Key highlights and takeaways from tonight's conversation
~ Elon Musk on Clubhouse - Good Time ~

with @elonmusk, @sriramk, @aarthir, @pmarca, @garrytan, @stevesi

THREAD HERE 👇 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1355983231988862978
@aarthir to @elonmusk - When are we getting to Mars and what will it take?

- 5.5 years to get to Mars from now, need to make Starship get to Mars and back. Need fully reusable rocket!
- Having sustainable life on Mars is most important for preserving the consciousness of life.
@sriramk - why is the consciousness of life important to you?

- Reading Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy made him think about what life is about and its scope and how the universe is the answer
- We have to increase the scope and scale of consciousness to figure out what to ask
@elonmusk

- First time in history that we have chance to make life multiplanetary and have likely a short window of time to make it happen. Have an obligation to ensure that life continues even in the face of calamity on earth.
@aarthir - How will civilization get set up there?

- Doesn't care about much how it gets set up, more important right now to be able to get there and back.
- One self-sustaining city, along with making Mars itself self-sustainable is the goal.
How will civilization look 10/20/30 years in Mars?

- Will start out with tiny outposts and life will be difficult but will still be an adventure.
- Martian civilization would be tougher by necessity.
- With travel time, there would be a new group of ppl arriving every 2 yrs
How do you think we should think about Aliens?

- No conclusive evidence of aliens, but doesn't mean there aren't aliens in this universe
- Seen no occurrences that can't be explained by other means, which are much more likely than alien technology
Q: You had a quote, "who controls the memes controls the universe" - explain that?

- Play on words from a line from Dune "who controls the spice controls the universe"
- Some truth to it in that a meme is a complex form of communication and can say 10,000 words
Elons history on twitter:

- Left twitter after using it a bit when it first came out
- came back to be able to talk to people directly, and "*started* crazy on twitter." Made memes and has good "meme dealers" 😂
@sriramk - Why should people be working for Neuralink?

- need to improve the bandwidth b/w cortex and digital tertiary layer
- Neuralink would massively improve communication and speed of it to save space in brain
- Neuralink would address brain/spinal injuries
- Releasing new progress videos w/in a month. Already have a happy monkey that can play video games using mind, trying to see if they can get monkeys to play mind pong
- Early applications will be for ppl with serious brain injuries.
- paying attention to implantation removal too
@pmarca - What is the best way of educating a 5 yr old?

- Youtube and Reddit is what my kids were mostly educated on given amount of time spent online
- Make education exciting, explain things to kids
- Establish relevance and narrative or else kids have a hard time remembering
@sriramk - Why doesn't the world have more Elon Musks??

- Long sections of Elon's life have been difficult and not sure people would want to do that.
- "If someone DOES want to be me or do the things I've done, I would say most probably you are mistaken"
@sriramk - What do you think of Crypto and $BTC bitcoin?

- Have to be careful with what he says because it can move markets
- Have been encouraged by friends to get involved in bitcoin but was slow on uptake and at this point thats a good thing
- Don't have strong cryptos, but does joke about Dogecoin.
- "Most ironic outcome would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future" (but joking)
@sriramk - What do you see for Tesla's future and all things battery technology?

- Sustainable energy - make a lot of cars and make them affordable
- Goal to make 20 million cars a year, grow car production ASAP
- Great suppliers but have to produce it ourselves to accelerate
- Tesla has some of the most advanced AI in the world, bringing the day of self-driving sooner - directly correlating to lives saved
- Have to solve "vision" to really get autonomous vehicles
@sriramk - What's a typical workday for Elon Musk?

- Wake up and see if there are any emergencies on text and email, often are
- Deal with chores (have to do em!)
- Have a bunch of meetings, write
- Enjoy in-person meetings more than email/text, "anything is better than email"
@sriramk - What does your open-time look like? (meetings/workday)

- Not much open time, lots of meetings that are scheduled and intense on a day to day basis
- Thinking about taking a week off some time!
- Want to write a book of his experiences on Tesla/SpaceX to get it right
- Used to sleep on the floor of the factory.

@sriramk - do you still?

- Only in crises. "when the team is being asked to work super hard - I gotta be right there with them, and they gotta see it. Seeing is believing"
- "If I can take that level of pain, then they'll do it too"
@sriramk - If you had to start another company or effort, what would you start?

- "No plans on starting other things" - lots going already 😅
- Said tunneling was interesting but no one was pursuing it so starting The Boring Company
- Lots of possibilities there
- "Digitization of medicine" - create an RNA or DNA sequence. Encapsulate that in a way you can get them multiplied billions of times in a liquid shell. You can literally do anything
- "you could probably figure out how to turn someone into a literal butterfly"
Elon on vaccinations for COVID, what would he do differently?

- Relax requirements on vaccinations, make it first come first serve
- Don't worry about second dose, give everyone first dose
- J&J vaccine is one shot, room temp so thats good
- NOT ANTI-VAC, take the vaccine!!
@sriramk - View on the future of California?

- Love CA, lived more than half of my life here, and built companies here
@sriramk - What are you watching on TV?

- Watched "The Last Kingdom" (emotionally accurate live transcription), also seen "Cobra Kai"
- @pmarca recommends "The Expanse"
- "Devs" also recommended along with "Mythic Quests"
- @elonmusk enjoyed "Tenet"
@elonmusk wants to bring up @vladtenev (Robinhood CEO) to tell his story for what happened with Robinhood in re: to $GME and Gamestop.

For this, we're going to try to use mostly direct quotations for actual statements. See below 👇
@vladtenev - Vlad Tenev

-"Wednesday of last week - we had unprecedented volume/load on the system. A lot of these meme stocks were going viral on social media, and people were joining RobinHood and there was a lot of net buy activity on them" - RobinHood #1 app on stores.
- "Thursday morning at 3:30am Pacific, our operations team receives a file from the National Securities Clearing Corporation.
- As a clearing broker, we have to put up money to the NSCC based on some factors including things like the volatility of trading activity concentration"
- "Equities business so it's based on, stock trading and, options trading or, or anything else. They give us a file with the deposit and the request was around $3 billion, order of magnitude more than typical"
- @elonmusk - That seems like an unprecedented increase, what formula did they use to calculate that?

- @vladtenev - "Robinhood has raised $2B (billion) in funding, so $3B (total) is a large number"
- "Bit of an opaque formula, but a component of it is 'VAR' - Value at Risk"
- VAR is "based on quantitative things but not fully transparent, not publicly shared
- "Special component which is discretionary, acts as a multiplier"

- @elonmusk "Discretionary meaning their opinion?"
- @vladtenev "Little bit..but definitely more than just their opinion"
- Elon: Did something shady go on? Its weird that you suddenly get a $3B demand?

- Vlad: "I wouldn't impute shade Enos to it or anything like that. And actually, you know, NSCC was reasonable subsequent to this and worked with us to lower it"
- Elon: IS ANYONE HOLDING YOU HOSTAGE RIGHT NOW, BLINK TWICE (😂😂)

- Vlad: No, but thank you for asking!
- Worked with the NSCC and they lowered it to $1.4B from $3B. Explained how they planned to manage risk through the day on the volatile stocks through "position closing only"
- NSCC came back with charges of $700M to deposite, "which we then paid promptly".
- "That's why we had to make positions closing only. We knew this was a bad outcome for customers.
- Part of what's been really difficult is Robinhood stands for democratizing access to stocks and we want to give people access so that's very challenging, but we had no choice"
- "We had to conform to our regulatory capital requirements. And so the team did what they could to make sure we were available for customers"
- "legitimate sort of turmoil in the markets like these are unprecedented events with these meme stocks"
- "there probably is some amount of extra risk in the system that warrants, higher, higher requirements, so it's not entirely unreasonable" (in regards to charges)
- "we got a lot of questions about, you restricted buying, why didn't you also restrict selling?"
- "people get really pissed off if they're holding stock and they want to sell it and they can't so I think that's categorically worse"
- Other brokers had to do the same
- Elon: did you sell your customers out OR did you have no choice? If latter, why didnt you have a choice and who was saying that?

- Vlad: Would obviously be ideal if there was a little bit more transparency around financial reqs model
- We were able to open and serve our customers 24 hrs later. Raised over a billion dollars in capital so that when do open tomorrow morning we'll be able to relax the stringent position limits.

- #ElonMusk: will there by any position limits?
- #Vlad: "Always some limits but..
- "won't impact 99.9% of customers".

- Elon: "If you had no choice, then you had no choice".

- Vlad: "the financial system that allows customers to trade shares is a complex web of multiple parties, and it's hard. It's just the necessity of trading equities in the US"
- Elon: What was it about you being beholden to Citadel?

- Vlad: That rumor was false; this was a clearinghouse decision based on capital requirements. MMs weren't involved in that.

- Elon: Wouldn't they have a say since it's an industry consortium not a government agency?
- Vlad: "don't have any reason to believe that, then we're getting into kind of the conspiracy theories a little bit, so I just have no reason to believe that that's the case"

- Elon: "Lets see what happens with future actions!"
Aaaand thats it! Thanks so much for joining us, and I hope this helped and was insightful.

If you'd like more coverage like this, and would like to join our alpha/beta, please FOLLOW us here, and signup on http://notater.co 

#ElonMuskclubhouse #ElonOnClubhouse #Clubhouse
You can follow @notaterCo.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled:

By continuing to use the site, you are consenting to the use of cookies as explained in our Cookie Policy to improve your experience.