Sam Altman says Elon Musk’s mind games were damaging OpenAI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did "huge damage" to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever…
By · May 12, 2026 · 1 min read
This article was originally published by
The Verge
and is republished here under license.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did “huge damage” to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and “take a chainsaw through a bunch.”
Altman conceded that this was the management style the Tesla CEO was known for, but that it was incompatible with his startup. “I don’t think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab,” Altman testified when his lawyer, William Savitt, asked about the impact of Musk’s departure from OpenAI on morale. “For a …
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