Elon Musk's debut on a new social conversation app was a wild ride, with talk ranging from wiring a monkey's brain for video gaming to the entrepreneur's grilling of Robinhood's CEO - all as many users were unable to join because of the surge in demand to hear the world's richest man speak.
Many who tried tuning into Clubhouse, the app backed by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, ended up on pirated streams that popped up on YouTube and aired the chief executive of Tesla taking questions from moderators for more than an hour.
The invitation-only platform founded last year is one of the hotter commodities in social media and has the potential to become a can't-miss information platform for journalists, investors and the public, much like Twitter - a service beloved by Musk.
As news of the billionaire's impending appearance at 10pm California time on Sunday evening spread across the internet, there was a flurry of tweeting by people seeking invitations to hear him speak. Several "pre-game" rooms - where users can join conversations or just listen - emerged beforehand to discuss Musk's coming appearance.
So it's no surprise that the moderators, who included tech industry veterans Marc Andreessen and Steven Sinofsky, also convened a "post-game" session, where they talked about how Clubhouse's platform had been "stretched to its limits" as people sought to join the room with Musk. They said engineers had been on hand to deal with any snags. They also spoke about bringing on other luminaries, including Bill Gates.
While the limited number of users on Clubhouse - launched in March last year - lends it an air of exclusivity, it's also starting to grow faster and attract more funding, pushing it further into the news and social media spheres. It now has an estimated 5-million users, a jump from 3-million just 10 days earlier.
Last week, investors including Andreessen Horowitz valued it at $1bn (about R15bn). Clubhouse raised $100m in the round, according to Axios.
What Clubhouse offers is a certain clubby intimacy with others on the platform. Some of that is retained when luminaries such as Oprah, Drake or Jared Leto show up. Sunday's session with Musk was as close as any of his 44.7-million Twitter followers were going to get to a conversation with him.
The session started off with the founder of rocket company Space Exploration Technologies talking about colonising Mars, and if he would feel comfortable letting his sons make the journey to the planet. That segued briefly into whether the TV series, The Expanse, was worth watching or not.
"The important thing is we establish Mars as a self-sustaining civilisation and that we ensure the long-term existence of consciousness," Musk said. That naturally led to a back-and-forth about aliens. "I've seen no conclusive evidence," he said.
"That doesn't mean there isn't aliens; I just haven't seen the evidence."
Next up was memes. Asked how he "got so good" at them, Musk said: "I love memes. They're very insightful, and symbolism powerfully impacts people."
He revealed that he gets his memes from two friends. "I don't follow them, I make them," he said. "I have kick-ass meme dealers; you have to have a good meme dealer. My friends Mike and Claire. I am the recipient of very interesting memes.
"People are, like, you are going crazy on Twitter," he said. "I was, like, I started crazy."
The conversation turned to Neuralink, Musk's start-up that is developing a brain-computer interface. The company has put a tiny wireless implant into the skull of a monkey, who can "play video games with his mind", Musk said.
The goal with the brain-linking technology is to eventually help people who have lost brain capacity because of injury or other maladies, with implanted chips. Videos of the plugged-in simians will be released soon, perhaps in about a month, Musk said.
When asked about bitcoin, Musk said he needed to "watch what I say", then gave an answer that roiled the price of the cryptocurrency again. "Bitcoin is a good thing," but he's "late to the party" and should have bought eight years ago.
On Tesla, the electric-car company that's the source of much of his wealth, Musk had a message for battery manufacturers: make more. "It's important to emphasise to our suppliers, we're not trying to put them out of business, we want them to increase their rate." He said at Tesla's "battery day" event in September the company would begin producing its own cells to supplement more purchases from outside suppliers.
Achieving Tesla's goal of selling 20-million electric vehicles a year is significant because that will replace about 1% of the 2-billion cars projected to be on roads by 2030, Musk said, thereby "moving the needle" in the company's fundamental goal: to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.
That target is a stretch, since the world's two largest carmakers delivered fewer than 10-million vehicles last year. "We're trying to grow car production as fast as possible but the primary limiting factor there is battery-cell production," Musk said.
Next was the global rollout of vaccines.
There are "too many requirements on who can get the vaccine", Musk said, adding that while it's "important for the elderly" he called for distributing it on a first-come, first-serve basis because "it'll get the most amount of vaccines out there".
Asked if he was willing to be inoculated, Musk said he was "definitely pro-vaccine", seemingly contradicting remarks he made to a New York Times columnist in September.
The rambling conversation took a different turn when Musk called up Vlad Tenev, CEO of trading App Robinhood Markets, to talk about the restrictions the company put in place last week amid a trading frenzy. "Spill the beans, man," Musk said to Tenev, introducing him as "Vlad the stock impaler".
Tenev said rumours Robinhood was pressured by Citadel or others to restrict trading on GameStop and other "meme stocks" were false. He said the restrictions were linked to the National Securities Clearing Corp seeking $3bn in deposits, which Robinhood negotiated down to $700m.
At times, the topics turned more personal. The most poignant part of the conversation may have been when Musk was asked, "why doesn't the world have more Elon Musks?"
"I might be getting too much credit. There were sections in life that have been hard and painful and I'm not sure people would want to do that," Musk said. "If someone was to be me or do things I've done, you're mistaken. You'd have to have some kind of wraith demon in your skull."
Bloomberg
