Elon Musk's case against OpenAI is that Sam Altman stole a charity. The texts being read aloud in court tell a different story.
In them, Musk tries to fold OpenAI into Tesla by dangling a board seat at Altman, freezes promised funding without telling co-founders, and maps out which engineers he wants to poach next.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and current OpenAI President Greg Brockman in 2015. He left the board in 2018, and that's when OpenAI set up the for-profit arm now at the center of his lawsuit.
Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman in 2024, claiming they walked away from their promise to keep the company a nonprofit. The trial in Oakland is now wrapping its second week.
Shivon Zilis - who sat on OpenAI's board from 2020 to 2023 and has four children with Musk - took the stand Wednesday.
She told the court that the company's earliest leaders argued "ad nauseam" about how OpenAI should be set up. At one point, she said, Musk wanted OpenAI to join Tesla outright and offered Altman a Tesla board seat to make it happen.
"There were lots and lots of arguments about all of the different possible structures put in place at that time," Zilis testified.
Musk's whole case rests on the idea that Altman betrayed a nonprofit mission, but the evidence presented this week complicates that.
In August 2017 messages between Zilis and Musk's aide Sam Teller, Zilis flagged that $5 million in quarterly funding from Musk had been quietly put on hold. She wrote that OpenAI was "likely to realize this week" the money was missing and that the news would have a "big psychological impact."
By February 2018, Zilis asked Musk how she should handle the OpenAI team. He told her to stay "close and friendly" while Tesla actively pulled three or four engineers over and let more drift in over time without recruiting them.
One of those people was Andrej Karpathy, who left to lead Tesla Autopilot. Musk previously testified Karpathy was leaving OpenAI anyway, but after being shown texts of Zilis celebrating Musk's offer to him, Zilis conceded Musk approached Karpathy first.
Musk's 2017 emails also reference an idea to build a Tesla AI lab to take on OpenAI and Google's DeepMind.
That lab never happened. Instead, Musk launched xAI in 2023, merged it into SpaceX, and renamed the combined entity SpacexAI - putting the AI question right back inside Musk's other companies, not OpenAI.
Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella could still be called to testify before the trial wraps. The texts now in the public record have already redrawn the official history of how OpenAI became OpenAI.
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