Summary
Elon Musk has filed a court injunction to block OpenAI’s transition to a fully for-profit business and prevent it from allegedly restricting investors from supporting competitors like his AI startup, xAI.
Musk accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of antitrust violations, claiming they used “group boycotts” to limit funding for rivals while benefitting from shared sensitive information.
OpenAI dismissed the allegations as baseless. The legal battle reflects escalating competition in the booming generative AI industry, valued at $157 billion, with Musk’s xAI emerging as a new challenger.
No company can take over Nasa. Nasa is a research organisation. It actually pushes the envelope and does things that have no apparent objective ROI… like going to Mars and driving around a rover. Only a government funded organisation can do that.
Of course we can just pour endless buckets of money into for-profits… but then who decides what is done with the money… Nasa actually has the organization for this… with scientists… clear grant processes etc. etc.
Oh of course no company can, and especially SpaceX can’t. SpaceX is a lot of fluff, and I’m sure some get great Engineers work there, but if you look at what they have done so far it’s laughably bad. It took well over 3 billion from the US government to put people on Mars and so far it managed to blow up a banana over the Indian ocean… oh, and to needlessly blow up a launch pad.
Doesn’t matter though, Elon Musk who keeps yelling that the government is wasting too much money (but not on his company of course!!) now is in the position to make the US tax payer really bad through the nose and make sure the money lands in his pocket.
He’s still working hard on getting the 56 billion dollar for Tesla because of course… But he can get so much more for his mars scam!
SpaceX exists only because of NASA.
The Merlin engine is based on an engine developed by NASA, they even started by buying the exact same turbopumps directly from NASA’s subcontractor
The initial funding from Musk ($100 million) allowed SpaceX to develop the Falcon 1, in 2008 they only reached orbit on its 4th attempt. At this point they had no money left, a small rocket with a terrible track record and no customers for it.
3 months later NASA awarded a $1.6 billion contract to SpaceX for the ISS resupply ! This is what allowed then to continue and develop the Falcon 9.
You’re leaving off the part that NASA was wanting to incentivize private space companies. They opened up a competition to win some contracts and SpaceX wanted them. A requirement was reaching orbit. They succeeded, so they won some contracts.
It’s not like NASA just out of the blue decided to save SpaceX after Musk used the last of his money. They made an open offer, SpaceX fought for and won what they got. If that 4th rocket had failed, they’d have been toast, but it didn’t.
Edit: I guess I should add that SpaceX protested NASA when they did a sole source contract and NASA quickly revoked the contract, which led to NASA creating the program they then competed in. And if you think this is a bad thing its generally not. Sole source contracts aren’t competitive and will usually cost the government more. Ultimately that company they chose went bankrupt.