leroy_masochist

Regardless of whether Carreyrou is right, Mr. Back's life has now changed massively. The article points out that the market value of Satoshi's wallet is north of $100bn. Time to invest in some personal security.

I feel like there's a big market opportunity to create an EV-only rental car agency that will eventually get rolled up by an Avis or Hertz.

Besides the body damage repair cost mentioned in the article, one other reason for Hertz' decision has to be customer complaints. Car rental agencies frequently have to give people a different car than the one they reserved and for whatever reason, a lot of Americans have a bone to pick with electric vehicles. Having traveled extensively for work over the years, I've seen some pretty stunning meltdowns from the people ahead of me in the Hertz line when they got, e.g., a Traverse instead of a Tahoe (i.e., a marginally smaller SUV than the one they reserved).

Imagine the theatrics that ensue at the Honolulu airport when an entitled boomer out of central casting (sorry to stereotype) gets a Bolt instead of the Malibu they reserved. I could totally see how such incidents, at scale, would bubble up to Hertz leadership and drive decisions.

It doesn't seem like there are any electric-only agencies out there except for the Tesla plan to let owners monetize their vehicles during owner downtime. Feels like a good market opportunity and the US Gov would probably subsidize the shit out of it.

> I think OpenAI should have prioritized character more in its hiring.

I think OpenAI should have prioritized sanity more in its board member selection.

She literally wanted to destroy OpenAI in order to save it. Unbelievable. We need a total and complete shutdown of EAs serving on startup boards until we figure out what the hell is going on.

Can we have a quick moment of silence for Matt Levine? Between Friday afternoon and right now, he has probably had to rewrite today's Money Stuff column at least 5 or 6 times.

You're nitpicking via an overly literal interpretation of what I wrote and missing the point entirely.

In the case of nonprofits, the fiduciary duties of board members pertain to keeping the organization financially healthy as opposed to representing the interest of shareholders. But you already knew this, right?

Right, my point here is that the "design" of the board here raises a lot of questions.

Board charters are often written so that this kind of thing doesn't happen - especially in the case of startups with small boards and charismatic founders.

> the board (at least what remains) seems to disagree strongly with the direction in which the organization was headed

Yeah that is clearly the case, but when you have a situation where four of the six board members execute a coup against the two most powerful and important board members (the CEO and the chair), the company looks like a shitshow and nobody is going to want to work there or partner with them, at least until they are able to present a credible narrative about what they did (which may never happen).

Totally get the fact that the four remaining board members didn't like where things were headed, but their actions yesterday created a tremendous amount of collateral damage that will massively impede OpenAI in its journey toward whatever new azimouth they choose.

Nope. This is a 501c3 board, so it explicitly doesn't have any Revlon or other fiduciary responsibilities.

> Ultimately one important job of the board is to be able to replace the CEO.

This is true in the abstract but it is not common to see the narrowest possible majority on a six-person board oust the co-founder/CEO (also a board member) while excluding the board chair (who was also the company's President and co-founder) from the process.

> So it would be odd if it was structured in a way that this wasn’t possible.

You are wrong here. Boards are usually structured so that what just happened at OpenAI is not possible. The exclusion of the board chair from the process is especially egregious and the involvement of board chairs in decisions of this magnitude is often mandated in documents of incorporation.

Matt Levine is going to have a field day with this, LOL.

I can't find the exact quote, but I distinctly remember Sam giving founders advice along the lines of, "operate under the assumption that co-founders and investors are not going to screw you". Pretty sure it was a Startup School lecture at some point.

That still may be good life advice in general (even if it wasn't for Sam in this case) but what I really don't get is the fact that OpenAI's board governance was structured in a way such that this was even possible.

I also don't understand what is to be gained from the perspective of the remaining senior leaders at the company. This is a tremendously momentum-killing event. I cannot think of a single facet of their day-to-day operations, product roadmap, competitive position, etc. that would be improved by this decision.

Yesterday, when this was announced, I was bracing myself for some truly awful news about something that Sam had done in his personal life that was about to be divulged, since that is the only possible rational reason for the board to make the decision it did.

What am I missing? It's all so strange.

Someone else in this thread answered that it's because of NAICS standards, which is an interesting hypothesis, but I think the real reason is, "because investment banks organize their coverage groups that way". And the reason that investment banks do this is primarily because the core of the value in these businesses is driven by intellectual property and/or exclusive licenses to deliver content. In other words, assset value across these three verticals is driven by legal rights to exclude other people from creating a similar asset, whether that asset is a piece of code, monopoly-protected land-line phone service (not really a thing anymore but very much so in the 80s/90s when the TMT category came into being), or episodes of a TV show.

TLDR: because dealmakers think it makes sense that way.

There's a bogus argument about GCT scores in this article:

> In Joint Force Quarterly, Matthew F. Cancian showed the long-term trend in intelligence among Marine officers. Comparing the absolute scores on the General Classification Test (GCT), new Marine officers started a long-term downward trend in intellectual capability starting around 1980. Of concern, “two-thirds of the new officers commissioned in 2014 would be in the bottom one-third of the class of 1980; 41 percent of new officers in 2014 would not have qualified to be officers by the standards held at the time of World War II.” Though data for the other services is not available, Cancian suspects that a similar trend has occurred in them as well.

I'm familiar with this issue in detail. Until the late 90s, GCT scores were a metric used by the Marine Corps for officer MOS assignments, which happen for ground officers during the Basic School, the 6-month infantry leadership course that all USMC officers go to as the foundation of their training (pilots get airframe assignments after flight school). After the late 90s, they stopped using GCT scores as a factor in MOS assignment, but they still kept making officers take the test for poorly articulated reasons. When I took the GCT at TBS in 2006, it was at 7am on a Friday after we had been in the field with little sleep since that Monday; I had gone to bed at around 2am that morning because weapons turn-in had taken forever at the armory. We were told immediately before taking the test that it was only going to be used for data tracking purposes and that we should take it seriously because of the "bragging rights" that came with a high score.

If you take away the incentives to do well on a test and schedule it at a time that is going to ensure subpar performance in all test-takers, it shouldn't be a surprise that people do worse on it than they did in the past when it directly affected their career prospects.

All in all, the article strikes me as more of the same alarmist drivel that has been par for the course in military-related op-eds since Jesus was a lance corporal.