He said it out loud.
If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army?” Musk said on the call. “I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”
And what’s the army for?
…you can actually create a world where there is no poverty…
Musk is deploying the classic utopian framing that’s preceded every authoritarian project: “eliminate poverty” through technological dominance and centralized control.
I’ve written extensively about how these narratives work – from Hitler’s Lebensraum promise of “living space” to apartheid theology’s “separate development” to the ACTS 17 preacher Peter Thiel’s “optimal governance.”
The promise is always paradise; the mechanism is always control.
The “no poverty” promise always comes with an implicit answer to “for whom?”
Historically, these projects define poverty as a problem of the wrong people existing in the wrong places – solved through displacement, containment, or elimination rather than redistribution of resources or power.
Tesla can’t even make steering systems that reliably keep vehicles in their lanes. Their “solution” to societal problems likely will be even more dangerous than their “vision” failing to respect double yellow lines.
With an “army” of millions of autonomous machines under Elon Musk’s individual control, failure modes will become systematized violence.
Musk is not talking about oversight, regulation, or democratic accountability. He wants personal control of an army as a precondition. This maps directly onto the history of territorial sovereignty projects such as apartheid — his demand is for extreme governance exemption with concentrated control (e.g. Nazism).
Hitler promised to solve poverty too, but he just redefined who counted as people, then built an enforcement apparatus to murder those redefined as “the poor“.
No one shall be hungry, no one shall freeze. […] Within 4 years the German farmer must be freed from his misery. Within 4 years unemployment must be finally overcome.
That’s what Musk’s “robot army” + “no poverty” means in practice. It’s another Stanford killing machine, like the 1800s in America that Hitler studied.
The 1800s American West wasn’t just the homework for Nazi Lebensraum architects – it was their template. “Manifest Destiny” was utopian framing for Indigenous elimination. “Civilizing the frontier” meant systematic displacement and extermination. The “problem” of poverty was solved by redefining who counted as human, then deploying enforcement mechanisms (cavalry, settler militias, reservation systems) against those excluded from the category.
Stanford University sits on stolen Ohlone land, built with fraud and railroad money extracted through Chinese labor that was then excluded from the prosperity it created. The “Stanford” in “Stanford killing machine” isn’t metaphorical, it’s the institutional genealogy of genocide that Musk is invoking today.
We must remember Churchill was dismissed as alarmist, warmongering, and unreasonable for warning about men like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel throughout the 1930s. The British establishment – including his own party – marginalized him precisely because he was willing to say what the threat actually was while others counseled moderation, diplomacy, and “not inflaming tensions.”
Churchill would say this is a centrally planned and controlled distributed weapons system with humanitarian marketing.
And Musk has admitted out loud:
- Operating under single-person command authority
- Demanding exemption from democratic oversight
- Failure modes causing death
- Intending scale in civilian population centers
- Integrating with surveillance and targeting networks
That is by definition another Stanford-born genocidal killing machine, regardless of its nominal purpose.