About five hours into Elon Musk’s testimony, I wrote the following sentence in my notes: “I have never felt more sympathy for Sam Altman in my life.”
Musk’s direct testimony was better than yesterday – even if his lawyer kept asking leading questions to tell him how to answer. But that memory was instantly extinguished by a heartbreaking interrogation. For hours, Musk refused to answer yes or no questions, occasionally “forgot” things he had testified about that morning, and yelled at defense attorney William Savitt. I watched a few members of the jury look at each other. At one point when they were exchanging testicles, one woman was stroking his head. Me too, babe.
Even the judge, who sometimes prompted Musk to answer “yes” or “no,” had a bad time. “Sometimes he was difficult,” Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said after Musk left the courtroom. (At one point, when he interrupted his rebuttal, he got the biggest laugh of the day.) “Part of the administration in my view is just to pass on the evidence.”
“I don’t yell at people,” Musk said
Musk spent much of yesterday painting this heroic portrait of himself, and this morning, near the end of his direct examination, he said, “I don’t bully,” and I “don’t yell at people.” He said that he may have called someone a “jerk,” but in the spirit of saying something like, “don’t be a jackass.”
Soon after, Savitt made him petty, angry, and generally difficult to deal with. At one point, we all watched Musk lose his temper. He spent hours puzzling over simple questions. Again and again, Savitt referred back to Musk’s deposition, where he had answered questions differently, questioning Musk’s accounts. Even if the average judge didn’t think he was lying, it was completely inconsistent.
Savitt’s cross-examination left a clear impression that Musk stopped his quarterly payments to OpenAI because he could not fully control the company, then tried to fold it and fold it to Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four board seats and 51 percent of the shares. Other founders will receive three seats, combined, to be voted on by shareholders (including other employees). Although Musk said the plan would eventually grow to 12 seats, it is clear that Musk had full control over the original board of seven.
When Musk didn’t get what he wanted, he pulled the plug on his financial commitment and hired Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI’s second engineer, from Tesla in 2017. Despite his duty of loyalty to OpenAI as a board member, he did not try to get Karpathy to stay at OpenAI when he said he heard Karpathy wanted to leave. (“I think people should have the right to work where they want to work,” Musk said on the stand.)
“From my and Andrej’s point of view, Tesla is the only way I can hope to hold a candle to Google.”
In 2018, Musk said that OpenAI had no way forward with its current structure, saying it was “on the path to certain failure” in emails to Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman. His proposed solution was to merge Tesla with OpenAI. “In Andrej’s and mine’s view, Tesla is the only way I can hope to hold a candle to Google,” Musk said. The plan never came to fruition, and Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board that year.
As of 2016, Musk had his concerns about OpenAI as a non-profit organization. In an email to a colleague at Neuralink, he wrote “Deepmind is moving too fast. I’m concerned that OpenAI isn’t on track to catch up. Setting it up as a non-profit may, in retrospect, be the wrong move. The sense of urgency isn’t high.”
Asked about this, Musk said he was just speculating. Savitt said, “Those are your words, yes or no?”
“A lot of times you ask the wrong questions.”
Musk replied, “This is speculation.”
Savitt said, “So you thought it was a bad move? That’s what you said?”
Getting Musk to put any of that on the record was very difficult. He declined to answer questions such as whether he knew that cutting off OpenAI’s donations would cause financial pressure, or whether he had asked Karpathy to stay at OpenAI. He accused Savitt of asking questions “designed to trick me,” and we got multiple versions of this:
Musk: You often ask the wrong questions
Savitt: I try to frame the questions as best I can. I do my best.
Musk: That’s not true.
Musk was trying to make this as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it as painful as possible for everyone, including the judge. Watching him simply refuse to answer questions during cross-examination that he easily answered during direct time was annoying. Watching him refuse to admit that he understood the nature of the timeline – and therefore the fact that he was still a director of the OpenAI board before he resigned in 2018 – was infuriating. It made him look dishonest.
“I had lost faith in Altman and was worried that they were really trying to steal from a charity.”
Musk’s underlying story, repeated over and over again during testimony this week, was that OpenAI is “stealing from charity” and “robbing non-profits.” He insists he was OK with some limited for-profit work, but not anything that would overshadow OpenAI’s non-profit work and create a “tail that wags the dog” — another phrase he reaches for, repeatedly, as a blanket of protection. With direct evidence, he painted himself as a trusting “fool” who believed the fraudulent promises of Sam Altman and his team: “I gave them $38 million in free funding, which they used to build an $800 billion company,” he lamented. His lawyer’s questions were wrapped up in the fact that Musk allegedly ignored a multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft.
“I no longer trusted Altman and I was concerned that they were trying to steal from a charity,” Musk said. “It was true.”
“I said I didn’t look carefully!
When put to the test, Musk wouldn’t even explain how worried he was about learning OpenAI’s functionality before suing them a few years later. When OpenAI raised its for-profit arm in 2018, it received an email detailing the proposed business structure. At the stop, he said he would read only its first paragraph, which says donors should consider investments as donations that may not be returned. “I read a highlighted box with an important warning,” Musk said.
Savitt asked Musk if he had any objections to the building, when he received the documents. Musk said he didn’t read beyond that first box.
Musk: I didn’t read the fine print .. We’ll get into the fine print of this document.
Savitt: A four-page document.
Musk then said he didn’t learn beyond taking this “in the spirit of the offering.” Then we got the deposition, where Musk said, “I don’t think I read this term paper… I’m not sure I read this term paper… Savitt pointed out that nowhere did Musk say he would study the first phase with Musk, raising his voice and undermining his statements from the morning that he doesn’t bully (lol) or yell at people (lmao), he said, “I said he didn’t look at me! I read the article!”
Imagine that you will face this man as your founder. I think I’m going to open an artery soon.
