Elon Musk tried to hire OpenAI's entire founding team — Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever — to run a new AI lab inside Tesla in 2018, according to emails and testimony aired in an Oakland courtroom on Wednesday. Musk also floated making OpenAI itself a Tesla subsidiary, or putting Altman on the Tesla board. The disclosures land in the middle of a trial that could reshape OpenAI, an $852 billion company now aiming to go public as soon as this year.
The witness was Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI adviser from 2016 and a board member from 2020 to 2023. Zilis, who is also the mother of four of Musk's children and an executive at Tesla and Neuralink, was the back-channel between Musk and the rest of OpenAI's founders during the six-month stretch in late 2017 and early 2018 on which much of the case hinges. By the end of 2017, Musk had lost confidence in the non-profit's ability to build artificial general intelligence on its own.
"There is little chance of OpenAI being a successful force if I focus on TeslaAI," Musk wrote to Zilis at the time. She then sketched plans for an event to "share that Tesla is building a world-leading AI lab (?) which will rival the likes of Google / DeepMind and Facebook AI Research." By early 2018, Zilis had laid out nine possible scenarios for reaching AGI, most of them routed through Tesla — including bringing Altman in to run AI at the carmaker, or poaching DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis for the role.
Key facts
- 01Court evidence shows Elon Musk tried in 2018 to move OpenAI's founders — Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever — into a new AI lab inside Tesla.
- 02Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI adviser from 2016 and board member from 2020 to 2023, drafted nine AGI scenarios in early 2018, most centered on Tesla.
- 03Musk is suing OpenAI, now valued at $852 billion, claiming Altman 'stole a charity' by converting it into a for-profit.
- 04OpenAI attorney William Savitt argued Musk was 'prepared to do the for-profit, provided he would get control.'
- 05Musk left OpenAI's board in early 2018 after the founders rejected the Tesla proposals; OpenAI is targeting a public listing as soon as this year.
OpenAI's other founders did not bite. In a February 2018 email to Musk's then-chief of staff Sam Teller, Zilis relayed the verdict: "They all think Elon is an incredible human being but that he really hasn't done his homework AI/AGI and that really concerns them about working with him." Musk left OpenAI's board in early 2018. The lab restructured later as a for-profit company sitting under a non-profit parent, the same structure Musk now claims was an act of theft.
“Zilis laid out nine possible scenarios for achieving AGI in early 2018, most of them centered on Tesla — including hiring Altman to run AI at the carmaker or poaching DeepMind's Demis Hassabis for the same role.”— Jaeden Schafer
That is the legal core of the trial. Musk argues Altman and Brockman unjustly enriched themselves by converting a charity into one of the most valuable private companies on earth. OpenAI's lead attorney, William Savitt, told the court the 2018 evidence shows the opposite — that Musk was "prepared to do the for-profit, provided he would get control." Speaking after Wednesday's hearing, Savitt said Musk wanted to "fold OpenAI into Tesla… when neither option was available to him he picked up his marbles and went home."
Brockman, testifying on Tuesday, told the jury Musk had been seeking "unilateral control over AGI," terms the founders could not accept. Zilis, for her part, told the court her "allegiance [is] to the best outcome of AI for humanity." Her testimony is unusually loaded: she and Musk had a romantic relationship roughly a decade ago and decided to have children via IVF in 2020, two years after the OpenAI fight. "I… really wanted to be a mum," she said. "[Musk] was encouraging everyone around him to have children."
The Tesla-AI-lab counterfactual is the part that matters for the industry, not the trial. In early 2018, the founders had to choose between an unbuilt Musk-controlled lab and a non-profit that would later need tens of billions in outside capital. They picked the second path, and the resulting company shipped ChatGPT and now anchors a market measured in the hundreds of billions. The version of history where Altman runs AI at Tesla is one where Google's DeepMind likely has no serious western rival.
There is also the postscript Zilis described from 2020. Altman, by then running OpenAI through its for-profit conversion, texted her for advice on how to re-approach Musk. She was encouraging but cautious: "the only thing I wonder is if he'll pull the 'you should have gone with Tesla' card on you." Musk, of course, eventually went and built his own lab anyway — xAI — and is now suing the people who turned down his earlier offer.
The Musk side of the case has thinner ground than the headlines suggest. The same evidence that frames Altman as opportunistic also frames Musk as someone who was willing to commercialize OpenAI on identical terms, provided he held the keys. A jury that reads the 2018 emails closely is being asked to decide whether the harm Musk claims is a structural one — the for-profit conversion itself — or a personal one, that the conversion happened without him at the top.
Whatever the verdict, the trial has already done something useful: it has put the 2018 control fight on the public record. OpenAI's defense is that the modern company exists precisely because Musk did not get his way. That argument is easier to make when the alternative timeline is a Tesla-owned AI division, the same Tesla that has spent the years since shipping a driver-assistance system that still cannot reliably handle a left turn. The non-profit-to-capped-profit pivot looks ugly in isolation. Next to the counterfactual, it looks like the reason ChatGPT exists at all.
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