Elon Musk’s worst enemy in court is Elon Musk | The Verge
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It’s dangerous to tell a courtroom “I don’t lose my temper.”
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Just a simple country CEO who was being tricked by that sophisticated lawyer
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It’s dangerous to tell a courtroom “I don’t lose my temper.”
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About five hours into Elon Musk’s testimony, I typed the following sentence into my notes: “I have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life.”
Musk’s direct testimony was an improvement over yesterday — even if his lawyer kept asking leading questions to cue him in how to answer. But that memory was immediately obliterated by an absolutely miserable cross-examination. For hours, Musk refused to answer yes or no questions with yes or no, occasionally “forgot” things he’d testified to in the morning, and scolded defense lawyer William Savitt. I watched a few jury members glance at each other. During one testy exchange, one woman was rubbing her head. Me too, babe.
Even the judge, who at times prompted Musk to answer “yes” or “no,” was having a bad time. “He was at times difficult,” said Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers after Musk after the jury left the room. (At one point, when she’d cut off his argumentative answer, she got the biggest laugh of the day.) “Part of management from my perspective is just to get through testimony.”
Musk spent a lot of yesterday painting this heroic picture of himself, and this morning, near the end of his direct examination, said, “I don’t lose my temper,” and “I don’t yell at people.” He said he might have called someone a “jackass,” but only in the spirit of saying something like, “don’t be a jackass.”
Live updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court battle over the future of Open AI
Immediately afterward, Savitt baited him into being petty, irritating, and generally hard to deal with. At one point, we all watched Musk lose his temper. He spent hours quibbling over simple questions. Again and again, Savitt referred back to Musk’s deposition, where he’d answered questions slightly differently, calling Musk’s accounts into question. Even if the average juror didn’t think he was lying, he was certainly inconsistent.
Savitt’s cross-examination left the distinct impression that Musk quit his quarterly payments to Open AI because he wasn’t going to get full control of the company, then tried to kneecap it and fold it into Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four board seats and 51 percent of the shares. The other co-founders would get three seats, together, to be voted on by shareholders (including other employees). Though Musk said that the eventual plan was to expand to 12 seats, it was obvious that Musk had full control on the initial board of seven.
When Musk didn’t get what he wanted, he pulled the plug on his funding commitment and hired Andrej Karpathy, Open AI’s second-best engineer, to Tesla in 2017. Despite his fiduciary duty to Open AI as a board member, he did not try to get Karpathy to stay at Open AI when he said he heard Karpathy wanted to leave. (“I think people should have a right to work where they want to work,” Musk said on the stand.)
“In my and Andrej’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google.”
By 2018, Musk was saying that Open AI had no path forward with its current structure, declaring it was on “a path of certain failure” in emails to Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman. His proposed solution was to merge Tesla and Open AI. “In my and Andrej’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google,” Musk said. The plan never came to fruition, and Musk resigned from Open AI’s board that year.
As early as 2016, Musk had own concerns about Open AI as a non-profit. In an email to a colleague at Neuralink, he wrote “Deepmind is moving very fast. I am concerned that Open AI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.”
Asked about this, Musk said he was just speculating. Savitt said, “Those are your words, yes or no?”
Savitt said, “So you thought it might have been a wrong move? That’s what you said?”
Getting Musk to put any of that on the record was intensely difficult. He refused repeatedly to answer questions like whether he knew cutting off Open AI donations would create financial pressure, or whether he’d asked Karpathy to stay at Open AI. He accused Savitt of asking questions that were “designed to trick me,” and we got multiple versions of this:
Musk: You mostly do unfair questions Savitt: I am trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best. Musk: That’s not true.
Savitt: I am trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best.
Musk was trying to make this as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it as painful as possible for everyone else, including the jury. Watching him simply refuse to answer questions during cross he’d easily answered during direct was annoying. Watching him refuse to admit he understood the nature of linear time — and therefore the fact that he was still a director of Open AI’s board before he resigned in 2018 — was infuriating. It made him look dishonest.
“I’d lost trust in Altman and I was concerned they were really trying to steal the charity.”
Musk’s basic, oft-repeated story during this week’s testimony has been that Open AI is “stealing a charity” and “looting a non-profit.” He maintains that he was all right with some limited for-profit activity, but not anything that would overshadow Open AI’s nonprofit work and constitute “the tail wagging the dog” — another phrase he reached for, over and over, like a security blanket. In direct testimony, he painted himself as a trusting “fool” who had believed the wily promises of Sam Altman and his cohort: “I gave them
“I’d lost trust in Altman and I was concerned they were really trying to steal the charity,” Musk said. “It turned out to be true.”
“I said I didn’t look closely! I read the headline!”
On cross examination, Musk would barely even explain how much he bothered to learn about Open AI’s operations before suing over them a few years later. When Open AI proposed a for-profit arm around 2018, he got an email outlining the proposed corporate structure. On the stand, he said he’d only read the very first section of it,, which said that contributors should consider the investments as donations that may have no return. “I read the highlighted box with ‘important warning,’” Musk said.
Savitt asked Musk if he’d raised any objection to the structure then, when he’d received the documents. Musk said that he didn’t read beyond that first box.
Musk: I didn’t read the fine print.. We’re going into the fine print of this document. Savitt: It’s a four-page document.
Musk: I didn’t read the fine print.. We’re going into the fine print of this document.
Musk then said he hadn’t read beyond taking this in the “spirit of a donation.” And then we got the deposition, where Musk said, “I don’t think I read this term sheet… I’m not sure I actually read this term sheet… I did not closely look at this term sheet.” Savitt pointed out that nowhere in the deposition did Musk say he’d read the first paragraph and Musk, raising his voice and effectively undermining his claims from the morning that he doesn’t lose his temper (lol) or yell at people (lmao), said, “I said I didn’t look closely! I read the headline!”
Imagine having to deal with this man as your cofounder. I think I would sooner open a vein.
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