NEW YORK — Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, said that the future of warfare is artificial intelligence (AI) and drones in a newly released video of his conversation last summer at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.
"The current war in Ukraine is very much a drone war already," said Musk, 53, who also heads up Tesla Inc and the X social network, formerly Twitter. "If there's a major power war, it's very much going to be a drone war."
The billionaire, who now plays a significant role in the US government via his close relationship with President Donald Trump, said the US needs to invest in drones and boost the rate of producing them at home. He was speaking in a fireside chat with Brigadier General Shane Reeves, the Military Academy's Dean of the Academic Board, on Aug 16th. Musk posted a link to the 40-minute conversation to X late on Thursday.
Musk, who said he often goes to sleep listening to audiobooks of military history, cautioned against complacency by national leaders. "Countries pretty much are geared up to fight the last war, not the next war," he told an audience of armed forces personnel.
The West Point appearance in the summer occurred shortly before Musk fully threw himself into Trump's re-election campaign. Since then, the South Africa-born tech chief has become a key player in Washington, where he is leading an aggressive effort to "right-size" the federal government. Teams from his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have landed at several federal agencies, where they are looking into data systems and scrutinising spending and contracts.
SpaceX is a key part of what President Dwight Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex. Beside launching rockets for partners like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), its satellite system known as Starlink is available in over 100 countries and territories.
"Starlink is the backbone of the Ukrainian military communications system because it can't be blocked by the Russians," said Musk. "On the front lines, all the fibre connections are cut, the cell towers are blown up, the geostationary satellite links are jammed. The only thing that isn't jammed is Starlink."
Musk also talked about something he called his first-principles algorithm, the ethos that he uses to run his overlapping empire of half a dozen companies: Step one is to make the requirements "less dumb," step two is to delete excess parts or process, step three is to optimise and step four is "go faster."
"Military procurement goes wrong right at the outset with excess requirements," said Musk.
