Musk Suing OpenAI for Billions
The Judge Couldn't Help Laughing
In the morning, he declared on the witness stand:
"I never shout."
By the afternoon, he was yelling at the lawyers in court.
The judge broke into a laugh,
and the jurors all looked up at him.
Less than four hours had passed between those moments.
Hello,
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie.
Just last week,
in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California,
what might be the most important tech lawsuit of our era officially began.
The Plaintiff:
Elon Musk.
The Defendants:
OpenAI,
its CEO Sam Altman,
and co-founder Greg Brockman.
Jury selection alone was a spectacle.
The court needed to pick nine people from the candidate pool.
One candidate said right to Musk's face
that he's a greedy, racist, homophobic piece of trash.
Another called him a world-class jerk.
The judge had to repeatedly remind them,
"Please remain objective."
The nine selected jurors
mostly claimed no strong feelings toward Musk or AI.
But think about it:
A man walks into court,
and before he even speaks,
potential jurors are already lining up to insult him.
This is quite rare even in American legal history.
The damages sought?
Over $130 billion.
What does that look like?
Roughly half the annual GDP of all countries worldwide.
And Musk wants more than just money.
He wants the court to force OpenAI back into a non-profit,
remove Altman and Brockman from all positions,
and block OpenAI's IPO scheduled for later this year.
His core allegation can be summed up in one sentence:
"They stole a charity."
The story begins in 2015.
That year,
Musk, Altman, and others co-founded OpenAI,
a non-profit research lab determined not to seek profit
but to develop AI for all of humanity.
Musk testified in court,
"I came up with the name.
I recruited the core team.
I taught them everything I know.
I provided all the initial funding."
But OpenAI's lawyer did some math right there:
A pledge of $1 billion,
but only $38 million actually paid.
That's a fulfillment rate of less than 4%.
Musk grew defensive,
shouting,
"Without me, OpenAI wouldn't exist.
I contributed my reputation.
Those things have value."
The lawyer followed up,
"So exactly how much money was donated?"
Musk had to admit,
"In a strict monetary sense,
it was $38 million."
How do you describe this scene?
It's like someone at a dinner party bragging they'll treat everyone,
only to offer 'spiritual support' when the bill arrives.
But don't laugh at Musk just yet,
because his anger isn't entirely baseless.
Today's OpenAI
is valued at over $850 billion.
Regardless of who paid what initially,
a non-profit turning into such a massive commercial empire
definitely raises a huge question mark.
In court, Musk used a vivid metaphor for this,
calling it "the tail wagging the dog."
He said OpenAI's original design
was a non-profit 'dog' with a for-profit 'tail.'
The tail only existed to secure funding
and to serve the dog.
But now it's completely reversed.
The for-profit arm has sucked up all talent, capital, and focus.
The non-profit is just a legal shell,
occasionally used as a storefront.
This metaphor is actually quite accurate.
And Musk has a key text message as evidence.
In 2022,
Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment.
OpenAI's valuation soared to $20 billion overnight.
Musk texted Sam Altman,
saying this felt like a bait-and-switch.
He meant: you used the non-profit mission
of benefiting all humanity to lure me in.
Once the company succeeded, I realized
that was never what you actually intended to do.
How did Altman respond?
He said,
"I agree."
"It does feel bad."
Musk's lawyers highlighted this text in court.
See?
Even Altman himself admitted it felt wrong.
Isn't that evidence enough?
But the problem is,
when OpenAI's lawyers started fighting back,
Musk's own past was exposed layer by layer.
And the person doing the exposing—
his background is a drama in itself.
OpenAI's lead counsel is William Savitt.
He used to be Musk's lawyer,
helping him with Tesla's litigation.
Later,
he switched sides.
Representing Twitter's executives,
he won the lawsuit that forced Musk
to complete the $44B acquisition of Twitter.
Now,
he appears for the third time,
standing opposite Musk to represent OpenAI.
No one knows better how to handle this witness.
Savitt's strategy is brutal.
He doesn't present new evidence;
he uses Musk's own words—
emails and videotaped depositions—
to dismantle everything Musk said in court.
The first blow was the truth behind his departure.
Musk always told the public
he left the OpenAI board in 2018
to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla.
Savitt pushed for more detail.
Musk's lawyers objected.
The judge overruled it,
allowing the questioning to continue.
Finally, Musk was backed into a corner
and admitted it.
In 2017, he demanded from the other founders
51% of equity
and four board seats,
while all other founders combined had only three.
When rejected,
he cut off funding
and pooped OpenAI's core researcher,
Andrej Karpathy, to Tesla.
He left
not because of a conflict of interest,
but because he didn't get what he wanted.
This truth is fatal to Musk's narrative,
as he'd blamed conflicts of interest for a decade.
The second blow targeted the roots of for-profit shift.
Savitt produced emails written by Musk himself.
In 2015,
before OpenAI was even announced,
Musk suggested adding a for-profit entity.
In 2016,
he emailed colleagues saying,
"Making it a non-profit might be a mistake."
In 2017,
he instructed a senior advisor to secretly use the OpenAI name
to register a for-profit company.
In 2018,
he emailed the other founders,
claiming OpenAI was doomed to fail.
The solution, he said, was a merger with Tesla.
Do you see the problem?
Musk is suing OpenAI today for betraying its non-profit mission,
yet he’s been pushing for monetization since 2015.
There's only one difference:
the monetization he wanted
was monetization under his control.
Monetization by anyone else
is "betrayal."
The third blow was the most lethal.
Savitt asked,
"Did your company, xAI, use distillation techniques
to extract knowledge from OpenAI's models to train Grok?"
Musk first dodged the question,
saying distillation is common practice among AI companies.
Savitt pressed him,
"Did xAI do it or not?
Yes or no?"
Musk replied,
"In part, yes."
A man suing others for stealing,
admitting in court that he is also stealing from them.
In legal terms, this is called "unclean hands."
It means if your own hands are dirty,
you can't easily accuse others of being messy.
This admission was made on a federal witness stand,
and its legal consequences could go far beyond this lawsuit.
Then there was another scene,
the most tense moment of the entire trial.
Savitt pulled out a 2018 term sheet
and asked Musk if he had read it.
Musk told the court
he had read the beginning
and had a general idea of the contents.
Savitt immediately played Musk's pre-trial video deposition.
In the video, Musk was asked the same question
but never mentioned reading the beginning.
Two versions of Musk
appeared before the jury at the same time.
Musk became agitated,
shouting his defense:
"I said I didn't look at it carefully,
not that I didn't read it!"
This argument lasted several minutes.
As Musk's voice grew louder,
the judge told him to answer the question directly.
Savitt kept pressing.
Musk pointed at him and said,
"Your questions aren't simple 'yes' or 'no'—
they are designed to trick me!"
This was Musk at his most emotional.
Next was the "model card" incident.
Savitt asked Musk,
"Do you know what a model card is?"
A model card is a safety document AI companies release with a model,
disclosing capability boundaries, risks, and safety test results.
It's a basic transparency standard in the AI industry.
Musk said,
"Not exactly sure,"
even though his own company, xAI, issues them for Grok.
He's suing OpenAI as a champion of AI safety,
yet doesn't know the name of the safety files his own company uses.
After these three days,
one reporter observing the trial wrote in their notebook:
"I've never felt so sympathetic toward Sam Altman in my life."
But...
don't be too quick to pity Altman.
Because OpenAI has its own skeletons in the closet.
The biggest landmine
is Greg Brockman's private diary,
unearthed during the discovery phase.
In 2017,
OpenAI was burning through cash rapidly,
and internal talks began about switching to a for-profit structure to raise more funds.
Musk was the biggest donor,
but his condition was full control.
Brockman and Altman didn't want to accept,
but they didn't dare refuse him to his face.
So their strategy was:
keep placating Musk in person, promising to stay non-profit,
while looking for another way out in private.
Brockman wrote a passage in his diary:
He said,
he couldn't claim to Musk that they would stay non-profit
if they were going to turn into a for-profit in three months.
"That would be a lie."
He knew very well
that Musk's narrative would be:
We were ultimately dishonest with him;
we always wanted to go for-profit,
we just didn't want him along for the ride.
There's another sentence in that same diary:
"Financially,
what gets me to a billion?"
Talking about the mission,
while calculating personal net worth.
This was the true mindset of the OpenAI co-founders
back in 2017.
The judge directly cited this diary in a January ruling
as core evidence that the case should move to trial.
Next, Brockman will have to take the witness stand
to explain every word he wrote.
The court also revealed an eye-opening set of text messages.
In December 2024,
Zuckerberg messaged Musk,
stating Meta had written to the California Attorney General
in support of his lawsuit against OpenAI.
Two people who usually mock each other
were now aligned because of a common rival.
In February 2025,
Musk sent a message to Zuckerberg:
"Would you be willing to join me and a few others
in a joint bid for OpenAI’s intellectual property?"
Zuckerberg replied,
"Let's hop on a call."
Musk said okay,
"Tomorrow morning."
Ultimately, Zuckerberg did not participate.
Seven days later,
Musk bid $97.4 billion alone
to acquire all of OpenAI.
On the witness stand,
Musk swore he made this bid
to stop them from "stealing a charity."
But the texts show
his first instinct was to recruit another tech giant for a joint bid.
Was this saving a charity,
or a business acquisition?
Savitt closed his cross-examination with one sentence:
"He only supports a non-profit
if he's the one in control."
At this point, you might think,
"Isn't this just rich people fighting?
What does it have to do with me?"
But the most interesting part of this trial
is not who wins or loses.
It's like an X-ray machine,
revealing something much deeper.
When these people founded OpenAI in 2015,
what did they say?
"For all humanity."
"Not for profit."
"Open source."
"Against Google's monopoly."
Doesn't that sound ironic today?
But I truly believe that when they said those things,
it was at least partially sincere.
Musk was indeed worried about AI safety;
he warned in 2014 that AI could be more dangerous than nukes.
Altman did want to build a different kind of lab;
in his first email to Musk in 2015,
he laid out a very specific plan and mission.
The problem is,
sincere original intentions don't preclude how things eventually play out.
Many betrayals aren't premeditated;
they happen step by step.
Each step seems reasonable at the time,
yet in hindsight, you've reached the opposite of your starting point.
When this lab actually created ChatGPT,
and it became worth hundreds of billions,
original intentions were no longer enough.
It's like two people planting a tree together.
When they planted it, they agreed:
this tree is for the whole village to enjoy the shade.
But the tree grew into a giant,
covered in golden apples.
Musk says, "I watered this tree,
it should be under my control."
Altman says, "You only provided 4% of the water,
we were the ones who grew it."
But no one mentions the original promise anymore:
that this tree
was for the whole village to enjoy.
This isn't just a Silicon Valley story;
it's a fundamental program of human nature.
When there are no interests involved,
it's easy to be noble.
But when the stakes are high enough to change the world,
nobility becomes the scarcest resource.
Think about it —
have you seen similar scenarios around you?
Friends starting a business together,
agreeing at the beginning,
"Brothers in arms,
we'll share the wealth."
Everyone is noble when the company is small.
But once the company is valuable,
how is equity split?
Who should be CEO?
Whose contribution was greater?
All the questions that never needed answering
suddenly become the sharpest ones.
This trial
is essentially a partner falling-out magnified ten thousand times.
The trial will last several more weeks,
with a series of high-profile witnesses set to appear.
Altman himself will take the stand.
He spent the entire first week in the defendant's seat,
expressionless,
without saying a word.
When he finally speaks,
all of Silicon Valley will hold its breath.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is also expected to testify,
as Musk accuses Microsoft of assisting OpenAI
in completing its transition to a for-profit model.
Without Microsoft's $13 billion investment,
none of this would have been possible.
Nadella must explain to the nine jurors
whether Microsoft knew when it signed the deal
that it was helping a non-profit transform.
There's another particularly noteworthy witness,
Shivon Zilis.
She wears three hats:
former OpenAI board member,
mother of four of Musk's children,
and the alleged leaker of internal information.
OpenAI claims Zilis used her board position
to leak internal decisions and trade secrets to Musk.
This character map alone
is enough for a three-season TV drama.
But the real question this trial leaves us with is this:
When an organization founded with a non-profit mission
creates technology that could change human destiny,
what should it do?
Stay non-profit?
Who then pays the billions in annual training bills?
A non-profit structure can't sustain that level of cash burn.
Turn for-profit?
Then what about the original donors' money?
What about the researchers who joined for the mission?
The deeper question is:
With a for-profit company controlling the most powerful AI,
who ensures it still serves all of humanity?
There is no standard answer to this question.
But the nine jurors must provide one.
Their answer will not only decide this lawsuit,
but may also redefine a fundamental rule:
that is,
when humanity creates an unprecedentedly powerful technology,
what institutional framework can ensure its survival
while ensuring it doesn't only serve the few?
If you have thoughts on this topic,
especially on how AI companies should be structured
to balance mission and survival,
I’d love to hear your perspective.
I am Leo Wang.
See you next time.