Eight years ago this summer, Elon Musk took the stage at a National Governors Association meeting before a bipartisan audience bewitched by his billions and his vision for the future.
Musk, who appeared at the invitation of then-Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican known for his moderate politics, warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence. The Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder also called for stricter government regulation of the emerging technology.
“I keep sounding the alarm bell,” Musk told the governors. “But until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal.”
Though Musk flashed some overconfidence — his prediction that in 10 years nearly all cars produced would be autonomous is not close to materializing — there also were notes of modesty. As he often did back then, Musk posited that Tesla’s stock price was too high.
Musk’s cautious and pragmatic tone that day in 2017 bears little resemblance to the disruptive and omnipresent force he’s become in Big Tech and in President Donald Trump’s second administration. There were other elements that foreshadowed the modern-day Musk’s political persona: his frustrations over how the media covered his business practices and his broader critique of government’s unwillingness to cancel regulations he believed had outlived their usefulness, for example.
But the same Musk who once worried about the weaponization of AI later bought Twitter, rebranded the social media site as X and paired it with AI software that spread unfounded political smears and conspiracy theories. The man who raised the public’s expectations about self-driving cars and space travel while lowering expectations for Tesla shareholders has since pushed for a performance-based compensation package worth more than $50 billion.
And Musk, who also marveled that day that “we live quite comfortably in a world that George Orwell would have thought was super crazy,” now serves as a “special government employee” with nearly unprecedented latitude and control.
Empowered by Trump, he is overseeing a disorienting and rapidly moving initiative to slash costs and fire federal employees under the umbrella of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Those implementing Musk’s vision are using AI tools to identify cost-savings, as reported by The New York Times, Washington Post and others.
In a Quinnipiac University poll released this week, 55% of the registered voters surveyed said that Musk has too much power “in making decisions affecting the United States.”
“Gosh, no,” former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, told NBC News when asked if he envisioned Musk ever assuming such a prominent and heavy-handed White House role.
“Everybody wants waste in government out,” McAuliffe added. “But I wish that they would put more of a thought process into the process of the cuts. If you are taking a sledgehammer to funding, there are things that are going to have real ramifications on our country.”
McAuliffe, who handed off the National Governors Association (NGA) chairmanship to Sandoval at the 2017 meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, was the only governor among nearly 20 of that year’s attendees to respond with any detailed recollection of Musk’s appearance. Others recalled the question-and-answer session but said they found it unremarkable and otherwise declined to comment on Musk’s ascendance in politics.
“I do remember Elon Musk speaking at the NGA meeting, and that he was worried about AI. I’m sorry to say I can’t remember anything more than that, nor do I remember asking a question,” former South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a Republican, wrote in an email. He had asked Musk at the event if lower gas prices negatively affected sales of electric vehicles.
Scott Pattison, who served as the NGA’s executive director at the time, said he did not recall Musk’s speech and asserted he would not have been invited had he been the firebrand he is today.
“I will say that we would never have had Musk had we not thought he was nonpartisan and so supportive of one political candidate and ideology,” Pattison wrote in an email. “It shows how much has changed and Musk has gone from a business person to a political actor.”
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
A ‘main event’ for bipartisan governors
Sandoval, who had dangled a $1.25 billion tax incentive package to land a Tesla factory for Nevada, brought in Musk to help kick off his NGA chairman’s initiative, which focused on technology and innovation. Musk’s appearance at the bipartisan conference was heavily hyped in advance and served as the meeting’s closing session.
“Now for the main event,” Sandoval primed his colleagues as he welcomed Musk. “I think everybody has been waiting for me to finish, so that we can get to Elon. I’m really thrilled to introduce a man who’s arguably the personification of technological innovation.”
Sandoval, who declined a request to comment for this article, then made a point to remove his necktie after a business-casual Musk arrived on stage with an open shirt collar.
“Is that alright if I do that?” Sandoval asked Musk.
With the casual, hospitable vibe set, Sandoval eased into the Q&A. (“What drives you?”) He offered friendly prompts. (“Talk a little more about … making life multiplanetary.”) And he asked Musk to respond to critics of tax breaks like those Sandoval had pushed to land the Tesla project in Nevada.
“Those incentives were a little overstated,” Musk said, insisting that he wasn’t aware of their full value until the press conference to announce the deal. “They took what added up over 20 years and made it sound like Nevada was writing us a $1.3 billion check. And I’m still waiting for that check. Did it get lost in the mail? But, you know, this is the way the press works, of course.”
Sandoval also asked Musk how governors should think about innovation when developing public policy. Musk replied by warning that long-standing regulations could inhibit innovation.
“It’s always important to bear in mind that regulations are immortal, and they never die unless somebody actually goes and kills them,” Musk said. “And then they get a lot of momentum. So a lot of times, regulations can be put in place for all the right reasons, but then nobody goes back and gets rid of them afterwards, when they no longer make sense.”
‘The pen is mightier than the sword’
Despite Musk’s concerns about overregulation, he called for “proactive” regulation of AI in response to Sandoval’s question about a future in which robots replace the human workforce.
The exchange led to Musk’s remark about the threat seeming remote to most people, short of killer robots running rampant. It also led to a Musk aside about regulating air travel. The comments have new relevance given how Musk’s DOGE portfolio includes the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates SpaceX. Musk’s SpaceX team is helping to study improvements to air traffic control systems, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Sunday. The Trump administration, meanwhile, fired hundreds of FAA employees this week.
“You know, if you ask the average person, ‘Hey, do you want to get rid of the FAA and just, like, take a chance on manufacturers not cutting corners on the aircraft, because profits were down that quarter?’ … Like, hell no. That sounds terrible,” Musk told the governors in 2017.
He continued: “I think even people who are pretty extremely libertarian, free market, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, we should probably have somebody keeping an eye on the aircraft companies, making sure they build a good aircraft and good cars and that kind of thing.’”
Musk, who in later years would call for a federal department to oversee AI development, last week called for the federal government to “delete entire agencies.”
McAuliffe recalled Musk’s call for proactive AI regulation as timely, if unsettling.
“You always want to bring in someone who is topical, and who better than Elon?” McAuliffe said. “On one hand, very futuristic. On the other, he scared a lot of the governors in the room.”
McAuliffe added: “He was very, very dark as it related to the issue of AI.”
The session’s most unsettling exchange on AI came when other governors had a chance to ask questions. Then-Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, pressed Musk specifically on his contention that AI presented a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”
Musk responded first by predicting that AI “could start a war by doing fake news and spoofing email accounts and fake press releases and just by manipulating information.
“The pen,” he added, “is mightier than the sword.”
Musk then offered an elaborate scenario based in part on the 2014 attack on a Malaysia Airlines flight that was downed by a Russian-made rocket launcher over eastern Ukraine.
“I want to emphasize, I do not think this occurred, this is purely a hypothetical — I’m digging my grave here,” said Musk, laughing along with the audience.
He continued: “If you had an AI … where the AI’s goal was to maximize the value of a portfolio of stocks, one of the ways to maximize value would be to go long on defense, short on consumer, start a war. And then, how can it do that? Well, you know, hack into some Malaysian airline’s aircraft routing server, route it over a war zone, then send an anonymous tip that an enemy aircraft is flying overhead right now.”
