Elon Musk appeared more petty than prepared

Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed.

Elon Musk appeared more petty than prepared

In his opening testimony against Sam Altman, Musk was unfocused and uncharming. This is not the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his defamation suit, he turned on the charm and the jury responded by finding him not guilty. Today he looked adrift and unprepared. The only times he showed real animation were when he was bragging about how much he’d done for OpenAI.

The direct examination is a way of telling a story through questions; it’s important to make the narrative clear. For a suit that accuses Sam Altman of straying from OpenAI’s mission, Musk spent a weird amount of time talking about himself, recounting his biography, and hyping up the various ventures he’s undertaken that have nothing to do with 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.”

For instance, he told jurors that he worked between “80 to 100 hours a week,” which was how he got so much done. It is unclear to me whether his prolific posting habits count as part of the workweek. I hope the defense asks.

The origins of OpenAI and the Google rivalry

We did eventually get around to OpenAI, where Musk portrayed himself as the driving force. He’d been worried about AI since childhood, and felt that someone needed to prevent Google from developing it. He testified that he became involved in AI safety because he had a conversation with Google’s own Larry Page and asked, “What if AI wipes out all the humans?” Page essentially shrugged — as far as he was concerned, as long as the AI didn’t also go extinct, things were all right.

“I said, ‘That’s insane,’ and he called me a species-ist for being pro-human.” So OpenAI, for Musk, was born specifically to keep Google from having too much power in AI. Musk also said that after he recruited Ilya Sutskever, then a research scientist at Google, to OpenAI, “Larry Page refused to speak to me ever again.”

Distractions and technicalities

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.

We went very quickly through a lot of ideas, including “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). Musk defined this as being when a computer “becomes as smart as any human, arguably smarter than any human.” These definitions and personal anecdotes felt like a distraction from the core legal point.

The core of the trial: The for-profit model

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 was to make clear that Musk’s intentions were very different than the for-profit that came to pass.

However, the argument “I agreed to a for-profit model but not THAT for-profit model” isn’t particularly strong. It distracts from the core point of the trial: Did OpenAI betray its mission statement and fool Musk into making a charitable donation?

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.