Elon Musk announced Tuesday that Saudi Arabia had approved the use of Starlink, as part of his mounting efforts to use Donald Trump’s trip abroad to boost his many businesses. While speaking with Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswah on the White House–led trip, the billionaire bureaucrat thanked Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for approving his SpaceX-owned and -operated satellite internet service, for aviation and maritime use.
But Starlink wasn’t the only one of Musk’s businesses that got a plug to the president’s foreign friends. Musk said that he had shown Trump and MBS several of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, which are still undergoing development. Musk warned last month that China’s suspension of rare earth metals exports amid Trump’s slowly deescalating trade war could potentially delay manufacturing.
Musk also discussed his ambitions to bring Tesla’s robotaxis to Saudi Arabia.
“I think it would be very exciting to have autonomous vehicles here in the kingdom, indeed, if you’re amenable,” Musk said. The U.S. National Highway Safety Administration is still probing Tesla on how well these autonomous vehicles will function in poor weather conditions, including sun glare and dust, which could potentially decrease their utility in a city like Riyadh, which experiences frequent sand storms.
But it seems Musk had a solution for this: he pitched that the Saudi government construct tunnels with the help of his Boring Company. “In order to solve traffic, you really need to go 3D with roads,” Musk said, describing tunnels as a novel kind of “wormhole” and not a classic feature of public infrastructure.
Musk began to plug his infrastructure and tunnel service after being prompted by Alswah to discuss yet another one of his companies, xAI. He described the goal of that project as to produce a “maximally truth seeking” artificial intelligence.
“What questions do we not know to ask? Once you know the question, the answer is the easy part,” Musk said.
Alswah called Musk a “lifetime partner” to the kingdom, and said they were “joining hands” on “XAi, Starlink, robotics, and Tesla.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s first day in Saudi Arabia was off to a sleepy start. The president was filmed falling asleep during a briefing with MBS, shutting his eyes and jerking awake.
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