Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding

Summary

Podcast Summary: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Episode: Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding
Date: September 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the All-In Podcast hosts are joined by Elon Musk for a deep-dive conversation intersecting technology, economics, society, and planetary destiny. The wide-ranging discussion covers Musk’s latest projects—Optimus humanoid robots, Tesla’s next-gen AI chips, Starlink’s ambitions for global wireless, evolution of AI models at xAI, the existential threats and opportunities of Western civilization, and humanity’s future on Mars. The tone is candid, humorous, and at times philosophical, offering insight into both the technical and human factors driving the future.

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Main Topics and Key Discussion Points

1. Optimus – The Humanoid Robot Project

• Significance: Musk describes Optimus as potentially "the greatest product ever created by humanity" (00:00).
  • “If successful, Optimus will be the biggest product ever.” (Elon Musk, 05:06)
• Development Focus:
  • The main engineering challenge is achieving human-level manual dexterity, especially the hand/forearm actuators (03:25–08:58).
  • Supply chain for actuators and robotics hardware doesn't exist—Tesla is building from scratch.
• Cost and Scale:
  • Marginal cost target: ~$20,000/unit at one million/year scale (05:24).
  • AI chip is a costly component ($5,000–$6,000 per robot).
• Why Human Form?
  • The world is built for humans; a general-purpose robot must take this shape for backwards compatibility and versatility (11:21).
• Software Integration:
  • Human-comparable performance would leverage advances in LLMs; users could interact naturally with Optimus (10:42).

Notable Quote:

“Your hand is actually a remarkable thing... In order to create a robot that can be a generalized humanoid, you must solve the hands problem.”
— Elon Musk (06:51–08:38)

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2. AI & Silicon Advancements – Tesla & xAI

• Dojo & AI Chips:
  • Tesla’s AI5 chip is nearing completion: "By some metrics... 40 times better than AI4." (12:59)
  • Advancements come from deep hardware-software co-design.
• Implications for Products:
  • FSD (Full Self-Driving): Existing hardware will reach human-level (or better) driving safety "in the next few months" via software updates—"Your car is going to feel like it is sentient by the end of the year." (16:50)
• Grok and xAI’s Next-Gen LLMs:
  • xAI is building models that rely not only on scraped web data but also extensive synthesis, correction, and context enhancement (26:59).
  • Discussion around creating a "Grokpedia"—an improved, less biased version of Wikipedia (28:13).

Notable Quote:

“I think we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year... and probably within five... AI is smarter than the sum of all humans.”
— Elon Musk (29:42–30:10)

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3. Starlink’s Push for Global Mobile Connectivity

• Direct-to-Phone Ambitions:
  • SpaceX is acquiring spectrum and developing satellites/phone chips to enable truly global, high-bandwidth, direct-to-device service (17:25–19:08).
  • Estimated launch of compatible phones: approximately two years (17:35).
  • Vision: Starlink as a global carrier option, potentially even buying traditional carriers for spectrum (19:30; 20:14).
• Technical Caveats:
  • Signal will work in normal homes, not in heavily shielded environments (18:54).

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4. Starship, Reusability, and Space Access

• Progress & Roadmap:
  • Next year, SpaceX expects to achieve full reusability of Starship—a huge leap for lowering the cost of space access (20:19–21:42).
  • Starship (v3) will deliver 100+ tons to orbit, doubling the scale of current heaviest launchers (21:50–22:11).
• Technical Hurdles:
  • Heat shield: Making a reusable, robust shield is a major focus, “No one has ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield” (24:33–25:03).
• Team Acknowledgement:
  • Elon credits the SpaceX team's talent and dedication for the progress (23:01).

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5. AI at Scale – Training, Limits, and Exponential Growth

• Superclusters:
  • xAI is building out Colossus 2, one of the world's biggest AI compute clusters (29:08).
• Scaling Laws:
  • Returns diminish logarithmically; “10x more compute might double the intelligence” (29:42).
  • Human intelligence on a societal scale is plateauing or declining as population shrinks—“AI will keep scaling up until we’re using most of the power of the sun or galaxy” (29:42).

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6. Why the West Is Imploding – Birth Rates, Borders, Culture, and Optimism

• Symptoms of Decline:
  • Falling birth rates, mass migration without assimilation, rising unaddressed crime, loss of civilizational confidence (32:12–33:44).
  • Media, political, and societal inability to address or even discuss these stresses.
• Optimism and Purpose:
  • Without a sense of hope and meaning, people stop having children; “The actions of the west are indistinguishable from suicide.” (34:22)
  • Religion once provided this purpose; its loss opens the way for destructive secular ideologies (35:34–36:40).
  • Advocates for a “philosophy of curiosity”—a secular sense of wonder and purpose grounded in exploration, science, and expanding consciousness (36:40–39:32).

Notable Quote:

“Having a child is an act of optimism about the future. So if you’re not optimistic... suicide might be just what happens.”
— Elon Musk (34:52)

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7. Space, Expansion, and the Future of Civilization

• Why Mars?
  • Dual goals of discovery (moon/lunar base, lunar research as "very cool") and survival (“planetary redundancy" in case Earth suffers calamity) (39:32–41:56).
  • The clock is ticking: the window for a self-sustaining Mars city may close if civilization stagnates or declines (41:56–43:47).
• Timeline:
  • Feasible path: "about 25 to 30 years" for a self-sustaining Mars city, with exponential growth in payloads each Mars transfer window (43:47).

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Optimus and Human Dexterity:
  “Your hand is actually a remarkable thing... In order to create a robot that can be a generalized humanoid, you must solve the hands problem.” (Elon Musk, 06:51–08:38)

• On AI’s Near Future: “I think we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year... and probably within five... AI is smarter than the sum of all humans.” (Elon Musk, 29:42–30:10)

• On the Decline of the West:
  “The actions of the west are indistinguishable from suicide.” (Elon Musk, 34:22)

• On Optimism and Children:
  “Having a child is an act of optimism about the future. So if you’re not optimistic... suicide might be just what happens.” (Elon Musk, 34:52)

• On Meaning and Civilization:
  “We must expand as a consciousness. We must grow humanity and we must extend humanity in order to comprehend, to understand the universe...” (Elon Musk, 36:40–38:22)

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Structured Timeline of Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |---------------|-----------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–05:06 | Optimus project introduction and vision | | 05:06–09:20 | Cost, supply chain, actuator design challenges | | 09:20–10:42 | Manufacturing, hands as key difficulty | | 12:18–15:34 | Silicon, Dojo AI5, technical advances, FSD impact | | 16:50–19:08 | Starlink spectrum acquisition, direct-to-phone | | 20:19–25:41 | Starship, reusability, heat shield issue | | 26:21–29:42 | Grok/xAI LLM scaling, synthetic data, Grokpedia | | 29:42–31:30 | Hardware scaling laws, AI intelligence limits | | 32:09–35:34 | Birth rates, culture, optimism, “suicidal” West | | 35:34–39:32 | Role of religion, philosophy of curiosity, purpose | | 39:32–44:33 | Moon bases, Mars as plan B, timeline for Mars city |

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Takeaways

• Elon Musk is doubling down on building the physical and digital infrastructure for the next century: AI, robots, global connectivity, and off-world civilization, all at previously unimaginable scale.
• He views societal and civilizational health—especially optimism, curiosity, and child-rearing—as equally crucial to technological progress.
• Despite daunting challenges, Musk’s outlook is fundamentally optimistic, driven by a deep sense of curiosity and a desire to safeguard and expand consciousness.

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For those seeking deep insight into where technology, society, and civilization are heading—and what it means to be human in the age of AI and planetary expansion—this is a landmark, must-listen episode.

Transcript

[Interviewer]

I believe Optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity. Elon Musk and his ex AI startup have built the largest and most powerful artificial intelligence training supercomputer in the world.

[Elon Musk]

As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that.

[Interviewer]

You know, this is an arms race of epic proportions. He's a big thinker.

[Conference Host]

You guys went on Fox the other.

[Technical Moderator]

Day with the Doge team.

[Conference Host]

You saw Elon's face nodding while they were speaking with a grin. Ear to ear, he was.

[Elon Musk]

Pro Is X has acquired X in.

[Technical Moderator]

An all stock transaction.

[Interviewer]

Tesla's first robotaxis are officially on the road.

[Elon Musk]

The company's board proposed a new compensation package for the CEO that could pay him just about $1 trillion in stock. He gets nothing if he doesn't hit the numbers.

[Interviewer]

Space X will buy wireless spectrum licenses from Echo Star for its Starlink satellite network for about $17 billion. There's a cooey.

[Technical Moderator]

There'S a splashdown.

[Interviewer]

How do you have time this? I never understand you.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, well, I do work a lot.

[Interviewer]

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Elon Musk.

[Elon Musk]

All right.

[Interviewer]

All right. Where are you?

[Elon Musk]

Alto.

[Interviewer]

You're in Palo Alto and not Washington.

[Elon Musk]

D.C. i'm at Tesla Global Engineering headquarters in Palo Alto.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So no more Washington dc. You're back at work, you're focused.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, yeah. I haven't been to D.C. since May.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Elon Musk]

That was a hell of a side quest.

[Interviewer]

That was a good side. Any lessons from your time in Washington D.C.

[Elon Musk]

The government is basically unfixable. I applaud David's noble efforts. It's good to have talented people in the administration. But at the end of the day, if you look at our national debt, which is insanely high, the interest payments exceed the Defense Department, I guess. Sorry. War Department budget, and they keep rising. So if AI and robots don't solve our national debt, we're toast.

[Interviewer]

Which is a great segue. Optimus is, I think, going to be the greatest product in the history of humanity. What's the progress like and how much of your. How many of your cycles are going specifically to Optimus? What's the timeline? I think you're on version three, maybe four. Tell us everything.

[Elon Musk]

Well, yeah, everything would take a long time.

[Interviewer]

We've got time.

[Elon Musk]

We're finalizing the design of Optimus version 3. And that really is going to be a very remarkable robot. It will have essentially the manual dexterity of a human, so. Meaning a very complex hand, an AI mind that can navigate and comprehend reality and it will be made in very high volume. Those are the three things that are missing. Like if you see any other robotics company, they're missing those three things. Those are the three really hard things. And I spend, actually at this point, it might be more of my mental cycles than anything, anything else, any other single thing on Optimus. That's, that, that's solving for real world AI. All of the electromechanical issues of Optimus, the, the supply chain and production challenges of it, because we have, there is no supply chain that exists for humanoid robots. So it has to be, we have to recreate it from scratch and which requires doing a lot of vertical integration. None of the actuators in Optimus are available from an existing supply chain. So. But I, I think it is accurate to say that if successful, Optimus will be the biggest product ever.

[Interviewer]

And the cost of it, at scale, 20, 30, $40,000 a robot, what do you think the first wave of them will cost? And when will we be able to buy one to work on the ranch?

[Elon Musk]

I think the marginal cost of production once you hit a million units per year is probably around the $20,000 range. It, it, it sort of depends on how much you spend on the AI chip in the, in the robot. And you need to achieve a lot of efficiencies in the actuators. There are 26 actuators per arm, like 26 electric like motors, gearboxes and power electronics. So, so, but, but the, the, the, the, the AI chip will be pretty expensive like that, that might be like 5, 5 or $6,000 of the, of the bill of materials, maybe more. And, but, but I think at volume, at a million units a year, the, the production cost is probably on the order of $20,000, maybe 25,000 like that. And price will be as a function of demand.

[Technical Moderator]

Elon, can you maybe explain to everybody why the hand is so important to get right and why, you know, the actuator design is so unique and you know, why it's so difficult, why nobody makes it and why you have to start there almost to build the rest of the robot properly.

[Elon Musk]

Well, it turns out human hands are incredibly, they've evolved to be this incredibly sophisticated machine like the. Your hand is actually a remarkable thing. Look closely at your hands and think of all the things you can do with your hands, which is a lot.

[Interviewer]

I can think of many things. Yeah, I was just thinking about something.

[Elon Musk]

Your hands are very versatile instrument.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, you could give a high five.

[Elon Musk]

Very versatile. You know, you can swing a baseball bat, you can thread needles you can put thread in a needle, you can play the piano with violin. You know, you could disassemble or assemble a car. The hands are incredibly versatile instruments and most of the muscles of the hand are actually in the forearm. So your hand is kind of like a puppet. It's mostly a puppet. The muscles are coming from the forearm and they're pulling the tendons, which are also human tendon designs, or human tendon evolution is incredibly good. So you've got this web of tendons. You've got, I think the human hand is something like, depending on how you count it, 27 or 28 degrees of freedom in the hand. It's amazing. So in order to create a robot that can be a generalized humanoid, you must solve the hands problem.

[Interviewer]

We had, we had Ari.

[Elon Musk]

It's got hands, knees, hands.

[Technical Moderator]

And so is it like when you were first building Tesla where the supply chain doesn't exist and now you have to go out and find folks to work with and, you know, build all this vertical integration, get support? Is it, is it literally like it's just nowhere to be found and you're going to have to build all of this stuff up?

[Elon Musk]

Yes. We could not actually buy the actuators for any amount of money. They simply didn't exist. Even though they're are 10, 20,000 electric motors out there of various sizes and shapes, we've had to design every electric motor, gearbox and the controlling electronics from scratch, basically from physics first principles.

[Interviewer]

The good news is you've got a lot of experience with factories over the last couple of decades. So how challenging is this versus Cybertruck, Model Y? Model X gigafactory, you know. Yeah, the Faberge egg, known as the Model X. Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

Right. It's hotter than any of those things.

[Interviewer]

Okay, yeah, much hotter. Significantly, yeah.

[Elon Musk]

Starship, yes.

[Conference Host]

Well, harder than Starship.

[Elon Musk]

No, not Starship's hotter. Okay, sorry.

[Interviewer]

So somewhere between a Model X and a starship.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Audience Member]

Is it, Is the. What's harder, the hardware or the software?

[Elon Musk]

Right now we're struggling with the final design of the hardware. Like I said, it's really primarily the hand, not to just dismiss the rest of the robot. Rest of it's also important. But the hands. Are the hands inclusive of the forearm are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot.

[Audience Member]

And then let's assume you get past the hardware challenges. How much do you sort of get for free? Based on all the progress that's happening with LLMs, will consumers just be able to interact with this, talk to the robot, ask them to do things it'll understand and sort of.

[Elon Musk]

Oh, yeah, yeah, no problem.

[Interviewer]

You're spending a lot of time with Annie, I noticed, online.

[Elon Musk]

Not that long. Maybe I went a little over the top for Moaning Grok. Imagine.

[Interviewer]

But, well, but in all seriousness, those characters and these robots that seems to be, you know, like maybe they, you.

[Elon Musk]

Could get the embodiments of any iceberg.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Conference Host]

Why? Why the human form factor, Elon. You could make something that's maybe better than a human or maybe simpler than a human to do specific tasks and maybe better than a human to do more things than a human can do. How do you decide to make it just like a human?

[Elon Musk]

Well, if you wanted to do all the things that a human can do, it turns out you need a human robot. So if you want to just do a subset, that's much easier. But it turns out humans evolved to the shape and capabilities that we have for good reasons. There is like this value to having four fingers and a thumb and even the pinky actually is quite useful. Toes are much more question mark, but the fingers.

[Audience Member]

Well, also humans have designed the world as well. So we designed it for us. If you can make a humanoid robot, it'll be immediately backwards compatible with what we've built the world for.

[Elon Musk]

Precisely, Elon.

[Technical Moderator]

There's another part of the robot, so there's the LLMs, there's the actuation, the hands, but also there's the silicon that runs it. And there was dojo. I think you posted on X, AI5 and AI6 and it just seemed like you were incredibly excited about the direction in which the silicon layer was also going. Can you tell us about that and what that is? And what, what, what, what are we, what are we building here? What is being built? Is it a complement to everything that exists in the world? Is it a potential long term competitor? What is it?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. So at Tesla, we basically had two different chip programs, one dojo and one dojo on the training side. And then what we call, you know, AI4, it's just our inference chip that the AI force was currently shipping in all vehicles. And we're finalizing, finalizing the design of AI5, which will be an immense jump from AI4. By some metrics, the improvement in AI5 will be 40 times better than AI4. Wow. So 40%, 40 times. And, and this is because we work so closely at a very fine grained level on the AI software and the AI hardware. So we know exactly where the limiting factors are. And, and so effectively the AI hardware and software teams are co Designing the chip.

[Technical Moderator]

So a 40x improvement in the silicon, I think then as it, as everybody here in the audience experiences it, is that just an almost like an order of magnitude increase in the quality of FSD and the safety that you experience as a Tesla driver and then the quality of the robot, like where does it all manifest when you, when you, you know, bring it up and actually get it into production?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, to be precise, the 40x is on. If you said like compared to the worst limitation on AI4, which is running the Softmax operation.

[Technical Moderator]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

We currently have to run Softmax in around 40 steps in emulation mode, whereas that'll be just be done in a few steps natively in AI5. AI5 trip will also be easily handle mixed precision models. So you don't have. It'll dynamically handle mixed precision. There's a bunch of sort of technical stuff that AI will do a lot better in terms of nominal sort of raw compute. It's 8 times more compute, about 9 times more memory, roughly 5 times more memory bandwidth. So but because we're addressing some core limitations in AI4, you multiply that by that 8x compute improvement by another 5x improvement because of optimization at a very fine grain silicon level of things that are currently suboptimal in AI4, that's where you get the 40x improvement you had.

[Interviewer]

Keep going, keep going.

[Elon Musk]

So now that said, I am confident that the current chips, AI, AI for chips that are in the cars will achieve self driving safety that is at least 2 to 3 times that of human and maybe even 10x. And the software that will be released for that is coming out over the next few months. So version 14 will be the biggest upgrade in Tesla software since version 12. We are increasing the parameter count by an order of magnitude. There's a lot of reinforcement learning that's been used. You can think of AI sort of as a way of compressing reality. And some of those compression steps we were too lossy and we addressed the lossiness in the compression steps. So these are all software updates that'll go out. So just over there are updates. Your car is going to feel like it is sentient by the end of the year.

[Interviewer]

It feels that way already, to be honest. I saw in the trades that you spent about $17 billion on some spectrum and that. Yeah. So some couch change to enable your satellites and the Starlink network to connect directly with phones. What will that look like in a year or two? Are we going to drop our Verizon account and just expand our Starlink account? We're kind of hoping because Verizon kind of sucks.

[Audience Member]

How many of you want a Starlink phone?

[Interviewer]

Who wants a Starlink phone? Is it technically possible?

[Conference Host]

I know you can't see it, but it's. Everyone?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

All right, cool. So this is kind of a long term thing. It will allow SpaceX to deliver high bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites to the phones. But there are hardware changes that need to happen in the phone. So the. Since these frequencies are not supported in current phones, the chipset has to be modified to add these frequencies and that probably is a two year time frame. So the phones that are able to use the spectrum that was acquired probably start shipping in around two years. And then we also need to pull the satellites that are going to communicate on those frequencies. So in parallel we're building the satellites and working with the handset makers to add these frequencies to the phones. And then the satellites and the phones will then handshake very well to achieve high bandwidth connectivity. But the net effect is that you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone.

[Interviewer]

Wow. And it's going to be crazy.

[Audience Member]

Do these frequencies, would they work indoors, inside buildings, you know, like the phone currently does?

[Elon Musk]

Okay.

[Technical Moderator]

And so will you be able to have.

[Elon Musk]

Basically like, if you're in a building with like a thick metal roof, then.

[Audience Member]

No, but no, the same types of.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, yeah, normal. Normal homes, yes. Yes.

[Technical Moderator]

Elon, is your vision for this, that instead of, you know, having an AT&T account or, and then roaming when you're in the UK or you're in India, it's just we could have one direct deal with Starlink. It works all over the world eventually, not today, but at some point. Is that the end goal? That basically we don't need a regional carrier, we have a global carrier and that would be you?

[Elon Musk]

That would be one of the options. To be clear, we're not going to put the other carriers out of business. They're still going to be around because they own a lot of spectrum. So there's. But yes, you should be able to have a Starlink like you have an AT&T or P mobile, Verizon or whatever. You could have an account with Starlink that works with your Starlink antenna at home for your WI fi as well as on your phone. And yeah, it would be a comprehensive solution for high bandwidth at home and for high bandwidth direct to sell.

[Conference Host]

Could you buy some carriers to have more spectrum? Maybe you could buy Verizon.

[Elon Musk]

Not out of the question. I suppose that may happen.

[Interviewer]

Let's talk about Starship, you just had a really, what appeared to be a phenomenal launch. How close is it to, you know, being predictable and ready to go in a commercial setting?

[Elon Musk]

I think we will recover the ship next year. We've got one more launch of the Starlink version 2 stack. There's only one booster and ship left. That's in the version two design. And then thereafter it's, it's version three, which is a gigantic upgrade because that's got Raptor 3. And pretty much everything changes on the rocket with version three. So version three, you know, might have some initial teething pains because it's such a radical redesign, but it's, it's capable of over 100 tons to orbit, fully reusable. And I think unless we have some very major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year, catching both the booster and the ship and being able to deliver over 100 tons to a useful orbit.

[Interviewer]

What does the best rocket in the world do now in terms of tonnage to space?

[Elon Musk]

Well, in terms of sort of commercial rockets, there's, there's Falcon Heavy.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

Which we'll do in with. With side booster reuse, we'll do about 40 tons.

[Interviewer]

So this is five times bigger. Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

Well, two and a half times bigger in. But, but Stasha would be full reuse, full reusability.

[Interviewer]

Got it. Okay.

[Elon Musk]

So everything comes back.

[Conference Host]

Elon, after the explosion that happened with the failed launch, there was a lot of.

[Elon Musk]

Which one?

[Conference Host]

Sorry?

[Elon Musk]

Which failed launch?

[Conference Host]

Oh, the more recent one. The more recent would. The starship.

[Interviewer]

The big boom.

[Conference Host]

Yeah, the big boom on the base. And there was a lot of proclamations that there's going to be environmental and FAA and all these other sorts of. The recovery back to the launchpad again was incredibly fast. How did you get back so fast? Not just technically and work wise, but just like regulatory clearance wise, because they said there were going to be all these questions and reviews and so on. How did you guys manage that?

[Elon Musk]

Well, there were a lot of questions and reviews. We got through them all. And credit to the SpaceX team. They worked incredibly hard and they got the next chip and booster tested and on the pad and flown. And huge credit to the SpaceX team. Very proud of them for doing such a job, a great job recovering. I mean, creating a fully reusable orbital rocket is one of the hottest engineering problems ever. Certainly a candidate for most difficult engineering project ever. You know, it's on the podium at least. So it's a. That. That's been the goal of SpaceX from the beginning from 2002 and here we are 23 years later. So it's, it's a long journey and with, with a super talent like by far the, I think the most talented group of rocket engineers that's ever been assembled. And we're finally, next year, I think we'll be able to achieve full reusability.

[Technical Moderator]

Elon, what are the big technical blockers that you're focused on there between now and that full reusability? Are there some showstoppers where you're just kind of literally just obsessing over trying to figure out still, or is it more about getting through site over a laundry list of your learnings and just integrating it into the next launch?

[Elon Musk]

Well, for full reusability of the ship, there's still a lot of work that remains on the heat shield. So no one's ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield like the shuttle heat shield had to go through nine months of repair after every flight. Right. So no one has ever made a fully reusable overall heat shield.

[Technical Moderator]

And is that a material science problem or is that an engineering problem or both?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I mean it's a material science engineering problem. So it's. But we really are looking at the fundamental physics here again, physics first principles and trying to figure out how do we make something that is, you know, it can withstand the heat, is very light, doesn't transmit the heat to the primary, primary structure and.

[Technical Moderator]

But then whose integrity is it?

[Elon Musk]

Tiles stay on and they don't crack.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

And then as you ascend, if you hit some rain, the tiles don't dissolve in rain. There's, there's a lot of different issues and, and then you really need to know that these tiles are working. You can't, you know, go through this laborious inspection. So it really needs to be where, you know, these, these tens of thousands of tiles all work and don't need to be repurbished or checked one by one. That was the case with the shuttle.

[Technical Moderator]

Can we maybe switch now? I mean, who, who else were you talked about? Tesla. Then you go to SpaceX.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Technical Moderator]

Now I'd like to ask you some questions about Grok and Xai. You want to just give us an update? I think you, you kind of talked about where the next gen model is and you said something incredible. I still don't think people really understand it, which is, you know, there's going to be a next training run where you expect not to start from the common web and common crawl where you expected an enormous amount of synthetic Data, just tell us about how the evolution of GROK is going and this innovation and why it's so important.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, so we're running a lot of, using a lot of inference compute and, and reasoning to look at all of the source data, which is really the corpus of human knowledge, and then thinking about each piece of information and then adding, adding what's missing and correcting mistakes and removing falsehoods from the, from that training data. So it's, it's like if you take the Wikipedia as an example, but this really applies to, to books, PDFs, the websites, every form of information. The GROQ is using heavy amounts of inference. Compute. Let's say to look at as an example a Wikipedia page and say what is true, partially true or false or missing in this page. Now rewrite the page to correct the, remove the falsehoods, correct the half truths and add the missing context.

[Audience Member]

Elon, by the way, could you just publish that? Could we create like a Grokipedia? I mean that would be.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, especially for our bio pages, which are a disaster.

[Audience Member]

Wikipedia is so biased and it's, it's a constant war. If something gets corrected five minutes later there'll be an army of people trying to, I mean it's become hyper partisan and there's activists all over it. So if you do fix, for example, Wikipedia as a source of truth, it'd be great to publish that just so the world has it.

[Elon Musk]

All right, I'll talk about that. So talk to the team about that, like Grokpedia or whatever. Here's the Grokpedia version.

[Interviewer]

Be interesting.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, and then just have it out there for.

[Audience Member]

In terms of people here like it in terms of training. Grok 5, you're scaling up your supercluster in Colossus in Memphis.

[Elon Musk]

Colossus 2 now. Yeah, but we have a second one.

[Audience Member]

Yeah, could you give us an update on that? And then also as part of that, where are we in the scaling laws? If you scale a bigger cluster, do you get a more powerful AI model? Is there a point of diminishing returns? Or like how much more compute? If you throw twice as much compute at it, do you get a 10% better model? Do you get 100% better model? Like is it log linear? I guess. How much more juice is there left in scaling hardware, do you think?

[Elon Musk]

I think there's a natural logarithmic function associated with the amount of compute. So then like, say for argument's sake, like 10x more compute will double the intelligence. Maybe that's. That Might be a rough rule of thumb, but, you know, that still means that, you know, you go from 100 IQ to 200 IQ, still pretty. Pretty big deal. So. And I think. I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where, you know, most of the power of the sun is honest for compute. And then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy, you know, sort of Kardashev to Kardashev 3, scale, compute. So I guess once you think about artificial intelligence, not as sort of this, you know, a destination that you reach, but really as part of the overall escalation of intelligence that we are aware of, you know, human intelligence has also scaled as you have. As the population has increased and we've been able to store more and more information, human intelligence has scaled. Now human. Because of population declines and low growth rate, human intelligence is somewhat plateauing and will actually decline. And my guess is that I think that we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year. Wow. And then probably within five, like, say 20, 30, probably AI is smarter than the sum of all humans.

[Conference Host]

Do you think humans are on the decline because the AI is evolving? Do you think there's this evolution of the ecosystem on Earth that's underway, that we don't really understand the structure of what's going on?

[Elon Musk]

But yeah, maybe we implicitly know that it's coming.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, I hope the birth rates turn around. I'm a big proponent of increased birth rate, obviously.

[Interviewer]

Well, you're doing anything about it or no?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I'm trying to set a good example.

[Interviewer]

You know, we had a big conversation at this conference we didn't expect, which is suicidal empathy. The west, this declining birth rate. I notice you've been pretty active about it.

[Conference Host]

And open borders.

[Interviewer]

And open borders.

[Conference Host]

It's like let the invaders in.

[Audience Member]

Tucker talked about.

[Conference Host]

Could all three of those be the same thing?

[Audience Member]

It seems like there's a number of symptoms of the west being suicidal. The most obvious one being the birth rate is not a replacement level. So obviously, if that continues indefinitely, then the west will literally not reproduce enough to replace itself. But there's other things, too. There's the fact that the borders were totally opened to the point where Western culture, the social fabric started to come apart. And you see this especially in Europe, where the indigenous cultures of the UK or France or Germany are starting to potentially be taken over by cultures of people who are brought in and aren't assimilating. You have crime, where we have this case on social media. Right. Now this young woman, Irina, who's just killed in a senseless way on a subway, which is horrific enough in and of itself, but then in addition to that, the elite media just, for whatever reason, just refused to cover it, like it didn't exist. So you have this issue of crime that's not being addressed or even acknowledged.

[Interviewer]

And no acknowledgement of this. It's almost like we're trying to deny the reality of the spiral and this. Yeah.

[Audience Member]

So you have all these data points that seem to suggest that the west is suicidal or doesn't seem to want to defend itself or propagate itself. Look, I think everyone in this room thinks that life is awesome, Right?

[Interviewer]

It's pretty great.

[Elon Musk]

It's worth living.

[Audience Member]

Yeah. And when Alex Karp was here earlier today, the first defending the west, that got some of the loudest applause at the conference. So I guess we probably don't really understand what's going on. We don't really.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. What's your take, Elon?

[Conference Host]

Because, you know, what's your take on the suicide of the West?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I'm very worried about it.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I'm very worried about it. You know, I think there's. Let's just say that the actions of the west are indistinguishable from suicide. So. But it's. And look, at least in America, there's generally a sense of optimism. But when's the last time you talked to someone from Europe who lives in Europe who's optimistic?

[Interviewer]

Not for a while. Decades.

[Elon Musk]

Like even one. It's rare. So I think unless people have a sense of optimism and purpose about the future, suicide might be just what happens. Like having a child is an act of optimism about the future. So if you're not optimistic. So I think we need to maybe give people a sense of optimism and excitement about the future and a belief that the future will be better than the past and they'll be more interested in having kids.

[Conference Host]

Did religion play a role in the past, Elon, to kind of placate and make folks feel that way when they want?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I think so. The nature abhors vacuum. And if you take away religion, then I think you actually, you get something in its place which is actually worse than what was there before. I mean, it's like destructive, basically. You get, you get like the white work, mind virus filling, filling the hole that religion used to have, taking the place of religion. You get these dystopian de facto religions that are very self destructive. So I think perhaps some sort of revival of religion or at least what we need is some coherent philosophy that people can get excited about. I mean, for me it's a philosophy of curiosity. I'm curious about the nature of the universe and I want to go out there and I want humanity to be out there exploring the stars, maybe meeting alien civilizations, maybe in some cases we see the ruins of a long dead alien civilization. But they were, they were very strong for 10 million years. You know, the kind of stuff that you see in Star Trek in a non dystopian sci fi book or movie or show. And so I'm just, I have a philosophy of curiosity of like I just want to know what's going on. And in order to know what's going on, we must have and increase in this, in the scope and scale of consciousness. We must expand as a consciousness. We must grow humanity and we must extend humanity in order to comprehend, to understand the universe or even what questions we should ask about the answer that is the universe. Douglas Adams book the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is actually a deep book on philosophy disguised as humor. And what the point he was trying to make in that book was that the questions are the really the hard part. The answer is the universe. Like the answer is everything you see around you. But what are the questions that we don't know to ask? Now some of the questions I guess I do know, I'd like to know is the standard model of physics correct about the origins of the universe. Are we actually 13.8 billion years old? How does the universe end? Does it end in a heat death or in some other way? You know, we're in a black hole. We might be.

[Technical Moderator]

Elon, can you talk about the whole.

[Elon Musk]

Sort of simulation question? Are we a simulation? Maybe.

[Interviewer]

Where do you think we find the answer first? In AI or in the stars? Because you're pursuing both, obviously.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. I don't know if I hope more people can get behind a philosophy of curiosity because I think it's very exciting and inherently optimistic because there's this amazing sense of wonder about the nature of the universe. And when you uncover some secrets of the universe, that's amazing. And you're like a whole world of understanding has opened up. I mean we used to not even know where all the continents were. It used to be like just the map would be there be dragons. And like what we know is that when they sailed in that direction, they didn't come back.

[Interviewer]

I mean the moon base, that's all.

[Elon Musk]

That'S all they knew.

[Interviewer]

I kind of feel like the moon base or just going to the moon for real this time would be a big step in the right direction. You still have the moon planned? What's the status of that? Is that still on the agenda?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I think, I think having, I think we want to try to reach new heights as a civilization. Yeah. So I think it's fine to go to the moon, but we should go to the moon in order to establish a lunar base. Like a lunar research base. Yeah, I mean there are parts of the moon that are perhaps older than parts of Earth and we might understand more about the nature of the universe. If we had a science base on the moon that would be very cool. And then we obviously want to go beyond the moon to Mars. And will they self sustaining city on Mars? I do think that there is a fork in the road of human destiny where if we can establish a self sustaining city on Mars, with the key test being if the resupply shifts from Earth stop coming for any reason, does Mars continue to prosper or does it die out? At the point at which Mars is able to prosper and grow on its own, the probable lifespan of consciousness is dramatically greater because we are no longer dependent on everything going right on Earth. You know, there's, there's always some possibility of self annihilation on Earth with the World War three or, or super virus or, or, or a meteor like extinct, you know, that destroyed the dinosaurs. We know from the fossil record that there have been many mass extinction events. So the question that I sort of, I'm always wondering about is will civilization, will the civilizational arc continue to ascend such that we can make Mars self sustaining before the civilizational arc descends? Because the window of opportunity to make life multi planetary exists now for the first time in the four and a half billion year history of Earth.

[Technical Moderator]

Yeah, Elon, let's assume that we get there and you're there. You know, you'd be the elder statesman, you'd have the moral authority of Mars. How do you run Mars?

[Elon Musk]

But this point that I think I want to just emphasize again that it's more important than the form of governance on Mars or who's there. In the early days, what really matters is that Mars is self sustaining, that we are truly a multi planet species and such, that we've achieved planetary redundancy so that if something, and obviously we should do everything possible to make sure life on Earth is great. But there's always some risk of an annihilation event on Earth. Yeah, like I said, self annihilation or some natural disaster. And so the probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as soon as we are multi planet species. With the key test being can Mars survive if the resupply ships stop coming? So getting like the first missions to Mars are not that important. What matters is can you get sufficient tonnage to Mars such that Mars can prosper on its own. And that means it has to have all of the ingredients of civilization. It's not just that you need to build for example a chip factory on Mars or ship FAB on Mars, but you, you need the ability.

[Technical Moderator]

Do you, do you have a sense of the timescale? Like let's assume starship is at a state starting in, you know, 2026, then there's going to be a bunch of testing. Obviously there's going to be a bunch of early testing. We only have certain launch windows, so there's a bunch of time constraints. Is this a 50 year thing in your mind? Is it 150 year thing? Is it something that is for our generation or is it our children's generation? Where do you see that point? If it's optimally possible, if things go and break our way.

[Elon Musk]

I think it can be done in 30 years, provided there's an exponential increase in the tonnage to Mars with each successive Mars transfer windows, which is every two years. So every two years the planets align and you can transfer to Mars. So I think in roughly 15, but maybe as few as 10, but 10 to 15 ish Mars transfer windows. If you're seeing exponential increases in the tonnage to Mars with each Mars transfer window, then it should be possible to make moss self sustaining in about call it roughly 25 years.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Technical Moderator]

That's incredible.

[Interviewer]

All right, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk. We'll see you when we're back in town. We miss you. See you in person next time. Thank you, brother.