Sam Altman Defends Himself From Elon Musk’s Accusations in OpenAI Trial

On the stand on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Elon Musk tried to wrest control over the company they co-founded before the Tesla CEO’s 2018 exit.

Altman’s testimony in the federal trial in Oakland, which many see as a billionaire grudge match, pushed back on Musk’s claim that the powerful AI start-up betrayed its mission to benefit the public good. Musk has accused Altman of “stealing a charity” by building an $850 million for-profit company on the back of its nonprofit research lab.

Altman said that in early discussions about creating a for-profit arm, Musk sought majority ownership, and later proposed folding the nonprofit into his car company.

“I read that as a lightweight threat,” Altman said of the plan to bring OpenAI into Tesla. “I don’t think it would have served the mission. I think it would have effectively destroyed the nonprofit in the process.”

“Mr. Musk did try to kill it, I guess twice,” he said.

As early as summer 2017, Altman, Musk and other OpenAI executives began discussing if and how to launch a for-profit, citing a need to raise more money to keep up with competitors like Google.

Altman said they were “running the organization on a shoestring,” with a short runway of cash. To acquire the compute — or the GPUs and CPUs needed to power AI — and funding they needed to pursue artificial general intelligence, or a superintelligent AI technology known as AGI, the company would need more significant investments, the executives determined.

“I thought, of course, we needed to raise billions to quickly ramp,” he said. “I saw no way to do it.”

Altman, Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI and Ilya Sutskever, a former top OpenAI computer scientist and member of its founding team, have said that in those conversations, Musk repeatedly proposed plans that would give him majority control. Initially, Altman said that he asked for 90% equity in a potential for-profit.

The other executives pushed back on this request, including in an email Altman sent to Musk at the time, in which he said, “I am worried about control. I don’t think any one person should have control of the world’s first AGI — in fact, the whole reason we started OpenAI is so that wouldn’t happen.”

Altman described Musk as “mercurial,” and said that when he left OpenAI in February 2018, after for-profit discussions fell apart, “people wondered if he’d try to take a vengeance on us” — which both he and his attorney, William Savitt, have alleged is exactly what Musk’s lawsuit aims to do.

During his cross-examination, though, Musk’s counsel Steven Molo seemed to suggest that it is Altman who has amassed significant control over OpenAI since it did launch a for-profit arm in 2019.

Molo asked Altman about the testimonies of various former OpenAI executives, who said he was untrustworthy and had a history of lying. Altman denied hearing those testimonies, but when asked if he had “repeatedly been called a liar” by people he has done business with, he said, “I have heard people say that.”

Molo said that Altman sits on the board of directors for both the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit arm, and OpenAI’s for-profit. He is also the company’s CEO.

“Would you ever fire yourself as the CEO of the for-profit?” Molo said, adding that the board of the nonprofit is supposed to provide oversight for the chief officer.

Altman said that CEOs are “almost always” on their company’s boards. When pressed, he said he had “no plans” to fire himself.

Molo also asked Altman about how board members were selected following his brief firing in 2023. During the five-day ouster, there were long negotiations behind the scenes about whether Altman would return, and who would be on the board if he did. Altman, Brockman and other OpenAI executives who followed them out were also in discussions with Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest financial backer, which had offered to bring them on to start a new AI team.

Altman said initially he’d proposed to remove OpenAI’s board, which fired him, and replace it with four members, including himself. Altman was not made a board member at that time, but Molo said that he had proposed the three members who were ultimately selected — Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo — in conversations with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Altman said that he had no power to appoint new board members, but that he did say which configurations he would be “willing” to be rehired into.

Earlier in the day, he characterized his return to OpenAI as running “back into a burning building to try to save it.”

Later this week, both Altman and Musk’s legal teams will present their closing arguments. Then the jury and judge will decide which tech leader to believe.