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Elon Musk returned<\/span> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n As the cross-examination began, tension rippled through the courtroom. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers started the day by reprimanding someone in the gallery for taking a picture of Musk. OpenAI\u2019s 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\u2019s lawyer, William Savitt, that he saw his questions as misleading. Meanwhile, Savitt\u2019s cross-examination was derailed by objections, technical issues, and Musk continuously claiming he doesn\u2019t recall key details of OpenAI\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Savitt showed the courtroom emails from September 2017 between Musk, Altman, Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever discussing the formation of what would become OpenAI\u2019s 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. \u201cI would unequivocally have initial control of the company, but this will change quickly,\u201d said Musk in one message. Sutskever wrote back rejecting the idea because he said he feared it would give Musk too much power.<\/p>\n 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. 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\u2019s launch. But in the spring of 2017, he stopped sending the money. In another email from August 2017, the head of Musk\u2019s family office, Jared Birchall, asked Musk if he should continue withholding it. Musk responded simply, \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n In October 2017, shortly after 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.<\/p>\n Musk sent an email to one Tesla vice president about hiring an early OpenAI researcher, Andrej Karpathy. \u201cJust talked to Andrej and he accepted as joining as director of Tesla Vision,\u201d Musk wrote. \u201cAndrej is arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision\u2026The openai guys are gonna want to kill me, but it had to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n On the stand, Musk argued that Karpathy was already interested in leaving OpenAI when he tried to recruit him to Tesla. \u201cAndrej had made his decision. If he\u2019s going to leave OpenAI, he might as well work at Tesla,\u201d Musk said.<\/p>\n That same month, Musk also wrote to Ben Rapoport, a cofounder of Neuralink. \u201cHire independently or directly from OpenAI,\u201d said Musk. \u201cI have no problem if you pitch people at OpenAI to work at Neuralink.\u201d<\/p>\n When pressed about this by Savitt, Musk argued that it would have been illegal for him not to allow Tesla and Neuralink to hire from OpenAI. \u201cIt\u2019s illegal to restrict employment. It would be illegal to say you can\u2019t employ people from OpenAI. You can\u2019t have some cabal that stops people from working at the company they want to work at,\u201d Musk said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n