Elon Musk & Andrej Karpathy ·OpenAI ·1 FEB 2018
If You Can't Win Open, Find a Cash Cow
Open research without a profit engine isn't idealism — it's free R&D for whoever has the bigger bank account.
Leader · Profile
Elon Musk
Tesla·SpaceX·X·OpenAI
1999–present
CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X (formerly Twitter). Co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and later broke with and sued it — correspondence from that fight is among the richest primary-source records of how he negotiates and wields leverage.
EM
Correspondence in the archive
5 letters
Elon Musk ·OpenAI ·28 JUN 2017
How to Turn a Partner's Asset Into Your Competitive Weapon
The fastest way to build a moat is to make someone else's resources do the work — before your rivals think to ask.
Elon Musk & Ilya Sutskever ·OpenAI ·20 SEP 2017
When Funding Becomes Leverage, Trust Becomes the Real Asset
The moment your funder's leverage looks like a path to absolute control, your co-founders stop building and start negotiating their exit.
Ilya Sutskever ·OpenAI ·12 JUL 2017
Compute Is the Constraint, Not Cleverness
If the bottleneck is hardware, the winner is whoever buys the most of it first.
Greg Brockman ·OpenAI ·31 JAN 2018
Turn Your Mission Into A Moat
When you can't outspend competitors, out-trust them — moral high ground is a strategic asset, not a slogan.