Friendship breakups are by no means straightforward, however few are as messy and costly because the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s as soon as thriving tech bromance, which has — for now — reached a authorized finish.
On Monday, a jury dominated towards Musk in his lawsuit towards OpenAI, which contended that Altman and different executives “stole a charity” (as one in every of Musk’s legal professionals put it) by turning a lot of what was as soon as a nonprofit analysis lab into a company behemoth. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one in every of a number of publishers which have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting stays editorially unbiased.) For 3 weeks, legal professionals on each side deployed an more and more unhinged physique of proof in an try to discredit each males and show they’re untrustworthy and power-hungry.
Musk claimed he was duped into donating roughly $38 million to OpenAI beneath false pretenses, and was suing for $150 billion in monetary restitution alongside main adjustments to OpenAI’s management and governance construction. Choose Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s determination that Musk did not deliver his lawsuit throughout the three-year statute of limitations, on condition that OpenAI first added its for-profit arm in 2018. Nevertheless, it’s potential that the proof put forth at trial will nonetheless be sufficient to persuade state regulators to revisit the agreements that allowed OpenAI to restructure right into a for-profit enterprise to start with.
Attorneys inform me that Musk will seemingly select to enchantment the ruling, that means the catfight may not be over but. However even past the end result, the trial shone an usually uncomfortable highlight on the internal workings of Silicon Valley and the AI business. Listed here are 5 main revelations from the trial.
OpenAI’s board members questioned Sam Altman’s honesty
Musk’s authorized crew sought to color Altman as a deeply untrustworthy particular person, liable to mendacity to his co-founders, workers, and board members if it meant advancing his pursuits.
A number of former OpenAI workers and board members testified as a lot within the courtroom. Altman’s “sample of habits associated to his honesty and candor” led on to his non permanent ouster as CEO in 2023, mentioned Helen Toner, a former board member, in a video deposition. He had a bent of “saying one factor to 1 particular person and utterly the alternative to a different particular person,” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief expertise officer, testified. In a single occasion, she mentioned, Altman explicitly lied to her in regards to the security overview required to vet a brand new AI mannequin.
Greg Brockman stored a diary — and he most likely needs he hadn’t
A few of the extra salacious proof entered into trial got here from a private diary stored by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who chronicled his “stream of consciousness” as he weighed whether or not it could be “morally bankrupt” to pivot OpenAI right into a for-profit enterprise.
“Can’t see us turning this right into a for-profit with out a very nasty combat,” he wrote in a single 2017 entry. “It’d be flawed to steal the nonprofit from him,” that means Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and offered most of its start-up funding. “He’s actually not an fool,” Brockman later wrote. “His story will appropriately be that we weren’t trustworthy with him in the long run.”
Brockman was additionally candid about his private ambitions; “It might be good to be making the billions,” he wrote. He later obtained a stake in OpenAI now estimated to be price about $30 billion.
Shock, shock: Elon Musk is troublesome to collaborate with
OpenAI constructed a bot in 2017 that was so superior, it might beat prime skilled gamers at strategic multiplayer battle recreation Dota 2, a significant milestone for the budding lab. “Time to make the subsequent step for OpenAI. That is the triggering occasion,” Musk emailed Brockman.
Musk gave Brockman and cofounder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Mannequin 3 vehicles, presumably to “butter us up,” Brockman testified. The Tesla CEO then summoned them to his self-described “haunted mansion” for discussions of a potential OpenAI for-profit arm, the place whiskey was served by Musk’s then-girlfriend Amber Heard.
At one level, Musk grew to become so irate at his friends’ insistence that they share management of OpenAI — fairly than cede absolute management to Musk — that “I truly thought he was going to hit me, bodily assault me,” Brockman testified. Within the following months, Musk repeatedly pitched having Tesla soak up OpenAI, Altman testified. And, in a single “significantly hair-raising second,” he mused that OpenAI ought to cross on to his kids.
Musk finally left OpenAI in 2018 to start constructing his personal competitor. Throughout an all-hands assembly, Musk obtained into one other tense verbal tussle with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, over the race to develop synthetic common intelligence. “He snapped and known as me a jackass,” Achiam testified. For Achiam’s valor, two OpenAI workers — together with Dario Amodei, who later departed to type Anthropic — awarded him a small golden statue of a donkey’s rear finish, inscribed with the message, “By no means cease being a jackass for security.”
Microsoft cozied as much as OpenAI to keep away from being left behind within the AI race
Musk first funded OpenAI due to one other friendship breakup, this one with Google cofounder Larry Web page, who Musk says mocked him at his personal birthday celebration for preferring people over computer systems. Microsoft — which is called in Musk’s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission — later grew to become OpenAI’s first main company investor in 2019, as a result of it, too, needed to compete with Google because the AI race heated up.
“I don’t need to be IBM,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that firm’s decline within the private computing race, in keeping with emails revealed at trial. “It was turning into much more core and necessary that we had actual company at each layer of the stack,” Nadella testified.
That meant ingratiating itself in each nook of OpenAI’s world. Microsoft performed an important position in bringing Altman again to energy after the failed board coup in 2023, which Nadella known as “newbie metropolis, so far as I used to be involved.” In a textual content thread revealed at trial, Altman requested Microsoft executives to vet varied members of OpenAI’s reconstituted board of administrators, who now management each the for-profit firm and the unique nonprofit.
By this summer season, Microsoft can have invested over $100 billion in OpenAI, one of many firm’s executives testified. The corporate was awarded a 27 % stake in OpenAI final fall.
Everyone desires to rule the world (of synthetic common intelligence)
Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Virtually everybody who testified at trial pointed fingers at a unique boogeyman whose motives have been too impure and whose character was too corruptible, to be trusted with management of what all agreed can be a particularly consequential expertise. Against this, their very own introspection principally took a again seat to ambition.
“We don’t need to have a Terminator final result,” Musk testified, to obvious eyerolls from Choose Gonzalez Rogers, who tried and generally failed to steer the trial away from discussions of AI’s existential dangers. “In case you have somebody who is just not reliable accountable for AI,” Musk mentioned, “I feel that’s a really large hazard for the entire world.”
Over a decade in the past, Musk got here along with OpenAI’s cofounders to construct a charity geared up to tackle a completely different menace then poised to steer the AI race: Google, which had not too long ago acquired Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Now, like Altman and Brockman, who testified that they resisted Musk’s dictatorial makes an attempt to safe absolute management of synthetic common intelligence, Musk portrayed himself as somebody selfless and clear sufficient to be put in cost.
“It’s ironic that your shopper, regardless of these dangers, is creating an organization that’s within the precise house,” Gonzalez Rogers at one level instructed Musk’s lawyer, in reference to xAI, which has come beneath fireplace this yr for facilitating the mass creation of nonconsensual deepfakes. “I think there are many individuals who wouldn’t prefer to put the way forward for humanity in Mr. Musk’s fingers.”
Replace, Might 18, 2026, 2 pm ET: This story has been up to date to mirror the conclusion of the trial.
