh, you'll love it. Well, I like the definition of, like, the AI should try to maximize the freedom of action.
[0:49:35] Humanity. Maximize the freedom of action. Maximize freedom, essentially. I like that definition. But we do want a close coupling between collective human intelligence and digital intelligence. Neuralink is trying to help in that regard by creating an interface between a high bandwidth interface between AI and
[0:50:07] And human brain. We're already a cyborg in the sense that your phone and your computer are kind of an extension of you. Just low bandwidth input output. Exactly. It's just low bandwidth. Particularly output. I mean, two thumbs, basically. So how do we solve that problem? The bandwidth thing? The bandwidth issue. I mean, we've all succumbed to it now. We're all cyborgs. We're just low efficiency cyborgs. So how do we...
[0:50:45] How do we make it better? I think we've got to build an interface. We didn't evolve to have a communications jack. There's got to be essentially vast numbers of tiny electrodes that are able to read-write from your brain. Of course, security is pretty important in this situation, to say the least.
[0:51:12] I was going to say, I'm not coming with. I'm keeping my brain air gapped. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people will choose to do that. But it's a bit like Ian Banks' Neural Ace. But in the case of Neural Ace, that's there from when you're born. It's sort of, it's not a... It's a backup. Sorry? It's a backup. Yeah, kind of a backup. This would be, there's a digital extension of you that is an AI.
[0:51:42] The AI extension of you, a tertiary layer of intelligence. So you've got your limbic system, your cortex, and the tertiary layer, which is the digital AI extension of you. And that high bandwidth connection is what achieves a tight symbiosis. I think that's the best outcome. I hope so. If anybody's got better ideas, I'd love to hear it. And talking about another project that you're working on that our audience wants to know a little bit more about, Starlink.
[0:52:14] Can you tell us anything? Do you mean Skynet? Hopefully not Skynet. It's internet in the sky. We don't talk that much about Starlink, but essentially it's intended to provide low latency, high bandwidth internet connectivity throughout the world. There actually will not be enough...
[0:52:48] Cognitive processing power on board the satellite system to in any way be a Skynet thing. Digital AI requires a lot of super intelligence, requires a lot of big servers on the ground. It's too power intensive. But this is intended to provide people who don't have any internet connectivity with internet connectivity. And it's very good for sparsely populated and moderately sparsely populated areas.
[0:53:17] And for giving people in cities a low-cost choice of internet access. But I do think it's going to be important. The Starlink system will be important in providing the funding necessary for SpaceX to develop interplanetary spacecraft. And at the same time, helping people who have either no or super expensive connectivity and giving people in urban areas more of a competitive choice. Very cool.
[0:53:48] I have to ask you because it's the number one question. Just going back to Mars, what kind of government do you envision for the first Martian colony? And what's your title? Yeah, exactly. Emperor? Oh, God, Emperor. I don't know. It might be too much. I don't know. I have to watch my jokes here. Not everyone gets irony. You must remember.
[0:54:22] So I think most likely the form of government on Mars would be somewhat of a direct democracy where people vote directly on issues instead of going through representative government. When the United States was formed, representative government was the only thing that was logistically feasible because there was no way for people to communicate instantly. A lot of people didn't even have really access
[0:54:53] There wasn't even really, the post office was very primitive. A lot of people couldn't write. So you had to have some form of representative democracy or things just wouldn't work at all. But I think on Mars, most likely it's gonna be people, everyone votes on every issue and that's how it goes. There are a few things I'd recommend, which is keep laws short. Long laws, it's like, that's...
[0:55:21] That's something suspicious is going on if there's long law. If the size of the law exceeds the word count of Lord of the Rings, which it does, amazingly, then it's like something's wrong. So there should be a limit to the size of the law that you should be able to digest it. How come you can read the Constitution and all of the amendments? You can read those in maybe an hour.
[0:55:50] And we govern so much of our civilization by that, and yet modern law is this obtuse, super boring tome that's indecipherable to almost anyone. So I think direct democracy, laws that are comprehensible, I think having some kind of hysteresis on, like it should be easier to remove a law than create one.
[0:56:19] Because things just get to inertia. You have to have something that's going to overcome inertia. So probably, I don't know what the right number would be. Maybe it's like 60, 40. Maybe it requires 60% to get a law in place. But any number above 40% can remove a law. Otherwise, you just get laws just accumulate over time, accumulate over time. And it's sort of like Gulliver, where you just get trapped by all these tiny strings and you can't move. You get hardening of the arteries of civilization with rules and rules and rules and rules.
[0:56:49] So it should be just easier to get rid of a rule than to put one in. Maybe they should even have some kind of sunset clause so that they just automatically expire unless there's enough of an impetus to keep them around. I know there's a fair amount of interest. I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about the very early days with Tesla and how it came together. My brother Kimball is here. I thought we'd bring him out. You guys can talk a little bit about it. Sure.
[0:57:29] You guys might get lucky tonight. I notice you have a guitar. I'm going to ignore that. We've got hats, we've got a guitar. I guess there are a fair number of entrepreneurs here today and a fair number of people interested looking at Tesla, which now, extraordinary success of it. How did this come together? When you guys were looking at, I know famously, you were looking at problems you could solve.
[0:58:00] What do those conversations look like? Yeah, so the, let's see. I'm talking to Kimball, thanks for coming on, about the things that I thought would be most important to work on for a long time, all the way back to college days. And electric cars are something I've been interested in since I was 18, 19. When do you first recall hearing me talk about electric cars? I'm just curious.
[0:58:33] First time was, well, you talked about it in the 90s a lot. We used to brainstorm a lot randomly, even in, I think we were 20 years old. And the first thing I remember us brainstorming was solving connectivity amongst doctors. And we were on a road trip from... That was hopeless. A long time ago. We had a lot of doctors in the family, so we had the information. But the idea was really to solve that problem where from Silicon Valley to Philadelphia, brainstorming how you do it. This was before the internet, so we...
[0:59:02] You know, in our minds, designing network computers, doctors talking. This has all happened, of course, over 25 years, but that's sort of the first time I remember us really trying to solve a world problem, and unless it was a world problem that was really important, it just wasn't that interesting to us. Electric cars, you talked about for a long time, but I remember walking into your house once, this is in probably 2002 or 2003, and you had these plans laid out that the team at Tesla had...
[0:59:31] Well, the earlier guys had basically said, you know, we're going to take this Lotus Elise and we're going to convert it into an electric car. And, you know, we sat down and talked about it for a bit. And it wasn't so much that it could be done. I think we all believed it could be done. It was more just the attitude that it should be done. And it went from there. Yeah, well, the first internships that I had that were interesting were on ultracapacitors for use in electric cars.
[1:00:00] So that's why I first came out to Silicon Valley in, like, 93 or 92 or something like that, was to work at a company called Pinnacle Research on advanced ultracapacitors with the idea that this could be a solution to the energy storage problem in electric vehicles. And then when I graduated from Penn, I was going to be doing a PhD at Stanford in material science and physics.
[1:00:29] Try to figure out if there's a way to solve for an ultra high density solid state capacitor that would have enough range to power an electric vehicle. So that's a 95. And then I wasn't sure. There's one of those things where you could work on it for a long time and discover that there's actually no good solution. You could publish a paper.
[1:01:00] You get a PhD in all that, but it would be academic in its value. So in 1995, I had a choice of either work on this energy storage system for electric vehicles or try to play a role in building the Internet. But the Internet stuff was happening right then and there, whereas the electric vehicle technology was going to progress slowly on its own.
[1:01:29] Whether I was there or not. So I thought, well, I'll put the grad studies on hold and do something to help build the internet, or do something useful on the internet. And that's when I talked to Kimball, and you were working in Canada at the time. Yes, right. And I said, hey, why don't we try to do this company in Silicon Valley?
[1:01:51] It was pretty cool. We were the first to see maps in door-to-door directions. It had been built by a company, Navtech, but never been on the internet. And it was so cool to be the first two humans to see it. You can draw a map, type in an address, get directions, things you probably all did about 50 times today each. And we were the first to see that and put it on the internet, so it was really cool. It was the first maps and directions, yellow pages and white pages on the internet.
[1:02:22] And then we ended up helping bring a lot of publications online. So as investors and customers, the New York Times Company, Knight, Ritter, Hearst, and a number of others. But I always wanted to get back to electric vehicles because that was a primary interest of mine from undergrad and grad days.
[1:02:50] After Zip2, I still did one more internet company because I thought Zip2 had not achieved its full potential. We built this incredible technology, but it wasn't being used by the customers in the right way. It was a bit like building F-22 fighter jets, and then you sell them to people and they roll them down the hill at each other. It's really not the way to use it.
[1:03:20] That's where I decided you really want to go to the end consumer. If you've got great technology, you want to go all the way to the end consumer. Don't tell it to some bonehead legacy company that doesn't understand how to use it. With X.com, which became PayPal, that's where we tried to do something significant with the internet.
[1:03:51] And it got sort of part of the way towards its objective. After PayPal went public and then got bought by eBay in 2002, that actually freed up me and a bunch of other people to go and create companies. And I started debating between either solar, electric car, or space. I thought space was like the least likely to...
[1:04:22] I started off with space first. About a year and a half later, in 2003, I had lunch with JV Straubel and Harold Rosen. It was at this fish restaurant in El Segundo.
[1:04:54] I had been involved in space and electric vehicles. And JB had just graduated from college and was working with him. And the conversation turned to electric vehicles because Harold had done something called Rosen Motors, which was like an attempted EV startup. And I said, well, I've always been super interested in electric vehicles. I was going to do my PhD on advanced energy storage.
[1:05:26] I was going to do grad studies on advanced energy storage techniques for electric vehicles. And so JV said, well, have you heard of this company called AC Propulsion? Because they had created the T-Zero electric sports car as a prototype. I was like, wow, that's great. Lithium-ion batteries had really achieved a level of energy density that, for the first time, could allow you to have a significant range in an electric car.
[1:05:57] And they had a sports car that had zero to 60 in under four seconds, a 250-mile range. And it was pretty cool. Now, it was just a kit car, so it didn't have a roof or airbags or a thermal control system, and it was extremely unreliable. It wasn't productized, but it was a proof of concept. So I got the test drive from AC Propulsion, and I was like, wow.
[1:06:22] You guys should really commercialize this. This would show people what electric cars can do. And I tried for months to get AC propulsion to go into production with the T0. And they just were not interested in doing that. Amazingly, they wanted to do an electric Scion. You know, like that boxy car? But the problem is the electric Scion would cost $70,000. Or you could build a
[1:06:52] Sports car for $100,000. Okay, but nobody's going to buy the electric Scion. But people might buy the electric sports car. So after hounding them for months, I finally said, look, if you guys are not going to commercialize the T-Zero, would you mind if I did that? They said, no, no problem, go ahead. I was like, great, so I'm going to do that with JV. And they said, but if you're going to...
[1:07:22] If you're going to go and try to prioritize T0, there's some other teams you should talk to that are also interested in doing that. So that's where Wadden Everhart, Mark Topping, and Ian Wright came in. And I think that was probably the biggest mistake in my career, quite frankly. Whenever you think you can have your cake and eat it too, that's something you're probably wrong.
[1:07:54] So I thought, I can keep running SpaceX. I'll dedicate 20% of my time to Tesla, and that'll be fine. But actually, it didn't. Things really melted down. Went through hell. We had to recapitalize the company. Kim was there singing in real time. So Silicon Valley, accurate or not accurate? The show? Yeah.
[1:08:25] It starts to get very accurate around episode four. So it took a few episodes to kind of get grounded. The first few episodes struck me as Hollywood making fun of Hollywood's idea of Silicon Valley, which is like not on point. But then by about the fourth or fifth episode, season one, it really starts to get good. And then by season two, it's amazing. In fact, reality, the truth is stranger than fiction.
[1:08:55] All the crazy stuff you see in that show, Silicon Valley, the reality is way crazier than that. Yeah, you've seen it too, right? Yeah, it's like, wow. What will have to be a story for another time, unfortunately, is we've been asked to wrap it up. I've got one last question from the audience. It is, what is your favorite song from the movie Three Amigos? Well, we'd only do it if you guys are willing to sing along. Okay, all right. So Jonah actually is the dancer of the three.
[1:09:28] The three of us have been playing and singing and dancing this song since we were kids. And so we're going to do that on stage. And if you guys can sing along. We'll do the first verse and then you guys can sing along on the second verse. Okay. This is going to be real bad. I said terrible. It's going to be terrible. I'm nixing the dancing thing. Oh, come on. It's the sky. Then you'll walk with me along the by on by. Okay, all together now.
[1:10:41] My Little Buttercup. Smile. My Little Buttercup, where do you stay a while? Where do you stay a while? And you and I will walk by on by. Wow, this is really winning.