- Elon on Zoom, Besties at the summit in Miami
- I WAS THERE!!!!!! woohoo 🙂
- Twitter
- Debating number of bots on twitter with Parag
- care about number of unique people
- twitter claim is that number of unique humans on their service is > 95%
- He thinks its much higher than 5% (fake accounts) - ≥ 20%
- Has most liked tweet of any living human
- < 5M likes (~4.7M) - “next buying coca cola to put cocaine back in”
- They claim monetizable users is 217M so most popular tweet is ~2% of total daily active users?
- Shouldn’t it be more than 10%?
- Analogue with YouTube - most popular videos have 10B views where the service has 1B users
- Speculating that its 80-90% bots!!
- This number is important because its about brand advertising (not just click through purchase)
- Why important to him?
- Important to have a public town square that is broadly inclusive and has max possible people - balance politically, unbiased, transparent system, put algorithm on github and allow people to critique it
- Twitter has a far left bias
- Not a right wing takeover, but a moderate wing takeover
- People of all political beliefs are welcome on the political town square
- Smartest people in history have thought about this - free speech matters for healthy democracy - when someone you don’t like says something you don’t like
- White House is blind to Tesla but sees other EV manufacturers who are not as good
- Republicans do bad stuff because of corporate evil and religious zealotry
- Democrats are bad because of unions
- Obama was more moderate than Biden
- What is the likelihood that a deal gets done this quarter?
- Wants to get logical explanation for number of fake accounts on twitter
- Its a material adverse mis-statement if its not true
- Analogy to house full of 5% or 90% termites
- Relying on public disclosures so this matters
- Its important because 70% twitter revenue is based on brand advertising
- Accuracy of filing is important if you’re buying 1 share or the whole company and its a big deal if its not true
- Why is it hard for them to give a good answer?
- “Don’t want to know the answer”
- Could twitter become a super app?
- With payments, etc
- WeChat is a good model - people in China live on twitter, its twitter + paypal + lots of other stuff, its an excellent app - nothing like that outside of China - so would be useful - so utility of something spam free would be good, post comments, create videos, creators get a share of revenue
- Something like this could be made outside of Twitter - so either convert Twitter or make something new - high trust system with crypto|fiat - people need to have high trust using it
- Prefers to make from scratch but could buy
- Tesla - what are the companies within it?
- Typical car company assembles vehicles, send to dealers, manage supply chain, might make engine, parts are made by suppliers, most software is done by suppliers - so actual work done by car companies like Ford, GM is not much - they don’t do sales or service - have dealerships
- Tesla does its own sales and service
- Have their own “gas stations” = supercharger network, ~15000 superchargers globally
- make their own battery pack, power electronics, drive unit
- Make a lot of the car internally - not religious about it - but more about the pace at which they need to move, faster than legacy supply chain in terms of speed, cost,
- Software - speed, charging, Tesla OS in the car
- Autopilot AI team from scratch - best real world AI team on earth - challenges anyone to show a better AI team demonstrated in a car - in bay area it can go from San Jose to Marin
- Have had 100000 people in the beta
- Want to expand to 1 million
- Also built a chip team - coz there was no hardware to run the AI on - couldn’t just put trunkful of GPUs in the car - expensive and requires lot of power/cooling
- “Best in the world” at the time and still now
- Designing Dojo supercomputer to analyze video coming from all over the world - 10s of billions of miles of training data - optimized inference hardware in the car
- Tesla Giga Factory = not normal factory, a machine that builds other machines, it looks like a chip layout
- Insurance company
- Lot of people pay equivalent to 30-40% of their lease payment for insurance
- Lots of middle entities and based on statistics that require history
- Tesla does insurance based on how you actually drive the car - not based on historical demographics
- Can close the loop by driving better and improving your score - promotes safer driving
- JCal house someone has 93% score and someone else has ~60% score 😛
- Lot of people pay equivalent to 30-40% of their lease payment for insurance
- Robo taxi uber competitor
- Building vs Acquiring
- Tesla
- Roadster cost $190K vs sale price of $115K (JCal bought #16)
- They didn’t bring Elon in
- He was going to start EV company with JB straubel based on AC Propulsion - t0 prototype - they referred him to Martin Everhard et al
- His moral error was trying to have his cake and eat it too - wanted to work on tech, product, design and was doing SpaceX at the time and rockets were blowing up - should have realized he needed to be in charge of company also - had to be CEO in the end
- When he joined there were no prototypes, no intellectual property, no nothing, to be “crystal ******* clear”
- 2008 was rough - GM, Ford, etc were going bankrupt or almost - people were angry he even asked for money for an electric car company in that environment
- Subset of existing investors: Antonio Gracias, Steve Jurvetson, Ira Ehrenpries - he owes a debt of gratitude to them to this day - he put all his money, house etc in - stayed in Jeff Skoll’s bedroom
- Company was on death’s door on Christmas Eve 2008
- First 3 SpaceX rockets blew up - Gawker said he had 4 weeks of payroll left, in fact it was 2
- If he had paid Tesla SpaceX suppliers on time in 2008 they would have got bankrupt
- Showed JCal a photo of a clay model of Tesla Model S - if he could sell it for $50K it would change the world
- SpaceX and Tesla are doing well - not staring death in the face, might be on the horizon but need to keep working hard
- CEO of company has high chore level - hates doing chores but its the reality - personnel, legal, if you don’t work on them, the company suffers - sheer volume of work is insane
- Tesla
- SpaceX
- Goal is to make humans a multi-planetary species - its inspiring
- Hasn’t seen any evidence of aliens yet
- Would be good to find aliens - that will help SpaceX grow more
- Pipeline:
- Orbital rockets and space station crews
- Global communication system in space - Starlink - satellite system is great for remote locations
- Connecting a lot of remote schools in Brazil - so doing good for places that have poor or expensive connectivity - need digital connectivity in modern world
- Permanently crewed base on the moon - don’t have to keep coming back - can build epic telescopes on the moon - detect aliens, etc
- Going to Mars doesn’t technically require government support but it would be good to have it
- Key is to get the city on Mars to be self-sustaining - need large base of resources on Mars, nothing can be missing
- Its the great filter of going to multi planetary species
- Life on Earth is going to end some day - sun will expand, boil oceans, etc - so if you don’t expand beyond Earth its like signing the death warrant - humans also have WW3 danger
- Which will come first: WW3 or going to Mars?
- Nuclear Fusion
- Tokamak style - donut ring with electro magnets that control the plasma - need to just scale it up - need to optimize surface to volume ratio - can have a hot zone in the center far away from the walls and more of a hot zone
- Question is whether its economically viable or not - he doesn’t think it is by an order of magnitude
- Can’t just use normal hydrogen - deuterium, tritium, helium3 - unusual forms of hydrogen - there’s not a lot of this raw material - its expensive
- Have to translate the hot thing to usable electricity - cost of fuel issue that is very significant - difficult maintenance issues
- Better alternatives: Solar, Wind, Hydro, some Tidal - we already have a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky that works every day
- Can we scale up our solar power generation 1000x today?
- Maybe yes - 100mile*100 mile square in Utah or Texas can power entire US
- Can extend to water - earth is 70% water so we can have 100 times power generation
- What happens in that world?
- Low birth rates worldwide - currently headed towards population decline - education, urbanization lead to birth rate plummeting
- The wealthier or more educated you are the fewer kids you have
- So not sure who will use that energy
- Maybe if we have a very robot oriented economy then we can use all this extra energy
- This is the biggest single threat to human survival - low birth rates
- People are dumb thinking fewer kids are better for the environment - we can double the number of humans
- Can’t have civilizations just dwindle into nothing - Japan population dropped by 600K last year - lowest birth rates ever
- At least need to maintain our numbers - can’t end civilization with adult diapers and a whimper
- “How can I bring a child into this terrible world?” Respond with “Have you read history?”
- CA to TX
- Gigafactory is 3*size of pentagon - so big its weird - took JCal 45 minutes to find Elon
- Will extend building to a mile long, 0.25 miles wide, 80 ft tall
- Need to maximize economies of scale
- Rail cars of cell raw materials coming in, building cells, battery packs, casting cars
- Big innovation where they’re casting cars directly
- Sandy Monroe correctly criticized Tesla Model 3 issues - very difficult to make in single casting - 120 pieces went down to 1
- In CA even if Gavin Newsom wants to do it, there are too many litigators and bureaucrats that will get in the way - taxes are too high
- CA has gone from land of opportunity to taxation hell hole
- 18 months to build in Austin, would have been still working on permits in CA
- How to fix this?
- People in CA have to get fed up - only will happen if Republicans have > 0% chance of winning in CA, right now its 100% democrats - how will party be responsive to people if they are guaranteed to win
- Economy
- Called 2022 recession in 2021
- If boom goes on for too long it leads to mis-allocation of capital and human capital - people do silly things not good for their fellow human beings - need an “economic enema” - “this too shall pass”
- Need to be careful with money if you’re running a company
- Paypal days
- Raised $100M in March 2000 - VCs were wiring money to their account without a term sheet - had sleuthed their bank account number - there was lot of demand
- In April 2000 market went into free fall - in a month - even good companies couldn’t raise money
- Paypal almost went bankrupt in 2000 so got lucky with that money
- In 3 weeks got X.com and Confinity merger done and raised $100M - was lucky
- Watch your costs, cash flow, get to positive cash flow asap
- Probably are in recession and it will get worse
- Rough going for 12-18 months
- Software companies having a hard time first - canaries in the coal mine
- Immigration
- Elon, Friedberg, Sacks came from South Africa
- Chamath, Elon came via Canada
- Immigration is like talent recruitment
- Think of it like a pro sports team
- If you want to win the league, add aces from other teams
- These people want to come here - why are we fighting them off to not come here
- We should be recruiting these stars to come here and work - that’s the way to win
- We want anyone with strong work ethic to come to the US - Mexico, Europe, China, etc
- Not sure why Biden isn’t different from Trump on this issue
- Real President is whoever controls the teleprompter
- This administration doesn’t seem to get a lot done - Trump administration at least had lot of people who get a lot done
- Jeff Bezos disinformation tweet against Biden
- Inflation is because government printed a lot of money - more than it had
- Issues checks far in excess of revenue - velocity of money remaining constant
- Federal government writes checks that never bounce - effectively creation of more dollars - with same number of goods and services its leads to inflation
- Can’t make deficit 100 times bigger - can’t because it will make dollar worthless - happened in Venezuela and Argentina
- True economy is output of goods and services - money is just a way to exchange goods and services and exchange obligations over time - its a database - an information system for labor allocation
- Can apply information theory to money - explains why one thing is worse than other
- Like good quality network - high bandwidth, low jitter
- Paypal innovation was increasing bandwidth of money - people were mailing checks - now faster way to send money
- They basically disintermediated cobol databases with batch processing - instead provided real time system
- China
- Not monolithic - everything is not a plot by the Chinese government - many factions within China that compete vigorously within China - tremendous number of hard working smart people in China that want to get ahead and get things done
- Chinese economy is going to be 2-3 times size of US - better stop infighting in the US - need to stop punching ourselves in the face - need to be competitive - new kid on the block is going to be 2-3 times our size, better step up our game and stop infighting
- Do we need to lose the game first - or need a war?
- Tesla work ethic in US is substantially greater than typical car company
- But China is more
- Politics at work
- Point of a company is to produce useful products and services for your fellow human beings - its not a political gathering place - lets not lose sight of why a company should exist
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