Thorold BarkerElon, hello, welcome. Are you in Palo Alto, I understand?
Elon MuskYeah. Well, our global engineering headquarters is in Palo Alto.
Thorold BarkerGreat. 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 a little announcement. I would love to get your thoughts on it. I see you're interviewing Ron DeSantis tomorrow morning, is that right? On Twitter Spaces, I see. Yes, I need the exact time, but oh, tomorrow morning your time, I think that would be probably correct.
Elon MuskOkay. So yes, I will be interviewing Ron DeSantis, and he has quite an announcement to make. It'll be the first time that something like this is happening on social media, and with the real-time questions and answers, not scripted. So it's going to be live, and let's see what happens.
Thorold BarkerAnd 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?
Elon MuskYes, I mean, I'm not at this time planning to endorse any particular candidate. But I am interested in X slash Twitter being somewhat of a public town square, where more and more organizations host content and make announcements on Twitter. It's the only place on the internet to really get real-time, like down to the minute and second, news. So I think it's quite groundbreaking that there'd be a major announcement of this type on social media.
Thorold BarkerAnd 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 more of this? I mean, if it's the town square, are you going to be interviewing other candidates, Democrats? What's your thought of this? Are people willing to come? Are you going to be there to execute the town square across the spectrum?
Elon MuskYes, absolutely. So just 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 left moderate to what's considered right. And I do think it's important that Twitter have both the reality and the perception of a level playing field, a place where all voices are heard, and where the kind of dynamic interaction that you don't really see anywhere else. I mean, today on Twitter, for example, AOC and Ted Cruz got into an argument on Twitter, which was, independent of which side you agree with, still very entertaining.
Thorold BarkerSo I'm sure tomorrow will be entertaining. We're all going to be tuned into that. But when you approach an interview like that, and obviously a really important election like the one that is coming up, can you just talk a little bit about what are the key issues that really matter for you at this pivotal moment?
Elon MuskYou mean matter for me as an individual?
Thorold BarkerIn terms of who leads the country, but also more broadly than that, for the country and for your businesses. I mean, can you give your sense of where the real issues lie here?
Elon MuskWell, I've said publicly that my preference, and I think it would be the preference of most Americans, is really to have someone fairly normal in office. I think we'd all be quite happy with that actually. Someone that is representative of the moderate views that I think most of the country holds in reality. But the way things are set up is that 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 the majority of your party's vote, and 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 it shifts towards the center for the general election. So I would really just like someone fairly normal, accessible, to be the president. That would be great.
Thorold BarkerSo 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...
Elon MuskI think, you know, be careful about these statements. So we'd maybe have to have a few drinks before I would give you the answers.
Thorold BarkerI will look forward to that, and I look forward to the conversation tomorrow, and obviously a lot more of those to come over the coming months. So that's great, 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... what is a day in the life of Elon Musk? What does that look like?
Elon MuskWell, the days are very long and complicated, as you might imagine. And there's a great deal of context switching. There's a meme relating to Dune where it's like, fear is not the mind killer, context switching is. So switching context is quite painful. But I do generally try to divide, 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 then Thursday would be sort of a half SpaceX, half 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 only have one part-time assistant.
Thorold BarkerHow many days a week is that, the part-time?
Elon MuskI mean, I suppose how she works, she's technically full-time, but as such, 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, and since the most valuable thing I have is time, I schedule it myself for the most part.
Thorold BarkerSo if you come into Tesla today, do you have a series of meetings set up, or do you come in with something on your mind and you go in and see people? I mean, how structured is this? Or if you show up at Twitter, in terms of the people working for you, how do they handle that?
Elon MuskYeah, so today I have several hours of scheduled meetings at Twitter. There are a number 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 won't be going to sleep until probably 2 a.m. or something like that, and be working almost the entire time.
Thorold BarkerAnd if you're scheduling 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?
Elon MuskI 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 real-world AI by far. And in fact, if positions were swapped, and it was up to Microsoft and OpenAI to create the best large language model, basically if the tasks were swapped, Tesla was given the task of making the most competitive large language model, and Microsoft, OpenAI were tasked with self-driving, Tesla would win. I don't think people understand the degree of the capability of Tesla's AI system. So while I don't use AI a lot personally, Tesla uses a tremendous amount.
Thorold BarkerWe'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 ownership control of two of those at least. What is your succession plan if you suddenly couldn't execute what you're doing, both in terms of who runs the companies, but as importantly, who votes those shares, in terms of what happens longer term and strategically? Have you got a plan for all of those?
Elon MuskYeah, succession is one of the toughest age-old problems. It's plagued countries, kings, prime ministers and presidents, and CEOs, since the dawn of history. There is no obvious solution. I mean, there are particular individuals identified, that I've told people, if something happens to me unexpectedly, this is my recommendation for taking over. So in all cases the board is aware of who my recommendation is, which they may choose to, it's up to them of course, they may choose to go a different direction. But there is, in worst case scenario, this is who should run a company.
Elon MuskThe control question is 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 ultimately accrues to the benefit of humanity, that the idea is the continuance of civilization. We're not always successful in that, but that is aspirationally our goal.
Elon MuskI have one idea, which is sort of partly in place, which is to create kind of an educational institution that would control most of my vote. But this is not a case of automatically, I'm definitely not of the school of automatically giving my kids some share of the companies even if they have no interest or inclination or ability to manage the companies. I think that's a mistake. So, but it's a very hard problem to solve. And then who should be on the board of directors of the educational institution is also a very hard problem to solve. So I think probably some disaggregation of control would make sense. I'm really just kind of thinking out loud creatively here.
Thorold BarkerBut it sounds like it's something that you need to get planning of who those people are going to be, because as you've said, whether you look at SpaceX, you look at Tesla, you look at Twitter, 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 fairly important.
Elon MuskYes, absolutely. Now, the goals of the companies, the achievement of those goals varies considerably in difficulty. The original goal of Tesla was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, which actually I think we've done to a significant degree, and have actually, it's kind of an order, industry CEOs too often acknowledge Tesla's role in accelerating electric vehicles. So that, I feel, has a lot of momentum. We're still solving self-driving, which we're aspirationally hoping to do this year. And so it has got a long way to go, but the execution plan is relatively clear, and that execution plan will generate a lot of positive cash flow for the company. So it's a fairly obvious thing to do.
Elon MuskWith 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 cash-flow negative at first. Long-term, let's just say the target market on Mars is small.
Thorold BarkerYou've got to think long term. You're also going to have to get on very well with those you go with, I would imagine.
Elon MuskYes, definitely. You know, sanity will be a prime requirement, and stability, for traveling to Mars. You don't want someone going nuts and opening the airlock in the middle of the night. So SpaceX is a harder problem because it's much more a long-term goal, and with a lot more money lost along the way, so we've got to make sure that that happens.
Thorold BarkerAnd is that the sort of thing, just to stay on SpaceX and we'll go to Twitter in a second, but is that the sort of thing that you'd like to lock into the goals of SpaceX, that Mars remains the ultimate ambition of this come what may? Is that that important to you?
Elon MuskYeah, I mean, it's to make life multi-planetary such that, and the key threshold for multi-planetary is that if the supply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, that Mars does not die out. 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 ships from Earth. Until we reach that point, we're really just a one-planet civilization, with an extension. But the point at which the planets are self-sustaining, when Mars is self-sustaining, then even in a worst-case scenario of Earth civilization either dying with a bang or a whimper, then Mars would have a much better chance of surviving. So the intent here overall is to ensure the light of consciousness, which appears to be just a tiny candle in a vast darkness.
Elon MuskI frequently get asked, have I seen any evidence of aliens, and I'm not, apart from the fact that I did at one point have an alien registration card when I was getting my green card. It's an alien registration. Possibly a slightly different type of alien.
Thorold BarkerSo do you think you'll live to see Mars happen?
Elon MuskI hope to live to see the first humans on Mars. But I think it'll take some period of time beyond that to make it self-sustaining. So it's at least 20 years from the first visit to make it self-sustaining, as my guess, and it may be 40 or 50, and that's assuming you really go for it. So that's a tough one. But it's important for improving the survivability of civilization.
Thorold BarkerAnd who's going to pay for that? I mean, are your investors going to 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 that's a tougher return, isn't it?
Elon MuskYeah, I think long term the value of it will be incredibly high. It's just beyond the planning horizon of most people or most investors. Obviously, 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. But you know, the one thing is, to build this self-sustaining colony. 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 fell.
Elon MuskSo, and you know, I have to say there's a little bit of late-stage empire vibes going on right now.
Thorold BarkerYeah, for sure. Is AI something that, in your view, accelerates the risk of that, or increases the risk of that outcome?
Elon MuskI think it does, yeah. I mean, we could definitely make a city on Mars self-sustaining without AI, or without sort of AGI, which is artificial general intelligence or super intelligence. So I think that'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 humanity's growth.
Thorold BarkerI was more thinking the opposite. Does it increase the chance that the planet implodes and those things come true? I mean, how concerned are you about these developments right now sort of accelerating your bad-case scenario here?
Elon MuskWell, I mean, the development of artificial digital super intelligence is very much a double-edged sword. If you have a genie that can grant you anything, they can also do anything, and that necessarily presents a danger. And I expect the first uses of AI, or certainly the first government uses of AI, to be weapons technology. So just having more advanced weapons on the battlefield that can react faster than any human could, 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.
Thorold BarkerSo I want to get back to AI, because this is big stuff and I'd like to talk about it in more detail, but I do want to come back to the present from a long way in the future. You've just hired a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an ad veteran, into Twitter. You usually focus on hiring engineers. Linda is a very different person. Can you just quickly tell us about your courtship? How did that go down?
Elon MuskWell, 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 them that Twitter is a good place to advertise, and generally that in fact hate speech has declined, which it has, and that the quality of the system, especially with respect to scammers and spammers, is dramatically better than it used to be. We've gotten rid of, at this point, well over 90 percent of the scams and spam on Twitter. It should be quite rare at this point that you see a scam.
Thorold BarkerJust to be clear, when you say you've got rid of 90 percent of the scams, is that the same thing as the bots, or is this scams in general, and bots is a different animal here?
Elon MuskThey were typically used, bots, for scams. But have you taken the bots down 90 percent?
Thorold BarkerBut you haven't taken the bots down 90 percent?
Elon MuskNo, I think we have, actually.
Thorold BarkerYou have? Okay.
Elon MuskYeah, I think we have. Yeah, maybe more than 90. Now, it is at least much, much harder to operate a platform on Twitter and have it yield any advantage. So, dramatic improvement in bots, dramatic improvement in ability to detect sort of troll armies, which is a little different. That's where you've got, say, a hundred people in a warehouse in a low-wage country, each of which are sitting at a desk with 100 phones, 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 operate. So quality of the system has gotten a lot better.
Thorold BarkerIf you said to Linda that you are going to keep speaking your mind whatever the commercial impact of that, has she agreed to that? Is she happy with that? You're aligned?
Elon MuskUh, yeah.
Thorold BarkerAnd in her role as CEO, does she have any say over moderation, or is that under you, or do you do that together?
Elon MuskWell, the general principle is that we will adhere close to the law. So for any given country we will try to adhere as close to the law as possible. The law varies between countries, and we can't simply fight the law in another country, because they will simply cut us off. So the general principle is do whatever we can to enable free and open communications between people, provided they're not, like I said, breaking the law.
Thorold BarkerShe's aligned on that plan, that focus?
Elon MuskYeah, there is an important thing, which is that that obviously doesn't mean that 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, if they're advertising a children's movie, they won't want the content nearby to be, they'll want it to be sort of family-friendly. That's totally understandable. So it's not like advertisers have to appear next to content that they don't agree with.
Thorold BarkerAnd can you, so some people say you can be a little erratic with your tweeting, or at least tweet a broad range of content. Does anybody say I don't want to be adjacent to Elon Musk? Is that something that's happened on the platform?
Elon MuskI've never heard that yet.
Thorold BarkerAnd did that come up with Linda at all, sort of what you tweet and whether that was something that could affect advertisers? Did she ask you about that?
Elon MuskShe did, in fact, at the conference that we did in Miami. So, free speech is paramount.
Thorold BarkerFine. I wanted to ask you a little bit about your vision for Twitter as a community and as a conversation. You've talked about your desire to maximize unregretted time. Could you explain what that means and how you measure that?
Elon MuskYeah, so previously Twitter was mostly focused on this number called MDAU, 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 see a notification on their phone about a tweet, but they wouldn't actually click through to the site. So what really matters is true user seconds of screen time. So that's the figure we track right now, and that's based on the screen time as reported to us by iOS, Android and the browser.
Thorold BarkerSo it would have to be the amount of time the app is in the foreground, right, is the most rigorous way to assess this. So when you say unregretted, sorry, please keep going.
Elon MuskExactly. So in terms of unregretted, 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 that time do you regret? And generally the feedback on that has been very positive, that they find the information to be useful, entertaining, funny. So we seem to be heading in the right direction as far as I can tell. I'm certainly open to any critiques from the room.
Thorold BarkerWell, let me ask you one on that, which is, you recently tweeted about George Soros. You said, 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 unregretted time, that debate that you created? Does that fit into that category, do you think?
Elon MuskWell, I mean, I said Soros reminds me of Magneto.
Thorold BarkerWell, you went a little further than that, but again, without going into the Soros tweet itself, 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 gets triggered, does that fit into the definition that you're trying to create in that new town square?
Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think the important thing is that, look, what I say 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 freedom of speech. That doesn't mean you have to agree with what I say. If somebody says the total opposite, that doesn't mean they won't be supported on Twitter. They are. The point is to have a diverse set of views, and free speech is only relevant if it's speech by someone you don't like who says something you don't like. Is that allowed? If so, you have free speech, otherwise you do not. And for those who would advocate censorship, I would say, if you succeed in that, it's only a matter of time before the censorship gets turned on you.
Thorold BarkerI agree. I mean, that's your free speech definition which you said, but I'm just curious on the unregretted part, 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.
Elon MuskWell, I mean, I did clarify that some of my concerns about Soros 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 LA and San Francisco district attorney races, with Chesa Boudin, and the guy, I always want to call him Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, Bragg, and basically he's funded a large number of DAs elected who are very easy on crime and will often refuse to prosecute.
Thorold BarkerSo you were basically trying to make a deeper point with that.
Elon MuskYeah.
Thorold BarkerCan I just move on quickly, because I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole, because that debate has played out on Twitter a bit. Are you back near profitability now?
Elon MuskTwitter is not quite there, but we're not... When I first, the 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 and the controls don't work. So it's discomforting, to say the least. Now we had to do some pretty heavy-handed cost-cutting to get the company healthy, but at this point we're trending towards, if we get lucky, we might be cash-flow positive next month, but it remains to be seen.
Thorold BarkerAnd is the staffing at the level you now want it, or are you going to start taking it back up again? It's gone from, I think, 8,000 to about 1,500 or something like that. Is that crazy correct?
Elon MuskYeah. I think 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, but there's still a lot of change that has to happen. But I think 1,500 is probably a reasonable number.
Thorold BarkerAnd 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?
Elon MuskYeah, I think Twitter maybe is somewhat of an outlier, in that there were a lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have a lot of value. And that's, I think, true probably at most Silicon Valley companies, maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter, but there's still potential for significant cuts at most of the companies without affecting their productivity, in fact increasing their productivity. At any given company there are people who help move things forward, and people who sort of try to slam the brakes on. And Twitter was in a situation where you'd have a meeting of 10 people, and one person with an accelerator and nine with a set of brakes, so you didn't go very far. And so now we're going about releasing functionality even with a little bit of risk to site stability, as long as it's not too serious, and I think at this point it's probably fair to say we introduced more functionality in the last six months than Twitter has in the last six years.
Thorold BarkerAnd in terms of outages, there were some outages early on. Are you confident things are stable now?
Elon MuskWell, outages are not unusual. Instagram recently had an outage, for example. It was reported on Twitter, ironically. So we've had outages, but not massive ones, and they've generally been brief and limited in scope.
Thorold BarkerDo you regret buying it? You tried to get out of it. Or are you now happy you bought it?
Elon MuskWell, all's well that ends well.
Thorold BarkerHas it ended well yet, or have we still got to wait and see?
Elon MuskI think we're hopefully on the comeback arc.
Thorold BarkerSo one of the things you have talked about, you bought it for 44 billion, 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 bigger vision? I mean, you want to bring back advertisers now. And are they coming back, by the way?
Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
Thorold BarkerCan you give any idea of the scale of the comeback in terms of who you lost and who's coming back?
Elon MuskWell, I think it'll be very significant. So the advertising agencies at this point have all lifted their warnings on Twitter. So I appreciate the fact that GroupM, for example, removed their concern label over Twitter, which is a very big deal. And so I think at this point I expect almost all advertisers to come back. We've also done a lot more to make the advertising more relevant to users, so that we show users things that they're more likely to be interested in buying.
Thorold BarkerSounds obvious, but...
Elon MuskThat's what tends to happen. Yeah, not super obvious. I mean, just basic stuff, like if you do a search on Twitter, previously the search banner ad did not take the search terms into account, which is pretty insane. It would just show a random ad, whereas obviously show an ad that matches your search.
Thorold BarkerSounds 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?
Elon MuskObviously 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 trap them in the app, but let's provide enough compelling functionality that over time people's usage of the platform grows.
Thorold BarkerSo in 10 years' time, is advertising still going to be dominant on Twitter?
Elon MuskI think advertising will always play a role. At some point, 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.
Thorold BarkerSo I want to do a quick round of questions. 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 AI and talk a little bit about some of the deeper points that you started making earlier. So first one: will Twitter be public again in five years?
Elon MuskI don't know.
Thorold BarkerOkay. Do you think the HQ will still be in San Francisco?
Thorold BarkerOkay, not good so far. Let's try a couple more. Which decade are we going to crack artificial general intelligence?
Elon MuskI think this one.
Thorold BarkerOkay, so it's that soon. Okay. Are you going to take a SpaceX trip yourself?
Elon MuskI will at some point, yeah. Not sure when.
Thorold BarkerWhich is the most exciting country to build a Tesla plant in right now?
Elon MuskWell, 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.
Thorold BarkerIs India interesting?
Elon MuskAbsolutely.
Thorold BarkerAre you still a fan of crypto?
Elon MuskWell, I mean, I'm not advising anyone to buy crypto or bet the farm on Dogecoin or anything like that.
Thorold BarkerOn Dogecoin, I might have been thinking maybe you should, but let me advise you that would be a... have some ways.
Elon MuskDoge 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 lower than it was, I think. Well, I don't know, maybe. A 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 as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies, the most ironic outcome would be that it becomes the global currency.
Thorold BarkerOkay, we'll wait and see. Final one: can you rank the US and China on their development of AI, each out of ten?
Elon MuskWell, I mean, the US very much has the most advanced AI.
Thorold BarkerSo you'd say China's close behind?
Elon MuskCertainly, and has the resources to scale and to optimize. The biggest single advances in AI still come from the US and Europe.
Thorold BarkerAll right, so it's hard to give an exact number score, because it's more like, but there's a big gap still?
Elon MuskThere is a gap, that gap looks like it's on the order of 12 months.
Thorold BarkerIs it narrowing or expanding?
Elon MuskIt's hard to tell. I suspect it will narrow to some degree.
Thorold BarkerOkay. 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. I mean, what do you want to do yourself in this space, beyond Tesla and the stuff you talked about earlier? What is that new thing?
Elon MuskWell, I think there should be a significant third horse in the race here. We've got OpenAI and Microsoft, Google DeepMind, and probably there should be a third horse in the race.
Thorold BarkerSo 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?
Elon MuskTo some degree. I don't want to jump the gun here on announcements, but, you know, OpenAI has a relationship with Microsoft that seems to work fairly well. So it's possible that xAI and Twitter and Tesla would have something similar. Possible.
Thorold BarkerYou've talked about the importance of regulation, and you called for this moratorium. I 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.
Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I think there should be, you know, I've been pushing hard for a long time. I met with a number of senators and congresspeople in Congress, and 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 insight committee gains insight into what various companies are up to. And to the degree that there's competitive dynamics there, you would sequester board members who perhaps have conflicts. But anyway, you figure out some sort of regulatory board, and they start off gaining insight, and then I have proposed rulemaking, and then that will get comments by industry, 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 NHTSA, and food and drugs with the Food and Drug Administration.
Thorold BarkerRight. 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 globalizable?
Elon MuskWell, really the key question is, will China cooperate with the West? That remains to be seen. But I would still advocate some degree of oversight. I mean, we have regulatory oversight of aircraft, for example, and yet the US is still very much doing great on aircraft. So makes more, it makes more effort than any other place. So just because you have FAA regulations doesn't mean that it's necessarily slowed down very much.
Thorold BarkerDoes, 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 change that dynamic, or is that a much more unlikely outcome?
Elon MuskWell, there are a lot of AI startups. The thing that's becoming tricky is that, in order to compete, you really need three things. You need talent, talented people. You need a lot of compute, expensive compute. And you need access to data. So whoever's succeeding on those three will win. So now that the cost of compute has gotten astronomical, it's now kind of a minimum ante, I would say, minimum would be 250 million dollars of server hardware.
Thorold BarkerMinimum, that's like just to be 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?
Elon MuskYeah, to train a big one. To train a model of probably GPT-5 size, I wouldn't be surprised if they use at least 30,000, maybe 50,000 H100s, which are the latest GPUs, not sure that's quite the right word, but the latest technology from Nvidia. And then you need to run inference as well. So there's a lot of the GPUs, at this point they're considerably harder to get than drugs.
Thorold BarkerActually, that's really not a high bar in San Francisco.
Elon MuskYou can tell us more about that later, but yes.
Thorold BarkerOkay, so a couple of things I just wanted to go into on AI, which I'd love your perspective on. Is this going to, 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 where this heads?
Elon MuskIn terms of access to goods and services, I think AI will be ushering in an age of abundance, assuming that we're in a benign AI scenario. I think AI will be able to make goods and services very inexpensively. And so anything that is a product or a service where there's not artificial scarcity created, such as, like, I want to live exactly in this neighborhood, houses, it's like, okay, well, there's only 100 houses there, so that would still have scarcity, or a unique artwork would have scarcity. But anything that does not have scarcity, that we deliberately designed to be scarce, will be plentiful for everyone, in a benign scenario.
Thorold BarkerAnd in the unbenign scenario?
Elon MuskWell, there's a wide range of...
Thorold BarkerBut 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?
Elon MuskWell, I don't think the AI is going to try to destroy all humanity, but it might put us under strict controls. I mean, there's a non-zero chance of it going Terminator. It's not zero percent, but it's, I think it's a small likelihood of annihilating humanity, but it's not zero. We want it all to be as close to zero as possible. And then, like I said, AI assuming control for 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.
Thorold BarkerBut isn't another scenario, you say that, yeah, like, you know, let's say you're, I mean, well, contestant, hypothetically, it's unlikely, let's face it, and you say, what do you want, and so, I want world peace.
Elon MuskAnd it's like, okay, well, you know, one way to achieve world peace is to take all the weapons away from the humans, so they can no longer use them, and to punish any humans that engage in extraterritorial activity.
Thorold BarkerBut isn't the more likely nasty outcome that, rather than AI taking over and being the ultimate nanny that keeps us all doing stuff that is super safe, that actually somebody nefariously harnesses that power to achieve societal control or military superiority, and that actually some country around the world decides to use it in a different way?
Elon MuskYes, that's what I mean by AI used as a weapon. 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 10,000 times harder, to create an account that has a verified phone number from a credible carrier, that has 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. Whereas in the past someone could create a million fake accounts for a penny a piece, and then manipulate, have something appear to be very much liked by the public when in fact it is not, or promoted and retweeted when in fact it is not. The popularity is not real, essentially gaming the system. So the device towards a subscription-based verification I think is very powerful, and 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 degree.
Thorold BarkerSo 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, 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 the candidates?
Elon MuskI think that's something we need to look at in a big way, is to make sure that we're minimizing the impact of AI manipulation. We're certainly taking that seriously at X, Twitter, 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.
Thorold BarkerOkay, but beyond Twitter, are you worried about this for the election in general?
Elon MuskYeah. There probably will be attempts to use AI to manipulate the public, and some of it will be successful. And if not this election, for sure the next one.
Thorold BarkerOkay, 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 it's going to be like to be human? How much is this going to change the fundamental nature of how we operate as a race at this point?
Elon MuskI think it's going to change a lot, especially if you go further out into the future. I mean, everything will be automatic. There'll be household robots that you can fully talk to as though they 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 factories. And cars will also be all automatic. And anything that intelligence can be applied to, even modest intelligence, will be automated.
Thorold BarkerSo if you say like 10, 20 years from now, will we be connected to that technology through a Neuralink-type device? I mean, is that where this, in your view, obviously, is that where this heads?
Elon MuskWell, a high-bandwidth interface from cortex to your sort of computing or AI tertiary layer, which already exists, it's just that we don't have a high-bandwidth connection. We've got a limbic system, which is a sort of foundational element, that's sort of our instincts and desires and whatnot. There's the cortex on top of that, which is the thinking part of our brain. And then there's 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 constraint on a better merging, the constraint on having human interests and machine interests be aligned, is the bandwidth, especially the output. So at what speed can you output to a computer? It's using voice or your fingers, which move very slowly, so you're talking about maybe 10 bits per second, or some fairly small data rate. So with the Neuralink, you can increase that by, you know, a million, probably. So everything just speeds up.
Thorold BarkerOkay. I mean, this is obviously in a relatively benign scenario, because there's a question of, not just, let's say it's a benign scenario, how do we even appreciate or understand what the computer is doing, how do we go along for the ride?
Elon MuskAnd if you have a brain-machine interface that's, I don't know, a million times faster, then we'll go along for the ride a lot better than if we're interfacing with a phone using two slow-moving meat sticks.
Thorold BarkerIf you put it like that. And in terms of, you have a lot of kids, many in this room have kids, what do they need to, 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?
Elon MuskWell, I think it's important to have a broad range 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 has a strong interest and ability. So finding that overlap of where is my child 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.
Thorold BarkerOkay.
Elon MuskBut 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.
Thorold BarkerIn what time frame are we talking about here?
Elon MuskSo, if you say like over a 20, 30-year time frame, I think things will be transformed beyond belief. 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 decade. So the impact, arguably we are on the event horizon of the black hole that is super intelligence.
Thorold BarkerOkay. So I'm going to ask one final question, and then I'm going to see if you've got two minutes to take a couple of questions from the floor. And it comes back to China, which you talked about a little bit. You have a very big business in China in Tesla, and obviously you're on that geopolitical fault line that's getting potentially interesting. To what extent is this affecting your decision-making around sort of how you put assets 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?
Elon MuskWell, there is fundamentally an issue that's coming to a head with Taiwan. And it's unclear when exactly push will come to shove, but it seems that there's a good chance push will come to shove. It's trending in that direction. I'd rather not think about what would happen. The results for the global economy would be absolutely catastrophic. But you know, China has been very clear about its goal on, 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're not bracing it, they're not hiding it.
Thorold BarkerAnd is the biggest concern, despite 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?
Elon MuskWell, there's even more that comes out of China. So much of the world's heavy lifting on manufacturing, especially if the manufacturing is simply hard work and not particularly glamorous, China does an immense amount of hard work that most people have no idea how much hard work they do. So Taiwan was much less of a concern than being cut off from China. Now, China would reciprocally suffer, of course, because the economies of China and Taiwan are like conjoined twins with the Western economy, with the rest of the world. So China, the West, the rest of the world being conjoined twins from an economic standpoint will mean that the separation is going to be dire indeed, if it happens. I hope it does not happen. There's no easy solution here, but if there's any path to a diplomatic solution, we should really take that seriously.
Thorold BarkerGreat. Do you have time to take a few questions from the floor, Elon?
Elon MuskSure.
Thorold BarkerDoes anybody have a question they'd like to pose? We'll go here, and then here. Mike behind you.
Audience memberThanks, Elon, thanks for joining us. I'm the founder of a real estate business in Newcastle in the northeast of England. We manufacture and export more cars from the northeast than the whole of Italy. Would you let me build you a Tesla factory in the northeast of England?
Elon MuskThanks for the offer. We'll probably consider England for a future location of a Gigafactory.
Audience memberThank you. So you will consider it, are you actively considering it?
Elon MuskWe're not currently looking at new locations, but we will towards the end of this year.
Audience memberI'll send you some plans.
Thorold BarkerDavid here, please.
DavidThank you for your time. Fusion. Lots of scientists say it could change the world. The planet, the sun, all life 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 is not actually focusing on fusion, which I think could be a game-changer for society, rather than on Twitter, where there are many media decent companies that can do it, and I would say almost in a trivial way?
Elon MuskWell, I think we already have a giant fusion reactor in the sky called the sun that shows up every day. So I've always said, if you want to know what standing in front of a future fusion reactor feels like, just go and stand in front of the sun, you know, just walk outside. That's what a giant fusion reactor feels like, because that's what the sun is. It converts about four and a half million tons of mass to energy every second, and requires no maintenance. It's amazing. You don't have to refuel it, you don't have to maintain it, it's just there. So my recommendation for fusion is solar power and batteries. And we can easily power all of Earth with just photovoltaics and batteries, not easily, but there's a very clear path to do so, and no miracles are required, just work. I'm also an advocate of wind, and of nuclear fission, geothermal, hydro and whatnot.
Thorold BarkerWe'll take a couple more, one here and then the lady at the back.
Audience memberThank 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 mid term?
Elon MuskI guess I just talk to my team, read the news, I don't know, 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. I don't know, I think we just try to prepare for the worst, hope for the best. And, you know, make sure we have factories in geographically diversified regions of the world where the supply chain is as localized as possible. But this is important also for force majeure 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 a supply chain that does not inherit force majeure from all of Earth, because something's going to happen somewhere, it's a big planet. So that's why I think it's important to have localized supply chains with factories in many geographies.
Thorold BarkerLast question, from the lady at the back, thank you.
Audience memberYeah, you famously tweeted that you thought 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?
Elon MuskWell, yeah, I mean, I think it's very telling if you look at the birth rates, which are just publicly available. You can look at the birth rate last year for every country, it's available online, and you can look at the trend in birth rates, and it's just very clear that the trend has been strongly downward, and that we've recently hit all-time lows. You'd think during COVID, you know, what else have 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 COVID, and an increase in divorces, too, since people had to make a lot of time with their significant other.
Elon MuskSo I think generally, it's simply changing people's minds about the goodness of having kids. It's very important to have kids in order to continue civilization. And I think sometimes it's viewed as, 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 certainly not the case. 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 just to give you a sense, 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 you're given a task from an airplane of dropping a bowling ball and you have to hit someone, you'd miss, you'd almost never hit anyone. You very rarely go over a person. In an aircraft, you fly from LA to New York, vast areas of land with no one at all.
Elon MuskSo anyway, 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. And I think in terms of government incentives, there should be some, I think, tax breaks for having kids, or make it just financially not burdensome to have children. And it's always worth bearing in mind, 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 doesn't seem quite right. Because that's the world they'll be forced to, absent automation, is that someone else's kids will have to take care of you when you're old. So anyway, one way or another, we need to solve this birth rate issue, or civilization will dwindle to nothing.
Thorold BarkerIsn't that where AI comes in? It'll do all the jobs for us, so we can handle a potentially lower population, or what you're talking about?
Elon MuskI think there will be robot nannies that are very competent, so that will help.