Elon Musk hinted that Tesla could unveil a flying car by the end of 2025. He said this on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
They discussed the death of a former OpenAI employee, the replacement of jobs by robots, an AI-shaped future and other topics.
A flying Tesla
Musk said Tesla plans to release a new Roadster by the end of 2025. The car will feature “crazy technology” and supposedly be able to “fly”.
“My friend Peter Thiel once remarked that there should be flying cars in the future, but we don’t have them. I think if Peter wants a flying car, there should be a way to buy one,” he said.
The billionaire described the vehicle as “more jaw-dropping than all the James Bond cars put together”. He did not answer follow-up questions about the technology used for flight.
The entrepreneur unveiled a Roadster eight years ago. The model is named after the company’s first electric car, released in 2008.
In July the air-taxi maker Joby Aviation delivered its first craft in the UAE and completed a phase of pilot testing. The service is slated to launch in the region in 2026.
Suicide or murder?
On the podcast Musk said the death of former OpenAI employee Suchir Balaji “looks like a murder”. He pointed to cut surveillance-camera wires, traces of blood in two rooms, a wig found at the scene and a food order placed shortly before the death.
“He ordered DoorDash right before he allegedly killed himself, which seems unusual. It’s like ‘I’ll order a pizza, and then I’ll think and kill myself’. That’s a very rapid change in thinking,” the billionaire said.
In September the incident was discussed by Sam Altman with Tucker Carlson.
“He killed himself. I think so,” noted the head of OpenAI.
A city in Texas
Musk spoke about the SpaceX Starbase launch site in Texas, which in May was registered as a city.
At present the company carries about 90% of all cargo sent from Earth to orbit.
“You don’t often hear: ‘Hey, we built a city’,” he stressed.
The entrepreneur aims to achieve full rocket reusability within a year, to cut launch costs by a factor of 100.
Artificial intelligence
Musk said AI systems should “strive for truth” to avoid political bias. He characterised the influence of ideology on some models as a “woke mind virus”.
“Let’s say you told an artificial intelligence that diversity is the most important thing, and after that it became omnipotent. And you also told it that there is nothing worse than misgendering,” the entrepreneur described a thought experiment.
After that the AI would consider that misgendering Caitlyn Jenner would be worse than a global thermonuclear war in which everyone dies, Musk concluded.
In October the startup xAI launched Grokipedia—an artificial-intelligence-based online encyclopedia, “oriented toward the truth”.
In June Musk said that his company would rewrite “all human knowledge” to train a new version of the Grok chatbot. In his view, there is “too much garbage in any base model trained on uncurated data”.
The billionaire faced criticism over the plan. AI specialist Gary Marcus compared it to a dystopia. Later users noticed that the chatbot relies on the entrepreneur’s posts on X. This includes the conflict between Israel and Palestine, abortion and immigration law.
The observations suggest Grok was specifically tuned to take Musk’s political views into account when answering contentious questions.
On the podcast the billionaire predicted the replacement of all jobs by artificial intelligence and robots. That would create a “universal high-income” society in which work becomes optional.
A government-run artificial intelligence could help with the US national debt and administrative tasks, Musk added.
Buying Twitter
During the podcast the businessman discussed his purchase of Twitter. According to him, the social network “was causing harm at a civilisational level”. It had allegedly fallen under the control of the so-called “enlightened crowd”, which “spreads across the world a nihilistic, anti-civilisational mind virus”.
“You can see the results of this mind virus on the streets of San Francisco, where downtown looks like a zombie apocalypse. That’s bad. We don’t want the whole world to turn into a zombie apocalypse,” the entrepreneur added.
Encrypted messages
Musk mentioned the upcoming XChat messenger “with encryption, disappearing messages and the ability to send any files”.
“Our goal with XChat is to replace the previous Twitter direct-messaging system with a fully encrypted environment in which you can send text messages, files, and also make audio and video calls,” he said.
AI future
According to the billionaire, traditional smartphones will disappear and be replaced by “edge nodes”. They will serve as interfaces for AI systems, linking local hardware with cloud servers.
“You will get everything through AI. Everything you can think of, or everything the technology can anticipate, it will show you. That’s my prediction of where it all goes,” Musk said.
As for timing, he gave “five or six years”.
In October, Musk said that Tesla’s Optimus robots would become “incredible surgeons”.