How we feeling today? I'm just going to need just a little bit more. How we feeling today? How we feeling? All right. That's what I'm talking about. My name is Dani Jones. Some of you might have seen me last night. But today is probably one of the highlights of my experience here at Summit. And it's because one of my good friends, Kiko Donv, is here to speak with you all today. And the greatest thing about Kiko was the fact that he went to the greatest university in the world, University of Michigan. I wanted to give you guys a quick story. I remember I was sitting on my couch and this is the first time that SpaceX had launched a crew capsule and I was watching the television screen and I was watching the entire SpaceX team and I saw Kiko and that was a moment where I was just so proud of my friend because I met Kiko at the University of Michigan and I'd heard all the great things that he had done. But I had yet to see the greatness in action. My face lit up. I took a picture and I sent it to him and just like Kiko will respond back, he's like, 'Yeah, man. This is what I do.' And that's Kiko, one of the greatest minds in the space race, the one that has put people into the atmosphere and beyond. Kiko Donv has changed the essence of humanity by virtue of the work that he's done and he is here with you today. I'd like to introduce to you my friend Kiko Donv.
Thank you, Dani. So, like he said, I'm super excited to be here. Thank you guys for coming to Detroit. As Dani said, I grew up here in Michigan. I was actually going to tell you guys, my first concert ever was down the street when I was in 10th grade. It was Eminem. So, it was a lot of fun. To be down here, you know, like 20-some years later is something special. Today's going to be kind of cool. We've never done this before. I've done talks, and then my partner Franz, who's the chief designer at Tesla, has done talks, but we've never actually done a talk with an exec from SpaceX and an exec from Tesla together. So, this is kind of a first. And the reason we thought it'd be cool to combine the two is because a future where we have two planets that are both self-sustaining and strong is a future that we think is worth fighting for. I like to say that there is no Mars without Earth and there is no Earth without Mars. So, we have to do both and we're going to show you how we're working towards those goals today. You know, SpaceX was built with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary. We design and manufacture the world's most advanced rockets, spaceships, and satellites. It's what we do. But it didn't always start that way. We were just a little company that formed a little office in 2002 founded by a guy named Elon Musk, a couple engineers in a mariachi band. We literally started from nothing in an office. It took us about 6 years to launch our first rocket, Falcon 1, in 2008. Then we launched Falcon 9 for the first time in 2010. But for those first five years, we had a contract with NASA to resupply the space station. But launches were pretty sparse. We started to get into a rhythm. But everything really didn't actually change until 2016 when we figured out how to land one of those rockets. For the first time ever, we made rockets reusable. And all of a sudden, we took one step closer to making space flight aircraft-like. Now, we were still getting into a cadence, meeting the demands of the commercial industry. But it was in 2020 that demand skyrocketed when we decided to deploy a global internet constellation from lower Earth orbit, Starlink. All of a sudden, we went from 26 launches to 61 launches to 96 launches in 2023 and started launching at a pace that the Earth's never seen before. Last year in 2024, we launched 134 times, which beat the total launch record for any other entity prior to that. As you can see with the image, human space flight took off. We basically lowered the cost of access to space by an order of magnitude, effectively building a railroad between here and lower Earth orbit. Hundreds of companies have been started because all of a sudden you can get to space. You could not before. And this has all happened just in the last 10 years. Starlink was a big part of that growth. At this point, we have markets in 135 countries that are now live. That's over three billion people that have access to connectivity. Places in the world where you could never before get high-speed broadband internet now all of a sudden have access to this. Yes, let's go. Over five million active customers. You hopefully you'll get in on a United flight soon or on a cruise ship, or maybe any of you guys use this in your personal life while you're out on some sort of vacation somewhere far, far away. Connectivity is changing the world and Starlink's really made it super easy for anyone anywhere to get online. I've been lucky enough to work on a ton of different products at SpaceX, but to be honest, Starlink is the first time that I feel like I worked on something that changed people's lives. I don't know how many times I've heard stories of someone that had a family member that never had access to telemedicine, students that couldn't get access to education or had poor education that all of a sudden just through connectivity through Starlink were able to learn and grow or help themselves. I had a story during COVID where a woman was basically locked away in her house and had no other way to connect with her family members and we had a team actually go deploy a Starlink system over there and all of a sudden she could FaceTime with her friends and family. Truly changing the world for the better and it makes me super proud to have gotten a chance to work on this. It's only going to grow. The other thing we've done is really changed the game when it comes to human space flight. So, we've flown 17 crew missions to date from 17 different countries. A lot of people don't realize that in 2011 when we retired the space shuttle, America didn't have a way to get back to low Earth orbit. In 2020, just a little over 5 years ago, it was May 30th, 2020, we launched Bob and Doug. It's the first time America had a chance to have American astronauts back on a vehicle launched from here in the States. But the cool thing is this isn't just an American human space flight thing. SpaceX and Dragon the capsule along with Falcon 9 have basically made it global human space flight. One of those astronauts was the first woman from Saudi Arabia to ever fly into space. It's not just about us having something for our country, but rather opening up space and the ability for humans to fly and go way beyond. But if you're going to go to Mars, you don't necessarily want to take the minivan. You want to take the jumbo jet. Enter Starship. Now, while Falcon 9 was a reusable vehicle, it was only evolutionary. Starship will be a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle, both stages, that's going to have the ability to actually transport many tons to the surface of Mars. It is the future and it will change the game forever.
All right. All operators on countdown one. Flight directors go for launch. Stage separation. Booster. Yeah. Hi. All right. I don't think you guys get the absurdity of the video at the end. Has anyone here ever caught a skyscraper falling from the sky going supersonic speeds with chopsticks? Didn't think so. So, the reason that we designed the vehicle this way, here's where I want to talk about revolutionary versus evolutionary. So, Falcon launches and then we land the first stage, but Falcon's got landing legs and we often land it downrange. We basically landed on this big ship in the ocean. And that's been amazing because we've been able to reuse those vehicles and lower the cost of access to space. But that vehicle lands on this ship, and then we got to bring it all the way back to port, fold the landing legs up, get it back to the hangar, and get it ready to fly again. So even if we don't have to do anything to the rocket, it still takes us many days just to go from launch to launch. Now if you think about an airplane, an airplane takes off and lands on that same exact runway. So, when we were thinking about Starship, we wanted a vehicle to truly act like an airplane. We realized it's not only got to take off from the launchpad, it's got to land at the launch pad. And so, we were going to add legs and then deploy, but Elon likes to push us to run this thing called the algorithm where we really challenge the requirements. And he's like, 'Dude, I don't think you need legs. I think we should just get these giant Mechazilla arms and figure out how to snatch this thing out of thin air.' And we were effectively like, 'I don't know if this is going to work.' But like many things that we've thought of that have seemed absolutely crazy, there's only one rule that matters and that's physics. So we go to first principles. We design a system, a rocket and a ground system in architecture, a tower and some chopsticks, and then we go for it. And what you have is a completely revolutionary space system. So I talked about lowering the cost of access to space. Falcon 9 basically cut it by an order of magnitude. But when we talk about actually making life multiplanetary, the real goal you're optimizing for is the cost per ton to the surface of Mars. Right now, it's about a billion dollars for one ton to get to the surface of Mars, which is an absurd amount of money. When you think about what it's going to take to do a self-sustaining city on Mars, it's like a million tons, maybe 10 million tons. This is obviously not economically feasible unless we figure out how to lower that cost. So what Starship is going to do is cut that cost from Falcon by another factor of 100 because we're going to get rid of all that work and the only cost you'll have to actually launch the rocket is the cost of propellant. That's why reusability is the key. Look through the arc of civilization and what you will see is anytime humans make a leap in transportation, steam ships, roads, railroads, jet travel, you see this step function in capability. That's what rockets are going to do. They're going to change the way we live and work forever. And they're going to open up an entirely new industry and economy. And it's very, very, very exciting. And I'm hyped. I got to see Tim talk before this, and I feel like this is me trying to take advantage of this little moment in time that we have to do something special. We want to go to Mars in '26. We've already started to plan for it. The first missions are going to be actually just focused on learning. We got to get through deep space, get to the end. So we want to make sure we understand what it takes to travel through the environment and land. We've already started to look at potential landing sites. Specifically, there's a region called Arcadia, super flat and it's got a bunch of ice water that you want to use for water, oxygen, and fuel depots basically. We started to think about what the bases are going to look like, how we're actually going to create the infrastructure and how that's all going to come together. And then I always like to show people this picture. I got a 3 and 5-year-old. I like to read to them at least every night that I'm home. We got Goodnight Michigan, Goodnight Florida, Goodnight Moon. But I get all the feels when I think about a Martian kid on the surface getting read a book, Goodnight Earth. And I do think this is going to happen. And I do think this is a future that's worth fighting for. That's my goal. It's to make life multiplanetary. But like I said up front, we're not going to have Mars without Earth. We need Earth to be self-sustaining. We need to figure out how to bring autonomy on safely. So I want to introduce our next speaker. Franz is one of the best automotive designers in the country and really I would say in the past 100 years. He's the chief designer at Tesla and he's been in that role since 2008. He's basically shaped the iconic designs of the Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, and Tesla Roadster. He basically makes the Tesla products look cool. And he's a dear friend of mine. It's his first summit. So, if you guys don't mind, let's give Franz a super warm welcome.
Thanks, Kiko, for that introduction. Happy to be back in Detroit. Actually lived down the street on Woodward in the early '90s and the city was a little different then and I was able to survive and still be here on stage. So, it's great to be back here. Yeah, I've been with Tesla for 17 years and it's been a similar story to SpaceX. We started small. In fact, I was an army of one. Elon hired me as the designer for Tesla and we started in the back corner of SpaceX in a little tent and we set out to change the world. We had this amazing technology. We're working to make Earth sustainable. And this technology just needed a design wrapper around it to allow people to feel good about the technology and be attracted to it and want to spend their hard-earned money on something that they could park in their driveway and drive them around. And similar to the clothes we wear, vehicles are very often a fashion statement. But there's a little more to just designing cool products. Our vision even at the early onset was about democratizing transportation. And if you think about that, transportation can be pretty expensive. You just heard how expensive it is to get to Mars. Just getting around the corner can be expensive as well. And our goal all along has been how do we democratize transportation, make it affordable for everybody. And that's through autonomy. And with autonomy, we can have a safer environment, safer roads, more accessible transportation for younger generations, older generations, handicapped, etc. It's how we get cleaner cities, cleaner air, and give people back time. Time is the most precious thing that we have. And if I as a designer can find a way, I'm not a doctor, if I can find a way to help people get the most precious thing back, then I feel like we're doing something great. We were founded on a proof of concept, similar to what you heard about SpaceX. We started small. We started with Roadster and then subsequently we've been building products through the years. Model S was our first designed, engineered, and manufactured EV and probably the first electric vehicle designed and manufactured completely as an EV. The Roadster started as a gas powered car and we converted it, but since then we've been changing the metrics and continuing to do that through our products and some of the future products that you see coming as well. But electrification was just the first step. It's an enabler. It helps us get to a more autonomous future. And the things that we've been doing and hiding in plain sight are some of the key pieces that will enable a more autonomous transportation system. Things like self-presenting doors. In this autonomous world of robo taxis, how do you get in and out? In 2015, we started with doors that automatically open as you walk up to the car, automatically close as you sit in the car. It's an opportunity for us to allow you to get into these vehicles and not have to worry about it. We also started designing with Model 3 a really clean interior interface that was really focused around an infotainment system. I like to say that the screen is the hero of the interior. And if you remove the steering wheel, you're left with this beautiful, clean, simple aesthetic that is a hallmark of all of our Tesla interiors. But it's really focused around the infotainment and the center screen and the interaction of that. And that's a stepping stone. What do you do in your vehicle when you're not driving? You have a great entertainment system. And so we've been working since day one on a really immersive entertainment infotainment system. And we've always focused on a rich in-car media. Whether it's gaming, videos, work, etc. It really paves the way for a great experience when you're actually being driven around. I have kids. They love to just run out to the car and play the games even when we're not going anywhere. They're just sitting in the driveway playing games in the car. When you can provide an experience like that, then it makes your experience as you're moving around even better. Another enabler for autonomy is drive by wire. In Cybertruck, we're the first vehicle to have a completely decoupled drive, brake, and steering system. That means there's no mechanical connection back to the wheels. So now if you remove the steering wheel and you remove the brakes, the car can still drive and move around on its own. Again, another enabler and it's hiding in plain sight in our Cybertruck. But all that happens with software in the background. And we've been quietly working on some really amazing software. From being able to just walk up to the car with a phone in your pocket, no key, get in, the car actually automatically selects drive, whether it's forward or reverse depending on the situation. You never even need to touch anything. We have smart summon. You can call the car from a parking spot, have it park in your garage when you can't get in and out of the car. Driver profile. If you have more than one car or if you're getting in a robo taxi, the way you like your radio station or what music you're listening to, how you like your seat, your HVAC, your climate, all already goes with you as you get into the next vehicle or into a robo taxi. It's seamless app integration. And then, of course, another enabler is wireless charging. We're already working on that. It allows the vehicle to charge autonomously. So when it's not driving somebody or needs to charge, there's no human in the loop. All this is happening autonomously. But none of this autonomous world exists if we don't have an amazing full self-driving software suite. And we've been working on full self-driving since roughly 2020. And it's been a vision only based system. You see a lot of these other systems out there with LIDAR and radars and all this kind of stuff on the vehicle that doesn't look great, especially in my mind. All of our vehicles are vision based only. They're hiding on the car. You don't even know that they're there. And we live in a very vision-based world. We learn to drive through vision and audio. So we developed a system so that we could drop in as if a human dropped into a car and be able to drive anywhere in the world. There's no mapping required. There's nothing else required other than just seeing the world around you and reacting to it. And with seven or eight cameras that don't blink, they're not distracted. We have eyes on the road and it's just safer and safer. And it's infinitely scalable and adaptable to anywhere on this planet. We've been hearing a lot about AI, but AI takes a lot of energy. So one of the things that we've been doing at our company is working on a way to harvest energy. Solar has been a part of Tesla for many, many years. We're hearing these ideas that electricity consumption is going to increase even 75% by next year. And 10% of all US energy in 2030 will be focused on AI. So we believe that solar is a way that we can offset all that energy consumption. And we've been actively working on developing solar both for commercial use and for residential. It's an amazing feeling to have solar panels on your roof, a battery backup system, and be able to be off-grid and responsible for your own development of electricity or be able to move your vehicle around. You can create your own power generation source. But with power, you need to be able to store it. And we've also been working on energy storage which is key to enabling the grid to sustain the grid. Our electric grid is really based on peak loads and we need to be able to balance the grid but also harvest all this energy that we're storing from the sun and be able to use it. So we're working on both commercial scale with megapacks that are going around the world and residential that you can again harvest your own energy, store it, and use it as you see fit. And that leads to a supercharger network that's incredibly vast. In the early days, range anxiety was a thing. People worried about electric vehicles not being able to go anywhere. One of the first things that we did with Elon's vision was to create a system that enabled people to go anywhere. And you can see on this map that we have an incredible charging network. You can now drive anywhere practically in so many parts of the world without ever having to worry about running out of energy. There's charging, supercharging, charging at your house, destination charging. It's everywhere. And all it takes is a little switch to inductive charging at those sites to allow for a fully autonomous system that again, you don't have to plug anything in. You don't have to do any work. The car charges for you. So, as you can see, all these elements are leading up to a pretty big event that we're about to launch this month in Austin, which is a ride sharing program. Any Tesla, if you own a Tesla, a friend owns a Tesla, can be turned into a robo taxi. You can start to generate your own income by sending your car out to pick up your friends, your neighbors, or into a system. It's amazing. It's safer. Statistics are already showing that autonomous driving is magnitudes of order safer than a human driver. There's no distractions. And this is just going to keep getting better and better. Our robo taxi system will begin in June and continue to roll out worldwide as fast as we can go because we think it's better from a giving time back, a sustainability perspective, and just making a better overall environment. And who really wants to drive in traffic anyway? I certainly don't. So, why don't we get Kiko back up here? I think he's going to throw me a couple oddball questions.
Thanks. Ah, can you hear me? Okay. So, Franz is being modest about his designer background. I went to engineering school, and you went to design school, correct? Correct. So in engineering school when you get taught to build something, you get requirements. You get told, okay, it has to weigh this much, it has to move at this speed. But no one says it has to look cool. And it actually wasn't until I started working at SpaceX where Elon was very like, 'No, dude. It has to look rad.' That's like one of the requirements. To the point where we would have to iterate on everything we were doing just to make it look cool. Which was super challenging from an engineering perspective. So my first question to you is how do you balance the function and the fit and meeting the needs of actually building the product that works the way you want it to with making it look cool?
I mean that's the battle that we struggle with every day. As a designer, you see the world and you look at everything out there from nature to things that we've created to architecture, fashion, products that are in the world, and you realize that besides nature, maybe in some way, it's all designed and it all has an aesthetic and it all could be better than what we see. And as a designer, we feel like we want to make an impact in a positive way. But none of that happens if we don't have the ability to actually produce it or manufacture it or even engineer it so that it can work or do whatever it is. So we've created this kind of symbiosis between designer and engineer where we go back and forth. In our team, we've developed designers to think like engineers because we know the engineer process is A to B, straight line, fast as possible, and it's the simplest way. And sometimes an aesthetic has an emotion to it and it's not the straight line. Why are shoes cool? They perform a function, but they also have a fashion element to it. So, I think that the hardest thing that we do is that interaction. But we have to understand the principles of what an engineer is thinking and the solution set to get our ideas realized or they don't ever come into existence. So it's a constant dialogue and I think it's a really healthy one. Sometimes we have to agree to disagree, but being pushed by somebody like Elon who really sees the idea of an amazing concept and breaking physics but doing it in an aesthetically pleasing way that attracts people to the product is really important. That's the underlying thing that we've done at Tesla: try to make all this amazing technology acceptable and something that you aspire to, something that you want to own, that you feel good about owning. There's probably some secret sauce in there, too.
But when is perfect the enemy of good enough? There's never a practice designer, there's never perfect. And so you have to learn to lift the brush at some point in order to realize that your widget needs to get out into the world. You have to stop at some point and let it go into the world and then iterate if you get a chance after that. But aspiring to perfection is the goal, but you have to realize that you probably won't ever get there. And it can be a curse, too. I'm always cursed with delivering but feeling like we left out so much. And then when you're driving on the highway, you see it every day, all day, driving right by you. It is terrible. I see these cars and I'm like, 'Oh, we screwed that up. That's a mess. Next time we got to fix this.' And sometimes you get a chance, sometimes you don't. It's okay. The rockets are perfect.
Yeah, I know. When it comes to risk-taking, I know how I think about it in a technical setting. I'm going to push the performance of the engine or this component or this environment maybe isn't as analyzed as I'd like it to be. So I'm going to have to push the envelope and try it. But when it comes to design, and I think we can talk Cybertruck because this is the ultimate example of risk-taking in the automobile industry. What's your thought process? You want to push, you want to do something different. It's going to be crazy, but it might totally flop. How do you go through that in your head and walk us through that?
I think Cybertruck is an interesting case study. It's probably not too dissimilar to the idea you were explaining earlier about catching a skyscraper with some toothpick chopsticks. We had this idea to create a pickup truck and we started looking at pickup trucks. They've been basically the same for 50 years, 60 years. Really no change. We lined up all the trucks, took the badges off, and couldn't tell the difference. And we thought if we're going to approach this, we can do a first principles perspective on it and really break down just what makes a great truck. So we started looking at ideas like unibody, stronger in general. Putting the toughness on the outside. Typically a car's weakness is the paint. It is the weakest point. But when you have a tough truck, you have this really fragile, delicate skin around it. So we started looking at alternative materials, stainless steel like what you guys are using. But then that starts to create some other challenges on how you form it. Some of these materials are just so hard that if you're bulletproof, it's hard to stamp that. And you start to evolve this idea around origami and folding that you can do in mass production. And we ended up very quickly in a unique form. If you peel back the odd shape of it, the functionality of what we were trying to achieve with the truck is still 100% there. It just has a little bit of a different shape, but the shape was driven out of some functional ideas of how do you manufacture different. The manufacturing process. There's no massive stamping dies, no massive stamping machines. It's just break forming. There's no paint shop. So suddenly our factories become more sustainable. We're not emitting all these toxins into the air with a paint shop and the energy that consumes. If you guys ever get a chance to take a tour of the Tesla factory, it's one of the coolest things you will ever see. The casting, the giant casting machine for the Cybertruck, it is like in one moment I'm in the industrial era in the 1920s and then the very next moment I'm in the 2050s. Henry Ford started giant castings in his factory as well, and then over time it went to multiple little parts coming together to create one part. And we've gone back again to first principles and said if you could have one part, it's far easier and far better. It's just one giant part now. I think the casting machines are the biggest in the world potentially for one piece casting.
So Franz mentioned bulletproof. Do you guys know Franz's story about bulletproof? Did anyone watch the Cybertruck unveil event? Okay, so him and Elon are on stage and they're like, 'Yeah, the Cybertruck's bulletproof, the glass will never break.' And then Franz takes his little hammer that's not even that big of a hammer and he hits the window. It was a big hammer. It was a big hammer. Okay, fine. But anyways, he takes this big hammer and is like, 'Yeah, watch. We'll take this big hammer. We're going to smash into the truck. It's going to be fine.' And the glass definitely shatters right there on stage in front of everyone during the live event. And you could tell both you and Elon, I was like, 'Oh yeah, no, they didn't plan that. No, that was not planned.' But maybe I'm trying to extract the lesson from that. What did you learn from this experience of don't throw steel balls at glass?
Well, I did it twice, too, if you recall. I think in a weird sort of way it ended up being an amazing marketing thing, but man, I was sweating bullets. To the testament of somebody like Elon, we know Elon maybe in a different way than the rest of the world does, potentially unfortunately. He was incredibly soft. He said, 'Don't worry about it. It's fine. It's okay.' The shock moment at that moment was hard, but afterwards he's like, 'It's great. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it.' And the world doesn't see that side of it.
It's so funny you say that. I'm actually going to tell a story myself. Christmas morning 2023. I was in bed. Our kids were going to get up. My whole family was there and my phone won't stop ringing at 4 in the morning. And it's my recovery director. We have a whole naval fleet. And we had launched a rocket 3 days ago and he kept calling me because the rocket had tipped over on the barge and had exploded and was basically disintegrated, which is the equivalent of losing $60 million on Christmas morning. It's just a huge bummer. People got to work Christmas and I'm like this is definitely not what Santa Claus ordered this morning for me. I got to tell my wife, 'Hey, I got to work this morning for a little bit.' And I had the exact same experience. I texted Elon and Gwynne and he's like, 'Don't worry about it. You had a great year. No problem. No sweat off your back. You'll get better. We'll fix it. We'll get stronger. You guys are crushing it. No worries.' And they both were like, 'Just focus. Enjoy yourself. Merry Christmas.' And move on. People rarely hear those stories. You think of this environment as so incredibly demanding. But I think I have the best boss in the world.
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe I'll ask you a question. When I started, I started in the back corner of SpaceX and was there for all the early Falcon 1 launches. Some of them didn't work and the fourth launch had to work for you guys to survive. I was sitting next to Gwynne as we were waiting for the launch to happen and the air in the room was so thick with anticipation. Everything hangs in the balance for that moment. But you fast forward to 140 launches in a year and now it's just like going out and getting a coffee. How has that changed from when you started to launching today, which is like, 'Oh, another SpaceX launch, of course it worked'?
Yeah, you definitely normalize it because that's the goal. We got to make it boring. No one other than my three-year-old sees an airplane and goes 'airplane'. My kids do that, but humans don't do that. The intent is you got to make space flight aircraft-like where it's just another day in the office. I will tell you, human space flight ages you greatly every single time. When there's a launch with four people on top of a million pounds of propellant and you're about to hurl them into space at 17,500 mph where a gazillion things can go wrong, but everything has to go right for it to work perfectly, it's a harrowing experience. I think I've aged simply because of the human flights. And new development is also like the Starship flights come with that same sort of heart-pounding energy because you don't really know what's going to happen. But space flight is intoxicating. I like to say it's like a narcotic. Once you do something that no one's ever done before, it's like a shot of energy. It's like a drug almost. It's the equivalent of what I would assume winning a national championship or a Super Bowl is like. You get this shot of, 'Oh man, I've achieved this peak and now all I want to do is go do it again.' There are very few things where you can work on something so long and so hard and then it's either good or bad in about a minute. It's very binary, very fast. And winning is this huge amazing thing. You're in orbit. And losing is a legit massive explosion. Not just a metaphor. There's actual fire and stuff raining from the sky. So, you got to win. And you got to try. But also, a testament to the amazing teams that you have. What you don't see behind the scenes is just an incredible team effort of brilliant people coming together. We have that in our group. You guys certainly have it. What do you think makes our team special? What makes our culture? What do we drive our people to do that makes it such that we can accomplish these things?
I think in our situation, it really is focus on a really singular mission, which is making our planet a more sustainable planet and what are the tools that we have in order to be a stepping stone in doing that and being a lightning rod for getting people energized around that concept. You can see what's happened over the span of just 15 to 20 years of the EV revolution that's happened in the world. It really was because of what we did, how we brought it to the world in a way that people could accept it, this incredible technology that became normal. I think if you have people that see that, they want to be a part of that mission. They want to be a part of that focus and that goal. And I think it starts from there. And then you just have incredibly passionate people that are incredibly intelligent. Sometimes they're not great as a team member, but at that level, amazing people want to work with amazing people. Good people just want to work with good people. And we want always the amazing people because it draws more people to them and like-minded. You guys experience the same thing. But for us it really focuses around the mission first because then you can erase all the craziness and all the stuff that gave me gray hair yesterday and just focus on the mission.
And that's, you know, you put your head down. I was explaining this to someone at lunch today. You actually have to have that because it's never enough. I get this comment when someone's trying to quit. They're like, 'Kiko, it feels like it's never enough here.' And I'm like, 'Well, do you have a self-sustaining city on Mars?' And they're like, 'No.' I'm like, 'Then it's not good enough. You literally have to.' And that can be very tough for someone. When your goal is so big and it feels like your whole life is just sprinting, sprinting, sprinting, it could feel like there's no end. So you have to have a team that can embrace the journey and realize it's all about the ride. The destination is the goal, but you got to enjoy the here and now and the ride. The other thing we tell our team, I think something that both SpaceX and Tesla do better than anyone is we do things fast, fast at scale with hardware. So we have this saying, and Franz, I think you have a good play on it, which is we tell our teams, you got to be the winning race car driver. Which means you got to drive the car the fastest, but it also means you can't crash. Winning race car drivers don't just drive fast, they drive fast and they don't crash. Which is really important. So you got to keep the car on the tracks.
Yeah. Following on that metaphor, a great race car driver has to find the limits. And in order to find the limits, you have to go into the corner maybe a little faster than you would and spin, lose control, so that you know where the actual limit is. I feel like we get to that point, we lose control sometimes, but we know then where our limit is and we can push forward from there. One of our greatest challenges, and this comes back to our team, but for both SpaceX and Tesla, is we're not underdogs anymore. In fact, we kind of have a target on our back now on multiple fronts. So both companies are learning and one of our biggest challenges especially as leaders is how do you be a startup when you're not a startup anymore? What built SpaceX and Tesla and made us so successful, the drive, the innovation, the life or death mentality, we have to try to recreate that consistently even when you're a trillion dollar company, even when you're a $350 billion company. So we're working through how to do that. I think it comes down to the mission and setting hard goals, the mission and the people. And if you, our team, there's a few execs at Tesla, but they're all treating their team as if it is a startup company. I do the same. Amazing people, running as lean as possible, breaking things and figuring out from there. And keeping people focused on the mission. It's easy to get distracted by the world, but if you have that strong mission and people are really believing in it, then I think you can keep that focus and keep people going forward.
So, we've had this whole conversation, but I feel like we've left off a topic.
We did. Yeah. Tell me about this. One of the other things that we've been working on, part of this AI direction and a little bit about autonomy, is Optimus. It's been a piece of our puzzle. It's a fascinating project as a designer to kind of recreate ourselves in a way. And you learn very quickly that the mechanics of a human are unbelievably challenging. How we move, how we just get from A to B, how we walk, how we do some of these things, the mechanics inside of our body are insane. When you're trying to replicate that with known actuators, it gets really challenging really quickly. So the idea of creating something that has a limbic resonance that feels human, not scary, not off-putting, but welcoming, and also creating something that's ultimately going to be incredibly functional in our lives. Just like autonomy, having a robot that can do the most boring factory work, that can deliver packages to your front door, that can pick up the dog poop or clean your dishes or clean the baby diaper. Start to take all these responsibilities that are chores in our lives and put them on somebody like Optimus who doesn't care, does it gladly. It's been a really amazing journey. We've only been working on Optimus for a few years and we started going fast, breaking things quickly. We have design vision, we have the mechanical engineering behind it. So it's an amazing design process. But I think it's going to really transform in a way that it's hard to imagine because it doesn't exist yet. So we're kind of predicting the future a little bit.
Summit, don't you think it'd be a lot cooler if Franz could just show us one of these things in person? Franz. All right, let's bring one out because we have another one here. Yeah. Give me a round of applause. Let's go.
Hey everyone, I'm Optimus, your friendly humanoid robot from Tesla. Super stoked to be here at the Summit Series. Let's dive into some exciting stuff together.
Optimus, can you tell us a joke?
Sure thing. Why don't robots ever get lost? Because they always have their GPS. Global positioning smarts.
Can you tell a more funny joke?
All right, here's one for you. Why was the robot so good at poker? It had a steel face. Sorry, I don't know if that was super funny.
Hey, Optimus, when are we going to Mars?
