Elon Musk
also referred to as: elon
56 statements across 44 episodes · 26 bullish · 8 bearish · 31 people on the record · first statement Jan 2, 2019 by Benedict Evans · said 417 times in 118 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Marc Andreessen (69), Ben Horowitz (59), Balaji Srinivasan (46), Erik Torenberg (37), Sonal Chokshi (16), Travis Kalanick (11), Alex Rampell (11), Martin Casado (10)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 89 mentions in 23 episodes 4 per episode
- Why AI Demand Is Outrunning Compute Supply
- Building a Company in Stealth | Travis Kalanick with a16z
- Ben & Marc: Why Everything Is About to Get 10x Bigger
- Box CEO on the AI Adoption Gap | The a16z Show
- Why Balaji Srinivasan Thinks the SaaS Apocalypse Is Overhyped | The a16z Show
- Travis Kalanick: How AI Will Transform the Physical World
- Why Every Founder Needs a Story | Replit CEO on a16z
- The Media Game Has Changed
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 154 mentions in 39 episodes 4 per episode
- Tech vs. Media: Balaji Srinivasan on the Battle Shaping Our Future
- Dylan Patel on the AI Chip Race - NVIDIA, Intel & the US Government vs. China
- The Unicorn Founder Who Delegated Everything.
- Robinhood CEO: Making Everyone An Owner
- The Lawyerly Society vs. The Engineering State: Who Owns the Future?
- Dylan Patel on GPT-5’s Router Moment, GPUs vs TPUs, Monetization
- Keith Rabois: Israel, OpenAI, Opendoor, and DOGE
- Marc & Ben on the Collapse of Traditional Media - Podcasts, Politics & the New Media Playbook
- 31 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 59 mentions in 15 episodes 4 per episode
- AI, Robotics & the Future of Manufacturing
- AI, Robotics & the New Global Arms Race
- Marc & Ben on AI Policy, Safety, Censorship & Unexpected Risks
- Trump is About to Change Everything For Tech Startups
- Startup Building: Major Shifts in Tech & Culture
- Future of Crypto, Blockchain & Web3 w/ Chris Dixon
- The Declining State of Higher Education
- The Quest for Community-Trained Open Source AI Models
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 33 mentions in 13 episodes 3 per episode
- The Art and Science of Podcasting with Sriram and Aarthi
- Polarizing Talent: Navigating 2023's Landscape
- Advancing AI, Approaching VC's & Crypto Scandals: Ask Us Anything!
- AI Will Save The World with Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado
- The Rise of the Exponential Organization with Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail
- Why It's Time to Be A Techno-Optimist
- What is the Future of Hollywood?
- Oppenheimer & the Catastrophe of Communism
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 16 mentions in 3 episodes 5 per episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 59 mentions in 21 episodes 3 per episode
- a16z Podcast | The (Definite) Optimism of Peter Thiel
- a16z Podcast | Startups and Pendulum Swings Through Ideas, Time, Fame, and Money
- a16z Podcast | Welcome to the New Era of Commerce
- a16z Podcast | How to Be Original and Make Big Ideas Happen
- a16z Podcast | The Art of the Regulatory Hack
- a16z Podcast | Principles and Algorithms for Work and Life
- a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
- a16z Podcast | QR. AR. VR.
- 13 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Elon Musk, oldest first
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Tesla built its full-stack strategy incrementally using off-the-shelf components
“It's even beyond that because they, you know, they started the first car. They didn't make half the components. So there's been a steady road. You know, they start with like, well, let's do a roadster and we'll buy in half the bits. And then you kind of step s…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Andreessen: Elon Musk saving Tesla and SpaceX in 2008 was spectacular
“So to start, think about this, to start a new electric car company... Simultaneously to start the first new private rocketry company in the United States in probably 40 years... And then to go through the 2008 crash... And have both come out the other side, li…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Thiel: Investor passed on PayPal because Musk's car outvalued his condo
“There was one of the investors I talked to years later who talked to us in summer of 2000 and said he didn't want to invest in the company because the CEO, Elon was living in a one bedroom condo in Palo Alto at the time, and the CEO was clearly lying to him be…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Russell: Current BCI tech will allow seamless thought-controlled computer actions
“And now with this current generation, it seems like between Elon, Facebook, probably something from Google that We're actually going to start to see these things that kind of invisibly actually just let you think something and have some kind of action show up …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Elon Musk's genuine sincerity drives his ability to fund radical ideas
“Yeah, like, he's really good at packaging crazy sounding ideas and, like, Getting lots of governments, investors to throw lots of money into them, and while managing to keep control of them. Part of that is the narrative, right? He does hook it into, like, lar…”
Jan 2, 2019
Dalio: Visionary leaders like Jobs and Musk prioritize mission over feelings
“The one that you're referring to is there's a test call in workplace inventory, which is called concern for others, and it doesn't really mean concern for others. What it means is that when faced with the choice of whether the mission is Or the individual's fe…”
Nov 9, 2022 bullish
Nov 9, 2022
Mar 20, 2023
Sriram Krishnan: Famous podcast guests drive single-time acquisition, not audience retention
“And often a famous name can help with that, which is you get an Elon Musk, you know, A.R. Rahman, who's huge in India. A lot of people who have told you who you are will find you, right? But that is a one-time value. But how do you retain them? And what we hav…”
Mar 20, 2023
Jul 7, 2023 neutral
Lee: Brutalizing a Business With Mandates Efficiently Forces Cultural Shifts
“However, It may be the way to cut the Gordian knot is to brutalize the business. I'm not suggesting this is the way forward, but it is clearly a method forward. And you do wonder how many leaders have been quietly inspired by this approach and may in fact be a…”
Jul 7, 2023 negative
Feb 1, 2024 neutral
Apr 24, 2024 neutral
May 2, 2024 neutral
May 16, 2024
Jun 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 1, 2024
Oct 29, 2024 negative
Horowitz: California essentially kicked Elon Musk out over automated manufacturing
“Most of the kind of issues that he's run into have been based on the fact that he is, you know, a modern manufacturing facility that's highly automated. And that's why California in particular has been You know, basically kicked them out of the state.”
Oct 29, 2024 positive
Nov 12, 2024 negative
Dec 12, 2024 positive
Apr 14, 2025 positive
Yudis: Software quality depends on the CEO's proximity to software expertise
“In the companies, and you can literally measure from the CEO, how many levels do you have to go to where they really know software? Those companies are, you take a Tesla in this example, Elon knows software. So you're right at the CEO level and therefore the p…”
May 28, 2025 negative
Marc Andreessen claims extreme progressives dominate most AI companies except Elon Musk's
“Yes, I think the demographic estimate is something like seven percent of Americans are like these sort of extreme progressives, which basically is the AI, you know, most of the AI companies except for, you know, maybe except for Elon. And so you've got seven p…”
Aug 1, 2025 bullish
Balaji Srinivasan: Future democracy will replace two-party systems with a thousand-city model
“That's a future democracy, not a two-party system with the illusion of choice, but a thousand city system with the reality of choice. 97% for Elon, right? This is essentially a precursor to what's coming next, where you vote with your feet, your wallet, and yo…”
Aug 1, 2025 positive
Balaji Srinivasan: Musk's Twitter acquisition liberated Meta and YouTube from censorship
“X-Day was also the liberation of Meta and liberation of YouTube, right? All the countries that these racial fanatics at the NYT had occupied, right? All the networks they had occupied. That was like, you know how, like, the Nazi empire was at, like, its peak, …”
Aug 1, 2025 positive
Balaji Srinivasan: Elon Musk's X changes stripped journalists of traffic and status
“The ban on outbound links meant that suddenly X became the place you just go for the information, and you don't go to the journos anymore, right? So he stripped their status, he stripped their control over the central stream of media, he stripped their traffic…”
Aug 20, 2025 positive
Smith: Elon Musk is the only entrepreneur to scale US manufacturing
“Who's the only entrepreneur who's been able to successfully scale manufacturing in America, you know, even in the face of international competition, and it's been pretty credible because his supply chains are far more domestically sourced than most manufacture…”
Sep 3, 2025 negative
Sep 9, 2025 neutral
Sep 22, 2025 neutral
Sep 22, 2025 positive
Oct 2, 2025
Kupor: Federal workforce will shrink by 300,000 employees due to DOGE
“We've done a lot of work over the course of this year, a lot of which was catalyzed by Elon and the Doge team. As a result, we expect probably that we'll end up with somewhere around 2.1 million employees at the end of the year, so roughly about a 300,000 redu…”
Oct 16, 2025 neutral
Oct 22, 2025 positive
Nov 26, 2025 negative
Top software engineers prefer Elon Musk over legacy auto executives
“A genius software engineer is not going to, they're going to want to work for Elon Musk. Like you can say about Elon Musk, whatever you want, but like a suave, well manicured executive from the car industry is like not really, like an, a talent magnet for soft…”
Jan 7, 2026 bullish
Andreessen: Routine Mars Trips Could Begin Within a Decade
“I think Elon's gonna pull it off. And so I think, you know, I don't know. I don't know exactly. I don't want to predict. This is not a prediction, but I, you know, I would not be surprised if within a decade there's routine trips back and forth.”
Jan 15, 2026 positive
Jan 26, 2026 bullish
Mar 27, 2026 positive
Caldwell: Musk's aggressive deadlines force teams to prioritize critical paths
“When Elon sets, like, super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately. There's a thousand things that have to happen, but a hundred of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those hundred things.”
May 4, 2026 negative
Rogers: EU official Thierry Breton threatened Elon Musk over Trump interview
“I think, you know, one key moment in August, 20, 24 was when a now former EC European Commission official, Terry Breton, Sent a letter to Elon Musk threatening him with regulatory penalties if he aired an upcoming interview on X with then presidential candidat…”
May 4, 2026 positive
Boyle: Elon Musk buying Twitter was most consequential free speech event
“I would argue that it's the most consequential moment in terms of Elon buying Twitter, kind of, you know, displacing the trust and safety team there and kind of, you know, changing, I would say, the kind of nature of free speech for a lot of the country with t…”
May 4, 2026 positive
Jun 19, 2026 positive
Andreessen: Musk, Karp, Luckey, and Huang are today's great communicators
“If you watch what Palmer Luckey does, or if you watch what, you know, Alex Karp does, or if you watch what Elon does, or if you watch what any of the great communicators do, like, that's what they're doing. You know, I'd say put Jensen in the, in that rank, yo…”
Jul 22, 2026 negative
Horowitz: US lost manufacturing skill outside of Elon Musk's companies
“We were the best in the world by far. We taught the world how to do was manufacture, and now we've basically forgotten how to do it as a country other than like Elon. Like if you need somebody who knows how to manufacture, you literally have to get them from E…”
Aug 13, 2026 bullish
Kalanick calls Elon Musk the undisputed leader in industrial AI
“Who's the best of the best at industrial AI? Anybody want to guess? It's really obvious. His name rhymes with Shmilon, ok? He's the best of the best. And he'll just keep going and keep doing lots more, even if what you do now is not what he does now. So if you…”
Aug 13, 2026 positive
Aug 27, 2026 bullish
Casado: Cursor and Elon Musk's ventures are the best M&A fit seen
“I actually think that these two companies, I mean, we just like, you know, talk about the M&A little bit are very good fits. They're very good fits on, on like a technical level, right? Like Elon has a compute, they have the distribution and the data on a visi…”
Aug 28, 2026 bullish
Casado: AI hardware startups will produce a transformational alumni founder wave
“Like, listen, we're gonna create a whole generation of, you know, founders that come from these new companies that will know how to do this, and, you know, they'll be hired in much more junior. Like, I would say, actually, one of the greatest legacies of Elon …”
Aug 31, 2026 bullish
Sep 3, 2026
Levchin: Seeing peers' human vulnerabilities inspired PayPal alumni to pursue massive ideas
“So if you know kind of the true base version of who we all are, as you watch one of these people go for something really big, like Elon Taking humanity to Mars, which is extraordinary. And yet, you know, he's a human being. Like, I've seen him sweaty and tired…”