Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more. 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/elon-musk * Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/id1516093381?i=1000748400389 * Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4nah0x1qQF2hxgJnv8PlmN?si=88be1f9b1a8b47b4 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 - Mercury just started offering personal banking! I’m already banking with Mercury for business purposes, so getting to bank with them for my personal life makes everything so much simpler. Apply now at https://mercury.com/personal-banking - Jane Street sent me a new puzzle last week: they trained a neural net, shuffled all 96 layers, and asked me to put them back in order. I tried but… I didn’t quite nail it. If you’re curious, or if you think you can do better, you should take a stab at https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh - Labelbox can get you robotics and RL data at scale. Labelbox starts by helping you define your ideal data distribution, and then their massive Alignerr network collects frontier-grade data that you can use to train your models. Learn more at https://labelbox.com/dwarkesh To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise. 𝐅𝐔𝐑𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆 Notes on Space GPUs — turned my Elon prep into a blog post: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/notes-on-space-gpus 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 0:00:00 - Orbital data centers 0:36:46 - Grok and alignment 0:59:56 - xAI’s business plan 1:17:21 - Optimus and humanoid manufacturing 1:30:22 - Does China win by default? 1:44:16 - Lessons from running SpaceX 2:20:08 - DOGE 2:38:28 - TeraFab