Samson International Smart Mobility Summit (Tel Aviv) May 18, 2026 Remote video appearance at the Samson International Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv: Full Self-Driving and robotaxis, Optimus, Starship, Neuralink, and praise for Israeli innovation.
Remote video appearance at the Samson International Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv: Full Self-Driving and robotaxis, Optimus, Starship, Neuralink, and praise for Israeli innovation.
Transcript Full transcript on whatsuptesla.com → When we talk about vision and deployment, few people in history have embodied those words. Like our next guest. He didn't just dream of a world without fossil fuels. He built the company that made electric vehicles the global standard. He didn't just look at the stars, he's building the highway to get us there. As the co founder and CEO of Tesla and a man whose impact spans from the ground to the orbit, he continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in autonomy, AI and sustainable energy. When we reached out to him about the Samsung Smart Mobility Summit, he was clear he wanted to be part of the conversation here in Israel. While we couldn't step away from while he couldn't step away from the launchpad today, he's joining us now live via video conference. Please turn your eyes to the screens and give a massive welcome to to Mr. Elon Musk.
Hi, Elon. My name is Daniela Galiot and we're absolutely thrilled to have you joining us here Today at the 9th International Samsung Smart Mobility Summit in Israel, a country that shares your spirit of relentless innovation.
Thank you for having me and I would be there in person, but this is IPO, you know, we've got to get the IPO SpaceX IPO going pretty soon, I think so. But I look forward to visiting Israel again, so I'm happy to, you know, ask any questions you may have or.
I've got a few questions lined up
for you, whatever would be interesting. Yeah, perfect.
So I'll start with the first one. Tesla has spent years developing the vision and technology for smart mobility. Now that you're moving from testing to actual deployment, what is the biggest challenge in scaling this technology to millions of users around the world?
So in terms of having self driving be ubiquitous, I think we're making steady progress. The Tesla full self driving software, which is really just AI and cameras, we don't use radars or LIDAR or anything like that. It's really trying to drive the car in the same way that a human drives the car, which is human drives the car primarily with vision and with a biological neural net, that we take the same approach with our vehicles, which is a digital neural net and cameras, and, and I expect this approach to ultimately be at least an order of magnitude safer than humans driving. So I'm not sure how, I'm not sure if we have approval for this in Israel. I think we may have, or we'll get it soon, hopefully, and you'll be able to experience it for yourself. But it is quite magical because the car feels like it is sentient. It actually feels like it's alive. And you can actually, as we improve the software, you can feel the sentience growing in the car. It feels alive. And I think we already have some vehicles operating with no people inside and no safety monitors in three cities in Texas and probably will be widespread in the US by the end of this year and hopefully in Israel too.
Thank you. We look forward to that.
The world's going to have a lot of robots in the future and what Tesla makes is effectively four wheeled robots right now. And in the future we'll also be having humanoid robots. You're seeing a lot of startups with humanoid robots and my prediction is that there'll be far more robots, like intelligent robots in the world than there will be people. And, and I think this is most likely to be a good thing. You know, we always want to be a little paranoid or certainly not complacent about the safety of robots, but I think it will usher in an age of not universal basic income, but universal high income.
Right, thank you. I think we have one of your robots out here in the exhibition, so that's also a lot of fun for everybody here. Go and take a look.
Exactly. When you think about, let's say, the most exciting development or breakthrough that you're working on right now, what do you think would be the one that people aren't talking about enough?
Well, I guess people are mostly aware of the rockets that SpaceX does. There's the Starship rocket which we are now in version three of, will I think achieve full and rapid reusability. This is the fundamental breakthrough necessary to make life multi planetary, to extend consciousness beyond Earth and have self sustaining cities, self growing cities on the moon, Mars and elsewhere in the solar system. So this is really quite a profound breakthrough and we might succeed in doing that this year. The critical factor being full and rapid reuse of all parts of the rocket. That's a much bigger deal than people would realize. When that technology is developed, that'll be a fork in the road of human history where we can become a space bearing civilization, multi planet species. And I think that's an incredibly exciting thing. Perhaps to some degree there's also people, not that many people are aware of neuralink, which is creating a cybernetic interface to AI from your brain. And it has enabled people who have completely lost their brain body connection to speak again and to use their computer and their phone. And we believe it will enable people to walk again because you can, you can take the signals from the brain, from the motor cortex. And if somebody has, say, a severe spinal injury, you can transmit those signals to a second neural implant and reanimate the body so that people can use their limbs. And we think at some point live a normal life by effectively bridging the signals from the brain to past the point in the spine where the damage has occurred. These are pretty wild things that are possible. And then later this year we expect to do our first implant for what we call blindsight, where even if somebody has lost both eyes or lost the optic nerve, or perhaps has not even been able to see, has never seen, even if they were blind at birth, it will give them initially limited vision, but I think over time, very precise vision, perhaps a superhuman vision. So, you know, restoring control of people who are tetraplegics and restoring sight I think are pretty, pretty big deals, you know, those sort of what I might call like sort of Jesus level sort of technologies, you know. Miracles.
Miracles, yes, exactly. I mean, miracles of science, you know.
Great, thank you. I have another question about the automotive world. If I bring it back to smart mobility. When you look past the immediate rollouts of fsd, which you mentioned, and the cyber cab, what does the ultimate end game for smart mobility look like in 10 or 20 years from now? I mean, what is the grand vision that still keeps you up at night when we talk about mobility?
Well, at this point, the path to cars driving an order of magnitude safer than humans is very clear. I think it's not really a question mark. So I'm not sure this one keeps me up at night because I see the path is just so obviously there. And I think you say five years from now or certainly 10 years from now. My guess is if say like 10 years from now, probably 90% of all distance driven will be driven by the AI in a self driving car. So overwhelmingly, it'll be quite a niche thing in 10 years to actually be driving your own car because the car will drive you. I think there will also be humanoid robots that are pretty much everywhere. And I think it'll be pretty cool, I mean, because like, who wouldn't want their own personal CE3PO R2D2? But even better than that, and I think everyone's going to want one, maybe two.
Well, yeah, hopefully not, you know, but we do need to, we should always be concerned about such a thing because yeah, Terminator is one of the possible outcomes. I think it's an unlikely one, but it's not impossible. And so we should always be careful to make sure the robots are safe. But the, this is why I actually think we are headed to a future of amazing abundance. And because you can think of the output of the economy as productivity per capita times the population. And if the robots are extremely productive and you have a lot of them, you're effectively going to have an economy that will be maybe 10 or even 100 times bigger than what it is today. And that's why I think it's going to be a future of universal high income. Pretty much anyone can have whatever they want. I mean, there are lots of questions of meaning. So how do we derive meaning in a world where AI and robots can do anything better than we can do? Because that is probably where we're headed. But I think people will still find ways to have, have eating. And sometimes I wonder also, it's like, what is the future? I always like asking this question, what is the future that you want? What do you think the future is? What's the best future you can possibly imagine? And a lot of people are often they're like a little surprised by that question because I was like, well, let's say there was, you know, let's say, you know, you're praying to God and you ask for this for a given future, what future do you want God to give you? And probably a future where there's amazing abundance for all, where everybody has incredible medical care and we have this, in fact we're saying anything can be cured. Where people, no one is hungry and people are free to do what they would like. I think that's probably the best future.
And peace. Peace and love.
Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, always worry about like, if you wish for something, does it actually become some dystopian version of that? You know, you sort of. But certainly love. I mean, I think we want a future with love. That seems like a no brainer. Peace is an interesting one because, you know, sometimes the price for complete peace may be too high because the complete peace may require too much suppression of the people. So perhaps there is peace to some degree, but not completely. Ideally there's not like large scale war, of course, but you have to think about these questions kind of deeply. Do you want a world where there's no conflict? But how do you achieve a world of no conflict at all without some form of suppression? So my guess is probably people would want a future with some conflict. Not total peace, but nothing. Not a serious war perhaps. But these are interesting philosophical questions. What future would you like?
Totally. I'm going to bring you back to us to Israel here just for a second. Do you have a message to the Israeli innovators hearing the crowd?
Well, I have to say, you know, I'm a huge admirer of the innovation coming out of Israel, honestly. I think objectively true that Israel punches far above its weight for population. I think probably number one, honestly, in the world in terms of, you know, so, you know, my head is, my head is, my hat is off to Israel for just how much incredible innovation. I say innovation per capita, Israel must be number one by far in the world.
Thank you. Before you go, I would like to invite Israel's Minister of Transport and Road Safety, Brigadier General Miri Regev, to join our conversation. Minister Regev has been a driving force behind Israel's massive investment in transportation infrastructure and safety, while making sure that innovation is front and center at the core of Israel's transport policy. Please welcome Minister Regev to the stage. Thanks, Daniela. Shalom Lekulam. Thanks. Ceylon, you are great. We love you. Go to sleep. I see that you are tired. Thank you for joining us.
It's like 2:30 in the morning here in Austin, Texas, but it was a. Thank you for having me and yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you, Delon. Thank you.