How Elon Musk left OpenAI, according to Greg Brockman
The story
Cutthroat negotiations between startup founders are rarely shared so publicly, especially when a company becomes as world-changing as OpenAI.
From the source
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Image Credits: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images AI How Elon Musk left OpenAI, according to Greg Brockman Tim Fernholz 11:23 AM PDT · May 6, 2026 In late August 2017, key figures at OpenAI (then a small nonprofit research lab) gathered to discuss how they would create a for-profit to commercialize its technology and raise the funds needed to realize AGI.
Elon Musk was demanding full control of the company and had just given each of his co-founders Tesla Model 3. CTO Greg Brockman said he saw that as way of buttering them up at a time when Musk and Sam Altman were vying to win support for their respective visions of the company s future. OpenAI s head of research, Ilya Sutskever, had commissioned a painting of Tesla to give Musk during the meeting as a friendly gesture.
Who and what
Key names and topics in this story: Elon Musk, OpenAI, Greg Brockman.
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