Elon Musk Is His Own Worst Legal Enemy

About five hours into Elon Musk’s testimony, I typed a single line into my notes: “I have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life.” Musk’s direct testimony that morning had been a marked improvement over the previous day, even if his lawyer kept resorting to leading questions to steer him toward the right answers. But that progress was immediately erased by a brutal cross-examination that dragged on for hours. Musk refused to answer yes-or-no questions with simple affirmations or denials, conveniently “forgot” details he had recalled just hours earlier, and repeatedly scolded defense lawyer William Savitt. I saw jury members exchange glances. During one particularly tense exchange, a woman rubbed her head in frustration. Me too, honestly.

Even the judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who occasionally prompted Musk to answer with a simple “yes” or “no,” seemed exasperated. After the jury left the room, she remarked, “He was at times difficult.” At one point, when she cut off one of his argumentative responses, she earned the biggest laugh of the day. “Part of management from my perspective is just to get through testimony.”

Musk spent much of the previous day painting a heroic self-portrait. During his direct examination, he claimed, “I don’t lose my temper,” and “I don’t yell at people.” He admitted he might have called someone a “jackass,” but only in the spirit of saying, “don’t be a jackass.” Almost immediately, Savitt baited him into being petty, irritable, and generally difficult. We all watched Musk lose his temper on the stand. For hours, he quibbled over straightforward questions. Savitt repeatedly referenced Musk’s deposition, where he had answered the same questions slightly differently, casting doubt on his current testimony. Even if jurors didn’t think he was lying, his inconsistency was glaring.

Savitt’s cross-examination painted a clear picture: Musk quit his quarterly payments to OpenAI because he wasn’t going to get full control of the company. Then, he allegedly tried to kneecap OpenAI and fold it into Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four board seats and 51 percent of the shares, while the other co-founders would share three seats voted on by shareholders. Although Musk claimed the plan was to eventually expand to 12 seats, it was obvious he sought total control from the start.

When he didn’t get what he wanted, Musk pulled his funding commitment and hired Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI’s second-best engineer, away to Tesla in 2017. Despite his fiduciary duty to OpenAI as a board member, Musk made no effort to convince Karpathy to stay. “I think people should have a right to work where they want to work,” Musk said on the stand.

By 2018, Musk was declaring that OpenAI had no viable path forward under its current structure. In emails to Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, he called it “on a path of certain failure.” His proposed solution: merge Tesla and OpenAI. “In my and Andrej’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google,” Musk wrote. The plan never materialized, and Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board that year.

As early as 2016, Musk had doubts about OpenAI’s non-profit model. In an email to a colleague at Neuralink, he wrote, “Deepmind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.” When asked about this, Musk claimed he was just speculating. Savitt pressed him: “Those are your words, yes or no?” Musk replied, “This is a hypothetical.” Savitt shot back, “So you thought it might have been a wrong move? That’s what you said?” Finally, Musk conceded, “Yes.”

Getting Musk to put any of this on the record was agonizing. He repeatedly refused to answer whether he knew cutting off donations would create financial pressure for OpenAI, or whether he had asked Karpathy to stay. He accused Savitt of asking questions “designed to trick me.” The exchange became a loop: Musk said, “You mostly do unfair questions.” Savitt replied, “I am trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best.” Musk shot back, “That’s not true.”

Musk seemed determined to make the cross-examination as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it excruciating for everyone else, including the jury. Watching him refuse to answer questions during cross that he had easily answered during direct was frustrating. Watching him refuse to acknowledge the basic passage of time,and therefore the fact that he was still a director of OpenAI’s board before he resigned in 2018,was infuriating. It made him look dishonest.

Musk’s core narrative throughout the week has been that OpenAI is “stealing a charity” and “looting a non-profit.” He claims he was fine with some limited for-profit activity, but not anything that would overshadow the non-profit’s work,what he repeatedly called “the tail wagging the dog.” In his direct testimony, he painted himself as a trusting “fool” who believed Sam Altman’s promises. “I gave them $38 million of essentially free funding, which they used to create an $800 billion for-profit company,” he lamented. His own lawyer’s questioning ended with Musk claiming he was blindsided by a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft. “I’d lost trust in Altman and I was concerned they were really trying to steal the charity,” Musk said. “It turned out to be true.”

On cross-examination, Musk could barely explain how much he had bothered to learn about OpenAI’s operations before suing them years later. When OpenAI proposed a for-profit arm around 2018, he received an email outlining the proposed corporate structure. On the stand, he admitted he only read the first section, which warned that contributors should consider their investments as donations with no guaranteed return. “I read the highlighted box with ‘important warning,’” Musk said. When Savitt asked if he raised any objection to the structure at the time, Musk said he hadn’t read beyond that first box. “I didn’t read the fine print,” he insisted. “We’re going into the fine print of this document.” Savitt pointed out, “It’s a four-page document.”

Musk then said he had taken the document in the “spirit of a donation.” Savitt referenced Musk’s deposition, where he had said, “I don’t think I read this term sheet… I’m not sure I actually read this term sheet… I did not closely look at this term sheet.” Savitt noted that nowhere in the deposition did Musk claim he had read the first paragraph. Raising his voice,and effectively undermining his earlier claim that he doesn’t lose his temper or yell,Musk shot back, “I said I didn’t look closely! I read the headline!”

Imagine having to deal with this man as your co-founder. I think I would sooner open a vein.