#2054 - Elon Musk

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

Yeah.

Elon Musk (0:17)

Thank you.

SPEAKER_2 (0:17)

It's amazing.

Joe Rogan (0:28)

That he puts out a piece of art per day. 365 days a year.

Elon Musk (0:34)

Yeah, I was following him on the X platform, FKA Twitter, but it was too jarring.

Joe Rogan (0:40)

Too jarring, some of the images?

Elon Musk (0:41)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:42)

Well, cheers, sir. Happy Halloween. Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it.

Thanks for rolling up in the Cybertruck, too. I got a chance to look at it in the factory, but that was almost a year and a half ago or so.

Elon Musk (0:57)

Was it?

Joe Rogan (0:57)

It was a while ago.

Elon Musk (0:59)

Yeah, a year ago, I guess.

Joe Rogan (1:00)

Yeah, at least a year.

Elon Musk (1:01)

At least a year.

Joe Rogan (1:03)

And it's different in real life. You see it in person.

Images are just... We were talking about it outside. You just can't contextualize them. It looks so odd that you have to see it in the flesh.

Elon Musk (1:17)

It looks like computer graphics in reality.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

Yeah, it's the coolest-looking fucking production car that's ever been made.

Elon Musk (1:23)

It's bulletproof, literally.

Joe Rogan (1:25)

Literally.

Elon Musk (1:26)

Yeah. One of the videos we're going to show is just going full Al Capone.

Just like if Al Capone showed up and emptied the entire magazine of a Tommy gun into the side of the car, you'd be okay.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

The only thing that's not bulletproof is the glass.

Elon Musk (1:42)

The glass is optionally bulletproof.

Joe Rogan (1:44)

Oh, it is optional?

Elon Musk (1:45)

If you want it, you can make anything bulletproof if you want. But the glass has to be very thick for it to be bulletproof.

So it can't go up and down. So if you want to fix glass...

Joe Rogan (1:56)

Then how do you order drive-thru?

Elon Musk (1:57)

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_2 (1:58)

Yeah, that's a problem.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

You gotta pull ahead and open the door and get out.

Elon Musk (2:03)

But it's okay, you can just duck.

Joe Rogan (2:05)

Yeah, you can just duck. Like duck where? How far away are you from full, like delivering them to people? Has anybody gotten them yet?

Elon Musk (2:14)

We plan to do our first deliveries next month.

Joe Rogan (2:17)

So now it's just testing and fuck it around?

Elon Musk (2:23)

The hard part by far is manufacturing, not designing the car. There's just not really a movie about that, but there should be. The movies will always be about the sort of inventor who invented the car, and then the job is done. That's invented the object, now the job is done. This is not true. That's the easy part.

The hard part is manufacturing by far.

Joe Rogan (2:52)

Why is it so much harder than making an individual model?

Elon Musk (3:07)

To make it affordable, you have to make it at volume. So you've got to make everything at high rate consistently.

If you tour the production line, you'd have a sense for it. You've got to have all of the casting machines, all of the stabbing machines, as the case may be, the glass machines, the wheels, the tires, everything required for the motor, the battery cells, all of the constituents of the battery cells, all of the silicon that goes in there, the chips.

It is, the manufacturing is somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times harder than making a prototype. Whoa. And then if you want to say, like, you want to get from, once you reach volume manufacturing, which is insanely difficult, then you want to make the car affordable, it's harder to, say, reduce the cost of the car by 20% than it is to get to volume production in the first place. So I really cannot emphasize enough how hard production is relative to design. I'm not saying that design is trivial because you have to have taste and you have to know what to make. If you don't have a taste and judgment, then your prototype will be bad. But it is trivial, really, to churn out prototypes, and it is extremely difficult to build a factory.

Joe Rogan (4:40)

And how much more difficult is it to make this, considering the body is made out of steel?

Elon Musk (4:46)

Very difficult. The difficulty of manufacturing is proportionate to the amount of new technology that you have in a car and on the product. In this case, there's a lot of new technology. The production line will move as fast as the slowest and least lucky and most foolish part of the entire production line. And you could say, to first approximation, there are 10,000 things that have to go right, at least, for production to work. So if you have 9,999 things that are working and one that isn't, that sets the production rate.