Elon Musk
30 statements across 10 episodes · 8 bullish · 9 bearish · 9 people on the record · first statement Sep 15, 2016 by Elon Musk · said 86 times in 29 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Elon Musk's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Garry Tan (13), Michael Seibel (12), Craig Cannon (12), David Lieb (11), Aravind Srinivas (6), Sam Altman (5), Mark Pincus (4), Mr. Money Mustache (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 15 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
- The Future Of Brain-Computer Interfaces · Y Combinator
- Zynga Founder: Consumer Is Not Investible Right Now - Thats Why You Should Build It · Y Combinator
- How The Best Companies Defend Against Mediocrity And Rot · Y Combinator
- The Most AI-Pilled CEO We Know · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 15 mentions in 6 episodes 3 per episode
- Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search · Y Combinator
- Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware · Y Combinator
- The Truth About The AI Bubble · Y Combinator
- How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas · Y Combinator
- How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era · Y Combinator
- Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 13 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
2022 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Elon Musk & The Midwit Meme – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- Advantages Of A First-Time Founder · Y Combinator
- How To Change The World? Get The Small Things Right – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- Should You Follow Your Passion? – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 10 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit · Y Combinator
- Cannabis Startup Founders David Hua and Vincent Ning on Legalization, Banking, and Industry Trends · Y Combinator
- PR + Content for Growth by Kat Mañalac and Craig Cannon · Y Combinator
- Tim Urban of Wait But Why · Y Combinator
- Sam Altman on Choosing Projects, Creating Value, and Finding Purpose · Y Combinator
- Leah Culver of Breaker and Tom Sparks of YC Answer Your Questions About Security and Podcasting · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 15 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- Don't Start a Blog, Start a Cult - Mr. Money Mustache · Y Combinator
- The Technical Challenges of Measuring Gravitational Waves - Rana Adhikari of LIGO · Y Combinator
- IPFS, CoinList, and the Filecoin ICO with Juan Benet and Dalton Caldwell · Y Combinator
- An AI Primer with Wojciech Zaremba · Y Combinator
- Office Hours with Sam Altman · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
Everything said about Elon Musk, oldest first
Sep 15, 2016
Musk: Technology naturally declines unless smart people work crazy hard
“It feels like technology just automatically gets better every year, but it actually doesn't. It only gets better if smart people work, work like crazy to make it better. That's how any technology actually gets better, and By itself, technology, if people don't…”
Sep 15, 2016
Sep 15, 2016 bullish
Musk: Merging human brains with AI solves the AI control problem
“So, so I think if we can effectively merge with AI by improving that the neural link between your cortex and the, your digital extension yourself, which already, like I said, already exists, just has a bandwidth issue.
[865] Elon Musk: and then effectively
[8…”
Sep 15, 2016 negative
Sep 15, 2016 negative
Sep 15, 2016
Sep 15, 2016 bullish
Sep 15, 2016 positive
Musk: OpenAI was founded to prevent concentration of advanced AI
“The reason that obviously you mean the rest of the team you know, created open AI was to help
[783] Elon Musk: with the democracy, help, help spread out AI technology
[787] Elon Musk: so it doesn't get concentrated in the hands of a few.”
Sep 15, 2016
Musk: Products do not need to change the world to be valuable
“If somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that's a good thing. Like, it doesn't have to change the world. Like, you know if you're doing something that has high value to people and frankly, even if it's something, if it's li…”
Jul 1, 2017
Sep 27, 2017 negative
Mr. Money Mustache: Cars should be luxury tools, not daily commuter vehicles
“Is that a car should be thought of as like a luxury racing wheelchair. So there's times in your life you want a luxury racing wheelchair. For example, when you're with your friends and you're all going up into the mountains in like high altitude in a blizzard …”
Sep 19, 2018
Cannon: Startup content competes with Elon Musk smoking weed on Joe Rogan
“Most people think that they're competing with people that make the same stuff that they make. That is a hundred percent not true. You are competing with this. Elon Musk smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast. I haven't checked the views, but I think it's probably…”
Mar 2, 2022 positive
Nov 8, 2024 neutral
Altman: I wrote OpenAI's early checks before Elon Musk funded scale
“It was definitely helpful that I could just, like, write the early checks for OpenAI, and I think it would have been hard to get somebody else to do that at the very beginning. And then Elon did it a lot at a much higher scale, which I'm very grateful for, and…”
Nov 21, 2024 negative
Lieb: Elon Musk's hardware taste does not translate to software
“Jeff Bezos once said that, like, taste is not transferable across domains, and to me, this is like a great example of that. I would say, Elon, like, if I drive a Tesla, I think it's the best car that I've ever sat in, but the taste and the decisions they made …”
Nov 21, 2024 negative
Nov 21, 2024 neutral
Jun 19, 2025 bearish
Musk: Government efficiency work is a side quest compared to AI
“I did sort of feel a bit like, you know, when I was in D.C. Taking a lot of flack for, like, getting rid of waste and fraud, which was an interesting side quest as side quests go. But Got to get back to the main quest. Yeah, I gotta get back to the main quest …”
Jun 19, 2025 bullish
Musk: AI could expand the economy thousands or millions of times
“You know, the economy, assuming we don't, things don't go awry, and like AI doesn't kill us all and itself then you'll see ultimately an economy that is not, not 10 times more than the current economy. Ultimately, like if we become, say, or whatever our future…”
Jun 19, 2025 negative
Jun 19, 2025
Musk: Augmented Human Intelligence Will Probably Be One Billionth of Digital Intelligence
“Human intelligence, even assuming a significant increase in human population and intelligence augmentation, like massive intelligence augmentation, where like everyone has an IQ of a thousand type of thing. Even in that circumstance collective human intelligen…”
Jun 19, 2025 positive
Jun 19, 2025 neutral
Musk: AI hype and early valuations are eye-watering, though some will pan out
“The hype level on AI is, is, is pretty intense as you've seen. You know, you see companies that are, I don't know, less than a year old getting sometimes billion dollar or multibillion dollar valuations. Which I guess could pan out and probably will pan out in…”
Jun 19, 2025
Musk: A high ego-to-ability ratio breaks feedback loops to reality
“Like a major failure mode is when ego to ability ratio is double greater than sign one. You know like if you, if your ego to ability ratio is, it gets too high, then you're gonna basically break the feedback loop to reality. And in, in AI terms, your arrow, yo…”
Jun 19, 2025 bullish
Jun 19, 2025 neutral
Jun 19, 2025 negative
Musk: Giving legacy incumbents board control forces irrational decisions on new tech
“I guess for the first, my first startup, the big, the, really the mistake was having too much shareholder and board control from legacy media companies who then necessarily see things through the lens of legacy media and that they'll kind of make you do things…”
Jun 19, 2025
Musk: Engineering requires maximum truth-seeking because math cannot be fooled
“If you're trying to build a rocket or cars, or you're trying to have software that compiles and runs reliably, then you have to be maximally truth-seeking or your software or your hardware won't work. Like, there's not, you can't fool math, like math and physi…”
Jun 21, 2025 negative
Elon Musk emailed OpenAI saying it had zero percent success chance
“I can say this one because it got publicized in early, not early, a few years into OpenAI, where Elon sent us this really mean email. We'd been working through that for a while and said we had a zero percent chance of success. Like, not 0.10, that we were tota…”
Mar 9, 2026 positive
Hodak: Musk founded Neuralink to upgrade humanity against AI risks
“Elon, he, I mean, he saw what was coming in AI, like, very much more clearly than many other people much earlier, and I think the implications of, like, if you gotta, this can't be a separate thing from humanity, and that needs to emerge somehow, I think that …”