He trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI over the allegation that the organization abandoned its founding mission in pursuit of profit is coming to an end, and both sides will present their closing arguments Thursday. It’s been a three-week effort that has featured many eye-opening testimonials from the biggest names in the AI space. The witnesses provided a look into the machinations of these players that is usually reserved for books published years after the fact.
We will have to wait for the jury to reach a conclusion on the arguments heard throughout the case to see who really wins, but the court of public opinion is certainly capable of reaching its own conclusions. In that sense, there are very few winners who will emerge from this test: just a group of people who seem like a combination of petty, greedy, vindictive, and controlling.
Since there are no real winners here, how about a power ranking of who lost the least?
Mira Murati
Mira Murati did not physically take the stand during this trial, but she did appear quite frequently during the course of the trial. The former CTO of OpenAI and current CEO of Thinking Machines Lab figured prominently in recounting the drama surrounding Sam Altman’s very brief ouster at OpenAI, when the board voted to remove him. Among other things, he gave us a “you’re fired” text message in which he told Altman that the board meeting was “directionally very bad”for him.
Murati also appeared before the jury through a videotaped statement, in which he did not instill much confidence that Altman is a trustworthy actor. She he explicitly said in his testimony that she didn’t believe Altman was entirely honest with her and created enough chaos in the company that she feared the operation was “at catastrophic risk of falling apart.” Actually, that’s not what you want to hear about the guy who’s still running a company with a Valuation of almost 1 trillion dollars.
Sam Altman
While he was routinely portrayed as untrustworthy, Altman benefited somewhat from the fact that not many people trusted him in the first place. Can you suffer damage to your reputation when your reputation is simply confirmed by everyone’s testimony?
That’s not to say the entire experience won’t raise more questions about Altman’s leadership. If anything, it probably seems like the OpenAI board was right to remove it and simply acted too soon before everyone could have second thoughts.
In addition to Murati saying Altman was disingenuous, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner said there was a “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor” that led her to vote to remove him. according to The Guardian. Another former board member, Natasha McCauley, said it caused “repeated crisis events” at the company. And former OpenAI founder Ilya Sutskever confirmed that he believed Altman showed “a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his executives, and pitting his executives against each other.”
Even if Altman wins the trial, there may be consequences in the form of questions about his leadership.
Elon Musk
You can put Musk in the same bucket as Altman in that he didn’t lose as much because his reputation precedes him. Yes, he seemed like a greedy, power-hungry control freak, but that was his mark going into the test.
The thing about Musk is that he probably did more damage to his own reputation than anyone else, and it’s not like many people had good things to say about him during the course of the trial. Musk reportedly became irritable again and again while being questioned. He undermined some of his own public claims about his companies while on the stand, He tried and apparently failed to position himself as an advocate for charitable giving.and lost his temper repeatedly after stating “I don’t lose my temper.It was also revealed that he tried force a deal to exit OpenAI just days before the trial was to begin, which is not a good look.
Then other people started talking about Musk, and that wasn’t exactly any better. It was repeatedly painted as temperamental and difficult to deal with. OpenAI President Greg Brockman described it as erratic and unpredictable. The mother of his children revealed a lot intrigues happening behind the scenes in Musk’s camp That doesn’t exactly make him seem like the benevolent nonprofit advocate he would like to be perceived as. He apparently suggested at one point that if he were the head of a for-profit branch of OpenAI, He would pass it on to his children if he died..
To put the icing on the matter, Musk abandoned the trial to travel to China with Donald Trump despite not be excused by the judge to do so.
Greg Brockman
Greg Brockman, probably the guy with the lowest public profile of the main players in the case, came out of the trial in very bad shape, not because anyone had much to say about him, but because he was forced to read and respond in his private diary while on the stand. That is a brutal destiny.
what he wrote It didn’t exactly go well either.. At one point, he asked rhetorically in a text message: “Financially, what will get me to a billion dollars?” and then wrote: “It would be nice to make billions.” If he were trying to prove that he wasn’t just trying to cash in on the profitability of the company he co-founded, that’s the last thing he’d want the public to see.
He also wrote about the idea of turning the company into a for-profit without Musk in charge: “It would be a mistake to steal the nonprofit from him. Turn it into a B Corp without him. That would be moral bankruptcy.” But hey, they don’t count morality in your credit score.
Shivon Zilis
Through little fault of his own, Shivon Zilis had a very bad couple of weeks. He became a central figure in the trial because he had one foot in both OpenAI’s and Musk’s camps while the split was underway. He is now decidedly on Musk’s side, given that She lives with him and is the mother of four of his children.as we learned during the trial. Despite that, Musk called her his “chief of staff” or “close advisor,” not a romantic or platonic partner.
(Zilis referred to her and Musk as “friends and colleagues” who had a “unique” relationship that was “romantic in nature,” so it doesn’t seem like there are really unrequited feelings here, just two people who have organized their lives in a non-traditional way. That’s fine, it’s just strange for a guy who’s really interested in.”traditional values.”)
Zilis’ proximity to Musk and the communication the two shared may be the most damning thing to emerge from the trial. In a text message sent to Musk shortly before leaving OpenAI, Zilis asked: “Would you rather I stay close and friendly with OpenAI to keep the information flowing or start disassociating? The trust game is about to get complicated, so any guidance on how to do it right is appreciated.” Musk responded: “Close and friendly, but we’re going to actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla. More people will join over time, but we won’t actively recruit them.”
In emails between the two, Zilis also apparently revealed that Musk was also exploring the possibility of OpenAI becoming a for-profit organization, undermining his entire argument that the organization was obligated to remain a nonprofit.
At one point in those emails, he mentioned that it was discussed that OpenAI “will shift to for-profit in the next two weeks (whoa, quick!).” In another email, Zilis apparently offered Musk some ideas to boost Tesla’s own AI efforts. “One was to make OpenAI a public benefit Tesla subsidiary. Another was to get Altman as an ‘anchor’ for TeslaAI,” he wrote, which doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a person who insists that a company remain a nonprofit would consider.
Zilis is in no way responsible for Musk’s own actions or behaviors, but her communications with him are what provided potentially devastating insight into the case. It seems difficult, but make no mistake: it is the spoiled rich at the center of the process who created this mess.
