He's a moral imbecile. Richest man in the world taking food from the poorest kids and celebrating putting this "into the woodchipper" should never be forgotten by anyone with a grasp on what this really represents.
FTR I don't think he thought he could save us, I think he thought he could do cool stuff (space and EVs) and now says climate change isn't as bad as he used to think (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).
You don't hear this sort of stuff about ebays founder, for instance.
Depends on who “us” is. Musk and his close friends? Sure. The rest of us? Well, in his view, the majority of humanity is a stepping stone to a future for his lineage to live on through space travel and colonization. This isn’t an exaggeration, though I don’t have my sources on this handy as it’s been a while so take it with a grain of salt. But Musk’s altruism has largely always been about making himself look good, and less about helping people.
Why would he be?
Musk would look at this and say "why aren't these people more generous and willing to pay for my API".
Rules for thee but not for me.
For example the firehose/streaming API more or less require 5 grand a month, so off limits to a indie dev. Does he not even have solidarity with developers?
My point is there is no generosity here at all between parties.
Consumers want to pay less. Provider wants to charge more. It's not a charity.
Why would he be?
Why shouldn't he be?
He has 10x more of everything in the world than he could ever possibly use in his lifetime.
Greed is not a virtue.
Your multiplier is miles off. Not only on basic maths but because he has no idea what to do with all of his wealth other than accrue more and try to prove he's still not the unlikeable teenager he was in SA.
Without a rounding error on his wealth he could fix world wide problems such as clean drinking water for everyone. Instead he follows his self-made "I'm a genius" agenda.
I know there will be no actual day of reckoning for him, but if there were he would have a lot of difficult questions and no decent answers.
Elon is somewhere around 10,000x.
Restricting content from AI is the big messy debate we're going to see over and over for the next who knows how many years.
I don't know if this was successful or not. Ultimately they convinced someone to buy the platform for $44bn, so I guess you can say it was. That buy has locked the platform down more, and the new version certainly feels less culturally central and relevant than it used to.