Elon, welcome to JP Morgan's headquarters. You're on the 51st floor, which is about the equivalent of the nowhere near where you go generally in space, but as high as we can get in New York City. But before we get started with you and Jamie, we had a very special guest that wanted to welcome you here this afternoon. And so your mother, May Musk, is here to welcome you.
May, please stand up. I don't think you can see me or everybody here.
They can see you. Yes, he can.
I actually can't see my mom, but I can hear her certainly. Okay.
Oh, there you are. Okay. What I'd like to say is when you were 3 years old and I told people I have a genius son, they would roll their eyes and then...
Sure. Understandable. Frankly.
I knew. And then when you said you wanted to start with rockets, then I rolled my eyes.
And then you did it. And so this is just a great party here and we're celebrating.
Sounds good. Love you so much.
One proud mama. Please. So let me, Elon, welcome you. It's a really privilege to have you here on this momentous occasion. It is new for us, but it's an important thing. The trajectory of American innovation. We're here live. 3,500 people of our top individual investors around the world in 100 branches. There are 350 people here, 3,500 around the country. This is a very unique thing, by the way, because Elon has spoken to me about democratizing finance. This is part of it. Treating individual investors the same way institutions are treated and hedge funds and all those things. My view is it's a wonderful thing to do. Elon very brave by the way because I would never let my mother speak publicly when I was in the room.
God knows what she would have said.
I had no idea she was there actually. Elon is the Edison of our time. I remember visiting Elon in Tesla like 15 years ago. A whole new way of building cars, vertical integration which had not been anything remote what our car companies are doing. Now you have SpaceX. I visited the SpaceX factory in California and it's exceptional to have more than 650 rockets. You told me one today putting satellites in space. You have 9,000, almost 10,000 Starlink satellites up there. Starlink 3 is coming which is a whole new generation which hopefully will replace some of these undersea cables. It's been an extraordinary 24 years with watching Elon grow over time and now making a massive leap into the future. So, welcome and coming here. Elon, I have 10 questions for you. So, I want to make sure I get to each one. Some of them came from folks here. They're all important, but one just to start is why SpaceX public now? Because you had choices. You didn't have to. Why now?
Yeah. I've been asked for many years about taking SpaceX public. So, it's probably been I don't know almost 10 years that people have been suggesting to me that I should take SpaceX public. We've been positive cash flow for quite a long time. I think since around 2014, 2015 and we've been self-funding. In fact, in our private equity rounds they actually have not been fundraising rounds. They've been liquidity rounds for investors and employees because we give everyone at the company stock and SpaceX has actually bought back stock in most of our sort of funding events. So what's different about now is that it's a number of things but we are embarking on a significant growth phase like a capital growth phase where we are going to put in orbit probably 100,000 satellites, just for communications and these will be of the version three and beyond versus version two and version one that are currently in orbit. Version three is, depending on how you count it, 10 to 20 times more capable than the version two satellite. And there were three chips that the SpaceX chip design team taped out that are specific to this that are far beyond state-of-the-art, which means it's 100 times more bandwidth than the SpaceX Starlink system currently offers and also half the latency because the altitude will be about half altitude. I think it will actually be the highest bandwidth, lowest latency means of communicating. And the future with AI and robots is actually going to require a lot more bandwidth than we currently use. Because you can imagine what's the bandwidth of a human? The peak bandwidth of a human is a few hundred bits per second, but the bandwidth of a computer can be a trillion bits a second. So the appetite for bandwidth of AI and compute, AI and robots is going to be enormous. And then we're also doing the AI data centers in space which is another massive capital endeavor. But I think it'll be the primary means by which AI can be expanded. It's increasingly difficult to build power plants on the ground. There are very few people who want a power plant in their backyard. So if we wanted to say double the electricity usage of the United States, which is on average about 500 gigawatts, we would have to build about twice as many power plants, which I don't think most communities are not super excited about that. But actually, if we go to space, we can go far beyond the electricity generation of Earth. In fact, this is going to sound crazy, but you could actually increase harnessed energy by a factor of a million and still be using much less than a millionth of the sun's energy. So, current human civilization uses much less than a trillionth of the sun's energy output, which is humbling to think about. We're really a tiny dust mote in a vast darkness and the sun is enormous. The sun is 99.8% of all mass in the solar system and most of the remaining 2% is Jupiter. Sometimes people ask me, maybe going a little wide-ranging in this answer but because you just asked me why you're going public now. I'm like talking about the sun's power output. I'm like a bit of a long-winded answer. If I was an AI, you might tell me to, you know, okay, but also it is important. Some of these things are important because people sometimes wonder what's the future of energy generation. And I can say that it is absolutely solar power or maybe a better word for solar power is star power. It's the power of a star. And the crazy thing is that if you burnt all mass in the solar system that was not the sun, the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%. Because the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Even if you teleported two more Jupiters from another solar system and burnt them too, the sun would round up to 100%. It's very much the sun and you could scale to a million times Earth's economy in space in terms of harnessed power which is a good proxy for economic output and still be much less than a millionth of the sun's energy which is humbling really to think about how tiny we are and this is just one star among many. So I guess the tail end would be we're embarking on a massive new growth phase and we need capital for that.
Another thing is the revenue. I also feel pretty good about the revenue projections but before revenue was a little unstable but now I feel like the revenue is much more predictable.
Yeah. I always learn listening to you. I guarantee you. So I mean you people hear about multi-planetary species, travel to space, one of the most exciting ideas in human history. Can you explain the bridge that you speak about? I've heard you talk about from the Earth to the moon to Mars.
Yeah. So, you don't necessarily have to go through the moon to get to Mars. I just think that we can build a self-growing city on the moon faster than we could do so on Mars. And there's also the potential if you say you want to scale far beyond what you can do from Earth is that because the moon has no atmosphere and about 16th Earth's gravity, you can use an electromagnetic accelerator, a rail gun or mass driver. Basically, you don't need to use rockets to do AI data centers into deep space from the moon. You can literally just shoot them like a rail gun type of thing. And you can manufacture the solar and the radiators on the moon from moon materials. That would allow scaling potentially to beyond a thousand terawatts a year which is a truly staggering number. Like I think we can do probably somewhere around 1 terawatt per year of AI space compute from Earth but we can do a thousand terawatts or more from the moon. And like I said, we can also make a moon base. And I think it would be pretty cool if you could vacation on the moon. That would be the most epic vacation. Not everybody wants to go to the moon, but I think a lot of people do. I think it would be pretty amazing to obviously provided you could do so safely and come back safely and everything, but I think that will be possible in the future. And then Mars is another step beyond that. Mars is a whole planet and with gravity much closer to that of Earth. And it has an atmosphere, albeit thin. And if you warm up Mars, you could one day make Mars like Earth, meaning with liquid oceans and life and where you could walk outside without a space suit type of thing. So Mars is, I call Mars a fixer-upper of a planet, but it's got a lot of potential.
I mean, let me go to number three, but I never ever thought you'd be in the hospitality business.
We should have moon hotels, don't you think?
Yeah. Musk hotels. Like it could be other actually. You think of us more like we're kind of like the Union Pacific. When they built the Union Pacific back in the day, people thought they were crazy because like why are you trying to carry all this cargo and people to California? No one's there. But now California is the biggest state in the country.
Yeah. For not for long, but yeah.
