OpenAI publishes internal emails on Elon Musk's early push for a for-profit structure

OpenAI published a further batch of internal emails and messages, this time from 2015 to 2017, in response to a preliminary-injunction motion Elon Musk’s lawyers had filed weeks earlier seeking to block the company’s conversion to a for-profit structure — a step beyond his original March 2024 suit, which had by then been refiled in federal court after Musk dropped the state case.

OpenAI’s central claim was that Musk himself had proposed and, in the company’s account, “not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit” structure for OpenAI back in 2017, and that the current restructuring followed the shape he had pushed for at the time. The company wrote that when Musk failed to secure majority equity and full personal control under that plan, “he walked away and told us we would fail.” This built on the emails OpenAI had already released in its earlier response to Musk’s lawsuit, adding correspondence intended specifically to counter the argument, central to the injunction bid, that OpenAI’s founders had never contemplated a for-profit OpenAI.

Musk did not substantively contest the documents’ authenticity. The dispute over the injunction went on to a federal judge, who in March 2025 declined to block the restructuring while allowing the underlying breach-of-contract claims to proceed toward trial — an outcome that left the release’s central claim, that Musk’s own record undercut his case, largely unresolved by any court finding on the merits.