It’s no secret that Elon Musk is hiding plenty of skeletons in his closet.

The mercurial billionaire has made an extensive list of enemies through his offensive commentary, led the gutting of humanitarian aid, exploited workers at his companies, and meddled with the democratic process — all the while alienating investors with his chronic overpromising and underdelivering.

Simply put, documentarian and investigative journalist Alex Gibney had a very rich source of material to draw from for his upcoming documentary “Musk,” which had its world premiere today at the ongoing Venice Film Festival.

According to journalist David Sirota, Musk is “freaking out” about the film because Gibney “doesn’t pull punches, doesn’t cower and won’t be bullied.”

“And so the bully is mad,” Sirota tweeted.

By all accounts, the four-hour epic will be a doozy. The documentarian “crafted a movie that, while not new in its specifics, is often damning in its totality, standing apart from anything the media entertainment complex has recently turned out — a portrait of power with the cinematic scope of ‘All the King’s Men’ and the potential social impact of ‘The Pentagon Papers,'” the Hollywood Reporter gushed.

Musk has reportedly gone to extreme — and sometimes unsuccessful — lengths to silence those involved in Gibney’s latest work. Musk’s ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who is “prominently featured” in the documentary, told reporters at the Venice Film Festival that she was “offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million,” as quoted by People.

“When you’re offered something like that [to stay quiet], it really causes a debate in your head about what your speech means and how valuable that is and why do they want to offer me this amount of money to not speak?” St. Clair said.

St. Clair is one of four women who have had a total of 14 children with Musk, at least that we know about so far. The 26-year-old had a major falling out with the entrepreneur, going as far as to allege that the billionaire “financially retaliated” against her for filing a custody petition by reducing child support payments.

We’re likely to hear more commentary from Musk about the film. Last week, Musk tweeted that Gibney was “obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of,” calling him a “douchebag to his core.”

But considering the staggering amount of material Musk has gifted the world, Gibney had plenty of material to work with.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Is Insisting He Knows More About Chess Than Chess.com

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An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.

It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people.

The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of his EV maker on the gold-colored self-driving vehicles, which are too small to fit more than two passengers and lack both steering wheels or pedals. Their sudden appearance in a story about a deadly airliner disaster had the billionaire taken aback. However, instead of offering his condolences after the tragedy, Musk simply tweeted the word “Weird” in response.

The peculiar cameo also led to plenty of questions over Tesla’s plans to roll out the cars outside of Austin. Just last week, the Cybercabs were deployed for the first time in the Texas city, but the company has yet to announce any imminent launches in Miami.

Regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration watched closely following last week’s deployment, which comes just shy of two years after Tesla first showed off its Cybercab. As Bloomberg notes, the light on details event was “uncharacteristically low-key,” offering no livestream or media coverage.

The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”

Indeed, regulatory approval is hazy for vehicles without any traditional driver controls, a topic that’s especially pertinent to Tesla. Musk has bet the company’s entire future on the success of its Cybercabs and its humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.

With neither showing any signs of a significant public rollout any time soon, Wall Street is bound to keep asking some tough questions.

More on the Cybercab: Tesla Loses Trademark to “Cybercab” Due to Its Own Staggering Incompetence

The post Amazon Cargo Jet Crashes Just Feet From Parking Lot Full of Tesla Cybercabs, Killing Five appeared first on Futurism.

Is being the world’s richest man not enough for Elon Musk?

He must also have us all believe that he’s a genius, sui generis, with a mind so mighty that it’s wasted on supposedly intellectual pastimes like “chess.”

He’s so convinced that the board game is beneath him, in fact, that he’s begun arguing about it with… Chess.com, a leading source of expertise and chess AI. 

The inane saga kicked off yesterday on X — where else — when Musk responded to a post about all the possible moves you can make in chess. To a mind as omniscient as Musk’s, the number — a mere 40 orders of magnitude more than all the atoms in the observable universe — wasn’t sufficiently large enough to be interesting.

“The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny,” he claimed, “and chess will be fully solved one day.”

Here, Chess.com entered the fray by responding with a succinct rejoinder: “skill issue.”

The bait worked.

“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers,” Musk wrote, essentially repeating himself. “Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”

Indeed, humans who aren’t intelligent as Musk, in their feeble-mindedness and fleeting time on this planet, may enjoy activities such as games and sports, blissfully unaware that a hypothetical machine may hypothetically make mince meat of those activities one day. And yet, as Musk admitted, he’s choosing to waste his time “arguing with some random intern.” (“I’m a full-time employee,” the Chess.com account clarified.)

Musk also went on about how an artificial superintelligence — something we don’t even know is possible to build — will “figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend.” Then he cited some conversations he had with his personal AI chatbot, Grok, as if that put matters to bed.

There’s certainly an interesting intellectual debate to be had about “solving” chess — something that actual mathematicians have explored and tried to tackle — but Musk’s arguments seem to be driven solely by contempt. The board game is a long-held bugbear of his.

Back in 2022, in a now infamous tweet, Musk wrote about how he stopped playing chess as a child because he “found it to be too simple to be useful in real life,” before extolling how Polytopia, a mobile game, was the superior activity of choice for the cognoscenti.

He had something similar to say amid his battle with Chess.com. Responding to another account, Musk wrote that he “felt diminishing returns from chess in terms of transfer learning to understand reality.” Next time your opponent destroys you at chess, you might try deploying that excuse, too.

More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Is Having One of His All-Time Meltdowns

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If you happen to live in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Kansas, you may soon notice a massive uptick in ads extolling the virtues of AI data centers.

That’s not by accident. As Bloomberg reported this week, a group funded by tech industry billionaires called Build American AI is spinning up a massive campaign meant to sway public opinion around data centers in key battleground states.

The ad blitz is described as being in the “millions of dollars” range, per Bloomberg, though Build American AI hasn’t disclosed an exact figure.

Among the group’s backers are figures heavily invested in continuing the data center boom, like the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Also involved is Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, whose $100 million super PAC Leading the Future is reportedly bankrolling the publicity campaign.

In a statement to Bloomberg, a representative for Build American AI framed the question of data center development as an existential threat, and repeated the myth that opposition to data centers — an incredibly popular stance among American voters — is actually a radical psy-op.

“The stakes are too high to allow the loudest and most extreme voices to dictate America’s future,” Build American AI complained. “Driving responsible investment away will cost Americans good-paying jobs, weaken communities and undermine America’s ability to lead.”

But no matter how much doom-and-gloom tech billionaires try to browbeat the public with, they face an arduous battle. An August survey by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a record 61 percent of US adults oppose new data centers in their backyards, up 12 percent from a survey conducted in March.

That being the case, it’s unlikely a few dramatic TV ads will be enough to launder the AI industry’s already caustic image — especially at the ballot box in November.

More on data centers: As the Rest of the Economy Crumbles, the Amount of Money Flooding Into Data Centers Is Simply Astounding

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There was a time in the United States when the richest moguls, regardless of their many personal shortcomings, embraced philanthropy in a cynical effort to keep the angry mobs at bay. Andrew Carnegie famously built libraries, John D Rockefeller helped fund research that eventually eradicated hookworm, while JP Morgan donated vast collections of art and books to museums and other cultural institutions.

Today’s robber barons aren’t in such a giving mood. Sure, there are some figures like Microsoft’s Bill Gates — who has plenty of his own problems, to be clear — but they seem to be quickly becoming the minority.

Case in point, the billionaire CEO of cyrpto-trading company Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, recently went on a tirade about how charity is actually a “net negative on the world.”

“The common view is that philanthropy is a noble cause,” Amstrong said during a recent appearance on the right-wing Katie Miller Podcast. “And like, Bill Gates after the DoJ thing is like, ‘I’m going to go rehabilitate my image, I’m going to do philanthropy.'”

That’s a fool’s errand to Armstrong, however, as such philanthropic aspirations — selfish as they are — can become “captured by ideology.”

“I guess I have sort of a contrarian view where a lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative on the world,” Armstrong continued. “And they get captured. It’s actually remarkably hard to find a foundation that has not gotten captured by ideology.”

Though Amstrong’s estimated net worth of around $8.7 billion puts him in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, he says that “so far, I’ve just been like ‘I’m not going to do that.’“

More on tech billionaires: AI Billionaires Are So Greedy That They’re Supercharging Sales of Yachts and Private Jets

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