What Did Elon Musk Say About 3I/ATLAS? Every Quote and the Science Behind It

When the world's richest person weighs in on an interstellar comet, people pay attention. Elon Musk's comments about 3I/ATLAS have generated millions of views, sparked a public debate with Harvard's Avi Loeb, and fueled a wave of misinformation that scientists are still correcting months later.

Here is a complete, fact-checked account of everything Musk has said about 3I/ATLAS — what he got right, what he got wrong, and what science actually tells us.

The Joe Rogan Podcast: October 31, 2025

The bulk of Musk's commentary on 3I/ATLAS came from a single appearance: Episode #2404 of The Joe Rogan Experience, released on October 31, 2025 — two days after 3I/ATLAS reached perihelion.

When Rogan asked if Musk was "paying attention" to the interstellar comet, Musk dismissed the alien spacecraft speculation directly:

"One thing I can say is like, look, if I was aware of any evidence of aliens, Joe, you have my word. I will come on your show and I will reveal it on the show."

But he didn't completely shut the door:

"It could be aliens, I don't know."

On what appeared to be a personal scale discussed during the podcast, Musk reportedly placed 3I/ATLAS at a "two" out of ten — where zero is confirmed natural phenomena and ten is confirmed extraterrestrial origin. He called it an object "meriting attention" but far from anything proven to be artificial.

The science says: Musk's assessment was broadly correct. Every observation of 3I/ATLAS to date — its trajectory, composition, outgassing behavior, and spectral signatures — is consistent with a natural cometary body. Four separate SETI radio searches found zero technosignatures.

The Nickel Debate: Musk vs. Loeb

The most substantive scientific exchange came when Rogan raised 3I/ATLAS's unusual nickel-rich composition — a finding that Avi Loeb had flagged as potentially anomalous. Pre-perihelion observations by the Keck Observatory showed a nickel-to-iron (Ni/Fe) ratio of 3.2, dramatically higher than the solar system average of roughly 1.0.

Musk offered a straightforward explanation:

"No, there are definitely comets and asteroids which are primarily made of nickel. So the places where you mine nickel on Earth are actually where there was an asteroid or comet that hit Earth that was nickel-rich."

He added with characteristic humor:

"It would be a very heavy spaceship if you made it all out of nickel. Yeah, that's a heavy spaceship."

The science says: Musk was partially right but oversimplified. Nickel-iron meteorites are indeed common — they come from the cores of differentiated asteroids. However, the key anomaly wasn't that 3I/ATLAS contained nickel, but that it had an unusually high Ni/Fe ratio. In solar system comets and meteorites, nickel almost always appears alongside iron at roughly equal ratios. 3I/ATLAS's 3.2:1 ratio was genuinely unusual. Interestingly, as the comet's outer layers were processed by solar heating, the Ni/Fe ratio dropped to approximately 1.1 by late January 2026 — suggesting the anomalous surface ratio may have been a transient feature of pristine interstellar material, with the deeper interior more closely matching solar system norms.

Avi Loeb Fires Back

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb did not let Musk's comments pass unchallenged. In a series of Medium essays and media appearances, Loeb pushed back on several points:

On Musk's nickel explanation, Loeb argued that Musk was "missing" a crucial detail: while nickel-iron meteorites are common, they are always iron-rich alongside nickel. The anomaly in 3I/ATLAS was the high Ni/Fe ratio — nickel without proportional iron — not the mere presence of nickel. Loeb wrote that Musk's explanation "ignores" the actual compositional data.

On the broader alien question, Loeb published an essay titled "Elon Musk is Wrong About Aliens", arguing against Musk's general stance that humanity is probably alone in the universe:

"Do not be so presumptuous, as space entrepreneurs that are better than you probably lived in the Milky Way for billions of years before you were born."

In a more conciliatory piece titled "Elon Musk's Uncertainty About Aliens Can Be Resolved by the Scientific Method", Loeb argued that Musk's "it could be aliens, I don't know" stance should motivate more investigation rather than dismissal.

The science says: The scientific community largely sides with Musk on the specific question of 3I/ATLAS's nature — the object behaves as a natural comet in every measurable way. However, Loeb's point about the Ni/Fe ratio being genuinely anomalous (not just "nickel exists") is valid. The ratio has since normalized as deeper layers were exposed, which most researchers interpret as confirming a natural process rather than evidence of artificial construction.

The "Alienz" Tweet: November 19, 2025

On November 19, 2025, NASA held a press briefing to release new images of 3I/ATLAS captured by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA official Amit Kshatriya stated plainly: "This object is a comet."

Musk's response on X was a single word: "Alienz" (with an alien emoji).

The post immediately went viral, sparking debate in the replies. Critics pointed out that while NASA was actively trying to counter conspiracy theories, Musk was stoking them — even if as a joke. Others noted the irony of NASA's blurry images, with one commenter asking: "If we can see grains of sand on Mars, how is the clearest photo for 3I/ATLAS what we've seen?"

The science says: The blurry images are easily explained. 3I/ATLAS was approximately 1.8 AU (269 million km) from Earth at its closest — roughly 700 times farther than Mars at its closest approach. Even the Hubble Space Telescope could not resolve the nucleus into more than a few pixels. HiRISE, designed for Mars surface imaging at orbital altitude (300 km), was observing an object millions of times more distant. The resolution limitation is physics, not a cover-up.

The Hypothetical Impact: "Obliterate a Continent"

During the Joe Rogan podcast, Musk discussed what would happen if 3I/ATLAS struck Earth — a purely hypothetical scenario, since the comet's trajectory passes nowhere near our planet:

"It would like obliterate a continent type of thing. Maybe worse. Probably kill most of human life. If not all of us."

He and Rogan also drew parallels to the 1908 Tunguska Event in Siberia, where an airburst flattened approximately 2,000 square kilometers of forest, speculating about whether interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS could cause similar events.

The science says: Musk's impact assessment was in the right ballpark, though slightly dramatized. 3I/ATLAS's nucleus has been measured at approximately 1.3 km in diameter (Hui et al., 2026) with a mass estimated in the billions of tons. At its interstellar velocity of 58 km/s — roughly four times faster than typical solar system asteroids — the kinetic energy of impact would be enormous. A 1.3 km body at that speed would release energy on the order of hundreds of thousands of megatons of TNT — far exceeding the Chicxulub impactor that killed the dinosaurs (which was larger but moving slower). Continental devastation would be a minimum consequence.

However, the Tunguska comparison is inaccurate. The Tunguska impactor was estimated at only 50-60 meters across — roughly 1/25th the size of 3I/ATLAS's nucleus. The scale of destruction would not be comparable.

And to be absolutely clear: 3I/ATLAS poses zero threat to Earth. Its closest approach was 1.80 AU (269 million km) on December 19, 2025, and it is now heading out of the solar system permanently.

Could SpaceX Send a Mission to 3I/ATLAS?

Musk himself has not proposed or discussed sending a SpaceX mission to 3I/ATLAS. However, the question has been studied by scientists, and SpaceX hardware features prominently in the answers.

The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) completed a mission study demonstrating that a future interstellar comet similar to 3I/ATLAS could be intercepted by a spacecraft launched on relatively short notice. The study found that a low-energy rendezvous trajectory would be feasible, requiring less velocity change than many routine solar system missions.

Academic researchers have noted that missions to objects like 3I/ATLAS "would be achievable for a SpaceX Starship refueled in low Earth orbit, with a spacecraft payload with nuclear thermal propulsion." This is theoretical — no such mission has been funded or planned.

For 3I/ATLAS specifically, the window for intercept has effectively closed. The comet crossed Jupiter's orbit in March 2026 and is accelerating outward at 58 km/s. Even Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, could not catch it now.

The best hope for a spacecraft encounter with an interstellar object lies with ESA's Comet Interceptor mission, currently scheduled for launch in 2029. Comet Interceptor will park at the L2 Lagrange point and wait for a suitable long-period or interstellar comet to target — essentially keeping a spacecraft "on standby" for the next visitor from another star system.

The Misinformation Problem

Musk's high-profile comments — particularly his "it could be aliens" remark and the "Alienz" tweet — had an unintended consequence: they provided ammunition for a wave of fabricated content that attributed far more dramatic statements to him.

Fake headlines that have circulated include:

• "Elon Musk: 'It's Confirmed, The 3I ATLAS is an Alien Space Craft!'" — Fabricated. Musk said the opposite.
• "FINAL WARNING!! 3I/ATLAS is an alien ship" attributed to Musk — Fabricated. Musk never made such a statement.
• Claims that Musk "warned that Earth might not be ready for a response from the object" — Fabricated. Musk discussed a hypothetical impact scenario, not alien communication.

Deepfake videos also targeted physicists Michio Kaku and Brian Cox, making them appear to confirm that 3I/ATLAS was an alien spacecraft. Both publicly denounced the videos.

The pattern is clear: Musk's genuine quotes — which were nuanced and mostly scientifically grounded — were stripped of context, exaggerated, or replaced entirely with fabricated statements to drive clicks and views.

What Science Actually Tells Us

Setting aside the media circus, here is what the scientific consensus on 3I/ATLAS actually looks like as of February 2026:

It is a natural comet. Every observation — optical, infrared, radio, and ultraviolet — is consistent with a body made of ice and rock, outgassing volatiles as it was heated by the Sun. The chemical inventory (water, CO₂, CO, methane, methanol, HCN) matches what models predict for a comet formed in a cold protoplanetary disk around another star.

It is genuinely extraordinary. 3I/ATLAS is the largest, fastest, and most scientifically productive interstellar object ever detected. Its 1.3 km nucleus is roughly 40 times more massive than 2I/Borisov. Its volatile inventory — including the first methane detection in an interstellar object (JWST) and the first radio detection of hydroxyl (MeerKAT) — provides an unprecedented chemical snapshot of material from another planetary system.

The SETI results are definitive. Four radio telescopes (Allen Telescope Array, Parkes/Murriyang, MeerKAT, and the Green Bank Telescope) searched for technosignatures. The most sensitive observation — Green Bank at 0.1 watts EIRP — could have detected a signal weaker than a cell phone. Nothing was found.

The alien hypothesis has no supporting evidence. Every "anomalous" characteristic initially cited — the Ni/Fe ratio, non-gravitational acceleration, unusual brightness — has been explained by standard cometary physics. The Ni/Fe ratio normalized as deeper layers were exposed. The non-gravitational acceleration matches outgassing models. The brightness was simply a comet outperforming conservative predictions, as comets frequently do.

Musk, to his credit, landed on roughly the right answer: it's almost certainly a natural object, the science is interesting, and if anything changes, we should pay attention. The details he got wrong — particularly the oversimplified nickel explanation — are understandable for a non-specialist speaking off the cuff on a podcast.

The real lesson from the Musk-3I/ATLAS saga may be about the power of celebrity commentary on science: a few casual remarks generated more public attention than thousands of hours of careful scientific work. Whether that attention helps or hinders public understanding of interstellar visitors remains an open question.

Track 3I/ATLAS in real time on our Orbit page, read the latest discoveries on the Timeline, and learn how to observe the comet on the Observing page.