Elon Musk and Sam Altman bring their rivalry to court

Of the two unloved billionaires, which will the jury trust?

THE run-up to the biggest courtroom drama in the history of artificial intelligence produced plenty of salacious details, from questions about ketamine use to a list of insults traded between two of the planet’s most powerful people. Plenty more tittle-tattle is still to come, if the opening days of Elon Musk v Sam Altman et al are any guide.

The ramifications of the trial, which began in a Californian courtroom on April 27th, could be profound. If Mr Musk wins—an outcome betting markets deem unlikely, but which remains possible—it could seriously hurt OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and a lynchpin of the AI boom. For many, the case will be of interest for another reason: the spectacle of two unloved billionaires who hate one another slugging it out in court.

Jury selection did not disappoint. “Greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage,” was how one prospect described Mr Musk in a pre-trial questionnaire. “World-class jerk,” opined another. Few had heard of Mr Altman, though witnesses brought by Mr Musk’s lawyers are sure to paint the boss of OpenAI as a slippery character.

Mr Musk’s lawyers asked the nine-member jury eventually selected to put their opinions of the world’s richest man to one side. The case was not about him, they insisted. Instead, their central allegation was that, after setting up OpenAI with Mr Musk’s help in 2015, Mr Altman and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder, “stole a charity” and enriched themselves with the support of Microsoft, the lab’s biggest investor.

OpenAI began in 2015 as a non-profit, with a mission to produce safe AI for the benefit of humanity. Mr Musk provided it with $38m of support over its first few years. That much all sides agree on. Where they differ is on what happened next, once it became clear that OpenAI needed to create a for-profit arm in order to raise the sums required to build cutting-edge AI. Amid frustration that he could not gain control, Mr Musk left the board in 2018. Microsoft then became OpenAI’s main backer. But when it poured $10bn into the for-profit arm in 2023 after the launch of ChatGPT, everything changed, Mr Musk argued. After that “bait and switch”, OpenAI operated for the good of Mr Altman and his pals.

Lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft countered that there was no evidence of a promise to maintain OpenAI as a charity, and that the “sour grapes” came only after the value of OpenAI soared and a jealous Mr Musk founded a lab of his own, xAI. Besides, the three-year statute of limitations had passed, they added.

In Mr Musk’s witness testimony, which began rather blandly, he said he was a “fool” to provide the initial funding to OpenAI. His cross-examination was spicier. Lawyers for the defence focused on his admission that he initially supported the creation of OpenAI’s for-profit arm. Mr Musk sparred with Mr Altman’s lawyer, answering testily and calling the questions “unfair” and “definitionally complex”.

What was missing was a dramatic confrontation with Mr Altman. Before Mr Musk’s initial testimony, the pair sat metres apart, studiously avoiding eye contact. But by the time Mr Musk had taken the witness stand and been asked by his lawyer to point Mr Altman out, the latter had left the courtroom. Nor will Mr Musk have a chance to trade barbs online, with the judge having ordered both men to curb their “propensity to use social media”. Still, there will be plenty more opportunities for fireworks.■