Mistral CEO mocks claims former French minister turned €200 into €90M in Mistral shares
arthurmensch · x · 2026-09-21
Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch responded sarcastically to viral accusations against the company: former Macron digital minister Cédric O invested under €200 and now holds a €90M Mistral share portfolio; an EPFL team trained an LLM as capable as Mistral's for under €40M. The quoted thread alleges Mistral has stopped growing its engineering team, relies almost entirely on public contracts steered by the Élysée, and ships freely downloadable previous-generation Chinese models to clients — calling it a major industrial scandal. Mensch's reply mocks the accusers without denying the figures.
More from Companies & People
- OpenAI claims AI agents solved Navier-Stokes; mathematicians dispute credit and independence — nordicinst · 2026-09-21
- Meta to invest $115M training blue collar workers for guaranteed data center jobs — NinaDSchick · 2026-09-21
- Flock Safety offers employee buyouts amid backlash over surveillance tech — Polymarket · 2026-09-21
- Commentary: Mistral's co-founder-in-office scandal and pivot to paid B2B PoCs make a return to frontier research unlikely — MaziyarPanahi · 2026-09-21
- Emad Mostaque: frontier weights are becoming national security assets, expect ITAR-style export rules — ccerrato147 · 2026-09-21
- Anthropic denies UK AI Security Institute pre-release access to Mythos 5.1, a first — ccerrato147 · 2026-09-21