[0:00:00] Hey everybody, Friedberg here. What you're about to hear is a discussion from our All In Summit recorded in LA on September 9th. We're going to publish some of the best conversations once a week. If you want to see all the talks, subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash at all in and follow us on X at the all in pod. I'm going to take this. All right.
[0:00:46] Thanks for taking the time. How are you doing, brother? You keeping busy? Yeah. I mean, it's rarely a slow week. I mean, in the world as well. Yeah. I mean, any given week, it just seems like the thing's getting out of here. It's definitely a simulation. We've agreed on this at this point. I mean...
[0:01:15] Well, look, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high. Yes, the ratings are high. How are the freedom of speech wars going? This is a, you've been at war for two years now. Yes. The price of freedom of speech is not cheap, is it? I think it's like 44 billion, something like that. Just give or take a billion. Yeah, round of numbers.
[0:01:45] It's pretty nutty. There is this weird movement to quell free speech around the world. And this is something we should be very concerned about. You have to ask, why was the First Amendment a high priority? It was number one. It's because people came from countries where if you...
[0:02:12] If you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed. And they were like, well, we'd like to not have that here. Because that was terrible. And actually, there's a lot of places in the world right now, if you're critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed. We'd like to not have that.
[0:02:34] Are you concerned? Can I add to that? I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message. I think we always thought that the West was the exception to that, that we knew there were authoritarian places around the world, but we thought that in the West we'd have freedom of speech. And we've seen, like you said, it seems like a global movement. In Britain, you've got teenagers being put in prison for memes.
[0:03:05] It's like you like to Facebook post, throw them in the prison. People have got an actual prison for obscure comments on social media. Not even shitposting. Pavel got thrown in prison recently. I was like, what is the massive crime? Pavel in France, and then of course we've got Brazil.
[0:03:34] With Judge Voldemort. That one seems like the one that impacts you the most. What's the latest on that? Well, I guess we are trying to figure out is there some reasonable solution in Brazil. The concern, I mean, I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly. And funny memes aside, the nature of the concern was that
[0:04:08] At least at XCorp, we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law. Obviously, we cannot, as an American company, impose American laws and values on other countries. We wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do think that if a country's laws are a particular way,
[0:04:37] And we think we're being asked to break them and be silent about it, then obviously that is no good. So I just want to be clear. Sometimes it comes across as Elon's trying to just be a crazy whatever billionaire and demand outrageous things from other countries. And while that is true...
[0:05:08] In addition, there are other things that I think are valid, which is like we obviously can't... I think any given thing that we do at XCorp, we've got to be able to explain in light of day and not feel that it was dishonorable or we did the wrong thing. So we don't...
[0:05:37] That's the nature of the concern. We actually are in discussions with the judicial authorities in Brazil to try to run this to ground. What's actually going on? If we're being asked to break the Brazilian law, then that obviously should not sit well with the Brazilian judiciary.
[0:06:06] And if we're not and we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we're mistaken. I think that's a pretty reasonable position. I'm a bit concerned as your friend that you're going to go to one of these countries and I'm going to wake up one day and you're going to get arrested and I'm going to have to go bail you out or something. This feels very acute. Yes. I mean, it's not a joke now. They're literally saying, it's not just Biden saying we have to look into that guy. Now it's become quite literal.
[0:06:36] This, I don't know, who was the guy who just wrote the, was it the Guardian piece about like? Oh, yeah, yeah. There have been three articles, and I think in the past three weeks. Robert Reich. But it wasn't just him. It was three different articles. That's a trend. Calling for me to be imprisoned in the Guardian, you know. Guardian of what? What are they protecting, exactly? Guardian of, I don't know.
[0:07:05] Authoritarianism? Yeah. Guardian of... Yeah. Censorship? Censorship. But the premise here is that you bought this thing, this online forum, this communication platform, and you're allowing people to use it to express themselves. Therefore, you have to be jailed. I don't understand the logic here. Right. What do you think they're actually afraid of at this point? What's the motivation here? I mean, I think...
[0:07:33] If somebody's sort of trying to push a false premise on the world, then that premise can be undermined with public dialogue, then they will be opposed to public dialogue on that premise because they wish that false premise to prevail. So that's, I think, the issue there is if they don't like the truth, then we want to suppress it.
[0:08:02] What we're trying to do with XCorp is, I distinguish that from my son, who's also called X. You have parental goals, and then you have goals for the company. Everything's just called X, basically. It's a very difficult disambiguation. The car, the son. Yeah, it's X everything. What we're trying to do is simply adhere to the...
[0:08:32] The laws in a country. So if something is illegal in the United States or if it's illegal in Europe or Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down or we'll suspend the account because we're not there to make the laws. But if speech is not illegal, then what are we doing? Okay, now we're injecting ourselves in as a sensor and where does it stop?
[0:09:02] And who decides? And where does that path lead? I think it leads to a bad place. So if the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different. But otherwise, we're going to obey the law in each jurisdiction. That's it. It's not more complicated than that. We're not trying to flout the law. I'm going to be clear about that. We're trying to adhere to the law. And if the laws change, we will change.
[0:09:30] And if the laws don't change, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law. It's pretty straightforward. Yes, it's very straightforward. And if somebody thinks we're not adhering to the law, well, they can file a lawsuit. Bingo. Also very straightforward. Yes. I mean, there are European countries that don't want people to promote Nazi propaganda. Yes. They have some sensitivity to it. It is illegal. It is illegal in those countries. And in those countries, if somebody puts that up, you take it down. Yes.
[0:09:56] But they typically file something and say to use that. No, in some cases it is just obviously illegal. Like you don't need to file a lawsuit for, you know, if something is just, you know, unequivocally illegal, we can literally read the law. This violates the law. You know, anyone can see that. Like, you know, you don't need, like if somebody is stealing, you don't need, let me check the law on that. Okay.
[0:10:22] They're stealing stuff. So we had J.D. Vance here this morning. He did a great job. And one of the things is there's this image on X of basically you, Bobby, Trump, and J.D. are like the Avengers, I guess. And then there's another meme where you're in front of a desk where it says D-O-G-E. The Department of Governmental Efficiency. Yes, yes. I posted that one.
[0:10:49] I made it using Grok, the Grok image generator. And I posted it and printed it to my profile. How do you do it? Well, I mean, I think with great difficulty. But it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations.
[0:11:24] And the last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early 80s. We're 40 years away from a serious effort to remove regulations that don't serve the greater good and reduce the size of government. And I think it's just, if we don't do that, then what's happening is that we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal.
[0:11:52] And that's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States. Like, if you look at the absurdity of the California high-speed rail, I think they've spent $7 billion and have a 1,600-foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it. I mean, your tax dollars at work? I mean, that's the expense of 1,600 feet of concrete, you know? And I mean, I think it's like, you know, I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but...
[0:12:23] I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was not an optimist. At the current trend, California high-speed rail might finish sometime next century. Maybe. Probably not. We'll have teleportation by that time. Yeah, exactly. AI do everything at that point.
[0:12:50] So I think you really think of the United States and many countries, it's arguably worse than the EU, as being like Gulliver tied down by a million little strings. And like any one given regulation is not that bad, but you've got a million of them. Or millions, actually. And then eventually you just can't get anything done. And this is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people.
[0:13:20] It's just they don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations. I'll give you a recent example that is just insane. SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for, they claimed, dumping potable water on the ground, drinking water. And we're like, this is at Starbase. And we're like, we're in a tropical...
[0:13:50] Thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. And there was no actual harm done. It was just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff. And there's zero harm done. And they're like, they agree, yes, there's zero harm done. And we're like, okay, so there's no harm done. And you want us to pay a $140,000 fine. It's like, yes, because you didn't have a permit. Okay. We didn't know there was a permit needed for zero harm.
[0:14:19] Fresh water being on the ground in a place that where fresh water falls from the sky all the time. Got it. Next to the ocean. Next to the ocean. Because there's a little bit of water there too. Yeah. I mean, sometimes it rains so much the roads are flooded. So we're like, you know, how does this make any sense? Yeah. And then they were like, well, we're not going to process any more of your applications for launch, for Starship launch, unless you pay this $140,000. So they just ransomed us. And we're like...
[0:14:48] Okay, so we paid $140,000, but it's like, this is no good. I mean, at this rate, we're never going to get to Mars. I mean, that's the confounding part here, is we're acting against our own self-interest. You know, when you look at, we do have to make, putting aside fresh water, but hey, you know, there are...
[0:15:09] The rocket makes a lot of noise. So I'm certain there's some complaints about noise once in a while. But sometimes you want to have a party or you want to make progress, and there's a little bit of noise. Therefore, we trade off a little bit of noise for massive progress or even fun. So when did we stop being able to make those trade-offs? But talk about the difference between California and Texas, where you and I now reside. Texas, you were able to build the Gigafactory.
[0:15:38] I remember when you got the plot of land. It seemed like it was less than two years when you had the party to open it. Yeah. From start of construction to completion was 14 months. 14? 14 months. Is there anywhere on the planet that would go faster? Is like China faster than that? China was 11 months. Got it. So Texas, China, 11 and 14 months. California?
[0:16:05] How many months? And just to give you a sense of size, the Tesla Gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon. Which was the biggest building in America. No, there were bigger buildings, but the Pentagon's a pretty big one. Yeah, or it was the biggest at the time. In units of Pentagon, it's like three. Okay, three Pentagons and counting. Yeah. Got it. In 14 months. Just the regulatory approvals in California would have taken two years. So that's the issue.
[0:16:35] Where do you think the regulation helps? Like for the people that will say, we need some checks and balances. We can't have some, because for every good actor like you, there'll be a bad actor. So where is that line then? Yeah, I mean, I have a sort of, you know, in sort of doing sensible deregulation and reduction in the size of government is just like be very public about it and say like, which of these rules do you, if the public is really excited about.
[0:17:04] When we were watching you work, David and I, and Antonio, in that first month at Twitter, which was all hands on deck, and you were doing zero-based budgeting.
[0:17:36] You really quickly got the costs under control. And then miraculously, everybody said, this site will go down. And you added 50 more features. So maybe explain. Because this is the first time. Yeah, there were so many articles that this is, Coder is dead forever. There's no way it could possibly even.
[0:17:56] Continue at all. It was almost like the press was rooting for you to fail. Let's write the obituary. Here's the obituary. They were all saying their goodbyes on Twitter. Remember that? Yeah, yeah. They were all leaving and saying their goodbyes because the site was going to melt down. Yeah, totally failing. All the journalists left. Which is, if you ever want to hang out with a bunch of hall monitors, oh my God, Threads is amazing. Every time I go over there and post, they're like...
[0:18:21] They're really triggered, but... Yeah, I mean, if you like being condemned repeatedly, then, you know, for reasons that make no sense, then Threads is the way to go. It's really... It's the most miserable place on Earth. Disney's the happiest. This is the anti-Disney. But if we were to go into government, you went into the Department of Education, or pick the department. You've worked with a lot of them, actually. You can't go in there and say, okay, we get it. But if you could...
[0:18:48] Just pair two, three, four, five percent of those organizations. What kind of impact would that have? Yeah, I mean, I think we'd need to do more than that. Ideally, but compounding every year, two or three percent a year, I mean, it would be better than what's happening now. Yeah, look, I think we've, you know, if Trump wins, and I'll say this.
[0:19:17] I suspect there are people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen. But we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing, besides the regulations, America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly. And everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one. They're all grabbing the silverware.
[0:19:44] Everyone's stuffing their pockets in the silverware before the Titanic sinks. Well, you know, the Defense Department budget is a very big budget, okay? It's a trillion dollars a year, DoD, Intel, it's a trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year, just in interest and rising. We're adding...
[0:20:13] A trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay somehow, every three months. And then soon it's going to be every two months. And then every month. And then the only thing we'll be able to pay is interest. And it's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt.
[0:20:44] This does not have a good ending. And so we have to reduce the spending. Let me ask one question because I've brought this up a lot and the counter-argument I hear, which I disagree with, but the counter-argument I hear from a lot of politicians is if we reduce spending, because right now if you add up federal, state, and local government spending, it's between 40% and 50% of GDP. So nearly half of our economy is supported by government spending and nearly half of people.
[0:21:14] in the United States are dependent directly or indirectly on government checks, and either through contractors that the government pays or they're employed by a government entity. So if you go in and you take too hard an axe too fast, you will have significant contraction, job loss, and recession. What's the balancing act, Elon? Just thinking realistically, because I'm 100% on board with you, the next set of steps, however, assume Trump wins and you become...
[0:21:43] The chief D-O-G-E. D-O-G-E. Like double G. Yeah, and I think the challenge is how quickly can we go in? How quickly can things change? I want that on my business card. Without all the contraction and job loss.
[0:22:09] So I guess how do you really address it when so much of the economy and so many people's jobs and livelihoods are dependent on government spending? Well, I do think it's sort of, you know, it's a false dichotomy. It's not like no government spending is going to happen. You really have to say, like, is it the right level? And just remember that, you know, any given person, if they are...
[0:22:36] Doing things in a less efficient organization versus a more efficient organization, their contribution to the economy, their net output of goods and services will reduce. I mean, you've got a couple of clear examples between East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea. I mean, North Korea, they're starving. South Korea, it's like amazing. It's the future. The compounding effect of productivity gains. Yeah, it's night and day. And so in North Korea, you've got 100% government.
[0:23:03] In South Korea, you've got probably, I don't know, 40% government. It's not zero. And yet you've got a standard of living that is probably 10 times higher in South Korea. At least. At least, exactly. And then East and West Germany. In West Germany, just thinking in terms of cars, you had BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes. And East Germany, which is a random line on a map, the only car you could get was a...
[0:23:32] A Trabant, which is basically a lawnmower with a shell on it. And it was extremely unsafe. There was a 20-year wait. So you put your kid on the list as soon as they're conceived. And even then, only, I think, a quarter of people maybe got this lousy car. So that's just an interesting example of basically the same people, different operating system.
[0:24:02] And it's not like West Germany was some, you know, a capitalist heaven. It was quite socialist, actually. So when you look, you know, probably it was half government in West Germany and 100% government in East Germany. And again, sort of a five...
[0:24:24] I'll call it at least a 5 to 10x standard of living difference, and even qualitatively, vastly better. And it's obviously, you know, sometimes people have these, amazingly in this modern era, this debate as to which system is better. Well, I'll tell you which system is better. The one that doesn't need to build the wall to keep people in, okay? That's how you can tell.
[0:24:43] Okay. It's a dead giveaway. Spoiler alert. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway is you have to build a barrier to keep people in. That is the bad system. It wasn't West Berlin that built the wall. Okay.
[0:25:02] They were like, you know, anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead. Speaking of walls. And if you look at sort of the flux of boats from Cuba, there's a large number of boats from Cuba. And there's a bunch of free boats that anyone can take to go back to Cuba. Plenty of seats. There's like, hey, wow, an abandoned boat. I could use this boat to go to Cuba where they have communism. Awesome.
[0:25:29] And yet nobody picks up those boats and does it. Amazing. He's given this a lot of thought. Wait, so your point is jobs will be created. If we cut government spending in half, jobs will be created fast enough to make up for, right, just to count it. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that people have immediately tossed out with no severance and now can't pay their mortgage. Then you see some reasonable off-ramp. Transition plan. Yeah.
[0:25:58] So a reasonable off-ramp where they're still receiving money, but have like, I don't know, a year or two to find jobs in the private sector, which they will find. And then they will be in a different operating system. Again, you can see the difference. East Germany was incorporated into West Germany. Living standards in East Germany rose dramatically. Well, in four years, if you could shrink the size of the government with Trump, what would be a good target?
[0:26:27] Just in terms of like ballpark. I mean, are you trying to get me assassinated before this even happens? No, no. Pick a low number. I mean, you know, there's that old phrase, go postal. I mean, it's like they might. Yeah. So we'll keep the post office. I mean, I'm going to need a lot of security details, guys. I mean, the sheer number of disgruntled workers, former government employees is quite a scary number. I mean, I might not make it.
[0:26:54] I was saying low digits every year for four years would be palatable. And I like your idea of an offering. But the thing is that if it's not done, like if you have a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation opportunity and you don't take serious action, and then you have four years to get it done, and then if it doesn't get done, then... How serious is Trump about this? You've talked to him about it, yeah? Yeah, I think he is very serious about it. Got it.
[0:27:22] No, I think actually the reality is that if we get rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector, we will have immense prosperity, and I think we will have a golden age in this country. And it'll be fantastic. Can we talk about SpaceX? You have a bunch of critical milestones coming up. Yeah, in fact, there's a very exciting launch.
[0:27:52] That is maybe happening tonight. So if the weather is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to Cape Canaveral for the Polaris Dawn mission, which is a private mission funded by Jared Isaacman. And he's an awesome guy. And this will be the first time, the first commercial spacewalk. And it'll be at the highest altitude.
[0:28:19] Since Apollo. So it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone. What comes after that? Let's assume that's successful. I sure hope so, man. No pressure. Astronaut safety is... Man, if I had all the wishes I could say about it, that would be the one to put it on.
[0:28:53] Space is dangerous. The next milestone after that would be the next flight of Starship. The next flight of Starship is ready to fly. We are waiting for regulatory approval. It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.
[0:29:27] Really hard. Approved. Yeah. You ever see that movie Zootopia? There's like a sloth. He's coming in for the approval. Yeah, they accidentally tell a joke and I was like, oh no, this is going to take a long time. But yeah, Zootopia, you know, the funny thing is like, so I went to the DMV about, I don't know, a year later.
[0:30:04] After Zootopia and to get my license renewal. And the guy, in an exercise of incredible self-awareness, had the sloth from Zootopia in his cube. And he was actually Swift. With the mandate, beat the sloth. Personal agency. No, I mean, sometimes people think the government is...
[0:30:31] More competent than it is. I'm not saying that there aren't competent people in the government. They're just in an operating system that is inefficient. Once you move them to a more efficient operating system, their output is dramatically greater, as we've seen when East Germany was reintegrated with West Germany, and the same people were vastly more prosperous with a basically half-capitalist operating system.
[0:31:02] For a lot of people, like the maybe most direct experience with the government is the DMV. And then the important thing to remember is that the government is the DMV at scale. Right. That's the government. Got the mental picture. How much do you want to scale it? Yeah. Sorry, can you go back to Chamath's question on Starship? So you announced just the other day Starship going to Mars in two years. Yeah, by the way.
[0:31:34] Yeah, yeah. And then four years for a crude aspirational launch in the next window. And how much is the government involved? I'm not saying say you're watched by these. But based on our current progress with Starship, we were able to successfully reach oval of velocity twice. We were able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in water.
[0:32:01] And that's despite the ship having half its flaps cooked off. You can see the video on the X platform. It's quite exciting. So we think we'll be able to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. And the fundamental holy grail breakthrough for rocketry, the fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multi-planetary is a...
[0:32:30] Rapidly reusable, reliable rocket. With a pirate somehow. Throw a pirate in there. Starship is the first rocket design where success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. So for any given project, you have to say, this is the circle. Here's a circle.
[0:33:00] And the success dot in the circle is success in the set of possible outcomes. That sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where success is not in the set of possible outcomes. And so Starship not only is full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch. And I'm confident it will succeed. It's simply a matter of time.
[0:33:30] And if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. So that would be very helpful. And in fact, if something isn't done about reducing regulation and sort of speeding up approvals. And to be clear, I'm not talking about anything unsafe. It's simply the processing of the safe thing.
[0:34:00] can be done as fast as the rocket is built, not slower, then we could become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species and be out there among the stars in the future. It's incredibly important that we have things that we find inspiring, that you look to the future and say the future is going to be better than the past. Things to look forward to.
[0:34:32] Kids are a good way to assess this. What are kids fired up about? And if you could say, you could be an astronaut on Mars. You could maybe one day go beyond the solar system. We could make Star Trek, Starfleet Academy real. That is an exciting future. That is inspiring. You need things that move your heart.
[0:35:03] Life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. There's got to be things that you look forward to as well. Yeah, and do you think you might have to move it to a different jurisdiction to move faster? I've always wondered if like... Rocket technology is considered advanced weapons technology, so we can't just go do it, you know... In another country? Yes. Yeah, interesting. And if we don't do it, other countries could do it.
[0:35:36] I mean, they're so far behind us, but theoretically, there is a national security justification here. If somebody can put their thinking caps on, like, do we want to have this technology that you're building, the team's working so hard on, stolen by other countries, and then maybe they don't have as much red tape. I wish people were trying to steal it. So no one's trying to steal it. It's just too crazy, basically.
[0:36:06] And that's for you. Yeah, it's way too crazy. Elon, what do you think is going on that led to Boeing building the Starliner the way that they did? They were able to get it up. But not complete. But can't complete. They can't finish. Can't finish. I don't understand. And now you're going to have to go up and finish. Well, I mean, I think Boeing is a company that is...
[0:36:39] They actually do so much business with the government, they have sort of impedance match to the government. So they're like basically one notch away from the government. They're not far from the government from an efficiency standpoint because they derive so much of their revenue from the government. A lot of people think, well, SpaceX is super dependent on the government. And actually, no, most of our revenue is commercial. And there's been, I think, at least...
[0:37:11] Up until perhaps recently, because I have a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory. And the CEO before that, I think, had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory and didn't know how airplanes flew. So I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and a spacecraft go to orbit, then it can't be a total mystery as to how they work.
[0:37:42] So, you know, I'm like, sure, if somebody is like running Coke or Pepsi and they're like great at marketing or whatever, that's fine because, you know, it's not a sort of technology dependent business. You know, or if they're running a, you know, financial consulting and their degrees in accounting, that makes sense. But I think, you know, if you're the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse. Pretty basic. Yeah. Yeah.
[0:38:12] It's like, it's disconcerting if the cavalry captain just falls off the horse. He's fucking inspired the team. I'm sorry, I'm scared of horses. Gets on backwards and like, oops. Shifting gears to AI, Peter was here earlier and he was talking about how so far the only company to really make money off AI is NVIDIA with the chips. Do you have a sense yet of where you think the big applications will be?
[0:38:42] From AI, is it going to be an enabling self-driving? Is it going to be enabling robots? Is it transforming industries? I mean, it's still, I think, early in terms of where the big business impact is going to be. Do you have a sense yet? I mean, I think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of, I mean, it does run ahead of the revenue right now. There's no question about that.
[0:39:18] The rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen by far. And it's, I mean, for example, a Turing test used to be a thing. Now, you know, your basic open source, random LLM, you're writing on a frigging Raspberry Pi, probably could, you know, beat the Turing test. So there's, I think actually,
[0:39:53] The good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone can have whatever they want, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is a manufactured good or provided service will, I think, with the advent of AI plus robotics, that...
[0:40:24] The cost of goods and services will trend to zero. I'm not saying it'll be actually zero, but everyone will be able to have anything they want. That's the good future. Of course, in my view, that's probably 80% likely. Look on the bright side. Only 20% probability of annihilation. It's nothing. Is the 20%, what does that look like?
[0:40:55] I don't know, man. I mean, frankly, I do have to go engage in some degree of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI in order to sleep well. And even then, because I think the actual issue, the most likely issue is like, well, how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do a bit better? That is perhaps the bigger challenge. Although, you know, at this point, I know more and more people who are retired and they seem to,
[0:41:26] Enjoy that life. But I think that maybe there'll be some crisis of meaning because the computer can do everything you can do but better. So maybe that'll be a challenge. But really, you need the sort of end effectors. You need the autonomous cars and you need the sort of humanoid robots or general purpose robots.
[0:41:56] Once you have general purpose humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles, really you can build anything. And I think that there's no actual limit to the size of the economy. I mean, there's obviously the mass of Earth, like that would be one limit. But the economy is really just the average productivity per person times...
[0:42:25] Number of people, that's the economy. And if you've got humanoid robots that can do, where there's no real limit on the number of humanoid robots, and they can operate very intelligently, then there's no actual limit to the economy, there's no meaningful limit to the economy. You guys just turned on Colossus, which is like the largest private compute cluster, I guess, of GPUs anywhere. Is that right?
[0:42:54] It's the most powerful supercomputer of any kind. Which sort of speaks to what David said and kind of what Peter said, which is a lot of the kind of economic value so far of AI has entirely gone to NVIDIA. But there are people with alternatives and you're actually one with an alternative. Now you have a very specific case because Dojo is really about images and large images, huge video. Yeah, the Tesla problem is different from the...
[0:43:24] You know, the sort of LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence actually is actually, and what matters in the AI is different to the point you just made, which is that in Tesla's case, the context length is very long. So we've got gigabytes of context. Gigabytes of context windows, yeah. Yeah, you've got, you know, sort of... I was just bringing it up. Kind of billions of tokens of context. Nutty amount of context because you've got...
[0:43:53] Seven cameras, and if you've got several, let's say you've got a minute of several high-def cameras, then that's gigabytes. So you need to compress. So the Tesla problem is you've got to compress a gigantic context into the pixels that actually matter and condense that over a time. So you've got to, in both the time dimension and the space dimension, you've got to compress the pixels.
[0:44:24] In space and pixels in time. And then have that inference done on a tiny computer, relatively speaking, a small, you know, a few hundred watts. It's a Tesla designed AI inference computer, which is by the way still the best. There isn't a better thing we could buy from suppliers. So the Tesla designed AI inference computer that's in the cars is better than anything we could buy from any supplier.
[0:44:51] By the way, the Tesla AI chip team is extremely good. You guys, in the design, there was a technical paper and there was a deck that somebody on your team from Tesla published, and it was stunning to me. You designed your own transport control layer over Ethernet. You were like, ah, Ethernet's not good enough for us. You have this TT COE or something, and you're like, oh, we're just going to reinvent Ethernet and string these chips. It's pretty incredible stuff that's happening over there. Yeah. No, the team, the Tesla,
[0:45:21] Chip design team is extremely, extremely good. So... But is there a world where, for example, other people over time that need, you know, some sort of like video use case or image use case? Theoretically, you know, you'd say, oh, why not? You know, I have some extra cycles over here. So it should kind of make you a competitor of NVIDIA. It's not intentionally per se, but... Yeah, I mean, the, you know, there's training and inference.
[0:45:49] And we do have those two projects at Tesla. We've got Dojo, which is the training computer, and then our inference chip, which is in every car inference computer. And Dojo, we've only had Dojo 1. Dojo 2, we should have Dojo 2 in volume towards the end of next year. And that will be, we think, sort of comparable to...
[0:46:19] Sort of a B200 type system, a training system. I guess there's some potential for that to be used as a service. I guess I have some improved confidence in Dojo. But I think we won't really know.
[0:46:51] How's the Optimus project going? I remember when we talked last, you said this publicly, that it's in doing some light testing inside the factory.
[0:47:20] So it's actually being useful. What's the build of materials for something like that at scale? So when you start making it like you're making the Model 3 now and there's a million of them coming off the factory line, what would they cost? $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, you think? Yeah. I mean, I've discovered really that anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its materials.
[0:47:48] So now there's, I should say, some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property and like paying for patents and stuff. So a lot of what's in a chip is like paying royalties and depreciation of the chip fab. But the actual marginal cost of the chips is very low. So Optimus, obviously, is a humanoid robot. It weighs much less and is much smaller than a car.
[0:48:17] So you could expect that in high volume, and I'd say that you also probably need three production versions of Optimus. So you need to refine the design at least three major times, and then you need to scale production to sort of the million unit plus per year level. And I think at that point, the cost, the labor and materials on Optimus is probably not...
[0:48:49] Much more than $10,000. And that's a decade-long journey, maybe? Basically, think of it like Optimus will cost less than a small car. Right. So at scale volume with three major iterations of technology. And so if a small car costs $25,000, it's probably like $20,000 for an Optimus, for a humanoid robot that can be your buddy.
[0:49:18] A combination of R2-D2 and C-3PO, but better. Honestly, I think people are going to get really attached to their humanoid robot. You watch Star Wars, and it's like R2-D2 and C-3PO. I love those guys. They're awesome. And their personality. All R2 could do is just beef at you. You guys could speak English.
[0:49:46] Maybe C3PO to translate the beeps. So you're in year two of that, if you did two or three years per iteration or something. It's a decade-long journey for this to hit some sort of scale. I would say major iterations are less than two years. It's probably on the order of five years, maybe six to get to a million units a year. And at that price point, everybody can afford one.
[0:50:13] Yes. On planet Earth. I mean, it's going to be that one-to-one, two-to-one? What do you think, ultimately, if we're sitting here in 30 years, the number of robots on the planet versus humans? Yeah, I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans. Vastly, yeah. Vastly exceed. I mean, you have to say, like, who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. Totally. You know, it's just like, especially if it can, you know, it can take care of your...
[0:50:43] It could take your dog for a walk. It could mow the lawn. It could watch your kids. It could teach your kids. It could... We could also send it to Mars. Yeah, absolutely. We could send a lot of robots to Mars to do the work needed to make it a colonized planet for humans. Mars is already a robot planet. There's a whole bunch of robots, like rovers and helicopters. It's only robots. Yes, only robots. So, yeah. No, I think the sort of...
[0:51:13] Useful humanoid robot opportunity is the single biggest opportunity ever. Because if you assume like, I mean, the ratio of humanoid robots to humans is going to be at least two to one, maybe three to one. Because everybody will want one and then there'll be a bunch of robots that you don't see that are making goods and services. And you think it's one generalized robot that then learns how to do different tasks? Yeah.
[0:51:44] I mean, we are a generalized... Yeah, we're a generalized, non-robotic. We're just made of meat, you know? We're a meat pup, a generalized meat pup. Yeah, I mean, I'm operating my meat puppet, you know? So, yeah, we are actually... And by the way, it turns out, like, as we're designing Optimus, we sort of learn more and more about why humans are shaped the way they're shaped. And, you know, and...
[0:52:10] Why we have five fingers and why your little finger is smaller than your index finger. Obviously why you have opposable thumbs, but also why, for example, the major muscles that operate your hand are actually in your forearm. And your fingers are primarily operated... The muscles that actuate your fingers are located...
[0:52:38] The vast majority of your finger strength is actually coming from your forearm. And your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings. And so the current version of the Optimus hand has the actuators in the hand and has only 11 degrees of freedom. So it doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, roughly 25 degrees of freedom.
[0:53:08] And it's also not strong enough in certain ways because the actuators have to fit in the hand. So the next generation Optimus hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm, just like a human, and they operate the fingers through cables, just like the human hand. And the next generation hand has 22 degrees of freedom, which we think is...
[0:53:36] Enough to do almost anything that a human can do. And presumably, I think it was written that X and Tesla may work together and provide services. But my immediate thought went to, oh, if you just provide a grok to the robot, then the robot has a personality and can process voice and video and images and all of that stuff. That's where we wrap here. I think everybody talks about...
[0:54:05] All the projects you're working on, but people don't know you have a great sense of humor. That's not true. Oh, you do. You do. People don't see it, but I would say, I know for me, the funniest week of my life, or one of the funniest, was when you did SNL, and I got to tag along. Maybe you saw it. Maybe behind the scenes, some of your funniest recollections of that chaotic, insane...
[0:54:31] A week when we laughed for 12 hours a day. It was a little terrorizing on the first couple of days, but... Yeah, I was a bit worried at the beginning there because, frankly, nothing was funny. Day one was rough. Rough. Yeah, so, I mean... Well, it's like a rule, but can't you guys just say it? Just say the stuff that got on the...
[0:54:55] The funniest skits were the ones they didn't let you do. That's what I'm saying. Can you just say it? There were a couple of funny ones, yeah, that they didn't let you do. You can say it so that he doesn't get them. I mean, how much time do we have here? We should just give them one or two. In your mind, which one do we regret most? Not getting on air. Do you really want to hear that? I mean... It was spicy. It was a little funny. Okay. All right, here we go, guys. All right. So, one of the things...
[0:55:33] I think everyone's been sort of wondering this whole time, is Saturday Night Live actually live? Like live. Live, live, live. Or do they have like a delay or like just in case, you know, there's a wardrobe malfunction or something like that. Is it like a, you know, five second delay? What's really going on? But there's a way to test this. Right. We came up with a way. There's a way to test this.
[0:56:03] Which is, we don't tell them what's going on. I walk on and say, this is the script I'll throw on the ground. We're going to find out tonight, right now, if Saturday Night Live is actually live. And the way that we're going to do this is I'm going to take my cock out. And if you see my cock, you know it's true.
[0:56:39] And if you don't, it's been a lie. It's been a lie all these years. All these years. We're going to bust them right now. And this, we're pitching this. Yeah, yeah. So we're pitching this. On Zoom. Yeah, we're pitching this on Zoom on like a Monday. Because it's COVID. Yeah, we're like kind of hungover from the weekend. And we're like pitching this at noon. We're in Miami, yeah. And it's, you know, Jason's on. Mike and you. Yeah, and Mike. You know, so essentially got like, you know, what my friends would think of sort of.
[0:57:08] Quite funny. Jason's quite funny. I think Jason's the closest thing to Cartman that exists in real life. We have a joke going that he's Butters and I'm Cartman. And my friend Mike's pretty funny too.
[0:57:29] So we come in like just like guns blazing with like ideas. And we didn't realize like actually, you know, that's not how it works. And that's normally like actors and they just get told what to do. I'm like, oh, you mean we can't just like do funny things that we thought of? What? They're watching this and on the Zoom, they're aghast at Eli's pitch. Yeah, it's silence. And I'm like, is this thing working?
[0:57:58] Are we muted? Is our mic on? And they're like, we hear you. And then after a long silence, Mike just says the word, crickets. And they're not laughing. They're not even going to chuckle. I'm like, what's going on here? And then Elon explains the punchline, which is... Yes, exactly. So there's more to it. Okay. That's just the beginning. So Elon says... So then I'm like...
[0:58:27] So I said, look, I'm going to reach down. Into my pants. Into my pants. And I stuck my hand in my pants. And I'm going to pull my cock out. And I tell this to the audience. And the audience is going to be like, what? Right. And? And then I pull out a baby rooster. You know? Yes. And it's like, okay, this is.
[0:58:56] Kind of PG. It's not that bad. This is my tiny cock. And it's like, what do you think? And do you think it's a nice cock? I mean, I like it. And then Kate McKinnon walks out. Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, oh no, but you haven't heard half of it. So Kate McKinnon comes out and she says, Elon, I expected you would have a bigger cock. Yeah.
[0:59:27] I don't mean to disappoint you, Kate, but I hope you like it anyway. But Kate's got to come out with her cat, okay? Right. And Kate says... You can see where this is going. And I say, wow, that's a nice pussy you've got there, Kate. Wow, that's amazing. It looks a little wet. Was it raining outside?
[0:59:57] Do you mind if I stroke your pussy? Is that cool? It's like, oh no, Elon, actually, can I hold your cock? Of course, Kate, you definitely hold my cock. And then we exchange, and I think just the audio version of this is pretty good.
[1:00:17] You know, it's just like, wow, I really like stroking your cock. And I was like, I... And then Eli says, I'm really enjoying stroking your pussy. Yes, of course. And yeah, so, you know. They're looking at us like, oh my God, what have we done inviting these lunatics on the program? Yeah, and then they said like, well, it is Mother's Day.
[1:00:46] It's Mother's Day. We might not want to go with this one. A lot of moms in the audience. And I'm like, well, that's a good point. Fair, fair. It might be a bit uncomfortable for all the moms in the audience, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they'll dig it. Maybe they'll like it. So, yeah. Yeah, that was... That's the cold open that didn't make it. We didn't get that on the air.
[1:01:14] But we did fight for Doge. Yes. And we got Doge on the air. I mean, there's a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. They have these cue cards for what you're supposed to say, and I just didn't say it. I just went off the rails. Yeah. They didn't see that coming. Yeah, it's live.
[1:01:36] Elon wanted to do Doge. This is the other one. And he wanted to do Doge on late night. And he says, hey, J. Cal, can you make sure? Oh, yeah. I wanted to do the Doge father. Like you sort of redo that scene from The Godfather. I mean, you kind of need the music to cue things up. You bring me on my daughter's wedding.
[1:01:58] Listen, you asked for Doge. Yeah, you got Marlon Brando on the scene. I give you Bitcoin, but you want Doge. Exactly. You really got to set the mood. You got to have a tuxedo. And this whole concept of the Doge father. And you got to have like Marlon Brando. Yeah. You come to me on this day of my Doge's wedding. And you ask me for your private keys. Are you even a friend? You call me the Doge father.
[1:02:30] Buona sera, buona sera. That's potential. They had great potential. So they come to me, and I'm talking to Colin and Joe, who's got a great sense of humor, and he's amazing, he loves Elon. And he's like, we can't do it because of the law and stuff like that. The law? The law and liability. So I said, it's okay.
[1:02:53] Elon called Comcast and he put in an offer and they just accepted it. We just bought NBC, so it's fine. And Colin Jost looks at me, it's so good. And he's like, you're serious? I'm like, yep, we own NBC now. And he's like, okay, well that kind of changes things, doesn't it? I'm like, absolutely, we're a go on Doge.
[1:03:20] And then he's like, you're fucking with me. And I'm like, I'm fucking with you. Or are we? Or are we? It was the greatest week of, and that is like two of 10 stories. We'll save the other eight. But it was, and I was just so happy for you to see you have a great week of just joy and fun and letting go. Because you were launching rockets. You're dealing with so much bullshit in your life. To have those moments, to share them and just laugh.
[1:03:51] It was just so great. More of those moments. I think we got to get you back on SNL. Who wants to back on SNL one more time? All right, ladies and gentlemen, our bestie, Elon Musk.