Elon Musk's Most Asked Interview Questions

He says Earth will someday face an extinction event, so humans should live on more than one planet. Mars is the only practical choice, and SpaceX builds reusable rockets to make it affordable.

He calls AI one of the biggest risks to civilization, though he thinks the most likely outcome is good. His fix is an AI that is maximally truth-seeking and curious.

He works most of his waking hours, seven days a week, and focuses on whichever company has the most urgent problem. He says this is how he is wired, not advice.

It means breaking a problem down to the basic truths of physics and reasoning up from there. For example, he asks what a rocket is made of and what those materials cost.

He says a public square where people can speak freely, within the law, matters for civilization, and Twitter was moving away from that. Twitter became X, now owned by SpaceX.

He says solving self-driving means solving layer after layer, each one revealing the next, and that FSD will be safer than human drivers.

He says it is likely, because games will one day look just like reality. He often jokes that if this is a simulation, the ratings must be high.

Try to be useful and contribute more than you consume. He also says to read widely and learn a little about many subjects.

He says a useful humanoid robot would be the biggest product ever, because robots could do dangerous, repetitive, or boring work. He thinks they could someday outnumber cars.

First, it helps people with paralysis control computers and phones with their thoughts. Long term, he wants a brain link so humans can keep up with AI.

He calls falling birth rates one of the biggest long-term risks to civilization. He often cites South Korea, where the population would shrink sharply within a few generations.

He says he has seen no evidence of alien life at all. He sees that as a reason to treat consciousness as rare and spread life beyond Earth.

He says Tesla's purpose is to speed up the world's move to sustainable energy. The plan was to start with an expensive sports car and use the money to build cheaper cars.

In 2008 Tesla closed a funding round on Christmas Eve, hours before missing payroll. In 2018 it built a Model 3 assembly line in a tent to avoid bankruptcy.

He says he does not know, but expanding consciousness helps us learn which questions to ask about the universe. He calls this a philosophy of curiosity.

He says fully reusable rockets are the key, because throwing one away after each flight is like scrapping an airliner after one trip. Reuse can make a Mars city affordable.

Question every requirement, delete parts or steps, simplify, speed up, and automate last. He says the most common mistake is optimizing something that should not exist.

Yes. He wants an objective third party that can see what leading AI labs are doing, just as cars and rockets already answer to regulators.

He helped start OpenAI as an open nonprofit and objects to it becoming closed and profit-focused. He tends to favor open-sourcing models a generation behind the frontier.

He says Grok is built to be maximally truth-seeking and curious, with humor inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He thinks a truthful AI is the safest kind.

He says AI and robots will eventually do almost any job, making work optional and goods abundant. The harder question, he says, is how people will find meaning.

In 2014 he said Tesla would not sue anyone using its patents in good faith. The real rival was gasoline cars, so helping everyone go electric served Tesla's mission.

He says Tesla is best seen as an AI and robotics company that happens to make cars. He expects most of its long-term value to come from self-driving and robots.

He says prototypes are easy and production is hard, because thousands of parts and steps must go right at once. He called the Model 3 ramp production hell.

He has fought public battles with funds that bet against Tesla. He says in 2018 they had Tesla in checkmate on paper, but the tent assembly line saved it.

He has said he has Asperger's syndrome and found social cues hard to read as a child, so he read constantly. He describes his mind as a storm of ideas.

He says he will say what he wants, even if it costs him money. He treats legal free speech as a principle and thinks correcting bad information beats banning it.

He says government grows through rules and spending nobody reviews, and the national debt is a serious threat. DOGE applies his delete and simplify approach to that.

He says he agrees with Einstein's God of Spinoza, a higher power that shows itself through the laws of physics. He says it is up to us to understand more.

He says his mind is a storm and most people would not want to be him. He tries not to hold grudges, because they do not help the future.