On October 23rd, 2022, Elon Musk texted Sam Altman a link to a story from The Information about OpenAI seeking more funding from Microsoft. This was five weeks before ChatGPT arrived, and about five months before Musk launched xAI. “I was disturbed to see OpenAI with a $20 billion valuation,” Musk wrote then. “De facto, I provided almost all the seed A and most of B round funding.”
That’s the core allegation underlying the spectacle that’s been playing out in federal court, and across our Twitter timelines, for the past two weeks. Musk alleges both he and the entire world were duped by OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit, betrayed by the company’s decision to create a for-profit entity, and that OpenAI and its founders have been unjustly enriched thanks to their initial deception and subsequent maneuvers to make OpenAI one of the most valuable for-profit ventures on earth (though actual profits may still be theoretical).
The time and energy required to maintain hardcore sports fandom is barely rational and rarely worth the investment. On the other hand, if I were to explain to an uninitiated stranger why it’s nevertheless a good deal, I would start with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
They are a maddening basketball team, full of clunky offense and bad decisions that will make you miserable, but also replete with the sort of indelible characters that make the sport feel twice as alive and every playoff win turn borderline euphoric. One week ago, only days after calling out every Denver Nuggets player by name, Jaden McDaniels exploited Nikola Jokic’s matador rim protection to put up 32 points and 10 rebounds on 13-25 shooting, all while ruining Jamal Murray’s life on defense. It was my favorite game anyone’s played all season.
Xi Jinping is fond of saying that the world is undergoing changes unseen in a century, and on that one, he’s not wrong. Alliances are shifting, cold war thinking informs superpower activity on every continent (including Antarctica), and trade barriers once thought regressive and self-destructive are now treated as essential (albeit unfortunate) planks of any coherent security platform. And in the middle of that environment, I have a simple request for Western media institutions and public intellectuals all over the world: please, stop telling me that Chinese leaders are playing the long game.
