Elon Musk Says Cleaning Up Government Is Like Picking Up Trash On A Beach Before A Thousand-Foot AI Tsunami Hits—And That's Why He's Done With Politics

Elon Musk says that he’s done with politics, and he’s got a great metaphor to show why.

What Happened: Speaking at the AI Startup School by Y Combinator, Musk described his brief stint in the federal government as a “side quest” that quickly proved less impactful than his core mission, which is building transformative technologies.

Musk compared his efforts at fixing government systems to picking up needles and trash from a beach while an overwhelming threat looms right ahead.

“Fixing the government is kind of like there's a beach with needles and feces and trash, and you want to clean it,” he says, before adding that “there’s also this thousand-foot wall of water,” referring to the advances in AI, comparing it to “a tsunami of AI.”

“How much does cleaning the beach really matter, if a tsunami is about to hit?” he asks, before saying that it wouldn’t matter all that much.

Musk's comments underscore a broader theme he kept returning to throughout the talk, that the stakes in AI are escalating too quickly for slow-moving institutions to respond meaningfully. The Tesla Inc. TSLA and SpaceX CEO said the urgency of the AI age has pulled him away from political engagement and back to building.

“Got to get back to the main quest,” he says.

Musk believes that politics is too mired in dysfunction to make a difference. “There's just so much noise,” he says, “The signal-to-noise ratio in politics is terrible.”

Why It Matters: Having spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency under the administration of President Donald Trump, Musk recently criticized the GOP’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” as a “disgusting abomination.”

This week, Musk warned that the U.S. risks “de facto bankruptcy,” citing the $37 trillion in federal debt, on which interest payments now account for 25% of total tax revenue.

Price Action: Shares of Tesla were up 1.82% on Wednesday, trading at $322.05, and are up 1.29% after hours.

Shares of Tesla score high across the board in Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings, with a favorable price trend in the short, medium, and long term. Click here for deeper insights into the stock.

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