Elon Musk Pressured OpenAI: ‘They Are Gonna Want to Kill Me’
▼ Summary
– Under cross-examination, Musk was pressed on his actions during a 2017 power struggle with OpenAI, including withholding promised funding and attempting to hire away its researchers.
– Emails showed Musk demanded initial control of OpenAI’s for-profit arm with four board seats, a proposal rejected by cofounder Ilya Sutskever.
– Musk stopped his $5 million quarterly payments to OpenAI in spring 2017, and his family office confirmed the withholding in an August 2017 email.
– In October 2017, Musk recruited OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy to Tesla and told Neuralink to hire from OpenAI, arguing it was legal and Karpathy had already decided to leave.
– Musk grew frustrated on the stand, often claiming he didn’t recall key details, while OpenAI’s lawyer faced objections and technical issues during cross-examination.
Elon Musk returned to the witness stand Wednesday for another round of testimony in his ongoing legal fight with OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, facing sharp questioning over a bitter 2017 power struggle that ultimately ended in his defeat. Under cross-examination from OpenAI’s legal team, Musk was grilled about his efforts to squeeze the organization after losing control, including halting promised funding and attempting to poach key researchers. Emails introduced as evidence painted a picture of a founder using every lever at his disposal.
Tension was palpable from the start of the session. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers began the day by scolding someone in the gallery for snapping a photo of Musk. OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman sat behind his attorneys, a yellow legal pad balanced on his lap, fixing Musk with a cold stare during his testimony. Musk himself grew visibly frustrated on the stand, frequently interrupting to tell OpenAI’s lawyer, William Savitt, that his questions were misleading. Savitt’s cross-examination was repeatedly sidetracked by objections, technical glitches, and Musk’s insistence that he could not recall key details about the company’s early history.
Savitt presented the court with emails from September 2017 exchanged among Musk, Altman, Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever, discussing the creation of what would become OpenAI’s for-profit division. In that thread, Musk demanded the authority to select four members of its board of directors, granting him more voting power than his cofounders, who would be left with just three seats. “I would unequivocally have initial control of the company, but this will change quickly,” Musk wrote in one message. Sutskever rejected the proposal, stating he feared it would concentrate too much power in Musk’s hands.
Months before those negotiations, Musk had already stopped sending payments to OpenAI, a severe blow given that he was the organization’s primary funder at the time. Since 2016, Musk had been wiring $5 million quarterly as part of a broader $1 billion pledge made at OpenAI’s founding. But in the spring of 2017, the money stopped. An email from August 2017 shows Jared Birchall, head of Musk’s family office, asking whether he should continue withholding the funds. Musk’s reply was succinct: “Yes.”
By October 2017, shortly after losing the power struggle, emails reveal Musk was actively coordinating with executives at Tesla and Neuralink, his brain-computer interface startup, to recruit OpenAI employees. Despite still serving on OpenAI’s board, Musk sent a message to a Tesla vice president about hiring early OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy. “Just talked to Andrej and he accepted as joining as director of Tesla Vision,” Musk wrote. “Andrej is arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision…The openai guys are gonna want to kill me, but it had to be done.”
On the stand, Musk defended the move by arguing Karpathy was already planning to leave OpenAI. “Andrej had made his decision. If he’s going to leave OpenAI, he might as well work at Tesla,” Musk said.
That same month, Musk wrote to Neuralink cofounder Ben Rapoport. “Hire independently or directly from OpenAI,” Musk instructed. “I have no problem if you pitch people at OpenAI to work at Neuralink.”
When Savitt pressed him on this, Musk pushed back, insisting it would have been unlawful to restrict hiring from OpenAI. “It’s illegal to restrict employment. It would be illegal to say you can’t employ people from OpenAI. You can’t have some cabal that stops people from working at the company they want to work at,” Musk said.
(Source: Wired)
