Here are a few highlights from Elon Musk’s interview with Nikhil Kamath:

‘Work will be optional in future because of AI’

Rapid advances in AI and robotics could make work optional within the next two decades, according to Musk. “My prediction is that, in the future, working will be optional. People can play this back in 20 years and say it was wrong, but I think it will be correct. In less than 20 years maybe even 10 or 15 advances in AI and robotics will bring us to a point where working is optional,” he said in the interview.

“I’m confident that if AI and robotics continue to advance and they are advancing very fast, working will be optional, and people will have any goods and services they want,” he said. “If you can think of it, you can have it.”

Musk’s comments echo a viewpoint held by several other leaders in the tech industry, such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, and Nvidia boss Jensen Huangamong others. However, these remarks also come at a time when several companies have been hit with AI-fueled mass layoffs.

Last month, Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning AI/ML research scientist widely known as the ‘Godfather of AI’, warned that the AI race could make tech billionaires like Elon Musk vastly richer even as millions of workers stand to lose their jobs in automation.

‘Future social media will be AI videos’

In response to a question about how X might evolve in the future, Musk said, “I do think most interaction is going to be real-time video with AI. So real-time video comprehension, real-time video generation. That’s going to be most of the load and that’s how it is for most of the internet right now,” he said.

“Text is a pretty small percentage but text tends to be higher value generally, it’s more densely compressed information, but if you say like ‘what is the most amount of bits generated and compute spent’, it’s certainly going to be video,” Musk added

Musk is not alone in his vision of transforming X into an AI-powered, real-time video communication platform. Several social media giants such as Meta and YouTube are also looking to include more AI-generated content in users’ feeds. During an earnings call in October this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will “add yet another huge corpus of content” to its recommendations system as AI “makes it easier to create and remix” work that gets shared online.

The rise of AI-generated content on social media platforms has also sparked concerns of a decline in content quality (known as AI slop) and potential disruption of the creator economy.

‘Would love to be operating Starlink in India’

Stating that Starlink is currently available in over 150 different countries, Musk expressed that he was looking forward to being able to roll out the satellite internet service in India soon.

In June this year, Starlink became the third entity in India with a satcom licence, officially called Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite (GMPCS) licence, after Eutelsat’s OneWeb and Reliance Jio. It has also been granted a Unified Licence by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), marking the end of Starlink’s long and complicated efforts to secure regulatory approval in India.

Notably, Musk also said Starlink would be complimentary to existing telecom companies. In the past, the satcom major was locked in a fierce battle against the country’s telecom giants Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtelover how frequency for India’s space waves should be assigned to satcom operators.Since then, Starlink has inked separate retail partnerships with Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, and Airtel, for them to offer its service to their customers.

Musk further said that Starlink would not be able to fully serve densely populated cities in India, adding that “it can be much more effective in rural areas where the internet connection is much worse, and often people either sometimes have no access to the internet or it’s extremely expensive or the quality is not very good.”

‘Not guaranteed to have positive future with AI’

From a regulation point of view, Musk spoke about developing AI systems with three principles at the core – truth, beauty, and curiosity – in order to ensure a positive future.

“It’s not that we’re guaranteed to have a positive future with AI. In my opinion, it’s very important that AIs pursue truth as the most important thing like don’t force an AI to believe falsehoods. I think that can be very dangerous,” he said. Grok, the popular AI chatbot developed by Musk-owned xAI, is said to be designed as a ‘truth-seeking’ model.

However, this approach has come under scrutiny as Grok has encountered several behavioural issues in the past year. Its integration with X has made things more chaotic.

In July 2025, xAI had to apologise for the “horrific behaviour” of Grok after several users managed to goad the AI chatbot into posting antisemitic and abusive tirades, including praise for Adolf Hitler. Before this, Grok’s ‘unhinged nature’ sparked controversy in India due to its sensational AI-generated responses to political questions about PM Modi, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, and other related topics.

In November 2025, Grok appeared to go off the rails again, showering Musk with effusive praise. The chatbot told some users that Musk would be more effective than Hitler at conquering Europe. It also said that the billionaire would make for a better role model than Jesus Christ. “I think you can make an AI go insane if you force it to believe things that aren’t true because it will lead to conclusions that are also bad,” Musk said in the interview.