Remote Interview of Elon Musk at 2023 World Government Summit (Feb. 15, 2023)

Host: Mohammad Abdullah Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs and Chairman of the World Government Summit organisation

Mohammad:

Good morning.

Elon Musk:

Good morning.

Mohammad:

Good to see you, Elon.

It's been almost six years where I sat with you here on this platform with a great audience. It was your first trip to Dubai with your family. I hope you enjoyed it.

Elon Musk:

Yeah, it was wonderful. I very much enjoyed it.

And I see my head is gigantic on the stage. My head has grown larger since we last met.

Mohammad:

Is it because of Twitter?

Elon Musk:

Yeah, I don't know, perhaps. Twitter is certainly quite the roller coaster.

Mohammad:

Elon, it's been six years. Within six years, we've seen tremendous things since our last conversation. We've seen the pandemic, Russian-Ukrainian war, development of chatGPT, you launched Starship, you recently also acquired Twitter.

Can I ask you this question?

Elon Musk:

A lot has happened.

Mohammad:

Why you bought Twitter? 

Why didn't you create your own platform, Maybe it was cheaper for you?

Elon Musk:

I thought about creating something from scratch, but I thought Twitter would perhaps accelerate progress versus creating something from scratch by three to five years. I think we are seeing just a tremendous technology acceleration that three to five years is actually worth a lot. 

So in fact, I was a little worried about the direction and the effect of social media on the world, especially Twitter.

And I thought it was very important that it be a maximally trusted digital public square, where people within countries and internationally could communicate with the least amount of censorship allowed by law. 

Obviously, that varies a lot by jurisdiction. But I think in general, social media companies should adhere to the laws of countries, and not try to put a thumb on the scale beyond the laws of the countries. I think this is something that is probably agreeable to the legislators and to the people of most countries.

That's a general idea. It's just to reflect the values of the people, as opposed to imposing the values of essentially San Francisco and Berkeley, which are somewhat of a niche ideology as compared to the rest of the world. Twitter was, I think, doing a little too much to impose a niche San Francisco-Berkeley ideology on the world.

I thought it was important for the future of civilization to try to correct that thumb on the scale, if you will, and just have Twitter more accurately reflect, like I said, the values of the people of Earth.

That's the intention, and hopefully we succeed in doing that.

Mohammad:

But how do you see Twitter? 

If we say five years down the road, what's your vision for this platform? What should it do?

Elon Musk:

I'd like to have this long-term vision for something called x.com from way back in the day, which is sort of like an everything app where it's just maximally useful.

It does payments, it provides financial services, provides information flow. Really, anything digital. And it also provides secure communications.

I think it should be as useful as possible, as entertaining as possible, and also to be a source of truth. If you want to find out what's going on and what's really going on, then you should be able to go on x, the x app, and find out.

It's a source of truth and a maximally useful, I guess app is the wrong word, but system. And Twitter is essentially an accelerant to that sort of maximally useful everything app.

Mohammad:

If you look at Twitter today, it's a platform. Sometimes there is a lot of misinformation on Twitter.

Sometimes I don't feel comfortable even because there is some way there is this negative between nation, between people, between a different ethnic group. There is this hate thing. 

How are you going to fix this issue where you are a mission for humanity to get them together?

Elon Musk:

I think there is something that we are putting a lot of effort into called community notes. It's currently just in English, but we will be expanding it to all languages.

I think that is quite a good way to assess the truth of things where it's the community itself. Basically the people of Earth who are basically not exactly voting, but competing to provide the most accurate information, sort of a competition for truth. I think it's a very powerful concept to have a competition for truth.

And you can always say, what is true? Because what may be true to some may not be viewed as true to others, but you want to have the closest approximation of that.

I think the community notes thing is very powerful.

I think trying to have as many organizations and people and institutions verified as being legitimately those people and organizations is important. To have the organizational affiliation clearly identified, so that if you want to find out if an account is actually from a member of parliament or a journalist, or if a Twitter handle actually belongs to say Disney Corporation or something like that, you can go on Twitter and it's sort of an identity layer of the Internet. You can confirm that that is in fact the case.

I think once you've got these sort of interlocking identities, it's actually very hard to be deceptive in that case. Also, you have a reputation to protect at that point.

I think then people are far more likely to be measured in their response and be more reasonable since they have reputational value at that point.

These are some of the ideas that I have. I'm not saying that for sure it will succeed or that it's going to be perfect, but I am confident that over time it will head into a good direction.

I think the evidence for that will be that people will find it useful as we're measuring sort of the total user minutes, but not just user minutes, unregretted user minutes is I think the key figure of merit.

For example, TikTok has a very high usage. I often hear people say, well, I spent two hours on TikTok, but I regret those two hours. I'm not trying to knock TikTok, but it's just we don't want that to be the case with Twitter.

We want to say, OK, you spent half an hour on Twitter, but you found it to be useful and entertaining and a good thing in your life. And also, it would be a force for good for civilization. That's the aspiration.

Mohammad:

Thank you.

Elon, we have over 150 governments within the World Government Summit, global leaders. They have eight billion customers. Their citizens. How government can use Twitter better to serve its citizens?

Elon Musk:

Yeah, well, I think generally I would recommend, you know, really communicating a lot on Twitter. And I think it's good for people to speak in their voice as opposed to how they think they should speak.

You know, sometimes people think, well, I should speak in this way that is expected of me. But it ends up sounding, I think, somewhat at times somewhat stiff and not real. You know, like if you read a press release from a corporation, it just sounds like propaganda.

So I would encourage CEOs of companies and legislators and ministers and so forth to speak authentically, and to, you know, if there's a particular policy, to explain it. 

And I think there's, you know, sometimes a concern about criticism. But I think at the end of the day, you know, having some criticism is fine. You know, it's really not that bad.

I mean, I'm constantly attacked on Twitter, frankly, and I don't mind. It's, you know, you have to be somewhat thick-skinned, I suppose, at times, you know, just because they really will try to twist a knife. But I think just like I said, as a forum for communication, it's great.

And I would just encourage more communication and, like I said, to sort of speak in an authentic voice. 

Like sometimes people will have someone else be their sort of Twitter manager or something like that. And I think it's just people should just do their own tweets, you know. 

And like sometimes you make a mistake or something, it's fine. But I think just doing your own tweets, just like you would do your own, you know, you give a talk here, or you would, you know, have a meeting at a summit or something. I think that's the way to do it, is to actually do the tweets yourself and convey the message that you want directly.

Yeah. So, I mean, one thing I should say, I know this is called the World Government Summit, but I think we should be maybe a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government.

If I may say that we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having, frankly, this may sound a little odd, too much cooperation between governments.

You know, if you look at, say, at history and the rise and fall of civilizations, that really all throughout history, civilizations have risen and fallen. But it hasn't meant the doom of humanity as a whole because there have been all these separate civilizations that were separated by great distances.

And so, you know, say like while Rome was falling, you know, Islam was rising. And so you had like, you know, the sort of caliphate doing incredibly well while Rome was doing terribly. And that actually ended up being a source of preservation of knowledge and many scientific advancements.

So, I think we want to be a little bit cautious about being too much of a world, of a single civilization, because if we are too much of a single civilization, then the whole thing may collapse.

I'm obviously not suggesting war or anything like that, but I think we want to be a little bit wary of actually cooperating too much. It sounds a little odd, but we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization, that the whole thing doesn't collapse and, you know, humanity keeps moving forward.

Mohammad:

Thank you. You see, I hear you. I agree and disagree with you at a certain point.

And I think, you know, today people, they don't fight with sword anymore. I mean, they have nuclear weapons. So if there is this conflict, the whole civilization will be gone. The whole human civilization will be gone.

And what we are trying to do here at the Emirates actually is to do exactly what you are saying. We have 118 nationalities. You have every single race, every single religion, and we're trying to create a model that shows the world that it doesn't matter who you are, what your color, what's your religion, where you're from. Humanity can live in peace and harmony.

My last question, I'll go to Twitter again, then we'll move out of Twitter, if you allow us. 

I mean, you've been running Twitter as the chairman, as the owner, as the CEO, and that's taken a lot of time. Did you identify a CEO? And when are you going to hire him?

Elon Musk:

Well, I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it's in a financially healthy place, and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out.

So, I don't know, I'm guessing probably towards the end of this year, would be good timing to find someone else to run the company, because I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year.

Mohammad:

Elon, if we move to another subject, I mean, at the summit here, we have speakers who speak about the state of the world, the state of geopolitical of the world for the next decade, the state of the economy of the world, you know, from now and the next 10 years.

If I ask you about the state of technology, if you can elaborate a bit and brief us, how do you see technology in the next 10 years from now?

Elon Musk:

Well, to 10 years, it's always difficult to predict technology with precision, especially over a 10-year timeframe when it is changing so much.

I mean, there's obviously the transition to sustainable energy with solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles, and that is, if you look at the percentage growth of that, that is a very high percentage growth, although because of the massive industrial base of the current sort of fossil fuel economy, even if all, for example, if electric cars were 100% of production immediately, it would take 20 years to replace the fleet.

So this is still something that is quite gradual, you know, it's measured in at least a few 30, 40 years type of timeframe.

On a more sort of near-term timeframe, I think artificial intelligence is something we need to be quite concerned about, and really be attentive to the safety of AI.

You mentioned chatGPT earlier. You know, I played a significant role in the creation of OpenAI. Essentially, at the time, I was concerned that Google was not paying enough attention to AI safety, and so I, with a number of other people, created OpenAI. 

Although initially it was created as an open source nonprofit, and now it is closed source and for profit.

I don't have any stake in OpenAI anymore, nor am I on the board, nor do I control it in any way. But the chatGPT, I think, has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become, because the AI has been advanced for a while, it just didn't have a user interface that was accessible to most people. 

So what really chatGPT has done is just put an accessible user interface on AI technology that has been present for a few years. And there are much more advanced versions of that that are coming out.

So I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly, because if you think of any technology which is potentially a risk to people, like if it's aircraft or cars or medicine, we have regulatory bodies that oversee the public safety of cars and planes and medicine.

And I think we should have a similar sort of regulatory oversight for artificial intelligence, because it is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine. And this may slow down AI a little bit, but I think that might also be a good thing.

The challenge here is that government regulatory authorities tend to be set up in reaction to something bad that happened. So if you could say aircraft or cars, the cars were unregulated at the beginning, the aircraft were unregulated, but they had lots of airplane crashes, and in some cases manufacturers that were cutting corners, and a lot of people were dying. So the public was not happy about that, and so they established a regulatory authority to improve safety.

And now commercial airliners are extremely safe. In fact, they're safer than if you were to drive somewhere. The safety for a commercial airliner is better than a car. And cars are also extremely safe compared to where they used to be.

But if you look at, say, the introduction of seatbelts, the auto industry fought the introduction of seatbelts as a safety measure for, I think, 10 or 15 years, before finally the regulators made them put seatbelts in cars. And that greatly improved the safety of cars, and then airbags were another big improvement in safety.

So my concern is that with AI, if there's something bad, if something goes wrong, the reaction might be too slow from a regulatory standpoint. I'd say one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI.

But AI is both positive and negative. It has great, great promise, great capability, but also with that comes great danger. 

I mean, you look at, say, nuclear, just the discovery of nuclear physics, you had nuclear power generation, but also nuclear bombs. 

So anyway, I think we should be quite concerned about it, and we should have some regulation of what is fundamentally a risk to the public.

Mohammad:

Very great. Let me move to another subject, Elon, education.

I mean, you have your own philosophy about education. With AI, education might change dramatically. Can you tell us briefly about your philosophy of education?

And number two, do we need 12 years of schooling and four years of university?

Elon Musk:

Well, with respect to education, I think in general, some things that we could do to make it more compelling would be to explain to children why we are teaching a particular subject.

So the human mind has evolved to really forget anything that it deems unimportant. So in fact, human memory is really quite bad relative to the memory of your phone. Your phone can remember the entire contents of an encyclopedia down to the last letter and pixel. But human memory is terrible by comparison.

So the mind is constantly trying to forget things, actually. But if you explain why a subject is being taught, that will then establish relevance, and it's much more likely to result in motivation for kids. And then also, if you teach knowledge, especially in the sciences, as solutions to a problem, it's much more effective. 

So let's say you're trying to understand an internal combustion engine. Well, it's actually better to sort of take that apart and then say, what tools do we need to use to take it apart?

We need a wrench and screwdriver and various other things to take it apart. Then you understand the reason for the tools. And so for mathematics, they are like tools in physics and engineering. 

But if you teach to the problem and then you understand, then you establish the relevance of the tools, then it's actually much easier to remember mathematics and physics, because they help explain how the world works, as opposed to teaching them without explaining why and simply teaching them.

Instead of teaching to the problem, currently people teach to the tool. It would be like having a course on screwdrivers or a course on wrenches, but not understanding why you have a course, you're learning about screwdrivers and wrenches.

I think this is really quite a fundamental principle that should be applied in education. And I think sometimes we do teach classes that children do not find useful, and where the answer to the why is actually not going to be a very good answer.

Most people, I think, do not find advanced mathematics useful, and are unlikely to find it useful in their life. Or the elements that they do find useful could be taught very quickly as general principles.

I also think that critical thinking is something that should be taught to children at a relatively young age, effectively like a mental firewall, to really think about when somebody tells you something, is it cogent, is it true, or what is the probability that it is true?

And so that you can be taught to reject things that are untrue or more likely to be untrue, and favor things that are more likely to be true.

Critical thinking, I think, is very helpful for people to learn.

Mohammad:

So is it 12 years of schooling you are with or without 12 years?

Elon Musk:

12 years is a long time, I suppose.

I mean, humans just do take a long time to mature. So there is emotional maturity, physical maturity, and mental maturity that is happening simultaneously with the education.

I suppose it could be done in 10 years. Perhaps it does not need 12.

But then if someone matured at age 16, they are more likely to be matured at age 18. So I guess 12 years is probably not bad. 

We probably don't need an additional four or five or six years in college or university. That seems probably excessive. I think we would probably shave a few years off and be fine.

Mohammad:

OK, Kids will love it, by the way.

But you know, social media. We spend so many hours on social media.

I mean, the average sometime in a certain country, three, four hours on social media. And sometimes when we go to our kids, we see them spending also long hours, part of this knowledge.

Do you have any rule for your kids, I mean, how much they can spend on social media?

Elon Musk:

You know, I've generally not tried to restrict social media for my kids, although that might have been a mistake.

Depending on which kid it is, I mean, they've really been programmed by Reddit and YouTube, I'd say. More than anything else, Reddit and YouTube.

I think probably I would limit social media a bit more than I have in the past, and just take note of what they're watching, because I think at this point they're being programmed by some social media algorithm, which you may or may not agree with.

I think probably one needs to supervise children's use of social media, and be wary of them getting programmed by some algorithm written in the Silicon Valley, which may or may not be what you want.

Mohammad:

Elon, you've been working very hard. Since six years ago we met. You look much younger, by the way, than six years ago.

Elon Musk:

Thanks, you look better too.

Mohammad:

But I know that you've been working for almost 20 hours a day. You sleep on the sofa in the office, maybe a Twitter office, at Tesla office. You told me once I was with you at Tesla's office.

How do you balance your life? I mean, with this stress, with so many different companies, how do you balance it?

Elon Musk:

Well, I mean, I should point out that a 20-hour workday is relatively unusual and rather painful.

But I do sleep six hours a night. And if I sleep less than six hours a night, I find that I might be awake longer, but I get less done.

But I do have worked ridiculous amount, I think, relative to most people in that it's pretty much seven days a week, and mostly from when I wake up to when I go to sleep. 

I'm not suggesting this is good for everyone. And I think, frankly, I would like to work a bit less than that. 

So if I look and say, Tesla went through some very difficult times where it was on the ragged edge of survival. And really, if I didn't give it everything I got, the company could have easily gone bankrupt. It was really on the verge of bankruptcy for quite a while.

I don't mean to suggest complacency at this point, but it does require much less work to operate Tesla now versus, say, in the 2017 to 2019 timeframe. And it's not at mortal risk of survival. It's achieved economies of scale that make it not on the ragged edge of survival.

And then SpaceX also has a strong team and is able to make a lot of progress even if I spend less time there, it does help if I spend time there, but it keeps making progress even if I don't.

Twitter is still somewhat of a startup in reverse. And so there's a lot of work required here to get Twitter to a sort of a stable position, and, like I said, to really build the engine of software engineering at Twitter, and really have a great product roadmap and the people in place to implement that product roadmap.

And so it is not my intention to work like crazy. I mean, I think I'd be comfortable with a mere 80-hour work week would be fine. That is what I would aspire to.

Mohammad:

Thank you. We are running out of time. I have one last question I have to ask you.

Three UFOs have been shot, one over Alaska, Lake Huron, and Canada. Alien? No alien.

Elon Musk:

I don't think it's aliens, no.

I do find in the whole question of aliens, a very interesting one, which is typically called the Fermi Paradox, which is that if the universe is really as old as science seems to think it is, and where are the aliens?

Have we really been around for 13.8 billion years? If so, shouldn't there be aliens all over the place? The crazy thing is I have seen no evidence of alien technology or any alien life whatsoever. 

And I think I know, SpaceX, we do a lot. I don't think anyone knows more about space than me, or at least space technology.

But I think it's actually a troubling thing if there are no aliens as well, which is that what that actually could mean then is that civilization and consciousness is like a tiny candle in a vast darkness, and a very vulnerable tiny candle that could easily get blown out.

And I think we should therefore take great care with what may very well be this tiny candle in a vast darkness, and make sure that it does not go out, and that we extend the light of consciousness beyond Earth, and do everything we can to ensure that the light of consciousness does not go out.

Mohammad:

Elon, we've run out of time. Thank you very much.

And hopefully to see you next year with us here in the Emirates with your family.

Elon Musk:

Sounds good. Thank you. And thanks again for having me.

Mohammad:

Thank you. Thank you. We'll see you. Bye-bye. Thank you.