Elon Musk wanted ‘absolute control’ of the company: OpenAI

The Sam Altman-run OpenAI has hit back at Elon Musk’s lawsuit, saying as the company discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, “Musk wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control”.

In a blog post, the ChatGPT maker alleged that Musk wanted “majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO.” In the middle of these discussions, “he withheld funding”.

OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Altman himself, and Wojciech Zaremba said “we couldn’t 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”.

Elon Musk left OpenAI, “saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself. He said he’d be supportive of us finding our own path”.

According to OpenAI, they couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Musk because “we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI”. The billionaire then suggested merging OpenAI into Tesla instead.

Musk soon chose to leave OpenAI, "saying that our probability of success was zero", and that he planned to build an "AGI competitor within Tesla”.

In December 2018, Musk sent OpenAI an email, saying “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it”.

OpenAI said it is focused on “advancing our mission and have a long way to go”.

Musk alleged in his lawsuit that OpenAI has become “a closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft.