Elon Musk says he hopes to turn X into a “giant brain” and turn it into a financial platform once it secures money transfer licenses.
“We want to create a group mind or collective consciousness in which each person reports information to the system and gives their opinion. Think of it as a giant brain,” Musk said Thursday in a wide-ranging 100-minute interview with Cathie Wood, CEO of investment management firm ARK Invest, on X’s Spaces app.
Wood was an early investor in Musk’s Tesla Inc. TSLA,
+2.98%
and still has significant exposure to the electric vehicle manufacturer. On Wednesday, Ark bought 111,387 shares of Tesla through its signature Innovation Exchange Traded Fund ARKK and its Next Generation Internet ETF AR K W.,
according to daily transaction disclosures.
Late Thursday, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives raised his price target on Tesla shares from $310 to $350, based on an “increasingly positive view of further EV stock gains and margin stabilization in 2024.” This puts Tesla on track for a $1 trillion market valuation next year, Ives added.
In a conversation with Wood, Musk discussed the pros and cons of running a publicly traded company. Reporting quarterly results inevitably comes with financial and legal hurdles, he said. “You will be sued non-stop by class action law firms with bogus accusers, and the press will report on it. It drives me crazy,” Musk said.
Similarly, he noted that Tesla has “created more millionaires than any other company.”
Regulation, he added, risks restricting companies, like Gulliverwith “millions of strings” on the ground, he joked.
At one point he went off on a tangent, claiming there was no evidence of aliens. “We have to build a city on Mars,” he said. ‘It is important that we make life interplanetary.’
Billionaire Musk, who helped found OpenAI, reflected on his preference for open-source AI and his fears, including the technology’s ability to replicate humans and spread disinformation. “You have to dramatically increase the cost of manipulating the system,” he said. “This is why we switched to a subscription, a small monthly payment, to minimize noise” on X.
He envisions that AI will eventually create technology and physics.
He said his various conversations with the media on controversial issues are understandable. “She [the media] I don’t have much choice,” Musk said. “Any media that isn’t focused on controversy is losing clicks in what is clearly a declining traditional market. Desperate times lead to desperate measures.”
At one point he accused the press of treating him like a “law-breaking maverick.”
This includes, he claims, constant headlines about the withering or death of X, which has lost a slew of advertisers such as IBM Corp.
+0.46%,
Walt Disney Co. DIS,
+0.82%
and Apple Inc. AAPL,
-0.08%
about Musk’s inflammatory comments, as well as the increasingly extremist content on the microblogging service.
“X is actually growing in traffic. Traditional media is down, but X is up, Musk said. “Of course the media won’t write that. Instead, they say that X is dying. That headline is a bit annoying.”
Conversely, he plans to expand X by “reaching as many people as needed with accurate information.”
“With the internet and a rapidly developed platform like X, you can now get all the people to report information and distill it through the experts,” Musk said.
“Do all neurons communicate with the lowest possible noise? If you pass on information that is uninteresting or wrong, you will get less traffic,” Musk said. “We have made progress on bots and trolls, but there is still work to be done.”
