Elon Musk told The Economist he "got carried away, frankly" in his relationship with Donald Trump. The comments came in his first interview since SpaceX, his rocket company, began selling shares on the US stock market in June 2026. The 90-minute conversation was recorded at a Tesla factory in Texas for The Economist's video platform The Insider, and was published on July 23, 2026, under the headline "Croesus or Cassandra? Elon Musk's vision of the future" The Economist. A companion editorial, "Should you be afraid of Elon Musk?," ran the same day The Economist.

Musk's remarks on Trump come after a relationship that mixed political spending with government power. Musk gave $200 million to help Trump get elected in 2024. After the election, Trump put Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge for short. Doge oversaw $150 billion in budget cuts and led to tens of thousands of people losing their federal government jobs The Guardian.

Musk left Doge in May 2026 BBC. His departure came after a CBS News interview in which he described Doge as "a little bit successful" and "somewhat successful." He told correspondent David Pogue he was disappointed by Trump's budget bill, which he said would add to the federal deficit — the gap between what the government spends and what it takes in CBS News. On a December 2025 podcast with Katie Miller, wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, Musk had already said he probably would not do Doge again given the chance The Guardian.

Musk had initially promised that Doge would save as much as $2 trillion a year BBC. The $150 billion in cuts actually delivered fell well short of that goal.

The interview also covered Musk's vision for artificial intelligence, or AI — computer systems that can do tasks normally requiring human thinking. He told The Economist that AI will eventually make work by humans "optional." Within five years, he said, AI systems may become smarter than all human intelligence combined. Within ten years, he predicted, robots in the workplace will help bring about an era of "amazing abundance" where money becomes meaningless The Guardian.

Those claims tie into Musk's business interests. He has merged his own AI company with SpaceX and plans to power it with datacenters — large facilities that house computer servers — placed in space The Guardian. Experts have warned that the space datacenter plan would be "catastrophic" for Earth, though the specific concerns are not detailed in the available reporting.

The SpaceX stock market launch in June 2026 made Musk briefly the world's first trillionaire, with his personal wealth reaching over $1.25 trillion before falling back to around $750 billion The Guardian. The print edition of The Economist dated July 25, 2026 features the interview The Economist.

The timing of the interview matters for several reasons. Musk is speaking publicly at a moment when his three main companies — Tesla, SpaceX, and the merged AI venture — have come together into a single story tied to the SpaceX stock listing. The "Croesus or Cassandra" headline refers to an ancient king known for his enormous wealth and a Greek figure who foresaw the future. The question is whether Musk's predictions about AI-driven abundance come from genuine foresight, or whether they are shaped by his own business interests.

The companion editorial asking whether the public "should be afraid" of Musk reflects concern at The Economist about how much economic, technological, and AI power is concentrated in one person's hands. Musk's planned space datacenters combine his rocket launch ability, his AI goals, and his newly public company into a setup that no competitor can easily copy. If the regulatory and technical hurdles can be overcome, the merged company could control key infrastructure for the next generation of AI in a way few other firms could challenge.

The broader picture is that the Trump regret signals distance, not a clean break. Musk's phrase "got carried away" acknowledges he went too far, but he does not reject the political alignment or the goals Doge pursued. Whether that distance grows into open opposition, or stays as a step back by someone who has moved on to other projects, will depend on what happens with Trump's legislative agenda and whether Musk's business interests clash with the administration's trade, regulatory, or spending plans.

In my view, Musk is using the attention from his first interview as a trillionaire to shift focus away from the political fallout of Doge and toward a technological future he is both building and describing. Whether that shift is convincing depends on follow-through that, for now, is mostly promise.