Over the next six weeks, Brockman said, Musk and the other co-founders had intense discussions about creating a profitable entity to raise enough capital to create artificial general intelligence—powerful AI that can compete with humans at most cognitive tasks. Musk wanted majority equity in the entity and the right to elect a majority of the board members. He also wanted to be its CEO, Brockman said.
Brockman testified that in August 2017, he and the other co-founders gathered to hammer out the terms of a for-profit structure. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist at the time, arrived carrying a painting of Tesla as a “symbol of goodwill” in exchange for the actual Tesla Musk had given him a few days earlier. “It felt like (Musk) was buttering us up, right, he wanted us to feel grateful to him,” Brockman told the jury.
When Brockman and Sutskever proposed that they all have equal shares of equity, Musk became silent and finally said, “I decline,” Brockman said. Musk then stood up and “stormed around the table,” he said. “I really thought he was going to kill me.” Musk grabbed the painting and walked out.
Brockman said that he later struggled to decide whether to continue building OpenAI with Musk or to part ways. “There was a fork in the road,” he said. “Do we accept Elon’s terms? Or do we reject the terms, he leaves to make his own terms, and then we make our own?”
“The one thing we could not accept was handing him unilateral, complete control over AGI,” Brockman told the jury.
What was Brockman thinking?
In his dramatic baritone, Mollo argued that Brockman was motivated by greed rather than commitment to OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to develop AI that benefits humanity. He said Brockman never invested any money in the company, but now has a stake worth about $30 billion.
Brockman emphasized the characterization of Molo, saying, “Solving for the mission has always been my primary motivation.” “It’s the same today.”
