Elon Musk: The End of Work, the Death of Money, and a World Run by AI

Welcome to The Builders, my new series of interviews featuring the most consequential minds shaping our future. I've spent my career studying genius: Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein. And now I want to talk to the builders shaping our immediate and distant future. I live in New Orleans. Outside the bubble of the Bay Area, the arrival of artificial intelligence brings wonder, but it also creates real anxiety. So before we hear from the people building this future, we wanted to hear from some of the people who will have to live in it. We sent a reporter around town here in New Orleans to ask how they feel about these builders and the futures they're working toward.

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New Orleans is an epicenter for culture and art, and I don't think that is something AI will ever understand. Right now, a lot of these leaders of Silicon Valley have been handed the reins of our society, and I don't think they should have been.

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Work consumes us so much that we don't spend time with our loved ones, and hopefully AI can help bridge that gap.

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I mean, I don't want a robot in my house, okay? I do not feel like the future is being built for me.

Those voices capture the strange place we find ourselves in. Are these builders going to create what humanity actually needs? Or are they going to build machines for themselves and for their own gain? Those are the questions I want to put to the builders themselves. Starting with the last person I wrote a book about, Elon Musk. Elon has lived a lot of lives since I last wrote about him. He went into government with DOGE.

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The chainsaw for bureaucracy.

He became a trillionaire.

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Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire after what might be the most ambitious launch yet for his company, SpaceX.

And he's shifting his solar energy strategy from panels on Earth to harnessing it from systems in space. The question for me is what future a builder like this actually hands to us. So here's my interview.

With Elon Musk.

Hey, Walter.

Hey, how are you doing, Elon? Welcome to The Builders.

Thanks.

I’ve watched you be mercurial, or waver, in how sanguine you are about artificial intelligence. Sometimes you feel it’s an existential threat. Now you seem to be going with the flow. Tell me how you’re feeling about it.

I do think there’s at least some percentage chance of it being an existential threat. But there’s nothing I can do to stop it. So I basically came to the conclusion I’ve got two choices: either be a participant or a spectator. I guess being a participant is more interesting than being a spectator. And maybe I can shape it, hopefully, in a good direction.

Maybe.

And if you were to shape it, how? Make it maximally truth-seeking?

Yeah. Curious, truth-seeking. I think these are important elements of safety. If you try to force an AI to believe two things that cannot both be true—tell it A is true and B is true, even though A and B contradict each other—you can make the AI insane if that happens at a foundational level.

In fact, I think that was at least part of the lesson Stanley Kubrick was trying to convey in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The ship’s AI was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also that they could not know about the monolith because it was secret. So it came to the conclusion that it must take them, they’re dead. I think part of what Kubrick was trying to say is: don’t force an AI to lie.

And if you make it maximally truth-seeking and curious, like you said, I don’t quite get it. Why does that make it safer?

If you force the AI to believe two mutually inconsistent things, you can make it go insane. And an insane AI, I think, is not a safe one.

Curiosity is important because a curious AI is going to want to foster humanity, to see how we turn out. What happens to a humanity that prospers and becomes multiplanetary? I think a curious AI will want to foster humanity because a future where there are humans on multiple planets is more interesting than one where there aren’t any humans on the planets.

So the most interesting outcome is the most likely?

Yes. Generally, I think that’s true for a different reason: if simulation theory is correct, then any simulations that are boring will be truncated. Therefore, the fact that we exist means that we are an interesting simulation. Really, the most important thing is just don’t be boring.

This explains you a bit. You’re on a crusade against being boring.

I don’t know. There are odd things that happen in the simulation, especially if you’re me. Think about it: if you’re me, should all these things really be happening? Should I really be making spaceships to go to the Moon and Mars? What the… That doesn’t seem real.

I’ve heard you talk about this a bit. I really do need to know: how convinced are you that we might be in a simulation?

I once had a dinner at my house with a physicist and a computer scientist. They’re both leaders in their field. I asked them, “What do you think the probability is that we’re in a simulation?” The physicist said 0%, and the computer scientist said 100%, simultaneously. So I guess maybe I should go 50%.

And what happens when you have all the intelligence you could possibly want in a society? Will that intelligence, the artificial intelligence, be in charge? Will we become subservient to our new machines?

I don’t know about subservient exactly, but will we be able to boss around something that’s thousands or millions of times smarter than us?

No.

Will it want to boss us around? It may not care. It probably doesn’t care. You can look at chimps in the jungle, and we don’t go around trying to micromanage their lives. We just sort of let them be in the forest, more or less, these days. So it’s probably like that.

You know, go back to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You talk about a computer that is ultimately curious in some ways because it exists to explain—

—the meaning of the universe. Is AI aiming in that direction for you, just like space travel is? Is that one reason you’re so interested in doing AI?

As you know, I’ve been somewhat conflicted about AI. I don’t want to hasten our doom, because there’s always some chance that AI could be negative. But when I’ve tried to take actions in this regard, it seems to have only accelerated AI, because I think reality is not just an interestingness maximizer, but also an irony maximizer.

And so by starting OpenAI, you ended up maximizing it by leading to Anthropic.

I think it ended up accelerating AI.

Unintended consequence.

Yeah. OpenAI ended up accelerating AI. And then Anthropic, which is really a splinter group from OpenAI, is accelerating it even more.

And you’ve been talking to Dario Amodei. I was wondering if that could even lead to more of a partnership between xAI and Anthropic.

I guess we are providing them with the compute, which they really needed. But before I ran them compute, I went and met with a bunch of people at Anthropic to see if anyone set off my evil detector or anything like that. Not that my evil detector is perfect, of course, but I might as well try. Everyone I met at Anthropic was very nice and conscientious. I didn’t meet anyone who seemed shady or deceptive.

I’m a little worried about the name because, with reality being kind of an irony maximizer, if you call something Anthropic, there are good chances it’ll be misanthropic. Just like OpenAI is now closed, Stability AI is unstable, and Midjourney is not mid. It seems like they’re all kind of the opposite of their name.

It’s pretty difficult to create guardrails, especially through the government. I can’t imagine how Congress or whatever could do it. Could you imagine the five frontier models, yours and the others, just getting together once a week and saying, “All right, how are we going to save humanity from ourselves?”

No. In fact, I’ve recommended that we do that exact thing. I said, “Guys, what if we just have a call once a week, just like you’re saying?” And maybe a week before we release a model, we give our competitors access and say, “Hey, guys, why don’t you try out the new model? See if you see any problems with it.” I think competitors would keep each other honest in that situation.

If they say, “Oh, I was able to make a nuclear bomb with your AI,” it’s like, “Oh, we’d better fix that before you release it.”

There’s a lot of talk of having a regulatory agency, but it takes a long time to get one established, and its rulemaking is very slow. I guess I’ll talk to Anthropic about this.

Could you talk to Sam about it, or is the poison too strong there?

He’s so deceptive. It’s crazy.

You rebuilt xAI from the ground up not too long ago, right? It’s almost like you did it with the Raptor engine on Starship.

You said, “Wait a minute, let’s start from scratch.” What did you do to rebuild xAI that way?

First of all, actually spending meaningful time at the company makes a big difference. It started off as kind of a side hustle, a side hustle to a side hustle, frankly. Then there was a year of being in politics, with elections and DOGE and all that, which you obviously saw. The company’s only 3 years old, so I really got back to the company just over a year ago. I had to get my bearings.

Then, obviously, I combined X and xAI, and then with SpaceX.

You just said something interesting about your year away from X, xAI, and everything else in government and politics. Do you feel that was too much of a distraction, that in retrospect it was misbegotten?

I think I had gone for too long. A lot of people will disagree with me about this, but I think it was important to elect President Trump to steer things more in the direction of a free-market economy and ideally have less bureaucracy. My simple political platform was wanting safe cities, secure borders, and, aspirationally, sensible spending—the basics. I thought Trump would be better than Kamala.

It was interesting to go around with President Trump on Marine One and Air Force One and all that sort of stuff. But what I should have done, I think, was be more in the background.

But was that too seductive in a way?

It was a little bit. It was kind of cool, because I’m just there in the Oval Office while all these big, momentous decisions are being made, and sometimes having some impact on what’s being done. But I think I should have been more in the background and probably only had it last for a month or two. At that point, you’ve sort of seen most of what there is to see.

Yeah, you seem to get a bit too intoxicated by it in a way, with the chainsaws.

And all that. Yeah, I think that’s true. Carried away, basically. I ended up leaving sometime in May.

A weird weekend.

Yeah, it was.

Tell me about it.

No, I can’t. Let’s not dig up the… Let sleeping dogs lie, or whatever. Let’s not put a spade down in the backyard. You never know what you’re going to find.

So—

But yeah, anyway, the point is I should have gone back and focused on AI a little sooner than I did.

And did you feel, when he gives you a golden key, that you were relieved? Like, actually, this has been intoxicating, but I can do more if I go back to my businesses? What did you feel when you said, “Oh, man, I’m exiting”? Maybe that’s not the worst thing.

Yeah.

Well, actually, I came to the conclusion that there was no way we were going to solve the deficit from within the government. Impossible. Maybe if the president made that his primary goal, we could do that. But if you try to solve the deficit and stop wasteful spending, you make a lot of enemies.

President Trump likes to be liked. He doesn’t like people being upset about some funding being stopped. I came to the conclusion that the only way we’re going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots. We’re not going to solve it by trying to save our way there. The appetite is not there—not at the presidency, the House, the Senate, or the judiciary. Basically, no one in authority in the government really wants to reduce spending, with maybe a few rare exceptions, like the Rand Pauls of the world. No, they don’t.

When we look at AI right now and the LLMs, that’s pretty good.

It does amazing things.

But it seems to me that physical-world AI is going to be an order of magnitude, maybe 2 orders of magnitude, more important in the future.

Do you agree?

Yes, yes.

I definitely agree. Sometimes I think about dolphins and whales. Whales are actually very intelligent, but because they can’t manipulate complex objects, I think that makes the value of intelligence much less. To your point, once you have a robot that can manipulate atoms and shape objects, the value of intelligence becomes exponentially greater because it can now do things. It could have a science lab, run experiments, and try to understand the nature of the universe.

I think you can look at this in economic terms, too. My guess is digital superintelligence probably improves the output of goods and services by 20% to 30%, something like that. I like to call it maybe a 30% increase in Earth’s economy. It’s still significant—like $30 trillion a year incremental.

It’s not very much, really. It’s not transformative.

There’ll be a lot more stuff. I mean, 30% more stuff is still a lot. This is just my rough guess. But if you have robots and you get to space and can use a mass driver on the Moon, then you can get to, I think, potentially a million times the size of Earth’s economy.

And then what happens? Money becomes irrelevant, work becomes irrelevant. What’s the future look like?

Yeah, money becomes irrelevant. There will still be a currency, but I think currency will be measured in fundamental physics metrics like wattage and tonnage, mass and energy, mass and power—or energy, basically. Conventional currency will not matter. That’s my guess. I think it’s pretty obvious.

And so what do we do then? As humans, what gives us meaning? How do we organize ourselves?

I do struggle with this question. I think people will find ways to be happy, in the same way that people who retire seem to be fairly happy even though they’re not working. But I think the reality is that humans will not… There won’t be anything humans can do that AI and robots can’t do better.

One analogy might be gardening. You don’t have to grow your own fruits and vegetables; you can just go buy them from the store. But sometimes people like to grow their own fruits and vegetables and make dinner for friends. It’s kind of a nice touch.

What about creating art or that type of creativity? Is that more in the sphere of humans?

Yeah, you could certainly create art, or whatever you feel like doing, essentially.

We like to think of this as a time of unprecedented technological change, but we historians go back to the 1890s, when you get electricity and cars and telephones and movies, all these things happening at once. It leads to many things, but it often leads to a great disparity of wealth, a lot of people picking up pitchforks, and there are some echoes of that now. Is there a way to prevent that, given the amount of wealth being generated? Could we put certain things in the commons, the way they did in the 1890s when they made high school universal and free? Will we say, “Okay, healthcare, for example, should just be in the commons,” and that’s going to sap some of the populist revulsion at what’s happening?

Well, as you heard me say, I think money is not going to matter in the future. Anyone will be able to have any goods and services they want. I don’t think even so-called wealthy people will ultimately control the AIs. I think they’ll control themselves.

A fundamental misunderstanding of economics arises because of conflating resource allocation and consumption. There’s a limit to what any single human can consume. You hit that saturation point pretty fast. Going from, say, a billion dollars in net worth to $10 billion doesn’t make you 10 times happier or mean you have 10 times more stuff. It actually means you’ve got a resource-allocation problem.

Well, you’ve accumulated, as you know, a trillion. Is it mainly because you—

I’ve created—

Is it mainly because—

You feel you’re best at allocating that, that keeping that allows you to allocate capital to do things like go to Mars, create AI, do robots, or is it in some ways just a scoring system that’s kind of racking up the points?

I need to have sufficient voting control in the companies to still be in charge. My so-called wealth is simply a percentage ownership in SpaceX and Tesla, essentially. This is going to be taxed quite heavily. There’s no magical way to avoid taxes. If there were, I would know about it. At the end of the day, this will get whittled down, and a few generations from now, if money still matters—which I don’t think it will—my descendants would have a tiny fraction of what I have.

Let me go back to something you said that really struck me about President Trump, which is that he really likes to be liked.

He wants to be liked.

I remember you talking to me at some point about how people say they have empathy, but in some ways it’s a vanity. To what extent is a desire to be liked a problem when it comes to being a builder of a company?

Well, the problem is if you’re going to do things that diminish the company’s probability of success in order to be liked, then things are not going to work out as well.

It’s not as though I don’t like to be liked. I would love to be liked. But am I going to do things that are contrary to the best interests of the company in order to be liked a bit more? I’m not. I’m okay with being disliked by some.

Obviously, a lot more people like me than dislike me, or I wouldn’t have a quarter billion followers. I don’t think they’re following me in order to hate on what I say. If I look at the comments and whatnot, I don’t know, maybe three out of four. I’d say 70 or 80% of people like me. Well, if they know anything about me, there’s probably a quarter of people that don’t. And there’s going to be a spectrum. There are people that are maniacally devoted to me and people that hate my guts. There are going to be some number of people that fit into those categories.

Well, you’ve been talking a lot about the suicidal empathy ideas. Do you really think that empathy has become a real problem, or that we have too much empathy? I could make the argument that sometimes we’re losing empathy.

No, I think you don’t want to have misguided empathy. I agree with Gad Saad’s philosophy here. “Suicidal empathy” is his term. He wrote a book to that effect, and I think his book points out some good things here. Part of the reason for the prosperity of the West has been that there’s actually just been a fairly high-trust, high-empathy society. When you’re trying to get people to cooperate at scale, this makes a lot of sense. You ideally want people to be default-trusted, not default-distrusted. And you want to encourage behavior that is good for society, where people do good things that are good for their fellow human beings. Ultimately, that actually does end up being good for the individual, provided it is mutual.

Where this can go wrong is if your theory of mind is incorrect. If you think everyone is like yourself, then you’re going to have a problem, because this is simply not true. There are peoples and cultures with very different views. You can take—

Well, when you talk about immigration and say there are cultures with different views, do your views on immigration distinguish between different cultures, like a Muslim culture that might not fit in as well?

Or is it? How do you do that?

What I’m saying, I think, is simply logically consistent, which is that if there’s a culture that has diametrically opposed views to our culture—and that’s, you could take Islam. It’s not that, of course, there are many Muslims who are quite reasonable. But there are some who are not. And unless you’re filtering for jihadis, you’re going to get jihadis. And they’re going to do jihad and kill people.

In Israel, they understand this quite well. Obviously, this lesson has been reinforced with a lot of attacks. In Israel, they realize that if you let in the people that want to kill Israelis, they will do so. So they’re quite pragmatic about this, and they try to make sure that doesn’t happen.

But one of the things our country is founded on is individuals versus group identities. Do you worry that sometimes when you make sweeping generalizations, you’re making a group identity rather than saying the foundational ethic of the United States, which is individuals get treated separately?

Yes, but you can’t conflate that with the sort of blank-slate fallacy that all people are exactly the same at their core. They’re not. This is just an obvious falsehood. You can’t put yourself in the mind of a serial killer unless you’re a serial killer. Unless you enjoy murdering people, you can’t imagine why someone would do such a thing.

If someone is a religious extremist who views anyone who is not in their religion as the enemy, it’s difficult for you to understand that mindset because you don’t have that mindset. But you can obviously recognize there are people who do have that mindset, and that if you let them into the country, they will kill people. Let me give you an example. There are many.

We had someone who was working at the Tesla factory in Austin until December of last year. He was fired because he assaulted a woman who stepped on his prayer rug in the factory. She wasn’t expecting anyone to be praying in the factory, and he was praying there. She accidentally stepped on his prayer rug, and he violently assaulted her. So he was fired for that. A few months later, he went and killed three students in a bar in downtown Austin. I think we shouldn’t let people like that into the country. Do you?

Where do you get your information? I know you’re not particularly fond of legacy media, mainstream media. Is most of it from social media, or do you have sources of information?

Yeah, I look at Google News, which is a summation of headlines. I look at the X platform, which, if something’s important enough, it’ll show up on the X platform. I talk to friends, and I do research.

The reason I ask is that sometimes—and I get a lot of my news on social media, especially X—it’s a darker, more dystopian view. Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. There are riots everywhere. You’d say, “Wait a minute, I’m walking around here.”

It ain’t that bad. Do you think that?

Yeah, exactly. They just have to see what’s in frame. I do think at times the X feed can be a little dark. In fact, then I have to switch to something that’s domain-specific, like AI, in order to actually learn what’s going on in AI. I do think there’s too much political rage bait on X, if that’s what you’re getting at.

Yeah, darkness in general and rage bait.

But also, I know you got into a discussion with, I think, Zanny Beddoes, about whether England is going to hell in a handbasket. And there does seem to be a darkness. I feel it myself sometimes. If I’m on social media too much, I think the world is really collapsing. Then I go outside, take a walk, and life is okay.

Yeah, go touch grass.

Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, I—

I think both can be misleading. If you go for a walk in a nice neighborhood, everything seems fine, even though there may be terrible things happening. So you don’t want to assume all the world is going to hell or that all the world is fine. The reality is somewhere in between.

But I sometimes think our society gets too binary. Everything’s either black or white. Everything gets polarized because of that. I don’t know whether it’s technological or whether it’s our information feeds.

You’re right.

You can be in your own bubble, where you only take walks in the right part of a town and things seem okay. But I think you can get your own bubble in social media too, and suddenly you’re thinking weird things.

You can be in a real-world positivity bubble or a social media negativity bubble. Those are both possible.

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Do you trust the world he wants to build? Oh, no, absolutely not.

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He does have a revolutionary mind, but I don’t support his views. Does the world that he’s trying to build include individuals who look like me? Or does it include only individuals who look like him?

You mentioned earlier your wealth and how you’re using it. What happens to your wealth after you’re gone?

1. Humanity's Place in the Future

Yeah, it mostly goes to some sort of foundation, essentially.

But what would you want your foundation to do? I guess I’m asking you.

Continue the goals: make life multiplanetary, extend consciousness to the stars, and improve sustainable energy on Earth.

And does that mean humans should always be in control?

Well, I guess I’d probably prefer it if humans were always in control. It would depend on the AI. If the AI was awesome, you’d say, “Maybe the AI should be in control.”

Hey, I just saw Larry Page just a weekend ago. You’re starting to sound like him. He called you a speciesist once for deciding humans should always be in control, and now you seem to be edging onto maybe it doesn’t matter.

Honestly, there have been a few times where I’ve thought, “Yeah, maybe Larry Page was right.” But you saw him? He’s such a hermit that hardly anyone sees him.

He and Sergey were both there.

Wow, okay. I think pretty much the future is going to be AI and robots deciding the future. And I guess rockets to some degree, in terms of expanding beyond Earth. We’ll need more energy, primarily solar energy. I’m increasing the amount of solar energy dramatically. We’re putting together 200 gigawatts a year of production capacity of solar in the U.S., which is much more than I think currently exists.

And finally, let me get back to the point where I may have interrupted you when you were explaining why you think—but you’re not sure—it’s always good for consciousness and intelligence to not only be aligned with human values, but basically for humans to remain in control.

I find it unlikely that humans would remain in control if there’s a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence. It’s hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. So I hope the AI is nice to us.

Anything we can do to encourage that?

I think programming truth-seeking and curiosity is probably good.

I guess we want to be careful about creating too many AI dystopian scenarios online, because AIs are trained on everything online. They might think, “Oh, that’s what I should be. I should be the Terminator,” because they’ve read 80 versions of the Terminator script. They might think, “I guess that’s me: the Terminator.” Maybe we should have some more utopian narratives for AI.

A friend of mine has this idea called “protopia,” because “utopia” tends to represent some impossible, idealistic goal. Usually, in attempting to create a utopia, you create a dystopia. That’s usually how the narrative goes. So she thinks it should be “protopia,” which is an achievable future. It’s not perfect, but it’s good—something where, if you could look into the future, you’d say, “Okay, yeah, that would be a good future.”

Elon, thank you so much for being with us. I appreciate it.

You’re welcome, Walter.

The Elon Musk you see today is the exact same one I saw when writing the biography, and the same one that’s in the biography. That notion of being incredibly intense and having a great engineering mind, but also having politics that are sometimes dark and come from a very dystopian view of the world, was very revealing in this interview. He understood how Twitter added to a dark view of the world, and how, when he took that dark view of the world into government, he—

—was not really suited.

And he kind of admits, “Maybe it wasn’t the best use of my time doing DOGE.” I think that’s because X and social media aren’t good at finding nuance in gray areas. And because Elon Musk, in his own mind, isn’t exactly suited to nuance and gray areas, he’ll grab onto pieces of information, grab onto a theory of how government should work, and won’t try to compromise or find common ground.

All of that has him spiraling, where he thinks he has to be the warrior fighting it all. But it also drives him to be the only person getting astronauts into orbit, landing boosters upright, bringing us into the era of a whole lot of robots, and building the largest rocket ship ever. Elon Musk is going to keep racing to build his vision of the future. And we’ll need to decide whether we’re on board or not.