“I see a path. I’m not saying it’s an easy path but I see a path of Tesla being the most valuable company in the world by far.” – Elon Musk
In this article we’ll look at how Tesla’s value is immense, as what Tesla is building will improve efficiency in all areas of human life, and do it at scale, making it affordable. Elon Musk outlined much of this is in this Shareholder meeting, so although he did not make mention of Master Plan 3, this was a big progress report on Master Plan 3.
Elon’s conversation focused on manufacturing at scale, AI, and robotics. Note: This is the January 29, 2025, Tesla Annual Shareholder Earnings Call.
Elon is More that Doubling Investments in Tesla
“Doubling is not even enough. We made many critical investments in 2024 in manufacturing, AI and robotics that will bear immense fruit in the future.” – Elon Musk
When discussing Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology, Elon emphasized its market impact, saying, “I think the interest level from other manufacturers to license FSD will be extremely high once it is obvious that unless you have FSD, you’re dead.”
The Misconception of Easy Production vs. the Reality
Elon: “Yeah, prototypes are trivial basically. Prototypes are easy, production is there for many years. The problem is there’s like those who have never been involved in production or manufacturing somehow think that may — once you come up with some eureka design, that you magically can make 1 million units a year, and this is totally false. There needs to be some Hollywood story or where they show actually the problem is manufacturing.”
Hollywood Does Not Make Movies Like This, But They Should
Elon: “I’ve never even heard of one (Hollywood story that shows how to win at manufacturing). It just doesn’t fit the narrative. The Hollywood thing is like some lone inventor in a garage goes EUREKA! And suddenly, it files a patent, and suddenly, there’s millions of units. And like I’m listening to the guys, we’re missing really 99% of the story. One percent is — a product is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Hollywood shows you the 1% inspiration and minus — but forgets about the 99% perspiration of actually figuring out how to make that initial prototype manufacturable and then manufacture at high volume such as reliable, low cost, consistent, and doesn’t break down all the time and that is 100 times more difficult at least than the prototype.”
Austin, Texas Will Experience Unsupervised Full Self-Driving as a Paid Service in June
“In fact, it could drive you. It’s a self-driving wolf.” – Elon Musk
Elon’s timeline was a surprise for many, as he plans to initially launch unsupervised FSD in Austin in June. For me personally, it makes sense. I live in Austin, use FSD everyday, it works astonishingly well!
“We’re going to be launching unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June.” – Elon Musk
Elon: “And I am like — setting up for what I think will be an epic 2026 and a ridiculous ’27 and ’28, ridiculously good. That is my prediction. As you know, very few people understand the value of self-driving and our ability to monetize the fleet. Some of these things I’ve said for quite a long time, and I know people have said, Well, Elon, the boy who cried like a wolf like several times. But I’m telling you, there’s a damn wolf this time and you can drive it. In fact, it could drive you. It’s a self-driving wolf.
For a lot of people, like their experience of Tesla Autonomy is like if it’s even a year old, if it’s even two years old, it’s like meeting someone when they’re like a toddler and thinking that they’re going to be a toddler forever. But obviously not going to be a toddler forever. They grow up. But if their last experience was like, Oh, FSD was a toddler. It’s like, well, it’s grown up now. Have you seen it? It’s like walks and talks. And that’s really what we’ve got.
And it’s difficult for people to understand this because human intuition is linear as opposed to what we’re seeing is exponential progress. So, that’s why my No. 1 recommendation for anyone who doubts is simply try it. Have you tried it? When’s the last time you tried it? And the only people who are skeptical, the only people who are skeptical are those who have not tried it.”
When addressing a question about discussions with other auto companies regarding the licensing of Tesla’s FSD, Elon explained there is interest.
Interest in Tesla’s Autonomous Tech
Elon: “Yeah. What we’re seeing is at this point, significant interest from a number of major car companies about licensing Tesla full self-driving technology.”
Analyzing Tesla’s Hardware
Elon: “What we’ve generally said is the best way to know what to do is take one of our cars apart. And then you can see where the placement of the cameras are, what the thermal needs are of the Tesla AI inference computer.”
Optimus Development Timeline
Elon: “With regard to Optimus, obviously, I’m making these revenue predictions that sound absolutely insane, I realize that. But they are — I think they will prove to be accurate. Now with Optimus, there’s a lot of uncertainty on the exact timing because it’s not like a train arriving at the station for Optimus. We are designing the train at the station and in real time while also building the tracks.”
Production Goals for Optimus:
Elon: “The normal internal plan calls for roughly 10,000 Optimus robots to be built this year. Will we succeed in building 10,000 exactly by the end of December this year? Probably not, but will we succeed in making several thousand? Yes, I think we will. Will those several thousand Optimus robots be doing useful things by the end of the year? Yes, I’m confident they will do useful things.”
Feedback Loop for Optimus Development
Elon: “Those Optimus in use at the Tesla factories for production design 1 will inform how we will change for production design 2, which we expect to launch next year.”
The Immense Scaling of Optimus
Elon: “And our goal is to ramp up Optimus production faster than maybe anything has ever been ramped, meaning like aspirationally in order of magnitude, ramp per year. Now if we aspire to an order of magnitude ramp per year, perhaps, we only end up with a half order of magnitude per year. But that’s the kind of growth that we’re talking about. It doesn’t take very many years before we’re making 100 million of these things a year if you go up by let’s say, a factor by 5x per year.”
How Tesla Solved Challenges in Developing Optimus
Elon: “But we do need to be — this is an entirely new supply chain, it’s entirely new technology. There’s nothing off the shelf to use. We tried desperately with Optimus to use any existing motors or any actuators, sensors. Nothing worked for a humanoid robot at any price.”
Custom Design for Optimus
Elon: “We had to design everything from physics-first principles to work for a humanoid robot and with the most sophisticated hand that has ever been made before by far. Optimus will be also able to play the piano and be able to thread a needle. I mean, this is the level of precision no one has been able to achieve. And so, it’s really something special.”
Future Value of Optimus to Tesla
Elon: “So, yes. And my prediction, long term, is that Optimus will be overwhelmingly the value of the company.”
Additional Statements on Optimus
Elon: “Optimus is not design-locked. So, let’s say like we’re designing the train as it’s going to — we’re redesigning the train as it’s going down the tracks while redesigning the tracks and the train stations.”
Vision for Optimus
Elon: “I’d like it to be the beginning of next year but maybe it’s more like the middle of next year,” (referring to the launch of an enhanced version of Optimus)
Elon: “The current line that we’re designing is for roughly 1,000 units a month of Optimus robots. The next line would be for 10,000 units a month. The line after that would be for 100,000 units a month.”
Elon: “I think probably with Version 2, it is a very rough guess because there’s so much uncertainty here, very rough guess that we start delivering Optimus robots to companies that are outside of Tesla in maybe the second half of next year, something like that.”
Elon: “But like I said, this is such an exponential ramp that it will go from no one’s receiving humanoid robots to these things like coming out like crazy. We can’t build enough. We’re always going to be in the — we can’t build enough situation. Demand will not be a problem even at a high price.”
Elon: “And then I said like, once we start — once we’re at a steady state of above 1 million units a year, I think the production — I’m confident at 1 million units a year, that the production cost of Optimus will be less than $20,000.”
Elon: “If you compare the complexity of Optimus to the complexity of a car, so just the total mass and complexity of Optimus is much less than a car. So, I would expect that at similar volumes to say the Model Y, which is over 1 million units a year, that you’d see Optimus be, I don’t know, half the cost or something like that.”
Elon: “What the price of Optimus is a different matter. The price of Optimus will be set by the market demand.”
Utility of Autonomous Cars
“Once that car is autonomous, my rough estimate is that it is in use for at least a third of the hours per week, so call it, 50, maybe 55 hours of the week.” – Elon Musk
Current Utilization of Passenger Cars
Elon: “So, a car goes — a passenger car typically has only about 10 hours of utility per week out of 168, a very small percentage.”
Projected Increase in Car Utility with Autonomy
Elon: “Once that car is autonomous, my rough estimate is that it is in use for at least a third of the hours per week, so call it, 50, maybe 55 hours of the week. And it can be used for both cargo delivery and people delivery. So, even, let’s say, people are asleep but you can deliver packages in the middle of the night or resupply restaurants or whatever the case may be, whatever people need at all hours of the day or night.”
Economic Impact of Autonomous Vehicles
Elon: “That same asset, the thing that — these things that already exist with no incremental cost change, just a software update, now have five times or more the utility than they currently have. I think this will be the largest asset value increase in human history. Maybe there’s something bigger but I just don’t know what it is. And so, people who would look in the rearview mirror are looking for past precedent, except I don’t think there is one.”
Everyone Should Try Autonomous Driving
Elon: “So, look, the reality of autonomy is upon us. And I repeat my advice, try driving the car or let it drive you. So, now it works very well in the U.S., but of course, it will, over time, work just as well everywhere else.”
Tesla’s Growth Plans: Batteries
Elon: “Yes, so we’re working hard to grow our annual volumes. Our current constraint is battery packs this year but we’re working on addressing that constraint. And I think we will make progress in addressing that constraint. And then things are really going to go ballistic next year and really ballistic in ’27 and ’28.”
Advancement in Full-Self-Driving (FSD) Technology
Elon: “So, a bit more on full-self-driving. Our Q4 vehicle safety report shows continued year-over-year improvement in safety for vehicles. So, the safety numbers, if somebody has supervised full self-driving turned on or not, the safety differences are gigantic. And people have seen the immense improvement with Version 13, and with incremental versions in Version 13 and 14 is going to be yet another step beyond that, that is very significant. We launched the Cortex training cluster at Gigafactory Austin, which was a significant contributor to FSD advancement.”
Training Infrastructure for AI/Optimus Development
Elon: “And we continue to invest in training infrastructure out of Texas headquarters. So, the training needs for Optimus humanoid robot, are probably at least ultimately 10x of what is needed for the car, at least to get to the full range of useful role. You can say like how many different roles are there for a humanoid robot versus a car? A humanoid robot has probably 1,000 times more uses and more complex things than in a car. That doesn’t mean the training scales by 1,000 but it’s probably at 10x.”
Economic Potential of Optimus Robots
Elon: “Now you can do this progressively, so it doesn’t mean like Tesla’s going to spend like $500 billion in training computer because we will obviously train Optimus to do enough tasks to match the output of robots. And obviously, the cost of training is dropping dramatically with time. But it’s one of those things where I think long-term, Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue, like it’s really bananas. So, that you can obviously afford a lot of training compute in that situation.”
Investment vs. Revenue in AI Training
Elon: “In fact, even $500 billion training compute in that situation will be quite a good deal. Yes, the future is going to be incredibly different from the past, that’s for sure. We live at this unbelievable inflection point in human history.”
Proof of Concept for Unsupervised FSD
Elon: “So, yes, so the proof is in the pudding. So, we’re going to be launching unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June. So, I talked to the team. We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, full self-driving in Austin in June. We already have Teslas operating autonomously unsupervised full self-driving at our factory in Fremont, and we’ll soon be doing that at our factory in Texas.”
Operational Details of Autonomous Vehicles at Factories
Elon: “So, thousands of cars every day are driving with no one in them at our Fremont factory in California, that we’ll soon be doing that in Austin and then elsewhere in the world, the rest of our factories, which is pretty cool. And the cars aren’t just driving to exactly the same spot because, obviously, they want to collide at the same spot. The cars are actually programmed with where — with what lane they need to park into to be picked up for delivery. So, the drive from the factory end of line to their destination parking spot and to be picked up for delivery to customers and then doing this reliably every day, thousands of times a day.”
Timeline for Unsupervised FSD in Public
Elon: “It’s pretty cool. Like I said, these Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them in June in Austin. So, what I’m saying is this is not some far-off mythical situation. It’s literally five, six months away, five months away kind of thing.
Approach to Safety and Expansion
Elon: “And while we’re stepping — putting our toe in the water gently at first just to make sure everything is cool, our solution, our sort of solution is a generalized AI solution. It does not require high precision maps of locality. So, we just want to be cautious. It’s not that it doesn’t work beyond Austin. In fact, it does. We just want to put our toe in the water, make sure everything is OK, then put a few more toes in the water, then put a foot in the water with safety of the general public as and those in the car as our top priority.”
Energy Storage as a Critical Asset
Elon: “Regarding energy, energy storage is a big deal and will become — really super important, will become incredibly important in the future. And it is something that enables far greater energy output to the grid than is currently possible because the grids are — the vast majority of the grid has no energy storage capability.”
Impact of Energy Storage on Grid Efficiency
Elon: “So, they have to design the power plants for very high peaks and assuming that there’s no energy storage. Once you have grid energy storage and home-based energy storage, the actual total energy output per year of the grid is dramatically greater than people think. Maybe it’s at least double. This will drive the demand of stationary battery packs and especially the grid-scale ones to and saying basically as much demand as we can possibly make.”
Tesla’s Expansion of Big Battery Production: Shanghai and Another 3rd Factory
Elon: “So, we have our second factory, which is in Shanghai, that’s starting operation, and we’re building a third factory. So, we’re trying to ramp output of the stationary battery storage as quickly as possible.”
Balancing Battery Demand Between Sectors
Elon: “Now there is a challenge here where we have to be careful — that were not robbing from 1 pocket to take to another pocket because for a given gigawatt hours per year of the cell output, does it go into stationary applications or mobile applications? It can’t go both into both so we have to make that trade-off, yes. But overall, the demand for total gigawatt hours of batteries, whether mobile or stationary, that will grow in a very, very big way over time.
For context, Tesla navigates between:
Stationary Applications: These include batteries for energy storage solutions that support homes, businesses, and the grid, particularly vital for managing renewable energy sources like solar and wind, which produce energy intermittently.
Mobile Applications: Here, the focus is on electric vehicles, where batteries are essential for vehicle operation, directly impacting Tesla’s automotive business.
Elon metaphorically described the situation as “robbing from one pocket to take to another,” emphasizing the need for strategy to ensure neither sector suffers from resource scarcity. The decision on where to allocate batteries involves complex trade-offs based on current market demand, potential profitability, and strategic long-term goals.
Significance of 2025 in Tesla’s Timeline
Speaking of the year 2025, Elon said “In fact, I think it probably will be viewed ’25 as maybe the most important year in Tesla’s history.
Tesla’s Dominance in Real-World AI
Elon: “There is no company in the world that is as good in real-world AI as Tesla. I don’t even know who’s in second place. Like you say, like, who’s in the second place for real-world AI? I would need a very big telescope to see them. That’s how far behind they are.”
Tesla’s Q4 and Full Year Earnings Calls from 2021, 2022, 2023 by Gail Alfar
The first post I wrote covering Tesla was in January 2022. I wrote about Tesla’s Q4 2021 earnings call. On that day I was locked out of my office (my laptop was locked inside) and there was a Pepsi just sitting there for me to enjoy. I remember calling my friend Johnna Crider that day and we talked until someone opened the doors. I still have that Pepsi bottle to remind me that “there is a lot of work to do, don’t get locked out!” I’ve been writing ever since about one of the best companies in the world: Tesla.
Tesla Q4 Earnings Call
Cybertruck owners love the feel and utility of their vehicles. Tesla built a truck with safety, speed, luxury, utility and performance in mind. You might wonder about deliveries. Are people taking delivery who made reservations years ago? The answer is yes, a Tesla executive explained that Cybertruck’s reservation-to-order conversion rate has been very promising, and if the trend continues, “it is expected that all 2024 builds will be sold out soon. New orders are also anticipated after the launch. The order numbers are increasing, and the team is working hard to ramp up production to fulfill the demand and decrease wait times.”
“Obviously,” Elon Musk said, “we could dramatically raise the price, but that doesn’t feel right to us to (price) gouge people for early delivery.” Elon estimates Tesla will produce around a quarter million Cybertrucks per year in North America, possibly more.
2024 is the year of the Cybertruck, and it is a head-turner
Image Courtesy Tesla, Inc.
“You know, there’s some very good trucks on the road, but if you were to switch out the brand name, you wouldn’t hardly know which company made them. But you definitely would know the Cybertruck. That’s our best product ever.” – Elon Musk
Mini-Timeline: October 7, 2021: Elon Musk officially announces that the Tesla HQ will be located in Austin, Texas.
January 26, 2022: Full-year 2021 financial results reveal that making electric cars is more profitable than making combustion engine cars.
January 25, 2023: Uncertain times did not slow down Tesla. Giga Berlin and Giga Texas joined Giga Shanghai in the production of Model Y, and within months the vehicle became a top seller!
January 25, 2024: Cybertrucks hit the roads in the USA. Model Y surpassed expectations and became the global best-selling car. Gasoline cars fell behind for the first time.
Tesla Energy
Exciting News: Tesla announced that moving forward they will start reporting Tesla Energy volumes in their production and delivery releases. This is good because Tesla Energy has demand signals globally for their Megapack. Growth is almost guaranteed to be strong and consistent through 2024 and 2025. Tesla expressed gratitude to their partners throughout the world for their trust in the Megapack team and gave personal thanks to the engineering and production teams for their outstanding 2023 performance. The Lathrop facility will double its capacity from 20 to 40-gigawatt hours by the end of the year with the operation of a second final assembly line.
Growth for big battery production has been much faster than the car business. Elon emphasized, “The energy storage business delivered nearly 15-gigawatt hours of batteries in 2023, compared to 6.5 gigawatt hours the year before. Tremendous year-over-year growth, triple digits. I think we’ll continue to see very strong growth in storage as predicted.”
Image Courtesy Tesla, Inc.
Many people are pleased that Elon Musk speaks often about Tesla’s progress and plans. This transparency is rare for big companies. Enjoy his opening remarks.
“The Tesla team did an incredible job in 2023. We achieved a record production and deliveries of over 1.8 million vehicles, in line with our official guidance. And in Q4, we’re producing vehicles at an annualized run rate of almost 2 million cars a year.
This was a phenomenal achievement. Looking at just the Fremont Factory alone, we made 560,000 cars. This is a record. In fact, it’s the highest-output automotive plant in North America.
And people are often surprised that the highest-output car factory in North America is in the San Francisco Bay area. It’s a little counterintuitive, perhaps. And it’s had an incredibly positive impact on that entire area. What would have been a rundown strip mall is the highest-productivity car plant in the Americas.
Think about that. It was derelict when we got it, and now, it’s the most productive plant in this entire part of the world, and it’s enriched the community in so many different ways. It’s really a gem. I’m super proud of the people that work there.
Model Y became the best-selling vehicle globally as predicted, and the best-selling vehicle of any kind, not just electric vehicles, with over 1.2 million units delivered. There’s a lot to look forward to in 2024. Tesla is currently between two major growth waves. We’re focused on making sure that our next growth wave driven by next-gen vehicle, energy storage, full self-driving, and other projects is executed as well as possible.
To close this blog post, I’d like to share with you my imaginary futuristic scenario, inspired by listening to the live stream.
In the year 2032, the world has entered an era of sustainable living and tech advancement, thanks to the visionary leadership of Tesla, Elon Musk, and its pioneering innovations. The family of the future is happier and more connected than ever before, as they enjoy the fruits of an earth transformed by clean energy and intelligent automation.
Thomas and Victoria arrive home in their sleek, self-driving Cybertruck, accompanied by four of their children. The family’s home is a testament to the power of technology, with a clean and inviting atmosphere that has been meticulously maintained by their trusty Tesla Optimus bot.
As the sun sets on the horizon, Victoria opens the smart curtains, revealing a breathtaking view of the city skyline. The temperature is a comfortable 65°, and the family decides to enjoy their dinner on the patio by the pool. The pool is heated by solar energy, a resource that powers the entire city through a network of Tesla Megapacks strategically placed on the outskirts. These big batteries store energy when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, ensuring a constant supply of electricity.
After a delicious meal, the family of eight disperses to pursue their passions. The children immerse themselves in reading, creating art, and engaging in virtual reality gaming experiences, all powered by renewable energy. Meanwhile, the fully charged Optimus bot cheerfully takes care of the post-dinner cleanup, leaving the kitchen spotless and preparing the coffee machine for the next day’s caffeine fix.
As we reflect on this futuristic scenario, it’s clear that Tesla’s groundbreaking innovations have not only made our lives more convenient but also more sustainable and connected. The future is bright, and we have Tesla to thank for helping us to live in harmony with our planet and one another.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to Gail Alfar. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author and podcaster is to support Tesla (the most American vehicle manufacturer) and Elon Musk in both making life better on Earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
FOR MEDIA USE ONLY News media is welcome to use my material in connection with a story or article. By downloading any content I create, you understand and hereby agree and represent that: (1) you are a member of the news media; (2) use of the content is in connection with a story or an article appearing in newspapers, periodicals, digital publications or television; (3) all images and rights thereto remain the property Gail Alfar.; and (4) use of the image is not for publication covers, advertising, promotion or otherwise for commercial purposes. Furthermore, use of any and all images and content appearing on this page must each include the notice “Courtesy of Gail Alfar” Use of materials copied from this website is at your own risk. You must obtain prior written consent from Gail Alfar for uses that exceed the above parameters.
Elon Musk talked on a Twitter space on July 12, 2023. Here’s what he said about his new company, xAI, AI regulation, the importance of insight followed by oversight, China’s reasons to regulate AI, “Team Humanity.” He also gives advice for young people (or anyone for that matter) as we enter into a new era and then discusses the singularity. Elon ends the discussion on a positive note, explaining why we should be optimistic about the future.
xAI
“I think I have been banging the drum on AI safety now for a long time. If I could press pause on AI or advanced AI digital superintelligence, I would. It doesn’t seem like that is realistic.
“So xAI is essentially going to build an AI, you know, you’ve got to grow an AI in a good way, hopefully.
“The premise of an AI is to sort of have an AI that is maximally curious, maximally truth-seeking, and, this may get a little esoteric here, but I think that a curious AI, one that is trying to understand the universe, I think I want it to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just so much more interesting than not-humanity.
“Obviously, I’m a big fan of Mars and that we should become a spacefaring, civilization, and a multi-planet species, but Mars is quite frankly boring relative to Earth. It’s a bunch of rocks, and there’s no life that we’ve detected, not even microbial life.
But Earth, with the vast complexity of life that exists, is vastly more interesting than Mars.
“You just learn a lot more with humanity being there, and, I think fostering humanity, if you are trying to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint.
“I think this is better than trying to explicitly program morality into AI. because if you program in a certain morality, you have to say well what morality are you programming? Who’s making those decisions? And even if you are extremely good with how you program morality, there’s still a morality, inversion problem. This is sometimes called the Waluigi problem, which is if you program Luigi, you inherently get Waluigi by inverting Luigi.
Haha, to use Super Mario metaphors. I mean this is starting to get quite esoteric, but hopefully, this makes some sense.
Who is Waluigi? For some background, Waluigi is a fictional character in the Mario franchise. He plays the role of Luigi’s arch-rival and accompanies Wario in spin-offs from the main Mario series, often for the sake of causing mischief and problems. Interestingly, Elon played the role of Wario in a SNL skit in May 2021. Wario, similar to Waluigi, was designed to be an arch-rival to Mario, an anti-hero or an antagonist.
Elon continued,
“So, I would be a little concerned about the way AI is programming the AI to say that this is good and that’s not good. xAI is really just kind of starting out here, it will be a while before it’s relevant on the scale of OpenAI Microsoft AI or Google Deep Mind AI. Those are really the two big gorillas in the Ai right now by far.
“I could talk about this for a long time, it’s something that I’ve thought about for a really long time and actually was somewhat reluctant to do anything in this space because I am concerned about the immense power of a digital superintelligence. It’s something that, I think is maybe hard for us to even comprehend.
“Even if AI is extremely benign, the question of relevance, perhaps, comes up. If it can do anything better than any human, what’s the point of existing? That is also an issue? Do we even have relevance in such a scenario? That’s the bad side of it. The good side, obviously, is that in an AI future where you really will have (in a benign scenario) an age of plenty where, really, there will be no shortage of goods and services. Any scarcity will be simply scarcity that we self-define as scarcity. It could be a unique piece of art or a house in a specific location. It’s artificially defined scarcity but goods and services will not be scarce in a positive AGI future.
But I think it’s also important for us to worry about a terminator future in order to avoid a terminator future.
AI REGULATION
Elon also spoke about the critical nature of AI regulation,
“And I am an advocate of having some sort of regulatory oversight and I’ve actually made this point throughout the world, meeting with world leaders including in China where there is actually strong agreement that there should be AI oversight, AI regulation.
“Just as we have regulations for nuclear technology, you can’t just go make a nuke in your garage, and everyone thinks that’s cool, we don’t think that’s cool. There’s a lot of regulation around things that we think are dangerous. And even if things are not dangerous at a civilizational level, we have the FDA, we have the FAA and the DOT. There are all these regulatory authorities that we put in place to ensure public safety at an individual level but AGI is just one of those things that is potentially dangerous at a civilizational level not just at an individual level. That’s why we want to have AI regulation.
“We want to be careful in how the AI regulation is implemented, not be precipitous or heavy-handed. But there has to be some kind of referee on the field here. One of the dangers is that companies race ahead to… I think it’s actually more dangerous for companies that are behind that might take shortcuts that could be dangerous.
“You know, the FAA came into being after lots of people died in aircraft crashes and they were like, If you want to make aircraft you cannot cut corners because people are going to die. So, that’s kind of how I see AI regulation. I know a lot of people are against it but I think its the kind of thing that we should do, we should do it carefully, we should do it thoughtfully.
Elon paused here while Ro Khanna, a U.S. representative from California and Mike Gallagher U.S. representative for Wisconsin spoke. In response to their conversation, Elon added,
“It’s difficult to think of, I can’t think of a good movie or TV example of Ai that’s the benign scenario. There are some books. The Ian Banks Culture books are the best imagining of a positive AI future that I’ve read. I think the Isaac Asimov Foundation series books have somewhat of a benign AI center (the TV series divulges quite far from the books). But the most sophisticated or perhaps the most accurate view of an AI future is the Ian Banks Culture books which I highly recommend. It would be helpful for Hollywood to articulate that vision in a way that the public can understand.
INSIGHT, FOLLOWED BY OVERSIGHT
Elon said
“I think the right sequence to go with here is insight, followed by oversight. At first, it’s really just for the government to try to understand what’s going on and I think there’s some merit to an industry group, like the Motion Picture Association that I think actually should be formed so I think we’ll try to take some steps in that direction because there’s some amount of self-regulation that I think can be good here.
CHINA WILL REGULATE AI
Elon Musk in China meeting with Qin Gang, foreign minister. May, 2023.
Elon Musk is generally pro-China, he thinks China is underrated and he truly agrees the people are China are really wonderful. When he was in China, he experienced a lot of positive energy there and he noticed the Chinese people generally want the same things that people in America want. He admits there are many political challenges. He praises China for how much they have accomplished to further the electrification of vehicles and implement solar and wind power. He spoke about his trip to China,
“When I was on my recent trip to China, I did spend a fair amount of time with the Senior leadership there, talking about AI safety and some other potential dangers and pointing out that if a digital superintelligence is created that that could very well be in charge of China instead of the Chinese communist party. I think that did resonate. No government wants to find itself unseated by a digital superintelligence. So I think they actually are taking action on the regulatory front and are concerned about this as a risk and I’ve seen some comments internally within China that the companies are a bit unhappy about the government wanting to put regulatory oversight on AI. So this is something that does actually resonate even in China because when I was in China I said one of the biggest obstacles to AI regulation outside of China is the concern that China will not regulate AI and then will get ahead and they took that point to heart, it’s a logical point, I think. And I highlighted that, if you make superintelligence, the superintelligence could actually run China and that also resonated.
“So I think, try to shed as much light on this subject. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Be as open about things as possible, going from insight for a few years to oversight with consultation with the industry, is the sensible approach.
“I think the public is starting to understand the potential of AI with ChatGPT, something the public can interact with. I’ve understood the power of AI for a while, and until you have some sort of easy to use interface it’s difficult for the public to understand. It’s also the case with stable diffusion and Midjourney, you can see the incredible art that AI can create, it’s really amazing.
“I’m actually somewhat of an optimist in general, but like I said, the best way to ensure a good future is to worry about a bad one. So I think that’s the sensible thing to do, and to have discussions like this, and continue to have discussions like this.
TEAM HUMANITY
Elon spoke about how easy it is to demonize an organization or a person if you have never met them in person, saying, “When you meet with them you’re like, well, there’s not that bad! You can understand where they’re coming from and at the end of the day, we’re all part of Team Humanity, hopefully! I think we should all aspire to be part of Team Humanity! We’ve got one planet only, so far, and we don’t want to lose it. There’s that famous quote – think it might be Einstein but could be one of those internet things where you think its Einstein but its not, where it says, it doesn’t matter how WW3 was fought except that WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones.” Haha, there’s not going to be anything left! So we really want to aspire to avoid global thermonuclear warfare. We really want to avoid that, Bigtime! Hopefully, we’ll focus on positive things like becoming a spacefaring civilization, becoming a multi-plantary species, hopefully going out there and visiting other star systems, but we may discover many long-dead one-planet civilizations that never got beyond their original planet.
“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” – Albert Einstein.
Elon continued,
“On the xAI front. If I speak to my personal motivations here, is that I’ve always just wondered what is really going on in reality. Are the aliens? Where are they? Like the Fermi paradox, I find to be intriguing and troubling if the standard model of physics is correct, the universe has been around for many billions of years, so why haven’t we seen aliens? Many members of the public are convinced the government is hiding evidence of aliens and I have not seen any evidence of aliens which is a concern. I might feel better if I saw some aliens. I have not seen one shred of evidence of aliens which is a problem. It means that life & consciousness might be incredibly rare. Maybe we are it, at least in this galaxy. The light of consciousness seems to be this tiny candle in a vast darkness and we should do our absolute best to make sure that candle does not go out.”
ELON’S THEORY ABOUT OUTCOMES RELATING TO CHINA – TAIWAN
“The most entertaining outcome is the most likely (as seen by a 3rd party, not the participants. Like, you could be watching a WW1 movie about getting blown to pieces while sipping a soda and eating popcorn. Not so great for those in the movie, but it is entertaining which does suggest it’s probably going to get hot in the Pacific. Hopefully not too hot. But it’s going to get hot. Hopefully, we can get past that and get to a positive situation for the world in the spirit of, aspirationally, we are all on Team Humanity. But it’s going to get spicey. But the most concerning thing is probably the Taiwan question over the next 3 years and the next 3 years after that I’d be surprised if there is not digital superintelligence in roughly the 5 or 6-year timeframe. If this was a Netflix Series, I’d say the season finale would be a showdown between the West and China and the Series finale will be AGI.”
ELON’S ADVICE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE (AND ANYONE)
“If someone is able to contribute to building AI in a positive way, if someone has that technical ability, that is probably the right thing to work on. For your average citizen, I think the future is definitely going to be interesting. Things get very strange in a future where the AI can basically do everything. In the benign scenario, I guess we will look for personal fulfillment in some way. I think between now and then it’s just trying to be useful. On the manufacturing front, I do think we should place much greater weight on the importance of manufacturing. I think things are shifting in that direction. Generally, when somebody asks me for advice, my advice is to try to be as useful as possible. It’s actually quite hard to be useful. If you can be of use to your fellow humans and contribute more than you take then I think that’s a great thing! I have a lot of respect for those who work hard and do make goods, and provide services, in excess of what they take. That is just a fundamentally good thing.
Elon explains the advent of AGI is often referred to as the singularity. A singularity is like a black hole. You just don’t know what happens after that. “We are on the event horizon of the singularity of digital superintelligence.”
One of the most interesting parts of all of history is the time we live in now, and Elon Musk is optimistic, he says,
“I think if I was to assign probabilities, I think it is more likely to be a positive scenario than a bad scenario, it’s just that the bad scenario is not 0% and we want to do everything we can to minimize the probability of a bad outcome with AI. I think it is maybe 70-80% likely to be a good future. Maybe a great future even! I think of the future in probabilities, nothing is for sure. The future is a set of branching probability streams.
What is the Turing Test? The Turing Test is a deceptively simple method of determining whether a machine can demonstrate human intelligence: If a machine can engage in a conversation with a human without being detected as a machine, it has demonstrated human intelligence.
Elon explains he thing we are well past The Turing Test with AI. He says,
“ChatGPT is well past the Turing Test so really we are on our way to digital superintelligence, I think it’s 5 or 6 years away. The definition of superintelligence is that it’s smarter than any human at anything. It’s not necessarily smarter than the sum of all humans, that’s a higher bar, to be smarter than the sum of all humans. Especially given that it’s the sum of all humans that are machine augmented in that we will have computers and phones and software applications. We are already defacto cyborgs, it’s just that the computer is not integrated with us. But one’s phone is already an extension of one’s self. If you leave your phone behind it feels like missing limb syndrome. You’re patting your pockets like -where did my phone go? It’s crazy the degree to which our phone is basically a supercomputer in your pocket. It is an extension of yourself. So there is a higher bar to be smarter than the sum of all humans that are computer augmented”
Elon explained this concept has caused him stress and many sleepless nights. He tries to figure out how we navigate through these facts to the best possible future for humanity as it may be the hardest problem humans have ever faced and it deserves, or rather, it demands our attention. He adds,
“I think ultimately the nation-state battles will seem parochial compared to digital superintelligence. Of all the risks that we face, there are ones that are dangerous at an individual level and dangerous at a state level and there are things dangerous at a civilizational level. Global thermonuclear warfare is dangerous at a civilizational level, some supervirus that has high mortality rates would be dangerous. I think it’s crazy to do gain-of-function research. Gain of function research is like saying – death maximization! Haha, like I don’t know who came up with this gain-of-function model!? Haha. AI is also a civilizational risk, but the thing about AI is that is has the potential to be amazing if it’s done right.
THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT
The hour-long talk ended with Elon Musk reminding listeners that,
“We want to maximize the collective happiness of humanity and the freedom of action of humanity. You want to look forward to the future and say that is the future I want to be a part of! And I’m excited about the future. That’s actually incredibly important in general. I’m actually concerned that there’s a pervasive pessimism in the world about the future and that’s part of what’s leading to a low birthrate in many parts of the world. I advocate for optimism. I think it’s generally better to be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right!
“You look up at the night sky, and see all those stars, and I wonder what’s going on up there. Are there alien civilizations? Is there life up there? Hopefully one day we find out!”
Elon Musk
This article by Gail Alfar. Please credit accordingly. Since January 2022, I have been writing and recording many of Elon Musks’ talks on my blog and here in order to preserve his important words in writing. My blog link is on my Twitter bio and I thank you for reading and for your support. You rock and you are part of Team Humanity! Thank you!
Elon Musk with Michael Grimes at Morgan Stanley TMT Conference 2023. Image courtesy @anirvanc on Twitter
Morgan Stanley held this year’s TMT Conference in beautiful (and rainy!) San Francisco and Elon Musk spoke on March 7 about Twitter, X.com, Tesla and SpaceX. The talk was informative, hopeful, well thought out and funny! Of course you may listen to it online and you may also prefer to read Elon’s interviews so that is why I have transcribed (and categorized) the interview here on “What’s Up Tesla.”
I do this with many of Elon Musk’s talks for you. It is part of the goal of this publication to preserve these important talks in writing. A breakdown for your reference:
Twitter:
Mission , News happening in real-time
Public relations department?
Advertising’s incredible potential
Community Notes and the rigorous pursuit of truth
Proactively reducing child exploitation
Advertisers enjoy brand safety
A healthy national dialogue
Freedom of speech: hearing what you don’t want to hear
Twitter won’t always be a fractal rube goldberg machine
Cash flow
Starlink, X.com, Tesla and SpaceX’s Starlink and Starship:
Starlink: a case study in effective advertising
X.com as your everything app
Tesla Master Plan 3 and the next-gen vehicle
Starlink’s advantage
Starship orbital launch
The Mission of Twitter
Michael Grimes: (paraphrased) Where are you on the core principles of Twitter: Authentic, informative, entertaining, accurate, brand safe and democratic?
Elon Musk: “I think some of these are a little at odds, but ‘brand safe’ I think really means ‘where advertising is displayed’ or the advertiser gets to choose what material is near that advertising. If it’s some sort of… like a train accident or a war scene, then probably a family-friendly brand is not going to want to advertise right next to that. Or it can’t be like, ‘here’s a bleak war scene, would you like to buy a hamburger?’ it would be like, awkward, you know?
So that’s understandable you want to put advertising next to content where it makes sense. But the content in general needs to be authentic and informative even if it is controversial or jarring. I think people need to be able to choose, to some degree, what content they want to see. Of course, on Twitter, you can. But really we want it to be the fundamental place you go to, to learn what’s going on and get the real story.
The truth, the whole truth and it’s going to be more than, hahaha, I’d like to say nothing but the truth but that’s hard, (laughter) there’s going to be a lot of BS there too. There are going to be lies, for sure, but you want to have the truth and you want to bubble up the truth and be able to sort of sort it out… you really want truth with the least amount of error.”
News happens in real-time on Twitter
Elon Musk explains Twitter’s unique place as a real-time news source,
“Well, I’m sure many of you use Twitter. Everything on Twitter is happening in real-time.
So if you contrast that to what’s happening in a newspaper, they have to learn the information, propose an article to their editor, get it approved, write the article, get it edited, figure out which day it’s going to get published on, and so the thing that happened is being reported on 3-4 days, sometimes a week late. And if it happens on a weekend then it’s at least 3 days.
You know ChatGPT was huge news for several days on Twitter before there were any news articles about it in major publications. So when thinking about investing in things, you want to have information that is as timely and accurate as possible, there’s no better source than Twitter for that.” Elon Musk
Michael Grimes lamented on the fact that people need to be “default skeptical” of any news story about Twitter and assume it’s default wrong because “not only some journalists have an agenda but the source has an agenda and it’s so easy to go through the chain of inaccuracy or outright falsehood.” He asked Elon Musk if a public relations department was a consideration,
No, PR departments… no the right name for PR is propaganda. Maybe we should have a VP of propaganda, I think that’s more honest, and also a VP of witchcraft. (laughter) Those would be two great ones.
“If you pick up any given newspaper and read the whole thing and say, ‘how many of those stories are positive about anything at all?’ Almost none. So if something is newsworthy it is going to have a negative slant, whether it is positive or not. There’s like something in journalism that, they’ve been trained to basically never write a positive story about anything. Once and a while you see a puff piece but it’s rare. So anything that’s newsworthy will get written about, anything that’s written about will go through a negativity lense and so you, therefore, have a bizarrely negative view of the world if you draw your information from newspapers. This is simply a fact.” Elon Musk
Why advertising on Twitter has incredible potential
“So on Twitter, you can get a much more balanced positive-negative situation, it doesn’t have that bias quite as much. There’s probably still a little bit of negativity bias but much less so. I’m not sure what the legacy media does, I mean at this point, really, Twitter is, by the way, the #1 news app in the world. So in terms of what people download for news, it’s #1.
There are 500M active users. 250M daily users of which I’d say there are probably 180M significant daily users, where it’s a meaningful amount of time. The average amount of time people spend on Twitter of that 250M is about 1/2 an hour or so. The thing I think that is most interesting is about 120M to 130M hours of human attention per day on Twitter, every single day on average.
I think it comes to an interesting point which is, it’s startling how poorly monetized that is because you have to say, how valuable is that attention? 130M hours of human attention per day, of people that read. So these are generally the smartest people in the world, the most influential people in the world, and you have 130M hours of their time per day, that’s a lot!
Currently, Twitter makes about 5 or 6 cents per hour of that time. I think this is poorly monetized (laughter). Like, if I’m spending 2 hours a day on Twitter, whatever ads are coming through are getting my, or yours or everyone in the room’s attention, your time is incredibly valuable. The thing is, we need to actually serve ads that are relevant and useful and I think as we do that we can probably at least get it like 15 cents an hour or 20 cents an hour, a quarter?
I think the actual potential here for Twitter revenue is gigantic. And it’s going to be a win-win situation which is if you are served advertising that you find timely and relevant with products and services that are useful to you, that’s good for you and good for the advertiser. Advertising in the limit of relevance is content.” Elon Musk
Community Notes and the rigorous pursuit of truth
Michael Grimes asked how Community Notes can be used without being hijacked by either side of an issue or political spectrum. Elon Musk explained,
“There’s a White Paper on Community Notes that I recommend reading, in fact, I’ll tweet it out so that people can have easy access to it because it’s really quite a clever idea. Think of it like page rank for pages as applied to people, which is that as people build credibility in how they review notes, they build up enough credibility to actually write notes. Those notes are then rated by others, and depending upon the credibility of the people rating your notes, your credibility score gets affected. In order to be a notes contributor, you have to be a verified person. And it takes a while to get there; when you just start out, you will start off with no credibility score.
We actively look at any attempts to game the system and shut them down. If they’re determined to be not real people or if they seem to be brigading because there are deliberate attempts to manipulate Community Notes. We also make the Community Notes source code open and available, so you can basically see everything. You can see exactly how Community Notes is calculating things, and what changes are made to Community Notes and we’ll keep iterating and the goal is to have truth with the least amount of error.
There’s always like, ‘What is truth?’ Does someone really aspire to the truth? If they really aspire to the truth they must acknowledge that there is some probability that what they think is untrue. If somebody thinks that what they say is true with 100% probability, there’s a 100% probability they are lying. Truth must acknowledge error, and you aim to minimize the error over time, that’s what Community Notes is. I think also, once someone gets Community Noted, they think twice about being dissected in the future. You start getting noted a few times, and you think ‘Uh, oh!’
The important thing is that anyone can be noted, including me, and in fact, I wanted to make a note of being noted. The point is that if I can be noted, anyone can be noted, including advertisers. We’ve had a few cases where the advertising wasn’t accurate and it got noted. This, I think will be very helpful in truth in advertising. The goal is the rigorous pursuit of the truth, aspirationally the whole truth, and the least amount of untruth.” Elon Musk
Proactively reducing child exploitation on Twitter
“I’ve repeatedly said to the Trust & Safety team at Twitter that the #1 Priority, which will always be the #1 Priority no matter what, is ensuring that children are safe on Twitter, that there’s no child exploitation. So that is #1 priority always and forever.” Elon Musk
Elon Musk explained to Michael Grimes, “I’ve repeatedly said to the Trust & Safety team at Twitter that the #1 Priority, which will always be the #1 Priority no matter what, is ensuring that children are safe on Twitter, that there’s no child exploitation. So that is #1 priority always and forever.
What I’ve been told is that we’ve done more to eliminate [CSE material] on Twitter in the last four months than what has been done in the last ten years. It will continue to be our number one priority. A 100-fold reduction in CSE search patterns is pretty gigantic to say the least. It’s the absolute number one priority.”
Advertisers on Twitter enjoy brand safety
Elon Musk used the example of Disney. “With respect to brand safety, it really depends a lot on the brand. By the way, Disney is a major advertiser on Twitter worldwide. Apple is one of our biggest advertisers.
But Disney of course does not want to have one of their ads next to things that aren’t appropriate for a family audience. But there are other products that are kind of more R-rated if you will, so they’re more comfortable with advertising being in the equivalent of like a R-rated movie or something like that. So brand safety depends on what brand you’re talking about. Is it a family brand or a less family brand?
Advertisers can actually adjust what content they are comfortable having their advertising appear next to. The same is true on TV. The advertising that you’ll see at 7 pm is different than the advertising that you’ll see at midnight. We have the same functionality on Twitter, so it’s truly up to the advertiser where they want to put their content. But I think by far the most important thing is if the advertising is effective. That it is relevant and that it moves the needle for a company. Advertising relevance is the most gigantic thing.
This is going to sound totally bizarre but Twitter did not consider relevance in advertising until 3 months ago. In fact if you use Twitter for a long time, you should ask ‘how many products have you bought off Twitter?’ Probably zero! (laughter) Judging by the laughter, probably zero. And your time is incredibly valuable.”
Michael Grimes: Flamethrower, no one bought a flamethrower?
Elon Musk: Haha, its possible that they might have bought things from content-based tweets because the content that’s recommended is reasonably relevant but the advertising has not been. So as we shift towards advertising being relevant and timely, as I said, advertising that is relevant and timely is content. The time of 130M person-hours of the smartest people on earth is insanely valuable. Historically, with advertising being mostly irrelevant, we’ve been wasting peoples’ time and that’s not good. Going forward, Twitter will have very relevant and useful advertising. There will be a massive increase in revenue because it is now useful. So I’m very optimistic about the future. It’s been a very difficult 4 months, but I’m optimistic about the future.
Healthy national dialogue on Twitter
Elon Musk: I think the objective reality for anyone looking at Twitter for a long time was that Twitter had a massive thumb on the scale on the left side. Twitter would ban and suspend accounts on the right 10 times more than on the left. This is naturally what you would expect, frankly, because we are in San Francisco, which is deep deep blue.
So, Twitter was controlled by the far left. So the natural thing that would happen then was the suppression of moderates, not just suppression of the right but even suppression of moderate voices. But that’s not conducive to a healthy national dialogue.
In order to have a healthy national dialogue, you have to represent the whole country, and you have to represent everyone in other countries too. That’s the only way to have a Town Square.
Freedom of speech: hearing what you don’t want to hear
Elon Musk: There were disproportionately more accounts unsuspended and un-shadowbanned on the right because Twitter had a huge thumb on the scale in favor of the left. But if you say, ‘Have we been suspending accounts on the left? Have we been shadowbanning accounts on the left? No, no we haven’t.’ No, because exactly what I said we were doing which is to make it an even playing field and you know something is Freedom of Speech when you’re hearing speech from someone you don’t like and you don’t like what they’re saying.
Otherwise it’s not free speech. And if you don’t have that ability, then sooner or later that suppression of speech is going to be turned on you. It is a good sign if you’re seeing people you don’t like say things you don’t like. That is a good sign, not a bad sign… provided you can say your piece too! I think this is fundamental.
The reason I did the Twitter acquisition was not because I thought this would be some lucrative goldmine, and in fact, it has been arduous and difficult with being dumped on [by mainstream media] every day. That’s not the most fun thing in the world. But if we do not have a strong foundation of free speech, I fear for the future of our civilization. We must have this. That’s why I did it.
Twitter won’t always be a fractal rube goldberg machine
Elon Musk: The codebase is like a Rube Goldberg Machine and when you zoom in on one part of the Rube Goldberg Machine there’s another Rube Goldberg Machine and then there’s another one! That’s what I mean by the fractal. As you zoom in there’s another fractal and another fractal and a fractal Rube Goldberg Machine. It’s quite difficult to keep this thing running and then also difficult to advance the product because it is really overly complex. We’ll make what appears to be a small change somewhere that then causes a massive disruption. For example, yesterday we made what we thought was a small change, we want to be in full disclosure including gruesome details. There was what was supposed to be a small change to 1% of the Twitter user base ended up being a catastrophic event to 100% of the Twitter user base. We don’t have enough time to go into the details but there was a Boolean flag in the Twitter front end that should not have been there.
I’ll give you an example. At one point there was a problem with Twitter Spaces where suspended users were able to join conversations even though they were suspended and so we temporarily turned off access to Twitter Spaces which then made anyone who is using the Twitter Android App unable to like a tweet. Now how those things are connected is not clear, haha. So if you had an iOS app you could like tweets, if you’re on the Web app you could like tweets but not if you had an Android app because of Spaces.
There’s a lot of work behind the scenes and simplifying the code base, getting rid of extraneous features and enabling Twitter to evolve more rapidly in the future but it requires a lot of cleanup.
Looking forward to Twitter being cash flow positive
Michael Grimes: You’ve grown users [on Twitter] despite a lean engineering team and cutting out a data center.
Elon Musk: Yeah, I think on balance we’re doing okay. Just to give you a sense of where things were at the close of acquisition on October 29th, Twitter was tracking to a negative 3 Billion dollar a year burn rate and had 1 Billion in the bank. That’s a pretty dire situation.
If 2023 had been a normal year, Twitter would have done something on the order of 4.5 Billion in revenue and 4.5 Billion in cost, roughly break even, but when you add 1.5 Billion of debt servicing to that and a massive decline in advertising, some of it cyclic, some of it political, but call it at roughly a 50% decline in revenue, you’ve got over 3 Billion dollars negative. Twitter has some revenue that’s not advertising-based, data subscriptions and what-not, but in the absence of action, Twitter would have had 6 Billion in costs and 3 Billion in revenue so minus 3 Billion and there was 1 Billion in the bank, so it would have gone bankrupt in 4 months. Immediate and drastic action had to be taken, which was.
We actually have now cut the non-interest burn to roughly 1.5 Billion. So we’ve got 1.5 Billion of debt servicing and 1.5 Billion of expenditures. We went from 3 data centers to 2, and reduced our cloud expenditures significantly, while at the same time having the fastest product evolution in Twitter’s history. So overall, not bad. There have been a few bumps along the road obviously but this is to be expected. And now I think we have the opportunity to grow it into something quite spectacular. We had the highest total user minutes in Twitter history.
The real numer to care about is actually not the MDAU (Monetized daily active user) but its user time. How many total user hours per day do you have? That’s the real figure of merit because one could for example go to 300 Million daily active users but if they spent less time on the system cumulatively that would actually be a downgrade. Its how much human attention are you worth?
That’s why I think the really profound thing is what Twitter has is roughly 130 Million hours of the smartest most influential people on earth, every single day. There’s nothing else that has that. I mean there are social networks that have more users but they do not have the smart, influential people, they don’t have you!
Michael Grimes: After doing the math, Twitter is EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) profitable today and then you’re looking for break even after debt services. When do you get to cash flow break even?
Elon Musk: Well it’s EBITDA profitable but the “D” is quite big! (laughter)
Michael Grimes: When do you get to cash flow break even after that “D”?
Elon Musk: This is where we need to focus on the “E” part. (laughter) Yeah, I hope we pay taxes. So like I said, we’re getting to the point where we’re close to having the total expenditures for the company excluding debt roughly equal to the debt. I think we’ll be there in Q2. I definitely don’t want to count chickens before they’re hatched or jinx it or anything but I think we’ve got a shot at being cash flow positive next quarter.
Twitter has huge advertiser value
Michael Grimes: Twitter has great advertiser value with 147 Billion global impressions of the World Cup 2022 conversation.
Elon Musk: What I say to advertisers and brands is ‘use Twitter yourself and believe what you see on Twitter, not what you read in the newspapers.’ Because what you see on Twitter is the real thing, and what you read in newspapers is not. And I’d like to thank Mark Read and WPP for their support and publicists and others that have stuck with us like Disney and Apple.
Michael Grimes: When do you introduce performance-based advertising and scale it?
Elon Musk: Performance-based advertising is really just advertising that is relevant, in fact we should realistically have zero nonperformance-based advertising.
We want advertising that matters, people’s attention is precious. We should not serve them ads that are annoying or irrelevant or strident or ugly. It was interesting you should mention White Lotus, I was talking today with David Zaslav, it was great, and he was like, ‘Why can’t we put a White Lotus trailer every time someone mentions White Lotus on Twitter?’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely!’
So one of the super-obvious but profound things that we’re doing is enabling keyword advertising so that can the keywords, like ‘White Lotus’ and if somebody mentions White Lotus, you put the White Lotus trailer there. I mean, that sounds very obvious.
We don’t need advanced AI for this one (laughter). It’s sort of just google Adwords that apply to tweets and the home timeline and replies and everywhere else because you often have sort of long, deep conversations with people going on talking about movies, TV, products and whatnot and that’s the perfect opportunity for advertisers to provide their message.
Starlink: A case study in effective advertising
Elon Musk: You know, if I think about something, for example, like Starlink, which does advertise in various media you want to advertise to users in a region that are not already saturated. So Starlink tends to be saturated in urban areas but it is not saturated in rural areas. What Starlink would like to do is say, ‘Please show the ad to rural users with a slow connection. And the simple message is, ‘Do you want faster internet for less money? Click. Probably you do. Twitter needs to be able to do a simple thing like that. And it will. It is already able to do that, we just haven’t fully rolled it out. So I think we’re around 20%-ish but by the end of this year almost all advertising should be reasonably relevant.
“Twitter is not a one way street, there’s continuous interaction. I think we can have a profoundly more useful advertising experience.” Elon Musk
Elon Musk: Even if you say nothing about that ad, after its dropped in the Twitter system and it has 10,000 views, you populate the parameter space of the ad and then you correlate the user parameter space and the ad parameter space and then you don’t need to do any demographic targeting because you could be like, say its a gardening ad or you could be 20, 30, 40, 70 years old, any sex, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is you like gardening and that’s the ad that should be shown. I think we can get away from the ad targeting by age range and sex in favor or targeting by interest. Alot of this demographic tageting was done coming from a TV or newspaper era where you don’t have interaction with the user, you just have to kind of guess because its a one way street in TV. But on Twitter its not a one way street, there’s continuous interaction. I think we can have a profoundly more useful advertising experience.
The everything app: X.com
Michael Grimes: Tell us about your vision for X, the everything app.
Elon Musk: I think its possible to create a very powerful finance experience basically. Paypal is kind of like a halfway version of what I think could be done in payments and finance. You want to be able to send money easily from one account on X / Twitter to another account effortlessly with one click. You want to be able to earn interest on the money, you want to be able to have debt so your interest can grow negative. Basically, I think it’s possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world just by providing people with convenience and payment options. We don’t have time to go into detail here except if we just make the app more and more useful, people will use it more and it will be great. I mean, you’ll see!
Michael Grimes: The Tesla team is nice and built out, the Twitter executive team is perhaps a bit leaner. Maybe there’s a meme that’s accurate.
Elon Musk: He does have a black turtleneck, haha! Do you need anything more? I don’t think so.
Michael Grimes: So when does that Twitter management team have that bench like you showcased at the Gigafactory?
Elon Musk: Well I think it takes a lot of time to build a strong management team. We built the Tesla management team over 20 years. I think Twitter is an easier problem than Tesla by a long shot. But it will take some time to build the team, probably a few years.
Tesla Master Plan 3 is a message of hope grounded in physical reality
Michael Grimes: You shared Master Plan 3 at the Gigafactory and the edit that came to my mind was ‘Master planet! after your first piece there in sustainable energy for all earth. Can you take us through that positive, optimistic, mathematically underpinned vision?
Elon Musk: Okay, there’s not a lot of time to do that but I guess the overall message is that we can absolutely turn earth into a sustainable energy economy, fully sustainable, using lithium-ion batteries, solar, wind, as well as geothermal, nuclear and other things but primarily it’ll be solar and wind and lithium-ion batteries.
And to our calculations, you need roughly 240 TeraWatt hours of lithium-ion batteries. Most of those will be iron phosphate for the primarily iron cathode which is a plentiful material. In fact, the #1 element on earth is actually iron — a little factoid. I think earth by mass is about 32% iron and about 30% oxygen and then everything else is miscellaneous. So we’re like a mighty rust ball. So, plenty of iron. Basically, the materials needed to make 240 TerraWatt hours of batteries are actually plentiful on earth. We don’t need to mow down the Amazon or anything like that!
We don’t need to do anything terrible to the environment to create 240 TerraWatt hours of batteries, in fact, there will be less mining required in a sustainable energy economy than is currently required. Really, this is a message of hope and optimism grounded in physical reality, it is not wishful thinking. We should be excited and inspired about the future.
And I am not suggesting complacency or anything like that and getting there faster is better than getting there slower, but we don’t need to live some terrible austere life and give up the things that we like. You can have the things that you like, in fact, even more of them, and the environment can be good. All the good things are possible, that’s what I’m saying.
We should be excited and optomistic about the future. We need to go build this, its a lot of work but you should not feel sad about the future regarding sustainable energy, it will happen! Elon Musk
Elon Musk: We should be excited and optimistic about the future. We need to go build this, its a lot of work but you should not feel sad about the future regarding sustainable energy, it will happen! We just want to make it happen faster rather than slower.
Tesla’s next generation vehicle
Michael Grimes: That was the first big takeaway, the next one that I had was your next phase of vertical integration, the relentless first principles thinking on vehicle design, battery design, factory optimization. Could you talk more on this?
Elon Musk: There’s a clear path to making a smaller vehicle that is roughly half the production cost and difficulty of our Model 3. That vehicle will really be used almost entirely in autonomous mode. The thing that is really gigantic for Tesla is autonomy and if people have used the Tesla full self driving and gave seen how rapidly the full self driving capability has been evolving, it should be obvious that that is by far the most profound thing.
Elon Musk: The total addressable market stuff, it’s like, guys, this is actually not the right way to think about it. Passenger vehicles right now only see about 10-12 hours of use per week. There’s 168 hours in a week, if those vehicle are autonomous they’re probably going to get used for 50-60 hours a week. That’s a 5x increase in the value of a car and it costs the same to make the car. At that point you basically have software margins in a hardware product, it’s the same. Total addressable market is everyone, all humans. Powerful.
Why Starlink’s speed is fast
Elon Musk: The Starlink team is doing an amazing job.
More than half the satellites in orbit right now are Starlink satellites. So if you add up all satellites launched cumulatively, they are less than Starlink. Starlink is currently providing global connectivity, you can get connectivity anywhere on earth from the most remote part of Antarctica to San Francisco. Anywhere. Full-level connectivity, high bandwidth, and low latency.
The latency is important because unless you’re in low earth orbit you cannot get a low latency. The geostationary satellites are very high, you’ve sort of got sometimes up to a second of latency from a geostationary satellite, all things inclusive. With Starlink satellites, we believe we can get the latency under 20 milliseconds.
For international communications, an interesting thing is that in fiber, light travels much slower than in air or vacuum. So in rough approximation, light travels about 300 kilometers per millisecond in air or vacuum but only just roughly over 200 kilometers per millisecond in fiber. So you’ve got roughly a 40% increase in speed of light going through the Starlink system than through fiber and it can also follow a more direct route.
Instead of following the coastline of the continents, it [Starlink] can actually have a more direct route. It’s a shorter route and inherently faster from a physics standpoint so it connects the world way better than fiber and is providing connectivity to people that either never had it before or where their options were extremely expensive or very low bandwidth.
So [Starlink] is helping out a lot of communities that never had access, especially when you consider that education is digital these days, that’s really how you can learn anything. You can basically learn anything for free on the internet if you have the internet! In terms of providing education abilities to remote communities, Starlink is doing a lot of good in that regard.
Starship going orbital
“We don’t want to be one of those lame, one-planet civilizations!” Elon Musk
Starship launch soon. Image courtesy Elon Musk.
Elon Musk: We’re getting ready for the first launch of Starship. This is a very difficult program. The rocket is roughly 2.5 times the thrust of a Saturn V so if and once it reaches orbit it will be by far the biggest rocket that reaches orbit, but more importantly it is designed to be the first reusable orbital rocket ever so that the key to extending life beyond earth is a fully and rapidly reusable orbital rocket.
This is a very hard problem given the constraints of earth. Earth has a thick atmosphere and strong gravity, it is literally barely possible to do this, that’s why its not been done before. We are getting close to our first orbital attempt of Starship, hopefully in the next month or so we’ll have our first attempt. I’m not saying it’ll get to orbit but I guarantee excitement. (audience laughter) It won’t be boring. I think it’s hopefully above a 50% chance of reaching orbit.
We’re building a whole series of Starships in South Texas and so I think we’ve got, hopefully, an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year. It will probably take up a couple more years to achieve full rapid reusability, which I can’t emphasize enough, is the profound breakthrough that is needed to extend life beyond earth because it lowers the cost of access to space by orders of magnitude. In the same way, let’s say there were no airplanes that were reusable, how expensive would air flight be? It would be insane. You’d have to buy a new airplane every time you flew somewhere and you’d have to tow a small airplane behind you for the return flight. That’s not going to scale.
So if things go well there, this vehicle could make life multi-planetary, that’s a really big deal. And it could make life on Mars real and that’s one of the great filters that any civilization has to pass through which is, ‘does this civilization become multi-planetary or not?’ This is one of the elements of the Fermi Paradox. I mean I sort of wonder that, if we are able to get to multi-planetary that will be a forcing function to improve spaceflight to become multi-stellar, to go to other star systems and I think we may discover that there are many long-dead one-planet civilizations. We don’t want to be one of those. We don’t want to be one of those lame, one-planet civilizations!
Austin at sunset, image courtesy Aeriel Austin, Instagram
Gail Alfar, Author, Military Veteran. Exclusive to What’s Up Tesla – March 12, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Tesla (the most American vehicle manufacturer) and Elon Musk in both making life better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
Support “What’s Up Tesla” and the important work done here. Contribute to Gail’s Coffee Fund! Thank you!
Elon Musk talks at Tesla Global Engineering HQ offices. Picture courtesy Tesla, Inc.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk graced Palo Alto with his presence to officially open their brand new Global Engineering Headquarters last Wednesday evening (February 22) It was an event filled with excitement and anticipation as hundreds of Tesla employees, engineers and potential recruits gathered to hear what Elon Musk had to say. It was a special opportunity for attendees to not only receive valuable information directly from Elon himself but get a first-hand glimpse into Tesla’s plans for the future! This blog post contains the entire transcript of Elon’s inspirational talk.
Tesla shared a pre-talk video featuring music, graphics, and a montage of Tesla’s products including the humaniod robot and then Elon Musk stepped onstage,
“Hello everyone, welcome to the grand opening of Tesla Global Engineering Headquarters. This is definitely the wildest party I’ve ever seen in Palo Alto. Next-level (laughs). I hope you all have a great time here tonight, and I’m excited to share some updates.
This year will be the 20th year since the creation of Tesla. It’s pretty wild to think what’s happened 2 decades, from basically a test ride in the AC Propulsion tzero to now (having) millions of cars on the road and we’ve got several models. We’ve got the Cybertruck coming out later this year which is going to be epic. And I think we’ve got a whole bunch of Cybertruck pre-production units that you can check out. Its going to be an amazing car, something that’s going to change the look of the roads.
It’s going to be great! We’re developing Optimus here. I mean we’re really building a better future for humanity right here in Palo Alto!
I’m just reflecting on the immense amount of stuff that has happened in the last 20 years. It’s like… whoah! In fact, we have now 48,000 employees in California. And we’re the biggest manufacturing employer in the state by a factor of two. Fremont manufacturing is the biggest automotive plant in North America, it has the highest output! Hand it to the Fremont team! Its pretty incredible what Tesla Fremont manufacturing is producing, just an incredible number of vehicles. We’re running 24/7, its incredible. Last year the Model Y and Model 3 were the No. 1 and No. 2 best-selling cars in the state of California.”
I mean we’re really building a better future for humanity right here in Palo Alto! Elon Musk
“Now when we started out, and actually for many years, they said what we were doing was impossible and then when we weren’t quite on schedule they would say we were just late and that’s why we specialized in making the impossible merely ‘late.’ (laughter) The sheer number of articles saying this was impossible is insane.”
Articles insinuating Tesla would fail. Image courtesy Tesla, Inc.
“And then I think we’ve also done a lot to get the whole industry and earth thinking in the direction of electric vehicles. We open-sourced our patents, made our patents available and we’ve really tried everything we can to encourage the rest of the industry to move toward sustainability. And that’s thanks to all of your hard work, so my hat is off to you!
When we started out, no one believed in EVs. No one was producing EVs, and now the industry has accepted that electric vehicles are the future, so, its pretty wild.”
Hundreds line up to attend Grand opening of Tesla HQ. Image courtesy Tesla, Inc.
“So this is our Global Engineering Headquarters, we’ve got a gigantic manufacturing facility in Fremont, we’ve got Lathrop. We’ve got a big center in Los Angeles and also operations in San Diego, so throughout the state doing software and hardware. Like I said, Tesla is as much a software company as it is a hardware company. We’re doing a lot (and) we’ve got stationary storage.”
“Tesla is as much a software company as it is a hardware company” Elon Musk
“We’re looking forward to Investor’s Day on March 1st, coming up soon. It’s going to be sort of Investor’s Day not just for Tesla investors but kind of like investors in earth and just sort of explaining how we get to a fully sustainable energy future and that people should have optimism and hope for the future. We shouldn’t be complacent, but people should not feel that there’s no hope for the future because there absolutely is and along with the rest of the industry we’re going to make it happen. So believe in the future! (applause) We really have alot of people here.”
“Although we are obviously expanding in many parts of the world, we’ve continued to expand in California the entire time. Every year we’ve grown our headcount in California significantly and we expect that to continue in the future. We’ve invested $5 Billion since 2016 (in California). Right now we’re doing almost $45 Million per day of value creation in the California economy.”
Tesla Engineering HQ. Image courtesy Tesla, Inc.
“This is our cool view of the Tesla Engineering HQ. The thing really warms my heart and I think is pretty incredible is that this is Hewlitt-Packard’s original headquarters. This is where they created Hewlitt-Packard, which was really the foundation of Silicon Valley. We’re, I think, inheriting an incredible legacy here and also they did really great decor and we’re quite appeciative of this nice place! Its a nice sort of poetic transition from HP to Tesla. We intend to keep carrying that torch forward.”
As a picture of the original Tesla Roadsters is shown, Elon continues, “Yeah that’s 2008 I guess, 15 years ago! I hope you guys have a fantastic time tonight, welcome to our new Global Engineering Headquarters and its going to be epic! We’re going to build the future here! Thank you!”
I was able to catch up with a representative of Tesla Owner’s East Bay who gave me this statement after attending the event:
“The event truly embodied the evolving story of Tesla as it comes full circle from its days as a small scrappy startup 20 some odd years ago, to its position on the forefront of the planet’s emerging technologies from sustainable transport to manufacturing, renewable energy, power storage, autonomy, Ai and robotics. All at HP’s old HQ, the birthplace of the modern tech movement. It isn’t about Tesla a Texas or California, New York, or Nevada company. This is now Tesla a global-American company. And securing the world’s best engineering talent here, means the best days for humanity are still ahead.”
In conclusion, I’m amazed at what Tesla has accomplished in the last 20 years, its astonishing to think that it all started with Elon’s test ride in the AC Propulsion tzero. From these early roots of Tesla to having millions of cars on the roads today, Elon Musk and the Tesla team have revolutionized the entire automobile, software, solar, and AI industry. I know Tesla won’t rest until they achieve their goal of helping all humanity transition to sustainable energy and transportation, which is why I believe working with Tesla Engineering is such an amazing opportunity. If you’re passionate about engineering or know someone who is, and want to be part of Tesla to change lives on earth for the better, then consider joining Tesla Engineering!
Tesla Career website screen capture courtesy Tesla, Inc.
Exclusive to What’s Up Tesla – This article was created by Gail Alfar with the goal to preserve this interview in text or written form for the purpose of 1. education and 2. preserving the brilliant insight and words of Elon Musk. February 25, 2023. All Rights Reserved.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time donation to support What’s Up Tesla
Make a monthly donation to support What’s Up Tesla
Elon Musk gives an amazing talk at World Government Summit 2023
Welcome back to my blog, I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s post as it is a good solid read. Elon Musk gives an amazing talk at World Government Summit 2023 (Feb 15) in Dubai. The reason I am focusing on this is I believe Elon’s words hold great value. We all want a better future and I hope reading this will inspire you to look toward a positive future for humanity. So relax, enjoy and get ready for these 14 important areas that Elon Musk covers in this great talk,
Why did Elon buy Twitter?
What will X.com be like?
What is Community Notes on Twitter?
How can governments and organizations tweet best?
Why civilizational diversity matters
Twitter’s next CEO
Elon’s thoughts on technology in the next 10 years
Elon Musk talks about the need to regulate Artificial Intelligence
Education: Elon Musk explains a better way to teach kids
How much time should children spend at school?
How does Elon balance his stressful and busy life?
As a father, does Elon restrict social media for his own kids?
Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter as a ‘Reverse Startup’
Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), Aliens
Below are Elon Musk’s words at World Government Summit 2023
Elon explains why he bought Twitter
“I mean I thought about creating something from scratch but I thought Twitter would perhaps accelerate progress versus creating something from scratch by 3 to 5 years. I think we are seeing a tremendous technology acceleration that 3 to 5 years is actually worth a lot. I mean, if you think I was a little worried about the direction, and the effect of social media on the world and especially Twitter I thought it was very important for there to be a maximally trusted sort of Digital Public Square where people within countries and internationally can communicate with the least amount of censorship allowed by law, and obviously that varies a lot by jurisdiction.
I think in general, social media companies should adhere to the laws of countries and not try to put a *thumb on the scale beyond the laws of the countries. I think this is something that is probably agreeable to the legislators and to the people of most countries. So that’s the general idea, it’s just to reflect the values of the people as opposed to imposing the values of essentially San Francisco and Berkeley, which are somewhat of a niche ideology, as compared to the rest of the world. I think Twitter was doing a little too much to impose a niche ‘San Francisco-Berkeley’ ideology on the world. You know, I thought it was important for the future of civilization to try to correct that *thumb on the scale if you will and just have Twitter more accurately reflect like I said, the values of the people of Earth. That’s the intention and hopefully we succeed in doing that.”
X.COM
Q: Long term vision for twitter?
“Well I think it would be, you know, have this long-term sort of vision of something called x.com from way back in the day which is sort of like an everything app. where it’s just maximally useful. It does payments, provides financial services, provides information flow, really anything digital. It also provides secure communications. You know, I think [the goal of x.com] is be as useful as possible, as entertaining as possible, and a source of truth if you want to find out what’s going on and what’s really going on then you should be able to go on the x app and find out. So it’s sort of a source of truth and a maximally useful system. And Twitter is essentially an accelerant to that sort of maximally useful everything app.”
What is Community Notes on Twitter?
“I think there’s something that we’re putting a lot of effort into called Community Notes. It’s currently just in English, but we will be expanding it to all languages. That is I think quite a good way to assess the truth of things where it’s the community itself basically the people of Earth who are basically, not exactly voting but competing to provide the most accurate information. So it’s sort of a competition for truth. I think it’s a very powerful concept to have a competition for truth, because you also said, like what is truth, it’s because what may be true to self, may not be viewed as true to others, but you want to have the closest approximation of that so I think the Community Notes thing is very powerful. I think we are trying to have as many organizations and people and institutions verified as being legitimately those people and organizations is important, and to have the organizational affiliation clearly identified so that if you want to find out if somebody’s actually, if an account is actually from a member of parliament or a journalist or if let’s say, a Twitter handle actually belongs to Disney corporation or something like that, you can go on Twitter and it’s sort of an identity layer of the Internet you can confirm that is, in fact, the case.
I think once you’ve got these interlocking, sort of identities, it’s actually very hard to be deceptive in that case, and it’s also, you have a reputation to protect at that point. So I think then people are far more likely to be measured in their response. And will be more reasonable, since they have reputational value at that point. So these are some of the ideas that I have, and you know I’m not saying that for sure it will succeed or that it’s going to be perfect but I am confident that it will over time head in a good direction. and I think that the evidence for that will be, do people find it useful? As we’re measuring sort of the total user minutes, but not just user minutes, unregretted used minutes which I think that that’s the key figure of merit. For example, TikTok has a very high usage but I often hear people say well. I spent two hours on TikTok, but I regret those two hours. I’m not trying to knock TikTok, but it’s just we don’t want that to be the case with Twitter. We want to say like ‘ok, you spent half an hour on Twitter, but you found it to be useful and entertaining, and a good thing in your life. and ultimately be a force for good for civilization,’ that’s the aspiration.”
How can governments and organizations tweet best?
“I think, generally, I would recommend really communicating a lot on Twitter. And I think it’s good for people to speak in their voice as opposed to how they think they should speak. Sometimes people think, ‘I should speak in this way that is expected of me,’ but it ends up sounding somewhat at times, stiff and not real. You know like if you read a press release from a corporation it just sounds like propaganda. I would encourage CEOs and companies and legislators and ministers and so forth to speak authentically. If there’s a particular policy to explain it. I think sometimes there’s a sometimes a concern about criticism but I think at the end of the day having some criticism is fine. It’s really not that bad.
I’m constantly attacked on Twitter, frankly. And I don’t mind, you have to be somewhat thick-skinned I suppose at times you know because they really try and twist the knife. But I think as a forum for communication, its great. I would just encourage more communication and like I said, to sort of speak in an authentic voice. Like sometimes people will have someone else be their sort of Twitter manager or something like that and I think people should just do their own tweets. And like sometimes you make a mistake or something, its fine. But I think, doing your own tweets, just like you would give a talk here or have a meeting at a summit, that’s the way to do it is to actually do the tweets yourself and convey the message that you want directly.”
Why civilizational diversity matters
“One thing I should say, I know this is called the World Government Summit, but I think we should be a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government if I may say that we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having, frankly, this may sound a little odd, too much cooperation between governments. If you look at history and the rise and fall of civilizations where all throughout history civilizations have risen and fallen but it hasn’t meant the doom of humanity as a whole because they’ve been all these separate civilizations that were separated by great distances.
While Rome was falling, Islam was rising so you had, you know, the sort of caliphate doing incredibly well while Rome was doing terribly. That actually ended up being a source of preservation of knowledge and many scientific advancements. So I think we want to be a little bit cautious about being too much of a single civilization because if we are too much of a single civilization then the whole thing may collapse.
I’m obviously not suggesting war or anything like that but I think we want to be a little bit wary of actually cooperating too much. It sounds a little odd but we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization that the whole thing doesn’t collapse and humanity keeps moving forward.”
Twitter’s next CEO
“Well, I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out, so I’m guessing probably towards the end of this year should be good timing to find someone else to run the company. I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year.”
Elon’s thoughts on technology in the next 10 years
“Let’s see, ten years… It’s always difficult to predict with precision, especially over a ten year time frame when it is changing so much. There’s obviously the transition to sustainable energy with solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles and if you look at the percentage growth from that, that is a very high percentage growth, although because of the massive industrial base of the current fossil fuel economy, even if all cars were 100% electric production immediately it would take 20 years to replace the fleet. This is still something that is quite gradual, its measured in at least 30-40 years type of time frame.”
Elon Musk talks about the need to regulate Artificial Intelligence
“On a more sort of near-term time frame, I think artificial intelligence is something we need to be quite concerned about and really be attentive to the safety of AI. You mentioned ChatGPT earlier. I played a significant role in the creation of Open AI. Essentially at the time I was concerned that Google was not paying enough attention to AI safety and so I went in with a group of other people and created Open AI. Although initially it was created as an open source nonprofit and now it is closed source and for profit. I don’t have any stake in OpenAI anymore nor am I on the Board, nor do I control it in any way. But Chat GPT I think has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become because AI has advanced for a while it just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people. So what really Chat GPT has done is just put an accessible user interface on AI technology that has been present for a few years. And there are much more advanced versions of that that are coming out.
So I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly, because think of any technology which is potentially a risk to people like if it’s an aircraft or cars or medicines and we have regulatory bodies that oversee the public safety of cars and planes and medicine. I think we should have a similar regulatory oversite for artificial intelligence because it is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine. And this may slow down AI a little bit but I think that that might also be a good thing. The challenge here is that government regulatory authorities tend to be set up in reaction to something bad that happened.
So if you look at say aircraft or cars, you know cars were unregulated in the beginning (aircraft were unregulated) but they had lots of crashes and in some cases, manufacturers that were cutting corners and a lot of people were dying. So the public was unhappy about that and so they established a regulatory authority to improve safety. And now commercial airliners are extremely safe. In fact, they’re safer than if you were to drive somewhere. The safety per mile of a commercial airliner is better than a car. And cars are also extremely safe compared to where they used to be.
The auto industry fought the introduction of seat belts as a safety measure for 10 or 15 years before finally the regulators made them put seatbelts in cars. That greatly improved the safety of cars. Airbags were another big improvement in safety.
My concern is that with AI, is that if something goes wrong the reaction might be too slow from a regulatory standpoint. If I’d say, ‘what are the biggest risks to the future of civilization?’ It’s AI, but AI is both positive and negative and has great promise, and great capability but also with that comes great danger. Just like with nuclear physics, you had nuclear power generation but also nuclear bombs. I think we should be quite concerned about it and we should have some regulation of what is fundamentally a risk to the public.”
Education: Elon Musk explains a better way to teach kids
Education should be more compelling and establish relevance
“With respect to education, I think in general there are some things that we could do to make it more compelling would be to explain to children why we are teaching a particular subject. The human mind is default to really forget anything that it deems unimportant, in fact human memory is really quite bad relative to the memory of your phone. Your phone can remember the entire contents of an encyclopedia down to the last letter and pixel. But human memory is terrible by comparison. The mind is constantly trying to forget things. But if you explain why a subject is being taught, that will establish relevance and is much more likely to result in motivation for kids. If you teach knowledge in the sciences as solutions to a problem, its much more effective.”
Examples
“Let’s say you’re trying to understand an internal combustion engine, well it’s actually better to take that apart and then say ‘what tools do we need to take it apart? We need a wrench and screwdriver and various other things and then you understand the reason for the tools. Mathematics and Physics and Engineering are like tools. If you teach to the problem then you establish the relevance of the tools then its actually much easier to remember mathematics and physics because they help explain how the world works as opposed to teaching them without explaining why. It’s like teaching to the problem but currently, we teach to the tool. It would be like having a course on screwdrivers or a course on wrenches but not understanding why you’re learning about screwdrivers and wrenches.
I think this is really quite a fundamental principle that should be applied in education. I think sometimes we do teach classes that children do not find useful and where the answer to the ‘why’ is actually not going to be a very good answer. Most people do not find advanced mathematics useful and are unlikely to find in their life, or the elements that they do find useful could be taught very quickly as general principles.
Critical thinking should be taught to children at a relatively young age. It’s effectively like a mental firewall to really think about when somebody tells you something is it cogent? Is it true? Or what is the probability that it is true? So that you can be taught to reject things that are untrue, or are more likely to be untrue and favor things that are more likely to be true. Critical thinking is very helpful for people to learn.”
How much time should children spend at school?
Elon was asked if he thinks children should go to school for 12 years,
“Twelve years is a long time I suppose, I mean humans do take a long time to mature so there’s emotional maturity, physical maturity, and mental maturity that is happening simultaneously with education. I suppose it could be done in 10 years, perhaps it does not need 12, but then is someone mature at age 16? They’re more likely to be mature at age 18. So I guess 12 years is probably not bad.
We probably don’t need an additional 4 or 5-6 years in college or university, that seems probably excessive. I think we could probably shave a few years off and be fine.”
As a father, does Elon restrict social media for his own kids?
“I’ve really not tried to restrict social media from my kids although that might have been a mistake, depending on which kid it is they’ve really been programmed by Reddit and Youtube I’d say. More than anything else, Reddit and Youtube. I think probably I would limit social media a bit more than I have in the past and take note of what they’re watching because I think at this point they’re being controlled by some social media algorithm which you may or may not agree with. I think probably one needs to supervise children’s use of social media and be wary of them getting programmed by some algorithm written in Silicon Valley, which may or may not be what you want.”
How does Elon balance his stressful and busy life? (Elon has worked 20-hour days)
“I should point out that a 20-hour workday is relatively unusual and rather painful but I do sleep 6 hours a night, and if I sleep less than 6 hours a night I find that I might be awake longer but I get less done. But I do have a worker (unclear) this amount I think relative to most people and that is pretty much 7 days a week and mostly from when I wake up to when I go to sleep. I’m not suggesting this is good for everyone and I think frankly I would like to work a bit less than that.”
Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter
Tesla tested vehicles in extreme weather conditions in the Middle East. Image courtesy Tesla, Inc.
“Like I say, Tesla went through some very difficult times, where it was on the ragged edge of survival and if I didn’t give it everything I got the company could have easily gone bankrupt. I was really on the verge of bankruptcy for quite a while. I don’t mean to suggest complacency at this point but it does require much less work to operate Tesla now versus the 2017-2019 time frame. Now it’s not at mortal risk of survival, it’s achieved economies of scale that make it not on the ragged edge of survival.
SpaceX also has a strong team and is able to make a lot of progress even if I spend less time there. It does help when I spend time there but it keeps making progress even if I don’t.
Twitter as a Reverse Startup
Twitter is still somewhat of a startup in reverse and so there’s a lot of work here to get Twitter in sort of a stable position and, like I said, to really build the engine of software engineering at Twitter and really have a great product roadmap and the people in place to implement that product roadmap. And so it is not my intention to work like crazy, I mean I think I still am, I’m comfortable with a mere 80-hour workweek. That would be fine! That is what I would aspire to.”
Unidentified Flying Object (UFOs), Aliens
Elon clarifies if he thinks reports of “sightings” are Aliens
“I don’t think it’s aliens, no. I do find the whole question of aliens a very interesting one. What is typically called the fermi paradox which is that if the universe is really is as old as science seems to think it is, where are the aliens? Have we really been around for 13.8 billion years? If so, shouldn’t there be aliens all over the place? The crazy thing is I’ve seen no evidence of alien technology or alien life whatsoever and I’d think I’d know. You know, SpaceX, we do a lot. I don’t think anyone knows more about space than me or at least space technology.
But I think it’s actually a troubling thing if there are no aliens as well. What that actually could mean then is that civilization and consciousness is like a tiny candle in a vast darkness and a very vulnerable tiny candle that could easily get blown out. We should therefore take great care with what may very well be this tiny candle in a vast darkness and make sure that it does not go out and that we send the light of consciousness beyond earth and do everything we can to ensure that the light of consciousness does not go out.”
“We should therefore take great care with what may very well be this tiny candle in a vast darkness and make sure that it does not go out and that we send the light of consciousness beyond earth and do everything we can to ensure that the light of consciousness does not go out.” Elon Musk
Exclusive to What’s Up Tesla – This article was created by Gail Alfar with the goal to preserve this interview in text or written form for the purpose of 1. education and 2. preserving the brilliant insight and words of Elon Musk. February 19, 2023. All Rights Reserved.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time donation to support “What’s Up Tesla”
Make a monthly donation to support “What’s Up Tesla”
Make a yearly donation to support “What’s Up Tesla”
Welcome back to my blog. It’s been 12 months since I first rented a shared office space to start “What’s Up Tesla.” I am committed to doing more to support the mission of Tesla and Elon Musk, as there is a long road ahead. In the coming year, I’ll keep dedicating time to this blog and my Podcast as we watch Tesla move with success through uncertain times and prove they are the only OEM that will thrive in 2023 and beyond.
Elon Musk spoke on StockMKTNewz (Dec 22, 2022 in a Twitter space) and his words were notable so I am sharing his talk with you. Some highlights are,
Elon aims to see Tesla grow quickly in a recession, “Let’s grow as fast as we can, without putting the company at risk”
Tesla is like no other car company. Elon explains, “the cars are upgradable to autonomy, and arguably an autonomous car is worth many times what a non-autonomous car is”
“I stand by my prediction that long term, Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world.” Elon Musk
Elon says he aims to see Tesla grow quickly in a recession, “Let’s grow as fast as we can, without putting the company at risk”
When asked if Tesla can sustain its current growth rate in the next few years or so (in a predicted recession), Elon Musk stated on StockMKTNewz,
“I’m just laying out what I see as, this is just my best guess at the future. It’s not like I have some incredible crystal ball that’s an exact predictor of the future, so with all appropriate caveats but the reality is, if we are in a recession, and I think we are in a recession, and I think 2023 is going to be quite a serious recession and it’s going to be, in my opinion, comparable to 2009.
I don’t know if it’s going to be a little worse or a little better, but I think it is likely to be comparable. It means demand for any kind of optional discretionary item, especially if it’s a big-ticket item will be lower with the FED increasing rates.
Like when you are heading into a recession you should be reducing the FED rate not increasing it. So that amplifies the difficulty, so now you have a sort of structural demand which is obviously going to be lower in a recession and you’ve amplified the effect of the cost of a car because they’re almost all bought with debt, so you get a double whammy is what I’m saying.
So the obvious choice in that scenario is you want to grow unit volume which case you’ll have to adjust prices downward or you want to grow at a lower rate or go steady, there’s sort of a choice there.
My inclination would be to still grow. Let’s grow as fast as we can, without putting the company at risk which would mean in that scenario profits would be low to negative during a recession, provided the cash position is okay.
I think that’s still the right move long-term because there’s something that Tesla possesses that other car companies do not which is extremely fundamental. That is the cars are upgradable to autonomy, and arguably an autonomous car is worth many times what a non-autonomous car is.”
“there’s something that Tesla possesses that other car companies do not which is extremely fundamental. That is the cars are upgradable to autonomy, and arguably an autonomous car is worth many times what a non-autonomous car is” Elon Musk
Tesla Model S with autonomy. Image courtesy Tesla, Inc.
Tesla is like no other car company
Elon Musk continued,
“So even if you’re margins are extremely low in selling the car, the subsequent upgrade to it being autonomous is worth a lot.
That’s something that no other car company can do. Only Tesla can do that.
I stand by my prediction that long term, Tesla will be the most valuable company in the world. I’m actually fairly confident that this will be what happens.
What I cannot predict, because there are many things outside of my control, is what will be the valuation along the way there. That is subject to a lot of emotional elements on the stock market subject to lots of macroeconomic conditions.
But I would say, long term Tesla is probably, my best guess, the most valuable company in the world in less than 5 years.”
“So even if you’re margins are extremely low in selling the car, the subsequent upgrade to it being autonomous is worth a lot. That’s something that no other car company can do. Only Tesla can do that.” Elon Musk
CONCLUSION
We are likely heading into a difficult recession in 2023. Elon Musk will not put Tesla, Inc. at risk and at the same time he will “grow unit volume in which case you’ll have to adjust prices downward.” This is a smart move as Tesla possesses something that no other car company has. Teslas are all upgradeable to autonomy. Elon said an autonomous car is “worth many times what a non-autonomous car is” and I agree.
I have been using Tesla autonomy for over 2 years now and it is advanced to the level where I can transport across the city of Austin during “rush hour” with zero disengagements. There are many Tesla owners that are having the same experience in different cities across the USA. However, the most valuable thing that no other car company has is Elon Musk for CEO. This is Tesla’s number one asset.
Austin, Texas photo courtesy Adrian N on Unsplash
Read about the magic of Tesla autonomy in these articles
If You Haven’t Used Autopilot Yet, Why Not? (3 Essentials) This article is for everyone who has ever thought, “I love my Tesla, but I will never do Autopilot, it’s too scary.” I am with you, it can be scary. This article covers 3 areas,
Tesla Autopilot is safer than a human driving
Enabling Autopilot during a drive is easy
You can use Autopilot on your daily drives and disable it anytime during a drive
Enjoying Tesla Autonomy What makes a road trip more fun? Tesla Autopilot definitely does! Freeway driving is also safer when there are eight cameras looking out for your family’s safety.
Exclusive to What’s Up Tesla – This article was created by Gail Alfar with the goal to preserve this interview in text or written form for the purpose of 1. education and 2. preserving the brilliant insight and words of Elon Musk. January 15, 2023
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time donation to support What’s Up Tesla
Make a monthly donation to support What’s Up Tesla
Elon Musk spoke with education minister Nadiem Makarim and youth at the B20 / G20 Summit on November 14, 2022. His talk was important because it provides us with tools to improve our own educational goals. This article contains the entire conversation and Elon’s response to questions. This interview is one of my favorites and I hope you’ll agree! It is a roadmap for personal growth and education. There are 8 main points that range from tools for productivity to daily habits.
Tools for Productivity: A Physics framework
Physics is the law, and everything else is a recommendation
Early life: Movies & Books that had an impact
Roadmap for Education: Early education in critical thinking and identifying fallacies. Learning what is relevant and eliminating mental obstacle courses
Careers that will be in demand: Sustainable Energy, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology
Proceeding with caution: Artificial intelligence and synthetic biology
Avoiding Big Mistakes: Place weight on both the heart and mind and welcome critical feedback from friends
Daily Habits: Be curious about everything, have a fearless sense of adventure
Tools for Productivity: A Physics Framework
Elon was asked to share what his tools for productivity and principles are, and how he does the amount of work that he does,
“Well, I do put in a lot of hours and I’m not sure I would actually recommend what I do to others, in the sense that I pretty much work all the time so you know it’s quite rare for me to take even a Sunday off so I’m not sure that’s that’s really, you know, I’m not recommending that to people. With regard to tools for understanding the world I think a physics framework is extremely helpful. In physics, they call it thinking from a first principles standpoint, where you try to understand the most fundamental truths in a particular situation, and then you reason up from there, and then you test your conclusions against what you believe to be the fundamental truths. So in physics, it would be like testing to see if you’re violating conservation of energy or conservation of momentum or something like that, and then constantly trying to be less wrong. So you should always assume that you are to some degree wrong, and you want to be less wrong. This is, I think, very important. It’s a little tougher on the ego, but it’s great for getting to the truth of things. Aspire to be less wrong.”
Physics is the Law, and everything else is a recommendation
Elon explained how he manages to continue successfully despite the many people who insist he will fail. He replied, “Well, I would go back to physics, in that the only things that are truly impossible are breaking the laws of physics. So, as long as you’re not breaking the laws of physics, it’s possible. It doesn’t matter what anyone’s opinion is. Physics is the law, and everything else is a recommendation. I’ve seen quite a few people break the law, but I’ve never seen anyone break physics.” Elon went on to explain that laws of physics are strong, saying, “Yes, you can certainly challenge the laws of physics but, they’ve been challenged quite well, and they’ve been found to be resilient.”
Early Life: Movies and books that had an impact
Elon (left) in 1976, with Tosca and Kimball Musk. Courtesy Maye Musk, A Woman Makes a Plan.
Elon shared some impactful moments from his early life,
“Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater. So you can imagine, if you see an incredible movie like that, and it’s the first time you’ve ever been in a movie theater, I think I was six years old, it’s going to have a really big effect on you.” – Elon Musk
“Well, I read a lot of sci-fi, and fantasy books, it’s not going to surprise anyone that I sort of like Star Trek, Star Wars, and that kind of thing. In fact, Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater. So you can imagine, if you see an incredible movie like that, and it’s the first time you’ve ever been in a movie theater, I think I was six years old. it’s going to have a really big effect on you. So, reading and watching a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, Lord of the Rings is probably my favorite book. Isaac Asimov had a huge effect on me, the Foundation Series. Robert Heinlein, ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.’ And then, in trying to find the truth of things I explored many avenues, and ultimately found that physics was the best way to explore the truth of things. At the risk of being a broken record on the physics front, I strongly recommend studying it, haha!”
Roadmap for Education: Early education in critical thinking and identifying fallacies. Learning what is relevant and eliminating mental obstacle courses
The interviewer asked Elon Musk to describe what education ideally should look like for today’s world. “Sure, well, when you’re trying to learn something, it’s extremely important to establish relevance, to say, why are you trying to learn this? Because our minds are constantly trying to forget things. So our minds are at a subconscious level trying to decide what is relevant and what is not relevant. So most of the things that you see and hear, your mind does not want to remember because there’s no point in remembering it, so you have to establish relevance. Once you establish relevance, your mind will naturally want to remember.”
“Explain the tools in the process of solving a problem, and then the tools will make sense” Elon Musk
“There’s, I think, two fundamentally different ways to promote education. One is by teaching to the tools, and the other is by teaching, where if you want to solve a problem, and trying to understand what tools you need to solve that problem. For example, it would be quite boring to have a series of lectures about wrenches and screwdrivers and winches and whatnot, without establishing relevance, but if you say ‘Well, let’s take apart an engine!’ Now how do we take this engine apart and put it back together? Well, we’re going to need screwdrivers, we’re going to need wrenches, we’re going to need a winch, we’ll need, maybe some Allen keys. You’ll have to take it apart, and then put it back together. and then you’ll understand in the process of doing that, why those tools are relevant. and you will remember them. This is a very simple but important principle, which is, ‘Explain the tools in the process of solving a problem, and then the tools will make sense,’ otherwise, they will seem irrelevant, and people will not remember them, and motivation will be difficult.”
The interviewer asked what needs to change from either a teacher or a curriculum perspective, and Elon replied,“Yeah, I think often, things are backwards. They’ll teach the tools, instead of teaching how to solve a problem, and then establish the relevance of the tools. So, you might take a course on calculus, for example, but you don’t know why you’re taking a course in calculus, it just seems like a mental obstacle course that doesn’t have any point. And actually for a lot of people I would say it probably is a mental obstacle course that has no point because unless you expect to use it in the future, there’s no point in learning calculus, at least at a detailed level. The principles of calculus are interesting to learn, but not the nuanced solving of equations. So, I generally say, What is it that somebody wants to do?, and then try to solve that problem and as you solve that problem, say, Well you need this tool, and you need that tool.”
“I think quite frankly, a lot of education is kind of pointless, and that people are taught a bunch of things, but they don’t actually ever use those things in the future” Elon Musk
“So, why go to the trouble of teaching people things that they will not use in the future? Quite frankly, I think a lot of education is pointless. Unless one simply wants to go through a mental obstacle course, to test people’s ability to go through a mental obstacle course. I think it’s debatable as to whether we should force people to go through these mental obstacle courses.”
“I Would Strongly Recommend The Principles Of Critical Thinking Be Taught At A Young Age” Elon Musk
Elon Musk with son X Æ A-Xii. Elon recommends Critical Thinking be taught in early childhood education.
“If I can make a strong recommendation for what should be taught in early education, it’s critical thinking. Critical thinking is incredibly important, because it creates a mental firewall to allow children to reject concepts that are not cogent. It’s sort of like having an anti-mind virus defense system. Critical thinking, if taught at a young age, creates a mental firewall that prevents false concepts from establishing themselves in people’s minds. So I would strongly recommend the principles of critical thinking be taught at a young age.”
Elon continued, recommending learning how to defend against fallacies. “And how do you defend yourself against mental trickery? People will often try various fallacies, and sort of trap you with fallacies. And so, having defense against fallacies would be a great course.”
Careers in High Demand: Sustainable Energy, Artificial intelligence, Synthetic Biology
The interviewer asked which careers might become the most desirable in the future, Elon replied, “Well sure, I think some of it’s going to be pretty obvious, you know, anything to do with sustainable energy is going to be pretty significant in the future. So if it’s to do with lithium ion batteries for stationary storage or for cars, aircraft, boats, that’s going to be very significant. Artificial intelligence will obviously be very significant in all fields for self driving cars, self flying airplanes, self piloting boats. I’d fully recommend learning those. These are very technical subjects, of course. There are many other worthy pursuits, but as a technologist, that’s what I would recommend. AI and sustainable technology.”
Elon continued,
“I think there’s a lot of opportunity in synthetic biology with the synthetic messenger RNA. That’s going to be a revolution in medicine, I think comparable to going from analog to digital. Synthetic RNA is like medicine going digital. It’s a much more profound revolution, than I think most people realize. But I am a technologist, so there’s plenty of good things to do that don’t involve technology. But from a technology standpoint, I would say, sustainable energy, AI, synthetic biology are the three big areas.”
Proceeding with Caution: AI and Synthetic Biology
What technology scares you the most in terms of its risk? Are there any technologies that scare you? Elon replied, “Well I think we should be a little bit concerned about AI because we don’t want digital super intelligence that goes wrong and causes damage to humanity. So I think we do need to be cautious with artificial intelligence.”
“You know, on the synthetic biology front, that also has the potential to be dangerous, because it is possible to create a far more damaging virus than would occur in nature. These technology tools are definitely double edged swords. The more powerful the technology, the more careful we need to be in how we use it.”
Nadiem Makarim asked what Elon thinks Indonesia needs to do to become a global economic power by 2045. “Well, I think widespread education obviously makes sense. I think having high speed Internet conductivity throughout Indonesia is going to be extremely important. I mean, think about the Internet, if you’ve got a low cost device and access to the Internet, you can learn anything. MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has lectures, which I believe are available for free on YouTube, so that you could learn practically anything you want from the Internet for free, providing you have Internet access, and at least some level of education to allow you to learn more from the Internet. So I think widespread Internet access is essential for that because it just allows people to learn whatever they want to learn at whatever pace they are comfortable learning.”
You want to take the ‘Aspire to be less wrong’ approach versus, ‘You’re right, and let’s prove that you’re right.’ Elon Musk
Elon Musk at B20 / G20 Summit, November 14, 2022. Elon speaks with education minister Nadiem Makarim and takes questions from audience
Elon took three questions from the audience. The first asked what mistakes he made in the past and how he coped with them. Elon responded, “To be frank I’ve made so many mistakes, that it would take far too long for me to list them all. So I would not want to bore people with the extremely long list of mistakes that I have made in the past. But I think the higher principle here is to always aspire to be less wrong over time. So, to acknowledge that you’ll always be to some degree wrong, but that you wish to be less degree wrong over time. If you can be a little less wrong every day, I think you’re doing great. It’s hard to be less wrong every day, but frankly, if you can be less wrong most days, that’s a pretty big victory.”
“Take the position that you’re wrong, and you wish to be, aspirationally, slightly less wrong” Elon Musk
Avoiding Big Mistakes: Place weight on both heart and mind, and welcome critical feedback from friends
“I think it’s important to place weight on both the heart and mind, not simply the mind. Some of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made in terms of hiring people was that they were strong of mind, but not of heart. Both matter a great deal. The higher principle is to just assume you’re wrong and you want to be less wrong and just try to be less wrong every day. Seek critical feedback, especially from friends. Often your friends will know what you’re saying is wrong, but they don’t want to hurt your feelings so they won’t tell you. But if you ask them to tell you, and say that it won’t hurt your feelings, then they will tell you. I think getting critical feedback from friends is very helpful. Yeah, what I’m saying is that we’re always wrong, you should just assume that you’re wrong. Because we are. You want to take the ‘Aspire to be less wrong’ approach versus, ‘You’re right, and let’s prove that you’re right.’ Take the position that you’re wrong, and you wish to be, aspirationally, slightly less wrong.”
In answer to a question about how a small but successful online business could expand to a global level, Elon advised, “Widespread Internet is going to make a big difference, minimizing the cost per useful byte of information is very important. Over time there will be so many devices being made, PCs, iphones, android devices, there will soon be more devices made than there are humans that exist in the world. So, at least if the device is going to be secondhand, it’s going to be extremely cheap. And I think we are seeing something of a plateau in device capability. Like it’s increasingly difficult to add incremental functionality to a phone or a laptop at this point, which means that they will just become lower and lower cost and more and more affordable. But really, the key is being online and having an affordable device. I think the trends are very much in that direction, so that is a reason to be optimistic about the future.”
Daily Habits: Be Curious about everything, have a fearless sense of adventure
“Well, in terms of day to day habits, I think, being curious about the world, how the world works, curious about technology, curious about everything, really. I think curiosity is a very important thing to have. And then, to be somewhat obsessive about the curiosity. Obsessive curiosity is probably the number one thing. And I think having a sort of, sense of adventure is also good. I think sometimes people are afraid of things when they shouldn’t be afraid of things. Like you want to make sure that your fear is proportionate to the actual danger. And I think, sometimes our instinctive fear is not proportionate to the actual danger. So you want to try to rethink things, and say ‘Okay, is that fear justified? Will some event actually happen?’ You know you sort of have to sometimes look at your instinctive fear, and question it, and decide whether that is really a valid fear, and often it is not. And simply looking at the fear, will make it go away. “
Elon Musk has some great recommendations for productivity and one of them is not to emulate him. He says he works every day and does not take breaks. This would not be good for you. Elon does recommend cultivating a “First Principles” standpoint based on the laws of physics. He says, “physics is the law, and everything else is a recommendation!” He loved watching Star Wars and Star Trek as a kid, and read such books as Lord of the Rings, The Foundation Series. and, ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.’
On the education front, Elon Musk outlines a roadmap that includes teaching what is truly relevant and critical thinking, as well as identifying fallacies and eliminating mental obstacle courses. He also highly recommends learning Physics.
As far as being cautious about technology, he is mainly concerned about the risks of AI and synthetic biology. Al could possibly harm humanity, and synthetic biology could create a far more damaging virus than would occur in nature.
When Elon Musk talked about mistakes he made in the past, he said they were too many to list, and he also said, “I think it’s important to place weight on both the heart and mind, not simply the mind. Some of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made in terms of hiring people was that they were strong of mind, but not of heart.”
Hike & Bike Trail of East Austin, Colorado River, Courtesy CVSherman
Exclusive to What’s Up Tesla – This article was created by Gail Alfar with the goal to preserve this interview in text or written form for the purpose of 1. education and 2. preserving the brilliant insight and words of Elon Musk. November 26, 2022.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time donation to support What’s Up Tesla
Make a monthly donation to support What’s Up Tesla
In a rare appearance, Elon Musk talked at the 29th Annual Baron Investment Conference, on November 4, 2022 in NYC. For this article, I am sharing the parts of his talk that were about Tesla. Thanks to Ron Baron for this opportunity to hear Elon talk. Highlights,
Why he works so many hours
Why Tesla patents are free
Why autonomy matters
Elon’s First Principles Algorithm, 2 examples
Finding out the “Dilbert Ratio” of a company
On being all-in with his teams
Extreme Engineering Challenge
Tesla needs to get into the mining business
Investing in TSLA and the value of Autonomy and Optimus
Self-Sustaining Tesla Superchargers for the Zombie Apocalypse!
Tesla and SpaceX
“I think what I’m working on has an important effect on the future, in the case of Tesla, I think it’s fair to say that Tesla has significantly accelerated the advent of sustainable energy. Before Tesla, no one was doing electric cars, and now as a result of Tesla, I think, almost every major car company in the world is building electric cars and I think that’s a pretty big deal. But there’s still a long way to go to transition the world to a sustainable energy economy and so we still have a lot of work ahead of us at Tesla, but that’s our goal there.”
“For SpaceX, I think it’s important for the future to be exciting and for humanity‘s existence to be assured of in the long term, I think we must become a multi-planet species and a space-faring civilization. We’re here like 4 1/2 billion years after earth got started, 13.8 billion years into the age of the universe. It’s only now recently the last 5000 years that we even invented writing. I would say, date the first civilization by when there was the first writing, which was in ancient Samaria around five or 6000 years ago. So, we’ve basically just been here for a very brief instant. All of human civilization is a blink of an eye, if there was an eye, on an evolutionary time scale. So, I think its important we take the actions to ensure that the light of consciousness continues because we should really view consciousness as a small candle in a vast darkness that could easily go out.”
Elon Musk explains why Tesla’s Patents are 100% Free
“I think there is a role for patents. I would say if somebody’s spent a lot of money developing a particular medicine and has to go through expensive stage three medical trials and then they finally get some medicine that is approved but where the drug itself is cheap to manufacture, then I think a patent, in that case, makes sense, otherwise, no one would go to the trouble of doing stage three medical trials.”
“There are definitely roles for patents. In the case of Tesla, our goal is to advance sustainable energy and we can’t just do it by ourselves, we need the whole industry to go that way, so we gave them our patents for free in order to help them accelerate electric vehicles.”
The Importance of Autonomy
“We’ve not formally announced our next car program, so I can’t talk too much about our vehicle program or programs that have not been announced, but we do expect to make cars that are more affordable than the current Model 3 or Model Y (big applause by the audience here). I think by far the biggest factor is autonomy, in terms of the value of the car because right now, cars get driven for about 10 or 12 hours a week maybe 1 1/2 hours a day, but there are 168 hours a week and so if they were autonomous the cars could drive for 50 or 60 hours to see a five-fold increase in the utility of the car that could do autonomy. This is a really gigantic thing. It would also mean that we wouldn’t need anywhere near as many parking lots and this would also be helpful for the environment because you would need far fewer cars.”
Elon explains his First Principles Algorithm
Best part is no part! Interior Tesla Model Y. Courtesy of Tesla, Inc.
“Well, I think the full explanation or at least an accurate explanation would take a long time. because the first approximation of a car is made of 10,000 unique parts and process steps. Tesla is, at this point, probably the best at manufacturing in the auto industry, which I think nobody was expecting.”
“Well, I’ve got this first principles algorithm that I find to be very helpful in the design and manufacturing of anything. People here may find it helpful. The first thing that you should do is make the requirements that you’ve been given less dumb. Whatever constraints and requirements you were given, they were to some degree, dumb, and you want to make them less dumb. If you don’t start with this, then you get the right answer to the wrong question. And the requirements must be given from a person who can explain the requirements, not from a department, because then you don’t know who to talk to. Then step two is to delete the part or delete the process step. This sounds extremely obvious, and yet, over and over again, we have found that parts are not needed, they were put in there, just in case, or by mistake. Or there was a step that someone thought was needed but was not actually needed. This sounds insanely obvious, but we have deleted so many parts from the car that did nothing.”
Two Examples of First Principles Algorithm
“There are so many examples, one example is there were three fiberglass mats on top of the battery pack. They partially covered the battery pack. I was on the battery pack production line, and the number one thing choking battery pack production was gluing these fiberglass mats on top of the battery pack. So the reason I repeat this algorithm myself is I try to first do things backwards. First, I try to automate it, then I try to accelerate it, just go faster, then I try to simplify it, and only then did I delete it. Because it turns out that the team at Tesla that does noise and vibration minimization, sort of making the car quiet, thought that the fiberglass mats were there because of the battery safety team for battery fire protection. Then I asked the battery fire prevention team what they were needed for and they said noise and vibration (laughter here)! So then we had two cars drive, with the microphone in each car and you could not tell the difference. So, we went to all that trouble for a part that should not exist.”
First Principle Algorithm: “So the reason I repeat this algorithm myself is I try to first do things backwards. First, I try to automate it, then I try to accelerate it, just go faster, then I try to simplify it, and only then did I delete it.” – Elon Musk
“Another example: And these were examples of chokepoints in the entire production system, I was running around the production line, just trying to fix the production line, just like a maniac, like a Tasmanian devil, just running around the factory, like a lunatic. The body production line for Model 3 was stuck because we had a laser welding cell to weld a small crossbar beam in the passenger footwell of the front seats. I’m looking at this beam, and I’m like “what the heck does that do?“ because the entire factory is stopped trying to get this laser weld cell to work. And I can’t imagine what this thing could do, and the production team said it was for crash safety. So then I called the crash safety team and I said ‘Is this for crash safety?’ and they said ‘Oh no this didn’t do anything we should delete it!’ It turned out to be totally useless, they forgot to tell the production team!”
What’s Your Dilbert Ratio!?
“Honestly, a bunch of these things just feel like you’re living in a Dilbert cartoon. I’m like, ‘Oh no what’s that one?’ Like any given company should have a question, ‘What’s your Dilbert ratio? It’s not zero! Dilbert quotient? Try to keep it low!”
Elon is All-In with his Teams
Around the time Elon Musk was living / working in Tesla Femont Factory, he gave a tour to Marques Brownlee on August 20, 2018. See https://youtu.be/mr9kK0_7x08
Ron Baron asked Elon Musk if this was him or somebody else who found these production problems. Elon responded,
“It’s literally me, it’s not someone else who did this, I was living in the factory in Fremont and Nevada for three years straight. It was my primary residence. I’m not kidding, literally. I actually slept on a couch in a tent on the roof at one point. And for a while there I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open in the factory for an important reason. And it was damn uncomfortable on that floor, and when I woke up, I would smell like metal dust.” Ron Baron mentioned that he went to visit and they bought Elon a couch. Elon responded that “I stopped using the couch, which was in a conference room, and I just slept on the floor under my desk so, during shift change, the entire shift could see me, and that’s important because, the team, if they think their leader is sort of off somewhere having a good time, or drinking mai tais on a tropical island, which I could definitely have been doing and I would have much have preferred to do, I’m not actually a masochist, I think! (Elon raises one eyebrow and smiles) But the thing is, since the team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, just with nothing, they knew I was there. and that made a huge difference. and they gave it their all!” (lots of applause)
Ron asked Elon how he retains his best employees, wondering how Elon prevents them from leaving when they don’t really need the money. Elon said,
“Well, we do have that problem a little bit, so as a company has prosperity, and then people become wealthy, then for a lot of people, once they become independently wealthy, they just can’t bring themselves to work, or they just don’t want to work, and that’s totally understandable. No judgment! And so you know, I have a lot of friends who are extremely talented, they had some success earlier in life, and they just decided that was enough trauma, a good friend of mine said “Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” So when people say to me, “What can you do to encourage entrepreneurs to start companies?” I say if you need encouragement, don’t start a company!”
Extreme Engineering Challenge
“Well, my memory for technical matters is very good. But I think what a lot of people don’t realize, is what I do 80% of the time is engineering. You know it’s actually quite rare for me to give a talk. My day-to-day work at SpaceX and Tesla is almost entirely engineering and design and also production. Production is key, although I consider that to be part of engineering. Starship is something special. The holy grail, like the critical thing needed to make life multi-planetary and for humanity to be a spacefaring civilization, is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket!”
On Starship: “It’s a very difficult engineering challenge! If this was a video game, the setting would be at extreme difficulty. Not impossible, but extreme difficulty!” – Elon Musk
“We’ve gone most of the way there with Falcon 9, you’ve seen the rocket booster come back and land. And we also recover the nosecone or faring. But we do not recover the upper stage. So we’ve gotten to the point where we are about 70 to 80% reusable with the Falcon 9. With Starship, we are going for 100% reusable. iI’s difficult to see how profound a change this will be. A fully rapidly reusable orbital rocket has the potential to drop the cost of access to space by a factor of 1000. (applause) And I should say also, Starship is a very big rocket. It’s more than twice the thrust of a Saturn 5 and about twice the mass. The entire ship is designed to land propulsively. So it can land on any solid surface in the solar system. If we can make Starship work, then it enables us to over time, to get anywhere in the solar system! It’s a very difficult engineering challenge! If this was a video game, the setting would be at extreme difficulty. Not impossible, but extreme difficulty!”
Tesla Delivery Logistics and Tesla Mining
Tesla vehicles ready for transport at South Lot Tesla Fremont, picture credit Gail Alfar, author, 9/30/22Model Y await transport at Giga Texas near Austin, credit Joe Tegtmeyer.
“I believe I’ve said in the past publicly that our aspiration is to reach 40,000 cars a week by the end of the year. We had a bit of criticism for our Q3 (2022) results because we had a lot of cars in transit and the reason why is we got too big for our cars to be transported in the final few weeks. There just weren’t enough car carriers, and there weren’t enough shifts. But it’s actually good in the long run to smooth out deliveries and actually have cars in transit at the end of the quarter because then you’re not rushing to get everything delivered by the end of the quarter and paying all the expedite fees.” When asked if cars could be autonomously delivered, Elon replied, “We can also, if you’re in the area, we can have the car just drive it to you!”
On Tesla Mining: “But it is looking increasingly like for some of the critical elements of batteries that Tesla will need to get into the mining business: Mining and refining.” – Elon Musk
“The scaling constraints change as time goes by. At the beginning, we were very vertically integrated, because suppliers did not take us seriously. The best suppliers would not talk to us because a car start-up had not been successful in the United States since Chrysler in the 1920s when I believe they started up. So it’s been a century since a car start-up was successful in the U.S., that was not a foreign car company coming in that was already successful in their own market. For an American car start-up, Tesla is the first success in 100 years!
So, you can imagine, if you are an auto supplier, that does not sound like a smart, financial decision. So we had to build a lot of the stuff ourselves and be vertically integrated to create the car. And then that ended up being an asset. Because now we understood so much about the supply chain and what it took to build a car. So we were able to design an integrated vehicle that actually needed far fewer parts, and cost less and weighs less and has higher performance. But it is looking increasingly like for some of the critical elements of batteries that Tesla will need to get into the mining business: Mining and refining. We’ve never contemplated investing in Glencore, I’m talking about Tesla doing it ourselves.” (response to Ron’s comment)
Investing in TSLA and the value of Autonomy and Optimus
Tesla Optimus humanoid robot prototype at 5th China Expo. is compact and efficient. More photos here.
“I actually rarely try to convince anyone to invest in Tesla, and many times I’ve said to people, ‘Don’t invest in Tesla,’ and ‘Our stock is too high!’ But then people just ignore me, and keep buying the stock for some reason.”
“I think at a very high level I’d say autonomy is insanely a fundamental breakthrough. And no one is even close to Tesla for solving generalized autonomy or generalized self-driving vehicles. No one’s even close. And with the self-driving, as I talked about earlier, the car becomes roughly 5 times more useful. But it costs the same for both. Now can you imagine what would happen if the company was doing like 25 to 30% gross margins but suddenly that same thing was five times more valuable? What would that do to the value of Tesla and the value of that car? It boggles the mind, actually. So if you think of net present value and future cash flows, if you actually do the math on that, it’s insane. Then there’s also the Optimist program, which is our humanoid robot. We will leverage our manufacturing expertise and the intelligence we’ve developed for self-driving to have a useful humanoid robot. Now, the economy is fundamentally GDP per capita times capita. If you no longer have a constraint on capita because of the useful humanoid robot, it is not clear that there is any limit to the size of the economy!”
Self-Sustaining Tesla Superchargers for the Zombie Apocalypse!
Finally, in response to a question about if Tesla would use street lamp posts for charging cars, Elon Musk emphasized Tesla’s goal for Supercharging, “I think they are already doing that in London, and the long-term goal for our supercharger stations is that they will have Tesla Solar and Batteries at them so that as many as possible are self-sustaining. That the supercharger stations generate energy during the day, and then also have a localized battery pack so that people can charge at night. The Tesla supercharging stations would continue to function even in a Zombie Apocalypse! You just never know! That’s coming one day, we know it is, it’s just a matter of time!”
CONCLUSION
Elon Musk and Ron Baron at the Baron Investment Conference 2022
Elon works so many hours 16-18 hrs/day because the mission of Tesla and SpaceX is so important for humanity.
Tesla patents are free for all carmakers in order to accelerate the transition to all-electric.
Autonomy is a huge deal: Elon says, “…right now, cars get driven for about 10 or 12 hours a week maybe 1 1/2 hours a day, but there are 168 hours a week and so if they were autonomous the cars could drive for 50 or 60 hours to see a five-fold increase in the utility of the car that could do autonomy. This is a really gigantic thing.”
Elon’s First Principles Algorithm is very helpful in the design and manufacturing of anything.
Every company has a “Dilbert Ratio” and it’s not ZERO!
Elon is all-in with his teams, especially when there are challenges facing the teams.
Extreme Engineering Challenge: Starship is the biggest to date!
Tesla needs to get into the mining business, Elon said, “But it is looking increasingly like for some of the critical elements of batteries that Tesla will need to get into the mining business: Mining and refining.”
We are going to enter an Age of Abundance! Elon said, “We will leverage our manufacturing expertise and the intelligence we’ve developed for self-driving to have a useful humanoid robot. Now, the economy is fundamentally GDP per capita times capita. If you no longer have a constraint on capita because of the useful humanoid robot, it is not clear that there is any limit to the size of the economy!”
Self-Sustaining Tesla Superchargers with solar & batteries will function in the Zombie Apocalypse!
Author’s Note: Elon Musk also spoke about Twitter and X .com, you may listen to the full talk here. I write about Tesla and sustainable energy, so did not include those aspects.
whatsuptesla.com 