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New Elon Musk essay: Tesla CEO’s current thoughts on technology and humanity
It’s been a while since Elon Musk published an extensive blog post outlining his stance on a specific topic. On the official Tesla website, his last blog post was on August 24, 2018, when he explained his decision to keep Tesla a publicly-traded company. Fortunately, a new Elon Musk essay has been posted in China, outlining the Tesla CEO’s thoughts on a number of topics — from sustainability, the Tesla Bot’s real-world use, Neuralink’s focus on the disabled, and SpaceX’s exploration aspirations.
The new Elon Musk essay was published in China Cyberspace, the Cyberspace Administration of China’s (CAC) flagship magazine. A translation of the essay was posted by Yang Liu, a journalist from the state-owned news agency Xinhua, on the Beijing Channel blog. As could be seen in Liu’s post, Musk actually discussed a number of topics in detail.
In a way, the publication of the new Elon Musk essay in the CAC’s flagship magazine is significant. As noted by The Register, Musk’s essay suggests that Chinese authorities approve of the Tesla CEO’s positions on the topics he discussed. Only a few other foreign entrepreneurs would likely be given the same honor.
Following is the full text of Elon Musk’s new essay.
Believing in Technology for a Better Future
Thank you for the invitation from China Cyberspace magazine. I am pleased to share with my Chinese friends some of my thoughts on the vision of technology and humanity.
Posted by Elon Musk
As technology accelerates, it may one day surpass human understanding and control. Some are optimistic and some are pessimistic. But I believe that as long as we are not complacent and always maintain a sense of urgency, the future of humanity will be bright, driven by the power of technology. It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: if humans want to make the future good, they should take action to make it good.
I want to do everything we can to maximize the use of technology to help achieve a better future for humanity. To that end, any area that contributes to a sustainable future is worthy of our investment. Whether it’s Tesla, Neuralink, or SpaceX, these companies were all founded with the ultimate goal of enhancing the future of human life and creating as much practical value for the world as possible—Tesla to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, Neuralink for medical rehabilitation, SpaceX for making interstellar connections possible.
Clean Energy: The Future of Sustainability
The starting point for my thinking about clean energy is how to create and store energy sustainably and for the long term, and how to provide a constant source of power for the future of productive life. In my view, the future of sustainable energy involves three components.
The generation of sustainable energy. The sun is like a giant fusion generator, from which mankind currently exploits a tiny amount of energy. In the long run, solar energy will become the main source of energy for human civilization. Of course, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear power are also useful energy supplements.
The storage of sustainable energy. Given the change of day and night and the change of weather, we need a lot of fixed battery banks to store solar and wind energy, because the sun does not shine all the time, and the wind does not blow all the time, energy needs to be stored in a large number of fixed battery banks.
Electrified transportation. Full electrification of transportation, including cars, planes, and ships. Electric rockets may be more difficult, but we may be able to manufacture the propellant used in rockets from sustainable energy sources. Eventually, the world economy will be run entirely by sustainable energy sources.
The world is on track for a sustainable energy transition, and humanity should continue to accelerate the process. The faster this transition is achieved, the less risk humanity poses to the environment and the more it will gain. When clean energy is available, carbon sequestration and desalination will be cheaper, climate change and water shortages will be solved, and when fossil fuels are out of the picture, the skies will be cleaner, the world will be quieter, the air will be fresher, and the future will be brighter.
Solar power, battery packs, and electric vehicles paint a rosy picture. Next, we need to focus on the limiting factors. The electrification of cars has become a consensus among nations, but battery support on a terawatt-hour scale is needed to roll out pure electric vehicles around the globe. According to our estimates, the world needs about 300 TWh of battery storage to achieve a transition to sustainable energy. The biggest difficulty in advancing sustainable energy lies in the large-scale production of lithium battery cells. Specifically, from the mining and element refining to battery cells coming off of the production line and finally assembled into battery packs, this is a complex process that is restraining the rapid development of a sustainable energy economy.
As a pioneer and innovator focusing on energy innovation technology, Tesla was founded to solve the problem of energy innovation. On the one hand, we create integrated sustainable energy products from the three segments of energy production, storage and use; on the other hand, we are committed to redefining battery manufacturing by innovating and developing advanced battery technology to remove restrictions on battery capacity. I believe that the world will transition to a sustainable future through a combination of solar and wind energy plus battery storage and electric vehicles. I am pleased to see more and more companies joining this field. Chinese companies will be a force to be reckoned with in the cause of energy innovation.
Humanoid Robots: Doing What Humans Do
Today’s cars are increasingly like smart, web-connected robots on wheels. In fact, in addition to cars, humanoid robots are also becoming a reality, with Tesla launching a general-purpose humanoid robot (Tesla Bot) in 2021. The Tesla Bot is close to the height and weight of an adult, can carry or pick up heavy objects, walk fast in small steps, and the screen on its face is an interactive interface for communication with people. You may wonder why we designed this robot with legs. Because human society is based on the interaction of a bipedal humanoid with two arms and ten fingers. So if we want a robot to adapt to its environment and be able to do what humans do, it has to be roughly the same size, shape, and capabilities as a human.
Tesla Bots are initially positioned to replace people in repetitive, boring, and dangerous tasks. But the vision is for them to serve millions of households, such as cooking, mowing lawns, and caring for the elderly.
Achieving this goal requires that robots evolve to be smart enough and for us to have the ability to mass produce robots. Our “four-wheeled robots” – cars – have changed the way people travel and even live. One day when we solve the problem of self-driving cars (i.e., real-world artificial intelligence), we will be able to extend artificial intelligence technology to humanoid robots, which will have a much broader application than cars.
We plan to launch the first prototype of a humanoid robot this year and focus on improving the intelligence of that robot and solving the problem of large-scale production. Thereafter, humanoid robots’ usefulness will increase yearly as production scales up and costs fall. In the future, a home robot may be cheaper than a car. Perhaps in less than a decade, people will be able to buy a robot for their parents as a birthday gift.
It is foreseeable that with the power of robots, we will create an era of extreme abundance of goods and services, where everyone can live a life of abundance. Perhaps the only scarcity that will exist in the future is for us to create ourselves as humans.
Neuralink: Empowering the Disabled
Some of our Chinese friends may not be as familiar with Neuralink as with electric cars. These companies focus on developing computer-human brain fusion technologies, developing brain chips the size of coins, similar to wearable devices such as smartphones, except that they integrate more deeply with the user’s body—recording and stimulating brain activity through implants in the cerebral cortex.
At this stage, the technology is helping injured people on an individual level. We have received many saddening letters: a 25-year-old young man was in the prime of his life when he had a motorcycle accident that left him unable to eat on his own, which is a great grief for the individual and the family. In light of this, brain-machine interface technology will be focused on curing or alleviating brain injury and other related disorders in the years to come. For example, it could help restore sensory or motor function to limbs of those with spinal injuries and mental system disorders or allow quadriplegics to use their brains to easily operate computers or cell phones.
This technology can also improve a wider range of brain injury problems, whether these disorders are congenital or accidental, or caused by age and external stressors, including severe depression, morbid obesity, sleep problems, and underlying schizophrenia, all of which are expected to be alleviated by human-computer devices.
With the development of brain-machine interface technology, in the long term, this connection is expected to expand the channels of communication between the outside world and the human brain, “accessing” more brain regions and new neural data. This technology could allow humans to effectively integrate with artificial intelligence and ultimately expand new ways for humans to interact with the world, themselves and others. Even if the goal of human-machine integration is difficult to achieve, brain-machine interface technology could be of great value in the field of medical rehabilitation.
Space Exploration: The Possibility of Cross-Planet Habitats
Finally, my greatest hope is that humans create a self-sustaining city on Mars. Many people ask me why I want to explore outer space and turn humans into multi-planetary creatures. In the vast universe, human civilization is like a faint little candle, like a little shimmering light in the void. When the sun expands one day and the Earth is no longer habitable, we can fly to a new home in a spaceship. If humans can inhabit other planets, it means that they have passed one of the conditions of the great screening of the universe, then we will become interplanetary citizens, and human civilization will be able to continue.
The first step toward interplanetary habitat is to reduce the cost of travel, which is what SpaceX was founded to do – first by building recoverable rockets and then by building reusable mega-ships with ever-increasing carrying capacity. As of earlier this year, SpaceX had successfully reused 79 rockets to deliver cargo to the space station and send ordinary people into space. We have also designed and built the largest launch vehicle in history, the Starship, which can carry 100 passengers and supplies at a time. In the future, we plan to build at least 1,000 Starships to send groups of pioneers to Mars to build a self-sustaining city.
As technology continues to change lives at an accelerating pace and the world evolves, life is more than simply solving one problem after another. We all want to wake up in the morning full of anticipation for the future and rejoice in what is to come. I hope more people will join us in our fight to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. I also welcome more like-minded Chinese partners to join us in exploring clean energy, artificial intelligence, human-machine collaboration, and space exploration to create a future worth waiting for.
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SpaceX has decided to stand down from what was supposed to be the first test launch of Starship’s v3 rocket tonight after a minor issue with a hydraulic pin delayed the flight once more.
The company scrubbed its first test flight of the upgraded Starship v3 on May 21 in the final minutes of the countdown. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk quickly took to social media platform X, explaining that a hydraulic pin on the launch tower’s “chopsticks” arm failed to retract properly.
Musk added that the company would fix the issue this evening. SpaceX will attempt another launch tomorrow night at 5:30 p.m. CT, 6:30 p.m. ET, and 3:30 p.m. PT.
The hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract.
If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow at 5:30 CT. https://t.co/DJAdvDYQpH
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 21, 2026
The countdown for Starship Flight 12 — featuring the taller and more capable V3 stack with Booster 19 and Ship 39 — had been progressing smoothly until the late-stage issue surfaced. The Mechazilla tower arm, designed to secure the vehicle on the pad and eventually catch returning boosters, could not complete its retraction sequence.
SpaceX teams immediately began troubleshooting the hydraulic system for an overnight repair.
Starship V3 introduces several significant upgrades over earlier versions. These include greater propellant capacity, more powerful Raptor 3 engines, larger grid fins, enhanced heat shielding, and an improved fuel transfer system.
We covered the changes that were announced just days ago by SpaceX:
SpaceX unveils sweeping Starship V3 upgrades ahead of May 19 launch
The changes are intended to increase payload performance, support higher flight rates, and advance the vehicle toward operational missions, including Starlink deployments, NASA Artemis lunar landings, and future crewed Mars flights. The debut flight from Starbase’s new Launch Pad 2 marked an important milestone in scaling up the fully reusable Starship system.
This stand-down highlights the intricate challenges of preparing the world’s most powerful rocket for flight. Despite extensive pre-launch checks, a single component in the ground support equipment can force a scrub.
The incident aligns with Starship’s proven iterative development approach. Previous test flights have encountered both successes and setbacks, each providing critical data that refines hardware and procedures. Some outlets may call some of these flights “failures,” when in reality, they are all opportunities for SpaceX to learn for the next attempt.
With V3, SpaceX aims to reduce ground-system dependencies and increase launch cadence to meet ambitious long-term goals.
The Tesla Model Y became the first-ever car to reach a legendary Norwegian milestone, surpassing 100,000 new registrations after gaining a reputation as one of the most popular vehicles in the country and the world.
As of May 20, Norwegian authorities have registered 100,224 units of the electric SUV, according to data from local outlet Opplysningsrådet for veitrafikken (OFV).
By population, roughly one in every 29 passenger cars on Norwegian roads is now a Model Y, underscoring its rapid rise as a national favorite.
Since the first deliveries in August 2021, the Model Y has transformed from a newcomer to a staple in Norwegian traffic.
Tesla back on top as Norway’s EV market surges to 98% share in February
Geir Inge Stokke, the Managing Director of OFV, described the achievement as “remarkable,” noting that few single models have gained such traction so quickly. “Tesla Model Y has hit the Norwegian market spot on, and the numbers illustrate how fast the EV market has developed here,” Stokke said.
The Model Y’s success reflects Norway’s aggressive push toward electrification. Nearly nine out of ten units, 87.6 percent, to be exact, are privately registered, with the remaining 12.4 percent on company plates. Owners span the country, from major cities to smaller municipalities, proving it is no longer just an urban or niche vehicle but a true “people’s car.
Who is Buying Tesla Model Ys in Norway?
Typical Model Y drivers are men in their early 40s. The average registered user age is 44, with 83 percent male and 17 percent female. Stokke noted that household usage often extends beyond the primary registrant, broadening the vehicle’s real-world appeal.
Geographically, adoption concentrates in urban centers with strong charging infrastructure. Oslo leads with 16,861 registrations (16.82 percent of the national total), followed by Bergen (7,450), Bærum (4,313), and Trondheim (4,240).
The top five municipalities—Oslo, Bergen, Bærum, Trondheim, and Asker—account for 35,463 units, or about 35 percent of all Model Ys. Yet the vehicle’s presence outside big cities highlights its broad acceptance.
Growth Trajectory and Popularity
Tesla built a lot of sales momentum in a short amount of time. In 2021, registrations closed out at 8,267, but more than doubled to more than 17,000 units in 2022 and more than 23,000 units in 2023. 2025 was the company’s strongest year yet, as Tesla managed to record 27,621 registrations.
Through 2026, Tesla already has 7,036 registrations.
Tesla’s Global Success with the Model Y
Tesla has tasted so much success with the Model Y; it has been the best-selling car in the world three times, it has dominated EV sales in numerous countries, and contributed to a mass adoption of electric vehicles across the planet.
As Stokke emphasized, the Model Y’s journey from newcomer to icon mirrors Norway’s broader success story. With robust incentives that push sales, excellent infrastructure, and consumer eagerness to transition to sustainable powertrains, the country continues setting global benchmarks in sustainable mobility.
The Tesla Model Y stands as a shining example of how quickly change can happen when conditions align.
SpaceX has disclosed the full financial details of its groundbreaking agreement with Anthropic, confirming that the AI company will pay $1.25 billion per month for dedicated high-performance computing resources.
The revelation came through SpaceX’s latest securities filing in preparation for its initial public offering, shedding light on one of the largest compute deals in the artificial intelligence sector to date. The prospectus was released last night, as SpaceX is heading toward its IPO.
This arrangement underscores the fierce demand for specialized infrastructure as frontier AI models require unprecedented levels of processing power to train and operate effectively. Industry analysts see the disclosure as a significant milestone, highlighting how top AI labs are locking in massive capacity to stay ahead in a rapidly accelerating field.
For SpaceX, it feels like a massive move that pushes its perception as a company from space exploration to artificial intelligence.
SpaceX is following in Tesla’s footsteps in a way nobody expected
The comprehensive deal grants Anthropic exclusive access to SpaceX’s Colossus clusters, encompassing Colossus I and the substantially expanded Colossus II, which together deliver hundreds of megawatts of power along with more than 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
Payments extend through May 2029, totaling nearly $45 billion overall; capacity is scheduled to ramp up during May and June 2026 at an initial discounted rate to facilitate seamless integration. Both companies retain the option to terminate the agreement with ninety days’ notice, so there is definitely some flexibility for both.
This pact not only enhances Anthropic’s ability to scale usage limits for Claude users but also injects substantial recurring revenue into SpaceX, bolstering its expansion into advanced data center operations and future orbital computing initiatives.
Observers describe the collaboration between the two companies as strategically advantageous because it gives Anthropic cutting-edge AI development the opportunity to collaborate with SpaceX’s expertise in rapid, large-scale infrastructure deployment.
This disclosure arrives at a pivotal moment when computing resources have become the primary bottleneck for AI progress.
As leading organizations compete to build more powerful systems, securing reliable, high-density facilities has emerged as a key differentiator.
SpaceX’s sites, such as those in Memphis, offer superior power availability and advanced cooling solutions that set them apart from conventional providers. For Anthropic, the added capacity is expected to deliver tangible improvements, including extended context windows, quicker inference times, and innovative features that appeal to both enterprise clients and individual users.
Looking ahead, the partnership paves the way for ambitious joint projects, including potential space-based AI compute platforms designed to overcome terrestrial limitations on energy and thermal management. Such efforts could redefine sustainable computing at massive scales.
Financially, the deal solidifies SpaceX’s diverse revenue profile ahead of its public market debut, extending beyond traditional aerospace activities. The massive check SpaceX will cash each month opens up the idea that additional
While some experts question the sustainability of these enormous expenditures given ongoing efficiency gains in AI architectures, the commitment reflects a strong belief in sustained demand growth.
The agreement also exemplifies productive synergies across sectors, with aerospace engineering insights optimizing AI hardware performance. As global attention on technology concentration increases, arrangements of this nature may help shape equitable access to critical resources.
SpaceX reveals reason for Starship v3 stand down, announces next launch date
Tesla Model Y becomes first-ever car to reach legendary milestone
