Elon Musk Podcast

While Breslow reports his company is better off without HR, I’d argue the art and science of managing humans is more important than ever—and it’s also evolving fast. I recently spoke to Himanshu Palsule, the CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, a learning and talent software company. With 140 million users and 7,000 enterprise customers who are taking a hard look at their own HR spend, Palsule has a vested interest in the conversation. But I’m impressed by the agentic platform it launched yesterday that leverages AI to help assess, train, and mobilize employees. “People will enable agents to take over the enterprise,” he told me at a customer event in New York. “If you lose your people, those agents aren’t doing anything in your company—they’re just creating chaos.” Other thoughts:

SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.
Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.

During a Y Combinator event on Tuesday night, Sam Altman had what YC partner Tyler Bosmeny called a “mic drop moment.” Altman offered $2 million worth of OpenAI tokens to every startup in the current class in exchange for equity in the startup.
In other words, he promised that OpenAI would invest in the whole class, not with cash but with an allotment of AI tokens that startups can use to build their products.

An OpenAI co-founder has joined the competition. Andrej Karpathy, who helped start the high-profile artificial intelligence outfit in 2015, has now joined Anthropic, he announced Tuesday. Karpathy was instrumental in the development of Tesla's Autopilot system, working for the automaker for about five years in between two separate stints at OpenAI. In his new role at rival Anthropic, Karpathy will "get back to R&D," he wrote in a social media post, adding, "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative."

The resistance and psychological shifts occurring among workers and Gen Z as artificial intelligence reshapes the modern landscape. Research indicates that many employees are sabotaging AI rollouts not due to a dislike of technology, but as a rational response to poor corporate strategy and the erosion of professional trust. This phenomenon, termed "algorithmic anxiety," reflects a deep-seated fear that automation is stripping away human dignity, professional identity, and job security. In response to this digital overstimulation, younger generations are spearheading an analog renaissance by embracing tactile hobbies and vintage technologies to reclaim ownership of their personal lives. Ultimately, the texts argue that for AI integration to succeed, organizations must move beyond technical efficiency to prioritize human-centric values and transparent leadership.