OpenAI kicked off an AI revolution with DALL-E and ChatGPT, making the organization the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI became a story unto itself when Altman was briefly fired and then brought back after pressure from staff and Microsoft, an investor and close partner.
It’s dangerous to tell a courtroom ‘I don’t lose my temper.’
I’ve just left the court after one of the most tiresome cross-examinations I have ever had the misfortune to witness. Elon Musk really wants us to think he’s just a poor simple country CEO, who is being maliciously tricked by a big-city lawyer. I’m not buying it and I don’t think the jury is, either
Well there goes all my fun! I was so excited to hear about Mechahilter in open court — and, in addition, Sam Altman apologizing to a Canadian town for OpenAI not flagging a mass shooter. But since Musk did bring up the difference in for-profit and not-for profit motives, there is a limited line of questioning that can proceed.
There are a few matters the lawyers want to discuss with YGR. Musk’s testimony may have opened the door to questions about xAI and its safety record. I do love hearing the phrase “opened the door.”
Savitt hasn’t significantly raised the issue yet, but he’s started hinting at the idea that Musk’s safety-last approach at xAI might undercut his credibility. He asks Musk if it’s important to instill good values in AI systems, and after Musk agrees, asks if racist or sexist training materials could have a negative impact. Musk says systems wouldn’t necessarily absorb those values, and Savitt follows up to mention AI discrimination — and more specifically, an anti-algorithmic discrimination law in Colorado that Musk and xAI have been fighting against.
Savitt also asks whether, if Musk is concerned that a profit motive undermines AI safety, that applies to his own xAI. Musk says sure, it’s an issue across the board.
Savitt briefly explores a line of questioning about Grok, but it ends quickly. (It could be brought up for discussion later.) He moves on to asking about Musk’s purported commitment to care deeply about AI safety. Has Musk ever posted on Twitter/X about AI regulation? Musk doesn’t know off the top of his head. Savitt also sounds dubious of the idea that Musk spoke with Obama about AI safety, asking if there are any press reports or statements from the White House. Then, Savitt asks if Musk has spoken with the current president about the issue, especially since the former White House AI czar, David Sacks, is one of Musk’s fellow Paypal Mafia members.
Elon Musk is trying to outlawyer the lawyer on cross. At one point YGR has to intervene to get him to answer a yes or no question with “yes.” At another, he raised his voice to lecture Savett — not sure if the jury noticed the, uh, well it wasn’t quite yelling but it came pretty close.
Savitt asks Musk about a term sheet for OpenAI’s for-profit shift, which Sam Altman sent Musk to examine in 2018, and Musk admits “I didn’t read the whole document.” (It’s apparently four pages long.) The attorney then brings up a deposition in which Musk says multiple times that he doesn’t think he read it or looked closely at it. Musk gets testy and raises his voice as he’s asked to identify any communications where he objects to the proposed changes in 2018 or 2019. He repeats, once more, that he’s okay with a nonprofit having a capped for-profit arm — which Savitt says isn’t his question.
Through several more rounds of crosstalk, Savitt tries to ask Musk if he was open to OpenAI being for-profit in 2017 and had discussions about it. “I’ll withdraw the question,” he says finally.
According to messages between Musk and Zilis, Musk thought OpenAI stood essentially zero chance of succeeding against Google Deepmind, particularly if he focused on AI at Tesla. Zilis remained close with OpenAI and apparently offered Musk updates, including on its for-profit plans. Savitt mentions, again, that Musk didn’t object to information about this for-profit shift at the time — and again, Musk says he didn’t have an issue with a capped for-profit structure that would flow into a nonprofit.
He calls it one of several companies working toward the goal and likely not the one that will win the race. Savitt goes back to Tesla briefly, noting that Musk apparently hoped to build it into an AI powerhouse at one point. He displays an email Musk sent to Gabe Newell about OpenAI, saying he “lost confidence” that OpenAI would serve as an effective counterweight to Google Deepmind and decided to attempt that through Tesla instead.
After a quick breather, Musk is on the stand again — now the topic is SpaceX, which xAI has been rolled into. The company is preparing for an IPO later this year. Musk says he can’t answer questions about SpaceX because of this.
Altman’s lawyer mentions Musk building an “AI-enabled robot army” while talking about the proposal to merge Tesla and OpenAI. Musk jumps in, saying he wants to make clear that while he has in fact referred to running a “robot army” at the company, he did not mean the term “robot army” in a “military sense.” Glad we’ve cleared that up.
Musk is not terribly happy with Savitt, who continues to run through the history of entanglements between Musk’s own companies and OpenAI. After telling Musk that “I’m trying to put the questions as fairly as I can, I’m doing my best,” (“That is not true,” Musk responds) Savitt brings up a deposition where Musk said he’d discussed a merger between Tesla and OpenAI. In email exhibits, Karpathy (who’d been hired away to Tesla by then) suggests OpenAI is burning cash and its funding structure won’t let it compete with Google, saying the best path forward might be “a for profit pivot” and attaching itself to Tesla. Any other big tech player, Karpathy said, could suffer from “incompatible company DNA.”
Musk previously mentioned that he hired researcher Andrej Karpathy at Tesla when he left OpenAI. Savitt asks whether, as a member of the OpenAI board at the time, he had a responsibility to suggest Karpathy stay at OpenAI and avoid poaching. “I think people should have a right to work where they want to work,“ Musk responds. A 2017 email suggests Musk knew how important Karpathy was:
“Just talked to Andrej and he accepted joining as director of Tesla Vision…. Andrej is arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision after Ilya. The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me but it had to be done.”
Musk also apparently authorized another company he owned to hire from OpenAI while on its board, telling people at Neuralink that “I have no problem if you pitch people at OpenAI to work at Neuralink.” Musk protests the characterization. “He is misstating my email, I’m simply saying if they want to try to recruit people from OpenAI or any other company including Tesla or SpaceX,” they can do so, Musk says. “It’s a free country.”
Musk quibbles his way through a line of questioning from Savitt, who asks if he was aware that cutting off most funding to OpenAI in 2017 would create financial pressure as OpenAI sought to get more compute. Musk repeats multiple times that he was losing faith in OpenAI, he was concerned they were going in the wrong direction, and that’s why he ended his donations. Savitt and Musk then spar over how much “sweat equity” Musk accrued at OpenAI — Savitt notes, for instance, he didn’t write the code for a consequential project where OpenAI’s bots learned to beat humans at DOTA 2. Musk retorts that he called Satya Nadella to get compute for the project and suggested focusing on it. “I got along with almost everyone almost all the time,” he adds.
Savitt is asking Musk about the equity discussions — the ones where Musk wanted initial control of OpenAI. Musk acknowledges his plan would have given him unilateral decision-making power at first but says that’s “standard practice.” He reiterates that it would have changed quickly as more investors joined up and insisted on board seats; over time, he says, he’d have had to relinquish control.
Musk is still fending off questions about various messages where he’s mentioned the possibility of a for-profit component at OpenAI, like an email to associates at Neuralink in 2016:
“Deepmind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.”
Musk says “I’m simply speculating here with people at Neuralink” here, calling the discussion hypothetical. He also brushes off a separate email chain where Greg Brockman mentions a for-profit structure and Musk doesn’t object, saying as long as “the for-profit is in service to the non-profit, it’s not breaking a promise.”
In an email a month before OpenAI was incorporated, Musk apparently wrote to Altman suggesting that “a standard c-corp with a parallel nonprofit” could work for the entity. Questioning about this quickly runs off the rails as Musk starts accusing Savitt of trying to “trick” him, comparing his questions to asking Musk if he’s stopped beating his wife. Judge Gonzalez Rogers is having none of this and cuts him off.
“Your questions are not simple, they are designed to trick me, essentially. If you ask a question where there is no possible simple answer, I must give a longer answer.”
Musk concedes that he mentioned a billion-dollar commitment to OpenAI, but the actual number he contributed fell far short of that — in his telling, because he lost faith in the mission. “I contributed my reputation, which nobody else was aware of at the time, these things all have value, without me it would not exist, I came up with the name, which means open source,” he says — but Gonzalez Rogers directs him to actually answer the question. “In monetary terms, I contributed $38 million,” he concludes. A deposition indicates his last $5 million quarterly contribution was in May of 2017, and he stopped paying for rent in 2020.
Savitt brings up another X post, this one from 2023, where Musk says “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit.” The deposition indicates Musk was mistaken in the $100 million number, but he maintains on the stand that “I think $38 million was a lot of money.”
Savitt starts off by pushing on Musk’s comments minimizing how much his businesses compete with OpenAI. Earlier today Musk downplayed Tesla’s AI ambitions, but Savitt pulls up a 2026 X post saying that “Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form.” Musk says that in the long term, Tesla will likely achieve this, but that it’s not making AGI right now.
Altman’s attorney William Savitt will be conducting cross-examination of Musk — who’s apparently a popular enough target for unauthorized courtroom photography that Judge Gonzalez Rogers just scolded spectators for it again.
We have been scolded now twice today for people trying to take photos or videos in the courthouse. Do not do that.
The testimony is reaching 2023, when Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI, hired by Microsoft, and then returned to his original position. Musk says:
“The OpenAI board concluded that Altman and perhaps Brockman, but certainly Altman, had been deceptive and that they had not been truthful about a lot of things, that Altman had failed to disclose his ownership of OpenAI associated companies, where he benefitted financially from companies that were associated with OpenAI, and that he had not been truthful to the board.”
The commentary is struck for a lack of foundation — it’s not clear how Musk knows it.
Musk says he was alarmed upon hearing about a $10 billion investment from Microsoft around 2022. “I reacted quite negatively because at a 10 billion scale there’s no way Microsoft is just giving that as a donation or any charitable way,” he says. He texted Altman that “I was disturbed to see OpenAI with a $20B valuation. De facto. I provided almost all the seed, A and B round funding.” An exhibit shows Altman responded: “I agree this feels bad, we offered you equity when we established the cap profit but you didn’t want at the time which we are still very happy to do any time you’d like.” Musk says he asked for a legal investigation and at this point had lost faith in OpenAI.
Musk describes his relationship with OpenAI in three phases: one that was “enthusiastically supportive”, a second where he became “uncertain,” and a third where “I’m sure they’re looting the nonprofit.” He’s asked whether Altman reached out about Musk’s public comments and mentions a time when Musk showed concern on Twitter over OpenAI granting Microsoft an exclusive license for GPT-3. “Sam Altman immediately reached out to reassure me that OpenAI was staying on mission as a non-profit,” Musk says.
A text message from Altman reads: “Saw your feedback on Twitter last week… happy to talk about this if you like but there’s no way we can hold a candle to DeepMind without many billions of dollars.” Altman tells Musk that Microsoft is the best way to get that with the least compromise: “we still retain autonomy to release our work ourselves. We can and will continue to provide API access to the most powerful language model in existence to everyone.”
In discussing one of Musk’s Twitter posts about Open AI, Musk says that OpenAI’s lawyers “were trying to trick the jury” in the opening statements.
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 non-profit 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.”
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:
“I enjoy working together. You quickly pushed me out of my academic comfort zone. With time I grew to appreciate the vast depth of your strategic Insight… It helps that we have the most overwhelmingly competent person in the world helping us.”
Brockman comments about “mistakes” being made in the “hard year” of 2017 and also gets effusive:
“In every meeting with you I continue to learn, grow and see the world in a new way. I particularly admire your clarity of purpose… and that you stick to what’s right rather than what’s easy.”
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.”
Elon Musk is going over emails from the evidence, saying that “everyone was in complete agreement” that fundamentally, OpenAI would be a charity.
