Sam Altman did not seem to be having a good time. During the many days he spent inside an Oakland courtroom, the normally chipper CEO of OpenAI - a guy who tends to be sunny even when warning about AI's existential risks - appeared anxious, even distraught. He frequently concealed his mouth with his palm, fidgeted with a water bottle, and stared at the floor. On the witness stand Tuesday, Altman repeatedly noted how Musk's actions had “annoyed” him. Which, frankly, was the most relatable thing anyone said in that room.
Musk, who helped form OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, alleged that Altman and OpenAI had violated the organization's founding principles by seeking profits. He was requesting, among other remedies, more than $150 billion in damages - which he said he'd donate to the OpenAI nonprofit. This morning, a nine-person jury delivered a unanimous verdict after less than two hours of deliberation: Musk sued outside the statute of limitations (two to three years, depending on the charge), and he could have known of any alleged wrongdoing well before. So OpenAI swept the legal argument. But in another sense, basically everybody involved came away looking petty, short-sighted, deceptive, or ignorant. Frankly, at the end of it all, everyone had good reason to be annoyed.
Musk came off the worst, by far. The question before the jury was whether OpenAI's for-profit arm had broken a legal promise to Musk at the organization's founding. This was a farcical notion, not least because in 2017, Musk himself was involved in discussions for OpenAI to raise more money by making a parallel for-profit arm. As a witness, Musk was impish. When asked simple questions, he rambled and avoided the issue. When lawyers asked for a yes or no, he bristled: “The classic reason why you cannot always answer a yes-or-no question,” Musk said, “is if you ask a question, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’” U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers interjected, “We're not going to go there.” Later, Musk accused an attorney of asking improper questions, and Gonzalez Rogers sharply cut in, telling the world's richest man, “You're not a lawyer.” Musk conceded but grinned and added, “Well, technically I did take Law 101.”
When Musk answered questions, he argued that OpenAI had sacrificed safe AI development by prioritizing profits. But when cross-examined about AI safety, he was unable to articulate any coherent arguments. Savitt noted that Musk's xAI is a for-profit company and asked if it presents identical dangers. “Yes,” Musk said. Savitt then asked about basic AI-safety measures like safety cards - years-old, widely used, industry-standard documents. Musk responded, “Safety card? Why would it be a card?” The same man who has a trillion-dollar compensation package from Tesla and may receive another from SpaceX was suing OpenAI for trying to make a lot of money.
Despite winning in court, Altman didn't come off much better. The first question from Musk's lawyer was “Are you completely trustworthy?” With a puzzled look, Altman responded, “I believe so.” He has a long history of being accused by colleagues of being deceptive. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, testified that Altman created an “environment where executives don't have the correct information.” Multiple former OpenAI board members testified to similar effect in explaining why, in late 2023, they briefly fired Altman. The many texts, emails, and internal documents released because of the lawsuit depicted a treacherous company culture that has nonetheless made its staff fantastically rich. Sutskever said his stake is worth some $7 billion, and Greg Brockman said his equity is worth some $30 billion. Altman, who previously told the Senate he has no direct equity in OpenAI, testified that through an investment fund run by Y Combinator, he has an indirect financial stake.
The trial surfaced countless other shenanigans: Musk apparently called an OpenAI employee a “jackass” for wanting to prioritize safety over speed, after which that employee was given a satirical trophy depicting a donkey's butt. In a diary entry, Brockman had written that it would be “wrong to steal the nonprofit from” Musk. Sutskever described AI progress from 2018 to now as “the difference between an ant and a cat.” Immediately after the verdict, Musk posted on X: “The ruling by the terrible activist Oakland judge, who simply used the jury as a fig leaf, creates such a terrible precedent.”
To the extent that the trial could have actually been about the best way to develop AI for the benefit of humanity - well, it simply wasn't. For the most part, Musk and Altman were essentially asking their attorneys to debate whether making ungodly sums of money was acceptable. In a remarkable exchange, Gonzalez Rogers excoriated one of Musk's lawyers for misleading the jury: after attacking a bridge “built on Sam Altman's version of the truth,” the lawyer said Musk is not asking for money. The judge pointed out that he, in fact, was asking for money. “You need to retract that statement, or you need to drop your claim for billions of dollars,” the judge said. Musk's lawyers did not drop the demand. So here we are: a trial that wasted everyone's time, accomplished nothing, and reminded us that billionaires will billionaire.