You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology.
I think he just wanted to have a sci-fi future, and because many other people think similarly he has tapped into that shared desire and has been succeeding.
Looking at things from the other side, musk is good at making physical things, where other companies are weak.
Grok in a tesla car is actually well integrated and kind of nice. You can ask the car about things to do, and it will drive you there.
Musk itself doesn't make things. He only puts the money, and other people build the things. How many times, they need to work around him or fix his crazy ideas ?
People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.
Companies aren't funded by one person, even his. After their current round, Blue Origin will have raised more than three times as much capital as SpaceX, and SpaceX is obviously far more advanced and has already gone public.
Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.
It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.
Musk had around $180M when he founded SpaceX in 2002, and purchased Tesla in 2004. ChatGPT tells me that more than 55,000 people in the world have more wealth than this. So either people who have money choose not to make such risky investments, or they're incapable of it. Probably both. We're very lucky that someone who is both capable of building companies like this and is willing to go bankrupt doing it exists.
Why are those important? Now if he had revolutionized public transport, we might have something to discuss. But instead, he actively worked against that, and was a major force in getting Trump reelected.
Then, after executing a pitch-perfect Hitler salute on a major public stage, he took a chainsaw to US soft power, dooming millions of children around the world to die of starvation and other preventable conditions - including Ebola! - thus getting closer to his idol’s body count. And that’s just one among many other things he did that were almost as bad, including a completely non-transparent rifling through American citizens’ personal data.
No, there is nothing Musk has done that balances the equation. We’d all be better off if he had never existed.
Easy he constantly forces them to cut corners and take risks put their lives in danger "Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands", "Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. "
That's a somewhat valid point about the "move fast and break things" culture at SpaceX. I'm sure there's some correlation between the pioneering, hyper-productive culture at Elon's companies and safety violations, but there's no way you could claim that lax safety standards account for the massive gap between SpaceX and the rest of the entire industry. It's not like they're just pumping widgets out of a factory faster and cheaper. They've revolutionized the cutting edge across all aspects, including design, software, etc. If the best companies could be explained by cutting safety corners, then China would be leading America in everything.
And that was the first I'd heard about high fatality rates for Tesla, so I looked it up. The cars themselves are always rated as very safe, and it seems the reason for high fatalities is just who buys them. Apparently, it's young, affluent, more risk-tolerant people who frequently drive fast on highways.
I'm no ER physician, nor OSHA expert - but if 600 accidents with the sorts of heavy equipment and rocketry that SpaceX does every day included only one death, then my conclusion would be that the vast majority of that 600 were pretty minor stuff. You'd have a lot more bodies otherwise.
Also, Musk is nothing special this way. Honest comparisons would be to cell phone tower workers, steel mills, hazardous chemicals handlers, farmers, and such.
Vs. most people's mental comparison is to working in a comfy office.
I’m a big fan of Musk. One of the few criticisms I have is how xAI is also inconsistent with original OpenAI mission. I had imagined xAI as en effort to correct and fully embody all original values of OpenAI and that Elon says they betrayed. That makes his criticism weaker and I understand why some can think it was all about control. In his words:
"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."
I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?
Those numbers always crack me up. If you do the math that way (US funding cuts kill people), imagine how many people we’ve killed by not confiscating all the wealth of our nation and shipping it to Africa!
Harvard (as credible a source as there is in the world): USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
> The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.
So about half a million children died, children who had no other recourse but to depend on this system which was already in place and for which there is no alternative.
If you "crack up" over the death of children, you're lacking some basic humanity.
Yes, and imagine if we doubled the USAID funding! Or even quintupled it! Why, if we borrowed a(nother) trillion dollars, imagine how many lives we'd save!
My point is that it's all fake math. If we're killing people by not funding aid programs, then we're killing even more by not funding more. How much are you personally sending to Africa? How much more could you be sending? Imagine if you borrowed to do it? You can't do the math that way. While tragic, those people have no demand on our treasury any more than Vladimir Putin does. We may be less benevolent than we once were. We are also much further in debt than we once were -- to the point of threatening the Republic's viability. The US didn't kill a half million children any more than France, or Spain, or Great Britian, or China did by not sending the same money. It's all fake math.
Even if we agree with the premise that cutting funds to save people is the same as killing people (I do not believe this), those don't include how many deaths were reduced by cutting USAID. The funds wound up fueling awful things around the globe.
Once you factor in everything, the cuts are a huge net gain in my estimation.
I know that this is a tall order, but consider that this might not actually be “objective”, and that instead, you’re substituting your opinion for facts.
(You don’t need to enumerate all of the things you believe justify the statement. I’m well familiar with them. I’m just trying to make you understand that there’s a layer of subjectivity here.)
You are wrong. I understand the sentiment, and I do not use the word lightly. Elon has an incredibly long track record of showing us who he is. He is a racist, unequivocally
Scroll through his twitter account and you won't make it more than a couple days without something racist
Also, after Elon bought Twitter, when people called me the n-word and I reported it, moderation said no rules were broken and no action would be taken. Before he bought twitter that was not the case, they'd be banned. So you can buzz off with this nonsense. I won't break any rules and say what should be said.
No he doesn't. There's a lot of bullshit surrounding him. Things are taken out of context.
I will say this, he believes in things about race that are controversial. For example that races may have different IQs. But you have to realize we don't actually know if races have different IQs. The idea fits common sense though... if races can LOOK different... what black magic suddenly makes them completely equal in intelligence when the same genes that govern looks also govern intelligence? We don't have hard evidence on this so right now the best we can say is we don't know but measured evidence and common sense points to the possibility of intellectual differences.
This, in itself, is not actually racist.
He does believe individual meritocracy so meaning even though he believes race correlates with certain stereotypes (like intelligence) he feels that people on the intellectual level need to be judged by merit and not by race.
Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?
The genes that control skin color don't control fast twitch muscle, but we know sub Saharan Africans have more fast twitch than the rest of the world. What magic skin color gene affects fast twitch muscle? None.
It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
>Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?
I mean the same genes on the entire DNA strand. Wholistically all of those genes define who you are.
>It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
Uh yeah? So.
>What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
What do you mean individuals? We CAN measure genes of an individual FYI. And if we can measure genes of an individual we can also measure them for groups and come up with generalized figures and correlations.
True. But you are voted down because not everyone can face the truth. So just lie a little and say "we don't know" even though the truth is we know enough to know that some races are on average more intelligent then others.
People have biases around this stuff and most people can't think critically so if you want them to be receptive you have to lie a bit.
Trump is objectively terrible, corrupt, and feeble-minded, but the lack of self-awareness on the other side is darker. For your platform to be so bad, so out of touch, that you lose to that? And the DNC takeaway was "No, we were perfect - it's the voters who are wrong."[1] I'd rather have one terrible president than support a party that doesn't even believe democracy should exist when it disagrees with them.
I wouldn't trust any numbers that came out of USAID. Mr Beast drilled hundreds of wells, built hundreds of houses for mere few million in Africa. If USAID really did sent 130 Billion in the last 20 years then there literally would be unlimited houses and unlimited wells already completed. Yet to my knowledge only a few solar wells, no houses have been built by USAID.
Mr. Beast? LMAO. A ridiculous comparison in terms of development project implementation.
(And I am no fan of USAID, whose real chief mission was creating dependency on the US and overthrowing independent governments.)
No, I don’t trust USAID, and it’s telling that that was your takeaway from my comment. I was pointing out the obvious differences between an institutional development project approach and that of a parachute-in “charity” looking to create as many trophy projects as possible. The latter do not care about creating local capacity to maintain the infrastructure, among other things.
Under democrat rule, the government's idea of "creating local capacity to maintain infrastructure" is to keep throwing money at problems that keep complaining. When instead 99% of the money is boarding planes and flying to Somalia (this is now 100% proven about the MN/Walz scandal by the way).
We actually need a competitive system to make change work. A way for someone to say - hey this isn't working, and the money shuts off immediately. Just throwing money is killing the United States, so yes, I'd much rather have most charity come from private collections at this point - unless the US changes how it does things.
Agreed - if you read any Elon books that’s a part of it. He always had someone to prove himself to from his dad to the world. It’s almost Michael Jordanesque except business wise.
Not true - I don’t hate him in fact I have a fucking poster of the guy lol I just read a few of his books and look at the facts - you’re not just a “regular guy” at that level he says so himself in the Walter Isaacson biography. Being compared to Michael Jordan isn’t an insult - but it’s not a big compliment either - the gift is also a curse.
Honestly, this is exclusively about money. xAI and X were complete money pits, Tesla's brand was tarnished and SpaceX was the only remaining untainted brand but it has an obvious problem.
Starship didn't turn out to be the obvious victory that Musk had in mind. He basically threw away the Falcon 9 mindset of incremental progress and is instead trying to use a completely different methodology on what amounts to be a vertically stacked shuttle.
Just look at the first thing SpaceX did after selling more than $60 billion worth of shares during the IPO: They borrowed another $20 billion to turn the junk bonds (11% to 16%) from X and xAI into lower interest (5%) long duration (2030s to 2040s) debt. They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring alone and the IPO lets Musk keep funding the endless money pit that Starship represents.
What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.
Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?
Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
> If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
> How does this work?
Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that.
I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition.
There were a lot of voters who didn't want those cuts. So they complain. Is that what swing voters thought they were getting?
The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.
And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would say that not helping other people is immoral. Most people wouldn't go that far, but some do. Some religions ephasize such things.
> Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country?
This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.
The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.
The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.
If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.
I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.
I don’t know, does global cancer research shut down when you stop giving the $500? Do kids immediately stop receiving treatment?
USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.
We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.
We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.
But if we never had, those deaths would have been happening that whole time, wouldn't they?
Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.
I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"
Maybe the deaths would have happened, or maybe these places would have become self sufficient or received aid elsewhere. There’s really no way to know.
But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.
Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.
Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.
You make a pretty fair point there. It would have been better to announce a timeline even if it's like a year. If nobody wants else to help, at least we would have forced our allies and enemies to all go on the record that they won't.
The people at risk witout the aid, though, are more comparable to a drug-addicted teenager who has criminally negligent parents than a truly-disabled grandma. Hopefully we can save a little bit of the blame for those local kleptocrats, who have been absorbing aid from all available sources and failing to properly govern since the creation of most of these countries. (Yes, I agree with you that our current iteration of government are mostly kleptocrats themselves).
I don't think that one USAID tracker website is very reliable, sadly. I also believed this. A bunch of programs were rolled into the state department, and for instance mortality stats for South Africa are significantly upwards-diverging from their model. Now SA is an unusually well-put-together African state, but the study could have modeled this and didn't, so I don't think it should be taken as gospel until more countries report in.
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology
It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.
There is also a simpler explanation that does not make Musk looking like an evil wrongdoer - Musk is working on human-shape robots, for this he needs AI.
BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.
He didn’t start Tesla, he bought it. To his credit he probably saved it. But we also don’t have the counter factual.
“Because of his political views”
This is a beyond charitable take. He brought in a chainsaw to the US gov (literally and figuratively), after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled. This isn’t just him tweeting a perspective.
not to mention his current 'Tommy Robinson' political opinion spree is sufficient to have very serious objections to his political opinions. I'd no more associate with him than I would Henry Ford at the height of his Dearborn Independent stuff or Theodore Bilbo etc. Of course a person's views can be so bad that they take on a moral dimension, that seems very obvious.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.