Elon Musk’s biggest opponent in court is Elon Musk

About five hours into Elon Musk’s testimony, I wrote the following sentence in my notes: “I have never been kinder to Sam Altman in my life.”

Musk’s direct testimony was changing yesterday – although his lawyer continued to ask leading questions to help him answer. But the memory was quickly canceled due to the most painful questions. For hours, Musk refused to answer yes or no with yes or no, sometimes “forgetting” things he testified in the morning, criticizing defense attorney William Savitt. I saw several judges looking at each other. During the tests, a woman was rubbing her head. Me too, baby.

Even the judge, who sometimes made Musk answer “yes” or “no,” had a bad time. “He was difficult at times,” Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said after Musk left the room. (At one point, when he cut off a controversial answer, he got the biggest laugh of the day.)

Musk spent much of yesterday painting his own powerful image, and this morning, near the end of his direct test, he said, “I’m not angry,” and “I’m not going to yell at people.” He said that he may have called someone a “whistle,” but it’s a spirit saying things like, “don’t be a wolf.”

Before long, Savitt forced him to be petty, annoying, and difficult to deal with. At some point, we could all see Musk losing his temper. He spent hours pushing simple questions. Repeatedly, Savitt referred back to Musk’s post, where he answered questions slightly differently, questioning Musk’s accounts. Even if the average judge didn’t think he was lying, he was certainly inconsistent.

Savitt’s analysis left it unsaid that Musk gave up his quarterly payments to OpenAI because he couldn’t control the company, then tried to kneel down and fold it at Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four seats and 51 percent of the shares. The other co-founders will receive three seats, in total, to be voted on by the shareholders (including other employees). Although Musk said that the final plan should expand to 12 seats, it was clear that Musk had full control over the first group of seven.

When Musk didn’t get what he wanted, he pulled the plug on his financial commitment and hired Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI’s second engineer, at Tesla in 2017. Although he had a fiduciary role for OpenAI as a board member, he didn’t encourage Karpathy to stay at OpenAI when he said he heard Karpathy wanted to leave. (“I think people should have the right to work where they want,” Musk said on the stand.)

By 2018, Musk was saying that OpenAI had no way forward with its current design, saying it was “on the path to failure” in emails to Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman. His proposed answer was to combine Tesla with OpenAI. “My opinion is Andrej, Tesla is the only way that can hope to hold a candle to Google,” Musk said. The plan was not implemented, and Musk left the OpenAI project that year.

In early 2016, Musk had his concerns about OpenAI as a non-profit. In an email to a colleague at Neuralink, he wrote “Deepmind is moving too fast. I’m worried that OpenAI is not on track to catch up. Putting it as a non-profit may, in retrospect, have been the wrong move. The thinking is not very high.”

When asked about this, Musk said that he was only thinking about it. Savitt said, “That’s your word, yes or no?”

Musk replied, “This is a fantasy.”

Savitt said, “So you think maybe it was the wrong move?”

Getting Musk to write any of the articles was very difficult. He repeatedly refused to answer questions such as whether he knew that withdrawing OpenAI’s contributions would cause financial problems, or whether he had asked Karpathy to stay at OpenAI. He accused Savitt of asking questions that were “designed to trick me,” and we have several versions of this:

Musk: You often ask unfairly

Savitt: I’m trying to answer questions as honestly as possible. I am doing my best.

Musk: That’s not true.

Musk was trying to make this as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it painful for everyone else, including the judges. Watching him refuse to answer questions that he could easily answer during a direct interview was frustrating. Watching him refuse to admit that he understood the nature of parallelism — and why he was still a director of OpenAI’s board before he resigned in 2018 — was infuriating. It made him look dishonest.

Musk’s main story, repeated over and over again this week, has been that OpenAI is “robbing charity” and “robbing nonprofits.” He says he’s been fine with a few for-profit projects, but nothing can overshadow OpenAI’s non-profit work and make it “wag the tail of the dog” – another phrase that has come up, time and time again, as a security blanket. In direct evidence, he showed himself as a reliable “idiot” who believed the fraudulent promises of Sam Altman and his team: “I gave them $ 38 million of free money, which they used to create a company with a profit of $ 800 billion,” he complained. His lawyer’s questioning ended with Musk saying he was blindsided by a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft.

“I lost faith in Altman and was concerned that he was trying to steal charity,” Musk said. “It was true.”

On closer inspection, Musk couldn’t explain how hard it was to learn about OpenAI before dissing them a few years later. When OpenAI decided to make a profit in 2018, they received an email detailing their target company. On the stand, he said he would only read the first section, which said donors would consider the money as a non-refundable donation. “I read the box that says ‘important warning,'” Musk said.

Savitt asked Musk if he would object to the plan, after receiving the documents. Musk said he didn’t read past that first box.

Musk: I haven’t read the fine print.. We’re going to this document.

Savitt: It’s a four-page document.

Musk then said that he did not count on taking this in the “spirit of giving.” Then we got the quote, where Musk said, “I don’t think I’ve read this paper… Savitt said that nowhere did Musk say he read the first paragraph with Musk, raising his voice and contradicting his claims from the morning that he doesn’t get angry (lol) or yell at people (lmao), he said, “I said I didn’t look right! I read the headline!

Imagine you are dealing with this person as your cofounder. I think I’ll open a vein soon.