Elon Musk Takes The Stand for a Third Day in Lawsuit Against Sam Altman

Elon Musk took the stand for a third day in his lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, offering extended testimony as he seeks to halt its conversion to a for-profit company. At the heart of the case is Musk's accusation that OpenAI and Altman manipulated him into providing $38 million to fund the venture in its early years as a nonprofit seeking to develop safe AI for humanity, only to turn it into a for-profit venture. "I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a startup," Musk said during his testimony on Wednesday. Musk faced hours of cross-examination from William Savitt, an attorney for Altman and OpenAI. Savitt, who has represented both Musk as well as parties that sued Musk in prior cases, sought to establish with the jury that Musk not only knew about OpenAI's early plans to construct a for-profit entity, but also supported it and requested majority control of it. Savitt sought to undermine Musk's previous testimony by highlighting factual errors and contradictions during the cross-examination, which will continue today. Musk appeared frustrated with Savitt's line of questioning throughout the cross-examination. "Your questions are not simple," Musk said. "They're designed to trick me, essentially." Musk had previously testified to the jury that though he did seek majority control of OpenAI, his intention was to lower his stake over time in a way that mirrored what he did at Tesla. Musk's fixer and the head of his family office, Jared Birchall, is scheduled to testify on Thursday, as is OpenAI co-founder and President Brockman. Musk's attorneys have pointed to private journal entries written by Brockman in 2017, obtained as part of legal discovery, as evidence that the OpenAI founders were secretly plotting about the company's for-profit structure. "We've been thinking that maybe we should just flip to a for profit," Brockman allegedly wrote in a private journal entry. "Making the money for us sounds great and all." He later said in a recorded deposition in September that the entry in question was "a reference to having some sort of a revenue plan...in order to pursue the mission" of OpenAI. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.