Elon Musk on AI, China, Tesla and Succession Planning | WSJ

Elon, hello, welcome. Are you in Palo Alto? I understand, yeah, first. Well, a Global Engineering headquarters in Palo Alto? Great well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm actually going to start somewhere a little bit differently than I expected, because I just saw on Twitter, on Twitter, a little announcement. I would love to get your your thoughts on it. I see your interviewing Rhonda santis tomorrow morning. Is that right on Twitter spaces? I see, yes, it's, I need like the exact time, but, oh, tomorrow morning, your time, I think it would be probably correct, okay, so, yes, I will be interviewing Ron Santos and he has quite an announcement to make and we'll be. Show more

We're the first time that's something like this is happening on social media and with the real-time questions and answers, no, not scripted. So it's Gonna Be Live and Let. Let, let's see what happens foreign, and you've been tweeting some Tim Scott stuff in the last few days. What should we be thinking about? Who you're backing? Obviously, this interview tells us something. Can you give us a sense of where your thinking is at the moment? Yes, I mean, I'm not at this time planning to endorse any particular cancer, but I am interested in, you know, X slash, Twitter being somewhat of a public town square and where more and more organizations host content and make announcements on Twitter. It's the. It's the only place on the internet to really get real-time, like down to the minute and second news, and it's yeah. So I think it's. It's quite groundbreaking that there'd be a major announcement of this type on social media. And should we expect- sorry, I don't want to go on too long about this, but in your new role as interviewer rather than interviewee, should we expect? Should we expect, more of this? I mean, if it's the Town Square, are you going to be interviewing other candidates, Democrats? What's your? What's your thought of this? Are people willing to come? Are you going to be there to execute the Town Square across the Spectryes? Absolutely so, just as I, as I promised when I do a series of media interviews. I did a range of interviews and I guess this would be also a media interview- so ranging from sort of on the you know left, moderate, to what's considered right, and I do think it's important that Twitter be have both the reality and the procession of Level Playing Field, of a place where all voices are heard and where, as the kind of dynamic interaction that is you don't really see anywhere else. I'll meet you today on Twitter, for example, AOC got into an and Ted Cruz got into an argument on Twitter which was, yeah, independent of which side do you agree with it's still very entertaining. So what? And I'm sure tomorrow will be entertaining, we're all going to be tuned into that. Show more

But when you, when you approach an interview like that and and obviously a really important election like the one that is coming up, you, can you just talk a little bit about what are the key issues that really matter for you at this pivotal moment? You can matter for me as an individual, or matter for you as an individual in terms of who leads the country, but also you know more broadly than that. Show more

You know for the country and for for your businesses. I mean, can you give your sense of of where the real issues lie here? Well, I've said publicly that my preference, and I think would be the preference of most Americans, is really to have someone fairly normal in office. I think we'd all be quite, quite happy with that. Actually, you know, I think, someone that is representative of the moderate views that I think most the country holds in reality, and but but the way things are set up is that we. We do have a system that seems to push things towards the edges because of the primaries. So in order to win the primary, you've got to win, obviously, majority of your parties vote in both cases. That tends to cause a swing to the left and the right, although I think things are more complex than simply left and right during the primaries and then and then let's shift towards the center for the Journal election. As far what, what I think is yeah, so I would really just like someone you know fairly normal, accessible, to be the president. Show more

That would be great. So if we go through the, if we go through the four names in the frame at the moment, can you just give a sort of yes, no, whether they're normal and sensible? So we've got Joe Biden. I, I think you know, be careful about these statements, so I we'd maybe have to have a few drinks before I would give you the answers. I will. I will look forward to that and I look forward to the, to the conversation tomorrow and obviously a lot more of those to come over the coming months. So that's great. Show more

Thank you very much. So what I wanted to start with you've just flown in, I think in the last 20 minutes. You live a pretty hectic lifestyle, but you've said that the only true currency is time. Can you give a sense to the people in this room who are scheduled within an inch of their lives, sort of how you you, what is a day in the life of Elon Musk? What does that look like? Well, weddings are very long and complicated, as you might imagine. Yeah, and, and there's a great, there's a great deal of context. Switching so doesn't mean my life called like relating to Doom, where it's like fear is not the mind killer. Show more

Context switching is. So switching context is is quite painful, but I do generally try to divide companies. That's predominantly one company on one day. So today is a Tesla day, for example, although I might end up at Twitter late tonight, and then tomorrow would be partly a Tesla day as well- have Twitter and, and then Thursday would be sort of a half SpaceX have Tesla day, but these things are somewhat intertwined. So the time management is extremely difficult and this is going to sound pretty strange, but I I only have one part-time assistant. How many days a week is that the part-time I mean? I suppose I suppose how she works- who were technically full-time, but as such, I, I do most of the scheduling myself, and the reason I do that is because it's impossible for someone else to know what the priorities are. So the and since the most valuable thing I have is time, I schedule it myself for the most part. So if you come into Tesla today, do you have a series of meetings set up, or do you come in with you know something on your mind and you go in and see people. I mean, how structured is this? Or if you shop at Twitter, in terms of the people working for you, how do they? How do they handle that? Yeah, so today I have several hours of scheduled meetings at Twitter. Show more

So there are a number of of things that are operated on a weekly Cadence, and so those meetings are already set up, and then I have supplemental meetings at the end of the day, particularly I, I, I. I won't be going to sleep until probably 2 AM or something like that, and be working almost the entire time. And if you're shaking this yourself, is AI going to be helpful over the next few years to help you do this, and you're going to be using technology to help you manage that. I guess we'll all be using technology. I don't use a lot of AI myself day-to-day. I mean, Tesla AI is actually very Advanced for real world AI it's the most advanced remote World AI by far and in fact, if positions were swapped and it would say up to Microsoft and open AI to create who could create the best large language model, basically, if the tests were swapped, Tesla was given that the task of making the most competitive large language model and Microsoft open AI were tasked with self-driving, Tesla would win. Okay, I don't think people understand the degree of depict the capability of Tesla's AI system. So, while I don't use AI a lot personally, Tesla uses a trans mount. We'll get on to that in a second, if that's okay. But one final thing in terms of just the management of what you do with your life. You're running three very big companies. You have very big stakes and you know ownership control of of two of those at least. What is your succession plan if you suddenly call and execute what you're doing, both in terms of who runs the companies but, as importantly, who votes those shares in terms of you know what happens longer term and strategically, what have you got a plan for all of those? Yeah, succession is one of the toughest age-old problems. You know it's, it's a, it's plagued. You know, countries, Kings, Prime Ministers and presidents for, and CEOs for, you know, since the dawn of History, there is no obvious solution. I, I mean, there are particular individuals identified as that that I've told people would look if something happens to me unexpectedly. Show more

This is who, my, this is my recommendation for taking over. So, in all cases, the board is aware of of who my recommendation is, which they may choose to. It's up to them, of course they, they may choose to go a different direction, but I, they, there is a in in worst case scenario, this is who should run a company. The control question is a much more. It's a much tougher question and something that I'm wrestling with, and I'm frankly open to ideas, because it certainly is true that the companies that I have created and are creating collectively possess immense capability, and so the stewardship of them is incredibly important. I want to make sure that the stewardship is ultimately accrues the benefit of humanity. That's the idea, is the tolerance of civilization, but they're not that we're always successful in that, but that is aspirationally our goal. So I, I have one, one idea which is sort of partly in place, which is to create kind of a, an, a sort of a educational institution, that that would control most of my vote. But this is, this is not a case of automatically- I I'm definitely not not of the school- of automatically giving my kids a- you know, some share of the companies, even if they are not, even if they have no interest or inclination, you know, or ability to to manage the companies. I think that's a mistake, so but but it's a very hard problem to solve, right? Show more

So? And then who should be on the board of directors of the educational institution is also a very, very hard job to solve. So I think probably some disaggregation of control would make sense. I'm really just kind of thinking out loud, creatively here, but it sounds like it's something that you- I mean you need to get planning of who those people are going to be, because, as you've said, whether when you look at SpaceX, you look at Tesla, you look at Twitter, these, these matter to society a lot, and having the right people to take those votes on the future of where they go and where money gets spent is is fairly important. Yes, absolutely. Now, the goals of the companies- they're the achievement of those goals- varies considerably in difficulty. You know the. The original goal of Tesla was to accelerate the Advent of sustainable energy, which actually I think we've done, done that to a significant degree and have actually it's kind of of it's kind of it's kind of a order. Show more

Industry CEOs too often acknowledge Tesla's role in accelerating electric vehicles and, yeah, so so that that, I feel, has a lot of moment. They're still solving self-driving, which were, you know, aspirationally hoping to do this year and, and so it has got a long way to go. But but the execution plan is relatively clear and the next that execution plan will generate a lot of positive cash flow for the company. So it's like, if it's a fairly obvious thing to do with SpaceX, it's a harder problem because the long-term objective is to make life multi-planetary, with a self-sustaining City on Mars, which is likely to be very casual or negative at first. Show more

A long term, let's just say the target market on Mars is small. You got to think long term. Yeah, you're also going to have to get on very well with those you go with, I would imagine. Yes, definitely, you know, sanity will be a prime requirement for, and stability for, traveling to Mars. You don't want someone going nuts and opening the airlock in the middle of the night, right? So SpaceX is a harder problem because it's it's much a long-term goal and and with a lot more money, less along the way. Show more

So gotta make sure that that happens. And is that the sort of thing- just to stay on SpaceX and we'll go to Twitter and tell us in a second? But is that the sort of thing that you'd like to lock in to the goals of SpaceX? That Mars Remains the ultimate ambition of this, come what may? Is that? Is that that important to you? Yeah, I mean it's to make light multi-planetary such that- and the key threshold for multi-planatory is that if the supply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, that a Mars does not die out. That's, that's the, that's the critical great filter. If you talk about things in terms of the Fermi Paradox, the great filter is Mars being self-sustaining, without any resupply shows from Earth. Until we reach that point, we're really just a one planet civilization with an extension. But the point in which the planets are self-sustaining- Oman is self-sustaining- then, even in a worst case scenario of of Earth civilization either dying with a bang or a whimper, then Mars would have a much better chance of surviving. Show more

So the intent here overall is to ensure the light of Consciousness, which appears to be just a tiny candle and a vast Darkness. I frequently, I frequently get asked: have I seen any evidence of aliens? And I, I I'm not, you know, apart from the fact that I didn't at one point have an alien registration card when I was getting my green green card. It's an alien registration, indeed possibly a slightly different type of alien, but so do you think you'll? Will you live to see Mars happen? I, I hope to love to see the first humans on Mars, but I think it'll take some period of time beyond that to make my self-sustaining. So it's at least 20 years from the first visit to make my sustain, as my guess, and it may be 40 or 50.. And that's assuming you really go for it, right? So that's a tough one, but like, so I think, important for improving the survivability of civilization. And who's going to pay for that? Show more

I mean, are your investors gonna put the money up to do that? Are you going to expect government to fund that? Where does that money come from? Because, as you say, you can make a return on starlink, you can make a return on launching satellites for other people and space tourism. But I mean, that's a. That's a tougher return, Isn't it? Yeah, I think, I think long term, the value of it will be incredibly high. I would just, it's just beyond the planning Horizon of most people or most investors. So I mean, obviously, if, if there's a thriving City on Mars and there's a lot of interplanetary Commerce and SpaceX is the primary provider of that, it would be immensely valuable. Show more

So, but, but you know, the one thing is that, at the be this self-sustaining, you know, Colony, and I think we, we, I think we generally operate with too much of an assumption that Civilization is robust and nothing could really take it down, a sentiment that has been common throughout history among Empires, shortly before they called it so, and you know, I have to say that you know there's a little bit of late stage Empire Vibes going on right now. Yeah, for sure are you, yeah, is. Is AI something that, in your view, accelerates the risk of that or increases the risk of that at that outcome? I think it does. Yeah, I mean, we could definitely make a city of Mars self-sustaining without, without AI or without sort of AGI, which is generally artificial general intelligence or super intelligence I have. So I think that that is. It's not necessary for anything we're doing, but it is happening and happening very quickly. So there is a risk that Advanced AI either eliminates or constrains Humanities growth. I was more thinking the opposite. Does it increase the chance that plant the planet, self input, implodes and those things come true? Show more

You, I mean how concerned are you about these developments right now, sort of accelerating your, your bad case scenario here. Well, I mean, the development of artificial digital sort of super intelligence is very much a double-edged sword. So it's, if you have, if you have a genie that can grant you anything, they can also do anything. That necessarily is presents a danger and I expect the first uses of AI to be- or certainly the first government uses of AI to be- weapons technology. Show more

So just having more advanced weapons on the battle, if you go back, that can react faster than any human could, that's, that's really what AI will be capable of. I mean future Wars between Advanced countries, or at least countries that have significant drone capability, will be very much the Drone Wars. So I want to get back to AI, because this is this is big stuff and I'd like to to talk about in more detail, but I do want to come, just come back to the present from a long way in the future. Show more

You've just hired a new CEO, Linda yacarino, an ad veteran, into Twitter. You usually focus on hiring Engineers. You know Linda is a very different person. Can you just quickly tell us about your courtship? How did that go down? Well, we had conversations over a number of months just relating to advertising, and then Linda felt that it would be very helpful for the advertisers to see me in person, so invited me down to a conference in Miami, which was very helpful, and met with a number of advertisers personally to assure their- you know, assure them- that that Twitter is a good place to advertise in a and generally, that, in fact, that that hate speech is declined- which it has- and that the quality of the system, especially with respect to scammas and spammas, is dramatically better than it used to be. Show more

We've gotten rid of, at this point, well over 90 percent of those- the scams and scams, the scams and spam on Twitter. It should be quite rare at this point at UCS camp, so we've also rolled out sort of. So, just to be clear, when you say you've got rid of 90 of the scams, is it? But is that the same thing as the Bots or is this scams in general? And Bots is a different animal here. They were typically used Bots for scan, but you haven't taken the Bots down 90 percent. No, I think we, we have actually, I think you have okay, yeah, yeah, I think we have. Yeah, maybe more than 19.. Now you've said, at least is now much, much harder to operate a platform on Twitter and have it yield any, any advantage. So dramatic Improvement in Bots, dramatic Improvement and ability to detect sort of trial armies, which is a little different. That's where you've got, say, oh, you know, a hundred people in a warehouse in a low-wage country, Each of which are sitting at a desk with 100 phones. Show more

So you've got 10 000 actual people and they will then act together to Brigade a particular subject or make something seem very popular when it is not. And we've been able to defeat almost all of them. We think very few of them are actually still able to to operate. So quality of the system has gotten a lot better, okay, so if you said to Linda that you are going to keep speaking your mind, whatever the commercial impact of that, and has she agreed to that, is she happy with that? Show more

You aligned, yeah, okay, and in her role as CEO. Does she have any say over moderation or is that under you or you? Do you do that together? Well, the general principle is that we were- we were here- close to the law. So for any given country, we will try to adhere as closer to the low as possible. Our law is very between countries and we can't simply fight the law in in in another country because they will simply cut us off. Show more

So the general principle is: do whatever we can to enable free and open Communications with between people, provided they're not, like I said, breaking. She's aligned on on that. That plan, yeah, that Focus, yeah, there is an important thing which is like that. That obviously doesn't mean that, say, advertisers should be forced to appear next to any content. So we've also developed adjacency controls that ensure that if what you're advertising is like Disney- Disney, for example, is a big Advertiser. It doesn't use advertising a children's movie- they, you know it- won't want the the contents nearby to be sort of family friendly. That's totally understandable. So so it's. It's not like advertisers have to appear next to content that they, that they don't agree with. And can you, so some people say you're, you can't be a little erratic with your Tweeting, or at least tweet a broad range of of content. Does anybody say I don't want to be adjacent to Elon Musk, is that? Show more

Is that something that's happened on the on the platform? I've never heard that yet, but and did it? Did that come up with Linda at all sort of what you tweet and and whether that was something that could affect advertisers? Did she, did she ask you about that? She did it, in fact, at the conference that we did in Miami. So we speech is Paramount. Fine, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your vision for Twitter as a, as a community and as a, as a conversation. Show more

You've talked about your desire to maximize unregretted time. Can you just could you explain what that means and how you measure that? Yeah, so previously Twitter was mostly focused on this number called- they called mdow, monetizable daily active users. But the problem is that, when you look closely at that, a bunch of those users never even went to Twitter. They would go to there, would see a notification on their phone about a tweet, but they wouldn't actually click through the site. So, but what really matters is true user seconds of screen time. So that's that's the figure we track right now and that's based on the, the screen time as reported To Us by iOS, Android and the browser. Show more

So it would be. It would have to be the time. The amount of time the app is in the foreground right is the most rigorous way to assess this. So so when you say unregret it, sorry, please keep going. Exactly so, in terms of undergraded it's, that's a little harder to measure, but we can certainly gather it anecdotally, which is to say that if you spent, you know, half an hour on Twitter yesterday, what percentage of the percentage of that time do you regret? And journaling the feedbackup button has been very positive, that they they find it's the information to be useful, entertaining, funny. So we seem to be heading the right direction, as far as I can tell. I'm certainly open to any critiques from the room. Well, let me let me ask you one on that, which is: you know you recently tweeted about George Soros. You said: let me get back. Well, let me just get the words, because I'm kind of interested in what you think about this. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates Humanity. That obviously generated a huge amount of response on Twitter on both sides, lots of different viewpoints. Is that unregrettable time, unregretted time that that debate that you created, does that fit into that category, do you think? Show more

Well, I mean, I said, like, Source reminds me of Magneto. You know, well, you know you went a little further than that. But again, without going into the Soros tweet itself, you know you're obviously a big figure on Twitter and you're setting a tone and a name. So I'm just curious as to whether that sort of debate which which gets triggered, is that, does that fit into the definition that you're trying to create in that New Town Square? Show more

Well, I mean, I think the important thing is that, like, look, what I say is not is what I'd say. You know, it's sort of a Town Square. I'm not going to mitigate what I say because that would be inhibiting for your freedom of speech. That doesn't mean you have to agree with what I say in order to mean if somebody says the total opposite, that they're that they won't be supported on Twitter. They are. The point is to have a diversion set of views, and free speech is only relevant if it's a speech by a speech by someone you don't like, who says something you don't like. Is that allowed if? If so, you have free speech. Otherwise you do not. And for those who would Advocate censorship, I would say it is if. Show more

If you succeed in that, it's only a matter of time before the censorship gets turned on you. I agree, I mean you can. That's your free speech definition, which you said. But I'm just curious as to, on the unregrettable part, what, what, what, what type of conversation you're trying to achieve and whether that's something that is acceptable, but maybe not where you want the broader conversation to go. Show more

Well, I mean, I did clarify that. You know, some of my concerns about Taurus are that he's funded a very large number of small but influential races around the country, especially with District Attorneys, and we find that, for example, the alien and and San Francisco district attorney races with chess boarding and the guy always- I always want to call him Gaston from Beauty and the Beast- driving and and the, the- it's basically he's. He's, of course, a large number of the ASP elected who are very easy on crime and will often fuse, refuse to prosecute. Show more

So you were basically trying to make a deeper point with that short. Yeah, can I just move on quickly to, because I don't want to go too far down that that rabbit hole, because that debate has played out on Twitter a bit is you know? Are you back near profitability now? Twitter is not quite there, but we we're we're not. Like you know, when I first acquisition closed, I would say it's analogous to being teleported into a plane that's plunging to the ground with its engines on fire. The controls don't work, so it's comforting, say the least. Now we have to do some pretty heavy-handed bus Cutting Company healthy, but we're at this point we're training towards. If we get lucky, we might be casual, casual, positive next month, but it remains to be seen. And is the Staffing the level you now want it, or are you going to start taking it back up again from this? It's gone from, I think, 8 000 to about 1500 or something like that. Is that crazy correct? Show more

Yeah, I think there's, you know there's, there's definitely we are going to start adding people to the company and we have started adding some number of people to the company and but it's still there's still a lot of change to have to happen. So but I I think 1500 is probably a reasonable number. And does this show what you can do in a big tech company in terms of cost reduction? I mean, when you look around other big tech companies in Silicon Valley, would you say from your experience that there's room for much more significant change at those as well? Yeah, I think Twitter maybe somewhat of an outlier, in that that there were a lot of people doing things that that didn't seem to have a lot of value, and that's, I think that's true, probably at most the Silicon Valley companies, maybe not to the degree to which it was a Twitter, but it's still. Show more

Yeah, there's a potential for significant Cuts, I think, out of the companies without affecting their productivity, in fact increasing their productivity. So, you know, at any given company there are people who help move things forward and and people who've sort of tried to slam the brakes on, and Twitter was in a situation where you'd have a meeting of 10 people, you know, and one person with an accelerator and nine- nine with a set of brakes. So you didn't go very far right, and so now, now we're going home about releasing functionality, even with a little bit of risk to side stability, as soon as it's not too serious, and I think this point is probably fair to say- we were introduced more functionality in the last six months than Twitter has in the last six years, and in terms of outages. Show more

There were some outages early on. Are you, are you confident things are stable now? Well, outages Are Not Unusual. Instagram recently had an outage, for example. It was reported on Twitter, ironically. So we've had outages, but not not massive ones, and they've generally been brief and limited in scope. Okay, do you regret buying it? You tried to get out of it, or are you now happy you bought it? Well, all's well that ends well. Has it ended well yet? Or we still got to wait and see? I think we're on the- hopefully on the- comeback Arc. Okay, so I mean, one of the things you have talked about, you bought it for 44 billion. Show more

You've talked about it one day being worth 250, I think in internal meetings. Can you just talk about how you get there? What is the? What is the bigger Vision? I mean you want to bring back advertisers now, and are they coming back? By the way, yeah, yeah, can you give any idea of the scale of the comeback in terms of who you lost and who's coming back? Well, I think it'll be very significant. So the advertising agencies, this point of all, lifted their warnings on Twitter, so appreciate the fact that that group M, for example, removed the sort of their concern label over Twitter, which is a very big deal, and so I think at this point I expect almost all advertisers to attack. Show more

Okay, we've also- I've done a lot more to make the advertising more relevant to users so that we show users things that are they're more likely to be interested in buying. Sounds obvious, but right, that's what tends to happen. Yeah, not super obvious. I mean just just basic stuff. Like if you do a search on Twitter, previously, this, the search Banner app that did not take the Search terms into account, which is pretty insane. Show more

So just show a random ad, okay, whereas obviously show an ad that is, you know, matches your search, sounds, sounds worth doing so, just quickly. What if you've talked about the sort of single app that does messaging and does finance and other things? I mean, can you just enlarge a little bit on sort of how you get there and why America wants that? Obviously, it'll be up to people to decide if they want it. It's like, do we make something that is useful enough that you want to use it more frequently? Great, that's our goal. So we're not going to do anything to stop people leaving the app or try to track them in the app, but let's provide enough compiling functionality that over time, people's usage of the platform growth. So in 10 years time, is advertising still going to be dominant on Twitter? I think advertising will always play a role at some point. Show more

Take 10 years from now. It may not play the largest role, but it will play the largest role for at least a few years to come. So I want to do a quick, quick, far round of questions. Just, you know, imagine that you're late at night, you're sitting there tweeting a few rapid fire responses to stuff and I'm just going to ask you a few questions. And if you can just give me short answers, then I want to go on to AR and talk a little bit about some of the deeper points that you you started making earlier. So first one: will Twitter be public again in five years? I don't know. Okay, do you think the HQ will still be in San Francisco? Okay, not good, so far, let's try a couple more. Which decade are we going to crack artificial general intelligence? I think this one, this one. Okay, so it's that soon. Okay, are you going to take a SpaceX trip yourself? I will at some point, yeah, not sure when, but you'll be nice. Which is the most exciting country to build a Tesla plant in right now? Well, we did make an announcement that Mexico would be our next location outside the US and picked a site and everything. So there's that, and then we'll probably pick another location towards the end of this year. Is India interesting? Absolutely. Are you still a fan of crypto? Well, I mean, I'm not advising anyone to buy a crypto or bet the farm on, you know, Dogecoin or anything like that. Okay, on Dogecoin, might have been thinking maybe you should, but let me advise you that would be a have some ways. Okay, so it does. Queer is my, is my sort of favorite cryptocurrency because it has the best humor and has dogs. I did, however, look at the price of it yesterday. It's it's lower than it was, I think. Well, I don't know, maybe you know it's like. Show more

Friend of mine has a saying that the most ironic explanation is the most likely and the most ironic outcome for currency would be that the thing that was made at as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies most ironic outcome would become that it becomes the Global Currency. Okay, we'll wait and see. Final one: can you rank the US and China on their development of AI? Each out of ten. I mean, the US says very much, has the most advanced AI. So this is you say like, like China's close behind, certainly, and has the resources to scale and to optimize the. The biggest single advances in AI still come from the US and Europe. But all right, so it's hard to give an exact number score because it's more like, but there's a big gap. Still there is a. There's a gap. That Gap looks like it's on the order of 12 months, right, fish, a narrowing, all expanding. It's hard to tell. I suspect it will narrow to some degree. Okay, can you talk a little bit about you've created a new AI company yourself? Obviously there's a huge amount of energy and activity in this space, or at least it's been talked about. Show more

I mean, what do you want to do yourself in this space beyond Tesla and and the- the stuff you talked about earlier? What is that new thing? Well, I think there should be a significant third horse in the race here. We've got open Ai and Microsoft, Google, deepmind and probably there should be a third horse in the race. So a little bit more on that soon. But is it something that will interact with the data of Twitter and the capability of Tesla. Is it something that tries to bring what you've talked about earlier in terms of capability together and become that third player? Is that what you're talking about to some degree. I don't want to jump a gun here on announcements, but you know the opening AI has a relationship with Microsoft that seems to work very well, fairly well, so it's possible that xai and Twitter and Tesla would have something similar possible. Show more

You've talked about the importance of Regulation and you call for this, this moratoriI mean the history of regulating Tech has been checkered. It's been very hard for Regulators to keep up with tech, let alone get ahead of it. What do you think actually needs to happen that practically could in this space to try to change that, because obviously the history of this is not encouraging? Show more

Yeah, I mean I think there should be. You know I've been pushing hard for a long time. I met with a number of centers and Congress people in Congress, in the white house, to advocate for AI regulation, starting with an Insight committee that is formed of independent parties as well as perhaps participants from the leaders in industry, and that that that oversight committee gains- or should say, get that Insight committee gains- insight into what various companies are up to and you know to the degree that there's okay competitive Dynamics there, you can, obviously you would sequester board members who are perhaps have conflicts, but anyway, if you figure out some sort of regulatory board and and they start off gaining insight, and then I have proposed rulemaking and then that, you know, will get comments that are on by industry and and then hopefully we have some sort of oversight rules that improve safety, just as we do with aircraft with the FAA, and spacecraft, and cars with Nitza, and Food and Drugs with the Food Drug Administration. Show more

Right, and how would that work in such a global thing as we're talking about, where Ai and the relative Advance between countries is going to be very, very important? Is that something that is is globalizable? Is that? Is that? Well, really, the key question is: we'll- China, you know- cooperate with the West? That remains to be seen. But I would still Advocate like some degree of of oversight. I mean, we have a regulatory oversight of aircraft, for example, and yet the, the US is still very much doing great on the aircraft, so it makes more effort than the rest, than any in any other place. So just because you have, you know, FAA regulations doesn't mean that it's necessarily slowed down very much. Show more

Okay, does so. So your view would be that the AI changes today lock in the tech Giants, the microsofts and the Googles of this world. Does it also? Is there also a scenario where it actually helps to bring in new players and and and and and change that dynamic, or is that a much more unlikely outcome? Well, that there are a lot of AI startups. The thing that's becoming tricky is that in order you really need three things to compete: you need Talent, talented people, you need a lot of compute, expensive compute- and you need to access the data. Show more

So whoever's got, whoever's succeeding on those three will win. So now that the cost of compute has gotten astronomical- so it's now, you know, kind of sort of minimante, I would say minimwould be 250 million dollars of silver Hardware, minimthat's like just two right relevant in any way. So the startups are more likely to piggyback off what the others are doing rather than compete directly themselves. Is what you're saying? Yeah, to train a big one. Are you going to take a SpaceX trip yourself to train a model of probably gbt five size? I wouldn't be surprised if they use at least 30, 30 000, maybe 50 000 h100s, which are the latest gpus are not sure it's not quite the right word, but the latest technology from Nvidia. So, and then you need to run inference as well. Show more

So there's a lot of the the G fuser- this point considerably harder to get than drugs. Actually, that's really not a high bar in San Francisco. You can tell us more about that later, but yes, okay, okay. So a couple of things I just wanted to go into on on AI, which I love your perspective on. Is this gonna? What does it mean for society in terms of is this going to embed wealth and power in a very small subset and create a big widening of inequality? Is it going to democratize and create the opposite? What is your sense of of where this heads? Terms of access to goods and services, I think AI will be ushering an age of abundance, assuming that we're in a benign AI scenario. Show more

I think the AI will be able to make goods and services very inexpensively, and so, in anything that is a product or a service where there's not artificial scarcity created, such as, like I want to live exactly in and this you know- neighborhood houses, it's like, okay, well, there's only 100 houses there, so you know that that would still have scarcity, or a unique artwork would have scarcity, but anything that does not have scarcity, that we def, that we deliberately designed to be scarce, will be plentiful for everyone. Show more

In a benign scenario and in the unbeline scenario, well, there's a wide range of, but what's the thing that you're most worried about when you look at, you know, when you've been talking for years about the need for regulation, what is the scenario that really keeps you up at night? Well, I don't. I don't think the AI is going to try to destroy all Humanity, but it might put us under strict controls, I mean, and there's no non-zero chance of of it going Terminator. It's not zero percent, but it's it's. I think it's. It's a small likelihood of of annihilating humanity, but it's not zero. We wanted at all going to be zero, close to zero as possible. And then, like I said, the of AI assuming control or the safety of all the humans and taking over all the Computing systems and weapon systems of Earth and effectively being like some sort of uber nanny. Show more

But isn't, isn't another scenario. If you say, you say that, yeah, like what you know, like, let's say, you're, you know, I must well, contact, consent, contestant, hypothetically, it's unlikely, let's face it. And and you know, you say what, what do you want? And so I want World Peace. And it's like: okay, well, the you know, one way to achieve, well, peace is to take all the weapons away from the humans so they can no longer use them, and and to punish any humans that engage in, you know, extra territorial activity. Show more

But isn't the more, isn't the more likely nasty outcome that, rather than AI taking over and being the ultimate naddy that keeps us all doing stuff that is super safe and it wants us to, that actually somebody nefariously harnesses that power to achieve societal control, stroke military superiority, and that actually some country around the world decides to use it in a different way. Yes, that that's what I mean by like AI uses as a weapon. Right, and the pen is mightier than the sword. So one of the first places we have to be careful of AI being used is in social media to manipulate public opinion. So the reason that Twitter is going to a primarily subscriber based system is because it is dramatically harder to create. It's like, or 10 000 times harder to create a, an account that has a verified phone number from a credible carrier, that has a, a credit card and that pays a small amount of money per month and have those credit cards and phone numbers be highly distributed, not clustered, incredibly difficult. Show more

So, whereas in the past someone could create a million fake accounts for a penny a piece and then manipulates have have something appear to be very, very much liked by the public, when in fact it is not, or promoted and retweeted when in fact it is not, is popularity, is is not real. Essentially gain the system. So the device towards a is a subscription-based verification. Show more

I think is is very powerful and that really you won't be able to trust any social media company that does not do this, because it will simply be overrun with Bots to such an extreme, extreme degree. So, if we take it back to where we started, if you look at the election that's coming up, how big a role will this big shift in AI capability over the last few months, which will obviously continue through the next year? Show more

How big an impact is this going to play? Do you think, in the messaging and the way that people get told the different pictures of of the candidates? I think that's something we need to go and look at for in a big way is to make sure that this we're minimizing the impact of AI manipulation. We're certainly pretty much taking it, Taking that seriously at XX Twitter. You know Twitter and and I think we're putting in place all of the protections to minimize and certainly detect when we see large-scale manipulation of the system. Show more

Okay, but beyond Twitter, are you worried about this for the election in general? Yeah, there probably will be attempts to use AI to manipulate the public and some of it will be successful and if not, the selection for sure the next one. Okay, I've got two more questions on AI if you've got the time, and then just a little bit on China and Tesla, if that's okay. The first thing is: we talk a lot in terms of AI about the next five to ten years and what the impact is going to be on jobs and some of these things. If you look out on a much longer time frame, given the speed and scale of the change and you look to your grandkids and great grandkids, can you just give us a sense of what, what it's going to be like to be human? Show more

How much is this going to change the fundamental nature of how we operate as as a race at this point? I think it's gonna change a lot, especially if you go further out into the future. I mean there will be. Everything will be automatic. I mean they'll. They'll be household robots that you can fully talk to, as though there are people that can help you around the house or be a companion or whatever the case may be. There will be humanoid robots throughout. You know, factories and ours will also be all automatic and anything that that we're intelligence can be applied. Even modest intelligence will be automated. Say like so, if you say like 10, 20 years from now, and we will, we be connected to that technology through a neuralink type. Divine, I mean, is that is that where this, in your view? Obviously is that why this heads? Well, A high bandwidth interface from cortex to the. So you're sort of computing or AI tertiary layer, which already exists, you know, it's just that we don't have a high bandwidth connection. Show more

We've got a limbic system which is a sort of foundational element, that's sort of our instincts and desires and whatnot. They're not cortex, on top of that, which is a thinking part of our brain, and about a tertiary digital layer which is currently in the form of our phones and computers and laptops and whatnot, and all the applications and the, the constraint on better, a better merging or the construct. You know, the constraint on on on having human interests and machine interests be aligned is the bandwidth, especially the output. Show more

So if you select at what speed can you output to a computer, it's using Voice or your fingers which will move very slowly, so you're talking about maybe 10 bits per second or some, some fairly small data rate. So with, with the neural link, you can increase that by. You know, increase that by a million probably, so everything just speeds up. It's up. Yeah, okay, I mean this is obviously in a relatively benign scenario, because there's a question of not just, let's say it's a Brian scenario. Show more

How do we even appreciate or understand what the computer is doing? Right, how do we? How do we go? How do we go along for the ride? And if we have a better, if you have a brain machine interface, that's, I don't know, a million times faster than, or more like, we'll go along for the ride. A lot better that then, if we're interfacing with a phone using two slow-moving meat sticks, if you put it like that, and in terms of, you have a lot of kids- many in this room have kids- you know, what do they need to? Show more

What skills do they need to have? What are the three skills that you think are most important for them, that you're trying to give them to be prepared and well positioned for this new world? Well, I think it's. It's important to have a broad range of of understanding in many different subjects. So I think general knowledge is important so you at least have some clue of what you don't know in different areas and then go deep in areas where your child is has a strong interest and ability. So finding that that overlap of where is my child, what interested in this and has some ability to be successful, then you know. Finding, if you can find- that Venn diagram overlap, then obviously encouraging. That is a good thing. And we are obviously headed to a high-tech world. So some basic understanding of computers and software and artificial intelligence is probably a good idea. Show more

Okay, but the actual broad thrust of I mean jobs will change, but it'll be more AI enabling and making it better and easier, rather than wholesale complete change of the skills you need. Which principle, what time frame we're talking about here? So if you say like over 20, 30 year time frame, I think things will be transformed beyond belief. What you probably think. You probably won't recognize Society in 30 years, like. I do think we're fairly close. You asked me about artificial general intelligence. I think we're perhaps only three years, maybe six years away from it- this, this decade. Show more

So the impact: arguably we are on the Event Horizon of the black hole that is social super intelligence. Okay, so I'm going to ask one final question. I'm going to see if you've got two minutes to take a couple of questions from the floor and it's. It comes back to China, which you talked about a little bit. Show more

You have a very big business in China, in Tesla, and obviously you know you're on that geopolitical fault line. That's getting potentially interesting. It. To what extent is this affecting your decision making around, sort of how you put assets and and stuff on the ground, and how concerned are you about that as a business person- and a lot of people in this room have business in China- about that getting very, very difficult for us. Well, there is fundamentally an issue that's coming to a head with Taiwan and it's unclear when exactly Bush will come to show, but it seems that there's a good chance. Show more

Push will come to shove. It's trending in that direction. I'd rather think what, what that would happen. The results would be for the global economy would be absolutely catastrophic. But you know, China has been very clear about its goal on China and sort of including Taiwan as part of China. So one does not need to read between the lines, one can simply read the lines. They were bracelet and they're not getting and is the biggest concern, despite, you know, the, the, the, the prospect of conflict itself. Obviously, a lot of the world's high-end chips come out of Taiwan. I mean, how catastrophic would that be if that was cut off. Well, there's even more that comes out of China. So the transit is a lot so much of of the world's heavy lifting on manufacturing- especially if the manufacturing is, you know, simply hard work and say not not particularly glamorous charges, does an immense amount of hard work that people, most people, have no idea how much hard work they do. Show more

So you kind of from Taiwan was much less less of a concern than being covered from time from China. Now, China would reciprocally suffer, of course, because I would say that the economy of the economies of China and Taiwan are they're like conjoined twins with the, what, the Western economy with the rest of the world. So China, China, the West, the rest of the world being Conjuring twins from an economic standpoint will mean that the separation is going to be dire indeed. Show more

Okay, that happens. I hope it does not happen so, and there's no easy solution here. But if there's any, if there's any path to diplomatic solution, we should really take that seriously. Great, do you have time to take a few questions from the floor, Elon? Sure does anybody have a question they'd like to pose? We'll go here and then here, Mike, behind you. Thanks, Elon, thanks for joining us. I'm the founder of a real estate business in Newcastle, in the northeast of England. We export, manufacture and Export more cars from the Northeast than the whole of Italy. Show more

Would you let me build you a Tesla Factory in the northeast of England? Thanks for the offer. So probably consider England for a future location of a geiger Factory. Thank you, I'll get you. So you will. You will consider it. Are you actively considering it? We, we, we. We're not currently looking at new locations, but we will pull towards the end of this year. I'll send you some plans. Okay, David, here, please. Thank you for your time. Fusion: lots of scientists say it could change the world Planet. It's the sun. All live on this planet and on Mars depends on Fusion, the sun itself. Can I ask you why, a man of your brilliant brain, resources and talent, it's not actually focusing on Fusion, which I think could be a game changer for society, and rather than on Twitter, where there are many media, decent companies that can do it and I would say it almost in a trivial way. Well, I'm. I think we already have a giant Fusion reactor in the sky that called the Sun, that shows up every day, so which always said like, if you want to know what's standing in front of a future Fusion reactor feels like, just go out, go and stand in front of the sun, you know, just walk outside. Show more

That's what. That's what a giant Fusion reactor feels like, because that's what the sun is. It converts about four and a half million towns, four and a half million tons of Mass to energy every second, and requires no maintenance. It's amazing. You don't have to, you don't have to refuel it, you don't have to maintain it, just there. So my recommendation for Fusion is solar power and batteries, and we can easily power all of Earth with just with photovoltaics and batteries. Not, I mean not easily, but there's just a very clear path to do so. And and no Miracles are quiet, just work, interesting. I've also an advocate of wind and of of nuclear fission, geothermal, hydro and whatnot. We'll take a couple more one here and then the lady at the back, thank you. As you're considering exposure to China, and particularly in the EV space and with the battery supply chain, what's your process for evaluating political risk in the near and Midterm? Show more

I guess I just talked to my team. You know, read the news, I don't know. Assess, assess the opinion on Twitter. I suppose there's a very deep analysis you can get on Twitter from people that are World experts on a particular subject. So I don't know, I think we just we try to prepare for the worst, hope for the best and, you know, make sure we have factories and geographically Diversified regions of the world where the supply chain is as localized as possible. Show more

But this is important also for forced Azure situations. So if there are earthquakes, wildfires, riots, revolutions, ice storms, heat waves, you name it, I think I've seen it all at this point. So you want to have you, you want to have a supply chain that does not inherit Force Major from all of Earth, because something that's going to happen somewhere. It's Big Planet, so. So that's why I think it's important to have localized Supply chains with factories in in many geographies. Last question from the lady at the back, thank you, yeah, you famously tweeted that you thought the population collapse was a much bigger risk to humanity than climate change. What do you think States, families, even companies, can do to ensure that more of us want to have more children? Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's. It's very telling if you look at the birth rates, which are just, you know, publicly available. You can look at, say, the birth rate last year for every country. It's available online and you can look at the trend in both rates and it's just very clear that the trend has been strongly downward and that we've recently hit all-time lows. Show more

So you think, if you know during covert, you know what else you got to do- you might as well have a kid, but it didn't happen. Actually, we had a big drop in birth rate during during covert, an increase in divorces too, since make a lot of time with their significant other. So I think, generally, so it's simply changing people's mind about the goodness of having kids. It's like very important to have kids in order to to continue civilization, and I think sometimes it's viewed, as you know, kids are viewed as an imposition on the world. I don't think that's the case at all, or that people sometimes think there are too many people in the world. That's, that's certainly not the case. You can. You can fit all of the humans on Earth on one floor in the city of New York. You know it would be uncomfortable, but but just to give you a sense of the cross-sectional area of earth that is human is very tiny. It just seems big if you're in a big city, but for the vast majority of the earth, if, if you're given a task of from front plane, of dropping a bowling ball and and and you have to hit someone, you'd you'd Miss, I almost never hit anyone. So what is that? You very rarely go over a person in an aircraft. You fly from LA to New York, the vast areas of land, with no one at all. So anyway, the I think we want to just generally have it be socially encouraged to have kids. I think certainly companies need to support employees that have kids. I think in terms of government incentives, there should be some. Show more

I think tax breaks for having kids, you know, or make it just financially not burdensome to have children, and it's always worth bearing in mind. Like, autonomy aside, if someone doesn't have kids. What you're actually asking is that someone else's kids take care of you when you're old, and that that doesn't seem like quite right, you know, because because that's that's the world before they'll be forced to do absent automation is is that someone else the kids will have to take care of you when you're old, and you know so. I think. Anyway, one way or another, we need to solve this birth rate issue, or civilization will go a little to nothing, isn't that? Where AI comes in, it'll do all the jobs for us. So we can- we can handle a potentially lower population, or what you're talking about. I think there will be robot nannies that are very confident, so that will help. Show more

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