Is Elon Musk going to be Trump’s AI Czar? And, if so, does that mean he has all of the US’ AI plays – OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, etc – at his mercy? We think so. And it’s going to make for an interesting few years.

Futuristic 32

[00:00:00 ] CR: Alright, give me

[00:00:06 ] SS: two, three, Cameron Reilly, Steve Sammartino, tuning in to the Futuristic Podcast. This is the time, we are the people, and we are so happy to have you here.

[00:00:15 ] SS: Yes.

[00:00:19 ] CR: episode, uh, 30, what, 2, I think? Yes, 32, according to my notes. Recording this on the 18th of November, 2024, Steve. We’re, um, we’re back in a new era, back to the future. A new era of a upcoming Trump era. Presidency in the United States, and the main reason I wanted to do a show, uh, there’s a lot of stuff going on, but I haven’t seen enough talk about this in the interwebs of late, is the fact that, as far as I can tell, essentially this means Elon Musk is now The AI czar of the Trump administration.

[00:01:13 ] CR: They’ve declared that he’s going to be co running the DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, with Vivek Ramaswamy. But, uh, like you absolutely got to be certain that Elon is going to be running Anything to do with AI, AI regulation, AI investment, and I’d fucking hate to be Sam Altman right about now, because

[00:01:41 ] SS: The Funk Soul Brother. Check it out now. The Funk Soul Brother. It’s over, brother.

[00:01:49 ] SS: It’s right, about now. That’s that

[00:01:50 ] SS: song.

[00:01:51 ] CR: right, uh, we know that Sam and Elon have got a longstanding beef, um, Elon sued Sam and OpenAI last year, or this year, I can’t remember, Um, over his involvement in OpenAI, uh, uh, uh, and, you know that this now means Elon is gonna be determining the future of, uh, of AI, of AI regulation. I, uh, uh, fuck, what this means for the future of AI.

[00:02:23 ] CR: And, my big, like, I’ve got a lot of concerns with the Trump Presidency. But one of the biggest I had in this election was, fuck, if Trump wins, what does that mean for the future of AI? Because he’s a loose cannon and he could fuck shit up.

[00:02:38 ] SS: yeah. He’s not

[00:02:39 ] CR: my entire life for

[00:02:40 ] CR: artificial intelligence and the singularity and I don’t want

[00:02:42 ] CR: it to get fucked up by some orange, uh, moron.

[00:02:46 ] CR: But then, and like, all right, there’s a lot of things we can say about Elon Musk. And his support for Trump and all those sorts of things. But Elon is max AI, even though he signed the whole AI slowdown thing early on, we all know that was kind of bullshit. Since then he’s invested gajillions of dollars into building XAI.

[00:03:11 ] CR: We know he’s all about humans and Neuralink integrating AI into our brains and AI helping the human race survive and all this kind of stuff. If Elon and Trump don’t have a falling out again, which I give that better than 50 50 odds,

[00:03:33 ] SS: 50, at least 50, 50, at

[00:03:35 ] CR: at least.

[00:03:35 ] CR: 50, yeah, I’d say 90 10 that they’re gonna have a falling out, maybe even before Trump takes office.

[00:03:42 ] SS: yeah, Trump’s really impetuous. He can change his mind in a heartbeat on something because someone else gets his ear or something else is relevant to him, which, there’s more to it. And I think that Musk made the investment because he knew there was complexity and risk. I mean, one of the simple ones is Tesla and China, right?

[00:04:04 ] SS: So that’s antithetical. Trump’s interests and Elon’s don’t overlap there. So there’s a number of things, which I think is why Elon invested so heavily. And while we’re on the topic, can we just say for all the entrepreneurial things that Elon Musk has done and done so well. Including SpaceX and Tesla. His greatest investment of all time was the 119 million.

[00:04:32 ] SS: He invested in the Trump presidency, which is about 10 percent of how much was raised. The day after the election, the market capitalization of, Companies that Musk’s owns went up by 15 billion. So that’s 126X return on investment in six months. So that’s his

[00:04:55 ] SS: greatest

[00:04:56 ] SS: ROI.

[00:04:58 ] CR: Well, you know,

[00:04:59 ] SS: And that excludes, that excludes, uh,

[00:05:01 ] SS: SpaceX. Which you would have to

[00:05:04 ] SS: imagine,

[00:05:06 ] CR: for the last couple of years, everyone who said he was an idiot for buying Twitter, and he’d fuck Twitter up, and he was a moron, you’ve heard me say this a million times, we could say lots of things about Elon Musk, but he is not an idiot,

[00:05:20 ] SS: no, he’s definitely not an idiot. He’s interesting and strange and I don’t like lots of what he does.

[00:05:25 ] SS: But

[00:05:26 ] CR: if he bought Twitter, he did it for a reason. Now I don’t think he bought it to get Trump elected because when he bought Twitter, I don’t think anyone thought Trump had any fucking chance of running again and getting the nomination. But yeah, it was. Clear to me from the get go that he bought Twitter because he wanted a platform to get shit done that he could, you know, use it to market his own services and products and that kind of stuff.

[00:05:55 ] CR: But he obviously has now used Twitter to help get Trump elected, which basically makes Elon and Peter Thiel in charge of the United States government. He and Peter Thiel just bought themselves

[00:06:10 ] SS: yeah, I, I think he has a lot of attention across every platform because he’s so newsworthy with everything that he does. I think he could have done it without Twitter or X because every feed that I see, and I can promise you, I don’t go onto X at all, uh, these days and I am still filled with musk. News and content because he’s always on, on, on the edge and, and controversy

[00:06:37 ] SS: works

[00:06:39 ] SS: in

[00:06:40 ] CR: Yeah, well I did a big show on the Bullshit Filter a week or two ago about why he threw his weight behind Musk, the China thing is part of it, but he also had about 20 or 30 lawsuits that the Biden administration were going after all of his companies for regulatory issues, And he had, my take, my read on the whole thing is he had just decided that he was going to destroy the Democrats for the, for, as payback for all of the investigations they were doing into all of his companies for labor practices and environmental regulations and all sorts of things, you know, he has that classic laissez faire capitalist mindset, which is, hey, I’m shaping the future and shaping the economy and doing all this good stuff.

[00:07:32 ] CR: You should just be supporting me and getting the hell out of my way and letting me do what