Musk believes civilization is less robust than people assume, and that AI might accelerate its destruction.įor someone who is time poor, it’s interesting how bearish Musk has come out on AI. So since the most valuable thing I have is time, I schedule it myself.” And the reason is because it’s impossible for someone else to know what the priorities are. And this is going to sound pretty strange but I only have one part-time assistant… but I do most of the scheduling myself. But I do generally try to divide companies so it’s predominantly one company on one day, so today’s a Tesla day for example, although I might end up at Twitter late tonight… Time management is extremely difficult. “My days are very long and complicated, as you might imagine, and there’s this great deal of context switching… Switching context is quite painful. (No wonder he dreams about building X, an everything app: It could help compress some of the work and things he has to oversee.) To an audience of CEOs and other executives “scheduled within an inch of their lives,” as Barker put it, Elon described the chaos of being at the helm of three different companies: Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla. Musk says he has only one part-time assistant. Here’s a selection of excerpts from the conversation: There aren’t many people who would be asked this range of questions in one sitting, and even fewer who would be interested to hear their answers. As Musk’s half-hour conversation stretched to more than one hour, he ranged from talking about ambitions to make Mars a self-sustaining civilization through to who might succeed him at any of his companies the political situation in China through to the future of humanity. In the meantime, and before investors run out of patience, Musk remains quite exasperating and compelling in equal measure. It’s hard to know how close that story is to reality at this point. “I mean, today on Twitter, for example, AOC and Ted Cruz got into an argument, which was, independent of which side you agree with, very entertaining.” (Cue audience laughter.) “I really just like someone fairly normal and sensible to be the president,” he added later, to more chuckling from the audience.įor Musk, the Twitter story he wants to tell - or at least hopes to sell - is that Twitter is on the return path from the layoffs, internal restructuring and big changes. “Ranging from the left, moderate, to what’s considered right… I do think it’s important that Twitter be about the reality and the perception of a level playing field, a place where all voices are heard, and where there’s the kind of dynamic interaction that you don’t really see anywhere else,” he said. In fact, it often feels like he has spent a lot of time tearing apart the company only to land on an idea that is a repeat of what it was already trying to do: build a media company, which he is now doing - complete with a new CEO with advertising chops who he’s poached from a media company, and a strategy to court advertisers and build entertaining content. Musk’s actions and words should sound extremely familiar. Yes, he wants to bring more audience to the platform at a time when so many appear to be running away but he also wants to position Twitter as a new media platform in its own right. Musk replied that he sees Twitter as a “town square,” where he wants everyone to participate. Musk avoided a direct yes or no answer, which speaks to something else about him: He likes to talk in circles, and his strategy sometimes goes that way, too. president, which prompted Thorold Barker, WSJ’s EMEA editor, to ask Musk if he was endorsing DeSantis. The interview kicked off just minutes after it was announced that Musk would be interviewing Ron DeSantis on Wednesday (today) on Twitter’s Spaces audio streaming platform, and that DeSantis would be making, in Musk’s words, “quite an announcement” as part of it.Įveryone widely expects that announcement to be about DeSantis officially entering the race for U.S. Dialing in over video, showing up late for his half-hour slot, Musk then proceeded to talk for more than an hour about Twitter (or “X slash Twitter” as Musk tried to call it), AI, Mars and more.

Yesterday, it was the turn of the WSJ, which featured him as its headliner to close off the opening-night dinner of their CEO Council conference in London. After months of moving fast and breaking things at Twitter, Elon Musk’s been on a crash course of a different sort in the last several weeks, doing the rounds of interviews across a range of media events and with different media platforms (although TC’s invite may have gotten lost in the mail…).

Uber conference number