Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., departs court in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023.
Marlena Sloss | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO Elon Musk called for federal regulation of AI technology during a taped interview on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight”
Musk revealed in the interview that aired Monday that he wants to start a new AI initiative called “TruthGPT” because he fears that existing AI businesses are training their systems to be “politically correct.”
The celebrity CEO also spoke at length about his AI fears and ambitions at Twitter, the social media company he acquired in a $44 billion deal in October 2022. He did not discuss Tesla or SpaceX in detail with Carlson during the Monday night segment of the interview.
Part two is scheduled to air Tuesday on Fox.
Regulating A.I.
Musk told Carlson he envisions a regulatory agency that “initially seeks insight into AI, then solicits opinion from industry, and then has proposed rule-making,” something like the Federal Aviation Administration and the way it has come to work with aviation and aerospace companies. With an agency and industry-accepted rules in place, “I think we’ll have a better chance of advanced AI being beneficial to humanity,” Musk said.
The centibillionaire, who is also co-founder of Neuralink and The Boring Co., said that he wants to start a new AI initiative called “TruthGPT” that he wants to be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
Previously, Musk signed a letter calling for a pause on advanced AI research, which he and others believe can harm society.
“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” the letter read.
The new technology would ostensibly compete with similar efforts by Sam Altman-led OpenAI, which was initially funded by Musk, Google’s DeepMind and other AI initiatives around the world.
“I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe, it is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Musk said on the show.
Musk added that he is worried that current AI technology is “being trained to be politically correct, which is simply another way of … saying untruthful things.”
Twitter and elections
During the prime-time interview, Musk also discussed Twitter, the social media company he acquired late last year in a $44 billion deal.
Carlson asked Musk if he was surprised to learn how much access intelligence agencies had to Twitter.
Musk said, “The degree to which various regulatory agencies effectively have full access to what’s going on on Twitter blew my mind.” He said that included “DMs” or direct messages because they were not encrypted.
In the U.S., law enforcement agencies can subpoena a social media user’s direct messages or any other information held by a U.S. company, which is not end-to-end encrypted.
Musk is now promising that Twitter will allow users to “toggle encryption on” for direct messaging as early as next month.
Asked if he believed Twitter would figure heavily in future elections as it did during President Donald Trump‘s campaign and presidency, Musk said, “I think it will play a significant role in elections, not just domestically but internationally.”
Twitter is now running with about 20% of the employees it once had, which numbered around 7,500 at the time he took over, Musk said Monday without giving a specific number. “If you’re not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization, you can really let go of a lot of people it turns out,” Musk quipped.
Musk has accused Twitter’s prior management and technology of unfairly benefiting Democrats and left-leaning users. However, Stanford researchers previously found “algorithmic amplification” of right-leaning content on Twitter, not left leaning, before Musk took over.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Read more CNBC tech news
In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
Read more CNBC tech news
Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.