What happened
Musk made the comment Thursday, telling followers that the bulk of crypto coins in circulation are scams. The remark landed alongside fresh court filings from his suit against OpenAI, which CryptoBriefing reported include references to internal discussions about a possible initial coin offering during the company's earlier capital-raising work. The publisher described the documents as surfacing in the ongoing case Musk has pursued since 2024 over OpenAI's shift from non-profit to capped-profit.
Neither Musk nor OpenAI has named specific tokens, advisers, or transaction structures in the publicly excerpted material reviewed by CryptoBriefing. Altman has not responded publicly to the ICO references as of Thursday afternoon. The filings themselves are part of a broader docket that has produced a steady drip of disclosures since the suit was refiled.
Why it matters
Musk is not a neutral observer of the token market. He runs xAI, holds Bitcoin and Dogecoin on Tesla's balance sheet, and has spent years swinging crypto sentiment with single posts. When he says most coins are scams, the comment reads less as analysis and more as positioning against an industry that he sees overlapping with his AI rivals.
The OpenAI ICO disclosure, if confirmed in the filings, would matter for a different reason. It revives a question the market thought was buried after 2018: whether marquee tech companies viewed token sales as a legitimate funding path, and what that implies for current AI-token projects raising on the same playbook. The SEC under chair Paul Atkins has signalled a lighter touch than the Gensler-era enforcement push, but securities counsel still treat ICOs structured around equity-like promises as a live risk.
A confirmed paper trail at OpenAI, even from years ago, would give regulators and plaintiffs' lawyers a fresh data point.