Elon Musk took the stand yesterday at a high-stakes trial over the future of OpenAI, casting his lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker as a defence of charitable giving.
The world’s richest person is suing OpenAI, its co-founder and chief executive officer Sam Altman and its President Greg Brockman, saying they betrayed him and the public by abandoning OpenAI’s mission to be a benevolent steward of AI for humanity, and transforming the nonprofit into a profit-seeking juggernaut.
“If we make it okay to loot a charity, the entire foundation of charitable giving in America will be destroyed,” Musk testified on the first day of the trial. “That’s my concern.”
Musk, who founded automaker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, also said he is committed to serving the public, by working 80- to 100-hour weeks and generally not taking vacations. “I like working and solving problems that make people’s lives better,” he said.
Before Musk began testifying, Bill Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI and Altman, told jurors during his opening statement it was Musk who saw dollar signs as he helped finance OpenAI’s early growth and pushed it to become a for-profit business, one he might eventually lead as CEO.
Savitt said Musk wanted “the keys to the kingdom,” and sued only after he failed and then in 2023 started his own AI business, xAI, now part of SpaceX.
“What he cares about is Elon Musk being on top,” Savitt said in his opening statement. “We are here because Mr Musk didn’t get his way.”
OpenAI’s lawyer also framed OpenAI’s March 2019 creation of a for-profit entity as critical to letting it buy computing power and pay top scientists to stay competitive with Google’s DeepMind AI lab.
Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo told jurors in his opening statement it was the OpenAI defendants who were greedy for money, as OpenAI began drawing investors including Microsoft. “It wasn’t a vehicle for people to get rich,” Molo said.
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