How Elon Musk Squeezed OpenAI: They ‘Are Gonna Want to Kill Me’

Elon Musk is back on the witness stand Wednesday to continue telling its side of the story in its 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 squeeze the organization during a 2017 power struggle that he ultimately lost. Around that time, Musk attempted to hire researchers from OpenAI and stopped sending funding he had previously promised, according to emails presented as evidence in the case.

As the cross-examination began, tension spread through the courtroom. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers started the day by reprimanding someone in the gallery for taking a photo of Musk. OpenAI Chairman and co-founder Greg Brockman sat behind his lawyers with a yellow clipboard on his lap, shooting a cold stare at Musk during his testimony. Musk became visibly frustrated on the witness stand, frequently stopping to tell OpenAI lawyer William Savitt that he considered his questions to be misleading. Meanwhile, Savitt’s cross-examination was derailed by objections, technical issues and Musk continually claiming he didn’t remember key details of OpenAI’s history.

Savitt showed the courtroom emails from September 2017 between Musk, Altman, Brockman and researcher Ilya Sutskever discussing the formation of what would become OpenAI’s for-profit arm. In the thread, Musk demanded the right to choose four members of his board of directors, which would give him more voting rights than his co-founders, who would only have three in total. “I will unequivocally have initial control of the company, but that will change quickly,” Musk said in a message. Sutskever responded by rejecting the idea because he feared it would give Musk too much power.

A few months before these negotiations began, Musk had stopped payments to OpenAI, which was particularly difficult for the organization because it was then its main source of funding. Since 2016, Musk had been sending $5 million in quarterly payments to OpenAI as part of a broader $1 billion commitment he made when the organization launched. But in the spring of 2017, he stopped sending money. In another email from August 2017, Musk’s family office head Jared Birchall asked Musk if he should continue withholding this information. Musk replied simply: “Yes.”

In October 2017, shortly after Musk lost the power struggle, emails show that he had discussions with executives at Tesla and Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, about hiring OpenAI employees. At the time, Musk was still a member of the board of directors of OpenAI.

Musk sent an email to a Tesla vice president regarding the hiring of an early OpenAI researcher, Andrej Karpathy. “I just spoke to Andrej and he has agreed to join Tesla Vision as a director,” Musk wrote. “Andrej is probably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision… The Openai guys are going to want to kill me, but it had to be done.”

On the stand, Musk argued that Karpathy was already interested in leaving OpenAI when he tried to recruit him to Tesla. “Andrej had made his decision. If he leaves OpenAI, he might as well work at Tesla,” Musk said.

The same month, Musk also wrote to Ben Rapoport, co-founder of Neuralink. “Engage independently or directly with OpenAI,” Musk said. “I have no problem if you offer people from OpenAI to work at Neuralink.”

When Savitt pressed him on this, Musk argued that it would have been illegal for him not to allow Tesla and Neuralink to hire 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 prevents people from working at the company they want to work for,” Musk said.