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Musk is still describing how his feelings about OpenAI shifted slowly. He says he wasn’t initially bothered by a deal with Microsoft. His understanding was that “Microsoft had agreed to be involved in a capped-profit way … to essentially provide some funding and compute” — but he describes a capped profit structure as still something that would put nonprofit interests first. He says he understood that the deal “would dissolve upon the discovery of AGI … which I thought was probably okay.” Did Microsoft contribute a large sum? “It depends on your definition of large but it wasn’t trivial.”

Musk answers questions about how much his own companies Tesla and xAI compete with OpenAI. Tesla is “not directly competitive with OpenAI,” he says, because it’s pursuing “real-world AI” related to driving: “literally just trying to make the car drive from A to B safely.” xAI is “technically competitive but much smaller than OpenAI” — it’s pursuing AGI but has only “a few hundred people compared to several thousand for OpenAI.” He acknowledges at least one OpenAI employee (Andrej Karpathy) has joined Tesla but says he can’t recall if there were more.

When asked again about Shivon Zilis, he said clearly, “We live together and she’s the mother of four of my children,” a thing he could not summon up yesterday.

Musk says he continued to send money to OpenAI on an assumption of good faith. “I was a little unsettled, but I took their reassurances that OpenAI would be a nonprofit at face value. I assumed they were telling the truth,” he says. He says he donated $5 million quarterly and paid $3 million a year in rent for the main office building for “some period of time,” possibly through 2020. It was only around late 2022, he says, that he concluded OpenAI was really breaking the deal they’d made.

Musk shows the jury an email where Sutskever mentions “several important concerns” about Musk’s proposed ownership structure, amounting to a fear that Musk could hold unilateral control over AGI. “My impression here was that they had gone back on what they had agreed on previously,” Musk says. The upshot is that he was a “fool who provided free funding,” he continues. “I gave them $38 million of essentially free funding, which they used to create an $800 bil for-profit company … My intention in providing funding was that it would be a nonprofit that no one would own any stock in.” But at the time, he says, Altman assured him OpenAI was sticking to a nonprofit structure. “I was foolish enough to believe them.”

The Moto Buds 2 Plus will cost $149 — $20 more than the Moto Buds Plus released in 2024. The new buds will have Sound by Bose, two 11mm dynamic drivers with a Knowles balanced armature, support the LHDC5 low-latency audio codec, as well as Moto AI with compatible Motorola phones.

As he did yesterday, Musk discusses how he initially wanted majority ownership of OpenAI that would be diluted over time, showing an email between him, Sutskever, and Brockman. “I needed to make sure it would go in the right direction and I was also providing the vast majority of the capital,” Musk says. As for Altman, Musk says “initially he said he was supportive, but my understanding is that he then convinced Greg and Ilya to go against this proposal.” He recalls that “I think we talked about Sam and I being co-chairs” during these discussions — but discussion of who would hold the CEO title? “I don’t recall.”

Still discussing his relationship with OpenAI employees in glowing terms, the notoriously difficult-to-work-for Musk is asked if he ever called one a “jackass.” Musk says maybe, but not in anger — “I don’t lose my temper” and “I don’t yell at people,” he says. He’s emphasized that his overall interactions at OpenAI were “excellent.”

On the stand for a second day, Musk is still aiming to establish his importance at OpenAI. We’re seeing emails from Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman in which they lavish praise on Musk. From Sutskever, for instance:

continued Musk under questioning, saying, “I chose not to. I chose to create something that would be a charity, and I could have absolutely created — just like I created my other company — and I would have owned a huge portion of the company.”