Elon to OpenAI: I know you are, but what am I?

Watching mega-billionaires feuding in public is a lot like watching two monkeys sitting in opposite trees flinging feces at each other. It's fine entertainment, so long as you stand far enough away not to catch a stray turd.

In this case, the monkeys in question are Elon Musk and Sam Altman (OpenAI). The feces is contained inside a lawsuit Musk recently filed against OpenAI, and the company's response.

A week or so ago Elon Musk filed suit against OpenAI, claiming that the not-for-profit organization had abandoned its early altruistic ideals in pursuit of filthy lucre. Musk was one of a group of techbros to found OpenAI back in 2015, when its mission was to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole," not to make buckets of dosh.

OpenAI responded by publishing a series of emails from 2018 showing that Musk very much wanted to turn whatever mega-intelligence the company developed into a cash cow by merging it with Tesla. And when they refused, he left the company's board, taking his toys (and $900 million he had promised to help fund the nonprofit) with him.

Per the (failing) New York Times:

Though Mr. Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for becoming a for-profit company, he hatched a plan in 2017 to wrest control of the A.I. lab from Mr. Altman and its other founders and transform it into a commercial operation that would work alongside his other companies, including the electric carmaker Tesla, and make use of their increasingly powerful supercomputers, people familiar with his plan have said. When his attempt to take control failed, he left the OpenAI board, the people said.

Musk's lawuit is yet more proof that having access to a virtually infinite pool of riches neither enhances your skill at self reflection nor improves your ability to recognize irony.

Dough Nation

On the list of the planet's great humanitarians, Elon Musk is... not on it. Per Alliance magazine, Musk has donated less than one percent of his personal fortune (currently estimated at $191 billion) to charity. Yes, he did donate nearly $6 billion in Tesla shares to his own nonprofit foundation in 2021, in part to offset a large tax bill incurred when he sold off shares of stock. [1] Per Fortune Magazine:

Personally, I would totally trust a foundation run by a professional poker player/philanthropist to invest my money in charitable causes that contribute to the greater good and not put it all on rolling a hard eight at the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino.

More recently (yesterday) Elon took to his dumpster fire Nazi hullabaloo social media site to trash MacKenzie Scott, the former Mrs. Jeff Bezos, for donating $16.5 billion to charities primarily serving women and minorities. [2]

Apparently that was bad optics even for Musk. He deleted that post, but not before it was cached by the Internet Wayback Machine.

In some ways, you have to admire Musk's dedication to being a total asshole. The man really puts his back into it. But his lawsuit against OpenAI probably won't get very far, because a) as an ordinary civilian he has no standing to sue the nonprofit, b) OpenAI could not have breached its contract with him because there was never any contract to breach, and c) the danger that OpenAI allegedly poses -- the creation of a superintelligent Artificial General Intelligence that could achieve sentience and destroy all of mankind because, why not? -- doesn't actually exist. At least, not yet.

And also there's the fact that Elon is attempting to build his own superintelligent AI engine ("Grok"), so far to mostly unintentional comic effect. It's hard to claim the moral highground decrying the profit motive when you're down in the dirt with the rest of the grubby capitalists, hoovering up every soiled greenback you can find while cackling like Fagin in Oliver Twist.

But it is succeeding in grabbing Musk even more attention, which he apparently craves the way Dracula enjoyed a good Bloody Mary.

A great story you should not miss

Last week, Road & Track's website published, and then quickly unpublished, a truly great piece of first-person journalism by a writer named Kate Wagner. [3] It's called "Behind F1's Velvet Curtain," and it's about her experience covering a Formula 1 race in Austin, Texas. It immediately reminded me (and multiple others) of the 1970 Rolling Stone story that put Hunter S. Thompson on the map: "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved."

The story appeared and disappeared within an hour, but not before other journalists noticed and began writing about it, hoping to invoke the famous Streisand Effect [4]. And it kinda/sorta did. Reporters from the Washington Post and a handful of other outlets covered the memory-holing of the story. When Defector asked R&T editor in chief Daniel Pund why he pulled the story, his reasoning was embarrassingly lame (and probably a lie):

The story was taken down because I felt it was the wrong story for our publication. No one from the brands or organizations mentioned in the story put any sort of pressure on me or anyone else.

A beautifully written 5,000-word story, replete with brilliant photography, clearly in the works for months, and somehow it escaped his attention until it was published? Or maybe the decision to kill it had more to do with paragraphs like this one:

I urge you to read it. I'm linking to the archived version here (again) in the hopes it will persuade the Algorithmic Gods That Rule Our Digital Lives to look more favorably upon it.

Like this story? Share it with all your friends (and Elon).

[1] I'm not convinced that giving away overvalued stock shares you already have too many of counts as "charity." It's like asking Scrooge McDuck for spare change and getting a handful of feathers he plucked out of his rump.

[2] According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Elon is down $38 billion and counting during the first two months of 2024. That is roughly the net worth of MacKenzie Scott, number 39 on that list.

[3] Wagner has an hilarious website where she skewers the archectural excesses of the new money/no taste class called McMansionHell. Zillow tried and failed to sue that site out of business in 2017.

[4] Per Wikipedia: "The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing public awareness of the information. The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress a photographer's publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, California, taken to document coastal erosion in California, inadvertently drew far greater attention to the previously obscure photograph." Thanks, Babs!