Altman Testifies Musk Sought OpenAI Control, Suggested Passing It to His Children

Elon Musk tried to take control of OpenAI and even suggested it could pass to his children when he dies, Sam Altman said Tuesday.

Altman, co-founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, faces a lawsuit from Musk. Musk accuses him of looting a charity, since OpenAI began as a non-profit.

Testifying before a federal jury in Oakland, California, Altman said Musk backed the idea of OpenAI becoming a for-profit business and wanted long-term control of it.

"A particularly hair-raising moment was when my cofounders asked, 'If you have control, what happens when you die?' He said something like '...maybe it should pass to my children,'" Altman testified.

Those comments came as Musk sought more control after OpenAI's founding in 2015. He proposed several ways to gain it.

Altman said Musk wanted more seats on OpenAI's board, to become its chief executive and suggested making OpenAI a subsidiary of Tesla, his electric vehicle company.

OpenAI's overarching goal was to get more money faster, Altman said Tuesday. He recalled talks with Musk about restructuring into a traditional for-profit entity.

Musk believed he should lead such a company, partly due to his fame as a business person who could attract financial backing.

"If I make one tweet about this, it's instantly worth a ton," Altman recalled Musk saying.

But Altman and OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever decided against giving Musk such control in exchange for financing. They said it would not help OpenAI's mission or pursuit of artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

"I was extremely uncomfortable with it," Altman said. "One of the reasons we started OpenAI was because we didn't think any one person should be in control of AGI."

AGI is loosely defined in the tech and AI community as an AI tool or model so capable it outperforms humans on most tasks.

Musk left OpenAI in early 2018 and stopped his quarterly donations of $5 million.

Altman called an email from Musk "burned into my memory." In it, Musk said OpenAI had a zero percent chance, not a one percent chance, of success without him.