Co-Founder, Technoking of Tesla, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Tesla
Elon Musk Cyber Rodeo Giga Texas - FULL SPEECH
Elon Musk delivers remarks at Giga Texas Factory Opening party on April 7th, 2022.
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 (28 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Elon Musk0:17
Breakfast.
Uh, all right. Welcome to Cyber Rodeo! Are you guys having a good time? So we're going to talk about past, present, and future. This is the most production-car Tesla ever made. So where we started? We started off with a very simple car, the Tesla Roadster, and actually we made the powertrain, Lotus made the non-powertrain portion, and we did final assembly and checkout literally in an old dealership in Menlo Park, California. Here we are today.
When we first started out at Tesla, I thought we had, optimistically, a 10% chance of succeeding. When people say, 'Hey, car companies dumb,' I'm like, 'I know.' But thanks to the incredible work of the Tesla team over many years, we got here.
So, this is where we are today. We've got Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y. We've got the most expensive joke in the world, but we did bring sexy back. So we've got cars in major vehicle segments, we've got residential and commercial energy products: Powerwall, Mega Pack. It's insane. Thanks for the incredible work of the Tesla team. Two-thirds of electric vehicles in the United States have been made by Tesla.
Construction of the Gigafactory... We have Full Self-Driving Beta. Anyone here use the Full Self-Driving Beta? You can really get a feel for how much this is going to transform society. The car will take you anywhere you want, ultimately 10 times safer than if you were driving yourself, and it's going to completely revolutionize the world. The Tesla Autopilot team and AI team have done an incredible job building real-world AI. We're aiming to go to wide beta for all Full Self-Driving customers in North America this year.
This is now our sixth major factory, and now we're on three continents. It's great for us to have two major vehicle plants in North America, an awesome factory in China, one in Europe that I was just at recently. This will be a huge improvement for Tesla, and it's also going to be a little better for the environment because you want to make the cars where the customers are, not put them on ships across the oceans. We're really entering a new phase of Tesla's future with six giant factories around the world.
This is also Tesla's global headquarters.
Why Austin? I actually asked the Tesla team, because California we're continuing to expand, but we ran out of room. We need a place where we can be really big, and there's no place like Texas. So here we are: 10 minutes from the airport, 15 minutes from downtown. A great central logistics hub, we have access to awesome talent. Thank you, Austin. Thank you, Travis County.
It wasn't easy building this incredible asset. I just cannot express enough appreciation and gratitude and admiration for the Tesla team that built it in Texas. Deep freeze, rain, quicksand—it was very difficult, but it's done.
So what we have here: if you put the building on its side, it's equivalent to three Pentagons. When a building is measured in units of Pentagon, it's quite large. This is the largest factory building in the world by volume.
According to our calculations, you could fit 194 billion hamsters in this building.
This is the machine that builds the machine, and it's the latest version. I've said it before, but the factory is the product. Prototypes require imagination and they're not easy, but relative to production, prototypes are easy. Production is hard, and this building is the most advanced car factory that Earth has ever seen.
Alien technology. Exactly. The factory is advanced; it feels like an alien dreadnought landed. The team is doing great work in Fremont, California, but here we took a lot of lessons learned. In Fremont, the buildings were all separate—a lot of movement between them. The thing that really makes this work is to think of it like a chip, like an integrated circuit, combining everything together in one package.
So this is a case where raw materials come in one side, get formed into a cell, formed into a pack, then we cast the front and rear body, the pack itself is structural, and out comes a finished product. Materials in one side, cars out the other.
We're building our own battery cells, which we think are the fastest to sell in the world here at Gigafactory Texas. All the footage you see here is from this factory. We think over time this will probably be the biggest cell factory in the world.
The things that we said we would do: basically make the car out of three major pieces—a rear body casting, a structural pack with the cells themselves carrying load. Just like airplanes where the wing is a fuel tank in wing shape, with the new Model Y architecture, the cells themselves carry load. That results in a car that is lighter, has a smaller number of parts, costs less, and improves crash performance—a safety advantage.
As I was saying, it's a revolutionary car manufacturing process: basically make a car out of three major parts—a cast rear, structural pack, and a cast front.
What you're looking at are the biggest casting machines ever made. It's a crazy thing to make your car this way—it's never been done before. When we were trying to figure this out, there were six major casting manufacturers in the world. We called six. Five said no. One said maybe. I was like, 'That sounds like yes.' With a lot of effort and great ideas from the team, we've made the world's biggest casting machine work very efficiently to radically simplify the manufacturing of the car.
As I was saying: raw materials in, a bunch of stuff happens, car out.
The Model Y program alone is projected to get to half a million units a year. Then we're going to start manufacturing Cybertruck here next year. The Model Y line will be the highest capacity line, I think, of any line in the world. Half a million units a year of a single product in a single factory—that's the biggest of anything in the world. Definitely this will be the highest volume car factory in America.
It always looks like CGI in real life, but that's not CGI—that's an actual Cybertruck driving around. I can't wait to have this baby in production. It's going to be epic.
Tesla is growing at the fastest pace of any large manufactured object in history. We've now exceeded a million—in trailing 12 months, we've delivered over a million cars worldwide. That said, there's a long way to go. The red bar chart is Tesla, and the blue is global vehicles. Even though we've delivered a million cars in the last 12 months, we're still a little over one percent of total vehicle output in the world. We want to try to get to, I don't know, 20%—as much as we can to move the needle. Scale matters in order to make a really big difference to sustainability. We have to make a lot of cars, we have to make a lot of stationary packs to transition the world to sustainable technology as quickly as possible.
What's next? I'm not going to spill all the beans right now, but what I can say is we're going to move to truly massive scale—scale that no company has ever achieved in the history of humanity. We need that to happen in order to transition the world to sustainable energy. Massive scale, Full Self-Driving, there's going to be a dedicated robo-taxi that's going to look pretty futuristic. And of course we have the Tesla robot, Optimus. This is what an economy even means. It'll be able to do anything that humans don't want to do. It's going to be an age of abundance. It's very hard to imagine it, but as you see Optimus develop, we'll make sure it's safe—no Terminator stuff—but it's really going to transform the world, I think, to a degree even greater than the cars. We have a shot of being in production for version one of Optimus hopefully next year. Cybertruck is coming next year, Roadster and Semi will follow.
This year is all about scaling up, and then next year there's going to be a massive wave of new products. Now, let us deliver our first Tesla cars made in Texas.
If you want to pass the windows... You want me to do it? I feel like I've broken enough things around here. I don't know; maybe we'll pass.
Cybertruck is going to be awesome. You see it here, you've seen it before, you see it over there. It's worth the wait, believe me. This will be our magnum opus. You can see some of the changes we've made already. There are no handles—who needs handles? The car knows you're there. I think we're going to have an incredible Cybertruck product for you next year. It's going to blow your mind. There is no other truck; everything else fails in comparison. This is the only one you need.
We can't wait to build this here and deliver them to you. Sorry for the delay; it's been an intense couple of years. We're going to have this for you next year, and it's going to be great. It's going to be one kick-ass product after another starting next year, and then some cool stuff that we haven't even talked about.
Thanks again for coming. I hope you're having a great time. Tesla believes in throwing great parties. So let's get this party started. Have a great time tonight. I love you guys!