Getting investment advice from an AI Warren Buffett or Elon Musk is a thing now

Career professionals seeking sound financial advice from Warren Buffett, career advice from Elon Musk, or entrepreneurial advice from John Doerr are attempting to get it through extended conversations with simulations of the business icons.

These online discussions can last for hours, leveraging books, podcasts, interviews, and speeches to deliver an experience that's supposed to feel like the real thing.

Are the AI-powered information exchanges helpful? Technology experts seem to think so, with the right guardrails.

“It’s not the 'real deal,' but that doesn't mean it lacks value,” said Shahrzad Rafati, founder and CEO at RHEI, a Vancouver-based AI content development company. “I call this 'Synthetic Mentorship.'"

Rafati noted you’re not talking to Elon Musk; you’re talking to a probabilistic model trained on the public artifact of Elon Musk. “The technology is essentially a highly sophisticated mirror; it reflects back the patterns, speech styles, and philosophies these figures have publicly shared over decades,” she said.

To date, the technology behind the simulated icons is impressive but limited. “It commoditizes wisdom, and it allows you to query a massive database of a person’s life work in a conversational interface,” Rafati said. “However, it lacks contextual intuition.”

For example, Rafati said a "Buffett Bot" can tell you what Warren Buffett said about value investing in 1985 or 2008, but it cannot tell you what he is feeling right now about a specific market shift that occurred this morning. “It’s a library, not a live consciousness,” she added.

How AI icon engagements work

Creating conversations with an AI celebrity isn’t difficult, technology experts say.

“You train a specific language model on all of Buffett's shareholder letters, interviews, books, and public speeches, and you can generate responses that sound remarkably like him,” said Jason Wild, founder at Wild Innovation, a New York City-based business leadership consultancy. “But I'd be skeptical about how effective this actually is for decision-making.”

That’s because the AI models are trained on historical data. “Time moves on, and markets change with geopolitical shifts,” Wild noted. "Advice from an expert based on how the world used to work, or even current assumptions, will lead to unintentionally producing the wrong advice delivered with a (dangerously) high level of confidence.”

According to Wild, Buffett's value-investing principles are timeless, but his specific decisions are the result of particular moments. “An AI version can give you the philosophy and mental model but not the judgment that comes from being 'in the arena' at that time,” Wild noted.

What matters most is how AI users build the LLM, and how natural and therefore trustworthy the delivery is. 

“One way to add that layer of trustworthiness is to have the discussion be with an AI hologram avatar; one with truly natural presence, and head-to-toe not just a talking head, which provides non-verbal body language cues that add to a sense of trust and engagement,” said Raffi Kryszek, head of AI innovation at Proto Hologram, a holographic display technology company.

That technology already exists as several high-profile individuals have put their AI hologram avatars in public. That list includes tech investor Tim Draper, Reid Hoffman, Antonio Neri of HPE, Michael Milken, and Sara Blakely.  “The other great aspect of this is to have people be able to communicate this way in literally any language,” Kryszek said.

As for engaging with Buffett, Kryszek said it would be difficult to keep a stock conversation up to date with up-to-the-minute news. “That said, there’s no barrier to having meaningful conversations with Buffett about his investing philosophy, or with Musk about the big picture with SpaceX,” he said. “However, you don't just link it up with any random app; you need to customize the LLM with guardrails and provide access to the person's real writing and past interviews.”

Engaging with deceased legends is on the table

Can these AI engagements be applied to deceased historical icons, and how far can the technology go?

Yes, technically, Wild said.

“It's not even that hard if there’s enough text,” he noted. “If you have a rich body of interviews, speeches, or writing, you can build a convincing conversational AI around almost anyone.”

The technology really isn't the issue; the motive is for AI users. “The interesting question is whether there's real value in getting advice from Jesus, Joan of Arc, or Leonardo da Vinci when the world they lived in no longer exists,” Wild said.

That's where the issue gets nuanced and tricky.

“These are probabilistic systems generating responses based on historical data,’ Wild said. “The output can only go as far as what we have, and our ability to believe that output is authentic becomes the real bottleneck.”

Lincoln never wrestled with AI regulation, and Plato never considered social media's effect on democracy. “Consequently, the question of 'does it work' isn't about the technology,” Wild added. “It's about whether advice shaped by a fundamentally different world still holds when you try to apply it in 2026.”

As Wild says, sometimes timeless principles carry forward beautifully, and sometimes they collapse on contact with modern reality.

“And the AI won't know the difference,” he added.