Musk talks digging tunnels and cutting budgets at Dubai summit

Offering the UAE an earth-boring contract potentially costing billions and a peek into his budget-slashing activities at the White House, Elon Musk headlined today’s final sessions at the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, appeared on giant screens before the conference’s 6,000 participants, looking like Big Brother with the words, “Tech Support” emblazoned on his black T-shirt.

The 54-year-old chief of X, Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company earlier signed a draft agreement with the UAE government to dig the foundations for the “Dubai Loop.” He said the new public transportation system would speed residents and visitors underground across the Gulf financial center that is home to the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper.

“You just wormhole from one part of the city – Boom! – you’re out in another part of the city,” Musk said, answering questions from Omar Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, as well as Vice Chair of the conference.

Describing his work as head of U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, Musk said dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development reflects a new approach: Washington is  “less interested in interfering with the affairs of other countries,” he said.

“Basically, America should mind its own business rather than push for regime change all over the place,” Musk told the crowd, which included at least 30 presidents and prime ministers from across the globe.

Musk was the last in a series of tech leaders from some of the world’s biggest companies who spoke at the government summit. On Wednesday, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair teamed up to examine the promise and threats of artificial intelligence.

Ellison, also speaking virtually with Blair onstage in Dubai, said AI will be transformative for governments and a broad range of industries including medicine, agriculture and robotics.

“Countries need to unify their data so it can be consumed and used by the AI model,” Ellison said, warning about the dangers of lax information security. “The digital tools we have right now are so primitive,” he said. “We can easily be locked out of all our data; passwords and data are so easily stolen and ransomed. We need to modernize our systems.”

On the first day of the conference, Robin Li, CEO of China’s Baidu, talked about how the high costs of AI development have forced the world’s second-largest economy to find new computing solutions, including DeepSeek, which has come up with vastly cheaper AI models than those developed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

“You just don’t know when and where innovations come from,” Li said.