Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters • Hacker News Board

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#871

Post by ActorNightly » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 11:30 PM UTC

bobsmooth wrote: post #828

ActorNightly wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. Are we still going to pretend that the man who has gotten every single prediction wrong so far knows what he is talking about?

Are we still going to pretend that the man who has revolutionized at least 2 different industries doesn't know what he's talking about?

He didn't revolutionize shit. He just threw enough VC money and paid the right people enough to eventually make a product that sticks. It took Space X multitude of crashes, downright scamming their suppliers, and lots of turnover to do something that other companies did in a few years. And the Starship is just laughably stupid.

And Tesla's only success is because they were subsidized like crazy. Of course people are going to purchase cheap electric cars with no maintenance. If BYD was allowed to operate in US, Tesla would have been under ground long time ago.

But I get your sentiment though. You are so far down the conservatism rabbit hole and probably have some inappropriate thoughts towards children, so you have to defend Musk till you die because god forbid you admit to yourself that you are terrible human being.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#872

Post by w0m » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 3:36 AM UTC

kakacik wrote: post #707

w0m wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why did Tesla work initially? Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics). 6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in…

Not sure which car you compare it to specifically from those manufacturers, but teslas seem much more expensive where I live than most models of those. Comparing it to corresponding BMW would be a more appropriate comparison. Then comparison of quality of manufacturing and driving experience would end up in very different way (as driver of even older bmw 5 series teslas I've been to feel very cheap, and driving enjoy…

I bought my LR Model 3 in 2020 for ~42,000, ~15k cheaper than a v6 3 Series at the time. A v6 5 series is another significant jump up in price/market.

> Not sure which car you compare it to specifically from those manufacturers

My comparison at the time was a Honda Civic, BMW 3 Series, and that was kind of it.

I generally consider the Model 3 interior roughly middle between the Honda and the BMW, while having worlds better tech, twice the hp, and - Electric (when they were still rare).

There really was nothing like it at any price point at the time, and i still consider it a great car (though of course not perfect).

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#873

Post by jesterson » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 9:01 AM UTC

general1465 wrote: post #855

jesterson wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish i could have a machine to detect workforce like you and not to hire those people.

Consider it self-regulating system. If task can't survive in a mind of a wisher for more then few days, it was not needed from the start. Now you are saving resources and time to company which you can redirect to actually required tasks instead of some silly whims.

It's not a "regulating system" of any kind, but plain passive aggressive arrogance. I know better what to do so I would just pretend like I am going to do what you suggested.

Unfortunately this trait is not so uncommon across IT engineers.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#874

Post by ben_w » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 11:34 AM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #708

LtWorf wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you work for elon musk and are a decent person…

Why would you start to work for elon musk if you consider yourself a decent person, but him unworkable for? Have you not heard of elon musk beforehand...? Did you let yourself be employed with the specific goal of sabotaging the work, in what must be the least effective (but certainly very lucrative) coup possible? What is it? Am I to believe this person is a chaotic mastermind? Or a selfish idiot? Or non-existant?

His reputation did not start out in the current state; if it had, I suspect he would never have been able to hold the importance/monetary power that he currently holds.

Changing one's mind about him can take a while.

With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly took me longer than I am happy with to change my mind about him; to be specific, I should have more radically changed my opinion of his personality when he libelled that cave expert in response to being told a submarine wasn't going to help, I should have recognised that only someone with a very fragile ego would react that way, that it wasn't just a blip on his record but something deeper.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#875

Post by QuiEgo » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

atombender wrote: post #844

QuiEgo wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teslas have a lot of flaws, but there is just now starting to be real competition. There was nothing like the model 3 in 2019. Tesla did well because they were first to market with a disruptive product people wanted, and because Elon sold it well. Both.

There was lots of competition in 2019: Volkswagen ID.3, Audi e-tron, Jaguar I-PACE, Polestar 1, etc., as well as lower-end entries like Hyundai Kona, Kia Niro, and so on. Depends on exactly what you think Tesla is competing against.

- there was nothing like the supercharger network

- All of the other options made a painful trade off on cost or range or something else. Tesla was the only one that had both range and was (to some degree) affordable without being compromised in some way.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#876

Post by mattbillenstein » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

iknowstuff wrote: post #672

mattbillenstein wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.

Source on pre/post traffic numbers?

I don't have it at hand, but if you look at all the products and apis they cut - and then all the users who abandoned it in the first few months, I think that's how this was derived.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#877

Post by sillyfluke » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #825

sillyfluke wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

literally almost everything I have bought on sale is something I wasn't looking to buy at that moment in time.

How many of those things cost more than 10,000 dollars?

I think you might be slightly misinformed on how many 10,000+ dollar purchases the average person makes in their lifetime to make sweeping statements of that nature. Advertizing sales on medical procedures or daycare could have the opposite effect I would imagine

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#878

Post by tasty_freeze » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #774

keeda wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not just content moderators, but he gutted Trust and Safety and the content moderation function of the company, which is surprisingly larger than the moderators themselves. Having worked peripherally with similar departments that had multiple teams, even though a lot of it comes down to human moderators, there is a ton of technology around the moderators, and even more keeping the content getting to them in the…

I get that he shredded trust & safety, and that Twitter got way worse afterwards in that regard. But he fired more than half the workforce, and they were not mostly T&S people.

You are strawmanning what I said. I said "Many of the workforce he laid off were content moderators" but you are arguing against something I didn't say, which was that those Musk laid off were mostly T&S people. Those are two different claims.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#879

Post by sehansen » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:51 AM UTC

candu wrote: post #852

jarrettcoggin wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ). Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on. The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting…

As someone who now lives and works in Denmark: it's sad that so many of us have been conditioned to think 6 weeks severance is generous. Here, labor unions are quite widespread, and very effective at negotiating reasonably but firmly. As a result, I can depend on 3 months severance _guaranteed under law_ after 6 months at a job. (After 3 years, it goes up to 4 months, and then from there up to a max of 6 months.) It…

Welcome to our cozy little country; I hope you're settling in well.

Just out of curiosity: Assuming you're a SW engineer, did you join IDA or Prosa or did you decide to not join an union? I'd like to gathers some more datapoints to help other engineers moving to Denmark make an informed decision.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#880

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 12:55 PM UTC

Auracle wrote: post #847

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not arguing anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is biased. It "is biased" to document human knowledge as accurately as possible. Is there something wrong with that?

Because it's not accurate? As I and others have pointed out?

I'm a bit confused then. You said that you're "not arguing anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is biased" but then also argue that Wikipedia is also inaccurate after someone points out that "so-and-so is biased" is a meaningless phrase. This reads like a shift of the goal posts and it discredits your arguments.

Regardless, one can see this claim of inaccuracy repeated in these comments with no provided example of such. The saying goes "what is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". It is therefore reasonable for a reader to conclude that the claim of inaccuracy can be dismissed as "bullshit", in the sense that the person making it cares not for its veracity.