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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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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

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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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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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Palm’s CEO emails Steve Jobs

From: Ed Colligan
Sent: Friday, August 24, 2007 6:30 PM
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Your proposal

Steve:

I have thought long and hard about our conversation on Wednesday, and I thought it important to let you know my position on the issues we discussed. I hope we can resolve our differences, but it has to be on terms that are right not only for our respective companies, but for the individuals potentially affected. Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal. I even thought about coming back with a proposal about limiting recruitment efforts, but frankly, I did not think it was something you would agree to do.

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Sam Altman emails Elon Musk

On May 25, 2015, at 9:10 PM, Sam Altman wrote:

Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI.

I think the answer is almost definitely not.

If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.

Any thoughts on whether it would be good for YC to start a Manhattan Project for AI? My sense is we could get many of the top ~50 to work on it, and we could structure it so that the tech belongs to the world via some sort of nonprofit but the people working on it get startup-like compensation if it works. Obviously we'd comply with/aggressively support all regulation.

Sam


From: Elon Musk
To: Sam Altman
Subject: Re: question
Date: Monday, May 25, 2015 11:09:22 PM

Probably worth a conversation


[This document is from Elon Musk, et al. v. Samuel Altman, et al. (2024).]

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Previously: Sam Altman emails Elon Musk: “The mission would be to create the first general Al and use it for individual empowerment—ie, the distributed version of the future that seems the safest” (June 24, 2015)

Previously: Microsoft CTO: "Thoughts on OpenAI" (June 12, 2019)

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Ilya Sutskever emails Elon Musk and Sam Altman

On Sep 20, 2017, at 2:08 PM, Ilya Sutskever wrote:

Elon, Sam,

This process has been the highest stakes conversation that Greg and I have ever participated in, and if the project succeeds, it'll turn out to have been the highest stakes conversation the world has seen. It's also been a deeply personal conversation for all of us.

Yesterday while we were considering making our final commitment given the non-solicit agreement, we realized we'd made a mistake. We have several important concerns that we haven't raised with either of you. We didn't raise them because we were afraid to: we were afraid of harming the relationship, having you think less of us, or losing you as partners.

There is some chance that our concerns will prove to be unresolvable. We really hope it's not the case, but we know we will fail for sure if we don't all discuss them now. And we have hope that we can work through them and all continue working together.

Elon:

We really want to work with you. We believe that if we join forces, our chance of success in the mission is the greatest. Our upside is the highest. There is no doubt about that. Our desire to work with you is so great that we are happy to give up on the equity, personal control, make ourselves easily firable — whatever it takes to work with you.

But we realized that we were careless in our thinking about the implications of control for the world. Because it seemed so hubristic, we have not been seriously considering the implications of success.

• The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you.

  • As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge, even though you also stated that you hate being CEO and would much rather not be CEO.

• Thus, we are concerned that as the company makes genuine progress towards AGI, you will choose to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary. We disagree with your statement that our ability to leave is our greatest power, because once the company is actually on track to AGI, the company will be much more important than any individual.

• The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.

We have a few smaller concerns, but we think it's useful to mention it here:

• In the event we decide to buy Cerebras, my strong sense is that it'll be done through Tesla. But why do it this way if we could also do it from within OpenAI? Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission. So the overall result may not end up being optimal for OpenAI.

• We believe that OpenAI the non-profit was successful because both you and Sam were in it. Sam acted as a genuine counterbalance to you, which has been extremely fruitful. Greg and I, at least so far, are much worse at being a counterbalance to you. We feel this is evidenced even by this negotiation, where we were ready to sweep the long-term AGI control questions under the rug while Sam stood his ground.

Sam:

When Greg and I are stuck, you've always had an answer that turned out to be deep and correct. You've been thinking about the ways forward on this problem extremely deeply and thoroughly. Greg and I understand technical execution, but we don't know how structure decisions will play out over the next month, year, or five years.

But we haven't been able to fully trust your judgements throughout this process, because we don't understand your cost function.

• We don't understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and it's hard to really understand what's driving it.

• Is AGI truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals? How has your thought process changed over time?

Greg and Ilya:

We had a fair share of our own failings during this negotiation, and we'll list some of them here (Elon and Sam, I'm sure you'll have plenty to add...):

• During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions. This is why we didn't push on the control — we thought that our equity is good enough, so why worry? But this attitude is wrong, just like the attitude of AI experts who don't think that AI safety is an issue because they don't really believe that they'll build AGI.

• We did not speak our full truth during the negotiation. We have our excuses, but it was damaging to the process, and we may lose both Sam and Elon as a result.

There's enough baggage here that we think it's very important for us to meet and talk it out. Our collaboration will not succeed if we don't. Can all four of us meet today? If all of us say the truth, and resolve the issues, the company that we'll create will be much more likely to withstand the very strong forces it'll experience.

- Greg & Ilya


From: Elon Musk
Subject: Re: Honest Thoughts
Date: Wednesday, September 20, 2017 2:17:03 PM

Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw.

Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay or I'm just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup.

Discussions are over.


On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 3:08 PM Elon Musk wrote:

To be clear, this is not an ultimatum to accept what was discussed before. That is no longer on the table.


From: Sam Altman
Subject: Re: Honest Thoughts
Date: Thursday, September 21, 2017 9:17:57 AM

i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!


[This document is from Elon Musk, et al. v. Samuel Altman, et al. (2024).]

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Elon Musk on Twitter’s finances

On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 8:34 AM Elon Musk wrote:

Please inform the agencies and resellers that I will be calling their CEOs immediately if they do not pay their bills. When something like this happens, I expect you personally first to call those who owe us money, not your “team”.

Let’s make sure that we are paying what we owe them, if anything. They may be refusing to pay us, because we are late paying them. That’s happened several times.

The GPU purchases are necessary, but should be funded via [REDACTED] in xAI and then xAI will be responsible for paying for them. Note, Twitter will benefit greatly from the work that xAI will be doing as we need to apply ML to the Twitter recommendation algorithm and search.

The headcount reduction you describe below is absurdly small. We are overstaffed by at least 500 people. At the same time, we do need to hire people who are exceptionally capable and hard-working.


[This document is from Schobinger v. Twitter (2024).]

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From: Brett Bullington
Date: Wed May 7, 2003 1:08:29 PM
To: Jon Rubinstein
Subject: I think you guys know this

But at some point, sooner than later, MusicMatch will offer a music download service.


From: Jon Rubinstein
Date: Wed May 7, 2003 6:24:11 PM
To: Phil Schiller, Steve Jobs
Subject: Fwd: I think you guys know this

We know this and shouldn't be surprised...

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