Elon Musk’s $100M OpenAI Donation Claim Scrutinized, Only $15M Tracked

After Elon Musk publicly scaled back his earlier claim of a $100 million donation to ChatGPT developer OpenAI to $50 million, another report has now revealed that only around $15 million in donations can be traced back to the Tesla CEO.

Musk attempted to take over OpenAI in early 2018, but Sam Altman and other OpenAI co-founders rejected Musk’s proposal.

The outgoing Twitter CEO, in turn, walked away from the company and reportedly canceled a planned $1 billion donation.

Musk always claimed to have donated $100 million to the developer of ChatGPT, which is now backed by Microsoft.

“I’m still baffled as to how a non-profit I donated $100 million to somehow turned into a $30 billion for-profit. If this is legal, why isn’t everyone doing it?” he tweeted in mid-March.

A week later, he wrote again: “I donated the first $100 million to OpenAI when it was a non-profit, but I have no ownership or control.”

In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Musk oddly scaled back his claim for the OpenAI donation, saying, “I’m not sure of the exact amount, but it’s in the $50 million range.”

However, a TechCrunch investigation into the funding behind OpenAI, citing documents filed with the IRS and state regulators, has revealed that Musk could not have given the company the $100 million he always claimed.

“In fact, while most of OpenAI’s funding remains unclear, the filings include only about $15 million in donations that can be definitively traced back to Musk,” the report said Wednesday.

Musk’s attorney did not respond to the report.

In 2016, the Musk Foundation made a $10 million donation to another Altman-related nonprofit called YC.org.

YC.org, in turn, donated $10 million to OpenAI.

That $10 million donation remains Musk’s publicly disclosed cash donation to OpenAI.

YC later gave OpenAI another $16 million in 2017, at least $5 million of which likely went to Musk, according to the report.

Microsoft later invested about $1 billion in OpenAI.

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