Elon Musk Posts Nostalgia for the OpenAI He Says Was Betrayed. His Own Emails Tell a Different Story.

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Forty days before his fraud trial against OpenAI begins, Elon Musk posted two words on X that summarised his entire legal argument: “Back when it was an open source nonprofit.”

The post, published March 17, quoted a December 11, 2015 email Musk sent to OpenAI’s founding team congratulating them on their start. The message was simple. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit committed to developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. Musk’s lawsuit argues that what it became was a betrayal of that founding promise.

The problem is the record OpenAI has already published in response to that lawsuit.
In September 2017, Musk personally created a for-profit entity as the proposed future structure of OpenAI. When the team declined to give him majority equity and full control over that vehicle, he walked away.

By January 2018, he was telling OpenAI’s leadership that the organisation was on a path of certain failure relative to Google and that immediate, dramatic action was required. By February 2018, he was proposing that OpenAI merge into Tesla, describing Tesla as the only organisation capable of obtaining the funding required. The team declined that proposal too.

In December 2018, months after leaving the board, Musk sent OpenAI an email stating that raising several hundred million dollars would not be sufficient and that the organisation needed billions per year immediately or it should be abandoned. OpenAI published that email, along with the others, as part of its public response to his lawsuit. The documents are on OpenAI’s website.

Musk is now asking a jury to find that OpenAI defrauded him by abandoning its nonprofit mission. OpenAI is asking that same jury to read the emails its co-founder sent while he was still involved. The founding 2015 message Musk posted on Monday is one data point. The 2017 for-profit entity he created, the Tesla merger proposal, and the December 2018 email demanding billions or nothing, are others.

The jury that convenes April 27 in Oakland will have access to all of it. As FinTech Weekly reported, Musk is seeking between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages. The judge overseeing the case has already described his damages methodology as unconvincing. The trial is expected to run four weeks.

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