The Role Models, S01E04: "The Divorce"

Runtime: 39:00 · Season One · A Will Sigmon Media production Season / Episode: 1 / 4 · episodeType: full

Cold open

Wednesday, September twentieth, two thousand seventeen. Two-oh-eight in the afternoon, Pacific time. An email arrives. The subject line is two words. Honest Thoughts. It's from Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, and it's signed by him and Greg Brockman. It's addressed to the two men who co-chair their company: Elon Musk and Sam Altman. It's long. It's careful. It's the kind of email you write at night, rewrite in the morning, and send before you can change your…

About this episode

September 2017. An email titled "Honest Thoughts" lands with OpenAI's co-chairs, and within minutes everything changes. Who would control the technology they believed could be the most powerful ever built? Episode 4 of The Role Models tells the story of OpenAI's split with Elon Musk through the founders' own emails, with both sides' accounts side by side.

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 Cold Open: Nine Minutes
• 1:35 Opening titles
• 1:51 The Triggering Event
• 6:47 Fifty to Sixty
• 11:20 Honest Thoughts
• 16:39 Cash Cow
• 22:28 Goodbye, All Hands
• 25:09 Our Primary Fiduciary Duty
• 28:23 A Few Thousand Books
• 31:20 Vancouver
• 34:30 Zero Percent

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: texts, emails, tweets, speeches, blog posts, interviews, filings.
• Dramatized staging is reconstructed from documented events; we invent no dialogue for any real person.
• Contested accounts are told as contested and attributed to the side that claims them.
• Allegations in court filings are unproven claims.
• Voices are AI-generated and perform words from the public record; they are not intended to resemble any real person.

Sources

• Musk v. Altman, N.D. Cal. No. 3:24-cv-04722: email exhibits (e.g. Dkt. 351-44, Exhibit 41, "Re: Honest Thoughts").
• OpenAI, "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit" (Dec 13, 2024), which reproduces the emails, and "OpenAI and Elon Musk" (Mar 5, 2024): advocacy by one party to a lawsuit, attributed every time.
• OpenAI, "OpenAI Supporters" (Feb 20, 2018).
• Elon Musk's complaint and public statements, including his February 2019 post on Twitter as reported by the Associated Press.
• Dario Amodei and Danny Hernandez, "AI and Compute" (OpenAI, May 16, 2018).

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 5, "The Bet."

Episode page: https://shows.willsigmon.media/role-models/episodes/s01e04

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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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