The ongoing legal battle with ChatGPT creator OpenAI reveals new details about the tense final months before Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk left the AI firm. Court documents, emails, and texts presented during the trial suggest Musk was not simply stepping away from OpenAI, but was trying to pull key talent into Tesla.
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Forget margin or options. Here's how the pros trade TSLAAccording to OpenAI’s lawyer, William Savitt, Musk was aggressively trying to “squeeze” the organization as tensions grew. The revelations came to light during cross-examination in a federal court in Oakland, California.
Musk Planned to Recruit Top OpenAI Researchers
New evidence presented in court on May 6 shows that Musk pushed to create a Tesla-based AI lab between 2017 and 2018. The idea was to put together a powerful team inside Tesla that could compete with top players such as Google’s (GOOGL) DeepMind and Meta Platforms’ (META) Facebook AI Research.
As part of those plans, Musk allegedly wanted to recruit top talent, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Court records also showed Musk explored bringing in DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis to lead Tesla’s AI work. According to the messages shown in court, Musk was already becoming unhappy with OpenAI’s direction in 2017.
In one exchange with tech executive Shivon Zilis, he said OpenAI had little chance of becoming successful if he focused fully on Tesla’s AI plans instead. Zilis, who testified in court, said that she had drafted various AGI scenarios, many centered on Tesla, including the idea of bringing Altman in to lead AI at the firm. But OpenAI’s leadership was not interested.
In another email shown in court, Zilis told Musk’s then-chief of staff that while OpenAI’s executives respected Musk, they had serious doubts about how well he really understood AI. After that, the dispute between the two parties became worse, and Musk left OpenAI in 2018.
Trial Reveals Deepening Rift Between Musk and OpenAI
The ongoing trial has already produced several major revelations. During the hearing, Brockman accused Musk of quietly having OpenAI staff work on Tesla’s self-driving tech in 2017 without the firm’s knowledge.
Musk also admitted in court that his AI startup, xAI, uses OpenAI models to help train its chatbot, Grok, a statement that drew attention. On top of that, court evidence showed Musk instructing Tesla in a 2018 email to hire AI researcher Andrej Karpathy. He joked that OpenAI employees would “want to kill” him for it.
Karpathy later became a key figure in Tesla’s Autopilot program. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s legal team also accused Musk of trying to take control of governance and even fold OpenAI into Tesla. Savitt claimed that Musk would only support a for-profit model if he remained in control.
Musk, however, argues the opposite. He claims that Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI unfairly benefited from converting the startup into a for-profit company. He is now asking the court to remove them from leadership and reverse the for-profit model.
Is OpenAI Going to Be Public?
OpenAI has not set a firm date for an initial public offering (IPO), but the privately held company is widely anticipated to go public in 2026, alongside competitors such as Claude AI creator Anthropic and Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX. For more information and analysts’ insights on OpenAI ahead of its IPO, visit TipRanks’ private company center.
