Short answers, pulled from the story.
OpenAI emerged as a not-for-profit organization in Delaware on the 1st of December 2015. Sam Altman and Elon Musk served as co-chairs alongside Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba.
In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit status to become a capped-for-profit entity. This model allowed profit to be capped at 100 times any investment while enabling OpenAI Global LLC to legally attract venture fund investment.
Authors Sarah Silverman, Matthew Butterick, Paul Tremblay, and Mona Awad sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in July 2023. Seventeen authors including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and Jonathan Franzen joined the Authors Guild filing a class action lawsuit in September 2023.
Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman on the 29th of February 2024. He accused them of shifting focus from public benefit to profit maximization before OpenAI dismissed the case as incoherent and frivolous.
In October 2024, OpenAI completed a $6.6 billion capital raise achieving a $157 billion valuation. The funding included investments from Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank.