America PAC Town Hall — Lancaster, PA October 26, 2024 Musk's return town hall in Lancaster, where he fielded audience questions for nearly three hours — ranging from early voting and government spending to education, Mars and Neuralink.
Musk's return town hall in Lancaster, where he fielded audience questions for nearly three hours — ranging from early voting and government spending to education, Mars and Neuralink.
Transcript Elon Musk
Welcome. Usa. Usa.
Elon Musk
Wow. I love it. It's an honor to be here talking to everyone here and everyone out there. So, yeah, I'm. Before I. Actually, what I want to emphasize before anything else is, as the sign says, vote early and vote now. So you can actually, I looked at the numbers. As of Yesterday, there's still 40,000 absentee ballots that have been mailed out just in the surrounding counties, just in the nearby area that have not been. That have not been handed in. So if you have any friends, family, or anyone you know who has an absentee ballot, just hound them relentlessly until they hand it in. Because if they don't hand it in, then the vote doesn't count. It's pretty straightforward. So, yeah, there's 40,000 absentee ballots that really need to be handed in just in this area. So please, you know, talk to friends and family. Don't get a vote. The other thing is that anyone in Pennsylvania can go to the county office on Monday and Tuesday and request a ballot and immediately there, hand it in. So I think probably a lot of people are not aware that you can actually do this. You don't even need to mail it. It's kind of weird because it's like called an absentee ballot. But you're like, right there, clearly not absent. Can I have an absentee ballot? But you're here. Yes. As strange as that sounds, you can literally go in, request an absentee ballot, and even though you're right there, you can hand it in. And you did this morning. Great. And I think maybe some county offices are open on the weekend, but they're definitely open on Monday and Tuesday. And then to add another strange twist, they close on Wednesday. So they're like, now what? So you have until just Monday and Tuesday in Pennsylvania to go into the county office, request a ballot, and you can hand it in right there. It doesn't even need to even go in the mail or anything. And that's the best way to do it. You can use the mail, but you can just do it right in person. And then for some reason on Wednesday, you cannot do it anymore until November 5th. So that's high urgency for Monday and Tuesday. Big deal. So. And this, this is, you know, this is an election that I think, frankly is. Is a folk in the road of destiny, you know, it really is. So, you know, it's. Yeah, it's. It's. It's. It's essential. So, you know, it's like, we need safe cities, secure borders, you know, sensible spending. I mean, basic stuff, you know, and. And we need to get rid of, like, the. The. Well, yeah, but I mean, it's like, I always feel like it's bad to, like, attack Kamala because he's just a puppet, you know, but it's just, you know, it's just a machine. It's just like this big government machine, and there's a puppet, and it's like, no point in attacking the puppet. It's just, you know, it's like I was like, you know, I made a joke that was sort of misconstrued, that it was like, nobody even bothered us to try to kill Kamala. That's pointless.
Elon Musk
Let's get another puppet. So everyone does. Nobody even bothers. Nobody's even. Nobody's even tried to kill Biden. It's like, doesn't that seem odd? They're trying to kill Trump twice. Yeah, exactly. I mean, listen, if somebody's already dead, what's the point of trying to kill him? So, you know, he's one foot and four toes in the grave. I mean, I saw A Weekend at Bernie's, and honestly, the corpse had more life than Biden, like, for sure, actually. So, you know, who's even running the country? Like, like, like, like, who's in charge? I just. It's confusing. Trump. Sure, he will be, hopefully. But I just sort of wonder, like, clearly Biden is not Compass Mantis, so who is actually in charge? The machine, I think it's just. It's just like the big government machine basically is what's in charge. But it's bizarre, you know, so, yeah, I mean, obviously with Trump, the great thing is that we have a real individual who is not beholden to anyone, and that's what scares the machine. And that's why the machine is trying to kill him. Yeah. So, Yeah, wild times, man. Wild times. I mean, I've had quite a few friends call me and say, have you? You should definitely improve your security. I'm like, that's probably a good idea. I'm like, they're like, they're definitely going to try to kill you. I'm like, yeah, that's a good chance they might try to do that. Yeah, so, yeah, exactly. If they shoot, they better not miss. So I'll find out who was behind him, not just who the gunman was. So. But it is crazy to think that, you know, we have a presidential candidate who. That they've tried to kill twice in recent months, and they try to get them with lawfare. Six ways to Sunday to try to prevent people from, from actually voting in a democratic way. It's outrageous, really. What are they, you know, what are they afraid of? So, yeah, I think it's kind of the truth and I'd certainly encourage people. If people haven't seen the conversation between Joe Rogan and Donald Trump, that was super cool. I mean, I think for a lot of people it's like, you know, how do you know, how do you understand somebody like, and what they're about? You know, like the sort of far left press has been going on and on about how like Trump is like Hitler, like Mussolini and Stalin combined and you rolled them all into one and he's somehow worse than all three of them combined. These are people who have killed tens of millions of people. I'm like, something's wrong with the press, guys. You know, something is wrong with the press. Journalism is dead. Like, what the heck is going on? It's bizarre. Yeah, actually, exactly. It's like, I mean, I do think like that old school journalism, I call it legacy media because it is kind of legacy media because it is from a time when in order to learn any news, you had to aggregate the news to some central publication and then some editor would decide what people should hear and then they would print the newspaper with like a lot of paper, literally, and then distribute that paper. And that's how you learn things. But you obviously don't need that anymore. You've got the Internet so anyone can learn anything at any time. Yeah, that's why X is future. It's citizen journalism where you hear from the people, it's by the people, for the people. That's what it's all about. I think this is a super, super big deal and it's, and it's absolutely fundamental and transformative that the people actually get to decide the news and the narrative and what matters. Because the legacy media is basically controlled by a handful of editors in chief. That's it. They decide what's going to get published. That's why I really encourage everyone out there to write stuff on the X platform and other platforms too. But citizen journalism is the future, you know, and that's where you get to hear from actual experts in the field, people who are experts in any given industry, and you get to hear the rebuttal. So if somebody says something that's wrong or requires more context, people can add that X has got community notes, which is great, you know, so community notes, I think is got a very good batting average. It's not perfect, but it's Got a very good batting average and many times I've gotten requests like, can we get rid of this community note? I'm like, no, we cannot. Not even a community note on myself. So with community notes, all the code is open source, all the data is open source. So you can recreate any given community note independently. And that transparency is how you know that it's true and it's real and it's honest. So that's, that's, yeah, but, and I think we've got, you know, besides man, the mic feedback's getting a little crazy. So maybe I should, should I go further back or further forward? Well, there's an X on the floor, I guess. I'm guessing that's where I should stand. Okay, yeah. All right. All right. Yeah. So yeah, the rock ship was pretty cool. That was an amazing thing. So, Yeah, the SpaceX team is an incredible team. And it's wild that this giant 250 ton object went to space, came back and was caught by giant Mechazilla arms. It's like, you know, it's super cool. That's the kind of thing that, you know, that I think is inspiring and exciting and you know, there's a lot of potential. I think we, we can actually build a permanently occupied science base on the moon. We can build a study on Mars. We can be a multi planet species and out there among the stars, it's very exciting. You know, so. I'm wearing this jacket that was given to me by the space force. You know, it's got Star Trek Enterprise on it. You know, it's like Starfleet Academy. We want to make Starfleet Academy real, you know, and go out there and visit other star systems eventually and see if there are alien civilizations. Maybe they're alien civilizations that existed for millions of years and we just find the, you know, the ruins of many long dead alien civilizations. I don't know. Well, they might be very interesting to
Elon Musk
because at least according to physics, the universe is 13.8 billion years old and Earth is about four and a half billion years old. So even if you just increment the time counter by a million years, you have to go three digits past decimal place to go bloop, a million years. And the oldest writing that we've discovered in archaeology is only 5,500 years old. Only that's nothing. That's a millionth of Earth's existence. It was the first writing. And you really have to hand it to the ancient Sumerians, by the way. They got a lot of firsts Those ancient Sumerians, they're really knocking out of the park frankly, you know, with the clay tablets and everything. Thankfully they wrote in clay tablets. It was quite helpful. I mean they've even discovered like schoolwork, like where they teach the kids cuneiform on clay tablets. And then there's the teacher correcting the cuneiform in red ink. It's been going on for a while. So here we are, a mere 5,500 year old civilization, just a baby really, but with a lot of potential. I think we, you know, we can go out there, we can make life multi planetary, understand the universe, find out what's going on. Maybe the aliens will come visit us. Maybe they are here right now, I don't know. So, alien registration card. So you know, people do ask me like, do I think aliens are amongst. I'm like, I haven't seen any. Yeah, there's illegal aliens, but there's a lot of those. But I haven't seen any like sort of green aliens with antennas on their head or anything like that. And maybe they are, they're just very subtle, but I haven't seen them. So. But I think we want to be kind of, we want to be the aliens exploring other galaxies, you know. And you know, I grew up watching Star Trek and Star wars was the first movie that I ever saw in a theater and it obviously affected me a lot. And we just want to have these sort of glorious, amazing, I don't know, space future real, you know, and have exciting, inspiring things that make you glad to wake up. When you wake up in the morning, you're glad to be alive. They have to be these things, you know, life cannot. Yeah, So yeah, well, I think we can. So that you can travel to Mars roughly every two years. So every 26 months the planets align and you can travel from Earth to Mars. And we're actually at a planetary alignment moment right now in the next few months. And so in roughly two years there will be another planetary alignment and that's when we intend to send the first starship rockets to Mars. So that's, I think we can probably send quite a few in two years. And then if those land successfully and we do not increment the crater count in Mars, crater count before and after equals the same, then we can send people. In four years we will be illegal aliens on Mars. You know, I guess if there's any, you know, any Martians, maybe they'll make Mars great again. Yeah, you know, Mars did have oceans a long time ago, it seems like. Yeah, like When Mars was a lot hotter, it had what appears to be liquid oceans. And if you warmed Mars up, it'll have an Ocean on about 40% of the Earth's of Mars surface. So Mars would be about have an ocean I think almost like a mile deep on 40% of the surface if you just warmed it up. So there's a ton of a massive amount of frozen ice on Mars. So yeah, it is kind of making Mars great again because you can warm it up and it can be an Earth like planet. So I think this is actually very important for the long term. The longevity of consciousness is to be a multi planet species. It's actually very important so because there's always some chance that something could happen on Earth that's either, you know, a man made disaster or a natural disaster like the, you know, the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. I mean there have been many mass extinction events in Earth's history and there will be mass extinction events, yet there is a de facto mass extinction event of humans actually the birth rate is plummeting, so. But the probable lifespan of civilization will be much greater if we are a multi planet species than if we are a single planet species. We don't want to be one of those lame one planet civilizations is what I'm saying. So we want to be a multi planet civilization and I'm not talking about like a lot of resources, like I don't know, 1% of our resources. Seems like a wise move to be a multi planet species and kind of just ultimately find out what's going on, like visit other star systems. And I think one day Mars may actually play a role similar to the role that America has played in saving the world. You know, America saved the world three times last century. That's a big deal. World War I, 2 and the Cold War. So. Earth would be very different if not for America saving the day three times last century. Yeah, Amen indeed. So, so I think in the future, Mars, they used to call America the new world and Mars would be the new new world, but actually, you know, planet. So I think one day Mars may save Earth just as America saved the rest of the world. I think that's a big. Yeah, as you can tell, I love space and rockets in case that wasn't obvious. So let's see, we can go right into questions and just sort of have it. It's always good to have like get the discussion going with people. So the lights are very bright in my eyes, so I can hardly, I can't see what's going on. There's two big lines. Okay, great. Well, let's see, how should we start? Okay, go ahead. Okay, sure.
Audience
Hi, Elon. My name is Ashley and I'm from Lancaster county and I have a 7 year old son named Daniel. And he made me promise that if I got to talk to you, I had to tell you that he thinks that the cybertruck is the thing. Coolest, coolest thing that has ever been invented. So he owes me one now for telling you that. But so my question centers around higher education. So I'm going to age myself a little bit. But 20 years ago when I graduated high school, I made the decision not to go to college and just to enter in the workforce. And it worked really well for me, but I did get a lot of slack from it, from people that thought that that was kind of crazy. And now I've seen, you know, the attitude toward higher education kind of changing and that not being the only model that we have. So my question's sort of twofold here. So when it comes to like my children who, you know, will eventually be needing to make that decision, you know, what decision or what, what advice would you give in comparison to like a trade school, higher education, or just entering the workforce? And from an employer standpoint, in 10 to 15 years, what do you think employers are going to be looking for from this next generation that will be entering the workforce?
Elon Musk
Sure. Well, I do think that probably too often people do do a university or college thing for four years and it's unnecessary. And then they accrue a lot of debt and it's hard to pay off the debt. And they often don't learn skills that are very useful. So it's not, you know, I think we should really reconsider whether going to college actually makes sense. I think it doesn't always. So you know what I think. And people also forget, like, what's the point of going to school in general? You're supposed to learn useful things, you know, improve your understanding of the world and, and learn skills that can help you contribute to your fellow human beings. But very often a university does the opposite. In fact, it will propagandize kids and not teach them anything useful and just saddle them with a lot of debt. So I think what really matters is are you doing something useful to help your fellow human beings? Are you contributing more than you take? And if you are, that's a great thing. Now we are headed into a pretty wild future here with artificial intelligence and robotics, I think, especially if you look, say like 10 years from now, or more that we're going to have, the world is going to look very different. I think it's like 80% likely to be good, you know, like the glass is 80% full, you know, and most likely we'll have, I think we'll probably have a situation which is universal high income, actually not universal basic income, but universal high income. And there will be no shortage of goods and services. That is what I think is most likely to occur. And we need to make sure that this AI is and these robots are on the side of humanity. You know, obviously, you know, James Cameron made a movie, made a couple movies about that. You know, you got to watch what you program these robots to do. And you know, the example I've used a few times is, you know, when Google Gemini came out, people asked, well, which one's worse, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or Global thermonuclear War? And said, well, Ms. Gender, Caitlyn Jenner is worse. It's like we've got a problem with this AI. And even Caitlyn Jenner said, yeah, you should definitely miss Jenner me. That's crazy. So, you know, we don't want to have an AI. That's. That concludes that the best way to avoid misgendering is to execute all humans, therefore reducing the probability of misgendering to zero because there are no humans. That's the kind of crazy stuff that could potentially happen that we want to avoid. Which is why I think we want to have a maximum truth seeking AI. It's got to be based in a good way and just be an honest and truthful and forthright AI. That's the best path to safety for artificial intelligence.
Audience
Hi Elon, I'm Christine. I'm from Lancaster County. I want to extend a heartfelt welcome from all of us in Lancaster County.
Audience
Thank you for all that you do. My question surrounds government and efficiency. What would be your plan to make government more efficient?
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, so I think the first of all, in terms of people sometimes ask, where would you start with government efficiency? And it's kind of like being in a room where the entire room is targets and so you can shoot in any direction and not miss. It's like impossible to miss because every direction is a target. So no missed possibility. Now we do have a fundamental issue, which is that the government is spending far, far more than it brings in. And the reality is that all government spending is actually taxation. All government spending is taxation. Sometimes people think some of it is taxation and some of it's not. But it's all taxation because the part that is not covered by tax revenue becomes inflation. So you're either taxed directly or you're taxed by inflation, but you are for sure taxed. And so all government spending is taxation. So we have to reduce government spending overall. This will be forced upon us in the future because already just the interest payments on the debt are 23% of all federal tax revenue. Just the interest payments. The interest payments now exceed the Defense Department budget, which is a trillion dollars a year. That's a lot of money. So just the interest on the debt exceeds what we spend on the military. Just the interest. And that is rising rapidly. So it can't be like, you know, we'll trim a little bit here and there. That's not going to work. They have to be quite radical reductions in cost. Yeah. And I think we just need to be, you know, if, you know, Please, Lord. Problems. The, you know, and the Department of Government Efficiency happens. We're going to be very open and transparent and be very clear about this is what we're doing. Here are the issues. This is the math for what's being spent and what, you know, and we're going to make it. We're going to make the spending lower. If somebody's got a better idea for how to make the spending lower, tell us. But if we don't, we're going to bankrupt the country. And so we got to do something. And it's got to be like, some pretty big moves. Drain the swamp. Yeah, I'd say, like, drain the swamps. This is like a. There's so many swamps. It's like, you know, there's so many swamps. There's. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just nutty that, like, there was a massive increase in IRS personnel. And instead of adding people to the Border Patrol, like, this is totally backwards. It's like, you can continue to remain a federal employee, but you have to go guard the border. That's your new job. You know, it's like, why are we spending money and applying resources to oppress the American people while rolling out a red carpet for illegals? It doesn't make any sense. So. So, yeah, it would have to be pretty big. I mean, there's. I actually have tried Googling it, and I've asked all the AIs, how many. How many government agencies are there? And even the government doesn't know. Okay. And the AIs don't know. They're like, well, it's about 450, but maybe it's 420. I'm like, 420, no kidding. That's a lot of agencies. Just at the federal level. I mean, like, if you sort of stand back and say, okay, just for a second, like, let's say we're starting the country again, how many agencies do we need? Do we need more than 99? Because that's. 99 is a lot of agencies. You know, like, that's, that's still a lot. You know, if you said, like, does any. How many people even know at 99 agencies? I'd say practically no one knows. 99 knows the names of 99 agencies, let alone the 420 or whatever there are. Yeah. So we have to unwind the situation. And I think. Well, I think we're going to do it and it's going to unleash a new era of prosperity because people don't even realize how much they're getting held back by millions of federal regulations. Millions, literally. And if it turns out that we accidentally got rid of a good regulation, we'll just put it back. Is that easy? Hey, Elon, I'm Dan from Pennsylvania as well. I am a teacher, public school teacher, and I just bought a Tesla this year and it's been amazing for my one hour commute.
Elon Musk
So thank you about that. Cool. Additionally, self driving. Yes. Oh my gosh. It blows. Like when I go into the teacher parking lot and I just tried to summon today, like, yeah, everybody's galls hit the floor. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah. So Republicans need to get out the vote. And as the mail in balloting becomes more common, what can I tell my friends about the safety and security of mail in ballots? Yeah. This election and future elections. And then real quick, also, My daughter is 2. Her name is Isabella. She loves the planets and loves astronomy already. And I want to know what I can, as a teacher do to help inspire her curiosity for the heavens, the stars. Sure. Well, let's see. With respect to voting, voting integrity, I think probably the best thing to do is to hand it in in person. But you can also mail it in and you can check to see whether your ballot has been received. So it is possible to check online or in person to see if your ballot has been received. But I would encourage people to vote early because what can happen is that November 5th comes around and there's like, you got something critical at work or there's a family emergency or, you know. Yeah. Some mysterious cyber security event that you never know might happen. So, you know, anything can crop up on November 5, whether it's personal or some, you know, there could be some other. Some other issue. So it is best to vote early. Now, it is very encouraging to see the early vote numbers, because if you compare the early vote numbers this year to 2020, there's about a. I think the last numbers I saw, it's like a 2 to 300,000 voter difference from 2020. That's a huge. That's major because I think it was like an 80,000 vote threshold last time. So Biden won ish by. 80,000 votes. That was the number that was reported. But the interesting thing is that the Delta early votes is now 200, I think maybe approaching 250 or even 300,000 better than 2020, which is far in excess of the margin of 2020. So Pennsylvania is trending in the right direction. It's very encouraging, But there's still a lot of work to do, and we don't want to be complacent. So definitely get everyone, you know to vote. And as mentioned earlier, people can actually go in person on Monday and Tuesday if they're concerned about putting anything in the mail. And they can actually get their ballot. Like, even if they don't have their ballot, they can literally go to the county office, get the ballot even though it says absentee, and then hand it in even though you're not absent. It's weird, but it works. But it stops working on Wednesday, and then the next opportunity is November 5th. So it's kind of quirky, but those are the current rules. And then, let's see, with respect to your daughter. And, you know, I think in order to inspire, like, kids are inspired by real amazing imagery. Like, they see something amazing. They see a rocket taking off, a rocket landing, or, you know, robots walking around, or like, cool things like the stuff that you see in sci fi movies. And when they see stuff like that, they're inspired automatically. They're inspired because it's. Because there are real advancements in technology, and that's, you know, that's what inspires kids, because it should. Kids are a great filter for what's awesome. You can tell if a little kid reacts, like, wow, that's amazing. That's real. So kids love the savage rock and they love rockets, you know, and that's because. And they have no filter. They just say what. They immediately say what they think, you know, so, yeah, so it's. It's great new rocket technology that allows us to, like I said, go there and be. Have a permanent science station on the moon, you know, not Just like it's great that we're into the moon 50 plus years ago, but we want to go to the moon and actually have a science base. Like we've got a science base in Antarctica. Well, we should have a science base on the moon and we should be building a city on Mars. And I actually think it's the long term future of civilization, I think could be decided by whether or not we build a self sustaining city on Mars. And if we do that is to say that would have millions of people and it would be like if anybody wants to go to Mars, they could. And that would be an incredibly exciting, inspiring thing to aspire to, go to Mars. You're like, wow, let's make that real. Let's bring her to Mars. Yes, let's bring her to Mars. Yeah, if she thinks like, wow, one day I could go to Mars, you know, and be one of the Martians and that would be super awesome I think, you know, it's wild. It takes six months actually when you go from Earth to Mars. You're just traveling across this void of nothingness for hundreds of millions of miles until eventually you reach another planet. It's kind of incredible to think that that's even possible. But how amazing would that be, you know, like, wow, we want to have a future where life is multi planetary, where we're advancing rocket technology and like I said, where Star Trek Starfleet Academy is real and that's what will inspire your daughter. Thank you. All right.
Audience
Hi, Elon, My name is Lauren from Pennsylvania. Thank you for being here. Thank you for everything you're doing and congratulations with SpaceX. You and your whole team are absolutely brilliant. I have two specific questions for you, but I was curious because I looked all over on X today and I didn't see anybody who won the million dollar prize. Oh yes, Was that given out today?
Elon Musk
Well, let's see. We are going to give it out tonight in fact. So let's. Is it, should we go ahead and do it? Yeah, okay, let's do it. Good timing. All right, Judy. Kimora. Yeah. Judy has no idea, by the way. She's just learning now, so. Authentic. Judy's on her way here. Like I said, Judy had not learned when you learned. All right. Oh, thank you. All right, all right. I mean we're trying to, trying to get attention for this very important petition to support the Constitution. And it's, you know, it's like if we, you know, we need the right to free speech, we need the right to bear arms, otherwise there is no right to Free speech. And, Yeah. And, and it's, you know, people sort of wonder why, why didn't, why, what's up with the million dollar prizes? I'm like, well, we needed to get the legacy media to talk about it. And, and I just knew that they would be like complaining like hell about it. That, like, for sure. Complaining on every, every newspaper and every TV station are complaining like crazy. And I was like, great, that's going to get the word out. Most. Welcome. All right.
Audience
Can you say hi to my son Kaden?
Elon Musk
Yes. Hi, Kaden and Kaylee. Hi. All right, So, yeah, so we're going to be giving out a million dollars every day through November 5th. And all you have to do is sign the petition in support of the first and Second Amendment. That's it. You don't even have to vote. Be nice if you voted, but you don't have to. And to support the. Basically sign something you already believe in and you get a chance to win a million dollars every day from now through the election. Yeah.
Audience
Congratulations. Judy, let me know if you want to share two specific questions for you, Elon. One regarding your concern about the declining birth rate.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's a big deal.
Audience
It is. Besides us as women having more and more children and since we're the only ones who can give birth.
Elon Musk
I mean, you do need a womb. A womb is necessary, otherwise you can't have kids currently.
Audience
What would be your solution? Would you be in favor of creating or supporting an IVF surrogacy program to increase the birth rates? And my second question is about what would you recommend towards the first steps on improving our American educational system? Thank you.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, in general, like, I think we should really view the birth rate as like, extremely fundamental crisis. Like, it's, it's really shocking how low it is. You know, the birth rate in America, in the United States has been below replacement rate since I was born, roughly roughly around 1971 or so.
Elon Musk
Since then, America has been below replacement rate. And pretty much every country, it seems as soon as they reach a certain level of prosperity, the birth rate drops below replacement. And then I started looking into, well, has this happened before in history? And in fact, it has in basically every civilization in the past. It's maybe counterintuitive, but the more prosperous that a civilization becomes, the lower the birth rate. So it's because you think, well, with prosperity you'd have more resources, then you'd have more kids. Actually, no. The historical fact is that the longer That a civilization has been prosperous, the worse its birth rate got. And this was an issue even in ancient rome, like in 50 B.C. there's like, actually we still have like the Roman laws that were written. They passed laws to try to improve the birth rate of Roman citizens in 50 BC. So like, basically this is a fundamental civilizational challenge that has been encountered many times before. It's not something that just, you know, happened recently. It's, it's, it's occurred throughout the cycle of civilizations. And I, I don't, I hope we can at least partly reverse it. And I think part of that is at least bringing it to conscious awareness. Because I meet many people who think that there are too many humans on Earth, but this is not true. There aren't enough humans on Earth. In fact, you can fit all the humans on Earth in the city of New York on one floor. Okay, so. Or like if you fly across the country and you look down and say, if you had to drop a ball in someone's head, would you succeed? And you would not, because the density of people is very low. There are actually very few people on Earth. It's only if you live in a very dense city environment that it seems that there are many people, that Earth is densely populated, but it is only densely populated in like 0.1% of the surface area. So I at least want to bring it to conscious awareness. So people don't think that Earth is overpopulated when in fact Earth is under populated. That is the truth. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Bill Gates and I are not best friends to say the least. So I don't know. He is. You know, I think there's, you can arguably, arguably say like, look, that maybe the real distinction is not right or left, but is someone an expansionist or an extinctionist? So he has some issues. This is true. So, but like, if you say like any given civilization, it's not going to be exactly steady. So any given civilization is either going to be growing or declining. And so you have to say you can kind of divide any person's actions into are they expansionist or extinctionist? And I mean, obviously I'm super expansionist oriented because I think that's a far more exciting future than going extinct. You know, sounds obvious when you say it like that. So, yeah, so it's just. But I still run into a lot of people who think Earth is overpopulated. So I'm like kind of hammering this point. We're not overpopulated, we're underpopulated. And you know, so I'm in favor of really, you know, we need to have babies by whatever means, whether it's ivf, surrogacy, whatever the case may be. You know, that can certainly help and. But we just can't go extinct like the humans need to. You know, I think humanity is great and we should have get bigger. Yeah, we want to. I think we should expand the scope and scale of consciousness so we can better understand the nature of the universe. I mean that's the foundation of my philosophy. Making babies great again. Yeah. Make babies great again. Yes. So, yeah, hopefully that was helpful. So thank you. Yeah.
Audience
Hi, I'm Mary Ressler and I live in Lancaster, Penns. I'm a teacher here. I've been following you because of your work with world literacy with xprize as I was a participant in Barbara Bush xprize with an app development called Literacy Speedway. But my passion is turning because since COVID every day in the trenches, in the classroom, I see the effects of mental health on our students. Not only students, but I've seen two of my brothers commit suicide. I've seen my own daughter who wasn't able to get a bed in a facility and had to wait months. I have seen what's happened to American families because of the mental health crisis and the lack of resources. Our mental health system in America is broken. And so even though I have a passion for world literacy and always will, I also would like to ask you because I know of your collaboration, your contacts, contacts with the election, with what the new administration can possibly do. What can you guys do to fix our broken mental health system in America? Sure. Well,
Elon Musk
I mean, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts and suggestions. I mean my sort of observation is that we do we over prescribe medication. And you know, like there's a lot of regulation, in fact too much regulation about getting any given medication approved. But then after it's approved, there's no follow up to see, hey, did we make a mistake? And then you get to get things that are approved and they just go hog wild. And it's causing a lot of damage. But there's not really a good revocation capability. So it doesn't make sense. Like there are good drugs that are not being approved and there are bad drugs that have been approved. This is a broken system, we need to fix it. I think very often when somebody has committed suicide or if they've essentially done, if something's, if something as bad has happened, like what were they prescribed? That is an important thing. Do you have any thoughts on those?
Audience
I do have Thoughts on it? I feel like in the brick and mortar school, in the educational setting, not only do the states, because I know education is state dictated, even though there's national common core curriculum, that there needs to be mental health services embedded into every school at this juncture, there also needs to be facilities in every state. Not a six month wait to see psychiatrists as in Pennsylvania at times, or 12 months to get a bed in a mental facility. The asylums unfortunately weren't the fix years ago in America because they were horrible. But when they were taken away, authority went to the states, federal money was taken away and now you have outpatient services and there's a lack of prescribers, there's a lack of counselors, there's a need for more. And every day our prison system right now is housing half almost. And I could give you the data to, you know, they're not there because they're criminals. They're there because they have mental health issues and it needs fixed.
Elon Musk
Are there any particular medications you think should be pulled from the market or added to the market?
Audience
I believe that every child, when they're diagnosed with a mental health condition should have. There is a test for it, there's some kind of tongue test that can dictate which medications will work and won't work for you. However, you have to ask as a parent for that test. And I can guarantee from my experience in this with parents working in the school district or just from friends and other associates, most people aren't even aware of it because it's not paid by for insurance and most Americans can't afford it. So when things aren't covered under your insurance, they're not given like a doctor isn't going to prescribe that. That is done. So you have to have the self awareness and knowledge to go and have that testing done. And most people unfortunately just don't know it even exists.
Elon Musk
Okay, all right. Well I think this is definitely something that we need to figure out better. There's clearly, I agree with you that there's a mental health issue. I think we need to look at like what drugs actually work and what are the side effects. And some of them, I mean, yeah, I think some of them are pretty sketch frankly that some of the drugs that are prescribed, I mean some of the stories I've heard about some of the psychiatric meds from people are pretty bad. Like it's like the reason they weren't in some cases, the reason they weren't commit suicide is when they took the drugs, not when they didn't take the drugs. You know, people do need to believe in something. So, you know, I think the probably nature abhors a vacuum. So if there is, you know, there's certainly a strong argument that the decline in religion has led to people seeking a new religion, essentially secular religion. So that is, you know, wokeism is essentially a secular religion, but it's, it's believed very fervently. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's a strong, strong argument for church. I agree. They need substance, they need natural things. Oh, that's true. All right, well, let's see. So.
Audience
Good evening. My name is Janelle. It's nice to meet you.
Elon Musk
Nice to meet you.
Audience
I wanted to actually first thank you and probably behalf on everyone here to thank you for creating the pack and the referral opportunity. I think everyone here is grateful. I saw it as a way to support two amendments that I actually care about and don't want to see go away. And secondly, I saw it as a way that if I could refer my friends, family and everyone that I could go, I could earn some extra money.
Audience
My husband and I are actually self funding our own fertility journey. I've got some unexplained infertility and so that money is going to actually pay our bill next month.
Audience
And I've always wanted to become a mom and I have a dream to be a mom and I know one day it will happen. I'm drawn to your population concerns. I don't know if you've talked to President Trump, but I would love to know if you would consider PAC or advocating a grant for fertility to make Americans like myself be able to afford it and have a baby.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I'm super pro baby, so yes. Yeah, absolutely. I'm super pro baby, so yes, absolutely. Hey, Elon. My name is Furman Jones and I just wanted to start out and say I really believe in you. Thank you. And I know everybody in here believes in you for one reason or another and I'm super thankful to even get to ask you a question. But anyways, I also believe in the Constitution and I also believe in the Bible and that's what I'm going to ask you about. Sure. The Bible says that nobody's perfect and there's no perfect form of government on this earth because greed is inevitable. It's like Churchill says that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other types. Right. But the one government that the Bible does say is perfect is the kingdom of God. And Isaiah 33:22 says, the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our king, and the Lord is our lawmaker. So I feel like so much of your worldview aligns with biblical principles, and we need Christians to vote and see that greed, that communism is the greatest manifestation of evil and greed. And so, yeah, that's my question. How do we get Christians to vote? And if you have time, what keeps you from believing in the Bible or being more vocal about it? Yeah, well, it is interesting that actually I was told that a surprisingly small percentage of evangelicals, of people that are really strong believers, act as quite a small percentage that votes. I thought. And I hope. Yeah, well, this is what I was told anyway. But I certainly hope more people, more Christians vote. That would be great. Please do so. Yeah, I mean, so I was, you know, brought up Christian and went to. Actually, somewhat strangely, went to Sunday school. And also I was sent to a Hebrew preschool. You know, I'm not Jewish, but I was. I don't know, I think it was in the neighborhood or something, you know, and so I was, like, hopping to Gila one day, Jesus is our Lord the next. And I was like, great. So, you know, so, you know, I certainly. I believe in, like, the teachings of Christ. I believe, you know, that he's like, I believe in the Christian principles, you know, love thy neighbor. I believe in turn the other cheek, which is very important for to have forgiveness. Because if you don't have forgiveness, then you have an endless cycle of retribution. You know, like, you know, I used to think, like, why would you turn the other cheek? That's ridiculous. You know, sponge them. But. And I think you do need to actually be strong. Like, you can't be weak. Because if somebody's. If you're facing sort of a predatory threat, and that threat is stronger than you, and that threat doesn't believe in Christian values, then you will just get executed. I mean, I don't know. But at a certain point, once you are strong. Once you are strong, you should forgive the transgressions of others. And this is obviously not something they believe in the Middle east, which is why there's this endless cycle of violence, you know, So I really think that, yeah, we should. Yeah. Should love thy neighbor, and we should forgive, and we should. We should be kind and gentle. So, yeah, I believe in what Jesus. I believe in what Jesus said.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk. My name is Grant Naugle. Hi, family. It's really, really good to meet you. My first question was, do you have an answer to life? The Universe and everything. Well, the classic answer is 42 and 420 is just 1042s. Interesting. But my real question. Yes, sorry. My real question would be, what is the most useful, most powerful piece of advice you have ever received? Most useful piece of advice. That's a tough one. Yes, indeed. Vote republican. Yeah, I mean, this is maybe going to sound like maybe I believe in, like, well, if you study physics, if you study. I just recommend studying physics, you know, and the tools of physics, sort of the thinking tools that it's not just a bunch of. What matters is not remembering a bunch of formulas. What matters is the thinking process that led to the discovery of those formulas. It's sort of critical thinking, first principles, analysis, trying to understand what is true at a most fundamental level and then reasoning up from there and testing your conclusions against the most fundamental truth in any given arena. This is how you can figure out whether something is more likely to be true or not. And I think it's good to think in terms of probabilities. So you receive information about a subject that should change the probability of your conclusion, but not the certainty of your conclusion. Conclusion like so in physics teaches you that you should not be 100% certain that about any given prediction. Now, there's some things that are highly likely, but physics teaches you you got to assign a probability to something being true. And then as you learn more information, your original conclusion may be wrong. And then, you know, you should then change your mind based on the new information. I mean, you can think of intelligence kind of as just how good is. I think probably the right metric for intelligence is the ability to predict the future. If you can predict the future well, then you're, you're as intelligent as you can predict the future. Well, because if something, if somebody claims, well, this thing is this person or this AI is very intelligent, like, well, how good are its predictions? And if its predictions are not very good, it's not that smart. So that's, I think, the key nature of intelligence. And if you're trying to decide what to do in the future, it is really. It just comes down to predicting the future. And to predict the future, you have to think critically about the past and constantly try to be less wrong. So maybe that would be. Maybe that would be right up there in terms of best advice, aspire to be less wrong. Hi, Elon. Yes. First off, thank you so much for having us here today. We always appreciate that we have somebody in your level of influence that can listen to regular people and kind of get our voices Heard. And it's also not every day that a person gets to meet their hero and ask them a question. So my main question is, since COVID the current administration has really put a struggle with small businesses and especially here in pa, we've seen a large decline in both the foundation of small business and I've personally known several small businesses that have had to close due to increasing regulation, taxes, you name it. Exactly. The burden of excess regulation is very severe and it crushes a lot of small companies and it makes big companies operate much less efficiently. So how do you think that we as small business owners and non small business owners can fight against this? And also, what can you do as a former small business owner that you can kind of fight for us? Well, I mean, to your point, I think a dramatic reduction in government spending and government overregulation, like I call it, sort of America is getting sort of strangulation by overregulation will unleash a new era of prosperity. Just allow people to do useful and productive things and don't make it a two year permitting nightmare, which it often is, and then burden small businesses with taxes that make them go bankrupt. So yeah, it's pretty straightforward. Like I said, it's kind of mind blowing that There are over 400 federal agencies governing our lives, most of them people have never heard of, but they do affect your life and unbalance negatively. So we just need far fewer agencies and get the government off your back. Yeah. Hi, my name is Marco from Lancaster. Thank you for your time. I'm sure it's the most valuable thing you can give to any organization. So thank you. Hi, Mr. True Currency. Thank you, sir. So my question is, my wife's a natural US citizen, She's registered to vote. I banked my vote already. I was just wondering if you'd be willing to talk about, I mean, we did it the right way. We took years and money and we got her naturalized the right way. If you'd be wanting to talk about your experience at all with immigration and also other than a secure border, how you see fixing that system? Yeah, well, since your wife has gone through the process of becoming a citizen and getting a green card, you've seen how absurdly slow and arduous it is. So I mean, I think the general principle that makes sense is the same principle that you'd operate a professional sports team on or a company which is like who would you want on your team? And if somebody's going to be productive, like productive and honest and a net contributor, and that'd be a great addition to the team. Welcome aboard. It should be not a long process because they'll produce more than they consume. They'll make everyone's lives better. And so we have this bizarre situation which is, like, mind blowing, that it is easier to get into this country as a murderer than as a Nobel Laureate, literally. That's not an exaggeration. Which is like, what? You know, it's like, I mean, it's like if you have the opportunity to say, have like, you know, Lebron James or Steph Curry on your team and you'd be like, yeah, that would make total sense. Our team's going to win. They'll make the whole team better. You know, so we want to actually, we need to have things be what they should, which is that legal immigration of honest, hard working, talented people is quick and easy and coming into the country illegally is hard. That's how it should be. Yeah. So honestly, okay, I had kind of a crazy idea this one was going to hit the press, which is like, what if we gave legal immigration job to Chick Fil A? They are so efficient. They make an amazing chicken sandwich. Their chicken sandwiches are epic. And they make a zillion of them and they just get it done. I think we should give the immigration job to Chick Fil A. They'll crush. That's going to be a headline. Hello, Mr. Musk. But honestly, it would be great. Hello, Mr. Musk. It's an honor to meet you. So my question is this, and I ask this as a first time voter. As we know, Trump did not and has not accepted the results of the 2020 election, one which has been called the most secure in the nation's history by the former president's own Department of Homeland Security. Similarly. Similarly, I saw the violent disruption of the electoral vote count on the news during January 6th.
Audience
And I asked this as a first time voter who.
Elon Musk
Who wants to discern the truth. Sure. What would you say to comfort the concerns of young voters like me who are worried that voting for a second Trump presidency will lead to Democratic backsliding? Well, I think that's a fair question. Honestly. It is a fair question. I mean, the thing is that, yeah, like, I want to frame this correctly and obviously anything I say, the legacy media is going to take a soundbite out of what I say and misconstrue what I'm saying, which is something they've done with President Trump many times. It is very important. If you heard something bad about President Trump, listen to his whole speech. That's actually Very important, you know, and, you know, on January 6th, I mean, his statements on that day, he told people to back down. I mean, he said. He said, do not do violence. And then people were like saying, well, that's actually some sort of dog whistle about doing violence. I'm like, what are you supposed to say? You know, he did actually tell people to not be violent. He recommended that the National Guard be deployed. Nancy Pelosi said no. So he didn't call for any violence. Exactly. And if you look at, like, while it obviously, you know, I think it was, you know, like the level of disruption was high. And I don't. I don't applaud any kind of damage to public property, of course, but it's. The media tries to characterize January 6th as some sort of violent insurrection, which is simply not the case. I mean, that is false. So, you know, I would take. I think, probably what I think is the reasonable middle ground, which is, I disagree with the level of protest, but it was in no way a violent insurrection, you know, so that there's got to be a lot of guns for the. To be a violent insurrection. And there were a lot of strange things from. In terms of voting irregularities that are hard to explain. So what? It's. Yeah, I mean, there were things that are statistically unlikely, let me put it that way. And so it's not as though the January 6th protesters had. That their protests had no merit. They had some merit. I disagree with the. The magnitude of what they did. But it's not as though there were no issues. There were actually there were issues. And we have this weird situation in America where it is almost impossible to prove fraud, because if you've got no voter ID and mail in ballots, how do you prove fraud? And, you know, it does seem more than a little odd that we don't have voter id. And then you look at, say, states like California, which is super majority Democrat, they passed a law banning voter ID in any election whatsoever. Now, how is that supporting democracy? That's not supporting democracy. I mean, that's insane. Almost every country on earth has voter ID requirements, but we don't why. And why do the same people that demanded vaccine IDs for you to do anything are the same ones who say no ID for voting. Something doesn't add up. It doesn't add up. You know, so I actually think my opinion is that those who say Trump is a threat to democracy are themselves the threat to democracy. Make some noise. Yeah. Whoo. I'll tell you what, that was awesome. Conspiracy was Theory, and now it's the truth. I mean, honestly, at this point. At this point, we're running out of conspiracy theories because there's so many of them have come true. Right. That. That we need. We actually need. Can someone please come up with some new conspiracies? The government's here to help. Government? I mean, even the frogs might be real. You know, the frog situation might be. I don't know.
Elon Musk
You know, conspiracy, the government. We're here to help. Yeah, probably heard that. Right, Right. Well, Elon, God bless you. It's very nice to meet you. God bless you, too. My name is Andrew Mariski. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, native. Yeah, I'm a small business owner of a barber shop 10 minutes down the street. Right. Called Legacy Barbers. Love to cut your hair sometime, if you will. Thank you. So I wanted to ask you a question and also encourage you with these few words. Augustine, who was a theologian and a philosopher, said, you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. And Second Chronicles 7, verse 14 says, if my people who are called by my name should humble themselves, pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land. So I want to encourage you with that, brother. Yeah, those are great, great words. Great words. Amen. Amen. And, Elon, I'll tell you what. Been watching you now for a while, hearing the stuff you say, we need more men like you in this country that do that are not afraid to stand up to the media. Legacy. Yeah. They're not afraid to stand up against people who think we're toxic. Masculinity. We need more men. Yeah. You know, I've got a great counter argument for toxic masculinity, which is, if masculinity is so toxic, how come the kids that are messed up don't have dads? Riddle me that. Riddle me that and something that you said earlier and amen to that. Yeah. And I'm actually going to be a dad February 3rd. Congratulations. I'm having a baby. Thank you, Lord. But the tweet that you had not too long ago, it said, and no one is even trying to assassinate Biden or Kamala. Yeah. Because it's pointless. Nobody bother assassinating a puppet. Right? Yeah. You know, when are people gonna start seeing that our country is not? When they keep saying democracy. It's a constitutional republic. Would you please make sure, if you don't mind, to keep reminding people that we are a republic. We're free we're free because of Christ Jesus, and we're free because of the men and women who died and shed blood for this country. That's absolutely. Yes. Amen, brother. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I mean, a lot of people died to make this country what it is is today. A lot of people died. Absolutely. Amen. And, man, people take it for granted, you know, so. Yeah, well, America Pack is kind of the Anti Soros pack, You know, something's got to be done about it. So it's like, you know, I don't know what's up with that guy, but honestly, putting DAs into, like. It's like. It's like the Joker's in charge, you know, like, electing DAs that don't prosecute crime is insane. That's like, literally, like Batman, Dark Knight. I mean, like, you know, lock up the citizens and free the criminals. It's insane. It's happening. Yeah. I mean, like, what. This is total madness, so we need to stop that. Yeah. So make America great again. Yeah. Well, I think America is great, but we want to be greater, and we want to do awesome things. We want to do. And you want to. You want to look forward to the future and be inspired and excited about the future. You know, that's what makes life worth living. Another thing. Yeah. All right. Have you ever looked into the space sport of arm wrestling? Oh, yeah. Arm wrestling. I have looked at. Not in depth, but I have looked into it, and for a while there, I did, like, actually read up on it, and actually various techniques for how to win at arm wrestling, which is like, a lot of it is, you know, get your angles, get your whole body into it and get your angles so you can actually, like, if you know the techniques in arm wrestling and somebody doesn't, you can actually went against somebody much bigger. Yeah. Well, yeah. No, no. I mean, I would challenge Biden, but that would be ridiculous. You know, that'd be so unfair. So thank you. He can use two. What if he uses two hands? Yeah, that'd be fine. Make a. Make arm wrestling great again. Yeah. Make arm wrestling great again. Absolutely. God bless.
Elon Musk
God bless. All right.
Audience
Hi, Elan. My name is Molly. I just want to thank you for spending so much time in Pennsylvania. I think what you're doing is amazing, and it's making a real impact. So God bless you. And I think you're a national treasure.
Audience
My main concern is with the national debt, and I know you talked a lot about reducing the spending side, but I was wondering what kind of Trump policies and industries you think will help grow the revenue side. And along those lines, do you have any plans to bring more Tesla manufacturing
Elon Musk
back to the U.S. well, Tesla actually is a massive manufacturer in the U.S. in fact, the biggest factory that's been built in recent years is the Tesla factory in Texas. So that's. Yeah. And then there's another big factory in Nevada. So there's Giga Nevada and Giga Texas and maybe someday Giga Pennsylvania. So that, that, that would be, that would be super cool. I'm a huge believer in manufacturing. I love manufacturing. I like making things. I spent a lot of time in the factory walking the floor. I lived in the factory for a while, literally lived in the factory. It was kind of like, kind of like Vegas actually, because I didn't even see the outside, but the lights were always on. But we had some tough times in Tesla. It's really difficult to make any kind of manufacturing company work. And you know. Yeah, Tesla is actually also the biggest manufacturing employer in California still. But state is not super grateful. So. But, but yeah, I'm. So we do a ton of manufacturing in the US and we keep investing and increasing our manufacturing activity in the US and SpaceX also is a massive manufacturer. You know, SpaceX is the biggest manufacturer of rockets and satellites in the world. And. Yeah, so, and that's, that's, that's all in the U.S. so SpaceX manufacturing is all in the U.S. and, and Tesla has massive amounts of manufacturing in the US like giant factories. So I'm a big believer in manufacturing. So I mean, I do think reform of the tax code, it would make sense because it's extremely complicated and there are too many loopholes. You know, I'm often pitched on these loopholes. That's how I know they exist. I'm like, that sounds pretty shady. I don't think we should do that. Like, well, lots of other people are getting away with it. We're like, yeah, but I still don't think we should do it. Yeah. For what it's worth, I'm the, the largest individual taxpayer in history, So I paid $10 billion in tax. Over $10 billion in tax. You're welcome. Like, I sort of thought maybe the IRS would like, you know, send me like a little trophy or something. You know, like one of those like, doesn't have to be expensive. It could be like, you know, one of those like, like things you get for when kids win a karate competition, like little plastic gold trophy or something like that, or a cookie or something. But I didn't get anything I was like, you know, and. But I was happy to pay the taxes. I don't mind, you know. Yeah, it's a good week this week. Yeah. Stock market's wild. Wild. Sort of roller coaster, you know, I think Warren Buffett's got a good, Good. A lot of good sayings, actually. But one of his sayings, I believe is like, you know, having a publicly traded company is like having someone stand outside your house and yell house prices all day. And it's still the same house. And you're like, why is this person yelling house prices at me all day long? And that's what it's like being in a publicly traded company is this. They just yell stock prices at you all day long. And it's like, well, it's actually still pretty much the same company as yesterday. So it's kind of weird being in a publicly traded situation. But anyway, I think we should simplify the tax code, get rid of a lot of exceptions and loopholes and make it easy to fill out taxes. It shouldn't be this, like, extremely complicated thing. Yeah. But overall, I think if we have less federal spending, then there's less taxation. And so that. And we have to reduce federal spending. There's no way to make up for it other than reducing the federal spending. And as I mentioned earlier, like, a very important point that I think is important for people to understand is that all federal spending is taxation, because what they don't receive, what federal government doesn't receive in direct revenue, they make up for in inflation. They just print money. So all federal spending is taxation. Very important principle. Almost nobody. Very few people seem to even, like, you know, somebody who's like, spend their life in economics. I'll mention to them, hey, all spending, all federal spending is taxation. They're like, first they'll argue with me and they're like, then they will agree it is because it is either direct tax revenue or it is inflation. All federal spending is taxation. So we must reduce federal spending or we will go bankrupt as a country. All right.
Elon Musk
I'm Chad Wick from Westchester, Pennsylvania. I met you last week at. I met you last week at Harrisburg. And since then, I've been prouder than
Audience
ever to wear my MAGA hat around.
Elon Musk
You've really inspired me to wear it more and more. Right. And since then, I've had my car slashed with a key, which is fine.
Elon Musk
Trump got hit with a bullet in the air, and look at him. He's doing good. So, yeah, somebody chased me around with the Shopping cart as well. But yeah, that happens.
Elon Musk
That's part of Westchester Penns.
Elon Musk
I mean, at this point, it's like flying the rebel flag, man.
Elon Musk
It's an adventure. Yeah. I've had some people get mad at me. Yeah. Like big time. I do have a question this time, though. I actually, I met somebody on X. I do podcasting and I met somebody on X directly through the platform. I would call him a friend. His name is Derek and he has something called Spina Bifida. It is Spina Bifida month right now. So Spina Bifida Awareness Month. I wanted to put the awareness out there is that it's a spinal experiment with spinal kind of like issues. And he has never been able to walk. Really? Never?
Elon Musk
I guess not. According from what I learned, he's never. He hasn't been able to walk like his whole, his whole life. So my question is like, for the disabled community and for people like him, will things like, will things like neuralink help? And also what will the Trump administration be doing for people who are disabled to help them? Anything? Well, yeah, so I think, I think there actually are a lot of things that, like medical devices and drugs that could be approved that are sort of stuck in regulatory molasses. Like, they're just, you know, it's like trying to get anything new approved is like running in molasses with lead shoes. It's really slow. So, you know, a good friend of mine was telling me how his mom was diagnosed with brain cancer and the doctor said like, well, that's pretty much game over, you know. And then he talked to. But he's very enterprising guy, so he didn't take that for an answer. And he asked every smart person he knew, is there anything that could help cure brain cancer? It turns out there's this drug called Wellyrig that was in trials at Harvard, I believe, and it cured his mom's brain cancer. So I'm like, how many welly rigs are there out there? Maybe there's a whole bunch of them and devices and everything. And we should, you know, like I said earlier, it's like we need to expedite approval of drugs, make sure people, you know, that people are properly informed of the pros and the cons. And then there also needs to be some after approval follow up to say, like, was something approved that shouldn't have been approved and. Or whether it need to be additional warnings. It's pretty common. It's common Sense, I think. You know, just. But like when you're dealing with the government, like common sense doesn't make sense. Like, you know, common sense just bounces off the government like water off ducks back, you know, I mean, it's like arguing with the dmv. It's impossible. They put that COVID vaccine in quick though. They did put the COVID vaccine quick. Yeah. That was weird. And they made everyone take it, which is messed up. So I don't think people should be forced to take vaccine unless they against their will. Hi, Elon. My name is Alex Gamble from Lebanon County. I first want to thank you sincerely for what you're doing. I think you're an American patriot. I really do. I love America. I really do. I mean, listen, I love America. And like sometimes people say like, that's just jingoistic propaganda. I'm like, I don't care. I love jingoistic propaganda. It's awesome. You know, it's like God bless America. I friggin. It's amazing. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. With the recent news from Lancaster county discovering 2,500 potentially fraudulent voter registration for forms, what's your opinion on mail in ballots and if we should get rid of them in the future? I also, I also want. We should get rid of them in the future. I mean, like, mail in ballots are a strange anomaly that got popularized during COVID But, but really like you, you have an obvious recipe for fraud and an inability to prove fraud. If you've got no id, no voter id and you got mail in ballots, right? Like, you can't even put a. You can't even. Like, like, like, like many years ago, a friend of mine was telling me how his, his dad actually helped improve democracy in Mexico. And, and it was by organizing a whole bunch of citizens to just stand outside the. The polling stations or the voting stations with a counter just to count the number of people that went in. Because obviously if you have more votes than people, something's wrong. Yeah. And, and it turned out they had a lot more votes than people. They're like, oh, this is a little strange. So anyway, but that, that actually helped fix the situation in Mexico big time. But, but, but if you don't, if you've got mail in ballots, you can't count. Just like, you don't even know what's going on. I also wanted to ask you a favor. My. My son is named Elon. Really? We named him after you. Wow. Thanks. He's three. You're an inspiration. And I was hoping to get an autograph from you to give to him when he's older. Well, the further I can't say no to that. I mean, from one Elon to another, you know, actually, you know, I was actually. I was named after my American great grandfather, I guess. So I'm like kind of the opposite of Obama. I'm from Africa, named after an American. So. But yeah, John Elon Haldeman was my great grandfather, and that's named after his middle name. So I think he was like, from Minnesota, I believe. Yeah.
Audience
My name is Jennifer Lucas. As you can tell, I do not have a Pennsylvania accent, but I do live here. I'm voting legally, I promise.
Elon Musk
Sure. I believe.
Audience
I'm from southern West Virginia.
Audience
And honestly, I've had a lot of questions on my mind, from education to drug epidemic. It's hit really hard. But one thing that I would really like to ask you about right now is lobbyists. If I buy vote, I go to jail. They buy votes on the floor, on the voting floor in D.C. and that's okay, right?
Elon Musk
That is affecting our voice as American citizens. So what can we do to ban
Audience
lobbyists in D.C. so we can take our power back?
Elon Musk
Apac. Oh, America pack. Yeah, I mean, you know, so I was actually part of making a movie called thank youk for Smoking. I don't know if anyone's seen that movie, but it's. It's a movie about political corruption and about lobbyists and political corruption at. And, you know, it's worth watching. Thank you for Smoking. And, you know, that was. I'm actually the pilot in the movie in that plane. So it's a very small role. But that movie explores the corruption that exists in D.C. due to all the lobbying that takes place. And the legislation is primarily written by lobbyists, in fact. And then Congress basically rubber stamps what lobbyists write. I think we probably do need to take a look at what rules make sense because obviously the point of the elected legislators is to legislate in the interest of the people. And so if there's legislation happening, which is often the case, that is not in the interest of the people, something's wrong. So. And you do get these, like, regulatory capture situations where the, you know, the companies in an industry end up controlling the regulators and preventing new entrants from coming into a market, making it difficult, you know, for new companies to come in. Anyway, I wanted to make that movie for a reason, which is to highlight that there is a lot of corruption in D.C. and like to have less of it. At least. It's tough. And, you know, this is also why I think the big government machine is so against Trump, because he's not beholden to all of these interests, you know, so he's not captured, essentially. He's not a puppet. So the sort of. The big government machine is very worried about electing someone who's not a puppet. So, yeah, I mean, I certainly advocate for, you know, better rules that limit the power of companies to lobby in D.C. or at the state level, for that matter. Yeah, I mean, like, for Mars. Like, people sometimes ask me, like, well, what kind of system of governance do I think makes sense for Mars? I'm like, well, that's going to be up to the Martians, you know, but, but, but I would recommend direct democracy, not representative democracy, where the people vote directly. And, you know, in the past, before there was electro, before you had, like, the Internet and electronics, you had to have representative democracy because you couldn't. You couldn't. You had to. Just like with the legacy media, you had to collect people's opinion by mail or literally by voice or by letters written with a quill on, you know, and a scroll type of thing, you know, like, slow. So you had to have representative democracy. You couldn't have direct democracy. But my recommendation for Mars would be that the people vote directly for anything and that any given piece of legislation must be short enough to understand. So, like, if it's, you know, not. Not more than a thousand words, maybe 300, the longer the legislation is, the worse it gets. And. And we've got legislation that's longer than Lord of the Rings, and, like, nobody's read it, you know, and really quick,
Audience
I just wanted to say thank you for everything that you're doing. I see you and I see your heart, and I know that you love humanity, not just America. I do everything that you do. It shows you care for everyone deeply. Thank you for that.
Audience
I have a lot of ideas, and if you want to hear them sometime, we can sit down for dinner.
Elon Musk
Thank you. All right. Hello, Elon. My name is Stephen Marchisot. I live in Lancaster County. It's nice to meet you. You once said in a job interview that when asked, what is your biggest weakness? You said, honesty, which I find really interesting. And the guy said, well, that's not a weakness. And what I find fascinating is the way you stand up to anybody and speak your mind. And my question is, there's a cost to telling the truth. There's a cost of being honest. Yes. And you're not afraid to pay that price. Well, hopefully it's not like fatal, you know. Yeah. And I think that I'm wondering like where that came from in your life because, you know, you're an amazing inspiration with everything. Yeah, I can, I can totally tell you. So, like, it's, I mean, first of all, you know, like, I think I aspire to be honest, but I'm also sometimes wrong. So obviously, you know, can be right all the time. So. And I do believe in like, you know, one should stand to be corrected. And the reason I believe in sort of truth and honesty is because I'm like, I'm trying to understand the universe, I'm trying to understand reality, you know, trying to understand like, what's the meaning of life? Like, what are we here for? Like, what's, what's going on? And if you don't aspire to truth, if you're not like rigorous about truth and honesty, then you're obviously going to live in a deluded world. You won't understand. You won't understand the nature of reality. You won't understand. So I just, I'm just curious and I want to understand the nature of reality. So that requires rigorous adherence to the truth. Also add. Thank you. What I find fascinating too is like, you know, for you to stand up and speak the truth about what you feel about Trump. There's so many celebrities that the other side has and yeah, it's weird that there's so many celebrities. You know, I'm like, like, why are they. What's up with that? Yeah, exactly. You're, you're the only guy with a serious amount of influence that's able to really stand up for Trump. And I really think that I know people that are like on the fence that are going to Trump because of you. So I think, great, you are making a massive difference in this election. Like you single handedly and that's an amazing legacy amongst all the other things that you do. So thank you. Well, I'm trying, I'm trying my best to, you know, I want to, I'm trying to make as big a difference as possible. And yeah, I mean, I do think like we're at a, like I said, a fork in the road of destiny where, you know, like, it's, yeah, it's not clear to me that there will be elections after this if Trump is not elected. You know, so the, I mean, there's basically, in my opinion, there's massive voter importation to swing states that is happening right now. If you look at the actual numbers as reported by the Democrat administration, There are triple digit increases in the number of illegals in, in each swing state. It's 240% was the number I saw in Pennsylvania in three years. And like, that's, you know, if the margin of victory is like, was 80,000 votes last time, well, what happens if you bring in like 300,000 illegals who are beholden to the Democrat machine and get a whole bunch of handouts? And even though they may socially not be in agreement with the Democrats, their first order priority is bringing friends and family into the country, which will be supported by the Democrats, but not by the Republicans. So it's voter importation is what's going on. And it doesn't take much to have the swing states be a permanent deep blue. That's what happened in California. So like, like I love Reagan, but he did sign in 1986 an amnesty, sort of illegal alien amnesty that thereafter California, which had been red or a swing state, but primarily red, went blue and then deep blue. And now California passed a law banning voter ID in any election whatsoever, even in a town council. That's what they will do to the whole country. The playbook is obvious because we could just look at what they did to California. They're going to do the same thing in Pennsylvania, same thing the whole rest of the country, if they can. And Trump is the only chance to have that not be the case. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you, it's even, it's because people like it's going to be worse than California because the one thing that keeps California from being even more crazy than it currently is is that people can move to other states and still be in America. But what if you can't move to any other states? It's going to be way worse than California. So it's profound. What's your favorite baseball team? Yankees. Well, sorry, okay, listen, I like the name, okay. It's a great name. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Ah, what have I done? Hi, Elon, My name is David and I am founder of an e commerce company here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And I appreciate the one thing that you saying about the IRS being bullying the American citizens instead of enforcing our border. We're doing that. And I found one problem being a business owner is I have been the subject of recent harassment by the irs and I find that being a huge discouragement to entrepreneurship, which is the American backbone. Sure. And I wanted to know what you, what would be one of the number one things you would recommend to the Trump administration about encouraging entrepreneurship and getting young people Especially encouraged into starting small businesses to keep our economy, Economy flourishing and to keep creating wonderful things like you have done. Yeah, well, I mean, really, I think, you know, if we can just get the government off people's backs, then you can, you can get a tremendous amount done. And, you know, it's like just we're over regulating six ways of Sunday as you've experienced yourself. And then even when there's like a little bit of success, then the government comes along and takes the money. So it's crazy, you know, so just when. If the founders of the country could see like where we are now, they'd blow their mind, you know, like there was a revolt against the British. I think it was like a 2% tax on tea, like say a 3% tax on tea. They were like, no way. And now it's like, you know, 40%. I mean, it's just like there's new taxes every day and there's a lot of hidden taxes that you experience as a small business owner that people don't even realize exist. You know, you sort of come to realize that because the IRS comes after you, but there's a ton of taxes they try to sort of mask from the consumers. So we just need smaller government and allow people to produce useful goods and services for their fellow human beings. Yeah, it's straightforward. Hi, Elon, My name is Will King. It's nice to meet you. Welcome to Lancaster. Thank you. I'm a young mechanical engineer and excited to work on new problems. One of my dreams would be to work for one of your companies. So we'll see where that goes. But question I have is what are your thoughts on tariffs? And how do you see tariffs impacting consumer spending or increasing inflation? And what problems need to be solved for US production to reach a scale and efficiency that would match current outsourced production? Like, obviously, it's. It's no first principle. It's not a first principle. Principles problem. We can do it. But what needs to happen to. In order for that to. Well, what are your thoughts on the subject? So I think what you were, what you were touching on before, a lot of government regulation and taxes. Well, taxes, you know, I don't know where we need to go with that, but I think I love your philosophy of surges in employment and going hardcore. You know, I was reading your autobiography, the Other. Or biography. The other biography. Yeah. Yeah. To be clear, it's a pretty good biography, but it's not. It's not actually what I would have written. Right. But what really stuck to Me, I was reading about how you wanted to move the servers from Twitter up to. Is it in Oregon? Well, yeah, actually there was, yeah, the, there were three data centers but only two were needed. Right. And I was being told it would take like nine months to. Right. And you showed up with your guys and you were like, hey, let's just do this overnight like Christmas. So I think yeah, Christmas Eve. Yeah. Cutting, cutting down some of those regulations and all this crazy stuff that goes, that extends the timeline for a bunch of stuff would really, really help and that, that worth work ethic. I agree with your 80 hour work principle, work week principle and the hardcore. It's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. But I think the principle is really cool and I think we should bring that culture and that mindset down to the 40 hour workweek or the 50. I do 50, but you know, work life balance potentially. But I love where you're taking your companies and it's really cool to see. Well, thanks. Thank you. Yeah, go ahead. Hello Elon, nice to see you here tonight. So recently I was reading an article on Medium where a Italian researcher named Andrea Rossi was able to demonstrate a new technology that he invented that was able to extend the range of an electric vehicle. It was a technically a quadricycle, so a very low power electric vehicle by four times. And after the, the full test that it actually increased the battery life of the electric vehicle. And obviously, you know, we don't, it's only been demonstrated once. We don't know if this technology could be replicated. But if it was able to be replicated, would you be interested in implementing this kind of technology into your Tesla vehicles and even possibly the starship? Well, I wish such a thing were real, but I do not think that such thing is real. That there is. You know, every industry has a certain amount of bs, but the battery industry I think might is a candidate for industry with the most amount of bs. So it's just there's like electrochemistry is very difficult. In fact, one of the ways that I will test like the intelligence of an AI system is ask it battery electrochemistry questions and rocket questions and usually comes back with terrible answers. So it's extremely difficult to increase the range, but the range is already sufficient to fully electrify everything on earth. So you know, teslas have over 300 miles of range and some of them have like 400 miles of range. We could actually make it go further. It's just that that's like an unnecessary amount of battery for Most people, because the amount of range that you need in a battery is about the same amount of range that your bladder has, essentially. So, you know, if you start a trip at say 9am, around noon, you want to probably hit the restroom, take a break, you know, have a bite to eat and, you know, so you drive for three hours, maybe four hours, and then charge the car. As long as the car is charged by the time you come back from the bathroom and you know, had lunch or whatever, then long distance trips are no problem. We are already there at this point, so. Yeah, but there is no magical breakthrough. Would you also be willing, if other technologies are discovered over the next few years into the near future, would you also be willing that theoretically could revolutionize electrical vehicles, space travel, you know, exotic propulsion, exotic energy generation techniques? Are you interested in researching those and potentially funding them and contributing to this kind of research? I do think there is a lot of technology out there that is not really mainstream, that it has potential. Although it's in a very infantile stage. I think there is potential. I mean, not only. I mean, Both Tesla and SpaceX are desperately interested in anything that works. We're not like, barring the door, we're like, please, if you've got something that works, tell us about it. Unfortunately, it's rarely the case that it actually works is the issue. So, you know, for a while there, Tesla, I guess we maybe still do like, we're just. We'd rate any given, you know, proposed new technology out of 10, where 10 is incredible and you know, one is total, total nonsense and really nothing got above a 4. So it's, it's just very difficult to do. But if, and I would encourage anyone to say prove me wrong, please do that. I would like to be proven wrong. That would be awesome. Yeah, but just, just compete with Tesla. That sounds like a great. If, you know, if there's a. Some technology that has much greater range, I would strongly recommend they just kick our ass, you know? Yeah. Elon, do you believe that Jesus the Christ is a real person who was crucified and died and is risen and that God is Jesus? What do you mean by a real person? That he was alive back 2000 years ago and he was the guy who was crucified?
Elon Musk
Yeah, no, I think there's. Yeah, I do think that's, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you get into like these, you know, theocratical debates of the Trinity and. But I thought, you know, but yeah, yeah, I think it's real, so. Hi, Elon. That feels very weird to say, but. Hi, my name is Chris Michelson. I'm a Lancaster county resident. We're really happy to have you here. Thank you, everybody. Look, I, like many of us here, feel that the very construct, the constitution of our country is at stake during this election. I agree. I'm a firm believer that those who can should. And I just want to say thank you for being one of the very few powerful members outside of the construct who have the balls to stand up here every day and do what you're doing. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. All right, there's a macho man's here. Look. President Trump has announced you or has announced that he will appoint you as the head of the Efficiency Commission. Right, right. That's obviously a perfect spot for you given your historical success running lean and exceptionally profitable businesses. One of my big concerns that extends beyond the disarray of our financial constitution here is the technology attacks that have happened on our country. 2021, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. Yeah. 2021, Robinhood, 7 million users, data stolen, their money held for ransom. 2023, T Mobile goes down overnight. Airport attacks, airline attacks. Have you spoken to Trump at all regarding your expertise around cybersecurity? Are you going to have any involvement there? If not, do you know who is and do you trust the them? And I have one more question. Well, I definitely, I certainly don't have all the answers here and I don't want to tempt fate, but, like, nobody has successfully hacked SpaceX or Starlink. Every day there are thousands of attempts to hack Starlink and no one has succeeded. Again, I don't want to tempt fate here. So this is not a tempt. Not saying to hacker groups out there, please hack Starlink, like, please don't hack Starlink. But, but thus far there have been many attempts by individuals and state actors to hack into Starlink and none of them have been successful. So track record thus far is pretty good. No one has successfully hacked into. Yeah, so far, so good. You know, don't want to be complacent or anything. No one has hacked into the Tesla mothership, like the Tesla core database. Many people have tried to hack into the Tesla core database. Zero successes. Yeah, I can certainly say, like, now government computers are not super secure because it's the government, you know, so it's like, if you say, like, what is an easy thing to hack? I say, well, government computers are easy thing to hack. So it's not good. No, I agree. That's why I like, you know, I'm like, as a hardcore technology guy, I'm saying we should not have voting machines, we should not have computers because they're too subject to being hacked by. And it's like the subject to being hacked by. And the people protecting these machines don't understand technology, and they could easily be bamboozled. So even with the best of intentions, so. But it's really hard to bamboozle paper ballots in person with id, which is obviously how it should be. One more thing, just real quick. Yeah. We've talked about baseball a couple times tonight. My brother's handicap. Ryan, I love you. I'm sorry that you couldn't be here tonight. He's a White Sox fan, and he just wants to know if you would consider buying them and turning them into a reputable business. Thank you. But I'm a technology guy, so I'm just, you know, I got to pick my battles here. So I'm just. I try to make technologies that people find useful. Thank you, Elon.
Elon Musk
All right. Hi, Elon. My name is Vladimir. I'm an entrepreneur from Reading, Pennsylvania. I came all the way here to see you because I'm not sure if you're going to make it to Reading, Pennsylvania. I couldn't wait. Thank you so much for your contributions to the world. Thank you for Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX X. Everything that you're doing is incredible. And thank you for stepping up with your leadership to once again try to take our country back. Thank you. My question to you is regarding artificial intelligence. Probably our greatest invention, hopefully not our last invention. You were really on the. You were really advocating for basically regulating the advances that we're making on artificial intelligence. How long do you think it would be before we actually reach AGI or Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Superintelligence? And are you still up for regulating this amazing invention that we've summoned here? Yes. I mean, I do think there should be some regulatory oversight for AI. So, yeah, I mean, I kind of view regulators as kind of like the referees in a sports game. You know, if you. Whether it's baseball, basketball, anything, any given sport, all the teams want to have referees so that, you know, teams don't break the rules, and there's fair play. So I think there. There is sort of a right number of regulators for any given industry, but there shouldn't be. There shouldn't be too many or too few. Now there's basically no regulators in AI right now. So it's like having a game with no referees. That's. That's, you know, Subject to something bad happening. So my recommendation would be to have. Yeah, to have an AI regulatory agency at the federal level. It should be, you know, not heavy handed. It should be. But there shouldn't be nothing in contrast in other industries where there's excess regulation, because these regulatory agencies have just sort of grown over time to the point where there are too many referees on the field. I think the sports analogy makes a lot of sense. Like you want to have enough referees to have a fair game, but not so many referees that people can't throw a pass on the football field without hitting a ref. You know, that's the situation we got right now. It's like you're trying to run downfield. Bam. You just bump into refs everywhere. So that's that. You know, we gotta take some corrective action there. So thank you. All right. Elon Musk. It's a pleasure to meet you. This should be sponsored by Dr. Scholz. I don't know how your feet are doing it right now. I just want to say thank you for being here tonight. It's an honor to be here with you. I actually have been waiting for almost a decade to talk with you and ask you a few questions. All right, first one, I want to just break right into business. A friend of mine is building the world's brightest light in the world, powered completely by renewable and Tesla solar panels. And we want to know if you'll turn it on for us. It's been cleared.
Elon Musk
The FAA approved it. Will you turn it on for us? Potentially, Possibly. Okay, when you say brightest light, like, what do you mean? Brighter than the Luxor? It'll hit the International Space Station and you can illuminate it at night. Okay. Yes. Yeah. It can light up the whole Grand Canyon as well. That's what the engineers say. Okay. It's a hell of a light. Okay. It is Tesla solar panels, too, so. Okay, great. That sounds good. Secondly, we've heard a lot of prayers tonight. I just want to say a quick prayer for you and ask everybody to join me and just put your hands up and let's pray that God protects this man here. He's risking his life, his family and his future for people here in a country who he believes in. And we believe in you, Elon.
Elon Musk
Thank you for everything you're doing. And we ask God that he protects you and keeps you safe in your journey in protecting us in our country. Thank you. Okay, so my question, my real question is you've done a ton of things You've literally enabled mankind to live amongst the stars. Well, not yet, but we're almost, we're getting there.
Elon Musk
And I can, I want to nerd out with you all day on this. The NASA has been, you know, touted that the fuel of the stars is hydrogen. I know, I know, before you kill me, you're not a huge fan of hydrogen and I understand it has its flaws, but we do have some incredible successes. And my question is for you. If I were able to help you and provide you with the right people and resources, would you be down to basically involve yourself with us and help save our planet? Well, I do have 17 jobs and with the Department of Governed Efficiency, 18. So I have to be cautious about taking on additional responsibility because it's just physically impossible. But yeah, I mean, the biggest source of energy by far is the sun. So nothing even comes close to the sun in terms of energy output. The sun converts over 4 million tons of mass to energy per second, and it's been doing that for a very long time and will do that for many, many billions of years to come. So one of the ways you can think of the progress of any given civilization is on the Kardashev scale. And so just a simple way of thinking about it is you're Kardashev Level 1 if you've harnessed all the power of a planet. You're two if you've harnessed all the power of a solar system and you're three if you've harnessed the power of a galaxy. We're very far from three, it's safe to say, but even from one. So when you think in Kardashev terms, it becomes very obvious that the sun is overwhelmingly the source of energy and everything else is tiny potatoes. Tiny, tiny, tiny potatoes. But hey, tiny potatoes are fine for now, but, but the sun is overwhelmingly the big potato, the humongous potato. So it's really harnessing the power of the sun that will lead us to the stars. Hi, Elon, Dave from Lancaster County. First, thank you so much for all the insight this evening. Thought provoking conversation, two questions, one, with slightly more than nine days until the election, what would you Recommend As a 30 second pitch to convince somebody not to believe what they're seeing on cbs, NBC and abc? Oh, I've got a great solution for that, which is send them links to videos, information on the X platform. So if they say that, you know, Trump loves Nazis, for example, like, well, actually here's the whole speech where he categorically condemns Nazis and Yet the Democrats keep claiming that he loves Nazis, even though he specifically said he condemns them in the strongest possible terms, they still perpetuate the fine people hoax. You know, it's pretty insane. So for any given thing that somebody says, well, Trump is this or that, just send them the actual speech. That's the antidote. Send them what he actually said. Thank you. And then the second part, X platform, actually has that. So, you know, that's the best way. Hey, Elon. John Scott, your old classmate from UPENN says hi. Okay, cool. Thanks for a great earnings call on Wednesday. Welcome. My name is Rafael Aziz. I'm a Coptic Orthodox Christian immigrant from Alexandria, Egypt. I have lived through religious persecution before and I believe that the liberal and the woke movement is a religious persecution. Today it is anti Christian and quite honestly, anti religion. You have posted on X that unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish. My question to you, Elon Musk, is very simple. Will you stand with the Coptic Christian community, our brothers and sisters, the Catholic and Christians, and the Protestant evangelicals against the liberal movement that is trying to destroy Christianity and religion in America? Yeah, I mean, I'm against the woke. Religion is fundamentally an extreme extinctionist belief system. It's an extinctionist belief system. And I think we want to be expansionists. We want to expand to the stars. We want to grow as a civilization. We don't want to go extinct. And so, yeah, I absolutely support the Coptic Christians and like, I mean, really, anyone who's like, expansionist, who believes in a future that is better than the past, in a future where we grow, I massively support that. So. All right. Hi, Elon, I'm Jeremy and I'm from Earth, more specifically Bowmansville. But my question is, address one astronomical unit. Can you give some insight into your decision, decision making process and worldview? I mean, I have a lot of respect for what you've been able to accomplish so far and you have a huge vision for what you want to accomplish. So yet. And in that way, there's a crossover between the areas that you're a subject expert in and politics. So if you have some insight into how you make decisions in your worldview, then that enables us all to trust you across a larger amount of issues. Sure. Well, you know, I'm a big believer in physics, you know, which is like, basically, if you like, I mean, I sort of say like, you know, everything else is a recommendation, pretty much. But physics is the law. Like, if you break physics, you're Gonna, it's not gonna. The rocket will explode and the car will not work. So you have to adhere to physics in order to make cars that work and to make rocks that work in order to make space Internet that works. Because if you're wrong, then reality is a very harsh judge. Reality is merciless. If you make a device that doesn't work, that violates physics, it simply doesn't work. And then you'll think, rocket blows up and the satellites don't work and the cars break. So you either, if you make technology, you either have a rigorous. You have to. In order to make technology work, you must have extremely rigorous pursuit of the truth because otherwise reality will bite you in the ass big time. Yeah. So. All right. Hi, Elon, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. My name is Justin Henson, also Lancaster county native. My generation is inheriting a housing shortage and we're statistically less likely to take blue collar jobs. Obviously declining birth rates been discussed. There's not going to be as many people to even fill blue collar jobs. What do you think the solution is to the current housing crisis that we're having in this country in terms of pricing? It seems like my generation is getting priced out of homes, but also balancing the equity that people who currently own their homes have and obviously not wanting to destroy that as well. What do you see there to be a solution to that problem? Well, I mean, the risk of being repetitive, I think regulation is strangling progress. There's so many regulations, you can't even like modify your kitchen or, you know, add a, add something to your house without getting a zillion permits. So if we get, if we reduce regulation, you reduce the cost of new houses. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, you know, if, I know there's like many small business owners and builders in this audience and, and who are listening and anyone who has tried to build things, whether it's, you know, build a house or do anything, build a business, you realize just how much of a government burden there is. It's massive. And there's a state burden as well as a federal burden. But we can at least do something about the federal burden. And then, you know, that's, you know, at least we don't have to have like 400 and however many agencies there are. This is so crazy. You know, like, I'd like to know if this is there. I bet there's not a single member of Congress that can name 200 agencies. I'd be surprised. So how many agencies do we need 99? That sounds like a lot. That sounds plenty to cover the bases. How many bases do we need to cover anyway? It was 99 pesos. Sounds like a lot. So anyway, I think we could just get the government over people's backs would be a big improvement in quality of life and cost of housing and everything else. Yes. Elon, what's going on? Big dog? Hey, how's it going? It's a pleasure to meet you. My name is Nathan. I'm from Columbia. Anyways, so I was gonna ask, how does it feel to be the richest man in the world? And also, can I get a picture with you real quick? Well, we're on TV right now, so I think. I think actually we're both live streaming right now. I think probably to millions of people, actually. So. Yeah, so I think millions of people will actually see us. We're now on screen for millions of people. In terms of. How does it feel? I mean, it's kind of a strange thing because I guess, like, I'm still very much like a technologist who, like, you know, I just work a lot, you know, and then my recreational activity is hanging out with friends and family and playing video games. Which is. Yeah, exactly. I play video games. Diablo or other video games. So, you know, it's like I don't. I don't have like any yachts or holiday homes or anything. So I guess if I was to maybe live a more hedonistic life and, you know, had like yachts and islands or something like that, then it would make more. I don't know, maybe that would be more. I don't know. But that's not my idea of fun though, because I like, I'm like, you know, I'm sitting. If I go and sit on the beach, then I'm like, this is boring now. What am I supposed to do now? You know? So I just like building things and I like being productive and doing useful things and making cool products and that's it pretty much. I mean, I also do like hanging out with friends and family and stuff. But, you know, I'm not like saying how can I sort of build a bigger yacht or anything like that. I don't have a boat or anything like that. So of course I still love you. Yeah, of course I still love it. Yeah, you're right. I do have boats. What are you talking for? Yes, There's a boat. SpaceX has these ships that are for the rocket lands on, you know. So I guess technically I do own boats. Yeah, I stand corrected. Thank you. Yeah, maybe I should, like, go sort of sailing around in one of them or something. Yeah. All right. Hi, Elon. My name is Bruce. I'm a voter here in Pennsylvania, and it's really, it is an honor to meet you. You've been a very strong inspiration for me and my family and all my friends. So God bless you for that. Thank you. Have a question right now about Latin America. You've obviously met President Naibu Kaleb, El Salvador, who has done an incredible job. He really has. He's a very smart guy. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Like, it's like, you know, we had a long conversation about many subjects, I think. Yeah, he's really sharp guy. Absolutely. So, following on that, what would you advocate for in a second Trump administration? To incentivize states like Mexico, Ecuador, and others into strengthening their policies on policing and economic opportunities to stem the tide of illegal migration to the US Southern border? Thank you. Yeah, well, I mean, if there's prosperity in those countries, then I think there would obviously be less of a forcing function for legal migration. It's pretty tough. And there's some lessons to be learned there. Like, when Chavez came to power in Venezuela, one of the first things he did was take the guns away from people. So he basically banned private gun ownership under the guise of safety. And then Maduro, when he had the election recently, he lost by a landslide and just ignored the election. And people protested and they got shot. They couldn't defend themselves. That's why you need the Second Amendment. It's a critical thing. So. I think it's worth looking at US Policies and saying which of these policies are actually helping other countries, and we send a lot of money to various countries. But I'm like, does it do any good? I don't know. I think we should just do a thorough review of, like, you know, do our actions actually help these countries, and why are we sending them our money again? And do the American people, like, we're sending people's tax money to other countries? Does it actually make sense? Like, are we actually. Is it doing good? Can it be defended to the American public or not? And if it can't, then I think we should probably stop sending money or send less.