How Elon Musk Slammed OpenAI: ‘They Want to Kill Me’

Elon Musk is back to the witness on Wednesday to continue to speak his side of the story in his own legal battle against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. During a cross-examination by OpenAI’s lawyers, Musk was pressed on all the ways he tried to squeeze the organization out of the 2017 energy battle it lost. Meanwhile, Musk tried to hire OpenAI researchers and stopped sending the money he had previously promised, according to emails submitted as evidence in the lawsuit.

When the questioning began, an argument broke out in court. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers began the day by reprimanding someone in the room for taking a picture of Musk. OpenAI’s president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, sat behind his lawyers with a yellow pen on his lap, glaring at Musk as he testified. Musk became frustrated on the witness stand, stopping frequently to tell OpenAI’s attorney, William Savitt, that he considered his questions misleading. Meanwhile, Savitt’s review has been marred by objections, technical difficulties, and Musk continuing to say he doesn’t remember the details of OpenAI’s history.

Savitt showed the court emails from September 2017 between Musk, Altman, Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever are discussing a design that could be a profitable arm of OpenAI. In the thread, Musk wanted the right to appoint four members of the board of directors, giving him more voting power than his co-founders, who will be left with all three. “I would still be running the company, but that will change very quickly,” Musk said in one message. Sutskever also wrote against the idea because he said he feared it would give Musk too much power.

A few months before the talks began, Musk suspended payments to OpenAI, which was particularly difficult for the organization as it was the company’s main source of funding. Since 2016, Musk has been sending $5 million to OpenAI per quarter as part of a larger $1 billion pledge he made at the start of the organization. But in the spring of 2017, they stopped sending the money. In another email from August 2017, the head of Musk’s family office, Jared Birchall, asked Musk if he should continue the cover-up. Musk answered simply, “Yes.”

In October 2017, shortly after Musk lost the power struggle, emails show that he discussed with Tesla executives and Neuralink, his brain-computing company, about hiring OpenAI employees. At the time, Musk was still a member of OpenAI.

Musk sent an email to Tesla’s vice president about hiring former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy. “I just talked to Andrej and he agreed to be the director of Tesla Vision,” Musk wrote. “Andrej is the #2 person in the world in computer vision… The openai guys want to kill me, but it had to be done.”

On the stand, Musk said that Karpathy was already interested in leaving OpenAI when he tried to recruit him to Tesla. “Andrej had made a decision. If he leaves OpenAI, he can work at Tesla,” Musk said.

That same month, Musk also wrote to Ben Rapoport, the co-founder of Neuralink. “Work independently or directly from OpenAI,” Musk said. “I have no problem if you put people in OpenAI to work on Neuralink.”

When pressed about this by Savitt, Musk said that it would have been illegal not to allow Tesla and Neuralink to hire OpenAI. “It’s illegal to block jobs. It would be illegal to say you can’t hire people from OpenAI. You can’t have a cabal that prevents people from working for a company they want to work for,” Musk said.