Elon Musk, Sam Altman OpenAI trial starts in California
Barbara Ortutay
Updated ,first published
California: Tesla CEO, the world’s richest man and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk took the stand on Tuesday (US time) in a high-stakes hearing revolving around a bitter feud between him and his old friends Sam Altman and Greg Brockman that could reshape the future development of artificial intelligence.
The billionaires’ feud at the Oakland federal courthouse heralds the beginning of a legal drama about two tech moguls that is expected to be filled with intrigue and potentially embarrassing details. In 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit against Altman and Brockman for their investments in OpenAI as well as Microsoft.
In the civil lawsuit, Musk, the world’s richest person with an estimated fortune of US$778 billion ($1.08 trillion), accuses Altman and Brockman of betraying the San Francisco company by straying from its founding mission to be the guardian of a revolutionary technology. It seeks compensation and seeks to fund the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s philanthropic arm and Altman’s removal from OpenAI’s board.
“I basically think they’re going to try to make this case very complicated, but it’s actually very simple,” Musk said. “So it’s not right to steal a charity.”
Musk was the first to testify, as his lawyer started asking about his life story. It included details about his move at the age of 17 from South Africa to Canada, where Musk said he worked for a time as a lumberjack, among other odd jobs, and then to the United States. He described the numerous companies he founded and runs, including SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Neuralink and others.
When asked how he has time for everything, Musk said he works 80 to 100 hours a week, takes no vacations, and doesn’t own a vacation home or yacht.
Musk, the co-founder of automobile manufacturer Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, stated that he designed OpenAI during his meetings with Google co-founder Larry Page.
“I said: What if AI wipes out humans? He said that would be okay as long as the AI survived. I said that was crazy,” Musk said. “Then he told me I was a speciesist because I cared more about humans than AI.”
“I thought this was crazy and that we should have some kind of counterpoint to Google,” Musk said.
Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo also asked Musk about his views on artificial intelligence. Musk said he expects artificial intelligence to be “smarter than any human” as soon as next year.
According to evidence presented before the trial, the kinship between Musk and Altman took shape in 2015, when they agreed to build artificial intelligence more responsibly and safely than the profit-driven companies controlled by Google’s Page and Sergey Brin and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The jury was selected Monday and the trial is scheduled to last three weeks.
OpenAI dismissed Musk’s claims as a baseless case of sour grapes aimed at hindering its rapid growth and bolstering its own xAI, which Musk is launching as a rival in 2023.
“We’re here because Mr. Musk couldn’t do what he wanted with OpenAI,” OpenAI attorney William Savitt told jurors in his opening statement.
Savitt said Musk wanted the “keys to the kingdom” and filed a lawsuit only after he failed and then launched his own artificial intelligence business xAI, now part of SpaceX, in 2023.
Savitt said Musk used promises of funding to bully OpenAI founding members and tried to take control of OpenAI and merge it with Tesla. In fact, he said that Musk wants to establish a for-profit company and own more than 50 percent of this company. He added that Musk pulled the plug on his $5 million quarterly donation amid controversy about OpenAI’s future.
Savitt said there is no record of promises made to Musk that OpenAI would remain a nonprofit forever or that everything would be open source. What Musk ultimately cares about, he said, is winning the AI race with Google, not OpenAI’s non-profit status.
Molo said the case was about Altman, Brockman and Microsoft, not Musk.
By 2017, nearly two years after OpenAI’s founding, it became clear that OpenAI would need more money, and Molo said the founders settled on the idea of creating a for-profit arm of OpenAI that would eventually support the nonprofit. Maturities are limited for investors so they “cannot make endless profits.”
‘I basically think they’re going to try to make this case very complicated, but it’s actually very simple. So it’s not right to steal charity.’
Elon Musk
“There’s nothing wrong with a nonprofit having a for-profit subsidiary, but (it) needs to advance the mission,” Molo said.
Microsoft initially invested US$2 billion in OpenAI. Then in 2022, news spread that OpenAI had struck a deal with Microsoft, and “that was a horse of a completely different color,” he said. Molo said OpenAI was a “game-changing” development that violated “every commitment” he made not just to Musk but to the world. Molo said it was no longer open source, but had become a for-profit company for the benefit of the defendants, and that Microsoft would retain control of most of its intellectual property through licensing.
Musk’s side is expected to present a tale of alleged betrayal, deceit and greed that led OpenAI to transform from its founding mission as an altruistic enterprise into a capitalist enterprise now worth $852 billion.
Altman, the OpenAI CEO, is expected to testify alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, one of the tech leaders who helped fund the late 2022 launch of ChatGPT, the chatbot that unleashed the current AI boom that is driving the stock market to record highs.
Altman’s court appearance likely prevented him from attending an Amazon event in San Francisco Bay on Tuesday, where both companies announced an expanded partnership.
“I wish I could be there in person today,” Altman told attendees of Amazon’s event in San Francisco via a pre-recorded video message. “My schedule was taken away from me today.”
