Elon Musk’s surprise Thursday appearance at the World Economic Conference got off to a rocky start with a failed joke about Greenland and some awkward stumbles – though he also announced plans to sell humanoid robots by the end of 2027 and achieve approval for “full self-driving” vehicles overseas.
After a pitiful round of applause from the crowd in Davos, Switzerland, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, who was co-chair of the forum, scolded the audience: “That was not a large applause. Start again.”
Musk, who has been a fierce critic of European politics and supported right-wing parties like Germany’s AfD, then launched into a joke about President Trump’s newly-formed Board of Peace.
“I heard about the formation of the peace summit. And I was like, is that piece?” Musk said, spelling the last word aloud. “A little piece of Greenland. A little piece of Venezuela.”
The joke – which came a day after Trump announced “a framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland,” – was largely met with silence from audience members.
At another point, the billionaire founder of Tesla, SpaceX and xAI discussed his hopes to reach Mars during his lifetime, saying he wants to die on the red planet, “just not on impact.”
Musk also joked that he was an alien from outer space.
“I’m often asked: ‘Are there aliens among us?’ And I’ll say, I am one, but they don’t believe me,” Musk quipped. “If anyone would know if there were aliens among us, it would be me.”
Fink awkwardly replied, “You’re from the future? Okay.”
After Musk argued that a world with more robots than people is the only way to give every human a high standard of living, Fink asked: “But then how will you have human purpose in that scenario?”
“Well, I mean, nothing’s perfect,” Musk replied, prompting a burst of nervous laughter from the audience.
Fink later said, “We only have a few minutes left, but I want to humanize you,” before launching into a stream of compliments, calling Musk an inspiration and friend.
Musk told Fink he expects to sell Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots to the public by the end of next year — sparking a 1.7% jump in Tesla shares on Thursday.
Earlier this week, Musk said a production rollout of Optimus bots and self-driving Cybercabs would be “agonizingly slow.”
But the exec said Thursday that Tesla is aiming to clinch supervised approval of its “full self-driving” technology in Europe by next month, as well as “maybe similar timing” for China.
The electric vehicle giant has already rolled out Robotaxis in some US cities, like Austin, Texas – but those vehicles still have passengers inside monitoring driving activity.
SpaceX is hoping to “prove full reusability” for its Starship rocket – the world’s largest space launch vehicle – this year, Musk said.
It has already created a partially reusable rocket with the Falcon 9, using the same booster over and over again for more than 20 flights.
A fully reusable Starship will severely cut the “cost of access to space,” Musk said, comparing it to the cost of an airplane flight.
“If you have to throw your aircraft away every flight, that would be a very expensive flight,” he said.
Musk — who has a penchant for making grandiose predictions — also estimated that there will be artificial intelligence by the end of this year that is smarter than any human, and AI in five years that can outsmart all of humankind combined.
“If we have ubiquitous AI, which is essentially free or close to it, and ubiquitous robotics, then you will have an explosion in the global economy that is truly beyond all precedent,” he said.
