Elon Musk is back for witnesses on Wednesday to continue to explain his side of the story in his legal battle against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. Under cross-examination by OpenAI’s lawyers, Musk was pressed on all the ways he tried to pressure the organization over a 2017 power struggle that he ultimately lost. Around this time, Musk tried to hire OpenAI researchers and stopped sending it the funding he had previously promised, according to emails submitted as evidence in the case.
As the interview began, tension rose in the courtroom. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers started the day by reprimanding someone in the gallery for taking a picture of Musk. OpenAI’s president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, sat behind his lawyers with a yellow legal pad in his lap, staring coldly at Musk as he testified. Musk became increasingly agitated on the witness stand, stopping repeatedly to tell OpenAI’s attorney, William Savitt, that he found his questions misleading. Meanwhile, Savitt’s investigation was interrupted by objections, technical issues, and Musk continuing to claim that he does not remember important details of OpenAI’s history.
Savitt showed the courtroom email from September 2017 between Musk, Altman, Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever discussing the creation of what will be the for-profit arm of OpenAI. In the thread, Musk claimed the right to choose four members of the board of directors, giving him more voting power than his founders, who would be left with three in total. “I would have had initial control of the company, but this will change quickly,” Musk said in a message. Sutskever responded by rejecting the idea because he said he feared it would give Musk too much power.
Months before these talks began, Musk had suspended payments to OpenAI, which was difficult for the organization because at the time he was its main source of funding. Since 2016, Musk has been sending $5 million in payments to OpenAI every quarter as part of an overall $1 billion pledge he made at the organization’s launch. But in the spring of 2017, he stopped sending money. In another email from August 2017, the head of Musk’s family office, Jared Birchall, asked Musk if he should continue to block it. Musk answered simply, “Yes.”
In October 2017, shortly after Musk lost the power struggle, emails show that he held discussions with executives at Tesla and Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, about hiring OpenAI employees. At the time, Musk was still a board member of OpenAI.
Musk emailed Tesla’s vice president about hiring early OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy. “I just spoke with Andrej and he agreed to join as director of Tesla Vision,” Musk wrote. “Andrej is definitely the #2 guy in the world in computer vision… The openai guys want to kill me, but it had to be done.”
On the stand, Musk said that Karpathy was already interested in leaving OpenAI when he tried to sign him to Tesla. “Andrej had made his decision. If he leaves OpenAI, he can also work for Tesla,” Musk said.
That same month, Musk also wrote to Ben Rapoport, co-founder of Neuralink. “Employ independently or directly from OpenAI,” Musk said. “I have no problem if you put people at OpenAI to work at Neuralink.”
When pressed about this by Savitt, Musk said that it would be illegal for him not to allow Tesla and Neuralink to hire from OpenAI. “It’s illegal to impose employment restrictions. It would be illegal to say you can’t hire people from OpenAI. You can’t have a cabal that prevents people from working at a company they want to work for,” Musk said.
