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Comment by tempnow987 | Hacker News Reader

Could Tesla have benefited from the cross pollination Elon brings to his companies?

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.

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Up until the recent AI boom Tesla was the #1 AI company in the world, now they are falling behind other tech leaders.

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.

On what basis was Tesla ever the #1 AI company in the world?

That's what they marketed themselves as anyway, and why they were valued higher than all other car companies combined (because they're not just about cars).

Which is out of touch from reality if you ask me but that's the collective reasoning at least.

Marketing.

Which is generally the main thing in AI-land, really.

These absolute statements are always interesting.

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.

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