Elon Musk, Sam Altman OpenAI trial starts in California
Barbara Ortutay
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.
“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.”
The jury was selected Monday and the trial is scheduled to last three weeks.
Opening statements began with Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, quoting OpenAI’s mission statement, which says it was founded as a nonprofit organization for the benefit of humanity as a whole and is not limited by the need to create financial wealth for anyone.
With Microsoft’s help, Altman and his top lieutenant, Brockman, “stole a charity,” Molo said, “a charity whose mission is the safe and open development of artificial intelligence.”
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.
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 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.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a nonprofit having a for-profit subsidiary, but (it) needs to advance the mission,” Molo said.
“Basically, I 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 a charity.”
Elon Musk
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.”
More to come
