Davos 2026: Conversation with Elon Musk

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's biggest challenges. In today's special episode, recorded at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, talks to Larry Fink, the Forum's interim co-chair and Black Rock's president and CEO. I'll let them dig in.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum So good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see everybody here. It's been an amazing week here in Davos. Hopefully everybody saw that we are having conversations here. Hopefully everybody agrees. There are some conversations that we may disagree. There's many conversations we may have agreed. But through those conversations, and I think today's result with a peace agreement earlier today. The World Economic Forum is here to have those conversations, to have understandings, and also resolution. So it's an important component of who we and what we are. And I'm thrilled to have Elon Musk here. He came all the way from California to be here to see all of you. So thank you, Elon.

Elon Musk, Tesla You're most welcome. I mean, I heard about the formation of the Peace Summit. And I was like, is that P-I-E-C? You know, a little piece of Greenland, a little piece Venezuela.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum We got one. All we want is peace. As I said, I'm a pretty proud CEO of BlackRock since we went public. The compounding return of Blackrock to our shareholders was 21%. Since Elon took Tesla public, his compounded return is 43%. This is just another advertisement for everybody, especially for Europeans. This is why more citizens should be investing with growth, investing with their countries. Imagine if a lot of pension funds invested with Elon when Tesla went public, and how much we return with all the pension funds that invested side by side with Elon and the growth. So. A spectacular return, there's very few companies, well I don't think there's any other company as large as Tesla today that has that compounded return, so congratulations.

Elon Musk, Tesla That's a good measurement. Well, we have an incredible team at Tesla, and that's the reason.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum So I want to get into the dirt, the meaningful component about technology, the possibilities. I want talk about AI and robotics, energy, space, and the progress ultimately coming down to engineering, engineering discipline, scale, execution. And few people, if not anyone, has the experience and the fortitude to confront these issues head on. Not just the ideas but the execution across so many different technologies, Elon, and that's why I thought it was important for us to have this dialog here in Davos. So you're presently building on AI, on robotics, on space, on energy, all at the same time. When you look across those efforts, what do they have in common from an engineering standpoint?

Elon Musk, Tesla Well, they're all very difficult technology challenges, but the overall goal of my companies is to maximize the future of civilization, like basically maximize the probability that civilization has a great future, and to expand consciousness beyond Earth. So if you take SpaceX, for example, that SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where we can extend. Life and consciousness beyond Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, eventually to other star systems. And I think we should always view consciousness, life as we know it, as precarious and delicate. Because to the best of our knowledge, we don't know of life anywhere else. You know, I'm often asked, are there aliens among us? And I'll say that I am one, but. Or you're from the future? They don't believe me. OK. So I think if anyone would know if there are aliens among us, it would be me. And we have 9,000 satellites up there. And not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship. So I'm like, I don't know. Bottom line is, I think we need to assume. Life and consciousness is extremely rare, and it might only be us. And if that's the case, then we need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness is not extinguished, because the way I view it is, the image in my mind of a tiny candle in a vast darkness, tiny candle of consciousness, that could easily go out. And that's why it's important to make life multi-planetary, such that if there is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues. That's the purpose of SpaceX. Tesla is obviously about sustainable technology and... And also, at this point, we've sort of added to our mission sustainable abundance. So with robotics and AI. This is really the path to abundance for all. If you say, people often talk about solving global poverty, or essentially, how do we give everyone a very high standard of living? I think the only way to do this is AI and robotics, which doesn't mean that it is without its issues. I mean, we need to be very careful with AI. We need to be very careful with robotics. We don't want to find ourselves in a James Cameron movie. You know, Terminator. He's great movies, I love his movies. But we don't want to be in Terminator, obviously. But if you have ubiquitous AI that is essentially free or close to it, and ubiquitous robotics, then you will have an explosion in the global economy, an expansion of the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum Neelan, can that expansion be broad or is it narrow? And how can that be created? How can it broaden the global economy?

Elon Musk, Tesla Yeah, it's. I mean, a way to think of it is that if you have a large number of humanoid robots, the economic output is the average productivity per robot times the number of robots. And actually, my prediction is, in the benign scenario of the future, that we will actually make so many robots in AI that they will actually saturate all human. Meaning you won't be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point. Like there will be such an abundance of goods and services because my prediction is that there'll be more robots than people.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum But how do you then have human purpose?

Elon Musk, Tesla Yeah, I mean, you know, nothing's perfect, but I mean it is a necessary, like you can't have both. You can't have work that has to be done and amazing abundance for all. Because if it's work that has to be done, and only some people can do it, then you can't have a bund as a whole. And it's narrow. It's narrow, exactly. But if you have billions of humanoid robots, and I think there will be, I think everyone on Earth is going to have one and going to want one. Because who wouldn't want a robot to, assuming it's very safe, watch over your kids, take care of your pets? If you have elderly parents, a lot of friends might have elderly parent, so it's very difficult to take care them. Yeah, it's expensive and they just aren't enough young people to take care of the old people. So if you had a robot that could take care of and protect an elderly parent, I think that would be great. That would be an amazing thing to have. And I think we will have those things. So overall, I'm very optimistic about the future. I think we're headed for a future of. Amazing abundance, which is very cool, and definitely we are in the most interesting time in history. I think there's a more interesting time in history.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum Can we, can you and I reverse aging in this new history or are we going to see it?

Elon Musk, Tesla You know, I haven't put much time into the aging stuff. I do think it is a very solvable problem. Like, you can do it. I think when we figure out what causes aging, I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious. It's not a subtle thing. The reason I say it's not subtle thing is because all the cells in your body, you know, with some pretty much age at the same rate. I've never seen someone with an old... Left arm and a young right arm ever in my life. So why is that? That means that there must be a clock, a synchronizing clock, that is synchronizing across 35 trillion cells in your body. And uh... There is some benefit to death, by the way. There's a reason why we don't actually have a longer lifespan. Because if people do live forever or for a very long time, I think there's some risk of an ossification of society, of things just getting kind of locked in place. And, you know, it just may become... Stultifying, just lack vibrancy. But that said, do I think we'll figure out ways to extend life and maybe even reverse aging? I think that's highly likely.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. So in the future that you talk about, the AI models, autonomous machines, rockets, depends on massive increases of compute, massive increases in energy, expensive energy, manufacturing scale. What are the bottlenecks to get there? And once again, with all that expenditures, Again, how can we make sure that it's broad? Not narrow.

Elon Musk, Tesla I just think the natural thing is it's going to be very broad because AI companies will seek as many customers as they possibly can and the cost of AI will get, it's already very low and it's plummeting every year. I mean the cost AI is almost meaningfully changing on a month to month basis.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum There's open, there's open models now everywhere. Yeah.

Elon Musk, Tesla Yes, very, there's open models, and the open models only lack, there may be a year behind the private, the sort of closed models. So I think the AI companies will seek as many customers as possible, which means they'll to provide AI to the world.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum But the cost of getting to there, the compute, the chips, the fab, the powering, that to me, what are the, you know, those are huge.

Elon Musk, Tesla The limiting factor, yeah, I think the limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power. It's just, right, it's energy. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being brought online is negligible. 10 percent, 4 percent a year, max. Yeah. It's clear that we're very soon, maybe even later this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on. But except for China, China's growth in electricity is tremendous. They're building 100 gigawatts of nuclear as we speak. Actually, solar is the biggest thing in China.

So China's, I believe China's production capacity on solar is 1,500 gigawattes a year, and they're deploying over 1,000 gigawatte a year of solar. Now, for continuous solar load, But you divide that by roughly, I don't know, four or five. That's around 250 gigawatts of steady state power paired with batteries. That's a very big number. That's half of the average power usage in the US. So US power usage on average is 500 gigawatts. China, just in solar, just like in solar like that, can provide steady state power and batteries, can do half of US electricity output per year just with solar. Solar is by far the biggest source of energy.

And actually, when you look beyond, even on Earth, but certainly beyond Earth, the sun rounds up to 100% of all energy. This is an important thing to consider. So the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter is about 0.1%, and everything else is miscellaneous. Now, even if you were to burn Jupiter, in a thermonuclear reactor, the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%, because Jupiter is only 0.1%. If you teleported three more Jupiters into our solar system and burnt three more Jupiter's and everything else in the solar system, the sun's energy would still run up to one hundred percent. So it's really all about the sun. And that's why... One of the things we'll be doing with SpaceX within a few years is launching solar-powered AI satellites because the space is really the source of immense power, and then you don't need to take up any room on Earth. There's so much room in space, and you can scale to hundreds of terawatts a year.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum You and I have had these conversations before, but why don't you tell the audience what would it take for the United States and what type of geography would it take to have that solar field to electrify the United States? And then let me ask a question. Why aren't we doing it?

Elon Musk, Tesla Yeah, so, I mean, I guess a rough way to think about it is 100 miles by 100 miles, I'll call it 160 kilometers by 160 kilometers of solar is enough to power the entire United States. Yeah, 100 mile by 100 mile areas is, I mean, you could take basically a small corner of Utah. Nevada. Nevada, New Mexico. Obviously, you wouldn't want it all in one place. But it is a very small percentage of the area of the US to generate all of the electricity that the US uses. And the same is true, actually, for Europe. You could take a small part. You can take. Relatively unpopulated areas of say Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that Europe needs.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum So why don't you think that there's a movement towards that here and in the United States?

Elon Musk, Tesla Well, there is... As it is in China. Well, unfortunately, in the U.S., the tariff barriers for solar are extremely high. And that makes the economics of deploying solar... Artificially high because China makes almost all the solar and the tap that

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum What would it take for Europe or the U.S. To build it commercially, if it's that scale?

Elon Musk, Tesla Yeah, I think, well, I can tell you what we're going to do at SpaceX and Tesla is we're building up large-scale solar. So the SpaceX and the Tesla teams both separately are working to build to 100 gigawatts a year of solar power in the US. And that'll probably take a center about three years or something. But these are pretty big numbers. And I'd encourage others to do the same. We obviously don't control the US tariff policy. But for other countries, China makes solar cells that are incredibly low cost. And I think it would be worth doing a large scale solar.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum So. I know you're going to be having a couple of big announcements on robotics and what it can do. I mean, when I went to the factory, you showed me those robots. Yeah. How quickly, you talked about the billions of robots, but how quickly can they be deployed in a manufacturing setting? How quickly can it be utilized and be functional and create that abundance that you talked about?

Elon Musk, Tesla Well, humanoid robotics will advance very quickly. I think we do have some of the Tesla Optimus robots doing simple tasks in the factory. Except probably later this year, by the end of this year I think they'll be doing more complex tasks. And but still deployed in an industrial environment. And probably sometime next year, I'd say that by the end of next year I think we'd be selling humanoid robots to the public. That's when we are confident that it's very high reliability, very high safety, and the range of functionality is also very high. You can basically ask it to do anything you'd like.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum You're already seeing that in Tesla cars, the software changes that you're doing. And what is it, every quarter now a software change that upgrades the ability of the robot within the car?

Elon Musk, Tesla Yes, the Tesla full self-driving software, we update it sometimes once a week and recently some of the insurance companies have said that it is actually so safe, Tesla full-self driving is so safe that they're offering customers half-price insurance if they use has the force of driving in the car.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum And that can be monitored by the insurance company? Is that part of the agreement? Yeah.

Elon Musk, Tesla But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point. And Tesla's rolled out a sort of robot taxi service in a few cities and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the US. And then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe hopefully next month.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum Really, that quickly.

Elon Musk, Tesla Yeah. And then. Maybe a similar timing for China, hopefully.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum I want to move to space, because historically, space is very capital-intensive. It's historically been done by governments. Obviously, SpaceX changed the whole model. But we've seen it slow to scale, and now I'm starting to see it ramping up in what you're doing and other things. Talk to us about the automation and AI, how it's changing the economics in building and preparing for us in operating in space.

Elon Musk, Tesla Sure Well, the key breakthrough, the major breakthrough that SpaceX is hoping to achieve this year is full reusability. So no one has ever achieved full reusablity of a rocket, which is very important for the cost of access to space. We've achieved partial reusability with Falcon 9 by landing the boost stage. We've now landed the boost age over 500 times. But we have to. Throw away the upper stage. The upper stage sort of burns up on reentry for Falcon 9. So, and the cost of that is equivalent to a small to medium sized jet. But with Starship, which is a giant rocket, it's the largest flying machine ever made.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum That's a rocket that you're using for the idea of going to Mars, right?

Elon Musk, Tesla Yeah, Mars and the moon, as well as for high volume satellite stuff. So Starship, hopefully this year we should prove full reusability for Starship which will be a profound invention because the cost of access to space will drop by a factor of 100 when you achieve full reusablity. It's the same sort of economic difference that you would expect between, say, a reusable aircraft and a non-reusable aircraft. Like if you have to throw your aircraft away after every flight, that would be a very expensive flight. But if you only have to refuel, then it's the cost of the fuel. And so that's really the fundamental breakthrough that gets the cost-of-access to space. We think... Below the cost of freight on aircraft. Under $100 a pound type of thing easily. So it makes putting large satellites into space very cheap. And then when you have solar in space, you get five times more effectiveness, maybe even more than that, than solar on the ground. Because it's always sunny. It's cold. Yeah, it's. It's always sunny, so you don't have a day-night cycle or seasonality or weather. And you get about 30% more power in space because you don't have atmospheric attenuation of the power. The net effect is solar is five times Any given solar panel will do five times more energy and space than on the ground.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum Is there any capacity in doing that and then taking that power and bringing it back to Earth? Is there a way of doing that or are you just taking that power and utilizing it for the needs, like building AI data centers in space?

Elon Musk, Tesla I think the case, it's a no-brainer for building AI, solar-powered AI data centers in space. Because as you mentioned, it was also very cold in space, if you're in the shadow, then it's very cold in space just three degrees Kelvin. So you just have, you have solar panels facing the sun and then a radiator that's pointed away from the sun. So it has no sun incidence and then it just cooling, it's just a very efficient cooling system. Net effect is that the lowest cost place to put AI will be space, and that will be true within two years, maybe three, three at the latest.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum So looking 10 or 20 years out, how would you describe success with AI or space technology, and where do you see it? Are you more certain what's going to happen the next three years, or five or 10?

Elon Musk, Tesla I don't know what's going to happen in 10 years, but the rate at which AI is progressing, I think we've... We might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year. And I would say no later than next year. And then probably by 2030 or 2031, call it five years from now, AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum We only have a number of minutes left, but I want to humanize you for a second. So there's no speculation that you're

Elon Musk, Tesla Make a joke about peace.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum I want I mean, I would frame this question by you're the most successful entrepreneur, industrialist in the 21st century, maybe beyond. So I want really get this, what inspired you? Who inspired you, what was a foundation of your curiosity? And importantly, was there an aha moment, an epiphany at any time in your life and career?

Elon Musk, Tesla Well, I mean, as a kid, I read a lot of science fiction, sci-fi, fantasy books, and comic books. And I always liked technology. I didn't expect to be where I am today. It seems incredibly implausible. But yeah, I was inspired by reading about books about the future, about science fiction. And And I guess I want to make science fiction not fiction forever, at some point, turn science fiction to science fact. And we want to have Starfleet and Star Trek, really, for real, where we actually have giant spaceships traveling through space, going to other planets.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum I'd like to just be beamed back to New York instead of flying. Um.

Elon Musk, Tesla Ha, ha, ha.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum We're talking about Star Trek.

Elon Musk, Tesla No, I guess my essential, what I would call the philosophy of curiosity, I'd like to understand the meaning of life, you know, is the standard model of physics correct regarding the beginning of existence and the end of the universe? What questions do we not know to ask that we should ask? And AI will help us with these things. So I'm just trying to understand, how do we get here? What's going on? What's real? Are there aliens? Maybe there are. And if we've got spaceships that are traveling to other star systems, we may encounter aliens. And we may find many long-dead alien civilizations. But I just want to know what's going on, I'm curious about the universe. That's my philosophy.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum Do you see yourself ever going to Mars in your lifetime?

Elon Musk, Tesla Uh, yeah, I mean, I would say, like, I, you know, I don't... That's a long commitment. I've been asked... Isn't that three years each way? Uh, it's, uh, six months. Six months, that's all it is? Yeah, six month, but the planets only align every two years. Okay. So, uh... Yeah, I've asked it a few times, like do I want to, you know, die on Mars? And I'm like, yes, but just not on impact.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum That's a good answer. Anyway, we're out of time. Hopefully everybody enjoyed this. I mean, there's so many myths around Elon Musk. I could tell you he's a great friend. And I constantly learn so much from him. And I'm totally inspired by what he has done. I've been inspired who he is. And I am totally inspired his vision of the future. And I don't think it's such a bad future. And I agree with his optimism. So, Elon, thank you. Any last words?

Elon Musk, Tesla Well, I think generally, I mean my last words would be, I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future. Good. And generally, for quality of life, it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and right.

Larry Fink, World Economic Forum On that note.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Thanks so much to them, and thanks so much to you for listening. This is just a sampling of the insights we're sharing from this year's annual meeting. To not miss a single leader, session, or trend, follow #WEF26 on social media.

And don't miss our special daily episodes that my colleague Robin Pomeroy will release on his podcast, Radio Davos. It is the best way to get caught up on the buzz, the big news, and how the top minds of the world are thinking about the biggest issues of our day.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum, recording live from Davos. Have a great day.