Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding
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I believe Optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity.
Elon Musk and his XAI startup have built the largest and most powerful artificial intelligence training supercomputer in the world.
As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that, you know?
This is an arms race of epic proportions. He's a big thinker. You guys went on Fox the other day with the Doge team. You saw Elon's face nodding while they were speaking with a grin ear to ear. He was proud.
He is proud. XAI has acquired X in an all stock transaction.
Tesla's first robo taxis are officially on the road.
The company's board proposed a new compensation package for the CEO that could pay him just about a trillion dollars in stock.
He gets nothing if he doesn't hit the numbers.
SpaceX will buy wireless spectrum licenses from Echo Star for its Starlink satellite network for about $17 billion. Three, two, one.
How do you have time? I never understand you. Yeah, well, I do work a lot. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Elon Musk.
All right. All right. Where are you?
Palo Alto.
You're in Palo Alto and not Washington, D.C.
I'm at Tesla Global Engineering Headquarters in Palo Alto.
Yeah, so no more Washington, D.C. You're back at work. You're focused, yeah?
Yeah, I haven't been to D.C. since May.
Okay.
That was a hell of a side quest.
That was a good side. Any lessons from your time in Washington, D.C.?
The government is basically unfixable.
Yeah.
I applaud David's noble efforts. It's good to have talented people in the administration, but at the end of the day, if you look at our national debt, which is insanely high, the interest payments exceed the Defense Department, I guess, sorry, War Department budget. And they keep rising. So if AI and robots don't solve our national debt, we're toast.
Which is a great segue. Optimus is, I think, going to be the greatest product in the history of of humanity, what's the progress like and how many of your cycles are going specifically to optimists? What's the timeline? I think you're on version three, maybe four. Tell us everything.
Well, yeah, everything would take a long time. We've got time. We're finalizing the design of Optimus version 3. And that really is going to be a very remarkable robot. It will have essentially the manual dexterity of a human, so meaning a very complex hand, an AI mind that can navigate and comprehend reality. And we made in very high volume. Those are the three things that are missing. If you see any other robotics company, they're missing those three things. Those are the three really hard things. And I spend actually at this point It might be more of my mental cycles than anything else, any other single thing on Optimus. That's solving for real-world AI, all of the electromechanical issues of Optimus, the supply chain and production challenges of it.
Because there is no supply chain that exists for humanoid robots. So we have to recreate it from scratch, which requires doing a lot of vertical integration. None of the actuators in Optimus are available from an existing supply chain. But I think it is accurate to say that if successful, Optimus will be the biggest product ever.
And the cost of it at scale, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a robot, what do you think... the first wave of them will cost and when will we be able to buy one to work on the ranch?
I think that the marginal cost of production, once you hit a million units per year, is probably around the $20,000 range. It sort of depends on how much you spend on the AI chip in the robot. And you need to achieve a lot of efficiencies in the actuators. There are 26 actuators per arm. Like 26 motors, gearboxes, and power electronics. So the AI chip will be pretty expensive. That might be like $5,000 or $6,000 of the bill of materials, maybe more. But I think at volume, at a million units a year, the production cost is probably in the order of $20,000, maybe $25,000, something like that. And the price will be as a function of demand.
Elon, can you maybe explain to everybody why the hand is so important to get right and why the actuator design is so unique and why it's so difficult, why nobody makes it and why you have to start there almost to build the rest of the robot properly?
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