Elon Musk’s Fall from Grace

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Will Musk come out of this?

The conflicts of interest certainly seem problematic—and not just for the shareholders. Consider the following: as the two companies, SolarCity and Tesla, were delaying operations and refusing to bargain with workers, Brad W. Buss received $4.95 million as a Tesla director in 2015 alone, on top of his $32 million as the Chief Financial Officer at the insolvent SolarCity. Antonio J. Gracias, founder and CEO of the private equity firm Valor Management, sits on Tesla’s board and owned 211,854 SolarCity shares at the time of the merger. Steve Jurvenston, another Silicon Valley venture capitalist, earned over $6 million as a Tesla board member in 2016 and owned over 417,450 shares of SolarCity during the merger. His investing firm, Draper Fisher Jurveston, put $18.9 million in SolarCity. Nancy Pfund, a venture capitalist at DBL investors, another equity firm, owned over 1.5 million shares of SolarCity at the time of the merger, and Pfund’s partner at DBL is Ira Ehrenpreis, who owns the map software firm MapBox and is also a Tesla director. (In 2015, he secured an agreement with the auto company to use his software, at a $5 million fee on top of sales.)

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Andrew Elrod — Boston Review

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Is Tesla Really Making Progress?

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This needull presents both sides of the argument. Some look at Tesla as game changer while others are not that impressed.

Because that scenario seems like a real possibility, a car that doesn’t need fossil fuel to run does feel like a game-changer, contrary to Cowen’s argument. Even when accounting for the environmental impacts of manufacturing a Tesla and running it on electricity from a coal-fired grid, its zero-emissions feature still counts as progress, given it will help reduce both future climate impacts and localized pollution from urban traffic, which disproportionately affect communities of color.

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Brentin Mock — CityLab

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Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

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This is a post from Wait but Why which took forever to write. The post is as long as Old Man & the Sea, well almost. But, if you want to understand (really understand) what Elon Musk is up to these days and understand human brain better as a bonus, please invest some time reading it.

Not only is Elon’s new venture—Neuralink—the same type of deal, but six weeks after first learning about the company, I’m convinced that it somehow manages to eclipse Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering undertaking and the grandeur of its mission. The other two companies aim to redefine what future humans will do—Neuralink wants to redefine what future humans will be.

The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around—but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.

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Tim Urban — Wait but Why

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Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free

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Today’s needull looks at OpenAI, an initiative to push the limits of AI. The project is unique in the sense that it does not restrict access to artificial intelligence. It is given that AI is going to be a substantial part of our lives in foreseeable future and OpenAI like Musk’s other ground breaking efforts might be well be first among equals.

That’s the irony at the heart of this story: even as the world’s biggest tech companies try to hold onto their researchers with the same fierceness that NFL teams try to hold onto their star quarterbacks, the researchers themselves just want to share. In the rarefied world of AI research, the brightest minds aren’t driven by—or at least not only by—the next product cycle or profit margin. They want to make AI better, and making AI better doesn’t happen when you keep your latest findings to yourself.

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Wired

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