Thread by @petergyang

Live-tweeting @elonmusk's appearance in @GoodTimeShowCH's Clubhouse room.

Starting now 🚀👇

Elon: Can you let in Vlad from Robinhood? 🤯

When are we going to get to Mars?

Elon: We have a decent shot of doing that in about 5 years. Earth and Mars sync up every 26 months...I figure 5 1/2 years.

How do we get to Mars?

Elon: To get to Mars you need a:
1. Fully and rapidly reusable orbital rocket
2. Orbital refueling that uses high-efficiency low-cost propellant

Why is multi-planetary life important to you?

Elon: When I was a kid I got quite depressed thinking about the meaning of life, but reading Hitchhock's Guide made me realize that the universe is the answer but what matters is what questions we ask.

Elon: I wouldn't be surprised if there are a whole bunch of dead one planet civilizations that prospered but gradually collapsed.

Elon: For the first time in the 4 1/2 billion year history of Earth it's possible to make life multi-planetary. And this window can be open for a long time or a short time. We should take advantage of this brief window of opening.

When we get to Mars, how will the whole thing work?

Elon: The important part is we get people there and we have the equipment necessary to establish a self-sustaining city.

Elon: The key question is can we get Mars into a self-sustaining state before World War 3 happens on Earth?

Elon: When we start on Mars, it'll be very dangerous hard work on the frontier. But it'll also be fun and a great adventure.

We gotta build the propellant plant, solar power, food production, etc.

Elon: I've seen nothing to indicate that there is any alien civilization whatsoever.

How do you think we should think about aliens?

Elon: I've seen no scientific evidence, that doesn't mean that there aren't aliens. But people that claim to see sightings of aliens, the resolution of the picture must be at least 7/11 ATM good. At least iPhone 6 level.

What do you mean by who controls the memes controls the universe?

Elon: It's a play on words from Dune - who controls the spice controls the universe.

Elon: A picture says a thousand words and maybe a meme says 10,000. It's a complex picture with a bunch of meaning in it. Memes can be very insightful, throughout history symbolism, in general, has affected people.

How do you get so good at memes?

Elon: I was on Twitter when there was <10,000 users, people were just tweeting their lattes. Then I deleted my Twitter account. My early tweets were pretty racy. Most people think I went crazy on Twitter, but no I started crazy on Twitter.

What are the new memes that you're following?

Elon: I have some pretty kick-ass meme dealers.

What is Neuralink?

Elon: I was thinking - even if a benign AI scenario, how do we go along for the ride? If we can couple collective human will to artificial intelligence that'll be a better outcome.

Elon: People are already a cyborg. You have your limbic system (desires) and your cortex (long-term planning). There's a tertiary layer in the form of your phones and applications.

Elon: But the bandwidth between your brain and your tertiary layer is very slow. At some point, computers talking to you will be like talking to a tree.

Elon: With Neuralink, we can think about more interesting things as opposed to having to take complex thought structures and compressing those into words.

Elon: In the short term, the idea is just to address brain injuries. The first thing we're going after is a wireless chip for a quadriplegic to control any device just by thinking.

It's sort of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go to the brain.

Elon: We already have a monkey who can play video games with his mind. He looks perfectly happy except he has a slight dark mohawk.

When the USDA investigated our monkey facilities, she said it was the nicest monkey facility she's ever seen.

What's the best way to think about educating a 5-year-old?

Elon: My kids were mostly educated by YouTube and Reddit. Generally, with education, you want to make it as interesting and exciting as possible.

Elon: One of the things that's fundamental is to explain why things are relevant. Start with a problem to establish relevance and talk about what tools you need to solve this problem.

Why doesn't the world have more Elon Musks?

Elon: There were long sections in my life that have been very painful and difficult, I'm not sure if everyone wants to do that.

Elon: When people ask me what encouraging words do you have for entrepreneurs who are doing a startup?

My response is if you need encouraging words, don't do a startup.

What do you think of BTC and crypto?

Elon: I got to watch what I say because some things can move the market. I do think Bitcoin is a good thing. Bitcoin is on the verge of getting broad acceptance by conventional finance people.

Elon: Dogecoin was made as a joke to make fun of crypto. But the most entertaining/ironic outcome is often the most likely. Arguably the most entertaining outcome is dogecoin becomes the currency of the future.

Where do you see Tesla over the next few years?

Elon: We have to make a lot of cards and make them more affordable. We want to make 20M cars a year. There are 2B active cards and trucks in the fleet, so we need to change 1% of the fleet to move the needle.

Elon: Once you have autonomy you massively increase the utility of any car. A typical car is driven 12 hours a week, there are 168 hours in a 7 day week. Cars that are autonomous could do 60 hours of usage instead of 12.

Why are you not a fan of LIDAR?

Elon: Sometimes I'm just talking smack. I'm not against LIDAR, we developed LIDAR for docking with the space station. However, for driving on real-world roads, you have to solve vision - understanding objects and making sense of those objects.

Elon: People have two eyes but really more like one eye. Effectively, people have one camera on a slow gimble and there's all sort of things that can go wrong. There's no question that neural net training with cameras is better.

What does a typical workday in the life of Elon look like?

Elon: I wake up to see if there are any emergencies on text or email. A ton of what I deal with is chores. I do enjoy the in-person meetings more than email. Anything is better than email frankly.

Elon: It's really hard to context switch between SpaceX and Tesla and Neuralink and Boring Company and personal stuff and of course, memes.

What does your calendar look like?

Elon: Generally, it's back to back meetings and it's insane. I was thinking how can I keep this up because I don't want my brain to explode. I was thinking maybe I should take a week off or something and clear my mind.

Elon: If I'm sleeping on the factory floor, they see me and they think "If CEO is willing to take that level of pain..." I mostly sleep on the floor outside of the conf room so they can see I'm there. I can't expect people to go all out if I'm not doing the same thing.

If you started another company what would you start?

Elon: I think there are tremendous opportunities in tunneling. Tunnels can make it easier to travel from one place to another in a city or long distance.

Elon: Then there are synthetic viruses. What's going on is the digitization of medicine. You can create an RNA/DNA sequence like a computer program and literally do anything. Your cells are like biological computers that take punch cards.

What would you do to get COVID vaccines out?

Elon: Worry about the first dose and first come first serve and don't worry about accidentally giving it to someone who doesn't deserve it.

There is going to be an avalanche of vaccines coming.

Elon to @pmarca: I tried to get a job at Netscape by the way. You were basically the only internet company. I sent my resume and didn't get any feedback then I tried hanging out in the lobby but was too shy to speak to anyone. And I thought what a charlatan.

What are you watching on TV and reading?

Elon: I just watched The Last Kingdom which is great. Cobra Kai is such a sick burn.

What do you think about @ExpanseOnPrime?

Elon: There are some things that didn't make any scientific sense, but I should keep watching it.

Elon: Watch @mythic_quest

Any final thoughts?

Elon: Do you want to hear the real story from Vlad about what happened with Gamestop? Let him in this room.

*Vlad joins the room*

Elon: Vlad the stock impaler!

Elon: Spill the beans man, why can't people buy Gamestop shares.

Vlad: Ok let me start by giving some background.

Elon: Yeah we know, just come on...

Vlad: On Wednesday, we had unprecedented volume on the system. Memes stock were going viral on social media. There was a lot of net buy activity on Robinhood.

Vlad: At 3:30 AM PST on Thursday, we received a file from the NSCC. As a clearing broker, we have to put up money to the NSCC based on different factors.

Vlad: The request was for around $3B.

Elon: Why was that so high?

Vlad: To give context, Robinhood has raised $2B in total venture capital up until now.

Vlad: Basically, there's a component called the VAR (value at risk) which is not publicly shared. There's also a special component which is discretionary.

Elon: Discretionary means it's just their opinion?

Elon: What everyone wants to know is did something shady go on here?

*By the way, it's amazing Elon is now the interviewer lol*

Elon: Is anyone holding you hostage right now? Blink twice.

Vlad: Basically there was another call with NSCC and we lowered to ~$1B. We proposed several measures and they came back and said deposit is $700M.

Vlad: We knew this was a bad outcome for customers. Robinhood stands for democratizing access, so that's been very challenging. But we had no choice, we had to conform to regulatory requirements.

Vlad: People ask if you restrict buying why didn't you restrict selling? Well, people are going to be much more pissed off if they're holding stock and they can't sell it.

Elon: Did you sell your clients down the river or did you have no choice? If you had no choice who are the parties responsible?

Vlad: 24 hours later our team raised over a billion in capital so when we do open tomorrow morning we'll be able to relax the limits.

Elon: Will there be any limits?

Vlad: There will always be some limits. Hopefully, they won't impact 99% of customers.

Vlad: Robinhood is a participant in the financial system so we have to work with all these parties. The financial system that lets customers trade shares is a complex web of multiple parties.

Elon: To what degree, are you beholden to Citadel?

Vlad: There's a rumor that Citadel pressured us to do this and that's just false. This was a clearing house decision and it's just based on the capital requirements.

Elon: Alright...ok...I guess we'll see what happens with future actions. 😆

Ok, we've wrapped up. This was pretty incredible - especially the surprise Elon grilling of Vlad at the end.

Amazing work @sriramk and @aarthir! Hope you all enjoyed these tweets.