Elon, welcome to the X Takeover, your third year in a row. Thank you so much for your time.
We have over 2,000 people here at Giga Texas today, and we are all here to support you and the work you are doing for humanity. So, thank you.
So, what's crazy, Elon, is four years ago, we sat down here in Giga Texas with you when the factory wasn't even running, and you described how close Tesla was coming to not surviving in 2008. Looking out at this community today of 2,000 people, what makes you pause and appreciate how far things have come?
Yeah. It's difficult to imagine here in 2026 that Tesla has actually come close to death multiple times. Actually, 2008 was the worst. You know, that's where we closed the financing round at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 2008, the last hour, the last day that was possible. We would have payroll a few days after Christmas if the round hadn't closed. So that was pretty stressful.
And then 2018 was pretty bad too, where we had to get to 5,000 a week of the Model 3 or go bankrupt. That was a pretty wild situation, which I guess probably a lot of people know the story of, but we had to figure out some way to increase Model 3 production by 50% in three weeks.
Yeah. So how did you do it?
I'll recount the story for those who haven't heard it. So the choice point was general assembly of the Model 3, and we were able to achieve rate almost everywhere else except for general assembly. And for general assembly you need a production line, you need shelter, you need power and equipment and all that.
We maxed out the two production lines that we had, and then we needed a third one, and that was where we built the tent in the parking lot. And then we needed some way to move the cars down the line, like the moving production line situation, and the only thing that we had was some discarding equipment that was used for moving small parts, not whole cars, and it didn't actually have the power to move the whole cars, but the parking lot was on a slight incline.
It's like a three or four degree incline. So we actually started the production line at the top, and then the sort of tiny production line that was just meant for parts was actually able to move the cars because they were going slightly downhill. And so we were able to increase production by 30% in three weeks.
Like the line and putting the rails, working 24/7. Like the short sellers were actually right, meaning if you looked at the situation, there was a crazy short position against Tesla at various times, and they had extremely good inside information. And they thought, well, there's no way we possibly solve the production choke point. And on a set-piece battle, like a conventional chess match situation, they had us in checkmate. But we just invented a new piece, basically.
Hey, Elon, we just had your mom here on stage today. What story are you hoping she doesn't tell us?
I don't know. Maybe I pooped my pants when I was like a toddler or something. I probably did. So, I don't know.
I was a pretty difficult to contain kid, and so my parents would tell me I'm not supposed to leave the house or whatever. When I was like, I don't know, four or five years old, I would just constantly leave the house and go running down the street. And then they'd lock me in a room so I couldn't run away and run down the street. And then we had one of those old locks where you could poke the key through the door, you know, the lock's accessible from both sides, and I could see the key and I poked the key until it fell down, and then I was able to get a piece of paper to scoop it up and bring it to the other side myself. And my mom was like, 'How did you get out?' I was like, 'I'm not telling you.' But yeah, I was a project.
So before we jump into more specific things, what's something that you wish more people would ask you?
Well, I don't really wish people would ask me questions, to be honest. Sorry. I wish people would ask more questions. So, yeah, I guess it's good to hear questions that you haven't heard before. Otherwise, a lot of times it's the same questions that people ask, and I feel like I could just have these recordings of the answer. I'll play you. Oh, that's question 27. Here we go. I've given a hundred times before. So maybe I should just have a web page with literally frequently asked questions.
It's like just go to the page and then you got it. You got the answers. You know, it's like the infinite selfie loop.
Yeah, exactly. My idea of hell is being stuck in an infinite selfie loop. Like it's an infinite kind of selfie, and they're like, you know, it's probably like say yes to one person every once in a while, and then there's a queue for pretty soon, it's never-ending selfies, and then there's always something goes wrong with the phone, or they don't get the camera right, or the effect is wrong, and then it's like, god damn it, you know, and they drop the phone off, and it's like, oh man. So it just can't be an infinite selfie loop. This is a long loop, you know.
Yeah, we had your mom and Nikki up for that too. They had the infinite selfie loop today. But I'll pass it to Kelvin.
All right, let's start with Starship. Congratulations on flight 14.
So, flight 14 lost an engine on the way up and still reached orbit. What was happening behind the scenes in those minutes before the team called the go for orbit message?
Well, we're just trying to see why. We're trying to understand what was the reason for the engine failure. Was there, say, a common cause where we expect to see more engine failures? Or the biggest question is, would there be a potential problem with restarting the sea level Raptor engines, the three ones with the smaller nozzles in the center for the deorbit burn? Because we don't want Starship to get stuck in orbit and then randomly reenter and maybe land on something. You know, that's our main thing is trying to make sure things are safe and possible. So the cause of the engine out, I think, was basically a failure in the flight computer software or engine computer software, I should say, which didn't appear to be anything that was present in any of the other engines. So I thought, okay, well, it's probably okay to go for it.
So Elon, we know one of your famous things is from the impossible to merely late. Did this flight feel like a turning point in what's possible now for Starship?
Well, I guess it is a good milestone. Because I mean, we could have gone to orbit many times before now. But the reason we didn't go to orbit before now was because we wanted to be extremely confident of being able to deorbit safely. So that's why we only went to orbit on this flight. But pretty much all of the prior missions, in fact, literally all the prior missions could have gone to orbit.
So at this point, everything's looking quite positive. The heat shield is looking robust. The engines are robust apart from that one glitch, but that glitch doesn't seem to be too much of an issue. It's pretty easy to remedy. But the heat shield was extremely robust on this flight, and that's one of the hardest things. Another really hard thing is, like I said, just getting to extremely high engine reliability, and everything looked good.
The big milestone that's coming up, hopefully on the next flight, which we don't know the exact date because we're making a bunch of improvements to the rocket. So between every flight there's often hundreds, sometimes thousands of small changes to improve things. In this case, the number of changes is not very many, but some of them take a fair bit of work, and we've got to go inside the tank to make some of these changes. So we don't know the exact launch date, but probably about four weeks or so. Four to six weeks is about right. If it launches a little bit before Thanksgiving is my guess. And that one, if it succeeds, is a big one because we're going to try to catch the booster, and if we do, that'll be the first time that there's been full recovery of an orbital class rocket.
Sounds good. You said four to six weeks. I'm not used to that. I'm used to the two weeks phrase.
Falcon Heavy is not two weeks.
All right. What's the hardest part left to get right once you catch the Starship for the first time? What is the next big goal after that?
Well, the next big milestone would be to refly both the booster and the ship. So the upcoming milestone will be the first time that all parts of an orbital rocket have been recovered. But then the flight after that hopefully will be the first time that all parts of an orbital rocket are reflown. And then there's a long tail of engineering and production work and work on the launch system and everything to make it rapidly reusable. So I say it's kind of the rapidly reusable, reliable rockets.
Rapidly reusable, reliable rockets. Man, we should have gotten you a patch for this one.
And when you founded SpaceX, could you have imagined its mission expanding into AI and data centers in space? And how did you come to see rockets and AI belonging under one group?
