• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 9, 2025

In a far-ranging, freewheeling and tech-centric live conversation on the X platform, Stagwell Chairman-CEO Mark Penn interviewed Elon Musk on the impact recent and not-to-distant technological innovations are and will be having on society, the economy, the nature of human beings, but not one question explicitly related to advertising.

Penn, who said he was attending CES with about 25 marketing executives, began by touting a self-driving experience he had recently with a Tesla vehicle and followed up with questions related to many of Musk's tech products, including AI, Optimus robots, Space X's Mars-bound Starships, his Neuralink brain implant chips, and of course, the X platform.

The conversation also touched on Musk's role in the impending Trump administration, including DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), and his plans to cut upwards of $2 trillion from federal government spending, but he said realistically hoped to at least attain $1 trillion in savings, largely due to removing regulations.

You can listen to the conversation here on X @Live, but the gist is that Musk painted a relatively utopian vision for the impact of his technologies, especially AI, robots, self-driving cars, and Neuralink, which he said would augment and/or replace many of the manual tasks humans have been required to sustain themselves, raising the most important question of all:

"It obviously begs the question, 'What are we all going to do'?" Musk quipped.

Musk predicted the quantum leap in productivity would provide the human race with more than just a universal basic income, but a "universal high income," enabling people to essentially "retire" and only do manual tasks that are optional to them.

While there was no explicit discussion about the role of advertising -- or ad-supported media -- in the conversation, Penn made note of Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that it was following X platform's move to abandon fact-checking and rely on community notes similar to X's solution for Meta's platforms.

"Yeah, that's cool," Musk replied, which digressed into Musk's long-standing rant that the government has been "censoring things," including the FBI having its own "portal into Twitter where they could spy on anything and censor anything and had a two-week auto-delete, so we don't even know what they did, except that they had immense power to do whatever they wanted, which doesn't sound legal. There also was a lot of self-censoring. I don't know, there was just a lot of censoring going on."

Penn posed a question from Zac Moffatt, CEO of Stagwell political shop Targeted Victory: "How do you make pessimism uncool again?," adding that "this used to be a can-do nation -- always very positive."

He went on to cite Stagwell research asking Americans if they think the U.S. is on the right track or the wrong track, noting: "they never say we're on the right track anymore."

"I'm actually pretty optimistic about the next four or five years," Musk responded. "I think we have the potential for a Golden Age. It's very important to get rid of the mountain of regulations that are holding things back."