Exclusive: Musk tells Isaacson "AI and robots" will need to fix deficit
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Walter Isaacson talks to Elon Musk in 2023 at SpaceX's launch and development facility in Starbase, Texas. Photo: Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
Elon Musk tells biographer Walter Isaacson in a new podcast interview that the fizzled DOGE experiment, which the SpaceX and Tesla CEO once headed, proved there's "no way we were gonna solve the deficit from within the government."
- "The only way we're going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots," Musk tells the author for a new podcast series, "The Builders with Walter Isaacson," premiering Tuesday. "We're not gonna solve it by trying to save our way there."
Why it matters: Musk's comments to Isaacson — author of the definitive 2023 biography, "Elon Musk" — admit that DOGE was a flop, but point to the chance that some future administration will take a new stab at the problem using ever-more-capable AI.
Zoom in: Musk said the appetite to cut spending "is not there at the presidency, the House, the Senate or the judiciary. Basically, no one in authority in the government whatsoever — with maybe a few rare exceptions [like the] Rand Pauls of the world — actually wants to reduce spending."
- "Maybe if the president made that his primary goal, we could do that," Musk added. "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 calling him, being upset about ... some funding being stopped."
Musk admits he "kinda got carried away, basically" and that he wound up being "gone for too long" from his companies.
- "What I should have done," he added, "was be more in the background ... and probably only had it last for a month or two" rather than the four months he was formally in the White House.
- "I should have gone back and focused on AI a little sooner than I did."
When Isaacson asked Musk if his time in the West Wing had been too seductive, in a way, Musk replied: "It was, a little bit. I mean, it was kinda cool 'cause ... I'm just there in the Oval Office while all these, like, big momentous decisions are being made."
- Asked about the time he brandished a chainsaw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) a month into Trump's second term, Musk said: "That was a weird weekend."
- Pressed to elaborate, Musk said: "Let's let sleeping dogs lie or whatever."
The big picture: Isaacson warned this week that Steve Jobs and the other great creators of the personal computer age would be cautious about autonomous AI agents not tightly connected to human control.
- Isaacson includes his warning in the new preface to an updated edition, published this week, of his sweeping 2014 history of the digital age, "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution."
Behind the scenes: Isaacson tells me he launched "The Builders" because he wanted to press the builders of this new AI age on these dangers and hear in their own voices what motivates them.
- "Musk is an amazing engineer who is pushing us forward with Starship, Starlink, Neuralink, and autonomous EVs," Isaacson said. "But as I describe in my biography, I think he is too prone to darkness and conspiracies when it comes to politics and people. His complexities come through in the interview, as I hope they do in the biography."
What's next: Isaacson's podcast series, created by media company Kaleidoscope, includes conversations with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Fei-Fei Li, and Dario and Daniela Amodei.
- A series preview says the tech legends "open up about their ambitions, what frightens them, how they think about humanity, and what drives them to build so big and so fast. The conversations are intimate, charming, and sometimes chilling."
Listen to a trailer for "The Builders."
