Trump’s victory will profit Elon Musk and xAI

Disclaimer: I voted for Kamala Harris within the 2024 presidential election and stand by my selection.

Republican politician and businessman Donald J. Trump has received the 2024 U.S. presidential election in a robust political comeback, regardless of varied pre-election polls exhibiting him neck-and-neck along with his opponent Kamala Harris (the present and now outgoing Vice President, a Democrat).

As many who observe the information know all too nicely, considered one of his most outspoken allies on this election was none different six-company proprietor/operator and expertise multibillionaire Elon Musk, who dedicated tens of tens of millions in funding to a political motion committee advocating Trump’s re-election.

All of Musk’s expertise corporations stand to learn from Trump’s return to workplace

Musk owns or operates the next corporations, all of which stand to learn from Trump retaking energy:

• Tesla Motors: Although Trump has pledged to not implement electrical car mandates or tighter emissions requirements, Musk’s fashionable electrical car and autonomous car firm may gain advantage from loosened restrictions on car requirements total, particularly close to autonomy. Already, Tesla inventory is up greater than 13% in the present day on the election being known as for Trump.
• SpaceX: Musk’s rocketry and spacefaring firm has feuded earlier than with the federal authorities, notably the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) which simply final month levied $633,009 in fines to SpaceX alleging it didn’t “follow its license requirements during two launches in 2023.” Musk would doubtless search to make use of the Trump Administration to recall this superb and take away future licensing necessities stopping what he sees as vital pace and nimbleness from the company or a extra “hands-off” method.
• Starlink: Equally, Musk’s satellite tv for pc web offshoot Starlink, which at present has greater than 6,000 satellites beaming web from orbit, would doubtless profit from Trump’s pledges to cut back administrative burdens and pink tape from federal regulatory companies such because the Federal Communications Fee (FCC) and FAA.
• Neuralink: Musk’s experimental mind implant firm has reportedly brought about the demise, damage and dismemberment of check monkeys but additionally additionally been efficiently implanted right into a paralyzed human affected person, permitting them to regulate a pc with their mind alerts. Given it’s a medical system, it’s overseen by the federal Meals and Drug Administration, which has already accredited Neuralink implantation in people and trials. However the Trump victory will doubtless solely additional clear the best way for Neuralink to ramp up its trials on extra human topics and achieve this sooner.
• X: Musk’s social community, the renamed Twitter he bought for $44 billion two years in the past, has already been by a technique of mass and focused layoffs, in addition to coverage and have updates allowing extra freewheeling and extremist speech and content material, and led to a extra political right-wing oriented userbase and content material. This development is more likely to proceed and X to achieve much more prominence as a mouthpiece for Musk’s, Trump’s, and their allies’ positions.

xAI could profit and transfer from being a runner-up within the AI race to a frontrunner

However most significantly of all, xAI, Musk’s AI startup offshoot of X designed to rival his former firm OpenAI, is now more likely to grow to be way more of a viable various to the U.S. authorities and army as a contractor and AI expertise providers supplier.

Already, the U.S. authorities has been courted by and is reportedly working with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta to combine generative AI fashions into varied departments.

Nonetheless, now that Musk helped propel Trump to a victory, count on xAI to affix within the checklist of federally accredited AI distributors and presumably even most popular AI distributors — although in fact, the federal government is technically supposed to stay vendor-neutral for corporations working inside the U.S., signing contracts primarily based on request-for-proposals and the companies’ health for the job.

xAI may even doubtless profit from repealed Biden-era AI Govt Order

But as AI influencer Andrew Curran famous on Musk’s X community this morning, one other direct final result of Trump reassuming the White Home come January 2025 (when he’s to be sworn in) is a robust probability — outlined within the Republican Social gathering election platform — of the repeal of outgoing President Joe Biden’s Govt Order (EO) on AI, which Biden issued in October 2023 and requires builders of highly effective basis fashions to share security check outcomes and different important data with the US authorities and topics corporations coaching AI fashions to red-teaming workout routines by the federal company The Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how (NIST).

Whereas many within the AI {industry} and outdoors of it applauded this order as a way of making certain security of AI deployments on American and world society, some analysts steered it may result in undermining U.S. AI competitiveness on the worldwide stage, each within the industrial (direct-to-consumer and business-to-business) market and the army area.

As such, with the doubtless repeal of this EO come January 2025 or early 2025, it may help xAI and its rivals in transport new fashions sooner — although as we’ve seen with xAI’s Grok-2 and its permissive picture technology characteristic, that may additionally result in an increase in deepfakes and different wild, offensive, but additionally artistic and imaginative AI imagery.

Both approach, issues are trying good for Musk’s corporations and xAI particularly – and that will assist the corporate’s fashions grow to be extra attractive to builders and enterprise clients.