.@elonmusk told me he plans to build “Optimus Academy” to train an army of humanoid robots. > “millions of simulated robots in the simulated world” > “tens of thousands of robots in the real world, to close the simulation to reality gap.” Why? There’s two big differences between the way Tesla will train humanoid robots and the way it built Full Self-Driving. - FSD only requires learning three degrees of freedom: turning, accelerating, braking … and a humanoid robot has to learn how to coordinate 50+ joints. - You can sell a Tesla without FSD, which allows you to collect the millions and millions of hours of driving data needed to bootstrap your model ... but you can’t sell an Optimus that hasn’t learned how to do stuff yet. The Optimus Academy is Elon’s attempt to build the data flywheel that Tesla got for free with FSD.

The first question I asked @elonmusk: What’s the point of sending GPUs into space? The whole idea behind orbital data centers is that if the launch costs continue to drop, it will become cheaper to put GPUs in orbit than to build power plants on Earth. The problem with this argument is that energy is only about 15% of a datacenter’s lifetime cost. The chips themselves are around 70%. And you still have to launch those to space! Elon kept returning to one point over and over again: It will simply not be physically possible to scale power production to the scale needed for AI on Earth. He kept pointing out the bottlenecks we’ve already run into on Earth: You can’t plug into the utilities - the interconnect queues are too long. You can’t do behind-the-meter natural gas and generate power yourself - lead times for turbines stretch past 2030. You can’t do solar on Earth, because of permits, and because of the tariffs. For it to make economical sense to shift compute to space, all of the following things would need to be true: - Power generation on Earth hits a ceiling, or AI demand outstrips every terrestrial option (for context, 1 TW of solar power is only 1% of the land area of the US, and AI currently only uses about 20 GW globally). - Chip production scales faster than power generation (because Elon builds TeraFab). It would be surprising if building and placing solar panels turned out to be harder than scaling semiconductor manufacturing. - Starship reaches thousands of launches per year. In that world, Elon wins the AI race outright. SpaceX is the only entity that can launch at that scale. xAI would have unlimited power. Everyone else will be stuck fighting over grid interconnects and turbine orders. And if those 3 conditions aren’t met? Well, on Earth, xAI is just gonna be one of the pack anyways - and there’s no market for the 4th best AI model. Elon’s comparative advantage was never going to be navigating utility interconnect queues or filing permits faster than Google. His advantage is SpaceX. So why not just bet on the world where SpaceX becomes the kingmaker? I asked Elon what that world looks like. 100 GW = 10,000 starship launches, and he wants to do more than that every year by 2030. That’s one starship launch every hour.