Musk v Altman: tech titans clash in court
Sam Altman was nobody’s idea of a household name in 2012. He ran a tech incubator, posted thoughts on Twitter that startup founders treated like scripture, and moved in circles that meant little outside Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, by contrast, was already the closest thing the technology world had to a myth, the man reinventing cars and rockets simultaneously, operating at a scale that made other entrepreneurs look like hobbyists.
Someone introduced them. And for a while, it worked.
By 2015 the two had co-founded OpenAI together, animated by something that sounded almost quaint given what would follow, a genuine belief that artificial intelligence this powerful needed to be built carefully, transparently, and for everyone. Not for shareholders. Not for governments. For humanity.
That version of events now sits at the centre of a federal courtroom in Oakland, California, where a nine-person jury will spend the next month deciding whose account of what happened next is true.
Musk’s version: he poured roughly $40 million into the venture, was manipulated by Altman and others into believing the non-profit mission was sacred, and watched as they quietly dismantled it, converting OpenAI into a commercially driven enterprise that now courts a rumoured $850 billion valuation ahead of a public listing, with Microsoft as a key backer. He wants billions back and Altman gone.
Altman’s version: Musk wanted control, couldn’t get it, left in a huff in 2018, built his own competing AI company called xAI, fell behind, and is now using litigation to do what the market won’t, slow OpenAI down.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has already signaled she has no interest in being dazzled by either man’s reputation, promising both will receive “no special treatment” in her courtroom. Both will testify. So will Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI insiders Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever, and Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member whose connection to this story runs deeper than most, being also the mother of four of Musk’s children.
The lead-up to the trial has not been short on colour. One of Musk’s attorneys, it emerged, performs as a clown in his spare time. Another moonlights in Hollywood. The judge ruled that Musk’s reported ketamine use, a topic that had surfaced in prior coverage, stays out of the jury’s earshot.
But underneath the circus atmosphere, legal scholars are tracking something with far higher stakes than the reputations of two billionaires.
“Whoever wins that race will have a lot of power,” said UCLA law professor Rose Chan Loui, referring to the broader contest to achieve artificial general intelligence, AI that thinks and reasons beyond human capability. A Musk victory, she noted, could cripple one of the most advanced players in that race. A loss leaves xAI still trailing a rival that, by most measures, helped ignite the consumer AI revolution when ChatGPT launched in 2022 and reached 100 million users in months.
The conflict’s roots go back further than the lawsuit. In 2023, Musk led a $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI outright. The company said no. Altman logged onto Musk’s own platform, X, and offered, with visible amusement, to buy Twitter instead, for a tenth of the price. Musk called him a swindler in the replies. On the morning the jury was sworn in this week, he was still at it, branding Altman “Scam Altman” in a public post.
Some who study power and conflict see the whole thing as something larger than a personal vendetta, a proxy war over who gets to shape what may become the most consequential technology in human history, dressed up in the language of broken promises and fiduciary duty.
“In King Kong vs. Godzilla, all the little people below are scrambling as these giants hit each other,” said University of San Diego professor Sarah Federman, who specialises in conflict resolution. “One ultimately wins, but what’s really left is this path that the rest of us have to live with.”
The jury will deliberate. The rest of us will wait, and wonder whether whoever wins will remember what the whole thing was supposed to be about in the first place.
Source: BBC
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