Internal Tech Emails

Internal Tech Emails

@techemails.bsky.social

Internal tech industry emails that surface in public records. πŸ” https://techemails.com

8,499 Followers 136 Following 82 Posts Joined Apr 2023
3 days ago

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

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3 days ago
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Mark Zuckerberg: "I wonder if we should consider buying Instagram"

February 11, 2012

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2 months ago

[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

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2 months ago
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2 months ago
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Sam Altman texts Elon Musk

February 18, 2023

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4 months ago

[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2025).]

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4 months ago
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

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4 months ago

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

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4 months ago
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

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5 months ago

[This document is from U.S. v. Holmes (2022).]

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5 months ago
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Elizabeth Holmes's schedule

Circa 2005–2009

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7 months ago

[This document is from OpenAI v. Open Artificial Intelligence (2025).]

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7 months ago
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

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7 months ago

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

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7 months ago
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

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7 months ago

[This document is from OpenAI v. Open Artificial Intelligence (2025).]

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7 months ago
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
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7 months ago
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

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7 months ago

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

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7 months ago
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

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8 months ago

[This document is from In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (2011).]

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8 months ago
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
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8 months ago
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

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9 months ago

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

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9 months ago
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

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9 months ago

[This document is from U.S. v. Google (2024) (1:20-cv-03010).]

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9 months ago
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Draft: "ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy"

December 2, 2024

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9 months ago
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 β€” it's just ChatGPT.

OpenAI's strategy for ChatGPT

December 2, 2024

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10 months ago

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

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10 months ago
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

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