Musk apologizes to Magneto for Soros comparison
In an interview with The Babylon Bee, Musk is asked about his comments comparing Soros to the Marvel character, Magneto, while claiming Soros ‘hates humanity:
Sorry Magneto. Y’know, I shouldn’t have said that. It was unfair to Magneto.
@elonmusk apologizes to Magneto for comparing him to George Soros. pic.twitter.com/hfEzvwCJai
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 31, 2023
Musk criticises NPR: ‘You don’t generally bite the hand that feeds you’
In an interview with The Babylon Bee, Musk talks about NPR leaving Twitter, after the company labelled it as state0funded media:
We’re trying to apply the rules consistently at Twitter. If we’re going to call some media state-affiliated, then we should apply the label equally. They got pretty upset at that, and said that ‘state-affiliated’ implies that the state has editorial authority and influence over the content. So you’re saying you don’t have that? How self-aware are you? NPR literally, on their own website, said government funding was essential to their operation. We even changed [the label] from ‘state-affiliated’, to ‘state-funded’. That’s literally a statement of fact. But they’re unhappy with that. They have got to their punches in criticizing the government. It’s just a guess, based on their extreme dependence on government funding. I mean you don’t generally bite the hand that feeds you.
How will we ever stay informed on Twitter without NPR? pic.twitter.com/wWNN0fv8uq
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 31, 2023
Musk: Tesla will ‘strongly consider’ building Gigafactory in England
In an interview for The Wall Street Journal, Musk says Tesla is preparing to look for a location to build a new battery factory later this year and would assess England as an option.
I will strongly consider England for a future location of a gigafactory. We are not currently looking at new locations but we will probably towards the end of this year.
Tesla already operates several production facilities in Fremont, California, Austin, Texas, Berlin, Germany, and Shanghai, China. A factory in Mexico was announced in early 2023, but ground has not been broken yet.
Musk details succession plans
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Musk discusses his succession plans, including potential successors, how to handle ownership control of his companies, his plan for an educational institution to control his shares, and how he will not automatically give his children shares in his companies:
Succession is one of the toughest, age-old problems. It’s plagued countries, kings, prime ministers, presidents and CEOs, since the dawn of history. There is no obvious solution.
There are particular individuals that I’ve told the board, ‘Look, if something happens to me unexpectedly, this is my recommendation for who should take over.’ The board is aware who my recommendation is. It’s up to them of course.
I want to make sure the stewardship ultimately accrues the benefit of humanity. We’re not always successful in that, but that is aspirationally our goal. I have one idea that is partly in place, which is to create an education institution that would control most of my vote.
I am not of the school of automatically giving my kids some share of the companies, even if they have no interest, or inclination, or ability to manage the companies. I think that would be a mistake. It’s a very hard problem to solve.
Elon Musk on his succession plan: "There are particular individuals that I've told the board look If something happens to me unexpectedly, this is my recommendation for who should take over. The board is aware who my recommendation is. It's up to them of course." pic.twitter.com/uaDFXj5oQD
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) May 23, 2023
Musk: AI could be ‘a danger’
Musk warns that AI could be a danger to humans, calling it “a double-edged sword” and saying it is not “necessary for anything we’re doing.”
If you have a genie that can grant you anything, that presents a danger…
He thinks AI advances the end of empires and expects governments to use it for weapons development before anything else.
There’s a little late-stage empire vibes right now…So just having more advanced weapons on the battlefield that can react faster than any human could is really what AI is capable of. Any future wars between advanced countries or at least countries with drone capability will be very much the drone wars.
On AI’s potential for peace, he says:
One way to achieve world peace is to take all the weapons away from the humans so they can no longer use them. I don’t think the AI is going to try to destroy all humanity but it might put us under strict controls
In terms of politics and the upcoming US presidential election, he says:
One of the first places you need to be careful of where AI is used is social media to manipulate public opinion. I think it’s something we need to be on the lookout for in the way of minimising the impact of AI manipulation. We’re certainly taking that seriously at Twitter and I think we’re putting in all the protections to detect large-scale manipulation of the system.
Musk: ‘Working from home ‘morally wrong’
During an interview with CNBC anchor David Faber, Musk criticises the hypocrisy of expecting service industry workers to go to work while others had the privilege of working from home, using a quote often attributed to Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France before the French Revolution.
There are some exceptions, but I think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ‘Let them eat cake’. It’s like, really, you’re going to work at home and you’re going to make the people who made your car come to the factory? You’ve got people who deliver your food, but they can’t work from home? The people that come fix your house, they can’t work from home, but you can? Does that seem morally right? It’s a productivity issue and a moral issue. Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bulls**t. The laptop class is living in la-la land.
Musk says that he works seven days a week, but doesn’t expect others to do that.
I’m saying put 40 hours in.
"I'm a big believer that people are more productive when they're in person," Elon Musk said Tuesday on the work from home trend. "People should get off their goddamn moral high horse with their work-from-home b*******." https://t.co/W1BjwKobX8 pic.twitter.com/FWzVHtZFEH
— CNBC (@CNBC) May 16, 2023
Musk: Tesla will have a ‘ChatGPT moment’ with full self-driving cars
Comparing Tesla’s self-driving AI to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which came to sudden public attention at the end of 2022, Musk says that a similar situation will happen when Teslas are able to drive themselves without human intervention.
I think Tesla will have sort of a ChatGPT moment, maybe if not this year, I’d say no later than next year…Suddenly, three million cars will be able to drive with no-one [at the wheel].
Musk says he envisions a future where millions of Tesla cars would operate autonomously, gradually expanding to three million, five million, and eventually 10 million self-driving vehicles. When owners are not using the vehicles, they will be used as Robotaxis, licenced by Tesla.
Comparing Tesla’s self-driving capabilities to Google’s Waymo, Musk says that while Waymo has achieved limited success in a tightly-mapped geographic area, Tesla has a more advanced and generalized solution. Musk argues that if Microsoft, and Tesla was tasked with producing a large language model akin to ChatGPT, his company would emerge victorious.
Musk may rehire fired Twitter staff
During an interview with CNBC anchor David Faber, which is also broadcast as a Twitter space, Musk says he may rehire some of the staff he fired when he took over the company. At that time, Musk cut Twitter’s headcount by 80%, from 7,800 to about 1,500.
Some people who were let go probably shouldn’t have been. Desperate times call for desperate measures… Unfortunately, if you do it fast, there are some babies who will be thrown out.
Yaccarino interviews Musk
0 0 Mark Devlin Mark Devlin2023-05-12 17:33:372023-05-12 17:44:04Yaccarino interviews Musk
Musk to build ‘TruthGPT’ AI platform
In an interview with Carlson, Musk says he is planning to build an alternative to ChatCPT, which he claims has been trained to lie. Musk says that OpenAI, which built ChatGPT, has now become a closed source, for-profit organization that’s far removed from the startup he helped found.
I’ve been thinking about AI since I was in college…I think I will create a third option, although I’m starting very late in the game…I’m going to start something which I call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.
Musk also says he supports the regulation of artificial intelligence.
AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production in the sense that it has the potential, however, small one may regard that probability, but it is not trivial; it has the potential of civilizational destruction
Musk: US Government had access to Twitter DMs
In a trailer for his interview with Carlson, Musk says the US authorities had full access to everything that happened on Twitter, including users’ private messages . Everything that happened on the social network was monitored by “various government departments.”
Musk: The degree to which various government agencies had effectively full access to everything that was going on at Twitter blew my mind. I was not aware of that.
Carlson: Would that include people’s DMs?
Musk: Yes
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 16, 2023
Musk ‘not saying’ Starship will get to orbit
SpaceX will debut its Starship vehicle in a month or so, but the chances of its first-ever orbital mission being a success are apparently only about 50%.
I’m not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. So, won’t be boring!…So I think we’ve got, hopefully, about an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year. It’ll probably take us a couple more years to achieve full and rapid reusability.
According to Musk, Starship will be the most powerful rocket to ever fly, featuring about 2.5 times more thrust at liftoff than NASA’s Saturn V. SpaceX hopes that, among other things, Starship will get people and cargo to the moon and Mars. It is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, which Musk considers the most important breakthrough for making Mars colonization and other ambitious exploration feats feasible.
Musk: Twitter to break even in 2023
Musk explains Twitter’s financial situtaion during a Twitter Spaces chat, saying that after cutting staff and costs, Twitter is now on track to bring in around $3 billion in revenue in 2023 – roughly $2 billion less than the $5.1 billion reported at the end of 2021, while the company has $1 billion in cash on its balance sheet. He in part blamed the $12.5 billion in debt tied to his April agreement to buy the company, as well as the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate hikes.
[It was like being] in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engine on fire and the controls don’t work…With the changes that we’re making here on massively reducing the burn rate and building subscriber revenue, I now think that Twitter will, in fact, be OK next year, I think we will be…roughly cash-flow break-even — that’s what I expect for next year.
He says advertisers have been asking “sane” but “tough” questions about their return on investment,
[Decisions] may seem sometimes spurious or odd or whatever. It’s because we have an emergency fire drill on our hands. That’s the reason. Not because I’m naturally capricious. Or at least, aspirationally, I’m not naturally capricious.
Musks says he has ‘too much work on his plate’
In a videolink interview for the B20 Indonesia conference in Bali, Musk, who is wearing a traditional batik shirt sent by the event’s organizers, says that has too much work:
You know my workload has recently increased quite a lot. I mean, I have too much work on my plate that is for sure. No doubt about it
When asked about his thoughts on other business leaders in Asia who wish to become the “Elon Musk of the East” the Tesla CEO says:
I’d be careful what you wish for. I’m not sure how many people would actually like to be me. They would like to be what they imagine being me, which is not the same thing as actually being me. The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly.
Musk also noted that longer video content is coming to Twitter.
Twitter for sure, I think it’s gonna be a lot more on video… And it’s kind of a no-brainer to enable longer video and also enable content creators to make a living with content on Twitter
Proposes China-Taiwan peace plan
In an interview with The Financial Times, Musk talks about his plan for China-Taiwan relations
My recommendation … would be to figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable, probably won’t make everyone happy. And it’s possible, and I think probably, in fact, that they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong.
GQ Interview: Colonize Mars before WWIII
In an interview with GQ, Musk says a Mars mission is important to help ensure the long term survival of mankind. He says he will announce detailed plans of the Mars Colonisation Transport programme in 2016.
You back up your hard drive…. Maybe we should back up life, too? I think we need to acknowledge that there’s certainly a possibility of a third World War, and if that does occur it could be far worse than anything that’s happened before. Let’s say nuclear weapons are used. I mean, there could be a very powerful social movement that’s anti-technology. There’s also growth in religious extremism. Like, I mean, does ISIS grow…?
60 Minutes interview
Scott Pelley profiles Musk on 60 Minutes:
If something’s important enough, you should try it even if the probable outcome is failure
Maxim Interview
Musk talks about coming along at the right time to start his business ventures:
Yeah, I feel like I’m here at the right time. If not for the Internet, where it’s possible to start with no capital and end up with a valuable company, it would have taken me a long time to build up these other businesses. It’s important to remember that being a good global citizen and a good businessman are not mutually exclusive.
Man on Mars
In an interview with the WSJ, Musk makes the case for an affordable electric car, the likelihood of his company SpaceX sending a man to Mars, and why he isn’t exactly like Iron Man’s Tony Stark.
I’ll put a man on Mars in 10 years