Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit - Day 1

Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015. (Michael Kovac/Getty Images)

MUSK BEEF

OpenAI: Elon literally wanted us to be for-profit!

OpenAI brings receipts showing Musk wanted them to be for-profit before he sued them for doing just that.

12/13/24 4:30PM

“You can’t sue your way to AGI.”

That is the pointed message from OpenAI to cofounder Elon Musk that appears in a lengthy blog post today on the company’s website, the second such post to publicly push back on Musk’s legal attacks on the company.

In a post titled “Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit” the company makes the case that Musk, who has filed multiple lawsuits to stop OpenAI from altering its core structure to a for-profit business, actually wanted that structure in the first place and even filed the paperwork to do that.

Currently, the company is structured as primary nonprofit entity, with a smaller for-profit arm.

OpenAI lays out a timeline to the key events in the feud since OpenAI’s founding in 2015. The post showed the receipts in the form of text-message threads detailing Musk meetings as well as redacted emails to and from Musk that all appear to show that Musk was indeed in favor of the for-profit approach to raise the huge amounts of capital needed to build the computing infrastructure and produce the first tangible results of their efforts.

According to a reading of OpenAI’s version of events, Musk seemed to be supportive and on-board until September 2017, when the founders were discussing the equity allocation for the for-profit arm. According to the post, Musk wanted 50% to 60% ownership of the company and to be CEO.

“On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars.”

After detailing his preferred terms for the new for-profit entity, Musk told founders Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman in an email:

“I’ve been really impressed with the quality of discussion with you guys on the equity and board stuff. I have a really good feeling about this. “

Two days later, Musk’s agents registered a public-benefit corporation named “Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc.” in Delaware.

Sutskever responded with the OpenAI team’s concerns in an email to Musk titled “Honest Thoughts,” which did not land well with Musk. Sutskever wrote:

“The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis [presumably Nobel Prize recipient and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis] could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.”

That appeared to trigger the famously mercurial Musk, as evidenced by his curt reply:

“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.”

The post goes on to detail more examples of Musk supporting the for-profit model and urging the company to raise vast sums of capital as quickly as possible. In January 2018, Musk suggested rolling OpenAI into publicly traded Tesla, offering the company a $1 billion budget, which Altman and the others were opposed to.

While things appeared chilly heading into 2018, Musk still communicated with Sam Altman and the others, casting doubt on their chosen path forward. Musk wrote to the OpenAI team:

“My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.
Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”

After Musk saw OpenAI’s fundraising achieve a valuation of $20 billion, Musk was angry. In a text to Altman, Musk said that he provided the bulk of the seed funding for OpenAI and was left without any equity (which OpenAI says he declined).

“This is a bait and switch,” Musk wrote.

A few months later, Musk founded his OpenAI competitor, xAI, and cosigned a letter calling for an industry-wide pause on AI development.

Rani Molla7m

Apple’s iPhone is the top-selling smartphone in urban China

Apple’s second-quarter earnings beat expectations and underscore its growing strength in China, where it is closing in on the top spot in the smartphone market.

“We are thrilled with the performance in Greater China,” CEO Tim Cook said, noting that iPhone was “the top-selling model in urban China.” Cook first called the iPhone the rather than a top-selling model there during the company’s first-quarter earnings earlier this year.

Data from IDC and Counterpoint Research show Apple accounted for 19% of smartphone shipments in China in the first calendar quarter of 2026, just behind Huawei at 20%. Analysts say Apple is poised to take the lead soon, helped in part by rising memory chip costs that are pushing up competitors’ prices.

Apple’s China revenue rose 28% in the March quarter, ahead of analyst estimates, and is up 33% in the first half of the year.

Apple is on its way to becoming the biggest smartphone seller in China

Apple’s China revenue rose 28% in the March quarter, ahead of analyst estimates, and is up 33% in the first half of the year.

Millie Giles3h

SpaceX’s compensation plan for Musk is partially tied to creating a permanent human colony on Mars, America’s favorite planet

The conditions of SpaceX’s pay package for founder Elon Musk were revealed in a confidential registration statement, which was reviewed by Reuters last week.

While the compensation plan, approved by the SpaceX board in January, includes a sky-high valuation target of $7.5 trillion, it turns out Musk will only be awarded 200 million in super-voting restricted shares if he also establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with more than a million people, according to excerpts from the statement.

Luckily, there might be some volunteers to become cosmic X-patriates, since Mars just so happens to be Americans’ celestial body of choice. According to a new YouGov survey, published Tuesday, Mars is Americans’ favorite planet (19%), followed by ring-laden Saturn (14%) and 143,000 kilometer-wide Jupiter (8%).

Americans favorite planet YouGov — Sherwood News

Respondents were less enthused by Mercury and almost-planet Pluto, with roughly 1 in 5 respondents calling one of these their least favorite planet — though a majority of US adults (55%) simply didn’t know what their least favorite planet was, like the 38% who couldn’t say what their top choice was.

Whether Mars is America's favorite because of manifold endeavors to colonize it, or whether its proximity to Earth, relatively livable climate (Mercury’s temperatures, for example, are a little more mercurial, hitting 800°F in the day then dropping to -290°F at night), and grip on pop culture, from Ziggy Stardust to chocolate bars, have given us a rosier view of the Red Planet, is unclear.

Ahead of the company’s highly-anticipated IPO, it had appeared that SpaceX’s priorities were shifting away from Mars, further towards the Earth’s Moon. But if the world’s richest man wants to ensure even more company shares come June, SpaceX’s path to Mars shouldn’t be eclipsed.

Rani Molla

John Apple

15h

Apple beats estimates on earnings and revenue

Apple reported second-quarter earnings after the bell Thursday.

Jon Keegan16h

White House said to oppose Anthropic’s plan to expand Mythos access to more companies

Anthropic is ready to invite a wider group of companies to gain access to Claude Mythos, the company’s powerful next-generation AI chatbot.

The tightly controlled model has been deemed something of a security risk by Anthropic itself, due to its ability to find thousands of software vulnerabilities and potentially be used for sophisticated cyberattacks.

About 50 companies have been given access to test the capabilities of the new model, and Anthropic wanted to expand that to 120, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration is blocking the move out of concerns that the new technology could fall into the wrong hands, per the report.

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was in talks to raise money with a $900 billion valuation — higher than its archrival in the AI chatbot world, OpenAI, which was recently valued at $852 billion.

White House Opposes Anthropic’s Plan to Expand Access to Mythos Model

About 50 companies have been given access to test the capabilities of the new model, and Anthropic wanted to expand that to 120, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration is blocking the move out of concerns that the new technology could fall into the wrong hands, per the report.

Rani Molla21h

Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend more than $700 billion on capex this year

Big Tech’s big capital spending continues to surge even higher than the companies had previously expected.

Alphabet raised its 2026 capex outlook to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from $175 billion to $185 billion. Meta increased its 2026 forecast to $125 billion to $145 billion, up from $115 billion to $135 billion. Microsoft, meanwhile, said it’s planning on spending $190 billion this calendar year, about $55 billion more than the FactSet analyst consensus. Amazon, the lone outlier, didn’t boost its capex forecast, keeping it at a cool $200 billion.

Combined, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend more than $700 billion on capex in 2026, nearly double what they spent last year and $100 billion more than they’d expected just last quarter, as they continue to build out the AI infrastructure to support their AI futures.

big 4 tech capex meta microsoft google amazon — Sherwood News