More than two weeks into the trial in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, neither of the tech titans has emerged as an overly sympathetic character. But nobody has more to lose than Altman.
Under a barrage of questions by a lawyer for Musk, Altman said he did not agree with trial testimony that depicted him as dishonest.
“I believe I am an honest and trustworthy businessperson,” Altman said.
A jury that’s already heard about Altman’s character from a parade of his former allies and adversaries will ultimately decide the verdict. But the repercussions could reverberate widely.
“This is not looking good for any of them, and I think that that’s a little bit unfortunate for the AI industry at a time when the public perception of AI is quite negative and seems to be getting worse,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute.
The lawsuit accuses Altman and his top lieutenant, Greg Brockman, of double-crossing Musk by straying from the San Francisco company’s founding mission to be an altruistic steward of a revolutionary technology. The lawsuit alleges they shifted into a moneymaking mode behind his back. Musk is seeking an unspecified amount of money to be paid to fund the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm.
Jurors have heard from witnesses including OpenAI ex-board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, who spoke about the decision to fire Altman in 2023 before they were themselves ousted from the board of directors when Altman returned to his role.
“A phrase we used was ‘a pattern of behavior,’ so no one single cause,” Toner said. “The pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor, his resistance of board oversight.”
He said he later backtracked and signed a letter supporting Altman’s reinstatement to try to keep the company from being destroyed.
Sutskever testified to his early admiration for Musk as an entrepreneur but said that once they were working together as co-founders, Musk’s push for a controlling stake in the startup “just felt aggressive to me.”
OpenAI has brushed off Musk’s allegations as an unfounded case of sour grapes that’s aimed at undercutting its rapid growth and bolstering Musk’s own xAI, now part of SpaceX.
“Part of the reason we started OpenAI is we didn’t think AGI could be under the control of any one person, no matter how good their intents are,” Altman said.
He described what he called a “particularly hair-raising moment when my co-founders asked Mr. Musk about, well, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’”
Altman said Musk’s response was that maybe “control of OpenAI should pass to my children.” Altman said he did not feel comfortable with that.
Altman said Musk was known to be “fairly mercurial” and only trusted himself to make the right decisions that were not obvious to others but which Musk believed would “turn out to be correct.” Among the pressures on OpenAI were Musk’s repeated attempts to have his car company Tesla absorb OpenAI, a proposal Altman said would not have aligned with OpenAI’s mission.
Altman testified that OpenAI has ended up creating “through a ton of hard work, this extremely large charity” and sought to challenge Musk’s contention that Altman had violated the nonprofit’s original purpose.
“Mr. Musk did try to kill it, I guess twice,” Altman added, before Musk’s lawyer interrupted to object to Altman’s remark. The judge struck it from the record.
Near the end of his testimony, Altman said he had thought incredibly highly of Musk during his early involvement with OpenAI, but “felt he abandoned us” as he pulled away his commitment and financial contributions.
“It’s been an incredibly painful thing for me,” he said. He called Musk a “critical contributor” to OpenAI and attributed his leaving to jealousy as he was working on launching a competing AI startup.
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O’Brien contributed from Providence, Rhode Island.
