Appearing on the popular tech podcast All In, hosted by venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, Musk said his time at the White House was “one hell of a side quest”.
“The government is basically unfixable. It’s good to have talented people in the administration, but at the end of the day, if you look at our national debt, it is insanely high. The interest payments exceed the Defense Department — sorry, the War Department — budget. So, if AI and robots don’t solve our national debt, we’re toast,” he said.
This comes days after Musk declined to attend a White House dinner hosted by President Donald Trump, where leaders of the tech world, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, were in attendance.
Musk supported Trump all the way to the White House in the 2024 elections, becoming his largest political donor as well. However, by mid-2025, their relationship had ruptured. Musk left DOGE and after a brief silence, a public feud played out between them across social media and in the press.
Musk also shared xAI’s plans for the next Grok model amid fierce competition in the AI field. He said the model will use “enormous amounts of synthetic data” to refine knowledge and address falsehoods in sources such as Wikipedia, possibly publishing a “Grokipedia.”