The Chaser Report - Cheap As Elon Musk's Brain Chips

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

In our first Chaser Report X Welcome To The Future crossover of 2024, Charles and Dom present to you a mix of Elon Musk news. First up, the brain reading Neuralink technology has got its first human test subject. And second, Musk gave himself a $55 billion pay package. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report, as well as another episode of Welcome to the Future, Future. Yes, welcome to the future is our tech podcast, which is separately available, but occasionally we crosspost, as we are with this one, because there is so much fascinating tech news and Charles, not that much else happening in the world. No, just the usual wars. Well, there's a sort of World War III brewing, but we can get to that next week. Yeah, and if we can't get to that next week, it doesn't matter. We won't be here any.

We'll be all be dead. Yeah, that's right. And the collapse of democracy is another issue that we should probably get to at some point. Oh, that await. We've got tech to talk about. Charles, some great stories today, including, I guess, two that involve our dear friend Elon Musk. Yes, unfortunately. We've got Neuralink.

Neuralink has implanted its first chip in a human. Yes. I'm sure that's gone ever so well. And a judge has decided that Elon Musk can't be paid $56 billion U.S. dollars by Tesla. I'm really looking for that one. Apparently, that's too much pay for someone. Oh, really? As we know, is very much a part-time CEO of Tesla.

All that, after this. Okay, so the point is that an invention has been made, Dom, I think, specifically for you. Oh, what? Yes. Let's let the inventors of Neurrelink tell you exactly what it does. The device is designed to interpret your neural activity so you can operate a computer or a smartphone by simply thinking about moving.

No wires or physical movement are required. Dom, you don't have to move your body at all and you can still browse your phone. That is such good news because you know what's been happening to me as I'm getting a bit older. I'm getting RSI in the hand that I used on my phone. Yeah, exactly. No, because I think the one problem

that needed to be solved with the world He's not, you know, World War III or the descent into anti-democratic sort of fascist movements. It's about solving the problem of having to scroll using your phone, which is way too much effort. Yeah, no, it is. At last, Elon's really on the thing that matter here. I mean, Charles, when Neurlink was first proposed, there's all this talk of, you know, it could let people with spinal injuries move again. It could repair all kinds of things.

You could use bionic legs and so on. I'm sure they're still going to use it for war. fair. I think that's very likely. Yes, definitely. But in the meantime, yeah, providing it, like those of us who spend all of our lives on our screens with even more ways. And when we get to the Vision Pro Charles, that too is another even easier way of controlling screen. Well, I do have some bad news, Dom, that unfortunately the first people who are doing the

trials, so it's entered human trials, they are all people who need it for sort of medical reasons. So I actually tried to apply for it this morning. You can go to Neuralink.com and you can apply it to be part of the human trials. But unfortunately, you know, like literally the second question is, do you suffer from paraplegia or aphasia? There's a whole lot of things that they're trying to do. And so, yeah, for the moment, it's medically necessary sort of things.

But I think that's probably not a bad thing because so far they've tested it on 1,500 monkeys. Oh, God. And a lot of those monkeys died. Who approved 1,500 monkeys being used for these trials? Who signed off on that? I mean, Elon Musk, let's just bearing in mind that what you're basically doing is letting Elon Musk have his technology in your body or in a monkey's body. And we've already seen what happens when you put human bodies in a car to design about Elon Musk. They crash into walls.

Yes, that's right. Well, look, it's interesting because I don't think anyone in the animal testing industry has an interest in talking down animal testing, right? So Wide magazine wrote a great piece about it last year, just cataloging all these horrific things that, you know, essentially they're planting these chips in the monkey's brains to, you know, sort of try and get them to control things using their mind. Like, it's a product that Elon Musk is calling telepathy, right? And then it would cause these hemorrhages in the brain, but they wouldn't know, because it's inside your brain, they wouldn't know about the fact that essentially their brains were rotting from the inside and dying and, you know, and they're in absolutely agony.

And there's these horrific case notes of the researchers cataloging how, you know, they'd become very sort of wan and sad. and they'd just start holding the hand of other monkeys nearby. Oh, my God. It was just so horrible. I feel as though organic tissue is not really designed to have chips implanted in. I don't know if anyone's thought of this at any point during the NeuroLink process. But having seen these experiences, how was this approved for humans, firstly?

And secondly, who signed up for it? The funny thing is that last year, the FDA, which is the body in the US, the approval of these things. The medical regulator, yeah. Said, no, fucking way. You can't do it. So I'm not sure how, I mean, maybe they're just this sort of ignoring the FDA. Oh, well, they probably just went to the third world, didn't they?

That's right. No, it's happening in the US. You should read the, it's actually worth going to urelink.com and trying to apply. Because just reading the legal disclaimer is just a process of hilarity about, you know, like we're not responsible for what happens to you. Yeah. I'm not getting one of these, I don't think ever, but certainly not. till Elon gets one first.

Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so, oh yeah, and also what you shouldn't do is yank on the connector that connects the chip to your brain. Oh, my God. Because it will dislodge part of the device. Yeah, that's not good. And lead to fungal and bacterial infections and then the rotting of your brain. I don't, I'm no neuroscientist, Charles, but I would have thought fungal infections in the brain

probably not the best. No, no. But at least they're organic, though, unlike the neuro- chip. Yeah, and also that's the future. And also balance that against the good for humanity, which is now that Elon Musk gets to control your brain. Yeah, and perhaps that's why it got approved by the FTA.

Perhaps Elon went in there with the chips and implanted them. And they were suddenly like, yes, Elon, whatever you say. And you can sort of see the marketing pitch, because Elon announced this on X a couple of days ago. Can we just call it Twitter anyway? Yeah, on Twitter a few days ago. And he said, imagine what this device would. do if Stephen Hawking was still alive.

So it's got this whole sort of like, we're doing this for the good of humanity, we're doing this for people who can't move, this is a great thing. This is the cochlear of brains. This is the Stephen Hawking who warned that artificial intelligence would destroy us all. Yeah, yeah. But you sort of get the sense that actually, you know, it's going to be. But then the thing is, like, if you're doing it for the good of humanity and these poor

people who are paralys. Why are you making them the first test dummies in this whole thing? Like, the only people, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know whether you've ever had like a brain scan. But when you get a brain scan done, whatever it's, they put electrodes on your scalp, right? That's what they do. Yeah. Wouldn't it be smarter to read the brain waves without needing to fucking put a chip in your brain? Like if you had a hat with sensors in it, wouldn't that be slightly less, I don't know, likely to make a fungus grow inside your brain? And look, that is actually what a lot of people have been pointing out is that, so essentially, if you go to NeurLink, you can actually have a look at what they're trying to achieve,

which is essentially you can move this blue dot around on the screen if you've got this chip planted in your brain, right? So it's sort of like a mouse controller, right? Remindsing of early computers in the 80s, right? So you can basically play Pong with a Neuilink chip in your brain. And there's all these people saying, well, actually, a lot of. You know, other researchers not aligned to Elon Musk have done exactly this, but without any sort of invasive surgery. What they do is they can read the movement part of your brain is well known enough that they can actually use sort of AI.

So you use a statistical analysis of what's going on in your brain to recognize when your eyes are shifting from one place to another. So you just put on a hat and you can do the same thing as this computer chip does. But trust Elon to go, no, no, no, no, I don't want any of that. Chip in the brain. But the thing is, I think that this is also very good for Elon Musk's. You know, he's sort of destroyed all the other companies that he's done. This is his next thing. This will be the next five years of everything that we hear about from Elon Musk.

It's bad, you know, maybe for humanity, certainly for science. Probably not very good for, you know, people who do suffer from anything. But it's very good for Elon Musk. Well, yes, I mean, and what we will do is bring. you, we'll bring you the death of the first person to get the chip implanted in a few weeks time. But after this, we will bring you the story about Tesla's board and how they gave Elon Musk a $56 billion pay package, after which he then spent all of his time breaking Twitter.

So I suspect we're going to find out within the next week or two, Elon Musk having one of these chips implanted by the board so that he stopped wasting his time on other companies. But surely Elon Musk should get the board to implant a chip in their brains. and then he can control them. Oh, yeah, that's probably what's going to happen. More after this. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Charles, can I ask you a slightly awkward question?

I am. What's your pay package from, you know, all of the business? And did you get it signed off by the board? Oh, for the chaser? Yeah. Oh. Because I don't remember having any discussions about this. Yeah, well, the thing is, Dom.

If the board were to approve my pay package, then I think they would be in breach of several industrial relations laws relating to slavery. So you haven't given yourself a $55 billion pay package, basically. No, yeah. Well, you know, like, you know, in good weeks, yes. But in bad weeks, let's just say, you know, the Jaser doesn't necessarily adhere to all those pesky minimum wage requirements. Yes, okay.

So what's just happened with Tesla? is that some shareholders sued because the board granted Elon Musk a series of sort of incentive-based payments, all of which he, like I said, I think 12 criteria, all of which he cleared, and all of which apparently he was pretty likely to clear. So the shareholders took him to court saying that it was a completely unrealistic and ridiculous pay package that hadn't been decided independently that he basically manipulated the board into giving him all this money. And the shareholders won.

and here's how Blenberg reported it. What shareholders alleged in their suit is that Tesla's board and its directors did not act with impartiality when setting the $55 billion compensation, which is a historic record for any compensation package for a publicly traded CEO. And the judge in this case, Kathleen St. Jude McCormick, is agreeing with that in the sense that investors had to go hunting to clarify whether or not there were conflicts of interest in the apportioning of that. that reward.

So there you go. Was there a conflict of interest in the Tesla's board giving him this package? The board which contains his brother and many of his close friends. Right. So it doesn't sound like there was any conflict of interest. It sounds like there was an alignment of interest between Elon Musk and his mates who presumably go out with Musk all the time and now Musk can afford to shout them really good drinks.

Well, apparently the board themselves, the director's handed back $780 million of compensation because it was too much. Right. Yeah, because I don't think that board members, I thought the whole point about a board member is you don't actually get paid much at all. You just, it's sort of like an honorary position. Like, I saw the pay packets for Apple's board of directors and it's sort of like everyone's on about 400 grand, which, you know, it's just good money.

But it's not $700 million. They're probably getting options as well. But let's just say, if you're Elon Musk's less talented brother Kimball, Kimball Musk, we don't talk about Kimball. He's on the board of Tesla. I reckon Kimball's the silent achiever. I reckon Kimball is the brains behind Elon. He's certainly the silent part.

I wonder whether Kimball is the guy who's had the Neurrelink implanted in his brain. Probably all the board had. So the judge's analysis of the deal was quite elegant, Charles. She wrote, in the final analysis, Musk launched a self-driving process, recalibrating the speed and direction along the way as he saw fit. And the process arrived at an unfair. price, which makes his child the first successful bit of self-driving that Tesla's ever achieved.

Right. So it's interesting. So $55 billion is, is, so is it too high or too low? To too high. Too high, right. Yeah, okay. Yeah, because I get very confused with these sorts of numbers because, you know, what's a $55 billion here, $55 billion there?

Like, for Elon Musk, because how much, he's worth about $300 billion now, isn't he? He keeps it. Certainly not. After this news broke, his shares in Tesla went down big-time Tesla's shares significantly. And obviously, his Twitter stockholding is down. So he might not be the richest in the world. So wait a minute.

The Tesla shares fell on news that they wouldn't have to give as many Tesla shares to Elon Musk. It's funny, isn't it? So doesn't that mean that the board's decision was correct? Because it was in the interest of the shareholders. Well, this is the weird thing because he certainly took the company to a trillion dollars or something. Yeah, exactly. To the moon. But the hilarious thing is, as well, they made the point that the board hasn't managed to keep

Elon Musk's attention engaged. So he was being paid all that money. You've got to remember for a part-time job. Yes. Which he abandoned for months to win Twitter. But if you want to know just how much money he was getting paid, someone's worked out. I love this stat. If you took the combined pay of the 200 highest paid CEOs in America in 2021, Elon Musk doesn't get paid anything as a CEO. It's just all in options. So the top 200, all of their pay, how many times would you have to multiply it by to get Elon Musk's pay package. I'd say at least five. Six.

Six times that the 200 best payers CEOs in America is how much he was getting paid for a part-time job. So how do the changes to the stage three tax cuts affect Elon Musk? Well, I've read it in the Herald today. I couldn't believe this. I'm saying what an amazing opportunity to stage three tax cuts are to make money for rich people. What? Why?

Because they can put more if they're paying to. they're super and basically avoid losing a lot of... I don't understand how it all works, but... But isn't that one of those you've got to spend money to make money ideas? You know how people always say, well, all you've got to do, you know, how to become a millionaire within seven years, just save $20,000 a day and you'll be a millionaire in no time. But it seemed extraordinary to me that this one thing that the very rich people, the one time

that they've been rained in and had still a massive tax cut, but less of a massive tax cut. Apparently, this article by John Collett, it says, how do you use... use the stage three tax cuts to turbocharge your wealth. So it's a win-win. You take, take money away from them on one hand and give them a massive opportunity to make money out of super. I don't understand. I'm not in that situation, but pretty funny. So do you think, do you think Elon Musk needed the $55 billion to even just pay attention to a little bit? Because he's worth like 300 million. So this is sort of like a rounding area. This is like you or me negotiating over some side hustle, I don't know, like you do a corporate speaking gig or

something like that. Like, it's not, it's not your main income. No, his main income is... It's just like $55 billion on the side. His main, his main project is ruining Twitter. I mean, we know that. That's what he's spent his time doing. And so you just go, I mean, maybe the point is he's worth that much. Maybe the point is, you know, who are we to judge whether somebody, like, I kind of feel like everyone's always pissing on the rich because they take all the wealth. Can't they get a break? Yes. And he's much less wealthy than he was before this decision, I suppose. So they've got to get back to the negotiating. And here's the truth.

part, Charles. He is the really tricky part. Elon says he's not really very interested in keeping working for Tesla at all. Yes. Unless he owns 25% of the voting shares. And he did used to. Yeah. And he sold them off to buy Twitter. Right. So basically having massively fucked that up and destroyed Twitter and basically Tesla's gone into a massive decline because he wasn't paying attention, et cetera, et cetera. So it's all bad. So his solution is that they should just give him more voting stock. They should basically give him the amount of money that he used to buy Twitter. Right. And otherwise he's not going to be interested in working for Tesla anymore. But isn't that a good thing for

Tesla? Like this sounds like a win-win-win-win. I mean, the biggest win-win-win-win-win is really Elon spends a lot more time. On neuraling. I was going to say, testing out the self-driving facilities and the engineers make a terrible miscalculation. But yeah, having a chip implanted. Or maybe, you know, you know, doing some manned

SpaceX flights and they explode all the time? I think that's true. What they should do is use the Tesla autopilot software to do the next SpaceX one, put a chip in Elon's brain so he thinks it's a good idea to go on it. Yes. And the problem will take care of itself. Look, I want to make a prediction of it, which is I reckon Elon Musk will be broke within 10 years. That's probably true, actually.

Yeah. I think everything he does is basically a pump and dump Ponzi scheme. I think Tesla is not worth anywhere near what it's valued at. That's what it's starting to plummet. It's got nothing to do with Elon Musk, really. Everyone's just kind of going, oh, I don't know, I don't know that I trust them not to kill me. But also, like, over the summer we rendered a BYD electric car, which is now the top-selling electric car in the world. They don't sell them in the US, but they still sell more than Tesla does worldwide.

Yeah, they do. A Chinese firm, I'm partially by Warren Buffett. Build your dreams, Charles. But it was much better. It's a much better car than a Tesla, like a driven testers. And you go, it fucking shithouse. Like, they keep on trying to control. you and everything like that.

But also it's quite possible that BYD doesn't have a CEO who would just potentially, like the Elon Musk way to run a car company is that you build in a software which makes it fart. I don't know if you've seen this. There's a button that makes the Tesla's fart. My 13 year old loves that feature. I think it's called random emissions testing or something. Yes.

So you have a stupid pun. Yes. And as part of that update, which you can't, you just gets delivered over the air, there'll be something that fucks up the navigation that makes you drive into a wall. Yes. That's what Tesla is. And you're buying a Tesla, you're buying a machine that can be updated at any time. We get a stupid feature that Elon thought was funny that will kill you.

That's what you're buying. Yes, that's right. I think I'm going to test drive at B.YD. So Tesla, that's gone. Tesla's finished. And SpaceX. SpaceX loses money. So what Elon did was he went, okay, we need a customer for SpaceX to serve, right?

Because it does like seven launches a month at the moment of these rockets. But what is it launching into space, right? It's launching Starlink satellites, right? And Starlink satellites are also owned by Elon Musk. He set up the company to give SpaceX a customer, right? And the whole thing is that's also losing money. So not only is SpaceX losing money, but the customer, the main customer, needs $12 billion a year in revenue to actually break even.

It's doing about, I think, $1.7 billion a year in revenue at the moment. So it's nowhere near profitable enough. And the actual satellites, the Starlink satellites, degrade really rapidly. And the reason they degrade really rapidly is because they were built with the idea of putting SpaceX into business in a full-time capacity. So they keep on having to upload hundreds and hundreds of satellites all the time. Oh, because they keep breaking on purpose. Yes, they keep breaking. Oh, my gosh, plan obsolescence.

It's like Apple in space. Yes, exactly. And then so I think you can just write that off, especially as Jeff Bezos and Amazon have said they're going to set up their own. own competitors, Starlink. You're just going, if there's one company that will relentlessly and ruthlessly sort of underpriced their thing for 20 years to get rid of their competitors, it's fucking Amazon. It's Amazon. Right.

So you get rid of Tesla that's just going to, you know, flame out and, you know, crash into a wall. Starlink and SpaceX, solar city's already gone broke. But Charles, the chip is the brain company will work up. Everyone's going to want a chip in their brains. Yeah, and then the neuroling one, which, I mean, look, yeah, exactly. If it helps someone who's got a spinal injury walk again, that's great. But that will be, you can guarantee that that is an unintended purpose. Like, Elon Musk wanted a chip in his own brain.

And someone's sensible went, oh, we could actually use this for a good purpose. That's not what the company's for. He's going to destroy it by coming up with some other stupid idea. Like putting humans with chips on brains. On Mars. Yes, and then, yes, and then, you know, because then what? What's the other, that's it for the boring company, which is already failed. And then the boring company with tunneling company.

Which has, they've done one project, which is in Las Vegas. And what it is, is it's a tunnel that allows you to put cars through a tunnel on a sort of automated track. Right. So it's a bit like reinventing across between a train and a car. And it constantly gets full up, right? So you can't use it most of the time because, like, there's too many cars inside it. He's invented a traffic jam. I wouldn't use it, Charles, because you know what a tunnel has?

What? A lot of walls. I don't know you want a Tesla. Tesla in a space with walls in every direction. I think it'd be all right if you had a B-Y-D. Yeah, you'd be fine. That's pretty good. All right, our gear is from Road.

We're part of the Iconoclass network. And the chip in your brain, the chaser should do a chip-based brain technology thing. In-tones! In-sones! And then it could tell you witty quips. We train it using Craig data, and he could say witty insulting quips. We should plant it in our own brain. Oh, we should definitely get it to get a model of Craig's brain.

Yes. Oh, that's a great idea. Okay, we'll do it. Don't tell him. Build your dreams.