Elon Musk on robots, litigious shareholders, and AI

In the second half of Elon Musk’s interview on CNBC, the Tesla CEO touched on a number of topics, including interest in acquiring Uber (UBER) (none), litigious shareholders (wants more control at Tesla), and his prediction that we’ll all want our own R2-D2 or C-3PO.

“Demand for humanoid robots will be insatiable,” Musk says, and expects they will be Tesla’s biggest product, predicting a million robots will be made by 2030, given that “everyone will want their own R2-D2 or C-3PO.”

To power the development of Optimus bots, Musk will continue to rely on GPUs from Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD). “As long as Nvidia makes GPUs better than Tesla, we’ll keep buying from Nvidia,” he said.

And this includes the building of another gigawatt training cluster, in addition to the 200K GPUs at a facility in Memphis.

Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xA1 is currently building the most powerful training cluster in the world near Memphis with a million next-generation Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.

“In 6 to 9 months, this facility will be the largest gigawatt training cluster in the world, powering Grok.”

When asked if xAI will ever merge with Tesla, Musk doesn’t rule it out, but that is something Tesla shareholders must approve.

“No plans to do so, but not out of the question.”

Finally, on the question of AI’s impact on society, Musk believes we are in the “Big Bang” of intelligence explosion and “one thing is for sure, it won’t be boring.”