Elon Musk tells the jury that all he wants to do is save humanity

On the stand, Elon Musk is positioning himself as a savior. In the high-profile trial between him and his fellow OpenAI co-founder, now CEO, Sam Altman , Musk opened by going through his background. He went as far back as being raised in South Africa and arriving in Canada for college with “2,500 in Canadian travelers’ checks and a bag of clothes and books,” then spent an unusually long time talking about his past, from Zip2 to PayPal to the current, more familiar slate of companies he now runs. Why is Musk giving the jury so much of his origin story? Though he may be, depending on the day, the world’s wealthiest individual, Musk suggested that all of his business ventures were concerned with the well-being of humanity. Rocket company SpaceX was founded as “Life insurance for life as we know it”; electric-car manufacturer Tesla was started because he thought continued reliance on fossil fuels “could be pretty bad for the environment and humanity as a whole.” (On the stand, he dubiously claimed that he founded Tesla.) He said that he has been worried about AI in his college years, that it could be a “double-edged sword,” one that could “solve all the diseases and make everyone prosperous, or it could kill us all.” He suggested that AI had two outcomes: the utopian Star Trek one, or the dystopian Terminator one. He wants the future to be more like Gene Roddenberry’s and not like James Cameron’s. This was his intention in co-founding OpenAI. …