Farewell, Elon.

A big week for the country, a big week for the world and a big week for tech assholios.

This week, we’re talking:

• Elon Musk is leaving SF 🌉

• Trump is not “better for startups” 👱‍♂️

• AI is training on your YouTube transcripts 🦾 ▶️

• J.D. Vance and his AI regulation skepticism 🤖 🤝 🤖

• Trump allies calling for a “Manhattan Project” for AI weapons 🤖 ☢️ ☣️

• AI has changed the game — privacy principles need to follow suit 🕵️‍♂️

• Venture Capital has an exit problem 💸🚪

My Take:

When I got married, my wife and I had what I call the up-all-night conversations to talk through all the non-negotiables and core things we wanted each other to know before taking the leap.

One of mine was to clarify that the only way I'd ever leave San Francisco was in a box.

I came to SF almost 30 years ago, saw all the radicals with green hair stomping around the Haight, the artists wearing beads and strange colors, the urbanites in their button-down shirts -- and I said to myself, "Daddy's home. I'm staying."

I've lived in the same zip code for 28 of those 30 years. I've seen booms and busts. I've seen adjustments, resets, twists, and turns. Yes, SF has its problems, and some of us are working to solve them. Too many others -- particularly tech tourists like Elon who don't understand the city, its magic and its history, and who just come here to transact -- love to take their potshots.

Elon likes to position himself as a trailblazer. In fact he’s part of a long tradition of get-rich-quick tourists who don’t care about the city’s heritage or its future. There has been a revolving door of them since the gold rush of 1849. They extract their gold and move on.

Elon Musk is indeed one of our generation’s greatest builders. It’s too bad he doesn’t bring his problem-solving mindset to addressing the issues that vex him so in the city that birthed the company he paid billions of dollars to acquire (after several efforts to back out of the deal). Instead, he’s tried to hold the city and the state hostage to his whims.

Elon Musk would like to be seen as a strategic thinker. While commentators will read much into Musk’s stated “final straw,” he looks like more of an opportunist and a stuntman to me. This is the guy who decided to jump on the Trump train VIA tweet minutes after the former President was shot at. This is the guy who curses out marketers and accuses them of ‘blackmail’ when they avoid advertising alongside white supremacists. This is the guy advancing the conspiracy theory that Jewish people seek to replace white people by ushering ‘hordes’ of pliant minorities (like me!) to do their bidding. Can we stop analyzing every decision he makes as if it had an ideological through-line, let alone good, sound reasoning behind it?

You can probably ascribe slightly more logic to the fact that Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are following Musk’s footsteps in loading up the Trump Super PAC coffers. They lit an awful lot of money on fire investing in crypto. Now they’re looking for a President who will loosen regulations and allow more FTX and Binance-scale blow-ups. Of course, it’s easy to wrap yourself in the mantle of, “we want to support the candidate who is best for startups.” But this line of thinking just doesn’t withstand rational scrutiny.

You see any killer startups coming out of Russia? Of course not. Why? Authoritarian regimes are not good for business. China once had a burgeoning entrepreneurial sector, before Xi went straight Mao on all of us. You can ask all the VCs fleeing China for confirmation. 

Free, fair markets and liberal democracy are the best soil conditions for long-lasting entrepreneurship.

Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz aren’t thinking long-term. Elon Musk isn’t thinking at all. He’s moving the last of his companies to Texas and prays for major fallout for San Francisco as a result. If SF is a dead zone for entrepreneurs, why is every major AI company of consequence headquartered here?

Since I’ve lived in SF, the city has seen three boom-and-bust cycles (1999-2001, 2007-2009, 2021-2024). The tourists come, they pan for gold, they pack up, confidently proclaim the city’s final demise – before a new crop swiftly replaces them. 

Elon and others are part of that long and mighty tradition, one I expect to continue to unfold at least two or three more times before they put me in that box.

What I’m Reading:

Apple, NVIDIA and Anthropic reportedly used YouTube transcripts without permission to train AI models VIA Engadget 🦾 ▶️

Some of the world’s largest tech companies trained their AI models on a dataset that included transcripts of more than 173,000 YouTube videos without permission… The dataset, which was created by a nonprofit company called EleutherAI, contains transcripts of YouTube videos from more than 48,000 channels and was used by Apple, NVIDIA and Anthropic among other companies. The findings of the investigation spotlight AI’s uncomfortable truth: the technology is largely built on the backs of data siphoned from creators without their consent or compensation.

J.D. Vance’s A.I. Agenda: Reduce Regulation VIA NYTimes 🤖 🤝 🤖

Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, is a strong skeptic of regulating artificial intelligence. He’s also in favor of reining in Big Tech, companies he says have grown so powerful that they stymie smaller companies’ ability to succeed. That seeming contradiction could play a role in shaping the Trump administration’s stance on A.I. policy if former President Donald J. Trump is elected later this year.

Trump allies want to “Make America First in AI” with sweeping executive order VIA arsTECHNICA 🤖 ☢️ ☣️

The plan, which includes a section titled "Make America First in AI," signals a dramatic potential shift in AI policy if Trump returns to the White House in 2025. The draft order… outlines a series of "Manhattan Projects" to advance military AI capabilities. It calls for an immediate review of what it terms "unnecessary and burdensome regulations" on AI development.

Has generative AI made our best privacy principles obsolete? VIA statescoop 🕵️‍♂️

Regulating AI using the OECD’s existing privacy principles will be about as effective as using traffic laws to halt a supernova. Case in point: The French Data Protection Authority got tied up in knots recently by trying to argue that data minimization doesn’t preclude training AI models on big datasets — but does still require developers to avoid feeding “unnecessary” personal data into AI systems. That brings us straight back to the core question of how, exactly, AI developers can know in advance whether data was necessary or not.

Venture capital has an exit problem VIA Financial Times 💸🚪

The problem has become more acute as tech stocks have stormed back from their post-Covid slump, but stock market listings and sales to other companies have remained subdued. In the US, there have been only four tech IPOs this year by companies valued at more than $1bn, compared with more than 70 in all of 2021, when the stock market was also hot.

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