OpenAI Trial Testimony Reveals Musk’s Tesla Board Offer to Altman
CNBC reported Thursday that a central witness in the Elon Musk versus Sam Altman trial revealed Musk once dangled a Tesla board seat in front of Altman. The offer was part of a broader push to absorb OpenAI entirely into the electric vehicle company.
Zilis Takes the Stand in Oakland
Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member who shares four children with Musk, delivered the testimony on Wednesday. She described her role at the startup as a liaison connecting Musk, Altman, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, and co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Zilis told the court that leadership debated OpenAI’s corporate structure “ad nauseam,” weighing numerous for-profit configurations. The Tesla board seat offer to Altman emerged as one of those proposals collapsed.
The Lawsuit and Its Origins
Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman in 2024, alleging the defendants abandoned the nonprofit mission he championed when co-founding the company alongside them in 2015. OpenAI later established a for-profit subsidiary after Musk departed the board in 2018. That structural shift sits at the core of his legal challenge. Musk himself testified earlier in the trial that he was not categorically opposed to a commercial arm, but felt it ultimately consumed the company’s original purpose.
Evidence Cuts Against Musk’s Earlier Claims
Documentary evidence entered during Zilis’s testimony complicated Musk’s own account. Text messages and emails showed that while still serving on OpenAI’s board, he was quietly working to recruit the startup’s top researchers to Tesla. In communications from early 2018, Musk wrote that he intended to actively pursue three or four OpenAI employees for the carmaker. That contradicted his earlier claim that he did not solicit talent from the organization. Zilis also conceded under questioning that Musk approached AI researcher Andrej Karpathy about joining Tesla before Karpathy made any independent move, countering Musk’s assertion that Karpathy was already planning to leave. Separately, a message thread from August 2017 showed Zilis alerting a Musk staffer that a $5 million quarterly funding installment for OpenAI had been quietly frozen, without any notification to Musk’s co-founders.
Trial Enters Its Final Day of Week Two
The proceedings concluded their second week Thursday in Oakland federal court. Other prominent figures, including Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, remain potential witnesses as the case continues. The outcome could carry significant consequences for OpenAI’s planned conversion to a fully for-profit entity, a restructuring already under intense scrutiny from regulators and the public alike.
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