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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time taking xAI seriously as a company considering how Elon seems to treat it as an accounting strategy and not as an independent company.

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Well in one of the most competitive and fast moving fields right now they have one of the best models available. They've earned the right to be taken seriously.

You may not care for the owner but the company's tech speaks for itself and the company deserves to be taken seriously based on their production alone.

A model companies and people actively avoid outside of Twitter. Nobody is choosing Grok unless they want to make spicy/racist meme or show an active support for Elon.

> A model companies and people actively avoid outside of Twitter.

That's an absurd statement. And one that shows your bias.

> Nobody is choosing Grok unless they want to make spicy/racist meme or show an active support for Elon.

I pay for Grok and Gemini as they are arguably the best two models available right now.

By your logic and your logic alone, this also mean that no one choses OpenAi unless they want to show active support for Sam Altman.

Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are run by serious businesses that aren't blatantly meddling with the models to boost racism, misinformation, and the owners ego. It's why they are discussed together and Grok is always left out except by Elon fans.

It will never actually matter how SOTA Grok gets (if it ever gets there) when it's output is being guided in that way.

Elon Musk's claim to fame is that he "helped create" (although the actual stories are more along the lines of "stopped sabotaging") paypal, which is a bank. An internet bank focusing on enabling payment to first Ebay, then merchants in general. And you can tell by his later takeovers. He took over Tesla, and absurdly financialized it. He took over SpaceX, and absurdly overleveraged it. That is what he does, any technical chops are for show.

He's an accidental banker with a gimmick: ketamine can make you believe anything!

Politico.eu collected Musk's latest results [1]. Out of what Musk and Trump promised [2], Musk first lowered his promises himself (after getting the money, sorry, the election) from 2000 billion (2 trillion) to 180 billion, a 91% reduction. He didn't make anywhere close to those savings, his organisation then made a further reduction in his promise to 52.8 billion, missing the promised target by 97.36%. But those appear to be inflated claims and actually verified savings only amount to 1.4 billion, 99.93% less than Musk initially promised. BUT ...

Then Trump was going to NOT spend this money. How's that going? Well, in order to NOT spend 1.4 billion dollars, Musk and Trump have spent 7.4 trillion taxpayer dollars. Hey, you missed "saving" by a tiny bit there, Elon.

So Musk, who promised to save the us government 2000 billion dollars, has in fact "saved" the government MINUS 7400 billion dollars. As always, Musk's direct contribution is barely a rounding error.

This number is not counting, of course, what he personally received from the US government which will comfortably put the cost of doing business with Musk for the US government over 8000 billion dollars. I guess that's one way to become "the richest man in the world" (even though I wouldn't trade $1000 of my money for all Tesla shares in existence, so is he really? I mean, maybe $100 for bragging rights, but they don't even come with a certificate anymore)

Let's just say that anyone expecting investments with Mr. Musk to pay off is not just crazy, that is WAY past dangerous insanity. Even his supposed "high-tech" achievements ... well, here's a summary [3].

TLDR: 99.97% miss in performance for Musk's latest project. Total cost to taxpayers of Mr. Musk: over 8000 billion dollars.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/trump-doge-contract...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4j33klz33o

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B71PNEwhyXc

Who did he took over SpaceX from?

Glad that you had to dig that deep to find something wrong. But: SpaceX was taken over from NASA/DoD (~ TRW). People generally don't say that because the people actually involved feel that it was NASA that abandoned them/their ambitions rather than the other way around.

But you know the same story emerges as elsewhere. Mr. Musk's was a financier, nothing else.

This is the most nonsense of nonsense claims.

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