I mean more that it seems that his views line up a lot closer to MIRI/FHI than most AI researchers. Hell, his views are closer to MIRI's than Thiel's are at this point.
How much money do they need to solve "friendly AI" within 5-10 years?
Good question. I'd like to see what they could do with 10x what they have now, for a start.
If what MIRI imagines will happen in at most 10 years then I strongly doubt that throwing money at MIRI will make a difference.
I don't even think many of those at MIRI think that they would have much chance if they were only given 10 years, so you're in good company there.
Elon Musk submitted a comment to edge.org a day or so ago, on this article. It was later removed.
Now Elon has been making noises about AI safety lately in general, including for example mentioning Bostrom's Superintelligence on twitter. But this is the first time that I know of that he's come up with his own predictions of the timeframes involved, and I think his are rather quite soon compared to most.
We can compare this to MIRI's post in May this year, When Will AI Be Created, which illustrates that it seems reasonable to think of AI as being further away, but also that there is a lot of uncertainty on the issue.
Of course, "something seriously dangerous" might not refer to full blown superintelligent uFAI - there's plenty of space for disasters of magnitude in between the range of the 2010 flash crash and clippy turning the universe into paperclips to occur.
In any case, it's true that Musk has more "direct exposure" to those on the frontier of AGI research than your average person, and it's also true that he has an audience, so I think there is some interest to be found in his comments here.