Elon Musk - "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
Thu Feb 05 2026
In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
Sponsors
* Mercury just started offering personal banking! I’m already banking with Mercury for business purposes, so getting to bank with them for my personal life makes everything so much simpler. Apply now at mercury.com/personal-banking
* Jane Street sent me a new puzzle last week: they trained a neural net, shuffled all 96 layers, and asked me to put them back in order. I tried but… I didn’t quite nail it. If you’re curious, or if you think you can do better, you should take a stab at janestreet.com/dwarkesh
* Labelbox can get you robotics and RL data at scale. Labelbox starts by helping you define your ideal data distribution, and then their massive Alignerr network collects frontier-grade data that you can use to train your models. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkesh
Timestamps
00:00:00 - Orbital data centers
00:36:46 - Grok and alignment
00:59:56 - xAI’s business plan
01:17:21 - Optimus and humanoid manufacturing
01:30:22 - Does China win by default?
01:44:16 - Lessons from running SpaceX
02:20:08 - DOGE
02:38:28 - TeraFab
Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
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In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more. Watch on YouTube; read the transcript. Sponsors * Mercury just started offering personal banking! I’m already banking with Mercury for business purposes, so getting to bank with them for my personal life makes everything so much simpler. Apply now at mercury.com/personal-banking * Jane Street sent me a new puzzle last week: they trained a neural net, shuffled all 96 layers, and asked me to put them back in order. I tried but… I didn’t quite nail it. If you’re curious, or if you think you can do better, you should take a stab at janestreet.com/dwarkesh * Labelbox can get you robotics and RL data at scale. Labelbox starts by helping you define your ideal data distribution, and then their massive Alignerr network collects frontier-grade data that you can use to train your models. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkesh Timestamps 00:00:00 - Orbital data centers 00:36:46 - Grok and alignment 00:59:56 - xAI’s business plan 01:17:21 - Optimus and humanoid manufacturing 01:30:22 - Does China win by default? 01:44:16 - Lessons from running SpaceX 02:20:08 - DOGE 02:38:28 - TeraFab Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe