Elon Musk

Elon Musk (born 1971) is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, the owner of X, and, for long stretches, the richest person alive. He has been entangled with AI longer than almost any other executive: he co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 — explicitly as a counterweight to Google’s AI dominance — and left its board in 2018 after a failed bid to take control.

The doomsayer who built a frontier lab

Musk spent years as AI’s most famous alarmist. In 2014 he told an MIT symposium that AI was humanity’s “biggest existential threat,” and in March 2023 he signed the Future of Life Institute open letter calling for a six-month pause on training systems beyond GPT-4. Four months later he announced xAI, a frontier lab whose stated mission is to “understand the true nature of the universe.” Its chatbot Grok launched on X in November 2023, trained on the Colossus supercomputer xAI built in Memphis, while Tesla pushed self-driving software and the Optimus humanoid robot.

In 2024 Musk sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, claiming they had betrayed the nonprofit mission he helped fund. Critics note the obvious tension: the man who demanded a pause immediately raced ahead himself, and Grok — marketed as an anti-“woke” alternative — drew repeated criticism for offensive outputs. Musk himself has shrugged at the contradiction, telling an audience in 2025 (as reported by Fortune) that even if AI turns out badly for humanity, he would still want to be alive to see it.

Whatever his rhetoric, his revealed preference is unambiguous: tens of billions of dollars into building AI as fast as possible, on the theory that a “maximally truth-seeking” AI built by him is safer than one built by his rivals.