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Elon Musk on the 3 factors that will determine the winner in AI

November 27, 2025

“Even a small player that is successful in AI will be worth a lot because they’ll contribute so much in productivity to the economy,” Elon explains. “There will be many companies that are worth sustainably several hundred billion dollars. So the next question becomes, How do we [xAI] achieve the lead?”

Elon believes it will come down to three things:

  1. Are you able to attract the best talent?

  2. Are you able to bring more GPUs online faster than anyone else?

  3. Unique access to data

And uses these three factors to make the case for xAI winning the AI race:

“We’ve already demonstrated that we can [bring AI hardware online faster than anyone else]. Jensen Huang himself said that he was blown away by how fast xAI build the Colossus data center . . . And for [unique access to data] we’ve got the X system — formerly the Twitter system — which is by far the best source of real-time data in the world.”

He continues:

“Those are some pretty significant assets, and I think we’re going to come up with some very innovative ideas . . . I think we’ll make some moves that are not on the chessboard, that people don’t anticipate.”