{"id":131,"date":"2026-05-20T19:39:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T19:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=131"},"modified":"2026-05-20T19:39:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T19:39:14","slug":"sam-altman-won-in-court-against-elon-musk-but-really-we-all-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=131","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, Really, We All Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A famous logic puzzle takes place on a mythical island divided between the knights, who never lie, and the knaves, who always do. A foreign traveller encounters a fork in the road: one way guarantees safe passage, the other certain death. A member of each tribe is present, though it isn\u2019t clear which is which, and the traveller is granted only one question. The solution is well known: ask either of them what the other would advise, and then to choose the opposite path. (An accurate account of a lie and an inaccurate account of the truth amount to the same wrong answer.) But this works only if someone<\/em> is honest. What if nobody can be trusted? The Cretan philosopher Epimenides inspired an alternative scenario set on his own island, when he supposedly said that \u201call Cretans are liars.\u201d Logicians call unstable statements like these \u201cself-referential paradoxes,\u201d or utterances that undermine their own claims. Epimenides would presumably have felt at home at trial of Musk v. Altman, which over the past few weeks turned an Oakland courtroom into an island of lying Cretans.<\/p>\n

Read more Your Personality, According to Your Sleeping Position<\/a><\/p>\n

In theory, the trial was about the good-faith control of artificial intelligence. In 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded OpenAI together as a nonprofit. Its mission\u2014\u201cto ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity\u201d\u2014was explicitly intended to counter Google\u2019s potential dominance of the technology, which seemed almost foreordained at the time. Musk pledged up to a billion dollars to prevent that outcome. It didn\u2019t take long for the two men to disagree over the chain of command. Each thought he alone deserved to run the show. About two years and thirty-eight million dollars later, Musk took his remaining nine hundred and sixty-odd million dollars and went home. In his valedictory e-mail, he wrote, \u201cMy probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind\/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.\u201d OpenAI needed another source of largesse. With investors in mind, it opened a for-profit subsidiary and secured billions of dollars from Microsoft and others. This past October, the company completed a lengthy process of restructuring and recapitalization. Today, the subsidiary is worth something close to a trillion dollars.<\/p>\n

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Musk\u2019s lawsuit alleged that Altman, along with other OpenAI executives and in collusion with Microsoft, \u201cstole a charity.\u201d He believes that they solicited his generosity on false pretenses, exploiting the cover of a humanitarian cause to build one of the world\u2019s most valuable companies, and, in the process, enriching themselves beyond measure. The remedies he sought include the unwinding of OpenAI\u2019s transformation into a for-profit company, the disgorgement of a hundred and fifty billion dollars in damages to be paid to the original nonprofit, and the final exile of Altman from the organization. It would effectively destroy the venture as such. The suit was an act of vengeance, and its primary function seemed to be to make everyone involved look heinous.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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At the very least, it promised to be entertaining. During jury selection, one prospective juror assessed Musk to be \u201ca greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage,\u201d while a more restrained prospect deemed him only \u201ca world-class jerk.\u201d Musk\u2019s lawyers argued that such sentiments were blatantly prejudicial. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the district-court judge and one of the few trial participants who managed to acquit herself honorably, told them to suck it up. \u201cThe reality is that people don\u2019t like him,\u201d she said. \u201cMany people don\u2019t like him\u2014but that doesn\u2019t mean that Americans nevertheless can\u2019t have integrity for the judicial process.\u201d In the first week of testimony, Musk took the stand and couldn\u2019t help but get tetchy. He seemed to have the impression that he alone understood the finer points of trial law. The Verge<\/em> reporter Elizabeth Lopatto, who seemed to be live-blogging her own disgorgement (not of money but of bile), wrote, \u201cI have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s attorneys hoped that the second week\u2014which rehashed an imbroglio from around Thanksgiving 2023, when the OpenAI board fired Altman only for Altman to return and fire almost the entire board\u2014would mitigate Altman\u2019s contrasting appeal. These allegations, for anyone unfortunate enough to have paid close attention, had long been rehearsed to death, and the iterative incantation of now-canonical lines from e-mails and text had the quality of operatic leitmotif: Altman had been removed, we heard again and again, for having been \u201cnot consistently candid in his communications.\u201d The few novel revelations made him look less like a mastermind than kind of a loser. The existence of the lawsuit was almost redeemed by the release of a text thread between Altman, who was conferring with the Microsoft C.E.O., Satya Nadella, and Mira Murati, who briefly replaced Altman as chief executive. Altman plays the role of the clueless boyfriend who can\u2019t accept that his partner is leaving him:<\/p>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: can you indicate directionally good or bad? satya and others anxious<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MURATI<\/em>: Directionally very bad<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cDirectionally\u201d is Silicon Valley jargon for \u201cgenerally.\u201d But Altman still doesn\u2019t get it:<\/p>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: can you wrap up soon? lots of pressure from msft for an update<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MURATI<\/em>: Sam this is very bad<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: can i come in?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MURATI<\/em>: They don\u2019t want you to<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Most of the regular courtroom observers eventually gave themselves over to listlessness. Wired<\/em> ran a story about the butt pillows used by OpenAI\u2019s phalanx of lawyers and executives, including the president and co-defendant, Greg Brockman, to insulate themselves from the discomfort of the court\u2019s benches. On a Tuesday morning of the third and final week of trial arguments, in the vacant hours of predawn Oakland, I arrived at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building to find a half-dozen journalists and interested civilians in the disorderly semblance of a self-organized queue. (One woman, who had severe bangs and a medieval-looking corona of braids, reminded Lopatto, the quick-witted Verge<\/em> reporter, of a \u201cstern German nanny\u201d; she declined to provide her name or purpose and refused to recognize the authority of the line.) The general topic of desultory conversation was not the dispiriting trial of the present but the livelier intrigue of courtroom tech-dramas past\u2014of Elizabeth Holmes, which inspired particular nostalgia, or Sam Bankman-Fried. Neither of those performances featured anybody to pull for, exactly, but at least they held out the pleasurable promise of comeuppance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Had Musk v. Altman merely been a petulant matter of injured vanity, it might have played as a diverting farce. It was instead a travesty. The underlying issues\u2014of how A.I. ought to be governed, and by whom, and how\u2014are of great consequence. But in this trial, to root against Tweedledum was effectively to root for Tweedledee. It was a no-win situation.<\/p>\n

The butt pillow might have begun as a symbol of the trial\u2019s frivolity, but it was clear soon enough that it was also a powerful metaphor for the collective failures that got us here. It was difficult, sitting in the unyielding pews, not to feel personally implicated. These were the leaders our society had somehow been assigned. Mike Isaac, a veteran tech reporter for the Times<\/em>, wasn\u2019t ashamed to admit that Brockman had inspired him to secure his own butt pillow. Isaac, a magnanimous man who looks like the actor Wilford Brimley styled as a member of the hardcore band Minor Threat, offered to share the cushion, but it struck me as somehow more appropriate to sit in the docks as a penitent. The courtroom filled up quickly in anticipation of Sam Altman, who was set to appear on the stand that day under oath. The OpenAI C.E.O. has long been known for his boyishness, but the past few years have coarsened his features and frosted his spiky hair with gray tips. He looked like a lesser vocalist for \u2019N Sync on a reunion tour. His presence in the courtroom had the mournful air of someone who no longer qualified as precocious.<\/p>\n

The basic question of the case, which is also the basic question of Altman\u2019s career, is whether the transmogrification of OpenAI from a safety-minded nonprofit into a ravenous corporate behemoth was cynical in intention or merely in outcome. Recently, my New Yorker<\/em> colleague Andrew Marantz appeared on a podcast to discuss the alternative ways to model his behavior: the \u201calways-a-master-plan, 3-D-chess view\u201d and the \u201cimprovisatory-checkers-all-along view.\u201d There was a clever bit of trollery in Altman\u2019s decision to hire as lead counsel the lawyer William Savitt, who had earlier forced Musk to follow through on his impulse to buy Twitter. Over hours of direct questioning, Savitt elicited from his brow-furrowed client a defense narrative that combined the most flattering elements of each version of the story. The part of the scheme that involved the creation of what he praised as \u201cone of the largest charities in the world\u201d\u2014the nonprofit parent, by virtue of its equity stake in the for-profit subsidiary, has assets valued at more than two hundred billion dollars\u2014was the result of what Altman repeatedly called \u201chard work\u201d or \u201cincredible work.\u201d But the part of the scheme that involved the creation of one of the largest and most powerful for-profit companies in the world was extemporaneous\u2014the by-product of having been \u201copen to creative structures.\u201d Altman said, \u201cSo this sounds a little silly to say now, but at the time, we almost didn\u2019t start this effort because we thought Google was so far ahead that it might be hopeless to compete.\u201d<\/p>\n

The decision to stand up a profit-making entity was a matter of facts on the ground: the future of humanity required that OpenAI prevail in an existential battle against Google; this battle could not be fought without access to enormous pools of capital; it was impossible to court investors without the promise of returns. On these three points, everyone involved was in agreement: a dinky donor-funded charity would be taking an abacus to a data-center fight. It was acknowledged only in passing that the introduction of a fiduciary motive might create perverse incentives, and even then the worry was primarily about optics. As one of Musk\u2019s consiglieri wrote in an e-mail, \u201cI\u2019m a super fan of capitalism and making tons of money doing great things, but not sure if this correlates with the \u2018noble cause for humanity, not doing it to make money\u2019 narrative.\u201d What divided Musk and his lieutenants, on one side, from Altman, Brockman, and the OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, on the other, was the unresolved issue of which special man got to wear the pants. In September, 2017, Musk e-mailed Sutskever and Brockman to describe a scenario in which he \u201cwould unequivocally have initial control of the company.\u201d He insisted that he had no interest in retaining unilateral power over the destiny of the species. At some unspecified time, he continued, the authority vested in him, by him, would devolve upon an expanded board: \u201cThe rough target would be to get to a 12 person board (probably more like 16 if this board really ends up deciding the fate of the world).\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Brandy (a Fine Girl) in Couples Therapy<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This organizational structure might have struck a reasonable person as a trifle or undemocratic, all things considered, but what was readily clear from the trial was that Musk and Altman agreed that A.I. governance was much too serious to be left in the hands of non-player characters such as the nine assembled jurors. Altman, at times, spoke to them like children: Microsoft built them a \u201cbig computer,\u201d but they needed \u201cmore capital to keep building larger computers.\u201d (The ongoing effect was like the scene in \u201cAirplane!\u201d where Julie Hagerty\u2019s stewardess character, upon hearing that a passenger needs to go to the hospital, asks, \u201cA hospital? What is it?\u201d and Leslie Nielsen\u2019s character treats her like ditz: \u201cIt\u2019s a big building with patients, but that\u2019s not important right now.\u201d) In his defense, it seemed as though the main lesson he\u2019d gleaned from his dealings with Musk is that many grownups are best treated as toddlers. Altman testified that Shivon Zilis, a Musk confidant, onetime OpenAI board member, and the mother of some of Musk\u2019s many children, had \u201ccounselled me over the years when dealing with Elon to remind him of things that happened in the past, because he was often upset.\u201d The chief prerequisite for Musk\u2019s employment seemed to be a talent for tantrum avoidance.<\/p>\n

But Musk deserved such condescension, and the jurors did not. With the exception of Microsoft\u2019s C.T.O., Kevin Scott, a Silicon Valley engineer of the classic \u201cWhole Earth Catalog\u201d variety, not a single witness seemed to regard the jurors as the sorts of people with brains. David Schizer, the former dean of Columbia Law School, provided expert testimony at a rate of fifteen hundred dollars an hour\u2014for a total he ballparked as somewhere north of three hundred grand\u2014to describe the relationship between the OpenAI nonprofit and its subsidiary as that of a museum to its gift shop. The implication (in a trial of freely mixed metaphors) was that the profit-seeking tail of the shop had come to wag the patrimony-preserving dog of the museum. In response, the defense produced Daniel Hemel, a law professor at N.Y.U., who was paid seventeen hundred and fifty dollars an hour to argue that the gift-shop analogy was all wrong. It would be more accurate, he said, to compare the OpenAI corporation to the Newman\u2019s Own brand, which directed its profits to support a philanthropic network of summer camps. The dog of outdoor adventures for seriously ill children was not, in other words, being wagged by the tail of the popular salad-dressing company.<\/p>\n

The testimony consistently deployed a cavalier attitude about money. Bret Taylor, the chair of the OpenAI board, responded to an inquiry about his director\u2019s compensation by saying, \u201cI\u2019m embarrassed to say I don\u2019t know, but on the order of two hundred thousand dollars.\u201d OpenAI\u2019s chief futurist, a researcher named Joshua Achiam, wasn\u2019t quite sure if he\u2019d sold some of his equity last fall for more than twenty million dollars or less. These witnesses seemed to be hoping that the treatment of their financial windfalls as an afterthought would make them appear committed to elevated principles, but the net effect was to remind the jurors and the public that these sums represented little more than couch-cushion change to them. The winner of the expert-witness sweepstakes was the U.C. Berkeley computer-science professor Stuart Russell, the co-author of the canonical A.I. textbook and an outspoken proponent of A.I. safety. Musk\u2019s attorneys brought him on to argue that OpenAI had played fast and loose with the technology, but Judge Gonzalez Rogers ruled that talk of existential risk was off-limits. (Musk\u2019s lead attorney, Steven Molo, argued, \u201cWe all could die! We all could die as a result of artificial intelligence!\u201d The judge observed that Musk might\u2019ve endorsed this argument more sincerely if he hadn\u2019t funded the xAI as a competitor.) Russell struggled to find something relevant to say. To prep for his unused time, he was paid for a full forty-hour workweek at a rate of five thousand dollars an hour.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The acknowledgment of A.I.\u2019s risk\u2014existential threat or otherwise\u2014was present only outside the courthouse, courtesy of a small cohort of the kinds of genteel retirees one might see a half-dozen miles north, in the Berkeley precincts of the worker-owned Cheese Board or Chez Panisse. One protester, with his face obscured by a ghoulish, oversized cartoon Musk mask, wore a Cybertruck suit made of corrugated cardboard with \u201cSwastitruck\u201d scrawled in runic letters. He brandished a quart-size ziplock bag labelled \u201cKetamine.\u201d Three women danced around him, singing a capella about Musk and Altman\u2019s shared depravity to the tune of \u201cThe Battle Hymn of the Republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Altman didn\u2019t exactly come off well, though he did get in some dryly amusing lines about having to endure Musk\u2019s desire to show everyone memes on his phone. It didn\u2019t really matter insofar as the evidence against Musk was challenging to refute. As document after document showed, Musk was well aware of the various plans under way to outfit their \u201csummer-camp charity\u201d with a substantial arm dedicated to the wanton sale of salad dressing. Musk had no problem going forward with a for-profit structure; his preference was to fold it into Tesla. (Altman testified that he\u2019d looked askance at this plan: \u201cTesla is a car company.\u201d) Even if Altman and others had in fact stolen his charitable valor, it was plain that his complaint did not fall within the three-year statute of limitations. But neither Musk nor his lawyers seemed to have embarked upon this case with the goal of juridical victory. It instead provided them with an opportunity to cast Altman, in advance of OpenAI\u2019s expected I.P.O., as an untrustworthy guy. Molo, Musk\u2019s attorney, is a stooped, pallid, funereal man with enormous hands, and he carried out his cross-examination with the solemnity of an undertaker. The first few minutes were supposed to be, I\u2019m sure, a tour de force:<\/p>\n

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MOLO<\/em>: Are you completely trustworthy?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: I believe so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MOLO<\/em>: But you don\u2019t know whether you\u2019re completely trustworthy?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: I\u2019ll just amend my answer to yes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MOLO<\/em>: Should the jury believe your testimony?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: I think that\u2019s up to them, but I believe so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MOLO<\/em>: You believe so, or they should?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: Sir, I\u2019m not gonna tell the jury what to think.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MOLO<\/em>: Do you always tell the truth?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: I believe I\u2019m a truthful person.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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MOLO<\/em>: That wasn\u2019t my question, sir. Do you always tell the truth?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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ALTMAN<\/em>: I\u2019m sure there is some time in my life when I have not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Molo went on to recite previous testimony from various former employees or board members, who offered that Altman had dissembled about OpenAI\u2019s safety protocols and created a \u201ctoxic culture of lying.\u201d Altman suggested that he hadn\u2019t heard their comments. Did Altman know that Dario Amodei, who worked alongside Altman at OpenAI before he left to found its rival Anthropic, had accused him of \u201cmisrepresenting the terms\u201d of the initial Microsoft investment? Altman, who unlike Musk has a recognizable sense of humor, remarked, \u201cDario has accused me of many things.\u201d At one point, perhaps ten minutes into this droning line of questioning, Molo asked Altman if he\u2019d actually read the lawsuit. \u201cMany versions, sir,\u201d Altman said. The dubiousness of Altman\u2019s character is of paramount importance to the world in general, but it seems the case\u2014at least directionally\u2014that it has, by this time, been priced into his reputation. To relitigate the matter on behalf of Musk only served to underline the conviction that all of these jerks deserved one another.<\/p>\n

Besides, the cumulative effect of Molo\u2019s sustained effort to demand Altman\u2019s self-incrimination seemed to remind the courtroom that most of us, irrespective of our own faults, tend to think of ourselves as credible people doing our best. This, of course, is the real problem. Musk attempted to color Altman as a uniquely unsuitable supervisor of this technology, but this invariably invited further scrutiny into his own abject unfitness for the role. The only proper response to any of this is to point out that something as flimsy and corruptible as individual character was always going to be an insufficient basis for A.I. governance.<\/p>\n

To claim that OpenAI\u2019s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value\u2014to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered\u2014or, perhaps better, failed to discover\u2014along the way that this was structurally impossible? There are signs that some part of him anticipated his enterprise\u2019s destiny from the beginning. In the earliest correspondence about what would become OpenAI, Altman seemed vaguely aware that the collective-action problem of A.I. governance had nothing to do with individual heroism. In 2015, he e-mailed Musk to say that the development of advanced A.I. was virtually an inevitability. He wrote that \u201cif it\u2019s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.\u201d What he had in mind, he continued, was not exactly a rival outfit. It was, instead, something like a \u201cManhattan Project for AI\u201d Perhaps the most salient thing about the Manhattan Project, however, was, that it was not entrusted to the private sector. To launch such a transformational and dangerous program as a commercial initiative was reckless and hubristic; a \u201cManhattan Project run by a wealthy cabal\u201d was as much a self-referential paradox as \u201call Cretans are liars.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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On Monday, the jury took only two hours to reach its verdict. Musk\u2019s complaint, the panel found, had indeed exceeded the statute of limitations. If Musk had really thought that his beloved charity had been stolen, it would have occurred to him to raise the issue long before OpenAI had become what it is today. If he hadn\u2019t cared before the launch of ChatGPT, he had no right to pretend to care now.<\/p>\n

In a better world, Altman might emerge from this humiliating rite with some genuine humility. This is almost certainly too much to expect. Still, his courtiers seemed to be encouraging him to lean into sheepishness. On the last morning of testimony, Mike Isaac, of the Times<\/em>, tweeted an image of his sad excuse for a courthouse lunch: a meat-based protein bar, Bumble Bee-brand Snack on the Run! Tuna Salad & Crackers, and vessels of sugary caffeine. After the morning break, Isaac sat down next to me on his butt pillow and tweeted a follow-up: \u201ca good samaritan who took pity on me (and whose identity i will protect) came and gave me a bagel and cream cheese.\u201d I\u2019d been standing nearby when Altman made the offering of the paper-plated bagel. Looking like a chastened little boy, he said, softly, \u201cMy comms team told me to give you this.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Place-Names from a Newly Donny-fied World<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gideon Lewis-Kraus on the trial of Musk v. Altman, in which the billionaire entrepreneur sought to unravel the for-profit transformation of OpenAI and remove its C.E.O., Sam Altman, from the organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letter-from-silicon-valley"],"yoast_head":"\nSam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, Really, We All Lost - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=131\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, Really, We All Lost - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Gideon Lewis-Kraus on the trial of Musk v. 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