By PYMNTS | October 18, 2026
Elon Musk says his work last year with the White House distracted him from artificial intelligence development at his businesses.
“[I] kinda got carried away, basically,” Musk said in an upcoming episode of the new podcast series, “The Builders with Walter Isaacson,” scheduled to premiere Tuesday (Oct. 20), per a report by Axios on Saturday (Oct. 17). He added that he wound up being “gone for too long” from his companies.
“What I should have done,” he said, “was be more in the background … and probably only had it last for a month or two,” said Musk, who leads Tesla and the rocket-satellite-AI company SpaceX. “I should have gone back and focused on AI a little sooner than I did.”
Musk also addressed the U.S. budget deficit, which he said would increase due to President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
There’s “no way we were gonna solve the deficit from within the government,” Musk said, adding, “The only way we’re going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots.”
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Musk spent the first few months of Trump’s second term leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), helping drive thousands of federal job cuts.
In related news, Musk said last month that he wants his xAI’s chatbot Grok to function as a financial assistant for users.
“Grok Bot now connects to your finances,” the AI company wrote on X, another Musk company. “Link your bank, card, and investment accounts with the new Finance integration, then ask Bot to help manage your spending, investments, and more.”
An example the company offered with the launch involved the agent analyzing a year of banking and card transactions to spot recurring subscriptions, price increases and overlapping services. Grok had already started incorporating other financial capabilities, such as crypto transactions, before rolling out the broader account-data connection.
PYMNTS also wrote recently about Musk’s X Money’s effort to determine whether a social platform “can claim a place” in the phone-based “payment routine” popularized by digital wallets. This followed the company’s announcement that it was opening exclusive access to the service.
“Consumers already have wallets on their phones, stored credentials at merchants and payment apps that reduce the work required to complete a transaction,” that report said. “But success is no layup: X Money has to give them a reason to add another financial relationship and then use it often enough to matter.”
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