With OpenAI, Musk’s hegemony has arrived
Sam Altman, the head of the US $500 billion project”Stargate” and the CEO of OpenAI, never imagined that he had only been in this position for more than half a month and was not sitting on a hot seat, elon Musk”America is 9,000 years old” is about to take the bench. Musk announced a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI on Feb. 10, sending lawyer Mark toberov directly to OpenAI’s board the same day.
At first, Altmann seemed unaware that he was in crisis. His immediate response on social media was, “No, thank you, but if you’d like, we’d like to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion.” Ironically, Altmann’s platform, twitter, now owned by Elon Musk, is now called X.
Musk immediately hit back, calling him”Altmann the liar” and accompanying a photograph of Altmann in court proceedings. In the photo, Altmann looks helpless with her eyes wide open.
Musk declared, “It’s time to return OpenAI to the open-source, security-centric, do-good organization it once was.”.
Musk explicitly said he was buying OpenAI for what he called”Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of mankind.”. However, the melon-eating masses have sharp eyes and don’t think so. People are whispering: Musk just wants to go back and get what he wants. In the history of OpenAI, Elon Musk could have had a piece of the action. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altmann and others, was a co-founder and a key early funder. However, Elon Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after”Disagreements over the direction of the company”. We don’t know exactly what the term”Philosophical dissonance” means, but to be fair, OpenAI wasn’t making money back then. It wasn’t until Nov. 30,2022, when CHATGPT came out of nowhere and OpenAI was at the forefront of AI development, that Musk regretted it.
Musk, of course, has never said he has any regrets; he has simply repeatedly denounced OpenAI for its profit maximization focus, which runs counter to its original mission. Then, on the 2023 of July 12th, Musk launched his own AI company, XAI, with a big Grok model and occasional scolding of OpenAI. However, the development of XAI has not been smooth. There have been few takers for Grok2, and the much-hyped Grok3 has been slow to come out, WWE The Great n Bash by the Chinese mega-model DeepSeek. Xai is already struggling with slow technological progress and a brain drain. Musk has launched a series of lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing it of antitrust violations and trying to stop its transformation into a for-profit company. Elon Musk, meanwhile, is waiting for a chance to make his mark in artificial intelligence.
Donald Trump’s victory certainly gives Elon Musk plenty of confidence. Appointed head of the Department for government efficiency, he wielded power in the United States from one man to ten thousand. That was the result of his $250M Campaign Fund, at a time when Elon Musk was thought to be in full control. But the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk was shocked that the new president had given his old nemesis, Altmann, the biggest prize in technology, the Stargate Project. On Jan. 21, Altmann took center stage with Masayoshi Son of Softbank and Larry Ellison of Oracle. Donald Trump has announced plans to invest up to $500bn over the next four years in American data centres to build the infrastructure for American artificial intelligence projects.
In the US, too, Altmann is no slouch. Although Elon Musk was in a prime position on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration and Altmann was seated in a makeshift conference room, his behind-the-scenes machinations had already taken care of him, he had been planning this for months. During the Biden administration, Altmann was a regular Washington fixture, meeting frequently with White House officials and lawmakers from both parties to help craft AI legislation and maintaining regular contact with Commerce Secretary Remondo. In the general election, he hedged his bets, supporting Democrats while donating to Republican campaigns and keeping in regular contact with Republican lawmakers.
As the election drew near, Altmann relied on the connections of Doug Bergum, Donald Trump’s Interior Minister, Larry Ellison of Oracle and son of softbank, among others, to penetrate Donald Trump’s inner circle, he also had a 25-minute call with Donald Trump days before Donald Trump’s inauguration to finalise future AI infrastructure projects. Elon Musk was left out of the”General direction of artificial intelligence” and the $500 billion prize.
At the end of January, OpenAI’s first $40bn round of funding had arrived. Musk, on the other hand, is still racking his brain in various U. S. departments to”Audit”. Musk laments that he seems to be farther and farther away from his dream! Reach out, Elon Musk’s dream or colonize Mars, reach out into outer space, stretch the limits of human existence. Exploring internally, Musk’s dream is to digitalize human existence, master the core technology of general artificial intelligence, and then dominate the underlying logic of smart cars, brain-computer interfaces, and cyberspace.
And to control everything, you need a Stargate. Is it possible that the name for Elon Musk’s dream does not now belong to him? So Musk will have to take control of OpenAI to regain his voice. Musk, then, came in with $97.4bn and was gung-ho. The acquisition plan, led by Elon Musk and his AI company Xai, includes an investment group made up of close friends of Elon Musk. Some of these firms invested in Tesla when it was young, others have large stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, and still others were founded by musk”Superfans”. Currently, Musk’s lawyer Toberov has said that the acquisition plan is to”Buy OpenAI all the assets.”. Musk’s team is ready to match or outbid any subsequent higher bids, which means that if there is another bid, Elon Musk must follow and win.
Elon Musk is expected to merge the company with its own XAI after buying OpenAI. The end is already in sight — musk has become the Shadow CEO of the White House, weaving his way from department to Department, slashing and dicing, couldn’t he have bought an OpenAI? The irony is that while musk has carved out a sublime historical niche for himself in the US, the ultimate way to acquire a rival company is through traditional American hegemony. As a self-styled”Reformer”, he was finally perfectly integrated into the background of American capital hegemony. The sort of clean-up or takeover that musk is pushing is a replacement for the old hegemony by the new hegemony, and even if the powers that be change, it will still be the same country and the same America. Image from the web