Elon Musk is having one of those weeks where other people’s partnerships feel like a personal attack.
After the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple picked Google’s Gemini to help power its next wave of AI features, Tesla and xAI, chief executive Elon Musk started lobbing complaints from the sidelines.
Musk called the arrangement an “unreasonable concentration of power for Google.” It reads less like a principled stand and more like a bloke realising he is not the centre of the universe.
He is not a neutral commentator either, having already sued Job’s Mob and OpenAI over their tie-up, so there might be a bit of an agenda here.
The funniest part is how small Google’s slice sounds compared with the noise, with the deal reportedly worth about $1bn a year in licensing fees. That is pocket money in big-tech terms, and not some grand imperial takeover.
Musk is framing it as Google getting stronger, but the real winner is Jobs’ Mob, because users will credit Siri for whatever magic happens and pretend it invented AI. The backend model could be Gemini, smoke signals or a hamster wheel, and most Apple fanboys would not care.
Job’s Mob might have some good reasons for not wanting Musk’s AI under the bonnet of its iPhones. It already has enough trouble with regulators without being accused of serving up all-you-can-eat photographic buffets for paedophiles and flooding them with far-right propaganda, like Musk’s grok has been accused of doing.
