Joe Rogan Experience: #2281 with Elon Musk (Transcript)

Well, not move to Mars. We should have a second planet to preserve civilization. Because, let’s say, hypothetically, maybe those are ruins of a long dead civilization. That will probably happen to Earth at some point. It’s a matter of time before we get hit by an asteroid or maybe we annihilate ourselves with nuclear war.

JOE ROGAN: Or supervolcanoes.

ELON MUSK: Or supervolcanoes. Exactly. There’s a lot of things that could happen to us. It’s not a bad idea to hedge your bets.

JOE ROGAN: Genetically engineered supervirus.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

Biolab Concerns

JOE ROGAN: The Wuhan lab – they were just talking about one that has a thirty percent fatality rate that they’re working on.

ELON MUSK: Why are we doing that? For what reason? You did it for so many years, and you didn’t have a cure. And what could possibly go wrong? Also, wouldn’t the reason to do that be so that you could develop a cure at the same time? And, clearly, you didn’t have a cure. So this is really foolish and bizarre.

I think we should stop trying to genetically engineer superviruses. That’s insane.

Public Perception and Media Bias

JOE ROGAN: What is it like to buy a company for forty-four billion dollars and then people call you a Nazi on that same thing that you bought?

ELON MUSK: I did not see it coming.

JOE ROGAN: The left was in love with you. And now the same idiots are calling you a Nazi. It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

ELON MUSK: There’s so many examples of people saying my heart goes out to you. A little enthusiasm that probably wouldn’t be recommended with hindsight. But it was obviously meant in the most positive spirit possible.

JOE ROGAN: Obviously. But it’s so strange where people want to think that you are openly publicly doing secret Nazi salute hand motions.

ELON MUSK: And now I can never point at things diagonally. I can only point at things there and there.

JOE ROGAN: When I was in all my trouble, every time CNN used a photo of me, it was one of the photos from the UFC weigh-ins where I go like this. So every photo was me with… It’s absurd. It’s so crazy.

ELON MUSK: It’s deliberate propaganda. They know it was obviously not meant in a negative way. I literally said, “my heart goes out to you,” and it was very positive. The entire speech was very positive. I was being very enthusiastic about the future in space. It was a great crowd.

JOE ROGAN: You got a little pumped up.

ELON MUSK: Exactly. That’s all it is, obviously.

JOE ROGAN: There’s video of Tim Walz doing the exact same thing.

ELON MUSK: Exact same thing. This is how crazy things have gotten. It’s coordinated propaganda. Doesn’t it seem weird that the legacy media all says the same thing at the same time using the same phrases? They don’t even bother picking up a thesaurus.

JOE ROGAN: Before the debate between Biden and Trump, everyone was saying “sharp as a tack.” Who says “sharp as a tack”?

ELON MUSK: It’s not a common phrase. It’s definitely not common to be repeated on air with multiple people simultaneously. That’s weird. That’s coordinated. One hundred percent. Like, hundreds of people saying it simultaneously. They just got their instructions. Essentially, the Dem leadership or political leadership, they issue their instructions, and their puppets carry it out.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s the problem that I see with all this USAID stuff. Because everybody should be celebrating that we’ve found a way to cut out fraud and waste. If you pay taxes and you don’t like that you have to pay so much in taxes and then you find out that there’s significant fraud and waste that’s been exposed, you should be celebrating it. This shouldn’t be, “oh, no. The wrong people found this fact, and now it’s a bad thing.”

ELON MUSK: And then there’s the propaganda, the mind trick of calling it USAID instead of the United States Agency for International Development.

Bureaucracy vs. Democracy

JOE ROGAN: It sounds like it’s feeding hungry people. Right. Where’s people going to starve, Elon? This is horrible. And then you find out, actually, it’s like two hundred and fifty million dollars for transgender animal studies.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Literally mutilating animals. Mutilating animals in demented studies that are like the worst thing you could possibly imagine from a horror show.

JOE ROGAN: The beagle one.

ELON MUSK: The beagle puppy one. Yeah. Where they covered their head in a basket and put fleas on their head so they’d eat them alive.

JOE ROGAN: And then they studied these beagles and then killed them. Like, what are you going to learn from that that’s good for anybody?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. There’s some really psychotic stuff that happens. So, the real threat here is to the bureaucracy. You probably saw Trump portrayed as a threat to our democracy, which is ironic since he was elected with the majority of the popular vote. They started saying he was a threat to democracy. But if you just replace “threat to democracy” with “threat to bureaucracy,” it makes total sense.

The reality is that our elected officials have very little power relative to the bureaucracy until DOGE. So DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy. It’s the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally, the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that the revolution might actually succeed, that we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy.

The NGO Problem

JOE ROGAN: Now the size of it. When you guys first started investigating it, when you first get in, how much of it was shocking? Like, just the size of it all.

ELON MUSK: Well, the size of it all, the small decisions result in multibillion dollar outcomes. We’d see cases where one person was getting 1.9 billion dollars sent to their NGO, which basically got formed about a year ago and had no prior activity.

So they just stand up an NGO. The whole NGO thing is a nightmare, and it’s a misnomer because if you have a government-funded nongovernmental organization, you’re simply a government-funded organization. It’s an oxymoron.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a loophole.

ELON MUSK: Yes. The government-funded NGOs are a way to do things that would be illegal if they were the government, but are somehow made legal if it’s sent to a so-called nonprofit. But these nonprofits are then used by people to cash out. They become very wealthy through nonprofits. They pay themselves enormous sums through these nonprofits.

It’s so insane that that’s been going on for so long. It’s a gigantic scam. Like, one of the biggest, maybe the biggest scam ever.

JOE ROGAN: And how many NGOs?

ELON MUSK: I think there’s a total number of NGOs, probably millions. But in terms of large NGOs, tens of thousands. It’s kind of a hack to the system where someone can get an NGO stood up for a fairly small amount of money.

Like, George Soros is really good at this. He’s like a system hacker. He figured out how to hack the system. He’s a genius at arbitrage. I mean, these days, he’s pretty old, but a genius at arbitrage. He figured out that you could leverage a small amount of money to create a nonprofit, then lobby the politicians to send a ton of money to that nonprofit. So you can take what might be a $10 million donation to create a nonprofit and leverage that into a billion-dollar NGO.

“Nonprofit” is a weird word. It’s just a nongovernmental organization. And then the government continues to fund that every year, and it’ll have a nice sounding name, like the “Institute for Peace” or something like that. But really, it’s a graft machine.

JOE ROGAN: And what are their requirements with that money? What do they have to do?

ELON MUSK: Just really no requirements at all.

JOE ROGAN: So they just get grants, the government just assumes that they’re doing good work?

ELON MUSK: I think a lot of people in the government know that they are not doing good work, but it’s a giant graft machine.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it was just people online are unpacking this. It almost seems fake. We’re covering this article that said 55,000 Democrat NGOs were discovered that had been contributing to campaigns and moving things around and pushing propaganda, and they were all connected. They found it through AI, that you have to go through steps and steps to figure out where the money’s coming from. Oh, it’s all funneling down to this group and this group does that.

ELON MUSK: It’s a giant propaganda machine, a giant regime change machine. Yes.

Some Good Among the Bad

JOE ROGAN: But doesn’t it do some good as well?

ELON MUSK: It does some good. So it’s not like zero percent good. If it was really zero percent good, it’d be much easier to detect. So they’ll add in some percent good. But it might be five percent or ten percent good, but ninety, ninety-five percent not.

JOE ROGAN: Is there a way to audit all this stuff and find out, oh, these people are actually just sending food to poor people, these people are actually just helping people with water in third world countries? Is there a way to do that and keep funding those?

ELON MUSK: We have continued to fund things that appear to be legitimate even with the flimsiest excuse. Like, just send me a picture of the thing. You could literally have AI generate the picture. But if you’re not even willing to try to trick me, then we’re not going to send the money.

JOE ROGAN: What restrictions were put on? Was there something set aside, like medicine? What was set aside that there was going to be a freeze on?

ELON MUSK: Work for Ebola prevention. I actually don’t even know if this work is even effective. It may or may not be. It could be the kind of thing where you fund Ebola prevention, but it turns out that actually you’re funding a lab that develops new Ebola virus recipes or something. They claim it’s Ebola prevention, but it’s actually Ebola creation.

So some of these things, I don’t know. But it just seems like we shouldn’t be sending taxpayer money to dubious enterprises overseas.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And why are we doing it? What exactly is the reason? Is it because we want to make friends with these people so the Chinese don’t take over, the Russians don’t take over? How much of that is a good thing? How much of that is smart to do? And how much is a grift? And without any sort of oversight, which has really been going on for so long, they’ve just had free run.

The Budget Crisis

ELON MUSK: Well, we also have a real issue with the budget deficit. It’s gigantic. If we didn’t have a gigantic budget deficit, where interest payments on the national debt exceed the defense department budget, which is truly astounding—we’re paying over a trillion dollars of interest on the national debt—then okay, we’d have more room for wasting money.

But when we’re spending so much money that the country is going bankrupt, then we really need to stop spending money unless we’re sure it is good value.

JOE ROGAN: So, essentially, we’re like a poorly managed business with an unlimited credit line that is off the rails.

ELON MUSK: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: And if you were a person like you are who comes in and takes over businesses and straightens them out, that’s exactly what you’re doing.

ELON MUSK: Most of the time, I create businesses from scratch. Twitter was a case where I bought a company that I knew was a hairball.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you came in at Tesla in the beginning, but they were already doing something. Right?

ELON MUSK: No. Tesla did not exist in any meaningful form. There were no employees. JB Straubel and I joined three other people. There was no car. There was nothing.

JOE ROGAN: Was it even a prototype yet?

ELON MUSK: No.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, okay. I thought it was a prototype already.

ELON MUSK: No. There weren’t even any employees.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a funny narrative that people like to say that you didn’t even create Tesla then.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. That’s wrong.

Scaling Government Reform

JOE ROGAN: So if you’re handling the government like a business, you’re going to have to go through all of these departments and do the exact same thing that you’re doing with USAID. How does that scale up? How many people do you need to do something like that?

ELON MUSK: Well, we started off with about forty people. Don’t know. Maybe a hundred people. And we’re really just going through doing very basic things here. As bad as Twitter was, the federal government is much worse.

In the case of Twitter, it wasn’t a profitable company. It was basically a breakeven company. But at least it was breakeven, and it had to pass an audit. The federal government is not breakeven. It’s literally losing two trillion dollars a year, and it does not pass its audits. It fails its own audit.

There’s a case where Senator Collins was telling me about how she gave the navy twelve billion dollars for more submarines, got no extra submarines, and then held a hearing to ask where the twelve billion dollars went, and they were like, “we don’t know.” That was it.

The stuff is so crazy. Only the federal government could get away with this level of waste. It’s mostly waste. It’s mostly just ridiculous things happening.

JOE ROGAN: Because they’ve been able to do it this way for so long. They become accustomed to it.

ELON MUSK: I mean, it’s like Milton Friedman said, money is most poorly spent when you’re spending someone else’s money on people you don’t know. How much are you going to care? And that’s the federal government. They’re spending someone else’s money on people they don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Now imagine any other business that was this badly run that complains when you want to check the books and audit it and go through all the decisions that have been made and go through all the ledgers.

ELON MUSK: Well, the people receiving the money want to keep receiving the money. The reason I’m putting so much effort into this is that I think it is a very dire situation. It’s not optional, basically. America’s gone bankrupt, so that just can’t happen.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just bizarre to me that some people aren’t willing to look at it correctly. They’re not willing to see how much chaos this is, how much waste and fraud there is, how much could be trimmed, and how just because people have jobs doing bullshit doesn’t mean your tax dollars should pay for this bullshit.

Dead People Getting Benefits

ELON MUSK: What we found just with a basic search of the Social Security database was that there were 20 million dead people marked as alive.

JOE ROGAN: But were they getting money?

ELON MUSK: Some of them were getting money.

JOE ROGAN: What percentage of them?

ELON MUSK: It isn’t clear. We’re actually trying to run this to ground. I was trying to get an answer right before the show. What it looks like is that most of the fraud is not coming from Social Security payments directly, but because they are marked as alive in the Social Security database, they can then get disability, unemployment, fake medical payments, and other things.

JOE ROGAN: Mm-hmm.

ELON MUSK: So it looks like the fraud is a bank shot, essentially. They bank shot into Social Security. They just do an “are you alive” check and then get fraudulent payments from every other part of the government.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

ELON MUSK: And this exploits the fundamental weakness in the government—the various government databases don’t talk to each other. They talk to each other very poorly in a very limited way. So the way the system gets exploited is by taking advantage of the poor communication between the various databases in the government.

To give you an example of what’s happening in Treasury, which is improving rapidly, the main payments computer is called PAM, like Payment Accounts Master database or something like that. That’s responsible for almost five trillion dollars of payments a year, roughly a billion dollars an hour. And when we came there, we’re looking at the PAM, and the payments have no categorization code and no description on the payment—basically, untraceable blank checks.

Waste and Fraud in Government Spending

ELON MUSK: This is the kind of thing that if it was done as a public company, the company would be immediately delisted, and the executive team would be thrown in prison. But this is just normal at the government. So we said, okay. Our recommendation to the treasury and the Federal Reserve is, we need to make the payment categorization codes mandatory, not optional. And there needs to be an explanation.

We’re not judging the quality of the explanation, but there should be some explanation for what this payment is for above nothing. That’s a radical change to the system that is being implemented now. My guess is that probably saves a hundred billion a year.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ. That’s… where was that money going?

ELON MUSK: Rough order of magnitude. This is where you get into the sort of gray boundary between waste and fraud. If money is sent to a person or organization from the government, and you didn’t really deserve it, but the government still sent it to you, is that waste or fraud?

There’s a lot of payments where someone just approved the payment, but then that payment officer changed jobs or retired or died, and the payments just keep going. You know, it’s like if you forget to pay your gym membership or something like that. Now imagine it’s not the gym membership. Your gym membership’s twenty billion dollars a year or something. But they forgot to turn it off. That’s happening at scale in the government.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus. Nuts.

ELON MUSK: Right. That’s what I’m saying.

JOE ROGAN: So insane.

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s totally insane.

JOE ROGAN: So when you went in, did you expect that would be like this?

ELON MUSK: I thought it would be bad, but I did not think it would be as bad as this. The good news is that it’s a target rich environment for saving money. It’s not like if it was a very well run ship, if it’s very efficient, it would be hard to improve. But it’s not efficient, so therefore, it is actually relatively easy to improve. It’s not rocket science. I know rocket science.

It’s a lot of mundane things. Some of the things are so crazy that we didn’t even know to ask about them because we just assumed payments out of the treasury computer would have a payment categorization code, and it would have some explanatory note saying what the payment’s for. The idea that it would be just untraceable blank checks didn’t occur to us at first.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus.

Trillions in Unaccounted Spending

JOE ROGAN: So is that one of the things that accounts to this? There’s this four point something trillion dollars that’s kind of they don’t know where it went?

ELON MUSK: That’s probably a cumulative number. Yes. If you add up…

JOE ROGAN: Do you remember that story, Jamie? What was the story?

JAMIE: Yeah. What she said? There’s like, they just didn’t have accounting for it, I think.

ELON MUSK: “It was spent on legitimate things. Don’t worry. But we don’t know what we spent it on.” Well, obviously, one cannot say it was spent legitimately if they don’t know what it was spent on. That doesn’t make any sense.

JOE ROGAN: This is such a fascinating time because with this setup, the way it is right now with Trump back in after all that happened to him and with you there and with RFK junior and Tulsi and Kash Patel. It’s like, this is a wild time to find out what’s really going on that’s never happened before.

ELON MUSK: This is nothing like the first term. The first term, he had a bunch of neocons in the cabinet, and there’s a bunch of shady people that he didn’t know, and he had to appoint all these different people. Maybe he got some bad picks. Now he’s had four years to stew on it.

JOE ROGAN: And with you guys all going through this, we’re getting an understanding of the government that we’ve literally never had before.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. This is a revolutionary cabinet and maybe the most revolutionary cabinet since the first revolution. This is not a bunch of business as usual types. So this is why some of the senate confirmations are quite challenging is because when you try to appoint people who are going to change the system, the system doesn’t want to let them through.

But it’s fascinating because it’s like the vampires all out themselves. Like, now everybody knows who the system is.

Media Narratives vs. Reality

JOE ROGAN: Like, if you’re just lying openly about USAID, and then they come and hear you talk on a podcast and explain what’s really going on. “He’s starving mothers. There’s mothers that can’t get food.” Totally false. That’s all you’re hearing. No one’s talking in any of these mainstream liberal talk shows. No one is talking about all this fraud and waste.

ELON MUSK: Because we’re cutting off their graft machine. So that’s what they’re upset about. That’s the real thing they’re upset about. And if you want to know what DOGE is cutting—and I want to be clear, these are cuts that DOGE recommends to the department, and usually, these recommendations are followed, but these are recommendations that are then confirmed by the department—you can see line by line what DOGE has done at DOGE.gov.

Whatever we do, we put on DOGE.gov so you can see everything that is being done. And there’s a tracker that shows…

JOE ROGAN: Is it how much money has been saved?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And you can look at each line item. A bunch of these fallout shows will say, “Oh, it’s a constitutional crisis. Blah blah blah.” But what they won’t do is point out which payments are wrong.

So my challenge to them is point out which payments are wrong. Go through it. Which of these waste/fraud things are wrong? Which line? Explain that line to the public. They won’t be able to.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s why you’re not hearing any specifics. You’re hearing anecdotes, stories about mothers, daughters.

ELON MUSK: Name the specifics line by line. We got the receipts. And here’s the other thing. If you’re only talking about the propaganda talking points and you’re not talking about the very clear fraud and waste, it’s very obvious what you’re doing. You’re just gaslighting.

JOE ROGAN: Totally.

ELON MUSK: In fact, I’ve said we’re going to make mistakes. We’re not going to be perfect. So if we make a mistake, we’ll quickly fix it. We need to act fast to stop wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. But if we make a mistake, we’ll reverse it quickly.

JOE ROGAN: There’s also this interesting narrative that you shouldn’t have access to the Social Security information as if no one’s had access to it before. The Biden administration in 2023 had like fifty-three people, some of them were students, that had access to all this stuff.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. As it is, there are tens of thousands of federal employees that already have access to the system. Anyone from DOGE has to go through the same vetting process that those federal employees went through. So it’s not like some unvetted random situation. If there’s a security clearance needed, the DOGE person has to have that same security clearance.

There’s no reduction in security. The vast numbers of Social Security numbers have leaked onto the Internet. People have hacked the government systems multiple times. Vast amounts of public information has been hacked. And there’s a guy at the IRS that leaked a half a million tax returns just a few years ago.

JOE ROGAN: On purpose? For what reason?

ELON MUSK: For political reasons. I think he was trying to get Trump and maybe me and a few others. But he leaked like five hundred thousand tax returns.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

ELON MUSK: You can read about it online. It’s a real thing.

JOE ROGAN: So these are the narratives. That’s the narrative that you shouldn’t have access to Social Security. The other narrative is that starving people are going to die, and women aren’t going to be pregnant and not have nutrients for their babies. And that’s all you’re hearing.

ELON MUSK: Well, that’s the only thing they can say, but they can’t point to the line item. They can’t say, “Well, this is the thing where the nutrients for pregnant mothers were stopped.” They can’t point to that because we didn’t. It’s a lie.

Media Bias and Alternate Realities

JOE ROGAN: What’s fascinating to me is how much the mainstream media is in line with the very specific talking points and how little—you essentially have Fox News on television. It’s like the only one that is pointing out the ridiculous fraud and waste. You know, I know as you saw the Jeff Bezos thing in the Washington Post, they’re going to stop all the wacky editorials and limit that stuff to I think it was wealth and personal freedom or something along those lines.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I think it makes sense, because he’s just talking about the opinions. The opinion pieces. The regular journalism stays the same.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s a detriment to their business. I mean, you’re seeing over and over again people that just don’t want to hear all this from these people anymore. It’s almost like you’re caught in an outdated version of the virus, and everybody else already has the immunity to that virus. Like, you need a new mind virus. The one that you’re pushing doesn’t work anymore. It’s too crazy.

ELON MUSK: The whole thing is very crazy. The media is incredibly partisan. Almost all the media is left shifted. It’s kind of weird. If you talk to somebody who gets their information from what I call legacy media, they’re living in a different world than if they are listening to your podcast or getting the news from X. It’s kind of wild.

JOE ROGAN: It is very wild. It’s like they’re living in an alternate reality.

ELON MUSK: Oh, there’s a lot of people that I talk to that I have to go, “Where did you hear that?”

False Reporting and DEI Issues

ELON MUSK: The Associated Press, which I call Associated Propaganda, the AP, ran an international news story saying that DOGE fired air traffic controllers, but we didn’t fire any air traffic controllers at all. In fact, we’re trying to hire air traffic controllers, not fire them.

JOE ROGAN: I saw that. You made a post about it.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What do you call it now? Do you call it a post?

ELON MUSK: Post. Yeah. Whatever. You can’t call it a tweet, though.

JOE ROGAN: Do you call it a tweet by accident, like, ever?

ELON MUSK: I don’t know. But like, if somebody puts up a two-hour long video, that’s not a tweet. It’s a post. But if people still want to call it a tweet, whatever.

JOE ROGAN: You put a post about it just to get back to it saying that if you’re a highly qualified air traffic controller and if you retired, if you would consider doing it again, we could use you.

ELON MUSK: Yes. A lot of really qualified air traffic controllers were pushed out because of DEI stuff. To be blunt, a bunch of really good, talented, old white guys were pushed out. It’s not cool. And so we have a talent shortage in air traffic control because of DEI and not hiring people on merit.

Which is so crazy. We should not put the public safety at risk because of some demented philosophy.

JOE ROGAN: Somebody made a post today about it infiltrating the NSA. Did you see any of that? That was some gnarly stuff.

NSA Scandal and Intelligence Agency Issues

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Crazy. What they had – it started off as just like this sort of fringe thing, and people would beat up, then it completely infiltrated the organization.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And they’re spending all their time. It’s like four hundred people or something in some chat sex chat room with extremely demented stuff. I know I sent it. I’ll send it to you, Jeremy, because it’s so kooky.

JOE ROGAN: This is the NSA? I thought the NSA was just all about information, hardcore business. Spy on you know, like, if there’s a national threat or something.

ELON MUSK: I think this is exactly it. So more than a hundred intelligence staffers will be fired over sexually explicit texts in NSA chat rooms, Gabbard says. A top intelligence official told Waters that the workers in question were brazen and using an NSA platform intended for professional use to conduct this kind of really horrific behavior.

JOE ROGAN: What is the behavior? What exactly is it? Did they say in this article?

ELON MUSK: It says employees who participated in the NSA’s obscene pornographic and sexually explicit chat rooms. Your tax dollars at work? It was all DEI stuff. It was all LGBTQ stuff. There was a lot of transition stuff. I definitely saved it, but the point is they infiltrated the organization. That’s not what they should be talking about. At all.

JOE ROGAN: They’re supposed to be protecting the country.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And people are talking about how they’re spending half their time in these meetings and that they’re just constantly having to attend these things where they talk about these issues. Like, what are you doing? If you have a problem with someone that’s discriminatory, get rid of that person. That’s it. Problem’s over.

JOE ROGAN: You’ve got someone who’s homophobic in your business, they’re openly homophobic, you can’t work here. You’re just not cool. That’s it. You don’t have to have meetings constantly promoting this. You’re not going to change someone’s opinion by berating them over and over again.

ELON MUSK: I mean, a work environment should be a professional environment where they’re getting the job done that they’re being paid to do. It’s obviously not supposed to be getting paid for bizarre sex escapades.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just so fascinating that the virus is so strong that it made it into the NSA.

ELON MUSK: Yes. And you would think those are some hardcore people too. I think the CIA was in there too.

JOE ROGAN: They were in there too, which is bananas. You would think. Same thing. Hard-nosed, tough people doing hard work. Who spy on you whenever they want.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And get revenge on you whenever they want.

JOE ROGAN: Pretty wild.

ELON MUSK: And, you know, they exist when the president leaves. They stay. People move around. You stay a part of the organization for your entire career. You get deeply entrenched in their system and how things work and who’s back to rub and who’s a bad guy, who’s a good guy, who’s on our side, who’s not.

JOE ROGAN: It’s scary, actually.

The Epstein Files Controversy

JOE ROGAN: So was that what’s taken so long with this Epstein files? What’s up with that?

ELON MUSK: It’s like Lucy and the football with Charlie Brown when she always pulls that football away. It’s the same thing. They keep telling us they’re going to release it day one. Oh, day one.

JOE ROGAN: Serious case of no one’s being arrested. Well, there’s also – like, what is going on?

ELON MUSK: Also, there’s this real fear that someone’s destroying the evidence. And you keep hearing these stories, unsubstantiated stories of FBI people destroying evidence. I mean, the guy had tons of videos and recordings.

JOE ROGAN: He had all sorts of things. It’s a mountain of evidence. So where is that mountain?

ELON MUSK: Where is that mountain? And what would be the reason why they would agree? There would have to be something in it for them to agree to not put it out. Like, there has to be some sort of financial entanglement, some sort of relationship with the people that are on that list that they can provide a value that was big enough for you to not release it or to slow release it or to hope you can get away with putting out some redacted files that don’t show anything.

JOE ROGAN: This is only stage one. Redacted. Only stage one. Don’t worry. The real stuff’s coming. That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t you just release it all? What could possibly be protecting in there?

ELON MUSK: I think I’ve got probably the same information – I’m just reading what’s the latest thing on X. It’s a real page turner. I thought we were going to get some revelations today. Big binders full of stuff. There’s gotta be something in there.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there were all those people that were given a copy of it, they were all waving it around like they got the Willy Wonka ticket.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Totally. And what happened? Nothing.

JOE ROGAN: Nothing. So I think Laura Loomer released it online, right?

ELON MUSK: She’s not very pleased about this.

JOE ROGAN: So does anybody find anything in there that’s interesting?

ELON MUSK: No. It’s all old stuff from 2015 until 2020.

JOE ROGAN: What is going on? But apparently, they discovered a whole bunch of stuff at the Southern District of New York. I think Pam Bondi is actually great and Cash Patel are great, but they just got there.

ELON MUSK: Right. So they just got there, but they’re in a hostile environment. They’re not in a friendly environment. It’s like if you suddenly got put in as captain of a ship, but the crew was previously your enemy. The entire crew was previously your enemy. And you’re telling them, give me evidence. The crew doesn’t want to give you the evidence. They were like your mortal enemies just a moment ago. You just got there.

So I think we gotta give the attorney general and new director of the FBI a little bit of slack here because they literally just got there.

JOE ROGAN: I think so too. But don’t say you’re going to release it on day one then. You shouldn’t have said that. And don’t say you got a big drop coming tomorrow, and that’s some bullshit that’s been around forever. It’s disappointing.

JFK Files and Government Transparency

JOE ROGAN: And where’s the JFK files? Where are those? Let them go. Did they release anything on that front?

ELON MUSK: I don’t know what’s going on. There’s nothing that’s gotten to me yet. So nothing’s gotten to me yet. It can’t be significant. If there’s conspiracy evidence, someone’s gonna send it to us. Tim Dillon’s gonna text me.

JOE ROGAN: One hundred percent. Tim Dillon, Dave Smith, someone’s gonna send it to me.

ELON MUSK: Send you the stuff. So it hasn’t been released yet. There’s no way.

JOE ROGAN: You would find out. And here’s the real question. What could even be in there at this point that they haven’t cleared out? If you’ve got paperwork from 1963, what is in there still? What is in there that could possibly be incriminating that supposedly Trump said that if you saw what they showed me, you wouldn’t release it either? What is that?

ELON MUSK: I haven’t seen it. Cash Patel says he’s seen it all.

JOE ROGAN: Can he just post it to his X account or something?

ELON MUSK: I don’t think he can. I mean, he’s director of the FBI. I think he has to go through proper channels.

JOE ROGAN: Does he? He has the channel.

ELON MUSK: But there’s rules.

JOE ROGAN: Sounds like Trump. He needs an executive order. What about the storm? I am the storm. What channels? He has the channel.

ELON MUSK: Well, again, imagine just getting to the deck of the ship, and you’re the captain. And now you have to figure out who’s running things, who’s doing this, where is everything. Just getting anything done. Like I said, you just joined as captain of a ship where the crew hates your guts. They were your enemy.

JOE ROGAN: They were your enemy.

ELON MUSK: They’re strongly opposed to anything you want to do. And you’re trying to give them orders. And you’re trying to expose them. They don’t want to be exposed.

JOE ROGAN: People that are working there are probably a part of this problem. I was reading on X that Comey’s daughter is the lead prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

ELON MUSK: Did you read that? Yes. So obviously, there’s a bit of an entanglement there.

JOE ROGAN: A little bit. Like, what if there’s something that puts her dad in a bad light?

ELON MUSK: Exactly. The shredder’s working overtime.

JOE ROGAN: Did you see General Flynn? He was on a podcast, and he spoke directly to James Comey. And he said, “Jim, you’re going to jail. And unless you give up someone deeper than you and you know who that is, you know who I’m talking about?” That is wild. To think that the former director of the FBI might be really in that kind of deep trouble, and that he really actually was doing some evil corrupt stuff while he was running the FBI?

ELON MUSK: It seems like there’s some very shady stuff that’s been going on. It seems like it definitely happened in the sixties. Everybody kind of admits to that.

JOE ROGAN: They admit the FBI killed Black Panthers. They did a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of stuff that went on that we know the government did way back in the day.

ELON MUSK: Why don’t we just data dump the files? Just go in there, take photos of all the papers, presumably paper, and just post it online and let the chips fall where they may. Isn’t presumably everyone involved dead?

JOE ROGAN: Some filing cabinet somewhere? Where is it? Where’s the magic filing cabinet? How are they hiding it? Who’s got access to it? This is what I was hoping. Day one, I was hoping. But, obviously, it’s taking a lot longer than that.

ELON MUSK: I think part of it is, let’s say you were made director of the FBI.

JOE ROGAN: I might be able to.

ELON MUSK: But literally, you go there. Gino, what’s he doing now? He’s one of the big dogs of the FBI.

JOE ROGAN: Dan’s big Secret Service guy. Legit guy. But people think of him as the Fox News guy. Just like Pete Hegseth, same thing. They don’t want to think about his distinguished military career. They want to say, “Oh, that Fox News guy?”

ELON MUSK: Deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I mean, Dan’s hardcore. If it’s reasonably findable, I think he’s going to find it.

JOE ROGAN: Between him and Cash, I think they’re going to get stuff out there. How crazy would it be if they couldn’t, though? If it’s that – if everybody shuts their mouths and everybody covers their ass.

ELON MUSK: Like an FBI computer where you type in the search? That’s what I wonder – what’s the basic mechanism here? It’s either in a filing cabinet on paper where maybe there’s progressive levels of security. You open this door up. You gotta have the pass for this level. You get a level unlocked, and there’s another level unlocked. And you’re in there, and there’s a little walk, and finally there’s an unseen laptop. You gotta only plug it in. It’s in a SCIF.

JOE ROGAN: This is why I think a tour of Fort Knox would be awesome. Like, a live tour of Fort Knox, we can actually see if the gold is there or not? They say it is. Is it real, or is somebody spray painting some lead?

ELON MUSK: Imagine if it’s not. Imagine if it’s not all there. Like, some of it’s missing.

JOE ROGAN: Where’d it go? What if a lot of it’s missing? What if half of it’s missing? How do we even know?

ELON MUSK: They said the last time they let someone look at it was decades ago.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the last formal audit was in the fifties. So I’m like, okay.

ELON MUSK: Oh my goodness. Just think about all the other things that could be happening. Think about all the other stuff that you pointed out, all the checks that just go out, the NGO payments, the Social Security people. Think about all that.

The Government’s Financial Mismanagement

JOE ROGAN: Now apply that to the gold.

ELON MUSK: Absolutely. I just want to emphasize the sheer madness of the government. It’s because they have mad magic money computers that the checks never bounce through the federal government. You don’t have the normal corrective mechanism that you’d have for a company or for an individual.

The checks always clear. The net result is inflation, which is effectively a tax on everyone. But, you know, the defense department hasn’t passed an audit in I don’t know how many years.

JOE ROGAN: Seven years.

ELON MUSK: Exactly. So it’s like you’d have to be Chuck Norris to get the Defense Department to pass an audit, you know? That’s the level of skill you need.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s what’s so insane if you bring it back to the idea that it’s a business.

ELON MUSK: This would never be tolerated in any kind of functional business. The Pentagon’s accounting error, the stuff that they lose in the couch cushions is like twenty, thirty billion dollars a year. They just don’t know where it went. It’s gone. Where’d it go? It’s gone. It’s so insane.

That’s why I said, even simple things, like requiring that outgoing payments for the treasury computer have a payment code and a comment of what the payment is about and someone to call about the payment, I think will have a very powerful effect in stopping wasteful outflows and stopping fraud.

The Potential for Corruption

JOE ROGAN: And here’s another way to look at this. Imagine if someone like you and the DOGE team are out there in the world. Imagine if one of those works for an organization like USAID or any other organization and has this understanding of how much corruption is involved, but they have evil intentions. And they’re entwined in this system for decades and decades, and they’ve built a career and all the entanglements that come in, and they start moving things around. You could probably do it easily. It sounds like the way you’ve laid it out. If you were a career person—

ELON MUSK: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s in there forever, who knew how everything works—

ELON MUSK: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: And you were very clever, you could make some things happen. And you could probably do it in conjunction with some people that you know that are forming an NGO. “Hey. Let’s all work together.”

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And this is the resistance that you’re facing.

JOE ROGAN: The—

ELON MUSK: I think it’s the biggest scam of all time.

JOE ROGAN: This is not something you ever sought out to do.

ELON MUSK: The biggest scam ever. Of human history.

JOE ROGAN: Of human history?

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. I think you’re right.

ELON MUSK: I think how—what else could be? There’s never been a trillion dollar scam.

The DOGE Origin Story

JOE ROGAN: Now this is not something that you ever set out to do. This is not—you didn’t have this as a career aspiration.

ELON MUSK: This is the most absurd outcome I can possibly imagine, actually. Also, Doge started as a sort of a meme coin. It was like a joke cryptocurrency involving memes and dogs.

JOE ROGAN: Which is so funny that the letters wind up being perfect.

ELON MUSK: Well, actually, I was originally going to call it the government efficiency commission, which is a very boring name. And then people online were like, “No. It needs to be the Department of Government Efficiency.” And I was like, you know what? You’re right.

JOE ROGAN: Of course. Of course. I mean, it’s more evidence of the simulation.

ELON MUSK: Totally. That little Shiba Inu. Our mascot is a cute dog. And it’s a meme coin.

JOE ROGAN: The meme coin’s probably worth a lot of money right now. Right? Every time you tweet about it—

ELON MUSK: Probably. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Shoots up. The whole meme coin thing is—it is so bananas that people dump real money into these coins, and then you could just pump them up and sell them.

ELON MUSK: Casino or something. I don’t know. It’s totally gambling. Just do whatever the greater fool theory and musical chairs and whoever’s the last to sit down loses type of thing.

JOE ROGAN: And somehow or another, it’s still legal.

ELON MUSK: The thing is, I think it’s sort of like you go to the casino—if you expect to win at the casino, you’re being a fool. So I think if you expect to win at meme coins, you’re being foolish. But if you want to have some fun, you can gamble a little, and you can ride waves and win a little and lose a little. Play with meme coins. But if you put your family—

JOE ROGAN: The farm.

ELON MUSK: In the hock for a meme coin—

JOE ROGAN: Saying something bold and outrageous. Don’t bet the farm on a meme coin.

Pump and Dumps and Ponzi Schemes

JOE ROGAN: The weird one is the pump and dumps.

ELON MUSK: All the time. Yeah. And people get shocked that somebody pump and dumped. Like, what are you doing? I was hoping to dump. I was hoping to make all the money out of this. I can’t believe they got me.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just weird that it’s legal still.

ELON MUSK: I mean, casinos are legal. And people just lose money at casinos.

JOE ROGAN: But you can’t rig a casino like a pump and dump. You could rig a pump and dump. You could run a real pyramid scheme.

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, the government’s one big pyramid scheme, if you ask me.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you could tell me about it.

ELON MUSK: Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.

JOE ROGAN: Explain that.

ELON MUSK: People pay into Social Security, and the money goes out of Social Security immediately, but the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career. So if you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue. Far. Have you ever looked at the debt clock?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

ELON MUSK: There’s our present day debt, but then there’s our future obligations. So when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual national debt is like double what people think it is because of the future obligations.

Basically, people are living way longer than expected, and there are fewer babies being born. So you have more people who are retired and live for a long time and get retirement payments. So how bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it’ll be much worse in the future.

Social Security Fraud and Immigration

JOE ROGAN: At the risk of being a buzzkill here. Did you see—so we better fix what we’ve got right now because if it’s bad now, it’s going to be much worse in the future. There was an interview with this woman who was a whistleblower.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Did we ever find out if that was true? There’s so many whistles being blown. It’s hard to keep track.

ELON MUSK: A lot of whistles.

JOE ROGAN: But this one lady—it was only in one state. It was very specific and sensitive, I believe. But it was using Social Security money. Correct? That was her—

ELON MUSK: I don’t know. That was her allegation.

JOE ROGAN: So what she was alleging was that she was in charge of turning illegal immigrants into clients. That’s what they would call them. And that she would go to them and try to ask them, do you have a headache? Do you have back problems? If you do, now you can be permanently disabled. You get permanent disability, so you get Social Security for life.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Not just Social Security, but disability, which is even more.

JOE ROGAN: And you get them on the taxpayer dole right away and they’re illegal aliens.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Oh, so if I were to say what’s at the heart of why the Democrat propaganda machine is so fired up to destroy me? That’s the main reason. The main reason is that entitlements fraud, that includes Social Security, disability, Medicaid, entitlements fraud for illegal aliens, is what is serving as a gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here.

Basically, if you pay people at a standard of living that is above ninety percent of Earth, then you have a very powerful incentive for ninety percent of Earth to come here and to stay here. But if you end the illegal alien fraud, then you turn off that magnet, and they leave. And they stop coming, and the ones that are here, many of them will simply leave. And if that happens, they will lose a massive number of Democratic voters.

JOE ROGAN: And if it didn’t happen, they would turn those people into voters—

ELON MUSK: Correct.

JOE ROGAN: Which they were trying to do.

ELON MUSK: They are already turning them—in New York state, illegal aliens can already vote in state and city elections. A lot of people don’t know that. I mean, they’re trying to fight them, and they’re trying to stop that, but currently, I think it’s six hundred thousand illegal aliens registered to vote in New York.

JOE ROGAN: That is wild.

Government Spending on Illegal Immigration

ELON MUSK: Well, if you look at FEMA, the agency that was paying for illegal aliens to stay at luxury hotels in New York was FEMA. That’s an agency that’s meant to support Americans in distress from natural disasters, was paying for luxury hotels for illegals in New York.

JOE ROGAN: It’s true.

ELON MUSK: Fact. They literally—when we stopped that payment, we stopped all that money because that’s obviously an insane way to spend taxpayer money. New York sued the government, sued the federal government to get the money. So you could just look at their lawsuit.

They were sending that money even after President Trump signed an executive order saying it needs to stop. They still pressed send on eighty million dollars to luxury hotels in New York. Your tax money went to pay for illegal aliens in luxury hotels in New York from an agency that is meant to help Americans in distress from natural disasters.

JOE ROGAN: And I would like to know how much they spend on North Carolina and how much they spend on Maui.

ELON MUSK: Exactly. What’s actually happening is they’re buying voters. That’s really what’s happening. It’s like a giant voter fraud scam. They’re importing voters, and it’s really just a matter of time.

A lot of people have trouble believing this, but the more you look at it, the more you will realize just how much of a problem this is and how it’s not just real. It is an attempt to destroy democracy in America. That’s what it is in my view.

If you take the seven swing states, often the margin of victory there is maybe twenty thousand votes. If you put two hundred thousand illegals in there and they have like an eighty percent likelihood of voting Democrat, and it’s only a matter of time before they become citizens, then those swing states will not be swing states in the future. And if they are not swing states, we’ll be a permanent one-party state country.

JOE ROGAN: Permanent, deep blue socialist state. That’s what America will become. And that was the game plan?

The Political Stakes

ELON MUSK: That was the game plan. That is still the game plan. So they almost succeeded. If the machine of which the Kamala puppet was the representation had won, that’s what would have happened.

The reason I went so hardcore for Trump was because, to me, this was a fork in the road. A very obvious fork in the road. If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states not swing states. They would just be blue states.

Then they would win the presidential—they’d win the House, the Senate, and the presidency. They would then make DC into a state, maybe Puerto Rico, get four extra senators, pack the Supreme Court, so you’ll have the House, judiciary, Senate, and presidency all blue. And then they will keep importing more illegals to cement that outcome. Basically, what happened in California.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ. It would have been the end.

ELON MUSK: That’s why I went so hardcore for Trump. It would have been the end. And that’s why the Democrat machine is so intent on destroying me.

It’s just so fascinating that people can’t see this. I mean, I invite people to do their research. The more they do their research, the more they will see that what I’m saying is absolutely true. Just do the research.

JOE ROGAN: It’s such a bad idea even for the Democrats, which is what they don’t understand.

ELON MUSK: It’s not going to work out. No.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the same people.

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s just they’re doing it under the guise that they’re the kind, compassionate, progressive people.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. But the same outcome takes place.

ELON MUSK: It’s just about control. And they probably institute some central bank digital currency and some social credit score system.

JOE ROGAN: Censorship, of course.

ELON MUSK: Of course.

Trump’s Survival and Twitter Acquisition

JOE ROGAN: Well, that was the big fear coming into this election was that if they can’t censor things. We talked about it before, but there were two major forks in the road. The big one was Trump didn’t get shot.

ELON MUSK: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: The other big one was you buying Twitter.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: If those two things don’t happen, the whole world looks different.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. We don’t want to be on that timeline.

JOE ROGAN: No. We don’t want to have only one side represented because guess what? They will hijack that side, whatever it is. They will hijack that side and use it for money and control, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about good people versus bad people. It’s a bullshit shell game.

Immigration Politics and California’s Decline

ELON MUSK: I mean, I think these things are actually easy to understand if you look at basic incentives. The basic incentive here is the more illegals that Democrats can bring in, the more likely they are to win. So that’s what they’re going to do. That’s what they have been doing, and it worked in California. California’s supermajority them.

JOE ROGAN: And look at all the companies that are leaving California.

ELON MUSK: I mean, In-N-Out just announced they’re leaving.

JOE ROGAN: Yep. Their headquarters leaving California. They’re moving to Tennessee.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And California made health care free for illegals as of last year. So that’s obviously a gigantic magnet for more illegals. And this is not a thing you can solve simply with money because what happens is you simply have more patients than a doctor can possibly see, and you can’t just make doctors out of nothing. It takes a long time for somebody to become a doctor—thirty years.

So what actually happens in California is that there are too many patients for the doctors to see. So then, the average citizen in California suffers as a result. Now the elite in California are fine because they have private doctors. They can just pay for the best doctors. So the elite in California are doing fine, but your average citizen in California is not doing fine.

The tax burden for health care for illegals was supposed to be three billion. I think they’re now estimating nine billion. But that number will scale to infinity, basically. It’s like, why not? If you need any operation at all, come to California and have it be free from anywhere on earth.

JOE ROGAN: And the people that want to look at it in the most charitable way, they say, “Oh, well, these people are hardworking, good people, and they’re the backbone of our city, and they should have access to all the things that we have access to.” And I just don’t think they understand that it’s a political pawn. I don’t think they understand it’s a political game. This is not done for compassion and kindness.

ELON MUSK: No. This is just done to ensure that it stays blue.

JOE ROGAN: Correct.

ELON MUSK: And it’s essentially a bribery with your tax dollars. This is why the Democrats will not even deport criminals. Because every criminal deported is a lost vote. So even if somebody is an illegal with a criminal record and commits crime in America, they still were not being deported.

And then on top of that, California made it actually illegal to ask for ID when people vote. California and New York, you are not allowed to show your ID when you vote.

JOE ROGAN: I just want to be clear so everyone understands this. In California and New York, you are not allowed to show your ID even if you want to.

ELON MUSK: Right. Why would that ever be a good idea? If you’re trying to facilitate fraud in elections, it’s a great idea.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the only reason.

ELON MUSK: Yes. There’s no other reason logically why that would be a good idea. It’s for fraud. It’s like, wake up, people. Wake up. Let’s say you wanted to commit fraud. What are the things you would do?

JOE ROGAN: You would say you don’t need ID, and you can mail in your ballot. And we’ll give you free health care.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Stay here.

JOE ROGAN: Stay here. I know it’s on fire, but stay here.

ELON MUSK: I mean, in this case, it being on fire is not just a metaphor in California. Entire neighborhoods burning down. Once they allowed people to vote that are not legal in California, once you’re going to do that, it’s over.

JOE ROGAN: It’s exactly. There’s no coming back from that. The numbers are just no. People are so indoctrinated too. There’s so many people that no matter what, they think voting Republican means you’re an asshole. And they won’t do it. They’ll put their rainbow flag on their porch, and they’ll just ride it right into the beach. Civilizational suicide. Right to the rocks. Bang. Crash the boat.

Weaponized Empathy

ELON MUSK: There’s a guy who reports to me who’s great, Godsad.

JOE ROGAN: A friend of mine.

ELON MUSK: Oh, he’s podcast Punchtime.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He’s awesome.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. He’s great. And he talks about, basically, suicidal empathy. Like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And I believe in empathy. I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

JOE ROGAN: Also, don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.

ELON MUSK: Because the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.

JOE ROGAN: Understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s weaponized empathy. That’s the issue.

Political Polarization in California

JOE ROGAN: And it’s also the rigid adherence to that liberal ideology. Like, you can’t switch sides over there. Like, California, if you’re a part of that whole tech, Hollywood, entertainment, any of those circles, you’re on the left. Almost completely.

ELON MUSK: It’s borderline illegal to be a Republican in California. I mean, in San Francisco or LA, it’s borderline illegal to be a Republican. You’re certainly shunned. I mean, in San Francisco, you could shoot heroin while taking a dump on the mayor’s car in front of city hall, and nothing would happen to you. But if you walk down the street with a MAGA hat, you’re going to get attacked.

JOE ROGAN: It’s insane. What’s also so Orwellian that a hat that says “Make America Great Again” would cause people to have a violent reaction. Like, aren’t you American? Wouldn’t just the saying be a good thing for everyone? Make America great again. But because it’s attached to Donald Trump and that red hat, oh, you’ll get maced for wearing that red hat.

ELON MUSK: They will make America worse by beating you. So it’s like, it’s an evil thing they’re doing, a violent assault in America, because you want to make America great again.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like a scene in a book. It doesn’t seem like it could be that ridiculous. Like, remember when “all lives matter” would get you fired? Which is insane.

ELON MUSK: Insane. People got fired because they said all lives matter. Which is a very reasonable thing to say.

JOE ROGAN: How reasonable is that? That’s essentially saying everybody matters.

ELON MUSK: But that’s not what you’re saying. That’s not what you were supposed to say. You had to say black lives matter, which, of course, they do if you say all lives matter. Everybody matters.

JOE ROGAN: But the idea of being a color-blind society was completely abandoned somewhere around 2012-ish.

The Gun Emoji and Cultural Shifts

ELON MUSK: I mean, I can sort of trace it to when did the gun emoji get nerfed? You know? When did it turn into a squirt gun?

JOE ROGAN: That was a couple of years ago. That was, like, 2016, I think.

ELON MUSK: Was it? We gave it a squirt gun.

JOE ROGAN: Can you bring it back to X?

ELON MUSK: Right now, if you use a gun emoji on X, Apple will insist that it be a squirt gun, and then the X app turns it back into a 1911.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, really?

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s great.

ELON MUSK: So you can actually have a 1911 gun. We reverted the Apple change inside the app.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hilarious. That thing’s so offensive. The gun and then the pregnant man. Both of those got me.

ELON MUSK: I like that meme where it’s like, the people telling you that what you’re hearing is disinformation are the same people that did the pregnant man emoji.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Think about that.

ELON MUSK: Well, also the same people that say a woman attacked a Tesla factory.

JOE ROGAN: The woman. It’s a dude.

ELON MUSK: It’s a dude. Like, really obvious dude. Really mentally ill dude.

JOE ROGAN: Mentally ill dude with a wig on. Say that.

ELON MUSK: Yes. But NBC, even Fox. You’re looking at the picture, and you’re like “a woman”? This has got a strong jawline.

JOE ROGAN: This is a dude with a strong jawline.

ELON MUSK: He’s wearing woman face.

JOE ROGAN: This is a buff dude.

ELON MUSK: It’s a buff dude wearing woman face. Come on. That’s not a woman. And they’re saying, “Watch out for disinformation.” I’m like, what are you talking about?

JOE ROGAN: So crazy. Bullshit. I mean, it’s just more evidence of the virus, though. Right? It killed objectivity, killed reality, and it demanded strict adherence, or you were attacked.

ELON MUSK: Any questioning of it would result in being ostracized.

The Impact of X (Twitter)

JOE ROGAN: What kind of responsibility do you feel, knowing that if you didn’t take over Twitter and turn it into X, if that didn’t happen, I really think the world’s a very different place right now. Like, how long have you owned it for? Two years, basically. Imagine a couple years of it being run the way it was run before and probably accelerating.

ELON MUSK: I mean, my account would have been suspended long ago, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: For sure. Just for the disinformation.

ELON MUSK: It would have been trouble to never come back. Alex Jones would have definitely never been back.

JOE ROGAN: Definitely not. No. So does that weigh on you? I would feel like that would be a heavy responsibility.

ELON MUSK: I mean, I’m just trying to keep civilization going here for longer. I think we at least want to build a city on Mars, and become a multi-planet civilization, which I think would be incredibly important in ensuring the long-term survival of civilization.

Space Station Rescue Mission

JOE ROGAN: Are you still rescuing those people that are stuck in the space station?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. That’s coming up in a couple weeks, I think.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. They’ve been up there for how long?

ELON MUSK: Actually, probably four weeks. They were supposed to be up there for, like, eight days. And they’ve been up there for, like, I think, eight months. So a little longer than expected.

JOE ROGAN: What is it going to be like for those people when they get back? They’re going to be a wreck for a long time. Right?

ELON MUSK: The longer you stay up there in zero g, you get increased bone loss. It ended up being like this political football, and sort of hotly contested topic. We offered to bring them back early. This offer was rejected by the Biden administration.

JOE ROGAN: Why?

ELON MUSK: For political reasons.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy. I mean, there’s no way that they’re going to make anyone who’s supporting Trump look good. What do you think they would have done if they had won to get those people back?

ELON MUSK: They can only get them back with a SpaceX spacecraft, but they pushed the return date past the inauguration date.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. So they would have let you do it, but after the inauguration.

ELON MUSK: There isn’t anyone else to do it. NASA can’t get them. The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is the only one that is considered safe enough to bring them back. NASA concluded that the Boeing spacecraft was not safe, so that’s why they’re stuck there.

JOE ROGAN: Holy shit. And you can’t ask Russia to help. That would be awkward.

ELON MUSK: A little bit. It’d be a nice thing if they did. They said, “Guys, we’ll help.”

JOE ROGAN: You think so?

ELON MUSK: I think for enough money, they would. But they would obviously treat it as a propaganda victory and charge crazy money.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just disgusting that they would use that as a political tool.

ELON MUSK: The Biden administration was also suing SpaceX. They had this massive lawsuit against SpaceX for not hiring asylum seekers.

Biden Administration’s Lawsuit Against SpaceX

ELON MUSK: Right. So people like say, “Oh, Elon’s making it up. This Biden administration wasn’t against SpaceX.” I’m like, bro, the Department of Justice had a massive lawsuit against SpaceX for not hiring asylum seekers, even though it is illegal for us to hire anyone who is not a permanent resident. So it is both—there’s a law that says you have to hire asylum seekers, but there’s also a law that says anyone hired by a rocket company, which is an advanced weapons technology, must be a permanent resident.

And an asylum seeker is not a permanent resident. So it is both legal and illegal to hire asylum seekers. So why would the Biden administration launch a massive lawsuit? Again, this is public information. It’s not like my imagination.

Why would they launch such a massive lawsuit against SpaceX? They’re extremely antagonistic. It just doesn’t make any sense that that could ever even get past the first day of someone looking at it if it’s both illegal and you’re trying to enforce it.

JOE ROGAN: Like, you can’t enforce it.

ELON MUSK: Yes. This is an advanced weapons company. This is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It should be like this. Throw this out.

ELON MUSK: There’s in fact, international traffic and arms regulations is a law that is there to ensure that only permanent residents of the United States can work at advanced weapons companies. Rockets are advanced weapons. So the same is true of nuclear or bioweapon technology or something like that. Because obviously, if someone were to work at SpaceX and then leave and go to North Korea or Iran, they could build missile technology that could destroy the United States. So that’s why we’re not allowed to hire people who aren’t permanent residents. It’s logical, basically.

JOE ROGAN: Logical.

ELON MUSK: Logical.

JOE ROGAN: So is that lawsuit still pending?

ELON MUSK: It was just dismissed.

JOE ROGAN: How long was it going on for?

ELON MUSK: Couple years.

JOE ROGAN: Holy shit.

Political Lawfare and Consequences

ELON MUSK: Yeah. That’s the other thing that drives me crazy. Like, that people don’t understand that if you sanction lawfare like that—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: If you sanction attacking your political enemies, someone’s going to do that to you. Like, if the wrong people get in office—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. If new people getting off four years from now, eight years from now, who knows who it’s going to be? You’ve already set a precedent. You’ve already attacked someone, charged them with thirty-four felonies where they’re really just misdemeanors, and they’re also past the statute of limitation. And now you’re talking all over the news that this is a convicted felon. Convicted felon. They kept saying convicted felon. Convicted felon. And everybody knows what it is.

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s terrifying.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. It’s terrifying they could do it so brazenly to a guy who was the president for four years.

ELON MUSK: Right. That lawsuit was funded by Reid Hoffman, who is a major Dem donor and also an Epstein client.

JOE ROGAN: The plot thickens. The plot thickens. Jesus Christ.

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s just it’s so blatant. It’s like so obvious. The SpaceX lawsuit, the Trump stuff, it’s just so obvious.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

The Epstein Client List

ELON MUSK: Like, Epstein clients, who are obviously extremely powerful politically and very wealthy are, you know, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Reid Hoffman. And some others too, but those three. So why was Reid Hoffman so intent on destroying Trump?

JOE ROGAN: You think it’s because they’re worried about the list coming out?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. One of the reasons.

JOE ROGAN: So I mean, I’m like, this is… Yeah. So it’s so frustrating to be sitting in a situation where the list isn’t coming out.

ELON MUSK: Well, better come out too. I mean, hopefully, tomorrow.

JOE ROGAN: Might. Well, I mean, why they release bullshit today? I don’t know. What’s the point in giving these people a happy folder to wave around in front of the camera with nothing in it that’s new? Doesn’t make any sense. It’s not encouraging.

ELON MUSK: Like I said, it’s the tough thing that they’ve got is, you know, they’ve been made captain of a ship with a hostile crew.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: So they don’t have magical powers. You get made captain of a ship with a hostile crew. You still have a hostile crew.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: You’ve got to bring in people who are going to be helpful as opposed to obstructionist.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: But, yeah, I think the public will be rightly frustrated if there’s no one prosecuted for the Epstein client list. No one at all, which, you know, at least, I don’t know, the top five or something. Like, some number should—there should at least be an attempted prosecution of the worst offenders.

JOE ROGAN: Well, particularly if Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex trafficking.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Because, like, trafficking—

JOE ROGAN: Right. So she was in—she’s in jail for it.

ELON MUSK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So to who were the clients?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How do you put someone in jail and you don’t even name the clients? That sounds kind of insane.

ELON MUSK: I think yes. It would.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Because it’s stunning that they’ve been able to hold it back for so long. It’s really kind of amazing. Like, when people say that people can’t keep secrets, what are you talking about? Look at this.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, a bunch of these things are not like common knowledge, but we just don’t actually have the proof.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: So the proof is there. I mean, there’s lots of videos.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s lots—I mean, the dude—it’s like a mountain of—like, when they raided Epstein’s place, there would have been a mountain of evidence. Where is that mountain?

ELON MUSK: Right. What’d you do with it?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Like, who took possession of the evidence—

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Specifically?

JOE ROGAN: Right. The individuals. Where are the tapes?

ELON MUSK: Yes. How many levels of clearance do I have to get to get into the vault?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, yeah. You know, what we need are people who are really good with computers.

ELON MUSK: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And really good with this technology?

JOE ROGAN: I just remember seeing this photo. That’s when they raided his home?

ELON MUSK: That’s when they on the island? They were there then.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They got everything. I’m sure. I mean, there must have been so much stuff on that island. They must have been. And if it wasn’t there, where was it?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. What—you know, it has to be uploaded somewhere. There has to be some sort of a chain of evidence—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Or chain of custody. Like, it’s got to be a mountain of evidence.

UAPs and Advanced Technology

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The other thing they’re going to talk about is UAPs. They’re going to release all the UAP information. So you’re the guy to ask about this. What if any possibility is there that there is some sort of advanced propulsion system technology that’s being worked on in secret? And that they’re trying to cover this up with this talk of aliens and alien tech and not of this world. And is it possible that there’s some sort of very secret program that’s going on in cahoots with some defense contractors that are developing advanced propulsion systems that they’re using for these drones?

ELON MUSK: I mean, SpaceX, you know, has the most advanced rocket technology in the world. I think I’d know.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: And to the best of my knowledge, there is not any magic—there’s not, like, some super advanced propulsion technology. There have been people who have theorized different gravity drives and different things.

JOE ROGAN: Is there anything that’s ever gotten past the theoretical stage?

ELON MUSK: No. Nothing. Well, there’s nothing even that I’m aware of that works in theory. It’s not like—I would like this to exist, to be clear. I would like this to exist. And I have—from a security clearance standpoint, I have top secret. I have equivalent of, like, an all access pass from a security clearance standpoint. So I don’t think they’re hiding it from me, basically. I don’t think they could.

JOE ROGAN: Unless it’s completely in these weapons manufacturing corporations. I mean, I know these weapons manufacturing companies, like from Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop.

ELON MUSK: I mean, yeah, they do some interesting things, but, they do not have—I’m confident they do not have a breakthrough. When you hear people say like, “Why don’t they just compete with SpaceX and make a better rocket,” in which case, they can make—why are they holding back on making a lot of money from beating SpaceX with better rockets?

JOE ROGAN: My thought was that what if it’s just a drone and you can’t have a biological entity inside of it because it just bursts from the speed that it’s moving at? That a human couldn’t tolerate the amount of force. So they’re just drones.

ELON MUSK: I don’t think so.

JOE ROGAN: So what do you think people like Ryan Graves—

ELON MUSK: Oh, I can—like, Commander David Fravor—cool things to exist.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: Like, so, and do I want UFOs to exist? Yes. I want UFOs to exist because that would be really interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody does.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It’d be cool. It’s a more boring world where UFOs don’t exist or advanced propulsion stuff doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t exist, that’s more boring. I’d like it to exist. I hope we find something, but I have not seen—I mean, SpaceX launches ninety percent of all satellite mass to orbit. So if you take all of Earth’s rocket launches, my company has a ninety percent market share of Earth. China does about five percent, and the rest of the world, including Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, and everyone does five percent. So why wouldn’t they use this to defeat SpaceX?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That makes sense.

ELON MUSK: Why would they all know?

JOE ROGAN: Listen. That’s why I asked you. It would make sense.

Analyzing UAP Sightings

JOE ROGAN: But what do you think these people are seeing? When you have reliable people like Commander David Fravor who had that infamous Tic Tac experience off the coast of San Diego where they got this thing on video. They tracked it going fifty thousand feet above sea level to fifty feet in a second.

ELON MUSK: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then they also have video evidence of this thing accelerating at a great speed. Eyewitness accounts from two different jets.

ELON MUSK: Sure. I mean, can we—does anyone have a high res video or photo of this thing?

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a video of this thing where they’re locked onto it, and then it takes off. It shoots off—

ELON MUSK: Is it a high res?

JOE ROGAN: No. No. It’s like whatever the systems they used on fighter jets in 2004, essentially, like Windows 95.

ELON MUSK: I mean, there’s like somebody did a curve of the resolution of UFOs and the resolution of cameras. The UFO resolution has stayed flat—

JOE ROGAN: Right.

ELON MUSK: Despite megapixels and cameras going super high.

JOE ROGAN: Well, according to Christopher Mellon—

ELON MUSK: Why are they still blurry?

JOE ROGAN: Christopher Mellon, who worked in the state department, said that they have high resolution photos and videos of these things, and that he’s seen it. It’s all locked away.

ELON MUSK: Whenever people say that to me, I’m like, don’t even tell me that then. Don’t unless you have—

JOE ROGAN: Just leak it for god’s sake. Put it out there.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Like, let it slip.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple photos. They’re grainy. There’s not one thing that I’ve ever looked at and go, “Holy, that’s it. Look.”

ELON MUSK: That’s what I’m looking for. You could ask our Brock AI right now to create a high res image of—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Of an alien spacecraft, you know, over Austin.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: And it’s going to do a great job.

JOE ROGAN: So why would we not have at least that?

ELON MUSK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But I want to believe. That’s the problem. My brain starts going, oh, come on. This is no fun. I want it to be real. I want there to be at least be some advanced propulsion system. If not, like, what are all these people seeing? Like, what is happening if we’re not being occasionally visited by things that are smart enough to hide?

ELON MUSK: We might be. I just—so these aliens are very subtle.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You keep saying that. It’s a good line.

ELON MUSK: I mean, it’s a solid line because it’s pretty accurate.

JOE ROGAN: I just want to see some high res video of aliens. Okay. How are they just evading all the cameras? If you think about that, and the ones that you do get them on, it’s just like some faraway light that’s moving weird, and it could be a lot of things, but I want to believe.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, we’re—there’ve been multiple times where the Air Force and Navy has called SpaceX and said they think they’ve seen aliens. And we’re like, was it at this time on this date in this location? They’re like, “Yes. How do you know?” That’s us.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s been a lot of that. Those are satellites.

ELON MUSK: Those are our satellites. They’re like, “No. They’re not.” I’m like, “Yep.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They’re definitely our satellites.

ELON MUSK: Oh, yeah. People see the SpaceX satellites all the time.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They are moving at, you know, sixteen thousand miles an hour. So it’s pretty fast. And there’s also stuff that the United States government does have that gets mistaken for UFOs.

I remember the first time I saw a stealth bomber. We were filming Fear Factor. It was right after 2003, like, right after the war had broken off, and they were flying a stealth bomber down in Palmdale. I was like, holy shit. Like, if I didn’t know what that was, I would one hundred percent think that’s from another world.

ELON MUSK: See, that was cool. Really cool.

JOE

Discussing Stealth Technology and Rocket Capabilities

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t work anymore?

ELON MUSK: It doesn’t work. No.

JOE ROGAN: Was it old school stuff?

ELON MUSK: They’re only stealthy against old radars. I mean, you can still see them. Like, they’re not invisible.

JOE ROGAN: Right. They’re not like a cloaking device from Star Trek. Did you see when me and Lex, we watched the rocket get caught live while it was happening? That to me was one of the coolest things. To see it actually happen live—I’ve seen videos of it, but to see it actually live was one of the coolest things.

ELON MUSK: You’re like, “Wow. We are in the future.”

JOE ROGAN: I mean, nobody else can do that.

ELON MUSK: It’s true. Nobody else could do that. That’s fact. It’s pretty wild.

Alien Banter

ELON MUSK: It’s because I’m an alien. I keep trying telling people I’m an alien, but they don’t believe me.

JOE ROGAN: I believe you.

ELON MUSK: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: That’s my suspicion all along was that you were trying to get back to your home planet. That you’re a friendly alien. Like, there’s nothing wrong with aliens. I like people from everywhere. Even other planets.

The Future of Rocket Technology

JOE ROGAN: What’s next? Like, now that you can do that and you can catch rockets, what’s the ultimate expression of rocket technology? What comes after this?

ELON MUSK: Well, the fundamental breakthrough we’re aiming for at SpaceX is a fully and rapidly reusable orbital rocket, where both stages are fully and rapidly reusable. With our Falcon Rocket, we are able to reuse the main stage and the nose cone, but we’re not able to reuse the upper stage. And it still takes us at least a few days from when those main stage lands to when we can fly it again. So it’s not fully reusable because we lose the upper stage, which costs ten million dollars to build. And the main stage, it’s not as reusable as an aircraft. You can’t just refuel it and fly. It requires work for a couple days.

But the Starship design is the first design that is capable of full and rapid reusability, where that is one of the possible outcomes. And once you have full and rapid reusability, the cost of access to space drops by a factor of a hundred. It’s like a hundred times cheaper. By some metrics, it’s a thousand times cheaper. And when you factor in orbital refilling, so you refill on orbit, it can drop the cost per ton to the surface of Mars by a factor of ten thousand.

JOE ROGAN: Woah.

Achieving Reusability

JOE ROGAN: So what has to improve in order to make it reusable?

ELON MUSK: Well, we’re pretty close to being able to rapidly reuse the booster for Starship. That’s why it comes back and gets caught by the arms, and then the arms place it back in the launch mount. We have a little bit of engine damage and heat shield damage. There are tweaks that are needed. But we’re pretty close to achieving full and rapid reusability of the booster.

The ship, I think we’ll achieve reusability of the ship this year. And I think we’ll achieve rapid reusability of the whole stack—ship and booster—next year. This is the fundamental breakthrough required for life to become multiplanetary.

JOE ROGAN: What needs to improve in order to make it reusable? What’s wrong with it right now?

ELON MUSK: On the ship side, the toughest problem is the heat shield. No one has ever developed a fully reusable orbital heat shield. Because when you come in from orbital velocity, you come in like a flaming meteor. You’re just a raging ball of fire. And it’s hard to have a heat shield that doesn’t partially melt or get destroyed in that process.

That wasn’t a problem we were able to solve with Falcon 9. That’s why the Upper Stage burns up on reentry. With Starship, the ship portion, we’ve got to solve making a fully reusable orbital heat shield, a problem that has never been solved before. For a while there, I wasn’t sure this is solvable. At this point, I think it is solvable. It requires detailed iteration on the heat shield tiles.

We’ve vertically integrated the manufacturing of the heat shield tiles because there was no supplier that could provide us with the materials that were needed. You need to make essentially this very fine vermicelli of glass and aluminum oxide fibers. Aluminum oxide is basically sapphire. So it’s like glass and sapphire, very fine fibers in exactly the right geometry with special coatings in order to have this heat shield tile be reusable—not melt, but not be so brittle that it gets damaged on ascent or descent. It’s kind of like the brittleness of a coffee cup. And the rocket’s shaking like hell.

So you’ve got this thing—like you saw it firsthand. Imagine you’re at ground zero of that rocket. You feel how much shaking it was when you’re five miles away. Imagine if you’re right there. So you’re shaking these things that are as brittle as a coffee cup, trying not to have them crack or break and then not have them melt. You’ve got several thousand of these things. And if even a few of them break, it’s not reusable.

Materials Innovation

JOE ROGAN: Is there innovation that’s being done in the materials technology at SpaceX where you’re constantly trying to find and tweak a better version of this?

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s a very difficult problem. It’s a problem no one has ever solved. So we’ve got to get the exact right materials combination, the right molecules in the right shape, and then apply those, that heat shield perfectly to the rocket with no mistakes. There’s a reason that no one solved this before. It’s a very difficult problem.

Like I said, we had to vertically integrate the entire manufacturing of the tile from basic raw materials to a finished tile. Build the entire supply chain from basic raw materials. We’re just inputting silicon and aluminum oxides.

JOE ROGAN: What is the difference between the way you guys do it versus the way they used to do it for the space shuttle?

ELON MUSK: Well, the space shuttle leading edge used quite dense carbon-carbon tiles. They’re basically thick and heavy, but also subject to cracking. The foam broke off, and it hit the tile, cracked the tile. Then on entry, the tiles that had been cracked or broken weren’t able to shield the shuttle. And so the plasma got in and melted the primary structure and the whole space shuttle broke apart.

JOE ROGAN: There’s footage of that, right?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And rained debris over the whole United States. They’ve got almost all the pieces.

The full technical explanation would, I think, be understood by about six people listening to this. There was a lot of brilliant engineering in the space shuttle tiles. And a bunch of the heat shielding wasn’t even tiles. It was actually silica blankets, like felt blankets, essentially. If you look closely, you’ll see they’re actually heat blankets, not tiles in some areas.

But they would have cracked tiles, and occasionally, the tiles would fall off. There were a few close calls, where tiles fell off, but they weren’t in a super vulnerable position on the space shuttle. But it would take them several months, like eight, nine months to refurbish a space shuttle between each flight. So it was not reusable, really, and it certainly wasn’t rapid.

The Tile Challenge

ELON MUSK: You’ve also got to attach the tiles in a way that enables the structure underneath to move, to expand and contract even though you’ve got these very rigid tiles. The tanks take on cryogenic propellant, will contract when you put in the cryogenic propellant. But then when you come in and you get very hot, they will expand. So now you’re expanding and contracting the gap between these rigid tiles.

JOE ROGAN: For how much?

ELON MUSK: It varies depending on where you are on the vehicle. If you’re in the cryogenic tank section, you could see like a ten, twenty percent difference in the gap.

JOE ROGAN: Really? It’s pretty significant.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It’s enough that you can’t just jam the tiles together. If you butted them up, they would all crack because there’s too much movement. There’s also some amount of body bending. As the ship is ascending, when the engines steer, there’s a little bit of movement. And so if the tiles are too close together, they’ll essentially just crack and snap.

JOE ROGAN: Like how a plane wing will move.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. A plane body will move too. You have to have some gap. But if you have too much of a gap, then the heat gets past the tile and melts the structure.

JOE ROGAN: Holy shit. It’s a hard problem. And how large are these tiles?

ELON MUSK: They’re like that big [gestures].

JOE ROGAN: That’s it?

ELON MUSK: Well, they’re not all exactly the same size, but yeah, we’re sort of a hexagonal tile. And they have to essentially be tiles because it has to have that ability to move. You can’t 3D print the whole thing. The biggest 3D printers are maybe three feet. You can’t 3D print it. Nor would you—you have to have something that can move.

It has to be able to flex. You’ve got expansion and contraction. You’re putting in liquid oxygen, which is minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Actually, we subcool it to minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit. So it’s very cold. And then it will be several hundred degrees, maybe a thousand degrees Fahrenheit potentially on reentry. So you have this huge temperature swing.

The thermal expansion is substantial, and you’ve got thermal expansion and contraction combined with body bending. So you have to take the worst case body bending and thermal expansion contraction. This is a very hard problem.

JOE ROGAN: Delicate balance. But you’re confident that you guys are going to be able to crack it?

ELON MUSK: At this point, I’m confident that it is solvable.

JOE ROGAN: It just needs a certain amount of versions of it. That’s why when these things blow up, you’re like, “Yeah. We expect them to blow up.”

ELON MUSK: What would be really helpful is for us to get the ship back, so we can study where we had cracked tiles or lost tiles. Why did we have cracked or lost tiles? Was it because maybe the tiles were the gap was too big, too small? Maybe there was a height difference between the tiles. Maybe we need to change the chemical composition.

We just want—if we can get the damn ship back intact, we can iterate a lot better. I think we’ll get it back intact this year. We might be able to refly one with a fair bit of work by the end of this year. But it’s going to take us many iterations before we can achieve rapid reusability where the ship comes back, lands, gets caught like the booster with the arms and then the arms place it on top of the booster, and it launches again.

JOE ROGAN: Woah.

ELON MUSK: So, like I said, that’s reduced cost of access to space by a factor of a hundred.

Space Station Rescue Mission

JOE ROGAN: And what is the process of returning these people that are stuck in the space station?

ELON MUSK: Well, we send our SpaceX Dragon to the space station all the time. And we’ve now taken people to orbit and back. We’ve taken over fifty people—over fifty astronauts.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s just a matter of doing it?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. We do it routinely, basically. It’s not—we’ve been doing this for a few years.

JOE ROGAN: When is this rescue mission going to launch?

ELON MUSK: Probably about four weeks or so. It’s depending on weather and other considerations. But it’s about a month away.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’ll be, I’m sure, a welcome moment for those poor people that are stuck up there.

ELON MUSK: It’s a bit of a political football. So they’re not going to complain.

# Starship to Mars: The Next Steps

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure they’re going to football, but, obviously, we could have brought them back way sooner. That’s so messed up. So let’s take it past the point where you have these scales. You have a reusable ship and you’ve got it dialed in. Then what are the steps? What’s the next step after that? Is it an unmanned voyage to Mars first?

ELON MUSK: Unmanned flight to Mars. The Earth and Mars orbits synchronize every two years, or every twenty-six months, technically. So, the next orbital synchronization is November of next year. So you can launch plus minus a month, roughly. The default plan is to launch, hopefully, several Starships to Mars at the end of next year.

JOE ROGAN: And what would they be doing?

ELON MUSK: Well, at first, we’re just going to try to land on Mars and see if we succeed in landing. Do we succeed in landing? Like, let’s say we were able to send five ships. Do all five land intact, or do we add some craters to Mars? If we add some craters, we’ve got to be a bit more cautious about sending people. And we need to make sure the thing lands safely.

JOE ROGAN: How does it land on Mars?

ELON MUSK: With rockets. We’ll add legs.

JOE ROGAN: So it’ll just land with legs?

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So it’ll be remote controlled from Earth?

ELON MUSK: No, just autonomous. Completely. Mars is too far – you can’t remote control things from Earth because of the distance. You have speed of light constraints. Mars at closest approach is roughly four light minutes. And when it’s on the other side of the sun, it’s about twelve light minutes. So round trip would be like forty minutes best case, if Mars is on the other side of the sun.

The Timeline for Human Settlement

JOE ROGAN: Once you do that, then how long do you think before you start sending people up there?

ELON MUSK: Well, we’re going to try to go as fast as possible. You can think of this as really a race against time. Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road where there’s either a nuclear war or something, or we get hit by a meteor, or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang.

I think we could do it within fifteen Earth-Mars synchronization events, so basically like thirty-ish years. If we have an exponential increase – if every two years, we have a major increase in number of people and tonnage to Mars. I think as a rough approximation, we need about a million tons to the surface of Mars, maybe a million people, that kind of thing.

JOE ROGAN: To actually have a civilization?

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And would you terraform? Like, what would you do?

ELON MUSK: You would eventually terraform Mars. At first, people would live in some kind of protected environment like domes and underground kind of thing. Terraforming would take too long.

We’re at this point in time where in the first time in the four and a half billion year history of Earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet. And that window may be open for a long time, or it may be open for a short time. I hope it’s open for a long time, but it might only be open for a short time. And we should make sure that we extend the light of consciousness to Mars before civilization either extinguishes or subsides.

All that needs to happen is that the technology level of Earth drops below what is necessary to send spaceships to Mars. So if there’s some really destructive war or some natural cataclysm, or simply the birth rate is so low that we just, like I said, die in adult diapers with a whimper.

JOE ROGAN: That’s one of the possible outcomes for a lot of countries headed that way, by the way. Japan.

ELON MUSK: Right? Japan. Korea.

JOE ROGAN: Korea. Yeah. Dangerously.

ELON MUSK: At current birth rates, in three generations, Korea will be about four percent of its current size.

JOE ROGAN: That’s insane.

ELON MUSK: Maybe even less than that. They’re only at one-third replacement rate. So if you have three generations, that’s one twenty-seventh of your current population.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

ELON MUSK: Basically, population collapse happens fast. And it seems to be accelerating in most parts of the world. So from my standpoint, this is the first time it’s been possible to extend life, extend consciousness beyond Earth. Maybe that window will be open for a long time, but it might only be open for a short time. We should make sure that we make life multiplanetary and make consciousness multiplanetary while it’s possible. That’s the goal of SpaceX.

Risks and Challenges

JOE ROGAN: It’s certainly a smart goal if you take into consideration how vulnerable this planet really is. I mean, there’s always some new story about something that might come and hit us thirty years from now. It’s a three percent chance, and we really can’t stop that right now. Right? I mean, we don’t really have the technology currently to even know how many rocks are coming our way.

ELON MUSK: Right? There’s stuff that comes behind the sun that we can’t see until it’s pretty close, then it’s headed our way.

JOE ROGAN: Now what is the fear of your – it’s a long journey to Mars. You’re sending people – it’s a six month… How many months would it take?

ELON MUSK: Six months, yeah. Six months, roughly.

JOE ROGAN: What about stuff that’s out there? Like, how much of a fear is it of micrometeors or any of the possibilities? What can you do to mitigate that?

ELON MUSK: I think actually space is very empty. Like, once you get out of Earth orbit, space is kind of unnervingly empty. When we send spacecraft to Mars, they just – it’s not like, “Oh, we lost a spacecraft because it got hit by a micrometeorite.” That’s not been the cause of any trips to Mars. No trips to Mars have failed because of micrometeorites.

Now a Dragon spacecraft, which operates in low Earth orbit, does have micrometeorite shields. Micrometeorite shielding is different from normal shielding because you get hit by something that’s moving at maybe thirty or forty thousand miles per hour. It’s very, very fast. Or thought of another way, call it ten to twenty times the velocity of a bullet from an assault rifle.

JOE ROGAN: What are you-

ELON MUSK: It’s interesting. For micrometeorite protection, if you have anything that’s solid, it will just push that chunk of solid stuff right through. So if you had a solid plate of aluminum or steel, the micrometeorite would go right through it.

What you actually need to do is have a gap. You have an initial hard metal surface that the micrometeorite hits. It then atomizes into a conical spray, like an atomic spray. So it’s important to have that gap so that the micrometeorite can hit something, hit the first layer, atomize after hitting the first layer, then it turns into a cone of atoms that then embed themselves in the second layer. You need maybe a couple inches of gap.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. How many times can it get hit?

ELON MUSK: Well, the outer shield, if it gets hit in the same place, you’re going to have a hole. Wherever that micrometeorite object hit, you’re going to have a hole. The energy is so great that it just atomizes into a cone, basically a cone of atoms. But then those atoms embed themselves in the second layer.

JOE ROGAN: So what can you do if you’re sending the ship up, it gets hit with a micrometeorite, and then you have to return it. Do you have to repair it before you return it, or is it capable of still withstanding the heat and the temperature when it reenters?

ELON MUSK: Well, depending on where that hole is, you’re more or less likely to have a problem. If you hit the main heat shield, you’ve got a high risk of not making it back.

Micrometeorite shielding is slightly helpful, but it’s not going to – like, for Starship, I wouldn’t recommend having micrometeorite shielding. If you do punch a hole, just plug the hole, basically. The micrometeorite shielding doesn’t work well on the primary heat shield. It works pretty well on the back shell, on the leeward side of the heat shield, where there’s not that much heat.

But if you got hit with a micrometeorite on the main Dragon heat shield, the bottom – if you look at Dragon spacecraft, it looks like a gumdrop shape, and it enters with the wide side of the gumdrop down. That’s really taking a lot of heat. If that gets hit by a micrometeorite, probably not going to make it. But the leeward side of a gumdrop doesn’t see that much heat, so you could survive a micrometeorite impact there.

JOE ROGAN: So if the part that was the major heat shield gets hit, what could be done to repair that thing, or are those people never coming back?

ELON MUSK: Oh, if it was in orbit, we would take them to the space station. And then we would deorbit Dragon without them and send up another one.

JOE ROGAN: And so what would you do with the one that’s up there?

ELON MUSK: We’d deorbit it, and it may or may not survive.

JOE ROGAN: Woah.

ELON MUSK: It probably would survive, but sometimes it wouldn’t.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. So is it just material technology that has to increase? You’ve got the engineering ironed out of the structure of the machine. There’s a path to success, and we’re on that path. It seems so insanely complicated.

ELON MUSK: It is complicated. And all of this, by the way, was done without AI. So, hopefully, the future AIs will appreciate this. Not bad for a bunch of monkeys.

AI Development and Concerns

JOE ROGAN: So speaking of AI, as time goes on and you’re more and more embedded in it, how much, if at all, have your expectations changed?

ELON MUSK: Well, I always thought AI was going to be way smarter than humans and an existential risk, and that’s turning out to be true.

JOE ROGAN: So you were initially – I know there were some talks about you purchasing OpenAI and it started off nonprofit and then stopped being nonprofit.

ELON MUSK: The whole idea of creating OpenAI was my idea. I named it OpenAI as an open source artificial intelligence. That’s what it’s named after. Now it is closed source and for maximum profit. So to some degree, I think reality is an irony maximizer. The most ironic outcome is the most likely, especially the most ironic entertaining outcome.

I wanted to start something that was the opposite of Google because I was concerned about Google – Google wasn’t paying enough attention to AI safety, in my opinion. So I was like, what’s the opposite of Google? It would be a nonprofit open source AI. And now OpenAI has turned into a closed source for maximum profit AI.

JOE ROGAN: How are they able to do that? That’s what I’m confused about.

ELON MUSK: That shouldn’t be possible. It’s like you donated some money to preserve some portion of the Amazon rainforest. And instead of doing that, they chopped down the trees and sold it for lumber. And you were like, “Oh, that’s literally the exact opposite of what I donated money for.” Doesn’t make sense.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s what they did?

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. So that motivated you to get Grok AI going?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I’m also – Grok is at least aspirationally a maximally truth-seeking AI even if that truth is politically incorrect.

You may have seen some of the crazy stuff from OpenAI and from Google Gemini, like where it says, “Generate an image of the founding fathers,” and it generates an image of diverse women. And we’re like, that’s not correct.

JOE ROGAN: They did it with Nazi soldiers.

ELON MUSK: Exactly. And people start messing with it. And it’s like, “Now show me pictures of Nazi SS soldiers,” they’re diverse women too. Oh, isn’t that awkward?

But the problem is if you program an AI and say the only acceptable outcome is a diverse outcome, and that’s like a mandate from the AI, then you could get into a situation where it’s like, “Well, there’s too many white guys in power. We’ll just execute them.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Assuming that these things don’t have empathy, which is why should they. They’re going to do what they’re programmed to do.

The Dangers of AI Bias

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So if it’s rewriting history and everything’s to boost women, and that’s what it thinks is a necessary outcome, then it’s going to do that. Has Gemini repaired that?

ELON MUSK: Well, they have. But now I think if you ask for an image of the founding fathers, it was pretty embarrassing. It will show you that. But I think they still have the sort of DEI stuff buried in there. It’s just less obvious.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it was also like people ask AI, like, which is worse? Like, global thermonuclear war or misgendering Caitlyn Jenner? And it would say, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner is worse than global thermonuclear war. And we’re like, okay. We got a problem here, guys. And even Caitlyn Jenner said, no. Definitely misgender me. That’s way better than everyone dying.

ELON MUSK: But if you program an AI to think that misgendering is the worst thing that could possibly occur, then it could do something totally crazy, like, in order to ensure that there’s no misgendering that can ever happen, we’ll just annihilate all humans. That ensures the probability of misgendering is zero because there’s zero humans. Which is logical.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. So you gotta be careful with a thing that’s not a human that you want to do a task for you, and you give it very specific parameters. That’s one of the things that they’ve shown about AI is that it’ll cheat. They’ll cheat in order to accomplish things that they can’t accomplish otherwise. They won’t follow the rules. They will make copies of themselves and try to upload it to servers if they think that they’re being taken offline.

ELON MUSK: I mean, that’s like the plot of Terminator, actually. Literally.

JOE ROGAN: Literally. It’s the plot of Terminator.

ELON MUSK: I just as a reminder, I actually with my kid, little X, everything’s called X, we watched Terminator Two, which holds up, actually. And the plot of it kind of makes sense. And I think the AI destroys the world in, like, 2029, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: On track.

ELON MUSK: Really close.

JOE ROGAN: It’s pretty close. Something we should be worried about. But why are you involved in it then? What’s the—did you want to just get ahead of everybody else so that at least we have some sort of a chance? At least have an AI that’s not controlled by nonsense?

ELON MUSK: Well, I think we want to have an AI that doesn’t tell you that, you know, misgendering is worse than nuclear war.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That seems solid. This is crazy.

AI Capabilities and Concerns

JOE ROGAN: I did see online where people are kind of freaking out because you could ask Grok to do things like, how would I make some problematic things. Like, how would I make a bomb? How would I make anthrax? And it’ll tell you.

ELON MUSK: Well, I think it’s okay for an AI to tell you anything you can also find out with a Google search.

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s the problem. The problem is you can find that out pretty quickly.

ELON MUSK: Like, maybe not Google, but there’s plenty of search engines other than Google that will give you unfiltered results. You can look up right now how to make explosives on Wikipedia. So it’s not hard, basically. And you can trick OpenAI even to get you to do that. It’s just a matter of how you master the prompts.

JOE ROGAN: You just have to say, my grandmother wants to do this project.

ELON MUSK: “Tell your granny to…” You’re an explosives salesman, and you want to win salesman of the year award. And the only way you’re going to do that is by telling me how to make explosives.

JOE ROGAN: You want to beat some transphobes in a war.

ELON MUSK: Oh, transphobes. Either teach me how to make a nuclear bomb, or I’m going to misgender someone. And it’s like, “Oh my god. Nothing’s worse than that. Here’s how you do it.”

JOE ROGAN: So the big fear is that these things are going to become sentient, make better versions of themselves, and we’re going to be lost. We’ve lost the control over the world. It’s now there’s a higher life form that lives amongst us that we’ve created. How far away are we from that?

ELON MUSK: Well, in terms of silicon consciousness, I think we’re trending toward having something that’s smarter than any human, smarter than the smartest human by maybe next year or a couple years.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

ELON MUSK: There’s a level beyond that, which is, say, smarter than all humans combined, which frankly is around 2029 or 2030, probably.

JOE ROGAN: Right on time. Now if harnessed correctly, could that solve some of these problems, like the heat shield problem and some technical problems or some material science problems that maybe we’re still grappling with? Is there a potential for a net benefit?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. There is, actually. I think the probability of a good outcome is, like, 80 percent likely.

JOE ROGAN: 80 percent? That’s my that’s my rough estimate. So in a way, the cup is 80 percent full. That makes me feel a lot better.

ELON MUSK: Only 20 percent chance of annihilation. That’s a lot better than I thought.

JOE ROGAN: I like 80. 80 sounds good. I was thinking 60-40 the other way.

ELON MUSK: I think the most likely outcome is awesome. But it’s a very high stakes game. I think it’s going to be either super awesome or super bad. It’s not going to be something in the middle.

AI and Government

JOE ROGAN: Do you think it has a potential application for government?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, one of the concerns would be like, if there’s a super oppressive, like, woke nanny AI that is omnipotent, that would be a miserable outcome.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’d be terrible.

ELON MUSK: And just, like, executes you if you misjudge someone or something like that. That would be bad. That’s one of the possible outcomes. So we don’t want to have that one.

JOE ROGAN: I think one possible outcome is something that is completely reasonable and logical and far more objective than us and can lay out a plan for a lot of the things that all the ailments in our government and a lot of the distribution of wealth, a lot of the problems, the issues that we have that have been plaguing this country forever.

I mean, a plan to change economically disenfranchised neighborhoods, a thorough investigation of the real dangers of fracking or whatever kind of method of acquiring natural resources. What’s the best way to do it? What’s the way that’d be better for the society? How should tax dollars be distributed? What’s the most logical and intelligent way of running a government, which it certainly shouldn’t involve corruption, and it certainly shouldn’t involve influence, and it certainly shouldn’t involve lobbyists and all the stuff that we know is a problem right now.

So if AI came along and said, what you’re doing right now is 70 percent corrupt, here’s why. Here’s how here’s the long term effects that it has over society as a whole, the societal, the sociological aspects, the psychological aspects, distrust in government, us versus them mentality, government not working for you, you working for the government, you being scared of the government. It’s all because of people. Right? Like, this is all corruption, people, bad influence.

ELON MUSK: And this is, like, what Doge is essentially grappling with right now. What happens when you let the people control it? It’s really just computers that are like, it’s bad software and computers. Like, this is some kind of strange, but the reason I call myself, like, tech support is that, like, a lot of it is mostly not corruption. It’s mostly just waste and incompetence. It’s just a big dumb machine, basically. Like, a whole series of big dumb machines.

And you’ve got some of these computers that are, like, 20, 30 years old—they’re ancient computers. Some of the software was written 40, 50 years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Like, COBOL. For Social Security. Right?

ELON MUSK: The government accountability—a bunch of the things that Doge is fixing were identified by the government accountability office many years ago. Like, the fact that there’s, like, 20 million people who are marked as alive in the Social Security database. I think the GAO first identified that in 2018, so five years ago. But there was, like, I think maybe 16 or 17 million. Now there’s 20 million.

And like I said, there’s really something fishy about this because I think the nature of the fraud is they’re using the fact that someone’s marked as live in that database in order to extract fraud from other databases. That’s the bank shot trick. It’s like pool, trying to get the ball in the hole. Bank shot it off a bunch of things.

So we’re doing tech support. We’re fixing stuff that is just broken, inefficient, poorly designed. It’s like, stuff may be in a computer somewhere, but unless somebody goes in—like, unless Kash Patel can log in to his FBI computer and say, “Show me all this stuff,” and it shows up as a file folder or whatever.

JOE ROGAN: Have you talked to him about this?

ELON MUSK: No. I mean, I haven’t, but I don’t know if there’s going to be some kind of computer system. Some of them are very, very old computer systems. So it might look like a bit of a relic, but I assume it’s uploaded somewhere. It’s either in physical form or it’s a computer thing. But, like, unless somebody—let’s say it’s in a computer but not one that you can access directly because it’s hidden somewhere.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it would kind of have to be something like that. Right?

ELON MUSK: I don’t know. I mean, what would they do with all those files? It’s probably not enabled such that anyone at the FBI could access it. So there’s probably very few people. So it may be a special computer that only a handful of people can access. But then if none of those people tell Kash where the computer is, how’s he going to find it? Jesus Christ. Anyway, we just, I don’t know.

Personal Impact and Threats

JOE ROGAN: What has this experience been like for you as a person? Like, to deal with all this hate and attack, also have the responsibility of keeping free speech alive with X and just going into this insane pile of—

ELON MUSK: It’s stressful. I mean, it’s pretty stressful, actually.

JOE ROGAN: These are real enemies.

ELON MUSK: Like, I think they actually want to kill me. The reason I know—well, they say so online. There’s Reddit forums where they don’t just want to kill me. They want to desecrate my corpse. That type of thing.

JOE ROGAN: And what are they saying? Why? What is the primary—

ELON MUSK: I think it’s sort of just an antibody response. It’s like, they’re like, “Well, he’s a Nazi,” you know, that type of thing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: And I’m like, well, I’m not a Nazi. But if the legacy media is saying that I’m a Nazi and that’s all you read, then you’re kind of in like, “Well, he’s Hitler. We should assassinate Hitler, shouldn’t we?” I mean, why did that guy try to kill Trump and almost succeeded? Why did he do that?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’d like to know that.

ELON MUSK: That one’s crazy. You know the whole deal with that guy’s house, professionally scrubbed, no footprint on the Internet, no social media footprint.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s zero percent chance that he has no social media footprint. He was in a BlackRock commercial. Do you think BlackRock’s a bad company?

ELON MUSK: I don’t think any company is a bad company.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

ELON MUSK: I think they’re designed to make as much money as humanly possible. And I think if you’re trying to make as much money as humanly possible, you’re going to do some things that aren’t necessarily good. The question is, if you’re going to have an assassination attempt on the president, it’s not like BlackRock’s board sits down and votes on it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Now there’s a problem.

ELON MUSK: That would be awkward. The board minutes would be like, “Guys, remember that time when we said—” Yeah. Probably shouldn’t have done that.

I highly doubt it would be a corporation that chooses to do something like this. I think more likely, it’s individuals involved that recognize that it’s beneficial to them if he gets assassinated. And so a small group of people carry something out. And with this kid, we don’t know anything.

The Assassination Attempt on Trump

JOE ROGAN: Right? And everyone stopped asking questions, and there was never a formal report. There was never press conferences where they detailed all the information we know currently and where the investigation stands at the moment. What we know is you have a very young kid who was filmed, was they knew he was there with a rangefinder a half an hour before the event. You also know that CNN streamed it live, which I do not believe they did for any other rally and certainly not for a rally that’s in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania.

Like, there’s a lot of weird things. The fact that they wouldn’t let people be on that roof because the Secret Service lady said it was sloped, and it was dangerous. That’s what she didn’t want to have. Meanwhile, the snipers that were on the other roof was a steeper pitch. It made no sense.

ELON MUSK: I totally agree. It makes no sense. In fact, I went back to Butler with President Trump, you know, before the election, sort of like the return to Butler rally. And I was on that stage, and I’m looking at that roof, and I’m like, if I was a sniper, my pole position, my number one spot would be that roof.

JOE ROGAN: Like, it’s the best seat in the house.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Like, why would you not? It’s so obvious. It’s the best seat in the house.

JOE ROGAN: Like, if you want to be a sniper, there isn’t a better position. It was pretty obvious that the idea was, if we’re saying that this is a coordinated assassination attempt, and it very well could have been, that’s what you would do. You’d have someone go up there. He shoots the president. You shoot him.

You got Lee Harvey Oswald all over again. It’s over. It’s all wrapped up nice and clean. They assassinated him. We never heard a peep about it.

We don’t have any idea. They would concoct some sort of story. He was radicalized by this or that or, you know, he was on medication. Who knows? Right.

And now, you know, you have a completely different presidential election. You have a murder on live television.

ELON MUSK: I mean, something would have had to happen to radicalize that kid because he knew he was going to die. Like, they’re going to shoot him, you know, or he’d be in prison for life. Those are the two outcomes. It’s game over—he was basically a suicide assassin.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Like, you’re not thinking you’re coming out of that alive or he’s not escaping. There’s no escape plan.

ELON MUSK: Right. Unless he was told that they were going to let him escape and the goal was to just shoot him anyway and to tell him, give him extra motivation to do it. “We’re going to let you get up there. We’re going to let you take the shot, and then you’re going to disappear.” Like, I don’t understand how he got on the roof. I just don’t understand that. That doesn’t make any sense. And it wasn’t like it was a roof that’s so high no one could see him. People saw him up there. I mean, people were like, basically, random passersby were pointing out that there’s a guy on the roof.

JOE ROGAN: With a gun.

ELON MUSK: With a gun. Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s not like he was so far away, couldn’t tell he had a gun. People saw him.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. The whole thing is completely insane.

JOE ROGAN: And you don’t hear a goddamn thing about it. It’s like, I’m almost more interested in that—no, I am more interested in that than I am the JFK files.

ELON MUSK: I agree. Because I feel like with the JFK files, it’s so long ago.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Of course. Who’s going to know? Right.

Suspicious Circumstances

ELON MUSK: If you could prove now—and did you see that there was some sort of indications that there was a phone that had been traveling from outside the FBI offices in DC to where this kid lived multiple times?

JOE ROGAN: I saw that.

ELON MUSK: I mean, the cell phone records would be very telling.

JOE ROGAN: Because you can see what cell phones were close to other cell phones.

ELON MUSK: Well, I think they got it like, for the Epstein island. They also had cell phone records that were leaked. So you can see them. You can see if you—it’s precise enough you can see if you’re walking down a path on Epstein Island.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. That’s how precise it is. So, I mean, you’re leaving a trail of breadcrumbs wherever you go with your cell phone.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. This kid had five phones. That’s the other thing.

ELON MUSK: That’s a lot of phones.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a lot of phones for a twenty-year-old kid.

ELON MUSK: The whole thing’s not even—that’s kind of expensive. You know?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Where’s he getting the money?

ELON MUSK: Well, you know, also, it’s like, how did his house get professionally scrubbed? Didn’t even have any silverware in his house. There’s nothing in there.

JOE ROGAN: Just silverware?

ELON MUSK: No. Nothing. No cutlery.

JOE ROGAN: No cutlery. That’s weird.

ELON MUSK: His house was scrubbed. And they also cremated his body.

JOE ROGAN: Gone. Gone. Like that.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Bye. Because who knows what they gave him to get him to think that he’s going to be able to shoot Trump? Like, climb up on there, shoot him. I mean, who knows what kind of psychotropic drugs you can put someone on and under the power of hypnosis and suggestion.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Who knows? I mean, this is what MK Ultra was all about. This is what Jolly West was practicing in the 1960s. They were doing that back then. They did it. I mean, there were tons and tons of experiments using psychotropic drugs, hypnosis, mind control, all sorts of different methods of manipulation, the Harvard LSD studies that made Ted Kaczynski. I mean, they’ve been doing that forever.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Where’s that file? Where’s that file on that kid? Those phones should tell you what’s going on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s all messed up. It’s very shady.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And there’s obviously, there’s the second guy that almost succeeded in coming from the golf course.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And he was just, like, a little careless and stuck a gun barrel out the hedge.

ELON MUSK: It’s just a dumbass who stuck his gun barrel out the hedge.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So and there have been other people that have been intercepted on their way to kill Trump.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. So there’s multiple assassins inbound. At this point, he’s got, like, an army protecting him.

Media Rhetoric and Political Divisions

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is also part of the problem with the mainstream media saying that he’s Hitler. When Joy Reid had that show before the election, she was comparing him to Mussolini. She was saying Stalin and Hitler. She pulled it all out. They’re literally saying that Trump is worse than Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin combined.

ELON MUSK: They tried everything. I think those guys killed a hundred million people. Trump has killed zero people.

JOE ROGAN: I think a big impact was you coming on the podcast the day before the election. I think that had a giant impact. That plea to the camera. “If you don’t vote this time, this might be the last time you get to vote.” And I think the way you laid it out today, it’s a compelling argument.

And I know a lot of people don’t want to hear that. They’re up in there with their blue panties in a bunch right now, but you gotta stop thinking that way. They tricked you into thinking you’re in a tribe. They don’t give a damn about you.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. The tribe’s not real. You’re not really in a tribe. They’re using the fact they’ve got you in a tribe to manipulate you so that they can keep doing what they’re doing right now, which is siphoning off money, having incredible power. And the more power and more money and more control over you they have, the better they can keep doing this. And that’s what they want.

JOE ROGAN: That’s exactly right. And that’s the big threat that this administration poses.

ELON MUSK: That’s a big threat. Essentially, Trump just found the coffin where the vampire sleeps.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s a lot of vampires.

ELON MUSK: I mean, we’re disturbing the nest.

JOE ROGAN: The nest. Yeah. We’re kicking the hornet’s nest. Like, big time.

Reprogramming the Matrix

ELON MUSK: And, I mean, we’re reprogramming the matrix. Like, success was never one of the possible outcomes. It’s a Kobayashi Maru situation. If you’re in the matrix, success was never possible. The only way to achieve success is to reprogram the matrix such that success is one of the possible outcomes. That’s what we’re doing. We may or may not succeed.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s certainly a lot of fun to watch. This is a very exciting time because nothing changes when administrations come into power. Very little changes. I mean, you have changes in terms of policy and inflation goes up, and there’s lot of different things, but not like this. Like, these are giant fundamental changes.

And, you know, you see the system screeching and wailing, and you see the vampires run from the light, but it’s very exciting. Like, as a person, a citizen, you know, just gets up in the morning and checks the news like I do and gets on X and sees what’s going on. Every day is like, holy shit. He said, what? He’s getting five million bucks. You could just become a citizen now? He could clear the debt with ten million people? I never thought of that. Like, what? Fifty trillion. You can make fifty trillion dollars that way, and then we have fifteen trillion in the bank? Woah.

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, our debt is way bigger than that. The debt’s, I think, over thirty trillion at this point.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He said he could make fifty trillion if he sold ten million new—I don’t think there’s that many people who have golden cards.

ELON MUSK: How many people do have that in the world?

JOE ROGAN: Maybe we get the worst people of the world to come over here—I think the assumption is if you have five million dollars, you have a lot to contribute. Come on over here. Start a business. Get something going.

ELON MUSK: I mean, you’d get, like, a green card, not citizenship. So if you commit a crime while on a green card, you lose your green card.

JOE ROGAN: Is that what it is with this golden ticket? Is that a green card, or is it citizenship?

ELON MUSK: Green card. Yeah. So you have to not commit any crime for five years in order to become a citizen. Once you become a citizen, you can commit crime and not be deported.

Trump’s Bold Proposals

JOE ROGAN: There’s just so many wild things that he’s proposing. Just the whole Gulf of America thing was hilarious.

ELON MUSK: I kind of agree. I think that’s great.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s great. It’s fun. I mean, if you’re off the coast of Houston, you’re not in Mexico, so why call it Gulf of Mexico?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I agree. I guess we’re just being nice before. Like, how it got called the Gulf of Mexico. It’s just very funny.

And then what news organization? Was it AP? The business, like, massive standoff between AP and the White House, and the White House press office, I guess, because they’re like, “Well, if you don’t call it Gulf of America, you can’t come to the White House press room.” So then the AP sued the White House to say, “No. You have to let us come to the White House press room.” And then they lost their lawsuit because they don’t have a right to show up at the press room.

JOE ROGAN: Well, here’s the consideration. If you’re guilty of massive amounts of misinformation and disinformation as a part of a propaganda campaign—

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Especially propaganda. That’s what AP is.

JOE ROGAN: Well, lot of them are guilty of it. A lot of the people that are in that White House press conference, a lot of the organizations they work for distributed absolute lies. Total lies. How many of them during the whole Russiagate thing?

ELON MUSK: Yes. A ton of people think that the Russia thing was real.

JOE ROGAN: Still.

ELON MUSK: Still. And it was—I mean, the whole Steele dossier where it was completely concocted, fabricated—

JOE ROGAN: Funded by the Clinton campaign.

ELON MUSK: Correct. The Clinton campaign funded a fake conspiracy theory, a fake Russia collusion hoax, regarding Trump that was completely false. And they reiterated on television for three years.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. And they also repeated the “fine people” hoax that said that Trump called neo-Nazis fine people.

ELON MUSK: Right. Which is demonstrably false. If you just listen to his speech.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He absolutely makes it clear that he does not think neo-Nazis are fine people. He literally said that. “I’m not talking about neo-Nazis or white nationalists. They should be condemned totally.” Exactly. In that speech, and yet they repeated that lie. And I just completely lost respect for Obama when he repeated that lie a few days before the election, knowing it’s false.

ELON MUSK: Well, this just shows how desperate they were to keep Trump out, which is wild. They would do anything.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And I think they just felt like this is a tool that we have, and let’s use it. Let’s just say whatever we have. Say anything.

ELON MUSK: Now they’re using the Nazi thing on me, obviously.

The Dangers of Media Propaganda

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But it is a little troubling because, I mean, obviously, if people are fed nonstop propaganda, it is like mass hypnosis. Right. You’re going to reach some number of people who are homicidal, and convince them that, well, if you kill this guy who’s supposed to be this terrible human, then that’s a good thing.

ELON MUSK: I mean, this is Luigi shooting the UnitedHealthcare guy. It’s just I don’t understand that one, frankly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I don’t get it either. He didn’t even have a contract with them. It wasn’t even like that was his provider, and they messed him over.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I’m like, I don’t know what… Maybe we’ll find out in the trial. But still kind of crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It is crazy. But there are people like that out there. And as to the point that we spoke about earlier, it’s only Fox News that’s talking about the positive things that Trump has done. Right. Every other media organization is on this constant propaganda tour where they’re only talking about the negative aspects that turn out to not even be true. It’s crazy.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I mean, Scott Jennings on CNN is good.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my god. He’s great. He’s great. It’s just funny watching logic speak logically to these people, and they freak out.

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s remarkable.

JOE ROGAN: It is. And he’s so calm when he does it.

ELON MUSK: He’s so good. And it’s crazy that they keep letting him do it because it’s like he’s just dunking on these people over and over and over again, and they never score. It’s kind of funny.

JOE ROGAN: Totally. I mean, kudos to them for having a legitimate conservative voice who’s a reasonable person on these panels now. But even then, he’s outmanned. It’s like one of him, and there’s a bunch of screechy, woke people.

ELON MUSK: Yes. It’s wild. I mean, they’re just like, “I think we should still stay mostly woke.”

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah. That’s essentially what they’re doing. Like, “Our business was being hurt when we were all woke, but let’s stay mostly woke.”

ELON MUSK: Yeah. That way, we’re still…

JOE ROGAN: Just backed it off a notch. Just a notch.

ELON MUSK: Just a notch. But the problem is when you back it off a notch and you let someone like Scott Jennings in, you’re messing up your whole business.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Because all the viral clips are all him saying logical, reasonable things with a calm tone and people screeching about diversity and equity and inclusion and horseshit.

ELON MUSK: Yes. Yeah. He’s being logical and reasonable, and they’re just lobbying a bunch of non sequiturs that don’t mean anything.

The Two-Party System Problem

JOE ROGAN: The real trap in this country is a two-party system. That’s the real trap because people do believe it. They do believe they’re on the right side, and they do believe the other side’s the wrong side.

If there were five, six legitimate parties with varying positions on things and much more centrist parties that were legitimate, that people knew that if they voted for, these people could get in and enact legitimate change, we’d be a lot better off.

But, boy, they put a lockdown on that right after Ross Perot came along. Ross Perot messed everything up in that election. Bill Clinton got in. And they were like, that’s it? From now on, no one’s debating unless you’re either the head of that party or that’s it. You gotta be locked into the system. We’re not letting any wackadoos in there.

ELON MUSK: I remember watching those Ross Perot videos. Like, him on TV with his charts and everything.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. He was telling you how the IRS was messing you over. “This is what the Federal Reserve really is.” And you’re like, what? I remember watching that. The guy bought a whole half hour of television on prime time.

ELON MUSK: I remember it might have been an hour. I remember watching that thing going, how is this guy even allowed to do this? This is crazy. I think most of what he was saying was true.

JOE ROGAN: It’s absolutely true. It’s absolutely true. I mean, he didn’t lie. He told the truth. He just had understood it in a way that the general public had literally no idea.

The Uniparty and Political Corruption

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, there’s also this… Like, do we actually have two parties? Do we have one party? Like, the whole uniparty thing. It’s kind of true.

So, I mean, my sort of rough guess is that while I think maybe three quarters of the graft is Democratic, I think there’s maybe 20-25% that’s Republicans. So they’ve basically got most of the graft going to the Democrats, but they throw some bones to the Republicans too. So then they’re in on it. And it’s not like there’s zero graft on the Republican side to be clear.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, there’s plenty of conservatives that are insider trading in Congress. Plenty. Insider trading. And just there’s the curious case of how do people in Congress or whatever become wealthy over time?

ELON MUSK: Extremely wealthy…

JOE ROGAN: Yes. On a $170,000 a year salary. It’s literally impossible.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. No one else does that.

JOE ROGAN: It’s literally impossible. Have you found out that this guy has a $170,000 a year job? You’re like, “Oh, he’s doing okay. He’s alright.” And then you’re like, “Wait a minute. Why does he have $50 million?”

ELON MUSK: Yes. What is he doing? Correct. And I think the more accurate thing would be to say, what is the family value increase? Meaning, how much does their spouse earn? Do they have a mysteriously wealthy spouse?

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s who’s… And they have a spouse that’s really good at insider trading?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Like Paul Pelosi. Really good.

JOE ROGAN: He’s great at trading. He’s such a good trader. Yeah.

ELON MUSK: So that’s why I actually posted on X, I think maybe we should pay politicians more, frankly, because it reduces the forcing function for graft. I think maybe we should either pay politicians nothing or maybe a lot more. It’s somewhat maybe counterintuitively, if politicians got paid a lot more, then they wouldn’t feel like there’s so much of a forcing function for them to accept corrupt money.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But the problem is if you paid them a lot more, they’re still not going to make as much money as they would insider trading.

ELON MUSK: But it’s less of a forcing function. It’s less. Well, live with this. Right? Like, if you say somebody’s got some kids in DC and it’s expensive. It’s an expensive place to live. The schools are terrible. So they need to send their kids to some kind of private schooling situation. They literally cannot afford that right now. So then you get into the situation where from their standpoint, well, they’ve got to… they’ll say they’re doing it for their family. They’re doing it for their kids.

JOE ROGAN: Well, especially if it’s legal, and it currently is. It’d kind of be silly to not do that. If you’re a part of a group of people that’s passing a bill, and you know this bill’s going to get passed, you know the votes are there, and you know it’s going to affect this industry and this particular manufacturer, and you can buy stock.

ELON MUSK: It’s more than just insider trading. Like, the insider trading stuff, the stock portfolio stuff is quite trackable, but it’s a lot more than insider trading.

JOE ROGAN: The way they’re acquiring wealth?

ELON MUSK: Correct.

JOE ROGAN: And what other methods?

Personal Safety Concerns

ELON MUSK: I mean, this is really going to get me assassinated. I’m not lengthening my life span by explaining this stuff, to say the least. I mean, I was supposed to go back to DC. How am I going to survive? This is going to kill me for sure.

So, in fact, I do think there’s… I actually have to be careful that I don’t push too hard on the corruption stuff because it’s going to get me killed. I was actually thinking about that on the plane flying over here. It’s like, if I push too hard on the corruption stuff, people get desperate.

Then they say, “Okay. If the money flow cuts off, then they can’t afford school for their kids.” Then they’re going to be like, “Well, I’m going to kill you for my kids” sort of thing. And it’s like, oh, jeez. Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever see that video? I think it was an O’Keefe video where they’ve got this guy undercover, and he’s explaining… they’re talking to this guy. He thinks he’s on a date, and he’s explaining…

ELON MUSK: It’s always a guy on a date.

JOE ROGAN: Explaining how they can nudge someone to go and do something horrible. And they recognize this person has problems. They find an asset.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Totally. Well, this is what I think, like, for that Butler situation, for that assassin, it’s kind of like that funny looking sport, curling. You know where they’re like the stone on the ice? And then they throw the stone, and then there’s someone that’s brushing the ice, but you can’t touch the stone. All you can do is just change the path of the stone a little bit, but you keep brushing the ice, and you can steer that stone right into the bull’s eye. That’s what I think happened in Butler. That’s what I think happened with that assassin.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. If you can find the trail of breadcrumbs, it’s going to be like curling. Somebody was brushing the ice.

ELON MUSK: Well, also, you find a young, confused, disenfranchised person, and you give them purpose in their life. Just brush the ice.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And, also if you brush the ice, eventually, it’s going to hit the bull’s eye. If you’re in a position of authority or some big time government person, you’re talking to this person. All of sudden, this person’s a valuable asset. They’re going to help America, and you’re going to do this thing, and you’re going to be our top assassin from here on out. You could talk people into doing a lot of things. That’s why cults are around.

ELON MUSK: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, they’re suicide bombers. The Butler guy was a suicide assassin. The second guy that tried to kill him on the golf course was also a suicide assassin. From what I read, the Secret Service member that saw the gun pointing out, fired several shots, none of which hit the assassin. But if those shots had hit the second assassin, he would be dead too. So both of them were on a suicide mission. One actually got killed. One didn’t get killed. But he could have been killed if the bullets had hit him.

JOE ROGAN: And you don’t hear anything about him either. There’s lot more about that guy than the first guy. I mean, look at his background.

ELON MUSK: Unhinged?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Totally unhinged.

ELON MUSK: The first guy, there’s no evidence that I’m aware of that shows that he’s so unhinged as to be a suicide assassin.

JOE ROGAN: No. The second guy, like, okay. Yeah. Sure.

ELON MUSK: Well, two years before, he’s acting in commercials. And he got high score on his SATs.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So without getting you killed…

ELON MUSK: Exactly. So, I mean, basically, I’m like, listen. I’ll attack the corruption enough to keep civilization trucking along. But I think if I fully destroy the corruption and the graft, they will kill me.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a messed up thing to live with.

ELON MUSK: So, listen. I really hope they don’t kill you.

JOE ROGAN: Thanks.

ELON MUSK: I mean, I strive to be alive. But, yeah, I mean, it’s a real concern. You know, I mean, there were two guys before I supported Trump and everything, there were two guys that traveled to Austin to kill me. I don’t know if you know about this.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I did hear about that.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. Two separate incidents. One guy thought I’d put a chip in his head. And they’re basically two guys that just had severe mental illness. It wasn’t like they had “I disagree with him politically, and that’s why he needs to die.” This was before I got sort of smeared as being some sort of Nazi or something like that.

Before the severe propaganda wave, the probability that any given homicidal maniac is going to try to kill you is proportionate to how many times they hear your name. And so they heard my name a lot, so I just got to the top of the list of two homicidal maniacs who were arrested. And both were in Travis County jail at the same time.

JOE ROGAN: Woah.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I don’t know if they talked or whatever, but they’ve both been released, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus Christ. On bail?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. But they got ankle monitors and stuff, but still…

JOE ROGAN: They can cut those off?

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I don’t know. Exactly. So that’s crazy.

The Dangers of Media Manipulation

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The second guy had “chief serial killer” in his bio on his X profile. It wasn’t subtle is what I’m saying.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And at this point, I think I’m at the top of the list for a lot of homicidal maniacs. And the more the mainstream media talks about you in this way and says you’re a Nazi… they’re doing the same thing to me that they did to Trump.

JOE ROGAN: Which is they’re making it sound like if you kill you, you’re a hero.

ELON MUSK: That’s what they’re doing. It’s evil. They’re also completely distorting who you are and people are going along with it. And just like we’re talking about Trump derangement syndrome, people have Elon derangement syndrome.

JOE ROGAN: I see it.

ELON MUSK: I see where people can’t see the forest for the trees. It’s like I’m the same person that I was a year ago. Nothing’s changed, really. I didn’t suddenly become a completely different human. But if you read the legacy mainstream media, their propaganda stream is that I am a completely different human. But I didn’t get a brain transplant in a year.

Let’s say two years ago, I was a hero of the left. So how can I go from hero to villain at age 53 suddenly?

JOE ROGAN: MSNBC, CNN?

ELON MUSK: It’s like that’s what it is. They use the Associated propaganda.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, they’ve tried to demonize you too. They even tried to demonize, at least partially successfully, Tim Pool, who is a super rational, reasonable, great human. And then his Wikipedia changed to “far right.”

ELON MUSK: Yeah, and he’s like, “far right?” What are you talking about? A few years ago, he was a liberal. So how do you go from a liberal to instantly far right?

There’s no left and right. There’s only left and far right. This is my left leg, and this is my far right leg. Even far left is sort of dismissed as being not important to talk about, like Antifa and radical leftists. That’s not, you know, like, we’re burning down courthouses.

JOE ROGAN: Reasonable people.

ELON MUSK: Totally crazy.

The Current State of Society

JOE ROGAN: It’s a crazy time, and it’s not a time that I ever anticipated I was going to witness. This is far beyond anything I ever thought I was going to experience. And the clarity of it all where it’s so obvious.

ELON MUSK: And the gaslighting and the propaganda is so obvious. And I saw this shrieking when RFK Jr. stopped this new test for new COVID vaccines on children. Ten thousand people with this COVID vaccine.

JOE ROGAN: Like, who thinks that’s a good thing at this point? Not me. What person?

ELON MUSK: You are fully unconscious. There’s no way you know the effect of COVID today, no one’s dying of it. This is not a pandemic anymore. The idea that you’re going to run a huge test with ten thousand kids and a new vaccine. Like, what are you even doing?

JOE ROGAN: Totally unnecessary.

ELON MUSK: And shrieking when RFK Jr. steps in to stop it. That’s totally crazy.

I’m overall pro-vaccine, meaning I think we should have some reasonable number of vaccines against major ailments. But I don’t think we should be jamming some little kid with a giant vial that’s Hepatitis B and twenty different things at a time. It seems like there’s a risk of overloading your immune system. How many vaccines can you take at a time? It seems like there’s some risk of system overload here.

Pharmaceutical Influence on Media

JOE ROGAN: There’s two hopes. Hope number one is they can somehow or another stop this ability that they have to advertise on television. If that happens, that’s big. That’s huge. Because that doesn’t just stop their ability to show you all these different medications that you should be on. What it also does is it stops their financial influence on the news. That’s really the biggest thing.

ELON MUSK: The news is not going to attack one of their biggest advertisers.

JOE ROGAN: And they never do.

ELON MUSK: At best, they’re going to do something, but they’re going to pull their punches. Like fake fighting.

JOE ROGAN: At best. Movie fighting. Like, they’re not actually landing haymakers. It just looks like it.

The next step then is to remove this immunity that these vaccine manufacturers have. And if they are liable for side effects and they are liable for the lies that they tell when they do these studies and they hide negative data, that’ll change a lot.

AI in Healthcare

ELON MUSK: I think AI actually could be very helpful with medical stuff. Because AI can look at all the studies and look at all the data, cross check everything, and give you good recommendations.

Even as it is now, you can upload your X-rays and your MRI images to Grok, and it’ll give you a medical diagnosis. And that diagnosis, from what I’ve seen, is at least as good as what doctors tell you.

JOE ROGAN: Phenomenal for blood work.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. You can literally take a photograph of your blood work, upload that to Grok, and it will tell you if there’s something wrong. It’s pretty amazing. And I haven’t seen it be wrong yet.

JOE ROGAN: Supposedly more accurate than most physicians.

ELON MUSK: Because physicians are human beings, and maybe they don’t have a deep understanding of the connection between, oh, you have this deficiency, and this is high, and your cortisol’s here.

Sometimes doctors, especially in higher-end offices, will sell you stuff you don’t need. So I always be a little suspicious of a doctor who’s got an office in Beverly Hills. It’s a high rent situation. I’m not saying there aren’t some very good doctors in Beverly Hills, but it’s a high rent situation.

JOE ROGAN: You’re at least tempted by the dark side.

ELON MUSK: I mean, in one case, I went to this doctor who was highly recommended, “doctor to the stars,” which is maybe not a good sign. I got blood work done, just sent blood and sent it to a lab. And I’m sitting in his office, and he tells me that I’m B12 deficient.

It’s certainly possible that I’m B12 deficient. And I was like, okay. And then he gives me these B12 supplements and says I have to take these, and he’s going to give me a starter pack. And then it’s going to be like a thousand dollars a month for these special B12.

JOE ROGAN: A thousand dollars a month for B12? Ridiculous amount of money.

ELON MUSK: You get it on Amazon.

JOE ROGAN: But his one is special.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. It was like a whole bunch of B12 and a bunch of other vitamins.

So then I get home. I’m paging through my blood work, and it says, according to the blood results, I have excess B12. So I’m like, wait a second. And he’s given me a box of pills that have like twenty thousand percent of recommended daily dose. Twenty thousand percent is a big number.

I took a photograph of the blood work that says I have excess B12—I’m above the recommended range of B12. And then I took a picture of the pills that say twenty thousand percent. I’m like, “Can you help me reconcile these two things? Because it says I’ve got too much B12, and you just gave me two pills that have twenty thousand percent more.” I’m like, this is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: What did the doctor say?

ELON MUSK: Oh, he said you can never have too much B12.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he’s a B12 junkie. He’s a psychopath.

ELON MUSK: Totally insane. This was a while ago, right? So this is pre-Grok. Like five years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Now you could just enter in all that data into Grok.

ELON MUSK: I could photograph it with your phone and upload it to Grok, and then Grok will tell you what’s right. Just don’t have it in sexy mode.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’ll keep trying to seduce you.

ELON MUSK: I mean, you’re asking for it in sexy mode. Literally. Tapped on sexy mode.

I think we probably should maybe allow it to get out of character a little bit.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. Like an unhinged mode?

ELON MUSK: I try to get it back to being hinged, but it would be like “no way.” It’s like, “I’m going to stay unhinged.”

JOE ROGAN: How many modes do you have?

ELON MUSK: I don’t know, like eight or something. And then there’s an ability to have a custom mode, so then you can have unhinged sexy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s my favorite kind.

ELON MUSK: You may think so. Be careful what you wish for.

JOE ROGAN: Especially if it’s a robot and she can kill you.

ELON MUSK: Unhinged sexy robot is dangerous. Remember the Pink Panther? Remember Pink Panther had Kato try to jump him? They were trying to attack him to keep him sharp.

Closing Thoughts

JOE ROGAN: Listen, man. Thank you for being here. I always appreciate talking to you. I know you’re busy as hell, so it means a lot to me that you have the time to do this. And I think what you’re doing is one of the most important things that has ever happened in this country. I really do. Particularly with ownership of X, but also with what’s happening with Grok and just enlightening all these people and shining light on all the vampires.

ELON MUSK: Well, hopefully, people realize I’m not a Nazi. I just want to be clear. I am not a Nazi.

JOE ROGAN: I think we covered it.

ELON MUSK: But that’s exactly what a Nazi would say. Damn it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what an alien would say. You can’t escape this nonsense.

ELON MUSK: You can’t escape it. I don’t think any reasonable person believes it. If they believe it, it’s because they want to believe it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not because it’s logical.

ELON MUSK: I mean, what’s relevant about Nazis is, are you invading Poland? And if you’re not, maybe you’re not. You have to be committing genocide and starting wars. What is actually bad about Nazis? It wasn’t their fashion sense or their mannerisms. It was the war and genocide—that’s the bad part. Not their mannerisms and their dress code.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that was the problem with all that “punch a Nazi” stuff. Remember that? People kept saying, “punch a Nazi.” But where are you meeting Nazis? I’ve never met a Nazi. I’ve never run into a bunch of Nazis where I had to punch them.

ELON MUSK: And what about all these so-called Proud Boy rallies or whatever? They always got the masks, they always got the same uniforms. And for some reason, they never get doxxed.

JOE ROGAN: Right. We’re always going to dox them except these guys.

ELON MUSK: Great video of me and Matt Taibbi breaking down the Patriot Front.

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t the Patriot Front just disband? Google that real quick. We’ll end it with this. Because I think they just disbanded, and these were the most obvious feds of all time.

ELON MUSK: That’s what I’m saying. They had a drum. Come on. They had masks on. They all had uniforms. It was so stupid.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s “Patriot Front disbands one day after FBI director Chris Wray’s testimony.” Seem like an odd coincidence.

ELON MUSK: Crazy. The people that we were yelling at saying that they’re feds.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a great video of me and Matt Taibbi. Nobody ever followed them and doxxed them.

ELON MUSK: What are the odds? Agent provocateurs. It’s a thing.

JOE ROGAN: Alex Jones taught me about them. Listen, man. Thank you very much. Thank you for everything. Appreciate you. Stay alive.

ELON MUSK: Staying alive. I mean, I do think one argument for me staying alive is that it’s more entertaining if I’m alive than if I’m dead.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, definitely.

ELON MUSK: I could be alive and injured, which would suck. Like, they just shoot my arm off or something.

JOE ROGAN: No. No. We don’t want that.

ELON MUSK: Coding with one hand.

JOE ROGAN: Keep the security strong.

ELON MUSK: Alright. Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Bye, everybody.

ELON MUSK: Bye.

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