Elon Musk said Sam Altman “stole” the nonprofit — but the lawsuit revealed he had similar intentions

The jury is out decision to reject Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the founders of OpenAI and Microsoft confirmed what we saw in court: Musk’s case was weak, in part because he waited too long to file it.

At a hearing last week, OpenAI’s lawyers detailed how the law was on their client’s side, while the opposing team focused on Sam Altman. lack of loyalty and expressed disbelief that anyone would disagree with Musk’s objections.

The final result was that, after the decision, some found it difficult to believe that Musk had lost – including the man himself. In a letter he later retracted, Musk called Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers “a bad Oakland judge,” then announced his plans to appeal, saying, “There is no question to anyone who has followed this story closely that Altman & Brockman enriched themselves by stealing from charity.”

But Altman and Brockman weren’t the only people who benefited from OpenAI’s nonprofit funding. As Musk and his legal team tried to file a lawsuit against Altman, the revelations about Musk.

One case that came out of court showed Musk benefiting from OpenAI in a very public way. Greg Brockman testified that in 2017, Musk asked him to bring a team of OpenAI researchers to Tesla headquarters to help the autopilot team for a few weeks. “It was very clear that it was not something we could turn down,” Brockman said.

Brockman described taking a group of leading scientists, including Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, and Scott Gray, to negotiate with Tesla’s “contaminated” employees. They helped come up with ideas to improve the technology of the self-driving car, and Sutskever told the team that if they could get 10,000 square footage, they could improve their software. Musk also asked Brockman to encourage employees to fire, which he refused to do.

A person familiar with the matter confirmed Brockman’s account and said Tesla did not reimburse OpenAI for the time and energy of its employees. Musk’s family office, Excession, did not respond to a request for comment.

The soul of The story of Musk is that Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI committed a “philanthropic breach of trust” — that Musk donated money to charitable causes, and that his co-founders instead used it for other purposes. He also accused them of “unjust enrichment” for property and other benefits from OpenAI’s profits.

In the case of the OpenAI scientists who joined Tesla, Musk’s philanthropic contributions were designed to hire scientists focused on making AGI profitable. Instead, he offered them to work for free at his for-profit company.

Dorothy Lund, Columbia Law School professor and co-author Beyond the unprecedented podcasttold TechCrunch that this would be unacceptable, calling it “a bit heavy-handed for Musk to be charged with philanthropic violations, when he appears to be sending goods in a way that is inconsistent with the mission.”

It is true that the self-driving project had artificial intelligence, but Musk’s witnesses emphasized that Tesla’s self-driving project was very different from the OpenAI research. This is partly because Karpathy left OpenAI for Tesla shortly after this incident. OpenAI’s attorneys characterized the departure as Musk violating his duties at the lab, where he served as the agency’s chairman, by hiring one of its key researchers to his company.

Another fact that undoubtedly impressed the judges is the amount of time Musk has to try to gain sole control of OpenAI’s for-profit affiliate in 2017. Musk deployed good cop, bad cop tactics in trying to convince his co-founders to allow him full control of OpenAI’s for-profit affiliate — giving them free Teslas and threatening to freeze his contributions.

His efforts put his lawyers in a difficult position, facing the need to convince the jury that there was a big difference between what Musk thought and the profit that was made. He added that a “small scale” for-profit approach would be acceptable, although OpenAI witnesses indicated that non-profits and large commercial tools are common.

Indeed, there are arguments to be made when Musk took one of the shares his co-founders offered to share equally, and finds himself today as one of OpenAI’s largest shareholders – not a controller. But several times during the trial, Musk’s friends testified that he refused to invest in any business he might own.

The failure of Musk’s claims because he wrote them too late has been attributed to technicality, but the statute of limitations has meaning: People and businesses make important decisions and spend money based on their understanding that what they are doing is legal. If someone like Musk waits long enough to sue him, then the cost of uncovering all those decisions could exceed the reasonable return.

None of the jury members said anything about how they reached their verdict. However, he was asked to consider if, before August 5, 2021, Musk they should they know that OpenAI is using things outside of its intended purpose or creating a for-profit partnership. The answer to this is clear: Musk himself was doing those things.