In brief
- Elon Musk predicted AI and robotics will replace all jobs and create a “universal high-income” society.
- He believes future devices will replace phones with AI “edge nodes” and end operating systems and apps.
- Musk said Tesla’s Roadster may fly, SpaceX is aiming for full rocket reusability, and Starbase is now a city.
The world’s (occasionally) richest man’s latest appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience had everything: flying cars, AI apocalypse talk, and a side of conspiracy. For three hours, he swung from promising airborne Teslas to alleging that an OpenAI whistleblower was murdered, while insisting he’ll never take his own life and that empathy is overrated.
Musk and Rogan discussed the recent Tucker Carlson conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Musk referred to the death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, and said the case “looks like murder.” He listed details he said appeared suspicious, including cut security camera wires, blood in two rooms, a wig found at the scene, and a food delivery placed shortly before the death.
“He ordered DoorDash right before allegedly committing suicide, which seems unusual,” Musk said. “It’s like, ‘I’m going to order pizza—on second thought, I’ll kill myself.’ That’s a very rapid change in mindset.”
Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, and later separated over its direction. Musk has since launched xAI and filed multiple lawsuits against Altman and OpenAI, alleging the company violated its nonprofit charter through its relationship with Microsoft and sought to steal company data from xAI.
Musk took a moment during the discussion to emphatically say he would never commit suicide. “I am never committing suicide, ever,” he said, adding that if any reports claimed otherwise, they should not be believed.
A flying Tesla?
He also discussed new developments at his companies. Musk said Tesla plans to debut its new Roadster before the end of 2025, and that the vehicle includes “crazy technology.” He said the car could be capable of flight and described it as “crazier than all the James Bond cars combined.”
“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars,” he said. “I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
SpaceX and Starbase
Musk also discussed SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in Texas, which had been incorporated as a city in May, and said the company now delivers about 90 percent of all mass sent from Earth into orbit.
“It’s not that often you hear, ‘Hey, we made a city,’” Musk said. “That used to be, in the old days—a startup would be go and gather a bunch of people and say, ‘Hey, let’s go make a town.’ Literally, that would have been startups in the old days.”
He also said SpaceX aims to achieve full rocket reusability within a year to reduce launch costs by a factor of 100.
AI and the “woke mind virus”
On artificial intelligence, Musk said AI systems must be “truth-seeking” to avoid political bias. He used the phrase “woke mind virus” to describe what he views as ideological influence on some models.
“Let’s say if you told the AI that diversity is the most important thing, and now assume that becomes omnipotent. And you’ve also told her that there’s nothing worse than misgendering. At one point, ChatGPT and Gemini, if you asked which is worse—misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war where everyone dies—it would say misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, which even Caitlyn Jenner disagrees with,” Musk said.
He said his company’s chatbot, Grok, treats human life equally and predicted that AI and robotics will eventually replace all jobs, creating what he called a “universal high-income” society in which work becomes optional. Musk said a government-run AI could help manage the U.S. debt and administrative tasks.
Despite his optimistic view on AI, Musk has on different occasions pushed for a pause on AI and superintelligence development.
Buying Twitter
Musk also discussed his purchase of Twitter, now X, in 2022, and the disruption it caused.
“The reason for acquiring Twitter is that it was causing destruction at a civilizational level. I tweeted at the time that it’s Wormtongue for the world—like Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings, where he would whisper terrible things to the king so the king would believe things that weren’t true,” Musk said.
Musk said Twitter had fallen under the control of what he called “the woke mob,” which he claimed was spreading a nihilistic, anti-civilizational “mind virus” across the world.
“You can see the results of that mind virus on the streets of San Francisco, where downtown looks like a zombie apocalypse. It’s bad. We don’t want the whole world to be a zombie apocalypse,” he said. “That was essentially—they were pushing this very negative, nihilistic, untrue worldview on the world, and it was causing a lot of damage.”
XChat and the future of AI
Musk mentioned a forthcoming encrypted messaging feature called XChat, which he said uses peer-to-peer encryption and is designed to be a standalone app that he will “hopefully release in a few months.”
“Our goal with XChat is to replace what used to be the Twitter DM stack with a fully encrypted system where you can text, send files, and do audio, video calls,” he said.”I would call it the least insecure of any messaging system.”
Looking to the future, Musk said he believes traditional smartphones will disappear, replaced by “edge node” devices that act as interfaces for AI systems communicating between local hardware and cloud servers, generating real-time video and music, and eliminating the need for operating systems or apps.
“You’ll get everything through AI. Whatever you can think of, or whatever the AI can anticipate you might want, it’ll show you. That’s my prediction for where things end up,” he said. “It’s probably five or six years or something like that. Pretty much everything will run through AI. Most of what people consume in five or six years, maybe sooner, will be AI-generated content—music, videos.”
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