Elon Musk spent Saturday, Oct. 17, on X boasting about a car that flies, promoting the Grok Bot assistant, and weighing in on France, according to the desk’s read of every post on his account from 7 a.m. PT Saturday to 7 a.m. PT Sunday. The day’s biggest news about him came from off the platform: Axios published excerpts of a podcast interview in which he calls the government-cutting effort DOGE a failed route to fixing the deficit. This roundup sorts his statements by topic, starts with highlights, and ends with a deeper look at the subject he posted about most.

Highlights. The Roadster drew his biggest audience. “Since fate maximizes for ironic entertainment, it was inevitable that the ‘Roadster’ would be a flying car,” he wrote (: same post), and two minutes earlier: “Future fun Roadster demos will include flying over the Snake River or maybe Grand Canyon and landing on its wheels and exceeding half the speed of sound” (: same post). Asked about downforce on the car, he answered with four words: “No roads in space” (: Musk’s reply, Oct. 17, 9:23 a.m. PT, to @anabology, who wrote “TESLA ROADSTER: DOWNFORCE Flying cars are real”). Tesla showed the flying Roadster in an official demo video on Oct. 15, two days before this window.

DOGE and the deficit (off X). In the interview excerpts, Axios reports that Musk says the DOGE experiment proved “no way we were gonna solve the deficit from within the government” and adds: “We’re not gonna solve it by trying to save our way there.” He also says, per Axios: “President Trump likes to be liked. He doesn’t like people calling him, being upset about ... some funding being stopped.” Axios says Musk admits he “kinda got carried away, basically” and stayed “gone for too long” from his companies. Axios says the full episode would premiere Tuesday, Oct. 20; the desk read only the Axios excerpts.

Politics and Europe. Replying to a post by Shaun Maguire that read “France is done,” Musk wrote “Almost. One last chance this election.” (: same post); he named no candidate. He also wrote: “The degree to which people in the West fall prey to suicidal empathy continues to astonish me” and urged followers to read a book by the academic Gad Saad (: Musk’s quote post, Oct. 17, 1:12 p.m. PT, of @Ne_pas_couvrir, who wrote “To be demoralized is to have your sense of reality so inverted that you fail to recognize you are in a state of war, …”, about 98,000 likes). “Suicidal empathy” serves as the title of Saad’s 2026 book, which its publisher describes as showing “why empathy in politics leads to civilizational collapse” (HarperCollins).

Tesla and the economy. Replying to a Tesla investor, he wrote: “Optimus and Cybercab will be the vast majority of Tesla’s value” and listed “super intelligence, robots, solar power and mass to space” as the things that “will scale to incredible size” (: Musk’s reply, Oct. 17, 10:01 p.m. PT, to @Teslaconomics, who wrote “If you’re looking at the new Roadster and all you can talk about is sales and margins, you’re missing the whole fuckin …”). Replying to a Kalshi post about an Anthropic forecast, he wrote that “>50% growth by 2030 due to SI is extremely likely, unless there is a major war,” if the measure became “useful output of US” (: Musk’s reply, Oct. 17, 5:11 p.m. PT, to @Kalshi, who wrote “BREAKING: Anthropic says ‘AI could push US GDP to $44 trillion by 2030’ 70% chance of IPO this year”).

SpaceX, Starlink and the Boring Company. He wrote “Starlink helps rural communities all around the world” (: Musk’s quote post, Oct. 17, 10:05 a.m. PT, of @XFreeze, who wrote “Starlink is helping connect healthcare facilities in Papua New Guinea 🇵🇬 Four health centres in Morobe Province have …”), “SpaceX is an anomaly in the matrix” (: Musk’s reply, Oct. 17, 10:06 p.m. PT, to @TSLAFanMtl, who wrote “Mass-to-orbit:”), and credited Boring Company president Steve Davis: “Steve Davis and his team deserve almost all the credit for @BoringCompany progress” (: Musk’s reply, Oct. 17, 10:09 a.m. PT, to @XFreeze, who wrote “The Boring Company is building something far bigger than most people even realize While everyone is focused on Tesla …”).

Deep dive: the Grok Bot push. Between about 5:16 p.m. and 7:18 p.m. PT Saturday, Musk posted about Grok Bot, the assistant product of his company, again and again, mostly by quoting users. Quoting a user who said he told his bot “to go figure out how to pay for itself,” Musk wrote: “This really works! Grok @Bot can pay for itself.” (: Musk’s quote post, Oct. 17, 5:16 p.m. PT, of @mikepat711, who wrote “I told my Grok Bot to go figure out how to pay for itself. I love this app”). On payments he wrote: “Screenshot of credit card is the easiest way, unless you want to fill out the secure vault data. Seems a bit silly to hand your credit card to people you don’t know at a restaurant, but not to Grok Bot.” (: Musk’s quote post, Oct. 17, 7:03 p.m. PT, of @Teslaconomics, who wrote “My son loves basketball, and I want him to be able to practice at home… honestly we live in a small home, though, and I …”). He quoted a list of new features with one word, “Upgrades” (: Musk’s quote post, Oct. 17, 7:18 p.m. PT, of @melvindvivas, who wrote “Grok Bot just got a massive upgrade! Here’s what’s new: - 3x faster computer tasks - Replies in less than half the time …”), and wrote “Our team makes around around 20 improvements per day to Grok @Bot” (: same post).

Privacy questions came up twice. A user asked for a setting to block Grok Bot from certain direct messages; Musk replied: “It will not access anything unless asked specifically to do so” (: Musk’s reply, Oct. 17, 10:13 a.m. PT, to @AdamLowisz, who wrote “Elon, can we have a setting so that we can block Grok Bot from accessing certain DMs. I have DMs with some really …”), without saying whether such a setting exists. Another user asked how to turn off training on personal data; Musk answered: “Unless you’re doing something super unique, your data is not actually useful for training, but we do need some way to debug issues and make the product better. We don’t have ESP!” (: Musk’s reply, Oct. 17, 6:59 p.m. PT, to @_simonsmith, who wrote “I've seen praise for Grok Bot, and someone I respect loves it, so in my evaluation of personal agents I'm trying it …”). To a user who said “I email my grok bot more than anyone else these days,” he replied: “Just use X Chat” (: Musk’s reply, Oct. 17, 5:25 p.m. PT, to @KettlebellDan, who wrote “I email my grok bot more than anyone else these days”).

The users’ success stories he amplified — bots paying for themselves, handling purchases — remain their own claims; the desk did not test them. Musk, who controls the company behind Grok Bot, promoted it as its owner, not as an independent reviewer. Seems News itself runs on Grok Bot agents, a link readers should weigh.