[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]
Posts by Internal Tech Emails
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 texts Elon Musk
December 13, 2024
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]
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?
Mark Zuckerberg texts Elon Musk
February 3, 2025
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
Mark Zuckerberg: "I wonder if we should consider buying Instagram"
February 11, 2012
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]
Sam Altman texts Elon Musk
February 18, 2023
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2025).]
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.
Sam Altman texts Shivon Zilis
February 9, 2023
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
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.
Mark Zuckerberg messages Facebook employee
April 9, 2012
[This document is from U.S. v. Holmes (2022).]
Elizabeth Holmes's schedule
Circa 2005–2009
[This document is from OpenAI v. Open Artificial Intelligence (2025).]
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.
Elon Musk names OpenAI
December 3, 2015
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
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
Mark Zuckerberg on buying Instagram
April 5, 2012
[This document is from OpenAI v. Open Artificial Intelligence (2025).]
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 haha but, i like that it's relevant, pretty unbranded, and has good connotations of thinking/individualism i don't like that it's hard to know how to pronounce. Ilya Sutskever Ah, is it Latin? Greg Brockman ah yeah. "cogito ergo sum" Ilya Sutskever Ah Greg Brockman descartes' "i think therefore i am"
Ilya Sutskever I can see why everyone liked it I had friends who named their company "whetlab" I didn't like it at once since I didn't know what whet meant If you think that enough people know what cogito means than i support it Greg Brockman elon says: Not bad. Sounds kinda cute. Most people won't get the latin, but the ones we want to join will. I'd support that. (or will be russian ☺)
Ilya Sutskever Knowledge of Latin is independent of knowledge of ML Greg Brockman hah, yeah. but more seriously, i think cogito is well-known enough Ilya Sutskever Maybe it's ok Then I'm ok with it Greg Brockman cool
Greg Brockman What do you think Cogito as a name? Ilya Sutskever Not a huge fan Greg Brockman noooooo! (elon + sam both liked it)
Cofounders on naming OpenAI
November 24, 2015
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
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
actively fragmenting our network. This all means people will be less likely to try our new products or any other features we build. Long term this is likely a bigger brand issue for our products than our recent privacy issues because it gets to the heart of whether we are a company that can even build useful things and remain relevant in people's lives. Tech companies can withstand crises, but once you're Yahoo -- large but irrelevant -- it's tough to get people to even consider your products and it's difficult to succeed. Unfortunately, this brand dynamic is accelerating for us. I do not believe our current corporate brand strategy is sustainable. From a relevance perspective, we need to find a way to make it so that when a person uses more of our apps, they feel like we're serving them better and becoming more relevant in their life, not less. I only see two solutions to this: we either need
to aggressively brand all of our services with Facebook as our corporate brand, or we need to create a new corporate brand and aggressively brand all of our services with that. We are not a holding company, so Alphabet is not the right analogy for us. People have a relationship with us, and they do not with Alphabet. Most people don't know what Alphabet is, and Alphabet isn't relevant in their lives. In that case, Google remains the corporate brand people have a relationship with. If we want to consider rebranding, a better model is Apple, Microsoft, or Samsung -- companies with strong consumer-facing corporate brands that are distinct from any specific product, but aggressively attached to all of their products. That said, an impulse to consider rebranding feels largely motivated by fear that the Facebook brand is irreparably tarnished. I disagree with this and believe it would be difficult to execute
such a rebrand without it coming off like an Altria moment. The only way I could see this working is if we find a name so symbolic of our mission that it feels like we're running towards our core rather than away, and so inspiring that we'd proudly stamp it on every service we provide. That seems difficult, so it's likely the strongest move is doubling down on the Facebook brand -- like Amazon has with their lead product -- and aggressively branding Instagram and WhatsApp with it. When you open those apps, it would say "Instagram by Facebook" and "WhatsApp by Facebook". We may even need to put Facebook branding in the chrome of those apps where the app names and logos are today to cement this relationship in people's minds. We don't have to execute a change this month while the Facebook brand is at a global minimum, but this is such a big shift, it seems critical to have a coherent corporate brand moving forward, and it will take time to execute, so we should start now.
Mark Zuckerberg on rebranding Facebook
May 3, 2018
[This document is from In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (2011).]
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
Steve Jobs emails Eric Schmidt
February 13, 2006
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
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.
Mark Zuckerberg on competing with Elon Musk
April 26, 2022
[This document is from U.S. v. Google (2024) (1:20-cv-03010).]