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Elon Musk Thinking
BREAKING: Elon Musk's First Interview Since Jury Rejected Claim Against Altman's OpenAI!!!
00:26:06
BREAKING: Elon Musk's First Interview Since Jury Rejected Claim Against Altman's OpenAI!!! #ElonMusk Source: Forbes Elon Musk is the CEO of the company X, Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX and the Boring Company. Follow me on X...
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Want to keep up with everything trendy? From breaking news to shareable jokes, pop culture bites to viral food spots, it's all on TikTok. Download TikTok now to explore latest interview of Elon Musk.
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Forbes Interviewer
All right, everybody, we have a very special guest. Listen, we love all of you. This is a. This is the most amazing room of innovators in America. We love you all. It's a dinner of equals. But there can only be one number one. We do. We're Forbes. We do rank things. And the Forbes 250 Innovators. The number one innovator, and it wasn't that close, to be honest, was Elon Musk. So. And we are very honored to have him join us. Elon, are you here? Oh, we're glad that you're glad that you're here. Thank you. There he is.
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Elon Musk
You do like ranking things.
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Forbes Interviewer
It's true, we do. We're good at it. And again, first, congratulations. It was not that close. There were a lot of battles in a lot of places, but number one was not in doubt. But anyway, this is a room of your people. Well deserved. There's a room of your people. I will say they were asking the first question, and we want to get really nerdy about innovation. The first question, though, that everybody was asking is. All right, ask Elon. We had one of the great cases in the world of innovation over the last few weeks. What's Elon's verdict on the verdict today? The case in Oakland? Yes.
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Elon Musk
Oh, that good. I was like, what are you talking. Yeah, yeah, there's. Well, they basically just decided that the statute wouldn't. Pacing steadfast. They did not actually render an opinion the way that there have been unjust enrichment or the shaft stolen, which I think is obviously the case. But I do think it's somewhat ambiguous situation that goes, you know, what happened was by degrees, meaning it wasn't stolen all at once. It was stolen one of these at a time. And so you have to say, like, well, was there really even a basis for illegal action before, you know, pop culture stolen? I don't think there is, actually. So, you know, like, the first step, I don't belabor this point. The first step into adding a for profit thing had a cap for profit and was at a small scale. And also that all stock would revert to the charity upon the adventure of general intelligence. That clause has now been removed. So it will Continue to be a for profit after developing artificial general intelligence. That removal was quite recent, just in the last few weeks. So this point is, it is whatever, an $800 billion for profit company somehow from a nonprofit. And I think this is a dangerous precedent to set because if it means that someone can start, take money as a nonprofit, convert that to a for profit when it's successful, it undermines all charitable giving in America
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Forbes Interviewer
and certainly would see a lot of people starting to start nonprofits with the path towards for profit.
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Elon Musk
Exactly. What do you got to lose?
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Forbes Interviewer
Right? Exactly what you said on X. You're appealing, optimistic about the appeal.
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Elon Musk
Yeah, I think we necessarily have to appeal because this will become precedent which people can actually then essentially loot charities and use this case as a, a basis for doing so, which I think would be really.
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Forbes Interviewer
Let's talk innovation. Your, your title we have up here. I mean again, you're the CEO of four major companies. Even those companies have major companies within those companies. Was this, was this part of the plan or did it just happen?
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Elon Musk
More or less just happened. I mean. Well, let's just say that when I was in college, I wanted to be part of things that would change the world in a significant way. I didn't originally think I wanted to be doing things in AI because AI was somewhat of a double edged sword, but I did want to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy economy, which is the sort of electric cars, solar and batteries and you know, I think some, some kind of brain machine interface that can give you cybernetic superpowers I think is probably good. It could, you know, help people that have brain or spine injuries. You know, we're still enable people who've never spoken for years to speak again. Which is, which we've done give people eyesight who have lost both eyes or the optic nerve or maybe have never even seen at all. Blind from birth. By direct interface to the optical centers in the brain, you can actually restore eyesight or give people eyesight that they've never had before and you can enable people to walk again, which I think is profound. I mean these are kind of Jesus level things like say like when technologies are hitting like Jesus level miracles, you know, like that's pretty good.
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Forbes Interviewer
Yeah. How do you, how do you. Again, it's asked a lot, but it's fun to ask it to you. How do you prioritize? I mean, because you're right, you've got multiple deities here. If it's, if these are Jesus level solutions, which one do you serve?
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Elon Musk
Jesus level, you're like okay, that's pretty good. So and the SpaceX is about making life multi planetary, expanding consciousness to the stars and hope we will make a fundamental breakthrough later this year which is to have the first fully reusable orbital rocket which is necessary in order to transport enough tonnage to the moon or Mars to create a self, a self growing city basically to extend civilization to other planets. I mean I think probably you need to move a rough order of magnitude about a million tons to the moon or to Mars to create enough of an industrial base to have how did the civilization there be self growing? Meaning like the acid test being if the resupply shifts from Earth stop coming for any reason does it, does the civilization on the moon or Mars continue to grow or does it die out? And I think that's a fundamental branching point in, in the future of civilization. Are, are we a multi planet space faring civilization or are we stuck on one planet forever? And I do want to emphasize like being a multi planet civilization is, doesn't mean like we leave Earth and go somewhere else because that would just be a single planet civilization somewhere else.
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Forbes Interviewer
Right. And a lesser place probably.
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Elon Musk
Yeah. In a tougher place to live than, than here. By far Earth is extremely easy and comfortable compared to the moon, Mars or pretty much anywhere else. But you know, I think, I think at some point we want to be a space bearing civilization. We want to be out there among the stars and be. Yeah,
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Forbes Interviewer
so these are again, these are huge, huge things that you're dealing with. So when you try to figure out when you get up every morning is it just kind of like a buffet or do you have kind of a plan on what you're going to focus on? Because that's something a lot of innovators here have to deal with on a much smaller scale.
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Elon Musk
Well, I guess I don't really, I don't really get up and say hey, what shall I innovate today? You know, type of thing. It's really just both building the technologies necessary to extend life beyond Earth. There's you know, there's this, there's the Starlink Internet which is rebuilding the entire Internet and space but better, you know, I guess that's kind of pretty cool. There's yeah, the Optimus robot that we're developing at Tesla, the self driving cars, solar power at scale, you know,
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Forbes Interviewer
big stuff. A lot of again they're all pointing, a lot of them are pointing to becoming interplanetary. Is there a time when you could see again putting these companies together and just running one Big company. I mean some. Would you have a portfolio, but do you envision that and would that help you in terms of making these things mesh?
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Elon Musk
Well, it's difficult for me to sort of comment on that, you know, because, you know there's publicly traded companies and yeah, one publicly traded and one's, you know, about to be. So it would be like difficult to,
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Forbes Interviewer
you know, no problem, we'll move on. Although we did the, you know, the reports today that said you might follow your SpaceX S1 this week. Is that, that a go?
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Elon Musk
I'm not, I think I'm not allowed to comment on, on these things. It's like a quiet period or something to that effect.
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Forbes Interviewer
That, that is the beauty, that is the beauty of going public or being in that quiet period. Do you have a favorite of all your, we know you love all, you love all your, your children, all your companies. Is there a favorite among your companies?
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Elon Musk
Well, no, I mean I'm not really going to say. That's like what's your favorite kid type of thing, you know, I think you can't really say that. You know,
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Forbes Interviewer
what if it's not your favorite company? Who's your favorite role model as an innovator historically?
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Elon Musk
Well, I guess, you know, I'm obviously a big fan of Nikola Tesla, since named the company after him. But I also, I also like, you know, I don't know, Edison is great too. Like some people like don't like, don't like Edison, but I think some pretty impressive stuff and like General Electric is like Edison's company. That's, I mean I certainly admire like great scientists, engineers, but like anyone, I mean, you know, Ben Franklin, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, you know, we, we did, we
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Forbes Interviewer
did, we surveyed historians and so you were number one on the 250 living list. We did a 250 historical and the top three were Edison, you said Franklin and Henry Ford. So you, you've, you know, you, you're, we should have had you as a judge.
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Elon Musk
What's like actually more awesome than people realize because I mean he basically invented mass manufacturing of, of complex objects. Like people didn't really know how to do that before. Before Ford.
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Forbes Interviewer
Yes.
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Elon Musk
And like Ford actually created the automotive industry of, of Earth. Really. And because, because he, he pretty much started what became General Motors and then he kind of got, I don't know, kicked out of that or something and then started Ford Motor Company and really develop mass manufacturing complex objects. It's quite a tricky thing. And then everyone just pretty much copied them.
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Forbes Interviewer
What's amazing if you look at the historical list and even the current list is just how much innovation comes out of America and how much of the things that everyone takes for granted came out of America. Do you have a favorite innovator who's living today besides anybody in this room or anybody? Who are some of your favorite entrepreneurs, innovators you admire? Who are your contemporaries now?
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Elon Musk
Well, I mean, I guess, I mean, I don't really think about these things that much, but. Well, I mean, I guess, you know, Jensen Huang at Nvidia is like doing pretty great in terms of inventing, you know, developing AI computers. And,
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Forbes Interviewer
well, you met, you must say, you mentioned Jensen. And listen, you were early warning about the dangers of AI, but also you've been, you know, a somebody who's helping pioneer a lot of great things that come out of AI right now. Where are you on the scale about being petrified or excited?
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Elon Musk
Well, I think I'm like simultaneously both, honestly. It's like, I mean, at this point, like, like when I go to sleep, there's like some AI breakthrough. When I wake up, there's some AI breakthrough, and by lunchtime there's another AI breakthrough. So it's like a head spinner at this point. It, you know, it's pretty obvious that we're going to have AI that is vastly smarter than humans. And already, in some ways, it already is. I mean, it seems like AI unequivocally smarter than humans in every way, including in innovation, is probably not more than a year or two away would seem.
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Forbes Interviewer
That's, it's heavy to think about.
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Elon Musk
Jesus, this is kind of worrying. I hope it's nice to us. You know
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Forbes Interviewer
what? Right. You know, when you look about all
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Elon Musk
the things we've asked it to do.
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Forbes Interviewer
What, what's something, Listen, you have a better position to see this in anybody. Pretty much what's going to happen in five years that you're seeing that maybe a lot of people aren't seeing that's going to blow people's minds. That will be doable in five years.
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Elon Musk
In five years will have probably. So five years being, say, 20, 31, I think digital intelligence will exceed the sum of all human intelligence that there will be in five years. Probably there might be a, let's say at least 100 million humanoid robots, but maybe a billion. Yeah. All right.
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Forbes Interviewer
The.
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Elon Musk
Let me, and, and, and I, I, I predict that the economy is probably twice its current size in five, maybe six years, five to seven years, because you're going to hit a doubling period, you know, where the economic output is increasing so, so fast that, you know, plus, minus a few years, you're, you will see giant changes.
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Forbes Interviewer
What, what you know, a couple follow up questions on that. When do you see the first data center in space again? You have a better vision on that than pretty much anybody. You know, you're, again, if, when we're going to Mars, it's, you're clearly going to be leading the way. When, when do we get a colony in the moon? When do we get a colony on Mars? So, three pronged question. Data center in space, humans on the moon, humans on Mars Timeline.
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Elon Musk
Data center in space is much easier than people may think. I mean SpaceX at this point has 10,000 satellites in orbit right now. And, and in the future with Starship, we'll be launching over 10,000 communication satellites per year, each one of which is much more capable than our current satellites. So you can expect, you know, probably 10 to 100 times more communications capability than currently exists from space. But, but that, that will pale in comparison to the tonnage of AI satellites. So I mean, it's always helpful to use the physics tools of thinking in the limit. If, say, if you think in the limit, what is the most amount of AI compute you could possibly bring bring to bear? And the, the way to access power that's far beyond anything on Earth is in space. So these are sort of humbling ways to maybe frame the problem and see how tiny we are here on Earth. We are like microbes on a dust mote compared to the sun. So we all of human civilization currently uses less than a trillionth of the energy of say, the power emitted by the sun, much less than a trillionth. All human energy, counted as generously as you could possibly imagine, is much less than a trillionth of the sun's energy. So that means if you were to increase civilizational energy harnessed by a million, you would still be much less than a millionth of the Sun's energy. Um, so, and another way to think about it is because people sometimes say, what about this, this form of, of power generation or that form of power generation? I'm like, everything is irrelevant compared to the Sun. The sun is 99.8% of mass in the solar system. If, if all mass that was not the sun was, was burnt, and you've extracted the absolute maximum amount of energy from all mass that is not the sun, the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100% of, of the amount energy produced in the solar system. And then if you teleported two more jupiters from other somehow teleported two more jupitters into our solar system and burnt them too. The sun would still be 100% of power rounding up. So really everything is just extremely tiny compared to the sun. So that therefore when you go to space, if you, if you want to, to climb a C, K F scale in any meaningful way whatsoever, you have to go to space. And, and, and you know, our rough estimate is that you could probably do a terawatt a year of AI powered, you know, solar powered AI satellites from, launched from Earth. That would require, let's say something like 10 million tons a year of payload to orbit at 100 kilowatts per ton and that'd be a terawatt per year. The average power usage in the United States is half a terawatt. That would mean you'd be launching twice the, twice the amount of AI power than, than the entire electricity consumption in the United States per year.
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Forbes Interviewer
Yeah, yeah.
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Elon Musk
So this is, this is, this is, we're not breaking any physics here. This is, this is all achievable. Now if you want to take that up several more orders of magnitude, then the thing to do is to build a base on the moon and construct a mass driver and build the solar panels and radiators on the moon. Chips you could probably bring from Earth, but build those on the moon too. And that would enable you to do about a petawatt per year into of solar powered AI. And I'm not sure how much AI we need at the end of the day, but that's a lot.
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Forbes Interviewer
That is a lot.
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Elon Musk
What it would be vastly greater than the, than the Earth's economy. This economy would be really inconsequential by comparison with that.
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Forbes Interviewer
No, that's a, that's a vision of abundance for sure. I know you've had a quite a busy day and you, you always have a busy day. So we don't, we want to be mindful of your time. So I just have two last questions. One, there must be, I mean again, you keep on coming up with these big ideas and you keep executing them. What's a, what's a big idea in your head that you haven't deployed yet that you'd like to.
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Elon Musk
Well, you know, I did, I did say for the longest time that people want to build tunnels. And then everyone thought I was joking. And then I was like, fine, well let's just create a company, boring company to build tunnels. Because this is an obvious way to reduce traffic to zero by going 3D with your transport system. Just as we go 3D with the buildings, it's obviously logical to illogical to expect that you, you won't have traffic if you have buildings that are 3D and a transport system that is 2D and everyone tries to go in and out of the 3D building at the same time. But if you have a transport network that is three dimensional with tunnels going all over the place, then you can address any arbitrary level of traffic. Now, I encourage other people to start tunneling companies because the boring company is the only one, as far as I can tell, that's taking this seriously.
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Forbes Interviewer
It's boring to be the only boring company, right?
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Elon Musk
Yeah. Honestly, there's like a lot of opportunity, you know, in tunnels. There really is. And it's quite hard work building these things. So I hope other people do it too.
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Forbes Interviewer
Okay.
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Elon Musk
And I guess there's, there's probably a lot of opportunity in synthetic medicine. So with like these days, you can basically create custom, you know, rna. And I think, I think like the sort of. We're going from a situation where medicine has been analog, where we kind of like just find drugs kind of by accident most of the time, like finding sticks in the forest that, you know, seem like this stick seems like a useful club type of thing. It's quite primitive how we found medication in the past now, but once you can. And since we can now construct synthetic rna, you can effectively think of medicine, the future of medicine as being digital. Like, so if you just know what to program into that synthetic RNA strand, you can basically, I think, cure almost anything.
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Forbes Interviewer
All right, challenge to the room. Digital medicine and 3D transportation. Let's go. Let's give Elon some competition. All right, last question.
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Elon Musk
Electric aircraft are probably an opportunity there. I think there's some startups in that field.
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Forbes Interviewer
What kind of aircraft?
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Elon Musk
Electric aircraft.
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Forbes Interviewer
Electric aircraft. I'm sure that's coming when we get together and hopefully, who knows what the way technology is going, some of us will be here in another 250 years for the Forbes, you know, 500 celebration. Innovation. What would you want your. Again, you're still building it, but when you think about your legacy, and I know it's early, but what would you. What would be make you feel good? When people look back the way you talked about Edison and Franklin, what would. What would you like people to say about you?
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Elon Musk
You played a useful role in the advancement of civilization.
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Forbes Interviewer
Great way to end. And I think, by the way, again, this is the most incredible room in America today. I think that's true for all of us. So let's take inspiration. You all are great, but he's number one. Elon Musk, thank you for joining us here at this.
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Elon Musk
I think we're human. That's what the AI Will say there.
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Forbes Interviewer
Thank you again. Thank you for your time and all that. And thank you. Now we're going to have them. We're going to let you go and we're going to bring the other award winners up. But Elon Musk, again, thank you for your time and all, all your good thoughts.
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Podcast Host
Thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.