Tesla CEO Elon Musk is back in court, facing a highly publicized legal battle against OpenAI founder Sam Altman.

On Tuesday, Musk took the stand to testify against OpenAI founder Sam Altman, whom he claims didn’t keep his promise that OpenAI would continue to operate as a non-profit when Musk left the board.

Here’s Musk arriving at the court:

CNBC reported more on the court battle between the two tech titans:

The highly anticipated trial between Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is in its second day on Tuesday.

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Musk is the first witness called to testify.

Earlier, attorneys for Musk and OpenAI presented their opening arguments to the jury. Musk’s lead trial lawyer, Steven Molo, delivered the opening statement for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. OpenAI lawyer William Savitt gave the opening statement for the AI company, Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

Musk sued OpenAI, Altman and Brockman in 2024, alleging they went back on their promises to keep the artificial intelligence lab a nonprofit. OpenAI established a for-profit subsidiary after Musk left its board in 2018, something Musk claims he was assured would never happen.

OpenAI has characterized Musk’s lawsuit as a baseless “harassment campaign.” The company said Monday in a post on X that it “can’t wait to make our case in court where both the truth and the law are on our side.”

One user on X noted Elon’s hair was messed up when he arrived at the court and joked he must have played some video games prior to arriving due to his hair having an impression of a gaming headset:

The Verge is inside the courtroom and provided play-by-play remarks from Musk:

“I was not averse to a small for-profit,” Musk says. Musk tells the court that “at various times we discussed, we brainstormed about different ways to fund the charity,” including a for-profit structure. “We did talk about establishing a for-profit or Tesla providing some of the funding — there were a bunch of ideas that were brainstormed — I was not averse to a small for-profit that would provide funding to the nonprofit as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.” These were “informal verbal conversations and email and text discussions” between Musk, Brockman, Altman, and Sutskever, he recalls.

Musk is trying to establish how instrumental he was to getting Huang and Nvidia to supply OpenAI with hardware. “I was asking Jensen for access to the first AI supercomputers they were making,” he says — referring to Nvidia’s DGX lineup — as an exhibit of a 2016 email conversation enters the record. “This was the first AI supercomputer ever developed and it would make a huge difference to OpenAI if we could get one … I wanted to be clear with Jensen that this was — I’m emailing from my Tesla email here, but I wanted to be clear this is not a Tesla request.” The conversation shows Huang promised “I will make sure OAI is one of the first ones” to get one.

Musk says nonprofit was non-negotiable for OpenAI.“I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding, besides that nothing,” he says (to a few chuckles in the courtroom). “It was specifically meant to be a charity that does not benefit any individual person. I could have chosen to start it as a for-profit and I chose not to.” He calls himself “instrumental in recruiting Ilya Sutskever and most of the initial team.”

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This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
 

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