But the solution was simply tell the robots 'Well you can watch me work and if I spend more than 25 minutes in the radiation field you can remind me, then come get me'

To be fair he also demonstrated two ways in which those laws could be made to work, it was less the laws themselves and rather issues with defining what harm actually meant not including emotional harm. (and the flaw shown in little lost robot was frankly really dumb)

You wouldn't neccesarily have to take that kind of risk with a brain interface, its pretty easy to make a circuit that can output only so you control the computer with your thoughts but there's no return line so it still has to show the information back to you on a screen. A screen on you're eyeball if you want to be all fancy and integrated about it but a screen with no direct input to your brain beyond the usual visual means.

This is probably actually the prefered way to set up such a system because the actual implanted parts are pretty much just your peripherals meaning you can have the actual device be external which saves you a lot of unnecesary surgery every time computers get better.

Of course musk is the same guy who's proposing indentured servitude on mars so he's probably going down the mind control route if he can.

Particles have a minnimum possible energy state that is slightly above zero, if you can find a way to extract that energy you can do it endlessly because the particles energy can't actually be reduced so you can extract that same energy over and over again. (Assuming no mechanisms we haven't discovered yet don't prevent this)

So while others have already mentioned that the title is misleading, it should be noted that it IS possible to pull energy from nothing at least on paper. In real life there are probably practical limitations that prevent the otherwise perfectly allowable maths to become reality but its a good thing to keep in mind anyway to remind ourselves that the laws of thermodynamics are descriptions of the universe and not ironclad parts of it.

Thats the point though, they didn't fire everyone who was forming a union, they just happened to fire that exact same group of people for definetaly unrelated reasons.

Could easily be something like a few days of LHC data or a year of night sky survey, it takes decades to go through all the information those things produce.