Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk claims to have shot down OpenAI's initial coin offering (ICO) in 2018, according to an amended court filing submitted on Nov. 14.
Though OpenAI would go on to launch its own token worldcoin (WLD) in 2023, the filing suggests that OpenAI's leaders were interested in launching a token about five years beforehand — and that the world's richest man rearranged that timeline.
Musk and his legal team claim that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, two of OpenAI's founders, wanted to launch a token in early 2018 to help make the company profitable. At the time, Musk said, "It would simply result in a massive loss of credibility for OpenAI and everyone associated with the ICO," the filing shows.
OpenAI initially started as a non-profit aiming to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI). "Musk has long been concerned by the grave threat these advanced systems pose to humanity," his attorneys wrote in the filing. So, Musk joined OpenAI as co-chair of its board of directors and invested $44 million in the startup, providing other contributions as well.
OpenAI wrote in a March 5 release that it needed to shift to a for-profit structure to obtain the capital necessary to fund its mission. Musk had even suggested merging OpenAI with Tesla to solve the AI startup's funding issues, according to both the amended filing and OpenAI's release. However, Musk left OpenAI in February 2018 and eventually launched his own AI firm called xAI.
"We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him," the firm wrote.
Musk sued OpenAI and its executives Altman and Brockman in August of this year for alleged fraud, violating federal RICO, unfair competition and other complaints. The amended suit filed on Nov. 14 also named Microsoft as one of the defendants. Microsoft partnered with OpenAI and invested $1 billion in the startup in 2019.
OpenAI launched its cryptocurrency Worldcoin (WLD) in July 2023, The Block previously reported. WLD traded at $2.21 as of 11:36 p.m. ET (16:36 UTC) on Nov. 15.
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