That Elon Musk being a big mouth will not surprise anyone at this point in life, but the owner of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX always finds a way to surprise us. Last weekend, Musk claimed that he was offered shares of OpenAI “at various times”, but said that he “found it unethical/illegal to accept them”.
The staunch defender of ethics and legality, who fired thousands of Twitter employees as soon as he took control for such reasonable reasons as contradicting him, was once co-chairman of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, along with Sam Altman when it was founded in December 2015, and committed to contribute $1 billion to the project.
Responding to a Twitter user about the contribution made by the billionaire to OpenAI, Musk added that he was not clear that the structure of the AI company, which was initially created as a non-profit organization focused on developing artificial intelligence “in a way that can benefit humanity as a whole”, was legal. However, Musk did not specify when he was offered the shares, how many were offered, or who offered them to him.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018, resigning from its board to “eliminate potential future conflicts” due to Tesla’s focus on AI. However, Musk later claimed that he resigned due to disagreements with the OpenAI team.
The billionaire, who launched his own AI company last year, as well as a chatbot called Grok that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has continued to criticize the AI company, especially its billion-dollar partnership with tech giant Microsoft. Musk said last year that the non-profit company is now focused on “maximizing profit,” something that, according to the owner of one of the industry’s least valuable social networks, was never his intention.
