Satya Nadella, chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft (MS), said there was no contact from Tesla CEO Elon Musk when MS made a large-scale investment in OpenAI.
According to foreign media including The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), CEO Nadella said this on the 11th (local time) when he appeared as a witness at a trial held at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland.
When asked by an attorney whether he knew how to contact Musk, Nadella said, "We know each other's phone numbers." He added, "I am very proud that MS boldly invested in OpenAI, a fledgling lab no one wanted to invest in," and testified that MS's investment in OpenAI was not a donation and was commercial from the start.
Earlier, Musk testified that MS's $13 billion investment made over three rounds from 2019 to 2023 was the decisive trigger that led him to doubt OpenAI. He said OpenAI broke its promise to operate as a nonprofit and became a for-profit corporations, causing him harm, and he filed a lawsuit against Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, Greg Brockman, OpenAI president, OpenAI, and MS, which funded OpenAI, alleging the two took improper gains in the process.
Musk's side argues that Nadella's remark during the 2023 episode when Altman was abruptly fired as CEO by the OpenAI board and then returned within days—"We are under them, above them, and around them"—shows MS's influence over OpenAI.
Nadella explained, "It was merely a comment related to a strategic partnership that granted us intellectual property rights." Regarding the abrupt firing, Nadella criticized that the OpenAI board only said "Altman was not consistently candid in his communications," without any explanation of specific incidents, saying, "From where I sit, it looked amateur." As for his move to recruit Altman to MS immediately after the incident, he emphasized it "was to prevent losing talent to competitors such as Google."