Elon Musk’s Last-Ditch Effort to Control OpenAI: Recruit Sam Altman to Tesla

A few months before Elon Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in February 2018, he tried to recruit Sam Altman to join a “world-class AI lab” within Tesla. Musk went as far as offering the OpenAI CEO a Tesla board seat, according to emails and testimony presented in federal court on Wednesday during the Musk v. Altman trial. The emails were shown to a jury during the cross examination of Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI adviser and board member who is also the mother of four of Musk’s children.

Musk’s core claim in this lawsuit is that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman effectively stole a nonprofit, using the $38 million Musk invested to create a private company worth more than $800 billion today. OpenAI’s legal team has responded by arguing that the Tesla CEO has had “sour grapes” ever since he failed to assume control of OpenAI in 2017.

Evidence presented on Wednesday revealed new details about Musk's plans. In an email from November 2017, Zilis shared a draft of an FAQ page stating: “The purpose of this event is to share that Tesla is building a world leading AI lab which will rival the likes of Google / DeepMind.” Another note suggested that a NeurIPS event could be a “forcing function for Sam to commit to Tesla AI.”

Zilis also testified about the recruitment of Andrej Karpathy, contradicting Musk's earlier testimony that Karpathy left OpenAI of his own volition. Furthermore, the trial touched upon Zilis's personal relationship with Musk and her eventual resignation from the OpenAI board in 2023, just as Musk was launching his competitor, xAI. "When the father of your babies starts a competitive effort and will recruit out of OpenAI, there is nothing to be done," Zilis told a friend in a text message.