During an interview with the “All-In Podcast,” Elon Musk commented on why Microsoft founder Bill Gates dismissed the possibility that Tesla could make a usable electric semi-truck without knowing the details, and his views about climate change:

Tesla Semi starts high volume production this year https://t.co/yZLDmkA9EP

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2026

ELON MUSK: You’d think someone like Bill Gates, who started a technology company that is one of the biggest in the world (Microsoft), would be strong in the sciences. But actually, in my direct conversations with him, he was not strong in the sciences. Like, this was really surprising. He came to visit me at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, and was telling me it is impossible to have a long-range [electric] semi-truck. And I was like, “Well, but we literally have them. And you can drive them, and Pepsi is using them right now.” You can drive them yourself or send a trusted person to drive the truck and verify it can do the things we say it is doing. And he’s like, “No, it doesn’t work.” OK? I’m kind of stuck here. I was like, “So it must be you disagree with the watt-hours per kilogram ofthe battery pack? You must think we can’t achieve the energy density in that battery pack, or the watt-hours per mile is too high, and that when you combine those two numbers, the range is low? So which one of those numbers do you think we have wrong, and which ones do you think are correct?” And he didn’t know any of the numbers. Then doesn’t it seem, perhaps, premature to conclude that a long-range semi cannot work, if you do not know the energy density of the battery pack or the energy efficiency of the truck chassis? DAVID FRIEDBERG: He’s now taken a 180 on climate. He’s saying maybe this shouldn’t be the top priority. I can’t figure out why he changed his position. Does he have to set up a data center for Sam Altman? MUSK: “Climate is gay.” Why would Bill Gates say the climate is gay and retarded? The reality of climate change is that you’ve had people who say it doesn’t exist at all, and people who say we’re going to be underwater in five years. Neither of those positions is true. You can measure the carbon concentration in the atmosphere yourself. You literally can buy a CO₂ monitor online for about fifty dollars and measure it yourself. CO₂ has been increasing steadily by about two to three parts per million per year. If you continue taking billions, eventually trillions, of tons of carbon from deep underground and transferring it into the atmosphere and oceans, you will change the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans. You can argue about degree and time scale, but it will happen. In my opinion, we’ve got at least 50 years before it’s a serious issue. It’s not five years, and it’s probably not 500 years. The correct order of magnitude for concern about climate change is around 50 years. So the right course of action is a reasonable one: lean toward sustainable energy. Lean toward solar and a solar-battery future. Have the rules of the system lean in that direction. I don’t think we need massive subsidies, but we also shouldn’t have massive subsidies for oil and gas. Oil and gas have huge tax write-offs that have existed for decades, sometimes 80 years. When special tax conditions exist for one industry and not another, that’s a subsidy. The political reality is that oil and gas are strong in the Republican Party but not the Democratic Party, so you won’t see even the tiniest of those subsidies removed. In fact, some were added, while many sustainable energy incentives were removed. Some of those incentives had gone too far, to be fair. The correct scientific conclusion is that we should move toward sustainable energy. We’ll eventually run out of oil, gas, and coal anyway-it’s finite. We’ll have to move to something that lasts. FRIEDBERG: The irony is that solar is already cheaper than many carbon-based sources. The market is moving in that direction naturally. We don’t need to force behavior-better systems are winning in the market. But they can’t win if old systems are subsidized. MUSK: There are actually major disincentives for solar. China is a massive producer of solar panels. They do an incredible job. They have about one and a half terawatts of annual solar manufacturing capacity, and they use about one terawatt per year. The entire U.S. steady-state power usage is about half a terawatt. If you factor in storage and intermittency, divide by about five, China could still produce enough panels to supply roughly two-thirds of U.S. electricity. In about 18 months, China could manufacture enough solar panels to power the entire United States. FRIEDBERG: What do you think about near-field solar, meaning nuclear? MUSK: I’m in favor of making energy any way that isn’t obviously harmful. But people don’t want nuclear reactors in their backyard. Nuclear is actually very safe-there’s a lot of scaremongering around fission. The U.S. Navy has nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers. The regulatory environment makes nuclear difficult. But more importantly, people underestimate the sheer magnitude of the sun. The sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter is about 0.1%. Everything else is in the remainder. If you burned the entire rest of the solar system, the sun would still round up to 100% of the energy. This is why solar matters. Civilization-scale thinking makes it obvious. A Type-I civilization harnesses planetary energy, Type-II harnesses the energy of its star, Type-III a galaxy. We’re only a small fraction of Type-I right now. Once you think in those terms, everything is solar and everything else is noise. The sun produces over a billion times more energy than everything humans consume combined. Solar is the obvious solution. Short term, we use other sources, but long term it’s star-powered. Maybe we have a branding issue-call it starlight instead of solar. People talk about fusion on Earth, but why make a tiny, difficult sun on Earth when we have a giant free one in the sky? Solar energy reaching Earth is about a gigawatt per square kilometer. Commercial panels are around 25% efficiency. With dense packing, you get about 200 megawatts per square kilometer. Solar panels are made of silicon-sand. Batteries like iron-phosphate lithium-ion use iron, phosphorus, carbon, and lithium, all abundant. We published the math showing you can power Earth entirely with solar and batteries. There’s no shortage of materials.

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