Elon Musk celebrated his 44th birthday in July 2015 at a three-day party thrown by his wife at a California wine country resort dotted with cabins. It was family and friends only, with children racing around the upscale property in Napa Valley.

This was years before Twitter became X and Tesla had a profitable year. Mr. Musk and his wife, Talulah Riley an actress who played a beautiful but dangerous robot on HBOs science fiction series Westworld were a year from throwing in the towel on their second marriage. Larry Page, a party guest, was still the chief executive of Google. And artificial intelligence had pierced the public consciousness only a few years before, when it was used to identify cats on YouTube with 16 percent accuracy.

A.I. was the big topic of conversation when Mr. Musk and Mr. Page sat down near a firepit beside a swimming pool after dinner the first night. The two billionaires had been friends for more than a decade, and Mr. Musk sometimes joked that he occasionally crashed on Mr. Pages sofa after a night playing video games.

But the tone that clear night soon turned contentious as the two debated whether artificial intelligence would ultimately elevate humanity or destroy it.

As the discussion stretched into the chilly hours, it grew intense, and some of the more than 30 partyers gathered closer to listen. Mr. Page, hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal cords, described his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. Humans would eventually merge with artificially intelligent machines, he said. One day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.

If that happens, Mr. Musk said, were doomed. The machines will destroy humanity.

With a rasp of frustration, Mr. Page insisted his utopia should be pursued. Finally he called Mr. Musk a specieist, a person who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future.

That insult, Mr. Musk said later, was the last straw.

Many in the crowd seemed gobsmacked, if amused, as they dispersed for the night, and considered it just another one of those esoteric debates that often break out at Silicon Valley parties.

But eight years later, the argument between the two men seems prescient. The question of whether artificial intelligence will elevate the world or destroy it or at least inflict grave damage has framed an ongoing debate among Silicon Valley founders, chatbot users, academics, legislators and regulators about whether the technology should be controlled or set free.

That debate has pitted some of the worlds richest men against one another: Mr. Musk, Mr. Page, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the tech investor Peter Thiel, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sam Altman of OpenAI. All have fought for a piece of the business which one day could be worth trillions of dollars and the power to shape it.

At the heart of this competition is a brain-stretching paradox. The people who say they are most worried about A.I. are among the most determined to create it and enjoy its riches. They have justified their ambition with their strong belief that they alone can keep A.I. from endangering Earth.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Page stopped speaking soon after the party that summer. A few weeks later, Mr. Musk dined with Mr. Altman, who was then running a tech incubator, and several researchers in a private room at the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park, Calif., a favored deal-making spot close to the venture capital offices of Sand Hill Road.

That dinner led to the creation of a start-up called OpenAI later in the year. Backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from Mr. Musk and other funders, the lab promised to protect the world from Mr. Pages vision.

Thanks to its ChatGPT chatbot, OpenAI has fundamentally changed the technology industry and has introduced the world to the risks and potential of artificial intelligence. OpenAI is valued at more than $80 billion, according to two people familiar with the companys latest funding round, though Mr. Musk and Mr. Altmans partnership didnt make it. The two have since stopped speaking.

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.

Last month, that infighting came to OpenAIs boardroom. Rebel board members tried to force out Mr. Altman because, they believed, they could no longer trust him to build A.I. that would benefit humanity. Over five chaotic days OpenAI looked as if it were going to fall apart, until the board pressured by giant investors and employees who threatened to follow Mr. Altman out the door backed down.

The drama inside OpenAI gave the world its first glimpse of the bitter feuds among those who will determine the future of A.I.

But years before OpenAIs near meltdown, there was a little-publicized but ferocious competition in Silicon Valley for control of the technology that is now quickly reshaping the world, from how children are taught to how wars are fought. The New York Times spoke with more than 80 executives, scientists and entrepreneurs, including two people who attended Mr. Musks birthday party in 2015, to tell that story of ambition, fear and money.

Five years before the Napa Valley party and two before the cat breakthrough on YouTube, Demis Hassabis, a 34-year-old neuroscientist, walked into a cocktail party at Peter Thiels San Francisco townhouse and realized hed hit pay dirt. There in Mr. Thiels living room, overlooking the citys Palace of Fine Arts and a swan pond, was a chess board. Dr. Hassabis had once been the second-best player in the world in the under-14 category.

I was preparing for that meeting for a year, Dr. Hassabis said. I thought that would be my unique hook in: I knew that he loved chess.

In 2010, Dr. Hassabis and two colleagues, who all lived in Britain, were looking for money to start building artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that could do anything the brain could do. At the time, few people were interested in A.I. After a half century of research, the artificial intelligence field had failed to deliver anything remotely close to the human brain.

Still, some scientists and thinkers had become fixated on the downsides of A.I. Many, like the three young men from Britain, had a connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, an internet philosopher and self-taught A.I. researcher. Mr. Yudkowsky was a leader in a community of people who called themselves Rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists.

They believed that A.I. could find a cure for cancer or solve climate change, but they worried that A.I. bots might do things their creators had not intended. If the machines became more intelligent than humans, the Rationalists argued, the machines could turn on their creators.

Mr. Thiel had become enormously wealthy through an early investment in Facebook and through his work with Mr. Musk in the early days of PayPal. He had developed a fascination with the singularity, a trope of science fiction that describes the moment when intelligent technology can no longer be controlled by humanity.

With funding from Mr. Thiel, Mr. Yudkowsky had expanded his A.I. lab and created an annual conference on the singularity. Years before, one of Dr. Hassabiss two colleagues had met Mr. Yudkowsky, and he snagged them speaking spots at the conference, ensuring theyd be invited to Mr. Thiels party.

Mr. Yudkowsky introduced Dr. Hassabis to Mr. Thiel. Dr. Hassabis assumed that lots of people at the party would be trying to squeeze their host for money. His strategy was to arrange another meeting. There was a deep tension between the bishop and the knight, he told Mr. Thiel. The two pieces carried the same value, but the best players understood that their strengths were vastly different.

It worked. Charmed, Mr. Thiel invited the group back the next day, where they gathered in the kitchen. Their host had just finished his morning workout and was still sweating in a shiny tracksuit. A butler handed him a Diet Coke. The three made their pitch, and soon Mr. Thiel and his venture capital firm agreed to put 1.4 million British pounds (roughly $2.25 million) into their start-up. He was their first major investor.

They named their company DeepMind, a nod to deep learning, a way for A.I. systems to learn skills by analyzing large amounts of data; to neuroscience; and to the Deep Thought supercomputer from the sci-fi novel The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. By the fall of 2010, they were building their dream machine. They wholeheartedly believed that because they understood the risks, they were uniquely positioned to protect the world.

I dont see this as a contradictory position, said Mustafa Suleyman, one of the three DeepMind founders. There are huge benefits to come from these technologies. The goal is not to eliminate them or pause their development. The goal is to mitigate the downsides.

Having won over Mr. Thiel, Dr. Hassabis worked his way into Mr. Musks orbit. About two years later, they met at a conference organized by Mr. Thiels investment fund, which had also put money into Mr. Musks company SpaceX. Dr. Hassabis secured a tour of SpaceX headquarters. Afterward, with rocket hulls hanging from the ceiling, the two men lunched in the cafeteria and talked.

Mr. Musk explained that his plan was to colonize Mars to escape overpopulation and other dangers on Earth. Dr. Hassabis replied that the plan would work so long as superintelligent machines didnt follow and destroy humanity on Mars, too.

Mr. Musk was speechless. He hadnt thought about that particular danger. Mr. Musk soon invested in DeepMind alongside Mr. Thiel so he could be closer to the creation of this technology.

Flush with cash, DeepMind hired researchers who specialized in neural networks, complex algorithms created in the image of the human brain. A neural network is essentially a giant mathematical system that spends days, weeks or even months identifying patterns in large amounts of digital data. First developed in the 1950s, these systems could learn to handle tasks on their own. After analyzing names and addresses scribbled on hundreds of envelopes, for instance, they could read handwritten text.

DeepMind took the concept further. It built a system that could learn to play classic Atari games like Space Invaders, Pong and Breakout to illustrate what was possible.

This got the attention of another Silicon Valley powerhouse, Google, and specifically Larry Page. He saw a demonstration of Deep Minds machine playing Atari games. He wanted in.

In the fall of 2012, Geoffrey Hinton, a 64-year-old professor at the University of Toronto, and two graduate students published a research paper that showed the world what A.I. could do. They trained a neural network to recognize common objects like flowers, dogs and cars.

Scientists were surprised by the accuracy of the technology built by Dr. Hinton and his students. One who took particular notice was Yu Kai, an A.I. researcher who had met Dr. Hinton at a research conference and had recently started working for Baidu, the giant Chinese internet company. Baidu offered Dr. Hinton and his students $12 million to join the company in Beijing, according to three people familiar with the offer.

Dr. Hinton turned Baidu down, but the money got his attention.

The Cambridge-educated British expatriate had spent most of his career in academia, except for occasional stints at Microsoft and Google, and was not especially driven by money. But he had a neurodivergent child, and the money would mean financial security.

We did not know how much we were worth, Dr. Hinton said. He consulted lawyers and experts on acquisitions and came up with a plan: We would organize an auction, and we would sell ourselves. The auction would take place during an annual A.I. conference at the Harrahs hotel and casino on Lake Tahoe.

Big Tech took notice. Google, Microsoft, Baidu and other companies were beginning to believe that neural networks were a path to machines that could not only see, but hear, write, talk and eventually think.

Mr. Page had seen similar technology at Google Brain, his companys A.I. lab, and he thought Dr. Hintons research could elevate his scientists work. He gave Alan Eustace, Googles senior vice president of engineering, what amounted to a blank check to hire any A.I. expertise he needed.

Mr. Eustace and Jeff Dean, who led the Brain lab, flew to Lake Tahoe and took Dr. Hinton and his students out to dinner at a steakhouse inside the hotel the night before the auction. The smell of old cigarettes was overpowering, Dr. Dean recalled. They made the case for coming to work at Google.

The next day, Dr. Hinton ran the auction from his hotel room. Because of an old back injury, he rarely sat down. He turned a trash can upside down on a table, put his laptop on top and watched the bids roll in over the next two days.

Google made an offer. So did Microsoft. DeepMind quickly bowed out as the price went up. The industry giants pushed the bids to $20 million and then $25 million, according to documents detailing the auction. As the price passed $30 million, Microsoft quit, but it rejoined the bidding at $37 million.

We felt like we were in a movie, Dr. Hinton said.

Then Microsoft dropped out a second time. Only Baidu and Google were left, and they pushed the bidding to $42 million, $43 million. Finally, at $44 million, Dr. Hinton and his students stopped the auction. The bids were still climbing, but they wanted to work for Google. And the money was staggering.

It was an unmistakable sign that deep-pocketed companies were determined to buy the most talented A.I. researchers which was not lost on Dr. Hassabis at DeepMind. He had always told his employees that DeepMind would remain an independent company. That was, he believed, the best way to ensure its technology didnt turn into something dangerous.

But as Big Tech entered the talent race, he decided he had no choice: It was time to sell.

By the end of 2012, Google and Facebook were angling to acquire the London lab, according to three people familiar with the matter. Dr. Hassabis and his co-founders insisted on two conditions: No DeepMind technology could be used for military purposes, and its A.G.I. technology must be overseen by an independent board of technologists and ethicists.

Google offered $650 million. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook offered a bigger payout to DeepMinds founders, but would not agree to the conditions. DeepMind sold to Google.

Mr. Zuckerberg was determined to build an A.I. lab of his own. He hired Yann LeCun, a French computer scientist who had also done pioneering A.I. research, to run it. A year after Dr. Hintons auction, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. LeCun flew to Lake Tahoe for the same A.I. conference. While padding around a suite at the Harrahs casino in his socks, Mr. Zuckerberg personally interviewed top researchers, who were soon offered millions of dollars in salary and stock.

A.I. was once laughed off. Now the richest men in Silicon Valley were shelling out billions to keep from being left behind.

When Mr. Musk invested in DeepMind, he broke his own informal rule that he would not invest in any company he didnt run himself. The downsides of his decision were already apparent when, only a month or so after his birthday spat with Mr. Page, he again found himself face to face with his former friend and fellow billionaire.

The occasion was the first meeting of DeepMinds ethics board, on Aug. 14, 2015. The board had been set up at the insistence of the start-ups founders to ensure that their technology did no harm after the sale. The members convened in a conference room just outside Mr. Musks office at SpaceX, with a window looking out onto his rocket factory, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

But thats where Mr. Musks control ended. When Google bought DeepMind, it bought the whole thing. Mr. Musk was out. Financially he had come out ahead, but he was unhappy.

Three Google executives now firmly in control of DeepMind were there: Mr. Page; Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and Tesla investor; and Eric Schmidt, Googles chairman. Among the other attendees were Reid Hoffman, another PayPal founder, and Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher studying existential risk.

The DeepMind founders reported that they were pushing ahead with their work, but that they were aware the technology carried serious risks.

Mr. Suleyman, the DeepMind co-founder, gave a presentation called The Pitchforkers Are Coming. A.I. could lead to an explosion in disinformation, he told the board. He fretted that as the technology replaced countless jobs in the coming years, the public would accuse Google of stealing their livelihoods. Google would need to share its wealth with the millions who could no longer find work and provide a universal basic income, he argued.

Mr. Musk agreed. But it was pretty clear that his Google guests were not prepared to embark on a redistribution of (their) wealth. Mr. Schmidt said he thought the worries were completely overblown. In his usual whisper, Mr. Page agreed. A.I. would create more jobs than it took away, he argued.

Eight months later, DeepMind had a breakthrough that stunned the A.I community and the world. A DeepMind machine called AlphaGo beat one of the worlds best players at the ancient game of Go. The game, streamed over the internet, was watched by 200 million people across the globe. Most researchers had assumed that A.I. needed another 10 years to muster the ingenuity to do that.

Rationalists, effective altruists and others who worried about the risks of A.I. claimed the computers win validated their fears.

This is another indication that A.I. is progressing faster than even many experts anticipated, Victoria Krakovna, who would soon join DeepMind as an A.I. safety researcher, wrote in a blog post.

DeepMinds founders were increasingly worried about what Google would do with their inventions. In 2017, they tried to break away from the company. Google responded by increasing the salaries and stock award packages of the DeepMind founders and their staff. They stayed put.

The ethics board never had a second meeting.

Convinced that Mr. Pages optimistic view of A.I. was dead wrong, and angry at his loss of DeepMind, Mr. Musk built his own lab.

OpenAI was founded in late 2015, just a few months after he met with Sam Altman at the Rosewood hotel in Silicon Valley. Mr. Musk pumped money into the lab, and his former PayPal buddies, Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Thiel, came along for the ride. The three men and others pledged to put $1 billion into the project, which Mr. Altman, who was 30 at the time, would help run. To get them started, they poached Ilya Sutskever from Google. (Dr. Sutskever was one of the graduate students Google bought in Dr. Hintons auction.)

Initially, Mr. Musk wanted to operate OpenAI as a nonprofit, free from the economic incentives that were driving Google and other corporations. But by the time Google wowed the tech community with its Go stunt, Mr. Musk was changing his mind about how it should be run. He desperately wanted OpenAI to invent something that would capture the worlds imagination and close the gap with Google, but it wasnt getting the job done as a nonprofit.

In late 2017, he hatched a plan to wrest control of the lab from Mr. Altman and the other founders and transform it into a commercial operation that would join forces with Tesla and rely on supercomputers the car company was developing, according to four people familiar with the matter.

When Mr. Altman and others pushed back, Mr. Musk quit and said he would focus on his own A.I. work at Tesla. In February 2018, he announced his departure to OpenAIs staff on the top floor of the start-ups offices in a converted truck factory, three people who attended the meeting said. When he said that OpenAI needed to move faster, one researcher retorted at the meeting that Mr. Musk was being reckless.

Mr. Musk called the researcher a jackass and stormed out, taking his deep pockets with him.

OpenAI suddenly needed new financing in a hurry. Mr. Altman flew to Sun Valley for a conference and ran into Satya Nadella, Microsofts chief executive. A tie-up seemed natural. Mr. Altman knew Microsofts chief technology officer, Kevin Scott. Microsoft had bought LinkedIn from Mr. Hoffman, an OpenAI board member. Mr. Nadella told Mr. Scott to get it done. The deal closed in 2019.

Mr. Altman and OpenAI had formed a for-profit company under the original nonprofit, they had $1 billion in fresh capital, and Microsoft had a new way to build artificial intelligence into its vast cloud computing service.

Not everyone inside OpenAI was happy.

Dario Amodei, a researcher with ties to the effective altruist community, had been on hand at the Rosewood hotel when OpenAI was born. Dr. Amodei, who endlessly twisted his curls between his fingers as he talked, was leading the labs efforts to build a neural network called a large language model that could learn from enormous amounts of digital text. By analyzing countless Wikipedia articles, digital books and message boards, it could generate text on its own. It also had the unfortunate habit of making things up. It was called GPT-3, and it was released in the summer of 2020.

Researchers inside OpenAI, Google and other companies thought this rapidly improving technology could be a path to A.G.I.

But Dr. Amodei was unhappy about the Microsoft deal because he thought it was taking OpenAI in a really commercial direction. He and other researchers went to the board to try to push Mr. Altman out, according to five people familiar with the matter. After they failed, they left. Like DeepMinds founders before them, they worried that their new corporate overlords would favor commercial interests over safety.

In 2021, the group of about 15 engineers and scientists created a new lab called Anthropic. The plan was to build A.I. the way the effective altruists thought it should done with very tight controls.

There was no attempt to remove Sam Altman from OpenAI by the co-founders of Anthropic, said an Anthropic spokeswoman, Sally Aldous. The co-founders themselves came to the conclusion that they wished to depart OpenAI to start their own company, made this known to OpenAIs leadership, and over several weeks negotiated an exit on mutually agreeable terms.

Anthropic accepted a $4 billion investment from Amazon and another $2 billion from Google two years later.

After OpenAI received another $2 billion from Microsoft, Mr. Altman and another senior executive, Greg Brockman, visited Bill Gates at his sprawling mansion on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle. The Microsoft founder was no longer involved in the company day to day but kept in regular touch with its executives.

Over dinner, Mr. Gates told them he doubted that large language models could work. He would stay skeptical, he said, until the technology performed a task that required critical thinking passing an A.P. biology test, for instance.

Five months later, on Aug. 24, 2022, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman returned and brought along an OpenAI researcher named Chelsea Voss. Ms. Voss had been a medalist in an international biology Olympiad as a high schooler. Mr. Nadella and other Microsoft executives were there, too.

On a huge digital display on a stand outside Mr. Gatess living room, the OpenAI crew presented a technology called GPT-4.

Mr. Brockman gave the system a multiple-choice advanced biology test, and Ms. Voss graded the answers. The first question involved polar molecules, groups of atoms with a positive charge at one end and a negative charge at the other. The system answered correctly and explained its choice. It was only trained to provide an answer, Mr. Brockman said. The conversational nature kind of fell out, almost magically. In other words, it was doing things they hadnt really designed it to do.

There were 60 questions. GPT-4 got only one answer wrong.

Mr. Gates sat up in his chair, his eyes opened wide. In 1980, he had a similar reaction when researchers showed him the graphical user interface that became the basis for the modern personal computer. He thought GPT was that revolutionary.

By October, Microsoft was adding the technology across its online services, including its Bing search engine. And two months later OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot, which is now used by 100 million people every week.

OpenAI had beat the effective altruists at Anthropic. Mr. Pages optimists at Google scurried to release their own chatbot, Bard, but were widely perceived to have lost the race to OpenAI. Three months after ChatGPTs release, Google stock was down 11 percent. Mr. Musk was nowhere to be found.

But it was just the beginning.

Susan Beachy contributed research.

Originally posted here:

How Elon Musk and Larry Pages AI Debate Led to OpenAI and an Industry Boom - The New York Times

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For someone who despises the advertising industry, Elon Musk has a way with viral slogans. At a New York Times event on November 29th the worlds richest man was asked how he felt about firms pulling ads from X, the social network he bought last year when it was known as Twitter. If somebodys going to try to blackmail me, he replied, go fuck yourself. The GFY approach, as he dubbed it, may come naturally to billionaires. But it is bold for a company that last year made 90% or so of its revenue from ads. Those that have pulled ads from X include Apple and Disney, whose presence Mr Musk previously cited as evidence that X was a safe space for brands.

Advertisers are worried about unsavoury content on the platform. Since Mr Musk fired 80% of Xs staff, including many moderators, more bile seems to be leaking through the filters. Last month Media Matters for America, a watchdog, reported that ads for brands such as IBM had appeared alongside posts praising Adolf Hitler (X disputes this and is suing Media Matters).

Social networks are freer than mainstream media to tell advertisers to get lost. Whereas a typical TV network in America gets most of its ad revenue from fewer than 100 big clients, social networks can have millions of small ones. A year ago the largest, Facebook, was getting 45% of its domestic sales from its 100 biggest advertisers, reckons Sensor Tower, a research firm; a boycott against it in 2020 by more than 600 firms, including giants like Unilever and Starbucks, had little effect on sales. But X lacks Facebooks sophisticated ad-targeting apparatus, and relies on campaigns by big brands. In October 2022, when Mr Musk bought Twitter, its 100 top clients accounted for 70% of American ad sales.

Half of them have since left X, Sensor Tower says. On December 1st Walmart said it had gone, owing to its ads poor results on X. The impact has been severe. In September Mr Musk said that Xs American ad business was down by 60%. Advertisers in other regions may be less bothered by the culture wars that Mr Musk is fighting. But X is unusually reliant on America. Whereas Meta, Facebooks parent company, makes most of its money abroad, 56% of Twitters revenue came from America before Mr Musk bought it. Even before GFY, Insider Intelligence, another research firm, expected Xs worldwide ad sales to fall by more than half this year (see chart).

Mr Musks fans insist being rude to air-kissing admen and woke brands delights Xs everyman users. X still has nearly five times as many as Threads, a newish rival from Meta. Yet Sensor Tower reports that the X app is being downloaded less often than a year ago, and estimates that it has lost 15% of monthly users.

Some observers put this down to a purge of bots and fake users. Still, X must monetise the users it has in new ways to make up for the declining ad dollars. One idea is X Premium, which offers extra features and fewer ads for between $3 and $16 a month. So far there seem to be few takers: Sensor Tower estimates that X has sold $60m-worth of subscriptions in the past year, equivalent to 1% of pre-Musk annual ad sales. Mr Musk has talked of turning X into an everything app, handling payments, calls and more. But even optimists concede this would take years.

Until then, the aim is to replace the departing big advertisers with an army of little ones. X is said to be working on its ad technology for smaller firms, eyeing a Facebook-like long tail of clients. There is no time to lose. Further drops in ad sales could necessitate a bail-out from investors, or from Mr Musk himself. Xs employees have their work cut out to attract advertisers faster than their boss repels them.

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Continued here:

Elon Musk's X is especially vulnerable to an ad boycott - The Economist

Top Stories This Week Binance founder CZ must stay in US until sentencing, judge orders

Binance founder Changpeng CZ Zhao has been ordered to stay in the United States until his sentencing in February, with a federal judge determining theres too much of a flight risk if the former crypto exchange CEO is allowed to return to the United Arab Emirates. On Dec. 7, Seattle District Court Judge Richard Jones ordered Zhao to stay in the U.S. until his Feb. 23, 2024 sentencing date. He faces up to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering on Nov. 21 and has agreed not to appeal any potential sentence up to that length.

A United States Congress committee has unanimously passed a pro-blockchain bill, which would task the U.S. commerce secretary with promoting blockchain deployment and thus potentially increase the countrys use of blockchain technology. The act covers an array of actions the commerce secretary must take if passed, including making best practices, policies and recommendations for the public and private sector when using blockchain tech. The bill will now go to the House for a vote. If passed, it must also pass in the Senate before returning for final congressional and presidential approval.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has delayed its decision on whether to approve or reject a spot Ether exchange-traded fund (ETF) offering from asset manager Grayscale. In a notice, the SEC said it would designate a longer period for considering a proposed rule change that would allow NYSE Arca to list and trade shares of the Grayscale Ethereum Trust. Grayscale first filed with the SEC to convert shares of its Grayscale Ethereum Trust into a spot Ether ETF in October, adding its name to the list of companies awaiting a decision from the regulator.

Elon Musks X-linked artificial intelligence modeler, xAI, has an agreement for the private sale of $865.3 million in unregistered equity securities, according to a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission made on Dec. 5. The company is seeking to raise $1 billion. XAIs product, a chatbot called Grok, has recently rolled out to Xs Premium+ subscribers. Musk announced the launch of xAI in July and claimed its goal was to understand the universe.

Bitcoin will hit a new all-time high in late 2024 because of a long-feared United States recession and regulatory shifts after the next U.S. presidential election, asset manager VanEck predicts. The firm is confident that the first spot Bitcoin ETFs will be approved in the first quarter of 2024. However, it also made a gloomy prediction for the general U.S. economy. VanEck is among several firms, including BlackRock and Fidelity, that are vying for an approved spot Bitcoin ETF. VanEck also believes that the BTC halving, due in April or May, will see minimal market disruption, but there will be a post-halving price rise.

At the end of the week, Bitcoin (BTC) is at $44,402, Ether (ETH) at $2,364 and XRP at $0.66. The total market cap is at $1.65 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.

Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Bonk (BONK) at 203.10%, ORDI (ORDI) at 134.34% and BitTorrent (BTT) at 114.32%.

The top three altcoin losers of the week are Maker (MKR) at -6.48%, UNUS SED LEO (LEO) at -6.22% and Kaspa (KAS) at 4.98%.

For more info on crypto prices, make sure to read Cointelegraphs market analysis.

The expected approval of the ETF will be positive news for the crypto market, likely leading to significant growth.

Adam Berker, senior legal counsel at Mercuryo

The only true use case for it [crypto] is criminals, drug traffickers, money laundering, tax avoidance.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase

Jamie Dimon is in no position to criticize Bitcoin with this sort of track record.

Gabor Gurbacs, strategy adviser at VanEck

So, for us, I think Bitcoin is our central bank. With that in mind, I think of Ethereum as our investment bank.

Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands

The ETF is certainly a key driver in sentiment.

Jon de Wet, investment chief of Zerocap

It takes a community and the whole industry to figure out how to better educate people. Thats the hard part. Its not a technology issue; its an operational problem.

Eowyn Chen, CEO of Trust Wallet

Early bull market Bitcoin price preps 1st ever weekly golden cross

Bitcoin is lining up an early bull market as a unique chart feature plays out for the first time in history.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Dec. 7, entrepreneur Alistair Milne noted that should current performance continue, Bitcoin will witness a crossover of two weekly moving averages (MAs), which have never delivered such a bull signal before.

The 50-week and 200-week MAs are key trendlines for Bitcoin traders and analysts alike. The latter is the ultimate bear market support level, and it has so far never decreased in value.

BTC price strength is on the way to taking the 50-week MA trendline above the 200-week counterpart. Known as a golden cross, on lower timeframes, this is considered a classic bullish signal, and for Milne, the impetus is that considerable upside could be in store should the phenomenon play out.

The 50-week moving average will now soon cross back above the 200-week MA making a golden cross for the 1st time. QED: Early bull market, he wrote.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is being criticized by the crypto community after claiming Bitcoin and cryptocurrencys only true use case is to facilitate crime. However, according to Good Jobs Firsts violation tracker, JPMorgan is the second-largest penalized bank, having paid $39.3 billion in fines across 272 violations since 2000. About $38 billion of these fines came under Dimons watch, who has been CEO since 2005.

The United Kingdoms Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has added crypto exchange Poloniex to its warning list of non-authorized companies. The Seychelles-based exchange is one of the three companies owned by or affiliated with entrepreneur Justin Sun that have suffered four hacks in the last two months. The warning to Poloniex was published on the FCAs website on Dec. 6. It doesnt offer a reason but says that firms and individuals cannot promote financial services in the UK without the necessary authorization or approval.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the United States Senate introduced legislation aimed at countering cryptocurrencys role in financing terrorism, explicitly citing the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. The bill would expand U.S. sanctions to include parties funding terrorist organizations with cryptocurrency or fiat. According to Senator Mitt Romney, the legislation would allow the U.S. Treasury Department to go after emerging threats involving digital assets.

Lawmakers fear and doubt drives proposed crypto regulations in US

If the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act were to become law, many cryptocurrency providers would have to learn how to comply with the same regulations as traditional financial institutions.

Expect records broken by Bitcoin ETF: Brett Harrison (ex-FTX US), X Hall of Flame

Brett Harrison taught a promising young Sam Bankman-Fried programming for traders at Jane Street, but wasnt so impressed with the man SBF became.

Web3 Gamer: Games need bots? Illuvium CEO admits its tough, 42X upside

Games overrun with bots just show bot owners care, claims Pixels founder. Plus we review Galaxy Fight Club, chat to Illuviums CEO and more.

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Binance's CZ must stay in US, Elon Musk seeks $1B for AI, and other news: Hodler's Digest, Dec. 3-9 - Cointelegraph

Fine. Lets talk about xAI, which is getting funded to the tune of $1 billion or whatever.

xAI is, according to some commentators, Elon Musks bid to save X, the platform better known as Twitter. Musk may have spectacularly struck out with advertisers and failed to make up the shortfall with subscriptions, the thinking goes, but he can fundraise off the hype of a new AI product currently available only to a subset of blue checks. That product is Grok: a ChatGPT-style answer bot allegedly possessing a sense of humor. This raises several questions, particularly since AI chatbots remain a money pit with an unsure path to profit. But one sticks out to me: why is Grok so unfunny?

xAIs website makes it clear Grok is launching from a weird defensive crouch: Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please dont use it if you hate humor! Right off the bat: hall monitor behavior.

And normally, I dont expect engineers to be funny on purpose. (Bless their hearts.) I look to them to be useful. The thing is, though, that Groks entire pitch is humor. Minus some chatter about how great (I guess?) it is that xAI can train on tweets, Musks promise is that Grok is cooler and more entertaining than several existing, more full-featured, and cheaper products. Okay, babe. Lets see what Musk thinks is so hilarious.

I scrolled back through Musks Twitter feed to find Grok answers, either generated by him or that he retweeted from other accounts. I figured that Musk would highlight what he thought were particularly good answers as a way of promoting the service. After all, even before Musk owned Twitter, his feed was a tremendously important promotional tool for Tesla. What does that look like for Grok?

These are some Cards-Against-Humanity-ass answers. No self-respecting joke requires a just kidding, unless the just kidding itself is about to get upended. Following up with a real recipe for cocaine, for instance, would actually be funny. It would also be the kind of dangerous thing you couldnt get from the PC police at ChatGPT, Bard, or any other competitor. If you are going to go edgelord to teach the woke scolds a lesson, I expect you to commit to the fucking bit.

Grok also has to balance humor with its ostensible pragmatic purpose: real-time answers. Like news comedians Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, its supposed to give you the facts, but funny. Lets see how it manages.

Whoopsie-doodle! The jury took four hours to convict, not eight. Eight isnt enough of an exaggeration to actually be funny, so I think what we have here is a garden-variety AI hallucination.

Its possible, although difficult, to be absolutely factually accurate while also being funny Will Cuppys The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody is probably the pinnacle of the genre. (Cuppys book was unfinished when he died and the result of 15 years of painstaking research.) Here is an example: Queen Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She resembled her father in some respects, although she beheaded no husbands. As she had no husbands, she was compelled to behead outsiders.

Note the tone, which is friendly, a bit dry, and somewhat in contrast with the actual facts. It is closer, in fact, to ChatGPT than to Grok; understatement is funny, too.

As far as I can tell, Groks house style is the opposite. Its hyperbolic and vulgar (although, granted, often after being asked to be more vulgar), relying on irreverence and shocking language to get a laugh.

This is a well-established genre of humor Sarah Silvermans act, for instance, revolves around the disconnect between her wide-eyed naif persona and the raunchy words coming out of her mouth. But the consistency of Groks attitude robs the AI of the ability to actually surprise you. The bot has no sense of how to shape and harness vulgarity; while I like working blue, I dont think the use of profanity is the key to a joke unless, as in the case of George Carlins Seven Dirty Words, the joke is about profanity itself. And as with much AI text, if you think for just a second, the joke often comes apart.

I am not an orgy expert. But doesnt every horny bastard in the house coming at you specifically sort of defeat the purpose? Like, isnt that a gang bang? Unless Ive misunderstood hedonism completely, an orgy becoming a total clusterfuck is a huge success.

There are, Im sure, several funny ways to answer this question, but one gets the same basic point across in far fewer words: No, and fuck you for even asking.

Actually, now that I think about it, though Grok is sometimes aggressive, Ive never seen it turn that aggression toward the question-asker. Genuinely funny people are also lightly alarming because you can never tell when they are going to cut you to bits. Imagine trying to be friends with Nora Ephron or Ali Wong wouldnt you worry they might describe you behind your back? Or worse, in print? Or, worse still, in a movie?

Meanwhile, Grok wont even judge you for getting crabs:

One tool in the arsenal of a humor writer is pulling a changeup on the pace. For instance, heres Hunter Thompson on Richard Nixon:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixons funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal.

Three long-ish sentences followed by the punchline: Even his funeral was illegal. Grok doesnt, and maybe cant, do that. Nor does it seem to understand the much-vaunted rule of three.

The correct answer to the trolley problem is that whoever is posing the problem is an asshole. Feel free to update Grok accordingly.

As for the Business Insider answer, I cant help but feel that it reads like a not-especially-inventive Mad Libs answer. So I turned it into one and sent it to two of my colleagues. Heres what I got back:

Verdant sweaters is an accidental and yet vicious burn on the use of online shopping commissions as a revenue stream for publishers. I also particularly like clowder of mildewed sugar gliders feels like a bardic insult and casket of the internet. Ill grant you the Mad Libs versions make less sense than the original, but the unexpected insults render them, in places, funnier.

The thing is, I do think its possible for AI to be funny. Take Janelle Shanes AI Weirdness, for instance, where Shane and her audience revel in computer-generated absurdity. (For instance: a Thanksgiving dish generated by AI called Punpkan Cockes Apple, which could presumably be served as an accompaniment to Mashed Turktees and Grasted Potinos.)

AI failure is probably the native form of AI humor. And as any funny person knows, the key to humor is taking the thing you do inadvertently that gets a laugh and making that thing happen on purpose. Were I attempting to develop a funny AI, gibberish would be an important area of research. Which combinations of consonants are funniest? How close do you need to be to a real word to get a laugh? What combinations of words and images are the most absurd? Some of what makes the AI funny is how confidently it is absolutely wrong so, how might I heighten the contrast between the AIs persona and its actual answer?

I cant rule out that Grok is funny and Musk is very bad at highlighting examples. (I havent gotten access myself; if someone wants to give me the opportunity, you know where to find me.) But absurdism certainly does not seem to be what Grok is up to and perhaps it cant be. Musk is committed to the notion that AI is going to be smarter than people. That belief rules out developing the humor of AI failure because the failures demonstrate the ways in which AI is not smarter than people.

Instead, Grok at times insists on imitating humans, particularly Musk-favorite Douglas Adams.

Even human comedians are better served by doing something original than retreading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The real Adams is lurking in the background of this answer, making Grok look bad by comparison. Thats not just a problem for Grok. Take RayBot, an AI version of an advice column written by Achewoods Chris Onstad. RayBot is often funny, but Onstad consistently outperforms his own AI when the two are asked the same questions. For any funny response you get from RayBot, you wonder what Onstad would actually say.

Groks other limitation seems to be Musks desire to create a fuck you to other, supposedly overcautious AI companies without actually committing to being alienating. The cocaine answer is funny, in that its exactly as limited as any other large language model. The trolley problem about a racial slur does not actually use the racial slur in question, as thats simply a bridge too far. (Not that going all the way would be funny, either.) Edgy, pointlessly offensive humor can feel forced and try-hard, particularly if its the only mode the bot has and even more particularly if youre trying to actually use it like a foul-mouthed version of Google Search.

Still, I cant say Grok isnt funny. A man without a sense of humor raising $1 billion for a comic chatbot? Come on. Thats a pretty good joke.

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Why is Elon Musk's Grok chatbot so unfunny? - The Verge

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Elon Musk Halts Dogecoin Surge by Saying His AI Business Is 'Not Raising Money' - CoinDesk

Elon Musk is getting in some quality time with his son, X A-12 .

The 52-year-old owner of X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla brought his son, whom he shares with musician Grimes, with him to cheer on the Army football team while they faced off against the Navy on Saturday (December 9) in Foxboro, Massachusetts.

Read more about the father-son outing

The New York Post obtained photos of Elon and his three-year-old son.

In them, X A-Xii wears a pair of jeans with a green and black flannel while chilling on his dads shoulders. Elon kept warm in a blue jacket and was all smiles during the outing.

He revealed that he was cheering on the Army team in a post on X, and is probably celebrating the fact that they emerged victorious.

Their afternoon together comes two months after Grimes sued Elon over custody of their three children. They also share a daughter named Exa Dark Siderl. We learned that they welcomed a second son, named Techno Mechanicus, in secret earlier this year.

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Elon Musk Makes Very Rare Appearance With His Son X A-12 During Father-Son Outing at Football Game - Just Jared

Last week it was the curse heard round the world. This week, it may be the posts that push Disney’s Bob Iger out of a job. 

When Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X, was being interviewed at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Nov. 29, reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him about companies pulling their ads from his social media site. Disney, Apple, Coca-Cola, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and others have suspended their advertising on X after Musk reshared a post which came across to many as antisemitic.

Instead of responding in a contrite manner, Musk replied: 

“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f ? ? ? yourself. Go. F? ? ?. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.” Musk then appeared to directly call out Disney CEO Bob Iger by adding, “Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel.”

No matter which side of the Musk divide one is on, it is becoming clear that the mega-billionaire entrepreneur is now drawing deeper lines in the sand. To prove that point, Musk tripled down against Iger this week by firing multiple posts criticizing Disney and outright saying Iger “should be fired immediately.”

In response to the state of New Mexico suing Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for alleged child abuse content on the site, Musk said, “Crazy that Disney has to be sued to stop this terrible behavior.” Next, in response to a CNBC headline stating, “Facebook and Instagram content enabled child sexual abuse, trafficking: New Mexico lawsuit” Musk responded: “Why no advertiser boycott, Bob Iger? You are endorsing this material.” Just minutes before that, Musk had posted: “Bob Iger thinks it’s cool to advertise next to child exploitation material. Real stand up guy.” 

Also this week, while doing an interview regarding his new Cybertruck, Musk said with regard to the activism of Disney, “You have to wonder. What would Walt Disney think of the company that is his namesake today? I think Walt Disney is turning in his grave faster than a drill bit.”

In case anyone has any doubts, Musk has now openly declared rhetorical war on Iger and Disney. A fight Iger may soon wish he had never initiated.

While many on the left may now detest Musk for defending himself and his site, tens of millions are embracing this increasingly defiant Musk. They do so because they are convinced Musk represents the lone force in the nation and world standing up to globalists, cancel culture, woke CEOs and the left’s anti-capitalism and anti-freedom dictates.

To be sure, Iger is a very bright guy and should be smart and open-minded enough not to buy into the smearing of Musk. And yet.

To that very point, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who was at that Dealbook summit and listened to Iger go after Musk and X, posted: 

“If Bob Iger would carefully examine the facts, he would likely continue to advertise on X, but Disney caves to public pressure rather than do the right thing. Meanwhile Disney invests heavily on TikTok, likely alongside videos of kids teaching other teenagers to be anorexic and worse.”

But unfortunately for Iger — and the Disney stockholders — Iger may not be strong enough to fend off the bullying woke forces within his own company, which he helped to create and then enable.

Because of Musk’s celebrated showdown with Iger, consumers by the tens of thousands are loudly declaring that they are on “Team Musk” and have his back. As has been reported, thousands of Disney+ subscribers have not only cancelled the channel in solidarity but are posting all over X for others to join them.

Later during the Dealbook interview, Musk added to his reputation as a real-life superhero to millions: “I’m saying what I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil.”

Like Alexander the Great, Musk is now burning his boats and leaving himself only one direction: forward into the fight. As he is proving with his increasing attacks on Iger and Disney, Musk will not go quietly into the night.

Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration.

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Elon Musk declares war on Disney and Bob Iger - The Hill

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

Ed Zitron, CEO of media and public relations group EZPR, tells The New Abnormals Andy Levy that Elon Musk is driving the platform formally known as Twitter into the ground and is one step away from it going completely under.

Now that many big advertisers have walked away over Musks antisemitic comments, he says the problem for X comes when those advertisers stop posting and sports pull away.

That will be the real death knell for Twitter. I think that what will kill this website truly is if sports leaves it, he said. If Bluesky or Threads can truly capture the posting of the sports realm, Twitter is over. Its done. Because right now, really Bluesky needs video. If Bluesky had video, I think it would be a compelling competitor. And Threads is awful, which is the only advantage that X/Twitter/Rate-My-Nudes, whatever it is called at the moment actually has.

Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.

People want to see what the latest brand has to say about brand things. Its strange, and it feels, when you see these posts and you see people interacting with them sincerely, it feels like youve kind of entered a new world that you dont like. Yeah. But that is how social media works. And if these brands just give up on posting, I mean, thats bad, but really I do mean it, it is going to be the sports, its going to be the live reaction things that kill this website.

Zitron, who writes the Wheres Your Ed At substack, said that we could well see the worlds richest man lose his title due to his terrible mismanagement of X.

The only way to fix Twitter right now, and I really mean this, is for him to leave and never return. He needs to borderline delete his account. He needs to walk away and he needs to give it to Magic Johnson or someone completely inoffensive. But he wont do it because he cant admit that every choice hes made has been bad, he said. He blames everyone for his problems other than himself. Even the antisemitic comment, he said it was bad, but then didnt delete it and then told the advertisers to go fuck themselves. He doesnt care.

Twitter is burning a hole in his pocket. He may be the richest man alive, but guess what? He doesnt have unlimited funds. He will have to sell Tesla stock. Right? Or he could take SpaceX public. But that I think is impossible before 2027.

Plus! The New Abnormal team lampoons new House Speaker, and wee little psychopath Mike Johnson, who believes that God told him to be Speaker.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

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Ed Zitron Tells The New Abnormal That Twitter A.K.A. X Will Die If Sports Leave - The Daily Beast

Known by most of the industry as Bob Iger, the CEO of Disneys name has started to trend on X as Eiger due to Elon Musks misspelling across multiple tweets.

The embattled owner of the social media platform was attempting to put the Disney CEO on blast Thursday because after suspending ad buys with X over swirling antisemitic rhetoric and ad placements, the studio continues advertising with Meta despite an incendiary lawsuit filed against the studio on Wednesday.

Bob Eiger thinks its cool to advertise next to child exploitation material, Musk firsttweetedThursday. Real stand up guy.

This message came with a retweet of aCNBC reportabout New Mexicos Wednesday lawsuit against Meta Platforms and Mark Zuckerberg alleging that the companys platforms enabled child sexual abuse material to be distributed and that it failed to identify alleged predator networks, according to CNBC.

Why no advertiser boycott, Bob Eiger? Musktweeted10 minutes later with adirect linkto the CNBC story. You are endorsing this material!

The billionaire didnt tag Iger, but other users are in response to the news of the investigation and lawsuit.

Bob Iger only boycotts platforms that promote free speech, another user wrote inresponseto Musks second tweet. If hes not boycotting you then youve got a problem.

Another user played off of the Disney CEOs first name.

How about a Bobcott?? David Milsnertweeted. Asking for a friend

The surname snafu was largely ignored by Musks followers, who appeared to propagate the incorrect spelling in their responses to his tweets. Many took Musks side in the argument, while others inserted their own opinions or criticized the tech mogul for being a hypocrite.

My dude. Your platform literally shares this stuff and much worse next to ads, one userwrote.

Wait until you find out about the sexist and racist posts on Twitter! anothertweeted.

Musk responded to a comment asking why Disney hadnt fired Iger yet, saying that he should be fired immediately.

Walt Disney is turning in his grave over what Bob has done to his company, Muskadded.

Read up more of the discourse below:

The post Bob Eiger Trends on X After Elon Musk Blasts the Disney CEO With Multi-Tweet Typo appeared first on TheWrap.

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'Bob Eiger' Trends on X After Elon Musk Blasts the Disney CEO With Multi-Tweet Typo - Yahoo Entertainment

Elon Musk dished out some words of advice to Taylor Swift after the pop star was recently chosen as Time magazines 2023 Person of the Year.

On Thursday, the SpaceX founder congratulated Swift on his X social media platform (formerly Twitter) before jokingly cautioning the singer that her social life could take a nosedive after scoring the honor, based on his experience.

Some risk of popularity decline after this award. I speak from experience lol, the billionaire tech mogul wrote under the stars post.

Back in 2021, Musk was named Person of the Year for solving the globes most intractable challenges and driving societys most daring and disruptive transformations, the magazine explained at the time.

Elon Musk's comments to Taylor Swift come amid histumultuous custody battle with his ex-girlfriend Grimes overtheir three children.

Since then, the Tesla CEO and X ownerhas been embroiled in several controversies, including engagingwith antisemitic content on social media and boosting the oldPizzagateconspiracy theory that first went viral in 2016 and led a man to fire a rifle inside a pizza place in Washington, D.C., in the delusional belief that he needed to rescue hidden child sex slaves.

Most recently, Musk, who remains the richest person in the world, was criticized for telling companies that have paused ad buys on X: Go fuck yourself.

If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself, he said at The New York Times DealBook Summit last week.Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? Hope it is.

Swift has not yet responded to Musks reply on X.

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Elon Musk Has A Warning For Taylor Swift On Becoming Time's Person Of The Year - Yahoo Entertainment

Last month, during an interview at The New York Times DealBook summit, X owner Elon Musk declared that the advertisers whod boycotted the platform in reaction to his endorsement of a wildly antisemitic post could go to hell. Dont advertise, he said before going on to specifically target Disney CEO Bob Iger. If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself, is that clear? Hey, Bob, if youre in the audience. Thats how I feel, dont advertise. A week and change later, (perhaps with the benefit of hindsight and maybe even a gentle reminder from shareholders that his job is not, in fact, to tank the company), has Musk decided to make nice with the companies upon whom X relies on revenue to survive? Not exactly!

Instead, on Thursday morning, he declared on X that Iger should be fired immediately and that Walt Disney is turning in his grave over what Bob has done to his company.

In November, Disney, along with IBM, Apple and others, pulled their advertising on X after Musk wrote, You have said the actual truth in response to a post accusing Jewish communities of pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. Musk later apologized, saying, It might be literally the worst and dumbest post Ive ever done,yet curiously, it remained on the site as of Friday:

MuskboughtTwitter in October 2022, andunder his tutelagethe company has gone from a valuation of$44 billion to $19 billion (he also, for some reason, changed the name to X). At the DealBook conference, after telling Iger and company to fuck yourself, Musk said: If the company fails because of an advertiser boycott, it will fail because of an advertiser boycott. And that will be what bankrupt the company, and thats what everybody on earth will know. Let the chips fall where they may.

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Elon Musk Says Bob Iger, the Disney CEO He Publicly Told to Fuck Yourself, Should Be Fired Immediately - Vanity Fair