Elon Musk’s emails reveals early OpenAI struggles and talent battles

Elon Musk’s recently disclosed email exchanges, revealed through his lawsuit against OpenAI’s cofounders, offer a glimpse into the company’s formative years and platform the competitive battle for talent that has shaped its evolution.

The CEO of X, who co-founded OpenAI alongside 10 others, including Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, departed the organization in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with his responsibilities at Tesla.

These emails were made public as part of Musk’s legal effort to argue that OpenAI is violating antitrust laws. They also reflect Musk’s sense of betrayal over the organization’s shift away from its original vision as a nonprofit, with Musk envisioned as its leader.

In March, ReadWrite reported that Musk filed a lawsuit against Altman and Brockman, claiming he was “deceived” into co-founding the company under false pretenses. Lawyers representing Musk had stated that “Mr. Altman approached Mr. Musk with a proposal: that they join forces to form a non-profit AI lab that would try to catch up to Google in the race for AGI, but it would be the opposite of Google.”

OpenAI and Musk agree on securing top talent but concerns arise over leadership

In the early days, salary battles erupted as DeepMind tried to lure away OpenAI’s founding team, forcing swift salary increases of $100,000 to $200,000 per person. Musk appeared aligned with the rest of the group, advocating for doing whatever was necessary to secure top talent. “Either we get the best people in the world or we will get whipped by Deepmind,” he wrote.

However, an email from former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever detailed the team’s concerns about Musk’s leadership of the company: “[We] are concerned that as the company makes genuine progress towards AGI [artificial general intelligence], you will choose to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary.

“The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis [Hassabis, at Google-owned DeepMind] could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we.”

Musk adds Microsoft to OpenAI lawsuit

When it came to monetization, Microsoft entered the picture as early as 2016, proposing $60 million worth of Azure computing power in exchange for, among other things, mutual promotion between the companies. The idea of this corporate back-scratching didn’t sit well with the team, and Musk described it as making him feel “nauseous.”

Ultimately, they ended up paying significantly more, but without any binding obligations between the two sides. Musk wrote: “Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft’s marketing [b****].”

On Thursday (Nov. 14), Musk expanded his lawsuit to include Microsoft as a defendant, accusing both OpenAI and the tech giant of operating as a monopoly in an amended legal filing.

Featured image: Canva / U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley / TechCrunch

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