Chairman of Stagwell, here with Lindy Ocorino and an assembled group of about 25 CMOs of major corporations here at CES, during the CES to really see the latest in technology. And we're graced with Elon Musk, who has consented to give us some of his time to answer some of these really burning questions
about technology, how it's going to develop and change our lives, and how some of his interactions with government may also change our lives as well. And so if I might start off with kind of a big overall question, and I'll do some questions, and then we'll get some questions in from the group. I have to say that I've been actually a Tesla owner for many years. So great. Thank you. Clearly someone of great taste.
I know it matters. I will say that I drove from Miami to Fort Lauderdale to meet my brother for dinner about 40 miles. And I did not touch. Oh, well, I touched the wheel. But let me tell you that the Tesla. The car drove itself is what you're saying. And you did not need to intervene. It did not need me for this entire ride. Yeah, it's pretty magical. It's like when you tell people that they have not experienced it.
They don't believe you, yeah. Yes, and I didn't believe me either. Because I've been a skeptic about how far it would go, and your latest releases of software are really incredible. So I encourage people to try them. As a big question, and in that vein,
Coming in the next decade, what do you think is going to be the greatest advances in technology that will affect people's lives? What should they be expecting to see here from technology in their lives? I don't want to blow your minds, but AI is going to be big.
Like you don't need a thousand cat videos that are exactly the same, but all the interesting videos. And you just saw that down into tokens, essentially bits of information. And we've now exhausted all of the, basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training.
happened basically last year. And so the only way to then supplement that is with synthetic data where the AI creates, it'll write an essay or it'll come up with a thesis and then it will grade itself and go through this process of self-learning with synthetic data, which is always challenging because how do you know it
How do you know if it hallucinated the answer, or it's a real answer? So it's challenging to find the ground truth. But it is pretty wild that AI at this point has run out of all human knowledge to train on. It's just crazy. I know that you're building for Grok the largest AI center on the planet. We already have, yeah. It's an operation. Microsoft is planning $80 billion, where I used to work for a while.
That's a lot of money by anyone's standards really. I did a poll and we asked, is AI making a difference in your life today? 13% said yes. And they said in five years from now, will AI make a difference in your life? 87% expect in five years it will make a difference. Gigantic difference. Okay. What is it going to do for people? Is it going to put them out of work or to work? AI will do anything you want and even suggest things you never even thought of.
So AI really within the next few years will be able to do any cognitive task. Like it obviously begs the question, what are we all going to do? But pretty much any cognitive task that doesn't involve atoms, AI will be able to do within, I'd say max three or four years, maximum. And then the, another element of it is the robotics is that you need, so you can't just be thinking, AI can't just be thinking.
I feel confident in that prediction. But the funny thing is, if you go back even five years ago, certainly 10 years ago, 10 years ago, even 15 years ago, I was saying AI is going to be this massive thing that has deep superintelligence, smarter than the smartest human. People thought I was kidding. And they thought, that's ridiculous. There's no way a computer is going to be smarter than a human and be able to do all these complicated things.
The latest AIs are able to pass complicated tests better than most humans. They can pass the medical tests better than 80% of doctors or something. AI can diagnose radiography better than most people who have been doing it their whole life.
So that's just accelerating, obviously. I think probably if you haven't seen Jensen's talk, it's excellent. And it really shows how much AI is advancing. And it's advancing on the hardware front, on the software front, in terms of data. This is like the new sort of thing is synthetic data because we've actually run out of all the books. And you literally run out of, you take the entire internet and all books ever written and all interesting videos, like
And it's in a data center, it's got to do things. So that's where you need the robots. And you need self-driving cars, which obviously you've experienced. And that rate of improvement is exponential in how good the self-driving cars are. We feel confident in passing the, basically being better than human driving in about three months, basically Q2 of this year. We feel confident of passing, having a probability of accident that is better than the average experienced driver.
and then it'll keep going from there. Ultimately, I think it's going to be 10 times safer than a human driver, and then 100 times safer. It's to the point where, really, it just won't crash. And that's happening this year with Tesla. And this is a software update to a car. So as you experienced yourself, it's the same car. It got a software update. And suddenly, it's way smarter at driving. Let me try a few timelines then, because, look, I'm not the youngest guy around.
I want to be there for as much technology. My standards for what is young get older every year, as I get older. I used to build computers in kids, right, when you couldn't buy them yet. And I don't have to do that anymore. So self-driving, some timeline, self-driving cars, certified, government certified self-driving, you think will be within a year?
There already are autonomous in some regions, like Waymo has autonomous vehicles with no one in it, but they're limited to like a few cities in the US. The Tesla solution, which is a much more difficult path to go, but ultimately a much more powerful is a general solution to self-driving. The Tesla software is just purely AI and vision. It doesn't rely on any expensive sensors, no LIDARs, no radars, or it doesn't even require knowing the area beforehand.
part will be blind sites that even if somebody has lost both eyes or has lost the optic nerve or even if they've never they've been blind from birth we can interface directly with the visual cortex in the brain and enable them to see. And we already have that working in monkeys. I actually have a monkey who's now had that for I think two years and so enabling basically enabling people to
You could have a drive someplace that's never been before and no Tesla's ever been before. It could even be an alien planet and the car will still work, still drive. And so that's this year. When can I get a home robot? So that's the other element is our humanoid robots. So I think probably most people, if not everyone, would like to have their own personal C3PO R2D2.
And I actually think humanoid robots will be the biggest product ever in history by far. I agree. Yeah, it's just wild. Because you can just say, well, every human is going to want one most likely, and some will want two. And then there'll be all of industry in terms of making, providing products and services. So you have to say, what's the ratio of humanoid robots to humans? My guess is it's at least three to one, four to one, maybe five to one. So we're talking about 20, 30 billion humanoid robots.
And it's not even clear what money means at that point, or if there's any meaningful cap on the economy. I think at that point, assuming that things haven't gone awry in the good AI scenario, I think we won't have universal basic income, we'll have universal high income.
So do you think five years for my first robot? For Tesla, our Optimus robot really is, unless somebody's got something secret we don't know about, our Optimus robot is the most sophisticated humanoid robot in the world. It's got a hand that has 22 degrees of freedom. It looks and feels like a human hand. And we're aiming to have several thousand of those built this year. Initially, we'll test them out at Tesla factories. But then, assuming things go well, we'll
10x that output next year. So we'll aim to do maybe 50,000 to 100,000 humanoid robots next year, and then 10x at a gain the following year. It's like 500,000 robots in three years. That's a lot. That is a lot. Yeah. So I guess maybe we should think of this in terms of Roman legions. How many legions of robots will we have? A Roman legion is 5,000. So when will we have a colony on Mars?
I think we'll be able to send the first uncrewed spacecraft to Mars in two years. So Earth and Mars synchronize every two years. And so we're at a synchronous point right now. So then the next one will be in roughly two years from now. And then there'll be two years from then, there'll be another one. So for the first trip, obviously, we want to make sure that we can land Starship without crashing. We need to prove that we can land Starship on Mars without incrementing the crater count.
If those land safely then maybe on the next trip we would send people and then hopefully that would grow exponentially so eventually there will be thousands of starships going to Mars and I might have this like really cool visual like Battlestar Galactica or something like colony ships departing all together
with these bright points of light in space. I think it looked really cool. But I think the goal has to be to get to the point where Mars is self-sustaining. So the point at which Mars is self-sustaining, which is really defined as the point at which if the resupply shifts from Earth stop coming for any reason, that Mars doesn't die out, that Mars can continue to grow. So if there's something that happens on Earth, let's say there's a World War III or some natural disaster,
who knows what, but for whatever reason the resupply ships stop coming, if Mars can still continue to survive, then the probable lifespan of civilization is dramatically greater. If you stand back and say, how would you evaluate any civilization, you'd say, well, is that civilization still stuck on its home planet, or are they a multi-planet civilization? And we don't want to be one of those lame one-planet civilizations.
We're going to have a respectable outcome here. Even if we don't make it beyond our solar system, we're at least going to get to another planet. And finally, on my list, brain-to-technology communication, direct communication. Am I going to see that also? Because right now, this is looking pretty good for me. Yeah. So we've got Neuralink. We've got now three humans with Neuralink implanted, and they're all working well.
And we've upgraded devices where the devices will have more electrodes, basically higher bandwidth, longer battery life and everything. And so we expect to hopefully do 20 or 30 patients next year, or this year I should say, with the upgraded Neuralink devices. And our first product is we're trying to enable people who have lost their brain-body connection, so they're tetraplegic.
paraplegic, or basically, like you can imagine, say, Stephen Hawking, if Stephen Hawking could communicate as fast or even faster than a normal human, that would be transformational. Yeah. So that that's our first product is being able to read the motor cortex of the brain and say that if you think about moving your hand, it will move the cursor on the screen. And it enables enables people to control their computer or their phone just by thinking. And then our next
controlled devices. And ultimately, we think if you have a second neural link device that is past the point where the spinal damage occurred, we can actually transmit the signals from the brain past where essentially the wires are broken and enable someone to walk again. That would really be profound, obviously. I'm confident that is physically possible. And in the long term,
goal for Neuralink is to be able to improve the bandwidth. So right now, when we're speaking, our bandwidth in bits per second is quite low. And the sustained bandwidth of a human is less than one bit per second over a 24-hour period. So there's 86,400 seconds in a day. And the average human outputs much less than 86,400 bits in a day. If somebody's a writer, they might be able to exceed that. But most people do not output more than the number of seconds in a day.
And with a neural link, you could increase that output capability by 1,000 or maybe a million. So it would be a profoundly different experience. Like you'd be superhuman, essentially. Put me down for all of this so far. An early adopter. Yeah. And trust me, you'll really like the chip. I can guarantee it. And let me bring us down to earth for a question on Doge. I worked very closely, actually, with President Clinton in the 90s,
We did have reinventing government. We did balance the budget in two years actually. That's awesome. Those were the days. It didn't last very long. It didn't last very long. It got blown up very quickly. Have you identified some cuts that you're really looking at that you think will be successful? Do you think the two trillion is a realistic number now that you're looking more closely at it?
Yeah, I think we'll try for $2 trillion. I think that's like the best case outcome. But I do think that you have to have some overage. I think if we try for $2 trillion, we've got a good shot at getting one. And if we can drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and free up the economy to have additional growth such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply, then there will be no inflation.
That I think would be an epic outcome. And in terms of saving money in the government, it's a very target-rich environment for saving money. If you look at any direction, it's like people's like, where will you find places to save money? I'm like, it's like being in a room full of targets. Like you could close your eyes and you can't miss. So there's just a lot of waste in government because especially the federal government, you just got a situation where the checks never bounce. Like they've got like the infinite money computer
And then the people that spend the money are not the people, it's not their money. It's very hard for people to care about spending someone else's money. And then even if, you know, actually I know people in the government who do care about, just as a matter of principle, spending money effectively, and they try to do so, and they can't. The system prevents them from doing so. And they even get told to do crazy things, as again, this probably sounds familiar, where you get towards the end of the budget cycle, and they're told to spend up to their budget.
And even on nonsense stuff, because if they don't spend their budget, the budget gets reduced. So it's actually a perverse incentive to waste money. And then they're punished for not wasting money. So it's totally bananas. I agree. You will find I did a mathematical analysis in terms of how government used to do things. So if you take the Brooklyn Bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel, and you have inflation,
the infrastructure bill should actually get you 4,000 adjusted, braided Lincoln tunnels, which, of course, it's not, because government is not as efficient as it used to be. No, exactly. Essentially, we've had an accumulation of laws and regulations that make basically any large project essentially illegal. And even if you've tried to do it, you've got to spend way more money on the paperwork than on the thing itself.
And then it gets delayed. And so there's an element of Doge, which is very important, which is looking at regulations and getting rid of ones that where the harm is worse than the good. Like you said, any given regulations, okay, there's some amount of good, some amount of harm. What's that ratio? Is it like, and there's a lot of regulations where frankly, there's the completely nonsensical.
And we want to get rid of nonsensical regulations that do not serve the public good. Linda Iaccarino in her keynote here mentioned the Doge thing and she got enormous applause. So I think the country is really waiting to see this effort. They're behind it. They're optimistic. Let me try to get in one more topic here before I get one or two other questions out there, which is obviously Mark Zuckerberg made an amazing 180 degree turn. Yeah.
That's cool. What's your reaction to what he did? And his acknowledgement, frankly, that the government was in fact censoring things, or he was censoring things, or the government, or some combination thereof.
Yeah, there's no question. I mean, 1000% the government was censoring things. We know that for a fact from the Twitter files. Some of the stuff was pretty illegal, frankly. And the FBI had this portal into Twitter where they could spy on anything and censor anything and had a two-week auto-delete. So we don't even know what they did. Except that they had immense power to do whatever they wanted, which doesn't sound legal. And that sounds pretty crazy.
But there was also a lot of self-censoring, and I don't know, there was just a lot of censoring going on. And I think you, I feel very strongly that you have to have freedom of speech to have a functioning democracy. If you don't have freedom of speech, freedom of expression, then how do you know what's really going on? And if you can't make an informed vote, then you don't have a real democracy. It's just, it's incredibly important to,
I think listen to the wisdom of the founders of the country and say, why did they make that the first amendment? And it's that they did it for a reason. It's because they came from places where there was massive censorship and the penalties for speaking your mind would be fines, imprisonment, or death. And they're like, we really don't like that. We want that to not be the case in America. So then they have freedom of speech. You just posted, you are the media.
Citizen journalism really becoming more and more important in this age of media and you see it with the wildfires here. Yeah, exactly It really takes the citizens to report and tell people. Yeah Yeah, actually you think of it like um
Before there was before the internet, you had to have the what I call legacy media, which is, you had to have some aggregation points where, you know, that you'd have reporters go and find things out, then they would come, they would go to to to their office, they would write up articles, they would then print those articles on paper, that paper would then be distributed. And it was the only way to know what was going on. But it was very slow, especially in the old days. I think when
Like when Lincoln was assassinated, I think it took three weeks for that news to reach Asia or something like that. And in fact, in the old days, like you wouldn't even know that your country had gone to war because it would take a month for the fact, Hey, we're at war to reach your village. We learned about Pearl Harbor because we decoded the Japanese. They didn't know that we decoded their, their cyber system. And that's how we actually learned about it. Yeah.
And we have just, if I can squeeze in, I just got three minutes here. It's fine. You can go a little longer if you want. OK. Thank you. So I got three questions in from the audience that Dan Gardner and Toby Daniels of OnDiscourse had. Want to know, do you think the internet sucks? And what do you think we need to do to fix it? You mean the content on the internet or your internet connection? Because Starlink can help you on the internet connection. Starlink is great for internet connectivity.
Especially for places that have bad connectivity. In fact, I think stalling is really having a significant effect in terms of lifting people out of poverty, in fact, in many parts of the world where people have a product that they want to sell, but if they don't have an internet connection, they can't do it. And if they want to learn things, basically you can learn anything on the internet for free. MIT has all these lectures that are available for free on the internet.
which is an internet connection. And so once you have an internet connection, you've got access to education, you've got access to a global market. So I think it's very significant at how connectivity makes a difference in people's lives. With respect to, maybe the question was geared at, is there too much negativity on the internet? I think at times there is too much negativity. And I actually, on the X platform, I proposed we were going to tweak the algorithm to be a bit more positive. And then people got upset about me for that.
I'm like, OK, what do you guys want? Actually, the second question from Zach Moffitt, CEO of Target Victory, was how do you make pessimism uncool again? So I think it ties to maybe exactly what you're saying, which is that it's become people are afraid. This used to be a can-do nation. Yeah. Always very positive. And now the country, when I ask if we're on the right track or the wrong track, they never say that we're on the right track anymore. OK. There isn't. Well, hopefully with this, you know,
I'm actually pretty optimistic about the next, I think we're actually going to, I think we have the potential for a golden age.
So we need to, it's very important to get rid of the mountain of regulations that are holding things back. And I don't mean, there's some good regulations, but there's just so much that we just can't get anything done. You take the California wildfires, for example, we really need to have fire breaks and we need to clear the brush back away from houses. And, and we need to make sure the reservoirs are full. These are all kind of obvious things. But due to a bunch of environmental rulings, you can't actually do that in California.
So they're not allowed to do the five rakes and they're not allowed to push the brush back away from houses because it might hurt some like red-legged frog or something like that. It's like some sort of creature, usually a creature you've never heard of, that is preventing this from occurring. There's this fish called the smelt, for example, and so we have far more freshwater runoff into the ocean than we should really.
On the theory that it helps this one little fish that likes a slightly briny freshwater, saltwater mix, and if we keep more freshwater, then the smelt fish will not be happy. But there's no actual evidence that the smelt fish is
to be unhappy if we keep a bit more fresh water, in fact. So we should keep more fresh water, keep the reservoirs full, and just have some sensible fire breaks and move the brush away from houses. That's just an example. We've saved a lot of trouble, a lot of tragedy in LA if we'd done that. So, you know, and yeah, I think AI and robotics is going to lead to a higher standard of living for people beyond what they can imagine. So
I think we have AI doctors in medicine that are pretty incredible. That's the final question. She says, if all the robots and everything freeze up time for humans, what is it they will do with that time? Or what can we ask them to do with that time? I think that's a question that rounds out the circle of technology.
Yeah, I guess it would be a bit like being retired. Now, this will take a few years, but at some point, as AI and robotics get better, eventually AI will be able to do everything that humans can do. Any task you do will be optional, like it'll be a hobby or... So, it is a big question, will our lives have meaning if the computers and the robots can do everything better than we can?
That is a real question. I do wonder about that myself. And maybe that's why we need the neural link, so we can enhance human capabilities, so we can keep up with the machine. I just want to thank you for this obviously incredibly optimistic view about technology and where it's going. I feel reassured that the kind of leaps that are going to be made
particularly what you're working on are just incredible in the next few years, not decades away, but you really talked in terms of years consistently. And I'm very thankful for that. And, and I think that's absolutely tremendous message here at the, where we are in Las Vegas, studying what technology is going to be available to people. And, and really again, thank you for the tremendous role in opening up free speech.
And for the role that X and Linda is playing in terms of that, I know that we're working to get full recognition by everyone on the platform as it should be because free speech is, I think, the proper way to go. Yeah.
I don't think unbalance is good. One of the things I try to create conceptually with the X platform is it's like a global consciousness. It's like collective consciousness of humanity. And if you have a collective consciousness of humanity, you're going to get every aspect of humanity, good and bad. That's just naturally what happens. But I do want it to be a good and productive thing. And, you know, the aspiration is to maximize unregretted user minutes. So like you spend time in the platform.
But did you regret it or not regret it? And we want to maximize unregretted user time. And I always go back, and I always say that everything in technology was either in the Jetsons. Love the Jetsons. It's either in Star Trek or the Jetsons, more or less, right? But the one thing that was never predicted in any book that I could find is social media.
It's the one thing that they never really, there's no book built around how social media would develop, how it would really impact society, how it would move political movements and so forth. And it's interesting that everybody missed that in their projections. I guess the last question maybe is, what do you want X to be and where is that platform going to go? And I think that's a great question. Yeah, I do want X to be a force for good, exactly. I do want X to be a force for good and I do view it like the group mind of humanity and we want to have a sort of
a healthy, happy, and sane group mind versus the opposite. I want it to be the best source of truth. If you're trying to understand what's going on in the world, that it has the most accurate, the most up-to-date information about anything large or small. It gives you the best understanding of what's going on in the world, anywhere, anytime. Terrific. Thank you. Any closing thought you want to leave us with? Otherwise, I want to thank you for being so generous with your time.
You're welcome. I think I would encourage people to be optimistic about the future. I think it's much more likely to be good than bad. So that's my prediction. All right. Thanks, guys.