Dwarkesh Podcast

Elon Musk - "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

05 Feb 2026

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In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Mercury just started offering personal banking! I’m already banking with Mercury for business purposes, so getting to bank with them for my personal life makes everything so much simpler. Apply now at mercury.com/personal-banking* Jane Street sent me a new puzzle last week: they trained a neural net, shuffled all 96 layers, and asked me to put them back in order. I tried but… I didn’t quite nail it. If you’re curious, or if you think you can do better, you should take a stab at janestreet.com/dwarkesh* Labelbox can get you robotics and RL data at scale. Labelbox starts by helping you define your ideal data distribution, and then their massive Alignerr network collects frontier-grade data that you can use to train your models. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkeshTimestamps00:00:00 - Orbital data centers00:36:46 - Grok and alignment00:59:56 - xAI’s business plan01:17:21 - Optimus and humanoid manufacturing01:30:22 - Does China win by default?01:44:16 - Lessons from running SpaceX02:20:08 - DOGE02:38:28 - TeraFab Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

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Dwarkesh Podcast

Elon Musk - "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other episodes from Dwarkesh Podcast

An audio version of my blog post, Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

Sarah Paine – Why Russia Lost the Cold War

Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI

Sarah Paine – How Russia sabotaged China's rise

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

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