About five hours after Elon Musk’s testimony, I wrote the following sentence in my notes: “I have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life.”
Musk’s direct testimony was an improvement from yesterday – even if his lawyer continued to ask key questions to guide him on how to answer. But that memory was instantly obliterated by an extremely miserable interrogation. For hours, Musk refused to answer yes-or-no questions, sometimes “forgetting” things he testified to in the morning, and berated defense attorney William Savitt. I watched some of the jury members look at each other. During one exasperating exchange, one of the women was rubbing her head. Me too, babe.
Even the judge, who sometimes pushed Musk for a “yes” or “no” answer, had a hard time. “It was difficult at times,” Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said after the jury left the room. (At one point, when I cut off his argumentative answer, I laughed the biggest laugh of the day.) “Part of management in my view is just getting the degree.”
“I don’t yell at people,” Musk said.
Musk spent much of yesterday painting this heroic image of himself, and this morning, toward the end of his live examination, he said, “I don’t lose my temper,” and “I don’t yell at people.” He said it was possible to call someone an “ass,” but only in the spirit of saying something like, “Don’t be an ass.”
Immediately afterward, Savit tricked him and made him petty, annoying, and generally difficult to get along with. At some point, we’ve all seen Musk lose his cool. He spent hours dodging simple questions. Savitt repeatedly referenced Musk’s statement, answering questions slightly differently, raising doubts about Musk’s calculations. Even if the average juror didn’t think he was lying, he certainly was inconsistent.
Savitt’s questioning left the clear impression that Musk gave up his quarterly payments to OpenAI because he didn’t want full control of the company, then tried to fold it into Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four board seats and a 51 percent stake. The other founders will have three seats together to be voted on by shareholders (including other employees). Although Musk said the eventual plan was to expand to 12 seats, it was clear that Musk had full control of the initial seven-seat board.
When Musk didn’t get what he wanted, he rescinded his funding commitment and hired Andrei Karpathy, the second-best engineer at OpenAI, to Tesla in 2017. Despite his fiduciary duty to OpenAI as a board member, he did not try to convince Karpathy to stay at OpenAI when he said he heard Karpathy wanted to leave. (“I believe people should have the right to work where they want to work,” Musk said from the podium.)
“In my view and Andre’s view, Tesla is the only path that can hope to hold a candle to Google.”
By 2018, Musk was saying that OpenAI had no way forward with its current architecture, declaring that it was on a “path to certain failure” in emails to Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman. His solution was to merge Tesla and OpenAI. “In my opinion and Andre’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that can hope to hold a candle to Google,” Musk said. The plan never came to fruition, and Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board of directors that year.
As early as 2016, Musk had his own concerns about OpenAI as a nonprofit. In an email to a colleague at Neuralink, he wrote, “Deepmind is moving too quickly. I worry that OpenAI is not catching up. Founding it as a non-profit may have been a wrong move, in hindsight. The sense of urgency is not high.”
When asked about this, Musk said it was just speculation. “Those are your words,” said Savit, “yes or no?”
“You’re mostly asking unfair questions.”
“This is hypothetical,” Musk replied.
“So,” Savitt said, “you thought maybe it was a wrong move? That’s what you said?”
Getting Musk to put any of this on the record was very difficult. He has repeatedly refused to answer questions such as whether he knew cutting OpenAI’s donations would create financial pressure, or whether he asked Karpathy to stay at OpenAI. He accused Savitt of asking questions “designed to trick me,” and we got multiple versions of this:
Musk: You often ask unfair questions
Savit: I try to ask questions as much as I can. I’m doing my best.
Musk: This is not true.
Musk was trying to make this as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it as painful as possible for everyone else, including the jury. Watching him simply refuse to answer questions during the show that were easy to answer during the live broadcast was annoying. Watching him refuse to acknowledge that he understood the nature of linear time – and hence the fact that he was still a director of OpenAI’s board before his resignation in 2018 – was infuriating. It made him look dishonest.
“I had lost confidence in Altman and was concerned that they were really trying to rip off the charity.”
Musk’s main story, repeated often during his testimony this week, was that OpenAI is “stealing a charity” and “looting a nonprofit.” He stresses that some limited-profit activities are okay, but not anything that would overwhelm OpenAI’s nonprofit work and constitute the “tail wagging the dog” – another phrase he comes up with over and over again, like a security blanket. In his direct testimony, he portrayed himself as a confident “idiot” who believed the underhanded promises of Sam Altman and his cohorts: “I gave them $38 million in essentially free financing, which they used to create an $800 billion for-profit company.” His lawyer’s questioning ended with Musk allegedly being shocked over a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft.
“I lost confidence in Altman and was concerned that they were really trying to steal the charity,” Musk said. “This turned out to be true.”
“I said I didn’t look closely! I read the headline!”
When questioned, Musk barely explained how interested he was in learning about OpenAI’s operations before filing a lawsuit over it a few years later. When OpenAI proposed creating a for-profit arm around 2018, he received an email outlining the proposed company structure. He said on the stand that he had only read the first section of it, which states that shareholders should regard investments as donations that may have no return. “I read the box marked ‘Important Warning,’” Musk said.
Savitt asked Musk whether he raised any objection to the structure then, when he received the documents. Musk said he didn’t read beyond that first box.
Musk: I did not read the fine details. We will discuss the fine details of this document.
Savit: It’s a four-page document.
Musk then said he didn’t read beyond accepting this “in the spirit of donation.” And then we got the acknowledgment, where Musk said, “I don’t think I read this term sheet… I’m not sure I actually read this term sheet… and I didn’t take a close look at this term sheet.” Savitt pointed out that in no part of his testimony did Musk mention that he had read the first paragraph. “I said I didn’t look closely! I read the headline!” Musk said, raising his voice and effectively undermining his claims from the morning that he doesn’t lose his temper (lol) or yell at people (laughs).
Imagine having to deal with this guy as one of your founders. I think I will open the vein sooner.
