Musk testified Tuesday in his lawsuit against OpenAI that a disagreement with Google's Larry Page over AI safety was a core motivation for co-founding the company. Musk said he raised concerns about AI wiping out humanity, and Page dismissed the concern as 'fine' so long as AI itself survived, calling Musk a 'speciest' for being 'pro human.'
The two were once close friends — Fortune included them on its 2016 list of secretly best-friend business leaders, and Musk regularly stayed at Page's Palo Alto home. The friendship fractured when Musk recruited Google AI researcher Ilya Sutskever to help launch OpenAI in 2015, which Page experienced as a personal betrayal.
This is the first time Musk has made these claims under oath, though he has told the story previously to biographer Walter Isaacson and podcaster Lex Fridman. As recently as 2023, Musk told Fridman he wanted to reconcile with Page: 'We were friends for a very long time.'
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