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Satya Nadella on funding OpenAI

From: Satya Nadella
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2022 9:47 AM
To: Amy Hood, Jon Tinter, Mikhail Parakhin
Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] deal thoughts

Overall I want us to own – the silicon, infra, foundational model IP and “know how”. Right now we are a very thin layer on top of NVIDIA and all the IP is with Open AI. And we have a P&L that will lose 4 bil next year!!! I have not seen anything like this in my 30 years in our industry. I can justify it all by saying that Open AI has smart people and NVIDIA has a lock etc. But if we are going to spend this kind of money and not have control of destiny, it makes no sense. Better to be an investor and not even take all this execution risk!

I want to spend this money. The infra and HW/Silicon work at the “system” level need to have a proprietary edge (and show up as positive GM in Cog Services). And we need to have a foundational model team that is self – sufficient at all time and has the “know how” of taking what Open AI does and productizing it. As long as we have an internal org/investment model/open AI deal terms that all compose to achieve these two goals, we can take all kinds of other risk around monetization etc.

Will be good use the P&L review to get on the same page/context here so that we can all solve for what is our best Open AI deal terms in the context of our overall AI roadmap/plan.

Thx

Satya

Sent from Mail for Windows


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Previously: 30+ documents from Musk v. Altman and Satya Nadella in the full archive

Sam Altman's group chat with Satya Nadella

November 21, 2023

10:53 a.m.

Sam Altman
can we talk soon? have a positive update, ish

Kevin Scott
Not sure about Satya, but I’m around.


4:49 p.m.

Sam Altman
emmett thinks its looking reasonably positive for the 5 member board option

Satya Nadella
Good

Satya Nadella
Any timeframe

Sam Altman
emmett is getting on a call with all of them soon

Satya Nadella
Is this Larry Summers and Belinda and you three? Is that still the plan

Sam Altman
larry yes

Sam Altman
the other still up in air

Sam Altman
would diane greene be ok with you?

Satya Nadella
No

Kevin Scott
Belinda Johnson?

Kevin Scott
Diane Green strong no

Kevin Scott
Strong strong no.

Kevin Scott
Belinda is great.

Satya Nadella
[Liked “Belinda is great.”]

Satya Nadella
[Liked “Strong strong no.”]

Satya Nadella
How about Sue Desmond-Hellmann

Sam Altman
suggesting

Satya Nadella
Ursula Burns is another name

Kevin Scott
Amy Rao

Kevin Scott
(Chair of human rights watch)

Kevin Scott
Emilie Choi (President of Coinbase)

Kevin Scott
Amy Chang

Satya Nadella
I just added Brad to this

Brad Smith
Ursula Burns

Kevin Scott
Julia Hartz

Kevin Scott
Ciporra Herman

Kevin Scott
(Former Treasurer FB@ IPO, former CFO 49’ers)

Kevin Scott
Maynard Webb

Brad Smith
Anne Sweeney, operator at ABC and Disney, on the Netflix board. Solid, thoughtful, calm.

Brad Smith
Leslie Kilgore. Former CMO at Netflix. On board still. Incredibly smart, firm, practical, while also a good listener.

Kevin Scott
Yep. Leslie was on the LI board. Very reasonable.

Kevin Scott
Jeff Weiner?

Kevin Scott
Bing Gordon?

Satya Nadella
[Liked “Jeff Weiner?”]

Satya Nadella
Bing is on Amazon board or a consultant

Kevin Scott
He’s off now.

Kevin Scott
But valid.

Kevin Scott
Have you all thought about Emmett? They already picked him and he seems sane.

Sam Altman
we have offered that earlier

Sam Altman
still happy

Satya Nadella
I really think they need Emmett for their own reputation, I did say this to Adam

Sam Altman
agreed

Satya Nadella
Maybe Bret can stress that to Adam as well if he has not already done

Kevin Scott
I can quit for six months and do it. (Ready to be downvoted by Satya on this one, and not really serious. 😄)

Satya Nadella
[Disliked “I can quit for six months and do it. (Ready to be…”]

Kevin Scott
😂

Satya Nadella
Just added Bret so that he also sees all the names


7:15 p.m.

Sam Altman
we are still waiting for a proposal

Satya Nadella
Got it.

Satya Nadella
Do you think we get this done tonight and we issue statements or we think this is tomorrow? Do you want me to ping Adam with you and Bret on it and ask?

Sam Altman
bret on with them now

Satya Nadella
[Liked “bret on with them now”]


7:54 p.m.

Sam Altman
would you do this

Sam Altman
bret, larry summers, adam

Sam Altman
as the board

Sam Altman
and me as ceo

Sam Altman
and then bret handles the investigation

Brad Smith
You would be ceo but lot on the board

Sam Altman
yes

Brad Smith
Your future would be decided by Larry Summer. He’s smart but so mercurial. I think it’s too risky a propositions

Sam Altman
id accept it given my conversations with him

Sam Altman
and where we right

Sam Altman
now

Sam Altman
it’s bullshit but i want to save this

Sam Altman
can you guys live with it?

Satya Nadella
Can I call Larry tonight?

Sam Altman
sure any time

Satya Nadella
Give me his cell number

Sam Altman
we are going to talk with larry, bret, emmett, and the board in a few mins


10:38 p.m.

Sam Altman
thank you guys for the partnership and trust. excited to get this all sorted to a long-term configuration you can really depend on

Satya Nadella
[Loved “thank you guys for the partnership and trust. exci…”]

Brad Smith
Thank you! A tough several days. Let’s build on this and regain momentum

Sam Altman
[Loved “Thank you! A tough several days. Let’s build on th…”]

Satya Nadella
Really looking forward to getting back to building….


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Further reading from Aaron Holmes for The Information: “Nadella and Scott said they didn’t want former Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene or former Amazon director Bing Gordon on the board, which Nadella testified Monday was due to conflicts between Microsoft’s cloud business and those competitors.” (May 11, 2026)

Further reading from Cade Metz and Mike Isaac for The New York Times: “Mr. Musk’s lawyers, led by the experienced litigator Steven Molo, tried to portray Mr. Nadella as an unseen influence backing Mr. Altman … Mr. Nadella called the OpenAI board’s decision to remove Mr. Altman ‘amateur hour, as far as I’m concerned.’” (May 11, 2026)

Previously: “directionally very bad” (November 19, 2023)

Previously: Sam Altman texts Satya Nadella and Bret Taylor (November 19, 2023)

Previously: Microsoft CTO: Why the OpenAI board really fired Sam Altman (November 19, 2023)

Previously: 25+ documents from Musk v. Altman and Sam Altman in the full archive

Inside The Tech Emails Files

See how the biggest companies in tech actually operate — in their own words.

The Tech Emails Files are 250+ internal documents pulled from court filings we track year-round. Strategy memos. Board emails. Messages between CEOs and execs at Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and more.

Investors use it to understand how leadership actually thinks. Journalists use it for primary sources. Founders and operators use it to study how the biggest companies make decisions.

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“I don’t want to be IBM and OpenAI to be Microsoft”

From: Sam Altman
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2022 2:01 PM
To: Satya Nadella; Kevin Scott
Subject: [EXTERNAL] two documents for tomorrow

Satya, Kevin--

Looking forward to talking tomorrow!

The first document here outlines our current thinking about how we will get to AGI. There are a few new elements since the last time we’ve talked, the most important of which is that we’ve learned how to use compute to generate new knowledge and data, which allows us to spend compute to run a self-improvement cycle, and means we value compute even more than we did last time we talked.

The second is a proposal for a deal structure we think leads to long-term (i.e. indefinitely long) alignment for both companies.

Sam


From: Satya Nadella
Sent: Thur 4/28/2022 11:55:09 PM (UTC)
To: Jon Tinter, Dave O’Hara, Michael Wetter, Keith Dolliver
Cc: Kevin Scott, Amy Hood, Chris Young
Subject: FW: [EXTERNAL] two documents for tomorrow
Attachment: OAI AGI roadmap.docx
Attachment: OAI x MSFT proposal.docx

Have not fully digested this as yet. Kevin and I meet him tomorrow.

The goal here is figure out how to continue the partnership in a more aligned way.

Here are some top of mind thoughts (Kevin should feel free to add/edit):

• I don’t want to be IBM and OpenAI to be Microsoft.

• Happy to keep funding the HW and also their Opex/Payout for employees. We pay for all the HW required and also their Opex for engineers and also payouts to employees at defined milestones of delivery.

• In return we want full IP rights and also need to “embed” our folks across every layer of the stack so that we can be self sufficient if need came.

• We take the risk of figuring out how to monetize.

• Open AI takes the risk that we figure out how to build the HW.

• If we can’t figure out monetization, but someone else figures out how to monetize we just sell them Azure APIs and recoup our costs (Azure Infra GM margins).

• If there are no buyers or someone else wins the race, Open AI shuts down.

The biggest issue I see is all these investors. I just don’t get their incentives. I would rather have Open AI employees get money at appropriate delivery milestones for example vs these VCs. We have effectively funded 90% of their HW/Opex to date.

Please send any thoughts. Tomorrow will mostly listen and try to establish some principles that Kevin and I can use to establish for the next go around.

Thx

Sent from Mail for Windows


[Full original attachment:]

OAI x MSFT proposal

582KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Previously: 40+ documents from Microsoft in the full archive

Sam Altman texts Elon Musk

October 1, 2020

Sam Altman
Saw your feedback on Twitter last week. I’m happy to talk about this if you’d like, but I think there’s no way we can hold a candle to DeepMind without many billions of dollars, and MSFT still seems like the best way for us to get that with the least compromise. We gave MSFT a copy of GPT-3 to use in their own products, but we still get to retain autonomy to release our work ourselves (e.g., we can and will continue to provide API access to the most powerful language model in existence to everyone). If you’ve got any feedback about how to do better, I’d love to hear it. Thanks! Sam.

Elon Musk
Yeah, we should talk

Elon Musk
I don’t think it’s a winning approach to be (or at least appear to be) hypocritical

Elon Musk
At least change the name

Sam Altman
happy to talk whenever you’re free--agreed we should try not to appear hypocritical

Elon Musk
Sounds good. I’m in Texas and about to do a series of Starship engineering reviews, but free tonight.


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Further reading: Elon Musk on Twitter: “This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft.” (September 24, 2020)

Previously: Sam Altman texts Elon Musk: “i dont think openai would have happened without you—and it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai” (February 18, 2023)

Previously: 55+ documents from Elon Musk and Sam Altman in the full archive

Bonus: Microsoft’s investment memos for OpenAI, 2019–2024

March 7, 2019

Memo to Microsoft Board of Directors - March 7, 2019

6.16MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

June 10, 2019

Memo to Microsoft Board of Directors - June 10, 2019

1.28MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

January 11, 2023

Memo to Microsoft Board of Directors - January 11, 2023

887KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

September 9, 2024

Memo to Microsoft Board Of Directors - September 9, 2024

1.31MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

A note from @TechEmails

Every year, I track hundreds of court cases and review more than 10,000 filings to bring you Internal Tech Emails. If you like @TechEmails, and would like to help make this work more sustainable, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

You’ll be supporting the research that drives Internal Tech Emails, and will help ensure that it can continue publishing. And you’ll also receive access to the full archive of internal tech emails, with 250+ documents from Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and more.

Thanks for reading!
-Internal Tech Emails

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Sam Altman texts Mira Murati

November 19, 2023

9:43 a.m.

Sam Altman
can you please officially invite me to the office for a meeting?

Mira Murati
Yes I will, do you have an update you can share?

Sam Altman
adam is trying to get the board to agree to a configuration

Sam Altman
he is now saying they need til end of day

Sam Altman
satya and i said that doesn’t work

Sam Altman
and that we need to start preparing for plan b

Mira Murati
Ok please give me a second, I’m about to speak with them

Sam Altman
ok great


10:15 a.m.

Sam Altman
have an update lmk when you can talk


5:37 p.m.

Sam Altman
are you on with them? unrelated problem if you’re still waiting

Mira Murati
Not yet, just in a quiet room because I didn’t want all the outside theater


6:23 p.m.

Sam Altman
can you indicate directionally good or bad? satya and others anxious


7:05 p.m.

Mira Murati
Directionally very bad

Sam Altman
ok

Sam Altman
can you wrap up soon? lots of pressure from msft for an update

Mira Murati
Sam this is very bad

Sam Altman
can i come in?

Mira Murati
They don’t want you to

Sam Altman
what do you want to make it better? i’m still willing to just walk away if that helps

Sam Altman
if they are ramped up for crazy lawsuits against me then i’m not sure what

Sam Altman
can you please tell them i just want to resolve this however and would like to join

Mira Murati
They’re convinced about their decision

Sam Altman
for me to be fired? or some new thing?

Mira Murati
Yes for you to be gone

Sam Altman
ok

Sam Altman
then can i come in and talk about a path forward with them?

Mira Murati
They’re saying no and they need more time

Sam Altman
more time for what?

Mira Murati
They’ve walked me through all the reasons and the issues with you and why you can’t be ceo

Sam Altman
can you ask why they’ve been a saying all weekend they wanted me back?

Mira Murati
They want new ceo in place

Sam Altman
can you say you will call back in 10 min

Mira Murati
They want to have a new ceo in place tonight (not me

Sam Altman
do they know who?

Sam Altman
can i tell satya? is this final?

Sam Altman
or, should you add satya in?

Mira Murati
Trying to add Satya now

Sam Altman
still don’t want me?

Mira Murati
New guy is rando twitch guy

Mira Murati
They don’t want you

Sam Altman
emmett?

Mira Murati
Yeah

Mira Murati
But hold on I’m pulling Satya now

Sam Altman
ok

Sam Altman
do you think any way you can turn this around? even if we let them sleep on it tonight or whatever?

Mira Murati
Have been trying

Sam Altman
from a journalist:

Sam Altman

Mira Murati
Yeah

Mira Murati
Hoping Satya can help undo this

Sam Altman
should team send letter to board now?

Sam Altman
is he on with them?

Mira Murati
It won’t matter

Mira Murati
They don’t care if everyone quits

Sam Altman
is that what they want is the IP going to anthropic?

Sam Altman
that’s what team thinks

Mira Murati
Just not your hand on agi

Sam Altman
i can not come back!

Sam Altman
they were the ones that asked as of yesterday morning

Sam Altman
did satya get on call?

Mira Murati
Yes with him

Sam Altman
wait i have an interesting idea

Mira Murati
Still with Satya

Mira Murati
Go ahead

Sam Altman
what if msft acquires openai? would that provide the governance the board wants?

Sam Altman
is satya making progress at all

Mira Murati
Satya is being diplomatic


8:36 p.m.

Sam Altman
will you emmett on with the team asap

Sam Altman
also does adam know you rehired me

Mira Murati
Yes


10:10 p.m.

Sam Altman
can you chat soon?


11:47 p.m.

Mira Murati
Thought about your proposal, I’m on board

Sam Altman
kk. i think it’s best shot to get company back and keep people

Sam Altman
and if that doesn’t work

Sam Altman
we have a new thing and the compute and the ip

Sam Altman
but i feel has good chance of winning

Sam Altman
i think you all just need to get a petition of everyone saying they will quit and join, they don’t even do

Sam Altman
lmk if you have a minute for a call?


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Reactions on X: Essam Sleiman, Amrith, Emmett Shear, Ashlee Vance, Gergely Orosz, Mike Isaac, Erin Woo, flowersslop

Previously: 20+ documents from Musk v. Altman and Sam Altman in the full archive

Previously: Microsoft CTO: Why the OpenAI board really fired Sam Altman (November 19, 2023)

Previously: Sam Altman texts Satya Nadella and Bret Taylor (November 19, 2023)

Inside The Tech Emails Files

See how the biggest companies in tech actually operate — in their own words.

The Tech Emails Files are 250+ internal documents pulled from court filings we track year-round. Strategy memos. Board emails. Messages between CEOs and execs at Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and more.

Investors use it to understand how leadership actually thinks. Journalists use it for primary sources. Founders and operators use it to study how the biggest companies make decisions.

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Satya Nadella texts Mira Murati

November 17, 2023, 3:33 p.m.

Satya Nadella
Hi Mira… call when you have a chance. Thx Satya


November 18, 2023, 9:06 a.m.

Mira Murati
Satya could you please call me when you have a chance so we can coordinate how to talk with Sam here


November 19, 2023, 7:40 p.m.

Mira Murati
Can you join meeting with board please

Mira Murati
I’m not putting my name on this

Mira Murati
Quick call?


November 20, 2023

1:16 a.m.

Mira Murati
Hi Satya, I know it’s super late. Need to call you urgently

Mira Murati
The petition we’re sending says the following per your conversation with Sam and we wanted to confirm. “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees with the same compensation at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.”

Mira Murati
We’re removing it from public doc and communicating it privately

7:10 a.m.

Satya Nadella
Thx. So sorry. But that is right.


10:44 a.m.

Mira Murati
Satya could you please make a public statement soon that shows support for the joint openai team, basically bringing the team together? It's very important that we don't lose researchers to Demis or Elon. The technical team is being dragged in so many recruiting directions and a unified front would help immensely


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

Previously: 20+ documents from Musk v. Altman and Sam Altman in the full archive

Mira Murati texts Microsoft’s CTO

November 17, 2023

11:44 a.m.

Mira Murati
Hi Kevin, this is Mira (openai). I have something extremely urgent and important. May I call you for 5 mins?


7:32 p.m.

Mira Murati
Kevin feel free to call anytime if you‘d like to chat about any of this insanity tonight


November 20, 2023, 4:07 a.m.

Kevin Scott
Sorry I missed your call. I’m in DC and just grabbed 3.5 hours of shuteye from 3a to 6:30 ET. Up now and can chat whenever.

Mira Murati
Don’t worry Kevin, we resolved. Close to having the board resign

Kevin Scott
For real this time?

Mira Murati
It seems so

Mira Murati
Ilya signed our petition

Kevin Scott
I knew that you all had sent a petition. Can you send me what it said? Shockingly given how close everyone is covering this right now, I haven’t heard mention of it, other than through OAI->Microsoft employee conversations.

Kevin Scott
And LMK if there‘s anything I can do to help you.

Kevin Scott
You must be exhausted.

Mira Murati
[Image attachment]

Mira Murati
Nearly 500 signatures. I think it hasn‘t leaked yet because we just put it together and will release it soon if the board doesn’t resign immediately

Mira Murati
[Loved “And LMK if there ‘s anything I can do to help you.”]

Mira Murati
It’s been insane


November 21, 2023, 9:33 p.m.

Mira Murati
We’ve reached agreement. Sam will return as CEO with a new initial board Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. We will complete details in next day but we‘re announcing to the company right away


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

Previously: 20+ documents from Musk v. Altman and Sam Altman in the full archive

A note from @TechEmails

Every year, I track hundreds of court cases and review more than 10,000 filings to bring you Internal Tech Emails. If you like @TechEmails, and would like to help make this work more sustainable, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

You’ll be supporting the research that drives Internal Tech Emails, and will help ensure that it can continue publishing. And you’ll also receive access to the full archive of internal tech emails, with 250+ documents from Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and more.

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Elon Musk: The probability of OpenAI being relevant is 0%

On Wed, 26 Dec 2018 at 20:07, Elon Musk wrote:

My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.

Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.

Unfortunately, humanity’s future is in the hands of Demis.

https://nyti.ms/2Rjetd3?smid=nytcore-ios-share

And they are doing a lot more than this.

OpenAI reminds me of Bezos and Blue Origin. They are hopelessly behind SpaceX and getting worse, but the ego of Bezos has him insanely thinking that they are not!

I really hope I’m wrong.

Elon


On Dec 30, 2018, at 2:04 PM, Sam Altman wrote:

Can we meet the first week of January to discuss what we can do to increase that percentage?

Speaking for myself, I believe we have a good plan, a credible path to get sufficient capital, but are not executing nearly fast enough.

None of us want to be Bezos here!


On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 4:01 AM Elon Musk wrote:

I could meet on Wednesday in the Bay Area.

Will also be at the AI safety conference on Saturday (Jan 5).

OpenAI is not a serious counterweight to DeepMind/Google and will only get further behind. It is surprising that this is isn’t obvious to you.

In general, always overestimate competitors. You are doing the opposite.


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Previously: 15+ documents from Musk v. Altman in the full archive, including emails and messages from Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft

Editors’ Note: A heavily redacted version of this document was previously published by OpenAI in 2024.

Elon Musk: “This is a bait and switch”

October 23, 2022

Elon Musk
I was disturbed to see OpenAI with a $20B valuation. De facto. I provided almost all the seed, A and most of B round funding.

Elon Musk
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-valued-at-nearly-20-billion-in-advanced-talks-with-microsoft-for-more-funding

Elon Musk
This is a bait and switch

Sam Altman
I agree this feels bad—we offered you equity when we established the cap profit, which you didn’t want at the time but we are still very happy to do any time you’d like.

We saw no alternative, given the amount of capital we needed and needing still to preserve away to ‘give the AGI to humanity’, other than the capped profit structure.

Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have. Am trying to navigate tricky tightrope the best I can and would love to talk about how it can be better any time you are free. Would also love to show you recent updates.

Elon Musk
I will be in SF most of this week for the Twitter acquisition. Let’s talk Tues or Wed.

Sam Altman
[Liked “I will be in SF most of this week for the Twitter acquisition. Let’s talk Tues or Wed.”]


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Previously: 15+ documents from Musk v. Altman in the full archive, including emails and messages from Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft

New: The Tech Emails Files

See how the biggest companies in tech actually operate — in their own words.

The Tech Emails Files are 250+ internal documents pulled from court filings we track year-round. Strategy memos. Board emails. Messages between CEOs and execs at Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and more.

And today we’re unveiling a complete redesign, which finally makes it easy to search, filter, and browse the full archive.

Investors use it to understand how leadership actually thinks. Journalists use it for primary sources. Founders and operators use it to study how the biggest companies make decisions.

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P.S. Every year, we track hundreds of court cases and review more than 10,000 filings to bring you Internal Tech Emails. New documents are added to the archive as cases unfold.

Mark Zuckerberg: “I just logged into Snapchat for the first time in a while”

August 31, 2022

Mark Zuckerberg
Random thing. I just logged into Snapchat for the first time in a while to see what progress they’re making with AR. What surprised me is how porny and inappropriate the content they’re featuring is in their equivalent of Reels (Spotlight) and their 3P content stories (Stories). I was completely blown away that they haven’t faced more scrutiny for this, especially given that their audience skews so much younger. It’s not nudity but it’s really raunchy. I would never let my kids anywhere near this. It seems like we could easily get more scrutiny on them for this, and perhaps that would help the next time we face scrutiny for youth content on our services.

David Ginsberg
yup - i haven’t logged on in years, but will today. I’ll have the team look at it.


[This document is from In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation (2026).]

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Previously: Mark Zuckerberg tries to buy Snapchat (October 28, 2013)

Previously: 30+ documents from Mark Zuckerberg in the full archive

Satya Nadella and Sam Altman on ChatGPT

August 31, 2022

Satya Nadella
Btw...when do you think you will activate your paid subscription for chatGPT?

Sam Altman
we are hoping to be ready by end of jan, but we can be flexible beyond that. the only real reason for rushing it is we are just so out of capacity and delivering a bad user experience. DAUs still growing rapidly

Sam Altman
any preference on when we do it?

Sam Altman
btw, we shared with mikhail and bill gates last night that we believe we have now done the research to make a model as good as GPT-4 at 1/50th of the cost(!), and 3x the speed. we are planning to delay GPT-5 to go off and create this.

Satya Nadella
Let me think about it and weigh in. Overall getting this in place sooner is best. At some level Bing is the scoped ad supported version. So we collectively have both in market on top of the same base model.


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Previously: Microsoft CTO: Why the OpenAI board really fired Sam Altman (November 19, 2023)

Previously: Sam Altman texts Satya Nadella and Bret Taylor (November 19, 2023)

Thanks for reading!
-Internal Tech Emails

Sent from my iPad

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Mark Zuckerberg texts Elon Musk about DOGE and OpenAI

December 13, 2024

Mark Zuckerberg
Quick heads up that Meta sent a letter to the California AG supporting your lawsuit against OpenAI. Someone (not us) leaked leaked the letter and it will be public in the next hour. Wanted to make sure you heard this from me.

Elon Musk
Ok

Mark Zuckerberg
I have an idea to run by you. Not urgent, but let me know if there’s a good time to call in the next few days.


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Mark Zuckerberg texts Elon Musk about OpenAI lawsuit

February 3, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg
Looks like DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.

Elon Musk
[Reacted ❤️ to “Looks like DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our t…”]

Elon Musk
Are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others?

Mark Zuckerberg
Want to discuss live?

Elon Musk
[Liked “Want to discuss live?”]

Elon Musk
Will call in the morning


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Previously: 25+ documents from Mark Zuckerberg in the full archive
Previously: 25+ documents from Elon Musk in the full archive

Inside the Tech Emails Files

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P.S. Every year, we track hundreds of court cases and review more than 10,000 filings to bring you Internal Tech Emails. New documents are added to the archive as cases unfold.

Anthropic draft memo: "Product visions for early 2025"

Jun 15, 2023

We want to have a concrete and inspiring vision of the transformative role AI can play in society in 2025. This will serve several purposes.

First, it gives us a way of sharing with the broader world the positive transformations we believe could happen with TAI. Architecture decisions we make over the next year or two could shape the longer term relationship that human and machine intelligence have going forward. This could be impactful in the same way as, say, the Von Neumann architecture was for computers, or Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for the World Wide Web shaped the consumer adoption of the internet.

Second, for the product team, it’s also an exciting point on the horizon to work towards; it will inform medium term decisions about what initiatives to pursue and what technologies to develop to get us there. We’ll want to find clear stepping stones between where we are now and the long term vision, where we get technological proof points and market feedback along the way. Companies like Magic Leap that aim straight for their super-ambitious final destination end up disconnected from reality and burn an obscene amount of money, ultimately falling behind competitors who were able to absorb market feedback and build organizational muscle. SpaceX is probably a great example of doing this right. The founders (yes, there’s more than one!) had the borderline ridiculous goal of achieving human settlement on Mars, but they broke it down into a series of steps that achieved proof points and profit along the way. First they got good at building small, profitable, low cost rockets, then they got good at building medium sized, profitable, low cost rockets, then they figured out how to make rockets reusable to further lower the cost, then they became the world’s largest provider of orbital launch capability with their superior product, then they built the world’s largest rocket and almost got it into space on the first try… and if they can generate enough demand for heavy lift launch capability, then they can mass produce these giant rockets and start sending them to Mars. The long term goal kept the team inspired and focused, and the steps along the way gave the team the skills and the revenue to succeed.

Dario’s vision doc has highlighted (or implied) some key characteristics that a long term product vision should possess:

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Elon Musk emails Jensen Huang

From: Elon Musk
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 12:01 AM
To: Jensen Huang
Subject: DGX-1

Can OpenAI buy one of the early units? The team was asking me about this earlier today.

OpenAI is unaffiliated with Tesla. It is a non-profit funded by me and a few others with the goal of developing safe AGI (and hopefully not paving the road to hell with good intentions).


On Apr 19, 2016, at 10:11 AM, Jensen Huang wrote:

I’ve not forgotten.

This is the first supercomputer that’s selling itself off the web! Demand coming from all over.

First shipment starts end next month. And already taking orders for delivery in September.

I will make sure OpenAI gets one of the first ones.


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Mark Zuckerberg messages Facebook execs

February 11, 2012

Mark Zuckerberg
I wonder if we should consider buying Instagram, even if it costs ~$500m.

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Sam Altman texts Elon Musk

February 18, 2023

Sam Altman
i remember seeing you in a tv interview a long time ago (maybe 60 minutes?) where you being attacked by some guys, and you said they were heroes of yours and it was really tough.

well, you’re my hero and that’s what it feels like when you attack openai. totally get we have some screwed some stuff up, but we have worked incredibly hard to do the right thing, and i think we have ensured that neither google nor anyone else is on a path to have unilateral control over AGI, which i believe we both think is critical.

i am tremendously thankful for everything you’ve done to help—i dont think openai would have happened without you—and it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai.

Elon Musk
I hear you and it is certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake.

Sam Altman
i agree with that, and i would really love to hear the things you think we should be doing differently/better.

it’s also not clear to me how the attacks on twitter help the fate of civilization, but that’s less important to me that getting to the right substance.

also, i checked with our team on recruiting from tesla. we really are doing very little relative to the size of the company, but i will make sure we don’t hurt tesla, i obviously think it’s a super important company.


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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Previously: Sam Altman: “BTW, good idea for me to tweet something nice about Elon?” (February 9, 2023)

Microsoft CTO: Why the OpenAI board really fired Sam Altman

From: Kevin Scott
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2023 7:31 AM
To: Frank X. Shaw, Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, Amy Hood, Caitlin McCabe

Frank,

I can help you with the timeline and with our best understanding of what was going on. I think the reality was that a member of the board, Ilya Sutskever, had been increasingly at odds with his boss, Sam, over a variety of issues.

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From: Jeff Raikes
To: Warren Buffett
Subject: Go Huskers!
Date: Sunday, August 17, 1997 9:37 PM

Warren, I apologize in advance for this being a long note. I do hope you find it interesting, and be certain I don’t expect a long reply (or any reply at all for that matter). Perhaps sometime we’ll get a few minutes where I can get your reaction to the thoughts on business below.

Go Huskers!

We’re looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks for the Husker game. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to make your stay in Washington more enjoyable (and a little more Husker-oriented!), and I will also check with BillG on the plans and how I might help.

I’m sad to say I’m very pessimistic about our prospects. You’ve probably noted that Washington is very highly ranked this year. They have Huard, arguably one of the top 2 or 3 pro-style quarterbacks in the country - and only a sophomore. And they have an outstanding defense. In the meantime, the Huskers are replacing eight starters on defense, and the spring game showed that Frost still can’t throw the ball well enough. Without a balanced attack on offense, we’ll have difficulty against their speed. And Huard has the potential to pick apart our secondary - we’ll need an outstanding plan on pass rush, equivalent to the “Philadelphia Blitz” employed at the Nebraska vs. Florida Fiesta Bowl championship game.

I hope you’re hearing better news from fall practice. People here know I’m a huge Husker fan — I can’t tell you how painful it would be for me to go through two more losses to the Huskies.

The Making of An American Capitalist...

Tricia and I took the kids to Disney World, followed by a short vacation to Nantucket and Cuttyhunk (a small island off Martha’s Vineyard). I spent part of the vacation reading Lowenstein’s book (The Making of an American Capitalist) - and really enjoyed it! On the way from Cuttyhunk to Boston/Logan airport, we drove down Cove Road in New Bedford trying to find the Berkshire-Hathaway mill. While I saw a few old mills, I’m not really sure which might have been the one - I was looking for the clock tower. Or perhaps it has been torn down.

The book got me thinking about your golf tournament, the after-dinner “Talk with Warren”, and the inevitable question - why don’t you invest in Microsoft or high technology? The Lowenstein book provided some stimulus to ponder the question, and I thought it would be fun to share some thoughts with you on the subject. But I should emphasize my intent in doing so is not to try to change your viewpoint (though I hope it doesn’t reinforce your view!). I just view this as a fun discussion or intellectual exercise. While many people would see our business as complicated or hard to understand, I am absolutely convinced an astute investor can learn our business in only 3 to 4 hours (and probably less than two hours if BillG explained it!).

In some respects I see the business characteristics of Coca Cola or See’s Candy as being very similar to Microsoft. I think you would love the simplicity of the operating system business. E.g. in FY96 there were 50 million PC’s sold in the world, and about 80% of them were licensed for a Microsoft operating system. Although I would never write down the analogy of a “toll bridge”, people outside our company might describe this business in that way. Those 40 million licenses averaged about $45 per, for a total of about $1.8B in revenue. By the way, the remaining 10M PC’s were largely running Microsoft operating systems - we just didn’t get paid for them. This problem - piracy - if reduced, is one of the key upsides to our business.

In FY2000, there will be about 100M PC’s sold. We think we can reduce piracy to 10% and license 90% or 90M of the PC’s. But we also have “pricing discretion” — I think I heard this term used in conjunction with your pricing decisions on See’s Candy. We will be transitioning the world to a new version of our operating system, Windows NT. Today, we get more than $100 per system for NT, but only on a small percentage of the PC’s. But NT will be on closer to 70% of the PC’s sold in FY2000. We can achieve average license revenue of $80. So 90M licenses at $80 per license totals about $7.2B, up from just under $2B in 3 to 4 years. And since there are effectively no COGs and a WW sales force of only 100-150 people this is a 90%+ margin business. There is an R&D charge to the business, but I’m sure the profits are probably as good as the syrup business!

There is actually upside in the number of PC’s sold. Similar to your analysis of Coca Cola, the penetration of PC’s in International markets leaves a lot of room for growth. In the US, the number of PC’s per 1000 people is around 400 or so, but the number drops off rapidly to 100 or less in most countries, even in some of the European countries. (Unfortunately, I’m not in Seattle now so I don’t have these numbers at my fingertips, but Steve Ballmer can recite them from memory.)

The business described above is what we call the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) business, meaning our revenue comes from the manufacturers of the PC’s. The majority of the rest of the business is called the “finished goods” business. It consists of businesses or individuals buying office productivity software, educational or entertainment software, etc. Again the structure is very simple. A PC is just a razor that needs blades, and we measure our revenue on the basis of $ per PC. In FY96, nearly 50M PC’s were purchased and Microsoft averaged about $140 in software revenue per PC or $7B. This amount is in addition to the OEM royalty business I described above. (Steve Ballmer can recite the number of PCs and $ per PC to you off the top of his head for just about any country in the world; BillG can probably do the same though he doesn’t spend as much time on that as Steve.)

So in some sense that is it. There are a certain number of PC’s that get sold, a growing amount of Microsoft software per PC, the power to use the brand to sell even more software, some pricing discretion, international market growth, and the opportunity to grow revenue by further reduction in piracy. Obviously I’m not going through all the details we’d discuss in a couple hour session, but that is the heart of the business. Of course there is the R&D invested to build the software, but that is similar to Disney continuing to produce new content, or Nebraska Furniture Mart continuing to keep their format fresh, and an investment that BillG manages very closely.

Even some of the new “media” businesses are really not that new or different. Take our WebTV acquisition or the Comcast deal. I see articles covering those investments and describing Microsoft as becoming a media company. The real goal is to figure out a way to get an “operating system” royalty per TV. 10’s of millions of TV’s per year at $10-$20 per TV is a nice little “operating system” business.

There is a tremendous strategic synergy between the “finished goods business” and the OEM operating system business. E.g. we have about 90% share of office productivity software with Microsoft Office, and that is a great business (about $5B, also 85%+ operating margin). But also important is the fact that this software is heavily valued by the actual users (operating systems are a bit more invisible to the user), and they resist shifting brands. If we own the key “franchises” built on top of the operating system, we dramatically widen the “moat” that protects the operating system business. I.e. if I owned the most successful daily newspaper in Buffalo, I wouldn’t want to leave it to my competitor to own the Sunday edition.

Let’s build on this analogy and the strategic synergy between the operating system and the software that runs on it. It helps explain the investments we are making in Pete Higgins business (Interactive Media, like MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, Sidewalk, etc.). Again, some newspaper and magazine articles would say that Microsoft is trying to become a media company. But I prefer to view it as investing in the potential “user franchises” that will help protect our operating systems businesses in the future. We hope to make a lot of money off these franchises, but even more important is that they should protect our Windows royalty per PC, and hopefully our royalty per TV. And success in those businesses will help increase the opportunity for future pricing discretion.

So I really don’t see our business as being significantly more difficult to understand than the other great businesses you’ve invested in. But there is one potential difference that worries me, and it is a key part of the reason I spent the time to share these thoughts with you. The difference I worry about is the “width of the moat.” With Coca Cola, you can feel pretty confident that there won’t be a fast shift in user preferences away from drinking sodas, and in particular Coke. In technology, we may more frequently see “paradigm shifts” where old leaders are displaced by new. Graphical user interface replaces character user interface, the Internet explodes, etc.

In the absence of a paradigm shift in technology, market shares seldom change by more than a few points. With a paradigm shift, the shares can rapidly change by dozens of points. I spent my first ten years at Microsoft building Microsoft Office... We were way behind in share most of that time (less than 10%), but the shift to graphical user interface was the paradigm shift that allowed us to displace the old leaders (Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect) and now be at 90% share. Of course key to this shift in share, was their failure to identify the computing paradigm shift and properly invest in it. They were the leaders and they could have chosen to cannibalize themselves. But they didn’t act fast enough and were scared that investing in the new paradigm would open the door for us - ironically it was their slow pace that opened the door.

I remember one of our very first conversations in 1991. You asked me my view on what happened to IBM. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I think their addiction to the power they had in the previous generations of computing, really blindsided them from the paradigm shift of the PC and client-server computing.

In technology, the moats may be narrower. It is amazing how fast the Internet exploded. Or how quickly Java gained notoriety. We have some great moats, but even so, 18 months ago analysts were questioning whether we could move quickly enough. (Obviously, that turned out to be a great time to buy Microsoft!)

I am very confident about our business for the next 5 to 10 years. But I will admit it is easier to be confident about Coke’s business for the next 10 years. In short, I’ve long had this sneaking suspicion that it is not that you don’t understand this business. (In fact, BillG has probably already explained all of the above to you and I apologize for boring you with this, but it was fun and good for me to write it down.) My theory is that you don’t invest in technology or Microsoft because you see the moats as narrower; too much risk and the potential for a fast paradigm shift that would too quickly undermine your equity position.

Since Microsoft is the business I understand (i.e. I have a narrow circle of competence!) and I subscribe to your views on investments, well over 90% of my net worth is tied up there. (Thanks to BillG, I’m well into the nine digit range.) I feel fine about having 90%+ tied up in Microsoft. We have a “safety net” of tax free municipal bonds so I know the family will be OK if something happens. And we don’t intend to leave much to the kids, so I’m simply building a huge pile of chits to someday turn back to society. I do wonder about the time period ten or twenty or more years down the road. If at some point then the outlook for Microsoft has changed, I hope I will have learned enough from your approach such that I will have the ability to identify new areas of intrinsic value and continue to grow the pile of chits at a high rate. But for now, I’m heads down selling more software...

I’m curious as to what you think about the Lowenstein book. I’m sure it is difficult to have so much of your life spread across the pages, on the other hand, there are so many things for you to be proud of. It was great to gain an understanding of Graham’s approach, and more importantly your significant advancement of the approach. I found the arguments of the EMT (efficient market theoreticians) just laughable. They should spend a few days at Disney World so they can observe crowd theory in action. Believe me, the longest lines don’t necessarily translate into the best value! But the best part of the book was to learn more about your values, and in particular the discipline of character that leads to your success in investing. I wish there were a magic formula for teaching this to our children!

This leaves me one final task for this note. I’ve done a very poor job of adequately thanking you for all the great things you’ve done for me - golf at Augusta, Seminole, the Buffett Classic, and in particular, the opportunity to listen in on great conversations and learn from you. I want you to know I’ve really appreciated your kindness, and if there is ever anything I might do to reciprocate, please let me know.

Thanks. Jeff Raikes


From: Warren Buffett
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 1997 3:13 PM
To: Jeff Raikes
Subject: Re: Go Huskers!

hi, jeff;

i have so few friends who use e-mail that I only look for it once a week or so (and usually find nothing) so excsue the slowness in responding. I am also reasonably fast at typing but poor in the accuracy department and fine it easier just to plow ahead rather than correct, knowing i am always writing to those who will find a little deciphering an interesting but easy challenge.

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Sam Altman texts Shivon Zilis

February 9, 2023

Sam Altman
BTW, good idea for me to tweet something nice about Elon? Have been meaning to do this after he DMd about not being in the photo from the first day of OpenAI. Just about how much I and others look up to him, how critical his early contributions to OpenAI are, etc.


[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2025).]

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Further reading: Sam Altman's tweet: “society underestimates how much it owes elon for raising the collective ambition level at a time when optimism for the future was receding” (February 13, 2023)

Sam Altman emails Elon Musk

On Oct 18, 2015, at 11:36 AM, Sam Altman wrote:

Good seeing you a couple of weeks ago.

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Microsoft exec Jim Allchin emails Bill Gates

From: Jim Allchin
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 8:38 AM
To: Bill Gates; Steve Ballmer
Subject: losing our way...

This is a rant. I’m sorry.

I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems are customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate into great products.

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Facebook exec Chris Cox: Here’s our plan to beat Google+

Circa summer 2010

Abridged History of Google and Facebook

Sometime in the summer of 2007, Larry stopped talking to Mark. This was following an 8 month period in which we launched News Feed, opened registration to everyone, and launched Platform. Almost instantly, we were competing with Google for talent, for developer mindshare, and for tech-blog-cred. They began to worry about their ability to enter new markets with us in the game, and about core investments that weren’t doing well and that we were positioned to touch: Checkout, Local, Orkut. They worried about entrenched products that we might one day challenge: Calendar, Picasa, Youtube, Blogger, Reader, News, and about the Comscore data telling them the “social networks are bigger than email” story. Facebook had the world’s people, while Google had only their cookies: so we were better positioned even to own Search and Ads one day. Oh my!

So far, we haven’t seen the real competition. Open Social, Wave, Latitude, and Buzz were all lobs. By design, they had low chances of breakaway success and lacked depth as fleshed-out social products. They weren’t built by Google’s best people and they weren’t coddled and raised by its founders. They were test matches.

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Larry Ellison: "We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our users every day"

From: Larry Ellison
To: Jeff Henley, Mark Barrenechea
CC: Jeffrey Henley, Jennifer Minton, Safra Catz
Subject: RE: IT CRM
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 07:04:05 -0800

Our top priority is to get Oracle users are "delighted" with -the quality and functionality our CRM products. Until that happens I doubt we will achieve success in the market. The biggest problem is missing features as opposed to show stopper bugs. (There are a few of those as well but they are much easier to fix.) Every applications meeting now centers around representatives from our user community who report back on application quality and set priorities for development. We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our users every day. We need to work very hard to achieve a high degree of customer satisfaction for our sales and marketing products as soon as possible. We will have major improvements by June, but we are unlikely to deliver all we need until September. Doing it by September will require unrelenting focus and a Herculean effort. It can be done but not unless we change our development and testing process and do a better job listening to our user community. Larry


[This document is from In re Oracle Corp. Securities Litigation (2009).]

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Previously: Larry Ellison: “I need daily reports until the customer is happy” (March 23, 2001)

Steve Jobs's open letter on third-party iPhone apps: draft vs. final

October 14–17, 2007

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Mark Zuckerberg: “Do you think it’s way too much?”

April 5, 2012

Mark Zuckerberg
I think we're going to get Instagram done at 1.3% or 1.4%. I'm breaking to interview someone now but Kevin and I will likely agree on a number later tonight.

Can you get the team mobilized to get together and get this done quickly? He has extreme time pressure because of his other investment, so if we can get this done

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Mark Zuckerberg on rebranding Facebook, spinning off Instagram, Facebook’s strategy tax, antitrust regulation, and network collapse

From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: Chris Cox; Javier Olivan; Mike Schroepfer; Sheryl Sandberg; David Wehner; [REDACTED]
Sent: 5/3/2018 1:17:12 AM
Subject: Thoughts on Family Management -- privileged and confidential

Confidential -- do *not* share beyond this group

I am growing more convinced that we are approaching our family strategy incorrectly -- especially around Instagram. While we believe our current trajectory will yield strong business growth over the next 5 years, I worry it will also undermine our global network effect, erode our corporate brand, impose an increasingly large strategy tax on all our work, and then over time we may face antitrust regulation requiring us to spin out our other apps anyway.

We are at a moment where we are about to cement our family of apps strategy in a reorg and updated financial reporting. This is also a moment of reflection about our brand and the regulatory environment we face. Before we move forward, we should check in on our strategy and establish how we'd like to operate.

I'll describe what I see as the five primary issues with our current strategy and suggested remedies for each.

1. Cannibalization and Network Collapse

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Apple executive team meeting agenda

August 5, 2007

[The source of the handwriting on the document is uncertain — it may be Scott Forstall, then head of iPhone software at Apple.]


[This document is from Epic v. Apple (2021).]

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Further reading from Brad Stone for The New York Times: ‘Fake Steve’ Blogger Comes Clean (August 6, 2007)

Previously: Palm’s CEO emails Steve Jobs (August 24, 2007)

Previously: Bertrand Serlet to Steve Jobs: "Fine, let's enable Cocoa Touch apps" (October 2, 2007)

Previously: Steve Jobs’s agenda for Apple’s Top 100 meeting (October 24, 2010)

Mark Zuckerberg emails Peter Thiel

On Feb 12, 2013, at 12:10 AM, Mark Zuckerberg wrote:

Related to my update about the board below, we should check in at some point on your plans for our board over the next 2-3 years. I know you just sold the majority of your Facebook stock, so I'm not sure how you're thinking about this right now. I find you very helpful and I want to make sure I understand how you're thinking about this. Let's discuss when we get dinner later this month.


From: Peter Thiel
Sent: 2/12/2013 2:32:08 PM
To: Mark Zuckerberg
Subject: Re: Board Update

Mark,

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Mark Zuckerberg: The Facebook app's "cultural relevance is decreasing quickly"

From: Mark Zuckerberg
Date: Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 10:40 PM
To: Chris Cox, Tom Alison
Subject: FB app vision

We’ve spent a lot of time recently on shifting resources from non-Reels/NF FB features to Reels and now to other apps as well -- all moves that I agree with. But as we’re doing this, I want to make sure we have a unique vision for the FB app that can lead to sustainable growth over time. Even though the FB app’s engagement is steady in many places, it feels like its cultural relevance is decreasing quickly and I worry that this may be a leading indicator of future health issues. Even if IG and WA do well, I don’t see a path for our company to succeed in the way we need if FB falters, so we need to get this right. It’s the biggest gap in our FOA strategy that I see now.

It feels to me like the FB app’s position in cultural relevance is deeply tied to the friend graph structure as opposed to other organizing principles -- for example, IG/Twitter-style follow graphs, TikTok-style pure algorithmic approach, Groups/Reddit-style communities, etc.

Friending feels out of vogue right now for at least a few reasons. First, a lot of people’s friend graphs are stale and not filled with the people they want to hear from or connect with. Second, it feels heavyweight to request someone new as a friend, which makes it hard to rectify the first issue. Most of the time when I meet someone or become interested in someone I just want to follow them first but not ask anything of them. Third, and related, since FB doesn’t feel as culturally relevant, that adds further weight to adding some on FB vs other services. Do you want to be seen as someone adding friends on FB, or would you rather be seen adding the person on IG? Finally, many of the people I want to follow at this point are people who use social media somewhat professionally and therefore gravitate to IG and Twitter where it’s more natural to build follower bases (eg all the surfers and MMA fighters I follow).

I think this graph architecture of the service is fundamental to its cultural resonance or lack therefore. Our answer for a while was to shift more towards communities -- which still feels lighter weight and more exciting / acceptable to join on FB -- but for a combination of reasons this has not been able to become anywhere near the primary structure on FB, so the service is still primarily organized around friends. More recently, we’re pivoting to more unconnected Reels/IFR, but while this will be good for surfacing more interesting content, it reduces the social sense of feeling connected to the person creating the content as long as that creation and social interaction isn’t happening on FB -- and right now we seem very far from having much Reels creation originate on FB.

My theory is that we need to refresh the graph structure of FB in order for it to regain cultural relevance and a better long term path. There are a few possible ways to do this, but I don’t think we’ve yet committed to a path. I’ll lay out a few ideas here and then we can discuss over email and also get together to discuss live as well.

Possible graph structures:

Option 1: Double down on Friending

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Mark Zuckerberg tries to buy Snapchat

On 10/28/13 10:16 AM, Mark Zuckerberg wrote:

I just got off the phone with Evan. He said he enjoyed getting to know us but he thinks they can build much more value on their own. For reference, our offer was $3.1b for the company plus $1b in retention packages. [REDACTED] on his board was advising him strongly not to take the offer. Evan did not offer a counter.

Interestingly, [REDACTED] told him that Instagram was worth >$10b now and that Snapchat could be worth the same soon. I told him we thought Instagram was only worth ~$6b and had a clearer business model, but l'm not sure that moved him.

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From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2003 9:54 PM
To: Will Poole
Cc: Alexander Gounares; Amir Majidimehr; Chris Jones
Subject: Scenario leadership

This whole Apple music experience is one that is interesting to me and makes me wonder where the scenario thinking is in Windows.

What is the best scenario paper I have seen? None. Even on Photos which has a lot of people I really haven't seen anything.

Because we are going to be so late with a music service we are going to be behind others almost forever it seems like.

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Mark Zuckerberg messages Facebook engineer

April 5, 2012

Mark Zuckerberg
Around?

Facebook engineer
Yeah

Mark Zuckerberg
If you could buy one of either Instagram, Foursquare or Pinterest, which would you buy?

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Sequoia Capital partner emails WhatsApp cofounder

On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 7:10 AM, Jim Goetz at Sequoia Capital wrote:

are we concerned about wechat? I find the progress in europe troubling. we will try to triangulate on the growth numbers below with rivalytics.


From: Jan Koum
To: Jim Goetz
CC: Brian Acton; Neeraj Arora; Michael Abramson
Sent: 11/5/2012 7:31:21 PM
Subject: Re: Weixin

yeah talked about WeChat with Zuck on sunday at length... he was actually very concerned tencent was trying to buy us to compete with FB outside of china (he actually heard rumor from "bankers" that the transaction between us and tencent is in process)... i told him i'll let him know we ever do get an offer we would ever consider - that made him feel better.

should we be worried about WeChat? hard to say... their android google play slot is between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 downloads: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tencent.mm&hl=en

yes, i know there is no google play in china, so what this means probably is that they have at most around 10m android downloads outside of china. we have 100m.

i think if we fail, we only have ourself to blame due to things like two consecutive days of server outages and not wechat…

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