After buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk's time as CEO has been a whirlwind. Shares of Musk's other major company, Tesla, have plummeted more than 30% since he took over Twitter. As is often the case, his next move is unclear. I go as far as hitting that he's demonstrating some erratic behavior. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.
Hey, Bob. Sure, in the audience. Elon Musk's cooperation and or relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at. The Biden administration has just announced its second investigation into Elon Musk in less than a week. Both the Tesla and SpaceX is a product roadmap that they're on and that whether Elon is in the building or not is not going to impact the plan that they have.
People said he'd never get the rocket in space. He did that. People said the roads were never going to get delivered. He did that. People said he'd never get 100 of them done. He's got 200 done. As an entrepreneur, you can't listen to the noise. And you certainly can't listen to losers who have never accomplished anything with their life who are obsessing about you. Please.
We're out there among the stars. And we're a multi-planet species across many planets and many star systems. This is a great future. And that's what we should strive for. To our customer support at your service. Nearly every VC I speak with, every CEO, is looking to Elon's behavior and saying that's a model for how you can challenge your team to achieve the impossible in an impossibly difficult environment. And you can see those griffins on your left hand screen rotating and turning to guide the booster and there's that landing gun. Landing gun just begun. And you can see the water's along. And we have blast guns. And we have these levels going. And he's just a visionary like I've never seen.
我们正处于群星之间。我们是一个跨越多个行星和星系的多行星物种。这是一个伟大的未来,我们应该为之努力。我们的客户支持在为您服务。我几乎与每一个我交谈过的风投和每一个 CEO 都认为,埃隆的行为模式是一种榜样,展示了如何在极其困难的环境中挑战团队,实现不可能的目标。您可以在左侧屏幕上看到那些狮鹫在旋转和转动,引导助推器,还有着陆枪。着陆枪刚刚开始。你还能看到水,以及爆破枪,还有这些等级正在增加。他是一个前所未见的有远见的人。
How on earth would you bet against him? Elon seems to be on track to be not only the world's richest man, but the world's first trillionaire. Elon basically has had over the last 10 or 15 years an incredible amount of challenges that he's overcome. Probably had to deal with stuff that most of us would have broken under. And he just fought through it. And the guy just basically bended all the haters until he crushed their souls. And I just think that that's incredible. MUSIC CHEERING
The greatest answer for all of us. Oh, thank you. This is the generation of Elon Musk. Yes. CHEERING Oh, my God. Here I'm going to take this. All right. Oh, thank you. Ah. See what it is. Thanks for taking the time. LAUGHTER How are you doing, brother? You keeping busy? Yeah. I mean. LAUGHTER It's rarely a slow week. LAUGHTER I mean, in the world as well. Yeah. I mean, any given week, it just seems like the things getting out of here. It's definitely a simulation. We've agreed on this at this point. I mean, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high. Yes. Thanks for having me.
How are the freedom of speech wars going? This is a. You've been at war for two years now. Yes. The price of freedom of speech is not cheap, isn't it? I think it's like 44 billion something. Just. It's probably not a million. Give her. Give her take a billion. Yeah, around and around. Yeah. It's pretty netty. There is this weird movement to quell free speech kind of around the world. And this is something we should be very concerned about. You have to ask, why was the First Amendment a high priority? It was like no one. One. It's because people came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed. And they were like, well, we would like to not have that here. Because that was terrible. And actually, you know, there's a lot of places in the world right now. If you're critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed. Right. And we would like to not have that.
Are you concerned about that? Yeah. I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message. Yeah. APPLAUSE You know, I think we always thought that the West was the exception to that. That we knew there were authoritarian places around the world, but we thought that in the West we'd have freedom of speech. And we've seen, like you said, it seems like a global movement. In Britain, you've got teenagers being put in prison for memes. It's like you like to Facebook posts. Throw them in the prison. Yeah.
People have got an actual prison for obscure comments on social media. Not even shit posting. It's not even. It's prison media. It's just a problem that's thrown in prison. You've got a problem. I'm like, that's what I'm talking about. I was like, what is the massive crime? That. Povill in France and then of course we got Brazil with Judge Voldemort. That one seems like the one that impacts you the most. What's the latest on that? Well, I guess we are trying to figure out is there some reasonable solution in Brazil? The concern. I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly.
And funny means aside, the nature of the concern was that at least at X-corp we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law. So, obviously we cannot as an American company impose American laws and values on other countries that we wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do think that if a country's laws are a particular way and we're being asked to. We think we're being asked to break them and be silent about it, then obviously that is no good.
So, I'm sure it really clear, because sometimes it comes across as Elon's trying to just be crazy, whatever billionaire and demand outrageous things from other countries. And, you know, well that is true. In addition, there are other things that I think are. I think are valid, which is like we obviously can't. I think any given thing that we do at X-corp, we've got to be able to explain in light of day and not feel that it was dishonorable or we did the wrong thing. So, we don't. that was the destination of the concern.
So, we actually are in discussions with the judicial authorities in Brazil to try to run this to ground. Like what's actually going on? Like if we're being asked to break the law, resilient law, then that's. that obviously should not sit well with the resilient judiciary. And if we're not, when we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we're mistaken. I think that's a pretty reasonable position. I'm a bit concerned, as your friend, that you're going to go to one of these countries, and I'm going to wake up one day. And then you're going to get arrested and you're going to have to go bail you out or something. This feels very acute.
Yes. I mean, it's not a joke now. Like they're literally saying like, you know, it's not just Biden saying like, we have to look into that guy. Now it's become quite literal. Like this. who was the guy who just wrote the. was it the guardian piece about like. Oh yeah, yeah. There have been three articles in I think in the past three weeks. Robert Reich. But it wasn't just him. Yeah. There's three different articles. Three different articles. It doesn't. that's a trend. Calling for me to be imprisoned in the guardian, you know. Guardian of what? What are they protecting exactly? Guardian of. I don't know. Thoritarianism?
Yeah. Guardian of. yeah. Censorship? Censorship. I mean, but the premise here is that you bought this thing, this online forum, this communication platform, and you're allowing people to use it to express themselves. Therefore, you have to be jailed. I don't understand the logic here. Right. There's. what do you think they're actually afraid of at this point? What's the motivation here? Well, I mean, I think. if somebody's sort of trying to push or false premise on the world, and then that premise can be undermined with public dialogue, then they will be opposed to public dialogue on that premise because they wish that false premise to prevail. Right.
So that's, I think, you know, the issue there is if they don't like the truth, you know, then we want to suppress it. You know, the sort of. what we're trying to do with the X-corp is. I distinguish that from my son, who's also called X. Yes. Right. You have parental goals. Everything's just called X basically. Yes. It's very difficult to send big UAs. The power of the sun.
Yeah. It's X everything. So, what we're trying to do is simply adhere to the. You know, the law is in a country. So if something is illegal in the United States or if it's illegal in Europe or Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down or we'll suspend the account because we're not there to make the laws. But if speech is not illegal, then what are we doing? Okay. Now we're injecting ourselves in as a sensor and where does it stop and who decides? So. and where does that path lead?
I think it leads to a bad place. So if the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different. But otherwise, we're going to obey the law in each jurisdiction. Right. And some of these European laws. That's it. We're not trying to flout the law. We're going to be clear about that. We're trying to adhere to the law. If the laws change, we will change. And if the laws don't change, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law. It's pretty straightforward.
Yes. It's very straightforward. And if somebody doesn't think we're not adhering to the law, well, they can file a lawsuit. Bingo. Also very straightforward. Yes. I mean, there are European countries that don't want people to promote Nazi propaganda. Yes. They have some sensitivity to it. Well, it is illegal. It is illegal in those countries. In those countries, if somebody puts that up, you take it down. Yes. But they typically file something and say, do you just have it? Yes. No, in some cases, it is just obviously illegal. You don't need to file a lawsuit for something that's just unequivocally illegal. We can literally read the law. This violates the law. Anyone can see that. Like, you don't need. If somebody is stealing, you don't need. Let me check the law on that. Oh, no, they're stealing. That was not Francisco. Let's go.
So we had JD Vance here this morning. He had a great job. And one of the things is there's this image on acts of like basically like you, Bobby, Trump, and JD are like the Avengers, I guess. And then there's another meme where you're in front of a desk where it says, doge. The Department of Governmental Efficiency. Yes, yes. I posted that one. Tell us about it. I made it using Grock, the Grock image generator. And that posted it. Tell us about the. I printed it to my profile. How do you do it? Well, I mean, I. I think with great difficulty, but you know, look, it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations. Yeah. And, you know, last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early 80s. We're 40 years away from a serious effort to remove, you know, regulations that don't serve the greater good and reduce the size of government. And I think it's just. If we don't do that, then what's happening is that we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal. And that's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States. Like if you look at the absurdity of the California High-Speed Rail, I think they spent $7 billion and have a 1,600-foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it. I mean, you're taxed dollars at work. I mean. Yeah, what do we do? It's also expensive, 16-hour feet of concrete, you know? And I mean, I think it's like, you know, I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but. You know. I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was, you know, not an optimist. So. At the current trend, you know, California High-Speed Rail might finish sometime next century. Maybe. Probably not. We're just going to. We'll have teleportation by that time. Yeah, exactly. They say they. They do everything at that point. So. So. So.
I think you really think of, you know, the United States and many countries. It's arguably worse than the EU. It's being like, Gulliver tied down by a million little strings. And like, any one given regulation is not that bad, but you've got a million of them. And. Or millions, actually. And then eventually you just can't get anything done. And this is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people. It's just they don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations.
I'm going to give you a recent example that, you know, is just insane. Is that SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for. They claimed dumping potable water on the ground. Drinking water. So. And we're like, this is that star base. And we're like, we're in a tropical thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. And there was no actual harm done.
You know, it's just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff. And there's zero harm done. Like, they agree, yes, there's zero harm done. And we're like, okay, so there's no harm done. And you want us to pay $140,000 fine? It's like, yes, because you didn't have a permit. Okay. We didn't know there was a permit needed for zero harm, fresh water being on the ground in a place that where fresh water falls from the sky all the time. Got it. Next to the ocean. Next to the ocean.
Because there's a little bit of water there too. Yeah. I mean, sometimes it rains so much the roads are flooded. So we're like, you know, how does this make any sense? Yeah. And then like, they were like, well, we're not going to process any more of your applications for launch, for Starship launch unless you pay this $140,000. It was ransomed us. And we're like, okay, so we paid $140,000. But it was a. It's like, this is no good.
I mean, at this rate, we're never going to get to Mars. I mean, that's the confounding part here is we're acting against our own self-interest. You know, when you look at. We do have to make. We're putting aside fresh water, but hey, you know, the rocket makes a lot of noise. So I'm certain there's some complaints about noise once in a while, but sometimes you want to have a party where you want to make progress and there's a little bit of noise. Therefore, you know, we trade off a little bit of noise for massive progress or even fun. So when did we stop being able to make those trade-offs?
But talk about the difference between California and Texas, where you and I now reside. Texas, you were able to build the Gigafactory. I remember when you got the plot of land. And then it seemed like it was less than two years when you had the party to open it. Yeah. From static instruction to completion was 14 months. 14. 14 months. Is there anywhere on the planet that would go faster? Is like trying to faster than that? China was 11 months. Got it. So Texas, China, 11 and 14 months. California, how many months? And just to give you a sense of size, the. It tells the Gigafactory in China, it's three times the size of the Pentagon.
Which was the biggest building in America? No, there were bigger buildings. But the Pentagon's a pretty big one. Yeah, where it was in the thing. In units of Pentagon, it's like three. Okay. Three Pentagon's and counting. Yeah. Got it. In 14 months. Just the regulatory approvals in California would have taken two years. So that's the issue. Where do you think the regulation helps? Like for the people that will say, we need some checks and balances. We can't have some. Because for every good actor, like you, there'll be a bad actor. So where is that line?
Yeah, I mean, I haven't had sort of. You know, in sort of doing. Sensible deregulation and reduction in the size of government is just like the very public about it and say like, which of these rules do you. If the public is really excited about a rule and wants to keep it, we'll just keep it. And the thing about the rule is if the rule is, you know, it turns out to be a bad, we'll just put it right back. Okay. And then, you know, problem solved.
It's like it's easy to add rules, but we don't actually have a process for getting rid of them. That's the issue. There's no garbage collection for rule. When we were watching you work, David and I in Antonio, in that first month at Twitter, which was all hands on deck, and you were doing zero-based budgeting, you really quickly got the cost under control. And then miraculously, everybody said this site will go down and you added 50 more features. So maybe explain. Yeah. Because this is the first time.
Yeah, there were like so many articles like the. This is Twitter is dead forever. There's no way I could possibly even continue at all. It was almost like the press was rooting for you to found. It's like, all right, let's write the obituary. Look, here's the obituary. They're all saying they're goodbyes on Twitter, remember that? Yeah, yeah. They're all leaving and saying they're goodbyes because the site was going to melt down. It was totally failing. All the journalists left. Yeah. Which is. If you ever want to hang out with a bunch of hall monitors, oh my god, Threads is amazing. Every time I go over there and post, they're really triggered. Yeah, I mean if you like being condemned repeatedly, then, you know, for reasons I make no sense, then Threads is the way to go. Yeah, it's really. It's the most miserable place on earth. Is these the happiest? This is the anti-Disney.
But if we were to go into government, you went into the Department of Education or pick the department, you've worked with a lot of them actually. You can't go in there and see our base budget. Okay, we get it. But if you could just pair two, three, four, five percent of those organizations, what kind of impact would that have? Yeah, I mean I think we'd need to do more than that, I think. Ideally. Yeah. Compounding every year, two, three percent a year. I mean it would be better than what's happening now. Yeah, look, I think we've. You know, if Trump wins, and I'll say I respect their people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen, but we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once in a lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing, besides the regulations, America is also going bankrupt extremely quickly. And nobody seems to. Everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one. They're all grabbing the silverware. Everyone's stuffing their pockets in the silverware before this. Titanic sinks.
Well, you know, the Defense Department budget is a very big budget. Okay, it's a trillion dollars a year. DoD until it's trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year. Just an interest and rising. We're adding a trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay somehow, every three months. And then, soon it's going to be every two months. And then every month. And then the only thing we'll be able to pay is interest. And if this is. It's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt. And this is not. This is not have a good ending. How committed is it? And so we have to reduce the spending. Let me ask one question, because I've brought this up a lot in the counter-argument I hear, which I disagree with. But the counter-argument I hear from a lot of politicians is if we reduce spending, because right now if you add up federal, state and local government spending, it's between 40 and 50 percent of GDP.
So nearly half of our economy is supported by government spending and nearly half of people in the United States are dependent directly or indirectly on government checks. And either through contractors that the government pays or they're employed by government entity. So if you go in and you take too hard an axe too fast, you will have significant contraction, job loss and recession. What's the balancing act, Elon? Just thinking realistically, because I'm 100 percent on board with you, the next set of steps, however, assume Trump wins and you become the chief doge. Do you like double G? And I think the challenge is how quickly can we go in? How quickly can we change? Without all the contraction and job loss. So I guess how do you really address it when so much of the economy and so many people's jobs and livelihoods are dependent on government spending?
Well, I mean, I do think it's sort of, you know, it's a false dichotomy. It's not like no government spending is going to happen. You really have to say like, is it the right level? And just remember that, you know, any given person, if they are doing things in a less efficient organization versus more efficient organization, they're a contribution to the economy. And that output of goods and services will reduce. I mean, you've got a couple of clear examples between East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea. I mean, North Korea, they're starving. South Korea, it's like amazing. It's the future. It's a compounding effect of productivity gains. Yeah. Yeah, it's night and day. And so in the North Korea, you've got a 100 percent government. In South Korea, you've got probably, I don't know, 40 percent government. It's not zero.
And yet you've got a standard of living that is probably 10 times higher in South Korea. At least. At least, exactly. And then East and West Germany, in West Germany, you hadn't, just thinking in terms of cars. I mean, you had BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, and East Germany, which is a random line on a map. The only car you could get was a Trabant, which is basically a lawnmower with a shell on it. And it was extremely unsafe. There was a 20-year wait. So you put your kid on the list. As soon as they're conceived. And even then, only, I think, a quarter of people maybe got this lousy car. And so that's just an interesting example of basically the same people, different operating system. And it's not like West Germany was some capitalist heaven. It was quite socialist, actually.
So when you look, probably it was half government in West Germany and 100 percent government in East Germany. And again, sort of a five to, I'd call it at least a five to 10x standard of living difference. And even qualitatively, vastly better. And it's obviously, you know, some of the people have these amazingly in this modern era, this debate as to which system is better. Well, I'll tell you which system is better. The one that doesn't need to build the world to keep people in. Okay. That's how you can tell. Okay. It's a dead giveaway. It's a spoiler alert. Dead giveaway.
Are they clogging the wall to get out or come in? You have to build a barrier to keep people in. That is the bad system. It wasn't West Berlin that built the wall. Okay. They were like, you know, anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead. Speaking of walls. So, you know, and if you look at sort of the flux of boats from Cuba, there's a large number of boats from Cuba. And there's a bunch of free boats that anyone can take to Cuba. Plenty of seats. There's like, hey, wow, an abandoned boat. I could use this boat to go to Cuba where they have communism. Awesome. Yes. And nobody picks up those boats and does it? Amazing.
So, you've given us a lot of thought. Yeah. So, your point is jobs will be created. If we cut government spending a half, jobs will be created fast enough to make up for, right, just to count. Yes. I'm not suggesting that people have like immediately tossed out with no severance and now can't pay their mortgage. They need to see some reasonable off ramp where, yeah. Yeah. So, reasonable off ramp where you know, they're still, you know, earning, they're still receiving money but have like, I don't know, a year or two to find jobs in the private sector, which they will find. And then they will be in a different operating system. Again, you can see the difference. East Germany was incorporated into West Germany. Living standards in East Germany rose dramatically. So, in four years, if you could shrink the size of the government with Trump, what would be a good target? Just in terms of like ballpark. I mean, are you trying to get me assassinated before this even happens? No. No. Pick a low number.
I mean, you know, there's that old phrase go postal. I mean, it's like they might. Yeah. So, we'll keep the post office. I mean, I mean, I need a half a security details, guys. Yes. The zero number of disgruntled workers for former government employees is, you know, quite a scary number. I mean, I might not make it, you know. I was saying a low, low digits every year for four years would be palatable. Yeah. And I like your idea of an over. But the thing is that if it's not done, like if you have a once in a lifetime or once in a generation opportunity and you don't take serious action and then you have four years to get it done. And then if it doesn't get done, then how serious is Trump about this? Like you've talked to him about it. Yeah. Yeah. He is serious about it. Got it. And no, I think actually the reality is that I forget rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector.
We will have immense prosperity. And I think we'll have a golden age in this country. And it'll be fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Can we talk about that? Yeah. That's interesting. Um, do you have a bunch of critical milestones coming up? Yeah. In fact, there's an important, a very exciting launch that is maybe happening tonight. So if that, if the weather is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to the Cape Canaveral for the, um, the Plaristorn mission, which is a private mission. So find it by Derek. And, um, Jared Eisenman and he's a. Awesome guy.
And, and there, this will be the first time, uh, the first private, the first commercial for spacewalk, um, and it'll be at the highest altitude since Apollo. So it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone. Yeah. And you know, I'm not going back after that. Let's assume that's successful. I sure hope so, man. Um, no pressure. Um, yeah. You know, absolutely, you know, ashmore prior, ashmore safety is, man, if I had like all the, all the wishes I could say about that would be the one to put on. So, you know, space is dangerous. Um, so the, the, yeah, I mean, the next milestone after that would be, the next flight of Starship, um, which, um, you know, Starship is, the next flight of Starship is ready to fly. We are waiting for regulatory approval.
You know, it really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than the paper can move from one desk to another. Yeah. And the stamp is really hard. Approved. Yeah. You've never seen that movie, you've proved. You've ever seen that movie, Zootopia, there's like a sloth coming in for the approval? Yeah, maybe accidentally tell a joke and then I was like, oh, no, this is going to take a long time. Sorry. Um, but yeah, Zootopia, you know, it's, you know, the funny thing is, I, so I went to the DMV about, I don't know, year later after Zootopia and to get my, one of license renewal. And the guy in an exercise of incredible self awareness had the sloth from Zootopia in his, um, his cube and he was actually swift.
With that, with that mandate, beat the sloth. Yeah. No, personally agency, personal agency. No, I mean, some people like, I think the, you know, the government is, um, more confident than it is. I'm not saying that there aren't competent people in the government. They're just in an operating system that is inefficient. Um, once you move them to a more efficient operating system, they, their output is dramatically greater as we've seen. You know, when East Germany was reintegrated to, into, with West Germany and, and, and the same people, um, were vastly more prosperous with a basically half capitalist operating system. So, um, but I mean, for a lot of people live there, like the, maybe most direct experience with the government is the DMV. Um, and, and then the important thing to remember is that the government is the DMV at scale. Right.
That's the government. Got the mental picture. How much do you want to scale it? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, can you go back to chemos, um, uh, question on starch? So you, you announced just the other day, a starship going to Mars in two years. And by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then four years for crude aspirational launch. Yeah. And how much is the government involved? I'm not saying, like, say you're watched by these, not, you know, but these, uh, but it, based on our current progress where we're, we're able to successfully reach oval of last year twice.
Uh, we're able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in the water. Uh, and that's despite the ship having, you know, habits, flaps, cooked off. Um, you can see the video on the platform. It's quite exciting. Um, so, you know, we, we think we'll be able to have to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. Um, and the, the fundamental holy grail breakthrough for rocketry for, to, to, what the fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multi planetary is a rapidly reusable reliable rocket. RRRR. For the pirates. Um, throw a fire in there. Um, the.
So with Starship is the first rocket design. Where. Success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. Um, so if you know, for any given project, you have to say, this is the circle to the right band diagram. Um, has a circle and it is success, the success dot in the circle. Um, is, is success in the set of possible outcomes? That's, uh, you know, sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where that, that is success is not in the set of possible outcomes. Um, and so, so Starship not only is fully full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch. Um, and, and, and, uh, I'm confident we'll succeed a simply matter of time. And.
You know, if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. Um, so that would, that would be very helpful. And in fact, if this, if something isn't done about, um, reducing regulation and sort of speeding up approvals. And to be clear, I'm not talking about anything unsafe. It's simply the processing of the safe thing can be done as fast as the rocket is both not slower than, uh, then we could become a space for civilization and a multi-climate species ultimate and be out there among the stars in the future. And there's. Yeah. It's, it's just very, like, it's incredibly important that we have things that, that we find inspiring that you look to the future and say the future is going to be better than the past.
Things to look forward to. And like, like kids are a good, a good way to assess this, like what are kids fired up about? And if you could say, you know, you could, you know, you could be an astronaut on Mars. You could maybe one day go beyond this whole system. We could make Star Trek, Starfleet Academy real. Um, that is an exciting future. That is inspiring. Um, you know, you just, I mean, you need things that move your heart. Right. Um, yeah. Fuck yeah.
Fuck yeah. Let's do it. Right. I mean, like, like life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. There's got to be things that you're looking forward to as well. Yeah. And, and do you think you might have to move it to a different jurisdiction and to move faster? I've always wondered if like, It's, and rocket technology is considered in fast weapons technology.
So we can't just go do it, you know, in another country. Yes. Yeah. Interesting. And if we don't do it, other countries could do it. I mean, they're so far behind us, but theoretically, there's a national security, you know, justification here if somebody can put their thinking caps on like, do we want to have this technology that your building, the teams, working so hard on stolen by other countries, and then, you know, maybe they don't have as much red tape. I wish people were trying to steal it. Um, so that no one's trying to steal it. It's too, it's too crazy, basically. Yeah. Um. And that's for you. Yeah. It's way too crazy. Yeah.
Elon, what do you think is going on that led to Boeing building the Star Line, the way that they did, they were able to get it up. But not complete. But can't complete. They can't finish. Can't finish. And now we're standing. Now we're standing. We're going to have to go up and finish. Um. Well, I mean, I think Boeing is a company that is, they actually do so much business with the government, they have sort of impedance matched to the government. So they're like basically one notch away from the government, maybe they're not far from the government from an efficiency standpoint because they derive so much of the revenue from the government. And a lot of people think more SpaceX is super dependent on the government and actually know most of our revenues commercial.
So, um. And there's been, I think at least up until perhaps recently, because then a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory. Yeah. And the CEO before that, I think had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory. And didn't know how airplanes flew. Um. So I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and a spacecraft to go to orbit, then it can't be a total mystery as to how they work. Yeah.
So. You know, I'm like, sure, if somebody's like running Coca Pepsi and they're like great at marketing or whatever, that's fine because it's not a sort of technology dependent business. You know, or if they're running a, you know, financial consulting in their degrees in accounting, that makes sense. But I think, you know, if you go through the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse. Pretty basic. Yeah. Yeah. It's like just concerning it. The cavalry captain is full of the horse. He's looking to inspire the team. I'm sorry. I'm scared of horses. Gets on backwards. I'm like, oops.
Shifting gears to AI. Peter was here earlier and he was talking about how so far the only company to really make money off AI is Nvidia with the chips. Um, do you have a sense yet of where you think the big applications will be from AI is again going to be in enabling self-driving. Is it going to be enabling robots? Is it transforming industries? I mean, it's still, I think, early in terms of where the big business impact is going to be. Give a sense yet. I mean, I think, I think the, the spending on AI probably runs ahead of, I mean, does run ahead of the revenue right now. There's no question about that. But the rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen by far.
And it's, I mean, like, for example, a Turing test used to be a thing. Now, you know, your basic open source random LLM writing on a freaking Raspberry Pi probably could, you know, be a Turing test. So there's, I think actually, like, the good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone can have whatever they want unless, except for things we artificially define to be scarce like some special artwork. But anything that is of manufacturer good or provided service, I think with the advent of AI plus robotics, that the cost of goods and services will be, will trend to zero. Like, I'm not saying it would be actually zero, but it'll be, it, it, everyone's going to be able to have anything they want. That's the good future.
Of course, you know, in my view, that's probably 80% likely. So look on the bright side. Only 20% probably of annihilation. It's nothing. Is the 20% like what does that look like? No, man. I mean, frankly, I do have to go engage in some degree of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI in order to sleep well. And even then, because I think the actual issue, the most likely issue is like, well, how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do a bit better? That is perhaps the biggest challenge. Although, you know, at this point I know more and more people who are retired and they seem to enjoy that life.
But I think that maybe there'll be some crisis of meaning. Because the computer can do everything you can do a bit better. So maybe that'll be a challenge. But really, you know, you need this sort of end effector. You need the autonomous cars and you need the sort of humanoid robots or general purpose robots. Once you have general purpose, humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles, really you can build anything. And I think there's no actual limit to the size of the economy. I mean, there's obviously the massive earth, you know, like that would be one limit. The economy is really just the average productivity per person times number of people. That's the economy. And if you've got humanoid robots that can do, you know, where there's no real limit on the number of humanoid robots and they can operate very intelligently, then there's no actual limit to the economy. There's no meaningful limit to the economy.
You guys just turned on Colossus, which is like the largest private compute cluster, I guess, of GPUs anywhere. So it's the most powerful supercomputer of any kind. Which sort of speaks to what David said and kind of what Peter said, which is a lot of kind of economic value so far of AI is entirely gone to Nvidia. But there are people with alternatives and you're actually one with an alternative.
Now you have a very specific case because Dojo's really about images and large images, huge video. So, yeah, I mean, the Tesla problem is different from the, you know, the sort of LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence actually is actually, and what matters in the AI is different to the point you just made, which is that in Tesla's case, the context is very long. So you've got gigabytes of context. Gigabytes of context. Yeah, you've got, you know, sort of. I was just bringing it up. It's kind of billions of tokens of context, not a amount of context because you've got seven cameras and if you've got several, you know, let's say, a minute of several high-def cameras, then that's gigabytes.
So you need to compress. So the Tesla problem is you've got to compress a gigantic context into the pixels that actually matter. And, you know, and condense that over a time. So you've got to, in both the time dimension, the space dimension, you've got to compress the pixels in space and the pixels in time. And then have that inference done on a tiny computer, relatively speaking, it's more, you know, a few hundred watts.
It's a Tesla designed AI inference computer, which is, by the way, still the best. There isn't a better thing we could buy from suppliers. So the Tesla designed AI inference computer that's in the cars is better than anything we could buy from any supplier. Just, by the way, that's kind of a. By the way, the Tesla AI trip team is extremely good. You guys, in the design, there was a technical paper and there was a deck that somebody on your team from Tesla published. And it was stunning to me.
You designed your own transport control, like, layer over ethernet. You were like, ah, ethernet's not good enough for us. You had this TTC or something. And you were like, oh, we're just going to reinvent ethernet and, like, string these chips. It's pretty incredible stuff that's happening over there. Yeah. No, the Tesla trip design team is extremely good. So.
But is there a world where, for example, other people over time that need, you know, some sort of, like, video use case or image use case, could theoretically, you know, you'd say, oh, why not? You know, I have some extra cycles over here. So we should kind of make you a competitor of NVIDIA. It's not intentionally per se, but. Yeah, I mean, the. You know, there's this training and inference. And we do have those two projects at Tesla. We've got Dojo, which is the training computer. And then, you know, our inference chip, which is in every. Every car in averse computer.
So. And Dojo, we've only had Dojo 1. Dojo 2 is. You know, should be. We should have Dojo 2 in volume towards the end of next year. And that will be, we think, sort of, comparable to. Sort of a B200 type system, a training system. And, you know, so there's, I guess, there's some potential for that to be used as a service. But. Dojo is just kind of like. I mean, I guess I have, like, some improved confidence in Dojo. But I think we won't really know how good Dojo is until probably version 3. And it usually takes three major iterations on a technology for it to be excellent.
And we'll only have the second major iteration next year. The third iteration, I don't know, maybe late, you know, 26 or something like that. How's the Optimus project going? I remember when we talked last. You said it's publicly that it's in doing some light testing inside the factory. Yeah. So it's actually being useful. It's the build of materials and when, you know, for something like that at scale.
So when you start making it like you're making the Model 3 now and there's a million of them coming off the factory line, what would they cost? $20, $30, $40,000, you think? Yeah. I mean, I've discovered really that, you know, anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its materials. So now there's. So some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property and like paying for patents and stuff.
So a lot of, you know, what's in a chip is like paying royalties and depreciation of the chip bab. So, but the actual marginal cost of the chips is very low. So Optimus, obviously, is humanoid robot. It is way much less than it's much smaller than a car. So you could expect that in high volume, and I'd say that you also probably need three production versions of Optimus. So you need to refine the design three major times and then you need to scale production to sort of the million unit plus per year level.
And I think at that point, the cost, you know, the labor materials on Optimus is probably not much more than $10,000. And that's a decade-long journey, maybe? Basically, think of it like Optimus will cost less than a small car. Right. So at scale volume with three major iterations of technology, and so if a small car costs $25,000, you know, it's probably like a $20,000 for an Optimus for a humanoid robot that can be your body like a combination of R2D2 and C3PO, but better. Yeah. I think people are going to get really attached to their humanoid robot because, I mean, like you're looking to sort of watch Star Wars and it's like R2D2 and C3PO. I love those guys.
Yeah. You know, they're awesome. And their personality and I mean, all R2 could do is just be for you. Right. That's good to speak English. And C3PO to translate the beeps. So you're in year two of that, if you did two or three years per iteration or something, it's a decade-long journey for this to hit some sort of scale. I would say major iterations are less than two years. Okay. It's probably on the order of five years. Yeah. Maybe six to get to a million years a year. And at that price point, everybody could afford one. Yes. I mean, it's going to be that one to one, two to one. What do you think ultimately, if we're sitting here in 30 years, the number of robots on the planet versus humans? Yeah. I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans. Vastly. Yeah. Vastly. I mean, you have to say like who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. Oh, man. You know, it's like, especially if it can, you know, it can take care of your, your, take your dog. Take your dog for a walk. It could, you know, mow the lawn. It could watch your kids. It could, you know, like it could teach your kids. It could, it could. We could also send it to Mars. Yeah. Absolutely. We could send a lot of robots to Mars to do the work needed to make it a colonized planet for humans. And Mars is already the robot planet. It's like a whole bunch of robots, like rovers and helicopters. Yes. Only robots.
So yeah. No, I think the sort of useful humanoid robot opportunity is the single biggest opportunity ever. Because if you assume like, I mean, the ratio of human robots to humans is going to be at least two to one, maybe three to one. Because everybody will want one. And then there'll be a bunch of robots that you don't see that are making goods and services. And you think it's a general one generalized robot that then learns how to do different tasks or? Yeah. Hey, I mean, we are a generalized. Yeah, we're a general. We're just non-rope. We're just made a meat, you know. We're a meat but with generalizing. Yeah, I mean, operating my meat puppet, you know. So yeah, we are actually. We haven't.
And by the way, it turns out like, as we were designing optimists, we'd sort of learn more about why humans are shaped the way they're shaped. And you know, and why we have five fingers and why your little finger is smaller than your index finger. You know, obviously why you have opposable thumbs. But also why, for example, the muscles, the major muscles that operate your hand are actually in your forearm. And your fingers are primarily operated. The muscles that actuate your fingers are located. The vast majority of your fingers strength is actually coming from your forearm. And your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings. And so the current version of the optimists hand has the actuators in the hand and has only 11 degrees of freedom. So it's not as, it doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, a roughly 25 degrees of freedom. And it's also like, a lot strong enough in certain ways because the actuators have to fit in the hand.
So the next generation optimists hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm, just like human, and they operate the fingers through cables, just like the human hand. And then the next generation hand has 22 degrees of freedom, which we think is enough to do almost anything that a human can do. And presumably, I think it was written that X and Tesla may work together and, you know, provide services, but my immediate thought went to, oh, if you just provide a grok to the robot, then the robot has a personality and can process voice and video and images and all of that stuff. So yeah, that's where you wrap here.
I think, you know, everybody talks about all the projects you're working on, but people don't know you have a great sense of humor. That's not true. Oh, you do. You do. People don't see it, but I would say, I know for me, the funniest week of my life, or one of the funniest was when you did SNL and we got, and you, I got to tag along. Maybe you saw it. Behind the scenes, like, some of your funniest recollections of that chaotic insane week when we laughed for 12 hours a day. It was a little terrorizing on the first couple of days, but. Yeah, I was a bit worried at the beginning there because, frankly, nothing was funny. Day one was rough. Rough. Yeah, so, I mean. It was like a rule, but can't you guys just say it? Say the stuff that got on the cutting. The funniest skits were the ones that didn't let you do. That's what I'm saying. Can you just say it? There were a couple of funny ones. Yeah, that didn't let you do it. You can say it so that he doesn't get it. I mean, how much time do we have here? Well, we should just give one or two because it was. In your mind, which one do we regret most? It's not getting on air. You really want to hear that? I mean. I mean, it was a little spicy. It was a little funny. Okay. Here we go. All right, here we go, guys. All right.
So, one of the things that I think everyone's been sort of wondering this whole time is, is Saturday Night Live actually live? Live. Live live live live, or do they have like a delay or like just in case, you know, there's a wardrobe malfunction or something like that. Right. Is it like a, you know, five second delay? What's really going on? But there's a way to test this. Right. We came out of the way. There's a way to test this. Which is, we don't tell them what's going on. I walk on and say, this is the script. I'll throw it on the ground. We're going to find out tonight, right now. If Saturday Night Live is actually live. And the way that we're going to do this is I'm going to take my cock out. This is way more and way. And if you see my cock, you know it's true. And if you don't, it's been a lie. All these years. All these years. We're going to bust them right now. We're pitching this. Yeah, yeah. So we're pitching this on Zoom. Yeah, we're pitching this on Zoom on like Monday. It's COVID. We're like kind of hung over from the weekend. We're like pitching this on like noon. And it's, you know, Jason's on. And, you know, so it's interesting to go like, you know, my friends, I think a sort of, you know, quite funny, you know, Jason's quite funny. I think like Jason's the closest thing to Cartman that exists in the world in the world. Yeah. We have a show of killing that. He's butters and I'm Cartman. Yeah. So, and I've heard Mike's pretty funny too. So we come in like just like guns blazing with ideas. And we do realize like actually, you know, that's not how it works. And that's, that's normally like actress and they just get told what to do. And like, oh, you mean we can't just like do funny things that we thought of? What? They're watching this and on the Zoom, they're a guest. Yes, no, no, no, it's pitch. Yeah, it's silence. Like so I'm like, and I'm like, and I'm like, is this thing working? Is this? We knew it is. Is that Mike on? I mean, like we hear you. And then after a long silence, like Mike just says the word crickets. And they're not laughing. And then you get a, not even a trouble. What's going on? And then Eli explains the punch line, which is. Yes, exactly. So there's more to it. Okay. Yes. That's just the beginning. So Eli says.
So, so then I'm, so now I'm like, so, so, so I say like I'm, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna reach down. Into my pants. Into my pants. Into my pants. And I, and I stick my hand to my pants. And I'm going to, and I'm, and I'm going to pull my call gun. I tell this to the audience and the audience is going to be like, go, what? Right.
And, and, and, and, and, and then, and then, and then, and then I pull out a, a baby rooster. You know, and it's like, okay, this is kind of PG, you know, it's like that, not that bad. This is my tiny cock. And, and, and it's like, what do you think? And so then, and do you think it's an ice cock? I mean, I like it. And I pitch. Yeah. And then Kate McKinnon walks out. Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, oh no, but you haven't heard half of it. McKinnon comes out. Yeah. And she says, Elon, I expected you would have a bigger cock. Yeah. I don't mean to just want you, Kate, but yeah. But I, I hope you like it anyway. And then, but, but, but Kate's got to come out with, with, with her cat. Okay. Right. So.
And Kate says, you can see where this is going. And I say, nice. Wow. That's, that's a, that's a nice pussy you've got there, Kate. Wow. That's amazing. It looks a little wet. Was it raining outside? I think, um, can I just, do, do you mind if I stroke your pussy? Is that cool? It's like, oh no, Elon, actually, can I hold your cock? Of course, Kate, you definitely hold my cock. Um, and, and then, you know, we exchange. And I think just the audio version of this is pretty good. Right. Um, and, and, um, you know, it's just like, wow, you're, I really like, um, stroking your cock. So, um, and it's like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, you know, I'm really enjoying stroking your pussy. Yeah. Of course. And, um, yeah. So, you know. They're looking at us like, oh my god, what have we done inviting these lunatics on the program? Yeah. And then they said, they said like, well, um, it is, uh, it is Mother's Day. It's Mother's Day. We might not want to go with this mother's. You might not want to go with this one. Why the moms in the audience. I'm like, well, that's a good point. Fair, fair. It might be a bit uncomfortable for all the moms in the audience, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they'll dig it. Maybe they'll like it. So, yeah.
Yeah, that was. Yeah. That's the cold open that didn't make it. We didn't get that on the air. We did fight for Doge. Yes. And we got Doge on the air. I mean, there's a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. They have these like cue cards for what you were supposed to say. And I just didn't say it. I just went off the rails. Yeah. They didn't do that coming. Yeah, it's live. Well, it's live. And so Elon wanted to do Doge. This is the other one.
And he wanted to do Doge on late night. And he says, hey, Jake, how can you make sure? Oh, yeah. I wanted to do the Doge father. You sort of redo the scene from the Godfather. I mean, you kind of need the music to cue things off. Da da da da da da. Da da da da da da da. You bring me on my daughter's wedding. Da da da da da da da. This, and you ask for dog. Yeah. You got more on brand name. I give you a bit, Gwen, but you want dog. Exactly. You really got to set the mood. You got the sexy stuff off us in the air. You got to have like, more on brand or? Yeah. I said, you come to me, on the stand of my door to the wedding. And you asked me for your private keys. Are you even a friend? You call me the door father. So, Bono, Sarah, Bono, Sarah. No. So, that's potential. They had great potential.
So they come to me and I'm talking to Colin and Joe. He's got a great sense of human. He's amazing. He loves Elon. And he's like, we can't do it because of the law and stuff like that. And the law and the liability. So I said, it's okay. Elon called Comcast and he put it in offer and they just accepted it. There's a lot NBC. So it's fine. Yeah. And Colin, Joe, just looks at me. So good. And he's like, you're serious. We own NBC now. And he's like, okay, well, that kind of changes things, doesn't it? I'm like, absolutely. Where ago on doge? And then he's like, you're fucking with me. And I'm fucking with you. Or are we? It was the greatest week of and that like is like two of 10 stories. Yeah, we got to. Yeah, we got to. We'll save the other eight. Yeah. But it was and it was just so happy for you to see you have a great week of just joy and finally letting go because you were launching rockets. You're dealing with so much bullshit in your life to have those moments to share them and just laugh. It was just so great. Yeah, more of those moments. I think we got to get you back on the S&L. Who wants to back on S&L one more time? Ladies and gentlemen, our bestie, Elon Musk. Thank you.