Elon Musk predicts a “ChatGPT moment” for Tesla, and warns investors have a tough 12 months ahead. The tech boss flags pressure on banks, and underlines Twitter’s dire state when he acquired it. Here are Musk’s 15 best quotes from Tesla’s shareholder meeting and an interview this week. Loading Something is loading.
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Elon Musk held forth on everything from artificial intelligence and Twitter to working from home, Federal Reserve policy, and China-Taiwan relations during two public appearances this week.
The Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX chief spoke during his automaker’s shareholder meeting and a CNBC interview on Tuesday. He took aim at ChatGPT-owner OpenAI, warned of stresses in the banking sector, and predicted a tough time for markets and the US economy over the next 12 months.
Musk also underscored Twitter’s dismal state when he acquired it last year, accused the Fed of relying on outdated economic data, and praised the high-quality management at Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
Here are Musk’s 15 best quotes, lightly edited for length and clarity:1. “I’ll say what I want to say and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
2. “I think Tesla will have a ChatGPT moment, maybe if not this year, I’d say no later than next year.” (Musk was referring to Tesla’s plan to activate full self-driving (FSD) mode in millions of its vehicles around the world.)
3. “It was like being teleported into a plane that’s in a nosedive, headed to the ground with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work.” (He was describing what it was like to take over Twitter in October last year.)
4. “It was a funny situation where when I first proposed the acquisition, they said, ‘Hell no.’ They adopted a poison pill, basically saying they’d rather die than be acquired; they’d rather chew on cyanide. Then a few months later they basically have a gun to my head saying, ‘No, you must acquire us.’ That’s quite a change.” (Musk was recalling how his Twitter deal played out.)
5. “I am the reason OpenAI exists. I more than helped, it wouldn’t exist without me. I came up with the name. I fully admit to being a huge idiot here.” (Musk was referring to ChatGPT’s owner and bemoaning his failure not to secure some control of it in exchange for partly funding it.)
6. “It does seem weird that something can be a non-profit, open source and somehow transform itself into a for profit, closed source. This would be like funding an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, and instead they became a lumber company, and chopped down the forest and sold it for money.”
7. “The advent of artificial general intelligence is called a singularity because it is so hard to predict what will happen after that. It’s very much a double-edged sword. There’s a strong probability that it will make life much better and that we’ll have an age of abundance. And there’s some chance that it goes wrong and destroys humanity. Hopefully that chance is small, but it’s not zero. We want to take whatever actions we can think of to minimize the probability that AI goes wrong.”
8. “We need to make sure that we don’t have a Terminator scenario. That’s very important. It’s all fun and games until Terminator shows up.” (Musk was describing a potential AI disaster.)
9. “The whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ‘Let them eat cake.’ Get off the god damn moral high horse with the work from home bullshit. The laptop class is living in la la land. They’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do. It’s wrong.” (Musk questioned the morality of expecting the people who build cars, deliver food, and fix cars to travel to work, while those with digital jobs stay home.)
10. “If you’re a bank and you’re not sure whether you’re going to be alive or not, it’s a pretty big distraction. If they’re on the way to the cemetery, increasing their auto loan portfolio is not the first thing on their mind.” (Musk was nodding to recent bank failures and rescue deals, and their chilling effect on lending.)
11. “The next 12 months will be difficult for everyone. When Berkshire Hathaway had their annual meeting, Warren and Charlie actually said, ‘Hey, this year, the Berkshire companies are going to make less money.’ And they’re very well-run organizations. And I think that’s just generally true for the economy.”
12. “My advice would be, ‘Don’t look at the markets for the next 12 months. If there’s a dip, buy the dip. And I think you will not be sorry because things come back up.”
13. “Raising the Fed rate is somewhat of a brake pedal on the economy. My concern with the way the Federal Reserve is making decisions is they’re just operating with too much latency. The data is somewhat stale. The Federal Reserve was slow to raise interest rates. And now I think they’re going to be slow to lower them.”
14. “The official policy of China is that Taiwan should be integrated. One does not need to read between the lines; one can certainly read the lines. there’s some inevitability to the situation. You should take their word seriously. They mean it.”
15. “No one really realizes that the Chinese economy and the rest of the global economy are like conjoined twins. It would be like trying to separate conjoined twins. That’s the severity of the situation. It’s actually worse for a lot of other companies than it is for Tesla. I’m not sure where you’re gonna get an iPhone, for example.” (Musk was underscoring the risks attached to mounting US-China tensions.)