Friendship breakups are never easy<\/a>, but few are as messy and expensive as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman\u2019s once thriving tech bromance<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On Thursday, closing arguments wrapped up in Musk\u2019s lawsuit against OpenAI<\/a>, leaving a jury to deliberate next week whether Altman and other executives \u201cstole a charity\u201d (as one of Musk\u2019s lawyers put it) by turning much of what was once a nonprofit research lab<\/a> into a corporate behemoth. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) For three weeks, lawyers on both sides have deployed an increasingly unhinged body of evidence<\/a> in an attempt to discredit both men and prove they\u2019re untrustworthy and power-hungry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If the jury rules that Musk was duped into donating roughly $38 million to OpenAI under false pretenses, then Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will decide on the damages, which could potentially lead to $150 billion in financial restitution and, while unlikely, could also include major changes to OpenAI\u2019s leadership and governance structure. Even if the jury does not rule in Musk\u2019s favor, however, it\u2019s possible that the evidence put forth at trial will be enough to convince state regulators<\/a> to revisit the agreements that allowed OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit enterprise to begin with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Lawyers tell me that whoever loses will likely appeal, meaning the catfight might not be over yet. But for now, here are five major revelations from the trial.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Musk\u2019s legal team sought to paint Altman as a deeply untrustworthy person<\/a>, prone to lying to his co-founders, employees, and board members if it meant advancing his interests.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Multiple former OpenAI employees and board members testified as much in the courtroom. Altman\u2019s \u201cpattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor\u201d led directly to his temporary ouster as CEO<\/a> in 2023, said Helen Toner, a former board member, in a video deposition. He had a tendency of \u201csaying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person,\u201d Mira Murati, OpenAI\u2019s former chief technology officer, testified. In one instance, she said, Altman explicitly lied to her about the safety review required<\/a> to vet a new AI model.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some of the more salacious evidence entered into trial came from a personal diary<\/a> kept by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who chronicled his \u201cstream of consciousness\u201d as he weighed whether it would be \u201cmorally bankrupt\u201d to pivot OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cCan\u2019t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,\u201d he wrote in one 2017 entry. \u201cIt\u2019d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him,\u201d meaning Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and provided most of its start-up funding. \u201cHe\u2019s really not an idiot,\u201d Brockman later wrote. \u201cHis story will correctly be that we weren\u2019t honest with him in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Brockman was also candid about his personal ambitions; \u201cIt would be nice to be making the billions,\u201d he wrote. He later received a stake in OpenAI now estimated to be worth about $30 billion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n OpenAI built a bot in 2017 that was so advanced, it could beat top professional players at strategic multiplayer battle game Dota 2<\/a>, a major milestone for the budding lab. \u201cTime to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event,\u201d Musk emailed<\/a> Brockman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Musk gave Brockman and cofounder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Model 3 cars, presumably to \u201cbutter us up,\u201d Brockman testified. The Tesla CEO then summoned them<\/a> to his self-described \u201chaunted mansion\u201d for discussions of a possible OpenAI for-profit arm, where whiskey was served by Musk\u2019s then-girlfriend Amber Heard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At one point, Musk became so irate at his guests\u2019 insistence that they share control of OpenAI \u2014 rather than cede absolute control to Musk \u2014 that \u201cI actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me,\u201d Brockman testified. In the following months, Musk repeatedly pitched having Tesla absorb OpenAI, Altman testified. And, in one \u201cparticularly hair-raising moment,\u201d he mused that OpenAI should pass on to his children<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Musk ultimately left OpenAI in 2018 to begin building his own competitor. During an all-hands meeting, Musk got into another tense verbal tussle with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI\u2019s chief futurist, over the race to develop artificial general intelligence. \u201cHe snapped and called me a jackass,\u201d Achiam testified<\/a>. For Achiam\u2019s valor, two OpenAI employees \u2014 including Dario Amodei, who later departed to form Anthropic \u2014 awarded him a small golden statue<\/a> of a donkey\u2019s rear end, inscribed with the message, \u201cNever stop being a jackass for safety.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Musk first funded OpenAI because of another friendship breakup, this one with Google cofounder Larry Page, who Musk says mocked him<\/a> at his own birthday party for preferring humans over computers. Microsoft \u2014 which is named in Musk\u2019s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI\u2019s abandonment of its nonprofit mission \u2014 later became OpenAI\u2019s first major corporate investor<\/a> in 2019, because it, too, wanted to compete with Google as the AI race heated up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to be IBM,\u201d Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that company\u2019s decline in the personal computing race<\/a>, according to emails revealed at trial. \u201cIt was becoming even more core and important that we had real agency at every layer of the stack,\u201d Nadella testified.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That meant ingratiating itself in every corner of OpenAI\u2019s world. Microsoft played a crucial role in bringing Altman back to power after the failed board coup in 2023, which Nadella referred to as \u201camateur city<\/a>, as far as I was concerned.\u201d In a text thread revealed at trial, Altman asked Microsoft executives to vet various members of OpenAI\u2019s reconstituted board of directors<\/a>, who now control both the for-profit company and the original nonprofit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n By this summer, Microsoft will have invested over $100 billion in OpenAI, one of the company\u2019s executives testified. The company was awarded a 27 percent stake in OpenAI last fall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Almost everyone who testified at trial pointed fingers at a different boogeyman whose motives were too impure and whose character was too corruptible, to be trusted with control of what all agreed would be an extremely consequential technology. By contrast, their own introspection mostly took a back seat to ambition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t want to have a Terminator<\/em> outcome,\u201d Musk testified<\/a>, to apparent eyerolls<\/a> from Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who tried and sometimes failed<\/a> to steer the trial away from discussions of AI\u2019s existential risks. \u201cIf you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI,\u201d Musk said<\/a>, \u201cI think that\u2019s a very big danger for the whole world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Over a decade ago, Musk came together with OpenAI\u2019s cofounders to build a charity equipped to take on a different threat<\/a> then poised to lead the AI race: Google, which had recently acquired Demis Hassabis\u2019 DeepMind. Now, like Altman and Brockman, who testified that they resisted Musk\u2019s dictatorial<\/a> attempts to secure absolute control of artificial general intelligence<\/a>, Musk portrayed himself as someone selfless and transparent enough to be put in charge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt is ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space,\u201d Gonzalez Rogers at one point told Musk\u2019s lawyer, in reference to xAI, which has come under fire this year for facilitating the mass creation of nonconsensual deepfakes<\/a>. \u201cI suspect there are plenty of people who wouldn\u2019t like to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk\u2019s hands.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\nOpenAI\u2019s board members questioned Sam Altman\u2019s honesty<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Greg Brockman kept a diary \u2014 and he probably wishes he hadn\u2019t<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Surprise, surprise: Elon Musk is difficult to collaborate with <\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Microsoft cozied up to OpenAI to avoid being left behind in the AI race<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Everybody wants to rule the world (of artificial general intelligence)<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n