But most of all, welcome Elon Musk.
Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the
time to speak to us today. I know you've got many things on
your plate. And Speaking of that,
congratulations on the Starship rocket last week and the first
soft landing in the ocean for the world's most powerful rocket
vehicle. It's a remarkable achievement.
You are taking the fiction out of science fiction.
Can you share with us what your thoughts, what thoughts were
running through your head when you saw that happening and
what's next? Well, I would say I was
incredibly excited that we achieved those milestones.
I thought perhaps we had maybe a 20 or 25% chance of achieving
both milestones where the booster and the ship both did a
soft propulsive landing in the ocean.
And so it really was we achieved all the objectives, which I
thought was unlikely. And that's thanks to an
incredible team at Space XI. Think we've we've got the most
talented team of rocket engineers that has ever been
assembled. And that's, that's how we're
able to accomplish these things. So, so it's an honour to work
with great people to accomplish great things.
So what's next in in the final frontier?
What do you see ahead for space? Well, the, the founding purpose
of SpaceX is to develop the technologies necessary to extend
consciousness beyond Earth. So, and, and, and this is sort
of a little cerebral, but perhaps appropriate for the Cato
event. I think they're quite cerebral,
but if you think about the sort of Fermi filters of, you know,
Enrico Fermi was always wondered, where are the aliens?
Why do we not see signs of them? And I frequently get asked, are
there aliens on Earth? And I, I, I haven't seen any
signs of aliens. And, and I promise you, the, the
minute I see any evidence of aliens, I'll immediately post it
on the X platform. Most popular post of all time.
So but that. But that we haven't actually
seen any evidence, so I'm not aware of any.
It's just that consciousness is extremely rare.
You know, if we believe the archaeological record and the
standard model of physics, Earth is about four and a half billion
years old. Civilization as measured by the
1st writing is only about 5000 years old.
So archaic creak uniform and roughly 5500 roughly 5500 years
ago was the first writing. I think that's a good date for
the start of civilisation, which which means that civilisation
has only been around for one millionth of Earth's existence
almost nothing. I think this potentially argues
for civilisation being fleeting and fragile.
And so the thing that we can do to increase the probable
lifespan of civilization is to be a multi planet species, to
extend consciousness to other planets, ultimately to other
star systems. And and this would massively
improve the probable lifespan of, of, of humanity and
consciousness as we know it. So that's it's, it's really
trying to get past the single planet Bermi filter that that's
the goal of SpaceX. That's why we're building such a
big rocket. It's far in excess of anything
that's needed to put satellites into a little bit.
And it, it's really it's a planet colonizer.
It's intended to build as quickly as possible a
self-sustaining city on Mars. And I, I think the, you know,
there's, it's somewhat of a race between making a self-sustaining
city on Mars and global thermonuclear war or some
calamity, whichever. If we have some civilization
ending calamity before that happens, then, you know, that's,
that's all they wrote. You know, that's, that's some,
perhaps some future aliens will discover our civilization and
say, well, they, they almost got there, you know, so, so that,
that's, that's the goal. I think that's kind of an
important thing to convey to people in the, in the audience
who, who think about the future and, you know, you care about
the, you know, the, the not just the preservation, but the
extension of civilization, the extent, the, the, the growth of,
of the scope and scale of, of consciousness.
So, yeah, so that that's, that's the, that's the goal.
Make life multi planetary is the goal of SpaceX.
And, you know, along the way we'll seek to generate revenue
from any space based activities, such as providing, you know,
building an Internet Internet system in space, anything that's
sort of space related in order to fund the the extension of
consciousness, consciousness beyond Earth.
That makes a lot of sense to me. We shouldn't keep all our eggs
in one basket. We should try to diversify risk.
So thank you for doing mankind's work.
But that's not the only thing you're doing.
If anyone has missed it, you're also revolutionising electric
cars and it's Neurolink, it's AI, The Boring Company.
And if you missed that, he recently bought Twitter and
renamed it X as well, where we're live streaming as right
now. It's yeah.
See, that's popular with the audience.
To to me, it's exhausting just to read the list of these
things. I think what's Alex Ferguson,
the football coach, the soccer coach, who said that hard work
is a talent, but it's also hard and it's actually quite
exhausting. So the question is, what's
what's the big plan? What's the overarching goal?
Is it just that you can't help yourself from getting involved
in every technological field, or is there an overarching goal?
Yeah, the overarching goal is to take the set of actions that are
most likely to improve the probability that the future is
good. And that leads to the, the, the,
the, the expansion of consciousness and our
understanding of the, the universe.
You know, this is somewhat prompted by a, you know, trying
to figure out what's the meaning of life, you know, so, you know,
I had this existential crisis when I was a kid trying to
figure out like, what's the meaning of life?
Is it just pointless? Like, and I read a lot of books
on, on philosophy and religious books and whatnot.
And, and ultimately the thing that I thought was most
enlightening was Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, where, you know, Earth is basically this giant computer
to answer the question of what is the meaning of life and comes
up with the answer 42. But, but it turns out that
actually the answer is the easy part and the hard part is the
question, but we don't actually know the right questions to ask.
So I thought, well, if we expand the scope of scale
consciousness, then we're better able to understand what
questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.
The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy great book and I advise
everyone to read it and maybe you can become the next Elon
Musk if you do. Thank you also Elon for putting
the role of the moderator and the interviewer and, and in the
spotlight coming up with the right questions.
That's that's the most important thing.
So let me ask you the next question then and try to probe a
little bit deeper into what you're really doing because as I
understand it, you you have six companies that you're running,
but you also have a 7th or did you just come up with another
one? Well, I really, the, the, the
companies that take up the vast majority of my time are Tesla
and SpaceX. So yeah.
So that the, and then the other companies are much smaller and
I, you know, I don't run sort of the X platform day-to-day.
That's Linda Yakarino. I do drive the product
development and the sort of feature improvement, that kind
of thing. And you know, it's so that's,
that's really, it's, it's not like it's these companies are
very different in scale. Like Tesla's, I don't know about
140,000 people, and SpaceX is about 15,000 people and all the
other companies are less, a few 100 people or less.
Yeah. So very, very different scales.
Yeah. But but apart from that, you
also have, if it's six companies, give or take, we also
have a 7th or what it might be. And that's to navigate
bureaucracy and regulations while you're doing this.
And this has been a conference about innovation and
entrepreneurship and how do we do that that when there's so
many obstacles in the way and it, I mean, it's difficult
enough to get to Mars. It's, it's rocket science,
literally. But you also have to navigate
regulation and precautionary mindset.
So, and I've understood that your style of management is to
question every requirement to create clarity by never
accepting, accepting that it just came from some department,
some place. Every requirement should come
with the name of the person who made it, because this makes it
possible to question whether it makes sense on the conviction
that only nature makes the real laws.
Everything else is a recommendation.
And that sounds great, but I think many politicians and
bureaucrats would beg to differ, right?
Yeah. Well, with respect to laws and
regulation, we do have a fundamental issue, which is a
natural outcome of an extended period of prosperity where
there's there really hasn't been sort of a global war or, you
know, there's when the things have been prosperous for a long
time, you just get, you get an accumulation of laws and
regulations naturally. And these laws and regulations
are immortal, whereas humans are obviously mortal.
So the, the longer you, you have this generation of this, this,
this creation of rules and regulations.
But you, but you sort of get to this point where, you know, each
law and regulation is not perhaps crippling in and of
itself. But they're, they're all like
little strings that, that, like a million little strings that,
that that tie Gulliver down. So it like each little string
and then eventually the giant can't move.
So we've in, in, you know, in, in the West, I think we've
created a a regulatory gridlock where just almost everything is
illegal. This is why they can't build a
high speed rail in California. They spent $7 billion and
there's a 1600 foot section is all they have to show for it and
doesn't have rails on it. It's, it's really, you know, too
absurd for parody because large projects are essentially illegal
in California. So and, and, and much of Europe
and, and, and other countries. So there there has to be some
garbage collection process for removing rules and regulations
in in order for society to function and not to, you know,
get hotening of the arteries just to to the point where you
can't do anything. And this relates to our risk
aversion. I think in the classical liberal
tradition, one important starting point is that we just
don't know everything. We nobody does.
So the world is a game of learning and of discovery and
therefore it takes trial and error and experiments to get to
the right place. And I've realized that when I'm
looking at your businesses that you're not really the risk
averse type. On the contrary, you shouldn't
avoid problems, but test things fast to find out what the
problem is fast and then fix it fast.
So a rocket blowing up might not be a mistake.
It might be an important step of levelling up to the next stage
of knowledge and of discovery. But that's the total opposite of
much of the risk averse culture in many businesses and certainly
in in governments So and many are so conservative that they
wouldn't allow anyone to do anything for the first time.
So the question is, how do you deal with that kind of risk
averse culture? What changes in culture and in
regulation would you make to make the world safe for
experiments? Well, like I said, at a
government level, I think that there should be a regulation
removal department and and probably some when we pass new
laws, they should have some kind of sunset perhaps that they they
need to be reaffirmed before they are or they just they
expire. Now the thing that tends to
happen is that once regulations are passed, an ecosystem of
consultants forms around those regulations that wants to keep
them going. Environmental regulations are
particularly bad in this regard. So, you know, and I, I, I'm very
much pro environment, but, but the, the, the environmental
regulations are, are in my view, largely terrible.
And they're, they're very much sort of permission based as
opposed to you have to get permission in advance, as
opposed to say paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which
I think would be much more effective to say, like, look,
we're going to do this project. If something goes wrong, then
we'll be forced to pay a penalty.
But we do not need to go through a three or four year environment
of our environmental approval process.
So just changing things from, you know, you have to get a
permission in advance to you have to pay a penalty if you do
something bad, I think would be profoundly effective for the
advancement of of large projects.
But just in general, I think governments around the world
should be actively deleting regulations, questioning whether
departments exist. Obviously, President Blais, I
think it seems to be doing a fantastic job on this front.
Just deleting things, deleting, deleting entire departments.
Fantastic. Yes.
You know, I mean here this thing about like, if you delete
departments and regulations, you can always put them back.
It goes out that those were very important.
You can always put them back. And, and, and really this is
like taking the brakes off of an economy and, and of a
civilization. It's it's it's we need to snap
those strings that are holding Gulliver down and preventing us
from making progress as a civilization.
Yeah. We've been discussing Argentina
here over the past few days in the new classical liberal reform
agenda. And the next speaker here on
stage is President Miley. And of course, he's up against
decades of, of, of not just obstacles in general, but
stagnation. But he's coming there with this
chainsaw. It was a very famous clip of him
on social media was when he's looking at bureaucracy and
spending in government departments and just removing
them one by one, a fuera. A fuera, which I guess means
sort of get just get rid of it. Sure.
Doesn't that remind you of something your own idea about
the value of subtraction when it comes to innovation and
business? Delete any part of the process
you can, and apparently if you don't end up putting 10% back
in, you did not delete enough. So sorry, yeah, there's I sort
of, I was, I like to use sort of the tools of physics like a
first principles approach to things.
And so the, the sort of a simple algorithm that I developed after
making the same mistake over and over again was and I need to
repeat it to myself. So I make hopefully make these
mistakes less, less often is that you start off first by
making the requirements less dumb.
So, so you, you delete the requirements as you know, delete
and simplify the requirements because if you don't delete and
simplify the requirements, you are simply going to get in the
best case outcome is the right answer to the wrong question.
And then you also then a lot of this involves like sort of
technology companies, but you want to delete first, then, then
once you've addressed the requirements, attempt to delete
the part or process step. And if you haven't deleted, if
you're not forced to put back in at least 10% of what you delete,
you're obviously being far too conservative in the deletion.
So, but people often afraid to delete things and, and I'm like,
well, it's just, you just just go ahead and do it.
And, and if you're not putting a little bit back in, you're,
you're just not deleting enough, obviously.
So I really would, I think this is a very big deal if, if it is
over over over deletion of rules, regulations and you'll
end up putting a few back and that's fine.
Yeah, I told you it's not risk averse, right?
You follow. It's pretty sensible.
It's just sensible really. I I think it stands the test of
logical examination. And to me, that seems to be what
President Millet is trying to do in Argentina as well, to delete
what's not absolutely essential, to leave space for creativity
and and entrepreneurship. You've met him repeatedly.
You've seen what's going on in Argentina.
Do you have any thoughts about that, his ambitions, how
important it is for Argentina and possibly for the rest of the
world, with the case right here, right now?
Well, I think it is very important that Argentina succeed
and that we give President Malay awful support.
And I think this and my prediction is that unless
President Malay is stopped in some way from taking the actions
that he wants to take, that that Argentina will have a massive
growth in the economy and there will be far more prosperity and
and optimism about the future than there ever there has been
perhaps in 100 years. And in in just 10 minutes, Malay
will we'll talk about those things from this stage.
Would you be able to give him some advice if he wants to turn
Argentina into an innovation and entrepreneurship nation again?
What? How should he go about it?
Well, from everything I've read, he's he's making all the right
moves. I would just encourage the
people of Argentina to give him their full support, run this
experiment because clearly the thing the policies of the past
have have not succeeded. We know that for a fact.
So let us, let us, I think, go boldly into the future.
You know, I hope people have originally given them their full
support. And I think it'll be a very
exciting adventure. And I think it's going to work
out really well. Could I just then broaden that
question about innovation and the future of economies?
Because right now it seems like active industrial policy is all
the rage, not just in the old left, but sometimes in the
populist right as well. The idea that governments should
get heavily involved and pick certain winners in business and
in technology. They all often talk about trying
to come up with government moon shots to create the the future,
which I find a little bit ironic because the landing a man on the
moon was great, but it didn't give us any kind of industry.
We didn't see Internet from the space, no moon base, no asteroid
mining, no solar power in space. Because it was political and not
commercial. So and because it was political
it was OK to spend tons of money, but it also made it
unsustainable in the future. It only became a commercially
viable final frontier when SpaceX got into the race.
So it it it. Could you tell us about how you
see government's role in innovation generally?
I mean, you were the guy who had to sue NASA to get them to open
up a space to to private providers as well.
What is the government's role in building the future of
technology? I, I think that the government's
role is, is, is really the, it, it's to ensure that the playing
field is a good playing field. That the rules that, that there
are good rules. The, the government is
essentially the, you know, the Football League and it like the,
the, the, the referee, the, you know, making sure that, that
there's fair play, that like I said, that the rules are
sensible and allowing the players on the field to play the
game. And what happens over time,
though, is government keeps growing and, and at a certain
point you have more referees than players on the field and
then the game is not good. You do need referees.
I'm not saying you don't need referees, but you don't want the
referees to outnumber the that would be silly, but that's often
what happens. So it's just make sure that the
that that, that the player that, that fair games are being
played, that the that are sensible rules and I think and
don't get in the way of the players and the results will be
excellent. When we met in Austin recently,
you talked about socialism as a concept and the problem that
when the government gets too heavily involved, you lose the
feedback mechanisms that really force them to continue to learn,
improve, and do things better all over again.
Would you be willing to share those thoughts with the
audience? Yeah.
You know, like another way you think the government is like a
corporation in the limit. It is the most, it is the
biggest corporation and it is a monopoly and and one that can
really kind of only go bankrupt if the country goes bankrupt.
So it doesn't have the the sort of, you know, commercial
corporations, if the cup, if they make bad products fail to
compete, then they will go bankrupt and and they should if
they make bad products. So, you know, government is
essentially corporation in the limit.
And, and since it is monopoly and and there's, there's no,
there's just it, it you can think of like, like I think one
way to think of the economy is just in terms of feedback loops.
And the feedback loop for government provided services to
be excellent is weak. Because if like if you have, if
you have a government monopoly or anything, what do your, you
as a consumer have no alternatives?
You have no means of like, you know, I would sort of say, like
you said, think of the Department of motor Vehicles,
like the DMV, you know, and, and, and it's very inefficient.
You wouldn't want the DMV to make cars, you know, and, and if
if you don't get good service from the government, what do you
do? Who do you complain to what?
And you just, you know, competition breeds excellence
because two organizations and more organizations are fighting
to make the and consumer happy and one will gain market share
if they do a better job than the other.
So that's why we really want government to do the least
because it because it's just got the broken feedback loop for
improvement, right Afuera? So we only have 4 minutes left
so, but I'd like to pick your brains on a couple of topics,
one of them being free speech. You bought Twitter partly to, as
you've said, described it, to save an open platform, to save
free speech, and that's very laudable.
But of course there are also trade-offs.
The old saying goes, if you keep your mind sufficiently open,
people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
So obviously when we have free speech, we'll get some ugly
stuff as well, even toxic. Can you talk about why to you
it's so important to save freedom of speech for to you and
for society and the progress of society?
Yeah, well, for a platform like the X platform only known as
Twitter, there will be things that are said that are that are
incorrect, but it provides an immediate feedback loop for
correcting that things that are wrong.
So somebody says something, well then another person can reply
and and rebut what that person saying.
There can be just an ongoing sort of dialogue or argument to
and and someone can read the whole thread and see, okay, this
person said something, but somebody counteracted that.
There was further rebuttals. There was more context added and
and that will give them the best understanding of the situation
as compared to say a legacy news media article where it's you
just have the opinion of the reporter, no rebuttal, no
comments, no no, no counter argument.
And very often what's, what printed in the press is
completely false and people don't know.
But on a, on a real time interactive platform like X,
like they can see the, like I said, they can see the not just
what somebody said, but what are the rebuttals?
What are the counter arguments? And we've got things like
community notes, which I think is very helpful, where if
something, if somebody says something false or, or sort of
get inaccurate or misleading, then the, the, the, the sort of
the core secret to community notes is that for a note to be
attached to a post, people who normally disagree about a
subject must agree on that, on that community note for it to be
shown. So the probability of it being
accurate is is very high because people who historically disagree
are are only going to agree on something that is quite
accurate. So it's all down to feedback
loops basically. I think you, yes.
You've been remarkably generous with your time, so I'll just
give you a last question possibility for some last
thoughts. It seems to me that your take on
the world is that progress doesn't happen by itself.
It's not automatic. After the moon landing, we went
back from the final frontier for half a century, and Argentina
has been stagnating for almost a a century by now.
It takes human agency. Someone's got to do it.
And in the light of that, are you optimistic about human
progress? And if So, what are you
optimistic about and what do you think that people are listening
today and and think tanks like the Cato Institute can do to
speed progress up well? It, it does seem as though like
civilization is reaching new heights in technology and, and,
and I think we've got quite a bit of momentum.
I, I do worry about certain existential risks like the low
birth rate, which is accelerating in, in most
countries, you know, and really this is one of those things that
I think is underrated as an issue is that if there are no,
no, no humans, there's no humanity, They, you have to make
them somehow. And I think we should be very
concerned about the, the accelerating implosion of, of,
of the birth rate. This is a super big deal.
Like basically nothing else matters if there are no humans.
Like as a first, as a initial premise, you must have humans
forced without a piece of living unless we're going to leave it
all to the robots. So this I think is is massively,
massively underweighted. And I don't have a great
solution to it, but it must be solved somehow or humanity will
dwindle to nothing. Perhaps if we give people hope
and a belief in the future and that it'll get better, that they
want more people to see it. Yeah, I, I agree.
I think we should we should have an optimistic view of the
future. And but like, I do think that
one sort of bad, like bad thing about the environmentalist
movement is that the, in the, in the sort of extreme form of the
environmentalist movement, it's people start to view humans as a
plague on the surface of the Earth, as a fundamentally bad
thing. And with the implication that if
all humans disappeared somehow it would be, would be better
off. This is the extinctionist
movement. And I think you can, you can
really, I think at a fundamental level, you can think of things
as as a fight between expansionist and extinctionist
philosophies. And the that's what really
matters. Like everything else is like if
humans, if humans go extinct or civilization collapses, whatever
policies we may have are irrelevant.
So first, first and foremost, we must have an expansionist
philosophy for, for civilization and for consciousness.
We must seek to, you know, go beyond what we've done in the
past to increase the, I think increase the number of humans.
And this is, this is incredibly fundamental.
So one way or another, this this must happen.
Yeah. So the.
Final message is go forth and procreate yes.
Go forth and multiply. In a free civilization, yeah.
Yes. Well, you know, time flies and
opportunity cost is a concept that's very viable when you're
talking to Elon Musk. So thank you so much for your
time here today, and I'm sure you've got other important
things to attend to now. Good luck.
All right. Thanks for holding.