Elon Emails

Birchall weekly update: OpenAI's $5M quarterly request

From:
Jared Birchall
Date:
July 9, 2016 (Sent 12:03 AM)
To:
Elon Musk
Subject:
Weekly Update
Elon - I hope the trip has gone well! Attached is your weekly balance sheet update. You can 'ignore links' when it asks. Confidential • I spoke with Chris Clark yesterday and he requested that we send the quarterly $5MM commitment at the beginning of the quarter - which is now. The only problem is we don't have sufficient cash to make that happen. We have $150k in the Foundation and $1.8 mil in the DAF. The foundation would need to sell some shares in order to generate the necessary cash. I share your desire to hold off for better valuations, but if we want to accommodate this request we'd need to gift 23k shares to the DAF where they would provide the payment. Thoughts? • We will also have the ~$150k payable each month for rent. That's another $600k this year, in addition to the $600k we'll need to support the USC project (among a few other commitments). Plus another $10MM committed in January. • Chris asked me about using the extra space in the building for some of the Y Combinator companies. I told him to hold off on any of those plans until I talk it through with you. • As suggested, I have requested a copy of all the OpenAI formation documents and am awaiting these from Chris. Jared J Birchall Managing Director Musk Family Office

About this email

Musk's family-office head reports that OpenAI's Chris Clark wants the quarterly $5M commitment sent now but cash is short, lists rent and other commitments, and says Clark asked about using spare building space for YC companies.

Notes

Public redacted version; parts of the weekly update may be redacted.

Where it came from

Court record; attribution confirmed.

OpenAI, executive & internal. Tags: donations, funding, pioneer-building, family-office, y-combinator, musk-v-openai