OpenAI responds to Elon Musk's lawsuit over its founding mission

Six days after Elon Musk sued OpenAI alleging it had abandoned a founding pact to develop AGI openly and for the public benefit, OpenAI published a blog post, “OpenAI and Elon Musk,” co-authored by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and two other early team members, disputing the premise directly and releasing internal emails to support its account.

The post said Elon Musk had contributed $45 million in total, despite having pledged up to $1 billion and telling colleagues OpenAI would need to raise at least that much to compete with Google. It said the disagreement that led to Musk’s 2018 departure arose when he proposed either merging OpenAI into Tesla or taking full control of the company himself, and that when those proposals were rejected he left, taking with him the funding he had promised. On the question of openness, OpenAI quoted a 2016 email exchange in which Sutskever wrote that it would “make sense to start being less open” as the technology matured, to which Musk had replied simply, “Yup” — offered as evidence that Musk had himself endorsed moving away from open publication before OpenAI’s structure changed.

Neither account was independently verified at the time; both were built on the same set of internal communications, selectively quoted by parties with an obvious interest in how the story was read. OpenAI’s post did not address Musk’s central legal claim — that a binding founding agreement existed and had been breached — beyond denying such an agreement was ever made.

The exchange set the pattern for the dispute that followed: public filings and rebuttals substituting for discovery, with each side publishing communications intended to recast the 2015 founding in its own terms. Musk withdrew and refiled the suit later in 2024, and the underlying disagreement over what OpenAI’s founders promised each other remained unresolved as the case moved toward trial.