The trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI over the accusation that the organization abandoned its founding mission in pursuit of profits is winding down, with both sides making their closing arguments on Thursday. It’s been a three-week endeavour that has featured lots of eye-opening testimony from the biggest names in the AI space. Witnesses provided a look into the machinations of these players that is usually reserved for books published years after the fact.
We’ll have to wait for the jury to reach a conclusion on the arguments they heard over the course of the case to see who really wins, but the court of public opinion is certainly capable of coming to its own conclusions. In that regard, there are very few winners to come out of this trial—just a bunch of people who come off looking like some combination of petty, greedy, vindictive, and controlling.
Since there are no real winners here, how about a power ranking of who lost the least?
Mira Murati
Mira Murati didn’t physically take the stand during this trial, but she did come up pretty frequently over the course of the proceedings. OpenAI’s former CTO and the current CEO of Thinking Machines Lab featured prominently in the recounting of the drama surrounding Sam Altman’s very brief ouster at OpenAI, when the board voted to remove him. Among other things, she gave us an all-timer of a “you’re fired” text in which she told Altman that the board meeting was “directionally very bad” for him.
Murati also appeared in front of the jury via a videotaped deposition, in which she did not instill much confidence that Altman is a trustworthy actor. She explicitly said in her testimony that she did not believe that Altman was entirely truthful with her and created enough chaos in the company that she was afraid that the operation was “at catastrophic risk of falling apart.” That’s not really what you want to hear about the guy who is still in charge of a company with a nearly $1 trillion valuation.
Sam Altman
While he was routinely depicted as untrustworthy, Altman benefited a bit from the fact that not that many people trusted him in the first place. Can you take reputational damage when your reputation is simply confirmed by everyone’s testimony?
That’s not to say that the whole experience won’t lead to more questions about Altman’s leadership. If anything, it probably makes it seem like OpenAI’s board was right to remove him and just moved too early before doubts could set in for everyone.
In addition to Murati saying Altman wasn’t truthful, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner said there was a “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor” that led to her vote to remove him, per The Guardian. Another former board member, Natasha McCauley, said he caused “repeated crisis events” at the company. And former OpenAI founder Ilya Sutskever confirmed that he believed Altman showed “a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.”
Even if Altman wins the trial, there may be fallout in the form of questions about his leadership.
Elon Musk
You can put Musk in the same bucket as Altman in that he didn’t lose that much because his reputation precedes him. Yes, he came off looking like a greedy, power-hungry control freak, but that was kind of his brand going into the trial.
The thing with Musk is that he probably did more harm to his own reputation than anyone else did, and it’s not like that many people had nice things to say about him over the course of the trial. Musk reportedly got testy over and over again while being cross-examined. He undermined some of his own public claims about his companies while on the stand, tried and seemingly failed to position himself as a champion of charitable giving, and repeatedly lost his temper after claiming “I don’t lose my temper.” It was also revealed that he tried to strong-arm a settlement out of OpenAI just days before the trial started, which isn’t a great look.
Then other people started talking about Musk, and that didn’t exactly go better. He was repeatedly painted as temperamental and difficult to deal with. OpenAI President Greg Brockman described him as erratic and unpredictable. The mother of his children revealed a fair amount of scheming happening behind the scenes in the Musk camp that doesn’t exactly make him look like the benevolent defender of nonprofits that he’d like to be perceived as. He apparently suggested at one point that if he were the head of a for-profit arm of OpenAI, he’d pass it on to his kids if he died.
To put a cherry on top of the whole thing, Musk left the trial to travel to China with Donald Trump despite not being excused by the judge to do so.
Greg Brockman
Likely the guy with the lowest public profile of the major players in the case, Greg Brockman came out of the trial in pretty rough shape—not because anyone had all that much bad to say about him, but because he was made to read from and answer for his private journal while on the stand. That is a brutal fate.
What he wrote didn’t exactly come off well, either. At one point, he asked rhetorically in text, “Financially, what will take me to $1B?” and later wrote, “It would be nice to be making the billions.” If you were trying to make the case that you weren’t just trying to cash in on the profitability of the company you cofounded, that is about the last thing that you’d want to be seen by the public.
He also wrote of the idea of turning the company into a for-profit without Musk in charge, “It’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt.” But hey, they don’t count morality in your credit score.
Shivon Zilis
Through little fault of her own, Shivon Zilis had a very bad couple of weeks. She became a central figure in the trial because she had a foot in both the OpenAI camp and the Musk camp while the split was underway. She’s decidedly in Musk’s corner now, given that she lives with him and is the mother to four of his children, as we learned during the trial. Despite that, Musk called her his “chief of staff” or “close advisor,” not a romantic or platonic partner.
(Zilis referred to herself and Musk as “friends and colleagues” who had a “one-off” that was “romantic in nature,” so it doesn’t seem like there are really unrequited feelings here, just two people who have arranged their lives in a non-traditional way. That’s fine, just weird for a guy who is really invested in “traditional values.”)
Zilis’s proximity to Musk and the communication the two shared may be the most damning thing to come out of the trial. In a text sent to Musk shortly before he left OpenAI, Zilis asked, “Do you prefer I stay close and friendly to OpenAI to keep info flowing or begin to disassociate? Trust game is about to get tricky, so any guidance for how to do right by you is appreciated.” Musk responded, “Close and friendly, but we are going to actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla. More than that will join over time, but we won’t actively recruit them.”
In emails between the two, Zilis also seemingly revealed that Musk was also exploring the possibility of OpenAI becoming a for-profit, undermining his whole argument that the organization was obliged to remain a non-profit.
At one point in those emails, she mentioned that it was discussed that OpenAI “switch to for profit in next couple of weeks (woah fast!).” In another email, Zilis apparently offered Musk some ideas to kickstart Tesla’s own AI efforts. “One was making OpenAI a public benefit corporation subsidiary of Tesla. One was getting Altman as an ‘anchor’ for TeslaAI,” she wrote, which doesn’t come off like the kind of thing a person who is insistent on a company remaining a non-profit would consider.
Zilis is in no way responsible for Musk’s own actions or behaviors, but her communications with him are the thing that provided some potentially devastating insight into the case. Tough look, but make no mistake, it’s the spoiled rich men at the heart of the proceedings who created this mess.
