That was not a large applause. Start again. That's better. Thank you.
Yeah. We're going to make this interesting. How many quotes are you going to want that are going to be after this session?
Uh I don't know. I mean, five.
So, good afternoon everyone. It's great to see everybody here. It's been an amazing week here in Davos. Hopefully everybody saw that we are having conversations here. Hopefully everybody agrees. There are some conversations that we may have disagreed. There's many conversations we may have agreed but through those conversations and I think today's result with a peace agreement earlier today, the World Economic Forum is here to have those conversations to have understandings and also resolution. So it's an important component of who we and what we are and I'm thrilled to have Elon Musk here. He came all the way from California to be here to see all of you. So, thank you, Elon.
I mean, I heard about the formation of the peace summit and I was like, is that PIC? You know, little piece of Greenland, a little piece of Venezuela. We got one. All we want is peace.
I'm going to, as I said, I'm a pretty proud CEO of BlackRock since we went public. The compounding return of BlackRock to our shareholders was 21%. Since Elon took Tesla public, his compounded return is 43%. This is just another advertisement for everybody, especially for Europeans. This is why more citizens should be investing with growth, investing with their countries. Imagine if a lot of pension funds invested with Elon when Tesla went public and how much return with all the pension funds that invested side by side with Elon and the growth. So, a spectacular return. There's very few companies, well I don't think there's any other company as large as Tesla today that has that compounded return. So congratulations.
Well, we have an incredible team at Tesla and that's the reason. So I want to get into the meaningful component about technology, the possibilities. I want to talk about AI and robotics, energy, space and the progress ultimately coming down to engineering, engineering discipline, scale, execution. And few people if not anyone has the experience and the fortitude to confront these issues head on not just the ideas but the execution across so many different technologies, Elon, and that's why I thought it was important for us to have this dialogue here in Davos. So you're presently building on AI, on robotics, on space, on energy all at the same time. When you look across those efforts, what do they have in common from an engineering standpoint?
Well, they're all very difficult technology challenges but the overall goal of my companies is to maximize the future of civilization, like basically maximize the probability that civilization has a great future and to expand consciousness beyond Earth. So take SpaceX for example, SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth to the moon, to Mars, eventually to other star systems. And I think we should always view consciousness, life as we know it as precarious and delicate because to the best of our knowledge we don't know of life anywhere else. You know, I'm often asked, are there aliens among us? And I'll say that I am one, but they don't believe me.
Or you're from the future.
Okay. So, but I think if anyone would know if there are aliens among us, it would be me. And we have 9,000 satellites up there, and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship. So I'm like, I don't know. The bottom line is I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare and it might only be us. And if that's the case, then we need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished because we're effectively, the way I view it is the image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness, a tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out. And that's why it's important to make life multiplanetary such that if there is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues. That's the purpose of SpaceX. Tesla is obviously about sustainable technology and also at this point we've sort of added to our mission sustainable abundance. So with robotics and AI, this is really the path to abundance for all. If you say, people often talk about solving global poverty or essentially how do we give everyone a very high standard of living? I think the only way to do this is AI and robotics. Which doesn't mean that it is without its issues. I mean, we need to be very careful with AI. We need to be very careful with robotics. We don't want to find ourselves in a James Cameron movie. You know, Terminator, he's great movies, love his movies, but we don't want to be in Terminator obviously. But if you have ubiquitous AI that is essentially free or close to it and ubiquitous robotics, then you will have an explosion in the global economy, an expansion in the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent.
Elon, can that expansion be broad? Or is it narrow and how can that be created? How can it broaden the global economy?
Yeah, it's, I mean, a way to think of it is that if you have a large number of humanoid robots, the economic output is the average productivity per robot times the number of robots, right? And actually my prediction is in the benign scenario of the future that we will, the robots, we will actually make so many robots and AI that they will actually saturate all human needs. Meaning you won't be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point. Like there will be such an abundance of goods and services because my prediction is there'll be more robots than people.
But how do you then have human purpose in that scenario?
Yeah, I mean, you know, nothing's perfect, but I mean, it is a necessary, like you can't have both. You can't have work that has to be done and amazing abundance for all. Because if it's work that has to be done and only some people can do it, then you can't have abundance.
It's narrow. Exactly. So, but if you have billions of humanoid robots, and I think there will be, I think everyone on Earth is going to have one and going to want one. Because who wouldn't want a robot to, you know, assuming it's very safe, watch over your kids, take care of your pet. If you have elderly parents, a lot of friends of mine said they have elderly parents. It's very difficult to take care of them.
Yeah, it's expensive and there just aren't enough people to take care of the, there aren't enough young people to take care of the old people, right? So if you had a robot that could take care of and protect an elderly parent, I think that would be great. That would be an amazing thing to have. And I think we will have those things. So overall I'm very optimistic about the future. I think we're headed for a future of amazing abundance, which is very cool. And definitely we are in the most interesting time in history. I think there's a more interesting time in history.
But can we, can you and I reverse aging in this new history or are we going to see it?
You know, I haven't put much time into the aging stuff. I do think it is a very solvable problem. Like, I think when we figure out what causes aging, I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious. It's not a subtle thing. The reason I say it's not a subtle thing is because all the cells in your body, you know, pretty much age at the same rate. I've never seen someone with an old left arm and a young right arm ever in my life. So why is that? That means that there must be a clock, a synchronizing clock, right, that is synchronizing across 35 trillion cells in your body. And you know, there is some benefit to death by the way. It's like there's a reason why we don't actually have a longer lifespan. Because if people do live forever or for a very long time I think there's some risk of an ossification of society, of things just getting kind of locked in place. And it just may become stultifying, just lack vibrancy. But that said, do I think we will figure out ways to extend life and maybe even reverse aging? I think that's highly likely.
I'm looking forward to that.
So in the future that you talk about, AI models, autonomous machines, rockets depends on massive increases of compute, massive increases in energy, expensive energy, manufacturing scale. What are the bottlenecks to get there? And then once again with all that expenditures again, how can we make sure that it's broadened, not narrow?
I just think the natural thing is it's going to be very broad because AI companies will seek as many customers as they possibly can and the cost of AI is already very low and it's plummeting every year. I mean, the cost of AI is almost meaningfully changing on a month-to-month basis.
There's open models now everywhere.
Yes. There's open models and the open models only lag, they're maybe a year behind the private, the sort of closed models. So I think the AI companies will seek as many customers as possible which means they'll provide AI to the world.
But the cost of getting to there, the compute, the chips, the fab, the powering that, to me, what are the, you know, those are huge.
The limiting factor, yeah, I think the limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power.
It's just, right, it's energy.
Yeah. I mean we're seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially but the rate of electricity being brought online is, 3%, 4% a year max.
Yeah, it's clear that we're, for very soon, maybe even later this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on. Except for China. China's growth in electricity is tremendous.
They're building 100 gigawatts of nuclear as we speak.
Actually solar is the biggest thing in China. So China's, I believe China's production capacity on solar is 1,500 gigawatts a year. And they're deploying over 1,000 gigawatts a year of solar. Now, for continuous solar load you divide that by roughly, I don't know, four or five, call it, that's around 250 gigawatts of steady state power paired with batteries. And that's a very big number. That's half of the average power usage in the US, right?
So US power usage on average is 500 gigawatts. China just in solar, just in solar, can provide steady state power and batteries can do half of the US electricity output per year just with solar.
Solar is by far the biggest source of energy. And actually when you look beyond, or even on Earth but certainly beyond Earth, the sun rounds up to 100% of all energy. This is an important thing to consider. So the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter is about 0.1% and everything else is miscellaneous. Now even if you were to burn Jupiter in a thermonuclear reactor, the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100% because Jupiter is only 0.1%. If you teleported three more Jupiters into our solar system and burnt three more Jupiters and everything else in the solar system, the sun's energy would still round up to 100%. So, it's really all about the sun. And that's why one of the things we'll be doing with SpaceX within a few years is launching solar powered AI satellites, right? Because space is really the source of immense power and then you don't need to take up any room on Earth. There's so much room in space and you can scale to enormous, I mean you can scale to I think ultimately hundreds of terawatts a year.
We, you and I have had these conversations before, but why don't you tell the audience, what would it take for the United States and what type of geography would it take to have that solar field to electrify the United States? And then let me ask a question. Why aren't we doing it?
Yeah. So, I mean, I guess rough way to think about it is 100 miles by 100 miles, we'll call it 160 kilometers by 160 kilometers of solar is enough to power the entire United States. So, the 100 mile by 100 mile area is, I mean, you could take basically a small corner of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico. Obviously wouldn't want it all in one place, but it's a very small percentage of the area of the US to generate all of the electricity that the US uses. And the same is true actually for Europe. You could take a small part, you could take relatively unpopulated areas of say Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that Europe needs.
So why don't you think that there's a movement towards that here and in the United States?
