Elon Musk: A Future of Amazing Abundance

Learn English with Elon Musk. In this wide-ranging conversation at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026, Elon Musk speaks with Laurence D. Fink about AI, humanoid robots, solar energy, Mars, and the future of civilization. His message is bold and optimistic: robotics can create abundance, energy will shape the future of AI, and humanity should work to expand consciousness beyond Earth.

Who This Speech Is For

• Learners who want to discuss AI, robotics, energy, and the future of civilization in English.
• Students interested in technology, entrepreneurship, and big-idea interviews.
• Intermediate to advanced learners practicing analytical, persuasive English in fast, idea-dense conversation.

How This Speech Helps Your English

• Builds advanced vocabulary around artificial intelligence, robotics, consciousness, abundance, and energy.
• Demonstrates how to explain complex ideas in direct, accessible English.
• Shows how humor, prediction, and technical reasoning can work together in a live interview.
• Helps learners follow long-form answers packed with abstract concepts and future-focused language.

Why This Speech Matters

• It connects AI and robotics to abundance, not only efficiency.
• It frames space exploration as a way to protect consciousness beyond Earth.
• It captures a high-level conversation about energy, autonomy, and what the next decade could bring.

Larry Fink: 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 on. There are many conversations that we may have agreed on, 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 build understanding, and also resolution. So, it’s an important component of who 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: You’re most welcome. I heard about the formation of the peace summit, and I was like, “Is that P-I-E-C-E?” You know, a little piece of Greenland, a little piece of Venezuela.

Larry Fink: We got one.

Elon Musk: All we want is peace.

Larry Fink: Okay. As I said, I’m a pretty proud CEO of BlackRock since we went public. The compounding return of BlackRock to our shareholders was twenty-one percent. Since Elon took Tesla public, his compounded return is forty-three percent. This is just another advertisement for everybody, especially for Europeans. This is why more citizens should be investing for growth and investing in their countries. Imagine if a lot of pension funds had invested with Elon when Tesla went public, and how much return with the all that pension funds that invested side by side with Elon and that growth. So, a spectacular return. There are 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: Oh, thank you.

Larry Fink: It’s a good measurement.

Elon Musk: Well, we have an incredible team at Tesla. That’s the reason.

Larry Fink: So I wanna get into the dirt, the meaningful component about technology, the possibilities. I wanna talk about AI and robotics, energy, space, and the progress ultimately coming down to engineering. Engineering discipline, scale, and execution. 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 dialogue 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: Well, they’re all very difficult technology challenges. But the overall goal of my companies is to maximize the future of civilization. Basically, maximize the probability that civilization has a great future and expand consciousness beyond Earth. So if you take SpaceX, for example, 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.

Larry Fink: Or you’re from the future.

Elon Musk: They don’t believe me.

Larry Fink: Okay.

Elon Musk: I think if anyone would know if there are aliens among us, it would be me. And we have nine thousand 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 that 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. The way I view it is the image in my mind of a tiny candle in a vast darkness, a 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, consciousness continues. That’s the purpose of SpaceX. Tesla is obviously about sustainable technology, 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. 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 it is without its issues. We need to be very careful with AI. We need to be very careful with robotics. We don’t wanna find ourselves in a James Cameron movie, you know, Terminator. He makes great movies. Love his movies, but we don’t wanna 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 in the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent.

Larry Fink: Elon, can that expansion be broad?

Elon Musk: Yes.

Larry Fink: Or is it narrow? And how can that be created? How can it broaden the global economy?

Elon Musk: I mean… The 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 make so many robots and AI that they will saturate all human needs, meaning you won’t be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point. There will be such an abundance of goods and services because my prediction is there will be more robots than people.

Larry Fink: But how do you then have human purpose in that scenario?

Elon Musk: I mean, nothing’s perfect. But it is 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 abundance for all.

Larry Fink: Then it’s narrow.

Elon Musk: It’s narrow. 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 want one, because who wouldn’t want a robot to, assuming it’s very safe, watch over your kids, take care of your pet, or help if you have elderly parents. A lot of friends of mine say they have elderly parents. It’s very difficult to take care of them.

Larry Fink: And expensive.

Elon Musk: It’s expensive, and there just aren’t enough young people to take care of the old people. 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 don’t think there’s a more interesting time in history.

Larry Fink: But can you and I reverse aging in this new history, or are we gonna see it?

Elon Musk: You know, I haven’t put much time into the aging stuff. I do think it is a very solvable problem. 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 a subtle thing is because all the cells in your body 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 thirty-five trillion cells in your body. And, you know, 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 for a very long time, I think there’s some risk of an ossification of society, of things getting kinda locked in place. It may become… stultifying and lack vibrancy. But that said, do I think we will figure out ways to extend life and maybe even reverse aging? I think that’s highly likely.

Larry Fink: I’m looking forward to that. In the future that you talk about, the AI models, autonomous machines, and rockets depend on massive increases of compute, massive increases in energy, expensive energy, and manufacturing scale. What are the bottlenecks to get there? And then once again, with all those expenditures, how can we make sure that it’s broad and not narrow?

Elon Musk: 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 is already very low, and it’s plummeting every year. The cost of AI is meaningfully changing on a month-to-month

Larry Fink: basis. There are open models now everywhere.

Elon Musk: Yes, there are open models. And the open models only lag… They’re maybe a year behind the private, sort of closed models. So I think the AI companies will seek as many customers as possible, which means they’ll provide AI to the world.

Larry Fink: But the cost of getting there, the compute, the chips, the fab, the power… that to me… Those are huge bottlenecks.

Elon Musk: I think the limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power.

Larry Fink: It’s just like it’s energy.

Elon Musk: We’re seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being brought online is…

Larry Fink: Three percent, four percent a year max.

Elon Musk: It’s clear that very soon, maybe even later this year, we’ll be producing more chips than we can turn on. Except for China. China’s growth in electricity is tremendous.

Larry Fink: They’re building a hundred gigawatts of nuclear as we speak.

Elon Musk: Actually, solar is the biggest thing in China. So China’s, I believe China’s production capacity on solar is fifteen hundred gigawatts a year, and they’re deploying over, a thousand gigawatts a year of solar. Now, for continuous solar load, you divide that by roughly, I don’t know, four or five. Call it around two hundred and fifty gigawatts of steady-state power, paired with batteries. And that’s a very big number. That’s half of the average power usage in the US. US power usage on average is five hundred gigawatts. China, just in solar, just with solar that can provide steady-state power, and batteries can do half of the US electricity output per year. Solar is by far the biggest source of energy. And actually, when you look beyond Earth, or even on Earth, but certainly beyond Earth, the sun rounds up to a hundred percent of all energy. This is an important thing to consider. So the sun is ninety-nine point eight percent of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter is about point one percent, 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 a hundred percent because Jupiter is only point one percent. If you teleported three more Jupiters into our solar system, and burnt three more Jupiters and everything else in the solar system, the sun’s energy would still round 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 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 enormous levels. I think ultimately you can scale to hundreds of terawatts a year.

Larry Fink: 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: A rough way to think about it is a hundred miles by a hundred miles, or a hundred and sixty kilometers by a hundred and sixty kilometers, of solar is enough to power the entire United States. So a hundred mile by a hundred mile area is… I mean, you could take basically a small corner of Utah.

Larry Fink: Nevada…

Elon Musk: nevada, New Mexico. Obviously, you wouldn’t want it all in one place, but you can… 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 for Europe. You could take… Relatively unpopulated areas of, say, Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that Europe needs.

Larry Fink: So why don’t you think that there’s a movement towards that here and in the United States?

Elon Musk: Well, there is…

Larry Fink: As it is in China.

Elon Musk: Well, unfortunately, in the US, the tariff barriers for solar…

Larry Fink: Panels…

Elon Musk: are extremely high. And that makes the economics of deploying solar artificially high because China makes almost all the solar.

Larry Fink: What would take for Europe and US to build it, commercially if that’s scale?

Elon Musk: Well, I can tell you what we’re gonna do at SpaceX and Tesla. We’re building up large-scale solar. So the SpaceX and Tesla teams both separately are working to build to a hundred gigawatts a year of solar power in the US, of manufactured solar power. That’ll probably take us, I don’t know, 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 Euro-US tariff policy. But for other countries, China makes solar cells that are incredibly low cost, and I think it would be worth doing large-scale solar.

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

Elon Musk: Well, humanoid robotics will advance very quickly. I think we do have some of the Tesla Optimus robots doing simple tasks in the factory. We expect that later this year, by the end of this year, they’ll be doing more complex tasks, but still deployed in an industrial environment. And probably sometime next year, by the end of next year, I think we’ll be selling humanoid robots to the public. But 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: 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: Yes. The Tesla Full Self-Driving software, we update it sometimes once a week. Recently, some of the insurance companies have said that… Tesla Full Self-Driving is so safe that they’re offering customers half-price insurance if they use it in their car.

Larry Fink: And that can be monitored by the insurance company? Can they… is that part of the agreement then?

Elon Musk: I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point. And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robotaxi service in a few cities, and it will be 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: Really? That quickly?

Elon Musk: And then maybe a similar timing for China, hopefully.

Larry Fink: I want to move to space because historically space is very capital intensive. It has 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 of building and preparing for us to operate in space.

Elon Musk: Sure. Well, the major breakthrough that SpaceX is hoping to achieve this year is full reusability. So no one has ever achieved full reusability of a rocket, which is very important for the cost of access to space. We’ve achieved partial reusability with Falcon nine by landing the boost stage. We’ve now landed the boost stage over five hundred times. But we have to throw away the upper stage. The upper stage sort of burns up on reentry for Falcon nine. 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: That’s a rocket that you’re using for the idea of going to Mars, right?

Elon Musk: 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 a hundred when you achieve full reusability. It’s the same sort of economic difference that you would expect, between, say, a reusable aircraft and a nonreusable 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 that’s really the fundamental breakthrough that gets the cost of access to space, we think, below the cost of freight on aircraft. So, under a hundred dollars a pound type of thing, easily. So it makes putting large satellites into space very low cost, 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…

Larry Fink: It’s cold…

Elon Musk: well, it’s always sunny, so you don’t have a day and night cycle, or seasonality, or weather. And you get about thirty percent more power in space because you don’t have atmospheric attenuation of the power. The net effect is that any given solar panel will do five times more energy in space than on the ground.

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

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

Larry Fink: Wow. So looking ten or twenty years out, how would you describe success with AI or space technology, and where do you see it? Are you more certain of what’s gonna happen in the next three years or five or ten?

Elon Musk: I don’t know what’s gonna happen in ten years, but at the rate AI is progressing, 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.

Larry Fink: Wow.

Elon Musk: And then probably by 2030 or 2031, call it five years from now, AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.

Larry Fink: We only have a number of minutes left, but I wanna humanize you for a second. So there’s no speculation that you’re…

Elon Musk: Thank you, Jeff. I’m at peace.

Larry Fink: I mean, I would frame this question by saying you are the most successful entrepreneur and industrialist in the twenty-first century, maybe beyond. So I wanna really get this to, you know, what inspired you? Who’s inspired you? What was the foundation of your curiosity? And importantly, was there an aha moment, an epiphany, at any time in your life and career?

Elon Musk: Well, I mean, as a kid, I read a lot of science fiction, sci-fi fantasy books, comic books, and I always liked technology. I didn’t expect to be where I am today. That seems incredibly implausible. But yeah, I was inspired by reading books about the future, about science fiction, and I guess I wanna make science fiction not fiction forever, at some point turn science fiction to science fact. And we wanna have Starfleet and Star Trek for real, where we actually have giant spaceships traveling through space, going to other planets, traveling to other star systems going places we’ve never gone,

Larry Fink: And if we ever get beamed up, to go back to New York. I’d like to just be beamed back to New York instead of flying. You know, talk about Star Trek.

Elon Musk: No, I guess what I would call the philosophy of curiosity is that I’d like to understand the meaning of life. Is the standard model of physics correct regarding the beginning of life, 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 did 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/or we may find many long-dead alien civilizations. But I just wanna know what’s going on. I’m curious about the universe, and that’s my philosophy.

Larry Fink: Do you see yourself ever going to Mars in your lifetime?

Elon Musk: I mean,

Larry Fink: That’s a long commitment.

Elon Musk: I’ve been asked, but…

Larry Fink: Isn’t that three years each way?

Elon Musk: It’s six months.

Larry Fink: Six months? That’s all it is?

Elon Musk: Yeah, six months, but the planets only align every two years.

Larry Fink: Okay.

Elon Musk: So, yeah, I’ve been asked a few times, do I wanna die on Mars? And I’m like, “Yes, but just not on impact.”

Larry Fink: That’s a good answer. Anyway, we’re out of time. I hope 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 by who he is, and I’m totally inspired by 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: Well, I think my last words would be that I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future. And generally, I think 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: On that note.

Tags: Elon Musk, World Economic Forum 2026, WEF Davos 2026, Laurence D. Fink, BlackRock, AI, artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, Tesla Optimus, Tesla, SpaceX, Starship, Mars, solar energy, future of civilization, consciousness, robotics, abundance