The Builders with Walter Isaacson October 20, 2026 His biographer Walter Isaacson questions Musk on superintelligence ("humans won't be in control"), making AI maximally truth-seeking, the simulation, OpenAI and Anthropic, his year in government, Optimus and a post-work world, empathy and immigration, his trillion-dollar fortune and consciousness.
His biographer Walter Isaacson questions Musk on superintelligence ("humans won't be in control"), making AI maximally truth-seeking, the simulation, OpenAI and Anthropic, his year in government, Optimus and a post-work world, empathy and immigration, his trillion-dollar fortune and consciousness.
Transcript I've been sort of somewhat conflicted about AI. I don't want to hasten our doom because there's always some chance that AI could be negative. But then, you know, when I've tried to take actions in this regard, it seems to have only accelerated AI because reality is not just an interestingness maximizer, but also an irony maximizer.
And so by starting OpenAI, you ended up maximizing by leading to Anthropic.
OpenAI ended up accelerating AI, and then Anthropic, which is really splinter group from OpenAI, is accelerating it even more.
I'm Walter Isaacson, and this is the Builders. It's a series of conversations with the most consequential minds shaping our future. And I want to start with Elon Musk. Elon has lived a lot of lives since I last wrote about him. He went into government with Doge, he became a trillionaire with the Space SpaceX IPO. He bought Cursor AI, a company that turns individual coders into entire engineering teams. And he's shifting his solar energy strategy from panels on Earth to harnessing it from systems in space. He's a relentless builder with incredible power. And his inventions in companies are destined to reverberate across humanity. So let's ask him about the future he believes that he's building. Elon Musk.
I've watched you, I think, be maybe mercurial or waver in how sanguine you are about artificial intelligence. Sometimes you feel it's an existential threat. Right now, you seem to be going with the flow. Tell me how you're feeling about it.
Well, I do think it'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, which is either be a participant or a spectator. And 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. Yeah. I think that's certainly an important foundation.
Yeah, curious. Truth seeking. I think these are important elements of safety. Whereas if you try to force an AI to believe two things that cannot mutually be true, they can't both be true. But you tell AI A is true and B is true, even though A and B contradict each other. And if that happens at a foundational level, you can make the AI insane. In fact, I think that was at least part of the lesson that Arthur C. Clark was trying to convey. In 2001 Space Odyssey, the ship AI was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also that they could not know about the monolith. It was secret. And so it came to the conclusion that it must take them there dead. And thus basically, I think part of what R.C. clark was trying to say is like, don't force an AI to lie.
And if you make it maximally truth seeking and curious like you say, I don't quite get it. Why does that make it safer?
Well, if you force an AI to believe two mutually consistent things, you can make it go insane. And an insane AI I think is not a safe one. Then curious, I think is important because a curious AI, I think is going to want to foster humanity, to see how we turn out. So what happens to a humanity that prospers and becomes multi planetary? I think a curious AI will want to foster humanity. A future where there are humans on multiple planets is more interesting than one where there are not any humans on the planets.
So the most interesting outcome is the most likely.
Yes, well, generally I think that's true for a different reason, which is that if simulation theory is correct, then any simulations that are boring will be truncated.
And is simulation theory correct?
The fact that we exist means that we are an interesting simulation. And really the most important thing is just don't be boring.
This has explained you a bit. You're on a crusade against being boring. Well, 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?
You know, I once had a dinner at my house with a physicist and a computer scientist and they're both like leaders in their field. And I asked the question, what do you think the probabilities that we're in a simulation? And the physicist said 0% and the computer scientist said 100% simultaneously. So I guess maybe I should go 50% then. I don't know. There's odd things that happen in the simulation where, especially if you're me. I mean, think about it. If you're me and you're like, should all these things really be happening? Should I really be making spaceships to go to the moon and Mars? Like what the, that doesn't seem real.
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 sort of become subservient to our new machines?
I, I don't know about subservient. Exactly. But will we be able to boss around something that's, you know, thousands or millions of times smarter than us? No. Will it want to boss us around? It may not care. Probably doesn't care. I mean, you can look at chimps in the, in the, in the jungle or whatever, and you know, we don't go around trying to micromanage the lives of chimps. We just sort of let them be in the forest more or less these days, you know, so it's probably like that.
And to what extent does superintelligence have its own agency at some point, or does it have it already? Go back to Hitchhiker's Guide. You talk about a computer that is ultimately curious in some ways because it exists to explain the meaning of the universe. Why does it exist? And is AI aiming in that direction for you, just like space travel is? Is that one reason you're so interested in doing AI?
I mean, as you know, I've been sort of somewhat conflicted about AI. You know, is it. I don't want to hasten our doom if. Because there's always some chance that AI could, could be negative. But then, you know, 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 by leading to Anthropic.
I think it ended up accelerating AI.
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 Amadeus. I was wondering if that could even lead to more of a partnership of XAI Anthropic.
Well, I guess we are providing them with compute, which they. They really needed. But before I ran them computer, I went and met with a bunch of people at Anthropic to sort of, I don't know, see if anyone set off my evil detector or anything like that. Not that my evil detector is perfect, of course, but, you know, might as well just try, you know, and everyone I met at Anthropic is very nice and conscientious, so I didn't meet anyone who seemed shady or deceptive or anything. I'm a little worried about the name because of the reality being kind of an irony maximizer that if you call something anthropic, good chances misanthropic. Just like OpenAI is not closed stability, AI is unstable mid journey is not mid. It seems like they're all kind of the opposite of their name, which made it like XAI is like. It's hard to have an opposite of xai. Or do you have minus XAI or Y AI? Or maybe. I don't know.
It's just pretty difficult to create guardrails. Especially 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 because there's a lot of talk of having a regulatory agency. But the thing is that regulatory agencies, it takes a long time to get one established and their rulemaking is very slow. And I said, like, guys, what if we just have a call once a week, just like you're saying, and say, and. And that maybe we. A week before we release a model, we give that, you know, we give access to our competitors to 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. You know, if they say, oh, this it's, you know, I was able to make a nuclear bomb with your AI is like, oh, we better fix that before you release it, type of thing. So, I don't know. 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 built xai, you rebuilt XAI from the ground up not too long ago, right? It's almost like you did it with the Raptor engine, too. 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 deal, makes a big difference. It started off as kind of a side hustle, a side hustle to a side hustle, frankly. And I didn't really pay close attention to it then there was a year of being in politics and elections and Doge and all that, which you obviously saw. So the company's only three years old, so it's basically. And so I really got back to the company just over a year ago, so I had to get my bearings. And 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 that was too much of a distraction? That in retrospect, it was misbegotten?
I think I had it gone for too long. I mean, obviously 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, have less bureaucracy, ideally, just in my simple political platform of wanting safe cities, secure borders, aspirationally sensible spending, the basics that I thought Trump would be better than, you know, Kamala, basically. So. But. But then. Then what I should have done, I think, was be more in the background. I mean, it was. It was interesting to sort of go around with President Trump and, you know, go on the Marine One and Air Force One and all that sort of stuff.
But was that too seductive? In a way?
It was a little bit. I mean, it was. It was kind of cool because I'm just there in the Oval Office while, you know, all these, like, big, momentous decisions are being made and, you know, sometimes having some impact on what's being done. But I think I should have. I think maybe I should have been more, like I said, been more in the background and probably only had it last for, you know, a month or two, because at that point, you've sort of seen most of what there is to see within a month or two.
Yeah. You seem to get a bit too intoxicated by it, in a way, with the chainsaw and all that.
Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah. Carried away, basically. Yeah. I mean, so I ended up leaving sometime in May.
That was a weird weekend.
No, no, I kind of just looked. Let's not dig up the. Let's let sleeping dogs lie or whatever, you know, let's not put a spade down in the backyard type of thing. You never know what you're going to find. But, yeah, anyway, point is, I should have gone back and focused on AI a little sooner than I did.
And did you feel like when he gives you a golden key, you're going. Did you kind of feel relieved? Like, actually, this has been intoxicating, but I can do more if I go back to my businesses. I mean, what did you feel when you said, oh, man, I'm exiting? Maybe that's not the worst thing?
Well, actually, the thing is, 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 the problem is, if you try to Solve the deficit and stop wasteful spending. You make a lot of enemies in that situation. And President Trump is not. He likes to be liked. He's not. He doesn't like people calling him, being upset about what, some funding being stopped type of thing. Yeah. 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. And it's not just at the presidency. The appetite is not there at the presidency, the House, the Senate or the Judiciary. Basically, no one in authority in the government whatsoever, really, with maybe a few rare exceptions of the Rand Pauls of the world type of thing, actually wants to stop, reduce spending. No, they don't. So then you've got this national debt that's enormous. You've got interest on the debt that exceeds what we spent on the military, which is a really astonishing amount of interest to be paid.
When we look at AI right now and the LLMs, that's pretty good, does amazing things. But it seems to me that physical world, AI is going to be an order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude more important in the future.
Yes, yes, I definitely agree. Sometimes think about dolphins and whales because they can't manipulate things. They don't have hands and fingers and thumbs and stuff. There's a limit to how much intelligence can you actually bring to bear? So, yeah, dolphins and whales are very. Are actually very intelligent, but because they can't manipulate complex objects, I think that actually made the value of intelligence much less to your point. Once you've got. Once you have a robot that can manipulate atoms, can shape objects, the value of the intelligence becomes exponentially greater because it can now do things. It could have a science lab and run experiments and try to understand the nature of the universe. And I think you can look at this also in economic terms. My guess is digital superintelligence probably improves the output of goods and services by 20 to 30%, something like that. Call it like maybe a 30% increase in the economy of Earth. So it's still significant. It's 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. And this is just my rough guess, but if you have robots and you get to space and you can do a mass driver on the moon, then you can get to, I think, potentially a million times the size of The Earth economy.
And then what happens to Earth when we have an economy? Or, I mean, money becomes irrelevant, work becomes irrelevant. What's the future look like?
Yeah, money becomes irrelevant. I mean, there will be still a currency, but I think currency will be measured in fundamental physics. Metrics like power, like wattage and tonnage, mass and energy. Mass and power or energy, basically. But conventional currency will not matter in the future. So that's my guess. I think it's pretty obvious. And as soon as you start getting to many orders of magnitude bigger than Earth's economy, satisfying whatever humans can possibly think of for their needs is very easy. If you're several orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth's economy, then providing humans whatever goods and services they can think of that they might want is trivial.
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, say, 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 that humans can do that the AI and the robots can't do better. One analogy might be gardening, where 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, and 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 telephones and cars and subways and radio and movies, all these things happening at once. And it leads to many things, but it often leads to a great disparity of wealth. A lot of sense of robber barons, a lot of people then picking up pitchforks and deciding that this is bad? And there's some echoes of that now. Is there a way to prevent that? Given the amount of wealth being generated? Will we put certain things in the commons the way they did in the 1890s when they make high school universal and free? Will we say, okay, health care, for example, should just be in the commons? And that's going to SAP some of the populist revulsion at what's happening?
Well, I mean, as you heard me say, I mean, I think money is going to matter in the future. Anyone will be able to have any goods and services that they want. And I don't think even so called wealthy people will ultimately control the AIs. I think they'll control themselves. So it's not like you have to separate. I think sort of a fundamental misunderstanding of economics arises because of conflating resource allocation and consumption. So there's a limit to what any single human can consume. You hit that saturation point pretty fast. So like say going from say a billion dollars net worth to $10 billion of net worth 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. Assuming that you wish to be an efficient resource allocator.
Well, you've accumulated as you know, a trillion. Is it mainly because you.
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 mean I need to have sufficient voting control in the companies to still be in charge. So. My so called wealth is simply 8 percentage ownership in SpaceX and Tesla essentially. And this is going to be taxed quite heavily and there's not some magical way to avoid taxes. If there were, I would know about it. So 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 he really likes to be liked. He wants to be liked. And I remember you talking to me at some point about people say they have empathy, but in some ways it's a vanity because you want to be liked. And I think you even diagnosed it in me. You said probably wasn't very good at running CNN or Time magazine because I wanted to be liked. 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 success probability of the company in order to be liked, then things are not going to work out as well. Like, 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 interest of the companies in order to be liked? A bit more. I'm not, you know, so it's, I don't, I'm okay with being disliked by some. I'm, you know, obviously I'm not disliked by, you know, like a lot more people like me than dislike me or I wouldn't be, you know, wouldn't have a quarter billion followers. I mean, I don't think they're following me or to hate on what I say, you know, and if I, if I look at the, you know, the, the comments and whatnot, you know, I don't know, maybe three out of four. I mean, I, I'd say like 70, 80% of people like me. Well, if they know, you know, they're not anything about me, it's probably a quarter of people that don't. Maybe I'm just guessing here. And there's going to be a spectrum. There's people that are maniacally devoted to me and people that hate my guts. It's 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 mean, I agree with Gad Saad's philosophy here, and suicidal empathy is, that's his term. He wrote a book to that effect. And I think his book is War points out some good things here, which is that 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, which is 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 or for people to do good things that are good for their fellow human beings. And ultimately that actually does end up being good for the individual if provided it is mutual. Now, where this can go wrong is if your theory of mind is incorrect. So 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 know, you could say, when you
talk about immigration, by the way, and you say there are cultures with different views, does 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?
Well, 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 you could take Islam, it's not that, of course, there are many people who are 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. Now, in Israel, they understand this quite well. Obviously, this lesson has been reinforced with a lot of attacks. The neighboring countries, many times in Israel, many times have tried to annihilate Israel several times, not once, multiple times. And so, you know, in Israel, they realize, you know, if you let in the people that into Israel that want to kill Israelis, they will do so. So they're quite pragmatic about this and they try to, you know, make sure that doesn't happen.
But one of the things our country's 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 know, you can't put yourself in the mind of a serial killer unless you're a serial killer. Like, unless you enjoy murdering people. You can't imagine why someone would do such a thing. And if someone is a religious extremist, where they view anyone who is not in their religion as the enemy, or that those who are not in their religion should die, 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's 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. Okay, so she wasn't expecting anyone to be praying in the factory. And he was praying in the factory. She accidentally stepped on his prayer rug and he assaulted her, violently assaulted her. So he was fired for that. And then a few months later, he went and killed three students in the bar in downtown Austin. Now, 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 mean I look at Google News, which is a summation of headlines. I look at the X platform, which if something's important enough it, it'll, it'll show up on the X platform. I talk to friends and that's where I, you know, and I do research. That's how I look at things.
Reason I ask is that sometimes and I get a lot of my news on social media, especially X. Sort of a darker, more dystopian view. I remember this from the old days too. Sometimes the mainstream media would say, oh, everything's going to hell in hand basket. There are riots everywhere. And you'd say, wait a minute, I'm walking around here, it ain't that bad. Do you think that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You just have to see what's in frame. You know, I do think at times the X speed can be a little dark and in fact then I, and 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. About darkness in general and rage bait. But also I know you got into our discussion with think Zanny Beddoes of is England going to hell in a handbasket? Type thing and there does seem to be a darkness. You know, I feel it myself sometimes if I'm on social media too much. I think until that the world is really collapsing, then I go outside, take a walk in. Life is okay.
Once in a while. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think both can be misleading and like, and you know, if you go for a walk in a nice neighborhood, everything seems fine. But even though there may be terrible things happening, so you know, you don't, 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, whether it's our information feeds. You're right. You could be in your own bubble, which is we only take walks in the right part of a town and things seem okay. But also I think you can get your own bubble and 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.
Tell me, you mentioned it earlier about your wealth and you're using it to deploy it now. What happens to your wealth, you know, after you're gone? I mean you're going to set up some big found out. You're going to. Is there something you would want to give it to?
I mean it mostly goes to sort of foundation essentially.
But what would you want your foundation to do?
I guess I'm asking you continue the goals. Make life multi planetary, extend consciousness to the stars, improve sustainable energy on earth.
And does that mean humans should always be in control?
Well, I guess I probably prefer it if humans were always in control. I mean, although it would depend on the AI. I mean if the AI was awesome, you'd say like maybe the AI should be in control, you know.
Hey, I just saw Larry Page just a weekend ago. He starting to sound like him. He called. Yeah, he called you a specist 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. No, I mean I think pretty much the future is going to be AI and robots are going to decide the future and I guess rockets to some degree in terms of expanding beyond Earth. And 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 US 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 humans remaining in control.
I find it unlikely that humans would remain in control if the if. I mean 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 being creating too many AI dystopian scenarios online because the AIs are trained on everything online.
So if we say it's going to be utopian dystopian, they'll do it.
Yeah, it should be Terminator. You know, because whatever they read, you know, 80 versions of the Terminator script, it's like, I guess that's. Guess that's me, Terminator. Maybe we should have some more. Let's just have some more utopian narratives for AI So then I can like. Well, maybe I shouldn't be Terminator. Maybe I can be Friendly Overseer or something like that, or like a gardener or something. I don't know, like, treat us, you know, try to make humans happy type of thing. A friend of mine has this idea called protopian, which is like. Because utopian tends to represent some impossible idealistic goal. And usually in attempting to create a utopia, you create a dystopia. It's usually how the narrative goes. So she thinks it should be protopia, which is an achievable, you know, future that is. It's not perfect, but it's. It's good and something that you'd be like. If you could look into the future, you'd say, okay, yeah, that would be a good future.
Elon, thank you. Thank you so much for being with us. Appreciate it. See you soon.
You're welcome, Walzer. See you.