Elon Musk calls the “labs” label a mismatch for for-profit AI corporations

Elon Musk said in an Oct. 2 post on X that the term “labs” "makes no sense" for for-profit corporations that report quarterly earnings per share.

In the post, Musk wrote: “They are for-profit corporations. Any entity that reports quarterly earnings per share is obviously not a ‘lab’!” He added that such companies “may own labs,” but also “have large enterprise sales teams generating billions of dollars in revenue.”

David Sacks had raised a related labeling question a few days earlier. In a Sept. 28 poll on X, he asked followers which label was more accurate: “Frontier lab” or “Closed model corporation.” The final result shown in the post had “Closed model corporation” at 84.3% of 6,290 votes.

After Musk’s post, Sacks reposted it on X. He also replied, “Vox populi”, apparently endorsing the result of his earlier poll.