Internal Tech Emails

[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).]

Draft: "ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy"

December 2, 2024

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.

OpenAI's strategy for ChatGPT

December 2, 2024

[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]

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.

Sheryl Sandberg messages Mark Zuckerberg

November 8, 2012

[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]

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.