The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

When Funding Becomes Leverage, Trust Becomes the Real Asset

The moment your funder's leverage looks like a path to absolute control, your co-founders stop building and start negotiating their exit.

Elon Musk, September 20, 2017: "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."

Ilya Sutskever, in the same thread: "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… 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… 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."

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Court Exhibit
Musk v. Altman (OpenAI)
4:24-cv-04722 (CAND), Doc. 353-19, filed 2025-11-07
September 20, 2017
Public domain
View the primary source →