The truth about Elon Musk and OpenAI
This page collects the facts and key events for anyone who wants to examine them for themselves.
Motivated by jealousy, regret for walking away from OpenAI and a desire to derail a competing AI company, Elon has spent years harassing OpenAI through baseless lawsuits and public attacks.
Journalists have reported on the existence of a smear campaign headed by Elon and his intermediaries, and there is also evidence(opens in a new window) that Elon coordinated with Mark Zuckerberg in repeated attempts to undermine OpenAI’s mission.
Elon is using his lawsuit to attack the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, which is focused on work in areas such as life sciences and curing diseases for everyone’s benefit.
OpenAI has always been, and still is to this very day, governed by a nonprofit dedicated to the same mission of creating AGI that benefits all of humanity. And today the OpenAI Foundation is one of the best resourced nonprofits in history at a valuation of more than $180B. An initial $25B commitment is focused on accelerating health breakthroughs, curing diseases, and proactively tackling risks that may arise from more capable AI. It expects to invest at least $1 billion this year to use AI to speed up progress on finding solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, such as helping researchers better understand and treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and making more health data available so discoveries happen faster (you can learn more about their work here)(opens in a new window).
At the same time, we at the OpenAI Public Benefit Corporation are complementing this work by continuing to prioritize safety, especially when it comes to young people. That includes through youth safety measures, such as our introduction of parental controls, working with our Expert Council on Well-Being and AI, and our Model Spec with Under-18 Principles that detail protections for teens. We’ve also launched an age prediction model to determine when an account likely belongs to a user under 18, so that we can automatically apply age-appropriate protections. This work continues to play an important role in achieving our mission.
OpenAI and Elon both agreed in 2017 that a for-profit entity had to be part of the next phase for OpenAI, given the large sums of money that would need to be raised to achieve the mission. Elon, however, demanded full control of OpenAI, and even wanted to merge it into Tesla (he would later merge his for-profit AI company, xAI, into SpaceX). When we wouldn’t agree to his terms, he walked away and told us we had a “0% chance” of success. He turned out to be wrong though, and a resentful Elon has attacked OpenAI ever since.
Elon donated $38 million to the OpenAI nonprofit, which was spent exactly as intended and in service of the mission. Despite claiming and receiving a tax deduction for this donation, he’s now asking the court to treat it as an investment that entitles him to significant ownership of OpenAI.
OpenAI remains focused on supporting the OpenAI Foundation and its work, while also continuing to improve ChatGPT for the more than 900 million people who use it each week.