Matteo Wong, covering Musk v. Altman for The Atlantic (gift link):
Musk is asking that Altman be removed from OpenAI’s board, that
the company convert back to a nonprofit, and for the return of
allegedly “ill-gotten gains” — some $150 billion — which Musk
says would go to OpenAI’s charitable trust. Outside legal
experts say that Musk is unlikely to win all or even much
of this. His argument is confusing: OpenAI has certainly evolved
from a nonprofit lab to a revenue-chasing, consumer behemoth, and
a chorus of critics has alleged that it has deviated from its
original mission of ensuring that AGI benefits humanity. But Musk
himself appears to have insisted that OpenAI couldn’t keep up as a
nonprofit — for instance, in early 2018, he wrote an
email to OpenAI leadership saying that merging the firm
with Tesla “is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle
to Google.” And even before he sued, Musk launched a rival
for-profit company, xAI. “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit is a pageant of
hypocrisy,” William Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI, told the jury
today, later adding that Musk had “sour grapes.” […]The trial makes the AI boom seem sordid and small. In his sworn
deposition, Altman wrote that Musk used to message him
complaints that he wanted more credit for the success of OpenAI
and took offense at not being included in an anniversary photo.
[…] Musk, for his part, has said that he would drop his lawsuit
if OpenAI changed its name to “ClosedAI.” Yesterday, as jury
selection began, Musk began furiously posting on X and repeatedly
called his co-founder “Scam Altman.” Before the start of opening
arguments today, Gonzalez Rogers admonished Musk and Altman for
their social-media use, asking them to limit their “propensity” to
post about the trial; both meekly assented, “Yes.”
It all seems so petty and spiteful, but this is a real federal lawsuit with the entire future of the biggest startup in history at stake.
