E69: Elon Musk on Twitter's bot problem, SpaceX's grand plan, Tesla stories, Giga Texas & more

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
So, live from an undisclosed location with the sultry filter on.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:09)
Very sultry filter on.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:12)
Having a great hair day.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:14)
Yeah, that is a good hair day for you.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:16)
Great hair day, my pal, and your favorite CEO and Twitterer, Mr. Elon Musk.
Rain Man, David Sacks. Queen of Q1. Appreciate you coming to the event and zooming in. What's new in your world?

**Elon Musk** (0:54)
Well, let's see. I guess right now I'm sort of debating the number of bots on Twitter.
And currently, what I'm being told is that there's just no way to know the number of bots. It's like as unknowable as the human soul, basically. You have no idea what level of witchcraft and alchemy is needed to determine these bot percentage. I said, like, why not try calling people, but I haven't got a response. You know, like, have you tried calling people or something, you know, like, maybe try to answer.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:38)
It's not a bot.

**Elon Musk** (1:40)
No, I don't know. But I think, like, that would be one of the things to do to say, like, have you tried calling them, as opposed to trying to read the tea leaves here? That's like impossible. You know, obviously, you can have an account that looks exactly like a human account or is being operated where one person is operating a thousand accounts or something.
But that person can only buy one toaster. They're not going to buy a thousand toasters. So you care about, like, number of unique, real people that are on the system. It's extremely fundamental. And anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are full of spam, scam, and just a lot of, you know, fake accounts. So it seems beyond beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of essentially the number of said another way, the number of real, unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95 percent. That is what they're claiming. Does anyone have that experience?
There's a bridge I'd like to sell you, you know, you know, and also you can buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:09)
What do you think it is?

**David Friedberg** (3:10)
What's the, I mean, If it's not 5%, what is it?

**Elon Musk** (3:15)
I think it's a number that is probably at least four or five times that number. I'd say at, if you did sort of the, the lowest estimate would be probably 20%. And this is a bunch of quite smart outside firms have done analysis of Twitter and looked at the daily users and their conclusion is also about 20%. But that's a lower bound. It's not an upper bound. If you look at say, the most liked tweets on Twitter. So I have the honor of having the most liked tweet of any living human. Thank you everyone for liking my tweet. Including some of the bots out there. But that tweet is less than 5 million likes. It's like 4.7 or something like that. And that was where I tweeted about that next time buying Coca Cola to put the cocaine back in.
It's clearly something that the public really wants.
Coca Cola corporations should really think about going back to their roots.
Coca Cola. I mean, this, I guess, is the reason why our grandparents could sort of walk 20 miles in the snow. Because they had Coca Cola with cocaine.

**David Sacks** (4:55)
This is the real reason.

**Elon Musk** (4:59)
Anyway, that is literally the most popular tweet of any living human. And Twitter says that the sort of monetizable daily active users is 217 million.
So why would it be that the most popular tweet ever basically is only 2, 2.5% of the entire user base? This seems a very, very low number.
And the most popular tweets generally are clustered around that sort of 4 million like level. So it's like basically 2% or less than 2% of the daily active users. And technically monetizable daily active users is how Twitter refers to it. So it just seems, how is this possible? Surely there's something that maybe 10% of people would like, not merely 2%.

**Jason Calacanis** (6:00)
Well, actually, if you think about it, Elon, there's a corollary on YouTube.
What's the total user base of YouTube and what have the most popular videos gotten there? And I think there's a billion or two, maybe a billion people using YouTube. And those, the most popular videos have tens of billions of views.

**Elon Musk** (6:18)
Yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (6:19)
That might be instructive.