Hey everybody, Friedberg here. What you're about to hear is a discussion from our All-In Summit record in LA on September 9th. We're going to publish some of the best conversations once a week. If you want to see all the talks, subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/allin and follow us on X at theallinpod.
The greatest entrepreneur of a generation, Elon Musk!
Sit there. I'm going to take this. All right.
Thanks for taking the time. How you doing, brother? You keeping busy?
Yeah. I mean, it's rarely a slow week.
I mean, in the world as well.
I mean, any given week. I mean, it just seems like the thing's getting out of here.
It's definitely a simulation. We've agreed on this at this point.
I mean, well, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high. Yeah, ratings are high. How are the freedom of speech wars going? You've been at war for two years now.
The price of freedom of speech is not cheap, is it?
I think it's like 44 billion, something like that.
Yeah. It's pretty nutty. There is like this weird movement to quell free speech kind of around the world, and this is something we should be very concerned about. You know, you have to ask like why was the First Amendment a high priority, was like number one. It's because people came from countries where if you spoke freely you would be imprisoned or killed, and they were like, well, we'd like to not have that here. Because that was terrible. And actually, you know, there's a lot of places in the world right now if you're critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed.
Yeah. And we'd like to not have that.
Are you concerned about that?
I mean, I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message.
You know, I think we always thought that the West was the exception to that, that we knew there were authoritarian places around the world, but we thought that in the West, we'd have freedom of speech. And we've seen, like you said, it seems like a global movement.
In Britain, you've got teenagers being put in prison for memes.
It's like you like a Facebook post, throw them in prison.
Yeah. People have got an actual prison for obscure comments on social media.
Yeah, Pavel got thrown in prison. I was pretty shook about that. I was like, what is the massive crime?
Right, Pavel in France, and then of course we got Brazil with Judge Voldemort. That one seems like the one that impacts you the most. Can you tell us what's the latest on that?
Well, I guess we are trying to figure out is there some sort of reasonable solution in Brazil. The concern, I mean, I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly. And, you know, funny memes aside, the nature of the concern was that at least at X Corp, we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law. So obviously we cannot as an American company impose American laws and values on other countries. We wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do think that if a country's laws are a particular way and we're being asked to, we think we're being asked to break them and be silent about it, then obviously that is no good.
Mhm. So, I just want to be clear because this sometimes comes across as Elon's trying to just be a crazy whatever billionaire and demand outrageous things from other countries. And while that is true, in addition, there are other things that I think are valid, which is we obviously can't, I think any given thing that we do at X Corp, we've got to be able to explain in the light of day and not feel that it was dishonorable or we did the wrong thing. So that's the nature of the concern.
So we actually are in sort of discussions with the judicial authorities in Brazil to try to run this to ground. Like what's actually going on? If we're being asked to break Brazilian law, then that obviously should not sit well with the Brazilian judiciary. And if we're not and we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we're mistaken.
I think that's a pretty reasonable position. I'm a bit concerned as your friend that you're going to go to one of these countries and I'm going to wake up one day and you're going to get arrested and I'm going to have to go bail you out or something. This feels very acute.
I mean, it's not a joke now. They're literally saying, it's not just Biden saying we have to look into that guy. Now it's become quite literal.
Who was the guy who just wrote the, was it the Guardian piece about...
Oh yeah, yeah. There have been three articles, I think, in the past three weeks. Robert Reich.
Three different articles.
Three different articles.
That calling for me to be imprisoned.
In the Guardian, you know, Guardian of what? What are they protecting exactly?
Guardian of, I don't know.
But the premise here is that you bought this thing, this online forum, this communication platform, and you're allowing people to use it to express themselves. Therefore, you have to be jailed. I don't understand the logic here. What do you think they're actually afraid of at this point? What's the motivation here?
I think if somebody's afraid, if somebody's sort of trying to push a false premise on the world, and that premise can be undermined with public dialogue, then they will be opposed to public dialogue on that premise because they wish their false premise to prevail.
So that's, I think, the issue there is if they don't like the truth, then they want to suppress it. So what we're trying to do with X Corp is, I distinguish that from my son who's also called X.
Right, you have parental goals. Everything's just called X basically. Very difficult disambiguation.
The son. Yeah, it's an X everything. So what we're trying to do is simply adhere to the laws in a country. So if something is illegal in the United States or if it's illegal in Europe or Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down or we'll suspend the account because we're not there to make the laws. But if speech is not illegal, then what are we doing? Okay. And now we're injecting ourselves as a censor, and where does it stop and who decides? So where does that path lead? I think it leads to a bad place. If the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different. But otherwise, we're going to obey the law in each jurisdiction.
Right. And some of these European...
That's it. It's not more complicated. We're not trying to flout the law. Let me be clear about that. But we're trying to adhere to the law, and if the laws change, we will change. And if the laws don't change, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law.
It's pretty straightforward.
Very straightforward. And if somebody thinks we're not adhering to the law, well, they can file a lawsuit.
Bingo. Also very straightforward. Yes. I mean, there are European countries that don't want people to promote Nazi propaganda.
They have some sensitivity to it.
Well, it is illegal in those countries. And in those countries, if somebody puts that up, you take it down.
But they typically file something and say, 'Take this down.' No. In some cases, it is just obviously illegal. Like you don't need to file a lawsuit for, you know, if something is just unequivocally illegal. We can literally read the law. This violates the law.
You know, anyone can see that.
You don't need, like if somebody is stealing, you don't need, let me check the law on that. Okay. Oh no, they're stealing.
San Francisco. Let's talk about... So, we had JD Vance here this morning. He did a great job. And you know, one of the things is there's this image on X of basically like you, Bobby, Trump and JD are like the Avengers, I guess. And then there's another meme where you're in front of a desk where it says DOGE.
The Department of Governmental Efficiency.
Yes. Yes. I posted that one.
I made it using Grok, the Grok image generator, and I posted it.
And put it to my profile.
Seat for efficiency. Um, how do you do it?
Well, I mean, I think with great difficulty. But you know, look, it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and remove absurd regulations.
And you know, the last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early 80s. So we're 40 years away from a serious effort to remove regulations that don't serve the greater good and reduce the size of government. And I think it's just if we don't do that, then what's happening is that we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal. And that's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States. Like if you look at the absurdity of the California high-speed rail, I think they've spent $7 billion and have a 1,600-foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it. I mean, your tax dollars at work.
Yeah. What are we doing? Well, that's an expensive 1,600 feet of concrete, you know.
And I mean, I think it's like, you know, I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but you know, and I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was not an optimist. So but at the current trend, you know, California high-speed rail might finish sometime next century, maybe, probably not.
We'll have teleportation by that time.
Yeah, exactly. Have AI do everything at that point.
So I think you really think of the United States and many countries, it's arguably worse than the EU, as being like Gulliver tied down by a million little strings. And like any one given regulation is not that bad, but you've got a million of them, or millions actually, and then eventually you just can't get anything done. And this is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people. It's just they don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations.
And I'll give you a recent example that is just insane. SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for, they claimed, dumping potable water on the ground, drinking water. So, and we're like, this is at Starbase, and we're like, we're in a tropical thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. And there was no actual harm done. It was just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff. And there's zero harm done. And they're like, they agree, yes, there's zero harm done. We're like, okay, so there's no harm done. And you want us to pay a $140,000 fine? He's like, 'Yes, because you don't have a permit.' Okay. We didn't know there was a permit needed for zero-harm fresh water being on the ground in a place where fresh water falls from the sky all the time.
Got it. Next to the ocean.
Because there's a little bit of water there, too.
Yeah. I mean, sometimes it rains so much the roads are flooded. So we're like, you know, how does this make any sense?
Yeah. And then they were like, 'Well, we're not going to process any more of your applications for launch, for Starship launch, unless you pay this $140,000.' They just ransomed us.
And we're like, 'Okay, so we paid $140,000.' But it's like, this is no good. I mean, at this rate, we're never going to get to Mars.
I mean, that's the confounding part here.
Is we're acting against our own self-interest. You know, when you look at, we do have to make, putting aside fresh water, but hey, the rocket makes a lot of noise. So I'm certain there's some complaints about noise once in a while, but sometimes you want to have a party. Well, you want to make progress and there's a little bit of noise. Therefore, we trade off a little bit of noise for massive progress or even fun. So, like when did we stop being able to make those trade-offs? Talk about the difference between California and Texas where you and I now reside. Texas, you were able to build the Gigafactory. I remember when you got the plot of land and then it seemed like it was less than 2 years when you had the party to open it.
Yeah. From start construction to completion was 14 months.
14 months. Is there anywhere on the planet that would go faster? Is China faster than that?
Got it. So Texas, China 11 and 14 months. California, how many months?
And just to give you a sense of size, the Tesla Gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon, which was the biggest building in America.
Uh no, there were bigger buildings, but the Pentagon is a pretty big one.
Yeah. Or it was the biggest in units. In units of Pentagon, it's like three.
