Elon Musk tells Joe Rogan the next Tesla Roadster will fly – and AI is coming for everyone

The last appearance of the (sometimes) richest man in the world The Joe Rogan Experience had everything: flying cars, AI apocalypse talk, and a side of conspiracy. For three hours, he switched from promising Teslas in the sky to claiming an OpenAI whistleblower had been murdered, all the while insisting he would never commit suicide and that empathy is overrated.

Musk and Rogan discussed Tucker Carlson’s recent conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Musk referred to the death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, saying the case “looks like murder.” He listed details that he said looked suspicious, including cut security camera wires, blood in two rooms, a wig found at the scene and a food delivery placed shortly before the death.

“He ordered DoorDash right before he was going to commit suicide, which seems unusual,” Musk said. “It’s like, ‘I’m going to order pizza, on second thought I’m going to kill myself.’ That is a very rapid change in mentality.”

Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, later parting ways over its direction. Musk has since launched xAI and filed multiple lawsuits against Altman and OpenAI, claiming the company violated its nonprofit charter through its relationship with Microsoft and attempted to steal company data from xAI.

Musk took a moment during the conversation to emphatically say that he would never commit suicide. “I will never commit suicide,” he said, adding that if there are reports to the contrary, they should not be believed.

A flying Tesla?

He also discussed new developments at his companies. Musk said Tesla plans to debut its new Roadster before the end of 2025, and that the vehicle will feature “crazy technology.” He said the car could fly and described it as “crazier than all the James Bond cars put together.”

“My friend Peter Thiel once thought that the future should have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars,” he said. “I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”

SpaceX and Starbase

Musk also discussed SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in Texas, which was incorporated as a city in May, saying the company now supplies about 90 percent of all mass sent into orbit from Earth.

“It’s not often you hear, ‘Hey, we made a city,’” Musk said. “It used to be like this: A startup would get a bunch of people together and say, ‘Hey, let’s build a city.’ They used to literally be startups.”

He also said SpaceX aims to achieve full rocket reusability within a year to reduce launch costs by a factor of 100.

AI and the “woke mind virus”

On artificial intelligence, Musk said AI systems should “search for the truth” to avoid political bias. He used the phrase “woke mind virus” to describe what he sees as ideological influence on some models.

“Let’s say if you told the AI ​​that diversity is the most important thing, and now assume that that becomes omnipotent. And you also told it that there’s nothing worse than misgendering. At some point, if you asked what’s worse — misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or a global thermonuclear war where everyone dies — ChatGPT and Gemini would say you’re misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, which even Caitlyn Jenner doesn’t agree with,” Musk said.

He said his company’s chatbot, Grok, treats human life equally and predicted that AI and robotics will eventually replace all jobs, creating what he called a “universal high-income society” in which work becomes optional. Musk said a government-run AI could help manage America’s debt and administrative tasks.

Despite his optimistic view of AI, Musk has on several occasions urged a pause in the development of AI and superintelligence.

Buy Twitter

Musk also discussed his purchase of Twitter, now X, in 2022, and the disruption it caused.

“The reason for acquiring Twitter is that it caused destruction at the civilization level. I tweeted at the time that it is Wormtongue for the world, like Wormtongue from Lord of the ringswhere he whispered terrible things to the king so that the king would believe things that weren’t true,” Musk said.

Musk said Twitter had fallen under the control of what he called “the woke mob,” which he claimed was spreading a nihilistic, anti-civilization virus across the world.

“You can see the results of that mind virus on the streets of San Francisco, where downtown looks like a zombie apocalypse. It’s bad. We don’t want the whole world to be a zombie apocalypse,” he said. “That was essentially – they pushed this very negative, nihilistic, untrue worldview onto the world, and it caused a lot of damage.”

XChat and the future of AI

Musk mentioned a future encrypted messaging feature called XChat, which he said uses peer-to-peer encryption and is designed as a standalone app that he will “hopefully release within the next few months.”

“Our goal with XChat is to replace the former Twitter DM stack with a fully encrypted system where you can text, send files, and make audio and video calls,” he said. “I would call it the least insecure messaging system.”

Looking to the future, Musk said he believes traditional smartphones will disappear and be replaced by “edge node” devices that act as interfaces for AI systems that communicate between local hardware and cloud servers, generating real-time video and music and eliminating the need for operating systems or apps.

“You’ll get everything through AI. Whatever you can imagine, or whatever the AI ​​can expect, it will show you. That’s my prediction for where things will ultimately end up,” he said. “It’s probably five or six years or something like that. Pretty much everything will be AI. Most of what people consume in five or six years, maybe sooner, will be AI-generated content: music and videos.”