Co-Founder, Technoking of Tesla, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Tesla
Elon Musk Reveals New Insane Project - SpaceX, Starship & AI
Elon Musk Reveals New Insane Project - SpaceX, Starship & AI
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Elon Musk Reveals New Insane Project - SpaceX, Starship & AI
Welcome back to the channel! Today, we're diving into one of the most ambitious and fascinating developments ever connected to Elon Musk. While the world is still watching SpaceX push the boundaries of space exploration...
About Elon Musk
Elon Musk recently oversaw SpaceX’s public listing on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, which he said was the largest initial public offering in the history of capital markets. During the event, Musk stated that he had originally given SpaceX “less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all” and recalled telling people, “Look, we’re probably going to fail, but you know, we should give it a try because if we don’t… we will never be a truly spacefaring civilization.” He described SpaceX’s mission as “to take the fiction out of science fiction” and said the company aims to make humanity multi-planetary, adding, “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars… not just a few astronauts.” The IPO was widely reported to have made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. In addition to the IPO, Musk discussed SpaceX’s plans to build AI satellites and space-based data centers. In an interview with SpaceX employees in Bastrop, Texas, he said that the company’s AI satellite is “actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite” and noted that the current reference design calls for Nvidia Rubin chips. He also spoke about a “terrafab” facility that he said would be approximately 100 million square feet, roughly 10 times the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, and discussed using a mass driver on the moon to launch materials into deep space. Separately, Musk oversaw the final delivery of Tesla’s Model S and Model X vehicles, which he called a “bittersweet moment,” emphasizing that those cars “showed that an electric car could actually be the best car of any period.”
Transcript (41 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Host0:00
Well, hello everybody and welcome. Hang out. I got Elon and Ian Doll with our Starlink team. Figured we'd check in. It's been a typical SpaceX year. Launched a brand new vehicle.
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Elon Musk0:12
Yeah.
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Host0:12
Acquired xAI, now SpaceX AI. Announced a terra-sized chip-building project.
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Elon Musk0:19
Yeah, never dull moment.
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Host0:20
Yeah, never a dull moment. Typical year. And so let's kind of wanted to connect some of the dots on how this all feeds into making life multi-planetary, starting to climb up the Kardashev scale. Maybe show off some cool new AI stuff. It's kind of start galaxy-sized. And bring people in with the Kardashev scale.
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Elon Musk0:40
What's the big picture?
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Host0:41
What's the big picture? What is the Kardashev scale?
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Elon Musk0:45
Like how do you decide what progress a civilization has made? That's the most objective metric that any alien species, say visiting us, would calibrate how much progress we've made as a civilization. And one of the most objective ways to do that is the amount of power that any given civilization has been able to harness. And there was a Russian physicist actually named by the name of Kardashev who thought about this and it's a good way to characterize it.
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Host1:25
Yeah, you ultimately need to send millions of tons to orbit and beyond. And you need the power associated with that. So if you want to put a 100 gigawatts or ultimately terawatt into space from Earth, you will at some point need a terawatt of solar. And then you're going to need a terawatt of AI chips. So the three things you need are mass to orbit, a lot of solar power, and radiators of course, and a lot of chips.
All right, well let's start taking down the list. So, mass to orbit, that's where Starship comes in. We just had first flight V3. It was awesome. I know you were there. It was crazy to see that rocket launch and like long time coming. What's kind of what's Starship's kind of purpose of being? What is it going to be doing?
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Elon Musk2:17
Yeah, so Starship is going to revolutionize space really. It's the first rocket design that is capable of full and rapid reusability. Now, reusability is the fundamental breakthrough that is necessary to make life multi-planetary as well as to ascend the Kardashev scale. You simply cannot ascend the Kardashev scale unless you have a reusable spacecraft and you cannot extend life to the moon, to Mars, and to the rest of the solar system without a reusable rocket. The cost is simply prohibitive. You can't make enough rockets unless you can re-fly them. Just like any other mode of transport, you can imagine that if we had to throw away airplanes every time we flew, flying would be far too expensive and basically no one would be flying airplanes.
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Host3:08
You'd be doing a whole lot more driving.
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Elon Musk3:09
Yes. Reusability. Yes. Every mode of transport is reusable without which is simply not viable as a transport system. So, cars, planes, boats, horses, bicycles are all obviously reusable. With rockets, it's much harder to make a rocket reusable because Earth has a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. And these make it just barely possible to achieve reusability with a rocket. And there've been many prior attempts to create a fully reusable rocket and most of those attempts have been abandoned partway through because they didn't think they could succeed. In order to achieve full usability, everything's got to be perfect. It's the engines, the structure, the avionics, the choice of propellant. You've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket instead of putting on landing legs, which are heavy. The rocket can simply be caught by the tower, and we haven't achieved full usability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship. And then you've got to achieve full usability. You've got to go a step beyond that, which is make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, it gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand, and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious inspection like an aircraft.
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Host4:43
Yeah.
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Elon Musk4:44
This is incredibly difficult. This is the first time that there's ever been a rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound. I mean it also happens to be the largest flying object ever made, the heaviest flying object ever made, the most powerful moving object of any kind. Starship V3 is more than double the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. By version 4 will be pretty much three times the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. And we expect Starship to be flying more than once per hour down the road.
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Host5:20
One of the fun facts from flight 12 that was actually the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever flown, and that's still just a fraction of what V3 can do.
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Elon Musk5:31
Yes.
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Host5:31
I mean once we're flying massive amounts really rapidly, I mean we already fly the majority of payload to space with Falcon. Do people even really understand what mass to orbit becomes once Starship is flying?
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Elon Musk5:51
It's many orders of magnitude greater than what is the case today. So, even with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, SpaceX delivers almost 90% of all Earth mass to orbit. I think it's somewhere between 85 and 90% right now. And then most of the remaining mass, I think, is mostly by China and then the rest of the world, including the rest of the US, is the remaining, I don't know, 5 to 7%. Now, with Starship, we'll be aiming to go from somewhere around 2,500 tons a year to orbit to millions of tons a year to orbit. And to do so in a pretty short period of time. So, we think probably we can get to a million tons to orbit per year in about 3 years, thereabouts.
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Host6:49
Starship is going to take care of the mass to orbit limiting factor.
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Elon Musk6:53
Yes.
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Host6:53
And then power generation.
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Elon Musk6:55
It's some like mythical place where the internet's in the cloud or something.
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Host6:59
Yeah, some people envision wires, some people envision boxes, but it actually comes down to a set number of chips and the things that we need to launch into space are actually quite small when we look at it. The more challenging part is figuring out how to get the power for it? And that's where a lot of what we've worked on for existing like Starlink technology, the solar arrays, are what we want to utilize that expertise to be able to build a satellite that can actually launch the critical components of the data center into space itself. We like to look at this and say like, what is the actual engineering problem here? And it's really a combination of delivering power and then taking the waste heat and energy away and sending it into the vacuum of space as you mentioned.
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Elon Musk7:49
Yeah. Now the AI satellite is actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite. A Starlink satellite has gigantic phased array antennas. It's got parabolic antennas. It's got laser links. It's much more complicated than an AI satellite. At least in the beginning, we can obviously launch the chips that are already being made. So, our current reference design is for Nvidia Rubin chips, or could be either GB300 or Rubin chips. And we'll also have a reference design for TPUs and essentially you can put any existing chips into orbit. But the current industry seems to be, it seems like it's going to, I don't know, get to maybe around 100 gigawatts a year of AI compute. But that doesn't answer the question of, well, how do you get to a terawatt? That's why you need the Tera Fab.
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Host9:07
Oh, he's looking a step bigger.
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Elon Musk9:09
Yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude, you need a gigantic chip factory. And to give you a sense of scale here, we expect that the Tera Fab is going to be around 100 million square feet to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space AI compute. And then aspirationally scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So, in 2 and 1/2 years hitting an annualized rate of 10 GW a year to space and 3 and 1/2 years maybe 100 GW and then depending upon what progress there is in chip making in the rest of the world and with the Tera Fab going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is 1,000 GW. Which is twice the current electricity consumption in the United States.
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Host10:04
Yeah.
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Elon Musk10:05
I think there'll be an appetite for that, but we'll see.
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Host10:08
It's a lot of satellites. So, it's I don't know what he's going to think about, but maybe do a lot of simulations or something.
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Elon Musk10:14
Yeah.
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Host10:16
So, after we've, you know, worked out all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth. What is the next step to again, try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Kardashev level two?
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Elon Musk10:34
At least in the beginning, we can obviously launch the chips that are already being made. So, our current reference design is for Nvidia Rubin chips or could be either GB300 or Rubin chips. And we'll also have a reference design for TPUs and essentially you can put any existing chips into orbit. But the current industry seems to be, it seems like it's going to, I don't know, get to maybe around 100 GW a year of AI compute. But that doesn't answer the question of well, how do you get to a terawatt? That's why you need the Tera Fab.
H
Host11:25
Always looking a step bigger.
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Elon Musk11:27
Yeah. In order to get to the next order of magnitude, you need a gigantic chip factory. To give you a sense of scale here, we expect that the Tera Fab is going to be around 100 million square feet. So, to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year in terms of space AI compute. And then aspirationally, scale that by an order of magnitude per year. So, in 2 and 1/2 years hitting an annualized rate of 10 gigawatts a year of space, in 3 and 1/2 years, maybe 100 gigawatts, and then depending upon what progress there is in chip making in the rest of the world and with the Tera Fab, going beyond that to scale to a terawatt per year, which is 1,000 gigawatts. Which is twice the current electricity consumption of the United States.
H
Host12:22
Yeah.
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Elon Musk12:22
I think there will be an appetite for that, but we'll see.
H
Host12:26
It's a lot of satellites.
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Elon Musk12:27
It's I don't know what it's going to think about, but we need a lot of simulations or something.
H
Host12:32
Yeah. So, after we've, you know, worked through all the limiting factors, we've kind of topped out what we can do on Earth, what is the next step to, again, try and actually notch maybe some percentage points towards becoming Kardashev level two.
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Elon Musk12:51
Why stop there? Why think small? The terawatt actually is very small. Let's not think small. So, in order to get to another three orders of magnitude to 1,000 X from a terawatt per year, the only way that we can really see that you can achieve that is on the moon with a mass driver. Essentially, where you do local production of photovoltaics and solar and radiators on the moon. Maybe you bring the chips from Earth or you could conceivably make the chips on the moon. But you need most of the mass to be made on the moon, so you don't have to transport it to the moon from Earth. And then because the moon has no atmosphere and only 1/6 Earth's gravity, you can accelerate the AI satellites into deep space without a rocket. So, you can basically shoot them into space using an electromagnetic gun, like a railgun type. I mean, it's basically a linear electric motor is a way to think about it.