From the docket (https://webapps.sftc.org/ci/CaseInfo.dll?CaseNum=CGC24612746, if links work correctly), it seems that this is Musk dismissing the case without prejudice (i.e., he can litigate the claims again if he wants) on the eve of a hearing asking the case to be dismissed with prejudice (i.e., precluding him from litigating the claims again).
Which makes me think this is a "you can't fire me because I quit" kind of action.
I think he feels bad for leaving OpenAI and is now jealous of what they accomplished. He probably just wanted to cast legal doubt over OpenAI's ability to profit from closed-source models. Which he managed to accomplish. If this hurts OpenAI's prospects to raise money is yet to be seen. I hope not...
I'd be pretty peeved if I backed a non-profit through its most-risky early days only for them to turn around and shun the original philanthropic mission in the spirit of profit maximization...
Not quite how that played out. He wanted complete control, they told him no, he pulled his money in the hopes of bankrupting them. When he reneged on the $1 billion he pledged in funding they were forced to seek funding elsewhere (Microsoft).
OpenAI went from a not-for-profit institution seeking to build in a safe and fair way that wouldn't advantage a handful of tech elite to very much the opposite. We can speculate on Musk's own motivations or call him a hypocrite but he's not wrong in pointing out OpenAI's sketchy behavior.
If I remember correctly, they started a for-profit side business (initially to bring in a little cash) and Musk was concerned about the way it was developing and who was gaining power over the company as a result. Perhaps he just wanted to stay in charge and didn't like other VCs moving into his turf, but it's also apparent that his expressed concerns at the time proved wildly accurate.
Yeah, I've Googled around and even asked ChatGPT. There seems to be no record of a for-profit side business. At least before Elon left. Of course they created one about a year after he left, because they're were running out of money, and would need to shut-down otherwise.
I can understand not wanting Elon to be the head of your company. His behavior is a little erratic.
You're still missing the part where a not for profit literally turned itself into a multi billion dollar for profit company and no ones been held accountable.
Nonprofits have to do that if they engage in commercial activity for tax reasons. You can't just group whatever activities you want under a nonprofit and make all that money tax free. OpenAI had to split it off as a for-profit once they had a product to sell to the public. The nonprofit didn't "turn into" a for-profit, the nonprofit owns the corporation.
Mozilla has the same structure with a for-profit corporation owned by the nonprofit, which allows it to take Google's money in exchange for default search engine placement. Likewise with Wikipedia/Wikimedia, Newman's Own, and so on.
Even so, it doesn't matter. Controlling board has been replaced by cronies who have no interest in the original altruistic purpose of the company, whether they call themselves not-for-profit or not.
No, you absolutely can't. Nonprofits can't engage in substantial business activities that are unrelated to their mission. If they do, they can lose their non-profit status.
The problem is that you don't understand how tax exemption works?
According to the OpenAI charter, their mission is to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." That's their legally binding mission - not selling cloud services by the token or licensing their models to companies like Microsoft and Apple. Any lawyer with half a brain would have advised them that those activities would almost certainly be found by the IRS and the courts to be unrelated business activities, so they spun them off as a for-profit corporation instead of taking an entirely unnecessary risk.
Just because their product is vaguely AGI related doesn't mean it has anything to do with their actual mission.
I've ran a not for profit worth ~$100m. All of those things are ones which fall within the original charter of openai. It's only when you start doing completely unrelated activities, like Mozilla's women who code, or you start raiding the coffers of the organization, like Wikipedia, that you need fancy structures to hide the blatant theft.
Based on this thread I find that incredibly hard to believe. Incredibly.
> It's only when you start doing completely unrelated activities, like Mozilla's women who code
Or like... Mozilla Firefox. Cause that's why they've had Mozilla Corporation since 2005. Google pays the corporation for default search engine placement and all of the full time Firefox developers I've ever known have worked for the corporation, not the nonprofit.
>Based on this thread I find that incredibly hard to believe. Incredibly.
It doesn't take much more than showing up and taking responsibility when no one else does.
>Or like... Mozilla Firefox. Cause that's why they've had Mozilla Corporation since 2005.
Yes, because Mozilla has always wanted to do more than be a browser company.
Remember Firefox OS?
Not for profits who have weird structures are there to make sure they can be looted for the benefit of the people running them, or to be used for pet projects that have nothing to do with the original charter.
Mozilla Corporation creation had nothing to do with Firefox OS or ambitions beyond Mozilla as a browser company -- it was forced on us by the IRS, after they'd promised we could take sponsorship revenue from Google for the search deal, directly into the non-profit, tax-free.
The IRS reneged, which led to the creation of the Mozilla Corporation for-profit subsidiary in 2005 to take the Google search revshare from that time on (we paid negotiated back taxes for the period when they said sponsorship revenue was okay to take tax-free into the 501c3).
Elon Musk kept giving OpenAI money after they announced they did that (even admitted that in the complaint!), which makes me suspect he's not as miffed about that decision as he claims to be.
Since we're commenting on an article about Musk's suit against OpenAI purportedly seeking the accountability the lack of which you decry, it is reasonable to assume even in the absence of a direct mention that you are expressing an opinion on the merits of Musk's suit, at least re seeking accountability of OpenAI. Especially when you comment is a direct reply to someone talking about Musk.
But I'd agree that Musk is a distraction here. OpenAI started as a non-profit project working to prevent exactly the type of irresponsible, profit-driven AI arms race it now engages in. Whether Musk is an angel or a demon is immaterial.
The person you are replying to said nothing about being entitled to the money. You are moving goal posts.
This is the equivalent of me coming to you and promising you money so that you can pull off a risky business move, then at the critical moment when I don’t like something pulling that money. Sure I might be entitled to do that as it is my money, but it’s a dick move and would certainly leave you holding the bag.
They declined to give Elon Musk control when he offered them a billion to save the company. Instead they turned around and gave up control to Microsoft for billions.
Do you honestly believe that if you were in Elon Musks shoes, that you would have given away a billion dollars without any conditions? How would you feel when you saw them turn around and sell out to Microsoft instead?
Expecting $1B unconditionally seems like an asshole expectation. Delusional and childish entitlement.
Do you believe that Microsoft has donated billions to OpenAI unconditionally?
Having Apple dependent on and paying for Microsoft infrastructure is a win for Microsoft. Of course the deal benefits Microsoft as much as Apple.
Microsoft needs Apple as a strong competitor. Otherwise they will be declared a monopoly and broken up by regulators. Microsoft was smart to use OpenAI as a proxy for this deal.
It's impossible to discuss this with you as you keep changing your comment.
I never once implied it would run on Apple servers. You're putting words in my mouth. I am asking if you have any direct evidence that they'll be running on Azure.
The fact that you keep dodging that question tells me you don't.
Yeah, I saw a story that backed up your claims after you left. Sorry I didn't just take your word for it - but that's not how it's done, you know? Strangers on the internet sometimes lie. Perhaps you've never encountered it before.
> Sorry for the shit language but I got tired of you not understanding anything.
Yeah, I wish you had actually offered a citation backing up your claims.
But, it was also the fact you kept changing the text of your comment, to remove the things I was addressing. It would have been better if you'd left a record of all the things you said. Like I said, editing your comments after the fact is dishonest.
Back at the beginning of all this, you had said:
> Having Apple dependent on and paying for Microsoft infrastructure is a win for Microsoft.
In the end it turns out Apple isn't paying for Microsoft infrastructure after all.
You are still missing the point and I think you have a persistent mental block. You are overthinking it. It's not that complicated.
The article says that Apple is partnering with OpenAI. It also says that OpenAI runs on Azure infrastructure.
Whatever they negotiate, the deal is intended to be a win-win for both sides in the long run. Obviously both sides are interested in making money. The article mentions future revenue sharing agreements and getting more users to subscribe to the paid ChatGPT.
Any increase of OpenAI/ChatGPT usage means an increased usage of (and dependency on) Microsoft/Azure infrastructure. I don't understand how this is so complicated to understand. OpenAI runs on Azure and more OpenAI usage/dependency means more Azure usage/dependency. Microsoft increases their cut of the AI market share as more Apple users use Microsoft infrastructure and of course they will make profit from that. None of these guys are doing it for charity.
> To answer your question below: Apple is a customer of OpenAI. They are using OpenAI as a service. The OpenAI models won't be running in Apple data centers.
Don't move the goalposts. I asked you if you had evidence that it will run on Azure.
It's a dick move to give people false expectations when you don't have to. It's a dick move to break your word. He didn't "have" to give them the money, but he didn't have to tell them he would give it to them either.
Them having to sell out to microsoft is directly Elon's fault though!
Like, you can't just directly cause the bad thing to happen with your actions, and then cry about it when someone goes to a different group for funding.
If Elon didn't want the microsoft deal to happen then he shouldn't have reneged on his funding promise just because they refused to give up complete control to him.
Elon offered funding. OpenAI declined the offer then signed a deal with Microsoft. Elon did not force them to choose Microsoft. It was simply a disagreement. After they signed up with Microsoft, Elon tried to get some of his money back. Didn't work. Too bad. Now he can move on with his life.
Then that means that any complaints from Elon about selling out are completely invalid, and it makes no sense for him to be mad about such a simple disagreement.
> Now he can move on with his life.
That would be wonderful.
Unfortunately you were the person arguing that it was somehow deserved for him to sue.
It is not deserved because he was the one who cause them to sell out to Microsoft.
That is the point.
The point is that you can't directly cause the supposedly bad action to happen, and then claim that you have been morally wronged when someone gets funding elsewhere.
If you think that it was merely a disagreement, then fine. Your previous arguments are invalid where you try to claim that this is some huge sellout situation, when it is directly Elons fault.
If you read the article, in the emails published Musk acknowledged the need to start charging customers due to the high cost of service, so it’s not like the other cofounders deceived him.
This is the better question... But probably easily answered by his army of sycophantic followers who will parrot anything he says no matter how contradictory the statements may be.
Yeah. Musk is cringe but on this he's right on this. OpenAI went from a company with noble aspirations to just another sketchy big tech company at odds with the interests of the rest of society.
Yea, they published some of Elon's emails around this. It wasn't a good look and I think they said "By the way, we will see you at a deposition" and it was over.
The way things are going, OpenAI can experiment on puppies and that'll still not affect their ability to raise money. They are clearly leading the space right now and making lucrative deals with most valuable companies out there.
They might not need to raise any more money. If they manage to release a significantly smarter model (gpt-5), I, and millions of others, will gladly pay hundreds of dollars per month to use it.
OpenAI has established lucrative partnerships with Apple and Microsoft and are the primary platform developers are building their applications on. They will have no problem profiting and raising money.
Nice. Do you actually realise these are just your beliefs and how you view the world? A good way to test this would be to check the number of zeroes in your bank account and Musk's net worth. Are they really close? No? Probably he has a different belief system then.
Why do people always assume anything he says isn't why he does what he does? He's repeatedly stated why he cares. It's rather frustrating. Like assume good faith please.
Which year of promising "FSD later this year/end of year" do we stop assuming good faith and recognize that maybe Musk has dug himself into his own hole when it comes to assuming good faith about his statements?
Kinda like "I have evidence that Vern Unsworth is a pedophile"? Should we have assumed good faith there, too?
> Which year of promising "FSD later this year/end of year" do we stop assuming good faith and recognize that maybe Musk has dug himself into his own hole when it comes to assuming good faith about his statements?
I take it as that is what he actually thinks. He is perpetually bad, exceptionally so, at judging the time things will take to complete. He's not actively lying. He actually thinks that. Once you assume that, you start to get a better understanding of why he operates the way he does. He's naive to a fault.
> Kinda like "I have evidence that Vern Unsworth is a pedophile"? Should we have assumed good faith there, too?
(First off, that's not a direct quote, he never said that.) That's not an engineering topic so I'm not going to stake my reputation on it, but my default assumption would be the same, he actually thought that, as silly as it seems. He had a preconceived notion, unfounded or not, that any old white man who retired to that area of the world was more than likely to be that type of person.
Of course the origin of that dirt seeking effort was that he was upset with the guy for doing personal attacks on him personally and also on the efforts of the SpaceX employees which he almost considers as extensions of himself. So he considered that he must be a bad person (as only a bad person would have attacked what he was trying to do), in multiple ways, so he went trying to find what other ways he was a bad person.
The lengths you go to just paint Elon as this innocent, naive guy.
The man who says "he knows more about manufacturing than anybody on this planet at this point" is actually, hilariously bad at making estimates. Tesla has even said in filings that "statements from Elon are visionary in nature and do not reflect an engineering reality" (to the DMV).
As for Unsworth, that doesn't stand up to the smell test:
If he actually believed that "old white men who retired to that area are more likely to be that type of person" he wouldn't have tried to peddle the "it doesn't mean anything, it's just a common insult that people in South Africa use .
> Musk’s attorneys argued that the tweet was not a statement of fact, but an insult.
So which is it, he believed it, or he didn't believe it?
> Of course the origin of that dirt seeking effort was that he was upset with the guy for doing personal attacks on him personally and also on the efforts of the SpaceX employees which he almost considers as extensions of himself.
This is horrific victim blaming, and a distortion of things. Musk said that he was bringing a team to Thailand to offer assistance. He was told that the sub wasn't a workable idea. But four days later, he arrived anywhere with it, and grandstanded in front of the media that his team and their idea was being ignored.
Unsworth never said anything about the SpaceX employees or their efforts. In fact what he said to CNN was that he viewed it as a "PR stunt":
> Are you willing to apologize to Mr Musk for saying that it was just a PR stunt?
and when pushed, he said that "Musk should stick the submarine where it hurts" when the discussion was on the media furore at the rescue site.
> So he considered that he must be a bad person (as only a bad person would have attacked what he was trying to do), in multiple ways, so he went trying to find what other ways he was a bad person.
This isn't reasonable, as you try to paint it to be. It's the actions of an utter sociopath.
Reasonable isn't taking a negative remark about you and making comments that you know will be picked up around the world, hiring a private investigator after you make them to try to supply proof.
And this isn't new for Musk. We all remember Paul Pelosi's "secret gay lover" was the one that attacked him with a hammer? That's what Musk truly believed too, there, I'm sure, so it was only reasonable that he broadcast that...
If WW3 happens anytime in the next 100 years, a colony on Mars would not survive because they would eventually stop receiving shipments of earth made tech. For example, replacement IC's or other silicon wafer based technology. Not like you are going to see a fab built on Mars in the first 20-50 years of a Mars colony.
It probably won't survive, but it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be tried for all different sorts of reasons. We don't know when a danger will occur or materialize, but we should begin to make sure our eggs are spread out as soon as possible to have the highest odds of survival as species.
Well yes, but I wouldn't be surprised if Starlink was for nuclear?
Why am I being downvoted here?
US, Europe, west, and democracy in general, at current times needs to be 100% at its game on the most significant power in human history.
Ultimately dictatorship is not going to give up, and they want to prove democracy is wrong, and at some points nuclear weapons are going to be used for that.
We are at pre-war right now. But it's a matter of time for all of it to escalate to all out war. We must be prepared for it.
Humanity cannot attain harmony because disparity exists. People are different, we have different beliefs in how rule should be attained and held, and we are willing to fight each other to the death to prolong that way of life. The concept of "perfect order" is nonsense, because it would require so much concentrated bigotry that nothing would possibly ever change or be unique. There is no harmony for us to reach, besides the mutual acceptance that we exist in constant resource competition with our fellow man. That's all there is.
Elon Musk isn't your savior, he's a fickle authoritarian that would destroy society like he destroyed his own image, if he got the chance. You guys need to stop obsessing over the same three popular celebrities and move on, this stuff is embarrassing (even by HN standards) and a waste of both our time. Send it to TMZ and get ignored by them, if you're desperate for attention.
There is no harmony at current state, because that is how natural selection has developed us. Although it would still be better if democracy ruled the World rather than dictatorship together with democracy. Elon Musk is not the saviour, but none the less the goals he set make sense. The other part of your reply is quite ugly unbased attacks from you.
No. Climate change will be bad but won't render Earth uninhabitable. It probably won't even be as bad as any of the major mass extinctions we know about. WW3 is not assured, and all the major powers understand why nukes are a terrible idea. Even if things go hot between US/CN I bet it'll stay conventional.
Furthermore if those disasters do happen, they will surely kill a martian colony, since it won't actually be independent of earth for decades, in terms of spare parts, genetically viable population, etc, even if they do manage to grow their own food and oxygen.
This is a bunch of legal procedure that I don't know with confidence, but my expectation is that the answer is "theoretically yes, but it won't be granted in this case." That is, the "theoretically yes" comes from some sort of mechanism to handle plaintiffs who pull this sort of stuff abusively, but Musk's (lawyers') actions here haven't reached anywhere near that level of abusiveness, so there's no reason to grant it.
The battle for AI really needs to be won with FOSS like it happened with Linux.
I can't imagine a future where AI is only controlled by the powerful and wealthy.
Honestly, we take many of the great things we have thanks to FOSS for granted and come to think of it, if those were to be invented today, they would be locked behind a subscription fee or entirely discontinued because VC's couldn't figure out how to make money from them.
> I can't imagine a future where AI is only controlled by the powerful and wealthy.
No need to imagine. It’s already here. Look at all the open weight models - all big corporate developed and then shared because it suited their corporate objectives.
There is not a hint of FOSS like organic model development in sight. On the technique and research yes but not on the actual training.
It’s too expensive and thus automatically limited to big tech and gov
It's crazy how good open weight models are already. With a 7900 XTX I can run a roughly GPT-3.5 quality q6 model at 70 TPS. FP16 at 30 TPS. I can swap out the model to cater to specific tasks.
Sure, it's nowhere near the amount of knowledge as Claude Sonnet / Opus, or the suite of GPT 4s, but when you hook it up to external sources of knowledge, it's still freaking useful.
Note the date on that: it was published in Nature on July 30 2018, and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody would've sent a preprint to Musk up to a month before then. The "pedo guy" tweet during the Thai cave rescue was July 18 2018. Musk's "funding secured" Tweet that the SEC sanctioned him over was Aug 7 2018. His appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was September 2018. Most of his children and extramarital affairs post-date 2018; at that point, he only had the 5 with Justine Musk. Pre-2018, most of his ideas were crazy but at least engineering-focused on reasonable causes.
Musk has repeatedly said his ambition is to die on Mars. After a reputable scientific paper came out saying that if you step off Starship, that will be the very first thing you do, he doesn't really have anything to live for. Meanwhile he's given up so much for that goal (most notably, his first family) that it must feel pretty bitter to have invested so much in something impossible.
For that matter, the psychology is likely pretty similar to the core MAGA demographic, many of whom work hard all their life to achieve the American Dream and then find that the American Dream is going to other people.
I always thought Musk's turning point was in the pandemic when he was wrong about how dangerous it could be (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/business/Elon-Musk-tesla-...). And from there the decline began, but now I realize and remember that before 2020 he was already doing some crazy things...
Nah, terraforming has never been Elon's immediate plan. He knows that it's difficult and very slow process and won't happen in his lifetime. Their goal is to set up a self-sufficient Mars settlement, which doesn't depend on terraforming at all.
Also, impossible with current technology doesn't mean that it's impossible in the future.
He actually talked about this on his latest Diablo stream, here: https://youtu.be/wzIJDU8SPMM?t=2066 He seems to think that terraforming is possible in the long term, with solar reflectors in the orbit which warm up the planet.
Using mars as a long shot target to develop real affordable space capabilities which will help us learn how to stop asteroids and launch cheap internet satellites is cool. Being serious about living there being a near term important and realistic goal is lunacy.
I think you mean: many of whom work some of their life to try to get richer than they already are and then continuously watch Fox News and Newsmax for 20 years and therefore believe brown people should suffer.
Right, if this is true (possible I guess, but does sound a bit Syndrome-from-The-Incredibles), even if there's really no technical way at all to terraform Mars it's hardly the end of the world, uh, planet.
Not least, terraforming would take centuries in any plausible effort. If he goes to Mars to die, he'll die in a pressurised environment whatever happens.
Well, that's a crazy theory (but fun to think about). I don't think he ever believed that terraforming Mars would be achieved in his lifetime. It's not necessary for a colony, and he always talked about "window" in which colonization can be started. Like, there are many things that can set our civilization back, like nuclear war, pandemics, meteors etc., and technical progress isn't guaranteed (we've been on the Moon on 60's and can't do that now), so his philosophy is that we must do it as soon as we can because at any moment we can lose that chance. And starting a colony without terraforming is of course better than not doing anything at all.
I think his behavior is just the consequence of his wealth and success, of being literally at the top of the world in terms of money. And especially because his money comes from SpaceX and Tesla, both of which were considered crazy and impossible enterprises by most people (and there were many people people saying that it all will fail well before he became really famous and really rich). So I think he just started believing that since he was right with SpaceX and Tesla, and others were wrong (and he became the world's wealthiest person because he was right, so he was in a certain capitalistic way more right than literally everyone), he is right about everything and can do everything. And he was always kind of crazy.
Politically I think that maybe his actions are somewhat calculated, maybe he's predicting that Trump will win and be more willing to finance crazy big missions to space? Right now Tesla isn't dependent on American environmental programs as much as it was before, and SpaceX is in a position in which they'll get government contracts forever, no matter who's in power, so he doesn't need to please the current government. And I think he was always more of a libertarian, so that checks out with many things he's saying. His "anti-war" views can also be explained by desire to minimize the risk of closing that window in which Mars colonization is possible.
Bad means they're different from your own which are automatically good because NickC25 is the ultimate arbiter of how good political and economic opinions are?
Many public figures just copy popular opinions and present them as their own precisely so that most people will like them. They haven't even tried to understand what they're talking about. At least Musk has some understanding and isn't driven by conformity.
>NickC25 is the ultimate arbiter of how good political and economic opinions are?
God, I fucking hope not. I'm just a single individual, just a man. No different than anyone else here.
I think Musk's political/economic opinions are awful because he's so far abstracted away from the real world that his opinions are effectively worthless. I wouldn't trust a random homeless guy's opinion much like I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos' or Elon Musk's opinions - they both represent an extreme of how thing ares, but no way would they represent how society should move forward.
They're surely wrong, at least in some on way, but so's everyone else's opinion. These are areas which are far to complex for anybody to understand. All we really have is opinions.
At least Musk's opinions aren't just a carbon copy of whatever's popular at the time. That alone makes them at least potentially worth something. The celebrities who can only repeat what they're supposed to say to make themselves look good are the ones who should shut up. Their stated opinions are simply whatever they think will serve their popularity.
The person who still owns one of the two major US political parties despite being manifestly unfit, and who continues to hold sway over at least 33% of voters nationwide?
Say what you will about Musk, he's no Trump. At least, not yet. He hasn't alienated that many people, and even if he were to do so, it wouldn't be enough to impact Tesla's sales.
He's so far abstracted away from the world we live in due to his hundreds of billions of dollars that he really has no idea what he's talking about, but because the new-age version of "might makes right" which is "obscene capital makes right", people tend to give him more credence than he deserves.
He got lucky with PayPal, and lucky with Tesla. That's it. He is not the president, he is not god, not allah, not yahweh, the flying spaghetti monster, he is just a man that got incredibly wealthy both through his own intelligence and some good fortune. That does not mean he's qualified to opine on something outside of his area of expertise.
Would you trade your ability to speak publicly about things you don't really understand in depth in exchange for 100 billion dollars? I sure would. Give me 1/100th of that and I'm off to a private island to read books and grow my own food.
Musk was always the money and hype guy - he has personally built nothing. Tesla was not founded by him, SpaceX is Gwynne's baby, not his. Twitter still hasn't recovered from being X'd by Musk.
I think this is taking it too far. There are a lot of money and hype guys out there, none of the rest of them transformed the automotive and space industries. Most of them were shoveling money into "disrupt laundry" startups instead.
> Just to be clear, you're saying that Shotwell has contributed more to SpaceX than Elon?
Which contribution do you believe that Elon Musk had on the development of reusable rockets?
Let's put it this way: if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
> if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
Would we have reusable rockets in the same timeline as SpaceX, absolutely not. The proof is all the other rocket companies that have failed to do so, including government entities.
So yah obviously if Musk never founded SpaceX, we would not have reusable rockets right now.
> if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
> do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
Correct.
You don't need a hypothetical, it's not like SpaceX is the first rocket making entity in the world. Why were all the other darlings incapable? SpaceX didn't invent a new branch of rocketry after all. And they hired from the pool of engineers who could have and did work at all the other rocket companies.
How did this same pool of scientists and engineers end up with a viable reusable rocket with 300+ successful landings only when they came together at SpaceX?
There are many reasonable points of criticism one can make for Musk. 99% of Musk-hate I see on HN isn't among them though. It's more reminiscent of the kind of nonsense articles Tesla short sellers used to publish back in 2016-17.
The original Tesla guys recognized and agreed Musk was a founder as part of their settlement, and this is now both the formal and legal truth of Tesla. I think some others were also recognized as founders too. The two initial guys didn’t really achieve anything prior to Musk and other early people joining.
Calling SpaceX Gwynne’s baby is just straight up misinformation. Talk to actual employees from SpaceX, especially early on. They’ll tell you that Musk actually does get involved in various deep aspects of the vehicles. You might not be aware, but Gwynne Shotwell was in BD not product.
I'm sure Elon does get involved. The question is, does he get involved in a constructive way.
All signs point to "no". We know this, because of what the Tesla and SpaceX people he brought on to Twitter in early days after the acquission said. I believe the words were, "babysit", "distract", and "manage".
I'm sure some fanboy will mark me down, but this was discussed on this very forum when it happened.
His two first successful business endeavors were web-based services (i.e. software), and he had no real experience with or education in cars or rockets before he joined/founded Tesla and SpaceX respectively (he’s got a bachelor’s degree in economics and one in physics).
I think he’s probably a smart guy who’s worked hard to learn as much as possible about the fields he’s entered into, but I find it hard to believe that he’s a world-leading technical mind at either. The reason he’s struggling comparatively with Twitter is partly that he doesn’t take it seriously, and partly that he has other ambitions for it (“X the everything app”) than what it actually is.
The main attributes behind his success are his obsessive desire to achieve certain goals, and his willingness to take on a very large amount of risk over and over again (he could easily have gone bankrupt several times, but so far things have mostly gone his way).
Edit: Another reason he’s had a tough time with Twitter is that he’s acted out of spite and alienated people and organizations he should have been on good terms with, mainly advertisers (Twitter’s actual customers).
This is such a poor hot take. Literally every single person that has personally dealt with him disagrees this narrative. It's only popular on reddit/hacker news boards and among some journalists. Karpathy has a good discussion on it that I've heard several employees at his other companies agree with.
Or even Shotwell herself for that matter and how she has expressed how she and Elon subdivide the work.
Elon Musk is not nice person, but he gets things done and he's deeply involved in the day-to-day activities of his companies. I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes.
Altman has a basically fine image I think, in the sense that nobody outside of tech circles knows his name, and everyone in tech circles must at least admit that he’s good at getting investors.
Musk has a reputation as being too demanding, which is one thing if you are doing something revolutionary, but nowadays the market has mostly caught up to his cars. It seems all that over-working his employees has done is produced poor QA.
He’s also politically alienating to liberals, who would otherwise be inclined to buy his cars.
Liberalism is free trade, property ownership, etc. Many people are excluded from that-- it's an ideology where both the rich and the poor are forbidden from sleeping under bridges.
Of course it's alienating to ordinary people.
This is why you got movements like social liberalism, to try to temper the madness and turn into something less socially useless, but everything moves back towards its origin, so here in Europe even once reasonably decent social liberal parties have now decayed into liberal parties, into the inherently alienating position that is liberalism's core.
That, of course, isn’t what people mean when they say liberal in the US context, here it just means social liberal or cultural liberal. In our defense, liberal economics are the ground state in the US, we don’t think to name them for the same reason a fish doesn’t think to name water.
Yes, I suppose which of the parties is the free-trade and property party to the highest degree has gone back and forth, and it's mixed up with all sorts of weirdness.
I suppose now neither of them is a free party anymore at least, and I suppose both are landowner's parties.
Musk on the other hand has built things. People can disparage him all they want, but I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal. who cares if he opens his mouth on social media.
I mean, he went to russia to launch a rocket, figured out they were a mess, came back and... several years later the world is launching rockets all the time. (It's june 11, and just starlink launched 4 rockets since the beginning of the month)
The rocket stuff is like the rise of pc hardware, where things start happening faster and all of a sudden, commercial flights are putting people in space.
I kind of think openai got off mission, and won't be as good for everyone, except maybe in the sense that other folks like meta have opened up models like llama.
> I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal.
None of those make me better off in any way. Some (neuralink, the boring company) have never made anyone better off except maybe in some pilot program.
If you've ever looked at satellite internet, hughes was not affordable, and very slow. Now starlink has shaken things up, and it is even fast enough to do real work.
This is a strange comment. Economic success and executive pay packages don't disqualify the claim that there is an image problem.
If anything, Musk getting a $45B package after a year of failures and layoffs at Tesla is something that tarnishes Musk and Tesla's image. The fact that this cash package is almost exactly what he owes creditors for the loans he took out buying Twitter, it almost looks like he's begging Tesla for an undo button for his own terrible decisions.
As for Apple making a deal with OpenAI, the fact that every product integrating ChatGPT is just being ruthless enshittified as a result, this is terrible optics for Apple when their biggest competitor, Microsoft, is currently playing target practice with its feet shipping poorly advised AI integrations (see: Recall).
As for OpenAI's image, the only thing they have going for them is the technical impressiveness of ChatGPT - organizationally everyone I know in the tech space assumes that OpenAI is a dumpster fire of a company.
> If anything, Musk getting a $45B package after a year of failures and layoffs at Tesla is something that tarnishes Musk and Tesla's image
I hate to defend executive comp, but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018. Half of all EVs sold in the US are Teslas. In 2023, the Model Y was the world’s bestselling car, outselling the Toyota Corolla. That’s completely insane. What more do you want?
I believe in honouring deals, even if it’s unsavoury ex post facto. Until recently, that meant approving the pay package.
But Musk unilaterally amended the deal when he “threatened on X…to develop AI elsewhere if he doesn’t get a 25% stake in Tesla” [1]. Then he developed AI elsewhere [2]. If you promise to give me a dollar, you dither, I say I’ll burn your house down if you don’t, and then I burn your house down, I don’t believe you owe me the dollar anymore.
Musk should offer to return xAI’s funding and merge it into Tesla in exchange for the vote.
Boards are supposed to be forward-looking. Typically a board would electively reward a CEO who has delivered out-sized performance out of fear that the CEO would leave for a different job (creating a bad future for the company).
This situation, though, has a different set of forward-looking concerns. Musk already has several other jobs. And the primary concern is that he wants this large pay package so that he can have more personal resources to put toward those other jobs (at the expense of Tesla).
As it stands now, Musk’s personal financial position depends on leverage against his Tesla position. This binds him to Tesla’s future performance. Giving him a huge personal pay package essentially weakens that binding, giving him greater license to deprioritize his Tesla leadership in favor of SpaceX, Xai, Neuralink, etc.
There is an argument to be made that Tesla’s board should be essentially antagonistic toward Musk’s other companies, given that his time and attention are finite resources, and Tesla is a public company. The board has responsibilities to investors to maximize their return, which should take precedence over whatever feelings of gratitude or connection they feel toward Musk personally.
>...Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018
Another way to think about this is that investors are in a position where they got that wildly ambitious growth, and are currently not obligated to pay for it, so why would they? This is to the guy that has no problems breaking contracts of his own, and gives the finger to people he owes money to.
I guess we'll see when this comes to a vote, but it would be shrewd business not to.
They are stock options. The money comes from the open market if he decides to sell the shares, and the shares themselves come from share dilution if he decides to exercise the options.
Should've let him keep the options we granted him back in 2018. Taking away his performance-based compensation is total bullshit. I voted to give it back. His options were worthless for most of that time. He got the stock to appreciate a lot and some guy with 6 shares sued him for this crap so that the lawyers and him could split $5 b that a judge granted them.
If anyone took away a software engineers options here after a company became successful because the company later decided it's too much there'd be hell to pay. Everyone rightfully complained about Zynga doing this.
But here it's fine? Bullshit. I voted to pay the man his due. I voted to move the corp out of Delaware to Texas. He made me money under reasonable terms. Back then everyone said he'd just fail.
> but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018
The speculation on Tesla's stock raised the "market cap". Any stock that Tesla doesn't own brings Tesla exactly 0 dollars, no matter how hight the illusionary market cap there is.
How much of the stock does Tesla actually own? How much of the stock that Tesla owns can the company safely sell to offset the $45 billion of actual money that they had to cough up for Elon?
They don't have to cough up any money. The 2018 compensation package they agreed upon is in stock options with vesting in 12 tranches, tied to stock price performance
The stock price increase directly benefits Tesla shareholders. It also reflects revenue growing by 5x since 2018 and the company becoming profitable since 2020.
> They'd do much better if they just shut up & built...something they're both clearly good at
That would require either of them to be good at building anything, and I don't think either has ever demonstrated that. They're just money men, and Musk went out of his way to PR himself as the real life Iron Man before utterly ruining it because he can't shut his mouth when he really, really should.
Doesn't change the fact that he didn't build shit. He brought money, which is what I said he did.
He wrote some code back in the 90's and there's no evidence he's done any actual work since then. His job is to be rich, and write checks. Anyone can do that. I wrote a check this morning.
Well, that and going on Joe Rogan to get high and crash the stock price of his companies. I could do that too I suppose but I'd prefer not to.
Is this what he wants to distract from by throwing screaming tantrums over apple and openai? Or is it the $46bn grab-the-money-an-run move as long as the tesla stock is still worth something?
This was always "lawsuit as press release", and despite the fact that I may agree that how OpenAI essentially morphed into a for-profit entity was dubious, Musk looked a bit ridiculous when it came out that he was essentially just butt hurt that he didn't get to take control of OpenAI under Tesla.
>how OpenAI essentially morphed into a for-profit entity
This is my big issue with them as well, and the fact that they still stick to 'Open'AI as their name. They might as well just sell themselves to Microsoft at this point.
Of course that lawsuit probably was not going to go anywhere though, seems like it was just for publicity.
To this point I just want to have a way to block all Musk related news from my doom scrolling time. I just can't see any meaningful value in these news anymore.
The big question is....whose going to play Elon Musk in the true-to-life film version, about the slow downfall of the man who wanted to be king of everything, but ended up a nothing as part of a musical duo with Kanye West, with a Reno casino resort residency.
His pipedream rocket company just succeeded at launching and landing the most impressive vehicle ever built by man. You could watch high-def live footage as the thing re-entered at the atmosphere at 20,000mph thanks to the space internet system that is rapidly becoming the best in the world. And in two days he's getting a $56 billion pay day granted to him by Tesla shareholders. It's a little early for schadenfreude.
When would you say the downfall started? Do you think the recent achievements of the companies he's involved with are repeated luck? Would you say that all successful individuals were always successful or had pleasant personalities?
I'm not necessarily a huge fan of Musk, but it's always interesting to see how his accomplishments are diminished. The attitudes towards Musk are remarkably similar to how others perceive Steve Jobs.
I never thought about it before, but you're right. He's got such an odd presence and unidentifiable accent(to me) in most of his roles, I think he'd be about the best we could ask for.
I honestly wonder if Apple should come after him for libel after yesterday's comments.
Apple exhaustively demonstrated privacy-focused AI integration in the OS using local models, and the ability to dial out to the OpenAI API, but only with the user authorizing every single call.
If Apple isn't going to publicly insult Elon's intelligence by accepting that he really believes his mentally bankrupt statements, he leaves them no choice but to file a libel case. His statements seemed to be carefully and maliciously prepared in a way that would damage Apple.
I don't think that allowing a bully to smear anyone's reputation with each tantrum is a smart thing to do, specially as Musk's tantrum consists of attacking a central piece of Apple's sales pitch: security.
My point is that it's arguably not a 'tantrum,' it's actually a strategically worded statement designed for maximum damage to Apple's business. The man isn't actually stupid. Musk is desperately trying to carve out space for his personal brand in AI, and to do that he needs to drag down major players like Apple. I think there's a strong case to be made that that's exactly what his move was.
If he gets serious blowback he can try to claim 'free speech,' but weaponizing speech for malicious purposes/personal gain has never been a protected activity.
> My point is that it's arguably not a 'tantrum,' it's actually a strategically worded statement designed for maximum damage to Apple's business.
I think so, too.
> The man isn't actually stupid.
I'm not sold on that idea. The character has a long track record of doing stupid and easily avoidable things, specially out of impulse.
> Musk is desperately trying to carve out space for his personal brand in AI, and to do that he needs to drag down major players like Apple.
I don't think he has anything to show regarding PR. His modus operandi is taking over other people's work and pass himself off as a pioneer. Hence his despair to hijack OpenAI,and his tantrum when he was denied that.
Could you actually outline for us what comments of his you're saying are libel, and explain why they're libel? Rather than just seemingly piling on the ad hominem in this thread.
His shrill statements implying that Apple will be piping all your private data to OpenAI are the exact opposite of what Apple demo'd. It's like they were designed to destroy consumer confidence in Apple's privacy protections across their entire product line, protections which Apple obviously designed at great expense and effort and are core to their business strategy.
This is someone with 187 million twitter followers who knew his statements would reach headlines to influence far beyond even the massive following. I don't think it would be hard to prove a billion dollars or more in damages for the kind of legal team Apple could easily assemble.
Can you quote him directly please? You're saying implying but it's more likely you're placing that assumption or interpretation on it. Was it actually concerns he put forward of how easy it would actually be for Apple to do so, rather than claiming they will 100% do so?
Re: "I don't think it would be hard to prove a billion dollars or more in damages for the kind of legal team Apple could easily assemble."
It's practically impossible to prove - in fact his statement and his reach you talk about could perhaps even have driven up their revenue, if we're just going to play armchair expert and put assumptions forward as reality.
> “It’s certainly a good advertisement for the benefit of Elon Musk,” Kevin O’Brien, partner at Ford O’Brien Landy LLP and former assistant U.S. attorney, told CNBC at the time. “I’m not sure about the legal part though.”
Because they have a brand reputation and all the (recent) words coming out of Elon, his media platform, and his AI are shit and people don't like them and it would conflict with Apple's brand image - they don't even let movie villains use iPhones and you think they'd put the potty mouthed, anti-science pro-fascism LLM he's trying to make onto their phones?
I dunno, why wouldn't you want an LLM trained by a company whose owner keeps inviting child pornographers and neo-Nazis to post? What could possibly go wrong?
Please do show me where he explicitly invited child pornographers. Go ahead, link me to the specific place where he said that. I want to see what he said word for word.
Can't make decision for myself. Article doesn't contain picture in question or a link to a tweet or anything of that nature. Given that current internet narrative is neurotic and even smallest questions are blown out of proportions I tend to think that offence was not that big, otherwise FBI would request IP address of the guy and put him in jail (much better outcome then "ban his twitter account")
I'm annoyed what was once an admirable mission of bringing open-source not-for-profit AI to the world was gleefully abandoned as soon as Micro$oft and now Apple threw some money their way. Seems understandable to be peeved if you were someone who put money and effort into this thing due to concerns about an AI arms race.
Which makes me think this is a "you can't fire me because I quit" kind of action.