OpenAI has released a trove of internal emails, text messages, and corporate documents to challenge Elon Musk’s recent lawsuit, portraying the billionaire entrepreneur as a founder who grew increasingly determined to dominate the organization’s direction.
The move comes after Elon Musk´s legal team filed a motion for an injunction against OpenAI, aiming to halt its transition to a for-profit entity. He is also accusing Microsoft of taking control of OpenAI, undermining its original mission to advance artificial intelligence for public benefit.
However, the now released emails paint a different picture, adding to a large amount of emails that were already released in November.
These disclosures, which span from late 2015 through early 2018, depict a fraught period in which Musk pressed for dramatic restructuring, pushed for massive funding, and sought a leadership role with unprecedented authority.
By revealing these materials, OpenAI aims to refute Musk’s claims of mission betrayal and show that his departure stemmed from his inability to assert unilateral control over the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the sought-after goal of building an AI system capable of broad, human-level cognition.
In a pointed statement that accompanied the released documents, OpenAI writes, “You can’t sue your way to AGI.”
Musk’s lawsuit, which he initially filed in March 2024 and refiled in August of the same year, accuses OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit origins and aligning with powerful industry players like Microsoft to achieve market dominance.
OpenAI, however, contends that Musk’s friction with the company emerged long before these developments and was rooted in conflicting visions of governance and oversight. In fact, OpenAI has accused Musk, saying he previously wanted full control and to merge it with Tesla.
Musk’s Early Doubts and the Nonprofit Structure
When OpenAI publicly launched in December 2015, it was celebrated as a research institute dedicated to ensuring that AI’s benefits would be widely shared. Its nonprofit status was a core part of its identity, aimed at avoiding conflicts of interest and preventing AI advances from being monopolized by a single entity.
Yet from the outset, Musk questioned this approach.
In an email from November 20, 2015, addressed to Sam Altman, Musk wrote, “Also, the structure doesn’t seem optimal. In particular, the YC stock along with a salary from the nonprofit muddies the alignment of incentives. Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit.”
This statement, obtained from the newly disclosed documents, reveals Musk’s early skepticism about relying solely on a nonprofit format.
These early misgivings might have seemed minor at the time, but they foreshadowed more intense debates to come. Throughout 2016, OpenAI focused on establishing its reputation and research capabilities.
Yet as the group began to realize the scale of the compute and talent required to compete with major players like Google and DeepMind, the question of how to secure billions of dollars in funding became more urgent.
Musk’s ideas on restructuring gained traction inside his own mind, even if many OpenAI leaders were wary of deviating from their initial mission.
The Mounting Funding Pressures
By mid-2017, OpenAI’s leadership understood that their ambitions—ranging from reinforcement learning in complex environments to robotics experiments and large-scale language models—would require orders of magnitude more computational resources than initially anticipated.
The move from theoretical research to projects of tangible complexity drastically increased operating costs. Musk, aware of the resource gap, grew insistent on bridging it through aggressive financial strategies. He argued that the nonprofit model would never secure the kind of war chest needed to stay ahead of established industry titans.
In multiple communications, Musk called attention to the growing threat posed by entities such as Google. On one occasion, he expressed his impatience with what he perceived as OpenAI’s incremental approach.
While OpenAI’s founders had imagined funding from philanthropic sources and a modest donor base, Musk believed that nothing short of a massive infusion of capital would suffice.
In December 2018—though by then he was already on the verge of leaving—Musk wrote, “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”
This blunt assessment underscored the scale of his vision and the fundamental tension: how could a nonprofit, beholden to principles of broad benefit and not shareholder returns, possibly raise billions annually?
Shifting Towards a For-Profit Hybrid
To solve what Musk perceived as a fundamental funding problem, he began to advocate for a substantial organizational overhaul. Internal notes and emails reveal that Musk encouraged merging OpenAI’s existing nonprofit research arm with a new for-profit layer that could attract major investments.
He believed that without offering equity stakes and the prospect of returns, no rational investor would pour in the capital required to outpace rival AI labs. By transforming OpenAI into a hybrid entity, Musk hoped to preserve some semblance of the original mission while unlocking the financial power of a conventional corporation.
One crucial piece of evidence is a July 21, 2017 email chain involving Musk, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman. Discussing China’s AI ambitions and how the U.S. must remain competitive, Greg Brockman wrote,
“100% agreed. We think the path must be:
AI research non-profit (through end of 2017)
AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018)
Government project (when: ??)”
Musk responded positively, suggesting they talk further. This early plan shows that at least some OpenAI leaders, feeling the pressure of global competition, entertained Musk’s ideas of forging a for-profit wing capable of rapid growth and large-scale resource deployment.
Musk’s push for a for-profit structure was not limited to abstract proposals. In September 2017, he registered a public benefit corporation named “Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc.”
The existence of this entity, revealed in the latest disclosures, illustrates how concretely Musk was planning for a future in which OpenAI could function like a startup—nimble, well-funded, and structured around equity stakes.
This would allow him to align incentives, secure board control, and arguably shape the strategic direction to an extent that nonprofit governance would not permit.
Tensions Over Control and Absolute Authority
As Musk’s proposals advanced, they collided with a core principle of OpenAI’s founding vision: preventing any single party from monopolizing AGI.
Co-founders like Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman had envisioned a structure where influence was shared among leading researchers and decision-makers, ensuring that no one person could unilaterally dictate the fate of AGI research.
Musk’s demands for equity and a CEO position, however, threatened to concentrate power in his hands to a degree that made others uneasy.
One of the most telling communications came from Ilya Sutskever in September 2017, when he wrote to Musk,
“The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don’t want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you’ve shown us that absolute control is extremely important to you.”
This stark admission of concern, directly addressing Musk’s intentions, underscores the gravity of the power struggle unfolding behind the scenes. For Sutskever, ceding so much authority to one individual—even if that individual was a visionary entrepreneur—clashed with the ethos of distributing AI’s benefits broadly and safeguarding humanity’s future.
Though Musk offered assurances and at times claimed not to personally care about equity so long as he could secure enough resources “to build a city on Mars,” such remarks did little to quell anxieties. To many at OpenAI, his willingness to assume dominant ownership and leadership roles seemed incompatible with the collective spirit and checks-and-balances approach they had intended to maintain.
Musk’s Departure and Unsuccessful Attempts to Merge with Tesla
As Musk pressed for more radical changes, he proposed that OpenAI spin itself into Tesla, promising a billion-dollar budget with the prospect of “increasing exponentially.” He reasoned that Tesla’s substantial resources and investor base would offer OpenAI what the nonprofit structure could not: a direct and virtually limitless pipeline of funds.
Yet the team, already unsettled by his demands for control, rejected this approach. According to internal messages, there was no appetite for placing the destiny of an AGI research lab under a corporate entity tethered to shareholder returns.
Musk’s attempts to orchestrate a merger with Tesla, and thereby ensure his own leadership, reflected his broader strategy of securing what he viewed as mission-critical funding at any cost.
While he insisted that such moves were necessary to stay relevant against powerful rivals, OpenAI’s other founders felt that tying their fate to a single corporation, especially one with responsibilities to investors and markets, would undermine the principle of ensuring AGI benefited all of humanity.
Following these failed negotiations, Musk stepped down as OpenAI’s co-chair in early 2018. That departure was not a quiet retreat. During a farewell meeting with OpenAI staff, Musk maintained that the organization needed to become far more ambitious in its resource gathering. He urged them to generate “billions per year” to remain competitive and warned that without dramatic action, they risked slipping into obscurity.
Musk had previously written, “OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be immediate and dramatic action or everyone except for Google will be consigned to irrelevance.”
This statement captures the sense of urgency and existential threat he believed OpenAI faced, yet others at the company disputed his conclusion that centralized control and a corporate tie-in were the only ways forward.
While Musk framed his departure as a refusal to accept what he saw as insufficient urgency, OpenAI’s documents tell a different story, one of the organization defending its founding ethos against a co-founder determined to reshape its structures around his personal vision.
The Capped-Profit Model and Musk’s Criticism
In March 2019, OpenAI announced a new structure known as the capped-profit model, a delicate compromise designed to raise substantial private investment while limiting returns and keeping ultimate governance under the nonprofit board. This hybrid approach aimed to resolve the funding dilemma without placing AGI development entirely at the mercy of profit motives.
Yet by this time, Musk was no longer in the picture. Internal documents suggest that on multiple occasions, OpenAI’s leadership offered Musk equity in the new arrangement, hoping to maintain some link with their former co-founder. He declined, leaving OpenAI to chart its own course.
Musk’s dissatisfaction did not fade. In texts disclosed by OpenAI, Musk expressed frustration upon learning of the company’s rising valuation. “De facto. I provided almost all the seed, A and most of B round funding,” he wrote to Sam Altman.
“This is a bait and switch.” These words reveal the intensity of Musk’s feeling of personal investment and his perception that OpenAI’s evolution into a capped-profit entity deviated from what he understood to be their original agreement.
Despite having left the company and spurned opportunities for formal involvement under the new structure, Musk continued to assert moral and financial claims over OpenAI’s trajectory, suggesting that the company had leveraged his early contributions to increase its worth while shutting him out of real influence.
Launching xAI and Renewed Legal Battles
In 2023, Musk founded xAI as a direct competitor to OpenAI, dedicated to developing AGI on his own terms. This venture signaled that Musk had not abandoned his ambitions to shape the future of artificial intelligence.
Instead of persuading OpenAI to follow his plans, he created a rival entity that could pursue the strategy he saw fit, without the constraints of a nonprofit board or equal partners.
xAI’s launch put Musk and OpenAI on a collision course, with both entities vying for talent, compute, funding, and influence over the emerging AGI landscape.
Just months after xAI’s establishment, Musk escalated the conflict by filing the lawsuit against OpenAI. He alleged that the organization’s partnership with Microsoft, its capped-profit model, and its rising valuation were all signs of a deviation from the original nonprofit mission.
OpenAI, in turn, countered these claims by releasing the internal emails and texts that illustrated Musk’s push for unilateral control years before. OpenAI indicated that Musk proposed a for-profit model and insisted on controlling it, which the company believed conflicted with its mission.
Musk then withdrew his lawsuit again in June, only to reinitiate his legal battle again with a new lawsuit filed in August.
OpenAI sees itself as having preserved its mission by resisting Musk’s power grab, while Musk characterizes its evolution as a betrayal of the original founding principles and an unjust rewriting of the narrative that gave birth to the organization.
Broad Implications for the AI Industry
The dispute between Musk and OpenAI is not merely a personal feud. It lays bare the profound structural and ethical questions that the AI industry must address as it transitions from a field dominated by academic labs and small startups to one where trillion-dollar tech giants and ambitious entrepreneurs compete head-to-head.
The fundamental question lurking behind every funding model, governance choice, and organizational pivot is how to ensure that AGI, if and when it is realized, does not become the tool of a narrow elite.
Musk’s aggressive pursuit of capital and authority at OpenAI underscores how easily fears about lagging behind corporate behemoths can push even a founder of a supposedly idealistic nonprofit toward more conventional, and arguably more self-serving, corporate solutions.
OpenAI’s narrative suggests that it refused to be swayed by these pressures. While Musk championed a model that, in his view, would give OpenAI a fighting chance against entities like Google, the other leaders rejected any arrangement that bestowed “unilateral absolute control” on one individual.
They believed that the whole point of a structure like OpenAI’s original nonprofit design was to prevent AGI from being guided by the ambitions or biases of a single person, no matter how visionary. This principle of distributed accountability becomes all the more crucial as AI systems grow increasingly powerful and their societal impact more complex and unpredictable.
The Enduring Debate Over Governance and Vision
As the lawsuit winds its way through the courts and the public debate intensifies, Musk’s criticisms continue to resonate with some observers who question whether OpenAI can genuinely maintain a public-interest mission while trading profits and partnering with major tech firms.
Conversely, OpenAI’s supporters argue that the hybrid model and nonprofit oversight board are precisely the mechanisms required to uphold ethical standards in a field where immense financial and political pressures are at play.
The company’s leaders maintain that their path, though complicated and imperfect, is more in line with their founding ethos than Musk’s proposed power-centered rearrangement could ever have been.
The internal documents, now in the public eye, capture the organization’s formative battles in vivid detail. There are references to Musk’s promises of hardware integration, to his claims of future billion-dollar budgets, and to his insistence that only dramatic measures could preserve OpenAI’s competitiveness.
They also document the repeated challenges made by the team, who pointed out that conceding the reins to one person undermined the very safeguards against AI misuse that they had set out to build. These debates did not occur in secret; they were known to the core stakeholders, and the final stance taken by OpenAI—to reject Musk’s terms—was not the result of confusion or shortsightedness, but of deliberate principles.
Toward an Uncertain Future
What emerges from this extended look at OpenAI’s internal struggles and Musk’s contested legacy is a cautionary tale about the complexity of governing a technology with world-altering potential.
Musk’s departure and subsequent rivalry with OpenAI demonstrate that even the most talented and well-intentioned figures can find themselves at odds over the proper path.
His emphasis on overwhelming funding, investor appeal, and centralized authority may have been a sincere attempt to secure OpenAI’s future in a ferociously competitive environment.
Yet the other founders’ refusal to yield to these demands highlights a commitment to a more pluralistic vision of AI governance, one that does not rely on a single leader’s guidance or favor.
The road ahead for OpenAI, xAI, and the entire AI ecosystem remains uncertain. The documents released in response to Musk’s lawsuit underscore that the choices made today—about funding models, leadership structures, shareholder rights, and ethical guardrails—will shape the kind of world AGI might help create.
They show that behind the headlines, the personalities, and the legal wrangling lies an existential question about who gets to steer the course of machine intelligence. Whether OpenAI’s chosen path or Musk’s preferred approach proves more sustainable and just remains to be seen.
For now, the public and the courts have a deeper and more nuanced record to consider, made possible by OpenAI’s willingness to pull back the curtain on its tumultuous early years.
