A fireside with Elon Musk on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.
Before rockets and robots, Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk, he walks through the early days of Zip2, the Falcon 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the “miracle” of Tesla surviving 2008.
He shares the thinking that guided him—building from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that we’re in the middle of an intelligence big bang.
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Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
01:25 – His origin story
02:00 – Dream to help build the internet
04:40 – Zip2 and lessons learned
08:00 – PayPal
14:30 – Origin of SpaceX
18:30 – Building rockets from first principles
23:50 – Lessons in leadership
27:10 – Building up xAI
39:00 – Super intelligence and synthetic data
39:30 – Multi-planetary future
43:00 – Neuralink, AI safety and the singularity
48:10 – Message for the Next Generation of Builders
Namibia Rundu
Ultimately AI will help us find God
I get it. Green shoots on the red background. But Elon. We have a perfectly blue planet – right here – to save. And defend. And fight for.
For natural ELE-scale events alone, single-digit to ~10% in 10,000 years is a defensible number. That means it's overwhelmingly unlikely that we will have an ELE, especially if we work to defend this planet like it's our home, which it is. Even in the absolute best-case scenario, Mars is insanely uninhabitable and inaccessible to the vast majority of humans. Let's clean up, and defend, planet earth. That's the money shot.
@MightyWindX @elonmusk @America
Mine
43:11 some of the interviewer's interruptions during pauses in thought really hurt, but this one was the most significant. I really wanted to know how he would conclude his reasoning.