How Elon Musk Squeezed OpenAI: They 'Are Gonna Want to Kill Me’

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Maxwell Zeff Paresh Dave Business Apr 29, 2026 7:41 PM How Elon Musk Squeezed OpenAI: They 'Are Gonna Want to Kill Me’ Tensions flared on the third day of trial in Musk v. Altman as OpenAI’s lawyers cross-examined Musk. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Elon Musk returned to the witness stand on Wednesday to continue telling his side of the story in his legal battle against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.

Under cross-examination from OpenAI’s lawyers, Musk was pressed on all the ways he tried to squeeze the organization over a 2017 power struggle that he ultimately lost. Around this time, Musk tried to hire away OpenAI researchers and stopped sending it funding he had previously promised, according to emails presented as evidence in the case. As the cross-examination began, tension rippled through the courtroom.

Technical Details

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers started the day by reprimanding someone in the gallery for taking a picture of Musk. OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman sat behind his lawyers with a yellow legal pad in his lap, giving Musk a cold stare as he testified. Musk grew visibly frustrated on the witness stand, pausing frequently to tell OpenAI’s lawyer, William Savitt, that he saw his questions as misleading.

Meanwhile, Savitt’s cross-examination was derailed by objections, technical issues, and Musk continuously claiming he doesn’t recall key details of OpenAI’s history. Savitt showed the courtroom emails from September 2017 between Musk, Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever discussing the formation of what would become OpenAI’s for-profit arm. In the thread, Musk demanded the right to choose four members of its board of directors, giving him more voting power than his cofounders, who would be left with three in total.

“I would unequivocally have initial control of the company, but this will change quickly,” said Musk in one message. Sutskever wrote back rejecting the idea because he said he feared it would give Musk too much power. Months before these negotiations started, Musk had halted payments to OpenAI, which was particularly difficult for the organization because he was then its main source of funding.

Industry Implications

Since 2016, Musk had been sending $5 million payments to OpenAI quarterly as part of a broader $1 billion pledge he made at the organization’s launch. But in the spring of 2017, he stopped sending the money. In another email from August 2017, the head of Musk’s family office, Jared Birchall, asked Musk if he should continue withholding it.

Musk responded simply, “Yes. ” Around the time Musk lost the power struggle, emails show that he held discussions with executives at Tesla and Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, about hiring OpenAI employees. At the time, Musk was still a board member of OpenAI.

Musk sent an email to a Tesla vice president in June 2017 about hiring an early OpenAI researcher, Andrej Karpathy.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.