To me it was just an interesting bit of speculation popularised by an academic and sci-fi author (Vernor Vinge) - which is the very thing such people should be doing imo.
And the history of it goes back to Ulam and Von Neumann, and maybe Turing. Hardly grifters.
Musk can't have it both ways, "AI is summoning the demon, and also I own a humanoid robot factory, AI for autonomous cars, and am training my own LLM now that a company I part funded then stopped supporting made a famous one before I did".
But there's still a lot of alignment research going on, to make sure we can even tell if the AI we have now has the equivalent of an evil bit (which they definitely observably and reproducible demonstrate having) that is set to "evil".