Sam Altman didn’t seem to be having a good time. During the days he spent inside the Oakland courtroom, the normally cheerful CEO of OpenAI—a man who has a sarcastic demeanor even as he preaches AI’s dangers to humans—seemed nervous, even agitated. As he listened to the proceedings of Elon Musk’s case against him, a week-long trial that threatened to remove Altman from the board of OpenAI and destroy the company, he occasionally covered his mouth with his palm, played with a water bottle, and leaned forward and looked at the floor. He kept looking back at the rows of reporters behind him. On the witness stand Tuesday, Altman repeatedly noted how Musk’s actions “infuriated” him.
Musk, who helped create OpenAI as a non-profit organization in 2015, claimed that Altman and OpenAI had violated the founding principles of the organization by seeking profit. He was asking for, among other remedies, more than $150 billion in damages, which Musk said he would give to the nonprofit OpenAI. This morning, the nine-member jury made a unanimous decision after less than two hours of deliberation: Whether OpenAI has done something wrong or not, Musk sued outside the statute of limitations, two to three years depending on the indictment. And Musk could have known about any alleged wrongdoing, the jury found, in advance. Altman has been given a break: OpenAI and the AI industry will continue, unabated, at least until Musk. to appeal the decision. (The second part of the case, related to claims Musk made under antitrust laws, remains unresolved, though the presiding judge said his were “not very good claims.” Neither Musk nor OpenAI’s lawyers immediately responded to a request for comment.)
OpenAI swept the legal argument. But in another sense, basically everyone involved in Musk vs. Altman he came out looking small, blind, delusional, or stupid. During the several hours I spent in the courtroom, sometimes queuing as early as 5 am to get a seat, there was not much to be found. Of course, at the end of it all, everyone had a good reason to be upset.
Musk came out worst in this test, by far. The question before the jury was whether the for-profit organization OpenAI somehow broke a legal promise the organization made to Musk at the time of the organization’s founding: “It’s not right to steal from a charity,” as Musk told the jury on the first day. This was a false idea according to any amount of evidence and testimony presented in the case, which is that in 2017, Musk himself was involved in OpenAI discussions to get more money by making a parallel arm of profit. Coming to the case, this was already an uphill battle for Musk and his lawyers. But even with those small expectations, the whole thing was a hoax.
As a witness, Musk was a fool. When asked simple questions by William Savitt, one of the attorneys representing OpenAI, Musk bristled and dodged the issue. When lawyers asked yes or no, he answered bitterly: “The only reason you can’t always answer a yes-or-no question,” Musk said on the witness stand, “is if you ask the question, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?'” (“We’re not going there,” US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers interjected.) sharply, telling the world’s richest man, “You’re not a lawyer.” Musk agreed but, after pausing, smiled and added, “Well, technically I took Rule 101.”
When Musk answered questions, he said that OpenAI is committed to the safe and responsible development of AI by prioritizing profit. But when asked about the safety of AI, Musk couldn’t articulate any concrete arguments. Savitt noted that Musk’s xAI, OpenAI’s competitor, is a for-profit company, and asked whether xAI presents the same risks. “Yes,” Musk said, “I think it poses some security risk.” Savitt then asked about basic AI security measures. Musk, who previously testified that he wants to avoid AI “Terminator results,” I didn’t know.” When asked about security cards, for example, Musk replied, “A security card? Why would it be a card?” These are years-old, widely used, industry-standard documents that anyone who has worked at an AI company in the last five years should be intimately familiar with.
The next day, in an exact exchange, Savitt went down the list of Musk’s other businesses. Did he think Tesla was making the world a better place? “Yes,” Musk said. And is Tesla a profitable company? “Yes.” Savitt then asked these two questions about SpaceX, Neuralink, and X. For each of his businesses, Musk answered yes and yes. The same person who has a trillion dollar compensation package from Tesla and can receive another from SpaceX was suing OpenAI for trying to make a lot of money. I wondered in my heart, What are we doing again in this court?
Despite winning the court, Altman didn’t fare much better. The first question from Steven Molo, one of Musk’s lawyers, to Altman was “Are you completely trustworthy?” With a puzzled look, OpenAI’s CEO replied, “I believe so.” Molo asked if he had misled business partners, and Altman, after standing up, said, “I believe I am an honest and trustworthy businessman.”
Altman’s evasive response was significant because he has a long history of being accused by colleagues and business associates of being a manipulator. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, testified that during his time at the company, he felt that Altman created “an environment where executives don’t have the right information,” which is not good for AI security. Many former OpenAI board members testified to the same effect in explaining why, at the end of 2023, they he briefly fired Altman. (For his part, Altman recently wrote blog post that he “isn’t proud of his mishandling in a dispute with our previous board that caused a huge mess for the company.”) When the judge entertained OpenAI’s lawyers by presenting counterarguments in the various cases he is hearing, Musk smiled and shook his head. Musk’s legal team essentially maintained its case against Altman’s integrity, and Molo told the jury in his final argument to consider that they were walking on a bridge: “The bridge is built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth,” he said. “Will you cross that bridge?”
Many of the texts, emails, and internal documents released as a result of the lawsuit, and the sworn testimony of current and former OpenAI executives, were unflattering to the company—reflecting a corporate culture of treachery that has nonetheless made its employees incredibly wealthy. Sutskever said that his stake in the company is worth $7 billion, and Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI and another defendant in the case, said that his equity is worth $30 billion. Altman, who previously told the Senate that he has no direct equity in OpenAI, testified that through an investment fund run by the startup Y Combinator (of which Altman was president), he has an indirect financial stake in the company.
The case unfolded and produced countless other shenanigans: Musk called an OpenAI employee a “scumbag” for wanting to prioritize safety over speed, while the employee was given a mock trophy showing a donkey’s butt. (During his own testimony, Musk denied yelling at someone and said he would only use such a word in jest.) In a diary entry, Brockman had written that it would be “wrong to steal a nonprofit from” Musk and that doing so “would be very morally bankrupt, and he’s really not stupid.” Sutskever, the Yoda figure of the AI world, described the progress of AI from 2018 to now as “the difference between an ant and a cat.” At the start of the trial, the judge asked Musk not to post on social media while the trial was ongoing, and he showed restraint. Immediately after the decision, Musk posted on X: “The decision of the evil Oakland activist, who used the jury as a fig leaf, sets such a bad example.”
To the extent that the experiment could have been about the best way to advance AI for human benefit, and about whether OpenAI is honoring its founding promise to do so—well, it wasn’t. For the most part, Musk and Altman—billionaires who are perhaps two of the most influential tech CEOs in the world—were actually asking their lawyers to discuss whether making ungodly money was acceptable. In a surprising exchange during the closing arguments, Gonzalez Rogers was pleased with one of Musk’s lawyers for misleading the jury: Molo, after attacking the bridge “built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth,” said that Musk is not asking for money from OpenAI. The district judge said that he was, in fact, asking for money. “You need to rescind that statement, or you need to drop your multi-billion dollar claim,” the judge said. Musk’s lawyers did not stop the demand.
