Best guess is the real end game for all this AI years from now will be using them to build a base on Mars. The stuff done with it on Earth will primarily just serve as funding. Pretty sure Elon wouldn't still bother leading all these companies if all he wanted was the money.
Dude, Elon Musk is full of shit.
And not just Musk,
they all are - Meta, Amazon, etc. This sort of trash is just Musk's particular brand of shit. These are about creating a myth about themselves and their companies, and that is in large part about keeping investors keen. Musk's self-made myth is futuristic visionary - calling himself "Chief engineer" or whatever, absurd grand visions out of 80s science fiction, and pretending that he actually understands the stuff the real scientists and engineers he employs are doing.
The reality is that Elon Musk has made a series of decisions in the last few years which expose how incredibly fallible he is. Everything about Twitter, from the moment he promised to buy it, is a lesson in incompetence. He overpaid, then he wrecked its value, all those "blue tick" missteps, and he's ended up making it worse for users, worse for the businesses that advertise on it, etc. and cratered it's value. You can argue it's served a purpose for a right-wing rabble-rouser by taking control of a major media company in order to encourage the far right across the globe, but I've not sure neo-fascists in control of major media is a win for the world. There's xAI and Grok as well, which is basically a joke. The big players in AI are Anthropic and OpenAI. Grok just generates memes for publicity, it's not a serious contender.
Then there's SpaceX. Apparently, the US government has started handing out contracts to other companies away from SpaceX because it's failing to meet targets. Then there's the Boring Company, which is a vanity project that has achieved little and probably won't do much in future.
His main company is Tesla. He's boosted in a president who has royally fucked Tesla up the backside by crapping all over the EV and batteries market. Of course, Musk has also shattered a load of Tesla's sales abroad - in essence, he picked a political fight with the sort of people who buy his cars. Then there's his cybertruck, which I guess appears to have made its money back (allegedly), but ultimately is a failure. Given increasing competition in the EV market and the fact that it looks like China can make them better and cheaper than Tesla, it's hard to see this doing well.
So, he's got robots and AI cars. On AI cars,
Musk famously over-promises and underdelivers: I mean, arguably Star Citizen is making more progress. Robots, yeah, whatever, but of course we also know that Musk cheated with them too.
This is Elon Musk. It's a lot of show and advertising to present him as the great visionary. He is not.
* * *
You say it's not about the money? Okay, but if it isn't,
why is he so intent on giving himself so much?
The best answer I can think of is that it's not the money per se, it's that he's a massive, rampaging narcissist and the money is making up for the massive hole in his ego that will never be filled - and that the more has gone wrong (plenty in the last few years), the more he needs to replace that damage to his ego with much more money.
Yes, what Elon craves is attention, power, respect, adoration. Money is part of that, or to superficially make up for a lack of some of the other stuff.
