Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts

Monday, November 18, 2024

18: Elon Musk

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Sunday, November 17, 2024

17: DOGE

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024

22: Donald Trump, Elon Musk



Leaked documents show US intelligence on Israel’s plans to attack Iran, sources say
Microsoft Windows Deadline—10 Days To Update Or Stop Using Your PC
What Elon Musk Really Wants The Tesla and X mogul has long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image. Trump may be his Trojan horse.............. In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century. ........... because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image. ........

because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.





Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics. .......... The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.” ............ This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.” ........ Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.” ....... This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.” ......... In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable. .......... \........................... In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” .......... In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”.................. His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity. .............. These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right. ...........

The Moment of Truth The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.

Donald Trump Gains in Three Swing States He's Looking to Flip: New Polls
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Thursday, October 17, 2024

17: Elon Musk

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Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Elon Musk, Mukesh Ambani, Starlink

Elon Musk and other billionaires invest staggering sums into electing Trump, plus other takeaways from third-quarter filings Musk, the world’s richest person, gave nearly $75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC that he helped form over the summer – a massive cash infusion aimed at helping turn out voters in key battleground states. Adelson, a staunch Trump backer and heir to a casino fortune, gave even more, plowing $95 million into another outside group backing the former president, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission covering the three months ended September 30. ............... Altogether, just three billionaires – Musk, Adelson and Midwestern packaging magnate Richard Uihlein – donated roughly $220 million in a three-month period to groups backing the Republican’s candidacy. ............ Harris has set a blistering pace – raising $1 billion since she became the Democratic standard-bearer in late July – a milestone achieved faster than any other presidential contender. And Tuesday’s filings show that a high-dollar fundraising committee that channels money to her campaign and aligned Democratic committees, took in $633 million during the third quarter – four times the amount raised by Trump’s equivalent fundraising arm in that time.......... In the battle for control of Congress, meanwhile, individual Democratic incumbents and candidates in some key Senate and House races widened their financial advantage over their Republican opponents.

India says no auction of satellite spectrum after Musk decries move Telecoms Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said during a New Delhi event that the spectrum will be allocated administratively in line with Indian laws, and its pricing worked out by the telecom watchdog.......... "This spectrum was long designated by the ITU as shared spectrum for satellites," Musk said, referring to the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency for digital technology. ......... "Satellite companies who have ambitions to come into urban areas, serving elite retail customers, just need to take the telecom licenses like everybody else... they need to buy the spectrum as telecom companies buy," Mittal, who is also the chair of Airtel, said at the New Delhi event. ......... Earlier in 2023, both Eutelsat unit OneWeb and Airtel had voiced concerns about auctioning the spectrum in their submissions to the Indian government. ......... Musk's Starlink and some global peers like Amazon's Project Kuiper back an administrative allocation, saying spectrum is a natural resource that should be shared by companies.



Elon Musk expands his empire of misinformation At any Tesla event, you have to go in expecting a good amount of smoke and mirrors. This is the company run by Elon Musk, after all — its self-anointed Technoking who’s made overpromising and underdelivering a theme of his career........... But Thursday’s “Cybercab” robotaxi unveiling was, even by Musk-ian standards for bluster, one giant optical illusion. The kind of spectacle that should remind everyone that the world’s richest person is someone who promotes and appears to relish misinformation and hyperbole on a mass scale, whether he’s speaking to investors, his millions of followers on X or whichever politician he feels is most likely to agree with his increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-laden worldview........ the fact that the robots were not actually autonomous and were being operated remotely by humans ............ At one point, an attendee even got a bartending bot to admit that it was being assisted by a human. ........... Over the weekend, federal emergency workers were forced to halt their in hurricane-hit North Carolina after National Guard troops reported that an “armed militia” was “hunting FEMA

Elon Musk battles Indian billionaires over satellite internet spectrum Starlink head in spat with owners of Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel mobile networks who have called for space bandwidth auctions ......... A person close to the company said only services reaching currently unserved communities should be assigned spectrum, to allow for a “level playing field” after Indian operators invested “billions of dollars” in terrestrial connections. .......... “It’s more about ensuring that the telecom industry remains in control of the local players rather than foreigners coming in and dictating their agenda,” they said. “I can’t think of any other explanation, it’s not like there’s a scarcity of spectrum, it’s abundant.” ......... A simple assignment of spectrum may hand Musk’s company, the largest and most successful of its kind, a “first-mover advantage”, while an auction process would allow Indian players time to get their products market-ready, said the person close to Reliance. ......... Musk told Modi last year that he wanted to bring Starlink, which operates more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites, to India to connect remote communities........ Musk also has his eye on the long-term potential of India as a location for a Tesla plant, despite cancelling a trip to New Delhi earlier this year to prioritise talks with and focus on its Asian rival China.



No spectrum auction: Government after Elon Musk objects to Mukesh Ambani's pitch Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has announced that India will follow the global trend of administrative spectrum allocation. The decision came after Starlink CEO Elon Musk objected to Ambani's Reliance Jio lobbying for the auction route.

‘Will do the best to serve…’: Starlink owner Elon Musk react ..
‘Mukesh Ambani afraid of Elon Musk’? Tesla billionaire responds to meme on Reliance boss
Musk reacts to Ambani lobbying, calls any India move to auction satellite spectrum 'unprecedented' Starlink boss Elon Musk in reponse to news that rival Ambani is lobbying for the auction route instead of allocation for satellite broadband spectrum in India would be “unprecedented”.

Elon Musk Takes On Mukesh Ambani's JIO
Explained why SATCOM technology is unlikely to disrupt incumbent telecom players in India
Masterstroke by Mukesh Ambani, big trouble for Elon Musk, game over for Starlink? Jio has made its apprehensions known to the government about international corporations like Starlink and Amazon Kuiper looking to introduce their satellite internet services in India.
Elon Musk Challenges Ambani and Mittal on Satellite Spectrum
Scindia: No Satellite Spectrum Auction Scindia emphasised that the pricing structure would be determined by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
India Sides with Elon Musk on Satellite Spectrum as Ambani, Mittal Prepare for Intense Battle Telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has given blow to Indian telecos, including Reliance and Airtel, who have been advocating for the auction method ........ the minister cited the Telecommunications Act 2023 and global practices to back his stance on spectrum allocation. .......... “For satcom, spectrum will be allocated administratively...that does not mean that spectrum does not come without a cost. What that cost is and what the formula of that costing is going to be...will be decided by the TRAI,” said Scindia. Satellite spectrum across the globe is allocated administratively, and India is taking the same route, he added. ........ The key issue pointed out by Reliance was TRAI’s failure to provide a level playing field between satellite-based and terrestrial access services. In the letter, the telecom giant cited the Supreme Court judgement in the 2G case and hinted towards a legal battle that might surface if concerns remain unresolved.



Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on October 15 ..
Elon Musk calls Reliance Jio's spectrum auction request 'unprecedented'

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Thursday, July 20, 2023

Twitter's Blue Check: Is It Worth It?



Twitter Blue: What does paying for Twitter actually get you, and should you do it? Are the additional features worth your $8? .

Should You Pay for a Checkmark on Twitter, for Yourself or Your Business?
Twitter’s Blue Check Apocalypse Is Upon Us. Here’s What to Know. Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, is changing the platform’s longstanding practice of verifying accounts. That has implications for a range of users. .

How To Get Verified on Twitter in 2023: The Essential Guide Twitter's verification process has changed in the past year. Learn how to get verified on Twitter in 2023 with our simple guide. .

Half of Twitter Blue subscribers have less than 1,000 followers And Elon Musk now says he wants to force these users all into your feed. ...... starting April 15, the platform apparently will no longer promote non-paying Twitter Blue subscribers via its recommendation algorithm on the For You feed. ....... around half of all users subscribed to Twitter Blue have less than 1,000 followers. That's approximately 220,132 paying subscribers. ........ 78,059 paying Twitter Blue subscribers have less than 100 users following their account. That's 17.6 percent of all Twitter Blue subscribers. ......... there are 2,270 paying Twitter Blue subscribers who have zero followers. ....... Twitter Blue currently has a total of 444,435 paying subscribers. ......... less than 0.2 percent of Twitter's 254 million daily active users, a metric previously shared by Musk, are paying for Twitter Blue. ....... only 6,482 legacy verified accounts have paid to subscribe to Twitter Blue. ....... There are approximately 420,000 legacy verified accounts in total, which are mostly celebrities, pro athletes, journalists, influencers, and other notable users that received the checkmark badge for free under Twitter's old verification system. .......... Musk shared that in a few weeks only Twitter Blue subscribers would be recommended to users in the platform's For You feed. (Hours later, Musk "clarified" that this will also include people users directly follow.) ............ The reason so many celebrities chose to stay active on Twitter over other social media platforms was originally due to the legacy verification system. Alexander said he doesn't plan on even staying on Twitter after the legacy verification badges are removed.......... Many Twitter power users who have interacted with Twitter Blue subscribers note that they are most often far right wing accounts, cryptocurrency scammers, and hardcore Elon Musk supporters. We will soon find out if filling users' feeds with some of the least influential accounts on the platform, as Musk plans to do, is a good business strategy. .



Why Elon Musk’s cull of Twitter ‘verified’ blue ticks could prove costly Twitter’s aristocracy is no more. Last year, Elon Musk described the verification process as a “lords & peasants system” and on Thursday he deployed the guillotine. Feudalism has now given way to capitalism: money gets you status....... The change has stripped the blue tick from about 400,000 legacy verified accounts. ....... Subscribers to the new service will get boosted rankings in conversations and search, while their replies will also receive greater prominence. Tweets that they interact with will also benefit. ......... maintaining influence or presence on the platform will cost money from now on, whereas it was free under the previous system ........ users will still be able to see unverified accounts that they follow on the platform’s default For You feed. .......... Musk’s move is largely rooted in financial motivations, despite the anti-feudal rhetoric. ......... He said in his 1 November Twitter thread that giving paid-for verified accounts priority in replies, mentions and search was “essential to defeat spam/scam”, presumably under the logic that a bot account would not pay for a tick and would thus be less prominent. ........ In its last published set of accounts, advertising represented 90% of Twitter’s $5bn (£4bn) in annual revenue. According to Musk recently, revenue is due to drop to less than $3bn this year. Costs have also been slashed sharply, with staff numbers cut by about 75% to 1,500 people, which Musk says has seen off the threat of bankruptcy. But if advertisers do not return in force he will need more than the 600,000-635,000 Blue subscribers the platform is estimated to have, which equates to about $5m+ a month in revenue. .

Twitter Blue for Business 2023: How much does a Twitter checkmark cost? Twitter Blue is worth it if you want to access the prestigious checkmarks, skyrocket your brand awareness, and receive 50% fewer ads....... Users with a Twitter Blue subscription will have their tweets prioritized, which could give you more engagement on the app.



How Elon Musk transformed Twitter’s blue check from status symbol into a badge of shame



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Thursday, July 13, 2023

Elon Musk Followed You



Goodbye Mirrors: This Telescope Could Collect 100x More Light Than the James Webb . Our proposed telescope, the Nautilus Space Observatory, would replace large, heavy mirrors with a novel, thin lens that is much lighter, cheaper, and easier to produce than mirrored telescopes. Because of these differences, it would be possible to launch many individual units into orbit and create a powerful network of telescopes............ Webb cost more than $8 billion and took over 20 years to build. The next flagship telescope is not expected to fly before 2045 and is estimated to cost $11 billion. These ambitious telescope projects are always expensive, laborious, and produce a single powerful—but very specialized—observatory. .......... a few of us came up with the idea of revisiting an old technology called diffractive lenses. ....... Our current design is in fact not a single telescope, but a constellation of 35 individual telescope units. ......... By combining data from all the units, Nautilus’ light-collecting power would equal a telescope nearly 10 times larger than Webb. With this powerful telescope, astronomers could search hundreds of exoplanets for atmospheric gases that may indicate extraterrestrial life. .........

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Monday, July 03, 2023

Dear Mark, Just Say No



A ‘Cage Match’ Between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg May Be No Joke Talks over a matchup between the two tech billionaires have progressed and the parameters of an event are taking shape......... In response, Mr. Zuckerberg posted on Instagram: “Send Me Location,” a reference to the catchphrase of Khabib Nurmagomedov, one of the U.F.C.’s most decorated athletes. ........... On Tuesday, he said, he was “on the phone with those two until 12:45 in the morning.” He added, “They both want to do it.” .......... The fight would be an exhibition match, Mr. White said, and outside official U.F.C. jurisdiction and rights deals, though he would help produce the event. The tech leaders have agreed there should be a charity component ........... One person close to Mr. Musk said that while he hated sports and didn’t appear to have the discipline to train regularly, no one could rule anything out with him. ........ If the matchup between Mr. Musk, 52, and Mr. Zuckerberg, 39, goes ahead, it would be a rare spectacle, even in the braggadocio-filled universe of the tech industry. While Steve Jobs and Bill Gates used to snipe at each other, the closest the tech world had before this to real sporting feuds was among billionaire yachtsmen like Larry Ellison of Oracle and Hasso Plattner of SAP. ........ But two wildly wealthy tech titans grappling, punching and kicking in a Las Vegas or Roman arena? No one would have dreamed it. ......... recently, Mr. Zuckerberg dispatched a team at Meta to build a competitor to Mr. Musk’s Twitter, code-named Project 92 ....... Apart from their 13-year age difference, Mr. Musk is said to be at least 70 pounds heavier than Mr. Zuckerberg. In official mixed martial arts bouts, athletes are generally matched up by weight. .........

“it will be the biggest fight in the history of combat sports.”

.......... Mr. Zuckerberg is especially familiar with the U.F.C. world. Over the past 18 months, he has embarked on a personal journey to bulk up and dove deep into Brazilian jujitsu, a grappling martial art in which competitors try to submit their opponent and which is used in U.F.C. fighting. ............. Mr. Zuckerberg started training on a lark mostly in his garage in 2021, where he built what he called a “mini academy” with a circle of friends who spar with him. He has said he appreciated that Brazilian jujitsu required “100 percent focus” and strategic thinking to defeat an opponent, rather than brute strength. .......... Mr. Zuckerberg has sought out martial arts experts, including Dave Camarillo, James Terry and Khai Wu. In May, he competed in his first public martial arts tournament in Redwood City, Calif., which he attended undercover — up until the moment he took off his hat and sunglasses to fight. He won gold and silver medals in the challenge. ......... Mr. Zuckerberg is likely in fighting shape. He has been on a strict workout regimen, going for runs and challenging friends and colleagues to beat his times ......... Last month, he posted a personal record for completing the “Murph” challenge, which requires completing a series of pull-ups, push-ups, running multiple miles and doing hundreds of squats, all while wearing weighted, military-grade body armor. ........ “Doing sports that basically require your full attention, I think, is really important to my mental health and the way to stay focused on everything I’m doing,” he said in a recent podcast episode. ......... Mr. Musk, on the other hand, has tweeted that he “almost never” works out and once suffered a back injury that required surgery after participating in an exhibition with a sumo wrestler. Last month, he said he had trained in “judo, Kyokushin (full contact)” — two Japanese martial arts — and “no rules streetfighting.” ......... “He made that very clear: ‘I’m not going to lose any weight,’” Mr. White said of Mr. Musk’s approach to the potential matchup. “‘Are we going to fight or are we not going to fight?’” Mr. White said Mr. Musk told him. ........ This week, Lex Fridman, a podcaster, posted photos of himself training judo with Mr. Musk. Mr. Fridman, who has also trained jujitsu with Mr. Zuckerberg

Last month, he posted a personal record for completing the “Murph” challenge, which requires completing a series of pull-ups, push-ups, running multiple miles and doing hundreds of squats, all while wearing weighted, military-grade body armor.

‘I Don’t Really Have a Business Plan’: How Elon Musk Wings It To a degree unseen in any other mogul, the world’s richest man acts on impulse and the belief that he is absolutely right......... He had no plan for how to finance or manage Twitter, Mr. Musk told a close associate. To push the $44 billion deal through, he turned to a small inner circle, including Jared Birchall, the head of his family office, and Alex Spiro, his personal lawyer. And when Twitter resisted his overtures, Mr. Musk pressured the company with a string of tweets — some mischievous, some barbed and all impulsive. ...... Tech billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Larry Page often make long-term plans and manage their affairs through a corporate machinery of lawyers, communications professionals and different advisers. Mr. Musk, 50, operates unlike any of them........... While Mr. Musk has successfully bet on electric cars, space travel and artificial intelligence, he often wings it in the biggest moments, eschews experts and relies almost solely on his own counsel ......... To operate this way, Mr. Musk has constructed an insular world of about 10 confidants who mostly agree with him and carry out his bidding. They include his younger brother, Kimbal Musk; Mr. Birchall; Mr. Spiro; and various chiefs of staff. To manage his many ideas, Mr. Musk continuously creates new companies, most of which are structured so that he remains in charge. His trusted lieutenants often work across his far-flung empire of businesses. .......... Relying on his small crew and hewing to his own thinking have enabled Mr. Musk to call the shots and conduct himself with few restraints, turning him into a Howard Hughes-like figure of the modern age — even as his seat-of-the-pants methods often create bedlam. ........... Mr. Musk works in a way that only the “most confident leaders do,” said Tim Draper, a venture capitalist who backed Mr. Musk’s electric automaker, Tesla, and his rocket company, SpaceX. “Think J.F.K., George Washington and Ronald Reagan.” ............ “I don’t really have a business plan,” he said. “I had a business plan way back in the Zip2 days. But these things are always wrong, so I just didn’t bother with business plans after that.” ........ In a live television appearance that year, Mr. Musk said the company would guarantee transactions on all auctions on eBay, the e-commerce site. It was the first time his engineers had heard about the feature, said a person who worked with him at the time. They had to race to make the feature a reality .......... In 2000, X.com’s board and the executive Peter Thiel ousted Mr. Musk over disagreements about the company’s direction. It was a painful exit for Mr. Musk, who soon embraced the idea that he — and he alone — should be in charge of future ventures. .......... “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket,” he told Inc. Magazine in 2007. ......... As Mr. Musk established more companies, he collected associates he could deploy across many of the endeavors. .......... “When Elon says something, you have to pause and not immediately blurt out, ‘Well, that’s impossible,’ or, ‘There’s no way we’re going to do that. I don’t know how,’” she said. “So you zip it, and you think about it. And you find ways to get that done.” .............. Mr. Musk also began treating his portfolio of companies as a single organization. .......... In 2015, he and Sam Altman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a group of researchers founded OpenAI, a lab developing artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. Within months, Mr. Musk enlisted several OpenAI researchers to help with Tesla’s assisted driving system, Autopilot, two people with knowledge of the work said. He later appointed an OpenAI researcher, Andrej Karpathy, as Tesla’s senior director of artificial intelligence. ............. By 2016, Mr. Musk’s business empire was sprawling. In pressure-filled situations, the billionaire sometimes showed an ugly side of his management style........ Mr. Musk erupted, four people with knowledge of the incident said. Screaming into the phone, he threatened to sue the regulator if the investigation went forward, they said. (Mr. Musk backed down the next day, and the agency proceeded with the investigation.) ........... At Tesla, Mr. Musk pushed to ramp up manufacturing of the company’s Model 3 sedan. Believing only he could get the task done, he fired the executive in charge of manufacturing and decided to revamp the entire assembly line of the company’s factory in Fremont, Calif., himself. Often, he slept in a conference room at the factory. .......... On Aug. 2, 2018, he drafted an email to the company’s board with the subject line: “Offer to Take Tesla Private at $420.” It contained few details about how the offer would be funded. .......... Despite the cheerleading from insiders, Mr. Musk’s effort failed. The funding he had counted on to take Tesla private didn’t materialize. Tesla shareholders sued him for securities fraud in August 2018. A month later, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mr. Musk with securities fraud. ............. “Elon’s approach of doing business is minimum level of documentation,” Deepak Ahuja, Tesla’s then-chief financial officer, said in a 2018 deposition. “He really does do business based on a verbal commitment and a handshake.” ............

Throughout many ups and downs, Mr. Musk had one constant: Twitter.

........... He typically tweets a dozen times or more in a day .......... In 2020, he eliminated Tesla’s communications department, partly because he felt he could go directly to fans and customers through Twitter .



Mark Zuckerberg Would Like You to Know About His Workouts It’s been a tough run for Meta, and the boss seems to be getting out some aggression with military-style endurance routines and Brazilian jujitsu. ........... He looks — to use a scientific term — completely shredded. He also looks completely focused, like a guy in a Michael Bay movie who just finished a dangerous mission, or at least the Raya profile picture of the actor who plays that guy. .............. The challenge consists of a mile run, followed by 100 pull-ups, followed by 200 push-ups, followed by 300 squats, capped off with another mile run, all while wearing a 20-pound vest. ........... Just as eye popping as Mr. Zuckerberg’s arms was the time he said the brutal routine took him: under 40 minutes. That’s an elite time .......... That would be Brazilian jujitsu, the grueling grappling-based combat sport that is a fundamental part of mixed martial arts. In an August 2022 appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Mr. Zuckerberg said that he had taken up martial arts during the pandemic, training with Dave Camarillo, a well-known coach in the Bay Area........... “The crazy thing is it really is the best sport,” Mr. Zuckerberg told Mr. Rogan at the time. “There’s something that’s just so primal about it.” (Mr. Rogan is a martial arts enthusiast and Ultimate Fighting Championship commentator.) ............ sports like Brazilian jujitsu appeal to a desire among Silicon Valley types to reconnect with a primitive fighting spirit ........... “It’s like being on a playground with a bully but in this new framework,” she said. “It’s not quite choreographed but the stakes and the rules are unambiguous.” ......... On May 6, Mr. Zuckerberg competed in his first Brazilian jujitsu event, in Woodside, Calif., where he defeated an Uber engineer and won two medals, and lost consciousness. ............

a veteran Brazilian jujitsu fighter who refereed one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s matches, said that he halted the bout after he heard Mr. Zuckerberg start to snore, a sign of someone who has passed out in a choke hold.

........ For Mr. Zuckerberg, who has absorbed a number of metaphorical body blows over the past several years — including an election meddling scandal, a ghost town metaverse and widespread layoffs — it is perhaps a revealing time to start fighting back. ........... Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and chairman, has, in his 50s, developed remarkable biceps, linebacker shoulders and impressive vascularity. .

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Thursday, April 27, 2023

27: Musk

Elon Musk Ramps Up A.I. Efforts, Even as He Warns of Dangers The billionaire plans to compete with OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer he helped found, while calling out the potential harms of artificial intelligence. ........ OpenAI was licensing Twitter’s data — a feed of every tweet — for about $2 million a year to help build ChatGPT ......... Musk believed the A.I. start-up wasn’t paying Twitter enough....... So Mr. Musk cut OpenAI off from Twitter’s data ........ Musk has ramped up his own A.I. activities, while arguing publicly about the technology’s hazards. He is in talks with Jimmy Ba, a researcher and professor at the University of Toronto, to build a new A.I. company called X.AI ......... he has spoken publicly about creating a rival to ChatGPT that generates politically charged material without restrictions. .......... What Mr. Musk’s A.I. approach boils down to is doing it himself ........ has long seen his own A.I efforts as offering better, safer alternatives than those of his competitors ........ Musk’s roots in A.I. date to 2011. At the time, he was an early investor in DeepMind, a London start-up that set out in 2010 to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can. Less than four years later, Google acquired the 50-person company for $650 million. ............ “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.” ......... A.I. could cross into dangerous territory without anyone realizing it .......... In the summer of 2015, Mr. Musk met privately with several A.I. researchers and entrepreneurs during a dinner at the Rosewood, a hotel in Menlo Park, Calif., famous for Silicon Valley deal-making. By the end of that year, he and several others who attended the dinner — including Sam Altman, then president of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, and Ilya Sutskever, a top A.I. researcher — had founded OpenAI........... OpenAI was set up as a nonprofit, with Mr. Musk and others pledging $1 billion in donations. The lab vowed to “open source” all its research, meaning it would share its underlying software code with the world. Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman argued that the threat of harmful A.I. would be mitigated if everyone, rather than just tech giants like Google and Facebook, had access to the technology. ......... But as OpenAI began building the technology that would result in ChatGPT, many at the lab realized that openly sharing its software could be dangerous. Using A.I., individuals and organizations can potentially generate and distribute false information more quickly and efficiently than they otherwise could. ........... In 2018, Mr. Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board, partly because of his growing conflict of interest with the organization .......... By then, he was building his own A.I. project at Tesla — Autopilot, the driver-assistance technology that automatically steers, accelerates and brakes cars on highways. To do so, he poached a key employee from OpenAI. ........ “There is disagreement, mistrust, egos,” Mr. Altman said. “The closer people are to being pointed in the same direction, the more contentious the disagreements are. You see this in sects and religious orders. There are bitter fights between the closest people.” .......... Mr. Musk renewed his complaints that A.I. was dangerous and accelerated his own efforts to build it. At a Tesla investor event last month, he called for regulators to protect society from A.I., even though his car company has used A.I. systems to push the boundaries of self-driving technologies that have been involved in fatal crashes. ............ That same day, Mr. Musk suggested in a tweet that Twitter would use its own data to train technology along the lines of ChatGPT. Twitter has hired two researchers from DeepMind ........... He wanted to build TruthGPT, he said, “a maximum-truth-seeking A.I. that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” ........... “He says the robots are going to kill us?” said Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who has attended A.I. events alongside Mr. Musk. “A car that his company made has already killed somebody.” .



They Wrecked Britain, and They’re Not Going Anywhere The Conservative Party is polling 15 points behind the opposition, and the popularity of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the Conservatives’ fifth leader in seven years, remains obstinately low. ....... While the wealth of the very richest rocketed, the party’s program of austerity, begun by David Cameron in 2010 and continued by each Conservative prime minister since, starved public services, created one of the most miserly welfare states in the developed world and contributed to the longest period of wage stagnation — for many, wage regression — since the Napoleonic Wars. Life expectancy is down, child poverty is up, and there are few signs of a reprieve on the horizon. Life under the Tories has become poorer, nastier, more brutish and shorter. .......... whether in government or in opposition, the Conservatives will continue to find ways to adapt and preserve power. No matter what happens in the next election, the historic vessel of Britain’s ruling class is not going anywhere. ....... the Conservative Party is not just the oldest but also the most successful political party in the world .......... Next year, Tony Blair will be the only Labour leader to have won an election in half a century. ....... Antique poles of ruling-class power — the monarchy, the unelected House of Lords, public schools and Oxbridge — continue to dominate the political landscape. .......... The first-past-the-post voting system remains distinctly undemocratic: Governments need claim only the support of about a quarter of the electorate to attain total executive control. ......... And then there are the public schools, whose name belies their exclusive, private nature. About half of Conservative leaders went to elite boarding schools like Eton and Harrow, which were founded in 1440 and 1572. ........... Only the University of Oxford, with roots back to 1096, can boast more illustrious alumni. Out of the university’s 30 prime ministers since 1721 (more than half the total), three-quarters went to public school. In Britain, the path to power often begins on the playground. .......... Britons are encouraged to take pride in the agedness of their institutions, to see themselves in the pomp and ceremony of the monarchy and the Lords, to relish their status as royal subjects rather than citizens............ — the Old Etonian James Bond, who breaks the rules with a gentleman’s charm; the humble wizardry of Harry Potter, who risks it all to save his enchantingly regimented boarding school from evil outside forces; and the magic of Mary Poppins, the English nanny who wants only to keep the house in order. ........... In 2019 alone, there were more than 30 new series of period dramas, which tend to be conservative-friendly depictions of the past .......... With most media moguls natural allies of the Tories, the newspapers’ daily drip feed of jingoism allows the Conservative Party to convincingly claim to reflect — rather than shape — the national mood. .......... Often Labour politicians seem keener on receiving the blessings of the current system — a peerage, a knighthood, a royal invitation — than on changing it. ......... Idealism and hope are scorned in favor of pragmatism and common sense, two terms that, in Britain, almost always seem to mean cleaving to the right. .......... The Tory philosopher Roger Scruton, described by Boris Johnson as “the greatest modern conservative thinker,” was surely correct when he wrote that “no conservative is likely to think democracy an essential axiom of his politics.” .......... Neither Britain nor the more Tory-voting England is fundamentally Conservative. ........ The Conservative Party’s remarkable ability to win elections has no corollary in nationwide popularity.

The Chatbots Are Here, and the Internet Industry Is in a Tizzy The new technology could upend many online businesses. But for companies that figure out how to work with it, A.I. could be a boon.

A Symbol of Loss in Almost Every Ukrainian Kitchen Soledar, crushed in Russia’s long assault on Bakhmut, was only a little town. But its salt is a national staple, and a matter of pride. ........... Ruslan, 45, was working 1,000 feet below the earth in one of Europe’s largest salt mines when the Russians launched their full-scale invasion. Almost a year later, he was fighting near the ruined city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine when the Russians took control of his nearby hometown, and the mine with it......... The mine provided more than 90 percent of the country’s salt, and its operator, the state-owned company Artemsil, exported salt to more than 20 countries. Now Ukraine is relying on imported salt for the first time in its modern history. ........ Salt was among the first resources that made the eastern Donbas region famous for its mineral wealth......... — excavations more than 1,000 feet deep, linked by more than 200 miles of tunnels, and caverns with cathedral-like roofs big enough to host orchestral concerts, a soccer match and even a hot-air balloon. The Soledar mine had become a tourist attraction, complete with a sanitarium built around the unproven health benefits of breathing salt-infused air. ......... The destruction of Soledar was part of Russia’s broader targeting of Ukraine’s economy. The occupation of Enerhodar — a town whose name means gift of energy, home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant — helped the Kremlin turn Ukraine from an energy exporter into a country struggling to meet its own power needs. ......... Russian occupation of lands used to produce wheat, corn and sunflower oil — normally Ukraine’s top exports — has devastated the agricultural sector. The wreckage of Azovstal, the Mariupol plant where Ukrainian soldiers held out for months, is a testament to Russia’s decimation of the nation’s steel industry. And port blockades throttle what remains. ........... It was the head of the mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who released a video on Jan. 12 trumpeting the fall of Soledar — the most significant Russian territorial gain in months. He claimed he was filming his victory speech in the salt caverns. ......... The symbolism was potent, and contested by the Ukrainians: Officials and workers from Artemsil said the backdrop looked like a nearby gypsum mine. .......... The handful of civilians who remained, he said, were either too old to move or had looked forward to the Russian arrival because they supported Moscow. Any others, he said, had probably been killed. ........ Ruslan’s wife, son and daughter were evacuated from Soledar before the Russians came, and the family does not know when it will return. Some of his friends have given up on the thought of going home, building new lives in new towns. ......... In the meantime, he said, his family holds onto a single bag of salt from Soledar, saving it for holidays and the day they can go home again.

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