It was raw and tense at times.

Former television host Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, thought-provoking interview with Elon Musk was released online Monday morning, covering topics such as politics, most notably the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that he now owns; and more.

The interview was intended as the debut episode of a new talk show in a collaboration between Mr. Lemon and X, but Mr. Musk canceled the deal a day after filming the more than hour-long interview at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. The first episode of “The Don Lemon Show” was streamed YouTube and posted to Mr. Lemons account on X.

In the interview, Mr. Musk said he was having breakfast with an unnamed friend in Florida earlier this month when Mr. Trump stopped by.

When asked what was discussed, Mr Musk said Mr Trump did most of the talking and that the former president did not ask for money or a donation to his campaign. Mr Musk also said he would not lend Mr Trump money to pay his legal bills.

While Mr Musk said he would not donate to any candidate, he said he would consider backing one in the latter parts of the race.

“I don’t know yet, I want to make an informed decision before the election,” he said, noting that he was turning away from President Biden. “I have made no secret of that,” he added.

If Mr. Musk endorses a candidate, he said, he would explain his choice in detail.

Elsewhere in the interview, Mr Musk was adamant that he does not abuse drugs, talking about his prescription for ketamine due to a “negative chemical state”.

“If you’ve been on too much ketamine, you can’t really get to work, and I have a lot of work to do,” he said. He noted that 16-hour work days were “normal” for him, and he rarely took weekends off.

Mr Musk appeared visibly irritated by a direct line of questions about him appearing to endorse an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about X.

“I don’t have to answer these questions,” he said. “I don’t have to answer questions from reporters. Don, the only reason I’m doing this interview is because you’re on the X platform and you asked for it. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this interview.”

Mr Musk also appeared to sidestep questions about whether he had a responsibility to moderate hate speech on the platform, and why certain posts had not been removed.

“If something is illegal, we will remove it,” Musk said. “If it is not illegal, we put our thumb on the scale and we are censorious.”

The show arrived Monday morning after a heavy promotional push from Mr. Lemon, who teased the interview in several places last week: including ‘The View’, in the days after Mr Musk abruptly dropped X’s partnership with the former CNN host.

Before the release, the men disagreed on how the interview went.

Mr. Lemon said in a statement last week that his questions were respectful and covered many topics. “We had a good conversation,” Mr. Lemon said. “It was clear he thought differently. His commitment to a global town square where all questions can be asked and all ideas shared doesn’t seem to include questions from people like me.

Mr Musk, on the other hand, thought differently. In a message on X, Mr Musk said Mr Lemon’s show lacked originality.

“His approach was basically just ‘CNN, but on social media,’ which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying,” Musk wrote.

While X had initially agreed to the Mr. show. To support Lemon financially blindsided Mr. Musk to terminate the partnership with the salespeople at X, and it was the latest self-inflicted disruption to business operations at X in recent months.

In November, Mr Musk boldly told advertisers not to spend money on his platform, using a curse word to fire them, and accused them of “blackmail” after he appeared to endorse an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about brought up again during Monday’s show. . Musk’s inflammatory comments caused numerous companies to suspend their advertising campaigns on X.

Elon Musk brought the raw computer code behind his version of an artificial intelligence chatbot on Sunday, an escalation from one of the world’s richest men in a battle to control the future of AI

Grok, which is designed to provide snarky answers styled after the science fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product of xAI, the company Mr. Musk founded last year. Although xAI is an independent entity of X, the technology is integrated into the social media platform and trained on users’ posts. Users who subscribe to X’s premium features can ask Grok questions and receive answers.

By opening the code up for anyone to view and use – known as open sourcing – Musk waded further into a heated debate in the AI ​​world over whether this could help make the technology more secure, or simply make it open to abuse.

Mr Musk, a self-proclaimed proponent of open sourcing, did the same with X’s recommendation algorithm last year but has not updated it since.

“There is still work to be done, but this platform is already by far the most transparent and in search of the truth (not a high bar, by the way),” said Musk. Posted Sunday in response to a comment about open sourcing X’s recommendation algorithm.

The move to open-source chatbot code is the latest salvo between Mr Musk and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which recently sued the mercurial billionaire for breaching his pledge to do the same. Mr Musk, who founded and helped fund OpenAI before leaving several years later, has argued that such an important technology should not be controlled solely by tech giants such as Google and Microsoft, which is a close partner of OpenAI.

OpenAI has said it will seek to dismiss the lawsuit.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)

The controversy over open source generative AI – which can create realistic images and videos and mimic human text responses – has roiled the tech world over the past year following the explosion in the technology’s popularity. Silicon Valley is deeply divided over whether the encryption underlying AI should be publicly available, with some engineers arguing the powerful technology should be protected from intruders, while others insist the benefits of transparency outweigh the drawbacks.

By publishing his AI code, Musk placed himself firmly in the latter camp, a decision that could allow him to gain an edge over competitors who had a head start on developing the technology.

Publishing the code will allow other companies and independent software developers to adapt and reuse it when building their own chatbots and other AI systems. Meta, the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, has also made it open source AI technology, called LLaMA. Google and a prominent French start-up, Mistral, have also done open sourcing.

Last year, Mr Musk – who also owns In November, he said that investors in his $44 billion take-private deal for 25 percent interest in xAI.

Mr Musk has said no topic should be off limits to chatbots, criticizing companies that steer their technology to avoid controversy as “woke”.

“If an AI is programmed to pursue diversity at all costs, as Google Gemini was, then it will do everything in its power to achieve that outcome, including possibly even killing people,” Mr Musk said in a message on Friday.

But at least some of the attitudes around open sourcing are closely tied to business interests. Because OpenAI is the market leader and offers the most powerful and perhaps the most popular chatbot, it has little incentive to make its code open source.

Mr Musk and xAI, on the other hand, are playing catch-up and could help level the playing field by making their code open source and inviting others to improve the technology.

Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor of computer science at Arizona State University, has argued that open sourcing current AI technology is the safest approach. But he added that companies like xAI and Meta weren’t necessarily open sourcing the technology for that reason.

“Elon Musk and Yann LeCun are not the best messengers for this argument,” he said, referring to Meta’s chief AI scientist.

In Taiwan, the government is rushing to do what no country or even company has been able to do: build an alternative to Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company.

Starlink has enabled militaries, power plants and medical personnel to maintain crucial online connections when primary infrastructure fails in emergency situations such as an earthquake in Tonga and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Officials in Taiwan are constantly reminded that communications infrastructure must be able to withstand a crisis. The island democracy is 80 miles (130 kilometers) from China, where leaders have vowed to use force if necessary to claim Taiwan is part of its territory.

Taiwan faces regular cyber attacks and almost daily incursions into its waters and airspace by the People’s Liberation Army, which has been built up in recent years.

And Taiwan’s infrastructure is vulnerable. Last year, the remote Matsu Islands, within sight of the Chinese coast, suffered patchy internet for months after two undersea internet cables broke. These fiber-optic cables that connect Taiwan to the internet have suffered about 30 such breaks since 2017, mostly due to anchors dragged by the many ships in the area.

The war in Ukraine heightened the sense of vulnerability weighing on Taiwan’s leaders. With much of its telecommunications system taken offline by Russian weaponry and cyberattacks, the Ukrainian military has become dependent on a system controlled by Mr Musk.

“The war between Ukraine and Russia gave us a profound reflection,” said Liao Jung-Huang, director of the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute. “Even if the cost to build it is high, in a special scenario the value of having your own constellation is unlimited.”

SpaceX dominates the satellite internet industry, and Mr Musk has long done business in China through his electric car company Tesla, which has a major production facility in Shanghai. Officials in Taiwan decided it would be best to build a satellite network that they could control.

But building a network of satellites manufactured, launched and controlled from Taiwan will require billions of dollars and years of research and testing.

SpaceX has spent five years launching thousands of satellites into so-called low Earth orbit, an area much closer than where traditional communications satellites fly, starting about 100 miles above Earth. The satellites send signals to terminals on the ground, and as they get closer, the signal gets faster.

Mr Musk has repeatedly proclaimed that within a few years his satellite network will provide the entire world with internet as fast as any land-based internet.

He’s not the only tech billionaire with this goal. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has also announced plans for a low-Earth orbit network. But while SpaceX is responsible for more than half of the active satellites orbiting Earth, Amazon has only launched two.

The British company OneWeb also sent a few hundred satellites into space. But the effort was so costly that it had to be bailed out by the British government before merging with European conglomerate Eutelsat to form a company called Eutelsat OneWeb.

In Taiwan, the government has said it wants to have its first communications satellite in orbit by 2026 and a second within two years, while developing four more test satellites. President Tsai Ing-wen has promised this $1.3 billion that Taiwan’s space program would develop the best of these tests into a satellite internet network created and operated entirely from Taiwan.

While the network is being developed, the Taiwanese government has entered into agreements for access to existing satellite networks. It has said it plans to deploy 700 terminals receive satellite signals. In August it became a partner of Luxembourg company SES, and in November Chunghwa Telecom announced a partnership with Eutelsat OneWeb. The partnerships could provide layers of backup even after Taiwan gets its own network up and running.

“We need to invest in more than one system,” said Yisuo Tzeng, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank funded by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry. “We can’t put all our eggs in one basket.”

More than 40 Taiwanese companies make parts in the satellite supply chain, said Mr. Liao of the Industrial Technology Research Institute.

A satellite network developed in Taiwan could do more than provide Taiwan with an alternative communications system. It could make Taiwan a key technology producer for years to come, just as the country is the source of most of the world’s advanced semiconductors.

“Right now we are strong in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, but space is a new industry where we can leverage that,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, founder of Tron Future, a startup that provides the payload for one of the satellites that the government is testing. .

One of the challenges Taiwan faces is the cost of the rockets that launch the satellites. Most rockets can only be used once and require enormous amounts of fuel, making the costs too high for all but the wealthiest governments to experiment with.

Every Taiwanese satellite that went into space between 2005 and 2016 was launched in the United States, said Yen-Sen Chen, founder of the rocket launch company TiSpace, who worked for more than a decade at the Taiwanese space agency’s predecessor.

Over the past year, Taiwanese research and weather satellites have been launched by French company Arianespace, as well as SpaceX.

Perhaps no entity has devoted more resources to rocket development than SpaceX.

It has become so unavoidable that it even sends competitor payloads into space. In December, Mr. Bezos’ project said it would launch some of its satellites three future Falcon 9 launches.

Taipei has been exploring ways to acquire satellite internet technology since 2018, including in talks with SpaceX. But Mr Musk resisted the requirement that any foreign entity involved in communications infrastructure be a joint venture with a local partner that would have a majority stake. Mr. Musk found this “totally unacceptable,” said Hsu Chih-hsiang, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The talks did not result in a partnership with SpaceX.

Last month, Rep. Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, alleged that by not making Starlink available in Taiwan, SpaceX could be in violation of its contract to make the service accessible to the U.S. government worldwide, according to a letter reviewed by The New York Times. .

SpaceX is complying with all of its US government contracts, the company responded in a message on X.

When asked about the prospects of any cooperation with SpaceX, Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs said in an emailed statement that it would “evaluate the possibility of cooperation” with any satellite operator, as long as the operator is “in accordance would be with Taiwan’s national security and information security regulations.”

Musk’s close business ties with China have also raised concerns in Taiwan. China is Tesla’s largest market outside the United States.

The Chinese government has eased long-standing restrictions on foreign ownership of companies and handed out lucrative incentives ahead of Tesla setting up its Shanghai Gigafactory. And he has made comments endorsing the Chinese Communist Party’s position on Taiwan.

“What if we were relying on Starlink and Musk decided to cut back under pressure from China because he has the Chinese market at stake?” asked Mr Tzeng of the defense think tank. “We have to take that into account.”

In the wake of a testy interview with Elon Musk, former television host Don Lemon’s deal for a new talk show on X blew up just days before it was set to air.

Mr. Musk ended Mr. Lemon’s partnership with The conversation was tense at times, Mr. Lemon said, as he asked probing questions about the upcoming U.S. presidential election and Mr. Musk’s various business ventures.

Mr. Lemon said he would release the interview on March 18. “My questions were respectful and broad, covering everything from SpaceX to the presidential election,” Mr. Lemon said in an interview. rack. “We had a good conversation. It was clear he thought differently. His commitment to a global town square where all questions can be asked and all ideas shared doesn’t seem to include questions from people like me.

Salespeople at

The cancellation of a show that Mr. Musk promised would have his “full support” is the latest self-inflicted disruption to business operations at X in recent months. In November, Musk told advertisers not to spend money on his platform, using a curse word to turn them away, and accused them of trying to “blackmail” him after he appeared to endorse an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about X. an expensive exodus.

Mr. Lemon was one of several headliners, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who signed contracts this year to produce long-form video content on platform to incentivize content creators to generate premium content that brands would want to advertise against.

X had agreed to lend his financial support to the establishment of Mr. Lemon, called ‘The Don Lemon Show’. But the company said in a statement that it would no longer pay Mr. Lemon to create content for the site.

“The Don Lemon Show is welcome to publish its content on X, without censorship, because we believe in providing a platform for creators to scale their work and connect with new communities,” the company said in a statement posted on X. “However, like any business, we reserve the right to make decisions regarding our business partnerships, and after careful consideration, X has decided not to enter into a commercial partnership with the show.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Lemon said he would continue to seek payment from X. “Don has a deal with X and expects to be paid for it,” she said. “If we have to go to court, we will.”

X’s recent video deals – including the one with Mr. Lemon – were led by X CEO Linda Yaccarino, a former NBC Universal executive who has leaned on her television experience to grow X’s content portfolio. The uproar highlighted the challenges Ms. Yaccarino faces as she tries to lure advertisers and content creators to the platform in the shadow of Mr. Musk’s impulsive leadership.

Ryan Mac reporting contributed.