Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI
reuters.comSam’s reply on twitter[0]
no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
Elon's response: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062013109703009
> Swindler
In another tweet chain: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889063777792069911
> Scam Altman
I absolutely hate how much CEOs acting like children / influencers has become the norm. Maybe they were always like this, and twitter has just given us a window into it, but I for one would wholeheartedly welcome a return to "respectability" norms for business and civic leaders.
The name-calling in public discourse wears on me. Ad-hominems, bad faith arguments. I’ve gotten to where I avoid the news altogether because of this seemingly accelerating trend.
I can handle some name-calling, but not the bad faith arguments. They can be whiny man-children all they want so long as they act like rational adults when it matters. But they can't even muster that anymore. It's all self-indulgent performance all the time. And just enough people are willing eat it up that it keeps reinforcing the behavior.
We are being shitty parents to our billionaire class. Billionaires need boundaries if we want them to grow up and turn into respectable adults.
hear no evil...
I think the grass roots of the tech world has some portion of the blame here. The introduction of hoodies, flip-flops, open drama and bickering, and kicker into the office environment is not unrelated. And it’s not just CEOs, we’ve now got a senator who looks like the guy I bought pot from as a kid. I never thought I’d make this argument, but maybe at least appearing respectable increases the odds that you’ll actually be a little respectable.
what people wear seems way more superficial than what people say and do
> I never thought I’d make this argument, but maybe at least appearing respectable increases the odds that you’ll actually be a little respectable.
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.
Eh, respectable looking people were responsible for the Holocaust, slavery, segregation, and plenty more.
They were at least united and somewhat effective in commiting these atrocities.
Plenty more indeed, like , hmm I dunno, Western Civilization?
Not the tech world generally. Silicon valley culture specifically, but SV is hardly the entire tech world.
It's the mirror of society, you have as many people who find him dumb and childish as you have people seeing him as a role model. Same with Tate and other influencers, the hard truth is that a lot of people are perfectly fine with these behaviours, and through internet's anonymity they thrive in ways they couldn't back in the days.
It's a very minor thing in the face of the idiotic insanity going around, but I just saw and was annoyed by Altman's twitter bio: "AI is cool i guess".
Is this like some kind of ironic detachment? It almost makes you long for corporate pablum about building a world for us all.
That would require the death of social media.
Fingers crossed!
It already has died 5 years ago - what we are witnessing now is just the decaying of the corpse
That's one of the things involved that should die, yes.
I welcome this with open arms.
Make it so.
This is the way.
One can only wish
I think it’s because the country has had its education so far degraded that messaging needs to stay at that level…
Didn't Epstein's pedophile island prove once and for all that billionaires are not "better" in any way, shape, or form than mere mortals? They are where they are because of luck and not because of any inherent qualities.
Why would he offer a swindler and a scam almost $100B?
We live in wild times, where billionaires share pathetic quips on social media. Like they are 12 and on a playground.
Musk borrowing from Trump's playbook...childish nicknames
wow I had no idea the level of discourse on that x website was so low, has it always been like this?
Reading the other comments in this Twitter thread it seems like it's gotten much worse than in the years before. It's seems so much more political and radicalized now.
>It's seems so much more political and radicalized now.
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?
Is anti-confirmation bias a thing? More likely to notice politics when it is not your own politics.
I mean, non-conservative opinions are pretty bland. The apparent MAGA strategy of burning it all down, well…
I’ll say it’s very, very noticable.
Or perhaps you are blind to how outrageous non-conservative opinions can be?
Potentially? I’m probably far more likely to ascribe them to a few isolated lunatics instead of the whole political faction
Yes and no. Yes the level of discourse was always that bad, but previously the people posting at that level were Internet randos, not the President of the United States and the executives of our most important businesses.
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.
> "Well, it's because they're so talented and brilliant [...]"
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.
Deepseek is run by a hedge fund and they are 100% in it for the money and not the culty AI doom BS, which helps a bit.
Wenfeng built a quantitative trading company upon his search to utilize AI for financial gain. He then leveraged his earnings to take a moonshot on buying a mother lode of NVidia chips – in 2021, prior to the US export bans and the release of ChatGPT – to develop a next generation of AI. Open AI led the way, and Wenfeng was perfectly placed to learn from them and do something better, and, ironically, be more open than OpenAI. Perhaps Deepseek knew they couldn't make money by gatekeeping the model as OpenAI would quickly catch up, or perhaps it was Wenfeng's personal call to make and he just wanted the rest of the world – not just OpenAI, not just the US – to have a fighting chance before the world economy is about to be upended. Or more likely, Deepseek are holding an even more secret sauce that they are using for AI trading.
Dunno. In an interview:
Liang Wenfeng:... Providing cloud services isn’t our main goal. Our ultimate goal is still to achieve AGI.
idk but action speaks better than anything else.
Well, Trump was always this, but my theory is Musk cooked his brain on various drugs during COVID lockdown and is now incapable of feeling fear.
Both Musk and Trump have "fuck you money". That is, enough to not care about consequences and to attract leeching sycophants. At best this leads to arrested development, at worst the lack of any need for introspection or grounding reality checks by others regresses their decision making.
I had a saying about academic professors - if you are not regularly contradicted, you have a problem. How can you be sure you’re right about anything? You run the risk of ending up in a fantasy land.
"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?"
I'm sure that's never crossed Putin's mind...
"let them eat cake"
vive le rasoir national!
Objectively good outcome.
Depends. It's way worse now. But I think the main difference was X Premium or whatever they call now.
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).
> And people also getting money by views
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.
It wasn't always this bad for most people. It's fREe SpEEcH aBSolUtISm now.
Yeah, except when you criticize the tsar.
Do not check out Kanye West on x unless you want to see what no censorship means (spoiler alert: a guy with 33m followers posting porn and glorifying nazism).
As of a little while ago, he’s gone from X
Given that Musk is "White House Tech Support" can he actually ban him? Doesn't Ye(Kanye) have a first amendment right to be on twitter, since twitter is now run by a "government" official?
I hear he deleted his account rather than being banned.
"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.
There is no first amendment right to be on Twitter (or any other privately owned service). That said, Musk doesn't actually care about free speech in general. He cares about his own free speech and the speech of those that agree with him.
> There is no first amendment right to be on Twitter (or any other privately owned service).
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.
It's been so for a long time amongst casual twitter. I'd say celebrities shitslinging at each otherin public became more common place around the pandemic though. No, Elon's purchase and unbanning of fascists did not help at all.
My experience was that most of the garbage was hidden below the 'show more replies' section and the higher quality replies were more likely to be at the top (not always, but mostly).
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).
I stopped going to Twitter often, but since Elon's tweets always appear in my notifications, they frequently are one or two words.
Yes I know I can mute. But the settings can get reset and this has happened several times.
Back when he was aggressively inserting himself in my feed, I just blocked him and never saw him ever again.
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.
You forgot one of the best options: ignoring social media altogether.
This is true. For the most part I do.
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.
We need a modern equivalent for old school forums. They were full of people interested in a topic without a lot of noise from people who benefit from disrupting them.
I agree. I think we've made a terrible mistake and forgot something important: you can't make a product for everyone. As long as people are not uniformly distributed, then it means there is no real "center" point. On a random normal distribution, you can find a point that is minimizes the distance to all others, but that point will not be representative of the distribution itself. If you try to make something for everyone, you make something that is for no one. Instead, we then need to make environments. Places for others to build. This ends up being the only thing that can be for everyone.
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.
Wow, it's like 12 year old boys or something.
Where the adults at?
Many moved to Bluesky. Others on X try to avoid the circus created. A few may even be on Mastodon.
I kinda meant — where are the adults leading our country, running our corporations ... but I get your point too.
This is the victory of Gamergate politics.
It’s often higher than this, but your talking about the people in positions of power and leading our society…so my expectations are lower.
Your question is loaded with a harsh generalization. The level of discourse at best can be generalized to a person, not to all people on a website.
Anything Musk interacts with fills up with the peanut gallery cheering for a fight.
Honestly it isn't much better here.
His boss called someone "Newscum". Birds of a feather flock together.
For whatever reason, Newsom's gotten many colorful nicknames from his critics. It was one of the funnier parts of moving to California. At one point I maintained a list of any I heard but it appears to be lost. Newssolini, Gruesome Newsom, Any Twosome Newsom, Gavin Gruesome, Governor Gaslight...
The reason is because his critics have nothing substantial to criticize him about. Name-calling is an admission that you got nothing.
People call Putin enough names. I'm sure they have a lot of reasons for that.
Same goes for Gavin.
People mostly use descriptions like "dictator" or "murderer" for Putin, not wordplay based insults.
Never spoken with a Russian I see...
Such a child
On one hand, I used to look at these super successful people with a pretty heavy dose of envy. Now I honestly don't, because I find their behavior reprehensible and disgusting, and just so childishly stupid. Granted, I'm fortunate enough that I really don't want for material goods (that's also because I realized I don't need very much), so I might feel differently if I had to slave away at some job I hated.
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.
Sam Harris has some of the best, arguably more constructive, critiques of Elon. I guess they used to be some degree of friendly with each other, exchanging text messages and such, but that has since ended.
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.
I'll have to find the commentary by Sam Harris, I think it'd be interesting. I thought this post by Philip Low, founder of NeuroVigil, a Neuralink competitor, was very insightful and interesting: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7288439...
That is very interesting, thank you. It fits into the narrative I've seen constructed remarkably well. I suspect that these people have assessed Musk accurately, and he really is a mess of a person. Aren't we all, in some way or another.
That's entirely forgivable, until you give a broken person immense power and influence. He's extremely dangerous.
I'm of a similar vintage and perspective to you. Watching people into their 70s and 80s still working tedious political jobs, or outrageously rich people squandering hours on screens and miserable taunting astounds me.
Both of them.
Let them fight.
Sam could reply with Elon Skum !
https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1889059531625464090, for those of us without an account.
FYI X has relaxed the login prompt (at least for me). You can again see the post without an account, but not the thread.
I like not even going there
I created an account for a product I am currently working on and got suspended after a week or so. Didn't make any tweet. Didn't even login or use it. Now when I open Twitter/X it just shows I was banned. I honestly wonder how that site it still in operation and still has real users after all of this.
Me too! I'm working on deep-bloom, and registered an x account. Even bought the premium. Then I got banned for no reason. They don't even cancel the premium, you have to jumpy through the hoops to cancel it manually. Probably did me a favour.
It doesn't matter. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Good that we are talking about a thread of messages here.
I'd rather not. I can view threads on Nitter instances without enabling JS.
My firewall blocks all IPs belonging to Twitter ASN. Have to use Tor Browser.
no, thank you
Nope, not interested.
I don't like petty internet arguments, I can't help appreciate him referring to it as Twitter.
I only call it Twitter because I’m not gonna say “X” it just sounds stupid.
It's like the ship of Theseus for me. If all of the parts are swapped out, is it the same ship? I don't know, that's interesting to think about. But if all of the parts are essentially the same but worse for wear, with a shittier captain, is it the same ship? Yes, it's still Twitter.
It seems like everyone calling it x.com would allow people to use the name without having to know the history or be confused by just calling something X.
Kind of how pets.com was always called pets.com, because just calling something "pets" would be confusing.
It's "X, the everything app", said with an exhausted sneer.
Zombo already took that title
You could split the difference and call it Xitter.
Pronounced "Shitter"
This is what I do. I cannot call it Twitter anymore because that makes me sad (I miss you Twitter 2008-2016). I cannot call it X because that is dumb. So Xitter it is.
Yes, and I think of the "X Window System" often when "X" is mentioned, doh!
It's a good thing their logos are so different.
I always called it OSTEN for the same reason
i say "the X website" and I find it very funny
He should probably take that twitter deal, probably not getting better than that
0penAI having its 2008 Yahoo moment.
Ya who?
Can Sam reply on his own? Does he have controlling votes?
Sam gives off incredibly strong “pride cometh before the fall” energy.
There's certainly a part of me that wonders if Altman incorrectly assumes last year's rules still apply, when in fact he just ensured retribution from the man who counts all three branches of the United States government as his underlings.
Well, I certainly hope people like sama are still willing to push back, and don't just bend the knee immediately to President Musk. Surely there's at least one or two people out there in Silicon Valley that still have a backbone.
It's a sad state of affairs when the hope is that Elon's illegal ravaging is stopped by Sam Altman.
Don't be so glum, some of us like watching the rich eat each other for a change.
I think Sam is at least stubborn and willing to be ruthless, so I feel like he's a good person to stand his ground
Is that not the exact same argument people make for Musk?
Not that I agree with that position either, but interesting how those traits appear to be perceived positively now by some.
It's the kind of trait you perceive positively when they are applied against people you dislike, and you perceive negatively when they are used against you.
I mean, Altman also wrote this (https://x.com/sama/status/1882234406662000833):
> 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!
Who are they? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta have already kissed the ring
Microsoft is the most influential business wise, and they did not align themselves with the new administration.
Microsoft very much has. They've done a good job staying away from the photo-ops. https://www.semafor.com/article/01/15/2025/trump-musk-dined-...
There's a difference between saying no and poking the bear. The reply was essentially a middle finger. A simple thanks but not at this time, or no reply at all, would probably have been a safer move. As CEO of a company, you should probably put said company's safety above pride. My .02.
That's not how you deal with Elon "Go Fuck Yourself, Bob" Musk.
Next: Trumps blasts OpenAI as "un-American" and DOJ opens an investigation into "improper x". Investors get nervous given Trump's unpredictability, share price drops. Elon et al get it for half price. Nice little scam.
(Not that I would feel bad. Altman can crash and burn and the world would be better off.)
Ah, but that’s assuming that things can’t go from bad to worse, which is a potentially fatal mistake to make.
To be fair, so does Musk.
So does Musk, and Trump, and Bernie, and AOC, and basically everyone who is a "personality" in today's America.
...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.
I don't think Bernie fits here. You can disagree with him, but he basically makes political / policy comments (the same ones he's made for decades too.
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)
You know who he is when I mention him by first name. That is what makes him a target, irrespective of the quality of his ideas or whether he's a decent person.
How can you see the parent message on Xitter?
Brave of him to be posting that on Xitter.
$974 million maybe!
I'll buy both.
GD!
"The bid is being backed by Musk's AI company xAI, which could merge with OpenAI following a deal, according to the Wall Street Journal which first reported Musk's offer earlier on Monday."
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.
If they merge two money furnaces, then they can make up for the losses with the higher volume :)
I guess just like First CityWide Change Bank.
Indeed. When two black hole merge, the resulting blackhole has larger mass and size.
I they cut costs enough, they can make money without selling a product.
This is an underrated comment.
And the key point in this news that punctuates the ridiculous farce that is the nature of this offer.
xAI is not making any money
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.
That’s called Survivor bias
as i underestand it, xAI is essentially Elon's personal piggybank, and how he funnels money from his other companies back to himself. Tesla is public and Twitter is co-owned by a whole bunch of other billionaires, but xAI is just Elon.
Twitter owns some shares in xAI . This has made the value of twitter debt improve from 55-60 cents to as high as 90 cents on the dollar according to some reports.
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.
> Dotcom bubble starts to look reasonable.
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.
With first mover advantage disappearing for OpenAI and very good alternatives appearing, one wonders how long they can sustain a multi billion dollar per year loss[0].
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...
ChatGPT is an extremely successful consumer product. Looking at Search traffic alone indicates they clearly have large brand value. Usage doesn't just depend on just benchmarks for most consumers.
There's large brand value, and then there's $300B brand value.
Without a moat, it's hard to argue OpenAI's value is that high.
You can choose as an investor between:
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.
I've been saying the same thing about Tesla for years, but here we are. The market can stay irrational blah blah blah
Well now that the Donald is running the US and is about to cut subsidies for electric vehicles, add tariffs to aluminum and steel, now maybe the markets may see the light, I am not holding my breath though.
Steel and aluminum tariffs will hit all car manufacturers simultaneously.
If all cars are more expensive, and all manufacturers have lower margins Tesla will have lower margins too. For the stock price the competition won't be other car manufacturers but other industries.
It would be a "subsiding tide lowers all boats" kind of thing.
I've been thinking, when I younger and living in the UK, all sorts of things (including some with the word "tax" in them) were denounced by the local right wing as "stealth taxes".
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.
Tesla- being more vertically integrated- stands to benefit from disproportionately increased costs for its competitors
Just because costs are higher for its competition doesn't mean that people are going to be buying more Teslas. Last I checked, Tesla was already down 40-60% in sales at its major European markets. They're getting absolutely slaughtered by BYD in China.
I mean as long as people are still buying cars, Tesla becomes more cost competitive. But in the short run it's not for consumers as much as it is for investors.
You may be right that Tesla will struggle internationally and the car market as a whole will struggle in USA
Cutting subsidies would weaken Tesla's competitors (according to Musk)
That comparison also shows that a recognizable brand alone can easily be worth more than 100 billion; Coca-Cola also has competition that offers similar products and zero tech advantage, but they still managed to keep their number one spot for decades.
Two bets with the same expected value can have wildly different variance.
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.
OpenAI is pre-revenue, they're a pure play.
It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth.
Marking “new tech paradigm isn’t about turning a profit/ the rules have changed” on my tech bubble bingo card.
For those not in the know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
the 'tres commas' era feels so quaint these days.
Is it already 1997 again?
The choice is not between that. It's between which of the two businesses can deliver outsized growth & returns back to the investor in their time horizon.
So invest all your money in Coca-Cola and maybe beat inflation by one or two percent.
Or you can gamble it all on a meme stock and maybe 100x your wealth.
Institutional investors are doing both.
Well, on the whole you can't because OpenAI isn't listed. If it was, retail investors would be piling in.
Huh? These are very different investment goals, you're not choosing between a or b
OpenAI's real moat is all in their know-how about developing LLM architectures and training them. That stuff can be expected to be very hard to replicate, no matter how hard anyone tries. The best case for OpenAI is actually if the DeepSeek R1 improvements are genuine, and OpenAI can adopt them to make their upcoming models even more capable than they would be otherwise.
The best moat is that their technology is used by microsoft - who forced it on tons of paying subscribers.
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.
> indicates they clearly have large brand value
BlackBerry, Nokia, Yahoo, and MySpace were popular at one point but couldn't keep up.
Yahoo is still website number 7 or 8 in the US.
Interesting. I would not have guessed that. https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/
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.
Conversions to paid users us only 5-6% though
https://beta.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2024/10/2...
Does that number matter?
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.
Indeed it matters. A popular website is only financially valuable if the site owner runs ads on it, as Google does. Without ads, ChatGPT's consumer business model is not much different from WinRAR with its soft 60-day trial period. Sure, some % of its users upgraded to the full thing. Everybody else had humbler use cases covered by the free functionality (the 60-day expiry was famously not enforced).
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.
As more advanced AI features get bundled into apps that users are already using like Google Search, FB, etc. there will be less incentive to have a separate ChatGPT subscription (even if it's slightly better, it won't matter to most people).
The one bundled to google search is so poor quality that it is degrading google experience...
How much of that community would jump ship on change of ownership? Not that Altman is any better than Musk but Musk has certainly created a more negative publicity about himself recently and thus more distrust or people of certain political stripes unwilling to use his products (scientific community probably leans that direction).
I've soured on Altman, but he's MUCH better than Musk. It's not even a competition.
they just need to find some laws to break or some poor people to exploit so they can be like other big SV startups.
Don't you think that the brand is huge though? It has become a household name and it's synonymous with artificial intelligence. They're also supposed to get grotesque amount of investments which is supposedly more than twice the value of what Musk offered(They have %40 stake in the project Stargate, which is supposedly $500B thing).
> Don't you think that the brand is huge though?
The world is littered with old once-great brands.
Intel would like a word.
You talk numbers, so let me ask you a numbers question: at their current valuation, if the brand is 60% of the value that’s top 5 estimated brand value.
Is OpenAI really one of the five most valuable brands in the world?
How did you choose 60% as the brand value ratio?
It got mentioned in the new york times and South Park a handful of times. How many billions is that worth if your technology is obsolete, your prospects are poor, your employees are taking the piss in interviews...?
> your employees are taking the piss in interviews...?
What does that mean?
It's an English term for mocking, teasing, ridiculing. I believe from the link of "piss" being alcohol. "He's on the piss again."
Yep. I use ChatGPT a lot, so much so that each day there is some point where it switches from version 4 to version 3. I don't even notice a difference.
I don't think you guys understand the reach of chatGPT. I live in Brazil and I was in line at a restaurant when I saw an older lady (around 60~70 years old) chatting with chatGPT on her smartphone. That's when I realized that chatGPT burst the bubble and by a lot.
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.
According to this analysis from a few months back: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/
OpenAI are kind of fundamentally unsustainable as a business.
This is the modern version of 2010's "Amazon makes no money in retail"
But isn't it the case that the cash cow for Amazon is actually AWS? That is, without AWS would we consider Amazon to be the success we see it as today?
Yes we would.
Keep in mind that while the store brings in a majority of revenue, it provides less than 20% of operating income. A majority of operating income comes from AWS (which provides less than 20% of revenue).
https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/01/10/amazon-e-commerce-...
Forget about AWS and simply compare Amazon with other offline/online/mixed stores.
"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.
Amazon weren't making money because they were expanding rapidly and had a lot of capex.
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.
I see your overall point, i think it is the wrong comp. It compare more to SAP or Atlassian.
I'm curious how you put OpenAI, SAP & Atlassian all in the same category. Do you mind explaining your thinking?
It's a comparison, not a same category.
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.
My understanding is that they sold a large chunk of the business to Microsoft in exchange for nearly unlimited Azure credits
If someone has 0 understanding of what an embedding model is used for, I seriously question their ability to predict winners and loser in AI.
> 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"
Before I read this 32-minute long article, who is Edward Zitron and why should I care about his opinion or analysis?
Zitron is a blogger whose content/internet personality is centered around being anti-Big Tech, and very much falls in the "AI is dumb/useless and will die any day now".
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.
From scrolling though his articles he is a guy who likes to write polemic articles declaring companies dead
It would have been easier to Google him, or ask Claude/Mistral to write you a summary of his article.
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.
We're here for human interaction, it's pretty condescending to tell someone to "Google it".
Ed Zitron has written many newsletters chronicling the business economics of OpenAI/other AI companies and their incentives.
They're the most comprehensive writeups in that aspect, although not as technically-oriented as most content on HN.
From the first release? A lot. It is much much smarter and multi modal.
> "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was," Musk said in the press release. "We will make sure that happens.""
From the creator of Grok, this is such an insane thing to say
And Tesla, who (in)famously doesn't regularly publish their GPL-derived codebases.
What’s the background here? How can we know they use GPL licensed code? Was there some leak?
Their infotaiment uses a customized Debian distro. On a Model S you could easily get a shell into it, because they used a freaking SSH with a password-based authentication over Ethernet to connect from the instrument cluster to the computer in the central console.
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...
This is a gist created 1 hour ago. No proof of the attack vector. What's the point of posting a private key?
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/
In case anybody wants it. I can do a more detailed writeup about hacking into my Tesla, but I'm not particularly interested in that. In short, I bought an Tesla instrument cluster on eBay and dumped the NAND chips from it.
They use plenty of GPL software there, including the Linux kernel itself.
Ok, you seem to be implying that just the use of GPL software necessitates the open sourcing of anything you build on it or with it. If that were the case, then all of AWS would be open sourced and all of the server backends built on Ubuntu clusters would have to be open sourced.
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.
Eh, if they were being compliant and merely building modules ontop of and called by BusyBox, they could get away with Mere Aggregation [0]*, but from a little looking around it looks like they were called out years ago for distributing modified BusyBox binaries without acknowledgement [1] and promised to work with the Software Conservancy to get in compliance. [2]
[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.)
You'd need to post Linux kernel source, though.
Your post reads like Debian is available with multiple licenses including BSD3 This is not true.
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.
source?
None of these people have any shame anymore, it's just exponentially growing levels of unwarranted chutzpah.
This is modern day tech ceo/politician playbook 101. And it's because of this that society in general is a shit hole. There is no semblance of honesty nor accountability at all anymore.
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.
You need rabid fans though to make sure your doubters are yelled down. That's one way Musk gets away with this behavior. Thousands of dimwits yelling down anyone that suggests he may not be operating in good faith.
How many of them are even real though? I'm pretty sure Musk has a troll farm for a long time now, back in twitter days his supporters' profiles already looked very suspicious
Wouldn't be surprised if the majority of xAI's GPU resources are being used for writing pro-Elon responses to Twitter comments.
Grok-1 was open-sourced. Grok-2 has yet to be open sourced, but perhaps they will once they launch Grok-3.
Could you add more context? I’m unfamiliar with Grok. Is Elon being a hypocrite?
Grok has absolutely no safety mecanism in place, you can use it for anything it will not block a query, all under the pretext of "free speech". And it's not open source either
>it will not block a query
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?
> > it will not block a query
> 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).
Safetyism is bad, but grok definitely has safeguards and will block certain queries.
why are you pro censorship?
Didn't X have to ban Grok output due to what their own users were making?
No, it's live and free for all X users.
I think a relevant bit of context for this move are the restructuring negotiations with Microsoft. Matt Levine has some excellent commentary on this [1][2], as usual. In short, due to their unusual "capped-profit" investment, Microsoft has first dibs on a very large chunk of hypothetical future profit. While the details are not public, a "low" valuation of 100B would imply that Microsoft is entitled to a controlling stake in the restructured for-profit, while a 1T valuation would proportionally imply a much smaller slice of the pie.
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...
The one thing Musk does not have in his drive for total world domination is AI.
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.
If you don't think Tesla is an AI company, you're not paying attention. xAI is also owned by him.
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?
He already owns xAI, valued at $45B+.
Correct, though my perception is that it's a distant Nth-place player behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.
Grok 2 is already better than Claude 3.5, at least for programming tasks, in my experience.
Why would musk want another AI company or is this just to get back at Altman?
My instinct says he wants OpenAI so he can turn ChatGPT into another propaganda machine like he did with Twitter.
It’s pretty wild to try to claim twitter wasn’t a propaganda machine before musk
I didn't realize I was implying that. It was def a propaganda machine before, but I hope we can agree that under Musk it is a very different machine
To turn something into implies it isn’t already
You don't understand, it was promotion of _the right things_, it doesn't count as propaganda. /s
The twitter files broke so many people's brains. They revealed essentially nothing of consequence, but it validates those who were already convinced that twitter was "silencing conservative voices".
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.
Except for when they, you know, get banned entirely
Why illegitimate? The Americans voted for him.
Musk wasn't on the ballot.
So you can't hire him as part of the department? There are hundreds of department heads that are not elected eithier.
None of them are giving press conferences in the Oval Office and acting like they're above the law. Typically when someone has as much power as Musk, they must either be elected or confirmed by the Senate.
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.
The president has broad authority to build his team and run his departments as he see's fit. Congress has the right to elect department heads but if a special initiative is created under the treasury department, that department does not need to be nominated. Elon has special overnment initiative to find massive waste... 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.
> The president has broad authority to build his team and run his departments as he see's fit.
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.
You hand-wave this away with "This has been known for decades"… Well, why does it take an unelected South African to step up and fix it?
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.
Where has he shone that other than saying something inane on twitter?
While it is true the president has broad authority, it's not true he can run his departments as he sees fit. His job is to faithfully (operative word) execute the office of president which includes defending the Constitution itself, most of which is about establishing a separation of powers that allows for checks and balances across the branches of government.
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" --
and the presidential oath of office --"he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States."
That's his job. Not to exercise broad authority over the executive branch as he sees fit. His job is to exercise broad authority over the executive branch as Congress sees fit."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.
Unelected bureaucrats only exist on the side you're not on, don't you know?
ChatGPT gov launched in January. Musk is using DOGE to hoover up tons of government data and reportedly using 'AI' technology to analyze it. There seems to be a rush to insert 'AI' into government processes, and with the government, unlike the consumer market, being the first to market will build a significant moat.
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.
> Elon's offer to purchase the OpenAI nonprofit for $97.4billion isn't going to happen, but it may seriously complicate OpenAI's efforts to claim the nonprofit is fairly valued at $40billion. If you won't sell it for $97.4billion, that means you think it's worth more than that.
That's a bad analysis. There's clearly non-market forces at play for why Sam Altman doesn't want to give control to a group associated with Elon.
Kelsey Piper is a very serious tech journalist who has written extensively about the OpenAI for-profit transition and the corporate structures involved [1].
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...
You're right. I was too quick and jumped the gun by calling it "bad analysis". However, I do believe that the source of this offer is the larger factor than the dollar amount in OpenAI's valuation of the offer. If this was anyone else offering to buyout OpenAI then the argument makes sense, but Sam Altman and Elon Musk seem to hate each other's guts and are even resorting to name-calling online in the fallout of this offer.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889062013109703009
There's a good chance there's more to it than I realize, though.
Well, they'll end up having to convince a judge that that those "non-market forces" are worth $50 billion+. Good luck!
Yeah easily by saying we’ll make 10x that in a few years.
You’re basically proving the point. If they’re confident they’re going to 10x their valuation in a few years, then the valuation probably doesn’t accurately reflect the value of the enterprise.
You can't take into account something like that when considering fiduciary duty.
It's a private entity. The duty is to investors, and they're welcome to file a lawsuit if they disagree - all depends on the agreement(s) they made.
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.
This statement is one of the things that really boils my piss about almost all online discussions where valuations are mentioned: Fiduciary duty does not mean that you must simply maximise share price, and never has.
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.
OAI's fiduciary duty is to their charitable mission. If selling to Elon for $97b jeopardizes the mission, then so would selling to preferred investors for $40b (as they would in turn face immense pressure by shareholders to realize an instant $57b gain by reselling to Musk!)
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.
Exactly. Well said.
Didn't they already raise at a $157 billion valuation?
Maybe they want it for 5x, 2x is absolutely low ball for most businesses that isn’t making a loss. I would think sam is valuing that as low as possible
Given musk’s history (“funding secured” to take Tesla private; trying to back out of buying twitter), OpenAI can make a reasonable case that he’s full of shit and it’s not a real offer.
He tried to claw back Twitter because tech stocks tanked, but he did have the funding to make the purchase (obviously). I don't think this is a good example. Besides, this is a real consortium, not a oneoff Tweet.
Considering an offer in relation to a valuation includes how likely the deal is to go through. That Elon has tried to pull out of a major purchase in bad faith definitely factors in.
That doesn’t make the offer worth $0, but it’s not $97.4bn
It feels like Musk is single-handedly making a great case for why unlimited accumulation of wealth is a bad idea.
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.
How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though?
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.
was looking for a musk margin call in 2023, no such luck, now he’s VP and markets are still fake
I would love to see a margin call on the tesla secured borrowing, he'd very publicly lose his marbles.
Tesla sales are collapsing globally partly due to Musk's mental breakdown and are not likely to recover much, especially since Tesla no longer really has a CEO.
Mental breakdown?
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.
yea, his mental breakdown.
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
Musk is the living embodiment of the ultra rich wet dream.
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...
To me it seems to have very little to do with his antics. Surely inflation, market saturation, and increased competition is more probable?
Tesla is a very very nice computer with a decent car attached to it.
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.
He said “partly” — seems reasonable that throwing nazi salutes around might have a partial impact on declining sales?
sales were trending down significantly in Europe even before the salute though.
That doesn’t mean Musk’s gesture didn’t accelerate the downward trend. But I agree with the general sentiment. Overall Teslas can’t compete with other EV makers because as soon as there’s a real market Tesla isn’t that attractive anymore outside of a brand loyal niche. Musk appears to have lost his magic, or perhaps his mind too. Dude looks quite disheveled these days..
because as soon as there’s a real market Tesla isn’t that attractive anymore outside of a brand loyal niche.
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 :)
Many people will NEVER buy a Tesla because they don't like Musk's politics or behavior.
perhaps but I was not commenting on elon or his politics and repercussions from him going full-on insane, I was specifically commenting on because as soon as there’s a real market Tesla isn’t that attractive anymore outside of a brand loyal niche.
If they drop price tesla still can’t compete because they are lacking the capacity to increase production
they'd be just fine if they sell all the cars they currently have capacity to make with their current margins... not to satisfy the insane evaluation but in general :)
Have a model Y. Had a vw ID.5 before (leased), his assessment is correct. Tesla is a decent car with a NICE infotainment system. VW's Android system is not wow'ing anyone, but the car is quieter, handles better, turns on a dime, suspension is way more comfy etc - Volkswagen Group knows how to make a car. (And yea, as a European, this will be my last US oligarch/Nazi car)
Oh no, it's in great part due to his antics. Owning a Tesla used to be about a positive future, the transition to sustainability, and with great engineering and making it sexy. Now owning a Tesla seems to be about kneeling to Moloch, paying for plutocracy, gleefully cutting basic food aid for the world's poorest starving children, undermining democracy around the world, and yes even doing a fascist salute. So, you want that as your brand? And yes, there's now much better competition, but unlike what one might gather from certain "conservative" news sources, the EV market has grown and continues to grow. [1] My guess is Tesla sales will continue to collapse.
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...
I'm actually shocked in such a media and marketing driven society that absolutely, nobody brings up the fact that the Tesla brand has been completely destroyed in the US and EU.
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.
EV sales are generally growing in Europe
Tesla sales are static or shrinking
Take January YoY in the UK, EV sales rose 24%, Tesla's sales dropped 8% ish
> To me it seems to have very little to do with his antics.
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?
I don’t think this is a mental breakdown instead he’s showing his real evil nature
This is not true. Tesla recently released new Model Y [0], and there's a gap in sales because of that transition. The old Model Y was the best selling car of any kind in 2024 globally.
It's either "a new car" or the same model that accounts for nearly all Tesla sales making it "best selling" compared to makers with newer cars and a wider selection. So... which?
What? They updated Model Y, which has been the best selling car in 2023 and 2024.
Looking at the 'best selling car' creates a distorted view
Tesla's sales are spread over a few models, VW's EV sales are spread over ten or so models
The stock seems to be unaware though
The stock has certainly responded, although only time will tell if it'll return to a more sensible valuation.
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.
Stock is betting on VP Musk continuing to pull up the ladder for all the EV competitors. Tesla CEO Musk got his fed grants to build out his charger network, now it's time to make sure no one else does so his remains on top.
Downvote if you must, but the man knows how to protect his moats while branding it "ending wasteful government spending".
He may know some things, he got pretty far. But he seems to make some of the dumbest moves. While his 180 turn in politics may have got him closer to his power goals he alientated too many people who used to buy into his vision. Republicans don’t care about EVs or whatever Musk wants to sell them so it seems poorly though out…
But competitors are already here and as others have stated Tesla sales are free falling outside the US, at best that’ll only work for the US. Even in that best case I don’t think that market alone justify the stock valuation. But even in the US I don’t get what will be the Tesla mass demographics anymore.
Down 5% today 11.6% this week 14% this month
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?
Recent price declines have just knocked the froth off the top of what is still an extremely frothy stock. About 20X industry PE ratios. I could imagine 5X to be sustainable, but...
I wish I could get paid $50bn to have a mental breakdown.
Pretty sure most people would have a mental breakdown if given 50 billion.
Imagine if pretending to be your friend was basically a fortune 500 size industry.
I remember when we thought we could just pay Trump 1-2 billion to go away. That would've been a good deal and is cheap in retrospect. And maybe Biden should have pardoned him immediately to kick the can down the road on SCOTUS deciding to allow Presidential immunity.. It probably would've happened anyway but it would've given the project2025 and Thiel libertarians less time to organize.
Didn't work for Neville Chamberlain, I don't think it would have worked for us.
My hope is that he'll eventually make some big mistakes that will send him to jail. Or does presidential grace give him total immunity?
No way, he’ll buy his way out of the courtroom. He may even enjoy the attention.
presidents can't pardon state crimes
Although... 4D chess move, if a state starts prosecution against Musk, get the DoJ to do it first and then pardon him after the fact.
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.
You can be tried by both the state and the federal government for the same conduct, and it is not double jeopardy.
Yes a superseding indictment would be all it takes. Charge him with something at the state level that doesn't have a federal equivalent. He reincorporated in Texas because of it's corruption friendliness, so that's unlikely.
What about criminal use of punctuation? :)
I believe Word Crimes are Weird Al's jurisdiction [1]
More likely: Trump lets him slash and burn, then turns on him and throws him under the bus to the American public. Very typical Trump playbook.
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 listen to Cohen on his podcast and on YT. He was once Trump's right hand man, they were buddies for 15+ years. Even he says Trump will cast Elon aside when he is no longer useful.
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.
By my measure, Cohen is the only person from Trump world who has redeemed himself. He’s still a slimey hot head, but he sees Trump for what he is, and he’s committed himself to making things right. Of course he’s trying to profit as much as possible, but he serves as an example that even the biggest sycophants can make it out of the cult.
He's probably protected in the sense that he knows stuff Trump doesn't want public.
As if anything Trump's done in secret becoming public would harm his reputation.
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.
This assumes that Trump is actually able to make decisions. He's clearly showing signs of dementia, and so he's easily controllable. His handlers just make sure he forgets anything they don't want him to remember.
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.
Colonoscopies are not that bad; many countries do it without sedation. The sedation part is annoying in multiple ways; it prevents you from doing a bunch of stuff the rest of the day, while without sedation, you can continue as if not much has happened afterward.
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 kinda like to think that Jeff Bezos is whispering in Trump's ear, hoping for this inevitable outcome, and waiting to pick up the pieces with Blue Origin.
Some billionare backstabbing is granted
Classic aggressive follower.
Given Musk is currently pissing off foreign governments, there is a real danger that one of those governments will just send in a nice looking person with some tea to have a quiet chat with him.
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.
Like that time he was summoned to Israel and "convinced" to tow the line? He looked like a school kid being told off by the principle.
When was that?
late November 2023
I have thought the same thing. Musk can protect himself from the average nutjob but he is working very hard to make the kinds of enemies he will NOT be able to protect himself from.
Can you give an example?
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.
He’s pushed boundaries on the Ukraine war. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians would be willing and capable of assassination if it helped war goals but I think he just hasn’t quite crossed a line to either side where he’s better off dead.
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.
> Starlink connections in Ukraine are geofenced
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.
Don’t worry, once he is no longer under the protection of the US government he’ll probably be a dead man. They will get to him.
Read some history of the Gilded Age.
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.
The Rockefellers and Morgans were brought down? It was a pretty soft landing for them, then.
Ok, so who brought down these three?
That sounds extremely interesting. Do you have particular books you would recommend?
TR's autobiography is in the public domain, for one
The governments of Brazil, thanks to how Musk treated their judges and Musk blatantly favoured people who were being investigated for inciting violence and planning a coup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Twitter_in_Brazil#...
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...
I've thought that too (you articulated it well). I mean, there are other uber rich in the world that, you know, are president of a different country — and might feel threatened by Musk's wealth.
I too would have liked to see Musk go to Mars.
We'll see. After throwing out a few Nazi salutes, Tesla sales have been tanking in Europe.
And Australia. Musk drove everyone in BYD's arms.
and plenty of other great cars. Zeekr X looks tasty. So many choices Americans won't ever have because Musk owns that country now.
The weak Aussie dollar and the low cost of BYD cars is what did that.
Also, Tesla stopped selling the Model S here.
Nothing specific to Australia, there are no RHD versions of the new S/X anywhere in the world. But S/X sales were a rounding error compared to 3/Y anyway.
Model S stopped being sold here in 2023.
In 2024, Tesla reported a 17% drop in Australia despite EV market growing.
I'm pretty sympathetic on protecting the country from CCP subsidized market capture, but at this point we need to let BYD sell here. It would lower vehicle prices and knock off tesla. Both of which need to happen.
September 2025: President Musk announces all new federal vehicles will be Teslas.
September? It's early February. You really think it'll take 7 months?
Why would he want to be demoted to president?
To get to President Musk, longer than that. On the other hand, he was called Prime Minister Musk by a congressman all the way back in December.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gonzales-elon-musk...
Nah, just has to convince Trump to replace Vance with him, and then do a regicide.
The qualifications for VP are the same as the qualifications for President, Musk isn't eligible. For now.
I don't think the Constitution is going to be something they pay a lot of attention to, going forward, if they get their way.
Trump and Musk may not pay attention to the constitution, but I understand that the US armed forces swear allegiance to the constitution — while they must obey lawful orders of the president, unconstituional orders must be refused even if from the president.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces_oat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Uniformed_Servic...
We'll see what happens when push comes to shove.
Oh come on stop perpetuating misinformation. Unless Musk is going to Nazi rallies and jew hating I can't take anyone who believes this seriously.
You forgot the /s tag.
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/...
Lol this article is nothing but conjecture written by someone who clearly already hates him
Misinformation? There are multiple videos of Elon doing a Nazi salute.
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.
How is it misinformation? It's obvious what it was. Doesn't mean he's a Nazi, maybe he's "just" a '90s era trolling edgelord. Come to think of it, considering his X shitposts he boosts to hundreds of millions of people every day, that's a good description of him.
[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.]
Reach matters. If you’re a nobody with three followers and tell someone on the internet to kill themselves, you’re a troll and can be ignored. If you have millions of followers, that one comment will get the other person doxxed, threatened by your followers, and may end up in physical harm to them and their family.
If you own a social media platform and have this amount of reach you can never be “just a troll edgelord”.
I don’t think we need to lie or be disingenuous about this gesture, Elon is not known for his hate of Jewish people. I think this obviously fake take helps him.
There is enough to criticize in his actions.
European countries are quite capable of making their own judgement about a gesture, especially when it would be illegal in France and Germany.
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2025-01/elon-musk-hitler-salute-i...
German media has been extremely coy calling Elon out about it. You would think that they'd be all over this, but them phrasing it as questions and digging out the "roman salute" (that no one here has heard of before) has been an eye-opening experience.
Have they?
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)
It's an opinion piece, and exceptions confirm the rule. Just search for German news articles on Google.de. See how many legit news outlets mention "Musk Hitlergruß" and how many more opt to beat around the bush when you search for "Musk Geste".
Do you even get a count of search results? They no longer include that number in my search results.
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.
> Elon is not known for his hate of Jewish people.
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...
Guy who talks like a nazi, supports nazi parties, boosts nazis on his social media platform does a nazi salute and you still doubt what he meant?
Must has spent quite a lot of time recently supporting far right groups. Most likely he picked it up unconsciously.
Obviously this is room for a flame war, but I don’t think the poster was being deliberately malicious, rather it is perfectly reasonable to interpret the gesture as a nazi salute. You may disagree that it was.
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.
Also after Teslas keep catching on fire more than the damn Ford Pinto did.
Might not be enough data for good statistical significance yet, but IIRC the "die in a fire" probability in a Tesla Refrigerator is something like 17x the Ford Pinto based on current numbers.
Citation needed. Last I checked EVs are much less likely to catch fire than ICEs. (They are, however, much harder to put out if they do.)
That list is garbage: it includes Tesla Megapacks (energy storage, not car), multi-car crashes where any car catches fire, a car carrier carrying Teslas catching fire, etc.
Did you have any actual statistics to back up your assertion?
https://fuelarc.com/evs/its-official-the-cybertruck-is-more-...Vehicle Model | Total Units | Fire Fatalities |Fatality Rate (per 100k) Tesla Cybertruck| 34,438 | 5 | 14.52 Ford Pinto | 3,173,491 | 27 | 0.85Like the parent comment says, this is garbage. For the cybertruck it includes all fatalities (3 in a high speed crash that caught on fire, 1 in a different crash, 1 in the recent car bomb outside Trump's tower). For the pinto they only count the 27 deaths the NHTSA identified as being caused by the design flaw that led to catching fire from low speed collisions.
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.
tbh, despite the rap the Pinto gets it really was just as dangerous as the rest of the vehicles on the road [1].
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...
if you keep dismissing the data, maybe you can provide some data
The people involved are clearly trying hard to make the cybertruck look bad. If there was real data, I assume they'd present it. The fact they choose to produce these crude distortions instead implies to me there is not real data that makes the cybertruck look bad.
The data is right there. You're welcome to do your own analysis rather than ask other people to do it for you.
I'm not sure what your point is - as I've already mentioned this comparison is between all cybertruck deaths, none of which were low speed collisions resulting in a fire, and the deaths that the NHTSA review identified as caused by fires from low speed collisions caused by the design flaw in the Pinto.
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.
My point is the data is right there and you can do your own analysis to make the comparison. Do you not know the difference between data and analysis?
I'm confused as to the level of your incompetence.
Or the press pretending that it was a nazi salute, outrage sells.
If it was standalone event you could perhaps argue it was accidental. But the fact that he is supporting Afd who had done similar things in the past where they run a campaign, and make nazi symbolism in such a way that it would be barely legal, but at the same time obvious to everyone what they are referring to, it is pretty damning.
I'm curious if you know what a Nazi salute looks like? Make a comparison by looking it up, he does the salute twice.
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
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy48v1x4dv4o I really don't buy it, it just looks like an awkward gesture. From the article:
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.
Everyone who saw the speech, saw the three (!) Heil Hitlers and the ensuing smirk that said “whatcha gonna do, suckers?”.
Pretending at equivocating just to troll will tank your own credibility.
You mean the German newspaper Zeit with headlines like "Ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß"
It WAS a Nazi salute, and claiming otherwise is textbook gaslighting.
I've been hearing about the inevitable decline of Tesla for about 10 years now.
For how many of those did BYD exist in western markets and for how many was the Tesla brand toxic to the demographics that care about climate?
New things happen all the time, even things that had been predicted to happen sooner than they did.
Most of that was from Republican climate change deniers trying to make a culture war out of EVs.
Musk switching sides on that seems a good time to re-evaluate who is making the predictions now and why.
There's an entertaining conspiracy theory that Musk isn't actually pro Dem or Repub; instead he simply realized that everyone who would buy an EV on the left already did, and so now by pandering to the right he can tap into a new market.
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.
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
It has started long ago with the Cybertruck release delayed by two years and then not many wanted to buy it. The new roadster was originally announced for 2020, might come this year. The groundbreaking of Gigafactory Mexico has been delayed and I doubt the recent tariff madness helps. Level 5 FSD has been promised to be achieved in three years, that was 2013. With sales tanking, I do wonder if the $1 billion expected revenue in CO2-pooling[1] (from EU competition alone) will be at risk or if the EU can come up with some tariff in response to Trump's new attempt of tariffs on EU products. Also, after two failed attempts to get this massive compensation package as CEO approved by a court, will he try and fail again? Now that he's a squatter in some D.C. government building?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stella...
Musk owns 42% of the $350B SpaceX, so he would still be the 6th richest person in the world(tied with Sergey bring) if TSLA and all his other investments went to $0.
Still plenty - just look at your Zuckerbergs, Andressens, Horrowitzes, Soros, Gates, etc
> Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man,
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...
Given that he owns a huge part of SpaceX that is also valued at many billions, that's highly unlikely.
you think it's bad now... Wait till tesla starts selling optimus at scale and SpaceX starts controlling strategically valuable resources in LEO by space mining. Elon's not the one you need to worry about, it's his son X.
criminally overvalued is an interesting term to explore. I wonder when after all this shakes out in the courts, how much of his oligarchal access to government will be seen as illegal, therefore undermining any stock premium Tesla has from that access to government.
So there is a plan here. One is to sue or stop the SEC.
Tesla is a meme coin at this point. However there are these pesky shareholders to deal with.
I don't know that, but I can say that he has an absurd amount liquidated.> How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though?
So I would assume he has north of $30bn outside Tesla. Which that alone would make him near top 60 on Forbes's Billionaire list.- 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.htmlI 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.
> “Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money.”
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.
Your mind produced a wonderful list of rabbitholes there! Lovely job.
I don't feel this is a great response tbh. While you're comparing money, you're not differentiating how government money is different than corporate money, which are both different from personal money. Even if a person wants to build a tunnel of that magnitude, absolutely no way are they going to do it out of their pocket, at worst it would be through corporate funds. Its not like these guys are spending their own money on those things you're talking about. Even Elon still gets others to invest in his companies.
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.
> I'm saying it is essentially impossible to spend these amounts of money on things that personally benefit you
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.
I reckon Musk is so over extended that the only reason he’s doing what he’s doing is to basically rob what he can to cover it before a bigger fish comes along and he falls off a yacht like Madoff.
How do you mean? There were major loans to buy Twitter, but AFAIK Musk brought on a bunch of other people so that's not entirely on him. Other than that what is he extended into?
His companies are supporting each other in weird ways like xAi intercepting Tesla's GPUs, xAi being separate from X which is where it's used, Boring building one of its few tunnels in a Tesla factory for ???, the employees from one working at another, etc. there's probably a lot of shenanigans going on to make each company look OK at the right times.
The one that has to be somewhat transparent is looking pretty shaky
Yeah, I can't find the link but apparently a lot of the improvement in x/twitters results are due to xAi paying x to advertise.
Nobody likes the guy, but I think a lot of people let their distaste for a person blind them to their strategy. Since Musk’s early days co-founding PayPal, his MO has been to start with a small fortune, bet it on a fortune 10x that, and repeat, abandoning each project after it serves its purpose. It’s clear at this point that his next step has been political power since at least the Twitter purchase, and that step just had its Tesla takeoff moment. I think there’s basically no chance he fails to leverage that into an even greater fortune than everything that came before, even while letting Tesla and the rest run on autopilot.
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”.
He single handedly also vindicated one of the most authoritarian regimes - China - in how it slapped Jack Ma as soon as he started entering politics and gaining influence beyond tech entrepreneurship.
I can’t agree that his bad behaviour vindicates other bad behaviour. Checks and balances would be a far better solution than what was done to Ma. We should never consider a state manipulating politics so forcefully to be vindicated because someone seeks to exploit the state. It vindicates the very systems Musk seeks to destroy, showing the USA needs strong and more assertive checks and balances.
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.
What "check" or "balance" do we have for someone not even in government? He is now but he wasn't before the inauguration. Feel free to propose the check or balance if it doesn't already exist.
You're right, this is a very difficult question to answer, and I don't have a clear answer for myself either.
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.
Everybody is quietly at home expecting someone else to do something. Bread is available, and we hold the circus in our hand now.
As a Canadian, this terrifies me. I take the US administration’s threats very seriously.
Two different flavors of bad do not make one of them good.
Clearly Jack Ma should have pledged his commitment to China's core socialist values like Musk did: https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-signs-letter-pledgin...
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...
China requires that pledge for basically anyone with power or wealth. For example, they added a new law, forcing all of the AI companies in China (like DeepSeek) to uphold socialist values and all that. And TikTok, which they pretend is a separate company from ByteDance based in Singapore, forces US executives to sign a pro CCP pledge as well:
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.
Maybe not treasonous but ineligible for whatever position Musk has now...
Nothing vindicates the CCP.
They enact laws guaranteeing free speech and human rights, then execute their critics and sell their organs.
That's what I am saying, Musk shenanigan so bad they EVEN vindicated CCP.
No. Musk being a shithead does not vindicate a regime that routinely practices mass murder in flagrant violation of their own Constitution (which presumably only exists as a sick joke to them.) Article 35 of their Constitution guarantees free speech, but they murder people who try it. Read the rest of their Constitution while you're at it.
Even as a less than serious rhetorical argument, what you said is insane. Get a grip.
No one in this thread knows what vindicated means.
im not criticizing your opinion but can you point me to some evidence that shows they routinely practice mass murder? im genuinely curious.
He has none most likely, and if he does it’ll be some garbage sourced from Adrian Zenz.
The dreams of Musk/Trump
I am pretty disturbed by how musk is silent on issues concerning China and the CCP. To me it is a big risk that Tesla depends on access to the Chinese market to justify their valuation. Musk clearly will not say anything even slightly negative about the CCP, even though he personally values free speech and other liberal values. So can he really be trusted with control of companies like SpaceX?
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.
> even though he personally values free speech and other liberal values
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.
> even though he personally values 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.
> Musk clearly will not say anything even slightly negative about the CCP, even though he personally values free speech and other liberal values. So can he really be trusted with control of companies like SpaceX?
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.
I missed that one, do you have a link?> He literally posted an AI generated video of Xi in Winnie the Pooh garb.That was pretty funny, though I think it is important to note that the post makes fun of many world leaders, including Trump.
> "financial terrorist"
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.
Easy: buy media companies to sow political division and pollute the discourse, buy political influence to restrict access to open and unbiased education to ensure the populace cannot engage in critical thinking, then poison the environment in myriad ways until people in their 20s require a dozen rounds of IVF to have kids (or more likely, just giving up because of the ruinious state of inflation compared to incomes).
good thing even parts of this would never really happen haha
Come on... endlessly wealthy and wants to do harm? There's only one real, obvious answer: Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans. Make something as contagious as measles that kills a third of people reliably, spread it multiple global focal points at once, and you could topple the world pretty effectively. If you attacked the economy and food supply at the same time I don't think there would be any coming back from that.
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.
I don't think you actually read the assignment. Please try again.
The thought experiment was to do maximum harm entirely legally
Just doing that seems like you will likely be arrested.
I think that's more of a concern for people who aren't genocidal maniacs out to destroy the species. Like I said, we already have examples of people who wanted to usher in an apocalypse, some of them even gave it the good old college try, but they lacked resources. If you gave Shoko Asahara a few hundred billion to play with, who knows what Aum would have come up with. At the very least their sarin would have been pure.
> could do entirely legally.
> Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans.
I think you missed a constraint there.
What do you mean I only have 256 GB of memory on my server?
> I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally.
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.
The next Bond movie is going to be historic... Honestly I preferred it when he was considered the next Iron Man.
I dunno maybe that asteroid is coming and we need his rockets and mass distraction.
Previously I would have said buying election results. But apparently the electoral college makes it surprisingly cheap. Musk buys twitter for 44 billion dollars and yet he only needed a quarter of a billion to buy the American government.
The dems outspent republicans by a billion or so, so 250M didn't do much. If it did, Kamala would've won by a lot.
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-sp...
Way more billionaires supported Kamala vs. Trump (83 vs 52).
They spent it running ads and stuff, Musk went ahead against the taboo and legalnrestrictions against buying votes/voter registeration and did a million dollar a day lottery for registered republicans in a swing state.
I'm assuming whatever spending advantadge Dems had was more or less squandered the moment those billionaires got cold feet and decided to oust Joe Biden instead of relying on the incumbent vote. That disruption very likely scared off several donors.
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".
Dem handling of the Palestine situation went extremely badly for them.
There was no good way to handle it, Pro-Palestinian propaganda was very active, to a significantly larger extent than it is now.
Russia probably played a role in that.
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.
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.
Yup! You guessed it!
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...
If you read the book, the comparison goes from amusing to unsettling, if not all the way to scary. Among other parallels, Drax ingratiates himself with England's leadership ("Your Majesty, may I have the temerity...") and cheats at games despite obviously not needing the money or fame.
I'm actually started to wonder if Elon is actually deeply mentally ill, high functioning, and living in a completely delusional reality. He's clearly trying to live out things he's seen in novels. If you haven't yet read up on where his name came from, check this out. He was named after the main character of a book written by a Nazi rocket scientist. It's almost too weird to believe, but it is indeed true:
Wikipedia says his great-grandfather’s name was also Elon. Compelling as the other theory is, this seems much more plausible as the reason for his name.
> 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.
I wonder what would happen if Musk just paid $1 million to every single women who was willing to be inseminated with his sperm and $100,000/year/child to raise them and he ended up having thousands of kids.
I thought he was doing something like that already.
he normally uses surrogates and is only up to 12 or so, far cry from thousands.
> entirely legally.
Hypothetically, would it be legal to fund a president whose policy was "let's nuke everyone"?
Apparently, the answer is "yes"
I meant more literally than metaphorically, unless something drastic has happened in the last 2 hours that I'm not aware of (given Trump, this is not impossible).
Oil companies have been doing this for 100 years.
>I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally.
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.
Buy a lot of forest, cut it down, and replace it with a smooth concrete surface.
It rarely is 'doing damage' in the eyes of the one doing it.
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 ...
I mean, you could invent tetraethyl gasoline and CFCs.... you don't have to be super wealthy for that, but getting the world to adopt them in horribly harmful ways certainly takes capital.
CFCs are easily a net win, as they made refrigeration (and consequently food preservation) practical, cheap and safe.
TEL, though, yeeeeah... that was a bad move.
I don't get what is "financial terrorism" here:
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 understand it either. Why is Elon Musk a "terrorist"? And why is this the most upvoted post? Maybe being European limits my ability to comprehend American political rhetoric.
I typically like Elon about 70% of the time, but I need to agree here. I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.
>I typically like Elon about 70% of the time
>I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.
then you don't know much about him
Almost everything that is happening in US politics was telegraphed beforehand if you were looking carefully enough. If Musk's current level of influence and his actions are a surprise to anyone, I'd politely suggest that they augment their sources of information.
Since you’re ahead of many of us, can you let us know what happens next?
This [1] should give you another 150 days of predictions.
no, rather, GP tryptophan doesn't know much about {him|her|it}self.
He always had it? Money give influence naturally.
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)
> He always had it? Money give influence naturally.
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.
" 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.
Until he's pardoned by the president.
The strategy has worked just fine for Trump for the past decade.
lol. Trump has immunity, and can also pardon
Musk can be convicted AFTER Trump isn't president.
Except there’s a line of cases basically saying you can’t do something unlawful and then quickly stop in order to make the legal controversy go away.
You act as if Trump will obey a court order.
I’m not acting as if anything. I’m simply pointing out that there are also rules for mootness.
The current doctrine is those - and any other - rules don't apply to the president in his official capacity. SCOTUS declared that it's legal when the president does it.
I'm not going to be as extreme as saying "california has integrity". But California was wise to prioritize its people over a robber baron who's just mad his cars weren't selling. He probably still couldn't buy off CA to this day.
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.
I liked Elon until about 2018. Since then he's gradually degraded from "interesting founder" to "guy who picks fights about weird topics on the internet" to "absurdist oligarch actively working to destroy institutions which support average Americans."
I certainly suspect that there were always elements of what he's become that just weren't as publicly apparent.
How about:
- 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.
I stopped liking Musk when his first wife's tell-all "I Was a Starter Wife" came out in Marie Claire in 2010. Yes, penned by a disgruntled former spouse, it felt nonetheless authentic and immediately believable, and all the events since have generally confirmed her characterization of him.
As so often, it's how they treat the women around them that tells you a lot about men.
What did you like about him until 2018? He is not some visionary or genius or even smart. Neither is/was he a decent person to deal with (read up on his PayPal days). He is however, extraordinarily ruthless and thin skinned.
So what is it that you saw in him that you liked him?
(Not OP) I liked his willingness to invest so much in exciting, lofty goals (Tesla, SpaceX).
Twitter wrecked his mind. I'm not talking about buying it, I'm talking about being such a heavy user of it.
Shows how vulnerable anyone is to propoganda, no matter how high your quality of life.
This. He is definitely not a genius and not even smart. He can’t formulate any interesting, original thoughts. He parrots, daily, dumb ideas and state propaganda (for example, russia) without any critical thinking.
The average person on the street is smarter than him.
Circa 2010 he still had the image of being an outsider and optimist instead of whatever we've got going on today.
Yep, hard to respect a guy who spent how many years screaming that full self driving will be out by next quarter!?
The Peter Molyneux of tech. But at least Peter was just an over-ambitious game designer and missed promises were just less video games.
My Tesla drives itself virtually everywhere. All I have to do is look out the window, which I'd do anyway. The only times I control my Tesla are when pulling in and out of my garage and when I need to get it going so FSD can take over (and occasionally when parking).
I'm happy with it.
I really like “absurdist oligarch”. “Rich awkward joker” also comes to mind.
"Trolling Edgelord" comes to mind for me. It's as if all this is one big joke to him, and he gets a kick out of everyone being upset by his antics.
He spent $44 billion on his own personal propaganda machine, and then used even more money to purchase the US presidency
His personal contribution was $20 Billion. The rest was other investors and loans Twitter is responsible for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
> I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.
memetics
He's only 50% evil :)
I liked Elon 90% of the time 5 years ago. Now honestly I don’t want him to build a whites only mars base.
5 years ago?
7 years ago he called Vernon Unsworth a pedophile. That was enough for me.
N.K. Jemisin's SF short story Emergency Skin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Skin) is pretty much this.
Do you really think it will be whites only?
I'm sure they will carve out exceptions for Uncle Toms like Vivek Ramaswamy, but if they get too uppity they'll be tossed out the airlock.
> Now honestly I don’t want him to build a whites only mars base.
I do because the Earth would be rid of him and we could maybe have at least 1 slow news day.
This might be the worst cost benefit tradeoff I’ve heard of.
He founded (for some definition) the two most impressive American corporations of the century and tweeted a lot to build a direct connection to people.
I’m wondering under what definition he “founded” Tesla rather than being the investor who took it over years later kicking the founders out?
I’d give him SpaceX, but it definitely did better when he was paying less attention to it.
> I’m wondering under what definition he “founded” Tesla rather than being the investor who took it over years later kicking the founders out?
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).
> 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.
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.
Probably, but making a sucessful transition to eco-friendly vehicles was the point of that government money, and at the time batteries were much more expensive.
(The price of batteries is also why, at the time he went for batteries, the zeitgeist was hydrogen).
The founders who went for batteries were all about heavy acceleration at the time, which Hydrogen couldn’t really do.
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.
Cybertruck seems to represent him making all the same fundamental mistakes that were present in the original design of the Roadster, by being too expensive to produce. (Compare the price as announced vs. as delivered, and that's not justifiable by inflation).
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...)
Among other things, the terms of a legal settlement with the other people who "founded" it.
So him paying people somehow changes what happened?
“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.
I wonder how much each company spends internally on damage control/mitigation re: Musk. I don't think he's as much of a chaos monkey as Trump, but I try not to pay attention to him so I could be missing things.
He is 100% of the reason I do not drive a Tesla today. I'm not the only person who feels this way.
If he buys OpenAI he will be 100% of the reason I don't use it.
What’s impressive about Tesla? It’s already being outcompeted by companies in China, losing market share, and the other manufacturers are catching up.
Besides that, he’s pissed off the demographics most likely to buy Teslas. It’s not like most Trump voters are buying EVs
>What’s impressive about Tesla?
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.
I completely agree with you and will add that it super interesting to watch everyone completely rewrite his accomplishments because they don't like him and his politics now.
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.
There is no “disruption”. In either the common vernacular or especially not in the “innovator’s Dilemna” definition. EVs still make a small percent of the market in the US and the rest of the industry in the US are backing away from their EV investments.
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.
> 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.
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.
You are pointing to a disrupted market as evidence that the market didn't need to be disrupted. A quick search suggest that EU ban on CO2-emitting cars was from 2022, 5 years after Tesla started selling the Model 3. The global trend toward EVs was largely started by Tesla showing that EVs were a viable product with real demand.
I don't think this is correct. See this article from July 2017 [1] Banning petrol cars was already discussed, it mentioned many car constructors, but not mention of Tesla. At that time, 27,903 Tesla cars were sold in Europe [2], so the market wasn't disrupted at all.
> 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/
That July 2017 article you linked cites Volvo committing to switch their fleet to all electrics and hybrids. If you click on that hyperlink you will find this paragraph:
>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.
I would say US government and more specifically California was the spark, and the hundreds of millions of dollars given to start this industry.
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.
The spark was the Paris agreement and Europe pledging to reduce their CO2 emissions. EVs were already a common sight in France way before Tesla.
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.
No France didn’t have meaningful ev traction. California and Tesla pushed out the market for EVs. Paris agreement helped Im sure but Tesla really did bring the EV market muscle - its undeniable.
EVs have been around since the 90s but there was a collective effort to restrict their growth and production.
>EVs were already a common sight in France way before Tesla.
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...
Is 2% what we call “widespread demand” these days?
Okay and the GUI was started by Apple as far as PCs. Where did that leave Apple as far as the PC market compared to Microsoft?
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?
>Were any of the existing car manufacturers ever threatened by Tesla
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.
Actually they are backing off from EVs
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.
Yes and Microsoft would never have embraced the GUI if it weren’t for Apple and other AI companies would never have embraced LLMs if it weren’t for OpenAI.
But that doesn’t justify Teslas value. In the words of the AI industry - “there is no moat” around EVs
Genuinely can't tell if you are trying to be sarcastic with the first sentence, but I'll just point out that Tesla can both have accomplished a lot as a company, been a net benefit for humanity, be wildly overvalued as a company, and have no real moat. They were the first automaker to put substantial money into selling EVs as a business and that gave them a first mover advantage that has now largely disappeared (but still exists in certain areas such as still having the best charging network).
I’m saying simply it no more matters in nerd circles than Mac geeks arguing about Apple bringing the GUI to personal computers when it was almost dead in the late 90s.
It is just as meaningless now on HN as it was then on comp.sys.mac.advocacy back then
You seem to want to argue against a point I'm not making, so this is me ducking out of our conversation.
I’m saying it’s pointless to who was first.
They arent meaningless, Tesla did some pretty cool shit. And then they shipped a very small quantity of cars that have poor maintenance and the kind of vendor lockin that we get shitty at John Deere for.
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.
> If I was to invest in a car company I would want them shipping millions of cars
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.
Yep as the other commenter said, millions of janky cars.
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.
You realize that’s not the argument you think it is to justify Tesla’s market cap?
I was merely correcting someone who was wrong on the internet, because Tesla does not in fact ship "a couple hundred thousand janky cars", as OP claimed.
I wouldn't touch Tesla stock with a 10 foot pole.
They ship millions of janky cars.
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.
I remember when the original iMac was the best selling model of computer among all brands. A title Apple retained until, IIRC, they offered multiple colour options.
MacOS was still something like 5% or so of the overall market.
Funny aside, the narrative is usually that Apple was struggling between the time Jobs left and he returned between 1984 and 1997. The truth is that their market cap was larger than Microsoft’s through 1992-93 and they were the largest or second largest computer seller around 1991-94. The bottom didn’t fall out until Windows 95 and Apple manufacturing low end computers no one wanted.
It is probably telling that multiple people here think that the only relevant framing of "impressive" is as an investment. And that is only made stranger by the fact that Tesla has been objectively a hugely successful investment in terms of performance, no matter how many people dislike their cars, Musk, and the company's fundamentals or they think there is some hypothetical crash that is right around the corner.
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.
I know hundreds of people are trying to codify musks legacy at this point.
>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.
>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.
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.
That doesn’t explain Twitter or the fact that Tesla sells are decreasing and that its market share is declining. Its profits are a nothingburger.
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
facts! except did not disrupt the market in a way like Tesla did. I am not sure this really counts as distruption - not sure 8.1% of the market qualifies as distruption… perhaps it does if the trend continues like it did outside of the US
> What’s impressive about Tesla?
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.
The fact that it's worth more than all the other automakers combined.
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 fact that it's worth more than all the other automakers combined.
The South Sea Company was also stupendously valuable until it wasn't.
> The fact that it's worth more than all the other automakers combined.
"Tesla stock price is too high imo"
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020
Well, Trump’s various meme coins also have a value…
But, using pricing fundamentals, can you really justify Tesla’s value anymore than OpenAIs?
No doubt he needs to distance himself from the company so that his political career stops impacting it so directly. The business is over valued but still very impressive. Yes the software is controversial, but the hardware is fantastic and a decade ahead of what other domestic automakers are doing. They’re also profitable and have a long term vision to innovate unlike many industry peers who chase the government mandate du jour.
There is nothing about Tesla that is even one year ahead of EVs. My wife and I travel a lot and haven’t owned our own car since late 2022 until late last year and tried a lot of different EVs. They were all just as good as the Tesla and had a better infotainment system.
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
Tesla and the Chinese manufacturers are not playing in anything near the same league. Making cheap EV's is in no way "outcompeting" Tesla. Rather, Tesla has shown that it can handily outcompete traditional luxury auto companies, beating them at their own game.
BYD seems to be in a similar league. Unit sales 3x tesla in the last quarter and:
>... 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
Someone hasn’t heard of the “Innovator’s Dilemma”.
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
The Innovator's Dilemma is about new, disruptive technologies causing large, established, incumbent firms to fail. Are the Chinese EV makers developing new technologies?
That’s exactly the opposite of the Innovator’s Dilemna. That’s the startup bros definition they use in pitch decks. But not Clay Christenson’s definition
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
Musk didn't found Tesla.
Presumably the two impressive companies are SpaceX and OpenAI? Or maybe the Boring Company?
You may be referring to PayPal as one of those companies, but in case you’re not: Elon did not found Tesla.
He didn't found PayPal either. He founded X.com, and they happened to merge with Confinity who owned the brand PayPal. Confinity existed before X.com (and had better brand recognition with PayPal), and if Musk would've had it his way, PayPal as brand wouldn't exist post-merge; it would have been called X.com.
I said "for some definition" because according a legal settlement he made with the others, he did found it.
I disagree. I understand that Musk invested in OpenAI under the understanding that ChatGPT would remain open source. He has expressed dissatisfaction with the direction OpenAI has taken ChatGPT and wants to return it to its original charitable mission. He paid millions of dollars for something that OpenAI didn't deliver, so I can understand him wanting to bring the project back inline with the vision he paid for.
I view Musk's decision here as a good thing that will benefit the world.
> I understand that Musk invested in OpenAI under the understanding that ChatGPT would remain open source.
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.
You may not believe this, but there is no moral quality to money, spent or otherwise. There is no mandate and no value to obeying Musk's wishes.
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.
As an interesting thought experiment, replace Musk's with Google.
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?
Yes... Both would be terrorists if that's the appropriate word, it would just take a bit longer for people to call Pichai that because he hasn't defined his public image to be "Nazi edgelord" and minds need to adjust.
Pichai is just a bureaucrat though
Yep. Taxing billionaires is not about generating a lot of money for everybody else. It is about limiting the power of the most powerful people. It is bad for society for people to have this much money.
I pay more taxes than Tesla.
Tesla took on a lot more losses than you ever did, decreasing their current day tax bill, so that's a meaningless comparison.
Considering the threat of his wealth and the ability to fund primary challengers against sitting senators is being used to whip their votes, I wouldn't restrict the it to just "financial" terrorist.
Not disagreeing with you, but just want to point out that billionaires and political lobbying groups have used funding (or the threat of funding) primary opponents to coerce congress for a long time.
He's just being louder about it than most billionaires.
I thought competition was exactly what business was about and how the capitalist system was functioning and financing itself? I don't condone Musk's actions but I'm not sure how he ends up as a terrorist. That looks like aggressive competition in a line of business. It's not clear how critical infrastructure or public safety would be negatively affected by his actions, therefore not sure what to think of it.
PS: I do believe Musk should be subject to the federal criminal conflict of interest statute given his position in gov.
> He's using his enormous amount of wealth and influence as a weapon to bludgeon anyone and anything in his way.
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.
I imagine that's why he's pivoted to using other peoples' wealth.
Gee, at some point hard to tell if Elon is not just the guy on stage for whoever holds the (purse) strings.
Well, people need to understand that it's not just one group of people, but an ever-evolving group of people that don't always share the same interests - but have very similar, overlapping interests - and will gladly take each other to court, but will just as gladly unite to vanquish outsiders.
Yea probably Soros and the free masons are still running the show
/s
I mean, in this case it would be the Saudis.
> you'll be frittering away that wealth very quickly
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.)
He’s vulnerable to more than that, but it is definitely the biggest risk.
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.
At the rate Teslas are recalled, you don’t need to politicize it
That’s true at normal levels of rich. But at Musk levels I’m not so sure. Even Twitter paid off handsomely even though he ran its financials into the ground, because he leveraged it to elect Trump, and immediately became worth $100B more the day after the election.
>> He's using his enormous amount of wealth and influence as a weapon to bludgeon anyone and anything in his way.
> 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.
China might not have been "wrong" when they put Jack Ma back in his box.
> It feels like Musk is single-handedly making a great case for why unlimited accumulation of wealth is a bad idea.
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.
I am normally NOT the person who wants to see people not make as much money as they [legally] can, but we see how much of a wrecking ball a person-state can really be.
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?
Capitalism is bad because Elon won the game. Never mind that Sam Altman is a board member of the same non-profit he is trying to sell to himself for pennies.
Why not both?
this is why china doesn't have more than ≈ 10 billionaires and stopped jack ma from controlling more than he already does through media/financial ventures
We need an income and a wealth cap.
Such an idea runs counter to the principles of individual liberty.
There should be limits on individual liberty. We don’t let every American have a nuclear bomb in their basement.
Maybe but it would be for the greater good, a concept probably hard for many Americans to understand by design.
Correct.
This is how the world works, sadly. We only hear about this because Elon Musk is famous.
You do realize the saudis for almost a century are way richer, more powerful, and way way way more corrupt right?
Genuine question: are people genuinely against the work being done by DOGE? I am frequenting both X and HN + other liberal leaning news sources, and it's like the people in the comments are living in different solar systems.
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.
USAID was audited by an (actual) independent (actual) auditor in November of 2024.
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.”
This is what I saw most recently: [0]. Whether or not it could be vaguely considered to be congressionally authorized (the executive branch has leeway in the execution of said laws) is more or less irrelevant to whether it's wasteful and/or fraudulent, but it looks like those examples were not documented in law anyway.
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.
If only there were professionals we could pay to go into an organization and find waste, fraud, and abuse so we wouldn't have to rely on people like @ricwe123 on X.
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?
Millions of dollars worth of subscriptions for reporting on government press releases with added spin seems like a great example of waste to me... The government shouldn't be paying any media outlets purely due to the conflict of interest, regardless.
> 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.
> congressionally approved
You say that like it’s a good thing…
Following the constitutionally designed balance of powers is a good thing, even when some line items appear in the budget which I personally disagree with.
This is what’s known as “compromise,” or otherwise “being a fucking adult.”
Yeah it's called pork.
One man's pork is another man's bacon. That's why it's in the budget. Everything in the budget had someone advocating for it, whether you agree with them or not.
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 DOGE was serious about finding cost savings, they would start with the biggest budget hog, the one that has never once passed an audit in its entire history – the Pentagon.
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.
> If DOGE was serious about finding cost savings, they would start with the biggest budget hog, the one that has never once passed an audit in its entire history – the Pentagon.
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.
> auditing government spending
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.)
> Gutted NIH and research funding
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-...
I disagree. Wealth accumulation is absolutely a good thing. Elon does good things. EVs, rockets, Starlink, Neuralink etc. This is stuff that people want. More capital is allocated to good things when the same person can manage more capital. Elon's wealth is mostly in the things he has built himself.
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 the things he has built himself.
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.
That's exactly what I mean. Elon makes decisions to manage capital and talent, in order to make good things for the world, and thus accumulates more capital and talent to make more good things. He started from Zip2 and built his way to managing multiple companies, each of which make groundbreaking products and services. These products and services wouldn't exist without Elon. They wouldn't exist if capital wouldn't be allowed to accumulate.
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.
> built his way
> 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.
Whose investment decisions are radical (and good) by your definition?
The argument was put for that Elon is an exceptional mind when it comes to capital allocation. My counter-argument is that to have Elon's success, you don't need such an exceptional mind, but it may seem exceptional due to the selection bias of people who typically have accrued wealth. There may be vastly more people with such purported competency of capital allocation, but we'd simply never know because they are less likely to find themselves wealthy in the way that Elon did.
It's not an opinion. The fact that he is the richest man in the world is the proof that his decisions have been succesful. And obviously it's not luck because of repeated success.
You're obviously too young to have observed the dotcom bubble blow up and collapse, so I fully understand why you're drinking the kool aid. I guess we'll see how things pan out.
You seem to be arguing that your personal opinion is more correct than what markets say about Elon's companies, and you make this opinion the basis of your argument. Sorry, but you're not being logical here. By any measure, Tesla and SpaceX are extremely succesful companies, and to argue otherwise is just dumb.
> Tesla and SpaceX are extremely succesful companies, and to argue otherwise is just dumb.
Definitely not what I was arguing, but I'll leave you to figure out how we got here.
Bernie Madoff was similar back in the day…
> compared to other entities, which aren't a singular person
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.
Why would it be valid to compare a company's AUM to someone's personal net worth?
Blackrock doesn't control how the vast majority of that money is spent...
Because otherwise the weird mental contortions get super uncomfortable!
Using BlackRock as a comparison is really disingenuous. They're basically a Vanguard. They hold assets as trustee for the actual owners of the wealth. BlackRock and Vanguard can't wake up one day and decide to put in a bid for OpenAI because of some personal vendetta.
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.
>Elon's wealth is mostly in the things he has built himself
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.
Elon did good things. And then it went to his head. Look at almost every tech billionaire today and how many good things they (aren’t) doing.
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.
Remember when he didn't solve world hunger?
https://truthout.org/articles/musk-pledged-6b-to-solve-world...
“If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it,” Musk said.
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.
As far as I can tell, WFP never said they could "solve" world hunger with $6B. They did put together a report about what they could do with $6B, which didn't seem to interest Musk after all.
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.
> More capital is allocated to good things
Or bad things.
Saying he isn't even that rich and then saying that he has 1/30th of the total assets managed by BlackRock is completely absurd. I frankly don't understand how you can think one person controlling 1/30th the value of all of BlackRock's managed assets is totally fine and normal. Additionally, as mentioned by others, BlackRock invests on behalf of clients, so unlike Musk, they can't just throw around their money willy-nilly, so the comparison is just disingenuous.
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.
I think this is a negotiation tactic that aims to eventually block OpenAI's transition to for-profit.
And at least at the stated valuation. They've valued it at $40 billion but if they decline larger offers it is hard to sustain the low valuation.
I wholeheartedly agree
non-non-profit
Fixed! Thanks!
Unless it ends up like the Twitter situation and he is forced to put the money up.
poison pill offer ?
It's also another great view into Musk's character.
The whole OpenAI debacle is a cluster. Clearly OpenAI should have been founded as a for-profit corp from the beginning. If it had, then folks like Musk that put up $100M to help found it wouldn't have been shuttered out of whatever deal is going on to transform it into a for-profit.
So, from what I have read about spinning a for-profit off from a non-profit, the for-profit needs to be purchased from the non-profit at market value. There have been a lot of questions about how MSFT or OpenAI's other investors would fund the purchase of the for-profit entity.
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.
I don't know that this sets a floor, really. There's already a valuation, set by its own preferred investors. I'd think $97b is almost definitely below that. And do the nonprofit board members have the same fiduciary as a typical for-profit board?
The point presumably is that the valuation in a round is paper money. Whereas Elon's group have just offered cash, so they've set the actual value. The law might only care that the non-profit gets a market cash value actually bid, not the speculative value that it could have based on multipling how much some shares were sold by the number of shares.
Actually, OpenAI's for profit was going to buy itself from the non-profit at $40 billion. So this at over twice that is a much more attractive offer.
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.
A lot of people are unsurprisingly throwing shade on Musk being involved here but I think it's really important to understand what this is fundamentally about: stopping or fundamentally changing OpenAI's plans to be spun off.
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.
I do not, for a single second, believe that Musk is doing this for altruistic reasons.
Nobody is doing anything for altruistic reasons, including and especially Sam Altman.
Yeah sure, in the pandemic all people just did it for the money. Same with all the voluntary fire fighters and all the other voluntary work.
A lot of people did a lot of things for a lot of money during the pandemic. Even voluntary fire fighters do it for status, fun, companionship, extra money, experience, etc. Doesn't mean that volunteers aren't valued or important. It's important to note that there's limits to people's charity even among the most charitable. Those limits are driven by perceived costs outweighing the perceived benefits to the individual.
it doesn't have to be luckily
I never said this was altruistic. The same goal can come from him trying to derail OpenAI-P.
Could it be that part of the the Musk-led group's offer of $100 billion is a tactic to drive up the valuation of Open AI-P, so that it's more painful/difficult for Open AI-P to buy itself out of Open AI-NP?
That's why I said this:
> 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.
> 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.
"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.
> "We believe an OpenAI-P owned by Elon is fundamentally against our mission."
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.
The issue isn't OpenAI-NP having some stake (which will obviously be the case no matter what), it's Elon having some stake.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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
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!
Interesting logic, but I think it's obvious to everyone that the reason they won't sell to Elon has nothing to do with the price of the offer.
I'm too smooth brained to see the obvious reason. Would love for someone with more folds to say what the reason is instead of hiding it behind its obviousness.
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.
Which number is bigger isn't the only calculation to make. Elon has shown himself to be a capricious and distracted steward of the companies he assumes control of. He has a lot of debt and is already over-leveraged on multiple companies as well as his new roles in government. X has plunged in value, Tesla sales are plummeting worldwide, Elon's scorched earth political agenda invites unending controversy that OpenAI already has enough of on its own. Even if you ignore those glaring concerns, there's a compelling argument to be made that OpenAI's current leadership has already proven itself more than capable of world-class innovation and vision when they effectively created an entirely new industry.
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.
That may be all true. But maybe I'm not quite understanding the point or how it relates to Elon from the perspective of non-for-profit OpenAI. It could be "stranger X" and let me explain.
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.
For as "obvious to everyone" as your point is supposed to be, it focuses entirely on what the offer means to OpenAI-P and zero on what it means to OpenAI-NP. The decision is to be made by an OpenAI-NP that can effectively divorce itself from OpenAI-P and in either case will be divorced from control of OpenAI-P. They can either have $40B in OpenAI equity or $97B.
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 isn't what I suggest at all
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?
> This you?
> > 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.
> Here's how I summarized my initial point in the TL;DR on my ultimate parent post:
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.
LMAO you literally just removed every word about the incentives around control of OpenAI-P and are claiming it's not a strawman to say that the only thing I say is 97 > 40.
It's not a strawman, it's the crux of your argument. The rest is just hand-waving away the chaos that Musk represents for OpenAI P and NP so you can repeatedly frame this is a simple question of which number is bigger than the other - hence why you have to repeat it over and over again.
> 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.
X plunging in value is outdated information. EBITDA is double what it was when it was public ($682m to $1.25bn). Revenue is down, but profit is up substantially, due to aggressive cost management.
XAI is valued at another $40bn as well.
Twitter’s interest payments are quite large though, something like $1.2bn/year.
The advertising business is rising again, with Disney, Comcast and IBM back. [1]
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/
Yeah, I think that's the critical observation here. Good job cutting through the noise and spotting it.
Drive up or value it fairly? If Sam and the board are unwilling to even consider the $100B offer then it seems to be strong evidence that it is worth much more than $100B.
This is a well known unsolved problem in theoretical investment science.
I probably misunderstand you but why should it be fundamentally about that and not fundamentally about controlling more valuable technology? The example of Twitter clearly demonstrates that despite the Dear Leader's altruistic claims, he's after money and power just the same as anyone else.
He would probably also be happy to get OpenAI-NP for $97B! However, I don't think he believes this is likely at all. His goal is to force OpenAI's hand and stop the comical; undervaluing of OpenAI-NP by forcing OpenAI to value OpenAI-NP at >$97B.
I probably haven't explained this clearly enough in my original post which I wrote too quickly.
I think some of it is just a grudge. From everything I've read about Musk he seems big on them. So while some of it may be for power, a large portion is probably plain old revenge.
Reportedly [0], SoftBank is looking to invest $40B for a share of OpenAI.com that would value it at $260B.
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...
I thought about this for a bit and I'm not sure how you would even counter. A legitimate offer has been tendered. It's pretty much checkmate here. A certainly well played move. This will definitely derail things. For OpenAI to best move would be to actually unconditionally accept, as it's likely this offer isn't serious in the sense that it's the offer they'd prefer to give.
Great thread, thanks. This is kind of what I was thinking and makes the most sense. That this is a play to block OpenAI plans to go full for-profit.
OpenAI gonna prove P=NP is what you are alluding to?
I think Musk (probably using his Saudi admirers yet again) wants to buy OpenAI because he needs a working chatbot right now. For example, he is gutting the General Services Administration and wants to install a GSAi chatbot to replace the workers:
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.
Putting aside that LLMs can’t replace people that way, it would be infinitely cheaper to just license one vs buying OpenAI. And you could say “but Elon wants government money”, but it’d take so long to make it back because inference is so cheap (and probably running at a loss if you’re OpenAI).
This makes no sense. Republicans work for the government too. How are they going to get re-elected if they fire their base?
> I think Musk (probably using his Saudi admirers yet again) wants to buy OpenAI because he needs a working chatbot right now.
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.
Nonsense. He's ignoring judges orders to cease and desist in his funding freezes and he's simultaneously attempting to seize control of the AI company through an aggressive acquitision, all the while avoid seemingly all oversight.
This can only be described as techno authoritarianism.
> and he's simultaneously attempting to seize control of the AI company through an aggressive acquitision
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 can add data, transportation and transhumanism to the list of things he'd love to do.
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.
Notably a steep discount from their recent raise at a 157B. The board would never approve.
Yes, seems like a PR stunt to discount OpenAI.
It's the opposite - it's a PR stunt to try to keep Sam Altman from discounting OpenAI even further and selling it to himself at a laughably low price.
Hardly Musk's first attempt at blatant market manipulation. Hell, that was how he got stuck holding the bag with Twitter
And in trouble with the SEC by claiming someone he was going to take Tesla private.
It seems unlikely that he'll get in any trouble with the SEC this time around.
What market is openai trading on?
Just because a company is not being traded on the open market doesn't mean it doesn't exist within the context of a market economy
Isn't this Musk offer just for the nonprofit part, i.e. not a comparable number?
Well the nonprofit theoretically controls the for-profit, so the argument would be that the subsidiary for profit is somehow worth more than its parent? It’s a complicated legal structure but I don’t think that could be true.
IMO this offer is exactly to prove that point.
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.
WSJ Full Article: https://archive.is/Uygax
This includes the actually interesting bit:
> 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.
Intelligent and honest journalists are as rare as unicorns.
This isn't that, I'm not at all knowledgeable about this topic, it's just the basic level of curiosity you'd expect from an educated layman!
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"
Regardless of how you feel about the potential consequences of Musk being a significant shareholder of OpenAI, the alternative is not to let sama and other preferred investors buy the non-profit's stake at a >50% discount as they had planned to do before this offer.
Rather than discussing crazy Elon, I would like to hear insights on what this means? Why does he want OpenAI? Is there a chance to ever get this money back? Who is financing this after the twitter failure?
The last question to me is the most interesting. I am starting to believe that they don't consider it a failure because they might be lending the money as a bribe to be close/hold something to the guy influencing the president.
Like Trump getting money from DB over and over.
> to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI
What does it mean to buy a nonprofit? Who owns it now? Does anyone?
Nonprofits generally have to break out unrelated business income [1] into for-profit companies that pay tax and pass the post-tax profit to the non-profit. In this case OpenAI the nonprofit owns OpenAI Global, LLC which is the entity that operates their API/ChatGPT and receives the investments from Microsoft et al.
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...
Honest question. What's happens to Microsoft's investment then?
That depends entirely on the final contracts they signed with OpenAI Global, LLC and I think there have been at least two deals so far (and latter ones might have amended the previous ones).
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...
> Musk is offering to buy the forprofit from the nonprofit
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.
I think the journalist that originally reported the story for the Wall Street Journal, that got sent the press release, is just misinformed about nonprofits and that has been parroted by every downstream outlet. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed a lot with reporting on OpenAI over the last year (and tons in HN comments any time the topic comes up).
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).
Exactly what I want know! A non profit is a corporation for public benefit. They bylaws state how the board gets elected, but there is no such thing as voting shares. So there is no owner. When you close a non profit you have to disperse the assets to another entity that supports the non profits mission statement.
Yeah this is another question I had and another source of frustration with the journalists that write these pieces.
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...
I see clear sentiment change in HN. And that is why I love this forum. People here do change their opinions when presented with facts :) Proud to be a member of the community.
I mean...you're kinda using sentimental anecdata to pat hn on the back a little bit here. There are definitely other explanations for sentiment change than being presented with facts.
There could be 2 other reasons: 1) Vocal people dynamics changed. It could be the case but other communities (eg reddit) do not show such behavior. The sentiment there is the same as before just louder, no shift. 2) Moderators are silencing one side of the audience. I do not have the evidence to prove such behavior.
This seems like the opening shot in a negotiation for Elon to own more of the PPU's that get converted into common from his original 2016 investment.
I think this was the final item for “Elon Bond villain” bingo
Good it was reprehensible that tech attention or gullible government/bank money would be going to something that isn't owned by Elon. Only he can save us
You forgot to capitalize the "h" in "he" in your last sentence.
This would be a disaster.
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 guess I didn't realize that when Elon said that Twitter was going to be the "Everything App" that he meant he was just going to buy and control everything.
I've been uncomfortable with this shit stain since he took over twitter. And it has gotten exponentially worse ever since he endorsed the orange clown.
The turning point for me is when that incident occurred with the boys stuck in the flooded cave in Thailand. Musk had his designers create a mini-submarine to rescue them... but it wasn't suitable. One of the cave divers who risked his life to rescue the boys made the mistake of saying Musk's sub was useless... so Musk called the diver "a pedo."
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.
Don't forget that Musk also hired a PI to gather evidence that the cave diver was a pedophile (which obviously failed).
Well...at least we know what those scammy as fuck crypto scemes for Donald and Melania were for.
This is an odd thread. If a group is able to take control and prevent OpenAI from becoming a for profit corporation would be a welcome development.
I suspect many people in this thread don't believe this is genuinely about preventing OpenAI from becoming a for-profit corporation.
Who is still give that guy money after the failure of Twitter and the impending collapse of Tesla stock?
The Saudis, Softbank, Thiel, or maybe some banks or private capital lenders trying to ingratiate with Musk et al?
Recalling that almost all the OpenAI employees signed to support the reinstatement of Altman... it'd be funny if all someone else had to do to seize control of OpenAI was to offer the employees more money.
More pot stirrer than ai overlord kind of move by Musk here.
Is he finding it hard to get anyone to care about grok?
A bird in hand is worth two in the bush and a judge will see it that way if the non-profits directors balk at this based upon an investment valuation.
No. I don't like this. Too much power concentrated in the hands of a single individual. I admire Musk, but I firmly believe never put anyone on a pedestal. I hope this does not happen.
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.
Does Baron Capital represent the Harkonnens?
....Atreides Management?
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 type of people who name their companies Palantir and Anduril
Maybe they should be called the Nazgul.
And cross swords with IBM's legal department? No thanks.
> 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.
How would X benefit from such an acquisition?
Considering Musk's power and the shrinking moat of OpenAI you would think he would be create something better with government support - or as some new department.
It certainly doesn't say much about his confidence in X.ai keeping up with OpenAI
Why shouldn't he buy everything? He bought the U.S. (sarcasm, I hope)
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.
Well, now that Wall Street offloaded the X debt they were stuck with for some time they can support great new ventures.
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...
Ketamine is a hullava thing.
Where's he getting that $94.7B, from the US Treasury?
the same fund that's going to buy tiktok
Your tax dollar at work!
> consortium led by Elon Musk
Are there other major investors involved here or just Musk?
From WSJ:
> 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.
Given that it's being done through xAI, it seems reasonable to think that most parties from December's series C would also at least entertain the idea:
> 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.
Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir
Im expecting the third world war to start anytime now and it will be us against Musk and Trump’s terminators autonomous killing robots. Im half joking when I say that.
Gotta settle ownership in the octagon.
It's time for a Celebrity DeathMatch: Musk vs Altman. With Zuckerberg as an extra if possible. Aaaah I miss that show.
Isn’t musk becoming a single point of failure risk?
he's certainly becoming a single point of failure
really? I'm curious to know what he's failed at. Seems like he's making all the right moves lately.
Indeed, it's hard to imagine how he could move any more to the right.
Well-played!!
Single point of failure does not mean failure. It's an engineering term that refers to the risk associated with consolidating numerous responsibilities under a single system.
He’s failed at being a likeable human.
Right moves for whom?
A Bond villain.
Lex Luthor
He failed at Twitter.
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.
Getting teenagers to siphon your data is definitely a right move in my book
I really thought his inauguration performance (the drugs, the saluting) would finally wake people up to what's going on what Elon Musk.
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.
Your take is radically empathetic, and we have seen (e.g. with Tony Hsieh) how it all unraveled.
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-...
He's been posting on Twitter obsessively for years now, it's definitely one of his worst addictions. He blew $44 billion to satisfy his cravings, which has to be a record spend on an addiction.
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.
Some failures: the boring company hasn't done much of anything, other than a very short loop in Las Vegas. Do you know anyone who has bought one of his solar roof systems, and when was the last time anyone mentioned it? The hyperloop idea didn't go anywhere. Twitter is worth about 25% of what he paid for it, though one could argue being in control of it is worth $30B to him personally. He also said he was going to get rid of bots, and failed at that.
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
He bought Twitter and all he got was congress, the senate, and the presidency. Trump's 2020 loss was a wakeup call for him.
you now have a significant percentage of the educated populace thinks he's an asshole at best and fascist at worst; this was most not the case before he bought twitter and went full-MAGA
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.
worse, he was quite clear he planned to make it politically neutral which he absolutely didnt
what? he's making terrible moves. violating the consitution, mainly. illegally hacking and slashing the federal government without any idea what he's doing, what he's cutting, providing any clear or sensible or accurate reason why, supporting and echoing nazis and white nationalists. i mean he's now the #2 villain to the half of the country with a moral compass. i miss when it was fun to talk about how cool a tesla was and how cool spacex is and now its just miserable to be associated with this guy.
Terrible for who? Maybe for you (or me), seems to be working out quite great for him.
i mean maybe? he's good at burning bridges and getting away with it. but i gotta think its not gonna help his companies
Does the longevity of a single company matter when you"re dealling with billions? He can always jump on the next thing, right?
im sure he'll be fine but thats not really my main concern here
We need government protection of our valuable national resource of Billionaires. I say we first start with weekly blood tests to make sure no one is poisoning/drugging them, with the results made public.
I wrote this in 2021: Billionaires: Our Single Point of Failure https://metastable.org/billionaires/
Sincere question: what do you believe should happen when a company becomes successful?
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.
In the post, I say private individuals can own assets in two ways, as individuals (up to a cap) or through a personal corporation (no cap).
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.
> the devil is in the details
Well yeah :)
Any ideas on how the board is chosen? Does the majority(only) owner / CEO of the p-corp do it?
The board can and should be friendly with the p-corp owner. Almost all the time they are going to be green light everything. They are really just a "sanity check" (literally).
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.
It sounds like you are also libertarian, but you argue that even libertarian societies should have some form of public interest limitation, license or oversight. This is in line with traditional Thomas Jefferson thinking: "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
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.
Do you really think Musk actually does anything of value?
No and I am eagerly awaiting the day I don’t have to hear his stupid name or see his uncanny valley face ever again. Something irks me that the world’s richest man which many people look up to and actively try to emulate is a petulant asshole.
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.
I don't know if they are valuable or positive, but as of late he's certainly doing things with impact.
Probably nothing technical but he certainly does provide huge value as a brand and IMHO he is irreplaceable. Who else can convince very rich people invest gargantuan amounts of money into moonshot projects?
If he died tomorrow nothing would change. Sam Altman would just rush in to be the next money playboy with idiosyncrasies.
He's keeping TSLA's stock price afloat with endless bluster. That's worth probably 500 billion on its own.
Most unfireable CEO ever despite very obviously harming the company more than working there. If they replaced him with someone who would actually work for Tesla the Robotaxi/Optimus stories would not longer hold water (probably the first thing CEO would do was reset expectations so they don't get blamed for the lies) and it would quickly be valued way less than Toyota.
I hope we will not see consolidation in this space but instead many competing services. I want a future where I will pay my AI money to someone else than the current set of billionaires.
I want a future where I don't need to pay anyone to do my computing.
Reminder: don’t trust third parties with your digital belongings. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re third parties. And third parties, by definition, are people who today are on your side and tomorrow will sell you to the highest bidder.
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.
Yo dogg, I hear you like capitalism. And here is your Musk.
Musk is salty he left the alliance at the start and now wants back in.
Musk is a Xi surrogate
Sick and tired of idiotic daily Musk Musk Musk news. You can't live life anymore without that nazi doing some random thing. Btw he is out now insulting Altman. Childish and horrible.
mmmmh... chat-gpt 5 and their other models are so much a disappointment they want to sell fast?
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).
Trump put Elon on stage at rallies over and over, letting all of America know if you vote for Trump, he will hire Elon to run DOGE. They were as open about this as a campaign can possibly be. Then, America overwhelmingly voted to have exactly that. Period. End of story. Cry about it any way you want but this is what the people voted for, this is what the people want. Get over yourself. No one cares about your opinion but you. The people have spoken. Deal with it.
How in the hell is this not on the front page?
Once again, any bad news for OpenAI is censored from reaching the front page of HN.
This is the technology equivalent of monkeys throwing feces.
If everyone pandered to Musk every time he wanted attention, the world would come to a standstill.
How is this bad news for OpenAI?
Great idea
Take the money. It's not Open, and its not A(G)I. You won't get a better deal.
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.
itt technocrats complaining about how bad elon is with tone a reasoning no better than his
Couldn't the prior actions and TikTok be taken as precedents for a National Security takeover? Put it under DOGE?
The comments here are disturbingly similar to reddit. Is HN broken or what?
HN has been reduced to reddit over the previous few years, sorry to say. Yes, it is broken. Some cool hobbyist projects get some attention here and there but a cultural tumor has metastasized among its audience.
Since my goal is to see the failure of LLM technology, I think this is fantastic.
Why is that your goal?
At this point I think the burden of proof should be on ML people to explain why that shouldn't be my goal. Every person in that industry has stated that the technology is going to displace 30% of jobs within the decade. Why should anybody support something which is certain to absolutely destroy society while simultaneously having no positive payoff?
So it's not really LLMs you want to see fail, it's the businesses people are building around them. I can sympathize with that for sure but to me it seems obvious that there's many potentially beneficial applications of the technology that don't involve taking jobs.
Right, though I don't see much distinction given that the cost of training the models is so high. The existence of the technology is equivalent to the existence of these businesses, is it not?
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.
AlphaFold 2. It's not an LLM but it's not that different technologically. EDIT: that last sentence is actually a bit unfair to AlphaFold 2 as I consider it to be much more impressive technology than LLMs, but it comes from a common lineage.
It's a bit too late for that and it is not enough.
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.
>Investors already put their money in at around $157B+ and are not willing to take a price cut down to less than $100BN.
This is for a controlling stake, not outright ownership, isn't it?
Considering musks history, its also possible he doesn't actually want the deal and is doing it for other reasons.
While I think the purchase of Twitter was ultimately in his favor, he definitely had buyers remorse back then.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/07/softbank-set-to-invest-40-bi...
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.
That's hilariously nonsensical.
Hey Sam, I'll buy it for tree-fiddy, good luck getting anyone to invest at a bigger valuation now!
You sure ?
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.
distillate is a noun, not a verb
Edit: I love the edit, it's very straightforward now!
Yes but why would investors on the board who own a piece of OpenAI at 157B be ok with a sale at a smaller valuation?
Cash in hand might be better than trusting that valuation.
OpenAI is not worth more than 9.74 billion, considering their moat is steadily shrinking and their models aren't even open. Even if OpenAI produces their chips via TSMC, it means that at least AMD can do the same, if not anyone else with just 100 million to spend.
OpenAI is the 6th most popular website in the world and if someone's going to kill Google, it's them. If they IPO'd today, they'd easily be worth hundreds of billions if not more.
>If they IPO'd today, they'd easily be worth hundreds of billions if not more.
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.
OpenAI is currently in talks to raise at a $340B valuation.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/30/openai-said-to-be-in-talks...
Who in their right mind would put money into OpenAI with DeepSeek out there dumping its better models for free with no license restrictions?
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.
Absolutely, we can even make a parallel with UNIX:
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.
You've got a point about UNIX and Linux, but let's not forget about Microsoft. Back in the day, even with free systems popping up, Microsoft became a tech giant with its pricey products. Similarly, OpenAI has the potential to be the Microsoft of AI. With its resources and smart partnerships, it could set the trend and stay ahead, even as open-source options grow.
This would have been true 2 years ago.
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).
This. Most users don't care about what model has the best benchmarks on twitter.
They care about the heavy censorship of the model, the amount of refusals and the low quality of the answers with the o1/o3 series.
They seem to be doing ok...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...
IPOs are pump and dumps; this much is a given.
OpenAI isn't even profitable yet, and they might never become profitable.