About five hours after Elon Musk’s testimony, I typed 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 lawyers kept asking leading questions to prompt him about how to answer. But that memory was quickly erased by a most pitiful cross-examination. For hours, Musk refused to answer yes or no questions, sometimes “forgetting” things he had testified about that morning, and scolding defense attorney William Savitt. I saw some of the jurors looking at each other. During one tasty exchange, a woman was rubbing her head. Me too, babe.
Even the judge, who occasionally prompted Musk to answer “yes” or “no”, was having a bad time. “He was difficult at times,” Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said after Musk after the jury left the room. (At one point, when he cut off his reasoned answer, he got the biggest laugh of the day.) “Part of management from my perspective is just to testify.”
“I don’t yell at people,” Musk said.
Musk spent all of yesterday painting this heroic picture of himself, and this morning, at the end of his direct examination, he said, “I don’t lose my temper,” and “I don’t yell at people.” He said he might have called someone an “asshole”, but only in the sense of saying something like, “Don’t be an ass.”
Soon after, Savitt berated him for being petty, irritable and generally difficult to deal with. At one point, we all saw Musk losing his temper. He kept puzzling over simple questions for hours. Repeatedly, Savit referred to Musk’s statement, where he answered questions in a slightly different manner, questioning Musk’s accounts. Even if the average juror didn’t think he was lying, he was certainly inconsistent.
Savitt’s cross-examination left the clear impression that Musk gave up his quarterly payments to OpenAI because he was not going to get full control of the company, then he tried to kneel it down and fold it into Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four board seats and 51 percent of the shares. The other co-founders will get three seats together, which will be voted on by shareholders (including other employees). Although Musk said the ultimate plan was to expand to 12 seats, it was clear that Musk had complete control over the initial board of seven.
When Musk didn’t get what he wanted, he reneged on his funding commitment and hired Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI’s second-best engineer, to Tesla in 2017. Despite his duty to OpenAI as a board member, when he said he heard that Carpathy wanted to leave, he did not try to get Carpathy to remain at OpenAI. (“I think people should have the right to work where they want to work,” Musk said on the stand.)
“In my and Andrej’s opinion, Tesla is the only way that can even hope to hold a candle to Google.”
By 2018, Musk was saying there was no way for OpenAI to proceed with its current structure, declaring in an email to Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman that it was on a “path to certain failure”. Their proposed solution was to merge Tesla and OpenAI. “In my and Andrej’s opinion, Tesla is the only way Tesla can hope to hold a candle to Google,” Musk said. The plan never came to fruition, and Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board that year.
As early as 2016, Musk had his own concerns about OpenAI as a non-profit organization. “DeepMind is moving too fast. I worry that OpenAI is not on track to catch up. Setting it up as a non-profit may be the wrong move later on. The sense of urgency is not as high,” he wrote in an email to a colleague at Neuralink.
When asked about this, Musk said that he is just speculating. Savitt said, “Those are your words, yes or no?”
“You mostly ask inappropriate questions.”
Musk responded, “That’s hypothetical.”
Savitt said, “So you thought it might have been a wrong move? That’s what you said?”
It was extremely difficult for Musk to get any of these on record. He repeatedly refused to answer questions such as whether he knew that cutting OpenAI donations would create financial pressures, or whether he had asked Karpathy to remain at OpenAI. He accused Savitt of asking questions that were “designed to deceive me,” and we got several versions of this:
Musk: You mostly ask inappropriate questions
Savitt: I’m trying to pose the questions as objectively as possible. I’m trying my best.
Musk: That’s not true.
Musk was trying to make it as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it as painful as possible for everyone else, including the jury. It was annoying to see him refuse to answer questions during cross-examination, which he would have easily answered during direct answer. 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 resigning in 2018 – was infuriating. This made him look dishonest.
“I had lost trust in Altman and I was worried that they were actually trying to steal the charity.”
Musk’s basic, oft-repeated story during this week’s testimony has been that OpenAI is “stealing a charity” and “robbing a nonprofit.” He says he had no problem with some limited for-profit activities, but nothing that would overshadow OpenAI’s non-profit work and become “the tail wagging the dog” – another phrase he reached for repeatedly, like a security blanket. In direct testimony, he portrayed himself as a credulous “fool” who had believed the slick promises of Sam Altman and his cronies: “I essentially gave them $38 million of free funding, which they used to build an $800 billion profitable company,” he lamented. The questioning of his own lawyer has revealed that Musk was allegedly ignored in the billion dollar deal with Microsoft.
Musk said, “I had lost trust in Altman and I was concerned that they were actually trying to steal the charity.” “It turned out to be true.”
“I said I didn’t look closely! I read the headline!”
Upon cross-examination, Musk would barely even be able to explain why he bothered to learn about OpenAI’s operations before suing him a few years later. When OpenAI proposed a for-profit branch around 2018, they received an email outlining the proposed corporate structure. On the stand, he said he had only read its first section, which states that contributors should treat investments as donations that may have no returns. “I read the highlighted box saying ‘Important Warning,'” Musk said.
Savitt asked Musk if he had raised any objections to the structure when he received the document. Musk said he didn’t read beyond that first box.
Musk: I didn’t read the fine print.. We’re going into the fine print of this document.
Savit: It’s a four-page document.
Musk then said that he had not read it other than taking it “in the spirit of charity.” And then we got the statement, where Musk said, “I don’t think I read this term sheet… I’m not sure I actually read this term sheet… I didn’t look closely at this term sheet.” Savitt pointed out that nowhere in the statement did Musk say he read the first paragraph and Musk, raising his voice and effectively undermining his claims from the morning that he doesn’t lose his temper (laughs) or yell at people (lmao), said, “I said I didn’t look closely! I read the headline!”
Imagine that you have to deal with this person as your co-founder. I think I’ll open a vein soon.
<a href