Emails Show Musk Sought Majority Control of OpenAI and Withheld Funding in 2017

Elon Musk returned to the witness stand Wednesday in his legal battle against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, where emails presented as evidence detailed his efforts to gain control of the organization and withhold promised funding during a 2017 power struggle. Under cross-examination by OpenAI lawyer William Savitt, the courtroom was shown emails from September 2017 between Musk, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever discussing the formation of what would become OpenAI's for-profit arm. In the thread, Musk demanded the right to choose four members of the board of directors, giving him more voting power than his cofounders, who would hold three seats total. "I would unequivocally have initial control of the company, but this will change quickly," Musk wrote. Sutskever rejected the proposal, fearing it would give Musk too much power. Months before those negotiations, Musk had halted quarterly $5 million payments to OpenAI that he had pledged since 2016 as part of a broader $1 billion commitment. In an August 2017 email, Jared Birchall, head of Musk's family office, asked whether to continue withholding the funds. Musk replied, "Yes." Emails also showed Musk discussing plans to recruit OpenAI staff to Tesla and Neuralink while he remained a board member. In June 2017, he wrote to a Tesla vice president about hiring researcher Andrej Karpathy as director of Tesla Vision. "The openai guys are gonna want to kill me, but it had to be done," Musk said. In October 2017, he told Neuralink cofounder Ben Rapoport, "I have no problem if you pitch people at OpenAI to work at Neuralink." Musk argued on the stand that restricting such hiring would be illegal. In February 2018, Musk texted then-OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis that Tesla would "actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla." When Zilis asked whether to maintain good relations with OpenAI, Musk told her to stay "close and friendly." Cross-examination is expected to continue, with Birchall and Brockman slated to testify as witnesses.