A fireside with Elon Musk at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

Before rockets and robots, Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk, he walks through the early days of Zip2, the Falcon 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the “miracle” of Tesla surviving 2008.

He shares the thinking that guided him—building from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that we’re in the middle of an intelligence big bang.

Chapters:

00:00 — Intro.
01:25 — His origin story.
02:00 — Dream to help build the internet.
04:40 — Zip2 and lessons learned.
08:00 — PayPal.
14:30 — Origin of SpaceX
18:30 — Building rockets from first principles.
23:50 — Lessons in leadership.
27:10 — Building up xAI
39:00 — Super intelligence and synthetic data.
39:30 — Multi-planetary future.
43:00 — Nueralink, AI safety and the singularity.