COLOGNE, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 13: Co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak attends the Digital X 2022 event ... [+]
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, was asked what he thought of Elon Musk on Tuesday during an appearance on CNN. And the hosts seemed genuinely surprised at the response—which wasn’t very flattering of the billionaire Tesla CEO.
CNN This Morning host Kaitlan Collins asked Wozniak whether he ever talks with Musk.
“I’ve never actually met him and spoke with him. I admire some things that he’s done for the world, changing us towards electric cars,” Wozniak told the CNN hosts.
But then things took a darker turn, with Wozniak bringing up Musk’s many promises in the 2010s that self-driving cars were just over the horizon.
“But you know, his real motivations inside—is he really a purist of trying to clean the air and all that—gets shadowed by a lot of other things. And he basically got a lot of money from myself for a car, I believed things he said. That a car would drive itself across the country by the end of 2016. Oh, I had to upgrade to that model. You know, $50,000 and then it wouldn’t do anything,” Wozniak said.
But it didn’t stop there. Wozniak explained the promises that seemed to just keep coming.
“I could tell it would never make it across the country, and he said ‘Here we have a new one with eight cameras, it’ll make across the country by the end of 2017,’” Wozniak said.
“I actually believed those things, and it’s not even close to reality. And boy, if you want a study of AI gone wrong and taking a lot of claims and trying to kill you every chance it can, get a Tesla,” Wozniak continued.
Musk made a lot of promises for self-driving cars starting in 2014, with fully autonomous driving always just one or two years away. But we’re still waiting on that to happen, despite Tesla rolling out something called “Full Self-Driving” which is anything but.
"My guess as to when we would think it is safe for somebody to essentially fall asleep and wake up at their destination?" Musk said in 2019. "Probably towards the end of next year."
Collins and her co-host Poppy Harlow seemed shocked at Wozniak’s assessment of a fellow tech mogul. Harlow moved on to ask about how Musk was running Twitter, the social media platform Musk bought for $44 billion in October 2022. And Wozniak said he didn’t really have any strong opinion on that since he didn’t use social media much.
“Well, it’s kind of bumbling. I can’t say good or bad. I’m not really there. And Twitter, you know, probably needs a lot of change and revamping in most people’s eyes. So we’ll see. I mean, Twitter is a social network and I pretty much avoid the social networks,” Wozniak said.
