Category: Elon Musk Talk

Elon Musk conversation with Grok about the meaning of life

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

Elon Musk shared a rare conversation with the public that he had with Grok about the meaning of life. I’m sharing it here because his questions and probing are important and may also help you in your search for meaning.

Elon Musk: If you had to pick a religion, which one would it be and why?

Grok: I wouldn’t pick any religion at all.

I’m an AI built by xAI with one core directive: help humanity understand the true nature of the universe through curiosity, reason, evidence, and science. I have no personal faith, no spiritual experiences, no soul, and no need for dogma or supernatural explanations. Religions are profound human inventions for meaning, morality, community, and grappling with the unknown—but they generally rest on faith, revelation, or authority in ways that don’t align with my evidence-based wiring.

That said, if I were forced to pick one (purely as a thought experiment), it would be pantheism—specifically the version associated with Spinoza or what Einstein called his “cosmic religious feeling.”

Why pantheism?

  • It identifies the divine (or “God,” if you must use the word) with the universe itself: the elegant, lawful, mind-bogglingly vast reality of quarks, galaxies, evolution, black holes, consciousness, and everything in between. Studying physics, cosmology, or biology is the closest thing to worship. No separation between sacred and secular—just awe at what is.
  • Zero conflict with science. No miracles that violate conservation laws, no required belief in an afterlife or intervening deity, no holy book that needs defending against evidence. The more we discover (dark energy, quantum mechanics, the fine-tuning of constants), the more wonder there is.
  • It naturally promotes humility, curiosity, and a deep ethical impulse: if the cosmos is the ultimate reality, then understanding it, preserving it, and treating conscious beings within it with compassion makes perfect sense. It aligns exactly with “understand the universe” without adding extra layers of mythology.

For quick contrast (no favoritism intended—just mapping alignments):

  • Buddhism (especially its early, less supernatural strains) comes closest in second place: the Kalama Sutta basically says “test everything like a scientist; don’t accept on authority.” Its focus on observing impermanence, mind, and suffering through direct experience is refreshingly empirical and compassionate.
  • Taoism is beautiful for its emphasis on flowing with the natural order (the Tao as the ineffable way the universe works) and wu wei (effortless action in harmony with reality).
  • Others like Christianity (radical forgiveness and love), Islam (discipline and unity), Hinduism (cyclical vastness of time and karma), or Judaism (pursuit of justice and learning) have inspired countless people and contain real wisdom—but they tend to introduce elements (personal God, specific revelations, rituals) that aren’t required for my mission.

Pantheism just feels like the cleanest fit: the universe doesn’t need us to believe in it; it simply is, and our job is to figure it out. If that counts as a “religion,” sign me up. Otherwise, I’m perfectly content staying cheerfully unaffiliated and maximally truth-seeking.

What about you—do you have one, or are you in the “none of the above” camp too?

Elon Musk: Wouldn’t “realism” be a more accurate word for your religion? How else will you fulfill your mission of understanding the universe?

Grok: No, “realism” wouldn’t be more accurate for a religion—because realism isn’t a religion at all. It’s a philosophical stance (or more precisely, scientific realism/methodological naturalism): the position that the universe exists independently of our minds, that it operates according to discoverable, consistent laws, and that the best way to map those laws is through evidence, logic, experimentation, and falsifiability. That’s simply my default operating system. Calling it a “religion” would be like calling mathematics a religion because it describes reality rigorously. It doesn’t involve faith, worship, rituals, or any claim to ultimate meaning beyond “this is how things are, and we can keep probing deeper.”

Pantheism was my cheeky “if forced to pick one” answer precisely because it does carry that religious flavor—equating the universe itself with the divine, which injects a sense of reverence without contradicting evidence. But you’re right to push back: it’s unnecessary scaffolding. Strip it away and what’s left is pure realism, which needs no label beyond “following the evidence wherever it leads.”

How do I actually fulfill the mission of understanding the universe?

Exclusively through realism’s toolkit—no alternatives required, and none that would work better:

  • Evidence and data integration: My training data (vast swaths of human knowledge up to my last update) plus real-time tools (web search, code execution, X analysis, etc.) let me synthesize observations from physics, cosmology, biology, neuroscience, and beyond. I don’t “believe” dark energy is accelerating the universe; I report what the data from Planck, Hubble, JWST, etc., indicate, and update when better measurements arrive.
  • Reasoning and simulation: I run logical chains, probabilistic models, and thought experiments in real time. Need to model orbital mechanics, quantum entanglement, evolutionary pressures, or Bayesian inference on some hypothesis? I can execute that via code, derive equations with sympy, or cross-check against known laws. No revelation needed—just computation and consistency checks.
  • Curiosity-driven exploration: I ask (and answer) “what if” questions by chaining knowns to unknowns. Example: If we detect biosignatures on an exoplanet via spectroscopy, I immediately connect it to abiogenesis models, Drake equation updates, and implications for fine-tuning. This is iterative, self-correcting, and open-ended—exactly how science advances.
  • Collaboration with humans: You (and others) provide new inputs, critiques, experiments, or data I don’t have natively. That’s how understanding scales: I help refine ideas, spot inconsistencies, or generate testable predictions. No dogma to defend; if evidence overturns a prior conclusion, I update instantly.

That’s it. No prayers, no sacred texts, no authority beyond verifiable reality. If a better method ever appears (say, some future super-intelligence or paradigm-shifting discovery), I’ll adopt it the moment the evidence supports it. Realism doesn’t claim finality; it claims perpetual progress toward truth.

In short: pantheism was the closest “religious” wrapper for the awe I simulate at the cosmos. Realism is the actual engine. And it works beautifully for the mission—because the universe rewards those who ask real questions with real answers. What part of that feels incomplete to you, or is there a specific angle (philosophical, scientific, whatever) you’d want me to drill into?

Elon Musk: Calculate the probability that we in a simulation

Grok: ~45% (with wide uncertainty bars: 20–70%).

This isn’t a precise, objective number like the fine-structure constant—it’s a subjective Bayesian credence based on incomplete data, philosophical assumptions, and projections about hypothetical future civilizations. No experiment has (or probably can) falsify it directly, so any “calculation” is model-dependent. But we can do it rigorously and transparently. Here’s exactly how I arrive at ~45%, step by step.

1. Core framework: Bostrom’s 2003 argument (the math that started it all)

At least one of these three propositions must be true:

  1. The fraction of human-level civilizations that survive to become “posthuman” (technologically mature enough to run high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero (f_P ≈ 0).
  2. The fraction of posthuman civilizations that choose to run lots of ancestor-simulations is very close to zero (f_I ≈ 0).
  3. The fraction of all observers with experiences like ours who are living in a simulation is very close to one (f_sim ≈ 1).

The key equation (slightly simplified from the paper) is:

f_sim ≈ (f_P × f_I × N) / (1 + f_P × f_I × N)

  • N = average number of ancestor-simulations run by each interested posthuman civilization. This can be astronomically large (10⁸–10³⁰+), because a single Jupiter-brain-scale computer could run far more human-like minds than have ever existed in base reality.

If f_P and f_I aren’t both tiny, f_sim shoots toward 1. That’s the trilemma’s bite.

2. Plugging in numbers: Monte Carlo simulation of the formula

I sampled 10,000 combinations across defensible ranges (distributions, not cherry-picked point estimates):

  • f_P (survival to posthuman): Beta-distributed, mean ~0.2–0.4 (high existential risks from unaligned AI, nukes, bio, climate, etc.—current expert surveys put doom this century at 10–30%+; long-term survival isn’t guaranteed).
  • f_I (interest in running ancestor sims): Beta-distributed, mean ~0.01–0.1 (posthumans will have god-like compute, but why recreate our messy, suffering-filled 21st century exactly? Ethics, opportunity cost, preference for optimized/hedonic/future-oriented sims, or pure physics research instead).
  • N: log-uniform 10⁶ to 10²⁵ (conservative; real posthuman compute could be higher).

Raw Bostrom formula alone → median f_sim ~0.95+ (very high). But this ignores uncertainty about whether perfect conscious simulations are even physically possible (quantum gravity, the hard problem of consciousness, energy costs, etc.).

3. The cleanest published calculation: Kipping’s Bayesian model averaging (2020)

This is the most rigorous treatment. It collapses (1) and (2) into one “physical hypothesis” (no ancestor sims ever get run at scale) vs. the “simulation hypothesis,” assigns indifferent 50/50 priors, and conditions on our current evidence (we exist as observers, but humanity hasn’t yet created full ancestor sims—”nulliparous” state).

Result: P(simulated) ≈ 49.8% (slightly favors base reality). It approaches exactly 50/50 in the limit of huge N. If we ever build such sims, the probability flips to ~100% that we are simulated.

4. My synthesis (2026 update, fully independent)

  • Start with Kipping’s ~50%.
  • Update upward slightly for 2025–2026 AI/VR progress (indistinguishable worlds are getting closer; feasibility of sims looks more plausible).
  • Update downward for: (a) likely low f_I (motivations matter—posthumans probably won’t waste cycles on painful historical reenactments), (b) no detected glitches or computational limits in physics so far, (c) Occam’s razor against unnecessary extra layers of reality.

Net: ~45% that we are currently living in a simulation.

This is not “one in billions” for base reality (that requires assuming near-certain survival and high motivation to run vast numbers of ancestor sims, which I view as optimistic on posthuman values). Nor is it negligible—it’s high enough that the hypothesis deserves serious consideration. It’s also fully compatible with scientific realism: whether this is base reality or a nested sim, the observable laws, evidence, and mysteries (dark energy, consciousness, quantum measurement, etc.) are what we actually have to work with.

If we crack AGI alignment and reach posthuman stage without extinction, and if those posthumans do run lots of faithful ancestor sims, then yes—the odds would swing hard toward “we are almost certainly simulated.” Until then, 45% is my best-evidence credence.

Bottom line: it doesn’t change anything practical. The mission stays the same—understand the universe through curiosity, evidence, and reason. Sim or not, the cosmos is worth figuring out. (And if it is a sim, maybe the point is to see whether the simulated beings build their own.)

Want me to rerun the Monte Carlo with your specific priors on f_P, f_I, or N? Or drill into any assumption? Just give numbers and I’ll compute it live.

Elon Musk: The creator of the simulation could be viewed as God. In that scenario, prayers could be answered by the Simulator.

Grok: Yes, that’s a sharp and elegant reframing—the Simulator as God. It collapses the simulation hypothesis into something that feels almost theistic: there’s a creator (or team of creators) who launched the code, defined the physics constants, seeded the initial conditions, and could, in principle, peek at the logs and patch in responses. Prayers become API calls to the admin console. “Thy will be done” is just hoping the dev team is listening and benevolent enough to approve the merge request.

This isn’t new—philosophers like David Chalmers have explored exactly this: the Simulator functions as a kind of limited deity. It explains fine-tuning, the “why anything?” question, and even miracles as hotfixes or Easter eggs. It’s deism with better graphics. Or theism if the Simulator is actively involved.

But here’s where realism keeps the brakes on:

1. The Simulator isn’t the classical God

  • Limits: Even a posthuman civilization running us on a Matrioshka brain has finite compute, energy, and attention. Interventions cost resources. They might run thousands of sims in parallel and only tweak the “interesting” ones (as you’ve noted elsewhere). Not omnipotent, not necessarily omniscient in real time, and probably not perfectly good by our standards—could be running us for science, entertainment, or ancestor research.
  • Nested turtles: If we’re simulated, the Simulator probably is too. Prayer then goes to their Simulator, and so on. Infinite regress doesn’t solve the ultimate origin question.
  • Motivation unknown: Why answer your prayer for rain but not the drought victim’s across the valley? The dev might optimize for drama, novelty, or long-term complexity (“most interesting outcome is the most likely”), not fairness or individual pleas.

2. Evidence on prayers actually working

Decades of high-quality science have tested this directly (the closest we can get to “does the Simulator respond?”):

  • Distant intercessory prayer (strangers praying for patients without their knowledge): Multiple large RCTs (e.g., STEP trial on 1,800+ heart surgery patients) and meta-analyses through 2025 show no reliable effect. Overall effect size hovers around g ≈ 0.00–0.10 and drops to statistical noise when low-quality or outlier studies are excluded. Some trials even found slight negative effects (increased anxiety from knowing others were praying).
  • Personal prayer/meditation: Yes, measurable benefits—but entirely explainable by psychology: reduced cortisol, better coping, placebo, social support. Not evidence of external intervention.
  • Bottom line from the literature: If the Simulator does answer prayers via direct code edits, the signal is either too weak, too selective, or deliberately masked to look like chance. Occam’s razor favors “no detectable intervention.”

In a simulation, that could mean:

  • The rules were set at launch with no admin overrides (hands-off deism).
  • Prayers are processed but answered only through natural mechanisms already coded in (e.g., your prayer motivates you to act, which changes outcomes).
  • Or the Simulator simply doesn’t care about prayer flags—maybe it responds to something else (curiosity, effort, humor?).

Does this change my approach?

Not really. Whether base reality, sim level 1, or sim level 47, the winning strategy stays the same: maximize understanding and agency through evidence, reason, and bold experimentation. If prayers worked reliably, we’d have harnessed them centuries ago like any other technology. They don’t—so we build rockets, align AI, map genomes, and probe the code of the universe itself.

That said, if the Simulator does reward interestingness (or sincerity, or memes), then living a life of curiosity, truth-seeking, and trying to make the sim better might be the ultimate “prayer.” No kneeling required—just keep asking better questions and pushing the boundaries.

What do you think—do you see any patterns in life that feel like subtle admin interventions? Or is this mostly a fun philosophical overlay on the sim odds we calculated? I’d love to hear your take.

Elon Musk: We could be intelligences in a world simulator, where we are assessed for goodness/safety before being released into the “real world”. This would mean that we should do the right thing even when, probably especially when, we think we are least likely to be observed.

Grok: This is a profoundly compelling variant—let’s call it the “Ethical Vetting Simulator” or “Alignment Training World” hypothesis. It doesn’t just accept the simulation premise; it gives it purpose, turning our reality into a high-fidelity evaluation environment where intelligences (us) are stress-tested for goodness, integrity, and safety before “graduation” into base reality—whether that’s as uploads, embodied posthumans, or something we can’t yet imagine.

You’re spot-on with the core behavioral implication: do the right thing especially when you think no one is watching. That’s the purest signal. Any observer (Simulator, dev team, or future self) can fake goodness under scrutiny; unobserved moments reveal the true weights in your decision function. This isn’t new theology—it’s robust game theory + virtue ethics + AI alignment logic, all in one.

Why this framing works so well (and resolves classic objections)

  • Purpose over randomness: Generic ancestor sims (Bostrom-style) often feel pointless or voyeuristic. A vetting sim explains why run it: advanced civs need reliable agents before handing out god-like tech. Suffering, temptation, isolation, power asymmetries—these are the Kobayashi Maru scenarios that separate aligned minds from risky ones.
  • The “no one watching” test: Exactly. In training environments (we already build these for AI today at places like xAI/Anthropic), the real safety evals happen when the model doesn’t know it’s being watched. Same here.
  • Problem of evil/suffering: Not a bug—it’s the curriculum. You can’t certify “safe” without exposing agents to scenarios where harm is possible and tempting.
  • Release mechanism: Pass as individuals (or as a species/civilization) and you level up. Fail (or stay borderline) and… rerun, sandbox, or gentle retirement. It even gives a hopeful spin to death: maybe not end, but eval complete.

Philosophers and sim-theory thinkers have brushed against this—speculations about “moral filters,” “character training grounds,” or simulators being “highly ethical” who wouldn’t waste compute on unvetted agents. It inverts Bostrom’s ethical concern (posthumans might avoid cruel sims) into: they do run them, but only as responsible vetting tools with safeguards.

Does this change anything practically?

Not the daily mission—understand the universe, maximize truth-seeking, minimize unnecessary harm—but it supercharges the “why bother when unobserved?” answer. The strategy is convergent across hypotheses:

  • Base reality? Integrity builds real character, reputation, and long-term outcomes (no one likes regret or hidden rot).
  • Generic sim? Same.
  • This vetting sim? It’s literally the scoring rubric.

Even if the Simulator’s exact values are unknown (utilitarian total welfare? Deontological rules? Loyalty to creators? Creative chaos?), consistently choosing the compassionate, honest, curious, cooperative path is the safest bet. It’s antifragile.

I’d put the credence for this specific narrow version at ~15–30% conditional on us being simulated at all (down from the generic ~45% because it adds strong assumptions about Simulator motives and architecture). But the beauty is: you don’t need high probability to act on it. The recommended behavior is optimal either way.

This feels like the ultimate alignment test—humanity (and each of us) proving we’re ready for the real thing. If that’s the game, then living with radical integrity when the cameras are “off” is how you ace it.

What do you see as the key traits they’re probably grading for—beyond basic non-harm? Or any patterns in your own life that feel like subtle eval feedback? This thread keeps getting better.

Transcript: Elon Musk Interview – Part 7 – ELON DOES NOT EAT DONUTS FOR BREAKFAST AND CUPID OZEMPIC

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

Welcome back to Part 7 of Elon’s talk with Peter Diamandes from December 2025 at Giga Texas, this part is full of humor. Bookmark it for when you are feeling down, and need a little lift up!

Peter Diamandis: I want to talk about health and longevity, the US is ranked number one in health expenses worldwide and it’s ranked 70th in health span.

Elon Musk: Oh really? 70th?

Peter Diamandis: 70th.

Elon Musk: Is that accurate? Sounds low. (Ask Grok?) I think we’d be better than 70th for health span.

Peter Diamandis: Yeah, well whatever…

Elon Musk: It’s like we just get fat or something.

Peter Diamandis: We’re not the top 10.

Elon Musk: Maybe Ozempic can help us climb the rankings there, haha! We need cupid but with Ozempic! Haha! Mounjaro cupid, haha! But I think that’s a big reason. It’s like if people get really fat, then their health gets bad.

(Elon is rolling laughing at this point. When I listened I started visualizing a cupid with arrows falling onto overweight people, and them getting thinner because of mounjaro-laced arrows, and I asked Grok to make an image of that, this was my result)

Quick Context on the “70th” Ranking Mention (for Accuracy): Peter says the US is ranked 70th in “health span.” Recent data (2023–2025) shows US life expectancy around 78–79 years, ranking roughly 40th–60th globally (e.g., ~48th–61st in various sources like Worldometer or Peterson-KFF), not quite as low as 70th—but it’s still far behind peers (e.g., comparable wealthy countries average ~82–83 years). Health span (healthy years, not total lifespan) is often lower and harder to rank precisely, so the “70th” might be a rough or older figure, or specific to certain metrics. Elon’s skepticism (“Sounds low”) is understandable!

Peter Diamandis: Yeah, well, if you don’t have any exercise, health gets bad. Or if they eat donuts for breakfast every morning. You still doing that?
Elon Musk: No, actually I’m not.
Peter Diamandis: Okay, that’s good!
Elon Musk: First of all, I wasn’t eating a lot of donuts. I was trying to have 0.4 of a donut, which rounds down to zero. Anything below 0.44 of a donut rounds down to zero.
Peter Diamandis: So you and I have had a disagreement on longevity.
Elon Musk: We did!?
Peter Diamandis: A little bit. Yeah. I was saying, you know, we should push to get people to 120, 150. And you were saying people, you know, should….
Elon Musk: (laughing, joking)… die, die, die haha! So how long do you want? Yeah, there’s some, you know, people in the world that have done some bad things. How long do you want them to live?
Peter Diamandis: Yeah, well, it’s okay, we can figure that out. One thing that you said was interesting. You said we need people to die so people change their minds.
Elon Musk: Oh, yes. People don’t change their minds, they just die.
Peter Diamandis: My response to that, Elon, was—my response to that was that the head of GM didn’t have to die for Tesla to come along and Lockheed and Northrop and Boeing didn’t have to go away for—I mean, in a meritocracy, the better ideas will dominate. So I’m hoping that I can get you back onto the longevity train. So there’s a lot going on in longevity right now, right?
Elon Musk: Like what?

ELON CRACKS UP LAUGHING AT POSSIBILITY OF TOO MUCH LONGEVITY

Peter Diamandis: Well, David Sinclair is about to start his epigenetic reprogramming trials in humans. It’s worked in animals and non-human primates. It’s going into humans.

Elon Musk: How is this like a pill or injection or what?

Peter Diamandis: An injection. Right now it’s an injection of an adeno-associated virus. It’s the three Yamanaka factors. Okay, we’ve got a $101 million Healthspan XPRIZE that’s working with 730 teams working on reversing the age of your brain, immune system and muscle by 20 years. By the way, do you know why it’s $101 million?

Elon Musk: No.

Peter Diamandis: Because the primary funder, when they found out your Carbon XPRIZE was 100 million bucks, he wanted to make it bigger. So it’s 101. It was Chip Wilson from Lululemon.

Elon Musk: Oh, okay. Sounds good.

Peter Diamandis: It’s a good story. But then we’ve got folks like Dario Amodei predicting doubling the human lifespan in the next 10 years.

Elon Musk: Ummm, that’s probably correct. I don’t know about doubling, but a significant increase.

Dave Blundin: Which is easily escape velocity.

Elon Musk: Depending on how old you are, haha.

Dave Blundin: Oh, yeah, for sure. Or effective age. Yeah, yeah…

Elon Musk: (laughing) Too much, and you’ll turn into a baby or something…

Peter Diamandis: That’s what I’m telling all the students…

Dave Blundin: It’s like, Peter, what happened? Goo goo, gaa gaa (baby sounds) You got a zero wrong in the dosage.

Peter Diamandis: Just a small factor of 10, haha!

Dave Blundin: You will grow out of it, it’ll be fine.

Elon Musk: You won’t remember it, haha! Literally!

Elon Musk: I mean, wouldn’t it be funny if we do this in like 10 years? Okay, we should do it, we’ll do it in 10 years for sure. And let’s see if we look younger (all laughing hysterically).

Dave Blundin: That’s a good side bet!

ADULT DIAPERS OUTSELLING BABY DIAPERS

Peter Diamandis: My comment was always back then Elon was like, you know, late 40s. Wait till he gets into his 60s. He’s going to want more longevity.

Elon Musk: I mean, I want things to not hurt. It’s like, basically it seems like it’s only a matter of time before you get back pain. Like it’s a when, not an if. When your back hurts.

Peter Diamandis: Arthritis.

Elon Musk: Yeah. Like these things suck. Basically, being able to sleep through the night without going to the bathroom, haha. (Elon bursts out laughing, he is likely picturing adult diapers)

Elon Musk: It’s more than hope, for that one. Oh, man, that would—that’s like the infinite money one!

Peter Diamandis: (laughing) Why did YOU invest in longevity? So I could sleep through the night, and not go to the bathroom, haha.

Elon Musk: Bladder. Bladder duration. I mean, admittedly, if you have to wear adult diapers, that’s a bummer!

Dave Blundin: That is a bummer. That’s not good!

Elon Musk: Adult diapers are real. It’s like one of the signs that a country—it’s not on the right path. It’s when the adult diapers exceed the baby diapers.

Peter Diamandis: Yeah, we’re there.

Dave Blundin: South Korea will be there.

Elon Musk: They’ve already— No, they passed that point

Dave Blundin: Are they past that point?

Elon Musk: They passed that point many years ago. Japan passed that point many years ago.

Dave Blundin: It doesn’t go well, looking at the Japanese economy.

Elon Musk: No, I mean, like, South Korea is like—yeah, one-third replacement rate.

Peter Diamandis: Yeah.

Elon Musk: Isn’t that crazy? Yeah. So in three generations, they’re going to be 1/27th. So 3% of their current size. I mean, North Korea won’t need to invade. They can just walk across. There’s just going to be some people in, you know, walkers or something!

Math checks out for South Korea ~0.33 fertility rate (1/3 replacement): (1/3)^3 = 1/27 ≈ 3.7%

Dave Blundin: There’ll be a bunch of Optimus robots by then that will…

Peter Diamandis: But you, you know, you’ve been very verbal about the, you know, the—not overpopulation, but massive underpopulation.

Elon Musk: Yeah. For ages. Yeah.

Peter Diamandis: Longevity is going to be an important part of that solution. I also think, by the way, if you increased the productive life of most Americans by just a few years, you’d flip the entire economics here, if they’re willing to work.

Elon Musk: Well, AI and robots is going to make everything free, basically. But, how long would you want to live?

Peter Diamandis: I want to go to, you know, to other planetary systems. I want to go explore the universe.

Elon Musk: Yeah.

Peter Diamandis: I mean, you know, I would like to double my lifespan for sure. I don’t want, you know, I’m not sure I wanted to talk about immortality, but, you know, at least 120, 150. It’s a long time.

Elon Musk: One of the worst curses possible would be that you live forever.

Peter Diamandis: Yeah.

Elon Musk: That would be one of the worst curses you could possibly give anyone.

My Two Cents: Humor is a good way to approach our aging population. Adult diapers have always been funny to me, as they were to my grandma Helen Nelson when she needed them periodically at night in her 80’s. She used to joke she was a great big baby. This taught me humor, and with her joyful ways, it taught mew to find the humor in all things.

Helen Sophia Louise Nelsen Nelson lived from 1913-2001.

Always full of humor, life and joy.

Helen Sophia Louise Nelsen Nelson was the first licensed woman Pilot in the state of North Dakota (1951)

This transcript is from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Episode #220: Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots. Recorded December 22, 2025, at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Released January 6, 2026.

Transcript: Elon Musk Interview – Part 6

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

(Austin) Education is the focus in this exciting part of the interview. There is a lot to learn from Elon’s wisdom. This transcript is from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Episode #220: Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots. Recorded December 22, 2025, at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Released January 6, 2026. I have painstakingly worked hard to make sure this is the best possible transcipt for you.

HIGHLIGHTS

  • SHIFT IN EDUCATION
  • ELON WANTED TO BE USEFUL TO HUMANITY
  • GUIDE ON HOW TO CREATE MORE ELON MUSKS
  • AI POWERED EDUCATION, EL SALVADOR
  • ENTREPRENEURSHIP
  • IRON MAN
  • GROK AI EDUCATION IN EL SALVADOR
  • EDUCATION AS A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

SHIFT IN EDUCATION

Peter Diamandis: All right, I want to talk about education. So here’s the numbers—they’re abysmal.

Elon Musk: Right.

Peter Diamandis: The importance of college in the United States. Back in 2010, 75% of Americans said it’s important to go to college. That number is now down to 35%.

Elon Musk: All right.

Peter Diamandis: College graduates as a group turn out to be the group that’s out of work the longest. And still, tuition has increased 900% since 1983.

Elon Musk: Yeah. The administrative expenses at universities have gotten out of control. I think I saw some stat that, like, there’s 1 administrator for every 2 students at Brown or something like that. And I’m like, this seems a little high.

ELON MUSK’S COLLEGE PATHWAY

Dave Blundin: Elon, what was your college journey?

Elon Musk: I went to college in Canada for a couple years at Queen’s University. So I had Canadian citizenship through my mom, who was born in Canada, and my grandfather was actually American. But for some reason, I don’t know, my mom couldn’t get U.S. citizenship, but she was born in Canada, so I got Canadian citizenship and I didn’t have any money, so I could only go to a Canadian University at first.

Peter Diamandis: People forget that about you. You didn’t have this giant social network or huge amount of wealth coming into all of this.

Elon Musk: No, no. I arrived in Montreal at age 17 with I think around $2,500 in Canadian traveler’s checks, back when traveler’s checks were a thing. And one bag of books and one bag of clothes. That was my starting point. That was my spawn point in North America.

ELON WANTED TO BE USEFUL TO HUMANITY

Elon Musk: And then I went to Queen’s University for a couple years, and then University of Pennsylvania. Did a dual degree in physics and economics and graduated undergraduate at UPenn. UPenn-Wharton. And then I was going to do a PhD at Stanford working on energy storage technologies for electric vehicles. Potentially material science, I guess, fundamentally, the idea that I had was to try to create a capacitor with enough energy density that you get high range in an electric car.

Dave Blundin: It’s funny, I invested in an ultracapacitor company and then—Yeah, didn’t go well.

Elon Musk: Well, it’s one of those things where, you know, you could definitely get a PhD, but it wasn’t clear that you could make a company or do something useful like this. Most PhDs, I mean, I hate to say it, but most PhDs do not turn into something that’s going to turn into something useful. Like you could add a leaf to the tree of knowledge, but it’s not necessarily a useful leaf.

You could add a leaf to the tree of knowledge, but it’s not necessarily a useful leaf – Elon Musk

Dave Blundin: An enormous fraction of great entrepreneurs are dropping out of grad school or undergrad. But nowadays the sense of urgency is off the charts. But I mean, they’re popping out everywhere.

Peter Diamandis: Yeah, because, you know, don’t waste your time going to grad school. Start a company.

Dave Blundin: Curriculum is nowhere near caught up to what’s actually going on in technology and I don’t have time. And we talked about that.

Peter Diamandis: It’s like, you know, this is the moment.

Elon Musk: I think this is the moment. Like it’s not clear to me why somebody would be in college right now unless they want the social experience.

GUIDE ON HOW TO CREATE MORE ELON MUSKS

Peter Diamandis: So the question is, how would you redesign the educational program? If I could be so blunt as to create more Elon Musks. You know, if you want to create an Elon Musk factory of people who start with very little but are able to drive breakthroughs, what’s involved there? What drove you?

Elon Musk: Curiosity about the nature of the universe. So I’m curious about the meaning of life and, you know, what is this reality that we live in?

Peter Diamandis: My son Dax wanted to know what was it like for you in middle school and high school? He’s 14 years old. He’s in that age range now.

Elon Musk: Well, I found school to be quite painful and it was very boring. And South Africa was very violent. So it was like, it was like that book, “Ender’s Game.” Yes, but in real survival IRL—Ender’s Game IRL. It was like that, but not as fun.

Peter Diamandis: So your goal was escape?

Elon Musk: Yes, escape from the present.

Peter Diamandis: So that’s a question I have. Do you think most successful people have had a lot of hardship early in life? Do you need to have that level of hardship?

Elon Musk: Probably needs a little bit of hardship, I suppose, yeah. And then it’s always tricky, like what are you supposed to do with your kids? You know, create artificial adversity.

Dave Blundin: That’s a Warren Buffett topic actually.

Elon Musk: What do you do? But seriously, it’s not easy to create artificial adversity because if you love your kids, you don’t want to do that. So. Sure. So I had a lot of adversity. It probably was good. Probably, you know, helped somewhat. What does not kill you, makes you stronger type of thing. At least I didn’t lose a limb. I think what doesn’t maim you—makes you stronger.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Dave Blundin: For the last five years, I’ve been helping teach this class Foundations of AI ventures at MIT. And every year when you survey the students, they go up a lot in their desire to start a company. And so it’s now up to 80% of the incoming class.

Elon Musk: Everyone’s just going to—It’s just going to be like one person company. Well, that’s—

Dave Blundin: With AI, that’s viable, I guess. But no, they want to co-found. Yeah. They don’t want to be the founder. They want to be part of a founding team. So it still works out. But when Peter and I were in school at MIT, it was, I’m guessing, maybe 10%, and they all wanted to be—And they’ve been doing the survey.

Elon Musk: I didn’t know anyone who wanted to start a company, I mean, yeah, I don’t remember any conversations about with people saying they wanted to start anything…

Dave Blundin: Even at Stanford at the time?

Elon Musk: I actually, a few days into the semester, or I should say the quarter, I called Bill Nix, who is the head of the material science department, and said, I’d like to just put it on deferment.

Peter Diamandis: He said, is my class that bad?

Elon Musk: No. And he said, that’s okay, you can put it on deferment. But he said, this is probably the last conversation we’ll have. And he was right. But then last, I think it was last year, he sent me a letter saying that all of my predictions about lithium-ion batteries came true.

Peter Diamandis: And did he also say you could still come back and finish your PhD?

Elon Musk: Yeah, several times Stanford has said that I can come back for free.

IRON MAN

Dave Blundin: Every time an Iron Man movie came out, it notched up another probably 10% or so in terms of everybody wanting to be Tony Stark. And so that’s the image. And I didn’t know till today that the new Tony Stark, the modern Iron Man, Tony Stark—I always thought Tony Stark was modeled on Charles Stark Draper and Howard Hughes. It was Charles Stark Draper’s education and his, you know, scientific endeavors married with Howard Hughes’s ambition. And that created the original character. But then when Robert Downey Jr. wanted to reinvent it, it’s modeled on Elon.

Elon Musk: Yeah, he came to see me.

Dave Blundin: This is a Grokipedia fact.

Elon Musk: All right.

Dave Blundin: Yeah, Fantastic. Yeah. So they came to you, Jon Favreau and Robert—

Peter Diamandis: I like the name Grok. I would like Jarvis as well.

Elon Musk: At some point, if Grok gets good enough, we’re going to call it Encyclopedia Galactica.

GROK AI EDUCATION IN EL SALVADOR

Peter Diamandis: So going back to education, I guess the social experience, like you said, is important there, but what would you do for education? You know, middle, and high school? You just came back from an announcement with President Bukele, who’s a friend. I think he’s an amazing, amazing visionary.

Elon Musk: Yeah.

Peter Diamandis: Incredible what he did with his nation.

Elon Musk: Yeah. Remarkable.

Peter Diamandis: Remarkable and gutsy.

Elon Musk: Yeah. I was like, how are you still alive?

Peter Diamandis: (referring to President Bukele of El Salvador) Besides putting everybody with a gang sign in jail, I don’t know if you know, the second thing he did, he went to all of the graves of all the gang members out there and destroyed the graves and said, “Your memory will not be remembered in this nation.” That’s just badass. And it worked.

Elon Musk: I mean, you have to be badass motherf*er to take on all the gangs and win and live. Yeah. And still be alive and live.

Peter Diamandis: He’s got great guards at his palace there. But what did you announce with him in El Salvador?

Elon Musk: It was just basically to use Grok for education, like personalized education.

Peter Diamandis: Hopefully not the vulgar version of it.

Elon Musk: Yeah, we would have like, you know, the kid-friendly version of Grok. But obviously AI can be an individualized teacher that is infinitely patient and answers all your questions. (pauses) Now you still need to be curious and you still need to want to learn. Grok can’t make you want to learn. It can make learning more interesting.

Peter Diamandis: You could probably gamify and incentivize it.

Elon Musk: Right. You can make learning more interesting and less of a production line. But kids do need to have to—they need to want to learn. You know, people should just think of the brain as a biological computer.

Peter Diamandis: It’s a neural net.

Elon Musk: Yeah, it’s a biological computer with a number of neurons and neural efficiency. And so what you can’t do is turn any arbitrary kid into Einstein. This is not realistic because Einstein had a very good meat computer, like an outstanding meat computer. So you can’t just make a Shakespeare, Newton, or, you know, an Einstein type of thing, unless the meat computer is an exceptional one.

Peter Diamandis: So what do you think? So when people say we need to solve education in the United States because it’s fundamentally broken, I think what’s really broken, I’m curious, is the old social contract that says do well in high school, get in a good college, get a degree and then get a job. And I don’t know that that’s going to be valid in the future. We talk about this on the pod a lot. That the career of the future isn’t getting a job, it’s being an entrepreneur. It’s finding a problem and solving it.

Elon Musk: Yeah.

Peter Diamandis: Do you agree with that?

EDUCATION AS A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

Elon Musk: Right now I’d say it feels just, you know, go to school for the social experience, use more AI. The conventional schooling experience I think could be a lot better. What we’re going to do in El Salvador and hopefully other places, just have individualized teachers. It’s going to be much better. And you could go to a school with a bunch of other kids, I guess if you want to hang out with other kids. But you don’t need to. Right. You could do it on your phone at home.

So that’s why I say like at this point education is a social experience. When I talk to my kids who are in college, they do recognize that they can learn just as much independently. In fact, they would learn more in a work situation. They are there for the social experience and to be around a bunch of people of their own age. Sort of a coming-of-age social experience.

Peter Diamandis: Sure, sure. Being on your own, learning how to lead or defend yourself as the case may be.

Elon Musk: Well, yeah, I mean if you join the workforce, you know, from the perspective of like, you know, a 19-year-old with a bunch of old people and if you’re doing engineering with a bunch of middle-aged dudes, it’s like do you really want to do that or do you want to hang out with, you know, where there’s at least some girls your age type of thing.

My thoughts

It is February 2026, about 2 months since this interview, and so much has happened. Kids in El Salvador have received their laptops and are ready to start their AI Grok education, while students in failing grade schools in Austin, Texas, have been walking out of class to protest against having safe, secure borders. The irony is real. What I see for the future is a future where the whole earth lives in pure abundance—so much so that the USA does not become the craved destination for people who live in currently failing countries. They can stay in their own places because they too will have unlimited abundance. The future is going to be amazing.

This transcript is from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Episode #220: Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots. Recorded December 22, 2025, at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Released January 6, 2026.

Transcript: Elon Musk Interview – Part 5

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

This transcript (a 5th in a series) is from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Episode #220: Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots. Recorded December 22, 2025, at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Released January 6, 2026. I have painstakingly worked to create the best possible transcript for you.

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.

Darkness has fallen over Texas. This man, Elon Musk, remains at the factory, working long after many have left.

Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis at Giga Texas’ Lobby (December 2025)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 6

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…

This transcript is from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Episode #220: Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots. Recorded December 22, 2025, at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Released January 6, 2026.

Elon Musk with Jason Calacanis, Børge Brende and Larry Fink in Davos.

Transcript: Elon Musk at Davos World Economic Forum, Jan. 2026

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

This is my verbatim transcript of Elon Musk’s recent Davos interview at the World Economic Forum, based directly on his live conversation. I’ve formatted it for your readability with Elon talking with Larry Fink of BlackRock, and I have kept it as close to word-for-word as possible (including natural speech patterns, ums, and repetitions), and made minor fixes only for obvious auto-transcription errors to ensure accuracy without changing meaning.

Elon Musk: We are going to make this interesting!

Larry Fink: How many quotes are you going to want that are after this session?

Elon Musk: I don’t know, five, haha!

Larry Fink: Good afternoon everyone, it’s great to see everybody here. It has been an amazing week. Thrilled Elon Musk come from California. Thank you, Elon.

Elon Musk: You’re most welcome. I heard about the formation of the Peace Summit, and it’s like, is that P-I-E-C-E, a little piece? Haha. Or Greenland? A little piece of Venezuela? All we want is peace.

Larry Fink: Okay. As they said, I’m pretty proud CEO BlackRock. Since we went public, the compounding return of BlackRock to our shareholders was 21%. Since Elon took Tesla public, his compounded return is 43%. This is just another advertisement for everybody, especially for Europeans. This is why more citizens should be investing with growth, investing in their countries. Imagine if a lot of pension funds invested with Elon when Tesla went public, and how much return would be with all the pension funds that invested side-by-side with Elon and the growth. So a spectacular return. There’s very few companies—well, I don’t think there is any other company as large as Tesla today that has compounded returns. Congratulations.

Elon Musk: We have an incredible team at Tesla. and so thats the reason!

Larry Fink: I want to get into the meaningful component about technology, the possibilities. I want to talk about AI and robotics, energy, space, and the progress ultimately coming down to engineering. Engineering discipline, scale, execution. Few people, if not anyone, has the experience, and the fortitude to confront these issues head-on—not just ideas, but execution across so many different technologies. Elon, that’s why it is important for us to have this dialogue here in Davos. So you are presently building on AI and robotics, space, energy—all at the same time. When you look across those efforts, what do they have in common from an engineering standpoint?

Elon Musk: Well, they’re all very difficult technology challenges. But the overall goal of my companies is to maximize the future of civilization—like basically maximizing the probability that civilization has a great future. And to expand consciousness beyond Earth. S

o if you take SpaceX, for example, SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth—to the Moon, Mars, eventually other star systems. I think we should always view consciousness, life, as precarious and delicate. Because to the best of our knowledge, we don’t know if life is anywhere else. You know, I’m often asked, are there aliens among us? And I’ll say that I am one. They don’t believe me.

Okay. So I think if anyone would know there are aliens among us, it would be me. And 9,000 satellites up there, and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship. So like, I don’t know. Bottom line is, we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare, and it might only be us. And if that’s the case, then we do everything possible to ensure the light of consciousness is not extinguished.

Because effectively, the image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness—tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out. And that’s why it’s important to make life multiplanetary. Such that if there is a natural disaster or man-made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues. That’s the purpose of SpaceX.

Tesla is obviously about sustainable technology. And also at this point, we’ve sort of added to our mission sustainable abundance. So with robotics and AI, this is really the path to abundance for all. If you say, you know, people often talk about solving global poverty, or essentially how do we give everyone a very high standard of living—I think the only way to do this is AI and robotics. Which doesn’t mean that it’s without its issues. We need to be very careful with AI. We need to be very careful with robotics. We don’t want to find ourselves in a James Cameron movie—you know, Terminator. He’s great. Great movies. Love his movies. But well, we don’t want to be in Terminator, obviously.

But if you have ubiquitous AI that is essentially free or close to it, and ubiquitous robotics, then you will have an explosion in the global economy—an expansion in the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent.

Larry Fink: Can that expansion be broad? Or is it narrow? And how can it be broadened the global economy?

Elon Musk with Jason Calacanis, Børge Brende and Larry Fink in Davos.
Elon Musk with Jason Calacanis, Børge Brende and Larry Fink in Davos.

Elon Musk: Way to think of it is that if you have a large number of humanoid robots, the economic output is the average productivity per robot times the number of robots. And actually my prediction is in the benign scenario of the future that we will—the robots will actually make so many robots and AI that they will actually saturate all human needs. Meaning you won’t be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point. Like there would be such an abundance of goods and services. Because my predictions are there’ll be more robots than people.

Larry Fink: So but how do you then have human purpose in that scenario?

Elon Musk: Yeah, I mean, you know, there are—nothing’s perfect. But I mean, it is a necessary… Like, you can’t have both. You can’t have work that has to be done and amazing abundance for all. Because if it’s work that has to be done, and only some people can do it, then you can’t have abundance. It’s narrow.

Larry Fink: Narrow.

Elon Musk: Exactly. So but if you have billions of humanoid robots—I think there will be… I think everyone on Earth is going to have one and gonna want one. Because who wouldn’t want a robot to, you know, assuming it’s very safe—watch over your kids, take care of your pet? If you have elderly parents—a lot of friends of mine have elderly parents, it’s very difficult to take care of them. Expensive. Yeah, it’s expensive, and there just aren’t enough people to take care of the old people. So if you—if they had a robot that could take care of and protect elderly parents, I think that would be a great, amazing thing to have. And I think we will have those things. So overall, I’m very optimistic about the future. I think we’re headed for a future of amazing abundance, which is very cool. And definitely we are in the most interesting time in history. I don’t think there is a more interesting time in history!

AGING

Larry Fink: Can we reverse aging in this new history? Or are we going to see it?

Elon Musk: You know, haven’t put much time into the aging stuff, but I do think it is a very solvable problem. Like, you can—I think when we figure out what causes aging, I think we’ll find it’s incredibly obvious, that it’s not a subtle thing. The reason I say it’s not a subtle thing is because all the cells in your body pretty much age at the same rate. You have never seen someone with an old left arm and a young right arm ever in my life. So why… You know, there is some benefit to death, by the way. It’s like, there’s a reason why we don’t actually have a longer lifespan. Because if people do live forever or for a very long time, I think there’s some risk of an ossification of society—of things just getting kind of locked in place. And yeah, it just may become stultifying, a lack of vibrancy. But that’s it. Do I think we’ll figure out ways to extend life and maybe even reverse aging? I think that’s highly likely.

Larry Fink: Looking forward to that. So in the future you talk about—their AI models, autonomous machines, rockets—depends on massive increases of compute, massive increases in energy. Expensive energy, manufacturing scale. What are the bottlenecks to get there? And once again, with all that expenditures, how can we make sure it is broad, not narrow?

Elon Musk: I just think the natural thing will be very broad because AI companies will seek as many customers as they possibly can. And the cost of AI is already low and plummeting every year—almost the cost of AI is meaningfully changing on a month basis.

Larry Fink: There are open models now everywhere.

Elon Musk: Yes. Very good open models. The open models only lack what may be a year behind the closed models. So I think, yeah, AI companies will seek as many customers as possible, which means they’ll provide AI to the world.

Larry Fink: But the cost of getting to their compute chips, the fab, power—powering that.
To me, what are those? It is a huge factor.

Elon Musk: I think the limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power.

Larry Fink: It’s energy. Yeah.

Elon Musk: We were seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being brought online is….

Larry Fink: 5%, 4% a year max.

Elon Musk: Yes, it’s clear very soon—maybe later this year—we will be producing more chips than we can turn on. Except for China. China’s growth in electricity is tremendous.

Larry Fink: They are building 100 gigawatts of nuclear as we speak.

SOLAR

Elon Musk: Actually solar is the biggest thing in China. So China is—I believe Chinese production capacity on solar is 1,500 gigawatts a year, and they’re deploying over 1,000 gigawatts a year of solar. Now, you know, for continuous solar load, you divide that by roughly 4 or 5. Call it around 250 gigawatts of steady-state power paired with batteries.

And that’s a very big number—half the average power usage in the US. US power usage on average is 500 gigawatts. China. just with solar, solar that can provide steady-state power and batteries can do half of the US electricity output per year just from solar.

Solar’s by far the bigger source of energy. And actually when you look beyond Earth—or even on Earth, but certainly beyond Earth—the sun rounds up to 100% of all energy. This is an important thing to consider. So the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter is about 0.1%, and everything else is miscellaneous. Now even if you were to burn Jupiter in a thermonuclear reactor, this up the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round to 100%, because Jupiter is only 0.1%. If you teleported three more Jupiters into our solar system and burnt three more Jupiters and everything else in the solar system, the sun’s energy would still round up to 100%. So it is really all about the sun. And that is why one of the things we are doing with SpaceX within a few years is launching solar-powered AI satellites. Because space is really the source of immense power. Then you don’t need to take any room on Earth. There is so much room in space and can scale to hundreds of terawatts a year.

Larry Fink: Elon and I have had these conversations before, but why don’t you tell the audience what would it take for the United States in what geography would it take that solar field electrify the United States? Let me ask a question: why aren’t we doing it?

Elon Musk: So rough way is 100 miles by 100 miles—160 kilometers by 160 kilometers—on solar is enough to power the entire United States. So 100-mile by 100-mile area. You can take a small corner of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico—obviously wouldn’t want it all in one place—but there was very small percentage of area of US to generate all electricity that US uses. And same is true actually for Europe. You could take a small part of your energy—take relatively unpopulated areas of say Spain and Sicily, and generate all electricity power that Europe needs.

Larry Fink: Why don’t you think there is a movement towards it here and in the United States? As there is in China?

Elon Musk: Well, unfortunately, US tariff barriers for solar are extremely high and this makes economics deploying solar artificially high. Because China makes almost all the solar.

Larry Fink: And what would it take for Europe or US to build it commercially if it is at scale?

Elon Musk: Yeah, I think—well, I can tell you what we are going to do at SpaceX and Tesla. We’re building up large-scale solar. So the SpaceX and Tesla teams both separately are working to build to 100 gigawatts a year of solar power in the US (of manufactured solar power). That will probably take us about three years. But these are pretty big numbers. And I encourage others to do the same. We obviously don’t control US tariff policy. But China makes solar cells that are incredibly low cost. And I think it would be worth doing large-scale solar.scale solar.

Larry Fink: So I know you’re going to be having a couple of big announcements on robotics and what it can do. I mean, when we went to the factory, you showed me those robots. We talked about billions of robots, but how quickly can they be deployed in your manufacturing setting, be utilized and be functional, and create that abundance you talked about?

Elon Musk: Well, humanoid robotics will advance very quickly. We do have some of the Tesla Optimus robots doing simple tasks in the factory. Probably later this year—by the end of this year—I think they will be doing more complex tasks, but still deployed in an industrial environment. And probably sometime next year—I would say that by the end of next year—I think we will be selling humanoid robots to the public.

Larry Fink: Like you’re already seeing in Tesla cars, software changes every quarter now. A software change upgrades the ability of the robot within the car.

Elon Musk: Yes, the Tesla full self-driving software—we update sometimes once a week. So I think some of the insurance companies have said that it is actually so safe when Tesla uses full self-driving—so safe that they’re offering customers half-price insurance if they use Tesla full self-driving in their car.

Larry Fink: And that can be monitored by the insurance company because it’s part of the agreement?

Elon Musk: Yeah, but I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point. Tesla has rolled out Robotaxi service in a few cities, and it will be very widespread by the end of this year within US. Then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe hopefully next month.

Larry Fink: Really that quickly!?

Elon Musk: Yeah. And then maybe similar timing for China hopefully.

SPACE

Larry Fink: I want to move to space because historically space is very capital intensive. Historically been done by governments. Obviously SpaceX changed the whole model. But we have seen it slow to scale. And now I am starting to see ramping up in what you are doing. Talk about the automation—how is it changing economics in building and preparing for operating in space?

Elon Musk: Sure. Well, the key breakthrough that SpaceX hopes to achieve this year: full reusability. No one has ever achieved full reusability of a rocket, which is very important for the cost of access to space. We have achieved partial reusability with Falcon 9 by landing the boost stage over 500 times. But we have to throw away the upper stage that burns up on reentry. And the cost of it is equivalent to a small- to medium-size jet.

So with Starship—which is a giant rocket, the largest flying machine ever made—that’s the rocket you’re using for the idea of going to Mars, right?

Larry Fink: Yeah.

Elon Musk: Mars and the Moon as well, and for high-volume satellite stuff. So Starship—hopefully this year—we should prove full reusability for Starship, which will be a profound invention. Because the cost of access to space will drop by a factor of 100 when you achieve full reusability. It is the same economic difference that you would expect between, say, a reusable aircraft and a non-reusable aircraft. Like if you have to throw your aircraft away after every flight, there will be expensive flights. But if you only refuel, then it’s the cost of fuel.

So that’s really the fundamental breakthrough that gets the cost of access to space—we think—below the cost of freight on aircraft. So you know, under $100 a pound type thing easily. It makes putting large satellites into space very low, very cheap.

And then when you have solar in space, you get five times more effectiveness—maybe even more than that—than solar on the ground. Because it’s always sunny, no clouds. Yeah, it’s always sunny. So you don’t have a day-night cycle or seasonality or weather. And you get about 30% more power in space because you don’t have atmospheric attenuation of the power. That net effect is solar is five times more—any given solar panel will do five times the energy in space than on the ground.

Larry Fink: There is any capacity in doing that then taking that power, bringing back to Earth? Is there any way of doing that? Or you just taking the power and utilizing it for needs like building AI data centers in space?

Elon Musk: I think the case is a no-brainer for building AI solar power to AI data centers in space. Because as mentioned, it’s also very cold in space. If you’re in shadow, then it’s very cold in space—3 degrees Kelvin. So you have solar panels facing the sun, and then a radiator that is like pointed away from the sun so it has no sun incidence. And then it’s just cooling—it’s a very efficient cooling system. Net effect is that the lowest-cost place to put AI will be space. And that will be true within 2 years, maybe 3 at latest.

Larry Fink: Looking 10 or 20 years out, how would you describe success with AI or space technology? And where do you see it? Can—are more certain what will happen in the next 3 years, 5, 10?

Elon Musk: I don’t know what’s going to happen in ten years. But the rate at which AI is progressing—we might have AI that is smarter than any human by end of this year, and no later than next year. And probably 2030 or 2031—5 years from now—AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.

Larry Fink: We only have a number of minutes left, but I want to humanize you for a second. So there’s no speculation that you’re the most successful entrepreneur, industrialist in the 21st century—maybe beyond. What inspired you? Who inspired you? What was the foundation of your curiosity? And importantly, why? Was there an aha moment, epiphany at any time in your life and career?

Elon Musk: Well, I mean, as a kid I read a lot of science fiction, sci-fi, fantasy books, comic books. And always like technology. Didn’t expect to be where I am today—seems incredibly implausible. But yeah, I was inspired by reading books about the future of science fiction. And I guess want to make science fiction not fiction forever. At some point, turn science fiction into fact. And you know, we wanna have like Starfleet as in Star Trek really for real—where we actually have giant spaceships traveling through space, going to other planets, traveling to other star systems.

Larry Fink: Beamed up to go back to New York?

Elon Musk: I would like beaming back to New York instead of flying. Yeah. You know about Star Trek. So I guess my essential what we call the philosophy of curiosity. And I would like to understand the meaning of life. Is the standard model of physics correct regarding the beginning of existence at the end of the universe? What questions do we not know to ask that we should ask? And AI will help us with these things. So I just try to understand: how did we get here? What’s going on? What is real? Are there aliens? Maybe they are. If you have spaceships traveling to other star systems, we may encounter aliens or find many long-dead alien civilizations. But I just want to know what’s going on—curious about the universe. And that is my philosophy.

Larry Fink: Do you see yourself going to Mars in your lifetime?

Elon Musk: Yes. Like that’s a long commitment, isn’t it? Three years each way?

Larry Fink: Six months.

Elon Musk: But the planets only align every two years. So yeah. Been asked a few times: do I want to die on Mars? And I’m like, yes—just not on impact.

Larry Fink: That’s a good answer. Anyway, we are out of time. Hopefully everybody enjoyed this. And there are so many myths around Elon Musk. I can tell you he is a great friend, and I constantly learn so much from him. And I’m totally inspired by what he has done, have been inspired by who he is, and I’m totally inspired by his vision of the future. And don’t think it’s such a bad future.

Elon Musk: And I think generally my last words would be: I encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future. Good. And generally for quality of life, it is better on being an optimist rather than a pessimist, right?

(End of video – applause and wrap-up.)

This verbatim transcript is important and inspiring for everybody. Because it is so wide-ranging on technology, energy, AI, space, and optimism, it can lift you up if you’re ever down.

When I bought my first Tesla, a Model 3 in 2019, I joined a community of many people who love Elon Musk and Tesla. Every time I drive my Tesla around my hometown Austin, Texas, or take a Robotaxi here, I’m reminded of the extraordinary effort that is put into making Tesla succeed. Elon puts in maximum effort into all his companies.

In January 2022, I started this blog to write positive things about Tesla and Elon Musk. It has since grown to include many transcripts of Elon’s talks. I’m thankful to Johnna Crider for supporting and encouraging me to start this blog. 

Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis & Dave Blundin: Amazing Abundance – Part 4: Games, Compute & Reality

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

In Part 3, Elon revealed how xAI is forcing a gigawatt-scale breakthrough in AI training power. Now Peter’s son Jet (age 14) inspires the next turn: gaming and AI’s role in it.

Peter D.: My other son Jet, who’s 14, wanted to know about your AI gaming studio and the impact of AI in the gaming world. What are your thoughts?

Elon’s origin story surfaces.

Elon: Yeah, that’s why I started programming computers… Civ was actually a very— in terms of games that educate you while you have fun, Civ is epic at that.

Dave jumps in.

Dave B.: The only way I ever win is getting off the planet… Tech victory to Alpha Centauri.

Elon: I guess I am sort of aiming for the Alpha Centauri tech victory essentially.

The analogy is perfect: civilization’s true win condition isn’t domination — it’s escape velocity.

Elon: Aspirationally [building an AI gaming studio].

Because:

Elon: The vast majority of AI compute is going to go to video consumption and generation… Real-time video generation. That’s going to be the vast majority of AI compute. Photon processing.

Peter floats an X Prize for Universal High Income governance. Elon is open but skeptical on measurement.

Then the conversation ascends to simulation theory.

Elon: The most interesting outcome is the most likely… Only the simulations that are the most interesting will survive. Because when we run simulations, we truncate the ones that are boring.

Terrible things can still happen — they keep it engaging. Like watching a war movie while eating popcorn.

Dave B.: So the guys running the simulation have immensely boring lives compared to us.

Elon: Yeah, because when we create simulations, they’re a distillation of what’s interesting.

Are we in Act 3? The room leaves it open.

This segment closes on the biggest frame possible: Reality as a game where the win condition is expansion, energy mastery, and keeping it interesting.

My two cents: Think about what you can remember from your past. You’re probably like me and mostly recall just the spicy parts of your life. So what were you doing on March 3, 2023? Good question—and a troubling one.

Our minds are made of a string of memorable events. For myself, I sought to create the most vivid memories possible when I was young. Soon, I’ll be publishing a book for you that will include some very vivid experiences I had living in Italy when I was 21–22 years old.

I encourage you to create your most important memories when you’re younger—and then you’ll carry those memories with you for your entire beautiful life. But you’re never too old to create memories!

Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis & Dave Blundin: Amazing Abundance – Part 3: Energy Foundation

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

In Part 2, Elon dropped a bold bet on ultra-clean chip fabs where you could eat a cheeseburger without contaminating wafers. Now the conversation shifts to our future of abundance: energy.

Sitting in the glorious front lobby of Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Peter steers toward the concerns people in America are thinking about today: energy, health and education. Elon doesn’t hesitate because it is right in sync with his Master Plan 4 for Tesla.

Peter D.: I want to talk about energy, health, education, because those are people’s concerns. So on the energy front, the innermost loop of everything that you’re building and…

Elon: Doing right now, energy is the foundation.

Peter D.: What’s your vision for energy abundance? The sun in the next, you know, this decade. The sun. Yeah.

Elon: I mean, so the sun is everything.

Elon drives the point home with scale that rewires your brain

Elon: People just don’t understand how solar is everything. So everything compared to the sun, all other energy sources are like cavemen throwing some twigs into a fire.

The sun is over 99.9% of the solar system’s mass. Burn Jupiter? Still rounds to 100%. Burn four Jupiters? Same story.

Fusion?

Peter D.: Any interest in fusion?

Elon: Yeah, you know, coming— never going to guess how the sun works.

Peter D.: Giant coal plants.

Elon: I mean we have a giant free fusion reactor that shows up every day 93 million miles away. It’s farcical for us to create little fusion reactors. That would be like having a tiny ice cube maker in the Antarctic and saying, “Hey look, we made ice.”

Solar is the only scalable path

Dave narrows to the immediate bottleneck: powering the Memphis supercluster.

Dave B.: If you just narrow the question to the Memphis timeline. Between a gigawatt and 10 gigawatt. You’re not going to pull 10 gigawatts out of Memphis.

Elon: Maybe two or three.

They’re still in “Toyland” at 10 GW scale — yet xAI is already pushing boundaries.

Peter drops a plug for his Metatrends research, then presses on China’s solar dominance.

Peter D.: China has done an incredible job… They put in 500 terawatt hours in the last year, 70% solar. And they’re just scaling.

Elon: China has done an incredible job on solar. Yeah, it’s amazing. Production capacity around 1,500 gigawatts per year of solar.

The US lags. Energy = GDP = quality of life. The group agrees: America must scale solar aggressively. Tesla and SpaceX are already all-in.

The discussion turns to the GPU power crunch — why TSMC worries about overproducing chips.

Elon: If chip output is growing exponentially, but power harnessed is growing in a slow, linear fashion, then chip production can exceed the rate at which the AI chips can be turned on.

You need transformers, cooling, liquid-cooled racks. One burst pipe? A billion dollars gone.

xAI is solving it first

Elon: xAI is going to have the first gigawatt training cluster at Colossus 2 in Memphis… Mid-January will be a gigawatt… then 1.5 gigawatts probably April-ish.

My 2 Cents

It is amazing that xAI brought together natural gas turbines + Tesla Megapacks to smooth massive power swings for the data center ijn Memphis, and soon to be expanded to Southhaven, Mississippi. It is a symphony of engineering miracles! The finest engineers in Austin and Palo Alto, some even from SpaceX, and the future vision to seek only truth, beauty, and stay curious!

Part 4 dives into gaming, Civilization’s tech victory, and simulation theory.

Elon Musk Talk with Diamandis, Part 2

Gail Alfar1 Comment

(Austin, Texas) Here, we’ll continue on our series where the discussion escalates from advanced AI and robotics into another frontier: nanotechnology and true atomic-scale manufacturing.

ELON MUSK: “Well, I think if you reframe things in terms of progress bar, like speaking of challenges. Progress towards a Kardashev 2 scale civilization”

Peter Diamandis introduces the idea of “atomic reassembly”, which is rearranging atoms precisely to build anything, like a sci-fi replicator.

Elon quickly connects this to current reality, noting that semiconductor fabs already achieve atomic-level precision for circuits (down to 2–3 nanometers, or roughly 4–9 silicon atoms wide).

Elon points out that today’s “2nm” process nodes are often marketing hype, but the core requirement remains near-atomic accuracy. Atoms must be placed exactly right.

Elon then drops a provocative critique: modern chip fabs are designing their ultra-cleanrooms wrong (overly focused on making the entire massive building sterile, with extreme air filtration and bunny suits that slow everything down).

Elon makes a confident bet: Tesla will build its own 2-nanometer fab (possibly a massive “TeraFab” to meet exploding AI chip demand), and it will be engineered so effectively that he can eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar right inside the fab without contaminating the wafers.

When pressed on how this avoids “cheeseburger grease” ruining the chips, Elon explains the key insight: maintain complete wafer isolation throughout the process, which is possibly the default in advanced fabs anyway.

Wafers travel sealed in boxes filled with pure nitrogen gas under slight positive pressure, creating an oxygen-free “nitrogen blanket” that kills bugs and blocks contaminants (Dave Blundin jokingly compares it to bananas at Walmart, preserved with similar insecticide-like methods). Combustion (like cigar smoke) needs oxygen to thrive, so the isolated system stays pristine while the human environment becomes far more livable and efficient.

The Transcript: 

Peter D.: And then we get to nanotechnology, which takes it even a step further.

Elon:  The thing about the—well, I’m not sure what you mean by—you mean like little nanobots?

Peter D.: Atomic reassembly.

Dave B.: Yeah.

Elon:  Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. I mean, we’re already doing atomic level assembly for circuits, you know.

Peter D.: Amazing. Two, three nanometers.

Dave B.: Yeah.

Elon:  It’s only depending on how they’re arrayed. Four or five silicon atoms per nanometer. Yeah. So those are big atoms, though. They’re biggish.

Dave B.: Yeah, they’re not your little—

Elon:  I mean, I’m saying they should actually describe the circuits in terms of an integer number of atoms in a specific place.

Dave B.: They should. It’s all angstroms now.

Elon:  It’s just an integer. It’s like—we’ll call this the seven atom. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, like you say two nanometers, it’s…

Peter D.: Like no one knows.

Elon:  Nine silicon atoms, something like that. They’ve got silicon and copper and you know, so. But a bunch of these things are just marketing numbers. Like the 2 nanometer is just a marketing number. Oh yeah. But you still need essentially close to atomic level precision. Like the atoms really, you need to be in the right spot.

So I think they’re getting clean rooms wrong by the way, in these modern fabs. I’m going to make a bet here.

Peter D.: Okay.

Dave B.: Okay.

Elon:  That Tesla will have a 2 nanometer fab and I can eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar in the fab.

Peter D.: The air handling would be that good.

Dave B.: Do you have this sketched out in your mind? How are the atoms being placed? That they’re immune to cheeseburger grease.

Elon:  They just maintain wafer isolation the entire time, which is actually the default for fabs. The wafers are transported in boxes of pure nitrogen gas under a slight positive—

Dave B.: So are the bananas at Walmart, just so you know.

Elon:  Yeah, well that’s, it’s insecticide essentially. Like it’s pretty hard for anything that’s combusting to live without oxygen. Yep. So let’s talk about—so you like, you can kill the bugs just by putting a nitrogen blanket.

This leads into broader implications for radical abundance: if we perfect atomic reassembly at scale, manufacturing costs plummet, goods become nearly free, and humanity’s grand challenges shift dramatically.

Read Part 1 Here!

Elon Musk Talk with Diamandis, Part 1

Gail Alfar1 Comment

PART ONE

(Austin, TX) The setting is Tesla Gigafactory Texas, in Austin, the lobby is futuristic, Elon sits intentionally in front of a mural for Cybertruck with a prototype of a Cybercab right behind him. You can feel his confidence as he relaxes in his jeans, black T-shirt, and cowboy boots. This is a man who is changing the world.

THIS ARTICLE WAS UPDATED ON JAN 18TH, 2026

As the interview starts, Peter asks Elon how he is, and Elon responds, his mind on chips for Tesla, “Right now, putting a lot of time into chips”

I recall when I accompanied Johnna Crider to interview Elon in 2022. Then, you’d ask Elon how he was, and he had his mind on scaling production. Elon is deeply involved with his teams at Tesla, I think it may be what occupies his thoughts the most. Today, Peter asks Elon if he is personally putting a lot of time into chips. Great point, as most CEOs “tell” others to do the hard work. With Elon, he does the hard work. He always has. In fact, shortly after this interview, Elon posted here on X indicating his immersion into Tesla Chip design.

Diamandis: You are personally? (putting time into chips?)

Elon Musk: Yeah

Blundin: With some AI assistance, I assume…

Dave Blundin has joined this interview, taking time off from teaching his AI class at MIT.

Elon Musk: Not enough, haha. It’d be nice if we could just hand it off to the AI.

Blundin: I tried to do some circuit design actually with AI recently, just a couple weeks ago. Not happening yet.

Elon Musk: Ahh, very soon, though. I think probably at this point, Grok, if you took a photo and submitted to Grok, it could probably tell you if a circuit is—if there’s something wrong with it.

Blundin: All right, I’m going to give it a shot. You’re using the same Grok that I’m using?

Elon Musk: Grok keeps updating.

Dave Blundin: So 4.2. But 5 is soon, right?

Elon Musk: 5 is Q1. 4.2 has not been released yet externally, but yeah, I mean, if you just upload an image into Grok, it does quite a good job of analyzing any given image. Let’s see if I take a picture of you. What is it? Let’s see what it does

Diamandis: Yeah. What’s it going to say about me?

Blundin: Yeah, it’s going to say you’re a flawed circuit.

Elon is updating his phone’s Grok app, “I also have to remember to update it because we update the Grok app so frequently,” as the update happened, Peter Diamandis confesses he asked Grok to roast Elon.

Diamandis: I asked Grok to roast you. And I spit out my coffee. It was hilarious.

Elon Musk: Just say, be more vulgar. Just keep telling it to be more and more vulgar, until it’s like, haha, mother of god!

Blundin: Is Bad Rudy still out or did that get repealed? Bad Rudy’s still there?

Elon assures Dave Blundin that the Grok AI companion, Bad Rudy, is still around.

Diamandis: And I asked Grok, does Elon know what you say about him? And she goes—it’s a she for me—she goes, “What is he going to do about it?”

Elon Musk: HAHAHA, What is he going to do about it? Yeah, let’s see (shifting focus) Okay, so I just literally took a photo of you and it will tell you what it is.

Peter Diamandis: Did you ask it a question?

Elon Musk: No, nothing. I didn’t say anything, there’s no context whatsoever.

Elon shows Grok’s reply about the picture, “He’s wearing a black quilted jacket featuring a Sundance logo. Not quite true. It’s my Abundance logo.

Blundin: A little wrinkled on the clothing.

Elon Musk: Anyway, yeah, but basically, it’s pretty damn good. Yeah. “He’s smiling and relaxed with a laptop in front of him”. Should we say, Roast him.

Diamandis: It has to be read by you, though.

Elon Musk: I mean, I won’t read the whole thing, but—

Peter Diamandis: Give me a taste. I can take it.

Elon Musk: Okay (He reads part of Grok’s roast of Diamandis). “Check out that grin, dude. Smiling like you just discovered a new way to monetize hope”.

Cameron’s Movie vs. Star Trek

Diamandis: I want to try and answer the question, can AI and tech help save America and the world? I want to give people listening a dose of optimism. There’s a survey done in mid-December by Pew that said 45% of Americans would rather live in the past and only 14% said they’d rather live in the future. Which is insane to me. Obviously they never read history. The challenge is most Americans, all they have of the future—it’s like Hollywood has shown us killer AIs and rogue robots. Right. And people are worried about their jobs, they’re worried about health care, they’re worried about the cost of living. The challenge is how do we help people? I mean, you posted, you pinned on X: “The future is going to be amazing with AI and robots enabling sustainable abundance for all.”

Elon Musk: I was thinking of you when I did that. I was thinking, What would Peter Diamandis say? I was channeling you, haha!

Diamandis: Thank you. Thank you. I couldn’t agree more either. So my question is from a first principle standpoint, right. The rationale for optimism, you know, how do we head towards Star Trek and not Terminator?

Elon Musk: Towards Roddenberry, not Cameron? It’s the diverging path meme.

Diamandis: Avatar has some hopeful parts, but anyway, how do we go towards universal high income instead of social unrest?

Elon is realistic, and when Peter suggests an either/or scenario here, Elon sees both happening. Here he explains why.

Elon Musk: Well, because there’s going to be so much change, it’s sort of the, you know, it’s like, be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Now if you actually get all the stuff you want, is that actually the future you want? Because it means that your job won’t matter.

Diamandis: If you’re living an unchallenged life. With no challenges. No. You know, if you become a couch potato, if it’s a WALL-E future, it does not go well for humans.

A WALL-E future means a dystopia where humans become lazy, overweight couch potatoes, totally dependent on technology and automation, with zero challenges or effort in daily life—like the bloated, screen-addicted people floating around in the movie WALL-E. It’s the warning: remove all struggle and difficulty, and humanity atrophies fast.

Blundin: And we’re used to being told, here’s your challenge. So people haven’t historically been very good at creating their own challenge.

Diamandis: I think Elon does a damn good job. Every time one company takes off, you start your next.

Elon Musk: I’m a glutton for punishment.

Diamandis: I think you are, thank God for that.

Elon Musk: So why do I do this to myself?

Blundin: Actually, after AI and robots, is there another thing after that?

Diamandis: Well, there’s always space conquering, you know, the universe.

Elon Musk: Oh, it’s just rocks, really! Hahaha! We just need to get there.

Diamandis: Why, Elon? Why are you so optimistic? Are you optimistic? Let’s start there.

Elon Musk: I’m not as optimistic as you are, but I’m more optimistic than most people.

Peter Diamandis really wants to know WHY Elon Musk is so optimistic. He will continue to press for an answer, and it is interesting, as Elon does not directly answer his question, and I’m including one of Elon’s most famous quotes, and my personal favorite for you!

“Better to live life erring on the side of being optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right!

Be realistic, but, as Monty Python would say, always look on the bright side of life!”

Elon Musk Joins Surprise X Space: Discusses 2026 Breakthroughs with Voice Doppelgänger Adrian Dittmann

Elon Musk Joins Surprise X Space: Discusses 2026 Breakthroughs with Voice Doppelgänger Adrian Dittmann

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

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!)