On the stand, Elon Musk cant escape his own tweets
” He left having admitted, under oath, that Tesla is not currently pursuing artificial general intelligence — directly contradicting a tweet he’d posted just weeks earlier.
It was that kind of day for Musk.
The lawsuit he filed challenging the structure of OpenAI is alleges Sam Altman and the other cofounders tricked him into backing a non-profit, then launched the frontier lab’s for-profit arm and let it come to dominate the organization.
After Musk testified for hours on Wednesday in a California federal court, it appears the case may come down to how much of a distinction jurors and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers make between investors in OpenAI having their potential profit capped or not.
In Musk’s telling, when he cofounded the lab with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others, he trusted them to build AI for humanity, but over time became suspicious of their motives, and finally concluded that they were “looting the nonprofit.”
OpenAI’s lawyer William Savitt sought to complicate that story during cross-examination, trying to show that Musk had supported a variety of efforts to transition OpenAI toward for-profit status so it could raise the funds necessary to compete with firms like Google, including incorporating the AI lab into Tesla.
Musk testified that he had discussed converting the company to a for-profit as early as 2016, and that in 2017, he had explored creating a for-profit arm of OpenAI where he would hold the majority of the equity and control the company. When those plans fell apart, he stopped making regular donations to OpenAI, though he continued to pay for its office space until 2020.
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Musk insisted that there was a big difference between investors whose profits are capped and those whose profits are unlimited. The earliest major investments by Microsoft in OpenAI limited the software giant’s profits, but those restrictions have been rolled back over the years. Musk says those changes ultimately led him to bring this lawsuit.
Savitt tried to establish that Musk had been consulted by Altman and Shivon Zillis — his longtime adviser who is also the mother of four of his children — about subsequent efforts to raise money, and did not object. Zillis was also a member of the OpenAI board when it approved some of those transactions.
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