OpenAI Fires Back at Musk Allegations With Trove of Emails
The startup said Musk spurned the company after pushing it to raise more money, and proposing a merger with Tesla.
OpenAI fired back at a lawsuit filed against it by Elon Musk in a blog post Tuesday, using the billionaire’s own emails to show he backed the company’s plans to become a for-profit business and that he insisted it raise “billions” of dollars to be relevant compared with Google.
Musk filed the lawsuit last week against OpenAI, Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, alleging the startup had strayed from its mission to build responsible AI and that it had become beholden to Microsoft Corp., its largest investor. In the post, OpenAI said that Musk was lashing out after trying and failing to make the company part of Tesla Inc.
“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” the company said in the post, which was co-authored by several of OpenAI’s co-founders, including Altman, Brockman and Ilya Sutskever.