Before March 2021, Elon Musks charitable foundation had never announced any donations to Cameron County, an impoverished region at the southern tip of Texas that is home to his SpaceX launch site and local officials who help regulate it.

Then, at 8:05 one morning that month, a SpaceX rocket blew up, showering the area with a rain of twisted metal.

The Musk Foundation began giving at 9:27 a.m. local time.

Am donating $20M to Cameron County schools & $10M to City of Brownsville for downtown revitalization, Mr. Musk said on Twitter.

Mr. Musk, the worlds second-richest person according to Forbes, presides over SpaceX, Tesla and other companies that are pushing the boundaries of technology, while also controlling a social media platform, now known as X, through which he promotes his often-polarizing political and social views.

At the same time, he runs a charity with billions of dollars, the kind of resources that could make a global impact. But unlike Bill Gates, who has deployed his fortune in an effort to improve health care across Africa, or Walmarts Walton family, which has spurred change in the American education system, Mr. Musks philanthropy has been haphazard and largely self-serving making him eligible for enormous tax breaks and helping his businesses.

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Elon Musk Has a Giant Charity. Its Money Stays Close to Home. - The New York Times

In a blatantly misogynist outburst, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk took aim at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie Scott for making charitable donations to *checks notes* causes that support women and minorities.

"'Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse' should filed [sic] be listed among 'Reasons that Western Civilization died,'" Musk tweeted only to delete the toxic message later.

Even for Musk, who has a growing track record of making disgusting comments, including outright racist tirades and backing antisemitic conspiracy theories, his latest tweet proved to be a bit much.

It's unclear if Musk was aiming the distasteful and incredibly misguided tweet directly at Scott. He was responding to another X-formerly-Twitter user who accused her of donating to nonprofits that "deal with issues of race and/or gender," a big no-no for Musk and his right-wing supporters.

Musk has been on the warpath as of late, complaining about companies that have diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring policies in place. To the billionaire, these practices amount to "reverse racism," a largely nonsensical term favored by white supremacists.

In January, he argued that DEI policies would allow black people to become pilots, which he said would lead to deaths because yes, he actually said this their IQs are too low. Then there was his infamous and deeply unhinged comment arguing that an antisemitic conspiracy theory was "the actual truth."

Given Musk's latest comments, "super rich ex-wives" who have it out for their uber-wealthy former spouses have been added to his growing list of enemies.

It's worth noting that Musk himself has been married and divorced three times. He married actor Justine Wilson in 2000 and divorced her eight years later. In 2010, he married English actor Talulah Riley and divorced just two years later. The pair remarried in 2013 but divorced yet again in 2016.

Whether Musk considers Wilson and Riley to be "super rich ex-wives" who shouldn't give to charitable donations for some reason remains unclear at best.

Scott founded a charitable organization called Yield Giving in late 2022, which connects donors to non-profit charities.

Since divorcing Bezos in 2019, Scott has given away more than $16.5 billion to more than 1,600 nonprofits, according to the organization's website.

Last year, Scott revealed a long list of recipients of the $2.1 billion total she donated in 2022. Some of these recipients include affordable housing nonprofits, reproductive care organizations, and youth training groups.

That kind of philanthropy puts Musk's own feeble efforts to shame. The billionaire created the Musk Foundation with his brother in 2002. In 2021, he gifted it $5.7 billion in Tesla shares.

That money has gone to fund "human space exploration research and advocacy," "pediatric research," and the development of "safe AI," according to the foundation's extremely barebones website.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Cryptically Said Humanitys Future Was Controlled by [Redacted]

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Elon Musk Deletes Tweet Saying Ex-Wives Responsible for Collapse of Civilization - Futurism

Former President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders want Elon Musk to speak at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, CNBC reported Friday, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

The hope is that a Musk convention speech would help raise the partys lackluster support among younger voters, who tend to lean Democratic by significant margins. In 2020, the party tried something similar by having Charlie Kirk, the founder and CEO of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, give the conventions opening speech.

If Musk does speak in favor of Trump in July, he would take on a role similar to that of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who spoke at the 2016 convention. So far, Thielwho co-founded PayPal with Muskhas said that hes sitting out the 2024 race, arguing that the first Trump administration was crazier and more dangerous than hed expected.

CNBC wasnt able to report whether Trump or any of his associates have directly raised the prospect with Musk, but one source did note that new RNC chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump will both likely be behind the idea of inviting Musk to Milwaukee.

The news comes days after Musk traveled to Florida to meet with Trump, who is desperately seeking an injection of campaign cash as he stares down the barrel of a significant fundraising disadvantage against his likely general election opponent, President Joe Biden. On Wednesday, after news of the meeting broke, Musk took to X, formerly Twitter, to tell his 175 million followers that, just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President. (Though he didnt say it explicitly, he was clearly referring to Trump and Biden.)

Though Musk began telling his followers in 2022 to vote for Republicans, hes maintained an ambivalent and sometimes acrimonious relationship with Trump. The Tesla CEO criticized the former presidents decision in 2017 to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, and the two went after each other in the summer of 2022, with Musk saying that it was time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset." Before Trump secured a virtual lock on the GOP nomination, Musk made approving remarks about the abortive candidacies of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and also hosted an online event with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But Musks Wednesday comment doesnt necessarily settle the issue of whether hell financially support Trumps re-election bid, as it leaves the door open to him contributing some of his near-$200 million fortune to a pro-Trump PAC or nonprofit. (Musk, moreover, has a history of breaking public promises, as Business Insider noted Wednesday.)

And even if Musk doesnt donate directly to Trumps re-election effort, he will likely contribute via his mammoth social media following, to which he has steadily fed a diet of right-wing conspiracies over the past year. In just the last week alone, Musk speculated that the Biden administrations immigration policies amounted to treason and accused it of importing voters to lay the groundwork for something far worse than 9/11.

On Friday night, Musk posted a photoshopped image of Biden putting a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Jhoan Boada, a Venezuelan migrant whose face was plastered all over right-wing media after he was mistakenly identified as a participant in an assault of two New York police officers. Unfortunately for Musk, readers added a community note to the post, noting that Boada was misidentified as a suspect and has been exonerated off [sic] all charges.

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Trump Wants Elon Musk To Speak at the Republican National Convention: Report - Vanity Fair

Donald Trump, who is urgently seeking a cash infusion to aid his presidential campaign, met on Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla., with Elon Musk, one of the worlds richest men, and a few wealthy Republican donors, according to three people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion.

Mr. Trump and his team are working to find additional major donors to shore up his finances as he heads into an expected general election against President Biden. Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Musk to allies and hopes to have a one-on-one meeting with the billionaire soon, according to a person who has discussed the matter with Mr. Trump.

Its not yet clear whether Mr. Musk plans to spend any of his fortune on Mr. Trumps behalf. But his recent social media posts suggest he thinks its essential that Mr. Biden be defeated in November and people who have spoken to Mr. Musk privately confirmed that is indeed his view.

With a net worth of around $200 billion, according to Forbes, Mr. Musk could decide to throw his weight behind Mr. Trump and potentially, almost single-handedly, erase what is expected to be Mr. Biden and his allies huge financial advantage over the former president.

On Wednesday, following the publication of this story, Mr. Musk posted on X that he was not donating money to either candidate for US President. He did not specify which two candidates he was referring to.

Aides to Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk has long portrayed himself as independent-minded, and like many business leaders he has donated to candidates from both parties over the years. Unlike other U.S. billionaires, he has not spent heavily on a presidential election, and his donations have been fairly evenly split over the years between Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Musks businesses, Tesla and SpaceX, have benefited from federal government contracts and subsidies.

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Donald Trump, Seeking Cash Infusion, Meets With Elon Musk - The New York Times

Elon Musk last week sued two of his OpenAI cofounders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, accusing them of flagrant breaches of the trios original agreement that the company would develop artificial intelligence openly and without chasing profits. Late on Tuesday, OpenAI released partially redacted emails between Musk, Altman, Brockman, and others that provide a counternarrative.

The emails suggest that Musk was open to OpenAI becoming more profit-focused relatively early on, potentially undermining his own claim that it deviated from its original mission. In one message Musk offers to fold OpenAI into his electric-car company Tesla to provide more resources, an idea originally suggested by an email he forwarded from an unnamed outside party.

The newly published emails also imply that Musk was not dogmatic about OpenAI having to freely provide its developments to all. In response to a message from chief scientist Ilya Sutskevar warning that open sourcing powerful AI advances could be risky as the technology advances, Musk writes, Yup. That seems to contradict the arguments in last weeks lawsuit that it was agreed from the start that OpenAI should make its innovations freely available.

Putting the legal dispute aside, the emails released by OpenAI show a powerful cadre of tech entrepreneurs founding an organization that has grown to immense power. Strikingly, although OpenAI likes to describe its mission as focused on creating artificial general intelligencemachines smarter than humansits founders spend more time discussing fears about the rising power of Google and other deep-pocketed giants than excited about AGI.

I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment. This is real. I will cover whatever anyone else doesn't provide, Musk wrote in a missive discussing how to introduce OpenAI to the world. He dismissed a suggestion to launch by announcing $100 million in funding, citing the huge resources of Google and Facebook.

Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman, Brockman, and others in 2015, during another period of heady AI hype centered around Google. A month before the nonprofit was incorporated, Googles AI program AlphaGo had learned to play the devilishly tricky board game Go well enough to defeat a champion human player for the first time. The feat shocked many AI experts who had thought Go too subtle for computers to master anytime soon. It also showed the potential for AI to master many seemingly impossible tasks.

The text of Musks lawsuit confirms some previously reported details of the OpenAI backstory at this time, including the fact that Musk was first made aware of the possible dangers posed by AI during a 2012 meeting with Demis Hassabis, cofounder and CEO of DeepMind, the company that developed AlphaGo and was acquired by Google in 2014. The lawsuit also confirms that Musk disagreed deeply with Google cofounder Larry Page over the future risks of AI, something that apparently led to the pair falling out as friends. Musk eventually parted ways with OpenAI in 2018 and has apparently soured further on the project since the wild success of ChatGPT.

Since OpenAI released the emails with Musk this week, speculation has swirled about the names and other details redacted from the messages. Some turned to AI as a way to fill in the blanks with statistically plausible text.

This needs billions per year immediately or forget it, Musk wrote in one email about the OpenAI project. Unfortunately, humanity's future is in the hands of [redacted], he added, perhaps a reference to Google cofounder Page.

Elsewhere in the email change, the AI softwarelike some commentators on Twitterguessed Musk had forwarded arguments that Google had a powerful advantage in AI from Hassabis.

Whoever it was, the relationships on display in the emails between OpenAIs cofounders have since become fractured. Musks lawsuit seeks to force the company to stop licensing technology to its primary backer, Microsoft. In a blog post accompanying the emails released this week, OpenAIs other cofounders expressed sorrow at how things had soured.

We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom weve deeply admired, they wrote. Someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAIs mission without him.

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The Fear That Inspired Elon Musk and Sam Altman to Create OpenAI - WIRED

OpenAI has responded to Elon Musks lawsuit by saying that he at one point wanted absolute control of the company by merging it with Tesla.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, OpenAI said it will move to dismiss all of Elons claims and offered its own counter-narrative to his account of the company abandoning its original mission as a nonprofit.

As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,including majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO, according to the post, which is authored by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. We couldnt agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.

Musk alleged in his suit that OpenAI has become a closed-source de facto subsidiary of Microsoft that is focused on making money instead of benefitting humanity. In so doing, his suit claims that OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission that he helped fund.

In Musks view, this constitutes a breach of a contract. While Musks complaint mentions an OpenAI founding agreement, no formal agreement has been made public yet, and OpenAIs post did not directly address the question of whether one existed.

OpenAI also defended its decision to not open-source its work: Elon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI, the post says, referring to artificial general intelligence. The company published a January 2016 email conversation in which Sutskever said, as we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open, and that its totally OK to not share the science. Musk replied: Yup.

There are some other puzzling allegations in Musks suit, like the one that GPT-4 is a de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithm that represents artificial general intelligence. OpenAI had already rejected those claims in a staff memo but didnt address them in its public blog post on Tuesday.

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OpenAI says Elon Musk wanted 'absolute control' of the company - The Verge

Donald Trump, who is urgently seeking a cash infusion to aid his presidential campaign, met Sunday in Palm Beach, Florida, with Elon Musk, one of the worlds richest men, and a few wealthy Republican donors, according to three people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion.

Trump and his team are working to find additional major donors to shore up his finances as he heads into an expected general election against President Joe Biden. Trump has praised Musk to allies and hopes to have a one-on-one meeting with the billionaire soon, according to a person who has discussed the matter with Trump.

Its not yet clear whether Musk plans to spend any of his fortune on Trumps behalf. But his recent social media posts suggest he thinks its essential that Biden be defeated in November and people who have spoken to Musk privately confirmed that is indeed his view.

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With a net worth of around $200 billion, according to Forbes, Musk could decide to throw his weight behind Trump and potentially, almost single-handedly, erase what is expected to be Biden and his allies huge financial advantage over the former president.

On Wednesday, following the publication of this story, Musk posted on X the social media platform that was called Twitter until Musk bought it in 2022 that he was not donating money to either candidate for US President. He did not specify which two candidates he was referring to.

Aides to Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk has long portrayed himself as independent-minded, and like many business leaders he has donated to candidates from both parties over the years. Unlike other U.S. billionaires, he has not spent heavily on a presidential election, and his donations have been fairly evenly split over the years between Democrats and Republicans. Musks businesses, Tesla and SpaceX, have benefited from federal government contracts and subsidies.

A person close to Musk said his relationship with the government had historically made him wary about identifying too closely with one political party over the other. In 2017, the billionaire famously stepped away from two business advisory councils when Trump was president over Trumps decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.

Climate change is real, Musk posted on Twitter in June 2017. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.

The two have had other moments of friction. A few months before the midterm elections, in the summer of 2022, he and the former president traded insults, with Trump calling him an expletive and Musk saying it was time for the former president to sail into the sunset.

At the same time, however, Musk was becoming more open about his preference for the Republican Party.

On the eve of the midterms, he told his more than 100 million followers on X that they should vote for a Republican Congress. He has railed against what he describes as the lefts woke agenda and has attacked Biden over the record number of migrants who have entered the United States during his presidency.

Musks comments about immigration have grown increasingly alarmist. He has suggested that the presidents immigration policies threaten the existence of the U.S. itself and have pushed U.S. democracy to the brink. He has suggested that Democrats are ushering in vast numbers of illegals to cheat in elections. There is no evidence to support his claim of mass voter fraud.

America will fall if it tries to absorb the world, Musk posted Tuesday on X. Earlier in the day, he posted that the Biden administrations immigration policies amounted to treason.

The person close to Musk, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that if he does get behind Trump, his views about immigration will have been a significant motivator.

Musk has previously raised questions over Bidens age and once echoed one of Trumps favorite jabs by claiming the president was still sleeping after Biden failed to congratulate one of his companies. Musk has also held a grudge against the president after the White House did not invite Tesla to an event on electric vehicles in August 2021.

Lets not forget the White House giving Tesla the cold shoulder, excluding us from the EV summit, the Tesla CEO posted on X in December.

Musk visited the White House in September to discuss matters around artificial intelligence, according to NBC News, which obtained visitor logs. Biden and Musk did not meet during the visit.

After buying Twitter in October 2022, Musk reinstated Trumps account. The former president had been barred from the platform after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a decision that Musk had previously suggested was a mistake.

Still, it was far from clear that Musk would support Trumps presidential bid. Musk had indicated before the Republican nominating contest that he was leaning toward backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis kicked off his formal candidacy in a livestreamed audio discussion with Musk on X last May, and there was widespread speculation that a donation from Musk to the super political action committee supporting DeSantis would follow. But it never did.

On Monday, Musk appeared to criticize television host Bill Maher, who said in a clip posted to X that he would vote for Biden over Trump in most any circumstance.

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a very real disease, Musk wrote in response on X.

Even if Musk does not ultimately decide to donate to a pro-Trump super PAC or spend money in other ways to help Trump, his own megaphone is substantial. Musk has 175 million followers on X and has an ability like few others in the U.S. to shape news coverage.

c.2024 The New York Times Company

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Donald Trump, Seeking Cash Infusion, Meets With Elon Musk - Yahoo! Voices

Musks lawsuit alleges OpenAI abandoned its original plans to be an open-source AI company that was for the good of humanity.

OpenAI has struck back at billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk by releasing emails that show he supported its plans to create a for-profit company, which he wanted to be the head of, have board control, and merge it with Tesla.

The leaked emails counter Musks current lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, which alleges the start-up betrayed its non-profit mission to develop artificial intelligence (AI) that benefits society.

As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control, including majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO, according to the OpenAI blog post published on Tuesday authored by OpenAI co-founders Brockman, Altman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba.

We couldnt agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.

Musk was an early investor in OpenAI and left the board in 2018 after clashing with Altman. Musk is now raising money for his own AI project called XAI.

His lawsuit filed last week claims OpenAI had breached an agreement to make breakthroughs in AI freely available to the public by forming a multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion (12 billion) into the company.

OpenAI, Inc has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft, Musks lawsuit alleges.

The Tesla boss says this constitutes a breach of a contract.

OpenAI, which is closed source, said in its blog post that the expense of building AI tools presented a barrier to its original non-profit mission to develop increasingly sophisticated AI that benefits all of humanity.

In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding, the blog post authors added.

OpenAI also said in its blog post that Elon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI (artificial general intelligence).

The company also published a 2016 email conversation in which Sutskever said, as we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open, and that its totally OK to not share the science. Musk replied: Yup.

OpenAI has set the pace for AI competition since it launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and the start-up is estimated to be valued at $80 billion (73 billion).

However, last November the saga of Altmans firing and subsequent re-hiring by the OpenAI board has raised concerns over the companys safeguards and governance.

We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom weve deeply admired - someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAIs mission without him, OpenAI said in its blog post.

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OpenAI hits back at Elon Musk's lawsuit and says he wanted full control of ChatGPT maker - Euronews

OpenAI fired back at Elon Musks lawsuit against the company by releasing screenshots of emails from Musk during his time at OpenAI that show he supported making it a for-profit company and said a merger with Tesla was the only way to compete with Google.

What inspired Elon Musk's design for Tesla's Cybertruck?

Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself, OpenAI wrote in a blog post published late Tuesday. He said hed be supportive of us finding our own path.

Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, sued the company and CEO Sam Altman last week, alleging that its multi-billion-dollar partnership with Microsoft betrays its founding commitment to benefiting humanity over making profit. The lawsuit has a sparked debate among Musks fellow Silicon Valley billionaires about the future of AI.

OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft, Musks lawsuit says. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an [artificial general intelligence] to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.

OpenAI said in its response Tuesday that Musk wanted to start with a $1 billion funding commitment to avoid sounding hopeless, after Altman and their other co-founder Greg Brockman initially planned to raise $100 million.

By 2017, OpenAI said, the company realized building AGI, or artificial general intelligence, would require billions of dollars per year far more than the company and Musk thought it would be able to raise as a nonprofit.

OpenAI said Musk wanted majority equity, board control, and the CEO position after the team discussed creating a for-profit entity that year and withheld his funding during those discussions. But OpenAI said it couldnt agree to Musks terms because it would have been against the mission for one person to have absolute control over the company.

In 2018, OpenAI said, Musk suggested merging the company with Tesla, which Musk said in one of the emailscould serve as its cash cow to compete with Google.

Musk decided to leave OpenAI that year, the company said, adding that he had warned that our probability of success was 0. Musk planned to build his own AGI competitor within Tesla, OpenAI said.

When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars, OpenAI said. The company included a screenshot of an email from December 2018, in which Musk wrote: Even raising several hundred million wont be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.

Musks lawsuit also seeks an order for OpenAI to open its research and technology to the public. OpenAI said Tuesday that it provides broad access to its AI models, including free versions, and that Musk understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI.

In one email, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever wrote to Musk, saying it will make sense to start being less open as the company continued developing its AI, and that Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but its totally OK to not share the science.

Musk responded to that, Yup.

Were sad that its come to this with someone whom weve deeply admired someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAIs mission without him, OpenAI said.

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OpenAI fired back at Elon Musk's lawsuit by releasing his emails - Quartz

Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI, claiming it breached an agreement between early backers when it transitioned into a for-profit company and received a big funding check from Microsoft, and asking it to go open-source and nonprofit again.

Now, OpenAI has published its side of the story.

OpenAI's response is fairly short but quite devastating for Musk, as it contains several emails from Musk which indicate that he knew about OpenAI's plans to go for-profit, and that he suggested for the company to merge with Tesla. One email also indicates that he knew and agreed with OpenAI's plans to eventually stop sharing all its work as open source.

OpenAI's blog post, authored by co-founders Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and OpenAI in general, further claims that Musk wanted "full control" of the company.

"As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control. Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself. He said hed be supportive of us finding our own path," the post says.

The post further claims that, when Musk couldn't have his way with OpenAI, he decided to leave and build his own AGI (artificial general intelligence) competitor within Tesla; Musk indeed launched his own AI project in November 2023.

OpenAI further disputed Elon Musk's claims that he donated a hundred million dollars to the company, even though he claimed the company needs to go big to "avoid sounding hopeless" in comparison to Google. "Elon said we should announce an initial $1B funding commitment to OpenAI. In total, the non-profit has raised less than $45M from Elon and more than $90M from other donors," the post says.

The emails that OpenAI shared provide important context given Musk's lawsuit, as they indicate that he knew about OpenAI's plans to ditch open-source and go for-profit, but gave up on it once he realized he couldn't be in charge.

There's a lot still missing here; for example, the agreement between co-founders and early investors that Musk mentions in his lawsuit isn't explicitly mentioned in OpenAI's post. Also, it's likely that a lot more correspondence exists between Musk and OpenAI's founders and investors, painting a fuller picture of everyone's intentions towards the company. Given Musk's lawsuit, this surely isn't the last we've heard on this topic.

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OpenAI shares Elon Musk's emails, says he wanted 'full control' of the company - Mashable

In response to Elon Musks lawsuit against OpenAI, the company answered by releasing emails from Elon Musk showing that he actually supported OpenAI pivoting to a for-profit model and even merging with Tesla.

OpenAI, an AI company now famous for its ChatGPT chatbot based on large language models, was originally co-founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a non-profit.

In 2018, Muskleft OpenAIs boardand cited a potential conflict with Teslas own AI effort as the reason for severing ties with the company at the time. The main issue seems to be a competition for AI talent between OpenAI and Tesla though Musk has since said that he also disagreed with OpenAIs direction on AI safety and moving from a non-profit organization to a for-profit.

Over the last few months, and especially since he launched his own AI startup (outside of Tesla), xAI, Musk has been hammering OpenAI over its move to a for-profit structure.

During that time, OpenAI continued to make waves in the AI industry most recently through the unveiling of Sora, an impressive AI text-to-video generator.

Earlier this week, Musk went as far as filing a lawsuit against OpenAI in which he accused the company of prioritizing profits over public good and going against its original mission.

Today, OpenAI fought back with a blog post in which the company said it plans to move to dismiss all of Elons claims. The company showed proof, including emails, that Musk said that OpenAI wouldnt be helpful as a non-profit and he supported a move to for-profit:

In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations.

When that didnt sit well with the rest of OpenAI, Musk shifted strategy and suggested to merge OpenAI into Tesla:

We couldnt agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI. He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should attach to Tesla as its cash cow, commenting that it was exactly right Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isnt zero.

OpenAI released an email from Musk to prove this chronology of events. Musk forwarded an email from a person whose name has been redacted. In that email, the person explains the logic for merging OpenAI and Tesla. Musk wrote that the person is exactly right.

Here are the emails:

Honestly, I dont know what to think at this point. I dont know if I was always wrong about Elon. I dont know if he changed drastically over the last few years or if he just got worse at hiding his true self, but this is not the man I used to consider my hero.

For months, Elon has been publicly bashing OpenAI for its pivot to for-profit and now we learned that he himself admitted that it wont be able to survive as a non-profit and supported the pivot though only if he is in control of the company as its own entity or within Tesla.

This is a high level of hypocrisy.

Elon completely supported the shift to for-profit (as long as he was in control of it), but now he has decided the bash the move and even sue the company as he started a competing startup. If you think thats a coincidence, I have a bridge to sell you.

That said, based on those emails, he does ultimately seem to want AI to be good for humanity, but his methods are questionable. He requires us to just trust him entirely, which is so hard to do these days.

This whole thing supports what Sam Altman said last year: Elon desperately wants the world to be saved, but only if he is the one saving it.

Also, its just a coincidence that by him saving the world from AI/with AI, he would own the entities getting extremely valuable from it. Just a coincidence.

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Elon Musk tried to merge Tesla and OpenAI, emails reveal - Electrek

But this time, its the same execs who forced Musk to close his $44 billion acquisition in the first place, who are now claiming his goal was to cheat them out of $200 million before their stock options vested the next morning. They also have a remarkably thorough source to explain why he closed the deal and fired them when he did: Elon Musk himself, as quoted by Walter Isaacson in the biography released last year, Elon Musk.

Theres a 200-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning, he told me late Thursday afternoon in the war room as the plan unfolded.

Another passage cited from the book calls out a conversation between Musk and his lawyer, Alex Spiro. [H]e tried to resign ... but we beat him, they said, specifically referring to Agrawal. By firing Agrawal before he was able to send a resignation letter, they apparently believed it would mean the company wouldnt have to pay his severance package.

Despite claims made by Elon Musks X about negligence, waste, and misconduct, the lawsuit argues it was authorized by the companys board and necessary to do things like pay $90 million to the lawyers who forced Elon Musk to pay $44 billion for Twitter.

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Fired Twitter execs are suing Elon Musk for over $128 million - The Verge

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On Tuesday, OpenAI published a blog post titled "OpenAI and Elon Musk" in response to a lawsuit Musk filed last week. The ChatGPT maker shared several archived emails from Musk that suggest he once supported a pivot away from open source practices in the company's quest to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). The selected emails also imply that the "open" in "OpenAI" means that the ultimate result of its research into AGI should be open to everyone but not necessarily "open source" along the way.

In one telling exchange from January 2016 shared by the company, OpenAI Chief Scientist Illya Sutskever wrote, "As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it's built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)."

In response, Musk replied simply, "Yup."

A 2016 email exchange between Illya Sutskever and Elon Musk.

An archival email shared by OpenAI in its blog post.

An archival email shared by OpenAI in its blog post.

An archival email shared by OpenAI in its blog post.

An archival email shared by OpenAI in its blog post.

Musk's lawsuit accuses OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, and President Greg Brockman of deviating from its original nonprofit mission by prioritizing profit through a special subsidiary. It also claims that OpenAI has breached its founding agreement to make significant AI advancements open source and freely available to the public. Musk co-founded OpenAI and previously provided funding but is no longer with the company.

"To this day, OpenAI Inc.'s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity,'" the lawsuit says. "In reality, however, OpenAI Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft."

OpenAI regularly receives criticism in the AI community for producing proprietary AI models without accompanying open source code or neural network weights that would allow others to build on the company's work directlyor execute OpenAI's most powerful AI models on other people's hardware.

In response, the OpenAI post strives to redefine the "open" nature of the company, stating, "Were making our technology broadly usable in ways that empower people and improve their daily lives, including via open-source contributions. We provide broad access to today's most powerful AI, including a free version that hundreds of millions of people use every day."

The attack from Musk appears to have a personal angle, judging by the response from OpenAI. Were sad that it's come to this with someone whom weve deeply admired, the company writes. "Someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAIs mission without him.

The shared emails have portions redacted using black bars, which have inspired some AI fans online to attempt to decode the missing pieces using LLMs like Anthropic Claude 3. In a few emails from 2018, Musk suggested that OpenAI should become part of Tesla and warned that OpenAI would have difficulty out-funding Google DeepMind without his help. OpenAI says Musk wanted control of the company, however, which the other founders did not accept.

The back-and-forth nature of the lawsuit and released emails suggest the Musk-OpenAI feud may end up more like a bitter divorce proceeding than a business challenge to a highly valued tech company. Either way, OpenAI plans to fight. "We intend to move to dismiss all of Elons claims," the company writes.

See more here:

OpenAI responds to Elon Musk lawsuit by clarifying its open nature - Ars Technica