During testimony in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman characterized the billionaire's influence on the startup as culturally corrosive, saying Musk did "huge damage" to the organization he co-founded in 2015.
Altman detailed Musk's management approach in court, explaining that the Tesla CEO required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by accomplishments and "take a chainsaw through a bunch." While conceding this was Musk's known management style, Altman argued it was fundamentally incompatible with how a research lab needs to operate.
"I don't think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab," Altman testified when asked by his lawyer, William Savitt, about the impact of Musk's eventual departure on morale. The core tension, Altman explained, centers on the nature of research work itself. "For a research lab where people need, sort of, psychological safety and long periods of time to pursue an idea, this idea that you constantly have to show your results, and if they're not good enough on a short period, you're going to get fired. That really didn't work for the kind of research we went on to successfully do."
Musk left OpenAI in 2018. At the time, the startup attributed his departure to a conflict of interest with Tesla's machine learning operations. But courtroom testimony has begun painting a different narrative. Altman stated that Musk's departure actually functioned as "a morale boost in some ways," with staff members realizing they no longer had to operate under that management model.
The lawsuit, now in its third week, hinges on broader claims. Musk contends that OpenAI abandoned its original mission to benefit humanity and that Altman and Brockman deceived him into funding the startup. Testimony has included accounts from Brockman, former board member Shivon Zillis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and former CTO Mira Murati.