Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Musk, Huang and Zuckerberg advised Trump against an industry-funded AI regulator
Three of the biggest builders of AI systems gave the President the same private advice about an oversight body the industry would have funded itself. The Wall Street Journal is the only source for it.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Musk sided with his rivals Dario Amodei and Sam Altman in calling for foundation model labs to slow the pace of development.
- Trump and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang contradicted him in the same week, both saying AI companies need to go faster, with Trump calling fears of runaway AI a hoax.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had joined Huang and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg in advising Trump to oppose an industry-funded regulator.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- contradiction Anyone treating the labs' slow-down statements as willingness to be regulated now has a counter-example from the same week, since the Journal puts the same men in a room arguing against the funded body.
- exposure The official weighing that advice holds Nvidia and SpaceX stock on his most recent disclosure, so the decision maker's own portfolio sits on the growth side of the question he is being lobbied about.
- constraint The only oversight design any of them endorsed in public keeps the testing, the findings and the release decision inside the labs, so a buyer waiting for an outside counterparty is waiting for something nobody at the table proposed.
- cost The body would have been paid for by firms whose annual AI infrastructure spending CNBC puts in the hundreds of billions of dollars, so the fee would have been small against what they already spend.
CNBC's report describes it only as an industry-funded regulator, and does not identify who put it forward or how the funding would have worked [9][19].
In public Musk offered a different design, one in which labs test each other's new models, find the safety problems and fix them before release [6]. "You can always escalate the amount of regulatory oversight, but it is very difficult to reduce it," he said in a virtual appearance on the All-In Summit panel on Tuesday, which also included former White House AI czar David Sacks [5][7]. "It does tend to be very much a one-way ratchet" [8]. The objection there is to irreversibility. The arrangement he described is also one the labs can start and stop by themselves.
His exposure to the answer got much larger in the space of six months. SpaceX merged with xAI in February and closed a $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding tools company Cursor in August [11][12]. In between, it went public in the largest IPO on record and briefly made Musk a trillionaire [13]. The safety spending he has a public number attached to is older and smaller: $10 million through his foundation in late 2014, seeding Max Tegmark's Future of Life Institute [14]. The Cursor cheque is 6,000 times that [15].
Timnit Gebru and Emile Torres wrote the combination up in March 2024. Their paper mentions Musk more than 30 times and concludes that he and a small group of elite players in AI have claimed they are "safeguarding humanity's future, while simultaneously creating unsafe products, centralizing power, and evading accountability" [16].
The Journal's report is the only account of the private advice, and Musk did not respond to CNBC's request for comment [9][10], so how far the three of them actually agreed is unsettled. Opposing a body that the industry funds but does not control is also not the same as opposing every federal rule, and the terms would decide which one happened here. And the public and private positions are consistent if you take the ratchet argument at face value: peer testing is available now and can be unwound, and a funded regulator would be neither of those things.
In my view the reported advice is the best guide available to the near-term federal path in the United States, and it points at nothing binding. If the Journal is wrong about Musk's role in it, the two positions stop conflicting, and what remains is a man who prefers peer review to rulemaking.
What to watch
- An AI oversight bill with a named sponsor, which would force the three companies into a public position on a text rather than an advisory conversation.
- Any on-the-record comment from Huang or Zuckerberg about the industry-funded regulator proposal, neither of whom is quoted on it in CNBC's account.
- Whether Trump's next financial disclosure still lists Nvidia and SpaceX among his holdings.