
Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
From Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel
February 5, 2026 · 2h 50m
About this episode
Dwarkesh Patel interviews Elon Musk about the future of AI in space and various technological advancements.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Dwarkesh Patel
Guest: Elon Musk
Topics covered
- AI in space
- orbital data centers
- humanoid manufacturing
- xAI business plans
- DOGE
- SpaceX lessons
Keywords
- AI
- space
- orbital data centers
- humanoids
- xAI
- DOGE
- SpaceX
Sponsors
Mercury, Jane Street, Labelbox
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: xAI
Products: DOGE, Optimus
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