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Elon Musk Thinking
Elon Musk Interviewed by JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon!!!
00:21:08
Elon Musk Interviewed by JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon!!! #ElonMusk Source: https://youtu.be/2aTfE_UM7sU?si=Dyed7SXmKipvJGfN Elon Musk is the CEO of the company X, Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX and the Boring Company. Follow me on X...
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Interviewer
Latest interview of Elon Musk.
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Host
Elon, welcome to J.P. morgan's headquarters. You're on the 51st floor, which is about the equivalent of the. Nowhere near where you go generally in space, but as high as we can get in New York City. But before we get started with you and Jamie, we had a very special guest that wanted to welcome you here this afternoon. And. And so your mother, May Musk, is here to welcome you. May, please stand up.
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Maye Musk
I don't think you can see me or everybody here.
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Host
They can see you. Yes, he can.
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Maye Musk
This is your part.
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Elon Musk
I actually can't see my mom, but I can hear her, certainly.
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Maye Musk
Okay.
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Elon Musk
There you are. Okay.
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Maye Musk
What I'd like to say is when you were three years old and I told people I have a genius son, they would roll their eyes.
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Elon Musk
Sure. Understandable, frankly.
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Interviewer
I knew. I knew.
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Maye Musk
And then when you said you wanted to start with rockets, then I rolled my eyes. And then you did it. And so this is just a great party here and we celebrating. Love you so much.
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Elon Musk
Love you, too.
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Host
One proud moment, please.
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Interviewer
So let me, Elon, welcome you. It's a really privileged to have you here on this momentous occasion. It's new for us, but it's an important thing. The trajectory of American innovation. We're here live, 3500 people of our top individual investors around the world in 100 branches. There are 350 people here, 3500 around the country. This is a very unique thing, by the way, because Elon has spoken to me of democratizing finance. This is part of it, treating individual investors the same way institutions are treated and hedge funds and all those things. My view is. It's a wonderful thing to do, Elon. Very brave, by the way, because I Would never let my mother speak publicly when I was in the room. God knows what she would have said.
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Elon Musk
No idea she was there. Actually,
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Interviewer
Elon is the Edison of our time. I remember visiting Elon in Tesla like 15 years ago. A whole new way of building cars, vertical integration, which had not been anything remote. What our car companies are doing now, you have SpaceX. I visited the SpaceX factory in California and it's exceptional to have more than 650 rockets. And you told me one today, putting satellites in space. You have 9,000, almost 10,000 Starlight Starlink satellites up there. Starlink 3 is coming, which is a whole new generation which hopefully will replace some of these undersea cables. It's been an extraordinary 24 years with watching Elon grow over time and now making a massive leap into, into the future. So welcome and coming here, Elon, I have 10 questions for you, so I want to make sure I get to each one. Some of them came from folks here, they're all important. But one just to start is why SpaceX public now? Because you had choices you didn't have to. Why now?
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Elon Musk
Yeah, I've been asked for many years about taking SpaceX public. So it's probably been, I know, almost 10 years that people have been suggesting to me that I should take SpaceX public. We've been positive cash flow for quite a long time, I think since around 2014, 2015. And we've been self funding, in fact, in our private equity rounds. They actually have not been fundraising rounds, they've been liquidity rounds for investors and employees because we give everyone at the company stock and SpaceX has actually bought back stock in most of our sort of funding events. So what's different about now is that it's a number of things, but we are walking on a significant growth phase, like capital growth phase, where we're, we're are going to put in orbit probably 100,000 satellites, probably over 100,000 satellites just for communications. And these will be the version three and beyond versus version two and version one that are currently in orbit. Version three is, depending on how you count it, 10 to 20 times more capable than the version two satellite. And there were three chips that the SpaceX chip design team taped out that are specific to this, that are far beyond state of the art, which means it's 100 times more bandwidth than the SpaceX Starlink system currently offers. And also half the latency because the altitude will be about half altitude. I think it will actually be the highest bandwidth, lowest latency means of communicating and the Future with AI and robots is actually going to require a lot more bandwidth than we currently use because you can imagine what's the bandwidth of a human. It's peak bandwidth of a human is a few hundred bits per second. But, but bandwidth of a computer can be a trillion bits a second. So the appetite for bandwidth of AI and compute, AI and robots is going to be enormous. And then we're also doing the AI data centers in space, which is another massive capital endeavor. But I think it'll be the primary means by which AI can be expanded. It's increasingly difficult to build power plants on the ground. There are very few people who want a power plant in their backyard. So if we wanted to say double the electricity usage of the United States, which is on average about 500 gigawatts, we would have to build about twice as many power plants, which I don't think people are, most communities are not super excited about that. But actually if we go to space, we can go far beyond the electricity generation of Earth. In fact, this is going to sound crazy, but you could actually increase harnessed energy by a factor of a million and still be using much less than a millionth of the sun's energy. So current human civilization uses much less than a trillionth of the sun's energy output, which is humbling to think about. We're really a tiny. When you see the true size of Earth relative to the sun, we're a tiny dust mote in a vast darkness. And the sun is enormous. The sun is 99.8% of all mass in the solar system. And most of the remaining 0.2% is Jupiter. Sometimes people ask me, I'm maybe going a little wide ranging in this answer, but because they just asked me, why are you going public now? I'm like, I'm like talking about the sun's power output. Bit of a long winded answer. If I was an AI, you might tell me to, you know, okay, but also, but it is important. Some of these things are important because people start to wonder what's the future of energy generation. And I can say that it is absolutely solar power, or maybe a better word for solar power is star power. It's the power of a star. And the crazy thing is that burnt all mass in the solar system that was not the sun. The amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100% because the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Even if you teleported two more Jupiters from another somehow teleported two more Jupitters from another solar system and burnt them too. The Sun. The sun would round up to 100%. So it's very much the sun. And you can scale to a million times Earth's economy in space in terms of harness power, which is a good proxy for economic output and still be much less than the length of the Sun's energy. Which is humbling really to think about how tiny we are and this is just one star among many. So I guess the teal it would be. We're embarking on a massive new growth phase and we need capital for that.
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Interviewer
Okay, okay.
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Elon Musk
Number two, another thing is the revenue. I also feel pretty good about like the revenue projections. Like before, like revenue was a little unstable, but now I feel like the revenue's like much more predictable.
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Interviewer
Yeah, I always learn listening to you. I guarantee you when you're a maintenance
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Interviewer
When you people hear about multi planetary species travel to space, one of the most exciting ideas in human history. Can you explain the bridge that you were you speak about? I heard you talk about from the Earth to the moon to Mars.
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Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah. So you don't necessarily have to go through the moon to get to Mars. I just think that we can build a self growing city on the moon faster than we could do so on Mars. And, and there's also the potential if you say you want to scale far beyond what you can do from Earth is that because the moon has no atmosphere and about one sixth Earth's gravity, you can use an electromagnetic accelerator, a rail gun or mass driver. Basically you don't need to use rockets to do AI data centers into deep space from the moon. You can literally just shoot them like a railgun type of thing. And you can manufacture the solar, the solar and the radiators, solar powered radiators on the moon from moon materials that would allow scaling potentially to beyond 1,000 terawatts a year, which is a truly staggering number. Like I think we can do a thousand. I think we can do probably somewhere around 1 terawatt per year of AI space compute from Earth. But we can do A thousand terawatts or more from the moon. And like I said, we can also make a moon base. And I think it would be pretty, pretty cool if you could vacation on the moon. That would be the most epic vacation. Not everybody wants to go to the moon, but I think a lot of people do. I think it would be pretty, pretty amazing, obviously, provided you could do so safely and come back safely and everything. But I think that will be possible in the future. And then Mars is another step beyond that. Mars is a whole planet and with gravity much closer to that of Earth's and it has a atmosphere, albeit with an atmosphere. And if you warm up Mars, you could one day make Mars like Earth, meaning with liquid oceans and life and where you could walk outside without a spacesuit type of thing. So Mars is, I call Mars a fixer upper of a planet, but it's got a lot of potential.
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Interviewer
Let me go to number three. But I never ever thought you'd be in the hospitality business.
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Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely. We should have moon hotels, don't you think?
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Interviewer
Yeah, musk hotels.
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Elon Musk
Like it could be other. Actually you think of us more like we're kind of like the Union Pacific. When they built Union Pacific back in the day, people thought they were crazy because, like, why are you trying to carry all this, all this cargo and people to California? No one's there, but now California is the biggest state in the country.
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Interviewer
Yeah, not for long, but yeah, yeah.
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Elon Musk
No, admittedly it's self defeating.
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Interviewer
Yes. So Starship, you built it. Unbelievable ship. I think it's already had 12 flights, I read, but obviously technically it's just hard to do. What are some of the breakthroughs you had that people should know about, they don't know about?
- [11:51]
Elon Musk
Our webcasts are very good. So I recommend anyone, if they want to learn about Starship, the SpaceX website or any of the Starship live casts are a great way to learn about it. But really the fundamental breakthrough of Starship is that it will be the first orbital rocket that is fully reusable. So this might sound like an obvious thing, but because in every other mode of transport, whether that's aircraft, cars, bicycles, horses, you name it, ships, these are all. We take it for granted that they are reusable. An aircraft journey would be very expensive if you had to throw the plane away every time. And that's how rockets have been in the past. But it's very difficult from a technology standpoint to achieve full reusability for a rocket. We've got part of the way there with Falcon 9. But we'll get all the way there with Starship. And once you achieve full reusability, then it's simply a cost. It's simply the cost of access to orbit is just the cost of propellant because now you can reuse all aspects of the vehicle. And the propellant we used for Starship is liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which is the cheapest propellant you could possibly get. We can possibly just literally get oxygen from the air and methane from natural gas. So the cost of propellant for Starship will be less than the cost of jet aviation fuel, which means that you should be able to actually send cargo to space for less than the cost of cargo on an airplane going on a transoceanic trip.
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Interviewer
Starlink, another thing that has been amazing, global communications. We already mentioned Ukraine. You had mentioned to me that V3 would maybe be able to replace some of these cyber cables, which by the way is a huge security risk for all of us because several have already been cut in the Baltic Sea. So what's the next view for Starlink, both V3 and maybe V4?
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Elon Musk
Yeah, so the V3 satellite is a gig and you can look it up on the Internet. As I said, It's 10 to 20 times more capable than V2. It's a very big satellite. In fact, it can only be launched on Starship. It's too big to be launched on any other rocket on Earth. So starship has a 30 foot diameter cargo bay and the B3 satellites are, let's see, they're about 7 meters, so about 22, 23ft wide. So very big, like the size of a small bus essentially. And there's a bunch of technical details about. We have much bigger phased array antennas, we've got more ground links, we've got more of our laser. Our satellites communicate with each other with lasers that we developed and manufacture. So it's got a lot more lasers and more advanced lasers. It's also got W band and E band. These are technical details, but it's got a lot of. It's like a crazy orbiting radio station.
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Interviewer
Doesn't Starship do 12 of them or 15 at once?
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Elon Musk
It should be able to do 50.
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Interviewer
50.
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Elon Musk
Yeah, because Starship V3 is aimed at aiming to do 100 tons to orbit with full reusability. And then Starship V4, we're aiming for over 200 tons per mission and then being able to launch every hour.
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Interviewer
Next one, data centers in space, You've been talking about that. Other people have mentioned it, but obviously it has different technical Capabilities. It's colder up there, less vibration. But you also got to get the data back to the earth by some method. I think you mentioned the lasers in good weather and bad and so how hard is it to do now that you've looked at it for a while?
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Elon Musk
We don't think this is a particularly difficult thing to do. In fact we think it's easier than our communication satellites. Quite a bit easier than our communication satellites. The Starlink V3 communication satellite is an equipment incredibly complex machine. The AI data center would be much simpler by comparison because it's really just solar power plus radiator, some basic equipment for operating the satellite and then the laser links which would connect to the Starlink communications constellation and then back and then to the ground. And the connection would happen no matter what the weather is because once you connect via lasers to the sonic communication constellation, the Starlink communicates the ground with frequencies that are cloud penetrating. So they in fact even roof penetrating to some degree. So you, you would always be able to close link with the data data centers. Excellent.
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Interviewer
Talking about America, one of the big things here, we've been talking about the re industrialization of America for a long time, bringing back advanced manufacturing. And now you're talking about building the Tarifab building chip fabs in New York. What compelled you to do that now with all the other things you're working on?
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Elon Musk
We try to. So what's the limiting factor? And the limiting factor? What we see as limiting factor is being able to make chips both logic memory and packaging. It's worth noting that there's not a single high volume computer memory fab in America right now. Zero. There's one being built in Idaho by Micron but that will not reach volume production until I believe 2028. And there's some being built in New York but they are in I think 29 and 30. And this is a tiny fraction of the memory that's needed. And in fact even if you take the best case assumptions of the the memory makers and the logic makers, it is not enough to meet the demand that is anticipated. Which is why you're seeing stocks of Micron go TO I think 1.2 trillion or some quite high number. So there's just clearly a need for AI logic, memory and packaging AI computers essentially. That is far beyond what even the best case assumptions of the existing fabricators can do. And that's why we need to do the Terafab. Yeah, it seems like essential, otherwise we will not, there will not be enough chips.
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Interviewer
So I'm going to do one more on some of the stuff you're building and then a little bit more on other issues. AI strategy. You've also bought took rock inside into SpaceX. How does that fit into this platform you're building?
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Elon Musk
Yeah, there's, you know, so we do intend with our SpaceX AI satellites to allow people to put whatever GPU or TPU they want. So if Nvidia GPUs can be put on it, Google GPUs can be put on it, Amazon Trainiums or any other chips that people want to put on can be put on. We will also offer our chips in the future and I think we also want to offer our software, our AI software as well in the future. But. But it will be such that you can run anyone's AI on hardware or software on the Tesla AI satellite or SpaceX AI satellites. Yeah.
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Interviewer
So the next three are completely different. I'm going to mention each one. I'll each ask you each one. But one's about his view of patriotism, his service to this country. One's about culture and bench. How do you actually build these wonderful companies? Because a lot of people here have those issues and then kind of leadership and I have a very specific question about that. But first I'll start with patriotism. You've served this country. I know you're a patriot. We've spoken about it. How do you view your role of being an American patriot? Helping the United States?
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Elon Musk
Yeah, I'm incredibly pro American, so. And we always have been.
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Interviewer
So.
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Elon Musk
Yeah. So SpaceX does do a lot of work for the. What used to be called the Department of Defense, the Department of War these days, the. We have a division called Star Shield, which provides military communications and. And there's some other stuff that's kind of classified. Can't be, can't talk about that. But we are helping the department Award and Intel part of the government were a vital element of that. So, yeah, just super pro America. Always have been.
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Interviewer
Thank you. Culture bench. Brent going to be with you for 15, 20 years. I know you've built a huge bench in SpaceX. How do you keep it going? What's important to you? How do you make sure you keep the best talent?
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Elon Musk
Yeah. Gwynne was, I think around the seventh person to join the company, and that was 2002, so 24 years. And generally the senior executives at the company have a very long tenure. I think Brent Johnson's been CFO for 15 years. And yeah, like we, I think because people really believe in the mission, I think they want to stay and they want to keep building it. Like we want to make humanity a space bearing civilization. We want to take humanity to Mars and the moon and ultimately beyond. We want to make. It's like science fiction, make it real. Go to places that have never been explored before. Make Star Trek real.
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Interviewer
That was one of my favorite shows.
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Elon Musk
Yeah, excellent.
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Interviewer
And then last one, you've built multiple companies. How have you changed from maybe 20 years ago? Maybe I should ask you guys, how have you changed from like when you started to today? Lessons you've learned, how you change both as a leader and as a person.
- [21:06]
Elon Musk
I think I'm probably more chill than I used to be. So I was probably a little. I'm way more laid back than I used to be, which I'm still not that laid back, but more than I used to be, for sure. And one of the things I found over time, and I've mentioned this before, is that in terms of recruiting people to the company or having people work at the company, their individual abilities and their intellectual capabilities matter a lot. But also it also matters if they have a good heart. It's not just about whether somebody has certain IQ or whatever, but just are they a good person? That matters a lot. I don't know. I guess I've learned a lot, although I feel like I still have a lot to learn and make a lot of mistakes. But I think maybe the future AI will say, not bad for a human.
- [21:52]
Interviewer
Listen, before we thank Elon for coming, I just want to thank him, just watching him build companies and I can't wait to watch the next 10 or 15 years about what you accomplish and what you dream of and getting to Mars and building new businesses and being creative. So, Elon, I want to thank you on behalf of everybody for coming here, sharing your ideas. There are brochures out there about the whole SpaceX thing. But Elon, thank you, thank you, thanks for having me.
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Host
I will say that we.
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Interviewer
Thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.