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On March 4, 2026, Elon Musk posted on X that \u201cTesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid\/atom-shaping form.\u201d Less than eight weeks later, under oath in an Oakland federal courtroom, he was asked whether Tesla has any concrete plans to pursue AGI. His answer: \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n
That single contradiction \u2014 between what Musk tells his millions of followers and what he admits when he\u2019s facing perjury charges \u2014 captures the story of his decade-long obsession with artificial intelligence better than any timeline ever could. But here\u2019s a timeline anyway, because the trial of Musk v. Altman is now exposing, under oath, what many of us have long suspected: Musk\u2019s AI ambitions were never about safety, open access, or benefiting humanity. They were about control.<\/p>\n
Last year, I wrote about cracks forming in Elon Musk\u2019s armor of lies<\/a> \u2014 how the convergence of the Tesla shareholder lawsuit over xAI and OpenAI\u2019s countersuit was starting to expose Musk\u2019s contradictions. Thirteen months later, those cracks have become chasms. The Musk v. Altman trial, now in its second week, is producing daily revelations that connect directly to Tesla shareholders.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the updated timeline.<\/p>\n \tAdvertisement – scroll for more content<\/p>\n 2015\u20132017: OpenAI and the seeds of the pattern<\/p>\n December 2015: Musk co-founds OpenAI as a nonprofit with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, pledging $1 billion (he ultimately contributed $38 million). The stated mission: ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.<\/p>\n 2016\u20132017: Musk emails NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to secure an early supercomputer for OpenAI, emphasizing the nonprofit status. Internally, he\u2019s the biggest name on the letterhead, and he uses that leverage to recruit top AI talent \u2014 including researchers who, according to Brockman\u2019s trial testimony, were as often repelled by Musk\u2019s involvement as attracted to it.<\/p>\n Mid-2017: According to Brockman\u2019s testimony this week, Musk begins pushing OpenAI to go for-profit \u2014 the very thing he would later sue them for doing. But there was a catch: he wanted full control. Brockman testified that Musk told him he needed $80 billion to build a city on Mars, and that controlling OpenAI\u2019s AI could help him raise that money.<\/p>\n August 2017: Internal memos detail concerns from Brockman and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever about Musk\u2019s desire for control. When the equity discussion didn\u2019t go Musk\u2019s way during an in-person meeting, Brockman testified that Musk said \u201cI decline,\u201d stood up, and stormed around the table so aggressively that Brockman thought Musk was going to physically hit him. Instead, Musk tore a painting off the wall and stormed out, threatening to withhold funding.<\/p>\n Late 2017: While still on OpenAI\u2019s board, Musk secretly recruits OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy to lead Tesla\u2019s self-driving AI effort. On the stand last week, Musk claimed Karpathy was already planning to leave. Brockman\u2019s testimony directly contradicted this \u2014 he said Musk came to him with \u201can apology and a confession.\u201d A 2017 email from Musk to a Tesla VP, presented as evidence, reads: \u201cThe OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me. But it had to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n 2018: Musk loses control and walks away<\/p>\n February 2018: After failing to secure the CEO role at OpenAI, Musk resigns from the board. He frames the departure publicly as being about a conflict of interest with Tesla\u2019s AI work. The trial evidence paints a different picture: he left because he couldn\u2019t be in charge.<\/p>\n 2018\u20132019: Musk begins telling Tesla investors that Tesla will be a major player in AI and that AI products \u2014 particularly \u201cFull Self-Driving\u201d \u2014 would be critical to Tesla\u2019s future. He promises a fleet of one million robotaxis by 2020. This is where his AI obsession formally becomes a Tesla shareholder story.<\/p>\n 2019\u20132023: The decade of broken AI promises at Tesla<\/p>\n This is worth its own list because the scale of it is staggering:<\/p>\n 2019: Musk promises 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020. None materialize.<\/p>\n 2020: Promises \u201cFull Self-Driving capability\u201d by end of year. It doesn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n 2021: Tells investors Tesla\u2019s AI will have \u201creliability in excess of a human this year.\u201d It doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n 2022: Promises the dedicated robotaxi vehicle (later named Cybercab) will enter production by 2024. It doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n 2023: Promises unsupervised FSD and a robotaxi service. Neither arrives.<\/p>\n 2024: Promises unsupervised FSD in Austin by June 2025, and robotaxi coverage for \u201chalf the population of the U.S.\u201d by year-end 2025.<\/p>\n 2025: None of these promises are met<\/a>. In January 2025, Musk admits Hardware 3 \u2014 installed in millions of Teslas sold with the promise of full autonomy \u2014 can\u2019t actually deliver unsupervised FSD. Six years after customers paid thousands for it.<\/p>\n Throughout all of this, Musk is telling Tesla investors that Tesla\u2019s AI capabilities are what justify the company\u2019s inflated valuation. The stock price is, to this day, built largely on the promise that Tesla will crack autonomy.<\/p>\n 2022\u20132024: The Twitter blunder, the xAI creation, and the conflict explodes<\/p>\n To understand why Musk created xAI \u2014 despite spending years telling Tesla investors that Tesla itself was an AI company \u2014 you have to understand the Twitter disaster.<\/p>\n 2021\u20132022: Musk sells over $23 billion worth of Tesla stock to fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (with additional billions sold for tax obligations). This slashes his Tesla stake from around 23% to about 13%. It\u2019s a self-inflicted wound that changes everything that follows.<\/p>\n October 2022: The Twitter deal closes. Musk now controls a money-losing social media platform and holds a much smaller stake in Tesla \u2014 the company whose valuation he\u2019d spent years inflating with AI promises.<\/p>\n Early 2023: With his reduced Tesla stake, Musk faces a problem: he told investors Tesla would be an AI powerhouse, but he no longer has the ownership position to fully benefit from it. His solution isn\u2019t to buy more Tesla stock. It\u2019s to create a separate AI company \u2014 one he controls entirely.<\/p>\n March 2023: Musk co-founds xAI, a private AI company under his full control, with a team of researchers recruited from Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research, and \u2014 inevitably \u2014 Tesla. The move is remarkable: the CEO of a company he\u2019d been calling \u201can AI company\u201d for years launches a competing AI startup on the side.<\/p>\n January 2024: A Delaware court voids Musk\u2019s $56 billion Tesla compensation package, ruling it wasn\u2019t \u201centirely fair\u201d to shareholders. Musk responds by threatening to build AI products outside of Tesla<\/a> unless shareholders give him more control \u2014 effectively holding Tesla\u2019s AI future hostage to get more shares. The message is clear: give me what I want, or I\u2019ll take the AI to xAI.<\/p>\n June 2024: Tesla shareholders sue Musk for breach of fiduciary duty<\/a>, alleging he diverted Tesla\u2019s AI resources \u2014 including thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs, key employees, and strategic focus \u2014 to his private company. Separately, shareholders re-approve the $56 billion compensation package in a new vote, giving Musk the control he demanded.<\/p>\n September 2024: Musk states publicly that Tesla has \u201cno need to license anything from xAI.\u201d Remember this.<\/p>\n 2025: The entanglement deepens<\/p>\n April 2025: I wrote about the cracks forming in Musk\u2019s armor of lies<\/a>, connecting the Tesla shareholder lawsuit, the OpenAI countersuit, and the broader pattern.<\/p>\n October 2025: Tesla discloses it\u2019s exploring an investment in xAI<\/a>. The very company shareholders are suing Musk over, Tesla might now fund with shareholder money.<\/p>\n Late 2025: Tesla\u2019s annual filing reveals xAI purchased $430 million in Tesla Megapack battery systems throughout 2025. Tesla is literally powering the data centers of the company its CEO created as a competitor.<\/p>\n 2026: Everything unravels<\/p>\n January 2026: xAI tells investors<\/a> their goal is to \u201cdevelop self-sufficient AI to power robots like Tesla\u2019s Optimus\u201d \u2014 directly contradicting Musk\u2019s \u201cno need to license\u201d claim from 16 months earlier.<\/p>\n January 28, 2026: Tesla invests $2 billion in xAI\u2019s Series E round<\/a>. Tesla shareholders are now funding the very company the shareholder lawsuit argues Musk had no right to create outside of Tesla.<\/p>\n February 2, 2026: SpaceX acquires xAI<\/a> in an all-stock deal valuing xAI at $250 billion and the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. This is the largest merger in history. The timing raises questions: why does SpaceX need an AI company, and why now?<\/p>\n February 11, 2026: The answer starts to emerge. After the merger, key departures accelerate. Co-founder Tony Wu leaves, followed within 24 hours by Jimmy Ba. Musk announces xAI is being \u201crebuilt\u201d<\/a> following the departures \u2014 an extraordinary admission about a company just valued at $250 billion.<\/p>\n March 2026: By now, 9 of 12 original xAI co-founders have left. By late March, all 11 are gone, along with 80+ researchers and engineers, including chief engineer Igor Babuschkin. Musk posts on X that xAI \u201cwas not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.\u201d<\/p>\n Let me repeat that: every single co-founder left the company that SpaceX just bought for $250 billion.<\/p>\n March 4, 2026: Musk posts the tweet claiming Tesla will be \u201cone of the companies to make AGI.\u201d This is while he\u2019s actively rebuilding xAI from scratch.<\/p>\n March 11, 2026: Musk confirms a joint xAI-Tesla \u201cDigital Optimus\u201d project<\/a> \u2014 a direct integration of xAI\u2019s Grok into Tesla products. This announcement obliterates his 2024 claim that Tesla had \u201cno need to license anything from xAI\u201d and hands the shareholder lawsuit plaintiffs exactly the evidence they need.<\/p>\n April 21, 2026: SpaceX announces a deal with Cursor \u2014 an AI coding startup \u2014 with an option to acquire it for $60 billion. The deal involves using SpaceX\u2019s Colossus supercomputer to build a new AI model. Let that sink in: SpaceX paid $250 billion for xAI and its AI capabilities, and within two months, it\u2019s paying another company up to $60 billion to build a new model. If xAI\u2019s technology was worth $250 billion, why does SpaceX need Cursor?<\/p>\n April 23, 2026: On Tesla\u2019s Q1 2026 earnings call, Musk admits that Hardware 3 lacks the memory bandwidth for unsupervised FSD. He pushes unsupervised driving to \u201cprobably Q4\u201d \u2014 another goalpost move in a decade of goalpost moves.<\/p>\n April 25, 2026: Two days before his trial against OpenAI begins, Musk texts Greg Brockman to gauge interest in a settlement. Brockman suggests both sides drop their claims. Musk\u2019s response: \u201cBy the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.\u201d<\/p>\n The trial: what comes out under oath<\/p>\n April 28 \u2013 May 2, 2026 (Week 1 \u2014 Musk\u2019s testimony):<\/p>\n The first week belongs to Musk on the stand, and it\u2019s a parade of contradictions:<\/p>\n He admits there was no written agreement governing the terms of his $38 million donation to OpenAI \u2014 undermining the foundation of his entire \u201cthey stole my charity\u201d argument.<\/p>\n He admits xAI distills OpenAI\u2019s models to train Grok \u2014 a practice that violates OpenAI\u2019s terms of service. He\u2019s suing OpenAI while his company copies their work.<\/p>\n He repeatedly tells the jury \u201cyou can\u2019t just steal a charity\u201d until Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers strikes the phrase from the record, reminds him he\u2019s \u201cnot a lawyer\u201d and has \u201cnot taken a class in evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n He testifies that Tesla has no plans to pursue AGI \u2014 directly contradicting the tweet he posted just weeks earlier.<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s lawyer William Savitt uses Musk\u2019s own tweets, emails, and deposition testimony to expose contradiction after contradiction. Microsoft\u2019s lawyer gets Musk to acknowledge a single tweet \u2014 that Microsoft had \u201ccaptured\u201d OpenAI \u2014 and sits down. That\u2019s their entire cross-examination.<\/p>\n May 5\u20136, 2026 (Week 2 \u2014 Brockman\u2019s testimony):<\/p>\n Greg Brockman takes the stand and systematically dismantles Musk\u2019s narrative:<\/p>\n Musk wanted OpenAI to go for-profit \u2014 but only if he was in charge, partly to fund $80 billion for Mars colonization.<\/p>\n Musk never expressed interest in open-sourcing OpenAI\u2019s technology, despite repeatedly claiming on the stand that it was supposed to be a core principle. Brockman testified \u201cit was not a topic of conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n The Karpathy recruitment was not Karpathy\u2019s independent decision to leave. Musk came to Brockman with \u201can apology and a confession.\u201d<\/p>\n During the 2017 equity meeting, Musk stood up and stormed at Brockman so aggressively that Brockman thought Musk was going to physically attack him.<\/p>\n May 6, 2026: Anthropic announces it will use all the compute capacity of SpaceX\u2019s Colossus 1 data center \u2014 over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The company that Musk built to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic is now renting its data center to Anthropic because it has no competitive model to run on it.<\/p>\n The full picture<\/p>\n Step back and look at the complete arc:<\/p>\n Musk co-founded OpenAI to control AI development. When he couldn\u2019t get control, he left. He told Tesla investors that Tesla would build AI and autonomy \u2014 promises that inflated Tesla\u2019s valuation for years without delivery. He founded xAI as a private company using Tesla\u2019s talent and resources. He got Tesla shareholders to invest $2 billion in it. He sold it to SpaceX for $250 billion. Every co-founder left. SpaceX is now paying Cursor to build the AI model that xAI was supposed to have, and renting xAI\u2019s data center to a competitor because there\u2019s nothing useful running on it.<\/p>\n And through it all, Musk used AI as a narrative tool \u2014 a story to tell whichever audience needed to hear it at any given moment. Tesla investors heard \u201cTesla will build AGI.\u201d OpenAI heard \u201cthis should be a nonprofit for humanity.\u201d xAI investors heard \u201c$250 billion valuation.\u201d Under oath, the story is different every time.<\/p>\n Electrek\u2019s Take<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been covering Musk\u2019s AI contradictions for years, and the OpenAI trial is now confirming what the evidence has long suggested: this was never about building safe AI for humanity. It was about control.<\/p>\n The most damning revelation isn\u2019t any single lie \u2014 it\u2019s the pattern. Musk tells Tesla investors that Tesla will build AGI, then testifies under oath that it won\u2019t. He tells the public xAI exists to keep AI safe, then admits xAI copies OpenAI\u2019s models. He sues OpenAI for abandoning its nonprofit mission while his own trial witnesses testify he was the one pushing to go for-profit. He sells xAI for $250 billion, then the entire founding team walks out and the company has to be \u201crebuilt from the foundations up.\u201d<\/p>\n For Tesla shareholders specifically, the question is simple: how much of Tesla\u2019s valuation is built on AI promises that Musk himself admits, under oath, aren\u2019t real? He said Tesla has no plans for AGI. He admitted HW3 can\u2019t deliver unsupervised FSD. The robotaxi timeline has been pushed back for a decade straight. And the AI company he built with Tesla\u2019s resources is now an empty shell renting its servers to competitors.<\/p>\n The cracks we wrote about last year aren\u2019t cracks anymore. The armor has fallen off. What\u2019s underneath is a decade of promises made to sell stock, recruit talent, and maintain control \u2014 promises that Musk can\u2019t keep repeating when he\u2019s under oath.<\/p>\n
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