Elon Musk tried to takeover OpenAI in 2018 but failed: Report

Right now, if there is one company that is talked about extensively after the big three from Google, Microsoft and Apple then it is OpenAI. While the company is just an extended version of a startup right now, it seems as if the company is already semi-acquired by Microsoft due to their huge investment and also the fact that they use their technology in the Bing Search as well. It is worth noting that Elon Musk tweeted about how OpenAI used to be an open-source startup and talked a lot about being the change they want in the world. Now, it looks like OpenAI has become a close-sourced startup with backing from Microsoft.

While he is not wrong about that part, it is worth noting that we now have a report which tells us about Elon Musk’s history with OpenAI. Semafor reports that Elon Musk tried to takeover OpenAI back in 2018 when the startup was in its early stages but was doing a lot of work that was not yet public. It looks like the startup caught Elon’s attention who wanted to acquire it but they refused saying that they have a funding round coming up.

However, that funding round did not happen and the company took a different direction and now it looks like they took the right decision. While Elon Musk promised $1 Billion in funding, he only provided $100 Million to the startup which led them to create a for-profit entity that eventually had close ties with Microsoft and that is how Microsoft got exclusive access to some of the libraries created by OpenAI.

Elon Musk’s tweet about OpenAI becoming a for-profit organization and the fact that he had interest in taking them over much earlier suggests to us that he is now regretting his decision and his tweet could have come out of a moment of frustration. Because let’s be honest, he would have eventually taken the same route as well. We already saw what he did with Twitter by introducing the Twitter Blue program as well as limiting API access for third-party apps among other decisions since he took over.