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 percent since he took over Twitter. As is often the case, his next move is unclear. I go as far to say that he`s demonstrating some erratic behavior.

Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, share 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, there`s 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 here would never 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 grid fins on your left-hand screen rotating and turning to guide the booster. And you can see the water below and we have blast zone. He`s just a visionary like I`ve never seen. 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. My greatest entrepreneur of this generation, Elon Musk. I`m going to take this. All right. Thanks for taking the time. How are you doing, brother? You keeping busy? Yeah. I mean, it`s rarely a slow week. I mean, in the world as well. Yeah.

I mean, any given week, it just seems like the thing is getting out of here. It`s definitely a simulation. We`ve agreed on this at this point. I mean, look, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high. Yeah. The ratings are high. 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, is it? I think it`s like 44 billion, something like that. Give or take a billion. Yeah. It`s pretty nutty. There is like this weird movement to quell free speech kind of around the world.

And that`s something we should be very concerned about. You have to ask, like, why was the First Amendment like a high priority? It was like number one. Is because people came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed. And they were like, well, we`d 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 are critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed. Right. Yeah. We`d like to not have that. Are you concerned -- Can I add to that? Yeah. I mean, I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message.

Yeah. 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, opposing -- It`s like you like to -- you like to Facebook post, throw them in the prison.

Yeah. People have got an actual, you know, prison for, like, obscure comments on social media. Not even shitposting. Like, not even -- Yeah. It`s crazy. Look, this is when -- Pablo got thrown in prison recently. Right. You`ve got Pablo -- I`m like, I was pretty shook about that. I mean, what is the massive crime that -- Right.

Pavel in France, and then, of course, we got Brazil with Judge Voldemort. That one seems like the one that impacts you the most. Can you -- what`s the latest on that? Well, we -- I guess we are trying to figure out is there some reasonable solution in Brazil. The -- you know, the concern -- I mean, I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly.

And, you know, funny memes aside, the nature of the concern was that, at least at XCorp, 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 -- you know, we wouldn`t get very far if we did that.

But we do, you know, think that if a country`s laws are a particular way, and we are being asked to -- what we think we are being asked to break them, then -- and be silent about it, then, obviously, that is no good. So I just want to be clear, because sometimes it comes across as Elon is trying to just be a crazy whatever, billionaire, and demand outrageous things from other countries.

And, you know, while that is true, in addition, there are other things that I think are -- I think are valid, which is, like, we obviously can`t -- you know, I think any given thing that we do at XCorp, we`ve got to be able to explain in the light of day, and not feel that it was dishonorable, or, you know, we did the wrong thing, you know?

So we don`t -- that was the -- that`s the nature of the concern. So we actually are in sort of discussions with the, you know, judicial authorities in Brazil to try to, you know, run this to ground, like, what`s actually going on? Like, if we`re being asked to break the law, Brazilian law, then that obviously should not be -- should not sit well with the Brazilian judiciary.

And if we`re not, and we`re mistaken, we`d like to understand how we`re mistaken. I think that`s a -- 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 you`re going to get arrested, and, like, I`m going to have to go bail you out or something.

Like, this is -- feels very acute, like -- 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 -- I don`t know, who was the guy who just wrote the -- was it the Guardian piece about, like -- Oh, yeah, yeah, there`ve been three articles, and I think in the past three weeks -- Robert Reich.

Yeah. But it wasn`t just him. Yeah. Three different articles. Three different articles. Yeah. That 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. Authoritarianism? Yeah. Guardian of -- yeah.

Yeah. Censorship? Censorship. 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. So, 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 afraid -- if somebody`s sort of trying to push a false premise on the world, 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. So, now, you know, the sort of -- what we`re trying to do with XCorp is -- I distinguish that from my son, who`s also called X.

Yes. Right. You have parental goals, and then you have goals for the company. Everything`s just called X, basically. Yes. Very difficult disambiguation. The car, the son. Yes. It`s everything. So, what we`re trying to do is simply adhere to the, you know, the laws in a country. So, if something is illegal in the United States, or if it`s illegal in, you know, Europe or Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down, and we`ll suspend the account, because we`re not, you know, there to make the laws, we -- but if speech is not illegal, then what are we doing?

Okay. Now, we`re injecting ourselves in as a censor, and where does it stop, and who decides? So, 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 -- That`s it. It`s not more complicated than that. We`re not trying to flout the law. I`m going to be clear about that. We`re trying to adhere to the law, and 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. There`s some European -- Yes. It`s very straightforward. And if somebody thinks we`re not adhering to the law, well, they can file a lawsuit. Bingo. Also very straightforward. Yes. But what about 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. Yes, it is illegal. And in those countries, if somebody puts that up, you take it down. Yes. But they typically file something and say, "Take this down." Yes. No, in some cases, it is just obviously illegal.

Like, you don`t need to file a lawsuit for, you know, if something is just, you know, unequivocally illegal. We can literally read the law. This violates the law. You know, anyone -- Why not? Anyone can see that. You know, you don`t need -- like, if somebody is stealing, you don`t need -- let me check the law on that.

Yes. Okay. Oh, no. They`re stealing stuff. Let`s talk about it. So, we had J.D. Vance here this morning. He did a great job. And you know, one of the things is there`s this image on X of, like, basically, like, you, Bobby, Trump, and J.D. are like the Avengers, I guess.

And then there`s another meme where you`re in front of a desk where it says, "D-O-G-E." Yes. The Department of Governmental Efficiency. Yes. Yes. I posted that one. Tell us about it. I made it using Grok, the Grok image generator. And I posted it. Tell us about -- And put it to my profile.

Seek for efficiency. 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, your tax dollars at work, I mean -- Yeah.

What are we doing? That`s the expense of 1,600 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 -- but at the current trend, you know, California high-speed rail might finish sometime next century.

Maybe. Probably not. We`re just -- We`ll have teleportation by that time, so -- Yeah, exactly. We just have AI do everything at that point. So, I think you really think of, you know, the United States and many countries, it`s arguably worse than the EU, as 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, 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 like 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 at Starbase, and we`re like, it`s -- 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 was just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff, and there`s zero harm done. Like, and they`re 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 -- any more of your applications for launch, for Starship launch, unless you pay this $140,000.

They just ransomed us, and we`re like, okay, so we paid $140,000, but it was -- it`s like, this is no good. At this rate, we`re never going to get to Mars. I mean, that`s the -- 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 -- putting aside fresh water, but, hey, you know, there -- 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, or 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, like, when did we stop being able to make those tradeoffs?

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 our -- it seemed like it was less than two years when you had the party to open it.

Where we -- yeah. From start of construction to completion was 14 months. Fourteen. Fourteen months. Is there anywhere on the planet that would go faster? Is, like, China 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 -- Tesla Gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon.

Which was the biggest building in America. No, there were bigger buildings, but the Pentagon was a pretty big one. Yeah. Or it was the biggest at the time. In units of Pentagon, it's, like, three. Okay. Three Pentagons 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, then? Yeah. I mean, I haven't -- sort of, you know, in sort of doing a sensible deregulation and reduction in the size of government is just, like, be 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 here, the thing about the rule is, if, like, if the rule is, you know, 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 rules. When we were watching you work, David and I and 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 costs 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 thing. Yeah, there were, like, so many articles, like, that this is -- Twitter is dead forever. There's no way it could possibly even continue at all. Yeah. It was almost like the press was rooting for you to fail. It's like, all right, team.

Let's write the obituary. Like, here's the obituary. And they were all saying their goodbyes on Twitter. Remember that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. They were all leaving and saying their goodbyes, because the site was going to melt down. Yes. Yes. Totally failing. All the journalists left. Yeah. Which is, if you ever want to, like, hang out with a bunch of hall monitors, oh my god, Threads is amazing.

Every time I go over there and post, they're, like, they're really triggered. Yeah. I mean, if you like being condemned repeatedly, then, you know, for reasons that make no sense, then Threads is the way to go. It's really, it's the most miserable place on earth. If Disney's 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 zero-base budget. OK, we get it. But if you could just pair 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% 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. 2%, 3% 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 suspect there are 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 the Titanic sinks. Well, you know, the Defense Department budget is a very big budget, OK?

It's a trillion dollars a year, DOD, Intel, it's a trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year, just in interest, and rising. We're adding a trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay somehow, you know, 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 it's just, you know, it's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt, and this does not have a good ending.

And so we have to reduce the spending. Let me ask one question, because I've brought this up a lot, and the counterargument I hear, which I disagree with, but the counterargument 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 a government entity. So if you go in and you take too hard an ax 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 D-O-G-E, D-O-G-E, D-O, like double G-E. Yeah, and I think the challenge is how quickly can we go in, how quickly can things change, and without ...

I'll let that on my business card. Yeah. Without all the contraction and job loss. You don't have Scott. Yeah. 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 a more efficient organization, their contribution to the economy, their net 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 the compounding effect of productivity gains. Yeah. Yeah, it's night and day. And so in North Korea, you've got 100% government, and in South Korea, you've got probably, I don't know, 40% government.

It's not zero. Yeah. 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, 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 in 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. 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% government in East Germany. And again, sort of a 5 to 10x standard of living difference, and even qualitatively vastly better. And it's obviously, so many 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 wall to keep people in, OK? That's how you can tell. OK? Yeah. It's a dead giveaway. Spoiler alert. Dead giveaway. Are they climbing 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, OK? They were like, you know, anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead. Speaking of walls. 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 go back to Cuba.

They're empty on the way back. 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. And yet nobody picks up those boats and does it. Amazing. You've given this a lot of thought. Yeah. Wait, so your point is jobs will be created if we cut government spending in half.

Jobs will be created fast enough to make up for, right, just the countries. Yes. Obviously, you know, I'm not suggesting that people, you know, have like immediately tossed out with no severance and, you know, now can't pay their mortgage. There needs to be some reasonable off-ramp where, yeah, so a 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. Well, 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. I mean. So we'll keep the post office. I mean, I'm going to need a lot of security details, guys.

Yes. I mean, the sheer number of disgruntled workers, former government employees, is quite a scary number. I mean, I might not make it. I was saying a low digits every year for four years would be palatable. Yeah. And I like your idea of an offer. Yeah, but the thing is that if it's not done, like if you have a once in a lifetime, once in a generation opportunity, and you don't take serious action, and then you have four years to get it done, and if it doesn't get done, then.

How serious is Trump about this? Like, you've talked to him about it. Yeah. Yeah. He's serious. He is very serious about it. Got it. No, I think actually the reality is that if we get rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector, we will have immense prosperity, and I think we will have a golden age in this country.

And it'll be fantastic. You have a bunch of critical milestones coming up. Yeah. In fact, there's a very exciting launch that is maybe happening tonight, so if the weather is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to Cape Canaveral for the Polaris Dawn mission, which is a private mission, so funded by Jared Isaacman.

And he's an awesome guy, and this will be the first commercial spacewalk, and it'll be at the highest altitude since Apollo, so it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone. Yeah. And what comes after that? Let's assume that's successful. I sure hope so, man. No pressure. Yeah, astronaut safety is, man, if I had all the wishes I could say about, that'd be the one to put it on.

So space is dangerous. So yeah, the next milestone after that would be the next flight of Starship, which, 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.

That stamp is really hard. Approved. Yeah. Approved. You ever see that movie Zootopia, there's like a sloth coming in for the approval. Yeah, they accidentally tell a joke, and I was like, "Oh no, this is going to take a long time." Sorry, sorry. Yeah, Zootopia, you know, the funny thing is, like, so I went to the DMV about, I don't know, a year later after Zootopia to get my license renewal, and the guy in an exercise of incredible self-awareness had the sloth from Zootopia in his cube, and he was actually Swift.

Yeah. With the mandate, "Beat the sloth." Yeah, no. "Beat personal agency. Personal agency." No, I mean, sometimes people think the government is more competent 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. Once you move them to a more efficient operating system, their output is dramatically greater, as we've seen, you know, when East Germany was reintegrated with West Germany, and the same people were vastly more prosperous, with a basically half-capitalist operating system.

So, but I mean, for a lot of people, like, their most direct experience with the government is the DMV, 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. Elon, sorry, can you go back to Chamath's question on Starship? So you announced just the other day Starship going to Mars in two years, and- By the way. Huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then four years for a crude aspirational launch in the next window? And how much is the government involved, and NASA involved?

I'm not saying, like, say you watch by these, you know, but these, but based on our current progress where with Starship we were able to successfully reach orbital velocity twice, we were able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in water, and that's despite the ship having, you know, half its flaps corked off.

You can see the video on the X platform, it's quite exciting. So, you know, we think we'll be able to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. And the fundamental Holy Grail breakthrough for rocketry, the fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multi-planetary is a rapidly reusable, reliable rocket.

With a pirate, somehow, throw a pirate in there. So Starship is the first rocket design where success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. So, you know, for any given project you have to say, this is the circle, so we'll write that, here's the circle, and it is success, the success dot in the circle is success in the set of possible outcomes.

That's, you know, it sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where that success is not in the set of possible outcomes. And so Starship not only is full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch, and I'm confident we'll succeed, it's simply a matter of time.

And if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. So that would be very helpful, and in fact, if something isn't done about 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 built, not slower, then we could become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species and be out there among the stars in the future.

And it's incredibly important that we have things that we find inspiring, that you look to the future and say the future's going to be better than the past, things to look forward to. Like kids are a good way to assess this, like what are kids fired up about? If you could say, you could be an astronaut on Mars, you could maybe one day go beyond the solar system, we could make Star Trek, Starfleet Academy real.

That is an exciting future. That is inspiring. I mean, you need things that move your heart. Life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another, there's got to be things that you look forward to as well. Yeah, and do you think you might have to move it to a different jurisdiction to move faster?

I've always wondered if like... Rocket technology is considered advanced weapons technology, so we can't just go do it... In another country? Yes. That's interesting. And if we don't do it, other countries could do it. I mean, they're so far behind us, but theoretically, there is a national security, you know, justification here.

If somebody can put their thinking caps on, like, do we want to have this technology that you're building, the team's 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. So no one's trying to steal it, it's just too crazy, basically.

And that's for you. Yeah, it's way too crazy. Elon, what do you think is going on that led to Boeing building the Starliner 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. I don't understand. You're going to have to go up and finish.

Well, I mean, I think Boeing is a company that is, you know, 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 their revenue from the government.

And a lot of people think, well, SpaceX is super dependent on the government. And actually, no, most of our revenue is commercial. And there's, I think, at least up until perhaps recently, because they have a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory. 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.

So I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly, and a spacecraft go to orbit, then it can't be a total mystery as to how they work. So you know, I'm like, sure, if somebody is like running Coke or Pepsi, and they're like great at marketing or whatever, that's fine, because it's not a sort of technology-dependent business.

Or if they're running a financial consulting, and their degree is in accounting, that makes sense. But I think if you're the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse. Pretty basic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's disconcerting if the cavalry captain just falls off the horse. He's not going to inspire the team.

I'm sorry. I'm scared of horses. He gets on backwards, and 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. Do you have a sense yet of where you think the big applications will be from AI?

Is it 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. Do you have a sense yet? I think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of, I mean, it 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, for example, the Turing test used to be a thing. Now your basic open source, random LLM, you're writing on a frigging Raspberry Pi probably could beat the Turing test.

So there's, I think actually 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 a manufactured good or provided service will, I think, with the advent of AI plus robotics, that the cost of goods and services will trend to zero.

I'm not saying it'll be actually zero, but it'll be, everyone will be able to have anything they want. That's the good future. Of course, in my view, that's probably 80% likely. Look on the bright side, only 20% probability of annihilation, nothing. Is the 20%, what does that look like?

I don't know, 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, but better?

That is perhaps the bigger challenge, although 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, but better, so maybe that'll be a challenge, but really, you need the end effectors, you need the autonomous cars, and you need the humanoid robots, or general purpose robots, but once you have general purpose humanoid robots, and autonomous vehicles, really, you can build anything, and I think that there's no actual limit to the size of the economy.

I mean, there's obviously the mass of Earth, that'll be one limit, but 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, 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, is that right? 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 the kind of economic value so far of AI has 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.

Yeah, I mean, the Tesla problem is different from the sort of LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence 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 we've got gigabytes of context.

Gigabytes of context, yeah. Yeah, you've got billions of tokens of context, a nutty amount of context, because you've got seven cameras, and if you've got several, let's say you've got a minute of several high def cameras, then that's gigabytes. So the Tesla problem is you've got to compress a gigantic context into the pixels that actually matter, and condense that over a time, so you've got to, in both the time dimension and 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, a few hundred gigabytes, 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, the Tesla AI chip 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 layer over Ethernet, you were like, "Ah, Ethernet's not good enough for us," and you have this TT-COE or something, and you're like, "Oh, we're just going to reinvent Ethernet and string these chips," it's pretty incredible stuff that's happening over there. Yeah. No, the Tesla chip design team is extremely good.

But is there a world where, for example, other people over time that need some sort of video use case or image use case could theoretically, you'd say, "Oh, why not, I have some extra cycles over here," which would kind of make you a competitor of NVIDIA, it's not intentionally per se, but ...

Yeah, I mean, 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 our inference chip, which is in every car, inference computer, and Dojo, we've only had Dojo 1, Dojo 2 is, we should have Dojo 2 in volume towards the end of next year, and that will be, we think, sort of comparable to a B200 type system, a training system, and so, I guess there's some potential for that to be used as a service, but Dojo is just kind of like, I guess I have some improved confidence in Dojo, but I think we won't really know how good Dojo is until probably version 3, 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 Optimist project going, I remember when we talked last, and you said this publicly, that it's in doing some light testing inside the factory, so it's actually being useful, what'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, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 you think?

Yeah, I mean, I've discovered really that anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its materials, so some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property and like paying for patents and stuff, so a lot of what's in a chip is like paying royalties and depreciation of the chip fab, but the actual marginal cost of the chips is very low, so Optimist is obviously a humanoid robot, it weighs much less and is much smaller than a car, so you could expect that in high volume, and I'd say you also probably need three production versions of Optimist, so you need to refine the design at least 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 labor and materials on Optimist is probably not much more than $10,000.

And that's a decade-long journey, maybe? Basically, think of it like Optimist will cost less than a small car, so at scale volume with the three major iterations of technology, and so if a small car costs $25,000, it's probably like $20,000 for an Optimist, for a humanoid robot that can be your buddy like a combination of R2-D2 and C3PO, but better.

I honestly think people are going to get really attached to their humanoid robot, because I mean, like you look at sort of, you watch Star Wars, and it's like R2-D2 and C3PO, I love those guys, you know, they're awesome, and their personality, and I mean, all R2 could do is just beef at you, can't speak English, and C3PO to translate the beefs.

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 the major iterations are less than two years, so it's probably on the order of five years, maybe six to get to a million units a year.

And at that price point, everybody can afford one, on planet Earth. 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 exceed. I mean, you have to say, who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. Totally. You know, this is like, especially if it can, you know, it can take care of your, take your dog for a walk, it could mow the lawn, it could watch your kids, it could, you know, like, it could teach your kids, 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. Mars is already a robot planet. There's like a whole bunch of, you know, robots, like rovers and... Only robots.

Helicopter. 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 humanoid 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. I mean, we are a generalized robot. Yeah, we're a generalized, non-robot. We're just made of meat. Yeah, exactly. We're a meatball. We're a generalized meatball. Yeah, I mean, I'm operating my meat puppet, you know.

So yeah, we are actually... And by the way, it turns out like, as we're designing Optimus, we sort of learn more and 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, 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, like... The muscles that actuate your fingers are located, the vast majority of your finger strength is actually coming from your forearm, and your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings. And so the current version of the Optimus hand has the actuators in the hand and has only 11 degrees of freedom, so it doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, roughly 25 degrees of freedom.

And it's also like, not strong enough in certain ways, because the actuators have to fit in the hand. So the next generation Optimus hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm, just like a human, and they operate the fingers through cables, just like a 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 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." It's the UI.

That's where we wrap here. I think 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 I got to tag along.

Maybe you saw it. Maybe behind the scenes, 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. Yeah, I was a bit worried at the beginning there because frankly, nothing was funny.

Day one was rough. Rough. Yeah. Well, it's like a rule, but can't you guys just say it? Just say the stuff that got on the cut. The funniest skits were the ones they 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 they didn't let you do.

You can say it, so that he doesn't get ... I mean, how much time do we have here? Well, we should just give him one or two because it was ... In your mind, which one do we regret most 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? Like live.

Live, live, live. Do they have like a delay or like just in case there's a wardrobe malfunction or something like that? Right. Is it like a- Truly live. Five second delay? What's really going on? But there's a way to test this. Right. We came up with a 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 on the ground. We're going to find out tonight, right now." If Saturday Night Live. 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 the greatest pitch ever.

If you see my cock, you know it's true. And if you don't, it's been a lie. 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 a Monday afternoon.

Because it's COVID. Yeah. We're like kind of hungover from the weekend. We're pitching this at noon. We're in Miami. Yeah. And Jason's on. Mike and you. Yeah. And Mike. My friends who I think are sort of quite funny, Jason's quite funny. I think Jason's the closest thing to Cartman that exists in real life.

Yes. We have a joke going that he's Butters and I'm Cartman. Yeah. And my friend Mike's pretty funny too. So we come in like just like guns blazing with like ideas. And we didn't realize actually that's not how it works and that's normally like actors 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 aghast at Elon's pitch. Yeah. It's silence. And I'm like, is this thing working? Is this? Are we muted? Is our mic on? And they're like, we hear you. Yeah. And then after a long silence, like Mike just says the word "crickets." And they're not laughing.

Not even a chuckle. What's going on here? And then Elon explains the punchline, which is. Exactly. So there's more to it, okay. That's just the beginning. So Elon says. So then I'm like, so, so, so, so I said like, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm going to reach down into my pants and I stuck my hand on my pants and I'm going to, and I'm, and I want to pull my cock out and I tell this to the audience and the audience is going to be like, what?

And then, and then, and then, and then I pull out a baby rooster, you know? And it's like, okay, this is kind of PG, you know, it's like, not that bad. This is my tiny cock. And, and it's like, what do you think? And so then, and do you think it's a nice cock?

I mean, I like it. And I pitch, I'm like, and then Kate McKinnon walks out. Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, oh no, but you haven't heard half of it, so Kate McKinnon comes out and she says, Elon, I expected you would have a bigger cock. Yeah. I was like, I don't mean to disappoint you, Kate, but yeah.

But I hope you like it anyway. Kate's got to come out with, with, with her cat. Okay. Right. So you can see where this is going. And I say nice. Wow. That's, that's a, 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? 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. And then, you know, we exchanged and I think just the audio version of this was pretty good.

Right. And, and, and, you know, it's just like, wow, you, I really like stroking your cock. And I was like, I'm really enjoying stroking your pussy. Yes, of course. And 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. A lot of moms in the audience, and 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. Uh, so, uh, yeah, that was, that's the, um, that's the, that's the, that's the, um, cold open that didn't make it. We didn't get that on the air, um, but, uh, we did fight for Doge. Yes. And we got Doge on the air.

Well, I mean, there's a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. Like if they have these like cue cards for what you're supposed to say, and I just didn't say it. I just went off the rails. Yeah. They didn't see that coming. Yeah, it's live.

It's live. And, uh, so the, Elon wanted to do Doge. This is the other one. Elon wanted to do Doge on late night and he says, um, hey, Jake, how can you, um, make sure? Oh yeah. I wanted to do the Doge father. Like you sort of redo the, you know, that scene from, uh, the, the, the Godfather.

I mean, you kind of need the music to cue things up. You bring me on my daughter's wedding and you ask for Doge. Yeah. You got Marlon Brando. I give you Bitcoin, but you want Doge. Exactly. You really got to set the mood. You got to have the tuxedo and the sort of job office and the, you know, and you're gonna have like Marlon Brando and I said, you come to me on this day of my Doge's wedding and you ask me for your private keys.

Are you even a friend? You call me the Doge father. So that's potential, that great potential. So they come to me and I'm, I'm talking to Colin, um, and Joe's who's got a great sense of humor and 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, the law and liability. So I said, it's okay. Elon called Comcast and he put in an offer and they just accepted it, NBC. So it's fine. Yeah. And Colin Jones looks at me and I sold it so good and he's like, you're serious. I'm like, yep, we own NBC now and he's like, okay, well that kind of changes things, doesn't it?

I'm like, absolutely. We're a go on, on Doge. And then he's like, you're fucking with me and I'm like, I'm fucking with you. Or are we? Or are we? It was the greatest week of, and that like is like two of 10 stories. We'll save the other eight. But it was, and I was just so happy for you to see you have a great week of just joy and fun and letting go.

Cause 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 gotta, we gotta get you back on SNL. Who wants him back on SNL one more time?

All right, ladies and gentlemen, our bestie, Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Thank you. Thank you. (applause)