from Hacker News

Why Is Elon Musk Invited to Speak at AI Startup School?

by basementcat on 2/18/25, 6:13 AM with 10 comments

• by bell-cot on 2/18/25, 7:53 AM

  Y Combinator is a business organization, which needs to smoothly interact with a wide variety of VIP's, organizations, and more-ordinary people in order to function.

  Being an individual - you're free to boycott this site, donate 25% of your income to anti-Musk Democrats, take a job with a competitor to Tesla or SpaceX, and otherwise demonstrate your commitment to a far stricter moral code.

• by joker666 on 2/18/25, 6:31 AM

  He owns XAI.

• by waonderer on 2/18/25, 7:34 AM

  He owns xAI and runs grok.

• by ddxv on 2/18/25, 6:51 AM

  He's the richest man in the world and probably spent the most on GPUs of anyone in the past 12 months to get Grok 2 and 3 out. In the end, he's too powerful to ignore. On the other side, he wants to be there.

• by archagon on 2/18/25, 11:45 AM

  Seconded. Given Musk's repugnant political activity and outbursts, this should be a non-starter regardless of his influence in the AI scene. Just the other day, he referred to people on benefits as being part of the "parasite class." (I am sure that’s some of us here.) A few weeks ago, he described Hitler as a "communist" to his fascist German buddies. Prior to that, he called for the execution of a federal witness for daring to testify against the president. What would it take to actually make him persona non grata at YC? Open racism? Eugenics? An “I ♡ Nazis” shirt, perhaps? Or is absolutely nothing off the table anymore?

  And this is on top of the abominably illegal and anti-competitive training on private government data that DOGE is (likely) doing as we speak. The future of AI is in the worst hands imaginable and YC is cheering it on. Despicable.

  I hope there's a protest. If he's there in person, I will be more than happy to make him and his kind feel vehemently unwelcome in my city.

• by wozer on 2/18/25, 5:40 PM

  Y Combinator is mostly ideologically aligned with Musk and the Trump administration. If you don't believe me, look through the tweets of Garry Tan, for example.

• by andsoitis on 2/18/25, 7:13 AM

  That's binary thinking.

  One can recognize someone's accomplishment in one domain even if it means they suck in another, even if they're a jerk.

  Jobs is one such example. Another would be Bach. Newton, Nikola Tesla, John Lennon, William Golding, Winston Churchill, Einstein, Darwin, Edison, Prince, Henry Ford, Marie Curie, Schrödinger, Picasso, Marconi, etc. all come to mind as being despicable in some (or more) dimensions even though they were geniuses in others and moving humanity forward.