Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI
291 points by nycdatasci 2 hours ago | 145 comments

granzymes 39 minutes ago
Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance:

Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.

Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.

The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.

It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.

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granzymes 32 minutes ago
My own thoughts:

If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point.

His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019.

Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into Tesla. His complaints fell flat for me given the number of emails where he said that a non-profit was likely a mistake.

This is technical, but Musk clearly never created a charitable trust, which was a precondition for his claims. His funds were donated for general use by OpenAI, not for any specific use that would allow him to claim breach of charitable trust. Also, all of his funds were spent by no later than 2020 which is before his alleged breach in 2023.

Musk unreasonably delayed bringing this case until the success of ChatGPT and starting a competing AI company, and he had unclean hands because he attempted to sabotage OpenAI repeatedly by poaching its key staff while on the board.

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john_builds 7 minutes ago
thanks for the snippet
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Arodex 34 minutes ago
>Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.

Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".

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granzymes 29 minutes ago
The statute of limitations exists to prevent unreasonable delay, to protect defendants from prejudice due to loss of evidence to the passage of time, and to recognize that people who are injured tend to complain immediately and not sit on their claims.

This case demonstrates why. Musk only complained after OpenAI was commercially successful with ChatGPT and after he started a competing effort. He repeatedly said “I do not know” and “I do not recall” on the stand, and argued that the passage of time made it hard for him to remember facts that would have been helpful for OpenAI.

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Arodex 25 minutes ago
I know why statutes of limitation exist. I was wondering why it applied here. Apparently it wasn't completely straightforward, as nine jurors were needed to reach a decision on that point, instead of a single judge or even clerk.
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granzymes 22 minutes ago
Whether the statute of limitations applies is a question of fact, and is therefore reserved for the fact-finder which in this case was the jury.
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ryandrake 4 minutes ago
It seems to me like justice should be about right vs wrong and illegal vs legal, and not “did you fill out form 27B/6 on time?” Dismissing a case on these kinds of trivial procedural grounds seems like the court just doesn’t want to do its job.
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granzymes 29 seconds ago
The statute of limitations is not a trivial issue. Defendants have rights just as much as plaintiffs do, and our justice system does not allow plaintiffs to unreasonably delay in bringing their claims.
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toast0 11 minutes ago
IMHO, whether (and which) statue of limitations applies is a question of law, whether said time limit has passed is a question of fact. I'd like to read the jury instructions and verdict, but I didn't see a link to them anywhere.

I guess there could be a question of fact in a case where the statues of limitation differ for different injuries, and the factual question is which injury was it.

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chipsrafferty 30 minutes ago
There are multiple reasons why statutes of limitations exist, one of them being that the further away in time, the harder it is to prove evidence. Witnesses may have died, or their memory may be more faulty.
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hnfong 26 minutes ago
Also criminal liability is generally handled differently. Some jurisdictions have no limit, and where the limits exist for criminal liability, limitations on serious crimes can be much longer than the civil ones.
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hn_acc1 14 minutes ago
This is not a robbery, though. Not in the "break in and steal stuff from your house multiple times" situation. Legally, each of those are separate events, and one doesn't really affect the other unless it's all the same person, and the repetition is used to get a stronger case, etc.
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kstrauser 23 minutes ago
Because there has to be some point. It's unjust to allow someone to sue 30 years later, as everyone would have a sword of Damocles hanging over their head waiting for the right moment to strike. And in general, if you didn't realize you were robbed for 3 years, perhaps it's the case that you weren't actually robbed.
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skeptic_ai 19 minutes ago
So if I exchange your Rolex with a fake one and then you try to sell after 3 years and you notice it’s fake, it’s fine for you?
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granzymes 17 minutes ago
The statute of limitations takes into account when the plaintiff discovered or with reasonable diligence should have discovered their injury.

In this case, the jury found that Musk knew or should have known of his alleged injury prior to 2021.

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eftychis 9 minutes ago
There is the notion of equitable estoppel, that would *perhaps*, depending on the facts, apply which stops a defendant, who for instance concealed or committed certain acts of fraud, from raising the statute of limitations defense.

Edit: to augment the sibling comment.

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mustaphah 2 hours ago
The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.
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dzonga 58 minutes ago
Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him.

e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.

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Freedom2 46 minutes ago
I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
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rufo 13 minutes ago
My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
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exe34 54 minutes ago
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
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bonesss 48 minutes ago
As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.

As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.

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nebula8804 27 minutes ago
Too early to write closing arguments on this. A vengeful future administration might make us realize that the entire transaction was a huge mistake.
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MBCook 19 minutes ago
True. There is a “so far” on that.
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BeetleB 35 minutes ago
> Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.

That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.

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aniviacat 20 minutes ago
If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?
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BeetleB 7 minutes ago
By a tad. SpaceX's worth is an order of magnitude more than Twitter's debt. I doubt any serious person considering buying shares in SpaceX will spend even a moment worrying about Twitter.
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saalweachter 5 minutes ago
Musk only owns 42% of SpaceX; he only takes 42% of the loss as if he continued to own Twitter outright.
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ngruhn 47 minutes ago
On the other hand, buying twitter was the turning point for his public image. Before that, he was Tony Stark. Now he's Lex Luthor.
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nebula8804 25 minutes ago
Key word being public. People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. I remember the circumstances that led to the creation of /r/realtesla.
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mschuster91 3 minutes ago
> People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space.

The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.

Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show, the "legitimate" bluecheck verification program being all but dead for new applicants. People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.

What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates.

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hn_acc1 12 minutes ago
Is he though? I find he still has a STRONG positive image among younger tech people..
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the_doctah 24 minutes ago
And all he really did was gut the censorship engine.
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pesus 22 minutes ago
Is that what we're calling allowing CSAM and promoting white supremacist rhetoric?
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tahoeskibum 54 minutes ago
Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
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outside2344 46 minutes ago
And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
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shimman 45 minutes ago
Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.
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the_doctah 23 minutes ago
Needs context otherwise you appear hysterical.
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blurbleblurble 42 minutes ago
I don't believe in racial essentialism myself but I know someone who does

*ducks to dodge downvotes for not only making a bad dad joke but a political one*

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mustaphah 55 minutes ago
Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
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tombert 26 minutes ago
I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
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jjordan 46 minutes ago
There was no decision made on this basis. It was dismissed entirely due to the elapsed statute of limitations.
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ls612 42 minutes ago
He lost the lawsuit on a legal technicality about the statute of limitations not on substantive grounds.
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tahoeskibum 55 minutes ago
Anybody read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
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pj_mukh 39 minutes ago
Wait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true.

If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.

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lqstuart 4 minutes ago
Maybe one of the scientists who cashed out 8 figures will file a suit that OpenAI has wronged them by depriving them of the joy of working
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modeless 44 minutes ago
Yeah people are going to make up a lot of reasons why Elon lost that have nothing to do with the actual and very simple reason.
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dcow 43 minutes ago
Right. Nobody cares whether Musk won or lost (well maybe a few do). People actually following the case wanted to know whether OpenAI would be held in any way accountable for anything. And this “resolution” does not satisfy. Before Musk got involved, what happened at OpenAI was a BigProblem for many people.
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2b3a51 2 hours ago
Reached for comment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead counsel Marc Toberoff said, “One word: Appeal.”

One wonders on what grounds?

In the UK, in a civil case like this, the judge I think comments on the likelihood of an appeal avenue once the verdict has been reached.

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ryandrake 2 hours ago
To be fair, is there any corporation or high net worth individual ever who, after losing a lawsuit, said “You know what, we accept the court’s decision that we were wrong and will be reflecting on how to do better in the future.”

Never. That never ever happens.

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Legend2440 2 hours ago
On the grounds of "I have infinite money and lawyers to drag this thing out forever, whether I'll win or not."
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2b3a51 56 minutes ago
Nothing like 'vexatious litigation' in the US?

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants

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Legend2440 52 minutes ago
There is, but it's a pretty high bar to clear. Merely exhausting one's appeals does not qualify as vexatious. He could keep going for years as long as his lawyers make vaguely plausible arguments each time.
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artninja1988 52 minutes ago
To any lawyers in here, is there an argument to be made for the statue of limitations not to apply here
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duskwuff 56 minutes ago
> One wonders on what grounds?

Invent a time machine; send a lawyer back to file a new lawsuit within the statute of limitations.

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pixl97 52 minutes ago
Typically if they bring up a case like this a judge again will get pissy and dismiss it with prejudice.

You can try to file it again, but that gets to the point where the judge can throw your ass directly in jail for 30 days, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.

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AnimalMuppet 44 seconds ago
Filing the same lawsuit a second time is different. They're talking about appealing the decision in this case. You don't get tossed in jail for that.

But (at least in the US), the appeals court does not have to accept your appeal. When you file the appeal, you have to give them enough reason for them to even listen to your appeal, instead of rejecting it from the first filing.

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colechristensen 50 minutes ago
He lost on the grounds of a statue of limitations defense which is exactly the kind of thing which is easily appealable.
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qyph 43 minutes ago
Are you a lawyer? IANAL but my understanding is it would be difficult for an appeal to succeed. Appeals courts only evaluate review matters of law, not of fact. Whether is has been more than the 3 year limit the statute of limitations places is a matter of fact I think. And the advisory jury makes this much harder to appeal. What do you think the grounds for appeal will be?
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colechristensen 7 minutes ago
I'm not saying it will succeed, but what counts as having passed the statue of limitations and various workarounds and modifications of the time period particularly in cases like this where the acts in question weren't necessarily a single event but progressive activity is the kind of question which is the bread and butter of an appeals court.
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frankchn 26 minutes ago
In this case, I think it is a jury's finding of fact re: the statute of limitations. Unless the appellate court finds that the trial court and jury is clearly erroneous, it will usually give significant deference to that finding.
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dctoedt 19 minutes ago
It's even harder than "clearly erroneous" (the standard applied when a judge makes fact findings without a jury). Under the Seventh Amendment, if a hypothetical reasonable jury could have reached the result that the actual jury did, then that's the ball game [0], even if the trial judge or appellate-court judges would have reached a different result.

[0] Assuming that the trial judge didn't materially screw up in admitting or excluding evidence, or in instructing the jury about the law, and also assuming no proof of juror bias or improper influence.

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enraged_camel 31 minutes ago
Pretty sure it's the opposite: appeals mostly only work when the decision is not clear cut, and the statute of limitations is.
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atom_arranger 13 minutes ago
Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?

I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.

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granzymes 12 minutes ago
This case sets no precedent one way or the other on that question. The IP was transferred to the for-profit for fair value in 2019, and Musk never argued otherwise in this case.

The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.

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alok-g 29 minutes ago
The lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?
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cityofdelusion 39 minutes ago
This should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.
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thesdev 33 minutes ago
I hope he appeals. Not cheering for Musk, cheering for the fight.
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lapetitejort 3 minutes ago
Cross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.
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enraged_camel 32 minutes ago
There's nothing to appeal. Statute of limitations is... just that.
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paulpauper 28 minutes ago
For criminal cases at least, the statue of limitations is not set in stone. But probably for civil, its much more cut and dry.
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jgalt212 25 minutes ago
Who cares if the plaintiff or defendant won? The trial had great expository value regarding all the players involved.
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tptacek 51 minutes ago
I think a lot about how there's a very plausible alternate history where Elon Musk controls most of the frontier of AI.
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Aurornis 45 minutes ago
I've thought about that, too, but it would require that all of the key individuals at OpenAI would have been willing to stay at OpenAI under his ownership.

That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.

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Hikikomori 41 minutes ago
They're willing to work under the current snake, even got him back after he was removed, so why not musk?
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saynay 7 minutes ago
Haven't they hemorrhaged a lot of the founding talent in the years since? Now it is full of ex-Meta ad-tech people trying to find a way to make it actually turn a profit.
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sanderjd 46 minutes ago
There but for the grace of god go we...
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dragontamer 45 minutes ago
You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it.

It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.

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fastball 34 minutes ago
Tesla wasn't "successful" before he "took it over" (read: invested most of their seed capital and ran the actual day-to-day operations).

SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...

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pizzafeelsright 33 minutes ago
10 years returns S&P 500 (index of all those better than Musk): 261% Tesla: 2700%

Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.

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Calavar 28 minutes ago
GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?

Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.

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filoleg 7 minutes ago
> GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?

GME did not beat the S&P500 over the past 10 years, and it is just the evidence of you needing to verify your claims before making them.

Over the past 5 years[0]: S&P500 up by 77%, GME down by 50%.

Over the past 10 years: S&P500 up by 260%, GME up by 207%.

GME performance in the past 10 years doesn't indicate that Ryan Cohen is a business genius. It indicates that he runs a company that has been underperforming the market for at least the past decade.

0. https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?windo...

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paulpauper 27 minutes ago
This is what he Grok hopes to become, but probably too late
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HardwareLust 42 minutes ago
And how much worse things would be if that had come to pass?
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geek_at 40 minutes ago
why would he run Anthropic?
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tptacek 20 minutes ago
As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)
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cubefox 36 minutes ago
So you are allowed to violate the law if you aren't sued quickly enough.
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pocksuppet 32 minutes ago
Yes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.
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cubefox 25 minutes ago
What Altman and Brockman did still seems highly unethical.
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johnbellone 22 minutes ago
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
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tskj 42 minutes ago
Annoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?
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energy123 39 minutes ago
Laws were broken?
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shevy-java 6 minutes ago
Both should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases.

Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".

We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.

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paxys 60 minutes ago
> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.

Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.

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sdenton4 60 minutes ago
A dismissal on technical grounds, which is also a complete loss.
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Deprogrammer9 7 minutes ago
Nazi boy lost yet again.
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mrcwinn 2 hours ago
Advice for Elon: you can actually use ChatGPT on the web or the desktop app to schedule reminders for you, like "file lawsuit against OpenAI."
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jordanb 2 hours ago
The consequences of relying on grok..
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LarsDu88 58 minutes ago
Did you not read the article at all? He had to do this in 2021, well before such GPT apps existed.
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freejazz 52 minutes ago
That's not what the article stated. The jury had to find that the harms occurred prior to certain dates in 2021, not that Musk had to file before then.
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dirtbagskier 2 hours ago
[dead]
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mugivarra69 53 minutes ago
[dead]
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trilogic 2 hours ago
[flagged]
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rvz 2 hours ago
Sam is just too good at this game and as I said before [0] is far worse than Elon and also outsmarted him.

Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651664

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an0malous 37 minutes ago
I’m not a Sam Altman fan, but I think it’s debatable if he’s worse than the guy who did a sieg heil at a political rally
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armchairhacker 2 hours ago
Why do you think Sam is worse than Elon?
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cozzyd 54 minutes ago
Presumably better at being devious. Elon is sloppy...
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ryandvm 20 minutes ago
There's something to be said for the fact that the current crop of plutocrats just show their whole asses.
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iamkrazy 2 hours ago
It's funny how they are still calling it "open"AI.
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shagie 58 minutes ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20160220093339/https://openai.co...

> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.

> Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.

---

https://web.archive.org/web/20180323231344/https://openai.co...

> We publish at top machine learning conferences, open-source software tools for accelerating AI research, and release blog posts to communicate our research. We will not keep information private for private benefit, but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns.

---

It's about open research.

https://openai.com/research/index/

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Analemma_ 52 minutes ago
This was pretty much the quality of Elon's argumentation in court. Turns out "getting sick dunks" wins likes on Twitter, but it doesn't win lawsuits.
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dbbk 2 hours ago
They have open models
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wotsdat 60 minutes ago
lol
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foofyter 2 hours ago
He didn’t lose anything, it was a technicality that is up for interpretation. It’ll be appealed for sure. Both sides would agree with that.
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russellbrandom 2 hours ago
He lost in the sense that he filed a lawsuit and that lawsuit was dismissed.

It seems like a reasonable way to use the word, no?

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donkyrf 2 hours ago
Obviously so.

You're either responding to an LLM or a badly malfunctioning human.

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stirfish 54 minutes ago
An account that's two minutes old, defending Elon Musk in a way that makes no sense.
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foofyter 51 minutes ago
Attacking me instead of looking at the evidence makes no sense.
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jonlucc 33 minutes ago
You didn't cite any to look at?
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cgag 15 minutes ago
Hmm, I wonder why the title of the article doesn’t say the lawsuit was dismissed or why.
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petesergeant 55 minutes ago
I think it's fair to say the headline misleads, even if technically accurate. My initial read was that he had lost on the merits of the case, and not "jury rules Musk sued too late".
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Legend2440 2 hours ago
He can appeal if he wants to, but if he had a good argument for why the statute of limitations shouldn't apply, he would already have brought it up.

Odds of him winning on appeal are low.

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LastTrain 52 minutes ago
Sure, losing is winning. I mean what are words anyway?
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jhatemyjob 40 minutes ago
Yep. Headline is clickbait. Never bet against Elon.
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loxodrome 57 minutes ago
Ending a trial over a bureaucratic technicality is not good justice.
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paxys 55 minutes ago
Statute of limitations is not a "bureaucratic technicality", it is the law.
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Arodex 38 minutes ago
Then why did the American justice system needed nine jurors when a clerk could have sufficed?

The American judicial system is completely Byzantine and rotten, from top to bottom. Worse than many third world countries.

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jonlucc 27 minutes ago
There are questions of fact involved, and the judge empaneled the jury to resolve the factual dispute. In this case, when did the clock on SoL start ticking? Was it tolled for any amount of time to extend the date? Those are more than just counting 3 years on a calendar.
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wagwang 49 minutes ago
Can some lawyer explain the rationale of statute of limitations? Like why does a robber get to get away with the crime if they are able to evade the police for x number of years. Is it just because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything?
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throwway120385 41 minutes ago
The easier scenario to think about where statutes of limitation really make sense is in collection of payment through the court system. Suppose you buy something on post-payment terms and then the supplier bumbles around forgetting to bill you for it. At what point should you reasonably be expected to pay the bill? In my state you get 7 years, and I think that's probably pretty generous because it covers the entire tab from when you get the thing to when you start a proceeding in court.

For a robbery that doesn't involve a weapon I think we should generally forgive and forget if it's been long enough. Nobody cared enough to bring action in court for whatever reason, and it would be awful for someone in their 40's to be jailed and brought into court for something that happened in their 20's. At that point if the government fails to prosecute that's on them, and on us for failing to hold them accountable. But 20 years is a long time and people can change over that timespan, so it probably doesn't make sense to hold a grudge for that long.

There are especially egregious crimes that have no statute of limitations like murder and sexual assault, but we might find our society better off for keeping the statute of limitations for injuries that we can recover from.

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badlibrarian 37 minutes ago
Evidence degrades, memories fade, witnesses die. Generally the worse the crime, the longer the statute of limitations. Murder in most places has no limit.

Also, if someone hasn't committed a crime in, say, 20 years, there's questionable need to lock them up for three years to deter the behavior. Goal is to optimize the overall system even if some people slip through the cracks.

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paxys 10 minutes ago
If they were evading the police then the statute of limitations would not apply, because the case would stay active the entire time.

It is instead relevant if the state decides not to charge you for a crime but comes back to you decades later and goes "we changed our mind, now you have a week to come up with a defense".

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qyph 37 minutes ago
Not a lawyer but generally it is as you say: "because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything". It's not fair to have a trial when the evidence is unreliable because of the flow of time.

Encouraging timely action is another factor. Generally people with real harms will file sooner than later, otherwise why wait?

It's also to grant peace of mind -- so people can stop worrying about potential litigation after some amount of time.

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nradov 39 minutes ago
Are you asking about criminal or civil law? This was a civil case. The general reason for imposing filing time limits is that it's better for businesses and society in general to have certainty about outcomes rather than perfect justice. If a plaintiff tries to dredge up old issues from many years ago it just wastes everyone's time and clogs up the court system.
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repelsteeltje 31 minutes ago
+1

Wasting everyone's time and clogging up the court system perfectly describes the heart of this matter. Plain bullying and hype.

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sobellian 34 minutes ago
Not a lawyer, but - fugitives don't get to run the clock on statute of limitations.
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tim333 38 minutes ago
To a large extent.
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wvenable 36 minutes ago
That's definitely one of the reasons; evidence gets worse over time. Memories fade, witnesses die or become unavailable, documents get lost or destroyed, and physical evidence degrades. In this case specifically which is centred around a lot of discovery of emails and text chats, you can imagine that in other 5-10 years a lot of that discovery might become impossible to get and could drastically alter the outcome of the case.

It's also generally considered unfair for someone to have an indefinite threat of being sued or prosecuted hanging over them when their ability to defend themselves gets weaker over time. Limitations discourage strategic delays or using old claims as leverage far into the future. Without limitation periods, old business transactions could be reopened forever, estates could never fully settle, people and businesses would face constant uncertainty.

Ultimately, the courts are just better at resolving current disputes than reconstructing old ones.

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jacobp100 49 minutes ago
It can be both
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dcow 48 minutes ago
I am absolutely certain that if Sam was suing xAI and the case got dismissed on a technicality people would be lined up with screeds about the injustice of the situation.
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tim333 30 minutes ago
I think it would depend on the facts of the case. This one seemed a bit of a non case. Quote from a law expert in the FT which I thought good:

>the spectacle of these two multibillionaires fighting about power and money has distorted and obscured what the law is meant to care about here, which is the public interest

(https://www.ft.com/content/846479c8-4ab0-4812-a1d5-08abdd8b9...)

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freejazz 41 minutes ago
That's just a point about how (annoying) Sam-boosters are.
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newaccountman2 36 minutes ago
If you consider a statute of limitations to be a mere bureaucratic technicality, then you might as well say we shouldn't have the entire Anglo-American legal system.

Moreover, there is no "justice" here either way--it's just rich people suing each other.

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freejazz 53 minutes ago
The jury found against Musk - what exactly are you talking about?
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pixl97 51 minutes ago
Like any case involving legal matters, they are talking about things they deeply do not understand.
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freejazz 42 minutes ago
More shocking than the sheer incorrectness of the legal analysis I see here often is the confidence with which it is offered.
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jdw64 36 minutes ago
It turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified
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