Elon Musk

Casey Newton says Elon Musk pledged on Monday to give one share of his company SpaceX to every kid in America next year. The offer arrived a day after Anthropic announced that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund. In a response to that post, Elon Musk wrote that he recommends giving the shares directly to the public. Casey Newton says the story comes from PBS.

Casey Newton calls the pledge a heartwarming story as the holidays approached, and he introduces Elon Musk as a famous philanthropist and also the person who dismantled USAID. He asks why anyone would set up an organization to disperse the money when the shares could go directly to children. Kevin Roose loves t

Jared Diamond says he is not aware of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg having a philosophy of life beyond their business. The business leader he admires as a person is the Patagonia leader he knows. For the Patagonia leader, as with John Wooden, Patagonia is a model for life, and he has a philosophy of life. Steve Jobs had a philosophy of life as regards business.

Jared Diamond has had several lengthy conversations with Bill Gates and likes him. People who met Bill Gates under other circumstances hold different views. Jared Diamond met Elon Musk once and met Jeff Bezos once, and he does not know many leaders in the business world. The Patagonia leader emphasized time off for his staff and Pata

Jason Calacanis says the biggest neoclouds got crushed after CoreWeave's bonds started to sell off. He calls the selloff a possible canary in the coal mine and says the week may have been an AI bubble, if one exists, popping or deflating a little.

On Tuesday, people on X, including Chamath Palihapitiya, pointed out that the yield on some of CoreWeave's debt had hit 15%. Yields rose because bond traders are worried about CoreWeave's ability to generate enough cash to support its debt and want a higher rate of return. Elon Musk added one word, yikes, headlines followed, and everything tanked. CoreWeave, IREN, and Nebius were down about 20% as publicly traded companies. On Wednesday, CoreWeave

A former FBI analyst looked at Twitter before Elon Musk purchased it and determined that bots were somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent. At the high end, he estimated 80 percent. The company had been saying the share was 5 percent.

The 5 percent figure came from a random sample of 100 posts, called only allegedly random. Elon Musk paid 44 billion dollars. Selling Twitter for 44 billion dollars is the last moment anyone wants to learn the service is mostly robots.

The 80 percent estimate sounds high and is probably right. Propaganda has always meant leaflets and films. The same logic uses the greatest vehicle of propaganda the world has ever seen and an army of comments. Manufactured

Jensen Huang says NVIDIA's engineers and Elon Musk's team are designing a server that works in space and on Earth. Musk wants computing and physical buildouts in the same place, and Huang says nobody knows energy better. The case is not that a launch is cheap. NVIDIA's performance per unit of energy makes the return on the computer high enough that the launch cost is a small share of it. Low-cost computing does not belong in orbit. High-value computing does, and he calls this the highest-value system in the history of computing.

The machine also has to stay useful after it is up there. Huang says NVIDIA is the only hardware company that still ships new software, including new algorithms, fo

Michael Lewis says the stated goal is to cut the deficit by two trillion dollars out of a seven trillion dollar deficit. Seventy-five percent of the spending is either interest payment on the debt, the military, or entitlements, and none of the interest, the military, or the entitlements is being addressed. Cutting two trillion dollars out of the debt just by attacking the remaining spending is mathematically impossible.

What actually gets cut is a few billion dollars, which ends up being almost nothing. Paying people who have been laid off for two years ends up probably costing more than the amount cut. He says the result has not been good business.

Seen from Mars the way Elon Musk would

Michael Lewis says the people Elon Musk called blockers were doing their job beautifully. They were not partisan, no one would ever accuse them of incompetence, and they were dedicated to the country. Blocker was a new insult. Before January 20th, 2025, they went by civil servant.

When Musk went into the government with his team at Doge, he said the same thing he had said when he went into Twitter. People already there will want to stop you, so find the blockers and get rid of them. The six main characters in his book never called themselves blockers. Musk would have described them that way. Lewis says they are mainly trying not to break the law. He lines the word up with impressionist and

Chamath Palihapitiya says intellectual property in software was effectively rendered worthless two days ago. When services are headless, including the services Elon Musk is making headless, and after Benioff made Salesforce headless a few months earlier, an agent can wrap the products and connect the products to other experiences. Chamath says the value of intellectual property in software no longer exists.

Fights with customers over who owns the intellectual property used to be a negotiation. Two days ago Chamath told the room the intellectual property is irrelevant and to solve the problem instead. Chamath calls the shift the most important thing in artificial intelligence in the week of

Elon Musk said he is going to make GrokBot headless. The comparison on All-In is Perplexity, where an orchestrator picks the best model on price and performance. Elon Musk's account of GrokBot is that the product will pick the best end-to-end model, and whatever is most likely to give the best outcome is what the bot will use.

On All-In, they then ask for thoughts on Dots, OpenAI, and GrokBot, and the answer turns the tools loose on practical jobs. In the example, GrokBot went through an inbox, canceled a couple of subscriptions, changed a phone plan, and saved a few thousand dollars a year. The concrete follow-up names Dots, Muse, and GrokBot.

A grand plan would be easier to understand. People like the Murdochs buy with the intent to control vast media empires, and Elon Musk bought Twitter in part to use it politically. Larry is close to Elon, and Oracle holds a 15% stake in TikTok, so the purchases can look like one project. The reporting found interests and politics, and Tom Dotan says he does not see a project spanning administrations or generations.

Peter Kafka opens the episode by calling Larry Ellison an 82-year-old billionaire and one of the 10 richest men in the world. Larry Ellison bought his son, David Ellison, a media empire. The companies were once called Paramount and Warner Brothers. Peter Kafka says they are now called Skydance.

Peter Kafka also calls Larry Ellison the eighth richest man in the world, tight with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and connected to both TikTok and a traditional media conglomerate. He says the public does not know that much about Larry Ellison.

On Pirate Wires, Mike Solana and Liv Boeree open on a week of superintelligence news. The show says Donald Trump answered Bernie Sanders by signing an executive order that renamed artificial intelligence to superintelligence across federal departments, at a White House meeting the episode calls a morally binding pact for AI labs to police themselves. It places Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg in the room. Solana describes Sanders's Stop Artificial Superintelligence Act as a pause on advanced AI, a permanent ban on superintelligence work, and prison for violators, plus only a soft maybe on withholding technology from countries trying to build it. He says Eliezer Yudk

Breakfast is steak, eggs, and coffee. Lunch is usually skipped or kept very small, and dinner changes with the company and the cuisine, since a wide range of food is preferred.

A low cash balance is not a real restart once you can promise a high return. Either something catastrophic has happened and civilization has melted, in which case a thousand dollars is not gonna solve your problems, or people will still give money because a dollar comes back as much more than a dollar.

Faster-than-light teleportation and time travel would break reality, unless we are a simulation. Time travel does not break a simulation: like a video game, you can restore a saved game from a prior start point while other saved games keep running in parallel, and they do not have to be consistent with each other.

The acid test is whether you see really interesting content from accounts you have never seen before. Grok reading everything and recommending any given thing to anyone should go live in December, so excellent content from a new user with no followers can still be seen by a lot of people.

Social media makes people more performative because they do anything they can for a few more views on a TikTok video, reels, or an X post. Interesting real-life video also spreads and goes viral, so you get both performance and footage that challenges the narrative but is nonetheless real.

Starbase needed an inspirational name to match Starlink and Starship. It was built on a former sandbar by the Rio Grande, only about three feet above sea level, and is now an incorporated city.

Mars is not a refuge for billionaires. A Mars or moon base will be much more dangerous and less comfortable than Earth, with a higher risk of death, cramped conditions, worse food, massive hard work, and a real chance of failure.

He averages six hours and says people can map his sleep from his X posts. He tried less than six hours to stay awake longer, but his cognitive function dropped. A phone app timed his natural sleep at five hours and 56 minutes, so that is the amount he keeps.