All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E69: Elon Musk on Twitter's bot problem, SpaceX's grand plan, Tesla stories, Giga Texas & more

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

0:00 Bestie Guestie Elon Musk joins via Zoom at the All-In Summit! 0:43 Benchmarking Twitter's bot problem, thoughts on slights from the Biden Administration 13:26 Breaking down Tesla's 6+ businesses, comparing them to a traditional car company 21:42 Concerns around the Twitter deal, crypto payments on Twitter 30:19 Building vs. acquiring, early Tesla stories 39:52 SpaceX's grand vision and business model, nuclear fusion vs. solar 56:37 Moving from CA to TX, fixing California, macroeconomic takes 1:10:20 American exceptionalism, a new immigration strategy Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg https://twitter.com/elonmusk Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffec

So live from an undisclosed location with the sultry filter on Very sultry filter on Having a great hair day. Yeah, that is a good hair day for great hair day my pal And your favorite CEO and Twitter mr. Elon Musk, how you doing pal? Thanks. I appreciate you coming to the event and coming and zooming in. What's new in your world? Well, let's see. I guess right now, I'm sort of debating the number of bots on Twitter. It's like, brah, on Twitter. And currently, what I'm being told is that there's just no way to know the number of bots.

It's like as unknowable as the human soul, basically. So, we have an idea. We have a witchcraft and alchemy is needed to determine these both as part of the standard. I said, why don't I try calling people, but I haven't got a response. If you try calling people or something, you know, like maybe try that. Try the answer. It's not about that.

No, no, I don't know, but I think that would be one of the things to do to say, like, have you tried calling them as opposed to a try to read the tea leaves here? That's like impossible, you know Obviously, you can have an account that looks exactly like a human account or is being operated where one person is operating a thousand accounts or something But that person can only buy one toaster. They're not gonna buy a thousand toasters So you care about like number of unique real people that are on the system, it's extremely fundamental. And anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are a full of spam, scam,

and just a lot of fake accounts. So it seems beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of, essentially, the number of real, set another way, the number of real, unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95%. That is what they're claiming. Does anyone have that experience? I mean, really? There's a bridge I'd like to sell you, you know And then also, you can buy the Brooklyn Bridge. What do you think it is? Yeah, what's the, I mean, it's not 5%.

What is it? I think it's a number that is probably at least four or five times that number. I'd say it at, if you did sort of the lowest estimate would be probably 20%. And this is a bunch of quite smart outside phones have done analysis of Twitter and looked at the sort of daily users and their conclusion is also about 20%. But that's a lower bound. It's not an upper bound.

If you look at, say, most liked tweets on Twitter. So I have the honor of having the most liked tweet of any living human. Thank you, everyone, for liking my tweet. Including some of the vats out there. But that tweet is less than 5 million likes. It's like 4.7 or something like that. And that was the... Where I tweeted about,

that next time buying Coca-Cola, to put the cocaine back in. Really good. That is definitely, it's clearly something that the public really wants. And, you know, Coca-Cola corporations should really think about going back to their roots. You know, Coca-Cola. Wheat, Coca-Cola. I mean, this, I guess, is the reason why our grandparents could sort of walk 20 miles

in the snow. Because they had Coca-Cola with cocaine. This is real reasoning. Anyway, that is literally the most popular tweet of any living human. Twitter says the sort of monetizable daily act of uses is 217 million. Why would it be that the most popular tweet, however, basically is only 2, a half percent of the entire user base. This seems a very, very low number. And the most popular tweets generally are clustered around that sort of 4 million like level.

So it's sort of like basically 2% or less than 2% of the daily active users. And technically monetizable daily active users is how to put her first. So it just seems how is this possible? Surely there's something that maybe 10% of people would like, not merely 2%. Well, actually, if you think about it, Elon, there's a corollary on YouTube. What's the total user base of YouTube? And what have the most popular videos gotten there? Yes.

And I think there's a billion or two, maybe a billion people using YouTube. And those, the most popular videos have tens of billions of views. Yes. That might be instructive. Exactly. That ratio makes a lot more sense. So something doesn't add up here. And my concern is it's not that is it like, you know, is it five or seven or eight percent, but is it potentially 80 percent or 90 percent? But I mean, I certainly know there's some real people on Twitter, but what's,

is it an order of magnitude? Is it 50% instead of five? And that's obviously an incredibly material number, especially since Twitter relies primarily on brand advertising as opposed to specific click through advertising where you make a purchase. If you make a purchase, it doesn't really matter that much. But for brand advertising, which is really just awareness advertising, it matters if real humans are seeing that or not. Yeah, and so I guess stepping back for a second, people are curious why you want to buy Twitter.

Why is this so important to you? And then I guess, what are the chances you think the deal gets done at this point? So it's too hard. Why is it so important to you? I mean, some of this I have articulated before, but I think there's a need for a public town square, digital town square, that where people can debate issues of all kinds, including the most substantive issues.

And in order for that to be the case, you have to have something that is as broadly inclusive as possible that has as much of the people on the platform as possible, where it feels balanced from a political standpoint. It's not biased one way or the other, and where the system is transparent. This is why I think it's important to put the algorithm on GitHub

and actually allow the public to see it and critique it and improve it. And if there are any manual changes, sort of shadow banning, as it's called, or increasing or decreasing the prominence of a tweet, that's done manually, that that should be noted so you know what has happened and it's not just, you know, you're just where it is right now, we don't know what the heck is going on. Why is one tweet doing well? Why is it not? Is it the algorithm that someone manually intervened? Why are accounts banned, with no recourse apparently.

And, you know, the reality is that Twitter at this point, has a very far left bias. And I would classify myself as a moderate, and neither Republican nor Democrat. And in fact, I have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats historically, overwhelmingly. I'm not sure. I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear.

Right. Now, this election I will. I'm going to go and keep going. He's fine. We're going, we're gonna recess it, Tadam, we're gonna recess it, David, it's act, I mean, let me ask you a question. The point I'm trying to make is that this is not some sort of attempt to, you know, it's not some right wing takeover

as, as, pay, so if you're a little left made fear, but rather a moderate wing takeover, and an attempt to ensure that people of old, you know, political beliefs feel welcome on a digital town square that, and they can express their beliefs without fear of being banned or shadow banned. And that we obviously need to get rid of the bots and scams and straws and people that are operating

huge bot armies in an attempt to unduly influence the public opinion. So this is what I think is very important that we have that. Like the, some of the smartest people in history have thought about it and said, like, free speech is important for a healthy democracy, it is important. And free speech only matters. Like say, when does free speech matter most? It's when someone you don't like saying something you don't like. That's when it actually matters. So, you know, obviously, and it's pretty actually matters. So, you know, obviously, and it's pretty annoying when someone you don't like says something, you don't like, that's bad, but it's actually a good sign that you

have free speech. So, I mean, I get trashed by the media all the time. It's fine. I don't care. Do it twice as much. I couldn't care less. But it's indicative of the fact that even though I have like a lot of resources, I do not actually have the ability to stop the media from trashing me. And that's actually a good thing. Yeah. I have to ask with regard to this current administration, I know how hard you work on the car company. And then Biden, you know, you've been a lifelong Democrat, you've donated to a bomb and to everybody, probably never voted Republican.

And yet, and the same is true for Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is, you know, a Bernie Sanders supporter. And that Democratic Party has been openly hostile to Joe Rogan. And Biden can't even say the word Tesla or invite you to the White House when they do an EV summit. I'm curious just on a very personal basis, what does it feel like to have that experience where the party you supported won't even say the name of your company or invite you there, they should be celebrating the work you're doing. Yeah, I mean, it definitely feels like this is not right. Like this is the issue here is that there's just this, the the Dereaucard party is overly, overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers, particularly the class action lawyers.

And generally, if you, if you'll see something that doesn't, that is not in the interest of the people, on the Democrat side, it's going to come because of the unions, which is just another form of monopoly, and the the trial lawyers, that that's where actions will be happening from the Democrat side. They're not in the interest of people. And then to be fair, on the Republican side, there's, if you say like, where does something like, not ideal happening, it's because of corporate evil

and religious salutary. But that's generally where the bad things will be coming from on the Republican side. That are not representative of the people. So in the case of Biden, he is simply too much captured by the unions, which was not the case with Obama. So, in the case of Obama, you could have, you know, he was sort of quite reasonable, and I think he took more of a view that, you know, obviously, you need to take the concerns

of the unions into account, but they're bigger issues at stake, and unfortunately, Biden does not do that. You'll have a Tesla question. I read today, it's incredible. There was a Bloomberg article that said the following. So the setup is this. It said, since you went public, Tesla is up 22,000%. 11 quarters of sequential profitability.

So hitting on all cylinders. But the public analyst. We have a little bit. That's a car joke. That's a combustor. Barrier, we're stepping on the gas pedal. Barrier, all sold it. People touched. But analysts, when they put out their projections,

it's one of the most enormous bands for any company in America. The price targets for Tesla, despite all of this success, some have it at 200, some have it at 1600, it's all over the place. You tweeted a couple of months ago, Tesla's not a company,

it's like six companies inside of a company. Like you've had the billers. Yeah, maybe more. Yeah, maybe more. Can you just explain to people all these companies inside the super company, just so folks have a sense of what had to be done to get here? Okay.

I mean, this is of course a requires thought and I'll probably be leaving out quite a few things. But if you look at say what, what does a typical car company do? What they do is they assemble vehicles and they send them to dealers and they manage the supply chain. They might make the engine, or typically we'll make the engine,

but most of the parts are made by suppliers. And a lot of the actual technology development is done by suppliers and most of the vehicle software is done by suppliers. So the actual amount of real work done by car companies, what do you think of sort of like a GM report is not actually that much. So they don't do sales, they don't do service. So in the case of Tesla, for example, we do our own sales and service. We don't have dealerships. Then Tesla also has by far the biggest network of superchargers,

sort of the electrical equivalent of gas stations. So we built the entire global supercharger network, which is still the most advanced and by far the best way to charge your car, we're traveling long distance, or if you live in a city and don't have the ability to charge your car when traveling long distance, or if you live in a city and don't have the ability to charge your car in a street parking or an apartment. So the whole Supercharge Network, we developed the Supercharge Network, we deployed it, I think we have,

I don't know, 15,000 Supercharges globally in travel anywhere in America right now with the Tesla Supercharge Network. Then in terms of vertical integration, we make the battery pack, the power electronics, the drive unit. We're more integrated in the parts. We actually make so much of the car internally. We're vertically integrated, not necessarily because we think that this is some religious reason to be vertically integrated, but because the pace

of it we needed to move was just much faster than the supply chain could move. And to the degree that you inherit the legacy supply chain, you inherit the legacy constraints, including the speed, cost and technology. And then Tesla is as much a software company as it is a hardware company. So the software that runs in Tesla operates the car,

operates the screen, does the charging, all of that stuff is developed by Tesla. And so we have sort of a car, a Tesla OS in the car. When you go on for a long time, and then very importantly, Tesla has built an autopilot AI team from scratch. That is the best real world AI team on earth. If anyone else has got a better one, I'd like to see it demonstrated in a car. The full-stop driving beta at this point can very often take you with zero interventions across the Bay Area from San Jose to Marin. So through complex traffic,

it's really quite sophisticated and I'd invite anyone to join the beta or look at the videos of those who are in the beta. We've got like a hundred thousand people in the beta or look at the videos of those who are in the beta We've got like a hundred thousand people in the beta. So it's not tiny and we'll be expanding that to I don't know probably millions people or a million I don't know so on that order by the end of the year so it's You had to slide. We also we also both a chip team to because there wasn't it wasn't hard work that we could run the friggin AI on. We couldn't just fill the trunk with a whole bunch of GPUs. And, you know,

it would have triggered a trunk full of GPUs that would have been very expensive and take massive amount of power and cooling, just to be able to do what the Tesla designed full self-driving computer can do. So, and we started a chip team from scratch, designed it. It was the best in the world, and still is the best in the world several years later.

And we also then developed, we were designing a Dojo supercomputer to be able to process the old video that's coming out from billions miles of data, because just sort of like the way that it's pretty cool to compete with Google, because they have so much data and they have all the people doing searches all the time and humanity is training it. But the same is true of Tesla.

You really need billions of miles, ultimately tens of billions of miles of training data combined with a sort of a vast training computer. And then optimize inference hardware in the car and say the AI and training, especially software, across the board to be able to achieve a full-subdravying solution. I know, I just want, that when he opened Tesla Gigafactory, remember this six years ago?

I'll just tell the audience a story quickly, Elon. He puts a slide up there and he says, guys, we're not actually building a factory, we're building a machine that makes machines. And he puts the layout of the factory. And it looks like a chip. And it was basically like how you would actually lay out a microchip if you were, or you were like a layout

engineer. It was the craziest thing I'd ever seen. I was like, that was when I first got it. You walk in, and you see what's happening. And you have an insurance company. Now you're doing insurance for Tesla owners. And an Uber competitor. And eventually a RoboTaxi Uber competitor, RIP.

Insurance is not quite significant. And now are you OK? I'm OK. OK. Just the car insurance thing is a bigger deal that may seem. A lot of people are paying 30%, 40% as much as their lease payment for the car in car insurance.

So the car insurance industry is incredibly inefficient because they're just, first of all, you've got so many sort of middle entities you've got from the insurance agent all the way to the final so to reinsure there's like a half a dozen companies each taking a cut. And then the, it's all very statistical. So even if you're a very good driver, you could be like 20 years old and a great driver, but it's all statistical.

So you can't get insurance or it's extremely expensive. So Betezza allows for real time insurance based on how you actually drive the car. You can actually, if you drive the car in a safer way, you actually have lower insurance. So ours is, insurance is based on how you actually drive, not how, historically, people that fit your whatever demographic have drive. And then you can close the loop around your insurance rate by simply driving better and looking at your score

and lowering your assurance in real time. And people do it, actually promote safer driving. I actually have had this experience because in my household, two people drive my car. And one of them has a 93 score, and the other one does not. They have like a 64. And you may have met this

other person, but I've been trying to work with her on the aggressive turns and stops in advance of our insurance bill, which we're hoping we'll go down at some point. You did the one question. Is this Twitter deal going to get closed, do you think? There's a chance, is there? Well, I mean, it really depends on a lot of factors here. I'm still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number of sort of fake or spam accounts on Twitter. And Twitter is refusing to tell us. So this seems like a strange thing.

Wait, sorry. Are they refusing to tell you or you don't think they really know? I mean, there's a good chance they may just have no idea. They claim that they do know. Yeah. And they claim that they've got this complex methodology that only they can understand. But the guy who landed two rockets, simultaneously, you do that.

I wish he was through, he'd stir this cold run, and then you throw the nothin' poem, and, the awful deltoid. Oxford, oil, and straw. Well, suddenly, it comes to you in a dream, I don't know. That's probably all. Then suddenly, it comes to you in a dream. I don't know.

But there should be some objective way to this, the thing, because this is a material public state. The fractured issue. Yeah. It's a material abyss misstatement. If they, in fact, have been specifically claiming less than 5% of Faker spam accounts, but in fact it is 4 or 5 times that number, perhaps 10 times that number. This is a big deal. It's not the same, it's only like if you said, okay, I'm going

to, I agree to buy your house. You say the house has less than 5% termites. That's an acceptable number. But if it turns out it is 90% termites, that's not okay. It's not the same house. This house made mostly a termite. It's believed, literally, your house will disappear, because it's mostly made in two months. So that would obviously obviously not be appropriate. In making the Twitter offer, I was obviously

reliant upon the truth and accuracy of their public filings. Those filings are not accurate. It's simply not. You can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed. They say Elon's end negotiations. So at a different price, it might be a totally viable deal, correct? I mean, that, I mean, it's not out of the question.

But I really would, you know, the more questions I ask, the more I, the more my concerns grow. So at the end of the day, it has to be fixable and fixable with reasonable time frame and without revenues collapsing along the way and all that sort of stuff. And so I really need to see how these things are being calculated. And it can't be some deep mystery that is like more complex than the human soul or something like that. It's got to be, you know, I think we can apply the scientific methods to this and try to figure out what's really going on. And Twitter's revenue is primarily dependent, I think 70% or some of that order on brand

advertising as opposed to specific purchase advertising. This is a big deal because brand advertising is not a purchase that results from that. So it's basically how much mind share or like basically if you're a big company, how often do they hear your name? It's as opposed to something that where you can directly measure the outcome. So that that means that they're somewhat going on faith and if that faith is undermined or reduced because of the reality of the situation coming to the fore, then the Tesla's revenue or subtlety then the Tesla's revenue or pretty much such a totality.

The totals revenue will be significantly impaired and that's a major problem. You wanted to give a chance to ask these questions during your negotiation. The, like I said, I was relying upon their public filings. So the degree that they're probably called, and this is normal for a public company. If you make a formal filing, that is what investors are relying on, whether they are making an acquisition offer or simply buying some shares.

So this, the accuracy of these filings is important, whether you're buying one share or the whole company. And so, if these filings are inaccurate, if they're potentially blatant, it's a big deal. You know, do you have a sense of why this has been such a persistent problem for Twitter? Do they not have the technical capabilities to solve the the bot problem? Or is it more of like just a they've under prioritized the issue or been unwilling to because potentially their implications for at revenue? I don't know. It's sort of speculative at this point. So the you know the the worst interpretation would be that they don't want to look too closely at the thing because they might not like the answer. That would be the worst interpretation would be that they don't want to look too closely at the thing because they might not like the answer

That would be the worst interpretation But the bet I'm sure what the best interpretation is but the least bad interpretation would be Maybe they thought it was this way, but they're the way they were doing it was wrong And they didn't realize they're mistaken and simply weren't paying enough attention It just seemed as though it should be a lot easier to get rid of the bots and spam and trolls. Then like this is not some, we're not trying to put the atom here. We're not trying to get to the moon. Okay.

I'm just trying to limit the amount of obviously scammy accounts. If it's like Bitcoin giveaway, you know, probably it's just BAMmer, you know, like, it does, maybe, you know. Wait, you're not giving away 100 Bitcoin? I just sent you 10. If you send me two Bitcoin, I'll send you one back, right? That's my, what if I said you'd want me? Actually, I thought one of the interesting things that came up in your product roadmap, or I guess this was released and people covered it, was the possibility of Twitter becoming

kind of a super app with payments included, maybe perhaps even doze or something. This seems to me based on your work with David, a PayPal, a pretty brilliant idea. What's the vision there in terms of if you were able to buy it, perhaps at the right price, what would it look like if I could add Jason to add Elon Musk, 10 bucks or something, if we were splitting a check or something? Sure, well, for those that have used WeChat, I think that's WeChat's actually a good model.

If you're in China, it's basically you kind of live on WeChat. It does everything. It's sort of like Twitter plus PayPal plus a whole bunch of other things and Oral and so on with actually a great interface and it's really an excellent app. And we don't have anything like that outside of China. So I think such an app would be really useful. And it's just like the utility of it, of sort of a spam free thing where you can make comments, you can post videos, you can,

you know, I think it's important for content creators to have a revenue share. Now this does not need to be done on Twitter. It could be done from something that's created from scratch. So it could be something new. So really, but I think this thing needs to exist, whether it is converting Twitter to be the sort of like

kind of all-encompassing app that that extended everything from digital to elsewhere were important ideas that abated. It maximally trusted and inclusive. And at the point of which you sort of have a high trust situation, then payments, whether it's crypto or Viat can make a lot of sense. Just what you just want to say, whether it's crypto or fiat, can make a lot of sense.

Just what you just want to say, that's incredibly useful and that people love using. So, it's either convert Twitter to that or start something new, those are the two, but it does need to happen somehow. Well, it's interesting you bring that up because the price of Twitter is pretty high and you've built a couple of companies and some engineers like to come work for you And you've now gone through the intellectual exercise of studying all this If you're looking at the two choices now fixing Twitter given all these problems and maybe just starting your own version

Which one are you leaning towards because it you I have watched you build a couple of companies and the products have turned out pretty good. So is it easier for someone like you to just start from scratch? I mean, I mean, it's certainly the, my default inclination is to start thanks from scratch. I mean, I'm not really at a buy things. Like, is this still sort of, you know, like SpaceX was started from scratch, you know, in the case of Tesla, you know, it was like five people.

It was still this guy, Eva Hodg, who's the worst guy I've ever worked with, who priced a claim like so credit essentially for creating Tesla. And if you saw down, great, why don't you just go, you know, create another car company when he was fired? But anyway. So. Well, I mean, that's a pretty good story. I mean, I remember.

Because he's a sad dude. I mean, no, but I remember having this conversation with you. We were having a conversation about the Roadster. I think I can tell the story. I said, how's it going, pal? And you said, well, I got one problem. It turns out the roadster parts and putting it together cost $190,000.

And I said, I gave you $150,000 for number 16. So if you make $2,000 of these, you're going to lose $80 million. And you were like, yeah, or double that. I mean, they basically, the parts of the car cost more than they were selling it for when you were starting to get involved. That's it was this.

No, no, I better involve well before that. Before that, yes. Better involve when Tesla was nothing but a piece of paper. Let me be crystal clear. Crystal talking clear. No, they didn't bring me in. Either. I was going to start an EV company with JB Struggle based on the AC for Paulion T0.

When I asked AC for Paulion if it was okay to do that, they said, well, there's also some others who want to create an EV company, but have not created one yet, would you like to join forces with them? And I said, okay, well, we'll do that. That was a huge mistake. J.B. and I should have just started the car company ourselves. Instead, we teamed up with Everhard, Topping and Wright. Big mistake, the actual moral error here was me trying to have my cake and eat it too,

which is like, I just want to work on the technology and the product and have someone else be the CEO and sort of run the business operations because I just like working on technology and product design. And also as like doing SpaceX at the time in Iraq is so blowing up. So it seemed like, okay, this is like, I always wanted to an electric car company. This is how I can have my cake and eat it too. That was a huge mistake and fundamentally a moral error. At the end, I had to freaking BCU, and I didn't want to be basically. But as either that or it's coming, it's gonna die. So we started with really just nothing

and the TZR prototype from AC for Poltion. Not not. That's the pre-corsa to Tesla. Yeah. There was one half-synchered clear once again when we created Tesla, when I joined, there were no employees, there was no intellectual property, there was no prototype, there was no nothing.

Yeah. We crystal fucking clear. And. And. And. And. And. And.

And it almost bankrupted you. I mean, you that sent you to the cliff of. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was. Yes, we're on the ragged edge of bankruptcy so many times it was ridiculous. So, I want 2008 was one of the worst years where basically the GM and Ford, just a GM and Christ of the world, Ford almost went bankrupt and you know, trying to raise money for a start

up electric car company in 2008 while GM was going bankrupt was difficult to say the least. And you know, people were angry that I even asked them. They're like, fuck you and get hang on. So the only way that that Tesla actually made it through 2008 was a subset of the existing investors, which includes like Antonio Gracias and Steve Davidson and a few other key people, Ira Aaron Price, who I've hold a data graph to to the state. And I put in all the money I had left and they said everything literally everything. I didn't even have a house.

So I was like, staying actually in Jeff's car's bedroom, spare bedroom. And the subsets were the best. I put in as much as I put in. And, but the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, mean, it was an incredible moment in time, and people also forget at the time that the first two rockets SpaceX sent up didn't exactly make it to orbit. Like, one of the first three, right? At the first three, and I remember having dinner with you at that time, and I asked you,

hey, how's it going? I heard Galker says you got four weeks of payroll left, and you said, that's not true. And I said, thank God. And you said,'s not true. And I said, thank God. And you said we have two. And I said, both SpaceX and Tesla in 2008, if we'd simply paid our suppliers on time, we would have gone bankrupt immediately. Tell us, tell us actually, it was a pretty crazy moment, because I also remember asking you

that we were having dinner at Boa, and I said, well, certainly it's got to be some good news. And you took out your blackberry to date the conversation. I don't remember it. And you said, don't tell anybody, Jay Collins. It's no problem. And you showed me the clay version of the Model S. Yeah.

Beautiful card ever seen. I said, oh my God, it's stunning. How much was it going to cost? He said, I think I can make it for $50,000. I remember I was yesterday. I said, if you make that card for $50,000, you'll change the fucking world. And you did it.

It was a little more than $50,000, but you have $50,000. Yeah. That's a good one. Hi, sure. Let's ask about space. OK, well, let's ask about space. But I want to ask one more personal question. That's basketball spaces. Okay, well, that's what's space, but I want to ask one more personal question. Has life gotten easier for you as these companies have hit scale or has the complexity made life even more challenging?

Because those early days, it was just fighting to survive. Nobody knew who you were, you were anonymous, and it was really just about the work. And now let's face it, you're the world's most famous guy and everybody's watching everything you do, but these companies are also very big. So what's life like for you today? Are you enjoying what you're doing every day? Well, I mean, it's somewhat a barola coaster.

So there are like good days and bad days, and there's the worst of crisis issues. And you know, like sort of knock on wood, like we're not like facing death in the face. Like it's definitely like quite stressful when like death is like trying to eat your face off and like the foam is like, you know, just getting it. And like, yeah, right there.

You know, it's pretty stressful in that situation. So both SpaceX and Tesla have significant cash reserves. So it's not worth staring death in the face. We could sort of see it over in the horizon, so don't get complacent or entitled, because it's not like just sort of foaming at the mouth and gnashing 20-year face off on a daily basis. That's certainly, we've moved on from that point

and hopefully never return. But there are a lot of issues that need to be, it's just like if you're a CEO of a company, the chore level is high. And if you don't do your chores, then the company goes to hell. And I hate doing chores, frankly. So who do, who does?

So that's the real, there's a whole bunch of sort of personnel issues and legal issues and things that I don't find enjoyable to work on. But if I don't work on them, the company suffers. So it's more like just the sheer volume of work is insane. And then I'll go do some, go add to it with Twitter or something like that. Yeah, I mean, extra processor. Yeah, I mean, I haven't had it of Blinding of Wolfen I Can True, and then just sitting there with like two bunk cheeks.

Yeah. Alyssa, you know, tell us a little bit about where we are at SpaceX, like how you fund the ability to go to Mars, but then also commercially still build a conventional space business domestically. I think this Russia thing was probably really good for SpaceX if you want to just tell us a little bit about that. Sure. Well, the goal of SpaceX is to develop the technology that enables life to become multitonitary and make humanity a space-sparing

civilization, which I think is a very exciting, inspiring thing. And it's like, one of those things where you can, that I think, just makes kids like be excited about the future. And we need things that are inspiring and exciting and make the future seem like it's going to be better than the past. Life can't just be about solving one of those real problem after another. It's got to be like, what's inspiring and exciting. And I think that a future where we are space-pranked civilization is one that we can all get excited about.

And we can go out there and find out what's out there in the universe and what's the meaning of life and where are the aliens? And hopefully they're friendly. And that kind of thing. So, you know, it's pretty interesting. I do get asked about the aliens' question a lot. And I've not seen any evidence of aliens. And I'll be the first to, you know, plead about it or whatever if I see something. I mean, you'll tell us if you find them.

I will tell you, I will definitely tell you if there's aliens. And I think it would be quite helpful for, like if we found aliens, like probably SpaceX would get a ton more revenue because people like, oh man, aliens, we've got to upgrade our space technology pronto, which is what if we're on finally? You know? It's like, you know, that fact. It's the idea that you build basically the ability to do orbital cargo, take all those

profits, launch Starlink, take all those profits and move it all into building something that can get to Mars. Is that the kind of rough plan? Pretty much. If it was like a three-slide PowerPoint it would be pretty much as you describe, which is developed rockets that are capable of taking satellites to orbit and crew to the space station.

You know, basically servicing government commercial space launch needs, and then build a global communication system in space that obviously it does a lot of good for Earth by providing internet connectivity to the least served because the satellite system is really great for remote locations and you know countryside or remote islands or places where someone's trying to cut off their internet.

As a prelude to a war, we take them to the system like in Star Wars, yeah. Yeah, so it's like, you know, so it can be pretty helpful. Like, I think it's not like basically, I think is a sort of forceful grid in a tone right by providing connectivity to the least served or where they've got either no connection or a very expensive or poor connection, you know, like we're connecting a lot of schools or remote schools in Brazil right now. I'm actually going to be headed there to sort of kick things off, but they've got a lot of schools that have no connectivity at all. And in a modern age, how do you learn with no connectivity?

I mean, you get, I guess, old textbooks and stuff, but it's really, you're at huge disadvantage if you have no digital connectivity. So I think this is a lot of good that Starlink could do in it, despite by itself, but then the revenue generated from Starlink is what can enable the community of a permanently crude base on the moon, which will be the next step from Apollo, which is like, there's no spot, not go there for a few hours, and then head back. Let's have a moment at the Occupied Science Station on the moon.

And we could also build some pretty epic telescopes on the moon that would enable us to learn more about the nature of the universe and figure out what's going on and maybe detect those aliens. Do you think that there's enough profit in those businesses to fund all this or do you need wall street and other investors to come share the load with you? Is going to Mars a partnership with the government does it need to partner with governments, but of course, government support would be helpful. So it's going to be very expensive to build a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Like in order to become multi-planetary, you know, a way that's meaningful, the key threshold is at which point does the city become self-sustaining, such that if the ships from Earth stopped coming for any reason, and it could be any reason, it could be World War III, or it could be just, you know, civilization subsided and just gradually got decrepit or something, but if the ships stop coming, if the resplice ships from Earth stop coming to Mars for any reason, does the city still survive? And that's like really a large base of resources that are needed on Mars. You can't be missing any one critical ingredients. And I think of this, there are these various great filters that perhaps stop civilizations.

And one of the great filters is, will we become a multi-planet species or not? Will humanity be one of those species that passes the great filter of going beyond one planet and being a multi-planet species? And this is certainly something we will have to do at some point, because the sun is expanding, and we'll eventually boil the oceans

and destroy all life on earth. So if you care about life on earth, you should really care about life becoming multi-planetary and ultimately multi-stellar because otherwise, you're basically saying you're assigning the sort of death warrant for all life as we know it. It's inevitable. And then there's also the various things that killed the dinosaurs. And you look at the fossil record, there have been five major extensions that are on the order of 89% of all creatures on earth dying for a wide range of reasons. And then humans can also, you know, with the world war three danger that other creatures didn't have where we could do ourselves in by sort of misusing advanced technology and sort of just, you know, having some radioactive

hellhole that's left after World War III. So, you know, you could even characterize it potentially as which will come first, World War III, or life becoming multi-planetary on Mars. Yeah. So, I was gonna chip, but when you think about the importance of going to Mars versus solving critical energy and climate change problems here on Earth, obviously the effort with Tesla is related to sustainable energy.

And I think going back to like probably the 1950s, there were engineering designs around plasma fusion or fusion-based systems that have evolved to these plasma systems, to these token-backed systems. And every decade, it's like, hey, next decade, we're going to have it. What's your point of view on where plasma fusion systems are? Are we going to have fusion energy this century this decade and does it create limitless energy where the electricity production goes up by 10,000 fold and the price of electricity drops by 10,000 fold and Then what does that world on earth look like if that happens?

I guess question is like if that technology real when does it happen and what happens to the world here when and if that happens? I'll answer that question, but let me sort of point out what the actual issue is. If question is like, is it possible to solve fusion energy 100% yes? Definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely. It's for sure. So really just using a talkamock style, which is like it basically a donut ring with

with electromagnets that control the plasma, the way to solve that is simply scale up the talkamock. Fusion is very much a scale based thing. You want to minimize your surface volume ratio. So, as you scale up a talkamock, you reduce your surface volume ratio, which means like the volume we have relative to the surface, you're not have much more, like you can basically have a hot zone in the center that's relatively far away from the walls and more of a hot zone. So it's not, in my mind, a question is to whether each fusion can work, but there is a question as to whether it is economically viable

and whether it is competitive with alternatives. I think the economic viability of fusion is a much bigger question, and I think the answer probably is that a fusion, if fusion is not competitive economically, I think that is, I would say it's probably not competitive economically by an order of magnitude. Where does it break? Is it a materials breakdown or where does it break down economically? Well, so you can't just use normal hydrogen.

You need to use like, deuterium and tritium, like, unusual forms of hydrogen. Helium three. Helium three. There are some other types of fusion that could be used. But these are just not, there's not a lot of this raw material.

It's quite difficult to get the raw material. So first you have to get the raw material, that's expensive raw material. And then it's not just about generating the energy, you've got to turn that energy into usable electricity. You can't just have a hot thing, okay? So the hot thing has to translate to usable electricity. So I think you've got a cost of fuel issue,

which is very significant. You've got a whole bunch of knock downs from when you generate the heat to, when you actually convert that into electricity, you've got some very difficult maintenance issues with a fusion reactor. So, and that should be then compared to alternatives. The sustainable energy alternatives that I think are overwhelmingly more competitive are solar energy, wind, geothermal, hydro, some tidal energy, but it's really primarily solar and wind.

Now, you can really say, like, why bother creating fusion on Earth when we have a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky that just works with zero maintenance and it shows up every day. Right, it's pretty consistent. Yeah, but Elon, can we scale to a thousand X or a hundred X, our electricity production here using solar and other renewable sources? Yeah, so the amount of subsurface you need to power the United States is remarkably tiny. So you need like basically roughly 100 miles, 500 miles of territory and it's obviously

just in one place in the United States to power the United States. It's like a little corner of Texas or Utah, a little entire country. And then if you, if you, you could, you could basically power, you, you probably had 10x, just with solar alone, without displacing anyone's home, power and economy 10 times the size of the United States, in the United States, on land. What, what, what energy, if you extend that to, if you extend that to water, because Earth is 70% water, I mean, you could say, okay, now we could probably have a civilization that is 100 times as energy intensive as we currently have it. So what does that look like with the last part of my question, which is a world where energy

costs are, say, like 100 times cheaper than they are today and we have 100 times more energy production capacity? What changes about civilization? What do we do differently? What do we see change most kind of dramatically? Well, currently we're not, because of just generally low birth rates almost worldwide, civilization is not headed to have a population that is the order of magnitude greater than where we're currently headed towards a population decline. And this is almost everywhere in the world.

So it basically seems as though as soon as you have like urbanization and education, be on a certain level and income be on beyond certain level, birth rates plummet. And so as countries get wealthier, they're birth rates plummet. It's somewhat counterintuitive because people will say like, well, it's too expensive to have a baby. Nope, the wealthier they are,

they are the fewer kids you have. The more educated you are, the fewer kids you have. So it's the inverse. So, it's not sure who the usual let energy, unless there's a significant change in the birth rate. Or we have a very robot-oriented economy. That's also possible. So if we've got a lot of four-wheeled robots,

and four cars, and androids, humanoid robots, then you can suddenly see that there'd be a path to need for an order of magnitude more energy. But it's not coming from the humans unless something major changes on the human both rate level. This by the way is I think the biggest single threat to civilization right now is the... Yeah, why do you think society people just make those decisions when they become more absolute? Is it that they just become more selfish or there's more things for them to do and they have more money to spend on themselves and they say, you know what? I don't want to have

a large family. I want to, you know, go to Coachella. Yeah, well, there is this like weird like mind-viracy thing where some people are, I think like having pure kids is like better for the environment. Yeah, that's great. This is total nonsense. The environment is going to be fine. They're going to be fine even if we, if we doubled the size of the humans. This is, and I know a lot of our environmental stuff. We can't have civilization

just dwindle into nothing. Japan's leading indicator here, like the Japan's population declined by 600,000 people last year. That lowest birth rate in history. It's pretty bad. So, I don't know, and I think, so this one element of this is, a lot of people just think that having kids is somehow bad for the environment. I wanna be clear, it's not. It's essential for maintaining civilization that would at least maintain our numbers.

We don't necessarily need to grow dramatically, but at least let's not gradually do under a way and until civilization ends with us all in adult divers in a whimper. Like we don't want to end in adult divers with a whimper. That would suck. Not a suck, yeah. Lee, Lee and sad.

Well, I mean, and you know, I've had this conversation. I mean, in Japan, I had two people tell me when I was there. Like, I think it's immoral to bring humans into the world. I mean, people have gotten very sad about the future. It's kind of crazy. You think world's great. Life's awesome. Yes.

No, there's literally heard many times, like, how can I bring a child into this terrible world? I'm like, have you read history? Because let me tell you, it was way worse back then. Okay. Yeah. Now is a good time. Not a good time to get bored.

Hey, you know, listen, I know you're super busy, but I want to ask you about the move to Texas because I've been thinking about it, Austin, California. I don't know, some senator told you to go fuck yourself. And like, you know, like we don't even care. Yeah, I'm just gonna couple of senators, but that actually. Yeah, it seems to be turning into a bit of a trend. But how has building the Tesla gigafactory, which I got to see in Austin a couple of weeks ago, and it was one of the most

inspiring things I've ever seen? I mean, I don't know how many months it took to build there, but how long did it take to build that dreadknot? And then what would have taken to build that in California under Gavin Newsom? So we built the gigatexis, which is the biggest factory in North America, I think, possibly the biggest factory in the world. And it's three times the size of the Pentagon

to give you a sense of scale. OK, so this is friggin' big. It's like so big, it's weird. Like you just like- I was trying to find you in it. I was trying to drive around it. It took me about 45 minutes to find you. Yeah.

Like, no, you have to like call someone. You can't like find someone in the building. You have to call them on their cell phone and say, where are you? So I mean, the building is like just under a mile long, and we're actually going to extend it. It will be like literally a mile long and about a quarter mile wide, and it's 80 feet tall. So it's just ridiculously big.

And what you think about it, for manufacturing situation, what are the two things that really define manufacturing competitiveness are economies of scale and technology. And so if you've got an ace on economy, if you sort of maximize your ace level on technology and you maximize your ace level on scale, this

is obviously going to be the most competitive situation. That's why they're so frigging giant. Gaggitexas will go all the way from cell raw materials, like basically rail cars of cell raw materials coming in and then forming the battery pack, building the motor, casting. We also have introduced a major innovation, which is to cast the entire front third and rear third of the car as a single piece. I got this idea from toys, actually, because I was like, how did they make toys? So those are cheap. They just cast them. And I was like, well, can you build a casting machine that big? And they're like, well, no one ever has. I'm like, are we breaking physics?

Like, no, this is ask them. And there were six major casting machine suppliers in the world. And five of them said no, and the six said maybe. I'm like, I'll take that as a yes. I'm thinking about that. Well, I mean, you wanted to do this for the Model 3, but it was just too soon, huh? And now it's almost there.

Yeah, actually, this partly comes from the Model 3, which is actually a fantastic car in many ways, but we were rightly criticized for an inefficient design for the front and rear body. Like Sandy Monroe, who I think has really, has excellent from an engineering standpoint and really a very fair critic. He pistol updressed for the design of the battery.

He went to the park and piece by piece told you why you suck. And then he gets the why and told you why you're awesome. It took him to park and told us exactly why we sucked and he was correct. And then, and I was like, well, that's pretty embarrassing. So, no, he was complimentary of other parts of the carpet up the body design. And so it's like, okay, we're gonna go was like, well, that's pretty embarrassing. So, no, he was complimentary of other parts of the carpet, of the body design. And so it's like, okay, we're gonna go from like, you know,

it's just an incredibly difficult party to make. It's made out of like 120 different pieces with the similar metals that have joined, and you've got galvanic corrosion challenges. It's very difficult to make to a single piece casting. That's one piece. So like 120 pieces went down to like one. So it's a huge end of the model-wide body shop,

especially the new one where we cast both the front and rear, is 60% smaller than the Model 3 body shop. So it's, you know, gigantic. It's quite, there's a lot of innovations that Tesla decides to stuff that is obvious. So anyway, so yeah, the really, you know, to be fair to Gavin Newsom, like, you know, if you had a gun to Gavin's head, okay, and said, we need to start building this factory in California right now. He couldn't do it because there are so many regulatory agencies and so many litigators

in California that want to stop you from doing anything that even if you're the governor of the state, you cannot get it done. So something's got to be done to, you know, because California used to be the land of opportunity, and it's a beautiful state, and I love loving there, and I still spend a lot of time in California, even though every time I go there, I get, literally every day I go there, I get the Jesus tax out of me. Big tax, big tax bill, by day. Yeah, like this year, a cost per day of me going and working in California today is bugles the mind, and I still do it, you know, but the California is going to

have a lot of opportunity to the land of, of, of, sort of taxes, over regulation and litigation. And this is not a good situation. And really, this has got to be like a, a serious cleaning out of the pipes in California. How many months was it to get the giga Austin done? Took a year and a half, two years, something? Yeah, 18 months to build something three times the size of the Pentagon. Incredible. And you just basically the answer to how many months it would take in California's infinity. We would still be working on the permits.

Yeah. What do you mean Elon? This begs a good question, which is, you know, like, you're just not really concentrating. Can you just keep signing paperwork? What's more for you? What's a better model? Yes.

What's a better model for government? So, you know, like all governments tend to increase in complexity and dictatorship capacity. Is this the dictatorship dictatorship the right model? And how do we solve this? Let's say you go to Mars, or let's say you have to fix California. Is California permanently broken? Is there a way to fix it?

Or how do you set up a better model so that you don't end up having this kind of special interest, complexity situation that eventually kills the population? I mean, I think ultimately with California, the people of California just have to get fed up and demand change. That's the thing that really has to happen. And there's gotta be an above 0% chance

of the Republicans winning in California. If it's just a demand price every time, you gotta be. And this is like occasionally, the thing is that right now, plus the level of gerrymandering, which is basically just treating the people like sheep and it's terrible, that's gone on in California is outrageous.

So, the dams have a super majority in the house in Senate in California, the dams have a super majority in the House and Senate in California and the governor and everything. And so, how responsive is any political party going to be to the people if they are guaranteed to win? It's bait. It's a one party state. And so, I'm not saying that, you know, go and sort of elect the Republicans every time. but if it's never, you're just making California one party state, they will no longer be responsive to people,

and will only be responsive to those that fund the political campaigns. Clip Elon saying that 30 seconds on TV, over and over, go ahead, sex. Yeah, so Elon, shifting gears to the economy, we saw this surprise report of negative 1.4% GDP growth in Q1. Interestation has been rising, that increased the cost to the consumer of getting loans, things like that. We've had a stock market correction, really a crash in a lot of growth stocks, software stocks.

From where you said and the data that you see, where do you think the economy is headed right now? Do you think we're in a recession or is it just a risk? How do you assess our current economic situation? Well, predicting economic, record economic is always difficult. And one should assign probabilities to these things. Ironically, I did last year, if you'll ask me what I think about the economy. I said, well, I think we might enter a recession in approximately spring of 2020 of 2022.

All that. Male. Male. Yeah. So, now the thing is that recessions are not necessarily a bad thing. They, you know, I've not been through a few of them. And what has happened is if you have a boom that goes on for too long,

you get misallocation of capital. It starts raining money on fools basically. It's like any dumb thing gets money, and I'm sure you've seen a few of those. So at some point it gets just out of control and you just have a misallocation of human capital, where people are doing things that are silly and not useful to their fellow human beings.

And then those companies, there needs to be sort of an economic anima, if you will. I have everyone sort of shift uncomfortably in their seats. But the... I'm sorry, it's just a visualizing it. The economic animal. I mean, listen, it's got a little bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of

a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a job, it clears out the pipes, if you will. Yes. And sort of the bullshed companies go bankrupt and the ones that are doing useful products are prosperous. And there's certainly a lesson here that if one is making useful products and has a company that makes sense, make sure you're not running things too close to the edge from a capital standpoint. They've got some capital reserves to last through irrational times because in the past, when there's been a recession, it's amazing. It's flipped like a light switch.

I mean, David, do you remember this one from the PayPal, you know, X-Paypal Bays, when we raised $100 million in March of 2000. And literally, the demand was so high, we had people like VCs, like just literally without even a tombsheet, wiring money into our account. Well, some of the term feet later. They literally were like, sleuth out our bank account number and wire money in.

And we're like, where does come from? And it's like, oh, so it was like, there was literally firehousing money in March of 2000. And and then in April 2000, the market went into free fall. And it went from money, raising money was trivial to even good companies could not raise money in a month. So it's just important to bear in mind like that in our PayPal almost went bankrupt in 2000 we came close, but thankfully we'd raised that $100 million in March 2000

without which we would be in game over basically. And we kind of saw it coming. So it's like we got that the X X confinity merger done in like three weeks, add raise $100 million. Because we were like, oh, how is, we see this coming to an end pretty soon. And then a month later, it was like, you know, nightmare basically.

And, and, and so it's just important make sure if you're a healthy company, you got some capital, get through things. And, and then what's your costs and if it is a recession which more likely than not it is a recession not saying it is but probably is then just make what's your cash flow and get positive cash flows as you can. So yeah, but I think we probably are in a recession, and that that recession will get worse.

But these things pass, and then they will be room times again. So, there will probably be some tough going for, I don't know, a year. Maybe, maybe, 12 to 18 months is usually the amount of time that takes for a correction to happen. I mean, what do you guys think? Yeah, David, how do you feel about it? Yeah, I mean, it feels like it started. You know, what started as a slowdown earlier this year now seems like.

I mean, technically, I guess we need two quarters of negative growth to be in a recession, but it feels like we're in one. It feels like it started. You know, the growth, the softwares that we invest in are short the canaries and the coal mine. And there's a lot of dead canaries. Not dead, but. We're having a hard time breathing. Yeah. I'm not dead, but... I'm having a hard time breathing.

Yeah. It's not dead. It's not dead. It's not dead. It's just, it's just happening. It's snapping. Wake up a little birdie. Wake up.

It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just stunned. It's got, it's got stunned for a brief moment and it'll be fine. It sort of reminds me of the pet shop sketch with a parrot with Monte Pai. Yes, Monte Pai. Where are you? Pining, this parrot is planning for the Fjords. Hey, Elon, a lot of us have been talked about as we wrap here and you've been incredibly gracious giving us so much time, thank you for that.

A lot of talk about American exceptionalism over the last couple of years, waning and maybe this country had seen its best days. And we see the work you're doing and other people in this great country are doing and the debates we're having about the future. And yeah, China is doing pretty fantastic rushes on the ropes. But it does seem like America is still producing some of the greatest companies. The world has ever seen some of the greatest innovations.

What are your thoughts on America and our future? And what we need to keep this country and this beacon of hope that four of the five of us were not born here. Two of you came from South Africa and... No, three of you. Three of you came from South Africa and one of you from Canada. I don't know what they're putting in there. Oh, from Sri Lanka.

And from Sri Lanka and through Canada. Via Canada. Via Canada. He came through Canada too. Yeah, I know. It seems like that's the way... Canada is a gateway. It is a gateway.

And how do we, well, I'm hinting at the answer here, but it does seem like our immigration policy is absolutely insane. And maybe we need to keep collecting some of the great individuals that I get to share the stage with here and yourself. We need to keep bringing great people to this country. Why can't we get that in our heads that?

Yeah. I mean, immigration is talent recruitment. No, absolutely. I think it's incredibly important that the United States be like the destination for the world's best talent. I mean, you can think of this like a pro sports team. If you want to win the league and you want the best players in your team, now there are obviously a lot of very talented people born in the United States, but if you can add a few

aces from outside the country to the team, you're going to win the league. And here's the thing, those aces actually want to work for your team. They don't want to compete against you. They want to be on Team America. And so it's like, we have to fight them off to not be on Team America. That's the crazy thing. And so it's like, if you have some ACEs that are different between winning and losing, we should be like really recruiting them. Like you'd recruit like a star, basketball player or football player, that's what we should be doing, active recruiting. Just like if you're a company

that wants to succeed, you actively recruit the best talent. And that's the way to win. And if that stops happening, America will stop winning. And we have two administrations in a row, Biden and Trump, who don't want to let the greatest minds, the most talented people into this country, is absolutely insane. I think we'll look this every day, right? Yeah, the reality is like, actually,

anyone who's going to work hard and do useful things, and we want in the United States. And it's not just people who are sort of intellectually strong, but it's just anyone with a strong work ethic. If they're coming from Mexico or if they're coming from Europe or China or wherever, it's just if they're like going to come here and crank hard and contribute more than they take, hell yeah, that's just no ranger. Have you been disappointed in the similarities between Biden and Trump on this? Maybe you could have expected it from Trump because that was a rhetoric he needed to use to get elected. But it's not as if Biden has flipped the script

and said, okay, we're going to have 180 degrees in the other direction. He's kind of kept it the same, which has been really surprising actually. Man, it's hard to tell what Biden is doing for Tony Frank. Like, I feel like the- It's weak in that Bernie's. The real question is whoever controls the telefrontompter, you know, it's like, the past to power is the past to the teleprompter, you know, because that's the reason teleprompter. So I do feel like if somebody were to accidentally lead on the teleprompter, it's going to be

like, Ankerman, it's going to be like,-1-2-3, you know, type of thing. I mean, in fairness to Biden, he hasn't been napping as much as he needs to, but... It's hard to say to your job. You know, I mean, this is a administration just, it doesn't seem to get a lot done. And, you know, whatever, like, the Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done. So this administration seems just to not have the drive to just get you done. That's my impression. So, you know, we definitely need to fix immigration policy. Like we had COVID, which was an issue.

And so that was like one reason, like, not, you know, I guess, kind of down it on it. But now we've moved on. And so let's just make sure we're getting top talent in the United States. And really I'd say broadly, it's anyone who wants to work for Aswell and contribute more than they take to the economy. That's just necessarily going to make for a stronger, better society in America. Elon, did you see Jeff's, Bezos' tweet back and forth with Biden, or Biden, I think was talking about inflation. Inflation.

But then he correlated that to taxing corporations, and Baisos said, this is misinformation and disinformation, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think about that whole exchange then back and forth? I mean, the obvious reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion amount of more money than it had, obviously. So it's like the government can't just, have issue checks far and excessive revenue without there being inflation, velocity of money held constant.

So unless there's something we're changed with velocity of money, but if federal government rights checks, they never bounce. So that is effectively creation of more dollars. And if there are more dollars created, then increasing the goods and services at part of the economy, then you have inflation, again, velocity of money held constant.

But so this is just very basic, this is not like, you know like super complicated. And if the government could just issue mass amounts of money and deficits didn't matter, then why don't we just make the deficit 100 times bigger? Okay, the assures can't, because it will basically turn the dollar into something that is worthless.

So, and various countries have tried this experiment multiple times. It's not like, oh, I wonder what happens if this is done. Have you seen Venezuela? Like the poor people of Venezuela have been just run roughshod by their government. So, obviously, you can't simply create money. The true economy, it's very important, like the true economy is the output of goods and services. It's not money. It's literally what is the output of goods and services?

Money is simply a way to, for us to, or anything that you call money, is a way for us to conveniently exchange goods and services without having to engage in water and also to shift obligations in time. Those are the two reasons that you have money. This thing called money. It's really a database. Money is an information system for labor allocation and for exchange of goods and services and for translating in time. The quality of that information is a function of,

it's like you basically you can apply information theory to money. And I think it helps explain why one money system is, why one action is better than another. And so, like the, the, the, the, the, the, you, you, just, just like an internet connection, you'd want something that's high bandwidth, low latency and jitter, and it's not dropping packets. There's not having a lot of errors in the system. And the same is true of money. You want, and really like you said, what do PayPal really do?

That it helped improve the bandwidth, the speed at which money could move? Instead of mailing checks back and forth, which amazingly that was what people did in 2000, you can now do real-time exchange of money, and now you could ship your goods immediately instead of mailing a check and waiting for the bank to clear the check. and waiting for the bank to clear the check. So, like, and the ultimate thing with PayPal, or if it's sort of as in the x.com, sort of went more, less sort of niche payments, more sort of broad financial would be to simply,

just to just to immediate all the heterogeneous cobalt databases out there running on mainframes during batch processing and have a single real time system that was secure and not batch processing. So it would just be from an information standpoint more efficient and eventually it would all the batch processing co-mainframes operated by the banks would cease to exist. If you've spent more time and built more in China than almost anybody.

I mean, Apple would be the only company I could think of that's probably got a bigger footprint, but I'm not certain of that. What have you learned about China that you didn't know before you opened the factories there and started delivering cars there? What should we know about China? You know, as Americans, how should we think about China and our relationship with it? Because we haven't spent time there. Sure.

Well, I'd say like, China, in the first world, is not monolithic. It's not like everything is not some plot by the Chinese government. There are many factions within China that compete vigorously within China. China that compete vigorously within China. And so, and and the and the crash most important is that there's just a just a tremendous number of hard working, smart people in China who

want to get ahead and get things done. And they're not complacent, and they're not entitled. And they're going to that they're they want to get things done and they want to make a better life for themselves. And what we're going to see with, was trying it for the first time that anyone can remember who is alive is an economy that is twice the size of the US, possibly three times the size of the US, is going to be very weird living in that world. So we better stop the infighting in the US and stop punching ourselves in the face because there's a whole there's way too much of America

punching itself in the damn face, which is just dumb. And think about like, hey, we got to be competitive here. And there's a new kid on the block that's going to be two to three times our size. We better step off our game and you know, and stop infighting. You think it's easier to stop infighting once we're beaten or do you think that there's a way folks here can actually just you know get their political and commercial act together. But or does it not happen until we realize we've lost? Or do we need a war? I mean, I sort of hope we don't need a war.

But there will be certainly, an economic competition that I think will blow people away and when they realize just how competitive they have to be to be competitive with companies in China, it's very difficult. You know, Tesla is competitive because we have an awesome team in China. So like do your Tesla China employees work some meaningful percentage more or harder than your Tesla non-China employees?

Do you find like it's two different companies basically? Well, I mean, I think Tesla is somewhat, it Tesla is sort of pretty far out there in terms of work ethic anywhere in the world. So, the Tesla work ethic in the US I think is substantially greater than any other car company or any large manufacturing company that I'm aware of. So Tesla does have a strong worth of work ethic in the US. To be totally frank, the work that work ethic is exceeded on balance by the Tesla China team. That is, I think, objectively true.

So there's not to say there aren't lots of hard working people that test the US. There certainly are. But you say, on average, the work ethic in China is higher. It's just. Tell us. Tell us. You're pulling it like it is.

So what about if you're an American CEO? How do you deal with, you think, just the need for managing all these political factions inside of a company? You probably saw all the stermen drawn related to Disney and what happened to them and what's continuing to happen to them on both sides between their employees, as well as the governments, etc. You have any advice, or do you tell like young CEOs that you hang out with about how to deal with that,

how to make those decisions where you land in the spectrum of dealing with all of this stuff, the non-work issues that are related to now, going to work every day. I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean. You know, whether it's the need for political correctness or the need for having political points of view and having to bring that imbalance out in the workplace, how do you deal with that?

How do you give advice to other folks about having to deal with it? Look, I think it, you know, the point of a company is to produce useful products and services for your fellow human beings. It is not, you is not some political gathering place or a thing where that's the point of the company. I would say politics and other stuff should be. So, it's not blue side of why company should exist. So, I got a. I'm actually late for

the market. Yeah, I'm going to work on the rocket, guys. Yeah. We're going to go ahead and let you get to Mars. And I'll see you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to have you. Well, let your winners ride. Nice and done, bro! Besties are gone, go for it! That's my dog, take it away, she's right, wait, sit down! Oh man, my ham is the actual meat, the ass was the actual meat!

We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two, because they're all just just like this sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. What, your, that beat, what, your, your, your, your, beat? Beat, beat, what? We need to get merchies aren't there. I'm doing all this! I'm doing all this!