Elon Musk and Mark Cuban are billionaires as well as respected and admired tech luminaries and entrepreneurs. They both have millions of fans.
But their relations seem cold, judging from their exchanges and, recently, Cuban's remarks about Musk, which the Tesla CEO has not yet answered.
Musk, who runs electric-vehicle producer Tesla (TSLA), acquired the Twitter social network for $44 billion last October. He said he wanted to remake Twitter into a bastion of free speech, a place where nothing is censored and everything can be said so long as it does not violate the law of the state or country in which it is posted.
This laissez-faire approach made Musk a hero among the ranks of Republicans and conservatives, who complained of being muzzled by Twitter 1.0, pre-Musk.
While Musk justified his approach as enabling free speech, a number of his critics saw their accounts temporarily suspended, prompting some to ask him to define what free speech is.
Cuban: Musk View of Twitter Is 'Laughable'
At the same time Musk also regularly attacks progressives and their ideologies -- environmental social governance policy, gender identity and more -- and sometimes gives the impression that they are unwelcome on Twitter.
This discrepancy did not escape Cuban, who pointed it out last December.
"The final thought that suggests Twitter is the key to democracy, when you know it’s run by one guy who makes all the decision, again laughable. More like it’s the King telling everyone what the monthly tax is to speak up if you pay you can be heard. If not. Not," Cuban fired out on Dec. 6.
A few months later, Cuban has renewed this criticism. According to Cuban, Musk bought Twitter not to promote free speech but rather to get access to the data of the users of the platform.
"He isn't pushing free speech," the owner of the Dallas Mavericks said on May 18, referring to Musk. "When @elonmusk goes out of his way to engage with and promote the accounts and tweets of people who disagree with him, then I'll believe he is about free speech. Until then, this is just an adventure for him."
Musk's Opportunity: 'Pretty Cool. Pretty Scary.'
This scathing review followed a thread in which Cuban wonders about the evolution of technology -- the large language models that power artificial intelligence.
"I'm a believer that LLMs need to evolve from being Language models to being Knowledge models. (LKMs)," the "Shark Tank" star said. "To get there, they will need access to significant IP and data, the most important of which will not be free."
He therefore believes Musk may have an edge over the rest of the big three in AI -- Alphabet's Google, Meta Platforms and Microsoft/OpenAI -- because he owns Twitter, which gives him access to more accurate user data.
"All of this is why I think Elon Musk is starting his own @truthgpt, or whatever he will call it. He gets to take the entire Twitter firehose to train or feed any open source model and have a competitor to the big 3," the billionaire argued.
"He can weight his own tweets and those of the sources he likes and end up with a consumer facing AI that can be a virtual Elon."
His final conclusion: "Pretty cool. Pretty scary."
A Twitter user then pointed out to him: "This was always the main play behind [Musk’s] Twitter acquisition and why he’s pushing free speech so hard as it’s a good way to mitigate bias in the models."
Musk had been an early investor in OpenAI, the chatbot of which, ChatGPT, gave the public a taste of the progress of AI. The billionaire has distanced himself from the organization following strategic differences.
He is working on a rival to ChatGPT, which he calls TruthGPT, an AI platform. Meantime, OpenAI has received a more than $10 billion in investment from Microsoft.
Musk has yet to respond to Cuban and he's unlikely to do so. In recent months he's given the silent treatment to challenges from his peer billionaire.
