Elizabeth Lopatto

Musk’s team is getting another crack at Brockman.

Microsoft is low-key my favorite part of this trial? Their opening statement was just like, an ad for Microsoft products. Almost all questions, including of Brockman, are like, “Did Microsoft play a role in the founding? Did it participate in the creation of a for-profit entity?” (No, obviously.) It is so funny, like they are going to at any moment turn to the jury and say, “Now why are we in this?”

Brockman says he was told he was removed from the board in an eight-minute call, and not given a reason why. He was also told Sam Altman was fired. Shortly after, he quit. “The board’s actions felt wrong to me. Wrongly conceived, wrongly executed.” He thought that he’d start a new AI company with Sam Altman. Several other people quit alongside Brockman and they started planning their new company. Satya Nadella called to ask if something terrible had happened, and Brockman said no. So then being a startup within Microsoft was an option too. But ultimately, as we all know, Brockman went back to OpenAI.

She did not disclose her romantic relationship with Musk to Greg Brockman. She gave birth to twins while still a board member at OpenAI, and found out their father was Elon Musk through “public reporting.” She did, eventually, say the twins were via IVF and her relationship with Musk was “entirely platonic.” She stayed on the board because Sutskever, Altman, and Brockman trusted her — other board members wanted her gone.

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because he said, essentially, he saw no path at OpenAI and was going to work on AGI at Tesla. But during a Q&A period, he said that he wasn’t going to work on safety, and just focus on catching up with DeepMind. That generated a strong, negative reaction.

Every email to Musk starts with glowing compliments, and at times what even reads like groveling. I don’t know if the jury is noticing this, but I certainly am. I wonder how much ass-kissing Musk is accustomed to — probably a lot.

Some more successfully than others. While I’m willing to believe the “steal the charity” line is about booting Musk from the board, the idea that “making the money for us sounds great and all” was about unsuccessful fundraising was somewhat less believable. One thing Brockman is making clear is that Musk was mercurial — not a surprise. “Elon’s engagement depended directly on how likely he thought it was we’d succeed,” he says. By January 31st, 2018, Musk says he thought OpenAI was “on a path of certain failure relative to Google” in an email.

“Ilya and myself” decided not to remove him from the board because it felt right for the mission but wrong personally. By that point, Musk was trying to get them all to join Tesla. This makes the journal entry about “Ilya feeling like we morally should not be kicking elon out, and should be trying to make the non-profit work” as well as “it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him” read really differently.

Greg Brockman is explaining that Musk put conditions on his continuing donations at OpenAI, which he did not accept. Then Musk said they should merge OAI into Tesla. They’d get the money, a billion-dollar-per-year budget, and it’d grow from there. The work would have to be secret — that would be a requirement to make it happen.