Latest Interview, Elon Musk and Alex Karp!!!

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Elon Musk Thinking

Episode: Latest Interview, Elon Musk and Alex Karp!!!
Host: Astronaut Man
Date: September 14, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging conversation with Elon Musk, touching on his latest work across multiple ventures—Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and particularly his deep focus on robotics, artificial intelligence, global connectivity through Starlink, and the future of human civilization. The conversation transitions from technical deep-dives into AI hardware, robotics, Starship progress, and global telecom, to philosophical reflections on the “suicide of the West,” optimism, the need for purpose, and humanity’s multiplanetary destiny.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Optimus: The Humanoid Robot

[01:00]–[10:30]

• Progress & Vision

  • Version 3 of Optimus is being finalized—a robot designed for human-like manual dexterity, AI comprehension of reality, and scalable mass production.
  • Musk sees Optimus as potentially “the greatest product in the history of humanity.”
  • Quote: “If successful, Optimus will be the biggest product ever.” —Elon Musk [02:58]

• Technical Challenges

  • Human-like hands are a major engineering hurdle: 27+ degrees of freedom, most actuators custom-designed. No supply chain exists for humanoid robots, necessitating total vertical integration.
  • “None of the actuators in Optimus are available from an existing supply chain.” —Elon Musk [02:20]

• Cost & Manufacturing

  • Target cost at scale (1 million units/year): $20,000–$25,000, heavily dependent on the AI chip. First waves will be more expensive.
  • “The AI chip will be pretty expensive...maybe like five or six thousand dollars of the bill of materials.” —Elon Musk [03:44]

• Why Human Form?

  • The human form factor was chosen because if you want a robot to do all things humans can in their environment, it must be humanoid.
  • “Humans evolved to this...the shape and capabilities we have for good reasons.” —Elon Musk [09:35]

2. Tesla’s AI Hardware Leap

[12:13]–[15:00]

• AI Chips (AI4, AI5) and Dojo
  • Tesla developing new hardware: AI5 is a 40x improvement over AI4, allowing for more advanced inference and self-driving.
    • “By some metrics, the improvement in AI5 will be 40 times better than AI4.” —Elon Musk [12:34]
    • 8x more compute, 9x more memory, 5x memory bandwidth, plus software-hardware co-design.
  • AI5 will enable autonomy—Elon expects cars to achieve “self driving safety that is at least 2 to 3 times that of human and maybe even 10x,” with major software upgrade coming soon.

3. Starlink: Global Connectivity

[16:03]–[19:19]

• Direct-to-Phone Starlink

  • SpaceX’s $17 billion spectrum acquisition will allow direct satellite-to-phone communication—but requires new phone chipsets, likely shipping in ~2 years.
  • Starlink aims to offer a “global carrier” service competitive with major telecoms. Existing carriers will still have roles; this is an additional option.
  • “You should be able to have a Starlink account...that works globally on your phone.” —Elon Musk [18:44]
  • Will work in typical homes, but not through thick metal roofs or heavily shielded buildings.

• Acquisition Possibility

  • Not out of the question for Starlink/SpaceX to acquire other telecoms for more spectrum access. “Not out of the question. I suppose that may happen.” —Elon Musk [19:27]

4. Starship & SpaceX: Making Humanity Multiplanetary

[19:32]–[26:28]

• Latest Launches & Version 3 Upgrades

  • Starship Version 3 will be a “gigantic upgrade,” including Raptor 3 engines and massive tonnage capacity—over 100 tons to orbit, fully reusable.
  • "Unless we have some very major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year.” —Elon Musk [20:13]

• Technical Hurdles

  • Biggest blockers are reusable heat shields (material science and engineering problem). Each tile must be robust, low-maintenance, and weatherproof.

5. Grok & Synthetic Data: Next-Gen AI

[26:28]–[31:43]

• Grok’s Role in Improving Data Quality

  • Grok analyzes all training data (e.g., Wikipedia, books, sites) to filter falsehoods, correct half-truths, and add missing context—potentially creating something like a “Grokpedia.”
  • “Grok is using heavy amounts of inference compute to...remove the falsehoods, correct the half-truths and add the missing context.” —Elon Musk [27:12]

• Scaling Laws of AI

  • Adding compute yields diminishing but still significant returns (“logarithmic function”), e.g. 10x more compute may yield 2x better intelligence.
  • AI projected to surpass any single human’s capability “as soon as next year,” and likely smarter than the sum of all humans “by 2030.” —Elon Musk [31:21]

6. Philosophical Reflections: The “Suicide of the West” and the Future

[31:43]–[45:47]

• Declining Birthrates and Western Malaise

  • Musk expresses deep concern about Western societies’ lack of optimism, declining birthrates, and the erosion of social fabric through border policies and loss of cultural cohesion.
  • "The actions of the West are indistinguishable from suicide.” —Elon Musk [35:37]
  • Advocates for a revival of optimism, purpose, and perhaps spiritual or philosophical renewal (noting curiosity as his own driving creed).

• The Role of Religion & Philosophy

  • Removing religion, Musk says, creates a dangerous spiritual vacuum filled by destructive ideologies.
  • “If you take away religion then...you get something in its place which is actually worse...like the woke mind virus filling the hole.” —Elon Musk [36:59]
  • Proposes a “philosophy of curiosity” as inherently optimistic and essential for humanity’s future.

• Multiplying Human Consciousness: Mars and Beyond

  • Stresses the existential importance of making humanity multiplanetary, beginning with a self-sustaining Mars city.
  • The key metric is whether Mars could prosper independently if resupply from Earth ceased.
  • “The probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as soon as we are multi planet species.” —Elon Musk [43:19]
  • Optimistic timeline: Mars self-sustaining in as little as 25–30 years, if the exponential increase in tonnage is maintained during each 2-year Mars transfer window.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Your car is going to feel like it is sentient by the end of the year.” —Elon Musk [15:00]
• “Humans have designed the world...It’ll be immediately backwards compatible with what we’ve built.” —Panelist [10:19]
• “I think we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year...by 2030, probably AI is smarter than the sum of all humans.” —Elon Musk [31:21]
• “Having a child is an act of optimism about the future.” —Elon Musk [36:21]
• “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 [37:10]
• “The questions are really the hard part. The answer is the universe.” —Elon Musk (referencing Douglas Adams) [38:46]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Optimus – Hands & Supply Chain: [01:00]–[10:30]
• AI Chips (AI4/AI5): [12:13]–[15:00]
• Starlink/Direct Phone Connectivity: [16:03]–[19:19]
• Starship Progress & Full Reusability: [19:32]–[26:28]
• Grok, Grokpedia, and AI Scaling: [26:28]–[31:43]
• Philosophy, Religion, Optimism, and Western Decline: [31:43]–[39:36]
• Moon & Mars Plans: [40:48]–[45:47]

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Tone and Language

The conversation is a blend of technical detail, candid humor, philosophical reflection, and characteristic optimism tinged with concern for the future. Musk is earnest about engineering challenges but also uses playful analogies and intellectual curiosity to frame his answers—showing both grand ambition and self-awareness.

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For Listeners Who Missed It

This episode offers a sweeping update on Musk’s priorities—from humanoid robots poised to revolutionize society, to rockets that could secure human consciousness for eons, and AI that may soon outstrip our collective abilities. It also candidly addresses anxieties about Western decline and the search for meaning, culminating in a call to curiosity and exploration as the antidote to collective malaise.

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END OF SUMMARY

Transcript

[Grainger Custodial Supervisor]

This is the story of the 1. As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast. It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers, all so that he can help students, staff and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Maintenance Supervisor]

This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Interviewer / Host]

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 / Host]

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 the, essentially the manual dexterity of a human, so meaning a very complex hand, an AI mind that can navigate and comprehend reality and 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 else. Any other single thing on Optimus 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 think it is accurate to say that if successful, Optimus will be the biggest product ever.

[Interviewer / Host]

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 that the marginal cost of production once you hit a million units per year is probably around the $20,000 range. 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 the AI chip will be pretty expensive. That might be like five or six thousand dollars of the bill of materials, maybe more. And, but, but, so I, 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, something like that. And price will be as a function of demand.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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, 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. I can think of many things.

[Interviewer / Host]

Yeah, I was just thinking about something.

[Elon Musk]

You know, your hands are very versatile instrument.

[Interviewer / Host]

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, like a, like it's like a puppet. Like, it's mostly a puppet. The muscle, the muscles are coming from the forearm and they're pulling the tendons, which are, you know, also human tendon designs or human tendon evolution is incredibly good. So you've got this web of tendons. You've got. I think, I think the human hand is something like, depending on how you counted, 27 or 28 degrees of freedom per, you know, in the hand. It's. It's amazing. So in order to create a robot that can be a generalized humanoid, you must solve the hands problem.

[Interviewer / Host]

We had Ari.

[Elon Musk]

It's got hands, knees, hands.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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 build all this vertical integration, get support. 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 there 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 / Host]

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?

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Model X?

[Interviewer / Host]

Gigafactory, you know? Yeah, the Faberge egg, known as the Model X. Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

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

[Interviewer / Host]

Yeah, much hotter. Significantly.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Starship.

[Elon Musk]

Yes.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Well, harder than starships.

[Elon Musk]

No, not starships.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Harder.

[Interviewer / Host]

So somewhere between a Model X and a starship.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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. The 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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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, you know, 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 / Host]

You're spending a lot of time with Annie. I noticed online not that long.

[Elon Musk]

Maybe I went a little over the top promoting Grok Imagine.

[Interviewer / Host]

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

[Elon Musk]

You could get the embodiments of Annie, I suppose, yeah.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Elon Musk]

Precisely.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Elon. There's another, there's another part of the robot. So there's the LLMs, there's the actuation, the hands, but also there's the, the silicon that runs it. And there was, you know, Dojo, I think you, 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?

[Grainger Head of Maintenance]

This is the story of the 1. As head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the H Vac is humming, and his facility shines with Grainger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces. Plus 24. 7 customer support. His venue never misses a beat. Call quickgranger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Maintenance Supervisor]

This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[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 finalized 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 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 and so effectively the AI hardware and software teams are co designing the chip.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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 handled mixed precision models. So you don't have. It'll dynamically handle mixed. There's a bunch of sort of technical stuff that AI5 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, that 8x compute improvement by another 5x improvement because of, of optimization at a, 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 / Host]

I'll keep going.

[Elon Musk]

So now that said, I am confident that the current chips, AI4 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. The. There's this. There's a lot of reinforcement learning that's been used as we. There's like you can think of AI sort of as a way of compressing reality and some of those compression steps 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 updates. Your car is going to feel like it is sentient by the end of the year.

[Interviewer / Host]

It feels that way already to be honest. I saw in the trades that you spent about $17 billion on some spectrum and that 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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

How, how many of you want a Starlink phone?

[Interviewer / Host]

Who wants a Starlink phone? Is it, is it technically possible?

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. All right, cool. So this is a 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.

[Grainger Custodial Supervisor]

Wow.

[Interviewer / Host]

And it's gonna be crazy.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Elon Musk]

Okay.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

And so will you be able to.

[Elon Musk]

Have basically like, if you, if you, if you're in a building with it with a, like a thick metal roof, then. No.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

But, no, the, the same types of, of.

[Elon Musk]

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

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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 are 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 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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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 / Host]

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'll recover the ship next year. We've got one more launch of the Starlink version two stack, but there's only one, 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 / Host]

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

[Interviewer / Host]

So this is five times bigger.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, well, two and a half times bigger in. But, but Starship will be full reuse, full reusability.

[Interviewer / Host]

Got it.

[Elon Musk]

Okay, so everything comes back.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Elon Musk]

Which. Which failed.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Oh, the more recent one. The more recent with the Starship. The big boom. Yeah, and 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 launch pad 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.

[Grainger Head of Maintenance]

This is the story of the one as head of maintenance at a concert hall. He knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the H Vac is humming, and his facility shines with Grainger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces. Plus 24. 7 customer support. His venue never misses a beat. Call quickgranger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Custodial Supervisor]

This is the story of the 1. As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast. It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers, all so that he can help students, staff and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, creating a fully reusable orbital rocket is one of the hottest engineering problems ever. It's certainly, you know, 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, 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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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 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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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. But then whose integrity is it stay on and they don't crack. Yeah. 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 refurbished or checked one by one. That was the case with the shuttle.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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, you know, not to start from the, you know, 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 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 what's missing and correcting mistakes and removing falsehoods from that training data. So it's like if you take the Wikipedia as an example, but this really applies to books, PDFs, the websites, every form of information. The GROK is using heavy amounts of inference compute to 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, to correct the, remove the falsehoods, correct the half truths and add the missing context.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Interviewer / Host]

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

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Wikipedia is so biased and it's, it's a constant war. You know, 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 hyper 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 / Host]

It'd be interesting.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. And then just have it out there.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

For where in terms of people here like it, in terms of training. Grok 5, you're, you're scaling up your super cluster in colossus in Memphis.

[Elon Musk]

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

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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 a hundred percent better model? Like, is it log linear? What, what? 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 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 I, and, 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 fondest for compute, and then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy, you know, sort of Clashev to Kashev 3 scale compute. So I guess once you think of 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've have, as the population has increased and we've been able to store more and more information. Human intelligence at scale. 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. Yeah. And then probably within five, like say 2030, probably AI is smarter than the sum of all humans.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Interviewer / Host]

Well, you're doing anything about it or. No?

[Elon Musk]

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

[Interviewer / Host]

You know, we had a big conversation at this. 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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

And open borders. And open borders, like let the invaders in. Could all three of those be the same thing?

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 there's 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, you know, 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 / Host]

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

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

And when. When Alex Karp was here earlier today defending the west, they 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 / Host]

Yeah. What's your take, Elon?

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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

[Interviewer / Host]

Yeah.

[Elon Musk]

What's going on? I'm very worried about it. Yeah.

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[Elon Musk]

I'm very worried about it. You know, I think there's. The actions of the west are indistinguishable from suicide. 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 / Host]

Not for a while, decades, like even one.

[Elon Musk]

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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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 of horse vacuum. And if you take away religion then I think you actually, you, 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, right that, that are, that are very, very self destructive. So I think perhaps some, some sort of revival of religion or at least what we need is, is some coherent philosophy that people can get excited about. You know, 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 very strong for 10 million years. 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 an increase 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. You know, 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, black hole? We might be.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Elon, can you talk about the whole.

[Elon Musk]

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

[Interviewer / Host]

Where does the. 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 in 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. You know, it used to be like just the map would be there be dragons. And like all we know is that when they sailed in that direction, they didn't come back. I mean, the moon base, that's all, that's all they knew.

[Interviewer / Host]

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 that 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 ships 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. But you know, that destroyed the dinosaurs. We know from the fossil record that there have been many mass, mass extinction events. So the question that I sort of, I'm always wondering about is will civilization, can will the civilizational ark continue to ascend such that we can make Mars self sustaining before the civil 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.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

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]

This, this point that I think I, I want to just emphasize again that that's 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, if something and obviously we should do everything possible to make sure life on Earth is great, but there's always some risk that of an annihilation event on Earth. Yeah, like I said, self annihilation or some natural disaster. And, and so the, the probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as soon as, as soon as we are multi planet species. With the key test being can Mars survive if the resupply ships stop coming. So it's so getting like the first missions to Mars are not that important. The, 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, do you.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

Do you have a sense of the timescale? Like let's assume starship is at a state starting in, you know, 20, 26, 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 that, 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, you know, things go and break our way.

[Elon Musk]

I think it can be done in, in 30 years provided there's an exponential increase in the, in the tonnage to Mars with each successive Mars transfer windows, which is every two years. So every two years the, the planets align and you can, 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 Mars self sustaining in, in about quote, roughly 25 years. Amazing.

[Interviewer / Panelist]

That's incredible.

[Interviewer / Host]

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.

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