An interview with Elon Musk

Zanny Minton Beddoes (0:18)

The Economist. App or online.

Today, we're bringing The Insider to our podcast listeners. I want to give you the chance to hear some of the interviews I've been doing with the people shaping our world. Hello. Okay, well look at you.

Elon Musk (0:32)

Hello.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (0:34)

I saw Elon Musk a few months ago at an event in California, and I asked him if he'd like to come on to The Insider.

He said I should get in touch with him after the SpaceX IPO, and so I did, DMing him on X, his social media platform. And a few weeks later, I found myself in a Tesla factory in Texas.

Elon Musk (0:52)

That's all too close, obviously.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (0:53)

You what? It's too close to me. Put it wherever you want.

Elon Musk (0:55)

I'm just playing the fool.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (0:57)

Put it wherever you want.

Elon Musk (0:58)

We've got a little bit of Economist branding.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (0:59)

I'm very good at playing the fool, actually.

Elon Musk (1:01)

Not at all.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (1:01)

Don't want to brag or anything.

Our conversation lasted more than 90 minutes. It was fascinating, fraught, and at times heated. It's something that I thought you, our readers, watchers and listeners should hear first hand and in full. So with apologies for the length, here it is.

Elon Musk, thank you so much for joining me on The Insider. Thank you for having us here at Tesla Giga. It is really hard to introduce you without using superlatives. I mean, you are doing, I think, more to build the future than literally anybody alive right now.

Elon Musk (1:37)

I'm doing a lot of building in general. I'm sort of an instinctive builder, I suppose. I just like building things.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (1:43)

You are, but you're building...

Elon Musk (1:44)

You know, run around building things all day long.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (1:47)

You run around building a lot of things. You pioneered electric vehicles, you've revolutionized space travel, you've got a cutting edge AI model now, humanoid robots. Can we start this conversation by you putting all of this together? Tell me what the world's going to be like in let's say 10 years, if you succeed.

Elon Musk (2:04)

10 years, so we're talking 2036

Zanny Minton Beddoes (2:06)

Yeah.

Hopefully, we'll both be around. Hopefully, yes. We can, we can.

Elon Musk (2:11)

Probably. Most likely, we will be. It's hard to imagine the future that where there's not an overwhelming amount of artificial intelligence, meaning like in 10 years, I would expect artificial intelligence to be far greater than the sum of human intelligence, like far greater.

In fact, I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in about and around five years.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (2:36)

In five years?

Elon Musk (2:37)

Roughly five years is my guess. There really won't be anything that AI can't do better than humans apart from being human, perhaps.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (2:45)

At a more prosaic level, what will life be like?

Elon Musk (2:50)

The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance, where anyone can have anything they can think of.

This may sound preposterous, but here we are in 2026 Let's see where we stand in 2036 Now, of course, there are things that could derail this, like a massive global thermonuclear war or something like that. But assuming that there's not World War III, I think we're headed for an age of amazing abundance. So this is, I guess, a message of optimism and excitement about the future.

Zanny Minton Beddoes (3:31)

So we'll talk about the abundance in a second, but just a very prosaic matter. How are your companies going to be making money? Because when you look in the SpaceX IPO perspectives, it looked as though the overwhelming amount of the revenue would be coming from AI, from GROK, really. It won't be transporting things to space as SpaceX is now doing. What will your companies be doing in 10 years?

And how will they make money?

Elon Musk (3:55)

Well, you can really think of the economy as digital and physical intelligence. So, what we have right now, advancing very rapidly, is digital intelligence. Obviously, with AI, that is, it seems that, well, almost with every passing week, there are more AI breakthroughs that it can do something amazing that it couldn't do before. But it's still somewhat confined to the digital realm. It doesn't have end effectors. You need the end effectors in the form of humanoid robotics. You need basically lots of bots in a nutshell. You need lots of bots. And then you can go from intelligence manifesting itself only digitally to shaping atoms.