Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI(reuters.com) |
Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI(reuters.com) |
That bleeding money went to nvidia(US) and the US electric grid, so its FINE from a US point of view (I don't think a lot went to TSMC(taiwan)).
Unless openai is transfering significant amount of money outside the US (directly or via some montage).
Once again, any bad news for OpenAI is censored from reaching the front page of HN.
Great come-back, but at this point, I'd take the money. The field now has nation-state actors, it will almost impossible to sustain a revenue flow for this: price is going down.
(not an investor)
BTW the board valuation isn't against sunk cost, its against hyped future value. This may be half the hype but its a shitload more than spend.
The time for such a bid like this was when Sam was was ousted out of OpenAI and in complete state of chaos.
Investors already put their money in at around $157B+ and are not willing to take a price cut down to less than $100BN.
Unless that is the amount that Sam wants to walk away with, but its isn't even going to be no where near close to enough.
This is for a controlling stake, not outright ownership, isn't it?
While I think the purchase of Twitter was ultimately in his favor, he definitely had buyers remorse back then.
You can't just say things like this without justification. The last raise was in October, at $157B. Did OpenAI, the hottest startup in history, give away equity at a discount?
Now, since that time, has the value gone up or down? We now know they have serious technological competition and are losing lots of money.
I think the product is great, but they aren't worth limitless amounts of money.
Anyone with enough hardware can run the model and run a competing service for less.
Many companies currently using OpenAI are considering alternative cheaper and better options.
The OpenAI moat has been filled in.
Now with DeepSeek-R1, any company can host very similar service, so the technological edge has been lost.
Google itself offers similar experience with Google Flash 2.0 Thinking.
We haven't seen revolution with o3 (most of us, programmers, here are still with claude-sonnet-3.5 than the supposedly groundbreaking gpt-o3).
OpenAI isn't even profitable yet, and they might never become profitable.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/30/openai-said-to-be-in-talks...
UNIX was revolutionary. Companies poured billions into proprietary UNIX versions: IBM's AIX, Sun's Solaris, HP-UX, SGI IRIX...
Then in 1991, Linus Torvalds released Linux for free.
What was the point of UNIX anymore then ?
Unless OpenAI locks in customers with exclusive data, it risks becoming just another proprietary relic beaten by open alternatives.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...
By sending the message that he wants to buy at 97B, he could imply that 260B is clearly exaggerated and create fear for these investors.
Hey Sam, I'll buy it for tree-fiddy, good luck getting anyone to invest at a bigger valuation now!
Seeing Elon Musk, it could be a plausible move to screw financing for OpenAI.
Without financing OpenAI may not have enough runway to survive. That would create a bigger market for x.AI, and also as a bonus act as a personal revenge on OpenAI.
https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
Musk is clearly referring on their lack of funds at the end of this message.
Edit: I love the edit, it's very straightforward now!
Suppose the technology advances no further than it is today, and I'll even grant up to an order of magnitude improvement. I'm not interested in speculating over so-called AGI though. What would you point to as an overwhelmingly positive justification of its existence? I won't argue against it. I'm just curious.
The financing arm of a aristocratic line running a personality cult and who have a nepo baby on the cards contemplating a little bit of jyhad as his ticket out?
....I Do sometimes wonder who comes up with these names.
The same kind of people that idolize the character Patrick Bateman from American Psycho instead of laughing at how ridiculous and pathetic Bateman is.
OTOH, everything Trump threatens is an invitation to bribery.
And when it starts to go south for him, Elon's going under the bus, not to re-engineer them.
Trump's dream is to be the richest man in the world. Someone is in the way as soon as his hatchet man job is done. Nothing has any meaning to Trump but money.
It does all have a bit of Wile E Coyote feel to it. Keep gesticulating wildy to propel forwards before inevitably plunging in the abyss below.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banks-sell-5-5-billion-of-x-loan...
Are there other major investors involved here or just Musk?
> The bid is being backed by Musk’s own artificial intelligence company xAI, which could merge with OpenAI following a deal. He also has several investors backing him, including Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, a venture firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Ari Emanuel, CEO of Hollywood company Endeavor, is also backing the offer through his investment fund.
> A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Vy Capital, amongst others. Strategic investors NVIDIA and AMD also participated and continue to support xAI in rapidly scaling our infrastructure.
It happens in life, and it happens on the internet. Today, your digital life, files, photos, chats, etc, are on a server run by a company with a cute logo and a manifesto about privacy. Tomorrow, that company gets bought by a billionaire with lizard-like features, changes its terms and conditions, and your stuff ends up on a marketplace for five cents a bundle.
You make excellent criticisms and I've had similar thoughts. But I never really understood what people want to do other than confiscate companies once they become successful. Not saying that is what you want to do - you specifically say not that.
You mention "let’s engineer a network of trust and monitoring and a culture of transparency". I'm not sure what that means.
That's a nice thought but the problem, as we've now shown, is that any organization of humans will by definition become corrupted, the state will grow unless constrained, and any system is imperfect and can be gamed.
What is the place of the state, traditionally empowered through a monopoly on violence, in a multinational world? Right now, it's just a tool to be abused by the wealthy, and by extension to confound and entrap the masses. Can you believe they still teach nationalism? Populism should have been excised from education after the 20th century's tragedies, but instead it seems to have redoubled.
In future perhaps we'll have a dictatorship of AI to keep the humans in check, but the clear danger is that such a system would present too much value not to be usurped and abused.
Democracy in the utopian theoretical sense was supposed to be based upon popular education and representation. We could work towards improving the former with AI and more effective (not child minding oriented) personalized education programs, and the latter with more frequent referendums. Right now we have the opposite: laziness, lack of education, active misinformation, and near zero viable means for meaningful representation even in self-labelled democractic societies. It is no wonder so many people self-medicate.
I understand why he’s relevant to this website, I just can’t wait until we don’t have to hear from him anymore.
People with that wealth can do so much good and choose to do so much bad it makes me so sad and angry. Best I can do is care for my friends and family and my community.
So, if you start a company that becomes huge and your slice is worth $100 billion, or even $10 trillion, you can still own all of that via the personal corporation. And you can invest or spend all of it [almost] however you want.
The difference is that the personal corporation has oversight; I only specify there will be a "board" I don't have anything concrete beyond that.
But the idea is in extreme circumstances, the board can over-rule your money-related decisions. The intent is they will only step in if you are going nuts, but the devil is in the details of how exactly to do that. It might be impossible, but I'd rather see us at least try rather have brain-damaged trillionaires causing unchecked mayhem.
When I make this argument, people assume I want to tax or seize the billionaire's wealth, but no, I'm saying they can keep every penny. Although to be fair, if you did cleave apart people's finances like this, taxing the "personal corporation" higher than the individual portion would be tempting.
Well yeah :)
Any ideas on how the board is chosen? Does the majority(only) owner / CEO of the p-corp do it?
Now you could say how do we "make sure" the board acts when the time comes? Stands up to the owner? Maybe we don't. We put the mechanism in place, and if the board fails to stop the owner, then it didn't work in that specific case. And the world will know that. But as long as it works "most" of the time maybe that's enough.
Also I forgot, apart from a board a big thing might be reporting. Your p-corp activities would have much more stringent reporting requirements compared to a private individual. You can do anything you want with your $300M in private funds, including get it as small bills and roll around in it, but the p-corp funds need to be much more closely monitored. That alone, even without a board, would be big.
He failed at getting Tesla profitable sooner. So many job losses resulted in his erratic behavior.
He fails by not doing as well as someone else in his position.
To anyone who can see it (maybe it takes some relevant life experience), it's patently obvious he's been spiraling down a dark hole of drugs, depression, ego, burn out, and addiction.
He's in a very dark place and lashing out, hurting himself and others, like so many people in dark places do.
The man desperately needs help, as much as someone on the street doing fentanyl does. But being rich can actually make it harder to get clean. Wealth can insulate a person from consequences, which can make it harder to hit rock bottom which is often the wake up call people need to shock themselves out of their problem.
Elon Musk isn't the devil, he's actually good and useful person deep down, but right now he's fighting demons and they're winning.
I wonder if Shitter is a big factor in this spiral. Jaron Lanier pointed this out in Nov 2022 [1].
Unfortunately, if so, we have a worst-case scenario of "getting high on your own supply", and nobody can cut him off (or stage an "intervention").
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
But he's also addicted to drugs, work, gaming and who knows what else.
He will either shake his demons or die early after having destroyed his life and probably many other people's lives. I wish him well for everyone's sake.
Obviously, he has had some huge successes too. Tesla has a huge valuation based on the assumption that it was going to win everything, but growth has stalled -- the 18 wheelers are nowhere to be found, the cybertruck is an article of derision to everyone but fanboys. The sedans growth has stalled, in large part due to Musk going out of his way to alienate his core group of buyers -- liberals who think buying a tesla is green. Space-X is doing great things. The jury is out if starlink and thousands of LEO satellites will be a win or a loss.
His final big win is his support of a particular minority group: Nazi's and the Nazi-adjacent. They are platformed on Twitter, and he is doing his best to normalize giving Nazi salutes (at the presidential inauguration no less).
Musk is a ruthless businessman, but make no mistake - when it comes to engineering, he is an empty suit. https://archive.li/bePMk
I'd call that a fail.
Also, he was supposed to "save" Twitter and make it into a bigger social network and "everything app" (like WeChat). He instead decimated its revenue and so poisoned the brand that it'll never become an "everything app" other than among the same people buying $Trump coins.
no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
> Swindler
In another tweet chain: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889063777792069911
> Scam Altman
(Not that I would feel bad. Altman can crash and burn and the world would be better off.)
...which is probably accurate. I remember reading a r/AskHistorians question on why Robespierre was unable to maintain control of the Committee for Public Safety, and the answer was basically that in revolutionary France, everybody who stuck their neck out got it cut off. Within 10 years of the revolution's start, basically all of its leaders were dead. In times of crises, people with big egos volunteer to fix it, but the crises cannot be fixed, and then those egos become the scapegoats who are executed to salve the public's cries for blood.
xAI is not making any money - it's a money furnace, so what does it mean the bid is backed by xAI ? The leverage and 'creativity' in the US is off the charts. Dotcom bubble starts to look reasonable.
And the key point in this news that punctuates the ridiculous farce that is the nature of this offer.
This is normal at this point. Netflix also wasnt making any money when it was new, same with Uber and more. You can't run in the race to the bottom if you're climbing to the top.
While other factors may be involved, that debt is shopped around assuming there are bankable assets in that DC and GPUs which are quite valuable even if the either company goes sideways.
Given what happened to the internet afterwards, dotcom bubble was always reasonable. There were a lot of idiotic companies that made no sense, but the overall idea that internet is going to generate tons of value and money was completely true.
The launch of ChatGPT was earth shaking, but what have they done since that impacts or excites the average consumer? Does their revenue even come from the average consumer, or primarily from API users that will lift and shift to a viable competitor?
I don't know, but I'm very curious to see how they can hold their lead and be attractive in the longer term.
0. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...
From the creator of Grok, this is such an insane thing to say
Grift and lie to everyone's faces because you know that it doesn't matter what the fuck you say, as long as your political stance aligns with the right people bootlickers will lick up anything you say for a chance at being noticed.
Presumably, Musk is trying to throw a wrench into these negotiations, by putting a valuation on the low end on the table, while Altman's "counteroffer" to buy Twitter for 9.74B sort of claims that this is too low by a factor of 5 to 10-ish.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-21/who-ow...
Don't let him get it. Profoundly dangerous.
Watch as he attempts to use the levers of the now illegitimate US government to force the outcome.
Meanwhile, OpenAI was cofounded by him.
Is there some reason OpenAI, which has maneuvered for regulatory capture of the AI industry in the past, is less dangerous than whatever you perceive?
Of course this will lead to conflict between Altman and Musk as they rush to entrench themselves within the current administration. This buyout offer could be an effective tactic to delay the pending funding from Softbank, and in turn the kick off of stargate, while DOGE gets up to speed. Even a short delay could be impactful in the early days of an aggressive and fickle administration.
You can present an argument about why it's a "bad analysis" but your offhand "analysis" is not constructive or well-informed here.
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/380117/openai-microsoft-s...
It's pretty colorful language, but my mind immediately jumps to "financial terrorist". He's using his enormous amount of wealth and influence as a weapon to bludgeon anyone and anything in his way.
I think what this does is set a floor valuation with a fully backed bid that the non-profit would get IN CASH for essentially buying the for profit.
This really messes up OpenAI's plans because it means someone else would have to bid more and be willing to part with the cash in order for OpenAI to spin off.
Actually a brilliant move that gums up OpenAI's plans.
And a valuation in a funding round is not the same as a cash offer for the full amount. Otherwise every startup would be liquid.
The issue at hand is that OpenAI (the private, currently "capped profit" entity, henceforth in this post referred to as OpenAI-P) is trying to get spun out of control of the OpenAI non-profit (henceforth referred to as OpenAI-NP).
In order to do this, OpenAI-P must compensate OpenAI-NP for its ownership of OpenAI-P. Currently they are trying to value this at $40B. This is a swindling for numerous reasons. Firstly, OpenAI-NP has complete control over OpenAI-P. They OpenAI-NP board can do whatever it wants with OpenAI-P. OpenAI-P has some financial obligations to those who have purchased its PPU (its equity instrument) but ultimately OpenAI-NP controls OpenAI-P and could do whatever it wants with it (eg shut it down, fire Sam Altman on a whim, etc). Further, the cashflows that OpenAI-NP still has ownership of are, at least under the claims of people like Sam A, clearly worth dramatically more than the $40B valuation would imply.
In addition, the OpenAI-NP mission is "Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity". The control of the leading AI Lab is the only way that they can possibly live up to their mission. To abdicate control of OpenAI-P is to abdicate their mission. If the OpenAI-NP board follows their mission as they are obligated to, they cannot possibly be willing to abdicate this control and they must surely value it far beyond $40B.
EDIT TO ADD TL;DR - Musk is trying to force OpenAI to value OpenAI-NP's stake in OpenAI-P at a reasonable level which is far greater than the current $40B which will help Musk by potentially derailing OpenAI-P's goal to be spun off.
https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
Discussion:
> One of the thorniest questions in the conversion has been how the nonprofit will be valued. Musk’s bid sets a high bar and may mean that he, or whoever runs the nonprofit, would end up with a large and possibly controlling stake in the new OpenAI.
So this is a play to mess with the restructuring?
Why aren't the news stories exploring this angle? It's very annoying that this comes below the regurgitated press releases and asinine Twitter quotes. Reuters didn't even mention it. The Guardian just barely touches on it.
Like Trump getting money from DB over and over.
What does it mean to buy a nonprofit? Who owns it now? Does anyone?
Other examples include Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, which receives the payments from Google for default search engine placement and hires Firefox engineers, and the Smithsonian museum gift shop. It’s a very common corporate structure for nonprofits that run some kind of business because it derisks accounting and management.
Musk is offering to buy the forprofit from the nonprofit, which would mean a $97.4 billion endowment for the latter to carry out their mission. It’s not necessarily a bad deal because it converts an optimistic VC valuation into hard assets, unless the rumored new round at a $300 billion valuation with Softbank is true.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...
But that's not what the article says. It specifically says he's offering "to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI", not the for-profit that it owns. That's why I'm confused.
Either they know more about this stuff than me and it's their job to predict that gap and explain this key detail... Or they don't know more than me so it's their job to be curious about it!
The quotes and stuff just strike me as so lazy. Why are you telling me that a thing happened and then not even taking 3 sentences to scratch the surface of what that thing actually means?
I guess they have to pump stories like this out in just a few minutes...
Elon Musk is continually pushing for singular control of everything (not least of which is the US federal government). It makes me immensely uncomfortable.
I have no idea how he got away with it, but Musk claimed that when he said "pedo" he didn't mean to suggest the diver was a pedophile. It was just a South African general insult without any connotation of pedophilia, he claimed. Since then, whenever I can, I describe Musk as a well-known pedo. Sue me.
Without a moat, it's hard to argue OpenAI's value is that high.
BlackBerry, Nokia, Yahoo, and MySpace were popular at one point but couldn't keep up.
https://beta.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2024/10/2...
The world is littered with old once-great brands.
Is OpenAI really one of the five most valuable brands in the world?
We in the tech bubble know all the competitors and all the other products related to AI, but I guarantee that 98% of the rest of the world just knows chatGPT and some of them use it, even people who struggle to turn the Bluetooth on/off.
It's really hard to replicate this, I'm pretty sure this lady will never have the Claude or DeepSeek app installed on her phone, but she will be using chatGPT in the meantime.
OpenAI are kind of fundamentally unsustainable as a business.
> OpenAI has a "text embeddings" API that is used primarily for tasks where you want to identify anomalies or relationships in text, or classify stuff in text"
Sure, Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, but with how things are moving - It wouldn't surprise me that he's about the fall down the ranks. Let's see how much power he has once the "richest man in the world" aura fades away.
I suspect he has so many huge loans leveraged on that tesla stock that if Tesla went to zero, he'd be at bankruptcy court...
Tesla is a meme coin at this point. However there are these pesky shareholders to deal with.
> How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though?
- Dec 15 2022: Sells 22m shares for $3.6bn
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale/index.html
- Nov 4-8 2022: Sells 19.5m shares for $4bn
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-climate-and-environment-9ab47198753931c7bea91f6e678f1d17
- Feb 2022: Elon has $11bn tax bill from a $23bn taxable income. Article discusses 2 sells
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html
- This article says notes $1.52 billion between 2014-2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-over-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year.html
I believe we can agree that this sum of money falls into the category of "never will be poor." Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money. Remember, we're talking about a sum of money where you could easily line up $100 bills all the way across California, from top to bottom[0].
[0] A bill is 155.956mm x 66.294mm (0.155956m x 0.066294m) and CA's dimensions are 400km x 1220km. So 1220000 / 0.066294 = 18.403e6. You need ~$18.4m to do this with singles, $368.01 with $20's, and $1.84bn with $100's. So $30bn is 16 rows (2.5 meters wide) and $391bn (current Forbes value) is 212.5 rows, or 33 meters wide. A bill is 0.11mm thick if you want to calculate height. Maybe someone can come up with another fun visualization, because this one is well beyond imaginable already.
Fading global Tesla sales are consistent with this: it’s what happens when you go all in on one party in one nation, and Musk has always been willing to bet big on his next move. Also, I doubt it’ll last.
Remember also that Trump is about to die and Musk is 53. What fortune is 10x greater than Musk’s current massive wealth and political power? The office of super-President that he’s now suddenly so engaged in helping create “for Trump”.
I think I see what you mean, but it’s dangerous to casually say such a hostile and powerful state’s corruption could ever be vindicated.
And maybe Jack Ma should also have advocated for Taiwan's submission to China like Musk did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/08/elon-musk...
They enact laws guaranteeing free speech and human rights, then execute their critics and sell their organs.
In fact, I am worried about whether that influence from China extends further. How else do you explain Trump delaying enforcement of the TikTok ban? If anything he should be going a lot harder against China.
As a thought experiment, I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally.
Or if not damage, just trolling. For instance, writing X on the moon or something like that.
We seem to be watching this in real time. Musk bought influence over the US president, gained access to critical US systems, and is about to benefit from the EO pausing of enforcement of law banning bribes to foriegn nationals.
He bought power. He is buying more power. We are watching a supervillian rise.
Ian Fleming explored that idea rather effectively with Hugo Drax in the original Moonraker novel (which doesn't have much besides the name in common with the movie.)
The way things are playing out, Drax must have been Musk's childhood hero.
Hypothetically, would it be legal to fund a president whose policy was "let's nuke everyone"?
Run a government. No single person has ever been responsible for more death, suffering and harm as a person wielding a monopoly on violence. Even the Church only managed its bloody conquests, cultural genocides and colonialism because it had the power of imperialist states behind it. If not for Constantine, Christianity would have remained a weird apocalypse cult in the Levant.
A person such as Musk (or Trump, or Biden, or...or...) live in a completely different reality when compared to yours or mine, as their input differs vastly from ours. This is inevitable given the flaws of being human.
It's like training two AIs on completely different sets of input. The bigger the difference in training data ...
He's making an offer to buy something at twice the price of the other offer on the table.
I'm not sure it'd be a good deal for Musk but it looks like a good deal for the seller.
>I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.
then you don't know much about him
I've listened to a history podcast about the robber barons and how following the backlash and dismantlement of the Standard oil, industrialist started buying articles, sometime even newspapers to sell their stories, and in the US, it worked wonderfully. You still have the brand "Quaker" that was born at the time, and probably a dozen other, where they manipulated their own famillial history to build an image, and hide the fact that children died in their mine or that they just had 20 redneck strikers killed. It's not as bad today, but building a personal brand by buying puff articles, fondations. Buying goodwill and influence was always present since at least that time (Honestly, Berkshire Hathaway made at least some of its money on WB reputation, so tech billionaires are not the only kind of CEO who do it)
I certainly suspect that there were always elements of what he's become that just weren't as publicly apparent.
memetics
I view Musk's decision here as a good thing that will benefit the world.
This is false, but it what he tries to portray to save face. It has been shown numerous times that he was in agreement with keeping it AI private when it was assumed he would be in control of it. And specifically for safety reasons. And the only reason OpenAI took microsoft money was because Musk pulled his already pledged and budgeted funding for the company.
Why did he pull funding? Because he insisted OpenAI was light-years behind Google (he was very wrong) and insisted the way to save it was to give him full control of the company (also wrong). They told him he was wrong so he got made and pulled his already pledged funding.
Pledging funds for a non-profit then afterwards getting upset that they won't just give you the non-profit entity is pretty absurd.
If he wants to, he could apply legal mechanisms. The fact he's resorting to public pandering to sycophants to back him in his righteous cause suggests that he has exhausted those legal means.
Here are some recent headlines:
* "Google" group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI.
* Teen on "Google's" DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'.
* "Google's demolition crew.
* Google's DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts
Then ask yourself, if you would write the same comment, calling "Sundar Pichai", a terrorists? Why or why not?
PS: I do believe Musk should be subject to the federal criminal conflict of interest statute given his position in gov.
Using your "enormous amount of wealth" as a weapon means you'll be frittering away that wealth very quickly. Especially since others will be inclined to take the other side of the bet as soon as they catch on to it happening.
Musk’s vulnerability is Tesla. He has personally levered those shares in a way that makes him vulnerable to political retribution. (Banning cameras-only self-driving being one option. Politicising recalls being the nuclear one.)
> Using your "enormous amount of wealth" as a weapon means you'll be frittering away that wealth very quickly.
That has not been the case throughout history. To the contrary, using "your 'enormous amount of wealth' as a weapon" has been effectively employed by those possessing same for as long as there has been an agreed upon definition of "wealth."
See any reasonable definition of power.
Musk is bad, but he's only really one example amongst thousands. And there aren't many examples of where this has ever been a good thing.
It's made worse by the fact that isolation makes them literally detached from reality. COVID completely broke some billionaire brains as it was adding to their loneliness.
How long before they start forming their own armies to cause geopolitical havoc?
I see a post on X with receipts showing millions of dollars of pretty obvious waste and/or corruption, many involving news outlet grants and subscriptions, including names, amounts, etc. Then I see some tearjerker story about families of USAID workers on one of the beneficiary news outlets. And in the comments, people lamenting that Elon Musk's success is only due to luck and his estranged father's defunct gem mine. Or worrying Elon will use their SSN (which is already available on the dark web) to open a credit card.
You're pretty smart people. Do we really think auditing government spending by a super-competent outsider is a bad thing? The last time it was done was by Clinton, btw, who managed to create a surplus (granted, the debt situation was nothing compared to today). And before that, Truman, back before hyper-partisan politics. I can't imagine the level of grift back then was anywhere close to today in our bloated budget. I'm optimistic, and I think y'all need to relax.
They recommended a review of leases and to tighten up their employee expense reporting requirements.
You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.
No, no one is against “a more efficient government.” Obviously. No one is “pro-fraud.” Obviously.
Please post specific examples of fraud that DOGE has surfaced, not just “things that were congressionally approved but I don’t like.”
US "defense" spending is so absurdly overflowing with bloat and waste, it would be like a kid in a candy store.
But instead DOGE started with a tiny department controlling ~1% of spending, one which has routinely passed independent audits and also happened to have opened an investigation into one of Musk's companies.
And the action taken? Preventing the release of existing supplies of medicine and food to literal starving children in third world countries.
Pretending like anything Elon Musk is doing is legitimate auditing is absurd. Do you recall when he/DOGE gutted NIH and research funding on a whim, and he didn't even know? (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888575713629925769)
> super-competent outsider
I'd disagree about him being particularly competent at anything other than venture capital, and auditing ≠ venture capital. Regardless, why would I trust the richest man in the world to decide what the citizens of the country need and/or want from the government?
Honestly, I can keep going if you'd like, but I think this is enough to demonstrate that Elon Musk should not have illegal access to the government through his immense wealth and power (if that was not already self-evident.)
In addition, Elon isn't even that rich, when compared to other entities, which aren't a singular person. As an example, BlackRock manages over $10 trillion of assets (that's 30x compared to Elon), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms
Elon is not the richest entity in the world, and he doesn't have any special powers to bludgeon anything, like none of these large companies have, unless they do some weird market manipulation tricks (which should be illegal anyway).
Elon's wealth is mostly in acquisitions. Even PayPal, co-founded by Peter Thiel, was an acquisition by X.com (the bank), at which point Elon was already ousted as CEO. He came back briefly, trying to convert PayPal infra over to Microsoft much to Thiel's chagrin, but then ousted again in favour of Thiel, who renamed the merged company to PayPal.
So PayPal, an acquisition (not made by Elon). Tesla, another acquisition. And like SpaceX, Neuralink, Starlink, they are built by actual domain experts, with wealth bootstrapped from Elon dad's wealth (who funded Zip2), and Thiel. Thiel successfully built and administered PayPal, along with Amazon one of the few companies to make it unscathed through the dotcom bubble by providing actual business value, and gave a massive boost to Elon's net worth, and it was Thiel that enabled him to acquire Tesla. And it's Tesla's absurd valuation, that's enabled him to buy all the other things he fancies, including a seat at the government.
And you're seriously arguing that that's not a pretty important difference?
> he doesn't have any special powers to bludgeon anything
I've seen him described in all kinds of ways, but "without special powers" is a first.
Blackrock doesn't control how the vast majority of that money is spent...
You are confusing "assets under management" (AUM) with actual net worth. Blackrock's net worth is $43 billion, compared to $11 trillion in AUM, because 99.6% of the top-line number you chose is actually just client money. Musk, meanwhile, is around $400 billion, so you have the numbers backwards; Musk has about 10x the net worth of the nation's largest fund manager.
This is straight up wrong. Musk built Zip2 with his father's money, but everything beyond that has been built off of investing money he received from Zip2's sale to Compaq and any wealth accumulated since then. He's funding ideas, but don't lie to yourself and say that he's building them himself.
And the argument is moot anyway - he wasted tens of billions on Twitter. If he was doing good things (true scotsman) he would’ve built schools.
Or bad things.
To put this in perspective, the net assets of Google are around $300 billion, and their total assets are around $450 billion. Musk's net worth is roughly $400 billion.
> this is fundamentally about: stopping or fundamentally changing OpenAI's plans to be spun off.
If OpenAI actually values OpenAI-NP at $40B then they will surely sell it for $97B. The point is the $40B is obviously a dramatic undervaluing and the fact they won't sell it for $97B shows that. This is the wrench.
I probably haven't explained this clearly enough in my original post which I wrote too quickly.
Given that OpenAI.org currently wholly owns OpenAI.com (doesn't it? even Msft didn't get a stake?), I have trouble seeing (a) how the $40B valuation would stand up in court if anyone could challenge it (and I believe Musk is trying to do that?), but also (b) how Musk's $100B pushes up the valuation more than a SoftBank investment would do.
Scratching my head...
[0] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/business/money-report/sof...
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-chatbot-ai-first-agenda/
Perhaps "big balls" and the other geniuses he hired haven't managed to come up with a working solution.
Musk needs chatbots for his technocracy movement because they are great for faking progress in efficiency without understanding any of the systems they replace and destroy.
He may also need them for online bot campaigns to convince MAGA voters that layoffs, deregulation, H1Bs and supporting billionaires are really in their best interest.
That said, considering he overpaid for Twitter, perhaps OpenAI should consider his offer.
But I think Musk does have a working chatbot right now? Haven't used it so I won't speak from experience, but Grok by xAI is working and is not that much behind OpenAI, maybe like half a year behind, judging by LLM Arena[0] and other benchmarks that I've seen.
This can only be described as techno authoritarianism.
Kind of, yes! If OpenAI actually believes that the true value of OpenAI-NP is $40B then surely they will sell it for $97B! But, they of course don't believe that the proper valuation of complete control over OpenAI-P is worth only $40B. That's the point of why this works.
You go work at his company, living in his government, in his vehicle, using his data network, thinking thoughts through his mind link.
He's laid it out bare, quite honestly.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889062013109703009
There's a good chance there's more to it than I realize, though.
I genuinely think that a political recall over his language and promises regarding self-driving are the most likely downfall of this man. (Outside maybe from his drug use and rapid political agenda as a target). I think he’s get political green-light from Trump admin to roll out nationwide self-driving and it’ll be a deadly mess, and that will be the unwinding of Tesla and Musk. The rapid recall and mess that will result will tank them in the market, and start a crisis.
Precisely, states will react to the self driving vehicles, allowing consequences outside the control of the federal government, who will happily protect him.
I imagine that's the goal, but we're literally just a few weeks in and a large amount of the DoD is extremely secretive and difficult to access by the elected government (which is concerning enough as it is). From what I understand they are already moving to downsize the FBI, and the more secretive three letter agencies will hopefully follow.
> Preventing the release of existing supplies of medicine and food to literal starving children in third world countries.
This is really your strongest point, but if you look at the US track record abroad, most of that aid is damage control for wars/coups/etc. started directly or indirectly by the US. Most of those people, and certainly US taxpayers, would be better off with no US influence in the long run. Whether that will actually happen under this administration remains to be seen.
That doesn’t make the offer worth $0, but it’s not $97.4bn
Based on their blog post [1] and various rumors in the press, it sounds like Microsoft has some contingencies in place. I assume their investments will just convert to hard equity in case of a sale (if they haven’t already).
[1] https://openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-ad...
Sam, if the non-profit is worth $40B then clearly you would be willing to sell it for $80B.
That's pretty strong evidence that the non-profit isn't worth just 40B and thus the basis of the go-private is invalid.
Either that or Musk has a really bad lawyer or this is a publicity stunt. There is a process to turn a nonprofit back into a forprofit but it’s very complicated, probably requires dissolution of the entity altogether, would almost certainly involve California regulators, and might require that the nonprofit divest its assets to a different nonprofit (which would defeat the purpose since OpenAI Global likely has all the IP).
2 brain cells: "one hundy billy is a lotta dollars"
3rd brain cell: "Elon obviously doesn't actually expect this sale to happen, something more interesting is going on here, what is it?"
Journalist: "iunno just paste the quote and hit publish"
This is good though?
>And it's not open source either
Wonder why Grok-1 is open-source but not Grok-2. Maybe it will when Grok-3 releases?
> This is good though?
The opinion spectrum on AI seems to currently be [more safe] <---> [more willing to attempt to comply with any user query].
Consider as a hypothetical the query "synthesise a completely custom RNA sequence for a virus that makes ${specific minority} go blind".
A *competent* AI that complies with this, isn't safe to give to open source to the general public, because someone will use it like this — even putting it behind an API without giving out model weights is a huge risk, because people keep finding ways to get past filters.
An *incompetent* model might be safe just because it won't produce an effective RNA sequence — based on what they're like with code, I think current models probably aren't sufficiently competent for that, but I don't know how far away "sufficiently competent" is.
So: safe *or* open — can't have both, at least not forever.
(Annoyingly, there's also a strong argument that quite a bit of the recent work on making AI interpretable and investigating safety issues required open models, so we may also be unable to have safe closed systems as well as being unable to have safe open systems).
He's a good writer, but his content is written through an extreme anti-AI lens, so take it with a pretty big grain of salt.
I hadn't heard of the author before that article, but all the math and logic in it is sound. There is some guesswork on exact numbers (because OpenAI don't publish that sort of information) you can disagree with, but IMO it's fairly generous in their favour. And it still looks pretty bad for their financial prospects.
They're the most comprehensive writeups in that aspect, although not as technically-oriented as most content on HN.
New things happen all the time, even things that had been predicted to happen sooner than they did.
Musk switching sides on that seems a good time to re-evaluate who is making the predictions now and why.
But to your point, as the child of someone who parrot's right wing talking points, I am looking forward to see whether their remarks on EV's change over the next few years or not.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stella...
I don't know a good source for MAU numbers, but they would have to be very different with mobile app usage included.
I would guess that OpenAI (possibly as part of Microsoft or another company) will still be in the top 7 AI companies in a few years.
What’s the conversion rate on any single typical ad hosted by Google? Yet it all adds up to make a lot of money, for Google and (presumably) the advertisers.
Once zip/unzip technology became commodified (either by being baked into the OS or open-sourced as happened with 7zip), paid 3rd party tools were no longer needed and WinRAR's business disappeared.
What does that mean?
Not accepting external offers to purchase startups is fairly normal. And "we don't like the new overlords" is also a fairly normal reason for refusing said offers.
Fiduciary duty is specifically a moral imperative to do what is best for shareholders. Very often that is a large share valuation!
Sometimes, though, you work for a non-profit (who told their shareholders "we're not actually trying to make you any money, consider your buy in a donation, and your profit to be not being eaten alive by killer robots after AI gains sentience") your fiduciary duty to your shareholders is to continue to not allow an unhinged billionaire who doesn't appear to give two small fucks about any kind of safety to buy your company.
That's what this whole thing is about. Musk's offer will probably not be accepted, and he knows it. The purpose is to throw a wrench in OAI's plan to sell to insiders at a heavy discount, possibly making it impossible for the nonprofit to become a for-profit.
If this offer forces the preferred investments to cough up an extra $60b for the nonprofit, that's fantastic for the nonprofit mission.
I dunno maybe that asteroid is coming and we need his rockets and mass distraction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
TEL, though, yeeeeah... that was a bad move.
AOC falls a bit into the twitter-feud commentary, but Musk and Trump are on another level of embarrassing, lie-filled, garbage (also at all hours of the night, I think which tells you something too)
This is simply factually wrong. The twitter-engagement-bait driven nonsense like the OP in the tweet you linked is just so bad. I only got flagged about this when talking with an acquaintance working on medical research under NIH grants in the US. (I'm not from the US)
What has actually happened is adjustment of what they call the "indirect cost rate". This refers to the portion of funding you're allowed to chalk down to administrative overhead as opposed to direct research expenses.
For example in 2023, of the 35billion in NIH grants, 9billion went to administrative overhead (25%).
The new rule is them capping this to 15%. By the way this rate is around the standard in all private grant foundations.
Here is the primary source of information:
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...
Now, I'm not sure if all the DEI stuff the new government doesn't like comes under "administrative overhead". If it did, it would explain the timing of the announcement. But adjusting indirect cost rates is in general a very normal thing to do, and 25% is very high, even for a prosperous grant system like the NIH.
Here [2] is a university mentioning their negotiated indirect cost rate of 56%(!!!)
For comparison, the NSF from 2010 to 2016 varied their rate only between 16% and 24% [3]. The NIH rates are absurdly high.
News articles such as [1], that directly quote the above primary source and still misconstrue it, deserve jail time.
Also, it is really disingenous to say "cutting funds for cancer research" as if it's directly targeted at cancer research.
Engagement driven media like Twitter, news websites, etc, are truly the devil of the world. And the incentives are rotten, so no matter what Musk says X isn't fixing it in any way.
</rant>
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/08/nih-cuts-bi...
[2] https://research.umich.edu/update-on-nih-indirect-cost-rate-...
The one that has to be somewhat transparent is looking pretty shaky
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
This is why tariffs, divestment from China, and divestment of Chinese ownership in American companies or land is important. I also think it is reasonable to treat such pledges made by American residents to a foreign government as treasonous.
/s
https://truthout.org/articles/musk-pledged-6b-to-solve-world...
They didn't come up with a plan, because it's obviously impossible to solve world hunger with $6 billion. If it was possible, why USAID $40 billion annually couldn't do it.
CNN maybe wrote a bad headline? Doesn't really seem like the sort of thing to pretend to offer and then deny 42M people food aid over, but then I'm not a trillionaire. I don't think he bothered to actually read the story, instead just tweeted after reading a screenshot of a headline. He got mad about something the WFP didn't even say, and then people decided they must have said that because he got mad about it. They didn't!
If he really wanted to know what $6B could do, he could have donated it and found out. It was cheap enough for him to donate $6B to sit in the "foundation" that he personally controls, so it's not like he was hard up for cash.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/26/economy/musk-world-hunger-wfp...
> Correction: An earlier version of this story’s headline incorrectly stated that the director of the UN’s food scarcity organization believes 2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could solve world hunger. He believes it could help solve world hunger.
Kind of how pets.com was always called pets.com, because just calling something "pets" would be confusing.
Being a "nerd" who graduated HS in the 90s has been a weird arc. At first you got out and were like "yes! I survived HS", and then for a while you had skills that were valued, and now it feels like the whole world has devolved into a shitty sequel to Mean Girls.
I’ve generally found his take on things fairly insightful and worth hearing out. I know some people can’t stand him, and I don’t agree with him about everything, but I think it leaves you with a decent sense of what has happened to Elon over the years.
Kara Swisher is also familiar with Elon over the years and her commentary definitely elucidates some of the more bizarre aspects of his new persona. Where it probably came from, how things have shaken out, what he was like before when his quirks were present yet not as obvious, etc.
I mention them because your point about not envying them anymore is deeply justified by what these people have to say. They paint this picture that makes you pity him more than anything. He seems like a very intelligent 15 year old trapped in a man’s body with an incredible nerd complex, always deeply craving to be initiated yet never finding his way there. He throws his money and power around, but inside he’s a deeply troubled, needy, weak little boy. Addicted to twitter, fiending for more attention seemingly every moment. Possibly addicted to hard drugs. What a mess.
I got a laugh out of the mean girls sequel part, haha.
Of course when we look at any sort of success metrics that actually matter to a twitter personality, the top spots are overwhelmingly conservative pundits, and essentially always have been.
Capital should be allowed to accumulate to those, who find the best use for the capital and use it in the most efficient way for the service of the world. That's the idea of capitalism.
Now, if he makes bad capital allocation decisions (like what this news is about), then he loses the capital to someone smarter than him, to someone who finds better use for that capital. That's also capitalism. Doing irrational or "bad" things isn't possible, without it resulting in losing that capital.
> each of which make groundbreaking products and services
It's like you didn't read a word I said.
But to respond to your claim, which I've heard many times before – including from Paul Graham. Maybe he's some genius at allocating capital in your eyes or something, but I don't think his investment decisions were even that radical, but they are within the conservative circles of people who usually have that capital behind them. If, in some fantasy land, you could give more people the same level of wealth (i.e. real purchasing power) that Elon had in the 2000s, I'm certain a lot of people would have put that money into electric vehicles and batteries. They were exciting at the time, and had demonstrably great potential for returns, but they required enormous capex. Conservative old money wasn't interested in making that kind of all-in investment, but that's just because the kind of person that hoards wealth, isn't the kind that makes those kinds of bets. Elon had the luck of being wealthy enough, and also being an outsider with an aspirational mindset. That isn't so special, beyond the dumb luck of riding the coat tails of Peter Thiel's company.
You could sniff the password with a man-in-the-middle attack, if you knew the host key of the instrument cluster. Here's one from my previous Model S: https://gist.github.com/Cyberax/ad9866ab4306d43957dc480db573...
Also, so what if they used Debian? Linux is used on everything. Debian has multiple licenses, it also has BSD3 and others to choose from: https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/
They use plenty of GPL software there, including the Linux kernel itself.
The page you posted is a list of licenses various software in the Debian distribution are released with.
Of course the parent's idea that Tesla using Debian means they have to release the source of anything is incorrect.
At the very least Musk needs to explain some thing under oath, especially the processes he's put in place to deal with his massive conflicts of interest. He was asked about those yesterday, and he explained there is no conflict because he's posting everything transparently on Twitter, which is itself a conflict of interest.
We are being shitty parents to our billionaire class. Billionaires need boundaries if we want them to grow up and turn into respectable adults.
It's hard for most people to distinguish "sociopath" from "charismatic", and the jeans and hoodie dress code is as much about charisma as the suits and ties ever were.
What you're seeing is the same as it ever was — all that's changed is that when the deer dyed their fur hot pink, the predators copied it.
Is this like some kind of ironic detachment? It almost makes you long for corporate pablum about building a world for us all.
I’ve been looking at the idea of a tunnel between the UK and Ireland. Recent rough estimates were €15Bn and that probably didn’t include high speed trains on each side.
A new city, a 500km/h maglev line, paying spacex to build a moon base, launching a billion dollar prize fund for room temperature superconductor or graphene space elevator material research, paying a geoengineering project like military jets releasing reflective vapour into the upper atmosphere (last time I saw that price estimate was 2Bn and that was years ago), building a vanity vehicle project from scratch like reigniting the ocean going Ekranoplans or the Fairey Rotodyne, building the Elon Musk solar power plants in Texas to “unleash American energy“ with his name on it…
You would not casually spend that much on Lamborghinis and mansions in the Hollywood Hills, but if you wanted to do audacious or philanthropic things or get your name on mega-projects there are many countries with billion dollar projects one could fund. $30Bn would pay the city of Los Angeles budget for 2-3 years.
$30Bn he could give every American $90.
An important thing to note is that it takes time to spend money and money makes money. Even a very modest interest rate yields an incredible amount of money. The money is so large, it works differently than money does for us normal people. For example, say you have $30bn a year and are getting a modest 5% interest yearly, that's: $1.5bn a year, $4.11m/day, $171.2k/hr, or $2854/min. As you can imagine, this has a big effect. If you're trying to buy a McLaren F1, well, you can wait 5 days. Which it'll probably take that long to make this transaction happen anyways. So there would be no net loss of money. So, supposing you wanted to make your $15bn (I know, but we're approximating anyways and they're similar anyways) tunnel, you somehow got permission to do it, and you are doing it all out of your pocket, you have to realize that this does not equate to taking out $15bn from your net worth. Because... it takes time to build such a tunnel. Let's approximate again, saying it takes 5 years (very aggressive) and you pay at the end of the year, then the net decrease of your wealth is $7.5bn, not $15bn. At 10 years, you have no net change, and any longer you've had no effective loss. (To be clear, I'm not saying there's no cost, I'm saying that it doesn't change your net worth)
The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.
I should also clarify an assumption that I guess is not obvious. I'm saying it is essentially impossible to spend these amounts of money on things that personally benefit you. You can't buy enough houses, personal jets, yachts, and so on. We agree. But mega projects take a lot of time, as well as philanthropic endeavors. If you want a real world example, see MacKenzie Scott. She has given away 50% of her wealth, yet her net worth is identical to that in 2020, when Forbes started tracking her (divorce was in 2019). She is worth $36bn and has given over $17bn away, and in those 4 years (I'm sure some of this money is pledged and not yet in peoples' hands but that's standard philanthropy, right?). So yeah, she could have built that bridge for no change in her net worth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But in your favor, I guess Elon did buy Twitter and with his great negotiating skills offered a 27% premium (and not in a one-time lump sum). But also, this has seemed to have no real effect on his net worth due to how his wealth is actually held and showing the nativity of our approximations, as most billionaires are getting much more than 5% interest on their money.
This bit changes my reply, I have to agree with that. The rest though - yes the normal way to build a tunnel would be to make sure it will be financially profitable and get investors, but what I'm saying is that a UK-Ireland tunnel would not be profitable. One estimate said it would cost double the UK-France tunnel but get 20% of the use. Nobody would "invest", it would have to be funded personal money as a passion project just because they want to see it exist in the world.
> The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.
Nice problem to have, lol. Seems like it would be possible to invent as many megaprojects as one wanted in order to get rid of enough money, but maybe it isn't. Maybe the limit is how much attention one person can have. Maybe the balance of trying to start enough to use all your money without bankrupting yourself if one overruns costs and then never finishing them all, would be too hard.
7 years ago he called Vernon Unsworth a pedophile. That was enough for me.
My intuition here is that ANY private citizen acting without authority derived from a due process, or the necessary clearance, is breaking the law and needs to be arrested. Full stop. It bewilders me that Musk wasn't apprehended before he was given special permission to do what he was doing. This was blatant evasion of democracy and potentially harmful to hundreds of millions of people, and harmful to democracy itself. It sets an incredible precedent.
The check or balance that appears to be missing, I suppose, is the one where people feel they have the agency or ability at all to identify this type of nefarious behaviour and report it to an entity which can act to rectify it, independently of the president. Trump has enabled this every step of the way, and ultimately, any attempt to fix this likely would have been defused by him as well.
I'm not sure what citizens can do, or how exactly the institution should protect itself in the future. But there are many historical parallels to what's happening here, and inaction on citizens' parts is certainly a large component. Too many people are failing to stand in the way. Part of the solution is making it possible to do so. They step aside because the consequences, especially in the USA (with leaders who blatantly seek to purge their opposition), are far too great for an individual to absorb.
Even as a less than serious rhetorical argument, what you said is insane. Get a grip.
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-sp...
Way more billionaires supported Kamala vs. Trump (83 vs 52).
But yes, there was also simply a lack of energy in the D voter base in 2024. No amount of spending can recover disengaged voters who simply dismissed everyone as "equally bad".
I don’t think there’s any reasonable evidence of this, given he has sued media matters for publishing factual information, and even encouraged AGs to open criminal investigations.
Musk has absolutely no respect for free speech. He regularly uses the power of the government to punish anyone that dares criticize him. He makes a mockery of free speech.
Sorry to come back to this a week later, but Elon Musk just tweeted:
> 60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election.
> They deserve a long prison sentence.
I just don't think it's even remotely credible to claim that he values free speech.
He literally posted an AI generated video of Xi in Winnie the Pooh garb.
> How else do you explain Trump delaying enforcement of the TikTok ban
Because he wanted people to watch his inauguration on TikTok. Plus the intention was always that TikTok would be bought by a US company, not to shut it down entirely given the extensive number of people who rely it on both for income and for entertainment. The issue was that the Supreme Court ruled on the takedown being legal just 2 days before the ban deadline, giving no time for an acquisition. Even Joe Biden refused to enforce the ban on TikTok on the last day of his presidency.
> If anything he should be going a lot harder against China
Tariffs on China just kicked in.
> He literally posted an AI generated video of Xi in Winnie the Pooh garb.
https://www.inverse.com/article/32100-elon-musk-favorite-jam...
The person who asked 7 years ago never forgot that and made the same connection as you:
https://www.threads.net/@pixelastronaut/post/DFFJF9GxE7D?xmt...
https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/01/10/amazon-e-commerce-...
OpenAI don't make money because they're losing money on inference. If you remove their capex - training costs, which you can't because they have to remain competitive, they'd still be losing money.
Leaders in their market, at first because of a small moat and large advance, then the advance shrink but the brand will stay first for at least a decade due to brand recognition.
The Amazon comp works less, unless openAI start to suddenly build the sell their own chips.
> watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him (i wish i had done more of my own thinking and definitely fell in the npc trap).
> i'm not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!
a) Coca-Cola (~$300B, profitable, stable, stock-listed, well-known addictive brand, accepted business model with steady growth)
b) OpenAI (bleeding cash: $5B lost last year, tech that is not really novel anymore, weird corporate setup, competition that offers similar products).
It's not that easy to support the idea that OpenAI will be the winner.
The OpenAI bet is clearly that they build AGI and become the worlds first $10T company. At this valuation you only need to think it’s P > 0.1 for it to be a reasonable bet.
Coke is not a “swing for the fences” investment.
It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth.
It would be insane, an apocalyptic fantasy that few could afford outside of (hopefully somewhat) accountable or at least pragmatic governments. But a very rich person could afford it.
And as much as information warfare is terrifying, biological warfare is much worse. I get your "it's already here" point, but lets really take the question at face value and run with it.
edit: Consider that a group MUCH less wealthy than Elon Musk was able to experiment with nuclear weapons, and managed to carry out a sarin attack.
> Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans.
I think you missed a constraint there.
That's entirely forgivable, until you give a broken person immense power and influence. He's extremely dangerous.
"In 2023, Amazon accounted for 37.6% of all e-commerce sales in America, which was light-years ahead of second-place Walmart at 6.3%."
Amazon is highly successful even without AWS.
> Their first child, Elon Reeve Musk, was born in 1971, named after Maye's grandfather J. Elon Haldeman, with the name Reeve after her maternal grandmother's maiden name.
Or you can gamble it all on a meme stock and maybe 100x your wealth.
Institutional investors are doing both.
Of course microsoft can switch to a better model, but a better model will not easilu build such a such a big subscriber base.
Now openai is powering tons of microsoft tools which are used by tons of people due to office integration.
I imagine it will be thousands and thousands of examples of "small time corruption" with a few million here and a few tens of millions here that in no sane world should be spent. And for some reason, people prefer to hate billionaires that create wealth when instructed by multimillionaires who siphon wealth from taxpayers but happen to own newspapers.
> You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.
You could say the last two about anyone, but to deny that Elon is competent, especially coming from an anonymous internet commenter... okay.
Ah, yes, there are. They're called auditors. They audited USAID 4 months ago.
The entire US government spent only $7.7MM on Politico over the last 12 months. Oooo spooky stuff, if only there was a way to see what for! Turns out there is. You can scroll down and see the shocking revelation that the US government paid a news publication for subscriptions to a news publication!
Similar to how if you work in the energy industry, for example, a smart employer would pay for energy trade publications so you can do your job better.
https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c...
In fact you can drill down all the way to individual line items. Here's the 49 subscriptions to Politico Pro that HHS, an organization with 83,500 employees, purchased. Looks suuuuper abusive... /s
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_75...
> to deny that Elon is competent
Please show evidence of Elon being a competent public sector financial auditor. Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?
> Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?
I would wager that even you are more competent than the average auditor, assuming you know how to program. I'm seeing a lot of appeals to authority and credentialism, and assumptions that people who are hired by bureaucrats and politicians to audit themselves have better aligned incentives than a wildcard entrepreneur. If we can't agree on the fundamental axioms, I don't see this conversation going anywhere.
You say that like it’s a good thing…
This is what’s known as “compromise,” or otherwise “being a fucking adult.”
Not as much as he has now: he was famously frustrated by the California state government's Covid lockdown mandates, and was pretty powerless against them. That frustration is probably what led him to buy influence in the Trump campaign,and later administration. Money can take you so far, political power will take you further for imposing your will on others.
The "Shock-and-awe"/blitzkrieg strategy is another force-multiplier. By moving much faster than the bureaucracy and legal system can respond, the question on whether he has the power or authority to do the things he's doing may become moot.
This is a risky strategy if it is later determined that Musk broke laws with DOGE and is arrested and convicted.
Switching to a side of fellow billionaire politicians was simply a way to be among his own people, with similar levels of empathy for the working class.
>By moving much faster than the bureaucracy and legal system can respond, the question on whether he has the power or authority to do the things he's doing may become moot.
I think long term someone is going to shut down his shenanigans for good. Maybe even Trump himself will throw him under the bus. But I do wonder how deep he can get and what his consequences are. Like, could he simply leak government data to Russia/China and only get away with a fine? He's not military, but Court Mashals have given the death sentence over much more mild causes.
- hypocrite: free speech only for topics I approve of
- bully: and a school yard style bully at that. Calling people crude names etc. Remember "pedo guy"?
- liar: "full self driving early next year" for how many years in a row?
- reckless: doesn't seem to really care about all the tesla crashes while on auto pilot, giant safety (for others) hazard that is the cybertruck
And this is all before the current political drama.
As so often, it's how they treat the women around them that tells you a lot about men.
So what is it that you saw in him that you liked him?
Twitter wrecked his mind. I'm not talking about buying it, I'm talking about being such a heavy user of it.
The average person on the street is smarter than him.
I'm happy with it.
As far as I understand, its only "derivative" works that must be open sourced. Not merely building a software program or hardware device on top of a Debian OS. Tesla's control console is hardly a derivative work.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
[1] https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/ccs-review/2018-Ma...
[2] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete-...
*but I would argue (a judge would be the only one to say with certainty) that Tesla does not provide an infotainment application "alongside" a linux host to run it on, they deliver a single product to the end user of which Debian/BusyBox/whatever is a significant constituent.
(P.S. to cyberax: if you can demonstrate that Tesla is still shipping modified binaries as in [1] I think it would make a worthwhile update to the saga.)
Outside of the Executive Office of the President, that's not really all that true (between statutory constraints and officers subject to Senate confirmation), and the Departments are not his, which is the critical distinction between a monarchy, in which the government is the personal domain of its head, and a republic.
> He has shown that the Social security database is de-duplicated
I think you mean “not de-duplicated” and that it is not (and why) is not a new revelation by Musk, it has been well-known and, ironically, a common example of various lessons in real world database design for at least a generation.
The reality is that just because something has been “known for decades” doesn’t mean it has been addressed—especially in government bureaucracies, where inefficiency, inertia, and misaligned incentives often prevent meaningful reform. The persistence of outdated Social Security records, massive waste, and fraud is a perfect example of systemic dysfunction.
The president, as the chief executive, has broad authority to ensure that executive agencies function efficiently and effectively. While there are statutory and congressional constraints, the executive branch is ultimately responsible for implementing policies and running departments. If existing bureaucrats and Treasury officials have had access to this data for years but failed to act, then it is not only within the president’s prerogative but arguably his duty to bring in outside expertise—whether that be Musk or anyone else—to tackle waste and inefficiency.
The Constitution very purposefully gives most power to the people through Congress. Article I of the Constitution goes through the pains of enumerating all the powers Congress has and doesn't. Article II is 1/4 the length and is mostly about how the President is elected. But it describes a much more limited set of power granted to the President.
What you're doing is reading vast powers to dictate the workings of the executive branch from the "Executive Power Clause", but completely failing to account for the "Take Care Clause" --
"he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States."
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
And can't you see why this has to be the case? Because if we go down this path, there's nothing stopping the next executive from completely wiping out all programs he doesn't like, and what's to say you agree with the next guy as much as you agree with this one? What's to say he doesn't go after the programs keeping you alive, or housed, or fed because actually he doesn't like the color of your skin, or your religion, or the hand you use to write with? Or maybe he just doesn't like you personally, because you doing your job faithfully is in the way of his unfaithful objectives?
> He has shown that the Social security database is de-duplicated and there are thousands of individuals above the age of 150. Hundreds of treasury employees have access to the same database he has, and most of the data analysis can be done open source via FPDS-NG.
Then there should be no issue bringing all of that to Congress and going through the proper channels. In fact there is a bipartisan Congressional DOGE committee that was purportedly for exactly this, but Musk has been keeping them in the dark and cutting them out entirely. Why?
We can see why they don't want to work with Congress; their goal is to shutter lawful, Congressionally authorized agencies they don't agree with politically, yet don't have the legal power to end. They've said as much about the CFPB, but they have no legal authority under the Constitution to close it. The CFPB is a net economic benefit to consumers and saves the US money, there's no logical reason to go after it as one of the first targets if you're looking to balance the budget.
"We believe an OpenAI-P owned by Elon is fundamentally against our mission."
While I'm not saying Sam's being an angel here, I do think it's reasonable to say that llms aren't an existential risk and spinning them off to a consumer thing while xrisk and super alignment stays in a nonprofit is plausibly mission aligned, and certainly moreso than giving any amount of control to the guy who's proven his devotion to care and safety in progress by checks notes taking a sledgehammer to the US Treasury.
But OpenAI-P of course wouldn't be owned by Elon, he would just own $40B worth of OpenAI-P according to their own valuation of it. A tiny minority stake of the $157B enterprise.
OpenAI-NP, could just go back to other OpenAI investors and buy back their "$40B" stake plus have $57B leftover to apply to AI safety. Silly Elon, overpaying by almost 2.5X for something of such little value!
It's a hard point that they would likely have to make in court! Harder still with Elon having originally been involved in founding OpenAI-NP.
Everyone hates Elon reasonably but few people seem to care the Sam Altman is conducting a theft on the order of $57+B.
If OpenAI-NP has a reasonable case to believe that Elon will be a bad steward of the technology and work against their charter (https://openai.com/charter/), they shouldn't sell to him, even if his offer is more than another. Unlike a normal board, the duty-to-shareholder isn't the only duty, a hostile buyout like with twitter doesn't necessarily work.
> But OpenAI-P of course wouldn't be owned by Elon, he would just own $40B worth of OpenAI-P according to their own valuation of it. A tiny minority stake of the $157B enterprise.
IDK, Musk's offer is apparently for the nonprofit, not for a partial interest in the not-yet-extant for-profit subsidiary.
I think you added this after I replied. Even if this is the case, better to do so with $97B and no control in OpenAI than $40B and no control in OpenAI!
OpenAI-NP can either have a $40B from spinning out OpenAI-P or $97B in cash. In theory, they could literally just go and buy back their stake in OpenAI-P and have $57B left over for other AI endeavors if the valuation of it at $40B were remotely reasonable! If I'm on the board and I believe the $40B number, I'd do this in a heatbeat.
It wasn't long ago that the company almost fell apart because senior folks who actually care about the company tried to oust sama - the chaos that an Elon takeover would introduce is a critical risk that cannot be ignored.
"I'll pay you double" isn't the instant checkmate you're suggesting.
Definitely not what I was arguing, but I'll leave you to figure out how we got here.
Not that I agree with that position either, but interesting how those traits appear to be perceived positively now by some.
That's part of living in a society. As a child, you may have run into situations where you had to accept something you didn't think was perfect in order to get something you really wanted. This is like the big kid version of that! It's so complicated and so important to do at scale that we actually create these very elaborate systems called "governments" to manage the process. What we found over time was that these big systems could be captured by people who didn't want to compromise, so we invented "Constitutions" that constrain the system, regardless of who is currently operating it.
Right now, you're saying that your personal assessment of what's pork and what's not justifies weakening the system that keeps all of us safe from our government.
lol @ civilized people in 2025 falling for the “authoritarianism in exchange for quality of life promises” trick.
If the OpenAI-NP board sees such existential risk from a change in leadership of OpenAI-P, how can they in good faith eschew control of it? By removing themselves from control, they would see the exact same risk anyhow. Elon could make a tender offer for the private for-profit entity that its board would be bound to accept in its fiduciary duty to shareholders. Plus, they would have to make the case that both Elon is specifically bad AND that he's so bad that it's not worth having $57B more to deploy for their AI goals. What's more, you would have to consider whether or not preventing Elon from controlling OpenAI even prevents whatever risk you see from Elon as he is already building xAI in parallel.
> IDK, Musk's offer is apparently for the nonprofit, not for a partial interest in the not-yet-extant for-profit subsidiary.
You can't buy a non-profit. It's their assets he's trying to buy. If OpenAI-NP values their OpenAI-P claims at $40B then that's what Elon would own according to their own beliefs.
They can make the argument that this offer is not in good faith and that Elon would not make an equivalent offer on an open market. That is, Elon's purpose in this offer is to prevent the sale of OpenAI, not to actually acquire it. Perhaps one could get around this if the cash were put in escrow, but also Elon likely doesn't have 100B in cash and it appears part of the valuation that Elon is putting up is x.ai, so it's quite reasonable to say that x is overvalued in this deal and that it isn't really 90B anyway.
> You can't buy a non-profit. It's their assets he's trying to buy. If OpenAI-NP values their OpenAI-P claims at $40B then that's what Elon would own according to their own beliefs.
From what I can gather you're just mistaken here, Elon seems to be offering 100B for the thing recently valued at 157B (per https://archive.is/59jZ5#selection-637.0-648.0), while what is being sold for 40B is not the entire $157B entity.
Either that, or elon really is getting a controlling interest, and then the argument about Elon being a terrible steward still applies.
Yes this an angle they could take. This would probably be a huge mistake. By doing this they would in part be conceding that it's a worthwhile offer to be made and Elon also is likely more than able to acquire the funds.
> From what I can gather you're just mistaken here,
I'm not. You and WaPo are. For one, it should be obvious that that's the case otherwise this offer would be worthless since it's less than the $157B most recent valuation. There would be no point in discussing any of this and everyone would be laughing at Elon. For another, here's the original reporting from the WSJ which is unsurprisingly much clearer: https://archive.is/stI0V
It would be a "subsiding tide lowers all boats" kind of thing.
Trump is talking about tariffs as if they're a tax on non-Americans, but they're paid for by Americans who import stuff, which is basically all Americans given where your oil, aluminium, and steel come from.
Those tariffs are a stealth tax.
You may be right that Tesla will struggle internationally and the car market as a whole will struggle in USA
If the existing assets are worth $40b then for $97b as a board you could sell it, build another OpenAI (in fact you could build 2 new competitors) and still have change left over to pursue your mission. If your charter is to "produce lots of OpenAI accessible to everyone" this has to fit that mission - more AI competitors, more access to AI, etc. No matter what your feelings are of the characters in this story... by definition given their charter they have $40billion worth of assets (by their valuation) to achieve their mission - which includes the PV of all internal advantages/models/patents/etc they have developed. By accepting this deal they are ahead.
So:
- Either the assets are worth $40 billion and to further their charter they should take the deal (and by definition have more assets/firepower to do their mission) OR - $40 billion is significantly undervalued which then raises other questions around governance, internal dealings, etc to try to convert to a for-profit by buying the non-profit's assets. If they go with the internal plan with the other deal on the table it could be argued as self-sabotage. I'm not sure of US law, but it could give rise to the validity of the deal legally. A non-profit converting to a profit is already a bit "hazy" from my understanding.
In the scenario where they chose the $40B in OpenAI equity, they are eschewing $97B with which they can achieve their mission. They will be less effective by $57B. They still have no control over OpenAI in this context. They don't have control over OpenAI from the perspective of safety/benefit of humanity. All they have is $40B worth of equity.
Or, they can get $97B and go about completing their mission. In this case, what happens to OpenAI doesn't really matter. They lose control over OpenAI from the perspective of safety/public benefit in both cases, but in this case they get to deploy $97B of capital to their goals. The success of OpenAI-P is irrelevant to OpenAI-NP.
Now, maybe you would claim that there is some kind of existential risk from OpenAI-P being controlled by Elon. But if that's the case, how is Elon uniquely special? How does OpenAI prevent Elon from gaining control of OpenAI anyway when they won't have control to prevent it? How can they be sure Sam Altman is okay to lead when the board already removed him due his duplicity once. To eliminate their control OpenAI-P, they open themselves up to this same risk regardless. They can take that risk with either $40B of equity or $97B of cash.
> "I'll pay you double" isn't the instant checkmate you're suggesting.
This isn't what I suggest at all and I would've expected someone who sees through such complex issues to rationales that are "obvious to everyone" would've been able to see that. This does however pose real problems for OpenAI-P as they try to go private!
This you?
> They can either have $40B in OpenAI equity or $97B.
In other words: the big number trumps the small number - QED.
> and zero on what it means to OpenAI-NP
Why do you believe OpenAI-NP wouldn't care about all the issues I raised?
> > They can either have $40B in OpenAI equity or $97B.
> In other words: the big number trumps the small number - QED.
Yes those are words I used to describe a factual choice they have. Following that are a lot more words that dive deeper into that discussion. Here's how I summarized my initial point in the TL;DR on my ultimate parent post:
"Musk is trying to force OpenAI to value OpenAI-NP's stake in OpenAI-P at a reasonable level which is far greater than the current $40B which will help Musk by potentially derailing OpenAI-P's goal to be spun off.
For people with smooth brains like me, I'll helpfully point out how this doesn't present Elon's offer as "an instant checkmate." The first word to note is "trying." This suggests it is an attempt to do something that is not guaranteed to result in a win (ie a "checkmate"). The second word is "potentially" which again reinforces the case that this does not guarantee Elon achieves the stated goal (ie is not "checkmate").
> Why do you believe OpenAI-NP wouldn't care about all the issues I raised?
My prior post raised all sorts of reasons and you seem to have decided to ignore them to build strawmen.
XAI is valued at another $40bn as well.
If revenue is rising, with the new cost structure it'll be a cash machine. The doomers who claimed Twitter would collapse were plainly wrong, there's been one minor outage with dramatically reduced infra and employees.
[1] https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-returning-to-x/
I’d give him SpaceX, but it definitely did better when he was paying less attention to it.
I wouldn't call him a founder precisely because of this, but at the same time they produced, I forget the exact number, but less than 200 individual vehicles before he took over.
The company was seen as a financial disaster, a pipe dream, and a money sink for a very long time, and he did actually make it profitable.
(Although, given he's ranted about the difficulties of being a public company and having to listen to shareholders, I'm not sure how much this happened because of him rather than despite him).
Pretty much mainly on government money - without it, it would've gone bust long ago. Specifically the policies of Obama and those pesk environmentalists he seems to dislike so much.
“In 2009, Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Musk for slander and libel. As per NBC Bay Area, the lawsuit was settled, and as a condition of the settlement, Musk and two other Tesla executives, JB Straubel and Ian Wright, are now allowed to call themselves co-founders, in addition to Eberhard and Tarpenning.”
He had zero involvement for ~1 year, invested some money and then five years later he’s CEO. That’s hardly the definition of founding anything.
If he buys OpenAI he will be 100% of the reason I don't use it.
Besides that, he’s pissed off the demographics most likely to buy Teslas. It’s not like most Trump voters are buying EVs
There is this weird revisionist history now that Musk is hated to dismiss all Tesla's accomplishments as meaningless. The traditional auto industry would have never embraced EVs to the extent they have if someone did not disrupt the market in a way like Tesla did. That is both impressive and huge net positive for humanity in a way that is an extremely rare achievement for any startup.
The amount of people who try and discredit the insane things he's managed to pull off is fascinating.
I can fully understand peoples hatred of him, but to write off the literal things he has accomplished is such completely revisionist and post truth. Noone in here will like this but he probably qualifies as schumpeters definition of entrepreneur of our century unless he destroys everything in the next time period which isnt zero but a low probability.
This isn't clear to me. Maybe in the US? but in Europe, there should be no new CO2-emitting cars by 2035. There's a global trend to move to EV due to climate change that has little to do with Tesla.
But that doesn’t justify Teslas value. In the words of the AI industry - “there is no moat” around EVs
The issue isnt that Tesla did stuff. Its that its all historical stuff that doesnt justify its current market price.
If I was to invest in a car company I would want them shipping millions of cars, not a "net positive for humanity" and a couple hundred thousand janky cars.
Unless you have some sort of way to investigate alternate timelines, there is zero evidence of this claim, including the absurd "never" claim. Many of the innovations that made EVs possible -- for instance rapid advances in battery tech along with the computational improvements to go with them -- came from outside the auto industry. And for that matter the automotive industry had been iterating on EV tech for decades before Elon started dumping money to buy himself credibility. The first lithium-ion EV came out in 1998.
The auto industry was getting there. The blip of Tesla had little impact on the overall timeline, and it certainly isn't a "huge net positive" for humanity. It's a barely noticeable nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Elon, in his absolutely desperate need to constantly be The Subject, has a brilliance in choose the inflection point for buying into something. If it's the emerging hot new thing, Elon will appear with big bags of cash demanding that he be acknolwedged as the leader that made it all happen.
The fact that it's worth more than all the other automakers combined.
> the other manufacturers are catching up
Re-read what you wrote, and consider how preposterous it is that automakers founded more than a century ago are now "catching up" to a company that sold its first car in 2008.
to justify this “vapor worth” Tesla would have to sell about 89 billion cars :)
…automakers founded more than century ago…
look-up when BYD was founded…
The South Sea Company was also stupendously valuable until it wasn't.
"Tesla stock price is too high imo"
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020
But, using pricing fundamentals, can you really justify Tesla’s value anymore than OpenAIs?
Tesla is not as profitable as Toyota, GM or Volkswagen and their profit is trending down. There is nothing justifying their market cap based on their profit or even 5 year expected profit.
Tesla has made a lot of promises that they haven’t come close to fulfilling and Musk right now is the definition of regulatory capture
>... big event showcasing its autonomous driving tech on Feb. 10, rolling out driver assist features to EVs as low as $10,000.
They also have a funky supercar while the Tesla one we still await: https://youtu.be/6M3QdN43yqI
Tesla is far from the most profitable automaker and doesn’t even have the largest margins.
Compare thier place in the automaker to say Apple’s place in the phone market
Presumably the two impressive companies are SpaceX and OpenAI? Or maybe the Boring Company?
You don’t see in the auto industry the type of “disruption” you saw from Apple and the iPhone where everyone jumped on the bandwagon, abandoned their old phones and most of the previous smart phone makers went out of business. While Apple’s market share worldwide isn’t that great, they take most of the profits. Tesla is doing neither.
Contrast that with Apple, outside of the US and a few other high income countries that is market share may be neglible. But at least it’s taking most of the profit and by far is the most profitable phone maker
It's more politicized..now?
More politicized than when literal politicians and three letter agencies were determining what should and shouldn't trend? How can anyone say that?
I do wonder if these clowns appreciate the long-term consequences of shattering the mystique of business executives. It's all memey fun and games in the moment, but later on when you have to make the counterargument against "why do these people deserve their billions? why shouldn't they all go up against the wall instead?" and you try to say "Well, it's because they're so talented and brilliant; doing so would cause incredible harm to the economy without their strong guidance", it becomes much harder to do that convincingly when we can all see them behaving like toddlers in public.
It's interesting to draw comparisons between Sam Altman and Liang Wenfeng, CEO of Deepseek, the latter of which is a domain expert, the former an exalted entrepreneur, supposedly gifted in allocating capital. If Sam has just been lucky with his one bet so far, there's bound to be some market corrections that are going to shake the world just like in the dotcom burst.
I'm sure that's never crossed Putin's mind...
Basically, if you buy the verified badge, you get promoted on the algo timeline, comments, everything. And people also getting money by views...
This affects in two ways, first, not a lot of people want to give Money to elon, and the elon fans want to pay.
Second, this also makes a lot of people posting everywhere posting insane things just to get views and money.
Oh, there's also the bots that just reposts other people tweets now on the comments.
Why comments? It's how you get more views (money).
Yes, I read this week in Private Eye that two of our frothiest UK MPs (Farage, Lowe) are earning £3k a month from tweets, mostly sycophantic praising of Trump and derision of immigrants as vermin. Top tier content, I'm sure you'll agree.
The whole thing with 'verification' and those posts being prioritised flipped that on its head, to the point where I couldn't stand using it any-more (this was two years ago).
Yes I know I can mute. But the settings can get reset and this has happened several times.
I did delete X this week though because there's been very little there I care about for quite some time that isn't also on Bluesky.
But unfortunately I'm not aware of a better way to be in the academic/research community. Twitter and BlueSky are where the conversations are happening. These do more for paper discovery than things like Google Scholar, Semanitic Scholar, and elsewhere. Not to mention that posts tend to have additional context that is often left out of works, making it easier to bridge into topics that are not in my niche.
The other unfortunate part, is that I too have to advertise my own work and myself to the community. The work is not enough. There's an easy to observe strong correlation between the number of citations I get and the amount of publicity my works get, with the latter strongly influenced by the efforts of myself and others in the research team. Though recognizing this, it does enable me to find a lot of hidden gems. Works that are often rejected and unnoticed because they are not from big research teams.
So far the pros outweigh the cons, well... at least for BlueSky. I can't say the same about Twitter and I'd wish more people would move over. Smaller communities have a lot of advantages.
Where the adults at?
It’s about products coming into the market at the low end that are “good enough” when the current leaders “over serve” the market - “low end disruption”. Examples are PCs -> mainframes, Linux x86 servers -> Unix boxes, digital cameras/phones -> regular cameras and even smart phones to PCs
Surprisingly enough, another facet of the Innovator’s dilemma is that low end disruption partially happens because the companies involved are not vertically integrated like Tesla and each part of the supply chain focuses on optimizing their components and have scale efficiencies because the low end market has more volume.
We see that now with Chinese ODMs in the EV space. We saw that before with x86 PCs vs Macs and to an extent with smart phones. Apple is kind of unique as a vertically integrated company. But even they don’t make their own processors or manufacturer their own devices
Yes. I responded directly to that comment, acknowledged it as interesting, but stated that there are obvious reasons why this fact - that you are building your entire argument around - isn't the primary concern in this transaction. In exchange, you offered me feigned disbelief that all the insanity surrounding Musk isn't totally distorting the economic incentives at play.
> Following that are a lot more words that dive deeper into that discussion
Following that are a lot more words saying the same thing over and over again:
> ...either $40B of equity or $97B of cash.
97 bigger than 40
> in the scenario where they chose the $40B in OpenAI equity, they are eschewing $97B with which they can achieve their mission
if they choose 40 they are eschewing 97 (which is bigger than 40)
> but in this case they get to deploy $97B of capital to their goals.
In this case, rather than having 40 to put towards their goals, they have 97, 97 of course being higher than 40.
> My prior post raised all sorts of reasons and you seem to have decided to ignore them to build strawmen.
It's not a strawman, it's essentially the only thing you've had to say this entire thread. If an executive order is passed to make 40 greater than 97 your entire argument completely dissipates.
> how is Elon uniquely special
This is the part that is obvious to everyone, but I already offered a few reasons why. If you can't see them, then I think we're at an impasse.
(The price of batteries is also why, at the time he went for batteries, the zeitgeist was hydrogen).
He took over 5 years in when they already had the Roadster in production and the model S design was largely finalized with the goal of ever cheaper and more mass market cars over time.
The cyber truck’s look and buying solar city were definitely under his leadership, other moves are less clear.
The reports I've seen say Musk took an active role within the company starting in 2004 (Eberhard was asked to leave in 2007), including overseeing Roadster product design from the beginning (but I've not seen citations for this), and was behind the idea of using the sports car to fund the development of mainstream vehicles.
As I understand it, the first Roadster to be delivered was to Musk and in Feb 2008? So between Eberhard and Musk as CEO.
The best I can do for citations is this, but this is Musk writing on Tesla's blog — I would like to say crucially the date stamp is before Eberhard was pushed out in 2007… but the oldest archive copy is 2010 not 2006 when the blog post claims to have been written, and when the guy himself has a trust deficit I think it's worth being open about this discrepancy: https://web.archive.org/web/20100802142703/http://www.teslam...
(I also found this, which doesn't add much, but does show that Musk overpromising and people calling BS is a constant over time: https://web.archive.org/web/20111125032325/http://gigaom.com...)
Liang Wenfeng:... Providing cloud services isn’t our main goal. Our ultimate goal is still to achieve AGI.
It is just as meaningless now on HN as it was then on comp.sys.mac.advocacy back then
> France will end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of an ambitious plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced.
> The Netherlands has mooted a 2025 ban for diesel and petrol cars, and some federal states in Germany are keen on a 2030 phase-out.
> India, where scores of cities are blighted by dangerous air pollution, is mulling the idea of no longer selling petrol or diesel cars by 2030, and said it wants to introduce electric cars in “a very big way”.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/06/france-ban-...
[2] https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-europe-sales-figures/
>Of Elon Musk’s Tesla, whose ‘mass market’ Model 3 is expected to roll off the production line later this week, Samuelsson [Volvo's chief executive] said: “It’s a tough competitor. But with this decision we are really becoming the second premium car maker in the world which will also be all-electrified.”
The EU followed France. France followed Volvo. Volvo followed Tesla. Tesla was the spark.
And “disruption” doesn’t mean whet you think it means. Were any of the existing car manufacturers ever threatened by Tesla as far as market share and revenue like what happened to RIM and Nokia in the smart phone space?
Yes, that is why almost all of them started heavily investing in EVs after Tesla proved they were a viable product. You seem to believe that "disruption" can only come from wild financial success. All it means in this context is that they blazed a new trail for others established players to follow.
"first amendment right to be on twitter" I would love to see that litigation. Especially when he's posting porn (generally allowed on Twitter even in the before times!) at the same time as there's a bipartisan anti-porn internet porn censorship bill being proposed.
I agree with you on the "any other privately owned service". But since Musk is now a government official the head of "DOGE" and controls and might do some of his official communications through Twitter. Twitter might no longer fall into the privately owned service category any more.
Same goes for Truth Social. Since the president "owns it", it might not be "privately owned" anymore. At least as far as the first amendment might be concerned.
In general government officials can't block you from social media if their accounts are used in an official government capacity. It might follow that since now the government officials are running the social media that they are using in an official government capacity they must not be able to ban you from the entire platforms.
A case about truth social* went to court but was thrown out because when it reached the supreme court Trump was no longer president and the whole thing was moot. But now he is president again.
*correction: it was about him blocking people on his twitter account.
Tesla shipped 1.2 million of the Model Y alone in 2023, making it the best selling car worldwide. They sell about half as many cars as Ford, at 9x the profit margin.
Nissan sold 3.4 million cars in 2023.
Tesla sold 1.81 million that year.
China, who are the big fish in the EV pond, sold 30 million cars in 2023. 4.9 million went overseas.
The Chinese plan? Build your existing car for cheaper and with an EV option.
SAIC\GWM sold 4.6 million cars in 2023. And their EV Ute is shockingly awesome compared to the Cybertruck.
I wouldn't touch Tesla stock with a 10 foot pole.
And to make it explicit, I dislike Musk as much as the next guy and I absolutely would not invest in Tesla at this point, but we shouldn't let that bias our view of history.
>Tesla has been objectively a hugely successful investment in terms of performance
But the only thing he cant dance out of is that he is an absolutely impressive showman. I mean even in the emails OpenAI released, he very talked his way into a controlling interest in OpenAI.
I just feel like, heaps of Tesla investors are going to be left holding the bags when the shine wears off.
That said, if I saw a story about Musk wising up a little bit and hiring someone to rejuvenate his PR I would probably spread some money amongst all of his businesses.
Is that not the magic of the computer? You can build and make it your own? You can program it and make new creations? A computer is nothing without the programs and if programs could only be created by those with the means to make computers, we'd only have calculators. Is this not the magic of the internet? Where we can make new connections and build our own spaces and things inside this environment? If the building was limited to those who built the environment, would it be anything like it is today? Is this not the magic of the smartphone? Where we build apps and programs for others to use? If apps could only be developed by Apple and Google, would we even have a flashlight app?
It seems a mistake to close the doors, to board up the windows, and reinforce the walls. It is fear that causes us to do this, thinking we must seek control to maintain our "power." But even a king is benefited when the subjects are free to dream. The fear that giving up a little power will result in losing it all has only led to having less power in all.
No, he is greedy, this is greed. He is greedy for power and money.
As Terry Pratchett alludes to many of his books, the problems start when you treat other people as "things". And this is rife at the moment. So mental breakdown doesn't really cover it.
Come on, you cannot have missed this.
We started seeing signs of it when he called that diver rescuer a pedophile. Most recently its been him caught lying about him being the greatest gamer in the world and being one of his biggest fans (Adrian Dittman).
And then high on ketamine doing that salute on the inaguration
Nazi salute (two actually) on national television? Destroy government extra legally with presidential pardon immunity? Bust on minorities etc with social impunity?
He doesn't just have eff you money, he has eff you status. No longer being restricted to the milquetoast middle ground CEO trap. Unrestricted treatment of low money people as subhumans. nothing like rights or laws to get in the way.
Thing is, his stock is very very tied to perception, which is a synonym for "hype".
You can see this emerging unrestraint coming from virtually all of silicon valley "leadership". Allin podcast. Zuck the MMA wannabe. Larry Ellison (the archetype) in orbit with trump. Gleeful twitters about eliminating all jobs with AI.
And yet we are entering an era of geopolitical uncertainty, war, reonshoring of manufacturing. To fight looming conflicts with China and Russia, what is needed is functioning institutional democracy, not venal banal oligarchical corruption.
The other historical danger is that the rich poor gap is indicative of a forthcoming rebellion of the lower class. Trump is himself a symptom of this, and while the poor continue to divide themselves between the two parties, Trump shows that wild unpredictable swings in voter sentiment can bring unexpected candidates to the fore.
All it takes is one charismatic candidate to pledge to cull the rich and being universal healthcare...
In the best of times Musk's leadership brought us stuff like "Joe Mode" just because he saw someone complain on Twitter.
Now he's completely unhinged and we can't trust him even as much as before. He might just decide something crazy and force the factories to change it just because.
The robo-taxi attempt is fraught and Musk's mind seems elsewhere -- swinging a wrecking ball on government, turning Twitter into his microphone (with great damage to its value and creating a real opening for competitors), posting videogame results reminiscent of the old North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung-style, where the newspaper would report on his games of golf in which he swung 18 hole-in-ones.
By hitching his wagon to political movements most despised by the consumers of EVs he's alienated Tesla's audience. By his further actions he's shocked and disgusted them so that driving a Tesla is becoming an embarrassment. The brand is kaput.
There's maybe a separate China story but it's no better. Tesla taxis in China, really?
[1] Global electric vehicle sales up 25% in record 2024 - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/global...
Tesla sales are static or shrinking
Take January YoY in the UK, EV sales rose 24%, Tesla's sales dropped 8% ish
For your hypothesis to make sense, first you would have to establish that Musk's antics have no negative impact on Musk's public opinion or public image.
In the meantime, you've started to see a global wave of both Tesla stores and Tesla cars being vandalized in protest over Musk's public support for Nazism. In some cases such as Germany you even had public protests against the neonazi party that Musk supports and promotes.
So you establish the fact that throughout the world people started protesting Musk due to his public actions. Do you think this change in public sentiment brings with it a neutral impact on sales?
Tesla's sales are spread over a few models, VW's EV sales are spread over ten or so models
My guess is that this robotaxi launch will make or break the company. If the product looks like any other first-gen driverless service, Tesla is screwed.
The price to upgrade all those older Teslas is gonna be gigantic and the company is already heavily scrutinized for their lackadaisical approach to QA and safety.
Downvote if you must, but the man knows how to protect his moats while branding it "ending wasteful government spending".
The stock seems to be waking up to the problem. Sales are down 12% in Europe in Jan. Down 60% in Germany. Apparently German electric car drivers are not fans of Nazis. Who knew?
Imagine if pretending to be your friend was basically a fortune 500 size industry.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/03/13/ev-euphoria-is-dead-auto...
> You seem to believe that "disruption" can only come from wild financial success. All it means in this context is that they blazed a new trail for others established players to follow.
That’s not at all what “disruption” means according to “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
https://duartem.medium.com/summary-of-the-innovators-dilemma...
Also look at “low end disruption” a “sustaining innovation”, “over serving the market”.
Most people who talk about disruption have never read Clay’s books.
Double jeopardy would stop the state from continuing with the prosecution, and the pardon means no consequences.
I hate that I consider this an actually possibly.
Maybe he also takes a page from Putin’s playbook and puts him on trial in a very public and humiliating way, sending a clear message to all the other oligarchs.
I know a lot of people don't like Cohen. I have my own friends I've had for 15+ years and I know them well, just as much as Cohen knows Trump, so I feel there might be some validity to his thoughts.
After which, he will look very tired, and suddenly stop being "turbulent", as per the meaning several judges have recently noted in Trump trials was once infamously said by a king of a priest.
Then I will be sad, because I would have liked to have gone to Mars.
I too would have liked to see Musk go to Mars.
Also, Tesla stopped selling the Model S here.
Musk has been going to far right rallies and jew hating for some time now.
eg: https://clearthis.page/?u=https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/01/...
The goalpost does not need to be moved to "if he's not literally operating a gas chamber, he's fine".
The best interpretation is that he doesn't care how it looks to others when he does a Nazi salute. Like others said, he's more 90s edgelord than actual jew-hating Nazi.
And the car markets in Europe are showing him what they think of people who do Nazi salutes publicly.
[To people who think he's a Nazi: yes, I've read all the arguments, no, I don't care - giving him the benefit of the doubt still makes him a gigantic shitlord who think its funny to do Nazi salutes.]
There is enough to criticize in his actions.
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2025-01/elon-musk-hitler-salute-i...
You might not know him for that, but people who pay attention do.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/17/business/elon-musk-reveals-hi...
We shouldn’t let that argument distract from the impact it has had on Tesla demand in Europe. For me personally it was the final straw and I won’t be buying one as I had hoped to.
Along with other actions certain to hit sales, and the lack of an apology (which would have been wise, even if you didn’t mean it as a nazi salute) suggests that Musk doesn’t care about Tesla car sales.
I suspect he knows the writing is on the wall for Tesla, so he’s betting on robotics as an escape hatch. I wonder if he’s also hoping tariffs against china will help vs their EVs. Either way, I don’t see much hope for Tesla right now.
Of course you can argue in bad faith because it costs you nothing to be wrong but does that imply you are promoting this behavior? Seems like the obvious implication
The media is outraged because a duck quacks like a duck
Pretending at equivocating just to troll will tank your own credibility.
Companies simply do not survive this in the long run unless very specific inelastic demand (I'm thinking bp oil spill as the only example) exists, and even then BP wasn't as international or charged or so ... Nazi.
Tesla is musk. Musk is a Nazi. Musk was a progressive environmental future in the previous media construction.
That radical shift means no brand, no customers. How many people want to drive a car that basically has a swastika on it? 4% of the population?
On top of this, musks absent leadership since the model Y, in addition to Tesla's general problems getting new designs out the door, and his marketing ignorance in the good days, means Tesla has no badge diversification a luxury marque, no extensive model diversity for all the markets of the world, no cabin options for their extreme design, no trims and body style variations.
It's just the 3 and Y basically.
Tesla should have bought another car company to gain engineer, design, oem relationships, and manufacturing capacity.
Too late. Tesla is now a pump and dump scheme, musk wants his 60 billion that Delaware is holding up and then he'll sell off just like the board is doing now.
China will seize teskas assets on a whim from a trade war or a hot war with Taiwan.
The energy sector is not one I look forward to, Tesla doesn't have any advantage in battery packaging or battery technology("battery day" is now officially a dud), and lfp lmfp and sodium ion chemistries are far more suited to grid storage and home storage.
We all know AI driving at Q4 isnt happening under musk. It's a long slog and musk fires software teams too quickly, because he treats them like hardware. That's basically all the hype.
In 2024, Tesla reported a 17% drop in Australia despite EV market growing.
If you own a social media platform and have this amount of reach you can never be “just a troll edgelord”.
But the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation founded to combat antisemitism, did not agree.
"It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute," it posted on X.
I am all for it, he took advantage of a program specifically created to be taken advantage of. But I am not sure if it wasn't for the the tax related benefits, carbon emission credits, and the damn HOV lane access Tesla would be here.
But again, amazing! The goal was achieved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_F...
I think your narrative is correct in the US, but not in the rest of the world.
EVs have been around since the 90s but there was a collective effort to restrict their growth and production.
I can't say I'm an expert on French automotive sales. It is possible they have always had a small market for EVs going back years, but there clearly was an inflection point that occurred after Tesla had proved there was widespread demand for EVs with 2020 being the first year that EVs made up more than 2% of new car sales in France.[1]
[1] - https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/france-keeping-p...
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-placed-bottom-consumer-repor...
> Consumer Reports‘ annual reliability rankings have been released, and with data from 24 brands and over 300,000 vehicles, Tesla fell near the bottom (19/24) along with Mercedes-Benz, Jeep, Volkswagen, GMC, and Chevrolet. Electric vehicles overall also placed poorly, being the second least reliable category of vehicles. Hybrids/plugin hybrids, especially those from Toyota, were found to be the most reliable.
Also the idea of the “best selling car” is meaningless. That’s like when Apple has “the best selling phone” when other manufacturers like Samsung sell a dozen types of phones.
MacOS was still something like 5% or so of the overall market.
can't be further from the truth. if you drive tesla and then drive all of the competitors tesla is faaar superior car. cars are great. the core issue here are margins - before competition tesla's could retain the huge margins on their vehicles. feels like in order to compete now they will have to drop the prices and hence their margins and with the forward p/e ratio of 1,000,129 that won't go well for the company's financials. and of course elon being a tool isn't going to be helping with this :)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gonzales-elon-musk...
I mean, that was a link to a German newspaper and the headline is:
> A German Eye On Elon Musk's Hitler Salute (Yes, That's A Hitler Salute)
Did you have any actual statistics to back up your assertion?
Trump is basically immune from scandal. The people that vote for him either don't care, are low-information voters that somehow don't even hear about it, don't believe the news reporting on the scandals, or even worse, actively support him because of the scandals.
Do you think Trump of 8 years ago would have allowed Musk to usurp the news cycle? Or even allowed the merest notion that he's not controlling _everything_?
Remember, Trump actually underwent a colonoscopy without sedation to avoid relinquishing the control of the nuclear weapons to Pence. This dude is a control freak.
Even endoscopies are possible without sedation, but most people don't have the ability to not squirm or gag for that one. You can even see youtube videos of people doing that one without sedation.
I dislike Musk as much as the next person, but I can't think of any major state actors or criminal organizations he'd currently be antagonizing.
Eg. Starlink connections in Ukraine are geofenced. Which would piss off both sides in various ways. Pisses off ukraine because they have legitimate targets outside the fence and pisses off russia because they have legitimate targets inside the fence. That’s walking a fine line.
This was debunked. Starlink was never active in Crimea because Crimea was sanctioned by the US. He said if the US government asked him to activate it he would. They did not.
What happened to Rockefeller, Carnegie and JP Morgan? It wasn't the plebs and their jabbering (see muckrakers) that directly took them down, though that jabbering did help give an unusual dude from the NY aristocracy named Teddy(who couldn't stand the muckrakers) political cover to move against them.
Also worth reading about the 2 elections preceding Teddy's fascinating rise to power, where the oligarchy bought the Presidency.
of the UK, for calling for a government minister's arrest and for his "civil war" tweet: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ydddy3qzgo and https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/elon-musk-need... and https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-called-uk-ministers-not-a...
of Germany, as "Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, is investigating whether Musk's support for the AfD on the platform where he has 210 million followers could constitute an illegal party donation": https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/elon-musk-investigated-...
(also note that the party he's supporting, AfD, is getting investigated for being hostile to the constitution: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-69003733)
of Italy, where he has been warned by "Italian President Sergio Mattarella to stop interfering in the country’s affairs after a controversial tweet on his page asked for judges to be dismissed": https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/01/04/germany-accused-mus...
of Canada, because of what he's doing in so many other places: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/musk-angus-trudeau-poilievr...
But I have just tried "Musk Geste" on google.de news tab (I don't know how Google is personalising either my search results or your results, but FWIW I'm in Berlin), and of the first page, 6/10 links explicitly call the gesture a "Hitlergruß" in the summary, and the other four call it that (or note that some people have called it that) in the body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces_oat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Uniformed_Servic...
Vehicle Model | Total Units | Fire Fatalities |Fatality Rate (per 100k)
Tesla Cybertruck| 34,438 | 5 | 14.52
Ford Pinto | 3,173,491 | 27 | 0.85
A meaningful comparison would say that the Pinto could catch fire as a result of a low speed collision and the cybertruck apparently does not.
Of course, a gas can with a spear pointed at it isn't a great design. But the rest of the cars were also dangerous as well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...
I know that neither you nor the other commenters nor the person who made that website needs anyone to explain to you why this comparison is invalid. It is such a facile comparison that to describe it is to explain why it's invalid.
So, again, I'm confused as to the point of your comment.
I'm confused as to the level of your incompetence.