When Elon Musk wrote to his Neuralink associates: DeepMind is moving very fast, I am concerned OpenAI is not on a path to…

Emails submitted as evidence in the Musk v. Altman trial reveal Elon Musk privately warned his Neuralink associates that Google DeepMind was “moving very fast” and that OpenAI was “not on a path to catch up.” Testimony from OpenAI president Greg Brockman further shows Musk was fixated on DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis from OpenAI’s earliest days — even questioning whether founding it as a non-profit had been a strategic mistake.

Elon Musk has a lot of competitors. But according to testimony and documents surfacing at the Musk v. Altman trial, only one of them prompted Musk to question OpenAI‘s entire structure from the outside. That person was Demis Hassabis—CEO of Google DeepMind, and apparently a constant source of dread across Musk’s inner circle.In a letter to his Neuralink associates, Musk didn’t mince words: “DeepMind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as a non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.” That last line is the telling one—Musk wasn’t just worried about Google. He was questioning whether OpenAI was even built right for the fight.It wasn’t a one-off anxiety. OpenAI president Greg Brockman, testifying this week, told the court that Musk raised Hassabis “many, many times” during OpenAI’s early years, calling him “very consistent and fixated” on the man. At an AI dinner with Brockman and Sam Altman, the first thing Musk asked was: “Is Demis Hassabis evil?” One pre-OpenAI dinner with Hassabis left Musk rattled enough to email Brockman and fellow cofounder Ilya Sutskever, describing it as “extremely alarming.” The Verge, covering the trial closely, describes Hassabis as “a constant figure of fear among Musk and other OpenAI higher-ups.”

Musk pitched Hassabis an alternative to Google—and Hassabis said no

The backstory matters. In early 2014, DeepMind was running out of money. VC backers had pulled out, and Hassabis needed a partner with serious compute and patience. Google’s Larry Page stepped in with a deal worth between $400 and $650 million, per The Verge. Musk made a competing pitch, warning Hassabis about the risks of handing AGI research to a corporation. Hassabis took the Google money anyway—Google could fund the research at the scale it demanded. Musk’s alternative couldn’t guarantee the same.

The lab Musk feared went on to do exactly what he feared it would

Under Hassabis, DeepMind cracked a 50-year-old problem in biology with AlphaFold. He now leads Google Gemini, the former Google Brain team, and Isomorphic Labs—a for-profit spinoff focused on AI-driven drug discovery. Alphabet is putting roughly $175 billion into AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.Musk saw it coming. Whether he handled that foresight well is now a question for the courts.