Here's an interesting detail from crypto history that surfaced thanks to court documents. It turns out Elon Musk once supported the idea of conducting an ICO for OpenAI — and we're talking about a sum of around $10 billion. This happened in early 2018, during the height of the ICO boom.

According to internal notes published in response to Musk's lawsuit, it appears that the founders of OpenAI seriously considered creating a tokenized commercial division. The idea was logical for that time — they needed to fund their non-profit mission, and ICOs seemed like the perfect tool. Musk agreed with this approach in January 2018.

But then everything changed. By the end of that same month, Musk abandoned the plan. According to OpenAI, he decided that the organization wouldn't be able to raise the necessary funds this way and focused on AI work at Tesla. Interestingly, this decision influenced how OpenAI is structured today — with its hybrid model of a commercial corporation and a controlling non-profit organization.

This episode clearly shows how differently things could have turned out. ICOs in 2017-18 were a widespread phenomenon — startups raised billions by selling tokens directly to people. Regulation was blurry, investor appetite was huge. But the market cooled off, oversight increased, and this method of funding lost popularity.

The fact is, even major tech figures seriously considered token-based financing before it went out of fashion. And the rule here is simple — in crypto, everything changes quickly. What seemed like a revolutionary solution in 2018 now appears as an interesting historical fact. Musk's departure from OpenAI allowed the company to develop along a different path, and the result seems to have justified his decision.