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.
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 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.
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.
Shouldn't the defense have raised the statute of limitations much earlier?
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 problem is that our demographics leave little choice to the government and 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 reduces my motivation to earn money for NZ to nearly zero. I am not a money chaser and I dislike investing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
It seems like a reasonable way to use the word, no?
Odds of him winning on appeal are low.
Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick.
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.