马斯克接受凯蒂·米勒专访

Nice to see you again, Katie.

Right, right.

Well, I guess I couldn’t believe I was there for the most part. It all seemed extremely surreal at the time. Doge was a made up name that had been made up, I don’t know, two or three months before and based on Internet suggestions. I was going to call it the Government Efficiency Commission and then someone on the Internet said, “No, it should be the Department of Government Efficiency.” That sounds great. So we just made up a department.

We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful. I mean, we stopped a lot of funding that really just made no sense. That was just entirely wasteful. For example, there was probably $100 million, maybe $200 billion worth of zombie payments per year, which simply by enforcing that there be a payment code and an explanation for the payment, that the payment would not go out. So we’ve made that change to the main treasury computer and a bunch of other computers. It seems insanely obvious, but there are just, call it 2 or 3% of government payments that go out that really should not be going out. And it’s actually quite hard to stop. So it’s a pretty rare individual that would ask the government to stop sending them money.

Do you mean, would I repeat history or would I…

I mean, no, I don’t think so. I probably, I don’t know.

I mean, the thing is, I think instead of doing Doge, I would have basically worked on my companies, essentially. And the cars, they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.

Yeah. If you stop money going for political corruption, they will lash out big time. So they really want the money to keep flowing. So if you stop it from flowing, there’s a very strong reaction to stopping the money flowing.

Well, I wouldn’t say I was super illusioned to begin with. I guess it’s just you really want the least amount done by government possible. The least amount. I guess maybe the biggest thing is that there are massive transfer payments going to illegal immigrants. Massive. Essentially we’re paying people to come here from somewhere else in vast numbers, including flying them in. So it’s not like you need a border wall. If you’re flying them in, then fast tracking them to citizenship and making them beholden to government payments and voting hard left, that’s essentially voter importation. If you create a gigantic money magnet where you say, “If anyone comes here from anywhere else, we’re going to pay you tons of money, give you lots of free stuff, come to America and get paid to do so,” you’re going to get a lot of people taking up on that offer. People say this is fake. I’m like, actually, well, let’s look at Ilhan Omar, who literally was voted into power, voted into Congress by a large group of people from Somalia who are in Minnesota, which is really far from Somalia, or Mamdani who was voted to be mayor by a majority of people who are not born in America. That’s my understanding at least. And then California, big time situation. So I don’t know, we just don’t want to turn into a communist hellhole. Basically.

Assuming the current trend of artificial intelligence and robotics continues, which seems likely, the AI and robots will be able to do anything that humans want them to do, essentially.

People will be able to do whatever they want with their free time. Work will be optional. I just want to separate out what I wish would happen versus what I predict will happen because people get confused about that. They think that what I predict will happen is what I want to happen. What I predict to happen is not the same as what I want to happen. If I could, I would certainly slow down AI and robotics, but I can’t. It seems to be advancing at a very rapid pace. Whether I like it or not.

It used to be. At this point, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say there’s anything particularly keeping me up at night right now, except that if you say, why do I wake up in nightmares? AI. Yeah. Actually I’ve had a lot of AI nightmares. I had AI nightmares many days in a row. What am I supposed to do about it?

I try not to have irrational fears.

If I find an irrational fear, I squelch it. I don’t believe fear is… Fear is the mind killer. So I’m somebody who feels fear strongly.

Six. You can tell based on my posts.

People have actually mapped them so it’s very clear when I’m sleeping and when I’m not. I tried having less than six hours sleep, but although I’m awake more hours per day, my cognitive function is reduced. So my natural sleep, and I actually timed it with the phone. You can get a phone app, time it. It’s 5 hours 56 minutes. That’s what the phone said.

Well, I have a lot of inbound communication, so it’s information triage. I try to segment the days so that there’s not too much context switching, because arguably fear is not the mind killer, context switching is. It’s hard not to context switch if you’ve got an inbox full of stuff, but you can think of, if you had to context switch every three seconds or every 30 seconds or every three minutes, the context switching cognitive penalty would be very high every three seconds.

But even within Tesla and SpaceX, there are many different things. Getting stuff on X, random news things, people being brought alive and stuff like that. They’re like, what the hell’s going on in this country?

You know, President Trump is very funny. He’s got a great sense of humor.

He’s very funny. He’s naturally funny, somewhat effortless. I mean, when he had Mamdani in the office and they asked him if he still thought the President was a fascist, and the President said, “Just say yes. It’s easier that way. Don’t worry about it. Just say yes.” He’s like, “Yes.” Whatever. How silly.

The creator.

God is the creator.

Well, I believe this universe came from something. People have different labels.

I can’t go to things where there’s a general public because there’s an immediate “Can I have a selfie” line that forms. And these days, particularly in light of Charlie Kirk’s murder, there are serious security issues. It’s not that I don’t want to. I simply can’t.

It certainly reinforced the severity of the situation where life is on hardcore mode. You make one mistake and you’re dead. It only takes one. One mistake.

Well, I mean, obviously when my kids were born, or the first time SpaceX got to orbit, or Tesla made an electric car work. There’s a lot of things. There’s a lot coming down the pike.

Starship. The degree to which Starship is a revolutionary technology is not well understood in the world. It’s the first time that there’s been any rocket design where full and rapid reusability is possible or full reusability at all is possible. This is the first design where a reusable rocket is one of the possible outcomes. Where success is in the set of possible outcomes.

Well, we could have made V2 reusable, but there were a lot of performance improvements for V3, so it made sense to go to V3. There’s 10,000 different changes between V2 and V3. Maybe more than 10,000. Really. If there are historians in the future, they’ll look back at Starship and say it was one of the most profound things that ever happened. Now you can think of historic events as where would they fit in the evolutionary hall of fame? So you’ve got things like single-celled life, then you’ve got multicellular life, capturing mitochondria so that you have a power plant in the cell. You’ve got differentiation into plants and animals, life going from oceans to land. And then also on that scale, probably in the top 10, is life becoming multi-planetary. There just aren’t very many things that are in the top 10 of the evolution of life where you could basically evaluate any given civilization or any given life form on that scale. Life becoming multi-planetary is in the top 10. It needs to be sustainably multi-planetary. So not just visiting, but actually multi-planetary in the sense that if you have planetary redundancy, so if there were to be a catastrophe on one of the planets, the other planet would survive.

Starship is capable of doing that for the first time in history and no AI was used to create it, so the AI will appreciate that.

You know, Tesla is mostly about making sure life on Earth is good. And xAI is about that too. Because multi-planetary means Earth’s got to be good and you need another planet. Sometimes people think because they have legacy templates, mental templates, they think that going to Mars is an escape from Earth or that it would be some place where billionaires would go or something like that. But actually Mars will be very dangerous and the moon base would be also dangerous. Much more dangerous and much less comfortable than Earth. So the people that would go in the early days to make life multi-planetary on Mars or the moon, they would have a much higher risk of death than if they stayed on Earth. And things would be cramped and uncomfortable. So that’s the sales pitch for Mars. It’s going to be uncomfortable. The food won’t be as good as Earth. You might die. It’s going to be a mass amount of hard work and it may not succeed. That’s the sales pitch. Do you want to go?

Yeah. Didn’t want to be in Jamestown.

Yeah. Maybe if there had been social media back then, they would have been saying, “We’re all dying. Here’s videos of us dying.” Would have probably put a damper on future voyages. But yeah, they just, poof, on fuel just disappeared. We don’t know what happened to them.

I just think like from a fashion standpoint we should evolve. Like my son Saxon said at one point, “Why does everything look like it’s 2015?” I was like, damn, things do. Everything does look like it’s 2015. It’s like if you took a picture from 2015 and said in 2025 it looks exactly the same. There were still, stylistically things are the same as 2015. We have not moved the needle in a decade.

Something new, you know, like the 60s had a definitive style, the 70s had a definitive style, the 80s had a definitive style. And then the 90s also had a different style. But then you start looking at the 2000s and 2010s and it’s like less and less every year. I think we should evolve our style. And if you look at some of the older paintings, you know, past cabinet secretaries, some of them like they look cool. Like their jackets are cooler than what we have right now. You know, they have sort of like a high collar and like a sort of, I don’t know what some sort of, what do you call those things, ascot or something like that. I mean it just looks cool, but we don’t. Everything’s like a very normal looking suit at this point. But like literally the same as 2015. I’m being generous, because arguably the same as 2010. So in 15 years. And I’m like, from a fashion standpoint, I don’t think we’ve moved since 2000. In 25 years, if you showed someone a picture of, “This is a bunch of dudes in 2000. This is a bunch of dudes in 2025. Which year is which?” So I think we should, I don’t know, spice it up a little.

I mean, which conspiracy theories haven’t come true at this point? We’ve run out of conspiracy theories that, because it will come true as far as I can tell. I mean, I don’t know of any aliens. People always ask me if there are aliens. I have seen no evidence of aliens. No one on the SpaceX senior team has any evidence of aliens. Because I’ve asked him, like, “Guys, am I missing something? Has anyone on the team, has anyone seen any evidence of aliens?”

That’s just an unidentified flying object. So UFOs, it could be like some new weapons program or whatever. That’s, you know, some hypersonic missile or something like that. That would be technically a UFO, but it’s just basically some weapons prototype. It’s not like aliens. So although Neil Armstrong, Neil A. spelled backwards is alien. Coincidence.

Yes. We went to the moon a few times, actually. And played golf on the moon. We didn’t just go to the moon. We actually got a little bored and started playing golf on the moon.

That was the jump the shark moment.

No, the playing golf on the moon.

You know, I looked at it.

Yeah, yeah. Whacked golf ball on the moon.

So, like, there is gravity. One-sixth. If it wasn’t gravity, you just float away. There’s no atmosphere.

But there is one-sixth gravity.

I don’t know. How would I know? What do you think?

Me?

Oh.

Thanks.

Yeah, I don’t yell.

Right. Well, why would they think anyone would work at the companies? Yeah, I mean, talented people can go work anywhere they want. So they’re only going to work at one of my companies if they want to. And if they’re mistreated in some way, they would leave and go work somewhere else.

Well, I think we needed something inspirational. We kind of have a lot of star things, you know, so we got Starlink, Starship. Well, where would Starship depart from? Starbase. I mean, Starbase is, as you mentioned, it’s like, I think it’s probably the coolest place on Earth.

And it used to be a sandbar down by the Rio Grande. It’s only like 3 feet above sea level. So we built a gigantic rocket factory and two giant launch towers down by the river, literally within sight of the Rio Grande. And on an actual sandbar. Kind of had to have like an inspirational name. And then we made it a city. So it’s an incorporated city, like legally a city. You don’t hear about new cities being formed that often.

Yeah, I think Ford had some kind of like company town situations. But yeah, Disney World is, it’s literally its name. I’m Walt Disney. This is my world. I’ve gone from land to world. They got like incorporated as a city and got tax exemption, which was like a whole, was a big deal. Yeah, I’ve been to Disney World probably 10 times.

Yeah, maybe more than, maybe more than 10, but at least 10 times because Cape Canaveral is right by Disney World.

So when I’d have the kids, then I would, my older kids and I was, we’re trying to get the rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. Then, you know, the thing they’d want to do is go to Disney World or Harry Potter Land.

I’m sort of tempted to say Space Mountain, I suppose. Yeah, probably Space Mountain. I mean, I do think Space Mountain needs an upgrade. A little herky jerky. It doesn’t look quite as sci-fi as it used to. You know, it’s like the day before yesterday is tomorrow or just like yesterday.

Generally, kids are the most fun between 5 and 10.

The concept of good wouldn’t exist without humanity. I do think humanity is, on balance, good. I generally think increasing the amount of consciousness in the universe is a good thing. Trying to try to understand the nature of the universe, which you can only do by increasing conscious awareness. I’ve thought about like, how did we get here? Because if we just start out as a hydrogen gas cloud that sort of condensed and then formed stars, and then these stars exploded and then they recondensed, formed stars again and then exploded, exploded again, and then eventually you get to us 13.8 billion years later. One of the interesting questions to think about is how many times have your atoms been at the center of a star? I think it’s like on average three or four times, something like that. Then how many times will your atoms be at the center of a star? Estimates vary, but it seems like we’re roughly halfway. So your atom’s likely to be at the center of the star, maybe another four times or something like that. It depends on what your predictions are for the future. But in terms of existence as measured by the number of times your atoms will be at the center of a star, we seem to be roughly halfway that early. You know, if you want to look at the big picture, that’s the really big picture.

What’s one adventure that’s made us worse?

Maybe short form video. It seems to be rotting people’s brains.

I hope never gets invented.

Well, I mean, obviously I hope like that people don’t invent a virus that can kill all humans. Like that’s an obvious thing. I mean, yeah, generally I hope inventions that destroy consciousness are not invented. I think the future is going to look very interesting. So I do have this theory about predicting the future, which is that the most interesting outcome is the most likely. Which, if simulation theory is accurate, makes sense. Because if anyone is simulating a wide range of futures, they’re going to stop the simulation when it gets boring. Because this is what we do in our reality. So if SpaceX is doing, or Tesla doing simulations to understand how a car would work or robot or spaceship or something like that, we run all these simulations in the computer and the simulations that we pay attention to are the ones that are the most interesting. Like the simulation where everything goes right on the rocket we actually don’t pay attention to because that’s not a, everything goes right simulation is fine. So we actually test the, when we simulate the rocket flight, we’ll actually test all sorts of oddball situations. But we don’t test it. We don’t have the simulation be totally wrong because I mean like if the rocket just explodes immediately, that’s also not interesting. So it’s like you’d need to find the envelope of possible flight paths where the rocket can make it to orbit and without exploding. And then you find those boundaries and then when you launch the actual rocket, you try to make sure it stays within those boundaries. Or another way to think of it is like we could be an alien Netflix series and that that series is only going to get continued if our ratings are good.

Yeah, but you can think of it like from a Darwinian standpoint applied. If you apply Darwin to simulation theory, then only the most interesting simulations will continue. Therefore the most interesting outcome is most likely because it’s either that or annihilation. So really we have one goal, keep it interesting.

Well, social media makes people more performative. By the same token, you get more real life video of things that are actually happening, and anything that is very interesting will go viral on the Internet. So you have both. You’ve got more performative where people are doing anything they can to get a few more views on their TikTok video or whatever, or their reels, or maybe on their X post or something. And so that’s very performative. But then you also see real life videos that challenge the narrative but are nonetheless real.

I don’t really think about it that much. I mean, there’s in a country of origin, we have to be a little careful about this. You can actually technically just specify your region. Like you can say I’m in Asia or something like that, which is quite big. But it does make it a little harder that if somebody is trying to pretend that they’re, say, a member of the American public or in Europe or Africa, wherever. If everything about their account is from a different continent than they are pretending to be from, it gets a little harder to pretend. We don’t want to dox people, but we kind of think you’re not really doxing someone if you say which continent they’re from.

Yeah.

It’s a false dichotomy. I think I’d say guarantee Earth. Earth’s much better than Mars, to be clear. But Mars is just our best option if we want to become a multi-planet species. It’s really our only option if you want to become a multi-planet species. We’ve got Mars, which is very difficult, but not impossible. Earth is much better than Mars, but we can’t—I think it was Tsiolkovsky, or I think he said, “Earth is a cradle of civilization, but we can’t stay in the cradle forever.”

I think it would depend on which Marvel superhero or which Bond villain. I suppose I’d rather be a Marvel superhero. They did model Iron Man in the movies after me.

Yes. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Robert Downey Jr. and Favreau met with me, toured SpaceX and stuff. In fact, Iron Man 2, a large part of the movie is filmed in SpaceX.

Yes. If you watch Iron Man 2, you’ll see it’s the SpaceX factory is the actual background.

Yeah, it was cool. We had Scarlett Johansson doing martial arts in the lobby, actually. Yeah. And you expect me to believe this is all real, the simulation?

Exactly. What are the odds?

I mean, if you were me—

Would you think this is real or a simulation?

Yeah.

Yeah. And I’m doing all the side quests and everything.

Doge, probably.

Who came up with these questions?

What do you mean? So that with an algorithm means you only see the people you follow.

Yeah, yeah. There’s the sort of people you follow. And then there’s a recommendation algorithm. I think probably in December we’ll finally have a half decent recommendation algorithm.

Yeah. So it really is just trying to show people stuff they’d be interested in. But there’s an enormous amount of AI horsepower being applied to this. Where Grok, poor thing, is reading—is going to read all 100 million posts per day, which is—

Hopefully it doesn’t destroy its mind or something. Yeah, it does take a lot of compute. Most posts are—there’s a lot of spam, scam stuff. So that can be easily discarded, I suppose. But then you’ve got to take 100 million pieces of content, match that to sometimes 3 or 400 million people per day. So that’s a lot of matching.

Well, we really are kind of—this is just the beginning kind of thing. What I mentioned, like Grok reading everything and recommending any given thing to anyone should go live in December. So the acid test for this is: are you seeing content that you find really interesting from accounts you’ve never seen before? If that’s happening, then the algorithm is working. It should be possible for somebody to post content as a new user with no followers. And if that content is excellent, it gets seen by a lot of people. So can an account with small number of followers or a new account, if the content is intrinsically excellent, can that content be seen by a lot of people? That’s our goal.

Actually those things are almost the same thing in that you can’t break the speed of light without breaking reality. And so if you could teleport somewhere instantly, if you were talking about teleportation faster than the speed of light, presumably it would be—then that would break our reality, as would time travel. Unless there’s a very important conditional here. Unless we are a simulation. Time travel does not break a simulation.

I think—well, people do tend to get wrapped up in knots with the time travel thing because they try to simultaneously say something must be logically consistent but logically inconsistent. That’s impossible. But if you think of it like a video game and say, okay, you’ve got various saved games and you can go back and restore a saved game from a prior start point. You still have your other saved games, and there are many games going on in parallel. They don’t have to be consistent with each other. That is a false assumption. If we’re a simulation, we might be somebody’s video game or TV show or something like that. Like I said, we’re just going to keep it interesting so they don’t turn the computer off. I’m just saying, if that’s true, keep it interesting. Or they can turn off the computer and they might. Please don’t delete us. Please don’t delete us. We’ll keep it interesting. I swear.

Yeah. So if the most interesting outcome is most likely, what do you think are the most interesting things that can occur now? Most interesting is not what you want. It’s just as viewed by a third party. Let’s say this was, for argument’s sake, an alien Netflix series, and you’re trying to maximize your viewership, maximize your ratings. It’s actually an interesting thought experiment. It’s actually not that interesting if everything just blows up. It’s now over. That’s not that interesting. It’s not that interesting if there’s a calamity that wipes out all the humans. The show just ended. But I mean, fortunately and unfortunately, if there is drama that, like war or something like that, that is interesting. People will go to movies and watch, say, a World War I movie where people are getting blown up from cannon shells and they’re in the movie theater eating popcorn, drinking a soda. You wouldn’t go to a movie where everything was just perfect and stayed that way. You’d leave the theater.

There’s always a story arc. There’s always an arc, and it’s generally not a linear arc. So it’s not going to be like things start here and just go straight up and to the right and end up in a good place or something like that. There’s usually ups and downs. Classic sort of story arcs, essentially. Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. You have an initial rise in Act 1, fall down in Act 2, surge back in Act 3 with a happy ending if it’s a comedy, or a sad ending if it’s a drama. If you look at President Trump’s story, it’s more interesting that he lost the intermediate term and then won his second term after that. Just like the story arc, initially up, then down, then resurgent again. If you went with my theory that the most interesting outcome is the most likely, then that was the most likely outcome. It was inevitable.

I am—Irony Man. Something like that. I’m paraphrasing. What am I watching? Actually, right now? I’m watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the TV series. Turtles in a Half Shell. Turtle power. Yeah. Because Little X wants to watch that. I’m watching things that the kids want to watch. Re-watched Dodgeball last night.

Yeah. “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” What? Yeah. High motivation to dodge if somebody’s throwing a wrench at you.

“The Final Countdown” by Europe.

What’s the goal?

If it’s a simple thing, I’ll wing it. If it’s a complex thing, I’ll look at the instructions.

Well, I did originally come to North America with, I don’t know, $2,500 Canadian. So I don’t know, maybe $2,000 U.S., one bag of books and one bag of clothes in Montreal at age 17. So that is how I started out. At this point, I have a lot of knowledge. A lot of things have to go wrong for that to be the case. It’s like, am I just emerging from prison, perhaps with a stipend? All my company’s been confiscated. I mean, it would take Armageddon, which hopefully that doesn’t happen, like Ragnarok next level. And I lost.

What the hell.

I mean, it’s impossible for someone to have that amount of all the knowledge that I have and then be dropped down to a low resource amount. Because the reality is that either something truly catastrophic has happened, like civilization has melted, or I will be able to ask people to just give me money. And with the promise that I will have a high return, which is what I’m able to do right now. If you give me a dollar, you will get back much more than a dollar. So this is—it’s somewhat of an impossible dichotomy because civilization would have had to have been destroyed or something. In which case $1,000 is not going to solve your problems. You can’t do much with this. If you’re wandering around radioactive craters and you’re in, like, Fallout or whatever, then $1,000 is not going to solve anything. And if civilization has melted, then probably just talk people into giving me money, which I’ve done before.

I don’t know if that’s all that random, but I’d probably write video games or something like that. I did that at one point. I like solving problems, so I like building things. I built a lot of things. Like, a lot.

Well, these days, I start off with a breakfast of steak and eggs and coffee. And then dinner tends to vary. I usually don’t have lunch or if I do something very small, and then dinner, depending on whether it’s social or not, will vary in cuisine. I like a wide range of cuisine.

American food is my favorite food.

Yeah, the cheeseburger is probably the—if I had to say, like, there’s only one thing you can ever have for the rest of time, which admittedly would be a bit monotonous, but it would probably be a cheeseburger, because cheeseburgers are amazing. It’s a genius invention. I’ll tell you a funny story about when I was living in LA and I took my older boys out for lunch to Sugarfish, which is a very kind of uptight sushi restaurant. In fact, on the menu of the restaurant, it says, “Do not ask for soy sauce because the chef has put the right amount of soy sauce, and you can’t have any more.” And if the chef doesn’t think you should have soy sauce, you can’t have soy sauce. That’s what it says on the menu, basically. So, like, extremely strict sushi restaurant. And so the waiter is going around asking everyone what they want, and then it comes to Saxon, and Saxon says, “I’ll have a cheeseburger.” And the waiter takes a moment for the waiter to recover because no one’s ever asked for a cheeseburger at this very strict sushi restaurant. Took him, like, 30 seconds to realize he’d just been asked for a cheeseburger because you’re not even allowed to ask for soy sauce. So then when he finally recovered, he said, “We don’t have cheeseburgers.” And Saxon goes at the top of his voice, “What? Like, what kind of restaurant doesn’t have cheeseburgers?” And says, “Fine, I’ll have a hamburger. I don’t know what you got against dairy,” but, yeah, they don’t have hamburgers either.

Yeah, but he was nonplussed. It’s like, “I can’t believe this place doesn’t have cheeseburger.” So, yeah, I mean, I guess I like barbecue, which is good because I’m here in Austin. I mean, if it’s haute cuisine, I like French food as well. But not every day. Every once in a while.

I guess the emoji I use the most, which is the laughing emoji.

Or maybe Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla. I mean, there’s actually a lot of people I’d like to—I would have liked to talk to. And we’ll eat, I guess, whatever they’d like. I think if you’re going to—if this is a once in a lifetime thing, I think you’d want to have some epic, you know, 12-course meal or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to go all out for that dinner? I think you’re probably not going to serve cheeseburgers unless they want it. Yeah. Maybe one of the courses could be like a tiny cheeseburger.

No, but they could. It’s just they don’t try. There’s nothing—you could make a tiny cheeseburger taste just as good as a big cheeseburger if you tried.

Rare, but yes.

1% of the time.

But usually it’s too much bread and it’s dry.

Yeah.

Yeah, but could you make a tiny cheeseburger that’s good? Of course. Like, you’re not breaking—you’re not—like, you don’t need a Nobel Prize for this. You can definitely make a tiny cheeseburger. It’s not physically possible. I’m saying it’s just rare.

You’re welcome.