Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., departs court in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023.
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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.
Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks during the company’s annual general meeting in Tokyo, Japan, on Friday, June 27, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Intel and SoftBank announced on Monday that the Japanese conglomerate will make a $2 billion investment in the embattled chipmaker.
SoftBank will pay $23 per share for Intel’s common stock, which closed on Monday at $23.66. The shares rose about 6% in extended trading to $25.
The investment makes SoftBank the fifth-biggest Intel shareholder, according to FactSet. It’s a vote of support for Intel, which hasn’t been able to take advantage of the artificial intelligence boom in advanced semiconductors and has spent heavily to stand up a manufacturing business that’s yet to secure a significant customer.
“Masa and I have worked closely together for decades, and I appreciate the confidence he has placed in Intel with this investment,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a statement, referring to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.
Intel shares lost 60% of their value last year, their worst performance in the company’s more than half-century on the public market. The stock is up 18% in 2025 as of Monday’s close.
Tan took over as Intel CEO in March after his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, was ousted in December.
Intel has been a major topic of discussion in Washington of late, due to the company’s role as the only American company capable of manufacturing the most advanced chips.
However, Intel’s foundry business, which is designed to manufacture chips for other companies, has yet to secure a major customer, a critical step towards stabilization and expansion. Last month, Intel said it would wait to secure orders before committing to certain future investment in its foundry.
Tan met with President Donald Trump last week after the president had called for the CEO’s resignation. The U.S. government is considering taking an equity stake in Intel, according to reports.
SoftBank, meanwhile, has become an increasingly large player in the global chip and AI markets.
In 2016, SoftBank acquired chip designer Arm in a deal worth about $32 billion at the time. Today the company is worth almost $150 billion. Arm-based chips are part of Nvidia’s systems that go into data centers.
SoftBank was also part of President Trump’s Stargate announcement in January, along with OpenAI and Oracle.
The three companies committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the AI infrastructure project. Two months later, SoftBank led a $40 billion investment into OpenAI, the largest private tech deal on record.
“This strategic investment reflects our belief that advanced semiconductor manufacturing and supply will further expand in the United States, with Intel playing a critical role,” Son said in a statement.
Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, looks on during the closing bell at the Nasdaq Market in New York City on March 25, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Palo Alto Networks reported better-than-expected quarterly results and issued upbeat guidance for the current period. The cybersecurity software vendor said Nir Zuk, who founded the company in 2005, is retiring from his role as chief technology officer.
The stock rose about 6% in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did compared to LSEG estimates:
Earnings: 95 cents adjusted vs. 88 cents expected
Revenue: $2.54 billion vs. $2.5 billion expected.
Revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter rose 16% from about $2.2 billion last year, the company said in a statement. Net income fell to about $254 million, or 36 cents per share, from about $358 million, or 51 cents per share, in the year-ago period.
The company also issued upbeat guidance for the fiscal first quarter. Earnings per share will be between 88 cents and 90 cents, Palo Alto said, topping an 85-cents estimate from StreetAccount.
For the full year, Palo Alto said revenue will range from $10.48 billion to $10.53 billion on adjusted earnings of $3.75 to $3.85 per share. Both estimates exceeded Wall Street’s projections.
Palo Alto said that for the fiscal first quarter, remaining purchase obligations, which tracks backlog, will range between $15.4 billion and $15.5 billion, surpassing a $15.07 billion estimate.
Last month, the company announced plans to buy Israeli identity security provider CyberArk for $25 billion. It’s the largest deal Palo Alto has made since its founding, and most ambitious in an acquiring spree that ramped up after CEO Nikesh Arora took the helm of the company in 2018.
Shares sold off sharply after the news broke and have yet to recover previous highs. The stock is down about 3% this year as of Monday’s close.
“We look for great products, a team that can execute in the product, and we let them run it,” Arora told CNBC following the announcement. “This is going to be a different challenge, but we’ve done well 24 times, so I’m pretty confident that our team can handle this.”
Lee Klarich, the company’s product chief, will replace Zuk as CTO and fill his position on the board.
Satellite internet service Starlink, which is owned and operated by Elon Musk‘s SpaceX, appeared to suffer a brief network outage on Monday, with thousands of reports of service interruptions on Downdetector, a site that logs tech issues.
The outage marked the second in two weeks for Starlink. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The network’s July 24 outage lasted for several hours, with SpaceX Vice President of Starlink Engineering Michael Nicolls blaming the matter on “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network” behind Starlink.
That outage followed the launch of T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service, a direct-to-cell-phone service created to keep smartphone users connected “in places no carrier towers can reach,” according to T-Mobile’s website.
SpaceX provides Starlink internet service to more than six million users across 140 countries, according to the company’s website, though churn and subscriber rates are not publicly reported by the company.
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The SpaceX Starlink constellation is far larger than any competitor. It currently features over 7,000 operational broadband satellites, according to research by astronomer Jonathan McDowell.
On Monday, Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched another group of satellites to add to its Starlink constellation from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Southern California.
SpaceX is currently aiming to increase the number of launches and landings from Vandenberg from 50 to about 100 annually.
On Thursday last week, the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously to oppose the U.S. Space Force application to conduct that higher volume of SpaceX launches there.
The Commission has said that SpaceX and Space Force officials have failed to properly evaluate and report on potential impacts of increased launches on neighboring towns, and local wildlife, among other issues.
President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order seeking to ease environmental regulations seen by Musk, and others, as hampering commercial space operations.