Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has taken a shot at richest man in the world and abysmal gamer Elon Musk following the billionaire’s comments that the upcoming GTA 6 could be made far quicker with the use of AI.
With the (hopefully final) GTA 6 release date finally approaching, the upcoming open world will set a new technical benchmark for games this generation. Despite this, Musk, who announced his own AI games studio xAI to “make games great again” agreed with AI CEO Guillermo Rauch that users would be able to “’generate your own GTA 6 in a few minutes’ before GTA 6”.
In a discussion at a panel for the Seamafor World Economy 2026 event, Zelnick claimed that AI will not replace the majority of game developers. Earlier this year, the CEO claimed that the very idea of AI creating a AAA-quality video game “is laughable”, adding that the technology will never “supplant” real artists.
Instead, Zelnick explained that AI should instead take the jobs of the ultra-rich like Elon Musk and even himself before gunning for the average worker. “If AI were going to get rid of employment, the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, knows a little something about AI, last time I checked,” Zelnick said. “He has unlimited financial resources and he has unlimited human resources and he has, apparently, an unlimited amount of ideas, he also knows his way around AI. The man works 20 hours a day, if AI were going to take anyone’s job wouldn’t it take his job, the richest guy on Earth. Wouldn’t that be like job number one for AI to take. Why is he so busy?”
As for the future of Take-Two in a post-generative AI world, the CEO explained that the technology should be “taking mundane jobs away from devs”. However, as for the mantra of working at the company, Zelnick explained that workers should “be the most creative, be the most innovative, [and] be the most efficient”. AI simply can’t be the most innovative when its built around regurgitating past ideas.
The CEO explained that the true use cases of AI are simply extensions of tools we already have access to. Generating a completely new asset will always look terrible, but maybe it can be used to reformat an existing asset made by a talented artist for a new model.
“When I started in the video game business which was, believe it or not, 1993, if you wanted to create a lawn, an artist had to create individual blades of grass otherwise it would look like concrete,” the CEO said. “Today, pre-AI, if one of my artists, and I have many thousands of them, want to create a lawn, they press the lawn button, and [a form of] AI does that on steroids.
“So what does that mean?” he asked. “That does not mean that all of my artists are out of work. No, they won’t be out of work, they’ll be doing higher quality work, they don’t care about lawns anymore, they care about this incredible creature.” If AI means there’s a new method for creatures, Zelnick explains that “we need to make creatures that are forward-looking to make hits, and so our creators have to do that”.
As for Elon Musk, Zelnick suggests that maybe the Tesla and SpaceX CEO “is indeed in a simulation”. The Take-Two boss explained: “It’s possible. I mean, in fairness, if you were going to choose one person who was a simulation, he would be my number one choice”.
Elon Musk’s xAI games studio is said to be releasing its first AI-made video game “before the end” of 2026. However, considering the billionaire’s prior claim that he would put humans on Mars by 2024, it seems to be a safe bet that xAI will not release its first game this year. Even if it does, that game will certainly be no GTA 6.
