FULL CALL: Twitter All Hands with Elon Musk 6/16/22

Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be able to speak to everyone. And since we started late, I'm going to go right ahead and hand it over to Leslie so that she can moderate this Q&A session for us.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yes, I want to be clear about that. I love Twitter. In fact, I literally have tweeted 'I love Twitter'.

Well, let's see. I mean, I find I learn a lot from what I read on Twitter and what I see on the pictures, videos, text, and memes that people create. I also find it's a great way to get a message out or if I want to say something, make an announcement, I think Twitter's the best way to do that. It just goes out immediately to everyone. And you know, I sort of made this joke already, but some people use their hair to express themselves, I use Twitter. So, I find it's the best forum for communicating with a lot of people simultaneously and getting that message directly to people. In the past, you have to issue a press release and then hope that the regular media would write about the press release, and then they wouldn't write about it in quite the way you'd like. I always found old-style press releases kind of odd because you're writing a press release about yourself, which is sort of propagandist, and then hope that the media writes something favorable, which they usually do not. I think that's maybe one of the biggest reasons for me using Twitter is so I can talk and communicate directly with people and not through the lens of the media. And you know, I think there's obviously an important role for the media to play, but as anyone knows who reads the newspaper, it's coming through quite a negative lens. So, you know, how many newspaper articles do you read that are positive, and how many are negative? And then when you read about something that you personally understand, how many times has the media gotten it right? Well, I would say almost never. So, this is a way for people to communicate directly with each other and not through a negative lens, and I think that's extremely important for the world. So, I'm sort of going waxing on about this, but I think it's pretty important. You know, that's sort of like some of my comments about Twitter being like a digital town square, but really much more than that because you can't put that many people in a town square, but you have to communicate with millions of people on Twitter. That's just an incredibly important thing and I think it's essential for a functioning democracy or to function well. I think it's essential to have free speech and to be able to communicate freely. Now, the free speech stuff, this needs to be, you know, it's free speech within the context of the law, so I'm definitely not suggesting that we just flout the law because they hope it will get shut down in that case. And I think there's also freedom of speech and freedom of reach. Your freedom of speech is one thing because anyone could just go into the middle of Times Square right now and say anything they want, they could deny the Holocaust, okay? You can't stop them, they will just do that, but that doesn't mean you have to promote that to millions of people. So, I think people should be allowed to say pretty outrageous things that are within the balance of the law, but then it doesn't get amplified or get a ton of reach. And I think an important goal for Twitter would be to try to include as much of the country, as much of the world as possible. So currently, it's a relatively small percentage of the world that is on Twitter. If you assume daily active users are say 200 million, you've got eight billion people on earth, that's 7.8 billion who are not on Twitter. So, that's a pretty big number. And really, I think you want as many as possible on Twitter, you want to be as inclusive as possible, the broadest demographic. And for that to happen, people must like being on Twitter, so if they're being harassed or uncomfortable, they're just not going to use Twitter. So, we have to strike this balance of allowing people to say what they want to say but also making people comfortable on Twitter, otherwise they simply won't use it, it'll be quite niche. But I think there's also a lot that should be done in terms of enhancing the core technology and offerings of Twitter. Like right now, if a content creator does a video, they're going to put that video on YouTube and just link to it from Twitter because they're able to monetize their content on YouTube but not on Twitter. And I think it's going to be really important for if you want people to put the content on Twitter, which we do, then there has to be a mechanism for content creators to monetize that content. So they could make a dual post to YouTube and to Twitter, but I think it's crazy right now that content creators will use Twitter to drive traffic to their YouTube video because that's how they make a living, and that really should be on Twitter. We want to address the reasons why more people aren't using Twitter and why people click away from Twitter. If we can address those reasons, then they'll use Twitter more and get greater value from the service. And you know, if I think of WeChat in China, which is a great app, but there's no WeChat equivalent outside of China, and I think there's a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it's so useful and helpful to your daily life, and I think if we achieve that or even get close to that with Twitter, it would be a success.

Well, there's definitely an ongoing challenge with bot accounts and spam accounts. You know, there's still quite a lot of crypto scams on Twitter. It's gotten better but there's still a fair bit of that. There are also people where they're not necessarily bots but they might be operating one person operating hundreds of accounts and trying to make them look like individuals but they're not. So, you know, I think it's, and I'm reiterating stuff that I said publicly and in fact on Twitter, the, in order for people to have trust in Twitter, I think it's extremely important that there be transparency. So, that's why I'm an advocate of having the algorithm be open source so people can critique it, improve it, identify bugs potentially or bias. But what is transparency? Transparency constantly increases trust. So, I think it's just a very important, like anything that's happening on an automated basis be open source and be clear and that if there is any action taken by someone within Twitter to, you know, deep boost or d-boost or something with a tweet, that it's just very clearly identified on the tweet so people aren't subscribing to malice where there's no malice. So, but when it's inscrutable then people don't know what to think and they will sometimes think the worst when that's actually not true. So, I think that price is extremely important and then just for the usefulness of the system, getting rid of sort of troll farms and advanced spam is incredibly important. I'm going to have a thought in this regard which I think is might work, which is to, you know, there's currently just Twitter Blue, but if you hit Twitter Blue, your identification in the system does not change at all like you still look like a normal user, but I think if there was like a little, you know, Twitter Blue authenticated, not like authenticated like a celebrity, but authenticated at least by Twitter Blue payments, using the payment system for your authentication, that I think a lot of people will be like, okay, that's pretty helpful to have some designation that is next to my name that indicates I'm probably not a bot or spam or one person operating out of accounts. And, you know, that's like three bucks a month I believe, I think that would be pretty helpful, and then also prioritizing comments and mentions and whatnot by who is verified in this broader sense of verification, in the sense of that you're Twitter Blue verified, and just prioritize that above someone who's not verified. So there'll still be full read access to the system, but instead, any tweets or actions will be prioritized according to who's verified, and then a very large number of people can be verified.

You know, I think trust is as trust does. So, you know, I tend to be extremely literal in what I say. So, you know, aspirationally one does not need to read between the lines, one can simply read the lines. So, the things that I said about Twitter, I think, need to happen in order for it to be, you know, to really go to the next level. I mean, I think like the potential is there for Twitter to be accessible to an order of magnitude more people and for a lot more people to find it useful. Currently, I guess it would be like 4 or 5 percent of the world or something like that, I don't know, I said 4 or 5 percent of the world optimistically is finding Twitter useful and like maybe 50 percent of the world could find Twitter useful. So, I want to take whatever actions would lead to that. And, you know, I'm very much like, it's not essentially a trust thing, it's like if somebody's getting useful things done, then that's great, and if they're not getting useful things done, like, okay, why are they at the company? So, it's really just like we need to improve the core technology, improve the design, and, you know, so trust emerges from that. Yes, it's not, it's like, you know, if somebody's getting stuff done, great, I love them, and if they're not, I do not. It's pretty straightforward.

Yeah, so now Tesla makes cars and you cannot make cars remotely, obviously. They're, you have to make cars in a big factory, and the supply chain and, you know, and you have to bring in the parts and assemble them and then transport the car to the owner, all of these things must be done in person because they're just, it's physically impossible to do them remotely. Now there are some roles at Tesla where what can be done remotely like say software or design. And it's so that, you know, I think that's still a case where you want to aspire to do things in person, but if somebody is exceptional at their job then it's possible for them to be effective even working remotely. So with Tesla, I simply have asked for a list, you know, that the manager has to confirm that they're an excellent contributor and if they do, they're allowed to work remotely. So it's pretty basic, I think. There is a hit one takes remotely because the just reduced esprit de corps and, you know, it's like, it kind of matters to be in person at least some of the time. So like one of the things I said, even if somebody's working remotely, they're going to show up at the office occasionally so that they recognize their colleagues and don't have, you know, you have to walk down the street and pass your colleague and they're, you don't even recognize them, that would not be good.

Yeah, so SpaceX, I think, operates in the best of both worlds where stock and options are issued to everyone, but we don't have all the challenges being publicly traded company where the stuff could be up and down from one day to the next would be quite a distraction and where one is at the mercy of short sellers and class action lawsuits and just generally it's like being in the stockades and they should throw tomatoes at you all day. So, but SpaceX still allows liquidity and so every six months there's a liquidity event at SpaceX and people have the opportunity to sell their shares, and that's worked very well for the whole life of the company. So, I think something like that would make sense at Twitter, so it would still be stock and options, everything, and it just be liquidity events twice a year.

Yeah, I mean, the bias definitely needs to be strongly towards working in person, but if somebody is exceptional then remote work can be okay. But then if basically if their work output is exceptional, then remote work is fine. There is some communication impact that one takes when working remotely because if you're with people, you know, and they're just a few desks away, it's very easy to communicate in real time, but it's much harder to do that if you're in different physical locations. So I do want to emphasize that the bias is very much towards in-person work, it's just, but it would obviously be insane if someone is excellent at what they do but can only work remotely to then fire them even though they're doing excellent work, would be insane. So I'm definitely not in favor of things that are mad, I'm in favor of things that build the business and make it better.

Well, I think it depends on, you know, the company does need to get healthy, so I mean right now the costs exceed the revenue, so that's just not a great situation to be in. And so there has to be some rationalization of headcount and expenses to have revenue be greater than cost, otherwise Twitter is simply not viable or can't grow. So, yeah, I think it would just be dependent on, but when I said that anyone who's obviously a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about, like, I do not take actions which are destructive to the health of the company. So, you know, yeah.

Well, I certainly, I mean, I have a strong, a great understanding of the product because I use Twitter every day, practically. And you know, I think I've got a really good understanding of how Twitter works from a product standpoint. What I have less understanding of is, you know, like this sort of bot, spam or, you know, multi-user account, basically anything that affects the monetizable daily user number, that's probably my biggest concern, because that's really what drives advertising revenue as well as subscription revenue. So, and really Twitter's revenue is going to be subscription, advertising, I think payments would be an interesting thing to do as well. But all of those things are only relevant as a function of how many unique humans are on the system. So, that's my biggest concern and that's what I said publicly as well, like I said, I try to be as literal as possible.

Yeah, I mean, well, it's, to be clear, you know, everyone talks about the, as I said about Twitter as a whole, like there's eight billion people in the world, I'm told there's 200 million daily users of Twitter, that's a 7.8 billion person gap. So, I think we really want to have, you know, I don't know, at least a billion people on Twitter, maybe more, as many people as you can possibly get on Twitter, so that I think is the most inclusive definition of inclusiveness, it's like all humans. So, you know, that's important. From a company standpoint, you know, I believe in something like a strict meritocracy, so whoever's doing great work, great, they get more responsibility, authority, and that's that.

As I said earlier, really, it's like I think people, we should allow people to say what they want, post what they want, within the balance of the law, but that's different from them being able to reach people who don't want to be reached with that content. So if that content is offensive to people, they will simply stop using Twitter. So, it's important to make Twitter as attractive as possible, and really that means not showing people content that they would find painful or offensive or even frankly content they would find boring is not good. So we don't want them to see boring content. Unless we were talking about TikTok last night, and TikTok obviously just does a great job of making sure you are not bored. I mean, it does feel like next level, but TikTok does a great job of making you bored, I mean, I do find some other videos offensive, I think, but they're not boring. So, the focus is, how do we ensure people have content that they find entertaining and engaging and interesting such that they want to keep using Twitter and use it more. So, that's essential to the growth of the service.

Yeah, I mean, to be clear, the standard is much more than not offending people, the standard should be that they're very entertained and informed. Because like, so you could not offend someone but you could show them a bunch of content that they don't find interesting, and then they will not use the service or they will use it less. So, that's why I use the example of TikTok where they hold an algorithm to be as engaging as possible, and I think we want to also hold it to be as engaging as possible in a different way. I think that's, like TikTok is interesting, but you want to be informed about serious issues as well. And I think Twitter, in terms of serious issues, can be a lot better at informing people about serious issues. I do think it's important that there be, you know, if there are two sides to an issue, it's important to represent the various sides. Most issues in the world are complex, they're not boiled down to a simple this is 100% good and this is 100% bad. So, I think it would be, it would have a more informed public if people are presented with multiple sides to an issue.

Well, I mean, I'm in favor of going as far as the law will allow us. If the law, if say 200 employees would get arrested in the country if we didn't adhere to the law, then we would adhere to the law or exit the country or something. So, but I mean, as much as we can enable people to have a voice and to speak their mind, I think we want to do that.

Well, my political views, I think, are moderate, at least as would be, you know, if you said like what is the center of the normal distribution of political views in the country, I think I'd be pretty close to the center. You know, I voted Democrat every election until this recent one, this week. And then I voted for Mayra Flores, who's a Republican. She was Mexican American and I thought a good candidate and was voting for. So, but I'm in favor of moderate politics, but allowing people who have like relatively extreme views to express those views within the bounds of the law. So that's, you know, as I said, like I think if the far left 10% and far right 10% were equally upset on Twitter, then that would probably be a good outcome.

I think advertising is very important for Twitter. So in the case of say Tesla, SpaceX, there's no need for advertising because the demand exceeds our production. So, I mean, advertising is fundamentally a demand generator, and occasionally you want to get some other message out there, but it's fundamentally a demand generator. So given that Tesla demand is far in excess of production, there's no need for Tesla to advertise. But, you know, I'm not against advertising. I would probably, I don't want to talk to the advertisers and say like, let's make sure the ads are as entertaining as possible. I think they're more effective if they're entertaining. Like you don't want to be strident or spammy in the ad. And then of course, I don't think it's good to allow advertising of any products which are bad products. Like, I was literally scammed on, I bought this thing off of a YouTube ad and it doesn't work. And then I just Googled it and it's like, oh yeah, once you click on the second page of Google search results, it's like, yeah, this product totally doesn't work and it's trash. And I'm like, well, what the hell, YouTube, allowing advertising of scammy products, that's totally not cool. So, you know, like, and I just think if the advertising is entertaining, interesting, it's something you might actually want, and the product would be cool, fulfilling to the Twitter user, then I think that's great advertising.

Yeah, I think, you know, money is essentially a form of information. So, you know, it's information that allows us to exchange products and services without having to barter and allows people to shift obligations in time. But money is fundamentally digital at this point and it has been for a while. And, you know, PayPal, I think, has done a great job on the payments front. I think it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter, so that's easy to send money back and forth, you know, and fiat currency as well as crypto. You know, and I said essentially whatever somebody would find useful. So, like I said, I think the goal, my goal would be to maximize the usefulness of the service. The more useful it is, the better, and if one can use it to make convenient payments, that's an increase in usefulness. It's sort of news, entertainment, and payments, I think, are three critical areas. But really it's just about thinking about how to make using Twitter so compelling that you can't live without it and that everyone wants to use it.

Yeah, I don't think it's necessary for someone to use their real name. So if one does a phone-based authentication, I think it should be okay to not use your real name on Twitter. So Twitter would know who you are at least from a payment standpoint, but you would not have to state your real name or anything. That's obviously important where if someone has different political views from their manager, let's say, then they don't really want to get crosswise there and so it'd be better for them to have a pseudonym on Twitter. But it's still feedback-dedicated, and like I said, at no point would I suggest that you have to be authenticated in order to use Twitter. It's just that it would be prioritizing authenticated comments and actions on Twitter over unauthenticated in order to combat the sort of bots and trolls and essentially, it needs to be much more expensive to have a troll army. Whereas right now it's basically very inexpensive to have a hundred thousand paid Twitter accounts.

Well, I think that it would be helpful, you know, I think one thing about words is that it's hard to convey tone. And so, it's possible for, essentially, people will sometimes take the words and then assume they were said in maybe an angry way or, you know, an abrasive way or something like that. But I mean, although you can tell, my normal tone is not, I'm not an angry person. I almost never raise my voice, so in a year I might not have raised my voice literally. So, this is not, you know, so sometimes people may think, oh wow, he's sort of yelling or screaming or something, but I'm really not. So, maybe some way to indicate tone, I mean, emojis sort of do that, but I don't know, maybe there could be like an irony flag or something, this is like this is an ironic tweet or something like that.

I should, yeah, maybe I could just say it, yeah, exactly, or you could read it but then you can also see how I would have said it, like when you're like, I wonder if you said that in an angry way, and then you can see how I actually said it.

Well, I guess I'm not that hung up on titles, but I do want to drive the product in a particular direction. So, you know, it could be like I don't really care about being CEO. In fact, I renamed myself Technoking at Tesla with an official SEC filing, so, yes. And then our CFO was renamed Master of Coin, which I think is a cooler thing than CFO. So, the, I mean, what I really just want to do is drive the product, improve the product, and then it's like basically a software and product design, you know. So, you know, I don't mind doing other things related to operating a company, but there are kind of chores, there's a lot of chores to the CEO, and I really just want to make sure that the product improves rapidly and in a good way. And I don't really care what title is, but obviously people do need to listen to me, if I say like, hey, we need to improve production, like, I'm going to make the following changes at these features, then, you know, people listen to me in this regard. And I mean, that's what I do at SpaceX and Tesla. So, you know, I'm really just working with really engineering and production, and like, it sometimes may seem like, wow, he's really out there a lot, but actually I'm not, if you see how many actual interviews do I do, it's quite a small number. But if I do a tweet, they'll like make an entire two-page article about it, you know. So, I'm like, basically, far from it, I'm actually quite internally focused at SpaceX and Tesla, even though it may not seem that way. And it's really just, you know, evolving the rocket technology with SpaceX and providing global internet with Starlink, and then Tesla, it's about accelerating sustainable energy with electric cars and stationary battery packs and solar power. And, you know, the fundamental good of Tesla, I would say, is measured by how many years did we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, and then the fundamental good of SpaceX is, you know, are we able to make life multi-planetary and thus improve the probable lifespan of consciousness. But you always say like what is a unifying philosophy for me, it is we should take the set of actions most likely to extend the scope, scale, and lifespan of consciousness as we know it. And, you know, so that's like what set of actions improve things at a civilizational level and improve the probable lifespan of civilization. Like, civilization will come to an end at some point, but let's try to make it last as long as possible. And it would be great to understand more about the nature of the universe, why we're here, the meaning of life, where are things going, where we come from. Can we travel to other star systems and see if there are any alien civilizations that there might be? There might be a whole bunch of long-dead one-planet civilizations out there that existed, you know, 500 million years ago. If you think about the history of human civilization from the advent of the first writing, it's only about five thousand years, which is nothing. You know, Earth is roughly four and a half billion years old, so, the whole civilization as measured from the advent of writing is a flash in the pan, and I think we want to take whatever actions we can to extend that flash in the pan to hopefully be a flame that lasts a long time.

I gotta stop trolling people about the alien stuff because people really think, to be clear, I've seen no evidence. What I've seen, no actual evidence for aliens. I get asked that a lot, and I think I know, and I've not seen anything yet.

Yeah, so I think success would be, is a substantial increase in daily active users. You know, I don't, like said, if, you know, can we get daily active users over a billion, that would be, you know, it's still only one eighth of us, but that would be a huge improvement from where things are today. And, you know, and broadly speaking, like, is Twitter helping further civilization and consciousness? You know, like, are we, it's just Twitter, I'm not, we're not saying transactions are complete, so I shouldn't say we, but like, is Twitter contributing to a stronger, longer-lasting civilization where we're better able to understand the nature of reality. I would say, like my philosophy is one of curiosity, of trying to understand the nature of the universe in as much as possible. So, in order to understand the nature of the universe, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness, to extend the life of consciousness. So, I like, I guess broadly speaking, would be has Twitter meaningfully improved the strength and longevity of civilization.

All right, you're welcome.

All right, thanks. Bye, thank you.