Two of AI's most alpha egos - Sam Altman and Elon Musk - kicked off their legal slapfight in Oakland last week, and we’ve got the courtroom diary you didn’t know you needed. Musk is suing OpenAI, claiming his millions were meant for a pure nonprofit, not a corporation that now reportedly plans to go public this year. The stakes: a partial win for Musk could derail OpenAI’s IPO. The spectacle: cringey texts, raw diary entries, and enough scheming to fill a season of Succession.
Michelle Kim, MIT Technology Review’s lawyer-journalist hybrid, has been scoring a seat in the courtroom by waking up at 4:30 a.m. and lining up at 6 a.m. - and still sometimes getting shut out of the 30 unreserved seats. She reports that Musk’s lawyer dropped the cheerful line, “We could all die as a result of AI,” which shook the room. The judge snapped back that the trial wasn’t about whether AI has damaged humanity, thank you very much.
Musk, in a crisp black suit, was calm and even cracked jokes - until OpenAI’s lawyer asked tough questions. The big bombshell: Musk admitted that xAI distills OpenAI’s models to train its own, calling it “standard practice.” Journalists’ laptops got a workout. Also revealed: a text thread where Musk and Mark Zuckerberg plotted to stop OpenAI’s restructuring and even considered buying all its nonprofit assets. Yes, that Mark Zuckerberg.
Next up: OpenAI president Greg Brockman (who was furiously note-taking during Musk’s testimony), former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, ex-CTO Mira Murati, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The trial runs about three weeks; nine jurors will deliver an advisory verdict, but the judge can ignore them. Stay tuned for more billionaires behaving badly.