’Firing Jack was the final straw’: Elon Musk attacks Twitter leadership, takes aim at OpenAI’s Bret Taylor
Elon Musk has once again criticized former Twitter leadership, calling them the ‘crazy left’. Musk also criticized the company’s former executive chairman, Bret Taylor, who now serves as Chairman of the Board at OpenAI.
Interestingly, Musk included Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in the discussion, calling his departure from the company in 2021 a “firing.” Musk also called Dorsey possibly the “last bastion” of free speech before what he called the woke mind virus takes over the social media platform.
Musk was responding to a post on The alleged data showed that the increase in young adults identifying as non-binary peaked around the time Musk took over and then left Twitter.
Musk says Jack Dorsey was the final straw:
“The crazy left that took over Twitter was Wormtongue to the World,” Musk wrote, referencing the manipulative character in JRR Tolkien’s popular Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“Firing @Jack was the last straw. He was the last bastion. Bret Taylor is now president of @OpenAI,” Musk added.
Bret Taylor, in particular, was the public face of the legal battle that broke out between Musk and Twitter after the billionaire tried to terminate the deal in July 2022 due to concerns about spam bots. The case was later dismissed after Musk agreed to buy the social media giant for $44 billion.
Since then, Musk has made some radical changes to his social media platform; It changed its name to X, relaxed content moderation norms, ended its old verification program and even merged it with artificial intelligence company xAI.
In particular, Musk has frequently criticized OpenAI, a startup he helped found, for its woke tendencies, and has often gone on to compare his own chatbot, Grok, to the most realistic model of generative AI on the market. Musk has also filed multiple lawsuits against OpenAI; The most fundamental of these was the claim that the AI startup had abandoned its non-profit mission and turned into a for-profit company.
In another case, OpenAI scored a major victory, with a judge dismissing xAI’s lawsuit claiming the maker of ChatGPT was trying to steal trade secrets by hiring former employees.
Taylor, meanwhile, joined OpenAI’s board in 2023 following drama in which CEO Sam Altman was fired by the company and rehired shortly after.
