马斯克谈广告主、信任与头脑中的“风暴”｜DealBook Summit 2023

1:05What?

1:09For now.

1:55Sure.

1:59Yeah, it’s a long time.

2:01Oldest kids were three.

2:14Yeah, that’s a bit like 2007.

2:18Roadster was a little bit 2008.

2:36It’s been boring, that’s for sure. Wait, actually, technically I do have a boring company.

3:08No idea what this Twitter thing is you keep talking about.

3:21I have a platform.

3:44Everything?

3:46How long have you got?

3:50Okay.

4:00I’m trying to change… When things were just 140 characters, it made sense to call them a tweet because a bunch of little bit chirping, but point in which you can put three-hour videos on, it’s a very long tweet.

4:13This is more descriptive I think.

4:38Well, the trip to Israel is independent of… It wasn’t some apology tour. I want to be clear. That was-

4:50Trip to Israel is independent of… It wasn’t in response to that at all.

4:55And I have no problem being hated by the way.

4:59Hate away.

5:10I think it’s a real weakness to want to be liked, a real weakness. I do not have that.

5:56Yes. I mean, I think I am, but I’m certainly not going to do some sort of tap dance to prove to people that I am. So as for trust, I mean I think we break that down in a few ways. If you want satellites sent to orbit reliably, SpaceX will do 80% of all mass to orbit this year. China will do 12%. The rest of the world will do eight. That includes Boeing, Lockheed, and everyone else. So the track record of the rocket is the best by far of anything. You could hate my guts. You could not trust me. It is irrelevant. The rocket track record speaks for itself. With respect to Tesla, we make the best cars. Whether you hate me, like me or indifferent, do you want the best car or do you not want the best car? So I will certainly not pander. And Jonathan, the only reason I’m here is because you are a friend. What was my speaking fee?

7:04Yeah, sorry.

7:08I’ve spoken. Yes. Listen, what I’m trying to illustrate is that sometimes I say the wrong thing.

7:30No. No. You should hear the sketches that SNL wouldn’t post, by the way. Those are really good.

7:47Where am I?

7:50I’m here because you’re a friend, not because I’m being payable because I need any validation or anything, is that we’ve been friends for 16 years and I promise you I’d be here and that’s why I’m here.

8:03Not for any other reason.

8:34Did you read the whole thing?

8:37The responses.

8:39I said more?

8:41Yeah, I said more than what you just read.

9:18Yeah. Well, first of all, I did clarify almost immediately what I meant. I would say that that was… If I could go back and say I should in retrospect not have replied to that particular person, and I should have written in greater length as to what I meant. I did subsequently clarify it in replies, but those clarifications were ignored by the media. And essentially I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me. And arguably to those who are antisemitic. For that, I’m quite sorry. That was not my intention. So I did post on my primary timeline to be absolutely clear that I’m not an antisemitic and that I, in fact, if anything am [inaudible 00:10:12], and the trip to Israel was planned before any of that happened. It was neither here nor there. Do you see this thing? Do you know what it is?

10:28It says bring them home. The hostages. It was given to me by the parents of one of the hostages. And I said I would wear it as long as there was a hostage story remaining. And I have.

11:09I hope they stop. Don’t advertise.

11:14No.

11:18If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.

11:29Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience.

11:41That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.

12:08GFY.

12:17Yes. No, no.

12:21Absolutely. So no, totally. So actually what this advertising boycott is going to do, it is going to kill the company.

12:35And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we’ll document it in great detail.

12:46Oh, yeah. They’re going to say- Tell to earth.

13:00That’s what they’re going to say. And let’s see how earth responds to that.

13:06We’ll both make our cases and we’ll see what the outcome is.

13:21I mean, if the company fails because of an advertised boycott, it will fail because of an advertised boycott, and that will be what bankrupted the company, and that’s what everybody on earth will know.

13:36They’ll be gone and it’ll be gone because of an advertised boycott.

13:50Tell it to the judge.

13:53The judge is the public.

14:04They already are.

14:15Let the chips fall where they may. Let the chips fall where they may.

14:25What approach?

14:44No. We focus on making the best products and Tesla has gotten to where it’s gotten with no advertising at all.

14:53Tesla currently sells twice as much in terms of electric vehicles, as rest of electric car makers in the United States combined. Tesla has done more to help the environment than all other companies combined. Would be fair to say that therefore as a leader of the company, I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on earth.

15:21How do I feel about that?

15:26I’m saying what I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil, fuck them. Okay?

16:14Yes, it will be the biggest product launch of anything by far on earth this year.

16:46Of all the posts I’ve done on the platform, I think there might be 30,000 or something like that, right? Once in a while I’ll say something foolish and I have. And I would certainly put that comment that you’ve said the actual truth among perhaps one of the most foolish, if not the most foolish thing I’ve ever done on the platform. And I did do my best to clarify afterwards that I certainly do don’t mean anything antisemitic in that. The nature of the criticism was simply that the Jewish people have been persecuted for thousands of years. There is a natural affinity therefore for persecuted groups. This has led to the funding of organizations that essentially promote any persecuted group or any group with the perception of persecution. This includes radical Islamic groups. Everyone here has seen the massive demonstrations for Hamas in every major city in the west. That should be jarring. Well, a number of those organizations received funding from prominent people in the Jewish community. They didn’t expect that to happen. But if you generically without condition sort of fund… If you fund persecuted groups in general, some of those persecuted groups unfortunately want your annihilation. And what I meant by that, when I subsequently clarified is that it’s unwise to fund organizations that support groups that want your annihilation. Is this coming across clearly it at this point?

18:54I think logically this makes a lot of sense.

19:00Let’s say you fund a group and that group supports Hamas who wants you to die. Perhaps you should not fund them, right?

19:10Thank you.

19:44All of that. Yeah, all of that. I mean, look, I’m sorry for that tweet or post. It was foolish of me. Of the 30,000, it might be literally the worst and dumbest post that I’ve ever done. And I try to do my best to clarify six ways to Sunday. But at least I think over time it’ll be obvious that in fact, far from being antisemitic, I’m in fact [inaudible 00:20:14] and all the evidence in my track record would support that.

20:28The aspiration for X is to be the global town square. Now, if you were to walk down to let’s say Times Square, do you occasionally hear people saying crazy things?

20:51I mean, look, the joke I used to make about old Twitter was it was like giving everyone in the psych ward a megaphone. So I’m aware that things can get promoted that are negative beyond the sort of circle of somebody simply screaming crazy things in Times Square, which happens all the time. Actually, it’s pretty rare for something frankly that is hateful to be promoted. It’s not that it never happens, but it’s fairly rare. I mean, I would encourage people to look for those that use the system. When you look at the feed that you receive, how often is it hateful? And over time, has it gotten more or less hateful? I would say that if you look at the X platform today versus a year ago, I think it is actually much better. I mean, what is your personal experience?

21:56I’m just curious. You use this-

22:20This is actually a challenge in that sometimes people will say, why is it showing me posts from this person that I hate? And we’re like, well, did you interact a lot with this person that you hate? Well, yes. Well therefore thinks that you want to interact more with this person that you hate. That’s like a reasonable-

22:42If you kind of want to have an argument-

22:44Post.

22:48Listen, anyone can come up with a better word, that would be great.

22:51But the least bad word I can think of is post.

23:23For a while they thought I was Jewish, so I get it too.

23:26My name is Super George.

23:36I have said-

23:41Yeah, I said condemn… I literally posted, “I condemn antisemitism in all its forms.” That is a, I believe, literal post that I made. I mean, I’m like, listen, if I can get out the thesaurus, if you, and we could-

24:00You compose it, I’ll post it.

24:17Just because it came out of my mouth does not mean it’s true. [inaudible 00:24:19].

24:43Yes. Yeah. It as much as a weather metaphor makes sense. My mind often feels like a very wild storm. I have a fountain of ideas. I have more ideas than I could possibly execute, so I have no shortage of ideas. Innovation is not the problem. Execution is the problem. I’ve got a million ideas. I’ve got an entire design for an electric supersonic vertical takeoff jet, but if I just can’t do that as well. I’ve had that for 10 years. There’s a million things.

25:30No.

25:32No.

25:57We need a psychiatrist couch here or something. I think to some degree, I was born this way and then I was amplified by a difficult childhood, frankly. But I can remember even in happy moments when I was a kid, that it just feels like there’s just a rage of forces in my mind constantly. Now, this productively manifests itself in technology and building things for the most part. And I think on balance, the output has been very productive. I think the results, as we discussed earlier with SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal which is still going today, the first internet company that I started. In fact, the first internet company I started, Zipto, was funded by a New York Times Company, Hearst, Knight Ritter.

27:10And we wrote some of the software for the New York Times website and we helped bring online several hundred newspapers that previously were only in print. Now, this is in the ’90s, which at this point is like, I’m like a grandpa basically. The ’90s and internet feels like a pre-Cambrian era when there were only sponges. Anyway, I feel like a lot of productive things have been done. And you can also look at Tesla as being many companies in one. Like if the Tesla supercharging network were its own company, it would be a Fortune 500 company by itself, just the supercharging system. We also make the cells, we build the power electronics and the powertrain from scratch. We have the most innovative structural design, the largest castings ever used. We have the best manufacturing technology at Tesla, better manufacturing technology than companies that have been doing it for 100 years. So these demons of the mind are, for the most part, harnessed to productive ends.

28:36That doesn’t mean… Once in a while they go wrong.

29:11Prove to who.

29:14No. If I were to describe my philosophy, it is a philosophy of curiosity. I did have this existential crisis when I was around 12, about what’s the meaning of life? Isn’t it all pointless? Why not just commit suicide? Why exist? I read the religious texts. I read the philosophy books. That, especially the German philosophy books, made me quite depressed frankly. Want you not read Schopenhauer Nietzsche as a teenager. But then I read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a book on philosophy in the form of humor. And the point that Adamus was making there was that we don’t actually know what questions to ask. That’s why I said that, the answer is 42. Basically earth’s a giant computer and it came up with the answer 42. But then to actually figure out what the question is, that’s the actual hard part. And I think this is generally true also in physics. At the point at which you can properly frame the question, the answer is actually the easy part. So my motivation then was that, well, my life is finite, really a flash in the pan on a galactic timescale. But if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to figure out what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. And maybe we can find out the meaning of life or even what the right question to ask is. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Where are the aliens? Are there aliens? These questions, is there new physics to discover? Because there seems to be some real questions around dark matter and dark energy. So the purpose of SpaceX is to extend life beyond earth on a sustained basis, so that we can at least pass one of the Fermi Great Filters, which is that of being a single-planet civilization. If we are single-planet civilization, then we are simply waiting around for some extinction event, whether that is manmade or natural. But if you’re a single-planet civilization, eventually something will happen to that planet and you will die. If you’re a multi-planet civilization, you’ll live much longer. Also, multi-planet civilization, that’s the natural stepping stone to being a multi-stellar civilization and being out there among the stars. So now, this I think has two… This is not simply a defensive motivation, but it is also one where that gives meaning, man’s search for meaning.

32:40All right. Let me finish this philosophy point, even though it may seem rather esoteric, it may resonate with a few people. We must get past this Fermi Great Filter of being a single-planet civilization. And if we do that, we are more likely to understand the nature of the universe and what questions to ask. If you believe in the philosophy of curiosity, then I think you should support this ambition. Being a multi-planet species is more than simply life insurance for life collectively. That’s a defensive reason. But I think also that life has to be more than simply solving one sad problem after another. There have to be reasons for you wake up in the morning and you’re happy to be alive. There have to be reasons that you have to say, why are you excited about the future? What gives you hope? And if you aren’t sure, ask your kids. And I think the idea of us being a space-faring civilization and being out there among the stars is incredibly inspiring and exciting and something to look forward to. And there need to be such things in the world.

34:37Well, sometimes they’re right.

34:49Yes.

34:53Yes. Yes.

35:23I think what you trying to say is that, do I at this point think because I’ve been right so many times for others who said I’m wrong, that now I best believe I’m right when, in fact, I’m wrong?

35:37No, I’m right. So yeah, no, look, here’s the thing. Physics is unforgiving. Physics is unforgiving. I have these various little sayings that I’ve come up with, that physics is the law and everything else is a recommendation.

36:02In the sense that you can break any law made by humans, but try breaking a law made by physics. That’s much more difficult. So if you are wrong and persist in being wrong, the rockets will blow up and the cars will fail. So we’re not trying to figure out what flavor of ice cream is the best flavor of ice cream. There’s 1,000 things that can happen on a rocket flight, and only one of them gets the rocket to orbit. And so being wrong results in failure when dealing with physical objects.

37:09I hope he does.

37:11Yeah. Yeah. I actually agree with a lot of Jeff’s motivations. Let me put it this way, if there was a button I could press that would delete Blue Origin, I wouldn’t press it. So I think it’s good that he’s spending money on making rockets too. I’d suggest perhaps he spend more time on it, but it’s up to him. I should make a point here. So nothing any of my companies have done has been to stifle competition. In fact, we’ve done the opposite. So at Tesla, we have open sourced our patents. Anyone can use our patents for free. How many companies do you know who’ve done that? Can you name one? I can’t. At SpaceX, we don’t use patents. Once in a while we’ll file a patent just so some patent troll doesn’t cause trouble. But we’ve done nothing anti-competitive. We’ve done nothing to stop our competitors.

38:29I just want to clarify for the audience, because some companies have done anti-competitive things. I think the strange thing, the unusual thing about SpaceX and Tesla is that we’ve done things that have helped our competition. So at Tesla, we have made our supercharger system open access. We’ve made our charger technology available for free to the other manufacturers. No walled garden. We could have put a wall up, but instead we invited them in.

39:55I think it’s important for the audience to understand that the reason I have these powers is not because of some anti-competitive actions. It’s simply because we’ve executed very well.

40:06There are other satellites out there, you know?

40:11Right.

40:19Okay.

40:25They use our product if it’s better, then use somebody else’s product if their other product’s better.

40:39How is it a bad thing to make better products than other companies?

41:08What are you suggesting?

41:22Do you trust the government?

41:27Exactly.

41:31Like I said, we’re not the only company who has communication satellites. Our satellites are just much better than theirs. So it’s not like we have a monopoly, we just have the best product?

41:51I think at the end of the day, if we make bad products that people don’t want to use, then the users will vote with their resources and use something else.

42:08Certainly, my company’s overseen by regulators. Since SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla are overseen by cumulatively over 100 regulators, and actually more than that, a few hundred regulators because you’ve got, we’re in fifty-five countries. If you sum up all the times that I had an argument with regulators, of hundreds of regulators over decades, it can sound really terrible, except but they forgot to mention that there were 10 million regulations we complied with and only five that I disagreed with. But they list all the five and it sounds like, wow, this guy’s a real maverick. I’m like, yeah, but what about the 10 million we complied with?

43:16Well, it’s not SpaceX.

43:42The best that the X platform can do is adhere to the laws of any given country. Do you think there’s something more we could do than that?

44:05Well, first of all, Starlink and SpaceX do no business in China whatsoever. Tesla has one of four factories, four vehicle factories in China. And China is, I don’t know, a quarter of our market or something like that. So it’s a quarter of the market of one company. The same is true, by the way, of all the other car companies. They also have something on that order of a quarter of their sales in China. So if that’s a problem for Tesla, it’s a problem for every car company. I think one has to be careful about not conflating the various companies. Because I can only do things that are within the bounds of the law, I cannot do beyond that. My aspiration is to do as much good as possible and to be as productive as possible within the bounds of what is legal. More than that, I cannot do.

45:05Yeah. Jensen’s awesome.

45:14Yes. There’s a video of Jensen and me unpacking the first AI computer at OpenAI.

45:46Co-founded it, yeah. Well, the whole arc of OpenAI, frankly is a little troubling, because the reason for starting OpenAI was to create a counterweight to Google and DeepMind, which at the time had two-thirds of all AI talent and basically infinite money and compute. And there was no counterweight. It was a unipolar world. And Larry and Paige and I used to be very close friends, and I would stay at his house, and I would talk to Larry into the late hours of the night about AI safety. And it became apparent to me that Larry did not care about AI safety. I think perhaps the thing that gave it away was when he called me a speciest for being pro-humanity, as in a racist, but for species. So I’m like, “Wait a second, what side are you on, Larry?” And then I’m like, okay, listen, this guy’s calling me a speciest. He doesn’t care about AI safety. We’ve got to have some counterpoint here because this seems like we could be, this is no good. So OpenAI was actually started, and it was meant to be open source. I named it OpenAI after open source. It is in fact a closed source, super closed. It should be renamed super closed source for maximum profit AI. Because this is what it actually is. Fay loves irony. In fact, a friend of mine says, the way to predict outcomes is the most ironic outcome is the most… It’s like his Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is most likely. And my friend Jonah’s view is that the most ironic outcome is the most likely. And that’s what’s happened with OpenAI. It is gone from an open source foundation, a 5123, to suddenly it’s like a $90 billion for-profit corporation with closed source. So I don’t know how you go from here to there.

48:01I don’t know how you get … Is this legal? I’m like, “That’s legal?”

48:19That’s correct. Larry refused to be friends with me after I recruited Ilya.

48:30I think we should be concerned about this because I think Ilya actually has a strong moral compass. He really sweats it over questions of what is right. And if Ilya felt strongly enough to want to fire Sam, well, I think the world should know what was that reason.

48:54I’ve reached out, but he doesn’t want to talk to anyone.

49:01I’ve talked to a lot of people. I’ve not found anyone who knows why. Have you?

49:15One of two things is, either it was a serious thing and we should know what it is or it was not a serious thing and then the board should resign.

49:28I have mixed feelings about Sam. The ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power. So I don’t know. I think I want to know why Ilya felt so strongly as to fire Sam. This sounds like a serious thing. I don’t think it was trivial. And I’m quite concerned that there’s some dangerous element of AI that they’ve created.

50:09Yes.

50:12That’d be my guess.

50:31On the AI front, I’m in somewhat of a quandary here because I’ve thought AI could be something that would change the world in a significant way since I was in college, 30 years ago. Now, the reason I didn’t go build AI right from the get-go was because I was uncertain about which edge of the double-edged sword would be sharper, the good edge or the bad edge. So I held off on doing anything on AI, could’ve created, I think, a leading AI company, and OpenAI actually is that, because I was just uncertain, if you make this magic genie, what will happen, whereas I think building sustainable energy technology is much more of a single-edged sword that is single-edged good, making life multi-planetary, I think single-edged good, installing mostly single-edged good, giving people better connectivity to people that don’t have connectivity or it’s too expensive, I think is very much a good thing. Sonic was instrumental, by the way, in halting the Russian advance, and the Ukrainians said so. So I think, with AI, you’ve got the magic genie problem. You may think you want a magic genie, but once that genie’s out of the bottle, it’s hard to say what happens.

52:15The genie is certainly poking its head out.

52:41It’s funny, all these weights, they’re just basically numbers in a common separated value file, and that’s our digital god, the CSP file. I found that funny, but that’s literally what it is. So I think it’s coming pretty fast.

53:16If you say smarter than the smartest human at anything?

53:22It may not be then quite smarter than all humans, well, machine-augmented humans, because people have got computers and stuff. There’s a higher bar, but you say it’s more than any … can write as good a novel as, say, JK Rowling, or discover new physics, or invent new technology, I would say that we’re less than three years from that point.

54:21Yeah. Data is very important. You could say data is probably more valuable than gold.

54:42Yes, X might be the single best source of data. People click on more links to X than anything else on earth. Sometimes people think Facebook or Instagram is a bigger thing, but actually, there are more links to X than anything. This is public information. You can Google it.

55:08So it is where you would find what is happening right now on earth at any given point in time. The whole OpenAI drama played out, in fact, on the X platform. Google certainly has a massive amount of data, so does Microsoft, but it is one of the best sources of data.

55:59Yeah, that’s a huge lie.

56:02These AIs are all trained on copyrighted data, obviously.

56:13That’s a lie.

56:15Yeah, straight up lie.

56:16100%. Obviously, it’s been trained on copyrighted data.

56:28It’s one every minute here.

56:47Yeah.

57:20I don’t know, except to say that, by the time these lawsuits are decided, we’ll have digital God. So I’d ask digital God at that point. These lawsuits won’t be decided before, on a timeframe that is relevant.

57:41There’s that … I don’t know if it’s actually a real Chinese thing or not, but may you live an interesting time is apparently not a good thing, but personally, I would prefer to live in interesting times, and we live in the most interesting of times. For awhile there, I was really getting demotivated and losing sleep over the threat of AI danger, and then I finally became fatalistic about it and said, “Well, even if I knew annihilation was certain, would I choose to be alive at that time or not?” And I said, “I probably would choose to be alive at that time because it’s the most interesting thing, even if there’s nothing I could do about it.” So then basically, a fatalistic resignation helped me sleep at night because I was having trouble sleeping at night because of AI danger. Now, what to do about it? I’ve been the one banging the drum the hardest, by far the longest, or at least one of longest for AI danger, and these regulatory things that are happening, the single biggest reason they’re happening is because of me.

59:13Well, there’s regulation around anything which is a physical danger, a danger to the public. So cars are heavily regulated, communications are heavily regulated, rockets and aircraft are heavily regulated. The general philosophy about regulation is that, when something is a danger to the public, that there needs to be some government oversight. So I think, in my view, AI is more dangerous than nuclear bombs and we regulate nuclear bombs. You can’t just go make a nuclear bomb in your backyard. I think we should have some kind of regulation with AI. Now, this tends to cause the AI accelerationist to get up in arms because they think AI is heaven, basically.

1:00:19As I said a moment ago, one should not take what is viewed in the media as being the whole picture. There are literally hundreds, this is not an exaggeration, say, there are probably 100 million regulations that my companies comply with and there are probably five that we don’t. And if we disagree with some of those regulations, it’s because we think the regulation that is meant to do good doesn’t actually do good.

1:00:53It’s not defying regulations for the sake of defiance.

1:01:05No, I’m saying you’re fundamentally mistaken, and it should be obvious that you’re mistaken. My company’s automotive is heavily regulated. We would not be allowed to put cars on the road if we did not comply with this vast body of regulation. Now, you could fill up the stage with, literally six foot high, the regulations that you have to comply with to make a car. You could have a room full of phone books. That’s how big the regulations are. And if you don’t comply with all of those, you can’t sell the car. And if we don’t comply with all the regulations for rockets or for Starlink, they shut us down. So in fact, I am incredibly compliant with regulations. Now, once in awhile, there’ll be something that I disagree with. The reason I would disagree with it is because I think the regulation, in that particular case, in that rare case, does not serve the public good. And therefore, I think it is my obligation to object to a regulation that is meant to serve the public good, but doesn’t. That’s the only time I object, not because I seek to object. In fact, I’m incredibly rule-following.

1:02:21TikTok is-

1:02:30I don’t use TikTok.

1:02:33I don’t personally use it, but for teenagers and people in their 20s, they seem almost religiously addicted to TikTok. Some people will watch TikTok for two hours a day. I stopped using TikTok when I felt the AI probing my mind and it made me uncomfortable, so I stopped using it. And in terms of antisemitic content, TikTok is rife with that. It has the most viral antisemitic content by far.

1:03:26No.

1:03:32I don’t think this is some Chinese Government plot, but the TikTok algorithm is entirely AI-powered. So it is really just trying to find the most viral thing possible. It’s what is going to keep you glued to the screen. That’s it. Now, on sheer numbers, there are on the order of two billion Muslims in the world, and I think a much smaller number of Jewish people, 20 million, something, many orders of magnitude fewer. So if you just look at content production, just on sheer numbers basis, this is going to be overwhelmingly antisemitic, just on a numbers basis.

1:04:34Have I?

1:04:56Well, doing nothing to provoke the Biden Administration, they held an electric vehicle summit at the White House and specifically refused to let Tesla attend. This was in the first six months of the administration. And we inquired, we’re like, “We literally make more electric cars than everyone else combined. Why are we not allowed? Why are you only letting Ford, GM, Chrysler, and UAW, and you’re specifically disallowing us from the EV summit at the White House?” We had done nothing to provoke them. Then Biden went on to add insult to injury and publicly said that GM was leading the electric car revolution. This was in the same quarter that Tesla made 300,000 electric cars and GM made 26. Does that seem fair to you?

1:05:53And by the way, I had a great relationship with Obama. So this was not a-

1:05:57I voted for Obama. I stood in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand. Okay?

1:06:11And it hurt the company, too, and it was an insult to … Tesla has 140,000 employees. Half of them are in the United States. Tesla has created more manufacturing jobs than everyone else combined.

1:06:40Yeah, a real right-wing motive.

1:06:44God, far right, if anything.

1:06:46It’s a reverse psychology, next level.

1:07:10Yeah, I disagree with him on that.

1:07:25Well, I haven’t endorsed anyone for president. I wanted to hear what Vivek had to say because I think that some of the things he says, I think, are pretty solid. He’s concerned about government overreach, about government control of information. The degree to which old Twitter was basically a sock puppet of the government was ridiculous. So it seems to me that there’s a very severe violation of the First Amendment in terms of how much control the government had over old Twitter, and it no longer does. So there’s a reason for the First Amendment. The reason for the First Amendment, for freedom of speech, is because the people that immigrated to this country came from places where there was not freedom of speech. And they were like, “You know what? We got to make sure that that’s constitutional,” because where they came from, if they said something, they’d be put in prison or something bad would happen to them. And freedom of speech, you have to say, when is it relevant? It’s only relevant when someone you don’t like can say something you don’t like or it has no meaning. And as soon as you throw in the towel and concede to censorship, it is only a matter of time before someone censors you. And that is why we have the First Amendment.

1:09:09I think I would not vote for Biden.

1:09:14I’m not saying I’d vote for Trump, but this is definitely a difficult choice here.

1:09:31No, I think that’s outrageous. I’m not going to vote for some pro-censorship candidate. Like I said, I think you have to consider that there’s a lot of wisdom in these amendments, I mean, the constitution, and a lot of things that we take for granted here in the United States that don’t even exist in Canada. There’s no constitutional right to freedom of speech in Canada and there’s no Miranda rights in Canada. People think you have the right to remain silent. You don’t, actually, in Canada. I’m half Canadian, I can say these things, I suppose. So the freedom of speech is incredibly important, even when people … And like I said, it’s actually especially important, in fact, it is only relevant, when people you don’t like can say things you don’t like. [inaudible 01:10:40] they’re meaningless.

1:11:10Look, we actually are in an odd situation here where, on balance, the Democrats appear to be more pro-censorship than the Republicans, and that used to be the opposite. It used to be left position was freedom of speech. I believe, at one point, the ACLU even defended the right of someone to claim that they were Nazi or something like that. So the left was freedom of speech is fundamental. My perception, perhaps it isn’t accurate, is that the pro-censorship is more on the left than the right.

1:12:00… We certainly get more complaints from the left than the right, let me put it that way. But my aspiration for the X platform is that it is the best source of truth, or the least inaccurate source of truth. And while I don’t know of you will believe me or not, but I think honesty is the best policy, and I think that the truth will win over time. And we’ve got this great system, and it’s getting better, called Community Notes, which is fantastic I think at correcting falsehoods, or adding context. In fact, we make a point of not removing anything, but only adding context. Now that context could include that this is completely false and here’s why. And no one is immune to this. I’m not immune to it. Advertisers are not immune to it. In fact, we’ve had Community Notes, which has caused us some loss in advertising. Speaking of loss in advertising revenue. If a community note… If there’s false advertising, the Community Note will say, “This is false and here is why.” There’s one specific example that is public knowledge, so I’ll mention it, which is at one point Uber had this ad which said, “Earn like a boss.” And it was community noted. “If by boss you mean $12 and forty-seven cents an hour.” This did cause at least a temporary suspension of advertising from Uber.

1:13:45What did?

1:13:47Well, we do require that everyone has to buy a subscription, and we don’t make exceptions for anyone. And I think if I want the New York Times, I have to pay for a subscription, and they don’t give me a free subscription. So I’m not going to give them a free subscription.

1:14:13They didn’t buy a subscription. By the way, it only cost like $1000 a month. So if they just do that, then they’re back in the saddle.

1:14:27No, I’m saying-

1:14:37Any organization that refuses to buy a subscription is not going to be recommended.

1:14:52Free speech is not exactly free, it costs a little bit.

1:14:58Yeah. It’s like in South Park where they say, “Freedom isn’t free, it costs a buck O’ five.” Or whatever. But it’s pretty cheap. Okay? Low cost freedom.

1:15:17Freedom-

1:15:20Yeah.

1:15:53This is EV?

1:16:13Well, I think if you make a compelling electric car, people will buy it. No question about it. I mean electric car sales in China are gigantic. That’s by far the biggest category, and I think that would be the case… I mean it’s worth noting, so probably the best reputation of that is that the Tesla model Y will be the best selling car of any kind on earth this year, of any kind, gasoline or otherwise.

1:16:49I think the Chinese car companies are extremely competitive. By far our toughest competition is in China. So I mean there’s a lot of people who are out there who think the top 10 car company’s is going to be Tesla followed by nine Chinese car companies. I think they might not be wrong. So China is super good at manufacturing, and the work ethic is incredible. So if we consider different leagues of competitiveness at Tesla, we consider the Chinese league to be the most competitive. And by the way, we do very well in China because our China team is the best in China.

1:17:50Well, I mean I think it’s generally not good to have an adversarial relationship between people on the line, one group at the company and another group. In fact, I disagree with the idea of unions, but perhaps for a reason that is different than people may expect, which is I just don’t like anything which creates kind of a lords and peasants sort of thing. And I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company, and create a sort of lords and peasants situation. There are many people at Tesla who have gone from working on the line to being in senior management. There is no lords and peasants. Everyone eats at the same table. Everyone parks in the same parking lot. At GM there’s a special elevator for only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla. And the thing is that I actually know the people on the line, because I worked on the line and I walked the line and I slept in the factory and I worked beside them. So I’m no stranger to them. And there are actually many times where I’ve said, “Well, can’t we just hold a union vote?” But apparently a company is not allowed to hold a union vote, so it has to be somehow called for, but the unions can’t do it. So I said, “Well let’s just hold a vote and see what happens.” The actual problem is the opposite. It’s not that people are trapped at Tesla building cars. The challenge is, how do we retain great people to do the hard work of building cars when they have six other opportunities that they can do that are easier? That’s the actual difficulty, is that building cars is hard work and there are much easier jobs. And I just want to say that I’m incredibly appreciative of those who build cars, and they know it. So I don’t know, maybe we’ll be unionized. I say if Tesla gets unionized it will be because we deserve it and we failed in some way. But we certainly try hard to ensure the prosperity of everyone. We give everyone stock options. We’ve made many people who are just working the line who didn’t even know what stocks were, we’ve made the millionaires.

1:20:33well. I have to go to the bathroom sometimes.

1:20:45Well, about every three hours, I make a trip to the lavatory.

1:20:58No, I mean there’ll be brief moments between meetings. I mean obviously, I have 17 jobs and no, I guess technically it’s work at this point.

1:21:22Technically posting on Twitter or X is work. It does count as work. So there’s that. But no, I mean I think I’m on… Well I guess usually, probably I’m on for longer than I think I am.

1:21:40If you look at the screen time of a number of hours per week, sometimes that’s a scary number. It’s probably, I don’t know, it’s a little over an hour a day, or something like that.

1:21:56Yeah.

1:21:59Okay.

1:22:07Yeah, screen time. Sometimes this is a scary number though.

1:22:22I just got a new phone, so I think this is not accurate. It’s one minute. Pretty sure it’s more than that. Wait, it’s over the week. There we go.

1:22:35Okay, so it’s still wrong. It’s more than four minutes. I just got a new phone, so this is not accurate. It literally says four minutes.

1:22:44New phone. [inaudible 01:22:45].

1:22:56The idea of making a phone… What do you mean like-

1:22:59The app store?

1:23:05I mean, I don’t think there’s a real need to make a phone. I mean, if there’s an essential need to make a phone, I’ll make a phone, but I’ve got a lot of fish to fry. So I mean I do think there’s a fundamental challenge that phone makers have at this point because you’ve got basically a black rectangle. How do you make that better?

1:23:36No, that’s literally… Yeah, good phrase, in the head. A neural link.

1:23:46The best interface would be a neural interface directly to your brain. So that would be a neural link.

1:24:03Yeah, actually this is… The USDA inspector who came by Neuralink facilities literally said in her entire career she has never seen a better animal care facility. We are the nicest to animals that you could possibly be, even to the rats and mice, even though they did the plague and everything. So it is like monkey paradise. So the thing that gets conflated is that there were some terminal monkeys, where, this is actually several years ago, where the monkeys were about to die and we’re like, okay, we’ve got an experimental device. It’s a kind of thing which you would only put on a monkey that’s about to die. And then now the monkey died, but it didn’t die because of the Neuralink, it died because it had a terminal case of cancer or something like that. Neuralink has never caused the death of a monkey, to the best… Unless they’re hiding something from me, it’s never caused death of a monkey. And in fact, we’ve now had monkeys with Neuralink implants for two, three years and they’re doing great. And we’ve even replaced the Neuralink twice and we’re getting ready to do the first implants, hopefully in a few months. The only implementations of Neuralink I think are unequivocally good. Speaking of the double-edged sword, I think these early implementations are single-edged sword, because the first implementations will be to enable people who have lost the brain-body connection to be able to operate a computer or a phone faster than someone who has hands that work. So you can imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than someone who had full-body functionality, how incredible that would be. Well, that’s what this device will do, and we should have proof of that in a human, hopefully in a few months. It already works in monkeys and works quite well with monkeys that can play video games just by thinking. So in the next application after dealing with tetraplegics and quadriplegics is going to be vision. Vision is the next thing. So it’s like if somebody has lost both eyes, or the optic nerve has failed, basically where they have no possibility of having some ocular correction. That would be the next thing for Neuralink, is a direct vision interface. And in fact, then you could be like Geordi La Forge from Star Trek. You could see in any frequency, actually you could see in radar if you want.

1:27:05Not as well as Neuralink will though.

1:28:13Yes. Well, first of all, humans are terrible drivers. So people text and drive, they drink and drive, they get into arguments, they do all sorts of things in cars that they should not do. So it’s actually remarkable that there are not more deaths than there are. What we’ll find with computer driving is, I think probably an order of magnitude reduction in deaths. And the US has actually far fewer deaths per capita than the rest of the world. If you go worldwide, I think there’s something close to a million deaths per year due to automotive accidents. So I think computer driving will probably drop that by 90% or more. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be 10 times better.

1:29:13Well, in large numbers, it will simply be so obviously true that it really cannot be denied.

1:29:36Sure, of course. Wait, I shouldn’t have said that. So yeah, I’m optimistic about… I think I’m naturally optimistic about time scales, and if I was not naturally optimistic, I wouldn’t be doing the things that I’m doing. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t have sold a rocket company or electric car company if I didn’t have some sort of pathological optimism, frankly. So as you pointed out, many people said that it would fail. And in fact, actually I agreed with them. I said, “Yes, it probably will fail.” And they’re like, “Hmm, okay.” But I thought SpaceX and Tesla had less than a 10% chance of success when we started them. So yeah, anyway. But the self-driving thing is, I’ve been optimistic about it, but we’ve certainly made a lot of progress. If anybody has tried, has been using the sort of full self-driving beta, the progress every year has been substantial. It’s really now at the point where in most places it’ll take you from one place to another with no interventions. And the data is unequivocal that supervised full self-driving is somewhere around four times safer or maybe more, than just a human driving by themselves. So I can certainly see it coming. Actually, really-

1:31:14No, no, no, definitely not. Definitely not.

1:31:25Well, I mean I think they’ve all, with rare exception, thought it wasn’t happening. So they were investing, despite thinking, they’re very clear that they don’t think it’s real. So they’re not saying, “Oh, we just believe everything Elon says, hook, line, and sinker.” But the thing is that, I mean, it would be a fair criticism of me to say that I’m late, but I always deliver in the end.

1:32:03Right.

1:32:13Well, I think it’s quite literally-

1:32:21Well, I was encouraging people to amplify empathy, literally. I tend to be quite literal.

1:32:35I think I was talking to some friends, and we all agreed that we should try to amplify empathy. And so I wrote amplify empathy.

1:32:50Look, sometimes it’s pretty simple.

1:32:57All right. Thank you.

1:33:03[inaudible 01:33:04].