Elon Musk: OpenAI Betrayal, His Future at Tesla, and the Next Big Thing - Grokipedia
嘉宾：Elon Musk
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本篇目录8 章节
§01Disgraziad Corner: The most disgraceful things of the week!§02Elon on X's new algorithm, why there has been so much Sydney Sweeney content lately§03Creating Grokipedia: Wikipedia's failures, the future of information on the internet, confirmation bias§04Three years of X: Looking back on the Twitter acquisition and how it changed free speech on the internet§05Tesla vote on Elon's compensation, would he§06OpenAI lawsuit, for-profit conversion, how much Elon should own, OpenAI's great irony§07AI power efficiency, Robotaxis, future of self-driving§08Bill Gates flips on climate change, solar, energy production§01Disgraziad Corner: The most disgraceful things of the week!
Let's get started. You know, we wanted to try something new this week. Every week, you know, I get a little upset. Things perturb me, Saxx. And when it does, I just yell and scream, Discracia.
So I bought the domain name disgratia.com for no reason other than my own amusement. But you know what? I I'm not alone in my absolute disgust at what's going on in the world. So this week, we're gonna bring out a new feature here on the All In Podcast, Disgratia Corner.
Disgratzia. He
was the best guy around.
What about the people he murdered?
What? Murder. You can act like a man.
What's wrong with you?
He's just killed
him in manners.
We insulted him a little bit.
Split, and I want
the sticks. What's wrong with you? Your hair was in the toilet water. Disgusting. I gotta suffocate you, little.
It's a fucking disgrace. Disgratia. Disgratia.
This is fantastic. This is our new feature. Shemath, you look like you're ready to go. Why don't you tell you tell everybody who gets your dysgratia this week?
Wait. We all had to come with a dysgratia?
You really cursed it up. You said
you missed a memo. Alright. Fine. Enough.
I got one. I
got one.
Okay. Alright. Just calm down.
My disgratsia corner goes to Jason Kalkanis.
Oh, here we go. Come on, man. You can't
And Pete Buttigieg, where they, in the first thirty seconds of the interview, compared virtue signaling points about how each one worked at various moments at Amnesty International.
Absolutely.
Literally affecting zero change, making no progress in the world, but collecting a badge that they use to hold over other people.
Diskrazia. A lot of letters. We wrote a lot of letters. Is good. That means it's like a good one because Diskrazia.
Behind the scenes. Diskrazia. Jason Kommandan. Pete Buttigieg. Diskrazia.
Great. I'm glad that I got the first one, and you you can imagine what's coming next week for you. I saw the Sydney Sweeney dress today trending on social. Disgraziad. It's too much.
What? It's too much.
What is it? I didn't I didn't even know what this is.
See it?
Nick, I'll
put picture.
Okay? Bring it up.
It's a little floppy.
How
is this disgraziad? What's talking about?
Much. It's disgraceful. A little bit of like, look at this. Oh my god. Too much.
It's elegant.
Too much. In my day, Saks, a little cleavage maybe, perhaps in the nineties or 2 thousands, some side view. This is too much. Hey, guys.
Hey.
Hey. Very highbrow subject matter.
What's going on with the algorithm? I'm getting Sydney Sweeney's dress all day. And last week, Saks
§02Elon on X's new algorithm, why there has been so much Sydney Sweeney content lately
Well, maybe you should just stop everything in.
I'm crying. You married it 15 times. And then Saks poor Saks
got he got invited to SlutCon for two weeks straight on the algorithm. No.
I say the algorithm has become If you if you demonstrate
It's actual explain. You can't even tell if that's a joke or a real thing.
It's a real thing in San Francisco. All too real.
Oh, it it's actually real? Like, wait. Yeah.
That con is a For real?
I've noticed yeah. If you if you demonstrate interest in anything on x now, if you click on it, god forbid you like
something, man,
the algorithm is on it. It will give you more of that. It will give you a lot more.
Yes. Yes. So we we did have an issue. And we still have somewhat of an issue where there was there was an important bug that was figured out that that was solved over the weekend, which caused in network posts to be not shown. So you basically if you followed someone, you wouldn't see them wouldn't see their posts.
Got it.
It's obviously
a big
bug, a major bug. Then the the algorithm was not probably taking into account if you just dwells on something. But but but if you if you interacted with it, it would it would go hog wild. So if you pay as David said, if you if you wrote a favorite, reply, or engage with it in some way, it it it is gonna get you a torrent of that same thing.
Oh, Zaxx. So maybe you Zach, what was your interaction? Did
you bookmark Slachon? I think you bookmarked it.
Here's what I thought was good about it, though, is all of a sudden
I would see You happen to
sports with Sydney when he's boobs,
then you get a lot more of it. They would relate. Okay.
But what I thought was good about it was that you would see who else had a take on the same subject matter. And that actually has been a useful part of it. Yeah. And so you do you do get more of a you get more of, like, a three sixty view on whatever it is that you've shown interest in.
Yeah. Yeah. It it it just it's like it was giving you if you you take a you'd have like it was just going too far, obviously. It was overcorrecting. It had too much gain on it just turned up the gain way too high on any interaction would would you would then get a torrent of that.
It's like it's like, oh, you had a taste of it? We're gonna give you
three helpings. Okay. We're gonna both force you gonna give you the food funnel.
And and that's all being done I assume it's all being done with Grok now, so it's not like the old hard coding algorithm, or is it using Grok?
Well, what what's happening is that we're, you know, we're we're gradually deleting the legacy Twitter heuristics. Now the problem is that it's like, as you delete these heuristics, it turns out the one heuristic the one bug was covering for the other bug. And so when you delete one side of the bug, you know, it's like that that meme with the Internet that where there's like this very complicated machine and there's like a tiny little wooden stick that's Yeah. Something that's keeping it going, which was, I guess, Amazon AWS East or whatever had something like that. You know, when when when when somebody pulled out the little stick that they would what's this?
Oops.
I think it'd be good if it
Half of Earth. You know?
It would be great if it showed, like, one person you follow, and then, like, it blended the old style, which was just reverse chronological of your friends, the original version, with this new version. So you get, like, a little bit of both.
Well, you can still you still have the plot. Everyone still has the following tab. Yeah. That's something we're gonna be adding is the ability to have a curated following tab. Because the problem is, like, if you follow some people and they're maybe a little more prolific than you're, you know, the Scalable.
They're you you follow someone and some people are are are much more pro you know, say a lot more than others. That that makes the following tab hard to use. So we're gonna add a an option where you can have the following tab be curated. So will say, what are the most interesting things posted by your friends? And and we'll show you that in the following tab.
It will also give you the option of little bit everything. But but I think having that option, will make the following tab much more useful. So it'll be a curated list of people you follow, like, ideally most interesting stuff that they've said, which is kinda what you you you would wanna look at. And then we've we've we've mostly fixed the bug, which would give you way too much of something if you interacted with particular subject matter.
And
then the the really big change, which is where Grok literally reads everything that's posted to the platform, We're we're actually there's there's about a 100,000,000 posts per day. So it's a 100,000,000 pieces of content per day. I think that's actually just maybe just in English. I think it goes beyond that if it's outside of English. So Grok is gonna we're gonna start off reading the really what what Grok thinks are the top 10,000,000 of the 100,000,000, and and we'll actually read them and understand them and categorize them and match them to users.
It's like this is a this is not a job humans could ever do. And and and then once that is scaling reasonably well, we'll we'll add the entire 100,000,000 a day. So it's literally gonna read through a 100,000,000 things and and and and show you the things that it thinks out of a 100,000,000 posts per day, what are the most interesting posts to you?
How much of Colossus will that take?
Like A lot of work.
Yeah. That's like is it tens of thousands of servers, like, to do that every day?
Yeah. My my guess is it's probably on the order of 50 k h 100, something like that.
Wow. And that will replace search. So you'll be able to actually search on Twitter and find things in, like, with a with a plain language.
We'll have semantic search where you can just ask a question, and it will show you all content, whether that is text, pictures, or video that matches your search query semantically.
How how's it been three years in? This is a it was a three year anniversary, like a couple
of three years?
Yeah. Yeah. Remember it was Halloween?
Yeah. Halloween's back.
Halloween's back, but it was the when the weekend you took over was Halloween.
Yeah.
We had a good time.
Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. Three years.
We will think three years from now.
Yeah. What's the takeaway? Three years later, you were you you obviously don't regret buying it. It saved free speech. That was good.
Seemed to have turned that whole thing around. That was, I think, a big part of your mission. But then you added it to x AI, which makes it incredibly valuable as a data source. So when you look back on it, the reason you bought it is to stop crazy woke mind virus and made truth exist in the world again. Great.
Mission accomplished. And now it has a great future.
Yeah. We've got the community notes. You can also ask Grock about any any anything you see on the platform. You know, just just press the Grock icon on any x post, and we'll analyze analyze it for you, and and research it as much as you want. So you can you can basically have, just by by tapping the croc icon, you can, assess the, whether that that post is the truth, the whole truth, or nothing but the truth, or whether there's something supplemental or you need to be explained.
So I think it I think it's actually we made a lot of progress towards, yeah, freedom of of speech, and and and and people being able to tell whether something is false or not, know, propaganda. The recent update to Grok is actually, I think, very good at piercing through propaganda. So and then we we we use that latest version of Grok to create Grokopedia, which I think is much more it's it's it's not just, I think, more neutral that than and and more accurate than than Wikipedia, but actually has a lot more information than a Wikipedia page.
§03Creating Grokipedia: Wikipedia's failures, the future of information on the internet, confirmation bias
Did you seed it with Wikipedia? Actually, take a step back. How did you guys how did you do this?
Well, we used AI.
But meaning, like, totally unsupervised, just a complete training run on its own, totally synthetic data, no no seeded set, nothing.
Well, it was only just recently possible for us to do this. So we've we've we've we've finished training on a maximally truth seeking actually, truth seeking a version of that is good at cogent analysis. So breaking down, any any given argument into its axiomatic elements, assessing where those axioms are. Not you know, the the basic test for cogency, the axioms are likely to be true. They're not contradictory, that, the conclusion naturally the the the conclusion most likely follows from those axioms.
So so we're we're just trained Grock on a lot of critical thinking. So it it just got really good at critical thinking, which was quite hard. And then we took took that motion to Grock and said, okay. Cycle through the the the million most popular articles in Wikipedia and and add, modify, and delete. So that means research the rest of the Internet, whatever is publicly available, and correct, what's correct Wikipedia articles and fix mistakes, but also add a lot more context.
So sometimes, really, the the nature of the propaganda is that, you know, facts are stated that are that are technically true, but are not repress do not properly represent a picture of the individual or event.
This is critical. Because when you have a bio, as you do, actually, we all do on Wikipedia, over time, it's just the people you fired or you you've beaten business or have an axe to grind. So it just slowly becomes, like, the place where everybody, you know, kinda who hates you then puts their information. I looked at mine. It was so much more representative, and it was five times longer, six times longer.
And the what it gave way to was much more accurate. Much more accurate. And this opportunity was sitting here, I think, for a long time. Yeah. And it's just great that you got to it because they they don't update my page, but, you know, I don't know, twice a month with, you know and then who is the secret cobble?
There's 50 people who are anonymous who decide what's get gets put on it. It was a much better, much more updated page in version one.
Yes. This is version point one as we put it as we show at the top. So I I do think actually by the time we get to version one one point zero, it'll be 10 times better. But even at this early stage, as you as you just mentioned, it's it's not just that it's correcting errors, but it it is creating a a more accurate, realistic, and fleshed out description of of people and events.
Elon, do you think that
And and subject matters. Like, you can look at articles on on physics and Grogpeter. They're they're much better than Wikipedia by far.
This one I was gonna ask you is, like, do you think that you can take this corpus of pages now and get Google to deboost Wikipedia or boost Grokkopedia in traditional search? Because a lot of people still find this, and they believe that it's authoritative because it comes up number one. Right? So how do we how do we do that? How do you flip Google?
Yeah. So it it really can if if people share a lot of if if if if if Gracopedia, is used elsewhere, like, if people cite it on their websites, or post about it on social media, or when they do a search when Gwakpedia shows up, they click on Gwakpedia. It will naturally, you know, rise in in Google's, you know, rankings. I did I did send I did text Sundar because, you know, even sort of a day after launch, if you typed in Grokkopedia, Google would just say, did you mean Wikipedia?
Wikipedia. Yeah. Yeah.
And it wouldn't even bring Grokkopedia up at all.
Yeah. That's true.
So so now How's
the use how's the usage been? Have you seen good growth since it launched?
Yeah. It's it's very early. Went super viral. So we're we're, yeah, we're seeing seeing it started all over the place. But, yeah, it's and I think we'll see it used more and more, as as people refer to it.
And people will judge for themselves. When when you read a a Gorkpedia article about a subject or a person that you know a lot about and you see, wow, this is way better than than Wikipedia. It's it's it's more comprehensive. It's it's way more accurate. It's not it's it's neutral instead of biased, then you're gonna set you're gonna forward those links around and say that this is actually the better source.
Like, it's it Grafifyd will will will succeed, I think, very well because it'll it'll it is fundamentally a superior product to Wikipedia. It is it is a better source of information. And we haven't even added, images and video yet. We're add We're gonna add a lot of video. So using Grokka Imagine to create videos.
And so if if you're if you're trying to explain something, Grokka Imagine can take the text from Wikipedia and then generate a video, an explanatory video. So if you're trying to understand anything from how to tie a bow tie to, you know, how do certain chemical reactions work or, you know, really anything, dietary things, medical things, we could well, you can just go on and and see the video of of how it works. That's created by AI.
When when you have this version that's maximally truth seeking as a model, do you think that there needs to be a better eval or a benchmark that people can point to that shows how off of the truth things are so that if you're gonna start a training run with Common Crawl or if you're gonna use Reddit or if you're gonna use is it important to be able to, like, say, hey. Hold on a second. This eval just suck like, you guys suck on this eval. Like, it's just this is crappy data.
Yeah. I I guess I'm not I I think I mean, there are a lot of evals out there. I've complete confidence that Crocodile is gonna succeed because Wikipedia is actually not a very good product. Yeah. It it's it's it's the the information is sparse, wrong, and out of date.
And if you can go if you find if and and and it doesn't have you know, there there are very few images. There's basically no video. So if you have something which is,
you
know, accurate, comprehensive, has videos, where moreover you can ask if there's any part of it that you're curious about, you can highlight it and grok and and ask grok right there. Like, if you're trying to learn something, it's just great. It's it's it's Yeah. It's it's not gonna be a little bit better than than Wikipedia. It's gonna be a 100 times better
than Wikipedia.
Elon, do you think you'll see, like, good uniform usage? Like, if you look back on the last three years since you bought Twitter, there was a lot of people after you bought Twitter that said, I'm leaving Twitter. Elon's bought it. I'm gonna go to this other wherever the hell they went. And there's all these news And there's all these and there's all these articles
that say what happened to that? Yeah.
I'm pretty sure. You know?
Yeah. But but Blue sky
is falling is my favorite.
I guess my my question is, as you destroy the woke mind viral kind of control of the system and as you bring truth to the system, whether the system is through Grokkipedia or through X, do people, like, just look for confirmation bias and they actually don't accept the truth? Like, what do you like, or do you think people are actually going to see the truth and change and the world change? Yeah. But, I mean, is that like
You thought Sydney Sweeney's boobs were great
when you see my
Looking good. Yeah. Solid
solid peak up there. Yeah. Yeah. A little something a little sheer.
You know? Yeah. I think we just got flagged on YouTube
again. Yeah. We did we that was definitely gonna give us a censorship moment. Yeah.
Grade a moves.
Yeah. No. But but, like, like but but do
people change their mind? I mean
If there's a I could take it. There's no such thing as grade a move.
God. It's off the rails already. David, you were trying to ask a serious question. Go ahead.
Well, I just
wanna know if people change their mind. Like, can you actually change people's minds by putting the truth in front of them, or do people just take you know, they're they kind of ignore the truth because they're they feel like they're in some sort of camp, and they're like, I'm on the side.
They want the confirmation bias.
They want the confirmation bias, and they wanna stay in a camp, and they wanna be tribal about everything.
It it is remarkable how much people believe things, simply because it is their the the belief of the of their in group, you know, whatever sort of political or ideological tribe is. So, I mean, there's some some pretty hilarious videos of, you know, you know and there's, like, some guy going around. He's like a racist Nazi or whatever. And and then and and then there and he was, like, trying to show them the videos where of the thing that they are talking about where he is in fact condemning the Nazis in strongest possible terms and condemning racism in the strongest possible terms. And they literally don't even wanna watch the videos.
So so yeah. The people or at least some people would they would prefer they they will stick to whatever their ideological views are, whatever their sort of political tribal views are no matter what. The the the evidence could be staring them in the face, and and they're just gonna be a flat earther. You know? There's there is no evidence that you could show to a flat earther to commit convince them the world's around because everything is just a lie.
The world is flat type of thing.
So The the ability to hit at grok in a reply and ask it a question in the thread has really become like a truth seeking missile on the platform. So when I put up metrics or something like that, I reply to myself and I say, at grok, is the information I just shared correct? And can you find any better information? And please tell me if my argument is correct or if I'm wrong. And then it goes through and then it DM Sacks, and then Sacks gets in my replies and tries to correct me.
No. But it does actually a really good job of like and that combined with community notes. Now you've got, like, two swings at bat. The community's consensus view and then Grok coming in. I think it would be, like, really interesting if Grok on, like, really powerful threads kinda did, like, its own version of community notes and had it sitting there ahead of time.
You know? Like, you could look at a thread and it just had next to it, you know, or maybe on, like, the specific statistic, you could click on it and it would show you, like, ah, here's where that statistics from.
I mean, you can I mean, pretty much every I mean, essentially, every post on x, unless it's, like, advertising or something has the Grok symbol on it? Yeah. And just you tap that symbol, and you're one tap away from a Grok analysis. Literally, you're just one tap. And we don't wanna clutter the interface with where it's Sure.
Yeah.
Providing an explanation. But I'm just saying, if you go on x right now, it's one tap to get to get Grok's analysis. And Grock will research the the the the the x post and give you an an accurate answer. And and you can even ask us to do further research and further due diligence, and you you can go as far down the rabbit hole as you want as you wanna go. But I I do think, like, this is, you know, the consistent with we want x to be the the best source of truth on the on the planet by far, and I think it is.
And and where you hear, you know, any and all points of view, but but where those points of view are corrected by, human editors with community notes. And I think the the essence of community notes is that, people who historically disagree agree that this community note is correct.
So
this and and and all of the community notes code is open source and the data is open source, so you can recreate any community note from scratch independently.
By and large, it's worked very well. Yeah.
Yeah.
§04Three years of X: Looking back on the Twitter acquisition and how it changed free speech on the internet
I think we originally had the idea to have you back on the pod because it was a three year anniversary of the Twitter acquisition.
So Okay. I I just wanted
to kinda reminisce a little bit. That's true. I remember yeah. I mean, I remember
Where's that sink?
Where's that sink? Well, yeah. So Elon was staying at my house. We had talked the week before, and he told me the deal was gonna close. And so I was like, hey.
Do you need a place to stay? And he took me up on it. And the day before he went to the Twitter office, there was a request made to to my staff, do you happen to have an extra sink? And they did not, but they were able to
Yeah. Who has an extra sink, really?
But they were able to to locate one at a nearby hardware store, and I think they paid extra to get it out of the window or something.
Well, I I think the the store is confused because my security team was asking for any kind of sink. And and and, like like, normally, people wouldn't ask for any kind of sink. You need a sink that fits in your bathroom or connects to a certain kind of plumbing. So they're like trying to ask these like, well, what kind of faucets do you want? That's no.
No. I just wanted a sink. Yeah. They think
it's a mental person calling. I
think the the store was confused that we just wanted a sink. Yes. And didn't and didn't care what what the sink connected to.
Mean, because That
was was really
They were just like they they were, like, almost not letting us buy the sink because because they they thought maybe we'd buy the wrong sink. You know? It's just rare that somebody wants a sink for sleeping sake.
For meme purposes.
One of my favorite memories was Elon said, hey. You know, swing by. Check it out. I said, okay. I'll come by.
And drive up there, and I'm looking where to park the car, and I realize there's just parking spaces around the entire building. And I'm like, okay. This can't be like legal parking, but I park and it's legal parking.
Yeah. I mean, you're you're in Downtown SF, you might get your window broken.
I might not be there when
I get back. But we
get in there, and the place is empty. And then
Yeah. Yeah.
It it was seriously empty except the cafeteria.
There there was an entire there are two the Twin Headquarters is two buildings. One of the buildings was completely and utterly empty, and the other building had, like, 5% occupancy.
And the 5% occupancy, we go to the cafeteria, we all go get something to eat, and we realized there's more people working in the cafeteria than at Twitter.
There are more people making the food than eating the food. Correct. And this giant cafeteria, you know, giant really nice really nice cafeteria. You know, this this is where we discovered that the the actual price of the lunch was $400.
Yes.
The original price was $20, but it had five it went for it was at 5% occupancy, so it was 20 times higher. And they still kept making the same amount pretty much. So and charging the same amount. So effectively lunch was $4,400.
That was a great meeting.
Yes. And and then and then there was that that that where we had the the initial meetings sort of the sort of trying to figure out what the heck's going on meetings in the in in these in this the because, you know, there's the two buildings, two Twitter Twitter buildings, and one the one with literally no one in it. That's that's where we had the initial meetings. And and then we we'd we'd tried drawing on the whiteboard, and the and the the markers had had gone dry. So the we had used the the whiteboard markers in, like, two years.
So sad.
None of the markers worked. So we're like, this is totally resolved. But it but it was it was totally clean because the the cleaning crew had come in and done their job and cleaned cleaned an already clean place for, I don't know, two, three years straight.
It was flawless.
And and and I mean, honestly, this is this is this is more crazy than any sort of Mike Judge movie or or, you know, Silicon Valley or anything like that. And and then we I I remember going into the men's bathroom and and and and there's there's there's a table with, you know Hygiene? Hygiene products.
Yeah. Refreshed every week.
Tampons. Like a fresh box of tampons. And and we're like, but but there's literally no one in this building. So but nope. Nope.
They hadn't turned off the send send fresh tampons to the men's bathroom in the empty building had not been turned off. No. So so every week, they would put a fresh box of tampons in an empty building for years. This happened for years. It must be very confusing to the people that were being asked to do this because they're like
Okay. I'll throw them away. Well, I remember when you you
I guess they're paying us. So we'll just put tampon so seriously, I to consider the the the string of possibilities necessary in order for anyone to possibly use that tampon in the men's bathroom at the unoccupied second building of Twitter headquarters. Because you'd have to be a burglar who is a trans man burglar who's unwilling to use the woman's bathroom that also has tampons.
Statistically Even though there's someone in the building, and so you've
broken into the building. And at that moment, you have a period.
Yes. And you're on your period.
I mean, you're more likely to be struck by a a a meteor than need that tampon. Okay?
Well, I remember it was
I think it was shortly after that, you discovered an entire room at the office that was filled with stay woke t shirts. Yeah. Do you remember this?
An entire pile of merch.
Yeah.
Yes.
The hashtag stay woke.
Stay woke.
And also a a big sort of buttons like those magnetic buttons that you put on your shirt that said, I I am an engineer. I'm like, look. If if you're an engineer, you don't need a button. Like a big Who's the button for? Who are telling that to?
You could just ship code. We would know. We could check your GitHub. I'm like
But yeah, they're like scarves, hoodies, all kinds of merch that said hashtag stay work.
Yeah. A couple of
music When you found that, I was like, my god, man. The barbarians are fully within the gates now. I mean
The the barbarians have smashed through the gates and are looting the merch.
Yes. You are rummaging through their holy relics and defiling them.
I mean, but when you think about it, David, the amount of waste that we saw there during those first thirty days, just to be serious about it for a second, this was a publicly traded company. So if you think about the financial duty of those individuals, there was a list of SaaS software we went through and none of it was being used. Some of it had never been installed and they had been paying for it for two years. They'd been paying for a SaaS product for two years. And the one that blew my mind the most that we canceled was they were paying a certain amount of money per desk to have desk suite software in an office where nobody came to work.
So they were
Yes. Hanging But there were nobody.
There was there was millions of dollars a year being paid for for yes. But for analysis of pedestrian truck, software that use cameras to analyze the pedestrian traffic to figure out how where you can lead alleviate pedestrian traffic jams in an empty building.
Right.
That's like 11 out of 10 on a Dilbert scale.
Yeah. It was pretty shout out Scott Adams.
You've gone off scale on on on your Dilbert level at that point.
Let's talk about the free speech aspect for a second because I I think that is the most important legacy of the Twitter acquisition. And I think people have short memories and they forget how bad things were three years ago. First of all, you had figures as diverse as president Trump, Jordan Peterson, Jay Bhattacharya, Andrew They were all banned from Twitter. And I remember when you opened up the the Twitter jails and reinstated their accounts, kinda, you know, freed all the bad boys of free speech.
The best deal.
Yes. So you basically gave all the the bad boys of free speech their their accounts back. But second, beyond just the the bannings, there was the shadow bannings. And Twitter had claimed for years that they were not shadow banning. This was a paranoid conservative conspiracy theories.
Yeah. There there was an a very aggressive shadow banning by what was called the trust and safety group, which, of course, naturally would be the one that is doing the nefarious shadow banning. And I just I just think you you shouldn't have a group called trust and safety. I mean, this is an Orwellian name if you ever if there ever was one. I'm from the trust department.
Oh, really?
We wanna talk to you about your tweets. Can we see your DMs?
Say that you're from the trust department. It's literally that's the Ministry of Truth right there.
Yeah. The ministry They of they had maintained for years that they were not engaged in this practice, including under oath. On the heels of you opening that up and exposing that, because by the way, it wasn't just the fact they were doing it. They created an elaborate set of tools to do this. They had checkboxes in the app.
Tools to to, yes, to deboost accounts. Yes.
Yes. And, you know, subsequently, we found out that other social networking properties have done this as well, but you were really the first to expose it.
This is still being done at the other social media companies. It's Google, by the way. So for you know, I don't pick on Google because they're all doing it. But for search results, if you simply push a result pretty far down the page or, you know, the second page of results, like like, you know, the the joke used to be or personal is, I think, like, where do you hide a dead what's the best place to hide a dead body? The second page of Google search results.
Because nobody ever goes to the second page of Google search results. So you could you could hide a dead body there. Nobody would find it. And and and you still you it's it's then then it's not like you've you haven't made them go away. You've you've just put them on this one page too.
Yes. So shadow banning, I think, was number two. So first was banning. Second was shadow banning. I think third to me was government collusion, government interference.
So you released the Twitter files. Nothing like that had ever been done before where you just you actually let investigative reporters go through Twitters,
emails Unfederate groups. I didn't I I I was not looking over their shoulder at all. I they just had direct access to everything.
And they found that there was extensive collusion between the FBI and the Twitter Trust and Safety Group, where it turns out the FBI had 80 agents submitting takedown requests, and they were very involved in the banning, the shadow banning, the censorship, which I don't think we ever had definitive evidence of that before. That was pretty extraordinary.
Yeah. And and the the US House of Representatives had hearings on the matter, and and and a lot of, you know, it's unearthed. It's it's public record. So a lot of people some some people on left still think this is, like, made up. I'm like, this is just literally these the Twitter files are literally the files at Twitter.
I mean, we're we're literally just talking about the these are the emails that were sent internally that confirm this. This is what's on the Slack channels, and and this is what is shown in the in the on the Twitter database as where people have have made either suspensions or shadow bans.
Has the government come and asked you to take stuff down since, or they just have to your the policy is, hey. Listen. You gotta file a warrant. You gotta you gotta come correct as opposed to just putting pressure on executives.
Yeah. Our policy at this point is to follow the law. So so if if if now the the laws are obviously different in different countries. So sometimes, you know, I I get criticized for like, why don't I push free speech in x y z country that doesn't have free speech laws? I'm like, because that's not the law there.
And and if we don't obey the law, we'll simply be blocked in that country. So the the the policy is really just adhere to the laws in any given country. It is not up to us to agree or disagree with those laws. And if if if the people of that country want laws to be different, then they should, you know, ask their leaders to change the laws. Yeah.
But but anything that but as as soon you start going beyond the law, now you're putting your thumb on the scale. So so the yeah. That that that I I think I think that's the right policy is just adhere to the laws within any given country. Now sometimes we get, you know, in a bit of a bind like we had got into with Brazil where, you know, this this this judge in Brazil was asking us to or or telling us to break the law in Brazil and ban accounts contrary to the law of Brazil. And now we're now we're somewhat stuck.
We're like, wait a second. We're reading the law and it says, this is not allowed to happen. And also that and giving us a gag order. So, like, we're not we're we're allowed to say it's happening, and we have to break the law, and the judge is telling us to break the law. The law is breaking the law.
That's where things get very difficult. And we were actually banned in Brazil for a while because of that.
I just wanna make one final point on the free speech issue, and then we can move on. It's just I think people forget that the censorship wasn't just about COVID. There was a growing number of categories of thought and opinion that were being outlawed. The quote content moderation, which is another Orwellian euphemism for censorship
Yes.
Was being applied to categories like gender and even climate change. The definition of hate speech was constantly growing. Yes. And more and more people were being banned or shadow banned, and there was more and more things that you couldn't say. This trend of censorship was growing.
It was galloping, and it would have continued if it wasn't, I think, for the fact that you decided to buy Twitter and opened it up. And it was only on the heels of that that the other social networks were willing to, I think, be a little bit chastened in their policies and start to push back more.
Yeah. That's right. Once Twitter broke ranks, the others had to it became very obvious what the others were doing, and so they had to mitigate their their censorship substantially as because of what Twitter did. And, I mean, perhaps to give them some credit, they also felt that they had the air cover to to be more inclined towards free speech. They still do a a lot of sort of, you know, shadow banning and and whatnot at at the other social media companies, but it's it's much less than it used to be.
Yep.
Elon, what do you what have you seen in terms of, like, governments creating new laws? So we've seen a lot of this crackdown in The UK on what's being called hateful speech on social media and folks getting arrested and actually going to prison over it. And it seems like when there's more freedom, the side that is threatened by that comes out and creates their own counter. Right? There's a reaction to that, and there seems to be reaction.
Are you seeing more of these laws around the world in response to your opening up free speech through Twitter and, and those changes and what they're enabling that that the governments and the parties that control those governments aren't aligned, and they're stepping in and saying, let's create new ways of maintaining our control through law.
Yeah. There there is there's been an overall global movement to suppress free speech under the name of in in the under the guise of suppressing hate speech. But then, you know, the the it's the the the problem with with that is that your freedom of speech only matters if people are allowed to say things that you that that you don't like or even that things that you hate. Because if if you're allowed to suppress speech that you don't like, then and, you know, you you don't have freedom of speech. And and it's and it's only a matter of time before things switch around, and then the shoes on the other foot, and they will suppress you.
So suppress not, lest you be suppressed. But but there there there is a movement, and I I there there or there had there was a very strong movement to codify speech suppression into the law throughout throughout the world and including the West world, you know, the Europe and Australia.
UK and Germany were very, yeah, aggressive in this regard.
Yes. And and my understanding is that in The UK, there's something like two or 3,000 people in prison for social media posts. And in fact, that this that there's so many people in that were imprisoned for social media posts. And and many of these things are like, you you can't believe that that someone would actually put in put in prison for this. They they they have, in in a lot cases, released people who have committed violent crimes in order to to imprison people who have simply made posts on social media yet, which is deeply wrong.
Mhmm.
And and and underscores why the founders of this country made the first amendment the first amendment was freedom of speech. Why did they do that? It's because in the place that they came from, there wasn't freedom of speech, and you could be imprisoned or killed for for saying things.
§05Tesla vote on Elon's compensation, would he
Can I ask you a question just to maybe move to a different topic? If you came and did this next week, we will be past the Tesla board vote. We talked about it last week, and we talked about how crazy ISS and Glass Lewis is.
And Right.
We use this one insane example where, like, Ira Aaron Prize didn't get the recommendation from ISS and Glass Lewis because he didn't meet the gender requirements, but then Kathleen
also didn't It it doesn't make any sense.
Can you so the the board vote is on the sixth. So
She's an African American woman. Yeah. Yeah. She she they recommended against her, but then also recommended against our enterprise on on the grounds she was insufficiently diverse. So I'm like, this like, these things don't any sense.
Yeah. So I I do think we've got a fundamental issue with corporate governance in publicly traded companies where you've got about half of the stock market is controlled by past fintech funds, and most of them out most outsourced their decision to advisory firms and particularly Glass Lewis and ISS. I call them corporate ISS. You know? So all they do is basically just they're just terrorists.
So so and and they had they own no stock in any of these companies.
Right.
So I I think that there's there's a fundamental breakdown of fiduciary responsibility here where, really, you know, any company that's managing even though they're passively managing, you know, index funds or whatever, that they do, at the end of the day, have a fiduciary duty to vote, you know, along the lines of what would maximize the the shareholder returns because people are counting on them. Like, people, you know, have, say, you know, sort of has have all their savings since they have a four zero one k or something like that. And they're they're counting on the index funds to vote do company votes in the direction that would ensure that their retirement savings do as well as possible. But the problem is if that is then outsourced to ISS and Glass Lewis, which have been infiltrated by far left activists because, you know, you know, where far left you know you know you know where where basically political activists go? They go where the where the power is.
Mhmm.
And so effectively, Glasgow and ISS controlled the vote of half the stock market. Now now if if you're a political activist, you know what a great place would be to go work? Buy a certain glass doors, and they do. So so my concern for the future because this the the, you know, the Tesla thing is is it's called sort of compensation, but really it's not about compensation. It's not like I'm gonna go out and buy, you know, a yacht with it or something.
It's just that I I I do I in order if I'm going to build up Optimus and and, you know, have all these robots out there, I need to make sure we do not have a terminated scenario, then I and then I can make you know, maximize the safety of the robots. And and and but I but I I feel like I I need to have something like a 25% vote, which is enough of a vote to have a strong influence, but not so much of a vote that I can't be fired if I go insane. So it's it's kinda but but my concern would be, you know, creating this army of robots and then and then being fired for political reasons because of because of ISS and Glass Lewis, you know, decline to ISIS and Glass Lewis fire me effectively or or the the activists at those BOEMs fire me even though I've done everything right. Yeah. That's my concern.
Yeah. And then I and then then then you've got and then I and then I cannot ensure the the safety of the robots.
If you don't get that vote, it doesn't go your way. It looks like it's going to. Would you leave? I mean, is that even in the cards? I heard they were the board was very concerned about that.
Let's just say I'm not gonna build a robot army if I if I can be easily kicked out by activist investors. Yeah. No way.
No way.
Yeah. Makes sense. I mean and who is capable of running the four or five major product lines at Tesla? I mean, this is the the madness of it. It's a very complex business.
People don't understand what's under the hood there. It's not just a car company. You got batteries. You got trucks. You got the self driving group.
And this is a very complex built business that's you've built over decades now. It's it's not a very simple thing to run. I don't think there's a Elon equivalent out there who can just jump into the cockpit.
§06OpenAI lawsuit, for-profit conversion, how much Elon should own, OpenAI's great irony
By the way, if we take a full turn around corporate governance corner, also this week, what was interesting about the OpenAI restructuring was I read the letter, and your lawsuit was excluded from the allowances of the California attorney general basically saying this thing can go through, which means that your lawsuit is still out there. Right? And I think it's gonna go to a jury trial.
So
there, that corporate governance thing is still very much in question. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Yes. I believe that will go to a jury trial in February or March, and and then we'll we'll see what the what the results are there. But, I I there's there's an oh, then, like, a a mountain of evidence that that shows that OpenAI was created as a an open source nonprofit. It's it's literally that's the the exact description in the incorporation documents. And in fact, the incorporation documents explicitly say that no officer or founding member will be will will benefit financially from OpenAI.
And that they have completely violated that. Moreover, you can that then you you can just use the WayVac machine and look at the the website of OpenAI. Again, open source nonprofit, open source nonprofit the whole way until, you know, it it looked like, wow. This is a there's a lot of money to be gained here. And then suddenly it starts changing.
And they try to change the definition of OpenAI to mean open to everyone instead of open source, even though it always meant open source. I came up with the name. Yeah. That's how I know.
If they open sourced it, or they gave you I mean, you don't need the money, but if they gave you the percentage ownership in it that you would be rightfully which 50,000,000 for a startup would be half, at least. But they must have made an overture towards you and said, hey. Can we just give you 10% of this thing and give us your blessing? Like, you obviously have a different goal here. Yeah?
Yeah. I mean, essentially, since I came up with the idea for the company, named it, provided the a, and c rounds of funding, recruited the critical personnel, and told them everything I know. You know, if that had been a a commercial corporation, I'd probably own half the company. So but and and and I I I could have chosen to do that. That that's I if I it was totally at my discretion.
I could have done that. But I created it as a nonprofit for the world, an open source nonprofit for the world.
Do you think the right thing to do is to take those models and just open source them today? If you could affect that change, is that
the right thing to do?
Yeah. I think I think that that that is what what it was created to do. So it should. I mean, the the best open source models right now actually, ironically, because fate fate seems to be an irony maximizer. Mhmm.
The best open source models are generally from China. Yeah. Like, that's bizarre. And and and then I think the second best are one is May maybe it's better than second best. But like the the Grok 2.5 open source model is actually very good.
And I think we're we're probably be and and and we'll continue to open source our models. But, you know, but whereas, like, try using any of the the the recent so called the OpenAI open source models. They're out they don't work. They basically they open sourced a broken, nonworking version of of their models as a fig leaf. I mean, you know anyone who's running open open AIs, open source models?
Exactly.
Yeah. Nobody. We've had a big debate about jobs here. Obviously, there's gonna be job displacement. You and I have talked about it for decades.
What's your take on the pace of it? Because, obviously, building self driving software, you're building optimists. Yeah. We're seeing Amazon take some steps here where they're like, yeah, we're probably not gonna hire these positions in the future. And, you know, maybe they're getting rid of people now because they were bloated, but maybe some of it's AI.
You know? It's it's all debatable. What do you think the timeline is, and what do you think as a society we're gonna need to do to mitigate it if it goes too fast?
Well, you know, I call AI the supersonic tsunami. So so I'm not the most company description in the world. If
Fast and big?
If there was tsunami, a giant wall of water moving faster than the speed of sound, that's AI.
When does it land?
Yeah. Exactly. So and this is happening whether I wanted to or not. I I actually try to slow down AI. And then the the reason, you know, I I the reason I wanted to create OpenAI was to serve as a counterweight to Google because at the time Google was sort of essentially had unilateral power in AI.
That all the all the AI, essentially. And and, you know, Larry Page was not, you know, he he he was not taking as safety seriously. Don't know, Jason, sure, were you were you there when he he called me a speciest?
Yes. I was there. Yeah.
Okay. So
You were more concerned about the human race than you were about the machines. And, yeah, you had a clear bias for humanity.
Yes. Yes. I was exactly. I was like, Larry Larry, well, what you know, like, we need to make sure that the AI doesn't destroy all the humans. And then he called me a speciest, like racist or something for being pro human intelligence instead of machine intelligence.
I'm like, well, Larry, what side are you on? I mean, you know, that's kind of a concern. And and and then at the time, the Google had essentially a monopoly on AI.
Yeah. They bought DeepMind, which you were on the board of, had an investment in. Larry and Sergei had invested in as well, and it's really interesting.
About it because I told him about it. I I I showed him some stuff from deep from DeepLind, and and I think that's how he found out found out about it and and and acquired them, actually. I gotta be careful what I say. But but the the point is that it's like, look, Larry is not taking AI safety seriously, and and and and Google had essentially all the AI and all the computers and all the money. And I'm like, this is a Unipolar world where the guy in charge is not taking things seriously.
So and call me a speciest for being pro human. What do you do in those circumstances? You know? Build a competitor. Yes.
So OpenAI was created essentially as the opposite, which is an open source nonprofit, the opposite of Google. Now unfortunately, it's it's it it needs to change its name to closed for maximum profit AI.
Yeah. For maximum profit, to be clear. Exactly. The most about it. It currently
goes for the most amount of profit you could possibly get.
I mean
It it is so it is like like I said
It's comical. I mean, when you hear
when you hear Sam's there's an irony maximizer. You have to say, like, what is the most the most ironic outcome for a company that that was created for to do open source a not at nonprofit AI is it's super closed source. It's tighter than Fort The the the AI open AI source code is is locked up tighter than Fort Knox, and and and they are going for maximum profit. Like, I'm gonna get some like, get the bourbon, the steak knife that, you know
They're ready to yeah. I mean
You know? The the the the you know, like like, they they're going for the buffet, and they're they're just diving head first into the profit buffet. I mean, it's just Yes. Or at least aspiration the revenue buffet at least. Profit, we'll see.
We
I mean, it's like
it's like ravenous wolves
for revenue. Ravenous wolves. Revenue buffet.
No. No. It's literally, like, super villain. It's like Bond villain level flip. Like, it went from being United Nations to being Spectre in, like, James Bondland.
Yeah. When you hear him say I'm gonna when when Sam says he's gonna, like, raise 1,400,000,000,000.0 to build our data centers.
Yeah. No. But I think he I think he means it.
Yeah. I mean, it's, I would say, audacious, but I I wouldn't want to, yeah, insult the word. It's insane. Have a
question about this.
How is that possible?
§07AI power efficiency, Robotaxis, future of self-driving
In the earnings call, you said something that was insane. And then I think the math actually nets up, but you said we could connect all the Teslas and allow them in downtime to actually offer up inference. And you can stream them
all together.
I think the math is, like, it could actually be, like, a 100 gigawatts.
Is that right? Did you
do If if ultimately, there's a Tesla fleet, that is a 100,000,000 vehicles, which I think we probably will get to at some point a 100,000,000 vehicle fleet, and they have, you know, mostly state of the art inference computers in them that that each say are a a kilowatt of inference computer. And they have built in, power and cooling and Yeah. Yeah. Connect to the Wi Fi.
That's the key. Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. Exactly. And and and and, at the end, you'd have a a 100 gigawatts of inference compute.
Elon, do you think that the architecture like, there was an attention free model that came out the last week. There's been all of these papers, all of these new models that have been shown to reduce power per token of output by many, many, many orders of magnitude, like, not just an order of magnitude, but, like, maybe three or four. Like, what's your view in all the work you've been doing on where we're headed in terms of power, per unit of compute or per token of output?
Well, we we have a a clear example of efficient power efficient compute, which is the human brain. So our brains use about 20 watts of power, but in all that, only about 10 watts is higher brain function. Most of it's you know, half of it is this housekeeping functions, you know, keeping your heart going and breathing and that kind of thing. So so you've got maybe 10 watts of higher brain function in a human. And we've managed to build civilization with 10 watts of of a biological computer.
And that biological computer has, like, a twenty year, you know, boot sequence. Yeah.
So it's pretty pretty fun.
But but but but it's very power efficient. So given that humans are capable of inventing, you know, general relativity and quantum mechanics and or discovering general relativity. Like like inventing aircraft, lasers, the Internet, and discovering physics with with a 10 watt meat computer essentially, then there's clearly a massive opportunity for improving the efficiency of AI compute. It's because it's it's it's currently many orders of magnitude away from that. And and it's still the case that a a 100 megawatt or even, you know, a gigawatt AI supercomputer at this point can't do everything that a human can do.
It it will be able to, but it can't yet. So but but but we we have like I said, we've got this obvious case of human brains being very power efficient and achieving and and building civilization with with a with a, you know, with with 10 watts to compute. And and and and a very slow and our our bandwidth is very low. So the the the speed at which we communicate information to each other is extremely low. You know, we're we're not communicating at a terabit.
We're communicating more at, like, 10 bits per second. So
Do you think that there's a That
should naturally lead you to the conclusion that there is massive opportunity for being more power efficient with with AI. And and at Tesla and at xAI, we're both we we we we continue to see massive improvements in in inference computer efficiency. So yeah.
You think that there's a moment where you would justify stopping all the traditional cars and just going completely all in on cyber cab if you felt like the learning was good enough and that the system was safe enough? Is is there ever a moment like that, or do you think you'll always kinda dual track and always do both?
I mean, all of the cars we make right now are capable of being a robotaxi. So there's a little confusion of the terminology because the the the our cars look normal. You know, like model three or model y looks it's a looking car, but it looks looks normal. But it has an advanced AI computer and advanced AI software and cameras. And we didn't want the cameras to stick out, so we we, you know so that that we wouldn't want them to be ugly or stick out.
So so, you know, if we put them they're sort of in unobtrusive locations. You know, the forward looking camera cameras are in front of the rearview mirror. The side view mirrors are in the side repeaters. Oh, the the side view camera's on the side repeaters. The the the rear camera is, you know, just in the you know, above the license plate, actually, typically where the rearview camera is in a car.
And, you know, and and and the the diagonal forward ones are in the b pillars. Like, if you look closely, can see all the cameras, but but you have to look closely. We just didn't want them to be to stick out like, you know, warts or something. But but actually, all the cars we make are hyper intelligent and have the cameras in the right places. They just look normal.
And so so all of the cars we make are capable of unsupervised full autonomy. Now we we have a dedicated product, which is the CyberCab, which has no no steering wheel or pedals, which are obviously prestigious in a autonomous world. And we start production of the cyber cab in q two next year. And we'll that up to to quite high volume. Think, ultimately, we'll make millions of cyber cabs per year.
But but it it is important to emphasize that all of our cars are capable of being robotic taxis.
The CyberCab is gorgeous. I told you I'd buy two of those if you put a steering wheel in them, and there is a big movement
on line. Steering wheel.
People are begging for it. Why not? Why not let us buy a couple, you know, you know, just the first ones off the line and drive them? I mean, it's they look great. It's like the perfect model.
You always had a vision for a model two. Right? Like, isn't it, like, the perfect model two in addition to being a a cyber cab?
Look. The reality is people may think they wanna drive their car, but the reality is that they don't. How many times have you been, say, in an Uber or Lyft and and you said, you know what? I wish I could take over from the driver. And and and I wish I could get off my phone and and take over from the Uber driver and and drive to my destination.
How many times have you thought to yourself thought that to yourself?
No. It's quite the opposite.
There were have zero times. Okay. I
have the model y, and I just got 14. I have Juniper, and I I got the fourteen one, and I put it on Mad Max mode the last couple
of days.
That is
Mad Max mode.
A unique experience. I was like,
wait a second. This thing is driving in a very unique fashion.
Yeah.
Yeah. It it seems you wanna get to your destination in a hurry.
Yeah. I I used to give cab drivers an extra $20 to
do that.
Medical appointment or something. I don't know.
Yeah. It but it's it feels like it's getting very close. We do have to be very careful. You know, Uber had a horrible accident with the safety driver. Cruise had a terrible accident.
It wasn't their fault exactly, except, you know, that somebody got hit, then it they they hit the person a second time, they got dragged.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know,
there's this pretty high stakes. So you're being extremely cautious.
The the car's the car is actually extremely capable right now. Yeah. But we are being extremely cautious, and we're being paranoid about it because to your point, even one accident would would be headline news. Well, probably worldwide headline news.
Especially if it's a Tesla. Like, Waymo, I think, gets a bit of a pass. I think there's half the country or a number of people probably would, you know, go extra hard on you.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Not everyone in the press is my friend.
I hadn't noticed.
Yeah. Some of them are a little antagonistic.
Yep. So you can just but people are pressuring you to go fast. And I I think is everybody's gotta just take their time with this thing. It's obviously gonna happen, but I I just get very nervous that the the pressure to put these things on the road faster than they're ready is just, a little crazy. So I I applaud you for putting the safety monitor in, doing the safety drive, but no shame in the safety driver game.
It's so much the right decision, obviously, but people are criticizing you for it. I think it's dumb. It's the right thing to do.
Yes. And and we do expect it to take to not have any sort of safety, occupant or or there's hardly a driver that just sits Monitor. Safety safety monitor. Just sits you just sit they they just sit in the car and don't do anything.
Safety dude.
Yeah. So but we do expect that that the cars will be driving around without any any safety monitor before the end of the year, so sometime in December.
In Austin. Yeah. I mean, you got a number of reps under your belt in Austin, and it feels like pretty well you you guys have done a great job figuring out where the trouble spots are. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you learned in the first I don't know. It's been, like, three or four months of this so far.
What did what did you learn in the first three or four months of the Austin experiment?
Actually, it's it's gone pretty smoothly. A lot a lot of things that we're learning are just how to manage a fleet. Like, because because you've you've gotta write all the fleet management software. Right? So Yep.
And you've you've gotta write the ride hailing software. You've gotta write basically, the the software that Uber has, you've gotta write that software. It's just summoning a robot car instead of a car with a driver. So so a lot of the things we're doing, we're we're we're up the number of cars to say, like, what happens if you have a thousand cars? Like, so we'll we'll you know, we think probably we'll have, you know, a thousand cars or more in the Bay Area by the end of this year.
Probably, I don't know, 500 or more in the greater Austin Austin area. And, you know, if if if you you know, you have to you you have to make sure the cars don't all, for example, go to the same supercharger.
That's fine.
Right? So or don't all go to the same intersection. The that there's there's it's like, what do these cars do? And then, like, sometimes there's a high demand, and sometimes there's low demand. What do you do during during those times?
Do you have a car circled the block? Do you have a try to find a parking space? The and then, you know, sometimes the like I say, it's a it's a, you know, disabled parking space or something, but the the writing's faded or the the things faded. The car's like, oh, look. Your parking space would jump right in there.
It's
like Yeah.
Get a ticket.
Gotta look carefully, make sure it's it's, like, you know, it's not a an illegal parking space or or or or it sees it sees a space to park and it's like ridiculously tight. But it's like, oh, I can get in there. Yeah. But with like, you know, three inches on either side, Tyvy.
Bad computer.
Yeah. That could move through.
But but but nobody else will be able to get in their car if you do
that. Yeah.
So, you know, there's just like all these oddball corner cases. And
And regulators. Like regulators are all very yeah. They're they're they have different levels of persnicketiness and regulations depending on the city, depending on the airport. I mean, it's just, you know, very different everywhere. That's gonna just be a lot of blocking and tackling, and it just takes time.
Elon, let me ask you another
Like, in order to take people to San Jose Airport, like, Jose you actually have to connect to San Jose Airport servers and because you have to pay a fee every time you Yep. Turn off. So so the car actually has to has to do a remote call. The the robot car has to do, you know, remote procedure call to to San Jose Airport servers to to say I'm dropping someone off at the airport and charge me whatever $5, which is like there are all these, like, quirky things like that. The the the the like, airports are somewhat of a racket.
Yeah.
So so that's like, you know, we have to solve that thing. But it's kinda funny that the robot car is, like, calling the server the airport server to to, you know, charge its credit card or whatever.
To send a fax. Yeah. We're we're gonna be dropping off at this time.
But but it it will
soon become extremely normal to to see cars going around with no one in them. Yeah. Yeah. Extremely normal.
On on just before we lose you out, I wanna, like, ask if you saw that Bill Gates memo that he put out. A lot
§08Bill Gates flips on climate change, solar, energy production
of people are talking about this memo.
It like, you know,
did Yeah. I I guess, like say,
Billy g is not my love.
Oh, man.
Like, did did did climate change become woke?
Did it become, like, woke? And is it over being woke? Like, you know, like, what happened? And what's what what happened with Billy G? I mean, you know
Great question. Great question.
Yeah.
You know, you you think that someone like Colgate who clearly started a tech you know, a technology company that's one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft being you think he'd be really quite, you know, strong in the sciences. But, actually, my at least direct conversations with him have he he is he is not strong in the sciences. Like like he the he didn't yeah. This is they're really shot surprising. You know, like, he he came to visit me at the Tesla Gigafactory in in Austin and was telling me that it's impossible to have a long range semi truck.
And I was like, well but we literally have them, and you can drive them. And Pepsi is literally using them right now, and you can drive them yourself or send someone obviously, a guest not gonna drive himself, but you can send a trusted person to drive the the truck and verify that it can do the things that we say it's doing. And he's like, no. No. It doesn't work.
It doesn't work. And I'm like, okay. I'm like, kind of stuck there. Then it's like I was like, well so it must be that you disagree with the watt hours per kilogram of the battery pack so that you're you must think that perhaps we can't achieve the energy density of the battery pack or that the watt hours per mile of the truck is too high. And and that when you combine those two numbers, the range is low.
And so which one of those numbers do you think we have wrong, and what numbers do you think are correct? And you didn't know any of the numbers. And I'm like, well, then doesn't it seem that it's perhaps, you know, premature to conclude that a long range semi cannot work if you do not know the energy density of the battery pack or the energy efficiency of the of the truck chassis? But
yeah. He he's now taken a one eighty on climate. He's saying maybe this shouldn't be
a priority. Climate is gay. It's
just yeah.
Why would he say the climate is gay?
That's wrong. It's totally retarded.
He's well, Paul Gates said the climate is gay and retarded. Come on.
I maybe he's got some data centers he's gotta put up. Do they have to stand up a data center for for Sam Altman or something? I don't know. What is Azure?
I don't know.
He changed his position? I can't figure out why.
I mean, you know, I mean, the the reality of the whole climate change thing is is that the you know, you've just had sort of people who say it it doesn't exist at all, and then people who say it it's and saying, you know, RAR is gonna be underwater in five years. And, obviously, neither of those two positions are true. But, you know, the the the reality is you you can measure the the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. Again, you could just literally buy a c o two monitor from Amazon. It's like $50, and you can measure it yourself.
And, you know, and and you you can say, okay. Well, look. The the the the parts per million of c o two in the atmosphere has been increasing steadily at two to three per year. At some point, if you continue to take to take billions, especially trillions of tons of carbon from deep underground and transfer it to the atmosphere and oceans, so you transfer it from deep underground into the surface cycle, you will change the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans. Just you just literally will.
Then you can only then now you can say, to what degree and over what time scale. And the reality is that, in my opinion, is that we've got at least fifty years before it's a serious issue. I don't think we've five hundred years, but but we've probably got, you know, fifty. It's it's not it's not five years. So if you're trying to get to the right order of magnitude of accuracy, I'd say the cons the concern level for climate change is on the order of fifty years.
It's definitely not five, and I think it probably isn't 500. So so, really, the the right course of action is actually just the reasonable course of action, which is to lean in the direction of sustainable energy and and lean in the direction of of solar and so of a sort of a solar battery future and and and generally have the rules of the system lean in that direction. I I don't think we need massive subsidies, but then we also shouldn't have massive subsidies for the oil and gas industry. Okay? So the oil and gas re gas industry has massive tax write offs.
They don't even think of it as subsidies because these things have been replaced for, in some cases, you know, eighty years. But they're not there for other industries. So when you've got a special tax conditions that are in one industry and not another industry, I call that a subsidy. Obviously, it it is. But they've taken it for granted for so long in oil and gas that they don't think of it as a subsidy.
So the the right course of action, of course, is to remove, in my opinion, to remove subsidies from all industries. But but the the the political reality is that the oil and gas industry is very strong in the Republican Party, but not in the Democratic Party. So you you will not see, obviously, even the tiniest subsidy being removed from the oil, gas, and coal industry. In fact, there were some that were added to the oil, gas, and coal industry in in the the the sort of big bowl. And and and there were a a lot a massive number of of sustainable energy incentives that were removed, some of which I agreed with, by the way.
Mhmm.
Some of the incentives have gone too far. But, anyway, the the the the actual I think object the correct scientific conclusion, in my opinion, and I and I think we can back this up with with solid reasoning, ask ask Grog, for example. It is that we should we should lean in the direction of moving towards a sustainable energy future. We we will eventually run out of oil, gas, and coal to burn anyway, because it's a it's a finite there's a finite amount of that stuff. And we will eventually have to go to something that lasts a long time that is sustainable.
But to your point about the irony of things, it seems to be the case that making energy with solar is cheaper than making energy with some of these carbon based sources today. And so the irony is it's already working. I mean, the market is moving in that direction and this notion that we need to kind of force everyone into a model of behavior, it's just naturally gonna change Right. Because we've got better systems. Know, you and others have engineered better systems that make these alternatives cheaper, and therefore, they're winning.
Like, they're actually winning in the market, which is great. But they they can't they can't win if there are subsidies to support the old systems, obviously.
Yeah. I mean, by the way, there are actually massive disincentives of Postola because the because China China is is a massive producer of solar panels that during China does an incredible job of solar manufacturing of solar panel manufacturing. Really incredible. They have one and like, roughly one and a terawatts of of solar production right now. And and they're only using a terawatt per year.
By the way, that's a gigantic number. The the the average US power consumption is only half a terawatt. So just think about that for a second. China's you know, for China's solar panel out production max capacity is one and a half terawatts per year. US steady state power usage is half a terawatt.
Now now what you do have to to reduce you say, if you do produce one and a half terawatts a year of solar, you need you need to add that with batteries, take into account the the the differences between night and day, the fact that the solar panel is not always pointed directly at the sun, that kind of thing. So you can divide by five ish to say that but but that still means that China has the ability to produce solar panels that have a steady state output that is roughly two thirds that of the entire use of economy from all sources, which means that just with solar alone, China can, in one in in eighteen months, produce enough solar panels to the entire United States, all the electricity in The United States.
What do you think about near field solar aka nuclear?
I'm in favor of look. Make make energy from any any way you you you want. That that doesn't that doesn't, like, obviously harmful to to the environment. Generally, people don't welcome a nuclear reactor in their backyard. They're they're they're not, like, championing
Put it here.
Put it under my bed.
Like, put it Put
it on my roof.
If if if if if your next
door neighbor said, hey. I'm selling my house and they're putting a reactor there,
what would your the you you you know,
the typical homeowner response would be negative. It very few people will embrace a nuclear reactor adjacent to their house. So but none nonetheless, I I I do think nuclear is actually very safe. The it's it's there's a lot of scare sort of scaremongering and and propaganda around fission if it assuming you're talking about fission. And and but fission is actually very safe.
They obviously have this on you know, the navy. US Navy has this on submarines and aircraft carriers and with with people really working right I mean, so, you know, submarine's a pretty crowded place, and they have a nuclear powered submarine. So so so I think I think fission's fine as as a as a as an option. The the regulatory environment is makes it very difficult to actually get that done. And and then it is important to appreciate just the sheer magnitude of the power of the sun.
So this is here are some just important basic facts. Even Wikipedia has these facts. Right? You know? So you don't even have you you go to You
don't have to use
Rockpedia. But even Wikipedia has Yeah.
Even Wikipedia got it right.
Yes. Yes. I'm saying what I'm saying, even Wikipedia's got got these facts. Right? The the the sun is about 99.8% of the mass of the solar system.
Then then Jupiter's about point 1%, and everything else is in the remaining point 1%. And we are much less than point 1%. So if you burnt all of the mass of the solar system, okay, then the total energy produced by the sun would still round up to a 100%. Like, if you just burnt Earth, the whole planet, and burnt Jupiter, which is very big and and quite challenging to burn, you, you know, and turn Jupiter into thermonuclear active. It wouldn't matter.
The sun compared to the sun, the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, and everything else is in the miscellaneous category. So, like, basically, no matter what you do, total energy produced in our solar system rounds up to 100% from the sun. You could even throw another Jupiter in there. So we're gonna snag a Jupiter from somewhere else and somehow teleport you could teleport two more Jupiters into our solar system, burn them, and the sun would still round up to a 100%. You know, so as long as you're at 99.6%, you're still rounding up to a 100%.
Maybe that gives some perspective of why solar is really the thing that matters. And and and as soon as you start thinking about things in at sort of a grander scale, like Kardashev scale to civilizations, it it becomes very, very obvious. It's it's like, I'm not saying anything that's new, by the way. Like, anyone who studies physics has known this for, you know, very long time. In fact, Ikatoshev, I think, was a Russian physicist who came up with this idea, I think, in the sixties.
Just as as a way to classify civilizations, where the Kardashev scale one would be you've used you're you're you've harnessed most of the energy of of the planet. Kardashev scale two, you're you've harnessed most of the energy of your sun. Kardashev three, you've harnessed most of energy of galaxy. Now we're only about, I don't know, 1% or a few a few percent of Cardiership scale one right now, optimistically. So but as soon as you go to Kotchuk scale two, where you're talking about the power of the sun, then you're you're really just saying everything is solar power and and and and that the rest is in the noise.
And yeah. So, like, the, you know, like, the the sun produces about a billion times or call it well over a billion times more energy than everything on Earth combined.
It's crazy. It's mind blowing.
Right.
Yeah. Yeah. Solar's the obvious solution to all this. And, yeah, I mean, short term. Yummy.
Some of these other sources, but, hey, there it is. An hour and a half.
Star powered. Like, maybe we got a branding issue here.
Yeah. Star powered.
Instead of solar powered, it's it's starlight.
Yeah. Starlight.
Perfect. It's the power of a blazing sun. A pine. A blade. How much energy does an entire star have?
Yeah. Well, more than enough.
Than enough. Alright.
That's what and and and also you really need to keep the power local. So sometimes people honestly, I've had these discussions so many times. It's it's where they say, well, would you beam the power back to Earth? I'm like, do you want to melt Earth?
Yeah. Because you would melt Earth if you did that.
We'd be very surprised in an instant. So you you really need to get the power local, you know, basically distributed power. And and I and I guess most of it we use for intelligence. So it's like, you know, the future is like a whole a whole bunch of solar powered AI satellites.
But, Elon, the the only the only thing that makes the star work is it just happens to have a lot of mass, So it has that gravity to ignite the fusion to ignite the fusion reaction. Right? But, like, we could ignite the fusion reaction on Earth now. I don't know, like, if your view has changed. I think we talked about this a couple years ago where you were pretty like, we don't know if or when fusion becomes real here, but theoretically, we could take, like, 10
No. I wanna be clear.
My opinion on so, you know, I started first using physics in college. At one point in high school, was thinking about a career in physics. One of my sons actually is does a career is doing a career in physics. But my the point is I came to the conclusion is that I'd be waiting for a collider or or a telescope. I don't have any and I need to get that collider career in physics, but I have a strong interest in the subject.
So so so my opinion on, say, creating a fusion reactor on Earth is I think this is actually not a hard problem, actually. I mean, it's a little hard. I mean, it's it's not, like, totally trivial. But if you just scale up a tokamak, the the bigger you make it, the easier the problem gets. So the the you've got a surface volume ratio thing where, you know, you you're trying to maintain a really hot core while having a wall that doesn't melt.
So that's a a similar problem with with rocket engines. You you've got a super hot core in the rocket engine, but you don't want the the walls chamber walls of the rocket engine to melt. So you have a temperature gradient where it's very hot in the middle and and and gradually gets cold enough as you get to the perimeter, gets as you get to the, you know, the the chamber walls in the rocket engine where the it doesn't melt. Because you've lowered the temperature and and you got a temperature gradient. So just if you just scale up of, you know, the the donut reactor, Tokamak, and and and and improve your source to volume ratio, that becomes much easier.
And you you can absolutely, in my opinion no. I I I think just anyone who looks at the math, you can you can make a a that is part that generates more energy than it consumes. And the bigger you make it, the easier it is. And in the limit, you just have a giant gravitationally contained thermonuclear reactor like the sun. So which requires no maintenance, and it's free.
So this is also why why would we bother doing that on making a little itty bitty sun that's so microscopic you'd barely notice on Earth when we've got the giant free one in the sky?
Yeah. But we but we we only get a fraction of 1% of that energy on the planet Earth. We have to go
Much less than 1%. Yeah.
Right. So we've gotta figure out how to wrap the sun if we're gonna harness that energy. That that's our our long term.
If people wanna have fun with reactors, you know, that's that's fine. Have fun with reactors. But it's not a serious endeavor compared to the sun. You know, it's it's it's it's sort of a a fun it's a fun science project to make a nuclear reactor, but it's not it's not it's it's just peanuts compared to the sun. And and and even the the the solar energy that does reach Earth is a gigawatt per square kilometer or roughly, you know, call it two and a half gigawatts per square mile.
So that's a lot. You know? And the commercially available panels are around 25 almost 2026% efficiency and maybe you know which you can and then you say, like, if you do pack it densely, you get an 80% packing density, you're gonna which I think, you know, you've in a lot of places, you could get an 80% packing density. You effectively have about, you know, 200 megawatts per square kilometer. And and and and that you need to pair that with batteries so you so you have continuous power.
Although our power usage drops considerably at night, so you need less batteries than you think. And and and Doesn't the doesn't the question that makes A rough way to like, a very maybe an easy number to remember is is a a gigabyte hour per square kilometer per day is is a roughly correct number.
But then doesn't your technical challenge become the scalability of manufacturing of those systems? So, you know, accessing the raw materials and getting them out of the ground of planet Earth to make them, to make enough of them to get to that sort of scale on that volume that you're talking about. And as you kinda think about what it would take to get to that scale, like, do we have an ability to do that with what we have today? Like, can we pull that much material out of the ground?
Yes. Solar panels are made of silicon, which is sand, essentially. And
I guess more on the battery side.
But Oh, the battery side. Yeah. Yeah. So battery on the battery side, you know, the like, iron phosphate lithium ion battery cells, there's you know, earth and I'd like to throw out some, like, interesting factoids here. If most people don't know, if you said, as measured by mass, what is the biggest element?
What what is what is earth made of as measured by mass? Actually, we're it's it's iron.
Iron. Yeah.
Iron. Yeah. We're we're, I think, 32% iron, 30% oxygen, and and then everything else is in the remaining remaining percentage. So we're basically, a a rusty ball bearing is that's earth. And and with with with, you know, a lot of silicon at the surface in the in the form of sand.
And the the iron phosphate so so iron phosphate lithium ion cells, extremely common, most common element on earth, even in the crust. And then phosphorus is also very common. And and then the the anode is is carbon, but also very common. And then lithium is also very common. So the there there's actually you can do you can do the math.
In fact, we did the math and published the published the math, but nobody looked at it. It's on the Tesla website that shows that you can completely power earth with solar panels and batteries, and there's no shortage of anything.
Alright. So on that note, Yeah. Go get to work, Elon, and just power the earth while you're getting implants into people's brains and satellites and other good fun stuff. Good to see you, buddy.
Yeah. Good to see you guys. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks
for stopping
by anytime.
Thanks for doing this.
That's great. Zoom link. Stop
by anytime.
Thank you for coming today, and thank you for liberating free speech three years ago.
You're welcome.
Yeah. That was that was a very important milestone.
It's it's and and I see all you guys are in just different different places. I guess it's a very virtual situation.
Always been that. I'm at the ranch.
Sax is on the line.
Are you ever in the same room?
We try not to be.
When we
do only only when we do that that summit, but otherwise We could avoid each other. Yeah.
Your summon is is is is pretty fun. Yeah. Yes. We had a great time recounting SNL sketches that didn't didn't make it.
Oh god. There's just so many good ones.
I mean,
we didn't even get to the Jeopardy ones.
Yeah. Yeah.
No. They're so offensive. Oh, wait. No.
No. No. Well, I think we skipped a few that would have dramatically increased our probability of being killed.
We take this one out.
Boys, I love you. I love you.
I love
you all.
I'm going to poker. Later. Take care.
Alright. Have a good one. Bye bye. Love you.
We
should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.