One of the most interesting parts of Elon Musk’s testimony Tuesday in the lawsuit against OpenAI wasn’t about the charity he claims stole from him (we all knew that). he was coming). It was about an old friend.
Musk testified that one of his main inspirations for co-founding OpenAI was a disagreement with Google’s Larry Page over AI safety – specifically, a conversation in which Musk raised the possibility of AI wiping out humanity and Page shrugged it off as “fine” as long as the AI itself survived. Page called Musk “distinctive” for being “pro-human.” Musk called this attitude “madness.”
This is mostly remarkable, considering how close the two once were. Fortune included them in its 2016 list of Secretly Best Friends Business Leaders; Musk was so comfortable with Page that he visited her regularly at his home in Palo Alto. Page once told Charlie Rose that he would like to give his money to musk Than charity.
The friendship did not last until OpenAI. When Musk recruited Google AI star Ilya Sutskever to help launch the company in 2015, Page felt personally betrayed and broke off contact.
It’s a story Musk has told before — including to author Walter Isaacson for his best-selling biography of Musk — but Tuesday was the first time he told it under oath. Page has not commented, and it’s worth remembering everything Musk said in service of a lawsuit. Still, as recently as 2023 he told tech podcaster Lex Friedman that he wanted to fix things: “We were friends for a very long time.”
