I am willing to bet he has an automated scanner running searching for tweets containing "Elon", probably even aggregating them by how many followers a tweeter has
There’s some serious bad blood in the AI academic world between the old farts that toiled thanklessly all through the thirty years of the AI winter, proving all sorts of fundamental theorems, only to get steam rolled by (relative) newcomers with big tech backing the very second tech started catching up to the math.
Things got pretty heated with accusations of academic malpractice, and generic assholery.
Yann is one of the main participants in this drama. The other is a Swiss professor that is about equally friendly.
I view the author list of industry papers more as a sales-and-marketing thing than as a real list of contributors, but shouldn't that be "Neuralink and E. Musk" anyway? The equivalent of the P. I. putting his name first like that is unorthodox.
It depends on the field. My understanding is that in physics, it's accepted to put the PI first. Seems weird to me, but I'm coming from biology, which is a PI-last field