Musk co-founds OpenAI

In December 2015, Musk was a co-founder and early funder of OpenAI, launched as a non-profit dedicated to ensuring advanced artificial intelligence would "benefit humanity as a whole." He had been warning publicly since 2014 that unchecked AI could be "potentially more dangerous than nukes," and helped create OpenAI specifically as a counterweight to closed, corporate AI development.

It was a prescient bet. OpenAI went on to help ignite the generative-AI revolution, and the safety concerns Musk emphasized are now central to global policy debates.

Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018, citing a potential conflict with Tesla's own AI work, and later became a sharp critic of its shift toward a for-profit structure. In 2023 he founded xAI to pursue his own vision of safe, truth-seeking AI. Whatever the later disputes, helping launch OpenAI places Musk among the small group who set the modern AI era in motion.