General Elon Musk Fukkery Thread

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gizmodo.com

Why the Hell Is OpenAI Building an X Clone?

OpenAI is reportedly planning on making a social media platform because content to train on ain't cheap.
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Why the Hell Is OpenAI Building an X Clone?​


OpenAI is reportedly planning on making a social media platform because content to train on ain't cheap.

By Alex Cranz Published April 16, 2025 | Comments (14)

An image of Sam Altman in sunglasses shooting a piece sign.
An image of Sam Altman in sunglasses shooting a piece sign. © Bloomberg/Getty Images

Why is an AI company pretending that we’re living in 2022 and working on a new social media platform? OpenAI has money, everyone’s attention, and its iOS app is still the number one download on Apple’s App Store. It doesn’t really need to get into the social media business for cash (most platforms struggle to turn a profit) or prestige. Sure Sam Altman has beefed with both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and cockily threatened to make a social media platform, but why divert the company’s resources to that when its in a fight for AI supremacy with xAI, Google, and Anthropic. Altman’s X clone is all about getting a steady stream of content that it can train its models on for free.

There’s a shortage of data right now that is limiting how quickly and effectively AI models can be trained. Google has a steady stream of content thanks to running the most-used search engine on the planet and YouTube. Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has managed to impress plenty of people with its model Grok because it trains on the social media platform. The same goes for Meta and its Llama model.

OpenAI has been very focused on this problem for a while, and even has AI create new content to train AI models on. But as you can guess, AI-created content isn’t necessarily high enough in quality to be good training content. Which isn’t a surprise! AI is effectively just the best pattern recognizer and generator around. So if the pattern is “really bad AI schlock,” then yeah, what it generates would likely also be just as terrible. A social network of human users would give OpenAI that same steady stream of new training data that some of its biggest competitors enjoy. A nice big diverse (hopefully) training data set.

But that social network will still have to be used by people, and that’s where I’m baffled by OpenAI’s plans. Just because you build a social media network doesn’t mean people will actually use it! Just look at the half dozen promising Twitter clones that sprouted up after Elon Musk beat the original into submission with a kitchen sink and grotesque management practices.

Social media is not a Field of Dreams baseball field. In it’s report on Tuesday, The Verge suggests the new platform might be integrated into the ChatGPT app itself—effectively getting it in front of millions of users with a single software update. That plan sort of worked for Meta when it used Instagram to push users to Threads. Millions signed up as the platform broke records and spawned think pieces. Then it had a huge drop in users. Then it slowly climbed back up, and now Meta claims it has about 245 million monthly users. That sounds like a lot until you log in and it appears that half are clout chasing, a quarter are bots, and the other quarter are all those people who first signed up back in 2023. It’s a bit of a trash platform at this point. A joke for its users and people on other platforms, as well.

And that’s Meta, the company that is arguably the best at making engaging social media platforms. If Meta can’t bootstrap a monster hit into existence, then what hope does an AI company with little social media experience have?

There’s a small built-in user base. OpenAI fans are already thinking about moving to the new platform, and there’s a possibility of AI developers all still lingering on X to migrate over. Theoretically, it could become a hangout spot for the AI crowd. But that would be a small and insular user base that’s not exactly primed to produce the content needed to make a clever AI more clever. That’s gonna require the rest of us, and the tradeoffs might be too much for some. Plenty of people happily exchange their privacy and browsing data for the ability to use social media for free. But a lot of people (hey, Gizmodo readers!) have much stronger feelings about their data and content being used to train AI. For many, it feels like theft. Which means OpenAI’s social media platform could look less like a place to connect people and more like a place to rob them blind.
 
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The region 219 said:
Any threads on the NRLB’s whistleblower from the IT department? shyt is crazy if true.
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Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
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An employee and whistleblower from the NLRB, an independent federal agency enforcing the National Labor Relations Act, says DOGE took information from critical databases and describes the haunting images taken of him alongside threatening messages demanding he stop.
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www.europesays.com

Tesla whistleblower says Musk wanted to deport her team for raising brake issue - EUROPE SAYS

Former Tesla engineer Christina Balan, who was fired in 2014, said in an interview that her entire team was threatened with deportation for taking her side
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Tesla whistleblower says Musk wanted to deport her team for raising brake issue​


April 20, 2025

Elon-Musk-Game-of-Thrones.webp


Former Tesla engineer Christina Balan, who was fired in 2014, said in an interview that her entire team was threatened with deportation for taking her side when she brought up a brake safety issue directly to Elon Musk. She’s now succeeded in throwing out Tesla’s arbitration case against her, and hopes to meet Tesla directly in open court in a case that could influence corporate policy nationwide.

Christina Balan is a Romanian-born engineer who formerly worked for Tesla on the Model S. Her contributions were significant enough that her initials appeared on the Model S’ battery pack.

But in 2014, she brought up what she considered a safety issue directly with Elon Musk. She thought that the Model S’ floor mats could cause a brake safety issue, similar to a situation that Toyota had recently gone through (though that also led to a media firestorm that blew the issue out of proportion). She said that Tesla had chosen suppliers based on friendships, not quality.

And she brought it up directly to Musk because… he told her to. Famously, in 2013, Musk sent out an email to the entire company stating:

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Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens.

-Elon Musk, email to all Tesla employees, March 21, 2013

A few days after sending that email, Balan said she was offered a meeting with Musk, but that when she showed up to the meeting, it was instead attended by a lawyer and some large men in uniforms, and with Tesla forcing her to resign her position.

During that meeting, Balan says that Tesla’s lawyer threatened to deport many members of her team, who were currently waiting on green card applications, if she didn’t sign the resignation, seemingly in response to her team backing her up in raising these concerns. She ended up signing the resignation in protest, writing on it that “I’m resigning for the position that I was put in a month ago bc I dare to speak up to the Sr management, also bc people that had the chance to speak up were threatened…”

christina-balan-initials-model-s-battery-pack-tesla.jpg
Balan’s initials, “CB,” on a Model S battery pack

When Balan’s case got coverage in Huffington Post in 2017, Tesla sent a statement that Balan had stolen company resources to work on a “secret” personal project (Tesla emails show that Balan was told to work on this project by leadership). After this, Balan says she faced difficulty in finding work as companies feared ending up on Musk’s blacklist.

Balan filed a defamation suit over the press statement, but Tesla forced her case into arbitration and got the defamation suit thrown out. Forced arbitration is widely used by companies in America to find faster and more corporate-friendly rulings, an approach that has only become more common after endorsement by the “Supreme” Court.

Balan then appealed that decision, and after many delays (some related to her fight against breast cancer, which is now in remission), she finally succeeded in getting the arbitration thrown out on Monday – even though she represented herself, pro se, for most of the proceedings.

Her win could be significant for corporate policy nationwide, as it could serve to chill the overuse of arbitration which is seen by most observers as giving disproportionate power to companies in labor disputes. However, given the nature of the court’s recent finding, which was found to be a jurisdictional issue, this decision may not be directly applicable to many other arbitration cases.

Now, Balan wants to face Tesla in open court with her case, and hopes to bring more of her story to the public – which she says Musk has tried to stop her from doing, despite his claims of being a “free speech absolutist.”

She said so in an interview this weekend with The Times UK, a media organization owned by climate denier Rupert Murdoch, who is also the father of James Murdoch, a Tesla boardmember.

In the interview, Balan describes working conditions under Musk, and that he was a mostly-absent CEO who only showed up to the office twice a month, would threaten or retaliate against those who tried to fix problems. She says that she wants to take her case to open court “to prove how vindictive this monster is. He’s pure evil… he’s enjoying hurting people… and you don’t know about them because he’s forcing everybody to give up their freedom of speech and their right to sue.”

You can watch the whole interview below:

Electrek’s Take

We haven’t written about Balan’s case before because it’s been such a long time coming, and filled with various arcane legal wranglings. There will likely be more steps to come, many of which are boring legal maneuvers, but perhaps this case will now have a chance to go more public now that the arbitration decision has been thrown out.

And, frankly, I think the initial complaint over floor mats was probably not all that significant of a blockbuster. At the time, floor mats were getting a lot of focus due to the high-profile nature of the Toyota case (which was also overstated), so I think Balan’s team was probably more wary than usual. And we didn’t go on to see a slate of floor mat problems with the Model S in the time since.

However, Tesla’s response to bringing up the safety issue is still unacceptable (to say the least). Not only were all employees told to take steps like this to get problems solved by the CEO himself, but the strong-arm nature of a quick firing in response, and then threatening her team with deportation is beyond the pale.

While we only have Balan’s words as evidence for the deportation threat, we have since seen Musk take vindictive actions against entire teams, and seen his anti-immigrant attitudes including the desire to deport people illegally.

Recently Musk fired the entire supercharger team, in what was probably the dumbest business decision Tesla has ever made, reportedly because Rebecca Tinucci, a star of the auto industry and the head of the most successful team in Tesla, refused to fire more people.

(Incidentally, another longtime Tesla exec who was fired at the same time as the whole Supercharger team, Daniel Ho, had previously praised Balan, saying “without creative engineers like you, this place would be just another car company”)

And Musk is also the largest financial backer of an administration that is currently illegally deporting US citizens to a prison famous for beatings, overcrowding and food deprivation that some have called a place to “dispose of people without formally applying the death penalty.”

He has spent much of his public advocacy in recent years showing racist and anti-immigrant attitudes, including support for German neo-Nazis and agreeing with a defense of Hitler’s actions in the Holocaust. He’s focused more on pushing his white supremacist views than on anything to do with EVs and climate change (which he’s now pushing denial of), thus working against Tesla’s mission.

So, making deportation threats against immigrants does not seem out of character, despite Musk being a formerly “illegal” immigrant himself.

Either way, we look forward to hearing more about this case as it goes on, in the hopes that it can both elucidate more for the public what the real Elon Musk is like, and possibly do something to reduce, ever so slightly, the abuse of the arbitration system by companies.

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