Technology

Elon Musk says in court that he doesn’t want to be CEO of any company and tries to walk back SEC insults

Published

2 years ago

November 16, 2022

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Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk attends the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China August 29, 2019.

Aly Song | Reuters

Elon Musk said in court Wednesday that he does not want to be the CEO of any company.

He recently acquired social media giant Twitter and appointed himself as the CEO, adding to his responsibilities as the CEO and “technoking” of electric vehicle maker Tesla, and CEO and CTO of the U.S. defense contractor SpaceX.

Musk also confirmed that the arrangement at Twitter is temporary. “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time,” he said.

Musk and Tesla are in the midst of a trial in Delaware over the 2018 CEO pay package the company granted him, an unparalleled compensation plan that has made Musk a centi-billionaire and the richest person on the planet.

Shareholder Richard J. Tornetta has sued Musk and Tesla alleging that the CEO compensation was excessive and that its authorization by the Tesla board amounted to a breach of its fiduciary duty.

Elon Musk says Twitter Blue to relaunch on Nov. 29

Musk explained during the testimony that CEO is not necessarily an apt description for the work he says he does at his companies.

“At SpaceX it’s really that I’m responsible for the engineering of the rockets and Tesla for the technology in the car that makes it successful,” Musk said. “So, CEO is often viewed as somewhat of a business-focused role but in reality, my role is much more that of an engineer developing technology and making sure that we develop breakthrough technologies and that we have a team of incredible engineers who can achieve those goals.”

He also said, “It’s my experience that great engineers will only work for a great engineer. That is my first duty, not that of CEO.”

Attorneys for Tornetta asked Musk about a CNBC report that he had authorized at least 50 Tesla employees, mostly Autopilot engineers, to help with his work at Twitter, now that he owns the social media company.

Musk said he only called on Tesla employees to assist him at Twitter on a “voluntary basis” and to work “after hours” at Twitter. He said that no Tesla board member had called him to say it is not a good idea to use Tesla resources for one of his other, privately held companies.

“This was an after hours — just if you’re interested in evaluating, helping me evaluate Twitter engineering … that’d be nice. I think it lasted for a few days and it was over.”

When a lawyer asked if he thought it was a good idea to be using Tesla assets at Twitter, Musk responded, “I didn’t think of this as using Tesla assets.” He added, “There’s 120,000 people at the company. This is de minimis.”

With all his business commitments, Tesla has taken more of his time than anything in recent years, Musk said during the testimony.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs asked whether it was a good idea for Musk to strike a combative attitude towards regulators and specifically asked him about prior insults he lobbed at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“In general, I think the mission of the SEC is good but the question is whether that mission is being executed well,” he replied.

“In some cases I think it is not. The SEC fails to investigate things that they should and places far too much attention on things that are not relevant. The recent FTX thing I think is an example of that. Why was there no attention given to FTX? Investors lost billions. Yet the SEC continues to hound me despite shareholders being greatly rewarded. This makes no sense.”

In fact, the SEC and several other regulators have reportedly launched investigations into collapsed crypto firm FTX, but it’s not clear if those investigations started prior to the firm’s sudden bankruptcy last week.

What ‘SEC’ stands for

The SEC had charged Tesla and Musk for making “false and misleading” statements to shareholders when Musk said in tweets on Aug. 7, 2018, that he was thinking of taking the automaker private at $420 a share and had “funding secured.”

The price of Tesla shares jumped by over 6% after Musk’s tweets, and trading was halted the same day. Tesla shares remained volatile for weeks after the incident.

As part of a settlement agreement, Tesla and Musk agreed to pay a $20 million fine, Musk had to give up his role as chairman at Tesla for three years and agreed not to claim innocence or deny the SEC’s allegations. Musk and Tesla also committed to have the CEO’s tweets vetted by a securities lawyer before posting them if they contained material business information that could effect Tesla’s share price.

Tornetta’s lawyers asked Musk if he had a securities lawyer review all his tweets about Tesla and why he had been claiming innocence including in press interviews. Musk seemed to acknowledge that he doesn’t run all of his Tesla-related tweets by a lawyer first.

And he said, “The consent decree was made under duress. An agreement made under duress is not valid, as a foundation of law.”

At a time when Tesla shares were on a massive upswing, Musk had written in a tweet on July 2, 2020: “SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon’s.” The message was widely read as having a vulgar meaning and comprising a major insult to the agency.

On Wednesday in the Delaware court, attorneys asked him about this tweet and Musk claimed it had been widely misunderstood. The Tesla CEO said in court that he meant the initials to stand for “Save Elon’s Company” but the tweet was “interpreted differently.”

Technology

Alibaba launches new Qwen LLMs in China’s latest open-source AI breakthrough

Published

2 hours ago

April 29, 2025

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Alibaba launches new Qwen LLMs in China’s latest open-source AI breakthrough

Qwen3 is Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Alibaba released the next generation of its open-sourced large language models, Qwen3, on Tuesday — and experts are calling it yet another breakthrough in China’s booming open-source artificial intelligence space.

In a blog post, the Chinese tech giant said Qwen3 promises improvements in reasoning, instruction following, tool usage and multilingual tasks, rivaling other top-tier models such as DeepSeek’s R1 in several industry benchmarks.

The LLM series includes eight variations that span a range of architectures and sizes, offering developers flexibility when using Qwen to build AI applications for edge devices like mobile phones.

Qwen3 is also Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”

According to Alibaba, such models can seamlessly transition between a “thinking mode” for complex tasks such as coding and a “non-thinking mode” for faster, general-purpose responses.

“Notably, the Qwen3-235B-A22B MoE model significantly lowers deployment costs compared to other state-of-the-art models, reinforcing Alibaba’s commitment to accessible, high-performance AI,” Alibaba said.

The new models are already freely available for individual users on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud’s web interface. Qwen3 is also being used to power Alibaba’s AI assistant, Quark.

China’s AI advancement

AI analysts told CNBC that the Qwen3 represents a serious challenge to Alibaba’s counterparts in China, as well as industry leaders in the U.S.

In a statement to CNBC, Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said the Qwen3 series is a “significant breakthrough—not just for its best-in-class performance” but also for several features that point to the “application potential of the models.”

Those features include Qwen3’s hybrid thinking mode, its multilingual support covering 119 languages and dialects and its open-source availability, Sun added.

Open-source software generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. At the start of this year, DeepSeek’s open-sourced R1 model rocked the AI world and quickly became a catalyst for China’s AI space and open-source model adoption.

“Alibaba’s release of the Qwen 3 series further underscores the strong capabilities of Chinese labs to develop highly competitive, innovative, and open-source models, despite mounting pressure from tightened U.S. export controls,” said Ray Wang, a Washington-based analyst focusing on U.S.-China economic and technology competition.

According to Alibaba, Qwen has already become one of the world’s most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide and more than 100,000 derivative models on Hugging Face.

Wang said that this adoption could continue with Qwen3, adding that its performance claims may make it the best open-source model globally — though still behind the world’s most cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini.

Chinese competitors like Baidu have also rushed to release new AI models after the emergence of DeepSeek, including making plans to shift toward a more open-source business model.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported in February that DeepSeek is accelerating the launch of its successor to its R1, citing anonymous sources.

“In the broader context of the U.S.-China AI race, the gap between American and Chinese labs has narrowed—likely to a few months, and some might argue, even to just weeks,” Wang said.

“With the latest release of Qwen 3 and the upcoming launch of DeepSeek’s R2, this gap is unlikely to widen—and may even continue to shrink.”

Technology

Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

Published

5 hours ago

April 29, 2025

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Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

Uber on Monday informed employees, including some who had been previously approved for remote work, that it will require them to come to the office three days a week, CNBC has learned.

“Even as the external environment remains dynamic, we’re on solid footing, with a clear strategy and big plans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “As we head into this next chapter, I want to emphasize that ‘good’ is not going to be good enough — we need to be great.”

Khosrowshahi goes on to say employees need to push themselves so the company “can move faster and take smarter risks” and outlined several changes to Uber’s work policy.

Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office. Starting in June, employees will be required in the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to the memo.

That includes some employees who were previously approved to work remotely. The company said it had already informed impacted remote employees.

“After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

The company also changed its one-month paid sabbatical program, according to the memo. Previously, employees were eligible for the sabbatical after five years at the company. That’s now been raised to eight years, according to the memo.

“This program was created when Uber was a much younger company, and when reaching 5 years of tenure was a rare feat,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “Back then, we were in the office five (sometimes more!) days of a week and hadn’t instituted our Work from Anywhere benefit.”

Khosrowshahi said the changes will help Uber move faster.

“Our collective view as a leadership team is that while remote work has some benefits, being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks creativity, and increases velocity,” Khosrowshahi wrote.

The changes come as more companies in the tech industry cut costs to appease investors after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Google recently began demanding that employees who were previously-approved for remote work also return to the office if they want to keep their jobs, CNBC reported last week.

Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work.

“Going forward, we’re further raising this bar,” Khosrowshahi’s Monday memo said. “After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office. In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

Uber’s leadership team will monitor attendance “at both team and individual levels to ensure expectations are being met,” Khosrowshahi wrote.

Following the memo, Uber employees immediately swarmed the company’s internal question-and-answer forum, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC. Khosrowshahi said he and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company’s chief people officer, will hold an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to discuss the changes.

Many employees asked leadership to reconsider the sabbatical change, arguing that the company should honor the original eligibility policy.

“This isn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for your employees,” one employee commented.

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

WATCH: Lightning Round: Uber goes higher from here, says Jim Cramer

Technology

Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites in bid to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink

Published

11 hours ago

April 28, 2025

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Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites in bid to take on Elon Musk's Starlink

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is on the launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites, which are expected to eventually rival Elon Musk’s Starlink system, at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 9, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

Amazon on Monday launched the first batch of its Kuiper internet satellites into space after an earlier attempt was scrubbed due to inclement weather.

A United Launch Alliance rocket carrying 27 Kuiper satellites lifted off from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly after 7 p.m. eastern, according to a livestream.

“We had a nice smooth countdown, beautiful weather, beautiful liftoff, and Atlas V is on its way to orbit to take those 27 Kuiper satellites, put them on their way and really start this new era in internet connectivity,” Caleb Weiss, a systems engineer at ULA, said on the livestream following the launch.

The satellites are expected to separate from the rocket roughly 280 miles above Earth’s surface, at which point Amazon will look to confirm the satellites can independently maneuver and communicate with its employees on the ground.

Six years ago Amazon unveiled its plans to build a constellation of internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit, called Project Kuiper. The service will compete directly with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the market and has 8,000 satellites in orbit.

The first Kuiper mission kicks off what will need to become a steady cadence of launches in order for Amazon to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency expects the company to have half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, up in the air by July 2026.

Amazon has booked more than 80 launches to deploy dozens of satellites at a time. In addition to ULA, its launch partners include Musk’s SpaceX (parent company of Starlink), European company Arianespace and Jeff Bezos’ space exploration startup Blue Origin.

Amazon is spending as much as $10 billion to build the Kuiper network. It hopes to begin commercial service for consumers, enterprises and government later this year.

In his shareholder letter earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kuiper will require upfront investment at first, but eventually the company expects it to be “a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.” ROIC stands for return on invested capital.

Investors will be listening for any commentary around further capex spend on Kuiper when Amazon reports first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.

WATCH: Amazon launches Project Kuiper prototypes