GoKawiilis a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.
The strongest witness for Elon Musk’s case against OpenAI so far has been Greg Brockman’s journal. Brockman himself is running as a close second.
Brockman was called to the stand in a rather unusual way — he was cross-examined first, followed by a direct examination — and he had some serious high school debate club energy. There was a lot of “I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” “I wouldn’t say it that way,” and “That sounds like something I wrote. Can I see it in context?” When Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, read some of the evidence aloud, Brockman would pedantically correct him if he skipped a word, even if that word was “a” or “the.” When asked if Microsoft’s $10 billion investment was the biggest financial event at OpenAI, Brockman replied it was the only $10 billion investment. Come on.
I have previously said that if you can define the word “epistemology,” you should not testify in your own defense. So the lawyer skipped a word — is it really worth taking up the jury’s time to tell us all that? Save being the world’s cleverest boy for your parents.
“that’d be pretty morally bankrupt.”
This would have been bad enough. But the journal entries — a series of text files from his computer — were worse, because they were very clear about Brockman’s greed and opportunism at least circa 2017. Here’s one: “btw another realization from this is that it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt and he’s really not an idiot.” Here’s another: “maybe we should just flip to a for-profit. making money for us sounds great and all.” There’s also this: “cannot say we are committed to the non-profit. don’t wanna say we’re committed. if three months later we’re doing a b-corp it is a lie.”
“It’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him” is very close to Musk’s “steal a charity” line, I notice.
We haven’t finished the direct examination yet, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing something exculpatory about the events that inspired these entries. But between Brockman’s attitude toward the cross and the journal entries, I don’t think I’d trust him to watch my bag while I used the restroom.
Musk’s team is trying to paint Brockman as being greedy, which I buy. The infamous “What will take me to $1B?” from Brockman’s journal made an appearance. We established that Brockman’s stake in OpenAI’s for-profit was worth about $30 billion. Molo asked Brockman why he hadn’t donated $29 billion to OpenAI’s non-profit arm if $1 billion was enough for him.
“Why are we fighting about the fucking purple box?”
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