Elon Musk

As far as idea generation, I think I tend to think of things from a sort of physics standpoint, like from a first principle standpoint, what would be the best way to accomplish something and then pursue that.

And that's also a good way to determine if something's far from its optimum.

And like on rockets, for example, one could say, you know, you could reason by analogy and say, the rocket's going to cost a certain amount because that's what prior rockets have cost. Or you can say, well, what is a rocket made of? What are the material constituents? What do they weigh? What's the cost per unit mass? And that sets the limit asymptotically for what a rocket can be. So if you can figure out some creative way to rearrange those elements into a rocket shape, then you can achieve a much better outcome. That's the first principles approach. And I think also just combining ideas from different industries is really helpful for innovation.

So what have people discovered in one industry and can that be applied to other industries? That's, I think, also a great source of ideas. But usually you just struggle on a solution and you try a bunch of things. Some of them don't work and some of them, and most of them don't work, and occasionally one does. Some of them don't work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work and some of them work

I didn't expect PayPal's growth rate to be what it was. So, and that actually created major problems. So we started PayPal on University Avenue. Oh, yeah. After the first month or so of the website being active, we had 100,000 customers. Really? That, wow, I didn't realize it was. Yeah, it was nutty. Wow. And how did it start? How did people just even know to use it? And I mean, obviously, both buyer and seller have to be involved. Yeah.

Well, we started off first by offering people $20 if they opened an account. Mm. And $20 if they referred anyone. Oh. And then we dropped it to $10, and then we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer. So how much did one of you all spend with that kind of $5, $10, $20 incentive to get that critical mass going? That was a fair amount. I think it was probably $60 or $70 million. Oh, wow. Okay, so it was a substantial. Yeah, it was a lot. Oh, okay. So we're not talking peanuts here.

Yeah, this is. Yeah, it depends on your relative scale. Yeah. We could. It's a peanut to Google. Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. So core. Google's cash would be $500 million, so that's 0.1 % of Google's cash. That's true. You're right. That's inexpensive. Relative to them, it's pretty inexpensive. That's right. And then we just did a bunch of things to decrease the friction because, and it's just like bacteria in a petri dish. Yeah.

So what you want to do is try to have one customer generate, like two customers. Yeah. Okay, or something like that, maybe three customers ideally. And then you want that to happen really fast.

And you could probably model it just like bacteria growth in a petri dish. Yeah. And it'll just expand very quickly until it hits the sides of the petri dish. Yeah. And it slows down. So, you know. Um.

So this is going to sound kind of doomerish, okay, but corporations that are purely AI robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop. Like computer used to be a job that humans had and they'd have like entire skyscrapers full of humans just doing calculations. Now that entire skyscraper of humans doing calculations can be replaced by a laptop with a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet can do vastly more calculations than an entire building full of human computers. So you can think about, okay, well, what if only some of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by humans? That would be much worse than if all of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by the computer.

Really what will happen is the pure AI, pure robotics corporations or collectives will far outperform any corporations that have humans in the loop. And this will happen very quickly.

Processes are only as good as those who lead it. And so what are the traits you look for in those who lead your various businesses and enterprises?

Well, I'm very much in technology. So for me, if somebody is going to lead something in technology, they must themselves be good at technology. Meaning that if they're going to lead something that involves complex engineering, they must themselves be good at engineering. They don't necessarily need to be the best engineer on the team, but they need to be very competent in their field.

So this is incredibly important.

To me, if somebody is leading a given engineering field or engineering department and they are not good at that, then that would be like a cavalry captain who can't ride a horse. Problem. Problem. Great leader in every way except can't ride a horse. And then you've got a charge into battle and the cavalry captain pulls off the horse. You know, it's not inspiring. So, Cavalry captain must be able to ride a horse.

That's, that's, so that, that, that's actually, they don't need to be the best horse rider, but they must be competent in this regard. Otherwise, they cannot evaluate the talent of the team. And they don't understand the technology that's being developed. This may seem like a simple thing, but it is often the case, not the case that this, this is overlooked.

You know, I don't want to pick on the CEO of Boeing, but, I think he's got a degree in accounting or something. Which, I think that's the case. You know, you want to have like a, someone who knows how airplanes work, running the airplane company. I guess I have to cross out my job at Boeing CEO. There he goes, Can't do that. No, but I mean, it's like, it's like, you want to, you want to not be the, it's just, if you're running an airplane company, you should know how airplanes, you should know how airplanes work and how they fly and how to design airplane.

I think that's pretty important. So, I think it's vital. you want to bring some details over there? you want to bring some details over there? you want to bring some details over there? you want to bring some details over there? you want to bring some details over there? you want to bring some details over there? you want to bring some details over there?

One of the things that was important then in the creation of PayPal was kind of how it started. Because initially, the initial thought with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services. So to have one place where all of your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. And then we had like a little feature, which was to do email payments. And whenever we'd show the system off to someone, we'd show the hard part, which was the agglomeration of financial services, which was quite difficult to put together. Nobody was interested. Then we'd show people email payments, which was actually quite easy, and everybody was interested.

So I think it's important to take feedback from your environment.

You want to be as closed loop as possible.

And so we focused on email payments and really try to make that work. And that's what really got things to take off.

But if we hadn't responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So it's important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them and correct your prior assumptions.

My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months. 36 months? Less than 36 months. You can mark my words. You know, once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the sun's power are you harnessing, you realize you have to go to space. You can't scale very, very much on Earth. To be clear, you're talking like terawatts. Yeah. Well, all over the United States currently uses only half a terawatt of power on average. Right. So, you know, if you say a terawatt, that would be twice as much electricity as the United States currently consumes.

So that's quite a lot. And can you imagine building that many data centers? That many power plants? Those who have, like, lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware that it's actually very difficult to build power plants. And then you don't just need power plants, you need all of the electrical transformers to run the transformers. So the moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens, is space. It's not even close.

Everything you do is for humanity. Why? Why are we working? Why do you care about the politics? Why do you care about multi -climatic species? I mean, I think that's a good question you ask, because it goes to, like, what, at a foundational level, what is my philosophy? And why does it lead to this conclusion? Yes.

So the reason is that when I was a teenager, I had, like, an existential crisis to try to figure out what's the meaning of life. It doesn't seem to be any meaning. For me, at least, the religious texts, and I read all of them that I get my hands on, did not seem convincing. So then I'm like, okay. Then I started reading philosophers. Careful of, like, reading German philosophers as a teenager. It's definitely not going to help with your depression.

So reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, I'm like, as an adult, it's much more manageable. But as a kid, you're like, whoa. So then I was like, man, I'm just, like, struggling to find meaning in life here. And then I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and basically what Douglas Adams was saying is that we don't really know what the right questions are to ask. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth, it turns out, is a big computer, and its goal is to answer the question, what's the meaning of life? And Earth comes up with the answer 42. They come to the conclusion that, no, the real problem is trying to formulate the question.

The universe is the answer. What are the questions? The more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. The more we can expand consciousness and become a multi -planet species, ultimately a multi -stellar species, we have a chance of figuring out what the hell's going on.

And so this is why I think we should have more humans, both biological and digital consciousness, and why we should become a multi -planet species and a multi -stellar species is so that we can understand the nature of the universe. If you accept as a proposition that we don't really understand the meaning of life, and we wish to understand the meaning of life, then in order to understand the meaning of life, we should expand consciousness such that we can ask better questions, learn more, expand beyond the solar system, ensure that life on Earth is good collectively for civilization, and then we can be less dumb about the nature of the universe, and maybe we can answer some questions about where the soul came from and where it's going.

I think that's a sound philosophy. It's the least unsound philosophy I can think of.

You famously said when you were younger there were five problems that you thought were most important for you to work on. If you were 22 today, what would the five problems that you would think about working on be? Well, first of all, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that's a good thing. It doesn't have to change the world. Even if it's just a little game or some improvement in photo sharing or something, if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people, I think that's fine. Stuff doesn't need to be changed the world just to be good.

I think first of all, I should say that I do not expect to be involved in all these things. So the five things that I thought about at the time in college, making life multi -planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the Internet, broadly speaking, and then genetics and AI. I think I didn't expect to be involved in all of those things. Actually, at the time in college, I thought helping with electrification of cars was how I would start out. And then I put that on hold to start an Internet company in 95 because there does seem to be like a time for particular technologies when they're at a steep point in the inflection curve.

And I didn't want to, you know, do a PhD at Stanford and watch it all happen. And I wasn't entirely certain that the technology I'd be working on would actually succeed. You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have a practical bearing on the world. And I wanted to, you know, just, I really was just trying to be useful. That's the optimization. It's like, what can I do that would actually be useful? Do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs? Mostly not. So what is the best way to be useful? Some yes, but mostly not. How should someone figure out how they can be most useful?

Whatever this thing is that you're trying to create, what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect? So that's why I think having something that makes a big difference but affects a sort of small to moderate number of people is great. As is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people. The area under the curve would actually be roughly similar for those two things. So it's actually really about, you know, just trying to be useful and... Anything else, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind of story would you say, what kind

When I interview somebody, I really just ask them to tell me the story of their career and what are some of the tougher problems that they dealt with, how they dealt with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points.

And usually that's enough for me to get a very good gut feel about someone. And what I'm really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability.

So did they face really difficult problems and overcome them? And then, of course, you want to make sure that if there was some significant accomplishment, were they really responsible or was somebody else more responsible? And usually the person who's had to struggle with the problem, they really understand it. And they don't forget. You know, if it was very difficult. So you can ask them detailed, very detailed questions about it and they will know the answer. Whereas the person who was not truly responsible for that accomplishment will not know the details. College, university, university? No, it's not, there's no need even to have a college degree at all.

Or even high school.

I mean, if somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it's not necessarily the case. You know, if you look at, say, people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, these guys didn't graduate from college. But if you had a chance to hire them, of course, that would be a good idea. Yeah.

So, you know, just looking just for evidence of exceptional ability. And if there's a track record of exceptional achievement, then it's likely that that will continue into the future. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.! Mm Mm Thank you.

So 10 years ago, you had really compelling demos of self -driving, but only now we have Robotaxi and Waymo and all these services scaling up. Shouldn't this make one pessimistic on household robots? Because we don't even quite have the compelling demos yet. Well, we've been working on humanoid robots now for a while. So I guess it's been five or six years or something like that. And a bunch of things that we've done for the car are applicable to the robot. So we'll use the same Tesla AI chips in the robot as the car. You've got many more degrees of freedom for a robot than you do for a car.

Really, if you're thinking of it as like a bootstream, AI is really mostly compression and correlation of two bootstreams. So for video, you've got to do a tremendous amount of compression and you've got to do the compression just right. You don't care about the details of the leaves and the tree on the side of the road, but you care a lot about the road signs and the traffic lights and the pedestrians and even whether someone in another car is looking at you or not looking at you. Some of these details matter a lot. But the car is going to turn at one and a half gigabytes a second ultimately into two kilobytes a second of control output.

So many stages of compression. And you've got to get all those stages right and then correlate those to the correct control outputs. The robot has to do essentially the same thing. This is what happens with humans. We really are photons in, controls out. That is the vast majority of your life has been vision, photons in, and then motor controls out.

I want to ask if you saw the Bill Gates memo that he put out. A lot of people are talking about this memo. I just want to say, Billy G is not my lover.

You'd think that someone like Bill Gates who started a technology company, that's one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft, you'd think he'd be really quite strong in the sciences. But actually, he is not strong in the sciences. Yeah, he's now taking a 180 on climate. He's saying maybe this shouldn't be the top priority. Climate is gay. The reality of the whole climate change thing is that you've just had people who say it doesn't exist at all. And then people who are super lamest and saying, RAR is going to be underwater in five years. And obviously, neither of those two positions are true. The reality is you can measure the carbon concentration in the atmosphere.

At some point, if you continue to take billions, especially trillions of tons of carbon from deep underground and transfer to the atmosphere and oceans, you will change the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans. You just literally will. And the reality is that, in my opinion, we've got at least 50 years before it's a serious issue. I don't think we've got 500 years, but we've probably got, you know, 50. It's not five years. The concern level for climate change is on the order of 50 years. It's definitely not five. And I think it probably isn't 500. So really, the right course of action is actually just the reasonable course of action, which is to lean in the direction of sustainable energy.

So - So - So - So - So - So - Thank you.

What's the single biggest remaining problem for Starship? It's having the heat shield be reusable. No one has ever made a reusable orbital heat shield. So the heat shield's got to make it through the ascent phase and then it's going to come back in and also not lose a bunch of tiles or overheat the main airframe. Isn't that hard? Because it's kind of fundamentally a consumable? Well, yes, but your brake pads in your car are also consumable, but they last a very long time. Fair. So it just needs to last a very long time. I mean, we have brought the ship back and had it do a soft landing in the ocean.

We've done that a few times, but it lost a lot of tiles. You know, it was not reusable without a lot of work. So it's not really reusable in that sense. So like you want to be able to land it, refill propellant and fly again. Without, you know, you can't do this laborious inspection of, you know, 40,000 tiles type of things. That's the biggest problem that remains is fully reusable heat shield.