Elon Musk Warns Against World Government; Talks Aliens, Twitter And AI In New Interview
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[Update] Elon Musk Hopes To Find New Twitter CEO By Year's End; Slams Big Tech's Niche Woke Ideology
Speaking via video link to the World Government Summit in Dubai Wednesday, Elon Musk said since taking over the company, “Twitter is certainly quite the rollercoaster.” The Tesla and SpaceX CEO wants to improve and stabilize the social media platform both technically and financially before hiring someone else to run the company.
“I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financial healthy place,” he said when asked about when he'd name a CEO. “I’m guessing probably toward the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company.”
Musk suggests that: “Twitter is still somewhat a startup in reverse. There’s work required here to get Twitter to sort of a stable position and to really build the engine of software engineering."
The Twitter CEO also reiterated that the social media platform is an "acceleration" to his vision of the "everything app" or "X app" which incorporates video, payments and shopping.
On his acquisition of the company, Musk said, “I was a little worried about the effect of social media on the world, especially Twitter, and I thought it was very important that there should be a trusted digital public sphere, with the least amount of censorship allowed by law. ....Twitter was I think doing a little too much to impose a niche San Francisco-Berkeley ideology on the world.”
Thee Tesla CEO said: “Having some criticism is fine, I am constantly attacked on Twitter and I don’t mind. I have to be thick-skinned.”
Musk who is a prolific social media user himself, described his children as being “programmed by Reddit and YouTube.” He criticized the Chinese-made social media app TikTok.
“TikTok has a lot of very high usage (but) I often hear people say, ‘Well, I spent two hours on TikTok, but I regret those two hours,’” Musk said. "We don’t want that to be the case with Twitter.”
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke Wednesday, via video link to Al Gergawi at the World Government Summit in Dubai. He answered questions on various topics including Twitter, aliens, education, social media, artificial intelligence AI, and dangers of globalization and world government.
The SpaceX CEO acknowledged the irony of speaking at a world government summit, when he warned against the effort to form a powerful singular global authority.
"I know this is called the World Government Summit, but I think we should be maybe a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government," Musk said. "We want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having, frankly -- this may sound a little odd -- too much cooperation between governments."
The Twitter CEO noted that because of the absence of globalization, the historical rise and fall of separate civilizations "hasn't meant the doom of humanity as a whole."
"While Rome was falling, Islam was rising," Musk said, pointing to advancements in technology and science at the time.
The Tesla CEO suggested that the world needs "some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization, the whole thing doesn't collapse and humanity keeps moving forward."
"If we are too much of a single civilization, the whole thing may collapse," Musk said. "I'm obviously not suggesting war or anything like that, but I think we want to be a little bit wary of actually cooperating too much."
Al Gergawi pointed out recent incidents of US military shooting down unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the asked Musk if they're aliens.
“I don’t think they are aliens,” Musk answered as he chuckled.
“If the universe is really as old as science thinks it is, where are the aliens?" he asked. "If they have been around for 13.8 billion years, shouldn’t they be all over the place?”
Musk said during his research of space technology, he had seen no signs of alien life or alien technology. “With Space X, I don’t think anyone knows more about space technology than me,” he said.
The SpaceX CEO said that non-existence of aliens "could mean that civilisation and consciousness is like a tiny candle in the vast darkness. [It is] a very honourable tiny candle that could easily get blown out.”
Musk said that this gave humans some added responsibilities. “We should therefore take great care with what may very well be this tiny candle and make sure that it does not go out" he said. "And that we send the light of consciousness beyond earth and so everything we can to ensure that this light of consciousness does not go out.”
During the interview, the Tesla CEO who was one of the original founders of OpenAI, warned against unregulated AI. He also revealed his plan to hire someone else to run Twitter, by year's end.
WATCH Elon Musk interview at the World Government Summit