The US needs a red wave and will be finished if the Republican Party does not prevail in the 2024 presidential election, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday.
The billionaire, who had previously revealed he voted for Joe Biden in 2020, has since criticized the incumbent US president and clashed with his administration. Musk has repeatedly criticized Biden’s handling of the Southern US border crisis and has accused Democrats of being “controlled by the unions.” “I voted 100% Dem until a few years ago. Now, I think we need a red wave or America is toast,” Musk wrote on X. According to media reports, the entrepreneur became increasingly critical of Biden after Tesla, the top-selling electric-car company in the US, was excluded from a White House summit on EVs in 2021. Last year Musk revealed that he had doubts he’d be voting for Biden in the 2024 presidential election. As of yet, however, he hasn’t endorsed Biden’s rival Donald Trump. “I think I would not vote for Biden,” Musk told a DealBook summit in November, adding “I’m not saying I’d vote for Trump.” Earlier this month the New York Times reported that Trump had met with Musk in Florida, as the former US president seeks a major cash infusion for his re-election campaign. Musk confirmed the meeting but maintained that he is not donating to the Republican’s campaign. “I was at a breakfast at a friend’s place and Donald Trump came by, that’s it,” he told former CNN host Don Lemon last week, adding that Trump had not requested any financial assistance. “I’m not paying his legal bills in any way, shape or form. And he did not ask me for money,” Musk said.
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US billionaire Elon Musk has taken OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company he once helped to found, to court over an alleged breach of its original mission to develop AI technology not for profit but for the benefit of humanity.
OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab to develop an open-source Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), has now become a “closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world,” Musk’s legal team wrote in the suit filed on Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court. The lawsuit claimed that Musk “has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity – perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today.” “But where some like Mr. Musk see an existential threat in AGI, others see AGI as a source of profit and power,” it added. “Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.” Musk left the OpenAI board of directors in 2018 and has since grown critical of the firm, especially after Microsoft invested at least $13 billion to obtain a 49% stake in a for-profit branch of OpenAI. “Contrary to the founding agreement, defendants have chosen to use GPT-4 not for the benefit of humanity, but as proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world,” the suit read. The lawsuit listed OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and president Gregory Brockman as co-defendants in the case, and called for an injunction to block Microsoft from commercializing the tech. AI technology has improved at a rapid pace over the last two years, with OpenAI’s GPT language model going from powering a chatbot program in late 2022 to performing in the 90th percentile on SAT exams just four months later. More than 1,100 researchers, tech luminaries and futurists argued last year that the AI race poses “profound risks to society and humanity.” Even Altman himself has previously acknowledged that he is “a little bit scared” of the technology’s potential, and barred customers from using OpenAI to “develop or use weapons.” However, the company ignored its own ban on the use of its technology for “military and warfare” purposes and partnered up with the Pentagon, announcing in January that it was working on several artificial intelligence projects with the US military. It might be compared to a new Harry Potter book being announced or the long-awaited Rolling Stones album. Although gamers will say that even the enthusiasm for this contrasts sharply with their expectations.
After years of waiting, a trailer for the new Grand Theft Auto VI was supposed to be released this afternoon, but that was suddenly moved forward to the middle of the night: the trailer then turned out to have been leaked on social medium X, after which the developer decided to release the full-fledged video itself. to give. There are few video games that have been waiting for as many gaming fans as the new GTA VI. Rumors and speculation have been going around for months about what the game will look like. Developer Rockstar Games is still keeping many details secret, but expectations are high. What becomes clear from this trailer: the setting is once again Vice City, a fictional city based on Miami. For the first time, the game has a female protagonist. And the game won't be released until 2025. The previous GTA, the fifth in the series, was released in 2013. It is not known why Rockstar waited so long to release a sequel, but they themselves are silent about it. Experts think the developers wanted to take their time to deliver a good product. There are also critics who say that GTA V is a cash cow that still makes a lot of money. GTA V has grossed more than $8 billion since its launch ten years ago. This makes it one of the greatest entertainment products ever. Avatar, for example, remains far behind as the most lucrative Hollywood film with less than 3 billion. It is not yet possible to say whether Grand Theft Auto VI will live up to expectations. However, images of the game have been leaked in recent months. A hacker posted them on an online fan forum. Rockstar Games confirmed that "a third party" had illegally downloaded confidential information, including footage from the game. US retail giant Walmart has announced it is suspending advertising on X (formerly Twitter), becoming the latest major brand to abandon the platform.
Corporations including Apple, Coca-Cola and Disney have halted their paid ads on X in recent weeks. “We've found some other platforms better for reaching our customers,” a Walmart spokesperson said, explaining the decision. Walmart is the largest retailer in the US, with $500 billion in domestic sales in 2022. The mass exodus from X was sparked in November, when the advocacy group Media Matters for America claimed the platform had posted “pro-Nazi” and “anti-Semitic” content next to the posts of major advertisers. X has denied the findings, publishing an analysis suggesting Media Matters had manipulated the algorithms with fake accounts. Owner Elon Musk personally came under fire in November after he publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in a post on X. The tech tycoon agreed with a user who said Jews hold a “dialectical hatred” of white people, sparking responding with: “You have said the actual truth.” Later Musk later backtracked, calling his reply “one of the most foolish” posts he’d ever made on X. Since buying Twitter in October 2022, Musk has been continually accused by the mainstream media and the political left of failing to adequately moderate content. Starting in December last year, Musk countered many of those allegations by releasing the Twitter Files – a select series of internal documents given to journalists – detailing the company’s activities under previous management. In one of the most damning examples, it emerged that Twitter had helped block the dissemination of a bombshell report alleging influence-peddling by Joe Biden’s family, just three weeks before he was elected president. When Musk purchased Twitter for an estimated $44 billion, he fired many of Twitter’s former staffers, and unbanned many accounts in the name of promoting free speech. Speaking earlier this week at a conference in New York, Elon Musk struck a defiant tone on the exit of major advertisers, telling them to “go f*ck yourself.” Elon Musk's X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, is selling user accounts that are no longer in use for the price of $50,000 and higher. According to Forbes, a team within the company, known as the @Handle Team, has started to work on a handle marketplace to sell the account names left unused by people who originally registered them. Notably, this comes months after Mr Musk unveiled a plan to implement such a program in the near future.
Now, Forbes has uncovered emails indicating that the @Handle Team is actively working to sell disused user handles. The outlet reported that X has already sent solicitations to potential buyers, requesting a fixed fee of $50,000 to initiate the account purchase. These emails were sent by active X employees, who mentioned that the company had made recent updates to its @Handle guidelines, procedures and fees. Notably, after his purchase of the micro-blogging site, Mr Musk had hinted towards his plans to sell the old usernames. "Vast number" of handles had been taken by "bots and trolls", he tweeted days after his Twitter acquisition. In January this year, several reports then suggested that the billionaire was planning to free up as many as 1.5 billion usernames. In May, X had already begun the process of removing inactive accounts from its platform. Forbes reported that on Friday evening, X's username registration policy still stated that "unfortunately, we cannot release inactive usernames at this time". Its "inactive account policy," on the other hand, warned users to log in every 30 days to avoid being considered inactive. But it also said X was not currently releasing inactive usernames. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has indicated his desire to transform X into an "everything app". In a post, the billionaire said that the rebranded platform would be expanded to offer "comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world". In a recent internal meeting, Mr Musk also dropped a hint at an unlikely new feature for the micro-blogging site - dating. Musk said a person's X posts can be "the biggest indicator" of whether they are someone you'd want to hire. "I think the same is true also on the romantic front. Finding someone on the platform. Obviously, I found someone and friends of mine have found people on the platform. And you can tell if you're a good match based on what they write," he added. Prominent US Democratic Party donor George Soros is effectively trying to dismantle society, SpaceX owner Elon Musk claimed during a podcast with Joe Rogan on Tuesday. Musk slammed the liberal Hungarian billionaire for effectively “changing laws” by making sure they are not enforced.
“He’s doing things that erode the fabric of civilization,” Musk said, explaining that the current lawlessness plaguing American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles is the result of Soros backing progressive District Attorneys who “refuse to prosecute crime.” Musk noted that the billionaire was also “pushing these things in other countries too.” The cities mentioned by Musk have, in recent years, seen a significant spike in crime rates, which many have attributed to the election of progressive DAs like San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin. Last year, Boudin was voted out of office in a recall election after facing accusations of being too soft on criminals. "Soros realized that you don’t actually need to change the laws; you just need to change how they’re enforced. If nobody chooses to enforce the law or the laws are differentially enforced, it’s like changing the laws,” Musk surmised. The X (formerly Twitter) owner went on to claim that despite the 93-year-old Soros being “pretty old” and “basically a bit senile” at this point, he was nevertheless “very smart” and very good at arbitrage, figuring out that the highest “value for money” was in supporting local races rather than national election campaigns like those for the senate or the presidency. Back in May, Musk also compared Soros to the comic-book supervillain Magneto from the X-Men series and claimed that it was wrong to assume that the Hungarian businessman had good intentions. Earlier this month, the office of Russia’s prosecutor-general designated the Soros-funded Central European University as “undesirable” for attempting to “discredit” Russia’s political leadership and distort history. The “so-called educational international non-governmental organization” conducts several programs that “deliberately devalue and distort the history of the Russian state, downplay the merits of prominent Russian scientists, writers, and cultural figures, and promote pseudo-scientific claims that Russia is to blame for all the world cataclysms, which is clearly not true,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement. Other Soros-affiliated NGOs have also been banned as “undesirable” organizations in Russia, which has repeatedly accused the financier of trying to meddle in its domestic affairs.
One of the defining features of Musk, aside from his penchant for X is his self-branding as a genius trying to push humanity forward. In reality, many of his projects, like the Vegas Loop, which is a passenger car tunnel in Las Vegas meant to reduce congestion instead of utilizing public transportation, are abjectly stupid. There are also many misconceptions that he circulates to reinforce the common narrative of his sycophants, like that he founded Tesla, the electric carmaker. But he didn’t create the company, he bought it and later called himself the “founder,” which led to a legal battle that allowed him to keep the title despite not actually being what the English language would define as a founder. A local news report from the San Francisco Bay area on this issue also describes how he pulled the same thing with PayPal, which was the main product of Confinity, a startup that had emerged with Musk’s X.com in the 1990s. If simply being an early investor in a company would define one as a founder, then every person who pays US taxes could be considered a Tesla founder because of the large amounts of federal contracts that prop the EV maker up.
Musk shouldered his way into the prestige of being a founder of some of these companies in order to boost his own image. It gives a serious amount of clout in the tech bro environment to call oneself a founder. Therefore, if history is any guide, the plan appears to be this: Elon Musk’s Twitter rebranding and the introduction of new features is designed so that he can label himself the company’s founder. It’s not about any grand corporate strategy or serious attempt at becoming the app of power; he just wants to take credit for Jack Dorsey’s product while blatantly ripping IP from China. |
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