Tesla investor suit: Elon Musk harmed carmaker by founding rival company, xAI
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"...Could the CEO of Coca-Cola loyally start a competing soft-drink company on the side, then divert scarce ingredients from Coca-Cola to the startup?
Could the CEO of Goldman Sachs loyally start a competing financial advisory company on the side, then hire away key bankers from Goldman Sachs to the startup?
Could the board of either company loyally permit such conduct withoutdoing anything about it?..."
Has is involvement with spacex ever helped tesla in anything (materials engineering etc)? My guess is yes.
Has his involvement in Tesla helped SpaceX with anything (thing electric motors for thruster gimbling) My guess is yes.
In terms of AI, has his involvement with things like OpenAI and xAI helped Tesla in any way? My guess is at least with respect to AI - yes, Tesla is not behind in AI because of Elon - but if anything is overdoing it in AI because of him.
Is he able to attract reasonable engineers to his companies despite sounding like an absolute pain to work for / with because of all of this? My guess is yes.
Elon is now stealing Tesla's AI lead and squandering it on his pissing match with OpenAI because he feels jealous of what they were able to accomplish, despite his attempted takeover.
Now he is even taking AI hardware earmarked for Tesla and using it instead to push his other interests
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/elon-musk-told-nvidia-to-shi...
Tesla's AI is about vision learning and they were way ahead in that field, and now he's deciding to focus instead on "anti-woke" chatbots.
This does not benefit Tesla in any way shape or form.
Not disputing he is likely to push for anti-woke AI. He went bigtime anti-woke with Twitter and laid off a ton of staff particularly in DEI areas and a lot of the brand marketing on twitter left as a result.
Long term the outcome is a bit less clear - twitters demise was widely expected and it still seems to operate despite the layoffs though I'm not sure if users are still using it anymore or all went to bluesky etc.
At Tesla - if anti-woke drives a ton of engineers to leave that will certainly be a problem.
In terms of getting allocations of things like NVidia hardware, is it possible that some of these allocations come because of Elon being in the mix in the first place?
I think the fact that there are related party activities between his companies (including Elon himself) are pretty well known. I thought the solarcity deal was a TERRIBLE deal for Tesla, but Tesla energy has been doing pretty well generally - so again, waters a bit muddied, and executives are able to make bad decisions along with good ones.
Which is out of touch from reality if you ask me but that's the collective reasoning at least.
Which is generally the main thing in AI-land, really.