Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful

0:00We're at the very, very early stage of the intelligence Big Bang. being a multi-planet species, greatly increases the probable lifespan of civilization or consciousness and intelligence, both biological and digital. I think we're quite close to digital superintelligence. If it doesn't happen this year, next year for sure.

0:22Please give it up for Elon Musk.

0:35Elon, welcome to AI Startup School. We're just really, really blessed to have your presence here today. Thanks for having me. So, from SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, XAI, and more, was there ever a moment in your life before all this where you felt, I have to build something great? And what flipped that switch for you? Well, I didn't originally think I would build something great. I wanted to try to build something useful, but I didn't think I would build anything particularly great. If you said probabilistically, it seemed unlikely, but I wanted to at least try. So you're talking to a room full of people who are all technical engineers, often some of the most eminent AI researchers coming up in the game.

1:25Okay.

1:29I like the term engineer better than researcher. I mean, I suppose if there's some fundamental algorithmic breakthrough, it's research, but otherwise it's engineering. Maybe let's start way back. I mean, when you were, this is a room full of 18 to 25-year-olds. It skews younger because the founder set is younger and younger. Can you put yourself back into their shoes when you were 18, 19, learning to code, even coming up with a first idea for Zip2? What was that like for you? Yeah, back in 95, I was faced with a choice of either to do grad studies, PhD at Stanford in material science, actually working on ultracapacitors for potential use in electric vehicles, essentially trying to solve the range problem for electric vehicles.

2:25or try to do something in this thing that most people have never heard of called the internet. And I talked to my professor, who was Bill Nix, in the material science department, and said, like, can I defer for a quarter? Because this will probably fail, and then I'll need to come back to college. And then he said, this is probably the last conversation we'll have. And he was right. But I thought things would most likely fail, not that they would most likely succeed.

2:59And then in 95, I wrote basically, I think, the first or close to the first, maps, directions, internet, white pages and yellow pages on the internet. I just wrote that personally. I didn't even use a web server. I just read the port directly because I couldn't afford, and I couldn't afford a T1. The original office was on Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto. There was like an ISP on the floor below. So I drilled a hole through the floor and just ran a LAN cable directly to the ISP. And, you know, my brother joined me and another co-founder, Greg Curry, who passed away. and at the time we couldn't even afford a place to stay.

3:52So the office was 500 bucks a month, so we just slept in the office and then showered at the YMCA on Pajmo in El Camino.

4:03And yeah, I guess we ended up doing a little bit of a useful company, Zip2 in the beginning.

4:14and we did build a lot of really good software technology but we were somewhat captured by the legacy media companies and that Nitro, New York Times, Nehurst, whatnot were investors and customers and also on the board. So they kept wanting to use our software in ways that made no sense. So I wanted to go direct to consumers. Anyway, it's a long story, dwelling too much on Zep2, but I really just wanted to do something useful on the internet. Because I had two choices, like do a PhD and watch people build the internet or help build the internet in some small way. And I was like, well, I guess I can always try and fail and then go back to grad studies.

5:05And anyway, that ended up being like reasonably successful, sold for like$300 million, which which was a lot at the time. These days, that's like, I think the minimum impulse put for an AI startup is like a billion dollars. It's like, there's so many frigging unicorns. It's like a herd of unicorns at this point. Unicorn is a billion dollar situation. There's been inflation since, so quite a bit more money, actually. Yeah, I mean, like$9.95, you could probably buy a burger for a nickel. Well, not quite, but I mean, yeah, there has been a lot of inflation. um but uh i mean the hype level on ai is is is pretty intense uh as you've seen um you know you see uh companies that are i don't know less than a year old getting sometimes billion dollar multi-billion dollar valuations um which i i guess could could pan out and probably will pan out in some cases.

6:02But it is eye-watering to see some of these valuations. Yeah, what do you think? I mean, well, I'm pretty bullish, personally. I'm pretty bullish, honestly. So I think the people in this room are going to create a lot of the value that, you know, a billion people in the world should be using this stuff. And we're not even scratching the surface of it. I love the internet story in that even back then, you are a lot like the people in this room back then in that the heads of all the CEOs of all the legacy media companies look to you as the person who understood the internet. And a lot of the world, the corporate world, the world at large that does not understand what's happening with AI, they're going to look to the people in this room for exactly that.

6:55It sounds like, what are some of the tangible lessons? It sounds like one of them is don't give up board control or be careful about having a really good lawyer? I guess for my first startup, really the mistake was having too much shareholder and board control from legacy media companies who then necessarily see things through the lens of legacy media. And that they'll kind of make you do things that seem sensible to them, but really don't make sense with the new technology. um i know i should point out that i that i um i didn't actually at first intend to start a company i like i tried to get a job at netscape um i sent my resume into netscape and mark andreason knows about this um and uh but i don't think he ever saw my resume and then nobody responded so uh and then i tried hanging out in the lobby of netscape to see if i could like bump into someone but i was like too shy to talk and talk to anyone so i'm like man this is ridiculous so i'll just write software myself and see how it goes.

7:58So it wasn't actually from the standpoint of like, I want to start a company. I just want to be part of building, you know, the internet in some way. And, and since I couldn't get a job at an internet company, I had to start an internet company. Anyway, the yeah, I mean, from an AI will so profoundly change the future. It's difficult to fathom how much. But, you know, the economy, assuming we don't, things don't go awry, and like AI doesn't kill us all and itself, then you'll see ultimately an economy that is not 10 times more than the current economy. Ultimately, if we become, say, or whatever our future machine descendants or mostly machine descendants become like a Kodoshev scale to civilization or beyond, we're talking about an economy that is thousands of times, maybe millions of times bigger than the economy today.

9:07so yeah I mean I did sort of feel a bit like when I was in DC taking a lot of flack for getting rid of waste and fraud which was an interesting side quest as side quests go but gotta get back to the main quest yeah I gotta get back to the main quest here so back to the main quest so but I did feel a little bit like there's you know it's like fixing the government it's kind of like there's like say the beach is dirty and there's like some needles and feces and like trash and you want to clean up the beach but then there's also this like thousand foot wall of water which is a tsunami of ai like and how much does cleaning the beach really matter if you've got a thousand foot tsunami about to hit not that much oh we're glad you're back on the main quest it's very important yeah back to the with um building technology which is uh what i like doing um it's just so much noise like this the signal to noise ratio in politics is terrible so um i mean i live in san francisco so you don't need to tell me twice yeah dc is like you know kind of i guess it's all politics in dc but um the if you're trying to build a rocket or cars or you're trying to have software that compiles and runs reliably, then you have to be maximally truth-seeking or your software or your hardware won't work.

10:41Like, you can't fool math. Like, math and physics are rigorous judges. So I'm used to being in a maximally truth-seeking environment, and that's definitely not politics. So anyway, I'm glad to be back in technology. I guess I'm kind of curious, going back to the Zip2 moment, you had hundreds of millions of dollars or you had an exit worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, I got$20 million. Right. Okay. So you solved the money problem at least. And you basically took it and you kept rolling with X.com, which became PayPal and Confinity. Yes. I kept the chips on the table. Yeah. Not everyone does that.

11:23A lot of the people in this room will have to make that decision, actually. What drove you to jump back into the ring? well i i think i felt for with with zip too we built like incredible technology but never really got uh used um you know i think at least from my perspective we had better technology than say yahoo or anyone else but it was constrained by our customers um and uh so i wanted to do something that where okay we wouldn't be constrained by our customers go direct to consumer um and that's what ended up being like x.com, PayPal, essentially x.com merging with Confinity, which together created PayPal.

12:02And then that actually, the sort of PayPal diaspora, it might've created more companies than, so more companies than probably anything in the 21st century, you know? So many talented people were at the combination of Confinity and x.com. um so i just wanted to like i felt like uh we kind of got our wings clipped somewhat with zip two and it's like okay what if our wings aren't clipped and we go direct to consumer and that's that's what um paypal ended up being um but uh yeah with uh i got that like 20 million dollar check for um for my share of zip two at the time i was living with in a house with four housemates and had like 10 grand in the bank.

12:51And then this check arrives in the mail of all places in the mail. And then my bank balance went from 10 ,000 to 20 million and 10 ,000. You know, like, well, okay. So I have to pay taxes on that and all. But then I ended up putting almost all of that into X.com. And as you said, right, just kind of keeping almost all the chips on the table.

13:19And, yeah, and then after PayPal, I was like, well, I was kind of curious as to why we had not sent anyone to Mars. And I went on the NASA website to find out when we're sending people to Mars, and there was no date. I thought maybe it was just hard to find on the website. But in fact, there was no real plan to send people to Mars. So then, you know, this is such a long story, so I don't want to take up too much time here. but um i think we're all listening with rapt attention so i was actually i was on the long island expressway with my friend adair resi we're like uh housemates in college and and day was asking me what i'm what we're gonna do what am i gonna do after paypal and i was like it's like i don't know i guess maybe i'd like to do something philanthropic in space because i didn't think i could actually do anything commercial in space because that seemed like the purview of nations.

14:13So, but, you know, I'm kind of curious as to when we're going to send people to Mars. And that's when I was like, oh, it's not on the website. And then I started digging on, there's nothing on the NASA website. So then I started digging in and I'm definitely summarizing a lot here. But my first idea was to do a philanthropic mission to Mars called Life to Mars, where would send a, a small greenhouse with season dehydrated nutrient gel, land, land that on Mars and grow, you know, hydrate the gel. And then you'd have this, this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background. But the longest time I, by the way, I didn't realize money shot, I think is a porn reference, but, but anyway, the point is that that would be the great shot of green plants on a red background and to try to inspire, uh, you know, NASA and the public to send astronauts to Mars.

15:14As I learned more, I came to realize, and along the way, by the way, I went to Russia in like 2001 and 2002 to buy ICBMs, which is like, that's an adventure. You know, you go and meet with Russian high command and say, I'd like to buy some ICBMs. This was to get to space as a rocket. Not to nuke anyone, But they had to, as a result of arms reduction talks, they had to actually destroy a bunch of their big nuclear missiles. So I was like, well, how about if we take two of those, you know, minus the nuke, add an additional upper stage for Mars. But it was kind of trippy, you know, being in Moscow in 2001, negotiating with like the Russian military to buy ICVMs.

16:05like that's crazy um and but they kept also like raising the price on me so that so like literally it's kind of like the opposite of what a negotiation should should do so i was like man these things are getting really expensive and and then i came to realize that actually the problem was not that there was insufficient will to go to mars but there was no way to do so uh without breaking the budget, even breaking the NASA budget. So that's where I decided to start SpaceX to advance rocket technology to the point where we could send people to Mars. And that was in 2002. So that wasn't, you know, you didn't start out wanting to start a business.

16:51You wanted to start just something that was interesting to you that you thought humanity needed. And then as you sort of, you know, like a cat pulling on, you know, a string, it just sort of the ball sort of unravels. And it turns out this is, could be a very profitable business. I mean, it is now, but it, there, there had been no prior example of really a rocket startup succeeding, but there've been various attempts to do commercial rocket companies and that all all failed so um again with spacex starting spacex was uh really from the standpoint of like i i think there's like a less than 10 chance of being successful maybe one percent i don't know um but um but if if if a startup doesn't do something to advance uh rocket technology it's definitely not coming from from the big defense contractors because they just impedance match to the government and the government just wants to do very conventional things.

17:51So it's either coming from a startup or it's not happening at all. So like a small chance of success is better than no chance of success. And so, yeah, so SpaceX started that in mid-2002, expecting to fail. Like I said, probably 90 % chance of failing. and even like when recruiting people, I didn't like try to make out that it would, I said, we're probably going to die, but small chance we might not die. And if, but this is the only way to get people to Mars and advance the state of the art. And then I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't hire anyone who was good.

18:38So like none of the good sort of chief engineers would join because it's like this is too risky you're going to die and uh so then i ended up being chief engineer of the rocket and you know the first three flights did fail so it's a bit of a learning exercise there and um fourth one fortunately worked but if the fourth one hadn't worked uh i had no money left and that would have been it would have been curtains so it was a pretty close thing if the fourth launch of falcon not work it would have been just curtains and we would have just joined the graveyard of prior rocket startups. So it was like my estimate of success was not far off.

19:18We just, we made it by the skin of our teeth. And Tesla was happening sort of simultaneously. Like 2008 was a rough year because at mid 2008, we're called summer 2008. The third, the third launch of SpaceX had failed, a third failure in a row. The Tesla financing round had failed. And so Tesla was going bankrupt fast. It was just like, man, this is grim. This is going to be a tale of warning, an exercise in hubris. Probably throughout that period, a lot of people were saying, you know, Elon is a software guy. Why is he working on hardware? Why would he choose to work on this? 100%. So you can look at the, like, because there's still the, you know, the press of that time is still online, you can just search it.

20:17And they kept calling me internet guy. So like, internet guy, aka fool, is attempting to build a rocket company. So, you know, we got ridiculed quite a lot. And it does sound pretty absurd, like internet guy starts rocket company doesn't sound like a recipe for success, frankly. So I didn't hold it against him. I was like, yeah, you know, admittedly, it does sound improbable. And I agree that it's improbable. But fortunately, the fourth launch worked and NASA awarded us a contract to resupply the space station. And I think that was like maybe December 22nd. It was like right before Christmas because even the fourth launch working wasn't enough to succeed.

21:16NASA also needed, we also needed a big contract to keep us alive. So I got that call from like the NASA team. And I literally, they said, we're awarding you one of the contracts to resupply the space station. And I literally blurted out, I love you guys, which is not normally what they hear. Because it's usually pretty sober. But I was like, man, this is a company saver. And then we closed the Tesla financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible, which was 6 p.m. December 24, 2008. We would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas if that round hadn't closed. So that was a nerve-wracking end of 2008, that's for sure.

22:02I guess from your PayPal and Zip2 experience jumping into these hardcore hardware startups, it feels like one of the through lines was being able to find and eventually attract the smartest possible people in those particular fields. I mean, the people in this room, most of the people here I don't think have even managed a single person yet. They're just starting their careers. What would you tell to, you know, the Elon who's never had to do that yet? I generally think to try to be as useful as possible. It may sound trite, but it's so hard to be useful, especially to be useful to a lot of people.

22:43Where you say the area under the curve of total utility is like, how useful have you been to your fellow human beings times how many people? It's almost like the physics definition of true work. It's incredibly difficult to do that. And I think if you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher. Like, don't aspire to glory. Aspire to work. How can you tell that it's true work? Like, is it external? Is it like what happens with other people or, you know, what the product does for people? Like, what, you know, what is that for you? When you're looking for people to come work for you, like, you know, what's the salient thing that you look for?

23:22Or if there are a few. That's a good question, I guess. I mean, in terms of your end product, you just have to say, like, well, if this thing is successful, how useful will it be to how many people? And that's what I mean. And then you do whatever, you know, whether you're a CEO or any role in a startup, you do whatever it takes to succeed. And just always be smashing your ego. Like, internalized responsibility. like a major failure mode is when ego to ability ratio is double greater than sign one you know like if you if your ego to ability ratio is it gets too high then you're you're you're going to basically break the feedback loop to reality and in in ai terms you'll you'll have you'll you'll break your rl loop so you want you want you don't want to break your art you want to have a strong rl loop which means internalizing responsibility and minimizing ego and you do whatever the task is no matter whether it's you know grand or humble so i mean that's kind of like why actually i prefer the term like engineering as opposed to research i prefer the term and i don't i actually don't want it to call xai lab i just want to be a company um i like it's like whatever the one of the simplest, most straightforward, ideally lowest ego terms are, those are generally a good way to go.

24:55You want to just close the loop on reality hard. That's a super big deal. I think everyone in this room really looks up to everything you've done around being sort of a paragon of first principles and thinking about the stuff you've done. How do you actually determine your reality? Because that seems like a pretty big part of it. Like other people, people who have never made anything, non-engineers, sometimes journalists at time who've never done anything, like they will criticize you. But then clearly you have another set of people who are builders, who have very high, you know, sort of area under the curve, who are in your circle.

25:38Like, you know, how should people approach that? Like what has worked for you and what would you pass on to X, to your children? What do you tell them when you're like, you need to make your way in this world? Here's how to construct a reality that is predictive from first principles. Well, the tools of physics are incredibly helpful to understand and make progress in any field. First principles obviously just means break things down to the fundamental axiomatic elements that are most likely to be true and then reason up from there as cogently as possible as opposed to reasoning by analysis or metaphor um and then it just simple things like like thinking in the limit like if you extrapolate you know minimize this thing or maximize that thing thinking in the limit is is very very helpful um i'd use all the tools of physics um they apply to any field this is like a superpower actually so you can take say take for example like rockets you can say well how much should a rocket rocket cost the typical approach to how to that people would take how much rocket should cost is they would look historically at what the cost of rockets are and assume that any new rocket must be somewhat similar to the prior cost of rockets a first principles approach would be you you look at the materials that the rocket is comprised of.

27:06So if that's aluminum, copper, carbon fiber, steel, whatever the case may be, and say, how much does that rocket weigh and what are the constituent elements and how much do they weigh? What is the material price per kilogram of those constituent elements? And that sets the actual floor on what a rocket can cost. It can asymptotically approach the cost of the raw materials. And then you realize, oh, actually a rocket the raw materials of a rocket are only maybe one or 2 % of the historical cost of a rocket. So the manufacturing must necessarily be very inefficient if the raw material cost is only one or 2%.

27:49That would be a first principles analysis of the potential for cost optimization of a rocket. And that's before you get to reusability. To give an AI example, I guess, last year for XAI, when we were trying to build a training supercluster, we went to the various suppliers to ask, this was beginning of last year, that we needed 100 ,000 H100s to be able to train coherently. And their estimates for how long it would take to complete that were 18 to 24 months. It's like, well, we need to get that done in six months. So then, or we won't be competitive. So then if you break that down, what are the things you need?

28:38Well, you need a building, you need power, you need cooling. We didn't have enough time to build a building from scratch, so we had to find an existing building. So we found a factory that was no longer in use in Memphis that used to build electrolytes products. but then the input power was 15 megawatts and we needed 150 megawatts. So we rented generators and had generators on one side of the building and then we have to have cooling. So we rented about a quarter of the mobile cooling capacity of the U.S. and put the chillers on the other side of the building. That didn't fully solve the problem because the power variations during training are very big.

29:20So you can have power can drop by 50 % in 100 milliseconds, which the generators can't keep up with. So then we added Tesla Megapacks and modified the software in the Megapacks to be able to smooth out the power variation during the training run. And then there were a bunch of networking challenges because the networking cables, if you're trying to make 100 ,000 GPUs train coherently, are very, very challenging. Almost it sounds like almost any of those things you mentioned, I could imagine someone telling you very directly, no, you can't have that. You can't have that power. You can't have this.

29:59And it sounds like one of the salient pieces of first principles thinking is actually, let's ask why. Let's figure that out. And actually, let's challenge the person across the table. And if they if I don't get an answer that I feel good about, I'm going to not allow that to be, I'm not going to let that know to stand. Is that, I mean, that feels like something that, you know, everyone, if someone were to try to do what you're doing in hardware, hardware seems to uniquely need this. In software, we have lots of, you know, fluff and things that, you know, it's like we can add more CPUs to that.

30:34It'll be fine. But in hardware, it's just not going to work. I think these general principles of first principle thinking apply to software and hardware, apply to anything really. I'm just using kind of a hardware example of how we were told something is impossible but once we broke it down into the constituent elements of we need a building, we need power, we need cooling, we need power smoothing and then we could solve those constituent elements. And then we just ran the networking operation to do all the cabling, everything in four shifts 24 seven. And I was like sleeping in the data center and also doing cabling myself.