January 1, 2026 – In a surreal and entertaining moment to close out the year, Elon Musk unexpectedly joined an X Space on 30 December titled “The Year Ahead 2026,” hosted by @AdrianDittmann—a user long famous (and occasionally suspected) for sounding eerily similar to Elon himself.
The result was a light-hearted, mind-bending conversation in which the two voices—virtually indistinguishable—greeted each other as “other me” and dove into an optimistic preview of what Musk believes 2026 could bring for Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and humanity’s future in space.
The highlight clip captures roughly five minutes of the exchange. Below is a mostly verbatim transcript (with some of Adrian’s longer, rambling comments lightly summarized for readability), manually transcribed due to the extreme voice similarity that confounded automated tools.
Transcript
Adrian: Yo Elon, what’s up man? Long time no see. Or like here rather because you know, “Spaces.”
Elon: Hello other me.
Adrian: Hi other me, that’s a good one! Yeah, so I’ve seen your year has been quite the adventure.
Elon: There’s been a lot, yeah. It’s been quite a year. I think 2026 is going to be a real banger year!
Adrian: Indeed, indeed.
(Adrian mentions the upcoming midterms and “narrative engineering,” then notes he’s very busy with work. Elon asks what the work is.)
Elon: What’s your work?
Adrian: Sorry, come again?
Elon: What work?
Adrian: Manufacturing stuff.
Elon: Okay, cool. What have you been making?
Adrian: I kind of don’t want to talk about it—it’s not entirely relevant. It’s kind of like a luxury product type thing, not that high up. It’s quite simple. I just don’t want to talk about it too much because I don’t want to bring attention to those people. I don’t want any harm to come to them, you know what I mean. So I just don’t talk about it as much.
Elon: Okay.
Adrian: Doing some automation stuff now. It’s pretty fun.
Elon on Tesla and SpaceX
Elon: Well, Tesla should have widespread robotaxi. That’ll be a big thing for Tesla in ’26. Optimus 3 will launch, and then hopefully SpaceX will achieve full reusability with Starship. Those are the pretty giant ones.
Adrian: I assume the first major shipments with Starship are just going to be like Starlink satellites, right?
Elon: Yup. And then we are going to go to the Moon!
Adrian: Oh yeah, yeah. Definitely. The space compute thing is like a really good accelerant, I think. So SpaceX becomes the major delivery company of choice then.
Elon: Yeah, haha.
(Adrian asks if Elon has thought about manufacturing on the Moon, noting that low gravity allows creating materials difficult or impossible to produce on Earth.)
Elon: Well, I think the biggest opportunity on the Moon is to actually make solar cells and radiators—so you’re manufacturing on the Moon anything that weighs a lot. Chips can maybe still come from Earth because they weigh very little. And then you can use a mass driver to put a billion tons of AI-powered satellites into orbit per year.
Adrian: Mass driver basically being like a kind of rail gun. I just like “rail guns”—it sounds cleaner. Like if you were on Dyson spheres before, pivot to this.
Elon: Well, this will create a Dyson swarm where there are essentially a bunch of intelligent satellites around the Sun.
(Adrian asks if manufacturing could be done in zero-gravity orbit instead, or if even lower gravity than Earth’s—like the Moon’s—is still needed.)
Elon: You need mass. Mass must come from somewhere. You need a lot of tonnage.
(Adrian asks if there will be a lot of tunneling (“boring”) on the Moon or if bases will mostly be surface structures, adding that underground lava caves make more sense.)
Elon: Ahhh, sure. We’ll figure it out. The most important thing is to get serious tonnage from the Moon in order to send even way more serious tonnage from the Moon. You can scale to a hundred terawatts of AI compute per year from the Moon.
(Adrian asks about magnetic shields for protection; Elon responds.)
Elon: Superconducting magnets could shield against solar wind and even high-velocity small objects. It’ll be fine—we already have 9,000 satellites in orbit, so we know what it’s like being in space. But… I randomly saw your chat. I have to head back to Tesla work meetings.
Adrian: Well, thanks for coming!
Highlights
- Tesla: Widespread unsupervised robotaxi deployment in 2026 is expected to be a major milestone.
- Optimus: Generation 3 of the humanoid robot is slated to launch and start performing useful tasks.
- SpaceX: Full rapid reusability of Starship (including booster and ship catches) targeted for 2026, with initial major payloads consisting of Starlink satellites.
- Lunar Ambitions: Manufacturing solar cells, radiators, and heavy components on the Moon, followed by using mass drivers (electromagnetic railgun-like launchers) to deploy massive quantities of AI-powered satellites at far lower cost than Earth launches.
- AI Compute at Scale: Musk foresees scaling to hundreds of terawatts of AI compute per year, enabled by lunar resource utilization and orbital deployment.
My take: This was an unplanned and certainly unannounced X Space for Elon Musk. It appears he had a moment in between meetings to simply drop into the Space and chat. I think Elon would enjoy it if we all did this more. Back in November, I dropped into a Space, and got to chat, and it was memorable. If you’ve never done it, try it! In fact, when Elon does things like this, he’s actually working in X—it’s his job to try out the product. We’re lucky he bought X for the crazy price of $44 billion! Elon made this a fittingly futuristic way to ring in 2026.
(P.S. I couldn’t use AI to transcribe this—first it insisted the whole thing was a deepfake, then it completely failed to tell the two men’s voices apart. I finally gave up and did the transcript manually. Enjoy this rare treat!)
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