BONUS EPISODE: Elon Musk at Code Conference 2021

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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 start.

All right, China.

Cryptocurrency, what they're doing.

That's my safe word, by the way.

Okay, good.

What they're doing?

Cryptocurrency.

Yeah.

Cryptocurrency.

Yeah, it'll kill anybody.

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 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 they don't like that.

Okay.

That's my guess.

Okay.

So what do you think is going to happen?

Does this

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 obvious long-term role for crypto.

And

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

its overall security,

then

I think a lot of these things just seem just make a lot of sense in in that regard.

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, SEC 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, I would 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

massive cryptocurrency expert.

I think

there's some value to cryptocurrency.

I don't think it's like the second coming of the Messiah, which nobody will 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, Reincobel, 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 value 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 would say, the crypto messiah, but you're not.

Crypto messiah.

That's going to be a

good idea.

Well, I mean, I mostly don't tweet about crypto.

There's a minority, 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 is 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.

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 Mona?

Where is Jack Mana?

I know.

Do you know?

No, I'm curious.

You 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 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 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 US and other countries going and visiting and meeting with officials in the Chinese government.

China is very much set up to work with 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

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.

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

So overall things have gone pretty well, frankly.

You're not worried about U.S.-China relations?

I don't.

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-faring 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 a hundred 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 like heavy-duty heat shield, because you're coming in like a meteor.

Yes.

So

so like

orbit is roughly two orders of magnitude more difficult than than suborbit.

But it's still you know 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, I mean, all these things that we see in science fiction movies and books, like, you know, we want those to be like

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.

This always sounds like to a computer.

Like whale sounds, slow down.

Yeah.

So we can 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 space flight and providing transport for

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

We have a system 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.

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.

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

cells you know 5G cellular based stations.

And so it's really a good it kind of takes care of the people that that just didn't get internet or either the internet's too 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 like 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 that that's the so then the you know so so I think Sonic is is 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

Stalin 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 a fundamental breakthrough that is the holy grail of rocketry.

That is to have a fully reusable mobile rocket.

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.

So

in fact, a number of our boosters are on their 10th 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 competitors?

In using a reusable rocket.

Oh, yeah, sure, sure.

So

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 rem 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 of 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 confused?

Or over 100 tons to orbit.

100 more than 15, you 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 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 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 s civilization on Mars?

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, which is

from NASA,

which is being disputed by Jeff Bezos.

Yes.

How do you feel about that?

Well, I think I've expressed my thoughts on that front.

You know,

I think he should put more of his energy into

getting to orbit

than lawsuits.

You cannot sue your way to the moon.

You don't know how good your lawyers are.

Yeah.

So, why isn't he doing that?

I don't know.

He also likes 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.

Sub-tweet.

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

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'd be just freaking cool.

I mean, come on.

It's like, we've got our, you know, humanity, let's, we'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 we all go with them you know when

when

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 of the 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.

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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 space is.

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 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 humanity, presumably.

Yeah, I think

tourism,

I think that there's an element of tourism to it, but I think it there 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 One, where, you know, he's walking down the beach with the shoebox size cell phone on it, you know, talking to

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

But 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 we should 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, 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 new technology, especially if it's a physical object, that you can just suddenly make it cheap and available.

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,

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.

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

rich people?

As though we thought there there was somehow a shortage of sports cars for rich people?

Obviously not.

But you just got to

figure out the technology, you've got to 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 got to scale up the production rate 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.

When you say that.

Enough people need to go.

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 antinessing 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 consciousness?

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

you know, 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 about and

what's the meaning of life and 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 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're taking 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 is 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 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 last couple 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 on 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 going to have 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 like trying to make a beeline to Mars and just

dive or something.

It's just that, yeah, I'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

A couple hundred feet.

Yeah, no, you just need.

First of all,

half the time you're shielded by this, 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.

I think it'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 Earth.

Okay, that would be good for me.

When you think about...

I do think there's like an important thing before 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 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 Grace Filter 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, you know, 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 rest.

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 that important to your business?

Yeah, I mean, it's an important part of...

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 going to go to the government.

The government's about 40% of the economy.

You know, 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.

That's 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 Lander, just taking that as one example,

our bed was half the price of the Blue 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.

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 divest.

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,

but 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 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.

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 you're not.

Are you surprised by how much it's gone up?

And well,

I mean, I have literally gone on record and said I think our 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 up.

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.

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.

And the reason for that was because I had overpaid taxes the year before.

And 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.

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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 and Twitter?

I am a Twitter addict.

I say the wrong things all the time.

Someone explained it to me, 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.

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 after it's gone.

Let me shoot myself on the put fam.

Now let me shoot myself on 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're talking about the Schwarzschilder Enrichment Commission?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Schwarzeller 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.

Yeah.

No matter how rich you are.

But then you did the Biden tweet.

Can you explain that one?

Oh, one.

Well,

yeah, I mean,

so,

you know, like Biden held this EV summit.

Didn't invite Tesla

Invited

GM Ford, Chrysler, and UAW

an EV summit on the White House.

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

So you were pissed.

Does this sound maybe a little biased

or something?

So,

and then, you know, just

not the friendliest administration.

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

So, are you waiting to get Trump back?

Uh, no.

Who 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.

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

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.

When it comes down to the election, you've got two choices.

You're like, 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 what?

I hope so.

I hope so.

What's worry about democracy?

I'm not super worried about democracy.

Are you worried about democracy?

A little smidge.

What concerns you?

A lot of 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.

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 a rocket.

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 human civilization is the

rapidly diminishing birth rate.

The facts are out there for anyone to look at.

But a lot of people are still stuck with

Paul Illick'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 no babies, no humanity.

So you've got to come from somewhere.

Okay.

We're going to end on that.

We need questions from audience because there's a lot of great questions.

Hey, Lana, 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.

era.

So I think as

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

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

I mean,

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

So, you know, you've got to separate the sort of news headlines from the reality.

I think, like Steven Pinker at Hobbit has really pointed this out, like, 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 the only things to be improved, but it's

actually quite good.

But

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.

Okay, next, Tabir.

Hi, Techno King.

How do you respond to allegations?

You call him Techno King?

Yeah.

Okay.

That's my formal title.

I filed that with the SCP.

You've got to be respectful, Cara.

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?

I actually am 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

a cryptic basically blockchain is a

just a it's a cryptographic ledger.

so

I think that uh

there's probably a lot of things, 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.

Um the questions on the self-driving beta you guys are rolling out.

Curious why you're encouraging people to not share videos and 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 NDAs.

I mean, I'm not sure there's.

Yeah, I don't know why there's an NDA.

We probably don't need it.

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

All right.

I'm going to ignore this.

I'm going to keep getting questions.

Hi, Ranzia Yusuf from BCG.

Could you talk a little bit about AI and robotics?

And you've expressed concerns in the past, but 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 takes 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 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

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 the look at Boston Dynamics and this humanoid robots are going to happen.

So

they're either going to happen with or without Tesla.

So it's like Tesla 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 there?

Yeah, I think 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, so it can 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%

compound annual growth rate in solar

and

also a big growth in wind.

I'm also kind of 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.

And

But

they did this in Germany, for example, and I think that was, and then had to create 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 years ago, Code.

You said we were in a simulation.

This past couple of years has seemed truly fucked up.

Yeah.

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.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

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