BONUS EPISODE: Elon Musk at Code Conference 2021

Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo.

It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.
CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part?

Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you? Try Odoo for free at Odo.com. That's odoo.com.

Support for this show comes from Upwork. If you're overextended and understaffed, Upwork Business Plus helps you bring in top quality freelancers fast.

You can get instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork in marketing, design, AI, and more, ready to jump in and take work off your plate.

Upwork Business Plus sources vets and shortlists proven experts so you can stop doing it all and delegate with confidence.

Right now, when you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business Plus, you get $500 in credit. Go to upwork.com/slash save now and claim the offer before December 31st, 2025.

Again, that's upwork.com/slash S-A-V-E, scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit. Terms and conditions apply.

Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher. Today, we've got a bonus episode from our code conference.
It's my conversation with Elon Musk.

I've talked to Elon many times, and I have to say, this one was really good. We talked about the size of rockets and more.
All right, we have a lot to talk about. Great.
Where do you want to start?

Anywhere you'd like to talk. All right, China.

Cryptocurrency. What they're doing.

That's my safe word, by the way. Okay, good.
good.

What they're doing for cryptocurrency. Yeah.
Cryptocurrency. Yeah, it'll kill anyone.
Continue for later for us. Go ahead.

Cryptocurrency in China. Yes.
What they're doing around Bitcoin, et cetera. And then I'd like to pivot to what the U.S.
is going to do around regulation.

Well, it would appear that they don't love cryptocurrency.

It appears.

Yeah, it's subtle, but

hinting in that direction.

Yeah, so

I can't speak to exactly why they don't like it that much, but people can speculate for various reasons.

China, by the way, is having some significant electricity generation issues.

So

actually, I think part of it may actually be due to

electricity shortages in many parts of China. So

a lot of South China right now is having random

power outages because the power demand is higher than expected.

So crypto mining might be playing a role in that. I'm not sure.

This is further than that. It is further than that.

Well, I suppose

cryptocurrency is fundamentally aimed at

reducing the power of a centralized government. Yes, it is.
And that they don't like that.

Okay. That's my guess.
Okay. So, what do you think is going to happen? Does this happen? I mean, maybe the audience has other ways.
Shares went up. It didn't matter after they announced this.

They went down and they went up. You can change the shares of cryptocurrency more than China can.

Yeah. Is that a good thing?

If it goes up, I suppose

it is.

But I mean, I think there's an always long-term role for crypto.

And, you know,

really people should think of any kind of money system, whether it's the store of value or currency, as really a form of information.

If you apply information theory to money, whether it's cryptocurrency or some other form, and view it in terms of

how good is it at

sort of bandwidth, latency, jitter,

dropping packets,

which is, you say like fraud is like losing packets or something on the network.

And,

you know, it's overall security.

Then

I think a lot of these things just

make a lot of sense in that regard. Like any form of money has no power in and of itself except as an exchange of value between people for goods or services or to translate

things in time, like a loan. So, is this the right thing for governments to do to take control of it? Is it possible?

It is not possible to,

I think, destroy crypto, but it is possible for governments to

slow down its advancement.

So, what should the U.S. government do? We had Gary Gensler on earlier as EC chairman.
He was calling it the wild west of finance. What should they do, if anything?

I would say do nothing. Okay, they're not saying that.

Yeah, I mean,

I wouldn't seriously just let it fly. Because.

Well, what do you think governments can do? I think they can, like you said, I think they can ruin it. I don't think they can just slow it down.
I think they can stop it.

I don't think they can control it. And therefore, they may want to stop it.
I wouldn't say that I'm some, you know, massive cryptocurrency expert.

You know, I think

there's some value to cryptocurrency. I don't think it's like the se the second coming of the Messiah, which some people seem to think.

It will hopefully reduce the

error and latency in

the money system, the legacy money systems, and reduce the yeah, I mean, just

you know, governments have a habit of editing the money database, which is like probably some ancient mainframe somewhere in Virginia Ranking Cobalt, FY.

It's kind of bleak to think about that.

But so, you know, when governments can't give the hand out of the cookie jar and edit the money database, there's probably some values to that.

Okay. So, what are you, you're saying you're not an expert, but you spend a lot of time tweeting about it? Now, you tweet about a lot of things.
We'll get to that in a minute.

But why is that?

That's true. Why is that of interest to you, crypto? Because you become, I wouldn't say the crypto messiah, but you're

crypto messiah. That's going to be a

well, I mean, I mostly don't tweet about crypto. This is a minority of small number of tweets.
Okay. So

I do know a lot about the money system and payments and how it actually works, as opposed to, say, how

economists think it works.

On a practical basis, just how money money's just a basically the monetary system is a series of heterogeneous databases that

are not real time, with the exception of PayPal and a few others.

And

so reconcile on a batch basis

that may take anywhere from 24 hours to several days.

And so it's just, it's slow. That's just a lot of latency in Judder.
And

the ACH system has basically no security.

So, and this has just been the, it was that way when PayPal started in 99, and it's still that way 22 years later. It needs reform.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, I want to move on to when China, I want to stick with China for a second. You are operating there, selling there.

What do you make of what they're doing to the tech entrepreneurs there, the tech mobiles?

Where is Jack Mana? Where is Jack Mana? I know.

Do you know? No, I'm just curious.

We have some means to find out, I'm guessing.

Well,

maybe.

I don't know. I think

there are some

changes afoot in China.

I think part of this may be

actually COVID-related in the sense that

it's been quite difficult to have in-person meetings in China and and China really runs

a whole system is set up to run on the basis of in-person meetings. And the absence of

these meetings for the past 18 months, I think, has

probably led to

things being worse than they would be if there were more in-person meetings.

So I think as COVID lifts and the in-person meetings return,

I think think probably there will be an increase in the sort of trust level, and I think things will probably start heading in a more positive direction.

The trust level between tech and the government. Yeah, both internally within China and with respect to

people from the U.S. and other countries going and visiting and meeting with officials in the Chinese government.
Now, it's just

China is very much set up to work with the in-person meetings, and so COVID,

I think, has impeded that.

So,

I think things will improve most likely as the in-person meetings resume. So they did these antitrust actions because they couldn't say hello.

I think that

not all of it can be ascribed to that, but it's

some of it can be.

Yeah.

We'll see.

I suspect things will improve next year because of just more interaction. Are you nervous about what you're doing there? It's a big market for you.

You operate there.

Yeah, we've got a big factory in Shanghai, which is doing very well.

The Tesla China team is doing great work.

And

we do well selling in the Chinese market as well as producing cars for China and for export to Europe.

So overall, things are going pretty well, frankly. You're not worried about US-China relations?

I don't it's it's not no, not especially right now. Not especially, all right.
So let's talk about space.

You had a recent space.

You sent up a bunch of civilians into space. You did not send yourself up.

No, I have not set myself up.

I suppose I will at some point. But my goal is not to send myself up.

My goal is to open up space for humanity and ultimately set us on a path to becoming a space for English civilization and a multi-planet species. Yes.

So you don't want to go up yourself?

It's neither here nor there. I will go at some point.
What do you think of the other efforts to go to suborbital?

Suborbital is a step in the direction of orbit, but

so

but just to put things into perspective, you need about 100 times more energy to get to orbit versus suborbit.

And then to get back from orbit, you need to burn off that energy. So you need a heavy-duty heat shield, because you're coming in like a meteor.
Yes.

So

like

orbit is roughly two orders of magnitude more difficult than suborbit. But it's still

good to do something in space.

What did you think watching those,

both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, doing that?

I thought it was cool that they're

spending money on the advancement of space. I think we ultimately want to be, humanity wants to be, should want to be a space-faring civilization and out there among the stars.
And I think we

really want, you know,

all these things that we see in science fiction movies and books, like, you know, we want those to be

real one day, not always fiction. Right.

So

I think it's good that people are spending their money advancing space technology. So last time we talked, we didn't talk a lot about space.
We talked about a whole bunch.

We talked about meat flaps, which was Elon's word for speaking. Yeah.
We're flapping our

slow tonal wheezing. Yes, that's right.
When I sound like it right now.

Let's always sound like to a computer. Like whale sounds slow down.
Yeah. So we didn't talk about space.
So let's talk a little bit about where you think you've advanced.

with what you're doing, because I think you're probably the most fast forward of all these efforts.

Yeah, so with respect to SpaceX,

let's see.

I mean, there's two,

besides orbital human spaceflight and providing transport for

NASA of astronauts in Calgary to and from the space station, which we've been doing for a while now, over a decade,

we are

We have something called Starlink, which is a global internet system.

And this is, I think, going to have some profound positive effects on the world because Starlink is really designed to serve the least served.

You have 1,300 satellites up right now, is that correct?

1,500 people. And you want to put 30,000.

Yeah.

We'll get to space pollution in a minute, but explain the reasons for it.

Yeah, so in order to provide high bandwidth, low latency connectivity to a large number of people,

you need

a lot of satellites and they need to be at low earth orbit so that the latency is low.

The problem with satellites that are at geostationary orbit is that they are around 36,000 kilometers whereas we are at 550 kilometers. So gigantic difference in latency.

I mean for the Starlink system you could play like a competitive video game that's less latency dependent and still be able to play it with Starlink.

It's like browsing a terrestrial system, essentially.

But Starlink is really,

just to be clear, not a threat to

5G or

terrestrial fiber or anything like that.

But it's very well suited to

low to medium density regions of the Earth, places where it is too expensive to trench fiber or put

5G cellular based stations.

And so it's really a good,

it kind of takes care of the people that just didn't get internet.

Either the internet's too slow or too expensive or they just don't have it at all. It's very well suited, a space-based system for serving the least served, maybe 5% or something like that.

How big a part of your space business is it from your perspective? I mean, I think it's quite significant in that the

launch side of things, just launching other people's satellites and serving the space station probably tops out around $3 or $4 billion a year of revenue.

Whereas if we can get to, say, 3% of global internet traffic, then

that's roughly a trillion dollar a year business, then we can increase our revenue by an order of magnitude to more like 30 billion or something like that.

And

then we can use the proceeds from that to develop the rocket technology necessary to get humanity to Mars and to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system.

So I think Sonic is good in and of itself for providing,

like I said, providing internet access to

the least served in the world. It's a fundamentally good thing in that respect.

And also offering a little bit of competition in the cities, although

Sonic can really maybe serve less than 5% of people in a city. It's just because of the way the

spot beams from space are very big. So

anyway, it's a very nice complement and a necessary complement to

5G and

fiber.

So

and like I said, it'll provide a revenue stream for us to develop

our next generation rocket, which is Starship.

With Starship,

we're trying to achieve the fundamental breakthrough that is the holy grail of rocketry.

That is to have a fully reusable mobile rocket.

This is this is extremely fundamental.

With Falcon 9, we have a mostly reusable rocket. You recently proved it landed, correct? We've been landing for quite a while now.
But

so we in fact, a number of our boosters are on their tenth reflight.

So

we've shown that

reusing the

boost stage

can be done and that it is economically sensible to do so. What's the difference in price?

Between our Falcon 9 and the competitors?

In using a reusable rocket. Oh yeah, sure, sure.

So

it's it's it's really gigantic.

With Falcon 9, we still have to

lose the upper stage. And you can think of each stage being like the equivalent of a jet airplane.
So the boost stage is like the big jet airplane, upper stage is the small jet airplane.

We still throw away the small jet airplane every time.

So

Falcon 9 is able to be the most competitive rocket in the world because we recover the boost stage and the fairing.

But that but still our best case marginal cost of launch, not taking into account overhead allocation is about $15 million.

Per launch. Yeah, for 15 tons to orbit.

Which is quite big.

SpaceX,

over the last year or so, has

delivered about, I think, roughly two-thirds of all payloads orbit of Earth. And most of the remaining third is China, and then everyone else is

kind of

in the miscellaneous.

So

anyway, so but we still have a it's still $15 million because of the mostly because of the. What's the cost differential between that and what you're aiming for?

Yeah, so

basically Falcon 9 is effectively about

half to a third the cost of alternatives because of the reuse of the boost age. With

Starship,

we should be able to get to the point where

it's maybe 1%

the cost of an expandable system.

So that would just be a million bucks, right?

Yeah, the marginal cost of launch we think can be

potentially under a million dollars. So is anybody concerned? Or for over 100 tons to Overt.
100 more than 15, you said 15. Yes,

100 tons

likely, and with refinement of the design, probably 150 tons. So essentially, it would be

10 times the payload payload of Falcon 9 for

15 times lower cost.

When's that happening?

100-fold better. It's really

profound.

Essentially, with Starship, it is possible to make the economics close for creating a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon for those who want to go there.

And so there's really very, very profound development.

And that's what I'm spending most of my time on is driving the development of Starship. Starship, so you can go to Mars or you want a civilization on Mars? A civilization on Mars.

So what's first, the moon base or moon base first, correct? I mean, the moon is close, so we might as well. Okay.

You might as well. It's practically right there, you know.
You got a contract with the Defense Department to do a lunar lander.

From NASA. From NASA.

Which is being disputed disputed by jeff bezos yes how do you feel about that

well i think i've uh expressed my thoughts on that front um

you know uh

i if he i i i think he should put more uh of his energy into uh getting to orbit uh than lawsuits

um you you can't you cannot sue your way to the moon okay

you know how good your lawyers are yeah Yeah.

So why isn't he doing that? I don't know. He also liked to make fun of his rocket.

We all make fun of each other's rockets.

I mean, I think it does have,

I mean, it could be a different shape, potentially.

You know.

Could you explain from a technological point of view why it's that shape?

Well, if you are only going to doing suborbital, then your rocket can be sort of

shorter, yes.

So, have you called him and said, cut the shit, get bigger or what?

I have encouraged

him to emphasize getting to orbit. Yes.

Do you talk to him?

Not verbally. Not verbally.

What is it, mine held or not? No, just you know. Tweet at him.

Exactly. Sub tweet, if you want.
Subtweet.

So what sub-tweet? You do sub-tweet him. So

what are you going to do with the lunar lander? And how do you get the moon base there?

Yeah, so

a Starship is designed essentially as a general purpose

transport system to anywhere in the solar system.

because it is a propulsive lander. And with a propulsive lander, you can land anywhere that's got a solid surface.

So

and it's also designed for orbital refilling. So you can

get the Starship to orbit and then send tanker flights to refill it so that it has tremendous delta velocity. Basically, it can go very far from Earth orbit because you can refill propellants.

The moon base is important because.

Well, I think the moon base, I mean, certainly there's like a lot we could learn scientifically if we had a proper laboratory on the moon

about the nature of the universe and

where we all came from and the early history of Earth and that kind of thing. Yeah, we have a science station in Antarctica, and we're still learning a lot from

our activities in Antarctica, and I think we could learn even more on the moon.

So there's a lot of value, I think, to having a... And I think it would be just just freaking cool.
I mean, come on.

It's like, we've got to, you know, humanity, let's, you've got to represent here for humanity.

Just have a base on the moon. I think everyone would be like, hell yeah, we've got a base on the moon.
That's cool. Yeah.
You know?

For tourism? What do you think? No, the science,

science,

I think, like

a lot could be learned if you've got a sort of a science station on the moon, like we've got a science station in Antarctica and many other places.

And

I think there is value that shouldn't be denigrated for people who want to experience

going to orbit or going to the moon.

And

when they do so, and I think to some degree vicariously, we all go with them.

In the Apollo program, when they landed on the moon, Yeah, it was just a handful of individuals on the moon, but we all went with them, vicariously. Humanity went with them.
Like,

if you asked Peter DePaul of People on Earth and said, tell me, what do you think is humanity's greatest achievement,

maybe ever? It's like landing on the moon.

And that's inspiring, I think, to kids everywhere.

We'll be back with more from Elon Musk after the break.

Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business. This is where Odo comes in.

It's the only business software you'll ever need. ODU is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything.
That means CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters: running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com.

That's odoo.com.

Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in.

It's the only business software you'll ever need. Odoo is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything.
That means CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odo for free at odo.com.
That's odoo.com.

Welcome back to this bonus episode of Pivot. Here's more of my conversation with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at this year's Code Conference.
So you just sent up four civilians.

Is that space tourism you're doing? And by the way, you have to be kind of rich to do it. Like from what I understand, I cannot afford to go to the moon, for example.
Yeah, I mean,

I think billionaire's space is a lot of fun. I think it's got a bit more gravitas than

you know metaphorically, figuratively and literally,

more gravitas than

simply tourism. It's not like going to Disneyland.

It's more profound than that.

So sometimes people use tourism in a sort of a negative way. But

I think, especially with the inspiration flight, I think they really, I mean,

they filmed the whole thing in real time.

You know, they shared their experiences with the world. It was a really cool group of people.

I recommend watching the Netflix show Countdown. Mark Penioff talked about it.
It's awesome.

I didn't have anything to do with it.

And

the production value on the Netflix Countdown documentary is amazing. And you learn about the backstory of the people, and it's

actually super tourism.

This is for science and for saving saving humanity, presumably.

Yeah, I think

tourism,

I think that there's an element of tourism to it, but I think

there's also

the technology is expensive at first.

You can't just, when you try to develop brand new technology, it doesn't instantly become cheap and affordable.

Think of like cell phones, and the early cell phones were were really expensive and sucked, you know, frankly.

Like, you know, you think of like Wall Street 1 One where, you know, he's walking down the beach with the shoebox size cell phone on it, you know, talking to

and so it was like really expensive and the tech wasn't that great.

But if if some number of people didn't pay for the expensive cell phones, there would not be the inexpensive cell phones that everyone can afford.

So thank billionaires for going into space.

I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be top of your thank you list, but I mean it's not

I'm just saying that there is a nest nest when there's new technology it is necessarily expensive until you can refine the design and you can scale things up and then you can make it more affordable

there's a common misconception that there's some with some new technology especially if it's a physical object that you can just suddenly make it cheap and available

and and

but you have to have many design iterations and you've got to scale up the production and get economies of scale.

We had this argument against Tesla for a long time because people would say like, well, why are you building this Tesla roadster back in the day? It's basically,

you know, it's an expensive toy sports car for rich people. And we're like, yes, it is,

but

there's no way we could build an affordable electric car as our first car.

We just didn't have the capital, we didn't have the experience, and we needed to go through several technology iterations in order to get to something like the Model 3.

And

I actually wrote a blog about this because I knew people would be like, why are you making sports costs

rich people? As though we thought there was somehow a shortage of sports costs rich people.

Obviously not.

But you just gotta you've gotta figure out the technology, you've gotta go through multiple design, like how do you make something mass market and affordable?

Many, many design iterations, many different versions of the technology, a lot of hard work, and then you've gotta scale up the production so you get economies of scale.

And those two things are what make any given technology available to the public. And basically every technology that we take for granted today has gone through that.

So the idea that getting to Mars will be affordable someday? Yes, absolutely. It has to be.

In order for Mars to be a self-sustaining civilization, it has to be affordable.

Enough people need to go, you know? Why do you want people to go when you just keep saying that? Because you're worried about this planet?

Or are you just betting the odds are we'll either blow it up or

it'll be the day after tomorrow movie?

No, I think it's really,

you know, if you sort of look, you know,

just sort of stand back,

if we just step away from our sort of antinessian squabbles and say, let's look at the big picture here.

What set of actions can we take that maximize the probability that the future is going to be good for civilization and for for consciousness?

And I think we should regard consciousness on Earth as delicate, not

just fragile.

And

what sort of actions can we do to ensure that it continues and that the scope and scale of consciousness expands? And

I'm in favor of expansion because like

you know

if we want to understand what the universe is is about and

what's the meaning of life,

we need to get out there and find out.

And the more we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we will be able to understand what questions to ask about the answer of that is the universe.

So when you get a lot of criticism, say, about a star link, space pollution, you see a lot of stories about space pollution. Why is Elon Putting some of these astronomers get mad at you? Or with

the rockets, so that you have these big fence contracts that you're doing correct first time someone's broken into the area. How do you meet those criticisms?

This is just small potatoes?

Well first of all with respect to the astronomers

we are in

constant dialogue with the leading astronomers of the world and taking great pains to ensure that our satellites do not interfere with their telescopes.

And we've

I believe at this point they are satisfied that they will not.

So,

like I said, we've taken great pains to ensure that the satellites do not reflect or

otherwise interfere with

the telescopes, including the most sensitive telescopes. So,

there may be a few sort of amateur astronomers who are unhappy, but the professional ones are satisfied that we are taking reasonable steps to ensure that we are not standing in the way of science, nor would we ever want to.

And we're also looking at launching some

new telescopes using Starship, because Starship's a much bigger vehicle. We can launch satellites that have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble, which would be great for science.

And in fact,

there's an exciting program

working with Seoul Perlmutter at Berkeley on

a big new space satellite.

a space telescope, I should say.

And I think we'll do more of those. So I think at at the end of the day, Starship and SpaceX are going to do a lot to advance our understanding of

astrophysics and astronomy. You still want to, you said to me a couple of times ago, we talked, you want to die on Mars.
You still want to die on Mars.

Well, just not on landing, right? Yes.

Just not an impact. Right.

Well, that would be spectacular. Yes, but you wouldn't get to enjoy it much, you know, just a second or so.
You're not a narrative for the rest.

Yeah, no, well, I was just asked,

do you want to die on Mars? And I was like, well, I suppose if you're going to pick Earth or Mars, I'm like, it'd be cool to be born on Earth and die on Mars.

I'm not trying to make a beeline to put Mars and just

die or something.

It's just that, yeah, you've got to pick one. You're going to die somewhere.

Sure, Mars.

I've interviewed a lot of Astro, I guess, they're biologists, they're worried about, essentially they said you have to be under the Earth a couple hundred feet. No, no, no.
You get short.

Definitely not a couple.

Too much a couple hundred. Yeah, no, you just need,

first of all,

half the time you're shielded

by Mars itself.

That's half the radiation is just the planet shielding you. And then

you want to maybe have like, I don't know,

three feet of dirt-ish on the roof, or just kind of a thick roof.

They'd be fine.

So you're not worried about becoming shorter and stupider by moving to Mars?

No, I think we might become taller actually on Mars.

A little bit taller, yeah, because the gravity is roughly 40% that of us. Okay, that would be good for me.

When you think about.

I do think there's like an important thing.

Well, if you think of the various great filters, if people are familiar with the sort of great filter thought,

one of the filters is do we become a space,

a multi-planet species or not?

So that is at least one of the great filters. And I think it would be great to pass that

and have

be a multi-planet species where

the critical threshold is

for a Mars city, if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, whether that is

civilization on Earth,

it could be a mundane reason or it could be World War III.

But does Mars

prosper or die out? And if Mars is missing anything at all,

like the civilizational equivalent of vitamin C, then it will eventually die out.

So you need to get to the point where a Mars city is self-sustaining, even if the ships from Earth stop coming, then you have passed the great filter, or at least that particular great filter.

I think we should endeavor to pass that great filter as as soon as possible.

You said pretty soon last time we talked. Yeah, I mean, I think we should really try hard to make it happen this century,

before the end of the century. You'll be pretty old.

I'll probably be dead. Yeah.

Not on Mars.

Well, I mean, I'll pop over there when I'm old or something. Okay.
So

one of the things you're doing is a lot of government deals. You're doing this lunar lander.
You did the rocket one.

You're getting billions from $2.9 billion, is that right? Well, right now we're not getting anything because we're being sued. Right, that's right.
I'm sorry. Okay, but you're getting a lot of money.

Hopefully, we'll get it. Right, right, when it's over.
Yeah, and he fixes his rights. I mean, most of our launches are commercial, to be clear.

Yes, I understand that, but you're doing a lot of government work.

What is that like working with the government?

Is it important to your business? Yeah, I mean,

it's an important part of the business. I mean, just

bear in mind,

if you're in any industry, like let's say you're a pencil manufacturer, okay, about 40% of your pencils are going to go to the government.

The government's about 40% of the economy.

If you're a shoe manufacturer, you've got 40% of your business, it's going to be with the government. So

it's to be expected that any company is going to have

most companies are going to have a

percentage of business with the government, state, federal, and local, that is proportionate to the GDP of the government.

So, one of the criticisms of you is you don't pay enough taxes, if any.

Can you address that? Because here you are getting money from the government. You obviously want a functioning government to be able to build all kinds of things and services.

How do you look at that trade-off?

Well, I mean, there was a bunch of very misleading stuff that was published by ProPublica.

And really, that was some sort of

trickery. And

really they did themselves no good service by

doing that.

First of all, with respect to the government contracts that SpaceX wins,

our aspiration is to do the most for the least. And if you look at all the contracts we've won, we've won them because we're the best price.
We have a better service at a lower price.

They weren't just handed to us.

I don't think they were. And that's not what I'm saying.
In fact, you called me and said we finally got in after years of sort of this back slappy.

I think it's a great thing. That is a great thing.
Absolutely. I mean,

for the Luna Landa, just taking that as one example,

our bed was half the price of the Lou Origin Lockheed bed, half. So

for a vehicle that does basically 10 times more or eight times more perhaps,

our price was half.

And NASA has a mandate to get back to the moon, so

we save taxpayers like $3 billion

relative to that contract.

So I think that's a good thing. With respect to my personal taxes,

I don't actually draw a salary or anything. My cash compensation is basically zero.

Which is a good thing because income is a problem for most people because they pay taxes on income.

That was the whole point of the story, I think. Yeah, yeah.

So

I do have stock options that fast.

And so in the years that the, but I don't, I basically, with

Tesla and SpaceX, I just have not really bothered to sort of take money off the table, which is a common, most people do. They sell some of their stock and they take money off the table.

And for me, I just like said, you know, my money will be the sort of,

it was the first in, it'll be the last out.

And

the success of SpaceX and Tesla was far from assured.

And there are many times when it looked like the companies would, and they did, they skirted bankruptcy many times, but I never tried to take money off the table.

And now this is trying to be turned around and made into a bad thing. And this is messed up.

So

when my stock options,

just before my stock options expire, then I am forced to exercise. And my top marginal tax rate is 53%.

So I don't think that's particularly low. And it's going to go up next year.
It's like probably 57% or something. And you sell.
Yes. And

I have a bunch of options that are expiring early next year. So

a huge block of options will sell in Q4 because I have to, they'll expire. And my top marginal tax rate is 53%.

So you eventually will pay a lot of taxes.

Massive, yeah. I mean, basically majority of what I sell will be tax.
I don't think it was alleging illegality. It's that wealthy people got to borrow against their stock.

Yes, they were saying that somehow borrowing is a trick to get away from paying taxes. But it's important to bear in mind that we've had a very long expansion in the economy, maybe the longest ever.

And borrowing against stock is all is all sort of fun and games until you have a recession. and you get the margin goals.
And then you go to zero,

which happens basically every time there's a recession. Right.

Stocks don't always go up. They go down.
Yours seems to.

Most stocks have gone up, including some questionable stocks, frankly.

Are you talking about yourself? I'm sorry.

I think. Are you surprised by how much it's gone up? And wealthy.

I mean, I have literally gone on record and said I think stock price is too high, in my opinion.

This did nothing to stop the rise of the stock price. No.

So

what am I supposed to do?

I'm not the one making it go off.

But I think it's important to bear in mind, my actual tax rate is 53%. They try to make it sound like basically it was a big increase in the value of the Tesla stock, and then they added up.

They just very selectively poked the numbers to make it sound like I was paying very low taxes. But in fact, my taxes are very high.
They're like over half.

When you pay them, when you open them. Yes, and a huge amount will be paid

in the next three months because of expiring options. And there was like one year where I think my taxes were basically zero.
The reason for that was because I had overpaid taxes the year before.

I forgot to mention that.

You didn't call them back.

I'm not going to call them back. They have no interest in the truth.
Oh, okay. All right.
We'll be back with more from Elon Musk after the break.

Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in.

It's the only business software you'll ever need. ODU is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything.
That means CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odo for free at odo.com.
That's odoo.com.

Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in.

It's the only business software you'll ever need. Odo is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything.
That means CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odu for free at odo.com.
That's odoo.com.

Welcome back to this bonus episode of Pivot. Here's more of my conversation with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Let me ask you a question.

Twitter. Let's finish with Twitter and then let's get to questions from the audience.
What's going on with you in Twitter? I am a Twitter addict. I say the wrong things all the time.

What is someone explained to me? I was very close to you, saying it's your release valve.

This is where you feel better.

Yeah, I think I said

some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter.

Do you regret any of it or not? You are kind of prominent.

Yeah, I mean, sure.

Walk us through when you decide to do a tweet. You go, no, no, no.
Well, I think about it for hours. Do you? And I consult with my strategy team.

You just literally go, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or maybe I'm wasted on that.

Gone.

Let me shoot myself in the put fam. Now let me shoot myself in the foot fam.
Yeah.

That describes some of my tweets. Yeah.

Are you worried about any SEC involvement in your tweets going forward?

What does that stand for again? I mean, I know the middle word is Elon's, but I can't remember the other two words.

You need to answer me. You need to answer me.

Are you worried they're going to say, Elon, stop fucking tweeting? You talk about the Schwarzsler Enrichment Commission? Yeah. Yeah.
Schwarzeler Enrichment Commission. That's the new name.
Is it?

Yeah, yeah.

I asked about the particular recent tweet you did about, you did one great tweet about time,

saying time is the currency, which I thought was beautiful. Time is the ultimate currency, yes.

No matter what resources you have, you can't wind back the clock.

It's true.

No matter how rich you are.

But then you did the Biden tweet. Can you explain that one?

Oh, when

well,

yeah, I mean

so

you know, like Biden held this EB summit.

Didn't invite Tesla.

Invited

GM Ford, Chrysler and UAW

an EB summit on the White House.

Didn't mention Tesla once and praised GM and Ford for leading the EB revolution.

So you were pissed.

Does this sound maybe a little biased

or something?

So

and then, you know, just

it's not the friendliest administration. You know, I'm

yeah.

Seems to be controlled by the unions, as far as I can tell.

So, are you waiting to get Trump back?

Uh, no.

Would you like to be president besides yourself? I would not want to be president at all.

Uh, sounds like no no fun being president.

Um

what do you think is going to bring our country together, if at all? Moving to Mars, what?

Well, I think if there was some moderate, you know, sort of

centrist president, then I think that would help.

I think everyone just wants, I think most people, most people want a president who is just a very competent

executive,

not too far left, not too far right.

And

everyone would be like, I think,

most people would prefer that.

You know, some

when it comes down to the election, you've got two choices. You're like, no, you know, maybe you don't love either choice, but you've got to pick one.

Do you think it'll happen?

Do I think there will be

a centrist?

I hope so.

Hope so.

What about democracy?

I'm not super worried about democracy.

Are you worried about democracy?

A little smidge.

What concerns you?

A lot of the the dialogue is getting a little. I study propaganda.
Oh, yeah. It's worrisome.

The fact that it can happen here, it certainly can.

I'm a Philip Roth kind of person.

So.

Yeah.

But we're both having a lot of children, so we must believe in the future. Yes, children.
We have 10 children between us, correct?

I believe, yes. You're slightly ahead, but you've got to rock it.

Anyway.

I do think there is.

I think a lot of people think that there's too many people on the planet, but I think there's, in fact, too few, and that the possibly the single greatest risk to human civilization is the

rapidly diminishing growth rate.

And the facts are out there for anyone to look at.

But a lot of people are still stuck with

Paul Ellick's book, Population Bomb. It's like, that was a long time ago.
That is not the case today.

And

there was a massive notch in demographics last year because the birth rate plummeted. And also this year.

So more children.

So,

I mean, if, you know, no babies, no humanity.

You've got to come from somewhere. Okay.
We're going to end on that. We need questions from the audience because there's a lot of great questions.
Hey, Alana, I'm Ronan Levy from Field Trip.

We spent a lot of time talking about outer space.

We want to ask you about inner space. And the question specifically is, do you spend time thinking about humanity's somewhat destructive tendencies before sending people to Mars?

And specifically, you've talked about the subject of DMT and curious to know what role you think psychedelics may have in addressing some of the more destructive tendencies.

I'm going to talk about this tomorrow.

Okay.

I think generally

people should be open to psychedelics.

I mean, you know, yeah.

A lot of people making laws are kind of from a different era.

So I think as

you know as a new generation gets into political power, I think we will see uh greater receptivity to the benefits of psychedelics.

Um does human humanity's tendencies right now concern you, like about before we go to to Mars?

I mean

humanity's tendencies, I mean we are at a very peaceful moment in history. Um

so you know you've got to separate the

sort of news headlines from the reality. Um I think like Steven Pinker at Hobbit has really pointed this out,

we're actually at the lowest violence per capita in human history.

It may not seem like that, but objectively, those are the statistics.

That's not to say there's no violence or there aren't things to be improved, but it's

actually quite good.

But, you know, just like I said, big picture-wise, I think we want to take the set of actions that maximize the probability that the future is good

and

that civilization continues and that the

sort of the small candle of consciousness in the void that is humanity

continues and is not,

the candle does not go out.

King next, I'll be here. Hi, Techno King.

How do you respond to allegations? You call him Techno King? Yeah. Okay.
That's just my formal title. I filed that with the SSC.
You want to be respectful, Cara. Yeah.

How do you respond to allegations that you're a living cyber genetic organism sent from the future to save us? And secondly,

I can neither confirm nor deny that.

He's good. He's good.
And secondly, what do you think the probability is that general purpose blockchains that have greater utility will eclipse the value of like a finished product in Bitcoin?

Actually, I'm not sure how to answer that last one.

I think just generally public ledger stuff is good

because

I'm a fan of open source and just

sunlight being a great disinfectant and

the less things occur in the dark, the better.

And

basically, I mean, blockchains are

just a cryptographic ledger.

So

I think that

there's probably a lot of good things I can be done with that.

The first question?

I said I could neither confirm nor deny. Okay.

Hey, Elon, Alex Heath with The Verge. The questions on the self-driving beta you guys are rolling out.
Curious why you're encouraging people to not share videos, making them sign NDAs?

No, I mean there's a lot of videos being shared.

But the NDAs.

Pardon me? The NDAs for the full self-driving beta? I don't know.

People don't seem to listen to the NDA. I mean, I'm not sure there's

an NDA. We probably don't need it.

And people just are ignoring it anyway, so I don't know if it matters.

All right. So I'm going to ignore this.
I'm going to keep getting questions. Hi.
Hi, Ilan Zia Yousuf from BCG. Could you talk a little bit about AI and robotics?

And you've expressed concerns in the past, but now building some as well. What do you see as the issues that we do have to solve on that front?

Well, I've said for a long time I think AI safety is a really big deal.

And we should have some regulatory agency that is overseeing AI safety.

But there is not yet currently any such thing. And just generally, any kind of regulatory agency done by the government will usually take years to put in place.

So

after

the population collapse issue, I think AI safety is probably the second biggest

threat to the future of civilization.

And

yeah,

like I said, I'm not quite sure what to do with it.

I mean, Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robot maker, because we have basically

semi-autonomous cars that will ultimately be fully autonomous.

And we are building a humanoid robot that will be

basically

like the car but with legs.

So

and I kind of held off on doing that for a while because

I certainly don't want to hasten the AI apocalypse. But clearly with you, if you look at Boston Dynamics and those humanoid robots are going to happen.
so

they're either going to happen with or without Tesla. So it's like Tesla, I've got a little bit more, I mean, a lot more ability to ensure robotics safety and AI.

And I'll try my best to do that.

Okay, last question. Sorry.
Rick Cutter of the Cloud for Utilities. Thank you so much for the hard work you've done with Tesla, driving the EV market.

As we move towards more green energy, utilities are getting rid of their fossil plants, coal plants, investing in renewables, there's a difference in the economic output they can deliver.

Are you concerned at all as the growth of EVs continue? Do you think we could have a supply chain problem with energy demand? Yeah,

that's a very good question.

The full answer is lengthy. I'll try to give this the short version.

The electricity demand

roughly,

if we go, if we shift or transport to electric,

then electricity demand approximately doubles, maybe a little more than doubles.

And this is going to create a lot of challenges with the grid, especially for distribution to neighborhoods.

And this is why Tesla has the product, the solar roof and solar retrofit, is because even if you increase sustainable power generation at the utility level, you're still going to have a distribution problem where you need new high power lines, new medium power lines.

You need to dramatically increase the size of the substations, which means you're going to have to start knocking down houses to increase the substation size. This is really

unworkable unless you have significant local power generation at houses. And this is why I think it's actually very important that

a necessary part of the solution is local power generation on

rooms, on the houses of homes. Very important.

And then, of course, we need

large

sustainable power generation developments, primarily wind and solar,

but it needs to be paired with battery packs for steady state to

provide continuous power.

And a lot of good things are happening in this regard. The growth of solar in the last several years has been incredible.
I think it's like a 40%

confound annual growth rate in solar

and also a big growth in wind.

I'm also kind of a pro-nuclear,

nuclear, nuclear, pro-nuclear.

And

I'm sort of surprised by a lot of the public sentiment against nuclear.

And

I'm not saying we should go build a whole bunch of new nuclear plants, but I don't think we should shut down ones that are operating safely.

But

they did this in Germany, for example, and I think that was, and then had to create a a whole bunch of coal power plants. And I don't think that was

the

right decision, frankly. So

yeah, anyway, so

one way or another though, we're going to have to have a lot more electricity generation.

And this is primarily going to come down to solar and wind power.

Next conversation. Okay.
So Tesla pouring solar. Sounds good? Okay.
Can I ask you one more question? One time we talked a couple of years ago, Code, you said we were in a simulation.

This past couple of years has seemed truly fucked up.

It feels like a bunch of teenagers from the future are just really smoking a lot of dope and fucking with us.

Are we in a simulation?

I mean,

my heart says no, and my brain says yes.

Elon Musk.

Okay, that's the show for today. Stay tuned for more bonus code episodes in the Pivot Feed.

Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in.

It's the only business software you'll ever need. Odo is an all-in-one fully integrated platform that handles everything.
That means CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com.
That's ODOO.com.

Support for this show comes from SC Johnson. We've all been there.
Choosing not to wear your new white shoes because there's a 10% chance of rain?

Bending awkwardly over the tiny coffee table to enjoy a sip of your latte.

Not ordering the red sauce. Those feelings of dread are what we call stainsiety.

But now you can break free from your stainsiety with Shout's Triple Acting Spray that has stain-fighting ingredients to remove a huge variety of stains so you can live in the moment and clean up later.

Just breathe and shout with Shout Triple Acting Spray. Learn more at shoutitout.com.