As the interrogation began, tension prevailed in the courtroom. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers began her day by reprimanding someone in the gallery for taking a photo of Musk. Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, sat behind his lawyers with a yellow legal pad on his lap and gave Musk a cold stare as he testified. Musk appeared visibly frustrated on the witness stand, pausing frequently to tell OpenAI’s lawyer, William Savitt, that he found his questions misguided. Meanwhile, Savit’s questioning was derailed by objections, technical issues, and Musk’s persistent claim that he didn’t remember key details of OpenAI’s history.
Savitt showed courtroom emails from September 2017 between Musk, Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever discussing the formation of what would become OpenAI’s for-profit arm. In the matter, Musk claimed the right to choose four members to its board, giving him more voting power than his founders, who would be left with three in total. “I will have unequivocal primary control of the company, but that will change quickly,” Musk said in one message. Sutskever dismissed the idea because he said he feared it would give Musk too much power.
Months before these negotiations began, Musk halted payments to OpenAI, which was particularly difficult for the organization because it was then its main source of funding. Since 2016, Musk has been sending $5 million in payments to OpenAI quarterly as part of a broader $1 billion pledge he made at the organization’s launch. But in the spring of 2017, he stopped sending money. In another email dating back to August 2017, Jared Birchall, head of Musk’s family office, asked Musk if he should continue to withhold this money. Musk simply replied: “Yes.”
At the time Musk lost the power struggle, emails show he had discussions with executives at Tesla and Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, about hiring employees for OpenAI. At the time, Musk was still on OpenAI’s board of directors.
Musk sent an email to a Tesla vice president in June 2017 about hiring Andrei Karpathy, one of the first researchers at OpenAI. “Just spoke with Andre before joining as director of Tesla Vision,” Musk wrote. “Andre is arguably the world’s No. 2 computer vision guy… Onai’s men would want to kill me, but it had to be done.”
On stage, Musk said Karpathy was already interested in leaving OpenAI when he tried to hire him at Tesla. “Andre has made his decision. If he’s leaving OpenAI, he might as well work at Tesla,” Musk said.
In October 2017, Musk also wrote to Ben Rapoport, co-founder of Neuralink. “Hire independently or directly from OpenAI,” Musk said. “I have no problem if you offer people in OpenAI to work on Neuralink.”
When pressed on the matter by Savitt, Musk said it would be illegal for him not to allow Tesla and Neuralink to hire from OpenAI. “Restricting hiring is illegal. 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 the company they want to work for,” Musk said.
