Tesla‘s CEO Elon Musk elaborated on Thursday on the company’s “amazing abundance” mission in an interview with BlackRock CEO and World Economic Forum (WEF) co-chair Larry Fink.
On December 24, Musk said on X that he was changing the “Tesla mission wording” from “Sustainable Abundance” to “Amazing Abundance.”
Musk has been talking about “sustainable abundance” for the past few months.
“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,” the Tesla CEO said at the WEF interview in Davos, Switzerland.
However, he warned that it “doesn’t mean that it is without its issues. I mean, we need to be very careful with AI, we need to be very careful with robotics.”
Musk thinks about a benign scenario in which a large number of humanoid robots can lead to an economic output that will provoke an explosion in the global economy and “saturate all human needs.”
For that to happen, he flagged that AI and robotics need to be everywhere and to be “essentially free or close to it.”
Abundance Mission
Earlier this month, Musk was a guest on the Moonshots podcast, hosted by Peter Diamandis and Dave Blundin, where he talked about Tesla‘s mission of building “a world of amazing abundance.”
“It’s beyond abundance in any— beyond what people possibly could think of as abundance. Like the AI, actually. AI and robots. The limit will saturate all human desire,” the company’s chief executive declared.
Later on the interview, Blundin suggested that while Tesla and SpaceX — both run by Musk — were initially “completely separate,” they now “actually interact because AI ties everything together.”
Musk agreed, using a Superman analogy to explain it.
“If you apply automotive manufacturing technology to satellites and rockets, it’s like being Superman,” he said. “Then if you take advanced material science from rockets and you apply that to the automotive industry, you get Superman again.”
“That came from planet Krypton backing Planet Krypton. This is normal,” Tesla‘s CEO explained, referring to the home planet of the character.
Musk on Davos
Questioned by Fink on what AI, robotics, space, and energy “have in common from an engineering standpoint,” Musk responded that the goal of his companies — including Tesla, SpaceX, xAI — is “to maximize the future of civilization.”
This is not a new perspective for Musk, who has repeatedly discussed his plans to “repopulate” the planet.
“Well, they’re all very difficult technology challenges,” the tech mogul said, “but the overall goal of my companies is to maximize the future of civilization, like basically maximize the probability that civilization has a great future, and to expand consciousness beyond Earth.”
The CEO has previously criticized the World Economic Forum on this topic, particularly in 2022—2023, when overpopulation was a major focus of the forum.
The Tesla CEO previously said he was invited to speak at the WEF in early 2023, but declined.
Musk wrote that his “reason for declining the Davos invitation was not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring af lol.”
A month later, he wrote on the same platform that people “shouldn’t be obsessed with WEF/Davos, but they take themselves sooo seriously that making fun of them is awesome.”
He added that “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.”
Larry Fink on Musk
On Thursday, however, host Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock that owns over 200 million shares Tesla shares, called Musk “a great friend.”
“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,” Fink stated by the end of the interview.
The billionaire noted he’s “totally inspired” by Musk and “his vision of the future,” highlighting that he is optimistic about it.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has consecutively increased its stake on Tesla for the past six years, as of its latest quarterly update.
