Musk Weighed Offering Altman Tesla Board Seat, Jury Told (1)

Elon Musk at one point considered recruiting Sam Altman to serve on Tesla Inc.’s board of directors, jurors were told Wednesday at the trial over the feud between the two titans of artificial intelligence.

Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and confidante of Musk, testified “there was a time where that was on the table” around late 2017.

Shivon Zilis, center, exits the federal court in Oakland on May 6.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Musk and his fellow OpenAI co-founders were then in the midst of negotiations about the future of the AI nonprofit and how they could secure enough funds to meet their computing needs.

During those conversations, Musk had advanced a ...