Elon Musk opened up his Austin home for an interview last week, and you could see his levitating Tesla Cybertruck in the background, along with AI and Mars art. You may watch the full interview on X.

Katie Miller: Nice to see you, Elon. So I want to take us back. It’s January 20th. You are in the Roosevelt Room—if you remember this—getting sworn in, and they hand you a computer and a phone.

Elon Musk: Right.

The DOGE Origin Story & Roosevelt Room Handoff

Miller: I want to go back to what happened next. I think the story of DOGE from your perspective has never been told. What was your first thought on how DOGE was going to proceed?

Elon: Well, I guess I couldn’t believe I was there, for the most part, it’s like, it all seemed extremely surreal at the time. You know, DOGE was a made-up name… that had been made up, I don’t know, two or three months before… and… based on internet suggestions… and… I was going to call it the Government Efficiency Commission, and then… someone on the internet said, “No, it should be the Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE.” I’m like, “That sounds great.” So we just kind of made up a department.

Miller: Do you think you were successful?

DOGE Wins, Waste, Cuts, and Why He’d Never Do It Again

Elon:We’ve been a little successful—somewhat successful, at least.

We’ve cut a lot of funding for things that made no sense and were completely wasteful.

For example, there were probably $100–200 billion a year in “zombie” payments. Simply requiring a valid payment code and explanation before money goes out stopped most of them.

We pushed that change into the main Treasury system and several others.

It seems insanely obvious, but roughly 2–3% of government payments really shouldn’t be happening—and they’re surprisingly hard to kill.

Very few people ever tell the government, “Please stop sending me money.”

Miller: Would you ever do DOGE again?

Elon: Do you mean would I repeat history, or… or would I…

Miller: Two ways to think about it? One is if you could go back and start from scratch—like it’s January 20th all again. Would you go back and do it differently? And knowing what you know now, do you think there’s ever a place to restart? Not saying others in your stead—you go back and restart doing DOGE.

Elon: [Sighs] I mean, no, I don’t think so. Would I do it again? Probably not. I’m not sure.

Miller: Would you do DOGE again knowing what you know now?

Elon: I mean, the thing is, like… I think instead of doing DOGE, I… I would’ve basically built… you know, worked on my companies essentially. So… and not… and the cars, they wouldn’t have been burning the cars. 

Miller: You gave up a lot, yeah. When you cut off the money flowing to political corruption, they lash out hard. Big time.

Elon: So they really want the money to keep flowing. … so if you stop it from flowing, there’s like a very strong reaction to… to stopping the money flowing.

Miller: After you were in DC for a while, did you become disillusioned with how it operates?

Elon: Well, I wouldn’t say I was super disillusioned to begin with. I mean, the goal is always to have the government do as little as possible.

The single biggest issue is the massive transfer payments going to illegal immigrants. Essentially we’re paying people to come here from somewhere else, in huge numbers, including flying them in. You don’t need a border wall if you’re flying them in, then fast-tracking them to citizenship, making them dependent on government payments, and counting on them to vote hard left. It’s basically voter importation.

If you create a gigantic money magnet—“come to America from anywhere and we’ll pay you tons of money, give you lots of free stuff”—you’re going to get a lot of people taking you up on that offer.

People say this is fake. I point to Ilhan Omar, who was literally voted into Congress by a large Somali community in Minnesota (which is really far from Somalia), or the pattern we’ve seen with mayors and local officials elected the same way.

And then there’s California, which is the same situation, big time.

Basically, we just don’t want to turn the country into a communist hellhole.

Miller: If you’ve said in the future that no one’s going to need to worry about money or work because AI is going to take care of the rest—AI and robotics. What do you mean that people won’t have to work in the future?

Elon: Assuming the current trend of artificial intelligence and robotics continues—which seems likely—AI and robots will be able to do anything that humans want them to do, essentially. So hopefully not more than that, but AI and robotics will be able to provide all the goods and services that anyone could possibly want.

Miller: But you wouldn’t need to work—like, what would you do with your free time?

Elon: People will be able to do whatever they want with their free time. Work will be optional.

I just want to separate what I wish would happen from what I predict will happen, because people get confused about that. They think that what I predict is what I want.

What I predict to happen is not the same as what I want to happen.

If I could, I would certainly slow down AI and robotics, but I can’t. It’s advancing at a very rapid pace, whether I like it or not.

Miller: Is AI what keeps you up at night?

AI Future: Work Becomes Optional (But Elon’s Terrified)

Elon: It used to be that point… I don’t know. I… I wouldn’t say there’s anything in particular keeping me up at night right now—except that.

But if you ask if I wake up having nightmares? Oh, AI. Yeah. Actually… [laughter] I’ve had a lot of AI nightmares. I had AI nightmares many nights in a row.

What am I supposed to do about it?

Miller:  What’s your biggest irrational fear?

Elon: I try not to have irrational fears.

Elon: None.

Elon: If I find an irrational fear, I squelch it. I don’t believe… fear is… 

Fear is the mind killer. 

Miller: Well, on average, how many hours do you sleep a night?

Elon: Six. You can tell based on my X posts.

Miller: Yes, you can.

Elon: People have actually mapped them, so it’s very clear when I’m sleeping and when I’m not. I tried having less than 6 hours sleep, although I’m awake more hours per day, my cognitive function is reduced. So for my natural sleep… I actually timed it with the phone. They can get a phone app, but time it. It’s 5 hours 56 minutes. That’s what the phone said.

Miller: What’s an average day for you look like?

Elon: Well, I have a lot of inbound communication. So… it’s information triage. I try to segment the days so that there’s not too much context switching because arguably, context switching is difficult. It is hard not to context switch if you’ve got an inbox full of stuff. … but you can think like… if you had to context switch every 3 seconds or every 30 seconds or every 3 minutes, the context switching cognitive penalty would be very high. Every 3 seconds…and you’re talking about switching between, say, Tesla, X… xAI, SpaceX, and personal… SpaceX, then personal. And even within Tesla and… and SpaceX, there are many different things. I’m also getting the stuff on X—like random news things, you know, like people being burned alive and stuff like that. You’re like, what the hell’s going on in this country?

Miller: Who’s the funniest person you know in real life?

Elon: You know, President Trump is very funny. He’s got a great sense of humor.

Miller: President Trump is very funny.

Elon: He’s very funny. He’s like… naturally funny. It is somewhat… effortless. I mean… , you know, when he… had Mamdani in the office and… , they asked him if he… saw… thought the president was a fascist, and the president said, “Just say yes. It’s easier that way.”

Miller: Yeah. [Laughter]

Elon: Don’t worry about it. Just say yes. Awesome.

Miller: Who do you look up to the most?

Elon: The Creator.

Miller: What’s your current position on God?

Elon: God is the Creator.

Miller: You don’t believe in God though, do you?

Elon: Well, I believe this universe came from something. People have different labels.

Miller: When’s the last time you did something extremely ordinary, like go to Target or CVS?

Elon: I can’t go to things where there’s the general public because… , I… I’m there… there’s an immediate… “Can I have a selfie?” line that forms. And… and these days, in particular, in light of Charlie Kirk’s murder, there are serious security issues. It’s not that I don’t want to. I simply can’t. 

Miller: Has Charlie’s murder changed how you do things, or were you already locked down pretty well before that?

Elon: It certainly reinforced the severity of the situation where life is on hardcore mode. You make one mistake, and you’re dead. And it only takes one… one mistake.

Miller: What’s one moment in your life that you could live again just to feel it?

Elon: Well, I mean, obviously when my kids were born or the first time SpaceX got to orbit or Tesla made an electric car work.

Miller: You’ve had a lot of them.

Elon: It’s a lot. There’s a lot coming down the pike.

Miller: Like what?Simulation Theory & The One Rule: Keep It Interestingnetflix

Starship, Mars, and Becoming Multi-Planetary

Elon: Starship. The degree to which Starship is a revolutionary technology is not well understood. It’s the first time there’s been any rocket design where full and rapid reusability is possible. This is the first design where success is in the set of possible outcomes.

Miller: Are you talking about V3 or V2?

Elon: We could have made V2 reusable, but there were a lot of performance improvements for V3, so it made sense. There are like 10,000 different changes between V2 and V3.

“There are like 10,000 different changes between Starship V2 and V3” – Elon Musk

Elon: If there are historians in the future, they’ll look back at Starship and say it was one of the most profound things that ever happened.

Historic events fit on the evolutionary hall of fame: single-cell life, multicellular life, mitochondria, plants vs. animals, life going to land. Top 10 is life becoming multi-planetary.

It needs to be sustainably multi-planetary—planetary redundancy. Starship is capable of that for the first time in history. No AI was used to create it, so the AI will appreciate that.

Miller: Are all your companies working toward that goal?

Elon: Tesla is mostly about making sure life on Earth is good. xAI too. Multi-planetary means Earth’s got to be good and you need another planet.

People think going to Mars is an escape from Earth—like billionaires fleeing. No. Mars will be very dangerous, much less comfortable than Earth. Early settlers will have a higher risk of death. Cramped, uncomfortable. Food won’t be as good. You’ll work hard. It may not succeed. That’s the sales pitch.

Miller: Do you want to go?

Elon: Same as when people came to America.

Maybe if there had been social media back then, they would’ve said “We’re all dying” and put a damper on voyages.

Miller: You talk a lot on X about wardrobe—why does current fashion need to evolve?

Elon: My son Saxon said, “Why does everything look like it’s 2015?” And I was like, damn, it does. Stylistically, nothing has changed in a decade. The ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s all had definitive styles. 2000s and 2010s? Less and less. We should spice it up.

Show someone a picture from 2000 vs. 2025—hard to tell the difference.

Miller: What’s a conspiracy theory you believe in?

Elon: Which ones haven’t come true at this point? We’ve run out.

Elon: Aliens? No evidence. I’ve asked the SpaceX senior team—no one has seen any. UFOs are just unidentified objects—could be weapons prototypes.

Elon: Neil Armstrong—Neil A spelled backwards is Alien. Coincidence?

Miller: You believe we went to the moon?

Elon: We went to the moon a few times. We didn’t just go to the moon. We actually got a little bored and started playing golf on the moon. We literally did. Whacked a golf ball on the moon.

Miller: What’s the biggest misconception about you?

Elon: How would I know?

Miller: Everyone thinks you’re a difficult person to work for. I think you’re very kind. I’ve never heard you yell at an employee. Everyone at your companies is incredibly mission-driven.

Elon: Why would talented people work at the companies if they were mistreated? They’d leave.

Starbase: From Sandbar to Rocket City

Miller: The idea behind Starbase?

Elon: We needed something inspirational. We kind of have a lot of star things, you know. So, we got Starlink, Starship. Well, where would Starship depart from? Starbase? I mean, Starbase is, as you’ve mentioned, it’s like it’s probably the coolest place on Earth.

Miller: I agree.

Elon: …and it used to be nothing but a sandbar at the mouth of the Rio Grande, literally three feet above sea level. We built the biggest rocket factory on Earth there, plus two giant launch towers, right on the riverbank inside the Rio Grande floodplain, on that same sandbar. It had to have an inspirational name, so we called it Starbase. Then we went ahead and incorporated it as an actual legal city. You don’t see brand-new cities get born very often.

Miller: The last time there was a company town, it was Disney World.

Elon: Yeah. I think Ford had some kind of like company town situation, but yeah, Disney World is—it’s literally his name.

Miller: Yeah.

Elon: laughing I’m Walt Disney. This is my world.

Miller: Yeah.

Elon: I’ve gone from land to world. , they got incorporated as a city and got tax exemption which was like a whole big deal.

Miller: Yeah.

Elon: I’ve been to Disney World probably ten times, maybe more than ten, but at least ten.

Katie: Because Cape Canaveral is right next door.

Elon: Exactly — that’s why. Whenever we were down there with the older kids waiting for a launch out of the Cape, the second the scrub or hold was called, the only thing they wanted to do was hit Disney World or Harry Potterland. So we ended up going a lot.

Miller: What’s your favorite ride?

Elon: I’m sort of tempted to say Space Mountain, I suppose. Yeah, probably Space Mountain. I mean, I do think Space Mountain needs an upgrade.

Miller: It’s a little herky-jerky. The—it doesn’t look quite as sci-fi as it used to.

Elon: You know, it’s—it’s like it’s like the day before yesterday’s tomorrow, but just till yesterday.

Miller: What’s your favorite age to parent your kids?

Elon: Generally, kids are the most fun between age five and 10.

Katie: Do you think humanity is inherently good or is it just trying to be?

Elon: The concept of good wouldn’t even exist without humanity. I do think humanity is on balance, good. I generally believe that increasing the amount of consciousness in the universe is a good thing — trying to understand the nature of the universe, which you can only do by expanding conscious awareness.

I’ve thought about how we got here: we started as a hydrogen gas cloud that condensed into stars, those stars exploded, the debris re-condensed into new stars, exploded again, and 13.8 billion years later here we are. One fun question is: how many times have your atoms already been at the center of a star? On average it’s about three or four. And how many more times will they be? Estimates vary, but it looks like we’re roughly halfway through the total lifecycle. So measured by the number of times your atoms will sit in the core of a star, we’re about at the midpoint of existence. If you really zoom out, that’s the big picture.

Miller: What’s one invention that’s made us worse, not better?

Elon: Maybe short-form video [laughter] seems to be rotting people’s brains.

Miller: What’s one piece of technology you hope never gets invented?

Simulation Theory & The One Rule: Keep It Interesting

Elon: I hope inventions that can destroy us all never get created. Obviously I hope nobody ever engineers a virus that can kill every human — that’s the low-hanging fruit. More broadly, I hope we never invent anything that destroys consciousness itself.

I think the future’s going to look very interesting. I have this theory about predicting the future: the most interesting outcome is the most likely. If simulation theory is accurate that makes perfect sense, because if someone is running a wide range of simulated futures they’re going to stop the simulation when it gets boring; that’s exactly what we do in our reality. When SpaceX or Tesla runs simulations to understand how a car, robot, or spaceship will work, we run thousands of them on the computer. The simulations we actually pay attention to are the most interesting ones. The simulation where everything goes perfectly on the rocket? We don’t really look at that; it’s fine, but boring. We test all sorts of oddball failure modes, but we don’t waste time on the ones where the rocket just explodes instantly on the pad because that’s not interesting either. So we hunt for the envelope of flight paths where the rocket can actually make it to orbit without blowing up, we find those boundaries, and then when we launch the real rocket we do everything possible to stay inside them.

Another way to think about it: we could be an alien Netflix series. That series only gets renewed if the ratings stay high. Our one job is to keep it interesting so they don’t turn the computer off.

Miller: Are the ratings good?

Elon: Yeah.

Miller: Okay.

Elon: You can even look at it through a Darwinian lens: if you apply natural selection to simulation theory, only the most interesting simulations survive and keep running. Therefore the most interesting outcome is also the most probable one — because the alternative is instant cancellation. So really, humanity has exactly one job: keep it interesting.

Miller: Do you think social media has made people more honest or more performative?

Elon: Social media definitely makes people more performative. At the same time, it also gives us way more raw, real-life video of things that are actually happening, and anything truly interesting instantly goes viral. So we get both: tons of people doing whatever it takes for a few extra views on TikTok, Reels, or X, and at the same time real videos that directly challenge the official narrative but are undeniably authentic.

Miller: When you rolled out the country-of-origin labels on X, were there any accounts that surprised you — ones you assumed were American but turned out to be somewhere else?

Elon: I don’t obsess over it, but the feature does make it harder to fake. You can still just pick a broad region like “Asia” or “Europe,” but if every post, photo, and pattern screams one continent while the account pretends to be from another, it gets obvious fast. We’re not trying to dox anyone down to their street address — showing the continent is plenty. I think that’s fair.

Rapid-Fire Lightning Round

Miller: Yeah. Okay. So, in every episode we’ve played would you rather. Okay. Would you rather save humanity from extinction on Earth or guarantee its survival on Mars?

Miller: Would you rather save humanity from extinction on Earth or guarantee its survival on Mars?

Elon: It’s a false dichotomy. Earth is vastly better than Mars, full stop. But if we want to become a true multi-planet species (which is the only real insurance policy against extinction), Mars is literally our only viable option. It’s brutally hard, but not impossible. As Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said: Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.

Miller: Would you rather be a Marvel superhero or a Bond villain?

Elon: I think it would depend on which Marvel superhero or which Bond villain. I suppose I’d rather be a Marvel superhero. They did model Iron Man in the movies after me.

Miller: You were in the Iron Man movie, right?

Elon: Yes.

Miller: That’s pretty cool.

Elon: Yeah. Robert Downey Jr. and Favreau met with me and toured SpaceX and stuff. So, and in fact, Iron Man 2, a large part of the movie is filmed in SpaceX. If you look at—if you watch Iron Man 2, you’ll see it’s a SpaceX factory in the actual background.

ELON MUSK: “They did model Iron Man in the movies after me. I was in the Iron Man movie. Robert Downey Jr. met with me and toured SpaceX. Iron Man 2, large part of the movie is filmed in SpaceX. If you watch Iron Man 2, you’ll see, that’s the SpaceX factory.”

Miller: That’s so cool.

Elon: Yeah, it was cool. We had Scarlett Johansson doing martial arts in the lobby, actually. And you expect me to believe this is all real? It’s a simulation.

Miller: What are the odds?

Elon: Yeah. I mean, if you were me…

Miller: No, I agree with you.

Miller: Would you think this is real or a simulation? 

Miller: Your life is a simulation.

Elon: Yeah. And I like doing all the side quests and everything.

Miller: Yeah. What’s your best side quest?

Elon: DOGE. Probably. [Laughter]

Miller: Okay. Would you rather launch a social network with no algorithm or a rocket with no manual override?

Elon: Who came up with these questions?

Miller: Just keep going. These are funny. Maybe not to you [clears throat] ‘cuz they’re too trivial. 

Elon: What do you mean? Like, so that with an algorithm means that you basically, you only see the people you follow.

Miller: Like it’s just a mess. Like it was Twitter before you bought it.

Elon: Yeah. There is the sort of people you follow and then there’s a recommendation algorithm. I think probably in December we’ll finally have a half-decent recommendation algorithm.

Miller: It’s a lot better recently. 

Elon: So it really is just trying to show people stuff they’d be interested in, but there’s an enormous amount of AI horsepower being applied to this where Grok, poor thing, is reading it all, it’s going to read all 100 million posts per day which is…

Miller: Does that take up a lot of compute?

Elon: Hopefully it doesn’t destroy its mind or something.

Miller: Yeah.

Elon: Yeah, it does take a lot of compute. Like most, most posts are… there’s a lot of spam and scam stuff so that can be easily discarded I suppose, but then you’ve got to take 100 million pieces of content and match that to, I don’t know sometimes three or 400 million people per day. So that’s a lot of matching.

Miller: My algorithm used to look a lot like other people’s when you open their X account. Now mine is very unique compared to other people’s.

Elon: Well we really are kind of at the… This is just the beginning kind of thing. So, what I mentioned, like Grok reading everything and recommending any given thing to anyone, should go live in December. So the acid test for this is: Are you seeing content that you find really interesting from accounts you’ve never seen before? If that’s happening then the algorithm is working. Like it should be possible for somebody to post content as a new user with no followers and if that content is excellent, then it gets seen by a lot of people. 

So, can an account with a small number of followers or a new account, if the content is intrinsically excellent, can that content be seen by a lot of people? That’s our goal.

Miller: All right, last one. Would you rather invent time travel or teleportation?

Elon: Actually, those things are almost the same thing in that you can’t break the speed of light without breaking reality. And you know, if you could teleport somewhere instantly — if you’re talking about teleportation faster than the speed of light — presumably it would break our reality, as would time travel. Unless — there is a very important conditional here — unless we’re a simulation.

Time travel does not break a simulation.

People do tend to get wrapped up in knots with the time travel thing because they try to simultaneously say something must be logically consistent but logically inconsistent. That’s impossible. But if you think of it like a video game, and say, okay, you’ve got various saved games and you can go back and restore a saved game from a prior start point, you still have your other saved games and there are many games going on in parallel. They don’t have to be consistent with each other. That’s a false assumption. If we’re a simulation, we might be somebody’s video game or TV show or something like that. Like I said, we’re just going to keep it interesting so they don’t turn the computer off.

[Laughter]

What do you want? I’m just saying if that’s true, keep it interesting or they’re going to turn off the computer and they might—Please don’t delete us!

Please don’t delete us. Please don’t delete us, we’ll keep it interesting. 

Miller: You keep it interesting.

Elon: Yeah. So, if the most interesting outcome is the most likely, what do you think are the most interesting things that can occur? 

Now, the most interesting thing is not what you want. It’s just as viewed by a third party. Let’s say — this is just for argument’s sake — we were an alien Netflix series and you were trying to maximize your viewership, you know, maximize your ratings. It’s actually an interesting thought experiment. It’s not that interesting if everything just blows up. It’s over. That’s not that interesting. It’s not that interesting if there’s a calamity that wipes out all the humans. The show just ended. But I mean, fortunately and unfortunately, if there’s drama — like war or something like that — that is interesting. You know, people will go to movies and watch, say, a World War I movie where people are getting blown up from cannon shells, and they’re in the movie theater eating popcorn, drinking a soda. You wouldn’t go to a movie where everything was just perfect and stayed that way. You’d leave the theater.

Miller: Good romance story?

Elon: There’s always a story arc. There’s always an arc. , and it’s generally not a linear arc. So, it’s not going to be like things start here and just go straight up and to the right and end up in a good place for something like that. It’s usually ups and downs. The classic sort of story arcs essentially, you know, act one, act two, act three. You have an initial rise in act one, full back in act two,  back in act three with a happy ending if it’s a comedy or a sad ending if it’s a drama. If you look at President Trump’s story, it’s more interesting that he lost the intermediate term and then won his second term after that.

Miller: What are you watching on TV right now?

Elon: I am irony man. Something like that. I’m paraphrasing.

[Laughter]

Elon: What am I watching actually? Right now I’m watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the TV series Turtles in a Half Shell, Total Power. Little X wants to watch that. I’m watching things that the kids want to watch. Rewatched Dodgeball last night.

Miller: It’s a good movie.

Elon: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Elon: If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.

Miller: If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.

Elon: What?

[Laughter]

Elon: Yeah. [Laughter] High motivation to dodge if somebody’s throwing wrenches.

Miller: What song instantly puts you in a good mood?

Elon: The Final Countdown by Europe.

[Laughter]

Miller: Heard that song a lot. Do you read the instructions or just wing it?

Elon: What’s the goal?

Miller: Like if you’re putting something together, do you read the instructions or do you wing it?

Elon: If it’s a simple thing, I’ll wing it. If it’s a complex thing, I’ll look at the instructions. 

Miller: If you had to start from scratch today with only $1,000, what would you do?

Elon: Well, I did originally come to North America with like, I don’t know, $2,500 Canadian — so maybe two grand US — one bag of books and one bag of clothes, arriving in Montreal at age 17. That’s how I started out. At this point I have a lot of knowledge. A lot of things would have to go wrong for that to happen again. It’s like… am I just emerging from prison perhaps [laughter] with a stipend? All my companies have been confiscated? I mean, it would take Armageddon — which hopefully doesn’t happen — like next-level Ragnarök… and I lost.

Katie: Yeah.

Elon: What the hell?

It’s a bad hand. I mean, it’s basically impossible for someone to have all the knowledge that I have and then be dropped down to a low-resource situation. Because the reality is that either something truly catastrophic has happened — like civilization has melted down — or I’ll just be able to ask people to give me money with the promise of a high return, which is what I’m able to do right now.

Miller: Yeah.

Elon: Like if you give me a dollar, you will get back much more than a dollar.

Miller: Yes.

Elon:  So this is kind of an impossible dichotomy, because civilization would have had to have been destroyed or something. In which case, $1,000 is not going to solve your problems. You know, you can’t do much with a [laughter] if you’re wandering around radioactive craters, and you’re in like, you know, Fallout or whatever. Then $1,000 is not going to solve anything. And if civilization hasn’t melted down, then I’d probably just talk people into giving me money—which I’ve done before.

[Laughter]

Miller: If you weren’t running your companies, what random job would you enjoy doing the most?

Miller: If you weren’t running your companies, what random job would you enjoy doing the most?

Elon: I don’t know if that’s all that random, but I’d like probably write video games or something like that. I did that at one point. I like solving problems, so I like building things. I built a lot of things. Like a lot.

Miller: What do you eat in a typical day?

Daily Routine, Sleep Hacks, and Cheeseburger Supremacy

Elon: Well, these days I start off with a breakfast of steak and eggs and coffee. And then dinner tends to vary. I usually don’t have lunch or if I do something very small. And then dinner, depending on whether it’s social or not, will vary in cuisine. I like a wide range of cuisine.

Miller: What’s your favorite food?

Elon: American food is my favorite food.

Miller: Like pizza or a cheeseburger?

Elon: Like pizza, cheeseburger… cheeseburgers. Cheeseburger is probably… if I had to say there’s only one thing you can ever have for the rest of time, which admittedly would be a bit monotonous, but it would probably be a cheeseburger! Cheeseburgers are amazing! It’s a genius invention. 

I’ll tell you a funny story about when I was living in LA and I took my older boys out for lunch to Sugarfish, which is a very  kind of uptight sushi restaurant.

In fact, it’s on the menu of the restaurant, it says, “Do not ask for soy sauce.”  because the chef has put on the right amount of soy sauce and you can’t have any more. And if the chef doesn’t think you need soy sauce, you can’t have soy sauce. That’s what it says on the menu basically.  So it is an extremely strict sushi restaurant. And so the waiter is going around asking everyone what they want. And then it comes to Saxon, and Saxon says, “I’ll have a cheeseburger.”

[Laughter]

Elon: And the waiter’s like, takes a moment for the waiter to recover because no one’s ever asked for a cheeseburger at this, you know, very strict sushi restaurant. Took him like 30 seconds to realize he has just been asked for a cheeseburger because you’re not even allowed to ask for soy sauce. So, when he finally recovered, he said, “We don’t have cheeseburgers.”

[Laughter]

Elon: And Saxon, Saxon goes at the top of his voice, “What?” Like, “What kind of restaurant doesn’t have cheeseburgers?” Then he said, “Fine, I’ll have a hamburger.”

I don’t know what you got against dairy, but…yeah, they don’t have hamburgers either.

Miller: Did he stay for the rest of the meal?

Elon: Yeah, but he was nonplused. He was like, I can’t believe this place doesn’t have cheeseburgers. I mean I like barbecue, which is good because I’m here in Austin.  I mean if it’s Haute Cuisine, I like French food as well, but not every day, just once in a while.

Miller: If your friends described you in one emoji, what’s the emoji?

Elon: I guess the emoji I use the most, which is the laughing emoji. 

Miller: All right. And we close on this question every episode. If you could host a dinner party with three people, dead or alive, who’s coming to dinner, and what are you eating?

Closing Thoughts & Dinner Party with History’s Giants

Elon: Maybe Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Nicola Tesla. I there’s there’s actually a lot of people I’d like to I would have liked to talk to and we’ll we’ll eat, I guess, whatever they’d like. , I think if you’re going to if this is a once in a-lifetime thing, I think you’d want to have some epic, you know, 12 course meal or something like that.

Miller: at least.

Elon: Yeah. But some Yeah. You want to go all out for that dinner? I think you’re probably not going to serve cheeseburgers unless they want it.

Miller: Yeah.

Elon: Maybe one of the courses could be like a tiny cheeseburger. Those don’t taste as good as the big ones, though.

Miller: No, but they could. It’s just they don’t try. There’s nothing. You could make a tiny cheeseburger taste just as good as a big cheeseburger

Elon: if you try it.

Miller: Have you ever had a tiny cheeseburger that actually tastes good?

Elon: Rare, but yes.

Miller: Okay.

Elon: 1% of the time.

Miller: Fair.

Elon: But usually it’s too much bread and it’s dry.

Miller: Correct.

Elon: Yeah.

Miller: And then like there’s not enough meat in proportion to the bread.

Elon: Yeah.

Miller: Right.

Elon: But could you make a tiny cheeseburger that’s good? Of course. Like you’re not breaking, you’re not like getting any Nobel Prize with this. You know, [laughter] you can definitely make a tiny cheeseburger. It’s physically possible. I’m saying it’s just rare.

Miller: Thank you for doing this.

Elon: You’re welcome.