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Notes from Elon Musk and Diamandis Carbon Removal xPrize Launch Interview

by matznerd on 4/23/21, 3:30 AM with 2 comments

• by matznerd on 4/23/21, 3:34 AM

  From what I wrote on the Airminers slack: "I made this summary to share on the interview between Musk and Diamandis on the Carbon Remoal XPRIZE etc. I put a lot of direct timestamped linked to their discussion because there is a lot of other info, including some great Musk "tangents" on SpaceX, tunnels, and his reasons for wanting to expand the "scale and scope of consciousness to better understand the questions to ask about the answers that is the universe..."

  You can tell him and Diamandis are good friends and have so much they want to talk about etc, but they mostly stay on topic of the contest.

  The major takeaways are: -4 categories: DAC, oceans, land, and rocks.

  -Seems that they are going to be pretty flexible in categories and expanding where needed (comments open until mid-May).

  -Seems like they mostly want "people [to] have a good time" and that "some productive stuff comes out of it."

  -Scalability to gigatonne is key: "unless the cost is affordable, it is not scalable."

  -Contest is pretty wide open, any one of any age can join, whether established already or unestablished concepts/teams.

  -After some time, likely within the year, they will give $1m to at least the top 15 teams as seed money.

  -Then over the 4 years they will have to demonstrate something like 1000/tonnes per year of capture or Elon suggested maybe 100 tonne/month.

  -2nd, 3rd, 4th place share approx $20m

  -Winner gets $50m of "free money"/"non-dilutive capital"