It's another grey day in Silicon Valley, even though the sun is shining. This is where wannabe billionaires chase salvation and immortality, and the rest of us just chase lunch. The name on everyone’s lips as ever? Elon Musk—tech king, rocket man, and the guy who’d sell you the future, just don't read the fine print.
This time, he is pitching a story that not even the omnipresent sucker-born-every-day would buy. Musk is in court arguing that ChatGPT owner OpenAI is supposed to stay pure—a nonprofit angel to guard humanity from rogue AI.
But the paper trail tells another story.
Back in 2015, OpenAI was born as a nonprofit. Musk was there, front row, grinning. But behind the scenes, he wasn’t sold on purity. In November of that year, he said it plainly: “Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit.” It’s right there in black and white—an email to OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman.
We know this because OpenAI spilled the beans in an email, laid out alongside a few other gems like whatsapp messages and meeting notes, all in black and white, or more precisely ones and zeros since it was in its website. You get the drift.
Musk wasn’t dreaming of charity. He was eying a structure with teeth. By 2017, the real trouble started. OpenAI’s ambitions needed compute power—billions of dollars’ worth. That’s when Musk made his move. Summer 2017, he wanted to flip the script, to turn OpenAI into a for-profit, says OpenAI.
The crew at the AI giant, guys like Sam and Ilya Sutskever, didn’t disagree—money talks, and billions get things built. But Musk had a condition: he wanted to run the show. CEO. Majority equity. Absolute control. In other words, OpenAI would be his. By the fall of ‘17, Musk didn’t just want a for-profit—he made one.
Musk set up a public benefit corporation called Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc. The records are there, crisp as a court filing.
According to a big dump of correspondance last week by OpenAI, Elon demanded majority equity. On September 4, 2017, Shivon( Zilis), a trusted intermediary, wrote in a message to OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, “And he sounded fairly non-negotiable on his equity being between 50-60 so moot point on having majority”.
Then there is this little nugget: "On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."
What happened next was a play for power, and when OpenAI balked at handing him the keys, he turned sour.
“Certain failure,” he called it in an email to Altman, Sutskever, and Greg Brockman in 2018, unless they merged into Tesla.
"There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance," write Musk
He resigned from OpenAI’s board, and by December, he threw down the gauntlet: raise billions “immediately, or forget it.” Musk had walked out the door and slammed it behind him. Now?
He’s in court, at least in filings, claiming OpenAI betrayed its mission. It’d almost be funny if it weren’t such a lousy, transparent act. Hell, it is funny, all those billionaires squabbling over their desperate pursuit of more billions.
Superintelligence or just super ego
Musk didn’t leave OpenAI because they strayed from the light—he left because he couldn’t run the show - and presumably because he was still $80bn light on his quest for Martian Vegas.
That’s not betrayal. That’s ego. In this business, you learn to read between the lines. Musk’s words talk about saving humanity. The documents? They tell you he wanted to own it. You don’t get to rewrite history just because you lost the lead role. Not even if you’re Elon Musk.
