Elon Musk: OpenAI Betrayal, His Future at Tesla, and the Next Big Thing - Grokipedia

Summary

---

All-In Podcast: Elon Musk – 3 Years of X, OpenAI Lawsuit, Bill Gates, Grokipedia & The Future of Everything

Date: October 31, 2025
Hosts: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, David Friedberg
Guest: Elon Musk

---

Episode Overview

This episode features Elon Musk joining the All-In crew to reflect on the three-year anniversary of his acquisition of Twitter (now X), discuss the evolution and future plans for X and Grok, delve into major AI and OpenAI developments, corporate governance at Tesla and OpenAI, the role of free speech in social media, the impact of AI on society, and energy and climate matters—while mixing in the group’s characteristic humor and irreverence.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Desgraziad Corner & Social Media Culture

• New recurring bit "Desgraziad Corner" is introduced, with the hosts calling out people or behaviors they find disgraceful.
• Elon joins in with banter, and Chamath humorously nominates Jason and Pete Buttigieg for virtue signaling with little real impact.

“Literally affecting zero change, making no progress in the world, but collecting a badge that they used to hold over other people.” —Chamath Palihapitiya [01:39]

• The group riffs on the social media trend of Sydney Sweeney’s dress dominating their feeds, leading to a discussion about the X algorithm.
• Elon explains X’s (formerly Twitter) algorithm evolution and bugs:
  • A bug caused users not to see in-network posts, now fixed. The algorithm amplification of interests (even by simply interacting or lingering on a post) is described as going "hog wild."

  “If you interacted with it, it would go hog wild...it’s like, oh, you had a taste of it, we’re going to give you three helpings.” —Elon Musk [05:32]

---

2. Tech Upgrades: Grok, Algorithm Changes, and Grokopedia

• Algorithm overhaul:
  • X is stripping away old, complex Twitter code (“legacy heuristics”), replacing it with Grok-powered, AI-driven curation and semantic search.
  • Coming soon: customizable following tabs, Grok-curated highlights from people you follow.

  “GROK is going to...read through 100 million things and show you the things that it thinks. Out of 100 million posts per day, what are the most interesting posts to you?” —Elon Musk [08:04]

• Grokopedia’s birth (new AI-powered encyclopedia):
  • Seeded by crawling/correcting/extending Wikipedia (over a million articles), adding context and correcting errors for a more neutral and comprehensive database.

  “We took that version of Grok and said okay, cycle through the million most popular articles in Wikipedia and add, modify and delete... Sometimes the nature of propaganda is that facts are stated that are technically true, but do not properly represent a picture of the individual or event.” —Elon Musk [12:21]

  • Grokopedia shows version numbers, is growing in accuracy and depth, and aims to surpass Wikipedia in quality, neutrality, and multimedia content (images, videos via Grokimagine).
    – Early feedback, even from the hosts, is positive: longer, better bios, more accurate representation.

---

3. Free Speech, Government Influence & "Woke Mind Virus"

• Reflecting on buying Twitter:
  • Elon reiterates primary goals: save free speech, fight "woke mind virus," and foster truth on the internet.

  “The reason you bought it: to stop crazy woke mind virus and make truth exist in the world again. Great. Mission accomplished.” —Jason Calacanis [10:20]

• Censorship and shadow banning:
  • Twitter’s former Trust & Safety group engaged in extensive, secret shadow banning—despite public denials.
  • Elon's opening of "Twitter Files" revealed government collusion in content moderation (particularly US government/FBI).

  “There was a very aggressive shadow banning by what was called the Trust and Safety group, which of course, naturally would be the one that is doing the nefarious shadow banning. I just think we shouldn't have a group called Trust and Safety.” —Elon Musk [33:35]

• Current company policy:
  • X now follows only the law concerning takedowns—no voluntary moderation beyond legal requirements.
  • Discuss global moves to suppress speech under the banner of hate speech (notably UK, Europe, Australia), and thousands imprisoned for social media posts.

  “Your freedom of speech only matters if people are allowed to say things that you don’t like, or even that things that you hate... Otherwise, you don’t have freedom of speech.” —Elon Musk [41:19]

---

4. Corporate Governance: Tesla, ISS/Glass Lewis, OpenAI

• Tesla’s governance challenges:
  • Elon critiques influence of firms like ISS and Glass Lewis, calling them “corporate ISIS.”

  “They have, they own no stock in any of these companies...I call them corporate ISIS...they’re just terrorists.” —Elon Musk [44:09]

  • Stresses need for significant voting power to ensure long-term vision (especially around AI/robotics safety).

  “I’m not going to build a robot army if I can be easily kicked out by activist investors. No way.” [47:01]

• OpenAI lawsuit:
  • Elon expecting jury trial; charges OpenAI with abandoning its non-profit, open-source mission. Claims the original legal charter explicitly barred profit for founders and required open-sourcing models.

  “OpenAI was created as an open source nonprofit... incorporation documents explicitly say that no officer or founding member will benefit financially... They've completely violated that.” [48:11]

---

5. AI Acceleration, Jobs & Society

• Risks and opportunities of AI (“Supersonic tsunami”):
  • Elon uses the metaphor of a wall of water moving faster than sound: AI job displacement will be rapid, calling for societal preparation.
  • Musk describes the original rationale for founding OpenAI as a counterweight to Google, who (at the time) had unchecked power/influence in AI and didn't take alignment or safety seriously.

  “If there was a tsunami, a giant wall of water moving faster than the speed of sound, that's AI.” —Elon Musk [52:22]

  • Recounts being called a “speciesist” by Larry Page for caring more about humans than machines [53:18].
• Issues of model openness:
  • Elon points out the irony that China produces better open-source AI models than US companies who promised openness.

---

6. Robotaxis, Tesla Tech, and Autonomy

• Tesla’s robotaxi & "Cyber Cab":
  • All current Tesla cars have full autonomy hardware.
  • Dedicated taxi with no steering wheel/pedals (Cyber Cab) starts production early next year, planning millions annually; no more steering optionality for buyers.

  “All the cars we make are capable of unsupervised full autonomy... dedicated product which is the Cyber Cab, which has no steering wheel or pedals, which are obviously vestigial.” —Elon Musk [61:01]

• Austin pilot learnings:
  • Early self-driving/taxi experiments focus on fleet coordination, software, and regulatory intricacies.
  • Full autonomy (no safety monitor) in Austin expected by year end [65:32].

---

7. Energy, Bill Gates Rant, Climate & Solar

• Bill Gates criticism:
  • Elon dismisses Gates as weaker than expected on technical rigor (“not strong in the sciences”), and calls out his (now reversed) skepticism about long-range Tesla semi trucks.

  “My at least direct conversations with him have...He is not strong in the sciences. Yeah. This is really surprising.” —Elon Musk [70:09]

• Climate discussion nuance:
  • Elon sees the climate concern as real but over a longer timescale (50 years). Favors leaning steadily toward sustainable energy, not radical change or big subsidies/removals.
  • Critiques subsidies remaining for oil and gas while renewables get targeted.

  “We will eventually run out of oil, gas and coal to burn anyway because it's a finite... The correct scientific conclusion is that we should lean in the direction of moving towards a sustainable energy future.” [75:02]

• China’s dominance in solar panel production is discussed, with staggering production stats that could power the US multiple times over [77:17].
• Nuclear and Fusion:
  • Elon is pro-nuclear, says much opposition is cultural/sociological, not scientific.
  • Fusion on Earth is possible, but “peanuts” compared to leveraging the sun’s power via terrestrial solar.

  “Why would we bother doing that on making a little itty bitty sun that's so microscopic you'd barely notice on Earth when we've got the giant free one in the sky?” [87:11]

  • Advocates “star power” branding over “solar power” [83:59].

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jason on the X algorithm and social trends:

  “I'm getting sick of Sweeney's dress all day and last week.” [03:10]

• Elon on fixing the Twitter-to-X transition:

  “Where will things be three years from now?” [10:16]

• On Truth and Changing Minds:

  “People, at least some people, they will stick to whatever their ideological views are, whatever that sort of political tribal views are, no matter what the evidence could be staring them in the face and they're just going to be a flat Earther.” —Elon Musk [21:19]

• Elon on his OpenAI lawsuit:

  “I came up with the idea for the company, named it, provided the A, B and C rounds, recruited the critical personnel...if that had been a commercial corporation, I'd probably own half the company.” [49:44]

• On the inefficiencies at Twitter HQ pre-acquisition:

  “There were more people making the food than eating the food...we discovered that the actual price of lunch was $400.” —Elon Musk [27:15] “Tampons. Like a fresh box of tampons. And we're like, but there's literally no one in this building...You have to be a burglar who is a trans man burglar who's unwilling to use the woman's bathroom that also has tampons, Statistically no one in the building. So you've broken into the building, and at that moment, you have a period.” —Elon Musk [29:10]

• On the future of energy:

  “The sun produces about a billion times, call it well over a billion times more energy than everything on Earth combined.” —Elon Musk [83:45]

---

Key Timestamps

• 00:00–03:00: Desgraziad Corner, social banter, Sydney Sweeney meme
• 03:30–09:00: X algorithm issues, bug fixes, Grok-driven curation plans
• 09:51–15:20: 3 years of X/Twitter, Grokopedia and the shift from Wikipedia
• 19:29–24:49: Confirmation bias, truth-seeking, Community Notes and Grok, open-source data
• 25:02–32:41: Reminiscing on the Twitter acquisition—sinks, empty buildings, surreal details
• 32:48–40:52: Free speech legacy, unmasking shadow banning and censorship, government interference
• 40:52–46:49: Government responses globally, anti-speech laws, ISS/Glass Lewis in governance
• 47:40–51:28: OpenAI lawsuit, mission drift, open models and irony maximizer
• 52:09–55:32: The AI “supersonic tsunami”, OpenAI origins, Larry Page and AI safety
• 61:01–67:53: Robotaxis, Cyber Cab, Austin rollout, technical and regulatory challenges
• 69:31–77:17: Bill Gates, climate debate, solar dominance, China’s solar sector
• 78:53–91:19: Nuclear/fusion, star power, battery/scalability section
• 91:33–93:21: Closing banter, SNL sketches, poker plans, goodbyes

---

Tone and Style

The conversation is simultaneously technical, candid, and irreverent—laced with humor, sarcasm, and inside jokes—yet covers foundational issues of technology, governance, and society’s future. Elon Musk is direct and occasionally self-deprecating, the hosts banter but probe with sharp, informed questions, and the overall energy is “besties in a bar with billions of dollars and a front-row seat to shaping the future.”

---

Final Takeaway

This episode is an essential listen for anyone wanting an unfiltered, behind-the-scenes look at the past, present, and projected future of X/Twitter, the changing landscape of AI, corporate power, the ongoing mission for decentralized truth, real-world consequences of tech governance, and why the next wave of technological change will be both breathtaking and deeply disruptive.

---

Transcript

[Jason Calacanis]

So let's get started. You know, we wanted to try something new this week. Every week, you know, I get a little upset. Things perturb me, Sacks. And when it does, I just yell and scream, disgraziade. And so I bought the domain name disgraziad.com for no reason other than my own amusement. But you know what? I'm not alone in my absolute disgust at what's going on in the world. So this week, we're going to bring out a new feature here on the all in podcast. Descraziad Corner.

[Elon Musk]

Descratiad. He was the best guy around.

[Jason Calacanis]

What about the people he murdered?

[Elon Musk]

What murder? You can act like a man. What's wrong with you? Teach this kid a little manners. You insulted him a little bit. And I want the spits. What's wrong with you? Your hair was in the toilet water. Disgusting. I ought to suffocate you, you little.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a disgrace.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is fantastic.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is our new feature. Chamath. You look like you're ready to go. Why don't you tell. You tell everybody who gets your disgraziad this week.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Wait, we all had to come with a descratiation?

[Jason Calacanis]

You really missed a memo.

[David Sacks]

All right, fine.

[Jason Calacanis]

Enough.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I got one. I got one. Okay. All right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Just calm down.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

My Descrizia corner goes to Jason Calcanis.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, here we go. Come on, man. You can't.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And Pete Buttigieg, were they, in the first 30 seconds of the interview, compared virtue signaling points about how each one worked at various moments at Amnesty International.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Literally affecting zero change, making no progress in the world, but collecting a badge that they used to hold over other people.

[Jason Calacanis]

We wrote a lot of letters.

[David Sacks]

We wrote a lot of letters.

[Jason Calacanis]

Which is good. That means it's like a good one because it's behind the scenes. Disgraziad.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Jason Calcanis and Pete Buttigieg. Desgrazia.

[David Sacks]

Great.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm glad that I got the first one. And you can imagine what's coming next week for you. I saw the Sydney Sweeney dress today trending on Social Disgraziad. It's too much.

[David Sacks]

What?

[Jason Calacanis]

It's too much.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What is it? I didn't even know what this.

[Jason Calacanis]

You didn't see it?

[David Sacks]

Bring it up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The picture.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[David Sacks]

Bring it up.

[Jason]

It's a little floppy.

[David Sacks]

How is this disgraceful? What are you talking about?

[Jason Calacanis]

Much? It's disgraceful. A little bit of like. Look at this. Oh, my God. Too much.

[David Sacks]

It's elegant.

[Jason Calacanis]

Too much. In my day, Saks, a little cleavage maybe. Perhaps in the 90s or 2000s some side view. This is too much.

[Elon Musk]

Hey guys. Great high brow subject matter. We were discussing their own politics and Sydney Sweeney's dress. I don't know, trending on X. Hi, dad. Put away the phone, Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let your winners ride Rain Man David Sachs.

[Jason]

And instead we open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

[Elon Musk]

Love you.

[Jason Calacanis]

What's going on with the algorithm? I'm getting sick of Sweeney's dress all day and last week.

[Elon Musk]

Well, maybe you should stop everything it 15 times.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then Sacks, poor Sacks, got. He got invited to slutcon for two weeks straight. On the algorithm.

[Jason]

No, I say the algorithm has become. If you demonstrate actual.

[David Sacks]

Explain.

[Elon Musk]

You can't even tell if that's a joke or a real thing. It's a real thing.

[David Sacks]

In San Francisco.

[Jason]

It's all too real.

[Elon Musk]

Oh, it's actually real. Wait, yeah, for real.

[Jason]

What I've noticed. Yeah. If you demonstrate interest in anything on X now if you click on it, God forbid you like something, man, the algorithm is on it. It will give you more of that. It will give you a lot.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, yes. So we did have an issue. We still have somewhat of an issue where there was an important bug that was figured out that was solved over the weekend which caused in network posts to be not shown. So basically if you followed someone, you wouldn't see their posts. Got it. Obviously a big bug, major bug. Then the algorithm was not probably taking into account if you just dwelt on something, but if you interacted with it, it would go hog wild. So as David said, if you wrote a favorite reply or engage with it in some way, it is going to get you a torrent of that same thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, Zachs. So maybe you Zachs.

[David Sacks]

What was your interaction?

[Jason Calacanis]

Did you bookmark sluck on? I think you bookmarked it.

[Jason]

Here's what I thought was good about it though is all of a sudden.

[Elon Musk]

If you happen to sports Sydney Sweeney's boobs you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Later.

[Elon Musk]

Okay.

[Jason]

But what I thought was good about it was that you would see who else had a take on. On the same subject matter. And that actually has been a useful part of it. So you get more of like a 360 view on whatever it is that you've shown interest in.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, yeah. It's like it was giving you. If you take a. You'd have like it was just going too far. Obviously it was overcorrecting. It had too much gain on it just turned up the gain way too high on any interaction. You would then get a torrent of that. It's like, it's like, oh, you had a taste of it. We're going to give you three helpings.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

We're going to force you with. We're going to give you the food funnel.

[Jason Calacanis]

And that's all being done. I assume it's all being done with Grok now. So it's not like the old hard coded algorithm or is it using Grok?

[Elon Musk]

Well, what's happening is that we're gradually deleting the legacy Twitter heuristics. Now the problem is that it's like as you delete these heuristics, it turns out the one heuristic, the one bug, was covering for the other bug. And so when you delete one side of the bug, you know, it's like that, that meme with the Internet where there's like this very complicated machine and there's like a tiny little wooden stick that's something that's keeping it going, which was, I guess Amazon, AWS east or whatever, had something like that. You know, when somebody pulled out the little stick that there was. What's this?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think it'd be good if it.

[Elon Musk]

Half of Earth, you know, it would.

[Jason Calacanis]

Be great if it showed like one person you follow and then like it blended the old style, which was just reverse chronological of your friends, the original version with this new version. So you get like a little bit of both.

[Elon Musk]

Well, you can still, you still have the, Everyone still has the following tab. Now something we're going to be adding is the ability to have a curated following tab. Because the problem is like if you follow some people and they're maybe a little bit more prolific than your, you know, you follow someone and some people are much more pro, you know, say a lot more than others, that, that makes the following tab hard to use. So we're going to add an option where you can have the following tab be curated. So Groko will say, what are the most interesting things posted by your friends? And we'll show you that in the following tab. It will also. But I think having that option will make the following tab much more useful. So it'll be a curated list of people you follow. Like ideally the most interesting stuff that they've said, which is kind of what you want to look at. And then we've mostly fixed the bug, which would give you way too much of something if you interacted with a particular subject matter. And then the really big change, which is where Grok literally reads everything that's posted to the platform. There's about 100 million posts per day. So it's 100 million pieces of content per day. I think that's actually just, maybe just in English. I think it goes beyond that if it's outside of English. So GROK is going to. We're going to start off reading the. What GROK thinks are the top 10 million of the 100 million. And we'll actually read them and understand them and categorize them and match them to users. It's like this is not a job humans could ever do. And then once that is scaling reasonably well, we'll add the entire 100 million a day. So it's literally going to read through 100 million things and show you the things that it thinks. Out of 100 million posts per day, what are the most interesting posts to you?

[Jason Calacanis]

How much of colossus will that take?

[Elon Musk]

A lot of work.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, that's like. Is it tens of thousands of servers to do that every day?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. My guess is it's probably on the order of 50K H100, something like that. Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

And that will replace search. So you'll be able to actually search on Twitter and find things in like with a. With a plain language.

[Elon Musk]

We'll have semantic search where you can just ask a question and it will show you all content, whether that is text, pictures or video that matches your search query semantically.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

How. How's it been? Three years in. This is a. It was a three year anniversary. Like couple three years. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Remember it was Halloween.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. Halloween's back.

[Jason Calacanis]

Halloween's back. But it was the, the weekend you took over was Halloween. We had a good time.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Three years.

[Elon Musk]

Where will things three years from now?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. What's the takeaway? Three years later? You obviously don't regret buying it. It's saved free speech. That was good. Seemed to have turned that whole thing around and that was, I think a big part of your mission. But then you added it to xai, which makes it incredibly valuable as a data source. So when you look back on it, the reason you bought it, to stop crazy woke mind virus and make truth exist in the world again. Great. Mission accomplished. And now it has this great future.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. We've got community notes. You can also ask Grok about anything you see on the platform. You just press the GROK icon on any X post and will analyze it for you and research it as much as you want. So you can basically have, just by tapping the GROK icon you can assess whether that post is the truth, the whole truth, or nothing but the truth or Whether there's something supplemental you need to be explained. So I think it's actually, we've made a lot of progress towards freedom of speech and people being able to tell whether something is false or not false propaganda. The recent update to GROK is actually, I think, very good at piercing through propaganda. And then we used that latest version of GROK to create Grokopedia, which I think is much more. It's not just, I think, more neutral and more accurate than Wikipedia, but it actually has a lot more information than a Wikipedia page.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Did you seed it with Wikipedia? Actually, take a step back. How did you do this?

[Elon Musk]

Well, we used AI, but meaning like.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Totally unsupervised, just complete training run on its own, totally synthetic data, no seeded set, nothing.

[Elon Musk]

Well, it was only just recently possible for us to do this. So we finished training on a maximally true seeking. Maximally true seeking, a version of GROK that is good at cogent analysis. So breaking down any given argument into its axiomatic elements, assessing whether those axioms are the basic test for cogency. The axioms are likely to be true, they're not contradictory, that the conclusion most likely follows from those axioms. So we're just trained GROQ on a lot of critical thinking. So it just got really good at critical thinking, which was quite hard. And then we took that version of GROK and said, okay, cycle through the million most popular articles in Wikipedia and add, modify and delete. So that means research the rest of the Internet, whatever's publicly available, and correct what's correct Wikipedia articles and fix mistakes, but also add a lot more context. So sometimes really the nature of the propaganda is that facts are stated that are technically true, but do not properly represent a picture of the individual or event.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is critical because when you have a bio, as you do actually all do on Wikipedia, over time, it's just the people you fired or you beat in business or have an ax to grind. So it just slowly becomes like the place where everybody, you know, kind of who hates you then puts their information. I looked at mine, it was so much more representative and it was five times longer, six times longer. And what it gave way to was much more accurate, Much more accurate. And this opportunity was sitting here, I think, for a long time. And it's just great that you got to it, because they don't update my page, but I don't know, twice a month. And then who is the secret cobble? There's 50 people who are anonymous who decide what gets put on it. It was a Much better, much more updated page in version one.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, this is version 6.1 as we put it, as we show at the top. So I do think actually by the time we get to version 1.0, it'll be 10 times better. But even at this early stage, as you just mentioned, it's not just that it's correcting errors, but it is creating a more accurate, realistic and fleshed out description of people and events. Elon, you think that. And subject matters. You can look at articles on physics in Grokopedia. They're much better than Wikipedia by far.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is what I was going to ask you is do you think that you can take this corpus of pages now and get Google to deboost Wikipedia or boost Grokipedia in traditional search? Because a lot of people still find this and they believe that it's authoritative because it comes up number one. Right, so how do we do that? How do you flip Google?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, so it really can. If people share a lot of. If Grokopedia is used elsewhere, like if people cite it on their websites or post about it on social media or when they do a search, when Grokpedia shows up, they click on Grokpedia, it will naturally rise in Google's rankings. I did text Cindar because, you know, even sort of a day after launch, if you typed in Grokopedia, Google would just say, did you mean Wikipedia?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Wikipedia, yeah.

[Elon Musk]

And it wouldn't even bring Gropedia up at all.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, that's true.

[David Sacks]

So, so now how's the use, how's the usage been? Have you seen good growth since it launched?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. Is it very early? It went super viral. So yeah, we're seeing, seeing it cited all over the place. But yeah, it's. And I think we'll see it used more and more as people refer to it and people will judge for themselves. When you read a pedia article about a subject or a person that you know a lot about and you see, wow, this is way better than Wikipedia. It's, it's, it's more comprehensive, it's way more accurate. It's not, it's, it's neutral instead of biased, then you're going to set, you're going to forward those links around and say that this is actually the better sourcepedia will succeed, I think very well because it is fundamentally a superior product to Wikipedia. It is a better source of information and we haven't even added images and video yet. So yeah, we're going to add a lot of video. So using Grokimagine to create videos. And so if you're trying to explain something Grok, imagine can take the text from Grokopedia and then generate a video, an explanatory video. So if you're trying to understand anything from how to tie a bow tie to, you know, how do certain chemical reactions work or really anything, dietary things, medical things, you can just go and see the video of how it works that's created by Ada.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

When you have this version that's maximally truth seeking as a model, do you think that there needs to be a better eval or a benchmark that people can point to that shows how off of the truth things are? So that if you're going to start a training run with Common Crawl or if you're going to use Reddit or if you're going to use. Is it important to be able to like say, hey, hold on a second, this eval just suck. Like you guys suck on this eval. Like, it's just. This is crappy data.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I guess I'm not. I think, I mean there are a lot of evals out there. I've complete confidence that Crocodia is going to succeed because Wikipedia is actually not a very good product. Yeah, the information is sparse, wrong and out of date. And if you can go, if you find. And it doesn't have very few images, there's basically no video. So if you have something which is accurate, comprehensive, has videos where moreover you can ask if there's any part of it that you're curious about, you can just highlight it and ask rock right there. Like if you're trying to learn something, it's just great. It's not going to be a little bit better than Wikipedia. It's going to be a hundred times better than Wikipedia.

[David Sacks]

Elon, do you think you'll see good uniform usage? If you look back on the last three years since you bought Twitter, there was a lot of people after you bought Twitter that said, I'm leaving Twitter. Elon's bought it. I'm going to go to this other wherever the hell they went and there's all these news and there's all these. And there's all these artists.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, but Blue Skies Falling is my favorite.

[David Sacks]

I guess my question is, as you destroy the woke mind viral kind of control of the system and as you bring truth to the system, whether the system is through Grokipedia or through X, do people like just look for confirmation bias and they actually don't accept the truth? Like what do you like or do you think people are actually going to see the truth and change? And change? Yeah, but I mean, is that like.

[Elon Musk]

You thought Sydney Sweeney's boobs were great?

[Jason Calacanis]

Looking good. Yeah, solid, solid up there.

[Elon Musk]

A little sheer, you know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I think we just got flagged on YouTube.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, we did. We. That, that was definitely going to give us a censorship moment.

[Elon Musk]

Grade A moves.

[David Sacks]

No, but, but like, like, but, but do people change their mind?

[Elon Musk]

I mean if this actually technically, there's no such thing as grade A move.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's off the rails already. David, you were trying to ask a serious question. Go ahead.

[David Sacks]

Well, I just want to know if people change their mind. Like can you actually change people's minds by putting the truth in front of them? Or do people just take, you know, they kind of ignore the truth because they're, they feel like they're in some sort of camp and they're like, I'm on.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They want the confirmation, they want the.

[David Sacks]

Confirmation bias and they want to stay in a camp and they want to be tribal about everything.

[Elon Musk]

It is remarkable how much people believe things simply because it is the belief of the, of their. In group, you know, whatever their sort of political or ideological tribe is. So I mean there's some, some pretty hilarious videos of, you know, you know, there was like some guy going around Trump is like a racist Nazi or whatever. And, and then, and, and then, and he was like trying to show them the videos where, of the thing that they are talking about where he is in fact condemning the Nazis in strongest possible terms and condemning racism in the strongest possible terms. And they literally don't even want to watch the videos. So yeah, people, at least some people, they would prefer they will stick to whatever their ideological views are, whatever that sort of political tribal views are, no matter what the evidence could be staring them in the face and they're just going to be a flat Earther. You know, there's, there is no evidence that you could show to a flat earther to convince them the world's around because everything is just a li. The world is flat type of thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think the, the ability to hit at grok in a reply and ask it a question in the thread has really become like a truth seeking missile on the platform. So when I put up metrics or something like that, I reply to myself and I say acrock, is the information I just shared correct? And can you find any better information and please tell me if my argument is correct or if I'm wrong and then it goes through and then it DMs sacks. And then Sachs gets in my replies and tries to correct me. No, but it does actually a really good job of like. And that combined with Community Notes, now you've got like two swings at bat. The Community's consensus view and then GROK coming in. I think it would be like really interesting if Grok, on like really powerful threads kind of did like its own version of Community Notes and had it sitting there ahead of time, you know, like you could look at a thread and it just had next to it, you know, or maybe on like the specific statistic you could click on it and it would show you like here's where that statistics from.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, you can, I mean pretty much every, I mean essentially every post on X, unless it's like advertising or something, has the GROK symbol on it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

And you just tap that symbol and you're one tap away from a GROK analysis. Literally just one tap. And we don't want to clutter the interface with providing an explanation, but I'm just saying if you go on X right now, it's one tap to get Grok's analysis and GROK will research the X post and give you an accurate answer. And you can even ask us to do further research and further due diligence and you can go as far down the rabbit hole as you want to go. But I do think this is the consistent with, we want X to be the best source of truth on the planet by far. And I think it is. And where you hear any and all points of view, but where those points of view are corrected by human editors with Community Notes. And the essence of Community Notes is that people who historically disagree agree that this Community Note is correct. And all of the Community Notes code is open source and the data is open source. So you can recreate any Community Note from scratch independently.

[Jason]

By and large, it's worked very well.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Jason]

I think we originally had the idea to have you back on the pod because it was a three year anniversary of the Twitter acquisition. So I just wanted to kind of reminisce a little bit.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I remember.

[Jason]

Yeah. I mean, I remember.

[Elon Musk]

Where's that sink?

[Jason]

Where's that sink? Well, yeah, so Elon was staying at my house. We had talked the week before and he told me the deal was going to close. And so I was like, hey, do you need a place to stay? And he took me up on it. And the day before he went to the Twitter office, there was a request made to my staff, do you happen to have an extra sink? And they did not, but they were able to.

[Elon Musk]

Who has an extra sink, really?

[Jason]

But they were able to locate one at a nearby hardware store, and I think they paid extra to get it out of the window or something.

[Elon Musk]

Well, I think the store was confused because my security team was asking for any kind of sink, and normally people wouldn't ask for any kind of sink. You need a sink that puts in your bathroom or connects to a certain kind of plumbing. So they're, like, trying to ask these, like, well, what kind of faucets do you want? No, no, I just want a sink.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, they think it's a mental person.

[Elon Musk]

Store was confused that we just wanted a sink and didn't care what the sink connected to. They were almost not letting us buy the sink because they thought maybe we'd buy the wrong sink. It's just rare that somebody wants a sink for sake.

[Jason]

For meme purposes.

[Jason Calacanis]

One of my favorite memories was Elon said, hey, swing by. Check it out. And I said, okay, I'll come by. And I drive up there, and I'm looking where to park the car, and I realize there's just parking spaces around the entire building. And I'm like, okay, this can't be, like, legal parking, But I park, and it's legal parking.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, you are in downtown sf, so you might get your window broken.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I might not be there when I get back, but we get in there, and the place is empty. And then. Yeah, yeah, it was seriously empty. Except for the cafeteria.

[Elon Musk]

There was an entire. The Twitter headquarters was two buildings. One of the buildings was completely and utterly empty, and the other building had, like, 5% occupancy.

[Jason Calacanis]

And the 5% occupancy. We go to the cafeteria, we all go get something to eat. And we realized there's more people working in the cafeteria than at Twitter.

[Elon Musk]

There were more people making the food than eating the food. And this giant cafeteria. Really nice. Really nice cafeteria. This is where we discovered that the actual price of the lunch was $400. The original price was $20, but it was at 5% occupancy, so it was 20 times higher. And they still kept making the same amount. Pretty much so. And charging the same amount. So effectively, lunch was $400. That's a great meeting. Yes. And then there was that where we had the initial meetings, sort of the. Sort of trying to figure out what the heck's going on meetings. Because there's the two buildings, two Twitter buildings, and the one with literally no one in it. That's where we had the initial meetings. And we Tried drawing on the whiteboard, and the markers had gone dry. So nobody used the whiteboard markers in, like, two years.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So sad.

[Elon Musk]

None of the markers worked. So we're like, this is totally bizarre. But it was totally clean because the cleaning crew had come in and done their job and cleaned. Cleaned an already clean place for, I don't know, two, three years straight.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was spotless.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, honestly, this is more crazy than any sort of Mike Judge movie or Silicon Valley or anything like that. And then I remember going into the men's bathroom, and there's a table with, you know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Hygiene.

[Elon Musk]

Menstrual hygiene products. Yep. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Refreshed every week.

[Elon Musk]

Tampons. Like a fresh box of tampons. And we're like, but there's literally no one in this building. So. But. Nope, hadn't turned off the. Send fresh tampons to the men's bathroom in the empty building. Had not been turned off.

[Jason Calacanis]

No.

[Elon Musk]

So every week they would put a fresh box of tampons in an empty building. For years. This happened for years. It must be very confusing to the people that were being asked to do this, because they're like, okay, I'll throw them away. Well, I remember when you. I guess they're paying us, so we'll just put. So just have to consider the. The string of possibilities necessary in order for anyone to possibly use that tampon in the men's bathroom at the unoccupied second building of Twitter headquarters. Because you'd have to be a burglar who is a trans man burglar who's unwilling to use the woman's bathroom that also has tampons, Statistically no one in the building. So you've broken into the building, and at that moment, you have a period. Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

And you're on your period.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, you're more likely to be struck by a meteor than need that tampon. Okay, well, I remember it was.

[Jason]

I think it was shortly after that, you discovered an entire room at the office that was filled with Stay woke up T shirts.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Jason]

Do you remember this?

[Elon Musk]

An entire pile of merch.

[Jason]

Yes.

[Elon Musk]

Hashtag Stay woke.

[Jason]

Stay woke.

[Elon Musk]

And also a big sort of buttons, like those magnetic buttons that you put on your shirt that said, I am an engineer. I'm like, look, if you're an engineer, you don't need a button. Like a big.

[David Sacks]

Who's the button for? Who are you telling that to?

[Jason Calacanis]

You could just ship code.

[David Sacks]

We would know.

[Jason Calacanis]

We could check your GitHub.

[Elon Musk]

But, yeah, they're like scarves, hoodies, all kinds of Merch that said hashtag staywoke.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, a couple music.

[Jason]

When you found that, I was like, my God, man. The barbarians are fully within the gates now.

[Elon Musk]

The barbarians have smashed through the gates and are looting the merch.

[Jason]

Yes. You are rummaging through their holy relics and defiling them.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, but when you think about it, David, the amount of waste that we saw there during those first 30 days, just to be serious about it for a second, this was a publicly traded company. So if you think about the financial duty of those individuals, there was a list of SAS software we went through and none of it was being used. Some of it had never been installed and they had been paying for it for two years. They've been paying for a SaaS product for two years. And the one that blew my mind the most that we canceled was they were paying a certain amount of money per desk to have desk suiteing software in an office where nobody came to work. So they were paying nobody.

[Elon Musk]

There was. There was millions of dollars a year being paid for. Yes, but for analysis of pedestrian. Like software that use cameras to analyze the pedestrian traffic to figure out where you can alleviate pedestrian traffic jams in an empty building.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right.

[Elon Musk]

That's like 11 out of 10 on a Dilbert scale.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it was pretty shout out, Scott Adams.

[Elon Musk]

You've gone off scale on your Dilbert level at that point.

[Jason]

Let's talk about the free speech aspect for a second, because I think that is the most important legacy of the Twitter acquisition. And I think people have short memories and they forget how bad things were three years ago. First of all, you had figures as diverse as President Trump, Jordan Peterson, J. Bhattacharya, Andrew Tate, they were all banned from Twitter. And I remember when you opened up the Twitter jails and reinstated their accounts, kind of freed all the bad boys.

[Elon Musk]

Of free speech that stole the best deal.

[Jason]

Yes. So you basically gave all the bad boys of free speech their accounts back. But second, beyond just the bannings, there was the shadow bannings, and Twitter had claimed for years that. That they were not shadow banning. This was a paranoid conservative conspiracy theorist.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, there was a very aggressive shadow banning by what was called the Trust and Safety group, which of course, naturally would be the one that is doing the nefarious shadow banning. And I just. I think we shouldn't have a group called Trust and Safety. I mean, this is an Orwellian name if you ever. If there ever was one. I'm from the trust department. Oh, really?

[Jason Calacanis]

We want to talk to you about your tweets. Can we see, your DMs say that.

[Elon Musk]

You'Re from the trust department. That's the Ministry of Truth right there.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Jason]

They had maintained for years that they were not engaged in this practice, including under oath. And on the heels of you opening that up and exposing that. Because, by the way, it wasn't just the fact they were doing it. They created an elaborate set of tools to do this. They had checkbox.

[Elon Musk]

Elaborate set of tools. Yes. To deboost accounts. Yes.

[Jason]

Yes. And subsequently we found out that other social networking properties have done this as well. But you were really the first to expose it.

[Elon Musk]

This is still being done at the other social media companies. It's Google, by the way. Um, so for, you know, and I don't pick on Google. Cause they're all doing it. But for search results, if you simply push a result pretty far down the page or, you know, the second page of results, like, like, you know, the. The joke used to be, or still is, I think, like, where do you hide a dead. What's the best place to hide a dead body? The second page of Google search results. Because nobody ever goes to the second page of Google search results. So you could. You could hide a dead body there and nobody would find it. And you still have then. It's not like you haven't made them go away. You've just put them on this one page too.

[Jason]

Yes. So shadow banning, I think, was number two. So first was banning. Second was shadow banning. I think third to me was government collusion, government interference. So you released the Twitter files. Nothing like that had ever been done before, where you just. You actually let investigative reporters go through Twitter's emails unfettered.

[Elon Musk]

I was not looking over their shoulder at all. They just had direct access to everything.

[Jason]

And they found that there was extensive collusion between the FBI and the Twitter Trust and Safety Group, where it turns out The FBI had 80 agents submitting takedown requests. And they were very involved in the banning, the shadow banning, the censorship, which I don't think we ever had definitive evidence of that before. That was pretty extraordinary.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. And the U.S. house of Representatives had hearings on the matter and a lot of this was unearthed. It's public record. So a lot of people, some people on the left still think this is made up. I'm like, this is just literally the Twitter files are literally the files at Twitter. I mean, we're literally just talking about. These are the emails that were sent internally that confirm this. This is what's on the Slack channels and this is what is shown on the Twitter database. As where people have made either suspensions or shadow bans.

[Jason Calacanis]

Has the government come and asked you to take stuff down since. Or they just have to. The policy is, hey, listen, you got to file a warrant, you got to come correct. As opposed to just putting pressure on executives.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. Our policy at this point is to follow the law. Now, the laws are obviously different in different countries. So sometimes I get criticized for, like, why don't I push free speech in XYZ country that doesn't have free speech laws? I'm like, because that's not the law there. And if we don't obey the law, we'll simply be blocked in that country. So the policy is really just adhere to the laws in any given country. It is up to us to agree or disagree with those laws. And if the people of that country want laws to be different, then they should, you know, ask their leaders to change the laws. Yeah, but. But anything that. But as soon as you start going beyond the law, now you're putting your thumb on the scale. So. So the. Yeah, I think. I think that's the right policy, is just adhere to the laws within any given country. Now, sometimes we get, you know, in a bit of a bind, like we had got into with Brazil, where, you know, this judge in Brazil was asking us to. Or telling us to break the law in Brazil and ban accounts contrary to the law of Brazil. And now we're. Now we're somewhat stuck. We're like, wait a second, we're reading the law and it says this is not allowed to happen. And also that and giving us a gag order. So, like, we're not allowed to say it's happening and we have to break the law. And the judge is telling us to break the law. The law is breaking the law. That's where things get very difficult. And we were actually banned in Brazil for a while because of that.

[Jason]

I just want to make one final point on the free speech issue, and then we can move on. Is just. I think people forget that the censorship wasn't just about COVID There was a growing number of categories of thought and opinion that were being outlawed. The, quote, content moderation, which is another Orwellian euphemism for censorship, was being applied to categories like gender and even climate change. The definition of hate speech was constantly growing.

[Elon Musk]

Yes.

[Jason]

And more and more people were being banned or shadow banned. And there was more and more things that you couldn't say. This trend of censorship was growing. It was galloping. And it would have continued if it wasn't. I think for the fact that you decided to buy Twitter and opened it up. And it was only on the heels of that that the other social networks were willing to, I think, be a little bit chastened in their policies and start to push back more.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, that's right. Once Twitter broke ranks, the others had to. It became very obvious what the others were doing. And so they had to mitigate their censorship substantially because of what Twitter did. And I mean, perhaps to give them some credit, they also felt that they had the air cover to. To be more inclined towards free speech. They still do a lot of sort of shadow banning and whatnot at the other social media companies, but it's much less than it used to be.

[David Sacks]

Elon, what have you seen in terms of governments creating new laws? So we've seen a lot of this crackdown in the UK on what's being called hateful speech on social media and folks getting arrested and actually going to prison over it. And it seems like when there's more freedom, the side that is threatened by that comes out and creates their own counter. Right. There's a reaction to that and there seems to be reaction. Are you seeing more of these laws around the world in response to your opening up free speech through Twitter and those changes and what they're enabling that the governments and the parties that control those governments aren't aligned and they're stepping in and saying, let's create new ways of maintaining our control through law.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. There's been an overall global movement to suppress free speech under the name of. Under the guise of suppressing hate speech. But then the problem with that is that your freedom of speech only matters if people are allowed to say things that you. That you don't like, or even that things that you hate. Because if you're allowed to suppress speech that you don't like, then, and you know you don't have freedom of speech and it's only a matter of time before things switch around and then the shoes on the other foot and they will suppress you. So suppress, not lest you be suppressed. But there is a movement, and there was a very strong movement to codify speech suppression into the law throughout the world and including the Western world. Europe and Australia, UK and Germany were.

[Jason Calacanis]

Very aggressive in this regard.

[Elon Musk]

Yes. And my understanding is that in the UK there's something like two or three thousand people in prison for social media posts. And in fact, there's so many people that were in prison for social media posts. And many of these things are like, you can't believe that someone would actually be put in prison for this. They have in a lot of cases released people who have committed violent crimes in order to imprison people who have simply made posts on social media. Which is deeply wrong and underscores why the founders of this country made the First Amendment. The First Amendment was freedom of speech. Why did they do that? It's because in the places that they came from there wasn't freedom of speech and you could be imprisoned or killed for saying things.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Can I ask you a question just to maybe move to a different topic? If you came and did this. Next week we will be past the Tesla board vote. We talked about it last week and we talked about how crazy ISS and Glass Lewis is. And we use this one insane example where like Iraq, Aaron Prize didn't get the recommendation from ISS in Glass Lewis because he didn't meet the gender requirements. But then Kathleen also did.

[Elon Musk]

It doesn't make any sense.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So the board vote is on the 6th.

[Elon Musk]

It was an African American woman.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

They recommended against her but then also recommended against our enterprise on the ground. She was insufficiently diverse. So I'm like these things don't make any sense. I do think we've got a fundamental issue with corporate governance in publicly traded companies where you've got about half of the stock market is controlled by passive index funds and most of them outsource their decision to advisory firms, particularly Glass Lewis and iss. I call them corporate isis. Um, you know, so all they do is basically just, they're just terrorists. So, so, and, and they have, they own no stock in any of these companies.

[David Sacks]

Right.

[Elon Musk]

So I think that this, there's a fundamental breakdown of producer responsibility here where really, you know, any company that's managing, even though they're passively managing, you know, index funds or whatever that they do at the end of the day have a fiduciary duty to vote along the lines of what would maximize the shareholder returns because people are counting on them. People have say, have all their Savings and say 401k or something like that and they're counting on the index funds, do company votes in the direction that would ensure that their retirement savings do as well as possible. But the problem is if that is then outsourced to ISS and Glass Lewis which have been infiltrated by far left activists because you know where basically political activists go, they go where the power is. And so effectively Glass Lewis and issuance controlled the vote of half the stock market. Now, now if you're a political activist, you know what a great place would be to go Work, buy some glass doors and they do so so my concern for the future because this, you know, the Tesla thing is it's called sort of compensation but really it's not about compensation. SL I'd like, I'm going to go out and buy you know, a yacht with it or something. It's just that I, I, I do I, in order, if I'm going to build up Optimus and, and you know, have all these robots out there, I need to make sure we do not have a terminated scenario and I, and that I can make, you know, maximize the safety of the robots. And, and, and, but, but I, I, I feel like I need to have something like a 25% vote which is enough of a vote to have a strong influence but not so much of a vote that I can't be fired if I go insane. So it's kind of, but my concern would be creating this army of robots and then being fired for political reasons because of ISS and Glass Lewis, ISIS and Glass Lewis. Fire me effectively or the activists at those bombs fire me even though I've done everything right. That's my concern. And then I cannot ensure the safety of the robots.

[Jason Calacanis]

If you don't get that vote, if it doesn't go your way, it looks like it's going to. Would you leave? I mean is that even in the cards? I heard the board was very concerned about that.

[Elon Musk]

Let's just say I'm not going to build a robot army if I can be easily kicked out by activist investors. No way.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, makes sense. And who is capable of running the four or five major product lines at Tesla? I mean this is the madness of it. It's a very complex business. People don't understand what's under the hood there. It's not just a car company. You got batteries, you got trucks, you got the self driving group and this is a very complex business that you've built over decades now. It's not a very simple thing to run. I don't think there's a ELON equivalent out there who can just jump into the cockpit by the way, if we.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Take a full turn around corporate governance corner. Also this week what was interesting about the OpenAI restructuring was I read the letter and your lawsuit was excluded from the allowances of the California Attorney General basically saying this thing can go through. Which means that your lawsuit is still out there. Right. And I think it's going to go.

[Jason Calacanis]

To a jury trial.

[Elon Musk]

Yes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So there that corporate governance thing is still very much in question. Do you have any thoughts on that.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, I believe that we'll go to a jury trial in February or March and then we'll see what the results are there. But there's a mountain of evidence that shows that OpenAI was created as a, an open source nonprofit. It's literally, that's the exact description in the incorporation documents. And in fact the incorporation documents explicitly say that no officer or founding member will be, will benefit financially from OpenAI. And they've completely violated that and more of it. Then you can just use the Wayback Machine and look at the website of OpenAI again. Open source nonprofit. Open source nonprofit the whole way until it looked like wow, there's a lot of money to be gained here. And then suddenly it starts changing and they try to change the definition of OpenAI to mean open to everyone instead of open source, even though it always meant open source. I came up with the name. Yeah, that's how I know.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So.

[Jason Calacanis]

If they open sourced it or they gave you, I mean you don't need the money, but if you, they gave you the percentage ownership in it that you would be rightfully which 50 million for a startup would be half at least. But they must have made an overture towards you and said hey, can we just give you 10% of this thing and give us your blessing? Like you're obviously have a different goal here. Yeah, yeah.

[Elon Musk]

I mean essentially since I came up with the idea for the company, named it, provided the A, B and C rounds of funding, recruited the critical personnel and told them everything I know, you know, if that had been a commercial corporation, I'd probably own half the company. So, but, and, and, and I, I, I could have chosen to do that, that, that I, if I, it was totally at my discretion, I could have done that. But I created as a nonprofit for the world, an open source nonprofit for the world.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do you think the right thing to do is to take those models and just open source them today? If you could affect that change, is that the right thing to do?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I think that is what it was created to do. So it should, I mean the best open source models right now actually ironically, because fate seems to be an irony maximizer, the best open source models are generally from China. Yeah, like that's bizarre. And then I think the second best one is, or maybe it's better than second best but like the Grok 2.5 open source model is actually very good and I think we'd probably be, and we'll continue to open source our models but whereas like try using any of the recent so called the OpenAI open source models that don't work, they basically, they open sourced a broken, non working version of their models as a fig leaf. I mean, do you know Anyone who's running OpenAI's open source models? Exactly, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Nobody. We've had a big debate about jobs here. Obviously there's going to be job displacement. You and I have talked about it for decades. What's your take on the pace of it? Because obviously you're building self driving software, you're building Optimus. We're seeing Amazon take some steps here where they're like, yeah, we're probably not going to hire these positions in the future. And maybe they're getting rid of people now because they were bloated, but maybe some of its AI. It's all debatable. What do you think the timeline is and what do you think as a society we're going to need to do to mitigate it if it goes too fast?

[Elon Musk]

Well, I call AI the supersonic tsunami. So not the most comforting description in the world.

[Jason Calacanis]

Fast and big.

[Elon Musk]

If there was a tsunami, a giant wall of water moving faster than the speed of sound, that's AI.

[Jason Calacanis]

When does it land?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, exactly. Um, so now this is happening whether I wanted to or not. I, I actually try to slow down AI and, and then the, the reason, you know, I, I, the reason I wanted to create OpenAI was to serve as a counterweight to Google because at the time Google was sort of essentially had unilateral power in AI that all, all the AI, essentially. And, and Larry Page was not, he was not taking AI safety seriously. Jason Armchair, were you there when he called me a speciesist? Yes, I was there. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You were more concerned about the human race than you were about the machines and yeah, you had a clear bias for humanity.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, yes, exactly. I was like, larry, we need to make sure that the AI doesn't destroy all the humans. And then he called me a species, like racist or something for being pro human intelligence instead of machine intelligence. I'm like, well, Larry, what side are you on? That's kind of a concern. And then at the time, Google had essentially a monopoly on AI.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, they bought DeepMind, which you were on the board of, had an investment in Larry and Sergey had invested in it as well.

[Elon Musk]

And it's really interesting about it because I told him about it. I showed him some stuff from DeepMind and I think that's how he found out about it and acquired them, actually. I got to be careful what I say, but the point is that it's like, look, Larry's not taking AI safety seriously. And Google had essentially all the AI and all the computers and all the money. And I'm like, this is a unipolar world where the guy in charge is not taking things seriously and called me a species for being pro human. What do you do in those circumstances?

[Jason Calacanis]

Build a competitor.

[Elon Musk]

Yes. So OpenAI was created essentially as the opposite, which is an open source nonprofit, the opposite of Google. Now unfortunately, it needs to change its name to Closed for maximum Profit AI. Yeah, for maximum profit. To be clear, the most amount of currently go for the most amount of profit positively get. I mean it is so.

[Jason Calacanis]

It is like, like I said, it's comical. When you hear, when you hear Sam.

[Elon Musk]

As an irony maximizer, you have to say like, what is the most, the most ironic outcome for a company that, that was created for to do open source nonprofit AI is it's super closed source. It's tighter than. The OpenAI source code is locked up tight in Fort Knox. And they are going for maximum profit, like maximum get the bourbon, the steak knife that, you know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

I mean.

[Elon Musk]

You know, like they're going for the buffet and they're just diving headfirst into the profit buffet. I mean it's. Or at least aspiration. The revenue buffet. At least profit. We'll see. I mean it's like, it's like ravenous wolves for revenue. Ravenous wolves?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, it's literally like super villain. It's like Bond villain level flip. Like it went from being the United nations to being Spectre in like James Bondland. When you hear him say I'm going to. When Sam says it's going to like raise 1.4 trillion to build up data centers.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, no, but I think he, I think he means it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. I mean it's. I would say audacious, but I wouldn't want to. Yeah. Insult the word.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh, actually I have a question about this.

[Jason Calacanis]

How is that possible?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

In the earnings call, you said something that was insane and then I think the math actually nets up. But you said we could connect all the Teslas and allow them in downtime to actually offer up inference and you can string them all together. I think the math is like, it could actually be like 100 gigawatts.

[Jason Calacanis]

Is that right?

[Elon Musk]

If ultimately there's a Tesla fleet that is 100 million vehicles, which I think we probably will get to at some point. 100 million vehicle fleet. And they have mostly state of the art inference computers in them that each say are a kilowatt of inference. Compute and they have built in power and cooling and connect to the wifi.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That's the key. Yeah, exactly.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, exactly. And you'd have 100 gigawatts of inference compute.

[David Sacks]

Elon, do you think that the architecture, like there was an attention free model that came out the last week, there's been all of these papers, all of these new models that have been shown to reduce power per token of output by many, many, many orders of magnitude. Like not just an order of magnitude, but like maybe three or four. What's your view and all the work you've been doing on where we're headed in terms of power per unit of compute or per token of output?

[Elon Musk]

Well, we have a clear example of efficient power efficient compute, which is the human brain. So our brains use about 20 watts of power, but and of that only about 10 watts is higher brain function. Most of it's, you know, half of it is just housekeeping functions, you know, keeping your heart going and breathing and that kind of thing. So, so you've got maybe 10 watts of higher brain function in a human. And we've managed to build civilization with 10 watts of a biological computer. And that biological computer has like a 20 year, you know, boot sequence, but it's very power efficient. So given that humans are capable of inventing general relativity and quantum mechanics, or discovering like, like advancing aircraft lasers, the Internet and discovering physics with a 10 watt meat computer essentially, then there's clearly a massive opportunity for improving the efficiency of AI compute because it's currently many orders of magnitude away from that. And it's still the case that.

[Jason Calacanis]

A.

[Elon Musk]

100 megawatt or even a gigawatt AI supercomputer at this point can't do everything that a human can do. It will be able to, but it can't. Yet like I said, we've got this obvious case of human brains being very power efficient and achieving and building civilization with 10 watts to compute. And our bandwidth is very low. So the speed at which we communicate information to each other is extremely low. We're not communicating at a terabyte, we're communicating more at like 10 bits per second. So.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do you think that there's that.

[Elon Musk]

Should naturally lead you to the conclusion that there's massive opportunity for being more power efficient with AI and at Tesla and at Xai, we're both, we continue to see massive improvements in inference computer efficiency. So yeah, you think that there's a.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Moment where you would justify stopping all the traditional cars and just going completely all in on cybercab if you Felt like the learning was good enough and that the system was safe enough. Is there ever a moment like that or do you think you'll always kind of dual track and always do both?

[Elon Musk]

I mean, all of the cars we make right now are capable of being a robotaxi. So there's a little confusion of the terminology because our cars look normal, like Model 3 or Model Y looks. It's a good looking car, but looks normal. But it has an advanced AI computer and advanced AI software and cameras. And we didn't want the cameras to stick out so that we didn't want them to be ugly or stick out. So we put them. They're sort of in unobtrusive locations. The forward looking cameras are in front of the rear view mirror. The side view mirrors are in the side repeaters, the side view cameras on the side repeaters. The rear camera is just above the license plate. Actually, typically where the rear view camera is in a car and you know, and the diagonal forward ones are in the B pillars, like if you look closely, you can see all the cameras, but you have to look closely. We just didn't want them to be to stick out like, you know, warts or something. But actually all the cars we make are hyper intelligent and have the cameras in the right places. They just look normal. And so all of the cars we make are capable of unsupervised full autonomy. Now we have a dedicated product which is the Cyber Cab, which has no steering wheel or pedals, which are obviously vestigial in an autonomous world. And we start production of the Cyber cab in Q2 next year and we'll scale that up to quite high volume. I think ultimately we'll make millions of Cyber Cabs per year. But it is important to emphasize that all of our cars are capable of being robotic taxis.

[Jason Calacanis]

The Cyber Cab is gorgeous. I told you I'd buy two of those. If you put a steering wheel in them and there is a big movement.

[Elon Musk]

Around them, we're not putting a steering wheel in.

[Jason Calacanis]

People are begging for it. Why not? Why not let us buy a couple, just the first ones off the line and drive them? They look great. It's like the perfect model. You always had a vision for a Model 2, right? Isn't it the perfect Model 2 in addition to being a Cyber Cabin?

[Elon Musk]

Look, the reality is people may think they want to drive their car, but the reality is that they don't. How many times have you been say in an Uber or Lyft and you said, you know what, I wish I could take over from the driver. And I wish I could get off my phone and take over from the Uber driver and drive to my destination. How many times have you thought that to yourself?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, it's quite the opposite.

[Elon Musk]

Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

I have the model Y and I just got 14. I have Juniper and I got the 14 one and I put it on Mad Max mode the last couple of days.

[Elon Musk]

That is Mad Max mode.

[Jason Calacanis]

A unique experience. I was like, wait a second. This thing is driving in a very unique fashion. Yeah, yeah.

[Elon Musk]

It assumes you want to get to your destination in a hurry.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. I used to give cab drivers an extra 20 bucks to do that.

[Elon Musk]

Medical appointment or something. I don't know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, but it's. It feels like it's getting very close. But you have to be very careful. You know, Uber had a horrible accident with the safety driver. Cruise had a terrible accident. Wasn't their fault exactly. Except, you know, somebody got hit and then it. They, they hit the person a second time and they got dragged.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, there's this pretty high stakes. So you're being extremely cautious. The cars.

[Elon Musk]

The car is actually extremely capable right now. But we are being extremely cautious and we're being paranoid about it because to your point, even one accident would be headline news. Well, probably worldwide headline news.

[Jason Calacanis]

Especially if it's a Tesla. Waymo, I think, gets a bit of a pass. I think there's half the country or a number of people probably would go extra hard on you.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, exactly. Not everyone in the press is, my friend.

[Jason Calacanis]

Hadn't noticed.

[Elon Musk]

Some of them are a little antagonistic. Yeah. So you can just.

[Jason Calacanis]

But people are pressuring you to go fast. And I think everybody's got to just take their time with this thing. It's obviously going to happen, but I just get very nervous that the pressure to put these things on the road faster than they're ready is just a little crazy. So I applaud you for putting the safety monitor in doing the safety drive with no shame in the safety driver game. It's so much the right decision, obviously, but people are criticizing you for it. I think it's dumb. It's the right thing to do.

[Elon Musk]

Yes. And we do expect it to take. To not have any sort of safety occupant or there's not really a driver that just sits.

[Jason Calacanis]

Monitor.

[Elon Musk]

Safety monitor. Just. They just sit in the car and don't do anything.

[Jason Calacanis]

Safety dude.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. But we do expect that the cars will be driving around without any safety monitor before the end of the year. So sometime in December in Austin.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. I Mean, you got a number of reps under your belt in Austin, and it feels like pretty well, you guys have done a great job figuring out where the trouble spots are. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you learned in the first. I don't know, it's been like three or four months of this so far. What did you learn in the first three or four months of the Austin experiment?

[Elon Musk]

Actually, it's gone pretty smoothly. A lot of things that we're learning are just how to manage a fleet, like, because you've got to write all the fleet management software, right? So, yeah, and you've got to write the ride hailing software. You've got to write basically the software that Uber has. You've got to write that software. Or it's just summoning a robot car instead of a car with a driver. So a lot of the things we're doing, we're scaling up the number of cars to say, what happens if you have a thousand cars? We think probably we'll have a thousand cars or more in the Bay Area by the end of this year, probably 500 or more in the greater Austin area. And you have to make sure the cars don't all, for example, go to the same supercharger every time. Right. Or don't all go to the same intersection. It's like, what do these cars do? And then sometimes there's high demand, and sometimes there's low demand. What do you do during the. During those times? Do you have a car circled the block? Do you have a. Try to find a parking space? And then sometimes, like I say, it's a disabled parking space or something, but the writing's faded or the things faded. The car's like, oh, look, a parking space. We'll jump right in there. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Get a ticket.

[Elon Musk]

You got to look carefully, make sure it's not an illegal parking space or it sees a space to park. And it's like, ridiculously tight, but I can get in there with, like, you know, three inches on either side.

[Jason Calacanis]

Bad computer.

[Elon Musk]

But nobody else will be able to get in the car if you do that. So, you know, there's just like all these oddball corner cases and.

[Jason Calacanis]

And regulators, like, regulators are all very. Yeah, they have different levels of persnicketiness and regulations, depending on the city, depending on the airport. I mean, it's just very different everywhere. That's going to just be a lot of blocking and tackling. And it just takes time.

[David Sacks]

Elon.

[Elon Musk]

In order to take people to San Jose Airport. Like, San Jose, you actually have to connect to San Jose airport servers and because you have to pay a fee every time you turn off. So, so the car actually has to, has to do a remote call. The robot car has to do, you know, remote procedure call to, to San Jose airport servers to, to say I'm dropping someone off at the airport and charge me whatever, five bucks. Which is like, there are all these like quirky things like that. Like airports are somewhat of a racket.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

So that's like we had to solve that thing. But it's kind of funny that the robot car is like calling the server, the airport server to charge its credit card or whatever.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's like a. Send a fax. Yeah. We're going to be dropping off at.

[Elon Musk]

This time, but it will soon become extremely normal to see cars going around with no one in them.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

Just before we lose you, I want to ask if you saw the Bill Gates memo that he put out. A lot of people are talking about this memo, like, you know.

[Elon Musk]

Billy G is not my love.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh man.

[David Sacks]

Like, did climate change become woke? Did it become like woke? And is it over being woke? Like, you know, like what happened and what happened with Billy Jeep?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I mean, you know, great question, great question.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

You know, you think that someone like Bill Gates, who clearly started a tech, you know, started a technology company that's one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft being, You'd think he'd be really quite, you know, strong in the sciences. But actually my at least direct conversations with him have. He is not strong in the sciences. Yeah. This is really surprising. He came to visit me at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin and was telling me that it's impossible to have a long range semi truck. And I was like, well, but we literally have them and you can drive them and Pepsi is literally using them right now. And you can drive them yourself or send someone. Obviously Bill Gates not going to drive himself, but you can send a trusted person to drive the truck and verify that it can do the things that we say it's doing. And it's like, no, no, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. And I'm like, okay, I'm kind of stuck there. Then it's like. I was like, well, so it must be that you disagree with the watt hours per kilogram of the battery pack. So that you must think that perhaps we can't achieve the energy density of the battery pack or that the watt hours per mile of the truck is too high because. And, and that when you combine those two numbers the range is low. And so which one of those numbers do you think we have wrong and what numbers do you think are correct? And he didn't know any of the numbers. And I'm like, well, then doesn't it seem that it's perhaps premature to conclude that long range semi cannot work if you do not know the energy density of the battery pack or the energy efficiency of the truck chassis?

[Jason Calacanis]

But yeah, he's now taking a 180 on climate. He's saying maybe this shouldn't be the top priority.

[Elon Musk]

Climate is gay. Why would he say climate is gay? That's wrong.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's totally retarded.

[Elon Musk]

Well, gay. So the climate is gay and retarded. Come on.

[Jason Calacanis]

Maybe he's got to put up. Does he have to stand up a data center for Sam Altman or something? I don't know. What is Azure? No, he changed his position. I can't figure out why.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, you know, I mean, the reality of the whole climate change thing is that you've just had sort of people who say it doesn't exist at all, and then people who say it's our super lamas and saying, you know, RAR is going to be underwater in five years. And obviously neither of those two positions are true. The reality is you can measure the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. Again, you could just literally buy a CO2 monitor from Amazon. It's like 50 bucks, and you can measure it yourself and you can say, okay, well, look, the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing steadily at 2 to 3 per year. At some point, if you continue to take billions, eventually trillions of tons of carbon from deep underground and transfer it to the atmosphere and oceans, so you transfer it from deep underground into the surface cycle, you will change the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans. You just literally will. Then you can only then now you can say, argue to what degree and over what timescale. And the reality is that in my opinion is that we've got at least 50 years before it's a serious issue. I don't think we've got 500 years, but we've probably got 50. It's not five years. So if you're trying to get to the right order of magnitude of accuracy, I'd say the concern level for climate change is on the order of 50 years. It's definitely not five, and I think it probably isn't 500. So really the right course of action is actually just the reasonable course of action, which is to lean in the direction of sustainable Energy and lean in the direction of a sort of a solar battery future and generally have the rules of the system lean in that direction. I don't think we need massive subsidies, but then we also shouldn't have massive subsidies for the oil and gas industry. Okay, so the oil and gas, gas industry has massive tax write offs that they don't even think of as subsidies because these things have been in place for, in some cases, you know, 80 years, but they're not there for other industries. So when you've got special tax conditions that are in one industry and not another industry, I call that a subsidy. Obviously it is, but they're taking it for granted for so long in oil and gas that they don't think of it as a subsidy. So the right course of action, of course, is to remove, in my opinion, remove subsidies from all industries. But the political reality is that the oil and gas industry is very strong in the Republican party, but not in the Democratic party. So you will not see obviously even the tiniest subsidy being removed from the oil, gas and coal industry. In fact, there were some that were added to the oil, gas and coal industry in the sort of big bull, and there were a massive number of sustainable energy incentives that were removed. Some of which I agreed with, by the way. Some of the incentives have gone too far. But anyway, the actual, I think the correct scientific conclusion, in my opinion, and I think we can back this up with solid reasoning, Ask Grok, for example, is that we should lean in the direction of moving towards a sustainable energy future. We will eventually run out of oil, gas and coal to burn anyway because it's a finite, there's a finite amount of that stuff and we will eventually have to go to something that lasts a long time, that is sustainable.

[David Sacks]

But to your point about the irony of things, it seems to be the case that making energy with solar is cheaper than making energy with some of these carbon based sources today. And so the irony is it's already working. I mean, the market is moving in that direction and this notion that we need to kind of force everyone into a model of behavior, it's just naturally going to change because we've got better systems. You and others have engineered better systems that make these alternatives cheaper and therefore they're winning. Like they're actually winning in the market, which is great, but they can't win if there are subsidies to support the old systems. Obviously.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. I mean, by the way, there are actually massive disincentives for solar because China is a massive producer of solar panels. China does an Incredible job of solar manufacturing, of solar panel manufacturing. Really incredible. They have roughly one and a half terawatts of solar production right now and they're only using a terawatt per year, by the way. That's a gigantic number. The average US power consumption is only half a terawatt. So just think about that for a second. China's, you know, for China's solar panel out production, max capacity is one and a half terawatts per year. US steady state power usage is half a terawatt. Now, now you do have to, to reduce, you say to produce one and a half terawatts a year of solar, you need, you need to add that with batteries. Take into account the, the, the differences between night and day, the fact that the solar panel is not always pointed directly at the sun, that kind of thing. So you can divide by 55 ish to say that, but that still means that China has the ability to produce solar panels that have a steady state output that is roughly two thirds that of the entire US economy from all sources. Which means that just with solar alone, China can in 18 months produce enough solar panels to power the entire the United States. All the electricity of the United States.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What do you think about near field solar, AKA nuclear?

[Elon Musk]

I'm in favor of, look, make energy from any way you want that isn't obviously harmful to the environment. Generally people don't welcome a nuclear reactor in their backyard. They're not championing, put it here, put it under my bed.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Put it on my roof.

[Elon Musk]

If your next door neighbor said, hey, I'm selling my house and they're putting a reactor there, what would you. The typical homeowner response will be negative. Very few people will embrace a nuclear reactor adjacent to their house. But nonetheless, I do think nuclear is actually very safe. There's a lot of scaremongering and propaganda around fission, assuming you talk about fission. But vision is actually very safe. They obviously have this on the Navy. U.S. navy has this on submarines and aircraft carriers with people really walking. Right. I mean submarines are pretty crowded place and they have a nuclear powered submarine. I think fission's fine as an option. The regulatory environment makes it very difficult to actually get that done. And then it is important to appreciate just the sheer magnitude of the power of the sun. So here are some just important basic facts. Even Wikipedia has these facts right, so you don't even have, you don't have to use Rockpedia, but even Wikipedia has.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, even Wikipedia got it right.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, yes. I'm saying what I'm Saying even Wikipedia's got the right, got these facts right. The sun is about 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Then Jupiter's about 0.1% and everything else is in the remaining 0.1%. And we are much less than 0.1%. So if you burnt all of the mass of the solar system, okay, then the total energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%. If you just burnt Earth, the whole planet, and burnt Jupiter, which is very big and quite challenging, to burn Jupiter into a thermonuclearactor, it wouldn't matter. The sun compared to the sun, the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. And everything else is in the miscellaneous category. So like, basically no matter what you do, total energy produced in our solar system rounds up to 100% from the sun. You could even throw another Jupiter in there. So we're going to snag a Jupiter from somewhere else and somehow teleport. You could teleport two more Jupiters into our solar system, burn them, and the sun would still round up to 100%. As long as you're at 99.6%, you're still rounding up to 100%. Maybe that gives some perspective of why solar is really the thing that matters. And as soon as you start thinking about things at sort of a grander scale, like Kardashev scale two civilizations, it becomes very, very obvious. I'm not saying anything that's new, by the way. Anyone who studies physics has known this for a very long time. In fact, Kadashev, I think, was a Russian physicist who came up with this idea, I think in the 60s, just as a way to classify civilizations. Where Kadishev Scale 1 would be, you've harnessed most of the energy of the planet. Shift scale two, you've harnessed most of the energy of your sun. Kardashian three, you've harnessed most of the energy of galaxy. Now we're only about, I don't know, 1% or a few percent of Kardashev scale 1 right now, optimistically. But as soon as you go to Kashev Scale 2, where you're talking about the power of the sun, then you're really just saying everything is solar power and the rest is in the noise. And. Yeah, so the sun produces about a billion times, call it well over a billion times more energy than everything on Earth combined.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's crazy. It's mind blowing, right? Yeah, yeah. Solar's the obvious solution to all this. And yeah, I mean, short term, you have to use some of these other sources. But hey, there it is. An hour and a half with Elon Musk.

[Elon Musk]

Star powered. Like, maybe we got a branding issue here.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, star power.

[Elon Musk]

Instead of solar powered, it's starlight.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, starlight, perfect.

[Elon Musk]

It's the power of a blazing sun. How much energy does an entire star have?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, well, more than enough. All right.

[Elon Musk]

And also, you really need to keep the power local. So sometimes people, honestly, I've had these discussions so many times, it's where they say, well, would you beam the power back to Earth? I'm like, do you want to melt Earth? Because you would melt Earth if you did that. We'd be vaporized in an instant. So you really need to keep the power local. Basically distributed power. And I guess most of it we use for intelligence. So it's like the future is like a whole bunch of solar powered AI satellites.

[David Sacks]

The only thing that makes the star work is it just happens to have a lot of mass. So it has that gravity to ignite the fusion, to ignite the fusion reaction. Right. But like, we could ignite the fusion reaction on Earth. Now, I don't know, like, if your view has changed. I think we talked about this a couple years ago where you were pretty like, we don't know if or when fusion becomes real here, but theoretically we could take like 10.

[Elon Musk]

No, I want to be careful. My opinion on. So, you know, I started physics and physics in college. At one point in high school, I was thinking about a career in physics. One of my sons actually does a career is doing a career in physics. But the problem is I came to the conclusion is that I'd be waiting for a collider or, or a telescope. I don't have any to get that career in physics, but I have a strong interest in the subject. So. So, so my opinion on, say, creating a fusion reactor on Earth is. I think this is actually not a hard problem, actually. I mean, it's a little hard. I mean, it's not like, totally trivial, but if you just scale up a tokamak, the bigger you make it, the easier the problem gets. So you've got a surface to volume ratio thing where you're trying to maintain a really hot core while having a wall that doesn't melt. So there's a similar problem with rocket engines. You've got a super hard core in the rocket engine, but you don't want the. The walls, the chamber walls of the rocket engine to melt. So you have a Temperature gradient where it's very hot in the middle and it gradually gets cold enough as you get to the perimeter, as you get to the, you know, the chamber walls in the rocket engine where the, it doesn't melt because you've lowered the temperature and you got a temperature gradient. So just if you just scale up, you know, the donut reactor tokamak and improve your surface volume ratio, that becomes much easier. And you can absolutely, in my opinion, I think just anyone who looks at the math, you can make a reactor that generates more energy than it consumes. And the bigger you make it, the easier it is. And in the limit, you just have a giant gravitationally contained thermonuclear reactor like the sun, which requires no maintenance and it's free. So this is also. Why would we bother doing that on making a little itty bitty sun that's so microscopic you'd barely notice on Earth when we've got the giant free one in the sky.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, but we only get a fraction of 1% of that energy on the planet Earth. We have to go, yeah, right. So we've got to figure out how to wrap the sun if we're going to harness that energy. That's, that's our, our long term.

[Elon Musk]

If people want to have fun with reactors, you know, that's, that's fine, have fun with reactors, but it's not a serious endeavor compared to the sun. You know, it's, it's sort of a fun, it's a fun science project to make a thermonuclear reactor, but it's not, it's just peanuts compared to the sun. And even the solar energy that does reach Earth is a gigawatt per square kilometer, or roughly called two and a half gigawatts per square mile. So that's a lot. And the commercially available panels are around 25, almost 26% efficiency. And maybe. And then you say, like, if you pack it densely, you get an 80% packing density you're going to. Which I think in a lot of places you could get an 80% packing density. You effectively have about 200 megawatts per square kilometer. And you need to pair that with batteries so you have continuous power, although our power usage drops considerably at night, so you need less batteries than you think. And.

[David Sacks]

Doesn'T the question then become a.

[Elon Musk]

Rough way to like, maybe an easy number to remember is a gigawatt hour per square kilometer per day is a roughly correct number.

[David Sacks]

But then doesn't your technical challenge become the scalability of manufacturing of those Systems. So, you know, accessing the raw materials and getting them out of the ground of planet Earth to make them. To make enough of them to get to that sort of scale and that volume that you're talking about, and as you kind of think about what it would take to get to that scale, do we have an ability to do that with what we have today? Can we pull that much material out of the ground?

[Elon Musk]

Yes. Solar panels are made of silicon, which is sand, essentially.

[David Sacks]

I guess more on the battery side.

[Elon Musk]

The battery side, yeah. So on the battery side.

[David Sacks]

Like iron.

[Elon Musk]

Phosphate, lithium ion battery cells, there's, you know, Earth. I'd like to throw out some, like, interesting factoids here, if most people don't know. If you said, as measured by mass, what is the biggest element? What. What is. What is Earth made of as measured by mass? Actually, it's. It's iron.

[David Sacks]

Iron, yeah.

[Elon Musk]

Iron. Yeah. We're. We're, I think 32% iron, 30% oxygen, and then everything else is in the remain, remaining percentage. So we're basically a rusty ball bearing. That's Earth, and with a lot of silicon at the surface in the form of sand and the iron phosphate. So iron phosphate, lithium ion cells. Iron, extremely common, most common element on Earth, even in the crust. And then phosphorus is also very common. And then the anode is carbon, but also very common. And then lithium is also very common. So there's actually. You can do the math. In fact, we did the math and published the math, but nobody looked at it. It's on the Tesla website that shows that you can completely power Earth with solar panels and batteries, and there's no shortage of anything.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, so on that note. Yeah, go get to work, Elon, and just power the Earth while you're getting implants into people's brains and satellites and other good, fun stuff. Good to see you, buddy.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, good to see you guys.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, yeah. Stop by anytime.

[David Sacks]

Thanks for doing this.

[Jason Calacanis]

You got the zoom link. Stop by any time.

[Jason]

Thank you for coming today and thank you for liberating free speech three years ago.

[Elon Musk]

You're welcome.

[Jason]

Yeah, that was a very important milestone.

[Elon Musk]

And I see all you guys are in just different places. I guess. This is a very virtual situation.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm at the ranch.

[Elon Musk]

Are you ever in the same room? Nope.

[Jason Calacanis]

We try not to be.

[David Sacks]

Only when we do. Only when we do that. That summit. But otherwise we avoid each other.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, otherwise your summit is pretty fun. We had a great time recounting SNL sketches that didn't make it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, God, there's just so many good ones. I mean, we didn't even get to the Jeopardy ones.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Those were so offensive.

[Elon Musk]

Oh, wait, I think we skipped a few. That would have dramatically increased our probability of being killed. Take this one out, boys.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I love you.

[David Sacks]

I love you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I love you all.

[David Sacks]

I'm going to poker later.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Take care.

[Jason Calacanis]

Bye bye.

[Elon Musk]

Love you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let your winners ride Rain Man David. Sad.

[Jason]

And instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

[Elon Musk]

Love you, West.

[Jason Calacanis]

Queen of K. Besties are gone.

[Elon Musk]

13. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Will meet me at.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

We should all just get a room and just have one big, huge orgy.

[Elon Musk]

Because they're all just useless.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

[Elon Musk]

We need to get merch.