Take-Two CEO to Musk: AI Should Replace You First

"If AI were going to take anyone's job, wouldn't it take his job?" That was Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's response to Elon Musk's repeated claims that generative AI could produce something on the scale of Grand Theft Auto 6. Speaking at the Semafor World Economy 2026 conference on April 16, Zelnick turned Musk's own AI evangelism into a personal jab, and it landed harder than most corporate back-and-forths tend to.

The exchange has been building for months. Back in January, Musk agreed with a Twitter user that there was a "non-zero chance" people would be able to generate their own GTA 6 before Rockstar ships the real thing. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney piled on, calling "text-to-GTA" the next logical step. Musk went further, claiming AI would eventually figure out what game you want without you even asking. It was the kind of Silicon Valley futurism that sounds impressive in a tweet and falls apart the second you think about it for more than ten seconds.

Zelnick clearly thought about it. He pointed out that Musk has unlimited financial resources, unlimited human resources, and apparently unlimited ideas. He also knows his way around AI and works 20-hour days. So why hasn't AI freed him up? "The richest guy on Earth, wouldn't that be job number one for AI to take? Why is he so busy?" Zelnick asked. He then drew a comparison to the "paperless office" prediction from 1972, noting that offices now use more paper than ever and employ more people than ever. I appreciate that Zelnick didn't just dismiss the AI hype with vague platitudes; he picked a specific, embarrassing historical parallel and let it do the work.

On the practical side, Zelnick acknowledged that AI is already a useful production tool at Take-Two's studios, including Rockstar and 2K. He described how tasks like generating textures and landscapes, work that once required artists to create individual blades of grass, can now be handled by AI tools, freeing developers to focus on higher-quality creative work. "Anything you can do that reduces mundane work means our creators can do more exciting work," he said. It's a measured position: AI as assistant, not replacement.

The conversation ended with Zelnick and the moderator joking about whether Musk himself might already be an AI simulation. "If you were ever going to pick someone that would be a simulation, he would be my number one choice," Zelnick said. GTA 6 is set to launch on November 19, built by actual humans at Rockstar, not a ChatGPT prompt.