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Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

reuters.com

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Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#281

Post by calebio »

tryptophan wrote: post #118
alpha_squared wrote: post #102

It feels like Musk is single-handedly making a great case for why unlimited accumulation of wealth is a bad idea. 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.

I typically like Elon about 70% of the time, but I need to agree here. I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.

> I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.

memetics

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#282

Post by darknavi »

Layvier wrote: post #214

> "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was," Musk said in the press release. "We will make sure that happens."" From the creator of Grok, this is such an insane thing to say

And Tesla, who (in)famously doesn't regularly publish their GPL-derived codebases.

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#283

Post by jquery »

zozbot234 wrote: post #219
alpha_squared wrote: post #102

It feels like Musk is single-handedly making a great case for why unlimited accumulation of wealth is a bad idea. 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.

> He's using his enormous amount of wealth and influence as a weapon to bludgeon anyone and anything in his way. 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.

That’s true at normal levels of rich. But at Musk levels I’m not so sure. Even Twitter paid off handsomely even though he ran its financials into the ground, because he leveraged it to elect Trump, and immediately became worth $100B more the day after the election.

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#284

Post by m_fayer »

tqi wrote: post #169
minimaxir wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's response: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062013109703009 > Swindler In another tweet chain: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889063777792069911 > Scam Altman

I absolutely hate how much CEOs acting like children / influencers has become the norm. Maybe they were always like this, and twitter has just given us a window into it, but I for one would wholeheartedly welcome a return to "respectability" norms for business and civic leaders.

I think the grass roots of the tech world has some portion of the blame here. The introduction of hoodies, flip-flops, open drama and bickering, and kicker into the office environment is not unrelated. And it’s not just CEOs, we’ve now got a senator who looks like the guy I bought pot from as a kid. I never thought I’d make this argument, but maybe at least appearing respectable increases the odds that you’ll actually be a little respectable.

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#285

Post by [deleted] »

scarface_74 wrote: post #217
Trasmatta wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I certainly hope people like sama are still willing to push back, and don't just bend the knee immediately to President Musk. Surely there's at least one or two people out there in Silicon Valley that still have a backbone.

Who are they? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta have already kissed the ring

[deleted]

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#286

Post by itsoktocry »

serjester wrote: post #69
OutOfHere wrote: post #38

OpenAI is not worth more than 9.74 billion, considering their moat is steadily shrinking and their models aren't even open. Even if OpenAI produces their chips via TSMC, it means that at least AMD can do the same, if not anyone else with just 100 million to spend.

OpenAI is the 6th most popular website in the world and if someone's going to kill Google, it's them. If they IPO'd today, they'd easily be worth hundreds of billions if not more.

>If they IPO'd today, they'd easily be worth hundreds of billions if not more.

You can't just say things like this without justification. The last raise was in October, at $157B. Did OpenAI, the hottest startup in history, give away equity at a discount?

Now, since that time, has the value gone up or down? We now know they have serious technological competition and are losing lots of money.

I think the product is great, but they aren't worth limitless amounts of money.

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#288

Post by margalabargala »

dustingetz wrote: post #227
TrackerFF wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though? 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.

was looking for a musk margin call in 2023, no such luck, now he’s VP and markets are still fake

We'll see. After throwing out a few Nazi salutes, Tesla sales have been tanking in Europe.

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#289

Post by throwup238 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #258
throwup238 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonprofits generally have to break out unrelated business income [1] into for-profit companies that pay tax and pass the post-tax profit to the non-profit. In this case OpenAI the nonprofit owns OpenAI Global, LLC which is the entity that operates their API/ChatGPT and receives the investments from Microsoft et al. Other examples include Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, which receives the payments from Goo…

> Musk is offering to buy the forprofit from the nonprofit But that's not what the article says. It specifically says he's offering "to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI", not the for-profit that it owns. That's why I'm confused.

I think the journalist that originally reported the story for the Wall Street Journal, that got sent the press release, is just misinformed about nonprofits and that has been parroted by every downstream outlet. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed a lot with reporting on OpenAI over the last year (and tons in HN comments any time the topic comes up).

Either that or Musk has a really bad lawyer or this is a publicity stunt. There is a process to turn a nonprofit back into a forprofit but it’s very complicated, probably requires dissolution of the entity altogether, would almost certainly involve California regulators, and might require that the nonprofit divest its assets to a different nonprofit (which would defeat the purpose since OpenAI Global likely has all the IP).

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#290

Post by gip »

alpha_squared wrote: post #102

It feels like Musk is single-handedly making a great case for why unlimited accumulation of wealth is a bad idea. 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.

I thought competition was exactly what business was about and how the capitalist system was functioning and financing itself? I don't condone Musk's actions but I'm not sure how he ends up as a terrorist. That looks like aggressive competition in a line of business. It's not clear how critical infrastructure or public safety would be negatively affected by his actions, therefore not sure what to think of it.

PS: I do believe Musk should be subject to the federal criminal conflict of interest statute given his position in gov.

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