OpenAI President Brockman Accuses Elon Musk of Threatening to Make Him "Hated" Ahead of Trial

Elon Musk and OpenAI President Engage in Heated Pre-Trial Negotiations

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has denied a request by OpenAI's lawyer to allow a message from Elon Musk to be used as evidence in the trial, citing that communications about possible settlement negotiations are typically not admissible. The message, allegedly sent by Musk to OpenAI President Greg Brockman just before they faced off in a trial, vowed to ruin Brockman's reputation.

According to a court filing late Sunday, Musk wrote: "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America." The world's richest man referred to OpenAI's Sam Altman, with whom Brockman was expected to testify on Monday. Musk's lawyers had argued that the message shows "that Mr. Musk's motivation in pursuing this lawsuit is to attack a competitor and its principals."

However, Gonzalez Rogers stated that the lawyers waited too long to make their request, telling them Monday that they should have asked about Musk's motives while he was on the witness stand last week. "If you wanted to question his motives, that was the time to do it," she said.

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The trial, which is headed into its second week in federal court in Oakland, California, carries high stakes for OpenAI. Musk is seeking tens of billions of dollars in damages, the removal of Altman and Brockman from their leadership roles, and the unwinding of the ChatGPT maker's for-profit conversion, which was completed in October.

Trial Timeline:

Brockman is expected to testify on Monday, marking one of the most high-profile appearances in the trial so far. He is likely to face probing questions about his personal digital journal from Musk's lawyers. The private notes from almost a decade ago have been presented by Musk's legal team as evidence that Brockman and Altman planned to abandon the company's nonprofit mission before Musk left the board in 2018.

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In his own testimony last week, Musk spent hours recalling how a rift grew with his fellow OpenAI co-founders over differing visions of who should lead the company and how to structure it to keep pace with Google and other well-heeled rivals in the AI race. OpenAI's lawyers have argued that Musk's lawyers plucked isolated sentences out of context, with the snippets from Brockman's personal files "staged for maximum misrepresentation — with no dates revealed, critical context excised, and artful ellipses deployed to make disparate sentences look linked."

The lawyers for OpenAI contend that Brockman was simply brainstorming and weighing options at a time when the startup was desperate for massive capital.