Interesting piece of crypto history just surfaced. Turns out Elon Musk actually backed the idea of OpenAI doing a $10 billion ICO back in early 2018. Internal notes from their legal filings show he was on board with it at first.

Think about that for a second. At the height of the ICO boom in 2017-18, even mainstream tech figures were seriously considering token-based funding models. OpenAI's founders were actually discussing how to structure a for-profit arm with an ICO to support their nonprofit mission. Musk saw the potential.

But here's where it gets interesting - by the end of January 2018, he'd changed his mind. According to the notes, Musk concluded they wouldn't be able to raise enough through an ICO and decided to focus his energy on AI work at Tesla instead. So he walked away from the project entirely later that year.

The whole thing is a fascinating window into how token-based fundraising was viewed back then, even by people at the absolute top of tech. ICOs were everywhere in 2017-18. Startups were raising billions by selling tokens directly to the public. Regulatory rules were basically nonexistent, investors were hungry, and everyone was pitching tokens as the faster alternative to VC funding.

Musk's exit from OpenAI ended up shaping the entire structure of the organization. They went with the nonprofit-plus-public-benefit-corporation model instead, which is what they still use today. Pretty wild to think how one person's decision to step back from an ICO idea ended up determining the path of one of the most important AI organizations in the world.

It's one of those moments where you can see how different things could have gone if Musk had stayed committed to that original vision. The height of the ICO era could have looked completely different with someone like him pushing for mainstream adoption through OpenAI.