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OpenAI ‘s CEO Sam Altman took the witness stand on Tuesday to defend his business record in a trial pitting him against Elon Musk, rebutting testimony that disparaged his leadership at a pivotal time for the ChatGPT maker.
The trial, now in its third week, could determine OpenAI’s structure after it successfully raised billions of dollars in investment for its flagship artificial intelligence frontier model, ChatGPT.
Musk’s lawsuit alleges that Altman persuaded him to donate $38 million to OpenAI when it was a nonprofit, only for the company to shift to a for-profit corporate model in 2018. He argues that his funding was specifically going to a charity.
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.
The Altman-Musk relationship
Altman said during his testimony that he had concerns about Musk’s attempts to control OpenAI in its early years, as both men vied to be CEO in 2015. At the time, the company was trying to build a better-than-human type of AI called artificial general intelligence**.**
“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.
For Altman, there was a “particularly hair-raising moment when my co-founders asked Mr. Musk about, well, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’”
Altman claimed that Musk said the control of OpenAI “should pass to my children,” which Altman said he was not comfortable with.
When OpenAI was just starting, Altman and Brockman intended to raise $100 million (€85.4 million) to get OpenAI off the ground in 2015, but Musk encouraged them to go to up to $1 billion (€854 million) in funding commitment, according to a 2024 OpenAI blog post. Musk said he would cover “whatever anyone else doesn’t provide.”
However, to achieve AGI, Altman and Brockman realised they needed vast amounts of compute and “billions of dollars per year,” more than they’d be able to raise as a non-profit, the blog said.
With Musk, they decided to create a for-profit entity, but Musk wanted majority equity, board control, and to be CEO of the company, the blog post alleges. While negotiations went on, Musk reportedly withheld OpenAI’s dedicated funding.
Musk often tried to have Tesla, his car company, absorb OpenAI in a move that would not have aligned with the company’s mission.
OpenAI said in 2024 that Musk walked away from the company to build a relevant competitor to Google’s DeepMind.
Near the end of his testimony, Altman said he had thought incredibly highly of Musk during his early involvement with OpenAI, before things turned sour.
“I felt like he had abandoned us, not come through on his promises, put the company in a very difficult place, jeopardised the mission, didn’t really care about the things I thought he cared about,” Altman said.
“It’s been an extremely painful thing for me … to have someone that I respected so much not acknowledge that and continue to publicly attack us.”