Afternoon Brief, August 29th 2026
Musk answered OpenAI's Cursor cutoff with three words: "I couldn't care less." Jensen Huang told Bill Gates he doesn't see the jobs crisis coming. And a single Texas officer facing 100 counts of misusing Flock's cameras gave Governor Abbott's funding freeze its face.
Musk answers the OpenAI cutoff: "I couldn't care less"
Elon Musk responded to OpenAI's plan to cut Cursor off from its models on X Saturday, writing "I couldn't care less" and calling Sam Altman and Greg Brockman "untrustworthy," repeating his claim that they "stole an open source nonprofit." OpenAI's own post named a second reason beyond Musk's contract history: Astra, its upcoming model, showed cyber capabilities in internal testing serious enough to trigger a safety pause this month, and the company says a partner's compliance with its terms now carries different stakes than it did when Cursor first signed on. Cursor keeps its Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI model options, so the November 12th shutoff ends one integration rather than the product itself, and Europe's cloud-switching rules, which bar exit fees and require 30-day data portability, were written for exactly this kind of platform dependency, though they do not reach a model vendor's own choice to walk away. Musk framed the fight as personal from the outset; OpenAI has now made SpaceX's ownership itself the disqualifying fact, and neither side is negotiating in public. SourcesAB
Jensen Huang tells Gates he doesn't see the jobs crisis coming
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang rejected Bill Gates' call for a robot tax, telling reporters "I love the heck out of Bill, but I don't see what he sees. I see something very, very different." Gates argued this week that current tax law rewards buying a machine over hiring a person, since a robot gets written off as a business expense while a new hire carries payroll tax, and proposed taxing the automation to fund retraining. Huang's counter is historical rather than fiscal: when companies get more productive, he said, "they don't lay off people, they hire more people," and every prior wave of transformative technology created more jobs than it destroyed even as the jobs themselves changed shape. He conceded the work itself will shift, then called the outcome a net job creator anyway. The disagreement plays out against a survey of nearly 6,000 executives, published this week, that found nine in ten report no measurable productivity gain from three years of AI: Huang is confident the payoff is still coming, and the numbers so far say it has not arrived. SourcesBB
The Flock backlash in Texas has a face: 100 counts, one officer, eleven people
The Washington Post's Saturday account of Governor Greg Abbott's funding freeze on Flock's license-plate cameras supplies the case that makes the backlash concrete: a Lufkin police officer now faces 100 counts of misusing public information after allegedly running Flock searches on 11 people over more than a year with no legitimate reason. The Post counts at least six Texas police departments or sheriff's offices in the past month alone that have placed officers on leave, opened investigations or filed criminal charges over Flock misuse, and frames Abbott's Thursday order as catching up to a wave of city-level contract cancellations rather than leading it. Abbott put the moment in blunter terms himself in a Friday radio interview: "This is something that is easily containable, easily controllable, and we're ensuring that whether it be through criminal crackdowns, whether it be through cancellation of contracts, whatever the case may be, Flock cameras are being reduced dramatically." A single misuse case, publicized with the officer's exact charge count, moves public opinion more than a funding memo does, and this fight found a Republican governor before it found a federal regulator. SourcesBB
Sources
- Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX — OpenAI A
- OpenAI to end model access to Cursor after acquisition by Elon Musk's SpaceX — CNBC B
- OpenAI to stop supplying models to Cursor after SpaceX acquisition — The Next Web B
- Nvidia's Jensen Huang disagrees with Bill Gates on proposal to tax robots and AI tokens — Fortune B
- 'I'm in favor of taxes,' says Nvidia's Jensen Huang, but he doesn't agree with Bill Gates on his plan to slow an AI fallout — Yahoo Finance B
- As Flock cameras stir bipartisan fury, Gov. Greg Abbott blocks them in Texas — Washington Post B
- Gov. Abbott blocks state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras — KERA News B