“The matrix.” Dude, you are a billionaire. You hang out with billionaires, and the most powerful public officials in the world. You are the matrix. Fuck off with this gaslighting fake-populist bullshit.
When assholes like Musk and Friedman say garbage like this, they are advocating for taking away people’s power. People as collective wield power through government. They want to, instead, concentrate power in a small ruling elite class of oligarchs. It’s fundamentally un-democratic, and un-American.
Also, remember he believes in that "simulation theory" nonsense. And the reason tech bros like him believe in it is that it gives them the excuse to treat everyone else like shit. Because, you see, they're NPCs. Unlike Elon. He's got full awareness programming.
More specifically, he is a billionaire who once thought that AI could be extremely dangerous if developed improperly...
... and has lately developed AI improperly, gotten into feuds with other people developing AI, is currently attempting to build an army of economy tier androids as well as literal fucking brain chips so that humans can be cyborgs some day soon.
He would easily fit into the early timeline of The Second Renaissance from the Animatrix, you know, as one of the emblematic vain and greedy narcissists who set the downfall of mankind into motion.
More specifically, he is a billionaire who once thought that AI could be extremely dangerous if developed improperly...
This was an attempt to use scale to make government regulate the market.
Once AI is regulated only few companies control it.
The real thing he and others are afraid of is the open source AI. If regular people are are in control of the technology then it no longer can be profited off.
He has zero self-awareness. When Elon found out that his then-girlfriend, Grimes, was going to voice a character in the game Cyberpunk 2077, Elon showed up at the developer's studio, unannounced, requesting that they make a character for him to play the voice of, too.
Nevermind the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about fighting corrupt billionaires and their mega-corporations large enough to employ their own private armies and instate their own governments, the leader of which wants to live forever by means of transferring his consciousness into a chip that can be implanted into a brain. Elon recognized absolutely none of the irony in the situation. Never once did he realize he was already in the game, except they named him Saburo Arasaka.
It's even weirder, because it was a flintlock - likely because you don't have to actually register those in California, and Elon is paranoid about interacting with the government in a way that isn't begging them for cash.
If anything he would be one of the oligarchs from the MxO storyline but you have to actually be a pretty die hard Matrix fan to know anything about them, so yeah he'd think he's Neo.