All right, everybody. We have a very special guest. Listen, we love all of you. This is the most amazing room of innovators in America. We love you all. It's a dinner of equals, but there can only be one number one. We're Forbes. We do rank things. And the Forbes 250 innovators, the number one innovator, and it wasn't that close to be honest, was Elon Musk. So we are very honored to have him join us. Elon, are you here?
Oh, we're glad that you're here. Thank you. There he is.
You do like ranking things. It's true.
We do. We're good at it. And again, first congratulations. It was not that close. There were a lot of battles in a lot of places, but number one was not in doubt. But anyway, this is a room of your people.
Yeah, well deserved. There's a room of your people.
I will say they were asking, the first question, and we want to get really nerdy about innovation. The first question though that everybody was asking is, all right, ask Elon. We had one of the great cases in the world of innovation over the last few weeks. What's Elon's verdict on the verdict today?
The case in Oakland. Yes.
I was like, what are you talking about?
Well, they basically just decided that the statute of limitations have passed. They did not actually render an opinion on whether there have been unjust enrichment or not, which I think is obviously the case. But I do think it's somewhat of a dubious situation because what happened was in by degrees, meaning it wasn't stolen all at once. It was stolen one of these at a time. So we have to say, like, was there really even a basis for illegal action before proposal? I don't think there is actually. So, you know, like the first step, I don't believe at this point, but the first step into adding a for-profit thing had a cap for profit and was at a small scale, and also that all stock was reverted to the charity upon the invention of artificial intelligence. That clause has now been removed, though it will continue to be a for-profit after developing artificial general intelligence. That removal was quite recent, just in the last few weeks. So it is at this point an $800 billion for-profit company somehow from a nonprofit. And I think this is a dangerous precedent to set because if it means that someone can start, take money as a nonprofit, convert that to a for-profit when it's successful, it undermines all charitable giving in America.
It certainly would. You'd see a lot of people starting to start nonprofits with a path towards for-profit.
Exactly. What do you got to lose?
Exactly. What, you said on X you're appealing, optimistic about the appeal?
Yeah, I think we necessarily have to appeal because this will become precedent, you know, which people can actually then essentially loot charities and use this case as a basis for doing so. Which I think would be wrong.
Let's talk innovation. Your title we have up here, I mean again, you're the CEO of four major companies. Even those companies have major companies within those companies. Was this part of the plan or did it just happen?
More or less just happened. I mean, well, let's just say that when I was in college, I wanted to be part of things that would change the world in a significant way. I didn't originally think I wanted to be doing things in AI because AI was somewhat of a double-edged sword. But I did want to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy economy, which is the sort of electric cars, solar, and batteries. And you know, I think some kind of brain-machine interface that can give you cybernetic superpowers, I think is probably good. It could, you know, help people that have brain or spine injuries. You know, restore, enable people who've never spoken for years to speak again, which we've done. Give people eyesight who have lost both eyes or the optic nerve, or maybe have never even seen at all, blind from birth. By direct interface to the optical centers in the brain, you can actually restore eyesight or give people eyesight that they've never had before. And you can enable people to walk again, which I think is profound. I mean, these are kind of Jesus-level things, you know. Like I say, when technologies are hitting like Jesus-level miracles, you're like, that's pretty good.
Yeah. How do you, again, it's asked a lot but it's fun to ask it to you. How do you prioritize? I mean, because you're right, you've got multiple deities here. If these are Jesus-level solutions, which one do you serve?
Jesus-level, you're like, 'Okay, that's pretty good.' And then SpaceX is about making life multiplanetary, expanding consciousness to the stars. And hopefully we will make a fundamental breakthrough later this year, which is to have the first fully reusable orbital rocket, which is necessary in order to transport enough tonnage to the moon or Mars to create a self-growing city. Basically to extend civilization to other planets. I mean, I think probably you need to move a rough order of magnitude, about a million tons to the moon or to Mars, to create enough of an industrial base to have the civilization there be self-growing. Meaning like the asset test being if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does the civilization on the moon or Mars continue to grow or does it die out? And I think that's a fundamental branching point in the future of civilization. Are we a multiplanetary space-faring civilization or are we stuck on one planet forever? And I do want to emphasize, like, being a multiplanetary civilization doesn't mean like we leave Earth and go somewhere else, because that would just be a single planet civilization somewhere else.
And a lesser place probably.
Yeah. And a tougher place to live than here by far.
Earth is extremely easy and comfortable compared to the moon, Mars, or pretty much anywhere else. But you know, I think at some point we want to be a space-faring civilization. We want to be out there among the stars and be... Yeah. So these are again, these are huge, huge things you're dealing with.
So when you try to figure out when you get up every morning, is it just kind of like a buffet or do you have kind of a plan on what you're going to focus on? Because that's something that a lot of innovators here have to deal with on a much smaller scale.
Well, I guess I don't really get up and say, 'Hey, what should I innovate today?' You know, type of thing. It's really just building the technologies necessary to extend life beyond Earth. There's the Starlink internet, which is rebuilding the entire internet in space. But better, you know, I guess that's kind of pretty cool. The Optimus robot that we're developing at Tesla, the self-driving cars, solar power at scale, you know.
Big stuff. A lot of, again, they're all pointing, a lot of them are pointing to becoming interplanetary. Is there a time when you could see again putting these companies together and just running one big company? I mean, you have a portfolio, but do you envision that, and would that help you in terms of making these things mesh?
Well, it'd be difficult for me to sort of comment on that, you know, because there's publicly traded companies and one's publicly traded and one's, you know, about to be.
So it would be difficult to... No, no problem, we'll move on. Although we did, you know, the reports today that you might file your SpaceX S-1 this week. Is that a go?
I'm not, I think I'm not allowed to comment on these things.
Like a quiet period or something to that effect.
That is the beauty of going public or being in that quiet period.
Do you have a favorite of all your, we know you love all your children, all your companies. Is there a favorite among your companies?
