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The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI

After three years, Elon Musk was ready to give up on the artificial intelligence research firm he helped found, OpenAI.

The nonprofit had launched in 2015 to great fanfare with backing from billionaire tech luminaries like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who had as a group pledged $1 billion. It had lured some of the top minds in the field to leave big tech companies and academia.

But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google, people familiar with the matter said.

And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.

Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company — and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that’s changing the world, and the company at the heart of it.