Marking the three-year anniversary of his controversial acquisition of Twitter, now X, Elon Musk joined the All-In Podcast for a wide-ranging, 90-minute discussion. The conversation covered the platform’s chaotic early days, his ongoing legal and philosophical battle with OpenAI, the future of artificial intelligence, and his grand vision for a solar-powered civilization.

The State of X: From ‘Barbarians at the Gates’ to a ‘Source of Truth’

Reflecting on the acquisition, Musk painted a vivid picture of a company he found in a state of “totally bizarre” absurdity and waste. He recounted his symbolic entrance into the Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, a moment that preceded the discovery of a deeply dysfunctional corporate culture. He described two largely empty buildings in San Francisco where “there were more people making the food than eating the food,” leading to an effective lunch cost of $400 per person.

The oddities continued. “Nobody had used the the whiteboard markers in like two years,” Musk said, adding that his team found entire rooms filled with “#StayWoke” merchandise. In one of the most surreal examples, he described finding fresh boxes of tampons delivered weekly to the men’s restroom in a completely unoccupied building. “You’d have to be a burglar who is a transman burglar who’s unwilling to use the woman’s bathroom… and you’re on your period,” he joked. “You’re more likely to be struck by a meteor than need that tampon.”

For Musk, the clean-up was part of a larger mission to restore free speech. He pointed to the release of the “Twitter Files,” granting reporters “unfettered” access, which exposed deep coordination between the platform’s former “trust and safety group”—an “Orwellian name,” in his view—and government agencies. “The FBI had 80 agents submitting takedown requests,” he noted. Today, Musk stated X’s content policy is simple: “Our policy at this point is to follow the law.”

Looking forward, Musk detailed how AI, specifically Grok, is being integrated to fundamentally reshape the user experience. After addressing a recent algorithm bug that over-amplified content—“It’s like oh you had a taste of it. We’re going to give you three helpings”—Musk explained that Grok is moving beyond simple heuristics. The goal is for Grok to “literally read everything that’s posted to the platform,” eventually processing and categorizing 100 million posts per day. This will power semantic search and a new feature for the “Following” tab, where “Grok will say what are the most interesting things posted by your friends.”

Grokipedia: The Challenger to Wikipedia

A major new initiative is Grokipedia, a direct competitor to Wikipedia, which Musk dismissed as a product where “the information is sparse, wrong and out of date.” He explained the creation process involved training a “maximally truth-seeking” version of Grok on critical thinking and tasking it to “cycle through the million most popular articles in Wikipedia and add, modify and delete” by researching the rest of the internet.

Musk argued that Grokipedia’s advantage is providing crucial context often missing in traditional encyclopedias. “The nature of propaganda is that facts are stated that are technically true but do not properly represent a picture of the individual or event,” he explained. Future versions, he noted, will use AI to generate explanatory videos. “It’s not going to be a little bit better than Wikipedia,” Musk asserted. “It’s going to be a hundred times better.”

Corporate Governance: The Fights for Tesla and the Soul of OpenAI

The conversation turned to corporate governance, where Musk is engaged in high-stakes battles. Regarding the recent Tesla shareholder vote on his compensation plan, he framed it as essential for safeguarding the company’s ambitious robotics program. He expressed concern that without a significant voting stake, he could be ousted by activist investors. “My concern would be creating this army of robots and then being fired for political reasons because of ISS and Glass Lewis,” he stated. He clarified his goal is to have “something like a 25% vote, which is enough of a vote to have a strong influence but not so much of a vote that I can’t be fired if I go insane.” If that control isn’t secure, he added, “I cannot ensure the safety of the robots.”

On his lawsuit against OpenAI, Musk was uncompromising. He detailed his foundational role, stating, “I came up with the idea for the company, named it, provided the A, B and C rounds of funding, recruited the critical personnel.” He stressed that its incorporation documents explicitly state that “no officer or founding member will benefit financially from OpenAI.” Now, he lamented, the organization has performed what one host called a “Bond villain-level flip” from its mission. “Unfortunately, it needs to change its name to ‘Closed for Maximum Profit AI,’” Musk quipped. “They try to change the definition of open AI to mean ‘open to everyone’ instead of ‘open source,’ even though it always meant open source. I came up with the name. That’s how I know.”

The Future: AI Tsunamis, Robot Taxis, and a Star-Powered World

When asked about the societal impact of AI, Musk used a stark metaphor: “I call AI the supersonic tsunami.” He recounted a past conversation with Google co-founder Larry Page, who, upon hearing Musk’s concerns about AI safety, called him a “speciest” for prioritizing humans. This, Musk said, was a key motivator for creating OpenAI as a “counterweight to Google.”

On the more immediate front of autonomous vehicles, Musk confirmed Tesla’s dedicated Cyber Cab will begin production in “Q2 next year.” He dismissed the idea of adding a steering wheel for consumer purchase, using an analogy: “How many times have you been in an Uber or Lyft and you said, ‘You know what? I wish I could take over from the driver’?… Zero times.” While confident in the technology’s capability, he stressed a cautious rollout, “We are being extremely cautious and we’re being paranoid about it because even one accident would be headline news.”

Finally, Musk offered a pragmatic, long-term perspective on climate change, criticizing what he sees as alarmism. “The concern level for climate change is on the order of 50 years. It’s definitely not five and I think it probably isn’t 500,” he stated. He recounted a meeting with Bill Gates, who insisted long-range electric semi-trucks were impossible, yet according to Musk, “he didn’t know any of the numbers” for battery density or energy efficiency.

Musk’s solution is an accelerated transition to solar, which he sees as the only logical path. He dismissed nuclear fusion on Earth as a “fun science project” but not a “serious endeavor compared to the sun.” He concluded by putting the sun’s power in cosmic perspective: “The sun is about 99.8% of the mass of the solar system… Basically no matter what you do, total energy produced in our solar system rounds up to 100% from the sun.” He asserted that the materials for a global solar and battery infrastructure are abundant. “There’s no shortage of anything.”