By Steven Levy
Publication Date: 2025-11-21 16:00:00
It all started like many things, with Elon Musk. In the early 2010s, he realized that AI was on its way to becoming perhaps the most powerful technology of all time. But he harbored a deep suspicion that humanity would suffer if it came under the control of powerful profit-driven forces. Musk was an early investor in DeepMind, the U.K.-based lab that led the way in artificial general intelligence research. After Google bought DeepMind in 2014, Musk separated from the research organization. He believed it was essential to create a countervailing force whose incentive was people’s benefit rather than profit. So he helped develop OpenAI. When I interviewed Musk and Sam Altman at the company’s launch in 2015, they insisted that shareholder profits would not play a role in their decisions.
Fast forward to today. OpenAI is worth half a trillion dollars, or perhaps $750 billion, and its for-profit arm has become a nonprofit corporation. Musk, the richest person in the world, runs his own…
