“Don’t over plan your life. Be open to the wonders and opportunities that present themselves,” Tan said.
[sharing reflections on his journey from MIT graduate to Apple executive to OpenAI Chief Hardware Officer as part of the Distinguished Speaker series hosted by the School of Engineering]
Wow. Was just going to comment about how Tan threw away his professional credibility. This stuff will be the first result that comes up in a search or LLM.
He’s made terrible decisions since leaving Apple. I wonder if MIT/folks will now investigate his entire academic career as well.
What a way to throw away 25 years of hard work. Started off as a designer and worked his way up to VP. I’m sure we’ll hear from anonymous Apple employees about the nature of this person. Maybe he was pleasant to work with?
who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal
Eh, not a lawyer, but my experience with internet PR problems is that the Internet is pretty lazy with a short attention span.
Take something down and most of the Internet is too lazy to dig up an archive and they wander off to find something else to score internet points off of.
Reminds me of the (infamous) eBay sellers back in the days who collected perfect ratings for a couple of years just to suddenly turn into scammers, pulling off what was known as a "long con" or "exit scam."
Being spurned is one possible motivation, but so is an outstanding offer, where you go from middle of the pack performer with career stagnation to superstar leading the hot new product.
