The outgoing Twitter CEO, in turn, walked away from the company and reneged on a $1 billion planned donation, according to reports. Musk always claimed he donated $100 million to the ChatGPT developer, now backed by Microsoft. “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated $100 million somehow became a $30 billion market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he tweeted in mid-March.
A week later he posted again: “I donated the first $100 million to OpenAI when it was a non-profit, but have no ownership or control.” In an CNBC interview on Tuesday, Musk strangely reduced his claim regarding the OpenAI donation, saying: “I’m not sure the exact number but it’s some number on the order of $50 million.”
However, a TechCrunch investigation into the funding behind OpenAI, citing documents filed with the IRS and a state regulator, has revealed that Musk could not have given the company the $100 million he always claimed. “In fact, while the source of much of OpenAI’s funding remains unclear, filings contain only around $15 million of donations that can be traced definitively back to Musk,” the report said on Wednesday. Musk’s lawyer did not respond to the report.
In 2016, the Musk Foundation made a $10 million donation to yet another non-profit associated with Altman, called YC.org. YC.org, in turn, made a $10 million donation to OpenAI. That $10 million donation remains the only publicly disclosed cash contribution from Musk to OpenAI. YC subsequently gave OpenAI another $16 million in 2017, of which at least $5 million was likely Musk’s, according to the report. Microsoft later invested around $1 billion in OpenAI.