San Francisco Frontiers - Musk grilled on AI profits at OpenAI trial

"Few answers are going to be complete, especially when you cut me off all the time," the visibly irritated multibillionaire said as he resumed his duel Thursday morning with the defense attorney for OpenAI.

Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who must decide whether OpenAI -- the creator of ChatGPT -- betrayed its original nonprofit mission, had to intervene several times to compel the world's richest man to answer questions.

After the judge accused him of playing lawyer by complaining that opposing counsel's questions were "leading," the tech mogul conceded: "I am not a lawyer."

"Well, technically I did take Law 101 in school," he added, drawing laughter from the courtroom.

A benefactor to OpenAI's co-founders -- to whom he gave $38 million during the project's early days from 2015 to 2017 -- Musk accuses CEO Sam Altman and his partner Greg Brockman of betraying the startup's charitable mission by transforming it into a commercial company valued at more than $850 billion and poised to go public.

He is seeking to have OpenAI -- which rivals Anthropic and Google at the top of the global AI race -- return to nonprofit status, in a trial whose outcome could reshape the question of who controls AI innovation in the United States.

OpenAI's attorney William Savitt sought to demonstrate that Musk is a mirror image of what he denounces: all of his companies -- Tesla, Neuralink, X and his own AI firm xAI, recently absorbed into SpaceX -- are for-profit, and the entrepreneur himself presents them as beneficial to humanity.

"There's nothing wrong with having a for-profit organization," Musk answered, repeating his mantra: "You just can't steal a charity" -- meaning OpenAI should simply have started as a normal company from the outset.

"The worst-case situation would be that AI kills us all, I suppose," Musk declared with a smile, seizing an opening from his own attorney to invoke the climactic scenario from the film "Terminator."

The judge had sought to bar such digressions, telling Musk's attorney at the start of the hearing: "I think it's ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that's in the exact same space."

Musk's testimony concluded Thursday, his third day on the stand, although he could be called back before mid-May.

Altman, his former protégé turned adversary, was present for Thursday's exchanges and left the courthouse shortly after Musk finished.

Altman's testimony is expected next week or the week after. OpenAI President Brockman, another early co-founder, will precede him on the witness stand. A ruling on the merits is expected in mid-May.

H.King--SFF