Internal emails: Elon Musk wanted to keep OpenAI from becoming ‘Microsoft’s marketing bitch’
Elon Musk, an original co-founder of OpenAI, attempted to keep the organization from becoming too cozy with Microsoft in an early cloud computing deal with the Redmond company.
“This actually made me feel nauseous. It sucks and is exactly what I would expect from them,” Musk wrote in a 2016 email thread with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, commenting on Microsoft’s proposal to provide $60 million in cloud computing credits for $10 million, a $50 million discount on their commercial value, if OpenAI also agreed to “evangelize” Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud provider.
Altman responded, in part, “I had the same reaction after reading that section and they’ve already agreed to drop.”
Later, Musk was informed by Sam Teller, his chief of staff at the time, that Microsoft was willing to go forward with the agreement for a payment of $50 million from OpenAI without any evangelizing or other strings attached.
Musk wrote back that the revised proposal was fine by him, adding, “Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft’s marketing bitch.”
The emails predate, by a few years, the larger investment and partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, which began in September 2019, after Musk had left OpenAI’s non-profit board. Microsoft has since gone on to invest nearly $14 billion in the San Francisco-based organization’s capped-profit arm, OpenAI Global LLC.
The 2016 email thread was disclosed publicly this week among a raft of exhibits in an amended version of Musk’s wide-ranging lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI. The new complaint added Microsoft as a defendant for the first time.
Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder who has been tapped by President-elect Trump to target government inefficiency, filed the original lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI earlier this year.
The amended complaint, filed Thursday in federal court in California, alleges that Microsoft is selling or giving away cloud computing to OpenAI “for the purpose of injuring competitors or destroying competition.” It accuses the companies of attempting to illegally monopolize the market for generative artificial intelligence.
Microsoft declined to comment on the lawsuit in response to a GeekWire inquiry.
The tech giant has provided OpenAI with cloud computing resources to train the massive AI models behind ChatGPT and other AI breakthroughs.
In turn, OpenAI’s technologies have helped to boost Microsoft’s own AI products. Microsoft said on its most recent earnings call that its overall AI revenue is on pace to exceed $10 billion annually.
Altman, the OpenAI CEO, has appeared at Microsoft events and press conferences over the past two years to promote their partnership and shared AI initiatives.
Read the email thread below, and the amended complaint here.
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