Law

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:

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:

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 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.

We’ll be back with more from Musk soon.

The testimony is reaching 2023, when Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI, hired by Microsoft, and then returned to his original position. Musk says:

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.

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:

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.

Musk is on the stand to continue his direct examination. He’s wearing a black suit with a black tie, same as yesterday.

There are no photos or recordings allowed in the federal courthouse.

Elon Musk sat down, and Greg Brockman is here. I don’t see Sam Altman. The jurors will be seated shortly.

We’re done for the day.

“You seem to suggest OpenAI did not refer to open source,” YGR says. But that may conflict with what was said in another case. “I would suggest you talk to Quinn Emanuel and perhaps look at the prosecution history” about the origin of the name. “Do not take inconsistent positions in front of me.”

Musk and his attorney are going over emails about the equity split at OpenAI. Musk describes his cofounders’ demands for a four-way split as “unfair,” saying “it wouldn’t make sense to create a company that has an equal split — if one of the founders is also providing all the money.” He wanted a larger ownership stake that would dilute over time, he says, partly to make sure OpenAI was going in a direction he considered safe.

Musk describes various plans that the group batted around for making money at OpenAI, including a “small adjunct” for-profit and other ideas. “One of the ideas that was proposed was a cryptocoin issuance — but I was against that because it sounded kinda scammy,” Musk says.

Musk tells the court that “at various times we discussed, we brainstormed about different ways to fund the charity,” including a for-profit structure. “We did talk about establishing a for-profit or Tesla providing some of the funding — there were a bunch of ideas that were brainstormed — I was not averse to a small for-profit that would provide funding to the nonprofit as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.” These were “informal verbal conversations and email and text discussions” between Musk, Brockman, Altman, and Sutskever, he recalls.

Musk is trying to establish how instrumental he was to getting Huang and Nvidia to supply OpenAI with hardware. “I was asking Jensen for access to the first AI supercomputers they were making,” he says — referring to Nvidia’s DGX lineup — as an exhibit of a 2016 email conversation enters the record. “This was the first AI supercomputer ever developed and it would make a huge difference to OpenAI if we could get one … I wanted to be clear with Jensen that this was — I’m emailing from my Tesla email here, but I wanted to be clear this is not a Tesla request.” The conversation shows Huang promised “I will make sure OAI is one of the first ones” to get one.

“I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding, besides that nothing,” he says (to a few chuckles in the courtroom). “It was specifically meant to be a charity that does not benefit any individual person. I could have chosen to start it as a for-profit and I chose not to.” He calls himself “instrumental in recruiting Ilya Sutskever and most of the initial team.”

Through email exhibits and testimony, Musk emphasizes he believed OpenAI would be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that would “aim to bring in more money than it spends, and in doing so, that becomes cash reserves or savings” for the charity. “I was fundamentally involved” in the announcement, he says — “reviewed and drafted part of the announcement, reviewed the webpage, and did media interviews and whatnot.” Throughout this, he indicates, Musk thought he and Altman were on the same page.

“To be clear I would have created a nonprofit open source foundation with or without Sam Altman or [OpenAI cofounder] Greg Brockman, but at the time I was glad they were doing so with me,” he says. The name came about “as the result of discussions with Greg, Sam, and Ilya [Sutskever]. We bounced around a few different names, the one I thought made sense was OpenAI because the ‘open’ in OpenAI represents open source.” (A lack of open source releases, of course, is one of Musk’s bones to pick with OpenAI.)