Musk's Court Documents Reveal Gabe Newell Once Facilitated an Invitation for Hideo Kojima to Visit SpaceX and OpenAI
A legal dispute between tech giants has unexpectedly revealed an interesting connection between a gaming legend and space exploration dreams. Emails made public due to the lawsuit between Musk and Altman show that Valve founder Gabe Newell personally emailed Elon Musk in 2018, hoping to arrange visits to SpaceX and OpenAI for Hideo Kojima, the creator of "Death Stranding."
The story began when Hideo Kojima visited Valve headquarters in 2018 to discuss his new game. The two sides had a pleasant conversation. Subsequently, in a late October 2018 email to Musk, Gabe Newell wrote:
“Hideo Kojima of the ‘Metal Gear’ series is a true visionary in our field. He was at Valve discussing his new game and mentioned his interest in future work on artificial intelligence. I said I’d be happy to introduce him to the OpenAI team and spoke enthusiastically about their collaborations with us.”
Gabe Newell continued, “The second thing is, he mentioned he really wants to go to space, and I offered to introduce him to you. He’d love to visit SpaceX.”
Musk quickly responded: “Of course, would be great to meet Hideo Kojima, he’s welcome to visit the rocket factory. Just have him send me his email.”
However, by 2020, Hideo Kojima’s dream of going to space had not yet been realized. In an interview with Geoff Keighley, Kojima once again expressed his desire to go to SpaceX with Gabe Newell, to which Musk replied on social media: “Anytime.”
Regarding Kojima’s desire to communicate with OpenAI, Musk expressed early contradictory attitudes towards OpenAI in the email, which seemed to foreshadow his current lawsuit with Altman.
Musk wrote: “Regarding OpenAI, my involvement is now very limited. I still provide some financial support and receive verbal and email updates from Sam Altman every few weeks, but I don’t spend time there. I’ve lost confidence that OpenAI can muster enough resources to effectively compete with Google/Deepmind, so I’ve decided to pursue this through Tesla. We have billions of dollars in cash flow each year to build hardware, hoping for a dark horse chance to keep Google honest. That might be worth a chat sometime.”
Interestingly, Gabe Newell also mentioned his interest in neural modulation technology in the email, asking if he should communicate with the Neuralink team. Musk recommended several contacts to him and revealed some of the progress at the time: “We’ve made some pretty crazy technical advances. Highly confidential, but we’ve now been able to implant about 6000 electrodes into the brain of a monkey, and the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty good. And the electronics are compact enough to be flush with the skull, with only a USB-C port and a slight surrounding contour visible. Very psychedelic, like ‘Neuromancer.’”
It turns out Gabe Newell wasn’t just asking casually. A year later, he founded his own neuroscience company, Starfish Neuroscience, focusing on brain-computer interface technology.