As Musk v. Altman Trial Closes, Spectacle and Personalities Rule

Elon Musk’s lead trial attorney wanted to make one point absolutely clear in his hourslong courtroom examination of OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman on the stand this week: Everyone calls him a liar.

Steven Molo pressed Altman to reflect on the testimony of numerous former associates who said, under oath, that he isn’t to be trusted: former OpenAI board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and former CTO Mira Murati.

Altman largely equivocated: “If that’s what you say.”

“Should the jury believe your testimony?” Molo asked.

“I think that’s up to them, but I believe so,” Altman said.

Musk’s legal team spent much of its time and energy during the last two weeks of trial trying to prove that Altman has a loose relationship with the truth. But little evidence was presented that could directly answer the central question of the case: Did Musk form a charitable trust by donating $38 million to OpenAI in its early years? And did Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman breach the terms of that trust?

It’s a case that’s relied far more on the spectacle of hostile courtroom examinations and the clashing personalities of AI’s most prominent executives than any single, smoking-gun piece of evidence.

With closing arguments Thursday, Musk’s proposed path to victory now relies heavily on whether the jury believes—and cares—that Altman is a fundamentally untrustworthy character. The jury could begin deliberations the same day.

The Blip

Musk first sued Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI in federal court in Oakland, California, in 2024, alleging those two co-founders misused his donations and “stole a charity” by taking billions in investments from Microsoft and straying from OpenAI’s founding mission of creating artificial intelligence that can benefit all of humanity.

But Altman’s contentious ousting from OpenAI in 2023, known in tech circles as “the Blip,” that involved allegations that he was not consistently candid with the OpenAI board and top executives, was the focus of large portions of the trial. That incident didn’t involve Musk and occurred years after he left the organization.

The jury is left with no particular corporate document, text message, or email to hang a decision on. The case isn’t about “random tweets and emails,” one of Musk’s attorneys, Marc Toberoff, told reporters outside the courthouse Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the jury heard that Musk himself at various times in the years after OpenAI’s founding in 2015 said the nonprofit should consider utilizing a for-profit structure, or even fold into Musk’s own Tesla Inc., to raise the money needed for the compute-intensive technology. The world’s richest person is also operating his own for-profit competitor, xAI.

Even those witnesses who’ve called Altman’s character into question have testified that Musk’s donations came with no strings attached. No witness testimony or piece of evidence shows Altman or Brockman made any explicit promises to Musk when he began making his quarterly donations to OpenAI.

“This whole lawsuit is a pageant of hypocrisy and that pageant has played out gloriously from the beginning of this trial to the close of evidence,” OpenAI’s lead attorney William Savitt told attorneys outside the courthouse Wednesday.

The jury’s verdict will only be advisory, meaning Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has the discretion to overturn their decision. She will decide Musk’s remedies request on her own. His requests of the court could be existential for OpenAI if Gonzalez Rogers finds for him: $134 billion in damages, Altman and Brockman’s removal from their leadership positions, and the unwinding of OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit.

Gonzalez Rogers has attempted to tamp down on the theatrics of the case, admonishing attorneys, often with a strict, near shouting tone, to stay focused. She prohibited any in-depth discussion about extinction risks of AI, for example, saying that topic will only lead to a distracting sideshow “for the world to view.”

But even so, the spectacle would continue up to the last day of trial: On Wednesday morning, before the jury entered the courtroom, OpenAI’s legal team attempted, but ultimately failed, to enter into evidence a physical item.

It was a small golden trophy of a donkey’s rear end gifted to an OpenAI employee who said he stood up to Musk in a tense meeting about AI safety. Inscribed on it was the message: “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”

—Rachel Metz contributed to this article.