Elon Musk: 3 Years of X, OpenAI Lawsuit, Bill Gates, Grokipedia & The Future of Everything

let's get started. You know, we wanted to try something new this week. Every week, you know, I get a little upset things perturb me, sacks. And when it does, I just yell and scream disgrace. And so I bought the domain name to scratch the outcome for no reason other than my own amusement. But you know what, I'm not alone in my absolute disgust at what's going

on in the world. So this week, we're going to bring out a new feature here on the Arlen podcast, the scratchy odd corner.

This guy around what about the people he murdered?

You cannot like a man.

He's just a little bit manners.

insulted him a little bit.

Your hair was in the toilet water. Disgusting. I had to

suffocate you little disgrace.

This is the rad.

Disgrats. Yeah, this is fantastic. This is our new feature. Chamath. You look like you're ready to go. Why don't you tell you tell everybody who gets your discrepancy on this? Wait, we all had to come with a discrepancy. You missed a memo. All right. I know I got one. I go. Okay. All right. Just calm down. My discrepancy corner goes to Jason Calacanis.

And Pete Buttigieg, where they in the first 30 seconds of the interview, compared virtue signaling points about how each one worked at various moments at amnesty international. Absolutely literally affecting zero change making no progress in the world, but collecting a badge that they use to hold over other people. Just got a lot of letters. Which is good. That means it's like a good one because

there's a scratch behind the scenes. This got the odd chasing count and it's NP Buddha judge discussing great. I'm glad that I got the first one and you can imagine what's coming next week for you. I saw the Sydney Sweeney dress today trending on social disgraced the odd. It's too much. It's too much. What is it? I didn't I didn't even know what to see it. Picture. Okay, it's a little floppy. Get a vestito a propo. How is this? Much it's

disgraceful. A little bit. Like look at this. Oh my god. Too much. Too much. In my day, sacks a little cleavage, maybe, perhaps in the 90s or 2000s. Some side view. This is too much.

Great highbrow subject matter. We were discussing our own politics and then Sidney Sweeney pressed.

I don't know, it was trending on text. Hi Dad, put away the phone, Jason! What's going on with the algorithm? I'm getting sick of Sweeney's dress all day. And last

time,

well, maybe you should stop everything.

That's poor sex got you got invited to slug con for two weeks straight on the algorithm.

I say the algorithm has become if you if you demonstrate

actually, right, you can't even

tell if that's a joke or a real

thing.

It's all too real. Yeah, but for real notice. Yeah, if you if you demonstrate interest in anything on X now, if you click on it, God forbid, you like something, man, it will give you more of that. It will give you a

lot more. Yes, yes. So we we did have an issue. We still have somewhat of an issue where there was an important bug that was figured out that was solved over the weekend, which caused in-network posts to be not shown. So basically, if you followed someone, you wouldn't see their posts.

Got it.

Obviously, a big bug. We did your bug. wouldn't see that posts. Then the the algorithm was not probably taking into account if you just dwells on something. But if you if you interacted with it, it would go hog wild. So if you pay, as David said, if you if you were to favorite reply, or engage with it, it would go hog wild. So if you pay, as David said, if you if you were to favorite reply, or engage with it in some way, it is going to give you a torrent of

that same thing.

Zach's. So maybe you

that's what was your interaction?

Did you bookmark slug on? I think you bookmarked it.

Here's what I thought was good about it, though, is

I would see... If you happen to sport Switney's boobs, then you're going to feel a lot more of it.

Yeah.

Okay.

But what I thought was good about it was that you would see who else had a take on the same subject matter. And that actually has been a useful part of it. Yeah. So you do you do get more of a you get more of like a 360 view on whatever it is that you're shown interested.

Yeah, it just, it's like it was giving you if you take a, you'd have like, it was just going too far. Obviously, it was overcorrecting. It had too much gain on just the gain way too high on any interaction would would you then get a tar into that? It's like, it's like, Oh, you had a taste of it. We're going to give you three helpings. We're gonna force you to give you the food funnel.

And that's all being done. I assume it's all being done with grok now. So it's not like the old hard coding algorithm, or is it using

grok?

Well, what's happening is that we're gradually deleting the legacy Twitter heuristics. Now, the problem is that it's like, as you delete these heuristics, it turns out the one heuristic, the one bug was covering for the other bug. And so when you delete one side of the bug, you know, it's like that that meme with the internet that where there's like, this very

complicated machine and there's like a tiny little wooden stick. That's, yeah, that's going which was I guess, Amazon AWS, east or whatever, had something like that. You know, when when when somebody pulled out the little stick, there was half of Earth, you know,

it would be great if it showed like one person you follow. And then, like, blended the old style, which was just reverse chronological of your friends, the original version with this new version. So you get like a little bit of both.

Well, you can still you still have the plot. Everyone still has the following tab. Yeah. Now, something we're going to be adding is the ability to have a curated following tab. Because the problem is like if you follow some people, and they're maybe a little more prolific than you, you know,

you know, you follow someone and some people are much more, you know, say a lot more than others. That makes the following tab hard to use. So we're going to add an option where you can have the following tab be curated. So Grok will say, what are the most interesting things posted by your friends? And we'll show you that in the following tab.

It will also give you the option to delete everything. But I think having that option will make the following tab much more useful. So it'll be a curated list of people you follow, like ideally the most interesting stuff that they've said, which is kind of what you'd want to look at. And then we've mostly fixed the bug,

which would give you way too much of something if you interacted with a particular subject matter. And then the really big change, which is where Grok literally reads everything that's posted to the platform, there's about 100 million posts per day. So it's 100 million pieces of content per day. I think that's actually just maybe just in English. I think it goes beyond that, if it's outside of English. So Grog is gonna, we're

gonna start off reading the really what what Grog thinks are the top 10 million of the 100 million, and it will actually read them and understand them and categorize them and match them to users. It's like this is not a job humans could ever do. And then once that is scaling reasonably well, we'll add the entire 100 million a day. So it's literally going to read through 100 million things. And, and, and show you the things that it

thinks out of 100 million posts per day, what are the most interesting posts to you?

How much of Colossus will that take? Yeah, that's like, is it 10s of 1000s of servers like to do that every day?

Yeah, my guess is it's probably on the order of 50k h 100 something like that.

And that will replace search. So you'll be able to actually search on Twitter and find things in like with a with a plain language.

We'll have semantic search where you can just ask a question. And it will show you all content, whether that is text pictures or video that matches your search query semantically.

How How's it been three years in this is a three year

anniversary, like a couple days, three years. Yeah, Halloween.

Yeah, Halloween's back.

Halloween's back, but it was the weekend you took over was Halloween.

Yeah.

We had a good time. Yeah.

Yeah, three years. Well, thanks. Three years from now.

Yeah. What's the takeaway? Three years later, you were you obviously don't regret buying it. It's a free speech. That was good seem to have turned that whole thing around. And that was I think a big part of your mission. But then you added it to x AI, which makes it incredibly valuable as a data source. So when you look back on it, the reason you bought it to

stop crazy woke mind virus and let truth exist in the world again, great mission accomplished. And now it has a great future.

Yeah, we've got community notes. You can also ask Grok any anything you see on the platform. You know, just just press the Grok icon on any X post, and we'll analyze, analyze it for you. And research it as much as you want. So you can basically have, just by tapping the Grok icon, you can assess whether that post is the truth, the whole truth or nothing but the truth, or whether there's something

supplemental that needs to be explained. I think it's actually, we've made a lot of progress towards, yeah, freedom of speech and people being able to tell whether something is false or not false, you know, propaganda, the recent update to Grok is actually, I think, very good at piercing through propaganda. So, and we used that latest version of Grok to create Grokopedia, which I think is much more, it's, it's not just,

I think, more neutral, that then and more accurate than Wikipedia, but actually has a lot more information than a Wikipedia page.

Did you seed it with Wikipedia? Actually, take a step back. How

did you guys How did you do this?

Well, we used AI.

But meaning like, totally unsupervised, just a complete training run on its own totally synthetic data. No, no seeded

set nothing.

Well, it was only just recently possible for us to do this. So we've finished training on a maximally truth-seeking, actually truth-seeking, a version of Grok that is good at cogent analysis. So breaking down any given argument into its axiomatic elements, assessing whether those axioms are, the basic test for coercion, see the axioms are likely to be true,

they're not contradictory, that the conclusion most likely follows from those axioms. So we're just trained Gk on a lot of critical thinking. So it just got really good at critical thinking, which was quite hard.

And then we took that version of Grok and said, okay, cycle through the million most popular articles in Wikipedia and add, modify, and delete. So that means research the rest of the internet, whatever's publicly available, and correct Wikipedia articles and fix mistakes,

but also add a lot more context. So sometimes really the nature of the propaganda is that, facts are stated that are technically true, but on a reference do not properly represent a picture of the individual or event.

This is critical. Because when you have a bio, as you do, actually all do, on Wikipedia, over time, it's just the people you fired, or you you beat in business or have an axe to grind. So it just slowly becomes like the place where everybody, you know, kind of who hates you then puts their information. I looked at mine, it was so much more representative, and it was five times longer, six times

longer. And the what it gave way to was much more accurate, much more accurate. And this opportunity was sitting here, I think, for a long time. And it's just great that you got to it because they they don't update my page. But you know, I don't know, twice a month with, you know, and then who is the secret cobble is 50 people who are anonymous, who decide what's good gets put on

it. It was a much better, much more updated page in version one.

Yes, this is persons one as we put it as we showed at the top. So I do think actually, by the time we get to version one, 1.0, it'll be 10 times better. But even at this early stage, as you just mentioned, it's, it's not just that it's correcting errors, but it is creating a more accurate, realistic and fleshed out description of people and

events. And subject matters like you can look at articles on physics and rock Peter that they're much better than Wikipedia by far.

This one I was gonna ask you is like, do you think that you can take this corpus of pages now and get Google to deboost Wikipedia or boost Grokipedia in traditional search, because a lot of people still find this and they believe that it's authoritative because it comes up number one. Right.

So how do we how do we do that? How do you flip Google?

Yeah, so it really can if people share a lot of if if Grokopedia is used elsewhere, like if people cite it on their websites, or post about it on social media, or when they do a search, when Grokpedia shows up, they click on Grokpedia, it will naturally rise in Google's, you know, rankings. I. I did send I did text Sundar

because, you know, even sort of a day after launch, if you typed in Grokipedia, Google would just say, Did you mean Wikipedia?

Wikipedia? Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. So so now how's the usage been? Have you seen good growth since it launched?

Yeah, it's, it went super viral. So we're working, we're seeing say inside of all over the place. But yeah, it's, and I think we'll see it used more and more, as people refer to it, and people will judge for themselves. When you read a Garopedia article about a subject or a person that you know a lot about, and you see, wow, this is way better than Wikipedia. It's more comprehensive, it's way more accurate.

It's neutral instead of biased, then you're going to forward those links around and say that this is actually the better source. Graphic Vitae will succeed, I think, very well because it is fundamentally a superior product to Wikipedia. It is a better source of information. And we haven't even added images and video yet. That's going to add a lot of video. So using Grok Imagine to create videos.

And so if you're trying to explain something, Grok Imagine can take the text from Grokipedia and then generate a video, an explanatory video. So if you're trying to understand anything from how to tie a bow tie to you know, how to send chemical reactions work, or really anything, dietary things, medical things. We can grow up, well, you can just go

on and see the video of how it works.

When you have this version that's maximally truth seeking as a model, do you think that there needs to be a better eval or a benchmark that people can point to that shows how off of the truth things are so that if you're going to start a training run with common crawl, or if you're going to use Reddit, or if you're going to use, is it important to be able to like say, Hey, hold on a

second, this eval just suck like you guys suck on this email. Like it's just this is crappy data.

Yeah, I guess I think, I mean, there are a lot of evals out there. I've complete confidence that crockpit is going to succeed. Because Wikipedia is actually not a very good product.

Yeah.

The information is sparse, wrong, and out of date. And it doesn't have very few images. There's basically no video. So if you have something which is, you know, accurate, comprehensive, has videos, where moreover, you can ask if there's any part of it that you're curious about, you can just highlight it and ask Grok right there. Like, if you're trying to learn something, it's just great. It's it's

it's not going to be a little bit better than the North compete. It's going to be 100 times better than what you want. Do you think you'll see like, good uniform usage? Like if you look back on the last three years since you bought Twitter, there was a lot of people after you bought Twitter that said I'm leaving Twitter, Elon's bought it, I'm going to go to this other wherever the hell they went. And there's all these news. And there's all these and there's all these articles. Yeah, but blue sky is falling is my I guess my question is, as you destroy the woke mind viral

kind of control of the system. And as you bring truth to the system, whether the system is through Grokipedia or through X, do people like just look for confirmation bias and they actually don't accept the truth? Like what do you like,

or do you think people are actually going to see the truth and change? Yeah. But I mean, is that like-

You thought Sidney Sweeney's boobs were great, when you see mine.

Looking good. Yeah, solid, solid leak up there.

I think we just got flagged on YouTube.

Yeah, we did. That was definitely gonna give us a censorship moment.

Grade A moobs.

But do people change their mind? I mean.

If there's a, I can take it there's no such thing as grade A move.

Oh.

Right? Yeah.

God, it's off the rails already.

David, you were trying to ask a serious question. Go ahead.

Well, I just wanna know if people change their mind. Like, can you actually change people's minds by putting the truth in front of them? Or do people just take, you know, they're, they kind of ignore the truth because they're, they feel like they're in some sort of camp and they're like, I'm on the side, they want the confirmation,

they want the confirmation bias and they want to stay in a camp and they want to

be tribal about everything. how much people believe things, simply because it is their the belief of the of their in group, you know, whatever their sort of political or ideological tribe is. So I mean, there's some some pretty hilarious videos of, you know, you know, there's like some guy going around is like a racist Nazi or whatever. And and then and then there and he was like some guy going around, is like a racist Nazi or whatever. And then and then and then he was like trying to show them the videos of the thing that

they are talking about, where he is in fact, condemning the Nazis as strong as possible terms, and condemning racism in the strongest possible terms. And they literally don't even want to watch the videos. So so yeah, that people, at least some people would, they were preferred. They will stick to whatever their ideological views are of that sort of political tribal views are, no

matter what. The evidence could be staring them in the face. And they're just going to be a flat earther. You know, there's, there is no evidence that you can show to a flat earther to convince them the world's. And they're just going to be a flat earther. You know, there's, there is no evidence that you can show to a flat earth that commits them the world's round because everything is just a lie. The world is flat.

The ability to hit at rock in a reply and ask it a question in the thread has really become like a truth seeking mission missile on the platform. So when I put up metrics or something like that, I reply to myself and I say, Akron is the information I just shared correct. And can you find any better information? And please tell me if my argument is correct, or if I'm wrong, and then it goes through

and then a DM sacks and then sacks gets in my replies and tries to correct me. No, but it does actually a really good job of like, and that combined with community notes. Now you've got like two swings at bat, the community's consensus view, and then grok coming in, I think it'd be like really interesting if grok on like really powerful threads kind of did like its

own version of community notes and had it sitting there ahead of time, you know, like you could look at the thread and it just had next to it, you know, or maybe on like the specific statistic, you could click on it, and it would show you like, here's what that statistics from.

I mean, you can, I mean, pretty much every, I mean, essentially every post on X, unless it's like advertising something has the Grok symbol on it. Yeah. And you just tap that symbol and you're one tap away from a Grok analysis, literally just one tap. And we don't want to clutter the interface with where it's providing an explanation, but I'm just saying if you go on X right now, it's one tap to get Grok's analysis and Grok will research the X post and give you an accurate answer. And then you can even ask us to do further research and further dedulgence, and you can go as

far down the rabbit hole as you want to go. But I do think that this is consistent with, we want X to be the best source of truth on the planet by far, and I think it is. And where you hear any and all points of view, but where those points of view are corrected by human editors with community notes. And the essence of community notes

is that people who historically disagree agree that this community note is correct. So, and all of the community notes code is open source and the data is open source. So you can recreate any community note from scratch as independently.

By and large, it's worked very well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think we originally had the idea to have you back on the pod because it was a three-year anniversary of the Twitter acquisition. So I just wanted to kind of reminisce a little bit. And I remember, yeah, I mean, I remember. Where's that sync? where's that sink? Well, yeah. So Elon was staying at my house.

We had talked the week before and he told me the deal was going to close. And so I was like, Hey, do you need a place to stay? And he took me up on it. And the day before he went to the Twitter office, there was a request made to my staff. do you happen to have an extra sink? And they did not, but they were able to

who has an extra sink, really?

But they were able to locate one at a nearby hardware store. And I think they paid extra to get it out of the window or something.

Well, I think the store was confused because my security team was asking for any kind of sink. And like, like, normally people wouldn't ask for any kind of sink. And like, normally people wouldn't ask for any kind of sink. You need a sink that fits in your bathroom, or connects with certain kind of plumbing. So they're like, trying to ask, he's like, well, what kind of faucets do you want?

No, no, I just wanted a sink.

Yeah, they think it's a mental person call.

I think the store was confused that we just wanted a sink and didn't care what the sink connected to. That was earlier. They were almost not letting us buy the sink because they thought maybe we would buy the wrong sink. It's just rare that somebody wants a sink for sniffing sake.

For meme purposes.

One of my favorite memories was Elon said, Hey, you know, swing by, check it out. I said, Okay, I'll come by and I drive up there and I'm looking where to park the car and I realized there's just parking spaces around the entire business building and I'm like, Okay, this can't be like legal parking, but I park and it's parking.

Yeah, you're in downtown SF. So you might get your window

broken. Yeah, I might not be there when I get back in there and the place is empty. And then yeah, it was seriously empty, except the cafeteria.

There was an entire there to the Twitter course of two buildings. One of the buildings was completely and utterly empty. And the other building had like 5% occupancy.

And the 5% occupancy, we go to the cafeteria, we all go get something to eat. And we realized there's more people working in the cafeteria, then that Twitter.

There were more people making the food than eating the food. And this giant, really nice, really nice cafeteria. You know, this is where we discovered that the the actual price of the lunch was $400. The original price was $20. But it had five, it went for it was at 5% occupancy. So it was 20 times higher. And they still kept making the same amount pretty much. So and charging the same amount.

So effectively lunch was $400. That's a great meeting. Yes and then there was that where we had the initial meetings sort of the sort of trying to figure out what the heck's going on meetings in the in these in the because you know there's the two buildings two Twitter Twitter buildings and, and one, the one with literally no one in it. That's, that's where we had the initial

meetings. And, and then we tried drawing on the whiteboard and the and the markers had gone dry. So that nobody used the whiteboard markers in like two years. None of the markers worked. So we were like, this is totally bizarre. But it was totally clean because the cleaning crew had come in and done their job and cleaned

an already clean place for two, three years straight. It was I mean, honestly, this is this is more crazy than any sort of Mike judge movie or, you know, Silicon Valley or anything like that. And then I remember going into the men's bathroom and and there's a table with, you know,

hygiene to menstrual hygiene products. Yeah, refreshed every week, tampons, like a fresh box of tampons. And and we're like, but but there's literally no one in this building. So, but nope, hadn't turned off the send, send fresh tampons to the man's bathroom in the empty building had not been turned off.

No.

So every week they would put a fresh box of tampons in an empty building for years. This happened for years and must have been very confusing to the people that were being asked to do this because they're like, Okay, I'll they're paying us. So we'll just put them. So you have to consider that the string of possibilities necessary in order

for anyone to possibly use that tampon in the men's bathroom at the unoccupied second building of Twitter headquarters. Because you'd have to be a burglar, who is a trans man burglar. Who's unwilling to use the woman's bathroom that also has tampons.

Statistically

broken into the building.

That moment you have a period. Yes.

I mean, you're more likely to be struck by a meteor than need that tampon.

Okay.

Well, I remember I think it was shortly after that. You discovered an entire room at the office that was filled with stay woke t shirts.

Yeah, remember this entire pile of merch? Yes. They work. They work. And also a big sort of buttons like those magnetic buttons that you put on your shirt. That said, I, I am an engineer. Like, look, if you're an engineer, you don't need a button like a big button for who you're telling

that to ship code.

But yeah, they're like scarves, hoodies, all kinds of merch that said hashtags they work. Yeah, a couple music.

When you found that I was like, my god, man, the barbarians are fully within the gates. Now.

The barbarian have smashed through the gates and are looting the merch.

Yes, you are rummaging through their holy relics and defiling them.

I mean, but when you think about it, David, the amount of waste that we saw there during those first 30 days, just to be serious about it for a second, this was a publicly traded company. So if you think about the financial duty of those individuals, there was a list of SaaS software we went through. And none of it was being used. Some of it had never been installed, and they had

been paying for it for two years, they've been paying for a SaaS product for two years. And they had been paying for it for two years, they've been paying for a SAS product for two years. And the one that blew my mind the most that we canceled was, they were paying a certain amount of money per desk to have desk suiting software in an office where nobody came to work. So they were paying

nobody, there was there was millions of dollars a year being paid for four years, but for analysis of pedestrian traffic, like software that use cameras to analyze the pedestrian traffic to figure out where you can leave alleviate pedestrian traffic jams in an empty building. Right? That's like 11 out of 10 on a double scale. Yeah, it was

pretty shout out Scott Adams, you've gone off scale on your Dilbert level at that

point.

Let's talk about the free speech aspect for a second, because I think that is the most important legacy of the Twitter acquisition. And I think people have short memories and they forget how bad things were three years

ago. First of all, you had figures as diverse as President Trump, Jordan Peterson, Jay Bhattacharya, Andrew Tate. They were all banned from Twitter. And I remember when you opened up the Twitter jails and reinstated their accounts, kind of, you know, freed all the bad boys of free speech.

Yeah, it was the best deal.

Yes. So, you basically gave all the bad boys of free speech their accounts back. But second, beyond just the bannings, there was the shadow bannings. And Twitter had claimed for years that they were not shadow banning, this was a paranoid, conservative conspiracy theorist.

Yeah.

There was a very aggressive shadow banning by what was called the Trust and Safety Group, which of course, naturally, would be the one that is doing the nefarious shadow banning. And I just I think you shouldn't have a group called trust and safety. This is an old name if you ever if there ever

was one.

I'm from the trust department. Oh, really?

Well, you see your DMs say that you're from the trust department.

It's literally that's the ministry of truth right there. Yeah. including under oath and on the heels of you opening that up and exposing that because by the way it wasn't just the fact they were doing it they created an elaborate set of tools to do this they had check boxes and they had tools to uh yes to de-boost uh accounts yes yes and you know subsequently we found out that other social networking properties have done this as well, but you were the first to expose it. This is still being done at the other social media companies. It's Google, by the way.

So for, you know, and I'm picking on Google because they're all doing it, but for search results, if you simply push a result pretty far down the page or, you know, the second page of results, like you know the joke used to be or still is I think like where do you hide a dead what's the best place to hide a dead body the second page of google search results because nobody ever goes to the second page of google search results so you could you could hide a dead body there nobody would find it

and and you still have it's then then it's not like you've you haven't made them go away. You've just put them on this one page too.

Yes. So shadow banning, I think was number two. So first was banning, second was shadow banning. I think third to me was government collusion, government interference. So you released the Twitter files, nothing like that had ever been done before where you just, you actually let investigative reporters go through Twitter's, emails unfettered. I was not

looking over their shoulder at all. They just had direct access to everything.

And they found that there was extensive collusion between the FBI and the Twitter trust and safety group, where it turns out the FBI had 80 agents submitting takedown requests. And they were very involved in the banning the shadow banning the censorship, which I don't think we ever had definitive evidence of that before. That was pretty

extraordinary.

Yeah, and the the US House of Representatives had hearings on the matter. And, and a lot of this, you know, was unearthed. It's a public record. So a lot of people, some, some people on the left still think this is like, made up. I'm like, this is just literally these Twitter files are literally the files at Twitter. I mean, we're literally just talking about these are the emails that were sent internally

that confirm this. This is what's on the slack channels. And and this is what is shown in the in the on the Twitter database as where people have made either suspensions or shadowbans.

Has the government come and asked you to take stuff down since or they just have to your the policy is, hey, listen, you got to file a warrant, you got to, you got to come correct, as opposed to just putting pressure on executives.

Yeah, our policy at this point is to follow the law. So, so if now, the laws are obviously different in different countries. So sometimes I get criticized for like, why don't I push free speech in XYZ country that doesn't have free speech laws?

I'm like, because that's not the law there. And if we don't obey the law, we'll simply be blocked in that country. So the policy is really just adhere to the laws in any given country. It is up to us to agree or disagree with those laws. And if if, if the

people of that country wants laws to be different, then they should, you know, ask their leaders to change the laws. Yeah, but but anything that but as soon as you start going beyond the law, now you're putting a thumb on the scale. So so the, yeah, that I think I think that's the right policy is just adhere to the laws within any given country. Now, sometimes we get, you know,

in a bit of a bind, like we had got into with Brazil, where, you know, this, this, this judge in Brazil was asking us to or telling us to break the law in Brazil, and ban accounts, contrary to the law of Brazil. And now we're now we're sort of somewhat stuck. We're like, wait a second, we're reading the law and says, this is not allowed to happen. And also that and giving us a gag order so like we're

not we're allowed to say it's happening um and we have to break the law and the judge is telling us to break the law the law is breaking the law that's where things get um very difficult and we

were actually banned in brazil for a while because of that i just want one final point on the free speech issue and then we can move on is just I think people forget that the censorship wasn't just about COVID. There was a growing number of categories of thought and opinion that were being outlawed. The quote, content moderation, which

is another Orwellian euphemism for censorship, was being applied to categories like gender and even climate change. The definition of hate speech was constantly growing. Yes. And more and more people were being banned or shadow banned. There was more and more things that you couldn't say. This trend of censorship was growing, it was galloping, and it

would have continued if it wasn't, I think, for the fact that you decided to buy Twitter and opened it up. And it was only on the heels of that, that the other social networks were willing to, I think, be a little bit chastened in their policies and

start to push back more. Yeah, that's right. Once Twitter broke ranks, the others had to, it became very obvious what the others were doing and so they had to mitigate their censorship substantially as because of what Twitter did. And I mean, fast to give them some credit, they also felt that they had the air cover to, to be more inclined towards free speech. They still do a lot of sort of, you know, shadow

banning and whatnot at the other social media companies, but it's much less than it used to be.

Yeah. Elon, what have you seen in terms of like, governments creating new laws? So we've seen a lot of this crackdown in the UK on what's being called hateful speech on social media and folks getting arrested

and actually going to prison over it. And it seems like when there's more freedom, the side that is threatened by that comes out and creates their own counter, right? There's a reaction to that, then there seems to be reaction, are you seeing more of these laws around the world in response to your opening up free speech through Twitter and, and those changes and what they're

enabling that that the governments and the parties that control those governments aren't aligned and they're stepping in and saying let's create new ways of maintaining our control through law.

Yeah, there is, there's been an overall global movement to suppress free speech under the name of, under the guise of suppressing hate speech. But then, you know, it's the problem with with that is that your freedom of speech only matters if people are allowed to say things that you that you don't like, or even that things that you hate. Because if you're allowed to suppress speech that

you don't like, then and, you know, you don't have freedom of speech, and it's only a matter of time before things switch around, and then the shoes on the other foot and they will suppress you. So suppress not lest you be suppressed. But there is a movement and I there were there was a very strong movement to codify speech suppression into the law throughout throughout

the world, and including the Western world, you know, the Europe and Australia,

UK and Germany very aggressive in this regard.

Yes. And my understanding is that in the UK, there's something like two or 3000 people in prison for social media posts and the fact that this there's so many people in that were in prison for social media posts and many of these things are like you can't believe that someone would actually be put in prison for this they have in a lot of cases released people who have committed

violent crimes in order to, released people who have committed violent crimes in order to imprison people who have simply made posts on social media, which is deeply wrong. And underscores why the founders of this country made the First Amendment, the First Amendment was freedom of speech. Why did they do that? It's because in the places that they came from, there wasn't freedom of speech and you

could be imprisoned or killed for saying things.

Can I ask you a question just to maybe move to a different topic? If you came and did this next week, we will be past the Tesla board vote. We talked about it last week and we talked about how crazy ISS and Glass Lewis is. Right. We use this one insane example where like Ira like IRA Aaron prize didn't get the recommendation from ISS in Glass Lewis because he didn't meet the gender requirements. But then

Kathleen

also didn't it doesn't make sense.

Can you so the board vote is on the

is African American woman. Yeah. Yeah, she was the recommended against her, but then also recommended against our enterprise on the grounds he was insufficiently diverse. So I'm like, this, like, these things don't make any sense. Yeah. So I do think we've got a fundamental issue with corporate governance in publicly traded companies where you've got about half of the

stock market is controlled by passive index funds. I call them corporate ISIS. You know, so all they do is basically just they're just terrorists. So so and they own no stock in any of these companies. Right. So I think that there's a fundamental breakdown of fiduciary responsibility here where really, you know, any company that's managing,

even though they're passively managing, you know, index funds or whatever, that they do at the end of the day have a fiduciary duty to vote, you know, along the lines of what would maximize the shareholder returns because people are counting on them. Like people, you know, have say, you know, have all their savings and say 401k or something like that and they're counting on the index funds to vote, do company votes in the direction that would ensure that their retirement savings do as

well as possible. But the problem is if that is then outsourced to ISS and Glass Lewis which have been infiltrated by far-left activists because you know where far-left, you know where basically political activists go, they go where the power is. And so effectively Glass Lewis and ISS controlled the vote of half the stock market. Now if you're a political activist you know what a great place would be to go work? Buy a sesame glass of Lewis, and they do. So my concern for the future,

because this is, you know, the Tesla thing is it's called sort of compensation, but really it's not about compensation. It's not like I'm going to go out and buy a yacht with it or something. It's just that if I'm going to build up Optimus and have all these robots out there, I need to make sure we do not have a terminated scenario and that I can maximize the safety of the robots. I feel like I need to have something like a 25% vote, which is enough of a vote to have a strong influence, but not so much of a vote that I can't be fired

if I go insane. So it's kind of, but, but my concern would be, you know, creating this army of robots, and then and then being fired for political reasons. Because of because of ISS and glass Lewis, you know, declined to ISIS and glass Lewis fire me effectively, or the activists at those bones fire me. Even though I've done everything right. Yeah, that's my concern. Yeah. And then I and then then then you've got the and then I

and then I cannot ensure the safety of the robots.

If you don't get that vote doesn't go your way. It looks like it's going to. Would you leave? I mean, is that even in the cards? I heard they were the board was very concerned about

that.

Let's just say I'm not going to build a robot army. If I if I can be easily kicked out by activist investors. No way.

Yeah, makes sense. And who is capable of running the four or five major product lines at Tesla? I mean, this is the madness of it. It's a very complex business. People don't understand what's under the hood there. It's not just a car company, you got batteries, you got trucks, you got the self driving group. And this is a very complex business that's you've built over decades now. It's not a very simple

thing to run. I don't think there's a Elon equivalent out there who can just jump into the cockpit. By the way, if we take a full turn around corporate governance corner, also this week, what was interesting about the open AI restructuring was I read the letter and your lawsuit was excluded from the allowances of the California attorney general basically saying this thing can go through, which means that your lawsuit is still out there, right? And I think it's going to go to a jury trial. So there, that corporate governance lawsuit is still out there. Right. And I think it's gonna go to a jury trial. Yes. So there

that corporate governance thing is still very much in question.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yes, I believe that will go to jury trial in February or March. And then we'll see what the what the results are there. But I did this. There's like a mountain of evidence that that shows that open AI was created as a an open source nonprofit. It's literally that's the exact description in the incorporation documents.

And in fact, the incorporation documents explicitly say that no officer or founding member will benefit financially from open AI. And they've completely violated that. And moreover, you can just use the Wayback Machine and look at the website of OpenAI.

Again, open source, non-profit, open source, non-profit, the whole way. Until, you know, it looked like, wow, there's a lot of money to be gained here. And then suddenly it starts changing. And they try to change the definition of opening it to mean open to everyone instead of open source, even though it always meant open source. I came up

with the name. Yeah, that's how I know.

So if they open sourced it, or they gave you I mean, you don't need the money, but they gave you the percentage ownership in it that you would be rightfully which 50 million for a startup would be half, at least. But they must have made an overture towards you and said, Hey, can we just give you 10% of this thing and give us your blessing? Like, you're obviously have a

different goal here. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, essentially, since I came up with the idea for the company named it, provided the A, B and C rounds of funding, recruited the critical personnel, I told them everything I know. You know, if that had been a commercial corporation, I probably own half the company. So, but and I could have chosen to do that. That's I if I was totally at my discretion, I could have done that. But I

created as a nonprofit for the world, and open source nonprofit for the world.

Do you think the right thing to do is to take those models and just open source them today? If you could affect that change? Is that the right thing to do is to take those models and just open source them today? If you could affect that change,

is that the right thing to do?

Yeah, I think that that is what it was created to do, so it should. I mean, the best open source models right now, actually, ironically, because Fade seems to be an irony maximizer, the best open source models are generally from China.

Yeah. Like, that's bizarre. And then I think the second best one is, or maybe it's better than second best, but like the Grok 2.5 open source model is actually very good. And I think we'd probably be, and we'll continue to open source our models.

But whereas like try using any of the recent so called the OpenAI open source models, they're out there don't work. They basically they open sourced a broken non working version of their models. As a fig leaf. I mean, do you know anyone who's running open,

opening eyes, open source models? Exactly. Yeah, nobody. We've had a big debate about jobs here. Obviously, there's gonna be job displacement. You and I have talked about it for decades. What's your take on the pace of it? Because obviously, you're building self driving software, you're building optimists. Yeah, we're seeing Amazon take some steps here where they're like, yeah,

we're probably not going to hire these positions in the future. And you know, maybe they're getting rid of people now because they were bloated, but maybe some of its AI, you know, it's all debatable. What do you think the timeline is? And what do you think as a society, we're going to need to do to mitigate it if it goes too fast?

Well,

you know, I call AI the supersonic tsunami. So, so not the most competent description in the world. But it's fast and big. There was a tsunami, a giant wall of water moving faster than the speed of sound. That's AI.

When does it land?

Yeah, exactly. So now this is happening whether I wanted to or not, I actually try to slow down AI. And and then the reason, you know, I, the reason I wanted to create open AI was to serve as a counterweight to Google, because at the time, Google was sort of essentially had unilateral power in AI that all the all the AI, essentially. And, and, you know,

Larry Page was not, you know, he was not taking as safety seriously. I'm Jason, I'm sure we were you there when he called me a speciest?

Yes. Yeah. Okay. So you were more concerned about the human race than you were about the machines. And yeah, you had a clear bias for humanity.

Yes, yes. Exactly. I was like, Larry, well, what, like, we need to make sure that the AI doesn't destroy all the humans. And then he called me a species, like racist or something for being pro human intelligence instead of machine intelligence. I'm like, well, Larry, what side are you on? I mean, you know, that's kind of a concern. And, and, and then at the time, that Google had

essentially a monopoly on AI.

Yeah, they bought DeepMind, which you were on the board of had an investment in Larry and Sergey had invested in as well. And it's really interesting.

I found out about it, because I told him about it. I showed him some stuff from deep from DeepM mind. And I think that's how I found out, I found out about it and acquired them. Actually, I got to give what I say. But But the, the point is that it's like, look, now he's not taking AI safety seriously. And, and, and Google had essentially all the AI and all the computers and all

the money. And I'm like, this is a unipolar world where the guy in charge is not taking things seriously. So, and called me a speciist for being pro-human. What are you doing those circumstances? You know, build a competitor. Yes. So, OpenAI was created essentially as the opposite, which is an open source nonprofit opposite Google. Now, unfortunately, it needs to change its name to closed for maximum profit AI. Yeah. Maximum profit to be clear.

The most

the most amount of profit simply get I mean, it is so it is like, like, it's comical. And when you hear

me, it's like, wait, there's

an irony maximize the FCA. Like, what is the most the most ironic outcome for a company that was created for to do open source? Not at nonprofit AI is it's super close source. It's tighter than Knox. That this is locked up tighter than Fort Knox and they are going for maximum profit, like get the bourbon,

the steak knife, you know, they're going for the buffet and they're just diving headfirst into the profit buffet. I mean, it's just, or at least aspiration, the revenue buffet, at least profit, we'll see.

I mean, it's like, it's like

a ravenous wolves for revenue.

ravenous.

No, no, it's literally like, super bond villain level flip, like it went from being United Nations to being specter in like, James Bond land. Yeah. When you hear him say I'm gonna, when Sam says it's gonna like raise 1.4

trillion to build our data centers. Yeah, no, but I think he I think he means it. Yeah, I mean, it's, I would say audacious, but I wouldn't want to. Yeah, insult the word. It's actually I have a question about this. How is that possible? In the earnings call, you said something that was insane. And then I think the math actually nets up. But you said we could connect all the Teslas and allow them in downtime to actually offer

up inference. And you can string them all together. I think the math is like, it could actually be like 100 gigawatts.

Is that right? math is like it could actually be like 100 gigawatts. Right? Did you do if ultimately that there's a Tesla fleet that is 100 million vehicles, which I think we probably will get to some point 100 million vehicle fleet. And they have, you know, mostly state of the art inference computers in them, that that each say are a kilowatt of inference computer. And they have built in power and cooling. And yeah, connect to the Wi Fi.

That's the key. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. And, and, and, and the you'd have 100 gigawatts of inference compute.

Elon, do you think that the architecture like there was an attention free model that came out the last week, there's been all of these papers, all of these new models that have been shown to reduce power per token of output by many, many, many orders of magnitude, like not just an order of magnitude, but like maybe three or four. Like, what's your view and all the

work you've been doing on where we're headed in terms of power

per unit of computer per unit of compute or per token of output?

Well, we have a clear example of efficient, power efficient compute, which is the human brain. So our brains use about 20 watts of power, but and all that only about 10 watts is higher brain function. Most of it's, you know, half of it is housekeeping functions of, you know, keeping your heart going and breathing and that kind of thing. So, you've got maybe 10 watts of higher brain function in a human.

And we've managed to build civilization with 10 watts of a biological computer. And that biological computer has like a 20 year, you know, boot sequence. But it's very power efficient. So given that humans are capable of inventing, you know, general relativity and quantum mechanics and or discovering general relativity, like inventing aircraft, lasers, the internet, and discovering physics with a 10 watt meat computer, essentially, then there's clearly a massive opportunity

for improving the efficiency of AI compute. It's because it's, it's currently many orders of magnitude away from that. And it's still the case that a hundred megawatt or even, you know, a gigawatt AI supercomputer at this point can't do everything that a human can do. It will be able to, but it can't yet. So we have this obvious case of human brains being very power efficient and achieving and

building civilization with 10 watts to compute. And our bandwidth is very low, so that the speed at which we communicate information to each other is very low. So the speed at which we communicate information to each other is extremely low. We're not communicating at a terabit. We're communicating more like 10 bits per second. That should actually lead to the conclusion

that there is massive opportunity for being more power efficient with AI. And at Tesla and at X AI, we're both we continue to see massive improvements in inference computer efficiency. So, yeah,

you think that there's a moment where you would justify stopping all the traditional cars and just going completely all in on cybercab if you felt like the learning was good enough and that the system was safe enough? Is there ever a moment like that or do you think you'll always kind of dual track and always do both?

I mean all of the cars we make right now are capable of being a robo-taxi. So there's a little confusion of the terminology because our cars look normal, like Model 3 or Model Y looks, it's a good looking car, but it looks normal. But it has an advanced AI computer and advanced AI software and cameras.

And we didn't want the cameras to stick out, so that we wouldn't want them to be ugly or stick out. So we put them, they're sort want them to be ugly or stick out. So so we you know, we put them there sort of an out of truth of locations, you know, the forward-looking camera cameras are in front of the rearview mirror. The side view mirrors are in the side repeaters, or

this the side view cameras on the side repeaters. The rear camera is, you know, just in the, you know, above the license plate, actually typically where the rear view camera is in a car. And, you know, and the diagonal forward ones are in the B pillars, like if you look closely, you can see all the cameras, but but you have to look closely, we just didn't want them to be to stick out like, you know, warts or something. But but actually, all

the cars we make are hyper intelligent and have the cameras in the right places. They just look normal. And so all of the cars we make are capable of unsupervised full autonomy. Now that we have a dedicated part, which is the cyber cab, which has no steering wheel or pedals, which are obviously prestigious in an autonomous world. And we saw production of the cyber cab in Q2 next year. And we'll scale that up to to quite high volume, I think ultimately, we'll make millions of cyber cabs per year.

But but it is important to emphasize that all of our cars are capable of being robotic taxis.

Cyber cab is gorgeous. I told you I'd buy two of those if you put a steering wheel in them. And there is a big movement around. People are begging for it. Why not? Why not let us buy a couple, you know, you know, just the first ones off the line and drive them. I mean, it's they look great. It's like the perfect model. You always had a vision for a model two, right? Like, isn't like the perfect model two in

addition to being a cyber cab.

Look, the reality is people may think they want to drive their car, but the reality is that they don't. How many times have you been saying an Uber or Lyft? And you said, you know what, I wish I could take over from the driver. And I wish I could get off my phone and take over from the Uber driver and and drive to my destination. How many times have you thought to yourself thought that to yourself?

No, it's quite the opposite. Okay. I have the model Y and I just got 14. I have juniper and I got the 14 one and I put it on Mad Max mode the last couple of days. That is that makes for a unique experience. Wait a second. This thing is driving in a very unique fashion. Yeah. Yeah. It assumes you want to get to your

destination in a hurry. Yeah. I used to give drivers an extra

20 bucks to do that medical appointment or something. I

don't know. Yeah, but it's it feels like it's getting very close. But you have to be very careful. You know, Uber had a horrible accident with the safety driver. Cruz had a terrible accident wasn't their fault. Exactly. Except, you know, that somebody got hit and then they hit the person a second time and they got dragged. Yeah, there's this pretty high stakes. So you're being extremely cautious.

Because the car is actually extremely capable right now. But we are being extremely cautious and we're being paranoid about it. Because to your point, even one accident would be headline news. Well, probably worldwide headline news,

especially if it's a Tesla, like Waymo, I think gets a bit of a pass. I think there's half the country or a number of people probably would, you know, go extra hard on you.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Everyone in the press is my friend.

Hadn't noticed.

Some of them are little antagonistic.

People are pressuring you to go fast. And I, I think is

everybody's got to just take their time with this thing. It's obviously going to happen. But I just get very nervous that the the pressure to put these things on the road faster than they're ready, is just a little crazy. So I applaud you for putting the safety monitor in doing the safety driver, no shame in the safety driver game. It's so much the right decision, obviously, but people are criticizing you for it. I think

it's dumb. It's the right thing to do.

Yes. And we do expect it to take to not have any sort of safety occupant or or there not really a driver that just says monitor safety, safety monitor just sits, you just sit, they just sit in the car and don't do anything. Safety, dude. Yeah. So, but we do expect that the cars will be driving around without any any safety monitor. If before the end of the year,

so sometime in December,

in Austin, yeah, I mean, you got a number of reps under your belt in Austin, and it feels like pretty well, you guys have done a great job figuring out where the trouble spots are. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you learned in the first, I don't know, it's been like three or four months of this so far. What did you learn the first three or four

months of the Austin experiment?

Actually, it's gone pretty smoothly. A lot of things that we're learning are just how to manage a fleet like this, because you've got to write all the fleet management software, right? So yeah. And you've got to write the ride hailing software, you've got to write basically the software that Uber has, you've got to write that software. It's just summoning a robot car instead of a car with a driver.

So a lot of the things we're doing, we're scaling up the number of cars to say, what happens if you have 1,000 cars? We think probably we'll have 1,000 cars or more in the Bay Area by the end of this year, probably 500 or more in the greater Austin area. And you have to make sure the cars don't all,

for example, go to the same supercharger at the same time. So, or don't all go to the same intersection. It's like, what do these cars do? And then like, sometimes there's a high demand and sometimes there's this low demand. What do you do during during those times? Do you have a car circle the block? Do you have a try to find a parking space. The and then you know, sometimes the like, say it's a, you know, disabled parking space or something, but the the writing spaded or the things faded, the car was like, Oh, look at parking space, we'll jump right in there. And so

yeah, get a ticket. Got to look carefully and make sure it's like, you know, it's not a legal parking space. Or it sees it sees a space to park and it's like ridiculously tight. But it's like, I can get in there. Yes. With like, you know, three inches on either side type of bad computer.

But nobody else will be able to get in the car if you do that. So yeah, there's just like all these oddball corner cases. And

regulators, like regulators are all very, yeah, there, they have different levels of persickeness and regulations, depending on the city, depending on the airport. I mean, it's just, you know, very different everywhere. That's going to just be a lot of blocking and tackling and it just takes time.

You want to take people to San Jose Airport, like sounds that you actually have to connect to San Jose Airport servers. And because you have to pay a fee every time. So so the car actually has to has to do a remote call. The robot car has to do a remote procedure call to San Jose Airport service to say I'm dropping someone off at the airport and charge me whatever five bucks.

Which is like, there are all these quirky things like that. Airports are somewhat of a racket. Yeah. So so that's like, you know, we have to solve that thing. But it's kind of funny at the robot cars like calling the server, the airport server to charge its credit card or

to extend the fax. Yeah, we're gonna be dropping off at this

time.

But it will soon become extremely normal to see cars going around with no one in them.

Yeah.

Just before we lose you, I want to like, ask if you saw that Bill Gates memo that he put out. A lot of people are talking about this memo. Like, you know, did I just like, Billy G is not my love. Oh, man. Like, did did climate change become? Did it become like woke? And is it over? Like, you know, like what happened? And what's what

happened with Billy G? I mean, you know,

question. Great question. Yeah.

You know, you think that someone like Bill Gates, who clearly started a tech, you know, started a technology company, that's one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft, um, being, uh, you think he'd be really quite, um, you really quite strong in the sciences. But actually, my, at least, direct conversations with him have, he is not strong in the sciences. Like, yeah, this is really surprising.

You know, like, he came to visit me at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, and was telling me that it's impossible to have a long range semi truck. And I was like, well, but we literally have them. And you can drive them and Pepsi is literally using them right now. And you can drive them yourself or send someone else to drive himself but you doesn't drive himself, but you can send a trusted person to drive the truck and verify that it can do the things that we say it's doing. And it's like, no, no, it doesn't work, doesn't work. And I'm like, um, okay, I'm kind of stuck there.

Then it's like, I was like, well, so it must be that you disagree with the watt hours per kilogram of the battery pack so that you must think that perhaps we can't achieve the energy density of the battery pack, or that the watt hours per mile of the truck is too high. And that when you combine those two numbers, the range is low. And so which one of those numbers do you think we have wrong? And what numbers do you think are correct? And he

didn't know any of the numbers. And I'm like, well, then doesn't it seem that it's perhaps, you know, premature to conclude that long range semi cannot work if you do not know the energy density of the battery pack or the energy efficiency of the of the truck chassis.

Hmm. Hmm. But yeah, he's now taking a 180 on climate. He's saying maybe this should be

just gay. It's just, yeah, what do you say? I'm a disgain that's wrong.

It's totally retarded.

Well, gay so the climate is gay and retarded. You see, well, well, guess the climate is getting retarded.

Come on, I maybe.

I want some data centers.

You gotta put up. Do they have to stand up a data center for Sam Altman or something? I don't know what is Azure. It changes position. I can't figure out why.

I mean. You know, I mean, the reality of the whole climate change thing is, is that the you know, you've just had sort of people who say it doesn't exist at all. And then people who say it's our super llamas and saying, you know, rogers gonna be underwater in five years. And obviously, neither of those two positions are true. But you know, the reality is you can measure the carbon concentration in the atmosphere.

Again, you could just literally buy a CO2 monitor from Amazon, it's like 50 bucks, and you can measure it yourself. And you can say, okay, well, look, the possible million of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing steadily at two to three per year. At some point, if you continue to take billions,

eventually trillions of tons of carbon from deep underground and transfer it to the atmosphere and oceans, so you transfer it from deep underground into the surface cycle, you will change the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans. You just literally will. Then you can only, then now you can say to what degree and over what time scale.

And the reality is that, in my opinion, is that we've got at least 50 years before it's a serious issue. I don't think we've got 500 years, but we've probably got 50. It's not five years. So if you're trying to get to the right order of magnitude

of accuracy, I'd say the concern level for climate change is on the order of 50 years. It's definitely not five, and I think it probably isn't 500. So really, the right course of action is actually just the reasonable course of action, which is to lean in the direction of sustainable energy, and, and

lean in the direction of, of solar, and sort of a solar battery future, and, and, and generally have the rules of the system. Lean in that direction. I don't think we need massive subsidies, but then we also shouldn't have massive subsidies for the oil and gas industry. So the oil and gas industry has massive tax write-offs that they don't even think of as

subsidies because these things have been in place for, in some cases, 80 years. But they're not there for other industries. So when you've got special tax conditions that are in one industry and not in another industry, I call that a subsidy. Obviously, it is.

But they've taken it for granted for so long in oil and gas that they don't think of it as a subsidy. So the right course of action, of course, is to remove, in my opinion, to remove subsidies from all industries. But the political reality is that the oil and gas industry is very strong in the Republican Party, but not in the Democratic Party. So you will not see obviously, even the tiniest subsidy being removed from the oil, gas and coal industry. In

fact, there were some that were added to the oil, gas and coal industry. In fact, there were some that were added to the oil, gas and coal industry in the sort of big bull. And, and there were a lot of massive number of sustainable energy incentives that were removed, some of which I agreed with, by the way, some of the incentives have gone too far. But anyway, the actual, I think, the correct scientific conclusion, in my opinion, and I think we can back this up with with solid reasoning, as Grok, for example,

is that we should, we should lean in the direction of moving towards a sustainable energy future. We will eventually run out of oil, gas and coal to burn anyway, because it's a finite amount of that stuff. And we will eventually have to go to something that lasts a long time that is sustainable.

But to your point about the irony of things, it seems to be the case that making energy with solar is cheaper than making energy with some of these carbon based sources today. And so the irony is, it's already working. I mean, the market is moving in that direction. And this notion that we need to kind of force everyone into a model of behavior, it's just naturally

going to change. Because we've got better systems, you know, you and others have engineered better systems that make these alternatives cheaper, and therefore they're winning, like they're actually winning in the market, which is great. But they can't win if there are subsidies to support the old systems, obviously.

Yeah, I mean, by the way, there are actually massive disincentives of postponement because the because China, China is a massive producer of solar panels. China does an incredible job of solar panel manufacturing. Really incredible. They have roughly one and a half terawatts of solar production right now. And they're only using a terawatt per year.

By the way, that's a gigantic number. The average US power consumption is only half a terawatt. So just think about that for a second. China's solar panel production max capacity is 1 and 1 half terawatts per year. US steady state power usage is half a terawatt. Now, you do have to reduce, you say, to produce one and a half terawatts a year of solar, you need to add that

with batteries, taking into account the differences between night and day, the fact that the solar panel is not always pointed directly at the sun, that kind of thing. So you can divide by five ish, to say that, but that still means that China has the ability to produce solar panels that have a steady state output. That is roughly two thirds that of the entire US economy from all sources, which means that just with solar alone, China can in one in 18 months, produce enough solar panels to power the

entire the United States all the electricity in the United States.

What do you think about near field solar, aka nuclear?

I'm in favor of look, make make energy from any any way you want that that doesn't that doesn't like obviously harmful to the environment. Generally, people don't welcome a nuclear reactor in their backyard. They're not like, champagning. Put it here. Put it under my bed. Put it on my roof. If your next door neighbor said, hey, I'm selling my house and they're putting a reactor there. What would you, you know, typical homeowner

response will be negative. It very few people will embrace a nuclear reactor adjacent to their house. So, but nonetheless, I do think nuclear is actually very safe. The it's there's a lot of scare monitor, sort of scare monitoring and propaganda around fission, if you're talking about fission. And fission is actually very safe. They obviously have this on, you know, the Navy, US Navy has this on submarines and aircraft

carriers and with people really walking right. I mean, a submarine is a pretty crowded place and they have a nuclear powered submarine. So I think fission is fine as an option. The regulatory environment makes it very difficult to actually get that done. And then it is important to appreciate just the sheer magnitude of the power of the sun.

So here are some just important basic facts. Even Wikipedia has these facts, right? You know, so you don't even have to go to Rock Media, but even Wikipedia has, yeah, even Wikipedia. Yes, yes, I'm saying what I'm saying even Wikipedia got these facts, right? The sun is about 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Then Jupiter is about 0.1% and everything else is in the remaining 0.1% and we are much less than 0.1%. So, if you burnt all of the mass of the solar system, okay, then the

total energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%. They've just burnt Earth, the whole planet, and burnt Jupiter, which is very big, and quite challenging to burn. You know, didn't turn Jupiter into a thermonuclear actor, it wouldn't matter. The sun, compared to the sun, the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, and everything

else is in the miscellaneous category. So like, basically, no matter what you do, total energy produced in our solar system, rounds up to 100% from the sun. You could even throw another Jupiter in there. So we're going to snag a Jupiter from somewhere else. And somehow teleport, you could teleport two more Jupiters into our solar system, burn them, and the sun

was still right up to 100%. You know, so as long as you're at 99.6%, you're still rounding up to 100%. Maybe that gives some perspective of why solar is really the thing that matters. And as soon as you start thinking about things in a sort of a grander scale, like Kardashev scale to civilizations, it becomes very,

very obvious. I'm not saying anything that's new, by the way, like anyone who studies physics has known this for, you know, very long time. In fact, Khodoshev, I think, was a Russian physicist who came up with this idea, I think, in the 60s, just as a way to classify civilizations. Where Kardashev scale one would be, you've used your, you've harnessed most of the energy of the planet, Kardashev scale two, you've harnessed most of the energy of your sun, Kardashev three, you've harnessed most of the energy of galaxy. Now, we're

only about, I don't know, 1% or a few percent of KadaShep Scale 1 right now, optimistically. So but as soon as you go to KadaShep Scale 2, we're talking about the power of the sun, then you're really just saying everything is solar power and the rest is in the noise. And yeah, so like the, you know, like the sun produces about a billion times or call it well over a billion times more energy than

everything on earth combined.

It's crazy.

It's mind-blowing. Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, solar's the obvious solution to all this, and yeah, I mean, short-term, you have to use some of these other sources, but hey, there it is, an hour and a half with Elon Musk.

You're thinking of it like star-powered.

Like, maybe we've got a branding issue here. Yeah, star-powered. It's it's starlight. Starlight. It's the power of a blazing sun. How much energy does an entire star have? Yeah. Well, more than enough. All right.

And also you really need to keep the power local. Um,

so sometimes people honestly, I've had these discussions so many times. It's, it's where they say, well, would you beam the power back to earth? I'm like, do you want to melt earth? Because you would melt earth if you did that. Um. We'd be vaporized in an instant. So you really need to get power local, you know, basically distributed power. And I guess most would reuse for intelligence. So it's like, the future is like a whole bunch of solar powered AI satellites.

The only the only thing that makes the star work is it just happens to have a lot of mass. So it has a lot of to ignite the fusion to ignite the fusion reaction, right? But like, we could ignite the fusion reaction on Earth now. I don't know, like, if your view has changed. I think we talked about this a couple years ago, where you were pretty like, we don't know if or when fusion becomes real here. But theoretically, we

could take like 10. No, I want to be clear. My opinion on, so, yeah, I started physics in college. At one point in high school I was thinking about a career in physics. One of my sons actually is doing a career in physics. But the problem is I came to the conclusion that I'd be waiting for a collider or a telescope. I don't have any, and I need to that clear in physics, but I have a strong interest in the subject. So, so my opinion on say, creating a fusion reactor on Earth is I think this

is actually not a hard problem. Actually, it's a little hard. I mean, it's not like totally trivial. But if you just scale up a tokamak, the bigger you make it, the easier the problem gets. So you've got a surface-to-volume ratio thing where you're trying to maintain a really hot core while having a wall that doesn't melt. So that's a similar problem with rocket engines.

You've got a super hot core in the rocket engine, but you don't want the walls, the chamber walls of the rocket engine to melt. So you have a temperature gradient where it's very hot in the middle and gradually gets cold enough as you get to the perimeter,

as you get to the chamber walls in the rocket engine where it doesn't melt because you've lowered the temperature and you've got a temperature gradient. So if you just scale up the donut reactor, Tokamak, and improve your surface to volume ratio,

that becomes much easier. And you can absolutely, in my opinion, no, I think just anyone who looks at the math, you can you can make a, a, a reactor that is pot that generates more energy than it consumes. And the bigger you make it, the easier it is. And in the limit, you just have a giant gravitationally

contained thermonuclear reactor like the sun, though, which requires no maintenance, and it's free So this is also why why would we bother doing that on making a little itty-bitty Sun That's so microscopic you'd barely notice On earth when we've got the giant free one in the sky

Yeah, but we'll but we only get a fraction of 1% of that energy on the planet Earth. We have to go...

Much less than 1%.

Yeah. Right, so we've got to figure out how to wrap the sun if we're going to harness that energy. That's our long term...

Look, if people want to have fun with reactors, you know, that's fine. Have fun with reactors. But it's not a serious endeavor compared to the sun. You know, it's sort of a fun science project to make a nuclear reactor, but it's not, it's not, it's just peanuts compared to the sun. And even the solar energy that does reach earth is a gigawatt per square kilometer, or roughly, you, call it two and a half gigawatts per square mile. So that's a lot, you know, and the commercially available panels are around 25, almost 26%

efficiency and maybe, you know, and then you say, like, if you pack it densely, you get an 80% packing density, you're going to, which I think, you know, you get a lot of places, you could get an 80% packing density, you effectively have about, you know, 200 megawatts per square kilometer. And, and, and you need to pair that with batteries. So you have continuous power, although our power usage drops considerably

at night, so you need less batteries than you think. And, and, and doesn't that doesn't the question a rough way to look at a very maybe an easy number to remember is a gigabyte hour per square kilometer per day is a roughly correct number.

But then doesn't your technical challenge become the scalability of manufacturing of those systems? So, you know, accessing the raw materials and getting them out of the ground of planet earth to make them to make enough of them to get to that sort of scale on that volume that you're talking about. And as you kind of think about what it would take to get to that scale, like,

do we have an ability to do that with what we have today? Like, can we pull that much material out of the ground?

Yes, solar panels are made of silicon, which is sand essentially. And

I guess more on the battery side, but

the battery side, yeah. So battery, battery side. You know, the, like iron phosphate, lithium ion battery cells, this you know, earth, and I'd like to throw out some interesting factoids here. Most people don't know, as measured by mass, what is the biggest element, what is earth made of as measured by mass?

Actually it's iron.

Iron, yeah.

Yeah, we're I think 32% iron, 30% oxygen, and then everything else is in the remaining percentage. So we're basically a rusty ball bearing. That's earth. And with, you know, a lot of silicon at the surface in the form of sand. And the iron phosphate, so iron phosphate lithium ion cells, iron, extremely common, most common element on Earth,

even in the crust. And then phosphorus is also very common. And then the anode is carbon, but also very common. And then lithium is also very common. So there's actually, you can do the math. In fact, we did the math and published it,

published the math, but never looked at it. It's on the Tesla website that that shows that you can completely to work, Elon, and just borrow the

earth while you're getting implants into people's brains

and satellites and other good fun stuff. Good to see you, buddy.

Good to see you guys. Yeah.

Thanks for doing this.

Thank you for coming today. And thank you for liberating free speech three years ago. Yeah, that was that was a very important milestone. I see all you was that was a very important milestone.

See all you guys are just different different places. I guess this is a very virtual situation.

At the ranch.

You're in the same room. We try not to be only only when we do that that summit but otherwise we do this.

Your summit is pretty fun yeah yeah we had a great time recounting uh snl sketches that didn't didn't make it oh god there's just so

many good ones i mean we didn't even get to the jeopardy ones yeah yeah no those are so offensive

oh wait well i think we skipped a few that would have dramatically increased our probability of being killed.

You can take this one out.

Boys, I love you.

I love you.

I love you all.

I'm going to poker.

Later.

Take care.

All right, thanks, see you later.

Bye-bye.

Love you.

Take care. Rain Man David Saks I'm going all in And it said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it

Love you West County

Queen of Quinoa

I'm going all in What your winners like? What your winners like?

Besties are gone

That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway

Saks, win it all

Oh man!

Oh man!

My avatar will meet me at Blitz.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

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