On the stand, Elon Musk can’t escape his own tweets
Elon Musk came to a California federal court on Wednesday to argue that Sam Altman and his co-founders “stole a charity.” He left having admitted, under oath, that Tesla is not currently pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI)— directly contradicting a tweet he’d posted just weeks earlier. In Musk’s telling, when he co-founded the lab with Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others, he trusted them to build AI for humanity, but over time became suspicious of their motives, and finally concluded that they were “looting the nonprofit.” OpenAI’s lawyer William Savitt sought to complicate that story during cross-examination, trying to show that Musk had supported a variety of efforts to transition OpenAI toward for-profit status so it could raise the funds necessary to compete with firms like Google, including incorporating the AI lab into Tesla. After Musk said that Tesla’s AI work was focused only on self-driving and not AGI (a term for AI systems that can perform any intellectual task that a human can), he was asked about a recent post claiming that “Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI.” “We are not pursuing AGI right now,” Musk told the court. (Tesla shareholders may want to take note.) Musk was also asked about a post where he claimed to have invested $100 million in OpenAI, rather than the $38 million that actually changed hands.
Savitt brought up emails where Musk had backed efforts by Tesla and his brain interface company, Neuralink, to poach employees from OpenAI while he was still on that company’s board. When Musk’s lawyers floated questions about ChatGPT’s role in the Tumbler Ridge shooting—an incident earlier this year in Canada in which a person went on a killing spree after extensive conversations with the chatbot—she made clear that she didn’t want to hear about scandals caused by AI models, but that xAI and OpenAI’s approaches to safety were fair game. OpenAI ends Microsoft legal peril over its $50B Amazon deal DeepMind’s David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data The Stanford freshmen who want to rule the world … will probably read this book and try even harder Two college kids raise a $5.1 million pre-seed to build an AI social network in iMessage Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic in cash and compute OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, bringing company one step closer to an AI ‘super app’
Analysis: Why This Matters
This matters because moves around Elon Musk can reshape product roadmaps, valuations, and how everyday users interact with tech.
Key Takeaways
- Also expected to testify are his family office manager, Jared Birchall; AI safety expert Stuart Russell; and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
- Another conversation focused on his efforts to hire OpenAI leaders when he left the board in 2018, including Andrej Karpathy, who departed OpenAI to lead self-driving work at Tesla.
- Notably, Musk was asked about Tesla’s efforts to develop competing AI technologies and found himself, not for the first time, on the wrong side of one of his own posts on X.
Watch for follow-up announcements from competing platforms — the industry rarely stays quiet for long after news like this.
Source: TechCrunch