no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
> Swindler
In another tweet chain: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889063777792069911
> Scam Altman
(Not that I would feel bad. Altman can crash and burn and the world would be better off.)
...which is probably accurate. I remember reading a r/AskHistorians question on why Robespierre was unable to maintain control of the Committee for Public Safety, and the answer was basically that in revolutionary France, everybody who stuck their neck out got it cut off. Within 10 years of the revolution's start, basically all of its leaders were dead. In times of crises, people with big egos volunteer to fix it, but the crises cannot be fixed, and then those egos become the scapegoats who are executed to salve the public's cries for blood.
xAI is not making any money - it's a money furnace, so what does it mean the bid is backed by xAI ? The leverage and 'creativity' in the US is off the charts. Dotcom bubble starts to look reasonable.
And the key point in this news that punctuates the ridiculous farce that is the nature of this offer.
This is normal at this point. Netflix also wasnt making any money when it was new, same with Uber and more. You can't run in the race to the bottom if you're climbing to the top.
While other factors may be involved, that debt is shopped around assuming there are bankable assets in that DC and GPUs which are quite valuable even if the either company goes sideways.
Given what happened to the internet afterwards, dotcom bubble was always reasonable. There were a lot of idiotic companies that made no sense, but the overall idea that internet is going to generate tons of value and money was completely true.
The launch of ChatGPT was earth shaking, but what have they done since that impacts or excites the average consumer? Does their revenue even come from the average consumer, or primarily from API users that will lift and shift to a viable competitor?
I don't know, but I'm very curious to see how they can hold their lead and be attractive in the longer term.
0. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...
Without a moat, it's hard to argue OpenAI's value is that high.
BlackBerry, Nokia, Yahoo, and MySpace were popular at one point but couldn't keep up.
https://beta.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2024/10/2...
The world is littered with old once-great brands.
Is OpenAI really one of the five most valuable brands in the world?
We in the tech bubble know all the competitors and all the other products related to AI, but I guarantee that 98% of the rest of the world just knows chatGPT and some of them use it, even people who struggle to turn the Bluetooth on/off.
It's really hard to replicate this, I'm pretty sure this lady will never have the Claude or DeepSeek app installed on her phone, but she will be using chatGPT in the meantime.
OpenAI are kind of fundamentally unsustainable as a business.
> OpenAI has a "text embeddings" API that is used primarily for tasks where you want to identify anomalies or relationships in text, or classify stuff in text"
From the creator of Grok, this is such an insane thing to say
Grift and lie to everyone's faces because you know that it doesn't matter what the fuck you say, as long as your political stance aligns with the right people bootlickers will lick up anything you say for a chance at being noticed.
Presumably, Musk is trying to throw a wrench into these negotiations, by putting a valuation on the low end on the table, while Altman's "counteroffer" to buy Twitter for 9.74B sort of claims that this is too low by a factor of 5 to 10-ish.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-21/who-ow...
Don't let him get it. Profoundly dangerous.
Watch as he attempts to use the levers of the now illegitimate US government to force the outcome.
Meanwhile, OpenAI was cofounded by him.
Is there some reason OpenAI, which has maneuvered for regulatory capture of the AI industry in the past, is less dangerous than whatever you perceive?
Of course this will lead to conflict between Altman and Musk as they rush to entrench themselves within the current administration. This buyout offer could be an effective tactic to delay the pending funding from Softbank, and in turn the kick off of stargate, while DOGE gets up to speed. Even a short delay could be impactful in the early days of an aggressive and fickle administration.
You can present an argument about why it's a "bad analysis" but your offhand "analysis" is not constructive or well-informed here.
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/380117/openai-microsoft-s...
It's pretty colorful language, but my mind immediately jumps to "financial terrorist". He's using his enormous amount of wealth and influence as a weapon to bludgeon anyone and anything in his way.
Sure, Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, but with how things are moving - It wouldn't surprise me that he's about the fall down the ranks. Let's see how much power he has once the "richest man in the world" aura fades away.
I suspect he has so many huge loans leveraged on that tesla stock that if Tesla went to zero, he'd be at bankruptcy court...
Tesla is a meme coin at this point. However there are these pesky shareholders to deal with.
> How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though?
- Dec 15 2022: Sells 22m shares for $3.6bn
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale/index.html
- Nov 4-8 2022: Sells 19.5m shares for $4bn
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-climate-and-environment-9ab47198753931c7bea91f6e678f1d17
- Feb 2022: Elon has $11bn tax bill from a $23bn taxable income. Article discusses 2 sells
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html
- This article says notes $1.52 billion between 2014-2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-over-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year.html
I believe we can agree that this sum of money falls into the category of "never will be poor." Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money. Remember, we're talking about a sum of money where you could easily line up $100 bills all the way across California, from top to bottom[0].
[0] A bill is 155.956mm x 66.294mm (0.155956m x 0.066294m) and CA's dimensions are 400km x 1220km. So 1220000 / 0.066294 = 18.403e6. You need ~$18.4m to do this with singles, $368.01 with $20's, and $1.84bn with $100's. So $30bn is 16 rows (2.5 meters wide) and $391bn (current Forbes value) is 212.5 rows, or 33 meters wide. A bill is 0.11mm thick if you want to calculate height. Maybe someone can come up with another fun visualization, because this one is well beyond imaginable already.
Fading global Tesla sales are consistent with this: it’s what happens when you go all in on one party in one nation, and Musk has always been willing to bet big on his next move. Also, I doubt it’ll last.
Remember also that Trump is about to die and Musk is 53. What fortune is 10x greater than Musk’s current massive wealth and political power? The office of super-President that he’s now suddenly so engaged in helping create “for Trump”.
I think I see what you mean, but it’s dangerous to casually say such a hostile and powerful state’s corruption could ever be vindicated.
And maybe Jack Ma should also have advocated for Taiwan's submission to China like Musk did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/08/elon-musk...
They enact laws guaranteeing free speech and human rights, then execute their critics and sell their organs.
In fact, I am worried about whether that influence from China extends further. How else do you explain Trump delaying enforcement of the TikTok ban? If anything he should be going a lot harder against China.
As a thought experiment, I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally.
Or if not damage, just trolling. For instance, writing X on the moon or something like that.
We seem to be watching this in real time. Musk bought influence over the US president, gained access to critical US systems, and is about to benefit from the EO pausing of enforcement of law banning bribes to foriegn nationals.
He bought power. He is buying more power. We are watching a supervillian rise.
Ian Fleming explored that idea rather effectively with Hugo Drax in the original Moonraker novel (which doesn't have much besides the name in common with the movie.)
The way things are playing out, Drax must have been Musk's childhood hero.
Hypothetically, would it be legal to fund a president whose policy was "let's nuke everyone"?
Run a government. No single person has ever been responsible for more death, suffering and harm as a person wielding a monopoly on violence. Even the Church only managed its bloody conquests, cultural genocides and colonialism because it had the power of imperialist states behind it. If not for Constantine, Christianity would have remained a weird apocalypse cult in the Levant.
A person such as Musk (or Trump, or Biden, or...or...) live in a completely different reality when compared to yours or mine, as their input differs vastly from ours. This is inevitable given the flaws of being human.
It's like training two AIs on completely different sets of input. The bigger the difference in training data ...
He's making an offer to buy something at twice the price of the other offer on the table.
I'm not sure it'd be a good deal for Musk but it looks like a good deal for the seller.
>I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.
then you don't know much about him
I've listened to a history podcast about the robber barons and how following the backlash and dismantlement of the Standard oil, industrialist started buying articles, sometime even newspapers to sell their stories, and in the US, it worked wonderfully. You still have the brand "Quaker" that was born at the time, and probably a dozen other, where they manipulated their own famillial history to build an image, and hide the fact that children died in their mine or that they just had 20 redneck strikers killed. It's not as bad today, but building a personal brand by buying puff articles, fondations. Buying goodwill and influence was always present since at least that time (Honestly, Berkshire Hathaway made at least some of its money on WB reputation, so tech billionaires are not the only kind of CEO who do it)
I certainly suspect that there were always elements of what he's become that just weren't as publicly apparent.
memetics
I view Musk's decision here as a good thing that will benefit the world.
This is false, but it what he tries to portray to save face. It has been shown numerous times that he was in agreement with keeping it AI private when it was assumed he would be in control of it. And specifically for safety reasons. And the only reason OpenAI took microsoft money was because Musk pulled his already pledged and budgeted funding for the company.
Why did he pull funding? Because he insisted OpenAI was light-years behind Google (he was very wrong) and insisted the way to save it was to give him full control of the company (also wrong). They told him he was wrong so he got made and pulled his already pledged funding.
Pledging funds for a non-profit then afterwards getting upset that they won't just give you the non-profit entity is pretty absurd.
If he wants to, he could apply legal mechanisms. The fact he's resorting to public pandering to sycophants to back him in his righteous cause suggests that he has exhausted those legal means.
Here are some recent headlines:
* "Google" group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI.
* Teen on "Google's" DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'.
* "Google's demolition crew.
* Google's DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts
Then ask yourself, if you would write the same comment, calling "Sundar Pichai", a terrorists? Why or why not?
PS: I do believe Musk should be subject to the federal criminal conflict of interest statute given his position in gov.
Using your "enormous amount of wealth" as a weapon means you'll be frittering away that wealth very quickly. Especially since others will be inclined to take the other side of the bet as soon as they catch on to it happening.
Musk is bad, but he's only really one example amongst thousands. And there aren't many examples of where this has ever been a good thing.
It's made worse by the fact that isolation makes them literally detached from reality. COVID completely broke some billionaire brains as it was adding to their loneliness.
How long before they start forming their own armies to cause geopolitical havoc?
I see a post on X with receipts showing millions of dollars of pretty obvious waste and/or corruption, many involving news outlet grants and subscriptions, including names, amounts, etc. Then I see some tearjerker story about families of USAID workers on one of the beneficiary news outlets. And in the comments, people lamenting that Elon Musk's success is only due to luck and his estranged father's defunct gem mine. Or worrying Elon will use their SSN (which is already available on the dark web) to open a credit card.
You're pretty smart people. Do we really think auditing government spending by a super-competent outsider is a bad thing? The last time it was done was by Clinton, btw, who managed to create a surplus (granted, the debt situation was nothing compared to today). And before that, Truman, back before hyper-partisan politics. I can't imagine the level of grift back then was anywhere close to today in our bloated budget. I'm optimistic, and I think y'all need to relax.
In addition, Elon isn't even that rich, when compared to other entities, which aren't a singular person. As an example, BlackRock manages over $10 trillion of assets (that's 30x compared to Elon), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms
Elon is not the richest entity in the world, and he doesn't have any special powers to bludgeon anything, like none of these large companies have, unless they do some weird market manipulation tricks (which should be illegal anyway).
I think what this does is set a floor valuation with a fully backed bid that the non-profit would get IN CASH for essentially buying the for profit.
This really messes up OpenAI's plans because it means someone else would have to bid more and be willing to part with the cash in order for OpenAI to spin off.
Actually a brilliant move that gums up OpenAI's plans.
The issue at hand is that OpenAI (the private, currently "capped profit" entity, henceforth in this post referred to as OpenAI-P) is trying to get spun out of control of the OpenAI non-profit (henceforth referred to as OpenAI-NP).
In order to do this, OpenAI-P must compensate OpenAI-NP for its ownership of OpenAI-P. Currently they are trying to value this at $40B. This is a swindling for numerous reasons. Firstly, OpenAI-NP has complete control over OpenAI-P. They OpenAI-NP board can do whatever it wants with OpenAI-P. OpenAI-P has some financial obligations to those who have purchased its PPU (its equity instrument) but ultimately OpenAI-NP controls OpenAI-P and could do whatever it wants with it (eg shut it down, fire Sam Altman on a whim, etc). Further, the cashflows that OpenAI-NP still has ownership of are, at least under the claims of people like Sam A, clearly worth dramatically more than the $40B valuation would imply.
In addition, the OpenAI-NP mission is "Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity". The control of the leading AI Lab is the only way that they can possibly live up to their mission. To abdicate control of OpenAI-P is to abdicate their mission. If the OpenAI-NP board follows their mission as they are obligated to, they cannot possibly be willing to abdicate this control and they must surely value it far beyond $40B.
EDIT TO ADD TL;DR - Musk is trying to force OpenAI to value OpenAI-NP's stake in OpenAI-P at a reasonable level which is far greater than the current $40B which will help Musk by potentially derailing OpenAI-P's goal to be spun off.
Given that OpenAI.org currently wholly owns OpenAI.com (doesn't it? even Msft didn't get a stake?), I have trouble seeing (a) how the $40B valuation would stand up in court if anyone could challenge it (and I believe Musk is trying to do that?), but also (b) how Musk's $100B pushes up the valuation more than a SoftBank investment would do.
Scratching my head...
[0] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/business/money-report/sof...
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-chatbot-ai-first-agenda/
Perhaps "big balls" and the other geniuses he hired haven't managed to come up with a working solution.
Musk needs chatbots for his technocracy movement because they are great for faking progress in efficiency without understanding any of the systems they replace and destroy.
He may also need them for online bot campaigns to convince MAGA voters that layoffs, deregulation, H1Bs and supporting billionaires are really in their best interest.
That said, considering he overpaid for Twitter, perhaps OpenAI should consider his offer.
This can only be described as techno authoritarianism.
https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
Discussion:
> One of the thorniest questions in the conversion has been how the nonprofit will be valued. Musk’s bid sets a high bar and may mean that he, or whoever runs the nonprofit, would end up with a large and possibly controlling stake in the new OpenAI.
So this is a play to mess with the restructuring?
Why aren't the news stories exploring this angle? It's very annoying that this comes below the regurgitated press releases and asinine Twitter quotes. Reuters didn't even mention it. The Guardian just barely touches on it.
Like Trump getting money from DB over and over.
What does it mean to buy a nonprofit? Who owns it now? Does anyone?
Other examples include Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, which receives the payments from Google for default search engine placement and hires Firefox engineers, and the Smithsonian museum gift shop. It’s a very common corporate structure for nonprofits that run some kind of business because it derisks accounting and management.
Musk is offering to buy the forprofit from the nonprofit, which would mean a $97.4 billion endowment for the latter to carry out their mission. It’s not necessarily a bad deal because it converts an optimistic VC valuation into hard assets, unless the rumored new round at a $300 billion valuation with Softbank is true.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...
Either they know more about this stuff than me and it's their job to predict that gap and explain this key detail... Or they don't know more than me so it's their job to be curious about it!
The quotes and stuff just strike me as so lazy. Why are you telling me that a thing happened and then not even taking 3 sentences to scratch the surface of what that thing actually means?
I guess they have to pump stories like this out in just a few minutes...
Elon Musk is continually pushing for singular control of everything (not least of which is the US federal government). It makes me immensely uncomfortable.
The financing arm of a aristocratic line running a personality cult and who have a nepo baby on the cards contemplating a little bit of jyhad as his ticket out?
....I Do sometimes wonder who comes up with these names.
OTOH, everything Trump threatens is an invitation to bribery.
And when it starts to go south for him, Elon's going under the bus, not to re-engineer them.
Trump's dream is to be the richest man in the world. Someone is in the way as soon as his hatchet man job is done. Nothing has any meaning to Trump but money.
It does all have a bit of Wile E Coyote feel to it. Keep gesticulating wildy to propel forwards before inevitably plunging in the abyss below.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banks-sell-5-5-billion-of-x-loan...
Are there other major investors involved here or just Musk?
> The bid is being backed by Musk’s own artificial intelligence company xAI, which could merge with OpenAI following a deal. He also has several investors backing him, including Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, a venture firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Ari Emanuel, CEO of Hollywood company Endeavor, is also backing the offer through his investment fund.
> A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Vy Capital, amongst others. Strategic investors NVIDIA and AMD also participated and continue to support xAI in rapidly scaling our infrastructure.
It happens in life, and it happens on the internet. Today, your digital life, files, photos, chats, etc, are on a server run by a company with a cute logo and a manifesto about privacy. Tomorrow, that company gets bought by a billionaire with lizard-like features, changes its terms and conditions, and your stuff ends up on a marketplace for five cents a bundle.
That bleeding money went to nvidia(US) and the US electric grid, so its FINE from a US point of view (I don't think a lot went to TSMC(taiwan)).
Unless openai is transfering significant amount of money outside the US (directly or via some montage).
Once again, any bad news for OpenAI is censored from reaching the front page of HN.
Great come-back, but at this point, I'd take the money. The field now has nation-state actors, it will almost impossible to sustain a revenue flow for this: price is going down.
(not an investor)
BTW the board valuation isn't against sunk cost, its against hyped future value. This may be half the hype but its a shitload more than spend.
The time for such a bid like this was when Sam was was ousted out of OpenAI and in complete state of chaos.
Investors already put their money in at around $157B+ and are not willing to take a price cut down to less than $100BN.
Unless that is the amount that Sam wants to walk away with, but its isn't even going to be no where near close to enough.
This is for a controlling stake, not outright ownership, isn't it?