Adi Robertson

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 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.

Altman’s attorney William Savitt will be conducting cross-examination of Musk — who’s apparently a popular enough target for unauthorized courtroom photography that Judge Gonzalez Rogers just scolded spectators for it again.

We’ll be back with more from Musk soon.

The testimony is reaching 2023, when Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI, hired by Microsoft, and then returned to his original position. Musk says:

Musk says he was alarmed upon hearing about a $10 billion investment from Microsoft around 2022. “I reacted quite negatively because at a 10 billion scale there’s no way Microsoft is just giving that as a donation or any charitable way,” he says. He texted Altman that “I was disturbed to see OpenAI with a $20B valuation. De facto. I provided almost all the seed, A and B round funding.” An exhibit shows Altman responded: “I agree this feels bad, we offered you equity when we established the cap profit but you didn’t want at the time which we are still very happy to do any time you’d like.” Musk says he asked for a legal investigation and at this point had lost faith in OpenAI.

Musk describes his relationship with OpenAI in three phases: one that was “enthusiastically supportive,” a second where he became “uncertain,” and a third where “I’m sure they’re looting the nonprofit.” He’s asked whether Altman reached out about Musk’s public comments and mentions a time when Musk showed concern on Twitter over OpenAI granting Microsoft an exclusive license for GPT-3. “Sam Altman immediately reached out to reassure me that OpenAI was staying on mission as a nonprofit,” Musk says.

Musk is still describing how his feelings about OpenAI shifted slowly. He says he wasn’t initially bothered by a deal with Microsoft. His understanding was that “Microsoft had agreed to be involved in a capped-profit way … to essentially provide some funding and compute” — but he describes a capped profit structure as still something that would put nonprofit interests first. He says he understood that the deal “would dissolve upon the discovery of AGI … which I thought was probably okay.” Did Microsoft contribute a large sum? “It depends on your definition of large but it wasn’t trivial.”

Musk answers questions about how much his own companies Tesla and xAI compete with OpenAI. Tesla is “not directly competitive with OpenAI,” he says, because it’s pursuing “real-world AI” related to driving: “literally just trying to make the car drive from A to B safely.” xAI is “technically competitive but much smaller than OpenAI” — it’s pursuing AGI but has only “a few hundred people compared to several thousand for OpenAI.” He acknowledges at least one OpenAI employee (Andrej Karpathy) has joined Tesla but says he can’t recall if there were more.

Musk says he continued to send money to OpenAI on an assumption of good faith. “I was a little unsettled, but I took their reassurances that OpenAI would be a nonprofit at face value. I assumed they were telling the truth,” he says. He says he donated $5 million quarterly and paid $3 million a year in rent for the main office building for “some period of time,” possibly through 2020. It was only around late 2022, he says, that he concluded OpenAI was really breaking the deal they’d made.