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Elon Musk has invested $1 billion dollars into actors Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlbergs "un-woke" production company.

On April 24, 2024, Esspots.com published an article with the headline, "Breaking: Elon Musk Invests $1 Billion in Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg's New Un-Woke Production Studio." The article posited that the billionaire wanted to support projects that aligned with this vision, and the studio was committed to "traditional values" and "non-woke" content.

The article said:

Musk, renowned for his innovative ventures in technology and space exploration, expressed his enthusiasm for this new creative endeavor, citing a desire to support projects aligned with his vision for cultural authenticity and creative freedom. The collaboration between Musk, Gibson, and Wahlberg represents a fusion of Silicon Valley ingenuity with Hollywood craftsmanship, aiming to challenge prevailing industry norms.

The decision to back this un-woke production studio underscores Musk's broader interest in disrupting traditional paradigms across various sectors. Known for his outspoken views on culture and society, Musk has frequently critiqued the prevailing narrative in mainstream media and entertainment, advocating for a return to more genuine, relatable storytelling.

The Facebook page associated with the website, SpaceX Fanclub, also shared a post with the same headline on April 21, 2024, adding the article in the comments section days later. Many commenters under the post believed what it was saying, with statements like, "You are a Good Man Elon. So is Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg."

(Facebook user SpaceX Fanclub)

However, the above story originates from a site that describes itself as satirical in nature. SpaceX Fanclub's introduction section states, "We post SATIRE, nothing on this page is real."

Esspot.com's "About Us" page states:

Welcome to the US page of Esspots (A Subsidiary of SpaceXMania.com specializing in Satire and Parody News), your one-stop destination for satirical news and commentary about the United States of America. Our team of writers and editors is dedicated to bringing you the latest and greatest in fake news and absurdity, all with a healthy dose of humor and satire.

On this page, you can expect to find all sorts of hilarious stories and parodies about US politics, culture, and society. From outrageous conspiracy theories to outlandish political stunts, we've got it all covered.

The site also has a disclaimer, which says:

Welcome to Esspots.com, a website that specializes in satire, parody, and humor. Before you proceed to read our content, we would like to emphasize that nothing on this website is real. All of the articles, stories, and commentary found on Esspots.com are entirely fictitious and created for the purpose of entertainment only.

This is not the first time we've covered related satirical stories from Esspots.com. The site has previously falsely claimed that Wahlberg and Gibson were starting a "non-woke" production studio while declaring "Hollywood is saved." It also falsely wrote that Wahlberg refused to work with Tom Hanks, saying the latter was a "woke creep."

For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.

"About Us." Esspots, https://esspots.com/about-us/. Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.

"Disclaimer." Esspots, https://esspots.com/disclaimer/. Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.

Izzo, Jack. "Mark Wahlberg Refused To Work with Tom Hanks on $65M Movie?" Snopes, 19 Apr. 2024, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/mark-wahlberg-refused-work-tom-hanks-woke/.Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.

Rascout-Paz, Anna. "Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson Are Launching 'Non-Woke' Film Studio?" Snopes, 4 Apr. 2024, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/gibson-wahlberg-non-woke-production/.Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.

Robin, Alex. "Breaking: Elon Musk Invests $1 Billion in Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg's New Un-Woke Production Studio." Esspots, 21 Apr. 2024, https://esspots.com/breaking-elon-musk-invests-1-billion-in-mel-gibson-and-mark-wahlbergs-new-un-woke-production-studio/.Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.

See the original post:

Elon Musk Invested $1B Into Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg's 'Un-Woke' Production Studio? - Snopes.com

Tesla has hardly been keeping quiet as it prepares to announce earnings on Tuesday.

Shares in the carmaker are down in premarket trading on Monday after the company announced further cost cuts and a recall of its ballyhooed Cybertruck model over the past few days. These developments are the latest signs that Tesla is confronting its toughest stretch in years and many shareholders arent convinced that the company and its C.E.O., Elon Musk, are taking the right steps to address it.

The latest: During the weekend, Tesla cut prices of several models in China, the U.S. and Europe. The company also reduced the price of its driver-assistance software, known as Full Self-Driving (which doesnt actually allow for fully autonomous driving).

Those moves came a day after Tesla voluntarily recalled nearly 4,000 Cybertrucks over a faulty accelerator pedal that could get stuck.

Its all apparently keeping Musk so busy that he canceled a trip to India, during which he was expected to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and announce plans to build a factory there.

The moves came after an event-filled week for Tesla. The company had already announced that it was laying off 10 percent of its work force and that it was asking shareholders to again approve a multibillion-dollar payout for Musk that a Delaware judge had voided.

Markets arent sure the carmaker is on the right track. The cost cuts are only the latest announced in recent months, as Tesla tries to reverse a sales slump while rivals are taking market share. Analysts are especially worried about softening demand in China, a wider E.V. slowdown in the U.S., and that the price reductions are hurting global profit without juicing sales.

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How Can Elon Musk Reassure Tesla Investors? - The New York Times

During last nights earnings call with investors, Elon Musk threw out an all-time late-night dorm room bong sesh of an idea: what if AWS, but for Tesla?

Musk, who loves to riff on earnings calls, compared the unused compute power of millions of idle Tesla vehicles to Amazons cloud service business. If theyre just sitting there, he mused, why not put them to good use to run AI models? (Also, have you ever really looked at your hands? No, I mean really looked?)

Theres a potential... when the car is not moving to actually run distributed inference, Musk said. If you imagine the future perhaps where theres a fleet of 100 million Teslas and on average, theyve got like maybe a kilowatt of inference compute. Thats 100 gigawatts of inference compute, distributed all around the world.

So, to summarize, you buy a Tesla. Its your property. But Musk wants to freely use the unused compute power in your vehicle for... something? Possibly AI-related? Hopefully not the blockchain. (Tesla is an AI company now, by the way. Musk said so himself during the call.)

Would Tesla pay you for this? Unclear

Would Tesla pay you for this? Unclear. After all, this is Musk at his most hypothetical. Still, I wouldnt put it past him to just try to take compute power from his customers vehicles without consent or compensation. GM was giving your driving data to insurance companies without your consent! Baby, its a free-for-all.

But before we can even treat this as a serious idea, we need to figure out if its even possible. I reached out to Sam Anthony, former chief technology officer at Perceptive Automata, a now-defunct company that built modules for self-driving cars to allow them to do theory of mind tasks.

Anthony said, as a concept, its perfectly possible to split large computing tasks out over lots of small nodes. Weve seen it done with Bitcoin mining or Folding@home, a distributed computing project to develop new therapeutics. But just because something is possible doesnt necessarily make it a good idea.

Anthony said there are two main issues that make cars and electric cars, in particular imperfect nodes for a distributed computing project. First, you have to rely on the cars battery, or if its plugged in, the charging stations energy source, for power. And that power usually doesnt come free, with owners paying retail rates for electricity. Second, connectivity and speed are a big issue in distributed computing, Anthony said.

Inference in particular is a part of the [machine learning] workflow where your speed is essential.

Inference in particular is a part of the [machine learning] workflow where your speed is essential, he added.Youre not doing a ton of offline inference overnight, youre answering questions as theyre asked this is the big inference issue the AI companies are running into right now which makes the connectivity and availability issues of cars (which, you know, move around) even more of an issue.

In Musks mind, the distributed network would only work when the cars are parked or otherwise immobile. Still, Anthony argues that no one would willingly create a distributed computer architecture out of millions of car ECUs (electronic control units) unless they were somehow forced to do it.

Its somebody with a very weird looking hammer imagining the existence of deeply implausible nails, he said.

To be sure, computer scientists have been trying to create fast computers out of many small, idle nodes for a very long time. One of the earliest examples was SETI@home, in which Berkeley researchers thought they could find extraterrestrial life by tapping a volunteer network of distributed computers to analyze radio data. So why not a Tesla@home?

To be sure, computer scientists have been trying to create fast computers out of many small, idle nodes for a very long time

For one thing, the more geographically distributed the nodes, the harder it is to get them to work in concert with one another, said Phil Koopman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who co-authored a book about supercomputers.

Like Anthony, Koopman acknowledged that the project could work as long as the vehicles were plugged in while computing to avoid draining the battery. Good Wi-Fi was also a necessary component, so the Tesla would likely need to be parked at home overnight for the distributed network to function properly. But even then, youd likely run into obstacles while growing the project in order to make it useful for AI computing.

Scalability to that size is always challenging and rarely succeeds to the degree it is worth doing that instead of building a data center, Koopman said. The devil is in the details, so Id want to see some serious experimental confirmation it is viable.

Musk loves to pontificate on whats possible in a future overrun by autonomous connected vehicles. Things like a 24/7 robotaxi service in which your vehicle is out earning you passive income while you sleep sound awesome in theory. But when the rubber meets the road, Musks big ideas tend to deflate.

For now it is an interesting idea, Koopman said, but we need to keep in mind that most cool ideas like this do not pencil out to be practical.

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Elon Musk wants to turn Tesla's fleet into AWS for AI would it work? - The Verge

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk never actually made it into the ring, but Zuckerberg still dealt a blow to the Tesla CEO by surpassing him on the list of the worlds richest people.

Zuckerberg is now the third richest person in the world with a net worth of $171 billion, jumpingabove No. 4 Musk, who has a net worth of $168 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The Meta CEO has gotten tens of billions of dollars richer since the start of the year, according to Bloomberg, in part because of the stellar performance of Metas shares.

Although his official salary for a decade has remained steady at $1, Zuckerberg is Metas largest and controlling shareholder, with more than 350 million shares, according to the companys most recent proxy statement. Metas shares have skyrocketed about 40% since January, giving Zuckerberg paper gains of about $49 billion on the shares he owns or controls.

Meanwhile, one of Musks main sources of wealth, Tesla stock, is struggling. Shares have plummeted 43% since the start of the year, making it the worst performing company in the S&P 500. Musk owns just over 715 million Tesla shares, according to the companys most recent proxy statement, and their value dropped by $76 billion since January.

Teslas lackluster stock performance comes after the company reported its first year-over-year sales decline since the pandemic earlier this month. Over the weekend, the company also cut the price of several vehicles along with its Full Self-Driving software.

Even notable Tesla bulls have recently cast doubt on the companys direction and are expecting answers from Musk on Tuesdays earnings call.

But while Musks flagship company backslides, he is still trying to secure a $45 billion pay package, after a judge struck it down in January (when it was worth $56 billion). Musks big payday could put him above Zuckerberg by net worth, but its unclear whether thepackage will be approved by shareholders at the companys proxy meeting in June.

The two billionaire executives have been at odds for years. In 2016, Meta contracted SpaceX to launch a satellite that wouldve brought internet access to sub-Saharan Africa. The rocket exploded on the journey, prompting Zuckerberg to write on Facebook that he was deeply disappointed. After Musk bought Twitter (now X), Zuckerberg was quick to launch Threads, a look-alike competitor, which Musk later called eerily quiet.

Their conflict escalated in June when Musk challenged Zuckerberg in a post on X.

Im up for a cage match if he is lol, he wrote at the time.

Zuckerberg, who has recently taken an interest in martial arts, seemed to take the challenge seriously and was ready to set up the fight. He later called it off, saying Musk wasnt serious about getting into the ring.

Dana White offered to make this a legit competition for charity. Elon wont confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead, Zuckerberg wrote on Threads. If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me.

Original post:

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg avoided a cage match with Elon Musk but got a jab in anyway by passing him on the ... - Fortune

Before there was Elon Musk, there was William Crapo Durant. Billy Durant, as he was known, built one of the worlds biggest makers of horse-drawn carriages, bought control of Buick, co-founded General Motors, was forced out of General Motors, co-founded Chevrolet, regained control of General Motors, speculated on stocks, lost control of General Motors a second time, started Durant Motors, went bankrupt in the Depression, opened a bowling alley, suffered a stroke and died penniless in 1947.

Its highly unlikely that Musk, one of the worlds richest people, will die penniless, but in other respects he and Durant have a lot in common. They are, or in the case of Durant were, both brilliant, restless builders of empires and defiers of convention who experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows of business.

I talked to some experts on the wild early days of the automobile to see what Musk and the rest of us could learn from that period of ferment and creativity. One thing I found out is that the world is not always kind to visionaries with self-control issues. Durant flamed out at G.M. twice. In contrast, the prudent organization man who eventually succeeded him, Alfred Sloan, went from success to success. Renowned institutions bear his name.

To Understand the Future of Tesla, Look to the History of G.M. was the headline on a 2018 article in Harvard Business Review by Steve Blank, a serial tech entrepreneur who has taught entrepreneurship at Stanford and other universities.

Referring to 1920, the second time Durant lost control of G.M., Blank wrote:

While everyone around him acknowledged he was a visionary, Durants one-man show was damaging the company. He couldnt prioritize, couldnt find time to meet with his direct reports, fired them when they complained about the chaos, and the company had no financial controls other than Durants ability to raise more money. When the stock collapsed, Durants ownership share was at risk of being taken over by the bankers he owed, who would then own a good part of G.M. The board decided that the company had enough vision they bought out Durants shares and realized it was time for someone who could execute.

Founders often fail as managers, Blank noted. As Tesla struggles in the transition from a visionary pioneer to reliable producer of cars in high volume, he wrote in 2018, one wonders if the generous compensation plan that the Tesla board awarded to Musk that year would be better spent finding Teslas Alfred P. Sloan.

I called up Blank. He told me that the flaws in Musk that he identified that year remain. When youve been right in the beginning, you think youre right forever, he said. You surround yourself with people who think youre a genius forever. You run by whim rather than strategy.

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Opinion | Elon Musk Wouldn't Be the First Car Company Founder to Flame Out - The New York Times