Elon Musk tried to merge Tesla and OpenAI, emails reveal
In response to Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, the company answered by releasing emails from Elon Musk showing that he actually supported OpenAI pivoting to a for-profit model and even merging with Tesla.
OpenAI, an AI company now famous for its ChatGPT chatbot based on large language models, was originally co-founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a non-profit.
In 2018, Musk left OpenAI’s board and cited a potential conflict with Tesla’s own AI effort as the reason for severing ties with the company at the time. The main issue seems to be a competition for AI talent between OpenAI and Tesla – though Musk has since said that he also disagreed with OpenAI’s direction on AI safety and moving from a non-profit organization to a for-profit.
Over the last few months, and especially since he launched his own AI startup (outside of Tesla), xAI, Musk has been hammering OpenAI over its move to a for-profit structure.
During that time, OpenAI continued to make waves in the AI industry – most recently through the unveiling of Sora, an impressive AI text-to-video generator.
Earlier this week, Musk went as far as filing a lawsuit against OpenAI in which he accused the company of prioritizing profits over public good and going against its original mission.
Today, OpenAI fought back with a blog post in which the company said it plans to move to “dismiss all of Elon’s claims”. The company showed proof, including emails, that Musk said that OpenAI wouldn’t be helpful as a non-profit and he supported a move to for-profit:
In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations.
When that didn’t sit well with the rest of OpenAI, Musk shifted strategy and suggested to merge OpenAI into Tesla:
We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI. He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should “attach to Tesla as its cash cow”, commenting that it was “exactly right… Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero”.
OpenAI released an email from Musk to prove this chronology of events. Musk forwarded an email from a person whose name has been redacted. In that email, the person explains the logic for merging OpenAI and Tesla. Musk wrote that the person is “exactly right”.
Here are the emails:
Electrek’s Take
Honestly, I don’t know what to think at this point. I don’t know if I was always wrong about Elon. I don’t know if he changed drastically over the last few years or if he just got worse at hiding his true self, but this is not the man I used to consider my hero.
For months, Elon has been publicly bashing OpenAI for its pivot to for-profit and now we learned that he himself admitted that it won’t be able to survive as a non-profit and supported the pivot – though only if he is in control of the company as its own entity or within Tesla.
This is a high level of hypocrisy.
Elon completely supported the shift to for-profit (as long as he was in control of it), but now he has decided the bash the move and even sue the company as he started a competing startup. If you think that’s a coincidence, I have a bridge to sell you.
That said, based on those emails, he does ultimately seem to want AI to be good for humanity, but his methods are questionable. He requires us to just trust him entirely, which is so hard to do these days.
This whole thing supports what Sam Altman said last year: “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved, but only if he is the one saving it.”
Also, it’s just a coincidence that by him “saving the world” from AI/with AI, he would own the entities getting extremely valuable from it. Just a coincidence.
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EV sales kept up their momentum in December 2024, with incentives playing a big role, according to the latest Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book report.
December’s strong EV sales saw an average transaction price (ATP) of $55,544, which helped push the industry-wide ATP higher, according to Kelley Blue Book. The December ATP for an EV was higher year-over-year by 0.8%, slightly below the industry average, and higher month-over-month by 1.1%. Tesla ATPs were higher year-over-year by 10.5%.
Incentives for EVs remained elevated in December, although they were slightly lower month-over-month at 14.3% of ATP, down from 14.7% in November.
EV incentives were higher by an impressive 41% year-over-year and have been above 12% of ATP for six consecutive months. Strong sales incentives, which averaged more than $6,700 per sale in 2024, were one reason EV sales surpassed 1.3 million units last year, according to Cox Automotive, a new record for volume and share.
(My colleague Jameson Dow reported yesterday, “In 2024, the world sold 3.5 million more EVs than it did in the previous year … This increase is larger than the 3.2 million increase in EV sales from the previous year – meaning that EV sales aren’t just up, but that the rate of growth is itself increasing.”)
Kelley Blue Book estimated that in December, approximately 84,000 vehicles – or 5.6% of total sales – transacted at prices higher than $80,000 – the highest volume ever. KBB lumps gas cars and EVs together into this luxury vehicle category, so this is where Tesla Cybertruck is slotted.
However, Tesla bundles sales figures of Cybertruck with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi(!) into a category it calls “other models,” so we don’t know for sure exactly how many Cybertrucks Tesla sold in Q4, much less in December. However, Electrek‘s Fred Lambert estimates between 9,000 and 12,000 Cybertrucks were sold in Q4, and that’s not a stellar sales figure.
What will January bring when it comes to EV ATPs? What about tax credits? Check back in a month and I’ll fill you in.
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Tesla is now claiming that Cybertruck was the ‘best-selling electric pickup in US’ last year despite not even reporting the number of deliveries.
There’s a lot of context needed here.
As we often highlighted, Tesla is sadly one of, if not the most, opaque automakers regarding sales reports.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model or even region.
For comparison, here’s Ford’s Q4 2024 sales report compared to Tesla’s:
You could argue that Tesla has fewer models than Ford, and that’s true, but Tesla’s report literally has two lines despite having six different models.
There’s no reason not to offer a complete breakdown like all other automakers other than trying to make it hard to verify the health of each vehicle program.
This has been the case with the Cybertruck. Tesla is bundling its Cybertruck deliveries with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi deliveries.
Despite this lack of disclosure, Tesla has been able to claim that the Cybertruck has become “the best-selling electric pickup truck” in the US in 2024:
It very well might be true. Ford disclosed 33,510 F-150 Lightning truck deliveries in the US in 2024 while most estimates are putting Cybertruck deliveries at around 40,000 units.
Those are global deliveries, but Tesla only delivered the Cybertruck in the US, Canada, and Mexico in 2024, and most of the deliveries are believed to be in the US.
However, there’s essential context needed here, as we highlighted in our recent ‘Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous‘ article.
First off, Tesla had a backlog of over 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck that it has been building since 2019. This led many to believe Tesla already had years of demand baked in for the truck and that production would be the constraint.
However, based on estimates, again, because Tesla refuses to disclose the data, Cybertruck deliveries were either flat or down in Q4 versus Q3 despite Tesla introducing cheaper versions of the vehicle and ramping up production.
Again, that’s after just about 40,000 deliveries.
Furthermore, with almost 11,000 deliveries in Q4 in the US, Ford more likely than not outsold Cybertruck with the F-150 Lightning in Q4.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla is in damage control here. There’s no doubt that it is having issues selling the Cybertruck.
Inventory is full of Cybertrucks and Tesla is now discounting them and offering free lifetime Supercharging.
Tesla is great at ramping up production, and it’s clear the Cybertruck is not production-constrained anymore. It is demand-constrained despite having over 1 million reservations.
Again, those reservations were made before Tesla unveiled the production version, which happened to have less range and cost significantly more.
The upcoming cheaper single motor version should help with demand, but I have serious doubts Tesla can ramp this program up to more than 100,000 units in the US.
As a reminder, Tesla installed a production capacity of 250,000 units annually and Musk said he could see Tesla selling 500,000 Cybertrucks per year.
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