Elon Musk appeared more petty than prepared

Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed.

This is not the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his defamation suit, he turned on the charm and the jury responded by finding him not guilty. Today he looked adrift and unprepared. The only times he showed real animation were when he was bragging about how much he’d done for OpenAI.

The direct examination is a way of telling a story through questions; it’s important to make the narrative clear. For a suit that accuses Sam Altman of straying from OpenAI’s mission, Musk spent a weird amount of time talking about himself, recounting his biography, and hyping up the various ventures he’s undertaken that have nothing to do with OpenAI.

For instance, he told jurors that he worked between “80 to 100 hours a week,” which was how he got so much done. It is unclear to me whether his prolific posting habits count as part of the workweek. I hope the defense asks.

We did eventually get around to OpenAI, where Musk portrayed himself as the driving force. He’d been worried about AI since childhood, and who had finally felt that someone needed to prevent Google from developing it. He testified that he became involved in AI safety because he had a conversation with Google’s own Larry Page and asked, “What if AI wipes out all the humans?” Page essentially shrugged — as far as he was concerned, as long as the AI didn’t also go extinct, things were all right. “I said, ‘That’s insane,’ and he called me a species-ist for being pro-human.” So OpenAI, for Musk, was born specifically to keep Google from having too much power in AI. Petty! Musk also said that after he recruited Ilya Sutskever, then a research scientist at Google, to OpenAI that “Larry Page refused to speak to me ever again.”

What did Musk do at OpenAI? “I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people. taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding. Besides that, nothing.” He paused for laughter, and one or two people obligingly chuckled. But most of the courtroom was silent. I thought he sounded petulant. “I could have started it as a for-profit and I chose not to,” Musk said.

I do wonder how much of this the jury is following. We went very quickly through a lot of ideas, including “artificial general intelligence,” an imaginary thing that many AI researchers are nonetheless afraid of. Musk defined this as being when a computer “becomes as smart as any human, arguably smarter than any human.” (Large language models are not the same as intelligence, and AGI has been defined downward for quite some time. But whatever! This case is not about that!)

At another point, Musk was asked to explain who former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis was. “Shivon was the, um, my chief of staff and, uh, you know,” Musk said. One person in the gallery — presumably familiar with the fact that Zilis is the mother of a few of Musk’s kids — burst out in loud laughter. But the jury looked puzzled.

During discussions of how best to get OpenAI the vast amounts of funding it would need for compute, there was indeed discussion of a for-profit arm of OpenAI with Musk. The strategy here, I think, was to make clear that Musk’s intentions were very different than the for-profit that came to pass. (That’s true! He did not get 55 percent equity in it, as one possible cap table suggested he should.) This all seemed pretty mushy, and we got bogged down in a discussion of what, in Musk’s opinion, a reasonable equity split between founders and funders would be; it’s hard to preempt the argument you are expecting without making it yourself.

This is also kind of a distraction from the core point of the trial: Did OpenAI betray its mission statement and fool Musk into making a charitable donation? I agreed to a for-profit model but not THAT for-profit model isn’t a strong argument.

We’ll be back with more Musk testimony and presumably his cross-examination. If there’s a clearer story from the defense, this trial is effectively all over but the shouting. I’ve seen a strong performance from Musk on the stand before. Today he just didn’t seem dialed in. Maybe he’s grumpy about this trial because he knows he’s wasting his own time.