Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding

I believe Optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity.

Elon Musk and his XAI startup have built the largest and most powerful artificial intelligence training supercomputer in the world.

As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that, you know?

This is an arms race of epic proportions.

He's a big thinker.

You guys went on Fox the other day with the Doge team.

You saw Elon's face nodding while they were speaking with a grin ear to ear.

He was proud.

XAI has acquired X in an old stock transaction.

Tesla's first robo-taxis are officially on the road.

The company's board proposed a new compensation package for the CEO that could pay him just about a trillion dollars in stock.

He gets nothing if he doesn't hit the numbers.

SpaceX will buy wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar for its Starlink satellite network for about $17 billion.

Three, two,

one.

There's a two-eye launch.

There's a flashdown.

How do you have time?

I never understand you.

Yeah, well, I do work a lot.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Elon Musk.

All right.

All right, where are you?

Alto.

You're in Palo Alto

and not Washington D.

I'm at Tesla Global Engineering Headquarters in Palo Alto.

Yeah.

So no more Washington, D.C.

You're back at work.

You're focused.

Yeah?

Yeah, I haven't been to D.C.

since May.

Okay.

That was a hell of a side quest.

That was a good side.

Any lessons from your time in Washington, D.C.

The government is basically unfixable.

Elon.

Only.

I applaud David's noble efforts.

It's good to have talented people in the administration.

But at the end of the day,

if you look at our national debt, which is insanely high, the interest payments exceed the Defense Department, I guess, sorry, War Department

budget.

And

they keep rising.

So

if AI and robots don't solve our national debt, we're toast.

Which is a great segue.

Optimus is,

I think, going to be the greatest

product in the history of humanity.

What's the progress like, and

how many of your cycles are going specifically to Optimus?

What's the timeline?

I think you're on version 3, maybe 4.

Tell us everything.

Well,

yeah, everything would take a long time.

We've got time.

We're finalizing the design of Optimus version 3,

and

that really is going to be a very remarkable robot.

It will have

essentially the manual dexterity of a human, so meaning a very complex hand,

an AI mind that can navigate and comprehend reality.

and it will be made in very high volume.

Those are the three things that are missing.

Like if you see any other robotics company, they're missing those three things.

Those are the three really hard things.

And

I spend actually at this point

it might be more of my mental cycles than anything else, any other single thing on Optimus.

That's solving for

real world AI,

all of the electromechanical issues of Optimus, the supply chain and production challenges of it, because there is no supply chain that exists for humanoid robots.

So it has to be, we have to recreate it from scratch, which requires doing a lot of vertical integration.

None of the actuators in Optimus

are available from an existing supply chain.

So, but I think it is accurate to say that if successful, Octomus will be the biggest product ever.

And the cost of it at scale, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a robot, what do you think the first wave of them will cost?

And

when will we be able to buy one to work on the ranch?

I think that the marginal cost of production, once you hit a million units per year,

is probably around the $20,000 range.

It sort of depends on how much you spend on the AI chip in the

robot.

And you need to achieve a lot of efficiencies in the actuators.

There are

26 actuators per arm.

Like 26

motors, gearboxes, and power electronics.

um

so so it but but the the a the the the ai chip will be pretty expensive like that that might be like five five or six thousand dollars of the of the bill of materials maybe more um

and um

but but so i but i think at volume at a million units a year the the production cost is probably on the order of twenty thousand dollars, maybe twenty-five, something like that.

And

price will be as a function of demand.

Elon, can you maybe explain to everybody why the hand is so important to get right and why

the actuator design is so unique and why it's so difficult, why nobody makes it, and why you have to start there almost to build the rest of the robot properly?

Well, it turns out human hands are incredibly, they've evolved to be this incredibly sophisticated machine.

Like your hand is

actually a remarkable thing.

Look closely at your hands

and think of all the things you can do with your hands, which is a lot.

I can think of many things.

Yeah, I was just thinking about something.

You know, your hand's a very versatile instrument.

Yeah.

You can give them a high five.

Very versatile.

You know, you can swing a baseball bat, you can thread needles, you can put thread in a needle, you can play the piano with violin,

you know, you could disassemble or assemble a car.

The hands are

incredibly versatile instruments.

And

most of the muscles of the hand are actually in the forearm.

So your hand is kind of like a like a like it's like a puppet.

Like it's mostly a puppet.

The muscles are coming from the forearm and they're they're pulling the tendons, which are, you know,

also human tendon designs or human tendon evolution is incredibly good.

So you've got this web of tendons.

You've got,

I think the human hand is something like, depending on how you count it, 27 or 28 degrees of freedom per hand

in the hand.

It's amazing.

So

in order to create a a robot that can be a generalized

humanoid, you must solve the hands problem.

We had REST.

It's got hands.

It needs hands.

And so, is it like when you were first building Tesla, where the supply chain doesn't exist, and now you have to go out and find folks to work with and build all this vertical integration, get support?

Is it literally like it's just nowhere to be found, and you're going to have to build all of this stuff up?

Yes, we could not actually buy the actuators for any amount of money.

They simply didn't exist.

Even though there are,

I don't know, 10, 20,000 electric motors out there of various sizes and shapes,

we've had to design every electric motor, gearbox,

and the controlling electronics from scratch, basically from physics first principles.

The good news is you've got a lot of experience with factories over the last couple of decades.

So how challenging is this versus Cybertruck, Model Y,

Giga Factory, you know,

the Faberge egg known as the Model X.

Yeah.

Right.

It's hotter than any of those things.

Okay.

Yeah.

Much hotter?

Significantly, yeah.

Starships.

Yes.

Well, harder than Starship.

Starship's hotter.

Okay.

So somewhere between a Model X and a Starship.

Yeah.

What's harder, the hardware or the software?

Right now we're struggling with

the final design of the hardware.

Like I said, it's really primarily the hand.

Not to just dismiss the rest of the robot.

The rest is also important.

But

the hands inclusive of the forearm are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot.

And then let's assume you get past the hardware challenges.

How much do you sort of get for free based on all the progress that's happening with LLMs?

Will consumers just be able to interact with this, talk to the robot, ask it to do things, it'll understand?

And sort of

you're spending a lot of time with Annie, I noticed, online.

Not that long.

Maybe I went a little over the top remote and Grock imagined.

Well, but in all seriousness, those characters and these robots, that seems to be,

you know, like maybe they could get the embodiments of any.

Yeah.

Why why the human form factor, Elon?

You could make something that's maybe better than a human, or maybe simpler than a human to do specific tasks, and maybe better than a human to do more things than a human can do.

How'd you decide to make it just like a human?

Well, if you wanted to do all the things that a human can do, it turns out you need a human robot.

So if you wanted to do a subset,

that's much easier.

But

it turns out humans evolve to the shape and capabilities that we have

for good reasons.

There is

like this value to having

four fingers and a thumb.

And even the pinky, actually, is quite useful.

Toes are much more question mark.

Well, also,

humans have designed the world as well, so we designed it for us.

Exactly.

If you can make a humanoid robot, it'll be immediately backwards compatible with what we've built the world for.

Precisely.

Elon,

there's another part of the robot.

So there's the LLMs, there's the actuation in the hands,

but also there's

the silicon that runs it.

And there was, you know, Dojo, I think you posted on X AI5 and AI6, and it just seemed like you were incredibly excited about the direction in which the silicon layer was also going.

Can you tell us about that and what that is?

And

what are we building here?

What is being built?

Is it a complement to everything that exists in the world?

Is it a potential long-term competitor?

What is it?

Yeah, so

at Tesla we basically had two

different chip programs, one dojo and one

dojo on the training side, and then what we call AI4, it's just our inference chip.

The AI4 is currently shipping in all vehicles.

And we're finalizing the design of AI5.

which will be an immense jump from AI4.

By some metrics, the improvement in AI5 will be 40 times better than AI4.

Wow.

So 40%, 40 times.

And this is because we work so closely at a very fine-grained level on the AI software and the AI hardware.

So we know exactly where the limiting factors are.

And so effectively, the AI hardware and software teams are co-designing the chip.

So a a 40x improvement in the silicon, I think then

as everybody here in the audience experiences it, is that just almost like an order of magnitude increase in the quality of FST and the safety that you experience as a Tesla driver and then the quality of the robot?

Like where does it all manifest

when you

bring it up and actually get it into production?

Yeah, to be precise, the 40X is on, if you say like compared to the worst limitation on AI4, which is running the softmax operation,

we currently have to run softmax in around 40 steps in emulation mode, whereas that'll be just be done in a few steps natively in AI5.

AI5 trip will also be easily handle mixed precision

models.

So you don't have it'll dynamically handle mixed precision.

There's a bunch of sort of technical stuff that AI5 will do a lot better.

In terms of nominal sort of raw compute, it's eight times more compute,

about nine times more memory,

roughly five times more memory bandwidth.

So but because we're addressing some core limitations in AI4, you multiply that by

that 8x compute improvement by another 5x improvement.

because of

optimization

at a very fine-grained silicon level of things that are currently sub-optimal in AI4.

That's where you get the 40X improvement.

You had.

I'll keep going.

Keep going.

So now that said,

I am confident that the current chips,

AI4 chips that are in the cars will achieve self-driving safety that is at least two to three times that of human and maybe even 10x.

And the software that will be released for that is coming out over the next few months.

So version 14 will be the biggest upgrade in Tesla software since version 12.

We are increasing the parameter count by an order of magnitude.

There's a lot of reinforcement learning that's been used.

You can think of AI sort of as a way of compressing reality,

and some of those compression steps

were too lossy, and we addressed the lossiness in the compression steps.

So these are all software updates that'll go out.

So just over there updates.

Your car is going to feel like it is sentient by the end of the year.

Yeah.

It feels that way already, to be honest.

I saw in the trades that you spent about $17 billion on some spectrum and that.

yeah,

so some couch change

to enable your satellites and the Starlink network to connect directly with phones.

What will that look like in a year or two?

Are we going to drop our Verizon account and just expand our Starlink account?

We're kind of hoping because Verizon kind of sucks.

How many of you want a Starlink phone?

Who wants a Starlink phone?

Is it technically possible?

I know you can't see it, but it's everyone.

Yeah, technically.

All right, cool.

So

this is kind of a long-term thing.

It will allow

SpaceX to

deliver high-bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites to the phones.

But

there are hardware changes that need to happen in the phone.

So the since these frequencies are not supported in current phones,

the chipset has to be modified to add these frequencies.

Um and that probably is a two-year time frame.

So the phones that

are able to use the spectrum that was acquired probably start shipping in around two years.

And

then we also need to build the satellites that are going to communicate on those frequencies.

So in parallel, we're building the satellites and working with the handset makers to add these frequencies to the phones.

And then the satellites and the phones will then handshake very well to achieve high bandwidth connectivity.

But the net effect is that you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone.

Wow.

And it's going to be crazy.

Do these frequencies, would they work indoors inside buildings, you know, like your phone currently does?

Okay.

And so will you be able to have basically like...

If you're in a building with

a thick metal roof, then no.

No, the same types of

normal homes, yes.

Elon, is your vision for this that instead of having an AT ⁇ T account or and then roaming when you're in the UK or you're in India, it's just we could have one direct deal with Starlink.

It works all over the world eventually, not today, but at some point.

Is that the end goal?

that basically we don't need a regional carrier, we have a global carrier, and that would be you?

That would be one of the options.

To be clear, we're not going to put the other carriers out of business.

They're still going to be around because they own a lot of spectrum.

So

there's,

but yes, you should be able to have a Starlink,

like you have, like you have an ATT or P-Mobile or Verizon or whatever.

You could have

an account with Starlink that

works with your Starlink

antenna at home

for your Wi-Fi as well as on your phone.

And

yeah, it would be a comprehensive solution for high bandwidth at home and for high bandwidth direct to sell.

Could you buy some carriers to have more spectrum?

Maybe you could buy Verizon.

Not out of the question, I suppose that may happen.

Let's talk about Starship.

You just had a really

what appeared to be a phenomenal

launch.

How close is it to

being predictable and ready to go in a commercial setting?

I think we will recover the ship next year.

We've got one more launch of

the

Stalin version 2

stack.

There's only one

booster and ship left that's in the version 2

design.

And then thereafter it's version 3, which is a gigantic upgrade, because that's got Raptor 3,

and pretty much everything changes on the rocket with version 3.

So version 3 might have some initial teething pains because it's such a radical redesign.

But

it's capable of over 100 tons to orbit, fully reusable.

And

I think

unless we have some very major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year, catching both the booster and the ship

and being able to deliver over 100 tons to a useful orbit.

What is the best rocket in the world do now in terms of tonnage to space?

Well, in terms of

sort of commercial rockets, there's Falcon Heavy,

which we'll do in

with side booster reuse,

we'll do about 40 tons.

So this is five times bigger, yeah.

Well, two and a half times bigger.

But Starship would be

full reusability.

Got it.

Okay.

So everything comes back.

Elon, after the explosion that happened with

the failed launch,

there was a lot of.

Sorry?

Which failed launch?

Oh, the more recent one.

The more recent with the Starship had with the best.

The big boom.

Yeah, and the space.

The big boom on the spaceship.

And

there was a lot of proclamations that there's going to be environmental and FAA and all these other sorts.

The recovery back to the launch pad again was incredibly fast.

How did you get back so fast, not just technically and work-wise, but just like regulatory clearance-wise?

Because they said there were going to be all these questions and reviews and so on.

How did you guys manage that?

Well, there were a lot of questions and reviews.

We got through them all.

And credit to the SpaceX team.

They worked incredibly hard and they

got the

next ship and booster tested and on the pad and flown.

And

huge credit to the SpaceX team.

Very proud of them for

doing such a job, a great job recovering.

I mean,

creating a fully reusable orbital rocket is one of the hottest engineering problems ever.

It's certainly

a candidate for most difficult engineering project ever.

It's on the podium at least.

So

that's been the goal of SpaceX from the beginning, from 2002.

And here we are 23 years later.

So it's a long journey.

with a super talent, like by far I think the most talented group of rocket engineers that has ever been assembled.

And

we're finally next year,

I think we'll be able to achieve full reusability.

Elon, what are the big technical blockers that you're focused on there between now and that full reusability?

Are there some showstoppers where you're just kind of literally just obsessing over trying to figure out still?

Or is it more about getting through a sort of a laundry list of your learnings and just integrating it into the next next launch?

Well

for full reusability of the ship,

there's still a lot of work that remains on the heat shield.

So no one's ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield.

Like the shuttle heat shield had to go through nine months of repair after every flight.

Right.

So

no one has ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield.

And is that a material science problem, or is that an engineering problem, or both?

Yeah, I mean, it's a material science

engineering problem.

So it's

but we really are

looking at the fundamental physics here,

again, physics-post principles, and trying to figure out how do we make something that

is,

you know,

can withstand the heat, is very light, doesn't transmit the heat to the

primary structure.

And

tiles stay on and they don't crack.

And then as you ascend, if you hit some rain,

the tiles don't dissolve in rain.

There's a lot of different issues.

And then you really need to know that these tiles are working.

You can't

go through this laborious inspection.

So it really needs to be,

these

tens of thousands of tiles all

work and

don't need to be refurbished or checked one by one, as was the case with the shuttle.

Can we maybe switch now?

I mean, who else were you talking about about Tesla?

Then you go to SpaceX.

Now, I'd like to ask you some questions about Grok and

XAI.

You want to just give us an update?

I think you kind of talked about where the next-gen model is, and you said something incredible.

I still don't think people really understand it, which is, you know, there's going to be a next training run where you expect

not to start from

the

common web and common crawl, where you expected an enormous amount of synthetic data.

Just tell us about how the evolution of Grok is going and this innovation and why it's so important.

Yeah, so we're running a lot of, using a lot of inference compute and

reasoning to look at all of the source data, which is really the corpus of human knowledge, and then

thinking about each piece of information and then

adding what's missing

and

correcting mistakes and removing falsehoods from that training data.

So it's like if you take Wikipedia as an example, but this really applies to books, PDFs,

websites,

every form of information.

Grok is using

heavy amounts of inference compute to say to look at, as an example, a Wikipedia page and say

what is true, partially true, or false, or missing

in this page.

Now rewrite the page

to correct the

remove the falsehoods,

correct the half-truths, and add the missing context.

Well, Elon, by the way, could you just publish that?

Could we create like a Grakapedia?

I mean, that would be.

Yeah, especially for our bio pages, which are a disaster.

Wikipedia is so biased, and it's a constant war.

You know, if something gets corrected five minutes later, there'll be an army of people trying to...

I mean, it's become hyper-partisan and there's

activists all over it.

So if you do fix, for example, Wikipedia as a source of truth, it'd be great to publish that just so the world has it.

All right, I'll talk to you about that.

So talk to the team about that, like Grokpedia or whatever.

Here's the Grokpedia version.

It'd be interesting, yeah.

And then just have it out there for this.

In terms of

people here like it, In terms of training Grok 5,

you're scaling up your super cluster in Colossus and Memphis.

Colossus 2.

Yeah, but there's

a second one.

Yeah, could you give us an update on that?

And then also, as part of that,

where are we in the scaling laws?

If you scale a bigger cluster, do you get a more powerful AI model?

Is there a point of diminishing returns?

Or how much more compute, if you throw twice as much compute at it, do you get a 10% better model?

Do you get 100% better model?

Like, is it log linear?

What, I guess, how much more juice is there left in scaling hardware, do you think?

I think there's a natural logarithmic function associated with the amount of compute.

So

then, like, say for argument's sake, like, 10x more compute will double the intelligence.

Maybe that might be a rough rule of thumb.

Uh, but you know, that still means that you go from 100 IQ to 200 IQ.

Still pretty big deal.

So

and I think I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where

most of the power of the Sun is harnessed for compute and then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy.

You know, sort of Kladyshev 2, Kladyshev 3 scale

compute.

So I guess one should think of artificial intelligence not as sort of this

you know a destination that you reach but really

as part of the overall escalation of intelligence

that we are aware of.

You know human intelligence has also scaled as you've have as the population has increased

and we've been able to store more and more information, human intelligence has scaled.

Now, human, because of population declines and low growth rate, human intelligence is somewhat plateauing and will actually decline.

And

my guess is that

I think that we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year.

Wow.

And then probably within five, like say 2030, probably AI is smarter than the sum of all humans.

Do you think humans are on the decline because the AI is evolving?

Do you think there's this evolution of the ecosystem on Earth that's underway that we don't really understand the structure of what's going on?

Yeah, maybe we implicitly know that it's coming.

Yeah.

I mean, I hope the birth rates turn around.

I'm a big proponent of increased birth rate, obviously.

Well, are you doing anything about it or no?

Yeah, I'm trying to set a good example.

You know, we had a big conversation at this conference we didn't expect, which is suicidal empathy, the West,

this

declining birth rate.

I noticed you've been pretty active about it.

And open borders.

And open borders.

Just like let the invaders in.

Tucker talked about it.

Could all three of those be the same thing?

It seems like there's a number of symptoms of the West being suicidal.

The most obvious one being the birth rate is not a replacement level.

So obviously, if that continues indefinitely, then the West will literally not reproduce enough to replace itself.

But there's other things, too.

There's the fact that the borders were totally opened.

to the point where Western culture, the social fabric started to come apart.

And you see this especially in Europe Europe where

the indigenous cultures of the UK or France or Germany are starting to potentially be taken over by cultures of people who are brought in and aren't assimilating.

You have crime where we have this case on social media right now, this young woman, Irina, who's just killed in a senseless way on a subway, which is horrific enough in and of itself.

But then in addition to that, the elite media just, for whatever reason, just refuse to cover it like it didn't exist.

So you have this issue of crime that's not being addressed or even

no acknowledgement of this.

Like it's almost like we're trying to deny the reality of the spiral and this

sex spiral.

So you have all these data points that seem to suggest that

the West is suicidal or

doesn't seem to want to defend itself or propagate itself.

Look, I think everyone in this room thinks that life is awesome, right?

It's pretty great.

Worth living.

Yeah.

And when Alex Karp was here earlier today defending the West, that got some of the loudest applause at the conference.

So I guess we probably don't really understand what's going on.

We don't really.

Yeah, what's your take, Elon?

Because, you know, what's your take on the suicide of the West?

Yeah.

What's going on?

I'm very worried about it.

Yeah.

I'm very worried about it.

You know, I think there's

let's just say that the actions of the West are indistinguishable from suicide.

So

it's

look, at least in America,

there's generally a sense of optimism.

But when's the last time you talked to someone from Europe who lives in Europe who's optimistic?

Not for a while.

Yeah.

Decades.

Like even one?

It's rare.

So I think unless people have a sense of optimism and purpose about the future,

they

suicide might be just what happens.

Like having a child is an act of optimism about the future.

So

if you're not optimistic, this purpose.

Yeah.

So I think we need to maybe

give people a sense of optimism and excitement about the future and a belief that the future will be better than the past

and they'll be more interested in having kids.

Did religion play a role in the past, Elon, to kind of placate and make folks feel that way?

When they're

so.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

And if you take away religion, then I think you actually

get something in its place which is

actually worse than what was there before.

I mean, it's like destructive, basically.

You get like the white work mind virus filling the hole that religion used to have,

taking the place

of religion.

You get these dystopian de facto religions

that are very self-destructive.

So

I think perhaps

some sort of revival of religion, or at least what we need is

some coherent philosophy that people can get excited about.

I mean, for me, it's a philosophy of curiosity.

I'm curious about the nature of the universe, and I want to go out there, and I want humanity to be out there exploring the stars,

maybe meeting alien civilizations.

Maybe in some cases, we see the ruins of a long-dead alien civilization, but they were...

they were very strong for 10 million years.

You know, the kind of stuff that you see in Star Trek, in a non-dystopian sci-fi book or movie or show.

And so I'm just, I have a philosophy of curiosity, of like, I just want to know what's going on.

And in order to know what's going on, we must have

an increase in the scope and scale of consciousness.

We must expand

consciousness.

We must grow humanity.

And we must extend humanity.

in order to comprehend

and to understand the universe or even what what questions should we should ask about the answer that is the universe um you know douglas adams

book the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is actually a book a deep book on philosophy disguised as humor um and what the point he was trying to make in that book was that uh

the questions are the really the the hard part the the answer is the universe like the answer is everything you see around you but but but what are the questions that we don't know to ask?

Now, some of the questions, I guess,

I do know, I'd like to know, is the standard model of physics correct about the origins of the universe?

Are we actually 13.8 billion years old?

How does the universe end?

Does it end in a heat death or in some other way?

Are we in a black hole?

We might be.

Elon, can you talk about

the whole sort of simulation question?

Are we a simulation?

Maybe.

Where do you think we find the answer first?

In AI or in the stars?

Because you're pursuing both, obviously.

Yeah,

I don't know if

I hope more people can get behind a

philosophy of curiosity

because I think it's very exciting.

and inherently optimistic.

Because there's this amazing sense of wonder about the nature of the universe.

And when you uncover some secrets of the universe, that's amazing.

And you're like, a whole world of understanding is opened up.

I mean, we used to not even know where all the continents were.

You know, it used to be like, just the map would be, there'd be dragons.

And like, all we know is that when they sailed in that direction, they didn't come back.

I mean, the moon base.

That's all they knew.

I kind of feel like the moon base, or just going to the moon for real this time, would be a big step in the right direction.

You still have the moon planned?

What's the status of that?

Is that still on the agenda?

Yeah,

I think having...

I think we want to try to reach new heights as a civilization.

Yeah.

So I think it's fine to go to the moon, but we should go to the moon in order to establish a lunar base, like a lunar research base.

I mean, there are parts of the moon that are perhaps older than parts of Earth,

and we might understand more about the nature of the universe if we had a science base on the moon.

That would be very cool.

And then we obviously want to go beyond the moon to Mars and

build a self-sustaining city on Mars.

I do think that

there is a fork in the road of human destiny where if we can establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, with the key test being if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does Mars continue to prosper or does it die out?

At the point at which Mars is able to prosper and grow on its own, the probable lifespan of consciousness is dramatically greater because we are no longer dependent on everything going right on Earth.

You know, there's always some possibility of self-annihilation on Earth with the World War III

or a supervirus

or a meteor like extinguisher, you know, that destroyed the dinosaurs.

We know from the fossil record that there have been many mass extinction events.

So

the question that I sort of am always wondering about is:

will the civilizational arc continue to ascend such that we can make Mars self-sustaining before the civilizational arc descends?

Because the window of opportunity to make life multi-planetary exists now for the first time in the four and a half billion-year history of Earth.

Yeah.

Elon, let's assume that we get there and you're there.

You know, you'd be the elder statesman.

You'd have the moral authority of Mars.

How do you run Mars?

But I just,

this point that I think I want to just emphasize again that it's more important than the form of governance on Mars or who's there in the early days.

What really matters is that Mars

is self-sustaining, that we are truly a multi-planet species and such that we've achieved planetary redundancy.

So that if something changes

we should do everything possible to make sure life on Earth is great, but there's always some risk that of an annihilation event on Earth.

Like I said, self-annihilation or some natural disaster.

And so the probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically

as soon as we are multi-planet species, with the key test being, can Mars survive if the resupply ships stop coming?

So getting, like the first missions to Mars are not that important.

What matters is, can you get sufficient tonnage to Mars such that Mars can prosper on its own?

And that means it has to have all of the ingredients of civilization.

It's not just that you need to build, for example, a chip factory on Mars or chip fab on Mars, but you need the ability to build chip abs.

Do you have a sense of the time scale?

Like, let's assume Starship is at a state starting in 2026, then there's going to be a bunch of testing, obviously.

There's going to be a bunch of early testing.

We only have certain launch windows.

So there's a bunch of time constraints.

Is this a 50-year thing in your mind?

Is it a 150-year thing?

Is it something that is for our generation or is it our children's generation?

Where do you see that point if it's optimally possible?

You know, if things go and break our way?

I think it can be done in 30 years.

Wow.

Provided there's an exponential increase in the tonnage to Mars with each success of Mars transfer windows, which is every every two years.

So every two years

the planets align and you can transfer to Mars.

So

I think in

roughly 15, but maybe as few as 10, but

10 to 15-ish Mars transfer windows, if you're

seeing exponential increases in the tonnage to Mars with each Mars transfer window, then it should be possible to make Mars self-sustaining in about, quote, roughly 25 years.

Amazing.

That's incredible.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk.

We'll see you when we're back in town.

We miss you.

We'll see you in person next time.

Thank you, brother.