Elon Musk sues ChatGPT creator OpenAI (2024)

FAQs

Does Elon Musk still own OpenAI? ›

Elon Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, but he is no longer affiliated with the organization. OpenAI is an independent research organization that is not owned by any individual or company. It is a non-profit organization that is funded by a variety of sources, including donations and grants.

Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, arguing it has breached the principles he agreed to when he helped found it in 2015.

The lawsuit accentuates Musk's deep-seated concerns that OpenAI has deviated from its foundational manifesto of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the betterment of humanity, choosing instead to prioritize financial gains.

OpenAI fired back at Elon Musk's lawsuit against the company by releasing screenshots of emails from Musk during his time at OpenAI that show he supported making it a for-profit company and said a merger with Tesla was the only way to compete with Google.

ChatGPT is owned by OpenAI, a company that was founded to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) and to ensure that it benefits all of humanity. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit but restructured as a capped-profit company in 2019.

Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in a San Francisco court, alleging that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman have violated OpenAI's founding mission to develop AI safely and for the benefit of humanity.

Musk filed a suit against OpenAI in a California court last week, alleging that Altman and other executives had “breached the founding agreement” of the company by pursuing private commercial success instead of working to benefit humanity.

It was founded by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial Board of Directors members.

1 billion USD (2024)

Sam Altman / Net worth

OpenAI is a privately held company and therefore does not have a public stock price.

How much did Sam Altman invest in OpenAI? ›

Sharpe also said Altman won't receive any financial benefit from the OpenAI Startup Fund, which raised $175 million to take stakes in early-stage AI companies. Although regulatory filings show Altman owns more than 75% of the fund, he hasn't invested his own money and won't profit from its gains, according to Sharpe.

Musk alleged in his suit that OpenAI has become “a closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft that is focused on making money instead of benefitting humanity. In so doing, his suit claims that OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission that he helped fund.

Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was seen sharing an old Twitter (now called X) exchange, trying to remind Musk of how he stood by him when people were against Tesla in 2019. In an interview, Altman had also said that he texted Musk right after the lawsuit.

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The OpenAI ownership pie is divided between Microsoft (49%), other stakeholders (49%), and the original OpenAI non-profit foundation, which staunchly preserves its autonomy as the leading firm continues to write OpenAI history. Other OpenAI shareholders include a16z, Sequoia, Tigers Global, and Founders Fund.

A co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, Musk stepped down from the firm's board in 2018, four years after saying that AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded OpenAI together, but are now at odds in a lawsuit.

OpenAI fired back at Elon Musk's lawsuit against the company by releasing screenshots of emails from Musk during his time at OpenAI that show he supported making it a for-profit company and said a merger with Tesla was the only way to compete with Google.