That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.
1. 2019 capped-profit restructuring + 1B MSFT investment
2. 2023 Microsoft expansion / reported 75%-then-49% economics
3. 2024/2025 PBC restructuring
AFAIK it has not been reported as to exactly what the jury found, but IIUC the 2019 date is consistent with their findings.
That's poor for Musk, but it makes sense. He was arguing 2023. I think it is a valid argument.
But he had to know that 2019 was very much in play (and is likely the most logically consistent).
This is very squishy law.
Safety not only seems to be an anti-priority at xAI given what we've seen come out of it, even at OpenAI Elon seemed not that concerned with safety, leading to that entertaining incident with a "golden jackass" trophy: https://xcancel.com/abc7newsbayarea/status/20546984193823543...
Almost certainly Dario would still have split from under Elon too, but also very likely that Elon would have immediately thrown a barrage of IP / NDA / trade secret / non-compete violation lawsuits to cripple Anthropic and keep it from reaching the frontier.
It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.
SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...
Tesla is an incredibly overvalued company rapidly losing ground to China that survives by Musk’s image of being a futurist, and by announcing fake products that never see the light of day.
SpaceX has been headed by Gwynne Shotwell since the early days and usually when Musk inserted himself it’s been a mess.
Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space.
Good luck with that.
How do you measure Dojo, xAI, and Grok being failures?
Dojo is training models for FSD, which is in operation today. The chips in Tesla cars are also taped in-house / vertically integrated, a lot of which is presumably shared investment with the chips needed for the Dojo training side specifically.
Separating xAI from Grok (in a list like this) is kinda weird, but seems that Grok is actually a very capable LLM, even if it is not best-in-practice. Even if not beating out the top 3 labs, it certainly seems to be in the top 5 by most metrics. The xAI Colossus data centers are real AI training/inference infrastructure that were stood up in record time, and they are now selling capacity to other LLM providers. Is that a failure?
Dojo is shutdown dude. Literally doing nothing but rotting. After spending $Billions on a custom chip, Tesla is now just buying NVidia chips and wasting their Dojo efforts entirely
Team dismantled. Operations closed. Game over.
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A similar event is playing out with xAI. Operations are transferring over to SpaceX. Out of money, out of time. They're going to try to grab more money (possibly illegally) across Musks enterprises but there's some severe legal questions on the legality of these moves.
It's already sketchy as all hell that xAI bought Tesla's GPU fleet. Now SpaceX is buying it up under doubious circumstances.
Whatever is going on with xAI / Twitter is now clear. It's not possible for it to stand on its own two feet and needs external investors to continue to survive.
IE: Tesla spent over a $Billion building a team and custom building Dojo chips only to fire the entire team, throw away their chips and buy NVidia.
AFAICT Tesla has increased investment in their own chip ambitions. Dojo specifically being cut is a massive failure if you are motivated to believe that, but otherwise it looks more like a subset of custom chip work that didn't pay off and the company has appropriately cut their losses. The onboard "AI2/3/4/5" chips are clearly the bigger investment (they can be found on every Tesla vehicle) and do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment.
If your idea of Elon Musks AI success is to lean on THAT side of Tesla... well, good luck with that.
Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.
Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.
GME did not beat the S&P500 over the past 10 years, and it is just the evidence of you needing to verify your claims before making them.
Over the past 5 years[0]: S&P500 up by 77%, GME down by 50%.
Over the past 10 years: S&P500 up by 260%, GME up by 207%.
GME performance in the past 10 years doesn't indicate that Ryan Cohen is a business genius. It indicates that he runs a company that has been underperforming the market for at least the past decade.
0. https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?windo...
From Yahoo Finance
GME Jan 1, 2016: $7.09, $5.49 adjusted (accounting for dividend disbursements)
GME Jan 1, 2026: $20.09
266% or 365% return depending on how you count dividends. 365% for GME vs. 306% for S&P 500 over the same period (also using adjusted for dividend numbers).
Market Cap: Tesla (TSLA): ~$1.4T GameStop (GME): ~$9.7B
If anything, GME is a meme.
I also gave my bias so as a way to ignore me.
TSLA currently has a P/E of ~375. That's extremely overvalued. There's no possible objective reason for TSLA to have such an extreme ratio. Even if you think Robotaxi is going to be a massive success, it would have to completely devour Lyft, Uber, and traditional taxi services all combined to even get half way to justifying that P/E, and considering the already major distrust in Tesla's FSD, I just don't see that happening.
The math doesn't math. People buy TSLA because they want to be part of Elon's cult, not because of anything to do with Tesla as a company.
Normally the way this works, is you excuse yourself away from a debate for being too financially involved in the situation, knowing that your financial bias is too overwhelming.
But started this by pointing out Elon Musks weakness in the field of AI, and the best anyone seems to have come up so far is that Elon Musk has more money so it doesn't matter. It's not quite the flex that the Musk fanboys think it is.
The simplest solution would have been to ya know, point at an Elon Musk AI win. And Dojo, xAI, Grok are all relative failures in these respects.