He had to completely disconnect from OpenAI due to the conflict of interest with Tesla AI.

To be a bit more specific, I recall the separation happening because Musk poached Karpathy from OpenAI, which was against an agreement.

Musk impregnated an OpenAI engineer last year [0]. What kind of separation is that?

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/7/23198199/elon-musk-childre...

I'm not sure that counts as a "stake". He did found the company so I'm sure he still has connections there.

He didn't found OpenAI-the-company which was owned by the OpenAI-the-501(c)3-charity & which has sold off 'capped returns' parts of it, he co-founded the charity, and he left the OpenAI charity a long time ago after having stepped back a lot before that as well. There has been no reporting about him buying a stake in the company the charity owns, and it seems a little unlikely they would want him investing either. So Elon Musk's travails would appear to be largely unrelated to anything going on at either OpenAI-the-company or its parent OpenAI-the-charity.

Very clever use of the word travail. Was the irony intentional, gwern? (See the tail end of the definitions ;)

travail noun

tra·vail tr-vāl tra-vāl

1a: work especially of a painful or laborious nature : TOIL

1b: a physical or mental exertion or piece of work : TASK, EFFORT

1c: AGONY, TORMENT

2a: LABOR, CHILDBIRTH

(Less than intentional, more than accidental. I know the multiple meanings, so it came easily to mind by priming. That sort of unintentional wordplay is a bit of a bad habit, really, when it leads you to use obsolete vocab - the other day someone was asking me if I had made a typo for 'way' when I wrote 'X is in some wise deficient'. I didn't, but it's not like I was trying to be clear either.)

No wonder it succeeded.

lol - tesla, spacex, etc didnt succeed ? what planet are you living on?

It is hip on Twitter to say he just bought it all (with daddy’s money is even better to note) and knows nothing. As in: without getting free money he cannot succeed, only break. Link to an image of collapsing Tesla price.

It’s boring; chatgpt is great or skynet and either Musk is god or Musk is worthless is most of my Twitter timeline.

it's great, but it's also skynet's latest iteration. let's not kid ourselves while we're blinded by the new shiny.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Boring mass surveillance dystopia powered by fancy curve fitting algorithms is not going to be anything like Skynet.

Algorithmic dragnets running over all communications technology, every human carrying a microphone everywhere that they don't have control over, and walking killer robots sound very much like Skynet. The big difference is that it won't be run by an overarching AI, but by the grandchildren of the people who own everything now.

I don't know how rich Musk's dad is, but even if he was a billionaire, turning a billion into combined $1T+ marketcap companies is an incredible achievement.

Yes, but many of course think they would do equally well or better. And then many others are just trolling.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Let’s see how many of those are around when we actually go through a full business cycle. No company started since 2003 has really been through a real downturn. 2007/2008 was limited in its blast radius and the fed just threw money everywhere…

So 20 years for Tesla and 21 years for SpaceX is a sprint? What amount of time is a marathon? Facebook was founded in 2004, Google in 1998, are they still just sprinting?

how about when Tesla can survive off of the margins from ops without growth and without bilking its customer for vapor ware?

How about when they come out with a new body and chassis? When they go through a re-tooling cycle or two?

And again, let’s seem then make it through a full business cycle, because again, no company founded since 2001 knows that it’s like to run a company in a no growth or shrinking economy…

What is your definition for a "full business cycle"? Specifically the length? If you are going to define it as "I know it when I see it" then there's no room for a conversation here.