Elon Musk calls AI music videos 'awesome-core,' not slop, at X Takeover 2026

Elon Musk doesn’t think AI music deserves the word “slop.” Speaking by video link to X Takeover 2026 at Giga Texas in Austin on October 10, he said calling it slop-core “is like a misnomer, frankly. It’s awesome-core.”

And he went further than that. Some of the AI music videos he’s watched lately are, in his words, “maybe top 10, top 20 best music videos I’ve ever seen.”

A 37-second cut of that answer, posted by the fan account Tesla Hype, passed 360,000 views on X within 2 days. On October 12, the humour site The Poke rounded up 21 jokes about it.

What Elon Musk said about AI music videos at X Takeover 2026

Musk joined by video, on a big screen in a tent full of fans, for a live interview called “What Comes Next for Humanity,” streamed on X by the organiser, Tesla Owners Silicon Valley. Tesla Mag’s recap covers the rest of the day, Maye Musk and Nicki Minaj included.

About 34 minutes in, one of the hosts asked what AI had done recently that made him stop and rethink how fast it’s moving. His answer was music videos. He said “the music videos that AI is making are so good,” and that he posts “a bunch of these” on his X account.

He also said the AI didn’t do it alone. In the example he gave, Midjourney, Suno and “Claude 5.5” were all used, and “some of the art assets were curated by a person.” Then “the various AIs working together made an incredibly compelling music video.”

That’s the same trio he named 3 days earlier, when he said Grok Bot will hand tasks to Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney and Suno.

What got him was taste. He said it’s easy to picture AI writing software, because “the logic is consistent.” Understanding “beauty and harmony” is the harder job, and that’s where AI surprised him.

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You're like, wow, AI can do good taste. That's pretty wild.

Just before that, he made a bigger claim. He called slop-core a genre of music and said “I think it might be the fastest-growing genre of music.” He didn’t give a number for it.

What is slop-core, the AI music label Elon Musk wants renamed?

Slop is Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year, defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Slop-core is that word turned into a genre name for AI music, which is how Musk used it.

In music, the “in quantity” part is easy to prove. Fully AI-generated tracks passed 50% of Deezer’s daily uploads in June 2026, close to 90,000 tracks a day. That’s the nearest hard number to Musk’s fastest-growing claim, and it counts uploads, not listeners.

The label has stuck elsewhere too. Fans built SoullessMusic and SlopTracker to flag AI acts on Spotify, and UMG’s Lucian Grainge drew his line at “AI slop” in May.

Musk is arguing the best of it isn’t slop at all. He says the videos are on his X account, so that’s where to check his top-20 claim against your own taste. And if you’d rather make one yourself, start with my test of 5 AI music video generators.