As the cross-examination began, tension spread in the courtroom. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers started the day by reprimanding someone in the gallery for taking Musk’s photo. OpenAI’s chairman and co-founder, Greg Brockman, sat behind his lawyers with a yellow legal pad in his lap, giving Musk a cold look as he testified. Musk became visibly frustrated at the witness stand, and repeatedly paused to tell OpenAI attorney William Savitt that he found his questions confusing. Meanwhile, Savitt’s cross-examination was derailed by objections, technical issues and Musk continuing to claim he did not remember key details of OpenAI’s history.
Savit showed the courtroom emails from September 2017 between Musk, Altman, Brockman and researcher Ilya Sutskever, which discussed the formation of what was to become a for-profit arm of OpenAI. In the thread, Musk asked for the right to choose four members of his board of directors, giving him more voting power than his co-founders, who would be left with three in total. “I will obviously have initial control of the company, but that will soon change,” Musk said in a message. Sutskever wrote dismissing the idea because he feared it would give Musk too much power.
A few months before these negotiations began, Musk halted payments to OpenAI, which was particularly difficult for the organization since that was then its main source of funding. Since 2016, Musk had been sending $5 million payments quarterly to OpenAI as part of a broader $1 billion pledge made at the organization’s launch. But in the spring of 2017, he stopped sending money. In another email from August 2017, the head of Musk’s family office, Jared Birchall, asked Musk if he should continue to block it. Musk replied simply, “Yes.”
In October 2017, shortly after Musk lost the power struggle, emails show he discussed hiring OpenAI employees with executives at his brain-computer interface company Tesla and Neuralink. At the time, Musk was still a board member of OpenAI.
Musk sent an email to a Tesla vice president about hiring Andrzej Karpathy, an early OpenAI researcher. “Just spoke with Andrej and he has accepted to join as a Director of Tesla Vision,” Musk wrote. “Andrzej is definitely the No. 2 person in the world in computer vision… The OpenAI people want to kill me, but it’s got 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 has made his decision. If he’s going to leave OpenAI, he might as well work at Tesla,” Musk said.
That same month, Musk also wrote to Neuralink co-founder Ben Rapoport. “Hire them independently or directly from OpenAI,” Musk said. “I have no problem if you motivate the OpenAI people to work on Neuralink.”
When pressed about this by Savitt, Musk argued that it would have been illegal for him not to allow Tesla and Neuralink to hire from OpenAI. “It’s illegal to restrict employment. It would be illegal to say you can’t employ people at OpenAI. You can’t have some kind of cartel that blocks people from working at the company they want to work at,” Musk said.
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