Laurence Fink (00:10):
That was not a large applause. Start again. That's better. Thank you.
Elon Musk (00:23):
Yeah. We're going to make this interesting.
Laurence Fink (00:27):
How many quotes are you going to want that are going to be after this session?
Elon Musk (00:33):
I don't know. I mean, five.
Laurence Fink (00:36):
Okay. So good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see everybody here. It's been an amazing week here in Davos. Hopefully everybody saw that we are having conversations here. Hopefully everybody agrees. There are some conversations that we may disagree. There's many conversations we may have agreed, but through those conversations, and I think today's result with a peace agreement earlier today, the World Economic Forum is here to have those conversations, to have understandings, and also resolution. So it's an important component of who we and what we are, and I'm thrilled to have Elon Musk here. He came all the way from California to be here to see all of you. So thank you, Elon.
Elon Musk (01:28):
You're most welcome. Yeah. I mean, I heard about the formation of the Peace Summit, and I was like, "Is that P-I-E-C-E?" Little piece of Greenland, the little piece of Venezuela.
Laurence Fink (01:50):
We got one.
Elon Musk (01:52):
All we want is peace.
Laurence Fink (01:53):
Okay. As I said, I'm a pretty proud CEO of BlackRock since we went public. The compounding return of BlackRock to our shareholders with 21%. Since Elon took Tesla public, his compounded return is 43%. This is just another advertisement for everybody, especially for Europeans. This is why more citizens should be investing with growth, investing with their countries.
(02:27)
Imagine if a lot of pension funds invested with Elon when Tesla went public and how much return would be all the pension funds that invested side by side with Elon and the growth. So a spectacular return, there's very few companies. Well, I don't think there's any other company as large as Tesla today that has that compounded return, so congratulations.
Elon Musk (02:54):
Oh, thank you.
Laurence Fink (02:54):
It's a good measurement.
Elon Musk (02:55):
Well, we have an incredible team at Tesla.
Laurence Fink (02:56):
You do.
Elon Musk (02:57):
And that's the reason.
Laurence Fink (02:58):
So I want to get into the dirt, the meaningful component about technology, the possibilities. I want to talk about AI and robotics, energy, space, and the progress ultimately coming down to engineering, engineering discipline, scale, execution. And few people, if not anyone, has the experience and the fortitude to confront these issues head on. Not just the ideas, but the execution across so many different technologies, Elon. And that's why I thought it was important for us to have this dialogue here in Davos.
(03:37)
So you're presently building on AI, on robotics, on space, on energy all at the same time. When you look across those efforts, what do they have in common from an engineering standpoint?
Elon Musk (03:54):
Well, they're all very difficult technology challenges, but the overall goal of my companies is to maximize the future of civilization, basically maximize the probability that civilization has a great future and to expand consciousness beyond earth. So if you take SpaceX, for example, that SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond earth to the moon, to Mars, eventually to other star systems. And I think we should always view consciousness, life as we know it as precarious and delicate because to the best of our knowledge, we don't know of life anywhere else. I'm often asked, "Are there aliens among us?" And I'll say that I am one, but-
Laurence Fink (04:54):
Or you're from the future.
Elon Musk (04:55):
... they don't believe me.
Laurence Fink (04:56):
Okay.
Elon Musk (05:01):
I think if anyone would know if there are aliens among us, it would be me. And we have 9,000 satellites up there, and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship. So I don't know. Bottom line is I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare and it might only be us. And if that's the case, then we need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished because we're effectively ... The way I view it is, the image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness, a tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out. And that's why it's important to make life multi-planetary, such that if there is a natural disaster or a manmade disaster on earth, that consciousness continues. That's the purpose of SpaceX.
(06:03)
Tesla is obviously about sustainable technology, and also at this point, we've added to our mission, sustainable abundance. So with the robotics and AI, this is really the path to abundance for all. People often talk about solving global poverty or essentially how do we give everyone a very high standard of living? I think the only way to do this is AI and robotics.
(06:41)
Which doesn't mean that it is without its issues. I mean, we need to be very careful with AI. We need to be very careful with robotics. We don't want to find ourselves in a James Cameron movie, Terminator. He's great great movies, love his movies, but we don't want to be in Terminator, obviously. But if you have ubiquitous AI that is essentially free or close to it and ubiquitous robotics, then you will have an explosion in the global economy, an expansion in the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent.
Laurence Fink (07:26):
Elon, can that expansion be broad?
Elon Musk (07:29):
Yes.
Laurence Fink (07:29):
Or is it narrow? And how can that be created? How can it broaden the global economy?
Elon Musk (07:36):
Yeah. I mean, a way to think of it is that if you have a large number of humanoid robots, the economic output is the average productivity per robot times the number of robots.
Laurence Fink (07:53):
Right.
Elon Musk (07:56):
And actually my prediction is in the benign scenario of the future that the robots will actually make so many robots in AI that they will actually saturate all human needs. Meaning you won't be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point. There will be such an abundance of goods and services because my prediction is there'll be more robots than people.
Laurence Fink (08:25):
But how do you then have human purpose in that scenario?
Elon Musk (08:29):
Yeah. I mean, nothing's perfect, but it is a necessary ... You can't have both. You can't have work that has to be done and amazing abundance for all because if it's work that has to be done, and only some people can do it, then you can't have abundance for all.
Laurence Fink (08:58):
Then it's narrow.
Elon Musk (09:00):
Yeah,
Elon Musk (09:00):
Exactly. But if you have billions of humanoid robots, and I think there will be, I think everyone on earth is going to have one and going to want one. Because who wouldn't want a robot to, assuming it's very safe, watch over your kids, take care of your pet. If you have elderly parents, a lot of friends might have said they have elderly parents. It's very difficult to take care of them.
Laurence Fink (09:31):
And expensive.
Elon Musk (09:32):
Yeah, it's expensive. It's expensive and there aren't enough young people to take care of the old people. So if you had a robot that could take care of and protect an elderly parent, I think that would be great. That would be an amazing thing to have. And I think we will have those things. So overall, I'm very optimistic about the future. I think we're headed for a future of amazing abundance, which is very cool. And definitely we are in the most interesting time in history. I don't think there's a more interesting time in history.
Laurence Fink (10:17):
Can you and I reverse aging in this new history, or are we going to see it?
Elon Musk (10:25):
I haven't put much time into the aging stuff. I do think it is a very solvable problem. I think when we figure out what causes aging, I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious. It's not a subtle thing. The reason I say it's not a subtle thing is because all the cells in your body pretty much age at the same rate. I've never seen someone with an old left arm and a young right arm ever in my life. So why is that? That means that there must be a clock, a synchronizing clock that is synchronizing across 35 trillion cells in your body. And there is some benefit to death, by the way. There's a reason why we don't actually have a longer lifespan because if people do live forever for a very long time, I think there's some risk of an ossification of society, of things just getting locked in place. And it just may become stultifying, lack vibrancy. But that said, do I think we will figure out ways to extend life and maybe even reverse aging? I think that's highly likely.
Laurence Fink (12:00):
I'm looking forward to that. So in the future that you talk about, the AI models, autonomous machines, rockets, depends on massive increases in compute, massive increases in energy, expensive energy, manufacturing scale. What are the bottlenecks to get there? And then once again, with all that expenditures, again, how can we make sure that it's broad and not narrow?
Elon Musk (12:38):
I just think the natural thing is it's going to be very broad because AI companies will seek as many customers as they possibly can. And the cost of AI is already very low and it's plummeting every year. The cost of AI is almost meaningfully changing on a month to month basis.
Laurence Fink (12:58):
There's open models now everywhere, yeah.
Elon Musk (13:00):
Yes. There's open models. And the open models only luck... They're maybe a year behind the closed models. So I think AI companies will seek as many customers as possible, which means they'll provide AI to the world.
Laurence Fink (13:21):
But the cost of getting to there, the compute, the chips, the fab, the powering, that to me... Those are huge-
Elon Musk (13:34):
The limiting factor. Yeah. I think the limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power.
Laurence Fink (13:42):
It's energy.
Elon Musk (13:44):
Yeah. I mean, we're seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being brought online is-
Laurence Fink (13:53):
3%, 4% a year max.
Elon Musk (13:57):
Yeah. It's clear that we're very soon, maybe even later this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on. Except for China. China's growth in electricity is tremendous.
Laurence Fink (14:11):
They're building 100 gigawatts of nuclear as we speak. And solar.
Elon Musk (14:14):
Actually, solar is the biggest thing in China. I believe China's production capacity on solar is 1,500 gigawatts a year, and they're deploying over 1,000 gigawatts a year of solar. Now, for continuous solar load, you divide that by roughly, I don't know, four or five, call it that's around 250 gigawatts of steady state power paired with batteries. And that's a very big number. That's half of the average power usage in the US.
(14:52)
So US power usage on average is 500 gigawatts. China, just in solar. Just in solar that can provide steady state power and batteries can do half of the US electricity output per year just with solar. Solar is by far the biggest source of energy. And actually, when you look beyond, or even on earth, but certainly beyond earth, the sun rounds up to 100% of all energy. This is an important thing to consider. So the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter is about 0.1% and everything else is miscellaneous. Now, even if you were to burn Jupiter in a thermal nuclear reactor, the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100% because Jupiter is only 0.1%. If you teleported three more Jupiters into our solar system and burnt three more Jupiters, and everything else in the solar system, the sun's energy would still round up to 100%.
(16:12)
So it's really all about the sun. And that's why one of the things we'll be doing with SpaceX within a few years is launching solar-powered AI satellites because the space is really the source of immense power and then you don't need to take up any room on earth. There's so much room in space and you can scale to, I think, ultimately hundreds of terawatts a year.
Laurence Fink (16:50):
You and I have had these conversations before, but why don't you tell the audience, what would it take for the United States and what type of geography would it take to have that solar field to electrify the United States? And then let me ask a question. Why aren't we doing it?
Elon Musk (17:06):
Yeah. So I mean, I guess rough way to think about it is 100 miles by 100 miles, or call it 160 kilometers, by 160 kilometers of solar is enough to power the entire United States. So 100 mile by 100 mile area is, I mean, you could take basically a small corner of Utah.
Laurence Fink (17:31):
Nevada.
Elon Musk (17:32):
New Mexico. Obviously you wouldn't want it all in one place. But it is a very small percentage of the area of the US to generate all of the electricity that the US uses. And the same is true actually for Europe. You could take relatively unpopulated areas of say Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that Europe needs.
Laurence Fink (17:59):
So
Laurence Fink (18:00):
Why don't you think that there's a movement towards that here and in the United States?
Elon Musk (18:05):
Well, there is-
Laurence Fink (18:06):
As it is in China?
Elon Musk (18:08):
Well, unfortunately in the US, the tariff barriers for solar-
Laurence Fink (18:14):
Panel?
Elon Musk (18:14):
... are extremely high. And that makes the economics of deploying solar artificially high because China makes almost all the solar and the-
Laurence Fink (18:27):
What would it take for Europe or the US to build it commercially if it's at scale?
Elon Musk (18:35):
Yeah. Well, I can tell you what we're going to do at SpaceX and Tesla is we're building up large scale solar. So the SpaceX and Tesla teams both separately are working to build to a hundred gigawatts a year of solar power in the US, of manufactured solar power. And that'll probably take us, I don't know, about three years or something. But these are pretty big numbers. And I'd encourage others to do the same.
(19:11)
We obviously don't control the US tariff policy, but for other countries that China makes solar cells that are incredibly low cost and I think it would be worth doing large scale solar.
Laurence Fink (19:35):
So I know you're going to be having a couple of big announcements on robotics and what it can do. I mean, when I went to the factory, you showed me those robots.
Elon Musk (19:48):
Yeah.
Laurence Fink (19:53):
You talked about the billions of robots, but how quickly can they be deployed in a manufacturing setting? How quickly can they be utilized and be functional, and create that abundance that you talked about?
Elon Musk (20:10):
Well, humanoid robotics will advance very quickly. I think we do have some of the Tesla Optimus robots doing simple tasks in the factory except probably later this year. By the end of this year, I think they'll be doing more complex tasks, but still deployed in an industrial environment. And probably sometime next year, I'd say that... By the end of next year, I think we'd be selling humanoid robots to the public. That's when we are confident that it's very high reliability, very high safety, and the range of functionality is also very high. You can basically ask it to do anything you'd like.
Laurence Fink (21:04):
You're already seeing that in Tesla cars. The software changes that you're doing. And what is it? Every quarter now, a software change that upgrades the ability of the robot within the car?
Elon Musk (21:16):
Yes. So the Tesla Full Self-driving software, we update it sometimes once a week. And recently, some of the insurance companies have said that it is actually so safe that Tesla Full Self-driving is so safe that they're offering customers half price insurance if they use Tesla Full Self-driving in their car.
Laurence Fink (21:41):
And that can be monitored by the insurance company? Is that part of the agreement then?
Elon Musk (21:45):
Yeah. I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point.
Laurence Fink (21:57):
Right.
Elon Musk (22:02):
And Tesla has rolled out robotaxi service in a few cities and will be very widespread by the end of this year within the US. And then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month.
Laurence Fink (22:18):
Really that quickly?
Elon Musk (22:19):
Yeah. And then maybe a similar timing for China, hopefully.
Laurence Fink (22:26):
I want to move to space because historically space is very capital intensive. It has historically been done by governments. Obviously SpaceX changed the whole model, but we've seen it slow to scale and now I'm starting to see it ramping up in what you're doing and other things. Talk to us about the automation and AI, how it's changing the economics in building and preparing for us and operating in space.
Elon Musk (22:55):
Sure. The major breakthrough that SpaceX is hoping to achieve this year is full reusability. So no one has ever achieved full reusability of a rocket, which is very important for the cost of access to space. We've achieved partial reusability with Falcon 9 by landing the boost stage. We've now landed the boost stage over 500 times, but we have to throw away the upper stage. The upper stage burns up on reentry for Falcon 9. And the cost of that is equivalent to a small to medium size jet. But with Starship, which is a giant rocket, it's the largest flying machine ever made.
Laurence Fink (23:43):
That's a rocket that you're using for the idea of going to Mars, right?
Elon Musk (23:47):
Yeah. Mars and the moon as well as for high volume satellite stuff. So Starship, hopefully this year we should prove full reusability for Starship, which will be a profound invention because the cost of access to space will drop by a factor of a hundred when you achieve full reusability. It's the same sort of economic difference that you would expect between, say, a reusable aircraft and a non-reusable aircraft.
(24:24)
If you have to throw your aircraft away after every flight, that would be a very expensive flight. But if you only have to refuel then it's the cost of the fuel. And so that's really the fundamental breakthrough that gets the cost of access to space. We think below the cost of freight on aircraft. So under $100 a pound type of thing easily. So it makes putting large satellites into space, very cheap. And then when you have solar in space, you get five times more effectiveness, maybe even more than that, than solar on the ground because it's always sunny.
Laurence Fink (25:21):
It's cold and...
Elon Musk (25:22):
Yeah. Well, it's always sunny, so you don't have a day night cycle or seasonality, or weather, and you get about 30% more power in space because you don't have atmospheric attenuation of the power. The net effect is solar is five times more... Any given solar panel will do five times more energy in space than on the ground.
Laurence Fink (25:47):
Is there any capacity in doing that and then taking that power and bringing it back to Earth? Is there any way of doing that, or you're just taking that power and utilizing it for the needs, like building AI data centers in space?
Elon Musk (26:04):
I think the case, it's a no-brainer for building solar-powered AI data centers in space because as you mentioned, it's also very cold in space. If you're in the shadow, it's very cold in space. Just 3 degrees Kelvin. So you have solar panels facing the sun and then a radiator that's pointed away from the sun, so it has no sun incidents. And then it's just cooling. It's a very efficient cooling system. So net effect is that the lowest cost place to put AI will be space, and that'll be true within two years, maybe three. Three at the latest.
Laurence Fink (26:47):
Wow. So looking 10 or 20 years out, how would you describe success with AI or space technology and where do you see it? Are you more
Laurence Fink (27:00):
More certain what's going to happen in the next three years or five or 10?
Elon Musk (27:05):
I don't know what's going to happen in 10 years, but the rate at which AI is progressing, I think we might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year. And I would say no later than next year.
Laurence Fink (27:22):
Wow.
Elon Musk (27:24):
And then probably by 2030 or 2031, call it five years from now, AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.
Laurence Fink (27:36):
We only have a number of minutes left, but I want to humanize you for a second. So there's no speculation that you're-
Elon Musk (27:45):
I could make a joke about peace.
Laurence Fink (27:46):
Right, right. I mean, I would frame this question by you are the most successful entrepreneur industrialist in the 21st century, maybe beyond. So I want to really get this. What inspired you? Who's inspired you? What was the foundation of your curiosity? And importantly, was there a aha moment, epiphany at any time in your life and career?
Elon Musk (28:16):
Well, I mean, as a kid, I read a lot of science fiction, sci-fi fantasy books-
Laurence Fink (28:22):
Yeah, we talked about that.
Elon Musk (28:24):
... and comic books. And I always liked technology. I didn't expect to be where I am today. Seems incredibly implausible. But yeah, I was inspired by reading about books about the future, about science fiction. And I guess I want to make science fiction, not fiction forever at some point turn science fiction to science fact. And we want to have Starfleet and Star Trek really, for real, where we actually have giant spaceships traveling through space, going to other planets, traveling to other star systems, going places where we've never gone.
Laurence Fink (29:06):
[inaudible 00:29:07] beamed up to go back to New York.
Elon Musk (29:09):
Huh?
Laurence Fink (29:10):
I'd like to just be beamed back to New York instead of flying.
Elon Musk (29:15):
Yeah.
Laurence Fink (29:18):
Talk about Star Trek.
Elon Musk (29:19):
No, I guess my essential, what I would call the philosophy of curiosity. I'd like to understand the meaning of life. Is the standard model of physics correct regarding the beginning of life, beginning of existence and the end of the universe? What questions do we not know to ask that we should ask? And AI will help us with these things. So I'm just trying to understand, how did we get here? What's going on? What's real? Are there aliens? Maybe there are. And if we've got spaceships that are traveling to other star systems, we may encounter aliens or we may find many long dead alien civilizations. But I just want to know what's going on. I'm curious about the universe and that's my philosophy.
Laurence Fink (30:16):
Do you see yourself ever going to Mars in your lifetime?
Elon Musk (30:21):
Yeah. I mean, I would say, I don't-
Laurence Fink (30:24):
That's a long commitment.
Elon Musk (30:25):
I've been asked but
Laurence Fink (30:25):
Isn't that three years each way?
Elon Musk (30:28):
It's six months.
Laurence Fink (30:29):
Six months? That's all it is?
Elon Musk (30:30):
Yeah, six months, but the planets only align every two years.
Laurence Fink (30:34):
Okay.
Elon Musk (30:34):
So yeah, I've been asked a few times, "Do I want to die on Mars?" And I'm like, "Yes, but just not on impact."
Laurence Fink (30:50):
That's a good answer. Anyway, we're out of time. Hopefully everybody enjoyed this. I mean, there's so many myths around Elon Musk. I could tell you he's a great friend and I constantly learned so much from him and I'm totally inspired by what he has done. I've been inspired who he is and I'm totally inspired by his vision of the future. And I don't think it's such a bad future. And I agree with his optimism. So Elon, thank you. Any last words?
Elon Musk (31:28):
Well, I think generally, I think my last words would be, I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future.
Laurence Fink (31:35):
Good.
Elon Musk (31:37):
And generally, I think for quality of life, it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and right.
Laurence Fink (32:04):
On that note ...