Friendship breakups are never easy, but few are as messy and expensive as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s tech bromance, which has — for now — reached a legal end.
On Monday, a jury ruled against Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, which contended that Altman and other executives “stole a charity” by turning a nonprofit research lab 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 deployed an increasingly unhinged body of evidence to discredit both men and prove they’re untrustworthy and power-hungry. As a result, the trial revealed a number of uncomfortable inner dynamics in both Silicon Valley and the wider AI industry. Here are five.
1. OpenAI’s board members questioned Sam Altman’s honesty. Musk’s legal team sought to paint Altman as a deeply untrustworthy person, prone to lying to his co-founders, employees, and board members.
Multiple former OpenAI employees and board members testified as much in the courtroom. He had a tendency of “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person,” testified Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer.
2. Greg Brockman kept a diary — and he probably wishes he hadn’t. Some of the more salacious evidence entered into trial came from a personal diary kept by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who chronicled his “stream of consciousness” as he weighed whether it would be “morally bankrupt” to pivot OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise.
“It’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him,” he wrote of Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and provided most of its start-up funding. “He’s really not an idiot,” Brockman wrote at another point. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end.”
3. Surprise, surprise: Elon Musk is difficult to collaborate with. During one disagreement about the future of OpenAI, Musk became so irate that “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me,” Brockman testified. At another point, Musk got in a tense, public verbal tussle with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, over the race to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI).
“He snapped and called me a jackass,” Achiam testified. Two OpenAI employees — including Dario Amodei, who later departed to form Anthropic — later awarded him a small golden statue of a donkey’s rear end, inscribed with the message, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”
4. Microsoft cozied up to OpenAI to avoid being left behind in the AI race. Musk first funded OpenAI because of another friendship breakup, this one with Google cofounder Larry Page, who Musk says mocked him at his own birthday party for preferring humans over computers. Microsoft — which is named in Musk’s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission — later became OpenAI’s first major corporate investor in 2019, because it, too, wanted to compete with Google.
“I don’t want to be IBM,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that company’s decline in the personal computing race, according to emails revealed at trial.
5. Everybody wants to rule the world (of artificial general intelligence). Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Almost everyone who testified at trial pointed fingers at a different boogeyman whose characters were too impure to be trusted with control of what all agreed would be an extremely consequential technology. They were not particularly introspective about their own characters, however.
“I suspect there are plenty of people who wouldn’t like to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told Musk’s lawyer at one point in the arguments.
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