In August 2017, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever reunited at That of Elon Musk Self-proclaimed “Haunted Mansion,” a 47-acre, $23 million estate in Hillsborough, south of San Francisco, to discuss the future of OpenAI. Actress Amber Heard, Musk’s then-girlfriend, served the group whiskey and then fled with a friend. Brockmanco-founder and president of OpenAI, testified in federal court during the trial for Musk vs. Altman Tuesday.
Before the meeting, Musk gifted Brockman and Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist, with new Tesla Model 3 cars. “It was like he was flattering us,” Brockman said on the stand. “He wanted us to feel indebted to him in some way.” Sutskever tried to reciprocate for the occasion. The amateur artist gave Musk a painting of a Tesla. Musk and the other co-founders wanted to create a for-profit arm to entice investors to give them billions of dollars to pay for computing. But Musk also wanted control of the company, and Sutskever and Brockman opposed granting the Tesla CEO what they thought was a “dictatorship” over the future of AI development. They proposed shared control.
After several minutes of deliberation, Musk rejected their offer. “He got up and walked around the table,” Brockman recalled. “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me.” Musk grabbed the board, said he would stop funding the nonprofit until Brockman and Sutskever resigned, and left the room, according to Brockman’s testimony. But that night, Musk’s so-called chief of staff, Shivon Zilis, called Brockman and Sutskever “to tell them it’s not over,” Brockman testified. “There were discussions about the future that included us.”
The story of those heated negotiations emerged as Brockman wrapped up his testimony Tuesday. For OpenAI, the events at the mansion are representative of repeated cases of Musk’s erratic behavior which, according to them, undermines his arguments about the company. Musk claims his donations of around $38 million to OpenAI were mistreated by Brockman and others on the path to building an $852 billion for-profit company now known for services such as ChatGPT And Manuscript. Brockman, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and OpenAI deny any wrongdoing, and the jury In Musk vs. Altman could begin deliberating on an advisory decision as early as next week.
After Tuesday’s testimony, William Savitt, an attorney for OpenAI, told reporters that what Brockman learned in 2017 was how difficult it can be to meet your heroes. Brockman admired and respected Musk’s business acumen, but his desire for control was absolute and concerning, Savitt said. Marc Toberoff, Musk’s lawyer, told reporters that the real concern was Brockman’s motivations for sharing control, with his desire for wealth having come under scrutiny in court a day earlier.
For his part, Brockman offered another story Tuesday to highlight why he thought Musk wasn’t up to the task of controlling an AI company. Brockman recalled an OpenAI researcher from the time Alex Radford showing Musk an early version of an AI chatbot that didn’t generate responses he liked. Musk “kept saying this system is so stupid that a kid on the Internet could do it better,” Brockman said. Radford “was absolutely crushed” and “demoralized” to the point that he almost left the field of AI research entirely, Brockman said. Brockman and Sutskever “spent a lot of time” rebuilding his confidence. Musk’s failure to see the potential of the early technologies, which ultimately became the basis for ChatGPT, made him unfit to control OpenAI, according to Brockman. “You had to dream a little,” Brockman said. And Musk had not shown that he was capable of it.
Boardroom fights
Brockman said Tuesday that he, Sutskever and Altman were considering removing Musk from OpenAI’s nonprofit board as negotiations with him over a for-profit sister company dragged on for months. They would meet over whiskey at Musk’s mansion to discuss alternative financing options. There was agreement on what not to do, but little agreement on what to do instead. But Brockman and Sutskever decided that removing Musk was “a mistake,” Brockman testified. Ultimately, Musk left on his own after believing that OpenAI was on a path to “certain failure,” according to an email he wrote in early 2018.
Zilis, then advisor to OpenAI and Musk, kept him informed on developments in the AI sector in the coming years. “She was vicarious for Elon in a way,” Brockman said, calling her “a friend” who he had first met in 2012 or 2013.
But she ultimately had to face her own reckoning. Zilis joined OpenAI’s board of directors in 2020 and gave birth to Musk’s twins in 2021. She told Brockman about the children. But he only learned that Musk was the father later through press reports. When Brockman confronted her, “she said it was via IVF and it was entirely platonic with Elon,” he testified. Several board members wanted to remove Zilis from the board, but Brockman said he and Sutskever convinced them to let her stay because she helped manage Elon Musk’s frustrations with OpenAI. “We actually had a board vote,” he said.
Zilis left OpenAI board in 2023 after Musk launched rival lab xAI.
This wasn’t the only conflict between board members that OpenAI faced. Brockman said he supports the removal, or at least partial recusal, of Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo from the board after the knowledge sharing platform launched a chatbot in February 2023 that competed with OpenAI’s recently released ChatGPT. D’Angelo remains on the board today. Brockman also supported removing AI security researcher Helen Toner from the board, he said, without specifying a reason. She resigned from her position in 2023 after helping fire Altman, a decision that backfired and quickly led to her reinstatement. D’Angelo and Toner did not immediately respond to WIRED’s requests for comment on the testimony.
How the boardroom drama played out on Musk’s side will likely be rediscovered on Wednesday. Zilis is expected to take the witness stand to advance his case. Musk’s lawyers had requested that her testimony not be broadcast live due to safety concerns for her and the four children she now shares with Musk. But U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled there were no “compelling specific concerns” that warrant “interruption of transmission.”
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