I recently came across an OpenAI document that mentioned Elon Musk’s changing attitude toward ico, and I found it quite interesting. In mid-January 2018, he actually supported OpenAI’s first token issuance to raise $10 billion, and even congratulated the progress of the fundraising. But less than two weeks later, by the end of January, he changed his stance—he directly said he would no longer support the ico plan, and even believed that OpenAI was “destined to fail” compared with Google. By February, he had gone further, judging that OpenAI couldn’t raise enough funding, and then immediately resigned from the board, turning his focus to Tesla’s AGI development.

Interestingly, this timing actually corresponds to a key market turning point. In mid-January 2018, the entire crypto market was going through drastic changes—Bitcoin began to fall sharply after reaching nearly $20,000 in December 2017, and the market entered the early stages of a bear market. At the same time, the ico bubble also began to burst: large numbers of projects varied widely in quality, regulatory risks kept flaring up, and investor confidence dropped rapidly. Regulatory bodies such as the US SEC increased their scrutiny, mainstream platforms began restricting crypto-related advertising, and the whole industry quickly shifted from the previous frenzy of fundraising to contraction.

So Musk’s change in attitude, to some extent, also reflected the shift in market sentiment. In that period, ico as a fundraising method indeed lost its appeal—not only did OpenAI abandon the plan, but the entire market began re-evaluating the viability of this model.