Elon Musk weighed offering Sam Altman a Tesla board seat, jury told

By Madlin Mekelburg

 

Elon Musk at one point considered recruiting Sam Altman to serve on Tesla Inc.’s board of directors, jurors were told Wednesday at the trial over the feud between the two titans of artificial intelligence.

 

Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and confidante of Musk, testified “there was a time where that was on the table” around late 2017.

 

Musk and his fellow OpenAI co-founders were then in the midst of negotiations about the future of the AI nonprofit and how they could secure enough funds to meet their computing needs.

 

During those conversations, Musk had advanced a proposal to turn OpenAI into a subsidiary of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, where he was considering creating an AI lab.

 

 

“Do you recall Mr. Musk offered or discussed offering Mr. Altman a board seat at Tesla?” OpenAI attorney Sarah Eddy asked Zilis at the trial, now in its second week in federal court in Oakland, California.

 

“I do,” Zilis said, adding that she could not remember the exact time frame. Zilis is the mother of four children with Musk and is an executive at Neuralink, his brain-implant company.

 

William Savitt, another lawyer for OpenAI, told reporters outside the courthouse that there is “documentary evidence” Musk sought to add Altman to the board in an “effort to co-opt open AI and absorb it into Tesla.”

 

“It was in the nature of a blandishment, an inducement, to try to get Altman to abandon the mission and be part of Tesla,” Savitt said. “When it didn’t work, he left.”

 

The trial is the culmination of years of animosity and public feuding over the startup that Musk co-founded with Altman, Greg Brockman and others in 2015, before their relationship soured and they became rivals. 

 

Musk accused Altman and Brockman of enriching themselves by betraying the nonprofit’s founding mission to benefit humanity and converting it to a for-profit company, with billions of dollars of investments from Microsoft Corp. 

 

OpenAI and Microsoft have denied the allegations, arguing that Musk’s true motive is to harm a competitor to his own startup, xAI, that was launched in 2023, five years after he left OpenAI’s board.

 

Eddy showed Zilis an email she wrote in 2017 about an event to announce the creation of an AI lab at Tesla — an initiative that she said was under consideration but “never got legs.” 

 

The email included an FAQ about the event, stating that: “Those who want to work on large scale AI research don’t currently think of Tesla. Elon wants to change that by announcing his intention to create a world class AI lab.”

 

“In early 2018, Mr. Musk continued to try to persuade his co-founders to join Tesla and pursue AGI there, didn’t he?” Eddy asked, referring to artificial general intelligence.

 

“That would have been an idea on the table then,” Zilis said. “I can’t recall if it was also in 2017. I just don’t remember the exact time frame.”

 

Last week, Musk testified that he had started losing confidence in Brockman and Altman around 2017 over the course of negotiations about OpenAI’s future — particularly as they pushed back against his proposal to create a for-profit business and take charge of it. He was its biggest financial backer at the time.

 

Musk also faced questions about whether his efforts to recruit talent from OpenAI for Tesla at the time betrayed his own fiduciary duty to the ChatGPT maker.