Elon Musk is mad at Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI. Musk has many grievances with the nonprofit research lab, some of which he has brought up repeatedly on podcasts, during television interviews and in social media posts. Among them: Musk thinks ChatGPT, the company’s AI chatbot, is insufficiently conservative (“WokeGPT,” he likes to call it), worries it might somehow lead to the end of the world if the chatbots get out of control and seems to be very frustrated about receiving insufficient credit for OpenAI’s achievements. (“I am the reason OpenAI exists,” he claimed on CNBC last year.)
None of these are necessarily grounds for a legal complaint, which may be why the lawsuit he filed against OpenAI last week focuses on a related, but somewhat different grievance: Musk says he donated money to what he thought was a philanthropic research lab, only to discover it was Silicon Valley’s hottest startup, with an $86 billion valuation and ambitions for a whole lot more.
To analyze the suit, and the feud between two of tech’s most powerful figures, Elon, Inc. called in Bloomberg’s official Elon Musk correspondent, Dana Hull, along with Bloomberg’s unofficial one, Money Stuff author Matt Levine. We are also joined by tech reporter Shirin Ghaffary (and author of the Q&AI newsletter) for a discussion about the merits (or lack thereof) of Musk’s argument and the competitive state of play. We also cover Musk’s fight over pay in Delaware and the new (new?) Tesla Roadster.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Well, Elon Musk is now the richest person on the planet. More than half the satellites in space are owned and controlled by one man. Well, he's a legitimate super genius, I mean legitimate.
He says he's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will be different.
He'll vote Republican.
There is a reason the US government is so reliant on him. Alon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Anything he does, he's fascinating people.
Hey, welcome to Elon, Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's March fifth, twenty twenty four. I'm Max Chafkin in for David Papadopolis. This week we have courtroom drama for you. We're looking at an Elon feud between him and open ai, the maker of chat GBT. Last Thursday, Elon sued Sam Altman, the co founder of open Ai, claiming that he breached his contract by pursuing profit over the public good. The funny thing is that Elon has his own for profit AI company, x dot Ai. So there's some question about whether or not this is like a high minded activity or another sort of brilliant troll by a very troll happy billionaire. We're going to talk about that, and then later in the episode we're going to be talking about another bit of legal action on Elon Musk stocket. The lawyers who got Elon Musk's pay package, the fifty five billion dollar pay package from Tesla, voided they want to be paid get this six billion dollars and they don't want cash, they want Tesla stock. So we will get into all of that, and to do so, we've got a great panel for you. We have gathered Sharene Geffar, who covers AI for Bloomberg. Hey, Dana Hull, now officially Bloomberg's chief Elon Musk reporter, Hello, Dana Hey. And Matt Levine, author of Bloomberg Opinion's Money Stuff newsletter, who always seems to get his vacations interrupted by Elon news Hello Matt.
Yeah, I'm Bloomberg's unofficial Elon Musk correspondent.
So this lawsuit, first, let's start with Sharen. Can you just give us an overview of what is in this complaint? What is Elon Musk alleging?
Yeah, So, basically, Elon is claiming that when he invested in open Ai and made a deal with Sam Altman and the founders of the company that the plan was for open ay to be a nonprofit. And Elon's claim is that open ai has breached this contract and this agreement by turning into a for profit company with you know, heavy investment by Microsoft, and you know, the outcome is he Elon wants to see Openey's research become public and wants to rid open Ai of it agreement with Microsoft.
At this point, Matt, does this make sense? Like, can a nonprofit donor sue a nonprofit for you know, not being sufficiently good to humanity?
Not really? I mean, like normally the enforcement of nonprofit missions is a matter for like the state attorney general, not for individual donors, right, Otherwise you'd all the time see donors saying, you know, I gave one hundred dollars to this charity and they didn't do what I wanted. But so that's why he's bringing a breach of contract action. And it's very strange because they didn't sign any sort of contract, right, Like He's like, well, I have this email from Sam Altman from twenty fifteen that's basically a contract. So it's a bit of a stretch as a legal action.
Yeah, there's an email, I think, and it's like there's this just sort of a bunch of vague principles and then this the articles of incorporation, and I guess there's some maybe additional agreement in Elon's head, Dana. Why is he doing this? I mean, I think it's tempting to just sort of say, like this is just a guy who loves a good stunt, keeping himself in the middle of the news.
I think Elon just always has to be the man in the arena. And Tesla's valuation was all about being an EV company first mover advantage. Now it very much rests on it being an AI company. And he sees Sam as this big threat. I mean Sam is like the golden boy now, right, like raising all this money, and you know he's got this deal with Microsoft Open Ai. He's back, you know, running open Ai. He's supposedly raising money for like a chip venture, and like Elon is very competitive, like he's got to be the alpha male. And if you look at the landscape of AI titans, Sam is like number one, and so Elon is going for the jugular.
Yeah, I mean he's been like a lot of the language in this lawsuit. I noticed from like listening to all these podcasts that Elon's been doing over the last year or so, where he's sort of been, I don't know, kind of grumbling about about not getting enough credit for this and also criticizing open Ai. What is he actually looking for here? Like, what's the endgame? Is there any kind of hope for some kind of resolution that would be you know, advantageous to him.
I guess in his ideal world, what like the whole open ai project falls apart, and like they have to like reveal to the whole world what they're working on, and I mean Stream knows better than I do what the endgame would be here.
Yeah, So Elon's makes an interesting case here that open ai has already reached AGI or artificial general intelligence, this idea of when AI essentially surpasses or matches at least the intelligence of humanity. And you know that that is Openey's mission and has always been right to build AGI, as is Googles, as is several other leading A companies. Elon's making the case in this lawsuit that with GPT four, open Ai has already achieved AGI. And at that point, it actually is in their agreement with Microsoft that open ai and Microsoft's contractual agreements do no longer hold once.
Open ai has reached AGI.
Now open Ai says, no, we are far off from that GPT four. Our latest model is nowhere near being AGI. How does the case in Elon is making which is a bold one, and he actually cites some Microsoft research. It's very interesting where a few Microsoft researchers did do this paper recently saying that we see sparks of AGI in the latest model. So he kind of uses Microsoft's own researchers work to shoe their pail in this suit.
And we should say that open ai has not yet commented on this lawsuit, although Bloomberg did report over the weekend basically a bunch a couple of memos in which they're waving it off, saying it's all bogus met Where do you think this goes? I mean, do you think this could wind up in court? Or is this gonna be one of those lawsuits that I don't know, we just never hear about again.
I mean, he doesn't really settle, and like where are they going to pay him? Like there's no settlement here. Right, So it's going to go to court. My suspicion is that he will lose fairly early on because of sort of basic things like there was no contract, he has no standing to sue, et cetera. But if that's not true, I don't know. I mean, one reason, one strategic reason he might be bringing this lawsuit is because if he gets anywhere, he can get discovery right and he can like find out stuff about the inner workings of open Ai, which is really useful to him as a guy who's building a competitor to open Ai.
And amazing tweet material to you.
Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of lawsuits settle because for most people it is unpleasant and expensive to conduct a lawsuit. For Elon Musk, it's extremely fun and he has a lot of money. So I think that he will end up not winning any substantive relief from this lawsuit, but we'll have a lot of fun doing it.
To me anyway, as a stunt, it's like a win win, right, because on one hand, the judge could say, yes, open Ai got to Agi and therefore it has to give up. It's you know, has to this Microsoft partnership is dead or on the other hand, a judge will have to say, no, your your AI isn't very good, which would also be good for Elon Musk. I think, Matt, how do you rank this in the other sort of pantheon of dubious Elon Musk lawsuits.
I'm sympathetic to this one. Like, I don't think he's gonna win, you know, like I don't think that like there was a contract, and I think, like the legal theory here is dubious. But I look at this as like not a piece of strategy or whatever. I look at it as like he donated tens of millions of dollars to a nonprofit that is now an eighty six billion dollars startup that's raising money and commercializing stuff for MICROSOFTS. And he's like, well, how did that work? Like, I think that's a very reasonable complaint, like not as a legal matter, just as like a you know, personal matter. And so of course he's mad and he's bringing this lot suit. I don't know, I'm sympathetic to that.
He's pointing to some real hypocrisy with open AI, which is that like he's gone Sam Altman has gone around saying, you know, AI is really out of control we got. We gotta save the world from AI, and his solution seems to be putting the AI into like every Microsoft product. And there's something I think Musk kind a quote on this that's been circulating where he said it says, if you gave you know, money to save the Amazon and instead it turned out that the saved Amazon charity was actually just like cutting down trees. Dana, what do you make of that?
I guess on its face, the idea that a nonprofit is now like a financially very lucrative, highly valued part of Microsoft maybe is problematic. I could see the I could see the argument for that, But I think the larger context here is that, like, Elon isn't just like an investor who feels like he was duped. He is a competitor. I mean, he has his own AI company, and this is the same guy. Let us remind everyone who made this big show of like signing a letter saying that AI should be paused while he was like secretly creating his own startup. So, like, I just don't have a lot of empathy for Elon in this regard because he's always got his own interest at play, and right now his own interest is that through X and X dot AI, he's trying to start his own competitor to chat GPT, which is.
GROCK And so yeah, they're two competitors. Actually XAI and Tesla is a competitor right in a sense.
If you take the take the view that like, yeah, Tesla is trying to do full self driving, and like Tesla has all this data and Tesla is training all these models all the time. But I just want to make sure there's you know, as long as everyone realizes that, like you know, Elon is not just like an investor who said that open ai is no longer a nonprofit or is it really a nonprofit? He's like a tech titan who has his own AI ambitions and see Sam as the number one threat to what he's trying to accomplish.
Yeah, Sharine, you're reading on this like as you look at the competitive landscape. You know, we've talked with you on earlier episodes about GROK. This kind of like, you know, kind of surprisingly competent cat GPT clone like cat GPT, but a little less woke. I mean, is this as simple as like he could harm a competitor with this lawsuit? He could He's you know, at the very least, you know, making things a little annoying for Sam Altman, if not worse. I think two things can be true.
I think open ai is clearly a competitor to Elon's company, so he has an incentive there to go up against them. On the other hand, it is true that open ai started as a nonprofit and now it's not, and Elon did donate a lot of money toward it, And so I think that Elon's case brings up some valid questions about the trajectory of open ai. And I think, you know, his personal motivations and ins to can certainly be wrapped into this case. It's hard to separate that out. But I do think this is bringing some really you know, worthwhile questions to surface.
What's like the realistic outcome though, could the judge be like, yes, yes, you know, Gavel, gavel chat, GPT, GPT four is dead. Sorry, you know, and now we have to like use Grock when we're doing Excel or whatever in the future.
I mean, I don't think that the court is going to mandate that you use any certain software, probably certainly not Grock, but I do think I mean, look, I'm not a legal expert. But from the legal analysis I have seen, it seems like certainly this would be a difficult case. But you could essentially force open ai sure to like open source its models, or to go about abiding by its contract in a different way in the way that Elon wants it to, which is to say that now Openey's contract with Microsoft is severed, we have to open just license this stuff to the public, to Elon and anyone else. I think it's more about open sourcing the software of open ai rather than any certain person using any certain tool.
So, like Matt's saying, a public good right right.
One thing I think is interested about this case is that like Sam Altman and Elon Musk that got together to found a nonprofit. These are guys who are like so deeply part of like the startup tech silicon value ecosystem, where like like Elon Musk clearly thinks he's doing a lot of good for the world by starting for profit companies. It's just strange that they decided the way to do their most good for the world is by starting a nonprofit because they never had that thought before about all of their other businesses. And like Elon Musk is running his own AI business out of a for profit company. It just feels like everyone here is unfamiliar with what a nonprofit is and uncomfortable with it, and everyone just kind of wants it to be a for profit business. But it gives Elan some some leverage to mess with Sam Altman's for profit nonprofit.
I do think being a nonprofit was part of the pitch that appealed to certain researchers in the AI community. I think we have to remember that, like there's such fierce competition for these people who are are you know, PhDs and really understand AI, and so I do think that was a good way to differentiate what openee was doing compared to Google at the time. And that's really if you look at the history of OPENINGI, it was created as this antidote to Google's private development of potentially this life changing AGI.
So I think that's why it started.
Now, like like you're pointing out, whether everyone really understood what it means to be a nonprofit is a different question.
Yeah. I think Also another thing that was very important to attracting researchers was paying them a lot of money, including in stock options, which you can't really do it a nonprofit and they did anyway, so like, yeah, the for profit is also very important to attracting researchers.
Yeah, absolutely well, and not only that, but like it's not only a form of governance that they're all unfamiliar with, but it's one that they've in previous years talked about how how bad it is, right, Like, Like the whole point, the whole premise of Elon Musk's like thing is that, you know, Silicon Valley, this like startup tech, startup way of doing.
Things is uniquely you know, innovative. It's like it's like basically the way to solve all the world's problems, and you kind of have open AI maybe pursuing that, and like Elon Musk is on the outside of it for a change and is like, I don't know, a little jealous.
Yeah. I think if you asked Elon Musk on any day except last week, who does more good for the world, nonprofits or for profit startups? You would have said for profit startups, right, But then last week it's like nonprofits.
Okay, that's it for AI. We're gonna leave Scharen, let her get back to reporting on this as it develops. Thank you, Sharen. For your time today.
Great, thanks for having me.
All right, let's turn to Delaware, where in January Elon Musk's enormous fifty five billion dollar pay package was invalidated by a judge and now we have a new fight over how much the lawyers who won that class action lawsuit are going to get paid. And I just I read this in Matt's newsletter. The plaintiff lawyers want to be paid in stock. I believe six billion dollars in Tesla stock. Matt, you wrote, the obvious thing to say is this is absurd.
It's a lot of money for taking away his pay package. Like what I said was that you know, Tesla's shareholders did vote to give Elan Musk fifty six billion dollars of Tesla's stock if he could raise Tesla's market cap by like one thousand percent, And then he did do that thing, and they wanted to give him the stock, and these lawyers went to court and clouded it back from him. And now the lawyers are like, we want ten percent of that amount of money. Now, have they raised Tesla's market cap by six hundred million dollars, No, they have not, or even by sixty billion dollars. So it is a strange. It's a very large ask.
It's like the largest like lawyer fee that anyone has ever asked for. I mean, what other in what other scenario has any has any plaintiff lawyer asked for six billion dollars worth of stock?
Like never like it?
Well, I mean their argument is they got fifty six billion dollars of value for the shareholders.
Yeah, but Anne Lipton was telling me, telling us that this is like the largest fee request she's ever heard of, and yeah, it's absurd, but it's also cheaper than like most lawyers feed. Right, Like usually if you win, you get like thirty percent of like the final judgment, and this would be like eleven percent. So like it's like absurdly large and yet less than what most lawyers get. And the plaintiffs lawyers are arguing that, like they don't want to cripple Tesla, they don't want Tesla to have to give them six billion in cash, so they just really like to have six billion worth of stock, which everyone is like outraged about it. I mean, Elon is like this is criminal, and all the fans and a lot of TESL executives are like on x al weekend, just talking about how ridiculous it is.
Is there any precedent? Like do people ever like sue Kroger for slipping and falling and then get Kroger shares? Like does this ever happen where you get shares in the company you sue?
Yeah, Like especially those bankruptcies, tobacco bankruptcies. Like the answer is, if you like take all of a company's money, then you get shares. Because they don't have any money. That's not the case here, but like, but yes, Like they don't want to cause financial distress by taking six billion dollars in cash from Tesla, and so the only way for them to ask for an absolutely absurd size of award is by asking for it in stock rather than cash. Like that's what's happening here. They don't want to stock. They just they can't with a straight face ask for six billion dollars of cash, so they're asking for stock.
It really plays into kind of Elon Musk's narrative about this case, right, because he has said all along, this is just the lawyers. You know, this pay package actually made Tesla stronger, and now Dana you have the lawyers essentially like playing right, into his hand at least his sort of social media his like social media pattern.
Yeah, and I mean and Elon does have a point, Like the plaineiff here is like a pocket plane iff. I mean it really is the law firm that took this on and you know, like had a rare win. I mean, Elon almost never loses in any kind of court. And you know, not only is he pissed about it, but it'll be interesting to see what happens, Like the judge is going to have to have a hearing on this fee request and there's going to be scores of objections and is she gonna knock down the fee or go along with it. I mean it's hard for me to imagine her going along with a fee of this size. But I mean it was this rare you know, like his pay package was this like moonshot, unheralded, unprecedented pay package. Now we have the same kind of moonshot unprecedented fever requests. I don't know, Matt, do you what do you think? Oh?
Yeah, I mean you're completely right, Like this is this is an entrepreneurial law firm that is in the business of finding problems with companies and seeing if it can you know, spin up some cash for itself by identifying those problems. And if you were in a case like this that they put a lot of time and effort into and took a lot of risk because it's you know, it's a long shot case. If you win a case like this, you do owe it to yourself to ask for six billion dollars. Right, you may not get the six billion dollars, but like you'd feel like a fool if you didn't ask, because like, right, it's modest. That's like only ten percent of the amount that recovered, and they did such a great job for shoulders, it'd be crazy not to ask for it. I assume they expect it to be cut back to some somewhat more reasonable number. But if you start high, you get cut back to a still very large number.
So like, like it'll still be enormous, but not six billion.
It'll buy all of them a lot of yachts. Yeah, I mean, it's like this, This is not like an industrial company that nude to invest you know, like this is like you know a dozen lawyers or whatever. Right, Like they'll they'll they'll have a nice you know Christmas this year.
So there have two questions for both of you. One is, has Elon appealed? I know we've been expecting him to appeal, and then how do they actually get the money back? What does that look like? Are these options? Has he exercised these options? Does he write a fifty five billion dollar check? Or like what does the actual payback look like?
So there's sort of like a sequence of things that have to happen. First, there needs to be a hearing on the sphe request, and then the judge has to enter like her final judgment, and then that starts the thirty day clock by which Elon has to appeal. So he hasn't appealed yet because the clock hasn't started yet, because the judge hasn't entered her final ruling yet, because there hasn't been the hearing on the fee yet. So like we all expect him to appeal, but it's not going to happen till they or the spring, and then the shares get returned to Tesla, like it's a derivative lawsuit. So the sort of argument is that, you know, Elon doesn't have to cut a check, but like all the other shareholders who were deluded by the fact that he got this pay package will now not be deluded because all the shares go back to like the pool, and which is why Elon is surprise surprised, like basically letting it be known that he wants a new pay.
Package, but that's a separate paypack. I mean, his idea right is to have to get the keep the fifty five billion he was already paid and they get a new fifty five billion or something like that.
Regardless of whether he wins or loses on appeal, he still wants another pay package so that he can keep doing AI and robotics. But I mean, it's hard to imagine him winning on appeal. I mean, I don't know. Jeff Feely, our colleague in Delaware, Chance Recurt, doesn't think that Elon is likely to win on appeal, just because the judge's ruling was like this two hundred page opinion that was very carefully written.
You could have objections to this ruling, and I think it's possible to imagine a courd reversing it on appeal. I probably agree that it's less likely than not. By the way, the other thing, like it's not at all or nothing, like he wins on appeal or he gets the fifty five billion taken away. First of all, the fifty five billion number is fake, Like that's it's stock options. He has no stock. The options are not worth fifty five billion number. That was like a number in the disclosure. They're worth a little bit less than that now, but like they've been worth more or less than that as the stock price moves. But also, like the fix here is not necessarily like when on appeal, it's have Tesla give him that pay package again and then maybe also another pay package. Right, Like what this ruling says is that the pay package they gave him in twenty eighteen was invalid. But it's still a company with the board of directors that can make decisions, and if they made a decision, like we think he deserved half of that pay package, Like we take the judge's point that he couldn't deserve fifty five billion, but he deserves thirty billion. And we're going to submit it to a vote to the shareholders. We're going to fix what happened last time where the judge found that the shareholder vote was not fully informed. So we're going to give the sharelders more information about the decision making and We're going to ask the sharelders to vote again to give him thirty billion dollars of options based on his twenty eighteen performance. Like the scharelders vote yes, right, and then it's just the question of, like, well that hold up in court, And like, I think they can do things to fix the problem and they make it more bulletproof in court next time. So I don't think that this is like he gets nothing or he gets fifty five million dollars. And I think even if he loses on appeal, there are ways for Tesla to continue pumping money to him.
If they moved to Texas, right, that could be that could that's one avenue, Right if they move the incorporation of the company to Texas, that's a.
Really complicated avenue where someone will sue to prevent them from moving to Texas, and then we'll have a really really fun court case. But I think even without I think that, like I think the right move strategically and legally is for them to pay him more in Delaware even before trying to move to Texas. But like Elon may not want to hear that advice.
It sort of feels like to me that these two things are connected, these two topics we've been talking about, you know, because Elon is threatening essentially to do his AI stuff outside of Tesla unless he gets another big pay package. At the same time, he's filing this you know, mega lawsuit, super fun, chock full of details and sort of hilarity about how instrumental he was in the creation of open Ad, this super valuable startup. I mean, these two things are related, right, Like this is part all part of some kind of strategy to get the Tesla board to pay him another fifty billion dollars.
I mean, he doesn't need that much strategy. Like he could go to Tesla and be like, please pay me one hundred million dollars and then it'd be like here you go. Now there's like there's some legal strategy in the background where like like, yes, he needs a credible threat so that when they go back to court, he can be like, see, I would have left if they didn't pay me that money.
But do you think it strengthens his case, like like on appeal or whatever, that he's an AI pioneer, that he's clearly he's thought about leaving before, you know, like that this is swirling around it.
A little bit. I think that, like when you read the judge's decision in this case, she's like, you know, they said they needed to pay him this much to retain him, but in fact, he had said things like I'm a Tesla lifeer, I'm never going anywhere. This is my legacy, and so they didn't really need to pay him this much to retain him. And that was all stuff he said in twenty eighteen. Like now you know, now he's like got seven other companies and he's you know, publicly saying how Distractedy is and how how he's lost interest in Tesla. Like they do need to pay him more to retain him. So I think they will have a you know, the next pay package they give him, they will have a better case that they need to do it to motivate him, which is like a double edged sword. It's sort of like it sort of suggests that he is not fulfilling his fiducial i duties to Tesla shareholders in some way. But I think that like probably does help him at the margin.
I also wonder if this is sort of an attempt to just try to bring some real change to Tesla's board. I mean, it seems like the board is really the problem, right, Elon has stack the board with very close friends. They vacation together. I mean, this all came out in testimony. So I wonder if, like part of the judge's role here is to try to push for real governance change. But then that's hard to imagine too, because I just I don't really see a lot of big outsiders coming in and like starting like a board fight with Elon. I mean, it's Elon's board, it always it always has been. And you need a way to motivate Elon, Like how do you motivate the richest person on the planet to stick with the company when he has like a billion startup ideas in his own head and is running He's currently running six companies, and so Tesla has always struggled with how to keep him engaged in Tesla because if he walked completely, like the valuation of that company would be very much in question. And so the board is always wrangled with like, oh, how do we keep Elon engaged? Like how do we keep him here when his first love is clearly SpaceX And it's wild I mean because he is a part time CEO. I mean there's no other who just works part time like this, It's pretty it's pretty amazing how like little time Mealon spends at Tesla. I mean granted, like you know, he would argue that he sleeps there when he needs to and he's working around the clock, but I mean the man hyper focuses, but then he is like a wall and doing his other things.
We're going to go to our ending segment called is this a thing? And in which you too have to tell me is this a thing? And the topic of this as a tweet from Elon Musk on February twenty eighth. Tonight, we radically increase the design goals for the new Tesla Roaster. There will never be another car like this, if you could even call it a car. Tesla slash SpaceX collab production design complete and unveil at the end of the year, aiming to ship next year. Dana, is this real? Yes?
I think it's real. Like, are they gonna stick to the timeline?
No?
But the backdrop of this is that, like byd is now Tesla's biggest competitor. They're the Chinese company that makes a lot of cars. They're like the leader in ev sales, and they also have some kind of like new supercar, like remind everyone. Like Tesla first said that they were working on a next generation roadster in twenty seventeen.
Tesla with a sports called Tesla Royster. It was the foundation of the whole company, was the Tesla Royster. People who asked us for a long time, when are you going to make a new roadster. We are making it now.
I was there at that event that was back in the day when like Tesla invited you know, mainstream financial journalists to their product launches, and it was this awesome event. I mean, Tesla pulled out all the stops. It was in La Fronds von Wholshausen, the lead designer for Tesla, was actually like in the roadster as it came back out of the back of the semi. But what's weird to me is that like Tesla needs to go down market and make this next generation cheaper, twenty five thousand dollars car in order to remain competitive. So I'm not really sure why they're like now talking about this high end niche product when like the future of the company is really about the downmark it cheaper product. But I think he's just trying to remind everyone. Oh yeah, that this like product that we promised years ago is still happening. And I'm sure that when he tweeted that that that was it. That was news to probably all the engineers, like, oh now this is backfront center again, Matt.
What's your what's your take on this? Is this? Are you going to put down your deposit for the new new Tesla roaster?
I'm the wrong person to ask that. I will say that, like after he tweeted about radically increasing the design goals, which I don't know that that means. It's a funny phrase. He also did a callback to his twenty eighteen tweeter he said SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ten small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly. So you know, it's always like a little bit of not a thing, But you know, I believe that on that like there will you know, there'll be a roadster and stuff like that.
So do you think it's like eleven rocket boosters with the radical radically increase the design goals? Maybe that's what he means he.
Did retweet or re crock whatever he did call that back. Sarah he wants.
He also had some joke about like, oh, like we were promised flying cars and all we got was two hundred needy characters, and now he's basically kind of promising wing wink that there will be flying cars.
All right. On that note, let's end here. Thank you for listening to Elon, Inc. And thanks to Dana and Matt, Thank you, thank you, thanks guys. Before we go, a programming note, Elon Inc. Is going to south By Southwest next week in Austin, Texas. We're going to be doing a live taping on Tuesday, March twelfth at ten am. If you're in Austin at south By Southwest, please come say hi to us. We'll be talking to suel Chan, the editor in chief of the Texas Tribune, and Rachel Monroe, the New Yorker's Texas correspondent. We're going to be talking about how much or how little Elon has impacted his home state, and perhaps how much his home state has impacted Elon. This episode was produced by Stacy Wong. Naomi Shavin and Rayhan Harmanci are senior editors. The idea for this very show came from Rayhan Blake Maples Handles Engineering and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott. Her supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson. Huge thanks to Joel Weber, Sean Wen and Angel Recchio. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Suguiera. Sage Bauman is a head of Bloomberg Podcast and Brendan Newnham is our executive producer. I'm Max Chapkin. If you have a minute, rate and review our show, it'll help others find us and we will appreciate it. See you next week.