Friendship breaks hard. Money makes it worse. Power? It ruins everything.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman used to be inseparable. Now they are in a courtroom, trying to prove the other one is a liar, a thief, or both. The trial ended last week. The jury deliberates next week.
They will decide if Altman “stole a charity.” That’s Musk’s line. His lawyer says OpenAI turned from a noble nonprofit into a greedy corporation. Just so we’re clear: Vox Media has partnership deals with OpenAI. My reporting is separate. I don’t take orders.
The stakes? Huge.
If Musk wins, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers could order damages. We are talking $150 billion. That is not a typo. Or they could force a shake-up of OpenAI’s leadership. Unlikely. But possible.
Even if Musk loses, the trial might be enough for state regulators to poke around. They might ask how a nonprofit legally morphed into a for-profit behemoth. Lawyers tell me someone will appeal. This isn’t over. The catfight just changed arenas.
The Honesty Gap
Musk’s team went for the jugular. They wanted Altman to look untrustworthy. Lying to co-founders? Check. Lying to employees? Check. Lying to the board? Apparently.
Helen Toner, former board member, said Altman had a pattern. He’d say one thing to your face. The opposite thing behind your back. She cited this as a reason he was ousted as CEO in 2024 (wait, it was 2023). Yes, that time.
Mira Murati, ex-CTO, backed it up. She testified Altman explicitly lied about the safety reviews needed for new models. Safety isn’t a joke for them. Or was it?
“Saying one thing to one person… completely the opposite to another.”
That’s the pattern. That’s the allegation.
The Diary We Didn’t Ask For
Then there’s Greg Brockman. He kept a diary. He thought it was private. The jury had a front-row seat to his conscience. Or lack thereof.
Brockman wrote down his stream of consciousness in 2017. He worried about the moral bankruptcy of going for-profit.
“Can’t see us turning this into… without a very nasty fight.”
He called it stealing. Stealing the nonprofit from Musk. He admitted Musk wasn’t an idiot. He knew the story would look bad. He knew he wasn’t being honest with the guy who funded half of it.
Did he regret it later? Hard to say. He later got a stake in the company. Estimated now at $30 billion.
“It would be nice to make billions.”
Ambition wins. Morality loses? The jury gets to decide which weighs more.
Elon Is… A Lot
OpenAI isn’t exactly the perfect workplace, sure. But Elon Musk is not easy.
In 2017, their AI bot crushed pro Dota 2 players. Musk called it a trigger event. Time to step up. He sent new Teslas to Brockman and Ilya Sutskever. Presumably to butter them up. Then he invited them to his haunted mansion. Amber Heard was pouring whiskey.
Things got tense. Fast.
Musk wanted absolute control. He didn’t want shared governance. Brockman testified that at one point he actually feared for his physical safety.
“I actually thought he was… going to physically attack me.”
That is not how you keep engineers. Musk left in 2018. He started building his own competitor later.
During a meeting in 2018, he called Josh Achiam a jackass. Just like that. Achiam didn’t cower. He received a golden donkey rear-end statue from colleagues. Dario Amodei helped make it. Amodei left to build Anthropic later.
The note read: Never stop being a jackass. For safety. Irony is dead long live the internet.
Microsoft Needed A Friend
Musk funded OpenAI after falling out with Google. Larry Page mocked him for loving humans more than computers. Hurt feelings.
Microsoft needed an edge too. They feared being left in the dust.
Satya Nadella wrote internally: “I don’t want to be IBM.” IBM missed the mobile shift. Microsoft didn’t want to miss the AI shift. They wanted agency. They wanted control over the stack.
They stepped in big in 2019. When Altman was ousted in 2023? Microsoft pushed him back into power. Nadella called the coup attempt “amateur city.”
Altman texted Microsoft executives to vet new board members. They basically co-ran the comeback tour. Microsoft will have spent over $100 billion by summer. They hold a 27% stake now.
They aren’t just investors. They’re partners. They’re deeply involved.
Who Can You Trust?
Here’s the catch.
Everyone at the trial pointed fingers. Musk said Altman was dangerous. Altman said Brockman was greedy. Brockman said Musk was dictatorial.
No one looked inward. Not really.
Musk testified about the Terminator. Existential risks. Eyeballs rolled by the judge.
“If you have someone who isn’t trustworthy in charge of AI… it’s a very big danger.”
Ironically, his company xAI has been under fire for deepfakes this year. Nonconsensual ones. The judge pointed this out.
She told Musk’s lawyer: “Your client is creating a company in the exact same space.”
She added: “Plenty of people wouldn’t put the future in Mr. Musk’s hands either.”
Who is trustworthy? That’s the real question. Is it anyone?
