‘Make Star Trek real’: Elon Musk welcomes Pete Hegseth to the Texas Starbase

We're honored today to have the Secretary of War, Pete Heksev, and much of the senior leadership of the Pentagon here. It's an honor to have them visit. We just did a tour of the factory, and I think it really helps illustrate how manufacturing and manufacturing at scale is critical to the strength of America. How about this? Star Trek real. Yes! And I'll tell you a little bit just about the purpose of SpaceX. We want to make Star Trek real. We want to make Starfleet Academy real. So that it's not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact. And we have spaceships going through space, big spaceships, with people going to other planets, going to the moon, and ultimately going beyond our star system to other star systems where we may meet aliens or discover long-dead alien civilizations. I don't know, but we want to go, and we want to see what's happening. And we want to have epic, futuristic spaceships with lots of people in them, traveling to places we've never been to before. Yeah. That's the goal. Well, what a tour. What an opportunity to be here at Starbase, Texas, with Elon and the SpaceX team. There's nothing like this in America. There's nothing like this in the world. And what you have built and what you will build here is a testament to the strength of American ingenuity and American invention. So I want to thank all of you, all the folks out here for having us today. Elon, thank you so much for hosting us, for what you've built, for the vision you have for this company, the vision you have for our country, the vision you have for American innovation. I could not think of a more fitting venue to continue our arsenal of freedom tour. Since the end of the Cold War, the defense industrial base in our country has consolidated. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for new creators of technical innovations to win business at our department. The result is a risk-averse culture that prevents us from providing our warfighters with the best resources that America has to offer. That ends today. Simply put, the United States must win the strategic competition for 21st century technological supremacy. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, quantum, hypersonics, and long-range drones. If you talk to Elon Musk long enough, he will tell you how important hypersonics and long-range drones are, and he's 100% correct. Space capabilities, directed energy, and biotechnology are the new areas of global competition. Elon Musk is accusing the UK of being fascist and limiting free speech. The British government has threatened to ban X after growing concerns of deepfake sexualized images being produced by the tech giant's AI chatbot. Nick Martin has more. This is all about X's AI chatbot, Grok, which in the last few weeks has been used by some people to sometimes alter, in other cases, generate some explicit images of people, women and children in particular, without their consent. Now, when this was brought to X's attention, their first move was to say, OK, well, that X's feature will not be available to people who do not subscribe to X, but it will still be available to those who subscribe to the platform for as little as £7 a week. Well, this sent the UK government into a bit of a fury. Liz Kendall, the tech secretary, said it was completely unacceptable and that she was pointing and leaning towards Ofcom, the communications regulator, to do something about it, saying that any generation or altering of images in this way was against UK law. Well, now it seems that Elon Musk is fighting back. He says any suggestion that we should be restricting the platform would be a form of censorship. And as you just outlined there, he is certainly attacking perception that UK is in some way trying to restrict free speech. Ofcom says it's urgently looking at it. It said in the last couple of days that it had approached X and was trying to figure something out. But under the Online Harms Act, it is indeed illegal and against UK law to alter and produce explicit images. And if that is what is happening, then the UK government say that it's possible that if nothing is done, then they will have to consider banning X in the United Kingdom. Now, the Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, is in Washington. He's been meeting the Vice President, J.D. Vance, who himself has also over the last few months attacked what he says is Britain's restrictions on free speech. David Lammy has said that J.D. Vance, they brought this up, they had a chat about it, and he said that J.D. Vance agrees that it is entirely unacceptable and is sympathetic towards the UK's stance. But this certainly does look like the UK government is on a collision course with Elon Musk. X is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. And I think this is a debate which goes to the heart of huge questions over AI and what it's capable of and how governments respond when things take a turn for the worst.