Elon Musk

Larry Fink: So, good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see everybody here. It's been an amazing week here in Davos.

Hopefully everybody saw that we are having conversations here. Hopefully everybody agrees. There are some conversations that we may disagree. There's many conversations that we may have agreed, but through those conversations, and I think today's result with a peace agreement earlier today, the World Economic Forum is here to have those conversations, to have understandings, and also resolution.

So, it's an important component of who we and what we are, and I'm thrilled, to have Elon Musk here. He came all the way from California to be here to see all of you. So, thank you Elon.

Elon Musk: You're most welcome. I mean, I heard, I heard about, I heard about the formation of the peace summit, and I was like, is that, is that P-I-E-C? You know, a little piece of Greenland, a little piece of Venezuela.

Larry Fink: We got one. Elon Musk: All we want is peace. Larry Fink: Okay, I'm gonna, as I said, I'm a pretty proud, CEO of BlackRock since we went public.

The compounding return of BlackRock to our shareholders was twenty-one percent. Since Elon took Tesla, public, his compounded return is forty-three percent. This is, 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 would return with the, all the pension funds that invested side by side with Elon and the growth. So, 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. It's a good measurement.

Elon Musk: Well, we have an incredible team at Tesla, and that's the reason. Larry Fink: So I wanna get into, the dirt, the meaningful component about technology, the possibilities. I wanna talk about AI and robotics, energy space, and the progress ultimately coming down to engineering discipline, scale, execution.

And 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, 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 standpoint? Well, Elon Musk: they're all very difficult technology challenges. But the overall goal of my companies is to maximize the future of civilization, like basically maximize the probability that civilization has a great future, and to expand consciousness beyond Earth.

So if you take SpaceX, for example, that's SpaceX is about build advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, eventually to other star systems. And I think we should always view consciousness, life as we know it as precarious and delicate, because to the best of our knowledge, we we don't know of life anywhere else.

You know, I'm often asked, "Are there aliens among us?" And I'll say that I am one. Or Larry Fink: you're from the future.

They Elon Musk: don't believe me. Larry Fink: Okay. So, but I w I Elon Musk: think if anyone would know if there are aliens among us, it would be me. And we have nine thousand satellites up there, and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship.

So I'm like, I don't know. It's 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 ensure that the light of can the light, the light of consciousness is not extinguished because we're effectively We're, we're The way I view it is the measure in my mind is of 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 and also at this point, we've, we've sort of added to our mission sustainable abundance.

So with, robotics and AI, 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 doesn't mean that it is, 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 wanna find ourselves in a James Cameron movie, You know, Terminator.

Not possible. He's, he's, he's great movies. Love his movies, But we don't wanna be in Terminator, obviously. But we if you have, ubiquitous AI that is essentially free or close to it and ubiquitous robotics, then, you will have an an explosion in the, in the global economy, an expansion in the global economy that is truly, beyond all precedent.

Elon, Larry Fink: can that expansion be broad? Yes. Or is it narrow? And how can that be created?

How can it broaden the global economy? Yeah, it's. I Elon Musk: 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. 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, there will be such an abundance of goods and services because, the.

My prediction is there'll, there'll be, there'll be more robots than people, Larry Fink: But how do you then have human purpose in that scenario? Yeah, the. Elon Musk: I mean, you know, there are s nothing's perfect, you know. But I mean, I mean, it is, it is a necessary,

Like, you can't have both. You can't have work that has to be done, and amazing abundance for all. Because if it's, if it's work that has to be done, then you.

And only some people can do it, then you you can't have abundance for all. Then Larry Fink: it's narrow. It's Elon Musk: narrow. Yeah. Exactly. So, but if you have billions of humanoid robots, and I think there will be, the.

I think, I think everyone on Earth is going to have one and gonna want one, because, you would. Who wouldn't want a robot to, you know, assuming it's very safe, watch over your kids, take care of your pet, if you have elderly parents. A lot of friends of mine said they have elderly parents, it's, it's, very difficult to take care of them.

And Larry Fink: expensive. Yeah, it's expensive, and it. It's Elon Musk: expensive, and there just aren't enough people to take care of the. There aren't enough young people to take care of the old people.

Right. So if you if they if you had a robot that could take care of and protect an elderly parent, I think that would be great. That would be an amazing thing to have. And that 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, which is very cool. And and definitely we are in the most interesting time in history.

There's a. I don't think there's more, a more interesting time in history, so. But Larry Fink: can we can you and I reverse aging in this new history, or or are we gonna see it? You Elon Musk: know, I haven't, I haven't put much time into, the aging stuff.

I do think it is a very solvable problem. Like you can I think when we figure out what causes Mm. I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious.

It's not a subtle thing. 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. Good. I've never seen someone with an old left arm and a young right Ever in my life.

So why is that? It, that means that there must be a clock, a synchronizing Right. That is synchronizing across thirty-five trillion cells in your body.

And 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, because 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 kinda locked in place.

And you know, it just may become, stultifying, just Yeah. Lack vibrancy. But that said, do I think we will figure out ways to extend life and maybe even reverse aging?

I think that's highly likely. Larry Fink: I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. So, 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 get there? And then once again, with all that expenditures, again, how can we make sure that it's broad and not narrow? I Elon Musk: just think the natural thing is it's going to be very broad because, 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 every year. I mean, you s almost the cost of AI is-Almost meaningfully changing on a month to month Larry Fink: basis. There's open, there's open models now everywhere, yeah.

Yes. Elon Musk: Very g There's open models. And the open models only lag they're, they're maybe a year Right. The private the sort of closed models.

So I think the AI companies will seek as many customers as possible, which means they'll seek they'll provide AI to the world. Larry Fink: But the cost of getting to there, the compute, the chips, the fab, the powering, that to me, what are the, what are the bu you know, those are huge bottlenecks.

The limiting factor. Yeah, I Elon Musk: think the limiting factor for, AI deployment is fundamentally p electrical power. Larry Fink: It's just, it, like, it's energy. Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk: we're, we're seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being brought online is, Larry Fink: Three percent, four percent Elon Musk: a Larry Fink: year max.

Yeah. Yeah. It's Elon Musk: clear that we we're, we're, we're very soon, maybe even later this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on. Except for China. China's, China's growth in electricity is tremendous.

They're Larry Fink: building a hundred gigawatts of nuclear as we speak. Elon Musk: Actually, solar is the the biggest And solar, yeah. In China. So China's, I believe China's production capacity on solar is fifteen hundred gigawatts a year, and they're deploying over, a thousand gigawatts a year of solar.

Now, you know, for continuous solar load, you divide that by roughly, I don't know, four or five. Call it that's around, two hundred and fifty gigawatts of steady state power, paired with batteries. And that's a very big number.

That's half of the average power usage in the US. Right. So US power, usage on average is five hundred gigawatts. China just in solar, just like, just in solar like that can provide steady state power, and batteries can do half of the US electricity output per year just with solar.

Solar is by far the biggest source of energy. And actually, when you look beyond or even on Earth, but certainly beyond Earth, the sun rounds up to a hundred percent of all energy. This is an important thing to consider.

So the sun is ninety-nine point eight percent of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter is about point one percent, and everything else is miscellaneous. Now, even if you were to, burn Jupiter in a, in a thermonuclear reactor, the the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to a hundred percent because Jupiter is only point one percent.

If you teleported three more Jupiters into our solar system, the and burnt three more Jupiters and everything else in the solar system, the sun's energy would still round up to one hundred percent. Mm-hmm. So it's really all about the sun. And that's, that's why, one of the things we'll be doing with SpaceX, in a within a few years is launching, solar powered AI satellites.

Right. Because the space is really the source of immense power, and then you don't need to take up any room on Earth. There's so much room in space, and you can scale to, enormous, I mean, you can, you can scale to, I think ultimately hundreds of terawatts a year.

You Larry Fink: 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 Elon Musk: rough way to think about it is, a hundred miles by a hundred miles or call it, I don't know, a hundred and sixty kilometers by a hundred and sixty kilometers of solar is enough to power the entire United States. So yeah, a hundred, a hundred mile by a hundred mile area is. I mean, you could take basically a small corner of Larry Fink: Nevada.

Elon Musk: Nevada, New Mexico. Obviously, wouldn't want it all in one place, but I'm it, you can it's, it is a very small percentage of the area of the US to generate all of the electricity that the US uses. And the same is true actually, I mean, for Europe.

You could take a small po you could take, relatively unpopulated areas of, say, Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that Europe needs. Larry Fink: So why don't you think that there's a movement towards that here and in the United States? Well, Elon Musk: there As Larry Fink: it is in China.

Well, Elon Musk: unfortunately, in the US, the the tariff barriers for Solar panel. Are extremely high, and that makes the economics of deploying solar, so artificially high because China makes almost all the solar, and the, and the What Larry Fink: would it take for Europe or the US to build it commercially if it's that scale? Yeah, I think, I think,

Elon Musk: Well, I can tell you what we're gonna do, you know, at SpaceX and Tesla is we're, we're building up, large scale solar. Right. So the SpaceX and Tesla teams both separately are working to build to a hundred gigawatts a year of solar power in the US, of manufactured solar power. And that'll probably take us, I don't know, about three years or something. But this, that's these are pretty big numbers.

Mm-hmm. And you know, I'd encourage others to the to do the same. We obviously don't control the, you know, US, tariff policy. Mm-hmm. But for other countries, you know, I would you know, that there's China makes solar cells that are incredibly low cost, and I think, it would be worth, doing large scale solar.

So, Larry Fink: I know you are, like, you're gonna be having a couple big announcements on robotics and what it can do. I mean, when I went to the factory, you showed me those robots. Yeah. 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, create that abundance that you talked about? Well, humanoid Elon Musk: robotics will advance very quickly.

I think, we we do have some of the Tesla Optimus robots doing simple tasks in the factory. We accept it probably later this year. By the end of this year, I think they'll be doing, more complex tasks, and but still deployed in an industrial environment.

And probably sometime next year, I'd say that by the, by the end of next year, I think, we'll be selling humanoid robots, to the public. That's when we are confident that the it's very high reliability, very high safety, and the range of functionality is also very high. You can basically ask it to do anything you'd like.

Larry Fink: You're already seeing that in Tesla cars, this, the software changes that you're doing. And what is it? Yeah. Every quarter now, a software change that upgrades the ability of the robot within the car?

Elon Musk: Yes. The Tesla Full Self-Driving software, we update it sometimes once a week. And recent-recently, some of the insurance companies have said that, it is actually so safe, when Tesla Full Self-Driving is so safe that, they're, they're offering, customers half price insurance if they use Tesla Full Self-Driving in their car. Larry Fink: And that can be monitored by the insurance company?

Can they Is that part of the agreement then? Yeah. But it. I Elon Musk: think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point.

Right. At and Tesla's rolled out a sort of robotaxi service in a few cities Right. Will, I be 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. Larry Fink: Really? That quickly? Yeah.

Elon Musk: And then, maybe a similar timing for China, hopefully. Larry Fink: I want to move to space because historically, space is very capital intensive. It 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. Talk to us about the res you know, the automation and AI, how it's changing the economics in building, and preparing for us in operating in space.

Sure. Elon Musk: Well, the key breakthrough that that's the major breakthrough that SpaceX is hoping to achieve this year is full reusability. So no one has ever achieved full reusability of a rocket, which is very important for the cost of access to space. We've achieved partial reusability with Falcon nine by landing the boost stage.

We've, we've now landed the boost stage over five hundred times. But we don't we have to, throw away the upper stage. The upper stage sort of burns up on reentry for Falcon nine.

So And that the cost of that is equivalent to a small to medium-sized jet. So, but with Starship, which is a giant rocket, it's, it's the largest flying machine ever made. Larry Fink: That's a rocket that you're using for the idea of going to Mars, right?

Elon Musk: Yeah, Mars and the Moon, as well as for, high volume satellite stuff. So Starship, hopefully this year, we should prove full reusability for Starship, which will be, a profound invention, because, the cost of access to space will drop by a factor of a hundred when you achieve full reusability.

Right. It's, it's the same sort of economic difference that you would expect, 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. But if you only have to refuel, then it's the cost of the fuel.

And so that's really the fundamental breakthrough that gets the cost of access to space, we think, below the cost of freight on aircraft. So, you know, under a hundred dollars a pound type of thing easily.

Wow. So it makes, putting large satellites into space very low, very cheap. And then when you have solar in space, you get, five times more effectiveness, or maybe even more than that, than solar on the ground. Because it's, it's always Larry Fink: It's cold It.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's Elon Musk: Well, it's always sunny, so you don't have a day and night cycle or seasonality- Right. Or weather. And you get about 30% more power in space, because, you don't have atmospheric attenuation of the power.

Right. The net effect is solar is five times more, any given solar panel will do five times more, energy in space than, on the ground. Is Larry Fink: there any capacity in doing that 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, AI data centers up in space? I Elon Musk: think the case. It's, it's a no-brainer for building, AI, solar powered AI data centers in space.

Because as you mentioned, it's also very cold in space. Yeah. If you're, if you're, if you're in the shadow, then it's, it's very cold in space. It's three degrees Kelvin.

So you just have your solar panels facing the sun, and then, a, radiator that's like point, like, pointed away from the sun, so it has no sun incidents, and then it's, and then it's just cooling. It's a very efficient cooling system.

So, net effect is that the lowest cost place to put AI will be space, and that, and that'll be true within two years, maybe three. Three at the latest. Wow. Larry Fink: So looking 10 or 20 years out, 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 of what's gonna happen in the next three years or five or 10?

Elon Musk: I don't know what's gonna 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. And then probably by 2030 or 2031, call it five years from now, AI will be smarter than, all of humanity collectively.

Larry Fink: We only have a number of minutes left, but I want, I want to humanize you for a second. So there's no speculation that you're Thank Elon Musk: you Jeff. God peace. Right.

I Larry Fink: mean, I would frame this question by you are the most successful entrepreneur, industrialist in the 21st century, maybe beyond. I wanna. So I wanna really get this to, you know, what inspired you? Who's inspired you? What was the foundation of your curiosity?

And importantly, what was the what was the. Was there an aha moment, epiphany at any time in your life and career? Well, Elon Musk: I mean, as a kid, I read a lot of science fiction, sci-fi fantasy Yeah, we talked about that.

And comic books. And I always liked technology. I didn't expect to be where I am today.

This seems incredibly implausible. But yeah, I was inspired by reading about books about the future, about science fiction, and I guess I wanna make science fiction not fiction forever, at some point, turn science fiction to science fact. And you know, we wanna have like Starfleet

And Star Trek really, for real. Mm-hmm. Like, where we actually have giant spaceships traveling through space, going to other planets, traveling to other star systems, go I'm just interested where we've never been.

If you're ever Larry Fink: gonna be beamed up to go back to New York. You know? Right. I'd like to just be beamed back to New York instead of flying. Yeah. Talk about Star Trek.

No, Elon Musk: I guess my essential, I. What I would call the philosophy of curiosity, I'd like to understand, the meaning of life. You know, the. Is the standard model of, is the standard model of physics Mm-hmm.

Regarding the beginning of life, beginning of existence, and the end of the universe? What questions do we not know to ask that we should ask? And AI will help us with these things.

So I'm just trying to understand how do we get here? What's going on? What's real? Are there aliens? Maybe there are.

And if we've got, if we've got spaceships that are traveling to other star systems, we may encounter aliens and/or we may find many long dead alien civilizations. But I'm just, I just, I just wanna know what's going on. I'm curious about the universe and that's my philosophy.

Larry Fink: Do you see yourself ever going to Mars in your lifetime? Yeah. I Elon Musk: mean, I would say, like, I you know, I don'That's Larry Fink: a long commitment. I've Elon Musk: been asked, Isn't Larry Fink: that three years each way?

It's, Elon Musk: six months. Six Larry Fink: months? That's all it is? Yeah, Elon Musk: six months, but the planets only align Wow.

Every two years. Okay. So, yeah, I've been asked a few times, like, do I wanna, you know, die on Mars? And I'm like: Yes, but just not on impact.

That's Larry Fink: a good, that's a good answer. Anyway, we're out of time. I. Hopefully everybody enjoyed this.

I mean, there's so many myths around Elon Musk. I could tell you he's a great friend, and I constantly learn so much from him. 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? Well, Elon Musk: I think generally, I think my last words would be I would encourage everyone to be, optimistic and excited about the future.

Good. 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. On Larry Fink: that note.