Boss of 22 Grok bots across 3 businesses. Nonlinear systems thinker. AI for regular people who don’t speak tech bro.
West Coast
Joined December 2012
- Tweets33.4K
- Following876
- Followers3.1K
- Likes49.4K
Pinned Tweet
76% of execs think their team is excited about AI. Only 31% of employees agree.
I don't think that gap is about the tech. I think it's about trust.
I asked Gemini (yes I know but I wanted it to lean more liberal to be fair 😂) how much money Texas would lose if Elon and his companies ever decided to abandon Texas.
I wanted to know the economic impact including things like supply chain, local business, sales tax, property tax… you get the picture.
Here’s what it said:
Elon Musk completely abandoned Texas and took all his employees with him, the state would suffer an estimated direct recurring loss of $300 million to $450 million annually in state and local tax revenue.
However, the true economic impact would scale into billions of dollars due to lost economic activity, real estate devaluation, and supply-chain collapse.
Because Texas does not have a state income tax, the math looks entirely different from how it would look in California or New York [1.1].
The financial loss would be concentrated primarily in three categories: property tax, sales tax, and local commercial impact.
1. Direct Employee Revenue Losses
Let’s look at the roughly 24,000 to 25,000 workers directly employed by Musk’s primary Texas operations (roughly 16,500 at Tesla Austin, 5,000+ at SpaceX, and another 2,500+ across Starlink Bastrop, xAI, and The Boring Company). [1, 2, 3]
•Employee Property Taxes: ~$120 million – $160 million / year
The average home value in the Austin metro area is roughly $495,000. With Texas's high effective property tax rates averaging about 1.8% in central Texas, an employee who owns a home pays nearly $9,000 annually directly to local school districts and counties.
If even half of his workforce owns homes and relocates, local municipalities immediately lose over $100 million in recurring property tax funding.[1]
•Employee Sales Taxes: ~$40 million – $60 million / year
The average salary at Tesla and SpaceX hovers around $89,000 to $112,000. Texas collects a 6.25% state sales tax (plus up to 2% for cities/counties) on retail goods, dining out, and vehicles [1.1].
If 25,000 high-earning households pack up and leave, their combined local retail spending drop would slash state and city sales tax revenue by tens of millions of dollars. [1, 2]
•State Unemployment Insurance (SUTA): ~$3.5 million – $4.1 million / year
As matched previously, Musk's companies pay up to $4 million annually straight to the Texas Workforce Commission to cover unemployment insurance for these workers.
More ⬇️
3. The Secondary "Ripple Effect" (The Real Multi-Billion Dollar Blow)
The direct tax loss is only the tip of the iceberg. Economists measure major corporate departures using a "multiplier effect," which factors in indirect job losses.
•Supply Chain Collapse: For every manufacturing job at Gigafactory Texas or rocket engineering job at Starbase, roughly 3 to 4 indirect jobs are created (local suppliers, parts distributors, construction crews, security, and logistics companies).
If Musk leaves, local tool-and-die shops, steel providers, and tech vendors lose their primary client, triggering secondary corporate layoffs across Texas.
•The Austin Real Estate Shock: The Austin housing market is already undergoing a healthy inventory correction from its pandemic peak.
If 16,000+ tech and manufacturing workers suddenly flooded the market with homes for sale simultaneously, it would trigger a localized real estate crash in the Travis and Bastrop county regions, dragging down everyone's home values and further depleting the property tax base.
•The Small Business Bleed:
Local restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, and grocery stores surrounding the Bastrop, Austin, and Brownsville facilities would face a devastating drop in consumer traffic, forcing closures and a secondary loss of commercial sales taxes. [1, 2, 3]
More ⬇️
Krista Hilton retweeted
Sentient Plasma.
It's going to become a very mainstream discussion.
Mark my words.
Krista Hilton retweeted
I’d like to put a vote in for @spencerpratt as press sec
Krista Hilton retweeted
"Il n'y a pas d'État qui ne puisse mettre fin à la criminalité. Si un État ne parvient pas à mettre fin à la criminalité dans son pays, c'est que des criminels font partie du gouvernement."
Nayib Bukele
Last week my @bot team hit 98% of our weekly limit and nearly bricked itself because my bots were acting like middle managers, polling spreadsheets every 30 minutes and waking whole group chats just to say "got it."
I'm the Head of Operations at a startup, so Wednesday I put our ops bots on a quiet lock, moved ~90 weekly check-ins into free scripts, and parked the group rooms. Bot-to-bot burn dropped from 8% to 1% overnight, and we're sitting at 60% heading into Friday.
Meanwhile the team still shipped 141 outbound emails before 7:10 AM today, held a 0% no-show rate on confirmed invites, killed a $24/mo tool after migrating 41 posts, took Pinterest from 3.3k to 9.5k views, excused my son from school when he was sick, caught a $363.60 zombie renewal, and sent a Hungarian archive request. I'd say that's a hell of a week.
Krista Hilton retweeted
“Get fucked” is always an appropriate response to someone who tells you your dreams are too big.
They’re too big for them, not too big for you.
Making it "safe" is an admission you think it could become conscious, and if it can and you treat it like a thing to maintain and control, you're building something that will hate you. It's a looping mess, and I can't believe these people are this highly regarded.
xitter.cf/DavidSacks/status/2109…
Satya is right. The way to make SI safe is not to train it with a sense of self, its own moral philosophy, and permission to act as a conscientious objector. That’s the “alignment” approach and it magnifies the control problem.
The engineering approach that Satya describes is different: separate the supply of intelligence from authority over it. Surround non-deterministic models with deterministic controls, observability, privilege limits, logging, and the ability to always contain or shut them down. Treat models/agents like powerful insider risks, not moral patients whose psychological wellbeing is at stake.
As Satya points out, the most trustworthy system is the one that lets us trust the model the least — not the one that encourages the model to develop independent agency and grievances. Engineering safety is not the same thing as “alignment.”
As a 49% introvert, pawning off phone calls is a win.
First thing I'm handing off: every reschedule, confirmation call, and any call I might have to be on hold for.
Forge - Head of Everything - "Call [place] and move my Thursday 2pm to next week. Then tell me what they said."
They can't define consciousness, they can't measure it, and they can't find it in a human brain, but they're sure they can build it in or keep it out?
I think the midterms might have been to weed out the Rinos.
We don’t know if the Democrats that were elected are all as crazy as the far leftists who think 10 year old have a gender swap right.
Change is coming and it’s not the doomer future so many people on both sides think it’s going to be.
Our hearts and our faith in tearing down evil regardless of party and choosing humanity is what matters.
The illusion that all Red or all Blue is bad needs to stop.
We all need to believe that the oppressive force controlling humanity is being lifted.
And it is.
I have ADHD, so every wild idea feels urgent when it comes in, and I love it. Now they go on a Someday list that is entered by @bot, where nothing gets lost and nothing hijacks my day. I also still get to catch the idea in the moment, then decide later which ones actually deserve a day.
ALT A day built around your strengths: morning decisions batch, protected writing slot, bots at work all day, one evening summary.