GoKawiilThe jury’s speedy decision to reject Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the other founders of OpenAI and Microsoft confirmed what we saw in the courtroom: Musk’s case was a weak one, in part because he waited so long to file it.
Watching the closing arguments last week, OpenAI’s attorneys detailed point-by-point how the law was on their client’s side, while the plaintiffs team focused on Sam Altman’s apparent lack of credibility and expressed disbelief that anyone would disagree with Musk’s accusations.
The final effect was that, after the verdict, some found it hard to believe Musk had lost — including the man himself. In a post he later deleted, Musk called Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers a “terrible activist Oakland judge,” then announced his plans to appeal, declaring “there is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity.”
But Altman and Brockman weren’t the only figures who benefitted from OpenAI’s non-profit investments. As much as Musk and his legal team tried to make the trial about Altman, the proceedings revealed just as much about Musk himself.
One incident that came out in court showed Musk benefiting from OpenAI in an uncomfortably familiar way. Greg Brockman testified that in 2017, Musk asked him to bring a team of OpenAI researchers down to Tesla’s headquarters to help with the autopilot team for a few weeks. “It was pretty clear that was not something we could say no to,” Brockman said.
Brockman described taking a team of leading scientists, including Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, and Scott Grey, to consult with the “demoralized” Tesla workers. They helped come up with ideas to improve the vehicle’s self-driving technology, with Sutskever telling the team that if they could find 10,000 images of a tricky corner case, they would be able to fix their software. Musk even asked Brockman to recommend employees to fire, which he declined to do.
Another person familiar with the episode confirmed Brockman’s account, and said Tesla did not reimburse OpenAI for the time and effort of its employees. Musk’s family office, Excession, didn’t reply to a request for comment.
The heart of Musk’s case is that Altman, Brockman and OpenAI committed a “breach of charitable trust” — that Musk donated funds for a specific charitable purpose, and his cofounders instead used them for something else. He also accuses them of “unjust enrichment” due stock and other benefits from OpenAI’s for-profit.
In the case of the OpenAI scientists parachuting into Tesla, Musk’s charitable donations were intended to hire scientists focused on securing the benefits of AGI. Instead, he had them work for free at his for-profit company.
Dorothy Lund, a Columbia Law School professor and the co-host of the Beyond Unprecedented podcast, told TechCrunch that this arrangement wouldn’t be legal, calling it “a bit rich for Musk to be suing for breach of a charitable trust, when he appears to have been redirecting assets in a way that was inconsistent with that mission.”
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