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Elon Musk is still frantically pushing to launch X payment services in the US by the end of 2024, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Launching payment services is arguably one of the reasons why Musk paid so much to acquire Twitter in 2022. His rebranding of the social platform into X revives a former dream he had as a PayPal co-founder who fought and failed to name the now-ubiquitous payments app X. Musk has told X staff that transforming the company into a payments provider would be critical to achieving his goal of turning X into a so-called everything app "within three to five years."

Late last year, Musk said it would "blow" his "mind" if X didn't roll out payments by the end of 2024, so Bloomberg's report likely comes as no big surprise to Musk's biggest fans who believe in his vision. At that time, Musk said he wanted X users' "entire financial lives" on the platform before 2024 ended, and a Bloomberg review of "more than 350 pages of documents and emails related to money transmitter licenses that X Payments submitted in 11 states" shows approximately how close he is to making that dream a reality on his platform.

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Tesla shareholders have re-approved CEO Elon Musk's $44.9 billion pay package, the company announced today. "Our stockholders have approved the ratification of the 100 percent performance-based stock option award to Elon Musk that was approved by stockholders in 2018," Brandon Ehrhart, Tesla's general counsel and corporate secretary, announced at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting.

Ehrhart also said that shareholders approved a corporate move from Delaware to Texas, and the re-election of board members James Murdoch and Kimbal Musk (Elon Musk's brother). While the official announcement was made at the shareholder meeting late in the day on Thursday, Musk revealed that the yes votes were winning in a social media post last night.

"Both Tesla shareholder resolutions are currently passing by wide margins!" Musk wrote, referring to the pay vote and the move from Delaware to Texas. His post included charts indicating that both shareholder resolutions had more than enough yes votes to surpass the "guaranteed win" threshold.

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While Musk has spent much of today loudly criticizing the Apple/OpenAI deal, he also sought to drop his lawsuit against OpenAI, a court filing today showed.

In the filing, Musk's lawyer, Morgan Chu, notified the Superior Court of California in San Francisco of Musk's request for dismissal of his entire complaint without prejudice.

There are currently no further details as to why Musk decided to drop the suit.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu / Contributor | Anadolu)

Elon Musk is so opposed to Apple's plan to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT with device operating systems that he's seemingly spreading misconceptions while heavily criticizing the partnership.

On X (formerly Twitter), Musk has been criticizing alleged privacy and security risks since the plan was announced Monday at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

"If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies," Musk posted on X. "That is an unacceptable security violation." In another post responding to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Musk wrote, "Don't want it. Either stop this creepy spyware or all Apple devices will be banned from the premises of my companies."

Enlarge / He isn't using an iPhone, but some people talk to Siri like this.

On Monday, Apple premiered "Apple Intelligence" during a wide-ranging presentation at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California. However, the heart of its new tech, an array of Apple-developed AI models, was overshadowed by the announcement of ChatGPT integration into its device operating systems.

Since rumors of the partnership first emerged, we've seen confusion on social media about why Apple didn't develop a cutting-edge GPT-4-like chatbot internally. Despite Apple's year-long development of its own large language models (LLMs), many perceived the integration of ChatGPT (and opening the door for others, like Google Gemini) as a sign of Apple's lack of innovation.

"This is really strange. Surely Apple could train a very good competing LLM if they wanted? They've had a year," wrote AI developer Benjamin De Kraker on X. Elon Musk has also been grumbling about the OpenAI deal—and spreading misconceptions about it—saying things like, "It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy!"

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Tesla shareholders will vote on Thursday on whether to restore the mammoth pay package for chief executive Elon Musk that was struck down by a Delaware judge this year. But that is not expected to close the book on a legal saga that has consumed the electric-car maker and the leading US business law court that dared to defy Musk and his overseers on the company’s board.

In asking shareholders to approve of the same 2018 pay package that was nullified by the Delaware Court of Chancery in January, Tesla is relying on a legal principle known as “ratification,” in which the validity of a corporate action can be cemented by a shareholder vote. Ratification, the company told shareholders in a proxy note earlier this year, “will restore Tesla’s stockholder democracy.”

This instance, however, is the first time a company has tried to leverage that principle after its board was found to have breached its fiduciary duty to approve the deal in the first place.

Enlarge / Precision’s Layer 7 Cortical Interface array. (credit: Precision)

Work toward brain-computer interfaces has never been more charged. Though neuroscientists have toiled for decades to tap directly into human thoughts, recent advances have the field buzzing with anticipation—and the involvement of one polarizing billionaire has drawn a new level of attention.

With competition amping up in this space, Ars spoke with Ben Rapoport, who is a neurosurgeon, electrical engineer, and co-founder of the brain-computer interface (BCI) company Precision Neuroscience. Precision is at the forefront of the field, having placed its BCI on the brains of 14 human patients so far, with two more scheduled this month. Rapoport says he hopes to at least double that number of human participants by the end of this year. In fact, the 3-year-old company expects to have its first BCI on the market next year.

In addition to the swift progress, Precision is notable for its divergence from its competitor's strategies, namely Neuralink, the most high-profile BCI company and headed by Elon Musk. In 2016, Rapoport co-founded Neuralink alongside Musk and other scientists. But he didn't stay long and went on to co-found Precision in 2021. In previous interviews, Rapoport suggested his split from Neuralink related to the issues of safety and invasiveness of the BCI design. While Neuralink's device is going deeper into the brain—trying to eavesdrop on neuron signals with electrodes at close range to decode thoughts and intended motions and speech—Precision is staying at the surface, where there is little to no risk of damaging brain tissue.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks onstage at SXSW on March 11, 2018, in Austin, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | Diego Donamaria )

Tesla Board Chairperson Robyn Denholm urged shareholders to re-approve CEO Elon Musk's $46 billion pay package this week, saying the vote is "not about the money" while suggesting that Musk could leave Tesla or devote less time to the company if he isn't properly compensated.

"This is obviously not about the money. We all know Elon is one of the wealthiest people on the planet, and he would remain so even if Tesla were to renege on the commitment we made in 2018," Denholm wrote in a June 5 letter to shareholders.

Musk's pay plan was nullified by a Delaware Court of Chancery ruling in January 2024 after a lawsuit filed by a shareholder. The ruling said that Denholm had a "lackadaisical approach to her oversight obligations" and "derived the vast majority of her wealth from her compensation as a Tesla director." It also said most board members "were beholden to Musk or had compromising conflicts," and that the proxy information given to shareholders before the 2018 vote was "materially deficient."

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Australia's safety regulator has ended a legal battle with X (formerly Twitter) after threatening approximately $500,000 daily fines for failing to remove 65 instances of a religiously motivated stabbing video from X globally.

Enforcing Australia's Online Safety Act, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman-Grant had argued it would be dangerous for the videos to keep spreading on X, potentially inciting other acts of terror in Australia.

But X owner Elon Musk refused to comply with the global takedown order, arguing that it would be "unlawful and dangerous" to allow one country to control the global Internet. And Musk was not alone in this fight. The legal director of a nonprofit digital rights group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Corynne McSherry, backed up Musk, urging the court to agree that "no single country should be able to restrict speech across the entire Internet."