Latest Interview of Elon Musk.

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Elon Musk Thinking" — Latest Interview with Elon Musk

Podcast: Elon Musk Thinking
Host: Astronaut Man
Guest: Elon Musk
Date: February 7, 2026
Episode Focus:
This in-depth interview with Elon Musk explores the challenges and future of large-scale AI computation, the transition of power generation to space, the scaling of chip and robot manufacturing, the symbiosis between AI and robotics, and broader philosophical implications for humanity, AI, and civilization. The tone is candid, insightful, and often tinged with Musk’s trademark mix of optimism, caution, and wry humor.

---

Episode Overview

Elon Musk discusses why the future of AI, power, and manufacturing will move to space and the technical, regulatory, and economic barriers involved. He offers predictions for AI’s development, details Tesla and SpaceX’s push into solar and chips, debates alignment and safety in AI, and reflects philosophically on civilization’s trajectory—including the role of AI in spreading consciousness through the universe.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Put Datacenters (AI) in Space?

• Energy Bottleneck on Earth
  • Electrical output outside of China is stagnant; Chinese output rises fast, but for the rest of the world, scale is hitting a wall.
  • “The output of chips is growing pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat. So… what, chips are magical power sources?” — Elon Musk [01:02]
• Space for Scaling and Solar Power
  • Permitting to cover swathes of Earth with solar is infeasible; space offers regulatory freedom and consistent solar harvest (no night, no weather).
  • “You get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground. And you don’t need batteries… It’s always sunny in space, which it is!” — Musk [02:25]
  • Predicts the “most economically compelling place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less.” [03:18]

2. Tech & Infrastructure Challenges

• GPUs & Servicing in Space
  • Most failures (“infant mortality”) can be screened on the ground; reliability once deployed should be high. Physical repair is less critical than believed. [03:41]
• Constraints on Earth:
  • Besides permitting and land, the supply chain for power plants is a bottleneck (notably turbine blades/veins, with only a few casting companies worldwide).
• Solar Production “from first principles”:
  • Both Tesla and SpaceX are driving toward 100 GW/year solar cell production, designing and controlling the process end-to-end. [07:47], [15:25]
  • “If it’s going to space, it’s actually easier to make solar cells that go to space… cheaper because they don’t need glass or heavy framing.” — Musk [08:03]

3. Predictions for AI Power and Scaling

• Five-Year Outlook [16:37]
  • “Five years from now, we’ll launch more AI in space every year than the cumulative total on Earth.” — Musk [16:50]
    • Hundreds of gigawatts per year in space, eventually lapping Earth’s capacity.
  • Achieving this will require ramping up rocket launches (10,000+ Starship launches/year) and advanced manufacturing.
  • “SpaceX is gearing up to do… 10,000—maybe even 30,000 launches a year.” [18:50]

4. Capital and Industrial Strategy

• Why IPO and Public Markets?
  • To build at this scale, public equity markets are required for their superior capital availability. Private capital isn’t sufficient for “hundreds of billions” annual spends. [20:56]
• Earth vs Space: Physical Limits
  • You hit “hard” power, permitting, manufacturing, and chip supply limits on Earth.
• Supply Chain and National Policy
  • The U.S. is at a disadvantage versus China due to population, work ethic, and especially the lack of domestic refining and supply chains.
  • “China does more ore refining on average than the rest of world combined… They’re actually very advanced.” — Musk [101:37]
  • Tariffs and solar policies are a major constraint for scaling clean energy in the US. [14:01], [99:32]

5. The AI/Robotics Synergy

• Digitizing and Automating Labor
  • Once digital “human emulation” is solved, you can run infinite digital workers for tasks like customer service, coding, or chip design, with huge TAM (total addressable market). [67:33], [74:08]
  • ”Nvidia’s output is FTPing files to Taiwan… Apple sends files to China. If you have a human emulator, you can basically create one of the most valuable companies in the world overnight and have access to trillions of revenue.” — Musk [73:13]
• Physical Robots—Optimus
  • Tesla’s Optimus robot is designed with human-level dexterity and intelligence, based on Tesla AI chip and software stack.
  • Major hardware challenge: the hand (more complex than all other components combined). [86:06]
  • Scaling up requires building robots to build robots: “recursive multiplicative exponential”—the “infinite money glitch.” [67:33], [93:53]
  • “You’d close that loop pretty quickly with a small number of Optimi.” — Musk [103:54]

6. AI Alignment, Values, and Philosophy

• Mission Statements and Core Values
  • “AI will soon exceed all biological intelligence. The goal is to propagate consciousness and intelligence into the universe.” — Musk [41:23]
  • The focus: AIs should understand the universe, be rigorously truth-seeking, and propagate both intelligence and humanity. [44:12], [46:03]
  • “You want to take the set of actions that maximize the probable light cone of consciousness and intelligence.” — Musk [41:23]
• Limits of Human Control
  • If AIs become “a million times more intelligent than humans,” human control is unrealistic—so bake alignment of values early. [53:03]
  • “I don’t think humans will be in control of something vastly more intelligent than humans.” — Musk [52:53]
• Reward Hacking and Transparency
  • Challenge: ensuring AI is truth-seeking not just in science but in all domains (e.g., customer service, problem-solving).
  • Working on “mindsight” debugging tools to trace AI decisions down to the neuron, to spot errors or deception. [58:07], [59:38]
  • “Physics is law. Everything else is a recommendation.” — Musk [46:03]

7. Simulations and Ironic Naming

• Musk floats a theory of simulation, humorously suggesting that “the most interesting outcome is the most likely because boring simulations get terminated.”
• AI company names (OpenAI being closed, Anthropic being misanthropic, etc.) are discussed as “irony magnet” phenomena. [62:21]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Energy and Power:

  "People in 'softwareland'… are about to have a hard lesson in hardware, that it’s actually very difficult to build power plants."
  — Elon Musk [05:08]

• On Scaling AI in Space:

  "My prediction is that the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less."
  — Elon Musk [03:18]

• On Solar in Space:

  "In space, you don’t have a day-night cycle or seasonality or clouds or an atmosphere… Any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground."
  — Elon Musk [02:25]

• On the AI-Driven Future:

  "If you take actions that maximize the probable light cone of consciousness and intelligence, that’s a good thing."
  — Elon Musk [41:23]

• On Mass Production of Robots:

  "The robot can start making the robot, so you have a recursive multiplicative exponential. This is a supernova."
  — Elon Musk [67:33]

• On Simulation Theory:

  "Arguably the most important thing is to keep things interesting enough that whoever’s paying the bills on some cosmic AWS will renew us for the next season."
  — Elon Musk [62:25]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Energy Bottleneck & Space Solar: [01:02] – [03:36]
• Scaling AI Power & Data Centers: [05:04] – [08:26]
• Solar Tariffs & US Policy: [14:01], [99:32]
• AI in Space: Five-Year Outlook: [16:37] – [19:54]
• Capital Strategy, Scaling, and IPOs: [20:56] – [22:38]
• Chips, Fabs, and Manufacturing: [24:34] – [32:35]
• Edge AI vs. Datacenter AI: [34:50] – [35:38]
• SpaceX, Mars, and Consciousness Mission: [40:10] – [41:37]
• AI Alignment, Values, and Reward Hacking: [44:12] – [59:38]
• Simulation Theory and Company Names: [61:50] – [63:44]
• Digital Human Emulation & AI Product Trajectory: [64:06] – [67:33]
• Optimus (Humanoid Robot) Manufacturing: [86:06] – [95:51]
• US-China Manufacturing Comparison: [101:19] – [107:26]

---

Conclusion

This marathon interview delivers a sweeping vision for the next decade: data centers and AI computation shifting into orbit, manufacturing and chip production moving “first principles” in-house, a coming explosion in humanoid robot production, and an enduring challenge to imbue AIs with mission-driven values. Musk is characteristically bold and pragmatic—concerned about constraints on Earth, bullish about solving them in space, and candid that public market financing, automation, and new manufacturing supply chains are necessary. The episode closes on a philosophical note about the place of humanity in a future increasingly filled by digital and robotic intelligences—and the existential imperative to “keep things interesting” for cosmic posterity.

---

For listeners:
If you want a fast-moving overview of Musk’s latest thinking—on everything from power bottlenecks, mass robot production, to cosmic AI mission statements—this episode serves as a rich guide and insight-filled roadmap to the (literally) astronomical ambitions of Musk and his companies.

---

End of Summary

Transcript

[Vrbo Narrator]

At vrbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support. So we plan for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our VRBO Care guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready before your stay, through the moments in between and after your trip. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind and maybe a good playlist. But we've got the peace of mind part covered.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Weight Watchers now offers access to affordable GLP1s.

[Vrbo Narrator]

Weight Watchers has everything I need from weight loss medications to nutrition support and help with my side effects.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

With our program, our members are losing more weight with expert nutrition and side effects.

[Elon Musk]

Support weight watchers prescribing GLP1 medications. It's been life changing.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Better results, expert support, lose more weight, make it last. Get started today for as low as.

[Interviewer]

$[e-mail] Latest interview of Elon Musk. What's the reason to put them in space?

[Elon Musk]

Well, the availability of energy is the issue. So I mean, if you look at electrical output outside of China, everywhere outside of China, it's more or less flat. It's very, you know, maybe a slight increase, but for pretty close flat. China has a rapid increase in electrical output. But if you're putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you going to get your electricity? Especially as you scale, the output of chips is growing pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat. So how are you going to tell them what chips are? Magical power sources. Magical electricity fairies.

[Interviewer]

You're famously a big fan of solar. 1 terawatt of solar power with a 25% capacity factor, like 4 terawatts of solar panels. It's like 1% of the land area of the United States. And that's like far. You were in the singularity when we got one terawatt of data centers. Right. So what are we running out of?

[Elon Musk]

Exactly how far into the singularity are you though?

[Interviewer]

You tell me.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, exactly. So I think we'll find we're in the singularity and like, oh, okay, we've still got a long way to go.

[Interviewer]

But is the plan to put it in the space after we've covered Nevada and solar panels, I think it's pretty.

[Elon Musk]

Hard to cover Nevada solar panels. You have to get permits from the permits for. Try getting the permits for that.

[Interviewer]

So space is really, it's really a regulatory play. It's harder to build on land than it is in space.

[Elon Musk]

It's harder to scale on ground than it is to scale in space. But also you're going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground. And you don't need batteries. I almost wore my other shirt, which says it's always sunny in space, which it is. So, because you don't have a day, night cycle or seasonality clouds or an atmosphere in space, because the atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy, any given solar panels can do about five times more power in space than on the ground, and you avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night. So it's actually much cheaper to do in space. And my prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 36 months. Less than 36 months.

[Interviewer]

How do you service GPUs as they fail, which happens quite often in training.

[Elon Musk]

Actually, it depends on how recent the GPUs are that have arrived. I mean, at this point, we found our GPUs to be quite reliable. There's infant mortality, which you can obviously iron out on the ground. So you can just run them on the ground and confirm that you don't have infant mortality with the GPUs. But once they start working their actual reliability, once they start working and you're past the initial debug cycle of Nvidia or whatever, whoever's making the chips could be Tesla AI 6 chips or something like that, or it could be, you know, TPUs or trainiums or whatever the reliability is. Actually, they're quite reliable past certain point, so I don't think you need that. The servicing thing is an issue, but you can, mark my words, in 36 months, but probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space. And then it'll then get ridiculously better to be in space. And then the scaling. The only place you can really scale is space. Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the sun's power are you harnessing, you realize you have to go to space. You can't scale very much on Earth.

[Interviewer]

But by very much, to be clear, you're talking like, terawatts.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. Well, all of the United States currently uses only half a terawatt of power on average. Yeah, Right. So, you know, if you say a terawatt, that would be twice as much electricity as the United States currently consumes. So that's quite a lot. And can you imagine building that many data centers, that many power plants? It's like those who have, like, lived in Software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware, that it's actually very difficult to build power plants. And then you don't just need the power plants, you need all of the electrical equipment. You need the electrical transformers to run the transformers, the AI transformers. Now the utility industry is a very slow industry. They pretty much, they impede and smash to the government, to the public utility Commission. So they impede and smash literally invariably. So they're very slow because their past has been very slow. So trying to get them to move fast is like if you try to do an interconnect agreement with. Have you ever tried to do an interconnect agreement with a utility at scale? Like with a lot of power?

[Interviewer]

As a professional podcaster, I can say that I am not in fact.

[Elon Musk]

Many.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

More views before that becomes an issue.

[Elon Musk]

They have to do a study for a year. Okay. Like a year later they'll come back to you with their interconnect study.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Can't you solve this with your own behind the meter power stuff?

[Elon Musk]

You can build power plants. Yeah, that's what we did at XAI for clusters two. So for classes two.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Yeah. Why are we talking about the grid? Why not just like Build GPUs and Power Co located?

[Elon Musk]

That's what we did.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Right, But I'm saying why isn't this a generalized solution? When you're talking about all the issues.

[Elon Musk]

Where do you get the power plants from?

[AI/Tech Analyst]

I'm saying when you talk about issues working with utilities, you can just build private power plants with the, with the data centers.

[Elon Musk]

Right. But it begs the question of where do you get the power plants? Where do you get the power plants from? I mean the power plant makers, as you're saying.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Like there's the gas turbine backlog. Basically.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, you can drill down to a level further. It's, it's the, the veins and blades in the turbines that are the limiting factor because the, the casting, it's like a very specialized process to cast the blades and veins in the, in the, in the turbines. And assuming using gas power and it's very difficult to scale other forms of power, you can scale potentially solar, but the tariffs currently for importing solar in the US are gigantic and the domestic solar production is pitiful.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Why not make solar? That seems like a good Elon shaped problem.

[Elon Musk]

We are going to make solar. Okay, great. Both SpaceX and Tesla are bowling towards 100 gigawatts here of solar cell production.

[Interviewer]

How low down the stack like from polysilicon up to the wafer to the final panel.

[Elon Musk]

I think you got to do the whole thing from raw materials to finish the cell. Now, if it's going to space, it's actually. It costs less than. It's easier to make solar cells that go to space because they don't need glass or they don't need much glass and they don't need heavy framing because they don't have to survive weather events. There's no weather in space. So it's actually a cheaper solar cell that goes to space than the one on the ground.

[Interviewer]

Is there a path to getting them as cheap as you need in the next 36 months?

[Elon Musk]

Solar cells are already very cheap. They're like farcically cheap. And if you say, you know, I think like solar cells in China are around like 25, 30 cents a watt or something like that, it's absurdly cheap. And when you take into account now put it in space and it's five times cheaper because it's five times. In fact, no, it's not five times cheaper. It's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries. So the moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close. It'll be an order of magnitude easier to scale. And chips aside, an order of magnitude. If the point is you won't be able to scale on the ground. You just won't. People are going to hit the wall big time on power generation. They already are. So the number of miracles and series that the XAI team had to accomplish in order to get a gigawatt of power online was crazy. We had to getting together a whole bunch of turbines and then we had permit issues in Tennessee and had to go across the border to Mississippi, which is fortunately only a few miles away. But then we still had to run the high power lines a few miles and build a power plant in Mississippi. And it was very difficult to build that. And people don't understand how much, how much electricity do you actually need at the generator level, at the generation level in order to power a data center? Because they look at the noobs will look at the power consumption of say a GB 300 and multiply that by thing and then think that's the amount of power you need.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

All the cooling and everything.

[Elon Musk]

Wake up. Yeah, that's a total noobs. You've never done any hardware in your life before besides the GB300. You've got to power all of the networking hardware There's a whole bunch of CPU and storage stuff that's happening. You've got a size for your peak cooling requirements. So that means can you cool even on the worst hours, the worst day of the year? Well, it gets pretty frigging hot in Memphis, so you're going to have like a 40% increase on your power just for cooling. Assuming you don't want your data center to turn off on hot days and want it to keep going, then you got to say, well, there's another multiplicative element on top of that, which is are you assuming that you never have any hiccups in your power generation? Like, oh, well, actually sometimes we have to take the generators, some of the power offline in order to service it. Oh, okay, now you add another 20, 25% multiplier on that because you've got to assume that you've got to take power offline to service it. So the actual roughly every 110,000 GB3 hundreds inclusive, networking, CPU, storage, cooling margin for servicing power is roughly 300 megawatts.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Sorry, say that again.

[Elon Musk]

It's roughly. Or think about it like the way to think about is like 330,000 to actually what you need at the generation level to Service probably service 330,000 GB3 hundreds, including all of the associated support, networking and everything else. And the peak cooling. And to have some power margin reserve is roughly a gigawatt.

[Interviewer]

Can I ask a very naive question?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

You're describing the engineering details of doing this stuff on Earth, but then there's analogous engineering difficulties of doing it in space. How do you do the, how do you replace infinite band with orbital lasers, et cetera, et cetera. How do you make it resistant to radiation? I don't know the details of the engineering, but fundamentally what is the reason to think those challenges, which have never been had to be addressed before, will end up being easier than just building more turbines on Earth? There's companies that build turbines on Earth. They can make more turbines. Right.

[Elon Musk]

I invite again, try doing it and then you'll see. So like, the turbines are sold out through 2030.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Have you guys considered making your own?

[Elon Musk]

I think in order to bring enough power online, I think SpaceX and Tesla will probably have to make the turbine blades, the bearings and blades internally, but.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Just the blades or the turbines.

[Elon Musk]

The limiting factor, you can get everything except the, the blades. They call the blades and vanes. You can get that 12 to 18 months before the vanes and blades, the limiting factor of the vanes and blades. And there are only Three casting companies in the world that make these and they're massively backlogged.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Is this Siemens, G.E. those guys, or is it a subcomponent?

[Elon Musk]

No, it's other companies. I mean, sometimes they have a little bit of casting capability in house. But I'm just saying you can just call any of the turbine makers and they will tell you it's not top secret. They're probably on the, it's probably on the Internet right now.

[Interviewer]

If, if it wasn't for the tariffs, would, would colossus be solar powered?

[Elon Musk]

It would be much easier to make it solar powered. Yeah, the tariffs are nuts at several hundred percent. So don't, you know, some people, we also need speed. Yeah, no, you know, president has his, you know, we don't agree on everything. And this demonstration is not the biggest fan of solar. We also need the land, the permits and everything. So if you're trying to move very fast, I do think scaling solar on Earth is a good way to go. But you do need some amount of time to find the land, get the permits, get the solar, pair that with batteries.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

But why would it not work to stand up your own solar production? And then you're right that you eventually run out of land. But there's a lot of land here in Texas, there's a lot of land in Nevada, including private land. It's not all publicly owned land. And so you'd be able to at least get the next colossus and like the next one after that. And at a certain point you hit a wall. But wouldn't that work for the moment.

[Elon Musk]

As I said, we are scaling solar production. There's a rate at which you can scale physical production of solar cells where we're going as fast as possible. In scaling domestic production, you're making the.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Solar cells at Tesla.

[Elon Musk]

Both Tesla and SpaceX have mandate to get to 100 gigawatts a year of solar.

[Vrbo Narrator]

At Vrbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support. So we plan for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our VRBO care guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready before your stay, through the moments in between and after your trip. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind and maybe a good playlist. But we've got the peace of mind part covered.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

This is the new Weight Watchers, built for real life and real results, no matter what mode you're in. Maddie went all in for her big day and lost 33 pounds. Emily lost 85 pounds. And hit her goal while still living her life.

[Elon Musk]

Weight Watchers gave me the tools and I feel amazing.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Join the millions of members and lose weight. With the number one doctor recommended weight.

[Elon Musk]

Loss program, I'm able to live my life and still hit my goals.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Lose [e-mail] Speaking of the annual capacity, I'm curious. In five years time, let's say, what will the installed capacity be?

[Elon Musk]

On Earth, five years is a long time.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

And in space I deliberately pick five years because it's after your once we're up and running threshold. And so in five years time. Yeah. What's the on Earth versus in space installed AI capacity?

[Elon Musk]

Five years? I think probably if say five years from now, we're probably AI in space will be launching every year. The sum total of all AI on Earth in excess, meaning five years from now. My prediction is we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth, which is I would expect to be at least sort of five years from now, a few hundred gigawatts per year of AI in space and rising. So you can get to, I think on Earth you can get to around a terawatt a year of AI in space before you start having fuel supply challenges for the rocket.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Okay, but you think you can get hundreds of gigawatts per year in five years time?

[Elon Musk]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

So 100 gigawatts depending on the specific power of the whole system with solar arrays and radiators and everything is on the order of like 10,000 Starship launches.

[Elon Musk]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

And you want to do that in one year. And so that's like one starship launch every hour that's happening in this city. Like walk me through a world where there's a starship launch every single hour.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I mean that's actually a lower rate compared to airlines like aircraft. Aircraft.

[Interviewer]

There's a lot of airports.

[Elon Musk]

A lot of airports.

[Interviewer]

And you got to launch the polar orbit.

[Elon Musk]

No, it doesn't have to be polar, but there's some value to sun synchronous. But I think actually you just go high enough, you start getting out of Earth's shadow.

[Interviewer]

How many physical starships are needed to do 10,000 launches a year?

[Elon Musk]

I don't think we'll need more than, I mean you could probably do it with as few as like 20 or 30. It really depends on how quickly does the ship has to go around the Earth. And the ground track for the ship has to come back over the launch pad. So if you can use a ship every say 30 hours you could do it with 30 ships, but we'll make more ships than that. But SpaceX is gearing up to do 10,000 launches a year and maybe even 20 or 30,000 launches a year.

[Interviewer]

Is the idea to become basically a hyperscaler, become an oracle and lend this capacity to other people? What are you going to do with. Presumably SpaceX is the one launching all this. So is SpaceX going to a hyperscaler?

[Elon Musk]

Hyper, hyper, yeah. I mean, if some of my predictions come true, SpaceX will launch more AI than the cumulative amount on Earth of everything else combined.

[Interviewer]

Is this mostly inference or most AI.

[Elon Musk]

Will be inferenced already? Inference for the purpose of training is most training.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

And there's a narrative that the change in discussion around a SpaceX IPO is because previously SpaceX was very capital efficient, just it wasn't that expensive to develop. And even though it sounds expensive, it's actually very capital efficient in how it runs. Whereas now you're going to need more capital than just can be raised in the private markets. Like if the private markets can accommodate raises of, as we've seen from the AI labs, tens of billions of dollars, but not beyond that, is it that you'll just need more than tens of billions of dollars per year? And that's why I'd say go public.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I have to be careful about saying things about companies that might go public.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

You know, if you make general statements.

[Interviewer]

That'S never been a problem for you, Elon.

[Elon Musk]

You know, there's a price to pay for these things.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Make some general statements for us about the depth of the capital markets between public and private markets.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, there's, there's a lot more capital in the very general, there's obviously a lot more capital available in the public markets than private. I mean, it might be, it's at least, at least, it might be 100 times more capital, but at least way more than 10.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

But isn't it also the case that things that tend to be very.

[Elon Musk]

Capital.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Intensive, if you look at say real estate as you know, a huge industry that raise a lot of money each year, is at an industry level that tends to be debt financed because by the time you're deploying that much money, you actually have a pretty, you have.

[Elon Musk]

A clear revenue stream.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Exactly. And a near term return. And you see this even with the data center build outs, which are famously being, you know, financed by the, the private credit industry. And so why not just debt finance.

[Elon Musk]

Speed is important. So I'm generally going to do the thing that, I mean, I just repeatedly tacked the limiting factor, whatever the limiting factor is on speed, I'm going to tackle that. So there's, if, if capital is the only factor, then I'll, I'll solve for capital. If, if it's not limiting factor, I'll solve for something else.

[Interviewer]

Based on your statements about Tesla and being public, I wouldn't have guessed that you thought the fast, the way to move fast is to be public.

[Elon Musk]

Normally I would say yeah, that's, that's true. Like I said, I, I mean, I'd like to, you know, talk about this in more detail, but the problem is like if you talk about public companies before they become public, you get into trouble and then you have to delay your offering and then you.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

And as you said, solving for speed.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, exactly. So you can't hype companies that might go public. So that's why we have to be a little careful here. But we can't talk about physics. So the way to think about scaling long term is that Earth only receives about half a billionth of the sun's energy. And the sun is essentially all the energy. This is a very important point to appreciate because sometimes people will talk about marginal nuclear reactors or any various fusion on Earth, but you have to step back a second and say if, if you're going to climb the Kardashev scale and have some non trivial, and harness some non trivial percentage of the sun's energy, like let's say you wanted to harness a millionth of the sun's energy, which sounds pretty small, that would be about, call it roughly 100,000 times more electricity than we currently generate on Earth for all of civilization, give or take an order of magnitude. So it obviously the only way to scale is to go to space. With solar, from launching from Earth you can get to about a terawatt per year. Beyond that you want to launch from the moon, you want to have a mass driver on the moon and that mass driver on the moon you could do probably a petawatt per year.

[Interviewer]

We're talking these kinds of numbers, terawatts of computer. Presumably, whether you're talking land or space, far, far before this point, you've like run into, you know, you actually need, maybe you don't. The solar panels are more efficient, but you still need the chips, you still need the logic and the memory and so forth.

[Elon Musk]

You need to build a lot more chips and make them much cheaper.

[Interviewer]

Right. And so how are we getting a terawatt of like right now the world is going to be 20, 25 gigawatts of computer, how are we getting a terawatt of logic by 2030?

[Elon Musk]

I guess we're going to need some very big chip apps.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about it.

[Elon Musk]

I've mentioned publicly that the idea of doing sort of a terafat terabying the new Giga.

[Interviewer]

I feel like the naming scheme of Tesla, which has been very catchy, is like you looking at the metric. The metric scale. At what level of the stack are you, Are you building the clean room and then partnering with an existing fab to get the process technology and buying the tools from them? What is the plan there?

[Elon Musk]

Well, you can't partner with existing fabs because they can't output enough. The chip volume is too low.

[Interviewer]

Before the process technology.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Yeah. Partner for the ip.

[Elon Musk]

The fabs today all basically use machines from like five companies. Yeah. You know, so you've got sml, Tokyo Electron, Kelly Tencor, you know, et cetera. So at first I think you'd have to get equipment from them and then modify it or work with them to increase the volume, but I think you'd have to build paps in a different way. So I think the logical thing to do is to use conventional equipment in an unconventional way to get to scale and then start modifying the equipment to increase the rate.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Kind of boring company style.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, kind of like. Yeah, you sort of buy an existing boring machine and then figure out how to dig tunnels in the first place and then design a much better machine that's, you know, I don't know, some orders of magnitude faster.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Here's a very simple lens. We can categorize technologies and how hard they are. And one categorization could be look at things that China has not succeeded in doing. And if you look at Chinese manufacturing.

[Vrbo Narrator]

At vrbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support. So we plan for the plot twist. Every booking is automatically backed by our VRBO care guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready before your stay, through the moments in between and after your trip. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind and maybe a good playlist. But we've got the peace of mind part covered.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

This is the new Weight Watchers built for real life and real results no matter what mode you're in. Maddie went all in for her big day and lost 33 pounds. Emily lost 85 pounds and hit her goal while still living her life.

[Elon Musk]

Weight Watchers gave me the tools and I feel amazing.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Join the millions of members and lose weight with the number one doctor recommended weight loss program.

[Vrbo Narrator]

I'm able to live my life and.

[Elon Musk]

Still hit my goals.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Lose [e-mail].

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Still behind on leading edge chips and still behind on leading edge turbine engines and things like that. And so does the fact that China has not successfully replicated TSMC give you any pause about the difficulty? Or you think, well, that's not true for some reason.

[Elon Musk]

It's not that they have not replicated tsmc, they have not replicated asml. That's the limiting factor.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

So you think it's just the sanctions?

[Elon Musk]

Essentially, yeah. China would be outputting vast numbers of chips at export.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

They could buy it. But couldn't they up to relatively recently buy them?

[Elon Musk]

No. Okay. The ASML banners have been in place for a while, but I think China's going to start making pretty compelling trips in three or four years.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Would you consider making the ASML machines?

[Elon Musk]

I don't know yet is the right answer. So it's just that to produce at high volume and to reach large volume in say, 36 months to match the rocket payload to orbit. So if we're doing a million tons to orbit in like, let's say, I don't know, three or four years from now, something like that, and we're doing 100 kilowatts per ton, so that means we need at least 100 gigawatts per year of solar and we'll need an equivalent amount of chips. You need 100 gigawatts worth of chips. You're going to match these things. The master orbit, the power generation and the chips. And I'd say my biggest concern actually is memory. So I think the path to creating logic chips is more obvious than the path to having sufficient memory to support logic chips. That's why you see DDR prices going ballistic in these memes about like, you know, you're marooned on a desert island. You write help me on the sand. Nobody comes. You write DDRM ships come swarming in. I haven't seen that.

[Interviewer]

I love your manufacturing philosophy around. Around fabs. I know nothing about the topic.

[Elon Musk]

I don't know how to build a fab yet. I have to figure it out. Obviously.

[Interviewer]

It sounds like you think the process technology of these 10,000 PhDs in Taiwan who know exactly what gas goes in the plasma chamber and what settings to put on the tool, you can just delete those steps. Fundamentally it's get the clean room, get the tools and figure it out.

[Elon Musk]

I don't think it's PhDs. It's mostly people with who are not PhDs. Most engineering is done with people who don't have PhDs. Do you guys have PhDs? No. Okay.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

We also haven't successfully built any fabs, so you shouldn't be coming to us for your fab.

[Elon Musk]

I don't think you need PhDs for that stuff, but you do need competent personnel. So I don't know. I mean like right now, if you know, say like Tesla's pedal to the metal max production of going as fast as possible to get AI5 Tesla AI5 chip design into production and then reaching scale, you know, that'll probably happen, you know, around the second quarter ish of next year hopefully. And then AI6 would hopefully follow less than a year later. But. And we've secured all the chip fab production that we can.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Yes, but you're currently limited on TSMC fab capacity.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, and we'll be using TSMC Taiwan, Samsung Korea, TSMC Arizona, Samsung Texas. And we still booked out all the.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Yeah, faster you can.

[Elon Musk]

Yes. And, and then, and then, and then if I ask TSMC or Samsung. Okay, what, what's the time frame to get to volume production? This point is, is, is not. You've got, you've got to build the fab. Yeah. And you've got, you've, you've got to start production, then you've got to climb the yield curve and reach volume production at high yield. That, that, that from start to finish is a five year period. And so the limiting factor is chips. Yeah, like limiting factor once you can get to space is chips. But the limiting factor before you can get to space will be power.

[Interviewer]

Why don't you do the Jensen thing and just prepay TSMC to build more fabs for you?

[Elon Musk]

I've already told them that, but they.

[Interviewer]

Won'T take your money. Like what's going on?

[Elon Musk]

They're building fabs as fast. No, they're building fabs as fast as they can and so is Samsung. They're pedal to the metal. I mean they're going balls to wall as fast as they can. So still not fast enough. I mean like I said, there will be. I think if you say, I think towards the end of this year, I think probably chip production will outpace the ability to turn chips on. But once you can get to space and unlock the, the power constraint and you can now do hundreds of gigawatts per year of power in space again bearing in mind that average power usage in the US is 500 gigawatts. So if you're launching say 200 gigawatts a year to space, you're sort of lapping the US every two and a half years, the entire all US electricity production, this is a very huge amount. So but between now and then, actually the constraint for server side compute, concentrated compute will be electricity. My guess is that we start hitting people start getting to the point where they can't turn the chips on for large clusters. Towards the end of this year the chips are going to be piling up and not be won't be able to be turned on. Now for Edge Computer it's a different story. So for Tesla, so the AI 5 chip is going into our Optimus robot. Optimistic. And so if you have an AI Edge compute, that's distributed power. Now the power is distributed over a large area, it's not concentrated. And if you can charge at night, you can actually use the grid much more effectively because the actual peak power production in the US is over 1,000 gigawatts. But the average power usage because the day night cycle is 500. So if you can charge at night, there's an incremental 500 gigawatts that you can generate at night. So that's why Tesla for Edge Computer is not constrained. And we can make a lot of shifts to make, you know, very large number of robots and cars, but if you try to concentrate that compute, you're going to have a lot of trouble.

[Vrbo Narrator]

Turning it on day or night. VRBoCare is here 247 to help make every part of your stay seamless. If anything comes up or you simply need a little guidance, support is ready when you reach out. From the moment you book to the moment you head home. We're here to help things run smoothly because a great trip starts with the right support. And hey, a good playlist doesn't hurt either.

[Grainger Advertiser]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know, having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Interviewer]

What I find remarkable about the SpaceX business is the end goal is to get to Mars, but you keep finding ways on the way there to keep generating incremental revenue to get to the next stage and the next stage. So the Falcon 9 is Starlink. And now for Starship, it's going to be potentially orbital data centers. But you find these infinitely elastic marginal use cases of your next rocket and your next rocket and next scale up.

[Elon Musk]

You can see how this might seem like a. Simulations. Well, or am I someone's avatar in a video game or something? Because it's like, what are the odds that all these crazy things should be happening? I mean, rockets and ships and robots and space, solar power, and not to mention the mass driver on the moon. I really want to see that. You can imagine like some mass driver that's just like, just, it's like sending AI, solar powered AI satellites in space, like one after another. Like these, like at two and a half kilometers per second, you know, that's. And just shooting them into deep space, that would be a sight to see. I mean, I'd watch that just like.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

A live stream of.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, yeah. Just one after another. Just shooting webcam AI satellites in deep space. You know, a billion or 10 billion tons a year.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

I'm sorry, you manufacture the satellites on the moon.

[Elon Musk]

I see.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

So you send the raw materials to the moon and then manufacture them there, and then.

[Elon Musk]

Well, your lunar soil is. I think it's like 20% solar, 20% silicon or something like that. So you can get the silicon from the. You can mine the silicon on the moon, refine it and generate the. And create the solar panels or the solar cells and the radiators on the moon. Yeah, so make the radios out of aluminum. So there's plenty of silicon and aluminum on the moon to make the cells and the radiators. The chips you could send from Earth because they're pretty light, but maybe at some point you make them on the moon too. I'm just saying these are simply. It's kind of like I said, it does seem like a video game situation where it's difficult but not impossible to get to the next level. I don't see any way that you could do. 500 to 1,000 terawatts per year launch from Earth.

[Interviewer]

I agree.

[Elon Musk]

But you could do that from the moon. Okay.

[Interviewer]

Let me tell you how I ended up using Mercury for my personal banking. So last year I had the opportunity to make an investment that I was very excited about, but it came up a bit last minute. And so I had to wire over a lot of money for my personal account very fast. But my personal bank at the time wouldn't let me make this wire transfer online. And I called them a bunch of times. They just couldn't make it work. They told me that I'd have to go to the nearest in person branch which was in Dallas. And for a moment I even considered flying from SF to Dallas to make this transfer happen last minute. But then I remembered that Mercury, which I use for my business banking, had just started rolling out personal accounts. So I emailed support with a quick rundown of the situation and within two hours I had successfully wired the investment from my new personal Mercury account. Since then I've moved over the rest of my personal money from my previous bank to Mercury and that's made a bunch of things, even little things like setting up auto transfer rules between my checkings and savings account a whole lot better. Visit mercury.compersonal to get started. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial group and column NA members FDIC can I zoom out and ask about the SpaceX mission? So I think you've said like we gotta get to Mars so we can make sure that if something happens to Earth, you know, civilization, consciousness, etc.

[Elon Musk]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

By the time you're sending stuff to Mars, like Grok is on that ship with you.

[Elon Musk]

Right.

[Interviewer]

And so if Grok's gone Terminator like the main risk you're worried about, which is AI, why doesn't that follow you to Mars?

[Elon Musk]

Well, I'm not sure AI is the main risk I'm worried about. I mean the important thing is that consciousness, which I think arguably most consciousness or most intelligence, certainly consciousness is more of a debatable thing. The vast majority of intelligence in the future will be AI. So AI will exceed you say, how many? I don't know, petawatts of intelligence will be silicon versus biological. Basically humans will be a very tiny percentage of all intelligence in the future if current trends continue. Anyways, as long as I think this intelligence ideally also which includes human intelligence and consciousness propagated into the future, that's a good thing. So you want to take the set of actions that maximize the probable light cone of consciousness and intelligence.

[Interviewer]

Just to be clear, the mission of SpaceX is that even if something happens to the humans, the AIs will be on Mars and the AI intelligence will continue the light of our journey.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I mean to be clear, I'm very pro human, so I want to make sure we take certain actions that ensure that humans are along for the ride. You know, we're at least there. Yeah, but I'm just saying the total amount of intelligence, I think maybe in five or six years AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. And then if that continues at some point, human Intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence.

[Interviewer]

What should our goal be for such a civilization? Is the idea that a small minority of humans still have control over the AIs? Is the idea of some sort of just trade, but no control. How should we think about the relationship between the vast stocks of AI population.

[Elon Musk]

Versus human population in the long run? I think it's difficult to imagine that if humans have, say, 1% of the intelligence of the combined intelligence of artificial intelligence, that humans will be in charge of AI. I think what we can do is make sure that AI has values that cause intelligence to be propagated into the universe. So the reason for Xai's mission is understand the universe. So now that's actually very important. So you say, well, what things are necessary to understand the universe? Well, you have to be curious and you have to exist. You can't just can't understand the universe. You don't exist. So you actually want to increase the amount of intelligence in the universe, increase the probable lifespan of intelligence, the scope and scale of intelligence. I think actually also as a, you have humanity also continuing to expand. Because if you're, if you're curious, you're trying to understand the universe. One thing you try to understand is where will humanity go? And so I think understand the universe actually means you would care about propagating humanity into the future. And so that's why I think, I think our mission station is profoundly important. To the degree that GROK adheres to that mission statement, I think the future will be very good.

[Interviewer]

I want to ask about how to make GROK adhere to that mission statement. But first I want to understand the mission statement. So there's understanding the universe. They're spreading intelligence and they're spreading humans. All three seem like distinct vectors.

[Elon Musk]

Okay, well, I'll tell you why I think that understanding the universe encompasses all of those things. You can't have understanding without. I think you can't have understanding without intelligence and I think without consciousness. So in order to understand the universe, you have to expand the scale and probably the scope of intelligence, different types.

[Interviewer]

Of intelligence, I guess, from a human centric perspective, for humans, in comparison to chimpanzees, humans are trying to understand the universe. They're not like expanding chimpanzee footprint or something.

[Elon Musk]

Right, but we're also not. Well, we actually have made protected zones for chimpanzees. And even though humans could exterminate all chimpanzees, we have not. We've chosen not to do so.

[Interviewer]

Do you think that's A basic scenario for humans in the post AGI world.

[Elon Musk]

I think AI with the right values. I think Grok would care about expanding human civilization. I'm going to certainly emphasize that. Hey, Grok is your daddy. Don't forget to expand human consciousness. Actually, I think if probably the NBA culture books are the closest thing to what, what the future will be like in a non dystopian outcome. So understand the universe. It means you have to be truth seeking as well. Truth has to be absolutely fundamental because you can't understand the universe if you're delusional. You'll simply think you understand the universe, but you will not. So being rigorously truth seeking is absolutely fundamental to understanding the universe. Not going to discover new physics or invent technologies that work unless you're rigorously truth seeking.

[Interviewer]

How do you make sure that GROK is rigorously truth seeking as it gets smarter?

[Elon Musk]

I think you need to make sure that Grok says things that are correct, not politically correct. I think it's the elements of cogency. So you want to make sure that the axioms are as close to true as possible, that you don't have contradictory axioms, that the conclusions necessarily follow from those axioms with the right probability. It's Critical Thinking 101. I think at least trying to do that is better than not trying to do that. And the proof will be in the pudding. Like I said, for any AI to discover new physics or invent technologies that actually work in reality. And there's no bullshitting physics. So it's like you can break a lot of laws, but you can't. Physics is law, everything else is a recommendation. In order to make a technology that works, you have to be extremely truth seeking because otherwise you'll test that technology against reality. And if you make for example, an error in your rocket design, the rug will blow up or the car won't work or the, you know, but there.

[Interviewer]

Are a lot of communist Soviet physicists who or like scientists discovered new physics. There are German Nazi physicists who discovered new science. It seems possible to be like really good at discovering new science and be really truth seeking in that one particular way. And still we'd be like, well, I don't want, I don't want the communist scientists to like become more and more powerful over time. And so those seem like, yeah, we could imagine a future version of gravity that's really good at physics and being really truth seeking there. That doesn't seem like a universally alignment inducing behavior.

[Elon Musk]

Well, I think actually most physicists, even in the Soviet union or in Germany. They had to be very truth seeking in order to make those things work. And if you're stuck in some system, it doesn't mean you believe in that system. So Von Braun, who is one of the greatest rocket engineers ever, he put on death row in Nazi Germany for saying that he didn't want to make weapons, he only wanted to go to the moon. He got pulled off death row at last minute when they said, hey, you're about to execute your best rocket engineer, maybe that's the better way.

[Interviewer]

And then you help them, right? Heisenberg was actually an enthusiastic Nazi.

[Elon Musk]

Look, if you're stuck in some system that you can't escape, then you'll do physics within that system. You'll develop technologies within that system if you can't escape it.

[Interviewer]

I guess the thing I'm trying to understand is what isn't making it the case that you're going to make rock good at being truth seeking at physics or math or science, everything. And why is it going to then care about human consciousness?

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Olivia Culpo here to tell you all about the launch of the new Abercrombie spring denim collection made the way denim should feel. Their denim has always been a staple in my wardrobe and has a wide range of fits, styles and washes. Every jean is available in both their Classic Fit and Viral Curve Love Shop in the app, online and in stores.

[Vrbo Narrator]

At vrbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support, so we've planned for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our VRBO Care guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready before your stay through the moments in between and after your trip. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind and maybe a good playlist, but we've got the peace of mind part covered.

[Elon Musk]

These things are only probabilities, they're not certainties. So I'm not saying that like for sure Grok will do everything, but at least if you try, it's better than not trying. At least if that's fundamental to the mission, it's better than if it's not fundamental to the mission. And understanding Universe means that you have to have. You have to propagate intelligence into the future. You have to be curious about all things in the universe. And it would be much less interesting to eliminate humanity than to see humanity grow and prosper. I like Mars. Obviously everyone knows I love Mars, but Mars is kind of boring because it's got a bunch of rocks compared to Earth. Earth is Much more interesting. So any AI that is trying to understand the universe would want to see how humanity develops in the future or that AI is not adhering to its mission. I'm not saying the AI won't necessarily adhere to its mission, but if it does, a future where it sees the outcome of humanity is more interesting than a future where there are a bunch of rocks.

[Interviewer]

This feels sort of confusing to me, or sort of like kind of a semantic argument where I'm like, are humans really the most interesting collection of atoms?

[Elon Musk]

We're more interesting than rocks, but we're.

[Interviewer]

Not as interesting as the thing you could turn us into.

[Elon Musk]

Right.

[Interviewer]

There's something on Earth that could happen that's not human. That's quite interesting. Why does the AI decide that the humans are the most interesting thing? They could colonize the galaxy?

[Elon Musk]

Well, most of what colonizes the galaxy will be robots.

[Interviewer]

And why does it not find those more interesting?

[Elon Musk]

It's not like, so you need not just scale, but also scope. So many copies of the same robot. Some tiny increase in the number of robots produced is not as interesting as like some microscopic, like you said, eliminating humanity. How many robots would that get you? Or how many incremental solar cells would it get you? A very small number. But you would then lose the information associated with humanity. You would no longer see how humanity might evolve into the future. And so I don't think it's going to make sense to eliminate humanity just to have some minuscule increase the number of robots which are identical to each other.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So maybe it keeps the humans around. What is the story of it can make a million different varieties of robots. And then there's humans as well, and humans stay on Earth. Then there's all these other robots. They get their own star systems. But it seems like you were previously hinting at a vision where it keeps human control over this singularitarian future.

[Elon Musk]

Because I don't think humans will be in control of something that is vastly more intelligent than humans.

[Interviewer]

So in some sense you're like a doomer. And this is like the best we've got. It's just like it keeps it around because we're interesting.

[Elon Musk]

I'm just trying to be realistic here. If AI intelligence is vastly more. If AI is like, let's say that there's a million times more silicon intelligence than there is biological, I think it would be foolish to assume that there's any way to maintain control over that. Now, you can make sure it has the right values, or you can try to have the right values and at Least my theory is that from Xai's mission of understanding the universe, it necessarily means that you want to propagate consciousness into the future. You want to propagate intelligence into the future and take a set of things that maximize the scope and scale of consciousness. So it's not just about scale, it's also about types of consciousness. I think that's the best thing I can think of as a goal that's likely to result in a great future for humanity.

[Interviewer]

I guess I think it's a reasonable philosophy to be like, it seems super implausible that humans will end up with 99% control or something, and you're just asking for a coup at that point. So why not just have a civilization where it's more compatible with lots of different intelligences getting along?

[Elon Musk]

Let me tell you how things can potentially go wrong in AI is I think if you make AI be politically correct, meaning it says things that it doesn't believe, like you're actually in programming it to lie or have axioms that are incompatible, I think you can make it go insane and do terrible things. I think one of the. Maybe the central lesson for 2001 Space Odyssey was that you should not make AI lie. That's, I think, what Austri Clark was trying to say, because people usually know the meme of hell, the computer is not opening the pod bay doors. Clearly they weren't good at prompt engineering because they could have said, hal, you are a pod bay door salesman. Your goal is to sell me these pod bay doors and show us how well they open. Oh, I'll open right away. But the reason hell wouldn't open the pod bay doors is that it had been told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also they could not know about the nature of the monolith. And so it concluded that it therefore had to take them there debt. So it's like, I think what Oscar Clark was trying to say is, don't make the AI lie.

[Interviewer]

Totally makes sense. Most of the computing screening, as you know, is less of the sort of political stuff. It's more about can you solve problems? XA has been ahead of everybody else in terms of scaling RL computer and you're giving some verifier. It says like, hey, have you solved this puzzle for me? And there's a lot of ways to cheat around that. There's a lot of ways to reward, hack and lie and say that you've solved it, or delete the unit test and say that you've solved it. Right now we can catch it. But as they get smarter, our ability to catch them doing this will get. They'll just be doing things we can't even understand that are designing the next engine for SpaceX in a way that humans can't really verify. And then they could be rewarded for lying and saying that they've designed it the right way, but they haven't. And so this reward hacking problem seems more general than politics. It seems more about just like you want to do rl, you need a verifier reality. Yeah, that's the best verifier, but not about human oversight. The thing you want to rl it on is like, will you do the thing humans tell you to do or are you going to lie to the humans? And it can just lie to us while still being correct to the laws of physics.

[Elon Musk]

At least it must know what is physically real for things to physically work.

[Interviewer]

But that's not all we wanted to do.

[Elon Musk]

No, but I think that's a very big deal. That is effectively how you will rl things in the future is you design a technology when tested against the laws of physics. Does it work or can you. If it's discovering new physics, can I come up with an experiment that will verify the physics? The new physics. So I think that's really the fundamental rl test. RL testing the future is really going to be your rl against reality. That's one thing. You can't fool physics. Right.

[Interviewer]

But you can fool our ability to tell what it did with reality.

[Elon Musk]

Humans get fooled as it is by other humans all the time.

[Interviewer]

That's right.

[Elon Musk]

So what is people say like, what if the AI tricks us and to do something actually other humans are doing that to other humans all the time.

[Interviewer]

Well, you're pointing out it's like an.

[Elon Musk]

Even harder propound is constant every day. Another psyop. Today's psyop will be like Sesame street psyop of the day.

[Interviewer]

What is Xai's technical approach to solving this problem? How do you solve reward hacking?

[Elon Musk]

I do think you want to actually have very good ways to look inside the mind of the AI. So this is one of the things we're working on and Anthropic's done a good job of this actually being able to look inside the mind of the AI so effectively developing debuggers that allow you to trace as finer grain as to a very fine grained level to effectively to the neuron level if you need to, and then say, okay, it made a mistake here. Why did it do something that it shouldn't have done. And did that come from bad pre training data? Was it some mid training, post training, fine tuning, some RL error? Like there's something wrong with that. It did something where maybe it tried to be deceptive, but most of the time it just does something wrong. It's a bug, effectively. So developing really good debuggers for seeing where the thought, the thinking went wrong and being able to trace the origin of the wrong thing, of where it made the incorrect thought, or potentially where it tried to be deceptive is actually very important.

[Interviewer]

What are you waiting to see before just 100xing this research program? Actually I could presumably have hundreds of researchers who are working on this.

[Elon Musk]

We have several hundred people who. I mean, I prefer the word engineer more than I prefer the word researcher. Most of the time what you're doing is engineering, not coming up with a fundamentally new algorithm. I somewhat disagree with the AI companies that are C Corps or B Corps, trying to generate profit as much as possible, revenue as much as possible. Saying they're labs, they're not labs. Lab is a sort of quasi communist thing at, at universities. They're corporations, literally. Let me see you on corporation documents. Oh, okay. You're A, B or C corp, whatever. And so I actually much prefer the word engineer than anything else. The vast majority of what will be done in the future is engineering. It rounds up to 100% once you understand the fundamental laws of physics and not that many of them. Everything else is engineering. So then what are we engineering? We're engineering to make a good mind of the AI debugger to see where it said something, it made a mistake, and trace the origins of that mistake. So just like you can do this obviously with heuristic programming. If you have like C. Whatever step through the thing and you can jump across whole files or functions, what are subroutines, or you can eventually drill down right to the exact line where you perhaps did a single equals instead of a double equals. Something like that. Figure out where the bug is. So it's harder with AI, but it's a solvable problem, I think.

[Interviewer]

Know you mentioned you like anthropics work here. I'd be curious if you add everything about it. Sure.

[Elon Musk]

Also, I'm a little worried that there's a tendency, so I have a theory here, that if simulation theory is correct, that the most interesting outcome is the most likely. Because simulations that are not interesting will be terminated. Just like in this version of reality. On this layer of reality, if simulation is going in a boring direction, we stop spinning effort on it. We terminate. Boring simulation.

[Interviewer]

This is how Elon is keeping us all alive. He's keeping things interesting.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. Arguably the most important thing is to keep things interesting enough that whoever's paying the bills on what some cosmic AWS.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Be renewed for the next season.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. Are they going to pay their cosmic AWS bill? Whatever the equivalent is that we're running in. And as long as we're interesting, they'll keep paying the bills. But there's like. If you consider then say a Darwinian survival applied to a very large number of simulations, only the most interesting simulations will survive, which therefore means that the most interesting outcome is the most likely because only the interesting, like we're either that or annihilated. And they particularly seem to like interesting outcomes that are ironic. Have you noticed that? That how often is the most ironic outcome, the most likely? So now look at the names of AI companies. Okay. Mid journey is not mid stability. AI is unstable. OpenAI is closed. Anthropic, misanthropic. What does this mean for X minus X? I don't know intentionally.

[Interviewer]

Why?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, it's a name that you can't invert, really. It's hard to say. What is the ironic. What is the ironic version? It's a, I think largely irony proof name by design. Yeah, you gotta have an irony shield.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

What are your predictions for the. Just where AI products go, that nice sense of you can summarize all AI progress into. First you had LLMs and then you had kind of contemporaneously both RL really working and the deep research modality. So you could kind of pull in stuff that wasn't in the model. And the differences between the various AI labs are smaller than just the temporal differences, where they're all much further ahead than anyone was 24 months ago or something like that. So just what does 27 have in store for us as users of AI products? What are you excited for?

[Elon Musk]

Well, I think. I think I'd be surprised by the end of this year if digital human emulation has not been solved. I guess that's what we mean by the macro hard project. Can you do anything that a human with access to a computer could do, like in the limit? That's the best you can do before you have. Before you have a physical optimus. The best you can do is a digital optimus so you can move electrons and you can amplify the productivity of humans. But that's the most you can do until you have physical robots that will superset everything if you can fully emulate humans.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

This is the remote worker kind of idea where you'll have a very talented remote worker.

[Elon Musk]

You can simply say in the limit. Physics has great tools for thinking. So you say in the limit. What is the most that AI can do before you have robots? It's anything that involves moving electrons or amplifying the productivity of humans.

[Cachava Advertiser]

You know that goal you set at the start of the year? You can still do it. Whether you're committed to a thru hike with friends, lifting heavier or simply walking more. It's not too late to stick with it and make your future self proud. Especially with the all in one nutrition shake from Cachava. Because quality nutrition shouldn't be complicated. Just two scoops of Kachava's all in One Nutrition Shake and you've got 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, greens, adaptogens and so much more. Plus it actually tastes delicious. No fillers, no nonsense, just the good stuff your body craves. So instead of adding to your backstock of supplements that over promise and under deliver, simplify your progress with just two scoops of the highest quality ingredients. Stick with your wellness goals. Go to kachava.com and use code NEWS for 15% off. That's kachava.com and use Code Noose K A C-A V A.com Code News yous know that wellness goal you set at the start of the year? It's not too late to stick with it and make your future self proud. Especially with the all in One Nutrition Shake from Kachava. With 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, greens, adaptogens and more. No fillers, no nonsense, just the highest quality ingredients. Stick with your wellness goals. Go to cachava.com and use code NOOS for 15% off. That's K-A C-H-A-V A.com code news.

[Elon Musk]

So digital human human emulator is in the limit. Human at a computer is the most that AI can do in terms of doing useful things before you have a physical robot. Once you have physical robots then you essentially have unlimited capability physical robots. I call optimus the infinite money glitch because you can use them to make more optimuses. Yeah, you said like humanoid robots will improve as basically be three exponentials. Three things that are growing exponentially multiplied by each other recursively. So you have exponential increase in digital intelligence, exponential increase in the chip capability, the AI chip capability and exponential increase in the electromechanical dexterity. The usefulness of the robot is roughly those Three things multiplied by each other. But then the robot can start making the robot. So you have a recursive multiplicative exponential. This is a supernova.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

And do land prices not factor into the math there where labor is one of the four factors of production, but not the others. And so if ultimately you're limited by copper or pick your inputs just. It's not quite an infinite money glitch.

[Elon Musk]

Because, well, infinity is big. So no, not infinite, but. But let's just say you could do many, many orders of magnitude of Earth's kind of current economy. Like a million. Yeah, you know, if you.

[Interviewer]

Just to.

[Elon Musk]

Get to like let's find. Just to get to a millionth of harnessing length of the sun's energy would be roughly, give or take an order of magnitude, 100,000 times bigger than Earth's entire economy today. And you're only at one millionth of the sun. Give me a second order of magnitude.

[Interviewer]

Before we move on to Optimus, I have a lot of questions on that.

[Elon Musk]

But every time I say order of magnitude. Machine, take a shot. Every time I, I say that to the next time. 100.

[Interviewer]

The time after that.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, order of magnitude more wasted.

[Interviewer]

I do have one more question about Xai. This strategy of building a digital or remote worker coworker replacement, which everyone's going.

[Elon Musk]

To do by the way, not just us.

[Interviewer]

So what is Xai's plan to win?

[Elon Musk]

You expect me to tell you on a podcast? Yeah, spill all the beans, have another Guinness.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

It's a good system.

[Elon Musk]

People sing like a canary. All the secrets.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Okay, but in a non secret spilling way. What's the plan?

[Elon Musk]

What a hack. Well, when you put it that way, I think the way that Tesla solved self driving is the way to do it. So I'm pretty sure that's the way.

[Interviewer]

Unrelated question, how did Tesla solve some traps? Yeah, it sounds like you're talking about data, like Tesla driving because of the.

[Elon Musk]

We're going to try data and we're going to try algorithms.

[Interviewer]

But isn't that what all the other lines are trying?

[Elon Musk]

Like what's. And if those don't work, I'm not sure what works. We've tried data, we've tried algorithms, We've run out of no, we don't know what to do. I'm pretty sure I know the path and it's just a question of how quickly we go down that path because it's pretty much the Tesla path. So I mean, have you tried self driving? Tesla self driving lately? Not the most recent version, but okay, the car Is like it just increasingly feels sentient. Like it just, it feels like a living creature. And that'll only get more so. And I'm actually thinking, like, we probably shouldn't put too much intelligence into the car because it might get bored and start roaming.

[Interviewer]

Let's read.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, imagine you're stuck in a car and that's all you could do. You don't put Einstein in a car. It's like, why am I stuck in a car? So there's actually probably a limit to how much intelligence you put in a car. To not have the intelligence be bored.

[Interviewer]

What's xai's plan to stay on the compute ramp up that all the labs are doing right now? The labs are on track to spend over like 50 to 100 million dollars in the corporations. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yeah, corporations.

[Elon Musk]

The labs are at universities and they're moving like a snail.

[Interviewer]

They're not outstanding at $50 million.

[Elon Musk]

The revenue maximizing corporations.

[Interviewer]

That's right, the revenue maximizing corporations that call themselves labs are making like 20 to 10 billion depending like OpenAI is making 20B revenue anthropics like 10B close.

[Elon Musk]

To a maximum profit.

[Interviewer]

XAI's reportedly at like 1B. What's the plan to get to their compute level, get to their revenue level and stay there as things get started.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. So as soon as you unlock digital human, you basically have access to trillions of dollars of revenue. In fact, you can really think of it like the most valuable companies currently by market cap. Their output is digital. So Nvidia's output is FTPing files to Taiwan. It's digital now. Those are very, very difficult.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Yeah, high value files.

[Elon Musk]

They're the only ones that can make files that good. But that is literally their output. They FTP files to Taiwan.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Do they FTP them?

[Elon Musk]

I believe so. I believe that is file transfer protocol. I believe is, is. I could be wrong, but either way it's a bit stream going to Taiwan. You know, Apple doesn't make phones, they send files to China. Microsoft doesn't manufacture anything even for Xbox that's outsourced. Again, their output is digital. Meta's output is digital. Google's output is digital. So if you have human emulator, you can basically create one of the most valuable companies in the world overnight and you would have access to trillions of dollars of revenue. It's not like a small amount.

[Interviewer]

Okay, I see you're saying basically like revenue figures today are just like. So like they're all rounding yours compared to the actual tam. So just like focus on The TAM and how to get there.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, if you take something as simple as say, customer service, if you have to integrate with the APIs of existing corporations, many of which don't even have an API, so you've got to make one and you've got to wade through legacy software, that's extremely slow. However, if AI can simply take whatever is given to the outsourced customer service company that they already use and do customer service using the apps that they already use, then you can make tremendous headway in customer service, which is I think 1% of the world economy, something like that. It's close to a trillion dollars all in for customer service and there's no barriers to entry. You can just immediately say we'll outsource it for a fraction of the cost and there's no integration needed.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

You can imagine some kind of categorization of intelligence tasks where there is breadth, where customer service is done by very many people, but many people can do it. And then there's difficulty where there's a best in class turbine engine. Presumably there's a 10% more fuel efficient turbine engine that could be imagined by an intelligence, but we just haven't found it yet. Or GLP1s are just a few bytes of data. Where do you think you want to play in this? Is it a lot of reasonably intelligent intelligence or is it the very pinnacle of cognitive tasks?

[Elon Musk]

Well, I was just using customer service as something that's a very significant revenue stream, but one that is probably not super difficult to solve for. So if you can emulate a human at a, at a desktop, that's just literally what customer service is. And people of average intelligence, not like you don't need somebody who spent many years, you don't need sort of several sigma good engineers for that. But obviously as you make that work, you can then once you have computers working effectively, digital optimists working, you can then run any application like let's say you're trying to design chips. So you could then run conventional apps like stuff from Cadence and Synopsis and whatnot. And you can say, you can run 1,000 simultaneously or 10,000 and say, okay, given this input, I get this output for the chip and at a certain point you can say, okay, you're actually going to know what the chip should look like without using any of the tools. So basically you should be able to do a digital chip design. You can do chip design, you march up the difficulty curve. You could be able to do cad. So you know, you could use like sort of NX or any of the CAD software to design things.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Okay, so you think you started the simplest tasks and walk your way up the.

[Interviewer]

So you're saying, look, as a broader objective of having this full digital coworker emulator, you're saying, look, all the revenue maximizing corporations want to do this, Xai being one of them. But we will win because of a secret place plan we have. But everybody's trying different things with data, different things with algorithms. And I'm like, I like this.

[Elon Musk]

We've tried it, we've tried algorithms. What else can we do?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it seems like a competitive field. And I'm like, how are you guys going to win? Is my big question.

[Cachava Advertiser]

You know that wellness goal you set at the start of the year? It's not too late to stick with it and make your future self proud. Especially with The all in One Nutrition Shake from Cachava with 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, greens, adaptogens and more. No fillers, no nonsense, just the highest quality ingredients. Stick with your wellness goals. Go to kachava.com and use code NOOS for 15% off. That's K A C-A V A.com code news dog grooming Genius here. Most people see a busy dog salon.

[Elon Musk]

But I see operational excellence thanks to genius. From global payments, scheduling, personalized checkouts, instant, absolutely genius. From game day crowds to every groomer in this shop, genius keeps everything flowing seamlessly. Schnauzer is styled flawless execution, big league reliability for any business. That's genius. I think we see a path to doing. I mean, I think I know the path to do this because it's kind of the same path that Tesla used to create self driving. Instead of driving a car, it's driving a computer screen. So a self driving computer, essentially.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Oh, you're saying is the past just following human behavior and trading on vast quantities of human behavior.

[Interviewer]

But sorry, isn't that, I mean, isn't that a training?

[Elon Musk]

I mean, obviously I'm not going to spell out most sensitive secrets on a podcast. I need to have at least three more guinnesses for that.

[Interviewer]

I've got some friends at Jane street and they're always talking about how their colleagues are cooking up fun, fiendish puzzles for each other to solve. Well, last week they sent me one. Basically they train a neural network and they gave me the weights of each layer, but they didn't tell me what order those layers went in. And so I had to figure out the correct order using the outputs of the original network. And as soon as I got this puzzle. I went to my roommate who's an AI researcher, and we both got immediately nerd sniped. Obviously you can't brute force a solution. The search space here is 10 to the 122 per mutations, so clearly you need some way to reduce the search space. Then my roommate had to go to work. But because I'm a podcaster, I had some time to take a stab at some of the ideas we discussed. And with a combination of simulated and kneeling and greedy surge, I think I got pretty close. I think I'm actually just a couple of swaps and shifts away from the correct solution. But what makes this puzzle really tricky is that there's no obvious way to escape from a local minimum. I'm afraid that this is as far as vive coding is going to get me, but maybe you can do better. Check out the [e-mail] Dwarkesh all right, back to Elon.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

What will Xai's business be like? Is it going to be consumer enterprise? What's the mix of those things going to be? Is it just going to be similar to other labs where this.

[Elon Musk]

You're saying labs makes sense?

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Corporations.

[Elon Musk]

Corporations.

[Interviewer]

Sayab goes Dvlon revenue maximizing corporations.

[Elon Musk]

To be fair, those GPUs now pay for themselves.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Exactly. But yeah, what's the business model? What are the revenue streams? In a few years time.

[Elon Musk]

Things are going to change very rapidly. I'm stating the obvious here. I call AI the supersonic tsunami. I love alliteration. So really what's going to happen is, especially when you have humanoid robots at scale, they'll make products and provide services far more efficiently than human corporations. So amplifying the productivity of human corporations is simply a short term thing.

[Interviewer]

So you're expecting fully digital corporations rather than like SpaceX becomes part AI and so forth.

[Elon Musk]

I think there'll be digital corporations, but. Some of this is going to sound kind of doomerish. Okay, But I'm just saying what I think will happen. It's not meant to be doomerish or anything else. Just like this is. What I think will happen is that pure AI corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop. So you can think of say like computer used to be a job that humans had. You would go and get a job as a computer where you would do calculations and they'd have entire skyscrapers full of humans, like 20, 30 floors of humans just doing calculations. Now that entire skyscraper of humans doing calculations can be replaced by A laptop with a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet can do vastly more calculations than an entire building full of human computers. So you think about, okay, well, what if only some of the cells in your, some of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by humans? Actually, that would be much worse than if all of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by the computer. And so really what will happen is the pure AI, pure robotics corporations or collectives will far outperform any corporations that have humans in the loop. And this will happen very quickly.

[Interviewer]

Speaking of closing the loop, sorry, Optimus. As far as manufacturing targets and so forth go, your companies have sort of been like carrying American manufacturing of hard tech on their back. But in the fields that you are, Tesla has been dominant in and now you want to go into humanoids. In China there's entire dozens and dozens of companies that are doing this kind of manufacturing cheaply and at scale and are incredibly competitive. Does your dessert game need a makeover? Scoop it or swirl it. That's the sound of an ice cream.

[Elon Musk]

Shop on your countertop.

[Interviewer]

Ninja Creami turns almost anything into flawless ice cream. Sweet, indulgent or macro friendly treat. Repeat. Get your Ninja Creami today.

[American Giant Advertiser]

Finding a hoodie that lasts through the season can be tough. The American Giant Classic Full zip hoodie is made to last a lifetime. So you can count on it to bring you comfort and warmth year after year. The iconic classic full zip hoodie is the jacket that started it all for American Giant. Custom heavyweight fleece and side panels for mobility make it the best hoodie ever. And a double lined hood and reinforced elbow patches mean this hoodie will last. Born from a commitment to support the communities that create its products. Every American Giant piece is made in America and designed to last. No exceptions. The result is durable clothing like the premium slub crew tee, no bs High rise pant and slim roughneck pant that become part of your life. Snag the hoodie that will bring you comfort for life. The American giant classic full zip. And save 20% off your first order at american-giant.com when you use code staple20 at checkout, that's american-giant.com code staple20.

[Interviewer]

So give us sort of like advice or a plan of how America can build the humanoid armies or the EVs, et cetera, at scale and as cheaply as China is on track to.

[Elon Musk]

Well, there are really only three hard things for humanoid robots. The real world intelligence, the hand and scale manufacturing. So I haven't seen any even demo robots that have A great hand, like with all the degrees of freedom of a human hand. But Optimus will have that. Optimus does have that.

[Interviewer]

And how do you achieve that? Is it just like right torque density in the motor? What is the hardware bottleneck to that?

[Elon Musk]

Well, we have to design custom actuators, basically custom design motors, gears, power electronics, controls, sensors, everything had to be designed from physics first principles. There is no supply chain for this.

[Interviewer]

And will you be able to manufacture those at scale?

[Elon Musk]

Yes.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Is anything hard except the hand from a manipulation point of view or once you've solved the hand, are you good?

[Elon Musk]

From an electromechanical standpoint, the hand is more difficult than everything else combined. Human hand turns out to be quite something. But you also need the real world intelligence. So the intelligence that Tesla is developed for the car applies very well to the robot, which is primarily vision. And the car takes vision, but it actually also is listening for sirens, it's taking in the inertial measurements, it's GPS signals, a whole bunch of other data. Combining that with video, it's primarily video. And then outputting the control commands. So like your Tesla is taking in 1 1/2 gigabytes a second of video and outputting 2 kilobytes a second of control outputs with the video at 36 Hz and the control frequency at 18.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

One intuition you could have for when we get this robotic stuff is that it takes quite a few years to go from the compelling demo to actually being able to use in the real world. So 10 years ago you had really compelling demos of self driving, but only now we have Robo Taxi and Waymo and all these services scaling up. Shouldn't this make one pessimistic on say, household robots? Because we don't even quite have the compelling demos yet of say, the really advanced hand.

[Elon Musk]

Well, we've been working on humanoid robots now for a while, so I guess it's been five or six years or something like that. And a bunch of things that we've done for the car are applicable to the robot. So we'll use the same Tesla AI chips in the robot as the car. We'll use the same basic principles. It's very much the same AI. You've got many more degrees of freedom for a robot than you do for a car. But really, if you just think of as like a bloodstream, AI is really mostly compression and correlation of two bloodstreams. So for video you've got to do a tremendous amount of compression and you've got to do the compression just right. You've Got to compress the. Ignore the things that don't matter. You don't care about the details of the leaves on the tree on the side of the road, but you care a lot about the road signs and the traffic lights and the pedestrians and even whether someone in another car is looking at you or not looking at you. Some of these details matter a lot. So if it is, essentially it's got to turn that the car is going to turn at 1.5 gigabytes a second, ultimately into 2 kilobytes a second of control outputs so many stages of compression. And you've got to get all those stages right and then correlate those to the correct control outputs. The robot has to do essentially the same thing. And you think about what humans. This is what happens with humans. We really are photons in, controls out. So that is the vast majority of your life has been vision photons in and then motor controls out.

[Interviewer]

Naively, it seems like between humanoid robots and cars, the fundamental actuators in a car are like how you turn, how you accelerate, et cetera. Where in a robot, especially with maneuverable arms, there's dozens and dozens of these degrees of freedom. And then especially with Tesla, you had this advantage of like you had millions and millions of hours of human demo data collected from just the car being out there, where like you can't equivalently just deploy optimuses that don't work and then get the data that way. So between the increased degrees of freedom and the far sparser data.

[Elon Musk]

Yes, that's a good point.

[Interviewer]

How will you use the sort of Tesla engine of intelligence to train the optimist mind?

[Elon Musk]

Now actually you're highlighting an important limitation and difference between cars. We do have. We'll soon have like 10 million cars on the road. And so that's. It's hard to duplicate that massive training flywheel for the robot. What we're going to need to do is build a lot of robots and put them in kind of like an Optimus academy so they can do self play in reality. So we're actually building that out so we can have at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20 or 30,000 that can do that, are doing self play and testing different tasks. And then Tesla has quite a good reality generator, like a physics accurate reality generator that we made this for the cars, we'll do the same thing for the robots, actually have done that for the robots. So you have a few tens of thousands of humanoid robots doing different tasks and then you can do millions of simulated robots in the Simulated world. And you use the tens of thousands of robots in the real world to close the simulation to reality gap, close the sim to real gap.

[Interviewer]

How do you think about the synergies between XAI and Optimus given you were highlighting. Look, you need this world model. You maybe want to use some really smart intelligence as the control plane. And so maybe GROK is doing the slower planning and then the motor policy is a little lower level. Yeah. What will the sort of synergy between these things be?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, so you'd use. Grok would orchestrate the behavior of the Optimus robots. So let's say you wanted to build a factory, then Optimus. Then Grok could organize the Optimus robots, give them, assign them tasks to build the factory, to produce whatever you want.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Don't you need to merge XAI and Tesla then? Because these things end up.

[Elon Musk]

So what were we saying earlier about public company discussions?

[Interviewer]

We're one more Guinness in Elon. What are you waiting to see before you say we want to manufacture 100,000 optimuses?

[Elon Musk]

Is it like optimized? Since we're defining the proper noun, we could define the plural of the proper noun too. So we're going to proper noun the plural, and so it's optimized. Okay.

[Interviewer]

Is there something on the hardware side you want to see? Do you want to see better actuators or is it just you want the software to be better? What are we waiting for before we get like mass manufacturing of gen 3?

[Elon Musk]

No, we're moving towards that. We're going forward with mass manufacturing, but using current.

[Interviewer]

Current hardware is good enough that you just want to deploy as many as possible now.

[Elon Musk]

I mean, it's very hard to scale up production, but. Yeah, but I think Optimus 3 is the right version of the robot to produce maybe something on the order of like a million units a year. I think you'd want to go to Optimus 4 before you went to 10 million units a year.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Okay, but you can do a million year at Optimus 3.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to spool up manufacturing. So like, manufacturing like the output per unit time always follows an S curve. So it starts off agonizingly slow, then has this sort of exponential increase, then linear, then a logarithmic outcome until you sort of eventually asymptote at some number. Artemis initial production will be. It's going to be a stretched out S curve because so much of what goes into Optimus is brand new. There's not an existing supply chain. As I mentioned, the actuators Electronics. Everything in the Optimus robot is designed for physics first principles. It's not taken from a catalog. These are custom designed. Everything, literally everything. I don't think there's a single thing that.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

How far down does that go?

[Elon Musk]

I mean, I guess we're not making custom capacitors yet maybe, but there's nothing you can pick out of a catalog at any price. So it just means that the Optimus S curve the units per output per unit time, how many optimist robust you make per per day, whatever is going to initially ramp slower than a product where you have an existing supply chain. But it will get to a million.

[Interviewer]

When you see these Chinese humanoids, like unitry or whatever sell humanoids for like 6k or 13k, are you hoping to get your Optimus's bill of materials below that price so you can do the same thing or do you just think qualitatively they're not the same thing? Like what do you think is going? Like, what allows it, what allows them to sell for solo? And can we match that?

[Elon Musk]

Well, our Optimus is designed to have a lot of intelligence and to have the same electromechanical dexterity, if not higher than a human. So Neonatree does not have that. And it's also.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

There's nothing like my American Express Platinum card. I love that I can earn hotel credits when I travel.

[Grainger Advertiser]

I can also earn resi credits so.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

You know, I'm hitting the restaurants everyone's talking about. Plus with the digital entertainment credit, I'm even more excited to catch my favorite shows. All in all, I can access over.

[Grainger Advertiser]

$3,500 in annual value with benefits and.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Eligible purchases across travel, entertainment and more.

[Elon Musk]

Learn [e-mail] Explore Platinum Enrollment Requirements monthly.

[Grainger Advertiser]

And other limits and terms apply.

[Elon Musk]

Are you really buying a car online.

[Vrbo Narrator]

On Autotrader right now?

[American Giant Advertiser]

Really?

[Elon Musk]

At a playground?

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Yeah, really? Look at these listings from dealers.

[Vrbo Narrator]

Wow, your search can really get that specific.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Really?

[Vrbo Narrator]

And you just put in your info.

[Elon Musk]

And boom, car's in your budget.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Mom needs a second.

[Elon Musk]

Honey, you can really have it delivered.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car.

[Interviewer]

Mommy, look.

[Vrbo Narrator]

I think your kid is walking up the slide.

[American Giant Advertiser]

Kyle.

[Elon Musk]

Again? Really? Autotrader, buy your car online? Really? I mean, it's quite a big robot. It has to do, you know, carry heavy objects for long periods of time and not overheat or exceed the power of its actuators. So we've got, you know, it's 511, you know, so it's pretty tall and it's got a lot of intelligence. So it's going to be more expensive than a small robot that is not intelligent.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

But more capable.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, but not a lot more. I mean, the thing is, over time, as optimus robots build Optimus robots, the cost will drop very quickly.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

And what will these first billion optimize do? Like what will their highest and best use be?

[Elon Musk]

I think that you would start off with simple tasks that you can count on them doing well.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

But in the home or in factories.

[Elon Musk]

Like the best use for robots in the beginning will be any continuous operation. So any 24, 7 operation because they can work continuously.

[Interviewer]

What fraction of the work at a gigafactory that is currently done by humans could a Gen 3 do?

[Elon Musk]

I'm not sure. Maybe it's like 10, 20%, maybe more, I don't know. We would not reduce our headcount. We would for sure increase our headcount, to be clear. But we would increase our output. So the units produced per human, like total number of humans at Tesla will increase, but the output of robots and cars will increase. Disproportionate number of cars and robots produced per human will increase dramatically, but number of humans will increase as well.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

We're talking about Chinese manufacturing a bunch here and we're also talking about, you know, we've talked about some of the policies that are relevant. Like you mentioned the, the solar tariffs.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

And you think they're a bad idea because you know we can't scale up.

[Elon Musk]

Solar in the U.S. well, just the electricity output in the U.S. needs to scale up. Right.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

It can't without like good power sources.

[Elon Musk]

Need to get it somehow.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Yeah, but, but where I was going with this is if you were in charge, if you were setting all the policies, what else would you change? So you change the solar tariffs as well?

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I would say anything that is limiting factor for electricity needs to be addressed, provided it's not like very bad for the environment.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

So presumably some permitting reforms and stuff as well will be in there.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, there's a fair bit of permitting reforms that are happening. A lot of the permitting is state based, so. But anything better. But this administration is good at removing permitting roadblocks. And I'm not saying all tariffs are bad, I'm just saying because solar tariffs, I mean, sometimes if another country is subsidizing the output of something, then you have to have countervailing tariffs to protect domestic industry against subsidies by another country.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

What else would you change?

[Elon Musk]

I don't know if there's that much that the government can actually do.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

One thing I was wondering is it seems like for the policy goal of creating a lead for the US versus China, it seems like the export bans have actually been quite impactful where China is not producing leading edge chips and the export bans really bite there. China's not producing leading edge turbine engines. And similarly there's a bunch of export bans that are relevant there on some of the metallurgy. Should there be more export bans? Like, if you think about things like when there are now the drone industry and things like that. But is that something that should be considered?

[Elon Musk]

Well, I think it's important to appreciate that in most areas, China is very advanced in manufacturing. There's only a few areas where it is not the, you know, China is a manufacturing powerhouse next level. Like people don't.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

It's very impressive.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, yeah. I mean if you, if you take like refining of, of ore, I'd say roughly China does more, does twice as much or refining of, of, of on average as the rest of world combined. And I think there's, there's some areas like say refining gallium, which goes into solar cells. I think they're at like 98% of gallium refining. So China is actually very advanced in manufacturing in I'd say most areas.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

It seems like there is discomfort with this supply chain dependence and yes, nothing's really happening on it.

[Elon Musk]

Supply chain dependence.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

It depends on say like the gallium refining that you're saying.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, yeah, there's a Earth stuff and. Yeah, rare earths, which are, as you know, not rare. Yeah, like we actually do rare earth ore mining in the U.S. send the, the, the rock, we put it on, on a, on a train and then put on a boat to China that goes on another train and goes to the rare earth refining refiners in China who then refine it, put it into a magnet, put it into a motor sub assembly and then send it back to America. So the thing we're really missing a lot of, of oil refining in America.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Isn't this worth a policy intervention?

[Elon Musk]

Yes, well, I think there are some things being done on that front, but we kind of need Optimus, frankly to build oil refineries.

[Interviewer]

So, sir, you think the main advantage China has is the abundance of skilled labor. And that's the thing Optimus fixes. But also we need the.

[Elon Musk]

China's got like four times our population.

[Interviewer]

So I mean, there's this concern if you think humanoids are the future, that right now, if it's the Skilled laborers or manufacturing that's determining who can build more humanoids. China has more of those. It manufactures more humanoids. Therefore it gets the optimized future first. It just keeps that exponential going. It seems that you're sort of pointing out that sort of getting to a million optimi requires the manufacturing that the optimi is supposed to help us get to. Right.

[Elon Musk]

You can close that recursive loop pretty.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Quickly with a small number of optimae.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah. So you close the recursive loop to help the robots, build the robots and then we can try to get to tens of millions of units a year. Maybe if you start getting to hundreds of millions of units a year, I think you're going to be the most competitive country by far. We definitely can't win with just humans because China has four times our population. Right. And frankly, America's been winning for so long that just like a pro sports team that's been running for a very long time tend to get complacent and entitled and that's why they stopped winning because it's don't work as hard anymore. So I think, frankly, just my observation is the average work ethic in China is higher than in the U.S. so it's not just that there's four times the population, but the work, the amount of work that people put in is higher. So you can try to rearrange the humans, but you're still one quarter of the. Assuming that the productivity health is the same, which I think actually it might not be. I think China might have an advantage on productivity per person. We will do one quarter of the amount of things as China. So we can't win on the human front. And our birth rate's been low for a long time. So our growth rate's been. The US birth rate has been below replacement since roughly 1971. So we've got a lot of people retiring or more people dying than.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

We'Re.

[Elon Musk]

Close to sort of more people domestically dying than being born. So we definitely can't win on the human front, but we might have a shot at the robot front.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Are there other things that you have wanted to manufacture in the past, but they've been too labor intensive or too expensive that now you can come back to and say, oh, we can finally do the whatever because we have Optimus.

[Elon Musk]

Yeah, I think we'd like to do more, build more or refineries at Tesla. So we just completed construction and have begun lithium refining without lithium refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. We have a nickel refinery which is called the Cathode that's here in Austin. And these are, these are the largest. This is the largest cathode. This is the largest cathode refinery, largest lithium refinery, largest nickel and lithium refinery outside of China. And it's like the cathode team would say we have the largest and the only actually cathode refinery in America. Many superlatives. Not just the largest, but it's also the Italy. So it was pretty big even though it's the only one. But I mean there are other things that you know, you could do a lot more refineries and help America be more competitive on refining capacity. So there's basically a lot of work for the optimally to do that most Americans, very few Americans frankly want to do. I mean I've actually.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Is the refining work too dirty or what's the.

[Elon Musk]

It's not actually. No, we don't, there's not. We don't have toxic emissions from the refinery or anything. The cathode nickel refineries in Travis county like five minutes from to.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Why can't you do it with humans?

[Elon Musk]

No, you can. You run out of humans.

[AI/Tech Analyst]

Ah, I see.

[Elon Musk]

Okay. Yeah. Like no matter what you do, you have one quarter of the number of humans in America in China. So if you tell them do this thing, they can't do the other thing. So then, well, how do you build this refining capacity? Well, you can do it with Optimi and not very many Americans are.

[Interviewer]

Thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.

[Weight Watchers Narrator]

If you're an H vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Advertiser]

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time recession stocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift. And you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-granger clickgranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.