Just came across something pretty wild from OpenAI's early days. Turns out Elon Musk was actually on board with an ICO idea back in 2018 to help fund the organization. We're talking about a $10 billion token offering during the height of the ICO craze.

According to internal notes that came out through legal filings, Musk and the OpenAI founders were seriously discussing how to set up a for-profit arm with an ICO structure to support the nonprofit's mission. This was January 2018, when everyone and their mom was launching tokens and raising insane amounts of money. The mechanics were apparently being worked out, and Musk seemed genuinely interested in the approach.

But here's where it gets interesting—by the end of that month, Musk had already backed away from the whole thing. The reasoning? He figured OpenAI wouldn't be able to raise enough capital through an ICO anyway, so he pivoted his focus to AI work at Tesla instead. And not long after, he left OpenAI entirely.

The whole episode is a fascinating window into how even mainstream tech figures were thinking about token-based fundraising at that moment. ICOs were absolutely everywhere in 2017-18 before regulators started cracking down and the market got way more volatile. Startups were raising billions by selling tokens directly to retail investors, and nobody really knew what the rules were going to be.

What's interesting now is looking back at how seriously people considered the ICO model, even for a project like OpenAI. The fact that Musk entertained it, even briefly, shows how pervasive that thinking was. Of course, the organization ended up going a completely different route—combining a public benefit corporation with a controlling nonprofit, which is the structure they still use today.

Meanwhile, completely separate story but kind of relevant to the crypto evolution: there's this company Bitmine Immersion Technologies that basically flipped from being a mining operation into running an Ethereum treasury strategy. They've doubled their share count in six months and accumulated nearly 5% of all ether. They're holding 4.87 million ether at an average cost of around $2,206 per token. Pretty wild to see how the industry has evolved from pure mining into these hybrid treasury plays.