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SpaceX is facing a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that alleges the company illegally fired employees for writing an open letter that criticized CEO Elon Musk.

In the complaint filed on Wednesday, the NLRB accuses SpaceX of interrogating workers about their involvement with the letter and told employees not to discuss these interviews. NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado told Reuters that SpaceX violated the federal right of workers to collectively push for better conditions.

The labor agency claims SpaceX created an impression of surveillance by reading and showing screenshots of messages between employees, adding that the company attempted to prevent employees from handing out the open letter. SpaceX also allegedly invited employees to quit and threatened discharge if they participated in organized activities.

The NLRB is asking SpaceX to post a notice about employee rights for 120 days and wants the company to write letters of apology to each of the employees it fired, among other things. A hearing with an NLRB administrative law judge (ALJ) is scheduled for March 5th, 2024, provided that SpaceX doesnt try to settle the charges. Whatever decision the judge makes can be appealed to the board and taken to the federal appeals court.

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SpaceX accused of illegally firing employees who criticized Elon Musk - The Verge

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For someone who despises the advertising industry, Elon Musk has a way with viral slogans. At a New York Times event on November 29th the worlds richest man was asked how he felt about firms pulling ads from X, the social network he bought last year when it was known as Twitter. If somebodys going to try to blackmail me, he replied, go fuck yourself. The GFY approach, as he dubbed it, may come naturally to billionaires. But it is bold for a company that last year made 90% or so of its revenue from ads. Those that have pulled ads from X include Apple and Disney, whose presence Mr Musk previously cited as evidence that X was a safe space for brands.

Advertisers are worried about unsavoury content on the platform. Since Mr Musk fired 80% of Xs staff, including many moderators, more bile seems to be leaking through the filters. Last month Media Matters for America, a watchdog, reported that ads for brands such as IBM had appeared alongside posts praising Adolf Hitler (X disputes this and is suing Media Matters).

Social networks are freer than mainstream media to tell advertisers to get lost. Whereas a typical TV network in America gets most of its ad revenue from fewer than 100 big clients, social networks can have millions of small ones. A year ago the largest, Facebook, was getting 45% of its domestic sales from its 100 biggest advertisers, reckons Sensor Tower, a research firm; a boycott against it in 2020 by more than 600 firms, including giants like Unilever and Starbucks, had little effect on sales. But X lacks Facebooks sophisticated ad-targeting apparatus, and relies on campaigns by big brands. In October 2022, when Mr Musk bought Twitter, its 100 top clients accounted for 70% of American ad sales.

Half of them have since left X, Sensor Tower says. On December 1st Walmart said it had gone, owing to its ads poor results on X. The impact has been severe. In September Mr Musk said that Xs American ad business was down by 60%. Advertisers in other regions may be less bothered by the culture wars that Mr Musk is fighting. But X is unusually reliant on America. Whereas Meta, Facebooks parent company, makes most of its money abroad, 56% of Twitters revenue came from America before Mr Musk bought it. Even before GFY, Insider Intelligence, another research firm, expected Xs worldwide ad sales to fall by more than half this year (see chart).

Mr Musks fans insist being rude to air-kissing admen and woke brands delights Xs everyman users. X still has nearly five times as many as Threads, a newish rival from Meta. Yet Sensor Tower reports that the X app is being downloaded less often than a year ago, and estimates that it has lost 15% of monthly users.

Some observers put this down to a purge of bots and fake users. Still, X must monetise the users it has in new ways to make up for the declining ad dollars. One idea is X Premium, which offers extra features and fewer ads for between $3 and $16 a month. So far there seem to be few takers: Sensor Tower estimates that X has sold $60m-worth of subscriptions in the past year, equivalent to 1% of pre-Musk annual ad sales. Mr Musk has talked of turning X into an everything app, handling payments, calls and more. But even optimists concede this would take years.

Until then, the aim is to replace the departing big advertisers with an army of little ones. X is said to be working on its ad technology for smaller firms, eyeing a Facebook-like long tail of clients. There is no time to lose. Further drops in ad sales could necessitate a bail-out from investors, or from Mr Musk himself. Xs employees have their work cut out to attract advertisers faster than their boss repels them.

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Elon Musk's X is especially vulnerable to an ad boycott - The Economist

Elon Musk celebrated his 44th birthday in July 2015 at a three-day party thrown by his wife at a California wine country resort dotted with cabins. It was family and friends only, with children racing around the upscale property in Napa Valley.

This was years before Twitter became X and Tesla had a profitable year. Mr. Musk and his wife, Talulah Riley an actress who played a beautiful but dangerous robot on HBOs science fiction series Westworld were a year from throwing in the towel on their second marriage. Larry Page, a party guest, was still the chief executive of Google. And artificial intelligence had pierced the public consciousness only a few years before, when it was used to identify cats on YouTube with 16 percent accuracy.

A.I. was the big topic of conversation when Mr. Musk and Mr. Page sat down near a firepit beside a swimming pool after dinner the first night. The two billionaires had been friends for more than a decade, and Mr. Musk sometimes joked that he occasionally crashed on Mr. Pages sofa after a night playing video games.

But the tone that clear night soon turned contentious as the two debated whether artificial intelligence would ultimately elevate humanity or destroy it.

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How Elon Musk and Larry Pages AI Debate Led to OpenAI and an Industry Boom - The New York Times

Fine. Lets talk about xAI, which is getting funded to the tune of $1 billion or whatever.

xAI is, according to some commentators, Elon Musks bid to save X, the platform better known as Twitter. Musk may have spectacularly struck out with advertisers and failed to make up the shortfall with subscriptions, the thinking goes, but he can fundraise off the hype of a new AI product currently available only to a subset of blue checks. That product is Grok: a ChatGPT-style answer bot allegedly possessing a sense of humor. This raises several questions, particularly since AI chatbots remain a money pit with an unsure path to profit. But one sticks out to me: why is Grok so unfunny?

xAIs website makes it clear Grok is launching from a weird defensive crouch: Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please dont use it if you hate humor! Right off the bat: hall monitor behavior.

And normally, I dont expect engineers to be funny on purpose. (Bless their hearts.) I look to them to be useful. The thing is, though, that Groks entire pitch is humor. Minus some chatter about how great (I guess?) it is that xAI can train on tweets, Musks promise is that Grok is cooler and more entertaining than several existing, more full-featured, and cheaper products. Okay, babe. Lets see what Musk thinks is so hilarious.

I scrolled back through Musks Twitter feed to find Grok answers, either generated by him or that he retweeted from other accounts. I figured that Musk would highlight what he thought were particularly good answers as a way of promoting the service. After all, even before Musk owned Twitter, his feed was a tremendously important promotional tool for Tesla. What does that look like for Grok?

These are some Cards-Against-Humanity-ass answers. No self-respecting joke requires a just kidding, unless the just kidding itself is about to get upended. Following up with a real recipe for cocaine, for instance, would actually be funny. It would also be the kind of dangerous thing you couldnt get from the PC police at ChatGPT, Bard, or any other competitor. If you are going to go edgelord to teach the woke scolds a lesson, I expect you to commit to the fucking bit.

Grok also has to balance humor with its ostensible pragmatic purpose: real-time answers. Like news comedians Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, its supposed to give you the facts, but funny. Lets see how it manages.

Whoopsie-doodle! The jury took four hours to convict, not eight. Eight isnt enough of an exaggeration to actually be funny, so I think what we have here is a garden-variety AI hallucination.

Its possible, although difficult, to be absolutely factually accurate while also being funny Will Cuppys The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody is probably the pinnacle of the genre. (Cuppys book was unfinished when he died and the result of 15 years of painstaking research.) Here is an example: Queen Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She resembled her father in some respects, although she beheaded no husbands. As she had no husbands, she was compelled to behead outsiders.

Note the tone, which is friendly, a bit dry, and somewhat in contrast with the actual facts. It is closer, in fact, to ChatGPT than to Grok; understatement is funny, too.

As far as I can tell, Groks house style is the opposite. Its hyperbolic and vulgar (although, granted, often after being asked to be more vulgar), relying on irreverence and shocking language to get a laugh.

This is a well-established genre of humor Sarah Silvermans act, for instance, revolves around the disconnect between her wide-eyed naif persona and the raunchy words coming out of her mouth. But the consistency of Groks attitude robs the AI of the ability to actually surprise you. The bot has no sense of how to shape and harness vulgarity; while I like working blue, I dont think the use of profanity is the key to a joke unless, as in the case of George Carlins Seven Dirty Words, the joke is about profanity itself. And as with much AI text, if you think for just a second, the joke often comes apart.

I am not an orgy expert. But doesnt every horny bastard in the house coming at you specifically sort of defeat the purpose? Like, isnt that a gang bang? Unless Ive misunderstood hedonism completely, an orgy becoming a total clusterfuck is a huge success.

There are, Im sure, several funny ways to answer this question, but one gets the same basic point across in far fewer words: No, and fuck you for even asking.

Actually, now that I think about it, though Grok is sometimes aggressive, Ive never seen it turn that aggression toward the question-asker. Genuinely funny people are also lightly alarming because you can never tell when they are going to cut you to bits. Imagine trying to be friends with Nora Ephron or Ali Wong wouldnt you worry they might describe you behind your back? Or worse, in print? Or, worse still, in a movie?

Meanwhile, Grok wont even judge you for getting crabs:

One tool in the arsenal of a humor writer is pulling a changeup on the pace. For instance, heres Hunter Thompson on Richard Nixon:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixons funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal.

Three long-ish sentences followed by the punchline: Even his funeral was illegal. Grok doesnt, and maybe cant, do that. Nor does it seem to understand the much-vaunted rule of three.

The correct answer to the trolley problem is that whoever is posing the problem is an asshole. Feel free to update Grok accordingly.

As for the Business Insider answer, I cant help but feel that it reads like a not-especially-inventive Mad Libs answer. So I turned it into one and sent it to two of my colleagues. Heres what I got back:

Verdant sweaters is an accidental and yet vicious burn on the use of online shopping commissions as a revenue stream for publishers. I also particularly like clowder of mildewed sugar gliders feels like a bardic insult and casket of the internet. Ill grant you the Mad Libs versions make less sense than the original, but the unexpected insults render them, in places, funnier.

The thing is, I do think its possible for AI to be funny. Take Janelle Shanes AI Weirdness, for instance, where Shane and her audience revel in computer-generated absurdity. (For instance: a Thanksgiving dish generated by AI called Punpkan Cockes Apple, which could presumably be served as an accompaniment to Mashed Turktees and Grasted Potinos.)

AI failure is probably the native form of AI humor. And as any funny person knows, the key to humor is taking the thing you do inadvertently that gets a laugh and making that thing happen on purpose. Were I attempting to develop a funny AI, gibberish would be an important area of research. Which combinations of consonants are funniest? How close do you need to be to a real word to get a laugh? What combinations of words and images are the most absurd? Some of what makes the AI funny is how confidently it is absolutely wrong so, how might I heighten the contrast between the AIs persona and its actual answer?

I cant rule out that Grok is funny and Musk is very bad at highlighting examples. (I havent gotten access myself; if someone wants to give me the opportunity, you know where to find me.) But absurdism certainly does not seem to be what Grok is up to and perhaps it cant be. Musk is committed to the notion that AI is going to be smarter than people. That belief rules out developing the humor of AI failure because the failures demonstrate the ways in which AI is not smarter than people.

Instead, Grok at times insists on imitating humans, particularly Musk-favorite Douglas Adams.

Even human comedians are better served by doing something original than retreading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The real Adams is lurking in the background of this answer, making Grok look bad by comparison. Thats not just a problem for Grok. Take RayBot, an AI version of an advice column written by Achewoods Chris Onstad. RayBot is often funny, but Onstad consistently outperforms his own AI when the two are asked the same questions. For any funny response you get from RayBot, you wonder what Onstad would actually say.

Groks other limitation seems to be Musks desire to create a fuck you to other, supposedly overcautious AI companies without actually committing to being alienating. The cocaine answer is funny, in that its exactly as limited as any other large language model. The trolley problem about a racial slur does not actually use the racial slur in question, as thats simply a bridge too far. (Not that going all the way would be funny, either.) Edgy, pointlessly offensive humor can feel forced and try-hard, particularly if its the only mode the bot has and even more particularly if youre trying to actually use it like a foul-mouthed version of Google Search.

Still, I cant say Grok isnt funny. A man without a sense of humor raising $1 billion for a comic chatbot? Come on. Thats a pretty good joke.

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Why is Elon Musk's Grok chatbot so unfunny? - The Verge

Elon Musk is using ex-girlfriend Grimes tweets to prove to custody courts that she primarily lived in Texas despite her claims that she lived in California. This distinction is important, because Texas has a cap on maximum child support payments where California has no maximum cap.

The Hype Behind Tesla Stock Success In 2023

No cap, this billionaire with a B is fighting to minimize child support payments to the mother of three of his children, and is thus fighting for his kids to have less access to his grossly abundant financial resources, dependent on the outcome of the custody battle.

Musk and Grimes were dating on-and-off from 2018 until earlier this year, and musical artist Grimes, whose legal name is Claire Boucher, is the mother of three of Musks 10 children. Musk made the first move when he filed a lawsuit in Texas against Grimes on September 7 and initiated the custody battle, claiming he wanted to establish a parent-child relationship with his kids after Grimes moved to California with their two youngest children. According to Business Insider, Grimes then filed a lawsuit against Musk in California where she requested physical custody of their children and included an order to prevent either parent from moving the children out of California. Business Insider reports,

In previous filings, Musk has accused Grimes of moving to California in order to avoid Texas courts. The Tesla CEO has good reason to want the case to play out in Texas, which caps monthly child-support payments at just $2,760 per month for three children. He would likely face much heftier child support payments in California, which has no cap.

This is shaping up to be quite a messy custody battle, as the two celebrity parents are often traveling around the globe, causing confusion when determining the familys legal state of residence. To determine which court has jurisdiction over the case, judges normally look to where the children lived the longest over the past six months, and if that is inconclusive then judges usually lean toward the state where the children have roots via primary care doctors and school attendance. As Business Insider states,

In an amended petition filed Monday, the X owner said Grimes posted on the site on multiple occasions saying that she lives in Texas. Musk cites seven posts from social media that Grimes wrote between February 2021 and October 2023 in the court document.

The tweets reflected her continued residence, Musks filing reads. He alleges Grimes and the kids lived with him in a shared Texas home as recently as July of 2023.

In her California suit, however, Grimes claimed she moved with the children to California on December 31, 2022. But Musk said her posts on X indicate otherwise.

Grimes tweets are becoming incriminating, as they seem to indicate that she was living in Texas for longer than she claimed while under oath in California. Musk claims her tweets reflected her continued residence in Texas, and a California family law attorney said the tweets in question are extremely damaging to her credibility.

Though it seems that Grimes took the two one-year-olds with her to live in California against Musks wishes, Musk has kept their eldest son with him in Texas against Grimes wishes. This is shaping up to be a case of more money more problems, but given that the future of three children are dependent on the outcome of the case and Musks herculean wealth continues to grow each day, I wish the two adults would reach an amicable agreement and focus on the wellbeing of their kids instead of focusing on petty games.

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Tesla CEO And World's Richest Man Elon Musk Is Fighting To Avoid Paying Child Support To Ex-Girlfriend Grimes - Jalopnik