Gabe Newell was an enthusiastic supporter of OpenAI in 2018, donating $20 million and even acting as the sole member of an ‘informal advisory board’

The ongoing Musk v. Altman lawsuit has seen the release of various internal emails relating to OpenAI, which for now are mostly focused on the early years of the company’s founding, over roughly the period 2016-2020. OpenAI wasn’t nearly as prominent as it would later become, but one of the surprising elements is the involvement of Valve founder and CEO Gabe Newell, who seems to have acted as both an “informal advisor” and put his money where his mouth is.

The first email mentioning this is from Shivon Zilis to Elon Musk. Zilis is a tech venture capitalist who held a seat on OpenAI’s board until 2023, and was also romantically involved with Musk: they have four children together. Based on these and other emails, Zilis was both working for OpenAI and providing Musk with the inside track on what was happening.

In an email from Zilis to Musk, sent on April 23 2018, she lists some facts under various headings. Under “Tech” she discusses how OpenAI’s attempts to have its AI beat a five-player team in Dota 2 is “looking better than anticipated” and the uptick in the AI’s performances “is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before.”

Then we move on to “time allocation” where Zilis tells Musk how she’s dividing her time between OpenAI and Neuralink / Tesla, before this paragraph:

“Sam [Altman] and Greg [Brockman] asked if I’d be on their informal advisory board (just Gabe Newell so far) which seems fine and better than the formal board given potential conflicts? If that doesn’t feel right let me know what you’d prefer.”

Newell’s donation to OpenAI was listed on the OpenAI website in 2018, though not detailed, but other submissions show he was clearly on good terms with Musk and also provided some serious cash in the company’s early years. A separate court submission titled “undisputed facts” lists the contributions OpenAI received from people other than Elon Musk over the period 2016-2020.

The second-largest donation listed is “$20,008,279 from Gabe Newell” in 2018, the same period in which Newell was acting as an “informal advisor” to the company. His continued involvement is unclear, though future document releases may clarify this. But as recently as January 2026, Newell contributed an unspecified amount to a funding round for a brain-computer interface company called Merge Labs, which lists OpenAI as an investor and research partner.

In that case, at least, it’s easy to see where Newell’s interests align. He’s the founder of Starfish Neuroscience, which is designing a minimally invasive neural interface chip. In other emails Newell discusses neuroscience interests with Musk.

“For a long time I thought neuromodulation (e.g. rTMS) was weird, mainly because I had an unsophisticated understanding of a bunch of aspects of the brain,” wrote Newell. “I’ve more or less done a 180, and think there is a significant near-term consumer market. Is this something I should bring up with the Neuralink team? If so, anyone in particular I should chat with there?”

Musk gives him some contacts before saying Neuralink has “made some pretty insane technical progress. This is highly confidential, but we’re now able to implant ~6000 electrodes in a monkey brain with decent signal / noise. Moreover, the electronics are compact enough to be flush with the skull and the only thing visible is the USB-C opening and slight surround. Very trippy. Just like Neuromancer.”

The Musk v. Altman lawsuit continues. Among the other revelations are that, after Hideo Kojima visited Valve in 2018, Newell emailed Musk trying to set up a tour of SpaceX for Kojima: who really, really wants to go to space.