At his OpenAI trial, Musk relitigates an old friendship

One of the most interesting parts of Elon Musk’s testimony Tuesday in his lawsuit against OpenAI wasn’t the charity he claims was stolen from him (we all knew that that was coming). It was about an old friend.

Musk testified that one of his main motivations for co-founding OpenAI was an argument with Google’s Larry Page over the safety of AI — specifically, a conversation in which Musk raised the prospect of AI wiping out humanity and Page shrugged it off as “fine,” as long as AI itself survived. Page called Musk a “kind” because he was “pro-human.” Musk called the attitude “insane.”

That’s especially remarkable considering how close the two once were. Fortune included them on its list of secret best friends in the business world in 2016; Musk felt so comfortable with Page that he regularly crashed at his Palo Alto home. Page once told Charlie Rose that he preferred that give his money to Musk then to charity.

The friendship did not survive OpenAI. When Musk recruited Google AI star Ilya Sutskever to help launch the company in 2015, Page felt personally betrayed and cut off contact.

It’s a story Musk has told before — including to author Walter Isaacson for his bestselling biography of Musk — but Tuesday was the first time he said it under oath. Page didn’t comment, and it’s worth remembering everything Musk said in service of a lawsuit. Yet in 2023 he told tech podcaster Lex Fridman that he wanted to patch things up: “We had been friends for a long time.”