How Elon Musk pressured OpenAI: ‘They’ll want to kill me’

Elon Musk is back To the witness stand Wednesday to continue the narrative His side of the story In his country Legal battle Against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. During questioning from OpenAI’s lawyers, Musk was pressed about all the ways he tried to pressure the organization over a 2017 power struggle that he ultimately lost. Around this time, Musk tried to recruit researchers for OpenAI and stopped sending him previously promised funding, according to emails submitted as evidence in the case.

As the interrogation began, tension prevailed in the courtroom. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers began her day by reprimanding someone in the gallery for taking a photo of Musk. Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, sat behind his lawyers with a yellow legal pad on his lap and gave Musk a cold stare as he testified. Musk appeared visibly frustrated on the witness stand, pausing frequently to tell OpenAI’s lawyer, William Savitt, that he found his questions misguided. Meanwhile, Savit’s questioning has been derailed by objections, technical issues, and Musk’s persistent claim that he doesn’t remember key details of OpenAI’s history.

Savitt showed the courtroom Emails from September 2017 Musk, Altman, Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever discuss the formation of what will become OpenAI’s for-profit arm. In the matter, Musk claimed the right to choose four members to its board, giving him more voting power than his founders, who would be left with three in total. “I will have unequivocal primary control of the company, but that will change quickly,” Musk said in one message. Sutskever dismissed the idea because he said he feared it would give Musk too much power.

Months before these negotiations began, Musk halted payments to OpenAI, which was particularly difficult for the organization because it was then its main source of funding. Since 2016, Musk has been sending $5 million in payments to OpenAI quarterly as part of a broader $1 billion pledge he made at the organization’s launch. But in the spring of 2017, he stopped sending money. In another email dating back to August 2017, Jared Birchall, head of Musk’s family office, asked Musk if he should continue to withhold this money. Musk simply replied: “Yes.”

In October 2017, shortly after Musk lost the power struggle, emails showed that he had discussions with executives at Tesla and Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, about hiring employees for OpenAI. At the time, Musk was still on OpenAI’s board of directors.

Musk sent an email to a Tesla vice president about hiring one of OpenAI’s first researchers, Andrej Karpathy. “Just spoke with Andre before joining as director of Tesla Vision,” Musk wrote. “Andre is arguably the No. 2 man in the world in computer vision… The Onai men would want to kill me, but it had to be done.”

On stage, Musk said Karpathy was already interested in leaving OpenAI when he tried to hire him at Tesla. “Andre has made his decision. If he’s leaving OpenAI, he might as well work at Tesla,” Musk said.

In the same month, Musk also wrote to Ben Rapoport, one of Neuralink’s co-founders. “Hire independently or directly from OpenAI,” Musk said. “I have no problem if you offer people in OpenAI to work on Neuralink.”

When pressed on the matter by Savitt, Musk said it would be illegal for him not to allow Tesla and Neuralink to hire from OpenAI. “Restricting hiring is illegal. It would be illegal to say you can’t hire people from OpenAI. You can’t have a cabal that prevents people from working at the company they want to work for,” Musk said.