ELON INTERVIEW AT QATAR FORUM – FULL VERSION Here's the full interview with Elon Musk at the Qatar Economic Forum a few minutes ago. Timestamps: 0:44 A typical week for Elon 1:40 Tesla’s situation has already turned around 3:55 Elon's compensation important to control Tesla 6:41 Violence against Tesla was unjustifiable 9:27 SpaceX has declined requests to build weapons 12:02 Starlink may go public in the future 12:40 Shareholder derivative lawsuits need reform 14:56 OpenAI is trying to become closed-source for-profit 16:46 Every sector needs some referees but not too many 20:55 Any conflict of interest would be all over the news 24:00 Why does South Africa have racist laws? 26:15 DOGE is just an advisory group with limited power 30:09 Vital programs from USAID were kept 34:15 Elon plans less political money in the future 35:11 Elon doesn't speak to Putin 37:03 Elon's expectations for this year

Elon Musk: Let's have a glorious, amazing future in space! “We want to be the aliens exploring other galaxies. I grew up watching Star Trek, and Star Wars was the first movie that I ever saw in a theater. It obviously affected me a lot. We just want to have this glorious, amazing, space future be real! Have exciting, inspiring things that, when you wake up in the morning, you're glad to be alive. There have to be these things!” Town Hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, October 26, 2024

Elon Musk: I'm not sure people totally understand how big Starship is. “I'm not sure people totally understand. Starship is the largest flying object ever made. This thing will be over 5,000 tons of weight on liftoff. It's going to go straight up with 5,000 tons. This is much heavier than any aircraft, by far. No aircraft comes close to this weight. And it's going straight up. Aircraft can't go straight up. It will have more than twice the thrust of a Saturn V. It's a big rocket.” The Joe Rogan Experience, February 11, 2021

Elon Musk: The obvious reason for making ID illegal in elections is to enable cheating. “California is super majority Dem, 70% Dem. A month ago, they passed a law making it illegal to show ID in any election in California. A friend of mine went to vote in Palo Alto, because he was like, is this for real? He tried to show his ID and they reacted like if you show a cross to a vampire. They were like, no, we can't even look at that ID. It's illegal for them to even look at your ID if you want to present it in California. For any election at all even City council. Joe Rogan: What logical reason other than to cheat would you ever have that law? Elon: The reason is to cheat, obviously. Joe: You can never make an argument any other way. And I think 84% of people polled believe that you should show ID to vote. So it's against the will of the people. Elon: And we are extremely aware we're an outlier in not requiring ID. Basically, almost every country on Earth requires ID to vote. As soon as you ban ID for voting, it makes fraud impossible to prove, because how do you trace the fraud?” The Joe Rogan Experience, November 4, 2024

Elon Musk: Up until modern times, if you were stronger, you were right. Now, we've flipped it to if you're weaker, you're right. But neither is true. You have to look at morals in the absolute. https://t.co/B7XtHEwW4C

Here's Elon Musk expressing his confidence in a fully and rapidly reusable rocket just after seeing the two boosters of Falcon Heavy land for the first time in 2018. “I didn't really think this would work. Because when I see the rocket lift off, I see a thousand things that could not work, and it's amazing when they do.  Seeing the two boosters land synchronized, really just like the simulation, it makes me think, there really could be quite a scalable approach.  You could imagine large numbers of those just coming in, landing, taking off, landing, doing many flights per day.  So, it gives me a lot of faith for our next architecture, the interplanetary spaceship. We have different names for it, but BFR is the code name, and it gives me confidence that BFR is really quite workable.  I was actually looking at the side boosters and like, they're pretty big, you know, 16 stories tall, 60 foot leg span. But really we need to be way bigger than that.  I have tremendous confidence, obviously, in the SpaceX team. So I think we can really do this a lot and keep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability, which would have a profound effect on the future.” Falcon Heavy launch press conference, February 6, 2018

Elon Musk: Even if you're not absolutely certain about something, you can try to get as close to the truth as possible while acknowledging that there will be some error in what you're saying. Aspiring to the truth is very important. https://t.co/2xcOc6YJho

Elon Musk: We try to maximize animal welfare at Neuralink. We even offer monkey room service. “I want to emphasize that we do our absolute best to take care of the animals. When we had a USDA inspector come through, she said this was the nicest animal facility she's ever seen in her entire life. We have monkey room service, which is rare. We're the only ones who offer monkey room service. We really do everything we can to maximize the welfare of the animals.” Source: Neuralink Update, July 2024

Here's Elon Musk in 2013, explaining SpaceX's plans to build a commercial spaceport in Texas, which would later become Starbase. “Cape Canaveral is good for eastward launches. Vandenberg for southerly launches. And we figure we need a third launch site that's a commercial launch site. Because Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg are Air Force bases which is cool, and obviously, there's an important need for Air Force space launch bases, as there is for Air Force airports. But there's also a need for commercial airports. Just like you wouldn't expect commercial airliners to land at an Air Force base at a normal course of events, it makes sense to have a commercial spaceport. We need to be able to launch eastward. And we want to be close to the Equator. That basically means the potential states are Virginia through Texas, going south, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. We need to stay on US territory, because rocket technology is considered an advanced weapons technology, so it's very difficult to export that to other countries. So, those are our options. Right now, Texas is arguably the leading candidate. But we need certain legislation passed that's supportive of space launch. I don't think it's particularly controversial, but one of the things we need is we need is to be able to close the beach when we're doing a launch. And Texas has the Open Beaches Act. We can't launch if there's someone right next to the rocket on the beach. I don't think it's a particularly controversial thing. It's pretty straightforward. Then, we need a little bit of protection for the-1-in-10,000-person case who complains about the thing. We had this dude who filed a lawsuit against us for our rocket development site in Central Texas, near Waco. He's not even in the same county. He's in a neighboring county. And he also thinks the CIA is listening to his brainwaves. So, we need just a little bit of protection for people like that, so we're not spending a ton of time in court. That's basically what we're asking for. It's nothing major, and I think it's likely to move forward. If things go well, there'd be a decision this year, and then we'd start construction next year. And then, probably, the first launches would take place from there in two to three years.” SXSW, March 09, 2013

Elon Musk on DOGE's findings: “We found people receiving unemployment insurance with a birthdate in the future.” “We've seen just crazy things. Like the 20 million dead people in the Social Security database marked as alive, many of whom were receiving benefits. One person was 360 years old. I think that would be a bit of a red flag. They're older than America.  We found people receiving unemployment insurance with a birthdate in the future. We found at the Small Business Administration that they were giving out loans to people as young as nine months. So, we're stopping things like that.  We've actually found there's a lot of people who are federal government employees, they're active employees, who nonetheless applied for and have received unemployment insurance. And this appears to be at least 100,000 people.” My View with Lara Trump, Fox News, May 3, 2025

Elon Musk: I'm not aware of many companies that were created without an extended period of extreme pain. “Maybe there are occasionally companies that get created where there's not an extended period of extreme pain, but I'm not aware of very many such instances. But I do think that new great entrepreneurs are born every day. And we'll continue to see amazing companies get built.  I would definitely advise people who are starting a company to expect a long period of quite high difficulty. But, as long as people stay super-focused on creating the absolute best product or service that really delights their end customer, if they stay focused on that, if you get it such that your customers want you to succeed, then you probably will.  You have to focus on the customer and delivering for them. If your customers love you, your odds of success are dramatically higher.” Interview at Start Me Up Hong Kong, January 26, 2016

Elon Musk: As bad as Twitter was, the federal government is much worse. At least, Twitter passed audits. “Twitter was at least break-even, and it had to pass an audit. The federal government is literally losing $2 trillion a year, and it fails its own audits. There's a case where, Senator Collins gave the Navy $12 billion for more submarines, got no extra submarines, and then held a hearing to ask where the $12 billion went. And they were like, we don't know—that was it. Only the federal government can get away with this level of waste. The reason I'm putting so much effort into this is that I think it is a very dire situation. America's going bankrupt. That just can't happen.” The Joe Rogan Experience, February 28, 2025

Marc Benioff: Elon clearly sees the future. No one's like this. “I want to get to the future first and welcome our customers there. By the way, that's what I think Elon Musk does so well. I don't know what all the crazy things he's doing to see the future. He's clearly doing some unusual things. But then he's like, yeah, we're going to have robots in the future and brain-machine interfaces and driving electric cars. All of these things are going to be happening in the future, and I'm going to have 10 companies that are going to do all of them. No one's like this. I've never seen anything like it. I don't understand how it is even possible.” Lenny's Podcast, December 22, 2024

Elon Musk: As crazy as it sounds, the Pentagon literally loses track of $20 or $30 billion a year. “The Pentagon has not passed an audit in a very long time. As crazy as it sounds, they will lose $20, $30 billion a year, and they literally don't know where it went. Senator Susan Collins was telling me about how she gave the Navy $12 billion for extra submarines and got zero extra submarines. When she held a hearing and asked where the $12 billion went, they didn't know.” Fox News, March 27, 2025

Kevin O'Leary: The government drips with fat. Let Elon do his thing – there's nobody like him. “I'm okay with [Elon going through Washington with a Hoover]. I think the American people are okay with it. Everybody knows the dirty little secret about government. It drips with fat. No one's ever done an exercise like this. I thought he'd get a lot more pushback from Congress, and he's not. He's going in there with a spatula, and he's scraping out billions of dollars, and people are okay with it. After all, it's taxpayers' money. Why not do this? If you sit around your kitchen table, you've got to have a budget every year. Why can't we apply the same kind of philosophy to government? That's why he's getting a lot of latitude and a lot of slack, even though he's a controversial guy. But look at the executional skills he has. There's nobody like him. Let him do his thing.” Fox News, February 3, 2025

Andrej Karpathy on Elon's management style: If you have a big person who is also really smart and has a big hammer, things move quickly. “He hates meetings. He keeps telling people to skip meetings if they're not useful. He has a very good intuition for streamlining processes, making everything efficient —the best part is no part— simplifying, focusing, and just removing barriers, moving very quickly, and making big moves. I do think you need someone in a powerful position with a big hammer like Elon, who's the cheerleader for that idea and ruthlessly pursues it. If no one has a big enough hammer, everything turns into committees, democracy within the company, processes, talking to stakeholders, decision-making, everything just crumbles. If you have a big person who is also really smart and has a big hammer, things move quickly.” Lex Fridman Podcast, October 22, 2022

Elon Musk: A curious AI will want to preserve human civilization. “The best thing I can come up with for AI safety is to make it a maximum truth-seeking AI, maximally curious, and have its optimization function be to understand the nature of the universe. If that is its optimization function, I think it will actually want to preserve and extend human civilization, because we're much more interesting than an asteroid with nothing on it. My biological neural net suggests that a maximally curious and truth-seeking AI is the safest AI. We have to be careful with the alignment stuff. We definitely don't want to teach an AI to lie because that is a path to a dystopian future.” Interview with Linda Yaccarino, April 18, 2023