Elon Musk has admitted he became too consumed by politics during his volatile alliance with Donald Trump and his brief appointment as the president’s financial axman, running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).
The world’s richest person, and briefly its first trillionaire after his SpaceX company floated on the New York stock exchange in June, made the confession in a wide-ranging interview with the Economist published on Thursday. He shared his positions on subjects from foreign wars to AI, and made a number of eye-opening predictions for the future.
“I got carried away, frankly,” Musk said of his relationship with the president, whom he helped get elected in 2024 with $200m in financial backing, then served during his controversial tenure as head of Doge, overseeing $150bn in “harmful” budget cuts and forcing tens of thousands of people out of federal jobs.
The owner of Tesla did not expand on the statement, but appeared cognizant of the impact of his dalliance with the levers of power in Washington DC.
In December, he offered in a podcast with Katie Miller, wife of Trump’s White House adviser Stephen Miller, that his wrecking-ball approach to the federal government had been only partially successful, and that given the opportunity he probably wouldn’t do it again.
“I think instead of doing Doge, I would have basically worked on my companies,” he said at the time.
Talking to the Economist, however, he appeared to relish the attention his political involvement had garnered, and the influence he believed he exerted. “People don’t realize that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he said, the outlet referring to Musk – at least in his own mind – as a modern-day Cassandra.
The interview, a 90-minute conversation for the publication’s video platform The Insider, recorded at a Tesla factory in Texas, was Musk’s first since the SpaceX flotation, in which his personal wealth briefly topped $1.25tn before dropping back to a relatively penurious $750bn.
He reflected on moving from “exhilaration to terror” in a single day, but was not referring to the SpaceX share price. Instead, he was talking about artificial intelligence, which he believes will ultimately render work by humans “optional”.
AI systems and robots will eventually handle most digital and physical jobs, he said, and the merger of his own AI venture with SpaceX will allow him to develop systems to perform cognitive tasks such as software programming while Tesla manufactures humanoids.
Musk, the Economist said, plans to power his AI venture with datacenters in space, which experts have warned will be “catastrophic” for Earth.
Within five years, Musk said, AI intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within 10 years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless.
It was, however, Musk’s political views, and predictions, that were…
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