What did we learn throughout Musk v. Altman? A lot of gossip.
What did we learn throughout Musk v. Altman? A lot of gossip.
Today was closing arguments in the Musk v. Altman trial, and I almost feel bad writing about the unbelievable demolition derby I just witnessed. Steven Molo, Musk’s lawyer, stumbled over his words. He at one point called Greg Brockman — a co-defendant — Greg Altman. He erroneously claimed that Musk wasn’t asking for money and had to be corrected by the judge. He made it clear we’ve heard from many liars over the past few weeks, but offered little evidence for Musk’s actual legal claims.
OpenAI’s lawyer, Sarah Eddy, countered this by simply arranging the mountain of evidence that the company introduced in chronological order. She didn’t spend time trying to pretend anyone in this trial is especially reliable. She did, however, get the zinger of the day, about Musk: “Even the mother of his children can’t back his story.” William Savitt, who took the defendant baton after her presentation, demonstrated the number of times Musk “didn’t recall” some critical detail — and wondered how a sophisticated businessman couldn’t understand or read a four-page term sheet OpenAI had sent to him.
I found myself wondering, again, why we were all wasting our time here. So let’s discuss the gossip, which is the real point of this trial. How good was it? Here are my favorite nuggets.
- Musk used OpenAI to improve xAI. I’m afraid this trial was front-loaded; revealed the first week, this was the best bit of gossip we got. As I suggested in 2024, Grok was developed very fast — so fast I was skeptical it was entirely independent. Turns out, it wasn’t. Musk admitted that xAI distilled other models, including OpenAI’s. What was all that investor money for, again?
- Tesla AI failed to run at AGI. Musk in fact failed at this twice, once by unsuccessfully trying to acquire OpenAI and again by unsuccessfully trying to kneecap OpenAI by recruiting its employees, including Sam Altman himself, for a “world-class AI lab.”
- Sam Altman confirmed decade-old reports that he thought about running for governor of California.
- Everyone, but especially Musk, is obsessed with Demis Hassabis.
- Musk claimed he doesn’t lose his temper. During the cross examination, he lost his temper at OpenAI’s Savitt.
- Mira Murati played both sides of the Altman ouster — providing some chats that got him removed, then feeding Altman details about what the board was up to, publicly complaining about the event, and refusing to tell employees about her role in the ouster. I would call this “directionally very bad” for Murati. Everyone hammered on Altman as a snake, but Murati is no better.
- Musk wanted his kids to inherit OpenAI. (At least, according to Altman!)
- Altman hired Savitt, who kicked Musk’s ass on Twitter, and may very well kick his ass again. I was amused by Altman’s commitment to knifework under oath, managing to suggest both that Musk had little to do with OpenAI, say he had “front-runner-itis,” and imply Musk was no longer respected, but managing to annoy someone just procedurally… From one petty bitch to another: beautifully done.
- Brockman and other OpenAI engineers worked at Tesla, while they were theoretically employed by OpenAI, on self-driving software.
- Shivon Zillis didn’t tell her fellow board members that Musk was the father of her children until Business Insider got ahold of some court documents. She didn’t even tell her own father!
- “Rumor has it that, on top of the folks that secretly converse on Twitter DM because they don’t trust Demis not to spy on their email and gchat…”
- “I don’t want to be IBM and OpenAI to be Microsoft.”
- The jackass trophy. I am so sorry that the jurors didn’t get to see it. It was like a little league trophy but just the back half of a donkey. Even Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers thought this was pretty funny.
While this trial was meant to punish Altman and arguably already has, I’d like to focus on my actual takeaway here: Elon Musk sucks at AI.
Look, Musk said multiple times that OpenAI wouldn’t succeed. He’s tried, repeatedly, to kneecap it and steal its researchers and in one case — that of Andrej Karpathy, a founding team member Musk lured to Tesla — succeeded. But how’s xAI doing? Well, it’s a black hole for money that’s been acquired by SpaceX. It’s hemorrhaging researchers. One of its huge data centers isn’t going to be occupied by xAI — there’s a deal with Anthropic instead. It might buy Cursor, in an attempt to match the programming-focused products put forward by Anthropic and OpenAI. xAI’s enterprise users, whether that’s the US government or private companies, have been strong-armed into using it. To the degree that its bespoke CSAM machine Grok, aka MechaHitler, works, it apparently works because Musk distilled other people’s models.
Zilis wrote in 2018 that Brockman and Sutskever thought that Musk “really hasn’t done his homework [on] AI / AGI and that concerns them about working with him.” I am leaving this trial thinking all these fucking liars deserve each other, but in fairness to Brockman and Sutskever, they were absolutely right about this. The question now is if anyone who’s thinking of investing in the upcoming SpaceX IPO has noticed, or cares.
