Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and Elon Musk’s partner, testified Wednesday in the lawsuit against OpenAI. She testified that Musk wanted OpenAI to become a Tesla subsidiary. Altman, Brockman, and co-founder Ilya Sutskever refused.
The Wall Street Journal reported this in response to the lawsuit. Zilis faced lawyers in court who accused her of passing information to Elon Musk. Zilis has four children with Musk and previously worked for his companies Tesla and Neuralink. “I had an allegiance to the best outcome of AI for humanity,” she said in her testimony.
Central to her statement was the question of whether OpenAI should have become a Tesla subsidiary. Zilis testified that Musk proposed exactly that at the time, but that Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and co-founder Ilya Sutskever rejected this offer. There were a great many possible structures on the table at the time, according to Zilis.
Departure and Conflicts of Interest
The former board member left the board in 2023, after Musk had founded his own AI company, xAI, and began actively recruiting AI researchers from OpenAI. Zilis documented this in a text message to a friend: “When the father of your babies starts a competitive effort and will recruit out of OpenAI, there is nothing to be done.”
Zilis also testified about a potential partnership between OpenAI and nuclear fusion startup Helion. Brockman and Altman both have significant stakes in that company, as Brockman’s own testimony had previously revealed. Zilis said at the time that he had objected to the deal because the technology was unproven and the company did not yet have a working product.
As for the origin of the conflict: shortly before his departure from the OpenAI board in 2018, Musk, according to Zilis, poached a top researcher from OpenAI to join Tesla. His departure was partly motivated by concerns that Tesla and OpenAI would compete for the same AI engineers.