Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Well, Musk has always been a bit of a doomer in the sense that he thinks AI could prevent the end of humanity.
This is the FT's San Francisco bureau chief, Stephen Morris, talking about Elon Musk.
He's a big science fiction fan. He always references Ian Banks' culture novels as kind of the utopian idea of the future of AI, where machines create super abundance and the rest of the humans just live for parties. But he also likes to talk about Terminator, the flip side, Skynet, you know, deciding that the easiest way to prolong its existence is by removing humanity.
And he uses these kind of pop culture science fiction references a lot.
Musk has been warning about the dangers of AI for years. But at the same time, despite those fears, he's been determined to be a central player in the creation of the technology. He was an early investor in Demis Hassavis' DeepMind and one of the original founders of OpenAI.
With Musk, there's always an inherent contradiction. I was speaking with Sebastian Malaby, who has written a book, book about Demis Hassabis. And I said, you know, you've spoken to Elon a lot, you know, Demis, if Musk is so worried about AI, like why is he right out there on the frontier trying to build one of the biggest, most dangerous models?
And he said, well, as far as I can tell, like Elon is both terrified of this technology, but also terrified about not being in the vanguard of the next big thing. You know, so it was electric cars, it was autonomy, it's space flight rockets. AI is the next frontier and Musk just cannot bear to like not be there himself.
Elon Musk was quick to recognize the significance of AI, but he always seemed to find a way of missing out. By the time ChatGPT came along, DeepMind had long been sold to Google, Sam Altman was the boss of OpenAI, and Musk was out in the cold. But now he has his own AI lab, XAI, part of his giant SpaceX company, which Musk is hoping to take public in the largest IPO in history.
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Chapter 2: What is Elon Musk's relationship with AI?
This is Tectonic from the Financial Times. I'm Murad Ahmed, the FT's technology news editor. A handful of Silicon Valley companies are vying to lead the world in artificial intelligence. In this season, I'm talking to the FT's expert tech reporters about each of them. In this episode, XAI, SpaceX, and Elon Musk.
To talk about Elon Musk and XAI, I spoke to Stephen Morris and to Hannah Murphy, who writes about technology for the FT in San Francisco. You'll hear from her in a moment, but first I wanted Stephen to recap a bit of Musk's history with AI, starting with a famous debate he once had with Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, at a party back in 2015.
Yeah, it's his birthday. I think it's his 44th birthday party. His then wife, I think Tallulah Riley, the actress, had organized it for him. And he was having a debate, a late night debate around a fire pit with Larry Page, as you said, one of the co-founders of Google. Apparently, Larry Page has some disorder of his throat or vocal cords, which means he has to whisper very quietly.
And everyone at the party was trying to listen into this increasingly frenetic debate about the future of AI. And the way that Musk tells the story is that essentially Larry Page wanted to bring about the AI singularity and merge AI technology with humans to create, you know, not Androids. I forget what a human merged with a machine is called. Cyborg? Cyborgs.
And Elon Musk didn't like the idea of this at all. He is all about the human, which is probably why he has so many children. And he doesn't want them to be merged with AI and for humanity to essentially lose part of itself. So they start arguing more and more. And eventually Larry Page, according to Elon Musk, calls him a speciesist.
which means he's somebody that prioritizes this human over the machine. And Elon Musk goes, well, of course I do. And after this, they were no longer on speaking terms. And Elon Musk concluded from this exchange that Google was a dangerous company to have control of AI technology. And right from the beginning, it looked like this was going to be the default position.
Google had more money than anyone to invest in it. It bought the leading lab, DeepMind, and that led at least in Elon Musk's telling, is part of the reason why he determined to try and build all of these rival efforts, whether it's through Tesla, whether it's OpenAI, or whether it's now XAI, because he just doesn't trust Google.
And he's been repeatedly frustrated in his efforts to do things in AI. He was an early investor in DeepMind, and then it was sold to Google. Which he tried to block. And he was a co-founder of OpenAI, which he explicitly set up to compete with Google and maybe develop AI with more attention paid to the potential risks. Obviously, OpenAI went on to be a big deal.
So how come he wasn't part of that?
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Chapter 3: How did Musk's early investments shape his AI ambitions?
So they had a big argument. When he couldn't get control, they essentially refused to accede to any of his demands, and he left the board, I think, in early 2018.
And OpenAI went on to launch ChatGPT and kickstart the- Four years later, so it took a while. The AI revolution. And so how does Musk respond to the rise of ChatGPT?
Well, he's obviously very annoyed. He's a competitive person and, you know, he wants to get back in the game however he can. So he founds his own company, which he calls XAI. Almost everything in the Musk world has an X in it. Hannah and I have written a number of stories kind of chronicling, you know, the brutality of working for Elon Musk as he fights to catch up rivals in AI.
Yeah, let's talk about that. So Musk now has his own AI lab called XAI. It's got its own chatbot called Grok, and he appears to want to directly compete with the likes of Google and OpenAI. But the company seems to have a very different culture to other AI labs, and there have been a few controversies and problems. Hannah, you've also covered Musk over the years. What's going on?
I mean, it's hard for Stephen and I because how many times can you write the same story that there's been a reshuffle in the executive rankings that a huge number of people have left? I mean, it's the same story every couple of months. You'll speak to AI staff
at X and XAI who'll tell you that they will learn that they are supposed to do a product release about a new product they haven't really heard much about on Twitter by Musk posting it on Twitter, not even inside the company being told or given a clear timeline. And I think...
Labs like OpenAI and DeepMind have for years been slowly, steadily, consistently building up processes, a tech stack around rolling out these models that works. And Elon himself has said he doesn't believe in research. The term researcher, he thinks that's a relic and you should all be engineers working on the product now.
But that is at odds with some of the more sort of academic bent of technology. cutting-edge frontier breakthroughs. And then you also have the sort of organizational chaos, and then you have Musk saying that Grok itself has to embody his free speech ideals. I asked Grok itself if it was behind. In fact, I said, why is Grok behind the other models?
And it pushed back on this and said it wasn't meaningfully behind. Oh, really? But then it added... Grok trades some, in quotes, safe slash polished traits for maximum truth-seeking, real-time knowledge, and less refusal. So this is the idea that the model shouldn't be moralizing or paternalistic, and it should be as close to totally freewheeling. I think there's an unhinged mode, as it's called.
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Chapter 4: What challenges has Musk faced in the AI landscape?
these crises forward by, in the case of the non-consensual imagery, Musk had tweeted a deep fake of himself in a bikini and then suddenly hundreds of other people tried to do similar.
He'd also, on the Mecca Hitler piece, both cases sort of he, the man, spurring on this crisis, which then becomes a huge distraction and presumably internally having to deal with regulators, press, et cetera, knocking at your door.
So we should say that Elon Musk has said subsequently that any use of grok to create illegal content is, well, illegal, and therefore people are going to have to be responsible for that, and he doesn't condone that at all. But this issue that you bring up, Hannah, has shown, you know, there are so many of these conflicting things about him.
He wants to be a free speech absolutionist and be at the forefront of of the AI race and push people incredibly hard, but also keep all the talent with him. Do you get the sense, you know, is there an audience for what Grok is becoming? Is there a way of turning this into a viable business?
I think for me, a signal was last week speaking to someone, a source, and we were talking about Meta and they noted that while Meta has been trying to catch up, it's still a little bit behind OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, but it's made some traction recently. And they were saying Elon simply has not. It's rare to hear someone say that Mark is doing better than Elon.
And this tells me that, you know, Elon really is beginning to trail in this respect. I mean, there will always be Elon-obsessed Twitter fans and users who will, I'm sure, use Grok. Sometimes I will use it for research because it is good at scouring Twitter itself for anything people have said. But it's not in areas like coding, like perhaps...
you know, having particular edges in particular areas with the cursor acquisition as a bit of an acknowledgement that it is behind in a certain area. And I don't think we have a very clear sense of exactly what is the consumer and or enterprise target here.
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Chapter 5: What role does SpaceX play in Musk's AI strategy?
Stephen, very briefly, what's the cursor acquisition for those uninitiated?
So Cursor was an AI startup that specialized in coding, which is the most persuasive, most lucrative business case for AI so far. Musk always said that the grok was going to be hyper-focused on coding and was going to catch up and then lead the frontier. This hasn't happened. So he's turned to Cursor. First, he hired a couple of their senior staff to turbocharge his own efforts.
He then dispensed with, I think, all seven of his co-founders at XAI, growing frustrated with their performance or them growing frustrated with his demands. He's then got an option to buy this startup cursor for $60 billion, which is a huge increase in its valuation.
And as Hannah said, you don't buy a rival coding business for $60 billion if you think your own internal efforts are going well, do you?
So Musk is facing a lot of challenges with his AI business. We've had controversies with Grok, and he's struggling to compete, particularly when it comes to the business cases for generative AI like coding. But there's one massive event that we're expecting this year that could change everything. Because XAI is now part of Musk's other company, SpaceX.
And SpaceX is going public this year in what's expected to be the biggest IPO in history. So after the break, we'll talk about what that might mean for his AI ambitions. Criticize me if I'm doing a really bad job. I have no problem with that. But not for being a woman. That's just crazy.
That's Amanda Blank, the CEO of Aviva, on what she did when her own shareholders crossed the line. Every episode of Executive Decisions goes inside the moments that define a leader's career. Executive Decisions with me, Steve Sedgwick. Listen and watch now wherever you get your podcasts.
So look, Musk, the man of many contradictions here, we have told a story largely of woe that he has constantly had the vision to know that AI was going to be a really fundamental, important technology. Try to get in. on it. Maybe some personal failings have led to him not being able to really kick on.
And yet, he's the world's richest man who's on the verge of his greatest ever payday with the SpaceX IPO, which looks like it's going to be massive. And XAI is part of SpaceX now. How to explain all of that, Stephen? You wrote a great piece looking at what the SpaceX IPO means. Just talk us through how massive it's going to be and what Musk is trying to get out of it.
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Chapter 6: How does Musk's xAI compare to competitors like OpenAI?
We're building an even bigger rocket, which can send even bigger Starlink satellites up. And this interconnected cluster of telco technology will eventually be turned into giant floating data centers that don't need to be cooled down because obviously space is very cold. Don't need to pay for energy because the sun is so much stronger outside of the atmosphere.
So that's kind of like the optimistic ball case. You know, if you're looking at the bear case, You know, he hasn't actually got the Starship rocket to work yet without either failing or exploding. Nobody quite knows how to make a data center. One of the biggest problems is keeping all of these chips in a big cluster functional.
If you have to send up an astronaut or a robot up there to fix it in space, that seems to me to be slightly more difficult than sending somebody in a hard hat into a data center. And his competitors for once have far deeper pockets. Musk is severely outgunned on multiple fronts.
And whilst we haven't even had the SpaceX IPO, which is set to raise somewhere between 50 and 90 billion at a valuation of 1.75 trillion, people are already talking about the eventual merger of Tesla, which is a $1.4 trillion company with SpaceX, which would then put together an entity, which if you believe the valuation would fit very nicely into the top five companies in the world.
So what we're describing here with Elon Musk is somebody who's spread quite thin. He wants to run a space exploration company, a electric car company, a humanoid robot company. He wants to build a free speech social media group that dominates all others. And he also wants to conquer AI. Hannah, you've watched Musk try and run multiple companies at once.
How good is he at juggling all these balls all at the same time?
I feel like to compare him as I tend to these days to Mark Zuckerberg, the Mark Zuckerberg trope is that when he fixates on something, it's like the eye of Sauron and he will have an obsession, one obsession at a time. And at the moment for Mark Zuckerberg, it is AI. And I think it is actually fairly similar with Musk. From where I sit, I think X is getting a much less airtime.
There was a year or two around the takeover where he was obsessed with it. And then there was the sort of the Trump campaigning where he was very, very active and the company itself was getting a lot of attention and resources. And now it feels like that's sort of falling by the wayside. And it feels like he's definitely moved into a more expansive extraterrestrial, as Stephen says place.
moment where he's trying to elevate his pitch beyond just a consumer enterprise AI.
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