Elon Musk certainly has a lot of ideas. Since making a fortune from PayPal in the original dotcom boom, he's taken over Tesla, pushing forward production of electric cars, and founded SpaceX, the rocket company that now flies plenty of NASA payloads. Two newer companies — the Boring Company, focused on digging holes for transit tunnels, and NeuraLink, which is developing brain-computer interfaces — also occupy his time. Then there's the Hyperloop, the high-speed land travel design he's encouraged others to develop. Somehow, this brash billionaire still has time to get himself into trouble on Twitter.
Inside the players and politics of the modern AI industry
Guest host Alex Heath sits down with reporter Kylie Robison to discuss what it’s like to be fully immersed in the AI industry every day.
The Tesla CEO appears heading to victory in today’s shareholder vote over his enormous pay package. Musk posted two graphs on X last night which showed both proposals — the one of his compensation, and the other on reincorporating Tesla in Texas — ahead by wide margins. But the results aren’t final yet, and things could still go pear-shaped. After all, this is Tesla we’re talking about. Tune in at 3:30 pm CT if you want to watch Musk dive into a pile of cash, Scrooge McDuck-style.
Musk, who founded xAI, said that “if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies,” and called that integration “an unacceptable security violation.”
Apple and OpenAI have implemented precautions, with OpenAI saying that “requests are not stored by OpenAI.” Still, Musk might make visitors check their Apple devices. Will Windows devices need to be checked, too?
Twitter main characters past and present have met recently to discuss possible government roles for Musk should Trump win in November. According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Trump have “discussed ways to give Musk formal input and influence over policies related to border security and the economy.” Oh, and also voter fraud. Meanwhile, Trump is out on the campaign trail talking about how he’s going to ban the sale of electric vehicles.
It’s been five years since “threadnought,” a giant Twitter thread in which lawyers battled trolls who were trying to silence critics of an anime voice actor accused of sexual misconduct.
Now, with a law firm drafted from the thread’s funniest people, lawyer Akiva Cohen represents many former Twitter employees who are suing Elon Musk over how he fired them after buying the company.
The FDA has given the Elon Musk company a green light for its second patient, the Wall Street Journal reports. Neuralink’s first implant in a human started to detach from that person’s brain, causing him to briefly lose some functions. To try to solve that problem, Neuralink reportedly plans to place the device’s threads deeper into the brain.
The application to extend an injunction for X to remove posts depicting an attack on a church bishop was refused on Monday, for yet undisclosed reasons. A final hearing is expected in mid-June.
X blocked the video for Australian users but refused to remove it globally, despite the Australian eSafety Commission finding that geoblocking wasn’t enough to comply with its online safety laws.
The implant is a coin-shaped chip embedded into the skull with threads that reach into the brain.
In the weeks following the surgery, a number of threads retracted from the brain
That limited how much data it could collect, but Neuralink found a workaround by making its algorithm more sensitive. The Elon Musk company wrote about the problem in a blog after The Wall Street Journal asked about the issue.
On today’s Decoder, Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins and I try to figure out Tesla. The company has been on a real rollercoaster these past two weeks — in terms of its stock price, its basic financials, and well, its vibes. With Elon Musk saying he’s going all in on autonomy and announcing a robotaxi event in August, it seems like we’re getting closer to a make-or-break moment for the company.
Between when we recorded this episode and today, there have been more than a half dozen new updates in the Tesla saga, including another wave of layoffs. That is a lot of chaos for a company that is trying to execute a huge pivot to become a very different kind of business than it is today — and do so very quickly. Like I said, Andy and I tried to explain Tesla. You let us know if we succeeded.
In the wake of more “absolutely hard core” layoffs at Tesla that were especially hard on the charging division, Elon Musk is saying the company still plans to grow its Supercharger network “at a slower pace.”
Compare that to the message he sent internally, as reported by The Information: “We will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction.”
Tesla restrictions set by local authorities have been lifted now that the company’s Chinese-made vehicles have passed their data security requirements, as Musk arrived in Beijing to meet with Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Sunday.
According to Reuters, the automaker has also secured a deal to use Baidu’s mapping license to collect data on Chinese roads — a key step for introducing Full Self Driving software to the country.