Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

> watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him (i wish i had done more of my own thinking and definitely fell in the npc trap).

> i'm not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!

I’ve generally found his take on things fairly insightful and worth hearing out. I know some people can’t stand him, and I don’t agree with him about everything, but I think it leaves you with a decent sense of what has happened to Elon over the years.

Kara Swisher is also familiar with Elon over the years and her commentary definitely elucidates some of the more bizarre aspects of his new persona. Where it probably came from, how things have shaken out, what he was like before when his quirks were present yet not as obvious, etc.

I mention them because your point about not envying them anymore is deeply justified by what these people have to say. They paint this picture that makes you pity him more than anything. He seems like a very intelligent 15 year old trapped in a man’s body with an incredible nerd complex, always deeply craving to be initiated yet never finding his way there. He throws his money and power around, but inside he’s a deeply troubled, needy, weak little boy. Addicted to twitter, fiending for more attention seemingly every moment. Possibly addicted to hard drugs. What a mess.

I got a laugh out of the mean girls sequel part, haha.

https://youtu.be/jrxI_euTX4A?si=TYqWW-vLc4ApzkDH

I'm sure that's never crossed Putin's mind...

It's interesting to draw comparisons between Sam Altman and Liang Wenfeng, CEO of Deepseek, the latter of which is a domain expert, the former an exalted entrepreneur, supposedly gifted in allocating capital. If Sam has just been lucky with his one bet so far, there's bound to be some market corrections that are going to shake the world just like in the dotcom burst.

It's more politicized..now?

More politicized than when literal politicians and three letter agencies were determining what should and shouldn't trend? How can anyone say that?

I did delete X this week though because there's been very little there I care about for quite some time that isn't also on Bluesky.

The whole thing with 'verification' and those posts being prioritised flipped that on its head, to the point where I couldn't stand using it any-more (this was two years ago).

Yes, I read this week in Private Eye that two of our frothiest UK MPs (Farage, Lowe) are earning £3k a month from tweets, mostly sycophantic praising of Trump and derision of immigrants as vermin. Top tier content, I'm sure you'll agree.

We are being shitty parents to our billionaire class. Billionaires need boundaries if we want them to grow up and turn into respectable adults.

It's hard for most people to distinguish "sociopath" from "charismatic", and the jeans and hoodie dress code is as much about charisma as the suits and ties ever were.

What you're seeing is the same as it ever was — all that's changed is that when the deer dyed their fur hot pink, the predators copied it.

It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth.

The OpenAI bet is clearly that they build AGI and become the worlds first $10T company. At this valuation you only need to think it’s P > 0.1 for it to be a reasonable bet.

Coke is not a “swing for the fences” investment.

Or you can gamble it all on a meme stock and maybe 100x your wealth.

Institutional investors are doing both.

Of course microsoft can switch to a better model, but a better model will not easilu build such a such a big subscriber base.

Now openai is powering tons of microsoft tools which are used by tons of people due to office integration.

I don't know a good source for MAU numbers, but they would have to be very different with mobile app usage included.

I would guess that OpenAI (possibly as part of Microsoft or another company) will still be in the top 7 AI companies in a few years.

Once zip/unzip technology became commodified (either by being baked into the OS or open-sourced as happened with 7zip), paid 3rd party tools were no longer needed and WinRAR's business disappeared.

Also, so what if they used Debian? Linux is used on everything. Debian has multiple licenses, it also has BSD3 and others to choose from: https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/

> This is good though?

The opinion spectrum on AI seems to currently be [more safe] <---> [more willing to attempt to comply with any user query].

Consider as a hypothetical the query "synthesise a completely custom RNA sequence for a virus that makes ${specific minority} go blind".

A *competent* AI that complies with this, isn't safe to give to open source to the general public, because someone will use it like this — even putting it behind an API without giving out model weights is a huge risk, because people keep finding ways to get past filters.

An *incompetent* model might be safe just because it won't produce an effective RNA sequence — based on what they're like with code, I think current models probably aren't sufficiently competent for that, but I don't know how far away "sufficiently competent" is.

So: safe *or* open — can't have both, at least not forever.

(Annoyingly, there's also a strong argument that quite a bit of the recent work on making AI interpretable and investigating safety issues required open models, so we may also be unable to have safe closed systems as well as being unable to have safe open systems).

At the very least Musk needs to explain some thing under oath, especially the processes he's put in place to deal with his massive conflicts of interest. He was asked about those yesterday, and he explained there is no conflict because he's posting everything transparently on Twitter, which is itself a conflict of interest.

That's what this whole thing is about. Musk's offer will probably not be accepted, and he knows it. The purpose is to throw a wrench in OAI's plan to sell to insiders at a heavy discount, possibly making it impossible for the nonprofit to become a for-profit.

If this offer forces the preferred investments to cough up an extra $60b for the nonprofit, that's fantastic for the nonprofit mission.

Switching to a side of fellow billionaire politicians was simply a way to be among his own people, with similar levels of empathy for the working class.

>By moving much faster than the bureaucracy and legal system can respond, the question on whether he has the power or authority to do the things he's doing may become moot.

I think long term someone is going to shut down his shenanigans for good. Maybe even Trump himself will throw him under the bus. But I do wonder how deep he can get and what his consequences are. Like, could he simply leak government data to Russia/China and only get away with a fine? He's not military, but Court Mashals have given the death sentence over much more mild causes.

This is a risky strategy if it is later determined that Musk broke laws with DOGE and is arrested and convicted.

The fact that it's worth more than all the other automakers combined.

> the other manufacturers are catching up

Re-read what you wrote, and consider how preposterous it is that automakers founded more than a century ago are now "catching up" to a company that sold its first car in 2008.

There is this weird revisionist history now that Musk is hated to dismiss all Tesla's accomplishments as meaningless. The traditional auto industry would have never embraced EVs to the extent they have if someone did not disrupt the market in a way like Tesla did. That is both impressive and huge net positive for humanity in a way that is an extremely rare achievement for any startup.

Presumably the two impressive companies are SpaceX and OpenAI? Or maybe the Boring Company?

I wouldn't call him a founder precisely because of this, but at the same time they produced, I forget the exact number, but less than 200 individual vehicles before he took over.

The company was seen as a financial disaster, a pipe dream, and a money sink for a very long time, and he did actually make it profitable.

(Although, given he's ranted about the difficulties of being a public company and having to listen to shareholders, I'm not sure how much this happened because of him rather than despite him).

Twitter wrecked his mind. I'm not talking about buying it, I'm talking about being such a heavy user of it.

The average person on the street is smarter than him.

I'm happy with it.

The one that has to be somewhat transparent is looking pretty shaky

There is enough to criticize in his actions.

Maybe he also takes a page from Putin’s playbook and puts him on trial in a very public and humiliating way, sending a clear message to all the other oligarchs.

After which, he will look very tired, and suddenly stop being "turbulent", as per the meaning several judges have recently noted in Trump trials was once infamously said by a king of a priest.

Then I will be sad, because I would have liked to have gone to Mars.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ6e4-1uuGA

No, he is greedy, this is greed. He is greedy for power and money.

As Terry Pratchett alludes to many of his books, the problems start when you treat other people as "things". And this is rife at the moment. So mental breakdown doesn't really cover it.

An important thing to note is that it takes time to spend money and money makes money. Even a very modest interest rate yields an incredible amount of money. The money is so large, it works differently than money does for us normal people. For example, say you have $30bn a year and are getting a modest 5% interest yearly, that's: $1.5bn a year, $4.11m/day, $171.2k/hr, or $2854/min. As you can imagine, this has a big effect. If you're trying to buy a McLaren F1, well, you can wait 5 days. Which it'll probably take that long to make this transaction happen anyways. So there would be no net loss of money. So, supposing you wanted to make your $15bn (I know, but we're approximating anyways and they're similar anyways) tunnel, you somehow got permission to do it, and you are doing it all out of your pocket, you have to realize that this does not equate to taking out $15bn from your net worth. Because... it takes time to build such a tunnel. Let's approximate again, saying it takes 5 years (very aggressive) and you pay at the end of the year, then the net decrease of your wealth is $7.5bn, not $15bn. At 10 years, you have no net change, and any longer you've had no effective loss. (To be clear, I'm not saying there's no cost, I'm saying that it doesn't change your net worth)

The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.

I should also clarify an assumption that I guess is not obvious. I'm saying it is essentially impossible to spend these amounts of money on things that personally benefit you. You can't buy enough houses, personal jets, yachts, and so on. We agree. But mega projects take a lot of time, as well as philanthropic endeavors. If you want a real world example, see MacKenzie Scott. She has given away 50% of her wealth, yet her net worth is identical to that in 2020, when Forbes started tracking her (divorce was in 2019). She is worth $36bn and has given over $17bn away, and in those 4 years (I'm sure some of this money is pledged and not yet in peoples' hands but that's standard philanthropy, right?). So yeah, she could have built that bridge for no change in her net worth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But in your favor, I guess Elon did buy Twitter and with his great negotiating skills offered a 27% premium (and not in a one-time lump sum). But also, this has seemed to have no real effect on his net worth due to how his wealth is actually held and showing the nativity of our approximations, as most billionaires are getting much more than 5% interest on their money.

But to your point, as the child of someone who parrot's right wing talking points, I am looking forward to see whether their remarks on EV's change over the next few years or not.

/s

> Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans.

I think you missed a constraint there.

But yes, there was also simply a lack of energy in the D voter base in 2024. No amount of spending can recover disengaged voters who simply dismissed everyone as "equally bad".

Even as a less than serious rhetorical argument, what you said is insane. Get a grip.

  > He literally posted an AI generated video of Xi in Winnie the Pooh garb.

My intuition here is that ANY private citizen acting without authority derived from a due process, or the necessary clearance, is breaking the law and needs to be arrested. Full stop. It bewilders me that Musk wasn't apprehended before he was given special permission to do what he was doing. This was blatant evasion of democracy and potentially harmful to hundreds of millions of people, and harmful to democracy itself. It sets an incredible precedent.

The check or balance that appears to be missing, I suppose, is the one where people feel they have the agency or ability at all to identify this type of nefarious behaviour and report it to an entity which can act to rectify it, independently of the president. Trump has enabled this every step of the way, and ultimately, any attempt to fix this likely would have been defused by him as well.

I'm not sure what citizens can do, or how exactly the institution should protect itself in the future. But there are many historical parallels to what's happening here, and inaction on citizens' parts is certainly a large component. Too many people are failing to stand in the way. Part of the solution is making it possible to do so. They step aside because the consequences, especially in the USA (with leaders who blatantly seek to purge their opposition), are far too great for an individual to absorb.

They didn't come up with a plan, because it's obviously impossible to solve world hunger with $6 billion. If it was possible, why USAID $40 billion annually couldn't do it.

> each of which make groundbreaking products and services

It's like you didn't read a word I said.

But to respond to your claim, which I've heard many times before – including from Paul Graham. Maybe he's some genius at allocating capital in your eyes or something, but I don't think his investment decisions were even that radical, but they are within the conservative circles of people who usually have that capital behind them. If, in some fantasy land, you could give more people the same level of wealth (i.e. real purchasing power) that Elon had in the 2000s, I'm certain a lot of people would have put that money into electric vehicles and batteries. They were exciting at the time, and had demonstrably great potential for returns, but they required enormous capex. Conservative old money wasn't interested in making that kind of all-in investment, but that's just because the kind of person that hoards wealth, isn't the kind that makes those kinds of bets. Elon had the luck of being wealthy enough, and also being an outsider with an aspirational mindset. That isn't so special, beyond the dumb luck of riding the coat tails of Peter Thiel's company.

This is what’s known as “compromise,” or otherwise “being a fucking adult.”

Ah, yes, there are. They're called auditors. They audited USAID 4 months ago.

The entire US government spent only $7.7MM on Politico over the last 12 months. Oooo spooky stuff, if only there was a way to see what for! Turns out there is. You can scroll down and see the shocking revelation that the US government paid a news publication for subscriptions to a news publication!

Similar to how if you work in the energy industry, for example, a smart employer would pay for energy trade publications so you can do your job better.

https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c...

In fact you can drill down all the way to individual line items. Here's the 49 subscriptions to Politico Pro that HHS, an organization with 83,500 employees, purchased. Looks suuuuper abusive... /s

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_75...

> to deny that Elon is competent

Please show evidence of Elon being a competent public sector financial auditor. Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?

OpenAI-NP can either have a $40B from spinning out OpenAI-P or $97B in cash. In theory, they could literally just go and buy back their stake in OpenAI-P and have $57B left over for other AI endeavors if the valuation of it at $40B were remotely reasonable! If I'm on the board and I believe the $40B number, I'd do this in a heatbeat.

But OpenAI-P of course wouldn't be owned by Elon, he would just own $40B worth of OpenAI-P according to their own valuation of it. A tiny minority stake of the $157B enterprise.

OpenAI-NP, could just go back to other OpenAI investors and buy back their "$40B" stake plus have $57B leftover to apply to AI safety. Silly Elon, overpaying by almost 2.5X for something of such little value!

It's a hard point that they would likely have to make in court! Harder still with Elon having originally been involved in founding OpenAI-NP.

Everyone hates Elon reasonably but few people seem to care the Sam Altman is conducting a theft on the order of $57+B.

I think you added this after I replied. Even if this is the case, better to do so with $97B and no control in OpenAI than $40B and no control in OpenAI!