From OpenAI to Tesla to Twitter, Elon Musk casts a long shadow. The maverick CEO of Tesla, in an interview with CNBC's David Faber, holds forth on various subjects that he is regularly vocal about — free speech, the impact of rapidly evolving AI, and advertising Tesla cars in a first.

Here is the verbatim transcript of his interview, edited for style.

Q: You just finished your annual meeting, you took a lot of questions from very eager audience. I feel like most of it you have shared before, but there was some news and I want to start there, advertising — you didn't sound like you are going advertise that much. But you did at least seem to open the way to saying, "Okay, we might consider doing some advertising." Why?

A: I believe in listening to the shareholders and actually was surprised by the level of enthusiasm for advertising. Since we have not historically done that. But there perhaps is a some good logic to it and that if we are simply sending out information by say, the Tesla Twitter account or my Twitter account, or somewhat preaching to the converted, and not reaching people that are not already convinced, essentially, so I think they probably have a good point. Well, I mean, I think it's worth a try and we will see how effective it is.

Q: Do you have any idea how you would like to try it? Or what that would involve?

A: I have some general thoughts about advertising, if advertising is informative, and entertaining, then it can start to approach content. So I think sometimes advertising is perhaps non-informative, or perhaps in some cases bit misleading. In fact, we have lost some advertisers on Twitter, because community notes applies to advertising too. And so if somebody advertises something that is perhaps a bit inaccurate, then it gets community noted and then they get mad and stop advertising.

But we care enough about the truth that we are willing to give up advertising dollars on Twitter, even if in order to have the least inaccuracy.

Q: Again, back to advertising, I mean, am I going to start to see Tesla ads during the NFL broadcasts on a given Sunday, Monday, Thursday, the NFL is always on?

A: Well, bear in mind, we just agreed to it. So like I have a fully formed strategy.

Q: How much time does go into when you think about these things? I mean, was it something you have decided to do up on stage or at least did you know coming in, this comes up that I may go there?

A: I am not sure what the most effective thing is, except that, like I said, I believe that advertising should be informative about a product, it should be, ideally, aesthetically pleasing. It should be beautiful, should have some artistic element to it and it should be something that you don't regret watching after it's done. I think if advertising fits those criteria, that it starts to approach content, and you want advertising that is as close to content as possible, such that you don't regret the time you spent watching it.

Q: But you did say something as well, which is that you have been preaching to the converted. You mentioned a few statistics, for example, about safety, about price during the meeting that may not be fully understood by the general auto buyer public at large?

A: So a lot of people still think Teslas are super expensive, because we did start out with an expensive sports car, then a slightly less expensive sedan, and an SUV. But now we are at a point where the starting price of Tesla is actually below the average selling price of a car in the United States. So it tells us that we are actually much more affordable than people realise and so we just make sure people at least know that and that Tesla is also the safest car on the road in so many ways — actually people at Tesla don't even know sort of the cabin overheat protection, for example, or the fact that we continuously update the automatic emergency braking software and the way the airbags deploy.

So we would look at an accident, we say. "Is there anything we could do from a software standpoint to improve the cars that are already on road?" And then, "What can we update in the design to improve safety?" I think that statistics speak for themselves. This is not simply a matter of opinion — it is statistically safer than anything else.

Q: You mentioned affordability. It's something you discussed during your meeting. We have also discussed it a bit on on the earnings call recently, as well, in relation to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, and obviously, the monthly costs for a typical auto buyer. You think it's going to be a tough 12 months ahead? You have said that a few times.

A: For everyone, not just Tesla. So you can think of raising the Fed rate as somewhat of a brake pedal on the economy, frankly. So, it makes a lot of things more expensive, certainly things that are bought with credit, but then it has downstream effects on things that aren't bought on credit. So if the car payments or your home mortgage payment is absorbing more of your monthly budget, then you have less money to buy other things. So actually, it affects everything, even things that are not bought on credit.

My concern with the way the Federal Reserve is making decisions is that they are just operating with too much latency. Basically, the data is somewhat stale. So the Federal Reserve was slow to raise interest rates and now I think they are going be slow to lower them that appears to be the case.

Q: But when it comes to latency that takes me to pricing, because you have discussed the lack of latency in your own ability to understand exactly what's going on in the market for those cars, as opposed to many of the legacy and other competitors?

A: We have real time information on demand so we know how many people place an order for Tesla yesterday. So the computer calculates all that and literally, every day, we get an automated email to the exact staff that says how many people placed an order in which countries for which cars. So we know what the orders were yesterday. And you don't want to overreact to these things because sometimes you get like little dips for reasons that are hard to explain.

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Q: Do you look at them every day?

A: Yeah, but like I said, you don’t overreact to if like the week is slow or something. But if you look at the trend', say for an over two weeks span or something like that, you can see that for some reason, the demand is less than it was or it is higher.

Q: In terms of pricing, I mean are you almost like an airline at this point, in terms of kind of dynamic pricing model?

A: So we were basically adjust pricing to match demand and we obviously did a big price drop in Q1. January is usually a terrible time for car-buying. So there's the seasonality to car purchases, January is often the worst month. So we did a big price drop and then recently, we did a price increase. So as I mentioned to the audience, the reality is that all car companies make significant adjustments to price because you have got the MSRP number and then if demand is high, dealers will charge some premium over MSRP. If demand is lower, they will have manufacturing setups, so you can actually see a very big difference over the course of six months between the peak to trough of all cars. It is just that Tesla is so immediate and obvious and transparent it is not a question of MSRP, and then markups or discounts.

Q: But after your last earnings, a lot of investors came away wanting to talk about your margins and wanting to talk about your pricing. In particular, I think you talked about vehicle cost reduction. You sort of even said, “It is hard to explain the profundity of technically selling cars now for no profit and still yielding tremendous economics over time.” I would like you to explain a little bit more of what that means. You did a bit in the meeting as well, you are talking about sort of the move I think from manual to autonomous and the value add that will come along with that. But explain to people why that's profound and why conceivably not that you want to you could sell automobiles now for no profit and still make enormous profit in the future?

A: So Tesla is the only car company selling cars in that where we believe the car is capable of achieving full autonomy with a software update. So the value of a fully autonomous car is, we think, perhaps five times more than that of a non-autonomous car.

Q: Why?

A: The utility of a car, typically a passenger car, is going to be maybe 10 hours a week, maybe 12. If you say like, somebody's going to drive an hour-and-a-half a day, on average, so maybe an hour commute per day and then get an occasional long trip, but figure like 10-12 hours a week is typical for a passenger vehicle. You also have a lot of costs associated with parking — you need a garage, or you have got to buy a parking space, or get a parking ticket at the mall, so there is a lot of costs associated with cars. Now, if you have got a car that's autonomous, that can go around and essentially be like an autonomous Uber, the utility, I think, is going to be much higher, perhaps and this again, it is sort of speculative.

Q: I understand, we are talking about robo-taxis here, or at least what people have called or you have called?

A: Like an autonomous Uber — so perhaps, the utility that would be on the order of 50 hours a week, this is just a guess. Let us say there are 168 hours in a week, and probably as a rough guess, an autonomous car will be able to be active instead for, instead of for 10 hours a week, probably in our view for about 50. But it's the same car, so the costs the same to build.

Q: I want to understand the business model a little bit because I am buying the car and instead of it parking in my lot while I am working, it goes off and picks people up and drops them off. Who is making the money from that? I assume that is the value add you are talking about? Is it a revenue share, do you have this model sort of planned out specifically — how it would look?

A: It has been in the Tesla terms and regulations for quite a long time. So the owner of the car would make some amount. Who knows what it will be, but perhaps it could be a 50:50 split or 70:30, I don't know. If you buy a Tesla car, it can only be used in the Tesla network, it cannot be used in someone else's network. So that means that if the car is able to be used five times as much, and Tesla is likely to make basically two or three times the original value, or sale value of the car in robo-taxi revenue.

This is gigantic. It would be like selling cars for software margins, because in fact, it is software. So instead of effectively having say 25 percent margins, it might be 70 percent or more. The free cash flow associated with that is actually truly a staggering amount. The best analysis that I have seen as far about this is from Cathie Wood’s firm Ark invest.

Q: We know Cathie well.

A: She is great.

Q: I would assume you like her obviously. She has been a huge proponent of your stock for many years, was right by the way very early on.

A: She was right, so I thought she was being optimistic. But she turned out to be in fact almost spot on.

Q: And I am familiar somewhat with her analysis. What a lot of investors come back to or everybody is your promises of full autonomy and you seem to be saying again, it's close. You said it before you know that, you said at 19, I think about 20?

A: I guess I have somewhat of a pathological optimism.

Q: Well, it works by the way, because you don't end up with this unless you are optimistic.

A: Exactly. I mean, who would try to do this and rockets if they weren't pathologically? So, it's a double edged sword, I guess.

Q: But, do you ever say to yourself, "All right, I am getting a little ahead of myself here." I mean, when you said again, we are going to have full autonomy?

A: No, I didn't say — I said I think in my opinion, we probably will.

Q: There's a number of qualifiers there — I think, in my opinion we probably will, so what do you think in your opinion, you probably will win?

A: I mean, it does look like it's going to happen this year.

Q: Why?

A: We are now at the point where the car can drive on highways and in cities with and where human intervention is extremely rare. So I mean, just, I was able to drive for several days, just dropping a navigation pen in random locations in the Greater Austin area with no interventions. And the same in San Francisco, which is a very difficult place to drive. So I mean, you have bus lanes, one way streets. This is quite a challenging homeless situation.

Q: You were driving recently in San Francisco?

A: I have been doing that quite a lot because of where Twitter's headquartered.

Q: I want to get to a lot of other topics. But I am curious on Tesla, in particular. One thing I haven't heard you discuss is the impact on your business of the Inflation Reduction Act. At least I haven't heard it, maybe you have discussed it. Adam Jonas, who follows your company, and Morgan Stanley said, we believe the IRA is advantageous to Tesla in terms of absolute dollars, versus the legacy OEMs that could equal as much as 45 percent of current earnings per share? Is the IRA going to be usually beneficial to your company?

A: I am not sure if it is going be that beneficial. There are significant advantages for having domestic production of batteries, which I think is important for strategic reasons. As we move to an electric transport economy, I think it's important for the United States to have some independence with respect to battery production, including all of the precursors necessary for a battery. So the IRA strongly incentivised that. And I think that will prove to be something of national strategic importance in the future. So I am not sure I would say it's as good as a 45 percent increase in earnings per share, or 40 percent. It is helpful — I would say it's maybe half that or something, so, significant.

Q: Have you mapped it out at all? Do you have a sense? I mean, obviously, you talk about storage, for example, Megapack which is so important, you spend time on that as well. Is it beneficial in that particular area, beyond obviously, the credits, the tax credits that certain people get for buying a Tesla?

A: There are two clauses to the IRA. There is the incentive for battery manufacturing and it's really quite detailed, it's actually very well written. It really makes sure that you can't game it, so you actually have to build the batteries in the US and you actually have to build the precursors to the batteries. But if you do, it is, I believe $30 at the cell level and $15 at the pack level, I believe, if I recall correctly. So that is very significant for batteries, and then you have got the consumer tax credit for EVs provided they are both in the US and that the package was in the US. So this is the really the first time in many years that Tesla has actually had the consumer tax credit.

Because we actually exceeded the limit for the consumer tax credit several years ago, and so, up until December or actually January of this year, I should say, there was no consumer tax incentive to buy a Tesla. But there was for the other car companies, because they have not made that many electric cars.

Q: Before I wrap on Tesla, I would like to get to China, which is obviously an important market for you. I noticed that chart you put up BYD is the only company that seems to be making money so far. Are you concerned at all about ruthless pricing, sort of, at the low-end in the Chinese market and what that will mean to your market share there?

A: Currently our limitation with is the production rate of our Shanghai factory, it is not demand. So there are some constraints on our ability to expand in China and so we are making as many cars as we can, it is not a demand issue.

Q: You could be making batteries soon as well.

A: Yes, for the Megapack, mostly for non-US markets.

Q: Are you concerned at all about the growing belligerence between China and the US?

A: I think that should be a concern for everyone.

Q: I think you are right, I think it is shared by many people who run large organisations and smaller ones. Do you think for example, China will make a move to take control of Taiwan?



A: The official policy of China is that Taiwan should be integrated. One does not need to read between the lines, one can simply read the lines. I think there is some inevitability to the situation.

Q. That would not be good for Tesla, conceivably, or for any, any company in the world, frankly?

A: For any company in the world — almost no one really realises that the Chinese economy and the rest of the global economy are like conjoined twins. It would be like trying to separate conjoined twins. That is the severity of the situation. It's actually worse for a lot of other companies than it is for Tesla. I mean, I am not sure where you are going to get an iPhone. For example Apple recently started doing some sort of small amount of production in India, but it's tiny compared to China.

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Q: It is tiny, not to mention advanced semiconductor chip, if they take over Taiwan semi? You design your own chips, but you manufacture them at Taiwan semi to right?

A: We do some, we do use Samsung and TSMC.

Q: You seem to think it is likely to happen?

A: I am simply saying that that is their policy and I think you should take their word seriously, they mean it.

Q: You have said, in fact, in some of the brief conversations we have had, is one of the most valuable things in your own control. And I am curious now, and Tesla investors sort of seem to rejoice at the announcement of a new CEO of Twitter, in part because they thought — well, he is going to have more time for Tesla. How do you see sort of allocating your time now that you will soon no longer be the CEO of Twitter?



A: It was really a pretty challenging situation at the point at which the Twitter acquisition closed because in rough terms, that there was a $1.5 billion of debt servicing, it was added.

Q: You said you were four months away from bankruptcy, almost $3 billion in a year conceivably?

A: Negative $3 billion cash flow and had $1 billion in the bank.

Q: Now, that's not good. No, anybody who knows anything about corporate finance knows it's bad.

A: I would say that — the analogy I was using was, it's like being teleported into a plane that's in a nosedive, headed to the ground with the engines on fire and the controls don't work.

Q: And you chose to get into the plane?



A: Well, I did try to exit the deal and they wouldn't let me. I mean it was a funny situation where I first proposed acquisition — they adopted a poison pill approach, basically saying they would rather die than be acquired. Like they would rather chew on cyanide. Then a few months later they are like basically had a gun to my head saying, No, you must acquire us. I mean, that's quite a change.

Q: But you seem to think I can figure out a way out of this until finally, I guess, you realise I can't?

A: It was very clear to me that the decision would not come down to my favourite legally.

Q: Well, now you have a new CEO.

A: I think Linda Yaccarino is going be great.

Q: Why?

A: Twitter is very much an advertising-dependent business. Linda is obviously incredible at that, and she's just a great executive in general. So my skills and interests are in technology so I will continue to play a role, advancing the software and getting the features, product stuff basically. So, I mean, the general idea is Linda will operate the company and I will build products.

Q: And that will take less of your time?

A: I have that situation at SpaceX. Gwynne Shotwell, who is amazing, operates the company and I work in the sort of advanced technology. Everyone should play to their strengths.

Also read: Controversy erupts as Elon Musk taps Linda Yaccarino as Twitter CEO: Internet divided over the appointment

Q: In 2021, when you said you spent most of your time on the development of Starship, I think you have also been quoted, I have read where I think I heard you say, actually, most of your mental energy at certain points has been on Starship?. So I wonder have you been diverted from Starship a little bit and were returned to it as the main focus or is it Tesla. Again, your time I know, having tried to schedule this interview with you?

A: Time triage is a real thing for me. In fact, the only real currency is time, time is the only true currency.

Q: So where are you going to spend the currency now that you don't have to spend as much at Twitter?

A: Well, I am going to be devoting a lot more time to Tesla, and especially on the AI development, and new product development, and I will also be allocating some more time to getting Starship to orbit.

In the case of SpaceX, what I was able to do there was to as the Starlink constellation started working, I was able to move some of the best people from the Starlink programme to Starship programme. So the timing kind of worked out well, and we have really of the world's best engineers at SpaceX and Tesla, really some incredible human beings.

Q: There was some statistic you shared, I think, 3.6 million people applied for a job at Tesla. That was that the number?

A: Yeah it is crazy. There's a lot of demand.

Q: You have almost 1,28,000 employees, but 3.6 million people applying for a job?

A: We would only add, like, say 20,000 or 30,000 jobs, so it is much more difficult to get into Tesla or SpaceX than Harvard. The acceptance rate is even lower. The acceptance rate is lower than the most demanding universities in the world, it's insane.

Q: Speaking of employment, though, you had 7,800 people at Twitter when the plane was nosediving, I think you are at 1,500 — so roughly 6,300 people, were they all superfluous?

A: No, not all.

Q: Did you figure out which ones aren't? Or is it a little late. Sometimes it gets a little late?

A: I mean, look, desperate times calls for desperate measures. So the there is no question that some of the people who were let go, probably shouldn't have been let go. Because we certainly did not have the time to figure out. We had to make widespread cuts to get the run rate under control. So this is not to say that, hey, everyone who was let go from Twitter is like somehow terrible or something, it's just, we have to with very little information, get the headcount expenses, and the non-personnel expenses, down to where we at least break even.

We are not quite at breakeven yet, but we are close. We need to do it fast and if you do it fast, unfortunately, there are going to be some babies thrown out with the bathwater.

Q: But it is funny, I have heard from other tech CEOs quietly, they look at what you did at Twitter, and they sort of, they won't admit it publicly. But, they said, wow, that was something I mean, to cut that deeply and still be able to run the company, people will argue about how well or things are running. Have you heard from any of these CEOs and said, thank you for doing that giving us a lot of runway or leeway to at least make some cuts of our own?

A: I have heard that from a few people and I heard that through the grapevine. But like I said desperate times call for desperate measures and unfortunately, those were desperate times.

Q: So will Linda hire people do you think, are you ready for people to be hired at Twitter?

A: We absolutely need to hire people and if they are not too mad at us, probably re-hire some of the people that we let go.

Q: And they are going have to come into the office.

A: I am a big believer that people need to be more productive when they are in person. And the whole sort of work from home thing is like, - like there are some exceptions, but I kind of think that that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the Marie Antoinette quote, "Let them eat cake."

It's like, really you are going to work from home and you are going to make everyone else who made your car, come work in the factory, you are going make the people who make your food that gets delivered — they can't work from home. The people that fix your house, they can't work from home, but you can. Does that seem morally right? That's messed up.

Q: You see it as a moral issue?

A: Yes. It's a productivity issue, but it is also a moral issue. You also get off the moral high horse with the work-from-home nonsense. Because they are asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.

Q: It is still going on, this battle is still happening. I mean, leaders of organizations, and I speak to plenty of them. they want people back. I want people back — three days a week, they are still battling. It's not clear that it's ever going to change?

A: The laptop class is living in La La Land. As I said, look at the cars, are people working from home here? Of course not. So the people building cars, servicing the cars, building houses, fixing houses, making the food, making all the things that people consume, it is messed up to assume that they have to go to work, but you don't. It is not just a productivity thing, I think it is morally wrong.

Q: So if you want to work at Tesla, you want to work at SpaceX, you want to work at Twitter, you got to come into the office every day?

A: Yes. I mean, like, I am saying you put 40 hours in, and, it doesn't even need to be like Monday through Friday, you can work Monday through Thursday. I am also not saying no one should take — I think people should take vacations, like I work seven days a week, but I am not expecting others to do that.

Also read: Elon Musk says work-from-home is a moral issue and wants Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX employees to be in office

Q: How much sleep do you get by the way?

A: About six hours.

Q: You do six hours typically?

A: Yes.

Q: Well, that is not bad. I thought it would be less.

A: I have tried less. But my productivity, even though I am awake more hours, I get less done and the brain pain level is bad if I get less than six hours.

Q: But you work seven days a week?

A: Yes. In terms of actually, you would say like - how many days in a year do I not put in some meaningful amount of work? It's probably about two or three.

Q: Two or three days a year?

A: Yes.

Q: Great. Let's talk about free speech a bit. You call yourself a free speech absolutist.

A: Aspirationally.

Q: You want Twitter to be as truthful as possible, the most accurate source of information about the world. You mentioned community notes. Is that…

A: I would say my overall vision for Twitter is to be a cybernetic collective mind for humanity. This is going to sound quite esoteric and sci-fi, but in pursuit of that objective, you want to have information move quickly, have that information be accurate, and you want to have error correction on that information. So, you can think of community notes as an error correction on information and the network, and the effect of community notes is bigger than it would seem. It's bigger than the number of notes because if somebody knows that they are going to get noted, they are less likely to say something that is false because it's embarrassing to get a community note. And that applies even to advertisers. We have lost $40 million in advertising.

Q: Because it was misleading or because of community notes?

A: Two big advertisers good community noted. And I think on balance the community notes were correct. And I did say to those advertisers look, just go on Twitter, and provide some facts that contradict the community note, that is the way to deal with the community note — say that the community note is saying that the ad is misleading for the following reasons. And if you have got information that robots that node, then just add that to the ad.

Q: Coming on an election. I mean, it's a way away, but it's going to all start. President Trump is allowed back on the platform. He hasn't come back. One would imagine if and when he does, or there are others who will say the 2020 election was rigged. Is that something — I assume that's not something you believe?

A: The answer is nuanced. Like, do I believe Biden won? Yes, I believe he won.

Q: You voted for Biden?

A: I did.

Q: Do you regret that?

A: I wish we could have just a normal human being as president, that is what I want. There is an old saying that we are better off being run by people picked at random from the phonebook than the faculty of Harvard. I don't know who said that. But if somebody were very wise. And I would say, if we could do that for the President, that would be great.

Q: Do you think it would be beneficial? Obviously, you are not happy with Biden.

A: We all are just normal human beings.

Q: Whatever that means. I am not even sure anymore; we are normal human beings.

A: I don’t know.

Q: You want somebody who's competent, that is helpful?

A: Yes, I think. Somebody's executive ability is underrated. Since the president is effectively the chief executive officer of the country. It matters if they are a good executive officer. It is not simply a matter of, do they share your beliefs… but are they good at getting things done? There are a lot of decisions that need to be made every day. Many of them are unrelated to moral beliefs. And you just want a good executive? Because they are CEOs of America. So, we want a good CEO of America who is going to be effective.

Q: Unfortunately, we live in highly partisan times where there is worry about everything. Including ideas, including the truth, which gets back to it's not true that the election in 2020 was rigged. It wasn't stolen. And I wonder on the platform, when you see that, does that end up in a community note or is that something you take more action on?

A: To be clear, I don't think it was a stolen election. But by the same token, if somebody is going to say that there is never any election fraud anywhere, this is obviously also false. If 100 million people vote, the probability that the fraud is zero is, zero.

Q: This election was audited; somebody judges, and it went on and on and on and there was nothing whatsoever there. I don't want to debate this with you. My question is more about…

A: I think it's fair to say like that, in any given election, even if you try your hardest, if you have got 100 million votes, there is going to be some amount of fraud that is not zero. And it's important to acknowledge that without saying that the fraud was of sufficient to change the outcome. So, my opinion would be that there was a small amount of fraud, but it was not enough to change the outcome.

Q: By the way, it might have been either way.

A: Yes, there is a probability of each way.

Q: But you are going to let people say that on Twitter and then you are going to hope that they are corrected?

A: They will be corrected, 100 percent.

Q: Let's talk a bit about your tweets. Because it comes up a lot. Even today, it came up, and anticipation of this. I mean, you do some tweets that seem to be, or at least give support to what some would call conspiracy theories.

A: Yes, but honestly, some of these conspiracy theories have turned out to be true.

Q: Which ones?

A: Like the Hunter Biden laptop.

Q: That is true.

A: Yes, that was a big deal. There was Twitter and others engaged in active suppression of information that was relevant to the public. That is a terrible thing that happened. That's like the interference.

Q: How do you make a choice in terms of when you are going to engage? I mean, for example, even today you tweeted this thing about George Soros. I am looking for it because I want to make sure I quote it properly. But I mean, you know what you wrote but you basically…

A: I said it reminds me of Magneto. It is like, "Calm down, people."

Q: You said he wants the very fabric of civilisation and Soros hates humanity. Like when you do something like that, do you think about…

A: I think that is true. That's my opinion.

Q: Okay. But why share it when people who buy Teslas may not agree with you, advertisers on Twitter may not agree with you? Why not just say, "Hey, I think this, you can tell me, we can talk about it over there and you can tell your friends". But why share it widely?

A: There is freedom of speech, I am allowed to say what I want.

Q: You absolutely are, but I am trying to understand why you do because you know it puts you in a middle of a partisan divide in the country, it makes you a lightning rod for criticism. I mean, do you like that? People today saying (you are) an antisemite; I don't think you are.

A: No, I am not. I am like a pro-semite.

Q: I believe that probably is the case. Why would you even introduce the idea that, that that would be the case?

A: We don't want to make this a George Soros interview.

Q: I don't want to. But what I am trying to ask is, do your tweets hurt the company or the Tesla owners? "I don't agree with his political position and I know it because he shares so much of it." Or there are advertisers on Twitter that Linda Yaccarino (new Twitter CEO) will come and say, "You got to stop, man, I can't get these ads because of some of the things you tweet."

A: I am reminded of a scene in The Princess Bride, a great movie, where he confronts the person who killed his father, and he says, :Offer me money, offer me power. I don't care."

Q: Seriously, you do not care? You want to share what you have to say.

A: I will say what I want to say and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.

Q: But when you link to somebody who is talking about the guy who killed children in a mall in Allen, Texas, you say something like it might be a bad psyops, not quite sure what you meant, but…

A: In that case, not that the people were killed, but it was, I think incorrectly ascribed via white supremacist action. And the evidence for that was some obscure Russian website that no one's ever heard of that had no followers. And the company that found this is Bellingcat, and you know what Bellingcat does, psyops.

Q: I couldn't even follow exactly what it was you were trying to express there. So that's partly why I was curious.

A: I am saying ascribing it to white supremacy was nonsense and that the information for that came from an obscure Russian website and was somehow magically found by Bellingcat, which is a company that does psyops.

Q: And there is no proof by the way that he was not.

A: I would say that there is no proof that he is.

Q: And that's a debate you want to get into on Twitter.

A: Yes. Because we should not be ascribing things to white supremacy if it's false.

Q: I want to talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Well, let me end with Twitter in the sense of Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) was on the Hill today. And he said AI's ability to manipulate interactive disinformation is a significant area of concern — is it happening so quickly?

A: It is a matter of concern.

Q: I am curious as to whether you agree with that, how do you see that even playing out on Twitter with people somebody like you or me and using our voice? I do not know what it could be.

A: That is happening big time. So the reason that I am asking people to be verified on Twitter and that we are saying verification means you have got a phone number from a reputable carrier, which means that you have at least pass through whatever their security mechanisms are, that you have a credit card, which you now have passed through whatever security mechanisms that the credit card company has and that a small amount of money paid per month. That set of actions significantly increases the cost of fake accounts. And with the latest AI, it can bypass basically every test for — are you a human? So, how do you know that a million accounts were created, how do you know that those were people?

Q: I don't know, how do you?

A: Exactly you have to do account verification. And the thing that makes that, like, I sort of put myself in a position of like, if it was my goal to manipulate public opinion and create millions of accounts and make it seem as though a topic was trending and that this is actually with public beliefs, but in order to do so I had to get a million phone numbers, million credit card numbers and pay eight bucks a month and have that all not be traceable and clustered. I would say it is impossible. Impossible. So, the goal of Twitter verification is fundamentally to prevent AI manipulation of the system.

Q: Got it. A final question on Twitter. Walter Isaacson, your biographer. He said, your big goal for Twitter is disrupting the banking industry. Is that accurate?

A: I don't want to disrupt something with the superb sake of disrupting it, it's more like, if there is a better product, that's great. But I am not out for disruption for the sake of disruption. I am like, if we are going to make a product that improves the quality of life for people that they find more useful, that is great. And what people see in Paypal is sort of a halfway, frankly half-baked version of what it could be. And so, I think there is potential to create a more efficient financial system. And here we can get quite esoteric in terms of information theory, but the actual financial system today is a heterogeneous set of databases running on mainframes and COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) — that still engage in batch processing, it's very inefficient. So, things are still not real-time. And so, it's possible to have a much more efficient, homogenous real-time data system money is just information and that is not the only reason, it’s just a thing that would be poetic to fulfill, ultimately, the vision that I had for X over 23 years ago and see that come to fruition would be nice. But there are many other things for Twitter, it’s not just financial.

Q: When you talk about enhancing humanity. I am curious then about AI, which many people say will lead to great productivity gains, you showed those robots? I mean, I can imagine what they conceivably could do when powered by AI. But I am also curious, because you have certainly been concerned, what percentage do you give the chance that it will destroy humanity?

A: The advent of AI is called singularity because it is so hard to predict what will happen after that. But it's very much a double-edged sword, there is a strong probability that it will make life much better and that will have an age of abundance. And there is some chance that it goes wrong and destroys humanity. Hopefully, that chance is small, but it's not zero. And so, I think we want to take whatever actions we can think of to minimize the probability of that AI goes wrong.

Q: And you called for a pause along with a number of other people?

A: My friend Max Tegmark, he is a physicist at MIT, wanted me to sign on to the letter and it's like, I knew it would be futile. I just wanted to call it like, it's one of those things that for the record, I recommended that we pause. Did I think we would? Of course, not.

Q: You are starting X.AI? I think that's what you are calling it, or some new AI effort? How is it going to be different than OpenAI or Alphabet?

A: This is this is not the time to — we don't have enough time and it’s not the moment to really talk about it. We will have a launch event and we will explore the issues in more detail. And I mentioned this at the shareholder meeting that Tesla has tremendous capability in real-world AI.

Q: I know, people, on Twitter, prior to our interview, were saying he never gets asked about how advanced his AI is in Tesla. He always talks about the other names.

A: It is like, I am not even sure who is second, frankly.

Q: Why is that? What are people not understanding about what you have and why are we talking so much about ChatGPT in generative to OpenAI and what Microsoft can be able to do it and not about Tesla?

A: I don't know. I mean, people do talk about it online. I think Tesla will have sort of a ChatGPT moment, maybe if not this year, I would say no later than next year. Suddenly, 3 million cars will drive themselves with no one. And then 5 million cars and then 10 million cars. And I would also say that if positions were reversed; in fact, the positions are reversed. For example, Google has Waymo, which is sort of attempting self-driving and they are able to make self-driving work in a very limited geography with very tightly mapped streets. But as soon as anything goes wrong with those streets like there is an accident or a parade or road construction, it stops working. Basically, Google is unable to produce a generalized solution to self-driving that works anywhere. They have been trying that for a long time, they have been unsuccessful. Tesla basically has that, and it is far more advanced than Google. And so, if the positions were reversed, and you said, okay, Tesla has got to produce a large language model that has output equal to or greater than ChatGPT or Microsoft, OpenAI has to do self-driving. And we just we flip the tasks, Tesla would win.

Q: You have the computing power and everything else, you have to do it.

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: Open AI. I mean, you seem somewhat frustrated with them. You were one of the big contributors early on?

A: I am the reason OpenAI exists.

Q: How much money did you give them?

A: I am not sure of the exact number but it's some number on the order of $50 million. So, the mad fate loves irony. So, I used to be close friends with Larry Page, and would stay at his house, and we would have these conversations long into the evening about AI. And I would be constantly urging him to be careful about the danger of AI and, and he was quite cavalier about it. And at the time, Google, especially after its acquisition of DeepMind, had three-quarters of the world's AI talent. They had obviously a lot of computers and a lot of money. So, it was a unipolar world for AI. And we got a unipolar world, but the person who controls that does not or they did not seem to be concerned about AI safety. That sounded like a real problem and then the final straw was Larry calling me a speciesist for being pro-human consciousness instead of machine consciousness and I am like, well, yes, I guess I am. I am a speciesist.

Q: So you helped to the creation of OpenAI, you put in as much as $50 million?

A: More than helped, it wouldn't exist without it. I came up with a name. The name OpenAI refers to open source. So, the intent was what is the opposite of Google. It would be an open-source non-profit because Google is a closed source for profit. And that profit motivation can be potentially dangerous.

Q: Should you have gotten governance for that money? Should you have gotten some level of control perhaps in retrospect?

A: I fully admit to being a huge idiot here. So anyway, OpenAI was meant to be open as an open source. And a part of it is also in the beginning, I thought this is probably a hopeless endeavour, how could OpenAI possibly compete with Google DeepMind. I mean, this seemed like an ant against an elephant, not a contest. And I was also mean, I was instrumental in recruiting key scientists and engineers, most notably, Elliot. In fact, he went back and forth several times because he would say he is going to join OpenAI, then Dennis would convince him not to, then I would convince him to do so and then this went back and forth several times and ultimately, he decided to join OpenAI and Elliot joining was the linchpin for OpenAI being ultimately successful.

Q: So, you are very disappointed with what happened there in terms of it becoming for profit? Do you take any action, sue them in some way?

A: It does seem weird that something can be a non-profit, open source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source. I mean, this would be like, let's say you fund an organisation to save the Amazon rainforest. Instead, they became a lumber company and chopped down the forest and sold it for money. And you would be therefore like, wait for a second — that is the exact opposite of what I gave them money for. Is that legal? That doesn't seem legal. And in general, if it is legal to start a company as a non-profit, and then take the IP and transfer it to a for-profit, that then makes tonnes of money? Shouldn't everyone start? Shouldn't that be the default? And I also think that it’s important to understand that when push comes to shove, let's say they do create some digital super-intelligence, almost Godlike intelligence. Well, who is in control and what exactly is the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft? And I do worry that Microsoft may be more in control than, say the leadership team at OpenAI realises. I mean, Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft investment, have rights to all the software, all the model weights and everything necessary to run the inference system.

Q: So, they essentially have a great deal of control?

A: At any point Microsoft could cut off OpenAI.

Q: I want to end with one AI question. You have a lot of kids, I have some kids. I have one who is soon to go into the workforce. I struggle with how to advise him about a career when this technology exists and will only improve, I am just curious when you think about advising your children on a career with so much that is changing what do you tell them there is going to be a value?

A: This is a tough question to answer. I guess, I would just say to sort of follow their heart in terms of what they find interesting to do or fulfilling to do and try to be as useful as possible to the rest of society. If we do get to like a magic genie situation where you can ask the AI for anything and let's say, it's even the benign scenario, how do we find fulfilment? How do we find meaning in life if the AI could do your job better than you can? If I think about it too hard, it practically can be just dispiriting and demotivating because I have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into building the companies and then I am like, should I be doing this because if I would be sacrificing time with friends and family that I would prefer to, but then ultimately the AI can do all these things. Does that make sense? I don't know. To some extent, I must have a deliberate suspension of disbelief to be to remain motivated. So, I guess I would say just work on things that you find interesting, and fulfilling, and that contribute some good to the rest of society.

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