Thanks to the ongoing trial pitting billionaires Elon Musk and Sam Altman against each other, it’s come to light that Valve founder Gabe Newell–the third billionaire in this story–emailed Musk to ask if Hideo Kojima could get a tour of SpaceX.
In an email from October 2018, Newell wrote to Musk telling him that Kojima really wants to go to space. Newell thought Musk–who runs SpaceX–might be a good person to talk to. “He’d love to get a SpaceX tour,” Newell wrote to Musk, according to PC Gamer.
Musk wrote back to Newell, saying, “Sure, it would be great to meet Hideo Kojima and he’s welcome to see the rocket factory.” Whether or not Kojima actually got this tour is unknown, however.
Kojima wrote in his book The Creative Gene that if he could have just one wish granted to him in life, it would be to go to space. He said he doesn’t need to go to the moon or Mars; a “brief orbit” beyond Earth’s atmosphere would suffice, he said. “I would give up anything to make that wish come true: my current place as a game designer, which I’ve built up for forty-five years; I’m even prepared to throw away my family or my own life. That is how powerfully I–or rather we–yearn for the cosmos.”
Newell and Musk also discussed AI in their emails, with Newell telling Musk that Kojima is a big believer in AI for the future of work. This is presumably why these emails were made public in the case, because Musk wrote back and said things about OpenAI and Altman that lawyers may reference in the trial.
Musk said to Newell in the 2018 email that his involvement with OpenAI at the time was “very limited,” saying he continued to provide “some financial support” and had verbal and email updates with Altman every few weeks. “I lost confidence that OpenAI could muster the resources to serve as an effective counterweight to Google / Deepmind and decided to attempt that through Tesla instead,” he said.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and others in 2015, at which time it was run as a non-profit. Musk sued OpenAI and Altman in 2024 over the shift to a for-profit business model, among other things. OpenAI countersued the same year, accusing Musk of “bad-faith tactics.” The trial finally began this week in California.
As for Newell, he’s a billionaire with a fleet of yachts, including one that he works from. Despite his immense riches, he still gets out there and talks to fans, as he personally delivered Steam Decks back in 2022.