Elon Musk, who was one of the founders of OpenAI, has been attacking the company for months for its current business model after the announcement of AIs such as ChatGPT or GPT-4. The tycoon has come to emphasize in several tweets that the laboratory directed by Sam Altman is no longer a non-profit company, and has reiterated on different occasions that he came to invest some 100 million dollars with the aim of the laboratory developing models of artificial intelligence that have a positive impact on society. Well, it turns out that Musk actually he has not invested as much in OpenAI as he himself points out.
The tycoon, in fact, would have invested half of what he has been saying in recent months in OpenAI after ensuring that the company has gone from being a non-profit organization to, in a way, being a technology company like any other.
So far, we reiterate, the figure that Elon Musk has highlighted is 100 million dollarsas stated in several tweets published in the last few months. In one it stood out: “I’m still confused as to how a nonprofit I donated ~$100M to has somehow turned into a $30B market cap profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it? in another postclaimed that he donated “the first $100 million to OpenAI when it was a non-profit organization” but that he now has “no ownership or control”.
In an interview with CNBC, however, Elon Musk gave a considerably lower figure after the interviewer asked him about the amount he donated to OpenAI. “I’m not sure of the exact amount, but it’s an amount on the order of $50 million,” the tycoon claimed. The actual number could even be considerably smaller, according to research from TechCrunchwho have been able to verify that, at least publicly, Musk donated 15 million dollars.
Elon Musk donated more than the publicly listed $15 million
The tax returns that the aforementioned medium has accessed also reveal other interesting details about Elon Musk’s investment in OpenAI. Among them, that the first engineers of the then non-profit organization received free Teslasthe investment made by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), or a stratospheric computer bill that would have led the company to accept the investment of 1,000 million dollars from Microsoft.
Elon Musk, indeed — and in a way — would have donated something more than 15 million dollars publicly listed in documents filed with the IRS (Internal Revenue Service).
The tycoon, on the one hand, and as the company later confirmed, transferred 10 million dollars to OpenAI through another non-profit organization called YC.org, which is also associated with Sam Altman. This organization, which contained a fund of 16.6 million dollars, detailed in a financial document that 15 million dollars of its income came from a single contributor; probably Musk. YC.org later re-invested $15 million in OpenAI; 5 million dollars came from Elon Musk.
To this we must add the overhead from Tesla vehicles that Elon Musk donated to early OpenAI engineers, for a total of $248,295, plus another $14,105 for vehicle upgrades. Not counting, in addition, the donations that the tycoon would have made through Donor Advised Funds (DAF), which is, in a way, a mechanism to donate through third parties.
The total amount is not even close to the $100 million that stands out so much
Even so, and taking into account the rest of the investments of other executives, the total amount that Elon Musk has donated is not close to the 100 million dollars that he himself affirms in several tweets.
In fact, and in total, OpenAI received up to 2021 133.2 million dollars in donations. According to calculations of TechCrunch, the total number donated by other investors and foundations, with the exception of Musk, is about 75.8 million. Assuming that the rest are only donations from the also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, the total amount he donated would be $57.4 million.
Elon Musk has not made any other statement regarding his OpenAI investment since the CNBC interview.
