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

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

January 27, 2026 Gail AlfarLeave a comment

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

Elon Musk: We are going to make this interesting!

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

Elon Musk: I don’t know, five, haha!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry Fink: Narrow.

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

AGING

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

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

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

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

Larry Fink: There are open models now everywhere.

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

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

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

Larry Fink: It’s energy. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

SOLAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry Fink: Really that quickly!?

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

SPACE

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

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

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

Larry Fink: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry Fink: Six months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 14, 2026 Gail AlfarLeave a comment

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

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

Elon’s origin story surfaces.

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

Dave jumps in.

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

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

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

Elon: Aspirationally [building an AI gaming studio].

Because:

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

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

Then the conversation ascends to simulation theory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join my conversation with @elonmusk on AGI timelines, energy, robots, and why abundance is the most likely outcome for humanity's future, alongside my Moonshot Mate @DavidBlundin!

(00:00) – Navigating the Future of AI and Robotics
(04:54) – The Promise of Abundance and Optimism… pic.twitter.com/4e4Lstx4ox
— Peter H. Diamandis, MD (@PeterDiamandis) January 6, 2026

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

January 14, 2026 Gail AlfarLeave a comment

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

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

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

Elon: Doing right now, energy is the foundation.

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

Elon: I mean, so the sun is everything.

Elon drives the point home with scale that rewires your brain

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

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

Fusion?

Peter D.: Any interest in fusion?

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

Peter D.: Giant coal plants.

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

Solar is the only scalable path

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

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

Elon: Maybe two or three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xAI is solving it first

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

My 2 Cents

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

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

Tesla Plans 304-Stall Supercharger Station in Firebaugh

January 14, 2026 Gail AlfarLeave a comment

Tesla plans to build the world’s largest Supercharger station with 304 stalls, including 16 for Tesla Semis, in Firebaugh, California.

Tesla plans to expand its existing Supercharger site in Firebaugh, California, into the world’s largest with a total of 304 stalls — 288 for passenger vehicles and 16 dedicated for Tesla Semis — once complete.

This represents an 85% increase over Tesla’s current largest site (164 stalls at Oasis in Lost Hills, California). The project, approved via a conditional use permit last month, adds 232 new car stalls to the existing 56 (some sources note the current count as around 72, but the core expansion figure holds). It includes a separate area for Semi operations with its own access routes, plus an amenity building and outdoor seating primarily for truck drivers.

Here are examples of large-scale Tesla Supercharger sites for context:

Tesla: Largest Supercharger in the world: 168 charging spaces, 100 ...

Dreaming about last weekend Firebaugh take over. @elonmusk https://t.co/s0FUlRTz9u
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) March 13, 2021

Tesla Opens Its Largest Solar-Powered Supercharger Site in ...

Firebaugh sits along Interstate 5, a key corridor connecting Southern California ports to Central Valley and Bay Area distribution hubs. This strategic spot has made it a priority since the original site opened in 2020 as Tesla’s then-largest in the US with 56 stalls.

Why Firebaugh and why now

The expansion reflects long-term planning by Tesla’s charging team, coordinated with local utilities and jurisdictions. It accounts for forecasted EV adoption growth, with built-in flexibility to adjust pace based on real demand.

A Tesla Charging team member with years of experience emphasized this deliberate approach.

Here is the post from Tesla’s Max DeZegher, who has been building Superchargers since 2014:

Projects like Firebaugh are years in the making, and happen in coordination with the utility and jurisdiction.

It takes long-term forecasting, planning and flexibility (decelerating/accelerating based on demand), but @TeslaCharging will keep up with EV adoption. https://t.co/MVKbBHGQeE
— Max (@MdeZegher) January 13, 2026

The site’s location supports both consumer travel and commercial trucking, especially as Tesla ramps up the Semi program. Dedicated Megachargers for Semis signal confidence in heavy-duty electric transport along this major freight route.

Reactions from Tesla enthusiasts and observers

Enthusiasts and Tesla-focused accounts quickly highlighted the scale as a bold step in infrastructure for EVs and trucking.

Sawyer Merritt broke down the details early, noting the existing 56 stalls.

Here are key posts capturing the excitement:

NEWS: Tesla plans on building the largest Supercharger station in the world, with a whopping 304 charging stalls in total, including 16 Tesla Semi charging stalls.

• 288 charging stalls for cars
• 16 stalls for Tesla Semis
• Amenity area

This Supercharger location will have… https://t.co/laYFE5sTug pic.twitter.com/rZ7fRcGvW0
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) January 13, 2026

BREAKING: $TSLA TO BUILD “LARGEST” SUPERCHARGER STATION WITH 300 STALLS 👀

Telsa owns the new gas station ! pic.twitter.com/7am54qw2Om
— TheSonOfWalkley (@TheSonOfWalkley) January 13, 2026

So what

This move positions Tesla far ahead in high-capacity charging, especially as more non-Tesla EVs gain access to Superchargers and Semi deployments increase. It underscores the company’s commitment to scaling ahead of demand along critical corridors, potentially reducing wait times and supporting broader EV and electric trucking adoption in California and beyond.

Firebaugh’s rural setting along I-5 provides ample space for this growth.

Here is a map view of the Firebaugh area:

Elon Musk Talk with Diamandis, Part 1

January 10, 2026January 25, 2026 Gail Alfar1 Comment

PART ONE

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

THIS ARTICLE WAS UPDATED ON JAN 18TH, 2026

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

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

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

Elon Musk: Yeah

Blundin: With some AI assistance, I assume…

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

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

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

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

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

Elon Musk: Grok keeps updating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Diamandis: Did you ask it a question?

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

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

Blundin: A little wrinkled on the clothing.

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

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

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

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

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

Cameron’s Movie vs. Star Trek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon Musk: I’m a glutton for punishment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be realistic, but, as Monty Python would say, always look on the bright side of life! https://t.co/ISdddxdpQl
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2025

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

January 1, 2026 Gail AlfarLeave a comment

January 1, 2026 – In a surreal and entertaining moment to close out the year, Elon Musk unexpectedly joined an X Space on 30 December titled “The Year Ahead 2026,” hosted by @AdrianDittmann—a user long famous (and occasionally suspected) for sounding eerily similar to Elon himself.

The result was a light-hearted, mind-bending conversation in which the two voices—virtually indistinguishable—greeted each other as “other me” and dove into an optimistic preview of what Musk believes 2026 could bring for Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and humanity’s future in space.

The highlight clip captures roughly five minutes of the exchange. Below is a mostly verbatim transcript (with some of Adrian’s longer, rambling comments lightly summarized for readability), manually transcribed due to the extreme voice similarity that confounded automated tools.

Transcript

Adrian: Yo Elon, what’s up man? Long time no see. Or like here rather because you know, “Spaces.”
Elon: Hello other me.
Adrian: Hi other me, that’s a good one! Yeah, so I’ve seen your year has been quite the adventure.
Elon: There’s been a lot, yeah. It’s been quite a year. I think 2026 is going to be a real banger year!
Adrian: Indeed, indeed.

(Adrian mentions the upcoming midterms and “narrative engineering,” then notes he’s very busy with work. Elon asks what the work is.)

Elon: What’s your work?

Adrian: Sorry, come again?

Elon: What work?

Adrian: Manufacturing stuff.

Elon: Okay, cool. What have you been making?

Adrian: I kind of don’t want to talk about it—it’s not entirely relevant. It’s kind of like a luxury product type thing, not that high up. It’s quite simple. I just don’t want to talk about it too much because I don’t want to bring attention to those people. I don’t want any harm to come to them, you know what I mean. So I just don’t talk about it as much.

Elon: Okay.

Adrian: Doing some automation stuff now. It’s pretty fun.

Elon on Tesla and SpaceX

Elon: Well, Tesla should have widespread robotaxi. That’ll be a big thing for Tesla in ’26. Optimus 3 will launch, and then hopefully SpaceX will achieve full reusability with Starship. Those are the pretty giant ones.

Adrian: I assume the first major shipments with Starship are just going to be like Starlink satellites, right?

Elon: Yup. And then we are going to go to the Moon!

Adrian: Oh yeah, yeah. Definitely. The space compute thing is like a really good accelerant, I think. So SpaceX becomes the major delivery company of choice then.

Elon: Yeah, haha.

(Adrian asks if Elon has thought about manufacturing on the Moon, noting that low gravity allows creating materials difficult or impossible to produce on Earth.)

Elon: Well, I think the biggest opportunity on the Moon is to actually make solar cells and radiators—so you’re manufacturing on the Moon anything that weighs a lot. Chips can maybe still come from Earth because they weigh very little. And then you can use a mass driver to put a billion tons of AI-powered satellites into orbit per year.

Adrian: Mass driver basically being like a kind of rail gun. I just like “rail guns”—it sounds cleaner. Like if you were on Dyson spheres before, pivot to this.

Elon: Well, this will create a Dyson swarm where there are essentially a bunch of intelligent satellites around the Sun.

(Adrian asks if manufacturing could be done in zero-gravity orbit instead, or if even lower gravity than Earth’s—like the Moon’s—is still needed.)

Elon: You need mass. Mass must come from somewhere. You need a lot of tonnage.

(Adrian asks if there will be a lot of tunneling (“boring”) on the Moon or if bases will mostly be surface structures, adding that underground lava caves make more sense.)

Elon: Ahhh, sure. We’ll figure it out. The most important thing is to get serious tonnage from the Moon in order to send even way more serious tonnage from the Moon. You can scale to a hundred terawatts of AI compute per year from the Moon.

(Adrian asks about magnetic shields for protection; Elon responds.)

Elon: Superconducting magnets could shield against solar wind and even high-velocity small objects. It’ll be fine—we already have 9,000 satellites in orbit, so we know what it’s like being in space. But… I randomly saw your chat. I have to head back to Tesla work meetings.

Adrian: Well, thanks for coming!

Highlights

Tesla: Widespread unsupervised robotaxi deployment in 2026 is expected to be a major milestone.
Optimus: Generation 3 of the humanoid robot is slated to launch and start performing useful tasks.
SpaceX: Full rapid reusability of Starship (including booster and ship catches) targeted for 2026, with initial major payloads consisting of Starlink satellites.
Lunar Ambitions: Manufacturing solar cells, radiators, and heavy components on the Moon, followed by using mass drivers (electromagnetic railgun-like launchers) to deploy massive quantities of AI-powered satellites at far lower cost than Earth launches.
AI Compute at Scale: Musk foresees scaling to hundreds of terawatts of AI compute per year, enabled by lunar resource utilization and orbital deployment.

My take: This was an unplanned and certainly unannounced X Space for Elon Musk. It appears he had a moment in between meetings to simply drop into the Space and chat. I think Elon would enjoy it if we all did this more. Back in November, I dropped into a Space, and got to chat, and it was memorable. If you’ve never done it, try it! In fact, when Elon does things like this, he’s actually working in X—it’s his job to try out the product. We’re lucky he bought X for the crazy price of $44 billion! Elon made this a fittingly futuristic way to ring in 2026.

(P.S. I couldn’t use AI to transcribe this—first it insisted the whole thing was a deepfake, then it completely failed to tell the two men’s voices apart. I finally gave up and did the transcript manually. Enjoy this rare treat!)

Thanks for extracting the clip from our space! https://t.co/XDqxGQ22Pc
— Adrian Dittmann (@AdrianDittmann) December 31, 2025

Elon Musk: Engineer, Defender of Humanity

December 19, 2025 Gail AlfarLeave a comment

Elon is a builder. We know him for his rockets, incredible vehicles, and satellite networks that connect the far reaches of Mongolia and people stranded in floods in North Carolina.

Some people don’t like it when he posts his thoughts about justice on X. But I do. I love it. I’ve learned so much about keeping society fair, safe, and free, and how critical it is to preserve Western civilization.

I went from thinking it was OK to welcome any immigrant who looked like they needed help, to understanding we must have secure borders and stop crime. Whether helping people in Europe, America, or Britain, Elon clearly wants to protect everybody and keep our world from falling apart.

I stand with Elon on immigration. I know firsthand most immigrants are decent, hard-working people. Even immigrants I’ve met say unchecked flows, no vetting, no proper screening, are the wrong way. With wide-open borders, vicious criminals slip right in with them. That’s not how to build a better America.

Elon has highlighted how Poland, with tight border controls, has stayed much safer. Meanwhile, my own city, Austin, gets more dangerous.

I love Elon for raising awareness about Iryna Zarutska from Ukraine, murdered in cold blood on video on a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, with nobody reaching out to help this poor woman right away. As beautiful murals go up around the country (funded in part by Elon’s $1M pledge), I think of his deep drive to keep everybody safe, he wants to make sure that we don’t have to bear the pain of another Iryna Zarutska. Her death should not be forgotten, it’s how we can pledge to do better in America.

In the UK, there’s also huge room for improvement. Elon raises awareness about how it’s sliding toward a police state: people jailed for things they write online, serious criminals released early. I wouldn’t know this without him.

Now, with jury trials being eroded in the UK, I see Elon’s renewed heart for helping Britain. That’s what Elon does best, help humanity. (Never stop, Elon!)

I’ve also filtered out cynics (I don’t meet many, but Elon warned against them). In a Lex Fridman interview, he said never trust a cynic, stay away from people who see bad in everybody, because they’ll excuse their own bad behavior by claiming everyone else is bad too.

Elon is wonderful when he says most people are “medium good.” He has real trust in humanity. I’d never heard of “suicidal empathy” until him. He raised my awareness of how it’s destroying Western civilization. Allowed me to examine myself and readjust my views.

Elon has highlighted Gad Saad and how suicidal empathy will destroy Western civilization, and he’s right. It deserves to be defended, not tried. If we lose it, everybody loses something valuable.

Past the rockets and cars (which are great), there won’t be an America around to enjoy them unless we preserve it. Since Americans built these wonders, future generations deserve to enjoy them too.

We don’t want to be complicit in the banishment of Western civilization, instead we should work hard to defend it.

Elon doesn’t preach from an ivory tower. He’s the most in-touch, high-position leader I’ve ever met, reaching out to all corners of humanity like no one else.

Hours after surgery, Noble began calibrating the coin-sized N1 device.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink Transforms Life for UK Veteran with Implant

December 15, 2025 Gail AlfarLeave a comment

New Era of Neurotech

LONDON — Thanks to Elon Musk and the innovative team he has assembled at Neuralink, Jon L. Noble, a 42-year-old British Army veteran and former paratrooper from Hampshire, has become the fifth UK patient to receive the company’s revolutionary N1 brain-computer interface implant. The procedure took place on December 11, 2025, at University College London Hospitals’ National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, as part of the ongoing GB-PRIME study launched last July.

From Application to Implantation

Noble, who served in elite airborne units before a spinal cord injury left him with severe paralysis, qualified through Neuralink’s patient registry. These are the beginning stages of trials, so the registry prioritizes stable candidates aged 22-75 with quadriplegia or similar impairments from trauma or ALS. Jon’s selection came after rigorous screening, including medical evals to ensure surgical viability and long-term participation in data collection.

In a September 3 X post, Noble expressed his determination: “Great news that Neuralink has just been given the green light to start trials on people with spinal cord injuries. I have submitted my application. @elonmusk NeuralinkUK.”

Rapid Recovery and Calibration

Hours after surgery, Noble began calibrating the coin-sized N1 device. Its 1,024 electrodes, threaded into his motor cortex, translate neural signals into cursor movements. He was discharged after just 12 hours and now trains remotely, with goals to control computers, games, and assistive technology using thought alone. His involvement embodies Neuralink’s compassion towards people who have served in the military, our veterans. Our heros.

Heartfelt Gratitude to the Driving Force Behind the Breakthrough

In a moving post-op update on X, Noble shared his profound appreciation: “To Elon Musk and all engineers, analysts, designers, and support staff att Neuralink worldwide: Thank you from the bottom of my heart… And of course my outstanding team at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London.”

Jon’s heartfelt acknowledgment reflects the beautiful impact of Elon’s leadership and the exceptional team he has built, turning his own ambitious ideas into life-changing realities for the people of Britain.

Accelerating Global Expansion

Neuralink’s UK trials, approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, have gained remarkable momentum since the first U.S. success in 2024. This is a testament to the drive to move fast that Elon Musk has instilled in the company. As of mid-December 2025, approximately 19 implants have been completed globally (around 12 in the US and 7 in the UK). The two most recent UK procedures have also been performed, though details on those recipients have not yet been publicly announced.

My thoughts

I anticipate dozens more participants and eventually, thousands of people regaining digital independence through neural intent alone, thanks to the doors being opened by Elon Musk and Neuralink. One reason I am optimistic, is that on Dec 3rd, Neuralink posted a previously unpublished video to X.

DJ Seo and our recruiting team visited several schools to provide an overview of Neuralink, including recent progress updates and an outline for the company’s path ahead. Watch the presentation:

@djseo and our recruiting team visited several schools to provide an overview of Neuralink, including recent progress updates and an outline for the company’s path ahead.

Watch the presentation: pic.twitter.com/Q6Ix9hXi0u
— Neuralink (@neuralink) December 3, 2025

I encourage you to watch the short presentation, in order to understand the challenges that face Neuralink, and follow along in real time. The progress and speed at which Elon works, is embedded with a sharp sense of urgency. The video is inspiring. It is like a mini-AI day, but instead of for Tesla, its for Neuralink!

Elon Musk in conversation with Katie Miller – My Transcript – Complete Edition

December 12, 2025 Gail Alfar1 Comment

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?

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.

SpaceX’s Starlink Quietly Rewrites the Future of Global Farming and Your Morning Coffee May Never Taste the Same

December 11, 2025 Gail AlfarLeave a comment

While Wall Street buzzes with talk of a possible 2026 SpaceX IPO that could value Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite empire at $1 trillion or more, the company’s most revolutionary product is already changing lives 550 kilometers below its orbiting constellation.

Starlink, the world’s first mass-market satellite internet service built and launched entirely by SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets and operated by a private fleet of over 8,000 satellites, is proving once again why Elon’s vertically integrated vision is unmatched in modern industry.

In about four years since starting commercial service, SpaceX has gone from landing rockets on drone ships to delivering gigabit-speed, low-latency internet to the most unreachable corners of the planet, places where traditional telecom giants never bothered to lay a single cable.

Elon himself has always been blunt about Starlink’s mission: it was never meant to fight Comcast or Vodafone in downtown Manhattan or Milan. “Physics doesn’t allow us to win in dense cities,” he told Indian billionaire Nikhil Kamath this year, but out where nobody else can reach, Starlink is unbeatable!

And “unbeatable” is exactly the word now being used by farmers, offshore oil platforms, Antarctic research stations, and airline passengers who, for the first time in history, enjoy better internet at 40,000 feet or in the middle of the Amazon than many suburban neighborhoods did a decade ago.

The numbers speak for themselves: more than 8 million Starlink terminals shipped, service in over 150 countries, and a growth curve that would make any Silicon Valley unicorn blush — all funded by the same company that sends astronauts to the International Space Station and is building the largest rocket in human history.

With Starship flights ramping up and analysts projecting a potential SpaceX public offering as early as next year, the same reusable rocket techn that makes Starlink launches dirt-cheap is about to make Elon’s company one of the most valuable enterprises ever created.

But perhaps the purest example of what this all means in the real world is happening right now on a quiet hillside in southeastern Brazil.

Your Coffee

At Fazenda Luciana — a specialty-coffee estate in Santo Antônio da Alegria, São Paulo state, owner João Paulo Silva de Freitas used to lose entire days because a broken harvester in a distant field couldn’t be reported until someone physically drove back to the farmhouse office.

Today, multiple Starlink minis blanket the property. Real-time video calls, soil-sensor data, drone mapping, and remote gate control are now as normal as the morning mist rolling over the coffee trees.

The result? Higher yields, fewer accidents, dramatically better security, and most importantly for coffee lovers, beans that are harvested and processed at the absolute peak of ripeness.

Fazenda Luciana grows high-quality specialty Arabica coffee, and while specific scores for their lots aren’t publicly detailed in recent reviews, Brazilian estates like this often produce beans in the 85+ range on international scales, making them among the finest available.

From orbit to your cup… only Elon’s SpaceX could make that possible.