Elon Musk had a colorful first day of testimony in his lawsuit against OpenAI. Taking the stand Tuesday afternoon in an Oakland federal courthouse, the world’s richest man reportedly told the nine-person jury that AI “could kill us all,” and invoked both James Cameron’s Terminator (bad outcome of AI) and Star Trek (good outcome of AI).
He also pinned the entire story of OpenAI on a single insult he says Google co-founder Larry Page once hurled at him: “specieist.”
The trial, which is expected to run about four weeks, centers on Musk’s 2024 lawsuit accusing OpenAI of betraying its founding mission as a nonprofit “for the benefit of all mankind.” Musk co-founded the lab in 2015 alongside Sam Altman after the two spent weeks discussing their fears of AI falling into the hands of profit-seeking megacorporations, namely Google. However, by 2017, the group realized that building advanced AI would require more funding than a nonprofit could raise, and they discussed creating a for-profit stance. Musk, who had donated at least $38 million to the lab, wanted to be CEO and gain majority control, but felt deceived after a power struggle with Altman over the role. He then departed in 2018.
After ChatGPT’s 2022 launch turned OpenAI into a roughly $730 billion company, Musk sued, alleging Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman stole a charity. He is seeking more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft.
OpenAI’s lawyers tell a slightly different story. Lead counsel William Savitt told jurors in his opening statement that Musk had simply lost a power struggle and was now nursing his “sour grapes,” particularly because Musk now runs his own for-profit AI lab, xAI. “My clients had the nerve to go on and succeed without him,” Savitt said. “Mr. Musk did not like that.”
Musk’s version of AI history
But on the stand, Musk brought the jury back a decade ago, when he and Altman plotted how to keep AI away “from the bad guys.”
He testified that those concerns about AI crystallized during a 2015 meeting with Page, when the Google co-founder predicted AI would bring utopia. Musk worried Page wasn’t taking the risks seriously, to which, according to Musk, Page accused him of being a “specieist”—someone who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future.
“The reason OpenAI exists is because Larry Page called me a ‘specieist,’” Musk told the court.
He went on to lay out a relatively binary vision of AI’s future borrowed from pop culture. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome,” he said. “We want to be in a Gene Roddenberry outcome, like ‘Star Trek.’ Not so much a James Cameron movie like ‘Terminator.’”
Musk also discussed Neuralink, his brain-chip startup, describing its goal as “AI safety” through “AI-human symbiosis,” and called SpaceX “life insurance for life as we know it.”
Yet, even as he positions himself in court as the last line of defense for charitable giving in America, his foundation, the Musk Foundation, has failed to give away the legally required 5% of its assets for four years running, according to public filings. The jury is asked to set aside their impressions of Musk to adjudicate the case.
Musk returns to the stand on Wednesday morning, where he will be cross-examined by OpenAI’s lawyers.