Take-Two CEO Slams Musk and His AI Narrative With a Brutal One-Liner

A few days ago, we wrote about Strauss Zelnick calling Elon Musk a simulation during an interview where the Take-Two Interactive CEO flipped Elon Musk's own favorite philosophical argument back on him.

Before anything else, though, we'd like to apologize. We didn't capture the full context of the interview the first time around, which was part of the Semafor World Economy 2026 panel in Washington, D.C., held on April 16. Zelnick went considerably further than a simulation punchline. In fact, he used Musk as a living argument for why AI is not going to take anyone's job, and what he's saying should make Musk's supporters at least pause.

Here is Zelnick's full argument:

If AI were going to get rid of employment, the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, knows a little something about AI, last time I checked. He has unlimited financial resources and he has unlimited human resources and he has, apparently, an unlimited amount of ideas. He also knows his way around AI. The man works 20 hours a day. If AI were going to take anyone's job, wouldn't it take his job? The richest guy on Earth, wouldn't that be like job number one for AI to take?

This was delivered in response to a question about whether AI will replace Rockstar Games' artists and those working on Grand Theft Auto 6.

After all, if AI is the transformative, labor-replacing technology Musk has promised the world for a decade, why is he still working 24-hour days? Why has xAI's "great AI-generated game" not materialized? Why is the person with the most money, the most compute, the most access to the technology itself, still personally working harder than ever instead of letting AI handle it?

Zelnick then answered his own question:

And by the way, why am I working harder than ever despite the fact that I've totally accepted AI into every part of my life?

As if this wasn't enough to bury Musk and his AI argument, here is what Musk has publicly predicted about AI's capabilities versus what has actually happened:

Now look at that table. Ten specific, dated predictions about AI and adjacent technologies with zero close to happening.

This is what Zelnick is pointing at. The person loudest about AI replacing jobs is the person whose own job, by his own stated metrics, should have been replaced by AI years ago. The fact that Musk is working 20-hour days in 2026 is evidence against his own thesis.

For Rockstar artists working on GTA 6, Zelnick argues that AI is a tool. He walked through a specific example from Grand Theft Auto's own development history:

When I started in the videogame business in 1993, if you wanted to create a lawn, an artist had to create individual blades of grass otherwise it would look like concrete. Today, pre-AI, if one of my artists want to create a lawn, they press the lawn button, and AI does that on steroids.

What Zelnick means is that game development has always looked to automate mundane tasks. Procedural generation for environments, motion capture for animations, and physics engines for object interaction are technologies once predicted to replace human creatives, but none of them have. Instead, they freed artists to focus on higher-value creative work. The artists who used to draw grass individually are now designing entire neighborhoods, character models, and narrative systems. The job expanded rather than disappeared.

AI can handle repetitive texture generation, basic animation cleanup, and asset variations. What AI cannot do is build the creative vision, emotional pacing, cultural commentary, and narrative coherence that separates GTA 6 from other titles because it's made by humans.

It's worth noting that Take-Two has had a rocky relationship with AI. At least, from an outsider's perspective. Take-Two laid off its head of AI last year amid "shifting priorities from upper management." The company has publicly moved from "AI tools might help us someday" to "generative AI has zero part in what Rockstar Games is building" over the past 18 months. That is not the direction a company moves if it believes AI is about to replace its workforce. That is the direction a company moves when it has evaluated the technology, decided it does not meet the quality bar required for a $3 billion flagship product, and quietly wound down the team that was supposed to integrate it.

With that said, the exchange between these two CEOS isn't really about Musk or Zelnick. It's about whether AI has lived up to expectations, and if you ask Zelnick, it hasn't.

If the tool worked the way its loudest advocates say it works, the loudest advocate wouldn't be working as hard. He is, and that's the end of it.