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granzymes 5 hours ago [-]
Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance:
Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.
The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.
It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.
az226 29 minutes ago [-]
It’s quite an odd ruling given that OpenAI completed its for profit “conversion” last fall.
It seems the biggest value loss to the nonprofit was in this conversion, not in the initial for profit subsidiary creation giving investors capped profit shares.
metalliqaz 10 minutes ago [-]
But this "conversion" was apparently not the focus of the suit, according to OP. Perhaps it occurred after they initiated legal proceedings?
bambax 4 hours ago [-]
I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system but do they really need a jury and a trial to determine whether the claims are barred by the statute of limitations? Couldn't this be decided by a judge before trial?
compiler-guy 3 hours ago [-]
Part of the Statute of Limitations isn't just on when he filed the claim, but when he found out or should have found out, by reasonable diligence that he had a claim at all.
So the question before the jury has a significant component of "Should he have found out by this time?" Which is a question of fact, and facts are typically decided by juries, in the US at least.
The two parties can agree together to let a judge decide facts like this, but generally, if one or the other party wants it to go to a jury, it does.
I'm guessing part of Musk's strategy was to have it go to the jury, which are often seen as easier to manipulate than judges, especially when a case is weak. Or perhaps his team already knew this particular judge would be inclined to rule against him, so did the next best thing.
CSMastermind 3 hours ago [-]
Elon argued that even though the events in question took place sometime between 2017 and 2020 OpenAI intentionally hid the information from him until 2022-2023 which is why he wasn't able to file the lawsuit until 2024.
That's what the jury found against - they said he was reasonably informed enough to have brought the suit earlier and thus the 3 year clock should start ticking in 2020 not 2023.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
In the US, judges make determinations of law, but juries (in a jury trial at least) must evaluate the evidence to make findings of fact. So the jury would need to make a finding as to when the statute of limitations started ticking based on the evidence, and the judge then makes the legal determination that the statutory period has lapsed.
duxup 15 minutes ago [-]
If it’s a very clear fact yes a judge can make the call. In this case what Musk knew was part of that and a jury then had to make the call on what the fact was.
cwmma 3 hours ago [-]
In the American system juries figure out questions of fact and judges figure out questions of law.
In this case I guess the question was 'when did the incident actually happen' with Elon arguing it was later then Altman.
prepend 3 hours ago [-]
In this case the judge determined that it did require a trial and refused to dismiss based on statute of limitations.
ai-x 2 hours ago [-]
That's like saying can't the Judge decide who the killer was when he literally saw the video of shooting.
dnnddidiej 2 hours ago [-]
Or like if a piece of evidence was obtained lawfully?
I can understand why people and me included might think they can decide this before trial.
manquer 36 minutes ago [-]
> quintessential question of fact
It is always complicated - statue of limitations timers have many tolling conditions - to name of few: discovery of harm, not being in the legal jurisdiction, negotiating in good faith to resolve the dispute.
The law always has some room for interpretation, which is why lawyers, juries judges and appellate courts exist.
P.S. IANAL, and also don't know anything about this specific case, or its merits for appeal or lack thereof .
jmyeet 3 hours ago [-]
For people unfamiliar, generally speaking in trial courts the jury is the finder of facts and the judge is the finder of law (yes, there are bench trials where the judge does both). As an aside, appeals courts deal in legal issues (ie statutory interpretations and constitutional issues).
So not being within the statute of limitations is typically a legal issue so what must've happened here is the jury would've been asked if the earlier OpenAI-MS deals were substantially similar to the latest deal. I can't find the verdict form or the jury instructions but I'll bet that was the key issue the jury decided.
snark42 4 minutes ago [-]
That fact here was if Musk should have known about the potential breach of charitable trust before 2021 given it started in 2019, if not before, with Microsoft investment and he didn't sue until 2024. There is a 3 year statute of limitations.
4 hours ago [-]
Arodex 5 hours ago [-]
>Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".
granzymes 4 hours ago [-]
The statute of limitations exists to prevent unreasonable delay, to protect defendants from prejudice due to loss of evidence to the passage of time, and to recognize that people who are injured tend to complain immediately and not sit on their claims.
This case demonstrates why. Musk only complained after OpenAI was commercially successful with ChatGPT and after he started a competing effort. He repeatedly said “I do not know” and “I do not recall” on the stand, and argued that the passage of time made it hard for him to remember facts that would have been helpful for OpenAI.
Arodex 4 hours ago [-]
I know why statutes of limitation exist. I was wondering why it applied here. Apparently it wasn't completely straightforward, as nine jurors were needed to reach a decision on that point, instead of a single judge or even clerk.
granzymes 4 hours ago [-]
Whether the claim accrued before the statute of limitations expired is a question of fact, and is therefore reserved for the fact-finder which in this case was the jury.
toast0 4 hours ago [-]
IMHO, whether (and which) statue of limitations applies is a question of law, whether said time limit has passed is a question of fact. I'd like to read the jury instructions and verdict, but I didn't see a link to them anywhere.
I guess there could be a question of fact in a case where the statues of limitation differ for different injuries, and the factual question is which injury was it.
granzymes 4 hours ago [-]
You are correct that which statute of limitations applies is a question of law. If facts are undisputed, that is the end of the issue. In this case, the facts were disputed, and the jury found for the defendants.
The jury instructions are public and the final jury form will be published, likely later this week.
I can tell you that the instructions told the jury to decide whether Musk could have brought his case before 2021.
4 hours ago [-]
ryandrake 4 hours ago [-]
It seems to me like justice should be about right vs wrong and illegal vs legal, and not “did you fill out form 27B/6 on time?” Dismissing a case on these kinds of trivial procedural grounds seems like the court just doesn’t want to do its job.
tpmoney 1 hours ago [-]
Have you ever gotten into a fender bender and not had insurance involved? After resolving that situation, do you think it would be "justice" for the person you got into the fender bender with to come after you 20 years after the fact demanding compensation for 20 years of medical bills that they swear is related to injuries sustained in that horrific crash that you negligently caused? How would you even begin to construct a defense for yourself? Even assuming you still had the car, what is the likelihood it's in the same condition it was after that collision? How likely is it that you have a perfect 20 years of maintenance and repair records for that car? How likely is it that you have any evidence about what medications or substances you were or were not taking 20 years ago? How likely is it you could find any witnesses to the wreck from 20 years ago?
At a certain point, "justice" is deciding that it is impossible to fairly and reasonably adjudicate the dispute in question, and that it is better to have let a guilty person go free than to punish an innocent person. Statutes of limitation are one part of that package of procedures we have in place to make the process as fair and equitable as possible.
granzymes 4 hours ago [-]
The statute of limitations is not a trivial issue. Defendants have rights just as much as plaintiffs do, and our justice system does not allow plaintiffs to unreasonably delay in bringing their claims.
bobthepanda 2 hours ago [-]
there are also practical concerns at play with a statute of limitations, where evidence is more likely to disappear and the trial would've devolved into a he said/she said situation.
dbt00 3 hours ago [-]
If it was wrong in 2019, why did he wait 7 years to do something about it?
The passage of time makes it harder to have a fair trial, as shown by the number of times Elon said I don't know or I don't recall about conversations that would have been recent in 2019 but are now long (or strategically) forgotten.
dzhiurgis 3 hours ago [-]
Why would you try to sue something that has no chance of being alive?
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
Bringing claims promptly so they can be adjudicated is vital for justice. What would you think if you were sued for something that happened decades ago when the time to correct it was soon after the instigating event?
brookst 2 hours ago [-]
So you’d be OK if, say, a rental car sued you for putative damage to a car you rented 15 years ago?
Limiting time that an action can be brought is critical to having a fair trial.
geodel 4 hours ago [-]
It doesn't seem trivial at all. Allowing to flout procedure specially in case of very rich , powerful people with vast resources at their disposal would feel rewarding further for their cluelessness as if they are not already heavily rewarded by rigged system.
danso 2 hours ago [-]
How do you imagine justice functioning in a system that lacks a statute of limitations?
albedoa 3 hours ago [-]
I for one am happy that we have and enforce statutes of limitations. Calling it a kind of "trivial procedural grounds" is wild.
> the court just doesn’t want to do its job.
What do you think its job is.
peterfirefly 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
No, that is incorrect.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
In the US, court clerks do not decide cases. This was a jury trial, so the jury was required to do its job.
kstrauser 4 hours ago [-]
Because there has to be some point. It's unjust to allow someone to sue 30 years later, as everyone would have a sword of Damocles hanging over their head waiting for the right moment to strike. And in general, if you didn't realize you were robbed for 3 years, perhaps it's the case that you weren't actually robbed.
skeptic_ai 4 hours ago [-]
So if I exchange your Rolex with a fake one and then you try to sell after 3 years and you notice it’s fake, it’s fine for you?
granzymes 4 hours ago [-]
The statute of limitations takes into account when the plaintiff discovered or with reasonable diligence should have discovered their injury.
In this case, the jury found that Musk knew or should have known of his alleged injury prior to 2021.
rprend 1 hours ago [-]
Statute of limitations kicks in at the moment of your awareness of the watch being fake. But, you and the plaintiff might dispute over the fact of when you learned the watch was fake. That’s exactly what this jury decision was about. Musk claimed he wasn’t aware of OpenAI’s for profit push until 2022. Altman claimed he was aware of it as far back as 2017 or 2019. The Jury looked at texts and emails and interviewed witnesses and decided that Musk was aware of it in 2019, which is more than 3 years before he filed the suit in 2024.
eftychis 4 hours ago [-]
There is the notion of equitable estoppel, that would *perhaps*, depending on the facts, apply which stops a defendant, who for instance concealed or committed certain acts of fraud, from raising the statute of limitations defense.
"If the jury determines that at any time before those dates, Musk either knew — or had or should have known — that he had a claim that he could bring, then his suit was brought too late. The consequence of being too late is swift and absolute. If the lawsuit was filed late for a particular claim, that claim is out of the case; if it was too late for all of Musk’s claims, the lawsuit is over."
That's where the question of fact (i.e., the requirement for a jury decision) came in: "What was the statute of limitations?" is a question of law, but "When should Musk have known that OpenAI was moving too much toward for-profit?" is a question of fact (and, here, determines whether the statute of limitations applies).
chipsrafferty 4 hours ago [-]
There are multiple reasons why statutes of limitations exist, one of them being that the further away in time, the harder it is to prove evidence. Witnesses may have died, or their memory may be more faulty.
hnfong 4 hours ago [-]
Also criminal liability is generally handled differently. Some jurisdictions have no limit, and where the limits exist for criminal liability, limitations on serious crimes can be much longer than the civil ones.
hn_acc1 4 hours ago [-]
This is not a robbery, though. Not in the "break in and steal stuff from your house multiple times" situation. Legally, each of those are separate events, and one doesn't really affect the other unless it's all the same person, and the repetition is used to get a stronger case, etc.
jmyeet 3 hours ago [-]
There are several legal principles in play here. Note that these are civil trial issues and when you're talking about "robbing", you're likely talking about a criminal issue. These are:
1. Estoppel. If a party relies on your conduct then you can lose the right to sue over it;
2. Laches. This is a defense against prejudicial conduct, typically by waiting too long to take action;
3. Waiver. Your conduct can waive your right to sue. Imagine you live with someone and they don't pay half of the rent so you cover it. At some point your continued conduct means you lose the right to sue; and
4. The statute of limitations. Some claims simply have to be brought within a certain period. How this applies can be really complex. For example, we saw this in Trump's fraud convictions in New York. His time in office, away from the jurisdiction, essentially suspended the statute of limitations.
Some crimes like murder have no statute of limitations. Others have unreasonably short statutes of limitations. For example, probably nobody can be charged in relation to sex trafficking in the Epstein saga because the statute of limitations is often 5 years with such crimes. This is unreasonable (IMHO) because often the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.
It's also worth adding that not all legal systems have such wide-ranging statutes of limitation as the US does. Founding principles of those other legal systems is that the government shouldn't be arbitrarily restricted for prosecuting criminal conduct. The US system ostensibly favors "timely" prosecution.
FrustratedMonky 1 hours ago [-]
There sure was a lot of days of testimony on Sam Altman lying, for this to come down to " statute of limitations".
Shouldn't the defense have raised the statute of limitations much earlier?
SilverElfin 39 minutes ago [-]
Agree. If this is a precondition, why force people to share their diaries and stuff? Is it all to claim they hid material things that would have led to an earlier filing?
john_builds 4 hours ago [-]
thanks for the snippet
bflesch 3 hours ago [-]
If it's thrown out on a technicality then Musk got fleeced by his lawyers - good for them.
granzymes 5 hours ago [-]
My own thoughts:
If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point.
His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019.
Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into Tesla. His complaints fell flat for me given the number of emails where he said that a non-profit was likely a mistake.
This is technical, but Musk clearly never created a charitable trust, which was a precondition for his claims. His funds were donated for general use by OpenAI, not for any specific use that would allow him to claim breach of charitable trust. Also, all of his funds were spent by no later than 2020 which is before his alleged breach in 2023.
Musk unreasonably delayed bringing this case until the success of ChatGPT and starting a competing AI company, and he had unclean hands because he attempted to sabotage OpenAI repeatedly by poaching its key staff while on the board.
DoesntMatter22 4 hours ago [-]
Musk should have just made another company and then he’d have another 500 billion but he had that mistake and now it’s over. Then again we’ll see how well open ai does over the long term
granzymes 4 hours ago [-]
Evidence at trial showed that Musk attempted to pursue AGI at Tesla starting in 2017 before he left the board of OpenAI. He was unsuccessful in that endeavor and later restarted his efforts in xAI after the success of ChatGPT.
big_toast 3 hours ago [-]
Musk leaves the board in 2018 I think. And something happens in DX-754 where they've pivoted to AI in SpaceX around then too. I had a lot of trouble telling what "AI" meant in late 2017 at Tesla.
---
Sept 1, 2017 DX-669: Funding paused confirmation. Elon is still on the board for a while. DX-707 specifies the board as of Sept 26, 2017, and even suggests adding Shivon, Jared, Sam Teller.
Jan 31, 2018 DX-748: Elon is still discussing things with Greg. Elon: "The only paths I can think of are a major expansion of OpenAI and a major expansion of Tesla AI. Perhaps both simultaneously"
Feb 3, 2018 DX-754: Sam Teller says Elon "just suggested we use SpaceX email for AI stuff so switching over to that"
Feb 4, 2018 DX-755: Sam Teller and Shivon Zilis discuss disabling Openai
Feb 20, 2018 DX-770: Elon officially leaves board (first document I see specifying)
andrei_says_ 3 hours ago [-]
I sometimes wonder, what does one need a second 500 billion that the first 500 billion is not enough for?
aeternum 27 minutes ago [-]
Interestingly, during the trial he promised to donate any potential financial winnings to OpenAI's charity.
A move that surprisingly didn't get much press.
burkaman 8 minutes ago [-]
I think you are referring to a tweet on March 16th where he said "Btw, the proceeds of any legal victory in the OpenAI case will be donated to charity. I will in no way enrich myself." Not during the trial, not a donation to OpenAI's charity, and obviously not meaningful given his track record of not following through on public statements.
the_gastropod 21 minutes ago [-]
Elon Musk promises a lot of things that never come to fruition.
knicholes 3 hours ago [-]
Getting to Mars, it would seem.
nicolas_17 59 minutes ago [-]
I agree we'd all be better off if SpaceX figured out how to send Musk to Mars ASAP.
hdndjsbbs 3 hours ago [-]
Does anyone seriously still believe this? I thought as a society we had realized Musk is simply BSing whatever he feels like until it becomes untenable.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> Does anyone seriously still believe this?
I do. It’s not his singular focus. But he continues to personally invest himself in pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability. That goal seems more meaningful to him that it does to e.g. Bezos, who seems to have a rocket company to look cool.
thejazzman 59 minutes ago [-]
It’s in his own biography (the older one) that spacex would pursue mars without distraction. That he went to great lengths to ensure it wouldn’t be used for military, tourism, etc.
You can’t believe musk without simultaneously believing he’s a liar. It’s in HIS fucking book.
JumpCrisscross 58 minutes ago [-]
> It’s in his own biography (the older one) that spacex would pursue mars without distraction. That he went to great lengths to ensure it wouldn’t be used for military, tourism, etc.
I said I believe he wants to go to Mars and will put in the work to make that happen. I didn't say everything he's said is true. Musk absolutely lies. But his actions speak pretty consistently to Mars being a real goal.
tehjoker 1 hours ago [-]
This is a joint project of U.S. government military planners and an ostensible private individual. If Elon disappeared, rest assured, the contracts and development would still happen.
They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles. You need reusable spacecraft to make that tenable. This is not about Mars, don't buy the marketing. At best for civilians, this is about making broadband widely available such that America can dominate internet connectivity going forward and increase spying further. As an example, examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded.
The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications.
Fortress America will be invincible forever, so so they desire. The macroeconomics are not working out for them though even though the technological edge is still working for them on that level.
JumpCrisscross 57 minutes ago [-]
> They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles
This is a conspiracy theory folks who just Googled In-Q-Tel have been stringing together since Covid. It's not true.
> examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded
Russia wasn't excluded until recently. That was a problem!
> The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications
Wat.
awesome_dude 2 hours ago [-]
I know there's a risk when Musk's name comes up that everyone takes "all against" or "all for" approach - very polarising figure.
But I see a lot of that announcement, and the others someone else pointed to as his "aspirational, but ultimately never going to happen" goals - whether he believes the claims are achievable, or not, he says these things to energise people to working/paying for him to try
It costs him little to nothing to say, and other people's time, effort, and capital to try (and succeed/fail)
Tesla is falling to pieces now, and SpaceX is getting loaded up with completely unrelated projects (xAI) in order to try and make it look saleable (I guess) - it's very difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype.
usefulcat 1 hours ago [-]
> It costs him little to nothing to say,
That all depends on how much he values his credibility, I think..
But to be fair, for someone as good at self promotion as he is, I can believe that the value of the hype could be greater than the cost in credibility.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype
Oh yeah, the announcement is hype. But there is actual work underneath it making real progress in science and engineering that moves us closer to Mars. Some of that, moreover, is work that has limited appeal outside a Martian context.
vardump 1 hours ago [-]
> Tesla is falling to pieces now
Did I miss something?
stickfigure 57 minutes ago [-]
Year over year sales are declining. Stratospheric stock price is propped up by promise of selling humanoid robots, a technology (and market) which are unproven.
I would not invest.
4dfg 1 hours ago [-]
What a load of crap. He pushes this narrative purely for valuation purposes.
He has a legion of people propping up his stock by manipulating them into believing he is a wizard.
48terry 1 hours ago [-]
> pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability
I guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability
My cat is both cute and fluffy as well as a menace.
I mean, most of his wealth is coming from his overhyping skill, you can also tell marketing. Or lying.
I consider him a visionary in a sense of innovation but he is insecure and immoral one.
Needles to say his investors made money on his over promises.
42 minutes ago [-]
DoesntMatter22 2 hours ago [-]
To build more cool stuff. Would be great if he did neurolink for cancer
lovich 3 hours ago [-]
Because he is an addict and one of his addictions is money
testplzignore 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe he trying to collect every waifu from every gacha game. That would get expensive in a hurry.
latexr 25 minutes ago [-]
Money is finite. Every <unit of currency> not in your pocket is in someone else’s. Greedy narcissists can’t stand that, they need to have it all. They need to be number one. They don’t need the extra 500 billion to spend it, they need it so the number goes up.
lotsofpulp 3 hours ago [-]
Because money is just a proxy for power, and the goal is not to have cash, it is to have power. Perhaps via being able to make decisions at various businesses, or being able to travel to a different planet, or being able to influence other people, etc.
Could also partly be a curiosity to see what one is capable of, or maybe wanting to be known for helming an organization that accomplishes xyz.
robocat 3 hours ago [-]
Why did he need a second 250 billion after the first 250 billion? Makes me think of a inverted Zeno's paradox.
Why do you need an extra dollar?
I can answer for myself: New Zealand plans to tax the shit out of anyone that has more[A].
You need a fukton more than median wealth to be able to protect yourself against your own government.
The type of person that enjoys chasing money doesn't stop.
[A] via capital gains taxes and wealth taxes. Also one needs an excessive amount more to handle progressive taxation and means testing.
KaiserPro 2 hours ago [-]
> I can answer for myself: New Zealand plans to tax the shit out of anyone that has more[A].
New Zeeland is an outlier in that it doesn't have capital gains tax.
Its not the end of the world to have captial gains tax.
robocat 26 minutes ago [-]
CGT is fine.
I wasn't trolling, but I have unfortunately deviated from the topic.
What isn't fine is my belief that I'm going to be rug-pulled by my government. From multiple sources I believe New Zealand will tax most savings to smithereens. The lie is that I should save for retirement; when any savings will be taken from me over time via a variety of mechanisms including taxes.
Both our Labour (leftish) and National parties will screw me.
The underlying issue is that our demographics leave little choice to the government. The majority of voters are naturally happy to take everything from everyone who has more than them. Voters are selfish.
I was trying to make a argument based on marginal economics. NZ should be encouraging me to increase my income from export earnings: instead it drastically discourages me. I helped found a startup, so I deeply understand the multiple ways our government discourages us from earning export income. My marginal utility from an extra dollar is already drastically diminished because I already have enough to enjoy my life. The >40% taxation on top (incl GST) reduces my motivation to earn money for NZ to nearly zero. I am not a money chaser and I dislike investing.
After some threshold, money as a marginal value becomes meaningless because other non-monetary factors like politics dominate. It seems like nobody cares how much society profits from you - they only care about their own selfish goals.
ericmay 2 hours ago [-]
It’s also not the end of the world to not have capital gains tax.
rolph 2 hours ago [-]
"Why did he need a second 250 billion after the first 250 billion"
because thats another 250 billion less for a competitor to use against you.
robocat 18 minutes ago [-]
That is zero-sum thinking.
I'm not sure how one can learn to see the world in a more positive light...
awesome_dude 2 hours ago [-]
Why did you turn that into a whine about a tax that exists in 31 of 38 OECD economies?
Go to Australia where you pay a stamp duty for buying (to pay for infra) and a CGT for selling
Edit: Changed stamp tax to stamp duty
danaris 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, no, this is bullshit.
You can't just apply One Simple Rule like this ("more money is always better" / "more money never makes a difference"). There is, objectively, an amount of money above which another dollar, or another billion, will never make a meaningful difference in your overall lifestyle[0].
The amount isn't a single bright line, but like with so many things, there's an area below it where extra money unquestionably improves your quality of life, and an area above it where it unquestionably doesn't.
[0] unless "your lifestyle" involves manipulating major governments and controlling the way people the world over think, which I wouldn't consider a legitimate part of "lifestyle"
jamiek88 3 hours ago [-]
> Why did he need a second 250 billion after the first 250 billion?
Because billionaires are mentally unwell.
jongjong 57 seconds ago [-]
I don't think justice applies to any entity with a market cap above $500 billion. What do you think would happen to the jury and the judge if they did the right thing? It wouldn't be safe for them.
tahoeskibum 5 hours ago [-]
Anybody read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
pj_mukh 5 hours ago [-]
Wait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true.
If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.
lqstuart 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe one of the scientists who cashed out 8 figures will file a suit that OpenAI has wronged them by depriving them of the joy of working
gamblor956 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody else has come forward because the number of people with a potential legal claim for asserting any such harm was a small group of between 2 and 6 people, of which Musk was one (setting aside SOL issues).
modeless 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah people are going to make up a lot of reasons why Elon lost that have nothing to do with the actual and very simple reason.
dcow 5 hours ago [-]
Right. Nobody cares whether Musk won or lost (well maybe a few do). People actually following the case wanted to know whether OpenAI would be held in any way accountable for anything. And this “resolution” does not satisfy. Before Musk got involved, what happened at OpenAI was a BigProblem for many people.
atom_arranger 4 hours ago [-]
Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?
I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.
granzymes 4 hours ago [-]
This case sets no precedent one way or the other on that question. The IP was transferred to the for-profit for fair value in 2019, and Musk never argued otherwise in this case.
The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.
chaseadam17 26 minutes ago [-]
Which they are unlikely to do because the California AG signed off on the original IP transfer agreement…
az226 23 minutes ago [-]
Or a self dealing conversion.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
Transactions like that happen all the time and are not problematic if handled legally. Any of the interested parties could have sued over it, but none have.
atom_arranger 2 hours ago [-]
The interested parties would be taxpayers. I think some groups are trying to look into it.
The issue is that they did R&D as a charity, donations to which are tax deductible, there may also be other benefits to being a charity during R&D but that’s a big one, then once the thing works, setup a for profit, sell ip at “fair value”, get some investment, then things are ready for business.
I read there’s no statute of limitations on a tax issue like this, so I guess it might be hanging over them indefinitely.
I’m not a big taxation and government fan, they’d probably just waste the money anyways. It does seem unfair OpenAI gets to use this loophole though, unless all companies can make their R&D investment tax deductible, and get any other benefits of this setup.
beambot 34 minutes ago [-]
Or more specifically: One just did sue, but lost because he waited too long.
adrr 3 hours ago [-]
Because they got to participate in the early investment in the for profit entity.
> Early Angels (Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and others): Approximately $10 million invested, current value $1.4 billion. That corresponds to a return of around 140x.
Yeah. I wonder if the question "Did OpenAI steal a non-profit worth what is now maybe hundreds of billions of dollars?" will ever be answered. If not it will be one of the biggest heists in history.
gamblor956 2 hours ago [-]
The non-profit received shares in the for-profit as a result of the transfer. Those shares are theoretically worth hundreds of billions.
If it had been a for-profit company contributing assets to another for-profit company, the transaction would not have had any different tax consequence.
dnnddidiej 1 hours ago [-]
Wasn't an arms length transaction so shennanigans (or lack of) cannot be proved.
(This is just a thought IANAL)
asadm 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like there still needs to be a penalty to OpenAI here even if that doesn't favor Musk (even though he funded the whole thing). It is still a theft.
greenpizza13 2 hours ago [-]
Need standing to claim theft, need to be within statue of limitations.
It's not theft unless a jury says it is, they didn't say it is.
testfrequency 50 minutes ago [-]
Every AI model swallowing the entire world of digital and physical data to then be resold back to the people will forever be the biggest heist ever pulled off in our lifetime. I’m shocked how little it gets talked about, and how convenient it is that many of these companies lost or burned their paper trails
protocolture 28 minutes ago [-]
1. No if anything, the idea that works cant be built using other products without the express permission of the original author would be the greater heist.
2. This has nothing to do with the case which was just Musk trying to punish his competitor.
HardCodedBias 1 hours ago [-]
I think that your first statement is correct.
I do not think that your second was correct.
david927 2 hours ago [-]
My theory is this civil suit was used to expose Sam's (and Greg's) self-dealing and perjury. This was civil, now comes criminal.
2b3a51 5 hours ago [-]
Reached for comment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead counsel Marc Toberoff said, “One word: Appeal.”
One wonders on what grounds?
In the UK, in a civil case like this, the judge I think comments on the likelihood of an appeal avenue once the verdict has been reached.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, is there any corporation or high net worth individual ever who, after losing a lawsuit, said “You know what, we accept the court’s decision that we were wrong and will be reflecting on how to do better in the future.”
Never. That never ever happens.
Legend2440 5 hours ago [-]
On the grounds of "I have infinite money and lawyers to drag this thing out forever, whether I'll win or not."
There is, but it's a pretty high bar to clear. Merely exhausting one's appeals does not qualify as vexatious. He could keep going for years as long as his lawyers make vaguely plausible arguments each time.
artninja1988 5 hours ago [-]
To any lawyers in here, is there an argument to be made for the statue of limitations not to apply here
gamblor956 3 hours ago [-]
No. Once the jury made its finding of fact as to when the event giving rise to the claim occurred (and to when the SOL clock would start ticking), the appeal would have to determine that the jury could not have reasonably made such a finding. It's very, very rare for an appeals court to overturn a finding of fact.
dnnddidiej 1 hours ago [-]
Out interest how does it work with new evidence then? I guess in civil less likely than criminal (new DNA technology etc.)
shdh 2 hours ago [-]
Two words: “billable hours”
duskwuff 5 hours ago [-]
> One wonders on what grounds?
Invent a time machine; send a lawyer back to file a new lawsuit within the statute of limitations.
colechristensen 5 hours ago [-]
He lost on the grounds of a statue of limitations defense which is exactly the kind of thing which is easily appealable.
qyph 5 hours ago [-]
Are you a lawyer? IANAL but my understanding is it would be difficult for an appeal to succeed. Appeals courts only evaluate review matters of law, not of fact. Whether is has been more than the 3 year limit the statute of limitations places is a matter of fact I think. And the advisory jury makes this much harder to appeal. What do you think the grounds for appeal will be?
colechristensen 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying it will succeed, but what counts as having passed the statue of limitations and various workarounds and modifications of the time period particularly in cases like this where the acts in question weren't necessarily a single event but progressive activity is the kind of question which is the bread and butter of an appeals court.
turtlesdown11 1 hours ago [-]
> particularly in cases like this where the acts in question weren't necessarily a single event but progressive activity is the kind of question which is the bread and butter of an appeals court.
No, findings of disputed fact - like when Musk had reason to know of his injury, are determined by a jury (or a bench judge). Appeals courts examine whether the law was applied correctly, not what the jury's fact finding was. There may be an avenue of appeal that the jury was improperly instructed, but determining questions of fact are exactly -not- the bread and butter of an appeals court.
frankchn 4 hours ago [-]
In this case, I think it is a jury's finding of fact re: the statute of limitations. Unless the appellate court finds that the trial court and jury is clearly erroneous, it will usually give significant deference to that finding.
dctoedt 4 hours ago [-]
It's even harder than "clearly erroneous" (the standard applied when a judge makes fact findings without a jury). Under the Seventh Amendment, if a hypothetical reasonable jury could have reached the result that the actual jury did, then that's the ball game [0], even if the trial judge or appellate-court judges would have reached a different result.
[0] Assuming that the trial judge didn't materially screw up in admitting or excluding evidence, or in instructing the jury about the law, and also assuming no proof of juror bias or improper influence.
gamblor956 2 hours ago [-]
A state of limitations case is actually one of the strongest kinds of legal defenses a defendant can have.
It's a foundational issue that goes to whether the court is even allowed to proceed with the case. A defendant could be guilty/liable/whatever of the alleged claims, and it wouldn't matter. If the statute of limitations has run, they're in the clear.
The only counter to an SOL defense is to try and claim that the SOL was paused for some reason, but those exceptions are very narrow and wouldn't apply here (and in the real world very rarely apply to civil cases).
enraged_camel 4 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure it's the opposite: appeals mostly only work when the decision is not clear cut, and the statute of limitations is.
pixl97 5 hours ago [-]
Typically if they bring up a case like this a judge again will get pissy and dismiss it with prejudice.
You can try to file it again, but that gets to the point where the judge can throw your ass directly in jail for 30 days, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago [-]
Filing the same lawsuit a second time is different. They're talking about appealing the decision in this case. You don't get tossed in jail for that.
But (at least in the US), the appeals court does not have to accept your appeal. When you file the appeal, you have to give them enough reason for them to even listen to your appeal, instead of rejecting it from the first filing.
aanet 3 hours ago [-]
This was one trial where I didn’t want either side to win
100ms 2 hours ago [-]
And somehow I still feel worse off that Musk lost?
mustaphah 5 hours ago [-]
The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.
dzonga 5 hours ago [-]
Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him.
e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.
Freedom2 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
rufo 4 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
nkozyra 3 hours ago [-]
A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.
5 hours ago [-]
exe34 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
bonesss 5 hours ago [-]
As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.
As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
nebula8804 4 hours ago [-]
Too early to write closing arguments on this. A vengeful future administration might make us realize that the entire transaction was a huge mistake.
MBCook 4 hours ago [-]
True. There is a “so far” on that.
SwellJoe 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know where a vengeful future administration would come from. We only have Democrats or Republicans to choose from, and Democrats have made turning the other cheek their entire purpose and political mission. They slow-rolled the investigation of Trump so long he got elected again in the meantime. The idea that any major Democrat would go after a billionaire and not just any billionaire but the biggest billionaire of them all? Absurd thought.
BeetleB 5 hours ago [-]
> Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.
That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
aniviacat 4 hours ago [-]
If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?
BeetleB 4 hours ago [-]
By a tad. SpaceX's worth is an order of magnitude more than Twitter's debt. I doubt any serious person considering buying shares in SpaceX will spend even a moment worrying about Twitter.
ben_w 4 hours ago [-]
They probably should. I've seen people concerned a subsidiary's GDPR fine would be calculated on the basis of the parent company's global revenue, and in Musk's case something similar has happened in Brazil where Starlink's assets were frozen and justified in part because of how Musk fails to properly delineate between his businesses.
generj 2 hours ago [-]
The EU also lacks incentivizes to not harm SpaceX. The US government as a whole, and DoD in particular wants SpaceX around to deliver cheap mass to orbit.
Europe on the other hand would love any judgements which give their rockets a chance to catchup. So they won’t temper an investigation or fines accordingly.
saalweachter 4 hours ago [-]
Musk only owns 42% of SpaceX; he only takes 42% of the loss as if he continued to own Twitter outright.
nkozyra 3 hours ago [-]
Well Twitter has other investors, too.
But he'll also likely be shaving equity here and there along the way to hedge this bet.
ngruhn 5 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, buying twitter was the turning point for his public image. Before that, he was Tony Stark. Now he's Lex Luthor.
nebula8804 4 hours ago [-]
Key word being public. People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. I remember the circumstances that led to the creation of /r/realtesla.
mschuster91 4 hours ago [-]
> People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space.
The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show, the "legitimate" bluecheck verification program being all but dead for new applicants. People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates.
jandrese 3 hours ago [-]
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show
I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Any of the struggles old Twitter had are absolutely dwarfed by its current problems. They still lose money hand over fist, the noise floor is way higher than it used to be, and a solid majority of the best users have either left or simulpost their content on other platforms like Mastadon and Bluesky. The new blue check system is close to an outright disaster, the only saving grace being that you can filter out the worst of the trolls by installing an extension that filters out blue check users.
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
For SpaceX this is true, but for Tesla the competition has caught up and in some cases surpassed them. The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools. Elon's big bet on Full Self Driving has yet to pay off as the deadline for getting it to actually work as advertised continues to slip and it's not clear when if ever unsupervised Full Self Driving will be available, especially on vehicles with older hardware. People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021. Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape. Tesla had 3 or 4 years where they stood head and shoulders over the competition, but those days are gone.
mschuster91 54 minutes ago [-]
> I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Oh yes, I did. Which is why I wrote my last sentence: "What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates."
> The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools.
Yup, the problem of the competitors is that it's a whole mess. Everyone has different rates, sometimes depending on the payment method, discoverability is nuts, payment is nuts.
> People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021.
Again, that is why I wrote: "at least until that damn rust bucket". With that, Tesla started to go down the drain - it was obvious that Musk had managed to yeet everyone able / willing to say "no, that is a goddamn stupid idea" to him.
> Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape.
Meh. The Model 3 is less than 40 k€ here in Germany. Competitors in that price range of actual quality brands such as BMW still don't get that range.
HWR_14 2 hours ago [-]
> there's a reason that place was up for sale.
It was "up for sale" because it was a public company. Tesla is also "up for sale" by that definition.
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition
The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one. I also choose not to do business with companies with that kind of leadership. A noble idea like by an ignoble person does not bode well for that noble idea.
mschuster91 54 minutes ago [-]
> The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one.
Well... on the other side, not recognizing where the world is moving towards is a damn large part of why the "legacy" automotive companies went down the gutter. VW nearly killed itself over Cariad and even in 2020, most automotive control units had less UI performance than a 2015 iPhone.
turtlesdown11 2 hours ago [-]
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single serious person who'd say Twitter is a better product/experience today than prior to the acquisition.
The place continues to bleed users and is the first stop shop for Nazis
mschuster91 52 minutes ago [-]
> I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single serious person who'd say Twitter is a better product/experience today than prior to the acquisition.
I stated that it already was in the gutters. That does not imply it's gotten out of the gutters ever since. Musk took something that was already pretty much dead and gave it a final shot.
latexr 5 minutes ago [-]
> something that was already pretty much dead
You keep saying that, but prior to the acquisition Twitter had finally managed to start turning a profit.
watwut 2 hours ago [-]
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show
Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
Musk bought it for political reasons, to stomp down on left leaning opposition and networks that were well functioning there. That part was a success, it is a nazi site now and helped Trump win elections.
mschuster91 52 minutes ago [-]
> Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
I did not claim that Musk improved on the issues, quite the contrary. It seems many people did not read the very last sentence. I also wrote:
> People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
Quite obviously I am referring to what was the situation back in 2022. Past tense.
hn_acc1 4 hours ago [-]
Is he though? I find he still has a STRONG positive image among younger tech people..
> And the latest poll conducted by Gallup seems to confirm that Musk has become genuinely hated: a whopping 61 percent of 1,000 randomly selected adult American respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, topping the list of most despised global figures.
> Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has widely been accused of genocide against Palestinians, couldn’t quite match Musk’s “strongly negative skew,” with just 52 percent of respondents saying they had an unfavorable opinion of the politician.
CamperBob2 3 hours ago [-]
A lot of young people are coming of age with the worst imaginable role models to emulate, from politics to business. This is going to become obvious soon enough, I imagine.
I'm very glad I'm not responsible for raising children these days.
Jcowell 2 hours ago [-]
No by then his public image would have be damaged by the cave diver incident
Ironically, I'd say that Musk is still Stark, in a lot of bad ways: both show narcissism, overconfidence, impulsivity, ego-driven decision making, control issues, disregard for consequences, and volatility.
the_doctah 4 hours ago [-]
And all he really did was gut the censorship engine.
pesus 4 hours ago [-]
Is that what we're calling allowing CSAM and promoting white supremacist rhetoric?
the_doctah 53 minutes ago [-]
>CSAM
proof?
>white supremacist rhetoric
Not illegal so... ?
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
Did the total of fines the US gov't was looking to levy on Musk total up to more than the $44Billion he spent on Twitter?
robofanatic 3 hours ago [-]
$44B is peanuts for a soon to be trillionaire
dylan604 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn't make it a good deal. Just means he can afford to make bad deals.
dlev_pika 2 hours ago [-]
This is part of what people miss about poverty - it’s incredibly unforgiving.
By contrast, the more money you have the more mistakes you can afford to make
exe34 3 hours ago [-]
When you are the richest man in the world, you can afford to do things out of spite. But we won't know - he got rid of the people who could have fined him.
dylan604 3 hours ago [-]
It just seems highly unlikely the USG would issue a >$44Billion dollar set of fines to anybody.
tahoeskibum 5 hours ago [-]
Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
outside2344 5 hours ago [-]
And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
shimman 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.
the_doctah 4 hours ago [-]
Needs context otherwise you appear hysterical.
doron 4 hours ago [-]
The results of DOGE
A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health.
USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries.
Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce.
Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded.
Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns.
Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support.
"I disagree with you and have zero awareness of the world around me."
dlev_pika 2 hours ago [-]
Not to anyone with basic grasp of what USAID did or was
the_doctah 49 minutes ago [-]
A tax money laundering program? I don't even want to hear what you've been brainwashed to believe it was. You probably think California makes efficient use of its tax dollars too.
shimman 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah canceling USAID programs that made the difference between life and death for millions of people around the world. Were you in a coma during DOGE in 2025 or are you being purposely selective in your memory?
Nothing hysterical about killing millions of people, hopefully there becomes a movement in the US to not only try Elon Musk at say the International Criminal Court (which we all know will lead to successful conviction, the evidence is apparent and naked enough as is) but hopefully the US government nationalizes his assets as he is a danger to the world.
Also the US should start throwing some oligarchs in prison to help rehabilitate its image after people start blaming us for causing famines and more deaths due to the recent imperial project that has become a total shit show.
If books are woke for you, maybe just go back into your cave where concern trolling is more respected.
the_doctah 51 minutes ago [-]
>"If founding is not restored by 2030, 8 to 10 million people will die."
"The polar ice caps will be gone by 2020" energy.
And yes, Harvard is too woke for me. Thanks for asking.
blurbleblurble 5 hours ago [-]
I don't believe in racial essentialism myself but I know someone who does
*ducks to dodge downvotes for not only making a bad dad joke but a political one*
CamperBob2 3 hours ago [-]
Obviously Trump was not going to be a champion of clean, renewable energy. If he knew the "Trump thing" was coming -- which thanks to his position inside Twitter he probably did -- then the rational thing to do was, in fact, what he did. Suck up to Trump to try to avoid or shape the outcome.
What he didn't need to do was alienate his existing customers by acting like he enjoyed it. Did he actually think he was going to sell a lot of EVs to Trumpers?
mustaphah 5 hours ago [-]
Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
SimianSci 3 hours ago [-]
After the many years, there have been insider voices indicating that success was despite Musk in many ways.
Musk bought his way into cutting edge tech, it succeeded despite him due to the already amazing people working in the industries.
The projects that have his actual involvement are pretty regularly seen as mistakes or flops.
I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.
dlev_pika 2 hours ago [-]
I heard this was a thing at Tesla, figure out how to redirect while the grown ups were actually building stuff
tombert 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
peterfirefly 4 hours ago [-]
It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures.
Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself.
Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course.
Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
johneth 2 hours ago [-]
So it's a lot less dumb if 50 really difficult and borderline physically impossible things happen. On the word of a conman. Right.
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
> It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.
No, it's still dumb.
No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space.
Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what.
Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS.
And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop.
Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.
pfdietz 2 hours ago [-]
> No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica.
Solar energy is going to expensive in Antarctica.
We can imagine a situation where the server hardware becomes so cheap that the energy cost dominates. In that case, sticking the things in space could make sense, particularly if extremely low mass space PV (just a few microns thick) can be made to work and also work cheaply.
tombert 1 hours ago [-]
You still would have to deal with the fact that you would almost certainly need to budget at least 2x the regular amount of hardware to deal with the fact that you can’t do stuff like “replace failed power supply” or “replace failed hard drive” without launching an astronaut into space, so you would need to have an abundant amount of resiliency to overcome that. You know, fault tolerance. Something you can’t handwave away for a data center.
I am harping on this point because You can’t just say “but in future computes won’t need maintenance” because at that point you’re just engaging in speculative fiction that you have no way of knowing. I could say “in the future we’ll have cold fusion” and maybe that’s true but I have no way of knowing.
So given that you would need 2x the power that you’d need on earth. Compared to just putting a shitload of solar panels in a desert where non-astronauts can easily access it I don’t see the point.
And of course there’s the nuclear-power-plant sized elephant in the room; if power is the constraint it would still almost certainly be more economical to have a nuclear reactor than trying to get a data center in space.
baggy_trough 3 hours ago [-]
It gets you out of the reach of the suffocating regulatory states here on Earth.
johneth 2 hours ago [-]
Are you forgetting that you need to launch from one of those "suffocating regulatory states"?
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
If it's something that could even realistically be done, which again I don't actually concede based on what I said before, then maybe it would have slightly less regulation.
Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who makes shit up based on his 12-year-old-boy fantasies because it sounds neat and investors just eat it up.
gamblor956 3 hours ago [-]
It's actually more dumb if you can manage all of the things to make this farce successful, because high-temperature chips that don't require cooling would work even better on Earth than in space because the temperature resistance could be combined with ambient cooling, and there are far more valuable (and longer-lasting) things that could be launched with greater launch mass efficiency.
Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.
mustaphah 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm not convinced he's all that smart
We probably disagree on the meaning of "smartness"
tombert 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not even sure I'm willing to concede he's smart by any definition of the word.
I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence.
jjordan 5 hours ago [-]
There was no decision made on this basis. It was dismissed entirely due to the elapsed statute of limitations.
ls612 5 hours ago [-]
He lost the lawsuit on a legal technicality about the statute of limitations not on substantive grounds.
graphememes 1 hours ago [-]
Losing on a technicality kind of sucks ngl
jamiek88 57 minutes ago [-]
It’s a finding of fact and a fundamental law not a ‘technicality’ but I can see that’s going to be the pro-elon position already.
ownerai 55 minutes ago [-]
Nine jurors, unanimous, under two hours.
The statute of limitations argument wasn't even close.
alok-g 4 hours ago [-]
The lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?
protocolture 26 minutes ago [-]
I used to work for one. Probably not that similar, as one was a PBI. But one entity paid and billed back to the other. It was interesting to see how the way the 2 entities spent money differently.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
Lots of non-profits use structures like that, it's not uncommon. Non-profit vs. for-profit is mostly a legal and accounting distinction; many laypeople confuse "non-profit" with "charity" and they are very different.
yalogin 3 hours ago [-]
This should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.
keeda 4 hours ago [-]
While none of the billionnaires on the stand came across as stellar paragons of virtue, it's hilarious that even they could not stand Elon.
That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon.
Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible.
On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.
htx80nerd 1 hours ago [-]
>Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter
yes the free speech really has been a terrible development for those who preferred the previous regime
protocolture 15 minutes ago [-]
"Free Speech" Do they still censor the word "Cis".
polalavik 3 hours ago [-]
it was probably never about winning for Musk, but to leverage the legal system to air out some drama in open AI and some internal dialogue among the execs of the company for bad press.
achatham 3 hours ago [-]
The donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.
thesdev 5 hours ago [-]
I hope he appeals. Not cheering for Musk, cheering for the fight.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
It would just burn more cash unless he can somehow go back in time and change the facts.
thesdev 2 hours ago [-]
If anyone can afford burning cash for his ego it's the richest man in the world with the biggest ego in the world.
hoppyhoppy2 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, and more burnt cash (and hopefully emotional energy) would be an acceptable outcome
lapetitejort 4 hours ago [-]
Cross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.
enraged_camel 5 hours ago [-]
There's nothing to appeal. Statute of limitations is... just that.
lowkey_ 3 hours ago [-]
IANAL but civil statute of limitations is based on when the prosecuting party reasonably discovered they were wronged and had legal recourse, not when the event happened. It is entirely possible to debate when that was in this case.
paulpauper 4 hours ago [-]
For criminal cases at least, the statue of limitations is not set in stone. But probably for civil, its much more cut and dry.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
Criminal law actually has very specific statutes of limitation as well, depending on the crime.
jgalt212 4 hours ago [-]
Who cares if the plaintiff or defendant won? The trial had great expository value regarding all the players involved.
polski-g 1 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why this is a Musk lawsuit and not an IRS lawsuit. How can you take donations under a charity org and then convert it to a for profit corp?
paxys 5 hours ago [-]
> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.
Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.
sdenton4 5 hours ago [-]
A dismissal on technical grounds, which is also a complete loss.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
No, it's a complete loss. Much like in engineering, the law considers technical details to be extraordinarily important.
tskj 5 hours ago [-]
Annoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?
energy123 5 hours ago [-]
Laws were broken?
cubefox 5 hours ago [-]
So you are allowed to violate the law if you aren't sued quickly enough.
pocksuppet 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.
cubefox 4 hours ago [-]
What Altman and Brockman did still seems highly unethical.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
The tech industry largely does not care about ethics.
DANmode 3 hours ago [-]
You misspelled “finance”.
johnbellone 4 hours ago [-]
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago [-]
Well, you're allowed to violate the contract if you aren't sued quickly enough. You're allowed to violate the law if you aren't prosecuted quickly enough (for some crimes).
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
I think a lot about how there's a very plausible alternate history where Elon Musk controls most of the frontier of AI.
Aurornis 5 hours ago [-]
I've thought about that, too, but it would require that all of the key individuals at OpenAI would have been willing to stay at OpenAI under his ownership.
That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.
Hikikomori 5 hours ago [-]
They're willing to work under the current snake, even got him back after he was removed, so why not musk?
serial_dev 3 hours ago [-]
They are both snakes (IMO), but they are different kinds of snakes. I can see why to some Sam is acceptable while Elon wouldn’t be (and vice versa). It’s also convenient to be more lenient toward the snake’s shortcomings when you becoming extremely rich depends on it.
saynay 4 hours ago [-]
Haven't they hemorrhaged a lot of the founding talent in the years since? Now it is full of ex-Meta ad-tech people trying to find a way to make it actually turn a profit.
sanderjd 5 hours ago [-]
There but for the grace of god go we...
HardCodedBias 1 hours ago [-]
The following dates for the start of the statue of limitations were the most plausible:
2. 2023 Microsoft expansion / reported 75%-then-49% economics
3. 2024/2025 PBC restructuring
AFAIK it has not been reported as to exactly what the jury found, but IIUC the 2019 date is consistent with their findings.
That's poor for Musk, but it makes sense. He was arguing 2023. I think it is a valid argument.
But he had to know that 2019 was very much in play (and is likely the most logically consistent).
This is very squishy law.
dragontamer 5 hours ago [-]
You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it.
It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.
fastball 5 hours ago [-]
Tesla wasn't "successful" before he "took it over" (read: invested most of their seed capital and ran the actual day-to-day operations).
SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...
dragontamer 4 hours ago [-]
Well sure. But that's not AI chips or FSD. The subject of this whole topic.
Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space.
Good luck with that.
fastball 3 hours ago [-]
Your previous comment was clearly not constraining itself to the realm of AI chips / FSD. Regardless:
How do you measure Dojo, xAI, and Grok being failures?
Dojo is training models for FSD, which is in operation today. The chips in Tesla cars are also taped in-house / vertically integrated, a lot of which is presumably shared investment with the chips needed for the Dojo training side specifically.
Separating xAI from Grok (in a list like this) is kinda weird, but seems that Grok is actually a very capable LLM, even if it is not best-in-practice. Even if not beating out the top 3 labs, it certainly seems to be in the top 5 by most metrics. The xAI Colossus data centers are real AI training/inference infrastructure that were stood up in record time, and they are now selling capacity to other LLM providers. Is that a failure?
Dojo is shutdown dude. Literally doing nothing but rotting. After spending $Billions on a custom chip, Tesla is now just buying NVidia chips and wasting their Dojo efforts entirely
Team dismantled. Operations closed. Game over.
---------
A similar event is playing out with xAI. Operations are transferring over to SpaceX. Out of money, out of time. They're going to try to grab more money (possibly illegally) across Musks enterprises but there's some severe legal questions on the legality of these moves.
It's already sketchy as all hell that xAI bought Tesla's GPU fleet. Now SpaceX is buying it up under doubious circumstances.
Whatever is going on with xAI / Twitter is now clear. It's not possible for it to stand on its own two feet and needs external investors to continue to survive.
fastball 1 hours ago [-]
Ok, but Dojo clearly has a spiritual successor in the form of: whatever Tesla is currently using to train FSD models? Like... Tesla kills teams all the time. Sounds like many were absorbed into the rest of the org. Seems like a bit of a nothing-burger without the follow-up that Tesla is shutting down FSD ambitions in general (or similar).
pizzafeelsright 5 hours ago [-]
10 years returns
S&P 500 (index of all those better than Musk): 261%
Tesla: 2700%
Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.
Calavar 4 hours ago [-]
GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?
Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.
pizzafeelsright 3 hours ago [-]
I was responding to the idea Musk is not a good businessman. I think the evidence suggests otherwise.
Market Cap:
Tesla (TSLA): ~$1.4T
GameStop (GME): ~$9.7B
If anything, GME is a meme.
I also gave my bias so as a way to ignore me.
filoleg 4 hours ago [-]
> GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?
GME did not beat the S&P500 over the past 10 years, and it is just the evidence of you needing to verify your claims before making them.
Over the past 5 years[0]: S&P500 up by 77%, GME down by 50%.
Over the past 10 years: S&P500 up by 260%, GME up by 207%.
GME performance in the past 10 years doesn't indicate that Ryan Cohen is a business genius. It indicates that he runs a company that has been underperforming the market for at least the past decade.
GME Jan 1, 2016: $7.09, $5.49 adjusted (accounting for dividend disbursements)
GME Jan 1, 2026: $20.09
266% or 365% return depending on how you count dividends. 365% for GME vs. 306% for S&P 500 over the same period (also using adjusted for dividend numbers).
lotsofpulp 2 hours ago [-]
For the previous 10 years, dividends reinvested, GME returned 14.59% per year, SP500 did 15.376% per year. Considering the much, much higher risk of owning a single stock, the risk adjusted return of SP500 is much higher than GME.
I'd argue that Tesla's stock price is more about con artist acumen than business acumen.
TSLA currently has a P/E of ~375. That's extremely overvalued. There's no possible objective reason for TSLA to have such an extreme ratio. Even if you think Robotaxi is going to be a massive success, it would have to completely devour Lyft, Uber, and traditional taxi services all combined to even get half way to justifying that P/E, and considering the already major distrust in Tesla's FSD, I just don't see that happening.
The math doesn't math. People buy TSLA because they want to be part of Elon's cult, not because of anything to do with Tesla as a company.
bigbuppo 60 minutes ago [-]
I remember the days when a P/E in the high single digits was a giant red flag.
4 hours ago [-]
dragontamer 4 hours ago [-]
So you are personally invested in this and openly admit to it. And yet expect me to take a discussion with you seriously?
Normally the way this works, is you excuse yourself away from a debate for being too financially involved in the situation, knowing that your financial bias is too overwhelming.
pizzafeelsright 3 hours ago [-]
I do not expect you to take me seriously.
dragontamer 3 hours ago [-]
Nor I you.
But started this by pointing out Elon Musks weakness in the field of AI, and the best anyone seems to have come up so far is that Elon Musk has more money so it doesn't matter. It's not quite the flex that the Musk fanboys think it is.
The simplest solution would have been to ya know, point at an Elon Musk AI win. And Dojo, xAI, Grok are all relative failures in these respects.
saulapremium 4 hours ago [-]
I absolute abhor the man but I think this is silly. No doubt that he has had luck and help, but he is still a good businessman. He's certainly an asshole (almost certainly dark triad territory), but I think that can be a benefit when creating a business.
dragontamer 4 hours ago [-]
It isn't helping him in this fight vs Sam Altman, AI investments or the like.
paulpauper 4 hours ago [-]
This is what he Grok hopes to become, but probably too late
DANmode 3 hours ago [-]
Fifth place is fine, when the numbers and power in question are that large.
HardwareLust 5 hours ago [-]
And how much worse things would be if that had come to pass?
geek_at 5 hours ago [-]
why would he run Anthropic?
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)
keeda 3 hours ago [-]
Hmm, my understanding is that Dario split over insufficient focus on safety at OpenAI (which, admittedly, could just be the PR-friendly reason) -- something that Elon is also clearly not big on.
Safety not only seems to be an anti-priority at xAI given what we've seen come out of it, even at OpenAI Elon seemed not that concerned with safety, leading to that entertaining incident with a "golden jackass" trophy: https://xcancel.com/abc7newsbayarea/status/20546984193823543...
Almost certainly Dario would still have split from under Elon too, but also very likely that Elon would have immediately thrown a barrage of IP / NDA / trade secret / non-compete violation lawsuits to cripple Anthropic and keep it from reaching the frontier.
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
It's not my argument here that Musk is necessarily more aligned with Amodei.
cityofdelusion 5 hours ago [-]
This should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.
gilrain 1 hours ago [-]
It isn’t fun when billionaires fight — an asshole always ends up winning.
jamiek88 51 minutes ago [-]
Anyone getting emotional in this thread arguing on behalf of either billionaire should have a long hard look in the mirror.
moralestapia 4 hours ago [-]
You can hate Musk all you want but between him and Scam I'd pick Musk any day.
What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.
eukara 2 hours ago [-]
Should have done it sooner. He took his time.
He should know timing is important: That's why he frequently skips getting approval for his construction work, dumps drilling fluids (while feigning compliance!)... or builds an illegal power plant. He usually seems to have little patience.
We're all supposed to play by the same rules.
protocolture 7 minutes ago [-]
He isn't asking for money tho? He is suing because he believes he was promised that it would be a not for profit forever.
But they have emails from one Elon Musk telling them to structure it roughly how it turned out.
They also have emails including Musk where the profit share is discussed, and his "investment" is talked about as roughly a donation.
Like he could have asked for a profit share at any point and it just doesn't seem to happen?
If the outcome is unfair to Musk, its because Musk worked tirelessly to ensure he had no legal standing with which to make it fair to Musk.
"At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board"
"generally, safety should be a first-class requirement"
"Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit"
"Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact"
"The underlying philosophy of our company [OpenAI] is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity"
"The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right"
"do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year?"
"The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it."
"it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)"
"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard."
"Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role."
"Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress."
"At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world."
"Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch."
"Ok. Let's figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint..."
"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved . . . In as little as four years, each overnight experiment will feasibly use so much compute capacity that there’s an actual chance of waking up to AGI"
"We think the path must be: AI research non-profit (through end of 2017), AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018), Government project (when: ??)"
"Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period"
"As mentioned, my experience with boards (assuming they consist of good, smart people) is that they are rational and reasonable. There is basically never a real hardcore battle. . ."
"The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge. . ."
"Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission"
"During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions . . . this attitude is wrong"
"i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!"
". . .apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he [Sam] is happy about this"
"Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct"
"We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years."
"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so."
"The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before."
"This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."
"all investors are clear that they should never expect a profit"
"We saw no alternative to a structure change given the amount of capital we needed and still to preserve a way to 'give the AGI to humanity' other than the capped profit thing, which also lets the board cancel all equity if needed for safety. Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have."
DivingForGold 4 hours ago [-]
Musk may have lost round 1, but Musk has a HUGE pile of cash, and Open AI is a borrower from everybody and their brothers. Almost all the principle people left Open AI already.
henry2023 2 hours ago [-]
Musk doesn’t seem particularly good at lawsuits. Remember when he was suing Twitter to get out of having to buy them?
Perhaps he lacks good lawyers, perhaps he just can’t find substance and he’s filling out of spite.
ajross 3 hours ago [-]
That's misunderstanding the finances involved here. OpenAI is a privately held company; sure, that means they're "borrowing" from their investors technically. But that's in exactly the same sense that a public company is actually "owned" by its shareholders. The behavioral relationship goes the other way: people own bits of the company because they want it to do well and their share to grow in size, not because they expect the debt/dividend to be repaid per se.
In point of fact most valuations place OpenAI in the hundreds of billions of dollars already and growing rapidly.
Basically, no: OpenAI's pockets are deeper than Musks's personal wealth. Especially so considering that this suit is existentially important to them where Musk needs to maintain leverage for other efforts.
There won't be a round 2. It's over.
gigatexal 31 minutes ago [-]
Maybe if musk continues to be shown he’s a wholly immoral person and a net negative for society he’ll get so fed up he’ll take his ball and hop on his space ship and yeet himself onto the surface of mars. One can hope.
jazz9k 2 hours ago [-]
It's interesting that this was 'too late' yet the lawsuit brought against Trump (which he lost) was 30+ years ago with no witnesses, and a filed by a lunatic.
If anything, it shows just how a Jury can be tainted by politics and if you are a Republican in a Blue state with a most likely Blue jury, you have no chance at justice.
2 hours ago [-]
shevy-java 4 hours ago [-]
Both should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases.
Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".
We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
> Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.
> We publish at top machine learning conferences, open-source software tools for accelerating AI research, and release blog posts to communicate our research. We will not keep information private for private benefit, but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns.
This was pretty much the quality of Elon's argumentation in court. Turns out "getting sick dunks" wins likes on Twitter, but it doesn't win lawsuits.
dbbk 5 hours ago [-]
They have open models
wotsdat 5 hours ago [-]
lol
foofyter 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
russellbrandom 5 hours ago [-]
He lost in the sense that he filed a lawsuit and that lawsuit was dismissed.
It seems like a reasonable way to use the word, no?
donkyrf 5 hours ago [-]
Obviously so.
You're either responding to an LLM or a badly malfunctioning human.
stirfish 5 hours ago [-]
An account that's two minutes old, defending Elon Musk in a way that makes no sense.
foofyter 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jonlucc 5 hours ago [-]
You didn't cite any to look at?
foofyter 3 hours ago [-]
The article.
5 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
cgag 4 hours ago [-]
Hmm, I wonder why the title
of the article doesn’t say the lawsuit was dismissed or why.
petesergeant 5 hours ago [-]
I think it's fair to say the headline misleads, even if technically accurate. My initial read was that he had lost on the merits of the case, and not "jury rules Musk sued too late".
Legend2440 5 hours ago [-]
He can appeal if he wants to, but if he had a good argument for why the statute of limitations shouldn't apply, he would already have brought it up.
Odds of him winning on appeal are low.
LastTrain 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, losing is winning. I mean what are words anyway?
5 hours ago [-]
jhatemyjob 5 hours ago [-]
Yep. Headline is clickbait. Never bet against Elon.
stetrain 3 hours ago [-]
Unless you're betting that a thing he has said will happen will actually happen when he said it would. Or even 10 years later.
jhatemyjob 1 hours ago [-]
True
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
Sam is just too good at this game and as I said before [0] is far worse than Elon and also outsmarted him.
Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick.
Presumably better at being devious. Elon is sloppy...
ryandvm 4 hours ago [-]
There's something to be said for the fact that the current crop of plutocrats just show their whole asses.
an0malous 5 hours ago [-]
I’m not a Sam Altman fan, but I think it’s debatable if he’s worse than the guy who did a sieg heil at a political rally
whaleofatw2022 4 hours ago [-]
Be more afraid of the technocrat who doesn't even have a tell. It means they are better at manipulation.
armchairhacker 2 hours ago [-]
Does this also mean we should be more afraid of (leadership) Democrats than Republicans?
mrcwinn 5 hours ago [-]
Advice for Elon: you can actually use ChatGPT on the web or the desktop app to schedule reminders for you, like "file lawsuit against OpenAI."
jordanb 5 hours ago [-]
The consequences of relying on grok..
LarsDu88 5 hours ago [-]
Did you not read the article at all? He had to do this in 2021, well before such GPT apps existed.
freejazz 5 hours ago [-]
That's not what the article stated. The jury had to find that the harms occurred prior to certain dates in 2021, not that Musk had to file before then.
ViAchKoN 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting how it played out. Curious will it somehow affect OpenAI business or XAi.
jsLavaGoat 4 hours ago [-]
He lost his trial. That is just the first phase of a lawsuit.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago [-]
No, it's effectively over.
loxodrome 5 hours ago [-]
Ending a trial over a bureaucratic technicality is not good justice.
paxys 5 hours ago [-]
Statute of limitations is not a "bureaucratic technicality", it is the law.
wagwang 5 hours ago [-]
Can some lawyer explain the rationale of statute of limitations? Like why does a robber get to get away with the crime if they are able to evade the police for x number of years. Is it just because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything?
throwway120385 5 hours ago [-]
The easier scenario to think about where statutes of limitation really make sense is in collection of payment through the court system. Suppose you buy something on post-payment terms and then the supplier bumbles around forgetting to bill you for it. At what point should you reasonably be expected to pay the bill? In my state you get 7 years, and I think that's probably pretty generous because it covers the entire tab from when you get the thing to when you start a proceeding in court.
For a robbery that doesn't involve a weapon I think we should generally forgive and forget if it's been long enough. Nobody cared enough to bring action in court for whatever reason, and it would be awful for someone in their 40's to be jailed and brought into court for something that happened in their 20's. At that point if the government fails to prosecute that's on them, and on us for failing to hold them accountable. But 20 years is a long time and people can change over that timespan, so it probably doesn't make sense to hold a grudge for that long.
There are especially egregious crimes that have no statute of limitations like murder and sexual assault, but we might find our society better off for keeping the statute of limitations for injuries that we can recover from.
badlibrarian 5 hours ago [-]
Evidence degrades, memories fade, witnesses die. Generally the worse the crime, the longer the statute of limitations. Murder in most places has no limit.
Also, if someone hasn't committed a crime in, say, 20 years, there's questionable need to lock them up for three years to deter the behavior. Goal is to optimize the overall system even if some people slip through the cracks.
charcircuit 3 hours ago [-]
>Evidence degrades
Maybe in the past, but with modern technology that isn't always true. Statue of limitations comes from a time before even cameras existed.
bigbuppo 51 minutes ago [-]
The purpose of the law isn't revenge.
Also, I see many other people in this thread confusing criminal law and civil law, which is a bit sad to see on a place like HN.
qyph 5 hours ago [-]
Not a lawyer but generally it is as you say: "because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything". It's not fair to have a trial when the evidence is unreliable because of the flow of time.
Encouraging timely action is another factor. Generally people with real harms will file sooner than later, otherwise why wait?
It's also to grant peace of mind -- so people can stop worrying about potential litigation after some amount of time.
nradov 5 hours ago [-]
Are you asking about criminal or civil law? This was a civil case. The general reason for imposing filing time limits is that it's better for businesses and society in general to have certainty about outcomes rather than perfect justice. If a plaintiff tries to dredge up old issues from many years ago it just wastes everyone's time and clogs up the court system.
repelsteeltje 4 hours ago [-]
+1
Wasting everyone's time and clogging up the court system perfectly describes the heart of this matter. Plain bullying and hype.
paxys 4 hours ago [-]
If they were evading the police then the statute of limitations would not apply, because the case would stay active the entire time.
It is instead relevant if the state decides not to charge you for a crime but comes back to you decades later and goes "we changed our mind, now you have a week to come up with a defense".
wvenable 5 hours ago [-]
That's definitely one of the reasons; evidence gets worse over time. Memories fade, witnesses die or become unavailable, documents get lost or destroyed, and physical evidence degrades. In this case specifically which is centred around a lot of discovery of emails and text chats, you can imagine that in other 5-10 years a lot of that discovery might become impossible to get and could drastically alter the outcome of the case.
It's also generally considered unfair for someone to have an indefinite threat of being sued or prosecuted hanging over them when their ability to defend themselves gets weaker over time. Limitations discourage strategic delays or using old claims as leverage far into the future. Without limitation periods, old business transactions could be reopened forever, estates could never fully settle, people and businesses would face constant uncertainty.
Ultimately, the courts are just better at resolving current disputes than reconstructing old ones.
48terry 3 hours ago [-]
You, hypothetically, are a bit of a rough person in your early 20s. You do some Crimes, one of which was against me. We'll say it was enough to give you a hefty fine and a year or less of jail time.
I don't press charges.
20 years pass. You grow up. You've changed your ways. You've become a squeaky-clean individual. You've put all that behind you. You become a healthy member of society. Your career's underway, you live in your own place, you may or may not have started a family.
Hey, remember that Crime I didn't press charges about at the time? Well, surprise, motherfucka. I've been waiting for this moment to do so. To the courts you go, get your ass fined, thrown in jail, and give you a criminal record, all so it'd hurt you that much worse now that you have your roots planted in your life.
Actually, you did Crimes to several people, right? Let's get them all in on this action! We'll just kind of trickle the suits in, one-by-one. Let one resolve, give it a few months, the next guy presses charges about his. Just kind of a steady flow of skeletons in the closet that you have to either defend against (and how are you gonna do that? It's 20 years old, hope you have evidence for your side somewhere in the attic) or take the sentencing of (which will do wonders for that career of yours), just to make your life hell.
sobellian 5 hours ago [-]
Not a lawyer, but - fugitives don't get to run the clock on statute of limitations.
tim333 5 hours ago [-]
To a large extent.
loxodrome 3 hours ago [-]
I recognize the value of the statute of limitations, but it is a technicality, and unfortunately, the central legal questions of this case were not addressed.
jacobp100 5 hours ago [-]
It can be both
dcow 5 hours ago [-]
I am absolutely certain that if Sam was suing xAI and the case got dismissed on a technicality people would be lined up with screeds about the injustice of the situation.
tim333 4 hours ago [-]
I think it would depend on the facts of the case. This one seemed a bit of a non case. Quote from a law expert in the FT which I thought good:
>the spectacle of these two multibillionaires fighting about power and money has distorted and obscured what the law is meant to care about here, which is the public interest
That's just a point about how (annoying) Sam-boosters are.
Arodex 5 hours ago [-]
Then why did the American justice system needed nine jurors when a clerk could have sufficed?
The American judicial system is completely Byzantine and rotten, from top to bottom. Worse than many third world countries.
jonlucc 4 hours ago [-]
There are questions of fact involved, and the judge empaneled the jury to resolve the factual dispute. In this case, when did the clock on SoL start ticking? Was it tolled for any amount of time to extend the date? Those are more than just counting 3 years on a calendar.
newaccountman2 5 hours ago [-]
If you consider a statute of limitations to be a mere bureaucratic technicality, then you might as well say we shouldn't have the entire Anglo-American legal system.
Moreover, there is no "justice" here either way--it's just rich people suing each other.
freejazz 5 hours ago [-]
The jury found against Musk - what exactly are you talking about?
pixl97 5 hours ago [-]
Like any case involving legal matters, they are talking about things they deeply do not understand.
freejazz 5 hours ago [-]
More shocking than the sheer incorrectness of the legal analysis I see here often is the confidence with which it is offered.
turtlesdown11 1 hours ago [-]
The Dunning Kruger effect is very, very strong on HN. Also, many folks believe they are an expert in their own domain, so they must be an expert in all...you can see the Nobel disease play out in the minor leagues here.
5 hours ago [-]
jdw64 5 hours ago [-]
It turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified
martinbfine 58 minutes ago [-]
It really doesn't matter. OpenAI will surely fail under Sam Altman. Just like Sam's other ventures.
Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.
The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.
It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.
It seems the biggest value loss to the nonprofit was in this conversion, not in the initial for profit subsidiary creation giving investors capped profit shares.
So the question before the jury has a significant component of "Should he have found out by this time?" Which is a question of fact, and facts are typically decided by juries, in the US at least.
The two parties can agree together to let a judge decide facts like this, but generally, if one or the other party wants it to go to a jury, it does.
I'm guessing part of Musk's strategy was to have it go to the jury, which are often seen as easier to manipulate than judges, especially when a case is weak. Or perhaps his team already knew this particular judge would be inclined to rule against him, so did the next best thing.
That's what the jury found against - they said he was reasonably informed enough to have brought the suit earlier and thus the 3 year clock should start ticking in 2020 not 2023.
In this case I guess the question was 'when did the incident actually happen' with Elon arguing it was later then Altman.
I can understand why people and me included might think they can decide this before trial.
It is always complicated - statue of limitations timers have many tolling conditions - to name of few: discovery of harm, not being in the legal jurisdiction, negotiating in good faith to resolve the dispute.
The law always has some room for interpretation, which is why lawyers, juries judges and appellate courts exist.
P.S. IANAL, and also don't know anything about this specific case, or its merits for appeal or lack thereof .
So not being within the statute of limitations is typically a legal issue so what must've happened here is the jury would've been asked if the earlier OpenAI-MS deals were substantially similar to the latest deal. I can't find the verdict form or the jury instructions but I'll bet that was the key issue the jury decided.
Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".
This case demonstrates why. Musk only complained after OpenAI was commercially successful with ChatGPT and after he started a competing effort. He repeatedly said “I do not know” and “I do not recall” on the stand, and argued that the passage of time made it hard for him to remember facts that would have been helpful for OpenAI.
I guess there could be a question of fact in a case where the statues of limitation differ for different injuries, and the factual question is which injury was it.
The jury instructions are public and the final jury form will be published, likely later this week.
I can tell you that the instructions told the jury to decide whether Musk could have brought his case before 2021.
At a certain point, "justice" is deciding that it is impossible to fairly and reasonably adjudicate the dispute in question, and that it is better to have let a guilty person go free than to punish an innocent person. Statutes of limitation are one part of that package of procedures we have in place to make the process as fair and equitable as possible.
The passage of time makes it harder to have a fair trial, as shown by the number of times Elon said I don't know or I don't recall about conversations that would have been recent in 2019 but are now long (or strategically) forgotten.
Limiting time that an action can be brought is critical to having a fair trial.
> the court just doesn’t want to do its job.
What do you think its job is.
In this case, the jury found that Musk knew or should have known of his alleged injury prior to 2021.
Edit: to augment the sibling comment.
"If the jury determines that at any time before those dates, Musk either knew — or had or should have known — that he had a claim that he could bring, then his suit was brought too late. The consequence of being too late is swift and absolute. If the lawsuit was filed late for a particular claim, that claim is out of the case; if it was too late for all of Musk’s claims, the lawsuit is over."
That's where the question of fact (i.e., the requirement for a jury decision) came in: "What was the statute of limitations?" is a question of law, but "When should Musk have known that OpenAI was moving too much toward for-profit?" is a question of fact (and, here, determines whether the statute of limitations applies).
1. Estoppel. If a party relies on your conduct then you can lose the right to sue over it;
2. Laches. This is a defense against prejudicial conduct, typically by waiting too long to take action;
3. Waiver. Your conduct can waive your right to sue. Imagine you live with someone and they don't pay half of the rent so you cover it. At some point your continued conduct means you lose the right to sue; and
4. The statute of limitations. Some claims simply have to be brought within a certain period. How this applies can be really complex. For example, we saw this in Trump's fraud convictions in New York. His time in office, away from the jurisdiction, essentially suspended the statute of limitations.
Some crimes like murder have no statute of limitations. Others have unreasonably short statutes of limitations. For example, probably nobody can be charged in relation to sex trafficking in the Epstein saga because the statute of limitations is often 5 years with such crimes. This is unreasonable (IMHO) because often the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.
It's also worth adding that not all legal systems have such wide-ranging statutes of limitation as the US does. Founding principles of those other legal systems is that the government shouldn't be arbitrarily restricted for prosecuting criminal conduct. The US system ostensibly favors "timely" prosecution.
Shouldn't the defense have raised the statute of limitations much earlier?
If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point.
His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019.
Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into Tesla. His complaints fell flat for me given the number of emails where he said that a non-profit was likely a mistake.
This is technical, but Musk clearly never created a charitable trust, which was a precondition for his claims. His funds were donated for general use by OpenAI, not for any specific use that would allow him to claim breach of charitable trust. Also, all of his funds were spent by no later than 2020 which is before his alleged breach in 2023.
Musk unreasonably delayed bringing this case until the success of ChatGPT and starting a competing AI company, and he had unclean hands because he attempted to sabotage OpenAI repeatedly by poaching its key staff while on the board.
---
Sept 1, 2017 DX-669: Funding paused confirmation. Elon is still on the board for a while. DX-707 specifies the board as of Sept 26, 2017, and even suggests adding Shivon, Jared, Sam Teller.
Jan 31, 2018 DX-748: Elon is still discussing things with Greg. Elon: "The only paths I can think of are a major expansion of OpenAI and a major expansion of Tesla AI. Perhaps both simultaneously"
Feb 3, 2018 DX-754: Sam Teller says Elon "just suggested we use SpaceX email for AI stuff so switching over to that"
Feb 4, 2018 DX-755: Sam Teller and Shivon Zilis discuss disabling Openai
Feb 20, 2018 DX-770: Elon officially leaves board (first document I see specifying)
A move that surprisingly didn't get much press.
I do. It’s not his singular focus. But he continues to personally invest himself in pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability. That goal seems more meaningful to him that it does to e.g. Bezos, who seems to have a rocket company to look cool.
You can’t believe musk without simultaneously believing he’s a liar. It’s in HIS fucking book.
I said I believe he wants to go to Mars and will put in the work to make that happen. I didn't say everything he's said is true. Musk absolutely lies. But his actions speak pretty consistently to Mars being a real goal.
They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles. You need reusable spacecraft to make that tenable. This is not about Mars, don't buy the marketing. At best for civilians, this is about making broadband widely available such that America can dominate internet connectivity going forward and increase spying further. As an example, examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded.
The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications.
Fortress America will be invincible forever, so so they desire. The macroeconomics are not working out for them though even though the technological edge is still working for them on that level.
This is a conspiracy theory folks who just Googled In-Q-Tel have been stringing together since Covid. It's not true.
> examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded
Russia wasn't excluded until recently. That was a problem!
> The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications
Wat.
But I see a lot of that announcement, and the others someone else pointed to as his "aspirational, but ultimately never going to happen" goals - whether he believes the claims are achievable, or not, he says these things to energise people to working/paying for him to try
It costs him little to nothing to say, and other people's time, effort, and capital to try (and succeed/fail)
Tesla is falling to pieces now, and SpaceX is getting loaded up with completely unrelated projects (xAI) in order to try and make it look saleable (I guess) - it's very difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype.
That all depends on how much he values his credibility, I think..
But to be fair, for someone as good at self promotion as he is, I can believe that the value of the hype could be greater than the cost in credibility.
Oh yeah, the announcement is hype. But there is actual work underneath it making real progress in science and engineering that moves us closer to Mars. Some of that, moreover, is work that has limited appeal outside a Martian context.
Did I miss something?
I would not invest.
He has a legion of people propping up his stock by manipulating them into believing he is a wizard.
I guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability.
My cat is both cute and fluffy as well as a menace.
Solar Roof: https://electrek.co/2026/05/14/tesla-solar-roof-promise-vs-r...
Tesla Full Self Driving: https://electrek.co/2026/05/18/musk-unsupervised-fsd-widespr...
Hyperloop / Boring Company mass-transit vision
Mars settlement timelines
X as an everything app
I consider him a visionary in a sense of innovation but he is insecure and immoral one.
Needles to say his investors made money on his over promises.
Could also partly be a curiosity to see what one is capable of, or maybe wanting to be known for helming an organization that accomplishes xyz.
Why do you need an extra dollar?
I can answer for myself: New Zealand plans to tax the shit out of anyone that has more[A].
You need a fukton more than median wealth to be able to protect yourself against your own government.
The type of person that enjoys chasing money doesn't stop.
[A] via capital gains taxes and wealth taxes. Also one needs an excessive amount more to handle progressive taxation and means testing.
New Zeeland is an outlier in that it doesn't have capital gains tax.
Its not the end of the world to have captial gains tax.
I wasn't trolling, but I have unfortunately deviated from the topic.
What isn't fine is my belief that I'm going to be rug-pulled by my government. From multiple sources I believe New Zealand will tax most savings to smithereens. The lie is that I should save for retirement; when any savings will be taken from me over time via a variety of mechanisms including taxes.
Both our Labour (leftish) and National parties will screw me.
The underlying issue is that our demographics leave little choice to the government. The majority of voters are naturally happy to take everything from everyone who has more than them. Voters are selfish.
Attacking the successful is called the tall-poppy syndrome down here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome (I'm nowhere near successful enough for much backlash - but I do fear it).
I was trying to make a argument based on marginal economics. NZ should be encouraging me to increase my income from export earnings: instead it drastically discourages me. I helped found a startup, so I deeply understand the multiple ways our government discourages us from earning export income. My marginal utility from an extra dollar is already drastically diminished because I already have enough to enjoy my life. The >40% taxation on top (incl GST) reduces my motivation to earn money for NZ to nearly zero. I am not a money chaser and I dislike investing.
After some threshold, money as a marginal value becomes meaningless because other non-monetary factors like politics dominate. It seems like nobody cares how much society profits from you - they only care about their own selfish goals.
because thats another 250 billion less for a competitor to use against you.
I'm not sure how one can learn to see the world in a more positive light...
Go to Australia where you pay a stamp duty for buying (to pay for infra) and a CGT for selling
Edit: Changed stamp tax to stamp duty
You can't just apply One Simple Rule like this ("more money is always better" / "more money never makes a difference"). There is, objectively, an amount of money above which another dollar, or another billion, will never make a meaningful difference in your overall lifestyle[0].
The amount isn't a single bright line, but like with so many things, there's an area below it where extra money unquestionably improves your quality of life, and an area above it where it unquestionably doesn't.
[0] unless "your lifestyle" involves manipulating major governments and controlling the way people the world over think, which I wouldn't consider a legitimate part of "lifestyle"
Because billionaires are mentally unwell.
If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.
I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.
The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.
The issue is that they did R&D as a charity, donations to which are tax deductible, there may also be other benefits to being a charity during R&D but that’s a big one, then once the thing works, setup a for profit, sell ip at “fair value”, get some investment, then things are ready for business.
I read there’s no statute of limitations on a tax issue like this, so I guess it might be hanging over them indefinitely.
I’m not a big taxation and government fan, they’d probably just waste the money anyways. It does seem unfair OpenAI gets to use this loophole though, unless all companies can make their R&D investment tax deductible, and get any other benefits of this setup.
> Early Angels (Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and others): Approximately $10 million invested, current value $1.4 billion. That corresponds to a return of around 140x.
https://www.trendingtopics.eu/openai-cap-table-leak/
If it had been a for-profit company contributing assets to another for-profit company, the transaction would not have had any different tax consequence.
(This is just a thought IANAL)
It's not theft unless a jury says it is, they didn't say it is.
2. This has nothing to do with the case which was just Musk trying to punish his competitor.
I do not think that your second was correct.
One wonders on what grounds?
In the UK, in a civil case like this, the judge I think comments on the likelihood of an appeal avenue once the verdict has been reached.
Never. That never ever happens.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants
Invent a time machine; send a lawyer back to file a new lawsuit within the statute of limitations.
No, findings of disputed fact - like when Musk had reason to know of his injury, are determined by a jury (or a bench judge). Appeals courts examine whether the law was applied correctly, not what the jury's fact finding was. There may be an avenue of appeal that the jury was improperly instructed, but determining questions of fact are exactly -not- the bread and butter of an appeals court.
[0] Assuming that the trial judge didn't materially screw up in admitting or excluding evidence, or in instructing the jury about the law, and also assuming no proof of juror bias or improper influence.
It's a foundational issue that goes to whether the court is even allowed to proceed with the case. A defendant could be guilty/liable/whatever of the alleged claims, and it wouldn't matter. If the statute of limitations has run, they're in the clear.
The only counter to an SOL defense is to try and claim that the SOL was paused for some reason, but those exceptions are very narrow and wouldn't apply here (and in the real world very rarely apply to civil cases).
You can try to file it again, but that gets to the point where the judge can throw your ass directly in jail for 30 days, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
But (at least in the US), the appeals court does not have to accept your appeal. When you file the appeal, you have to give them enough reason for them to even listen to your appeal, instead of rejecting it from the first filing.
e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.
As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
Europe on the other hand would love any judgements which give their rockets a chance to catchup. So they won’t temper an investigation or fines accordingly.
But he'll also likely be shaving equity here and there along the way to hedge this bet.
The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show, the "legitimate" bluecheck verification program being all but dead for new applicants. People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates.
I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Any of the struggles old Twitter had are absolutely dwarfed by its current problems. They still lose money hand over fist, the noise floor is way higher than it used to be, and a solid majority of the best users have either left or simulpost their content on other platforms like Mastadon and Bluesky. The new blue check system is close to an outright disaster, the only saving grace being that you can filter out the worst of the trolls by installing an extension that filters out blue check users.
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
For SpaceX this is true, but for Tesla the competition has caught up and in some cases surpassed them. The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools. Elon's big bet on Full Self Driving has yet to pay off as the deadline for getting it to actually work as advertised continues to slip and it's not clear when if ever unsupervised Full Self Driving will be available, especially on vehicles with older hardware. People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021. Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape. Tesla had 3 or 4 years where they stood head and shoulders over the competition, but those days are gone.
Oh yes, I did. Which is why I wrote my last sentence: "What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates."
> The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools.
Yup, the problem of the competitors is that it's a whole mess. Everyone has different rates, sometimes depending on the payment method, discoverability is nuts, payment is nuts.
> People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021.
Again, that is why I wrote: "at least until that damn rust bucket". With that, Tesla started to go down the drain - it was obvious that Musk had managed to yeet everyone able / willing to say "no, that is a goddamn stupid idea" to him.
> Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape.
Meh. The Model 3 is less than 40 k€ here in Germany. Competitors in that price range of actual quality brands such as BMW still don't get that range.
It was "up for sale" because it was a public company. Tesla is also "up for sale" by that definition.
The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one. I also choose not to do business with companies with that kind of leadership. A noble idea like by an ignoble person does not bode well for that noble idea.
Well... on the other side, not recognizing where the world is moving towards is a damn large part of why the "legacy" automotive companies went down the gutter. VW nearly killed itself over Cariad and even in 2020, most automotive control units had less UI performance than a 2015 iPhone.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single serious person who'd say Twitter is a better product/experience today than prior to the acquisition.
The place continues to bleed users and is the first stop shop for Nazis
I stated that it already was in the gutters. That does not imply it's gotten out of the gutters ever since. Musk took something that was already pretty much dead and gave it a final shot.
You keep saying that, but prior to the acquisition Twitter had finally managed to start turning a profit.
Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
Musk bought it for political reasons, to stomp down on left leaning opposition and networks that were well functioning there. That part was a success, it is a nazi site now and helped Trump win elections.
I did not claim that Musk improved on the issues, quite the contrary. It seems many people did not read the very last sentence. I also wrote:
> People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
Quite obviously I am referring to what was the situation back in 2022. Past tense.
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-most-hated-person-america-gal...
> And the latest poll conducted by Gallup seems to confirm that Musk has become genuinely hated: a whopping 61 percent of 1,000 randomly selected adult American respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, topping the list of most despised global figures.
> Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has widely been accused of genocide against Palestinians, couldn’t quite match Musk’s “strongly negative skew,” with just 52 percent of respondents saying they had an unfavorable opinion of the politician.
I'm very glad I'm not responsible for raising children these days.
Ironically, I'd say that Musk is still Stark, in a lot of bad ways: both show narcissism, overconfidence, impulsivity, ego-driven decision making, control issues, disregard for consequences, and volatility.
proof?
>white supremacist rhetoric
Not illegal so... ?
By contrast, the more money you have the more mistakes you can afford to make
A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries.
Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce.
Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded.
Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns.
Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...
Nothing hysterical about killing millions of people, hopefully there becomes a movement in the US to not only try Elon Musk at say the International Criminal Court (which we all know will lead to successful conviction, the evidence is apparent and naked enough as is) but hopefully the US government nationalizes his assets as he is a danger to the world.
Also the US should start throwing some oligarchs in prison to help rehabilitate its image after people start blaming us for causing famines and more deaths due to the recent imperial project that has become a total shit show.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
"If founding is not restored by 2030, 8 to 10 million people will die."
If Harvard is too woke for you here's a youtube interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ8wm5PTKJg
If Youtube is too woke for you, here's the book detailing this as well:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243105542-into-the-wood-...
If books are woke for you, maybe just go back into your cave where concern trolling is more respected.
"The polar ice caps will be gone by 2020" energy.
And yes, Harvard is too woke for me. Thanks for asking.
*ducks to dodge downvotes for not only making a bad dad joke but a political one*
What he didn't need to do was alienate his existing customers by acting like he enjoyed it. Did he actually think he was going to sell a lot of EVs to Trumpers?
I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures.
Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself.
Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course.
Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
No, it's still dumb.
No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space.
Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what.
Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS.
And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop.
Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.
Solar energy is going to expensive in Antarctica.
We can imagine a situation where the server hardware becomes so cheap that the energy cost dominates. In that case, sticking the things in space could make sense, particularly if extremely low mass space PV (just a few microns thick) can be made to work and also work cheaply.
I am harping on this point because You can’t just say “but in future computes won’t need maintenance” because at that point you’re just engaging in speculative fiction that you have no way of knowing. I could say “in the future we’ll have cold fusion” and maybe that’s true but I have no way of knowing.
So given that you would need 2x the power that you’d need on earth. Compared to just putting a shitload of solar panels in a desert where non-astronauts can easily access it I don’t see the point.
And of course there’s the nuclear-power-plant sized elephant in the room; if power is the constraint it would still almost certainly be more economical to have a nuclear reactor than trying to get a data center in space.
Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who makes shit up based on his 12-year-old-boy fantasies because it sounds neat and investors just eat it up.
Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.
We probably disagree on the meaning of "smartness"
I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence.
That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon.
Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible.
On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.
yes the free speech really has been a terrible development for those who preferred the previous regime
Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.
That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.
1. 2019 capped-profit restructuring + 1B MSFT investment
2. 2023 Microsoft expansion / reported 75%-then-49% economics
3. 2024/2025 PBC restructuring
AFAIK it has not been reported as to exactly what the jury found, but IIUC the 2019 date is consistent with their findings.
That's poor for Musk, but it makes sense. He was arguing 2023. I think it is a valid argument.
But he had to know that 2019 was very much in play (and is likely the most logically consistent).
This is very squishy law.
It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.
SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...
Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space.
Good luck with that.
How do you measure Dojo, xAI, and Grok being failures?
Dojo is training models for FSD, which is in operation today. The chips in Tesla cars are also taped in-house / vertically integrated, a lot of which is presumably shared investment with the chips needed for the Dojo training side specifically.
Separating xAI from Grok (in a list like this) is kinda weird, but seems that Grok is actually a very capable LLM, even if it is not best-in-practice. Even if not beating out the top 3 labs, it certainly seems to be in the top 5 by most metrics. The xAI Colossus data centers are real AI training/inference infrastructure that were stood up in record time, and they are now selling capacity to other LLM providers. Is that a failure?
Dojo is shutdown dude. Literally doing nothing but rotting. After spending $Billions on a custom chip, Tesla is now just buying NVidia chips and wasting their Dojo efforts entirely
Team dismantled. Operations closed. Game over.
---------
A similar event is playing out with xAI. Operations are transferring over to SpaceX. Out of money, out of time. They're going to try to grab more money (possibly illegally) across Musks enterprises but there's some severe legal questions on the legality of these moves.
It's already sketchy as all hell that xAI bought Tesla's GPU fleet. Now SpaceX is buying it up under doubious circumstances.
Whatever is going on with xAI / Twitter is now clear. It's not possible for it to stand on its own two feet and needs external investors to continue to survive.
Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.
Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.
Market Cap: Tesla (TSLA): ~$1.4T GameStop (GME): ~$9.7B
If anything, GME is a meme.
I also gave my bias so as a way to ignore me.
GME did not beat the S&P500 over the past 10 years, and it is just the evidence of you needing to verify your claims before making them.
Over the past 5 years[0]: S&P500 up by 77%, GME down by 50%.
Over the past 10 years: S&P500 up by 260%, GME up by 207%.
GME performance in the past 10 years doesn't indicate that Ryan Cohen is a business genius. It indicates that he runs a company that has been underperforming the market for at least the past decade.
0. https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?windo...
From Yahoo Finance
GME Jan 1, 2016: $7.09, $5.49 adjusted (accounting for dividend disbursements)
GME Jan 1, 2026: $20.09
266% or 365% return depending on how you count dividends. 365% for GME vs. 306% for S&P 500 over the same period (also using adjusted for dividend numbers).
https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
TSLA currently has a P/E of ~375. That's extremely overvalued. There's no possible objective reason for TSLA to have such an extreme ratio. Even if you think Robotaxi is going to be a massive success, it would have to completely devour Lyft, Uber, and traditional taxi services all combined to even get half way to justifying that P/E, and considering the already major distrust in Tesla's FSD, I just don't see that happening.
The math doesn't math. People buy TSLA because they want to be part of Elon's cult, not because of anything to do with Tesla as a company.
Normally the way this works, is you excuse yourself away from a debate for being too financially involved in the situation, knowing that your financial bias is too overwhelming.
But started this by pointing out Elon Musks weakness in the field of AI, and the best anyone seems to have come up so far is that Elon Musk has more money so it doesn't matter. It's not quite the flex that the Musk fanboys think it is.
The simplest solution would have been to ya know, point at an Elon Musk AI win. And Dojo, xAI, Grok are all relative failures in these respects.
Safety not only seems to be an anti-priority at xAI given what we've seen come out of it, even at OpenAI Elon seemed not that concerned with safety, leading to that entertaining incident with a "golden jackass" trophy: https://xcancel.com/abc7newsbayarea/status/20546984193823543...
Almost certainly Dario would still have split from under Elon too, but also very likely that Elon would have immediately thrown a barrage of IP / NDA / trade secret / non-compete violation lawsuits to cripple Anthropic and keep it from reaching the frontier.
What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.
We're all supposed to play by the same rules.
But they have emails from one Elon Musk telling them to structure it roughly how it turned out.
They also have emails including Musk where the profit share is discussed, and his "investment" is talked about as roughly a donation.
Like he could have asked for a profit share at any point and it just doesn't seem to happen?
If the outcome is unfair to Musk, its because Musk worked tirelessly to ensure he had no legal standing with which to make it fair to Musk.
"At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board"
"generally, safety should be a first-class requirement"
"Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit"
"Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact"
"The underlying philosophy of our company [OpenAI] is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity"
"The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right"
"do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year?"
"The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it."
"it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)"
"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard."
"Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role."
"Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress."
"At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world."
"Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch."
"Ok. Let's figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint..."
"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved . . . In as little as four years, each overnight experiment will feasibly use so much compute capacity that there’s an actual chance of waking up to AGI"
"We think the path must be: AI research non-profit (through end of 2017), AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018), Government project (when: ??)"
"Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period"
"As mentioned, my experience with boards (assuming they consist of good, smart people) is that they are rational and reasonable. There is basically never a real hardcore battle. . ."
"The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge. . ."
"Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission"
"During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions . . . this attitude is wrong"
"i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!"
". . .apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he [Sam] is happy about this"
"Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct"
"We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years."
"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so."
"The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before."
"This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."
"all investors are clear that they should never expect a profit"
"We saw no alternative to a structure change given the amount of capital we needed and still to preserve a way to 'give the AGI to humanity' other than the capped profit thing, which also lets the board cancel all equity if needed for safety. Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have."
Perhaps he lacks good lawyers, perhaps he just can’t find substance and he’s filling out of spite.
In point of fact most valuations place OpenAI in the hundreds of billions of dollars already and growing rapidly.
Basically, no: OpenAI's pockets are deeper than Musks's personal wealth. Especially so considering that this suit is existentially important to them where Musk needs to maintain leverage for other efforts.
There won't be a round 2. It's over.
If anything, it shows just how a Jury can be tainted by politics and if you are a Republican in a Blue state with a most likely Blue jury, you have no chance at justice.
Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".
We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
> Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.
---
https://web.archive.org/web/20180323231344/https://openai.co...
> We publish at top machine learning conferences, open-source software tools for accelerating AI research, and release blog posts to communicate our research. We will not keep information private for private benefit, but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns.
---
It's about open research.
https://openai.com/research/index/
It seems like a reasonable way to use the word, no?
You're either responding to an LLM or a badly malfunctioning human.
Odds of him winning on appeal are low.
Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651664
For a robbery that doesn't involve a weapon I think we should generally forgive and forget if it's been long enough. Nobody cared enough to bring action in court for whatever reason, and it would be awful for someone in their 40's to be jailed and brought into court for something that happened in their 20's. At that point if the government fails to prosecute that's on them, and on us for failing to hold them accountable. But 20 years is a long time and people can change over that timespan, so it probably doesn't make sense to hold a grudge for that long.
There are especially egregious crimes that have no statute of limitations like murder and sexual assault, but we might find our society better off for keeping the statute of limitations for injuries that we can recover from.
Also, if someone hasn't committed a crime in, say, 20 years, there's questionable need to lock them up for three years to deter the behavior. Goal is to optimize the overall system even if some people slip through the cracks.
Maybe in the past, but with modern technology that isn't always true. Statue of limitations comes from a time before even cameras existed.
Also, I see many other people in this thread confusing criminal law and civil law, which is a bit sad to see on a place like HN.
Encouraging timely action is another factor. Generally people with real harms will file sooner than later, otherwise why wait?
It's also to grant peace of mind -- so people can stop worrying about potential litigation after some amount of time.
Wasting everyone's time and clogging up the court system perfectly describes the heart of this matter. Plain bullying and hype.
It is instead relevant if the state decides not to charge you for a crime but comes back to you decades later and goes "we changed our mind, now you have a week to come up with a defense".
It's also generally considered unfair for someone to have an indefinite threat of being sued or prosecuted hanging over them when their ability to defend themselves gets weaker over time. Limitations discourage strategic delays or using old claims as leverage far into the future. Without limitation periods, old business transactions could be reopened forever, estates could never fully settle, people and businesses would face constant uncertainty.
Ultimately, the courts are just better at resolving current disputes than reconstructing old ones.
I don't press charges.
20 years pass. You grow up. You've changed your ways. You've become a squeaky-clean individual. You've put all that behind you. You become a healthy member of society. Your career's underway, you live in your own place, you may or may not have started a family.
Hey, remember that Crime I didn't press charges about at the time? Well, surprise, motherfucka. I've been waiting for this moment to do so. To the courts you go, get your ass fined, thrown in jail, and give you a criminal record, all so it'd hurt you that much worse now that you have your roots planted in your life.
Actually, you did Crimes to several people, right? Let's get them all in on this action! We'll just kind of trickle the suits in, one-by-one. Let one resolve, give it a few months, the next guy presses charges about his. Just kind of a steady flow of skeletons in the closet that you have to either defend against (and how are you gonna do that? It's 20 years old, hope you have evidence for your side somewhere in the attic) or take the sentencing of (which will do wonders for that career of yours), just to make your life hell.
>the spectacle of these two multibillionaires fighting about power and money has distorted and obscured what the law is meant to care about here, which is the public interest
(https://www.ft.com/content/846479c8-4ab0-4812-a1d5-08abdd8b9...)
The American judicial system is completely Byzantine and rotten, from top to bottom. Worse than many third world countries.
Moreover, there is no "justice" here either way--it's just rich people suing each other.