After a quick breather, Musk is on the stand again — now the topic is SpaceX, which xAI has been rolled into. The company is preparing for an IPO later this year. Musk says he can’t answer questions about SpaceX because of this.
Altman’s lawyer mentions Musk building an “AI-enabled robot army” while talking about the proposal to merge Tesla and OpenAI. Musk jumps in, saying he wants to make clear that while he has in fact referred to running a “robot army” at the company, he did not mean the term “robot army” in a “military sense.” Glad we’ve cleared that up.
Musk is not terribly happy with Savitt, who continues to run through the history of entanglements between Musk’s own companies and OpenAI. After telling Musk that “I’m trying to put the questions as fairly as I can, I’m doing my best” (“That is not true,” Musk responds), Savitt brings up a deposition where Musk said he’d discussed a merger between Tesla and OpenAI. In email exhibits, Karpathy (who’d been hired away to Tesla by then) suggests OpenAI is burning cash and its funding structure won’t let it compete with Google, saying the best path forward might be “a for profit pivot” and attaching itself to Tesla. Any other big tech player, Karpathy said, could suffer from “incompatible company DNA.”
Musk previously mentioned that he hired researcher Andrej Karpathy at Tesla when he left OpenAI. Savitt asks whether, as a member of the OpenAI board at the time, he had a responsibility to suggest Karpathy stay at OpenAI and avoid poaching. “I think people should have a right to work where they want to work,“ Musk responds. A 2017 email suggests Musk knew how important Karpathy was:
“Just talked to Andrej and he accepted joining as director of Tesla Vision…. Andrej is arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision after Ilya. The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me but it had to be done.”
Musk also apparently authorized another company he owned to hire from OpenAI while on its board, telling people at Neuralink that “I have no problem if you pitch people at OpenAI to work at Neuralink.” Musk protests the characterization. “He is misstating my email, I’m simply saying if they want to try to recruit people from OpenAI or any other company including Tesla or SpaceX,” they can do so, Musk says. “It’s a free country.”
Musk quibbles his way through a line of questioning from Savitt, who asks if he was aware that cutting off most funding to OpenAI in 2017 would create financial pressure as OpenAI sought to get more compute. Musk repeats multiple times that he was losing faith in OpenAI, he was concerned they were going in the wrong direction, and that’s why he ended his donations. Savitt and Musk then spar over how much “sweat equity” Musk accrued at OpenAI — Savitt notes, for instance, he didn’t write the code for a consequential project where OpenAI’s bots learned to beat humans at Dota 2. Musk retorts that he called Satya Nadella to get compute for the project and suggested focusing on it. “I got along with almost everyone almost all the time,” he adds.
Savitt is asking Musk about the equity discussions — the ones where Musk wanted initial control of OpenAI. Musk acknowledges his plan would have given him unilateral decision-making power at first but says that’s “standard practice.” He reiterates that it would have changed quickly as more investors joined up and insisted on board seats; over time, he says, he’d have had to relinquish control.
Musk is still fending off questions about various messages where he’s mentioned the possibility of a for-profit component at OpenAI, like an email to associates at Neuralink in 2016:
“Deepmind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.”
Musk says “I’m simply speculating here with people at Neuralink,” calling the discussion hypothetical. He also brushes off a separate email chain where Greg Brockman mentions a for-profit structure and Musk doesn’t object, saying as long as “the for-profit is in service to the non-profit, it’s not breaking a promise.”
In an email a month before OpenAI was incorporated, Musk apparently wrote to Altman suggesting that “a standard c-corp with a parallel nonprofit” could work for the entity. Questioning about this quickly runs off the rails as Musk starts accusing Savitt of trying to “trick” him, comparing his questions to asking Musk if he’s stopped beating his wife. Judge Gonzalez Rogers is having none of this and cuts him off.
Musk concedes that he mentioned a billion-dollar commitment to OpenAI, but the actual number he contributed fell far short of that — in his telling, because he lost faith in the mission. “I contributed my reputation, which nobody else was aware of at the time, these things all have value, without me it would not exist, I came up with the name, which means open source,” he says — but Gonzalez Rogers directs him to actually answer the question. “In monetary terms, I contributed $38 million,” he concludes. A deposition indicates his last $5 million quarterly contribution was in May of 2017, and he stopped paying for rent in 2020.
Savitt brings up another X post, this one from 2023, where Musk says “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit.” The deposition indicates Musk was mistaken in the $100 million number, but he maintains on the stand that “I think $38 million was a lot of money.”
Savitt starts off by pushing on Musk’s comments minimizing how much his businesses compete with OpenAI. Earlier today Musk downplayed Tesla’s AI ambitions, but Savitt pulls up a 2026 X post saying that “Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form.” Musk says that in the long term, Tesla will likely achieve this, but that it’s not making AGI right now.