‘I Actually Thought He Was Going to Hit Me,’ OpenAI’s Greg Brockman Says of Elon Musk

In the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial, OpenAI president Greg Brockman testified about a tense 2017 meeting at Elon Musk’s ‘haunted mansion’ in Hillsborough, California. With Amber Heard serving whiskey, Musk gifted Brockman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Model 3s—which Brockman interpreted as an attempt to make them feel indebted. When Musk demanded sole control over the proposed for-profit arm, Sutskever and Brockman offered shared governance. Musk rejected the proposal, stood up, and stormed around the table. Brockman testified, ‘I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me.’ Musk grabbed a painting Sutskever had given him, threatened to cut off all $38M in non-profit funding, and left the room. Later that night, Musk’s chief of staff Shivon Zilis called to keep negotiations alive.

Brockman also recounted a separate incident where Musk demoralized OpenAI researcher Alec Radford by calling an early chatbot prototype ‘stupid,’ nearly causing Radford to quit AI research entirely—despite that technology later becoming the basis for ChatGPT. Brockman argued that Musk’s inability to see long-term potential made him unfit to control an AI company. Although Brockman, Altman, and Sutskever considered voting Musk off the board, they decided against it. Musk eventually left in early 2018, deeming OpenAI on a path of ‘certain failure.’ The jury will soon deliberate on Musk’s claim that his donations were abused to build the $852 billion for-profit OpenAI.