“It’s a free country.”

Live updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court battle over the future of OpenAI Musk previously mentioned that he hired researcher Andrej Karpathy at Tesla when he left OpenAI. Savitt asks whether, as a member of the OpenAI board at the time, he had a responsibility to suggest Karpathy stay at OpenAI and avoid poaching. “I think people should have a right to work where they want to work,“ Musk responds. A 2017 email suggests Musk knew how important Karpathy was: “Just talked to Andrej and he accepted joining as director of Tesla Vision…. Andrej is arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision after Ilya. The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me but it had to be done.” Musk also apparently authorized another company he owned to hire from OpenAI while on its board, telling people at Neuralink that “I have no problem if you pitch people at OpenAI to work at Neuralink.” Musk protests the characterization. “He is misstating my email, I’m simply saying if they want to try to recruit people from OpenAI or any other company including Tesla or SpaceX,” they can do so, Musk says. “It’s a free country.” A free daily digest of the news that matters most.