Elon Musk recently returned to the witness stand in his legal dispute against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, detailing his side of a significant power struggle within the organization in 2017. Cross-examination in court brought to light how Musk attempted to exert control and financial pressure on OpenAI.
Emails presented as evidence revealed that around 2017, Musk sought to recruit OpenAI researchers and ceased sending promised funding. These actions transpired as Musk ultimately lost the internal power struggle.
Court documents showcased email exchanges from September 2017 between Musk, OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever, discussing the formation of what would become OpenAI’s for-profit entity. In these communications, Musk demanded the right to appoint four out of seven board members, granting him more voting power than his co-founders. "I would unequivocally have initial control of the company, but this will change quickly," Musk stated in one message. Sutskever responded, rejecting the proposal, expressing concern that it would vest too much power in Musk.
Months before these governance negotiations, Musk had already halted payments to OpenAI, a decision that severely impacted the organization as he was then its primary funding source. Since 2016, Musk had been making quarterly $5 million payments as part of a broader $1 billion pledge made at OpenAI’s inception. However, in the spring of 2017, he stopped these contributions. An August 2017 email from Jared Birchall, head of Musk’s family office, asked if payments should remain withheld, to which Musk simply replied, "Yes."
Concurrently with the power struggle, emails indicated Musk held discussions with executives at Tesla and Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, regarding hiring OpenAI employees. Notably, Musk was still a member of OpenAI’s board of directors at this time.
In June 2017, Musk emailed a Tesla vice president about recruiting Andrej Karpathy, an early OpenAI researcher. Musk wrote, "Just talked to Andrej and he accepted as joining as director of Tesla Vision. Andrej is arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision… The openai guys are gonna want to kill me, but it had to be done." On the stand, Musk contended that Karpathy was already inclined to leave OpenAI when he attempted to recruit him to Tesla.