TSLA

The billionaire through tweets and litigation is framing his rivals as fundamentally flawed and unworthy: Google is woke, Microsoft MSFT -1.84%decrease; red down pointing triangle is overreaching and Sam Altman is two-faced.

A 35-page complaint filed in a San Francisco court late Thursday is built on what Musk describes as the hypocrisy of Altman. According to the lawsuit, when Altman and Musk started OpenAI years ago they agreed it would be a not-for-profit entity to counter the greed of Google—only to have OpenAI, under Altman’s control, later pivot toward moneymaking ventures with Microsoft.

Musk has also acknowledged the spending war to fund AI companies’ development, saying recently it will take “at least single digit billions in hardware to have a seat at the adult table rather than the kiddies’ table and next year it’s probably in the tens of billions of hardware to remain at the adults’ table.”

The expense behind creating the technology is what necessitated OpenAI’s evolution as an organization beyond being a simple not-for-profit, Altman has said.

OpenAI concluded it wasn’t equipped to operate as a not-for-profit because it was becoming too costly for the amounts of computer power needed to train the software that mimics the way humans think.

“No one wanted to fund this in any way,” Altman told The Wall Street Journal last year. “It was a really hard time.”

• 01/06/2024 – Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX – WSJ

Some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine—could harm his companies

• 06/17/2023 – Behind Elon Musk’s Management Philosophy: First Principles – WSJ

Linda Yaccarino understands the assignment.

Or at least that is what her first staff-wide memo as Twitter CEO suggests. In it, she showed she was in tune with a key management philosophy of her new boss, Elon Musk. That is his total embrace of the so-called first principles approach for problem solving, a mixture of physics and philosophical reasoning that breaks issues into their very basics and doesn’t simply rely on what has been done before.

“When you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach,” Musk said in 2013 during a TED talk. “Good physics is really sort of figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics.”

The challenge, according to Musk, is that it is easier to make decisions by looking at previous experiences, past practices or, as he describes it, analogy. These can be mental shortcuts. That is fine for most things in life. But that approach, he said, can be limiting when it comes to discovering something new.

For breakthroughs, he advocates the first principles approach. In the most basic sense, Musk has described the approach as such: “Boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘OK, what are we sure is true, or as sure as possible is true?’ And then reason up from there.”

In a telling sign of how much Musk believes in first principles, he insisted his children be educated in its way of thinking, setting up Ad Astra School in 2014 built around that philosophy. “It’s so foundational to Elon,” Joshua Dahn, the school’s co-founder, said in an interview.

Creating the school, which served children ages 8 through 14 at SpaceX headquarters until 2020, required Dahn to deploy first principles thinking at every step.

“Part of the superpower is once you understand the first principles approach—and you expect Elon to question you on it along those lines—then there’s no other path if you’re going to find success other than to sort of operate that way,” Dahn said.

The first principles process involves envisioning what ultimate success looks like and then being open to any path that leads there. Even something so ingrained in traditional schooling, such as accreditation, showed how Musk’s mind applied first principles reasoning in decision making, raising very simple questions: “What’s accreditation? Why does it exist? What’s it for? What’s the cost? What’s the opportunity cost of doing that?”

And the answers can’t simply be: That is what other schools do.

“Reasoning by analogy, especially in the early days, is the thing that’s a total killer,” Dahn said.

Musk’s business successes and his often-stated focus on first principles have sparked interest in others. James Clear, the bestselling self-help author, has written about the approach, writing that while great minds from Aristotle to Johannes Gutenberg have employed such reasoning, “no one embodies the philosophy of first principles thinking more effectively” than Musk.

Ad Astra closed at SpaceX in Hawthorne, Calif., when Musk’s children moved on. Dahn has since spun off his work into Astra Nova School, an online offering for a broader population of students.

Still, it isn’t an easy approach. For Musk’s engineers, the work of unlearning assumptions can be challenging, especially at times when the tried-and-true method would be quicker.

Musk lectured on first principles at his children’s school years ago, diving into his reasoning behind starting SpaceX, including the math behind a rocket and the economics behind its costs.