Elon Musk departed OpenAI board in 2018 after leadership dispute with Sam Altman and cofounders

Feb 21, 2018

Elon Musk left OpenAI's board in February 2018 after cofounders including Sam Altman and CTO Greg Brockman rejected his proposal to take control of the AI research organization, with the public explanation citing conflict of interest with Tesla's autonomous driving work. Musk stopped funding OpenAI after contributing $100 million of a promised $1 billion, leaving the organization unable to afford expensive AI training costs. OpenAI pivoted to transformer models in fall 2018 and created a for-profit entity in March 2019, securing $1 billion from Microsoft to build the supercomputer that produced ChatGPT and DALL-E. After ChatGPT's explosive November 2022 launch made OpenAI a $30 billion company, Musk publicly accused the organization of betraying its open-source nonprofit mission to become a closed-source, maximum-profit entity controlled by Microsoft.

Musk's 2018 departure from OpenAI board amid power struggle

▪Greg Brockman was OpenAI's chief technology officer in 2018.
▪A power struggle ensued at OpenAI in 2018 over Elon Musk's takeover attempt.
▪Sam Altman added the title of president to his OpenAI role in 2018.
▪Elon Musk stepped down from OpenAI's board of directors in 2018.
▪Elon Musk had already contributed $100 million to OpenAI before his departure.
▪Elon Musk had promised to donate roughly $1 billion to OpenAI over a period of years.

OpenAI's transformation from nonprofit to for-profit entity

▪OpenAI took $1 billion from Microsoft less than six months after creating its for-profit entity.
▪OpenAI's latest language model GPT-4 has 1 trillion parameters.

Musk's reaction to OpenAI's success and Microsoft partnership

▪Elon Musk tweeted on March 15, 2023 questioning how a non-profit to which he donated approximately $100 million became a $30 billion market cap for-profit company.
▪Elon Musk tweeted on February 17, 2023 that OpenAI was created as an open source, non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google.
▪Elon Musk was furious after ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
▪Elon Musk tweeted on February 17, 2023 that OpenAI has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.