Elon Musk found himself on Thursday forced to explain how his own commercialization of AI was no more "stealing" from humanity and did not run the same dangers as that of the owners of ChatGPT, accused of having abandoned their initial philanthropic vocation.
“My answers cannot be complete if you cut me off all the time,” said the multibillionaire, resuming his bitter duel with the defense lawyer on Thursday morning, interrupted the day before at the trial he obtained against OpenAI in a civil court in Oakland, near San Francisco.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who must decide whether or not OpenAI has betrayed its original non-profit vocation, had to intervene several times to force the richest man in the world to respond bluntly.
Accused by the magistrate of playing the lawyer by complaining about the "leading" questions from the opposing party, the uncontrollable captain of the tech industry had to concede: "I'm not a lawyer. But hey, I still took the introductory law course at the university", he replied, a cheeky smile at the lips which triggered laughter from the room.
Benefactor of the founders of OpenAI, to whom he gave 38 million dollars during their debut in 2015-2017, Elon Musk accuses the boss Sam Altman and his associate Greg Brockman of having betrayed the public utility mission of the start-up by transforming it into a commercial company valued at more than 850 billion dollars, and now ready to enter the stock market.
He demands the return of OpenAI, which competes with Anthropic at the head of the global AI competition, to the status of a non-profit association in a trial whose outcome could raise the question of the governance of technology in the United States.
- Terminator -
Methodically, OpenAI's lawyer, Bill Savitt, tried to demonstrate that Elon Musk resembled exactly what he denounces: all his companies -- Tesla, Neuralink, X and his own AI company xAI recently absorbed into SpaceX -- are for-profit, and the entrepreneur he himself presents them as beneficial for humanity.
“There's nothing wrong with running a profitable business,” the businessman defended, implying that OpenAI just had to take that path from the start and couldn't change its goal along the way. "You just can't steal from a charity," he repeated, hammering home the term "charity" rather than "non-profit."
To counter this argument, the company's lawyer carefully led Elon Musk towards his February 2025 initiative, when the latter formed a consortium of investors to buy OpenAI's assets for $97 billion.
"They were stealing from a charity and we had to stop them," Musk defended, admitting that he
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