Elon Musk went to court against Sam Altman, he talked about himself instead
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Day one of Musk v. Altman had everything from a saviour complex, a Tesla origin story, to a judge telling the the owner of X to stay off X.
SurveyThe trial that tech Twitter has been salivating over finally began yesterday. Now, I expected to see Elon Musk walking in guns blazing with a tight legal case against Sam Altman and OpenAI but I was sorely mistaken. What we got instead was essentially an extended LinkedIn post. It almost felt like a greatest-hits tour of Musk’s biography, complete with SpaceX, PayPal, and the bold claim that he founded Tesla.
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Musk opened his testimony by going as far back as arriving in Canada for college with little more than a bag of clothes, books, and some travellers’ checks, before working his way through every venture he’s ever touched. One can only assume the jury was waiting for the part about OpenAI. They waited a while.
For a lawsuit that accuses Sam Altman of straying from OpenAI’s founding mission, Musk spent a puzzling amount of time recounting his own biography and hyping ventures that have nothing to do with OpenAI. He informed the jury that he works 80 to 100 hours a week, which raises the obvious question of whether his prolific posting on X counts toward that total.
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The saviour framing was impossible to miss. SpaceX was life insurance for civilisation, Tesla was his gift to the environment, and OpenAI was, naturally, his attempt to stop AI from wiping out humanity. Musk framed AI as either the utopian Star Trek future or the dystopian Terminator one and positioned himself as the man trying to deliver Roddenberry’s vision rather than Cameron’s. Subtle.
Then came the charity angle. Musk accused Altman of being a thief, arguing that a verdict in Altman’s favour would set a precedent for looting every charity in America and destroy the entire foundation of charitable giving in the country. High stakes framing, certainly. What he did not mention, however, is that most of his own foundation’s philanthropic donations have gone to causes closely tied to his personal interests. A minor omission.
And then there was the judge. Before proceedings got underway, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had to remind Musk to refrain from attacking the opposing party on social media during the trial. A grown man, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, needed to be told to stay off his own app in order to behave in a courtroom. We are living in historic times.
To be fair to Altman he hasn’t taken the stand yet. His turn is coming. Whether he’ll do better than Musk’s extended personal TED talk remains to be seen, but the bar, at this point, is somewhere on the floor.
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