Elon Musk is accused of fabricating mathematical calculations to get $134 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft

Only Musk’s contributions are counted

Al Wazzan is “a financial economist with decades of professional and academic experience who ran a successful venture capital firm that provided seed funding to technology startups,” Musk’s filing said.

OpenAI explained how Musk reached out to Wazzan, who testified that he had never been hired at any of Musk’s companies before. Instead, three months before offering his opinions, Al Wazzan said Musk’s legal team had reached out to his consulting firm, BRG, and the call was directed to him.

Wazzan’s task was to figure out how much Musk would owe after investing $38 million in OpenAI — roughly 60 percent of its seed funding. Musk also made non-monetary contributions that Wazan had to weigh, such as “hiring key employees, bringing in business contacts, teaching his founders everything he knows about running a successful startup, and lending his prestige and reputation to the venture,” Musk’s filing said.

The “truth pattern” was “very unique,” ​​Al-Wazzan testified, admitting that his calculations were not something that could be found “in a textbook.”

Additionally, Wazan had to take Microsoft’s alleged ill-gotten gains into account, by inferring how much of Microsoft’s profits went back into funding the nonprofit. Microsoft alleged that Wazzan erred in this estimation after he assumed that “a portion of Microsoft’s share in the for-profit OpenAI entity should flow back to the OpenAI nonprofit organization” and arbitrarily determined that the portion should be “equal” to the nonprofit’s “share in the for-profit entity.” Using these bizarre calculations, Wazzan double-counted the nonprofit’s value and inflated Musk’s damage estimates, Microsoft alleged.

“Al-Wazzan provides no rationale — contractual, administrative, economic, or other — for reallocating any portion of Microsoft’s negotiated interest to the nonprofit,” the OpenAI and Microsoft filing said.