OAKLAND, Calif. — OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman detailed a wild meeting in 2017 with Elon Musk in which the co-founders tussled over ownership stakes in the company – at one point claiming that he feared Musk “was going to physically attack me.”
Testifying on Tuesday in the second week of the bombshell trial over the future of OpenAI, Brockman claimed Musk showed up to meet him along with other OpenAI top brass to negotiate their equity stakes in the for profit company that would eventually launch ChatGPT.
In the middle of talks, Brockman said Musk personally gifted free Teslas to him, Ilya Sutskever and others — a move Brockman saw as Musk “buttering us up” and to make the co-founders feel “indebted to him in some way.” Likewise, Sutskever had given Musk a painting of a Tesla car, Brockman said.
But when the OpenAI co-founders rebuffed Musk’s demand for a majority stake in the company — with Musk claiming he needed $80 billion to create a city on Mars — Musk went ballistic, according to Brockman.
“Something really shifted in him,” Brockman said of Musk. “He became angry and he went off from there.”
“He stood up and he stormed around the table,” Brockman continued. “I was sitting in front of the painting and I actually thought he was going to hit me. I truly thought he was going to physically attack me. Instead, he just grabbed the painting and started to storm out of the room.”
Musk then demanded to know when the group would leave OpenAI — and declared that he’d withhold funding until they did.
Musk rejected Brockman’s proposals for equal ownership stakes among the founders and his argument that no one person should control such powerful AI, according to Brockman.
“He said he had experienced what it was like to not have control and he didn’t like it,” Brockman said Elon had told him. Brockman added: “He said he needed the money for Mars. He said he needed $80 billion to create a city there.”
The fiery meeting was just one tumultuous moment from the August and September period detailed by Brockman on Tuesday in Oakland federal court. Just weeks earlier, Musk had invited the team to what he called a “haunted mansion” that he had recently bought near San Francisco.
Brockman said that when he, Sutskever and Altman arrived at the mansion that it was “clear there was a party there the night before,” littered with “confetti and cups.” Musk’s girlfriend at the time, Amber Heard, was also there, Brockman said, and Musk invited her to join them but Heard declined, saying she wanted to hang out with a girlfriend who was there.
Whiskey was served, Brockman testified, and the OpenAI group discussed a for-profit entity and the conversation was “celebratory.”
“We had an actual line of sight to achieving the mission,” Brockman said.
Musk’s lawsuit, which alleges that Brockman, Altman and OpenAI have violated the company’s charitable mission, is asking for $150 billion in damages and a court order that would remove Altman from the OpenAI board of directors. He also wants an order unraveling the for-profit company structure that the company adopted last year.
Brockman, who wore a black suit and blue tie, appeared more comfortable than the prior day when he was grilled by Musk’s lawyer over diary entries from nearly a decade ago in which Brockman fantasized about becoming a billionaire — even as the then-nonprofit charity got millions in donations from Musk.
The defendants have sought to show in court that Musk was included in and supported discussions for a for-profit venture and that Musk’s suit amounts to “sour grapes.”
Brockman got grilled by Musk’s lawyer on Monday over embarrassing diary entries.
“Financially what will take me to $1B?” Brockman wrote in the digital journal in 2017, referring to the idea of converting OpenAI to a for-profit entity.
“We’ve been thinking that maybe we should just flip to a for profit,” Brockman allegedly wrote. “Making the money for us sounds great and all.”
Brockman, at times visibly tense and uncomfortable on Monday, repeatedly insisted that his push to shift OpenAI to a for-profit entity was always meant to serve the mission and that any personal financial motivations were secondary.
“Solving for the mission has always been my primary motivation,” Brockman said. “It remains so today.”
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