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So live from an undisclosed location with the sultry filter on. Very sultry filter on yeah. Having a great hair day. Yeah, that is a good hair day for great hair day, my pal. In your favorite CEO and Twitter, Mr Elon Musk. How you doing, pal? Let your winners ride. Rain Man David satcher. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Queen. Appreciate you coming to the event and are coming zooming in. What's new in your world? Umm. Well, let's see. I guess right now I'm sort of debating the number of bots on Twitter. With Para on Twitter. And the currently I'd like the what, what's, what I'm being told is that the there's just no way to know the number of bots. It's like as unknowable as the human soul, basically. So you have no idea what level of witchcraft and alchemy is needed to determine these business partners and age? I said like, why? Why not try calling people? But I haven't got a response, you know, like have you tried calling people or something? You know, like maybe try that. Right now, I don't know, but I think like that would be one of the things to do to say, like, have you tried calling them as opposed to trying to read the tea leaves here? That's like impossible. You know, obviously you can have an account that looks exactly like a human account or is being operated at where one person is operating 1000 accounts or something, but that person could only buy one toaster. They're going to buy 1000 toasters. So you care about like number of unique real people that are on the system. It's extremely fundamental and anyone who uses Twitter is well aware of that. The the comment the comment threads are are full of spam, scam and and just a lot of you know fake accounts, so it's it seems. Beyond. Beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of. Essentially, the number of said another way, the number of real, unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95%. That is what they're claiming. Does anyone have that experience? It's mean. I mean. Buddy? This is like, there's a bridge I'd like to sell you, you know? You know. And and also you can buy the Brooklyn Bridge. What do you think it is? What? Yeah, what's the, what's the. I mean, and it's not 5%. What? What is it? I think it's so number that is probably at least four or five times that number. But I'd say it at if you did sort of the the the lowest estimate would be probably 20%. And and and this and this is a bunch of quite smart outside firms have done analysis of Twitter and looked at the, the the sort of daily, daily users and their conclusion is also about is about 20%. But that's a lower bound. It's not an upper bound. If you look at, say, the most liked tweets on Twitter. So I I have the the honor of having the most liked tweet of any living human. This is. Thank you everyone for liking my tweet. Including you some of the bots out there, but. That tweet is less than 5,000,000 likes. It's like 4.7 or something like that and that that that that was the where I tweeted about that, that next time buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in. Definitely. It's clearly something that the public really wants and. You know, Coca-Cola Corporation should really think about going back to their roots, you know? Coca-Cola, I mean this. This I guess is the reason why our grandparents could sort of walk 20 miles in the snow because they had Coca-Cola with cocaine. This real reason. So. Umm. But anyway, that's that's that's literally the most popular tweet of any of any living human. And but Twitter says that the Daily Monitor, the sort of monetizable daily active users, is 217,000,000. So why would it be that the most popular tweet ever basically is only, you know, two 2 1/2% of the entire user base? This this seems a very very low number. And and the most popular tweets general clustered around that sort of four million like level. So it's sort of like basically 2% or less or less than 2% of of the daily active users and and technically monetizable daily active users is how Twitter refers it. So it just seems how is this possible surely there's something that maybe. You know, 10% of people would like, not merely 2%. You know, if you think about it, Elon, there's a corollary on YouTube. What do, what's the total user base of YouTube and what have the most popular videos got in there? And I think there's a billion or two, maybe a billion people using YouTube and those, the most popular videos have 10s of billions of views that might be instructive. Exactly. That ratio makes a lot more sense. So something doesn't add up here. And my concern is, is not, is not that, is it like, you know? Is it 5 or or 7 or 8%? But is it potentially 80% or 90%? But yeah, you know is it, I mean I certainly know that some real people on Twitter, but but what's if, is it an order of magnitude, is it, is it 50% instead of five? And that's obviously an incredibly material number, especially since Twitter relies primarily on brand advertising as opposed to specific click through advertising where you make a purchase. If you if you make a purchase, it doesn't really matter that much. But for brand advertising, which is really just awareness advertising, it matters if if real humans are seeing that or not. Yeah, and and so I guess stepping back for a second, people are curious why you want to buy Twitter. Why is this so important to you? And then I guess what are the chances you think the deal gets done at this point? So A2 parter. Why is it so important to you? I mean, some of this I've articulated before, but I think there's a need for a public town square, digital town square, that where people can debate issues of all kinds. Including the most substantive issues and in order for the for that to be the case, you have to have something that is broadly inclusive as possible, that has as much of the the the people on the platform as possible where it's it feels. Balance from a political standpoint, it's not biased one way or the other and where the system is transparent. And This is why I think it's important to put the algorithm on on GitHub and actually allow the public to see it and critique it and improve it. And if there are any manual changes, sort of shadow banning as it's called, or increasing or decreasing the prominence of a tweet that's done manually, that that should be noted so you know what has happened and it's not just. You know, you're just where where it is right now. We don't know what the heck is going on. Why is one tweet doing well? Why is enough sweet not is it is the algorithm that someone manually intervene? Why are some accounts banned with no recourse? Apparently. And you know the the the reality is that that Twitter at this point you know has a very far left bias. And I I would classify myself as as a moderate. And you neither. You know, no Democrat and in fact I have voted, voted overwhelmingly for Democrats historically. Overwhelmingly. Like, I'm not sure I might never have voted for Republican. Just to be clear now, now this election I will. Well, David, you OK? Keep going. Keep going. He's fine. He's fine. We're gonna resuscitate him. We're gonna resuscitate David Sacks. I mean, let me ask you, a personal point I'm trying to make is that this is not some sort of attempt to, you know, it's not some right wing takeover as as some people in life may fear, but rather a moderate wing takeover and an attempt to ensure that that people of, of old, you know, political beliefs feel welcome on on a digital town square that and they can express their, their beliefs. Without fear of being banned or shadow banned and and and that we we obviously need to get rid of the bots and and and scams and trolls and and people that are operating a huge bot armies and attempt to unduly influence the the public opinion. So this is what I think it's very important that we have that like the the some of the smartest people in history have have have have thought about it and said like free speech is important for a for a healthy democracy. It is important and free speech only matters. Like, say, when does free speech matter most? It's when someone, when it's someone you don't like saying something you don't like, that's when it actually matters. So you know, obviously and and and and it's pretty annoying when someone you don't like says something you don't like, that's that's that's bad. But it's actually a good sign of that that that you have free speech. So, I mean, I get trashed by the media all the time. It's fine. I don't care. Go do it twice as much. I couldn't care less. But it's indicative of the fact that even though I, you know, I have like a lot of resources, I do not actually have the ability to stop the media from trashing me. And that's actually a good thing. Yeah, I I have to ask with regard to this current administration, I know how hard you work on the car company. And then Biden, you know, you've been a lifelong Democrat. You've donated to Obama and to everybody, probably never voted Republican. And yet, and the same is true for Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is, you know, a Bernie Sanders supporter and that the Democratic Party has been openly hostile to Joe Rogan. And Biden can't even say the word Tesla or invite you to the White House when they do an EV summit. I'm curious, just on a very personal basis, what does it feel like to have that? France, where the party you supported is, it won't even say the name of your company or invite you there. They should be celebrating the work you're doing. Yeah. I mean it definitely feels like this is not right like this is the the the issue here is that there's just, there's the the Democrat Party is overly, overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers, particularly the class action lawyers. And generally if you if you'll see something that doesn't that is not in the interest of the of the people. On the on the Democrat side, it's going to come because of the unions, which is just another form of monopoly and the the trial lawyers. That that's where actions will be happening from Democrats side. They're not in the interests of the people. And then to be fair, on the Republican side there's this if you say like where does something like not not ideal happening, it's because of corporate evil and religious dietary. But that's generally where the bad things will be coming from on the Republican side that are not representative of the people. So in the case of Biden, he is simply too, too much. Captured by the unions, which was not the case with Obama. So in the case of Obama you could have, you know, his sort of quite reasonable and I think he took more of a view of that. You know, obviously you need to take the concerns of the unions into account, but there are there are bigger issues at stake and and unfortunately Biden does not do that. You don't have a have a Tesla question. I read today, it's incredible. There was a Bloomberg article that said the following. So the setup is this. It said since you went public, Tesla's up 22,000%. Eleven quarters of profit, sequential profitability. So hitting on all cylinders but the public analyst. Yeah, absolutely. That's a combustion. Barry, we're stepping on the gas pedal firing. Clogged. But analysts, when they put out their projections, OK, it's it's one of the most enormous bands for any company in America. The, the price targets for Tesla, despite all of this success, some have it at 200, some have it at 1600. It's all over the place. You tweeted a couple of months ago, Tesla's not a company. It's like 6 companies inside of a company. Like you've had to build. Yeah, maybe more. Can you just explain to people, all these companies inside this super company, just so folks have a sense of? That had to be done to get here. OK. I mean, this this question requires thought and I'll probably be leaving out quite a few things, but if you look and say what what does a typical car company do? What what they do is they they. There, there, there assemble vehicles and they send them to dealers and they manage the supply chain that they they they might make the engine or typically will make the engine, but most of the parts are made by suppliers and a lot of the actual technology development is done by suppliers and most of the most of the vehicle software is done by suppliers. So the actual amount of real work done by car companies that what do you think of sort of like a GM Ford is not actually that much. But like, so they don't do, they don't do sales, they don't do service, they so. So in the case of Tesla, for example, we we do, we do our own sales and service, we don't have dealerships. Then Tesla also has by far the biggest network of superchargers, sort of the electrical equivalent of gas stations. So we built an entire global supercharger network, which is still the most advanced and by far the best way to charge your car when traveling long distance. Or if you live in a city and and don't have the ability to charge your car because the street parking or an apartment. So the whole Supercharger network we we developed the Supercharger network, we deployed it. I think we have. Under 15,000 supercharges globally, you can travel anywhere in America right now with the Tesla Supercharger network. Then in terms of vertical integration, we we make the the the battery pack, the the power electronics to Dr unit. We we actually make, we're more integrated in, in the parts. We actually make so much of the car internally we're vertically integrated, not necessarily because we're just we think that this is some religious reason to be about the integrated, but because the pace at which we needed to move was just much faster than the supply chain. Moved and to the degree that you inherit the legacy supply chain you inherit, inherit the legacy constraints including their speed, cost and and technology. And then Tesla is as much a software company as it is a hardware company. So the software that runs in Tesla operates the car, operates the the screen, does the charging. All of that stuff is developed by Tesla. And so we have sort of a car, a Tesla OS in the car. I could go on for a long time and then very importantly. Tesla has built an an autopilot AI team from scratch that is the best real world AI team on Earth, and if anyone else has got a better one, I'd like to see it demonstrated in a car the the full self-driving beta at this point. Very often take you with zero interventions across the Bay Area, from San Jose to Marin. So through complex traffic, it's really quite sophisticated and invite anyone to, to join the beta or or look at the videos of those who are in the beta. We've got like 100,000 people in the beta. So it's not tiny and we'll be expanding that to our probably 1,000,000 people over a million, I don't know on that order by the end of the year, so. It's. You had this slide. We also we also bought a chip team to because there wasn't, it wasn't hardware to that we could run the friggin AI on. We couldn't just fill the trunk with a whole bunch of GPUs and and you know they would have taken a trunk full of GPUs that would have been very expensive and take massive amount of power and cooling just to be able to do what the Tesla designed full self-driving computer can do. So and we started trip team from scratch, designed it. It was the best in the world. And still the best in the world several years later. And we're also then developed, we're designing a a Dojo supercomputer to be able to process the all the video that's coming in from billions of miles of data because just sort of like the way that that it's critical to compete with Google because they have so much data and they have all these people doing searches all the time and humanities training it. But the same is true of of of Tesla, you really need billions of miles, ultimately 10s of billions of miles of training data combined with a sort of a vast. Training computer and then optimize inference hardware in the car and say they are AI and training and specialized software across the board to be able to achieve a full self driving solution. When? When he opened Tesla Gigafactory. Remember this six years ago? I'll just tell the audience the story quickly, Elon, he puts a slide up there and he says, guys, we're not actually building. A factory. We're building a machine that makes machines, and he puts the layout of the factory and it looks like a chip. And it was basically like how you would actually layout a microchip if you were or, you know, you were like a layout engineer. It was the craziest thing I've ever seen. And I was like, that was when I first got it. Yeah. You know, you walk in 10 and you see what's happened, and you have an insurance company. Now you're doing insurance for Tesla owners and an Uber competitor. Right. And eventually a robo taxi Uber competitor. RIP. Yeah, I mean it. Insurance is like quite significant now. Are you OK? OK, OK, OK. That that that that car insurance thing is a bigger deal that may seem a lot of people are paying you know 3040% as much as their lease payment for the car in an in car insurance. So the car insurance industry is incredibly inefficient because that they're they're just first of all you got like so many sort of middle entities you got you've got from the insurance agent all the way to the final sort of reinsure there's like 1/2 a dozen companies each taking a cut and then the that's all very statistical so that there's. Even if you're a very good driver like you could be like you know 20 years old and a great driver, but they it's all statistical so you can't get either can't get insurance or it's extremely expensive. So but Tesla allows for real time insurance based on you how you actually drive the car. You can actually if you drive the car in a safer way, you're actually have lower insurance. So ours is is insurance is based on how you actually drive, not how you know. Historically people that you know fit your whatever demographic have drive it's and and then you can close the loop around your insurance rate by simply driving better and looking at your score and and and lowering your assurance in real time and people do it actually promote safer driving. I actually have had this experience because in my household two people drive my car and one of them has a 93 score and the other one does not. They have like a 60 score and you may have met this other person. But I've been trying to work with her on the aggressive turns and stops in advance. Of our insurance bill. We're hoping we'll go down at some point. You didn't. The one question is this Twitter deal going to get closed? Do you think the chances here, well, I mean, it really depends on a lot of factors here. I'm still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number of sort of fake or spam accounts on Twitter and Twitter is is refusing to tell us so. You know. Mr seems like a strange thing. Wait, sorry. Is are they refusing to tell you you don't think they really know? I mean, there's a good chance they may just have no idea. They claim that they do know. And they claim that they've got this complex methodology that only they can understand. But the guy who landed two rockets simultaneously through you stir this cauldron, and then you throw another bloom and. And then suddenly it comes to you in a dream. I don't know. But there should be some, you know, objective way to sort the thing, because this is a, this is a material public state. You know, it's it's a you know it's a material adverse misstatement. You know, if, if if they in fact have been viciously claiming less than 5% of fake or spam accounts, but in fact it is four or five times that number or perhaps 10 times that number. This is a big deal. It's not the it's seems like if you said, OK, I'm going to, I agree to buy your house. You say the house has less than 5% termites. That's that's an acceptable number. But if it turns out it is 90% termites, that's not OK you know, it's not the same house. Just give her money. Might leave it literally your your house will disappear because it's mostly made it two months so you know that that would obviously just not be appropriate. So in in making the Twitter offer obviously reliant upon the the truth and accuracy of their public filings and if those those filings are not accurate it's simply not that that's that it's it's not you you can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed and you know they say Elon life and negotiation so. With a different price, it might be a totally viable deal, correct? That. I mean it's not out of the question, but I really would you know, this is, you know the more the more questions I ask, the more I, the more my concerns grow so. You know, at the end of the day, acquiring has to be fixable and and fixable, you know, with reasonable, reasonable time frame and without revenues collapsing along the way and all that sort of stuff. And so, you know, I I really need to see how these things have been calculated and and it can't be some deep mystery that is like more complex than the human soul or something like that. It's got to be, you know, it's, it's, I think we can apply the scientific method to this and try to figure out what's really going on. And Twitter's revenue is, is, is primarily dependent I think 70% or some of that order on brand advertising as opposed to specific purchase advertising. This is a big deal because brand advertising is not, there's not a, there's not a purchase that results from that. So it's basically you know how much mind share or like basically if you're a big company how, how often do they hear your name. It's as opposed to something that where you can directly measure the outcome. So that that means that they're somewhat going on faith. And if that faith is undermined or or reduced because of the reality of the situation coming to the fore, then the Tesla's revenue or Twitter situation subtlety. What is revenue? Will be significantly impaired, and that's a major problem. Ryan, did you have a chance to ask these questions during your negotiation? The like I said I was relying upon the the public filings. So the degree that the public and this is normal for a public company if you you know if if if you make a formal filing that that that is what investors are relying upon, relying on whether they are making an acquisition offer or simply buying some shares. So this, this, this, the accuracy of these filings is important whether you're buying one share or the whole company and so. If these filings are inaccurate or if they're sort of potentially blatant, it's a big deal, you know. Do you have a sense of why this has been such a persistent problem for Twitter? Do they not have the technical capabilities to solve the the bot problem or is it more of like just a they've under prioritized the issue or been unwilling to because potentially their indications for add ad revenue? I don't know, it's sort of speculative at this point. So the. You know, the the the worst interpretation would be that they don't want to look too closely at the thing because they might not like the answer. That would be the worst interpretation, but the I'm not sure what the best interpretation is, but the least bad interpretation would be. Maybe they thought it was this way, but they're the way they were doing it was wrong and they didn't realize there were mistaken and simply weren't paying enough attention. It does seem as though it should be a lot easier to get rid of the bots and and spam and trolls then like this is not some we're not trust, but the atom here you know? I'm not trying to get to the moon, OK, just trying to limit the amount of obviously scammy accounts. If it's if it's, if it's like Bitcoin giveaway, you know, probably it's it's a spammer, you know, like. Maybe, you know, wait, you're not giving away 100 bitcoins. She sent you, Teddy? If you if you send Me 2 Bitcoin, I'll send you one back, right? That's my what if I send you 20? Actually, I thought one of the interesting things that came up in your product road map, or I guess this was released and people covered it, was the possibility of Twitter becoming kind of a super app with payments included, maybe perhaps even doze or something. This seems to me, based on your work with with David at PayPal, like a pretty brilliant idea. What's, what's the vision there in terms of if you were able to buy it, you know, perhaps at the right price. What would it look like if, you know, I could add Jason to at Elon Musk, you know, 10 bucks or something if, you know, we were splitting a check or something? Sure, well. For those that have used WeChat, I think that's Wechat's actually a good model. If you're in China, it's basically you kind of live on WeChat, does everything. It's sort of like Twitter plus PayPal plus a whole bunch of other things and we'll roll into one with actually a great interface and it's it's really an excellent app. And we don't have anything like that outside of China, so. I think such a such an app would be really useful and it's just like the utility of of it of of sort of a a spam free thing where you could you can make comments, you can post videos, you can. You know, I think it's important for content creators to have a revenue share now, now this, this does not need to be done on Twitter. It could be done from something that's created from scratch. So it could be something new, so really, but I think this thing needs to exist whether it is converting Twitter to be the sort of like. Kind of all-encompassing app that that. Like I said, everything from digital town square where important ideas unabated. You know, maximally trusted and inclusive and end point where you're sort of have a high trust situation, then then payments, whether it's crypto or Fiat, can make a lot of sense. I guess we just want to ask incredibly useful and that people love using so that that that. But it's it's either convert Twitter to that or start something new. Those are the two, but it does need to happen somehow. Well, it's interesting you bring that up because the price of Twitter is pretty high and you've built a couple of companies and some engineers like to come work for you and you've now gone through the intellectual exercise of studying all this if you're looking at the two choices now fixing Twitter. Given all these problems and maybe just starting your own version, which one are you leaning towards? Because I have watched you build a couple of companies and the products have turned out pretty good. So is it easier for Someone Like You to just start from scratch? I mean, I mean it's certainly the. My my default inclination is to start things from scratch. I mean, I'm not really. I don't buy things like this. This still sort of, you know? Umm. Yeah, like like SpaceX would start up from scratch. You know, in in the case of of Tesla, you know, it was like 5 people still. This guy, Mark Everhart, who was the worst guy I've ever worked with who tries to claim like sole credit essentially for creating a Tesla. If you so damn great, why don't you just go, you know create another company when he was fired. But anyway, so that's a pretty good story. I mean, yeah, remember? I remember having this conversation with you. We were having a conversation about the Roadster. I think I can tell this story. I said, how's it going, pal? And you said, well, I got one problem. It turns out the Roadster parts and putting it together cost 190,000. Yeah. And I said I gave you 150 for #16. So if you make 2000 of these, you're going to lose $80 million and you're like, yeah, or double that. I mean, they basically the parts of the car cost more than they were selling it for. When you were starting to get involved, that's it was this. Well, well, before that, before that, yeah. What, what? When? When Tesla would what was was nothing but a piece of paper. Let me be crystal clear. Crystal ******* clear. You didn't bring me in. Either I. I was going to start, I was going to start an LED company with JB Straubel and based on the the AC Propulsion T0 and when I when I asked AC propulsion if it was OK to do that, they said, well there's also some others who want to create an EV company but have not created one yet. Would you like to join forces with them? And I said OK, well we'll do that. That was a huge mistake JB and I should have just started the car company ourselves. Instead we teamed up with the Everhard topping and right. Big mistake. The the the the the actual moral error here was me trying to have my cake and eat it too. Which is like I just want to work on the technology and the product and have someone else be the CEO and and and sort of run the business operations because I just like working on technology and product and design and and and also I was like doing SpaceX you know at the time and rockets were blowing up so it seemed like, OK, this is like I always wanted to and electric car company. This is how I can have my cake and eat it too. That was a huge mistake. Fundamentally a moral error, and so so. But in the end, I had to freaking be CEO, and I didn't want to be basically. So, but it's either that or come he's going to die. So so we started with really just nothing and the you know the the T0 prototype from AC propulsion, not, not if that's the, that's the precursor to Tesla. 100% clear. Once again, when we created Tesla, when I when I joined, there were no no employees, there was no intellectual property, there was no prototype. There was no nothing. We crystal ******* clear. And. It almost bankrupted you, I mean you that sent you to the Cliff of insolvency. I mean, that was we're on the ragged edge of bankruptcy so many times it was ridiculous. So I want 2008 was one of the worst years where basically the. You know GM and Ford, GM, GM and. Ford almost went bankrupt and you know, trying to raise money for Startup Electric car company in 2008 while GM is going bankrupt was difficult to say the least. You know, people were angry that I even asked them for money. They're like, **** you and hang up. So the only way that that that that Tesla actually made it through 2008 was a subset of the existing investors. Motion includes like people like Antonio Gracias and you know, Steve Robertson and and and and a few other key people are Aaron Price. Who I hold it down to grab two Tuesday and and I I put in all the money I had left and they said that everything. Literally everything. I didn't even have a house so this is my ex-wife at the house. So I was like staying actually in Jeff's calls bedroom. Spare bedroom. And and but there was that. This is a subset of the best would say OK, if I put in there, put as much as I put in. So I put in everything and then we closed that round 6:00 PM, Christmas Eve, 2008. I was last hour of the last day that it was possible because after that people were kept breaking for the holidays and we would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas. It was pretty that's doorstep. I mean it was an incredible moment in time and and people also forget at the time that the first two rockets SpaceX sent up didn't exactly make it to orbit like one of us. Right, the first three. And I remember having dinner with you at that time, and I asked you, hey, how's it going? I heard you. Gawker says you got four weeks of payroll left, and you said that's not true. And I said, thank God. And you said we have two. And I said. I said no, I mean both SpaceX and Tesla. In 2008, if we'd simply paid our suppliers on time, we would have gone bankrupt immediately. Tell us. Tell us actually. It was it was a pretty crazy moment because I also remember asking you out. We were having dinner at Boa and I said, well, certainly it's got to be some good news and you took out your BlackBerry to date the conversation. I don't remember it. He said don't tell anybody, Jay Cutler said. No problem. And you showed me the clay version of the Model S. Beautiful car I've ever seen. And I said, Oh my God, this is stunning. How much is it gonna cost? You said, I think I can make it for 50,000. I remember it was yesterday I said if you made that car for 50,000 you change the ******* world and you did it. And I was a little more than 50,000, but. How's your let's ask about spaces. OK, well, that's what space. But I want to ask one more personal question. Has life gotten easier for you as these companies have hit scale? Or has the complexity made life even more challenging? Because those early days, it was just fighting to survive. Nobody knew who you were. You were anonymous, and it was really just about the work. And now, let's face it, you're the world's most famous guy and everybody's watching everything you do. But these companies are also very big. So what's life like for you today? Are you enjoying what you're doing every day? Well, I mean it's it's somewhat of a roller coaster. So there are like good days and bad days and there's there was a crisis issues. And you know, like sort of, you know, knock on wood. Like we're not like. Facing, you know, death in the face, like, like, it's it's it's definitely like quite stressful when like, you know, death is like trying to eat your face off and like the the foam is like, you know, just kidding and like, yeah. Right there, you know? No, that's it's pretty stressful in that situation. So like, right you know, both SpaceX and Tesla have, you know, significant cash reserves, so like, you know, it's not worth staring death in the face. We could sort of see it over in the rizon, you know, so don't get complacent or entitled because it but it, but it. But if it's not like just sort of foaming at the mouth, gnashing, trying to eat your face off on a daily basis, that's certainly we've moved on from that point and hopefully never, never return. But but there are a lot of issues that need to be. It's just like if you're a CEO of a company, the chore level is high and if you don't do your chores, then the company goes to hell. And I hate doing doing chores, frankly. So who does? So that's the real, like there's a whole bunch of sort of, you know, personnel issues and legal issues and and and things that I I don't find enjoyable to work on. But if I don't work on them, the company suffers. So it's more like. Just the sheer volume of work is insane. That's the and then and then, you know, go do something, go add to it with, you know, Twitter or something like that. I mean, honestly, I'm extra processor. Yeah. I mean, I have a habit of biting off more than I can chew and then just sitting there with like chipmunk cheeks. Alyssa, you want to tell us a little bit about where we are at SpaceX? Like how? You fund the ability to go to Mars, but then also commercially still build. A conventional space business domestically. I think this Russia thing was probably really good for SpaceX, if you want to just tell us a little bit about that. Sure. Well, the, the, the, I mean the goal of SpaceX is to develop the technology that enables life to become multiplanetary and and make humanity of spacefaring civilization, which I think is very exciting inspiring thing. And it's like some one of those things where you can that that I think just makes kids like be excited about the future and and we need things that are inspiring and exciting and and make future seem like it's going to be better than the past. Life can't just be about solving one of those real problem after another. It's got to be like, like, what's what's inspiring and exciting? And I think that a future where we are spacefaring civilization is is one that we can all get excited about. And and and we can go out there and find out what, what's what's out there in the universe and what's the meaning of life, and, you know, where are the aliens? And hopefully they're friendly and that kind of thing. So. You know, it's interesting. I do get asked about the aliens question a lot, and I've I've not seen any evidence of aliens, and I'll, I'll be the first to you know, tweet about it or whatever. If I found if I see someone, I mean you'll tell us. If you find them, I will tell you. I will definitely tell you if there's aliens. And. You know, I think it would be quite helpful for, you know, like like if if we found aliens like probably SpaceX would get a ton more revenue because people like, oh man, aliens, we would upgrade our space technology pronto was what if you're on friendly, you know, it's like, you know that. That's the idea that you build basically the ability to do orbital cargo, take all those profits, launch Starlink, take all those profits and move it all into building something that can get to Mars. Is that the kind of rough? Plan pretty much it's. If there was like a three-step 3 slide PowerPoint, it would be pretty much as you described, which is. Develop rockets that are that are capable of of taking a satellites to orbit and crew to the space station. You know, basically servicing government commercial space launch needs and then. Build a global communication system in space that obviously it does a lot of good for earth, but by providing Internet connection, Internet connectivity to the least served because a satellite system is really great for remote locations and you know, countryside or or remote remote islands or or places where someone's trying to cut off their Internet. As a prelude to a war, we take them system like in Star Wars. Yeah yeah. So it's like, you know so it can be pretty, pretty helpful like I think it's like basically I think is a sort of forceful grid and a turn, right by providing connectivity to the the, the, the lease served where they've got either no connection or a a very expensive or poor connection, you know the like we're like we're we're connecting a lot of schools, remote schools in Brazil. Right now I'm I'm actually going to be headed there to sort of kick things off, but they've got a lot of schools they have no connectivity at all and in a modern age, how do you learn with no connectivity? I mean I guess old textbooks and stuff, but it's really, you're at a huge disadvantage if you have no digital connectivity. So I think there's just a lot of good, that's all I can do it just by itself but but then the the the revenue generated from stalling is what can enable. The Commission of a permanently crude base on the moon, which would be the next, you know, next step from Apollo, which is like this is not not go there for a few hours and and and then head back, let's have a permanently occupied like science station on the moon and we could also build some pretty epic telescopes on the moon that would enable us to learn more about the nature of the universe and and figure out what's going on and maybe detect those aliens. Do you, do you think that there's enough profit in those businesses to fund all this? Or do you need Wall Street and other investors to come share the load with you and kind of going to Mars a partnership with the government? Does it need to partner with governments to get there? Well, I think technically it does not need to partner with governments, but of course government support would be helpful, so. Umm. But it's going to be very expensive to build a self-sustaining city on Mars like in order for us to become multiplanetary in a way that's meaningful. The the the key threshold is at which point does the city become self-sustaining such that if the ships from Earth stopped coming for any reason and it could be any reason, could be World War three or it could be just you know civilization subsided and and and and just gradually got decrepit or something. But but if the shifts. Stop coming. If the response ships from Earth stop coming to Mars for any reason does the city still survive and and that's that's like really a large base of resources that are that are needed on Mars. You can't be missing any one critical ingredient but so and and think of this like there are these various great filters you know that that perhaps stop civilizations and one of the great filters is will we become a multi planet species or not will humanity be one of those. Species that passes the grateful trip of going beyond the one planet and being a multi planet species and this is certainly something we will have to do at some point because this the sun is expanding and will eventually boil the oceans and destroy all life on Earth. So if you care about life on Earth you should really care about life becoming multiplanetary and ultimately multi stellar because otherwise you're basically saying you're you're signing the the sort of death warrant for all life as we know it. It's it's inevitable. And then there's also the the various things that kill. That, you know the dinosaurs and and I mean you look at the fossil record they've been five major extinctions that are sort of on the order of 8980 to 90% of all creatures on Earth dying for for a wide range of reasons. But and then humans can also you know with us the World War three danger that that that other creatures didn't have where we could do ourselves in by sort of misusing advanced technology and and sort of just you know having some radioactive. Whole that's all that's left after World War three, so. You know, you want you could even capitalize it potentially as which will come First World War three or life becoming multiplanetary on Mars. And this is, yeah, I was going to ship, but you know, when you think about the importance of going to Mars versus solving critical energy and climate change problems here on Earth, obviously the effort with Tesla is related to sustainable energy. And I think going back to like probably the 1950s there were engineering designs around plasma. Fusion or fusion based systems that have evolved to these plasma systems, to these tokamak systems, and every year, every decade it's like, hey, next decade we're going to have it. What's your point of view on where plasma fusion systems are? Are we going to have fusion energy this century? This decade? And does it create limitless energy where the electricity production goes up by 10,000 fold and the price of electricity drops by 10,000 fold? And then what does that world on Earth look like if that happens? I guess question is like is that technology real? When does it happen and what happens to the world here? When and if that happens, I'll answer that question but then I'll let me sort of point out what the what the actual issue is. If the question is like is it possible to solve fusion energy 100%? Yes, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely is for sure. So the the, the and and and really just using a tokamak style which is like basically a doughnut ring with a. With Electro magnets that control the the the the plasma the the way to solve that is simply scale up. The tokamak fusion is very much a scale based thing. You want to minimize your surface to volume ratio. So as you scale up a talk mark you reduce your surface volume ratio which means like the the the volume you have relative to the the the surface you you now have much more like you. You can basically have a hot zone in the center that's relatively far away from the walls. And had more of a hot zone, so the the. So it's it's not in my mind a question as to whether each fusion can work, but there is a question as to whether it is economically viable and and whether it is competitive with, with with alternatives. I think that the economic viability of fusion is a much bigger question and I I think the answer probably is that a fusion earth if fusion is not competitive economically, I think that. That is a I I would say it's probably not competitive economically by an order of magnitude, but where does it break? Is it a materials breakdown or where does it break down? Economically, well, so. So you can't just. Use a normal hydrogen. You know you you need to use like deuterium and tritium, like unusual forms of hydrogen, helium 3. But you know that there are there are some some other types of, of fusion that could be used, but these are just not they're not like there's not a lot of this raw material. It's quite difficult to get the raw material. So first you have to get the raw material that's that's expensive raw material and then it's not just about generating the the energy you've you've got to turn that energy into usable electricity. You can't just have a hot thing. OK, so the hot thing has to translate to usable electricity. So I think you got you've got a cost of a fuel issue which is very significant. You've got you got have a whole bunch of knockdowns from when you generate the heat to when you actually convert that into electricity. You've got some very difficult maintenance issues with with the A fusion reactor. So and that should be then compared to alternatives, the sustainable energy alternatives that I think are overwhelmingly more competitive are solar energy, wind, geothermal, hydro, some title and energy, but it's really primarily solar and and wind. Now, and you can really say, like, why bother creating fusion on Earth when we have a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky that just works with zero maintenance and it shows up every day? Yeah. But can we scale to 1000 X or 100 XR electricity production here using solar and other renewable sources? Yes. So the the amount of software you need to power the United States is remarkably tiny. So you need like basically roughly 100 miles by 100 miles of territory and it's obviously need to be in one place in the United States too proud of the United States. It's like a little corner of Texas or Utah's entire country. And and then if you if you if you you could you could basically power you you probably 10X the the just with solar alone without displacing anyone's home power and economy 10 times the size of the United States in the United States on land when energy prices. To water because Earth is 70% water. I mean you could, you could say, OK, now we could probably have. A civilization that is 100 times as energy intensive as we currently have it. And So what does that look like with the last part of my question, which is a world where energy costs are saying it's 100 times cheaper than they are today and we have 100 times more energy production capacity, what, what what changes about civilization? What do we do differently and what do we see change most kind of dramatically? Well, currently we're not because of of just generally low birth rates almost worldwide civilization is not headed to. Have a population that is an order of magnitude greater than where where we're currently headed towards a population decline. And this is almost everywhere in the world. In the world. So. You know, it basically seems as though as soon as you have like urbanization and and and and education beyond a certain level and income beyond a certain level of birth, rates plummet. And so as countries get get wealthier, their birth rates plummet. It's somewhat counterintuitive because people will say like, well, it's too expensive to have a baby. Nope. The the wealthier the are, the are. The fewer kids you have, the more educated you are, the fewer kids you have. So. It's, it's, it's. It's the, it's the inverse. So, so I'm not sure who to use all that energy unless there's a significant change in the birth rate or we have a very robot oriented economy. So that's also possible. So if we've got a lot of you know 4 wheeled robots and full of cars and androids, so humanoid robots, then you could certainly see that there be pass the need for an order of magnitude more energy. But it's all coming from the humans, unless something major changes on the on the human birth rate level. This, this, by the way, is I think the biggest single threat to civilization right now is the why? Why do you think, societally, people just make those decisions when they become more affluent? Is it that they just become more selfish or there's more things for them to do and they have more money to spend on themselves? And they say, you know what? I don't want to have a large family. I want to, you know, go to Coachella. Yeah, well there is this like weird, like mind virus Y thing where some people are, I think, like having fewer kids is is like better for the environment. That's total nonsense. Nonsense. The environment is going to be fine. They're going to be fine even if we if we doubled the size of the humans. This is and I know a lot of our environmental stuff, so, you know. You we can't have civilization just dwindle into nothing. And you know Japan's leading indicator here, like the Japan's population declined by 600,000 people last year. That lowest birth rate in history, it's, you know, it's pretty bad. So I don't know. We. I think so. So this one element of this is, is a lot of people just think that having kids is is somehow bad for the environment. I want to be clear. It's not. It's essential for me for maintaining civilization that would at least maintain our numbers. We don't necessarily need to grow dramatically, but at least let's not, you know, gradually dwindle away and until civilization ends with us all in adult diapers and in a whimper like we don't want. Realization to end in adult diapers with a whimper. That would kind of suck. Yeah, Lee. Lee. In fact, I mean, and you and I have had this conversation. I mean, in Japan, I had two people tell me when I was there. Like, I think it's immoral to bring humans into the world. I mean, people have gotten very sad about the future. It's kind of crazy. It's great life. Awesome. No, this, this. Literally. I've heard many times have like, how can I bring a child into this terrible world? I'm like, have you read history? Because let me tell you, it was way worse back then, OK? Yeah. Now is a good time. Good time to report. Hey, you know, listen, I I know you're super busy, but I want to ask you about the move to Texas, because I've been thinking about it. Austin, California. I don't know, some senator told you to go **** yourself and like, you know, like we don't need. Actually. This seems to be turning into a bit of a trend, but how has building the Tesla Gigafactory, which I got to see in Austin a couple of weeks ago, and it was one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen. I mean, I don't know how many months it took to build there, but. How long did it take to build that dreadnought? And then what would have taken to build that in California, California, under Gavin Newsom? So we're both the Giga Texas, which is the biggest factory in North America, I think possibly the biggest factor in the world. And it's three times the size of the Pentagon to give you a sense of scale. OK, this is frigging big. It's like, it's weird. It's like so big. It's weird like you. It's like I was trying to find you in it, and I was trying to drive around and it took me about 45 minutes to find you. Like, no, you have to like, call. You can't like, find someone in the. You have to call them on their cell phone and say, where are you? You know? So I mean, the building is like just under a mile long and we're actually going to extend it. It will be like literally a mile long and about 1/4 mile wide and it's 80 feet tall. So it's just ridiculously big. And when you think about it like for manufacturing situation like what, what, what are the two things that really define manufacturing competitiveness are economies of scale and technology. And so if you got an ace on economy like if you sort of maximize your your ace level on on technology and you maximize your ace level on scale, this is obviously going to be the most competitive situation and that's why they're so freaking giant and the the the age of Texas will go all the way from cell raw materials. Like, like, like basically rail cars of cell raw materials coming in and then forming the the battery cell, then the battery pack, building the the the motor casting. We're also have introduced a major innovation, which is to cast the entire front third and rear third of the car and as a single piece. I got this idea from toys actually, because I was like, how did they make toys? Those are cheap. They just cast them. And I was like, well, can you pull the casting machine that big? And they're like, well, no one ever has. I'm like is are we breaking physics? Like, no. Well, let's just. Ask them. And there were six major casting machine suppliers in the world and five of them said no. And the six said maybe I'm like, I'll take that as a yes. Well, I mean this, you wanted to do this for the Model 3, but it was just too soon, huh. And and now it's almost there. Yeah. Actually this this partly comes from the Model 3, which is actually a fantastic car in many ways. But we were rightly criticized for an inefficient design with for the front and rear body like Sandy Monroe, who I think is really has excellent from an engineering standpoint and and really a very fair critic. The pistol whipped us for the design of the the Battery Park and piece by piece told you while you suck. And then he did the why and told you why you're awesome because you took it apart and told us exactly why he's why we sucked and he was correct. And then and I was like, well, that's pretty embarrassing. So no, he was complimentary of other parts of the carpet of the body design and and so it's like, OK, we're going to go from like, you know? The the It's just incredibly difficult body to make that's made out of like 120 different pieces with dissimilar metals that have joined and you've got galvanic corrosion challenges. So it's it's very difficult to make to a single piece casting that's one piece. So like 120 pieces went down to like one so. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a huge. And the the like the model Y Body Shop, especially the new one where we cast both the front and rear is 60% smaller than the Model 3 Body Shop. So it's it's, you know, gigantic. It's quite there's a lot of innovations at Tesla besides the stuff that is is obvious. So anyway so yeah the but if and really you know to be fair to to to Gavin Newsom like you know if if you if you if you had a gun to Gavin's head. OK and said we need to build start building this factory in California right now. He couldn't do it because there are so many regulatory agencies and so many litigators in California that want to stop you from doing anything that even if you're the governor of the of the state. We cannot get it done. So something's gotta be done to, to to, you know, because California used to be the land of opportunity and it's a beautiful state and I love, I love living there. I still spend a lot of time in California even though every time I go there I get this every, literally every day I go there, I get the Jesus tax out of the tax bill by day. Like the sheer cost per day of me going and working in California today is boggles the mind and I still do it, you know, but the California. Have opportunity to to the land of of of sort of taxes over regulation and litigation. And this is not a good situation. And really, there's got to be like a serious cleaning out of the pipes in California. How many months was it to get the gig Austin done? Took a year and a half. Two years? Yeah, 1818 months to build something three times the size of the Pentagon. Basically, the answer to how many months it would take in California's Infinity, we would still be working on the permits, yeah. This this begs the good question, which is, you know, like. Training paperwork. For Ford, for you, what's a better model? Yes. What's a better model for government? So, you know, like all governments tend to increase in complexity, dictatorship capacity. Is the dictatorship the right model? And, you know, like, how do we solve this? Let's say you go to Mars or let's say you have to fix California, California permanently broken. Is there a way to fix it? Or like, how do you set up a better model so that you don't end up having this kind of special interest complexity situation that eventually kills the. Population I mean I think ultimately with California the people of California just have to get fed up and and demand change that's something that really has to happen and and and there's there's got to be an above 0% chance of the of the Republicans winning in California if if if it's if it's just the Democrats every time you got to be you know and this is this is like occasionally it's The thing is that right right now you and plus the level level of gerrymandering. Which is basically just treating the people like sheep and and it's it's terrible. That's going on in California is outrageous. So California, the Dems have a super majority in the House and Senate in California and the governor and everything. And so how responsive is any political party going to be to the people if they are guaranteed to win? It's it's a one party state. And so I'm not saying that, you know, go. Sort of elected Republicans every time, but if it's never you're, you're just making California one party state. They will no longer be responsible, responsive to people and will only be responsive to those that funded their political campaigns. Clip Elon saying that 30 seconds on TV over and over. Go ahead. Six. Yeah. So, Elon, shifting gears to the economy, you know, we saw this surprise report of -, 1.4% GDP growth in Q1, interest rates been rising, that increased the cost to the consumer of getting loans, things like that. We've had a stock market correction, really a crash in a lot of growth, stocks, software stocks. And from where you said and the data that you see, where do you think the economy is, is headed right now? Do you think we're in a recession or is it just a risk? How do you, how do you assess our current economic situation? Well, predicting economic record economics is always difficult and and one should assign probabilities to these things. But ironically, I did last year, people asked me what I think about the economy. I said, well, I think we might enter a recession and approximately. Spring of 2020 of 2022. Yeah, so. Now The thing is that recessions are not necessarily a bad thing. They they you know what? I've now been through a few of them, and what has to happen is if you if you have a boom for that goes on for too long, you get misallocation of capital. It starts raining money on fools. Basically. It's like any any dumb thing gets money, and I'm sure you've seen a few of those. So at least at some point, I guess just out of control and you just have a misallocation of of human capital. Where where people are doing things that are silly and and not useful to their fellow human beings and and and then those company that needs to be sort of an economic enema if you will. To have everyone sort of shift uncomfortably in their seats. So, but but the. I'm sorry, it's just, I'm visualizing it. The economic enemy, I mean, listen, it's gotta literation. This too shall pass. Eventually, the economic enema does its job. It clears out the pipes, if you will. Yes. And and and and sort of the ******** companies. Go bankrupt and the ones that are doing useful products are prosperous and but there's certainly a lesson here that if one is making use of park and and and has a company that makes sense make sure you're not running things too close to the edge from a capital standpoint. They've got some capital reserves to last through irrational times because in the in the past when there's been a recession it has gone it's it's amazing it's flipped like a light switch. I mean David do you remember this when from the from the PayPal you know X PayPal base when when we. Raised $100 million in March of 2000 and we literally we had the demand was so high, we had people like BC's like just literally without even a term sheet wiring money into our account. Some of the term sheet later, literally. We're like, we're like, sleuth out our our bank account number and wire money in and we're like, where'd this come from? And it's like, oh. So it was like there was virtually fire housing money in March of 2000 and and then in April 2000 the market went into freefall and it went from money raising money was trivial to even good companies could not raise money in a month. So it's just important to bear in mind like that, you know, PayPal almost went bankrupt in in 2000. We came close. But thankfully we would raise that $100 million in in March 2000 without which we would be we would in game over basically. And we kind of saw it coming. So it's like we we, we, we got that the, the the ex Confinity merger done in like 3 weeks AD raised $100 million because we were like, oh, how is we, we see this coming to an end pretty soon and then a month later it was like, you know Nightmare basically. And so it's just important to make sure if you're a healthy company, you got some capital to get through things. And and and then what what's your costs and if you if if if it is a recession which it more likely than not it is a recession. Not saying it is, but it probably is then just. Like what's your cash flow and get to positive cash flow soon as you can? So yeah. But I think we probably are. They are in a recession and that that recession will get get worse but you know these things pass and then there will be room times again. So it'll probably be some some tough going for I don't know a year maybe, maybe you know 12 to 18 months is usually the the amount of time that takes for for a correction to to happen. What do you guys think, David? How do you feel about it? Yeah, I mean, it feels like it started, you know, what started as a slowdown earlier this year now seems like, I mean, technically, I guess we need two quarters of negative growth to be in a recession, but it feels like we're in one, feels like it started, you know, the growth stock, the software business that we invest in are for the Canaries in the coal mine. And there's a lot of lot of dead Canaries, not dead, but I'm having a hard time breathing. Yeah. It's not bad. It's just it's just napping. Napping. Wake up, little birdie. It's just it's just stunned. It got stunned for a brief moment and and and it just it'll be fine. It sort of reminds me that the the parrot, you know the pet shop sketch with the parrot with Monty Python, Monty Python. It's pining this parent is pining for the fjords. Yeah, Elon, a lot of it's been talked about as we wrap here, and you've been incredibly gracious, giving us so much time. Thank you for that. A lot of talk about American exceptionalism over the last couple of years waning, and maybe this country had seen its best days. And we see the work you're doing and other people in this great country are doing and the debates we're having about the future. And yeah, China's doing pretty fantastic Russians on the ropes. But it does seem like America is still producing some of the greatest companies the world has ever seen, some of the greatest innovations. What are your thoughts on America and our future and what we need to keep this country and and this beacon of hope that, you know, four of the five of us were not born here. You know, two of you came from South Africa and no, three of you. Three of you came from South Africa. And one of you from can't know what to put in the from Sri Lanka and from Sri Lanka and through Canada via Canada. Canada too. Yeah, I know. It seems like that's the, that's the way. Canada is a gateway. It is a gateway. And how do we it's well, I'm hinting at the answer here, but it does seem like our immigration policy is absolutely insane and maybe we need to keep collecting some of the great individuals that I get to share the stage with here and yourself. We need to keep bringing great people to this country. Why can't we get that in our heads, that immigration, it's talent. Recruitment, no, absolutely. I think it's incredibly important that the United States be like the destination for the world's best talent. And you can think of this like like, like a pro sports team, if you want to win the league and and you know you want the best players on your team there. Now, there are obviously a lot of very talented people born in the United States, but if you could add a few aces from from outside the country to the team, you're going to win the league. And and, and here's the thing, those aces actually want to work for your team. They don't want to compete against you. They wanna, they want, they want you on Team America and and so it's like, we have to, like, fight them off to not be on Team America. That's the crazy thing. And so it's like if you had some aces that are different between winning and losing, we should be like really recruiting them. Like you'd recruit like a star basketball player or football player. That's what we should be doing. Active recruiting. Just like if you're a company that wants to succeed, you actively recruit the best talent. And then and and and that's the way to win. And and if if that stops happening, America will stop winning. And we have two administrations in a row, Biden and Trump, who don't want to let the greatest minds, the most talented people into this country is absolutely insane. Even I think with this everyday reality is like actually anyone who who's going to, who wants to to to, to work hard and be and and do useful things. And in this, you know we we want in the United States and and it's not just people who are sort of intellectually strong, but it's just anyone with a, with a strong work ethic, you know, if they're coming from Mexico or if they're coming from, you know, Europe or China, wherever. It's just if they're like going to come here and crank hard. And and and contribute more than they take. Hell, yeah. I mean, that's just it's a no brainer. You have you been have you been disappointed in the similarities between Biden and Trump on this? Like, maybe you could have expected it from Trump because that was a rhetoric he needed to use to get elected. But it's not as if Biden has flipped the script and said, OK, we're going to go 180 degrees in the other direction. He's kind of kept it the same. Which has been really surprising, actually. Yeah. It's hard to tell what bird is doing for telling Frank. Yeah. Yeah, like I feel like we get that Bernie's. The president is whoever controls the teleprompter, you know, it's like, it's like the what the path to power is the path to the teleprompter, you know, like what? What? Because that's the reason the teleprompter. So, you know, I I do feel like like if if somebody would accidentally leave on the lean on the teleprompter, it's going to be like Anchorman. It's going to be like Q ASDF 123, you know, type of thing. I mean, in fairness to Biden, he he hasn't been napping as much as he needs to. But. You just, it's hard to say. They're getting done. You know this. I mean, this is ministration just it doesn't seem to get a lot done like and, you know, whatever. Like the Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done so that this administration seems just just do not have like the drive to just get you're done that that. That that's why it's it's that's my impression so. Umm. You know we definitely need to fix immigration policy like we had COVID which was an issue and and and so that was like one reason to like not you know I guess clamp down on right now we've moved on and so let let's let's just make sure we're we're getting top talent in the United States and really I'd say broadly it's anyone who who wants to work with us off and and and contribute more than they take to the economy like that's just necessarily going to make for a stronger better society in America. Elon, did you see, uh, Jeff Bezos's tweet back and forth with Biden or Biden, I think was talking about inflation. Inflation. But then he correlated that to taxing corporations. And Bezos said this is misinformation and disinformation, etcetera, etcetera. What do you what do you think about that whole exchange? Then back and forth. I mean, the obvious reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion amount of more money than it had, obviously. So it's like to go and can't just, you know? Have. The issue checks for an excessive revenue without there being inflation. You know, velocity of money held constant. So unless something would would change with velocity of money, but but but it it's just look the federal government writes checks they don't, they never balance. So that is effectively creation of more of more dollars. And if if there are more dollars created then the increase in the goods and services output of the economy then you have inflation. Again, velocity of money held constant. But so. This is just, this is very basic. This is not like, you know, super complicated and and if if if the government could just issue massive amounts of money and have A and and deficits didn't matter, then, well, why don't we just make the deficit 100 times bigger? OK answer is you can't because it will basically turn the dollar into something that is worthless. So and and various countries have have tried this experiment multiple times. It's not like oh I wonder what happens if this if if if this is done. Have you seen Venezuela like the the poor people of Venezuela are you know have been just run roughshod by their government and so obviously you can't simply create money that the the the true economy is very important. The truer economy is the output of goods and services. It's not money, it's it's literally what is the output of goods and services. Money is simply a way to to for us to or anything that you call money is is a way for us to conveniently exchange goods and services without having to engage in voter and also to shift obligations and time that those are the two reasons that you have money. This thing called money, it's it's really a, it's a database, but money is a is an information system. Or for labor allocation and for exchange of goods and services and for translating in time. And the quality of that information is a function of it's like basically you can apply information theory to money. And I think it helps explain why one money system is or why why one action is better than another. And so if like you just just like a an Internet connection, you'd want something that's high bandwidth, low latency and jitter and is not dropping. Packers does not have a lot of errors in the system and the same is true true of money. You want and really like you said, what what do PayPal really, really do that helped improve the the the bandwidth that the speed at which money could move instead of of mailing checks back and forth. Which amazingly that was what people did in 2000. You can now do real time exchange of of money and and now you could ship your goods immediately instead of mailing a check and waiting for the bank to clear the check. So like and and the the ultimate thing that with PayPal or or if it's sort of was in the x.com sort of went more or less sort of niche payments more sort of broad financial would be to simply does that doesn't to mediate all the heterogeneous cobalt databases out there running on mainframes during batch processing and have a single real time system. That that was secure and not batch processing and so. It would just be, from an information standpoint, more efficient and and eventually it would all the the batch processing COBOL mainframes operated by the banks would cease to exist. Spent more time and built more in China than almost anybody. I mean, Apple would be the only company I could think of that's probably got a bigger footprint, but I'm not certain of that. What have you learned about China that you didn't know before you opened the factories there and started delivering cars there? What should we know about China? You know, as Americans, how should we think about China and our relationship with it? Because we haven't spent time there. Say like China. First of all, it's not monolithic, it's not like everything. Everything is not some plot by the Chinese government. The, the, the. There are many factions within China that compete vigorously within China and and so. And perhaps most important is that there's just a just a tremendous number of hardworking, smart people in China who want to get ahead and get things done. And they're not complacent and they're not entitled and they're going to, they're they're they want to get things done and they they they want to make a better life for themselves. And what we're going to see with, with China for the first time that anyone can remember who is alive is an economy that is twice the size of the US, possibly three times the size of the US. It's going to be very weird living in that world. So we we better stop the infighting in the US and stop punching ourselves in the face because like, there's a whole, there's way too much, you know of of America punching itself in the damn face, which is just dumb. And and think about like, hey, we got to be competitive here and and there's a new kid on the block that's going to be two to three times our size. We we better step up our game. And, you know, and stop infighting. You think it's easier to stop infighting once we're beaten? Or do you think that there's a way folks here can actually just, you know, get their political and commercial act together, but or does it not happen until we've realized we've lost or do we need a war? I mean, I sure hope we don't need a war. But there there will be certainly. You know, an economic competition that I think will will blow people away. When they realized just how competitive they have to be to be competitive with companies in China, it's very difficult. You know, Tesla is competitive, but Tesla's competitive because we have an awesome team in China that you know so. Like do your Tesla China employees work some meaningful percentage more or harder than your Tesla non China employees? Do you find like it's two different companies basically? Well, I mean I think Tesla is somewhat, it. Tesla sort of pretty far out there in terms of work ethic anywhere in the world. So it tells the work ethic in the US I think is substantially greater than any other car company or or any large manufacturing company that I'm aware of. So you know Tesla. Tesla does have a a strong work ethic in in the US. But but to be totally frank, it it it it the work, that work ethic is exceeded. Unbalanced by the Tesla China team, that that is, I think, objectively true. So there's not say there aren't lots of hard working people at Tesla, US, there certainly are. But if you say on average the, the, the work ethic in China is higher, it's just telling it like it is, you know? So what about if you're an American CEO, how do you deal with, do you think just the need for managing all these political factions inside of a company? You probably saw, you know, all the sterman drawing related to Disney and what happened to them and what's continuing to happen to them on both sides between their employees? As well as the government, etcetera, Yemeni advice or what do you tell like young CEO's that you hang out with about how to deal with that, how to make those decisions, where you land in the spectrum of dealing with all of this stuff? The non work issues that are related to now you know going to work every day. I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean. Like. You know, all the whether it's the the need for political correctness or the need for having political points of view and having to bring that imbalance out in the workplace. How do you deal with that? How do you give advice to other folks about having to deal with it? Look, I think it, you know the the the point of a company is to produce useful products and services for your fellow human beings. It is not, you know, some political gathering place or a thing where it that's the point of a company. Like it's, I'd say like it's you know, politics and other stuff should. Let's not lose sight of why companies should exist. So I I gotta, I gotta. I'm actually late for. I'm going to work on the rocket guys, yeah. We're gonna go ahead and let you get to Mars, and I'll see you soon. Thank you, gentlemen. Nicely done. We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man David satta. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm going. Besties? My dog's driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge **** because they're all this useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release them out. Beat, beat. Where did you get merch? I'm going.