Altman strikes back

Sam Altman and OpenAI aren't letting Elon Musk dictate the conversation around his lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker

Elon Musk made a big splash last week by suing OpenAI, which I talked about in brief in The Angle’s last Friday roundup. Yesterday, OpenAI responded to the suit with a public blog post coauthored by all of the company’s key people, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockton, and Ilya Sutskever.

Unsurprisingly, the letter begins by confirming that OpenAI will seek to have all of Elon’s claims from the lawsuit dismissed; but where a more staid approach to corporate comms would dictate that an official response essentially end there, the post goes on to articulate in previously unrevealed detail some of the specifics of Elon’s contributions to, participation in, and eventual separation with OpenAI.

Altman and co. confirm that Elon never put in the $100 million he once claimed he contributed to OpenAI — instead, he maxed out at $45 million (though apparently there was a verbal commitment for up to $1 billion in an extremely hedgy, probably-was-never-going-to-actually-happen kind of way.

The biggest thing contained in OpenAI’s response, in terms of how it refutes Elon’s claims in his lawsuit, is that he was actively in support of adding the for-profit element to OpenAI’s original not-for-profit structure — only he differed in terms of how to structure that. TL;DR, Elon wanted to control it via Tesla, and everyone else seems to have not wanted that.

Specifically, Elon wanted to essentially make Tesla the for-profit engine of OpenAI, which would of course mean that OpenAI was then beholden to Tesla for the fruits of its labor. Musk hasn’t been shy about his efforts to build and develop AI expertise within Tesla over the years — he’s employed some of the best and the brightest in the industry in service of this goal, including Andrej Karpathy — and he recently launched Grok at X (neé Twitter) to try (without much success) to compete with ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s note also addressed the name of the company, often mocked in the context of how it doesn’t actually espouse open source when it comes to its models. The ‘open’ in the name referred to use and access, the company claims, not to the licensing model it chooses to distribute with.

One other key thing to note about the response from OpenAI that goes against the grain of the usual machinations of these things: They came with receipts.

The blog post includes lightly redacted emails from and to Elon, which pretty clearly back up the points they make. Of course, what we get to see is a selective subset of the full record, so who knows what that means in terms of what’s on the other side of the conversation or what emails we aren’t privy to, but it’s still a very aggressive move for a tech company in general — especially with someone with the notoriety and influence of Musk on the receiving end.

Without naming names, I have spoken to a lot of very powerful, well-placed people in Silicon Valley who overtly and immediately balk at the idea of saying anything negative about Elon Musk in public. The rabidity of his fanboys is one reason, but the ‘never count Elon out’ rep that he’s built by turning trash fires into Teslas is another. So for Altman and his colleagues to come at the throne should be a very blatant sign that this is going to get very ugly. And, naturally — extremely interesting.

Also, this is completely off-topic, but in case you missed the news, yesterday I announced that I’ve joined OMERS Ventures to work on developing and building our network, and help with telling the story of the firm and our portfolio companies. The Angle will continue, independently, and free for all — but expect me to talk about what’s making me excited over there here, and probably vice versa as well. Also, if you feel like making me look good to my new colleagues and bosses, go ahead and follow OMERS Ventures on X and on LinkedIn. Love you, thanks!