Considering the sheer quantity of corporations under his belt, it's a real marvel that Elon Musk has any time at all to spend on Twitter. The tech magnate owns and heads SpaceX, Tesla and xAI. And though he found a replacement to helm Twitter, he still owns (and passionately uses) the platform.
All told, Musk is a busy man. And he had a very busy week.
SpaceX
One of Musk's many missions is to populate Mars. A big obstacle blocking that extra-terrestrial objective is the sheer cost of space travel. So, the billionaire is working to make space travel accessible; to do this, he decided to emulate air travel with the world's first reusable rocket.
"If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred," he said in 2015. "A fully reusable vehicle has never been done before. That really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space."
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is a two-stage craft; the booster component is designed to break off and make a safe landing back on the planet, where it can then be refurbished, repaired and reused.
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SpaceX sent one of these Falcon 9 rockets out on its 16th mission July 10, breaking the company's own rocket reuse record after the booster safely returned home.
Just a few days later, the company -- which remains private -- hit a valuation of approximately $150 billion, according to a CNBC report. Based on an internal document obtained by CNBC, SpaceX has an arrangement with its investors to sell up to $750 million in stock at $81 per share. SpaceX last sold stock at $77 per share.
xAI
Musk, who was among those that called for a six-month pause on the development of larger artificial intelligence models, co-founded OpenAI in 2015. He stepped down from the company's board in 2018 and said in 2019 that he parted "on good terms" with OpenAI in order to focus his time on Tesla.
Musk, who has since been critical of OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft, said in April that he was going to launch an AI company to rival Microsoft and Google.
"It does seem weird that something can be a non-profit, open source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source," he said of OpenAI in a May interview with CNBC. "This would be like, let's say you found an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, and instead they become a lumber company, and chop down the forest, and sold it for money."
DON'T MISS: Elon Musk Officially Launches New Company That Could Make Twitter Seem Tiny
Musk officially launched this rival AI company, xAI, July 12. The goal of this AI startup is to "understand the true nature of the universe," according to the company's website.
Musk will lead xAI's team of engineers, which come from companies including Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Musk's own Tesla. Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, will advise the team.
Musk first incorporated the company in March in Nevada.
xAI will "work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission."
Twitter (and Threads)
The big Musk news of the past week has been the seemingly internet-breaking launch of Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter competitor Threads. Meta's new app recorded more than 100 million signups less than a week after its launch, and Similarweb noted a traffic dip on Twitter on the first two days of Threads' launch.
In the midst of this potentially legitimate threat to Twitter's throne, Musk finally made good on a promise he made six months ago to roll out an ad-revenue sharing program to Twitter's content creators.
This first block payment totaled $5 million. And despite the size of Musk's monetized account, he said he added his share to the creator pool.
The rollout, which saw some creators earning tens of thousands of dollars, gave creators a very concrete reason not to jump ship for Meta's Threads.
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At the same time, Threads' engagement and user retention has seemingly dropped. SensorTower told CNBC that on July 10 and 11, the platform's daily active users had dropped about 20% from July 8. The amount of time each user spent on the platform dropped by half.
“These early returns signal that despite the hoopla during its launch, it will still be an uphill climb for Threads to carve out space in most users’ social network routine,” SensorTower's managing director, Anthony Bartolacci, said.
The Lawsuits
In the midst of this Twitter vs. Threads story blossomed a different Twitter offshoot. On July 12, a new class action lawsuit was filed against Twitter for not paying out a minimum of $500 million in severance pay. And on July 13, Twitter sued four IP addresses in Texas for allegedly attempting to scrape "every tweet ever made" in a data-scraping effort that Musk said caused Twitter's recent rate limits.
Tesla
Tesla, according to a new study by Auto Trader, is the most-wanted car brand in the U.S. and the world.
"Tesla came out as the car brand people are looking to buy the most across the world, topping the tables as the most Googled car for sale in 39 countries," the study stated. "It came first in the USA, as well as Canada, France, Spain, Germany, Australia, UAE and Scandinavia."
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Tesla also put its all-electric Cyberquad up for sale in China July 13. The kid-friendly quad starts at $1,670.
The EV leaders stock, meanwhile, has continued to rise as the company inches closer to a billion-dollar valuation. It hit a high for the year thus far on July 14 of $282.40 per share.
Quotes, Tweets and Interesting Commentary
Elon Musk is not an astrophysicist. But he does run SpaceX, which apparently gives him the credibility to weigh in on aliens, of all things.
"Many members of the public are convinced that the government is hiding evidence of aliens, and I have not seen any evidence of aliens. I get asked this a lot," he said in a Twitter Spaces July 12. "But I think that's actually maybe a concern. I might feel better if I saw evidence of aliens."
The billionaire thinks that the lack of alien evidence is far more frightening than the alternative.
DON'T MISS: Elon Musk Says He Has the Answer About Aliens
In the same spaces -- which he hosted on the same day he announced xAI -- Musk discussed AI and AI safety, saying that he thinks AI "is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not humanity."
Though he is keen to provide a rival option to Google and Microsoft, Musk said that he was "somewhat reluctant" to jump into the sector because of his mounting concern over the "immense power of a digital super intelligence."
"Even if the AI is extremely benign, the question of relevance comes up. If it can do anything better than any human well, what's the point of existing? " Musk said, adding that, if this goes well, the future will be one with "no shortage of goods and services."
"I think it's actually important for us to worry about a "Terminator" future in order to avoid a "Terminator" future. I am an advocate of having some sort of regulatory oversight," he said. "I would be surprised if there is not digital super intelligence in roughly the five or six-year timeframe."
"If this was a Netflix series, I'd say the season finale would be a showdown between the West and China and the series finale would be AGI."
