The comments on this post are very misinformed. The car did not issue a "Take over immediately" alert despite having the capability or claiming to do so[1]. Hence the partial blame.
The punitive damages are justified since, Tesla during the whole process has been found to repeatedly lie about the existence of the server logs. @greentheonly on X, found that the server logs was indeed uploaded to their servers[2] and after this they had to hand over the logs. The logs were crucial in determining that Autopilot/Autosteer was on and that no warnings were issued. Tesla knew that they had the server logs all along. For a corporation to engage in this behavior is almost criminal.
Pretty terrible of them to do meetings with IYO, see the product and then start a new company with very similar name??
What reason do they have to do something like this given the enormous resources they have? It feels that in the last 10 years more and more startups have started embracing the win-at-all cost strategy which was previously reserved for big tech players like MSFT?
And seems like it is actually trying to give a bonus to Sam or give money back to Thrive otherwise it would make no sense to acquire io with $1.5B cash in addition to the stock. I am surprised that the board approved this?
After thinking for sometime it seems like even though Sam doesn't have any stake in io, he might have a stake in the Thrive fund that invested in io. Put $50M in a Thrive fund, which is used to invest in io that ultimately gets acquired by OpenAI at a really high valuation.
Joshua from Thrive anyways wanted Sam to have some stake and the numbers being floated around was of the order of $7B. The whole thing seems absurd and makes me trust OpenAI even less.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/08/04/tesla-withheld-data-lied-misd... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/articles/hacker-who-helped-score-243-m...