Over three months after filing a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of going against its original mission, Elon Musk is dropping the suit.
Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but stepped away in 2018 and now owns rival AI startup xAI. He sued OpenAI in late February in California state court, alleging that the ChatGPT-maker was going against its open-source founding principles and creating AI “to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”
His lawsuit prompted OpenAI leaders to release internal emails he sent from 2015 to 2018 encouraging them to seek funding.
Musk decided to file to dismiss the suit on Tuesday, and the case was dismissed, according to court documents obtained by CNBC. 
Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X. (Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
The case could have been dismissed without Musk dropping it. OpenAI had already moved to throw out Musk’s claims and a judge was going to decide on the matter at a hearing originally scheduled for Wednesday in San Francisco, per CNBC.
Though the case is over, Musk is still publicly calling out OpenAI.
On Monday, Musk criticized Apple’s decision to work with OpenAI and bring ChatGPT to the iPhone and said that he would ban Apple devices at his companies.
He wrote, “Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.”
Musk has previously called out Google, OpenAI, and Meta’s AI efforts and raised $6 billion last month for his AI startup.
Related: Elon Musk Threatens to Ban Employees from Using Apple Products
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Twitter is once again in trouble, with its ad revenue reportedly dropping drastically, but Elon Musk says advertising on the platform is “on the upswing”.
According to the New York Times, Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue has been down 59% from last year between April 1 and the first week in May, landing at $88 million and weekly ad revenue sales projections are regularly missed.
In a conversation held on Twitter Spaces hosted by Robert F. Kennedy, Musk lamented this situation and blamed advertisers, saying: “Twitter has seen extreme pressure from advertisers and has at least in the West, seen an advertising boycott from a lot of companies. I think this is a fundamental corruption of democracy. And the public should be absolutely outraged by this.”
“I would like to, for sure, thank those companies that have stuck with us like Apple and Disney and many others, but we have for North America and Europe seen roughly half of our advertising disappear overnight, simply because we insist on free speech.“
Curious. Apprehension from advertisers has been building since Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, with concerns around a platform that does not distinct “free speech” from “hate speech”, is seeing an “unprecedented” rise in hate speech, fired a majority of his moderation team in order to fight hate speech, and is now rife with adult content, including online gambling, drugs and pornography.
It’s almost like this could have been easily predicted. It’s a situation that YouTube has already been through once with “the adpocalypse” and advertisers are not quiet about the fact that they pull marketing in association with anything that goes against their brand or that their users might consider unethical.
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It’s a busy week in China as some of the biggest names in U.S. business are in town — Elon Musk, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, and Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan have all gone overseas.
Dimon, who’s there for a three-day JPMorgan summit in Shanghai, is hoping his visit will help smooth things over after he made a joke in 2021 that his company would outlast the Chinese Communist Party.
“You’re not going to fix these things if you are just sitting across the Pacific yelling at each other. So I’m hoping we have real engagement,” he said at the conference this week.
Narasimhan is also in Shanghai for business meetings and announced that he’s doubling down on plans to open another estimated 2,800 locations in China by the end of 2025, hoping that the country will become the coffee chain’s biggest market.
But all eyes have been on Musk, who arrived in style via private jet to Beijing on Tuesday before heading to Shanghai on Wednesday to check up on Tesla’s factory and meet with staff members there, according to Reuters.
Musk is visiting the country for the first time in three years after pandemic-era restrictions hindered travel to the country, and the masses are happy to see him.
Reuters also reported Musk is being called a “global idol” and “Brother Ma,” in reference to famed Chinese billionaire and businessman Jack Ma who co-founded Alibaba.
Chinese social media and blogging site Weibo shows what appears to be a customized menu for dinner, along with Musk’s arrival, who’s seen entering the building with Chinese billionaire Zeng Yuqun, founder of battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology.
Musk and Yuqun in Shanghai this week via Weibo
The menu at Man Fu Yan proudly displays Tesla’s logo, featuring 16 courses and an homage to the electric car company calling it a “dark horse, standing out from traditional automotive companies and making remarkable achievements.”
The menu for Musk’s dinner in Shanghai via Weibo
Tesla, which opened its Shanghai gigafactory in 2018, is set to begin construction on a battery factory at the same location by Q3 of 2023, with production estimated to reach completion by Q2 of 2024.
Tesla’s Megapack, a rechargeable battery energy storage device used at battery storage stations, will primarily be produced in the new facility.
Musk did not post on social media about his visit overseas.
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There’s no doubt about it: Things aren’t looking so great for commercial real estate, especially for office space.
Look no further than a revised forecast issued earlier this month by a group of researchers from New York University and Columbia University, which predicts that office values in New York City alone will plummet a staggering 44% by 2029. That’s much steeper than the group’s prior prediction—issued a year ago—for NYC office values to fall 28% by 2029.
The stickiness of remote work, coupled with interest rates spiking just as many commercial real estate loans come due, is the underlying source of the commercial real estate bearishness. However, at least in the eyes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, property declines will soon spread beyond commercial real estate.
On Monday, Musk insinuated that pain awaits the residential housing market when he tweeted that “Commercial real estate is melting down fast. Home values next.”
But the loss in demand for commercial real estate is what’s driving demand for residential real estate. People who work from home need more space at home. Sales volume is down because inventory is down. Today, home prices increased for a second straight month.
— Glenn Kelman (@glennkelman) May 30, 2023
Musk didn’t say how much he thinks U.S. home prices will fall—nor did he explain why. He also got some push back.
On Tuesday, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman shot back at Musk, tweeting, “But the loss in demand for commercial real estate is what’s driving demand for residential real estate. People who work from home need more space at home. Sales volume is down because inventory is down. Today, home prices increased for a second straight month.”
The idea that remote work has boosted home prices during the pandemic is supported by research published last year by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The San Francisco Fed paper argues that upwards of 50% of Pandemic Housing Boom gains through November 2021 can be attributed to an elevated demand for “space” created by the pandemic’s remote work shift.
“Our results suggest that rising house prices over the pandemic reflected a change in fundamentals rather than a speculative bubble. This implies that the evolution of remote work may be an important determinant of future housing costs and inflation,” wrote the team of San Francisco Fed researchers.
So who is right, Kelman or Musk? The industry is fairly divided.
While national home prices have fallen a bit—down 2.2% from June 2022 according to the seasonally adjusted Case-Shiller National Home Price Index—they aren’t crashing broadly. Some markets like San Francisco (down 12.9% from its 2022 peak), Phoenix (down 8.4%), and Las Vegas (down 9.0%) have fallen sharply. However, many places in the Midwest, like Chicago, and along the East Coast, like Miami, are still near all-time highs.
Economists at firms like Zillow and CoreLogic argue that national home prices have bottomed, while firms like Moody’s Analytics and Fannie Mae think that national home prices—which rose on a month-over-month basis in February and March according to Case-Shiller—will soon flip back into correction.
Want more housing data? Follow me on Twitter at @NewsLambert.
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Elon Musk doesn’t like people working from home. A year ago he declared the end of remote work for employees at car maker Tesla. Now he has called the desire of the “laptop classes” to work from home “immoral”.
“You’re gonna work from home and you’re gonna make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory?” he said in an interview on US news network CNBC: It’s a productivity issue, but it’s also a moral issue. People should get off their goddamn moral high horse with that work-from-home bullshit. Because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.
There’s a superficial logic to Musk’s position. But scrutinise it closer and the argument falls apart. While we have a duty to share workload with others, we have no duty to suffer for no reason. And for most of human history, working from home has been normal. It’s the modern factory and office that are the oddities.
Working from home and the industrial revolution
Prior to the industrial revolution, which historian date to the mid-1700s to mid-1800s, working from home, or close to home, was commonplace for most of the world’s population. This included skilled manufacturing workers, who typically worked at home or in small workshops nearby.
For the skilled craftsperson, work hours were what we might call “flexible”. British historian E.P. Thompson records the consternation among the upper class about the notorious “irregularity” of labour.
Conditions changed with the rapid growth and concentration of machines in the industrial revolution. These changes began in England, which also saw the most protracted and tense conflicts over the new work hours and discipline factory owners and managers demanded.
Judgements of conditions for workers prior to industrialisation vary. Thompson’s masterpiece study The Making of the English Working Class (published in 1963) recounts bleak tales of families of six or eight woolcombers, huddled working around a charcoal stove, their workshop “also the bedroom”.
But it also mentions the stocking maker with “peas and beans in his snug garden, and a good barrel of humming ale”, and the linen-weaving quarter of Belfast, with “their whitewashed houses, and little flower gardens”.
Either way, working from home is not a novel invention of the “laptop classes”. Only with the industrial revolution were workers required under one roof and for fixed hours.
Misapplying a concept of justice Musk’s moral argument against working from home says that because not all workers can do it, no workers should expect it.
This has some resemblance to the “categorical imperative” articulated by 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But acting according to the same principle does not mean we all have the same options. We can, for example, want all workers to have the maximum freedom their tasks allow.
The wider error Musk appears to be making is misapplying what ethics researchers call distributive justice.
Simply put, distributive justice concerns how we share benefits and harms. As the philosopher John Rawls explains in his book Justice as Fairness, in distributive justice we view society as a cooperative activity, where we “regulate the division of advantages that arises from social cooperation over time”.
Research on distributive justice at work typically concerns how to pay workers fairly and also share the suffering or “toil” work requires. But there is no compelling moral case to share the needless suffering that work creates.
How to share more fairly
Clearly, professionals benefit from work in many ways we might argue are unjust. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed satirically in The Economics of Innocent Fraud, those who most enjoy their work are generally the best paid. “This is accepted. Low wage scales are for those in repetitive, tedious, painful toil.” If Musk wanted to share either the pay or toil at Tesla more equally, he has the means to do something about it. He could pay his factory workers more, for example, instead of taking a pay package likely to pay him US$56 billion in 2028. (This depends on Tesla’s market capitalisation being 12 times what it was in 2018; it’s now about 10 times.) To share the “toil” of work more fairly, he wouldn’t just be sleeping at work. He’d be on the production line, or down a mine in central Africa, dragging out the cobalt electric vehicle batteries need, for a few dollars a day.
Elon, the floor is yours Instead, Musk’s idea of fairness is about creating unnecessary work, shaming workers who don’t need to be in the office to commute regardless. There is no compelling moral reason for this in the main Western ethics traditions.
The fruits and burdens of work should be distributed fairly, but unnecessary work helps no one. Commuting is the least pleasurable, and most negative, time of a workers’ day, studies show. Insisting everyone has to do it brings no benefit to those who must do it. They’re not better off.
Denying some workers’ freedom to work from home because other workers don’t have the same freedom now is ethically perverse.
Musk’s hostility towards remote work is consistent with a long history of research that documents managers’ resistance to letting workers out of their sight.
Working from home, or “anywhere working”, has been discussed since the 1970s, and technologically viable since at least the late 1990s. Yet it only became an option for most workers when managers were forced to accept it during the pandemic.
While this enforced experiment of the pandemic has led to the “epiphany” that working from home can be as productive, the growth of surveillance systems to track workers at home proves managerial suspicions linger.
There are genuine moral issues for Musk to grapple with at Tesla. He could use his fortune and influence to do something about issues such as modern slavery in supply chains, or the inequity of executive pay.
Instead, he’s vexed about working from home. To make work at Tesla genuinely more just, Musk’s moral effort would better be directed towards fairly distributing Tesla’s profit, and mitigating the suffering and toil that industrial production systems already create.
The Conversation
Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Telegraph Online staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.
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Mark Cuban has Tweeted at Elon Musk for years, often to criticize the Twitter owner over his business decisions. But most of the arguments have been one-sided.
Musk has remained uncharacteristically quiet about it until this past weekend when he decided to respond to one of Cuban’s Tweets — unleashing a storm from Cuban.
Cuban was going back and forth with the “Twitter Daily News” account about the idea of free speech and whose Tweets are promoted on the platform while accusing Musk of choosing to “support and influence the positions he wants to support and influence.”
Suggestions for improvement are welcome
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 19, 2023
“Suggestions for improvement are welcome,” Musk said in response, which prompted Cuban to outline a seven-point plan for improvement.
Thanks for asking. IMO here are the issues:
“Today, the For You timeline consists of 50% In-Network Tweets and 50% Out-of-Network Tweets on average, though this may vary from user to user.”
And
“What Tweets did the people I follow recently engage with?
Who likes similar… https://t.co/lgJ83KCbhF
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) May 19, 2023
“It stands to reason that the person with the greatest number of followers will have the greatest influence on the most number of For You timelines,” Cuban pointed out. “And For You candidates include, as stated above, tweets that people you follow engage with. So who @elonmusk engages with on Twitter has an ENORMOUS impact on what an indeterminable number of people see in their For You Timelines.”
Despite asking for his suggestions, Musk did not reply.
Cuban has previously publicly bashed Musk about his decisions since taking over the communications giant.
Last November, after Musk began changing Twitter’s legacy verification system that gave blue checkmarks to notable users, the “Shark Tank” star criticized the plan.
“The legacy blue checkmark meant that someone took the time to decide that the user might be able to contribute something more,” Cuban argued. I found that valuable. It saved me time and because Twitter did a decent job of it, it opened my eyes to new people that I didn’t know about.”
Musk recently stepped down from his interim position as CEO of the company after appointing former NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino earlier this month.
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Just a few days after expressing his concerns about the unequal nature of remote work, Elon Musk took to Twitter to offer a concise perspective on the issue.
What Happened: While replying to a tweet that said, “It’s morally wrong to not commute to work in a Tesla,” Musk acknowledged that while certain jobs “can be done effectively at home,” it is unrealistic and “out of touch” to expect the majority of people to have that option.
Using a historical analogy, Musk likened the idea of widespread remote work to the phrase, “Let them eat cake,” suggesting that it is an impractical solution for most individuals.
On Tuesday, during an interview with CNBC’s David Faber, Musk expressed his criticism of remote work, saying it was “morally wrong” when service workers still had to show up in person.
He questioned the fairness of the “laptop classes” benefiting from the luxury of working from home while service workers had no alternative but to be present at their workplaces.
This discussion arose in the context of the return-to-office policies that have sparked significant concerns among Silicon Valley and U.S. tech workers, especially since many of them were initially promised generous remote work mandates by top executives.
Why It Matters: Musk has been time and again quite vocal in his opposition to the work-from-home practice.
In November 2022, he banned remote work at Twitter in his first email to the employees since buying the social media company, saying that the social media platform needs “intense work” in the office.
Then, in March this year, Musk sent out his plans for returning to the office to his Twitter employees in the middle of the night.
Read Next: Micromanaging Or Masterstroke? Elon Musk Reportedly Takes Control Of Tesla’s Hiring Process
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The billionaire founder of Tesla and outgoing Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, has taken a spectacular swipe at remote work in a rare interview.
Musk weighed in on the remote working debate during an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, reaffirming his long-held stance that workers should be required to come into the office.
Musk, who took over Twitter’s ownership earlier this year, said he was ready to hire more staff at the social media platform (after firing nearly 50 per cent of staff in his first week as CEO), but confirmed they’d need to be in the office.
“I’m a big believer that people are more productive when they’re in person,” Musk said.
While he said “there are some exceptions,” Musk said the notion of working from home is a “moral issue” and “bullshit”.
“The whole sort of work-from-home thing… there are some exceptions, but I kind of think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, let them eat cake.
“It’s like, really, you’re gonna work from home and you’re gonna make everyone else who made your car come work to the… factory. You’re gonna make the people who make your food that gets delivered that they can’t work from home, that, you know, the people like they can’t fix your house. They can’t work from home. But you can. Does that seem morally right? That’s messed up.”
The CEO said those that can work from home were living in “la la land”, and considered them to be part of the “laptop class”.
“It’s messed up to assume that yes they have to go to work but you don’t. It’s not just a productivity thing, I think it’s morally wrong.”
Musk has previously revealed he told Tesla staff they would be required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week. If they didn’t, the company would assume the staff members had resigned. Musk added at the time that he would review any requests for exemptions.
Prior to Musk’s takeover, the then-Twitter CEO Parag Argawal said Twitter staff would be able to continue to work from home “forever”. In a note to employees posted on Twitter, Argawal had said that staff would be able to work from “wherever you feel most productive and creative”. Musk terminated Argawal in October 2022, along with many other top Twitter execs.
Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world. Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here or become a member here.
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What Elon Musk said on working from home
“The laptop class is living in la la land. Look at the cars,” he said, referencing Tesla’s factory. “Are people working from home here? Of course not. The people [that are] building the cars, servicing the cars, building houses, fixing houses, or making the food, making all the things that people consume—it’s messed up to assume that they have to go to work but you don’t. [Why] is that? It’s not just a productivity thing. I think it’s morally wrong.”
Musk went on to say that there are some exceptions to remote work and also stated that he didn’t expect people to work seven days a week like he does.
Not the first time
Incidentally, this is not the first time that Musk has expressed his strong disapproval for work from home. Just days after he took over Twitter in 2022, Musk ended the company’s “work from home forever” policy and ordered everyone back into the office. The policy was created by the company’s previous co-founder Jack Dorsey.
The order at Twitter came a few months after Musk delivered the same diktat at Tesla. Musk mail at Tesla said, “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week. Moreover, the office must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office. If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned.”
“The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much – so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt,” it added.
“Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in,” the mail concluded.
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If you’re reading this while working remotely, Elon Musk is judging you.
In a recent interview with CNBC, the tech CEO came down hard on work-from-home culture, saying he thinks it’s “morally wrong.”
Musk, who told Tesla workers last year to return to the office or “depart Tesla,” has long been vocal about his belief that people are more productive in person. However, on Tuesday, he said it’s not only about productivity, it’s also a “moral issue.”
“The people who make your food that gets delivered can’t work from home. But you can? Does that seem morally right?” he said in the interview. “It’s messed up to assume that they have to go to work, but you don’t.”
Musk, also the CEO of SpaceX, said he believes people should “put 40 hours in” and that it doesn’t “necessarily need to be Monday through Friday.” He said he works seven days a week, and that days in a year where he does not put in “some meaningful amount of work” only add up to “about two or three.”
Despite Musk’s opinion, in a 2022 Cisco survey, 78% of respondents said remote and hybrid work improved their overall well-being. Still, there is an argument for one glaring problem posed by remote work beyond the CEO’s argument of productivity and morality: commercial real estate.
Remote work has upended the commercial real estate industry
Across the U.S., nearly 20% of office spaces are vacant, and those numbers almost double in big cities like New York and San Francisco, where less than half of the cities’ office spaces are occupied, according to property management company, Kastle Systems.
The trouble with vacant buildings isn’t just the eeriness they possess or the dust they collect, but the trillions in debt they potentially foreshadow. According to Morgan Stanley, nearly $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt will be due by the end of 2025, and a potential surge of loan defaults could be catastrophic for an already fragile banking system plagued by three bank failures in 2023 thus far.
Related: Fully Remote Work May Be A Relic of the Past, According to a New Report
However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 72.5% of businesses said their workers rarely or never worked from home in 2022, marking a close return to the pre-pandemic number of 76.7%.
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