Elon Musk’s Full Interview from the World Economic Forum 2026

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: that was not a that was not a large applause start again that's better thank you yeah we're gonna make this interesting how many how many quotes are you gonna want that are gonna be after this session uh i don't know i mean five okay so uh good afternoon everyone it's great to see everybody here uh it's been an amazing week here in davos um hopefully everybody saw that we are having conversations here hopefully everybody agrees there are some conversations that we may disagree there's many conversations we may have agreed but through those conversations and i think today's result with a peace agreement earlier today um the world economic forum is here to have those conversations to have understandings and also resolution so um uh it's an important component of who we and what we are and i'm thrilled uh to have elon musk here um he came all the way from california to be here to see all of you so uh thank you elon uh you guys welcome [00:01:20] Speaker 2: um i mean i heard i heard about uh i heard about the formation of the the peace summit and i was like is that uh is that uh is that p-i-e-c uh you know a little piece of greenland a little piece of [00:01:39] Speaker 1: venezuela we got one all we want is peace okay i'm gonna uh as i said i'm a pretty proud uh ceo black rock since we went public um uh the compounding return of black rock to our shareholders with 21 percent uh since elon took tesla uh public his compounded return is 43 percent this is i just another advertisement for everybody especially for europeans this is why more citizens should be investing with growth investing with their countries imagine if a lot of pension funds invested with elon when tesla went public and how much return with the all the pension funds that invested side by side with elon and the growth so um a spectacular return there's very few companies well i don't think there's any other company as large as tesla today that has that compounded return so congratulations oh thank you good [00:02:46] Speaker 2: measurement well we have an incredible team at tesla and that's the reason so i want to get into uh [00:02:52] Speaker 1: the dirt the the meaningful component about technology the possibilities um i want to talk about ai and robotics energy space and the progress ultimately coming down to engineering engineering discipline scale um and i want to talk about that um and i want to talk about that um a little execution um and few few people if not anyone has the experience and the fortitude to confront these issues head-on not just the ideas but the execution across so many different technologies elon and that's why i thought it was important for us to have this dialogue here uh in davos so you're presently building on ai on robotics on space on energy all at the same time when you look across those efforts what do they have in common from an engineering [00:03:43] Speaker 2: standpoint uh well they're all very difficult technology challenges um but the uh the overall goal of my companies is to maximize the future of civilization like basically maximize the probability that civilization has a great future um and uh to expand consciousness beyond earth so if you take spacex for example that spacex is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond earth uh to the moon to mars uh eventually to other star systems and uh i think we should always view consciousness uh life as we know it as as precarious and delicate um because to the best of our knowledge we we don't know if life anywhere else you know i'm often asked are there aliens among us and i'll say that i am one but or you're from the future they don't believe me okay um so uh but i i i i i think if anyone would know if there are aliens among us it would be me um and uh we have 9 000 satellites up there and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship so i'm like i don't know bottom line is i think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare and it might only be us and if that's the case then we need to do everything possible to to ensure that the the light of can the light the light of consciousness is not extinguished because we're effectively the way i view it is the image in my mind is of a a tiny candle in a vast darkness a tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out and that's why it's important to make life multi-planetary such that if there is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster on earth that consciousness continues that's the purpose of spacex tesla is obviously about sustainable technology and uh and and also at this point we've we've sort of added to our mission sustainable abundance so with robotics and ai this this is really the path to abundance for all if you say you know people often talk about solving global poverty or essentially how do we make give everyone a very high standard of living i think the only way to do this is ai and robotics which which doesn't mean that it is uh without its issues i mean this we need to be very careful with ai we need to be very careful with robotics we don't want to find ourselves in a james cameron movie uh you know terminator he's great great movies love his movies but we don't want to be in terminator obviously um but but if you have um ubiquitous ai that is essentially free or close to it and ubiquitous robotics uh then uh you will have an an ex an explosion in the global economy an expansion the global economy that is truly uh beyond all precedent can that expansion be broad yes or is it narrow [00:07:22] Speaker 1: and how can that be created how can it broaden the global economy yeah it's [00:07:30] Speaker 2: i mean i mean the way to think of it is that if you have a large number of humanoid robots the economic output is the average productivity per robot times the number of robots right um and and actually my prediction is in the in the benign scenario of the future that we will the robots we will actually make so many robots in ai that they will actually saturate all human needs meaning you won't be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point like like there will be such an abundance of goods and services because the my prediction is there'll be there'll be more robots than people so but how do you then have human purpose in that scenario yeah i mean you know there was nothing nothing's perfect you know um but i mean i mean it is a necessary um like you can't have both you can't have work that has to be done uh um and uh amazing abundance for all um because if it's if it's work that has to be done then then you and only some people can do it then you then you you you can't have abundance it's narrow it's narrow exactly so um but if you if you have billions of humanoid robots i think there will be um i think i think everyone on earth is going to have one and going to want one um because uh you who wouldn't want a robot to you know um assuming it's very safe uh watch over your kids take care of your pets uh if you have elderly parents uh a lot of friends might have said they have elderly parents it's it's very difficult to take care of them expensive yeah it's expensive and it's expensive and it's expensive and there just aren't enough people to take care of the don't enough young people to take care of the old people right um so if you if they um if you had a robot that could take care of and protect and and elderly parents i think that would be great that would be an amazing thing to have um and and i think we will have those things so i mean overall i'm very optimistic about the future i think we're headed for a future of amazing abundance uh which is very cool um and uh and definitely we are in the most interesting time in history um i think there's more interesting time in history so can we uh can you and i reverse aging in [00:10:11] Speaker 1: this new history or or are we going to see it you know i haven't i haven't put much time into uh the [00:10:19] Speaker 2: aging stuff i i do think it is a very solvable problem like you can i think when when we find figure out what causes aging i think we'll find it's incredibly obvious it's not a subtle thing um the reason i say it's not a subtle thing is because all the cells in your body you know with some pretty much age at the same rate i've never seen someone with with an old left arm and a young right arm ever in my life um so why is that it that means that there must be a clock a synchronizing clock right that is synchronizing across 35 trillion cells in your body um and uh you know there is some benefit to death by the way it's like there's there's a reason why we don't actually have a longer lifespan uh because if you if you have if people do live forever for a very long time i think there's some risk of an ossification of society of things just getting kind of locked in place um and uh you know it just may become um stultifying just not uh like like vibrancy um but that that said do i think we'll figure out ways to extend life and um and maybe even reverse aging i think that's highly likely [00:11:51] Speaker 1: i'm looking forward to that yeah so um in the future that you talk about the ai models autonomous machines rockets depends on massive increases of compute massive increases in energy expensive energy manufacturing scale what are the bottlenecks to to get there and once again with all that expenditures again how can we make sure that it's broad and not narrow [00:12:26] Speaker 2: uh i i just think the natural thing is it's going to be very broad because uh ai companies will seek as many customers as they possibly can and the cost of ai will get it is already very low and it's it's plummeting uh every year i mean you almost the cost of ai is almost change meaningfully changing on a [00:12:47] Speaker 1: month-to-month basis there's open there's open models now everywhere yeah yes very there's open models [00:12:55] Speaker 2: and the open models only like there may be a year behind right the the private the sort of closed models um so so i think the the the ai companies will seek as as many customers as possible which means [00:13:10] Speaker 1: they'll seek they'll provide ai to the world but the cost of getting to there the compute the chips um the fab um the powering um that to me what are the what are the you know those are huge the limiting [00:13:26] Speaker 2: factor yeah i think the limiting factor for um ai deployment is fundamentally electrical power it's just right it's energy yeah yeah um i mean we're seeing the the rate of ai chip production increase exponentially but the rate of electricity being brought online is uh three percent four percent a year max yeah it's clear that we're we're very soon maybe even later this year uh we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on except for china china china china's china's growth in electricity is tremendous they're building 100 gigawatts of nuclear as we speak uh actually solar is the biggest thing in china so china's i believe china's production capacity on solar is 1500 gigawatts a year and they're deploying over a thousand gigawatts a year of solar um now you know for continuous solar load you divide that by roughly four or five uh call it that's around uh 250 gigawatts of steady state power paired with batteries um paired with batteries um and that that's a very big number that's half of the average power usage in the u.s right so u.s power uh usage on average is is 500 gigawatts uh china just in solar just like just in in in solar like that can provide steady state power uh and batteries can do half of the u.s electricity output per year just with solar solar is by far the the biggest source of of of energy um and actually when you look beyond or even even on earth but certainly beyond earth uh the sun rounds up to a hundred percent of all energy this is an important thing to consider um so the sun is 99.8 of the mass of the solar system jupiter is about 0.1 and everything else is miscellaneous um now even if you were to uh burn jupiter in a in a thermonuclear reactor uh the sun the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to a hundred percent because jupiter is only 0.1 percent if you teleported teleported three more jupiters into our solar system this and and burnt three more jupiters and everything else in the solar system the sun's energy would still round up to 100 percent so it's really all about the sun um and that's that's why uh one of the things we'll be doing with spacex uh you know within a few years is launching um solar powered ai satellites right um because the the space is really the source of immense power and then you don't need to take up any room on earth uh there's so much room in space and you can scale to uh enormous uh i mean you can scale to i think ultimately hundreds hundreds of terawatts a year [00:16:42] Speaker 1: you and i have had these conversations before but why don't you tell the audience what would it take for the united states and what type of geography would it take to have that solar field to electrify the united states and then let me ask a question why aren't we doing it yeah so i mean i guess a rough [00:17:01] Speaker 2: way to think about it is 100 miles by 100 miles we'll call it 160 kilometers by 160 kilometers of solar is enough to power the entire united states so the 100 100 mile by 100 mile areas is i mean you could take basically a small corner of utah nevada nevada new mexico obviously wouldn't want it all in one place but i'm just you could it's it is a very small percentage of the area of of the us to generate all of the electricity that the us uses um and the same is true actually i mean for for europe you could take a small part you could take uh relatively unpopulated areas of say spain and sicily and generate all of the electricity power that you're paid so why don't you think that there's a movement towards [00:17:53] Speaker 1: that here and in the united states uh well there is as it is in china well unfortunately in in the u.s [00:18:01] Speaker 2: the the the tariff barriers for solar panel are extremely high um and that makes the economics of deploying solar uh so artificially high because china makes almost all the solar um and uh and [00:18:18] Speaker 1: the tech that what would it take for europe or the us to build it commercially if it's that scale [00:18:26] Speaker 2: yeah i i think i think uh well i can tell you what what we're gonna do you know spacex and tesla was is we're building up um large-scale solar right so the spacex and tesla teams both separately are working to build to 100 gigawatts a year of solar power in the u.s of manufactured solar power and um that'll probably take us i don't know about three years or something but that's that's these are pretty big numbers um and um you know i'd encourage others to this to do the same um we obviously don't control that you know your u.s tariff policy uh but uh for for for other countries uh you know that there's china makes solar cells that are incredibly low cost and i think uh it will be worth uh doing large-scale solar so i know you are you're going to be having a couple big [00:19:33] Speaker 1: announcements on robotics and what it can do i mean when i went to the factory you showed me those robots yeah um how quickly you talked about the billions of robots but how quickly and how quickly can they be deployed in a manufacturing setting how quickly can they be utilized and be functional and be uh create that that abundance that you talked about [00:20:02] Speaker 2: well humanoid robotics will advance very quickly i think uh we we do have some of the tesla optimist robots doing simple tasks in the factory um except probably later this year by the end of this year i i think they'll be doing um more complex tasks um and and but still deployed in an industrial environment and uh and probably sometime next year i'd say that by the by the end of next year i think uh would be selling humanoid robots uh to the public um that that's when we are confident that there is very higher liability very high safety um and the range of functionality is uh is also very high you can [00:20:53] Speaker 1: basically ask it to do anything you'd like you're already seeing that in tesla cars this the software changes that you're doing and what is it every quarter now a software change that upgrades the the ability of the robot within the car uh yes uh the tesla full self-driving [00:21:09] Speaker 2: software we update it sometimes once a week um and um recently some of the insurance companies have said that uh it is actually so safe uh when tesla full full self-driving is so safe that uh they're offering uh customers half price insurance if they if they use tesla full self-driving [00:21:32] Speaker 1: in the car and that can be monitored by the insurance company can they is that part of the agreement then yeah [00:21:39] Speaker 2: um but i i i think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point right um and tesla's rolled out uh sort of robo taxi service in a few cities and right well uh i be very very widespread by the end of this year within the us and then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in europe hopefully next month really quickly yeah and then uh maybe a similar time timing for china hopefully [00:22:17] Speaker 1: i want to move to space because historically space is very capital intensive historically been done by governments obviously spacex changed the whole model but we've seen it slow to scale and now i'm starting to see it ramping up in what you're doing and other things um talk to us about the reason you know the automation and ai how it's changing the economics and building and preparing for us in operating in space uh sure um [00:22:51] Speaker 2: well the the key breakthrough that tells that the major breakthrough that spacex is hoping to achieve this year is full reusability um so no one has ever achieved full reusability of a rocket which is very important for the cost of access to space um we've achieved partial reusability with falcon 9 by landing the boost stage we've we've now landed the boost stage over 500 times um but uh we we don't we have to throw away the upper stage the upper stage sort of burns up on re-entry for falcon 9 so and that the cost of that is equivalent to a small to medium-sized jet so um but with with starship which is a giant [00:23:32] Speaker 1: rocket it's the largest flying machine ever made that's a rocket that you're using for the idea of going to [00:23:37] Speaker 2: mars right yeah mars and the moon um as well as for uh high volume satellite stuff so starship um hopefully this year we should prove full reusability for starship which will be um a profound invention uh because the cost of access to space will drop by a factor of 100 when you achieve full reusability um right it's it's the same sort of economic difference that you would expect that uh between say a reusable aircraft and a non-reusable aircraft like if you have to throw your aircraft away after every flight that would be a very expensive flight um but if you only have to refuel uh then it's the cost of the fuel and so that's really the uh the the fundamental breakthrough that gets the cost of access to space uh we think uh below the cost of uh of freight on aircraft uh so you know under a hundred dollars a a pound type of thing easily um so it it it makes uh putting large satellites into into space very low very very very cheap um and then when you have solar in space you you get uh five times more effectiveness maybe even more than that than solar on the ground because it's it's always sunny and cold yeah it's it's it's it's well it's always sunny so you you don't have a day night cycle or seasonality right or weather um and you get about uh 30 percent more power in space uh because uh you don't have atmospheric attenuation of the power right the net effect is solar is five times more uh any given solar panel will do five times more uh energy and space than uh on the ground there's any capacity in doing that and [00:25:40] Speaker 1: and then taking that power and bringing it back to earth is there any way of doing that or you're just taking that power and utilizing it for the needs like building um [00:25:52] Speaker 2: ai data centers in the space i i think the case it's it's a no-brainer for building uh ai solar powered ai data centers in space um because as you mentioned it's also very cold in space if you're if you're if you're if you're in the shadow uh then it's it's very cold in space just three degrees kelvin so you just have your solar panels facing the sun and then uh a radiator that's like point like pointed away from the sun um so it has no sign incidents and then it's and then it's just cooling it's a very efficient cooling system so uh net effect is that the lowest cost place to put ai will be space and that'll be true within two years maybe three three at the latest wow [00:26:39] Speaker 1: so looking 10 or 20 years out um what would how would you describe success with ai or space technology and where do you see it is that can you are you more certain what's going to happen the next three [00:26:52] Speaker 2: years or five or ten i don't know what's going to happen in 10 years but the rate at which ai is progressing i think we we're we might have ai that is smarter than any human by the end of this year and i would say no later than next year wow um and then probably by 2030 or 2031 call it five years from now uh ai will be smarter than uh all of humanity collectively [00:27:28] Speaker 1: we only have a number of minutes left but i want to humanize you for a second so there's no speculation that you're a piece right i want to i mean i would frame this question by you are the most successful entrepreneur industrialist in the 21st century maybe beyond um i want to so i want to really get this you know what inspired you who inspired you what was the foundation of of your curiosity and and importantly what was the what was it was there a aha moment epiphany at any time in [00:28:03] Speaker 2: your life and career well um i mean as a kid i read a lot of science fiction sci-fi fantasy books yeah we talked about uh and uh comic books uh and i always liked technology uh i didn't expect to be where i am today that seems incredibly implausible um but uh yeah i was since i was inspired by reading about books about the future about science fiction and uh and i guess i want to make science fiction not fiction forever at some point to science fiction to science fact um and uh you know we want to have like starfleet and star trek really for real like where we actually have giant spaceships traveling through space going to other planets traveling to other star systems beamed up to go back to new york [00:29:00] Speaker 1: you know i'd like to just be beamed back to new york instead of flying yeah um [00:29:09] Speaker 2: talk about star trek no i guess my my essential uh what i would call the philosoph philosophy of curiosity um i'd like to understand uh the meaning of life you know the it is the standard model of is the standard model of physics correct regarding the beginning of life beginning of existence and the end of the universe what what questions do we not know to ask that we should ask um and ai will help us with these things um so i'm just trying to send how do we get here what's going on what's real are there aliens maybe there are um and if we've got if we've got spaceships that are traveling to other star systems uh we may fight we may encounter aliens and or we may find many long dead alien civilizations but i i i'm just i just i just want to know what's going on i'm curious about the the universe [00:30:01] Speaker 1: and um that's my philosophy you see yourself ever going to mars in your lifetime uh yeah i mean i would say [00:30:13] Speaker 2: like i i you know i that's a long commitment i've been asked but isn't that three years each way uh it's uh six months six months that's all it is yeah six months but the planets only align every every two years okay so uh yeah i've been asked a few times like do i want to you know die on mars and [00:30:33] Speaker 1: i'm like yes but just not on impact that's a good that's a good answer anyway uh we're out of time i hopefully everybody enjoyed this um i mean there's so many myths around elon musk i could tell you he's a great friend and i constantly learned so much from him um and i'm totally inspired by what he's what he has done i've been inspired who he is and i'm totally inspired by his vision of the future and i don't think it's such a bad future and i agree with his optimism so elon thank you any last words um [00:31:18] Speaker 2: um well i think generally i think my last words would be i would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future good um and and and generally i think for quality of life it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and right [00:31:39] Speaker 1: on that note [00:31:51] Speaker ?: you