Just came across something interesting in the OpenAI legal filings that shows how wild the crypto landscape was back in 2018. Turns out Elon Musk actually backed a plan for OpenAI to raise around $10 billion through an ico, which is pretty wild when you think about where we are now.

So here's what happened: early 2018, during the peak of the ico boom, Musk was apparently on board with the idea of creating a for-profit arm that would issue tokens to fund OpenAI's nonprofit mission. The internal notes show he was seriously discussing the mechanics of how this would work. But by the end of January that same year, he'd already pulled back. According to the docs, Musk concluded they couldn't raise enough through the ico route and decided to focus his energy on AI work at Tesla instead.

What's fascinating is how this moment captures the entire crypto zeitgeist of 2017-18. Everyone was obsessed with ico fundraising back then, startups were raising billions by just dropping tokens directly to the public, and nobody really knew what the regulatory landscape would look like. It felt like the wild west compared to traditional venture capital. Even mainstream tech figures like Musk were seriously considering ico structures as a legitimate funding mechanism.

Musk's exit from OpenAI later that year ended up shaping the whole organization differently. Instead of going the ico token route, they ended up building this hybrid model combining a public benefit corporation with a controlling nonprofit, which is still their structure today.

Meanwhile, it's wild to see how the ico model has evolved. Speaking of transformations, I noticed Bitmine Immersion Technologies basically pivoted from pure mining into running a leveraged Ethereum treasury strategy. They've been aggressively accumulating ether and now hold nearly 5% of all ETH. That's a different kind of ico-era thinking adapted for today's market.

The whole thing just reminds you how fast crypto narratives shift. What seemed like the future in 2018 gets abandoned, then different models emerge. Makes you wonder what we're currently betting on that'll look quaint in a few years.