Category Archives: Elon Musk

Elon Musk says he wants "just a normal person" as president.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The 2024 presidential election is a year away, but Elon Musk already knows who he wants to see in office.

Musk has praised and criticized Biden and Trump alike, and he now says he wants a "normal person" as president.

He told Fox News he'd like a president "whose values are smack in the middle of the country."

Elon Musk says the ideal presidential candidate for him is "just a normal person."

In an interview that aired Monday night on Fox News Channel's "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the billionaire discussed his voting history and who he'd be inclined to vote for in 2024.

"I didn't vote for Donald Trump. I actually voted for Biden. Not saying I'm a huge fan of Biden because I would think that would probably be inaccurate, but you know, we have difficult choices to make in the presidential elections," Musk said.

Looking ahead, Musk added, "I would prefer, frankly, that we put just a normal person as president, a normal person with common sense and whose values are smack in the middle of the country, just center of the normal distribution and I think that they would be great."

Musk has praised and criticized President Biden and Donald Trump alike in recent years. He's said the US and many other countries have a "gerontocracy," referring to a government controlled by citizens much older than most of the population. He's also called for maximum age limits for lawmakers and said politicians should be "ideally within 10 or at least, 20 years of the average age of the population."

Musk's outward political stances have shifted to the right in recent years. Last summer, he said he voted Republican for the first time, backing former Texas GOP Rep. Mayra Floresin a special election.

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Elon Musk says he wants a 'normal person' for president in 2024 whose values are 'smack in the middle of the country' - Yahoo News

It seems Elon Musk wants to join the artificial intelligence arms race.

"I'm going to start something which I call TruthGPT," Musk told Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Monday, adding that he'd want his AI chatbot to be a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."

The timing of Musk's announcement which, to be clear, was not an actual product unveiling is notable, given that just three weeks ago, the Tesla and Twitter CEO signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on all work on AI systems more powerful than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4.

Musk spoke about the dangers of rapid AI development before pitching his own version, alleging that chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Bard are being trained to be "politically correct." He didn't provide evidence for those claims, or detail exactly what a "truth-seeking AI" might entail.

"A path to AI dystopia is to train AI to be deceptive," Musk said. "AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production ... [It] has the potential of civilization destruction."

Broadly speaking, that sentiment echoes a recent chorus of worries from tech luminaries and CEOs, including from billionaire investor Mark Cuban and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Even Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in, noting that Bard can "hallucinate" answers to human prompts writing responses that sound plausible, but are factually inaccurate.

"It could cause harm," Pichai told CBS News' "60 Minutes" on Sunday.

One of Musk's specific criticisms of OpenAI which he co-founded in 2015, and helped fund before leaving its board three years later centers around the organization's restructure from nonprofit to "capped-profit" in 2019, meant to help the company accept external funding.

That opened the door to a partnership with Microsoft, which helped train ChatGPT-4, OpenAI announced earlier this year. For-profit status could influence the ethics behind an AI program's development, Musk said on Monday.

Twitter which intends to pursue generative AI, Musk told the BBC last week is a for-profit company. So is X.AI, a new startup Musk quietly incorporated in Nevada last month.

Musk didn't immediately respond to CNBC Make It's request for comment. He admitted on Monday that he's "very late" to the chatbot race, but said he's still motivated to try due to concerns over the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership and Google dominating the market.

His timeline remains unclear, particularly considering his history of starting and then abandoning or indefinitely pausing ambitious projects, like The Boring Company's high-speed tunnels between major U.S. cities or Neuralink's computerized brain implants.

"I'm definitely starting late, but I will try to create a third option," Musk said. "This might be the best path to safety, in that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans, because we are an interesting part of the universe."

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Elon Musk now says he wants to create a ChatGPT competitor to avoid 'A.I. dystopia'he's calling it 'TruthGPT' - CNBC

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said some time ago that the Model Y would outsell all of Tesla's other cars, and by a wide margin. This came as a surprise since it's much more expensive than the popular Model 3. The CEO went on to predict that the Model Y would eventually become the best-selling car in the world. Many people thought he was crazy, but there's a much better chance of it actually happening than you might think.

When the Tesla Model Y first debuted, it was a bit of a disappointment to many people. The entire unveiling ceremony revolved around the history of Tesla, and the electric crossover was barely present. When it was finally shown, it wasn't shown in great detail, and there was no look at the third row. All you could really tell was that it wasn't much more than an inflated Model 3.

That said, the Model Y has been selling exceedingly well across the globe. In fact, it already made some top sales lists in 2022, and Tesla's sales stand to be much stronger in 2023. While many people love to pick on Elon Musk for his wild ideas and terrible timelines, he often proves them wrong. Sure, there are some promises Musk has made that have come true very late or still not come to fruition, but many of his dreams people doubted years ago are already a reality.

If all continues to move forward as it has thus far this year, Musk could have another "I told you so" moment.

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According to Electrek, Musk said in 2016 that the Model Y would create demand for 500,000 to 1,000,000 units per year and eventually become the world's best-selling passenger car of any kind. Keep in mind, it didn't even come to market until 2020. In 2022, Tesla noted that the Model Y would soon keep pace with the top-selling Toyota Corolla, which sees some ~1.2 million units sold per year.

Tesla could inform us during its upcoming earnings meeting that the Model Y is already on track to become the best-selling car in the world as early as this year. It topped all rivals in China, the world's biggest automotive market, for Q1 2023. Meanwhile, in the world's second-largest car market, the US, early data points to the Model Y being the best-selling passenger car for the quarter.

The Model Y is also breaking sales records in many European markets, and Tesla has ramped up its production at Giga Berlin to 5,000 copies per week. Tesla is also ramping up production at Giga Texas while constantly making tweaks and upgrades in Fremont and Shanghai.

Tesla aims to produce some 1.8 million EVs globally in 2023, though Musk has said the company could possibly achieve 2 million. If everything falls into place as planned, the Model Y has a very good chance of being the best-selling car in the world.

What do you think? Leave us your words of wisdom in the comment section below.

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Elon Musk May Have Been Right, His Tesla Model Y Guess Could Come True - InsideEVs

Here is an edited excerpt from this weeks CxO newsletter. To get this to your inbox, sign up here.

Elon Musk, like other tech peers, is wary of middle managers.

Growing up, I watched my dad cycle through several careers, from being a distributor of polyvinyl flooring to an independent bookseller. He called himself a salesman but Ive always thought his greatest job skill was managing a sales team, which he did for several global carpet companies. On car trips, wed listen to him reassure Helena, joke with Bob, debate tactics with Stan, and quote Winston Churchill to cheer up Mel. Textile tycoon Roger Milliken was celebrated as the boss whod tried to best Des Brady in a quote battle. At night, Id fall asleep to the sound of him telling my mom stories about the quirks and characters of office life.

With his dry Scottish wit and vague distrust of authority, my father wasnt what youd call a Company Man. The words private beach were practically marching orders to trespass. But his curiosity, competitive spirit and desire to help people get where they wanted to go made him a great manager.

Middle management is a tough place to be these days. Long before the pandemic even started, they were the unhappiest employees in most companies. Now, they have to deal with layoffs, tighter budgets, and pressure to meet their numbers while attending to the emotional wellbeing of people who may still be working from their bedrooms. Oh, and their boss thinks a bot could do their job.

I believe in the value of the middle manager, as do management thinkers like McKinseys Bill Schaninger, who believes theyre critical in driving large-scale organizational change. He is co-authoring a new book on the topic that will be out this summer and will be speaking at our upcoming Future of Work Summit on June 1st the day after hell be retiring from McKinsey to start his new adventure. In a recent article, Schaninger and colleagues argue that middle managers are less a symptom of bureaucracy than victims of it.

Managers are an especially vulnerable species in Silicon Valley, where startups often fumble from Lord-of-the-Flies-like chaos to plush seating and a plethora of cool new titles once the money comes in. (Time Ninja, youll be across the hall from our Dream Alchemist and Chief Happiness Engineer.) When the headwinds come, those who measure excellence in lines of code might look at that middle layer as a cost center to cut.

Exhibit A is Metas Mark Zuckerberg, who declared 2023 to be a Year of Efficiency a telling signal when the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp already laid off 11,000 people the year before. Indeed, the company plans to close 5,000 open roles this year and lay off an additional 10,000 people, possibly starting today.

In a Q&A with employees earlier this year, reported in Command Line, Zuckerberg said, "I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."

That sounds like a Dystopian nightmare, or a sign that the Meta CEO may not be clear on what a number of his people actually do. Then again, this is a leader who equates being well understood with complacency, which cant have helped morale.

The same could be said of Elon Musk, who came into Twitter, tweeting that there seem to be 10 people managing for every one person coding.

Was the new Twitter CEO confusing functions like sales or, say, compliance with management? Possibly. He tends to recognize excellence in a form that reminds him of himself, which may explain why he says its hard to find people to delegate to. Musk also believes every manager should have the technical skills of the people they manage, even though studies suggest training in leadership skills may be more important. Certainly, middle managers are not to blame for the outages, misinformation, eroding value and general chaos at Twitter in recent months. If anything, the platform could use more good managers.

Instead, at Twitter and elsewhere, their numbers are likely to dwindle. Salesforce, Google and Amazon have also targeted middle management as areas to cut. In some ways, that makes sense. But lets distinguish between those who manage people and administrators whose functions add layers of bureaucracy. (Senior contributor William Baldwin lays out the compelling case to slash the ranks of administrators at Harvard.)

Great middle managers are the carriers of culture, the motivators of people, the agents of change. People tend to quit their boss, not their job, which makes nurturing better bosses a meaningful factor in a company's success.

During the last chapter of my dads career, he managed an independent bookstore with one employee and some occasional interns. He loved books but not that much. He seemed happiest when showing my son how to repair old books, dispensing life advice to the young woman working the cash register, or marching as Mr. Pickwick in the town parade. Like a lot of great middle managers, he was a teacher, a mentor and a coach. We could all use more of those right now, especially as technology transforms how we work.

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Why Mark Zuckerberg And Elon Musk Fire Their Most Valuable People - Forbes

SAN FRANCISCO Elon Musks latest wave of firings has seen the dismissalof the man formerly in charge of making sure the Twitter CEO looked like absolute hell every time you saw him, sources have confirmed.

Damn, not sure Ill be able to find more work in this field, said Cal Harper, who up until recently was in charge of laying out Musks awkwardly fitting wardrobe and coaching him on how to look out of place no matter what he was doing. I thought he was joking when he brought me onboard a while ago to make sure he looked uncomfortable and inhuman on every occasion both public and private, but you know, I wasnt going to say no to the money. This was the best job I ever had. He sent my family on a vacation after those pictures of him on that boat worked out so well for us.

Musk defended the move, stating that he had learned enough to perform the tasks himself.

Probably going to do his job from here on out, he said. No reason to pay someone to apply skin pastener and fuck my hair all up when Im perfectly capable of doing it myself. Based on current trends, cases of me looking weird and bloated and making those dumb faces should be down to zero by late April.

As of press time, the full time employee that was paid to hang around and talk about how strong Musks meme game was had also been dismissed.

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Elon Musk Fires Guy in Charge of Making Him Look Like Shit All the ... - Hard Drive

The centerpiece of the first day of the inaugural Possible conference in Miami Beach took place yesterday when Elon Musk the polarizing but brilliant founder of Tesla and Starlink, and current owner of Twitter took to the main stage to offer up his version of what Twitter is doing to address the concerns of brand marketers about brand safety on the platform.

In a conversation with NBC Universals global chair of advertising & partnerships Linda Yaccarino who is seen by many as a possible candidate for the CEO position at Twitter, which is currently occupied by his dog Floki Musk talked of championing citizen journalism while also deriding mainstream media, vowing he would be treated the same way as anyone else on Twitter, and promising freedom of speech while limiting hate speech through a series of community controls.

People may not be aware of this already, but we have adjacency controls in place that are really quite effective, Musk told the packed mainstage room where hundreds recorded his comments on their cell phone cameras even after it was rumored that electronic recordings of the session somehow would not be permitted. Additionally, Musk took a handful (several overly fawning), questions from the audience after it was expressly said he would do no such thing.

Whether Musk, who charmed the audience and even got applause for his freedom of speech position, holds true to his words remains to be seen. He certainly tried to woo the roomful of marketers with some of his messaging. Advertising goes all the way from spam to compelling content, he said. And I really want to focus on obviously the compelling content, to make it relevant, make it interesting.

Rishad Tobaccowala, an author, speaker and advisor who for decades was a high-ranking executive with Publicis Groupe, offered his thoughts on Musks comments in a video segment below with Digiday immediately following the Twitter owners session with Yaccarino.

https://digiday.com/?p=500154

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Elon Musk aims to charm marketers with vow to focus on 'compelling ... - Digiday