Elon Musk testifies in legal battle with OpenAI over 2017 power struggle, emails reveal he halted funding and attempted to recruit researchers

In September 2017, Musk demanded the right to choose four members of OpenAI's for-profit arm board of directors, which would have given him more voting power than cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Researcher Ilya Sutskever rejected the proposal, saying he feared it would give Musk too much power.

Starting in spring 2017, Musk stopped sending $5 million quarterly payments to OpenAI, halting a $1 billion pledge he had made at the organization's launch in 2016. In August 2017, his family office head Jared Birchall asked whether to continue withholding the funds; Musk responded 'Yes.'

In October 2017, shortly after losing the power struggle, Musk held discussions about hiring OpenAI employees for Tesla and Neuralink (his brain-computer interface company), while still serving as an OpenAI board member. He recruited computer vision researcher Andrej Karpathy to Tesla as director of Tesla Vision.