Elon Musk’s worst enemy in court is Elon Musk

In the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial over OpenAI's future, Elon Musk's testimony took a damaging turn during cross-examination by defense lawyer William Savitt. After claiming on direct examination that "I don't lose my temper" and "I don't yell at people," Musk was baited into losing his temper repeatedly, refusing to answer simple yes/no questions and scolding Savitt. The judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, prompted Musk to answer directly, and at one point, she cut off his argumentative answer, drawing the biggest laugh of the day. Jurors glanced at each other, and one woman rubbed her head during a testy exchange. Savitt highlighted inconsistencies between Musk's current testimony and his prior deposition, casting doubt on his credibility.

The cross-examination painted Musk as a control-seeker who pulled funding from OpenAI when he couldn't get majority control. Emails revealed Musk initially wanted four board seats and 51 percent of shares, with co-founders getting only three seats collectively. When denied, he stopped his quarterly payments and hired OpenAI's second-best engineer, Andrej Karpathy, for Tesla in 2017. Musk admitted he didn't try to retain Karpathy, saying "people should have a right to work where they want." By 2018, Musk called OpenAI "on a path of certain failure" and proposed merging it with Tesla, asserting that "Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google." The plan failed, and Musk resigned from the board.