The return of Elon Musk on the witness stand Wednesday to continue telling his side of the story in his legal battle against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. During questioning by OpenAI lawyers, Musk was pressed on all the ways he tried to pressure the organization over a 2017 power struggle that he ultimately lost. Around that time, Musk tried to hire OpenAI researchers and stopped sending him previously promised funds, according to emails submitted as evidence in the case.
As the hearing began, tension rose in the courtroom. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers started the day by reprimanding a person in the gallery for taking a photo of Musk. OpenAI CEO and co-founder Greg Brockman sat behind his lawyers with a yellow legal pad on his lap and shot Musk a chilly stare as he testified. Musk became visibly frustrated during the witness stand, frequently stopping to tell OpenAI lawyer William Savitt that he found his questions misleading. Meanwhile, Savitt’s hearing was thwarted by objections, technical problems, and Musk continually claiming he couldn’t remember key details of OpenAI’s history.
Savitt showed the courtroom emails from September 2017 between Musk, Altman, Brockman and researcher Ilya Sutskever discuss the creation of what will become the for-profit arm of OpenAI. In the thread, Musk claimed the right to elect four board members, which would give him more voting power than his co-founders, who would be left with a total of three. “I would undoubtedly have control of the company initially, but that will change quickly,” Musk said in one message. Sutskever wrote back, rejecting the idea because he feared it would give Musk too much power.
Months before negotiations began, Musk stopped payments to OpenAI, which was particularly tough for the organization because he was its main source of funding at the time. Since 2016, Musk has sent quarterly payments of $5 million to OpenAI as part of a broader $1 billion pledge he made to launch the organization. However, in the spring of 2017, he stopped sending money. In another email from August 2017, Musk’s family office chief Jared Birchall asked Musk whether he should continue to withhold the information. Musk replied simply: “Yes.”
In October 2017, shortly after Musk lost his power struggle, emails show he was in talks with executives at Tesla and Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, about hiring OpenAI employees. At that time, Musk was still a member of the OpenAI board.
Musk emailed one of Tesla’s vice presidents regarding the hiring of early OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy. “I just spoke with Andrej and he has agreed to become the director of Tesla Vision,” Musk wrote. “Andrej is probably number 2 in the world in computer vision… The Openai guys will try to kill me, but it had to be done.”
At the booth, Musk argued that Karpathy was already interested in leaving OpenAI when he tried to recruit him to Tesla. “Andrej has made a decision. If he’s going to leave OpenAI, he might as well work at Tesla,” Musk said.
That same month, Musk also wrote to Ben Rapoport, co-founder of Neuralink. “Hire independently or directly from OpenAI,” Musk said. “I have no problem if you invite people from OpenAI to work at Neuralink.”
Pressed on this matter by Savitt, Musk argued that it would be illegal for him to prevent Tesla and Neuralink from hiring employees at OpenAI. “It’s illegal to restrict employment. It would be illegal to say you can’t hire people from OpenAI. You can’t have some cabal that stops people from working at the company they want to work for,” Musk said.