Full Interview: Elon Musk on AI and U.S. Innovation WSJ!!!

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Elon Musk (0:03)

Thank you.

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

Back to the show.

Elon Musk (0:07)

Hi.

SPEAKER_1 (0:08)

Hi, Elon. How are you?

Elon Musk (0:10)

Good. How are you?

SPEAKER_1 (0:11)

Pretty good. Pretty good. Thank you so much for being here. And by here, I mean.

Elon Musk (0:18)

Sure. Electronically.

SPEAKER_1 (0:20)

My bits are there. And where are you right now?

Elon Musk (0:24)

I'm at the Tesla Gigatex factory that we're about to complete.

So, yeah, what you see behind me is the factory, basically. We have the office space and the factory kind of together. So I think this is kind of important that we don't have ivory tower management or engineering and that the management engineering is as close to the factory as possible. So yeah, so you can see what's going on in the factory and, stay grounded.

SPEAKER_1 (1:01)

All right. Well, I'm in the ivory tower here in front of a lot of CEOs and a live audience here in Washington, DC.

And we are also joined by lots of people all over the Internet. We are streaming this to wsj.com, Twitter and YouTube. So we have a very brief amount of time, only 30 minutes, but I'm very excited to talk about a wide range of things. I want to start with talking about our world, the world we currently live in. Then I want to move to the future of the world, and then talk a little bit about your world. And so we'll start right here in Washington, DC., where everyone is talking about the infrastructure plan and the bill. And I wanted to ask you, say tomorrow you get a phone call from Joe Biden and he says...

Elon Musk (1:46)

I think that's unlikely, but sure.

SPEAKER_1 (1:48)

You know, he just gives you a call and he says, you know, I haven't been talking a lot about Tesla lately, but you know, what do you need from this bill? What are your needs? What do you answer him?

Elon Musk (1:59)

Well, I have to be totally frank.

I don't know if we... At least no one at Tesla has actually brought up whether they care about this bill or not. I think if this bill happened or didn't happen, I don't know. We don't think about it at all really.

SPEAKER_1 (2:20)

Okay.

Elon Musk (2:22)

It might be better, honestly, it might be better if the bill doesn't pass. We've spent so much money. It's like the federal budget deficit is insane.

It's like $3 trillion, the federal expenditures are $7 trillion, federal revenue is $4 trillion. That's a $3 trillion difference in... If this was a company, it would be a $3 trillion loss. So, I don't know if we should be adding to that loss. That seems pretty crazy. Something's got to give. You can't just spend $3 trillion more than your own every year and expect...

Don't expect something bad to happen. I think this is not good.

SPEAKER_1 (3:04)

Well, Mitch McConnell is actually saying...

Elon Musk (3:06)

In fact, if I may elaborate on that, the deficit is more than 3 trillion when you look at the future obligations. So it's 7 trillion of current expenditures, but it's much more than that if you look at future obligations for Social Security, Medicare and so forth. So we're running this incredible deficit. Someone's got to give. I don't know.

This can't keep going.

SPEAKER_1 (3:30)

Well, Mitch McConnell said something similar. It wasn't too... not as extreme as you.

But just... okay, so let's say this follow-up question is, okay, Elon, you don't think we need to spend anything on the infrastructure. If he says to you, what is the biggest improvement we can make to the US infrastructure? What are you at? What do you say?

Elon Musk (3:54)

I think we generally could have better airports, better highways, and I think that...

especially in cities that are congested, we've got to do something to deal with the extreme traffic, which I think is some combination of double-decorating freeways and building tunnels.

But if we don't do something, we will be stuck in traffic for forever. And as autonomous vehicles come to the fore, and it's easier to drive without going through the pain of having to drive yourself, which is absolutely coming and will be one of the biggest transformations ever in human civilization. There will be more cars on the road, and the traffic will get much worse. And so we really need to do some combination of tunnels and, or like I said, double-decorating freeways. I'm not a big believer in flying cars. They're basically helicopters with wheels, and people don't want the skies to be swarming with helicopters. So it's tunnels and double-decorating freeways. We don't have a traffic problem in suburbs. We have a traffic problem on freeways because they were just too small and did not anticipate the size of the open environments that we currently experience. So yeah, but I don't see a strong effort in this direction.