Zoom: Musk said the urge to cut spending “does not exist in the presidency, the House, the Senate or the judiciary. Basically, no one in a position of authority in government – with a few rare exceptions (like) the Rand Pauls of the world – actually wants to cut spending.”
- “Maybe if the president made it his main goal, we could do it,” 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 out, being upset about … stopping some funding.”
Musk admits he “got a little carried away, basically” and that he ended up being “away for too long” from his businesses.
- “What I should have done,” he added, “was to step back more…and probably only last a month or two,” instead of the four months he was officially in the White House.
- “I should have gone back and focused on AI a little earlier than I did.”
When Isaacson Asked Musk if his time in the West Wing had been too seductive in a way, Musk replied: “It kind of was. I mean, it was pretty cool because…I’m right there in the Oval Office while all these big, momentous decisions are being made.”
- Asked about the time he wielded a chainsaw on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) a month into Trump’s second term, Musk said, “It was a weird weekend.”
- Pressed to elaborate, Musk said: “Let sleeping dogs lie or whatever.”
The big picture: Isaacson warned this week that Steve Jobs and other great creators of the personal computer era would be wary of autonomous AI agents that are not closely tied to human control.
- Isaacson includes his warning in the new preface to an updated edition, released 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 started “The Builders” because he wanted to pressure the builders of this new era of AI about these dangers and hear in their own voices what motivates them.
- “Musk is an extraordinary engineer who is moving us forward with Starship, Starlink, Neuralink and autonomous electric vehicles,” Isaacson said. “But as I describe him 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 will 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 preview of the series says the tech legends “talk about their ambitions, what scares them, their view of humanity, and what drives them to build so big and so fast. The conversations are intimate, charming, and sometimes frightening.”
Listen to a trailer for “The Builders.”
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