The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes Is ‘Bemused’ by Elon Musk’s Post-Interview Jabs

Despite the cordial setup, the resulting interview grew heated. The first 55 minutes of Beddoes and Musk’s 85-minute conversation is quite civil, with respectful exchanges on the future of technology and other matters. The world’s richest man spoke optimistically about the potential for an “age of abundance” and how he’s going to “enjoy the ride.” Musk even expressed a willingness to meet with former friend turned rival Sam Altman to address AI safety concerns.

The conversation took a turn when it shifted to Musk’s legacy in the Trump administration and his grim view of Europe. Musk acknowledged he “got a little too involved in politics” when he spearheaded DOGE, but he rejected Beddoes’s contention that the suddenness of cuts to agencies like USAID led to “unnecessary suffering.” Musk said it “caused a lot of complaining,” but “zero people died because of DOGE.” Beddoes also challenged Musk on using X to portray the U.K. as being on the verge of “civil war” to his more than 240 million followers. Musk admitted having not visited the U.K. for “a few years,” yet he dismissed the London-based Beddoes’s “cloistered” perspective. Later, Musk said people “hate” media figures like Beddoes: “You’re loathed far more than I am.”

After the interview, Musk persisted on X, calling Beddoes “an unthinking NPC” (“non-player character” in gamerspeak) and a “traitor to the West.” Beddoes says she has been “genuinely bemused” by Musk’s reaction and had to find out what an NPC is. “Not a video-game player,” she admits.

We don’t typically see Elon Musk taking these types of questions. What was your thinking going into this in terms of what you wanted to cover and what you wanted to press him on?

What I try and do in these interviews is to really have a conversation. That’s why they’re longer. I try for them not to be a sort of “gotcha” series of sound bites. So I spend a lot of time thinking about what is interesting about that person. And with Elon, there was just so much.

I am absolutely not a Musk hater. He’s probably doing more than anybody to build our future. You just look at his record and it’s an extraordinary record of confounding critics and building things. I was really interested in his views on AI because he’s long been one of the people most concerned in his public statements. In 2015, he was on a podcast and said that the thing that most alarmed him was the prospect of artificial superintelligence. He said that we would be “pet Labradors.” He founded OpenAI in part because he was concerned about artificial general intelligence. And then in 2023, he asked for a pause. Even last year, he said to Ted Cruz that there was a 10 to 20 percent chance of killer robots wiping out humanity. I think some of the most interesting parts of the conversation were about that.

But then the last part got a lot of attention. I think an important side of Elon is his political side — his role in the Trump administration but also his interventions into European politics.

I was, and am, genuinely baffled by the gap between the extraordinarily expansive view of humanity that he shows when he’s talking about the future, and interstellar travel, and being a multiplanetary civilization, and all that stuff and then the kind of tribalism cesspit of social media that he’s in. He says that the most important thing with AI is to ensure that it is truth seeking and curious. Then you look at the stuff that he propagates on X and it’s not truth seeking, a lot of it. It’s caricature. It’s dystopia.

There’s a disjuncture.

It’s what’s so fascinating about him. But it’s also really alarming because he does have 240 million followers and he has a whole bunch of followers basically for whom he can do no wrong and who believe everything that he posts. As a result, many people’s views of Europe or political views are shaped by what Elon says.

I find it really disturbing. That’s partly why that last part of the interview became a bit heated. I wasn’t pushing an agenda. I disagreed with his characterization of Europe. I don’t think the facts back it up.

One of the best questions you asked was a simple one. When he’s talking about how the U.K. is on the precipice of civil war, you asked when he was there.

I love the fact that he said that I had a cloistered existence. Look, it’s perfectly reasonable to have different perspectives, and that’s the point of these interviews.

Part and parcel of learning about the man himself was also how he reacted to different situations in that conversation. And I think one of the reasons that it’s resonated so much with people, had such a reaction, is because he doesn’t often sit down at such length. And usually if he does, it’s with a sort of podcast in the tech world and the other stuff isn’t talked about.

Or it’s a more sympathetic interviewer, or he’s accustomed to having his fans reinforcing his views on X.

I didn’t come in trying to be an aggressive interview. I want these to be conversations, not flattery sessions.

What was your experience since the interview? He’s been tweeting about you being an “NPC.” He’s tweeted that you’re a “traitor to the West.” 

I’m genuinely bemused by it. I’ve been watching this. I had to look up what an NPC was. Not a video-game player. I didn’t even know what it was.

He’s used that before. 

At one point, he posted “Zany interview with Zanny,” and I thought that was quite funny. I reposted that. The other stuff, the aggressive stuff, I’m not the only one he’s gone after aggressively.

Presumably he’ll move on.

You’ve spoken to some other controversial figures, like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Benjamin Netanyahu. Tell me a bit about what your goal has been with the interview series.

The goal with all of them is to have interesting extended conversations with leaders and people who are shaping our world. It’s all sides of the political spectrum — business leaders, technologists, political leaders, people who are of global importance and who matter, and people whose worldview The Economist would disagree with as well as people whom it would agree with.

The first person I interviewed was Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and then the second was Steve Bannon, someone whose worldview is completely different from The Economist’s. I thought it was important to sit down and try and understand it, probe it a bit, try and make sense of it.

We were set up in 1843 to champion classical liberal values. We’re pretty unashamed about the fact that we have a worldview. I’m an unashamed classical English liberal. I always have to say that in an American context. I come with a perspective, and The Economist has a perspective.

The whole idea of The Insider when we launched it last year was to give our subscribers through this weekly show a window into The Economist, to get to know us, get to know who we were, how we reached our opinions, how we did our analysis. And most of our shows are discussions with me and my deputy, Ed Carr, and a small group of journalists, and we’re talking about whatever the news of the week is. One out of five, something like that, is a big interview.

When it comes to speaking to polarizing or controversial figures, in 2018, Steve Bannon was invited to two conferences: The Economist’s and The New Yorker’s. The New Yorker ended up rescinding his invitation after a backlash. You ended up having Bannon, and you defended at the time the importance of hearing him, even if he has much different views from The Economist’s. I wonder if that kind of debate about whether to platform someone or not has shifted in the last seven or eight years, if the culture has shifted.

I think it has. I think that was a peak de-platforming moment. And I’ve always been vociferously opposed to that whole de-platforming of people. I genuinely believe that you don’t make progress in democracies and in societies by only talking to like-minded people in the echo chamber. You have to engage. That’s part of the process of functioning liberal democracy, that you have discussion and debate. If you only sit in your echo chamber, it doesn’t work. And I felt that in 2018, and that was the reason that I spoke to Steve Bannon onstage. And I remember the environment was very different. I think I put out a statement.

You did. 

I felt the need to defend the decision. Whereas now, I mean, yes, some people have said “Why have you interviewed X?” or “Why have you interviewed Y?” But much, much less. I think the times have shifted, which is good in the sense that people realize the importance of having these kinds of conversations. The no-platforming thing is thankfully weakened.

You’ve always been pretty visible. You’ll go on Morning Joe, you do panels, you’re speaking with high-profile people. I thought it was interesting that The Economist, a publication founded in 1843 and that traditionally hasn’t had bylines, is increasingly trying to get its correspondents and editors out in the world. Can you tell me a bit about doing that?

I think it’s an evolution rather than a revolution. We’ve had podcasts for quite a number of years now, and obviously people are identified on podcasts. We’ve had short-form social videos. In fact, we’ve built up our social-media presence over the last ten years. So it’s not like we suddenly woke up one day and said, “Oh my goodness, we’re a non-byline weekly and we’re going to create this whole new thing.”

Our subscribers really want this. They want to get to know us better. And in an era of changing media consumption towards video, towards audio, we have lots more people listening to us now than we used to. It fits with the media landscape of the moment. I also think that in an era of increasing AI, having that direct personal link with people is really important.

Now there’s an interesting question, which I’m sure you’re going to follow up with, which is, “Okay, so how do you balance that with the fact that you still don’t have bylines? Isn’t this completely incoherent?”

Glad you asked.

The Economist is at its core a sort of hive mind of individuals. It’s very collaborative. We work together, we talk all the time. If we’re talking about the Middle East or Iran, we’ll have the geopolitics people talk to the oil people. So there’s a lot of debate and discussion internally. The culture is very much — and people who come in from other publications will attest to this — collaborative, sui generis. And I’m very sure that that culture is the secret source of our success. It’s why our journalism is as good as it is.

What I’ve alighted on as a balance is that our core journalism to the weekly Economist — the written articles, the kind of feedstock, if you will — is still non-bylined but that I’m very encouraging of journalists to tweet their articles, to go on podcasts, to go on The Insider, to do shortform videos. The lack of bylines isn’t that I want journalists to be in the witness-protection program. I love it when our journalists are well known. It’s great for the brand.

But there is something about the process through which we hone our arguments, figure out what’s going on. We’re about 300 people all told from the fact-checkers to every journalist. It’s a small organization and we work really quite collaboratively. There’s lots of WhatsApp groups where people are trading or sharing information, discussing things, debating things. I don’t want to call it cultlike, but it’s a wonderful culture. And I’m very protective of that culture and keeping it.

One other area of change, I saw Charlotte Howard was recently named U.S. editor, also the first American in the role in the publication’s history. Can you tell me a bit about that and your strategy in the U.S. as we’re gearing up for midterms. 

Charlotte’s been our New York bureau chief for a while. She was also a U.S. business correspondent. She was executive editor.

I don’t care whether it’s American or not American, but traditionally the job has been done from London. The big change is not in the nationality of the editor, but the change is the fact that the U.S. editor is based in New York rather than being based in London. We have a really strong U.S. team. James Bennet’s our Lexington columnist. Steve Coll is part of the team. Shashank Joshi, who is about to start as D.C. bureau chief. I’m very confident that as we gear up for the midterms, and for the rest of this administration, we’ve got a very, very good bench.

What is The Economist’s lane in covering Donald Trump’s administration and U.S. politics?

In a highly polarized media environment, we are hard to pigeonhole in traditional left-right terms. Socially liberal, fiscally prudent. Pro-free trade or things that are not fashionable nowadays. We don’t come from the traditional prisms of American coverage. We have a truly global perspective. We bring a sense of the rest of the world and how America fits into the rest of the world. And we bring a kind of fair-minded, rigorous, trustworthy perspective.

I was actually just in Washington, and I think there is a respect for the fact that we stand back and we try and put things into context. We put things in a global context. Sure, there are very clear areas where we disagree with this administration. A paper founded to champion free trade is not going to think that tariffs are a great idea. But we strive to be fair-minded, to criticize where we think criticism is warranted, to provide context and analysis.
Unfortunately, it’s true that the media environment is polarized and trust — as Elon pointed out to me — is very low in the U.S. I like to think that that’s an opportunity for us.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.