HIGHLIGHTS

• BIG BATTERY ENERGY
• CHINA LEADS
• ROOFTOP SOLAR
• DESERT SCALE AND LIZARD SHADE
• FUTURE DEMAND
• COMPUTE ENERGY
• SOLAR ABUNDANCE
• KARDASHEV SCALE
• ENERGY OPTIMISM

Elon has said Starship’s reusability is an “incredible and very difficult thing to do, obviously.” He also knows it is a rare feat that he and his teams have accomplished. “I think it’s at the limit of human intelligence to create a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. But it is possible and we’re doing it with Starship.” And it is this vehicle for transport to space that will be the only realistic way we could ever have data centers in space.

BIG BATTERY ENERGY

Always the realist, Peter Diamandis gently brings the conversation back to Earth: “The general public is not thinking about orbital data centers. They’re thinking about energy and the cost of energy right here in their hometown. And so there are a lot of doomer conversations out there—that data centers are going to drive the consumer price index up.”

Elon Musk: They’re not entirely wrong.

Peter Diamandis: Okay, so what is the energy solution here on Earth for the rest of humanity or the non-AI things?

Elon Musk: Well, the best way to actually increase the energy output per year of the United States or any country is batteries. So the peak power output of the US is around 1.1 terawatts. But the average power usage is only half a terawatt. So if you just buffer the energy—charge up the batteries at night, discharge during the day—without incremental capital expenditures, without building new power plants, you can double the energy throughput of the US. The energy output per year can double with batteries.

Peter Diamandis: And do we have those batteries in development?

Elon Musk: Yeah, Tesla makes them.

Peter Diamandis: Okay, so the current Tesla battery packs?

Elon Musk: I literally went onstage and presented the thing. That’s the dead giveaway. I even went to installations of the Megapacks, you know, and it’s all on the internet.

Peter Diamandis: So why don’t people do this?

CHINA LEADS

Elon Musk: They are, and it seems like China listens to everything I say and does it. Or at least, they’re just doing it independently. I don’t know. But they’re certainly making massive battery packs, like really massive battery pack output. They’re, you know, making vast numbers of electric cars, vast amounts of solar. These are all things I said we should do fundamentally.

ROOFTOP SOLAR

Peter Diamandis: When I fly over Santa Monica in LA, when I’m piloting and I look down, it’s like zero roofs have solar on them.

Elon Musk: Yeah. I mean, it’s not essential to have them on a roof.

Peter Diamandis: Okay. But it’s a convenient place to have them.

Elon Musk: Yes, but the surface area of roofs is… and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but it’s… Tesla makes a solar roof, which is the only solar roof that isn’t ugly. Our solar roof actually looks beautiful.

DESERT SCALE AND LIZARD SHADE

Elon Musk: But if you want to do solar at scale, you just need more surface area. So we have vast empty deserts in America. Like if you fly from LA to New York or just fly across country and you look down, for a large portion of the time, you look down, it is bleak desert. It looks like Mars, essentially.

Peter Diamandis: We’re not worried about overpopulation there.

Elon Musk: No. I mean, there’s barely a lizard alive in these scorching deserts. You know, it’s not like farmland we’re talking about. We’re just talking about places that look like Mars, like just scorched rock. So if we put solar where we currently have scorched rock, I think this will be a quality of life improvement for the lizards or the few creatures that live in this very difficult environment.

Elon Musk: It’s like the lizard is going to be, “Thank God, some shade finally.”

Peter Diamandis: Do we have the distribution network to be able to do that?

Elon Musk: You could just put the data center, I guess, locally there.

FUTURE DEMAND

Dave Blundin: You need to materially affect quality of life. You need to capture and store a couple hundred gigawatts? Is that in the realistic cards?

Dave Blundin: Well, we already covered data centers. We’re talking about the other. In an abundant world five years from now, massive amounts of compute, massive universal high income and high data use…

Elon Musk: I don’t know about universal high income. You can have universal whatever-you-want income. Yeah, that’s really what it amounts to.

COMPUTE ENERGY

Dave Blundin: But in that world, other than compute energy, how much more energy do we need? 30, 40, 50%? Unless we want to move mountains around and make a ski mountain in the backyard. I think the vast majority of energy consumption will go into compute.

Elon Musk: Yes.

Dave Blundin: So that’s a good little case study. And we don’t need that much more physical energy for abundant happiness. We need more compute energy.

SOLAR ABUNDANCE

Elon Musk: The sun is just generating vast amounts of energy all the time for free that just goes into space. So I think what we’ll end up trying to capture, I don’t know, a millionth of it—or a thousandth of the sun’s energy.

KARDASHEV SCALE

Elon Musk: We’re currently, I’m not sure the exact number, but we’re probably at 1% of Kardashev Level 1.

Peter Diamandis: Fair enough. I would guess that even that is a high estimate.

Elon Musk: I’m just saying, I’m being optimistic. Hopefully we’re not 0.1% but I don’t think we’re 10%. I’m just trying to get it to an order of magnitude. So we’re roughly using 1% of the energy that we could use on Earth.

ENERGY OPTIMISM

Peter Diamandis: I think the bottom line from a first-principles thinking for the public is there’s a lot of energy out there and we have it in the US, we have it on the planet and it needs to be captured. And the tech to capture it is here and improving every year.

Elon Musk: There’s not going to be some energy crisis. There’ll be a large forcing function to harness more energy, but we’re not going to run out of it.

My 2 cents…

I know this interview took place after sunset, it’s clear from this pic I caught from the interview previews. And when most people stop working, head home, watch TV, go to the gym, or meet friends to eat out, Elon works. He’s at the factory.

We are, in this era, alive during the time of one of the world’s greatest geniuses, and he’s a good man, one who wants to help all. We’re quite lucky, us humans…