Elon Muskbrat, more or less, threatens to quit Tesla if they don't meet his demands

Elon is unhappy. Boo and hoo. Since he made his horribly ill-advised offer to buy Twitter and was forced to follow through on the purchase, he's had to sell a lot of his shares in Tesla to keep himself and Twitter afloat: he now holds about 13% of its shares. He wants to remedy that, and his method is to whine to the Board of Directors of Tesla that if they don't award him another 12%, that he might take his toys and go elsewhere. Or invent his new toys elsewhere. Something like that.

This can go three ways, IMO. The board caves and awards him the additional shares. Now, the problem is that the board has troubles of its own, having faced lawsuits and government inquiries that they've been a little too free with giving themselves money. This might look like more of the same and could land them in more hot water. In fact, some board members are banned from taking any compensation for multiple years!

Or they could say no bueno. In which case the Muskbrat walks. Or he doesn't. I expect he has additional remunerations with Tesla that vest over time. If he walks, he'll lose that. So walking wouldn't be in his best interest. And if he walks, and they bring in someone who actually knows how to run a car company who brings in some good managers and innovators who make some serious improvements there - and lord knows they need 'em! - he's going to look like the buffoon that he is.

If he stays, and doesn't get his shares, it's an empty threat. He just lost any leverage opportunity with the Board for negotiating in the future. Which could have some interesting consequences as time goes by. Now, the thing is, it's a Musk Family Crony Board. They probably lean towards caving, or at least negotiating, but there's that whole 'enrichment' investigation stuff fresh in their minds and still hanging over them.

Not a good time! Well, a good time for the popcorn-munching fans of slow-moving disasters, perhaps. :)

https://gizmodo.com/elon-threatens-to-build-products-outside-of-tesla-unles-1851168957

Writing computer programs is hard. Writing SECURE computer programs is even harder!

And what's even harderer? Using an AI coding assistant to write secure programs.

Many, MANY times that I've written about computer insecurity issues I've said explicitly that computer security is HARD. And here we have a prime example.

It turns out that using an AI to help you write a program produces LESS secure programs! But that's not the worse part: the program is more likely to believe that they are writing MORE SECURE CODE!

This is very bad. I've used AI for hints in writing code, looking for little obscure code references that I'm not familiar with. Quite useful. I haven't used it to write entire programs for me, I'm not sure that I could. However, there are people out there paying for subscriptions to ChatGPT 4 and other engines using them heavily, and that is worrisome.

https://arxiv.org/html/2211.03622v3

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/01/code-written-with-ai-assistants-is-less-secure.html