All right. Hey guys, can you guys take a seat and, yeah, let's not be getting ready for, you know, what is coming. So, I'm going to open up with the Medal of Science and then go into your next question, and then I'll go into...
No, I think it's most relevant.
I can hit him with that.
Uh-huh. Woo!
Elon, welcome to the X Takeover. Your third year in a row. Thank you so much for your time.
You're welcome. Hey, guys.
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.
Uh, thank you. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate your support.
So, what's crazy, Elon, is four years ago we sat down here at 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's actually, you know, has 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. It's the last hour of the last day that it was possible. We would have bounced payroll a few days after Christmas if the round hadn't closed. So that was pretty stressful.
And then 2018 was pretty bad too. 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, which is insane. Absolutely insane.
Yeah. So, but I'll recount the story for those who haven't heard it. So the choke point was general assembly for the Model 3, and we were able to achieve rate almost everywhere else but except for general assembly. And for general assembly you need like a moving production line — you need shelter, you need a moving production line, power, and equipment and all that.
And 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 a moving production line situation. And the only thing that we had was some discarded equipment that was used for moving small parts, not like 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 was like a 3 or 4 degree incline. So we actually started the production line at the top and then the tiny moving 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.
Yeah, that was wild. I mean, we're laying the — as we're building the tent, we're like laying the concrete for the line and putting in the rails, so working 24/7.
Like the short sellers were actually right, meaning like if you looked at the situation — there was a crazy short position against Tesla as there has been at various times, and they had extremely good inside information. And they thought, well, there's no way we could possibly solve the production choke point. And on a set-piece battle, unlike a conventional, say, chess match situation, they had us in checkmate. But we just, you know, invented a new piece, basically, that didn't exist before. So the short sellers got steamrolled.
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 don't know. I probably did. Everybody does. So I don't know...
I was a pretty difficult-to-contain kid, you know, so like my parents would say that, you know, 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 and unlock myself. And my mom was like, 'How'd you get out?' I was like, 'I'm not telling you.' But yeah, I was hard to contain as a kid.
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. I'm not like... sorry, I'm not going around like, 'I wish people would ask me more questions,' like, you know, 'here we go with questions,' you know. So, yeah, I...
I guess it's good to hear questions that you haven't heard before. Otherwise, you know, a lot of times it's like the same questions that people ask, and I feel like I could have just, like, whatever, have these recordings of the answer and I'll just play you. 'Oh, that's question 27. Here you go. It's answer 27 that I've given a hundred times before.' So maybe I should have a... let's just have a web page with literally frequently asked questions.
It's like asking because then it's like, just go to the page and then you got it. You got the answer, 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 infinite. Can I have a selfie?' And then, like, you know, the problem is like you say yes to one person and every once in a while, and then a queue forms, pretty soon there's just never-ending selfies.
And then there's always like 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 the phone drops, and it's like, 'Oh man.' It's just... an infinite selfie loop is just a long loop, you know.
Just, uh... we had your mom and Nikki up for that, too. They had the infinite selfie loop today, but I'll pass this to Kelvin.
All right, let's start with Starship. Congratulations on flight 14.
Thanks. Yeah, it's a great team.
It's pretty wild that I can just go down there in South Texas and just see it from the road. So flight 14 lost an engine on the way up and still reached its orbit. What was happening behind the scenes in those minutes before the team got called the 'go for orbit' message?
Well, we were just trying to see why. We were trying to understand what was the reason for the engine failure. Was there, say, a common cause where we could expect to see more engine failures? Or would there — 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 de-orbit burn? Because we don't want a Starship to get stuck on orbit and then it randomly reenters and maybe lands on someone. You know, that's our main thing, is trying to make sure things are as safe as 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 engine computers. So I thought, okay, well, it's probably okay to go to orbit.
So, Elon, we know one of your famous sayings 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 de-orbit 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 of 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 like pretty easy to remedy. But the heat shield was extremely robust on this flight, and that's one of the hardest things. The other 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 like 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. It probably 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 — we catch the booster, which we've already proven we can catch the booster twice, but we're going to try to catch the ship, which is a super big deal. 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.
I'm confident it's not two weeks.
All right, you heard it here. Now, 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 would be the first time in history 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...
The pirate... pirate ship, the pirate rocket. Rapidly reusable, reliable rockets. Man, we should have gotten you a patch for this one.
Hey, when you founded SpaceX, Elon, 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 roof?
Well, because I'm very far-sighted, of course. Well, I guess if you say, as you expand into space, you're able to harness a lot more of the sun's power in space than you can on Earth.
So one, it's like important to appreciate the sheer magnitude of the sun and how the sun is pretty much everything. So the sun is 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, and then you've got Jupiter as, you know, most of the remaining mass, and then the gas giants are pretty much that. And then Earth is basically a tiny dust mote, like a rounding error in the mass of the solar system.
So we're just extremely tiny. It's like hard to believe how Earth is a tiny dust mote. So as you expand into space and you're able to harness more of the sun's power, you have to say, what are you going to use that for? It's like, well, you're going to use it for a lot of digital intelligence.
I mean, you're basically — you're either going to do computation or you're going to shape atoms. And there's going to be probably a lot more digital thinking than there will be shaping atoms, because the amount of atoms you can shape in the solar system is not that much, and a lot of the atom shaping itself will be for the purposes of building digital superintelligence and what I call creating a sentient sun.
And it may be that there are many sentient suns out there, you know, and that would help us then understand the nature of the universe and extend consciousness to, you know, beyond our solar system, ultimately to, you know, like Star Trek, to go to places you've never — I forget what the exact phrase was, but explore the universe, but go places you've never been before. And I think like maybe we'll find alien civilizations out there. Or we may find that there are the long-dead ruins of alien civilizations that have been around for maybe they had a really good run, like 10 million years, before their civilization came to an end, because nothing lasts forever. So...
Like I always think about Earth civilization. If you date Earth's civilization from the first writing, that's 5,500 years ago, like in ancient Sumer with the sort of archaic cuneiform. That's only 5,500 years.
It looks like Earth is about four and a half billion years old according to, you know, what physics suggests. And so that means human civilization has only been around one-millionth of Earth's existence.
And so if we had a civilization that lasted a million years, or let alone 10 million years, would be, I think, a very, very successful civilization if we did that.
Yeah. I mean, but that's still very tiny compared to the apparent age of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years. So like just to get to like the third place past the decimal point on the age of the universe — to increment it by a million years you'd have to go 13.8 whatever the next digit is, whatever the next digit is, plus, you know, plus one on the third digit past the decimal point. Now you're a million years old, and that would be a civilization vastly older than humanity.
