Elon Musk

Mohammad Al Gergawi: In life, we've seen, within this part of the world, great people, like Al-Khawarizmi, who invented algorithm. Globally, Newton, Henry Ford, the Wright brother, Albert Einstein, and Elon Musk. It seem you are in rush.

You wanna go to places that nobody been. You are reinventing a certain industry, from the rocket industry with SpaceX to the car industry with Tesla. What's your mission in life?

Why you do whatever you do? Elon Musk: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here.

And we're having a really great time, with my kids in Dubai. It's really been fantastic. I'd really encourage anyone who hasn't been to visit.

What a, what a great city. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. And in terms of the motivations, I guess the there's sort of a, kind of a long version of the explanation, but essentially, the.

When I was a kid, I was wondering kind of what's the meaning of life. Like, why are we here? What's it all about?

And I came to the conclusion that, what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask. And the more that we can increase the scope and scale of, human consciousness, the better we are able to ask these questions. And so I think that there's certain things that are necessary to ensure that the future is good.

And some of those things are in the long term, having long-term sustainable transport and sustainable energy generation, and to be a space-faring civilization and for humanity to be out there among the stars and be a multi-planetary, species. I mean, I think the.

Being a multi-planet species and being out there among the stars is important for, the long-term survival of humanity, and that's one reason, kind of like life insurance for life collectively, life as we know it. But then the part that I find personally most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure, and it makes people excited about the future.

And if you consider two futures, one where, we are forever confined to Earth until eventually something terrible happens, or another future where we are out there on many planets, maybe even going beyond the solar system, I think that second version is incredibly exciting and inspiring, and there need to be reasons to get up in the morning. You know, life can't just be about solving problems. Otherwise, what's the point?

There's gotta be things that people find inspiring, and make life worth living. Mohammad Al Gergawi: So what is life for you? I mean, you look at our life, and I heard you before speaking.

Is this the dream? Is Is life a dream? Real? Is it a million deep?

What is life for Elon Musk? Elon Musk: I find as I get older, I find that question to be maybe more and more confusing or troubling or uncertain. I think particularly when you see the advancement of something like video games.

You know, like say 40 years ago, you had video games, the most advanced video game would be like Pong, where you had like two rectangles and a, and a dot, and you're like batting it back and forth. I played it. Oh, yeah. Me too, exactly. I played Pong.

That's all. Exactly. It sort of dates you a little bit, but yeah, we both played the same game. And that was like, wow, that was a pretty fun game at the time. But now you can see a video game that's, photorealistic, almost realistic, and millions of people playing simultaneously and you see where things are going with virtual reality, and augmented reality.

And if you extrapolate that out into the future with any rate of progress at all, like even, 0.1% or something like that, a year, then eventually those games will be indistinguishable from reality. They'll be so realistic you will not be able to tell the difference between that game and the reality as we know it.

And then it seems like, well, how do we know that that didn't happen in the past, and that we're not in one of those games ourselves? Mohammad Al Gergawi: Interesting. Interesting. I mean, could be. Everything is possible in life.

I mean, there's I mean, yeah, particularly like things seem to be accelerating to some to something. Isn't it? I mean, if you look at, our life, it seem in the past 100 year, life been accelerating quite fast. Yeah. In the past 20- It's getting

Much faster. Faster and faster. Is it more slow? So my question is really, how life will be in air 20, 30, 50 years from now?

Our education- Mm-hmm. Our transport. How do you see it? Elon Musk: Well, I think this is one of those things that's quite difficult to predict.

When you think of, say, I mean, the first controlled powered flight was 1903 with the Wright brothers. And then 66 years later, we put the first people on the moon.

I mean, that. If you'd asked people, say, in 1900, what are the odds of, you know, man landing on the moon, they would have said, "That's ridiculous." and if you talk, try to talk to them about the internet, they would not even know what the heck you're What are you talking about?

Talking about. Like, this sounds so crazy. But today, with a $100 device, you can, you can, video conference with anyone in the world, on the other side of the world for. And if you have a Wi-Fi connection, you know, just, you for.

It's basically free. For free to have an instant visual communication with anyone or even with millions of people. You know, with social media, you can communicate to millions of people simultaneously. So, and you can Google something and ask any question.

It's like an oracle of wisdom that you can ask almost any question and get an instant response. It would have been incredibly difficult to predict these things in the past, even the relatively recent past. So I think the one thing that we can be quite certain of is that any predictions we make today for the, for what, the future will be like in 50 years will be wrong.

Yeah. That's a. That's for sure. I mean, I think directionally, I can tell you what I hope the future has, as opposed to maybe what it will be, 'cause this may just be wishful thinking. I mean, I hope we are out there on, Mars and maybe beyond Mars, the moons of Jupiter.

I hope we're we're traveling frequently throughout the Solar System, perhaps preparing for missions to nearby star systems. I think all of this is possible within 50 years. And I think that'll be very exciting to do that.

And I think we'll, we'll see autonomy and artificial intelligence advance tremendously. I think that's actually quite near term. My guess is in probably 10 years, it will be very unusual for cars to be built that are not fully autonomous.

10 years. 10 years from now. Yeah. I think almost all cars, built will be capable of full autonomy in about 10 years. As it is, the Tesla cars that are made today have the sensor system necessary for full autonomy, and we think probably enough compute power to be safer than a person.

So it's mostly just a question of developing the software and uploading the software. And if it turns out that the compute power, that more compute power is needed, we can easily upgrade the computer. And so that's all Teslas built since October of last year.

And other manufacturers will follow and do the same thing. So getting in a car will be like getting in an elevator. You just tell it where you wanna go, and it takes you there with extreme levels of safety, and that'll be normal.

It'll just be normal. Like, for elevators, there used to be elevator operators. You get in, there'd be a guy moving a lever.

Now you just get in, you press the button, and it's taken for granted. So autonomy will be widespread. The. You know, I think one of the most troubling questions is artificial intelligence, and I don't, I don't mean narrow AI.

Like, vehicle autonomy I would put in the narrow AI class. It's narrowly trying to achieve a certain function. But deep artificial intelligence, or what is sometimes called artificial general intelligence, where you could have AI that is much much smarter than the smartest human on Earth, this, I think, is a dangerous situation.

Mohammad Al Gergawi: Why it is dangerous? I mean, there is two view. One view is artificial intelligence will help humanity.

There is another school of of thought is artificial intelligence is a threat to humanity. Why is it? Elon Musk: Well, I think it's both. You know, it's, it's like, one way to think of it is imagine we're going to be visited.

You. Imagine you're very confident that we were going to be visited by super intelligent aliens, in, let's say, 10 years or 20 years at the most. Super intelligent. So you think within 20 Yes. Oh we'll have alien on Earth?

Well, digital super intelligence will be like an alien. It will be like an alien. Yeah. Mohammad Al Gergawi: But my question is, do you think there is other intelligent life outside the Earth?

It seems probable, but I think this is, this is one of the great questions in physics and philosophy, is, where are the aliens? Maybe they're among us. I don't know. Some people think I'm an alien.

Not true. Not true. But Maybe we are alien. Of course I'd say that, wouldn't I?

Maybe we are alien, Elon. I mean, if you look at this part of the Yeah. They believe that human being are not from Earth.

They came from somewhere else. Maybe. And Adam came from somewhere else to Earth. So in a way, human being, alien to this land.

Do you think we'll make contact with alien within the next 50 years? Elon Musk: Well, that's a really tough one to say. I mean, if there are super intelligent aliens out there, they're probably already observing us.

That would seem quite likely, and we just, are not smart enough to realize it.

But I can do some back of the envelope calculations and any advanced alien civilization that that was at all interested in populating the galaxy, even without exceeding the speed of light, even if you're only moving at, say, 10 or 20% of the speed of light, you could, populate the entire galaxy in, let's say, 10 million years. Maybe 20 million years max.

This is nothing, you know, in the grand scheme of things. Mohammad Al Gergawi: Once you said you wanna die on Mars. Why? Elon Musk: I don't.

To be clear, I don't want to die on Mars. It's like if. I mean, we're all gonna die someday, and if you're gonna pick some place to die, then why not Mars?

Okay. You know, if we're born on Earth, why not die on Mars? Seems like maybe it'd be kind of exciting. But so I think given the choice of dying on Earth or dying on Mars, I'd say, "Yeah, sure.

I'll die on Mars." but it's not some kind of Mars death wish. And and if I do die on Mars, I just don't want it to be on impact.

Okay. Got it. Yeah. Let's come back to Earth, actually. Okay. Mohammad Al Gergawi: You tweeted that you are building a tunnel under Washington, DC.

Why? What is it? Well, it's a secret plot. Okay. Just between us.

Okay. Nobody helped you? Elon Musk: Yeah, exactly. Please keep that secret. The. Well, I think this is gonna sound a little,

I mean, it seems like somewhat trivial or silly, but I've been saying this for many years now. But I think that the solution to urban congestion is a network of of tunnels under cities. And you can. When I say, I don't mean a 2D plane of tunnels.

I mean tunnels that go many levels deep. So you can always go, deeper than you can go up. Like, the deepest mines are taller than the tallest buildings.

So you can have tunnels, a network of tunnels that is 20, 30, 40, 50 levels. If. As many levels as you want, really. And so given that, you can overcome the congestion situation in any city in the world.

The challenge is just figuring out how do you build tunnels, quickly and at low cost and with high safety. So if tunneling technology can be improved to the point where you can build tunnels fast, cheap, and safe, then that would completely get rid of, any traffic situations in cities. And so I think that's why I think it's an important technology.

And Washington D.C. Washington DC, LA, and most of the major American cities, most major cities in the world suffer from severe traffic issues, and it's mostly 'cause you've got these buildings which are. You have tall buildings that are 3D, and you have a road network that is, one level.

And then people generally wanna go in and out of those buildings at the exact same time, so then you get the traffic jam. Mohammad Al Gergawi: Let's come back to UAE and Dubai. The first time I met you it was fourth of June, 2015, at your office in SpaceX, and I ask you, "Would you have a presence in UAE?"

And your answer was, "I'm busy with China. Maybe not in the near future." Yeah. And almost a year and a half later, we are here.

Seem time goes quite fast. Yeah. Why now? Elon Musk: Well, I think actually things are going reasonably well in China. So, we had some initial challenges figuring out charging and service infrastructure and various other things, but now it's actually going fairly well.

And so the timing seemed to be good to, really make, a significant, debut in this region starting in, Dubai. Mohammad Al Gergawi: Okay. In your opinion, what is the new disturbing thing that will come technology next? What's next in technology?

What's next in technology? That will disturb the way we live, the way we think, the way we do business. Elon Musk: Well, the most near-term, impact from a technology standpoint is autonomous cars, like fully self-driving cars.

Like I said, that's gonna be. That's gonna happen much faster than people realize. So. And that.

It's gonna be a great convenience to be an autonomous car, but there are many people whose jobs it is to drive. So if, In fact, I think it might be the single largest employer, of people is driving, in various forms.

And so then we need to figure out new roles for what, you know, what do those people do. But it, but it will be very disruptive and very quick. Now, and I should characterize what I mean by quick.

Because the, there are, quick means different things to different people. There are over two billion vehicles in the world, right? Approaching, in fact, approaching two and a half billion, cars and trucks in the world.

The total new vehicle production capacity is about 100 million. Which makes sense because the life of a car or truck before it's finally scrapped is about 20, 25 years. So the point at which we see full autonomy appear will not be the point at which there is massive societal upheaval because it will take a long time to make enough autonomous vehicles to, be, to disrupt, employment.

So that disruption I'm talking about will take place over about 20 years. But still 20 years is a short period of time to have, I think, something like 12 to 15% of the workforce be unemployed. Yeah. Thank you. This is the largest global government summit.

We have over 139 government here. If you wanna advise government official to be ready for the future, what is three thing or three advice you'll give them? Well, I think the first bit of advice would be to really pay close attention to the development of artificial intelligence.

I think this is. We need to just be very careful in, how we adopt artificial intelligence and to make sure that, researchers don't get carried away. 'cause sometimes what happens is a scientist can get so engrossed in their work, they don't necessarily realize the ramifications of what they're doing.

So I think it's important for public safety that we you know, governments keep a close eye on artificial intelligence and make sure that it does not represent a danger to the public. Let's see. Secondly, I would say, we we do need to think about transport in general.

And there's, there's the movement towards, electric vehicles, sustainable transport, that I think that's gonna be, you know, good for many reasons. But again, not something that happens immediately. That'll happen slower than the, self-driving vehicles.

So that's probably something that happens over 30 or 40 years, the transition to electric vehicles. So thinking about that in context, the demand for electricity will increase dramatically. So currently in terms of total energy usage in the world, it's about one third electricity, about one third transport, about one third heating.

So at, over time, that will transition to almost all, not all, but predominantly electricity, which means that the demand for electricity will probably triple. So it's gonna be very important to think about how do you make so much more electricity. And Seem they have an easy job.

That's, that's it. There is more, no more challenges for them. No. Well, then I think maybe the, these things do play into each other a little bit, but what to do about mass unemployment? This is gonna be a massive social challenge.

And I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of universal basic income. I don't think we're gonna have a choice. Universal basic income. Universal basic income.

I think it's gonna be necessary. Mohammad Al Gergawi: So to mean that unemployed people will be paid across the Yeah. Because there is no job.

Machine, robot is taking over. Elon Musk: There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. Okay. That's simply the.

And I wanna be clear that these are not, things that I think that I wish would happen. These are thing, simply things that I think probably will happen. And since. And if my assessment is correct, and they probably will happen, then we need to say, what are we gonna do about it?

And I think some kind of a universal basic income is gonna be necessary. Now, the output, the output of goods and services will be extremely high. So with automation, there will, there will come abundance.

There will be, almost everything will get very cheap. The, It's, so it's, I think the biggest. I think we'll just end up doing, universal basic income.

It's gonna be necessary. The harder challenge, much harder challenge is how do people then have meaning? Like a lot of people, they derive their meaning from their employment.

So if you don't have, if you're not needed, if there's not a need for your labor, how do you what's the meaning? Do you have meaning? Do you feel useless?

These are much, that's a much harder problem to deal with. And then how do we ensure that the future is gonna be the future that we want, that we still like?

Now, I mean, I do think that there's a potential path here which is, and we're really getting into science fiction or you know, sort of, advanced science stuff, but having some sort of, merger with biological intelligence and machine intelligence. To some degree, we are already a cyborg.

You like, you think of like the digital tools that you have, your phone, your computer, the applications that you have, like the fact that, as I was mentioning earlier, you can ask a question and instantly get an answer, from Google or you know, from other things. And so you already have a digital tertiary layer.

I say tertiary because you can think of the limbic system, kind of the animal brain or the primal brain, and then the cortex, kind of the thinking, planning part of the brain, and then your digital self as a third layer. The. So you already have that, and and it's like if somebody dies, their digital ghost is still around.

You know, all of their emails and their, the pictures that they posted and their social media, that still lives even if they if they died. So over time, I think we'll probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. And it's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and your digital, the digital extension of yourself.

Particularly output. Like when. And output, if anything, is getting worse. You know, we used to have like keyboards that we'd use a lot.

Now we do most of our input through our thumbs, on a phone, and that's just very slow. A computer can communicate at a trillion bits per second, but your thumb can maybe do, I don't know, 10 bits per second or 100 if you're being generous.

So some high bandwidth interface to the brain I think will be something that, helps achieve a symbiosis and between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem. Getting pretty esoteric here. I don't know if this Yeah.

Yeah. It's close. Okay. We got it. Mohammad Al Gergawi: Oh. Always you think out of the box.

Your idea is so huge. You wanna go to space. You decided to go to space, you did it.

You decided that you wanna, you wanna land your rocket back. You fail seven time, eight time? Yeah, something like that.

Then it landed there actually. More times than I care to count, yeah. How do you come with this idea actually?

Sometime they're pushing the human limit. You are always pushing the human limit. Why? Elon Musk: Well, I.

When I think about what's, what technology solution is necessary in order to achieve the particular goal and then try to make as much progress in that direction as possible. So in the case of spaceflight, the critical breakthrough that's necessary in spaceflight is rapid and complete reusability of rockets, just as we have for aircraft.

You can imagine that if an aircraft was single use, almost no one would fly. 'cause you can buy, like, say, a 747 might be $250 million, $300 million or something like that. You'd need two of them for a round trip.

And but nobody's gonna pay millions of dollars per ticket to fly to do air travel. So but because you can reuse the aircraft tens of thousands of times, the air travel becomes much more affordable. And the same is true of rockets.

So our rocket costs, $60 million roughly. So a, the capital cost, if it can be used once, is $60 million. But if it the capital cost, if it can be used 1,000 times, is $60,000.

So then if you can carry, you know, a lot of people per flight, then you can get the cost of spaceflight to be something not far from the cost of air flight. So it's, it's extremely fundamental. Because Earth's gravity well is quite deep, Earth has a relative, you know, fairly high gravity, the difficulty of making a rocket reusable is much greater than the difficulty of making an aircraft reusable.

And that's why a fully reusable rocket has never been developed thus far. But it, but if you use the most advanced materials, most advanced design techniques, and you get everything just right, then I'm confident that you can do a fully reusable rocket. Fortunately, if Earth's gravity was even 10% stronger, I would say it would be impossible.

Mohammad Al Gergawi: You need a team around you to deliver a lot of idea. How do you choose your team? Based on what? Elon Musk: Well, I suppose honestly It tends to be gut feel more than anything else.

So when I interview somebody, my interview question's always the same. It's What do you ask? I said, "Tell me the story of your life, and the decisions that you made along the way and why you made them.

And then, if. And then, and also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them." And that question I think is very important because the people that really solved the problem, they know exactly how they solved it.

They know the little details. And the people that pretended to solve the problem, they can maybe go one level, and then they get stuck. Mohammad Al Gergawi: So what was your biggest challenge in life?

Elon Musk: Biggest challenge in life? Hmm. No challenge. Well, no, there's a lot of them.

I'm trying to decide which Which one? Which is the worst. I think just thinking about how to spend time.

One of the biggest challenges I think is making sure you have a corrective feedback loop, and then maintaining that corrective feedback loop over time even when people wanna tell you exactly what you wanna hear. Okay. That's very difficult. Mohammad Al Gergawi: Yes. Time is over.

We'll. I'll ask you just one last Sure. If you allow me. In the World Government, Summit, we have so many people from, so many young people actually from across the globe.

If you have an advice to them, young people globally who wanna be like Elon Musk, what's your advice to them? Elon Musk: I think that probably they shouldn't wanna be You? It. I think it sounds better than it is.

Okay. Yeah, it's, not as much fun being me as you'd think. I don't know. You don't think so? No. There's definitely. It could be worse for sure, but it's,

I'm not sure I would. I'm not sure I wanna be me. Okay. But You know, I think, advice, I mean, if you wanna make progress in things, I think that, the best analytical framework for understanding the future is physics.

I'd recommend studying the thinking process around physics. Like, not just. Not the equations.

I mean, the equations certainly they're helpful, but the way of thinking in physics is the. It's the best framework for understanding things that are counterintuitive. And you know, always taking the position that you are some degree wrong, and your goal is to be less wrong over time.

The. I. One of the biggest mistakes people generally make, and I'm guilty of it too, is wishful thinking. You know, like you want something to be true even if it isn't true. And so you ignore the things that,

You ignore the real truth because of what you want to be true. This is a very difficult trap to avoid. And like I said, it's certainly one that I find myself and having problems with.

But if you just take that approach of you're always to some degree wrong, and your goal is to be less wrong, and solicit critical feedback, particularly from friends. Like, friends partic If friends. If somebody loves you they want the best for you.

They don't wanna tell you the bad things. So you have to ask them you know, and say, "Really, I really do wanna know." And then they will tell you.

Mohammad Al Gergawi: Thank you very much. It's been. It is great for the World Government Summit to have a legend who's creating the future for humanity to share his thought, his idea, his vision, his challenges, and his hope for life.

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.