"Let's leverage this position now!!!!"
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Steve Jobs on Real’s music store
On Jan 5, 2004, at 6:25 PM, Jeff Robbin wrote:
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5135382.html?tag=nefd_top
Real to launch song store
RealNetworks is expected to throw its hat into the digital song store ring later this week, releasing a download service based on technology similar to that used in Apple Computer's iTunes store, according to sources familiar with the plans.
From: Steve Jobs
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 6:33 PM
To: Jeff Robbin
Cc: Eddy Cue; Sina Tamaddon; Rob Schoeben; Chris Bell; Peter Lowe; Greg Joswiak; Executive Team
Subject: Re: Real to launch song store
This is great! Benefits to us:
Positions AAC as an open standard and Microsoft's WMA as proprietary.
Positions Real adopting AAC as adding "momentum to a standard that many see as the logical competitor to Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media technology."
Portrays a balkanized world of standards, and portrays this balkanization of standards as an industry problem, not an Apple problem. We are not alone - nobody's stuff is going to work with the other guy's stuff:
"Along with Real, Apple, Microsoft and Sony all offer or plan to offer music wrapped in their own proprietary anticopying technologies. Most of the other song stores proliferating online, including Napster, MusicNow and Musicmatch, use Microsoft's digital audio format."
In this balkanized world, the safest bet is the largest, most successful standard, and today we're it. Let's leverage this position now!!!!
Steve
[This document is from The Apple iPod iTunes Antitrust Litigation (2014).]
Previously: Microsoft execs on Apple’s music store: “We were smoked” (April 30, 2003)
Previously: Steve Jobs on iPod and DRM (May 8, 2003)
Facebook exec on Instagram acquisition
From: Boz
Sent: 4/10/2012 11:23:32 PM
The worry I have with this thread is not that people are underestimating Instagram so much as that they are overestimating Facebook.
For those who are curious, I rank photo tagging as the single most important thing we have ever done, just above internationalization and news feed. I actually expect browse to rank as #4 on that list soon. But all behind #1: photos. And we were getting our ass kicked by this company in mobile photo sharing. I share the concerns of everyone here but, from the economic side, I'm pretty pumped to have them in our corner. We are not too big to be dethroned just as those before us were not.
The question of whether or not a company is worth $1B assumes there is an objective valuation. There is not. Value depends on the buyer. I believe that us buying instagram almost certainly increased our net future value as a company by more than what we paid. If you rewind the clock to 2008 and imagine we had this kind of cash, would we have bought twitter for it? I hope so. If twitter didn't exist today (or existed under our mantle) we'd be worth more than whatever it would have cost us back then. It isn't that they are worth that much -- it is that they can affect how much we are worth by more than that much, if that makes sense.
There is a funny thing that happens with acquisitions. People tend think of them as a done deal and wonder if, in a few years when we look back, they will be successful. This is not a good way to look at it. Whether or not this is a success will depend on all of us and whether we sit back and throw stones or use that energy to help realize the future we hope will exist.
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: "It's a really big deal that we ship this photos app”(September 11, 2011)
Previously: Instagram cofounder on Mark Zuckerberg: “will he go into destroy mode if I say no” (February 13, 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg tries to buy Instagram (Circa March 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: Should we buy Instagram, Foursquare, or Pinterest? (April 5, 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: “last night we reached an agreement to acquire Instagram” (April 9, 2012)
Elon Musk: "The OpenAI Company"
From: Elon Musk
To: Ilya Sutskever; Pamela Vagata; Vicki Cheung; Diederik Kingma; Andrej Karpathy; John D. Schulman; Trevor Blackwell; Greg Brockman
Cc: Sam Altman
Subject: The OpenAI Company
Date: Friday, December 11, 2015 4:41:20 PM
Congratulations on a great beginning!
We are outmanned and outgunned by a ridiculous margin by organizations you know well, but we have right on our side and that counts for a lot. I like the odds.
Our most important consideration is recruitment of the best people. The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it. If we are able to attract the most talented people over time and our direction is correctly aligned, then OpenAI will prevail.
To this end, please give a lot of thought to who should join. If I can be helpful with recruitment or anything else, I am at your disposal. I would recommend paying close attention to people who haven't completed their grad or even undergrad, but are obviously brilliant. Better to have them join before they achieve a breakthrough.
Looking forward to working together,
Elon
[This document is from Elon Musk, et al. v. Samuel Altman, et al. (2025).]
Previously: Sam Altman emails Elon Musk: “If [AI is] going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first” (May 25, 2015)
Previously: Sam Altman emails Elon Musk: “The mission would be to create the first general Al and use it for individual empowerment—ie, the distributed version of the future that seems the safest” (June 24, 2015)