In what sounds like the world's most awkward Silicon Valley boardroom showdown, OpenAI president Greg Brockman has testified that he genuinely feared Elon Musk might physically strike him during a 2017 meeting. The drama unfolded in an Oakland federal court where Brockman is both a co-founder of OpenAI and a defendant in Musk's lawsuit trying to block the company's shift to a for-profit model.
Brockman told the jury that when he rejected Musk's proposal for greater control over the AI firm, the billionaire's demeanor shifted faster than a Tesla in Ludicrous Mode. "I actually thought he was going to hit me," Brockman recounted, presumably not the kind of AI prediction anyone signs up for. The meeting ended shortly thereafter with Musk announcing he'd cut off funding - a threat he made good on, since OpenAI had been relying on his backing since its 2015 inception.
This testimony lands in the second week of a month-long trial between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, part of a feud that's been simmering since Musk left the company and watched it balloon into one of the world's most valuable tech enterprises after launching ChatGPT. Before his exit, Musk apparently tried to gain more control by "buttering up" Brockman and fellow co-founder Ilya Sutskever - a strategy that, based on current events, didn't exactly work.
Lawyers for OpenAI introduced text messages from August 2017 between Sutskever and Brockman reading: "Will a model 3 make you be willing to accept massively unfavourable terms?" - presumably referencing Tesla's then-new sedan, not a threat model. The crux of Brockman's testimony is that Musk was fully aware of plans to transition OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit structure, which the company did last year after adding a for-profit arm to raise billions.
Up next on the witness stand: former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis, who happens to be the mother of four of Musk's children. Brockman testified that Zilis told him she'd had twins, but he only learned from public reports that Musk was the father. When he asked about it, "she said that it was via IVF and that it was entirely platonic with Elon." Brockman added that the company "trusted her to keep the Elon conflict under control" - a trust that ended when Zilis left the board in March 2023, just as Musk launched xAI, his own ChatGPT competitor.