Elon Musk at YC AI SUS 2025

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. Probabilistically, it seemed unlikely. But I wanted to at least try. 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.

Well, I was kind of echoing, but yeah, back in '95, I was faced with a choice: either do grad studies, a PhD at Stanford in material science, or actually work on ultracapacitors for potential use in electric vehicles, essentially trying to solve the range problem for electric vehicles, or try to do something with this thing that most people had never heard of called the internet. I talked to my professor, Bull Nicks, in the material science department and said, 'Can I defer for a quarter? Because this will probably fail, and then I'll need to come back to college.' He said, 'This is probably the last conversation we'll have,' and he was right. I thought things would most likely fail, not that they would most likely succeed. In '95, I wrote basically the first or close to the first maps directions internet white pages and yellow pages on the internet. I just wrote that personally and didn't even use a web server; I just read the board directly because I couldn't afford a T1. The original office was on Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto. There was an ISP on the floor below, so I drilled a hole through the floor and ran a LAN cable directly to the ISP. My brother joined me and another co-founder, Greg Curry, who passed away. At the time, we couldn't even afford a place to stay, so the office was $500 a month, and we just slept in the office and showered at the YMCA on Page El Camino. We ended up doing a little bit of a useful company, Zip2, in the beginning. We did build a lot of really good software technology, but we were somewhat captured by the legacy media companies. The New York Times and others were investors and customers and also on the board, so they kept wanting to use the software in ways that made no sense. I wanted to go direct to consumer. Anyway, it's a long story, but I really just wanted to do something useful on the internet because I had two choices: do my PhD and watch people build the internet, or help build the internet in some small way. I thought, 'I can always try and fail and then go back to grad studies.' It ended up being reasonably successful, sold for about $300 million, which was a lot at the time. These days, that's like the minimum impulse bid for an AI startup. There are so many unicorns now; it's like a herd of unicorns. A unicorn used to be a million-dollar situation, but there's been inflation since. In 1995, you could probably buy a burger for a nickel. But the high-level AI space is pretty intense. You see companies less than a year old getting billion-dollar, multi-billion-dollar valuations, which could pan out in some cases, but it is eye-watering.

I'm pretty bullish, honestly. I think the people in this room are going to create a lot of the value that a billion people in the world should be using. We're scratching the surface of it.

My first startup, the big mistake was having too much shareholder and board control from legacy media companies, who necessarily see things through the lens of legacy media. They'll make you do things that seem sensible to them but don't make sense with the new technology. I should point out that I didn't actually intend to start a company at first. I tried to get a job at Netscape. I sent my resume, but I don't think they ever saw it, and nobody responded. Then I tried hanging out in the lobby to see if I could bump into someone, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I thought, 'This is ridiculous. I'll just write stuff for myself and see how it goes.' It wasn't from the standpoint of wanting to start a company; I just wanted to be part of building the internet in some way. Since I couldn't get a job at any company, I had to start a company.

AI will so profoundly change the future that it's difficult to fathom how much. Assuming things don't go awry and AI doesn't kill us all, you'll see an economy that is about 10 times more than the current economy. If we become machine descendants, a cloud-ship-scale civilization or beyond, we're talking about an economy that is thousands of times, maybe millions of times bigger than today. I did sort of feel like when I was in DC taking a lot of flak for getting rid of waste and fraud, it's not like those people were saving the baby panda; they were stealing money. So I got a lot of flak for that. It was an interesting side quest, but I had to get back to the main quest. Fixing the government is like cleaning a dirty beach with some needles and feces, but there's also a thousand-foot wall of water, a tsunami of AI about to hit. How much does cleaning the beach really matter if you have a thousand-foot tsunami about to hit? Not that much.