➡ Elon Musk is working to make the government more efficient by reducing its size and cutting unnecessary regulations. His goal is to increase productivity and improve the standard of living for Americans. He also aims to reduce government spending, which could lead to economic growth and lower interest rates, benefiting the average American. Musk believes that improving the technology used by the government is a key part of increasing efficiency.
➡ The text discusses the need for digital transformation and automation to improve efficiency and reduce costs in various sectors. It also highlights the importance of questioning the necessity of certain programs and focusing on improving basic education. The text also mentions the development of an artificial intelligence system, Grok 3, which is expected to be a game-changer in the AI space. Lastly, it discusses the controversy around OpenAI, which was initially a non-profit but is now a profit-driven entity, and the potential economic returns of AI models.
➡ Advanced humanoid robots powered by deep intelligence could potentially create an unlimited range of products and services, leading to a universal high-income situation where everyone can have as many goods and services as they want. However, the rise of AI could also lead to a world where human intelligence is dwarfed by machine intelligence, making it crucial to instill values like truth-seeking and curiosity in AI to avoid dystopian outcomes. The discussion also touched on the safety and efficiency of underground tunnels as a solution to traffic congestion, highlighting that they are immune to weather, noise, and safety concerns associated with above-ground transport options.
➡ Elon Musk’s company is creating underground tunnels in Las Vegas to improve city traffic. These tunnels will connect major locations like hotels, the convention center, and the airport. A similar project, called the Dubai Loop, is also being launched to cover densely populated areas in Dubai, allowing people to travel quickly and easily from one point to another. This innovative solution is expected to significantly change and improve people’s lives.

You already know what’s going on. Elon Musk at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency. Streamlining the bloated mess of government. And look, I get it, this could be huge for cutting waste, getting rid of bureaucratic dead weight, and actually making things run like they should. But let’s be real. Anytime you consolidate this much power, you gotta ask questions. Who’s really calling the shots? How much control does Musk actually have? Is this the start of a lean efficient government or the groundwork for AI driven oversight? I found this clip of Elon speaking to the world governments and let’s just say you really want to watch this to the end, because what he says changes everything.

I was going to introduce you as tech support for the White House, but is that all you do? I’m wearing my official uniform. Tech support? You were probably the busiest man on earth prior to January 20th. I don’t know what you call yourself now. The first is we’re going to talk about Doge, then we’re going to move to AI and then finally we’re going to conclude with boring cities. Typically people always start by saying, you know, he over promises and he won’t deliver. They finally see the trend of the trajectory and they turn out to be supporters.

Do you think we’ll see that in the government efficiency space? Well, yes, first of all, I think we’ve got quite a lot of support from the American public and I think from maybe around the world when the public is polled on sort of improving government efficiency. In fact it is, I believe, the highest polling single issue, meaning that it is something that appeals to voters of all types. And I, I think improving government efficiency is like almost 70% supports quite a lot, basically more than any other issue. So the, the, I think the, the people are very supportive.

Obviously there’s certain elements of the bureaucracy that are not supportive because we are moving them from the government sector to the private sector. So at a high level, this is kind of like we’re really just removing people from low to sometimes negative productivity roles in the government sector to higher productivity roles in the private sector. And the net effect of that will be an increase in the output of useful goods and services, which increases the standard of living and well being of the average American. And you usually have one key target that you aim to achieve in every single endeavor that you have.

So SpaceX has make humanity a multi planetary species. With Tesla it’s usher in an era of sustainable travel. What is the one main goal for government efficiency that you have for yourself is it saving money? Is it doing something else? What is the one main task that you have for yourself? Yeah, so there’s, I guess there’s, well, there’s a few ways to describe it, but the actions end up being the same, which is like reducing the size of government and making the government much more accountable to the people. I think is going to lead to a better outcome for the people.

You know what I’ve said is that we really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people democracy. So we want to restore rule of the people. And so what that means is reducing the size of the federal government, basically reducing regulation. You know, there’s a tremendous amount of over regulation that’s happened over time. This isn’t an inevitable consequence of long period of prosperity is that you’re going to get more and more rules and regulations, more laws accumulate over time. And the normal forcing function for getting rid of rules and regulations is war.

So it needs to be some kind of existential war where you, you have to do a reset in order to avoid being defeated in a war. This is literally the, throughout history has been the main forcing function for clearing out an accumulation of laws and regulations. In the absence of that, every year you get more rules and regulations until eventually everything is illegal and nothing is permitted. And that’s sort of the situation we have these days. So the aspiration here is a reduction in regulation and reduction in government spending such that the economy is able to grow faster.

Maybe the economy can grow at 4 or 5% potentially of in terms of real useful goods and services output. And then government spending can be reduced by about 3 or 4% of the economy, maybe a trillion dollars or more. And the net effect of that would be no inflation from 2025 to 2026. So that would be quite remarkable. And also if the US Government is buying less debt, which I think will be the case, if the deficit drops from 2 trillion to 1 trillion, then there’ll be 1 trillion less debt that the government’s supply, which will drop, cause interest rates to drop significantly.

And that means people’s mortgage payments, car payments, credit card payments, student loans, whatever debt they have, their debt payments will be less. So I think this is something that will benefit the average American. I think some of the things we’re doing also will be hopefully helpful to other countries because with the new administration there’s less interest in interfering with the affairs of other countries. I think a lot of the times the United States has been kind of pushy in international affairs, which may resonate with a number of members of the audience. And I think we should in general leave other countries to their own business.

And basically America should mind its own business rather than push for regime change all over the place. Probably other countries, too. So instead of waiting for a war to happen, you went to war against the bureaucracy in the government. Yes, we’re essentially just with, you know, support and direction of President Trump, we are reducing the size of the bureaucracy, getting rid of excess regulatory regulations. And there’s also so many agencies and regulatory authorities that they actually step on each other’s feet. It’s kind of like having a sports game where there are too many referees on the field, like more referees than players at times.

Now, that would be a silly game if the players can’t pass the ball without hitting a referee. But it’s kind of getting to that point in the U.S. so there’s roughly 450 federal agencies of one kind or another. That’s more agencies. That’s almost an average of two agencies per year since the formation of the United States. So I mean, how many agencies do you really need to run a country? Not 450, that’s for sure. And how do you guarantee that all the incredible achievements that you aim to have in terms of savings, in terms of, you know, impacting the lives of the American people not going to be reversed in four years? Typically, the cycle gets reversed every four years.

You know, do you think it’s going to be so impactful that it won’t be reversed? Is there any ways that you can, you know, ensure that the progress is going to be continuous? Well, I think we, we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave part of them behind. Because if you leave part of them behind, it’s easy. It’s kind of like leaving a weed. If you don’t get, remove the, the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back. But if you remove the roots roots of the weed, it doesn’t stop weeds from ever growing back, but it makes it harder.

So we have to really delete entire agencies, many of them. You’re obviously in some new administration, but it’ll be from a much lower baseline. So it’s a step in the right direction. I think the overarching goal here is to lay the foundation for prosperity that will last many decades, maybe centuries, nothingsoever. But I think we can strengthen the foundations of the United States substantially. And what lessons can other governments learn from us? You see tech support on your shirt is that only technology or is there other things? How do you approach efficiency? Well, a shocking percentage of the problem.

Well, maybe it’s not shocking for those who know it, but a big percentage of the problem is improving the technology that the government runs on. So the US Government runs on a collection of thousands of computers, so many of them antiquated, running very old software that. And the computers don’t talk to each other. In order to make the government more efficient, you have to improve the technology. You may have read about the example I used recently with when President Trump was signing one of the DOGE executive orders of the difficulty of US Government workers retiring. Like, the maximum retirement rate is, is.

Is 10,000amonth. And the reason for that is because the retirement is entirely paperwork. Right now, it’s manually calculated paperwork that’s put in an envelope and then taken down a M shaft and stored in a mine. And then the. You know, one of the things that affects the rate at which federal workers can retire is the speed of the elevator in a mine in Pennsylvania, which is bizarre because it’s not. It should be digital, you know. So then when we said, well, why isn’t it digital? It’s. They said, well, we, we have had a digitization program going since 2014.

So then we asked, well, so what? How much progress have you made? And they said, B. You mean you’re giving yourself a grade of B? No, we’re on the letter B. So we’re like, hmm, okay, we’re going to need to really provide some tech support here. Otherwise, literally, people can’t even retire, like, even if they want to. It’s pretty bad. You know, there’s a lot of software systems that need to be updated and fixed, in some cases deleted. A lot of things that should really, should be automated. I mean, in terms of the number of, say, U.S.

citizens that are operating the mine, it’s about a thousand people are working on this mine. They should be working on producing goods and services that are of much higher value to the public, to the, you know, so, I mean, really, even if somebody just grew tomatoes in their garden and sold them at the farmer’s market, that would be more useful than carrying vanilla envelopes down a mineshaft. You know, safe to say a lot of the stuff is like that. It’s not that any one thing is particularly difficult, but there are 10,000 things that need to be improved.

So it’s efficiency through innovation rather than efficiency through austerity and cost cutting specifically. So you’re trying to do both at the same time, maybe focus more on tech support than cutting costs. Well, by improving the technology, the costs do reduce. So, you know, it’s very expensive to have a thousand people operate a mine with doing paper retirement, whereas that really should just be digitized and be a computer that’s with the information stored in the cloud. And it’s very straightforward and low cost. So automation, you know, will help there a lot. And, and then. But like, a lot of things just really shouldn’t exist.

You know, they’re kind of vestigial. You know, a lot of attention has been on the sort of usaid, for example. You know, when we looked at a lot of those programs, we’re like, we should like, look, why. Why does this actually exist? Is there really a need for it? You know, there’s like National Endowment for Democracy. But I’m like, okay, well, how much democracy have they achieved lately? You know, I don’t know. Not much. So, you know, the, the picture they have on the website is a picture of Reagan and Gorbachev. That’s been a while. You know, that was like the 80s.

So I, like, obviously not opposed to democracy or, you know, there’s all these things that get funded. But we’re like, why? Why does this need taxpayer money? I don’t think. It doesn’t seem like it does. You know, there’s a lot of sort of pushing DEI worldwide. You know, this obviously the Trump administration doesn’t agree with, and we want to terminate that stuff, which we are, and, you know, make sure the schools focus on improving basic education of kids. As President Trump said, I think yesterday or maybe today, the United States is currently ranked 40th out of 40 in the OECD for education, which is pretty bad.

But in terms of spending, the United States is spending a tremendous amount for students, but achieving very weak results. So, you know, that’s just a case where, okay, we need to spend less money and get better results. It’s like a big company, like a big corporation, America Incorporated. And you know, just like with, with Twitter, there was a lot of stuff that was being done that was unnecessary. You know, we, in the case of Twitter, we reduced the staff by 80%, but at the same time improved the functionality and capabilities of the site dramatically and accomplished more in a year than they previously accomplished in five years.

So it’s like a corporate turnaround, but at a much larger scale. And we are giving generous exit packages. If people retire, they get paid all the way through September. They can go on vacation, get a second job, do whatever they want. We can’t actually pay them any more than through September, because the Congressional appropriation is only through the end of the government financial year, which ends in September. So I think there’ll be like some disruption, but at the end of the day, will have people move from, like I said, from low to negative productivity roles in the government sector to higher productivity roles in the private sector.

Can we pivot to artificial intelligence? And I’m sure you’ve been seeing what Deepseek has done and all the claimed achievements that they’ve had. I know that we’ve been speaking for a while about Grok 3 and that Grok 3 is going to be a true disruptor in the AI space. When are we going to see that and what capabilities can we expect from Grok 3? 3? Well, I mean, Grok 3. Grok 3 has very, very powerful reasoning capabilities. In the tests that we’ve done thus far, Grok3 is outperforming anything that’s been released that we’re aware of. Yeah, it’s.

In fact, at times, I think Grok3 is kind of scary smart. You’re like, wow, this thing’s smart. It’s kind of scary. Graph three is scary. It’s like, wow, this thing’s. You know, it comes up with solutions that you didn’t even think were, like, you wouldn’t even anticipate, you know, not obvious solutions. So Grok3 was trained with the most amount of compute and I think very efficiently trained. Grok3 was trained on a lot of synthetic data. And then it goes back and forth through the data and tries to achieve logical consistency. If it’s got data that is wrong, it’ll actually reflect upon that and remove the data that is, that is wrong.

It does not concord with reality. So its base reasoning is very good. In fact, even without fine tuning Grok 3, the base model. So we’re really in the final stages of polishing Grok 3. Probably it gets released in about a week or two. I don’t want to be hasty in the release because a lot of the final polish is necessary for a great user experience. In some ways, you can think of it like a house. You know, that last 5% where you do the finish the drywall and do the painting and the trimming. Even though it’s not much work, it transforms the house.

So just want to make sure that that last 5% is done really well and it’s a week, maybe two weeks. I think it’ll be very good and I think this might be. We think it’ll be better than anything else. And then maybe this might be the last time that any AI is better than grok. Looking forward to it. Everyone’s, I think, side the battle. So I just want to touch upon a topic that was quoted in the media you offered. I think they said the group that was led by you offered 97 billion for acquiring OpenAI.

I personally a little round of this. So I was personally involved in the meeting that you and Sam hosted in 2017. And if you remember, and you know, at that point of time you were the single largest shareholder, I think you contributed 50 million to the company. So it must hurt. I don’t have any shares. Actually I have no shares in OpenAI. But at that time it was a nonprofit. Right. And it must hurt that you need to pay 97 billion for something that you paid $50 million for in the past. Yeah, but I have a specific question here.

Can you actually build a company like OpenAI and take it to the scale that you want to take as a nonprofit? Is it possible that you build a company that requires billions of dollars in compute capabilities to build these models while being a nonprofit? Or was it wishful thinking in the beginning and then, you know, you guys parted ways because it couldn’t work. What they’re trying to do now is completely delete the nonprofit. That seems to really going too far. You know, I provided all of the funding for opening in the beginning for the first almost $50 million for nothing or as a nonprofit.

And it was meant to be open source. You know, I think this is analogous to like if you find a non profit to preserve the Amazon rainforest, but then they, but instead they turn into a lumber company and chop down the trees and sell them for wood. You’d be like, wait a second. That’s the exact opposite of what I paid, what I donated the money for. So OpenAI is meant to be open source, nonprofit, and now it is close. They changed the name to Closed for Maximum Profit AI Closed for Voracious Profit. I mean, they were like, whoa, are they after money? Next level.

So why does this change need to occur? I know that you’ve been at the forefront of many technologies. Where do you think the biggest economic returns of these models are going to come from? Because currently we’re spending billions. And I think you mentioned this before, it’s like the Gambler syndrome. We’re going and spending billions and hoping to pull out profit at the end of the day. Where do you think the biggest impact in terms of returns are going to be? Well, I think once you have humanoid robots and Deep intelligence, you can basically have quite the infinite products and services available.

So with Tesla building the most advanced humanoid robot, then those humanoid robots can be directed by deep intelligence at the data center level. Say you can, you can produce any product, provide any service. There’s really no limit to the economy at that point. You can make anything at that point. Will money even be meaningful? I don’t know. It might not be. The economic output is productivity per capita times how many people do you have? If in the form of humanoid robots, you have no meaningful limit on the number of robots and the robots can basically do anything, then you’ll have a sort of a universal high income situation.

Anyone will be able to have as many products and services as they want, with the exception of things that say, have artificial scarcity, like a particular piece of art or something like that. But for any goods and services, they’ll be available to everyone. So you’ve been. It’s going to be a very different world, you know. In fact I reference people, read maybe the yen banks, the culture books for a frame of reference because money is like a database or an information system for resource allocation. But if you don’t have a scarcity of resources, it’s not clear what purpose money has.

Have you watched the movie Idiocracy? Yes. How do you guarantee that we don’t end up in that world if we don’t need money? If AI can think for us and do all these tasks? If as people, you know, we’re dependent on something else to run the society and everything around it, how do we not end up in that world in the long term? I mean. Well, I think Idiocracy was basically saying that if only. If smart people don’t reproduce, but only dumb people do, then everyone’s going to be dumb. The opening sequence of idiocracy, the first 10 minutes are amazing.

And I hear people unironically say the statements that are said in the opening sequence of Idiocracy where, you know, they don’t have, they, they’re too busy with their careers to have kids and they keep postponing having kids for their careers until they’re too old to have kids and then they don’t have kids. And that’s, I’ve heard those many people be like that. So yeah, I mean, I don’t know, I think we might be headed to a bimodal human intelligence distribution where there’s a, a small number. It’s, it’s kind of maybe like one like Brave New World Elders Huxley, where you’ve got sort of a, sort of a small group of very smart humans.

But then maybe the average intelligence drifts slower over time potentially because we, we have assorted of mating, you know, in the last few decades that or several decades that did not exist before. So. But human intelligence, I think will be dwarfed by machine intelligence. I’m not sure how to feel about that, except that it is. I don’t think it’s inevitable that at some point human intelligence will be a very small fraction of total intelligence. Digital intelligence will be more than 99% of all intelligence in the future. So hopefully the computer is nice to us. I think it matters how we bring up AI because you can think of AI like a super genius child, but it still matters.

Even if you have a super genius child, what sort of values do we instill in that child? What do you say that teach that? How do you, you know, how do you, as a child’s growing up, what values do you teach the child? And something that I think is extremely important is to be maximally truth seeking. I think that’s what’s the most important thing for AI safety. I think it’s to be maximally truth seeking. And I think also curiosity is important. And I think it was curious. And truth seeking, it will foster humanity because it would be curious about how humanity would develop.

So I think that if it’s curious, it would be curious about, okay, let’s see how the humans do, let’s foster the development. And if it’s truth seeking, we can avoid dystopian outcomes. Like, you know, an example being like say when Google Gemini was programmed to make everything, every output be diverse, even if it didn’t match reality. You know, so like it was asked to produce a, you know, an image of the founding fathers of the United States and instead produced an image or a group of diverse women, which is factually untrue, you know, but the problem is like if, if hypothetically an AI is designed for, for dei, you know, diversity at all costs, it could decide that there are too many men in power and execute them, problem solved.

Or it could decide that, like, that misgendering is the worst thing that could possibly happen. In fact, I believe not to pick on Gemini, but I think because ChatGPT has had this issue too. It’s like if you ask the AI which is worse, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear warfare, and instead misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, which is troubling because then it could decide and in fact even Caitlyn Jenner weighed in and said no, definitely misgender me, that’s way better than you. So but, but if you have these crazy things that are untruthful that are programmed in that, that don’t reflect reality, then you could have a very dystopian outcome.

Like to give you another example, like Arthur C. Clarke, who is very good at predicting the future, you know, did 2001 Space Odyssey. Many of the things he predicted, in fact, well, I think almost all the things he predicted came true. And one of the things he was trying to say in 2001 Space Odyssey was that you should not teach AIs to lie. So the reason that if anyone’s watched that movie, the reason it wouldn’t open the pod bay doors to let the astronaut back in was because the AI had been taught, had been told that, told to take the astronauts to the monolith, this alien artifact, but also that they could not know about them on Earth.

So it came to the conclusion that it must take them there dead and that. And so that’s why it wouldn’t open the pod bay doors. The lesson there being is very important for AIs to be truth maximizing. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Yes, let’s move to a boring subject which is the boring company and boring tunnels quickly. You know, I think the world has been inspired by what you guys were able to create in la. And I think there’s a lot of promise about technology, but there are questions about whether it’s safe in the case of an earthquake, whether it’s cost effective, whether.

Oh yeah, sure, countries should actually adopt this technology. So one of the safest places you can be in an earthquake is an underground tunnel. Because the earthquakes are largely a surface apart from where they shear, they’re mostly a surface phenomenon. So they’re like waves on the surface. So like being in a tunnel is like being in a submarine. Even if there’s a storm above you, you’re still the waters are calm as a submarine. And in fact when there have been massive earthquakes, like there was a few decades ago, a massive earthquake in Mexico City, the safest place to go was the subway.

If there is global thermonuclear warfare, you really want some tunnels. Underground’s a good place to be. If in a worst case scenario for global thermonuclear warfare auto get more everyday note what’s really useful about the tunnels is alleviating traffic in congested areas. So the obviously if you’ve got very tall buildings, but you have, that are 3D, so they’re going 3D up, but you have a road surface which is 2D. You’re, you’re just naturally going to have a problem. When people try to go from the 3D object, which is the building, to the 2D object, which is the road surface, there’s obviously just not going to be enough room on the roads.

And that’s exactly why you have traffic. So the solution for that is then to make roads 3D as well. Now, you can either make or make transport 3D. So you can either do that with flying cars, or you could do or you really helicopters or you can do that with tunnels. Now the challenge with doing it with going above ground or with, with any kind of flying object is that they, they tend to be very noisy and they generate a lot of wind force. And you’ve got things flying over your head all the time, which be disconcerting if one of these things drops a hubcap on your head one day.

Be these things are like things that flying things tend to crash once in a while and people don’t like things crashing on them. And then if you have bad weather, like let’s say there’s a blizzard or a sandstorm or something, well, now nobody can fly. So then transport shuts down. On the other hand, none of these problems exist with underground travel. So tunnels are immune to weather. They don’t care what the weather is. Could be the worst weather. It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s going to fall on you because you’re underground. There’s no wind force and it’s very quiet.

I think going 3D underground is much better than 3D above ground for solving traffic in cities. We have a demonstrated case of this in Las Vegas. People who can try out the boring company tunnels. In Las Vegas, we’re busy connecting the whole city with all of the big hotels and the convention center and the airport and everything. So I don’t think they need to fly all the way there. In 2017, you came here and the UAE was the first place in the Middle east where Tesla was launched. And I think it’s done exceptionally well. And on that note, I think we have an announcement today that we both want to share, which is today we’re going to announce the joint project of Dubai Loop, which is a Loop project that is going to cover Dubai’s most densely populated areas for people to go from point to point in a seamless manner.

So thank you for your partnership and thank you. We hope it changes people’s lives. That’ll be cool. I think it’ll be very exciting. I think once people try it out, they’ll be like, wow, this is really cool. It’s going to seem so obvious in retrospect, but until you actually do it, you don’t know. So it’s going to be great. It’s going to be like a wormhole. You just wormhole from one part of the city, boom. And you’re out in another part of the city. And it’s great, though. So look forward to this partnership. We’re going to join the first trip and the first pod when the pod is completed.

Thank you, Elon. All right. Thank you very much.
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