7 Ratios Musk Uses to Frame Human Civilization

A First-Principles View of the Cosmos

October, 25, 2025

By Charles Steel

“You think you have an understanding about what first principles of something is, and then you’d talk to Elon about it, and you didn’t scratch the surface.”

So said Jim Keller, the brilliant chip designer who worked at Apple, AMD and Intel, and who came into to Tesla as VP of autopilot hardware engineering.

The phrase “first principles” is grossly overused. When you hear those words, it’s often a flag that the person speaking doesn’t know what they are talking about. With Musk it’s different, though. Keller singled out Musk’s ability to keep going further back and unpeeling layers of assumptions as being his exceptional talent.

Jim Keller on Lex Fridman podcast.

I previously wrote about how Musk’s “philosophy of curiosity” is built up from first principles: i) the universe is the answer; ii) we need to find the questions that will better make sense of it; and iii) we must increase the scope and scale of human consciousness to do so.

And I also described the first-principles way that Musk’s personal why drives innovation via his product why: think of the Platonic ideal of what you are making and work backwards to how it can be made (do not copy with variations). Famously, for example, Musk obsesses about the “idiot index” – the ratio of the cost of a component and the raw materials needed to fabricate it.

How then did Musk decide to work in the areas of electric vehicles, space exploration and AI? How does he bridge from his esoteric philosophy of curiosity to his industry-redefining products. Once again, it’s through a view of the universe which seeks to reason up without recourse to analogy or prior experience. Predictably, it can be summarized in the simplest form.

Here are seven of the most important ratios which convey how Musk sees the cosmos and our place in it.

1. Civilisation as % of Earth’s Existence

Currently: 0.0001% Trend: ⬆️

This puts into context our human cosmic journey. Life has been around for an unimaginably long time and anatomically modern humans for a few hundred thousand years. But our ability to think critically and transfer knowledge is relatively very new.

For Musk, this is both inspiring and sobering. We have come a long way in a short space of time and the future potential is enormous. But we very capable, too, of really messing everything up at the very beginning.

2. Birth Rate

Currently: 1.6 births per woman (U.S.); Trend: ⬇️

A pre-requisite for developing civilization is growing the number of people, and, at a minimum that means more than 2.1 kids per woman.

Falling mortality rates (living longer) is another driver for population growth but Musk focuses entirely on increasing the birth rate which he believes is essential if we want a future with dynamism.

And he is very worried that these are in decline in countries ranging from the United States to Italy, Korea and Japan (nearly everywhere outside of Africa). This is particularly concerning as it seems to correlate with countries become richer and less religious.

3. Energy per Capita

Currently: 22,000 kWh p.a. (82,000 in U.S.)*; Trend: ⬆️

Musk looks at civilization in terms of number of people multiplied by the per person output of those people.

Technology, energy production and economic growth all drive one another in a self-reinforcing way. There are no low energy civilizations with high economic output. Environmentalists hate this but for Musk this means we are using the wrong kind of energy, hence the need for more solar power and electric transport.

4. Interest Payments to Government Revenue

Currently: 25%; Trend: ⬆️

Civilization can advance as the population and output per capita grows but there are traps, most notably debt.

For Musk, excessive borrowing misallocates resources and people and represents a mortgage on the future. That is why he had a paroxysm over President Trump’s 2025 Big Beautiful Bill which pushed the US National Debt to GDP even further above 100% (north even of 120%). He made only a small impact on the numerator (debt) with DOGE and so he returned full time to his companies to work on the denominator (GDP).

5. Digital to Biological Compute

Currently: <1%; Trend: ⬆️

GDP is a function of GDP per capita and the number of people but there is another variable which will change everything: productive non-humans. It is hard to compare GPU/CPU FLOPS on an apples to apples basis with the 100+ trillion synapses in the human brain but for now humans dominate. Musk believes this will not last for long.

Human productivity has been fuelled by non-human physical labour for millennia and now artificial intelligence promises to do the same for both intellectual labor and physical labor (robots).

The sum total of computation on servers is likely to overtake the computation that happens in human brains and to continue increasing exponentially. Such an outcome underlines the need for AI to be developed in a way that is safe can accessible to humans.

Furthermore, in such a future, Musk believes that GDP per capita will cease to be meaningful as money will no longer be a useful proxy for the value of a human’s time. Indeed the concept of money will merge with intelligence as a unit of value and it will in turn be driven by the amount of energy required for computation.

6. Useful Compute per watt **

Currently: NM; Trend: ⬆️

Training AI requires a lot of compute and Musk has said that xAI will be the first company to bring 1 Gigawatt (1 billion watts) online and then 10GW, 100GW, 1TW (1 trillion watts), which is almost as much as the entire nameplate power output of the U.S. electricity grid. Computation, however, is not the same as intelligence, and AI will, therefore, also need to become a lot more efficient.

The human brain operates on about 20 watts, so there is enormous room for AI training and inference to improve. Super-smart engineers will need to work with AI to develop new architectures to achieve this. That’s why Musk wrote in July 2025, “The @xAI goal is 50 million in units of H100 equivalent-AI compute (but much better power-efficiency) online within 5 years.”

7. Earth’s Energy Consumption as % of the Sun’s Energy

Currently: <1%; Trend: ⬆️

We currently use less than 1% of the solar power received from the sun, consuming an estimated 10 Terrawatts but Musk is convinced that technology can and should drive this up via higher GDP per capita and greater silicon compute.

For Musk, we are a start-up in the grand scheme of humanity. And the combination of solar panels and batteries on Earth – and even solar-powered data centers in space – will enable us to enormously increase the use of energy on our planet (Kardashev Type I) and then beyond our planet (Kardashev Type II).***

Musk has become increasingly excited by this prospect, which would harness the potential of SpaceX and Starlink, causing him to post on X in November 2025, “Perhaps our purpose is to make the mind of a sentient sun.”

. . .

Musk has countless ratios in his head. These seven just scratch the surface. But they illustrate how he is able to zoom out and think in the limit – many orders of magnitude out – and then zoom back in again to the detail. Because this macro framework is founded on a first principles approach, it grounds his thinking and thereby guides the course of action in each of his companies.

Notes

* Check out Our World in Data for long term analysis of energy consumption/generation.

** A watt is the unit of power which is the rate that energy is consumed/generated (1 watt = 1 joule per second). A kWh is equivalent to a thousand watts being consumed for one hour.

Useful intelligence per watt is hard to quantify. While the human brain is frequently approximated as delivering ~100 teraflops at ~20 watts, this figure is not directly comparable to GPU performance. Synaptic operations are qualitatively different from floating-point operations; energy draw varies by workload (training versus inference); and FLOPs quantify arithmetic rather than value delivered, which is ultimately a function of data selection and architectural efficiency – including explicit reasoning.

*** The Kardashev scale is often misunderstood. Using Carl Sagan’s logarithmic interpolation, today’s civilization sits around K ≈ 0.7–0.73, which corresponds to well under 1% of full Type-I power. Because the scale is logarithmic, K = 0.9 maps to about 10%, and K = 0.95 to about 32% of Type-I power.

---

This is the third in a series of blogs on How Musk Thinks. If you are interested in receiving blog updates, please sign up.

The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: 9 Ways He Thinks Differently will be published in 2026 by Greenleaf Book Group.

---