Musk on hiring Karpathy: 'The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me'

From:: Elon Musk
Date:: June 2017 (MIT Technology Review gives only the year 2017; a summary of the trial exhibit list (Ex. 773) dates it June 2017.)
To:: A Tesla vice president (unnamed in coverage)

Excerpt. Only this much of the email has been made public.

The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me. But it had to be done

About this email

After hiring OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy to lead Tesla's vision team, Musk told a Tesla vice president that OpenAI's people would be furious but that it had to be done. The email was shown to the jury in Musk v. Altman.

Notes

Trial exhibit 773 in Musk v. Altman (2026). Only this line was quoted in coverage I could retrieve; the full exhibit (published by The Verge in its trial-evidence roundup) could not be accessed.

Where it came from

Court record; attribution widely reported.

Tesla, executive & internal. Tags: karpathy, hiring, tesla-ai, openai, poaching, musk-v-openai

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