When Musk met Sunak: the prime minister was more starry-eyed than a SpaceX telescope

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk was begging Taylor Swift to release some concert videos on his X platform, but she weirdly seems to have gone ahead with her plan to release the film of her Eras tour directly into movie theatres, foolishly making it by far and away the highest grossing concert film ever, with opening numbers similar to the last Marvel movie. Sad, really, when you think it could have been a tweet. Still, I tell you who Elon Musk can get to release exclusive footage directly on to his platform: UK prime minister Rishi Sunak. Who is, famously, a Taylor Swift fan, so … next best thing.

Sunak’s interview of Musk was trailed by the PM with a post in which the famous 10 on the Downing Street front door morphed into the X logo, a somewhat excruciating stunt that unintentionally answered one of the key questions of the AI conference: just because you can do something, does it mean you should?

The event itself actually took place at Lancaster House, which I always think of as a cursed space of self-sabotage, given that it was where Theresa May made the January 2017 speech about her Brexit red lines, which did so very much to hamstring her next two and a half years of failed negotiations and torment. Anyway, I expect they’ve had an exorcist in since then, and the current PM went with a black backdrop reading RISHI SUNAK X ELON MUSK – ooh, hot new collab just dropped! – in which it felt quite sweet that Rishi had given himself first billing.

After all, the run-up to this interview had seen much of the coverage prejudge it as the most humiliating outing for a UK party leader since Ed Miliband ascended the stairs to Russell Brand’s flat during the 2015 election to participate in something called The Trews. I’m not sure that was fair – for all his obvious drawbacks and twattishness, Musk is a significant player in AI, and someone who knows rather more about what he is talking about on the subject than pretty much all of the international politicians attending the AI conference. I suppose the one drawback is that unlike them, he isn’t democratically accountable, but hey – nor are China, and they got the call-up.

AI will eradicate jobs, explained Musk, which Sunak seemed fairly accepting of, perhaps because he is scheduled for professional eradication next year. Not that he can’t be rebooted and refitted for Silicon Valley in his post-prime-ministerial life, just as former deputy PM Nick Clegg has been. Clegg now spends his days PR-ing Meta, and will definitely be the guy in a crew-necked sweater left doing comms for the apocalypse, while Mark Zuckerberg’s jet leaves for the gun-turreted disaster compound in New Zealand. The last face you’ll see on your phone before it goes black is Clegg’s, as he solemnly promises the world: “We will learn from this.”

I can’t help feeling Sunak comes across as the sort of guy who would probably believe him. Given the softball nature of his Thursday night encounter with Musk, who only said things he had said before, the event felt chiefly most useful in what it revealed about Sunak, rather than the man in charge of some of Earth’s most significant companies and resources.

One of Tony Blair’s great weaknesses was that he was pathetically impressed by rich people – almost any rich person would do – and Sunak’s analogous vulnerability would be his starry-eyed tech fandom. From long before he became prime minister, Rishi has seemed not so much unperturbed by a future where tech firms run the world, but actively encouraging of it, despite the vast and blatant encroachments on his own power and those of his political successors that it would mean. (“Companies over countries”, as Zuckerberg once said.) Sunak has always seemed intensely relaxed about a world in which national leaders gravitate to a more front-of-house role – glad-handing it in public, prancing about on the world stage, and generally looking like leaders even though they’d really only be the butlers to the true supranational overlords.

Perhaps that’s why the prime minister seems most in his element in situations like this Musk interview – they represent a future which doesn’t trouble him, let alone frighten him. Watching him giggle along to Musk’s wry but clear warnings about humanoid robots was a reminder that Sunak is an odd man, who doesn’t really get a lot of things. For me, the definitive Sunak post on Musk’s platform will always be the one from the pandemic, where he says “I can’t wait to get back to the pub … and I don’t even drink,” accompanied by a picture of him doing a thumbs-up through the window of a luxury kettle shop. After Thursday night’s encounter, I slightly got the impression he could have watched the Terminator series rooting for Skynet.

Speaking of franchises, someone once said that Brett Ratner didn’t direct movies – he hosted them. And maybe that’s the UK now, with the power to host things but not to direct them. Sunak might have taken comfort from Musk’s assertion that San Francisco and London are the “two leading locations on Earth” for AI. Yet as a few decades of the London dirty money laundromat should have taught us by bitter experience, there’s quite a big gap between host and host organism – and I wouldn’t necessarily trust the UK to be on the right side of it.