Tech billionaire Elon Musk waxed poetic about his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency in Washington, D.C., describing the experience as significant but secondary to a more pressing challenge: preparing society for the rapid rise of disruptive artificial intelligence.

“Fixing the government is like, say, the beach is dirty and there’s some needles and feces and trash,” Musk begin in an interview with Garry Tan of Y Combinator. “But then there’s also this thousand-foot wall of water, which is a tsuami of AI.”

“How much does cleaning the beach really matter if you’ve got a thousand-foot tsumai about to hit? Not that much,” the Tesla CEO continued. “Back to the main quest of building technology, which is what I like doing.”

"The signal to noise ratio in politics is terrible,” he added.

On May 28th, Musk announced his departure from DOGE, concluding his 130-day tenure as a special government employee in the Trump administration.

Later in the interview, Musk predicted that AI will drive an economy thousands or millions of times larger than today’s size, if it doesn't wipe us out first.

"AI will so profoundly change the future, it's difficult to fathom how much. But, you know, the economy, assuming we don't, things don't go awry, and AI doesn't kill us all and itself, then you'll see ultimately an economy that is not, not ten times more than the current economy,” Musk said. "Ultimately, if we become, say, or whatever our future machine descendants, or mostly machine descendants, become a Kardashev scale two civilization or beyond, we're talking about an economy that is thousands of times, maybe millions of times, bigger than the economy today."

Musk then mused how society is on the brink of digital superintelligence that could outsmart humans, predicting it might hit as soon as this year or next.

"I think we're quite close to digital superintelligence,” the billionaire said. "It may happen this year and if it doesn't happen this year next, year for sure.”

Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, is reportedly seeking to raise $4.3 billion in equity financing This capital raise would complement a separate $5 billion debt financing effort for a combined entity encompassing xAI and X, the social media platform. The fundraising push follows a $6 billion cash injection xAI received in December, signaling the company’s aggressive drive to bolster its AI capabilities amid intensifying industry competition.