Elon Musk's pod with Rogan yesterday is mind-blowing.
They discussed:
• The chances of Musk being assassinated
• Who's really protecting the Epstein files
• Why AI could end humanity by 2030
Let me save you 3 hours — here are the 12 most important things they talked about🧵
1. The scale of government waste is worse than anyone imagined.
$1.9 billion was sent to an NGO formed just a year ago with almost no prior activity.
The US government is losing $2 trillion per year, failing its own audits.
And it gets even worse:
Treasury payments worth nearly $5 trillion annually had no categorization codes or descriptions - essentially blank, untraceable checks.
A change as simple as making payment codes mandatory could save $100 billion yearly.
And here's DOGE's most shocking discovery:
DOGE found 20M dead people marked as alive in Social Security databases.
While they weren't directly receiving payments, their "alive" status enabled fraud through disability claims, unemployment, and fake medical payments.
This is potentially the biggest scam in human history.
2. What's really happening with immigration?
Elon believes Democratic leadership is using immigration as a voter recruitment strategy:
In swing states where elections are decided by ~20,000 votes, adding 200,000 immigrants who vote Democrat could alter the political landscape.
FEMA, designed to help Americans during disasters, was paying for luxury hotels for illegal immigrants in New York - even AFTER Trump signed an executive order to stop it.
This isn't compassion — it's calculation.
3. Musk had a shocking realization about X (Twitter).
If he hadn't bought the platform, Trump would have never been allowed back, Alex Jones would have remained banned, and Musk's own account could've been suspended.
The 2024 election might have had an entirely different outcome as a result.
4. Musk's Mars timeline has accelerated dramatically.
SpaceX will launch several Starships to Mars by the end of next year (November/December 2025).
The goal: determine if they can successfully land intact before sending humans.
But why the urgency?
Mars missions face a fundamental time constraint. Each Earth-Mars orbital synchronization occurs every 26 months.
Musk believes we have about 15 such opportunities (roughly 30 years) to establish a self-sufficient civilization on Mars before Earth potentially faces civilization collapse.
5. The SpaceX astronaut rescue mission finally has a timeline.
The stranded astronauts who've been in space for 8 months (instead of the planned 8 days) will be rescued in ~4 weeks.
Musk revealed that Biden rejected earlier rescue offers for political reasons.
6. On AI, Musk made his most alarming prediction yet:
We'll have AI smarter than any human within a year or two.
By 2029-2030, we'll likely have AI smarter than all humans combined.
But there's a fascinating silver lining to this existential threat...
Musk estimates that there's an 80% chance AI will benefit humanity. The other 20%? Complete annihilation.
His biggest worry isn't AI itself, but AI programmed with extremist values — Elon wants to avoid a world where AI "executes people for misgendering."
7. On the Epstein files, Musk didn't hold back.
The lack of transparency around the Epstein client list raises serious questions.
If Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex trafficking, who exactly was she trafficking to?
But powerful interests are preventing disclosure...
8. SpaceX is working on a technological breakthrough that's never been achieved before.
The Starship must solve fully reusable orbital heat shields - a problem no one has solved.
The heat shield tiles are as brittle as coffee cups but must withstand both extreme cold (liquid oxygen at -330°F) and reentry heat (potentially 1000+°F).
9. Government's structure makes reform nearly impossible.
Musk compared it to becoming captain of a ship where the entire crew was previously your enemy.
This explains the slow pace of promised transparency:
Even high-level appointees like Kash Patel face institutional resistance when trying to release classified information.
10. Musk fears assassination.
Two separate incidents involved people traveling to Austin to kill him before his political involvement.
Now with mainstream media portraying him as a "Nazi," he believes the risk has risen.
He's careful about how hard he pushes on corruption.
11. The Trump assassination attempt mysteries remain troubling.
The shooter's house was "professionally scrubbed" with no cutlery or personal items.
He had five phones at age 20, and his digital footprint was almost completely erased.
Email Elon what you accomplished last week — or resign.
That's Musk's ultimatum to 2M government employees.
But while government workers are in shock, this is NORMAL for Elon's management style.
A deep dive into the radical management style that made Elon Musk $400B+🧵
The email was sent on February 24, 2025.
As head of the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk instructed ALL federal workers to send "approximately 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week."
The deadline?
11:59 PM that same day.
"Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."
Government employees better demonstrate their value immediately - or they're out.
But to understand why this is happening, we need to look at Musk's management philosophy: