Musk: 'Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw'

From:: Elon Musk
Date:: September 20, 2017
To:: Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman; cc Greg Brockman, Sam Teller, Shivon Zilis
Subject:: Re: Honest Thoughts

Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay or I'm just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup. Discussions are over

About this email

Nine minutes after the 'Honest Thoughts' email, Musk ends the for-profit negotiations and says he will stop funding OpenAI until the founders firmly commit to stay as a nonprofit or go off on their own.

Notes

Text taken from the LessWrong transcription (habryka, Nov 16 2024), which the compiler states was checked against the originals. Sent Sep 20, 2017 2:17 PM. Paragraph breaks follow the commonly published layout; the retrieval tool returned the text as a single run.

Where it came from

Court record; attribution confirmed.

OpenAI, executive & internal. Tags: control, for-profit, funding, ultimatum, negotiation, musk-v-openai

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