Why Will a Non-profit Company Make So Much? Elon Musk Questions OpenAI $30 Billon Profit

Microsoft-owned OpenAI has recently been making significant profits from its ChatGPT AI conversational chatbot, which has become a popular choice globally. 

However, Elon Musk has once again raised questions over how a non-profit organization has transformed into a $30 billion maximum-profit company for Satya Nadella's tech giant.

Musk had previously donated $100 million to OpenAI but stepped down from the board of directors in 2018 and no longer holds a stake in the company. 

He expressed his confusion over how a non-profit to which he donated became a for-profit organization worth $30 billion. He also questioned the legality of this transition and asked why everyone is not doing the same.

Additionally, Musk has temporarily suspended OpenAI's access to Twitter's database. OpenAI was originally founded as a non-profit artificial intelligence research company in 2015. Its research director, Ilya Sutskever, was an expert in machine learning, and its CTO was Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe.

OpenAI's co-chairs were Sam Altman and Musk. In February 2023, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, also raised the same question about OpenAI, stating that it was created as an open-source non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google. 

However, he criticized Microsoft for making profits through OpenAI, which has now become a closed-source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft, contrary to his original intentions.

Despite the controversy, OpenAI's ChatGPT AI chatbot has become a popular choice, and Microsoft has invested $10 billion into it to make it more useful across industries.