Elon Musk Wants To Make 'Star Trek' Real Without Everything That Makes 'Star Trek' Great

We're only halfway through January and 2026 has already proven quite a year. Between the kidnappings of civilians and the kidnapping of another country's presidents, you might have missed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk coming together this week to announce a partnership between the U.S. military and Musk's Grok AI (best known for producing incredibly illegal porn and CSA materials and being Musk's full time hype machine) to lend machine learning to America's wars. During this announcement, both Hegseth and Musk acted like this partnership would be the first step to creating a world close to that envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in his hit TV series "Star Trek." The pair even made this announcement in front of a podium with the sign that read "Arsenal Of Freedom." 

It's what Elon Musk has always envisioned for SpaceX: A world where huge starships are quickly manufactured in order to shuttle human beings around the galaxy. "We want to make "Star Trek" real," Musk said at the event on the SpaceX campus in South Texas on Tuesday. The announcement was that Grok will be embedded into our nation's military intelligence apparatus as part of an AI acceleration strategy. "Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department," Hegseth said at the announcement. Yikes. But it wasn't the only thing they talked about. Musk repeated familiar claims that SpaceX will be the key to a "Star Trek" style civilization. Hegseth even flashed a Vulcan salute. 

But if these guys actually knew anything about "Star Trek" they might have paused and realized how big of an irony they were engaging in. Anyone who thinks they can billionaire-bully their way to the supposedly idealized future of the "Star Trek" shows probably haven't seen any episodes or, if they have, don't really understand them. 

If you haven't seen season 1, episode 21 of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" — which is entitled "Arsenal Of Freedom" — I don't blame you. Those first two seasons of TNG are a slog and contain some really off-kilter, poorly designed, and sometimes racist episodes. But this episode is definitely worth revisiting. In it, the Enterprise is sent to the planet of Minos to look for a missing ship, the USS Drake. Minos gained fame by selling advanced weaponry to both sides of conflict, but now their planet is empty of intelligent lifeforms. What they find instead of a starship is a merchant advertising the sale of weapons dubbed "The Arsenal of Freedom." The merchant encourages our crew to head down to the surface, but scans show no lifeforms beyond plants and animals. Curious! 

Our away team beams down (made up of First Officer William Riker, our boy Commander Data, and the flower of the first season, Security Chief Tasha Yar — yeah it weirds me out to see Worf in command red too) to check out the monster of the week. They get stuck on the planet, causing Captain Picard and Doctor Beverly Crusher to head down as well. Not-yet-Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge is acting captain of the Enterprise just in time for an attack by a cloaked ship. The attacks increase in intensity and become so violent La Forge orders the saucer to separate from the battle bridge as they face their mysterious foe (always an exciting moment for fans.)

After many hi-jinx on a poorly designed soundstage, it is revealed to Captain Picard that the merchant who lured the away teams down to the planet in the first place is a hologram demonstrating an intelligent weapon that adapts to its enemies. The weapons were so good, in fact, they destroyed their creators. It turns out, this entire attack (likely the fate of the USS Drake) is all a demonstration set to automatically run since no one was left to run it. To turn off the disastrous display, Picard agrees to "buy" the technology. What a sales pitch!

Do I think anyone from Elon Musk's or Pete Hegseth's teams actually watched the episode "Arsenal Of Freedom" (which is a play on President Franklin Roosevelt's speech calling the United States "The Arsenal of Democracy") before using the term on their podium? Nope. I think someone on their staff, probably a 20-something with no knowledge of classic Trek, asked Grok AI "what's an episode of "Star Trek" that involves AI and war" and went with this slogan, not realizing the whole plot of the episode is an AI weapon that proves a threat to the universe at large long after it destroyed its creators, and the sale of that weapon being the downfall of many. The real question is, have either Musk or Hegseth ever actually seen any episode of "Star Trek"? 

Again, I think the answer is no. Oh sure, Musk mentioned Starfleet academy a few times but it's very clear that's where their media literacy about one of the most enduring intellectual properties in science fiction ends. In "Star Trek," officers do go to an academy, but they learn about things like engineering and inter-species relations and how to deal with philosophical issues in real life. 

And sure, there are some episodes with battles (there are even full fledged wars in the show) and folks learn battle tactics while attending the Academy, but every trekie knows that the most impactful episodes are quiet, philosophical investigations of the human condition. Think "The Drumhead" where a red scare-like fear grips the Enterprise, or "The Measure Of A Man" where Commander Data has to prove his conscious individuality to a harsh bureaucracy that would benefit from his dehumanization. 

These characters hold poetry readings and jazz concerts to unwind. They're nerdy, over-educated peaceniks who are accepting, not just other races and religions, but entirely different species. Not only that, they celebrate and embrace the differences between cultures. These are things Musk, with his far-right political leanings, is not a huge fan of. Pete Hegesth is even less Trek-coded. Could you imagine Starfleet with a Secretary of War? Even the phasers are meant to be used as defensive weapons. Folks like Musk and Hegesth have more in common with the perennially overly ambitious, scheming and, occasionally, evil members of Star Fleet Command than any one else. Just because Earth is post-scarcity in the show, doesn't mean they are post-ego. 

Musk talks a big game about wanting to make popular science fiction a reality. He thinks he, the richest man in human history, will be the one to help usher in a post-scarcity world despite the fact that, my brother in Christ, you are the scarcity. 

No one sits on a dragon's horde like Musk without siphoning the hard work of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people. I'd rather he focus on bringing about a world where people don't burn to death in cars due to poorly designed door handles or worry about shrapnel from exploding rockets littering across an island nation or endangering wildlife or, you know, pay for that program to end world hunger with just $6 billion of his dollars like he offered and never ponied up. Maybe he could make sure his super smart AI isn't generating illegal sexual images, I don't know. 

Being able to pay a subscription so you can make naked AI images of real people is actually addressed in an episode of "Deep Space Nine" as a very scummy and horrifying thing to do. If even a Ferengi like Quark knows it's bad, then why doesn't Musk? If Musk is really interested in improving the human condition so we can get to a "Star Trek"-like world, where every human being has their needs met and are therefore able to reach their full potential, than he could start now. 

But he doesn't care. Maybe he saw one of the violent, action packed Chris Pine movies and decided to base the future off of that and called it "Star Trek". One thing is for sure: If Elon Musk is the architect of our sci-fi future, engineering is going to be very, very busy.