THE ROLE MODELS
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The Role Models · Season One · Episode 2 · 40 min

The One-Billion-Dollar Handshake

The billion dollars was a promise; the payroll is real. Nine researchers turn down "borderline crazy" money on a handshake, and a midnight email says "whatever it takes." What happens when you finally add up the checks?

0:00 / 40:27

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims.

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The Role Models, S01E02: "The One-Billion-Dollar Handshake"

Runtime: 40:27 · Season One · A Will Sigmon Media production Season / Episode: 1 / 2 · episodeType: full

Cold open

Saturday. December 12th, 2015. Montreal is waking up hungover. NIPS is winding down. Poster tubes, checkout lines, taxis to the airport. And somewhere in this city, eleven people are about to find out what they're worth. Yesterday afternoon, at half past one Pacific time, they announced to the world that they were walking away from Google, from Facebook, from the richest research labs on Earth, to join a nonprofit that is exactly three days old. It has no office, no…

About this episode

The billion dollars was a promise; the payroll is real. Nine researchers turn down "borderline crazy" money on a handshake, and a midnight email says "whatever it takes." What happens when you finally add up the checks?

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims.

Beat outline / chapters

  • 0:00 The Handshake
  • 3:41 Borderline Crazy
  • 9:40 Some Number in Excess of a Billion
  • 14:09 No Whiteboards
  • 22:55 Whipped by DeepMind
  • 31:29 The Calculator

Key people

  • Elon Musk
  • Sam Altman
  • Greg Brockman
  • Ilya Sutskever

How we tell it

  • Every line a character speaks in their own voice is verbatim from the public record: emails, interviews, a blog statement, a court filing. We invent no dialogue for any real person. Brockman's email shorthand ("~$1.25M/year") is read out in words.
  • Two scenes are dramatized staging, marked in the script: the Napa Valley recruiting day (fall 2015) and the first morning in Brockman's Mission District apartment (January 2016). The car, the vines, the stairs and the markers are reconstructed; the only words are ones the people later said to reporters.
  • The morning of December 12, 2015 is inferred: it is the "tomorrow" in Altman's December 11 email and "the day after the lab launched" in Brockman's February 2016 email.
  • Contested accounts are told as contested. Sutskever's "The Open in openAI" email and Musk's "Yup" are presented with both sides' readings from the lawsuit. How much Musk gave appears in every version on the record (OpenAI's "less than $45M," his complaint's "over $44 million," TechCrunch's ~$15M traceable, and his own public $100M and $50M), none adjudicated.
  • The $1.9M figure for Sutskever comes from OpenAI's 2016 tax filing via the New York Times. It "rhymes" with the offer Musk described to Walter Isaacson; we don't present them as the same fact.
  • Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person.

Sources

  • The founding emails (Musk's Dec 11, 2015 team email; the Jan 2, 2016 "Should AI Be Open?" thread and Sutskever's reply; Musk's Feb 19 and Feb 22, 2016 emails; Brockman's Feb 21 "compensation framework"; the Mar 21 Wired fact-check exchange): Musk v. Altman court exhibits and OpenAI's blog releases, compiled in [OpenAI Email Archives (LessWrong)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr).
  • Cade Metz, "Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free," [Wired, April 27, 2016](https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/): Zaremba, the counteroffers and the delayed launch, the Bengio list, the Napa day, the whiteboards, Brockman, Sutskever and Bostrom quotes.
  • Steven Levy, "How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers From Taking Over," Backchannel, December 11, 2015 ([republished on Wired](https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over/)).
  • The New York Times, launch coverage, [December 11, 2015](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/science/artificial-intelligence-research-center-is-founded-by-silicon-valley-investors.html): Musk's and Altman's quotes, funding "year by year."
  • "Introducing OpenAI," [openai.com, December 11, 2015](https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/): the $1 billion commitment and named funders.
  • Scott Alexander, "Should AI Be Open?" [Slate Star Codex, December 17, 2015](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/).
  • SpaceX's first orbital-booster landing (Falcon 9 Flight 20, December 21, 2015): [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_flight_20).
  • Brockman's 21st Street apartment as OpenAI's first office: SF Standard, April 21, 2026.
  • AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol, Seoul, March 2016 (Move 37 in Game 2; 4–1): [DeepMind](https://deepmind.google/research/breakthroughs/alphago/), [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol).
  • Cade Metz, "A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit," [The New York Times, April 19, 2018](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html): the 2016 Form 990 salaries and Sutskever's quote.
  • Mark Harris, "Elon Musk used to say he put $100M in OpenAI, but now it's $50M: Here are the receipts," [TechCrunch, May 17, 2023](https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/elon-musk-used-to-say-he-put-100m-in-openai-but-now-its-50m-here-are-the-receipts/): $133.2M in total donations, ~$15M traceable to Musk, the Musk Foundation → YC.org → OpenAI route, YC Research's $0.
  • "OpenAI and Elon Musk," [openai.com, March 5, 2024](https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/): "less than $45M from Elon."
  • Musk v. Altman, amended complaint, Case 3:24-cv-04722 (N.D. Cal., August 5, 2024): "over $44 million."
  • OpenAI's 2016 Form 990 (about $11M spent, ~52 people, $7M salaries and benefits), via the New York Times.

Cast

  • Narrator: Nathaniel C
  • Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, Nick Bostrom, and a document reader: original designed character voices (ElevenLabs), reading verbatim quotes

Credits

Written and produced by Will Sigmon for Will Sigmon Media. Narrator and character voices: AI-generated voices performing words from the public record.

Listen next

Next: Episode 3, "The Nonprofit Paradox."

Episode page: https://shows.willsigmon.media/role-models/episodes/s01e02

Disclaimer: a dramatization based on public records, including court filings, published emails and company posts. Some scenes and dialogue are reconstructed or composited. Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI or any person depicted. Allegations in court filings are unproven claims. The Role Models is produced by Will Sigmon Media with AI-generated voices. Quoted emails, posts and filings are read verbatim and attributed; where the parties disagree, both accounts are given, and a company's post written during a lawsuit is treated as advocacy by one side. Sources for each episode are listed in its show notes.

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