Elon Musk, in his second day of testimony in his blockbuster trial against OpenAI, on Wednesday said that he was “a fool” to fund the company, and that its other founders duped him into believing it would remain a nonprofit instead of the vast commercial success it later became.
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person who helped found OpenAI in 2015, pushed his case that the founders of the artificial intelligence company always intended for it to be a nonprofit.
“I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a start-up,” he said. “I gave them $38 million of essentially free funding to create what would become an $800 billion company.”
Mr. Musk has grown combative under cross-examination, often sparring with OpenAI’s lead counsel, William Savitt, and at one point drawing an interruption from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
“The classic answer to a yes-or-no question is not so simple,” Mr. Musk said. “For example, if you ask the question, ‘Will you stop beating your wife?’”
Judge Gonzalez Rogers cut him off, saying, “No, we’re not going to go there.”
In his questioning, Mr. Savitt has aimed to show that before leaving OpenAI, Mr. Musk was interested in turning the lab into a for-profit company. He has tried to paint a picture of Mr. Musk as someone who wants to wield outsized influence over his companies to have complete control, a point made to undercut Mr. Musk’s continuous assertions that no one individual should be in control of OpenAI and certainly not in control of artificial intelligence.
Mr. Musk left the start-up three years later after a power struggle with his co-founders. The public launch of ChatGPT catapulted OpenAI to commercial success in 2022.
Mr. Musk is seeking more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest financial partner. He is also asking the court to remove OpenAI’s co-founder and chief executive, Sam Altman, from the board, and to stop its recent shift to operate as a for-profit company.
OpenAI’s lead counsel, William Savitt, argued on Tuesday that Mr. Musk filed the lawsuit because he “didn’t get his way at OpenAI.” The start-up’s original nonprofit continues to oversee the for-profit company, and is working to redistribute billions of dollars generated by the commercial operation, he added.
The trial’s outcome could upend the A.I. landscape. OpenAI is a leading A.I. company. A win for Mr. Musk would also be a win for OpenAI’s competitors, from industry giants like Google to young companies like Anthropic and Mr. Musk’s own A.I. lab, xAI.
A loss for Mr. Musk would mean that OpenAI, which is now valued at about $730 billion, will be free to continue its commercial course just as it appears to be heading toward one of the biggest initial public offerings in history.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Here’s what to know:
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High-profile witnesses: Mr. Altman and several other key industry figures, including Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, are slated to testify later in the trial.
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Trial logistics: The trial is expected to take about four weeks before a nine-person jury at the federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif. If the jury rules in Mr. Musk’s favor, Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who also oversaw a high-profile lawsuit against Apple over its control of the App Store, will decide on monetary damages and other remedies.
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Musk’s social media: Judge Gonzalez Rogers on Tuesday called Mr. Musk, who assailed Mr. Altman on X before the trial, to the bench to discuss whether there should be a gag order preventing him from posting on social media about the trial. “How can we get things done without you making things worse outside the courtroom?” she asked. The judge asked him and Mr. Altman to start with a “clean slate” and “keep things to a minimum” on social media. They all agreed, and Mr. Musk has thus far complied.
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