Elon Musk: The Economy Will Be 10x the Size in 10 Years — #239

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: audience and as you can see I'm still trying to monetize hope. Yeah you look like you're in great [00:00:06] Speaker 2: shape. I'm doing great. Is there any sort of youth serum things going on or what? It's our longevity [00:00:14] Speaker 1: XPRIZE. We're getting there buddy. I think in our last conversation you're getting on board with the idea of extended longevity. Yes? Yeah. Okay. We'll leave it at that. Some degree. I mean like I don't [00:00:31] Speaker 2: know if we want everyone to live or whatever but I think health span and not you know having an extended period of senescence where you're just drooling on yourself sounds like a good idea. We [00:00:43] Speaker 1: want to avoid that. Yeah. So first off congratulations on the merger of SpaceX and XAI. Ball or move. Going to power humanity's first Dyson swarm. So I'm curious. It truly is. What's your timeline for launching these data centers and how much bandwidth do you think you can get in the first year? Give us a sense of the speed at which you're going to be making this happen. Yeah. So SpaceX is [00:01:12] Speaker 2: I'll leave it at that. I appreciate that. But I can't wait for the speed. You know we had a [00:01:28] Speaker 1: conversation here on Monday with with Eric Schmidt and with one of the leads from one of the other hyperscalers. I won't mention who but I'm curious where you feel we are in recursive self-improvement. Are we there? Do you see Grok doing recursive self-improvement at this point? And what's the timeline for AGI and ASI? Give us a sense of that. [00:02:00] Speaker 2: Yeah. I think we've been in recursive improvement for a while here. If you mean by like recursive self-improvement without a human in the loop. Is that what you mean? [00:02:14] Speaker 1: Is that what you mean? I do. On the on the AI software side. [00:02:18] Speaker 2: I mean humans are gradually getting less and less in the loop on the recursive self-improvement. So every successive model is built by the one before it. So that is happening to a large degree but it's not yet fully automated. It may be there end of this year but not later than next year. [00:02:55] Speaker 1: Do you see a hard takeoff at that point? [00:02:59] Speaker 2: We're in the hard takeoff. OK. Right now. Yes. I mean look at. I mean at this point. I go to sleep. There's some passive AI breakthrough. And when I wake up there's another one. Yes. Yeah. It's hard to keep track honestly. So yeah. It's a bit of a head spinner. Yeah. Well I think a lot of the head spinning is happening from you too. Yeah. Well you know Grok's doing pretty well and in some metrics by some metrics it's the best. For example it's the best at predicting things which you know it's arguably the best metric for intelligence. The new Grok 4.2.0 is it's really really good. We're currently behind on coding. The reason I was a bit late for this was that I was just in a giant sort of all hands on coding just going through all of the things that need to happen to essentially catch up and exceed our competitors on coding. Which I think I think we'll do. I feel we should probably get there by the middle of this year. And and then I think we don't quite understand just how much intelligence there will be or just how far it will exceed human intelligence to a degree that is impossible to fully understand. But you can still imagine a situation where we let's say a million times more energy is harnessed than all of Earth's current electricity usage. That would still only be roughly a millionth of the sun's energy output. So essentially if you increase the Earth's economy by a factor of a million it's still roughly a trillion. Since we're a trillionth of the sun's energy if you increase the Earth's economy in terms of electricity usage by roughly a million you will be roughly one millionth only of the sun's energy harnessed. But what is it what is what is what is an economy or an intelligence using a million times more electricity than all of civilization think about or look like or do. It's going to be something pretty magnificent. The challenge will be even vaguely appreciating in that level of intelligence. But it's safe to say it will it will solve everything you can possibly think of. Yes. Longevity being, you know, certainly one of them. And I do enjoy your unrelenting optimism. Thank you, pal. I see you. I see you. Hope. Hope. Yeah, exactly. You've taken to heart monetizing hope, which is pretty funny. Yes, it was. I came up with that one. It was Grock's. [00:06:04] Speaker 1: It was Grock's marketing advice to me when you roasted me on the podcast. [00:06:08] Speaker 2: Right, Grock. Grock was roasting you and saying you monetize hope. But hey, it's better than monetizing misery, I suppose. Yes. For sure. Yeah. But yeah, just when you have AI and robots are going to increase the economic output or by so many orders of magnitude, we cannot possibly comprehend it. [00:06:40] Speaker 1: We're likely in the very short time to become a minority, then a vast minority, then a microscopic minority of intelligence on this planet. [00:06:50] Speaker 2: Yes, not even on this planet, but in the solar system. Yes, for sure. Because your best case outcome for Earth for intelligence is roughly one billionth of the sun's energy. That's your best case outcome if you generate intelligence only on Earth. [00:07:14] Speaker 1: Intercept it, right? Yes. [00:07:16] Speaker 2: Yes. Because roughly half of the sun's energy hits Earth, and that's the vast majority of energy that's out there that we can access. So really the intelligence in the solar system will be many orders of magnitude greater than the intelligence on Earth itself. [00:07:38] Speaker 1: Yes. Let me ask you a question, Elon. How far out can you see? How many years out can you make reasonable predictions right now? [00:07:54] Speaker 2: It's hard to predict the path exactly, especially because often things are kind of an S-curve or a series of S-curves where it starts off slow, grows exponentially, hits linear zone, and then grows logarithmic. That generally has been what I've seen with breakthroughs in AI. AI, for example, is there'll be some breakthrough, it'll have an S-curve, and then it looks like it's just going to go to infinity, but then you hit logarithmic returns until there's another breakthrough. Yes. So progress in AI is just a sort of series of overlapping S-curves or connected S-curves. [00:08:35] Speaker 1: I mean, there was a point where you could probably predict out a decade or two decades. What are your thoughts now? Yeah. [00:08:45] Speaker 2: Okay, this is going to sound pretty crazy. [00:08:58] Speaker 1: It's okay. We've been talking about crazy... [00:09:02] Speaker 2: I'm sure as a receptive audience to wild prognostications. Yes. I'd say the economy is 10 times its current size in 10 years. [00:09:20] Speaker 1: Greater than. Okay. I was really saying something. Yeah. You'd said triple digit growth in five plus years from now on GDP and 10x the economy. But in terms of your ability... [00:09:37] Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like that's a... 10x in roughly 10 years, I feel is actually a fairly comfortable prediction. Mm-hmm. [00:09:52] Speaker ?: With... [00:09:53] Speaker 2: There's obviously... If there's like World War III or something, that could put a kink in those plans or those expectations. Yeah. But in the absence of World War III, if current trends continue, I would say the economy taxes in 10 years. Love it. [00:10:10] Speaker 1: Could you give us an... We had a bunch of... [00:10:12] Speaker 2: And we'll have a base on the Moon. [00:10:14] Speaker 1: Yes. And we'll... And we'll have... [00:10:17] Speaker 2: And we'll have people on Mars. [00:10:18] Speaker 1: And we'll have mass drivers on the Moon. [00:10:20] Speaker 2: Yes. [00:10:21] Speaker ?: I think so. [00:10:22] Speaker 2: In 10 years. I think we'll have a mass driver on the Moon in 10 years. [00:10:26] Speaker 1: I love it. Gerard K. O'Neil's vision being fulfilled. We had four robots on stage here this year at the Abundance Summit. I look forward to Optimus. I'm curious, Optimus 3 timeline, and in particular, when can I buy one or two? When do you expect Optimus to go into commercial... For commercial sale? Or will you be leasing it? [00:10:55] Speaker 2: Well, we're in the final stages of completion of Optimus 3, which is really going to be by far the most advanced robot in the world. Nothing's even close. [00:11:05] Speaker 1: Yeah. [00:11:06] Speaker 2: In fact, I haven't even seen any demos of robots that are as good as Optimus 3, frankly. Maybe they're out there or they're secret or something. I don't know. But... You know, I have to make sure I'm saying things that are reasonably public as well, of course. Of course. [00:11:28] Speaker 1: Of course. We're streaming this on X. [00:11:30] Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. This is pretty public and accurate. Yes. [00:11:35] Speaker ?: Yeah. [00:11:36] Speaker 2: I think we'll start production on Optimus 3 the summer, but very slow at first. Yeah. Like, you know, the sort of classic S-curve ramp of manufacturing units versus time. And then probably reach high volume production around summer next year. And then, you know, we'll have Optimus 4, you know, design clean next year. Try to release a new robot design every year, an improved robot design every year. [00:12:17] Speaker 1: When Dave Blundin and I were at the Gigafactory, it was an extraordinary experience. 11.5 million square feet for the Tesla. And then I think you said you're building out 9.5 million square feet for Optimus there as well, which is extraordinary. Yeah. Let's... [00:12:33] Speaker 2: Let's... It's 10 million square feet round numbers. Yeah. [00:12:36] Speaker 1: Yeah. [00:12:37] Speaker 2: Yeah. I had to... That'll be quite... That's gonna be a new factory design, too. Like, it's not different from other factories. [00:12:48] Speaker 1: How far before we have robots building robots? I mean, you automated so much of the Gigafactory already, where they're humans playing a small role. Do the robots just play the role that humans are playing in that regard? [00:13:04] Speaker 2: We still have a lot of humans building things. You know, Tesla direct employees who are building things, or like, basically, people in the factory are either building or managing people who are building, it's roughly 100,000. So we have a lot of people. Tesla total headcounts around 150K, of which two thirds are, you know, in the factory in one form or another. And then our suppliers, there's probably maybe a million or two million people in our suppliers type of thing. So it's a lot of people. What we do expect that is that the output per person at Tesla becomes very, very high. [00:13:49] Speaker 1: Yeah. [00:13:50] Speaker 2: So we're not planning any, like, layoffs or reductions in personnel. In fact, we will increase our headcount. But the output per human at Tesla is going to get nutty high. [00:14:03] Speaker 1: When we were together, we discussed the idea of sustainable abundance on our podcast, and you reinforce the idea that we have a coming age of universal high income, which has become a point of discussion beyond UBI. But I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on how we get there. Have you reflected on that any further? And more so, you know, we talked about a timeframe of civil unrest, you know, two, three, four, five years. Probably a lot of COVID-like checks in the interim until we get to a demonetization and a, you know, deflation that leads us to UHI. Any more reflections on that? Because it's a really, people need that hope and that vision. [00:14:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I don't think we should be sort of complacent. We do need to be careful because the future is a range of possible outcomes, and they're not all great. But I, at this point, I do agree with you that it's likely to be great. You know, it's probably 80% likely, maybe more likely to be great. And I do think we'll have universal high income. We're basically just issuing money to people, you know, and the, really just, because the output of goods and services will so far exceed the money supply that, you know, that effectively you have deflation. Because deflation is just the ratio of the outputs of goods and services to the money supply. So that's, so if the rate of growth of goods and services far exceeds the rate of growth of the money supply, which I predict will happen, then you will have deflation. [00:15:54] Speaker 1: Yes, and a lot of, a lot of people spinning up new companies, competing against each other, driving the price down and increasing the variability and deflation faster and faster. [00:16:07] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's basically AI and robots are going to make similar stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans. They'll just run out of things to do for the humans and then they, you know, there's only so much that humans can even express that they want. So you go back to my example of like, if you go a million times greater than the Earth's economy, you've long since saturated all human desire. You know, like maybe like, if you go a thousand times more than our current economy, a thousand times, you probably have already saturated, saturated human, anything people can think of that they want. [00:16:52] Speaker 1: So do you think the value of money is going to significantly decrease? Will it, will we go post capitalist? [00:17:00] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. So just as you're becoming a... It's probably something like an in banks culture sort of future. And I think the AI down the road will really not use human currency. It will just care about power and mass, wattage and tonnage. [00:17:31] Speaker 1: It's kind of ironic then, right? Just as you're becoming a multi-trillionaire, money starts to have less value. [00:17:38] Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. You know, this is all this stuff. It's just really just trillionaires represents like some percentage ownership in companies that I've built. And it's not like sitting in the bank account. It's just literally I own a percentage of the companies. The companies are doing lots of useful things. The value of the company grows. I own a percentage of the companies and that sums up to that number which seems high. [00:18:09] Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, I was interviewed by somebody who was asking me about your drive, what drives you. And I said, Elon's driven to solve problems. He's driven to make life in the world better by just solving the biggest problems over and over and over again. And if someone else were solving them, he wouldn't need to. But no one else is solving them. Right. So I just want to say thank you for that, pal. Thank you for that. You're welcome. I am curious. Do you think that democracy and our modern institutions can keep up with a supersonic tsunami coming our way? Are they just going to fall in its way? They're just going to break down? How do we deal? [00:19:11] Speaker 2: I mean, it's called the singularity for a reason, you know, which is that it's hard to predict what happens in the singularity. I mean, Grok's logo is the singularity. [00:19:19] Speaker 1: I love it. It's a beautiful logo behind you, by the way. It's gorgeous. [00:19:22] Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. It's so the light, the light, the halo around a black hole is the mass and light are falling in type of thing. It's hard. It's hard to know what happens inside the singularity, but it's going to be very interesting. Like we're going to live in the future will be very entertaining. Of that, I'm confident. [00:19:45] Speaker 1: Yes. [00:19:46] Speaker 2: And I think also like AI and robotics, also the only way we're going to solve our budget deficit, frankly, and not just go bankrupt as a country. So, you know, you've had an influence on me in that I'm like, I've just decided to be more optimistic. It's like, we just should be more optimistic. Thank you, pal. I thought that I wasn't an optimist, but I was like, maybe dwelling a little too much on the negative stuff. [00:20:16] Speaker 1: It's all upside being an optimist. And a realist a little bit. Yeah. [00:20:22] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't want to be complacent or just assume everything's going to go well, but try to make it go well. But I mean, there will be some pretty amazing things that happen. So if you've got humanoid robots that have very high dexterity and are incredibly smart, it means that everyone on Earth will have access to better medical care than the richest person on Earth. Which, by the way, I would say like, you know, if I'm allegedly the rich person or whatever, I think actually sovereigns are richer than me, by the way. But it's like, you know, I like I had to have like a like a neck surgery three times because the first two ones were done wrong. You know, like I might put that, you know, so and I like my back still hurts a little bit. I'm like, can I please solve back pain? That would be a huge one. And I think it will. [00:21:21] Speaker ?: Yep. [00:21:22] Speaker 2: So, you know, back pain sucks. I think that's maybe like, you know, sometimes why do people get grumpy when they get old? It's because of back pain. It's like if your back hurts all the time, you can't sleep while you're going to be grumpy. [00:21:33] Speaker 1: We had David Sinclair on stage this morning and he's going into human trials with ER100, his partial epigenic reprogramming. And one of the one of the papers recently published shows it enables joint repair. And so back pain may be one of the things that it eliminates. So that would be amazing. Yeah, for sure. For sure. [00:21:58] Speaker 2: Honestly, average happiness level for humans would just go up tremendously if you just solve back pain. Because it's not a question of if you'll get back pain, it's when, you know, you'll get back pain. [00:22:09] Speaker 1: I keep on inviting you to come down to Fountain Life in Dallas. We'll help you out. But sometime when you have time. [00:22:18] Speaker 2: Okay, well, do you have like, what do you, I understand like you can get like MRI and CAT scans and everything. But like, what do you do with that? Happy to send you the list. [00:22:25] Speaker 1: I'll DM you the list of therapeutics. You know, a secret serum or something? Yeah, exactly. You know, listen, you've been so generous. Next up on stage with me is one of another great moonshot entrepreneur, Ben Lamb, who runs Colossal, the de-extinction company, you know, the woolly mammoth and 15 other species. I heard, I heard you say you might want a mini woolly mammoth. Is that, is that true? [00:22:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it would be really cool to have a pet miniature woolly mammoth. That would be pretty epic. Okay. [00:23:00] Speaker 1: I'll, I'll put a word in with you, for you with, with, with Ben. [00:23:04] Speaker 2: That'd be adorable. Little things just running around, trumpeting away. And it's like, look at this, it's a great little pet. [00:23:11] Speaker 1: Amazing. [00:23:13] Speaker 2: Can somebody please do Jurassic Park in real life? Yeah, well. I'd definitely go, even if there was some risk of death. That'd be super cool. [00:23:22] Speaker 1: I think if anybody's going to do that, it's, it's Ben Lamb in Colossal. He's re, he's engineering living life products. Someone asked him recently if he can make a Pikachu. And he said, probably. [00:23:35] Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, Jurassic, Jurassic World, whatever. That would be great. [00:23:41] Speaker 1: All right. I'll ask him. Yeah. Elon, so grateful for you coming and joining us and sharing. Thank you, my, thank you, my friend. Let's give it up for Elon Musk. [00:23:52] Speaker ?: Thanks, guys.