The current Elon Musk - Sam Altman Lawsuit Trial and the future of Artificial Intelligence

[JohnS]

We seldom bring to the attention of our members topics that aren't cigar-related, however, in the midst of a number of events in our world that are grabbing the headlines (and rightly so), this particular one may have more lasting consequences (and be as equally relevant). I speak of the current trial taking place in California in the United States between Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman. At stake is the question of keeping Artificial Intelligence accessible for all or is this a cynical ploy for Musk to get himself a proverbial 'seat at the table'?

Elon Musk’s courtroom showdown with Sam Altman started this week. The biggest takeaways so far

Updated May 1, 2026/ Updated Apr 30, 2026, 4:09 PM ET/ PUBLISHED Apr 30, 2026, 3:26 PM ET by Samantha Delouya, Hadas Gold and Ramishah Maruf

Elon Musk speaks with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers during his cross examination by OpenAI attorney William Savitt as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman watches, during Musk's lawsuit trial over OpenAI's for-profit conversion in Oakland, California on April 29, 2026 in a courtroom sketch. (Vicki Behringer/Reuters)

Oakland, Calif. — Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the stand, accusing OpenAI and its executives of deceiving him into donating money to help found what is now one of the world’s biggest AI companies.

The lawsuit pits Musk against his former collaborators-turned-competitors, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, whom Musk alleges unjustly enriched themselves when they strayed from OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit organization to become a for-profit company. Musk also named Microsoft as a co-defendant in the case, accusing the company of aiding and abetting OpenAI’s breach of charitable trust.

The big personalities and high stakes of the trial were on full display in court, as Musk regularly clashed with OpenAI’s attorney, accusing him of trying to “trick me.” The judge occasionally scolded the parties involved, at one point going so far as to tell Musk to actually answer the questions he’s being asked and warning them to stop talking about whether AI will cause human extinction.

OpenAI and Microsoft have argued that Musk was supportive of creating a for-profit arm of the company. They say he is only bringing the suit because he wasn’t able to take complete control of OpenAI and now wants to bring down a competitor.

Musk’s AI plans under scrutiny

William Savitt, OpenAI’s lawyer, suggested that Musk quit OpenAI’s board in February 2018 because he was blocked from taking unilateral control of the company. Musk, however, said he quit the board to focus on his other companies, including SpaceX and Tesla.

Savitt suggested that in the years after Musk left the board, he took actions to hobble OpenAI, especially after forming a competing company, xAI.

In questioning, Savitt asked whether Musk disclosed that he started his own AI company when he signed a public letter in 2023 advocating to pause development of AI systems that are more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4. Savitt also brought up the attempt Musk led last year to buy OpenAI with a group of for-profit investors, to which Musk responded: “There’s nothing wrong with having a for-profit organization, you just can’t steal a charity.”

Savitt also pressed Musk on why he hasn’t created an AI nonprofit since leaving OpenAI’s board. Musk said that he didn’t create a new one because he had started OpenAI.

“Why would I start another nonprofit when I already started a nonprofit? That doesn’t make any sense,” Musk said.

Debate over AI safety risks

The debate in the courtroom extended beyond OpenAI’s founding into the safety risks posed by AI just before questioning began Thursday.

“We could all die” because of AI, Steven Molo, Musk’s attorney, said to OpenAI’s attorney and Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers before the jury and Musk were seated on Thursday. But Judge Gonzales Rogers said such dire statements wouldn’t be permitted in front of the jury, especially given that Musk had founded xAI, his own for-profit AI company.

“I suspect there are plenty of people who don’t want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands, but it doesn’t matter, we aren’t going to get into those issues,” Rogers said, noting the trial is not about whether or not AI has damaged humanity.

Musk registered a for-profit corporation

The question at the heart of the case is whether OpenAI and its executives unjustly turned the company into a profit-seeking company, breaching its original mission and misleading Musk.

Musk was one of the company’s co-founders and provided $38 million to OpenAI. However, he left in 2018 and stopped all payments by 2020.

“I gave them free funding to create a startup,” Musk testified, saying that he thought he was donating to a nonprofit that was aiming to make AI “for the good of humanity.”

But as early as 2015, before OpenAI was officially announced, Musk had proposed that OpenAI include a for-profit entity, according to emails shown to the jury. In 2017, he directed his senior advisors to register a for-profit corporation in OpenAI’s name, OpenAI’s attorney said, pointing to meeting notes and the registration documents.

Musk testified this week that he was fine with OpenAI having a for-profit subsidiary as long as it didn’t “overtake” the nonprofit, which he argued is what ultimately happened.

Musk ‘didn’t read the fine print’

On Wednesday, Savitt showed Musk emails and text messages from 2018 in which Altman tried to tell Musk about OpenAI’s plans to secure additional funding from Microsoft. (Musk did not reply to all the messages.)

One email from the time included a term sheet for a proposed corporate structure that explicitly said OpenAI aimed to raise $10 billion in the future – but Musk testified that he “did not read the fine print.”

“It’s a four page document,” Savitt replied.

But Musk testified that his confidence in OpenAI’s leaders began to slip. Musk told Altman in 2022 that OpenAI’s $20 billion valuation following Microsoft’s $10 billion investment felt like a “bait and switch.”

“I agree it feels bad,” Altman replied, before noting Musk declined the equity OpenAI offered him.

At the root of it all is Google DeepMind

Musk’s race to build a better AI than Google was a motivating factor in his funding of OpenAI, he testified. Google’s DeepMind laboratory, for example, has produced significant research for years.

“DeepMind is moving very fast. I am concerned OpenAI is not moving fast enough to catch up. Setting it up as a nonprofit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move,” Musk said in a 2016 email to one of his colleagues at Neuralink, another one of Musk’s companies.

Musk testified on Tuesday that he was worried Google’s approach to AI wasn’t safe enough. There needed to be “some sort of counterpoint” to Google, “an open source nonprofit as opposed to a closed source for-profit,” Musk said.

Musk’s heated exchanges with OpenAI lawyer

OpenAI’s attorney, Savitt, questioned Musk over two days, on Wednesday and Thursday. At times, their exchanges became tense.

Savitt asked Musk to stick to “yes” or “no” answers, and at one point, Musk asked whether Savitt would stop interrupting him.

“Your questions are not simple. They’re designed to trick me,” Musk said to Savitt early on Wednesday, before comparing the question to the classic fallacy of “have you stopped beating your wife?” The judge cut Musk off, telling him they weren’t going to “go there.”

After the jury and Musk left the courtroom for the day on Wednesday, Judge Gonzales Rogers conceded to OpenAI’s lawyers that Musk “was, at times, difficult.” 

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/30/tech/takeaways-elon-musk-openai-sam-altman-lawsuit

[JohnS]

A subplot of the Musk-Altman trial: Which billionaires deserve the keys to the God machine?

PUBLISHED May 1, 2026, 5:30 AM ET by Alison Morrow

Elon Musk arrives at the US District Court in Oakland, California, on Tuesday. (Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP)

 

New York — Elon Musk finally shared an opinion that a lot of people can agree on: Microsoft should not control the future of AI.

Trouble is, Musk doesn’t seem to understand who should.

For context: Musk sued OpenAI and its executives over what may seem like a minor distinction — OpenAI’s shift from primarily being a nonprofit “lab” to a for-profit private company overseen by a nonprofit foundation. Musk is trying to prove that OpenAI’s leaders lied to him and betrayed the charitable mission of developing AI in a safe, transparent manner in order to make money. But OpenAI’s leaders are essentially making a sour-grapes argument; they claim that Musk, a co-founder who left in 2018, is only saying he’s bothered by OpenAI’s commercial shift now because of its blockbuster success in the same market that Musk’s newer AI company is competing in. 

But all of that is beside the bigger point.

In testimony this week, Musk repeatedly emphasized his belief that in the early days of OpenAI he needed to be in charge to ensure the tech was used safely. When Microsoft came along to invest $20 billion in the startup, Musk bristled at the idea because “Microsoft has their own motivations” that would diverge from what he believed were OpenAI’s more philanthropic aims.

Musk posed a seemingly rhetorical question, as my colleagues Samantha Delouya and Hadas Gold reported from the trial in Oakland, turning to the jury at one point to ask: “I don’t know, do you really want Microsoft controlling digital superintelligence?”

Musk seems to be making the point that Microsoft, maker of some of the most ubiquitous and despised workplace products in history (Outlook, Teams), is not the cool, benevolent technoking/memelord that should get the keys to sophisticated AI that, to borrow from Musk’s testimony, could “kill us all.”

But Musk’s alternative to Microsoft, at least in OpenAI’s early days, was himself. Or rather, Musk plus four board members appointed by — you guessed it — Musk. He testified that he needed “control” of OpenAI early on, expecting his stake would eventually be diluted by new investors.

Again, this all may be beside the point.

Let’s take Musk and all the other AI executives at face value and believe them when they say they want to reach “artificial general intelligence (AGI),” aka “superintelligence,” aka some hypothetical level at which the machine’s intellect surpasses that of humans. (We will, for the purposes of this newsletter, just gloss over the fact that AGI is little more than science fiction masquerading as a real possibility in order to wring capital out of investors and scaring the bejesus out of the public with references to the “Terminator” movies. And we will not, for now, dwell on the fact that no two AI evangelists share a common definition of AGI or a protocol for measuring it. We shall not, in this setting, scream that AGI is nothing but a bogeyman born of dull minds trapped in bodies that have failed to touch grass.)

And let’s also take them at face value when they say it will someday have the power to kill everybody. Sure, why not.

If that’s the case, then surely we should have some way to control it.

But while Musk and OpenAI’s lawyers are arguing back and forth about all of this, they appear to only be considering a limited set of options. Our list of choices when it comes to benevolent leaders with a vast amount of control over humanity’s future, at least as mentioned in this trial, appears to be confined to Musk, OpenAI (led by CEO Sam Altman), Microsoft, and possibly Google or Meta or Anthropic.

That’s it. That’s the only model, and those are the choices.

Some folks might be OK with that arrangement, but based on comments from the random group of citizens available for jury selection, it doesn’t seem like it’s a popular list of overlords.

“Elon Musk is a greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage,” one juror wrote in their voir dire questionnaire. Another called him a “world-class jerk.” Even federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had to admit: “The reality is that people don’t like him… Many people don’t like him, but that doesn’t mean that Americans nevertheless can’t have integrity for the judicial process.”

Gonzalez Rogers, for one, has no time for doomsday prophesies of the billionaire class.

On Thursday, as Musk’s lawyer repeated the industry hype in court — “we could all die!” — Gonzalez Rogers shut it down, pointing out Musk’s obvious philosophical contradictions.

“It is… ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space. I suspect there are plenty of people who don’t want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”

But that’s beyond the scope of this case, she continued.

“This is not a trial on whether or not AI has risks. This is not a trial about whether or not AI has damaged humanity. That may be a trial in the future.” 

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/01/business/a-subplot-of-the-musk-altman-trial-which-billionaires-deserve-the-keys-to-the-god-machine

[Chitmo]

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way both of these idiots could lose! 

[Namisgr11]

On 5/1/2026 at 9:38 PM, Chitmo said:

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way both of these idiots could lose! 

My feeling in a nutshell.