OAKLAND – Deliberations begin Monday (Tuesday, Manila time) in the blockbuster trial pitting Elon Musk against AI giant OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, whom Musk accuses of abandoning the company’s founding mission.
The three-week trial in Oakland, outside San Francisco, has seen a parade of Silicon Valley titans take the stand, with Musk arguing that OpenAI’s pivot to a profit-driven business betrayed its original nonprofit mandate.
The world’s richest person is suing OpenAI over its transformation from a scrappy nonprofit into the $850 billion juggernaut behind ChatGPT.
If successful, Musk’s lawsuit could deal a lethal blow to OpenAI, which helped trigger the AI revolution with its release of ChatGPT in 2022 and is now one of the world’s most valuable private companies.
Musk claims Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman improperly used a $38 million donation he had intended to sustain OpenAI as a research lab devoted to developing AI for the benefit of humanity.
For the nine-person jury, as Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers noted, the decision may come down to a simple question: who to believe among the bickering billionaires?
“A non-profit devoted to the safe development of artificial intelligence, open sourced as practical, for the benefit of humanity. You know, we’re supposed to buy that,” Musk attorney Steven Molo said in his closing argument Thursday, slamming Altman’s integrity.
OpenAI attorney Sarah Eddy countered with an attack on Musk himself.
“Even the people who work for him, even the mother of his children, can’t back his story,” she said, referring to Shivon Zilis — a business associate of Musk with whom he has four children — who testified about her role as an intermediary between the tech executives.
