Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful

**Elon Musk** (0:00)
We're at the very, very early stage of the intelligence big bang. Being a multi-planet species greatly increases the probable lifespan of civilization or consciousness and intelligence, both biological and digital. I think we're quite close to digital superintelligence. If it doesn't happen this year, next year for sure.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
Please give it up for Elon Musk. Elon, welcome to AI Startup School. We're just really, really blessed to have your presence here today.

**Elon Musk** (0:43)
Thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:46)
So, from SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, XAI and more, was there ever a moment in your life before all this where you felt, I have to build something great? And what flipped that switch for you?

**Elon Musk** (1:00)
Well, I didn't originally think I would build something great. I wanted to try to build something useful. But I didn't think I would build anything particularly great. If you said probabilistically, seemed unlikely. But I wanted to at least try.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:15)
So you're talking to a room full of people who are all technical engineers, often some of the most eminent AI researchers coming up in the game.

**Elon Musk** (1:25)
Okay. I like the term engineer better than researcher. I mean, I suppose if there's some fundamental algorithmic breakthrough, it's research, otherwise it's engineering.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:41)
Maybe let's start way back. I mean, when you were, this is a room full of 18 to 25 year olds. Excuse younger because the founder set is younger and younger. Can you put yourself back into their shoes when you were 18, 19, learning the code, even coming up with the first idea for Zip2? What was that like for you?

**Elon Musk** (2:05)
Yeah, back in 95, I was faced with a choice of either do grad studies, PhD at Stanford, and material science, actually working on ultracapacitors for potential use in electric vehicles, essentially trying to solve the range problem for electric vehicles, or try to do something in this thing that most people have never heard of, called the Internet. And I talked to my professor, it was Bill Nix, and the material science department, and said, like, can I defer for a quarter? Because this will probably fail, and then I'll need to come back to college. And then he said, this is probably the last conversation we'll have. And he was right. So, but I thought things would most likely fail, not that they would most likely succeed. And then in 95, I wrote, basically, I think the first or close to the first, the map's directions, Internet, white pages and yellow pages on the Internet. I just wrote that personally. I didn't even use a web server. I just read the board directly because I couldn't afford, and I couldn't afford a T1. The original office was on Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto. There was like an ISP on the floor below. So I drilled a hole through the floor and just ran a LAN cable directly to the ISP.
My brother joined me and another co-founder, Greg Curry, who passed away. And at the time, we couldn't even afford a place to stay. So the office was 500 bucks a month, so we just slept in the office and then showered at the YMCA on Pejmal and Al Camino.
I guess we ended up doing a little bit of a useful company, Zip2, in the beginning.
We did build a lot of really good software technology, but we were somewhat captured by the legacy media companies and that Nitro, The New York Times, Nehosed, were investors and customers and also on the board. So they kept wanting to use our software in ways that made no sense. So I wanted to go direct to consumers. Anyway, it's a long story, dwelling too much on Zip2, but I really just wanted to do something useful on the Internet. Because I had two choices, do a PhD and watch people build the Internet, or help build the Internet in some small way. I was like, well, I guess I can always try and fail, and then go back to grad studies. Anyway, that ended up being reasonably successful, sold for 300 million dollars, which was a lot at the time. These days, that's like, I think the minimum impulse put for an AI startup is like a billion dollars. It's like, there's so many freaking unicorns, it's like a herd of unicorns at this point. If a unicorn is a billion dollar situation.

**SPEAKER_2** (5:27)
There's been inflation since, so quite a bit more money, actually.

**Elon Musk** (5:30)
Yeah, I mean, like, in 1995, you could probably buy a burger for a nickel. Well, not quite, but I mean, yeah, there has been a lot of inflation. But I mean, the hype level in AI is pretty intense, as you've seen. You know, you see companies that are, I don't know, less than a year old, getting sometimes billion dollar or multi-billion dollar valuations, which I guess could pan out and probably will pan out in some cases. But it is eye-watering to see some of these valuations.