2 years doesn't seem like a very long time to stay at a company you founded.
I can only imagine what would cause someone to make such a drastic move. If he's going into Venture Capital then he has no problem with the workload.
Elon seems very talented at finding trends and convincing talented people to help him build the future. He seems equally talented at then pushing these same people away.
guywithahat · 2h ago
I would argue one moves to the VC world to lower the workload; I suspect there's a reason so many people seemingly retire into it
htrp · 2h ago
you work on your own schedule (people meet your deadlines since you write the checks).. and if you invest your own capital, you have no financial pressure
kangs · 46m ago
looks like to me he cashed out and wanted to own his own company, so he did
VladVladikoff · 1h ago
Hasn’t xAI already accomplished its goal? Milk some 50B of capital out of the AI hype bubble. Didn’t I read some story a month or two ago about Elon bank rolling some other projects off of the xAI valuation.
stephen_g · 1h ago
One thing was that he shuffled what was once Twitter into xAI ownership in an all-stock transaction, so that the people who bankrolled the Twitter purchase can pretend that they have stock that's worth something for now, instead of having to write down the value of those shares.
There's a lot of internal contradiction in his message. One the one hand, he wants to "have a maniacal sense of urgency" and on the other, he thinks that it's "critical to study and advance AI safety... to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity". If you're building something that you think is so powerful that you fear for the safety of humanity, then why are you building it at "blistering velocity"? Shouldn't you be taking a more careful approach and studying the impact of what you're building, and then only releasing it if you know it's safe? How do you do that if you are under constant pressure to move faster than everyone else?
donperignon · 45m ago
This message doesnt make any sense.
Grimblewald · 2h ago
I have no faith in elon products for one simple reason: if you have talent you have options and if you have options, why would anything elon has tainted be anywhere near the top?
There was a time it was reasonable, early space x days for example, when elon was still managable, easily abstracted away and you were able to work with better funding and less red tape vs other options - but modern times i cannot see a reason one would work with elon unless desperate or in the cult, and lets be honest, you dont reason your way into joining cults.
abxyz · 2h ago
A lot of (talented people in a field) are idiots / irrational in other parts of their life. A very talented engineer with options may buy in to Elon’s public vision (which sounds good on the surface) and may be completely incapable of recognizing when someone is betraying their vision. Very smart people get caught up in nonsense all the time.
nebula8804 · 1h ago
I spoke to SpaceX people at previous defcon and the answer was simple: Elon cultivated a culture of no tolerance for BS and only having "A" Players on your team. If you are olympic class you only want to be working with those kinds of people. The mission didn't hurt either: Make life multi-planetary, electrify the world etc.
Dont know how much of that has damaged itself post Trump. Seems like Tesla is losing a lot of top talent. Remains to be seen if SpaceX is falling off the wagon.
reactordev · 1h ago
SpaceX is well insulated from Musk shenanigans. Its leadership team is fantastic and their engineering org, as you stated, is Olympic class. Single handedly keeping the space coast of Florida afloat.
s5300 · 1h ago
>> Elon cultivated a culture of no tolerance for BS and only having "A" Players on your team.
Funny take because I know multiple talented people who’ve worked SpaceX & Tesla who claim an extreme amount of bloat wrt earnestly negative-value employees in the engineering sectors. This was pre-2020 as well.
I can only imagine what would cause someone to make such a drastic move. If he's going into Venture Capital then he has no problem with the workload.
Elon seems very talented at finding trends and convincing talented people to help him build the future. He seems equally talented at then pushing these same people away.
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There was a time it was reasonable, early space x days for example, when elon was still managable, easily abstracted away and you were able to work with better funding and less red tape vs other options - but modern times i cannot see a reason one would work with elon unless desperate or in the cult, and lets be honest, you dont reason your way into joining cults.
Dont know how much of that has damaged itself post Trump. Seems like Tesla is losing a lot of top talent. Remains to be seen if SpaceX is falling off the wagon.
Funny take because I know multiple talented people who’ve worked SpaceX & Tesla who claim an extreme amount of bloat wrt earnestly negative-value employees in the engineering sectors. This was pre-2020 as well.
It is a swindle by definition.