But most of all, welcome Elon Musk. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us today. I know you've got many things on your plate. And Speaking of that, congratulations on the Starship rocket last week and the first soft landing in the ocean for the world's most powerful rocket vehicle. It's a remarkable achievement. You are taking the fiction out of science fiction.
Can you share with us what your thoughts, what thoughts were running through your head when you saw that happening and what's next? Well, I would say I was incredibly excited that we achieved those milestones. I thought perhaps we had maybe a 20 or 25% chance of achieving both milestones where the booster and the ship both did a soft propulsive landing in the ocean. And so it really was we achieved all the objectives, which I
thought was unlikely. And that's thanks to an incredible team at Space XI. Think we've we've got the most talented team of rocket engineers that has ever been assembled. And that's, that's how we're able to accomplish these things. So, so it's an honour to work with great people to accomplish great things. So what's next in in the final frontier?
What do you see ahead for space? Well, the, the founding purpose of SpaceX is to develop the technologies necessary to extend consciousness beyond Earth. So, and, and, and this is sort of a little cerebral, but perhaps appropriate for the Cato event. I think they're quite cerebral, but if you think about the sort of Fermi filters of, you know, Enrico Fermi was always wondered, where are the aliens? Why do we not see signs of them? And I frequently get asked, are
there aliens on Earth? And I, I, I haven't seen any signs of aliens. And, and I promise you, the, the minute I see any evidence of aliens, I'll immediately post it on the X platform. Most popular post of all time. So but that. But that we haven't actually seen any evidence, so I'm not aware of any. It's just that consciousness is extremely rare. You know, if we believe the archaeological record and the standard model of physics, Earth is about four and a half billion
years old. Civilization as measured by the 1st writing is only about 5000 years old. So archaic creak uniform and roughly 5500 roughly 5500 years ago was the first writing. I think that's a good date for the start of civilisation, which which means that civilisation has only been around for one millionth of Earth's existence almost nothing. I think this potentially argues for civilisation being fleeting and fragile.
And so the thing that we can do to increase the probable lifespan of civilization is to be a multi planet species, to extend consciousness to other planets, ultimately to other star systems. And and this would massively improve the probable lifespan of, of, of humanity and consciousness as we know it. So that's it's, it's really trying to get past the single planet Bermi filter that that's the goal of SpaceX. That's why we're building such a
big rocket. It's far in excess of anything that's needed to put satellites into a little bit. And it, it's really it's a planet colonizer. It's intended to build as quickly as possible a self-sustaining city on Mars. And I, I think the, you know, there's, it's somewhat of a race between making a self-sustaining city on Mars and global thermonuclear war or some calamity, whichever. If we have some civilization ending calamity before that happens, then, you know, that's,
that's all they wrote. You know, that's, that's some, perhaps some future aliens will discover our civilization and say, well, they, they almost got there, you know, so, so that,
that's, that's the goal. I think that's kind of an important thing to convey to people in the, in the audience who, who think about the future and, you know, you care about the, you know, the, the not just the preservation, but the extension of civilization, the extent, the, the, the growth of, of the scope and scale of, of consciousness. So, yeah, so that that's, that's the, that's the goal. Make life multi planetary is the goal of SpaceX.
And, you know, along the way we'll seek to generate revenue from any space based activities, such as providing, you know, building an Internet Internet system in space, anything that's sort of space related in order to fund the the extension of consciousness, consciousness beyond Earth. That makes a lot of sense to me. We shouldn't keep all our eggs in one basket. We should try to diversify risk. So thank you for doing mankind's work. But that's not the only thing you're doing.
If anyone has missed it, you're also revolutionising electric cars and it's Neurolink, it's AI, The Boring Company. And if you missed that, he recently bought Twitter and renamed it X as well, where we're live streaming as right now. It's yeah. See, that's popular with the audience. To to me, it's exhausting just to read the list of these
things. I think what's Alex Ferguson, the football coach, the soccer coach, who said that hard work is a talent, but it's also hard and it's actually quite exhausting. So the question is, what's what's the big plan? What's the overarching goal? Is it just that you can't help yourself from getting involved in every technological field, or is there an overarching goal? Yeah, the overarching goal is to take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the probability that the future is
good. And that leads to the, the, the, the, the expansion of consciousness and our understanding of the, the universe. You know, this is somewhat prompted by a, you know, trying to figure out what's the meaning of life, you know, so, you know, I had this existential crisis when I was a kid trying to figure out like, what's the meaning of life? Is it just pointless? Like, and I read a lot of books on, on philosophy and religious books and whatnot.
And, and ultimately the thing that I thought was most enlightening was Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where, you know, Earth is basically this giant computer to answer the question of what is the meaning of life and comes up with the answer 42. But, but it turns out that actually the answer is the easy part and the hard part is the question, but we don't actually know the right questions to ask.
So I thought, well, if we expand the scope of scale consciousness, then we're better able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy great book and I advise everyone to read it and maybe you can become the next Elon Musk if you do. Thank you also Elon for putting the role of the moderator and the interviewer and, and in the spotlight coming up with the right questions. That's that's the most important thing.
So let me ask you the next question then and try to probe a little bit deeper into what you're really doing because as I understand it, you you have six companies that you're running, but you also have a 7th or did you just come up with another one? Well, I really, the, the, the companies that take up the vast majority of my time are Tesla and SpaceX. So yeah. So that the, and then the other companies are much smaller and I, you know, I don't run sort of the X platform day-to-day.
That's Linda Yakarino. I do drive the product development and the sort of feature improvement, that kind of thing. And you know, it's so that's, that's really, it's, it's not like it's these companies are very different in scale. Like Tesla's, I don't know about 140,000 people, and SpaceX is about 15,000 people and all the other companies are less, a few 100 people or less. Yeah. So very, very different scales.
Yeah. But but apart from that, you also have, if it's six companies, give or take, we also have a 7th or what it might be. And that's to navigate bureaucracy and regulations while you're doing this. And this has been a conference about innovation and entrepreneurship and how do we do that that when there's so many obstacles in the way and it, I mean, it's difficult enough to get to Mars. It's, it's rocket science,
literally. But you also have to navigate regulation and precautionary mindset. So, and I've understood that your style of management is to question every requirement to create clarity by never accepting, accepting that it just came from some department, some place. Every requirement should come with the name of the person who made it, because this makes it possible to question whether it makes sense on the conviction that only nature makes the real laws.
Everything else is a recommendation. And that sounds great, but I think many politicians and bureaucrats would beg to differ, right? Yeah. Well, with respect to laws and regulation, we do have a fundamental issue, which is a natural outcome of an extended period of prosperity where there's there really hasn't been sort of a global war or, you know, there's when the things have been prosperous for a long time, you just get, you get an accumulation of laws and
regulations naturally. And these laws and regulations are immortal, whereas humans are obviously mortal. So the, the longer you, you have this generation of this, this, this creation of rules and regulations. But you, but you sort of get to this point where, you know, each law and regulation is not perhaps crippling in and of itself. But they're, they're all like little strings that, that, like a million little strings that,
that that tie Gulliver down. So it like each little string and then eventually the giant can't move. So we've in, in, you know, in, in the West, I think we've created a a regulatory gridlock where just almost everything is
illegal. This is why they can't build a high speed rail in California. They spent $7 billion and there's a 1600 foot section is all they have to show for it and doesn't have rails on it. It's, it's really, you know, too absurd for parody because large projects are essentially illegal in California. So and, and, and much of Europe
and, and, and other countries. So there there has to be some garbage collection process for removing rules and regulations in in order for society to function and not to, you know, get hotening of the arteries just to to the point where you can't do anything. And this relates to our risk aversion. I think in the classical liberal tradition, one important starting point is that we just don't know everything. We nobody does.
So the world is a game of learning and of discovery and therefore it takes trial and error and experiments to get to the right place. And I've realized that when I'm looking at your businesses that you're not really the risk averse type. On the contrary, you shouldn't avoid problems, but test things fast to find out what the problem is fast and then fix it fast. So a rocket blowing up might not be a mistake. It might be an important step of levelling up to the next stage
of knowledge and of discovery. But that's the total opposite of much of the risk averse culture in many businesses and certainly in in governments So and many are so conservative that they wouldn't allow anyone to do anything for the first time. So the question is, how do you deal with that kind of risk averse culture? What changes in culture and in regulation would you make to make the world safe for
experiments? Well, like I said, at a government level, I think that there should be a regulation removal department and and probably some when we pass new laws, they should have some kind of sunset perhaps that they they need to be reaffirmed before they are or they just they expire. Now the thing that tends to happen is that once regulations are passed, an ecosystem of consultants forms around those regulations that wants to keep them going. Environmental regulations are
particularly bad in this regard. So, you know, and I, I, I'm very much pro environment, but, but the, the, the environmental regulations are, are in my view, largely terrible. And they're, they're very much sort of permission based as opposed to you have to get permission in advance, as opposed to say paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective to say, like, look,
we're going to do this project. If something goes wrong, then we'll be forced to pay a penalty. But we do not need to go through a three or four year environment of our environmental approval process. So just changing things from, you know, you have to get a permission in advance to you have to pay a penalty if you do something bad, I think would be profoundly effective for the advancement of of large projects.
But just in general, I think governments around the world should be actively deleting regulations, questioning whether departments exist. Obviously, President Blais, I think it seems to be doing a fantastic job on this front. Just deleting things, deleting, deleting entire departments. Fantastic. Yes. You know, I mean here this thing about like, if you delete departments and regulations, you can always put them back. It goes out that those were very important.
You can always put them back. And, and, and really this is like taking the brakes off of an economy and, and of a civilization. It's it's it's we need to snap those strings that are holding Gulliver down and preventing us from making progress as a civilization. Yeah. We've been discussing Argentina here over the past few days in the new classical liberal reform
agenda. And the next speaker here on stage is President Miley. And of course, he's up against decades of, of, of not just obstacles in general, but stagnation. But he's coming there with this chainsaw. It was a very famous clip of him on social media was when he's looking at bureaucracy and spending in government departments and just removing them one by one, a fuera. A fuera, which I guess means sort of get just get rid of it. Sure.
Doesn't that remind you of something your own idea about the value of subtraction when it comes to innovation and business? Delete any part of the process you can, and apparently if you don't end up putting 10% back in, you did not delete enough. So sorry, yeah, there's I sort of, I was, I like to use sort of the tools of physics like a first principles approach to things.
And so the, the sort of a simple algorithm that I developed after making the same mistake over and over again was and I need to repeat it to myself. So I make hopefully make these mistakes less, less often is that you start off first by making the requirements less dumb.
So, so you, you delete the requirements as you know, delete and simplify the requirements because if you don't delete and simplify the requirements, you are simply going to get in the best case outcome is the right answer to the wrong question. And then you also then a lot of this involves like sort of technology companies, but you want to delete first, then, then once you've addressed the requirements, attempt to delete
the part or process step. And if you haven't deleted, if you're not forced to put back in at least 10% of what you delete, you're obviously being far too conservative in the deletion. So, but people often afraid to delete things and, and I'm like, well, it's just, you just just go ahead and do it. And, and if you're not putting a little bit back in, you're, you're just not deleting enough, obviously.
So I really would, I think this is a very big deal if, if it is over over over deletion of rules, regulations and you'll end up putting a few back and that's fine. Yeah, I told you it's not risk averse, right? You follow. It's pretty sensible. It's just sensible really. I I think it stands the test of logical examination. And to me, that seems to be what President Millet is trying to do in Argentina as well, to delete what's not absolutely essential, to leave space for creativity
and and entrepreneurship. You've met him repeatedly. You've seen what's going on in Argentina. Do you have any thoughts about that, his ambitions, how important it is for Argentina and possibly for the rest of the world, with the case right here, right now? Well, I think it is very important that Argentina succeed and that we give President Malay awful support.
And I think this and my prediction is that unless President Malay is stopped in some way from taking the actions that he wants to take, that that Argentina will have a massive growth in the economy and there will be far more prosperity and and optimism about the future than there ever there has been perhaps in 100 years. And in in just 10 minutes, Malay will we'll talk about those things from this stage.
Would you be able to give him some advice if he wants to turn Argentina into an innovation and entrepreneurship nation again? What? How should he go about it? Well, from everything I've read, he's he's making all the right moves. I would just encourage the people of Argentina to give him their full support, run this experiment because clearly the thing the policies of the past have have not succeeded. We know that for a fact. So let us, let us, I think, go boldly into the future.
You know, I hope people have originally given them their full support. And I think it'll be a very exciting adventure. And I think it's going to work out really well. Could I just then broaden that question about innovation and the future of economies? Because right now it seems like active industrial policy is all the rage, not just in the old left, but sometimes in the
populist right as well. The idea that governments should get heavily involved and pick certain winners in business and in technology. They all often talk about trying to come up with government moon shots to create the the future, which I find a little bit ironic because the landing a man on the moon was great, but it didn't give us any kind of industry. We didn't see Internet from the space, no moon base, no asteroid mining, no solar power in space. Because it was political and not
commercial. So and because it was political it was OK to spend tons of money, but it also made it unsustainable in the future. It only became a commercially viable final frontier when SpaceX got into the race. So it it it. Could you tell us about how you see government's role in innovation generally? I mean, you were the guy who had to sue NASA to get them to open up a space to to private providers as well. What is the government's role in building the future of
technology? I, I think that the government's role is, is, is really the, it, it's to ensure that the playing field is a good playing field. That the rules that, that there are good rules. The, the government is essentially the, you know, the Football League and it like the, the, the, the referee, the, you know, making sure that, that there's fair play, that like I said, that the rules are sensible and allowing the players on the field to play the
game. And what happens over time, though, is government keeps growing and, and at a certain point you have more referees than players on the field and then the game is not good. You do need referees. I'm not saying you don't need referees, but you don't want the referees to outnumber the that would be silly, but that's often
what happens. So it's just make sure that the that that, that the player that, that fair games are being played, that the that are sensible rules and I think and don't get in the way of the players and the results will be
excellent. When we met in Austin recently, you talked about socialism as a concept and the problem that when the government gets too heavily involved, you lose the feedback mechanisms that really force them to continue to learn, improve, and do things better all over again. Would you be willing to share those thoughts with the audience? Yeah. You know, like another way you think the government is like a
corporation in the limit. It is the most, it is the biggest corporation and it is a monopoly and and one that can really kind of only go bankrupt if the country goes bankrupt. So it doesn't have the the sort of, you know, commercial corporations, if the cup, if they make bad products fail to compete, then they will go bankrupt and and they should if they make bad products. So, you know, government is essentially corporation in the limit.
And, and since it is monopoly and and there's, there's no, there's just it, it you can think of like, like I think one way to think of the economy is just in terms of feedback loops. And the feedback loop for government provided services to be excellent is weak. Because if like if you have, if you have a government monopoly or anything, what do your, you as a consumer have no alternatives?
You have no means of like, you know, I would sort of say, like you said, think of the Department of motor Vehicles, like the DMV, you know, and, and, and it's very inefficient. You wouldn't want the DMV to make cars, you know, and, and if if you don't get good service from the government, what do you do? Who do you complain to what?
And you just, you know, competition breeds excellence because two organizations and more organizations are fighting to make the and consumer happy and one will gain market share if they do a better job than the other. So that's why we really want government to do the least because it because it's just got the broken feedback loop for improvement, right Afuera? So we only have 4 minutes left so, but I'd like to pick your brains on a couple of topics,
one of them being free speech. You bought Twitter partly to, as you've said, described it, to save an open platform, to save free speech, and that's very laudable. But of course there are also trade-offs. The old saying goes, if you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it. So obviously when we have free speech, we'll get some ugly
stuff as well, even toxic. Can you talk about why to you it's so important to save freedom of speech for to you and for society and the progress of society? Yeah, well, for a platform like the X platform only known as Twitter, there will be things that are said that are that are incorrect, but it provides an immediate feedback loop for correcting that things that are wrong. So somebody says something, well then another person can reply and and rebut what that person saying.
There can be just an ongoing sort of dialogue or argument to and and someone can read the whole thread and see, okay, this person said something, but somebody counteracted that. There was further rebuttals. There was more context added and and that will give them the best understanding of the situation as compared to say a legacy news media article where it's you just have the opinion of the reporter, no rebuttal, no comments, no no, no counter argument.
And very often what's, what printed in the press is completely false and people don't know. But on a, on a real time interactive platform like X, like they can see the, like I said, they can see the not just what somebody said, but what are the rebuttals?
What are the counter arguments? And we've got things like community notes, which I think is very helpful, where if something, if somebody says something false or, or sort of get inaccurate or misleading, then the, the, the, the sort of the core secret to community notes is that for a note to be attached to a post, people who normally disagree about a subject must agree on that, on that community note for it to be
shown. So the probability of it being accurate is is very high because people who historically disagree are are only going to agree on something that is quite accurate. So it's all down to feedback loops basically. I think you, yes. You've been remarkably generous with your time, so I'll just give you a last question possibility for some last thoughts. It seems to me that your take on the world is that progress doesn't happen by itself.
It's not automatic. After the moon landing, we went back from the final frontier for half a century, and Argentina has been stagnating for almost a a century by now. It takes human agency. Someone's got to do it. And in the light of that, are you optimistic about human progress? And if So, what are you optimistic about and what do you think that people are listening today and and think tanks like the Cato Institute can do to
speed progress up well? It, it does seem as though like civilization is reaching new heights in technology and, and, and I think we've got quite a bit of momentum. I, I do worry about certain existential risks like the low birth rate, which is accelerating in, in most countries, you know, and really this is one of those things that I think is underrated as an issue is that if there are no, no, no humans, there's no humanity, They, you have to make
them somehow. And I think we should be very concerned about the, the accelerating implosion of, of, of the birth rate. This is a super big deal. Like basically nothing else matters if there are no humans. Like as a first, as a initial premise, you must have humans forced without a piece of living unless we're going to leave it all to the robots. So this I think is is massively,
massively underweighted. And I don't have a great solution to it, but it must be solved somehow or humanity will dwindle to nothing. Perhaps if we give people hope and a belief in the future and that it'll get better, that they want more people to see it. Yeah, I, I agree. I think we should we should have an optimistic view of the
future. And but like, I do think that one sort of bad, like bad thing about the environmentalist movement is that the, in the, in the sort of extreme form of the environmentalist movement, it's people start to view humans as a plague on the surface of the Earth, as a fundamentally bad thing. And with the implication that if all humans disappeared somehow it would be, would be better off. This is the extinctionist
movement. And I think you can, you can really, I think at a fundamental level, you can think of things as as a fight between expansionist and extinctionist philosophies. And the that's what really matters. Like everything else is like if humans, if humans go extinct or civilization collapses, whatever policies we may have are irrelevant. So first, first and foremost, we must have an expansionist philosophy for, for civilization and for consciousness.
We must seek to, you know, go beyond what we've done in the past to increase the, I think increase the number of humans. And this is, this is incredibly fundamental. So one way or another, this this must happen. Yeah. So the. Final message is go forth and procreate yes. Go forth and multiply. In a free civilization, yeah.
Yes. Well, you know, time flies and opportunity cost is a concept that's very viable when you're talking to Elon Musk. So thank you so much for your time here today, and I'm sure you've got other important things to attend to now. Good luck. All right. Thanks for holding.