The Chief AI Officer of America, Elon Musk

How will Elon Musk shape the future of Artificial Intelligence in 2025 and beyond? Let's dive deeper. A new kind of Government is forming.

Elon Musk’s role in the future of American AI is about to increase in multiple ways. Recently it was announced that Elon Musk has been appointed to co-lead the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, as announced by President-elect Donald Trump.

After an incredible effort by Elon Musk and his X platform to endorse Donald Trump, we have to assume that Elon Musk will act in the next Administration like America’s very own Chief AI Officer. What backdroom deals were made and what does it mean for the future of AI? There’s some evidence that according to researchers’ findings that suggest X made ‘platform-level’ changes to boost Musk and other conservatives’ posts when he endorsed Donald Trump.

Elon Musk paid $44bn for Twitter on 27 October 2022 and two years later if you get to become the Chief AI Officer of the leading nation state in AI, maybe it is worth it? Powerful CEOs buying media publications and influence is nothing new in American media and democracy. Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon bought the Washington Post in 2013 and lost many paid subscribers in this election cycle simply become he did not endorse Kamala Harris.

Elon Musk and his new “Department of Government Efficiency” role while having multiple companies with geopolitical and foreign affairs implications and interests represents a puzzling conundrum for the future of American democracy, government and power. Not so great for National Security I imagine. Can the POTUS job and a seat at the table be bought? Is monopoly and tycoon capitalism out of control in the era of populism? What role are AI and Ads playing in contemporary American democracy? There are no easy answers but Elon Musk’s cult of personality will be larger than life in 2025. A ruling financial elite somewhere have and known the answers and are putting the piece into place with AI precision.

How will Musk’s closeness with Trump and his business interests impact American foreign policy moving forwards? I certainly have more questions than answers. Elon Musk is using his personal brand and algorithmic control of X certainly in a very political manner. What does the age of Tycoon politicians tell us about America’s use of AI in National security, the evolution of surveillance capitalism and beyond. Trump’s cabinet and staff nominations really deserve special scrutiny, and they are a squad of China hawks to say the least.

Visual representation of cabinet nominations, 12 of 25 so far as of November 18th.

Some examples of interesting picks so far include:

• Health and Human Services: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of Robert F. Kennedy and former Democrat, a noted anti-vaccine activist who has railed against big pharma and the food industry.

• Defense: Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality and former national guardsman.

• Homeland Security: Gov. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., a Trump loyalist, who campaigned with Trump, will be crucial in Trump's efforts to crack down on illegal immigration and deport millions. She has called what's happening at the border "an invasion," and Trump lauded that during her time as governor, she sent national guard troops to the border with Mexico.

• Director of National Intelligence: Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who has cast doubt on U.S. intelligence, has parroted Russian lines like blaming NATO for Russia's invasion of Ukraine and spoke positively of Syria's al-Assad even after the U.S. accused him of using chemical weapons against his own people.

So it’s all pretty fascinating and you have to ask yourself what the intersection of the cult of personality, populism and AI will do to us as a whole and America in particular that already has a certain measure of internal division, civil unrest and a recent history of dubious foreign policy decisions and proxy-wars? At a crucial period of geopolitical and trade-wars, Elon Musk stands at the entire intersection of the future of AI and politics as of 2025. But can Elon Musk make America great again? Elon Musk as of today, has 205 million followers on X.

Elon Musk is building an AI Startup

He’s also building xAI, a rival to OpenAI and Anthorpic, the best frontier model builders who are nailing product and Enterprise AI innovation. I will be covering xAI a lot more in 2025. As the American media, or whatever is left of it, degenerates into absurdly exaggerated Podcast bro culture, you have to wonder about how various elements of what I call Tycoon capitalism or American exceptionalism begin to manifest.

In the 2020s, AI is taking form. Elon Musk has built Colossus in Memphis, the world's largest AI supercomputer with 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. xAI is in the process of doubling the size of Colossus to a combined total of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. This means Elon Musk will be among the leaders in AI compute and AI infrastructure in 2025.

Elon Musk has an outrageous advantage in being able to raise more funds than the people behind Anthropic or even OpenAI. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is raising up to (another) $6 billion at a $50 billion valuation, according to CNBC’s David Faber. They had just raised a huge series B in May, 2024. So this will be $12 Billion, nearly as much as OpenAI in a much shorter time period.

So recently the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) have signed a MoU to create an investment fund with a target size of US$1 billion. This means personalities like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI will increasingly be battling it out to gain funding from the Middle East for their visions of the future of AI and for primarily, scaling AI infracture faster and bigger. With BigTech U.S. capex likely going to hit $300 Billion in 2025, the likes of Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google will be trying to keep up.

An image of xAI’s Colossus data center compute hall, October, 2024.

Cult of Personality Meets AI Supremacy

Elon Musk clearly wants as much power over the future of AI’s capabilities as possible. With a place in Donald Trump’s administration, and Tesla’s stock surging after Trump’s victory in the elections (up 45% in the past month), Elon Musk is literally on top of the world - of course President-elect Trump will be sworn in at his inauguration. The presidential inauguration is always held on Jan. 20, as specified by the Constitution's 20th Amendment and by January 21st, Elon Musk will more or less by the Chief AI Officer of America, for real. And I cannot believe I’m saying this.

Frontier models like OpenAI’s GPT-5, Gemini 2, Claude Opus 3.5 or 4, and Grok 3 will be battling it out soon. Grok 3 is expected to be released by the end of December 2024. Elon Musk has indicated that Grok 3 is currently being trained with significantly more computational resources than its predecessor, Grok 2, which suggests a focus on enhancing its capabilities. With rumors of Generative AI reaching a point of diminishing returns going viral, it will be an interesting year for Generative AI in 2025. It will be a year of relentless datacenters expanionship and AI infrastructure compute consolidation and honestly, it will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Elon Musk with Colossus, will have incredible leverage with a compute advantage. Executing a good product and attracting the top AI researchers will be more difficult.

Luring the Middle East into the equation has always been crucial for the likes of Sam Altman vs. Elon Musk. With xAI’s newest round, the bulk of the capital, $5 billion, will reportedly be provided by sovereign funds in the Middle East while the rest is set to come from other investors. The deal is expected value xAI at $50 billion. This sort of scale means Amazon backed Anthropic might be getting priced out soon from the race, even as they scramble to get more funding.

Elon Musk’s newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will operate outside the formal government structure, providing advice and guidance without direct authority over federal spending decisions. In essence, Elon Musk becomes an important consultant for the POTUS as of January 21st, 2025. This is why I’m calling Elon Musk the next Chief AI Officer of the United States, it’s going to be official. It’s a weird metaphor. With Elon Musk winning funding and Presidential favoritism, it could mark a downfall period for OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s bizarre entanglement with that research lab that has sabotaged its own Copilots.

What kind of future impact on Government and spending could we expect in a world where Elon Musk is one of the most important consultants to the POTUS? Musk has expressed intentions to cut up to $2 trillion from the federal budget, although specifics on how these cuts would be achieved remain vague. He has previously criticized government inefficiencies and proposed reducing the number of federal agencies significantly. How will Musk’s relationship with Russia and China entangled with his business interests also influence foreign policy or national security or Taiwan? What do hypothetical Chief AI Officers do for entire countries exactly?

xAI’s latest funding round it appears is entirely about AI infrastructure because bigger is better according to the Silicon Valley tycoons. The $6 billion will likely be used to acquire 100,000 more Nvidia chips. Nevermind that the good Blackwell ones sometimes overheat. Nvidia has had to redesigns NVL72 servers to tackle overheating problems. Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs for AI and HPC overheat when used in servers with 72 processors inside.

The Podcast Bro Wars and Litigation

In such a world where Nvidia, Elon Musk and Sam Altman have so much power, how should we survive the coming broligarchy exactly? Elon Musk’s lawsuits speak volumes. Elon Musk expanded his lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, adding federal antitrust and other claims and adding OpenAI's largest financial backer Microsoft as a defendant.

Elon Musk now alleges that OpenAI is attempting to eliminate its competitors by stopping its investors from funding rival AI firms, which is technically true. Though it’s not clear how OpenAI can keep up with xAI in terms of scaling the required AI infrastructure to compete and in what way ChatGPT Enterprise has damaged Microsoft’s Copilot products and sales. Be careful who you team up with maybe?

If OpenAI have an inside track on UAE funding, Elon Musk seems to have won over Saudi Arabia. A key VC funder of xAI is Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. Generative AI is is in many ways rightfully speaking, a Billionaire movement. He is a prominent Saudi investor and businessman, and appears to be one of the largest backers of xAI through his company, Kingdom Holding Co. What kind of Kingdoms are we building exactly with the levels of Gigacomputer for AI compute and infrastructure we will have after the 2020s?

The Elon Musk vs. OpenAI lawsuit has been amended several times and the recent version of the lawsuit, filed in November 2024, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of forming a monopoly in the artificial intelligence sector and engaging in anticompetitive practices. Musk's legal team claims that the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft constitutes a "de facto merger," allowing them to dominate the generative AI market, which they allege accounts for nearly 70% of the industry share.

The lawsuit is a historical treasure chest of quotes and tidbits. OpenAI has gone from a “tax-exempt charity to a $157bn for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon – and in just eight years,” according to the filing, which also accuses OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of “rampant self dealing." (A gorgon is a fierce monster from Greek mythology.) It appears the Chief AI Officer of America in 2025 will also have a bunch of ulterior commercial motives and incentives for his consulting gig with the POTUS. What could possibly go wrong?

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