(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk acknowledged there was no written agreement or contract with OpenAI regarding the terms of his donation to the company when it was first founded as a nonprofit research organization more than a decade ago.
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Under questioning from OpenAI attorney William Savitt, Musk said he did not have his representatives prepare a document to lay out the conditions for the money he committed to OpenAI in its early days. Asked again whether he had done so, Musk said he “reviewed the corporate charter, which said it is a nonprofit.”
“At the end of the day, you can’t steal a charity,” he said, repeating his refrain from earlier in his testimony.
The tense questioning kicked off Musk’s third day of testimony in a closely watched trial over his claims that OpenAI betrayed its altruistic mission in pursuit of profit. In the lawsuit he filed in 2024, Musk alleged that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive officer, and Greg Brockman, its president, have enriched themselves by converting the company to a for-profit business with billions of dollars in support from Microsoft Corp.
OpenAI and Altman have accused Musk of harassment and say the real goal of the lawsuit is to undercut competition with his own startup that he co-founded in 2023, xAI.
When announcing its launch in 2015, the nonprofit said Musk committed to eventually donating as much as $1 billion to its mission to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” In a post on X in 2023, Musk wrote that he had donated $100 million. The actual amount was far less. “In strict monetary terms, I contributed $38 million,” Musk said this week.
Much of Musk’s testimony to date has been about his falling out with OpenAI’s leaders as they explored strategies to line up sufficient funding to compete with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other pioneers in the AI space that were operating as for-profits.
Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018 and went on to launch xAI as a for-profit five years later. xAI’s flagship chatbot, Grok, is known for its irreverant responses and previously ignited a global uproar for generating non-consensual explicit photos.
OpenAI’s lawyer asked Musk whether he believes his companies — including SpaceX and Tesla Inc. — are good for society, pointing at how he’s posted about AI and robots being beneficial for humanity. Musk replied yes to all.
