Elon Musk’s Final Attempt to Influence OpenAI: Bring Sam Altman to Tesla

Several months prior to Elon Musk’s departure from OpenAI’s board of directors in February 2018, he made an attempt to recruit Sam Altman for a “world-class AI lab” at Tesla. Musk even offered the OpenAI CEO a seat on Tesla’s board, as revealed through emails and testimony presented in federal court on Wednesday during the Musk v. Altman trial. These emails were displayed to the jury amid the cross-examination of Shivon Zilis, a former adviser and board member of OpenAI, who is also the mother of four of Musk’s children.

Musk’s primary assertion in this lawsuit is that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman essentially misappropriated a nonprofit, utilizing the $38 million he invested to establish a private company now valued at over $800 billion. On Wednesday, Musk’s attorneys presented video depositions from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and ex-board member Helen Toner, aimed at highlighting concerns regarding Altman’s purported track record of dishonesty.

In response to Musk’s allegations, OpenAI’s legal team questioned his underlying intentions, arguing that the Tesla CEO has experienced “sour grapes” since he was unable to seize control of OpenAI in 2017. Following this, he initiated a competing for-profit AI lab. OpenAI’s lawyers utilized Zilis’ cross-examination on Wednesday to introduce evidence related to Musk’s alleged plans to undermine OpenAI, suggesting that Zilis was aware of these intentions. In the context of this case, Zilis played a crucial role at OpenAI as a liaison between Musk and Altman.

In a text from February 2018 provided as evidence, Zilis—then serving as an adviser to OpenAI and holding positions at Neuralink and Tesla—asked Altman, “Did you consider a B Corp subsidiary of Tesla?”

“There was documentary evidence indicating that, at various times, Mr. Musk had considered joining Sam Altman on the board and proposed that option,” stated OpenAI lawyer William Savitt outside the courthouse on Wednesday. “It was part of Mr. Musk’s strategy to manipulate OpenAI and integrate it into Tesla … he was trying to persuade Altman to forsake the mission and become part of Tesla.”

In an email sent to Tesla’s VP of communications, Sarah O’Brien, in November 2017, Zilis produced a draft of an FAQ page related to an event Tesla intended to hold at the NeurIPS AI conference. “The purpose of this event is to communicate that Tesla is establishing a leading AI lab(?) that will compete with the likes of Google / DeepMind and Facebook AI Research,” the draft stated. The document continued, “A key challenge for Tesla is that when people think of Elon and AI, they associate him with OpenAI.”

Another section of the FAQ labeled “Who?” lists several Tesla executives slated to lead the unit, including Musk and Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI researcher. Altman’s name appears next to Musk’s, accompanied by two question marks.

The FAQ contains annotations suggesting that Altman could serve as a moderator for the NeurIPS event, which “could be a motivating factor for Sam to commit to TeslaAI.” Additional notes indicate that Tesla AI’s “strategy had yet to be clarified, and parts of it might be highly proprietary.”

Zilis testified on Wednesday that Altman never ended up joining Tesla, and the AI lab as well as the NeurIPS launch event never materialized. She also mentioned that Musk reached out to Karpathy about enticing him to Tesla. Savitt informed reporters that Zilis’ testimony concerning Karpathy is “directly contradictory to what Mr. Musk told the jury just a few days prior.” Earlier in the trial, Musk claimed that Karpathy left OpenAI of his own accord.