I’m With Elon

For Haters, He is the New Trump

What a week in AI. The new OpenAI models — o1 and Sora — were released. Google released Gemini 2.0 and a host of other models. Early reviews are very complementary. Google also announced a breakthrough in quantum chips capable of excellent error correction, opening the way for scale and useful applications.

There is now a new narrative in AI that predicts a relatively short path to a state where multiple AI agents can be working on pretty much everything. Google Gemini 2.0 was launched with that explicit set of expectations.

In the midst of this accelerating innovation Elon Musk is increasingly the target of law suits and hatred, particularly from those who would have preferred him to support the Democratic candidate in the election.

Today it was revealed that the SEC has been blatantly blackmailing him regarding his purchase of Twitter, This week’s Post of the Week is from Musk, publishing his attorney’s response to SEC pressure. This from the letter:

Yesterday the Commission Staff issued a settlement demand that required Mr. Musk agree within 48 hours to either accept a monetary payment or face charges on numerous counts. They indicated that this demand was the result of a directive from their superiors and that charges would be brought imminently unless Mr. Musk acquiesced. This demand follows a multi-year investigation and more than six years of harassment of Mr. Musk by the Commission and its Staff.

More recently, the Staff subpoenaed me, Mr. Musk’s attorney, for testimony and threatened to send a process server if I did not immediately cooperate. I categorically refused. This week, the Commission has also reopened an investigation into Neuralink.

Musk has no intention to agree to these terms so we can expect the temperature to be raised.

Lawfare is the new term to describe this kind of behavior. And the outgoing SEC management are clearly intent on using it.

Now, clearly, Elon Musk is a controversial character. But he is very direct, transparent and nothing if not honest. His Twitter acquisition, widely assumed to be crazy, now appears (at least to me) fully vindicated. He certainly did nothing illegal as far as we know.

The letter sums up his attorney’s belief:

This series of events makes clear that the Commission is not motivated to seek the truth but instead is engaged in an improperly motivated campaign against Mr. Musk and the individuals and companies associated with him. See 5 U.S.C. § 7324(a); 5 Fed. Reg. 2635. We demand to know who directed these actions- whether it was you or the White House.

These tactics and misguided scheme will not intimidate us. We reserve all rights.

The letter is addressed to SEC Chair, Gary Gensler.

I suspect we will see more and more of this. At a time when democracy is under no threat (as Steve Gillmor notes on substack, Trump winning helped save democracy. Had he lost we may be in a different place) Musk is becoming the new target of those who remain angry at the result of the election.

Trump is getting off quite lightly.

Why is this worth caring about? Because it seems that the new administration is prepared to bring builders into the administration to better prepare the future. These people are “billionaires and millionaires” as they are described in the media. But they are that because they build valuable things.

Without them I have no idea what a positive narrative about modernization and growth would be.

With them I can imagine a real conversation about change.

Aaron Levie, founder of Box.net, on X this week summed it up:

He ended a longer piece with:

America has the opportunity to be at the forefront of every one of the major industries of the future. We have the talent, educational system, basic research, venture capital, stock market, high skill immigration, customer bases, and global partnerships to lead across these spaces.

Now we just need to make sure we modernize the government to ensure this happens.

I might replace ‘America’ with ‘Humanity’ but other than that I solidly concur.

This week’s essays include great ones by Joe Lonsdale on defense tech and war, a less clearly goof piece by newly free journalist and economist Paul Krugman on why innovation is centered in America, and a piece by John Cassidy of Internet Bubble fame on the Crypto bubble.

Enjoy.

Hat Tip to this week’s creators: @JohnCassidy, @paulkrugman, @rex_woodbury, @JTLonsdale, @Om, @mgsiegler, @deanwball, @sundarpichai, @a16z, @davidu, @benthompson, @stratechery, @cademetz, @GoogleQuantumAI, @rhodgkinson, @geneteare, @michaelsayman, @ajkeen, @RiversidedotFM, @elonmusk

Contents

• Editorial: I’m With Musk
• Essays of the Week
• Post Election
• How Long Will the Trump Crypto Boom Last?
• Why Does U.S. Technology Rule?
• 10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing
• Our Duties as Defense Technologists
• AI
• Why AI will eat the browser
• Sora Slaps
• Thresholds — by Dean W. Ball
• Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
• Tech
• Big Ideas in Tech for 2025
• Intel’s Death and Potential Revival
• Google Makes New Quantum Computing Breakthrough
• Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip
• Venture Capital
• Vintage diversification is an underrated free lunch
• AI And DevOps Led For New Unicorns In November
• Interview of the Week
• Michael Sayman and Andrew Keen
• Startup Of the Week
• Riverside
• Post of the Week
• Elon Musk and the SEC