Senior Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 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. It’s hard to preempt the argument you are expecting without making it yourself 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. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Elizabeth Lopatto