Day Four of the blockbuster civil trial in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman began Thursday with Musk returning to the witness stand.
Musk faced grilling by OpenAI and Altman’s lead lawyer, William Savitt, and a brief round of questioning by an attorney representing OpenAI backer Microsoft, also a defendant.
Jared Birchall, a former Morgan Stanley banker and Musk’s money manager, was the second witness called by Musk’s legal team.
Here are the biggest takeaways from the trial, drawn from witness testimony and evidence presented in the California federal court.
Musk said xAI is no threat
Musk owns xAI, the maker of Grok, and the defense argues that his lawsuit over OpenAI’s transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity was filed to take down a rival.
Musk on Thursday sought to deflect those allegations by describing xAI as “the smallest” of the companies. He ranked his AI rivals in order of size, starting with Anthropic first, OpenAI second, Google third, and then “some Chinese open-source models.”
“xAI is very small,” he said of his own company. “It is about a tenth of the size of that of OpenAI,” Musk added.
Musk has taken aggressive steps to shore up xAI, including merging it with his rocket company, SpaceX, earlier this year. He more recently announced a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, giving SpaceX the right to acquire it for $60 billion.
Judge shut down talk of a robot apocalypse
Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has made multiple references to what he called an AI “Terminator” scenario during his time on the witness stand. On Thursday, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers put a stop to it.
“We’re not going to talk about extinction in this case,” Gonzalez Rogers told Musk before Thursday’s morning recess. The reprimand came after Musk answered questions about Tesla’s robot-making business and his past comments about “building a robot army.”
“No, we do not make weapons,” said Musk of Tesla, “We don’t want a ‘Terminator’ situation.” When asked about the situation he was referring to, Musk said, “In the movie it’s not a good situation,” adding that the “worst situation would be that AI kills us all, I suppose.”
Birchall questioned over OpenAI security
Birchall, Musk’s money manager, testified that Musk made $38 million in donations to OpenAI, which Musk alleges were improperly used to enrich some of the defendants.
Birchall said Musk made “approximately 60 donations” to the ChatGPT maker as well as monthly rent contributions.
On cross-examination, Savitt asked Birchall whether Musk ever gave him specific instructions or restrictions on how OpenAI should use the funds.
“There was a greater understanding, as one would expect there to be, among Elon and other founding members of OpenAI,” said Birchall. “I don’t believe that ‘for whatever use, at any time’ was the intended use of those funds.”
Savitt also questioned Birchall about OpenAI’s 2018 office-sharing agreement with Musk’s Neuralink, which seeks to connect human brains to computers. The lawyer pointed to emails between Birchall and another OpenAI employee in which Birchall said that the building should have armed security at all times, citing OpenAI’s growing profile.
“They were sharing that cost with Neuralink,” Birchall said of the security arrangement.
Birchall testified he was xAI’s corporate secretary “up until recent weeks.” He has also held positions at Neuralink and The Boring Company, Musk’s tunneling company.
Looking ahead
The first week of trial concluded with Birchall because the jury will not sit on Friday.
Next week, the nine-person jury will hear from Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and a cofounder. Brockman is considered a key witness in the case due to journal entries he wrote that shed light on the period before Musk left the company in 2018.
“His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him,” one Brockman diary entry reads, referring to Musk.
“it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him,” Brockman also wrote. “that’d be pretty morally bankrupt. and he’s really not an idiot.”
OpenAI has said Brockman’s diary entries were “cherry-picked” by Musk’s legal team.
Brockman’s journal entries are among the evidence cited by the judge when she ordered a jury trial. Musk has asked that Brockman and Altman be removed as officers of the company and forfeit their equity if found liable.
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