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

Thanks for having me.

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.

I think we should... I 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.

Yeah, back in '95, I was faced with a choice of either doing grad studies, a 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, or try to do something in this thing that most people had never heard of called the internet. I talked to my professor, who was Bill Nix 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.' And he said, 'This is probably the last conversation we'll have.' And he was right. So I thought things would most likely fail, not that they would most likely succeed. Then 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 I didn't even use a web server. I just read the port directly because I couldn't afford a T1. My 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 just 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, so we just slept in the office and then showered at the YMCA on Page Mill Road. 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, the host, whatnot, were investors and customers and also on the board. So they kept wanting to use our software in ways that made no sense. I wanted to go direct to consumers. Anyway, long story, dwelling too much on Zip2. But I really just wanted to do something useful on the internet because I had two choices: do a PhD and watch people build the internet, or help build the internet in some small way. I thought, 'Well, I can always try and fail and then go back to grad studies.' That ended up being reasonably successful, sold for like $300 million, which is a lot at the time. These days, that's like the minimum impulse bid for an AI startup is like a billion dollars. There's so many freaking unicorns, it's like a herd of unicorns at this point. A unicorn is a billion dollar situation. There's been inflation since, so quite a bit more money actually.

Yeah, what do you think?

For my first startup, the big 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 they'll kind of make you do things that seem sensible to them but don't really make sense with the new technology. I should point out that I didn't actually at first intend to start a company. I tried to get a job at Netscape. I sent my resume into Netscape, and Mark Andreessen knows about this, but I don't think he ever saw my resume, and nobody responded. Then I tried hanging out in the lobby of Netscape 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 software myself and see how it goes.' It wasn't from the standpoint of 'I want 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 an internet company, I had to start an internet company.

From an AI standpoint, it will so profoundly change the future, it's difficult to fathom how much. But the economy, assuming we don't things go awry and 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 a civilization of scale 2 or beyond, we're talking about an economy that is thousands of times, maybe millions of times bigger than the economy today. I did sort of feel a bit like when I was in DC taking a lot of flak for getting rid of waste and fraud, which was an interesting side quest as side quests go, but I got to get back to the main quest. So back to the main quest. I did feel a little bit like fixing the government is kind of like the beach is dirty and there's some needles and feces and trash, and you want to clean up the beach, but then there's also this thousand-foot wall of water which is a tsunami of AI. How much does cleaning the beach really matter if you've got a thousand-foot tsunami about to hit? Not that much.

Yeah, back to the main quest. Building technology, which is what I like doing. There's just so much noise. The signal-to-noise ratio in politics is terrible. I live in San Francisco, so you don't need to tell me twice. DC is all politics. But 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. You can't fool math and physics; they are rigorous judges. So I'm used to being in a maximally truth-seeking environment, and that's definitely not politics. Anyway, I'm glad to be back in technology.

Yes, I kept the chips on the table.

Well, I think with Zip2, we'd built incredible technology, but it never really got used. At least from my perspective, we had better technology than say Yahoo or anyone else, but it was constrained by our customers. So I wanted to do something where we wouldn't be constrained by our customers, go direct to consumer. That's what ended up being X.com, PayPal, essentially X.com merging with Confinity, which together created PayPal. The PayPal diaspora has created more companies than probably anything in the 21st century. So many talented people were at the combination of Confinity and X.com. I felt like we got our wings clipped somewhat with Zip2, and it's like, 'Okay, what if our wings aren't clipped and we go direct to consumer?' That's what PayPal ended up being. I got that $20 million check for my share of Zip2. At the time, I was living in a house with four housemates and had like $10,000 in the bank. Then the check arrives in the mail of all places, and my bank balance went from $10,000 to $20 million and $10,000. You're like, 'Well, okay.' Still have to pay taxes on that and all. But then I ended up putting almost all of that into X.com and just kind of keeping almost all the chips on the table. After PayPal, I was kind of curious as to why we had not sent anyone to Mars. 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. This is such a long story, so I don't want to take up too much time here.

So I was actually on the Long Island Expressway with my friend Adeo Ressi, who was a house classmate in college, and Adeo was asking me what I'm going to do after PayPal. I said, '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. But I was 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.' I started digging, and there's nothing on the NASA website. So I started digging in. I'm definitely summarizing a lot here, but my first idea was to do a philanthropic mission to Mars called 'Life to Mars,' where we would send a small greenhouse with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel, land that on Mars, and grow—hydrate the gel—and then you'd have this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background. For the longest time, by the way, I didn't realize 'money shot' is a porn reference, but anyway, the point is that would be the great shot of green plants on a red background to try to inspire NASA and the public to send astronauts to Mars. As I learned more, I came to realize—and along the way, by the way, I went to Russia in 2001 and 2002 to buy ICBMs, which is an adventure. You go and meet with Russian high command and say, 'I'd like to buy some ICBMs.' This was to get to space, not to nuke anyone. But as a result of arms reduction talks, they had to destroy a bunch of their big nuclear missiles. So I was like, 'Well, how about if we take two of those, minus the nuke, add an additional upper stage for Mars?' But it was kind of trippy being in Moscow in 2001 negotiating with the Russian military to buy ICBMs. That's crazy. But they kept raising the price on me, so it's kind of the opposite of what a negotiation should do. So I was like, 'Man, these things are getting really expensive.' Then I came to realize that actually the problem was not that there was insufficient will to go to Mars, but that there was no way to do so 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. That was in 2002.

Again, with SpaceX, starting SpaceX was really from the standpoint of, I think there's a less than 10% chance of being successful, maybe 1%, I don't know. But if a startup doesn't do something to advance rocket technology, it's definitely not coming from the big defense contractors because they just are impeded by the government, and the government just wants to do very conventional things. So it's either coming from a startup or it's not happening at all. So a small chance of success is better than no chance of success. So I started SpaceX in mid-2002 expecting to fail, like I said, probably 90% chance of failing. Even when recruiting people, I didn't try to make out that it would succeed. I said, 'We're probably going to die, but there's a 10% chance we might not die, and this is the only way to get people to Mars and advance the state of the art.' 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. None of the good chief engineers would join because they thought it was too risky, that we were going to die. So I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket. The first three flights did fail, so it was a bit of a learning exercise. The fourth one fortunately worked, but if the fourth one hadn't worked, I had no money left, and that would have been it. It would have been curtains. So it was a pretty close thing. If the fourth launch of Falcon didn't work, it would have been just curtains, and we would have just joined the graveyard of prior rocket startups. So my estimate of success was not far off. We just made it by the skin of our teeth. Tesla was happening sort of simultaneously. 2008 was a rough year. In mid-2008, summer 2008, the third launch of SpaceX had failed, our third failure in a row. The Tesla financing round had failed, and so Tesla was going bankrupt fast. It was grim. This is going to be a tale of warning, an exercise in hubris probably. Throughout that period, a lot of people were saying, 'Elon is a software guy, why is he working on hardware? Why would he choose to work on this?' 100%. You can look at the press of that time, it's still online, you can just search it. They kept calling me 'internet guy.' So 'internet guy,' aka fool, is attempting to build a rocket company. We got ridiculed quite a lot. It does sound pretty absurd: internet guy starts rocket company. Doesn't sound like a recipe for success, frankly. So I don't hold it against them. 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. I think that was maybe December 22nd, right before Christmas. Because even the fourth launch working wasn't enough to succeed. NASA also needed, we also needed a big contract to keep us alive. So I got that call from the NASA team, and I literally said, 'I love you guys.' That's not normally what they hear because it's usually pretty sober, but I was like, 'Man, this is a company saver.' Then we closed the Tesla financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible, which was 6 PM, December 24th, 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.