OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Elon Musk tried to take control of the artificial intelligence company, even suggesting it could pass to his children after he dies. This came during the high-stakes trial over Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, which accused the ChatGPT-maker of abandoning its core goals while transitioning to a for-profit company.
Altman said before a federal jury in Oakland, California, that Musk not only backed the idea of OpenAI becoming a for-profit business, he wanted control of it for the long-run.
“A particularly hair-raising moment was when my cofounders asked, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’ He said something like ‘…maybe it should pass to my children.’” Musk had co-founded OpenAI and left its board in 2018.
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According to Altman, Musk’s comments came as the Tesla CEO was trying to get more control of OpenAI after it was founded in 2015, and had floated several ways of gaining it. Altman also said that in addition to wanting more seats on OpenAI’s board and to become its chief executive, he suggested the AI company become a subsidiary of Tesla.
The overarching goal for OpenAI was getting “more money faster,” Altman said on Tuesday, recalling conversations that involved Musk about the company restructuring to become a more traditional for-profit entity. He allegedly felt he should be in charge of such a company, in part because of his fame as a business person who could help OpenAI get financial backing.
“If I make one tweet about this, it’s instantly worth a ton,” Altman recalled Musk saying.
Altman said that he and other co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, decided handing Musk such control in exchange for more or easier financing would not help OpenAI’s mission or its pursuit of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. “I was extremely uncomfortable with it,” Altman said. “One of the reasons we started OpenAI was because we didn’t think any one person should be in control of AGI.”
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In the tech community, AGI loosely refers to an AI tool or model that becomes so capable and “intelligent” that it outperforms humans on most tasks.
Altman described as “burned into my memory” an email from Musk in which he said OpenAI “had a zero percent chance, not a one percent chance, of success” without him. When Altman offered Musk the option of investing in OpenAI when it formed a for-profit subsidiary in 2019, Musk declined.
“He said no because he would no longer invest in any startups he didn’t control,” Altman said.
Earlier, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified at the trial, saying Musk never objected as Microsoft’s licensing and revenue-sharing partnership with OpenAI expanded. Following OpenAI co-founder Sutskever, took the witness stand, saying his stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm is worth about $7 billion.