A few months ago, The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes ran into Elon Musk at an event in California and asked if he’d appear on The Insider, a video series in which she sits down with influential and sometimes polarizing figures, including Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, and European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde. Musk, by her account, told her to DM him on X, which she did, and after a back and forth, including a thumbs-up emoji, they agreed to an interview after the SpaceX IPO at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. “It was very easy,” Beddoes tells me.

Despite the cordial setup, the resulting interview grew heated. The the first 55 minutes of Beddoes and Musk’s 85-minute conversation is quite civil, with respectful exchanges on the future of technology and other matters. The world’s richest man spoke optimistically about the potential for an “age of abundance” and how he’s going to “enjoy the ride.” Musk even expressed a willingness to meet with former friend turned rival Sam Altman to address AI safety concerns.

The conversation took a turn when it shifted to Musk’s legacy in the Trump administration and his grim view of Europe. Musk acknowledged he “got a little too involved in politics” when he spearheaded DOGE, but he rejected Beddoes’s contention that the suddenness of cuts to agencies like USAID led to “unnecessary suffering.” Musk said it “caused a lot of complaining,” but “zero people died because of DOGE.” Beddoes also challenged Musk on using X to portray the U.K. as being on the verge of “civil war” to his more than 240 million followers. Musk admitted having not visited the U.K. for “a few years,” yet he dismissed the London-based Beddoes’s “cloistered” perspective. Later, Musk said people “hate” media figures like Beddoes: “You’re loathed far more than I am.”

After the interview, Musk persisted on X, calling Beddoes “an unthinking NPC” (“non-player character” in gamerspeak) and a “traitor to the West.” Beddoes says she has been “genuinely bemused” by Musk’s reaction and had to find out what an NPC is. “Not a video-game player,” she admits.

We don’t typically see Elon Musk taking these types of questions. What was your thinking going into this in terms of what you wanted to cover and what you wanted to press him on?

What I try and do in these interviews is to really have a conversation. That’s why they’re longer. I try for them not to be a sort of “gotcha” series of sound bites. So I spend a lot of time thinking about what is interesting about that person. And with Elon, there was just so much.

I am absolutely not a Musk hater. He’s probably doing more than anybody to build our future. You just look at his record and it’s an extraordinary record of confounding critics and building things. I was really interested in his views on AI because he’s long been one of the people most concerned in his public statements. In 2015, he was on a podcast and said that the thing that most alarmed him was the prospect of artificial superintelligence. He said that we would be “pet Labradors.” He founded OpenAI in part because he was concerned about artificial general intelligence. And then in 2023, he asked for a pause. Even last year, he said to Ted Cruz that there was a 10 to 20 percent chance of killer robots wiping out humanity. I think some of the most interesting parts of the conversation were about that.

But then the last part got a lot of attention. I think an important side of Elon is his political side — his role in the Trump........

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