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      What Elon Musk Said in Testy Interview on Don Lemon’s New Show

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      The former CNN frontman released a wide-ranging interview with the billionaire about business, politics, hate speech online and more.It was raw and occasionally tense.The former television anchor Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, testy interview with Elon Musk was released online on Monday morning, touching upon topics including politics, particularly the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that he now owns; and more.The interview was intended to be the debut episode of a new talk show in a partnership between Mr. Lemon and X, but Mr. Musk called off the deal a day after filming the hour-plus interview at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. The first episode of “The Don Lemon Show” was streamed on YouTube and posted to Mr. Lemon’s account on X.In the interview, Mr. Musk said that earlier this month he was having breakfast at an unnamed friend’s home in Florida when Mr. Trump came by.When asked what was discussed, Mr. Musk said that Mr. Trump did most of the talking and that the former president did not ask for money or a donation toward his campaign. Mr. Musk also said he would not loan Mr. Trump money to pay his legal bills.While Mr. Musk said he would not donate to any candidate, he said he would consider endorsing one in the final stretches of the race.“I don’t know yet, I want to make a considered decision before the election,” he said, and noted that he was leaning away from President Biden. “I’ve made no secret of that,” he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk to Open Source Grok Chatbot in Latest AI War Escalation

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      Mr. Musk’s move to open up the code behind Grok is the latest volley in a war to win the A.I. battle, after a suit against OpenAI on the same topic.Elon Musk released the raw computer code behind his version of an artificial intelligence chatbot on Sunday, an escalation by one of the world’s richest men in a battle to control the future of A.I.Grok, which is designed to give snarky replies styled after the science-fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product from xAI, the company Mr. Musk founded last year. While xAI is an independent entity from X, its technology has been integrated into the social media platform and is trained on users’ posts. Users who subscribe to X’s premium features can ask Grok questions and receive responses.By opening the code up for everyone to view and use — known as open sourcing — Mr. Musk waded further into a heated debate in the A.I. world over whether doing so could help make the technology safer, or simply open it up to misuse.Mr. Musk, a self-proclaimed proponent of open sourcing, did the same with X’s recommendation algorithm last year, but he has not updated it since.“Still work to do, but this platform is already by far the most transparent & truth-seeking (not a high bar tbh),” Mr. Musk posted on Sunday in response to a comment on open sourcing X’s recommendation algorithm. The move to open-source chatbot code is the latest volley between Mr. Musk and ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, which the mercurial billionaire sued recently over breaking its promise to do the same. Mr. Musk, who was a founder and helped fund OpenAI before departing several years later, has argued such an important technology should not be controlled solely by tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which is a close partner of OpenAI.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After R.B.G. Awards Go to Musk and Murdoch, Justice Ginsburg’s Family Objects

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      The children of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who championed liberal causes and women’s rights, said the choice of recipients this year was an “affront” to the memory of their mother.When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of liberal causes whose advocacy of women’s rights catapulted her to pop culture fame, helped establish a leadership award in 2019, she said she intended to celebrate “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility.”But this year, four of the recipients are men, including Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the business magnate whose empire gave rise to conservative media; and Michael Milken, the face of corporate greed in the 1980s who served nearly two years in prison. It has prompted family members and close colleagues of Justice Ginsburg to demand that her name be removed from the honor, commonly called the R.B.G. Award.In a statement, her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother.”“The justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards,” Ms. Ginsburg said.Even as he declined to specify any of the recipients who he believed undermined the spirit of the award, Trevor W. Morrison, a former dean of New York University School of Law and one of the justice’s former law clerks, expressed concern that not all of them reflected the justice’s values.“Justice Ginsburg had an abiding commitment to careful, rigorous analysis and to fair-minded engagement with people of opposing views,” he said in a letter addressed to the organization that confers the awards, the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation. “It is difficult to see how the decision to bestow the R.B.G. Award on this year’s slate reflects any appreciation for — or even awareness of — these dimensions of the justice’s legacy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Trump, Seeking Cash Infusion, Meets With Elon Musk

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      It’s not clear whether Mr. Musk will spend any of his billions on the former president’s behalf. If he does, he could erase Mr. Trump’s financial disadvantage in the 2024 race.Donald Trump, who is urgently seeking a cash infusion to aid his presidential campaign, met on Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla., with Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, and a few wealthy Republican donors, according to three people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion.Mr. Trump and his team are working to find additional major donors to shore up his finances as he heads into an expected general election against President Biden. Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Musk to allies and hopes to have a one-on-one meeting with the billionaire soon, according to a person who has discussed the matter with Mr. Trump.It’s not yet clear whether Mr. Musk plans to spend any of his fortune on Mr. Trump’s behalf. But his recent social media posts suggest he thinks it’s essential that Mr. Biden be defeated in November — and people who have spoken to Mr. Musk privately confirmed that is indeed his view.With a net worth of around $200 billion, according to Forbes, Mr. Musk could decide to throw his weight behind Mr. Trump and potentially, almost single-handedly, erase what is expected to be Mr. Biden and his allies’ huge financial advantage over the former president.Aides to Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.Mr. Musk has long portrayed himself as independent-minded, and like many business leaders he has donated to candidates from both parties over the years. Unlike other U.S. billionaires, he has not spent heavily on a presidential election, and his donations have been fairly evenly split over the years between Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Musk’s businesses, Tesla and SpaceX, have benefited from federal government contracts and subsidies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Big Questions Raised by Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI

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      Experts say the case against the start-up and its chief executive, Sam Altman, raises unusual legal issues that do not have a clear precedent.From Silicon Valley to Wall Street to Washington, the blockbuster case that Elon Musk filed against OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman, has become Topic A. It is the business world’s hottest soap opera.But among lawyers, the case has become something of a fascination for a different reason: It poses a series of unique and unusual legal questions without clear precedent. And it remains unclear what would constitute “winning” in a case like this, given that it appears to have been brought out of Musk’s own personal frustration and philosophical differences with Open A.I, a company he helped found and then left.The lawsuit — which pits one of the wealthiest men in the world against the most advanced A.I. company in the world, backed by Microsoft, one the world’s most valuable companies — argues that OpenAI, a nonprofit organization that created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019, breached a contract to operate in the public interest and violated its duties by diverting from its founding purpose of benefiting humanity.Musk’s lawyers — led by Morgan Chu, a partner at Irell & Manella who is known as the “$5 billion man” for his win record — want the court to force OpenAI to open its technology to others and to stop licensing it to Microsoft, which has invested billions in its partnership with the start-up.Among the questions that lawyers and scholars are asking after poring through Musk’s 35-page complaint:Does Musk even have standing to sue? “One of the differences with nonprofits compared to other companies is that, generally, no one other than the state attorney general has standing to sue for the kind of stuff that he’s complaining about, like not following your mission,“ Peter Molk, a professor of law at the University of Florida, said of Musk’s lawsuit. That’s most likely why Musk’s lawyers are presenting the case as a breach of contract instead of attacking the company’s nonprofit status.Musk also alleges that OpenAI has breached its fiduciary duty, but that charge has its own challenges, lawyers said, given that such claims are traditionally handled in Delaware, not California, where the lawsuit was filed. (Musk, of course, has an infamously rocky relationship with the state of Delaware.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk’s Feud With OpenAI Goes to Court

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      The tech mogul wants to force the A.I. start-up to reveal its research to the public and prevent it from pursuing profits.Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, has escalated his feud with OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersMusk takes aim at OpenAI The gloves have really come off in one of the most personal fights in the tech world: Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman, accusing them of reneging on the start-up’s original purpose of being a nonprofit laboratory for the technology.Yes, Musk has disagreed with Altman for years about the purpose of the organization they co-founded and he is creating a rival artificial intelligence company. But the lawsuit also appears rooted in philosophical differences that go to the heart of who controls a hugely transformative technology — and is backed by one of the wealthiest men on the planet.The backstory: Musk, Altman and others agreed to create OpenAI in 2015 to provide an open-sourced alternative to the likes of Google, which had bought the leading A.I. start-up DeepMind the year before. Musk notes in his suit that OpenAI’s certificate of incorporation states that its work “will benefit the public,” and that it isn’t “organized for the private gain of any person.”Musk poured more than $44 million into OpenAI between 2016 and 2020, and helped hire top talent like the researcher Ilya Sutskever.Altman has moved OpenAI toward commerce, starting with the creation in 2019 of a for-profit subsidiary that would raise money from investors, notably Microsoft. The final straw for Musk came last year, when OpenAI released its GPT-4 A.I. model — but kept its workings hidden from all except itself and Microsoft.“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawyers write in the complaint.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Rocket Moves Closer to Launch

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      Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rolled to the launchpad for a series of tests in preparation for its maiden flight later this year.There’s an easy knock against the space dreams of Jeff Bezos and his rocket company, Blue Origin: In its 24th year of existence, the company has yet to launch a single thing to orbit.Blue Origin’s accomplishments to date are modest — a small vehicle known as New Shepard that takes space tourists and experiments on brief suborbital jaunts. By contrast, SpaceX, the rocket company started by the other high-profile space billionaire, Elon Musk, today dominates the launch market.On Wednesday, Blue Origin hopes to change the narrative, holding a coming-out party of sorts for its new big rocket.In the morning, at Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the doors to a giant garage opened. The rocket, as tall as a 32-story building, lay horizontally on the trusses of a mobile launch platform.The contraption was sitting on a transport mechanism that resembles several long mechanical centipedes, but with wheels, 288 in all, instead of feet. It began rolling slowly out and up a concrete incline, a quarter-mile trip toward the launchpad.The rocket will undergo at least a week of tests before returning to the garage.“I’m very confident there’s going to be a launch this year,” Dave Limp, the chief executive of Blue Origin, said in an interview. “We’re going to show a lot of progress this year. I think people are going to see how fast we can move.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Terrorists Are Paying for Check Marks on X, Report Says

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      The report shows that X has accepted payments for subscriptions from entities barred from doing business in the United States, a potential violation of sanctions.X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, is potentially violating U.S. sanctions by accepting payments for subscription accounts from terrorist organizations and other groups barred from doing business in the country, according to a new report.The report, by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit focused on accountability for large technology companies, shows that X, formerly known as Twitter, has taken payments from accounts that include Hezbollah leaders, Houthi groups, and state-run media outlets in Iran and Russia. The subscriptions, which cost $8 a month, offer users a blue check mark — once limited to verified users like celebrities — and better promotion by X’s algorithm, among other perks.The U.S. Treasury Department maintains a list of entities that have been placed under sanctions, and while X’s official terms of service forbid people and organizations on the list to make payments on the platform, the report found 28 accounts that had the blue check mark.“We were surprised to find that X was providing premium services to a wide range of groups the U.S. has sanctioned for terrorism and other activities that harm its national security,” said Katie Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project. “It’s yet another sign that X has lost control of its platform.”X and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Musk has said that he wants X to be a haven for free speech and that he will remove only illegal content.Since Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022, the company has made drastic changes to the way it does business — in some cases spurning advertising in favor of subscription dollars. It has also restored thousands of barred accounts and rolled back rules that once governed the site.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More