I sat in Musk v. Altman The courtroom today, painfully aware that no one would ask Chiffon Zillis the question on everyone’s mind: Hey girl, what the the curse You a job?
Zillis, who testified under oath that she is the mother of four of Musk’s children, was… what’s the best way to describe it? Musk’s advisor? She denies that she was a “chief of staff” but says she worked on Musk’s “entire AI portfolio: Tesla, Neuralink, and OpenAI” starting in 2017. The two met through OpenAI, and had what she refers to as a “one-time meeting” before becoming “friends and colleagues.” She confirmed that the “only meeting” was “romantic in nature.”
Her job under Musk was to “find and solve bottlenecks,” and she claims she worked 80 to 100 hours a week to do so. “It was just bananas,” she said. Her first two children with Musk – twins – were born in 2021, while Zelis was serving on OpenAI’s board of directors. She kept this a secret. She didn’t even tell the council who the father was Business insider It was stated in court documents that Musk was the father.
“My first call was to my father,” said Zillis, who testified that even her own family did not know the children’s paternity. “The call right after that was to Sam Altman.” Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, testified that he found out about the Zelis children from news reports. When he talked to her about it, she claimed that her relationship with Musk was “platonic” and that she had conceived the children via artificial insemination. That was reassurance enough for Brockman, who has been friends with her since 2013. She remains on the board.
On the podium, Zelis spoke calmly and quickly. She looked like a rat. A big part of what made her testimony so bad for Musk was that she seemed like the only person taking notes on what Brockman, Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Musk were discussing when the founders considered their options for creating a for-profit arm of OpenAI. It also “assisted and facilitated communication between key parties.” These notes are the most important evidence in the trial, even more important than Brockman’s memoirs.
The purpose of the direct testimony appears to be to remove the effect of what Zillis and the plaintiff’s attorney should have known was coming. So, she told the court, her role also meant telling Altman when Musk was “in the right frame of mind” to have a conversation – perhaps inadvertently corroborating Brockman’s testimony yesterday that he at one point feared Musk would physically attack him – while she vehemently denied that she passed information to Musk.
Look, she and Musk testified that they lived together, had a romantic relationship, and had four children. She was originally the plaintiff in the lawsuit. She kept her children’s paternity a secret From her father. All of these things would be reason enough to doubt her testimony about the belief that OpenAI betrayed its mission during the chaos that saw Altman’s ouster by the board. She claimed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something to the effect of “we are above them, we are below them, we are around them” during that chaotic period as “terrifying.” (The quote was “We are below them, above them, and around them.”)
But the notes are actually what Musk’s case addressed. Try as she might, Zelis couldn’t explain it.
There were a lot of ideas thrown around in 2017 and 2018. We’ve seen a lot of Zellis emails from that period. It is worth noting that in one of the options there was an option to “turn profitable in the next two weeks (wow quickly!).” Another email noted that the “completely non-negotiable agreement” for Altman, Brockman and Sutskever “represents a strict agreement that Elon (or no one) will have an absolute right.” [sic] Control the AGI they create. “They say they won’t move forward without guarantees to get out of his control,” she wrote in another letter to Jared Birchall, Musk’s money manager. “You and I can say this is stupid, all we want, but they are sticking with it.”
“If he sticks around E maybe it will force him to think about humanity more.”
Zellis also learned of Musk stopping donations before OpenAI did. On August 20, 2017, I wrote: “Funding freeze: OpenAI will likely learn this week that the $5M they took in Q3, albeit true, is on hold. Not sure how this will impact negotiations but wanted to report it as it would likely have a major psychological impact on them if they found out.” Musk told Brockman and Sutskever more than a week later, on September 1, that he was withdrawing funding.
There were other machinations:
- At one point, Musk appeared to suggest that she, Sam Teller, and Birchall – two of Musk’s closest aides – all take seats on OpenAI’s board so Musk could take control of the nonprofit. Zilis wrote to Teller that she had not shared that with the OpenAI team.
- In November 2017, Musk was considering creating a “world-class AI lab” within Tesla. To that end, Musk offered Altman a seat on Tesla’s board of directors.
- Zellis wrote an email to Musk saying she had come up with some solutions to save him time. Three of them were involved in developing artificial general intelligence at Tesla. One was to make OpenAI a Tesla public benefit corporation. One was to hire Altman as TeslaAI’s “anchor.”
- My favorite solution was: “Find a way to get Demis. Seriously….Demis is a huge fan and I don’t think it’s immoral…just immoral. If he sticks around E maybe it will force him to think about humanity more.”
- After hiring Andrei Karpathy, Musk asked for a list of the top people at OpenAI who could be poached.
We’ve already seen one of her text messages on the agenda – the one in which Musk leaves the board and she asks if she should remain “close and friendly” to continue relaying information to him. In her direct testimony, she tried to put it in context: “They were going through this weird half-breakup.” But in The Cross, we discovered that she did not mention this in her deposition.
“You have regained your long-lost memories,” OpenAI’s lawyer, Sarah Eddy, said in one of the trial’s funniest moments. Sure, Musk’s team objected and the objection was maintained, but we all heard it. In fact, this was one of many times when Zelis appeared to recover memories she didn’t have during her testimony, memories that were – coincidentally, I’m sure – helpful to Musk’s case.
To be fair, Zilis gives the best performance under questioning of anyone we’ve seen yet, but she doesn’t seem entirely sincere. And there was even more reason to doubt her when we found out how she left the board, which, according to her testimony, happened “because I got a call from Sam who said, ‘I heard Elon is starting a competitive venture,’ and I said, ‘Well, if that’s true, now is a good time to resign.’”
Her primary loyalty was and still is to Musk.
The mysterious thing is that she forgot that call between the deposit period and today. But it seemed she knew Musk was moving toward AI when she sent a text message to a friend who was on her phone with the name “Shahini Rubicon Flavor.” (Amazing name. Thomas Pynchon would be so jealous.) “I should resign from the OpenAI board by the way,” she wrote. “E’s effort has become known.” Her friend didn’t seem surprised by this revelation. “When your kids’ father starts a competitive effort and is going to recruit from OpenAI, there’s nothing you can do,” Zillis continued.
Musk “proactively apologized for diminishing my network of friends through this,” Zeles added.
Here’s what that added up to, for me: Her primary loyalty was and remains to Musk. For me to believe that she knew nothing about xAI, I would have to believe that despite their three children – at the time – and the time he spent with them every week, he had never discussed it with her. I don’t think so. Who will? There’s enough evidence in her meeting notes to suggest she routinely withheld information from OpenAI on Musk’s behalf – and xAI will be no different. I also don’t believe she didn’t provide Musk with information about the Microsoft deals she agreed to while on the OpenAI board.
Musk has had no problem turning OpenAI entirely into a for-profit charity or disrupting it by hiring its strongest researchers. He didn’t mind the idea of integrating it into Tesla in any of a variety of ways. The thing is an act The mind was not in control of him. That’s what I took from Zelis’s text messages and emails.
Brockman and the OpenAI board were incredibly naive to allow Zelis to continue working there after they learned of the paternity of her twins. But then, perhaps no one expected someone so meek to be so deceitful. She was smart enough not to raise her voice or lash out at obvious questions during her interrogation, so her stance reads as more trustworthy than anyone we’ve seen so far. The overall takeaway from her written letters is that she put Musk first in her life. Everyone comes second, including her father apparently. So, on stage, you might as well assume she’s saying what Musk wants to hear, too.
