Internal Tech Emails

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Internal tech industry emails that surface in public records. 🔍 https://techemails.com

Mira Murati Go ahead Sam Altman what if msft acquires openai? would that provide the governance the board wants? Sam Altman is satya making progress at all Mira Murati Satya is being diplomatic
Sam Altman from a journalist:
Sam Altman can you ask why they've been a saying all weekend they wanted me back? Mira Murati They want new ceo in place Sam Altman can you say you will call back in 10 min Mira Murati They want to have a new ceo in place tonight (not me Sam Altman do they know who?
Sam Altman can you indicate directionally good or bad? satya and others anxious Mira Murati Directionally very bad Sam Altman ok Sam Altman can you wrap up soon? lots of pressure from msft for an update Mira Murati Sam this is very bad
Mark Zuckerberg Random thing. I just logged into Snapchat for the first time in a while to see what progress they're making with AR. What surprised me is how porny and inappropriate the content they're featuring is in their equivalent of Reels (Spotlight) and their 3P content stories (Stories). I was completely blown away that they haven't faced more scrutiny for this, especially given that their audience skews so much younger. It's not nudity but it's really raunchy. I would never let my kids anywhere near this. It seems like we could easily get more scrutiny on them for this, and perhaps that would help the next time we face scrutiny for youth content on our services. David Ginsberg yup - i haven't logged on in years, but will today. I'll have the team look at it.
Mark Zuckerberg Quick heads up that Meta sent a letter to the California AG supporting your lawsuit against OpenAI. Someone (not us) leaked leaked the letter and it will be public in the next hour. Wanted to make sure you heard this from me. Elon Musk Ok Mark Zuckerberg I have an idea to run by you. Not urgent, but let me know if there's a good time to call in the next few days.
Mark Zuckerberg Looks like DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help. Elon Musk [Reacted ❤️ to “Looks like DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our t…”] Elon Musk Are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others? Mark Zuckerberg Want to discuss live?
Sam Altman BTW, good idea for me to tweet something nice about Elon? Have been meaning to do this after he DMd about not being in the photo from the first day of OpenAI. Just about how much I and others look up to him, how critical his early contributions to OpenAI are, etc.
Facebook employee Wow, awesome news. I like that you’re not killing the independent product. I love instagram. Mark Zuckerberg Yeah, I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them. I think this is a good outcome for everyone.
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 11:18 AM, Elon Musk wrote: Don't love the sound of Consider. What's the Cogito trademark issue? A naming approach we could try is for the real name to be long, but have actual use be a contraction, eg the full name of SpaceX is Space Exploration Technologies Corp. We could call this the Open Al Institute (Open AI-I!), but call it Open in everyday conversation. Looks like OpenAI.com is available for purchase.
Mark Zuckerberg Just want to gut check that this is reasonable. Do you think it's way too much? Sheryl Sandberg yes of course it is way too much Sheryl Sandberg but we knew that
Greg Brockman What do you think Cogito as a name? Ilya Sutskever Not a huge fan Greg Brockman noooooo! (elon + sam both liked it) Ilya Sutskever What about you? :) Greg Brockman i came up with it ☺ Ilya Sutskever Oops!
Greg Brockman What do you think Cogito as a name? Ilya Sutskever Not a huge fan Greg Brockman noooooo! (elon + sam both liked it)
When you get an Amazon Echo and start using it after you already use Amazon for commerce, you feel like Amazon is getting more relevant in your life. However, when you get Instagram and start using that in addition to Facebook, you feel like Facebook as a company is getting less relevant in your life. This is because we haven't effectively linked Instagram and WhatsApp to our corporate Facebook brand. The majority of people don't even know we own those services, and many of those who do know that still see them as sufficiently independent acquisitions that they do not reflect on the person's relationship with Facebook. I believe this contributes significantly to our brand issues. We have data that many people see Facebook as getting less relevant and believe our best days are behind us. Many think our services are getting worse -- which makes sense since our service is really about the network and we're
From: Eric Schmidt Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 15:17:11 -0800 To: Steve Jobs Subject: RE: Recruiting I'm sorry to hear this; we have a policy of no recruiting of Apple employees. I will investigate immediately ! Eric
From: Steve Jobs Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 3:15 PM To: Eric Schmidt Subject: Recruiting Eric, I am told that Googles new cell phone software group is relentlessly recruiting in our iPod group. If this is indeed true, can you put a stop to it? Thanks, Steve
A lot of people are apprehensive about the direction Elon might take Twitter, so this might be a unique moment where many public figures or aspiring creators would be more open to moving. Defensively, there’s also a chance that Elon unlocks product iteration velocity and that Twitter could grow a lot as a competitor to us. Twitter has always underperformed as a business compared to its importance, but there’s no rule saying that will always be the case. It’s possible that a product focused on public discussions could be a lot bigger than Twitter is, and it’s possible that either we or Elon could build this.
Who are our competitors? We think about competition in two ways. First, there's the consumer Al chatbot space: Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta Al. With [ HYPERLINK \I "_l6ubp9yx5tei" \h ]we are leading here, but we can't rest. We need the best free model, best Ul, and strongest brand. Looking ahead to 2025, [REDACTED] poses the biggest threat due to their ability to embed equivalent functionality across their products (e.g. [REDACTED] without facing the business model cannibalization risks that Google does. Then there's the broader game: building a super-assistant and then [REDACTED]. Now we're up against search engines, browsers, even interactions with real people. This one isn't a head-on match. It's about solving more and more use-cases and gradually pulling users in. That's why we don't call our product a search engine, a browser, or an OS — it's just ChatGPT.
Sheryl Sandberg I want to learn settlers of catan too so we can play Mark Zuckerberg I can definitely teach you Settlers of Catan. It's very easy to learn.
We need to take this new dynamic seriously -- both as a competitive risk and as a product opportunity to add functionality that many people clearly love and want to use daily. I suggest that you start thinking immediately about how to add ephemerality as an option into both Instagram and News Feed. This could be very quick and simple -- as easy as an icon you toggle to have your post auto-delete in 24 hours. Or if you have better and simpler ideas, we can try those instead. My guess is whatever we do first will be imperfect because we are not used to this behavior yet and people are not used to having this functionality in our products either. But I think it’s important for us to dive in and explore here. We’ll learn more by trying things quickly, and then we’ll perfect it in time. Overall, helping people share moments however they want is our mission, so we can’t sit around as Snapchat popularizes a new type of sharing. We need to make sure our products are the best way to share contently broadly and ephemerally.
One key insight that makes this work is that the stories expire after 24 hours rather than after you view them. It’s quite easy to imagine how this would work in any feed product. I struggled to imagine what a feed product would look like where you viewed a post once and then it disappeared, but it’s very easy to imagine a product where posts expire and are automatically deleted after some period of time. If I heard a stat Kevin shared the other day correctly, deleting posts after a period of time may already be a normal behavior on Instagram. So offering this as a feature would just make the behavior people want even easier while making it clear that this behavior is welcome and fits the purpose of our products. Second, the growth of Snapchat Stories means that Snapchat is now more of a competitor for Instagram and News Feed than it ever was for messaging. Snapchat was always in somewhat market from text messaging. But Snapchat Stories serves the exact same use cases of sharing and consuming feeds of content that News Feed and Instagram deliver.
On Jun 22, 2014, at 11:51 PM, Mark Zuckerberg wrote: I’ve talked to a few of you about this directly, but I want to make sure you’re all tracking the success of Snapchat Stories. They announced this week that more than 1 billion stories are viewed daily, and that number has doubled in the past 2-3 months. They have 50-100m daily actives, so that’s between 10-20 stories per person daily and growing quickly. They also said that now more stories are viewed daily than snaps, which means this is quickly becoming their primary product. This is worth noting for a couple of reasons: First, it’s a clear existence proof that ephemerality works in large semi-public feed products. I was skeptical at first of why someone would want to broadcast something so raw to so many people at once, but between playing with Slingshot and now seeing these stats, it’s completely clear that this is a very real mainstream sharing use case.
Alternatively, we could choose to not meet his ask here and having a smaller percentage in cash, but if we do that then we should try to get closer to his ask on everything else, or else the risk that he rejects this will start to increase meaningfully in my view. For what it's worth, even if we meet him on price and cash, we still need to negotiate on time of retention package since he had asked for 2 years and we'd really need this to be longer. If we negotiate on too many things, I do think he'll just walk and do his financing. So I guess here are my questions on cash: - If we offer $4b in cash, then are we comfortable with our level of cash balance assuming that at some point in the next half year we will likely get added to S&P and be able to raise more cash
From: Mark Zuckerberg Date: Thursday, October 31, 2013 12:31 AM Additional update: I just spoke with Andreessen and he believes it is a good idea for us to try to buy Snapchat at these prices or perhaps even higher. He has a number of arguments we can go through in person. This makes me more confident we should do this. Tactically, if we move forward, I wonder whether we should offer $4b + $1.5b to try to save $500m or whether we should jump directly to what he's asking for as a best and final offer of $4b + $2b.
matter what. He told me he had done the analysis but hadn't wanted to call me because he was afraid he'd offend me. I told him he wouldn't offend me and he finally shared that his number was $8b with majority cash, or some structure that would be equivalent to him to as if he had sold the company for that much. I told him it was crazy but I wasn't offended, wished him luck and then we got off the phone again. He owns 25% of the company, so it seems likely what he really wants is to make $2b personally pre-tax and $1b post-tax. In the structure that l'd proposed before, we offered $3b for the company and $1b in retention packages for him and his co-founder. That was equivalent to as if we bought the whole company for $5b from his perspective, since he'd get $0.50 of every $1 of retention package and only $0.25 for every $1 of consideration for the company.
On Oct 28, 2013, at 11:58 AM, Mark Zuckerberg wrote: I just talked to Evan again to make sure he understood the misaligned incentives he has with his investors. His said the he and Bobby really thought they could build a $10b+ business and wanted to try to do it. He also said that we were going to do something, he'd want to push to make the retention packages shorter, like 2 years instead of 4. We're going to talk again tonight and he's going to have a counter offer then (or he said he would), but this is looking less and less likely at this point.
On 10/28/13 10:16 AM, Mark Zuckerberg wrote: I just got off the phone with Evan. He said he enjoyed getting to know us but he thinks they can build much more value on their own. For reference, our offer was $3.1b for the company plus $1b in retention packages. [REDACTED] on his board was advising him strongly not to take the offer. Evan did not offer a counter. Interestingly, [REDACTED] told him that Instagram was worth >$10b now and that Snapchat could be worth the same soon. I told him we thought Instagram was only worth ~$6b and had a clearer business model, but l'm not sure that moved him. When I pressed him on his number for a while, he told me that it would be hard to walk away at $6-7b, but that he needed to check with [REDACTED]
On Jan 5, 2004, at 6:25 PM, Jeff Robbin wrote: http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5135382.html?tag=nefd_top Real to launch song store RealNetworks is expected to throw its hat into the digital song store ring later this week, releasing a download service based on technology similar to that used in Apple Computer's iTunes store, according to sources familiar with the plans.
From: Bill Gates Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2003 9:54 PM Subject: Scenario leadership This whole Apple music experience is one that is interesting to me and makes me wonder where the scenario thinking is in Windows. What is the best scenario paper I have seen? None. Even on Photos which has a lot of people I really haven't seen anything. Because we are going to be so late with a music service we are going to be behind others almost forever it seems like.
Mark Zuckerberg The other is in terms of core use cases: sending messaging, sharing photos, playing games, etc. Mark Zuckerberg We have this big issue right now because gaming is shifting from us to mobile platforms. It's causing all this negative momentum in a bunch of ways around gamer overall user engagement, ad spend from gamers, overall revenue, etc.
Mark Zuckerberg I just need to decide if we're going to buy Instagram Mark Zuckerberg I don't think the others are for sale at the moment. Mark Zuckerberg It's really expensive -- probably ~$1 billion.
Facebook engineer That's a pretty tough question as they all obviously have pros/cons. My first instinct is Foursquare as I think that's the most compelling of the products in a way that would be harder for us to easily replicate Facebook engineer However, I think it probably also has the least mass appeal of those three
Mark Zuckerberg Around? Facebook engineer Yeah Mark Zuckerberg If you could buy one of either Instagram, Foursquare or Pinterest, which would you buy?
9:52 AM I'd buy it right now. 10:18 AM Maybe we should do the whole [REDACTED] of the first series E (the one that closes tomorrow) so we don't make the acquisition too expensive for ourselves. 10:35 AM We could immediately offer improved terms on tomorrow's hundred million. For example, only a [REDACTED] times preference instead of the [REDACTED]. 1:36 PM To be clear, my view here is that we're buying market position – not technology. And that market position and momentum is very valuable.
From: Jan Koum To: [REDACTED] CC: Brian Acton; Neeraj Arora; [REDACTED] Sent: 11/5/2012 7:31:21 PM yeah talked about WeChat with Zuck on sunday at length... he was actually very concerned tencent was trying to buy us to compete with FB outside of china (he actually heard rumor from "bankers" that the transaction between us and tencent is in process)... i told him i'll let him know we ever do get an offer we would ever consider - that made him feel better. should we be worried about WeChat? hard to say... their android google play slot is between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 downloads: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tencent.mm&hl=en yes, i know there is no google play in china, so what this means probably is that they have at most around 10m android downloads outside of china. we have 100m. i think if we fail, we only have ourself to blame due to things like two consecutive days of server outages and not wechat...
Elon Musk Any interest in participating in the Twitter deal? Larry Ellison Yes...of course 👍 Elon Musk Cool Elon Musk Roughly what dollar size? Not holding you to anything, but the deal is oversubscribed, so I have to reduce or kick out some participants. Larry Ellison A billion...or whatever you recommend Elon Musk Whatever works for you. I'd recommend maybe $2B or more. This has very high potential and I'd rather have you than anyone else. Larry Ellison I agree that it has huge potential... and it would be lots of fun
From: Steve Jobs Subject: Fwd: Your proposal Date: Sun 8/26/2007 11:42 am To: Ed Colligan Cc: Steve Jobs Ed, This is not satisfactory to Apple. It is not just a matter of our employees deciding they want to join Palm. They are being actively recruited using knowledge supplied by Jon Rubenstein and Fred Anderson, with Jon personally participating in the recruiting process. We must do whatever we can to stop this. I'm sure you realize the asymmetry in the financial resources of our respective companies when you say: "We will both just end up paying a lot of lawyers a lot of money."
From: Ed Colligan Sent: Friday, August 24, 2007 6:30 PM To: Steve Jobs Subject: Your proposal Steve: I have thought long and hard about our conversation on Wednesday, and I thought it important to let you know my position on the issues we discussed. I hope we can resolve our differences, but it has to be on terms that are right not only for our respective companies, but for the individuals potentially affected. Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal. I even thought about coming back with a proposal about limiting recruitment efforts, but frankly, I did not think it was something you would agree to do. Like you, one of my most important tasks as CEO is to build and retain a first class team. I know it's difficult
Instagram seems like it's growing quickly. In 4 months they're up to 2m users and 300k daily photo uploads. That's a lot. We need to track this closely.
From: Elon Musk Subject: Re: Honest Thoughts Date: Wednesday, September 20, 2017 2:17:03 PM Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay or I'm just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup. Discussions are over.
We have a few smaller concerns, but we think it's useful to mention it here: In the event we decide to buy Cerebras, my strong sense is that it'll be done through Tesla. But why do it this way if we could also do it from within OpenAI? Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission. So the overall result may not end up being optimal for OpenAI. We believe that OpenAI the non-profit was successful because both you and Sam were in it. Sam acted as a genuine counterbalance to you, which has been extremely fruitful. Greg and I, at least so far, are much worse at being a counterbalance to you. We feel this is evidenced even by this negotiation, where
On Sep 20, 2017, at 2:08 PM, Ilya Sutskever wrote: Elon, Sam, This process has been the highest stakes conversation that Greg and I have ever participated in, and if the project succeeds, it'll turn out to have been the highest stakes conversation the world has seen. It's also been a deeply personal conversation for all of us. Yesterday while we were considering making our final commitment given the non-solicit agreement, we realized we'd made a mistake. We have several important concerns that we haven't raised with either of you. We didn't raise them because we were afraid to: we were afraid of harming the relationship, having you think less of us, or losing you as partners.
From: Elon Musk Subject: Re: Honest Thoughts Date: Wednesday, September 20, 2017 2:17 PM Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay or I'm just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup. Discussions are over.
From: Elon Musk To: Sam Altman Subject: Re: question Date: Monday, May 25, 2015 11:09:22 PM Probably worth a conversation
On May 25, 2015, at 9:10 PM, Sam Altman wrote: Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first. Any thoughts on whether it would be good for YC to start a Manhattan Project for AI? My sense is we could get many of the top ~50 to work on it, and we could structure it so that the tech belongs to the world via some sort of nonprofit but the people working on it get startup-like compensation if it works. Obviously we'd comply with/aggressively support all regulation. Sam