Elon Musk - "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
2/5/20262 hr 50 min
In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
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Timestamps
00:00:00 - Orbital data centers
00:36:46 - Grok and alignment
00:59:56 - xAI’s business plan
01:17:21 - Optimus and humanoid manufacturing
01:30:22 - Does China win by default?
01:44:16 - Lessons from running SpaceX
02:20:08 - DOGE
02:38:28 - TeraFab
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsElon Musk· Guest0:00
So are, are there really three hours of questions, or, or how's it- Yeah. Are you fucking serious?
Speaker 10:03
Yeah. [laughing] You don't think there's a lot to talk about, Elon?
Elon Musk· Guest0:08
Holy shit, man.
Speaker 10:10
[laughing] I mean, it's the most interesting point. All the storylines are kind of converging- Yeah -right now, so we'll, we'll see how much- It's almost like I planned it. Exactly. [laughing] Well, we're getting there.
Elon Musk· Guest0:20
I would never do such a thing.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:22
[laughing] So as you know better than anybody else, uh, the total cost of ownership of a data center, only ten to fifteen percent is energy, and that's the part you're presumably saving by moving this into space. Most of it's the GPUs. If they're in space, it's harder to service them, or you can't service them, and so the depreciation cycle goes down on them. So like, it's, it's just way more expensive to have the GPUs in space, pr- presumably. What's the reason to put them in space?
Elon Musk· Guest0:45
Um, well, the availability of energy is the issue. Um, so, uh, I mean, if you look at, at electrical output, um, outside of China, everywhere outside of China, it's more or less flat. It's very, you know, maybe a slight increase, but pr- pretty much flat. China has a rapid increase in el-- in electrical output. But if you're putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you gonna get your electricity, um, especially as you scale? Uh, the output of chips is growing, um, pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat. So where... How are you gonna turn the chips on?
Dwarkesh Patel· Host1:19
Um, uh, you know, I- Magical power sources?
Elon Musk· Guest1:22
Magical electricity fairies?
Dwarkesh Patel· Host1:23
[laughing] You, I mean, you're famously, you're, you're famously a big fan of solar. One terawatt of solar power, so with a