Doom Index / p(doom) / Elon Musk
Industry · rank 16 of 22
Elon Musk p(doom)
Elon Musk (CEO, Tesla & SpaceX; founder, xAI) has put the risk of AI causing human extinction or a comparably bad outcome at 20%. That is lower than the 38% median of the experts we track.
Latest stated p(doom)
20%
0%Median 38%100%
Stated Feb 28, 2025
Statement history
- Feb 28, 2025
20%
“The probability of a good outcome is like 80%”
Business Insider summarises this as 'only a 20% chance of annihilation'.
The Joe Rogan Experience (via Business Insider)Verified Oct 21, 2026 - Mar 25, 2024
10–20%
“I think there's some chance that it'll end humanity. I think that's, you know, like I said, I probably agree with Jeff Hinton that it's about, I don't know, 10% or 20% or something like that.”
Abundance360 SummitVerified Oct 21, 2026
Context
“p(doom)” is shorthand for the probability that advanced AI leads to human extinction or a similarly irreversible catastrophe. Speakers rarely share one definition or time horizon, so compare numbers with care.
The Doom Index uses the midpoint of each person's latest stated range (20% here) when computing the expert median.
See the full leaderboardOther experts' p(doom)
Roman Yampolskiy 99.999999%Eliezer Yudkowsky 99.5%Dan Hendrycks >80%Daniel Kokotajlo 70%Zvi Mowshowitz 70%Emad Mostaque 50%Holden Karnofsky 10–90%Jan Leike 10–90%Paul Christiano 46%Joep Meindertsma 40%Eli Lifland 35–40%Scott Alexander 33%Emmett Shear 5–50%Dario Amodei 25%Yoshua Bengio 20%Reid Hoffman 2 / 10Lina Khan 15%Vitalik Buterin 12%Geoffrey Hinton ~10%Nate Silver 5–10%Yann LeCun ≈0%
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